The Open Internet

I will believe it when I see it confirmed — hopefully in the Spring — but looks like the FCC commissioners understand the importance of an open Internet. Net neutrality is a really really important issue with far reaching implications. Unfortunately, the term net neutrality has become politicized and means different things to different people but I think we can all identify with things that are not net neutral.

Suppose Comcast makes an exclusive deal with ESPN. You read about it in the news and you go to the newly advertised ESPN web page and it says, “This page only available to readers who use Comcast as their Internet service provider”. You use Verizon or AT&T so you can not get access to the new ESPN content.  Or how about going to a healthcare site and finding out you can no longer get access to your electronic medical record unless you change Internet service providers. Perhaps extreme examples, but possible. There have been various efforts over the past fifteen years to “balkanize” the Internet — in other words create internets within the Internet. I recall one effort that I was asked to get involved with — but of course declined — was to create a “New York Web”. It was to be a “private” internet with no access to or from the Internet. A really bad idea which fortunately got no traction. The Federal government has also considered various unique internets to provide enhanced security.

Not that the open Internet we have today is perfect. It isn’t. There are many shortcomings but they are being addressed through an open global standards-based approach. That is what makes the Internet unique and why it has attracted more than a billion users. Think of something else that works the same everywhere in the world — currency? railroad track sizes? which side of the road to drive on? electrical sockets and plugs? I can not think of anything that works exactly the same in every corner of the globe — and even in outer space — except the Internet. It is really impotant to keep it that way. Why? I cite a number of examples in Net Attitude but there are new reasons popping up every day.

Global tracking of diseases so that medical assistance can be where it is needed is made possible by the Internet. The World Community Grid
is running virtual chemistry experiments to determine which of the
millions of small molecules can attach to the influenza virus and
inhibit it from spreading. There is the potential to make the world a
better place because of this project. Using the Internet to connect millions of idle PC’s around the world, the grid is able to work as one massive supercomputer. Not to be minimized is the ability of the global Internet to prevent many countries from oppressing their people as the net provides a way to get out the word on what is actually happening. Last but not least is the power of the Internet to allow a really good idea from anywhere in the world to find an interest by someone in any other part of the world and thereby spawn innovation and new businesses.

I am confident that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski completely understands all this but there are others who are threatened. Although the FCC voted unanimously to allow the rule making to go forward it faces enormous lobbying over the months ahead from Internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Qwest. They say that net neutrality would strip them of the ability to manage their networks effectively and that it would stifle innovation and competition. The providers do not want to be just providers of “dumb pipes” for the Internet. They want to move up the value chain and get involved with the content where there is potentially more profit. No problem with content deals as long as they don’t violate net neutrality. 

This is not a matter of government regulating the Internet. That would be a bad thing. What it does mean is that the government would prevent providers from closing off how the Internet works.

DEMOfall in San Diego – 2009

There was a short overnight in Telluride with some friends and then on to San Diego for DEMOfall. Demo continues to be my favorite conference — the semi-annual event attracted nearly 600 attendees. 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. Companies like IBM scout for potential acquisitions. The product
introductions that take place reveal key technology trends over the
coming 12 to 18 months. This year there were 70 companies
showing their latest and greatest — each getting six minutes on stage to tell their story.
Chris Shipley, executive producer of Demo and Chairman and CEO of Guidewire Group, 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 Tent”.

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 gaining traction in their 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. There were two changes in direction I noticed compared to last year. First is that nearly everybody at the conference had an iPhone. Secondly, most of the companies either offer their software for the Mac or are planning to.

There isn’t time to visit all of companies 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.

Local Dirt says they want to be “Everyone’s place to buy, sell, and find local food”. They have created an e-commerce platform to enable grocery stores or consumer groups to buy from local farmers and farmer markets. Locally grown food is the fastest growing segment of the food business and Local Dirt got a lot of interest.

CallSpark! aims to replace the phone icon in your iPhone with their. The enhancement is that if you want to call Fedex or Marriott or Hertz, CallSpark! finds the number for you even though it is not in your iPhone contact list. Basically, CallSpark! virtually expands your contact list to find people or businesses. I look forward to trying it out when it is on the App Store.

