Telepocalypse

Ho, ho, ho (that'll be $2, please)

My parents have a similar relationship with tea to that which Hemingway had with ethanol. So, I feel a bit guilty having bought them a new, fancy kettle for Christmas. It's a bit like buying your aunt Edith a pin cushion, when you know she's an intravenous heroin addict. Functionally appropriate, but of dubious wisdom. Anyhow, we had to make a side-trip up to Harrods in London yesterday to find one that really was worthy of giftdom. (Clue to Rowenta: you'll get blogospheric links when you stop hiding your merchandise behind a useless Flash site, and give every product a URL.)

Now, Harrods is in Knightsbridge, which is about a mile and a half from Oxford Street where most of the big department stores are situated. We had travelcards, giving us unlimited access to buses and tube trains. So we just hopped on the 137 bus, and headed off. Whilst on my bus, I whipped out my smartphone, and quickly googled "harrods opening hours" to check we weren't going to arrive too late.

I'm a scrooge, so we're with Tesco Mobile. Cheap calls, expensive data. They charge £4/Mb for WAP GPRS (and don't offer generic Internet GPRS at all). So a few big, heavy normal web pages delivered to my mobile cost me about £1.80 (roughtly US$3.15). Now, I knew it was going to be expensive -- I was doing it as much for the experiment as the practical value. But I was shocked at how bad it turned out to be. "Mobile web" pages that are 1/10 the size may be economically practical, but "real web" pages delivered to mobile handsets aren't. Tesco don't yet sell any smartphones, so this isn't a reflection on their retailing wisdom. But their data prices are pretty similar to the other pre-paid operators, and only a factor of 2 or so higher than typical post-paid plan prices.

Likewise, whilst on the train into London with my wife, we were chatting about what to do the next day, and as a joke I suggested we take the Eurostar train to Paris for a day trip. Whip out phone to check the price... The Eurostar web site is a disaster, as it happens. (I tried using it in Firefox on my parents' Mac mini last night, and it just doesn't work!) It certainly fails to work in Opera on a smartphone. But it cost me over £2 just to get to the point of the booking page where the drop-down boxes don't work.

The irony of this is that the mobile operator has gone to knowing effort to cut me off from real Internet access, and force me to browse via their proxy gateway. Yet despite having full access to my activities, they haven't delivered an appropriate value-based pricing. Does anyone else see the irony? I don't get ten times the value from a badly-coded heavy web page that can't be bothered to check the user agent string and deduce it's being delivered to a mobile phone. The dream of IMS et al is value-based price discrimination, yet with all the technological tools in place they aren't doing it yet on today's services! There's an opportunity here for someone to steal the mobile browsing market by making the pricing a more predictable per-page amount.

UPDATE: How about this for an idea: price web access on a "per domain" basis. OK, some people could try to set up proxies to get around that, but the general masses won't.

Honey, I'm home!

Whilst the other pundits in all industries are doing their 2006 predictions, here's mine for 2011.

There's a LOT of money in presence. LOTS and LOTS and LOTS.

Let me give you an example of why. Yesterday we had the repair man round to fix our hot water boiler. I'm now £175 (about US$300) poorer, but the hot water doesn't cut out after running a bath. I also got the boiler serviced, which basically means a man with some special screwdrivers and a laptop looks inside, sees there's no corrosion, and downloads a dump from the memory of the control circuit board for error code history. The good news is that the Geddes family looks like enjoying uninterrupted torrents of hot water for years to come.

Now, I could have just got a service done alone, if I hadn't had a fault. But that costs the same £175.

Here's where the presence comes in. I have a relationship with my central heating service company. I grant permission for them to access a presence feed from my house. They cruise the district, and if I'm home they call ahead to see if now's a good time for the annual boiler service. The system has access to my calendar etc., so they only call if I don't have anything imminently scheduled. Their costs drop dramatically, my service cost drops a bit. Profit! Presence takes the friction out of the rendezvous process.

Yes, we can crack all the privacy problems, right now. We have the technology today.

Another case. Mr UPS dropped a package round today. As it happens, I'm away, but I'd called ahead in anticipation and left instructions for the package to be left in a nearby location. But it could have been a failed delivery -- those yellow and brown post-it notes "we're sorry you were out" are really expensive to deliver. And the customer isn't happy. If there's a presence feed, they don't even stop by if I'm not in to sign.

I'll say it again. There's a lot of money in presence, if you can make yourself the hub through which sources and sinks meet. You also need to oil the payment and privacy wheels, plus create the right type of presence, which may be a derivative of the "raw" types of presence we have today. For example, instead of querying whether you're in, the telco provides a feed of the nearest home where someone is in and able to receive a delivery (from the list of people scheduled for UPS deliveries, naturally). So UPS can't just ping my presence any time they want and send someone round to burgle the place whilst I'm out.

Here's the deal. In the old world, the economic activity started when the phone call began. In the new world, that's when the economic acivity ends. The money is all in presence, social networking, filtering, privacy management, and so on. It's a complete inversion of the economics of telephony. Therefore expect many of the vendors to be disemboweled in the process.

Admin - RSS 1.0 feed reincarnated

Well, bugger me, Alan's right. I can't take my dear RSS 1.0 feed away from you dear readers, because I love you all too much.

