Long Distance

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.

Fellows

It has been a privilege over the years to have known a number of fellows of the IEEE and now I am honored to be joining their ranks. I first joined the IEEE in 1967 during my senior year at Lehigh University. With the support of a number of industry colleagues, the senior member status followed in 1994. I had no idea that fellow might be in the future.

As far as I know, nobody at Lehigh was thinking about the Internet while I was there, but Paul Baran had been thinking about the concept since 1959 when he began working for the RAND Corporation. The cold war was underway and Paul was focused on developing a communication network that could withstand a nuclear attack. The Internet and the World Wide Web followed as a natural evolution that has now reached it’s infancy. I have played a very small role and the tribute should go to Paul Baran, Vint Cert, Tim Berners-Lee and their colleagues.

Knovel Director John Patrick Named IEEE Fellow

Board Member Recognized for Internet Leadership

New York, NY – February 5th, 2008 – Knovel (www.knovel.com) today announced that John R. Patrick, a member of Knovel’s board of directors, has been named an IEEE Fellow in recognition of his leadership in technical and policy development of the World Wide Web. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

Mr. Patrick was a founding member of the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT in 1994 and of the Global Internet Project in 1995. Mr. Patrick was also instrumental in the development of e-commerce at IBM in 1997 as vice president for Internet technology. He is a member of the Internet Society, the Association for Computing Machinery, and The International Honor Society Beta Gamma Sigma. His book, Net Attitude, was published in 2001 and helped guide corporate strategies to leverage the Internet.

Mr. Patrick is a member of the board of directors of Jupitermedia, Knovel, Danbury Hospital and Danbury Health Systems, as well as a member of the Lehigh University Engineering Advisory Board.

“It’s great to have the IEEE validate the reason we recruited John to our board,” said Chris Forbes, CEO of Knovel. “John is a visionary with deep understanding of the role the Internet can and should play in helping people tackle their work efficiently and effectively. His insights meshed perfectly with the deep domain expertise of our board members who were principal executives at Thompson and Oxford University Press.“

About IEEE

The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) – the world’s largest technical professional society – fosters technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. Through its more than 370,000 members in 160 countries, IEEE is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics. Dedicated to the advancement of technology, the IEEE publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, and has developed more than 900 active industry standards. The organization also sponsors or co-sponsors nearly 400 international technical conferences each year.

About Knovel

Knovel (www.knovel.com) is an online resource used by applied scientists and practicing engineers around the world to quickly locate relevant and reliable technical information. Knovel’s thousands of customers include 75 of the Fortune 500 companies and 300 leading engineering and science universities worldwide.

Knovel has uniquely optimized content, search capabilities, and interactive tools for specific engineering disciplines. Knovel’s content includes material properties, process and design information, standard procedures, equations, and formulations. Close to 2,000 leading reference works and databases from over 40 international publishers and professional societies are integrated to provide a single source of answers to technical questions.

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Other patrickWeb stories about engineering

IBM Happenings: January 2008

The month of January was a busy one at IBM. The month was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. I was particularly pleased to see the continued collaboration with the Mayo Clinic. They jointly established an imaging center aimed at advancing medical imaging technologies to improve the quality of patient care.

The list of announcements made by IBM during the month is here. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.

DEMO in Palm Desert

Demo continues to be my favorite conference — the semi-annual event took place this past week in Palm Desert, California. There were many new people in attendance but also some friends from many Demos past — Amy Wohl, Shel Israel, John Landry, and Steve Larsen. While there were many attendees in their mid-twenties, the five of us joked how we had logged 200+ years in technology.

Whenever possible I try to start an out of town visit with a hunt for a benchmark or geocache. The nearest benchmark was along a railroad bed across the Interstate several miles away so I decided to look for three geocaches. The first two turned out to be more than challenging and after miles of walking and searching with ten feet of each I had to give up. At least the weather was great and I got some exercise. During a break before dinner the next day I went back out and looked for "Between Rock & a Hard Place". After reaching the latitude/longitude and looking for ten minutes or so I thought I would be zero for three but then as I thought about the comments made in the log at geocaching.com, it suddenly came to me and I found it. It was one of the most cleverly hidden caches I have seen in years.

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 77 companies showing off — each getting six minutes on stage to tell their story.

There were some key trends that emerged from Demo this year. Many companies in some way talked about mobile. Most companies either provide a web service or use web services as their platform. Most companies were media related in some way provided or used social networking. None of these things are new, by any means, but Demo confirmed their strategic importance and 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. visited the ones in which I had most interest. Chris Shipley kicked off the conference with insightful comments about the industry. See the Demo blog for more on her thoughts. Chris screens the companies and introduces them to the stage. After the main tent sessions the attendees got to visit with the companies in the "Demo Hall". There isn’t time to visit all of them so I tried to
be selective. Some of the ones I found interesting follow. They are in no particular order. (Read more)