DOTGO enables you to use your mobile phone to quickly, easily, and
reliably access any web site — to read the news, check a train schedule,
or track a package by simply sending a text message.  For example you could send a text to DOTCOM (368266) and put Coca Cola in the body of the message. DOTGO would have a marketing agreement with Coca Cola that would enable them to respond with information to you such as a link to go to a special offer.

Keen has a really slick commerce program to automate the small printers of the world. Every deal with a local printer? The one is this area does everything manually — preferably by phone but also fax. No email! Keen takes a broad view of the processes involved and has a comprehensive solution to streamline the process of getting things printed.

Fusebox is a collaborative system that does it all. Instant messaging, annotating or tagging movies with friends, and have online meetings. Take a look.

Gogrok is in this space too. They say they are going to make on-line collaboration easier and more interactive so that people can understand each other completely via the Internet. I found it interesting but suspect it will have trouble getting traction.

Intelius has a “People Search” which they claim is a great way to find and reconnect with family, old
friends, relatives — just about anyone! People Search reports include
phone numbers, address history, ages, birth dates, household members,
home value, income and more. They promoted it as a date check. Frightening! 

Cazoodle is a specialized search engine for buying things. It not only finds things but also organizes the various features and options so you can make a good choice and get a good price.

Digsby integrates instant messaging, email, and social networks into one easy to use application. That is their goal. I did not find very intuitive but it was defintely clever. The idea is to make it easy to write something and place it as a tweet and a Facebook post in a few mouse clicks.

Radioweave says they are the “second century of radio” and they have a system that creates a custom broadcasting “channel”. They say that In traditional radio, you tune in to a single channel until you are bored and then you change channels.

This is just a sample. They were all interesting. Statistically, of the seventy companies at Demo probably a half-dozen will survive. Some will get purchased and become a feature in another company’s offering. Some will run out of money and move on to another idea. Entrepreneurs never stop.

Knovel Interview

Prior to the Special Libraries Association convention at the Washington Convention Center in June there was an interview aranged by Knovel Corporation. The video was used on displays around the convention center and then made it’s way to the Knovel Blog. The conference closed with a panel will be moderated by TV newscaster Judy Woodruff. The panelists were Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Robyn Meredith, and yours truly. In the video interview I tried to set the stage a bit and also cover a few things I suspected Judy would not ask about.

Clever

The motorcycle ride to the Town of Saugerties was very nice. The four of us met downtown and went to The Dutch Ale House for lunch. Saugerties has a lot of history going back to 1677. The town is a quaint community located between the majestic Catskill Mountains and the scenic 315 mile long Hudson River. We strolled through the 19th century Village and picked off a geocache on the way down to the fully operational lighthouse. I checked the Tide Chart to make sure we could make it along the trail which is only about 4′ above sea level. The first part of the multi-cache was at the lighthouse — placed in a very clever way. The micro film canister contained a piece of paper with the latitude and longitude of the actual cache which was a quarter of a mile away. It too was cleverly placed. This cache find was #99 since we started geocaching in 2003.

Speaking of "clever", the World Community Grid just announced the completion of the first phase of the “Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together” project. It took only two years to complete because the members provided nearly 12,000 years of computer processing time to the project. Anyone can participate in the World Community Grid by installing a small piece of software similar to a screen saver. When your PC is idle the excess computing capability that it has gets pulled into a pool to help out on various projects of global importance. One of my PC’s contributed a modest 94 days of processing time to the “Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together” project.

Completing this phase of the project is a significant contribution to the research of not only Dengue Fever but also Hepatitis C, West Nile, Yellow Fever and other diseases caused by the Flaviviridea family of viruses. Get the latest details about the project here and if you want to add your idle computing capacity to important projects just visit the World Community Grid.

Google Voice (or is it Google Data?)

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

Comcasted – 2

There have been a number of stories here about service problems with Comcast. The company unfortunately gets a lot of criticism and I must say it is mostly well deserved. The latest concern is that Comcast is getting very aggressive with email marketing campaigns — most recently an invitation to participate in their sweepstakes.

It used to be that everything from Comcast was paper. Now it is paper plus a barrage of emails. Notices of my monthly statement and anything related to cable service is fine but I don’t want "Channel 1 On Demand: July highlights". Hopefully, spam filters will be able to tell the difference. At the bottom of the sweepstakes e-mail was "THIS E-MAIL IS AN ADVERTISEMENT". Really? Not only is your inbox spammed but your intelligence is questioned.

