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Tuesday, April 27, 2010

iPad - Part 3: Other Reading

Many of us have weighed in on the various aspects of e-books and e-readers. The jury will be out for quite awhile as the publishers, Apple, Sony, Google, Lenovo, Dell, and numerous others refine their strategy for what goes into a book, how it is displayed, and how it is priced. While the book war heats up, there are other dimensions of the e-readers to consider.

Reading magazines and newspapers on the Kindle can be quite convenient -- especially if you travel a lot -- but I can't say it is enjoyable or even natural. On the iPad reading magazines and newspapers is enjoyable and increasingly will seem the natural way to read them. The New York Times got good press at the launch of the iPad but I find it weak. The WSJ, however, is quite good. Easy to navigate and you get the full "paper" as it was published in the morning plus updates during the day. The ads are annoying and it doesn't take long to realize that it takes two swipes to go to the next page if the page you are leaving is an ad. I would rather not have the ads but having them is the publishers only hope of making money which they need if we want good journalists. The NPR and BBC news apps are pretty good also. The Zinio ipad app is home to a large number of magazines. A few are free. Pricing is reasonable -- Popular Mechanics, for example, is $7.99 for tweleve issues. Flipping Zinio pages is smooth and natural. Bottom line is that reading newspapers and magazines on the iPad is a pleasing and natural experience. My friend Jim Kollegger at Genesys Partners says "the iPad will do for publishing what the ATM did for cash".

Aside from books, magazines, and newspapers there is an infinite amount of material to read on the iPad. Even the uninitiated organizations of the world are distributing their documents in PDF format. Not my long term favorite format but it is far better than receiving a doc file that wants to open some "bloatware" to be read. In cases where I must receive a fax I have it sent to my efax number and it shows up in the gmail inbox as a PDF. When checking out of a hotel I ask the desk to fax a copy of my room bill "to my office, no cover sheet required". The PDF in my inbox can then be archived or used for reimbursement purposes. For more significant PDF's that are important for future reference or even a board packet for a meeting I use the GoodReader iPad app to store and read the files. I would prefer that things were synced in the cloud rather than iTunes but the process of moving PDF's from my ThinkPad to the iPad over the home LAN is easy now that I have done it quite a few times. The storage of the iPad allows nearly unlimited documents for most of us and having the documents "local" is nice for travel plus partaking of the great zoom and pinch features lets you have whatever the optimum view for you may be. This is especially important for charts and graphs.

In preparation for a board meeting this past week, I received the normal FedEx package containing the agenda and board papers. It was 38 pages, and including the binder clip, weighed a half-pound. I emailed the person organizing the meeting and asked for a PDF. After saving the attachment on the ThinkPad and uploading it over the LAN to the GoodReader app on the iPad I was good to go. Both reading the papers in a comfy chair the day before the meeting and following as needed at the conference room table were a welcome approach compared to fumbling with the paper. I reminded some people about the time, cost, and environmental impact of the old approach. In theory the same thing could be done with the iPhone but I have to admit that it is difficult with tabular information and graphs. It has certainly been feasible with the laptop but then you have to worry about battery life and the bulk of the device on the table. The iPad fills the bill really well. Another handy document reading tool on the iPad is the Memeo Connect Reader which syncs your Google Docs folders to the iPad app. This is really nice when you are on an airplane or somewhere that doesn't have a WiFi signal.

And then there is reading what bloggers have to say and the thousands of news feeds. I am using both NewsRack and Early Edition on the iPad. Both are evolving, listening to feedback and continuously improving their products. You can read patrickWeb, BusinessWeek, The Economist, Engadget or any of the millions of feeds that are out there. You can add new feeds on the iPad or use Google Reader on the desktop and have the feeds automatically sync to your iPad reader. The size and clarity of the iPad makes it quite enjoyable to scan through the feeds and read stories of interest. Another nice iPad app is the Wiki (squared). You enter a word of interest, read the article about it just like an encyclopedia but then follow the links and read to your heart's content. A real bargain for 99 cents.

How about creating documents? There are more tools to read than there are to write but there are some incredibly sophisticated writing tools available on the iPad. Apple itself features Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. I was skeptical about creating and manipulating a spreadsheet on the iPad but with Apple Numbers and no training I have learned how to do it. It is mostly intuitive. What surprised me is the breadth and depth of the functionality. I have a couple of other favorite iPad tools for writing. First is the CarbonFin Outliner. I have always liked outliners as a way to organize thoughts for a meeting or discussion agenda. You can add bullets and sub-bullets and then move them up or down or promote or demote them in the outline. The Outliner is available on a web site and you can sync your outlines. That enables you to make a change on any computer or on the iPad and everything is synced. This is the beauty of the Cloud and the way all applications should be (and will be). I have been using the Outliner for more than a year with the iPhone and I can highly recommend it. Another nice app is Things. Aside from being way overpriced ($19.99), Things provides a well organized way to capture your to do's in buckets -- Today, Next, Scheduled for a specific date, Someday, and Projects. As things get completed or moved around they show up in the Logbook. I have tried dozens of task list managers over the years and end up using scraps of paper and email as the dominant tools. Maybe Things, with the personal relationship people will have with their iPad, will make it a winner. I especially like the "Someday" category as a way to capture those things you think of that you want to do but you know you are not going to do anytime soon.

Meanwhile I am still reading The Great Bridge by David McCullough. Among my friends and recent acquaintances it seems I am the only one who has not read this great epic book. Both the political and engineering complexities encountered in the project are mind boggling. Even though I can't seem to find the time to finish this great book in a timely manner, I am getting used to reading on the iPad.

iPad stories on patrickWeb

Gadgets, Home Automation, Internet Technology, Media, Music, Personal Computing, WiFi, iPhone April 27, 2010 09:30 PM

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

iPad Thoughts

Part 1: Initial Thoughts

Part 2: Reading Books

Part 3: Other Reading

Part 4: What You Can Not Do

Gadgets, Home Automation, Internet Technology, Media, iPhone, Music, Personal Computing, WiFi April 21, 2010 10:05 AM

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

iPad - Part 2: Book Reading

If the financial analysts are right, Apple may soon have a market capitalization of more than $250 billion -- that is one quarter of a trillion dollars. Apple stock is up seven-fold in the past five years. People were skeptical of the stock price then and some are now but it is quite possible that the iPhone and the iPad have changed the game for the company in a very positive way. The "spillover" effect is that Mac sales are also booming and half of the buyers are first-time Mac buyers. Can Apple sustain such a high growth rate? The world is a big place and more than half of the iPhone sales last quarter were outside of America. The iPad sales outside the U.S. have not even started yet. The potential is very large -- many billions of dollars.

