Reality Check | Ephraim Schwartz | February 2007

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February 2007

February 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Gartner security expert: RFID middleware, readers vulnerable

The recent flap over RFID vulnerability in security cards manufactured by HID led me to call Gartner and to have a talk with its top security guy John Pescatore, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst.

I was suddenly wondering how insecure RFID really is.

It seems Chris Paget, a researcher at IOActive, was going to demonstrate at the annual Black Hat security conference how a security card could be easily hacked and cloned, not just cards from HID but from other security card makers as well.

It was reported that in the talk Paget not only planned to explain to attendees how vulnerable these cards are but he was also going to demonstrate how to do it.

I suggest you read the full story but the upshot was HID forced IOActive and Black Hat to cancel the demo.

Pescatore says RFID security cards can be done securely.

"They have the design features to do that," Pescatore told me.

The real problem is that the makers sometimes don't take the extra step like encrypting the contents.

In fact, the real vulnerabilities in RFID is not in the cards, warns Pescatore, but in the middleware and in the RFID reader software.

It is like in the early days of the Web when Web server designers assumed their product was safe because it was only meant to simply interrogate a browser and the browser would then respond. What they didn’t realize was that a hacker might pretend to be a browser.

The same is true now of RFID reader software. Makers think all the reader has to do is talk to the card and the card responds and then the reader asks for the card's number and the card responds again.

"But what if you are a Palm Pilot or a laptop pretending to be an RFID card?" asks Pescatore.

Or what if instead of responding with a 128 byte ID number the hacker sends a 4,000 kbyte digit. Will there be overflow? Or Perhaps the last 3,872 bytes are an executable program.

RFID reader software and middleware is built on the assumption that it is talking to a dumb tag and so the bad guys pretend to be the dumb tag and from buffer overflow it gets right into the executable space.

While publicizing vulnerabilities is important, says Pescatore, there should be a protocol about how long you wait after notifying a vendor of the problem before you go public.

On the other hand Pescatore, speaking for Gartner, says while talking about a vulnerability and its possible impact is not a problem, there is never an excuse to demonstrate how to exploit the vulnerability.

I agree. Just like you should not be able to put bomb making schematics on the Web you should not be able to demonstrate how to commit cyber crime either.

What do you think? Let me know.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 28, 2007 11:46 AM

February 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)

The benefits of a fast close

IT can help the finance department get its closing numbers to Wall Street faster

A fast close --the ability of a company to complete its accounting cycle and close its books -- is more than just a badge of honor for the finance department. It means dollars. The question is: Is your technology getting in the way or is it helping?

The best companies can close in two or three days; the laggards might take as long as 15 days.

At least, that was typical until Sarbanes-Oxley. With new audit demands, requirements that the CFO and CEO sign off on the numbers, and additional government reporting regulations, it is not surprising that a recent Business Process Management Initiative survey of about 350 companies said that close times increased by at least a week in 2005, and as much as two weeks last year.

Obviously, companies would like to return to a fast close for a number of reasons.

The No. 1 benefit is that it allows you to get historical information out to your managers quickly. If it is the middle of February before the January figures are distributed, you can't begin to take action on something for two weeks.

Not only that, but if it takes you 15 days to close, it is likely you are wasting an inordinate amount of administrative resource hours in the process, and that relates right back to costs, says Rob Kugel, senior vice president at Ventana Research.

Assuming the numbers are good, a fast close attracts equity investments before your competitors get their numbers out, adds Trevor Walker, vice president of marketing at Cartesis, an ISV that sells a financial consolidation suite called Cartesis Finance.
"The flow of capital to people buying stock will be more available, and the company will be perceived by the Street as a well-run organization," Walker says.

Now, let's go back to the question at hand: Is your technology getting in the way, or is it helping?

If you want to speed up the process by several days or perhaps a week, you need to migrate off legacy systems. Migration is difficult, and many companies think it is too costly, but the business folks need to understand that pulling information from legacy systems introduces tremendous complexity and its own set of costs, according to Ventana's Kugel.