What was I up to? I was fed up with each feed having completely different formatting and content, and the utter lack of support in Movable Type for managing this stuff. So as I'm pushed for time, I thought I'd axe the apparently obsolescent one.

Now I know better. All three original feeds have been restored, with identical full feed info plus comments. And it's 2am. At least I'm not being kept tonight up by the colic monster.

I've also narrowed down the choice for new readers to full feeds with or without embedded comments.

I'm sure it's still all stuffed up a bit, but with a bit of luck you're all too pissed after your office parties to notice.

UPDATE: Another reason to hate Movable Type: the post time defaults to when you first saved the article -- even as an unpublished draft, not when you actually publish it. It really is almost 2am, honest.

The challenge

I'm deaf. I'm also stupid, ignorant and (according to my wife) practically blind. Well, she asks me "are you blind or something?" enough that I think I need my eye prescription checked again.

But the deaf bit is official, kind of. I've long had tinnitus, with a quiet high-pitched noise in the background. It is only intrusive in a very quiet environment, and you quickly come to ignore it. I suspect I also managed to damage my hearing with a bit too much Walkman listening whilst falling asleep at night or working in grotty student jobs as a youngster. Last night, prompted by a BBC News article, I called up the new service offered by charity RNID to test your hearing. They play various 3-digit spoken sequences with varying amounts of background noise, which you enter on your phone keypad. My score, unsurprisingly, came out as "below normal", although not in the bottom category of "go see your doctor, quick".

(I guess RNID once stood for Royal National Institute for the Deaf, but royalty has lost its lustre, nationalism is passé, and the deaf are merely comprehension challenged.)

Note that the service is landline only (because of sound quality issues on cellular), and may not be callable from outside the UK (let me know if it is). It'll cost you money because it is an 0845 number. The "Local rates apply" stuff is a scam I've written about before. It should really say "Premium call rates apply" if absolutely truthful.

Nonetheless, it highlights the degree of challenge VoIP faces if it is ever truly to supplant the PSTN. Let's examine the hurdles we need to jump:

• Distribution. The service has to be more-or-less pervasively adopted amongst the population, including the non-geek elderly and disadvantaged liable to use this service. This kind of awareness campaign relies on us having a minimum level of social and technical homogeneity.
• Technical quality. The call has to meet a minimum level of quality, with a high degree of certainty that the threshold is crossed. Note that the absolute level of quality doesn't need to be exceptionally high, just the certainty of what you're getting.
• Money. They are using the revenue share from the 0845 number to fund the exercise. Money has to be able to flow in the opposite direction to some of the bits. Furthermore, there was no need to authorise or authenticate yourself to enable this flow, or provide details of any payment method. The regulatory environment has taken care of it so that "low rate premium numbers" such as this are callable as normal calls with no special arrangements.
• User experience. It just worked. The only thing the user needs to know is a string of numbers to enter to call the service. That string of numbers needs to be easily communicated via many different media, since -- guess what -- the callers may be partially deaf. There was no need to provision anything, register, or navigate any mazes.
• Devices. I used my shiny new DECT cordless phone at home. (No, didn't buy a WiFi model, I needed one quick from the local store because the old phone broke. Those wishing to take pity and mail me a fancy phone, address for Xmas gifts available on request.) This meant I was able to move around to an appropriate environment to do the test.

How does VoIP stack up against this challenge? I'll acknowledge in advance that this example (and the whole purpose of this article) is to pick the most extreme possible case that favours the PSTN.

• Distribution. Fuggedaboudit. For all its blinding success, Skype as the poster girl of advanced VoIP service remains at best in the single digits of total population penetration in large countries. Broadband penetration is nothing like high enough to count, let alone adoption of any specific PSTN-over-IP service or "Voice 2.0" successor.
• Technical quality. VoIP end-points generally fail to fully deliver on the "end-to-end" idea, with high reliance on smart nodes scattered around the network to proxy signals and gateway media. As such, they not only offer no QoS guarantees, but fail to support any kind of introspection where the other end point can query "what kind of signal are you getting?". Just being "normally better than the PSTN" isn't enough! The PSTN offers one, narrowly defined, voice quality (at least over TDM). VoIP offers a wider spectrum of outcomes. In Skype 2.0 you can tick the "Display technical call info" box (Tools -> Options -> Advanced) and get a ton of detail on jitter and packet loss pop up on your PC. But this service could not access that data, and tell you "sorry, the call quality you are experiencing is insifficient to support this service".
• Money. Bzzzt. No banana. No next-gen VoIP apps support payments, although eBay with Paypal is only an inch away from true integration with Skype. So far, the only way this can be done is to piggy-back on the PSTN, or use premium SMS. Messy.
• User experience. Oops. It's OK on a PC or Mac with Skype, most of the time. Let's just say that this Xmas day, the Queen's speech at 3pm will be losing audience share to "Son, while you're here could you take a quick look at my PC...". Most other PC services suck like a galactic black hole at basic stuff like download and install. And the more esoteric stuff like pure SIP totally lacks packaging for the everyday user.
• Devices. Carting a laptop, power cord, ethernet cable, and headset about doesn't exactly compare. People need to have an appropriate range of devices available. The WiFi handsets are still klunky, and can be a nightmare to provision. Do you still remember the password to your home WiFi router? QoS within the home network -- where it really matters -- is largely missing.