Tim Cook, the COO at Apple, said that he is addicted to his iPad and that he could not live without it. I have to confess I am in the same state of mind. Many friends have asked me why I am so enthusiastic about it. Is it the music, beautiful photo display, dazzling graphics, watching movies, the greatly enhanced iPhone applications that have come to life, a great new email program, effortless web browsing, the elegance of the device, the simplicity of using it? Yes. All of the above and much more. (See "iPad Thoughts" for an index to patrickWeb iPad stories). The main thing about the iPad is that it is personal. A bit hard to describe but the personal factor is what will make people tell their friends about it and proudly show it to them -- but not let it out of their site. Curling up in a comfy chair and being able to do almost anything in the digital world -- almost everything -- but not everything is what the iPad is about. Stories to come will focus on the personal and other aspects of the iPad. The purpose of this story is to offer some thoughts about book reading.

Will the iPad dethrone the Kindle? I don't claim to have the answer but I may have some clues. I would like to share the experience of reading e-books in six ways. The PC is one and categorically not a candidate to be considered, as I am sure we all would easily agree. Second is the Barnes & Noble Nook. I had one of the first and after a couple of books it was sold on eBay for what I paid for it. See the epilogue here. That leaves four -- the iPhone, the Kindle, the iBook reader on the iPad, and the Kindle reader on the iPad. I selected one of David McCullough's outstanding pieces of work and read chapters alternately on the four readers. Following are my thoughts.

Not that many years ago I said in speeches that I "would never read a book on my cell phone". I was wrong. Reading a whole book is unlikely for me but reading a chapter here and a chapter there is for sure. Standing in line at the supermarket or waiting for a subway train or maybe sitting on a park bench offers a chance to consume something you are really anxious to read. The iPhone Kindle app provides a landscape view and it is quite readable and simple to navigate. The beautiful thing is that when you later pick up your Kindle or the Kindle app on the iPad and open the reader it asks you if you want to continue where you left off on your iPhone. The Amazon Whispersync feature is innovative and extends your reading time and enjoyment. Apple will surely have something similar or better before the year is over and Google Android readers will no doubt have a sync feature as well.

One disadvantage of the iPad as a reader is that at one and a half pounds -- not a lot compared to a laptop or even a netbook -- it is five times heavier than a Kindle. The weight is concentrated in a thin flat device and I find it uncomfortable to hold after a while. The other thing is the back-lighting. The iPad screen is actually bright -- perfect for flipping through photos, watching a movie, or surfing the web, but for a couple of hours of reading it can be hard on your eyes. The positive aspect of the iBook reader is the graphical representation of the bookshelf and the flipping of the pages. It is truly incredible that as you slowly "flip" a page with your finger you can see the words on the back of the page. You have to see it to believe it. The processing power to perform the page turning is equivalent to what was called a supercomputer not long ago. The iBook reader also has some very nice content related features. The brightness can be adjusted -- helps with eye fatigue -- and there are five selectable fonts with variable sizes. I really like the display at the lower right of each page that shows how many pages remain to be read in the current chapter. An icon at the top brings you the table of contents of the book and a listing of all your bookmarks. Adding a new bookmark is very simple. You tap tap on a word and a menu pops up asking if you want to look up the word in a dictionary, search the book for occurrences of the word, or make the word be a bookmark. When I show someone the iPad iBook reader I always make sure to place a bookmark so that after they get finished paging around I can get back to where I was.

The Kindle reader on the iPad is an updated version of the iPhone reader. It takes good advantage of the larger screen and also allows you to change the color of the pages -- white, black, or sepia. The content controls are good but not as slick as the iBook reader. Ditto with the page turning. The Kindle reader has the graphical page flip but it doesn't show the words on the back of the page. Certainly not something you need but it makes a distinction for the iBook reader that people find impressive.

Last but certainly not least of the four is the Kindle itself. The Kindle uses e-ink -- it is reflective -- like paper. The more light the better. Like millions of others, I am Kindlzed -- since 2007. The 5 once device never burdens the wrist. The Kindle is monochrome but we don't need color to read a novel. The Kindle is simple and intuitive to use. Not flashy, compared to the iPad, but dependable with long battery life. For extended reading sessions the Kindle remains best, in my opinion --- for now. I expect things to change. The multi-purpose ability of the iPad is important. I find myself jumping over to check or send an email when I think of something while reading. Rather than just look up a word in the built-in dictionary I sometimes want to visit the Wikipedia or explore a web site. The iPad has personal appeal and you get attached to it. Publishers are busy working with authors to create multimedia content to be integral to new and backlisted books -- audio in the background, video interviews with the author or clips of content relevant to the topic of the book may make books more appealing and also may make them worth more -- which brings us to the pricing.

The McCullough book was $9.99 on Amazon and $14.99 through the iBook store at Apple. Same book. No multimedia content. Is Apple's version of the book worth 50% more? Publishers really don't like the idea of people getting used to paying $9.99 for a book. They want a new model. Apple is accommodating them -- so far. Time will tell how things are going to shake out. Ken Auletta's piece from the April 26, 2010 issue of The New Yorker explores the state of book publishing with excellent analysis of the strategies of the two digital behemoths -- Amazon and Apple, and also describes how Google will soon follow with it's readers and online store. There is a very large fight beginning for control of the e-books market.

There will be much more to say about the book market but in the meantime the iPad will be selling briskly. No doubt in my mind that there will be very large adoption -- tens of millions for sure -- and it will make a big dent in PC's. Also, more to say about what the iPad can not do and about the bigger question of iTunes. When will it be in the cloud? The iPhone will continue to be an important part of my life -- for calls and picture taking. This morning I had an appointment at a place that had no WiFi (fewer and fewer of such places) so I turned on the iPad and took a minute or two to download my email inbox and the Wall Street Journal before leaving the house. It was more than enough to occupy my subsequent idle time.

iPad stories on patrickWeb

Gadgets, Home Automation, Internet Technology, Media, Music, Personal Computing, WiFi, iPhone April 20, 2010 10:00 AM

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Neonatal Healthcare

We can all picture a hospital neonatal environment where a plethora of
medical monitors connected to babies are used to alert hospital staff
to potential health problems before patients develop clinical signs of infection or other issues. There are breakthroughs on the horizon for how this will be done. Today the instrumentation generates huge amounts of information -- up to 1,000 readings per second -- which is summarized into one reading every 30 to 60 minutes. The information is stored for up to 72 hours and is then discarded. If the stream of data could be captured, stored and analyzed in real time there would be a huge opportunity to improve the quality for special care babies.

