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Travels

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

SOA Las Vegas

The conference in Las Vegas this past week was not like the ones Thomas J. Watson used to hold in Endicott where all the blue suit white shirt male attendees would sing songs about IBM's future. The master of ceremonies for the opening morning was Drew Carey and the "dinner music" was by The B-52's -- the new wave rock band not the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. I don't think anyone wore a blue suit or a white shirt.

What attracted the 6,300 people to fly to Las Vegas and fill every hall, ballroom, salon, patio, and restaurant at the MGM Grand? IBM calls it "Smart SOA". I call it The Application Web.

Only the most brilliant technical people could come up with SOA as a name for something. Let's see, is it safe operating area, School of the Americas, Skies of Arcadia (a Nintendo game), Society of Actuaries, state of the art, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act? Nope. The SOA that brought all these people together stands for "service oriented architecture". It is really important. The wikipedia has a comprehensive definition of SOA but basically it represents a new way for companies -- and hospitals, schools, and governments -- to enable their customers -- and suppliers, business partners, and employees -- to get things done on the web. Actually it is isn't new -- the idea has been around for decades -- but now it is really happening. It is so much a part of the vernacular at IBM that they just matter of factly talk about "so a".

Web In a nutshell, SOA will allow web sites to do much more than “click here to buy”. In fact web sites built with SOA will result in us standing in fewer lines in the physical world and have to endure fewer telephone call centers that want to control us. Fulfillment models at our favorite retailer’s web site will result in the staple goods we need just showing up outside the garage door when we need them. If businesses have the right attitude, SOA will enable them to get closer to the ultimate Internet -- to build a people-oriented and user-friendly experience that is tightly integrated with all the appropriate business processes of the company.

Over the last fifty years there has been an explosion of computer applications, but many of them were built in silos and were highly inflexible. In some cases companies thought decentralization was the answer so they allowed divisions and departments to do their own thing. The result was that many have a hodgepodge of incompatible systems that nobody is happy with. The web took things a big leap forward. At last there was a common way (the browser) for accessing and displaying information, even though the applications that run on the server -- that do the pricing, inventory lookups, shipping estimates, invoicing, etc. -- are still proprietary and usually tied to one particular IT vendor or system. The applications have also been very monolithic; i.e. in order to fulfill the expectations of customers on the web the application has to do the whole job. Soup to nuts; present the right price, confirm if the item is in stock, calculate shipping, and confirm the status of the order. Increasingly, customers want to get access directly into the supply chain and see exactly where their order stands. In short, applications have gotten larger and more complicated -- harder, not easier.

SOA -- arguably the biggest change in information technology in decades -- is poised to change the way applications are created and how they interoperate. Instead of building a monolithic application that takes a customer order, does credit checks, checks inventory, looks through the supply chain, arranges for payment, charges the customer, clears credit card transactions, etc., with SOA these various functions are built as separate "pieces". Think Legos. The individual programs are called "services" and they are called upon as needed. A sales tax calculation "service", for example, could be used by many different divisions of a company thereby eliminating redundancy. IBM has been practicing what it preaches in this regard. It has reduced the number of programs it uses to run the company from 16,000 to just a few thousand -- and declining.

The SOA services do not all have to be developed or acquired internally. Thanks to the Internet, services can be "rented" from others. For example, suppose that a company called American Specialties Inc. (ASI) specializes in selling American goods for delivery mostly outside of America. They want to create an application to sell their products on the web. The trickiest part of the application is determining the best way to ship the product to ensure it gets there when the customer wants it and at the lowest cost. ASI doesn't’t have the skills to write this particular part of the application and they haven’t bee able to find a vendor with a software package that can do it and which is compatible with the rest of ASI’s software.

It turns out that there is another company called Rates and Costs Inc. (RCI), which specializes in the calculation of optimum routes and the associated costs for shipment to places anywhere in the world. RCI offers the calculation as a service on the web and it is the exact function ASI needs to incorporate into their web application. Since RCI follows the SOA standards, ASI is able to see the specifications for RCI’s service – what inputs are required and what output does it produce. RCI could have created their calculation service using any IT platform they choose -- the standards assure that things can work together.

The programmer at ASI likes RCI’s program because it performs exactly the right function that ASI needs and the software has already been written and tested! ASI follows the SOA standards to incorporate RCI’s service into their web application. Whenever a user goes to ASI’s web page and needs shipment route and cost information, a link is made behind the scenes to RCI’s web server to get the information. ASI’s customers don’t know, nor will they care, that part of the job is being done by RCI’s server; not ASI’s server. ASI makes an arrangement to pay RCI each time one of ASI’s customers uses the RCI web service.

Creating programs by linking to other programs without regard to what programming language was used to create the others’ programs represents a whole new paradigm. It is one of the information technology industry’s holy grails. Standards organizations, such as Oasis, have been attempting for years to create a “neutral” programming environment. The UNIX vendors – HP, DEC, Sun, IBM, Data General, and others – formed various organizations, councils and consortia over the years attempting to bring things together. Progress was made but none of these initiatives achieved real openness and true compatibility across the information technology industry -- until SOA. It is not really new but it is time. Open Internet standards and SOA tools are making it happen.

