The accidental early adopter

As a rule I stay well clear of the bleeding edge of technology.

How odd then, to find myself with a home-grown phone system ”in the cloud”, stitched together with lashings of free and experimental Internet telephony services.

I guess it came about because I need to do business from wherever in the world I happen to be at the time. When I’m away from base the sky-high roaming charges from mainstream telcos become very noticeable, as does the bustle at the local internet café. On the yachting circuit it’s mostly boat crews wanting to keep in touch on email and Skype, and local business seems more than willing to put in free Wi-Fi to attract them.

So after running up a few scary phone bills I started experimenting. Despite its popularity Skype was never the answer as it means being locked into a single provider. There is, however, a fiercely competitive and innovative industry offering Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solutions based on SIP and related internet standards. Not for the fainthearted as there is plenty of churn and more than a few interoperability problems. The bad news for the established telcos is you can build something today and never pay for anything other than your internet connection again.

And it’s not expensive. If you have broadband internet already, an additional outlay of around £25 ($40 / €30) will buy an adapter to SIP-enable your existing fixed line phone. Beyond that, pretty much everything can be had at zero cost with the exception of calls to standard phones. Your mobile phone may be SIP-ready out of the box – SIP is part of the 3GPP standards. If it also has Wi-Fi you may be able to use your mobile to make free calls from any Wi-Fi hotspot. VoIP calling over mobile data is the battleground as network operators would obviously prefer to make lucrative per minute charges for voice calls as long as possible. So your tariff may prohibit those calls and they may even be blocked.

I splashed out on a pair of new Siemens Gigaset IP phones and use my existing Nokia mobile. Both required a fair bit of tinkering to set up but worked well enough after that. You can probably shop around for the best rates to call standard phones forever – there are literally hundreds of internet telephone service providers (ITSPs). None of them are likely to beat good value fixed line providers for local calls unless you can dispense with your land line altogether and cut out the line rental. If you get broadband from your cable provider you may be able to do this. It’s very likely you’ll save on international calls regardless of your broadband provider. However, the better plan is to get more people you call onto SIP. Most ITSPs would have you believe all your internet calls have to go through them and only calls between their customers are free but that is not the case. The core ITSP service is the gateway out to the conventional telephone network and all you really need to make free calls over the internet is SIP at both ends. If your ITSP blocks “peered” SIP calls with unaffiliated networks, as some do, switch.

There are plenty of VoIP and SIP resources out there providing a useful service, more often than not completely free of charge. Here is the handful that are essential to my setup:

SIP Sorcery is a free service providing most of the functionality of a PBX or SIP switch. It went through an experimental cloud computing phase when its uptime wasn’t great but it now seems stable. It lets you set up a switching fabric to connect any SIP account to any phone. You’ll probably need to do some Ruby programming to make it work but there is an active and supportive community – not to mention Aaron, the man behind it – to help with that.

e164.org

E164.org is another volunteer-run service which is giving the official public ENUM solution a run for its money. ENUM is a scheme to layer phone number-style addressing over the internet. A key enabler to make internet telephony mainstream, this is another battleground for the telcos, and the standards-track process has been slow. In the UK the official ENUM registry has recently started but in many parts of the world it’s still nowhere. Meanwhile, e164.org has for years cheerfully allowed anyone who controls a phone number to register it and point it at their SIP phone, for free. And nothing prevents anyone setting up their phone to look up internet end-points in e164.org as well as in the official registry. The support is patchy at best but this is a great resource, and funded by donations. Need I say more?
In the UK, to receive calls from those on the plain old telephone system, it’s hard to beat Numbergroup.com. A commercial service making money from termination charges, they are by far the best deal around. The numbers are free, and the margin they take on the calls is razor-thin. Support is really responsive, though they’ve taken some time rolling out new IP-based infrastructure.

Conversely, to let the internet telephony crowd reach you, iptel.org is just the ticket. Free service that acts as a live test bed for well-respected SIP server software SER and SERWeb, not only can it give you a @iptel.org SIP address, you can also set it up to provide SIP service on your own domain, though this requires a little DNS magic. If you would like matching email and SIP telephony addresses on your own domain,  iptel.org is your friend.