The Hospital for Sick Children in Ontario, Canada has developed such a vision and is acting on it.
Dr. Carolyn McGregor, Canada research chair in health informatics at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology visited researchers at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center who are working on a new stream-computing platform to support healthcare analytics. A three-way collaboration was established, with each group bringing a unique perspective -- the hospital focus on patient care, the university's ideas for using the data stream, and IBM providing the advanced analysis software and information technology expertise needed to turn the vision into reality.

The result of the collaboration was Project Artemis which pairs IBM scientists with clinicians and`researchers to explore how emerging technologies can solve real-world business problems, in this case developing a highly flexible platform that aims to help physicians make better, faster decisions regarding patient care for a wide range of conditions. At the Children's hospital the focus is real-time detection of the onset of nosocomial infection (often called hospital-acquired infection).

Regulatory, ethical, privacy, and safety issues were addressed and then two infant beds were instrumented and connected to the system for data collection. The team then created an algorithm that describes the streaming data. By establishing the impact of moving a baby or changing its diaper those things can be filtered out to help spot the telltale signs of nosocomial infection.

Dr. Andrew James, staff neonatologist, at the Hospital for Sick Children is optimistic that as they learn more they will be able to account for variations in individual patients and eventually be able to integrate data inputs such as lab results or observational notes. In the future any condition that can be detected through subtle changes in the underlying data streams can be the target of the system's early-warning capabilities. It is likely sensors attached to or even implanted in the body will allow monitoring of important conditions from home or anywhere.

Other healthcare-related stories on patrickWeb

Gadgets, Home Automation, Internet Technology, Media, Music, Personal Computing, WiFi, iPhone April 11, 2010 06:59 PM

Sunday, April 4, 2010

iPad - Part 1: Initial Thoughts

I confess -- the doorway did not get out of my sight for the entire day yesterday. I had placed my order early in the morning on March 12 and when the first tranch of thousands of iPads left China for Louisville, KY and then to Orlando and on to Daytona and then onto a big brown truck, I did not want to be the unreliable part of the distribution scheme that Apple had planned with precision. By 4 PM the doubts were arising but at 5 PM my iPhone rang and it was UPS driver at the front door with an iPad in his hands.

If you know how to use an iPhone then you know how to use an iPad. I would not agree with some who say the iPad is *just* a "big iPhone". In fact I see the iPad as the beginning of the end of a lot of things as we know them today. It will not immediately replace laptops, netbooks, magazines, Kindles, and televisions -- not immediately. Over time, however, it is easy to see how the world will change. When we introduced the ThinkPad in 1992 it seemed like a huge deal just to get everyone at IBM to agree with the name. No one, certainly not me as VP of marketing at the time, had any idea that more than 30 million ThinkPads would be sold. The iPad will surely sell multiple times that number but more important the iPad will change the model of personal computing -- not immediately and not for everyone, but for many millions of people the PC will begin to look like a dinosaur. One of my reasons for such a bullish view is the number of skeptics coming forward to say that the iPad is not what it is cracked up to be. Skeptics have been a reliable predictor of the next big thing -- the Internet is too insecure to allow for banking and insurance. WiFi is too expensive and slow and will fizzle. Blogging was to peak out some years ago. Social networking is a fad. The iPad is just a big iPhone. Those with decades of experience with PC's may find it difficult to master the iPad but the younger generation which grew up on Nintendo will find it natural. They will use it not just for games, music, videos, and browsing but for creative work -- writing, drawing, composing, authoring, building, creating documents and web sites and multi-media content.

The extra "real estate" -- roughly seven times more area -- of the iPad has a bigger impact than one might think. It becomes very obvious when you first see a map on it. It is not just the size but the number of pixels. The iPhone is 480 x 320 while the iPad is 1024 x 768. The clarity and brilliance are stunning. You have to see it to believe it. The TV ads and pictures do not do it justice.
It is the applications that will make the iPad (and iPhone) highly successful. There will be hundreds of thousands of them and the larger screen opens up many new possibilities. Magazines will be huge hit -- the screen allows for not only more advertisements (not a feature) but for embedded video and high quality graphical content. You can do have all this on an iPhone but there is really no comparison. There is much to say about the iPad. It has been stimulating to explore it. Many questions in my mind and much more to learn but bottom line -- I love it! There are some things that are not perfect -- more about this later. For now, let me just comment about books and the impact on the Amazon Kindle. Amazon's profit for the fourth quarter of 2009 was $384 million on revenue of $9.52 billion. That is more than $10 million of products shipped each and every day. They are not going away, with or without the Kindle, but will the iPad dethrone the Kindle?

I don't claim to have the answer but I may have clues. There are more than 40 e-book readers out there. Apple may be the largest threat to the Kindle among them, but it is not a slam dunk. At least in the short term, I do not see the iBook reader as a Kindle killer. I read a lot of books and I don't buy any that are not available on the Kindle. I am Kindlzed. The 5 once device never burdens the wrist. The iPad is just one and a half pounds -- not a lot compared to a laptop or even a netbook -- but compared to the 5 once Kindle it is almost five times as heavy. If you spend a lot of time reading you may develop a need for a wrist brace. The other thing is the lighting. The Kindle uses e-ink -- it is reflective -- like paper. The more light the better. The iPad has back-lighting. I was using the iPad out on the terrace today and it was very difficult to see the screen clearly. The Kindle was clear as a bell. (I watched a movie on the iPad indoors later and the quality was fantastic). The journalists that got to see the iPad in person in January reported that the room was dim. Why would that be? I suspect because good lighting makes the backlit screen harder to read.

I am currently reading the biography of John Adams (highly recommended based on first 40%). The Amazon Kindle book was $9.99. I invested $14.99 to buy the iBook version from Apple. It is not 50% better. The iBook is flashy and impressive. I like the feature that shows how many pages remain in the chapter you are currently reading. But we don't need color to read a novel and the iPad becomes heavy after holding it for awhile. For heavy reading, the jury is out and the Kindle wins hands down.

On a positive note, I think the iPad will find very large adoption -- tens of millions for sure -- and will make a big dent in PC's. The netbooks have been very successful but they are basically PC's with Windows. Their only redeeming feature is their low price. That is a good thing but it is not innovative and who needs another copy of Windows? PC desktops and laptops are already in decline and the iPad is going to accelerate the trend. I see the iPad lightening the load in briefcases when travelling. It will also take up a lot less space on the kitchen counter and while resting there in the new iPad case it will double as a picture viewer. In the family room it will be the controller for movies and music. Most of this story was written using the Bluetooth wireless keyboard with the iPad. I need more experience with this before I say it will become my tool for writing. Finally, with most of our data in the cloud why would anyone need a PC or laptop? Many of us will still have a PC and a big flat panel for certain things -- like Quicken -- but more and more of my time will be with the iPad. The bigger question is iTunes. When will it be in the cloud? More on that to come.

