Telepocalypse

Friends like this

I previously wrote about how campaign organisations that want better connectivity should "respect the layers". That means they should campaign for connectiviy, or for "application" issues like free speech, DRM, copyright, etc.; but nor both.

Illustrating the point again is the EFF's current outrage over Apple's well-publicised persuit of bloggers who were given tip-offs about future Apple product releases. The core of the case is whether bloggers should have the protection of anyonymous sources that traditional journalists routinely enjoy.

I personally think the outcry here is misplaced. Freedom of speech is often in tension with other freedoms and responsibilities. In this case, it is with contract law, since the sources of the information had clearly signed NDA agreements with Apple. To not grant Apple their case means any NDA contract is rendered ineffectual as long as the information is laundered through a third party. I fail to see how it is in the public interest to eviserate contract law in order to protect the immoral release of information that has no public interest significance. (Viz the judges's comment that public interest != interested public.)

Regardless of this, reasonable people could vigorously disagree over the matter, yet simultaneously be in favour of progressive policies at the connectivity level. By covering such a broad range of issues, the EFF is alienating some of its potential support base. The intellectual property issues are easily tarred with commie anti-property propaganda, however unfairly. But the connectivity issue is as more about establishing free-market competition as any socialisation agenda.

Tomorrow it's the long heave over from Edinburgh to Washington DC for Freedom to Connect. Ironically the EFF is a major sponsor, so I'll see if I can find an answer to these apparent contradictions. Since there's a webcast, I won't be doing blow-by-blow blogging, but watch this space for the usual summary and analysis.

Prior art

Today's idea is one that someone else has no doubt already patented and implemented in a VR system 20 years ago. But nevermind.

The stupid network is all about intelligence at the edge. But the edge is fuzzy. Does it begin with my DSL modem? My laptop? Or the headset I speak into?

Well, I want to see more intelligence at that very last bit of the edge. In particular, I want a headset that has a motion sensor in it, so it knows if it is being worn (unless you're so stupefyingly drunk and comatose you've stopped moving entirely). My presence icon is then either wearing a headset or not, and people know if I'm ready to talk.

There is a certain irony to this. It involves replacing a headphone using minijacks -- layer 0 analogue transmission -- with one using USB and a rich protocol. So the last link in the machine network gets smarter, not stupider, in order to push intelligence to the edge.

A mile a minute

It's lousy running a network business. The capital expenses are horrendous. The customers complain all the time. There are endless congestion and delays. And you don't make any money at the end of the day either.

It's awful running an airline, isn't it?

But the airlines could teach the telecom industry a few lessons. Consider frequent flyer miles. These progams have become so valuable that they are often the sole profit centre of the airline. When airlines threaten to go bankrupt, their points partners like credit card companies bail them out.

The bad news is that people redeem these miles and this means flying expensive planes around and adding more fuel for every kilogram in the air. But what happens when you move from bums on seats to bits in pipes?

Today I saw an advert (sorry, forgot URL) for Rolling Stone magazine promising a sweepstake for 5000 downloads. There's zero incremental cost in minting these 5000 files. It's a genius idea; conjure money up from nowhere. The music industry should see where its future lies: you don't sell the music directly, you bolt it on to other profitable acivities.

"Minutes of use" are also effectively zero marginal cost. Although wireline metered telephony is feeling rather unwell and writing a will as a matter of urgency, pay-by-the-second alive and well on wireless.

So if I was a wireless telco, my next step would be to create a good old-fashioned loyalty scheme. Only open to monthly payers (we really love that recurring revenue stuff!). But you can earn minutes by taking out a mortgage, buying a new car, or applying for a loan.

It's money for old rope, as they say. Except you don't even need the rope.

April fool!

Oh, sorry -- am I a bit early? Never mind, here's a great joke from The Register:

O2 is to axe 500 jobs as part of a major restructuring of its business. The mobilephoneco wants to replace back office workers tied up with managerial and admin tasks and replace them with 2,000 workers dealing directly with punters.

It also plans to open a fourth call centre and expand its network of shops. [...]

Which means that the mobile outfit will spend more time chatting up its punters so they won't up sticks and switch allegiance to one of the discount mobile operators - such as easyMobile - currently making a big noise in the market.

Errr... but the punters are only interested in customer service if the product doesn't work. Otherwise, they just keep talking.

So apparently the way to battle low-cost competitors of a largely undifferentiated product is to increase your cost base. Rapidly.

No wonder I never made more than manager grade -- I clearly don't have what it takes.

OPINION://Feeling your presence

Over at we make money not art I saw an article on these wonderful chairs. They are designed for indoor public places, and are made from translucent plastic. Embedded sensors can tell if someone is sitting on them. Each chair has lighting that can vary in intensity and colour, and also can pulse. A central unit controls the whole show according to who sits where and for how long.

