Digital Common Sense

My pal Andy Abramson just posted this and it’s a pretty thoughtful look at what’s coming in IP communications. As such, it led me to rethink some of my recent comments, and seems a good opportunity to revisit these two subjects.

What’s Next In IP Communications? Here’s An Idea To Look At

Last week two stories seem to generate a lot of interest all across the blogs and in the news. The first was the rumor of a “Skype Killer” being planned by the leading telcos around the world. The second was the blockbuster move by the new WiMax consortium of players including Intel, ClearWire, Sprint plus the cable companies, along with online leader Google, to take over what Sprint and Clearwire were both not really doing yet, that to create a national WiMax footprint here in the USA which will deliver, in theory, both Mobile and Fixed broadband solutions.

These two topics are really pretty central to IP communications as we look ahead. Skype isn’t a panacea, but it’s the largets VoIP deployment in the world, and remains wildly popular. And it’s still growing. WiMax is arguably a successor to WiFi, or a fit somewhere in between WiFi and carrier wireless broadband. It could be the next carrier wireless broadband for data if it really succeeds.

Here’s a point Andy makes that the two technologies may be interwoven -

You see, the genie is out of the bottle and there’s no putting the Skype Genie back in, so another more robust and accepted flavor of IP communications that does the same thing and more, but without the already known concerns that Skype raises, could overtake them in time,
especially if its primary purpose was to supplant the existing analog base of installed users as the telcos move them to IP on their own or see them migrate to cable or WiMax.

I’m not sure I fully agree with the details, but I’m absolutely on the same page as Andy with regard to the problems.

The telcos don’t like Skype. Fair enough. They don’t like competition of any kind. They’ve struggled with it since divestiture of the old Bell System in 1984 and have a a long history of killing competition. But they’ve done too little for too long, and it’s far too late. What was once the leading technology industry (think 1956 and Bell Labs invention of the transistor), has fallen into a malaise of maintaining status quo and a sense of the right to be the incumbent forever.

Skype is in play. It may not be openly, actively courting, but Skype is clearly in play. And eBay has demonstrated their inability to leverage their huge investment in Skype toward any substantial success. Yet Skype continues to grow and improve. There’s been some speculation that some consortium of telcos might actually make a move to buy Skype. I think it’s highly unlikely. One of the biggest negatives Skype has shown is its disinterest in open standards for VoIP. for the telcos to embrace Skype, they’d have one of two paths to follow - (a) radically alter Skype to use open standard VoIP in fitting with their infrastructure, or (b) radically re-architect their own networks to use or add Skype’s protocols.

Either presents major problems, and would take on a lifetime of reinventing telephony all over again. They telcos believe they already know telephony, because they know it as it was. Frankly, they don’t have the innovative wherewithall to pull off either of those options successfully. What they might be able to do is mediocritize Skype by building a series of gateways to the PSTN. This could work from a technical standpoint. It also makes sense from a regulatory perspective to manage Skype in a fully separate environment.

Given the innovation shown by the telcos for the last fifty years (please note the tongue-in-cheek…there has been no substantive innovation by the telcos for fifty years), this last option seems a slippery slope, fraught with business, technology, and customer satisfaction problems.

So pick your analogy. Andy said the genie is out of the bottle. Others have said the horse is out of the barn, the water’s over the dam. For the telcos, their response to the Skype threat is simply too little, too late. Skype came on their horizon at a time every telco executive had been forced to read The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. Every one of them knew full well that disruptive technologies come with a set of known characteristics. Disruptive technologies generally:

• Arrive substantially “downmarket”
• Less complex and expensive (off-the-shelf)
• May sometimes be more costly
• Lower performance than mainstream technology
• Offer lower margins than mainstream technology
• Are introduced into insignificant markets
• May have to make their own markets
• Are perceived as unnecessary by mainstream customers
• Do not fit mainstream value model
• Are difficult to deal with by established players
• Carry significant first-mover advantage

They knew this and ignored Skype until it was too late. Years too late. Skype ate the telcos lunch, and in many ways now has the mindshare that the traditional telcos can never win back. They rested on their laurels as a sustaining technology.

Just as radically as the 3.5″ disk drive disrupted the old traditional disk makers out of business, Skype has forever changed the face of voice communications.

• Of leading 14” drive makers, none survive the 8” drive
• Of leading 8” drive makers, 1 survives the 5.25” drive
• Of leading 5.25” drive makers, only 35% introduce a 3.5” product!

It’s nice that the telcos finally woke up to smell the coffee, but the pot’s almost empty and there’s a hole in your cup. Too little too late. Like many of us have been saying for years to the telcos - the bell tolls for thee.

Andy goes on to bring in the WiMax angle as a related topic -

WiMax. Last week’s announcement of the mega players all joining hands was a very good deal for Clearwire and Sprint.
Clearwire’s investors cashed out. Sprint got someone else to carry the
ball in the USA market, plus this now provides another option to offer
IP based communications versus the already existing 3G solutions.

As a result I chose to think how the very much-ballyhooed WiMax play
could be differentiated versus being looked at as only a substitute for
the mobile phone. As I like to say “too much me too, me also, not me
different” is nothing really new. I mean, what good is going the 4G
route if all it does is give a less expensive experience to make phone
calls on the go, and not work everywhere for many years to come. That’s
what the cable guys already did with VoIP, where the only difference
from what we’ve always had from the phone company is the wire the phone
service travels over and the bill.

WiMax as a substitute for the mobile phone is a boneheaded idea for the reasons Andy states.He’s pretty open with his “too much me to, me also, not me different” description of ideas he sees as off the mark. I tend to be less charitable and call a boneheaded idea just that. A carrier-based approach to WiMax will take years to deploy. I compare carrier WiMax with ISDN in the United States. Never has a technology cost so much, to do so little, and arrive on the scene so late. By the time ISDN for consumers was generally available, it was overpriced, under-featured and obsolete. So now the telcos are going to make WiMax the next ISDN.

Sprint is among one of the least innovative companies I’ve watched for the past ten years. They’re slow to market with solutions that under-deliver, if they work at all. So know they’re going to partner with Clearwire. I’m just not as impressed as a number of my colleagues.

The success of WiFi has not been driven, extended or enlarged by the pitiful efforts we’ve seen that put WiFi in Starbucks and McDonalds. WiFi succeeded because it was unlicensed spectrum that you and I could deploy quickly, easily and cheaply in our homes, offices and businesses. Just like the disruptive technologies Christensen so aptly described, WiFi came in at the low end of a different market. It created its own market. I don’t believe WiMax has that same kind of potential. It’s too direct a competition potentially to existing wireless technologies. I believe we’ll see WiMax widely deployed, but it’s not a wireless technology I believe will sustain momentum long enough to become a major incumbent technology…at leastw not with the carriers driving it. They’ll drive it to mediocrity in their effort to stave off their own painful death while they tell themselves they’re innovating.

