According to the product page, this is "No Suitcase." So what is this? Maybe a $28,000 footrest? Well after further investigation, this is a container that holds a lot of stuff to be carried around easily. It also fits a briefcase inside it, so it's maybe a briefcase holder. It’s made out of carbon fiber, titanium, magnesium, aluminum and is easily carried onto an airplane. Bah, I don’t care what the Henk website says; this is a fancy suitcase, period.

The Henk [Cool Hunting]

8:49:52 PM    comment   

Interactive television programming is walking out the door and onto mobile handsets pressuring Japanese TV broadcasters to adapt content and programming. Networks TBS and FujiTV are linking up with ColorZip Japan a new server-based full color bar code technology, synching TV broadcasts to related digital content for sponsored websites, music samples, contests and prize drawings. Unlike typical black & white QR codes (think of it as bar code 3G), ColorCode was designed to scan from a comfortable distance even for low-resolution camera phones. Snap a photo of the code -- the server shoots info, image, url or streaming video instantly back. In Japan, satellite TV music and shopping channels should be coming on line soon with plans to incorporate ColorCode into e-commerce. The travel industry has taken notice with campaigns readying to roll out as well.

We spoke with ColorZip Japan CEO Christopher Craney, about how ColorCode is developing the Japanese market. Already in talks with telecom providers over having the code embedded onto new handsets, Chris discusses both corporate and individual marketing campaigns for this next generation bar code technology. We also interviewed the CTO, Evan Owens, who demonstrated several applications of their product which is available to view [after the jump] for WWJ subscribers only.

Free video preview run-time: 6:02, the full-length feature duration is 15:31. Coded for broadband connections only. [Wireless Watch Japan]
8:47:13 PM    comment   

Have just read Richard Stastny’s comprehensive recount of the goings-on around ENUM at the IETF meeting in Paris. I can’t but help feel that, despite the good intentions, some decidedly anti-competitive actions are going on here by the carriers.

In essence, the telcos are keeping control over a numbering business that is being run as a cartel that keeps out non-POTS VoIP applications, and discourages new POTS entrants. And since there is (today) no defensible service element in “VoIP service” other than the trivial routing function, the erection of artificial barriers to enable rent-seeking is priority #1, #2 and #3 in telcoland.

The importance of phone numbers is too easily dismissed in a world of email addresses, Skype IDs and IM buddies. Numbers work across all alphabets and typefaces, are relatively unambiguous, are easily entered and displayed on restricted UIs, and can easily be conveyed verbally and in print. We have a system for mnemonic mapping to letters where necessary. Competing global numbering schemes are unlikely to emerge, because of potential for namespace confusion (although local versions such as SMS short codes do sprout up). Numbering is serious business, if somewhat obscure and technocratic. Despite their sometimes confusing split semantics as “naming” and “routing” objects, they need not be casually dismissed as an obsolete anachronism of the pre-IP world.

The technical problem any ENUM system solves is the conversion of a phone number to any other form of URL (and back again). The specific business problem that Carrier ENUM purports to solve is>URL, the mapping must be correct.

Yet in doing this Carrier ENUM denies you any possibility of asserting ownership over your phone number independently of purchasing an overpriced “voice service”. It’s a bit like you>AOL or MSN. If you happened to want to use your email address (think: “phone number”) in some crazy new-fangled service like instant messaging (think: VoIP), you’ve got a problem. Oh, sure, you can do it in various numbering range ghettos that aren’t routed by half the world (and are charged at random rates by the other half). It’s like Microsoft’s support for Apple — sure, we like competition, as long as it knows its place.

With domain names, I can obtain clear ownership. I get to set a record for my domain that says who I’m empowering to manage the domain’s details for me. In other words, someone thought through the various roles of ownership, assignment, management, operation, etc. in advance. They made a reasonable stab at creating a system that separated them. With hindsight we know it’s not perfect and involves excessive expense, but it’s quite good.

What you would really like to be able to do is enter someone’s phone number in Skype, call them, and if they’re using a Skype-enabled device you get an ecrypted, wideband audio Skype call. But we can’t do that easily today because I could claim to have your phone number, and calls to you would come to me.