People in the finance department don't have any idea what a tangled bowl of spaghetti there is behind the computer systems and how getting it to the screen is a huge effort, Cartesis' Walker adds.

IT can help by making it clear to the folks in finance where there are bottlenecks in the flow of information necessary to complete the close and to perform the audit. Also, far too many companies are still stuck on spreadsheets, which usually contain far too many errors. Too often, the need to correct those errors ends up driving your close schedule.

If it is not already in place, the No. 1 piece of new software that companies should invest in is financial consolidation software, dumping their spreadsheets in the process, Kugel says.

High-performance hardware helps. For example, Cartesis Finance now runs on HP Integrity servers.

Walker is also a big fan of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, telling me that its automated real-time OLAP mechanism prevents it from having to rely on batch processing.

Getting IT and the finance department working together can help drive the success of your business in subtle ways. If your company hasn't realized that yet, it is about time it woke up.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 27, 2007 03:00 AM

February 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Can Google Apps Premium make money or is it just meant to pop Microsoft's balloon?

For me it is not a question of whether or not Google Apps Premium Edition for $50 per year, per user, will be a Microsoft killer.

Over time, as SaaS [Software as a Service] becomes ubiquitous and is acceptable to enterprise-level companies, it certainly could put at the least a very big dent in Microsoft revenues.

Imagine all the money a large company with 10,000 or more employees would save if they didn't have to license Microsoft Office? It would be in the multi-millions of dollars saved.

My question is will Google Apps Premium Edition make money for Google? Certainly not at $50 a year.

The more business subscribers they get at that low rate that have to be supported, the bigger the drain not gain it will be on the Google bottom line.

No, either Google would have to slowly up the price or make it pay for itself by supporting some form of advertising model. But what kind?

Google's current financial success rests on the fact that they get paid every time a user goes from the Google site to a company's site.
Can Google Apps support that model? I don't think so.

Will it support a banner advertising model? I don't see how.

Nobody reads banner ads much and besides you don't want anyone messing around with your screen as you type a report or crunch numbers in a spreadsheet.

We are left with two reasons why Google is doing what they are doing. One, they just want to deflate Microsoft or two, they have a business model in mind that we don't yet know about.

Well, we'll have to wait and see.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 22, 2007 03:19 PM

February 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Will merger of Sirius and XM radio be renamed S&XM?

I don't care if the new name for a merged Sirius and XM satellite radio is something like S&XM, its future is still doomed.

The news that XM satellite radio and Sirius satellite radio want to merge should come as no big surprise.

Despite XMs claimed 7.6 million subscribers and Sirius' 6 million, neither company has a made a dime. In fact, Steven Schwankert of IDG News Service reports that Sirius lost $1 billion last year on revenues of $1.5 billion.

The question is can two losing companies make a winner?

Under normal business conditions you might think yes. Once the infrastructure is paid for, duplication of operations and marketing are streamlined into a single platform and a single marketing message all the while subscriptions to the service keep climbing, it should over time become profitable.

However, the fly in the ointment is in this case Internet radio. While not a major force today, I see it evolving into a powerhouse as technology catches up to the concept of radio over IP.

First of all, the biggest audience for radio of any kind is during the work day while sitting at your desk. Why pay for that when you can just as easily tune in to the dozens of choices over IP with a high speed connection?

If drive time takes up another major slice of the listener audience Internet radio becomes a bit more problematic for now.

But think about where it is going. Either Wi-Fi or WiMAX in the car and access points along the highway and who needs to pay for a subscription?

Over time the promise of a mesh architecture where listeners' IP radio hops across the access points built into each vehicle to maintain a steady signal will mean the death knell for satellite ra-dio.

I think satellite radio was a good idea but it is a generation too late.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 20, 2007 10:10 AM

February 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)

SaaS, not so fast

Software as a Service has its limitations in the enterprise, writes Ephraim Schwartz

Last week's column was an upbeat look at SaaS (software as a service from the point of view of companies that are currently deploying SaaS solutions. This week we'll take a different tack.