The next generation of wireless isn’t here yet. I don’t think we’ve really seen it yet. While the US runs a 2.5G network at best, much of the world is moving toward real 3G wireless. 4G is another animal and what we’re seeing today is a lot of experimentation in the space as players try to find the technology mesh that will gain the critical mass of user acceptance.

I don’t think this mesh will come from any company we see today as a telco. The telcos are innovating us into the dark ages of FCC largess protecting their business. The telcos exist in an environment of cronyism, back room handshakes and political contributions. That’s an approach that may stave off death a while longer, but it won’t create an environment where innovation thrives. They’ve still got their heads in the sand. While they’ve been beat over the head with a clue-by-four repeatedly for years, the telcos, to a very large degree, still haven’t a clue. They don’t have a ten year roadmap that’s got any grit to it.
Technorati Tags: telcos, WiMax, Skype, 4G, next generation networks, unified communications

Filed by Ken at 3:34 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Tech in General, Technology, VoIP/Unified Communications
No Comments

I got a note from my good friend Pat Phelan, CEO at Cubic Telecom, yesterday afternoon while out running an errand about a new service called Twitterfone. You can see the press release down below. It isn’t VoIP, but this is a really fascinating example of where voice services are heading.

Please bear in mind that I was out in mobile mode, with only my Blackberry, so all I’d actually seen initially was the flurry of chatter on Twitter about Twitterfone and the expected flurry of test posts as people try it out. Sheryl and I got invitations to join the beta, but weren’t back at the office until last night to actually get that done. For those of you who follow me at all, you know I’m an avid Twitter user, and have been since it was Twttr, long before it caught the wave of popularity. Sheryl and I use Twitter as part of our work at Stardust Global Ventures, and it’s an integral part of our daily life.

When I started using Twitter, it was SMS only, so it required a mobile phone to use. Now it seems to have come full circle, as Twitterfone enables people to use their mobile phone rather than the browser/. Huh? Yep/ The difference is that you can now phone in a message and have it post rather than key in an SMS text message. It also posts a short URL that links to your recorded audio.

Like a great many people, I use Twitter almost entirely via mobile on my Blackberry, and I like the raw simplicity of the SMS interface. I find many add-on tools make Twitter more complex and are something of a nuisance. The web interface enhancements seem to wipe out the simple elegance of Twitter with undue complexity. But adding voice to the mix is a very different enhancement and opens new vistas in human-to-network resource interaction.

I’m not sure the concept bedazzles me initially, but it’s interesting. I’ve played with SpinVOX and Utterz in the past. Both can do a similar type of thing - variations on a theme. Both of those implementations work pretty poorly in my experience. Speech recognition software however is improving at a rapid rate and if Twitterfone can do speech to text conversion cleanly, there could be some real value. Given the global audience on Twitter, the language and pronunciation variations could prove challenging.

That challenge was on my mind while I out in mobile mode, only on my Blackberry. That’s when I got this message via Twitter on my mobile -

To be fair, it’s the only one of those I saw, but very few of the people I follow on Twitter are using Twitterfone so far. I know it’s in invite-only beta mode, so I expect some glitches.

This morning I tried it out myself for the first time. Here’s what Twitterfone posted. If you click the graphic, you can hear what I said.

Twitterfone did a reasonable, but not quite perfect job of speech-to-text conversion.

Given that both Twitter and Twitterfone are free services, and Twitter has proven time and again that it’s not entirely reliable, they make an interesting match for social networking tools. Now it’s pretty easy to make a phone call and post to Twitter. You can actually speak a three minute message and the beginning will post to Twitter (140 character limit). People who want to hear the whole message can click through on the web to do so. On my Blackberry, I can click through and read the transcribed text, but not play the audio.

Being able to post to Twitter via a phone call somewhat troubles me as much as it intrigues me. The stream of Twitter messages is filled with useless drivel as it is. I’m as guilty as the next of posting useless information that’s only noise to the world at large. Now we all have an easier way to post as we drive or are otherwise occupied. That’s a mixed blessing.

I know two of the founding investors, both friends I think highly of. I’m really curious what their long range plans are. Is this for publicity or do they envision a monetization scheme that enables monetization. So far Twitter doesn’t have any monetization mechanism, so now we have another free service enhancing a free service. I’m not sure where the survivability might be. It seems potentially rather tenuous. But Pat and Florian are very bright guys with a great handle on the business, so I’m interested in what their vision is.

Pat and Florian, how about a podcast briefing on here?

Twitterfone inaugurates voice-to-Twitter service

• Allows anyone to send updates to Twitter by calling a number
• Voice is automatically transcribed to text

Twitterfone www.twitterfone.com - an Internationally backed voice to text message service launched today in the US, UK and Ireland.

Twitterfone voice-enables Twitter, a text message rebroadcast service and the hottest social networking service at the moment. With Twitterfone, people can dictate text messages via their mobile to be sent out to everyone on their Twitter social network.

Twitterfone investor and Cubic Telecom President Pat Phelan stated “Right now the million active users of Twitter use cell phones or computers to send and receive short bursts of texts to each other. Millions of messages each day are sent like this but while Twitter is one of the truly mobile social networks out there, there are times when users on the move cannot stop what they are doing to key in a message.

Twitterfone improves upon Twitter by allowing us to make a voice call which is turned into text and sent out to our network of friends. This only costs the price of a local call, no matter how many it is sent to. With hands-free kits common in cars it now means we can text each other without taking our eyes off the road and our hands off the wheel.”

How Twitter works:
Once people sign up to Twitter, they can subscribe to receive updates of users and receive them via the web or a text message. Web gurus Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble have over 20,000 subscribers each and even the Los Angeles Fire Department and the English Government are now sending out text updates to people via their Twitter account.

An alliance of international high-tech and telecom companies provide the technology platform behind Twitterfone. Geneva-based VOX telecom provides calls routing, Redwood City, California-based Zong powers mobile enrollment and transactions, MAXroam powers the telephony intelligence system and Dublin firm Dial2Do supplies the core speech recognition which is at the heart of Twitterfone. Dial2Do CEO Ivan MacDonald stated

“We’ve been involved in the space where the phone system meets the web for a long time now, and naturally we’ve been fascinated by the rise of Twitter. Increasingly, we’ll see “web 2.0″ services that people use primarily from their phones. Projections are that mobiles will become the dominant way of accessing the Internet, and a lot of this will be done via voice interfaces. We are very pleased to see Dial2Do add even more value to an already extraordinary service.”

Phelan added “We built this because we are all avid users of Twitter and have made some excellent business connections and friendships from it. We decided to see what we could contribute to the service and with our telecoms backgrounds the Twitterfone idea fitted perfectly”.