What excites me about this is that it is a great example of what you might call "Galbian presence". Anyone who has read Douglas Galbi's awesome treatise on the history of presence will immediately see the sensuousness of these "presence chairs". Galbi rightly pulls out examples of sensuous communication from history such as religious manuscripts. Part of "presence" is that tingle you get when you actually see -- in real life -- Stonehenge, the Book of Kells, or the Declaration of Independence.

It is very easy when talking about presence to get sucked into thinking about IM icons, and the messaging of comings and going using protocols like SIMPLE. But go take a look at the work of Media Lab Europe in Dublin. They have flower pots that bloom according to the availability of your special other. Tables that remember what was on them. Then there are the haptic (touchy feely) instant messages, the time-smeared entrance lobby webcam, and so on. Presence isn't just about smiley icons.

Now I'm a consultant again, I can't resist the urge to map these onto a 2×2 grid. Along the bottom I'd put Galbi's "sensuousness". On the vertial, I'd put -- for want of a better term -- "continuity". By that I mean "that which connects the past, present and future".

So the flower pot is quite sensuous, but doesn't offer much continuity; it only shows present state. The glowing chairs are both sensuous and continuous. The visual history will even influence where people sit in future.

A standard IM client presence icon isn't very sensuous. But it is quite continuous; it doesn't just tell you whether someone is there now, but also suggests whether you'll be able to talk to them in the near future. It doesn't tell you, though, if they're available often. That would be better represented as sparklines.

Whether you're available in the future is often encoded in your calendar. Microsoft really get presence, IMHO, and are integrating all the pieces very nicely in their new collaboration tools and mobile offerings. If they end up owning the world (again), it's because the competition got lost trying to emulate the PSTN on IP.

Emoticons are a means of making chat more sensuous. The voice quality of Skype talk, however, is very sensuous over a good connection. It is also continuous; you can simply talk about the past and future.

As I noted before, the missed calls list in your mobile or Skype client is a form of anti-presence, because you weren't there. But we can work to make it all a lot better. Just because someone called doesn't mean they will want to talk to you. It could just be a wrong number! What if you could end your attempted call in two ways? Press the red phone button for "terminate with prejudice" -- this call is dead; press the green phone button for "let's parlez" -- sorry I missed you, please call back. It's the circuit-switched mindset that stops us from going here; the idea that the end of the call is the end of the connection and terminates the conversation. The message isn't "tear down circuit" any more, folks!

Even in Skype, there's no real difference between "is there" presence and "wants to have a chat". The Skype client could probably find out if you're typing furiously, or click-dragging. It could find out what application has focus. These are indicators you're involved in some task involving mental "flow", like authoring, drawing or organising. You shouldn't be interrupted. Whereas if you're just reading and clicking links, it's much less of an issue to have to pick up your thoughts. Why doesn't Skype make an intelligent guess as to my status: "working", "browsing", "reading", etc.?

The concepts of presence and absence have been great fodder for modern art. Today I was in the Dean Gallery with my daughter, admiring a Picasso-like abstract sculpture of a body, with the bits rearranged. Little madam was happily reeling off the names of the body parts, unperturbed by the unexpected absence of a torso. Artists have also long played off the notion of unexpectedly being there -- think of the Warhol soup can, the Duchamp urinal. We haven't yet got the message in our communications tools, though. If someone I know is always online, it's not news she's online right now. Tell me what's unexpected! Who is around that's hard to get hold of?

It somewhat reminds me of this classic Led Zeppelin album cover (for Presence, no less).

Inside, further characters from the 1940s and 50s festishise (in the designer's words) an "obsessional object", which is simultaneously present and absent:

I think you're getting the idea:

(These are all scanned and reproduced without permission from The Work Of Hipgnosis - Walk Away Rene, so nah nah, sue me.)

Taking this as a cue, why not make "presence" and "absence" more explicit features of our messaging tools? For instance, you're expected to make an effort to upload a picture of yourself into Skype. That's presence. Why not get people to also upload a picture of the back of their head? That's what you see for "absence". Bob called, but you just missed him -- look, there he is, going away.

These issues may seem trivial today, but imagine a world not so far away when you have thousands of contacts. Think of every company or person you've even called. Consider that most of those interactions weren't one-off. How will we manage "presence" in this environment? How will you remain "in the presence of" former work colleagues? It's a much bigger and richer problem than availability, contactability or address management.

If we're going to make the public's presence glands tingle, we're going to have to do much better than the first generation of IP tools. Sensuous, continuous, inverted and unexpected. That's the strange world of presence we need to urgently explore.