Now, we can imagine a "Voice 2.0" experience that does exceed that of the PSTN here. For example, the call begins with TV presenter Eammon Holmes slowly reading out instructions. In Voice 2.0, this would be multi-modal (where a display exists) showing the text as spoken. You would be able to review them again. An Eammon avatar might be lip-syncing too, with the text personalised to your name, to keep granny swooning at her daytime TV hero. In my case, I decided the traffic outside was too noisy for a hearing test, and wandered into the kitchen. In doing so, I missed a bit of the prelude. Then 2/3 of the way through the fridge kicked in. No pause button here, folks!

None of this is a criticism of what's been achieved so far. The PSTN isn't perfect either -- call from a mobile and the test will start regardless, despite the insufficent audio quality -- and you won't know how much you're being dinged by your mobile operator for calling an 0845 number. But I hope it shows just how long the journey may be.

I look forward to seeing some real progress on it in 2006!

Admin - RSS 1.0 feed discontinued

UPDATE: This article has been superseded. Ignore it. No, really. It's rubbish.

As part of a small pre-spring clean, I've shut down my RSS 1.0 feed. If you read this blog via a feed reader, please re-subscribe to my RSS 2.0 or Atom feeds.

I've done this because my templates were derived from an early version of Movable Type, and I now want to re-sync up with the latest templates. RSS 1.0 is no longer supported in Movable Type 3.2.

Headset troubleshooting

You only need to read this article if you have a USB headset for your PC which has an inline volume control on the cord. Otherwise, shoo. Be off!

I thought I'd share this technical problem. As I mentioned before I use a Plantronics DSP-400 headset for Skyping, but posh ordinary headphones for music. The default playback device in Windows is the normal PC speaker output, because some applications will only use the default Windows device and don't give you an option to choose anything else.

Problem is this. The volume control on the cord doesn't work. I spent ages trawling the forums and Plantronics support pages to find the answer. So here it is.

The volume control will only control the default Windows device, and doesn't stick to controlling just the headset. Despite being in the cord of the headset as a digital substutute for an old-fashioned analogue potentiometer. No, there is no software update that fixes it. No, the "Let Skype adjust my sound device settings" tick box doesn't over-ride this. No, Plantronics doesn't think it's a bug -- their customer support believes it is a feature:

This is not a bug, the inline volume control for the headset is designed to adjust the master volume for the current default playback device. Under most installations the inline volume control is only used when the headset is set as the default playback device. I do understand what you would like to do with the inline control but presently there is no work around for installations such as yours using multiple playback devices.

So there you have it. Apparently if you have a USB headset you're supposed to play everything through that.

The customer is always wrong.

Re-format your Skype business model?

Phil Wolff asked me via IM what I thought about this Booz Allen Strategy + Business article on 'Format Invasions', as it relates to Skype. I'll post my thoughts here in public, though.

To save you the effort of actually reading the article, the essence is that industries are susceptiple to invasion by new entrants wielding a "new format" or value network that has lower intrinsic cost. Many examples are given, such as Southwest Airlines vs incumbents; Toyota and lean production vs incumbents; and so on. It parallels Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma, but has different dynamics as the innovation is not a technology one and isn't protected by intellectual property. It is largely a matter of values and "delivery technology" -- the art of executing a particular way of getting the same customer outcome with fewer resources.

Superficially Skype would appear to fit the pattern of the article, and telcos would be wise to follow the advice. The problem is this. Skype doesn't have any new format revenue. So far, all the revenue comes from PSTN interconnect services, and services like voicemail which have been constructed with legacy centralised PSTN-alike cost functions. It's a bit like Southwest Airlines running a network where they give all flights away for free -- unless they happen to compete on a route where American or United have a service, in which case they charge.

So until there's a "real Voice 2.0 company" with revenues from presence, transaction integration, social networking, or some other such innovation, the business gurus' advice is somewhat hard to interpret in the context of Skype. Furthermore, we have a more complex situation. Traditional telephony bundles connectivity rental with voice service. In the new model people tend to buy all-you-can-eat connectivity and then run "free" voice service. So there isn't an apples-to-oranges fit. You're also seeing a split of a once unified industry into two at the same time.

All I can say really is you need to hire a really good consultant to navigate you through the strategic maze ;)

Warning: Blog reading causes philosophical angst

Trundling over Calton Hill with my older girlie monster this morning, I spotted plenty of discarded cigarette packets beside the path. Each now, by law, displays a large health warning occupying about half the box area. Smoking can give you a dicky ticker, a droopy dingle dangle, dreadful dentures and depleted dendrites. (Naturally, this has created some great business opportunities for those who decline to be lectured by government busy-bodies about their own health and lifestyle choices.)

What I noticed though was how all such appeals were "inward looking". That is, your health and well-being might be damaged -- it's about how you feel. There are no "outward-looking" campaign messages, where the perception of others about you is used as the emotional lever. What if the packets read "Your partner would be pleased if your breath smelt better?", "Your friends would respect you more if you quit smoking"? Social pressure is, in my mind, more likely to work than appeals to direct self-interest where the smoker has already understood and dismissed such issues.

It reminds me of a conversation I had last night about Chinese medicine. As I understand it, recent technical innovations in sprung-loaded fake acupuncture needles have finally enabled double-blind tests of acupunture therapy, and it was found to work for a range of conditions. Although I'm a relative skeptic on most of these things, western medicine does only deal with relatively simple cause-effect conditions. Complex "systems" issues of general well-being aren't handled well. There really is such a thing as culture, and it does condition your thinking.