Finally, Voxalot is a freemium service with a basic free package that includes voice mail and an iNum phone number. The iNum initiative is the one attempt at a VoIP-based global area code that seems to have some traction, to the point where several networks including BT in the UK enable direct calls to these numbers.

Well, there you go. It’s a whole lot more complicated than ideally it should be, but so far it works and is extremely cost-effective. The next step is to deploy all this infrastructure within the business which will be a big test. And then there is a raft of bells and whistles left to implement, such as phone numbers that follow me around the world at a reasonable cost – which is what started the whole thing off after all.

And if you have experience of deploying VoIP in a small business or even if you’re just at the thinking stage, I’d love to hear from you.

No, really, I would…

Logos and things

As I crossed the Atlantic, work on logo and other graphic design was progressing nicely under Jane’s guidance. We’ll start applying more and more of the design elements over the next weeks and months.

The main logo looks like this and I’m really quite pleased with it. Nice and fresh, don’t you agree?

Clearly the work of a professional.

Now therein lies the rub, as applying that professional design in all sorts of contexts is now left in the much less capable hands of this engineer turned sailor…

To start with, it’s high time I replaced the First Reef sailing ‘avatar’ or profile pic as seen on this blog and on Twitter. We’ve used the wave pattern from the logo in one or two places already, and that fits quite nicely with the watery theme the interim one had.

So here are a few attempts at that.

I think the rightmost one may have legs. What do you think?

(PS. Some fine print regrettably needed here: All rights reserved on the logo and related design elements.)

How to get afloat again

Goodness, is that the time already? It’s been three months since my last post.

Starting this business one of my work items was to log some fresh miles at sea. I did the bulk of my sailing in the early years of the decade, with a peak in 2004. I wasn’t quite sure how to get fresh sea time on the CV, but this turned out not too difficult. In the last couple of months three trips came together that I went on to skipper for a total of 3,500 miles, and there’s a delivery trip as mate coming up shortly to add another 2,000.

So that should do the trick as far as recent mileage is concerned.

I was lucky enough to land the job of delivering Magic Pelagic, a Dufour 44, eastbound across the Atlantic. She was in St Lucia following the ARC 2008 - a well-known annual transatlantic rally - and her owner could not spare the time away from his business to bring her back himself.

There were different crews for the Caribbean-Azores and for Azores-Lisbon so that they were really separate trips. From my own point of view the transatlantic felt like one five week long voyage – as long as any I’ve done before and my longest as skipper by some way. It does take it out  of you…

We were able to keep a micro blog going on Twitter, and I won’t go over the voyage in any detail here. If you were watching: thanks for following our progress and hope it was good value.

Just to say that it was a great experience, both crews were fantastic, and the crossing was on the slow side of expectations due to fickle winds, mostly on the Caribbean-Azores leg. (Though not as slow as Alastair Buchan reports in Sailing an Atlantic Circuit. His passage took 35 days – we were in after 22.)

For me, if I was to sum up the experience with one photo it would be this one. Lacking in glamour compared to eighties pop videos, perhaps, but long ocean passages do revolve in large part around domestics. So the boat ends up festooned with washing on various improvised clotheslines a lot of the time.

The picture features Sian and Alex having a jolly old time on watch one afternoon.

Here’s part of the crew at landfall in the Azores. Nice how the shot is entirely natural and not at all posed. Oh, no. Not a bit of it. Alex again in the foreground, with Val and Steve behind him. The island in the background is Faial, where most boats visit on their west-to-east transatlantics to stop off in Horta.

Finally then, here’s the obligatory picture for yachts passing through Horta: it’s traditional to leave a painting on the harbour wall. From left to right Tuomo, who joined in Horta, Geert, Steve, Val. Leaves Witold who joined a few days later in Ponta Delgada, and Paul, the boat’s owner, who had had to leave in Antigua.

Getting carried away?

