Great to see our good friend Jeff “I Travel for Breakfast” Pulver making some news on NBC5. LeeAnn Trotter from NBC5 in Chicago recently attended one of Jeff’s breakfasts. You can see the video output here - http://video.nbc5.com/player/?id=268426

And its’t true, Facebook is not just for kids any more.Technorati Tags: Jeff Pulver, breakfast, NBC5, Facebook. social media

Filed by Ken at 4:30 pm under Tech in General
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Thanks to Gary Kim for pointing this out. I don’t pay a lot of attention to Associated Press and would surely have missed it.

Just Say “No” to Associated Press
The Associated Press wants to charge you $12.50 to quote five words from news stories published by the news agency. Michael Arrington says TechCrunch simply won’t link to, or quote AP.

Of course, you can go their Web site and pay them. On this score, I agree with Michael. Just say “no.” I prefer Reuters in any case.

Like Gary, I rely much more heavily on Reuters and other news sources. This post brought to mind the reality that I need to actively ignore AP as a news source lest I accidentally incur their wrath.

Filed by Ken at 2:46 pm under Tech in General, Technology
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Filed by Ken at 8:03 pm under Tech in General, Technology
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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
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Last week Sheryl and I had the opportunity to see a demo of something new. Many of our friends and colleagues use an array of what we affectionately refer to as social networking tools. Facebook, Jaiku, Twitter, Hictu, and Seesmic are great examples of social networking tools that are used primarily for social interactions. With a bit of focus, they can be used as business tools as well. On the other hand, LinkedIn is almost exclusively a business tool, but has very limited social networking capability. Each have their focus, and each present some features that can be very useful depending on the user’s individual needs.

As social media expands and grows, we might think about how collaboration fits into the sphere of social media. Participating on Alec Saunder Squawkbox call this morning brought that point to light as we all collaborated on the phone, but talked about various news on the web.

Social media as we’ve thought about it up to this point is a broad and general genre of application and network service. From a tactical perspective, in the day-to-day operation of many specialities, there’s a collaborative aspect to our work that requires integration of social media tools to effectively use technology.

We had the pleasure of exploring an example of that in a solution that was quite impressive (thanks JP). It’s called GeoConference. from TGIS Technologies . TGIS Technologies Inc. is a 100% Canadian-owned company. It was founded in 1990 under the name Consultants TGIS Inc. and is legally incorporated under Canadian law. Its headquarters is
located in Chelsea (Québec). We had the chance to chat with Yves Carbonneau, President of TGIS.

Here’s some of the basic background we learned:

Overview
The GeoConference is a multi-tiered client/server application. It was created in C# and C++ and
functions in the .Net Framework 1.1+ environment. The Server can easily support several
hundereds of users simultaneously in different sessions.

The GeoConference system is constituted of the following modules:

• GeoConference Server
• GeoConference Client Application
• IIS Plug-in
• DataProvider
• BasicVector, GeoTiff, RasterImage, Photo and WMS Connectors
• GeoConference Remote Admistrator Tool.

Technological Innovation
The GeoConference system is innovative. No other equivalent commercial civil product exists at
the present time. It is the only product on the market that allows users to hold a “live
conference” in real-time using geospatial data. The unique technology that we have
developed lets us protect the geospatial data, pass through firewalls and install the client
application without IT assistance. Thanks to our technology, it is as easy to participate in a
GeoConference session as it is to make a phone call.

In business terms, the solution offers:

• Improved crisis response time(s)
• Better access (to information) and team co-ordination
• Availability of a shareable, real time COP (Common Operational Plan)
• Better preparedness for future situation management
• Improved cost control.

That’s what we learned. What we experienced was far more compelling. Anyone who’s ever worked with geospatial data knows that the tools are cumbersome, and provide only rudimentary useful information unless they’re in the hands of a power users. GIS data holds a wealth of information, but the tools fo extraction and analysis of that data just are not user friendly.

We joined a GeoConference and looked at a real-world example of how GeoConference might be used. Here’s a picture of what we saw.

What was most notable was the ease with which conference particpants can chat and ask questions, pass control back and forth, paint boxes and annotate areas on the screen and collaborate in a very comfortable social media-like setting.In short, Sheryl and I were in the drivers seat in a collaboration session that let us explore how physical disaster response teams might quickly and easily collaborate with extremely friendly tools to work the logistics of a disaster response.

I’ve done some work with GIS solutions and geospatial data in the past. I’m a novice at best, but I was positively wowed by this solution. It delivers the power to actually use GIS data in a practical way into the hands of incident managers and responders with a very minimal learning curve. No training. No huge downloads. No pain.

