Reality Check | Ephraim Schwartz » January 2007

January 31, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Barry Bonds does a surprise walk-on at Demo

TAGS: None

Barry Bonds made a surprise appearance at Demo this afternoon to help promote both his new mobile Web site, www.barrybonds.com and Bling the company powering the site, the first to use an Ajax client on a handset.

The pics, by Brian Solis of briansolis.com:

SF Giants' Barry Bonds makes his surprise visit at DEMO in Palm Desert, Calif.

Barry and Roy Satterthwaite, CEO and co-founder of Bling.

More Barry.

BarryBonds.com

Here's a link to Bonds' desktop site.

Bonds didn't stay long on stage but some of the sharper-eyed attendees did get to say hello prior to his appearance when he was spotted sitting outside the auditorium before he went on.

Roy Satterthwaite, CEO and co-founder of Bling Software was asked how much Bonds was paid to make the appearance at the Palm Desert event, but Satterthwaite said Bonds did it gratis in order to promote his new mobile site.

"Bonds was one of the first professional athletes to have a Web site. He saw its importance years ago," Satterthwaite told me.

Bling brings two new pieces of technology to the mobile
environment which will, according to its founder, give users a more fluid, desktop-like experience on a handset.

From the looks of the demonstration it appears to be true. A video of Bonds hitting his 715 home run was in full motion with no latency problems.

To do that Bling is using JavaScript processing and the Ajax client.

The platform runs a JavaScript interpreter that connects to a Java Virtual Machine embedded in many handsets.

The beauty of JavaScript, said Satterthwaite is that for developers it is far simpler to write in than object oriented programming languages.

Bling is also the power behind the new Hip Hop music site GoTV.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 31, 2007 05:44 PM

January 31, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Demo update - the tech keeps getting better

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I'm here in Palm Desert at Demo 07 conference.

If you don't know what that is go to this Demo link and you'll find out.

If you want to see the slide show of Demo click here.

And here is the offical Demo blog site.

In a nutshell though it's where startups present their technology in the hopes of attracting investors.

What's good about the show is there are none of those boring panel discussions where everybody ends up agreeing with each other instead of disagreeing, arguing and calling each other names like they should be doing.

What is also good about the show is you get to see some interesting tech stuff.

Here's a few of the things I've seen so far that haven't been written about yet.

Dave from Seagate Technology is a hard drive about the size of a business card that stores 10GB or 20GB.

But what makes it interesting is that it also includes a USB port, Wi-Fi , Bluetooth and an application processor running at 2.7GHz.

Now the possibilities get more interesting.

Add to that embedded Linux as an OS and it gets even better.

Targeted at cell phone users the idea is you can use this lightweight hard drive for storage and backup, voice, video music and pictures.

But with Linux and the processor you might also have developers write programs that can be stored on the drive and downloaded to wherever.

It reminds me of the old Brick concept where it was promised that someday you would havde a single, portable small device you carried around with you and when you arrive at a location with a monitor and keyboard available you just plug it in and it becomes your personal computer.

Then there's Charlie Crystal, CEO of SalesWorks who has the audacity to call software as a service, SaaS, old school.

"Anytime you get religious about a technology you lose," says Crystal. He's probably right.

SalesWorks offers an alternative to SaaS that Crystal calls a hybrid application. It sits partly on the desktop and partly on the Web.

If you want a mashup you might take your customer database from the desktop and mash it with Google maps, for example, or you might mash you customer database with Dun & Bradstreet ratings.

Any if you work for a really old school publication, something I think they used to call a newspaper, ThePort technology helps the old school get hip.

Calling themselves online social media software, ThePort was recently hired by the Atlanta Constitution to stop the bleeding, probably more like hemorrhaging of readers to more enticing Web Web sites.

Now the Constition offers a blog site with user profiles ala MySpace and affinity groups, becoming blog central for American Idol fans to talk to each other and comment.

Finally, two enterprise level applications targeted at troubleshooting, predicting and preventing problems in enterprise applications from Integrien and Triumfant.

Integrien's Alive 5.5 helps network managers create profiles of past problems and uses that profile for pattern recognition in preventing a second occurrence.

Triumfant Resolutoin Manager diagnoses and fixes a number of system problems.

Three of the most common problems are breaking a business application by deleting files, either accidentally or by a faulty install process; deploying an incorrect option from a program such as deploying the option in Outlook that permanently deletes junk email instead of saving it to a junk email folder; and installing an undesirable application.

Resolution Manager builds on an initial reference model based on scanning over 200,000 data points per computer on a network.

Once a baseline has been established it looks for aberrant data by collecting data rather than reacting to the problem after the fact. The system compares every computer to every other computer to see what is normal.

As a result it can detect an unexpected file and an unexpected process and with one click the process dies and the file gets deleted.

As far as the Outlook problem, it can uncover an unexpected value according to the corporate option selected, so it can restore the expected value, in this case save junk in junk email folder.

Finally it fixes faulty application installations by finding a donor machine and finds missing files and ports them over from donor machine.

That's it. It's time to go back to the presentations. I'll report back again soon.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 31, 2007 03:30 PM

January 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Debating the merits of user-generated content

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Giving users the means to contribute content is all the rage at Demo -- but does it have any value?

Creativity is alive and well. Twenty-something years after the PC revolution, new ideas and innovation, huge successes and tremendous flops, are all still part of the excitement.

