Digital Common Sense

Just wanted to share a few pictures quickly of some ITExpo highlights.

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Technorati Tags: ITExpo pics, ITExpo

Filed by Ken at 3:49 pm under Unified Communications
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Posting here will be light and sporadic for the next few days. Off to the Internet Telephony Expo in Los Angeles

Filed by Ken at 4:02 am under Technology, Unified Communications
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What is INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO?

ITEXPO
is the event with an educational program that teaches enterprises,
SMBs, and Government Agencies how to select and deploy IP-based voice,
video, fax, and unified communications. It’s where service providers
learn how to profitably roll out services their subscribers are
clamoring for. The vibrant Exhibit Hall features solutions for
enterprises, SMBs, government and service providers. ITEXPO is where
buyers, sellers, resellers, and manufacturers meet to forge
relationships and close deals.

In another  day or so the geniuses and magicians of the unified
commIunications sector will all be gathering in Los Angeles for the
Internet Telephony Expo. There will be hundreds of things to see and do. I’ve been listing the hot things I’m hoping to see for quite a while now.

Recent posts
The CorporateRat at ITExpo - Unified Communications
Sipera VIPER Labs - Blogging, podcast ahead and ITExpo

As a reminder I’ll be hosting two panel discussion again this year. Here are the details on the sessions.

I’m plan to record both sessions for podcast later. And I expect to record snippets from other sessions as well.
I’ve got several
meetings and briefings scheduled and will be doing some planned and some impromptu podcast chats from the show.

Blog posting here may be different over the next few days. I don’t really plan on live blogging sessions. I may well do some photo posts on the fly as the opportunities arises. I’m hoping to do some video as well. Podcasting requires some production time and the publishing process is more detailed than for a written post.

Rest assured there will be lots of news coming from the ITExpo.

Technorati Tags: ITExpo, Internet Telephony Expo, panel discussion, Ken Camp, unified communications

Filed by Ken at 8:56 am under Unified Communications, VoIP/Unified Communications
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My pal Dameon turns the tightest phrase I’ve seen with this question -

Who Will Be Smart Enough To Hire Dan York?
Inter-Tel and Mitel just recently finished merging. As is the case with many mergers, some people are let go. Unfortunately, Dan York was recently thrown overboard from the good ship Mitel.

I’ve been “laid off” in corporate reorganizations several times in my life. It’s never a good time. Even when handled well, it just plains hurts. As an outsider looking in - watching Mitel - I can’t help but believe they’ve made a serious mistake. But for a company in that mode, mistakes are common too.

Dan’s speaking at the ITExpo in Los Angeles next week, and frankly, I’ll be quite surprised if people there aren’t in pretty aggressive courting mode trying to woo Dan’s talent. He’s one of the sharpest knives in the technology drawer. He’s got uncommon breadth and depth, coupled with superb writing skills and stage presence that aren’t always present in a technologist.

I’m really interested to see who’s lucky enough to win Dan over. That’s going to be a company to watch.

Technorati Tags: Dan York, VoIP, security, unified communications

Filed by Ken at 12:07 pm under InfoSec, Information Security, Technology, Unified Communications, VoIP/Unified Communications
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Ok, I wrote this the other day about these bastards. See Social Networking VD

I immediately unsubscribed and sent them a screed demanding they not spam my address bok that they harvested. This is an elegant use of social networking to perform a pharming attack on an individual in a way. They don’t do anything but harvest email. The fuckers.

So I figure since they snookered a bunch of friends and me. so they are fair game. They’re a disease. So I’m sharing some intelligence here.

Ok, so Quechup.com is part of iDate™ Ltd. whose privacy policy says:

Information Collection:

iDate gathers two types of information about users:

1. Information that users provide through optional, voluntary submissions. These are voluntary submissions requesting information about our services and online C.V’s.

2. Information iDate gathers through log files and aggregated tracking information. These files contain absolutely no personal information.
Information Use:

iDate Gathers User Information In The Following Processes:

1. Optional Voluntary Information:
1.1 Contact Form requesting information on iDate’s services. Gathers company name, address, contact person, e-mail, telephone number and information regarding their interest in iDate. This information is used to understand a visitors interest in iDate and enable us to provide additional information about our services.