Twitterfone is in invite beta at the moment meaning that only those that have been sent invites can join up. There will be regular releases of invites and Twitterfone says they have planned for a million sign-ups over the next year.

Twitterfone inc is a privately owned corporation

Twitterfone investors are Pat Phelan, David Marcus, Florian Seroussi, Sean O Sullivan and Ivan MacDonald.

Technorati Tags: Twitterfone, Pat Phelan, Twitter, speech-to-text, voice recognition

Filed by Ken at 2:49 am under Mobility & Handheld, Unified Communications
1 Comment

Last year the O’Reilly ETel event was perhaps the most exciting conference venue in the industry. O’Reilly wasn’t able to continue the event, but that’s not enough to let something so exciting and powerful fade away. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Lee Dryburgh, this year we’ll see the kickoff of eComm2008. It’s what I believe will be the first of a revitalized, high-energy conference that will set the industry aflame with passion and innovation.

The conference takes place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA from March 12th-14th.

Established in 1996, the Computer History Museum is a public benefit organization dedicated to the preservation and celebration of computing history. It is home to one of the largest collections of computing artifacts in the world, a collection comprising over 13,000 objects, 20,000 images, 5,000 moving images, 4,000 linear feet of cataloged documentation and 5,000 titles or several hundred gigabytes of software. The mission of the Computer History Museum is to preserve and present for posterity the artifacts and stories of the information age. As such, the Museum plays a unique role in the history of the computing revolution and its worldwide impact on the human experience.

---

Here’s just a small sampling of speakers on the agenda. These are just a few that are my personal highlights. Check the speakers page for a complete list.

Bob Frankston

Frankston Innovating, Achieving connectivity from the edge.

Bob Frankston may be best known for writing VisiCalc. He has been working on online services and networks since 1966 and while at Microsoft initiated the home networking effort. Since then he’s focus his attention on a post-telecom model that builds on the Internet dynamic to achieve connectivity from the edge rather than the center.

---

Brough Turner

NMS Communications, SVP and CTO

Brough Turner is SVP, CTO and co-founder of NMS Communications wherehe oversees evolution of technology and product architectures andworks on business strategy and new market development. Brough writesand is quoted widely on telecommunications topics in trade and generalbusiness publications and he is a frequent speaker at telecom industryevents around the world. His current interests include mobilewireless access, broadband policy, mobile video, and user createdcontent and communities. Brough blogs athttp://blogs.nmss.com/communications/ on the technology, economic andsocial issues of communications at the intersection of telecom,mobility and the Internet.

---

David Isenberg

Awaiting…, Founder

David S. Isenberg spent 12 years at AT&T Bell Labs until his 1997 essay,”The Rise of the Stupid Network,” was received with acclaim everywhere in the global telecommunications community with one exception — at AT&T itself! So Isenberg left AT&T in 1998 to found isen.com, LLC (an independent telecom analysis firm based in Cos Cob, Connecticut) and to publish The SMART Letter, an open-minded commentary on the communications revolution and its enemies.

---

Jeff Bonforte

Yahoo! Inc., Vice President, Product Management

Jeff has founded a few startups including i-drive, an online storage pioneer, in 1998. He served as President for SIPphone, where he lead the development and release of Gizmo Project (www.gizmo5.com). He began working at Yahoo! in 2005, where he initially lead Voice. Shortly after, he was promoted to run Messenger, Voice and Chat. He was promoted to Vice President in 2007. Today he works in early product development in Search.

---

Lee S Dryburgh

SS7 Networks Limited, Director

Lee S. Dryburgh is a person-to-person communications technologist. He is an engineering doctoral candidate at UCL (with sponsorship from Cisco), SS7 consulting engineer via his company SS7 Networks and the initiator of the Emerging Communications (eComm) conference. He has performed work for numerous operators including British Telecom, O2, Sprint, T-Mobile, Orange, Verisign, Hutchinson, as well as vendors including Marconi, Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel, and Cisco. He is an acknowledged expert in the telecommunication protocol suite Signaling System #7 and lead-authored the bestselling book on the topic. His research focus is the future of telephony and enabling conversation between relevant strangers.

---

Martin Geddes

STL, Chief Analyst

Martin Geddes is author of the popular telecom strategy blog Telepocalypse, as well as chief analyst at STL and co-instigator of the Telco 2.0 initiative (www.telco2.net) — helping network operators and vendors make money in an all-IP world.

---

Thomas McCarthy-Howe

The Thomas Howe Company, CEO

Thomas McCarthy-Howe has nineteen years of experience in telecommunications product development. He is currently an independent consultant to service providers, enterprises and equipment vendors in the design and development of next generation communications equipment and services. Thomas has held senior management and engineering positions at industry leaders such as Comverse, Versatel Networks, PictureTel and Aware. As a member of the PictureTel engineering team, Mr. Howe designed audio and video software of the first PC-based video conferencing system, as well as software for the original version of NetMeeting, and as Aware Inc.’s software architect for the first commercially available ADSL chipset. In 2007, Thomas won the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Mashup Contest. In addition to his writing and teaching, he currently serves on several technical advisory boards and boards of directors.

---

That list is just a few of the fabulous speakers on the eComm agenda. Yes, those were chosen because they represent some personal friends we look foward to spending time with, but they’re also trusted colleagues who represent the voice of wisdom in the industry. The speaker’s list for this event is incomparable with that of many conferences.

---

Looking over the agenda yields such a depth and breadth of conversations that this is truly an even not to be missed.

My partner Sheryl and I are making sure we won’t miss it. We’ll be there, and expect to be presenting one of the lightning talks on the last day. We’ll be talking about why enabling a hyperconnected state with voice and data services is one of the most vital competitive differentiators in the industry.

We’re also lined up to speak should schedules change or anyone’s travel plans go awry. We will definitely be there blogging, interviewing, podcasting, doing video, and sharing the excitement and frenzy of action from the conference.

We hope you’ll look for us and come say hello. We want to meet and talk with as many of you as possible.

---

Special Bonus

The cost of this conference is already low, one of the lowest cost conferences in the industry. Early bird registration is still in effect right now, for another $300 off.

As a special bonus if you email either Sheryl or Ken, we’ll provide a special discount code that will get an additional 15% discount. The early bird registration will end soon, so make your plans now.

Drop us an email to let us know if you’re going to be there so we can set aside time to meet in person.

Technorati Tags: eComm, Lee Dryburgh, Ken Camp, Sheryl Breuker

Filed by Ken at 4:43 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Technology, Unified Communications, VoIP/Unified Communications
No Comments

Art Rosenberg always writes some pretty thoughtful pieces over at Unified-View. I’ve only met Art once, but have read his work for a long time. The other day he posted his thoughts on How Mobility and UC Will Really Change The Pace of Business Communications in 2008.

Art’s post set me thinking about unified communications, mobility and social network attributes in a slightly different want as I look ahead to 2008. I really encourage you to go read Art’s full post, but in the meantime, I’ll share some thoughts.