I’m totally guessing, but I assume that the PhoneGnome device (which bridges PSTN and VoIP calling) has some patented secret provisioning sauce to tackle this problem. The device, I suppose, places a free PSTN out-call and uses caller ID to associate the SIP address and PSTN number. (Self-provisioning would allow you to fib too easily.) But it doesn’t scale well unless we all buy>ENUM makes me feel a bit queasy, because there’s no need to be a “carrier” to do VoIP or ENUM. If the VoIP application is independent of transport, will I be able to declare myself to be a carrier, obtain numbers, and participate in Carrier ENUM? Methinks not, and that smells bad. (I also suspect Carrier ENUM is great for perpetuating the dependence on SIP proxies and smart networks a-la IMS, and preventing P2P connections. You can bet the technical rules will subtly stop any domestic IP connection from being classed as “carrier grade” and allowed to participate in Carrier ENUM as a peer.)

So is the>ENUM, where the plebs seize control? Not necessarily, but we could take some baby steps along the way.

If I were a regulator, I’d be looking to unbundle the phone number trust function.

Luckily, we’ve already got a model for it, at least in the UK. If you want to port your wholesale DSL line from>ID, I still need a similar mechanism to assert ownership of that ID. This strikes me as a problem easily solved with today’s digital ID technology ;)

It would not be unreasonable for a “virtual VoIP network operator” like Skype to charge you for access to this trusted directory function. Particularly if the receipient was a POTS (or POTS-on-IP) competitior that wants to disintermediate the Skype network while still allowing the use of Skype IDs! (There’s an business model struggling to emerge in every VoIP operator…) Given the near-zero barrier to market entry, let the market find a price, I say.

Since numbers are also de-provisioned and re-cycled, invalidating the truth of ownership, there needs to be a mechanism to publish these events. This is non-trivial. But even if we don’t solve this problem at all, the system seems stronger than the contract-based alernative of DUNDi, where the user unilaterally asserts truth in identifier ownership, and post hoc regulation deals with miscreants. At least we got the records right up front, even if they age badly.

This solution may be a turkey. I’ve no idea. But there are plenty of other possibilities lined up. For example, I could port control of my number to Skype, but retain the actual voice service somewhere else. If DNS can separate out the ownership, registration and operation roles, so can numbering. Part of the problem is being presented with a false dichotomy of Carrier vs. User ENUM. Another part is ENUM accepts the legacy world of phone numbers on the carrier’s terms - such as accepting>POTS application — that calling any phone number should make a single device “ring” and be answered. The idea you would place a bell in your house and remotely allow anyone in the world to activate it day or night will seem truly quaint to our grandchildren. ENUM focuses tightly on legacy phone numbers and their messed-up meanings, rather than offering a general frameworks for inter-service interoperability. Is ENUM a good answer to a bad question?

Anyhow, let’s disaggregate the functions behind the Carrier ENUM curtain. Let multiple domain-specific registries and directories emerge, re-combining the elements in new and useful ways. Let them be safe in the knowledge that the records in their directories have at least some kernel of truth to them. Let some competition into places that don’t know what competition and innovation are.

8:43:21 PM    comment   

There’s a bit of a “blogs I like” meme circling the blogosphere right now, so I’m going to throw in one or two I find worthy reading that other people might not have heard of. These are the kind of sources that give me the ideas for articles here — they educate rather than merely inform. Yes, there’s a list of many of the usual telecom suspects whose every outpouring I devour religiously. These are extra.

• On Demand Media. Seems to be anonymous. Everything is pin-sharp analysis of the emerging IPTV/Internet TV arena. Early days, but promising.

• Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm. Ben Hyde knows his technology and economics. It’s a nutritious combinaton.

• winterspeak by Zimran Ahmed. More technology-meets-economics.

• we make money not art. About every tenth entry is an example of a presence-enabled contraption, even though they don’t label them that way. Lots of fun.

• Bubblegeneration. (A recent read - hat tip: Thiyagarajan) Great combination of strategic insight into economic change wrought by new technology.

I’d recommend everyone to go out and assemble a daily diet of “out of my area” stuff beyond the technology ghetto. Just sample from time to time. Blogs like the [non]billable hour in law (this is awesome!). Search out the other vertical blogs for aviation, pharma, etc. Go find the equivalent “deep analysis” blogs in horizontal functions like marketing, HR etc. Then top off your daily diet with Arts & Letters Daily — a neatly packaged daily dose of cultural education.