1.2 Online Curriculum Vitae. Gathers personal details and contact details, specifically: name; address; e-mail; telephone number; age and marital status. And educational qualifications, professional experience and employment details. This information is used to assess suitable candidates to work with iDate.

2. Log Files and Aggregated Tracking Information:
Like most web sites we use log files located on our servers. These include internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, platform type, date/time stamp, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement in the aggregate, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses, etc. are not linked to personally identifiable information. We use a tracking utility called Webalizer that uses log files to analyze user movement.
Sharing

Legal Disclaimer
Though we make every effort to preserve user privacy, we may need to disclose personal information when required by law wherein we have a good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with a current judicial proceeding, a court order or legal process served on our Web site.

Aggregate Information (non-personally identifiable)
We do not share any aggregated demographic information with any 3rd parties.

Ok, so they’re liars, address book harvesters, and generally vermin. They are pond scum or worse. They truly do represent the venereal disease of Web 2.0.And I will call them out by name:

• Mark Finch, President and Chief Executive Officer
• Glen Finch, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
• Chris Morley, Chief Communications Officer
• Audrey Ragg, Chief Financial Officer
• Paul Sugden PhD – Project Development Manager
• Mathew Graham PhD – Project Development Manager
• Justin Small - Marketing Manager

You fuckers better never show up at a conference I’m at. I can pretty much guarantee we’ll be pillorying your sorry asses until the end of time.

Think I’m unfair? One of you pick up the phone and call me at 360-545-4050. We’ll record the call as a podcast and the the whole net hear your side of misuse of trust and email harvesting. That, or rot in hell.

Does my irritation with this truly sociopathic behavior of theirs show through?

Technorati Tags: QUeshup, spammers, emali harvesters, malicious social network attack, social network disease

Filed by Ken at 10:27 pm under Technology
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I’m so glad to see the head lemur back online and engaging. He’s one of the most direct people I’ve ever encountered. His laser-beam view cuts right to the heart of things.

I was one of those infected with this particular online disease recently. And he nails the problem precisely and accurately

Quechup The Clap of FaceBook

Well it didn’t take long for the first Socially Transmitted Disease to infect the sharecroppers on the FaceBook Plantation. Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease also know as the Clap. You get it from fucking around.

Quechup is the Clap of Social Networking. You get it from letting Quechup touch your address book.

Having to admit publically that you gave all your FaceBook ‘Friends’ the Clap has gotta hurt.

Technorati Tags: Quechup, veneral disease of social networks

Filed by Ken at 12:37 pm under Technology
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One of my favorite bloggers, Arjun Roychowdhury (aka CorporateRat), just posted this. Arjun and I are online contacts, but other than an occasional email, have never spoken or met. I’m really looking forward to meeting at the ITExpo. Keen insights and a great perspective on the industry. Arjun is someone I pay close attention to.

Speaking at Internet Telephony and our latest IMS report
Hi folks,
My apologies for the lack of postings. It just so happens that Sep/Oct/Nov are the worst three months for travel for me. I have been on the road for most part of this month and will be all over the map till the end of November.

If any of you are going to be at the Internet Telephony Conference in LA, I hope to see you there. I will be speaking on Monday about “IMS vs. WiMAX” there. So if you are attending, would be good to meet. On another note, I’ve been speaking and attending at the Internet Telephony show for several years now, and I must say, Rich Tehrani and the team has done a great job over the years in being innovative. For this show, as an example, they have come out with innovative interviews, video clips and press releases which help in advertising both their name and the participating company’s name. Good on you, Rich! I hope other setups pick up a bit on the ideas these folks have implemented.
[Read full post]

Technorati Tags: Arjun Roychowdhury, CorporateRat, ITExpo, IMS, unified communications

Filed by Ken at 6:46 pm under Unified Communications
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Hot Seat Bar, Tualatin, Oregon, originally uploaded by realmerlyn.