The iPhone will continue to be an important part of my life -- for calls and picture taking. And if I am in a location where there is no WiFi for the iPad, the iPhone will be my backup to the Internet. I do not plan to get the 3G model and sign up for another AT&T data plan. WiFi is available at most everywhere I go and the trend of expansion of WiFi will only accelerate. I suspect I will keep my Kindle too. There will be many naysayers and critics of the iPad but I am certain it will be a smashing success and a long-term game changer for personal computing. It will become so pervasive in our lives that even though it is a very powerful computer, it will not be thought of as a computer. It is at the crossroads between technology and the arts.

Index to patrickWeb stories about iPad

Gadgets, Home Automation, Internet Technology, Media, Music, Personal Computing, WiFi, iPhone April 4, 2010 10:59 PM

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Google Voice (or is it Google Data?)

Telephone Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a general term for a family of technologies that enable voice communications over the Internet (and corporate intranets). Strong double-digit growth has placed VoIP into everyday life for many millions of people. In the early days I used Packet8. Then a VoIP system was created by entrepreneurs Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis, and a group of software engineers based in Tallinn, Estonia. I happened to be in Tallinn as part of a Baltic cruise a couple of years ago and wondered why the cobbled streets of a nearly thousand-year old small town on the Baltic Sea was lined with brand new high-end sedans. Later I realized that Tallinn was a mini Silicon Valley and home to the development of Skype. Skype became my "phone" for SMS messaging but especially for calling home from abroad for free. Skype was a game changer. A potentially even bigger game changer is Google Voice.

I have used a number of the VoIP services over the years but an impediment has always been that there was no way to use an existing contact list. With Google Voice you get instant synchronization with your Gmail contact list. When you start out you get a phone number -- you can pick most any area code you want. The new number then becomes your "universal" number. When someone calls it your cell phone, your office phone, you home phone, and vacation home phone all ring. You answer and hear who is calling and press 1 to accept the call. Or for some people that you designate, the call goes straight to voicemail. For others only your cell phone rings. You can add your contacts to different groups and have each group be treated differently. You can "ListenIn" on voicemails as they are being recorded and then decide to enter a conversation. When you receive a voicemail you get an email containing a machine transcription of the message. It is not perfect but good enough that you can tell who it is and what the call is about. You can block callers, record conversations, or add them into an ongoing conference call -- up to four callers can be added to the free conference call. The history tab in Google Voice shows all of your inbound and outbound calls. Needless to say you can search through the history of all your calls to refresh your memory about a conversation you had a year ago. SMS messages and all of your calls have shared inboxes, trash, history, and spam folders just like gmail.

The feature I like the most is that you can install X-Lite -- a free VoIP program that runs on your PC -- and add the associated SIP number as one of your Google Voice phone numbers. When a call comes in while you are at your PC, a dialogue box pops up on your display. You click "answer" and then the call can be handled with a headset (I use a Plantronics noise-canceling model) which provides hands-free high quality audio for me and the caller. Another nice feature is that you can make a Google Voice call from your iPhone (or any mobile phone). All U.S. calls are free. A call to Norway is two cents per minute. With free conference calls and a boatload of other free features, Google Voice is going to put the heat on the telephony monopolists. It will also put pressure on eBay's $2.5 billion acquisition of Skype for which they later took a $1.4 billion write-down.

Speaking of the telephony monopolists, there have been rumors -- denied by AT&T -- that the giant phone company told Apple not to approve Google mobile for the iPhone. Apple says it is looking into it. Apple's concern is that Google mobile is so tightly integrated and user-friendly that it takes away from the iPhone's branded look and feel as a phone. This is just the beginning of a clash between Apple and Google. As for AT&T, they like innovation as long as it is not at their expense. Google mobile would let people call Europe for free or close to free while AT&T charges $1.49 per minute unless you sign up for a monthly plan. Google Voice, Google mobile, Skype, and the many other innovative VoIP providers see a phone call as just another form of data and moving data around the Internet is very cost effective. AT&T sees a phone call as a voice service and they are trying desperately to protect their revenue by stifling progress.

The Wall Street Journal just published an excellent editorial on this subject called Why AT&T Killed Google Voice. The sub-title to the story is "Telecom operators are yesterday's business. It's time for a national data policy that encourages innovation". Author of the story Andy Kessler says the Federal Communications Commission is investigating wireless open access and handset exclusivity and that the result " may finally end the 135-year-old Alexander Graham Bell era. It's about time.".

Kessler says "AT&T is dying" and that they are "dragging down the rest of us by overcharging us for voice calls and stifling innovation in a mobile data market critical to the U.S. economy". The problem is a lack of competition. Unlike all other Internet and data-related companies where there are thousands of competitors, when it comes to ownership of the spectrum -- the wireless pipe to customers -- that is hardly the case. Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile joined AT&T in bidding some $70+ billion since the mid-1990s for spectrum. The cost gets passed on to us in the form of higher fees. They have not had to compete on price. Google Voice is the new competition offering voice service for free by leveraging their huge data handling systems resources and advertising revenue.

Kessler says we can live with overpaying for mobile but "it's inexcusable that new, feature-rich and productive applications like Google Voice are being held back, just to prop up AT&T while we wait for it to transition away from its legacy of voice communications". Now the FCC and its new Chairman Julius Genachowski are getting involved. Hopefully the outcome will be deregulation not regulation. Many will call for a new national communications policy. But even that's obsolete and Kessler comes at it differently. "There is no such thing as voice or text or music or TV shows or video. They are all just data. We need a national data policy". There are four parts to Kessler's idea.

End phone exclusivity. Any device should work on any network -- yes, including the iPhone. Data should flow freely.
Transition away from giant companies owning airwaves and move to a standards based unregulated model like WiFi.
End municipal exclusivity deals for cable companies -- yes, including Comcast. Recognize that "TV channels" are a thing of the past. Enable people to pay for what they want to watch and not have to pay for dozens of "channels" they don't watch.
Encourage much faster data connections to our homes and phones. Kessler says it should more than double every two years. To homes, five megabits today should be 10 megabits in 2011, 25 megabits in 2013 and 100 megabits in 2017. These data connection speeds are technically doable today but are being held back by obsolete voice and video policies made to satisfy the telecom giants and their legions of lobbyists.

