Archive for December, 2004

How can we tap into all this audio content?

by eleanor on 23 Dec 2004 @ 5:07 pm in Emergent   ++

I hate podcasts and other captured audio on the web - it just doesn’t work for me. To really listen to someone speak, I find I need to be able to see them - watch their lips move and their overall delivery. The only way I can deal with it is to transcribe it, which I did here for the recent Udell podcast on IVR applications and here back in August for the Meta Group talking about Workplace.

What a pain. Sign me up for that magic speech transcription technology you were looking for when you find it. Transcription is very tedious, but personally, it’s the only way I can stay focused on the content.

More seriously, the culture of podcasting may very well drive innovation in this space - nothing like having the innovators’ commentary marooned to get them focused on a problem! When I was at BloggerconIII (some talks of which are available via ITConversations audio stream), the session on podcasting addressed this topic. What was strange was that several people, Dave Winer (conference organizer and very influential among bloggers and podcasters alike) declared that he intended never to provide transcripts for his podcasts at iPodder.org. Steve Gilmor, ZDNet editor and columnist and participant in the eponymous Gillmor Gang (to learn more about it, and see an example of the “navel gazing” that I find to be characteristic of this kind of group, see their blog) said that they did one transcript of the show, shoving the task out to India, but they were not happy with the results. The message from these two guys was that podcasting would stay audio only, and people would just have to sit through it.

Now, I’ve said that audio doesn’t work for me personally, and that’s my bias. I’m not the only one though - this has been discussed by Marc Canter and Tim Bray. You can see Udell’s response here. Tim’s phrase “four guys talking” captures my problem exactly.

I don’t intend to be hypercritical here, but it’s important we look at what this mode of interaction means - what it allows and requires both for the creator and the listener. The creator - as we saw in Jon’s case with the IVR conversation - benefits by just recording the conversation, doing the necessary processing (which is work and requires special equipment - but it’s also tech tinkering, which is fun more than tedious), and serving it. They can share the content directly, without needing to mentally pre-process it. Listeners benefit too, as Jon says himself, by having direct access to the full context of a conversation, rather than have it distilled through the views and the prejudices of the interviewer.

It’s true that text is lossy, but in podcasting we often just think about the benefits. The costs for the users are fairly high. Skimming is impossible. Searching is impossible. Pacing is out of control - if it’s too fast, you must go back (which is very cumbersome given the poor interface of the web plugins I use here, but might be easier on, say, an iPod); if it’s too slow, you’re stuck. Take Eric Rice - podcaster extraordinaire - for example. Now I like Eric personally, but he is a showman. He loves podcasting because it puts him in control of the pacing and the delivery. Listening to his podcasts, you can tell he is a radio personality, and it is his personality that he’s sharing in these ‘casts. So Eric shows us that the line between content and entertainment blurs with podcasts. And that’s great for all the people who tune in to talk radio. But wouldn’t it be better if this media were indexable, searchable, and fungible….. more like text.

Reading this page - I bet that you don’t read every word. No one does. But with audio, the words come to us as delivered. You can’t skip to the bottom because it’s not “there” yet; audio doesn’t exist in our minds until we hear it and process it. Anyhow, this is getting too far off the path, but it’s important because I’m not hearing much discussion on this to temper the hype around podcasts. Sure, it’s democratizing broadcasting and making it so that newcomers like Eric can get famous and people like Adam Curry, a sort of washed-up icon of the 1980s, can get “airtime”. But it’s also proliferating information that’s hard to consume and which requires time - the most scarce resource of all - to consume. I mean, what are we supposed to do with these? Where is the context?

So there’s a problem, but this problem is one these guys will want to solve. After all, while they do want to control the “experience” and delivery of their unique content, they also want to see it reach the widest possible audience. They’re not famous, or influential, or rich if no one is “listening”, if the ideas are trapped in audio. And there are people like me and Tim in the world, never mind the non-native English speakers and the deaf for whom this data is not accessible.

This first wave of podcasting is important, but it needs to be integrated into the rest of our information architecture - and right now that means text. Fortunately, since these guys are at the forefront of technology development, this problem will get solved. In fact, this might be one of the first applications for the speech applications that IBM recently open sourced. Or maybe these guys will pick up a copy of ViaVoice and get started training it.

:-)
Though during my research on IVR tech for a recent research request, I did find this Gartner report that discusses the state of audio search technology (back in 2002, so it’s surely more advanced now). It sounds like the technology exists, it must just be expensive and difficult to implement. Sign me up.

Updated to reflect proper grammar - Without being coy, I’ve gotten used to sloppy proofreading since my audience has been mostly Japanese. I’ll have to proofread now that us picky native speakers are tuned in.

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Transcript of Jon Udell podcast on IVR

by eleanor on @ 4:10 pm in Emergent   ++

Transcript of Monday’s podcast on IVR applications, a conversation between Infoworld columnist John Udell and Ron Owens, director of software application engineering and professional services for Intervoice (audio here) .