I booked onto a RYA Yachtmaster Instructor course today, for this coming September.

This isn’t what I had intended to do. My plan was to update the qualifications I have, take perhaps a year to get back on the water in a big way and acquire experience as an instructor. Now I have four months to get ready.

I guess the attraction of having a challenging milestone on the calendar was too much in the end. Everything is wide open and fluid right now so starting to pin a few things down feels good. It did help when the RYA said even if I fail Yachtmaster Instructor I may come away with an updated Cruising Instructor qualification. That would do the job for the time being.

Ellen MacArthur relates the story of her Yachtmaster Instructor course and exam in her autobiography, Taking on the World. John Goode and James Stevens, both well-known personalities in UK sailing, were her examiners. The encouraging thing is they used discretion and decided to award Ellen the ticket when she returned from her planned circumnavigation of Britain in Iduna. Presumably they felt that trip would give her the additional sea time she needed.

This happened fifteen years ago but hopefully Yachtmaster Instructor Examiners still exercise discretion. Without at least the updated Cruising Instructor ticket I won’t be able to work as an instructor beyond September.

The course is a five day continuous assessment – basically a five day exam – and has a fearsome reputation. The RYA used to say its pass rate was 50%, though I haven’t seen this stat for a little while. It seemed almost a matter of pride.

Anyway, if I don’t make it first time I’ll be in good company. James Stevens who examined Ellen is now the RYA’s Training Manager and Chief Examiner – ie, the man in charge of training and qualifications. In the current instructors’ newsletter he writes it took him two attempts to pass his Yachtmaster Instructor.

And you never know, perhaps I’ll pull one out of the hat and pass it. (I’d be over the moon. Just imagine the bragging rights! Not to mention the celebrations.) I figure I have my work cut out this summer, at any rate.

Right, then, off we go.

It’s been a little while since I had a chance to write for this blog. The last few weeks were surprisingly busy.

Some of this was to do with wrapping up at work. Some of it was to do with the most striking contrast so far between corporate life and a one man band start-up: in the start-up, everything is down to me.

If I don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. This simple fact takes a little getting used to. Too much time spent in management roles supported by the corporate infrastructure, I guess. And I’m sure this will make a few people smile – or worse.

I wanted to have some of the basics for trading in place before leaving employment so I could at least leave contact details behind. So that involved selecting and registering domain names, an interim web host and email setup, and at least sufficient content for a holding page. I’m also under orders from Jane to use up-to-the-minute marketing tools à la Twitter. As this is my first foray into applying web technology it’s all quite slow to get done. And I could only really work on it after hours.

It did get done, more or less. Working title for the business is First Reef sailing, and the holding page is at www.firstreefsailing.com. I hope to get a logo and website design sorted out over the next  few weeks, and that should give us a better handle on brand identity. You can find us on Twitter as @firstreef and @geertbollen. Please feel free to follow either or both - we could certainly use a follower or two. The intention is for @firstreef to tweet about sailing opportunities and @geertbollen about my own travels.

And after all that I haven’t organized phone service yet…

So Thursday 30 April was my last day at work. It was still hectic, trying to wrap up, and putting in the last efforts to land the team in the massive restructure that is ongoing. For all that, the team had put together a leaving presentation, one of many that day.

I was struck by just how many talented people I’ve had the privilege of working with over the years. I hope they do well in the restructure. They deserve to.

The other thing I took away was a generally positive response to what I am proposing to do. A good number of people’s imaginations seem fired up by the prospect of going sailing. Maybe there is a viable business in it somewhere.

What do you mean setting up in sailing is like a tech start-up?

Well, maybe it isn’t, but why not use what I know?

Trying to figure out what I need to be doing in the weeks and months ahead I came across Guy Kawasaki - a pleasant blast from the past. I knew him (or rather, of him) while he was Macintosh developer evangelist at Apple. This was early in my career at a start-up developing Macintosh software. The start-up failed, but not before providing a great formative experience with lots of passion and fun. Not to mention numerous coding marathons deep into the night and ending up at best with a few hours sleep under a desk. Work hard, play hard.