What struck me quickly is the wide number of uses this solution can have across a number of business sectors:

• Disaster response - Fire, flood, earthquake. Whatever the physical incident might be, coordinating logistics quickly and effectively is a challenge. Recall the deploreable response from FEMA during the Katrina disaster, and you have a sterling example of why tools are needed.
• Incident response - Think about fires and th elike in crowded cities. GIS data contains far more information that shown in the one screenshot I’ve invluded. High rise building sprinklers, electrical systems, plumbing and the like are all built in layers with the geospatial data schema. Imagine a fire truck en route to a scene with full GIS data about all the floors of the building, where the hot spots are, where the people are likely too be, Coordinating on the run via wireless broadband with an incident commander who’s remotely looking at the big picture.
• Transportation - Whether it’s mapping truck routes or railways, or planning a new highway, geospatial data plays a vital role. Here’s a solution that lets designers work with field engineers to collaborate effectively.
• Telecommunications - Think about the challenge of mapping antenna footprint coverage with geopspatial data. This tool could provide huge felxibility in antenna positioning for a wireless carrier simply exploring the “what if” questions of what it might take to deliver service in a new market.

The opportunities here are positively mind-boggling to me. It’s made me step back and think more about how social media can move into a tactical role, providing tools that we use in our everday lives in a number of different way. I think what we’re seeing in social media today is barely scratching the surface of where solutions like GeoConference are going to take us.

Technorati Tags: GeoConference, TGIS Technologies, GIS, geospatial data, incident response, collaboration, social media

Filed by Ken at 11:44 am under Tech in General, Technology
2 Comments

That’s probably not a fair question, but let me step back a moment. You might want to take a look at two earlier posts I wrote -

Yoohoo Yahoo. Where are you?
Hey Yahoo - Knock, knock. Is anyone home?

They were posts moitivated, at least in part, by comments from friend and colleague Stuart Henshall. I link to his comments in both.

Stuart and I were sharing observations about Jerry Yang at Yahoo and his plan to spend 100 days in silent reflection within Yahoo to sort out their plan of attack. Now it’s perhaps time to reflect on the outcome.

First, 100 days was far too long. In Internet time, that’s the life of some companies. To think time would stand still for Yahoo to spend 100 days contemplating its navel was ludicrous. Secondly, we’ve gone well beyond 100 days. Laughably beyond.

In the time that’s passed, now we hear rumblings of layoffs at Yahoo. I don’t have any direct confirmation, but certainly there are a lot of rumblings. And I have enough connections who work at Yahoo that the barometer shows there’s a climate of change sweeping in, but it seems mostly unknown. I get the feeling that for many Yahooligans,, they’re like mushrooms - being fed manure and kept in the dark. That’s just a sense I get from casual conversation.

In one of my earlier posts, I aimed this comment at  Jerry Yang:

I hope while you’re radio silent you’re talking with and listening to
people like Jeff Bonforte and Daniel Raffel and not just talking in an
echo chamber. If you’re staring into the abyss with a deer in the
headlights look, please don’t let the great people at Yahoo all ride
that train until it derails. I hope you aren’t doing all the talking
and failing to listen to the people who made Yahoo what it was. Because
it can be again, but not if you fail to act.

From the outrsiders perspective, when Yahoo went radio silent, they went comatose. They’ve failed to act, failed to plan, failed to think. None of those may be true. What they’ve really failed to do is provide a clue. They’re pretty much stuck in radio silence.

When you’re a company like Yahoo, competing with the likes of Google and Facebook silence isn’t a weapon. It isn’t a defense. It surely isn’t an attack. Silence is tantamount to cowering in fear.

I said Yang could revitalize Yahoo by talking and listening to the right people, but it’s something that had to be done in a timely manners.

The question in my mind now is whether or not Yahoo has any relevance at all. Is there enough left to salvage and maintain some degree of leadership. For me personally, I’ve realized that I use my Yahoo ID for one thing and only one thing. It’s my Flickr identity. If not for FLickr, Yahoo wouldn’t exist on my personal radar.

So here’s a question for you  - do you Yahoo? How and why? What is it you use Yahoo for these days. And if you don’t use it at all, I’d like to know that too. I can identify a number of things most of us don’t use Yahoo for -

• It’s not the search engine of choice. Google has that.
• It’s not the social network of choice. Facebook seems to have that, although I wouldn’t discount MySpace just yet either.
• It’s not the IM chat medium of choice. With Gtalk, AIM, MSN and Jabber, the real leader is probably a cross-platform tool that let’s us chat on multiple networks. If we’re talking pure messaging chatter, I don’t think we can discount either Twitter or Jaiku.
• It’s not the video tool of choice. Sure lots of people used Yahoo video, but I think Skype has actually overtaken it, and SightSpeed has a continually growing use base.
• It’s not the default home page. My Yahoo just isn’t. The most common home pages I see are Google, MSN, news or sports pages. I can’t remember the last time I saw Yahoo come up as anyones default home page.

If we don’t live in Yahoo, and we aren’t using Yahoo, how sustainable is it? And frankly, what the heck is Jerry Yang doing about it?

As an interesting comparison, there’s been a lot of talk about the senior leadership team at Skype and what’s been going on over there. Is Yahoo as interesting as Skype in terms of what lies ahead? Not in my book. And not if you read the chatter on the web.

Yahoo has lost relevance and is still in decline. The question for me is whether Yahoo is sliding into the abyss or will be able to pull out and salvage a respectable leadership role in any segment. Or will we simply write them off as another also-ran?