Last week, Jeffrey Falk, director of product development at The Members Group, characterized most ISVs who have a footprint in the enterprise and who are now offering a hybrid version of the SaaS model, as vendors with overly complex apps who are trying to unsuccessfully transform on-premise software to the SaaS model.

"A lot was bloatware, some with a half-baked Web client," Falk said.

The two vendors I spoke to this week see the situation in a different light. These companies recognize the limitations of SaaS and have, one might say, taken a more pragmatic approach to the hosted model.

Lombardi Software offers an on-premise BPM suite to the Fortune 3000. Although Lombardi launched a SaaS component called Blueprint to that suite last week, the CTO, Phil Gilbert, says it is "ludicrous" to think that full BPM and other enterprise applications will become Web 2.0 applications any time soon.

The Web services standards, the scalability, the performance, and the standardization across platforms like J2EE, .Net, WebSphere and a host of other SOA platforms, aren't there yet, Gilbert says.

"Standards are just getting to where CORBA was a decade ago," Gilbert tells me.

Blueprint is designed for collaboration during BPM's process discovery stage. It needn’t be integrated into legacy systems, nor does it require IT to deliver company data to the hosted model outside the firewall.

Having SaaS capabilities makes it easier for a company doing business process re-engineering to reach users, often a distributed team working on different systems, for part of the process. Lombardi's limited application of SaaS turns out to be the proper delivery mechanism for those roles and those functions.

But what about the many instances, especially in CRM, when what is needed is a single view of the customer? Much of that customer data resides in operational systems behind the firewall.

Nimaya was a consulting shop focused on integration back in 1998. In 2005 it recognized that this was the Achilles' heel of SaaS applications.

The only way for a hosted solution to get data from operational systems that are behind the firewall was to move data through the firewall to the SaaS database. Many companies are, and will remain, unwilling to do that. Plus, the more data you move to your SaaS solution, the more the SaaS provider charges for storage.

In 2006 Nimaya created the CustomerGrid platform and its ActionBridge software to offer a way around the problem for sales management. The CustomerGrid server behind the firewall gets data out in a transient
fashion. Extracting lots of different data from the operational systems, it executes a customer query on the server -- it also looks at data on a scheduled basis and runs it past a rules engine -- and then ships the results and the extracted data to the user in an XML package, says CEO John de Wit.

What you actually have is an EDM (enterprise data mashup).

Nimaya's ActionBridge can ship results to a SaaS interface such as Salesforce.com, an enterprise portal, or as a standalone application.

I think the point that both Lombardi Software and Nimaya make is that when you don't get religious about technology, you win. IT must operate under those ground rules, and IT should expect all of its vendors to do likewise.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 20, 2007 03:00 AM

February 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)

3GSM Conference: Business imperatives are slowing down mobile advances

News coming out of the huge 3GSM conference in Barcelona is not that good for mobile business users.

As predicted here, Reality Check, only yesterday mobile VoIP [Voice over IP] supported by the current cellular carrier network is not going to happen any time soon.

If you read my blog you will see that the carriers are not that anxious to push a technology that undermines millions of dollars already invested in cellular spectrum.

John Blau, of the IDG News Service reports today on a speech made at 3GSM by T-Mobile CEO Hamid Akahavan.

"VoIP services provided over mobile phone networks will have 'far less impact' than those offered over fixed-line networks," according to Akhavan.

Akhaan claims "there are technical issues that make mobile VoIP services difficult to implement," and I add there are monetary disincentives for the carriers to solve the problem.

In the meantime, Martyn Williams, another intrepid IDG News Service reporter writes that Samsung will demo faster Mobile WiMAX at 3GSM.

But if you read his report closely you will see the only one jumping on the WiMAX bandwagon is Sprint Nextel.

As I also mentioned in my column yesterday, Sprint is the only
major carrier that owns enough WiMAX licensed spectrum to make it worth their while to deploy WiMAX as an alternative to cellular.

By the way one of the great advantages of WiMAX is that it is an IP technology which would make it so much easier to deploy and support for network providers and their customers.