Is there a similar "philosophy" problem in communications technology? Are we in the post-Enlightenment west so ego-centric and self-absorbed that we're unable to see the fundamentally social nature of communications? Is this what is leading carriers to try mobile TV and other minor stuff? Even ringtones were misunderstood as being a content, rather than social signalling, medium. It's not what you hear from the tones you buy, but what others sense about you.

Perhaps it's no accident that so many new applications are emerging in east Asia. The problem is a deep cultural one, not a superficial product design or commercial execution one. But one to ponder when allocating your pension and investment dollars.

PS - I don't smoke tobacco, because it's a crap way of getting a small dopamine buzz. But if you do, it's none of my business.

Google goodies

When at Sprint, myself and David used to run around doing exec presentations on how the Sprint diamond logo (RIP) should be a trust mark, and that Sprint could add value as an intermediaryby making people's (wireless) web browsing experience safer and more convenient. We even filed a patent, whereby the operator logo on the handset would light up when showing operator-provided interstitial advice pages.

Anyhow, we used to get a lot of blank stares, and telcoheads looking at us like we'd just come back from vacation on planet Zog.

I don't think we'd get that reaction now. Just take a look at this:

This is the fire-up splash page from their new anti-phishing plug-in for Firefox. Google is the Web's new trustmark. Can you imagine any telco positioning themselves in this way? Every intermediation of a telco is regarded with distrust and suspicion. Nobody sees a telco trademark and thinks (however naively): "these guys are on our side". Google have to follow "don't be evil", not because they're nice, but because the privacy effects of theis business give them no choice.

PS - Notice Amazon/Alexa's new service where they are offering web crawling APIs (for a fee)? We argued that Sprint was in a good position to become the champion of commercial web services APIs, where people assembled applications from lots of component services, but where money was also due to flow between those parties. The idea was to leverage Sprint's natural advantage in providing an in-house selection of web services (messaging, profile, identity, etc.) into a wider sphere. Needless to say, those ideas got killed, and Sprint remains a capital-bound midwestern telco, and not a cash-machine virtual enterprise like Google.

Skype, where are you?

My parents are kleptomaniacs. Just don't tell them I told you. The garden shed is bursting with stuff. The loft is full of old boxes. The shelves teem with ornaments. (eBay will have a good fiscal quarter the sad day they shuffle off this mortal coil.) And the drawers under the bed are stuffed with toys from our childhood.

Which turns out to be quite useful when you yourself have kids and an endless supply of goodies starts to emerge for free from Nana and Grandad. I've been reading this picture book to my older daughter, where a little boy hunts around for his lost pet froggie.

Very cute.

Speaking of which, I think we all know of a very cute voice application that's currently hiding behind a log and looking a bit lost. Whatever happened to Skype's mojo? Why wasn't Skype 2.0's arrival a case for dancing in the streets?

I can forgive the ringing noise being replaced by an extract from the opera Ode to a Kathmandu Stomach Upset. (Believe me, the full work is quite an experience. I've been there.) As a customer, I'm not too fussed whether video is a plug-in or comes out of the box. Tweaks in colour schemes and icons don't impress me. (I'm male. It's the way we are. I think my mum is still hoping I'll notice when they've redecorated without having to prompt me first.)

No, what's important is this. Make it work. And make it easy.

Let's take the former one first. I bought a Plantronics DSP-400 USB headset a while back. It came "Skype certified" together with a small SkypeOut credit. I'm still happy with it. But it's also very annoying to use. Because I like to listen to music from my laptop with real, quality headphones. Sometimes I unplug the headset when I move my laptop about, or want to use it on another PC, and Windows takes note and resets my audio devices to point to the built-in stuff. No matter how often I set my preferences in Skype to "Plantronics headset", it keeps being turned back to Windows default each time I unplug. This is, needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), not a good experience.

It's a design snafu in Skype. The actual requirement isn't to select one device from the list, but I should be able to select the preferred order for audio devices it has seen. If the headset is plugged in, use that. Otherwise, revert to the next preference.

My laptop doesn't have a built-in microphone, and I never plug one into the microphone jack. I should be able to de-select that as an input. Which means anyone calling me when I have no headset plugged in needs to be warned "Martin doesn't have a microphone plugged in yet". This case should be handled intelligently.

Perhaps USB headset owners are too small a minority to make this a priority. But then don't waste your brand karma on declaring it Skype approved.

Another example is the new video chat. I'm pretty convinced that the video degrades the audio quality. My in-laws have low-speed DSL (256k down/128k up). Just audio is fine; add in the video and the sound gets choppy. This is bad, bad, bad. I can guess what's happening. Skype uses an audio codec supplied by GIPS. The video is probably a separate thing, and not integrated. Asking GIPS to create an integrated codec that prioritises voice to maintain a minimum bit rate will cost Skype Inc mucho dolula. The audio codec API probably doesn't make it easy to manage the bandwidth use. So we get a kludge, and the "integrated" product isn't any better than the third-party plugs-ins. It's more "overlayed" than "integrated".