This guy really needs to take a break from constant travel long enough to do a podcast interview.

Hey Randall, some of us would like just a touch more than Jaiku, a thumbs-up pic, and knowing what song you did a karaoke. Would sure like it if you can spare time to do a podcast chat with that Gabby Geek friend we share.

Filed by Ken at 6:24 pm under General
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First thanks to Pat Phelan for this great photo of my pals Alex Saunders and Howard Thawe, the business brains behind iotum’s Relevance Engine.

Just a today someone asked me if the Relevance Engine did everything they claim. It isn’t often I can answer a question like that so easily. Yes, 100%.

One of the approaches I’ve often taken is to explain that iotum is the David Allen’s Getting Things Done of online tools. It takes my daily life and puts things in context. Presence and availability our powerful data elements, but they’re only really useful when they are in context. iotums Relevance Engine puts my life in context. Now they give easy context to my conference calls too.

I can’t possibly tell the story as well as Alec, so I’m taking the liberty of sharing. In an email this morning, Alec said

I wanted to give you a small update on what we’ve been up to. After all, I am sure you’ve seen the odd blog post over the weekend hinting about an iotum and Facebook tie-in. Well, ten weeks ago we paused, re-evaluated the market and opportunity landscape and put development of the Talk-Now Blackberry application on hold.

Why?
A huge opportunity presented itself to us that we felt we could not ignore. Facebook, the white hot social networking platform that is all the rage today, opened itself up to third party developers to allow them to integrate their applications within the portal directly.

We were already evaluating how to enlarge the network of Talk-Now users with a web presence. In addition iotum had previously planned to incorporate social networking features into our Talk-Now platform eighteen months in the future (do you remember our briefing on the “Minerva” concept Luca?). We have always seen the growth of social networks in business as a huge opportunity. As I’ve written previously, business is social. We meet, talk on the phone, arrange events, dine together and socialize just as we do in our personal lives. Business social networking simply happens for different reasons, and it’s the natural evolution of the portal.

Facebook’s platform announcement presented the opportunity to accelerate our plans by 18 months.

The first application that we chose to build for Facebook was conferencing. Coincidentally, this is also the service Blackberry users of Talk-Now have indicated a high desire for. Tomorrow we will be launching the beta of iotum Conferencing on Facebook, bringing free conference calls to the Facebook platform. It’s a dial-in system, which may present problems for you, Luca and Paul, since the only numbers are in North America at this point. We will roll out international numbers in the future.

There are a few things I want to bring to your attention.

1. The conferencing application feels nearly identical to the Facebook Events application. Our goal was to model a conference call exactly like an event, except that it takes place over the telephone. By integrating with the Facebook portal in this way, conferencing becomes a natural extension of Facebook, rather than a separate application.
2. To make conferencing easier to use (after all, who hasn’t scrambled looking for a dial-in number and PIN), we are planning to send you the dial in number by text message before the call (this feature will be implemented in the next couple of days), and we use your mobile phone number as your personal identifier. In fact, if you’re calling from your mobile line, our software simply uses your caller ID to validate you and puts you automatically into right conference room. And there is an added benefit. In 60% of calls today, at least one person is missing. Often, it’s simple forgetfulness. Our text message acts as a reminder.
3. The application also takes advantage of the Facebook integration to allow you to post an agenda, and see who is already on the bridge (a bit of AJAXy magic we did allows that to be refreshed without you having to reload the page…). In future, we’ll do more Facebook integration, with features like a wall to allow notes to be captured, and recordings and documents to be posted. Plus, we’ll add more features allowing for live interaction with users, based on the AJAX work we’ve done.
4. You can operate the conferencing service in two ways – either as a standard scheduled call, or an unscheduled “instant” call. We think instant calls have the potential to change how people use conferencing, and make it much more useful for quick ad-hoc calls to arrange an activity amongst multiple people, or to manage unexpected events and crises.

