Tech Track

Review of the Yamaha Speakerphone PSG-01S

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:57:01 GMT

The PSG-01S is a USB speakerphone designed to work with Skype, giving you hands-free operation for personal or conference calling. This is part of a growing genre of products that are actually combined soundcard + speakers + mic in an external, USB-connected box. When you install it, you find that in programs such as Skype, where you can select which device will be your mic/speakers, there is now a new soundcard available on the list. This particular device is well-made, and quite compact with a standing height of 12cm, making it ideal to travel around with. Interestingly, it's also got a tripod mount on the base, so you could use it mounted high up on a standard camera tripod. The aluminium body is attractive, and it's relatively heavy, giving a feeling of quality.

In use, the device gives good sound quality. Mostly I used it at a distance of about 50cm, which gives good echo cancellation performance, but I also used it from 2m away, and was told that the voice quality was still acceptable. You could imagine using it for a small group conference, perhaps up to 8 people clustered around a table. In addition to Skype, I also used it with Microsoft Office Communicator, which also performed well, so this is perhaps a device for the modern corporate road warrior who needs to keep in touch with other colleagues. I will certainly be carrying it with me on future trips to see how well it does this task. One puzzle with OCS, was that something (whether the Yamaha software or OCS itself, I don't know) was automatically adjusting the mic gain setting, in fact until it was slightly too quiet, so I was overriding this automatic setting during calls.

I haven't yet tested this yet, but I imagine that the PSG-01S it will work with other softphones (which generally allow sound card selection) for use with VoIP, for example Bria, Xlite, Zoiper. Another question mark in my mind is about the Mac. I plugged it into my Mac and was able to use it as an external speaker unit. I didn't get it to work as a speakerphone, but I only spent about 10 minutes experimenting with it so far, and I'll have to report back later on this. In fairness,Yamahas don't claim the device is Mac compatible, but in my opinion that would be nice.

In use with Skype, I had a couple of slight wobbles. The first real call I made with Skype, the audio had a kind of "extreme dalek" effect for about 30 seconds, and then settled down to work perfectly. I took this to be some kind if echo cancellation auto-tuning process. The second wobble was a sudden "blue screen" on my Windows XP desktop. I don't know for sure that the Yamaha caused this, but this is a rare occurence with my sturdy desktop system, and of course the tendency is always to blame the last drivers installed.

One excellent feature with the PSG-01S is the use of an accelerometer inside the device to control features. This is the first time I've seen these kind of features outside of mobile phone handsets and games consoles, and in my view this really points to the future of many user interfaces. Lying the unit on its side mutes the microphone, and then standing it up again un-mutes with a confirmation "beep". LEDs on the top of the unit show you whether the mics are "live" or not. This is very nice and means you don't have to fiddle about ith software UIs during a call. Another nice thing is that if you give the unit a shake, the Yamaha control panel pops up on the PC. You can also change this to maximise volume on shake: I would like this to be more configurable so that the shake could be configured to trigger different events (for example send DTMF to mute all conference participants?).

The PSG-01S supports Windows, and is available from the Skype store for around $200. This is an expensive device, but works well, and as I said works with Microsoft OCS as well as Skype, so I imagine that many corporate travellers could justify it as a business expense. By the way, it also doubles as an external stereo-speaker unit (when laid on its side), so that's a nice side benefit for those of us that like to listen to music in hotel rooms.

UPDATE: It does work with Skype on the MacBook, although there is no console software for Mac, which means you can't configure the "shake" feature. Sounds good.

Moon 40

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:01:23 GMT

On the 20th of this month will be the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, Apollo 11, famously taking Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin for man’s first Moon walk. The Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) was fundamentally a simple machine which was designed to fall to the Moon rather than fly, with one giant rocket motor underneath and some smaller attitude thrusters that allowed the spacecraft to be rotated so that the main engine could potentially point in any direction when it fired. Control of the descent was therefore by means of a number of rocket engine “burns” that could slow the fall of the LEM. This certainly is a “brute force” method of flying; as with Earth flying machines like a helicopter or the Harrier jet, if you have a powerful enough engine it’s possible to bludgeon the laws of physics into submission.