So once again I am off to Demo. This year, 70 companies -- mostly startups -- will use the conference to present to VCs new takes on technology. For the purpose of full disclosure, let me say that Demo is an event put on by IDG, the parent company of InfoWorld.

If there is a theme, a single blood type, if you will, pulsing through startups' veins at this year's Demo, it is user-created content. And on the bleeding edge of that technology is a company called Helium, which went live in October and will announce its Helium Debate technology at the conference.

As opposed to Wikipedia, which uses citizen editors to perfect a single article, Helium offers a forum for experts to submit articles for peer review.

Using a unique algorithm, articles on a single topic are compared side by side, and reviewers rate them. If there are 20 articles, it does not mean that Article A will be compared with the other 19. But, if Article A is better than Article B, and Article B is better than Article C, the system assumes Article A is also better than Article C. Top-rated articles go to the top, offering the reader a variety of perspectives, as well as additional information. Lower-rated articles go to the bottom.

Helium Debate will bring this technology to discussion topics, ranging from whether troop-level increases in Iraq make sense to whether declawing your cat is cruel.

I'm not sure about the cat part, but if a reporter like John Burns -- who has covered Iraq from the ground level for several years -- enters the troop-level debate, I would read that intently. But, as a colleague of mine says, "People in the business" -- that is, the editorial side of the publishing business -- "know that most of what the average citizen knows about a particular topic is useless."

Is this attitude elitist?

Not really. When you've interviewed experts and non-experts for more than 30 years, as I have, you come to understand it's true.

Think of a disaster movie where the pilot and co-pilot become incapacitated and the stewardess asks over the PA system, "Does anybody know how to fly a plane?" If a blogger who writes a hobbyist column on flying remote-controlled airplanes raises his hand, I'd keep on praying.

Yes, there are bloggers who have expertise in their field, but it takes an awful lot of separating the wheat from the chaff to find them. Thus, the value-add of Helium.

Actually, what I find fascinating is the phenomenon of user-generated content itself. Helium, a startup with no marketing to speak of, generated in its first three months 10,000 hits per week from people who just want to be heard.

What is driving people to do this? Is it a pent-up urge that has festered for decades that only now can be satisfied thanks to the Web? If this opportunity for an audience had been presented to the general public 50 years ago, would it have been ignored?

The psychology is very interesting.

Whatever the reason, the facts speak louder than any debate. Drop some sugar on the floor and the ants will come -- in this case followed very quickly by the advertisers.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 30, 2007 03:00 AM

January 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Breaking News - Intel announces transistor breakthrough

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Deemed no less an important event than to run as the major headline on Saturday morning's New York Times, "Intel says chips will run faster, using less power,"Intel has indeed made a major breakthrough in the manufacturing of chips.

The ability to create at production levels a transistor measuring 45 nanometers [nm]--400 such transistors could fit inside a single human red blood cell-- will mean extremely high compute power at extremely low power usage.

The new chips, expected to be in production by the second half of this year will find their way not only into the latest computer processors from Intel but also it is expected they will be used in cell phones and other handheld devices, according to Mark Bohr, an Intel Fellow.

While Intel spokespeople were reluctant to quantify how the new technology might improve performance and battery life, according to the Times using such chips would make it possible to play a full-length movie on a cell phone without recharging the battery.

The breakthrough was made possible by using a new material, "high-k" in the design of the chip that turn on and off the millions of transistors and in the insulating material beneath the transistors.

The material has one-tenth the power leakage of electrical current than previous processors. Leakage during the flow of electric current is one of the major contributors to loss of battery power.

The breakthorugh represents the first change in the material used to manufacture chips in 30 years, said Bohr.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 27, 2007 10:42 AM

January 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Opinion poll --- Should YouTube supply the identity of ECOtotal?

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According to the story posted today by Forbes , News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox has subpoenaed YouTube to give up the real name of the person or persons known as ECOtotal who posted pirated clips of an unaired episode of the popular television show "24"

The clips were taken down but New's Corp still wants the name[s] of the so-called perpetrator[s].

The question is what's right and what's wrong?

While YouTube and the 'net have always placed a high value on a certain anti-establishment chic, as a writer this issue hits very close to home.

If I were writing a novel and someone was able to obtain chapters and post them online before it was published I would be very upset.

So is this any different?

Would I want the identity of the person or persons who stole my book and uploaded it revealed so they couldn't do it again?

Yes.

Would I want them to be prosecuted?

No.

Is this analogy appropriate?

I'm not sure. Certainly, television shows want publicity and it could be argued that "24" and other shows always air small clips ahead of time to entice the viewer. It's called coming attractions in the movies.

Is this different? Well, certainly ECOtotal doesn't own those clips but you have the last word.

Send in your comments on whether YouTube and its parent company, Google, should reveal the name of ECOtotal or not.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 26, 2007 11:03 AM

January 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Poor customer service -- print that, Epson

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I don't normally, or I should say, I never up until now wrote about personal, end user hassles I may have had with a high tech company.

Most of the time, I would consider it unfair to paint a company with a broad brush over an individual problem that may not be applicable to anything more than a customer support representative having a bad day.

I'm going to make an exception here because I think what happened concerns a bigger issue. Two issues actually.