UC Means All Business Communications
Now that the term “unified communications” (UC) has subsumed real-time telephony, wired and wireless connectivity, and all forms of messaging, it has become synonymous for all aspects of business communications. It has also become increasingly difficult to define everything that UC is really supposed to do for the enterprise. Microsoft and its Alliance partner Nortel wisely recognized this problem last year, and proceeded to establish hundreds of demonstration sites around the world in order to show business management what UC does for business operations and end users, rather than just explain how the technology infrastructure works.

This is a call to the burgeoniong unified communications community. Business communications and real-time telephony are what business cares about. I’ve written recently about VoIP being pumbing, or simply more infrastructure. Art’s saying something very similar. It’s not about technology. It’s about business. The industry has to wake up to that.

Simplifying The User Perspective of UC – Contacting People Quickly Any Way
…UC is all about making contact and communicating with people easily, flexibly, and quickly in a variety of ways.

What a great summary right there. Simplify. That sounds easy, but I realized how hard it is. Let me give you my perspective. Simplification is something that small, creative innovators do well. Simplification comes from companies like MOBIVOX, iotum, Cubic Telecom, GrandCentral, and the like really provide powerful tools that simplify life for users. When’s the last time you really say Cisco, Nortel or Avaya simplifying things for your communications needs? Really?

That’s part of the changing landscape that will impact unified communications and social networking in 2008. More powerful tools with simpler interactions are going to be a very hot item. They’re where the quickest successes will be found. That means the majority of innovative changes, the ones that catch our attention, will still be coming from small innovators next year. They’re the people to watch.

Here’s Art’s take on the traditional industry -

On the other hand, traditional telephony will be a big target for the most drastic changes in business contact procedures, since it has traditionally been based upon the inflexibilities of wired connections, restrictive user interfaces, and location-based devices. So, not only will business calls “integrate” with flexible messaging facilities, but, from a user perspective, all aspects of traditional call management will be changing as well. Much of what will happen to business call management will be derived from the experience of traditional customer call center technologies that can now be implemented more efficiently through IP telephony infrastructures and multimodal endpoint devices.

My view is more direct. Traditional telephony is a dead business that hasn’t keeled over yet. When I left Lucent Technologies in 1996, I told friends that I thought the old AT&T, Lucent and everything that spun out of that was a dead industry. But that like a large animal shot on safari, it would run for miles and miles before it finally fell over dead. It’s an industry that was repeatedly shot and has been running for a long time now, but still bleeding profusely. The traditional carriers are flagging and faltering. They haven’t innovated in years. That ability is gone from their genetic makeup. Sure, they may have divisions or business units that offer wireless and innovate a bit, but let’s face it, the traditional telcos aren’t she sharpest knives in the drawer. They only surprise with the stupid things they do.

When is the last time a traditional telephone company surprised customers with something really new and innovative? Think hard. Real hard. Was it direct dial long distance? or touch tone dialing? Look at your phone. Unless you have an iPhone, you’re using a very old and tired UI to do anything with it. That ten-digit touch pad was an interface to an old network. The new network of today really needs a more useful interface - one that’s simple and powerful.

Here are some areas where Art sees unified communications impacting business communications -

• “Contextual” Presence and Availability
• Proactive Notifications From Automated Business Process Applications
• Multimodal Messaging Communications
• “Instant” Conferencing

These are important because they’re all about the things we’ve been watching for a while now.

Presence and availability aren’t new concepts, but they’re becoming key attributes that successful business people have to manage. That’s a social media overlay into business service networking that’s on a collision course. It’s what I’d call a cataclysmic event on the horizon. And my prediction is that Microsoft will be a non-player, fumbling with how to get in the game and own that segment. They want it badly. I don’t believe they have a clue where to begin. They may indeed become a dominant player at some point but Microsoft is like the traditional telcos when it comes to innovation - it simply isn’t there.

Proactive notification is a vital part of the evolution to a Software Oriented Architecture (SOA) in some fashion. It’s all about making business processes and workflows interact easily with network communications services (voice, video and data). This is the convergence we’ve been talking about for ten years now. Tight coupling between business applications and network services will engender a change in corporate culture that will enable some companies to become the new enterprise we’ve never seen before. Some enterprise will become the nimble, innovative giants that have only been dreamed of. They’ll dominate their respective markets. They’ll also be incredibly vulnerable since they can be leapfrogged by a competitor at any point. That’s going to drive a time of mergers, acquisitions, and bloodletting across the industries involved.

Multimodal Messaging Communications speaks to me as mobility. What to we really want? Ubiquituous, easy access, anywhere, any time. We want always on, always connected, always ready to go services. This is a combination of mobile computing services and enhanced wireless networking. Technologies that couple with tools to give us powerful resources. I like to call it casual computing, but mobile computing will also do. It’s the always on mentality. That’s something my life partner Sheryl and I experience every day of our lives as a hyperconnected couple. I believe, Sheryl and I believe that the world is becoming more hyperconnected. We realize that our particular integration of mobile and network technologies into our daily lives isn’t the norm today. But we believe that’s changing for many people.

Instant Conferencing that Art mentions is a sore spot for many. Anyone who’s ever had to set up a conference call on the fly knows what a nightmare that can be. Even when we set one up in advance, the industry is fraught with a feature set that’s daunting and and uses an arcane set of keystrokes (mostly on that obsolete ten0digit dial pad) to operate. The conferencing segment of the industry really needs to be wiped out, and a fresh start. But there’s hope and light. iotum recently put up a free conference calling application on Facebook that gives a glimmer of hope to how conferencing might be set up in a business environment one day soon in an SOA world.

I think the key point, the real power in Art’s post, comes in the closing section - Managing The New I/O For Business Process Applications – People!. Then again, he’s a great writer who knows how to set us up. It also made me think of one of my favorite books of all time, Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology by Darrin Barney. The core concept is that we, as humans, are now really an I/O tool of the network, the large I Internet that collects and gathers information about everything on our planet. In short, we feed the machine. And after all, isn’t the Internet really a large data collection engine gathering input from all of us for the biggest data warehouse ever imagined?

Technorati Tags: unified communications, mobility, casual computing, always on, hyperconnected couple

Filed by Ken at 10:42 am under Mobility & Handheld, Tech in General, Technology, Unified Communications, VoIP/Unified Communications
No Comments

I’ve hinted many times on Digital Common Sense over the past few months that I was working on something new. Something looking forward to the future.

Today, my partner in life and business, Sheryl Breuker, and I unveiled the first peek at our joint venture, Stardust Global Ventures.

Sheryl and I share many interests in broad areas of technology, its impact on society, how human behavior adapts to use technology and the aspects of both mobile and casual computing.