The news that Nokia and Siemens are combining networks makes one wonder if carriers haven't quite figured out how to monetize their data services. It could be a sign that these two companies are trying to combine technologies and thus eliminate costly duplication, lower their operating costs and compete with the other major carriers who have been on a merger spree for the last two years.

If you doubt what I say look at this report from John Blau of the IDG News Service.

Blau reports that the CEO designate of the new Nokia Siemens network said that "HDTV and IPTV [Internet Protocol television] would lead to a hundred-fold increase in data traffic by 2015."

Perhaps this is a combination of wishful thinking and or reassurance to investors and financial analysts that everything will be okay.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 13, 2007 11:15 AM

February 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)

The real appeal of SaaS

Enough of the software-as-a-service vendor's hype ...
what do their customers think?

If we are ever to cut through the hype in hopes of determining how good SaaS (software as a service) really is, the best way would be to talk to companies that use SaaS. Of course, each application or service must stand on its own --SaaS can't turn a pig's ear into a silk purse, as they say -- but I've been wondering what it is that's inherent to all or most SaaS applications that makes the model so appealing to midsize and larger companies.

I spoke with Jeffrey Falk, director of product development at The Members Group, a midsize payment-processing company. The group uses Innotas, a SaaS solution for enterprisewide PM (project management).
Falk says the group looked into a SaaS PM solution almost five years ago, but the functionality wasn't there yet, so they went with an on-premises app. Five years later, when they wanted a new solution to "take them to the next level," Falk says, they looked again at SaaS.

"What struck us was that the functionality had caught up, and in some cases, the UI had surpassed what the on-premises solution provides," Falk tells me. As a result, the group deployed Innotas.

The reason for that, Falk says, is that in most cases SaaS apps were designed from the beginning to be Web apps, not just ports of fat clients. Most SaaS startups stay on the cutting edge of all issues related to running an Internet application: SOA, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and mashups are all part of the DNA of any worthwhile SaaS solution.

I also spoke with Rishi Ghuldu, manager of supplier development at Barrick Gold, the world's largest gold-mining company, with revenue of $6 billion. Barrick uses Ketera Technologies' solution for spend management. It has 27 operation centers, yet before it signed up for Ketera, it had no spend-management system in place.

Barrick Gold went the SaaS route for two reasons.

"We didn't want to select a system that is too arduous to implement and use for tackling something that is fairly simple," Ghuldu told me.

And with so many different divisions all using different systems, Barrick Gold needed the interoperability of SaaS to get started.
Both Falk and Ghuldu are also saying that without additional infrastructure investment or up-front software costs, SaaS allows companies to test drive a solution and change gears easily, as The Members Group has done, or dive in and deploy a new type of application, as Barrick did, without much risk.

Falk says The Members Group looked at traditional on-premises products and hybrid products for portfolio management, but they were too heavy and complex. "A lot was bloatware, some with a half-baked Web client," he says.

Falk is taking the next step, something I think will be repeated time and again. The Members Group had been reluctant to deploy a CRM application because of the bad trade-press that traditional CRM had gotten during the past several years.

"SaaS is a great way to put our toe in the water," Falk says.
From a business perspective, Falk believes because SaaS is more nimble, with upgrades typically four times a year, it allows his company to be more nimble.

So, is SaaS a better alternative to on-premises solutions? In some cases, yes, but technology is only part of the story. I think SaaS providers have another edge over traditional enterprise software companies. They haven't grown fat and happy. They are lean and hungry. As SaaS is adopted by more and more enterprise companies, let's hope that doesn't change.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 13, 2007 03:00 AM

February 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Dual mode Wi-Fi/ cellular -- a very short-term solution

The Wi-Fi Alliance announced today that is has certified its 100th Wi-Fi-enabled phone for interoperability with other devices and Wi-Fi networks. Of those, 82 are dual mode.

I've read the usual cant about how with Wi-Fi and cellular in a single device you can switch between networks with the software in the phone choosing the better connection or making the selection based on cost at a specific location, time of call, and the pricing for the particular cellular plan.