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, relevance, Jarry Yang

Filed by Ken at 10:37 pm under Tech in General, Technology, Unified Communications
5 Comments

I was quite surprised to read the post below from Om Malik just a bit ago. Om’s a good friend, but as is a hazard in our industry, one with whom I’m not in close contact with on a regular basis. While not happy to hear he’d had a heart attack, I’m very happy to know he’s on the mend and doing well.

A Heart-to-Heart with GigaOM Readers

Om Malik, Thursday, January 3, 2008 at 12:35 PM PT 

Happy New Year. As you may have noticed, my byline hasn’t been up on the site for a few days. That’s because the holidays weren’t exactly my most jolly.

I had a heart attack on Dec. 28. I was able to walk into the hospital for treatment that night and have been recovering here ever since. With the support of my family and my team, I am on the road to a full recovery. I am going to be OK.
[Read Om's full post]

I want to post my good wishes for a full and speedy recovery here, and to chide Om to remember that the smokes, scotch and fatty foods, enjoyable though they are, really do need to be a thing of the past. Take care of yourself, my friend.

Technorati Tags: Om Malik, GigaOm

Filed by Ken at 3:02 pm under Tech in General, Technology
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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
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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

Back some time ago, Jerry Yang at Yahoo said he’d be off spending 100 days seeking answers internally. It was a bad idea at the time, and several of us chided Yang in blogs for taking a vague and ambiguous approach that pretty much showed that Yahoo was lost, adrift, and hunkering down to their own internal dialogue.

The other day Stuart Henshall posted this -

Yahoo 100 Days and… We’re at 98!
98 days and counting. Just two to go. I doubted Yahoo’s hundred day plan on day two. Over the weekend I linked to two posts that further compounded my doubts. If we get a plan I still suspect it will be very 1.0 and not 2.0 focused. Why? It’s in the language.

• Still no cure for what ails Yahoo | CNET News.com
• Hey Yahoo - Knock, knock. Is anyone home? - Unified Communications (My earlier post)
• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Poor Yahoo
• Yahoo Still Struggling to Please Shareholders

Well, we’re beyond 100 days now and Yahoo is simply becoming a bigger non-event every day. Hey Jerry, what the heck is going on inside there. Judging from the stories about, Stuart and I aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed Yahoo’s in trouble.

100 days in Internet time is an eternity, but it’s workable if something comes out of it. So far, nothing’s coming from Yahoo but silence.

Some of us are watching to see how Yahoo is going to re-emerge, but the truth is that if they don’t pull out of that funk they’re in pretty quick, there won’t be a whole lot left. The competition is moving forward while Yahoo appears to have its head up its in the sand.

It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, crisis, lack of direction

Filed by Ken at 12:14 pm under Tech in General, Technology, Unified Communications
2 Comments

Social networking is gett all the buzz in the past few months. Applications like Twitter and Jaiku set the stage as catalysts for change, by enabling new, mobile networking. Facebook followed suit with some mobile capabilities, and then added Facebook apps, which have been getting a lot of attention. And in the past week or so, there seems to have been a mass exodus from the grandfather of business networks, LinkedIn.

Thanks to RSS, I stumbled acrss Sean Bonner’s Preffered Means of Contact post, which gave me some reason to think about this whole shift, and to write this post.

I won’t dwell on LinkedIn here, but I would like to thank all of you who’ve decided to leave. There are thousands of Fortune 500 business leaders on LinkedIn. These are people who don’t see the value of Twitter or Jaiku because they’re busy doing traditional business. They won’t move to Facebook for 2-3 years for the same reason. Your abandoning LinkedIn has essentially left money on the table when it comes to building relationships and picking up work with these folks. Since I’ll be happy to pick that up, I feel I should thank those of you who are so shortsighted that you believe the newest network is the most important network.

That said, when we look at emerging social networking tools, I began to think about mine; abotu how I use them and what makes them effective.

For years, we’ve had a combination of social networks that supported our personal shadow network. While the two are becoming more tightly coupled (the shadow networks are coming to light and are more visible), there’s an element of trust in the shadow network that still doesn’t exist in the broader social network. While my closest friends and colleagues share information on Facebook and Jaiku, that’s not where the important communications occur. It isn’t where business happens.

I don’t think I’m that different than a lot of people involved in the tech sector, whether it’s telecommuncations, data networking, security, web services or social media in general, so I thought I’d share what works for me. It’s my tutorial on how to communicate most effectively with Ken, so your mileage may vary.

I’ve read many people’s thoughts that email is dying. I say bullshit. Email remains the business tool for information that requires archiving in some fashion. If you want a record, or I want a record, email still works. It’s not the best, fastest or top priority for most of us today, but for non-ephemeral communications email is still incredibly useful.

First and foremost, the quickest ways to reach me for either business or personal reasons in my mobile phone. That means a phone call or SMS. Either work and get top priority for my attention. SMS has become my preferred IM platform most of the time. A phone call can be to my cell, but most go to my published GrandCentral number. It rings wherever I want it to ring, and if I can be reached live, it will work.