Our focus will shift and evolve, but we’re going to be actively engaged at the center of how social media, communications technologies, and the evolution of the Internet are used by people across all walks of life. I’ve focused for years on enterprise business needs. We believe that we can help business enterprises large and small better understand how to embrace and adopt emerging technologies to compete in new, stronger ways. The work force of tomorrow will demand access to the tools and resources they’ve grown up using. Corporate culture, for many organizations, must shift to a new paradigm of embracing social networks, instant messaging, chat, video and mobile solutions.

Just as business must adapt, society also evolves. These tools are used by kids in school, with their friends, educators, non-profit organizations, churches and families. As a hyper-connected couple, using leading edge technologies and tools ourselves, our mission is to help others understand how to embrace change, incorporate the tools in ways that make sense, and maximize the value of a constantly shifting technology.

I will continue to blog here, but Sheryl and I hope you’ll come follow us in our new home together at Stardust Global Ventures.

Technorati Tags: Stardust Global Ventures, Sheryl Breuker, Gabby Geek, Ken Camp, social medai. mobility

Filed by Ken at 4:38 pm under General, Mobility & Handheld, Portable Pleasures - PDA/Smartphones, Tech in General, Technology, Unified Communications
1 Comment

Here’s a post from Bard Linder over on Download Squad earlier today talking about the next release of Windows Mobile.

Where is Windows Mobile headed?

Posted Dec 14th 2007 5:00PM by Brad Linder

Windows Mobile may have trounced PalmOS pretty completely over the last few years, but if the mobile operating system wants to maintain its market share, it’s going to need to make some changes. For example, iPhone has raised the bar for mobile web browsing while the Windows Mobile version of Internet Explorer feels like a web browser from 1997 at best.
[Read Brad’s full post]

As a former user, I’m not sure I see a future at all for Windows Mobile. Like Brad points out, many of the enhancements can already be accomplished using third party solutions. For me, the stagnation and utter failure to advance over two years left me feeling Windows Mobile was headed for the deadpool. I still feel that. It just isn’t an OS I see having any viable future.

Technorati Tags: Windows Mobile, deadpool

Filed by Ken at 7:07 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Portable Pleasures - PDA/Smartphones
1 Comment

I’ve followed Network Observations for a while now. Lots of interesting posts there. While this particular issue is a wireless and mobility issue, it reaches far deeper into privacy of our personal information. It also speaks to the integrity and character of Verizon as a service provider.

If nothing else, it heightens awareness of the need for caveat emptor when dealing with service providers. They aren’t our friends. They don’t have our best interests at heart. Choosing an opt-out policy for selling customers information is sleazy at best. It’s a practice I think should be regulated, particularly in this environment.

Now’s the time to write to the FCC, but it’s also the time to slap Verizon if you’re a mobile customer of Verizon Wireless.

Outrage: An Open Letter to the FCC

SecurityDude, CISSP-ISSAP is an IT consultant, Security & Privacy Avvocate and blogger at large with over 20 years IT experience.

My post last week about Verizon Wireless’ impending disclosure of subscriber call information (CPNI) has struck a raw nerve with hundreds of readers. I would like to offer the letter below as a template you can copy and paste into an email to the FCC Commissioners.

Email Subject: Verizon Wireless CPNI Disclosure

Dear Chairman Martin, and esteemed FCC Commissioners,

I am writing to express my strong concern that Verizon Wireless is able to subvert the will of the people and established Federal law by simply including a leaflet in my monthly bill advising me that if I do not Opt-Out of CPNI disclosure within 30-days receipt of the notice, I will be Opted-In automatically and with no further notice. Verizon will no doubt snare hundreds of thousands of subscribers who are simply too busy, or fail to recognize the importance of the CPNI announcement.

You are aware that Federal Law prohibits telecommunications carriers from disclosing CPNI information. Verizon Wireless’ outrageous action is proof that carriers will not act in the best interests of their customers without strong Federal oversight such as that afforded by the Federal Communications Commission.

Even if a subscriber voluntarily Opts-In to CPNI disclosure, we should be concerned about the privacy of called parties who are subscribers of other wireless carriers not party to the CPNI disclosure agreement sought by Verizon Wireless? What if they do not wish their conversations disclosed? How are their legal rights to privacy protected?

I respectfully urge the FCC Commissioners to take immediate action to block Verizon’s CPNI disclosure from taking effect.

Sincerely,

Wireless Subscriber Under the Protection of the Laws of the United States & Protection of the US Federal Communications Commission

Here are the email addresses of the FCC Chairman and Commissioners:

Chairman Kevin J. Martin: KJMWEB@fcc.gov
Commissioner Michael J. Copps: Michael.Copps@fcc.gov
Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein: Jonathan.Adelstein@fcc.gov
Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate: dtaylortateweb@fcc.gov
Commissioner Robert McDowell: Robert.McDowell@fcc.gov

Additional Resources
(Added 10/25/07)
New York Times Article - Verizon Letter Stirs Privacy Debate
Verizon CPNI Notice - Posted on Verizon Wireless’ Legal Section
Full CPNI Notice - Complete notice

Technorati Tags: Verizon, Verizon Wireless, FCC, abuse of customer information, opt out

Filed by Ken at 11:58 am under Mobility & Handheld
5 Comments

I’ve talked at a lot in the past about the concept of casual computing. That’s been driven largely by my own mobility needs. I use a number of mobile and handheld devices on a regular basis. Beyond the devices themselves, there’s a large number of mobile tools, web-based services and the like that I find very handy. Here’s a link to a post that lists some great resources for talking, social networking web work, email and the like for mobile workers.

Travel Blogging: 100 Resources To Help You Post on The Road

The blogosphere doesn’t stop when you’re traveling, but finding a way to post when you’re away can be daunting. If you want to stay updated, you’ll need to enlist the help of some tools. Check out these resources that make mobile blogging a breeze.

Technorati Tags: mobility, mobile resources

Filed by Ken at 5:50 pm under Mobility & Handheld
1 Comment

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
1 Comment

I take some personal pride in this bit of news.

Jaiku brings conversations to mobile - Our new S60 client is now available for download

August 17th, 2007

You’ve heard us talking about it, possibly even had one of our lovely beta testers telling you how great it’s going to be; now it’s out in the wild, and ready for you to download.

The main push of this release is to let you bring the rich conversation you’ve been enjoying on our website with you out into the world on your S60 mobile, and man, has it done that. Our beta users have been saying things like “I almost never bother with the website these days” (but don’t tell our web-dev team that) and “One of the most polished S60 apps I’ve seen.”.

Personal because the fabulous folks at Jaiku allowed me to be the first to display and talk about this new beta some time ago in part 1, part 2, part 3

And I’d like to thank them for listening when I really pushed. I’d like to think I helped them really see the value in bringing bloggers into their early beta. And I’m looking forward to their continued success.

