Archive for October, 2004

Update on IBM’s autonomic initiatives

by eleanor on 29 Oct 2004 @ 6:30 pm in Geek   ++

Keeping an eye out for news of IBM’s work in autonomics, I found this piece from InfoWorld - IBM improves on autonomic toolkit.

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What is ZigBee

by eleanor on @ 5:07 pm in Emergent   ++

Here’s a good synopsis of what ZigBee is and why it might matter. Ephraim Schwartz at InfoWorld posts a pretty no-nonsense synopsis of ZigBee in his blog:

ZigBee is a group of major sensor manufacturers, Ember, Honeywell, Invensys, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Philips and Samsung, plus semiconductor manufacturers, wireless IP providers, OEMs and users.

The goal is to take sensor technology mainstream by creating a standard for remote wireless monitoring and control.

To that end ZigBee proponents want the radio to be IEEE 802.15.4 with ZigBee adding the logical network, security and application framework.

Pretty simple. ZigBee is important because standards are important. But sensor/mesh networks are still quite far out, at least outside of military applications.

ime talking with startup Aetherwire on their sensor network applications, and since then they’ve been actually doing business with the military. Another startup, Weatherbug is pursuing sensor networks from a different angle - Weatherbug’s original business is providing weather forecasts drawn from educational weatherstations they’ve located in thousands of schools throughout the US. Schools get a fun hands-on teaching product. Weatherbug gets to offer highly granular weather forecasts. I met Weatherbug’s newest sales rep at Gartner Symposium, and he said Weatherbug is also talking with government agencies about unspecified projects, but these can be easily assumed to be sensor-related, such as testing for contaminants.

Sensor networks indeed contain huge potential, but the task of introducing sensors into the world is an enormous financial undertaking. Ephraim compares the cost of 802.11 chips ($9) and 802.15.4 chips ($3) - and that doesn’t tell the whole picture. The sensor network infrastructure is designed to support low-bandwidth “heartbeat” style communications - such as kiddie tracking - or for autonomous self organization - such as recognizing a new node and communicating peer to peer. Check out the open source TinyOS project, which supports embedded sensor net development.

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Venture Source numbers are out

by eleanor on @ 12:15 pm in Venture & Startup   ++

The latest data on venture investing for the 3rd Quarter 2004 is out. You can view an abbridged version of the US data here.

In commentary, Cynthia Webb of The Washington Post provides a great roll-up of the consensus view in her Filter column.

InfoWorld’s Carra Garretson also has this take.

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CTIA conference coverage link roundup

by eleanor on 28 Oct 2004 @ 8:49 pm in Mobility   ++

Breeze though these links for a sense of being at the conference and to understand the hot topics:

• Overview
• Seybold keynote overview and commentary
• Commentary on status of US wireless industry
• Wireless Industry Growth Depends on Rich Data Services

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SuSE Linux Gaining Traction

by eleanor on @ 8:23 pm in Enterprise IT | Open Source   ++

We have a couple reports of SuSE Linux gaining traction with Novell’s backing and enterprise experience. Bolstered by Novell ’s promises of continued support,
Dell has announced that it will offer SuSE Linux-Based PowerEdge Servers.

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‘Palladium’ Echoes in New Handheld Security Spec

by eleanor on @ 8:19 pm in Enterprise IT | Mobility   ++

‘Palladium’ Echoes in New Handheld Security Spec

Intel, IBM and NTT DoCoMo have released a specification to create a “trusted mobile platform,” which appears to take the foundation of Microsoft’s own trust initiative, “Palladium,” into the mobile space.

The three companies placed the Trusted Mobile Platform specification on the Internet for public review. An executive at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel said the company hopes to have TMP products on the market by 2005, although the timing will be heavily dependent on OEM participation.

Speculation is that someone among the handset manufacturers will jump on board in the near term. I’m not convinced that this is an enormous problem since handsets and carriers are quite well locked down today (see iscussion of the power struggles here).

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VoIP is the killer consumer broadband app, Cisco CTO says

by eleanor on @ 8:16 pm in Geek | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Cisco CTO and president of Linksys (now a subsidiary) Charlie Giancarlo comments on consumer broadband applications, like VOIP, will determine the future of networking, reports NetworkWorld.