Later on (in the late 1970’s), the idea of landing the LEM inspired a series of popular computer games, probably most famously the “Lunar Lander” arcade game from Atari. I first saw versions of lunar lander in the early 1970s, running on programmable calculators, and specifically the Science of Cambridge MK14 (an early single-board microcomputer), the first computer that I ever programmed. In the computer game, the program modelled the amount of fuel in the craft, the altitude and the speed, and of course the moon’s gravitational pull of 1.6N/kg. By pressing a button you could “burn”, which used fuel and slowed descent. If you studied Physics or Applied Maths at school you would have had the formulae needed to create this program, and you could even do the necessary calculations by hand. Where the computer becomes important is in the dynamic nature of the calculations: as you burn fuel, the mass of the craft decreases, and therefore the force of the engine creates more acceleration as the flight continues.

The real LEM had a dry weight of around 4000kg, with another 11,000kg of fuel at the start of the flight, and the descent started from a height of 15km. Unlike the game of course, the Apollo 11 descent had two men’s lives depending on the outcome, and the flight did not go smoothly. Armstrong famously landed the LEM (codenamed “Eagle”) with only a few seconds of fuel left in the tank, after deciding that the landing site was too rocky and deciding to fly along the surface for a while, looking for a new site. If you’ve ever played “Lunar Lander”, you’ll know that flying along at constant height is a very expensive operation in terms of fuel, so this is a high-risk strategy.

The LEM also experienced some computer problems during the short flight, with the Apollo Guidance Computer giving “program alarm 1202” repeatedly, causing Armstrong to ask Mission Control whether he should abort the landing. In subsequent analysis, the experts from MIT concluded that the computer overloaded because of the data coming from both the rendezvous radar and the ground radar at the same time. The boffins imagined that only the ground radar would be on during the descent (to give accurate height readings), while the rendezvous radar would be used after takeoff. Armstrong, being a test pilot, was planning for possible emergencies, and if the landing should be aborted, he wanted to be able to find “Columbia” (the command/service module) as quickly as possible as they burned away from the Moon’s surface. You might say that the user exercised that software in the way that the programmers had not foreseen; a problem that’s still all too common in software engineering today.

I would like to think that with today’s technology it would be much easier to go to the Moon: we have faster , smaller computers; superior materials like plastics and carbon fibre; more sophisticated fuels and engine technologies. Certainly the one thing that hasn’t changed in the last 40 years is the courage that it would take to land on the Moon, and we have to pay tribute to the 12 men that have done it.

Burning Rubber, But Not Gas

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:43:27 GMT

The Isle of Man Tourist Trophy, or “TT”, is one of the Worlds most famous and iconic motor races, where the public roads of the island are turned into a motorcycle race track. A 38 mile (61km) course takes bikes around the island at speeds of up to 200mph (320kmh), with the fastest bikes averaging around 130mph (209kmh) over the lap.

This Friday, an important new page will open in the history of electric vehicles: the TTXGP. The aim of the TTXGP is to build and race a zero-carbon superbike around the standard course, for two laps. Although any zero-carbon technology is allowed, the entrants are all electric, powered by batteries; 76 miles is a long way, so clockwork or rubber-band powered is not going to be an option, and there are certain public safety issues associated with nuclear powered motorbikes, even supposing you could find a rider willing to sit on one.

Visually, the bikes look very much like petrol bikes, and in fact usually a standard road bike is the starting point for constructing the electric version. Brakes, suspension, frame, controls are all fairly standard, but what is usually the petrol tank is now generally full of batteries. The motors are electric, with no gearbox, and of course these vehicles are pretty much noiseless.

The electric technology looks somewhat puny in comparison with the petrol bikes, but the electric vehicles are expected to be able to reach top speeds of around 70mph. Of course it is hoped that if this kind of racing becomes a regular fixture, then this will drive innovation in battery and motor technology. As any engineer will tell you, you can have a hundred ideas on paper about how to build something, but the execution of building something is where the really great innovation comes from.

I’m looking forward to seeing what these bikes can do on Friday, and also hoping that this does create practical road bikes in the not-too-distant future. An electric bike with a range of, say, 200 miles at speeds of up to 70mph seems to me like a useful vehicle for commuting.

Picture courtesy of TTGXP

Letter to the DVD Industry

Thu, 07 May 2009 06:50:50 GMT

The DVD format is a big advance over the VHS tape, but in some ways the technology tail is being allowed to wag the entertainment dog. Can I point out a few things to you studios and DVD producers?

