Monday, July 25, 2005

Volantis vouches for i-mode nuances and benefits. When Volantis announced the launch of i-mode Express for O2, Ian Meakin, VP Marketing, Volantis, commented that "we understand the significant nuances that i-mode presents" and then reviewed these "fundamental differences in developing for i-mode rather than traditional WAP sites". [i-mode Business Strategy]
10:10:39 PM    comment   

Atop the Content H-eAP. : A story on AP's eAP initiative: to digitaize its distribution process. Mainly a backend change...... [PaidContent.org]
10:10:14 PM    comment   

Amp'd Announces Kyocera Handset. PC Mag, 26 July 2005
American upstart, youth-focused wireless carrier Amp'd Mobile announces its first phone today, a relatively sleek black slider from Kyocera called the "Jet" [.jpg image] . The phone runs on Amp'd's high-speed EV-DO network (leased from Verizon) and has a music and video player as well as a VGA camera. It supports TransFlash memory cards and support Nextel-style push-to-talk. Otherwise, the phone doesn't have spectacular cutting-edge features, Amp'd plans to launch later this year. [Wireless Watch Japan]
10:10:01 PM    comment   

TEPCO, KDDI to Cooperate. Kyodo via Yahoo, 26 July 2005
Tokyo Electric Power Co., Japan's largest power company, has launched negotiations with telecom carrier KDDI Corp. for a possible capital tie-up or merger of their communications businesses, the Asahi Shimbun reported Tuesday. [Wireless Watch Japan]
10:09:36 PM    comment   

Vodafone's Weighs Change in Japan. Forbes, 26 July 2005
Wireless giant Vodafone added 4.1 million new users - that's the population of New Zealand - in its strongest quarter for the past five years. Now it will focus its efforts on improving its Japanese business, according to Chief Executive Arun Sarin. Average revenue per customer have slipped in that country, as well as in the U.K. and Germany. Sarin's not averse to the idea of selling underperforming operations in Japan, where Vodafone languishes behind NTT DoCoMo and KDDI: "We're not married to any asset. If an asset loses its usefulness to us.. we'd be willing to look at (a disposal)," he was quoted as saying by AFX News. [Wireless Watch Japan]
10:08:24 PM    comment   

Vodafone Key Performance Indicators. Vodafone K.K., 25 July 2005
The Vodafone Group today announced its key performance indicators (KPI?fs) for the 1 April to 30 June 2005 period. KPI?fs relevant to Vodafone K.K., along with a summary of customer numbers*1, are as follows. The closing total customer base was 14,966,600. Vodafone K.K. had a net reduction of 74,100 for the quarter, but recorded positive net additions of 5,300 in June. 3G subscriptions increased by 382,200 to 1,299,400 in the quarter, increasing the 3G customer percentage from 6.1% to 8.7%. The percentage of prepaid customers was 11% at the end of June 2005, unchanged from at the end of March 2005. [Wireless Watch Japan]
7:20:32 PM    comment   

Japanese TV Powers Up Over Fast Networks, 3G Phones. Japanese TV Powers Up Over Fast Networks, 3G Phones
Gail Nakada, 24 July 2005
Japan's PoweredCom announced the start of a Video on  Demand (VOD) distribution service over high capacity fiber optics broadband networks. Powered Theater will soft launch August 11. Full service should begin in mid-September. Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is a partner in PoweredCom and very interested in seeing more traffic on their fiber optic networks. For this project, the company tied up with cell phone content provider Index Corps' subsidiary Neo Index and Mitsubishi as a technology/programming partner.