Guy popped up on account of The Art of the Start, which I should probably go out and read. It looks thoroughly pragmatic and even the marketing material had plenty of useful pointers. (Check out the video at the end of this post – as engaging a keynote speech as they come!)

Two themes of Guy’s resonate immediately (scroll down to the Test Drive section on the book’s page and have a look at the attached PDF):

1. Make Meaning
2. Get Going

Make Meaning

Awkward phrase perhaps but closely related to the enduring purpose of visionary companies in Jim Collins’ and Jerry Porras’ Built to Last. The idea of being very clear and obsessive about what you do to improve customers’ lives is intuitively appealing.

Perhaps this sailing business of mine won’t change the world. But I do think a lot more people would have fun out on the water if sailing were accessible to them. And I’m pretty fired up about figuring out how to make it available to as many as possible.

Guy tells start-up entrepreneurs to capture their purpose in a mantra, as a memorable short-hand mission statement. Great. Mine might be something like:

More people enjoy sailing.

And that should make it pretty clear what we’re about.

Get Going

I have a lot of work to do just to get into the yachting industry, let alone to set up a business that could trade in one of the conventional forms, say as an RYA-recognised sea school or a charter company. Inevitably I will need to go freelance and work for established businesses in the industry to gain experience.

It never felt good not to be trading in some form or other while I am concentrating on getting established, and I’ve been looking for an offering I could put together right now. Guy has a message along similar lines: do something, build a prototype, try and sell it into test markets, get going.

For a few years I effectively ran as a voluntary organizer of sailing cruises, as I worked towards sailing qualifications and needed to build up experience. People who came sailing with me were mostly friends, work-colleagues, friends of friends. Even then I was tempted to put some infrastructure around it with mailing lists and the like to do this on a slightly larger scale. That didn’t happen of course as there was the day job to do and there wasn’t a compelling reason to put the work in the infrastructure.

Things are different now, and my plan to get going in the short term is to pick this up again, at least to start with on a voluntary basis. Even if it’s ultimately not a business, running this now gives me a way to get to market and practice my trade that is independent of the established yachting industry. And that feels good.

Two strands to the business then, initially:

• freelance skipper/instructor aiming to become established conventionally;
• volunteer sailing trip organizer and skipper for all who like to go sailing.

Plenty to be getting on with on both fronts.

Making amends

Jane was a little annoyed with me for not mentioning her in my first post.

Jane is my partner and, ahem, marketing director for the new venture. We live in a leafy part of South West London. (That’s London, England. If you’re setting up business in a different country check the local rules.) Jane is sticking with corporate life for the foreseeable future – someone has to add a little stability. Hopefully she will blog here too.

Jane is a graphic designer by training and works as a communications manager, so credit goes to her for anything here that is pleasing to the eye or informative. As I’m the engineer in this outfit I get to wrestle with the tech – think I’m winning however can’t be sure.

The sailing is also mainly my thing. And Jane is a superstar and a saint for allowing me to indulge my passion.

16 days to go

In a little over two weeks’ time I will be my own boss.

Like so many, my employer is reducing headcount. Thankfully there are incentives to go, and I am leaving on a pretty generous voluntary package at the end of April.

This, then, is my opportunity to get into the sailing business and earn a living on the water. I get to follow a dream of the best part of 10 years, held ever since I got the sailing bug after missing a ferry and spending an unexpected afternoon in Hydra in the Aegean. (There was a flotilla in and they were having fun.) So this is a good news story.

Whether the story has a happy ending remains to be seen.

This is a journey I am starting with only the sketchiest of plans and no clear route map. It is also a major career change from my current job with a huge technology corporation. Oh, and there’s a recession on. The biggest one since the war, they say. Hard to tell if there will even be a marine leisure industry to join in a few months time, as the season gets underway in Northern Europe. The title of this blog reflects the way I feel about the whole adventure, and I hope to use it to capture some of the experiences on the way.

With luck some of it may even be useful to other career changers and dreamers.