1. Having different navigation on every DVD is a pain in the arse. I know you want to make it look nice (and unique), but fundamentally I just want to select something from the menu. Mostly I just want the movie to play. So, here are some don's for you:

- Don't redesign the cursor. I need to know what I'm, pointing at. Don't just use colours. I don't know that you think that 'red' is the cursor and 'yellow' is non-selected.
- Don't spatter the selectable icons all over the screen like a swarm of jellyfish. Line the icons up so I know how to jump from one to the other.
- Don't play a 15 second video clip every time I come back to the menu. I've seen it now. The first time was enough.
- Don't add visually confusing backgrounds so that it's hard to see which is part of the menu and which not.
- Don't add extra levels of menus just because you want to make it look lke a "spaceship control panel" or some such. Annoying. Time-wasting.

2. Don't show me warning videos (or screens full of text) about piracy or from the FBI. I know your point of view, and I don't care. I don't know who you think is interested in this message because:
- The real pirates have already decided to set up their duplication factories in Asia. They will not watch you piracy video. If we're lucky, they'll strip it off in the pirate version, and make our lives better.
- Normal home users like me are not engaged in piracy. We don't need to be told (every time) that piracy is bad, and we don't want to watch your poxy infomercial.
- I don't believe that even if I was on the horns of the dilemma of "shall I copy and sell this DVD", that watching your trailer or reading what the FBI have to say would make any difference to me whatsoever.

Producers please note: making these parts of the disc non-skippable is not making anyone happy. Please stop it. Actually, this is an incitement to rip the DVD and watch it in another format: at least then we don't have to sit through unwanted rubbish.

3. Don't show me your logos and idents. Especially don't make these bits non-skippable.
- I don't care that you're called Warner or Sony, and I won't remember that you're asociated with this movie.
- I don't care who provided the audio technology, and I don't want to watch your promo/ident
- I don't want any of this non-skippable crap from slowing down watching the movie.

4. Don't show me any trailers.
I realise that if I get a rental disc that it will have film trailers. I don't want it, but I'm resigned to it. Please note that I will skip them evey single time. But if I buy a disc, a definitely don't want any trailers. I bought the disc for a specific movie, and that is what I will watch repeatedly, not your ageing trailers.

Especially don't insert ads (e.g. for chocolate bars) in there too. I do not (will not) watch commercials ona DVD disc. If you insult me like this, then I will retaliate by not buying your confectionery. Once again, if you fill the disc with unwanted crap, then you're playing into the hands of DVD rippers and possibly also pirates. A format that offers the movie without all of that unwanted noise is a product that people desire.

5. Don't show me any multi-lingual warnings after the movie has finished. I still don't care. Also, you know now that I speak English, because I selected that from the menu to start with. Don't show me irrelevant rubbish when the technology allows you not to.

If you can do these simple things for me, we're going to get on fine. Otherwise you're just making enemies and it's you that suffers in the end. Transmission ends.

Calculating Easter Day

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:06:20 GMT

With Easter approaching, I was thinking about the calculation for Easter day. Back in the 1970s I had one of the first affordable programmable calculators, the Sinclair Cambridge Programmable, and this came with a book of algorithms for calculating all kinds of interesting things, mainly science and engineering related. It even had a rudimentary version of the Lunar Lander game, although with only the altitude and speed shown on the display, you had to use your imagination.

One of the sample algorithms offered with the calculator was a routine to work out Easter day for any given year. Easter Day is a moving feast, based on the movements of the moon. Specifically you have to work out the date of the Paschal Full Moon, then Easter day falls on the following Sunday. As usual Wikipedia has extraordinary levels of detail on the available algorithm, and as far as I remember the steps for the Sinclair calculator looked like those listed under Anonymous Gregorian algorithm:

a = Y mod 19

b = floor (Y / 100)

c = Y mod 100

d = floor (b / 4)

e = b mod 4

f = floor ((b + 8) / 25)

g = floor ((b − f + 1) / 3)

h = (19a + b − d − g + 15) mod 30

i = floor (c / 4)

k = c mod 4

L = (32 + 2e + 2i − h − k) mod 7

m = floor ((a + 11h + 22L) / 451)

month = floor ((h + L − 7m + 114) / 31)

day = ((h + L − 7m + 114) mod 31) + 1

So in other words in a series of quite simple fixed point calculations you can go from the year number to a month (March or April) and a day number. Quite simple and elegant, and ideal for my calculator, which only had a 36 steps (operations) in its memory.

Animoto.com

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:04:48 GMT

USS Pampanito in SF Harbour

Remembering Ada

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:16:40 GMT

Ada Lovelace was born into a privileged life as the daughter of Lord Byron, and then later she married into wealth with her husband William King, who became the first Lord Lovelace. She certainly enjoyed some of the vices of the upper classes, notably excessive gambling, but also drink and drugs. However, unlike many of her class she did not live a life of indolence but in fact worked hard and used her many talents, as it turns out with long-lasting contributions to science and technology.