I agree with Andy Kessler that technology doesn't wait around -- "so it's all going to happen anyway" -- but it will take years too long given the current course and speed. The best thing the new FCC could do would be to adopt the four pints above and then put itself out of business. New services like Twitter don't need to file with the FCC. Neither should new "voice" services. Voice is just another kind of data. Let's treat it that way.

Why AT&T Killed Google Voice

Internet Technology, Mobile, Public Policy, WiFi, iPhone August 22, 2009 06:46 PM

Monday, September 15, 2008

DEMOfall 2008 in San Diego

Gadget DEMO continues to be my favorite conference -- the semi-annual event took place this past week in San Diego, California. It was an uneventful trip from Palo Alto, where I had visited Mediazone, and on to San Francisco for a flight with Southwest (possibly the best airline in operation in the states) to San Diego to join the DEMO opening reception.

There were some key trends that were reinforced at DEMO again this year. Many companies in some way talked about mobile. Most companies either provide a web service or use web services as their platform. The term "cloud" is seeping into the vocabulary. Most companies were media related in some way or provided or used social networking. None of these things are new, by any means, but DEMO confirmed their strategic importance and demonstrated significant implementations. I don't think any of them have cracked the code so to speak but there were many that had exciting visions and demos. I visited the ones in which I had the most interest. Chris Shipley kicked off the conference with insightful comments about the industry. (See the Demo blog for more on her thoughts). She talked about how the web has evolved from banking and buying things to a social web with a lot of user generated content to a web that will create real market value. Only a small percent of Internet users actually take advantage of the potential of the social web. This next phase will bring down the barriers: syndication, distribution, constant connectivity, on demand and lead to the distributed web. There will be new devices, new protocols beyond the desktop and mobile. Collaboration will become purposeful, not just "social". All this will be accompanied with advances in usability, security, and authentication.

The Demo conference allows entrepreneurs to show off new gadgets, software, hardware and business ideas and enables the press, analysts, investors, and technology enthusiasts to assess what they see. The product introductions that take place reveal key technology trends over the coming 12 to 18 months. This year there were 72 companies showing off -- each getting six minutes on stage to tell their story. Chris screens the companies and introduces them to the audience. After the main tent sessions the attendees get to visit with the companies in the "Demo Hall". There isn't time to visit all of them so I try to be selective -- I visited 25 of the companies this time. Some of the ones I found interesting follow. They are in no particular order.

If you asked me which of the 72 launches I found most interesting I would have to say Telnic, Ltd., the "dot tel" company. Having yourname.tel will allow you to store, update and publish all your contact information and web links directly on the Internet. This is not a web service -- the data is actually stored in the infrastructure of the Internet. The heart of the Internet is the DNS -- the Domain Name System. Among other tasks, the DNS translates humanly-meaningful domain names (like amazon.com) to the numerical address (like 72.21.210.11). The names and numbers are stored in special purpose computers that are scattered around the world. With dot tel, companies or individuals will be able to have their contact information stored there too. It will be the one official place to have directories for people and companies. You will be able to choose how much information you want public (maybe just your name and your web site or blog address) and which data you want to be private.The private information will be encrypted and can be selectively shared with people or organizations that you authorize. People will be able to reach you on their mobile with the touch of a button through the dot tel directory. No web site or hosting is involved. I think this will be a big deal.

Plastic Logic, Ltd. showed an e-book that can display full-sized documents. It is like an 8.5 x 11 Kindle and will replace a briefcase full of documents. It was sort of a computer but not really a computer. I am a bit skeptical on this one.

A number of companies showed how the web is gradually replacing television as we know it. Use your favorite search engine and take a look at Awind Inc., RealNetworks, Inc., beeTV, RemoTV, Inc., Invision TV, LLC, and ffwd.com, Inc. Or just revisit the DEMO Conference Agenda for links to what Chris and team thought about them.

A handful of companies showed products that make creating, sharing, and consuming digital bits more enjoyable. See UGA Digital, Inc., Trinity Convergence, Inc., Blue Lava Technologies, Inc., Kadoo Inc., MixMatchMusic, Ltd., Photrade, LLC, MeDeploy, and
The Echo Nest Corp. Photrade is yet another company in the digital photography space. They will allow you to share and protect photos you take, purchase photos that others have taken, and make money from your photos. With the plummeting of high quality digital cameras and the availability of software that can make an amateur photo look professional there is a growing market here.

Mobile will become a bigger and bigger part of our lives. Maverick Mobile Solutions, Pvt. Ltd. has a solution that protects your phone in case you lose it. It sets off various bells and whistles. Not a bad idea as we put more and more personal data on our phones. G.ho.st lets you put your PC on your mobile phone. You have to see it to believe it. WebDiet claims to make losing weight and getting healthy easy by using your mobile phone to enter everything you eat and get an analysis that optimizes your diet. If you want to chat and share more with your friends take a look at Xumii.

There were more than a half-dozen companies showing off new ideas for protecting and managing digital assets. As we move more and more of our pictures, conversations, movies, notes, documents, etc. to the digital world, the security of them becomes more and more important. One of the companies I found quite interesting in this area is Usable Security Systems, Inc. UsableLogin is their product and what they are trying to do is make passwords as we know them obsolete and give us secure access to any web site. All you have to do is recognize a picture you have chosen and remember one simple codeword to log in securely. Some of us have more than 100 login/password pairs. I think Usable may have a problem getting some banking sites to cooperate but even if just 80% of the sites you visit could be handled with a single password that would be a very good thing. The Founder & CEO, Rachna Dhamija, did her PhD in security at Berkely and she gave a very good demo. See it here.

As a security aside, if you use Gmail, I highly recommend selecting the https option in the settings. This doesn't guarantee security but it does insure that the data going back and forth between your computer and Google is encrypted.

There were many more great demos. Browse your way through the DEMO Conference Agenda and see what catches your eye.

The flight back to New York on American Airlines offered an unexpected surprise. GoGoInflight offered broadband Internet service. The price was $12.95 and the performance was excellent. I ran a speedtest and found the results to be better than what I get from Comcast Cable at home. The WiFi connection works with both laptops and any mobile phone that has WiFi (like the iPhone).