SOA will make it possible for the web to evolve from a web of content to a web of content and applications. SOA will enable server-to-server interaction in addition to browser to server interactions. Servers will negotiate with other servers and even complete transactions by themselves with no direct human intervention. These interactions will replace the paper forms and faxes that flow back and forth from company to company today.

E-business evolved to on demand and on demand has evolved to business and IT "alignment". At this stage many enterprises have bought in to the concept but are struggling with how to get there. This is why many web sites don't fully meet our needs -- they are dependent on many independent applications that the enterprise has had for decades and so far have been unable to integrate them. SOA is the new model -- it offers the first comprehensive, standards based way to get the job done. Adoption of SOA will enable the interoperability within the many functions and departments of enterprises and between enterprises that has been a decades long dream. History has shown that adoption of standards leads to an explosion of usage and that will surely be the case with SOA. The SOA standards will enable entire industries to be brought together. Virtual corporations comprised of a federation of smaller ones will enable “hyper competition” on a global scale.

How does "Web 2.0" fit into all this? Like a ball and glove. Quite the hot topic in tech circles and among venture capitalists, Web 2.0 is basically a style, a model, an approach, and a philosophy wrapped together. It includes a "lightweight" programming model that is more like web page development than traditional programming. A key element of 2.0 is the blog feed -- a way to allow people to look at a web page but also subscribe to it. Another element is AJAX, a technique built on a collection of Internet standards that produces a rich user experience -- kayak.com is a good example -- with pages that don't "reload", they just change while you are looking at them. Another characteristic of Web 2.0 is that it is a perpetual beta -- users are treated as co-developers. At the conference, IBM announced WebSphere sMash which may turn out to be a really key tool for the evolution toward Web 3.0. Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow and CTO for IBM WebSphere, described a broad vision for how "smashups" will extend the web in a major way. The idea is to make it simple to combine content from multiple web sites. For example a travel agency may want to combine the best deals from airlines and hotels along with comments and discussion from tourists all in one "seamless" site. The smashup tool is based on a community project called "Project Zero" that has been underway for a number of months and is now ready to go mainstream.

All things considered, IBM really has it's act together with regard to SOA. Every software and services executive at the company is well versed on it and has it baked into their business and development plans. The promise is great and with tens of thousands of software engineers and top management support I think it is fair to expect IBM to continue to deliver on their vision. They have already made dozens of acquisitions to fill in the white spaces and customers are signing up and getting results. There were hundreds of customers and business partners there in Las Vegas to tell their success stories. Nothing is more creditable than having someone else tell your story for you.

great summary of IBM’s “Smart SOA” vision

Conferences, IBM, Internet Technology, On Demand, Travels, e-Business April 15, 2008 08:25 PM

Friday, March 14, 2008

South Africa 2008

Giraffes The trip is over and things are back to normal, but South Africa has left a lasting impression on me. All the stories and pictures are in the index below. For anyone who wants to print the stories, they are all combined into a single pdf file. I hope readers find it interesting and that some are able to go there and see some of the great sights.

Back From Africa
Luggage Back Too
Johannesburg
Infrastructure
MalaMala
Victoria Falls
Cape Town
Giving Back
Gallery of pictures from Africa
South Africa 2008 (all stories in single pdf)

patrickWeb Travel Photo Gallery

People, Travels March 14, 2008 09:44 AM

Thursday, March 13, 2008

South Africa 2008 - Giving Back

Poverty housing The trip to South Africa was very rewarding from business, educational, and recreational points of view. I feel extremely fortunate to have been able to make the trip. The hotels, wine farms, and bushveld animal sightings were stunning but so too was the poverty. It was very sad to see how so many people have been repressed for decades and are living in much less than decent housing.

Of all the people who are able to fly to South Africa on business or vacation trips, surely the least among them is far more fortunate than those in the depressed areas of South Africa. For those so inclined, are there ways to give back? I have been asking myself that question. Fortunately, there are many choices and I plan to act on some of them.

Among the time-tested organizations that have long-term experience working in Africa are the following...

Habitat for Humanity South Africa builds on the basic The Habitat Vision -- “A world in which every person has a decent place to live”. HFHSA has been actively building in South Africa since 1996 and to date over 2,000 houses have been constructed across Western Cape, Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.

Africare, founded in 1971 is a self-help program to assist Africans in the broad areas of food, water, the environment, health, private-sector development, governance, and emergency humanitarian aid.

The Africa Fund reaches out to local religious leaders, community and labor leaders, as well as state and municipal officials and their constituencies. The Africa Fund works to support human rights, democracy, and economic development on the continent.

The African Medical and Research Foundation, founded in 1952, is committed to empowering the disadvantaged people of Africa. The organization works in close partnership with local communities, government ministries of health, UN agencies, other NGOs to develop locally appropriate models for improving health, to contribute to capacity building at all levels, and to develop an enabling environment for health improvement.

The African Services Committee was founded in 1981 by a group of refugees and provides relief and assistance for diverse ethnic immigrant and refugee groups in need of food, shelter, clothing, medical care, legal services, housing, and employment.

Books for Africa, founded in 1988, Minnesota-based Books for America collects, sorts, ships, and distributes books to the children of Africa in partnership with Rotary Clubs, YMCAs, churches, schools, and various community groups.

