Supernova 2008 – Part 6 (final)

This will be my final comments about things I learned at Supernova 2008 in June. The prior comments are all in the conference section of patrickWeb. A "People" panel was moderated by BJ Fogg, whom I first met when he presented YackPack at Demo a few years ago. The research shows that people are endlessly creative, that the majority of most people’s time is spent offline, and that there are very large differences between the skills people have in using the Internet. There is a correlation between skill level and willingness to share — the more people know about the Internet the more likely they are to share what they know. Some argued that the skill level is a function of priority given. I am certain of that point. I know many people who could be web savvy if they wanted to be but they would rather play golf or work in the garden. Nothing wrong with that. There is a social technographics ladder that includes people who are inactive, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, and creators. Some postulated that user background is related to digital media savvy but that it is not an age thing. Another study however showed a very strong correlation between age and these various categories. The study would suggest that at my age I should be technologically inactive! I guess I just don’t fit the mold.

Social information discovery is a relatively new term but the phenomenon has been around from the beginnings of the Internet — you can ask a question and get a lot of people to answer. Sharing today is still done mostly in email which puts high social activation energy on the sender but social networks are changing this. We will share a lot more in the future. Social sites are causing an evolution to the entire web becoming social. User generated content used to be something you go to a site to do like epinions.com or or ticketmaster to find out what people are saying. The problem is that you don’t know the people who are making the comments. In the emerging social web you can see what your friends and colleagues think or what they are doing or what the friends of your friends think about restaurant, book, or movie. It is much more relevant.

There are a number of inhibitors to social networks reaching their potential. Our identity is too fragmented — logins and passwords galore. We have profiles here, there, and everywhere. Applications are incompatible among the various social networks. I am optimistic that this will all come together in a way that meets our security and privacy expectations. The short answer to these concerns is the evolution of standards. OpenID is trying to create a single identification that you can use at any web site. Oauth is an emerging approach for authentication so that you can allow access for a web site to get information about you from another web site but only certain information you have authorized, not all the information. OpenSocial is developing an approach to allow a Facebook application to work at MySpace or any other social network. Google Friend Connect is attempting to bring all three of these together into a social web.

Although I remain optimistic about the concerns, a panel on "Privacy and Security in the Network Age" with
Moderator Andrea Matwyshyn (Wharton), Bruce Schneier (BT Counterpane), Fran Maier (TrustE), Gerard Lewis (Comcast), and Lauren Gelman (Stanford CIS) dug into some of the stark realities. They attempted to answer the question of whether we are entering an era where individuals gain new control over their public personas, and powerful means to leverage reputations or will we be forced to abandon any hope of protecting our privacy and trusting what we encounter online?

Although he claimed to be optimistic, Bruce Schneier, a world renowned expert on privacy, was actually quite gloomy. Everything we do creates a transaction record and the resulting data records have value to others. Storage costs online are now so cheap, nothing gets thrown away. Google, your wireless provider, your healthcare insurance company, etc. all save every piece of data about you and what you do or look for. The trend will accelerate. There are many invasive technologies out there — surveillance video cameras will be so small in the future that we won’t know they are there. Our every movement will be captured. Soon we will be living in a world where no conversation will be private. While some frame the debate as security vs privacy, Bruce framed it as liberty versus control and said that "data is the pollution of the information age". In spite of these pronouncements, the experts are short term pessimistic but long term optimistic. Me too. The government may be watching us but we can watch them too.

The final session I attended was about Broadband Policy. The United States now ranks 15th in the world in terms of availability of broadband to consumers. We had a discussion about what we would do about it if we became policy advisor to the new president. We came up with the following.

A lot of us suggested getting rid of the FCC. It’s an ineffective political entity. Other suggestions were to map the gaps where infrastructure and users are and are not, take spectrum policy and flush it, take on universal service and revamp it to focus on broadband instead of pay phones, Un-ban municipal wireless broadband, and benchmark the US against other countries. There are some good things happening such as Verizon’s deployment of optical fiber but overall there is not enough competition and there are too many lobbyists seeking protection for large telecommunications companies. When I spoke at the World Wide Web conference in Paris in 1994 the U.S. was the Internet leader. France was skeptical to be kind. Today France is enabling WiFi throughout the country and partnering with utility companies to offer broadband at 100 times the speed of what the U.S. telcos define as broadband. I would like to be more optimistic on this front but I do not know of another industry (telecommunications providers) that have so many lobbyists urging protection and so many customers who are locked into services that they don’t like.

Other patrickWeb stories about conferences

Roku

About fifteen years ago one of my children worked at Blockbuster. One day I told him that Bockbuster would be history because people would be downloading their movies from the Internet. Yeah, right Dad. Ok, I was a bit ahead of my time. In the intervening years there have been numerous companies started to offer various ways to get movies via the Net but none have gotten much traction. The most successful innovation has been Netflix which offers 100,000 movies and an incredibly efficient distribution system for DVDs. The barriers to a downloading or streaming approach have included technology cost, inadequate bandwidth, complexity, device incompatibilities, and intellectual property concerns.

