Our guest reporter, freshman media major Christy Nakada on loan from her university in California demonstrates the Felica/au connection at the KDDI booth and brings the PiVi into focus from Fuji in this 4-minute peek-a-boo video from the event.

6:19:35 PM    comment   

A client recently made a comment that’s set me thinking. He noted that low bit-rate always-on data — such as that from presence feeds — tends to drain mobile handset batteries very quickly.

This is not news. But the significance is slowly dawning on me.

Firstly, a lof of wireless data technology roadmaps focus on increasing speeds. But the industry is likely to be taking a wrong fork in the road here. As Flarion discovered, and Andrew Odlyzko has long espoused, low latency is where it’s at. Andrew’s long-standing quip is that if you don’t care about latency, the postal system and a DVD burner is a great broadband solution available everywhere today. Flarion’s wireless technology is capable of sending a single bit in an efficient manner. This is a by-product of their innovative and efficient MAC (media access control) algorithm, which negotiates who gets to shout when. Flarion doesn’t assume the purpose of the network is constant bitrate applications over long session.

(Another reason to be suspicious of NGNs, which are also session-centric via expensive centralised proxies, and not presence-centric via P2P connection. Relaying tiddly presence messages is going to consume a lot of expensive CPU time — one or two orders of magnitude more than call data.)

Presence data is likely to be highly asymmetric. If you have N buddies, and you’re all producing the same bit-rate of presence data, you’ll have to download N times as much as you send. On the other hand, general network traffic is becoming more symmetric — think 2-way video, P2P file distribution.

For battery-constrained devices, this suggests an opportunity for vertical integration of the radio access network, handsets and telephony software. You design handsets with some dual-form radio. Part of the radio is in an “always listening” mode, accepting presence data and other low-bitrate trickle feeds. Rather than activating the transmitter to say “sorry, I missed that bit — could you say it again please”, data could be re-transmitted over and over by the mains-powered cell tower. This helps preserve battery life. At some expense, it could even be done at a lower frequency that conserves more power and had wider reach. Kind of a Microsoft SPOT watch blended into a cell phone.

Most presence data is not so vital that a few lost bytes or a minute’s delay is critical. And some form of sequence numbering can give the handset an idea it’s missing a lot of data, wake up and directly request re-transmission.

This is bad news for companies like Skype who may hope to piggy-back on fast cellular networks. Yes, I’ve received calls from people using EV-DO and laptops; or airborne Wi-Fi and a Pocket PC. But that’s not a mass-market proposition. I suspect that the limiting factor on deploying mobile Skype-like applications isn’t network and handset lockdown, but battery life.

It is widely assumed that the future of telephony is purely “mobile”. I’m less sure, at least in the medium term. I think that the “nomadic” or “portable” aspect will be very important — and even fixed telephony isn’t yet ready for its coup de grace. What does this mean? Well, your wired desk phone doesn’t lack for electrical power. It can offering a richer presence experience — even always-on webcam images of your cat’s basket or whatever you desire. Phones which have a power dock, like your traditional cordless handset, become relatively more attractive. The device offering the worst telephony experience may indeed be your traditional mobile handset. Battery technology is somewhat stagnated as a matter of physics (you’re trying to make safe, reliable things with bomb-like energy densities). Perhaps it’s time for handset makers to concentrate on improving the recharging experience?

In summary, the IP abstraction is a purely functional one; it takes no account of non-functional requirements. Some of them, like QoS, turn out to be mostly bogus. But some are critital, and pure Internet VoIP solutions may not deliver. If you’re a telco looking to fight disintermediation, this is one rock to look under very thoroughly.

6:04:51 PM    comment   

Presence data is important. So important, it’s the central economic driver of any future telephony service.

In the old world of telephony, you were forced to rent connectivity and service in a tightly coupled bundle. Economic activity begins when the phone call begins, and continues at a steady rate until the call ends.

In the new world, this model in inverted. As a result of technological progress, connectivity becomes very cheap to the point of being supplied on an all-you-can-eat basis at low prices. Its supply is highly fragmented (i.e. you will roam across multiple cellular, Wi-Fi and fixed networks during the day). Once a phone call is initiated, there is no “service” being delivered at the application layer that cannot be done in the peers themselves. The marginal cost of data transport for a thin audio stream is (effectively) zero. Thus when the call starts, economic activity ends.

But here’s the kicker. There is a great deal of economic activity before, during and after the call. In particular, the immediate period before the initiation of the call requires the exchange of presence data so that the caller and callee rendezvous at a mutually convenient time via an appropriate medium or channel. Most of the economic value in any future “telephony service” will come from the brokering of presence data between multiple sources and sinks.