The two ways most likely to reach me quickly are Jaiku (or for others, Twitter) or Facebook. I see most Jaiku’s pointed in my direction and respond. Facebook has an added advantage. If you’re in my network there, a status update, wall post, or message will hit my cell phone almost instantly. You’re assured I’ve seen it, and depending on our relationship, you know I’ll get back to you if that’s needed.

IM is another tool, and depending on which shadow networks my friends and colleagues are using, that’s a combination of Gtalk and Gizmo (both Jabber compliant), Skype and MSN Messenger. I don’t use Yahoo or AIM. The people I talk with most aren’t in those circles, so there’s never been a reason for me to use them. MSN and Yahoo easily talk across their walled garden platforms today. Jabber represents the next.

Email suffices for routine business. I don’t want IM messages from marketers wanting me to look at their client’s solution. I control email. I quit retrieving it automatically long ago on my laptop. It goes to my Treo, and a large percentage gets deleted there without ever achieving any momentum. That’s simple and I can do it at my convenience. It also increases the odds I’ll see that query from a LinkedIn contact in a timely manner and win the business others have abandoned.

There are plenty of social networking tools. Lately there’s Pownce, but frankly I couldn’t figure out why I’d bother looking at it. Today I gor email about some me-too YASN for making money. It was as exciting as mainstream media jumping on the Web 2.0 meme a year late. Yawn.

I’ve often said my social network isn’t on Facebook or LinkedIn, it’s in my phone. More seriously, that’s my shadow network. That’s people who I really work with and do business with. My phone is deeper and richer with information that Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Jaiku or the others can ever be. Because my shadow network involves an element of trust and a depth of relationships that I’ll never outsource to a web service. Why would I? Why would I risk that some online service might changes their terms of service and breach the integrity of my network?

I’ll use them where they work, for the value the offer, but ultimately, I own my network. Managing our individual social networks is simply the individual variant of customer relationship management (CRM). It’s simply relationship management (RM) to the power of one.

More as thought congeal, but there’s a start.

Technorati Tags: social networks, shadow networks, trust, collaboration, managing relationship

Filed by Ken at 12:13 pm under Tech in General, Technology
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Thanks to Brough for the post that sent me to read this. His post raised some intriguing points from this article in Technology Quarterly

Home truths about telecoms

Jun 7th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Technology and society: Anthropologists investigate the use of communications technology and reach some surprising conclusions

SUCH is the social significance of mobile phones that when it comes to evaluating their use and planning new products and services, mobile operators and handset-makers cannot rely on the technology-driven, engineering mindset that has traditionally dominated the telecoms industry. Most famously, industry leaders expected people to embrace videotelephony, which flopped, but failed to anticipate the success of text-messaging. So they are turning to social scientists, and in particular to anthropologists, the better to understand how telephones are used.
[Read full article]

I was intrigued my Steffana Broadbent’s (an anthropologist who leads the Swisscom User Adoption Lab) findings. The typical mobile user spends 80% of their time talking to just four people. Here’s something relevant to unified communications and convergence that I thought really stood out.

Next, despite much talk of “convergence” within the industry, people
are in fact using different communications technologies in distinct and
divergent ways. The fixed-line phone “is the collective channel, a
shared organisational tool, with most calls made ‘in public’ because
they are relevant to the other members of the household,” she says.
Mobile calls are for last-minute planning or to co-ordinate travel and
meetings. Texting is for “intimacy, emotions and efficiency”. E-mail is
for administration and to exchange pictures, documents and music.
Instant-messaging (IM) and
voice-over-internet calls are “continuous channels”, open in the
background while people do other things. “Each communication channel is
performing an increasingly different function,” says Ms Broadbent.

There’s a lot of insight for thought, and further validation, here. VoIP, mobile networks and tools, unified communications, IM, social networking and other areas of our communications technologies may not be maximizing the human usage tendencies shown here. A study like this could help an unknown become the next big thing.

Filed by Ken at 7:45 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Portable Pleasures - PDA/Smartphones, Tech in General, Technology, Unified Communications, VoIP/Unified Communications
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As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been included as a tester in the Covad Blogger Relations program. Part of that testing involved setting up a Covad T1 circuit as my Internet connection. I wrote up some initial performance baseline testing I did here.

Andy Abramson and I did some video comparison testing using SightSpeed for voice and video. In this post, I want to share what we did and what our findings were. This post includes four videos, so you can see each of our tests. The videos include some of our conversation about the link in use at the time and the experience overall. I’ve also posted some conclusions at the end of this post.

I’ll also talk about the idea of telepresence for the masses.

The Network Environment
Andy has two connections - Cox cable and a Covad T1. Ken has three connections - Qwest DSL, Comcast cable and a Covad T1.

Test #1 - Ken’s Qwest DSl to Andy’s Cox Cable
In this test we are both connected via WiFi in our home office to our T1 access point.

As we see in the video, there are issies with both audio synchronization and video freezing and pixelation.

Test #2 - Ken’s Comcast Cable to Andy’s Cox Cable
In this test we are both connected via WiFi in our home office to our T1 access point.

While there’s marked improvment in both the audio and video quality, the issue with synchronization, frame freeze and pixelation are also present in this test.