• Owens – Well, essentially what we do is, you can think of it as self service automation primarily accomplished though voice recognition. So if you look at companies that utilize websites or other things in terms of a self-service strategy, our goal is to make voice an additional channel to that self service automation so that clients can use these systems to gain access to information, conduct business, complete transactions.
• Udell – Right, so basically the IVR story. So why don’t we start with applications, because these discussions can tend to get a bit abstract. I’m just going to read off the ones you listed as packaged applications. This one is interesting, you have something you call an identifier, which is evidently an IVR-based password changing application. Is that correct? Why don’t you talk about how that works, and what’s happening on the back end to enable that?
• Owens – So we’ve tried to create a few applications that are geared to a horizontal market that are reusable, that allow the interface into client databases but essentially go through a series of questions to identify who the caller claims to be and then authenticates via either knowledge or speaker verification whether they are who they claim to be.
• Udell – So when you say “speaker verification”, is the point here that this is multifactor authentication and one of the factors is verification including voiceprint?
• Owens – Yes
• Udell – Now is this in use anywhere now? I’ve never run into this, but it’s happening out there in the world someplace. Where is this being used?
• Owens – It’s actually used at Ameritrade, and we have done press releases with them so we can talk about it.
• Udell – Oh, because I actually have an account at Ameritrade, which I have not visited for a long time. Now if I go there, where would I find this feature?
• Owens – They actually implemented it when they purchased Datek. So I’ll be honest, I’m an Ameritrade client, but I am an old Ameritrade client, and I have never accessed it via the telephone either, but I believe it was given as option to the Datek customers that were converted and they went through an enrollment process. It’s one of the largest customer facing verification deployments that’s available.
• Udell – Now the voice print is subject to replay attack if it’s captured, right?
• Owens – Actually, the voiceprint itself, what gets created is not anything that exists in terms of a wav file that can be reverse engineered. It’s just a series, it’s a numerical representation that’s housed in a database. You could break in and steal all of the voiceprints from any company that’s out there and you have something that’s absolutely worthless.
• Udell – OK, but if I speak the magic phrase on one hand, or if I play you a recording of the magic phrase on the other hand, you, listening, aren’t going to know the difference.
• Owens – Well, it depends on how you capture the recording.
• Udell – OK well, let’s talk about that a little, because that’s interesting.
• Owens – Well, if you capture the recording with high quality microphone and it’s a digital recording that you play back over the phone, you might be able to spoof the system, but sometimes they’re still able to detect fraudulence because some of the systems say ‘this is too close to the original, so it must be a fake’. There’s a certain amount of variance each time we speak a word is expected.
• Udell – Interesting, interesting. We’ve sort of gone down a rat hole - this is extremely interesting, but I want to back up and get the larger context as well. So can we broaden this out to the kinds of services that your platform makes available to developers, kinds of tools that are used to build these IVR applications and the environment that all this fits into in terms of application servers and standards like SALT and VoiceXML
• Owens – So to start at a platform level, we have platforms that support VoiceXML 2.0 and SALT standards, the Microsoft speech server. From a development environment…
• Udell – Well, can I just… probably most people are as vaguely familiar with those two things as I am so… I mean, to prepare for this call I went back to refresh my memory as to what’s going on.
• Owens – That doesn’t entitle you to ask hard questions, though. (laugh), so can you explain.
• Udell – Well it seems like we can’t have anything in this century without a war between two competing standards, right? And it’s almost ludicrous, it takes you 5 minutes just to get to the members’ page of the SALT Forum on one hand, and the members’ page of the VoiceXML Forum on the other hand. And the icons tell the story. In fact, I’m on those pages now, and I’m looking at the SALT forum and see Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Phillips, ScanSoft and Comverse. And on the VoiceXML side – AT&T, Lucent, IBM, Motorola, HP, Oracle, Verizon, and a couple of others. What jumps out at me is hmm… phone companies versus not. Not knowing anything about the politics, obviously you guys have to play both sides of the fence, but I’m curious if it’d be possible for you to condense all into a brief overview.