Ada is associated with Charles Babbage, who was a pivotal figure in the invention of the automatic computer. Today you get "hardware" people and "software" people, and in a way so it was then; Babbage was very much into mechanical engineering, and spent literal fortunes creating the Difference Engine and planning his later Analytical Engine. Ada had no hardware to work with, since the Analytical Engine was never built, so she worked entirely with a theoretical model of the computer, imagining how to create the steps to solve a mathematical problem, in other words, a computer program.

Ada’s involvement with the Analytical Engine began with a memoir written by Italian mathematician, Luigi Menebrea. Menebrea had written up details of the Babbage engines, in French, and Ada took on the task of translating the paper into English. Ultimately, the notes she added to the book ended up being bigger than the book itself, and it is this work that allows her to claim the title of the world’s first computer programmer. In the notes she created a set of steps, or an algorithm as we might say today, that would create the numbers of a Bernoulli series. Recently a copy of this book, "Sketch of the Analytical Engine" by Menebrea, with added notes by Ada, "Observations on Mr. Babbage’s Analytical Engine", was sold at auction for $170,000, a testament to its importance as a historic scientific book. Menebrea later went on to be Italian Prime-Minister, a rare case even still of a top politician coming from a scientific background. In a different social climate, one might have hoped for Ada to be a prime-minister, but in those days even to publish a book was not looked on favourably for a woman.

Her insight into the possibilities of a computer were extraordinary. She explained the Analytical Engine in this way: "We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.", making the link between the Jacquard loom (a mechanical system using cards to program a loom to weave) to the more general case of solving mathematical problems. She is also attributed with being the first one to state that a computer does not have creativity, but rather follows steps laid out for it: "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform." This simple statement is referred to as "Lady Lovelace’s Objection" and still stirs the question today "can computers think?" It informed computer pioneer Alan Turing to describe what is now called the "Turing Test"; a kind of blind test to see whether a human interacting with a computer can be fooled into thinking that actually they are communicating with a human. It is very difficult for a computer to convincingly pretend to be a human, because we can do so much more than simply blindly following patterns. Digital computers are faster than mechanical ones, but the essence of how they work is still the same.

Babbage himself was a man beaten down by failure and ridiculed by politicians and commentators at the time. His friendship with Ada, and the encouragement and intellectual horsepower she brought to the project must have been a key factor in him pressing on, against all odds. Babbage affectionately used the term "Enchantress of Numbers" of Ada, and she is often referred to as the "Queen of Engines".

Ada Lovelace has rarely been immortalized in fiction, but one attempt was in the 1990 novel "The Difference Engine". The central conceit of the book is that the Difference Engine (or perhaps that should have been the Analytical Engine?) has successfully been built and commoditized, and so a computer age has happened in the mid-1850s. These commodity computers are then used by the state for control purposes (for example all citizens have an ID card; shades of 2009), and computer programs can do untold harm if they fall into the wrong hands. The timeline of the novel requires Ada to still be alive by 1855, where sadly in real life she died in 1852.   The novel plays up her vice of gambling, and yet also creates a world where Ada is famous, and venerated in her time as an extraordinary scientist and visionary, rather like the modern cult of the veneration of Steve Jobs.

You can’t call it a well researched novel; for example it has one character joking that she will fling herself off Tower Bridge in London, a crossing that isn’t due to be built for another thirty years. However, the idea of computers revolutionising industry and society isn’t so crazy, as we know. Babbage did have plans to drive the Analytical Engine with steam (rather than the hand-cranked Difference Engine), so with the appropriate technology of the age perhaps a breakthrough could have occurred. Had Ada lived to 60, and Babbage had had more luck with funding from visionary politicians, perhaps a computing revolution could have happened in the age of steam?

But what of the software industry, that perhaps Ada created? Programming languages have proliferated; millions of programmers have been trained, and really the variety and complexity of software has now spun out of control. The United States Department of Defense (DoD) realized that this was a problem needing a solution, and so in the 1970s set out to define the software language to end all languages.   The ADA programming language, was designed in a characteristically long public sector project through the 1970s and 80s. The DoD commissioned and examined four different potential languages before choosing a winner, that would be used for all military applications from then on. Ultimately, the project cannot be seen as a long-term success and ADA is today not an important commercial language, having been outpaced by later developments like "C" and Java. However, the name "ADA" is an important tribute to the world’s first programmer, Ada Lovelace.

