Lehigh University

Thanks
to fellow Lehigh University alumus, Tom
Healy, for telling me about a story in The
Brown and White about my recent visit to the university. The story by Jennifer
Iwinski, "Author,
alumnus discusses Internet future", was very kind. Alumni involvement
and support is so important. Without alumni support, tuition would be even higher!
Giving of your time is important too. It is part of the learn-earn-return cycle.
All alumni have a lot to contribute and I was happy to do my small part. The
rewards from spending time with students are many, as I wrote in "Youth
at the Gate".

Complete
trip report

Youth
at the Gate

The Sharer

There
was an excellent piece in the New
York Times Magazine today called "The
Sharer" written by David Diamond. He had a Q&A interchange with
Linus Torvalds, the father
of Linux. The final question he asked was
about Linux being the nemesis of Microsoft. The answer from Linus will be a
classic. "I just can’t see myself in the position of the nemesis, since
I just don’t care enough. To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy
something, don’t you? Really, I’m not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just
be a completely unintentional side effect". See the full
Q&A at The New York Times. 
(read
more)

Youth at the Gate

At
10 am on July 24 Marcia Stepanek, CIO Insight
Executive Editor convened a roundtable on "youth and the future of the
workplace" at her office in Manhattan. I was in Singapore and it was 10
pm after a long day but I was delighted to be able to participate. The roundtable
participants ranged in age from 21 to 65 but we all had strong opinions about
"youth". The CIO Insight
story (and transcript) is called Youth
at the Gate. In my book, Net Attitude,
I wrote quite a bit about the importance of talking to teenagers. They hold
many of the clues as to what the Future of the Internet will be like. The kids
totally get the Internet and studies have now proven the obvious — most
teenagers in America (and in many parts of the world) use the Internet as their
preferred way to communicate. Email is prevalent, of course, but instant
messaging and SMS are their modus
operandi. There is so much we can learn from kids.  (read
more)

Is Internet Telephony Reliable?

In
spite of my enthusiasm for VoIP,
I realize that it will take some time for it to become pervasive. Not decades
– but not in the next twelve months either. I was experiencing some sluggish
network performance on the home
LAN today and decided to re-boot the router. This is something I don’t do
very often (wish I could say the same for Windows XP). Later I realized that
my Packet8 SIP
phone service was not working and then it dawned on me that I also had to re-boot
the Packet8 "terminal
adapter" — a small box that connects to the home LAN. It wasn’t a
big deal to unplug and replug the device and get things working again but it
got me thinking about some of the things we take for granted with the POTS
(plain old telephone system).  (read
more)

Long Distance – 2

There
is a lot of feedback from readers about the last few stories where I discussed
"long distance". Some are saying, "yeah verily", others
are saying "not so fast". This is understandable given that we are
beginning to go through a very disruptive period with regard to telephony. We
are 5% of the way into what is in store for us.  (read
more).

Long Distance

What
is "long distance"? I would define a long distance as something that
takes a long time to cover; e.g. flying
to Singapore requires going a long distance. It takes more than 24 hours
to get there. When it comes to telecommunications, however, the term "long
distance" has little meaning. Packets of ones and zeroes travel over the
Internet at nearly the speed of light. It takes a quarter of a second or less
to send a packet of one thousand zeroes and ones from New York to California.
To send the packet to Singapore might take a half of a second. In both cases,
depending on conditions, the time might be different by plus or minus a quarter
of a second. In other words there isn’t much difference. So why is the cost
of a telephone call different by one or more orders of magnitude? The answer
lies in part in the fact that people have not had an alternative to expensive
long distance services. That is no longer the case.  (read
more)

Rolling Thunder

This
story isn’t about WiFi, blogging, or The Future Of The Internet. Although, these
are the things I like to write about because of the huge impact they are having
on both our business and personal lives, it is also fun to write about music,
motorcycles, hiking, and other things. This particular story is a journal about
a 700 mile four day motorcycle trip. The journey began at 6:45 am on Sunday
with a ride (mostly in the rain) to Pennsylvania to meet up with 26 other riders
to take a tour of the Harley-Davidson
factory in York, Pennsylvania (pictures
here). The second leg of the trip was to Lehigh University in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, and the final leg was a ride into Manhattan and then on to Connecticut.
(read
more)

Interim Report

This
has been an exciting week so far. It is too late to record it all tonight so
I’ll be writing more about all this later in the week. The journey began at
6:45 am on Sunday with a motorcycle ride in the rain to Nuangola, Pennsylvania
to meet up with 26 other riders and head to Baltimore for the afternoon. We
then rode to York, Pennsylvania for the night and then to a tour of the Harley-Davidson
factory in the morning. The pictures are here.
Tuesday was an adventure I am not in a hurry to repeat — riding in a torrential
rainstorm to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Tomorrow morning
I will ride into Manhattan for a luncheon meeting, a board meeting and then
a ride to Darien, Connecticut to speak at BizMac. I have learned a great deal
on this trip and will be sharing the full story later.