• Owens – It’s possible for me to give you my opinion of the whole situation and where it stands. So, first thing that I try to tell clients is that there was a lot of publicity on VoiceXML a couple years ago and how it was going to revolutionize voice automation and that you had to have VoiceXML to do voice recognition and a lot of other things. The bottom line is all of those justifications for doing it were hyped. Because we actually had speech recognition systems literally years before the first VoiceXML companies were in existence, and some very sophisticated systems too. What VoiceXML as a standard did do is introduce some application portability and extension outside of call center space, moving into it infrastructure space — how to make it available and accessible in visual media, how to extend web pages into new channels – how do you connect self service on internet with telephone – how people want to get services. SALT came in when VoiceXML was getting near 2.0. VoiceXML was trying to do for voice what HTML did for the web [make it usable and presentable]. SALT was even more explicit, to make it multimodal [allow interaction with web pages via multiple modes]. SALT is less of a linear programming language than VoiceXML, it’s much more like a XML namespace that can be woven into XML or HTML documents. VoiceXML has much more of its own syntax and own tool environment. [therefore it is more embeddable into existing tools and infrastructure]
  Intervoice has its own VoiceXML browser conformant to the VoiceXML specifications, where you can view all VoiceXML files developed with their tool or others. The browser takes and interprets the file and turns it into instructions for the IVR. The same thing happens on SALT side – Microsoft provides SALT browser here, but the underlying technology is the same underneath, just the parsing technology comes from Microsoft. In both cases it’s streamed into output that is neutral for consumption by the IVR software. Intervoice has their own IVR, which is both a virtual and physical machine that drives their IVR functions. Microsoft’s SALT browser is the equivalent of IE, takes SALT documents and converts them into something that is digestible by voice [IVR].
• Udell - To what extent is it possible to build an application once for multimodal deployment? Can you write webpages that can be expressed vocally with one code base, does it meet Microsoft’s vision of SALT?
• Owens – Not now, not many consumer devices ready to take this input as multimodal. We don’t have phones where you browse to an item and then speak commands into while browsing the web [use both a cursor and a voice command in an arbitrary manner]. It’s still Microsoft’s vision, but they’ve realized that people are going to start with using simple speech recognition first and as consumer devices catch up to take advantage of the functionality, then they can build and extend out to more multi-modality.
• Udell – What does supporting Microsoft Speech Server mean for you?
• Owens – Basically we sell it as a solution – Microsoft Speech Server and our system work together. We can also use Scansoft ASR and also Nuance ASR for speech recognition technology. On it’s own, Intervoice’s system will give you touchtone DTMS interactivity, but no voice. They do not have own ASR engine, but [that’s ok since they are enabling the first real commercial applications] – speech server is theoretical until you have Intervoice making it commercially viable deployment. They make it into application companies can use.
• Udell – What does your product really add?
• Owens – Speech servers do not connect to telephony on their own. They won’t take a call, can’t handle calls, their progression through the system, transfers, CTI – we provide telephony or IP infrastructure. [In their scenarios] the application is driven from application server, which calls into the Intervoice server. Intervoice brings in speech recognition as needed, sending the utterance off to the ASR engine for processing, and then handling the returned response and the general infrastructure.
• Udell – I’m trying to understand the architecture, are pictures or a schematic available on your website>
• Owens – Probably not, we’ll have to talk to the marketing people.
• Udell – Let’s talk about applications. Tell me about the Amtrak system. What is the architecture?
• Owens – Calls come through call center and hit the switch. Then they’re greeted by IVR system and the application walks caller through getting info they need. The speech recognition component is ScansoftASR running on a separate server. The call flow is mapped out with prompts, responses are captured, the transaction goes against database to get info required [the schedule], then the data is transformed into concatenated speech and played back for the caller. This is built with Intervoice’s tool called Envision, which can develop code either in their legacy proprietary environment or VoiceXML-standard compliant code. It’s GUI-based with a drag-and-drop tools and pre-built components – things like dates, digits, already there to help focus on the logic flow.
• Udell – If wanted to reduce the GUI model to text, can you? [I have no idea why this is important]
• Owens – Yes, the system does output VoiceXML as text that you can view, after it’s been generated. If you’re using Microsoft’s Speech Server, it can be output in VB.NET, ASP, C# out of Visual Studio with Speech Server modules.