I know you’re probably asking “what does this have to do with the iotum Relevance Engine?”. Everything. Although our presence capabilities aren’t in the application as you will see it today, they will become part of it over time. We made a strategic decision to get to market quickly with the conferencing system, and then roll out additional features, like presence, as quickly as possible afterward. Also, later this fall the capabilities we have developed for Facebook will be re-integrated with the Talk-Now application on BlackBerry, allowing users to create instant conference calls from the BlackBerry driven by the iotum Relevance Engine. Users will be able to see at a glance who is available for a conference call, and then immediately bring all available people into that call. We’ve had interest in this feature from organizations ranging from sales groups, to political parties, IT professionals and public relations companies.

Over the weekend, I’ve been giving restricted access to the app to anyone from the blogging community who has asked. Later today (we’re targeting 1 PM Eastern time) we will completely remove the restrictions, allowing anyone to sign up and use the software. It’s still beta, and we may reset the database one more time between now and tomorrow, but it’s good enough that you can begin using it now. I encourage you to try the software, and let us know what you think. I suggest you begin by looking at who else has also installed the app, and try a call or two them.

As always, both Howard and I are grateful for your continued friendship and support.

I knew the beta was underway, but I’ve been time constrained and also knew I couldn’t really test it. So first, I’m not happy that TalkNow is frozen in time. It is by far the single most powerful business productivity tool I’ve used, but it’s severely limited to Blackberry users only. You will have to trust me that I’ll be taking Alec to task in person next week for this. TalkNow needs multiplatform support, and now. There’s power there that iotum needs to leverage.

But this addition to Facebook, and it’s live/available now, is one of the first and few genuinely useful apps for business to hit Facebook so far. It’s a powerful tool, and I expect iotum to reap the reward of widespread adoption very quickly.

Kudos Alec and Howard, and the whole iotum team!

Technorati Tags: iotum, Relevance Engine, Facebook, unified communications

Filed by Ken at 6:15 pm under Technology
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I’ve been using the Nokia N95 as a primary phone for several months. Like everyone who got the early release of this phone, I wrote some pretty glowing reviews. But I owe you all some comments after months of use too.

The phone has a phenomenal feature set. Stellar camera. On board GPS. Media player. It’s a delight in terms of form factor. One of my all time favorites.

But it’s far from perfect. The battery life, while greatly improved from when I first got it, remains mediocre on its best days. The camera bug has apparently been fixed with firmware upgrade as I haven’t seen that in a while.

My complaint? Not enough memory to do anything really. Play media and attempt to take a picture and you get an out of memory message. Load both Jaiku and Shozu and try for a picture? Nope. Let Jaiku, Shozu and TalkPlus run concurrently? Guaranteed headaches.

In this original version of the N95, users need to gracefully accept KERN3 EXEC messages. For the unknowing, that’s the N95 BSOD. It locks up. It reboots itself. It’s generally just not reliable enough for anything mission critical. In short, it’s leagues away from being an acceptable business class phone.

After months of use, I still love it, but the headaches that seemed minor in the early going are now a source of routine frustration almost daily. And while it’s a fabulous gadget, when you have an N95 in one pocket and a Blackberry in the other, the battery life and stability quickly becomes very obvious.

Nokia markets the N95 as a lifestyle device, not a business phone. That’s a wise choice. And now there’s a new N95. I have no idea if I’ll see one of those or not, but I’m confident it’s a complete generation improved. And that’s something the N95 needs…improvement

Technorati Tags: Nokia, N95, mobility, reliability, Nokia N-series

Filed by Ken at 5:46 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Portable Pleasures - PDA/Smartphones
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If you got spammed with an invitation because I got snookered into signing up on this before I figured out that all the invitations I was getting were my friends and colleagues getting snookered, please forgive me and disregard.

I’ve sent a cease and desist and killed my account on this farce. But that took 10-15 minutes and I suspect some of you got spammed. I encourage you not to invest time or effort in this system, which appears to to nothing more than harvest address books and spam others really.

Technorati Tags: social networking spam, abuse of trust. losers

Filed by Ken at 10:59 pm under Technology
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