Technorati Tags: Jaiku, Symbian, mobility

Filed by Ken at 2:57 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Portable Pleasures - PDA/Smartphones
1 Comment

I don’t think this comes as a big surprise to industry watchers. It shouldn’t.

Google’s first mobile phone reportedly will run a Linux operating system on a Texas Instruments “Edge” chipset, and will likely ship to T-Mobile and Orange customers in the Spring of 2008. “GPhone” call minutes and text messages will apparently be funded by mobile advertising, according to unconfirmed reports.
[Read post]

The impact of this could be striking in a couple of ways that haven’t been widely mentioned.

First, I’ll reiterate that I’m not terribly impressed with the iPhone. If Apple wanted to eat their own lunch in the iPod spce, I’d say the iPhone has been and will continue to be a huge success. If you’re in the telecom industry, it was a day long hiccup at most. The iPhone remains a non-event in the huge space that is mobile telecommunications.

That’s not to say as a concept it isn’t without great merit. What iPhone does is lead the way to the next generation user interface (UI). It set the stage for things to come, and that’s an important point. Kudos to Apple for changing the game, but I think we need to recognize which game they really changed.

Google’s entry into the space isn’t a surprise. We’ve been talking about it for a while. Entry with a Linux-based device isn’t really a surprise either. Given everything that Google’s done with muni-WiFi did anyone expect them to use RIM or Windows Mobile?

I haven’t had time, nor do I really have the depth of knowledge to really appreciate what the impact here might have on Nokia. Certainly there will be impact, but in mobile telecom space, if Google’s entering as an 800 pound gorilla, Nokia’s the alpha male and closer to 1200 pounds.

So who’s impacted? First and foremost I think Microsoft. Windows Mobile has been slow to evolve, is behind in very way, and get limited acceptance at best. RIM and Blackberry own a significant piece of enterprise business space. Nokia does quite well there. Windows Mobile is a quirky niche player with potential, but slow to deliver just not quite in time. This should be a nail in the coffin of Microsoft’s foray into mobile devices and handsets. I’d say to Microsoft, focus on your core competencies, and mobile solutions has never been one.

This will be really interesting to watch.

Technorati Tags: Google, mobility, mobile devices, Linux

Filed by Ken at 10:47 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Technology
2 Comments

My friend   has shown me iotum’s Talk-Now program before and I was quite impressed. But I’ve never had anything to test it with. Today that changed and I replaced my weary Treo 700W with the brand spanking new Blackberry 8830 World Edition (CDMA & GSM).

I confess, the first thing I did this evening after basic setup and synchronization was to go off and install the Talk-Now application. I’ll be giving it a real workout here in the next week or so. I’m on the hunt for a Blackberry screen capture tool so I can share screenshots. And I’ll be writing about it here as I get familiar with all the great stuff it does.

Technorati Tags: iotum, Talk-Now, Blackberry, unified communications

Filed by Ken at 8:08 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Portable Pleasures - PDA/Smartphones, Unified Communications
No Comments

I’ve written a bit about the new TalkPlus beta for Symbian that I’m testing on my N95 lately. And over time, I’ve written a lot about GrandCentral. These two present and interesting pair. They don’t do the same thing at all, yet they do exactly the same things. They don’t compete at all, yet they’re on a path to head-to-head competition. And they don’t work together.

Here’s the situation. My primary published telephone number is my GrandCentral number. It’s everywhere and the only number on my business card. I want to alias that number on my cell phone so that if I’m calling someone, the CallerID shows my GrandCentral number. It’s the number I’d leave in voice mail to reach me. It’s the number I prefer they call me back on. I like incoming calls going there because I have control. I like that control a lot. It’s incredibly granular and powerful.

TalkPlus makes that easy. They also do all the right things. When you alias, or mirror, a phone number you already own, TalkPlus doesn’t automatically activate it. There’s a verification process.

On the TalkPlus web site, you set up the number and then tell it when to call you. The most common selection is probably call me now. TalkPlus gives you a random 5-digit PIN on the web page.

When the phone rings, you’re asked to press 1 if you’re expecting the call. Then you’re asking to input the 5-digit pin to validate the phone. That’s simple, secure enough, and it works great. I’ve validated a number of phones.

GrandCentral introduces a wrinkle that, according to their support folks, can’t be overcome at this point in time. When a GrandCentral call comes in, you’re prompted to press 1 to accept, 2 to send to voice mail, etc. Pressing 1 accepts the call from TalkPlus just fine. But when you press 1 to tell TalkPlus you’re expecting the call, GrandCentral dialed digit feature access controls take over. In short, you can’t input the PIN to validate the number.

I can see a a future of competition between GrandCentral and TalkPlus on some fronts, but I don’t ever see them really hurting each other’s business. They’re similar, but different; complementary but comptetitive. But I do see a pretty universal need to give out my phone number, then verify that it’s my number by either (a) placing a call from that CallerID, something only possible with TalkPlus, or (b) accepting a call and dialing some validation sequence on the dialpad.

In short, it’s a bug. I’m not sure if it’s a big one or not. I can’t do what I’m trying to do, so it’s a big one to me at the moment. In the grand scheme of things, it certainly isn’t huge, but for people who need the functionality, it could be a show stopper. I know for me it’s enough to step back and look at the two solutions and figure out which one best meets the broadest set of my needs. And if I can’t mash the two together to do what I want, there’s a gap (money on the table) for someone else to fill (and win me away).

UPDATE: I think it’s only fair to note that within minutes of hearing of my issue, Craig Walker was in touch to chat about this issue. I think it’s really important to note the incredible responsiveness to issues that’s always been shown by the GrandCentral team. Their response has never been anything short of phenomenal. Problem isn’t solved yet, but I’m sure I’ll have more to say on the subject.

Technorati Tags: GrandCentral, TalkPlus, mobility, unified communications, mashup

Filed by Ken at 6:14 am under Mobility & Handheld, Unified Communications
3 Comments

Patch is out to updgrade the Treo. One key feature is that DUN tethering is now supported. I’ll be testing the Nokia N800 paired to EVDO on the Treo rather than GPRS on the N95 after I get it all done.

Technorati Tags: Treo, mobility, N800

Filed by Ken at 5:52 pm under Mobility & Handheld
No Comments

There’s a new Symbian client for TalkPlus that’s making the rounds in beta with some bloggers. I first looked at the new beta here with an early peek. Thanks to a pretty close working relationship with the TalkPlus team, I convinced them to let me look just a half-step further ahead.

TalkPlus begins with the idea of virtual numbers directed to your cell phone, but for me the real power comes with the ability to alias existing phone numbers. To be able to create new numbers in, say New York and Chicago for business, plus incorporate your home, office and other phone numbers all on a single device is incredibly powerful.

Let me show you what I mean. In this screenshot, I’ve fired up the TalkPlus client andhere’s the main screen when it’s up and running. Important to note that simply clicking a button will hide the client while it runs in background.