  Intervoice offers professional services to help create usable and effective voice implementation. It’s tricky to create a model that works for voice, not just a voice reading all the options on a given website. The mode of interaction determines what info should be presented how. We resell ASR products, and provide layer of integration.

• Udell – I’m trying to understand what specific value you bring…
• Owens – Technically you need to control telephony card, which our products do. If you didn’t have us, you’d need to build that to allow transfers, passing protocols, passing instructions to flow commands to CTI. You’d need to build monitoring system to watch the history of calls and the overall flow. On the services end, we provide expertise to move through [connect] business goals and translate into call flow and create the backend transaction model. We have the business logic and business rules to build voice applications for customers [that work…. Udell really didn’t get the value of the company at this point, and Owens was not doing a good job pitching it, as you will see the conversation takes a much different turn in the next exchange]. We take data out of the enterprise systems our customers have and link it into the process to create a full voice solution.
• Udell – Looking through my list, we’ve talked about a lot. What have we not talked about yet?
• Owens – Usability. Whether it’s usable or not determines success of project. [The voice of] “Amtrak Julie” was a deliberate product, constructed with impact and branding in mind – here characteristics, personality, age, demographics, and nuance. You must have the voice and the text and the script and the words match the expectations of the callers when they call. You can read a lot in the area of “persona development”. The key factors determining [the appropriate] voice are the customer age demographics, the formality of the prompts, selecting the gender, and trying to convey something consistent with image of the company. This is part of the design process we take our [professional services] customers through. Our voice user interface design engineers take the goals of the business – typical ones are to get the shortest length of call possible, highest possible automation rate, and the highest possible customer satisfaction – and balance that with what end users need – enough instruction to feel comfortable (which may lengthen the call), easy access to a rep if call doesn’t fit what self service system is designed to handle, but not so easy that people won’t try to use the system – customers want to keep the caller satisfaction level up but don’t want them to feel trapped in the system. Intervoice’s engineers take the end user goals and the organization goals and try to strike a balance. That’s what creates the personality of the system, how the scripting is done and how the logic flows. This gets tuned over time, since like the web page, the system is tracked as people use it.
• Udell – What are the kinds of opportunities for packaged applications that haven’t been seen in the past but are becoming possible going forward?
• Owens – What we’re trying to find is an area where… if you think about how Microsoft products work, if you’re working in Excel, PowerPoint or Word, you look for consistency of tools – File, Edit, Save, etc. That’s our definition of a horizontal function – it is always the same process to accomplish common goals. If you look at voice, horizontal applications are where companies don’t find a competitive advantage to be the world’s best. Like in changing your address, there’s no market there to differentiate yourself. The reverse is actually true – having the same process across all, say, credit card companies, is a benefit. Customers can learn over time that there is a common way to go about this common task, even though it is with different companies. Utilities and magazine subscription companies have this [address change] problem too. Familiarity will drive increased acceptance of automation and successful task completion. Then this is not just for address changes, but things like identify verification, password resets, things that cross multiple industries. Things for which voice is an appropriate, or even the preferred medium.
• Udell – When is voice the preferred media for data-driven interaction?
• Owens – It’s very interesting – all the data I’ve read shows there is no end to transactions that people want to complete over the phone. It’s kind of like the debit card phenomenon resulting in the death of checks – there are fewer checks going through financial institutions, but banks spend a lot of money on the increased level of financial transactions [driven by debit cards]. A net balance. The internet and phone are not so much substitutes, because, depending on circumstances, you might choose one or the other no matter what your preferences are. But really what that means is that companies have to deal with more interactions with their clients. Clients have more ways to interact and it’s our (Intervoice’s) job to make sure that they interact successfully and profitably for the organization.
• Udell – This reminds me of earlier when we were talking about multimodality with Microsoft’s approach with Speech Server. I want to circle back on one point. In addition to possibility of being able to interact with a webpage through direct manipulation or speech, there is this underlying notion that you’d like to develop an interface once, one interface, that would be at least minimally accessible by phone. The web may be preferable, but that it would be possible to interact with it by phone if necessary. To what extent is it possible to provide in a relatively automatic way at least minimal access to functions on a web page out of a development environment that is not dual-track (don’t have to build it twice)? Developing it twice is very hard, every time you do it two different ways it’s a huge impediment unless have an extreme motivation [i.e., because of the cost, effort and time of maintaining two applications].
• Owens – I’m going to take a slightly different view, and I may be biased, but I draw a different demarcation from the one you did. At the application server level when the data is being served up to either be presented to a web page, at that point, that data in that format can be presented to a voice system – that’s the demarcation of commonality and I think that companies who try to skip, either on web page development to make it a very clean and user friendly presentation layer via the web, or a very clean and aesthetically pleasing voice interface, if they try to skip at that presentation layer – they’ve made a critical and strategic error. Where they want to make the investment in the commonality is to make that data available. Once that data’s available, if it’s in an XML format – the cost of the presentation layer relative to that infrastructure if minimal.
• Udell – The point is well taken, and is actually the point I’ve been making, for, well, years now, which is that ultimately it is just a historical accident that we have so much presentation logic that is directly intertwined with the production of html. The point of the web services philosophy is to separate those two things, that in fact, in my view, if everyone could just switch a flip tomorrow, we’d all be better off if every web-facing application is encapsulated as neutral xml which is then rendered by html production technology, which could also be rendered by voice production technology.
• Owens – Exactly. It’s no different than the spaghetti code in COBOL we used to do years ago. Theoretically, we should have made all those host interactions in a modular form that could have been called from multiple applications, even though there’s no analogous presentation layer the principle is the same. Did we violate that? Regularly. We embedded the access and the data into whatever we were trying to accomplish. And it always has and always will cost companies millions. We’re at the point now where standards themselves don’t solve problems for companies, the implementation of standards can help accelerate a lot of things and help companies to be efficient and take advantage of it, but VoiceXML infrastructure for some clients won’t be the fix unless they do exactly what you said. And that takes some time to figure out how am I going to get the data and share that data across multiple channels.
• Udell – Nothing new here. Just common sense.
• Owens – Common sense that’s incredibly uncommon!

#end#

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Test post for reader-ratings

by eleanor on 21 Dec 2004 @ 8:39 am in Toys, Tips, & Tricks   ++

I’m testing setup of Scott Heavner’s Rating plugin - which is adaptable to let me rate things, like movies or books, but here - we’ll use it to let you, gentle reader, rate posts. Since there’s so much here, I thought this might be away to get your feedback and have more community interaction. What you see on this page is what I think is important out of the daily chaos of IT news, but I need to know more about what is relevant for your work.