Other patrickWeb stories about conferences

Conferences, Internet Technology, Mobile, Travels, WiFi, iPhone September 15, 2008 06:20 PM

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Supernova 2008 - Part 6 (final)

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This will be my final comments about things I learned at Supernova 2008 in June. The prior comments are all in the conference section of patrickWeb. A "People" panel was moderated by BJ Fogg, whom I first met when he presented YackPack at Demo a few years ago. The research shows that people are endlessly creative, that the majority of most people's time is spent offline, and that there are very large differences between the skills people have in using the Internet. There is a correlation between skill level and willingness to share -- the more people know about the Internet the more likely they are to share what they know. Some argued that the skill level is a function of priority given. I am certain of that point. I know many people who could be web savvy if they wanted to be but they would rather play golf or work in the garden. Nothing wrong with that. There is a social technographics ladder that includes people who are inactive, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, and creators. Some postulated that user background is related to digital media savvy but that it is not an age thing. Another study however showed a very strong correlation between age and these various categories. The study would suggest that at my age I should be technologically inactive! I guess I just don't fit the mold.

Social information discovery is a relatively new term but the phenomenon has been around from the beginnings of the Internet -- you can ask a question and get a lot of people to answer. Sharing today is still done mostly in email which puts high social activation energy on the sender but social networks are changing this. We will share a lot more in the future. Social sites are causing an evolution to the entire web becoming social. User generated content used to be something you go to a site to do like epinions.com or or ticketmaster to find out what people are saying. The problem is that you don't know the people who are making the comments. In the emerging social web you can see what your friends and colleagues think or what they are doing or what the friends of your friends think about restaurant, book, or movie. It is much more relevant.

There are a number of inhibitors to social networks reaching their potential. Our identity is too fragmented -- logins and passwords galore. We have profiles here, there, and everywhere. Applications are incompatible among the various social networks. I am optimistic that this will all come together in a way that meets our security and privacy expectations. The short answer to these concerns is the evolution of standards. OpenID is trying to create a single identification that you can use at any web site. Oauth is an emerging approach for authentication so that you can allow access for a web site to get information about you from another web site but only certain information you have authorized, not all the information. OpenSocial is developing an approach to allow a Facebook application to work at MySpace or any other social network. Google Friend Connect is attempting to bring all three of these together into a social web.

Although I remain optimistic about the concerns, a panel on "Privacy and Security in the Network Age" with Moderator Andrea Matwyshyn (Wharton), Bruce Schneier (BT Counterpane), Fran Maier (TrustE), Gerard Lewis (Comcast), and Lauren Gelman (Stanford CIS) dug into some of the stark realities. They attempted to answer the question of whether we are entering an era where individuals gain new control over their public personas, and powerful means to leverage reputations or will we be forced to abandon any hope of protecting our privacy and trusting what we encounter online?

Although he claimed to be optimistic, Bruce Schneier, a world renowned expert on privacy, was actually quite gloomy. Everything we do creates a transaction record and the resulting data records have value to others. Storage costs online are now so cheap, nothing gets thrown away. Google, your wireless provider, your healthcare insurance company, etc. all save every piece of data about you and what you do or look for. The trend will accelerate. There are many invasive technologies out there -- surveillance video cameras will be so small in the future that we won't know they are there. Our every movement will be captured. Soon we will be living in a world where no conversation will be private. While some frame the debate as security vs privacy, Bruce framed it as liberty versus control and said that "data is the pollution of the information age". In spite of these pronouncements, the experts are short term pessimistic but long term optimistic. Me too. The government may be watching us but we can watch them too.

The final session I attended was about Broadband Policy. The United States now ranks 15th in the world in terms of availability of broadband to consumers. We had a discussion about what we would do about it if we became policy advisor to the new president. We came up with the following.

A lot of us suggested getting rid of the FCC. It's an ineffective political entity. Other suggestions were to map the gaps where infrastructure and users are and are not, take spectrum policy and flush it, take on universal service and revamp it to focus on broadband instead of pay phones, Un-ban municipal wireless broadband, and benchmark the US against other countries. There are some good things happening such as Verizon's deployment of optical fiber but overall there is not enough competition and there are too many lobbyists seeking protection for large telecommunications companies. When I spoke at the World Wide Web conference in Paris in 1994 the U.S. was the Internet leader. France was skeptical to be kind. Today France is enabling WiFi throughout the country and partnering with utility companies to offer broadband at 100 times the speed of what the U.S. telcos define as broadband. I would like to be more optimistic on this front but I do not know of another industry (telecommunications providers) that have so many lobbyists urging protection and so many customers who are locked into services that they don't like.

Other patrickWeb stories about conferences

Conferences, Internet Technology, People, Public Policy, WiFi August 16, 2008 11:15 AM

Monday, June 9, 2008

Roku

Television About fifteen years ago one of my children worked at Blockbuster. One day I told him that Bockbuster would be history because people would be downloading their movies from the Internet. Yeah, right Dad. Ok, I was a bit ahead of my time. In the intervening years there have been numerous companies started to offer various ways to get movies via the Net but none have gotten much traction. The most successful innovation has been Netflix which offers 100,000 movies and an incredibly efficient distribution system for DVDs. The barriers to a downloading or streaming approach have included technology cost, inadequate bandwidth, complexity, device incompatibilities, and intellectual property concerns.

Then along came the Netflix Roku. The snazzy new device may be like manna from heaven for movie lovers. I have had previous experience with Roku. A few years ago I installed a Roku box for pictures. It enables the display of digital pictures on any TV in the house via the home local area network and can be a nice thing at holiday time. The Roku for Netflix movies is a fraction of the size and allows watching up to 10,000 movies or TV episodes on any TV in the house, if you have a video distribution system, or if you don't then you can use the Roku with the TV of your choice -- home theatre, HD, non-HD, any TV. I took the Roku out of the box, plugged in the power supply, and connected the cables to the video jacks. You then need to connect the Roku to the Internet. You can either plug it into your home LAN or connect via WiFi. The hookup took about three minutes. The TV then displays a code which you enter at netflix.com and you are then activated. A new tab is added to your account at Netflix labeled "Watch Instantly". You make a selection and it shows up on the Roku screen on your TV. You push the play button on the Roku remote and the movie starts streaming. I was watching a movie within five minutes of taking the Roku out of the box.

Streaming is different than downloading. There is no hard drive on the Roku. The movie comes from a server at Netflix directly to the Roku. Some buffering obviously takes place as I detected no jitters or pixelation. I was quite impressed with the quality. Looks like a DVD. Does this mean the end of DVDs? Yes, but it will take quite a while. Music is shifting to digital but there are still a lot of CDs sold. The transition for DVDs will take longer for a number of reasons. Streaming requires a stable and reliable one million bit per second connection. In theory, any DSL or Cable Internet provider should be able to provide that but in practice it is spotty. The trend is certainly in the right direction. HD streaming is not yet available but surely it will soon. That will require more bandwidth. So far only 10% of the Netflix collection is available for streaming. Not sure how fast they will be able to convert the rest.