It all sounds wonderful, but at the risk of being a Wi-Fi curmudgeon, I still think that Wi-Fi hot spots will in a short time disappear, and the need for a dual mode phone will disappear with them.

The performance of the cellular networks is continuing to improve, and the price of service is continuing to decline.

In addition, why would the carriers want to cannibalize their own cellular business for which they paid millions of dollars at spectrum auctions to offer something else?

One of two things will happen.

Either the carriers will stop investing in cellular to pump up Wi-Fi coverage and eventually WiMAX coverage, or the reverse: The carriers will invest heavily in fast-tracking cellular performance and rapidly lower prices in order to induce customers to expand the use of cellular for data and voice.

Because only Sprint has enough WiMAX spectrum to make it remotely worthwhile to deploy that technology, which does have better performance and a better range than Wi-Fi, the other carriers have little choice. They either have to stick with Wi-Fi and try to increase the number of available hot spots by a thousand fold or
improve cellular.

Look for the price of cellular cards for your notebook to decline. It makes perfect sense when you need something with serious internal performance, storage, and memory. Meanwhile, the cell phone will be used for lesser applications and, of course, voice.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 12, 2007 02:59 PM

February 07, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Kennedy, Kerry withdraw sponsorship of H-1B amendment

A little noticed amendment sponsored by Senate Democrats Kennedy and Kerry to the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 that would have raised the quota for H-1B visas was tabled earlier this week after initial approval by a voice vote in the Senate.

Amendment 180 if it remained in the Fair Minimum Wage Act which is expected to pass by a large margin, was essentially a version of the SKIL Bill.

It would have at least doubled the number of H-1B visas along with a provision to increase that number by 20 percent in each succeeding year if the visa quota was filled the previous year.

Another part of the amendment called for a new visa, H-5, for unskilled workers.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 7, 2007 03:24 PM

February 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)

High tech's consumer envy

Will the enterprise be neglected while vendors court the masses in search of the really big bucks?

If anything convinced me that the 20th century ethic of high-tech companies being technology-driven is over, it was a panel discussion held during the recent DEMO 2007 conference. So if you're the type who mocks the marketing guys and prefers to hear from the tech guys, you're making a big mistake. Like it or not, in the 21st century the marketing guys will rule the roost.

Rob Pait, director of global consumer electronics marketing at Seagate Technology, said Seagate is transitioning into a company that answers the needs of the digital generation. Thus the company's introduction of a 20GB business-card-size hard drive with the consumer-friendly name "DAVE," as opposed to a scary genius name like "Newton."

Answering the needs of the digital generation was Pait's way of saying Seagate wants to be a CE (consumer electronics) company. Obviously, Seagate saw what Apple did with the iPod and decided it wanted some of that. Pait said, in fact, that we could think of the iPod as a hard disk in hot pants.

You might say Seagate has CE envy.

While iPod technology is nothing new, Pait added, Apple has been able to wrap the consumer experience around that technology. No kidding. That's the difference between CE companies and high-tech companies.

It's called marketing. And marketing is everything from product design to pricing to distribution and finally advertising.

And then, in what could be described as an oxymoron, Enrique Salem, group president of consumer business at Symantec, echoed a similar theme around wanting to capture a mass market: "A lot of what we are doing today --the drive to embrace the Web sphere and Web 2.0 -- is something we have been doing for a long time."

How can you be driving to do something now and yet claim you’ve been doing it for a long time?

Robert Brewin, CTO of software at Sun, added a warning, saying you can't change company culture overnight. "You need to live the life," he said.

Sounds good, but can older high-tech companies adopt the CE lifestyle?

InfoWorld's editor in chief, Steve Fox, asked Pait for a date when the rotating hard disk would disappear in favor of solid-state memory. Despite the fact that Seagate wants to live the CE life, Pait's response was telling:

"Never," Pait said, adding that to think solid-state storage would ever replace the hard-disk drive was like believing "we will have starships someday, too."