To do this test, I need to upload the plugin, and play with a new feature I haven’t tried before - custom fields. OK - the first step is done. Now to test…

And test.

Eventually, when the real geeks troubleshoot this for me, there should be some sort of box after each post to rate them. If we use ratings, it’ll help provide another slice of the data up here, in additon to category grouping, conversation tracking via comments and plain old chronological view. I’ll update this when it’s fixed.
Updated: Haha - well, the plugin has been working for some time I think, but it doesn’t display on this main page, as I expected (and wanted). To rate posts, you’ll have to follow the link to comment page, where you can then rate it.

Once we get a few posts rated, I’ll add a new view of ‘highest rated posts’ to the sidebar.

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Google V. Microsoft outlooked in MIT’s Technology Review

by eleanor on 20 Dec 2004 @ 6:13 pm in Emergent | Enterprise IT   ++

This month’s (January 2005) Tech Review has a lengthy piece where Charles Ferguson, veteran of past battles with Microsoft (founded Vermeer, maker of FrontPage, in the midst of the browser wars) looks at What’s Next for Google. The piece is well worth a read, as it puts the current search environment (the overview of which is a draft post I’ve never had time to complete) in perspective - both as the next frontier and as the setting for a standards battle.

One point I think Ferguson did miss was when he wrote,

Two Google employees (both of whom prefer not to be named) told me that Google’s leaders believe that the company’s expertise in infrastructure—knowing how to build and operate those 250,000 servers—constitutes a competitive advantage more important than APIs or standards. This could be a major, even fatal, error. Microsoft can certainly obtain or cultivate the skills necessary to operate large-scale computing infrastructures; indeed, it already operates MSN, with nearly 10 million users.

is the whole of the Gmail and Blogger initiatives. Looking at those two projects, Google is moving to host and support (and technically, thereby, own and control access to) customers’ data. It’s this aspect of Google’s business that goes beyond simply the operational wherewithal necessary to operate this infrastructure, what Gartner called “Tera Architectures” in a Symposium 2004 presenation, Tera Architectures Emerge from the Lab. In terms of testbed for development of new algorithms and advertising schemes, as well as adding that personal element that John Battelle noted as being missing from Google when it’s compared to Yahoo! in these two posts: here and here. We’ll see how it plays out.

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Changing face of influence marketing

by eleanor on 10 Dec 2004 @ 5:59 pm in Strategy-Marketing   ++

This piece from The New York Times Magazine last weekend on changing techniques in marketing is worth reading because it very much blends with the more commercial ways blogs and bloggers are being exploited as sources of trusted referrals. Whether it’s Joi Ito commenting on a custom headset the vendor made for him (which he got to try at no cost - and I would guess, with no smear on his character - that probably ended up keeping), or Eric Rice who now has a section called Paid to Blog on his blog, influential bloggers are increasingly seen as highly effective marketing media.

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Sprint/Nextel Match Continues US Wireless Carrier Consolidation

by eleanor on @ 5:01 pm in Mobility   ++

Today’s talk is about merger discussions betweeen Sprint and Nextel. The Feature has an excellent rundown with links to background information and analysis. US carrier T-Mobile, a unit of Deutsche Telekom, is definitely left standing alone. With the backing of their corporate parent and their strength internationally (67 million worldwide, 13 million in the US), they are not out of the running.

The Wall Street Journal also covers the story and has this to add:

Discussions between Sprint and Nextel are ongoing, these people say. There’s no certainty a deal is completed, they add, and like all discussions they could fall apart over issues both large and small. Verizon Wireless could also enter the fray. The country’s second biggest wireless operator uses the same cellular technology as Sprint, and has long had a sporadic interest in the carrier.

In the deal there are significant technology hurdles in the combination for the short term. Nextel - The Journal notes - would need to issue new handsets to its 15.3 million customers to shift over to Sprint’s CDMA network. But this is looked at as a relatively small issue, as all mobile players are focused on the future and their investments in cellular broadband technology - an area where neither player has made investments and there are room for synergies. This move comes at a good time for Nextel since they are making a major shift themselves. Nextel is about to swap their 800MHz spectrum for 1900MHz - a move the FCC is pushing to get Nextel off public safety bands and eliminate interference. The deal is good for Nextel, in that they’re being offered a good chunk of the valuable 1900MHz spectrum. However, Nextel runs iDEN, which is a separate and incompatible system (other carriers use CDMA or GSM). This iDEN network is fundamental to their popular push-to-talk (PTT) service, which enables high performance walkie-talkie functionality. Nextel is and remains the leader in this space, precisely because other carriers have had trouble getting PTT working on CDMA or GSM networks. So unless there is or will be some development that ports iDEN to 1900MHz, this deal with the FCC will effectively eliminate whatever portion of Nextel’s PTT and cellular service that relied on 800MHz. Depending on how much spectrum Nextel has in the 900 and 1500 MHz bands, it’s possible that Nextel won’t have to abandon iDEN in all areas - but surely this will impact the level of service delivered.

