Genesys XVIII

The 18th Annual Genesys Partners Venture Dinner — Gen XVIII– Monday night at the Union League Club in New York attracted more than 100 venture capitalists, investors, journalists, entrepreneurs, and industry executives. As always, Jim Kollegger — CEO of Genesys Partners and one of the pioneers of the information industry — was an elegant master of ceremonies. He introduced the various sponsors, next day panelists for the SIIA Conference, several startup CEO’s, and a few of us who have been around the block a few times, each to make some comments.

Like a broken record, I offered the normal upbeat view of the future of the Internet but prefaced my remarks by asserting that we are only 10% of the way there. In other words, of all the things that could be done on the Internet that would save us time and make our lives better, only 10% of them are there. It may sound low but consider retail e-commerce. Although there has been continuous and steady growth of retail e-commerce it still represents just 4% of total retail (as of the end of October). Why isn’t it 25% or more? Much is written about that here at patrickWeb but the short version is that there are still a lot of lame web sites. “Click here for the location of our nearest dealer where you can visit” or “call to buy the product you just found” or “Click here to download this form and fax it to us”. And of course there are the ubiquitous clipboards at doctor offices where we take a pen and provide a lot of information information that they already have.

I described one man’s view of the evolution of the Internet including the seven characteristics below. This parsed way of looking at the Internet has served me well for quite a few years. The things going on under each area continuously change and Jim asks me once a year to do a thumbnail sketch of my latest thinking.

Fast
Broadband in the U.S. is not a pretty story compared to other parts of the world. We are second after China in number of broadband users, but 28th in the world in number of broadband users as a percentage of our population. The problem is that there are too many lobbyists and the FCC is a political organization. The new FCC head is a very smart guy with venture and business experience. He totally gets it. The only problem is that AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon have more lawyers than he does. Meanwhile France is offering 100 megabit access for $90 per month and WiFi throughout the country. Thanks to the telco lobby, many states have banned the offering of WiFi by municipal entities. Every citizen in Greenland has Internet access. We have 31,000 post offices.

Always On

WiFi is part of the fabric of the world. The big shift is streaming of data — not just tweets, but data from *things*. Bridges, toll booths, traffic lights, buildings, cars, and health monitoring devices attached to people. Hospital physicians will soon be adjusting the drip rate on infusion pumps in the hospital from their office based on real-time data from the patient. The WiFi infusion pumps enable hospital administrators to know where the pumps are (they never have enough of them) and which ones need maintenance. The creation of data is staggering. Of all the data in the world, 90% of it was created in the last two years. YouTube receives 60 hours of new video every hour. Wikipedia has 4 million articles and 8,000 editors.

Everywhere
There are one billion computers (including tablets), one billion cars, 1.5 billion televisions, and 2 billion Internet users. Small numbers compared to cell phones — 5.2 billion paid subscribers. The Internet used to be where your PC is, now it is where you are.  Most of the cell phones are dumb but soon most of them will be smart and they will all have Internet access. The mobile web is unfolding and is taking part in creating data in addition to consuming it through streaming. When you take a picture on your iPhone, it goes into the photostream and from there to iCloud and from there to all of your other devices.  

Natural
Social networking has become fundamental to all aspects of our economy and society. Integration of social networking with a full range of web applications will evolve to become the primary means of collaboration. The emerging issue is that many people are a bit liberal with sharing their every movement — what they are eating, listening to, where they are headed, their current latitude and longitude, and where they slept last night. They are not thinking that some day they may run for office or interview for a job. OpenSocial is an important new standard that will enable social media apps that work across all of the social media sites. The Europeans may legislate it, but regardless, a capability is needed to be able to remove things from the social media.