Tail wagging the dog

I'm seeing a lot of write-ups about The Long Tail these days. Has anyone else noticed that this is just a refinement and extension of Content is Not King?

Sorry, can you speak up a bit?

I'm increasingly noticing a problem with using PCs for teletalk, but I think it can be fixed.

Every laptop I've ever had, even the most boring corporate Dell, has had a microphone. Maybe not the best, but there's a little hole somewhere with some mysterious pimples at the bottom that captures your utterances for digital transmission.

Except my current laptop. Compaq, in their infinite wisdom, sliced this feature off the list. I didn't even think to look. OK, it was really cheap, and I've otherwise been happy with it. I'm sure losing a 25 cent microphone makes quite a different to a razor-thin profit margin.

So when people want to talk to me, I either need to plug in a headset or pull out by Bluetooth earpiece. I move around the house a lot with my laptop; either trying to find a quiet baby-free spot to work, or keeping things out of reach of grubby little fingers. I don't have a static set-up where things are always plugged in.

The problem is that many conversations begin with the Skype client ringing, and me having to initiate a chat session to tell them to hold on whilst I fish out my headset and plug it in. The caller doesn't know that I don't have a microphone plugged in or embedded in my laptop. My laptop doesn't know if anything is plugged into the socket. There's no "hardware presence".

The way round this might be for the voice application to see whether it can hear anything; if there doesn't appear to be any ambient sound over an extended period, assume no microphone is present, or nobody is around. Either way, the user's presence status needs updating.

Another problem is that the sound on my laptop might be turned off or set to zero. Some laptops have an analogue sound control, but mine is digital, with a mute, up and down buttons. Other people use the software volume control in their OS. Yet my "presence" (really "contactability") doesn't reflect any of this. A question for philosophers out there: is a softphone really ringing if the ring volume is zero?

Your PSTN desk phone normally has a ringer on/off button, and also a mute, but the PSTN isn't capable of transmitting a message "ringer off" or "they can't hear you" from the edge to the core. So it has the same problems. This is an opportunity for the stupid network to differentiate itself on features and usability. Why isn't anyone seizing the chance?

PS -- Switching between Bluetooth and a plug-in headset is also a usability disaster zone. Why doesn't my Skype client or Windows do something sensible, like notice the BT headset isn't currently connected and revert to the normal speakers and sockets? Had anyone every actually done a usability labs study on people using VoIP clients? I haven't used iChat, but I suspect Apple are the only ones who put user experience at the forefront.

Two pints of milk and a mobile, please

The great thing about having your parents come and stay is that you can wander around the supermarket without concern about one's wayward offspring. Yesterday we were in Tesco -- the UK's largest supermarket chain -- and I couldn't help but start to dissect their Tesco Mobile MVNO offering.

Here's the display:

It's a fuzzy phonecam shot, but that's a good thing because it makes the message stand out. Which bits can you read clearly?

See the prices of the phones? Just about. Their brand names? Nope. The fact you get Tesco Clubcard points and a top-up bonus gets more room. Their features? Hope you didn't leave your reading glasses at home.

The price and the promotion are what matter at Tesco.

There is a short blurb on each phone listing the key features, and some pictographs of them. But I think they could still do a lot better. Why not just label the phone "Great basic phone", "Best for kids: games, 'tones and MP3s", etc? Why make the customer do all the work?

Also, you don't buy a word processor because it was written in C++. You don't choose which airline to fly because of the Rolls Royce engines that power the plane. So why are we marketing phones as being "With JAVA Gaming"? Most people don't know what it means, and those that do probably don't care. Why not emphasise the features that make the phone different, rather than make them standard?

Over to the right of this Tesco Mobile display was another rack, this time branded to the network operators. Out of interest I picked up the Vodafone box. "Calls from 2p/minute!". Turn the box over, read the small print -- you know that "from" hides a world of evil. At the bottom are lines and lines of legal verbosity referring to various price plans encoded in terms only a Vodafreak would know.

So Tesco's customers don't care if there's a possible cheaper price elsewhere -- they have confidence that the price they see is the price they pay. No wonder the discount MVNO operators are cleaning up -- Vodafone don't know how to position themselves in non-premium markets. They're too used to fat corporate monthly spending accounts. They don't know how to run a low-cost operation, and unlike the airlines there's no real connectivity equivalent of the business class seat.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the network operators being driven out of the pre-pay market ... on their own networks! After all, one of the biggest issues with pre-pay is topping up, and Tesco have much more regular contact and lower transaction/agency costs than the mobile operators. They can spead the cost of their loyalty scheme across a much broader base. Their amazing data-collection capability means they know your household spending patterns in great detail, and can pitch very accurate offers.