The FCC transaction forces Nextel to do the same engineering work that other carriers have tried in supporting PTT via CDMA — something it’s prospective partner Sprint has been unable to do effectively (or at least effectively enough to spur customer adoption and usage). Perhaps teams from the two orgs, working together, can puzzle this out. But this merger defintely makes for less immediate gain for both parties.

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Carriers and Handset OEMs clash on branding, experience

by eleanor on 7 Dec 2004 @ 3:21 pm in Mobility   ++

In early November, The Wall Street Journal had a piece After Long Peace, Wireless Operator Stirs Up Industry (archived here) that gave an interesting view into the power struggle between carriers and handset manufacturers. This links into the discussion of open vs. closed systems, since when carriers like Vodafone/Verizon want to ensure each handset’s interface is exactly similar it means there’s no customization possible — even by consumers seeking to change look-and-feel. This intiative leaves little hope for independent developers, and will tend to inhibit the improvements in user-interface design because it establishes a standard all phones must adhere to which will prove difficult to change.

We’ll have to track this issue as it develops. Today I saw one piece that would suggest that Vodafone is not unstoppable in this quest, and has seen slower customer adoption. The Feature has a piece this week (interesting reading on its own) that signals that the VodafoneLive! handsets have not had as much absolute commercial success as Vodafone indicated in The Journal article: “Merrill Lynch says only 12% and 14% of the Vodafone customer base in Germany and the UK, respectively, has migrated to Vodafone Live! handsets in the last two years.”

The article also has an interesting assessment of who it will be that will determine carrier profitability.

What is becoming clearer is the importance of the top 10-20% of the customer base — those high usage customers who are early adopters of new technology. The mobile operators who can win and retain those customers, typically the number one or two operator in a given market, will be in a much stronger position.

That group is exactly the group who can be expected to find least value in a unified interface, especially if it hinders access to the unique features of their new handset.

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Preminet explained

by eleanor on 6 Dec 2004 @ 2:36 pm in Mobility   ++

I’ve commented on Nokia’s new Preminet initiative several times already (micropayments post and open vs closed systems, with a vague generalization that it is Nokia’s answer to the Qualcomm-Verizon BREW system. WirelessWeek gives a much more thorough exploration of what’s the vision and intent behind this new service here.

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IBM R&D projects (or, I want WebFountain)

by eleanor on 3 Dec 2004 @ 5:25 pm in Emergent   ++

InformationWeek has an interview with Paul Horn, Sr. VP Research for IBM. They talk RFID (specifically probing at IBM’s chip strategy, the point of which eludes me), and about a very interesting search tool called WebFountain.

InformationWeek: What are some of the other innovative projects IBM’s research and development division is working on today?

Horn: We have a project where the computer can crawl the Web similar to Google, but instead of [relying on] a keyword search, it reads the text, understands the text, and allows you to mine the context, not just keywords. The researchers bought back this idea because they looked at all the unstructured information on the Internet and tried to figure out how to get value from it.

InformationWeek: How could a company use that technology?

Horn: You could use it to manage the brand. We did this for a record company and discovered the buzz in chat rooms was a terrific indicator of future record sales. The buzz in the chat room started and within two weeks the record sales [in a specific local region] increased. The software, Web Fountain, is a prototype piece of research software that requires many servers to scan the Web. With the software, companies can manage their brand, predict future sales in a specific geography, or determine what attributes will push sales higher or lower. But this is a combined research and consulting service, because once companies gain access to this information they [will want to] reengineer their business processes to have the correct products in regions at the right time.

InformationWeek: Could this type of research turn into a business unit or division within IBM Global Services?

Horn: It could. We have 13 of these micro-practices that are embryonic, incubating service applications. The Web Fountain research application is part of Text Analytics, which is one of the 13. If any are successful, we can make them part of the consulting services business.

I want Web Fountain. Now.

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Consolidation in the PC market

by eleanor on @ 5:11 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

IBM’s selling their PC business to Lenovo, reports The New York Times today. This comes after research firm Gartner issued a press release on Monday predicting that 3 of the top 10 PC Manufacturers will be out of (the) business by 2007. And they pointed to IBM as a potential player.

I have to say I’m significantly less impressed by their display of foresight given the fact that IBM no doubt mentioned this to them. But who knows? Maybe the Gartner statement cleared the way before IBM’s announcement.

Regardless, Gartner is already 33% correct - wonder what that does to their probabilities. We only need two manufacturers to shut down operations now for Gartner’s prediction to come to pass, and we have 2 full years.

Who’s likely to be next? No shocking insight from Gartner. Analyst Leslie Fiering only shared specuation on two of the three. “The PC divisions of HP and IBM are vulnerable to being spun off if their drag on margins and profitability are deemed too great by their parent companies.” Big deal. We knew about HP already. Carly in her WSJ interview this week commented that any non-performing business is subject to divestiture, and IBM has already leaked.