The Global Alliance for Africa, is a Chicago-based group that works in concert with local and international partners to bring medical care to those regions of Africa most in need of help.

The South Africa Development Fund, was founded in 1985 by South African exiles living in the U.S. and it works in partnership with community-based organizations to provide financial and technical support to communities disadvantaged by decades of apartheid policies.

All of these fine organizations accept online donations.

Index of stories and pictures from South Africa 2008

People, Travels March 13, 2008 11:14 AM

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

South Africa 2008 - Cape Town

Cape Town - Table Mountain It was a smooth flight from Livingstone to Johannesburg from and then on to Cape Town. It was very relaxing to get to the Cape Grace Hotel, and quite a contrast to the Victoria Falls Hotel. Cape Town is a beautiful city, especially on the harbor. There are more shops and restaurants than you could possibly visit in a short time. One of the major attractions of the area is Table Mountain and the view from the rotating cable car is spectacular during the five minute ride to the top. On some days the cableway does not run because of the notorious high winds for which the city is known. It is also quite a site to see the clouds rise up and cover the mountain like a tablecloth. If you are brave you can do a Table Mountain Abseil -- climbing down the 3,000+ foot mountain swinging from a rope. No thanks.

There are many things to explore outside of Cape Town, most notably the Cape of Good Hope.The rocky point is a called a headland which means it is an area of land adjacent to water on three sides. I always had thought that the Cape of Good Hope is the southern most tip of Africa, but that distinction actually goes to Cape Agulhas, which is about 90 miles to the southeast. The Wikipedia says that the rounding of the cape in 1488 was a major milestone in the attempts by the Portuguese to establish a sea route to the Far East. More than 500 ships were wrecked trying to go by the Cape and instead crashing on the rocks. You can see water bubbling around the rocks off shore but many ships in bad weather could not. Now with GPS every ship can know precisely where it is and where any obstacles are. We also visited Cape Point which is just over a mile away. Both are well worth seeing. It was quite a climb to get up to the lighthouse. Unfortunately, the weather gets so bad that the lighthouse was not visible at times and therefore not effective. A few years ago we rounded Cape Horn on a cruise but the weather was so bad I was not able to get a very good picture. Here are some pictures from Cape Town and the Cape of Good Hope. At the end of the day we made a visit to the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden. I don't much about flowers but I have to admit that it was quite impressive.

No trip to Cape Town would be complete without visiting the wine country. Just like California has Napa and Sonoma, South Africa has eleven different wine areas with nice towns and "wine farms". The region we visited is called Paarl and the tour and tasting was at the Seidelberg Wine Estate. The views were beautiful and the wines were excellent.From there we rode through Franschhoek, where the French first made wine in South Africa 300 years ago. We stopped at Haute Cabriére Cellar Restaurant for lunch. The unique restaurant was built into the side of a mountain.

We got to the Cape Town airport at 2 PM thinking we had plenty of time but it turned out to be a chaotic Friday afternoon. We got home twenty-eight hours later. Our luggage arrived twenty-six more hours after that. All in all a really fun and educational trip.

Index of stories and pictures from South Africa 2008

Travels March 11, 2008 05:14 PM

Sunday, March 9, 2008

South Africa 2008 - Victoria Falls

If there is a "must see" in South Africa it would be Victoria Falls. My bottom line would be that if you go there to make it a day trip and be sure to fly directly to the Victoria Falls airport. The way we made the trip turned out to very complicated. Just like Niagara Falls are on the border between Ontario, Canada and New York State, Victoria Falls are on the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia. On the map it looks like you could fly to either place and they would be about the same distance to the falls. In a perfect world, yes, but in this part of the world there was a world of difference.

A bit conservative but we left Sandton at 9am and got to the airport at 9:30 for a 12:15 flight to Livingstone, Zambia. The first surprise, of many to come, was the $135 per person visa fee to enter the country. Ground transportation had been arranged and two young gentlemen escorted us to a small van to begin the 15 mile trip to the Victoria Falls Hotel. The first stop was at the immigration center as we left Zambia. This was followed by a stop at another immigration center as we entered Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe charged $50 per person to enter their country. Both immigration centers had long lines of people and trucks. The people are in poverty trying to survive in a country where the government leaders have done nothing for them and have bankrupted the country, but not themselves. Inflation is running at 100,000% while life expectancy has declined to 38 due to 17% of the male population having HIV infection.

We had to remove our luggage and change cars and drivers at the border so that the car service would not have to pay the visa fees. Dozens of huge tandem flatbed trucks carrying copper and industrial materials lined the shoulders of the poorly paved road. Some would have to wait a day or more to get clearance to cross the border. There were people along the road selling various food, carrying huge loads of goods balanced on their heads, and a baboon or monkey here and there. We finally arrived at the hotel after nearly seven hours. The ground transportation had to be paid in U.S. dollars -- no credit cards. After all the government fees -- which likely go to politicians, not education or road repairs -- I was out of U.S. dollars.