Customers have voted with their wallets — they like to talk. The quickest way to create more value is to enable more successful conversations. Presence helps curtail playing phone-tag and voicemail ping-pong. Vendors and operators who fail to align their products with what the customers value are less likely to prosper. Unfortunately, that appears to count in most of the industry.

Here’s a picture of the new world, as I see it:

Don’t take the scaling on this diagram too seriously — it’s just a brain-fart done in public. Here’s a guide to what I’m thinking:

• In the “before” diagram, we see money changing hands mostly during the phone call. Some of that money is used to subsidise the handset handware and software.
• In the “after” diagram we see three very different profiles for the connectivity, application services and hardware platform.
• The hardware one I’m least certain of; in the diagram it becomes more of a one-off purchase and cross-subsidy is weakened. This is because third parties claim an increasing proportion of the application revenue, or the application revenue just evaporates. I’m willing to accept that new forms of cross-subsidy may emerge here (e.g. think of Tivo as an example, where the hardware and service are coupled, but the connectivity isn’t).
• The connectivity may involve some up-front expenditure by the user, either in hardware purchase (e.g. Wi-Fi access point at home; membership fee). There is then a steady trickle of all-you-can-eat money, augmented by occasional bursts of premium metered connectivity revenue (e.g. roaming abroad, on an airplane).
• The service revenue model is completely disrupted. Most of the money comes in the operation phase before the actual call; connecting people via social networking, directory services and presence. There is no service revenue from the phone call per se. (There are important exceptions, another essay.)
• There may be transactions during the call that are mediated via third parties, particularly on multi-modal devices. (Again, I’ll elaborate in another essay, maybe perhaps.)
• There’s some follow-up phase which I struggle to find a name for where successful phone calls feed back into future successful conversations and relationships. For example, if we talk for an hour, that says a lot about our social relationship. If we only talk during business hours, that tells us something new. There’s gold in ‘dem ‘dar CDRs!

Ultimately, as I have previously argued, people demand successful conversations and relationships, not just reliable phone calls. Presence is a vital enabler. Deliver that, and you’re onto a winner.

5:55:44 PM    comment   

I’m really unhappy with the information architectures we adopt to display presence information. Many of you will be familiar with the work of Edward Tufte and his innovative displays of multi-dimensinal and fluid data on 2-dimensional static paper.

We need to do better with presence data, because that data is going be become a lot richer. So inspired by Tufte, let’s see what we can do. I’d like to introduce to you my little pet Tod the Tadpole. As you’ll see, I was diagnosed with disgraphia horiffica and have the drawing age of a 3 year old. Never mind.

(A friendly wag suggested this should be Simon the Sperm, but as a family blog I’ll demur…)

What this does is adds some more dimensions to our presence display. The most obvious one is a temporal history of our availability. In the example, when the tadpole tail is high, you’re available, when it’s low you’re not. The time scale is squeezed up as a log scale; the last minute and last hour might have the same pixel-width; the far end of the tail might be summarising whether you where around at all last week in just a few pixels.

This history is useful. If someone has just got back from vacation, you want to see that. If someone’s online all the time, there’s no rush to grab them; conversely, if they’re rarely online and you see them come on, call them now!

The up-down movement of the tail is smoothed by adding some inertia; coming online doesn’t make it zoom straight to the top, but applies a point force that accellerates it in that direction. (I guess some user testing would tell us whether “y”, “dy/dx”, or “d2y/dx2” is the right vertical scale.)

Day and night are shown too. This is important when buddies might be spread around the world and very mobile. I’ve drawn it really badly, but twilight and dawn would be light grey, whereas the middle of the night would be a jet black background. Tod is approaching sleepy time. Naturally, the lengths of the day and night phases would reflect your actual daylight at your current latitude.

You might even choose to colour the daytimes with weather-related information from the locale of the person, such as temperature hues or a pattern of raindrops.

The tail might also encode data about the nature of the presence, beyond being online or offline. For example, the red parts could indicate “busy” — i.e. typing, talking or dragging. (Just clicking in a browser might be regarded as the equivalent of being idle!).

Episodes of mobility, where such data is available from the user device or a network operator, could also be displayed, such as by using a dotted line.

Looking into the future, the background might indicate someone’s predicted presence status. If their calendar has a meeting shown, add a border for “busy”. If they’re due to catch a plane, add a border for “away”.

The “head” of the tadpole is also presence-enriched. If you’re listening to music, a set of headphone appear on your head. Hey, the little sound-marks coming out of your ears could even beat to the music! Roll the mouse over, see what they’re listening to. If you’re on a phone call, it looks like you’re wearing a headset. And so on.