I bought an Epson Stylus Photo R260,color printer, $149.
The printer did not work right out of the box. Called customer support and after going through a few tests the CSR [Customer Support Representative] said, yes, it's a hardware problem.

Now here's where it gets interesting. The CSR said I could either return it to the store, which for me would be a hassle or have Epson pick it up and they would send me a new one.

But, if Epson took it back they wanted me to know I might get a refurbished, as in used, model in return.

That's issue one. That to me is a very poor policy. Paying for a new product then getting a used in return. My gosh, you know it doesn't even sound legal.

The second and bigger issue.

When I complained the CSR said, it's right there in your documentation.

This is a tactic that so many companies use. As if putting something in the documentation makes it sacrosanct. They wrote the documentation, for heaven's sake. This isn't the Ten Commandments we are talking about here.

Just because something is written down Epson, and others companies as well, think that it makes bad behavior okay. It doesn't.

Be on your guard against this tactic and don't accept it. If they made the policy they can change the policy.

That's it. Do you think I'm whining or do I have a point? Let me know.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 24, 2007 01:01 PM

January 23, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Offshore attrition on the rise

TAGS: Talkback

Offshoring -- especially for BPO (business process outsourcing) -- is about to hit a wall. After all, despite being a relatively new phenomenon made possible by advances in communications, it remains subject to one timeless principle of economics: supply and demand.

The HR pros call it attrition. On any particular project outsourced to a service provider in India, you can expect at least a 15 percent turnover rate for personnel assigned to the project within a year. For some projects, BPO chief among them, it is not unheard of for a whole staff to turn over by year's end, according to Paul Schmidt, a partner in the global services delivery practice at TPI, one of the larger sourcing advisory organizations.

With technology so closely tied to business strategy, to talk about BPO today is to understand the consequences of not being able to deliver expected services in a timely manner due to high turnover.

Schmidt puts it much better than I can: "There is a tremendous opportunity for value leakage," he tells me. In other words, if you don't pay enough attention up front to the realities of attrition at your service provider, you will end up with higher costs, lower-quality deliverables, or, worse, a project that goes bust.

The high attrition rate, particularly in India, finds its roots in the phenomenal growth of outsourcing and offshoring. A recently completed TPI study, "India: An Attractive BPO Destination Marred by Alarming Attrition," by Dinesh Goel and Prabhash Thakur, pegs the growth of BPO attrition during the past three years at approximately 50 percent per year.

What's fueling this attrition is that, despite all you may have heard about how many computer science majors graduate from Indian universities annually, there is a finite talent pool -- and those graduates know it.

The study reports that "the rate of attrition seems to be increasing," and it questions whether the offshore BPO industry can sustain growth and satisfy clients over the long term given this trend. The study cites inconsistent delivery of service levels, loss of client-specific knowledge, and additional investment in retraining service provider staff as consequences of these high attrition rates.

Obviously, you can't just ignore the problem and assume that it's up to the service providers to fix it. There are steps you should take, as an offshoring client, to help mitigate the fallout of attrition. Schmidt recommends a carrot-and-stick approach.

A company must insist on an SLA that quantifies the level of attrition they are willing to tolerate. There must also be clauses within the SLA stating that when turnover reaches a certain threshold it is the service provider's responsibility to retrain and re-educate workers.

On the carrot side, Schmidt says the client should provide ample training and career movement. It should also consider including engaging and challenging work in the mix. And, allowing individuals to rotate through opportunities to work in the United States is certainly a big motivator for keeping them on a particular project -- not to mention reward and recognition programs with financial incentives.

That said, Schmidt doesn't see service provider fees going up long-term, mainly due to the competitive climate that persists in India.

I disagree with Schmidt. The huge demand and the finite supply will increase the cost of offshoring. Over time, this will level the playing field -- and will motivate companies to reconsider whether they should keep projects in-house or send them overseas.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 23, 2007 03:00 AM

January 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Some things never change...at IBM

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Don't get me wrong I really admire IBM and much of the work it does.

For a giant company they remain innovative and competitive. There is nothing like a tour of one of IBM's many labs to leave you in awe.

However, some things about the company never change.

Back in the mid 80s I worked for a mag, Computer Buyer's Guide and Handbook, that compiled specs on every printer currently for sale in the U.S.

In those early days we would send to the PR department of each printer manufacturer a disk with the blank forms and they would fill them out and mostly mail them back.

Every manufacturer complied. But it was only IBM that sent us a stack of manuals six feet high along with a note saying, "all the information you need is contained in these books."

Thanks but no thanks.

Now fast forward to 2007 and Lotus, an IBM division, is holding a teleconference to announce new products about to be introduced at Lotussphere.

Here's how the notice starts out:

"To participate in the Web conference you will need an IBM ID and password. If you already have an IBM ID and password" -- now why in the world would I have that? -- "you may proceed directly to the Web conference. If you do not have an IBM ID..."

And then it goes on to say setting one up is "quick and easy" and it will only take 10 minutes and then it will be activated in another ten minutes.

So that means I need to be aware of this teleconference at least 20 minutes before the darn thing starts.

After all these years Big Blue still doesn't get it. Being a reporter on deadline doesn't usually give you 20 minutes to play games with passwords and user IDs.

I almost forgot. You can also test your system for compatibility with the ID, password and Web conference by clicking on a "Test meeting" icon.

