Telepocalypse

Skype for small (and tall) business

On my wish list is a Skype bundle extension for small biz people like me. I'd gladly pay some up-front fee and a regular subscription for the following features:

• Immediate delivery of IMs, no delays ever.
• Ability to support multiple PCs, with all messages relayed to all registered personal devices.
• Two included SkypeIn numbers.
• Skype fax service. Cut'n'paste my signature image into each NDA or contract to be sent, click "Send to -> Skype fax" and done!
• Automatic top-up of SkypeOut balance. Love that free cash flow...
• A cool USB conference call speaker phone to stick in your laptop bag included.
• Ability to have separate "work" and "home" modes; in "home" mode only designated friends and family can see when you're online. Potentially an automatic thing based on time of day and the LAN into which you're plugged.
• Automatic Outlook address book sync.
• SMS notification of voicemails (plus general SMS support from within the client).

I could probably dream up a dozen more items. Most of the bits are out there already, just not packaged up. The SoHo/small biz market is one of Skype's growth drivers, and presents a real opportunity that many of Skype's consumer or big biz VoIP competitors aren't ready to seize.

I've used Skype Groups, the business payment service, to pay my Skype dues VAT-free. Seems to work well, although the user experience wasn't that great on the first go (too lazy to blog about it -- if you work for Skype and want to know what's broken, call me). Now all I need is for the rest of the product set to catch up...

Any reader sugestions for what you'd like to see in the Skype for Small Biz bundled package?

Oh, and MAKE THE DAMN SETTINGS FOR USB HEADSETS WORK, so it doesn't keep resetting to "Windows Default" every time I unplug my laptop. Please!

OPINION://Capitalism 2.0

In my Freedom to Connect speech I alluded to the need for a "third way" in the funding of networks, one that better aligns the needs of users and producers.

There are many, many competing models out there for muni networks, privately-financed networks, and numerous hybrids thereof. But rather than get lost in the weeds of analysis of individual cases, I'd like to show some examples of what I mean about diversity of funding models for collective provision of public and social goods. They're simple ones, but they make the point.

I live one street away from the Georgian-era New Town of Edinburgh. Many of the streets are arranged around private squares which have private parks in the middle. You need a key to get into the park. They're all immaculately kept.

(Note tha a Porche SUV is not compulsory to live in New Town. Lexus, BMW and Mercedes are also allowed if you can't afford a Porche.)

If you live around the square then the deeds to your house stipulate that you have to contribute to the upkeep of the park. Doesn't matter if you have 3 kids and 2 dogs, or are an albino agoraphobic sociopath with an allergy to grass. Many residents complain and bitch about the cost, but that's the deal. If you don't like it, live somwhere else. You've had 200 years' notice of the rules.

What's nice about this is that it's still based on voluntary exchange, not coercive taxation. The coercion is only applied if you fail to live up to your part of the deal when you bought your property. Any model that captures the self-interest of capitalism gets my vote. Ones that rely on politically motivated allocation of resources are suspect by default.

Another local model of service provision is buses. There are basically three bus markets in Edinburgh:

• Local buses within the city boundary and immediate outlying villages. Lothian Buses are owned by the city council and have a near-monopoly on this market.
• Routes to nearby Scottish towns and cities. A number of private operators run these routes, notably First Bus and Stagecoach.
• Routes to distant cities. Several long-haul operators do these, particularly National Express/Scottish Citylink.

Here's the view of of my apartment window this evening. The dome on the right is the Lothian Buses garage, where 1000 buses go to sleep each night. It's a listed (protected) building because of the unusual industrial architecture.

By the way, on the left of the picture is a white plain building. That's my phone exchange, which is now delivering me DSL service at 6 times the speed I got a month ago for 15% less cost from the same provider. Believe me, there's no need to Save the Internet over here -- it's doing very nicely, thank you very much.

Anyhow, back to the real subject. The "local access network" for public transport is publicly owned. Fares are lower than in comparable cities elsewhere. My wife complains, but the service is pretty frequent, pervasive and reliable. Product innovation could be better -- there are electronic signs at major stops telling you how long you have to wait, but London-style payment smart cards are nowhere to be seen. Yet it doesn't impinge at all on the competitiveness of the other, longer, routes.

The problem with "Capitalism 1.0" is that it doesn't work well with networked goods. The voluntary exchange for large numbers of people has too high a co-ordination cost. As a result we end up with weirdness like spectrum auctions that insist on 95%+ population coverage for cellular networks. Everyone in London gets a choice of 5, whereas if you live in the wrong Welsh valley, you get a choice of zero. We don't have "fluid connectivity" where we can seamlessly join up bits of connectivity that may be around and ensure that those who participate in the value network are suitably remunerated in a transparent and effortless fashion. We pay too high a price to have telcos and other players come along and perform the co-ordination function for us, and once a private entity captures a critical 'hub' (like, say, eBay with auctions) they may effectively be impossible to displace. We end up paying rent to enter the market square when we're surrounded by miles of empty public land that in principle could do the same job if only we could agree which field to meet in.

I don't really have the answer to the "Capitalism 2.0". All the DRM and intellectual property arguments are part of the debate, and the complexity of those issues suggests we're still waiting for the next Adam Smith to come along and lay out the way forwards.

UPDATE: The BBC, a classic hybrid-funded networked public good, seems to get it in spades. So much so, I'd almost go out and buy a TV set to see it happen!