On this screen, my Nokia N95 is set up with four phone numbers. I can do more. Quite a few more, but this shows the potential on one screen. I’ve built one TalkPlus virtual number in Seattle, aliased my Treo on a different mobile carrier, and aliased my home phone. I’ve simply sprayed a line through the actual numbers for privacy purposes.

Ths first option is checked. That’s the native device phone number. In other words, my N95 is working as normal on the carrier assigned number. if I click on this entry, I can see its profile.

It’s not terribly exciting. It simply says we’re using the native phone. On that main screen, changing the active profile is as simple as scrolling up and down. Leave the check mark on the one we want active and we’re done. Moving between numbers is simple and easy.

The second entry on the list is my Seattle TalkPlus virtual number. If we make that the active profile and click on it, here’s what we see.

It’s identifed as a TalkPlus number. That means it’s virtual and ephemeral. I can create and kill new TalkPlus numbers at will, and alias them to my phone. This is where, as a consultant, I might create local numbers in New York and Chicago if I did significant business in those cities and wanted a local number.

For personal use, it also means I can easily create a TalkPlus number in southern California so that my famliy can reach me by making a local call.

Here’s where it starts to get interesting for me - aliasing exsting numbers you already have. This TalkPlus beta is running on my Nokia N95 on the AT&T Cingular network. I’ve only had that phone and number for a few months. I started it as a test mechanism for the Nokia Blogger Relations program. My longterm mobile carrier has been Verizon, where I use a Treo 700W.

Why not alias my Treo to TalkPlus? So I did.

As you can see, I simply scroll down to check the Treo as my active profile and now my N95 looks, to the network, like my Treo. Calls placed can appear to be coming from that profile. Here’s the profile screen itself.

Note that the Treo is shown as a mirror number.

TalkPlus has some interesting business uses, but this aliasing or mirroring feature is by far the most powerful business tool.

For me, I actually carry three mobile phones on a daily basis. And i’ve got office and home office phone lines. To be able to alias all my phones to a single handset is a pretty powerful tool.

I’m a big fan of GrandCentral, and I’m still working to alias my GrandCentral number to TalkPlus. It works, but there’s a minor dialed digit interception issue with Grand Central I don’t quite have worked out yet.

The power lies in profiles and the address book. With TalkPlus, I can link entries to profiles:

• When I call mom, always show the call from my home number.
• When I call clients, always show the call from my office number
• When I call my best friend, show my native cell number

TalkPlus is about user control of what information we send and receive. It’s about options. It puts the user in the driver’s seat.

I’ll be exploring and using TalkPlus more and will keep you posted on what I find.

Technorati Tags: TalkPlus, Nokia, Symbian, N95, unified communicaitions

Filed by Ken at 5:45 am under Mobility & Handheld, Unified Communications
3 Comments

I just got the Mercator Capital newsletter in email. If you want to read it yourself or subscribe, you can find it here. This newsletter is one of the real gems of the industry if you follow closely. There’s almost always something really interesting inside. I like it because sometimes I strongly disagree, and sometimes I’m on the exact same wavelenght, but it’s always well-written and insightful.

This month’s issue has some expected stories, with the iPhone getting plenty of attention. I won’t speak to the iPhone because I still see it as a non-event in enterprise and business communications. It’s interesting, but has no impact on business at this stage of the game.

FWIW, I’ve heard a couple of interesting conversations of people who bought and iPhone and now want their corporate IT staff synch it to Outlook/Exchange. These queries seem to general be met with gales of laughter.

There are three points in the Mercator newsletter I do want to explore a bit. Everything in there’s great stuff, but these I find particularly interesting for what they might mean down the road.

Google’s $50M Acquisition of GrandCentral
Here’s an excerpt from the newsletter

At first glance, it is easy to see how GrandCentral could complement Gmail and even GoogleTalk. Gmail would serve an inbox for voicemail across all your phone numbers, where messages can be played back (in MP3), forwarded, prioritized, deleted, etc. This utility makes Google much more interesting beyond Instant Messaging as a communications platform, and more importantly, helps drive voice traffic on to their network.

Perhaps more interestingly, here’s something from Thomas Howe.

Walled Gardens… End of an Era?
The more I think about Google’s acquisition of Grand Central, the more I see it as a watershed moment in telephony.  Unlike Yahoo!, AOL and nearly every other large telephony concern, Google now supports, at the same time, open Internet standards and connections to the PSTN.  This is truly valuable, and unique, and should be celebrated.
[Read Thomas’ Full Post]

Thomas is one of those people I’ve never met or spoken to, but who I read closely. He cuts right through a lot of superficial fluff and gets straight to the heart of things. I confess I was somewhat nonplussed initially about Google acquiring GrandCentral, but if Thomas thinks it’s a watershed moment, that’s a clue for me to rethink my gut reaction.

After digesting Thomas’ post, I have to agree. This is a watershed event. In the telecom industry, it’s bigger than the iPhone. Google now represent a new major player in opening up telecommunications to the next generation of web services and Internet technologies. Thomas calls it the end of the era of walled gardens. I might not go that far, but but is going to be a formidable instigator of killing the walled garden mentality of the telecommuncations industry.

I’m toying with the idea of getting a panel together of a podcast discussion of just how this might change the face of telecom. I’d love to get Thomas Howe, Jon Arnold and one or two others on a conference call to talk about this. Timing and logisitics are issues, but it’s something I’m thinking about ways to pull together. If we can’t do it on a conference call, I’m going to see who else might be at the ITExpo in September, after we see how Google moves, to do a roundtable podcast.

ShoreTel’s IPO
Here’s a snip from the newsletter -

…One established vendor, ShoreTel, has focused on SMB customers from day one, and was hoping that a successful IPO would raise enough capital to allow them to keep pace with their competitors, and secure their standing as a leading Tier 2 player.

This sets the stage for our focus on ShoreTel’s rocky, yet ultimately successful, initial public offering. The company originally set the terms of their IPO on June 11, and indicated a pricing range of $8.50 to $10.50 per share. On June 27, the company priced at $10.50, the top end of the range, with the expectation to begin trading the next day on June 28. But that same night they locked in the terms of the IPO, the company was slapped with a patent infringement lawsuit by Mitel, an event that was not previously disclosed as a potential risk factor, which subsequently placed the IPO on hold. After a few more days of delay, the offering was re-priced at $9.50 per share, and the shares began trading on July 3.

ShoreTel’s shares opened at $9.80 on July 3, and closed at $12.15, for a 28% gain on Day 1. Since then the stock has traded between $12.00-$13.00, giving the company a market capitalization of over $500 million. The company’s underwriters confirmed that the over-allotment was fully exercised, resulting in about 9 million shares being sold, and netting the company around $80 million in cash from the IPO. Clearly the Mitel lawsuit did not provide too much of an overhang on the business to prevent it from completing its offering.