In a separate development Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) and Culture Convenience Club, parent company of video rental giant Tsutaya, have put together a joint venture to distribute programming over Internet broadband networks, original DVDs and through mobile phones. Though few details are available the new company should start at the end of October. TBS owns a controlling interest of 51 percent and CCC 49 percent. TBS also recently partnered with ColorZip Japan for a late-summer launch of TV applications using ColorZip's server based ColorCode code recognition system linking TV broadcasts to related digital content for sponsored websites, music samples, contests and prize drawings. [Wireless Watch Japan]
7:20:20 PM    comment   

It rings, it plays, it has TV: The 3rd screen. ... The littlest screen may have the biggest of futures. Already, cellphones serve as a third screen for some consumers - along with their televisions and computers. Because it's always with its user, some think the cellphone could become the most important of the trio - the first source for entertainment and information [Daily 3G News]
7:19:59 PM    comment   

When Cell Phones Become Oracles. Given enough data, your mobile phone may soon predict whom you will have dinner with, when you'll leave work and whether you're a Red Sox fan. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News]
7:18:54 PM    comment   

Yahoo Buys Desktop App Software Company. : Yahoo has bought a desktop application software/application company called Konfabulator. The Palo Alto-based 3-person software maker has a small desktop software that can be tweaked to monitor the weather, stock prices and a wealth of other customized information. (We've... [PaidContent.org]
7:06:33 PM    comment   

Indian Broadcasters Launch Website. Exchange4Media.com: The Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF), the only representative body of television broadcasters in India, has launched its website, ibf-india.com. Naresh Chahal, Director, Finance, IBF, said, âo[ogonek]The website has been launched just to give proper information related to the broadcasting industry to the advertising agencies and the masses.âo?
I just attempted to open the website, but it's taking a lot of time to open since it's cluttered with the images of the logos of its members. It could have been a better designed site and easily downloadable. Considering the bandwidth in India is very limited, I am sure most of the visitors could be discouraged to explore the site. [ContentSutra]
7:02:21 PM    comment   

WorldSpace's Tryst With India. The Financial Express: Is India truly listening to WorldSpace satellite radio? Going by the claims of WorldSpace India, the concept is here to last. It already boasts of 60,000-odd subscribers in Bangalore and Chennai. âo[ogonek]Satellite radio has several advantages,âo? says Deepak Varma, MD , WorldSpace India. âo[ogonek]WorldSpace digital-satellite signal ensures there is no fading, noise or interference. The system delivers digital quality sound in a coverage area of 14 million sq km. As long as youâo[dot accent]re in line of sight with the satellite, youâo[dot accent]ll never lose the high-quality sound,âo? he adds.
In India, WorldSpace has kept an annual subscription fee of Rs 1,800. The cost of the radio sets starts from Rs 2,000 and goes up to Rs 12,000. However, the high cost of subscription, coupled with the cost of radio set and its inefficiency of not being car-compatible, have hampered the growth of WorldSpace in India.


Related: WoldSpace Launches Services In Delhi [ContentSutra]
7:01:03 PM    comment   


VSNL Acquires Bermuda-based Teleglobe For $239 Million. Business Standard: Finally,Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL) is becoming a happening company. The erstwhile international telecom service monopoly, now owned by the private sector Tata, today signed an agreement to acquire Bermuda-registered Teleglobe International Holdings Ltd for $239 million.
This will be its second overseas acquisition, after the Tyco Global Network (TGN) takeover in November last year for $130 million. The acquisition would make VSNL a leading player in wholesale voice, bandwidth and enterprise data market, VSNL Director (Operations) N Srinath told reporters today. A Nasdaq-listed entity, Teleglobe is a leading provider of wholesale voice, data, internet protocol (IP) and mobile signaling services.
VSNL intends to set up a wholly-owned subsidiary in Bermuda, VSNL Telecommunications (Bermuda) Ltd, and merge Teleglobe with the new company. VSNL is buying out Teleglobeâo[dot accent]s largest shareholder Cerberus, a venture capital company, at $4.50 per share, a 20 per cent premium on its Nasdaq price. This will amount to $178 million. Besides, VSNL will take over $61 million worth of debt of Teleglobe. [ContentSutra]
7:00:38 PM    comment   

Gizmodo Japan: Automatic Human Washing Machine.

santelubain999.jpgThose who see showering as an inefficient process in obvious need of technical innovation should be delighted by the Avant "Santelubain 999" automatic personal washing machine. Upon slipping inside the clamshell-chic device, users will find a variety of functions at their fingertips including everything from "Body Shampoo & Shower," and "Sound Therapy," to the decidedly Japanese "Seaweed Pack."