They didn't say how long that would take.

Every other company on the planet gives you the phone number, hands you a password and ID and away you go.

Big Blue, you gotta lov'em.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 19, 2007 10:49 AM

January 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Community developed RIAs are harbingers of things to com

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If you want a peek into the future of RIAs (rich Internet applications), take a look at Tabblo (tabblo.com). The model that Tabblo has set into motion for photographers -- both amateur and professional -- will soon be adopted by enterprise IT to empower its user base.

Tabblo allows its members to store photos and text online and use its online photo-editing application -- either on their own or in collaboration with other members -- to create a finished album, book, poster, postcard, presentation, or portfolio.

The technology behind Tabblo's RIA is not unique. The company made a big bet on commodity hardware, a big bank of image servers, and open source software. And when a request is sent in from any browser, it gets farmed out in a stateless way.

"We are borrowing architecture from big scientific compute clusters, parallel processing," said Antonio Rodriguez, founder and CEO of Tabblo.

What is unique is how Tabblo wraps it all together, creating a specific context for photos, text, and templates and enabling its community of users and developers to help build the finished product.

Most of the features Tabblo develops -- from tags to the ability to create photo variations -- starts from a single designer. The richness of these features, however, comes from Tabblo's community approach.

A developer builds just enough of a tool to see how it is used, and others can examine how the tool was built and then add to it.

"This community approach will sweep software development," Rodriguez says.

Of course, this is the same idea behind open source. But open source focuses more on infrastructure. With RIAs, the technology is more immediate. Developers instrument the application, publish it, and see how users interact with what they've built, creating a quick feedback loop.

"We launched our solution seven months ago, and we learned that what a soccer mom in Iowa wants is not what a graphics designer in New York needs," Rodriguez says.

If it is true that the personal computer put about an 8 percent increase in worker productivity into the economy, Rodriguez predicts that building applications interactively using an open approach will put in another 8 percent.

The result is better software that is cheaper to build -- no packaging to pay for; no warehouses to store it; no truck to deliver it; no stores, brick-and-mortar, or even Web-based, to sell it.

The line between big desktop applications and online applications is becoming blurred. Soon, we will move everything to the cloud, including compute cycles and data storage.

Excess compute cycles can be used for more than just searching for extra-terrestrial life. Not to mention the fact that, if everything finds its home in the cloud, the device you use to access it becomes totally irrelevant.

The downside of a Web-based application is that if you lose your Internet connection you are hosed. But the same could be said for the telecommunications network. You just have to trust that 99 percent of the time you will have a dial tone.

The more I look at companies such as Tabblo and at SaaS (software as a service) as a delivery model, the more I begin to see that we are being inexorably driven into the cloud. And if that means better applications that are easier to manage and use, I don't think it is such a bad idea.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 18, 2007 01:59 PM

January 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)

How Verizon SaaS hosting helps feed the business Web

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The fact that Verizon Business Data Center Services, a division of Verizon Communications, announced a hosting contract with Now Solutions, a software as a service [SaaS] provider for human resources solutions, probably went unnoticed by most people.

But there is something bigger going on besides a simple customer win for Verizon Business. It is also a big win for the move to the so-called Business Web.

Obviously, more and more of the telecommunications network providers will be getting into the business of hosting SaaS solutions. It makes sense because they have global network and security experience plus more racks, blades and bandwidth than most companies will ever need.

The question is where is this heading?

We are seeing the beginnings of a new direction with Salesforce.com which is creating an ecosystem for SaaS providers on AppExchange and through the creation of mashups with other companies like Google.

These are the first signs that SaaS vendors are creating more holistic systems. Integrated might be another word for it, but integrated doesn't speak to the synergy of two applications leveraging each others capabilties so that the result is more than the sum of its parts, one plus one equals three.

It makes sense for the SaaS providers to band together to offer something packaged application providers would have a great deal of difficulty doing.

What SaaS providers want and what Verizon thinks it can help bootstrap, according to Chris Gesell, director of product marketing for IT Solutions at Verizon Business, is help in developing programs that can create the ecosystem.

It does not serve SaaS providers well for customers to think of SaaS solutions as separate silos. In other words it benefits all SaaS providers when the customer doesn't assume SaaS is good for their CRM soluton but won't work for say, logistics.

What Verizon is looking at down the road, says Gesell, is to create the infrastructure to allow that ecosystem to thrive.

Of course an ecosystem works to Verizon's benefit as well. By building the services and the support for a SaaS ecosystem Verizon hopes to attract more vendors to join the ecosystem hosted by them in their data center.

Ultimately, this will add to the momentum of SaaS and over time cement its place as a major competitor to traditional applications.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 17, 2007 02:14 PM

January 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

SaaS will make fat clients thin

TAGS: None

If I was allowed to buy stock in a high tech company, which I am not due to the fact that I cover most of them, I would buy into a manufacturer of thin clients.

The more I cover SaaS [Software as a Service] the more I am convinced that over time the need for a fat client on the desktop will become unnecessary.

Two announcements this week alone have convinced me more than ever.
Salesforce.com announced its Apex programming language that will allow coders to create data models, automate business logic, and create interfaces without the need to tune it to any specific hardware, database or operating system. Salesforce takes care of that on the backend.