“The idea in the past has been that the kind of network [carriers] build will define the kind of services consumers get,” Giancarlo says. “Now, it’s the consumers that will drive the next-generation network like never before.”

He says convergence in consumer electronic devices is driving part of this. Cameras that can take and send photos or video clips, as well as Wi-Fi-enabled PDAs with voice, are some of the driving forces. Convergence in home networking and applications, such as Internet telephony and sharing streaming MP3 music over wireless PCs, is another example.

Among these technologies, VoIP will be one of the most appealing among broadband consumers.

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A Broader View of Currency

by eleanor on @ 7:31 pm in Enterprise IT | Strategy-Marketing | Mobility   ++

Douglas Rushkoff has a speculative piece, TheFeature :: Open Source Currency, on what the emergence of alternative electronic currencies could mean for the world at large. It’s brief and worth a reread, especially in light of the troubles experienced (and caused) by PayPal’s network outages of last week.

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Personal media keeps coming up

by eleanor on @ 7:04 pm in Emergent | Datapoints | Life-Culture-Play   ++

To frame the discussion, here are some datapoints: SDForum held an Emerging Technology SIG on Music and Meta Data last week. Creative Common’s novel licensing is attracting most interest around the areas of personal media, mostly audio and video. The ‘podcasting’ phenomenon is gaining almost mainstream status, as users take to the airwaves (even though their broadcasts are canned files posted for later consumption). Check out the article “The Long Tail” from for an idea of the pervasiveness of this concept - the message is clear - with the limitless storage potential of the web, efficient search means the fringe is accessible to all, and with that exploration enabled - personalization is becoming revenue driver. These are real markets - just look at the incredible sales (and usage!) of cameraphones and the staggering fact that the ringtone market was $3.5B in 2003. Sales of add-on, momentarily-cool novelties to kids has become a viable business overnight

Consumer applications often drive technology — we see this constantly with games and pR0n. At this point in time we seem to be seeing a great deal of innovation around personal media.
Perhaps the iPod is to blame - users seem to have established much more personal relationships with the iPods than even previously with their cell phones. But it’s clear that these ‘toys’ are bringing broadband applications out of the house and the office.

So, it’s in light of these developments that I’m inclined to read this piece on emergent music technologies with less skepticism. I’ve never heard that story about Motorola’s genesis….

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That enterprise software licensing problem…..

by eleanor on @ 5:51 pm in Emergent | Enterprise IT | Strategy-Marketing   ++

At Symposium and increasingly in commentary and news, it’s apparent that the time-honored models of selling perpetual software licenses are breaking down. Customers are increasingly drawn to service providers and ASPs who sell ’software as a service’ — they sell access but not the intellectual property of the code.

To get a sense of the current mood, see eWeek’s report on discussions at the SoftSummit conference held last week in Santa Clara.

Also worth reading is this IDC report discussing the issue in a more academic way, focusing on the upcoming financial headaches for ISVs as their revenue streams are strained by disappearing upfront license payments.

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Mobile search rundown

by eleanor on @ 1:04 pm in Emergent | Mobility   ++

With the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment show in SF this weekend, there have been a lot of news items on wireless applications.

Eric Lin over at TheFeature has a good overview and commentary Mobile Search Is Off and Running on all the announcments this week concerning mobile search. He had info and links to other players, including IceRocket (RIM), Smarter, UpSnap, and Synfonic — as well as his thoughts on today’s announcement from Yahoo! of a new mobile search application including images.

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Cingular/ATTW merger cleared - overview of US wireless carrier market

by eleanor on @ 1:04 pm in Mobility   ++

The proposed merger between US mobile carriers AT&T Wireless and Cingular has been cleared this week. The new company will be called Cingular (see below for full story on the name confusion). This should come as a relief to my friend Bill Crocca, who took a job to rearchitect the companies’ network and systems a couple months ago.

The merger will create a behemoth to challenge Verizon Wireless’ dominance of the US cellular market (see below for background on the standards battle), but is formed from two companies that are, in many minds, damaged goods. See Mike Masnick’s piece on TheFeature for some technical details and analysis.

For more background information about AT&T Wireless’ plight and situation, see The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which ran a piece on 21 September entitled Fall of AT&T Wireless gives a thorough history of the company and its troubles.