Japanese beauty and health site iSpot.jp has published a first-hand report of the washer which, when run through google translate, results in a perfectly appropriate engrish account of the experience: "The ah which is true. The smut it is, don't you think? it is is. The ho it is with the washer we would like to see!" -JM

iSpot.jp Report (Google Japanese to English)
Avant - Santelubain 999

[Gizmodo]
6:59:41 PM    comment   

Germany: T-Mobile Plans HSDPA Launch. A new era of fixed-network speeds is dawning for T-Mobile consumers and business customers. Thanks to HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) technology, they will enjoy greater convenience and higher speeds with all mobile applications, such as surfing and chatting, sending e-mails or with high-volume downloads from the Internet or intranet. All this is made possible by the innovative transmission technology HSDPA. [Daily 3G News]
6:58:25 PM    comment   

China has 31.65 million broadband homes.. http://www.chinaknowledge.com/news_detail.asp?cat=general&ID=600 [Om Malik's Broadband Blog]
6:58:07 PM    comment   

KDDI is planning Ultra 3G. EVDO - Next Generation doesn’t sound sexy. That perhaps that explains why KDDI is staying away from the EVDO mumbo-jumbo, and is calling its post 3g network, The Ultra 3G. (No relation to Ali-G!) The Japanese giant along with rest of the CDMA faithful hopes to complete the next-generation CDMA 2000 wireless standard [...] [Om Malik's Broadband Blog]
6:57:54 PM    comment   

The untapped potential of PSP as a platform. [Om Malik's Broadband Blog]
6:57:31 PM    comment   

OPINION://Message in a bottle.

It was amusing to see Vodafone’s advert in the airport the other day. There they are, blasting out how they now offer Blackberry service on their network. Busy as usual taking credit for other people’s inventions and acting as gatekeeper. Who can blame them?

Except that Vodafone have done next to nothing to make this happen beyond supply connectivity. Not that running a vast cellular network is a trivial thing — it’s just the pretense that Vodafone are doing you a favour by permitting Blackberry devices onto their sacred network that riles.

I remember the many arguments inside Sprint’s Business Solutions division as to whom we should partner with to offer enterprise email service. We visited Seven out in the Valley, and RIM came to talk (down) to us. IBM gave their pitch many times over. But all these people — and the real customers — really wanted from us was a bit pipe and a sales force who could sell and provision the devices to go on it.

So Vodafone and Sprint haven’t done anything to improve the state of the art in messaging. But the funny thing is, despite all the plaudits and fans, neither has RIM. Or Microsoft. Or anyone else for that matter.

The problem is that there is a narrow focus on “messaging” rather than productivity — just like VoIP results in a narrow focus on “calling” rather than successful conversations and relationships.

I believe that even humble email can be transformed in how it is used and managed.

I recently discovered the 43 Folders blog, which is dedicated to personal productivity and self-improvement. It in turn is inspired by the book Getting Things Done, which I’m too mean to buy (and too lazy to read), but have enjoyed reading this summary.

In a nutshell, it’s a system for turning your life goals into manageable itty bitty chunks that you have some hope of tackling on a dreary Monday morning in the office when you could easily be goofed off reading telecom blogs.

The “43 folders” moniker comes from the Getting Things Done (GTD) system itself. Part of the system involves consciously deferring things into the next 31 days, or 12 months (and 31+12=?). Move things out of your inbox — where they cause you stress and decision fright — into your system. Relieve your short-term memory of unfinished items. Give yourself a daily dopamine shot by clearing your to do list.

I’ve begun to re-organise my email system along these lines. Since I run my own email server, I’ve got a lot of control. As you can see to the left, I’ve created appropriately named folders in my inbox. Actions I choose to actively defer are slotted away into the appropriate folder. Today is Sunday, so if I don’t think it deserves my attention again before Thursday, I put it into the “+Day.04” folder.

Every night I have a script that runs and moves things down. Stuff in “+Day.01” moves back into my Inbox. Stuff in the following days moves down one folder. Stuff in my “+Month.xx” folders that has appropriately aged also cascades on down.

I also maintain a +ToDo folder. (In case you haven’t worked it out, the “+” symbol simply forces these all to the top when sorted alphabetically.) In this folder I can expect to see the half dozen or so things I expect to do today. By keeping this separate from my inbox, I’m not forced to treat incoming mail as “to do” items. If necessary I can consolidate a whole bunch into one “to do” message, and file them away.