Ada’s life was short: she died at the age of only 36 from cancer of the uterus, leaving behind a husband and three children. In that short life, she profoundly affected the history of computing, inspiring a generation of scientists like Boole and Scheutz to create the framework that would eventually, after another century, create the electronic computer.

The consequent pace of change in computing in the last 60 years has been breathtaking. From the first valve-based general-purpose computers in the 1940s to the crippled 8K machines that navigated men to the moon in 1969, through to today’s pocket computers, the smartphone and mp3 music player. Perhaps the USB flash drive in your pocket contains as much computer storage that existed in the whole world in 1970?

The pace of innovation is impossible to imagine, and we continue to fail to imagine.   IBM founder Thomas J. Watson imagined "a world market for maybe five computers", then later Ken Olsen of the now defunct DEC minicomputer company said "there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home". By contrast, Ada Lovelace was someone with the imagination to see the potential of a machine that would never be built in her lifetime; even in her century, and this is a rare gift indeed.

This piece is a contribution to Ada Lovelace day, celebrating the role of women in our technology business. See http://findingada.com

eComm 2009 - Early Bird

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:58:49 GMT

The Early Bird Discount for the eComm conference expires at the end of Jan, so get your bookings in:

http://ecommconf.com/

Don't forget you can still get an additional 20% discount using the code 'MartynDavies', as I'm one of the speakers.

Threnody for VoIP

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 10:13:54 GMT

So, VoIP, you are dead.
Sorry to hear that.
Still, must get on and make a phone call.

With kind regards to all my friends who recently discussed this topic at length: Dan York, Ken Camp, Sheryl Breuker, Phoneboy, Luca Filigheddu, Alec Saunders, Andy Abramson, Lee Dryburgh, Jim Courtney

Jon Arnold

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 14:52:23 GMT

Prolific writer and analyst Jon Arnold has been blogging on the same Pulver website for a good long time. Unfortunately the collapse of Pulvermedia earlier this year has finally filtered through to that site, so his blog is moving home.

Fans of Jon (like me) should reprogram their blog reader to point to his new site:

http://www.ipcom-insights.com/blog/jon/

I'm a Speaker at eComm!

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:08:14 GMT

I'm proud to have been selected as a speaker for eComm 2009 in San Francisco:

http://ecommconf.com/

Some of the coolest people in telephony and Web 2.0 will be speaking and attending, and it will definitely be one of the major 'new telecom' events of 2009.

To get a 20% discount, please use my own promo code 'MartynDavies', which will bring the entry fee down to $952.

Register here:
http://www.amiando.com/ecomm2009.html

See you there!

eComm 2009

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:34:09 GMT

By all accounts the best technical conference of 2008, eComm returns next March.

Allow me to repost the call for speakers. If you're busy re-imagining, disrupting, innovating, interconnecting and mashing up in the world of telephony, then this is definitely the right venue for you:

CALL FOR SPEAKERS

Emerging Communications Conference (eComm 2009),
Burlingame, California –
March 3-5, 2009

http://www.eCommConf.com

This isn't a traditional telecom conference. The eComm audience has very high expectations of speakers. They are both seizing opportunities of the post telecom era (or reinventing traditional products and services) and can engage the audience. Rules include a ban on "brochure speak" from stage (overt marketing pitches) and a strict enforcement of the clock._

Plenary presentations lasts just 15 minutes including 2-3 minutes of Q+A. We've found this format of carefully prepared presentations keeps the atmosphere charged. This format also helps us to fit in more than 70 speakers over 3 days. Thanks to the intimate feel of the venue and the energy and attention of the audience, many speakers find it to be a great public speaking experience._

It's expected that most speakers stay for all three days of the conference. They stay to join a conversation with a high caliber audience containing an exceptional number of the industry influencer's and thinkers. Talks can be theoretical, practical, demonstrations or a mixture of all three.

Particular topics of interest for 2009:

* Democratization of communications innovation; anything from VoIP community, XMPP enabled social networking to DIY 12-volt telephony
* Convergence of the media industry with personal communications
* Theme "telecoms is becoming software"
* Telecom restructuring, threats, or new business models
* Telecom trends, particularly Asian
* iPhone or Android applications
* The new old - traditional carriers or vendors who are changing the game
* Mobile Social Software (MoSoSo) applications on any platform; any socio-centric devices or applications will be considered whether mobile or not
* Social Computing
* Mobile leveraging of Cloud Computing or Telco in the Cloud
* Future of Social Networking Applications
* Network Equipment Providers plans for next 1-3 years
* Facilitating business processes with voice
* 4G Technologies
* P2P modes of production or networking

Please note that this is a list of topics chosen by the selection committee, but it is not an all-inclusive list of topics - we like to keep an open mind.