Intelligent
The Semantic Web is the next big turn of the crank but the crank is moving slowly. Most web pages have links but do not have context. In other words the words on the page do not necessarily mean anything — but they could. If a web page said “Join us for a concert by The Eagles at Kimmel Center in Philadelphia next Tuesday” that set of words could have a lot of context. Clicking on it could add the concert to your calendar, knowing what “next Tuesday” means. It would also know exactly where the Kimmel Center is and that The Eagles is a performing group that performs a particular genre and your music player would receive a list of suggestions of music they have recorded or links to live concerts under way at the moment. This is the tip of the iceberg. The semantic web will lead us to a point where most of the interactions of web pages will be between computers not between computers and people. The biggest growth of intelligence is occurring in the field of analytics. Exabytes of data are being stored. Analytics will enable businesses to make sense of it, model their business and continuously adapt to what is going on. IBM’s Watson took on humans on the Jeopardy Show, but what is more interesting is the ability for a primary care physician to call and get a recomendation based on patient data they describe to Watson. Within a couple of seconds Watson will be able to review all medical information in the world and make a useful suggestion. Business Intelligence and analytics are poised to enable new insight into the mounds of data that are being accumulated.

Easy
Technology isn’t the easiest thing at times. There are many dimensions to “easy” but one good example is the Nintendo Wii. At a local senior center, members find the Wii to be their exercise coach. It is not just for kids! The iPhone and iPad have shown how easy it can be to get applications on a handheld computer. Amazon has done the same with the Kindle. Most companies still don’t get the idea that the Internet is about power to the people. If you can’t make it simple, people won’t buy it. Cloud computing has become the mainstay for me and for millions. The convenience and reliability of the clouds is compelling. Add Dropbox and you have a completely replicated set of data, wherever you are and with whatever device you may be using. How about TV? Three remotes — BlueRay, Cable box, and TV — include 151 buttons. Even a savvy child could not possibly master this impossible user interface. Boxee TV has produced a good model of the future of TV, but I suspect that an upcoming Apple TV will be what finally provides the needed regime change.

Trusted
This is the big one. Will we trust the Internet? Security technology is available to achieve much higher levels of security than presently deployed both at enterprise and consumer levels. It is a constant battle and requires significant budgets and a lot of talented people to maintain the needed security. The bigger issue will be privacy. (Stay tuned for the Firefox “do not track” feature). Banks have our personal information and they are using it. Healthcare insurers have more information about our health than our doctors do. Nevertheless, there is much to be optimistic about when it comes to electronic medical records. Perhaps 25% of doctors and hospitals use them but they are not easily interchangeable and accessible. This will change over the next few years as the government adds dollar incentives to make it happen. The result will be better quality of care, better outcomes, and fewer errors. And, fewer clipboards.

On Wednesday I gave a talk about the Future of the Internet and Healthcare at the SIIA Conference. The presentation can be found here.

Other patrickWeb conference related stories

Tags: broadband, fcc, future, health, health care, Healthcare, IBM, internet, ipad, iPhone, jeopardy, john patrick, Mobile, opera, siia, social media, supercomputer, union league, WiFi

R2D2 – WiFi – 1xRTT

A high school teacher named Kristen wrote to say that her students had been using some web pages from the patrickWeb blog as a source of information for their studies and projects. The posting below is one of the pages they found useful. The story was originally posted on June 10, 2003. One of the students in Kristen’s class, Brian, contributed an additional link to the blog that he has found particularly valuable in using Linux. I am grateful to all readers for using patrickWeb and especially appreciate it when they make suggestions or report errors in the site. Having just updated the site to an all new design, I am sure there will be some bugs that are discovered.

WiFi is such a clean and user-friendly name. WiFi stands for “wireless fidelity” and it is based on a standard called 802.11 — but who cares? It is becoming a household name, more and more available, and extremely useful. The information technology and telecommunications industries often get enamored with the technical name or the name of a standard and then these “tech-names” take on a life of their own — even though they may be next to impossible to remember, spell, or understand. An example is the technology used in the Sprint PCS wireless service which I use with my ThinkPad. It is referred to as 1xRTT. Somewhat like R2D2 except that I think most people know what R2D2 is.

