Richard Sprague WebLog : Future

Yet another huge storm

sprague — Tue, 05 May 2009 17:18:52 GMT

It’s pouring buckets again today, with strong winds last night blowing some nasty winds. Fortunately, I’m extremely well-prepared, so it’s just another storm for me. That said, I’m looking forward to what’s next:

This is a good time to remind my readers, and anyone else interested in the rest of what I do, to please check out http://blog.richardsprague.com for more details and thoughts. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of Twitter as well, so please join me there too.

eComm Notes part 4

sprague — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:55:15 GMT

Continuing my Virtual eComm attendance, here are some notes on other presentations;

Dean Bubley (Disruptive Analysis): Starts out with a great quote “Don’t assume” because consensus viewpoints are often flawed. (I would say consensus is usually flawed). Interesting examples of 3rd-party paid data and widgets combining benefits for multiple types of citizens looking for information, supplied via APIs delivered by MNOs.
Brough Turner (Founder, AshtonBrooke): 100Mbps broadband ranges from $127 (Amsterdam) to $11 in Stockholm but isn’t even available in important places like New York! His claim is that structural bypass is the solution, not network neutrality.
David Beckemeyer (TelEvolution) proposes a mobile phone sensor-net, a large peer-to-peer stream to send tons of interesting information beyond simply location. Wonder if he’s heard of the MIT SenseAble City ?
Graham Brierton (CTO, VoiceSage): CEBP (Comms Enabled Business Process) and how it makes a business use voice more efficiently.
Todd Landry (NEC Sphere) connecting the dots between people who “run the business” and those who “make phonecalls” with smart software.
Amir Zmora (Radvision): technical discussion of H.264 and video encoding issues for IP Video Communcations.
Jan Linden (VP Engineering at Global IP Solutions) VOIP and Video on iPhone, which he likes for the easy API, but doesn’t like for the lack of VOIP over 3G, lack of background app support, and requirement that app monitor the audio. Note that you can’t do 2-way video on iPhone yet because the app can’t access the camera.
Darrin Mylet (Founder, Spectru-station) hates that fact that 85% of all spectrum in the U.S. is going unused and proposes an interesting way to open access fairly to apps that need them.
Mark Rottegering (T-Mobile). Most people like the mobile industry is maturing, but really it’s merging with other industries. Lots of nice data, including a discussion of consumer willingness to pay per bit. Very interesting strategic discussion.
Shai Berger (Fonolo) is one I remember from last year’s eComm, so it was nice to get an update. They now have 500 companies mapped, with fascinating information about the call trees of various orgs. (Worst is US Department of Veterans Affairs).

…and much more. I’m learning a lot just browsing through the presentations. Organizer Lee Dryburgh says he wants to post the audio to IT Conversations again and I can’t wait to add them to my podcast list.

eComm Notes (Telio)

sprague — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:26:14 GMT

My boss, XDH kept mentioning Scandinavia in his Twitter feed from Ecomm, so one of my first stops in my Virtual eComm attendance was the presentation by Alan Duric, CTO at the Norwegian telecom company, Telio ASA.

Telemetry and real time communications will start to merge, thanks to technology like RFID.
He likes mobile storage: points out that churn is much lower when customers get online data storage from their carrier.

I’ll be cranking through the presentations throughout the next few days, writing up my summaries… Looks like a really good show!

eComm 09 virtually

sprague — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 02:50:19 GMT

Last year’s eComm was a wonderful way to see the latest cool stuff going on in the field of new communications technology and (more importantly) meet the people who are behind it all. The conference site, unfortunately, had poor internet coverage and many of us were unable to blog about it. And if you can’t blog in real time, it loses a lot of the fun. (That’s one reason Twitter is becoming so popular).

This year, my boss is attending, and I’m trying to stay in touch virtually as much as I can. So what do I do? Twitter of course: I’m following a steady stream of updates in real time on the Official eComm 2009 Twitter Channel.

So far, I’ve been intrigued by the Voxeo announcements and their new Tropo service.

Here’s a photo of conference organizer Lee Dryburgh speaking this morning, from Duncan Davidson’s FlickrR stream:

Looking forward to hearing as many more updates as I can squeeze in throughout the conference.