Then along came the Netflix Roku. The snazzy new device may be like manna from heaven for movie lovers. I have had previous experience with Roku. A few years ago I installed a Roku box for pictures. It enables the display of digital pictures on any TV in the house via the home local area network and can be a nice thing at holiday time. The Roku for Netflix movies is a fraction of the size and allows watching up to 10,000 movies or TV episodes on any TV in the house, if you have a video distribution system, or if you don’t then you can use the Roku with the TV of your choice — home theatre, HD, non-HD, any TV. I took the Roku out of the box, plugged in the power supply, and connected the cables to the video jacks. You then need to connect the Roku to the Internet. You can either plug it into your home LAN or connect via WiFi. The hookup took about three minutes. The TV then displays a code which you enter at netflix.com and you are then activated. A new tab is added to your account at Netflix labeled "Watch Instantly". You make a selection and it shows up on the Roku screen on your TV. You push the play button on the Roku remote and the movie starts streaming. I was watching a movie within five minutes of taking the Roku out of the box.

Streaming is different than downloading. There is no hard drive on the Roku. The movie comes from a server at Netflix directly to the Roku. Some buffering obviously takes place as I detected no jitters or pixelation. I was quite impressed with the quality. Looks like a DVD. Does this mean the end of DVDs? Yes, but it will take quite a while. Music is shifting to digital but there are still a lot of CDs sold. The transition for DVDs will take longer for a number of reasons. Streaming requires a stable and reliable one million bit per second connection. In theory, any DSL or Cable Internet provider should be able to provide that but in practice it is spotty. The trend is certainly in the right direction. HD streaming is not yet available but surely it will soon. That will require more bandwidth. So far only 10% of the Netflix collection is available for streaming. Not sure how fast they will be able to convert the rest.

The pricing is good. If you already subscribe to Netflix under any plan of $9.99 per month or more then you get unlimited streaming at no extra cost. The Roku unit is $99 plus shipping. Movies and TV episodes are selected via the web site just like picking a DVD. All things considered, I think Netflix and Roku hit a home run. Not perfect but you can see the beginning of the end of DVDs.

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.

WiFi Update No. 16

WiFi is alive and prospering with JiWire now reporting that there are 215,777 free and paid WiFi hotspots in 135 countries. , JiWire’s WiFi Hotspot Finder makes it easy to locate wireless Internet access around the globe but there are also a number of other tools available. I like the JiWire Hotspot Finder plugin for Skype. The plugin adds a "bot" to your to your list of contacts. Not sure what happens is you say "whazzup" but if you say "wifi toledo ohio", it replies to you saying "I found 45 locations with wifi within 3 miles of Toledo".

At some point not too far in the future there will be millions of hotspots and millions of mobile phones with WiFi built in. Not sure about the iPhone but millions of mobile phones will also have Skype and other VoIP applications on them. It doesn’t mean free long distance but it does mean long distance at a fraction of the current cost. If you travel in Europe you know it can cost dollars per minute to call back to the U.S. I recently got a new MaxRoam SIM smart card for the Treo 700P (which I use when out of the country). MaxRoam allows you to "travel global, pay local, and your callers pay local too". You can pick a U.S. number for the card. If you are in Paris and someone calls you the U.S. it costs .21 Euros (about 30 cents) per minute. If you call the U.S. it costs .38 euros (about 56 cents) per minute. It won’t be long before the words "long distance" only have meaning when it comes to air, sea, or land travel.

Meanwhile, the FON Community continues to grow. Fon wants WiFi to be available everywhere and they are doing a lot to make it happen. The idea is that FON members (foneros) share their wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi access wherever they find another Fonero’s Access Point. To become a "fonero" you go to the Fon website and order La Fonera which is a wireless access point about the size of a mobile phone. You connect La Fonera to a spare port on the back of your cable or DSL modem. La Fonera emits two wireless network signals — a private and a public one. The private signal is encrypted and offers you complete privacy. The public signal will be accessible to Foneros only. This free signal is the one that turns your broadband connection into a FON Access Point. I think FON is a really good idea (See prior story, "How To Become A Fonero").

Other patrickWeb stories about WiFi

One Laptop Per Child

There will be millions of iPhones, Casio cameras, and other electronic gifts given this holiday season. If you want to give the gift of a lifetime and get satisfaction that you are helping improve the world, then consider buying a Laptop XO. For the price of an Amazon Kindle, you can be part of a really big idea. Originated at MIT, One Laptop Per Child, aims to put computers in the hands of millions of children in developing countries. "One learning child. One connected child. One laptop at a time".

The OLPC laptop has been in development for years but is now becoming a reality. Manufacturing has started and orders are being taken online between now and yearend. For $399, get a laptop for yourself — or a lucky child you may know — and one will also be given to a less fortunate child in Cambodia, Greece, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, Uruguay, or other participating countries. (The countries themselves are buying XO’s — Nigeria ordered one million of them).
The two-for-one deal includes a full year of T-Mobile Hotspot WiFi service.

The XO has quite an impressive set of features and functions. The design optimizes power usage. The Internet connectivity is by WiFi but it also uses wireless mesh networking. This means that each XO acts as a wireless access point in a peer-to-peer fashion sharing connectivity with a nearby XO. The software is all open source and free including Linux, a web browser, word processor, email, audio and video player, and a very clever graphical user interface.

I hope large numbers of people, companies, and foundations participate in the limited time offer and that many millions of children will benefit. As an individual, the T-Mobile WiFi subscription for a year plus the $200 tax deduction for the donated laptop, it is hard to go wrong. Visit LaptopGiving.org during the holidays and you can make a difference.