The next surprise was that the hotel informed us that there would be a $20 per person charge to enter the trail to visit the famous water falls. No credit cards. No local currencies accepted -- only U.S. dollars. Could the hotel advance some cash and charge to our room? No. They will accept U.S. dollars as payment but they will not give out any dollars. "Sorry for the inconvenience". How do I get some dollars to go see the falls that I have traveled all day to see? You have to go to Zambia to a bank. There are no dollars available in Zimbabwe. I was beside myself to put it mildly -- feeling like I was in a small room with two doors that both said "No Exit". Fortunately, the driver was still in the lobby and he took us to the bank, with stops at both immigration centers, a wait in line to get our passports stamped and change cars again at the border.

The bank in Zambia was open and dispenses U.S. dollars against an American Express card -- except that international money transfers ceased at 3:30 PM. It was 3:45 PM. Back to the car and on to a shopping center five miles down the road to an ATM. After entering my PIN I asked for 1,500,000 Zambian kwachas, which I estimated would be about $400. The hourglass on the ATM screen flashed for a few minutes and then displayed a message saying "This ATM will be temporarily unavailable from 4 PM to 4:30 PM daily". It was 4:15. (The next day a charge for $402 appeared in Quicken from my credit card account). Back to the car and down the road to another ATM. This time I requested and was able to withdraw 2,000,000 Zambian kwachas. Now on to a "Currency Exchange Center". Sounds fancy but it was downscale from a strip mall dry cleaning business with handwritten posters on the wall showing the exchange rate. I presented an inch thick wad of bills and walked out with $522 plus a remainder of 900 kwachas because they don't handle coins. The 900 kwachas were worth twenty-four cents.

Back to the car, through the two immigration centers, passport lines, car change, and finally to the Victoria Falls park at 5PM. How long does it take to walk through the park and see the falls? Two hours but they close in one hour so it is too late to go. The day could have been a Chevy Chase vacation series movie.

The Victoria Falls Hotel overlooks the Victoria Falls Bridge and the gorges below. It is historic, elegant, and tranquil but not necessarily equal to the international acclaim advertised. The main thing going for it is the falls being within walking distance. The rooms are expensive and the food was the most expensive of the trip. Not sure if it was the malaria medication in preparation for MalaMala or the hotel food that made me sick the following few days. I think it was the hotel food. The wine selection and quality was poor. The dining room was hot and humid -- no air conditioning. The service staff were all very friendly and it would not have been fair to take out the uncanny day on them.

The next morning we walked to the falls. Once off the hotel property we were met with local young men offering various souvenirs for sale. Offering would not actually the right word -- they were hounding and begging. You have to feel sorry for them but you can't solve the problem by buying from them. One of them had something I had been looking for and when I offered $15 the few sales people suddenly became a throng that would not leave us alone. We paid our $20 U.S. dollar entrance fee at a gate and headed into the jungle to see the falls. As we got closer the mist in the air turned to a sprinkle and eventually pouring rain. The sky was blue but the tremendous amount of water from the falls makes the area feel like a rain forest. After an hour we returned to the hotel soaked through to the bone. The experience of the past day and a half made me feel soaked in every way. I was really happy to get back to Johannesburg to begin the last leg of the trip -- to Cape Town.

Index of stories and pictures from South Africa 2008

Travels March 9, 2008 09:49 PM

Saturday, March 8, 2008

South Africa 2008 - MalaMala

Rhinocerous

The most interesting part of MalaMala is seeing the animals but I was also interested in the aviation aspects of the trip. We headed to MalaMala from Johannesburg aboard a 29 passenger Jetstream 41 regional turboprop airliner which is made by British Aerospace. Their were two pilots, a flight attendant, and six passengers. I don't think South African Airways made much money on the flight. I was impressed with the Jetstream. It has two 1,650 horsepower Honeywell turboprop engines with McCauley five-bladed propellers. The pilots have a digital radio communications system and a fully digital automatic flight control system. The MalaMala Airport is a different story. The "airport" is actually a mile-long paved strip in the middle of the bushveld. There are no buildings and the emergency ground resources consist one fire truck sitting in the weeds. I don't believe there are any navigation aids on the ground. Nevertheless, I am quite confident that the daily flight into and out of MalaMala is as safe as any flights anywhere.

The MalaMala Game Reserve has been in existence since 1927 and claims to be the largest private "Big Five" (lion, leopard, buffalo, rhinoceros and elephant) game reserve in South Africa. MalaMala has 40,000 acres of land with a 12 mile unfenced border with the world-renowned Kruger National Park. There are several different "camps" where one could stay -- we were fortunate to be at Rattray's. Not only does MalaMala provide an exciting wildlife experience but it also is very focused on preserving and protecting the animals and the ecosystem. This became evident from the outset when Rob, our ranger, briefed us on the protocol to be followed while out in the bush. No getting out of or standing in the Land Rover, no waving of arms, and no making of noises to try to attract the animals attention.

Each day started at 5:30 AM with a wake-up call from Rob. After a cup of coffee we headed out in the Land Rover with our new friends, Gerhard and Hiltrud, from Germany. In total we made five trips into the bush. Rob and Culver, our tracker, had an uncanny sense of when various kinds of animals would be in certain places. The reserve has more than 1,000 miles of "roads" and frequently the Land Rover would suddenly pull off into the grass to see one of the big five or other animals. Rob would shut off the engine and we would just sit and watch. The rangers are in constant radio communication with one another to keep each other informed about the location of the game. The animals at MalaMala have grown up with engines as part of the ambient noise of the bush. They were not intimidated or seem to notice us whispering to each other as we were in awe of these great animals. We were typically twenty to fifty feet or so away and sometimes less than ten feet. (see photo gallery).