Of course, the head icons would be personalisable for more immediate recognition. After all, they’re your avatar. A great service would be one where you could feed in a normal digital photo of yourself, and it would do all the pattern and colour recognition to churn out a race, age and facially structure look-alike (assuming that’s what you want!)

Facial expression could also come into it. A huge chunk of our brain is given over to watching faces, and it’s not used much in today’s presence and telephony. Don’t show a clock icon when someone is away — make them look like they’re dozing!

Ideally the head would have a contextually appropriate background, such as a stylised version of “home”, “office”, “car”, “out and about” and “abroad”. Tricky with a small icon, but possible if you allow a little more screen real estate.

Which brings me to my last point. Take a look at this miniaturised screenshot of Skype.

Yes, it’s weeny. This protects the privacy of those careless enough to become my buddies. But more importantly, it lets you see the overall structure rather than the detail.

What do you see? A ton of whitespace! Is this vertical scrolled list the best possible information architecture for presence data? I think not. Now, I’m not sure what the right one is. You need predictability of location so you can find folks. You need to properly group and sort according to current presence status as well as tribal affilication (different work, family and friend groups). There’s a lot of variables, and an unconstrained space on which to display them. Other people get PhDs doing this stuff.

Why is better presentation of presence data so important? Because the toughest part of a phone call is the rendezvous. We often miss each other, play phone tag, have hurried “can I call you backs” (and don’t). We often simply don’t make some social calls for fear of calling at a bad time, and eventually relationships with old friends dissolve. Anyone who thinks telephony is just about creating a duplex audio stream isn’t looking at the whole problem.

Anyhow, I eagerly await for someone to rise to the challenge. In the meantime, remember Tod the Tadpole next time you accidentally call someone at 4am — who isn’t there anyway.

5:55:19 PM    comment   

In an otherwise excellent article at El Reg on Vodafone and VoIP, I just had to comment on this one:

The plan is to exploit the superior spectral efficiency of the 3G networks to bring voice prices crashing down and remove the main advantage of VoIP.

Bzzzzt. Nul points. Please re-read your Stupid Network primer. The point of a Stupid Network (as implemented imperfectly by IP) is unbounded option value. In this case, the ability to do new things with voice calling.

Remember, not a single Vodafone customer, not one living soul out of over 100m people, can tell if the person they’re calling is already on a call before they press the green button.

Until they start “innovating” (you call that innovation?) and creating a better communications experience, they deserve all the price pressure they get.

5:54:58 PM    comment   

I can recommend this short but thought-provoking article over at The Mobile Technology weblog.

In essence, it critiques mobile J2ME and BREW because they’re denied access to the communications-centric functions of the mobile handset.

I’ve long thought the same thing. What I’d like to see is these environments deploy “opaque objects”. This means that they would be able to query and manipulate things like your address book, but without actually seeing the data. Only the phone OS would see the data itself; the program would just hold an object handle. Functions like iteration through the address book, comparison, and set operations, would all be offerred. A number of user interface components would be offered native to the device to perform standard operations like the selection of one or more contacts, or the addition of new entries.

This would help to reduce the danger of privacy and security lapses. A progam that can’t see your actual address book data can do less harm to your privacy.

I also believe that the provisioning of access permissions of applications could be substantially improved. When I download a J2ME application, and it wants to access the network, I’m forced to go through a handset-mediated screen asking every session if I want to accept once, repeatedly (but just for the session — not forever), or not at all. This is a gross inconvenience. We don’t pop up a “do you really want to make this phone call” confirmation when you press the green button.

What I’d rather see is the permissions get set at install or purchase time. The install-time part is fairly self-explanatory — you set the access parameters to resources like profile, address book and network. The purchase-time one is more subtle, and really refers to the wired Web. The download app would come with a digitally signed set of permissions from the retail environment, where you have provisioned your access preferences. When you buy a certain networked game, you just tick a box saying “I understand that this game will be given access to my address book, and may access the network incurring packet charges.” The appropriate permissions are then tagged on, and you are never asked again on the handset.

Some of these could be parameter-driven. For example, my email application may be allowed to transfer up to 1Mb a day without asking, but above that I should be asked to give my consent. Waiting until the app is on the phone is too late to start provisioning this kind of thing.

This would possibly give network operators’ in-house mobile portals a large advantage, as third party sites may not have access to this signing facility and their user experience will suffer. Users downloading from third party sites would have to deal with more intrusive access screens on the handset.

Naturally, a balance is to be struck between privacy and convenience. You can ask too many authorisation questions and put people off. But today’s model of simply not allowing some highly valuable functions to be accessed by handset applications is decidedly not convenient, either. There are many low-level functions in the phone which could contribute to an enhanced application experience, if only the operators and handset makers weren’t so scared of exposing then.