So what, Gartner. I want to hear your predictions for who this third player is.

Adding to the connumdrum are conflicting reports as to the continued growth of the PC business over the next year and beyond. Gartner sees strong sales to continue throughout 2005. However, InformationWeek has a report with a roundup of other numbers, with the bearish title New Orders For Computers Fall; Dip In Buying Seen In ‘05:

After several months of gains, new orders for computers fell 16.1% in October, the Census Bureau reported Thursday. The government preliminarily pegged the value of those orders in October at a seasonally adjusted $5.67 billion. Still, new orders for computers in October rose 13.7% year over year.

Looking at all manufacturing industries, factory orders rose a seasonally adjusted .5% in October. That metric had been flat in September. For the year, new orders for all manufactured goods rose 11.1%.

Earlier this week, a report issued by the research firm IDC said market demand for IT products and services will dip over the next 12 months. Its Buyer Intent index slipped to 1,088 from 1,091. However, IDC says, the index is about 5% higher than it was in January.

None of us knows the future - it might be safest to make predictions that include sure bets, as Gartner did earlier this week.

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Microcommerce Viable, Gartner says

by eleanor on @ 4:35 pm in Mobility   ++

As I continue to catch up on back news, I see that research firm Gartner has blessed the emerging market of micropayments for digital content. InformationWeek reports:

Users of mobile applications already spend $570 million on ring tones, logos and screen savers annually, the company finds. By 2015, Gartner says, microcommerce for new products and services below $5 will generate between $60 billion (Gartner puts a 70% probability on hitting that mark) and $240 billion (60% probability) in revenue annually. E-commerce Websites and mobile commerce wireless networks are the major enablers of this trend. And music sales are rising thanks to the sky-rocketing popularity of portable digital music players such as Apple’s iPod.

Garter suggests companies think in new ways and consider microcommerce as a new opportunity to increase revenue in cases where a mobile-phone or Web infrastructure exists to create a viable business model.

That last sentence is worth re-reading…. e in the infrastructure exists. And where is that exactly true now? Only really tthrough the carrier networks, and upstart services like Preminet (What a dumb name - completely forgettable. I need to look it up each time!). This gets us back to last week’s discussion of open vs closed carrier markets.

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Growing consumer reliance on cellphones

by eleanor on @ 4:27 pm in Mobility | Life-Culture-Play   ++

So while in an earlier post I mention consumer willingness to pay for tech and communications, today I ran across a study from mid-November discussing the shift from landline to wireless calls among consumers.

An annual survey of U.S. households on the use of communications services has found that cellular phone users today are making 60 percent of their long-distance calls on their handsets, market researcher The Yankee Group said Wednesday. That number has been increasing steadily year over year, with 35 percent in 2002 and 43 percent in 2003.

The difference here is one of thrift - many mobile plans include long distance service. Perhaps another factor is the increasedly hectic schedule of people, where they instead choose to place long-distance calls when it is convenient - not necessarily when they are at home.

In a world where there are many emerging applications competing for consumer dollars, the landline long distance market seems a sure loser, something which big long distance players AT& and Sprint have realized.

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Microsoft and Sun report on progress of collaboration

by eleanor on 2 Dec 2004 @ 3:58 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

As I wrote about two weeks ago, the area of integration between Sun and Microsoft around directory services is a powerful reason for their new alliance. The Wall Street Journal has a quick piece that reports on their first joint progress report.

Sun and Microsoft executives emphasized that the collaboration has just begun and will need time to take shape. “Nine months ago we were slashing each other’s tires,” said Sun Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos. “Now we’re helping each other fix each other’s flats.”

The companies said that they have held 15 executive-level meetings in the past five months and that they have held monthly meetings of 24 engineers from both companies. The companies also set up an advisory council of executives from corporate customers that use both companies’ products.

One of the first big tests of the alliance, executives said, will be making it possible for a user to enter one password and log on to corporate applications based on either Sun or Microsoft technology. Mr. Papadopoulos said engineering teams were grappling with how to solve that thorny problem, but weren’t ready to pronounce a solution yet.

However, a problem this big and this obvious also has a lively open source project aiming to bridge the gap. SAMBA is a project designed to provide interoperability between various OS for file, print, authentication and other services. See the full story here.
SAMBA4, a major re-coding and re-architecting initiative (see here for detail, is nearing alpha release - it’ll probably take quite a while, but they are making quick progress.

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Doomed pay-by-cellphone scheme discussed in The Wall Street Journal

by eleanor on 1 Dec 2004 @ 3:12 pm in Emergent | Mobility   ++

More from The Wall Street Journal - this time about cashless payments via cellphone:

People in Watertown, Mass., who lose their wallets have a friend in cab company owner Moe Taha. He is happy to give them a ride — as long as they bring a cellphone.