We got back to camp at 9am for breakfast. In the afternoon we would meet at 4 PM and head out until 7:30 PM and then meet for cocktails and dinner. All three meals each day were prepared by the on-site natively-dressed staff. Our ranger sat with us at each meal and the homemade food was extremely good. On the second night we dined outdoors in the boma by the crackling fire pit. After dinner it was time to return to our khaya (Zulu for ‘home’).

Although the facilities were more than expected, the real attraction was the animals. At departure we received a certificate validating that we had indeed seen the big five. We actually saw many more animals including jackal, hyena, baboons, water buffalo, cheetah, giraffe, zebra plus many different birds and interesting plants and trees. The lioness playing with her four cubs was a special treat. As usual, I have to apologize for my poor photographic skills but the photo gallery is worth more than whatever else I can say, except for one thing that I found truly amazing. A leopard had overtaken and killed an impala. An impala is a fast runner and weighs 150-200 pounds. They can jump a distance of thirty feet. Whatever it's abilities, it was not enough to get away from the leopard. It dragged the impala to the base of a tree and we sat thirty feet away in the Land Rover watching as it planned the next steps to protect the "kill" from being taken by other leopards or by hyenas. After devouring enough of the meat to lighten the weight a bit, the leopard picked up the impala by the neck with it's teeth and raced straight up a fifty foot tree like a rocket ship. I could barely believe it as I saw it. Leopards are said to be able to carry three times their weight up a tree. The leopard placed the impala between two limbs near the top of the tree with head and antlers and two legs hanging over one part and the other two legs hanging over the other. The leopard then parked itself spread-eagled over a lower part of the limb and rested. We went back that night and saw hyena (notice those nasty teeth) laying in the grass hoping the leopard would get sloppy and let the impala fall to the ground. We went back the next day and the leopard was still up in the tree. Too bad I did not have a night vision zoom lens. Hopefully this picture conveys the story.

Index of stories and pictures from South Africa 2008

People, Travels March 8, 2008 02:30 PM

Thursday, March 6, 2008

South Africa 2008 - Infrastructure

South African Food We met Matimba Mbungela at Moyo's for dinner. It was pleasantly warm at the table outside. It was the first time I had my face painted and the first time I had eaten oxtail. At the end of the evening there was another first. Matimba insisted on picking up the tab. The server came to the table with a wireless credit card reader. After the card was swiped, Matimba's mobile phone received an SMS text message. South Africa has embraced mobile as a key part of their banking infrastructure. After every credit card charge your cell phone receives a message confirming the charge. In fact any debit or credit to your bank account or credit card results in an SMS message. Not everyone in South Africa has an Internet connection but tens of millions have a mobile phone. The security is good because most people don't share their phone. SMS has enormous potential for applications of all kinds. The New York Times, Fox News, and others are using SMS for news and election alerts but when it comes to SMS for data oriented applications, South Africa is well ahead of the United States.

Other aspects of infrastructure in South Africa were a mixed bag. Broadband Internet access was available everywhere we visited including the MalaMala bushveld (via satellite). Even Zimbabwe had dial-up access in an Internet lounge. It was $4 for 15 minutes if you paid cash, or $8 if you put it on your hotel bill. According to the Internet World Stats, just over 10% of the population of South Africa had Internet access as of 2006. I suspect the number is much higher now, especially if you consider Internet Cafes. We saw many of these throughout Soweto. iBurst, one of South Africa's largest wireless broadband providers, is planning to roll out 20 000 Internet cafes by 2010.

Availability of electricity in Africa is a challenge -- even in major cities in South Africa. When we checked into our hotel in Johannesburg, there was a letter under the door from the hotel general manager saying that if elevators stopped working, the emergency power generator should kick in within eight minutes. There are rolling power outages throughout the country. People say it is due to poor planning by the government. Rolling blackouts are annoying but the bigger problem is total lack of electricity in many parts of Africa. Without electricity it is hard to move water. Without water it is hard to build an economy and grow food. The big potential is solar, as Africa is very well positioned geographically. The UN and non-profits such as SELF are trying to break down economic and governmental barriers to exploiting solar's potential.

Finally is mobile communications. I took my iPhone because that is where all my calendar and contact details are, but when it comes to phone calls and the mobile Internet, the Apple - AT&T team does not make it easy. Apple locks the iPhone so you can not put a Vodacom South Africa SIM card in it -- Apple wants to be sure to get their commission from AT&T. In South Africa, AT&T charges $2.49 per minute for inbound or outbound calls, fifty cents for a text message, and $20 per megabyte for data service. (Some modest discounts are available if you sign up for a monthly international plan). Some unwary travelers have forgotten to turn off automatic email retrieval in their iPhone and ended up with thousands of dollars in charges from AT&T.