Test #3 - Ken’s Covad T1 to Andy’s Covad T1
In this test we are both connected via WiFi in our home office to our T1 access point.

We were surprised to see that while there was a very noticable improvement in quality, there were still issues. If you watched the entire video, you heard my thoughts on what the root cause might be. This led us to an unplanned fourth test.

Test #4 - Ken’s Covad T1 to Andy’s Covad T1
In this test Andy remained connected via WiFi, but I shut off the WiFi radio in my laptop and plugged an Ethernet cable in the Linkys router that serves as my access point.

The change, as you can see, was tremendous. Impressive to the point I’ll share our conclusions.

About the Technology
DSL is a shared media technology. While the twisted pair to the end user is dedicated, and may provide some level of bandwidth, that guarantee is really only assured to the DSLAM (DSL Access Multiplexor) at the DSL providers point of presence (POP). For DSL users, that’s typically in your telephone company’s central office that provides your dial tone. In some cases it’s co-located by a DSL provider or in another location.

DSLAMs serve a large number of customers. The DLS lines are aggregated and share some higer capacity link upstream to the Internet. There can be contention issues in a heavliy loaded DSLAM. There can also be what are essentially oversubscription issues by architectural design. If a DSLAM supports 128 users and has an upstream link of 10 Mbps and everyone’s active at the same time, each user may in principle only get 1/128th of the 10Mbps stream. That means DSL performance may well mirror dial-up modem performance during peak traffic periods.

Cable modem technolgy is a different architecture, but again, the user links aggregate at a cable “headend” for service delivery. Once difference between cable and DSL is that DSL provides a dedicated link over the phone line twisted pair. Cable modem architecture may in fact provide a data stream that passes a number of homes to get back to the cable headend. We share capacity in the coax or hybrid fiber-coax that delivers the cable service. In a cable modem network, your network neighborhood is, in a sense, your real neighborhood.

In both DSL and cable architectures, the bandwidth is typically asymmetrical. That means we get more bandwidth for information coming from the Internet to us that we have for sending information upstream to the Internet. This design made sense in the early development of the technologies. These were designed as consumer services. Most home users recieved far more than they transmitted. They didn’t run servers that provided service to other Internet users. With peer-to-peer technologies on the rise, and the increase in sharing audio and video, coupled with advances in gaming technology, this asymmetric approach may not be the best solution any longer.  

The Covad T1 is a frame relay T1 circuit connectied between the customer premise (our home offices) and the Internet. There is no sharing. It’s a dedicated symmetric link. It’s 1.5Mbps in each direction all the time.

Another Wrinkle - Wireless Spectrum
It’s well known that wireless connections aren’t as fast or efficient as wired. We use wireless in our home offices for convenience. I know that if I plug an Ethernet cable into my router, I get fast performance that an 802.11 link.

There’s also an issue with spectrum contention for WiFi. As you saw in the video, I run four WiFi access points, all in the 2.4Ghz spectrum. And my neighbors also run WiFi. There’s a channel capacity and spectrum overlap issue that degrades performance in current wireless technologies. And our tests prove that it’s measureable to the human eye and ear.

The great the population density of wireless access points, in an apartmetn complex or tightly packed business park, the greater the likelihood of contention.

If performance is truly a key issue, you may want to consider using wired Ethernet for workstations that need the higher level of performance in some situations.

Conclusions
First and foremost, Covad’s T1 service absolutely rocks. When the Covad Blogger Relations program ends, I’ll convert the circuit to mine and become a long-term customer. If I take into account what I pay Comcast and Qwest for Internet today, I’m already spending enough money. Neither is business class service, and it shows. But until you really compare side by side, you may think that what you’re getting is good enough.

For me, the Covad T1 proved conclusively that my business needs warrant moving the the right technology, and consumer services dont’ cut the mustard.

Why? I’m sure you’re asking why I can even think I need a T1 in my home office. That’s easy - telepresence for the masses. I do a lot of VoIP calls, on a number of services. Even on my own Asterisk box at times depending on how my lab is set up. I also do a lot of video. And I transfer large files, both audio and video, all the time.

In Test #4, it’s really obvious that this approach enables telepresence at an afforable level for the small business and many home office-based entrepreneurs. Cisco may have the buzz on the workd telepresence. At least they’ll tell you they do. They want to own the concept. But like so many vendors of that scale, they built a solution for the Fortune 500. Cisco’s telepresence is for the deep pockets of large enterprises.

I, like any other small business, will never be a Fortune 500 company. We are forever trapped in the Unfortunate 5 Million. We’re the great unwashed masses left to fend for ourselves. Cisco’s telepresence isn’t a tool for me. But Covad and SightSpeed are within reach. And while I’m a SightSpeed afficonado, there are plenty of other video tools that will work too.

Covad enables unfied communications for the SMB market. T1 connections to the Internet have been pretty common for many businesses. There are plenty of offices with 50 people sharing an Internet T1. What Covad’s doing is bringing that capacity into the reach of smaller businesses and entrepreneurs. Covad’s enabling us to deply unified communications solutions on a scale we can afford at a quality that provides the right level of telepresence for our needs.