Help! This is not an emergency

I like the drift of the Pulver/Evslin proposal on emergency communications, and wish there was as vigorous a debate going on over here. I just hope we in the UK aren't jerked out of complacency by some major disaster -- although widespread use of pre-paid cellular means the problem of sunken landlines isn't as acute.

Yet I can't help but wonder why the poor public has to wait for a disaster before they're given partial control over how their number maps to different destinations and services. Why can't I get a voicemail service from someone other than my connectivity provider? Why is ENUM hostage to the telcos, whose interest lies in ensuring that new services can only come from them? Why is the telco somehow regarded as a good and neutral trustee of my identity, rather than a hopelessly biased intermediary with a priority of preventing me authenticating myself in competing services using this identifier?

I wouldn't say that DNS is a perfect technical model, ICANN a particularly enlightened overlord, or Net Solutions/Verisign an very benign power. Nonetheless, the Internet's system clearly points the way to viable alternatives where users can easily provision themselves to use their number in their IM client, photo system, blog, or whatever. Domain names have drawbacks as personal identifiers, too -- but that's a different issue. Numbers are universally understood, easy to display and enter, and we've already got the infrastructure to deal with them. Time to rescue the phone numbers from the phone companies?

By the way, one modification I'd make to the Pulver/Evslin proposal is that I'd skip the stage of getting people to reclaim their lines/numbers, or to offer privacy to the emergency voicemail system. It's just too complex. Make the voicemail of drowned lines pre-announce something like:

"This line is inactive due to emergency measures. The owner has not yet recorded a greeting or forwarding number. There are two waiting messages. Press 1 to leave a message, press 2 to check messages, press 3 to record a personal greeting including any new numbers you may be contacted on. [Presses 2.] Any message you leave will be accessible to any caller, and you should therefore take care in deciding what private or confidental information to share. Beep"

The system could also use the inbound caller ID to only offer new messages to callers; there would be no "delete" in this mailbox -- all messages would be kept. I would view the lack of privacy here as a feature, not a bug -- we want status information to be spread as fast as possible, and rather like checking a friend's blog you should be able to pry around a bit for what's going on in your community.

The claiming/authentication process would only kick in when someone wants to flick their service out of emergency mode back to "normal" mode. Allowing porting of voicemail etc I'd say is just too darn hard given the inflexible reality of the system. If you're going to do 80% of the work to enable service unbundling, why not go the whole hog and transfer complete control over the numbers and directory/routing access to the users permanently?

In summary, an emergency voicemail system is probably a good idea, but should be designed from the ground-up for emergency use, and not simply be a repurposed standard voicemail product. The assumption should be that all business processes are suspended, no back office or personnel are functioning, and all you've got running is a bunch of servers on emergency power.

UPDATE: Check out Tom's comment below. I ought to also point out why I'm squicked by claiming processes. My last project at Sprint was a particularly futile digital identity re-engineering effort. This was allegedly a prelude to integrating the customer databases of the PCS, local and long distance divisions, and to avoid duplication of effort and disjointness in service delivery to common customers. There were several solutions to matching up customer records from the different divisions, one of which was a manual claiming process. Having seen the profusion of data quality issues and exception cases, I'm wary of any such process, particularly ones which need to be executed in times of panic and turmoil. Doesn't mean it can't be done, but don't underestimate how much complexity will creep out of the woodwork when you go to implement it in reality.

Doesn't Raise Money

Tim Lee makes a good point about intra-platform competition between Intel and AMD in processors having had more consumer benefit than the inter-platform competition between Intel and the traditional Power PC architecture for Apple Macs. He notes that DRM and laws like DMCA/EUCD prevent such competition occuring in content-centric consumer electronics devices.

There's a practical lesson here too. Disinvest in industries heavily reliant on DRM, because they'll be innovation-free zones. There may be monopoly rents, but the stock will have no 'pop' because there's no growth. For example, contrast the upside potention of multi-player networked games (where DRM is a side-show around automated "cheating" by having robot players) to music and movies. You might be lucky in investing in an Apple-like story at the right moment just as a DRM monopolist emerges, but you've probably missed the bus already. Picking individual winners is the posh person's version of betting on the horses.

PS - Some good news for telcos: the customers are happily paying you for communications, presence and connectivity right now. DRM is not compulsory; call the bluff of the content cartels, you're ten times their size. If you use DRM, make it protect the user's own content instead.

IMS 'Reality Check'

You can go read my latest outpourings on IMS over at IMS Insider.

UPDATE: For those with a larger budget, you can get another dose of Martin on IMS in IMS Opportunities and Challenges, published by Informa Telecoms & Media group.

Easychangeyourticket

I hate getting up at 4am to catch the first flight down to London, but someone's got to do it. Had a productive day's business, wrapped up early, was dropped off back at Luton Airport in plenty of time to catch the earlier plane. As someone who normally only uses Easyjet for personal flights, I've never had the occasion to catch an earlier plane. In my head, I've budgeted that I'm willing to pay up to £25 to come home 3 hours earlier. I ask the lady at the ticket desk, "How much to fly back on the earlier flight?" "Free," she says.

So it turns out that I had in fact bought a bundle of two things. First was an option to take a seat on my two booked outbound and inbound flights. (The tickets are options, because there's no contractual mandate for me to turn up; I can stay in bed all day and choose not to exercise them.)