What I gleaned from the panelists that night was that, as high tech is lured to the mass market, enterprise customers will play second fiddle. But the corporate culture and the special kind of marketing genius that is almost exclusively owned by the Panasonics, Samsungs, and Sonys of the world is not easily transferred to traditional high-tech companies.

Even the mighty iPod is thus far a one-trick pony for Apple. It remains to be seen whether lightning will strike twice, with the iPhone.

To think that a high-tech company can just switch and come up with a mass-market moneymaker is pure fantasy. But until all the high-tech CE wannabes learn this lesson, the hard way I am afraid, the enterprise is in for some neglect.

Rest assured, though, many of these companies will come crawling back, wherein the new CEO, whoever he or she might be, will talk about returning to the fundamentals. I, for one, haven't forgotten those ridiculous 2002 Hewlett-Packard ads about the garage.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 6, 2007 03:00 AM

February 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Chip makers to unveil future products next week at Solid State conference

While the 2007 IEEE ISSCC [International Solid-State Circuits Conference] might sound a bit dull to non-engineers, it is in fact an exciting event where if you have the perseverance to read through the program and attend the session you will be rewarded with advanced looks at near-future technologies from the likes of AMD, Broadcom, Intel,and Sun to name a few.

Here's just a small sampling of some of the new chip technologies that will most likely become part of mainstream products within the next year.

Intel will unveil a new record for microprocessor performance with a 5GHz Power6 microprocessor. The network-on-chip version of the Power6 will achieve 4GHz performance.

The chip has an amazing 700 million transistors and is a dual-core processor fabricated on a 65 nanometer process.

Infineon Technologies will present its paper on a GSM baseband radio with fully integrated power management.

The integration of power management with memory, RF, digital and analog baseband functions will reduce the manufacturing cost of cell phones which should further reduce the retail price as well.
Cell phone chip count will come down to an amazing 3-chip solution.

Atheros Communications, one of the leaders in chips for Wi-Fi will present an integrated 802.11n-compliant MIMO [Multimedia In Multimedia out] baseband and MAC processor that will achieve the highest WLAN data rate to date of 300Mb per second and the longest reported WLAN range of 700 feet.

Broadcom will continue the news around wireless with two announce-ments: a signle-chip Bluetooth with enhanced data rate in a small package and a MIMO multi-band CMOS transceiver for WLAN applications.

By packing more capability into a smaller package both will increase battery life, cost of manufacture while improving performance.

Who says Sun's Sparc processor is dead?
Sun Microsystems will present a network-on-a-chip architecture, the Niagara-2 processor, with a peak performance of one TFLOP.

The chip is an 8-core, 64-thread, 64-bit SPARC System-on-a-Chip.

According to the presentation the chip can handle up to 64 programs at once, doubling the number that was reported last year.

The higher performance is achieved by integrating more components on a single chip.

Hitachi will introduce a 4,320 MIPS four-processor core chip with the ability to individually manage clock frequencies for lower power consumption.

According to the paper "invididual cores have independent dynamic-frequency control." This will also enable indepdendent voltage control of each core.

Intel rival AMD will be there too. It will unveil an integrated quad-core x86 Opteron processor. The Opteron includes power and thermal-managmeent techniques.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 5, 2007 03:25 PM

February 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Rated: Eight new technologies from DEMO 07

Palm Desert -- Wednesday morning's Demo sessions spanned the usual startup gamut from the useful to the useless and a few in-between.
In order of appearance here's what the demos in the desert had to offer today.

Ferran Moreno, CEO and founder of Whisher.com hopes to bring some order to the chaotic world of free Internet access where users freely share their Wi-Fi connection with other users.

With the Whisher client installed, when a user finds a typical list of available networks Whisher adds its logo to those networks that are accessible.

Even though the network indicates that it is locked, the Whisher logo indicates that someone on that network is willing to allow the visitor to essentially use their user name and password to hop on board.

The actual log on details are not revealed, rather the Whisher software takes care of the log on in the background.

The software also allows users to exchange files--using drag and drop, in the Whisher environment-- as well as see a list of local users willing to chat.

