I just returned from a three-day conference for the Small Business Innovation and Research community. These are held roughly twice each year, on opposite sides of the country. You might ask yourself, apart from the many university scientists who participate in the conference what the relevance is to the non-profit/NGO world. In short, these people get grants, lots of grants. How much? Phase I grants are usually $100,000 for a six month project. Phase II grants are $750,000, awarded usually for two years.

SBIR is a sort of “set-aside” of 2.5% of all US federal grants that are awarded to outside contractors and researchers. This 2.5%, which this year includes more than two billion US dollars, has to be spent with “small businesses”. Awards are made by 11 U.S. federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, DOD (including Army, Navy, Air Force, DARPA), Department of Transportation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Science Foundation, etc. (By the way, the money being awarded is your money, federal taxpayer’s money.) So, you too, can be like Halliburton and Lockheed Martin, and receive federal largesse!

Actually, maybe you can’t. This program is for businesses, not non-profits. However, you can use a small business as a partner for a grant. This is exactly what happened in my case; I was a approached by a university researcher (the non-profit) to apply for an SBIR Phase I grant which we then jointly used for our telemedicine/videoconferencing project.

Not only are the grant applicants at the conference…and you might imagine how useful it is to compare notes with, say, a hundred other people like yourself who are applying for similar grants…but the grant givers present most of the conference sessions. So, in effect, the grant makers are telling you how to get their money. There are lots of discussion about what is required for a successful grant application. There are also lots of discussions of what didn’t work. Among the tips:

• Have a “portfolio” of grants with different start and end dates to level the fluctuations of revenue, and spread out the work of application, record-keeping, and compliance.
• Structure your grant as a project with outcomes.
• Do pre and post testing of the project subjects and be able to state outcomes with data.
• Follow the grant submission instructions, including font size and style, page lengths, specifications for attachements and so on. (This seems patently obvious…but apparently it is a real problem, even with the SBIR crowd.)
• Use graphics in the presentation to encapsulate the essence of a project in an understandable form.
• Put yourself in the reviewer’s shoes. Make the grant application easy to read. Several grant reviewers stated unequivocally that because of the volume of submissions, they look for any excuse to reject an application without having to read it, and formatting problems are an easy way to be able to quickly reject something.
• Get to know the personnel at the grant agency or foundation. Schmooze! Find out who the relevant people are at the foundation or agency and talk to them as you are working on the application.
• Keep in touch with the program officer at your granting foundation during the term of the grant. Appraise them in any change of scope of work. Avoid surprises.
• Grant budgets include direct expenses; money that is spent on items and services directly related to fufilling the grant objectives, and indirect expenses; money that is spent as the cost of doing business, such as office expenses, heat, utilities, etc. Grantor agencies may or may not allow you to charge indirect expenses to the grant…but you do have to be able to account for those expenses. Enlightened grant-givers will allow you to charge a portion of your indirect to the grant and they will acknowledge these expenses. They will be suspicious if you don’t account for the indirect expenses.
• You can’t be naive about accounting. QuickBooks by itself may not be the best solution for grant accounting. You need to be able to report all the financials by grant, as well as your consolicated financials.
  Accounting for management information purposes, may or may not be the same kind of accounting for financial purposes, and your system(s) need to be able to do both.

Related to the indirect expense issue, granting agencies and foundations are interested in your success as an organization. Your application should reflect your past successes, and your ability to keep your organization healthy. You need to demonstrate capability to follow through and execute the work plan. Such evidence can include things like:

• Letters from third parties, collaborators and clients
• Matching funds in-kind or in cash
• Letters demonstrating community support
• Experienced staff managing the project
• Contributions to journals, conferences, and associations

So, it is a bit of a sales job. You have to demonstrate credibility and capability.
Anyway, if you have the opportunity to attend an event like this I recommend it. I was even able to get a grant for the conference expenses. 🙂

Study- IM threats zooming up:

Study: IM threats zooming up. Messaging security company says its data shows a 1,500 percent increase in worms, viruses and other pests targeting IM networks.