This model also extends to Windows applications. We won’t see it, because Microsoft has gotten lost in the wilderness, but here’s what I’d like Windows to do when I install a new app. I should be presented with a human-digestible list of the key permissions it is requesting: “Access the web site ‘foo.com’”, “Modify files in the ‘My Documents’ folder”, etc. (By default, it should only have access to its own preferences directory. And I should be able to increase or decrease permissions — not just ‘take it or leave it’.)

Just because an app gets a buffer overflow or has a control logic bug shouldn’t mean it gets to trash my whole hard drive and access the whole Net. All those worms that download via browser bugs would have a hard time, because being able to execute arbitraty code wouldn’t automatically enable access to all OS functions. If you go to hax0rs.com by accident, and get a pup-up from the Windows OS asking if you want to authorise access to your address book, you should be deeply suspicious.

(As an aside, the security model of Windows is very broken, and will stay that way, because actions are done on behalf of users, and not applications. Just because I downloaded and installed an application doesn’t mean it should be trusted as if it were me. The user model doesn’t match the trust model. Unix/Linux is barely any better, but at least you can fake it by creating a different user for each app and constraining its actions accordingly. Ideally you’d have a file system where any haywire application could be terminated and the changes it had made simply undone. Windows also doesn’t make it easy to distinguish pop-ups that have come from the OS itself from those generated by the application. Another security headache.)

I hope you’ve managed to follow this rather abstract stuff, but really it’s very simple. If you’re going to give applications access to data and facilities that could harm the user, you need to put in appropriate controls, and make the provisioning of them simple. It may be just my ignorance of current developments in 3GPP standards etc., but it seems we are lacking on all three fronts.

5:53:15 PM    comment   

The Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported Tuesday that Nippon Television Network Corp., Japan[base ']s largest broadcast network, will begin offering some of its programming for a fee over the Web, beginning in October.

The report said that NTV would release up to 10,000 programs online, including both dramas and variety shows, and would charge 100 yen (90 cents) for a 15-minute program segment. The Nikkei said NTV hoped to attract 10,000 members to the service within a year and reap annual sales of 10 billion yen ($90 million) within three years.

The report sent Nippon TV shares up 3.2 percent Tuesday on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Following the report, however, Nippon TV released a statement saying that it had not finalized the details of the plan. "The numbers given in the report, including broadcasting time and fees, are from one of the simulations we are now examining," it said. "We are looking at several possibilities for the revenue model, specific content and other factors."

Later in the day, rival broadcaster Fuji Television Network Inc. announced its own plans to make its satellite TV programming available online later this month.

Fuji said it would begin offering sports programs and concerts online, for 200 to 500 yen (about $2-$4.50) per program.

Fuji stock, however, rose less than one point.

Two other broadcasters, TV Asahi Corp. and Tokyo Broadcasting System Inc.(TBS), have already begun experimenting with streaming their programming content online, according to a report in The Asahi Shimbun.

Making all this possible was an agreement negotiated by the Japan Business Federation also known as [base "]Keidanren,[per thou] in March setting a preliminary rate at which copyright holders (such as broadcast talent, actors and other performers) would be compensated for programming distributed over the Internet, The Asahi reported. To that end, Keidanren announced Thursday that it would be seeking government aid to undergo the messy task of creating an online database that would identify copyright holders for TV programs, movies and videogames.

Also driving the movement toward putting TV content online has been growing fears of an impending decline in TV advertising revenues. A recent survey by Yano Research quoted in Japan Today, suggested that the increasing popularity of DVD players with built-in hard drives is cutting down on the number of people actually watching commercials. It estimated that TV broadcasters will lose 54 billion yen (nearly half a billion dollars) this year due to the effect of digital recorders on advertising rates. [Japan Media Review]
5:51:41 PM    comment   

A very good article from the Economist on software pricing. And near as I can tell, no hysteria. A first.

Free is a compelling price to drive adoption. Best of all, it's not subject to bizarre multipliers based on the number of cores or threads on a computer's microprocessor.

And as much as my friend Linus helped change the world of operating systems, something tells me Postgres and MySQL are going to have an interesting blowback effect on the database marketplace - and JES (stay tuned for a momentum update) will bring the same to web application platforms.

After all, why spend money when the free stuff is setting performance records.

And to re-answer the same question: am I worried that changing the price of our software to free will diminish software revenues? No, quite the opposite: I believe it's vital to cause software revenue to grow - based on accelerating adoption.

It's far easier to convince a customer to pay for a product they're already using, than one they haven't even tried.

[Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog]
5:46:42 PM    comment