Factual and on the mark. I think ShoreTel’s market cap is now important as we watch what they do with it. My expectations are high, especially in the SMB space. I’ll be watching ShoreTel closely.

FONAV Acquisition by Trolltech AS (amount undisclosed)
This was just mentioned on the list of acquisitions at the end of the newsletter. FONAV has some really interesting things in the hopper, but they’ve been in quiet mode for about a year now. I had the chance to look at their stuff last year, and frankly, if it had been on the market, even as a prototype, I’d have bought it then.

I’ve been asked not to talk about what they’re doing in the mobility space, so I haven’t, but this is enough of a signal to indicate things are going to start happening. I’m not sure if the FONAV name will continue, but I’ll be watching closely. I’ll see if I can’t get in touch with Ram Fish or Jim Hudak and get an update that I can talk about.

Technorati Tags: Mercator, Google, GrandCentral, ShoreTel, FONAV, Trolltech AS, mobility, unified communications, VoIP

Filed by Ken at 12:36 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Unified Communications, VoIP/Unified Communications
No Comments

I’ve read a lot of reviews and posts the last two days about how fabulous the lates firmware (12.0.013) is. So first the good news.

This release adds support for AGPS (Assisted GPS uses the data network in tandem with the satellites), speeding response time (and arguably accuracy) slightly. I’m not a heavy GPS user on the N95. In fact, I have to force myself to use it, so I can’t really speak to this. The GPS has been lethargic and largely unimpressive other than that fact that it exists.

Support for Flash 9 in the browser now is supposed to redned videos more quickly. I don’t watch a lot of video on the N95, so I haven’t noticed anything. It all worked pretty well for me before.

SDHC support has been added, allowing larger capacity memory.

What I find problematic is, frankyl the memory management still sucks. Badly. The N95 runs fine bare bones, or at least it seems to. But one of the strengths is the extensibility, which frankly doesn’t work any more. I think the OS is consuming more resources taht ever, precluding the ability of thrid party programs to work effectively.

I’ve added Jaiku (beta), TalkPlus (beta) and a screenshot capture program. A day or so before I did the firmware upgrade learned that Shozu had released a new version and had an official N95 release. I loaded it and it worked fine, so I left it installed. I’ve had a number of problems with Shozu in the past.

In the upgraded N95, memory isn’t just at a premium, it’s a painfully scarce resource. Jaiku and Shozu are both programs that run in background. With them running, over half the time the Gmail app won’t run. It simply says there isnt’ enough memory. Most of the time the camera won’t function unless I shut Jaiku down. I leave Shozu running because it’s picture management software. Then when I’m done with pictures, I manually restart Jaiku.

I haven’t tried running GPS so Shozu can geotag and take pictures, but I’m inclined to think it won’t work. It certainly won’t work reliably.

The N95 is the iPhone’s biggest threat. It offers all the things the iPhone fails to deliver. I’m not interested in the iPhone myself because most of my work is business work. A Blackberry or another Windows Mobile device would be more useful to me than an iPhone. The N-series presents a middle ground that brings broad potential.

I’m disappointed that Nokia failed to deliver and left the door open for even deeper penetration of the inferior iPhone in the market. Nokia had a window of opportunity to really raise the bar, and from what I see, they failed to deliver.

Technorati Tags: Nokia, N95, Jaiku, TalkPlus, Shozu

Filed by Ken at 6:50 am under Mobility & Handheld, Technology, Unified Communications
6 Comments

Those of us who use the N800 have been consistently impressed with the Gtalk and Gizmo clients for VoIP. But now there’s also Skype. An easy installer comes ready to run on the latest firmware upgrade.

Gtalk works great, but it’s a smaller network offers limited use. It’s a great IM tool for N800 users, but its penetration into the user community is somewhat limited. Gizmo has greater penetration and the huge advantage of being a real SIP solution. VoIP junkies like myself really love Gizmo, and it works great on the N800.

But Skype still represents a huge user base that lives inside the walled garden of Skype’s non-interoperable protocol. Skype has done a dismal job of penetrating into the mobile handset space. Most of us don’t believe they’ve tried. But with this latest firmware release putting Skype on the N800, anywhere there’s WiFi, there’s a variety of VoIP, including Skype.

For anyone who’s used Skype on a PC, the interface and setup is clean, intuitive and simple.

Here’s the main screen once you start Skype running.

While there are slight differences in the screens because of the N800 form factor, it walks and talks and looks just like Skype.

When you’re in a call, the screen is very basic. No information is really needed with a one-to-one call in progress.

If you have SkypeOut credits and want to dial out to a PSTN number, you get a simple dialpad interface shown here.

The history tab brings up all history info just like the PC-based client,

And there’s a full set of configuration screens,

And, adding contacts is as simple as it ever was.

Those of you who know me know I’ve struggled finding relevance in Skype for my own use. After many years of loyal use, I uninstalled it and quit using it. I’m not convinced it’s fully relevant to my needs. I’m confident I can do just fine without out it. Yet, being able to stay in touch easily via Skype on the N800 was enough to make me eat my words and come back to the fringes of Skype at the very least.

In part, this is driven by my keen interest in social networks and the tools we use to manage them. And one thing we all notice is that we use the tools our friends use, not always because we like them or need them, but because they’re where our friends are. As walled gardens go, Skype still keeps some of my friends and colleagues behind a wall that Gtalk and Gizmo can’t yet penetrate. I hate that, yet Skype on the N800 gives me a tool to keep in touch.

Technorati Tags: N800, Skype, mobility

Filed by Ken at 11:32 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Portable Pleasures - PDA/Smartphones, VoIP/Unified Communications
1 Comment

I’ve been working with a number of Nokia devices for a while now. Today seems to be turning into a banner day.

First the N800 Internet Tablet has a firmware update. This one includes the Skype support that brought me back to Skype. Installed very smoothly. And WordPy installed nicely this time around on the N800 too. It’s all flashed and everything reinstalled. I’m very happy and impressed with the operation so far.

I plan on blogging some screenshots and review of the Skype app on the N800 over the weekend.

The N95 also has new firmware, and it includes GPS changes that will make that work far better on the handset. Not sure what else is included because I haven’t done that yet. Later this evening or this weekend.

Lastly, Shozu finally released a new version, and they’ve got one for the N95 now. It’s a photo and video uploading management tool I really liked, but had all sorts of problems with. A quick OTA install shows it seems to be working great, and playing nice with all the other apps I have on the N95. I may delay flashing the N95 just to get a bit more testing with Shozu. If it’s problematic after the flash, I’ll be very disappointed.

And again, I’;ll do some review and write-up of Shozu with screenshots sometime real soon here. In the next few days.

Technorati Tags: Nokia, N800, N95, Skype, Shozu

Filed by Ken at 5:02 pm under