Feel free to submit multiple presentations on different topics. Talks on generic subjects can be rejected. Be unique!

Before submitting a talk, please try to include answers to the following questions:

* How will your talk excite people?
* What do you aim to arouse in the audience?
* What will be said in your talk that has not been conveyed at another conference?
* Does your talk educate the audience?

Proposals will be considered for the following types of presentations:

* 30 minute keynote
* 15 minute plenary
* 1 hour tutorial (these extended classes give participants hands-on, practical, in-depth guidance)
* 5 minute "Lightening Talks" (rapid-fire presentations that provide insight into new technologies, projects, products or services)
* Other

Please include the following information for your proposal:

* Proposed title
* Overview and extended descriptions of the presentation: main idea, sub topics, conclusion
* Suggested topic
* Speaker(s): expertise and summary biography

Submission deadline. November 17, although the speaking programme is expected to fill in advance.

Final points. Dress code is casual or business casual. All speakers will gain FREE entry, will receive an extra FREE ticket and a single 50% discount code to giveaway also. Speakers who have limited budgets (i.e. academics) may have all or some of their expenses paid by prior agreement. The selection committee will be looking for evidence that you are an expert in the topic that you have proposed. Make sure to
leverage your individual or organizational expertise when making your speaking proposal.

Still have proposal submission questions? Email: Kristi@eCommMedia.com

SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL BY EMAIL:

2009_suggestions@eCommConf.com

The "Large" Small Print:_

If chosen you will be required to:

* Observe the clock - time slots will be enforced - this requirement is for all and there will be no exceptions.
* We will not allow presentation substitutions on-site.
* Refrain from "brochure speak" (product or marketing pitches) from stage. The audience is technically minded and averse to being blatantly pitched.
* Register for the event (short online process) within 2 working days of receiving a speaking confirmation (full instructions will be provided) otherwise your presentation may be canceled and/or filled with another speaker.
* Appear onsite and make oneself known to the delegated Speaker Caretaker at LEAST one hour before your scheduled talk otherwise your presentation WILL be canceled and/or filled with another speaker.
* Send in a draft presentation for review two months before the event and a final version one month before the event.
* Accept that all submissions will be evaluated by the 2009 Advisory Board. eComm 2009 Sponsorship or Exhibitor participation will not be considered in the evaluation of submissions, outside of any sponsored sessions offered in specific packages.

eComm 2009

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 13:54:20 GMT

Both a Threat and a Benefit

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:33:18 GMT

Looking through the details of the upcoming Infosec show in London, my eye was drawn to this one: Technical Theatre - Web 2.0 - Social network - business tool or security nightmare?. There is a tendency to try to turn complex issues into black & white for the sake of debate, but isn't it possible that social media tools might be both a threat and a benefit, both at the same time?

Of course blogs and tools like Jaiku/Twitter have the possibility of accidental information leakage, but then so does email, and we're still using that. On the flipside, telling people what you're doing can also result in fortuitous meetings, and connections with people that you didn't know, but have shared goals. As with email, controlled use of the technology is much better than an outright ban.

I know that some organisations have made strenuous efforts to ban tools like Skype and also tools like Facebook. For me this seems inconceivably stupid. Facebook is a great business tool for me, and allows me to keep track of countless people I have met on my travels. At the same time, I have been able to link up with people that previously I had no access to, and contacts via "a friend of a friend" are some of the most effective contacts that you can find. Those companies that choose to ban Facebook have a double whammy: not only do they shut off the possibility of any benefit, but they also alienate their own employees by doing so.

Which is not to say that we should allow all employees to spend all day, every day working on their social media networks; after all there is still work to be done. I think, though, that very few are doing this to such an extent that it effects their work efficiency. If there are employees with problems, then surely the best way to deal with it is in a one-on-one, manager to employee way. After all, your manager should be measuring your effectiveness against stated goals, and if performance is poor relative to these goals, then this is a management issue. Poor performance can be caused by many problems including drink, drugs, gambling, family problems etc., so addiction to online sites and services is just another type of problem that has to be dealt with using the same tools. Banning all employees from Facebook because the minority abuse it is a bit like banning everyone from the pub because you've identified one alcoholic on the staff.