While Salesforce may be used by only say 20 percent of a company's workforce now, if their IT department can start building other applications on the Salesforce platform that percentage is sure to rise.

Thus the urgency in designing an application for specific in-house servers, operating systems and networks--other than IP--goes away.

The second announcement only furthered my belief that we are heading into the cloud for most software. Also see my column, Tabblo's approach to RIAs on this topic posted today.

Verizon Business, a unit of Verizon Communications, is also getting into the hosting SaaS services on its network.

If Salesforce.com still gives some large enterprise-level companies pause, concerned that their data center is not up to the job, certainly a telecommunications carrier offers an alternative any large company might consider.

Add AT&T data center hosting to the mix with its reputation for a secure environment and frankly, I don't see a bright future for packaged applications sitting behind legacy firewalls that cost huge amounts of dollars to maintain.

The way I see it with more and more of software becoming a service, ala Web 2.0 if you will, the need for fat clients will almost disappear.

I'm telling you, buy thin.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 16, 2007 01:51 PM

January 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Offshoring: Money talks, programmers walk

TAGS: None

The hot debate currently going on in the online pages of InfoWorld Talkback in response to our news story "Survey: Offshoring does not cost developer jobs" misses the point.

The TalkBack pages are filled with comments from software engineers and programmers relating how they or people they know were laid off because the company they worked for took its software development off shore.

The question everyone should be asking is not are jobs in the U.S. at stake -- because employers probably don't really care if they are -- but rather does it make economic sense for a company to take its software development offshore?

I spoke with Barry Rubenstein, program manager for application outsourcing at IDC to see what he had to say.

Rubenstein's comments shot down the claim of the Software & Information Industry Association [SIIA] that offshoring is not costing jobs.

"Cost is a primary driver," for going off shore, said Rubenstein. "That is the main reason."

If cost is the "main reason," logically, that means that companies are comparing what the cost of hiring U.S. workers is versus the cost of hiring workers from Inida, Russia, or China. And if they decide to go offshore, they have obviously decided not to hire U.S. professionals.

Rubenstein added that if you just compare labor rates, then offshoring is "absolutely" less expensive. However, Rubenstein also said, "When you look at the added overhead to manage an offshore team, things get more complicated."

And this is exactly what I've been told time and time again by many companies that have taken their development off shore. It even gets to the point where some have brought it back in house because the cost of overhead outweighed the initial lower costs of labor.

Nevertheless, Rubenstein said there are reasons other than cost why some companies go off shore, citing a mid-sized manufacturer in the Midwest that uses SAP on the backend.

"It is hard to attract highly skilled SAP programmers to, say, work in Omaha, Nebraska. This is a big driver for outsourcing in general and offshoring in particular."

In some situations, there are also skills that companies can't find here, in particular intimate knowledge of legacy applications.

As older programmers retire, for example, Cobol programmers,
especially in the public sector, are hard to find, said Rubenstein.

(Why there are more experts in Cobol elsewhere eludes me. However, perhaps there is an explanation.)

"And these programs [like Cobol] have incredibly poor documentation, and companies have no choice but to turn to outside resources."

Nevertheless, I believe it would be foolish and even mendacious to say that no jobs are lost in the States due to offshoring.

The argument that "offshoring is used almost entirely as a form of expansion, not as a replacement," as David Thomas, executive director of SIIA said, is false on its face.

For every job placed outside of the United States, there has to be someone Stateside who is not being hired.

Again, the real question is, does offshoring make economic sense for companies? And is there no value to be gained by hiring local talent whenever it is possible?

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 12, 2007 02:26 PM

January 11, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Why Apple doesn't care if Cisco sues over the name iPhone

TAGS: None

Why would Apple use a name, iPhone, for its cellular handset when Cisco trademarked the name for its VoIP phone years a go?

My cynical guess is that Steve Jobs and his marketing department figured it this way.

If they lose the trademark infringement case in court they will have to turn over to Cisco all of the profits they've made from sale of the device.

But, the device isn't available until June. There are no profits until then.

And, once the press stops genuflecting before the iPhone, giving Apple millions of dollars in free marketing dollars, Apple will still have almost six months to market the heck out of their cellular phone under the iPhone name.

They can afford to spend millions of their own until the name becomes synonymous with Apple and cellular in the consumer's mind.

I don't see Cisco spending millions to market yet another run of the mill VoIP phone. Do you?

If they did it would probably just increase the sales of Apple's iPhone.

Apple it seems is using the lame excuse that since theirs is a cell phone and not a VoIP phone there is no conflict between the two products.

But Apple will never test that weak defense in court. Rather they will settle with Cisco before Cingular sells one Apple iPhone.

Did I hear someone say 'power' corrupts?

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 11, 2007 01:13 PM

January 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

IP, iPhone will change broadcast industry

TAGS: Media

The impact of companies that distribute user created content like YouTube and blip.tv, plus products like Apple's iPhone and AppleTV, Sling Media's Slingbox, and Samsung's Advanced VSB [A-VSB], will shake up both the media/broadcast and telecom industries.

If you don't believe me, take a look at the site RocketBoom, which hosts a daily, three-minute video blog; or see what happened to its former star Amanda Congdon, who was getting about 1 million hits per day for her show. She is being signed up by HBO and ABC.