They also sold me a limited option to change my option! This isn't in fact free; it's included in the price. I can't change to a flight on another day, for example, without a change fee. Thank goodness I wasn't flying Ryanair, where they'll surcharge you for oxygen costs if you breathe too hard.

Easyjet's problem is that they didn't market to me the fact that I was getting this second option as part of my ticket package. As it happened, they were the most convenient and cheapest option. But I could easily have gone down on several other routes available to me. They can't get any pricing premium for the option unless I know about it up front! Today was just pure forgone incremental revenue to them.

The same thing crops up in telecom, where users are sold options and the option could benefit from additional marketing to increase its perceived value to the user.

One example is Vodafone's Stop the clock promotion. It lets you make off-peak calls up to an hour and only pay for the first 3 minutes. As an improvement to the pricing of the sickly voice minute business, it's quite good. It helps to segment out "information passing" calls from long-running social calls, proportionately taxing the former more. It offers something of no real cost -- most calls remain under a minute or so, and the network capacity doesn't need increasing. Plus there's the benefit (to Vodafone!) of obfuscating real prices making price-comparison between operators harder. Most of all, you have to sign up for it (for free). You have to acknowledge you're getting this value -- the thing Easyjet messed up on at the marketing, booking and check-in stage.

You're being sold an option, too, with this promotion. Vodafone's pricing isn't very competitive historically. In your inflated minute fee, you're paying for the option to speak for an addition 57 minutes at no extra charge. Go over the hour (or change your airline ticket to another day) and you're gonna pay. If you just offer a passive discount, the user doesn't value it the same way.

How would you improve it? Well, Vodafone have long wanted to take more control over device design. So why not add the following feature. If you make a "stop the clock" call, and look at your call log, they will also display underneath the call "Stop the clock saved you £3.27". It's an entirely fictional saving, but re-inforces that value proposition. Or just have a 5-second post-call splash on how much the promotion "saved" you, with any key to dismiss it.

So don't say there's no mileage left in marketing innovation for voice. There clearly is. Oh, and be very, very suspicious of anyone who claims to offer "clear and simple" pricing -- it's almost certainly a fib to hide that they've made it harder to compare prices and understand what you're really paying!

Welcome to the byzantine black art of voice minute pricing; the airlines have plenty to learn. I guess Bell did have a head-start over the Wright brothers, after all...

Black is white, up is down, privacy is expensive

In economics there are all sorts of paradoxical and counter-intuitive situations. One such example is Giffen goods, where demand increases with price.

Telecom has a few interesting paradoxes too. Adam Thierer is busy trying to balance his libertarian outlook on technology with his parental instinct to track and trace his kids. In doing so, he reveals one such paradox. If you can trace your kids at any time, it has negative value for the teenage holder of the mobile phone. He recounts Sprint's service, which at least lets the tracked teen know when they've been pinged; there's a social cost to the tracker.

But imagine if it cost $50 to do a track (and the teen also knows they're pinged). This could, in fact, prove to be of positive net value to the lost teen. "I'm so concerned about your whereabouts that I'm ready to drop $50 just to know where you are." The higher the price, the greater the value you are placing on your offspring's privacy. (It's not a Giffen good, though, in case you're wondering... there's a close substitute good of calling and asking 'where are you!?', and the gain to the teen is outweighed by the loss to the parent.)

Another example of this is the privacy value proposition of SMS, which I vaguely remember mentioning before. You know that the message is always terminated on a private mobile device. If you allowed SMS messages to be received on interactive TV, this would destroy the privacy value proposition of SMS, because you could no longer be assured the message won't be displayed to the whole family and any visitors. The additional distribution value isn't big enough to outweight the privacy loss.

In the same way, universal integrated messaging has been a consistent flop, because it pierces the privacy walls that users erect between different services -- kind of manual avatars, in that you use SMS for one set of friends, IM for others, email for work colleagues, voicemail for clients, and so on.

The users will always take your product and adapt it to their needs. It takes some close observation to understand what they really perceive as value.

Netflux

Thought for the day...

Why hasn't anyone yet got a business model of shipping out high-capacity USB hard drives on loan with encrypted content, and then selling you the decryption keys for the content you want to view? Can easily get 100+ movies onto one drive these days. Bored of that selection? Swap it out for another 100, custom-burned for you in advance.

Doesn't anyone else see the Netflix-style shipping of DVDs that cost cents to press as somewhat peverse? That you put a $0.25 piece of media in a $0.20 shipping carton and pay $0.50 to send it back across the country? That you can't get the content you want when you want because the bits got affixed to a supply-constrained, fixed set of polycarbonate discs?

That said, given that storage technology continues to outpace transmission and processing power, their "high-latency mail-powered broadband" model looks like it'll have some serious longevity. Just hope they don't get too stuck in a "scarcity" rather than "abundance" mindset, ekeing out movies one at a time.

Brough Turner points to some slimey ways in which housing developers can keep their tenants hostage to their own private data utilities. You kind of wonder whether apartment complex owners will soon be getting into the business of putting a few racks down in the basement and installing a rack of hard drives every week, bypassing the telco and cablecos entirelty.

Telcos bearing IPTV offerings, beware! You've got competition, and you're the cost model ever more on their side every day -- they can put the storage nearer the user.

Don't I know you from somewhere?