I’ve been using the Covad link as my primary connection since it went in. it’s not the first time I’ve had a T1 to the house, but this is clearly the best experience.

Technorati Tags: Covad, Blogger Relations Program, Covad T1, telepresence for the masses, telepresence, unified communications, video, video collaboration, VoIP, SightSpeed. Andy Abramson, Ken Camp

Filed by Ken at 12:28 pm under Tech in General, Technology, Unified Communications, VoIP/Unified Communications
2 Comments

Last Monday I posted Today, Twitterectomy. Tomorrow, Jaiku and Facebook and declared myself on a week-long hiatus from Twitter. As addicting as Twitter can be, the week away has made some things really clear. Actually, it only took a few days to reach clarity.

I didn’t get a single direct Twitter message or email checking in on me from a single person. Not one. That really says two things. First, the people I’m most connected to already have other means to stay in touch. And secondly, it shows that many of the ephemeral passing voices we think of as online friends, are passing connections, and pleasant though the might be, they’re easily and quickly replaced with other pleasant connections.

In short, our core social network isn’t limited to a single sharing link. Our real friends are connected in multiple ways, and the loss of one connecting link doesn’t herald the loss of a friend. Our social networks are like hives and we cluster around similar places, so our connection points linger even as they evolve.

Consider me a Twitter alum who’s graduated and moved on. I’ll visit the old place now and again, but not in the co-dependent, can’t-get-through-the-day-without fashion that’s so rampant. Web only for me. Only when I feel like it. No Twitter SMS or IM. It’ll be a random, occasional, and probably infrequent, stopping point, but nothing more. It no longer excites me.

In the stream information flows (you really must read Stowe’s thoughts) the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter has shifted. There’s too much noise and too little signal. I’m no longer interested in being the human noise filter, straining out the bits of goodness that are there. Stepping away from Twitter for this past week has been much akin to when the next door neighbor turns off that annoying table saw at the end of the day. What I noticed was a sense of quiet…not serenity, but increased calm.

What I really noticed this week is that, while I didn’t remove myself from the torrent of information, I moved to a higher plane. I achieved a greater equilibrium. Balance is key. This week I was able to engage more in thoughtful, and thought provoking conversation. If there was a fundamental shift I could identify, it was “less sound bites - more ideas.”

Already being fairly active on Jaiku and Facebook, I began to wonder which might fall next. I don’t think either will wane for me in the near term. They’re quite different. Facebook is becoming a community for me. Overlapping friends in different circles. Jaiku has become my “life stream in the moment,” a different space that Twitter was or Facebook is likely to ever become.

I’ve realized that for me, mobility is vital. I need tools that work from my handheld. I’m doing some testing of a new Jaiku client for the Nokia S60 phones; in my case the N-series. It will be coming soon. I don’t know when. I can’t talk about it much at this point, but when I can, I’ll share info and screen shots.  Let’s just say it’s a leap forward and my primary tool for in-the-moment, stream-of-consciousness sharing of my status. Beyond that, it’s my aggregated life stream from here, VOX, Realtime, Flickr, blip.tv and anywhere else.

Facebook encompasses a broader community for me. And the new applications are sometimes of interest. Add to that, it does the mobility piece very well, and Facebook remains as a somewhat central part of the glue in my social network.

You’ll find me in all the usual places, but the sound bites and noise deter from the value of ideas and thoughtful endeavors that are more meaningful to me.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, social networking, sound bites, ideas, signal-to-noise

Filed by Ken at 1:11 pm under Tech in General, Technology, Unified Communications
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As one of those people who’s been fortunate enough to participate in the Nokia Blogger Relations progam, I’ve had the opportunity over the past several months to work with a number of Nokia devices. I’ve been on a journey of sorts through how these devices change the way I work. Longtime readers of my personal blog know that despite and the technological geekery I may have to explore, simplicity is my watchword. It’s often seen as an oxymoron that I talk about simplifying my life and tools while exploring so many different technologies. Here’s a recent post on my view of simplicity. There are two quotes in that post that bear repitition

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My Nokia exploration began with two phones from the N-series, the N73 and N93. They were soon joined by the N80i. If you haven’t seen them, here they are again. The N93 is on the left, the N73 in the center, and the N80i on the right.

As phones go, these are high-end devices. Nokia treats them as beyond phones. Here’s the tagline Nokia uses on their web site to position the N-series.

Multiple devices. Next generation computers. Whatever we call them, the N-series is certainly what I’d call a lifestyle device. Like and iPod, or other MP3 player, these are devices that bring enhanced capablities to our pockets, purses and hands.

Like most of the testers, I’ve been quite impressed. I’ve written a number of reviews about different facets of the devices. The N73 is an awesome camera in a phone. The N93, a stellar video camera. The N80i, a real Internet device. Each has strengths and weaknesses. Ad each has flaw or shortcomings, either in design or implementation. They aren’t perfect. The are the first generation of this new breed of lifestyle device.

Later I recevied an N800 Internet Tablet. Here’s a reminder picture.