But someday, companies like RocketBoom will have huge revenues from advertising, so that they will be able to counter-offer the pot of gold that ABC or HBO offers Internet stars like Amanda Congdon and then, holy smoke, we will really see major changes in the broadcast industry and the mindless junk it offers us.

The way it works now, according to Mike Hudack, CEO at blip.tv, is a small number of companies have a monopoly of broadcast spectrum.

They can go out and negotiate aggressively with any content provider. They simply have to remind the creative side that you can't get to a mass market without them.

And this is also true for telecom and its content providers.

It is true that due to the limited spectrum they make huge bets on content. So, as Hudack says it is actually inefficient for both the creators and the distributors.

The content provider gets paid on the upside, and often paid quite well. But if the show is a hit the distributor/broadcaster makes it up on the backside while the creator just gets to produce more shows.

The new delivery mechanisms, all IP, changes all that.

IP and the digital devices it uses gives everyone a freedom to be heard and seen that is unprecedented in the history of the world.

The question is will it be allowed to continue unfettered by either government or private enterprise trying to take back their monopolies?

Well, let's enjoy the ride while it lasts.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 10, 2007 12:57 PM

January 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Dell's Plant a Tree program misses the point

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Dell announced today what it is calling a "carbon-neutral" initiative that "plants trees for customers to offset the carbon impact of electricity required to power their systems."

Well it almost sound like a good idea. But Dell's "Plant a Tree for Me" program is going to cost.

For every PC a customer buys, the customer can donate an additional $2 for a notebook and $6 for a desktop to go toward the planting of trees.

What I want to know is why isn't Dell paying for this?

Why does the customer have to put in the $2 or $6?

Why the difference between a donation for a notebook and for a desktop?

Better they figure out ways to reduce pollution in the manufacture of their PCs than to make amends for destroying the environment after the fact.

They sell so many PC they must have some leverage with the companies that actually do the manufacturing.

Over time, a Dell spokesperson told me you don't even have to buy a computer from Dell you can just go to their site and donate the money. That's a pretty sneaky way of getting names and address of potential customers.

I have to admit that Dell does do some good stuff for the environment.

It has a global recycling policy that offers free product recycling worldwide. It also has as a company goal to use 50 percent recycled content by 2009.

What I object to is the propagation of the lie that consumers are responsible for the terrible shape the environment is in. The implication of the Plant a Tree for Me program is that if you donate money the environment will improve.

It avoids the truth that government and its politicians are in bed with manufacturers and if we really want to have a major impact on air quality and the environment in general it is up to them to do something in a major way.

How can buying a $2 tree be the equivalent of spewing 10 tons of soot,dirt and CO2 into the air on a daily basis from just a single manufacturing site?

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 9, 2007 01:28 PM

January 09, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Post holiday gadgets bring new woes to IT

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Ah, it's good to be back from the holidays, showing off the latest gadgets you received as gifts from your family.

That new Apple iPod, for example, will be great for storing files, especially because your company won't allow you to take home your laptop for some silly security reason. No one will ever guess all the stuff you need is around your neck, stored in a little silver Mini.

Multiply that scenario by the number of devices available -- cell phones, handhelds, and lesser MP3 players -- times the number of workers storing and accessing proprietary company information "in the wild," as Philippe Winthrop, research director for wireless and mobility at Aberdeen Group, puts it in his report "Enterprise Mobile Adoption: A Corporate Conundrum," and you will quickly understand the need to rein in mobile devices through a comprehensive mobile management strategy.

It should be noted that the Aberdeen study was sponsored by four companies in the mobile industry: Sprint, Mobile Armor, Integrated Mobile, and HTC. One hundred and fifty enterprises were surveyed.

Security is not the No. 1 reason companies have hesitated in deploying mobile devices. According to the study, 72 percent of those who have no plans to adopt a mobile strategy cited an unproven business case for mobility as the reason they were holding off. Cost of services was the second gating factor, at 44 percent; security third, at 40 percent.

Among those who are deploying a mobile strategy, however, security is at the top of the list of concerns. The problem is that you can't really have a good security policy for mobile unless it is part of your overall strategy, Winthrop says.

"There is a technology component, a legal component, and a human-factor component, and all three have their own shares of risk," Winthrop warns.

Of course, it's a lot easier to manage mobile devices and policies if the gateway to adoption is the organization, and not devices that came directly from beneath the Christmas tree to the office desktop. After all, as Winthrop says, you can't manage what you can't see.

I also spoke with Jay Highley, president and CEO of Integrated Mobile, a professional services outfit that offers managed services for mobile devices, about this problem.

According to Highley, most organizations don't even know how many mobile devices they have, what they pay, and the true cost of supporting them. Highley says companies must define a mobile-device policy and create a unified enterprise database across a multicarrier environment that might even include that iPod. The policy should require employees to register their devices, and the database should include fields such as the rev level of the device and the cost center to which it belongs.

My solution might go against the grain of everything an MBA has ever learned about how to run a business, but I think new times require new ideas.

For me, the secret to managing mobility -- from understanding the cost structure, to tracking the ROI, to offering help-desk support -- is to create a single point of contact. You can do this by using a managed service such as Integrated Mobile, or you can create your own department of mobility that does it all.

The advantage of the latter is that your point of contact is within the company and knows the company inside and out. That knowledge can be leveraged easily when it comes time to integrate mobility on both a strategic and operational level.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 9, 2007 10:54 AM

January 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Going underground -- Can technology be outsmarted?