I'm not against open source at all. A copy of emacs and a bunch of GNU utilities once used to accompany me everywhere. But there's hadly a single instance of an user-facing open source product without a sucky user interface, so I've more-or-less given up on it for anything but server apps. (I host my own Linux server, so evangelists -- please don't knock with free copies of The Penguin and promises of salvation, I won't be listening.) Even poster kids like Firefox have their troubles: the extensions interface is an embarassment.

I think I've reached the limits of Mozilla Thunderbird's email client. All I wanted to do was to turn off the notification icon in the tray. I no longer believe in being interrupted because my Paypal account has been suspended for the 1374th time.

No can do, at least in a sensible amount of searching.

Because a working, functional, synchronizable, socially aware open source calendar isn't due until around the end of time (the year 2038, I believe) I'm dabbling with Outlook again after a 2 year break. And it's actually rather good, despite its reputation. OK, IMAP support is bad, which is a problem for me as I'm never going to own an Exchange server. Still, I'm beginning to think the benefits outweigh the woes.

But there's one thing making me hesitate from switching.

In Thunderbird, it auto-completes every email address. And after two years on continuous and contiguous use of one laptop, it's captured pretty much everything. I never use my address book, as everything auto-completes! (I hear people record "telephone numbers" and make "phone calls". Strange, are folk.)

Outlook doesn't know me from Farmer Barleymow, so I'm back to re-training it and updating my address book. Ouch.

One of the mantras at Sprint we had for our abortive platform play was that leaving Sprint should feel like getting a divorce and re-training your new wife to live with all your foibles. That meant moving beyond merely keeping stateful customer data hostage and demanding ransom when your contract period was up. We wanted a service that actively learnt about you and how you used the system (without conscious configuration effort by the user). At the time mobile portals were all the rage, so we put our efforts into contacting obscure start-ups with technology to perform all kinds of intelligent search, sorting and collaborative filtering to try to get the right results to the user up-front. Sprint's "no click" to Amazon's "one click".

You would have thought that learning from user behaviour and anticipating need would be a high priority for mobile operators looking to reduce churn. (Don't expect handset vendors to help - they want handset churn, not stickyness). Yet I suspect that precisely zero of the operators are making the move from vertically intergrated telcos to horizontal plays their core strategic driver. Without breaking any commercial confidence, I would say that the criteria used at Sprint all related to secondary (or lower) phenomena, or confused strategic objectives with tactical metrics, or were too generic to be of real value. If anticipated ROI is your top measure, then the VP with the most plausible lies gets his project funded. Anyone for a doughnut shop on 119th St?

In doing so, you would array "defence" actions that prop-up your legacy vertical business, and "offence" actions that either break apart that business into component value pieces offered via a platform (e.g. billing) , or advance any parts where you really have some application-layer advantage (err, probably none). The defence part would naturally lead you to accumulate stateful data and learning about the user. I didn't know it at the time, but I was pitching a customer relationship play to an autistic technology enterprise, so nobody understood what you were saying (and not just because of the accent).

What would you do in practise? Smart address books, "one-click" impulse send of messages and photos to top contacts, intelligent suggestion of handset upgrades or new software or content. Your imagination is the real limit.

By the way, if anyone knows a good calendaring application for under-threes, my older daughter wants to hear from you. I was trying to get her ready to go out shopping this afternoon, and she goes for a fuss with her imaginary cooking set and can't be dragged away.

"Aren't you coming with me to get a new bathroom light, Laima?".

"No, I'm too busy. I haven't got time." she replies.

Ah, time management skills. Need to start 'em early.

A picture is worth a ... thousand dollars

Disclosure: I've done consulting work for Nokia, and am guilty of conspiring to pimp Nokia phones to bloggers. You've been warned!

You might have picked up that Nokia are slipping nice phones into the hands of various bloggerati courtesy of Andy's carefully-crafted PR2.0 efforts. But I got a free N90 some time earlier as a thanks for some good advice I gave them last year. So nah, nah sucks! ;) Anyhow, I've got a commercial interest. Thankfully.

All the pics here are taken with the N90, apart from the picture of the phone itself. No retouching of any kind has been applied. Click on them for the full-size originals, although bear in mind that bandwidth does cost me money.

The 3700 year old stone Machrie Moor stone circle, Arran, Scotland, 1 January 2006.

This isn't a review of the N90, but more an account of my experiences of living with the device in my pocket for 6 months. In a nutshell, the N90 is a standard Symbian series 60 smartphone with an enhanced main screen, quality optical unit with 2 megapixel camera on a twist cap, and a swivel and twist cover and external second colour screen. There are plenty of real N90 reviews out there that recap the functionality. I haven't read a single one. Nor have I bothered to read the manual. These are just my thoughts from being a casual user.

Firstly, understand that this is a camera with a smartphone dangling underneath, not the other way round. In fact, the "smartphone" bit suffers from all the usual issues of smartphones (non-standard UIs, different screen sizes, incompatible software, awkward activation and anti-piracy schemes, lack of memory, users simply don't care, blah blah) that have kept the market small. I don't really use any of the smartphone features, except to play Frozen Bubble whilst waiting to collect take-out food from the local Thai restaurant. But then I don't have a TV, and the radio's resting for a year or three. So we're not normal here at Geddes central.

I enjoy photography, without being a fetishist about it. Calling it a hobby would be too grand. So this phone has been of quite a lot of interest. Quite possibly you'll have seen on old blog posts some of the outputs from the crapcams on the other phones knocking around the house -- a Motorola V525 (nice phone but mediocre pictures, way too fuzzy at the corners) and Sony Ericsson T630 (appalling camera, great UI). The difference is enormous -- it's almost unfair to talk of them both in the same category.