It also can create message boards for user comments like rating the quality of the coffee in the cafe you may be sitting in.
MY TAKE: if in a perfect world there were millions of Whisher-enabled Wi-Fi networks this would be extremely useful. However, its survival depends on whether or not it can indeed market well enough to accomplish that goal.

Nuvoiz, says founder and CEO Chong-Jin Kah, is Skype for the enterprise.

"Skype is a wonderful consumer software but it is also a nightmare for IT managers. It is non-standard and has no management system to provision users."

Nuvoiz sits both on the client device, on a server platform and is connected to the IP-PBX system in the office.

It offers the typical call control buttons like chat, call recording, call hold, mute, call conference and call transfer.

The provisioning server can monitor and configure users among its many management features.

It also connects to standard SIP and Java servers on the backend.

MY TAKE: Nuvoiz has the right idea. Either a large company will buy Nuvoiz and use the technology or create their own.

In either case, I think Nuvoiz as a brand name will not exist for too long.

The timing for the introduction of Boston-Power's new battery for laptops couldn't be better considering the promise that its batteries won't explode or catch fire in your lap.

Introduced by the other Woz, John Wozniak, Master Technologist in Hewlett-Packard's Personal Systems Group, Wozniak said HP is very excited about Boston Power's Sonata product.

[By the way, I asked John Wozniak if he was related to Apple's creator and he said no.]

The competitive differentiator for this battery is the fact that it gets an 80 percent capacity charge in only 30 minutes and the fact that the battery will operate without fading probably as long as you would want to keep the laptop, three or four years.

However, battery life per charge is no better for this Lithium Ion battery than the ones being shipped today.

MY TAKE: after what will probably be a long testing period, you can expect notebook OEMs to adopt the Sonata as the standard device, with one proviso.

Marketing principles say if a device adds as much as $5 additional dollars to the system it will not fly.

Buzz Interactive allows users to combine music with a voice message, dial any phone and the system leaves the message.

My thoughts: I am afraid this technology will get lost in the crowded market of content providers trying to find space on the sales shelf for cell phone services.

Inilex is one of those control your car from afar technologies. Plug the ViM card into the appropriate spot on your car and it taps into the vehicles' electronic computer system.

Once in, using a phone you can start car features like heat or air-conditioning, or actually start the car and set the speed limit for younger drivers in the family. The GPS system also lets you know where they are going.

If the car is stolen it will send an alert to your phone and track it on a map.

MY TAKE: while consumers may not be bowled over, it might work for fleet managers and rental car operators. Just don't count on the police to drop everything and chase after the car thief when you call them.

Brevient Technologies' Jyngle offers a way to send and receive phone messages to and from designated affinity groups.

Users create the message with Brevient's service and with a click that voice message is sent out to the entire group at the same time.
Not unlike sending a fax to a group.

MY TAKE: this product may have legs for consumers. Think of car pools, bowling nights or other times when you need to get out a change of plans message quickly.

For business, retailers can also use the "join" feature to send out notices of sales to customers who opt in.

Iqzone wants to be the Craig's List for cell phones.

It is a service that delivers classified advertising via a mobile device. Like Craig's list users download photos and add text and ads appear on the site.

MY TAKE: I would expect Craig's List to offer a mobile version for viewing and why won't users just wait until they get back to a more convenient device to place an ad?

Mobio Networks offers pre-packaged mashups that adds some depth to the usual consumer services like restaurant reservations and movie schedules.

Built into the Mobio client software are 50 applications and widgets. For example, if you pull up a movie guide there will be a mashup with a map, a movie rating service, a payment service and a click to call phone service.

One of the templates is called Panic Kit and includes details on local hospital, pharmacy, towing,taxi services, and local locksmiths, again with the appropriate mashups.

If an ambulance service is added that happens in the background without user intervention.

MY TAKE: by aggregating services into mashups it really makes those services far more useful.

I expect that Mobio's technology will be licensed by numerous carriers.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on February 1, 2007 12:01 PM

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