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I happened to be walking around with extra cash this week and so I've been buying things, meals at restaurants, supermarket shopping, and the dry cleaners, with real money instead of a credit card.

The thought suddenly struck me that if I refrained from using a credit card for a year I wonder if I would disappear, in a technology/marketing/junk mail kind of way?

Without the constant refreshing of my name and number would all of the companies that hound me give up after a year and assume I no longer existed?

Without a credit card trail no one could actually track my movements.

Would I soon get a knock on the door from the marketing police wanting to know what in blazes is going on?

Refraining from using your credit card can be done. If you know how to budget and can take that amount of money out of your paycheck every month and keep it in your pocket, it might be a unique experience.

Is it un-American? Is it seditious?

I just ate in a fancy restaurant and paid cash. I felt like spy hiding in a strange city.

Not to go to far down the conspiracy road but I wonder how many times my location is known by companies paying for a credit card usage history.

Of course most rental car companies, airlines and hotels won't take cash.

Well, there are always taxis, trains instead of planes and cheap hotels instead of Ritz Carltons that I can use.

I'm getting serious about this.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 8, 2007 02:32 PM

January 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Siemens and Salesforce strike a blow against packaged apps

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The news that Siemens, a company with $110 billion in revenues last year, is stepping into a deal with Salesforce.com, with about $440 million in revenues, to offer a mashup on AppExchange is a yet another indication that software as we know it is changing rapidly.

Why would a company that large want to partner with a company that small? What does Siemens get from the deal?

Obviously Siemens executives now believe Salesforce, and by extension the SaaS model, is reaching critical mass in terms of potential revenue and it can no longer be ignored.

Siemens wants in and as more and more companies like them start to partner with Salesforce and other SaaS providers as well the trend will become like the proverbial snowball rolling downhill, creating ever larger revenue opportunities that more and more
enterprise-level software companies cannot ignore.

On top of that the concept of mashups lowers the bar for entry into the game.

After all, Siemens is basically a hardware company. However, offering the OpenScape communications applet was done without the need for a huge dollar investment that is typcially required for a new hardware product.

Where is this going?

Imagine Salesforce with CRM, or Google with an Office-like product, as anchor stores in a mall offering their suites of applications to which third parties can add very focused, vertical applets.

In a few short years it is going to be very hard for the current software giants like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP to ignore this. In fact, they aren't ignoring it, they are participating.

But the question is are they actually hastening their own demise?

Let me know what you think?

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 8, 2007 12:48 PM

January 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Technology versus privacy: finding the right balance

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All technologies that in one way or another invade your privacy rest on the premise that the benefits of such breaches outweigh the demerits.

While this argument is often used to defend government snooping it is obviously also acceptable in private enterprise. See Hewlett-Packard.

But I bring this up following a much smaller bit of news. It is the announcement from Control Module Inc. [CMI] that they are introducing the first RFID tags for workforce management.

The tags "identify, track, monitor and protect people and assets," says the press release.

As always we need to ask who are they protecting and from what?

On the plus side the RFID tags can protect workers by using what is called "machine control." In other words, a dangerous piece of equipment cannot be operated by an unauthorized employee.

The authorization resides in the RFID tag in the sense that the tag has an employee number which is matched to say a directory which says whether or not the employee is allowed to operate the equipment, like a fork lift truck. If unauthorized the truck won't start.

Of course in case of emergency when an unauthorized person might need to start a piece of equipment there could be a problem.

The tags also track employee start and stop times which basically replaces a time clock.

But the RFID tag can also track location. If a worker spends too much time at the water fountain or too much time on a particular task when management thinks they should be moving to the next task, it can all be measured, analyzed and appropriate action taken.

Then there is loss prevention which tracks not only the location of inventory but also can tell if an unauthorized person is leaving the premises with a piece of equipment.

Here's my gripe.

In our constant effort to create perfect systems by using technology we are in danger of dehumanizing people.

Technology, at least to date, still measures things as on and off, black and white, and therefore right or wrong. But people aren't like that.

Many years ago I had a friend who worked in a retail art supply store. He told wonderful stories about the characters he met, both as customers and fellow employees.

One particular salesman my friend told me about used to steal small amounts of money from the cash register. Of course management knew about it but they never fired him because he was just about the best salesman they ever had.

As long as he kept it under control, $5.00 here, maybe a tenner right before the weekend, they figured he brought more in than he took.

I don't think we have the technology that can make the kind of decision that the manager of the art supply store made. I fear we will give up our ability to make these kinds of human decisions if we rely solely on technology to make our decisions for us.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 5, 2007 04:03 PM

January 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Outsourcer claims skill shortage will raise wages. Will it also help raise H-1B quota?

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Is there a shortage of tech workers or isn't there?

In the answer to that lies the basis for increasing H-1B visa and
L-1 visa quotas.

According to Yoh, an outsourcer of tech talent and a division of Zimmermann and Day, a managed services company, a shortage in talent for research and development and software developers will raise wages in 07.

Of course, this is coming from a company that offers to supply such talent to its customers so it stands to reason if tech specialists require higher salaries Yoh's cut will also be larger.

The Yoh market report says there will be demand for clinical research associates, biostatisticians, firmware engineers and hardware engineers.