Welcome to Edinburgh -- all walking distance from my home.

The general quality of the camera is pretty good. It's not up to the standard of a dedicated digicam, but it's not totally outclassed either. That said, if someone could sprinkle a bit of Canon's magic pixel dust on the successors to the N90, it would be welcome. Yes, it struggles with high contrast, has barrell distortion, chromatic aberrations, noise, and shutter lag. But you won't care, trust me. It's exceeds your expectations too often.

Two megapixels is a great size. They're big enough to fill all but the biggest PC screens, and make great 6×4 printouts. My mum has a Sony DSC-U20 camera, a wee jewel that Sony has discontinued. (The successor was camera selection of the year by Good Experience guru Mark Hurst last year.) Again, 2MP, and great photos in a tiny, cheap, convenient package. Why pay for more?

The performance in low light is quite commendable. The LED flash is certainly no embarassment, as you can see from one of my earlier posts of the railway staircase. It tends to over-expose when close up, though.

There are a few big lessons I've drawn from this device.

It's a business device masquerading as a consumer phone

At client workshops and with colleagues, I always end the day by snapping all the flip charts and whiteboards. The resolution is just right for this, and with a modicum of care with lighting and keeping still even my scrawl is legible. Plus, carrying a camera around is a great means of capturing events and situations that are so much better communicated in pictures than words. Death to the 7-bullet Powerpoint! Stick up your own pictures that show 'em directly.

Full explanation of this chart available for modest consulting fee.

It's not just that you carry it with you outside...

Everyone knows the received wisdom that compensating benefit of camerphones is you always have them with you and charged up. But the unexpected finding for me is that many of my best candid pictures are inside my home. When my elder daughter was splayed out climbing on the edges of the hot bath with a great big 'look at me' grin, I'm definitely not leaving the room to go hunting for the digicam and seeing if the battery is charged. Whilst mobile telephony is all about "third places", I suspect mobile photography is more mundane home-based, particularly for those with children. I find that the "whip it out of your pocket" nature of a camera phone is very different from the reverance afforded to a dedicated camera it its own little pouch. I've taken far more spur-of-the-moment records of the kids than ever before.

Laima and Daina, my two daughters.

Video killed the photo star

The N90 does a great job with video. It seems to cope with lighting problems better than with photos, the audio comes through clear, the form factor is just great (particularly that you can swivel the top for a photo, and then open it up for a video). I think the best memories of my small monsters will be the videos. (I'm saving them up on gold CDs to use as blackmail tools for misbehaving teens in a decade or so. Clean your room, girl, or your baby vids go on Flickr and I'll tell your friends!)

Pixels matter

I used to cringe when taking photos with the other phonecams, and groan at seeing the results on a PC screen. Although you'll get your share of duds with the N90, there will also be plenty of great shots that you'll be proud of. But the good thing about lots of pixels is you can throw 'em away. Crop, downsize, and you've got something usable. I don't think I'd buy the N90 for my personal use (it's overkill for someone who works from home and goes out with family, and doesn't give his mobile number to many people), but a good quality camera is now near the top of the list of necessary features. In fact, I wish Nokia would stick out a phone that just does great pictures, voice and SMS. I'm sure there's a market.

Christmas fair, with Scott Monument in the background.

Ants are your new photographic friends (almost)

The absolute highlight of the camera is its macro performance which is quite exceptional. Furthermore, it's all automatic, with no macro mode to faff around with:

Taken at Butterfly World, Edinburgh, Scotland. March 2006.

Size isn't everything

I don't find the weight of the phone or its size an issue. Indeed, compare it to my first cellphone, a Motorola mr601.

1997 vs. 2006: La plus ca change...

Apparently my old Moto was quite a cool phone at the time, for those without a Startac budget.

It's not perfect, but that's life

There are some annoyances to the N90. The biggest, to me, is the ridiculously loud branded jingle noise it plays when you turn it on. Sometimes it randomly doesn't store a shot (you can generally tell), or there's a strange 3-way lag between pressing the shutter button, the shutter noise, and the actual picture being taken (by which time you've moved the camera and get a blur). The image transfer is a bit autistic -- I always go through the same old sequence of marking all pictures, sending via Bluetooth and deleting. There's no vibrate function, which is a problem if I'm walking about with headphones on. The battery life is OK, but nothing to shout about. The lens cover could do with being easily snapped-out and replaceable. You can't fix the exposure by half-pressing the shutter. Niggly stuff.

Bottom line

It's mine. I like it. I'm keepng it.

No, you can't have it. Go get your own.

IPTV is dead (part 27)

Techdirt reminded us last year how broadcast IPTV is a dumb idea, as the future's all in faster-than-real-time downloads. (Usual nod of head to Odlyzko for being a decade ahead of us all here.)

In future you'll only want to watch stuff that's gained a strong reputation for quality. But you won't know it's a quality offering until plenty of people have watched it and the data's been passed through the collaborative filters. Furthermore, anything that isn't live TV can be sent to your DRM'd video store awaiting the unlock key to be sent at the anointed viewing time.

Only a very small number of shows will have a reputation that precedes them. The recurring nature of sports events is one such example. A drama will have to have an exceptional star writer or actor to make a new series compelling in advance of its release. But drama is rarely live (possible future trend - ImprovTV?) so doesn't need real-time streaming.