In fact, Vodafone et al are trapped in a catch-22 situation: he inflexible voice network inhibits the introduction of premium features; but a stupid network wouldn't let them capture the value of the new features, because people would turn to 3rd party apps like Skype which would get baked into the handsets.

I've had many discussions about the wisdom of MVNOs from the network operator's perspective. You're outsourcing the customer relationship, which is very dangerous. When the time for contract re-negotiation come round, who will be wearing the brown underwear -- Tesco or O2? I think you know the answer.

It is instructive to see the ease with which Qwest abandoned its own network, flogged off its spectrum, and rolled its customers into a Sprint MVNO. If it was that easy, then the journey onto a competing operator isn't likely to be too taxing.

On the other hand, the first operator into the MVNO market might have a fighting chance if they get plenty of scale. They can offer a "soup to nuts" MVNO platform including billing, care, ops reporting, handset logistics, content vending, etc. They can drive down their own bloated internal costs as long as they're not be too attached to their legacy "own brand" customers and the high margins they generate. The outcome is more like a land management and leasing company than a telco; acquire spectrum, hire contractors like Nortel to build the network, and just worry about a modest horizontal slice of co-ordinating capacity and the operational platform. Get out of the application layer and let someone else worry about it.

Remediated

I've long struggled to keep up with Techdirt, The Register and Slashdot for disintermediation and reintermediation stories. Making my job much easier is unmediated, which in their own words is "Tracking the tools that decentralize the media". I can thoroughly recommend their newsfeed -- I hope they end up making a career our of it like paidContent.org.

OPINION://Details, details

I'd like to point out some itsy bitsy details that show how Skype is differentiating itself from the run-of-the-mill VoIP softphone or IM client. I think people sometimes look for profound reasons why Skype is wildly popular while others aren't, and the answer is actually about fairly mundane execution issues.

Here's the XTen user interface:

Now, I'm aware that their main busines is to OEM the softphone to other people and have it re-skinned. But oh my God! this is awful. For a start there are the non-standard window controls. The UI tries to re-create the layout limitations of a desk phone. And then there are some acronymic hieroglyphs in the display.

Skype just look, well, normal. Boring, in fact. Just enough anti-aliased chrome and icons to tell you it's a professional job. No more.

I'm sure the underlying technology of XTen is just wonderful. But this softphone will never get viral adoption; I'd never dream of asking my mum to install it.

And now "Pulver's communicator":

The bad news is it didn't just work out of the box. There's a usability glitch: it gives you a dialog box with your FWD number, but doesn't say "no panic -- we'll email this to you". It also asks for a lot of private information up-front (name, address, e-mail), which is a strange way to start a relationship. Then there was some bizarre login error when the client started.

Vendors should think of the adoption of their product as being a courtship. Never demand too much of the other party early on. Don't blow your nose in a mucky handkerchief while chatting a girl up.

However, the ability to integrate with other clients is a big plus. Verizon Wireless whipped Sprint PCS's ass by emphasising better coverage and network quality rather than cool features. Being able to reach more buddies is the application-layer equivalent. However, the sheer scale of Skype and the ease of running multiple IM clients means that Pulver's "embrace and extend" probably won't have much strategic value.

Another XTen sin is putting a virtual keypad up-front. Bad, bad, bad. At least Pulver gets the idea that the first stage of a successful call is finding someone available to talk to. Presence first, dialling second.

Yet both Pulver and Yahoo miss a simple optimisation. I apologise in advance to all my buddies for compromising your privacy and publicing shaming you by such association with me. You know how to delete me from your buddy lists in retribution.

Both clients sort the buddy list alphabetically. I don't mentally sort my contacts alphabetically.

Now take a look at Skype:

Voila! The UI emphasises people available to talk to. Is it really so hard?

As an aside, just imagine the possibilities if mobile phone companies weren't trapped by a PSTN mindset and tried to use presence to sell you more phone calls... Can you imagine any other business where one product accounts for 80%+ of your revenue, but you never attempt to promote consumption at the point of sale?

Skype is also noteworthy for the features it doesn't include. For instance, I detest the Yahoo! Insider marketing pop-up in Yahoo IM, and always disable it. But it's a nuisance. The UI is also littered with other cross-marketing junk. I don't care. Take it away.

Another example of attention-to-detail in Skype. I was having an asynchronous Skype chat with my brother, who is trying to make the most northerly Skype call ever from here.

The Yahoo IM client allows off-line messages, but doesn't tell you about their delivery. Skype is offering "message presence" as well as "person presence" -- was your message received and digested? The immediacy of the connection is just so much richer. The "being there" gap is smaller.