Sadly, Skype's also having a mid-life attack of feeping creaturism. In the rush to add more feature tick-box items, usability and simplicity is being sacrificed. I think I'd find grouping of contact quite useful. But the user interface is just too ugly and obscure. Hint to Skype UI designers: screens are 2-dimensional. There are information architectures other than "list"! (As I've whined on previous occasions.)

And why have my SkypeOut contacts suddenly been elevated into the middle of my Skype contacts? This is a case of the product turning against me. Every time you call someone more than once it asks if you want to name and remember that number. Was a useful and harmless feature as long as the list of remembered numbers kept out of sight. But believe me, the UK Passport Office isn't one of my buddies. And I've only just finished successfully suing Expedia in the small claims court after a car rental screw-up last summer. They're not my friends, either.

I can only imagine the stress and turmoil the development team are going through as the eBay deal sinks in. But these problems smack of leadership issues, where priorities are not clearly being spelled out, and strategic alignment is being lost. If I were in charge right now, the edict would be "no new features!". Let the API do the work for you. Focus on making what exists even easier. Make every use case or problem be handled ever smarter. The only exception to the rule is anything that integrates eBay merchants and transactions into telephony.

We've already got plenty of VoIP tools that kinda work, sort of, as long as you don't hit any snags or unusual situations. Skype's positioning is around simplicity, reliability and ease of use. Lose sight of that, and your cute frog will be forever lost.

Pirate radio

This little story over at El Reg reminds me on an anecdote from a few years back. Anyhow, the lead-in first:

The Mirror reports that a BT insider who had access to the shows' voting database fed the results to a betting syndicate before they were made public to viewers on the live TV shows. The gang then placed bets at betting exchange Betfair.com on the outcome of the voting netting a fortune.

So your communications are only as secure as the least trustworthy and most corruptible person in the telco data centre. And they want to keep Skype out of the enterprise because of (in)security concerns?!

Well, in about 1999, during my database consultant years, I was over visiting the Oracle headquarters at Redwood Shores, CA. My hotel was a few miles down the highway overlooking the airport. (I once got a great view of a Lufthansa 747 aborting its landing presumably due to the runway not being clear ahead. Vroom!) Rather than get a rental car when jetlagged like crazy, I was taking taxis. So I called the front desk and got a taxi booked for the next morning.

Up rolls a big old white Lincoln Town Car taxi with a woman diver. "Mr Geddes?" "Yes."

Off we head. She hands me her business card, and tells me to call directly to book further journeys.

That evening I call the taxi company direct to get back to my hotel. I really don't care who picks me up -- just that the first available taxi comes. "But Mr Geddes -- you didn't turn up this morning when we came to collect you!"

"What -- yes I did!"

"Was it a woman who collected you by name name of Blahdy Blah?"

"Yes."

Now, here's what was happening. A pirate taxi driver was listening in on dispatch orders from the taxi company, and sneaking in and snatching customers from them. So we agreed to get a little revenge in.

I call the pirate taxi driver, and make a reservation for the next morning.

Up she rolls to the front of the hotel. "Hiya -- nice morning!", I say.

And I get straight into the white Town Car. Not hers, but the one now pulled up behind. Driven by the owner of the legit taxi company. Who waves at her. And she screams a load of abuse back!

The moral of the story? No communication is too trival to encrypt.

UPDATE: Just to avoid possible confusion, it was the radio transmissions from the dispatcher that she was listening in to, not PSTN calls to order the taxis.

UPDATE: That's because the PSTN is totally secure. No, really it is. (Thanks, Lee).

Quote of the day

"The great thing about IP communications is that you can get rid of all interruptions just by unplugging one cable." -- Me.

Funny money

Lunch break time. I liked this entry on social benefits of broadband over at the Technology Liberation Front (and I thought I had a good blog name...).

Money quote:

The New Milenium Research Council today released a study on the benefits of broadband, which finds almost $1 trillion in benefits related to elderly and disabled Americans alone.

Even if their counting is off by an order of magnitude, it's a lot of money. I've often said that the future route to success in network operation is innovation in finance -- i.e. pricing, ownership, funding. The above echoes what I heard over at Citynet. Why is the City of Amterdam taking a 1/3 stake in their muni fiber network? One reason is that you don't need to keep grandma at home and out of the residential care for more than a few days to pay for your videolink.

Find the beneficiaries of the network, and tap them for the cash. Just don't necessarily expect the beneficiaries to be the same as the users, and for heavens sake get away from the horrific marketing, billing and support costs of traditional network sales.

Heads and shoulders, Redknees and toes

I had a chance this week to catch up by phone with Jeff Popoff, VP of Marketing at equipment vendor Redknee. (Looking at their web site, Jeff's had a vigorous haircut since we last met. Here in impecunious Scotland they call it "value for money". Only kidding, Jeff!)

Jeff was one of the recipients of my RFP From Hell when I was at Sprint. Think "IMS for the Web", and you're half way there. Anyhow, we've known each other from back in the darkest days of the telecom meltdown, when even responding to Martin's RFP seemed like a good idea.

Apart from all the usual new product stuff that anyone with a browser, one finger and an eye can find, Jeff kept me up to date with where Redknee's strategy is going. Because Redknee is fairly small, they can't afford grand visions that play out over long time periods. Most of their products are up in the higher layers of the stack, which is where telcos are most vulnerable. They don't have a pile of patents on obscure radio technology that they can use to leverage themselves into all sorts of other businesses. They're forced to iterate quickly, deliver stuff that works and makes money for its owners. So I see them as being the canary in the cold, dark, scary telecom coal mine.