It’s a necessity

sprague — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:32:59 GMT

Look at the list of things Americans now list as necessities (according to a new poll by Pew Research)

Car	91%
Clothes Washer	90%
Clothes Dryer	83%
Air Conditioning	70%
Microwave	68%
TV	64%
Home Computer	51%
Cell phone	49%
Dishwasher	35%
Cable TV	33%
High speed internet	29%

Me, I think clean clothes and air conditioning are less important than high speed internet, but my wife probably disagrees.

It’s especially interesting to look at how the list has changed since the previous poll in 1996. Some of these items didn’t even exist back then!

Everything changes, technology keeps advancing, and what used to be luxuries are constantly turning into necessities.

VOIPs not dead, it's just no longer cool

sprague — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:19:00 GMT

I've been following the conversation in the blogosphere (and in last night’s Calliflower podcast) among the VOIP pundits, arguing whether VOIP is dead or alive. I'm sort of an outsider to all this, since I've only been following VOIP for the past year or so, but it seems to me that the argument isn't so much about VOIP as it is about "coolness". Some of these people have been involved in VOIP since the 1800s or something, and they remember a time when you could start a successful conference or magazine or VC-backed company by simply attaching the name "VOIP" to it. It was cool.

But like so many other ancient technologies, what's cool runs in fads, and I think the real concern among many of the pundits is that they have careers built on an idea that is no longer cool. Many of them, I bet, secretly envy the people who had "social media" on their resume since 1868, or SEO or <insert your favorite buzzword here>. VOIP is soooo 2004.

We struggle with this problem in my own product. There are those who argue it should be called VOIP, and that we're missing the buzz by not emphasizing our VOIP capabilities. Then there are others who say it's really part of the successful Microsoft server tradition, and we should call it the "telephony edition" of Small Business Server or Windows Server or something. Other people argue we're really part of the "Unified Communications" revolution, and that we should rename ourselves to be the "small business" or "starter edition" version of OCS.

Fortunately, whether accidentally or deliberately, we don’t think of it in those terms Who knows, who cares what buzzword we attach? We're just trying to create an innovative solution, and iterate on it as quickly as we can. Yes, sometimes I envy the buzz you get automatically by attaching yourself to the fad technology of the moment-- and heck, maybe I should be more proactive about joining these things -- but at the end of the day our product can’t be dependent on a particular technology (like VOIP or SR). In some ways, you know you’re mainstream when you’re not cool.

It’s Twitter’s Turn

sprague — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:51:15 GMT

Every great new social phenomenon has a "fad" phase, where zillions of people join in because, well, because zillions of others are joining. A few years ago I suddenly reunited with my old friends at Apple Japan because suddenly it seemed like they all were on Orkut. That died down after a few months, and then (with Japan) it was Mixi, and a little later it resurfaced at Facebook. Now the same thing is happening on Twitter. It's fun! Every day somebody new is "following" me, and I hear snippets of updates in the lives of people who I enjoyed working closely with but for various reasons have moved on to other things and I don't keep up with as much as I wish I could.

Part of the fun is the newness of it all. You reconnect with old friends who, unfortunately, life hasn’t permitted an easy way to stay in touch with. And along the way you run into brand new people who are interesting and suddenly become

But we are all limited by a fundamental problem that humans can only develop so many relationships at a time. People living in the wild usually travel in bands of 50 or so, with 150 being roughly the maximum size of the extended “band”. Your “nation” may consist of a few hundred more than that, but it’s just not possible to be close to too many people, not at one time. Whatever you do on Twitter comes at the expense of what you do on Facebook and ultimately what you do in real life. I’m a technology fan, so I don’t mind these other media having as much play as the real world, but still, I can only be in a few places at one time.

I’m not sure how long the Twitter phenomenon will last. To me, it’s a basically a huge, open version of IRC or Instant Messenger—things that have been around forever and were looking for something like Twitter to take it to the next level. I’m wondering when the commercials will hit it—you see hints of it already—and you start getting distracted from your friends by all the compelling and professionally-created content (like real-time news updates).

But meanwhile, go ahead and follow me: http://twitter.com/sprague. I’m there now, running Thwirl and Tweetdeck, having the time of my life sending and receiving 140-character updates to great friends I haven’t seen in ages.