Maxroam is an innovative VoIP company in Ireland. For a little more than $40 they send you a SIM card which you can put into any unlocked GSM phone -- such as the Treo which I held onto after getting the iPhone for use during international travel. Maxroam gives you a U.S. mobile phone number. If someone calls my iPhone while I am out of the country it will automatically forward to the Treo. If I want to make a call I dial from the Treo using whatever local GSM operator is available. The cost for Maxroam varies by country -- in South Africa it is 39 cents per minute for inbound calls and 49 cents per minute for local or outbound calls. The Maxroam proposition was very appealing but unfortunately it did not work. I called and emailed the company with no response. If not Maxroam, someone will figure out how to use VoIP to get around the outrageous international mobile roaming rates. Fortunately, I was able to get a Vodacom prepaid card for the Treo. It worked very well for local and international calls. Most international calls were made from the hotel room with my ThinkPad using Skype at two cents per minute.

Index of stories and pictures from South Africa 2008

Internet Technology, Mobile, Travels, iPhone March 6, 2008 10:22 AM

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

South Africa 2008 - Johannesburg

The South African Airways flight to Dakar, Senegal on the northwest coast of Africa was approximately 4.000 miles and took about seven and a half hours. It was the half-way point on the journey to Johannesburg. From door to door it took just about 24 hours to get to the D'Oreale Grande at Emperors Palace at Kempton Park in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. South Africa borders the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Visiting this beautiful country is quite a geography lesson.

On the arrival night, it was a pleasure to meet Matimba Mbungela, a managing executive at Vodacom South Africa, in person after having exchanged email and phone calls during the prior week. Matimba introduced me to his colleague Chris Ross, the senior sales executive for Vodacom South Africa, who would be host of the conference taking place the next day. Vodacom is a Pan-African cellular communications company providing world class GSM services to more than 30 million customers in South Africa, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mozambique. More than 500 Vodacom business partners attended The Future of Technology conference to get an update on the various Vodacom offerings. My keynote at the end of the day offered a view of The Future of the Internet. That evening a delightful gala was held to recognize the sales achievements of the top Vodacom partners and dealers.

Like most conferences, there was an exhibition area where dozens of hardware, software, and services companies showed off their latest offerings. One of the most interesting one was the Firefly, from Grapevine Interactive. The Firefly is a parent-friendly mobile phone for young children. The tiny colorful phone has three prominent buttons on it. One to call Mom, one to call Dad, and one to place an emergency call. The phone can also store twenty parent-approved phone numbers.

Another conference took place later in the week in Midrand at Vodaworld, the company headquarters. The top 200 senior level executives of Vodacom came together as part of their professional development and to network with one another. The first part of the morning focused on The Future of the Internet and the second half we discussed innovation and how to nurture big ideas. The latter session was based on a class I led at MIT in September.

During the second half of the first week we stayed at the Intercontinental in Sandton, just a few blocks from Nelson Mandela Square. The giant statue of the former President of South Africa is impressive as is the life of the man who was first to be elected in a fully representative democratic election in the country. Mandela had led the anti-apartheid movement. We could see Robben Island, where Mandela spent 27 years in prison, from the waterfront the following week in Cape Town. We also visited his former home in Soweto. The respect for Nelson Mandela is universal regardless of ethnicity or political leaning. He will be 90 in July.

Nearby in Soweto is Orlando West stands the Hector Pieterson memorial square. Pieterson was killed at the age of twelve when police opened fire on protesting students in 1976. More than five-hundred were killed in the struggle. Soweto, which stands for townships southwest of Johannesburg, consists of dozens of townships and represents more than a third of the population of the city. The poverty is incredible. Some progress is being made but the results of decades of repression are obvious. The sights are breathtaking and not in a positive way. Hard to imagine that a government rationalized the extreme segmentation and discrimination. After a half day touring Soweto we had lunch in the Dube section of Soweto at Wandies Place. I could not identify most of the food in the buffet but it was very tasty.

Another half-day educational visit was to the Cradle of Humankind. It was well worth the one hour ride north of Johannesburg into the Gauteng province to see the Sterkfontein Caves where the 2.3-million year-old fossil Australopithecus africanus (nicknamed "Mrs. Ples"), an early hominid, was found in 1947. We literally had to crawl on hands and knees to get to the bottom of the enormous limestone cave hundreds of feet below ground. Although there was not much light, we could see huge stalactites and stalagmites and an underground lake that is fed from more than fifty miles away. Excavation at the site continues. In case you did not know it, we all came from Africa. The guide said "welcome back". If you are interested in finding the path taken by your ancestors to get from Africa to whatever part of the world you live in, take a look at the human genographic project.

Index of stories and pictures from South Africa 2008

Conferences, Internet Technology, People, Travels March 4, 2008 03:17 PM

Monday, March 3, 2008

Luggage Back Too

Luggage There is much to write about Africa and Internet technology, but I can not resist sharing about our luggage. We waited in line along with many others to provide information about the size and color of the missing bags. The agent entered the information and gave us a printout that was clearly from a decades-old system. We were told to give a call after twenty-four hours. I called after 26 hours and was told there was no update and that it could take up to five days. The reasoning was that there may not be room in the next few flights for "extra" baggage -- the classic case of taking care of the new customers rather than upset them by helping customers who have already been disappointed. After continuing to get "there is no new information" I thought to myself that tracking luggage would be a great application for the web. I wondered if the airline had thought about it.