Another small batch of programs will offer true interactivity, maybe via SMS if not something richer.

You have to ask yourself whether the current TV schedules of non-live, non-interactive programs make the slightest sense. The legacy technologies of broadcast and satellite TV might be plenty to absorb 90% of the demand for this kind of "right here, right now" TV. Expensive IMS-based bandwidth reservation systems look increasing irrelevant to the type of traffic that is actually likely to go over these networks.

I'd hate to be a programme scheduler in a TV broadcaster right now. In all industries, gatekeeping is a minimum-wage job -- where it isn't automated away.

Yet the profitless IPTV bandwagon rolls on...

Flying lessons

I was going to describe our journey down from Edinburgh to Cornwall as a fiasco, but dictionary.com informs me that...

fi·as·co n., pl. -coes or -cos. A complete failure.

...which isn't quite true as we did get there, and in one piece. But a 6½ hour delay with two small children, and zero apologies or information from airline Flybe for the first 6 of those hours isn't my idea of a great customer experience. Oh, and why not change gates at the last minute to the other end of the airport, and not announce anything. Hiding behind boilerplate "apologise for any incovenience caused" just doesn't cut it -- show some humanity, please. It was your chance to demonstrate you cared and you fluffed it.

Despite this attitide issue, the airline is doing rather well, with a profitable 2005. This is in contrast to another British airline with regional roots, bmi, which is haemorraging passengers. The differences in their strategies are illuminating for telecom network operators.

bmi operates from London Heathrow as its primary base. It's a member of Star Alliance. They're the second-biggest airline at LHR behind British Airways, but with a UK and European footprint -- they have very few intercontinental flights. They lack BA's economies of scale, and the European network can't be cross-subsidised by the intercontinental network. BA have ten or more flights a day from New York to London, say; a very attractive proposition to a corporate travel manager negotiating a preferred supplier.

Yet bmi's service is quite good, with all the features and frills you might expect. Morale seems quite high when I fly on them, and the staff are very professional. The prices of the fares are often agressive, particularly for one-way trips where BA demands you mortgage your first-born for organ harvesting prior to boarding.

Now, let's contrast this with Flybe. At Exeter airport, they had a big poster up on the wall where they had caused us to gather a good 20 minutes before really necessary. (Daughter #1 naturally waits until the very moment of boarding to decare a wee-wee situation, thus risking our ability to pre-board at all. Never mind. She got so excited on the plane playing with other kids she even stuck her hands in her pockets and pulled her trousers and knickers down in the aisle for no real reason. I hid down the back of the plane in the galley with her little sister and disclaimed all responsibility or association with her.)

Here's Flybe's product promise:

It's pretty ordinary. They aren't offering you a back massage, gourmet meal, and compimentary limousine to your destination. In fact, I wouldn't get too excited about that high-frequency schedule either (it's a bit of an exaggeration), and I pray on every flight never to be delivered directly to the runway-less heart of Edinburgh.

Now for their distribution strategy:

That's definitely different. This is just the route map from Exeter. And believe me, Exeter (pop. 111,000) to Norwich (pop. 121,000) isn't the most heavily trafficked route in the world. But to drive it means a time-destroying and soul-draining trip round London and the M25. Flybe's way of dealing with airline competition is to not have any, and just stick to intermodal competition.

Now, on to telecom. Many operators, particularly mobile ones, have spent vast fortunes on trying to create differentiation via their product strategies whilst simultaneously having near-identical distribution strategies. In this case, "distribution" includes not only network coverage, but also ability to roam, spread of retail outlets and ease of payment. Yet some operators did do things differently. Verizon Wireless in the US not only had the "can you hear me now" campaign (emphasising coverage), but also sewed up key markets like Washington DC by getting their network gear installed on the Metro system. In the process, Verizon whipped Sprint's ass (same technology), where features and content had taken over the marketing message.

If I had the time and budget, I'd love to get a panel of industry experts together. They'd rate each carrier on the degree to which it had distinguished itself in terms of product and distribution strategies from its competition. And then we'd have a beautiful pair of axes onto which to place the results as a scatter graph. I'd then colour each point according to the rate of return of each telco over some reasonable period, maybe with a fudge factor to correlate against the overall market.

Which strategy is winning? Product or distribution? I think I know, but the evidence needs a lot of work to gather.

Planes, trains and automobiles

Three highly relevant articles I can commend to readers that I've spotted on my journey in the last 24 hours.

First is in Business 2.0 (which whoops the ass of tired Wired), with some amazing statistics on Ryanair, the ultimate no-frills airline:

• Average fare $53
• 20% annual revenue growth
• 22% profit margin (Southwest Airlines net margin: 7.2%)
• 15.6% of revenues from non-ticket sources
• 98% of tickets booked online
• 1/4 of the customers currenly fly on free tickets (excluding tax and airport fees), and they plan to increase this to half.

Wow. There are lots of lessons for telcos here in the world of evaporating voice revenues. But if you're not wanting to work it out for yourself, you know who to call.

Next is indeed in Wired (no URL, impossible to find link), where they report a Honda dealer is handing out "Just Looking" stickers to people entering teh showroom, and the salesmen will leave them alone until they rip their sticker off. The result is a dramatic increase in sales. Telco lesson: there's lots of mileage in innovating how people purchase your product. But at the moment, all those tied vertically-integrated stores look uncannily similar (and poor). How about telling your loyal customer "people who communicate like you upgraded to the following phones". Loads of innovation potential.