Now Skype isn't perfect. For instance, most people haven't uploaded a picture of themselves. Would it have been so hard to make it easy to create a cartoonish personal character? Can't Skype do better than annoying pop-ups to communicate buddies coming and going? Why can't I just be notified of the arrivals of people with whom I want to initiate a conversation? Why can't I tag buddies as "must remember to call Bob"?

Nevertheless, the authors of Skype appreciate that calls don't exist in isolation; they have a lifecycle. Presence and "missed calls" ("anti-presence" -- you weren't there) are important to the initiation of a call, and history links one call or chat to the next. Skype is winning the VoIP wars by default as the competition flounders. Maybe it's about time they flattered the market leader with some imitation?

PC problems

I'm usually pretty strict about staying vaguely on-topic, but this one had me baffled for a while, and I'd like to share the solution with you all.

Most times I connected my PC to the Net it would freeze up for 30 seconds or so. Extremely frustrating. I tried a ton of different solutions, spent hours Googling.

It turns out to be a problem with Windows XP service pack 2. This attempts to limit the number of concurrent part-opened network sockets to 10. This limit is too low. You can see if you're suffering from this problem by checking your system event log and looking for "error 4226" warnings.

Unfortunately, in their unbounded wisdom Microsoft chose not to make this configurable via a registry entry. To fix it go here and download a tweak tool that mangles your network drivers.

This is particularly relevant to Skype users, as Skype is "connection hungry".

Almost makes you want to buy a Mac. (Except I'm allergic to BSD trailing slash semantics...)

UPDATE: Just an FYI, this problem doesn't rear its head when you boot your PC and the network connection already exists; in that case the applications start over a spread-out period of time. It's when you boot everything, and then connect there's a sudden rush to the connectivity exit and the tragedy occurs. Hey, Bill thought 640Kb was enough, so surely nobody will want to start more than 10 network connections at once...

Say "Cheese!"

My daughter -- all 12Kg of her -- is a cheesophile. Wherever we now go we have to take a little tub of cheese with us, otherwise we're liable to SERIOUS CUSTOMER DISSATISFACTION. We also have a tub of raisins as an emergency backup -- somehow the prospect of fiddling with little dried grapes can end quite severe hissy fits. Don't ask me why.

I put away a few things from the dish drying rack this morning, and left her cheese tub beside the kitchen sink. A little hand pops up and drags it onto the floor.

"No cheeese!" ... "Nohw cheessuh!" (Those vowels are pretty mangled. Use your imagination.)

She pauses.

"No ray-sins"

So to her, it's not defined by being a container, but by what it doesn't contain.

Along similar lines, we're often stuck in a rather infantile view of IP communications and VoIP. We grab the microphone, and stutter "No cost! No cost!". The more perceptive even blurt out "Service provider gone! No see service provider!". A rather naive view often follows -- "Daddy! WANT service provider".

But VoIP is just a container. Don't worry about it not containing what you ate yesterday. Just think of the goodies it will be stuffed with tomorrow.

And thus ends this Sunday morning's sermon.

Net Over the Voice

Was just speaking to someone over at the VON conference, and he sounded, well, a bit bored by it all. Was enjoying it, meeting good people, but not having his worldview shaken.

It occurs to me that now that the technology for VoIP more-or-less works, the raison d'etre for VON is going away. "VON" -- "Voice On the Net" -- is really a synonym for VoIP. It's a technology-centric focus. But can you imagine attending a conference called "Web Pages Expo 2005"? "HTTP World 2005"? I suspect not.

This isn't to disrespect the essential work that's been done. Until this last year or so, there have been too many gaps in the technology, so it was the right problem to attack. But Skype has since provided an existence proof of the usability, quality, scalability and mass adoption of VoIP. I don't know if Skype will be a long-term success, but it provides a lower bound on the value of VoIP. I suspect there will be another year or two of growth of VON -- it takes time to get the word out -- but after than the real action is all in the IT, connectivity and consumer electronics businesses.

Just like the HTTP example, this step change doesn't mean web pages or VoIP calls aren't critically important technologies. It's just we not need to start looking at the problems they can be used to solve. Instead of a supplier-centric conference, it becomes a user-centric one. I'm sure Pulver will manage the inflection point just fine.

Notably absent from VON are mobile carriers. The "problem" for consumers is the sense of "being there", and keeping in social touch with friends and colleagues. Picture taking, messaging, advanced presence, identity and other value components come into play. But this "conference" for personal mobility solutions is staged daily in Radio Shacks, Best Buys and Carphone Warehouses. At best some users will come to a show like CES.

Enterprise end-users probably aren't as well represented at VON as they could be; much of the action at VON is suppliers in the supply chain working together, not customers hunting for applications. But the theme for the conference won't be telephony; more like "efficient team communications", although doubtless somewhat snappier.