To add insult to injury the sweepstakes e-mail said "To exclude yourself from receiving future mailings regarding sweepstakes, please send a written request to “Thank You Times 3 Sweepstakes” C/O Comcast Cable Communications Management, LLC, Attention: Lifecycle Marketing, 1 Comcast Center, 1701 JFK Blvd., Philadelphia, PA 19103-2838." The e-mail went out in a blast but a request to respect your privacy requires a written letter. Then they sum it up with "Comcast respects your privacy"! I took a look at their privacy policy and not surprisingly the 5,645 word document was written by lawyers to be read by lawyers. I could rant on, as many people and journalists do, but I’ll stop for now. Comcasted.

IBM Happenings: June 2009

The month of June was another busy one at IBM with a flurry of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. See the list of press releases here and an index for prior months here. A major focus area in addition to a “smarter planet” is is Cloud Computing. IBM introduced the industry’s first set of commercial cloud services
and integrated products for the enterprise. This is an important and strategic move for the company. It reminds me of some disruptive times during my IBM career (hard to believe it began 42 years ago).

Disruption is usually associated with a technological shift but I have observed that the disruption is preceded by and accompanied by a “dissatisfier”. We have seen this movie three times.

In the 1980′s the dissatisfier was departments in enterprises that were dissatisfied with how long it took for the IT department to introduce new applications that addressed departmental needs. Departments started using spreadsheets on PC’s, sometimes acquired by finding a way to bypass IT department approval. Then companies like Novell offered “server” PC’s that allowed the spreadsheets to be centralized and shared by all the PC’s. Departments sometimes did their own network wiring to install “local area networks“. The IT department lost control. IBM was not the director of this movie and concentrated on defending the mainframe turf instead of embracing the disruption. The company was in the audience.

The second movie was in the mid 1990′s. It was called the the World Wide Web — a breakthrough application of the Internet. The dissatisfier was that there were many thousands of physicists in the world who wanted to gain access to a huge amount of data being created from particle physics experiments at CERN in Switzerland. The data was created in many different formats and the people wanting to use the data had many different kinds of computers. Enter Tim Berners-Lee with a new document format called HTML and an Internet protocol called HTTP. The result was any computer with a “browser” that could read HTML could get the data they wanted including multi-media. It was a major disruptive change to how all things IT worked. IBM did not sit in the audience for this movie. While Microsoft and Netscape (illegally driven out of business by Microsoft) were fighting over who had the best browser, IBM was making major investments behind the scenes to insure that all of it’s hardware and software supported the Internet. In 1996 Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, introduced the term “e-Business“. The company developed a layer of middleware called Webshphere that allowed enterprises to link all their applications to the web. This movie made $billions. There is much more to the story than summarized in this short paragraph. Take a look at Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround by Lou Gerstner and Net Attitude by yours truly (now available to read free on the web).

The current movie is about Cloud Computing. IBM is planning for a repeat of the success it had with e-business. This time the dissatisfier is that IT applications have become too too costly and too difficult to use. A good example is Microsoft Office. I call it the “global IT tax”. GE decided to confront this by going to cloud computing with Zoho.com. While Google, Zoho, Microsoft, Amazon and countless others are waging “cloud wars” over the consumer, IBM is behind the scenes again this time building a range of cloud offerings for the enterprise — cloud tools for developers, public clouds to enable more efficient offerings for all of the enterprise’s constituencies, private clouds to replace intranets, and research clouds for academia. The offerings announced in June are the tip of the iceberg. Stay tuned for much more from IBM in the clouds.

Much as client-server computing and the Internet transformed how people interact with other people and with data, cloud computing will transform these things yet again. With every computer in the world connected to every other computer through various clouds the potential to deliver data and collaborate around it will dwarf today’s capabilities and at a lower unit cost. The data.gov project that Vivek Kundra talked about at the Wired Conference may be a model followed by enterprises. The idea is that when something happens — a transaction, a widget gets ordered or shipped or had a service issue or a patient sees a doctor or has a procedure, the data will be in the cloud for others (who are authorized) to see it on a real-time basis. This is going to be an exciting movie and we will all be able to watch it in the clouds. (See other stories on cloud computing here at patrickWeb).