I visited South African Airways (flysaa.com) and at the bottom of the "After your trip" page was a link for "Lost/damaged luggage". Could it be? II entered the file reference number from the printout and voila! Information about each of the four bags was displayed along with the status. As the day went on the status changed from "No information available" to "Arrived at airport" to "Delivery process underway". It took thirty-six hours to get the luggage but I was impressed with how South African Airways had integrated a very old application with a user-friendly web front end. Apparently the people at the airport are not aware of it. The airline could certainly take some anxiety away and offload an extremely busy call center by informing their customers about the web application and including the url on the printout. The ideal solution would be to have the application automatically generate an SMS text message to your mobile phone every hour with the status.

The pictures are uploaded to the gallery and the stories will start soon.

Index of stories and pictures from South Africa 2008

Internet Technology, Mobile, On Demand, Travels March 3, 2008 04:58 PM

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Back From Africa

Map of Africa The trip back from Africa took twenty-nine hours. If you include the half day in Cape Town's wine country before going to the airport plus an evening event back home, the forty-five hours made for a really long "day". We left the hotel in Cape Town at 9am on Friday morning -- it was 2am in New York at the time -- and we got to JFK an hour late at 7:30 am Saturday. After waiting for two hours we were told that all the bags were off the plane. Ours remain somewhere between Cape Town, Johannesburg, and New York. We had hoped to see them the next day but South African Airways said it could take up to five days. In spite of the long trip home and missing luggage, it was a really great two weeks. There is much to share -- in words and pictures -- about the country, the people, the culture, the status of technology, and of course, the animals. The index below will be updated as the stories come to life.

Index of stories and pictures from South Africa 2008

Travels March 2, 2008 11:06 AM

Friday, February 15, 2008

Long Distance

Telephone There are quite a few stories here in the blog about "Long Distance". What is long distance? When the grandkids come from the Philadelphia area to Connecticut to visit, they consider that a long distance. When visiting Singapore or New Zealand or other parts of Southeastern Asia, you know you are a long way from New York -- like 10,000 miles or so. When we head to Johannesburg, South Africa from JFK tomorrow, that will be a long distance (approximately 8,000 miles).

When it comes to a "telephone" conversation, the words "long distance" don't really mean anything. Many of us remember the phone ringing decades ago at grandma's house at holiday time and the room immediately being urged to "shhhhhh" because the call was "long distance". Hurry, we would say as we waited our turn for a few seconds to say hello to the caller. Long distance was considered a luxury then but now is becoming a merely historical term.

Many of us who have been involved with the Internet have known for a long time that voice over IP, or Internet Telephony, would become ubiquitous. It is just so natural to utilize the global infrastructure of the Internet to send information between any two points. The world is actually a small place when you consider the speed of today's networks. I recall being at an Internet Society meeting in Honolulu in 1994 participating on a panel about the future of the Internet. A fellow panelist, Geoff Huston from Telstra, made a simple but, at the time, very controversial point. Geoff said that "voice" is "just another kind of data". What he meant, of course, was that once you speak into a handset or headset and your voice is converted to a stream of ones and zeroes, the "bits" traveling over the Internet look just like any other bits -- like from web pages, emails, efaxes, audio, video, etc.

How will I stay in touch while in South Africa? I will be taking my iPhone because that is where all my calendar and contact details are, but when it comes to phone calls and the mobile Internet, the Apple - AT&T team does not make it easy. Apple locks the iPhone so you can not put a Vodacom South Africa SIM card in it -- Apple wants to be sure to get their commission from AT&T. In South Africa, AT&T charges $2.49 per minute for inbound or outbound calls, fifty cents for a text message, and $20 per megabyte for data service. (Some modest discounts are available if you sign up for a monthly international plan). Some unwarry travelers have forgetten to turn off automatic email retrieval in their iPhone and ended up with thousands of dollars in charges from AT&T.

Where does all this lead? If innovation and competition continue -- and I believe they will -- then we will have choices. One choice will be to have a WiFi mobile phone with Skype on it. If Apple continues to thwart that option on the iPhone, others will provide it. If governments and operators cling to the old models, it will take a while but there is no doubt in my mind that we will soon have a wide range of choices of service available on the Internet -- wherever we are and with whatever devices we have.

Internet Technology, Mobile, Travels, WiFi, iPhone February 15, 2008 05:20 PM

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Christmas 2007

Christmas Tree There is much that could be said about the hundreds of miles of driving to see family and then a houseful of family and good times before during and after Christmas. I won't bore readers of the blog about that but there is one thing I would like to share about one special gift I received. It is called Open It!

Some will immediately be thinking of Open IT as in "Open Information Technology". For example, Open IT Works is based on a simple concept borrowed from Open Source, and is about sharing of IT solutions, best practices, projects, and product and vendor reviews. The Open It I received for Christmas has nothing to do with any of that. My Open It is to open things that come packaged in blisters, clamshells, boxes DVD cases, and numerous other things unopenables that are packaged with the vendor in mind -- and with no thought about how the consumer might open the package without injuring oneself. The Open It is made from hardened and plated precision alloy steel, has has honed, angled, and offset jaws, and an ergo-comfortable handle. It has a built in retractable utility knife and an interchangeable Phillips & slotted screwdriver. (You can click here to get a complete product data sheet). If you have ever suffered "wrap rage", suffer no more. It really works. The only catch is that the Open It comes in one of those packages that you need an Open It to open it! Hopefully, I will not become the technical support department for this product like I did for the PepperBall.