Two themes came out of what they're up to. The first is what they call "personalisation", which is a mix of digital identity, and contextually aware services. If "mobility" is the service, how does it adapt to the user's different contexts? When you're at work in your home office and have a Vonage phone you might want a different call handling behaviour to when you're in the airport on their WLAN; and a different behavior when you're on the plan on the satellite-fed WLAN; and yet again something different when you're in the corporate office behind a PBX.

As Jeff highlighted, the flip side is no carrier or service provider will do it unless paid. How to reap some value? Can you do it directly, like how MSN offers a premium email bundle? Or does it have to be indirect, the way Google uses your content in Gmail to perform contextual ads both in GMail and (potentially) other Google properties?

Also, people's expectations changed from 5 years ago. We now have high mobile penetration, a saturated market in most regions, and strong commoditisation. The classic response according to Jeff is to segment and differentiate. This means moving from adding subscribers to stealing them. How do you appeal to these new subs?

The Redknee way is to personalise, and offer a better mousetrap. Yippee! Maybe not quite Voice 2.0, but at least Voice 1.5 Beta 2 with Extension Pack, plus bonus Web 1.4 speical offer if you buy this week (credit option available, see in store for full details).

So Redknee do a bunch of network analytics to bring relevant stuff to you. I didn't dig too deply into the details. It's enough to know that the telecom borg is moving. Finally we're seeing some (potential) improvement in the core stuff that brings home he bacon, and not peripheral entertainment fripperies. OK, it's still trapped in smart, intelligent, centralised, slow, expensive networked telcoland. But it's progress, nonetheless.

An example they gave was being able to call someone's work PBX number, but prefix it with a '5' and get routed to their mobile (if their preferences allow it). Not earth shattering, I'll grant you. But it means you can keep your mobile number private. Why should you have to give your mobile number to all your work colleagues who can hassle you at all hours? So it's a significant privacy boost and convenience. People who don't have your number, but whom you do want to receive calls from out of hours, can also get hold of you. I suspect some carrier also gets a nice slice of call termination revenue to lubricate the deal. Everyone's a winner.

Another example was routing of SMS messages to an e-mail inbox when someone's on the road. I'm probably not doing them justice, because my brain freezes over for 60 seconds whenever I hear the words "ARPU uplift".

These examples may seem small, but it's the kind of mundane stuff that users want. It's just that they can't seize control today, and are stuck on the glacial telco timetable for new features and functionality. Anything that moves stuff along has to be good for the users.

The other big activity for Redknee is, um, selling stuff. Carriers retail communications services and devices, often in tandem. Many own large retail chains, or have a big presence as "virtual stores" embedded in large electrical retailers. They host web portals whose main function is the retail of content and online services. Telcos might appear under the "retail services" section of the stock listings one day.

So Redknee are working on helping telcos become better retailers of connectivity and content. Jeff observed how there are radically different purchase patterns, with teens making impulse buys of $2 ringtones of "must have" content to obtain school bragging rights. On the other hand, he might only access such content as part of a cheap bundle. But the retail lifecycle of mobile content is badly managed, and the pricing options are often too constrained. Redknee see a fundamental divide between "impulse" and "discount" mobile segments that they believe others haven't picked up on properly. As Jeff amusingly put it, telcos are selling naff furry dice to decorate your car. The furry dice market works differently from the car market, and it also works differently for the Kia and Lexus buyers.

Redknee are also working on ways of allocating different parts of your connectivity into different buckets. So your VPN usage from your laptop 3G card to the company mothership goes to the corporate account; but general web surfing stays on your private personal bill. Redknee also want to offer "personalised pricing" for content. I guess framing for these things makes all the difference. Give 'em a coupon, or offer to unload some cost onto your employer, and people's privacy worries melt away. At least that's Redknee's bet.

I'm sure Jeff's PR folk will be adding me to their Christmas card list for quoting this one, but it's worth repeating. "What 1-click does for Amazon, Redknee does for mobile retail." Actually, I've been advising some of my clients similarly. Mobile operators do an awful job of managing basic up-sell and cross-sell between services on your phone. They've got a lot to learn from wired e-commerce, still. Shouldn't every SMS be followed with a line followed by the message "Press the [green call button] to call Bob"? (And in Voice 2.0, "...to call Bob who is available for incoming calls.")

That said, Jeff said it's a challenge beyond what Amazon do, because they only retail to one context (the PC). Mobile retail has many contexts. If you're roaming, you need to offer a completely different selection of services to when someone is on the train, or at home.

Now for the fun bit. "What's Redknee's take on IMS?"

I guess none of this will be news or secret to their clients, because their product portfolio in this space (or absence thereof) speaks for itself. Redknee declare themselves as IMS skeptics, despite "making a ton of money migrating people to IMS-like architectures" (their words). Jeff says IMS is a bridge too far: 5-10 year standards effort, 5-10 vendor implementation, 5-10 year rollout. That means a 20 year cycle to reach the IMS vision. (Telepocalyptic aside: apparently if you ingest enough tryptamines you get the IMS visions much quicker. Ho ho.)

But the carriers see most services won't port. Nobody wants to pay for an IM sent via IMS.