This trojan appears to be installed by a system driver winik.sys which loads on boot-up. In the course of running it creates a random directory in the Program Files folder, and then starts a randomly named exe file multiple times, until, basically, the machine locks up.

I tried several of the suggestions found in several threads.What finally worked was:

1. Boot computer with floppy disk from Windows 98.
2. Delete C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\Drivers\winik.sys
3. Delete c:\Program Files\XXXXXXXX where XXXXX is the folder containing
AAAAAAA.dll
AAAAAAA.exe
BBBBBBB.exe
profile.???

(substitute the names of the actual directories/files)

4. Reboot machine
5. Clean registry with CCleaner.
Repeat step 5 until it shows that all the bad keys have been deleted. I had several thousand.
6. Rescan using Microsoft Anti-Spyware, Ad-Aware, and Spybot
All three showed different problems (!)

Notes:

1. By booting with Win98 I was able to access the files on the C: drive on the Windows 2000 Professional drive FAT32.
If it had been NTFS, I might have stayed further in the soup, but it appears that Win98 successfully ignored any file attribute settings or any settings based on Windows security.

2. Before doing any of this, I would give serious consideraton to reformatting the hard drive, and reinstalling everything.

This isn’t a book review, because I just ordered the book The Accidental Techie by Sue Bennett. Looks promising. A partial list of the table of contents:

Chapter Four: Assessing and Purchasing Technology

• Assessing New Technology
• Purchasing Technology and Choosing Vendors
• Identifying Maintenance Contracts and Fees
• Managing Consultants and Volunteers
• Volunteers

Chapter Five: Protecting Your Organization from Disasters and Data Loss

• Virus Protection
• Protecting Your System from Adware and Spyware
• Ongoing Software Maintenance
• Backup Systems
• Security Systems
• User Workstation Security
• Network Security
• Technology Policies

The Foundation Center offers an searchable online grant database. Much of this is available in CD-ROM format. They offer National Guides to Funding for certain segments such as health, AIDS, religion, and library and information services. Link

Another week, another Internet Soft Phone. Gizmo competes with Vonage and Skype. I’ve had this working for a week installed on my laptop, and using a headset with microphone. Here are the FAQs.

1. What is a soft phone?
A soft phone is a “phone in software”, or a phone emulator. It runs on the computer and interacts with the computer’s on-board sound hardware. A soft phone requires a microphone and speakers, at a minimum, or, ideally, some kind of headset.

2. Any other requirements?
You really need a broadband connection, DSL, Cable, T1, whatever.

The Gizmo software is available for Linux, Mac and Windows. I’ve been playing with the Windows version.

3. What about firewalls?
So far so good…the application seems to be able to go through my router/firewall without any difficulties.

3. What does it cost?
Gizmo is a free download. Once you have installed it, you can make calls to other Gizmo users (i.e. from computer to computer) for free. To call regular phone numbers, you need to purchase their Call-Out service of pre-paid minutes. A minimum purchase is US$10.00. Domestic U.S. calls are counted down at 1.8 cents per minute. U.S. to Europe are 2.9 cents.

I was interested in Gizmo, because I have an MCI WorldCom account for business long distance calls. These are billed at 8 cents/minute, and I usually run about $20.00/month. European overseas calls are expensive under the WorldCom plan, or my ATT plan on my home phone line, running about $1.20 per minute.

4. What is the call quality?
Variable, but generally good. The connection does not appear to always be full-duplex, that is, if both parties are trying to talk then somebody has to back off until the other person has stopped. I’ve tried this on:
a. a 90 minute tech support call from Vermont to Maryland
b. a call to my mother-in-law in Albany N.Y.
c. several calls home from various client sites.
d. an in-state call to my brother.
e. several calls from home to in-state clients.

In each case, when I’ve made a connection, I’ve asked the other party about the call quality. All reported that there was no difference in quality compared to a “regular” phone call. A couple people thought that the call “sounded like a cell phone call”, with some echo or breakup.