Watertown Taxi uses a service called MobileLime, provided by Vayusa Inc. of Newton, Mass., which allows passengers to pay for a ride by dialing a number on their phone, pressing a couple of buttons and then giving the cab driver the last four digits of their phone number as they leave.

Back at the taxi company’s shop, software provided by MobileLime completes the transaction. “It’s a genius idea,” Mr. Taha says.

Now I don’t know how hard they had to look for this improbable example - but it’s fascinating to know that it exists. The cynical question I have is about the probability of losing a cell phone compared to the probability of losing a wallet!!! I hear frequent stories of people losing their cell phones, as anecdotal as that is.

I think they need to seriously re-evaluate the problem case they are trying to address here. Selling on the convenience of … what exactly? I wanted to type ‘almost hands free payment’ - but ‘hands free’ is not what we’re talking about there. Selling the service to cabbies that don’t always have the infrastructure to easily manage credit card transactions is probably a better bet, but still a hard sell (as the reason most cabbies don’t have the infrastructure for credit card transactions is because they prefer cash).

The piece continues:

Closely held Vayusa already has teamed up with about 80 companies in New England to support MobileLime, and 7,000 individuals have signed on to use it. [ed note - why are we reading about this when only 7K people have signed up?? Is there that little to write about???]

ViVOtech Inc., a closely held company in Santa Clara, Calif., also has developed software that could be installed in cellphones to handle payments by credit or debit cards designated by a user. The approach requires a special device at a store’s checkout station, which could be installed for roughly $150, as well as use of cellphones that have a technology called near-field communication, which uses radio waves in a special frequency to send data over the space of a few inches.

Phones with near-field communication technology are being developed by Philips Electronics NV and Sony Corp. Philips recently announced that Samsung Electronics Co. will begin equipping its cellphones with the technology as well.

Now, the NFC technology is emergent and will be important, but it will take more relevant applications to drive adoption. Let’s hope they’re bubbling up out there.

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Use strategy to help protect IP

by eleanor on @ 2:56 pm in Strategy-Marketing   ++

Guest columnists Bharat Anand and Alexander Galetovic write in The Wall Street journal yesterday that it’s important to remember that protecting IP is not all and only about legal mechanisms and recourses. He argues that:

A number of resourceful companies, however, have figured out how to use their competitive strengths to accomplish what patent and copyright laws cannot. These market-based strategies may begin by preventing a would-be competitor from misappropriating a company’s core assets. They may integrate their products with ones that are less vulnerable. Or, ultimately, they may discover, salvation lies in moving into the very businesses that put those assets in danger.

The strategies he presents are:

• Act pre-emptively: “Some companies combat infringement by acting before competitors can catch their breath.”
• Create bundles that include secure products: “While Microsoft’s stand-alone applications like Excel or Word can be easily copied, its operating systems, on which these programs run, cannot, allowing the company to do business even in the Chinese market, where, it is estimated, 92% of all software installed last year was counterfeit.” And this Forbes piece, Kill Bill, from back in June talks about how IBM is following this strategy to trounce Microsoft.
• Transform the game: “When the threat to their core assets is overwhelming, companies must take more extreme action — sometimes expanding into related businesses….Alternatively, these companies could have acquired outright the businesses that were facilitating the erosion of their core assets — or been acquired by them.”

This article is adapted from an piece that appears in December’s Harvard Business Review.

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WSJ interviews Carly Fiorina

by eleanor on @ 2:17 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

Yesterday’s The Wall Street Journal has an interview with Carly Fiorina. It’s more of the same - she emphasizes the importance of “execution” and constant focus on cost savings. And she lists HP’s 3 top priorites as “how to get more efficient and effective” at managing the cost structure, gaining greater share of wallet, and a new focus on growing by leveraging capabilities and skills to grow organically into new businesses (she cites move into digital entertainment as an example of this.) The mass layoffs are over, but HP will expand and contract as they increase focus on new areas of the business and shift away from less profitable areas.

For technology she has this to say:

I think that the tech industry is going to grow at two times growth [in U.S. gross domestic product]. It was a five-times-GDP-growth industry in the late 1990s, and that was unsustainable. Now we’ve entered a period where tech is fundamental. When something becomes fundamental it involves a more important and complex set of decisions, so growth slows. By the way, two times GDP is an OK growth industry. But it’s not what it used to be.

I think there are changes that are yet to occur. The software industry still has some consolidation to go. [So does] the communication-technology side.

Provacatively, she responded to questions about the recent departure of many of HP’s top players by saying:

‘ve retained the people we wanted to retain. I won’t say that below my direct reports there weren’t some losses that would have been better if they stayed. But in virtually every case, the reason people left is because they weren’t selected for a job they wanted. The reason they weren’t selected for the job they wanted is because we didn’t think they were the best candidate for the job.

That all may be true, but it seems a strange cultural thing that HP is unable to put them to use productively - even if they weren’t the best fit with one particular job.

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