Social media tools are a business tool, and a social tool, but shouldn't be a security nightmare. Could security experts perhaps define policies that allow us to us the tools safely and benefit from the opportunities?

Alec Saunders Interview

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:33:30 GMT

One of the highlights of the recent VON conference was getting to Interview Alex Saunders, blogger and CEO of VoIP company Iotum. The interview podcast is now available at the Voip User site, where we have the "Bending the Needle" podcast series:

http://www.voipuser.org/btn/

Alec now has his own Squawkbox podcast, which he records daily via the "Free Conference Calls" application that Iotum created for the Facebook platform. If you use Facebook, go over and take a look: http://apps.facebook.com/freeconference/landing

It's quite an endeavour recording a daily podcast, and this is quite an interesting social media experiment. Anyone can join in Squawkbox, so if you want to take part in a topical tech news discussion, why not sign up for one of Alec's podcasts?

Video on the Net

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 09:48:17 GMT

At VON last week it seemed that everywhere I went there were people videoing and taking snaps, and a lot of this material has been tagged and blogged, and facebooked and flickr'ed and is available online. Jeff Pulver suggested the tag VONX08, so use this if you're searching on Technorati or some such, this is what to look for.

One particular phenomenon this year is QIK. This is a service that allows you to live stream (via 3G, GPRS or WiFi) up to the server, where QIK users can view live online, and then the video is stored so that you can tag it and leave it for posterity. Jeff used this to good effect a number of times, for example at his social media breakfast, but several people also caught Ken Camp proposing to Sheryl Brooker, which Maxroam's Pat Phelan has posted on his blog. QIK is also enjoying attention from Robert Scoble at the moment, who appeared on stage with Jeff and some other video service companies like Ustream.tv and Seesmic. Scoble was videoing the session from his place on the podium, and althoug I haven't found it yet, I imagine that this is also online.

I dabbled with QIK myself (this works nicely on Nokia smartphones), and uploaded a couple of short videos from the VoIP User dinner.

WiFi Everywhere

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:58:45 GMT

Well, this is cool. I'm in the BA Terraces lounge at San Francisco airport, where they've got free WiFi for the customers. I've already logged my phone on to Truphone and made a free call out to a friend. Bandwidth is good enough for voice calls. Firing up my laptop I find I have a choice of WiFi: with my PC I'm now connected to a T-Mobile hotspot, since yesterday I paid $9.99 in the hotel to connect to the Internet, a 24 hour pass. This is how life should be.

Spring VON.x 2008

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:38:39 GMT

VON opens tomorrow, but we already had some events in the pre-conference day. The day started out with one of Jeff Pulver's social media breakfasts: great fun tagging each other with stickers. Yes, not just RSS tags, but real bits of sticky paper. A great crowd there this morning, and several people remarked to me that the Brits were dominating the room. I'm not sure about that but there were James Body and Dean Elwood of Truphone, Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis, and Lee Dryburgh, fresh from his successes at the newly reborn Ecomm conference.
It was great to meet some old friends, as well as some people that I know through the social media, but only this week in person for the first time: Ken Camp & Sheryl Breuker, Luca Filigheddu, Phoneboy, and Stuart Henshall. Jeff asked if the Brits will be ready for a Pulver breakfast in London? I think so... this is a great networking initiative.

I went to a couple of the sessions on OpenSER at the preconference, and then also got to see my friend Jonathan Zar for lunch. Jonathan is always a great conversationalist. The other half of the Blue Box podcast team, Dan York, is over at the other coast doing VoiceCon this week.

I'm exhausted already, but there are more events to come later in the afternoon.

Mobile World Congress - Barcelona

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:52:06 GMT

I just returned from two days in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress (formerly known as 3GSM). That really is a big show now, and the sheer breadth of the mobile industry is quite amazing. Everything was there from different wireless technologies to content providers, operators, handsets, service delivery software, security. Just staggering. For my money 3GSM was a cooler name for the show, but there you go.

As ever, though, the people make the event. I finally got to meet Jonathan Zar of the Bluebox podcast, and also outreach chair at VOIPSA. I've been collaborating with Jonathan at a distance for a couple of years, but this is the first time we were ever in the same place at the same time. I've failed to meet him in America, in Asia and in Europe, and now finally we got to spend some time together. Weird in our modern social-media connected world, that when we met in person we discovered that we were already friends. Great to meet you Jonathan!