Epilogue: IBM has received considerable recognition for leadership with the World Community Grid. The grid can run virtual chemistry experiments to determine which of the millions of small molecules can attach to the influenza virus and inhibit it from spreading. There is the potential to make the world a better place because of this project. If you want to donate your surplus computer time to some of the great causes IBM is working on, take a look at worldcommunitygrid.org. Also, see IBM Happenings for May for more on the influenza project.

Other IBM Happenings for the month

Special Libraries Day

The flight down to Dulles on the Socata TBM 700 was smooth as glass and surprisingly quiet for such a fast airplane. A short shuttle ride got us to
The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center an enormous facility which provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and space artifacts that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall. The two sites together showcase the largest aviation collection in the world and accommodate more than one million visitors per year. The Center was made possible by a $65 million gift in October 1999 to the Smithsonian Institution by Steven F. Udvar-Hazy, an immigrant from Hungary and co-founder of the International Lease Finance Corporation.

You have to see it to believe it. The Boeing Aviation Hangar is 103 feet high, 986 feet long and 248 feet wide which makes it about ten stories high and the length of three football fields. The nearly 300,000 square feet of space is filled with airplanes — more than 160 — including a Boeing 707, a B29, a Lockheed SR-71, all manner of fighter jets, a 1903 Wright Flyer and everything in between. Adjoining the Aircraft Hangar is a Space Hangar — a mere 80 feet high, 262 feet long and 180 feet wide. The 50,000+ square feet includes more than 150 space artifacts, with the space shuttle Enterprise as the centerpiece.

We got to downtown D.C. in time to walk around the National Mall after checking into the hotel and then had a nice dinner at Olive’s. The next morning we headed over to the Convention Center for The SLA 2009 Annual Conference. I expected attendance would be down due to budget cuts and travel freezes but it was actually up from the prior year — nearly 6,000 people attended. It proves that even though you can find almost anything on the Internet there is still an important role for conferences where people can network in the halls and during breaks and meals.

The attendees were Information Professionals from 75 countries. The roles played by the library and information science experts have changed but are no less vital to libraries, information centers and corporate information and knowledge resource departments than before. Libraries are in fact very special places. A couple of weeks ago we took our granddaughter to visit the Yale Library. It was a busy place with a lot of computers but also a priceless collection of materials and most importantly a cadre of people who know how to help people find things. .

I only had time to visit one of the 400 exhibitors at the conference — Knovel Corporation, where I have been a director and investor for almost seven years. It has been exciting to see the company grow by serving a large number of corporate librarians and engineering executives.

The closing conference panel was moderated by TV newscaster Judy Woodruff. The panelists were Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Robyn Meredith, and yours truly. I learned a lot from my fellow panelists. Judy did a terrific job of brining out important points about the future of information technology. A lot of it was focused on healthcare. I spoke about how important it is to move to an electronic model — how it can improve healthcare outcomes and reduce costs.

Audience questions were provocative. One gentleman asked whether the Internet is making it possible for a very large company or a few companies to dominate the control of information. He was obviously referring to Google. I said no and reminded the audience how the press said in the 1970′s that IBM was going to take over the world. Then in the 1980′s it was Microsoft that would dominate. Now some believe Google will dominate. I have no fears about this. The barrier to entry for a new company is close to zero thanks to cloud computing. Google Docs is nice but check out Zoho.com. The race has only just begun. The bigger fear is monopolization by telecommunications and cable companies that has been made possible by intense lobbying of the FCC. I am cautiously optimistic that the new chairman will keep things “open” so that innovation and competition can thrive.

Wired Disruptions – 2009

I am late in sharing about various activities of the past two weeks. The activities used up the time for blogging! Exiting the train at Grand Central last Monday morning was followed by a nice walk down Madison Avenue to the magnificent Pierpont Morgan Library to attend the WIRED Business Conference: Disruptive By Design.

It was a superb day, featuring interviews and highlights from WIRED editor in chief, Chris Anderson as well as an impressive group of speakers including Jeff Bezos, Jeff Immelt, Shai Agassi, Elon Musk and Vivek Kundra, the newly named CIO of the United States. Alll of the content is available at wired.com.