Finally, the wonkier policy issues will get thrashed out in other forums. You are coming, aren't you?

Out of this world

A reader generously points out to me that ET can phone home for only $3.99 a minute.

Or, as the Marginal Revolution economics blog would say, "markets in everything".

OPINION://Ontologically speaking

I was reading David Weinberger's reports on how the New York Times is planning on tackling its "link rot" problem where articles slip behind the pay-wall. Part of their solution appears to be to replace articles with their summaries.

As usual, this got me thinking about telephony. Why don't phone calls and callers have URIs or URLs? [Side note: URL is something you can actually fetch over the Net, URI is just a unique name.]

Let's take addressing the endpoints first.

Obviously, ENUM is one way of "Internetising" the phone number address space. Furthermore, RFC 2806 "URLs for Telephone Calls" has a backways-looking way of creating URLs for PSTN end points, as "tel:", "fax:" and "modem:".

But does ENUM really go far enough? Does it have the right balance between the "DNS" part of URIs (e.g. "foo.com") with the "path" part? In other words, why do we need to put all the transient stuff into a format-constrained and centralised ENUM/DNS database? Why should I have to gain anyone else's blessing as to what records I store in the directory? Why don't you fax me at enum://www.martingeddes.com/fax://? (Your syntax may vary.) Why bundle the core identities, delegation, access control and personas into a single database?

It's not a criticism; just an observation. I don't have an answer.

ENUM also is rather "telco-centric" in that it tries to record the connectivity protocols to reach me. Although not necessarily technically constrained, in practice it doesn't seem to play well with the bigger identity picture of federation, or meta-data about who I am and who is willing to back those assertions as being true. On the other hand, not being all-things-to-all-people may be a feature and not a bug; that said, I'm not sure if its a good solution to a badly-framed problem.

In other words, there's probably still work to do in the establishment of URIs for identities and personas.

The "conversation" itself also lacks references. I can't link to the phone call we had last week -- neither the metadata nor the media; the dump of chat conversations from my Skype client doesn't include URLs. No URLs for voicemails, or for emails.

URLs are the network extension of a basic Unix philosophy. Loosely speaking, everything in Unix is a file or a sequence of characters. That makes for simple building blocks to create new things. Call it "stupid computing", if you like. Complex IBM operating systems with enforced journalling, sharing and transactionality (think: QoS, smart networks) lost out. URLs do the same for distributed network resources as Unix files do for single computers.

Solutions based on URLs (or plaintext files) tend to be less "efficient" than custom-designed solutions, but more resilient in the face of change. (Sound familiar?) I casually note the rapid rise of URL-friendly blogs and wikis, and the relative obscurity of vertically integrated collaboration tools like Groove.

I saw a good example of "URLization" from Joi Ito the other day. Product managers at various companies are being encouraged to use Technorati to track commentary on their products. If your product doesn't have a clear, unique URI, then you're in trouble. Will Peerio objects have URLs? Is GNUP really the DNS for distributed persistent objects?

This all brings me to my big question: on the Internet, if something doesn't have a URL, does it really exist? Or has it just disappeared into the analog memory hole, only existing as a memory in the brains of the humans it passed through?

We need to crack the URL problem for real-time communications like IM and phone calls. Until we do, the IP revolution will be stalled re-inventing solutions to elemental problems within endless vertical silos.

Follow the money

Just took a look at my most recent phone bill. Lots of calls across Europe, to the USA. All virtually free.

69% of my phone bill comes from one call. Of the 2 hours and 15 minutes I spent yakking on my PSTN phone, 8 minutes was spent talking to the US Embassy's premium rate enquiries number.

So I'd like to modify a previous claim I made that the correct price of a phone call is zero. Instead I'd now claim that the correct price is zero as long as either no value is being exchanged (usually within a trust circle), or the value is uncorrelated with who initiated the call.

The overt and covert premium rate numbers are likely to occupy an increasing proportion of our "information services" bills, even if hidden as connectivity charges.

Vodafailed

REPEAT
  CLICK LINK "TopUp online"

  PRINT "Sorry, your internet browsing session has expired."

  PRINT "This is because you have not been active within this site
         for some time. This is a security feature to protect your
         information and to also maintain efficiency. We apologise
         for any inconvenience this may have caused."

  PRINT "Please click here to return to the Vodafone home page"

  CLICK LINK http://www.vodafone.co.uk/
UNTIL FALSE

Media junkie

I can highly recommend this tongue-in-cheek essay by Wall Street Journal writer Andy Kessler on satellite radio and media company dynamics. For the temporally challenged, here are the juciest bits, and my thoughts:

What do you call a media company with a million subscribers and $500 million in annual losses? A great start. Sirius Satellite Radio has set Wall Street on fire, commanding a $7.4 billion value by following in the greasy path set out long ago by the cable industry, grow first and ask questions later.