Some vendors going to "pre-IMS" implementations. Get the unified charging and rating, policy, service and session control, profile, preferences, buddy lists etc. sorted out. And then use it as a grab-bag to implement whatever services carriers do want to roll out.

This approach works, and there's some value to the convenience the end user gets from those services. They'll be better integrated and easier to pay for and provision. But that's it. Sensible carriers are not going to swap out core infrastructure. You go 1/4 of the way to get 90% of your business objectives reached. Nobody needs an IMS-compliant core network.

Jeff recounted how it was like the old days with location-based services. Every pitch came with the example of using LBS to find an ATM. But you know where all the ATMs are near your home and office already. And it's too easy to find one when elsewhere, if only by just stopping and asking. There are too many substitutes to make it compelling. Same for IMS. Stuff like mobile TV doesn't make sense. It's better to unbundle, and say use a short code SMS to initiate and pay for the download, which then arrives via your broadband connection. Jeff's take is that IMS may be a good control path (Bellhead speak for signalling system), but is a bad bearer path (the media). Just plain too expensive.

Carriers can survive by making better services, being better retailers, and not killing themselves re-inventing the intelligent network. And I can't really top that analysis, so here I'll stop.

OPINION://Universally Strange Behaviour

As a tribute to Bob Frankston's rant on Bluetooth, here's a quick thought on my shiny new Canon MP780 multifunction printer. (RIP old Canon S400 -- you did good service at the battlefront.) As with all the Canon gear I've bought, it's a tour de force of modern product design and manufacture. But there's a problem. I use a Linux box as my home web, print, VPN, email and file server.

I can print from my laptop in raw mode via the CUPS printer spooler system -- the drivers on my Windows XP laptop assemble the image and the print server just ferries the bits. I do lose access to things like notification of low ink by being mediated in this way. I can fax and copy, because they're stand-alone functions. But I can't scan unless I plug the printer into a Windows box. There are no Linux drivers for the MP780 from Canon, and the SANE project hasn't yet reverse engineered one for me.

Rather than the usual Slashdot-style "Windoze sux and Canon don't get the joy of open source" diatribe, let's think about it a bit. Engage brain before opening mouth, as my Dad used to say. A bunch of bits want to get from the printer to my laptop. The printer happens to be plugged into the USB port of my Linux server. Moving bits isn't complex. If my Linux server appears to be in the way, we've got an architectural problem.

And that problem is indeed that people's can't just settle for layered connectivity. USB, Firewire, Bluetooth and friends confound and befuddle several different things. One aspect is electrical power -- the provision or regulation thereof. Bluetooth's excuse for living is that Wi-Fi is too power-hungry and IP too costly an overhead. Another is the negotiation of end point identifiers and routing. Plus security. Yet another is media access. And finally we have service discovery and invocation.

These "vertical" technologies bundle these functions together tightly. If my requirements don't match their anticipated use, I can't remix my own solution. In this case, my laptop is more than one connectivity hop from the printer. Game over! So rather than create a generic networking protocol for device discovery (a-la Sun's JXTA technology) we get a specialised, optimised version that fits the use case that some design committee thought up in a dull anonymous conference centre vaguely near an international hub airport.

Various non-functional requirements tend to drive people towards these stovepiped connectivity solutions. Speed, power, reliability, form factor. But often technology has marched on so much between conception and deployment that speciailised solutions are no longer cost-justified.

I'm aware that Canon et al design these printers with minimal memory and processing power and shuffle as much of the effort (and cost) onto the PCs to which they are attached. Most modern printers are the paper-spewing equivlent of the Winmodem software-based modem. But that still doesn't mean we need a smart box attached at the first hop that has to understand scanning and printing.

So what should my printer do? It should be network-aware! If printers had a religion they'd be monotheists -- the only God is the PC to which I'm attached. C'mon -- join the network age! Pantheism is the new deal. Ideally there'd be an Ethernet port. But confronting the deployed reality of USB-rich PCs, the printer just needs to be able to make itself network addressable -- via some form of tunnel if need be, and to be able to negotiate among multiple client devices trying to access it at once. Purely a software problem, no need to increase the device cost. Make the connectivity IP-based and standardised, so if I want to tunnel some IP link over PPP over a USB cable, it's all out-of-the-box stuff for any sensible OS I attach the printer to. I have reason to belive our society has crossed the threshold where such things are possible! Yeah, I might still only be able to use Windows and MacOS as the edge nodes. But in our stupid home network, it really shouldn't matter how the bits get from A to B. Don't want to have a print spooler inside the printer with the associated memory cost? Make it a discoverable network service, or get the PCs to co-operate in buffering data, Peerio-style.

The same thinking infects us in other ways. For example, we have PATA and SATA to communicate between hard drives and motherboards. Yet more and more storage is migrating into the network, mostly as cheap Network Attached Storage (NAS). Why isn't my local hard drive just a cache to my persistent cloud? Why must I manage these devices at the physical layer at all? What are we doing still worrying about the "C Drive"? Why don't hard drives just come with a gigabit ethernet port and a power socket?