Having a separate ToDo folder also forces me to separately consider emails that re-emerge into my inbox after a period in purdah. These appear as read items, whereas truly new emails are, naturally, unread. Old “to do” items don’t just silently slip back into my to do list.

Every time I think of a new “to do” item in my life, I send myself an email, and file it an appropriate time into the future. Of course, I also maintain a traditional calendar for events that are truly fixed in time.

Now, I would hardly claim to be the world’s most effective action-oriented person. The three minute morning blog and email fix has been known to take three hours and more. But this system definitely helps a serial procrastinator such as myself to make a start on even the most unpleasant jobs.

It isn’t perfect. For example, the GTD system suggests the use of project folders to group to do items. The limits of my email client just don’t make that very practical. It’s too hard to manage. I can’t, for example, take a virtual view of all my current to do/next step items across multiple projects.

There is an honourable exception to the statis of email technology. IBM’s research labs have been busy creating new means of visualising email. Yes, we want better ways of viewing large data sets. Yes, we want to seeing the connections between messages and senders. But still they’re creating innovative solutions to the wrong problem. People need to be more productive.

That means respecting their finite cognitive ability, as well as understanding their complicated social relationships. If your boss sends you an email with a sentence ending in a question mark, perhaps your PDA needs to make this swell in importance?

(Hmm - the Personal Digital Assistant only ever delivered on 2 of those 3 words. Assistance was sadly lacking. If Palm make the handheld computer, I’m looking forward to a company called Brain making the mindfelt computer.)

This could spell good news for a few players. If they cracked it, Microsoft and IBM would be extremely well placed. They can add proprietary extensions to their dominant messaging server products and email clients to support the advanced slicing, dicing and workflow that true productivity demands. Your old fashioned open source IETF-standard compliant messaging engine won’t be competing in the same market any more.

Device makers could also benefit. The beauty of the Blackberry is just the responsiveness of its actions, and the speed of the scroll wheel. But it’s incomplete. How can you quickly categorise and file actions? How does it fit into your project workflow? Why doesn’t it automatically highlight client messages versus internal chatter?

The UIs of some of RIM’s competitors don’t lend themselves well to “productive messaging” paradigm. Consider a Pocket PC with a touch-screen and a stylus. You’re trying to associate each incoming message with an action and/or destination. But drag-and-drop just doesn’t work that well.

I kind of imagine taking the touchpad technology from my laptop and putting a “touch strip” along the edges of the screen. Scroll and tap in multiple dimensions. Left and right scroll strips might even do different things.

So whilst there’s plenty of room for improvement, don’t hold your breath for any cellular carrier to help things out. Even IBM would turn blue in the face waiting.

[Telepocalypse]
6:56:44 PM    comment   

And a crate of bottles.

Just a follow-up thought or two…

This morning I was watching my friend and old Sprint colleague’s David Anderson doing his video blog with Robert Scoble for the Channel9 Microsoft Developer Network.

It reminded me of some of the basic tenets underpinning David’s application of lean manufacturing to software engineering. For those who care, I think David’s work will have a lasting impact on the software industry long after Longhorn/Vista has been forgotten. Watch the video — yes, it’s quite long — and then think: what’s the impact of an order of magnitude increase in average software development productivity on the economy?

My contention is that thinking along similar lines might improve our human ability to manage multiple relationships and messages. You shouldn’t need to have a nervous breakdown when your tribe size exceeds 150 people or when you get 200 mail messages a day. You should never have to declare email bankruptcy and have to start again afresh.

Just like David’s epiphany that if the developer is overworked and stressed, the problem might be the system that assigns work to developers and accepts work from clients, not the lazy developer. If your message inbox is overflowing, you aren’t lazy. You just don’t have the right tools yet.

Thankfully, us hairless chimps are good at fashioning new tools.