View From The 49th Floor

The 6:25 AM train ride to Grand Central Station was uneventful, although I have to admit that it was hard not to think about the possibilities on this September 11. A short walk lead to the security desk at JP Morgan Chase on Park Avenue. Then a bag check (no temperature was taken as in Singapore) and up to the 49th floor for the Executive Breakfast of the New York New Media Association (NYNMA). There were seventy-five or so in attendance. After my fifteen minute presentation on “The Future Of The Internet”, I introduced Chris Forbes who is CEO of Knovel Corporation (where I am a director). Chris gave an excellent presentation on how Knovel, as an information service provider, is leveraging the productivity of engineers and applied scientists. We then had a Q&A session — and the audience was not shy.

There were a lot of good questions asked of Chris about Knovel and the future of the publishing industry. Would traditional publishers continue to develop the big thick engineering reference manuals as they have always done? Chris answered that he thought it may take as long as ten years for a complete transition to modern information services but that the trend has clearly begun. Lexis/Nexis for lawyers is a proof point in another industry. There were some questions about the continued need to print web content. Both Chris and I agreed that printing is a very important aspect of the Knovel service and they offer virtually all of their content in PDF format. I plan to write a story soon about where I see printing going and the strategic role of CSS.

I talked briefly about how WiFi phones, SIP phones, and VoIP services such as Net2Phone are dramatically changing the “long distance” business. Changing in a very positive way for businesses and consumers and not so positive for the telecommunications industry. I have had a lot of feedback about my various Internet technology stories lately, especially in this particular area. Richard Shockey, Senior Manager for Strategic Technology Initiatives at NeuStar Inc. thought my comments about the “handwriting is on the wall” were conservative. He cites the very aggressive rollout of VoIP happening in
major corporations as a proof point.

My story about ENUM brought a number of comments. Al Nevarez in Menlo Park, CA sees ENUM as “the last g(r)asp of traditional connection-based networking”. Al believes that VXML (voice XML) will obviate the need for ENUM. Companies such as Bevocal are offering powerful applications using voice as the driver. IBM is in this space too. Their Voice Toolkit for WebSphere Studio helps developers create voice applications that can be integrated across an enterprise. Voice XML is indeed an alternative to ENUM but I think ultimately they will go hand in hand. The most significant part of ENUM is probably as a facilitator for VOiP. However there are times when people do not want to use their voice. There also are people who are mute. Al is correct, however, that because of vxml, the “phone has essentially become a browser” and so it can take advantage of anything available on the web.

Chuck Brownstein at CNRI continues to remind me that ENUM could potentially take our eye off the ball – meaning that there are many new applications that will be integrated with VoIP. It isn’t just replicating decades-old telephone services over the Internet. He is right. I like the way Steven Greenspan, President of Omenti Research in Scotch Plains, NJ thinks about it. He feels ENUM, SIP, and POTS (plain old telephone system) will coexist for a long time and that we are now seeing the beginnings of the integration of old and new ideas. There is plenty of room for the latter and the former will keep providing some value for a long time.

The feedback this week would not be complete without hearing from some readers about geocaching. Steve Crandall has been geocaching for about a year. He told me there are some caches are on rooftops in Manhattan! He also has discovered multi-caches where you go to a cache and get directions in the form of a poem or puzzle to lead to a secondary cache a non trivial distance away. Steve added some historical perspective I was not aware of too. He says that there were puzzle maps to caches where one would sign a list or leave some change at Cal Tech in the 70s and some friends of his have  said that this went on at the MIT Campus “since the dawn of time”.

patrickWeb stories about Knovel
patrickWeb stories about Internet technology
patrickWeb stories about hking and geocaching

Stamps On Demand

I
often correspond with my former IBM colleagues
by email and instant messaging, but today I made a visit in person to the Somers,
New York facility. It was a beautiful day with puffy white clouds and blue
sky — I couldn’t ask for better motorcycling
conditions. The subject of the two meetings was on
demand. This is such an exciting concept, and I believe that it represents
the beginning of the next major wave of opportunity in the networked world.
I expressed my thoughts about this in a prior
posting but will be writing much more about it over time. I took the long
way home and passed through some New York communities I had not taken notice
of before including Amawalk,
Granite Springs,
and Lincolnville (could not find a link). After I got home, I had an interaction
with stamps.com which was anything but
on demand.  (read
more)