The N800 is not a phone. It can be connected to a PC, but WiFi and Bluetooth are where it excels. This device easily connects to the Net via WiFi. If you have a phone with a data plan that supports pairing that functinoality, it does that incredibly well. I’ve paired it with each of the Nokias and been very happy.

The N800 doesn’t use the Nokia phone operating system. There’s no Symbian here. It runs a Linux version called Maemo, based on the Debian Linux kernel. As people quickly discovered, it’s a full-blown Linux workstation, or at least that potential.

The N800 integrates some basic VoIP capacities that are useful with the WiFi. A Google Talk client is built it. That client supports both voice and video. And it works amazingly well. If you’ve got good WiFi, a video call between two N800s is a pretty amazing thing. There’s also a Gizmo client that’s easily installed and works as smoothly and seamlessly as the desktop client. That means if you’ve invested a little cash to get outbound PSTN dialing credits, you can sit at a WiFi hotspot and make a phone call to an ordinary telephone from the N800. With a Gizmo inbound PSTN number, you can receive calls too. So the N800 isn’t a phone. It doesn’t support ubiquitous telephony. But it can provide some casual and convenient voice services.

The N800 enhances what many of us have begun to refer to as “casual computing.” For those who need something less that a laptop but more than a PDA/smartphone, it enables email, web browsing and provides the basic necessities. It’s nothing short of life-changing when you think about an Internet tablet in the kitchen to look up a recipe while you cook, a non-intrusive browser and email reader while watching TV with the family, and a host of other casual computing uses.

I’ve been a mobile user and road warrior for more years than I want to count. I’ve carried a 28 pound Compaq luggable with a 5″ orange screen and two 5.25′ disk drives on a plane. I’ve had more mobile devices than I really remember. The N800 was, for me, an evolutionary leap to the next level of mobile computing, but at that point, I was still thinking mostly casual computing.

Like everyone, I lusted for the N95. It’s got a 5 megapixel camera. That’s unprecedented in a mobile phone. Built in GPS. It’s a media player. It’s an amazing first generation device that’s part of the evolution. If the N73/N93/N80i were 1.0 devices of this evolving next generation, the N95 is a 1.4 device. It’s not an exponential leap forward, but it’s significant. And, like the rest, it does have some issues. Here’s a picture of the N95.

Make no mistake, the N95, is not a phone. I’m sorry but to call it a phone would be to call a Ferrari transportation. It’s a high-end lifestyle device. It does music, videos (both watch and record, pictures, GPS, Gizmo VoIP via built-in WiFi. Yes, it even makes plain old boring phone calls on the cellular/PSTN network too. This is indeed a multipurpose handheld device.

Since pairing up the N95 with the N800, I’ve been paying attention to that watchword I mentioned earlier - simplicity. Recently I took a casual computing weekend away on the Oregon coast. Even though I knew I would be doing some writing, probably blogging, email, web surfing, and taking lots of pictures, I made the conscious decision to leave me laptop home. I’ve made short business trips with only my Treo and wireless keyboard, but I pretty much always take my laptop on a trip. But that’s starting to change.

Beyond casual computing, and mobile computing, there’s a sociological blend of work and personal life that many of us deal with every day. Our friends, and our social circle - what we now call our social network - encompasses a bigger circle. That’s a social phenomenon tied to our stage in the information age. I think the rise of online social networks are really a true delineator that we have left the industrial age behind and are truly in the information age.

Social networks are part of our daily life. And we’re just beginning to really understand what they are. I use  LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter and Jaiku, yet they are not my social networks. The network providers hate it when we call them plumbers, but that’s all they really are. The provide pipes (yes, those notorious Internet tubes) that carry bits. Those bits can be data, voice or video. We raelly don’t care. I’ve come to realize that LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Jaiku are not social networks. They’re the next generation of plumbers. They carry my meaningful content that I share with my family, friends and colleagues through an application pipe.

I’ll repeat something I said a few weeks ago. My social network is in my phone. It’s in my N95 and N800. They carry my family, friends colleagues, even the entire Internet inside. It’s the people in my life that are my social network. And for the moment, Nokia is providing the hardware tools that use the application pipes to maintain the network.

Within the information age, the sociological implications of change are now becoming business drivers for companies like Nokia, and platforms like these. yes I said platforms. For me, the N95 and N800 couple with network connectivity however I can find it, and a smattering of minimal peripherals (power chargers, memory cards, bluetooth keyboard) have become a platform for productivity.

Social networks have evolved as our use of information technology has evolved. We’re in closer contact wtih people who are geographically farther away from us than we have ever been in human history. And it’s the ability to connect an use the tools that enables that. Those tools that enable what we’ve been calling casual computing also enable serious computing - serious work. Carrying them around all day every day is proving that to me over and over.

I’ve twice taken my laptop on a cruise because the whole point of a laptop is to take it everywhere. Detaching from work and not taking a laptop are difficult things. That’s rapidly changing. For me it has changed. My laptop is actually a nice, compact desktop. It only leaves the desk in my home office when absolutely necessary. Like a good backpacker, I am leaving a lighter footprint.

