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The Internet Service Providers of Austria have produced a webcast of their Internet Summit in Vienna which I attended the day before Thanksgiving. Here are the links…
Overall conference webcast
JRP Speech
Blog posting about the trip to Vienna
The snow began just after arriving at the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Vienna. It was the first snowfall of the year and at least some of the citizens were happy about it. After reaching my room I looked out the window and saw many people enjoying the ice skating rink. After an interview with Format Magazine and then a press conference with a dozen or so journalists, both to talk about the Future of the Internet, a small group of us had a delightful dinner at Zum Schwarzen Kameel (The Black Camel). The menu was traditional Austrian and elegant — it was hard to resist the dessert.
It was an honor to offer the opening keynote speech for the Internet Service Providers of Austria Conference at the Kursalon Wien in the morning. I talked about the what I see as some of the most important developments of a fast, always on, everywhere, natural, intelligent, easy, and trusted Internet. (A PDF version of the presentation outline is here). Some of the technologies I discussed included broadband power line capabilities, IPTv, podcasting and tagging, Ajax, OpenDocument Format, the Open Invention Netowrk, and Linux. At lunch time I was pleased to be able to get some feedback and also discuss some of the issues in more detail.
After the coffee break I was determined to find a geocache called Central Vienna. A quarter mile walk through the Stadtpark got me to the exact latitude and longitude but in spite of the best search I could make, the cache was not to be found. I had one more chance to be able to log a successful geocache find before leaving for the airport and fortunately the Johann Strauss cache was close by. It was to be my first webcam geocache. In order to be successful it was necessary to stand by the statue of Johann Strauss and then call a friend, ask him or her to visit the live webcam site and refresh the page. This would cause the camera in a tree nearby to capture the proof that I had been there. A further requirement was to be wearing a shirt or carrying a bag or something to signify being a true geocacher. As luck would have it, my GSM phone was not able to make an outbound call for some unknown reason (having something to do with Cingular).
As an alternative I posed by the statue with the Magellan eXplorist in hand while a young man was kind enough to take a picture with my camera. Hopefully, the owner of this cache will consider the picture adequate proof of my find! Then it was time to fly to London and then on to JFK to get home in time for Thanksgiving.
Now that we are well into the 21st century, it seems that it is time for companies to take email seriously as a key communications channel. Many companies are good at blasting to email lists, but how many companies are equally as effective at interpreting emails and then replying to them?
I have been receiving more and more email from my car company soliciting me to get service or trade in my car. Like many companies, they proudly display their email address. I sent an email to their service department to ask a simple question. They called back to reply and left a voicemail saying I could call them back. In other words, instead of just answering my email, they put the ball back in my court. The same day I received an unsolicited email from another company. At the bottom was an unsubscribe link. The link was dead — it was an invalid address. I went to their web site and sent an e-mail to info@thecompany.com and shortly thereafter, received a reply. It said, "Thanks for your e-mail. You can expect a reply generally within 48 hours. If you want to call our customer service number, the number is 123-456-7890." So if they are staffed to answer the phone, why aren’t they staffed to answer their e-mail? Likely it is an issue of habit, reluctance to change, and just lack of an Internet attitude. It’s time.
Many sites have a "contact us" link. Typically a click will bring up a web page with a form. Nothing wrong with a form, per se, but there are two major mistakes that companies make in using forms. First is that most all of them do not have a place to enter your own email address so you can be copied and thereby have a copy of the email you sent so you can track it and later find it. The even greater sin is to put you through hoops answering market research questions before you can send the email. Really bad.
And then there are the email lists — mailing lists to which we are frequently invited to subscribe. I predict a steady decline leading to extinction of email mailing lists. They will be replaced by blogs. Blogs are usually thought of as diaries or a place where individuals opine about their favorite thing. That is certainly true but blogs are also a powerful way to publish just about anything. The power of the blog is that it has context — subject, category, author, date, and content which enable the blog to be found, archived, and subscribed to. Instead of sifting through a large number of emails, most of which you don’t want, you will be able to go directly to folders in your blog reader and enjoy the things you actually want. Look for the orange xml or rss icon (
) on a web page. Just click it and you can subscribe — without providing your email address.
Blogging gives "power to the people" — both the publisher and the consumer. Email reduced the amount of paper documents. Instant messaging reduced the number of emails (relatively speaking), and blogs will reduce the number of email newsletters, journals, and notices of various kinds. Over time more and more of the things you read will be in one of your blog folders — not in your inbox where there is a good chance you will either overlook it or your spam filter will delete it.
Other patrickWeb stories about blogging
The fly is quite an amazing creature with wings that can flap 200 times per second, and aerodynamic capabilities at 6 miles per hour that include flying straight up, straight down, or backwards and somersault to an upside down landing on a ceiling. What appear to be two eyes are actually two compound eyes each of which contains 6,000 miniature hexagonal eyes called ommatidia. The fly can outmaneuver any man-made machine at low speeds and do so with very little power. While the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has three shoe-box sized PowerPC-based computers aboard, the fly uses just a few hundred of the neurons in it’s brain.