5. Any connection problems?
Several. Enough to make me not want to rely on this as my only phone. One problem is the whole caller id thing. The calls will either show an empty ID, or will show a “weird” ID. This was enough of a problem for my brother’s cordless phone, which deals with caller-id, to reject my call from an unknown or invalid ID. A second problem came up when I was calling home from a site that had a DSL broadband connection. For some reason this call triggered a direct call into my voice mailbox, and didn’t allow the called party to pick up. This happened twice in one day, a third time I got through.

Gizmo appears to be a follow-on project from SipPhone. SipPhone originally used the XLite software program, however, Gizmo is much more user friendly than XLite. I’m looking forward to continue trying it, especially via a wireless connection. If it works, I’ll be able to work in the coffee shop not only with an internet connection but a phone connection as well.

Web conferencing allows you to hold meetings between multiple participants over the internet. These are typically hosted applications, you pay by the minute or hour to host the conference. As an example, I was on-site at a client on a Friday, with the intention of doing a program walk-through. One thing led to another and we were unable to complete our task together, so the following week, we scheduled a web conference using Macromedia Breeze and Premier Global Services.

Breeze provides computer integration. Sitting in front of their own computers, participants can share programs, share a whiteboard, and see each other over a videoconferencing link. Macromedia has an overview of Breeze.

Breeze integrates with Premier Global Services which is a telephone audio conference provider. Participants are given a toll-free telephone number to call along with a “conference number”, a five-digit number for the conference. Once connected to the toll-free number , an auto-attendent asks for the conference number, and then directs you to the conference. The conference moderator has the ability to accept new participants, and to dial out to “retrieve” conference participants.

What does this cost?
Pricing is confusing. The base price for a meeting is 32 cents per minute per participant. So, a three-way conference will cost about almost $1.00 per minute. Clearly this becomes justifiable when there are distances to travel, or several participants involved. Telephone audio conferencing adds six cents per minute for participants who connect using a telephone. Monthly/Yearly plans are also available.

Another alternative is Microsoft’s LiveMeeting, which is a re-branded version of PlaceWare.

Both services offer two-week free trials.

A review of simpler and less expensive web-conferencing systems such as GoTo Meeting appeared in PC Magazine

Latest Norton/Symantec antivirus program appears to eat the executable files from RADMIN. The solution is to exclude the directory where the RADMIN program is located from both the Symantec full scan list and the Auto-Protect (real-time scan).

There was also a reference to the fact that Microsoft forbids the use of anything other than Terminal Services for remote access, in the license for Windows. I hope this is only an urban legend.

More at the Famatech web site.

Update 10/24 Still doing it!
Here is a fix from Symantec.

Kansas girl douses western tyrant, freeing Oz from terror

An example of the “inverted pyramid” of journalistic writing.

From the Phantom Professor’s web site. The article is about half-way down the page.

Its no secret that the ILECS (that’s the incumbent telephone network providers like Verizon) have been trying desperately to throttle back the march of ViUP or Voice over the Internet. One of their tactics has been to convince the Congress and FCC to require all internet voice nodes be compatible with the E-911 system. This has indeed slowed down the progress of companies like Vonage and Skype as they attempt to put in place an infrastructure that can identify the location of any call placed from one of their nodes. So I thought it interesting to find this over at Jerry Pournelle’s column from 9/12/2005:

In New Orleans both those communications broke down, largely due to lack of electric power. When the power grid shut down the City crisis control center communications depended on emergency generators, and those had insufficient fuel to run for more than a few hours. Within a day or so the city officials had no communications whatever. Their telephone systems were gone, and so were their radios.

An ingenious office worker discovered a working broadband Internet connection in the crisis center. He was able to connect to that, then use a Vonage VOIP system to connect to the rest of the world. For more than a day the only way the Mayor of New Orleans had for communicating (other than when CNN or Fox News teams with remotes could briefly reach him) was that Vonage VOIP. Moreover, not long after the VOIP system was set up, the telephone rang; it was the President of the United States calling from Air Force One.

Leaving aside the privacy issues of E911, the above story, if true, suggests that having working broadband connection might in fact be safer than E911. Indeed, not only could you use a VoIP node to place voice calls, but also send and receive eMail, and video.