... Harassed by the FCC over unwritten additions to the seven dirty word list, the King of All Media Howard Stern was ready to escape the public airwaves. A very Sirius $500 million and an encrypted signal was all it really took to shake him (and Mel) out of Viacom’s control.

Although we colloquially refer to broadcast "networks", in the mathematical sense they're rather degenerate hub-and-spoke affairs. However, when you zoom out and look at the bigger picture, there is a "network" and a network effect behind this: word of mouth recommendations and discussions between viewers. Similar dynamics appear in other "bit distribution" industries like movie theatres.

Clayton Christensen suggested that innovators should be impatient for profit but patient for growth, because their disruption to established mainstream players will only grow from "substandard" niches. But for industries with strong network effects, the reverse may be true. He who crosses the prairie fastest gets the most corn in following years.

Sky TV's cornering of the broadcast rights to English soccer ensured that to participate in the bar-room discussion of the big match you had to gain entry via their pay-TV system.

The lesson? Network effects may actually be external to the product itself, and may not be obvious.

Every successful media company is based on some restriction of trade – TV was a mandated oligopoly, cable has local franchise rights, movies control theaters, music controls retailers, etc.

The telecom version? The Paradox of the Best Network, and the Rise of the Stupid Un-Network (i.e. mesh) mean that all centralised network profits come from political mandate. The core competence of every telco over time drifts to the legal department.

Anecdotally yours

We got back from out 7 weeks of world travels today. Parents weren't online, called them on the old-fashioned phone. Our 19-month old daughter on my lap.

When I hold the handset to her ear she listens to her grandma, grabs it, and waves at the speaker.

Actually, I think she finds the telephone rather perplexing. The idea that grandma can speak out of the computer makes perfect sense to her -- after all, sometimes you can see grandma on the screen. But grandma talking out of a white handle?

I think we should take the hint. It's time to reinvent telephony.

Stupid network operators

So network operators want to run streaming radio over their networks!?! Mon dieu! This is so wrong, it's hard to know where to start.

Firstly, there's a free alternative called, um, radio. And then there's this popular little device which I believe is called an iPod that lets you listen to music you actually like without any adverts. Remarkable what technology can do!

So you're burning up your spectrum on value-less content. The user, on the other hand, is massacring her battery life, and possibly running up a huge bill -- which will cause her to churn.

Does anyone at the operators know how to read?

Peeriooooh

I promised earlier to give my own thoughts on the Dmitry Goroshevsky interview and Peerio, so here goes. As a courtesy I passed the text on to Dmitry in advance of posting, and his "right of reply" comments are at the end.

Now, as it happens some water has flowed under the birdge since then, with various press releases, patent applications and comment. So I've got a bit of free hindsight to make me look wiser than I really am, or at least not make predictions that are immediately proven false.

I'm going to divide my thoughts up into three bits: the business strategy, the technology, and the value offering.

Business strategy

I was a bit disappointed by the lack of clarity on who the customer is, what their need is, and how the solution is going to be sold to them. Likening yourself to the Microsoft monopolies sets a dangerously high set of expectations. Is the customer really the device manufacturers? If so, what's their unfilled need? I still think that in larger businesses the telco manager will note that this puts him out of a job, which will limit adoption. For big enterprises the "PBX" functions are also a side-show compared to the custom call distribution logic they've built. Avaya and friends make application platforms, not PBXs. A PBX replacement isn't a threat, because that isn't where the cost is to the customers. I don't see a P2P architecture making much of a dent on that customisation and integration cost.

Not knowing who the customer really is need not be fatal; I doubt Microsoft really understood the full dynamics of Windows and Office until relatively late in the game. As a technology vendor, Popular Telephony has the luxury of allowing it's partners to carry much of the cost and risk of market discovery, just like the PC vendors acted as channels for Windows.

Technology

Some of you will know I was a consultant at Oracle for a number of years in the Server Technolgies group. Before that I built Informix-based transaction systems. So I've got a professional interest in data stores.

Big iron databases exist for a reason; when you want to mix'n'match large datasets, it helps when you do it on a tightly joined set of CPUs, memory and IO buses. Highly distributed databases are OK for higher-latency applications, of where the data doesn't need much post-processing after capture. Peerio's persistence layer therefore only applies to a relatively narrow set of problems, such as the storage of binary objects like voicemails. If you ever need to run complex reports on your directory or call patterns, you need an old-fashioned big iron server.