If that’s not enough, more subtle challenges exist for the company though — see Seattle’s BizJournal’s discussion of the mess around ownership of the AT&T Wireless brand. Under the terms of the spinout arrangement with AT&T, ATTW loses branding rights the name 6 months after the deal with Cingular closes.

The most interesting discussion on this came from The Wall Street Journal from 17 August - Olympics Are an Odd Stage For AT&T Brands (this is a premium article, so purchase access). I read it back then, and it’s stayed in my mind. The article is definitely worth the $2.95, giving a very ironic view of the marketing challenges the new Cingular will face. In what sounds like an almost insurmountable situation, they’ve lost rights to the AT&T Wireless name and brand, with AT&T itself planning on launching a new company called AT&T Wireless in the near future. That’s sure to cause confusion and trouble for Cingular.

For a sense of the issues underlying the battles between Verizon Wireless (CDMA network for voice and data, Qualcomm’s Brew for applications) and the other US carriers - Spring, ATTW, Cingular, T-Mobile - who use TDMA and use GSM for voice and GPRS for data (and a looser J2ME infrastructure for applications)– a tremendously complicated matter — look at this overview piece from ZDNet back in 2003. The explanations there are still valid. For a sense of where the current debate is check out this piece from TechDirt.

For sense of the issues between Brew and J2ME, see this piece from TheFeature about Nokia creating its own application delivery intrastructure, Preminet. Under the vision, Preminet will perform for the J2ME/Symbian community much of the same role as Qualcomm has provided for the Brew folks - a seamless, process-driven pipeline for application testing, acceptance, delivery and billing.

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Desktop and network search developments

by eleanor on @ 10:59 am in Emergent   ++

There is a ton of news on search products, both from new startups and established players.

First, on the startup side, eWeek has a overview piece on new approach to search technology around clustering results, discussing startups Clush (child company of InfoSpider) and Clusty (by Vivisimo). Again from eWeek we have a new product/company announcement from Coveo Solutions (spun off from Copernic this week).

Concerning Google, we have a piece on Google’s search initiatives which discusses their revamped enterprise applicance strategy. See also this NWFusionpiece.

Competitors include vendors focused on enterprise search such as Verity Inc., FAST Search & Transfer ASA, Autonomy Corp. and Endeca Technologies Inc.
But the enterprise search market is a multifaceted one, and Google’s appliance approach does work well for SMBs (small and midsized businesses) that want a fast and less expensive way of building search into external and internal Web sites, said Susan Feldman, a research vice president at market researcher IDC, in Framingham, Mass.

Finally, we have news around Yahoo!. Last week, they announced the purchase of Stata Labs, maker of email search software Bloomba. This week, we have the announcment of a partnership between Yahoo! and Adobe in search, taking place in the form of a search toolbar that can search within Adobe’s Acrobat pdf format.

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Data and voice over wireless networks - current technology and developments

by eleanor on 27 Oct 2004 @ 10:27 pm in Emergent | Mobility   ++

Among all the conflict and poor service of US carriers, I’ve been tracking the potential for wireless broadband technologies (delivered by your particular technology favorite- WiFi, WiMax, point to point, sensors) to provide a blanket wireless MAN (metropolitan area network). In thinking about convergence, mobility, and the increasing relevance of VoiP technology for both enterprises and users, it becomes apparent that we face the real possibility that seamless voice and data connectivity are perhaps best delivered over conventional data networks. SBC is already looking at augmenting their conventional networks with WiFi bandwidth.

On the technology side, it’s clear that the value in wireless networks is shifting to the systems for data, minimizing the importance of voice. Eric Lin over at TheFeature has a piece discussing the current, very technical state of the industry as they start to consider the greater operating efficiency of using VoiP for their own networks.

The value that VoiP can bring, through its presence and universal locator attribute can help users overcome the complexity associated with managing multiple channels of communication. HP’s new iPAQ h6315 (PCWeek review) comes with WiFi and can be used with Skype’s VoiP service. US carrier T-Mobile sells most of these with voice calling plans in addition to unlimited data plans - but for some users, relying on Skype for calls could be practical and cost effective. Right now, this iPAQ user would remain a customer of T-Mobile, but we do have to wonder if a network of hot spots could provide much of the same level and quality of service, perhaps at a lower cost. For a look at what might be coming, see the Enterprise Mobility weblog for a discussion of the FCC’s approval of a broadband-over-powerline service.