The Feature-Driven Development (FDD) methodology agrees with the Theory of Constraints (TOC) by focusing on delivery of client-valued functionality. FDD does it by making the customer-valued feature the atomic unit for planning and tracking software development. Outputs, not inputs, are what are measured. Unlike function points, or lines of code, it isn’t an arbitrary intermediate product. Housekeeping code doesn’t count. TOC focuses on maximising the velocity that client-valued output emerges from a system by paying close attention to bottlenecks within the system. It also eliminates waste — particularly that of excess inventory. TOC also teaches us of the high real costs of “rush orders”, set-up time, and errors.

There’s a good reason I’m telling you all this; our processing of messages is also like an “action factory”. We accept “attention orders” from incoming messages. These have to be correlated, sorted, actioned, followed-up, filed, reviewed and archived. Some of these processes are complex.

Suddenly, it all starts to look familiar. Cars through a Toyota facory. Features through a software factory. Messages through an action factory.

Of course, you need to apply the metaphors where they work and know when to stop.

So what we want is an “agile messaging system”. We want small batch sizes. I should’t be presented with too many messages at once. My “getting things done” system tends to limit my daily to-do list to less than a dozen items.

We want small batch sizes — but not so small as the set-up costs start to outweigh the benefits of processing alike items. I’ve found it very beneficial to use the email subscription service of Bloglines. I forward certain mailing list subscriptions to special Bloglines addresses using a mail delivery script on my server. I can then peruse these as RSS feeds at my leisure. Two dozen emails from Gordon Cook once a week in a single sitting is better than twenty-four interruptions with “you’ve got mail”.

Speaking of which, the new mail flag is a productivity disaster. It flags every arriving attention request as a potential “rush job” that needs urgent attention. Somehow we need to fight against these machines and re-learn how to concentrate on one task for more than 3 minutes. Sometimes at the end of the day my head spins like a concussed cartoon character from attention atomisation.

When you come back from vacation, your inbox shouldn’t say “1273 new messages”. It should be “102 new batches”. It should have grouped and sorted them for you, ready for processing in what it sees as a reasonable order. Yes, you might miss an important one at first — but it can’t be worse than what we have now, can it? Small batches, frequent action.

We want to eliminate all waste. What is waste in email? It’s messages that you aren’t interested in, won’t action, etc. It’s also messages for authorisation of routine business transactions that you click “accept” without even reading. Much of the waste has to be eliminated by fixing the processes outside of the email system. But some of it can be fixed internally. Just apply a bit of filtering and collaborative intelligence to weed them out automatically.

The bottleneck of the system is the working memory of a human. That’s the constraint, the resource we’re trying to protect. The unique ability of a human brain is to perform associative memory actions across large and fuzzy data sets. Everything in a messaging client should be based around those limits. Martin’s getting tired now, I’ll hold that message back for a few minutes. Why not buffer messages out of sight until the right batch size is reached or until my working memory isn’t too tired?

In a way, this is what my RSS reader does. It holds messages back and batches them for me. I can now process a thousand messages a day where I might previously only handled a hundred.

A final parting thought. The theory of constraints introduces the concept of “drum, buffer, rope”. I won’t go into detail of where the terms come from. But part of the route to success is not accepting orders into the factory faster than the bottleneck can process them. A next-generation email system might ever write back to senders “Martin’s busy now — is this mail important”. “Your email wasn’t read while Martin was away, is this message still relevant?”.

Might give people some pause before hitting the send key in the first place.

UPDATE: Oops, forgot my key point. The client valued functionality of email isn’t messages received. That’s an intermediate by-product. There are a number of outcomes — actions, FYIs, social contacts, etc. I send David a cartoon joke about Glaswegians last week; ideally I’d preferred to submit it into a different queue than his email inbox, but I can’t. You build a better messaging tool by creating better outcomes (doh!). The only way of doing this, like with RSS, may be the gradual abandonment of email in favour of domain-specific messaging tools.

UPDATE: Benoit has been thinking along similar lines.

[Telepocalypse]
6:56:08 PM    comment   

Sprint Offers to Gauge Mobile Needs, Strategies With Assessment Service. Sprint is announcing a mobile technology assessment service under which it will evaluate how companies are using wireless devices and recommend possible changes in what the vendor said will be an agnostic way that doesn't simply promote its own offerings. [Computerworld Mobile/Wireless News]
6:55:42 PM    comment