Dmitry's claim about the limits of scaleability of centralised systems clearly has some truth to it. BitTorrent exists as much for economic as technical reasons. However, I'm skeptical that this is a serious issue in a telephony application for the near future. The quantities of data aren't huge, and within an enterprise it doesn't really matter about balancing the costs of hosting and consuming data.

Value offering

The value offering is where things get interesting. The users don't care what your business strategy is, and (I maintain) don't really care what the technology is, particularly in the SME segment. So despite my doubts on both the business and technology strategy, this could turn out to be a significant hit. The value proposition is much like Skype's -- it just works, and it does it cheaply. I'm also a fan of the device-centric approach that allows experimentation in the enterprise without having to seek permission from IT department gatekeepers. That said, I got told off once because I was running Skype and it was port-scanning for supernodes; Peerio might come up against the paranoid centralised security bureaucracy of large enterprises.

As pointed out elsewhere, the distributed data system could be a headache if the network topology gets altered radically. When I worked at Sprint, the company relocated 15,000 staff to a new campus from locations all over Kansas City. I wonder how well a Peerio solution would cope with such radical upheaval.

Summary

It's pretty brave to get Cluetrained and be interviewed by a blogger. I'm not being paid to say anything (no, really), and don't have any advertisers who might get upset if I'm too critical. So I'm pleased they took the chance.

I think the serverless concept is a red herring; the important thing is self-configuration. If there were servers in the enterprise that could be automatically discovered and used, there's no reason not to do so. The most important thing for Peerio to get right is the management interface; ideally, you should never need to see it.

The idea of "revolution from the edge" appeals to me still, and the idea of being able to buy devices that meet the user's needs, yet still play nicely in the corporate sandbox, is one worth persuing. From that perspective, I'm still a fan.

If they do make ease of adoption and low management cost their focus, they'll have a very compelling offering to medium-sized businesses. Get lost on the technology, and it'll be a footnote in the history books on communications. As for the wider adoption of Peerio as a distributed computing platform, we'll have to wait and see -- I'll reserve judgement on that one.

Dmitry's response

Dmitry Goroshevsky
ceo

Popular Telephony

Up in smoke

I've long known that telecom is a dirty game, despite pretence to the contrary. If you don't believe me, look here. In some ways telecom is the new tobacco -- just dangerous to your financial, rather than physcal, health.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at how much it costs to register a domain in Barbados. Wow! BDS$115 a year (approx. US$58). In other words, about six times the typical price of a cheap .com registry. A nice earner for Cable & Wireless, no doubt. But it smells worse than the drains.

Stupid buildings

It might come as a surprise, but this isn't a telephone:

However, it could easily be mistaken for one. "Ah!", you say, "but isn't it a bit, well, too building-shaped to be a telephone?". Nope.

It's actually the rebuilt Grenade Hall signal station here in Barbados. This is one of half a dozen signal stations built after the 1816 slave rebellion, when news of the uprising took several hours to cross the island. The powers that be decided they needed something better, that could get the messages delivered quicker in times of need.

Note that it wasn't the bandwidth that was the problem; just the latency. A messenger could carry a long message at much higher bandwidth than the signal stations. It just took a darned long time through the hills and cane fields. (Can you believe that even now it took us over an hour to cross an island that's only 22 by 14 miles!)

Our little madam (pictured) distracted me during the crucial seconds of the automated commentary saying how they actually signalled (flags, I think). But it was the IP of its day, sending a bitstream over a simple routed network.

Why isn't this building a phone? Well, it was a stupid building forming part of a stupid network. Phones are a smart network, dedicated to one application, voice calls. Once slavery was abolished in 1834, the signal station didn't fall into immediate disuse. It hadn't been built in a way that could only accommodate civil unrest messages to Bridgetown. Stupidity meant it could support other applications. For instance, the towers would be used to spot incoming ships (capture all those broadcast photons!) and relay their arrival onto waiting merchants. Ship-presence-multicast!

Indeed, Grenade Hall continued to be used right up into the early days of the telephone, with an antique model actually on display. However, the telephone is what killed it off. Lines were laid around the island, and being high up became a nuisance, not an advantage. The building fell into ruin, before being restored in the early 1990s.

You could argue that the telephone, despite its inflexibility (all messages have to encoded as "talk"), defeated flag signals on three key points: distribution, latency and bandwidth. It had more end points, you could relay messages quicker, and get more messages through. Plus it came with the "meta message" of the speaker's voice and intonation. So it's not a surprise that's it's taken a century of progress to come up with a compelling alternative. But I suspect few will see the irony the first day someone stands up on the tower and makes a wireless VoIP call from a device that can no longer be called a telephone.