8:42:43 PM    comment   

Many of you will have heard of the famous Black-Scholes equation for the pricing of financial options. The basic idea is that an option contract to buy a thing at some future date at a fixed price has some potential premium over the current price of the asset because it may allow you to buy at a discount some day (i.e. the strike price is below the market price on the day the option is exercised). Black-Scholes lets you calculate this premium.

A stupid network is like an infinite sequence of discrete options to communicate between connected parties. At the finest granularity, every frame or packet contains a message from a pool of possible messages. A stupid network makes that pool of possible messages larger by deferring optimisation for any particular message type. (For example, IMS networks pre-optimise on SIP, which would exclude a more bandwidth-efficient signalling protocol such as IAX — which could be a problem for wireless devices.) The assumptions for a “stupid” network is that networks have considerable longevity, there is high uncertainty about the future returns of different “messages”, and high initial cost — otherwise we could just build more and more application-optimised networks. These respectively map onto “low interest rate”, “big standard deviation in returns” and “high current stock price” in Black-Scholes, maybe perhaps, if I interpret things correctly.

I’m wondering if any network economists or general econometricians out there have done the work to adapt and extend Black-Scholes to model communications networks from an option theory viewpoint. If any of you know the answer, I’m curious to find out what they discovered.

As someone with a degree in mathematics, I would regard the problem as “non-trivial”, and definitely well beyond my aptitude.

Naturally, the option price may be somewhat different for the owner and user of the network, depending on how good the owner is at price discrimination (i.e. manipulating the strike price) — something the “stupid” network is notoriously poor at. There could be some interesting consequences for muni network advocates. Spreading superfast broadband to people who won’t today pay for it at market-clearing prices is a way of foisting options to communicate onto the economy, with the hope that someone will invent crazy new applications to redeem them. Perhaps there’s a sounder theoretical basis for muni networks yet to be explored?

8:42:18 PM    comment   

Just got back from experiencing a particularly unpleasant, ugly and amoral Hollywood movie.

Whilst in eyes-closed Zen-like meditative mood half-way through, I joined a few dots in my brain. Here’s a few not-so-random quotes from around the blogosphere:

Abundance has brought beautiful things to our lives, but that bevy of material goods has not necessarily made us happier. The paradox of prosperity is that while living standards have risen steadily decade after decade, personal, family, and life satisfaction haven’t budged. That’s why more people – liberated by prosperity but not fulfilled by it – are resolving the paradox by searching for meaning.

— Daniel Pink via Evelyn Rodriguez.

Live to Work and Work to Live

The social context of the relationship between workers and employers will shift from a livelihood basis to one that focuses on enhancing the quality of life for the individual. This trend will cause a broad redefinition of the implied social contract between individuals and organizations that has been relatively unchanged for over a century.

— The ReFormation of Work at The Future of Work Weblog

Microsoft should be trying to make it easier to use their technologies and to find new applications. Instead they are acting as if it is more important to limit the customers choices in order to preserve the obscellescent business model of Tellywood.

— Bob Frankston summarising Microsoft vs Customers and Itself.

Where’s the link? Well, let’s start from the beginning again.

I found the movie offended my inner values. It’s not the casual violence, the bad dialogue, the gloss. It was the lack of a core thing of beauty, of humanity — or the knowing negation or absence of such to highlight its true value. After all, there have been extremely good previous movies about professional assassins whose characters were violent and immoral, but where the director’s message was profoundly moral and human. This movie wasn’t nihilistic, it was just of no value.

I’m not well-read when it comes to media gurus, so I may be retreading over ground that greater minds have already mapped. But my feeling is that media and communications experiences can be broadly defined against two categories: cathartic and confirmatory.

Cathartic experiences are about escapism. They numb you to your real life. Playing hours of Tetris does this. Watching junk TV. You know the story. This movie was definitely cathartic.

Confirmatory experiences revive your sense of being. They don’t hide reality, they re-inforce it. They confirm your humanity. If you find a movie about killing depressing, it’s because it is depressing.