The pricing is good. If you already subscribe to Netflix under any plan of $9.99 per month or more then you get unlimited streaming at no extra cost. The Roku unit is $99 plus shipping. Movies and TV episodes are selected via the web site just like picking a DVD. All things considered, I think Netflix and Roku hit a home run. Not perfect but you can see the beginning of the end of DVDs.

Gadgets, Home Automation, Media, Personal Computing, WiFi June 9, 2008 06:00 PM

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.

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. Maxroam also 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. Most outbound calls will be made from the hotel room with my ThinkPad using Skype at two cents per minute.

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 5, 2007

WiFi Update No. 16

Wi-Fi Antenna WiFi is alive and prospering with JiWire now reporting that there are 215,777 free and paid WiFi hotspots in 135 countries. , JiWire's WiFi Hotspot Finder makes it easy to locate wireless Internet access around the globe but there are also a number of other tools available. I like the JiWire Hotspot Finder plugin for Skype. The plugin adds a "bot" to your to your list of contacts. Not sure what happens is you say "whazzup" but if you say "wifi toledo ohio", it replies to you saying "I found 45 locations with wifi within 3 miles of Toledo".

At some point not too far in the future there will be millions of hotspots and millions of mobile phones with WiFi built in. Not sure about the iPhone but millions of mobile phones will also have Skype and other VoIP applications on them. It doesn't mean free long distance but it does mean long distance at a fraction of the current cost. If you travel in Europe you know it can cost dollars per minute to call back to the U.S. I recently got a new MaxRoam SIM smart card for the Treo 700P (which I use when out of the country). MaxRoam allows you to "travel global, pay local, and your callers pay local too". You can pick a U.S. number for the card. If you are in Paris and someone calls you the U.S. it costs .21 Euros (about 30 cents) per minute. If you call the U.S. it costs .38 euros (about 56 cents) per minute. It won't be long before the words "long distance" only have meaning when it comes to air, sea, or land travel.

Meanwhile, the FON Community continues to grow. Fon wants WiFi to be available everywhere and they are doing a lot to make it happen. The idea is that FON members (foneros) share their wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi access wherever they find another Fonero’s Access Point. To become a "fonero" you go to the Fon website and order La Fonera which is a wireless access point about the size of a mobile phone. You connect La Fonera to a spare port on the back of your cable or DSL modem. La Fonera emits two wireless network signals -- a private and a public one. The private signal is encrypted and offers you complete privacy. The public signal will be accessible to Foneros only. This free signal is the one that turns your broadband connection into a FON Access Point. I think FON is a really good idea (See prior story, "How To Become A Fonero").

Other patrickWeb stories about WiFi

Internet Technology, WiFi December 5, 2007 05:22 PM

Sunday, November 25, 2007

One Laptop Per Child

There will be millions of iPhones, Casio cameras, and other electronic gifts given this holiday season. If you want to give the gift of a lifetime and get satisfaction that you are helping improve the world, then consider buying a Laptop XO. For the price of an Amazon Kindle, you can be part of a really big idea. Originated at MIT, One Laptop Per Child, aims to put computers in the hands of millions of children in developing countries. "One learning child. One connected child. One laptop at a time".

The OLPC laptop has been in development for years but is now becoming a reality. Manufacturing has started and orders are being taken online between now and yearend. For $399, get a laptop for yourself -- or a lucky child you may know -- and one will also be given to a less fortunate child in Cambodia, Greece, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, Uruguay, or other participating countries. (The countries themselves are buying XO's -- Nigeria ordered one million of them). The two-for-one deal includes a full year of T-Mobile Hotspot WiFi service.

The XO has quite an impressive set of features and functions. The design optimizes power usage. The Internet connectivity is by WiFi but it also uses wireless mesh networking. This means that each XO acts as a wireless access point in a peer-to-peer fashion sharing connectivity with a nearby XO. The software is all open source and free including Linux, a web browser, word processor, email, audio and video player, and a very clever graphical user interface.

I hope large numbers of people, companies, and foundations participate in the limited time offer and that many millions of children will benefit. As an individual, the T-Mobile WiFi subscription for a year plus the $200 tax deduction for the donated laptop, it is hard to go wrong. Visit LaptopGiving.org during the holidays and you can make a difference.

Internet Technology, Media, Mobile, People, Personal Computing, Public Policy, WiFi November 25, 2007 10:56 AM

Thursday, November 1, 2007

WiFi Update No. 15

WiFi Antenna JiWire is now listing 202,894 WiFi hotspots in 135 countries. Where is Wifi headed? I don’t claim to have a crystal ball but I believe the evolution continues to look very much like what we have seen before with the Internet and the World Wide Web. There was a long list of reasons fifteen years ago for why the Web would never turn into something serious -- certainly not into something that could be used for secure business transactions. The same list of shortcomings is at times attributed to WiFi even today – security, scalability, reliability, business model, etc. Just like the Web, WiFi is grass roots, standards based, and very decentralized. Just like with the Web, WiFi has become mainstream. The benefits are compelling. There are active debates about whether WiMax will replace WiFi -- it may or may not. (See WiFi Update No. 8 for more about WiMax). Odds look good to me at this point but not a sure thing. What is a sure thing is the continued evolution and adoption of wireless broadband.

WiFi and other wireless technologies are making the Internet “always on” and extending it to more people and more devices at more locations. This will result in more people doing more transactions which in turn will fuel the continued growth of information technology spending which in turn will provide more productivity to the economy. The constant question over the past fifteen years has been about where the money is in WiFi. The ultimate beneficiaries are consumers but the information technology industry will continue to benefit also as hardware, software and services will be needed to support the growth.

WiFi will have a major impact on the telecommunications industry. The iPhone is the tip of the iceberg. The telecommunications companies have made a quiet embrace on WiFi but don't really want it to catch on too fast so that people can use Skype for a call to Europe for a few cents per minute instead of a cellular call for $1.49 per minute. In the long run the increase in Internet usage made possible by WiFi will mean more “bits on the wire”; i.e. more traffic and utilization of the backbones of the Internet which are provided by the telecom industry. In spite of the slow embrace, the telcos will find that Internet telephony will emerge as a major application on the Net even though it will help reduce "long distance" revenue dramatically. More devices with WiFi will mean more choices for consumers -- something that the telcos don't like. They would much rather see us locked into a two year contract with a phone of their choice. They won't be able to do that much longer as consumers wake up to what is possible.