Even though I’ve been a true jedi master at the road warrior life (I used to travel 35-40 weeks a year hauling my technology everywhere), I’m evolving as I explore these new technologies. And while I still often carry more because I choose to (sometimes my laptop, a Nikon, tripods, digital recording gear, etc.), I’m proving the value in embracing the first quote at the beginning of this post. Simplicity is complex. It takes a spohisticated effor to truly simplify.

Here’s a picture of my more sophisticated mobile computing solution. It’s incredible for casual computing, but it’s also pretty damned powerful for serious work.

Paying attention to my own work habits has made me far more aware of how Nokia (and other companies) are truly helping us pry open the door to the next generation of sustaining work, casual or serious, and our social networks of family, friends and colleagues.

Technorati Tags: Nokia, N73, N93, N80i, N800, casual computing, working anywhere, mobility

Filed by Ken at 12:17 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Portable Pleasures - PDA/Smartphones, Tech in General, Technology
5 Comments

While not directly related to some of the areas I focus on, metro services of all kinds certainly interest me. And they do provide the services many of us use to conduct business onlineThe Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) invited me to a briefing with some of their board to talk about the latest work and specifications that have been ratified.

In addition, the winners of the MEF North American Carrier Ethernet Service Provider of the Year awards & the first Service Providers to attain MEF14 will be announced soon.

I jumped at the chance to participate in this briefing and will share what I learn here.

Technorati Tags: Metro Ethernet Forum, MEF, briefing

Filed by Ken at 12:02 pm under Tech in General, Technology
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This evening I performed a self-Twitterectomy. I swore off Twitter for at least 7 days. Once I post a link to this post there, I won’t b other with Twitter for at least a week. If I don’t develop a case of the bends or suffer other ill-effects, it’s quite likely I just won’t bother with Twitter any more.

Twitter was great while it worked. Critical mass has crushed it out of usefulness. TheIM interface hasn’t worked for a long time. I was doing that on my N800 with Gtalk for a time with good results, but it doesn’t work. Direct messages don’t work. Period. I can force them to email, but ya know, if I wanted 140 character messages in my email, I’d tell people to send me short email.

For me, Twitter stopped adding value a while back. Now it’s worse. No it detracts value. it doesn’t work on the web half the time. It takes more time and work, conscious effort, to send a 140 character message than it’s with.

Frankly, Twitter’s in the shitter. It had to be said.

That leaves Jaiku and Facebook for now. A few days ago I wrote Twitter, Jaiku or Facebook? How many touchpoints do you need?. As I said in that post, there is this dirty, oily feeling that Facebook is trying to become the evil empire, but Facebook has one thing going for it. It works via SMS. It works, and that’s one thing I need.

Facebook also has issues. The mobile web site sucks on a handheld. I’m forced to reauthenticate with every session. There’s no ability to remember me. This is easily dealt with via the N800. The N95 and N800 combination make Facebook a pretty useful tool. At times. But I don’t want to need both. I want to easily use either.

Then there are the apps. The ones everyone’s raving about. Have you stopped raving long enough to look at what they do, cause it’s pretty damn close to nothing. The Twitter app sucks partial Twitter into Facebook. But click a link and you’re gone to Twitter (and probably looking at the damn cat or in terminal hourglass waiting for something to happen. Try the Jaiku app. Click a link and off you go. I have to say, I learned out to click my way off to another web site years ago. As value, that doesn’t cut it.

The Flickr app looked nice. Too bad refresh doesn’t actually refresh. It doesn’t do anything really.

What Facebook has given us is potential. So far, I’ve tried a number of apps and none of them impress me. But the text messaging works, I like the friends I hang out with there. It has potential. So I’m hanging in with it a while longer.

Jaiku’s the one I really want. It’s on the cusp of greatness, yet so painfully slow to evolve. I like the way it aggregates my lifestream of information.  I love the potential of the Nokia client. I relish the way it can pull in the feeds I give it. I wish it could pick up my Facebook updates as handily as it does Twitter’s, but I don’t think Facebook outputs a usable RSS feed. At least not that I’ve found.

Still, Jaiku at least leaves me with a wish list to hope for.

• Give me control over the feeds. Let the user configure how often each feed gets polled. Give users that granularity of control
• Get the user created channels live. I know that’s coming at any moment. It’s a start, but don’t let it be the end. Do not let grass grow.
• Get the short codes and SMS working. And be prepared to deal with infrastructure support so you can avoid the constant downtime Twitter’s had. There’s no excuse to have taken this long to get US short codes activated, and the “this stuff takes time” song is and old broken record. That, and it’s bullshit. It doesn’t take anywhere near this much time and effort to set up shortcodes.
• Get that Nokia app improved. You gave us a taste and then did nothing. Nothing. Again,. frankly it’s getting tiresome.

I for one, know that Jaiku is in the middle of gathering some funding. I’ve worked for startups. I’ve managed and run them. In today’s net climate, you have to be up front with us. If you say “bear with us while we get funding to operate,” and provide updates and share your pain, I’ll be quite tolerant. if you tell me something’s coming any day as a delaying tactic, I’m likely to call bullshit and openly flame you for making feeble excuses. Jaiku is starting to feel more like the latter case and that troub