According to Webopedia.com, 1xRTT is short for single carrier (1x) radio transmission technology, a 3G wireless technology based on the CDMA platform. 1xRTT has the capability of providing ISDN-like speeds of up to 144 Kbps. 1xRTT is also referred to as CDMA2000. Clear as mud? What are 3G and CDMA? Again, according to Webopedia.com, 3G is an ITU specification for the third generation (analog cellular was the first generation, digital PCS the second) of mobile communications technology. 3G promises increased bandwidth, up to 384 Kbps when a device is stationary or moving at pedestrian speed, 128 Kbps in a car, and 2 Mbps in fixed applications. 3G will work over wireless air interfaces such as GSM, TDMA, and CDMA. The new EDGE air interface has been developed specifically to meet the bandwidth needs of 3G. Seems that each definition leads to several others.

CDMA is short for Code-Division Multiple Access, a digital cellular technology that uses spread-spectrum techniques. Unlike competing systems, such as GSM, that use TDMA, CDMA does not assign a specific frequency to each user. Instead, every channel uses the full available spectrum. Individual conversations are encoded with a pseudo-random digital sequence. CDMA is a military technology first used during World War II by the English allies to foil German attempts at jamming transmissions. The allies decided to transmit over several frequencies, instead of one, making it difficult for the Germans to pick up the complete signal. Because Qualcomm Inc. created communications chips for CDMA technology, it was privy to the classified information. Once the information became public, Qualcomm claimed patents on the technology and became the first to commercialize it.

As for what to use, I’ll stick with WiFi. When on the train or other places that don’t have WiFi yet, I continue to use the Sprint PCS service. Or is it 1xRTT? Or 3G? Or CDMA? It really is a good service, albeit expensive. I rarely get the advertised 100 kbps+ speed but it is usually at least 50 kbps. The best part is that there are no wires and if the signal is lost, it reconnects when a strong enough signal reappears. I hope the definitions were useful to those may have been curious like me. I found them at Webopedia, which is one of internet.com‘s network of more than 160 Web sites. They have the sites organized into 16 channels. You can find further information at Internet.com.

Other patrickWeb stories about WiFi

Tags: Internet Technology, internet.com, WiFi

Linkedin

I remember being a bit skeptical when LinkedIn first got started. Although I cannot say that I have personally benefited from being a member, I have found it a pleasure to help others by linking them to someone that I know. The concept is a good one: linking people together and enabling linkees to find one another. If you are friends with a few hundred people, then the friends of the friends of the friends of the friends of those friends likely adds up to millions oe people. The beneficiaries would be those who are looking for a job, looking to hire someone, forming a collaborative network, putting a deal together, or just getting in touch. These are all good things. Many people use LinkedIn as a place to put their profile. Mine is at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jrpatrick (I am not looking for a job), but if someone is really intersted in finding out who you are then a profile at wikipedia can be more comprehensive. My wikipedia entry is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Patrick.

The question about LinkedIn is how will it make a profit? So far, job ads are Linkedin’s biggest source of revenue. The basic membership is free but the premium services are quite expensive, like $30 to $75 per month. That is a lot to pay to be able to find someone and send them an email. Perhaps businesses find it cost justified. I hope so. LinkedIn is prudently seeking all the revenue streams it can find: general advertising, job ads, employment services, and premium memberships. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, has had a strong and consistent vision about linking people together. The company is seeking to go public to raise funds for expansion and I wish them the best. Their email to early subscribers was a nice touch.

I want to personally thank you because you were one of LinkedIn’s first million members (member number 371,197 in fact!). In any technology adoption lifecycle, there are the early adopters, those who help lead the way. That was you. We hit a big milestone at LinkedIn this week when our 100 millionth member joined the site. When we founded LinkedIn, our vision was to help the world’s professionals be more successful and productive. Today, with your help, LinkedIn is changing the lives of millions of members by helping them connect with others, find jobs, get insights, start a business, and much more. We are grateful for your support and look forward to helping you accomplish much more in the years to come. I hope that you are having a great year.