The telecommunications industry needs to start thinking differently about the Internet. Especially in the U.S. they still think that the Internet is one of the many services that you can get via a telecom service. Unfortunately, they have it backwards. Internet telephony (a voice conversation) is one of the many things you can do with the Internet! “Voice” is just another Internet application. The handwriting is on the wall.

WiFi hardware for home and business has become very affordable and reliable. Doesn't seem that long ago that a WiFi access point was more than $1,000, required a lot of electricity, and had limited speed, poor security, and utilized a very early version of the 802.11 standard. Last month I installed a Linksys "Wireless-N Gigabit Security Router with VPN". The standard has evolved from "b" to "g" to "n" with increasingly better security, speed, and range. What I like most about this new device is the VPN feature. A Virtual Private Network is not a new idea but the implementation of the VPN in the new Linksys device is impressive. A second unit is installed at the "getaway" house in Pennsylvania. A simple procedure lets you create a "tunnel" between the two houses directly from one router to the other. You can be in either place and have access to everything on a computer int he other place just as though it was plugged into the local area network. It basically allows a LAN (local) at each end to be connected by the WAN (wide area network aka the Internet). All the trafic through the "tunnel" is encrypted. There are many uses but most important to me are security and HVAC control. From either house it is very simple to check the temperature at the other, turn the heat up or down, set or reset security, or "see" what is going on through a web camera. You can also install a VPN client on your laptop and have "local" access to both homes while you are on the road.

Meanwhile, computer engineers at the University of Massachusetts have built a wireless communications network called TurtleNet which includes waterproof computers attached to the shells of snapping turtles. Without disturbing any of the daily activities, the turtles can swap information whenever they within 500 feet of each other. The biologists believe that the data gained will help the species in the long run.

Subway Surfing (first patrickWeb WiFi story)

Archive of other patrickWeb WiFi stories

Pringles Can (The Famous)

WiFi Antennas

Wireless Communities

Home Automation, Internet Technology, WiFi November 1, 2007 09:46 PM

Friday, October 19, 2007

iPhone - Update No. 9

Mobile phone The most encouraging thing about the iPhone is that Apple seems to be listening to the feedback of customers. The price cut rebate was handled well -- and expeditiously -- but compared to the other issues it was an easy fix. Other than various functionality, which I am sure will be continuously improved, the two big issues remain the applications and the network.

There are four kinds of applications. First are the "standalone" applications such as the calculator, calendar, photo gallery, clock, and offline email. No network required. A second type could be classified as "networked" applications. Examples would be stocks, weather, over the air email, and YouTube. Each of these is a combination of a standalone application plus a network connection -- either via AT&T's network or from a WiFi hotspot. A third type of application is a networked application which works only with WiFi. Example being iTunes. The fourth type is the "webapp" or as described by Steve Jobs "Web 2.0" applications. The webapps work through the Safari browser. There will surely be many useful webapps but there are two important limitations.

First is that webapps are most useful when they are connected to the network, preferably a fast one. The presumption with webapps is that the data -- travel itineraries, frequent flier numbers, healthcare information, personal financial information, etc. -- is on the server. That model only works if you can get to the server. Some people 8 gigabytes is not enough to have local data in addition to music and pictures. I think many people would happily make the tradeoff to have a bit fewer songs and have some accessible local data. the 8 gig limitation is only temporary as we will have a terabyte of local storage before long.

The other limitation of webapps is the interface. In theory you can do anything in a web browser but the human interface is not always ideal. That is why millions of people use Quicken instead of quicken.com. This will change over time as web standards evolve but in the short term I believe there is a rational need for local applications. A perfect example is Navizon which is a software-only wireless positioning system that triangulates signals broadcasted from WiFi access points and cellular towers which pinpoints your location and then launches a Google Map to show you where you are. (This is one of the third party applications that Apple erased with their recent firmware update). There are many applications that could be local applications with local storage on the iPhone. Both the app and data could be synchronized (backed up) through iTunes.

There is no doubt in my mind that enabling third party local applications on the iPhone as a supplement to webapps would be a great thing for Apple. I also have no doubt that Steve Jobs thinks so too. Apple announced this week that they will have a development kit available in the first quarter. This will spawn a flood of new iPhone applications. If anything, I believe Apple underestimated how many developers, in addition to the high-end personal digital assistant users, would take quickly to the iPhone and start building third party applications. Mr. Jobs says they need the time to make sure there are tools to enable the local applications to be built in a way that protects against viruses and other malware. The hubris of wiping out the third party applications was not a good move, but as I started this story I do believe Apple is listening and I am optimistic that in a matter of months we will see a lot of very useful and exciting applications emerge for the iPhone.

Other patrickWeb stories about the iPhone

Internet Technology, Mobile, Personal Computing, WiFi, iPhone October 19, 2007 05:16 PM

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Speed Demon

Speed skater I felt very fortunate to turn 62 earlier this month but I would feel even more fortunate if I was Sigbritt Lothberg. Not because she has reached the distinctive age of 75 but because she has the world's fastest Internet connection. Ms. Lothberg -- of Karlstad, Sweden -- has a 40 gigabit-per-second connection. That means that, if she was so inclined, she could download a full-length movie to her home computer in less than 2 seconds! That would be 75,000 times faster than what most of us get from a cable modem. Lothberg's son, Peter, worked with a town official to install the connection which uses a new modulation technique that allows the sending of data between two routers -- the specialized computers that move packets of ones and zeroes around the Internet -- placed up to 1,240 miles apart. Although this is not a likely scenario, it does show the possibilities for Internet speed. Peter says "she didn't even have a computer before." Apparently she isn't exactly making the most of her high-speed connection. She only uses it to read Web-based newspapers, but that is not the point.

The point is that -- especially in America -- there is not enough competition. While Ms. Lothberg is enjoying lightning speed with her Internet connection, AT&T and Verizon are each spending more than $20 million per year on lobbying. Unfortunately, much of the lobbying is aimed at preventing competition, especially in the wireless area. There is a perception that wireless is inherently much slower than "wired" connections. Actually, the ones and zeroes do not care whether they are moving through copper, or glass fiber, over the power grid, or through the air. The issue is not technology, it is about having widely available and open wireless networks with lots of competition. Some people worry that Google is the next juggernaut, like IBM in the 1960's and Microsoft in the 1990's, but if it was not for Google, the spectrum that will be made available for new wireless networks when TV goes digital in 2009, that spectrum would all be gobbled up by AT&T and Verizon to be parceled out according to their (limited) vision of what is possible and in a very proprietary way. If Google and others get a hold of that spectrum we will have an open approach and likely see some breakthroughs in speed and coverage for the wireless Internet.Stay tuned for a WiFi update in the next few days.