The speakers were excellent with the exception of Scott Thompson, President of PayPal who was doing a non-stop pitch for how great his company is. All the other speakers shared their vision for the future of various technologies and business strategies and in particular talked about how disruption can be a problem or an opportunity depending on how you approach it. Jeff Bezos, always the consummate visionary talked about how electronic books will disrupt traditional publishing business models. When I see small children carrying 50 pounds of books in their backpack it seems so obvious that an e-book — which weighs less than a half-pound can hold all of their textbooks — is going to prevail. Jeff said that books have “had a nice 500 year run”. Critics say that the market is limited for devices which can only do one thing, like enable you to read a book. Jeff said “what could be more important than reading”. He believes a “purpose built” device serves an important and growing market. Many business leaders in Amazon’s position with the Kindle would tie the content and the device in a proprietary model. Jeff says that Amazon plans for the Kindle to be the best device and their strategy is enable the device to read content of any format. In parallel the Amazon format will be made available on competitors e-books. He clearly follows a long-term strategy.

Jeff Immelt also demonstrated strategic leadership in his comments in numerous areas. He said that the Chinese have developed an MRI scanner that is a third the cost of what GE enjoys as their richest market segment today. Many companies would put their head in the ground, but GE is planning to compete directly with Chinese pricing and expand the MRI market on a global basis. I was quite impressed with the comments of Vivek Kundra. The former CTO for the city of Washington DC who is now the first US government CIO. He has a very aggressive approach to opening up government to the people. Today there are more than 20,000 government web sites and most do not make it easy to get data. Vivek is planning to make all non-secret data available to the public through data.gov, His visionary theory is that by making the data available people will find ways to build applications to explore and exploit the data. Privacy will be an issue but the upside is very large. While some people fear the government “watching us”, the strategy behind data.gov will allow citizens to watch the government.

Overall, the conference was exceptionally well produced. Upon leaving at the end of the day attendees were given a nice Golla Mobile Lifestyle bag containing a couple of WIRED magazines plus a copy of Chris Anderson’s new book — Free: The Future of a Radical Price. The summer read pile growing already — but mostly on the Kindle.

As usual, one of the best parts of the conference was seeing former colleagues from years past. It was very nice to catch up with Nicholas Negroponte and Ann Winblad and to compare notes with Jay Walker. Jeff Bezos hung around with attendees at the reception at the end of the day and answered questions from several of us. He is a brilliant businessman that makes it a habit to listen to what people (customers) have to say. I would say that is also why Amazon has a market capitalization of $36 billion.

Net Attitude

Net Attitude has reached a new status – the entire book is now available to read for free here on patrickWeb. This is something I have wanted to offer for a long time but in the prior years my publisher would not allow it. I believe studies have shown that books that are made free to read on the Internet actually get incremental sales — sales of the book that would not otherwise have happened. Perhaps the protective attitude (lack of Net Attitude) of publishers is why they are in the soup.

I wrote Net Attitude during the summer of 2001 and it was published in November of that year. The timing was not good as at that point business, management, and technology books were not selling much for obvious reasons. However, the book was published both in the U.S. and also outside the U.S. in Chinese, Italian, and UK English. After roughly 30,000 copies, the book sold out, althought there are some new copies floating around and selling on Amazon. There is also a version available for the Kindle and now the new version right here on patrickWeb. My thanks to Andy Grachuk at JingotheCat Web Design for creating the Web compilation.

2001 was a long time ago but not as long ago as 1994 when Tom Brokaw appeared on ” Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” to talk about “Early Reports About the Internet“. I was in Las Vegas at the conference that Brokaw refers to and the camera caught me with a few comments (see video). Bill Gates got most of the attention, understandably, but it is sad to hear that Brokaw called Gates one of the “founding geniuses of this new technology”. That same year both Bill Gates and I gave presentations at an IDG conference in Paris. Gates said the Internet was too slow and too insecure to be used for business. Needless to say, my speech represented the opposite point of view and was in the same camp as Eric Schmidt (then at Sun) who said that every business, large or small, will be on the Internet.

Thanks to Julie Moran Alterio,Technology and business reporter at The Journal News for telling me about the Brokaw video. She called it “A blast from your past”.