Sincerely,

	Reid Hoffman Co-founder and Chairman LinkedIn

Tags: john patrick, linkedin, wikipedia

patrickWeb Store – Books John has read

I have been experimenting with the Amazon aStore and decided to add books that I have read. After I complete a book, I will add it to the patrickWeb aStore so to make it easy for followers of my blog to buy books I have enjoyed, if they choose to. The first book I will add is Bill Bryson’s At Home. Like all Bryson books, it is extraordinary. Bryson takes you on a tour of his home in England room by room–living room, dining room, basement, kitchen, etc. and in each room he delves deeply into the history of things. For example, reading the dining room chapter you end up learning about the history of food, cooking, servants, and many other things in incredible detail just like all his books. I can highly recommend this latest one. Feel free to visit the patrickWeb aStore and take a look. Feedback welcome.

Tags: amazon, astore, book, books, bryson, john patrick

Health Discussions Forum

I am grateful to the readers of patrickWeb for years of visits to the blog and providing excellent feedback to me. I especially appreicate hearing about a typo or bad link or something that improves the site for everyone. As you may have detected, I have developed a strong interest in healthcare.  The interest in healthcare is not new — there are currently 54 posts in patrickWeb that are healthcare related. The involvement on the board and committees of Western Connecticut Healthcare has intensified the interest. I am also working on a doctorate in health administration.

About six months ago I learned about Dr. Eric Lutker, a retired psychologist who is my neighbor in Florida. Eric developed a learning institute at the club we belong to where he invites various resident speakers to make a presentation. I was one of his invited speakers and on election day last month I gave a talk about, guess what, the Future of the Internet. Much of my view about the future of the Internet correlates strongly with the future of healthcare, and my talks have gravitated toward the intersection of information technology and clinical technology. The Q&A session after the talk was 75% healthcare related, and afterward Eric suggested we start a blog on the subject. Hence, the Health Discussions Forum was born. Our goal is simple. We plan to post short healthcare related stories about things we read or opinions and reflections we may have. We have opened up the commenting feature of the blog to allow others to comment on what we write or on the comments other readers have written. We are not sure where it will lead but hopefully, it will be the beginning of a dialog on the important issues and innovations emerging in a very important part of all of our lives.

Now for the true confessions part of this posting. Most readers of patrickWeb visit the blog with Google Reader or other blog readers but there are approximately 300 readers who subscribe via email, receiving the entire post by email whenever a new story is created. I outsource this service through a provider called Feedblitz. In my enthusiasm for the new healthcare blog, I configured Feedblitz to send Health Discussion Forum postings to the patrickWeb subscribers. Less than 5% have unsubscribed so I hope that is because the posts were appreciated or at least tolerated. If you are a subscriber and prefer not to get the healthcare posts, you can unsubscribe at the bottom of one of the emails or if you prefer, just let me know and I will take care of it for you. I apologize to anyone that feels they got opted in unknowingly. If you are not a subscriber to Health Discussions Forum and want to give it a try, feel free to subscribe using the form below.

Tags: blogging, forum, health, health care, health discussions, Healthcare, patrickWeb

iPad – Part 9: The Seventeen Month Review

Most pundits are adults — if not seniors. Perhaps we should get some input from the younger crowd. Much younger. Like one of my grandchildren. After just seventeen months in this world my grandson has a perspective worth knowing about. – and seeing!

iPad stories on patrickWeb
Other gadget related stories on patrickWeb

Tags: grandchildren, grandson, ipad, Kindle, pundit

Change of address: patrickWeb blog has moved

My first web site was started back in 1995 and was located at ibm.com/patrick (IBM was kind enough to maintain the link when I e-tired at the end of 2001). People often asked me how I was able to get a web address so close to the top of the company. The best answer I can offer is that back then people did not know much about the Internet and the web. We were all on a steep learning curve. Since I was out giving speeches about the Future of the Internet and people were calling my office asking how they could get copies of my slides it made sense to build a web site and make the materials publicly available. Walking the talk It was a policy that served me well for years to come.