Last is in The Times (note: not "of London", it's The Times). Again, no URL, despite the whole of the rest of today's edition being online -- maybe it'll be posted up later. (Search for "Crowded trains to feel the strain" -- or look at p14 if you've got some wood pulp.) It's about expected crowding of trains in the next decade in the UK as the network reaches its capacity. The industry is structued as a nationalised track infrastructure, and private franchised train operators. Usage is soaring as the roads become overcrowded. But how to transfer cash from the "application" layer down to the "infrastructure" layer to fund the modifications for double-decker trains and longer platforms? One answer they list is to avoid the problem by increased price discrimination of travel times to push people out of the 8-9am peak.

It all sounds very familiar, and contains some salutory warnings for future hybrid telecom funding approaches that unpick today's vertically integrated model.

Tulips for telcos

As I type, I'm in Schiphol airport in Amsterdam between flights on my way home from Washington. I used to commute here a few years ago, and now I remember why I;m not fond of this airport despite its convenience and efficiency. There's never a moment's peace and refuge -- the travelator is engaged in an endless Dutch announcement torture of "mind your step", and the PA system continually blares demands for late passengers to hurry up on flights 1/4 mile away from your gate.

(For Dutch readers, the good news is the rest of the country more than makes up for the deficiencies of the airport.)

Oh, and there's no Wi-Fi.

But the absence of opportunity to waste time checking emails and surfing the web does give me time to think. Imagine there was Wi-Fi. Rather than having to whip out my credit card, and all the transaction friction that involved (think: yet another expense receipt and line item), I'd much rather bill my Wi-Fi access to my mobile phone account.

Since I'm not using my mobile itself for access, my laptop can't authenticate to the network without my mobile operator issuing me some new stand-alone credentials. Not likely to be a pretty process.

Yet my mobile is in my laptop bag under the table. It has a Bluetooth radio. My laptop has a Bluetooth radio. Bits can in principle flow from A to B. There's no need for the authentication capabilities of my SIM card to be physically limited to the phone itself. In fact, it's a powerful "personal authentication artifact" that could, with a dab of extra technology, be useful in all sorts of contexts. Imagine if your car unlocks just because you walk up with your phone, for example.

In this case, one of the weaknesses of Bluetooth could become a strength. The standard is fairly vertically integrated, with no clean separation of connectivity from application service. (The illusion of connectivity is created by emulating a serial modem as a separate application service of its own. Not nice.) "Profiles" that support headsets, file transfer etc. are standardised centrally. It wouldn't be a big deal to create a remote authentication profile. Maybe there's one already -- heh, not that I can check, becuase I'm disconnected, remember?

The telecom industry offers a compact with the public. In return for slow innovation and high prices, it offers standardisation (not merely standards) and "super-distribution" where everyone gets to have interoperable stuff (at least in principle). It's a very different model to the bottom-up building of markets in the Internet model where everything is driven by competing ideas and incremental growth of adoption one-by-one until one idea dominates and becomes the standard.

A cartel? But it's hard to argue that there's no public benefit if we're deluged by a massive network effect of something the public really values. And since there's active competition from the other side of the fence by Internet players, there are market forces to keep the telcos honest.

This authentication moment is also interesting for another reason. It falls outside the Internet Protocol/stupid network paradigm (which only says how to exchange packets and demands you don't mess with them). Yes, there are protocols like 802.1 that enable authentication for IP networks, but it's not the same thing. If telcos can make business out of authenticating to all sorts of foreign networks, the "dumb pipe problem" just isn't relevant, and you've finessed it away by creating value along some other orthogonal axis.

It's these chinks in the Internet Protocol abstraction that offer light at the end of the tunnel for telcos: payment, location, identity, retail, distribution, logistics, support, and integration.

Perhaps I need a companion blog, Teleresurrection, to document this stuff!

OPINION://F2C: Network neutrality speech

I know I've written ad nauseam about Network Neutrality, and the fight against bogeymen that aren't even there. But a couple of people at the Freedom to Connect conference here wanted me to post my speech up online. And as I'm losing my voice, it's much easier to type than talk, so I can point anyone who approaches me right here. This covers ground I've covered before, although never in one coherent argument.

This isn't a verbatim version of my speech; I just spoke from condensed notes, and I didn't manage to cover every point in my allotted time, so this is the full text.

Within the current funding and construction approach to networks, I believe a network neutrality law is a tactical, practical, strategic and philosophical error. It takes us further away from Freedom to Connect.

A tactical error

As a tactical proposition, it supposedly is to solve a problem. So what's the problem it might be solving?

Well, we certainly have a consumer protection and disclosure issue. Consumers are buying a product that has 'broadband internet' on the tin can, but they don't really know what's inside. The terms are often too obscure, hidden in obtuse language in the terms and conditions. That means we need disclosure along the lines that exist (in the US) for credit cards, where the key terms must be presented in a standard format. Furthermore, I'd suggest that there be regulated terms like "full internet access" and "partial internet access" to make it crystal clear.

Then there's the issue of monopoly and unfair competition. But there already are laws to deal with this. Sherman Act, RICO, and so on. The problem is process and organisation; getting the FTC, not the FCC, to enforce them.