Really, we do have to wonder about all that dark fiber out there that’s just waiting to be enabled.

But dialing back to the present and to now-realizable sources of innovation and convergence, NextWest, Avaya, and Altigen are among companies working to extend functionality associated with office PBX systems to mobile users. This will raise the ‘experience expectations’ of the mobile worker, leading in time to extension of these services by mobile carriers.

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IBM Pushes IT Automation

by eleanor on @ 8:21 pm in Emergent   ++

eWeek has a good overview of IBM’s autonomics program in an article by Paula Musinch. It’s worth a read for its clear discussion of IBM’s various initiatives.

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Q3 Sales of Smart Phones, PDAs show strong growth

by eleanor on @ 3:30 pm in Mobility | Open Source   ++

Handheld devices are seeing brisk sales worldwide, with the introduction of new models that push convergence closer to a reality.

According to Canalys, mobile device shipments grew 83 per cent in that quarter compared to Q3 2003. While PDA shipments were up 18 per cent over the same period - that’s those with and those without wireless connectivity of some form - smart phone shipments were up 190 per cent.

See more comments and data on The Register
Global smart phone sales soar

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Was Gartner’s endorsement of SOA at Symposium newsworthy?

by eleanor on @ 9:14 am in Enterprise IT   ++

At the opening keynote at Gartner’s Symposium conference, I was struck by the opening panel’s announcment that SOA was the most important trend. Now, I’m not minimizing it - but the delivery of this was basically that the speaker (I think Gartner Distinguished Analyst, Gene Phifer) basically looked at the audience and pronounced “SOA” like it was new information and all the attenees - largely CIOs - needed to take away from the conference. Here’s “>the research piece Gartner produced to go along with their keynote theme.

I’m just surprised that they pronounced it as if it were unheard of in the industry, instead of the lively topic of hype that it already was (see such indications of preSymposium indicators of SOA’s importance as this Survey: SOA prominent on 2005 budgets) Still, the Gartner endorsement has let loose a more serious consideration of what SOA means by the tech media. Two pieces I found interesting are these from Infoworld - Coming to Terms with Service-Oriented Architectures - a more general, big picture piece - and Coming to Terms with Components - which gets more into the details of businsess models and implementations.

Sure, SOA is important, but it’s a concept, a framework not all that different than the vision behind CORBA back in the ’90s (and how successful was that? what about EJB?). The emergence of SODA (services oriented development of applications) as a methodology takes us one step further toward realizing this goal by giving us a path to follow. Make no mistake - implementing SOA involves rearchitecting applications, data centers, networks and systems. It can be implemented incrementally, as enterprises roll out new applications - but this fundamentally conflicts with the kind of projects enterprises are taking on. They’re largely incremental improvements and staged roll outs. The current climate in enterprise IT spending doesn’t point to a huge uptake in undertaking projects to implement SOA.

There are significant benefits to be gained from adoption of SOA and component-based web services. It reduces integration costs for future applications and for changes to the system - essentially increasing agility and adaptability. But we can’t forget that it involves building a fundamentally different infrastructure.

Now vendors are talking about this a lot. Package vendors are retooling their applications to include web services and support SOA - but that’s because SOA helps mitigate one of their harder-to-avoid sales objections - the sheer cost and disruption of upgrades and new installs. But we have to remember that what vendors want to sell and what customers want to buy can be quite different. Especially with lagging IT spending and a widely held sense that there is no ‘next big thing’ out there to drive spending, vendors are eager to hop on anything that will strengthen their selling propositon. And SOA - as a “revolutionary” approach to software development, integration and delivery - implies a multi-year investment cycle, similar in strength and scope to those seen with the migration to client/server and the web.

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RFID research reports from ABI Research

by eleanor on 26 Oct 2004 @ 2:55 pm in Emergent   ++

A couple months ago I received a request to participate in a survey for ABI research on RFID. In exchange for my participation, they promised to share the results.

There are two reports, one for Developers, theABI Research Dev Survey Report and one for End Users of RFID, ABI Research End-Users Survey Report.
Enjoy!