Yoh also predicts demand in technologies like business objects and Java in addition to Microsoft developers, SAS programmers and systems architects.

With the adoption of SOA platforms by the enterprise Yoh also says there will be an increased need for Oracle and SAP "consultants and database administrators."

The Yoh research quotes Jim Lanzalotto, vice president of Strategy and Marketing at Yoh, saying hiring managers are looking for specialized talent.

"For example, a candidate with .Net developer skills and pharmaceutical experi-ence is far more engaging to a hiring manager than a candidate with skills but not the market expertise or experience," said Lanzalotto.

However, Norm Matloff, professor of computer science at the University of California, at Davis, scoffs at Lanzalotto's analysis.

"Employers create their own artificial 'shortages' by setting more and more requirements for the job. The hidden agenda here is often to tailor a job to a foreign national they want to hire, or to avoid hiring older--i.e. more expensive--applicants," said Matloff.

Obviously, the debate over a tech skills shortage or not continues.

But for what it is worth, Yoh also looked at technology skills in demand in 12 major U.S. technology hubs. Here are some of those findings.

Austin/Dallas/Houson: .Net C# Developer, Java/J2EE Architect and Developer, SQL DBA.
Boston: Business Systems Analyst, Project Manager, Clinical Research Associate
Silicon Valley: Firmware Engineer, ASIC Design Engineer, Embedded engineer.
For the full list go to the Yoh report.

I also asked Kim Berry, president of the Programers Guild what he thought of the Yoh report. Here are some of his comments.

"The problem is not a shortage of new graduates. The "shortage" is employers expecting that some other employer had borne the cost of providing on the job training:

"For example, [from the Yoh report] "a candidate with .Net developer skills and pharmaceutical experience is far more engaging to a hiring manager than a candidate with the skills but not the market expertise or experience."

This basically says "recent grads need not apply."

In some cases the only reasonable solution is for employers to hire people with general skills, and then provide training and time to learn the specifics of the particular job and business.

Generally the problem is that Congress has allowed employers to flood in foreign workers this decade rather than investing in their staff. Human DNA has not changed much in 15 years. But 15 years ago companies like HP rarely terminated workers, rather they provided them training. Now the buzz word at HP is "churn" - where layoffs of skilled workers and a shortage of skilled workers happen simultaneously.

I just searched YOH in Sacramento - only two openings - and they've only been unfilled for a week:

WHY ARE BOTH 5-7 years experience? Because they are probably both fake job ads to sponsor H-1b workers that are coming up on 6 years.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 4, 2007 02:33 PM

January 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Crimeware Evolves with polymorphing botnet worms

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If you are a cracker who has written an exploit, you have a choice between fame and fortune. In the good old days, crackers chose fame. But now fortune appears to be far more appealing.

Crimeware is a multibillion economy, according to Chad Harrington, vice president of marketing[cq] at FireEye[cq], makers of a
crime stopping -- or should I say cracker-stopping -- appliance that uses virtual technology to stop an exploit before it gets into your network.

Lest you think crimeware is the domain of some 16-year-old kid with too much time on his hands here's the multilayered reality.

At the bottom level, there are the crackers. These guys sell the vulnerability information to the next level up, called bot herders. A bot in crimeware terminology is a compromised machine.

The bot herders assemble this botnet of compromised machines and sell it to what are called the fraudsters. The fraudsters use the exploited machines to steal identities, customer and employee data, intellectual property, and the like. On the open market, an exploit can be sold for as little as $200 and as much as $50,000, Harrington says.

Although there are layers of security to contend with beyond compromising the op-erating system, once in the door, the rest is relatively easy pickings.

"Getting back out again is the tricky part," Harrington says.

Bot herders typically charge $1 per compromised machine, per month. But if they've cracked into a major corporation with access to customer and employee data, they could charge as much as $100 per system, per month.

What’s scary is that these botted systems are computers inside the firewall. Harrignton tells the story of a botted system that sent out notification of upcoming layoffs and directed employees to a bogus HR site that was hosted on the local domain and managed by a bot herder.

One of the major trends in crimeware for 2007 will be polymorphing botnet worms. These worms morph -- change their signature -- every four to six hours.

FireEye is using virtualization to combat these worms. Rather than trying to guess whether a packet will harm the network, FireEye runs virtual machines and fools the system into sending the worm to one of these VMs rather than the actual net-work.

I asked whether this process slows down the network. According to Harrington, la-tency is measured in a couple of seconds if it is something the system hasn't seen, and microseconds if it has.

FireEye runs most OSes plus a full stack of applications and browsers with users adding what they like.

It sounds as if anyone can set up their own VM solution to do what FireEye does. Harrington admits it is a simple idea but says you have to intercept the traffic in real time, which takes a few patents.

If you set up a honey pot -- a machine intended to be compromised -- the attacker has to find that machine and compromise it. What FireEye does is "sniff the traffic" off the network and pretend it is the end point.

"There is a conversation on the network going on between Machine A and Machine B. We create a shadow version from Machine A Prime to Machine B Prime. As the protocol goes back and forth, we pretend we are the end point of this conversa-tion," Harrington says.

Unfortunately, crimeware is a not a virtual reality. It's the real thing. Will 2007 be the year we finally gain the upper hand? Only time will tell.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 2, 2007 02:56 PM