The unbundling regime in the US has failed. "We need to stop the monopoly rents", they exclaim. But all network neutrality does is take the pain away. But morphine doesn't cure cancer. Price discrimination in competitive markets is, on average, beneficial to consumers. This is well established economic fact. By eliminating price discrimination, you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Is there a "moral right" to neutrality and traditional common carriage rules, given that the networks were (supposedly) built using public money? Sorry, no. The elected representatives in the US made a bunch of terrible deals on behalf of the public. Telcos got great deals in exchange for empty, unenforceable promises. The capital has all been transferred into into private hands. Gone!

There's a frequent complaint that "the Net needs us", and is under attack. But it's never been healthier. We've never had so many people so well connected. It's an emergent outcome of individual actors expressing their preferences via voluntary exchange. And they, by and large, demand an open connection! It's not sacred, an object of worship. We can think of better Internetwork architectures.

A practical error

Network neutrality can't be made to stick. Telcos will evade whatever definition you put up; it's easier than fighting UNE-P unbundling rules. It's easy to create atilted playing field.

There are so many blocking options, ways of setting aside reserved capacity, creating gateways, proxies, and private subnets. How about special peering agreements, unusual terms of service, locked-down edge devices supplied by the telco, different price policies, router queueing algorithms, topologies, hard-to-change defaults and settings, varying network symmetry and private IP address ranges. Good business for consultants like me in helping them evade the rules, but bad for the public.
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And when to 'design-in' neutrality? Do you really want courts involved in network design? Won't new entrants need to set aside as much money for lawyers as for network engineers?

A strategic error

Network neutrality makes competition and consumer welfare dependent on law and lobbying, not natural competition. So you've chosen the area in which the telcos are strongest on which to fight!

It creates great uncertainty for new entrants. Remember the CLECs? Well, I wouldn't want to be building infrastructure based on neutrality rules. It inhibits the very price discrimination that makes new access networks more economically feasible, particularly wireless ones.

We actively want un-neutral nets. For example, we'd all benefit if there were local peer-to-peer networks, where local traffic was free, reflecting the low cost of exchanging local traffic. Perhaps we'd benefit if Google could subsidise connectivity, so the person with the 2 Mbit/s connection gets their video at 10 Mbit/s, because the video is subsidised by ads.

A philosophical error

As noted by others, the Internet isn't a thing, it's a tangle of agreements to pass packets based on a standard interface. Those agreements are contracts that were freely enetered into. You have to interpose yourself into millions of those agreements. This is a bad precedent, whereby the certainty of contract is overturned.

It also surprises me the number of people who violently object to the use of eminent domain to apropriate private property in the Kelo decision are also the same people who would happily see private capital being partially appropriated for quasi-public use.

And where does it stop? Should any networked industry involved in any form of carriage be subject to such rules?

But there's a deeper reason to be suspicious of neutrality rules that re-inforce the status quo. The Internet is not "neutral"; it's baked in with all sorts of assumptions. It chose to ignore national boundaries, for example, in the structure of IP addresses. It chose to make IP addresses reverse traceable to ISP, but not to individual users, cramping the network's identity infrastructure by making anonymity the default. Good or bad? Doesn't matter; the existence of alternatives means we shouldn't prevent other internetworks emerging by assuming the one we have is the only way of doing it.

I will concede that there's a free speech issue. But to speak you need access at affordable prices, just like before to write you needed to have access to a printing press. If Yahoo! wanted to do a $10/month bundle deal with SBC where you could only access Yahoo! content, and consumers buy it, where's the problem? Outlawing it hurts the most price-sensitive (read: poorest) customers.

A better approach

I started off by listing the problems for which network neutrality is a purported solution, and hinted that there was a framing problem. So it falls to me to not just throw stones at network neutrality, but to suggest a better way.

The fundamental problem in networks is "less is more"; stupid transport has more option value than smart transport. The conduit of information goods has unique properties. Ownership of a network is a kind of Tolkein's ring, where the temptation to capture the value of the bits slowly corrupts and drives mad the owner.

We need models that better align the interests of network owners and users. This involves moving away from the feudal model of telecom and move to a new funding model that captures the positive externalities from a broader pool of beneficiaries. We need a "third way" other than monopoly and crypto-nationalisation via unbundling and price controls.

The focus of telecom will move to innovation in pricing, financing, ownership and purchasing of networks. We already see the initial steps, where the first hop may be over a wi-fi connection. In future, we'll see user-owned mesh networks. There are plenty of other models, be they local utilities, OPLANs, clawback of property price increases, muni networks, etc.

We have a co-ordination problem. We can't easily collectively get together to commission connectivity over which we have local control (as opposed to the feudal overlord). If necessary localities should be able to seceed from the telcos by buying back the infrastrucure at a reasonable replacement cost.

Most importantly of all, the natural unit of purchase of connectivity isn't necessarily the individual or hosuehold. The marketing and billing costs come to dominate the actual underlying service costs. Look at the US long-distance network, where the players all lost money bribing people to switch by using frequent flyer miles.

Look at what the Wikipedia technology and constitution did for collective information gathering. We need same community mechanisms for networks.

Other progressive actions are "abundance" policies: spectrum liberalisation, "layer 0" rights of way, eliminating franchising rules, opening up phone numbers to new services via ENUM, etc.

Summary

An open, free net is an emergent outcome, not an a-priori input to be legislated into existence. We need to capture and accellerate the experiments in how networks are built, financed and sold; and protect those experiments from incumbent wrath until the results are in.

But most critically, don't fossilize the network in 2006 by adopting network neutrality.