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The Tipping Point and Media Saturation

by eleanor on 24 Oct 2004 @ 11:05 pm in Strategy-Marketing   ++

Over the weekend I finally read Malcolm Gladwell’s 2002 book, The Tipping Point. It’s well-written and logical, with references to a great variety of research in pyschology and social sciences. This book is mentioned very often among startups and innovators as being an underlying transmission mechanism for getting new ideas into products which are then bought by real customers. I recommend reading it, even though the concepts were very familiar, showing that they have permeated into shared consciousness and mindset of the Valley. See some of the reviews on Amazon for an idea of the key ideas of the book (especially Gough’s).
The ideas seem very sounds and true to the experience of technology transfer. They certainly relate well to Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

However, there was one part of the book that seemed out of synch with another small tidbit of data I encountered. I’m not a social scientist and not terribly interested in how people’s minds work, but this seemed dichotomous. In discussing the human mind and his concept of stickiness, Gladwell wrote that “According to a study done by one advertising research firm whenever there are at least four different 15-second commercial in a two-and-a-half-minute commercial time-out the effectivenss of any one 15-second ad sinks to almost zero.” That would support the longer, lengthier model of advertising, as we see now with info-mercial style ads.

But when do these observations take on the force of absolute rules? A piece I recall reading in The Wall Street Journal came to mind after I read the above passage. ClearChannel, the dominant player in advertising on radio and billboards, recently proposed changing its radio advertising policies and prices to encourage shorter ads rather than the conventional 60-second slots.

An excerpt of Clear Channel’s Ad-Trim Plans Irk Some Clientsappears below. The full content is available for free to subscribers until 3-Nov-2004.

That’s why in July, the company announced a “less is more” initiative, saying it would trim available ad time to leave no more than 15 minutes of ads per hour and no more than six ads in a row. The move was supposed to create a less-commercial environment and attract more listeners for the nation’s largest radio station owner, with 1,200 stations around the country. At the same time, the radio chain was hoping to get advertisers hooked on 30-second spots and increase revenue, by charging more for two 30-second spots than for one 60-second ad.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some advertisers are balking, dubbing the plan “Giving you less, charging you more.” In the radio industry, a 30-second spot typically costs about 80% of the price of a 60-second pitch: Advertisers usually figure they might as well spend the extra cash and get a full minute. And advertisers, it turns out, don’t like having to cram their message into half the time they’re used to.

Clear Channel is trying to smooth out the situation as it approaches a self-imposed Jan. 1 deadline for implementing its new strategy. First, it is shaving a bit off the price of 30-second ads, to 75% of the cost of a full minute. And today, it plans to announce the creation of an in-house creative unit to help advertisers come up with snappier ads.

Clear Channel is presenting the plan to media buyers as a way to get more “frequency” for their advertising buck — five 30-second spots for the price of four 60-second spots. And with fewer ads in a row, Clear Channel says listeners will be able to recall the ads more readily.

What does this mean? Nothing of itself, except to say that even the best written book that presents clear and distilled theories about how the human mind works doesn’t have all the answers.

What I take away from this is that it’s important to keep the tipping point model in mind, but not to have it be the only factor guiding your advertising, marketing and product development activities.

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Revisting chassis design

by eleanor on @ 10:31 pm in Enterprise IT | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Addressing the consumer side for a bit, we take a look at the quiet computing issue. As computers become increasingly integrated in the life of the average American home, fan noise, power consumption and form factor assume more importance in buying decisions and user satisfaction. Visit anyone with a Windows Media home system and you will be surprised by the audible hum of the processor. What works in the office or the den doesn’t work when projecting movies - the processor should not be audible over the sound of crickets. It interferes with the viewing experience.

Finally there’s growing momentum to adopt the BTX chassis, which is designed to maximize airflow over the hottest components (chips and graphics cards).

Vendors currently producing kit with this chassis configuration include IBM (ThinkCentre), Gateway (consumer-grade 700GR - see article here), and HP (Grantsdale-chip based dc7100).

I have yet to see a demo of these systems, but anything to bring entertainment convergence closer to the TV model should help to improve the customer experience and increase adoption. Could this be a way for the Windows Media home entertainment style boxes to be welcomed into living rooms?

For more information see eWeek article: Quiet Computing.

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