Other notable folks were James Tagg, James Body and Ali Khan of mobile operator Truphone, Alec Saunders of iotum, the irrepressible Pat Phelan of Maxroam, Paul Walsh of Segala (who by fortune was on the same plane on the way out), James Whatley of Spinvox, Prashant Agarwal of Mippin, Avi Schechter of Fring, and mobile journalist extraordinaire Markus Goebel.

Neat Telephony Stuff in 2007

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 20:47:43 GMT

Over on VoIP User, I wrote a list of what I thought was interesting in telephony during 2007. I won't paste it up here too, but please take a look and feel free to let me know what you thought was great too.

Cheap WiFi on the Move

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 11:45:49 GMT

I wrote a while back about BT and FON coming together to offer cheap WiFi coverage in the UK. Being a BT Total Broadband customer, I joined (which you can do simply by clicking a box on their site), and now have access to FON hotspots as well as BT OpenZone hotspots. I get 500 minutes per month on OpenZone hotspots, which is currently far more than I need since mostly I would get the chance to use it when passing through the airport as I did last week. I'm able to log on not just my PC, but also my WiFi-enabled phone, which means that I can make free calls using Truphone.

One thing that I think will puzzle BT users though, is that if you are a paying customer of OpenZone, then you can also use hotspots from The Cloud. If you're a BT FON customer, you can use OpenZone. But if you're with BT FON, you can't use The Cloud.

Vista - "Wow" it's Hard to Use

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 11:17:16 GMT

John Wilson tells a tale of Windows Vista that mirrors my own experience. A friend of mine asked me to help install broadband on her machine which turned out to be a much bigger problem than I was really expecting. The broadband modem had a USB interface, but of course no drivers that worked with Vista. Many vendors seem to have taken this approach, to not spend the necessary money on making their drivers Vista compatible, since they don't consider the market to be big enough yet to care. This is of course a paradox, as new machines come bundled with Vista and you have to make a serious effort to get a machine with XP now.

For me the Vista interface is painful and unfamiliar. I've used XP since it was first released, and I am familiar with all the diagnostics available in XP. Not so Vista, where they seem to have made a big effort to hide or change a lot of the functionality I would use when diagnosing a network problem. Also the infamous nagging messages get you down after a few installation attempts, as you have to choose Allow/Cancel pretty much every step of the way.

I know quite a few power-users that have chosen at this juncture to jump to Mac, and I'm beginning to see why. Having had a great success with XP (which was a big step forward from the earlier Windows Me and Windows NT/2000), Microsoft have definitely stumbled over this one.

Where Are They Now?

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 12:09:04 GMT

In the last few days many people have expressed to me how sad it is that Blognation is closed, and have paid tribute to the great team of writers. I thought it would make sense to make to list the "last known coordinates" of the writers here. I hope I haven't left anyone out, and so in no particular order:

Blognation Ireland Conor O'Neill

Blognation Japan Robert Sanzalone

http://www.pacificit.ca/

Blognation Canada Tris Hussey
Recently started at B5 Media as Training Manager

http://www.b5media.com/

Blognation UK Ewan Spence

Blognation UK David Terrar

http://biztwozero.com/

Blognation UK Ivan Pope
Still running widget company Snipperoo, and blogging there

http://blog.snipperoo.com/

Blognation UK Huw Leslie

http://www.waah.co.uk/

Blognation China David Feng

Blognation Germany Nicole Simone

Blognation USA Oliver Starr

http://owstarr.com/

Visit Oliver Starr's site to find the donation details for Blognation USA editor Marc Orchant, who sadly died earlier this month.

Blognation Belgium/Luxembourg Robin Wauters

Blognation India Kiruba Shankar

http://www.kiruba.com/

Blognation France Jerome Bouteiller

http://www.jbouteiller.net/

Blognation Italy Amanda Lorenzani

http://webtwitcher.excite.co.uk/

Blognation Russia Yakov Sadchikov
Blogging on at Quintura

http://blog.quintura.com

Blognation Australia Chris Saad

Whatever Happened to Blognation?

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 17:53:21 GMT

Blognation has come to an end, and as Neville comments on his blog, sadly even the site is now inaccessible, leaving only the Google cache as a record of what was there. It's sad, but we must move on. I will be continuing to write here on my blog, but I very much hope to team up with some of the other talented Blognation writers again in the future.

Truphone Extend Free Calls into Next Year

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 17:18:39 GMT

Mobile operator Truphone announced today that they will continue to offer free international calls into 2008. Orginally they said that their promotion (which includes free calls to landlines in 40 countries) would finish at the end of 2007, but they have now extended until the end of February 2008. Truphone is available free to all Nokia smartphone users.