In July of 2002 I moved ibm.com/patrick to my own personal web site at patrickweb.com. Beginning in 1997 I began to blog about various topics — I called the postings “reflections“. They remain here on patrickWeb. Initially the tool of choice for writing was Lotus Internotes to do the writing and posting but then I experimented with various new blogging tools that were springing up. In July 2003 I switched to Movable Type. I thought it was the ultimate but have now decided to change to WordPress. For my needs it is a clearly superior tool and will save me hours in what I do. As a reader you will not see much difference initially. As I gain expereince with WordPress I plan to integrate it more tightly with patrickWeb. As things unfold you will see a much richer archive with categories and tags, books recently read, better search, and an overall improved look and feel. I hope to have all this completed over the next month or so.

On infrequent occasions I have something to say about the technical aspects of patrickWeb. Most readers will not care about this but for those who do care, patrickWeb will continue to use the Atom protocol to publish the index of 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 reading software, such as Google Reader, to be able to display the date, title, category or categories, and the content of what I write. I believe that Atom is a better long term approach but I will continue to publish in both Atom and RSS.

For those readers who are interested in exactly where the new feeds are you can find them as follows…

RSS feed is at  http://www.patrickweb.com/wordpress/feed/rss/

Atom feed is at http://www.patrickweb.com/wordpress/feed/atom/

For those who read patrickWeb from the homepage no action is required and for those receiving the stories from Feedblitz via email there should be no interruption.

As always, I greatly appreciate feedback about patrickWeb, especially if you find a broken link or an error of any kind. Suggested improvements in look or feel are also appreciated and thanks for reading patrickWeb.

A comparison of RSS and Atom by Tim Bray
More details about Atom
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Amazon Does It Right

Amazon is one of the few web sites that really has their act together. In the Fall of 1995, I made a presentation to a group of CEOs about the Internet. I showed them various web sites that I was fascinated with at the time, mostly related to engineering, scientific, government and academic projects. The word e-business had not yet been coined by IBM and there were not many exciting business web sites. One that seemed quite novel though was a site called Amazon.com. I asked for a show of hands from those who had heard of Amazon. Not a single hand went up.

Amazon opened its virtual doors in July 1995 with a mission to “use the Internet to transform book buying into the fastest, easiest, and most enjoyable shopping experience possible”. During the next few years Amazon became very popular and it was hailed as not only the best web site, but also as the new model of how businesses of all kinds would operate. The stock climbed from obscurity to a market capitalization of nearly $50 billion. (See other stories about Amazon in patrickWeb)

Amazon customer service is second to none. In more than a dozen years I have never once heard of a disgruntled customer. The company continues to innovate. The Kindle has been a joy. Many of us have talked about “wrap rage” when it comes to packaging. Amazon is actually doing something about it. Fortunately, Jeff Bezos has small children and has experienced the impossibility of opening toys so he has pressured manufacturers to stop their bad packaging habits and has introduced Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging.

Some years ago I enabled an Amazon Store page here on patrickWeb. If someone buys via a link from the site a small commission is generated. It amounts to less than $50 per year and more than all of it goes to charity. I just like the idea of providing a link to a retailer that I think does a really great job for customers. Forecasters are saying that online sales are not going to be so great this year. Could be, but I would not be surprised to see Amazon beat expectations. They are starting the shopping season aggressively with their Black Friday Sale.

Net Attitude on Kindle

The Kindle is quite an amazing device (see "Kindlized") and I am irrevocably hooked. In addition to buying a growing number of Kindle books, I now have one for sale. Net Attitude continues as a book but I suspect the Kindle version will have the edge going forward. The patrickWeb blog will also soon be available for the Kindle. Amazon is having growing pains as try to ingest a lot more blogs than they expected. The blogs will be updated daily so that Kindle users will always have the latest postings for all the blogs they subscribe to.

Technical Update

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

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