Holiday time also allowed me to finish a couple of books. Indian Summer was an excellent history of India, Pakistan, Kashmir, and Bangladesh. The Iranian Time Bomb
is a wake up call to what has been going on for thirty years. Good investigative reporting went into this. It was a special pleasure to finish Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Prepare yourself for 944 pages. I learned many things I did not know about the civil war and about Abraham Lincoln. He was quite the political strategist and a superb manager. A very long read but worth it. Several new books in the read queue for January. The quarterly update on favorites is here.

Favorites, Gadgets, People, Travels December 26, 2007 01:12 PM

Friday, October 26, 2007

Governance

Doctor and Patient It was an educational week at the Leadership Conference for Trustees, Physicians, Executives, & Nurse Executives at The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The conference, which focused on the subject of governance, was organized by The Governance Institute. Although not a new term, governance has taken a much higher profile in both for profit and not for profit organizations. At a very high level governance aims to assure that an organization produces a pattern of good results while avoiding an undesirable pattern of bad circumstances. The Governance Institute focuses on helping hospitals achieve best practices among the leading healthcare boards across the country.

The conference included three days of speeches, Q&A, and breakout sessions that covered many topics including clarification of a hospital board's basic fiduciary duties and core responsibilities, exploration of "best practices" of high-performing boards, understanding of various hospital-physican relationships and complexities of physician credentialing and privileging, approaches to hospital financial planning and capital allocation, and an analysis of the healthcare reform (and cost) being advocated by the various political candidates.

Governance can be a complex topic but at a high level it is mostly common sense. The way I think about it, good governance means being financially efficient but not pushing so hard on the numbers as to cause people to do unnatural things in order to "make" the numbers, focusing on how the leadership of the organization is selected and how they are paid, being transparent with the various stakeholders so they understand the decisions that are made and the rationale behind them, and insuring personal accountability is in place at all levels.

Although governance was the main focus of the conference, all of the speakers had some predictions about where things are headed with American healthcare. It was not a pretty picture. Costs are going to cointinue to escalate to the point where they are a huge part of the economy and exceed the cost of primary and secondary education at the state level. As costs rise they will be pushed toward hospitals and pressures will continue between payers (insurers) and providers. Primary care physicians, already in short supply in many areas, will be in even shorter supply as new graduates seek out speciality areas with more economic potential. As the cost of running a medical practice continues to increase many doctors will choose to become employees of hospitals. Hospitals will consolidate and as they gain economy of scale they will implement electronic medical records and become highly efficient providers of high quality care. Although America does not today offer the highest quality health care in the world, there is significant progress being made toward curing cancer and heart disease. The glass is half full, not half empty.

There was not a lot of spare time but enough to get in a look around the Greenbrier's spectacular 3,500+ acres, have a good hike up Kates Mountain Road, and also locate a benchmark near the old White Sulphur Springs train station (a few pictures in the photo gallery). That brings cumulative benchmarks found to eighty-eight. Some of my colleagues took a tour of the Bunker but we had been there before.

Other patrickWeb stories about healthcare
Pictures from 2002 trip to the Bunker

Conferences, Healthcare, Hiking, Travels October 26, 2007 04:19 PM

Friday, August 31, 2007

Upstate New York

Wind turbines More about the iPhone and WiFi soon but first a final travelogue for the summer. The total Trike ride was 550 miles. The first day got us up close to Utica where my brother lives. Utica is situated in the Mohawk Valley and is the county seat of Oneida County. Like many industrial towns and cities in the northeastern Rust Belt, Utica has seen continuous reduction in manufacturing activity during the past several decades. It is sad to see a beautiful area with open space and clean air be suffering economically.

The next morning we met some friends and rode 100 miles up to Sackets Harbor, on the shores of Lake Ontario, at the eastern-most and smallest of the Great Lakes. The lake flows into the St. Lawrence which then flows northeasterly through Canada connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Because of the strategic position of Sackets Harbor, it played a key role in protecting America's northern frontier during the War of 1812. Had it not been for Sackets Harbor, the majority of the day's motorcycle ride might have been Canadian.

The ride back to the Utica area was beautiful and educational. We saw huge wind turbines -- 195 of them -- that produce 2% of the New York state's residential electricity. I had seen the giant turbines before from a distance but a visitor center allowed us to stop for a closer look and hear the whooshing sound of the giant blades.

As we came across the Tug Hill Plateau, we could see tens of miles to the Adirondack Mountains. There are extensive park systems throughout the state of New York, but . Adirondack Park, with six million acres (half of which is private), is the largest by far. In fact it is the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States, greater in size than Yellowstone, Everglades, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National Park combined.

Riding back to the lake the next day through rural New York and Pennsylvania was a treat. There were clouds and sprinkles on the first day's ride but the last two were perfect blue sky and warm. The scenery included a lot of great views, mountains, hills, rivers, streams, farms, tractors, cows, and American Flags.