Rafal Zbikowski in the United Kingdom has been studying the fly for a long time with the hope of building a Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle (MAV). The insect-like MAV would be a small hand-held flying vehicle that could be used for the purpose of reconnoitering in confined spaces, for example, inside buildings, tunnels and shafts that might be very dangerous places for humans to visit. For example, looking in a dangerous coal mine for survivors of a flood or explosion and other hazardous situations. The military potential is even more dramatic. Imagine a fly-like device intruding a terrorist hideout and hovering while gathering information that could result in saving the lives of innocent people.
The engineering challenges are formidable but there is much focus on emulating the insect-like flapping and actually building an artificial replica of the amazing fly. A workshop on "Reverse Engineering of Insect Flight Control" was conducted to bring the key players together. They are really serious about this and have great respect for the fly.
The rest of us may marvel at the fly at times but their annoying presence also explains the invention of the fly swatter.
As discussed here many times, grass roots movements such as the Internet and Linux are hard to stop. However, one of the impediments to very fast adoption of Linux as compared to just the fast adoption that is taking place has been the underlying threat of legal action to a user or vendor of Linux by a patent holder.
That threat is about to be dealt a big blow as IBM, Sony and
Philips have joined forces with Novell and Red Hat to form a new
company called The Open Invention Network (OIN).
The concept is simple, but potentially brilliant. OIN, using the funding provided by the founding companies, will purchase Linux related patents in the open market. It will then offer them on a royalty free basis to any individual or company member that agrees not to sue the other members. OIN is starting out with a set of electronic commerce patents that were purchased
from business-to-business (B2B) software pioneer Commerce One. More purchases will follow and likely the purchases will spur even more innovation for systems and applications that leverage Linux.
OIN will have no income since it will seek no royalties from it’s patent portfolio, so how do the founders make a return on their investment
in OIN? Through the accelerated adoption of Linux which in turn opens the door for more sales of hardware, sofware, and services. Much of the IT industry and it’s customers will embrace the OIN move — with the exception of
Microsoft which has argued that relying on "open
source" software poses legal risks.
Market researcher IDC estimates that the worldwide Linux business will grow 25.9 percent
annually, doubling from $20 billion this year to more than $40 billion by 2008. If OIN is successful the growth rate could be even higher.
Other patrickWeb stories about Linux
Today’s New York Times has a story called Trying to Wean Internet Users From Free written by Joseph Nocera. Mr. Noceera did a good job of explaining some of the issues facing both newspapers and journalists due to the "ruthless efficiency of the Internet". He cites the music and telephony industries as victims so far and poses the question about whether newspapers are next.
We all know that newspaper circulation has been on a steady decline for twenty years and much has been written about the reasons for this. A continued decline of 2% per year would mean in fifty years there would be no newspapers. Financial pressures would cause failures long before that. I am making no predictions on the demise — most things that have been predicted to disappear are still with us. In the case of newspapers there are many attachments in addition to reading them — people use them to wrap fish, cover their head from rain, protect the floor when painting, pack dishes for shipping, and a myriad other things. What I would like to opine about is the future of journalists.
A journalist is a person who practices journalism, the gathering and dissemination of information about current events, trends, issues and people. (definition from Wikipedia). Columnists go beyond just gathering and disseminating information — they add their opinion and thereby have an influence over individual and public opinion. What the New York Times has done with their new "TimesSelect" is to cordon off their top columnists and put them behind a wall that is only accessible to subscribers. If you are already a print subscriber (which costs hundreds of dollars per year) you can subscribe for free, otherwise the cost is $49.95 per year. So far they have attracted 270,000 — half of them from each category. The move is controversial from a business model point of view, but the bigger issue may be the influence aspect.
If the columnists are behind the curtain, will they continue to have influence when tens of millions of bloggers are out in the open? Not only are the bloggers more accessible but their content has context — each posting can have tags that reflect what their story is about. The tags make it easier to find the stories of interest and increase the likelihood of them being read. Some say, yes but they are just bloggers out there. How do we know they are creditable sources of facts and opinion? There are two answers to that question. First is that sites such as Technorati show how many inbound links there are to a particular blog. If a large number of people are reading a blog it is likely worth reading. By looking at the blog’s comments and by looking at other things the blogger has written you can get a feel for whether you want to trust that particular blogger. Contrast this with the columnist that the New York Times has behind the curtain. How do you know whether the columnist is creditable? Because they work for the New York Times? That may be good enough for some — not so for others. Do you know how many inbound links there are to the columnist’s story? No. But bloggers have strong opinions about things and are ranting or raving about things. And columnists are not? Columnists have no agenda? Their editors have no agenda? Will people pay $49.95 per year just to have the ability to browse the columnist’s story. Not likely. This is not a sanguine situation for columnists. So what are they to do?