Confirmatory experiences appear to my eye to contribute to a search for meaning and purpose in life, and to help fulfil a desire for transcendence. We’re intensely social creatures, and the most intense confirmatory experiences tend to replicate the “tribal fireplace gathering” model — we talk, we eat, we gaze at the stars, we wonder, we hope for tomorrow.

Some media can follow a dual role between catharsis and confirmation. Watching a TV program along with millions of fellow simultaneous viewers may initially be cathartic, but the shared experience and next-day office chat is confirmatory. Playing Doom all day is cathartic; a sophisticated Warcraft avatar working in collaboration with other people towards shared goals is at least partly confirmatory. It’s like taking a drug to give you a different perspective on reality — separation of ego from your physical self and implantation into another body.

This stuff matters in the business world, even if we hate speaking in these terms. Billions and billions of dollars are being spent on networks and services that transform the mediascape. Broadcast TV fades in importance; “Me-TV” rises. Tools like Skype allow for new forms of social interaction, such as the family conference call.

I can’t beat Hugh Macleod’s eternal wisdom here:

THE MARKET FOR SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN IS INFINITE.

— The Hughtrain Manifesto

People by their actions are showing an inclination for more human, meaningful, indeed spiritual experiences. And it’s no contradiction in them paying to get them at times. The market for confirmatory experiences appears to be growing faster than that for cathartic ones. Or at the very least, you need to know your market and adjust your product accordingly. Just because you supply “tele-vision” doesn’t mean you’re at all delivering the same confirmatory experience via on-demand IPTV as you did on broadcast.

I don’t think the designers of these new media products have given much thought to the deeper needs of their customers. It’s still almost impossible to, say, virtually meet up with other people after a TV show that you found exceptionally good (or objectionable) and create a confirmatory experience out of it. If communities dominate brands is true, it’s saddening to see how few media companies make community formation an easy and rewarding experience.

I guess this is all old news to Cluetrainers, although perhaps they drew their scope too narrowly; it’s not just markets that are conversations, it’s the whole of life. And judging by today’s experience — to uses Bob’s phraseology — Tellywood’s cathartic product isn’t just an obsolete business model. It’s an obsolete business.

UPDATE: Want more evidence? Biggest blockbusters of recent years: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix. Common thread? A quest for meaning in each one.

UPDATE: One last thoughht. Cinemas don’t make money — just enough to survive. The one we went to is part of a big mall complex. Footfall through the shops is what counts. Lessons for other media distribution methods?

8:41:58 PM    comment   

Following on from my essay, I think Murdoch’s purchase of myspace.com is very shrewd. Now he gets it, certainly following his recent lament on Media Corp.’s earlier Net illiteracy. What’s the biggest, most-established community-forming .com out there on the block at an affordable price? We’ll buy that one. If he follows through and executes well, his competitors should be very scared. James Enck has often lamented, for example, the unidirection nature of Sky TV’s broadcast network in a conversational era. Now you can see where the backchannel is coming from. I’m impressed at his adaptability. The customers want a sense of meaning in life through participatory media? Then that’s what we’ll sell them!

One last anecdote. I once watched a presentation by the founder of popular pre-teen/teen site Habbo Hotel. It’s a strange but immensely popular 3D chat cum semi-structured virtual reality. Paraphrasing inaccurately, he said one depressed, overweight, spotty, teenage girl said that it was the first time she felt she could truly be who she really was without being judged just by her appearance.

Cathartic or confirmatory? I’ll let you be the judge.

8:41:38 PM    comment   

As a fellow free-market libertarian, and also a telecom blogger, I ought to be in agreement with Russell Roberts’s critique of municipal “socialist” telecom networks.

Yet I’d like to offer, if not a contrary view, at least a different perspective on muni networks. I believe there are good and bad reasons to build them. But dismissal is not an option.

Yes, there’s a clear transfer payment in favour of people who are unwilling to pay the current market-clearing price of a broadband connection. This is a net loss of utility to society, since the taxpayers whose money was confiscated had other, more pleasant, ways of spending this money in mind.

But there are also reasons to consider the free flow of information via telecom networks as a special and unique case. Information goods may not always conform to classical economic models, such as rivalrous consumption.

Let’s take the market economics first.