USB embeds other dangerous assumptions. Your mouse and keyboard is only supposed to work with one PC at a time, apparently. Despite loads of people wanting to control multiple PCs at once. (I do.) Thus we end up with all sorts of hacks to get around the lack of direct addressability. Your microphone is supposed to talk to only one PC. But what if I want to wander around the home and have the converation follow me, with a microphone in every room? More incompatible, non-interoperable hacks to simulate real network connectivity. Why can't my microphone be accessed by more than one PC? And so on. Every time you think you really have a concrete case for a single-hop network technology someone comes and snarfs it up with some damn counterexample.

My Canon printer has a USB port on the front to attach a camera for direct photo printing. Help! More stovepiped connectivity! My phone talks Bluetooth, not USB -- so I can never print from my phone, despite having a laptop with Bluetooth attached to the network attached to the Linux box attached to the printer. We can make packets traverse the globe in a few milliseconds, but crossing my study within line-of-sight is an impossibility!

I say all this because Bob's writing really pulled the scales from my eyes. I thought I "got" this stupid network stuff. But I still casually accepted these stovepiped connectivity solutions sprouting in front of me! For instance, the more I use Bluetooth, the more frustrating the inbuilt limitations become now I know how things could be better and different. Imagine Bluetooth was just an IP connection that searched for a local web services directory (répétez après moi: UDDI and WSDL). How much more powerful and flexible it would be!

It all kind of reminds me of Bob's single hop signalling essay, where he laments the framing problem of spectrum regulation that comes from a legacy mindset that radios should send data from A to B in a single hop across a single, exclusively-accessed channel. Drop the outdated assumptions, and your spectrum metaphor dissolves away like a Cheshire cat, just leaving the happy smile of raw unmediated connectivity.

Emerging travel plans

Although subject to final confirmation, it looks like I'll be attending and pontificating at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony conference on 24-26 January in San Francisco. If you're on the west coast and want to make a bid for my time around then, now's the chance to do it before I book any flights.

Help! I'm a telco!

I take it all back. Forget the "quacks like a duck" test for emergency service calling regulations and VoIP. Here's my mark II version. If you sell VoIP interconnected to the PSTN together with connectivity, you're liable for E911. Otherwise, you're not. The sale doesn't need to be a bundle; merely by entities with substantially similar control or billed through one entity. So SkypeOut wouldn't be liable for E911, unless it was being done on one of their WiFi hotspot partners, in which case they're supplying the bit haulage too and damn well ought to know where you are and how to route your call.

Any better ideas?

Call my bluff

What if Google turned round to SBCat&t and said "Screw your charging us to access your customers and network!"

How many DSL connections do you think Ed would sell to a Google-less Internet? I suspect Comcast and Time Warner would have a very, very merry Christmas.

Market power at the app layer, doncha just love it!

You can run...

...but you can't hide. I saw this BoingBoing post on a proposed Sony boycott, complete with amusing sticker, thus:

My first thought would be how a member of the public who saw this would react, particularly if they weren't aware of the DRM outrage. So we go to the world's favourite search engine and check it out:

The age of PR spin is definitely, 100%, totally, over. The only way Sony can recover from this is to fix the problem, not the appearance. And the problem is one of values, not products.

UPDATE: Why am I so upset by Sony? It's because their actions undermine the trust that is needed to make markets work. It's just just buyers of Sony CDs that are hurt. We all suffer collateral damage through increased search costs for digital products.

La-la-la (is this telephony?)

A week or two ago I attended Dorkbot Alba, a gathering of eclectic people and techno-centric ideas.

I really liked the presentation by artist Zoë Irvine. She's putting together Dial-a-Diva, which runs THIS SATURDAY, 3 DECEMBER. Get that?

It's a global 24-hour concert of singing from performers around the world. And you can just dial-in and listen.

It's a return to the roots of telephony, as it was first deployed and conceived -- a broadcast medium. So by not IP streaming, she isn't being ostentatiosly retro, but is reminding us of -- and reviving -- the medium's origins.

London calling

Was down at the NextGen Services & Networks event today next to Heathrow Airport. More on this later when it's not gone midnight.

Anyhow, trekked up to London on the train this evening for a business meeting. Just a few snippets of the joyous journey. I'll spare you harrowing images of packed commuter trains.

Firstly, as good telecom and internet folk, you know you're in good company when you start seeing stickers like this around on the trains:

Lawsuits, taxed to death, reviled by many? Telecom or tobacco, you choose.

Naturally, one lady was having a loud and boring conference call.

Next up was an example of innovation in the finance of a product, rather than a product itself. You can now buy fractional ownership of a hotel, with a timeshare-like claim on stays in the room you notionally own:

Any chance of similar innovation in telecom? Let me know!

The stairs at Staines railway station have turned into attention-sapping adverts:

Hmm. How many billions of phones have cellcos distributed? At what subsidy and cost per gross add? And what have they managed to fill up those little screens with by default? Nothing. In fact, it's so bad they'll try to sell you some $2 wallpaper to cover over the embarassing lack of ideas. Clue to telcos: you're attention brokers whether you like it or not. Please build business model.

Lastly, I can't help but think this'll make its way into one of my presentations some day:

PS - Annoyance of the day. I went to send a text message whilst at the conference today, but there was no coverage. It ended up stuck in my outbox, and I forgot to send it when back in coverage. The result was some confusion and embarassment when later business arrangements failed to sync. Why doesn't my phone automatically offer me the choice to "send whenever possible"? Does it think I just compose these messages for the sake of my triple-tap expertise?