Journalism and talent agencies

sprague — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:43:45 GMT

Traditional media is being killed by the plummeting costs of content creation and distribution, thanks to wonderful new technologies like cheap HD camcorders, easy-to-make podcasts, and Twitter. The resulting lower barriers to entry make it possible for CNN and NYTimes competitors to emerge from everywhere. What's left and how will it end?

One reason (the main reason?) we go to CNN or the New York Times is for the trust associated with their brand. But think about it: your real loyalty is often to the brand associated with the journalist. Would you rather watch CNN or Anderson Cooper? Would you rather read a generic New York Times review or one by David Pogue?

So it seems to me that in the future we'll get our content mostly from branded personalities, rather than companies. The news media companies will begin to look more like Hollywood talent agencies, a loose federation of big-name personalities, where the secret is to trade the power of one name in order to create a new one. Read this article by Walt Mossberg and I'll slip in new content by somebody else in the hopes that you'll begin to trust that new name as well.

There is also a premium on ultra-niche or highly-focused content, and maybe some of that will go to the people who help you discover it. Today, that's the search engines (yesterday it was the portals) and it's hard to see that changing, but I bet it will. One problem with keyword search is that it only works for things you know enough to search for. You have to know the keyword. That's a tough problem to get around, and the subject of some future thinking, I guess.

No CES for me this year

sprague — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:58:00 GMT

Michael Wolf is right on, at GigaOM, when he questions the long-term importance of CES. I got a lot out of attending in person last year, but I bet I’ll get even more out of it this year by not attending.

There is value in having a shared experience, being someplace in person with other people with your interests. And of course it’s nice to feel and interact with the products instead of just seeing the videos. But the number of face-to-face interactions you have these days is so much smaller than what you can do online, especially now that we have Twitter and a zillion other ways to be social virtually.

Technology of Sleepless in Seattle

sprague — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:01:02 GMT

I've lived here now for almost five years, and traveled here and considered living here for more than twenty years, but I finally saw this movie for the first time last night. I found myself getting emotional -- no, not over the sappy chick flick parts -- but over the technology in the movie and how much has changed, just in the 15 years since the movie was released. I don't think of this as an "old" movie, yet look at all the technologies we take for granted today, but that weren't used in Sleepless in Seattle:

Cordless phones: all characters make/receive calls on those old-fashioned wired handsets with a cord hanging to the wall.
Mobile phones: when the boy interrupts his father's date, he calls the restaurant, because nobody has cell phones.
Internet: the Meg Ryan character uses Lexus/Nexus to find information about Tom Hanks--technology she has access to only because she's affiliated with a major newspaper.
Starbucks: the characters kick back at beer pubs, because the idea of grabbing a latte together just wouldn't have been possible.
Flight reservations: the boy gets a plane ticket to NYC through a friend whose mom happens to be a travel agent and that's pretty much the only way to book a flight.
VHS tapes: The characters watch segments of a Cary Grant film on VHS.
Windows PC: few computers are shown in the movie (because of course not many people had them), but even the few that are shown are old clunkers running DOS.
Email: what's that? everyone sends postal mail to the Tom Hanks character because what else would they send?
Cable TV: the boy explains that he knows about adult behaviors because his friend "has cable".
Car radios: The Meg Ryan character switches between stations with those push-button click things, not the digital "scan" or "seek" features on every car today.

This movie is not that old, but each of these technologies seems ancient now, and we can't remember living without them. (the Internet? cell phones? PCs?) Still, if you think fifteen years is a long time (some of you weren't even born then), what about technologies from just the last five years since I moved to Seattle? There aren't as many, of course, but I can still see the technology changing before our eyes:

GPS: Meg Ryan fumbles with paper maps as she tries to find her way around Seattle.
Blackberry: It was pretty uncommon, even five years ago, to get your email while on the run.
Tivo: some people had it, but it wasn't nearly common enough that the writes could have expected everyone to understand the idea of time-shifting your TV.
Digital cameras: Again, they had started to appear but you still had lots of people using film.