Some will stay behind the curtain and hope that the management of the newspapers will figure out the right business model. Others will see a bigger opportunity by becoming bloggers themselves and then replace their current salaries by charging fees — not for their blogs but for speaking and consulting engagements. The years of experience and honed writing skills should attract a lot of attention in the blogosphere. That in turn will generate a lot of links. Companies, associations, and governments will pay fees to bring in expert points of view to their board rooms, customer meetings, and conferences. John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, told me ten years ago "give away the music and charge for the concerts". I think he had it right.
Other patrickWeb stories about blogging
Google the word "nano" and you get nearly 70 million results — ranging from the iPod Nano to nano tennis rackets, to some very esoteric and futuristic concepts. Nanotechnology is a relatively new field involving engineering on a scale of individual atoms. The technology will surely result in new materials and also the improvement of existing materials. Uses of the new materials will range from new medical devices to incredible car paint to stronger and lighter sporting equipment. In fact Kevin Maney at USA Today reported that nanotech will eventually make better-performing yacht racing masts, hockey sticks, vaulting poles, softball bats, golf clubs and tennis rackets. He says the technology will help make lighter racing bikes and race cars and even make a golf ball go straighter based on the physics of the material it is made from.
Not that sports are not important, but IBM has some much bigger ideas. Last week I visited the IBM Research Nanoscience Department at the TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York — a nice half-hour motorcycle ride along the reservoirs of Westchester County. In the same building is the second most powerful computer in the world (IBM also built the most powerful one which is installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and has built more than half of the 500 most powerful computers in the world).
The reason IBM is investing millions of dollars in nanotechnology is that it wants to make sure that it will have the fastest computers in the world twenty years from now. Today’s computers are built using silicon chips which are manufactured using a chemical process that has been constantly refined over the past forty years. Progress has been exponential but the end of the runway is in sight. Although various creative techniques are enabling continued improvements in speed, a new approach is needed fairly soon. Enter carbon nanotubes.
Carbon nanotubes are unique structures with remarkable electronic and mechanical properties. An ideal nanotube can be thought of as a hexagonal network of carbon atoms that forms a hollow cylinder. The nanotubes are "made" using a vapor deposition process in an extremely hot gas furnace. The nanotube model I saw at IBM looked like something my grandchildren would build with LEGOs. The real nanotubes are extremely thin — their diameter is about 10,000 times smaller than a human hair! Needless to say, you can’t see the nanotubes with the human eye and hence, the scanning tunneling microscopes (invented by Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd K. Binnig at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland for which they were awarded a Nobel prize) is a key tool for the researchers.
It was exciting to walk into one of IBM’s nanoscience laboratories. The equipment in the small room was breathtaking — millions of dollars worth of plumbing, cabling, tubing, tanks of gasses, and computers everywhere. It was an awesome feeling to be in a room where work is being done at the molecular level. I actually saw a demonstration of a nanotube switch turn on and off. On and off means ones and zeroes and the speed of the chips made from this technology will make today’s chips look like slow pokes.
The most impressive part of the visit was the two young scientists who described and demonstrated the nano technology. They were highly impressive and enthusiastic about their work and dedicated to solving the key problems that will be occurring fifteen to twenty years from now. I asked them whether they were from a chemistry, physics, or electrical engineering background. Their answer was yes. The whole experience gave me goose bumps, especially knowing that there are thousands more like them at IBM’s research labs around the world.
The Nanotube Site – site with many links to sites dedicated to nanotubes
The month of October was incredibly busy for IBM, with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
The Free 411 concept is the easiest thing to explain! This is an audio update to the original story. Click play, stop, or pause buttons on the podcast player.
On infrequent occasions I have something to say about the technical aspects of patrickWeb. Today I made a change that is important to me but will go unnoticed by close to 100% of the people who read this blog. From now on Atom is the protocol I use to publish the index to what I write. There is a debate in technical circles about what protocol to use — RSS or Atom. For the most part, the issues are technical. Both protocols accomplish the same thing — they provide an index that allows blog readers (aggregators), and other applications like iTunes, to be able to display the date, title, category or categories, and the content of what I write. The reason I am making the change is that I believe that Atom is a longer term approach. As you know from the many things I have written here about Linux and ODF, I am a firm believer in open standards. Atom was developed by Sam Ruby from IBM and a number of collaborators. The development of the details behind Atom was done out in the open for all to see and supported by a working group within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which is the closest thing we have to a body responsible for how the Internet works and insuring it remains open. In summary, there is nothing wrong with RSS — it is widely used — but I believe that Atom is a superset of what RSS has to offer and that Atom will continue to evolve and adapt to the rapidly changing world of blogging, podcasting, videocasting, and whatever comes next.
A comparison of RSS and Atom by Tim Bray
More details about Atom