But the biggest technological changes of the past five years would require fundamental rewrites of the plot. You literally wouldn't make a movie like Sleepless in Seattle anymore because the entire premise simply makes less sense in a world dominated by internet match-making and ubiquitous communications. Here are some new technologies, just from the past five years, that would almost certainly be included in a 2008 remake of Sleepless in Seattle:

Facebook, Twitter, and other real-time social networking
Blogs, Wikipedia -- user-generated content.
webcams

These newer technologies are clearly becoming mainstream, and in a few years we'll wonder how we lived without them. The exciting thing, to me, is to imagine the world of ten or fifteen years from now. The movies you watch in 2008 will seem just as antiquated in 2018 or 2023.

Getting to Version 3

sprague — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 17:44:31 GMT

We all know extremely good and cool technology products that never seem to catch on, while there are other products you look at and just say “how on earth did that ever become popular”? So what’s the difference?

Lots of people are commenting on what I got wrong about the iPhone, mostly repeating the standard explanation that “it’s so much easier” than anything else out there, implying that the main difference is Apple’s famous focus on the end-to-end experience. But there are other super-easy products that don’t catch on. Why not?

Part of the reason, I think, is that a brand new product needs some room to grow. You need to be able to make an initial stab at the market, even if it has some flaws, get users, and then iterate over and over based on that feedback. Something happens with some products, where they get enough initial buzz and usage that they have time to grow. (Brad Feld calls it the 80-19-1 Rule and Tom Evslin even has a downloadable spreadsheet to try to simulate it.)

People often say Microsoft gets it right on the third try, and that you should ignore the first two versions. But many of the world’s best ideas, especially at startups, never make it to the third version because nobody gives them the market buzz at that critical initial version. How do you get to version 3?

The Future Bill Gates

sprague — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 17:35:08 GMT

Lots of news this week about Bill Gates' last day at Microsoft, but most people don't realize how un-Bill and un-Microsoft it is to spend time reflecting on the past, so the goodbye meeting I went to on Friday morning was a little out-of-character. (Tears?!)

The most interesting parts, in fact, were the discussion about the future. Bill noted that he expects his priorities at the Foundation to remain roughly constant for the next 30 years! Global Health, U.S. Education, and Global Development.

Speaking of the future, my team had some interesting interactions with him this week that we'll be talking about soon. Stay tuned.

I want Hi-fi phone calls

sprague — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:07:45 GMT

Once you've spoken with your young son or daughter on a wide-band telephony connection, you'll never want to go back to your old POTS (Plain Old Telephony Service) phone line again. Children have such high pitched voices that the upper frequencies get chopped off and it's hard/impossible to distinguish your boy from your girl.

I've wondered for many years why the phone companies don't offer wide-band, 16khz audio for phonecalls. I can sort of understand how upgrading the entire network infrastructure is expensive and maybe would promote incompatibilities among carriers who adopt different wideband technologies, but why not high-quality between callers on a single network? If AT&T is so proud of its push-to-talk service, why not go the next step and make all ATT-ATT calls high-quailty?

Turns out the answers to that obvious question aren't easy, but I'm glad that TMCNet writer Rick Bye has at least summarized the challenges. He concludes with good news:

So, wideband telephony, an exciting feature that has been ‘coming soon’ for a long time, but may now actually be on its way, offering clear benefits to end users that should result in more and more people switching to VoIP services.

Tinkering and plunging

sprague — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 04:17:31 GMT

I admit that I'm often more of a tinkerer than a plunger when it comes to new technologies like Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and [insert your favorite web2.0 example]. I'm a tinkerer because I sign up for just about anything new that comes along, especially if I see it from one of my friends or others on my blog roll. But I just tinker with it, enough to get the basic idea, so I can be conversationally knowledgable about it if/when something becomes relevant later to my day job.

Plungers just jump right in, whole hog. They invite everyone they know, and then go crazy piling on dozens, maybe hundreds (or thousands) of friends, thinking they've discovered some new incredible way to automate what is fundamentally a one-on-one personal relationship-building process.

That's why I agree with sogrady at Redmonk who says:

[R]elationship volume and personal time are inversely proportional. As one rises, the other declines, more or less inevitably. In practical terms, this implies that the addition of relationships - be they personal, business or otherwise - unavoidably reduces the amount of time that you might allot to each.

So go ahead, add me to your Twitter feed if you like. I'll probably follow you and maybe learn something new about you in the process. But ultimately I think I'm concluding that Twitter, like Facebook before it, is more of a fad. It's being driven today by plungers, and once the next big cool thing comes along, they'll be on to something else.