The most important and unusual feature of telecom networks is that much of their value is option value — the ability to cater for unknown applications. E-mail, the Web, P2P, podcasting — none were there at the birth of the Internet. (Search for “End to end principle” and “Rise of the Stupid Network” for more data.) Unfortunately, the desire to price discriminate by a commercial supplier also serves to destroy option value, by limiting messages exchanged to those forms for which a tariff has been devised. The act of price discriminating network traffic and billing is also horiffically expensive. However, the desire to price discriminate is overwhelming, because of the billion-fold difference in value of different traffic types.

Telecom networks potentially generate huge consumer suplus. There is also an elemet of merely co-ordinated self-supply in a muni network. You do no harm by fixing your own blocked sink rather than calling a plumber. By engaging a general contractor, a locality effectlvely self-supplies itself (“unplugs its own data sink”), and retains the full consumer suplus. Again, because of the nature of networks, this isn’t something users can do unilaterally.

There may be a co-ordination problem that corporations find hard to overcome. Most communications are geographicaly local, but there’s little point in buying a videophone if insufficient of your friends and family across town — some of whom are in poorer households and districs — have one first. The natural unit of purchase of a telecom network may be greater than the single household, by the very nature of being a network.

Those poorer households are hard to cross-subsidise via market means, because the applications, where most of the money is spent, are separated from the connectivity. It’s so far proven impossible to make the cross-subsidies between different connectivity buyers and application users work in an effective and fair manner, particularly when users are on different networks. The coordination and transaction costs are too high. (Would a universal service type of outcome arise from a pure market operation? It’s debateable — at the very least, it’s uncertain.)

Another co-ordination problem is a whole district can’t easily sign up to a single network provider at once. The network provider has to engage in house-by-house sale. This is extremely expensive. A municipal network eliminates this transaction cost at a stroke.

There is also evidence that communications infrastructure generates new business and economic activity. This value is not captured by a traditional network operator (e.g. Google’s billions of revenue do nothing for SBC or Comcast). But if the general public is the network owner, their interests do align. There is real evidence that the net gains from any form of increased data connectivity are large (see this for example). It is unproven, although not unreasonable, to hope that a forced municipal network will indeed have this effect. Unlike most infrastructure white-elephants, the almost infinite flexibility of a telecom network significantly lowers the risk of such a public enterprise.

Next, there is the practical issue of a market forming over rights of way for new facilities-based entrants. Early phone networks involved massive looms of wire down the street from multiple providers. Planning laws, zoning and access restrictions prevent a proper market forming in this bottleneck.

Finally, there are internal public costs of service delivery. A municiapl network enables those local services to be delivered at potentially lower cost. This is particularly true when access is universal and non-digital service delivery channels can be eliminated.

There is also a non-market side to this. The operation of our democracy requires ideas to flow freely. The increasing dominance of digital media may displace traditional analog alternatives. (When did you last go on a protest march? Read a political pamphlet?) The current experience in Canada with Telus, cutting off access to union web sites that offended it, suggests that allowing a tiny handful of corporations to control this access is potentially dangerous.

Lastly, the invisible nature of information goods and rights of way emprically seems to lead to markets in them more easily being manipulated via political means and regulatory capture. The public don’t feel the pain of loss of the services they never got the experience, or the low prices they never saw advertised. The endless pleading and lobbying of telcos worldwide should be a warning signal of a market out of balance.

The trick is, of course, in balancing all these softer issues against the harder deadweight loss of a tax-backed transfer payment. But just because competition is good, it doesn’t mean that co-operation (if sometimes coercive) is automatically worse.

8:40:57 PM    comment   

Maybe its because I now work at an Internet Portal and thus am more aware of these things, but it seems that AOL is making all the right moves lately to become a serious competitor to MSN and Yahoo! Let's tick off the things they've done over the past month or so:

1) They opened up their network and redesigned their pages. AOL has always had a bunch of neat content trapped behind their walled garden, but us on the outside couldn't take advantage of it so it didn't matter. Now that they're opening this stuff up, suddenly AOL seems relevant again, no?

2) They webcast Live8 flawlessly. The way that AOL did Live8's live cast and now have all of it available on demand is exactly the way all of us would want it: Free, organized, high-quality. It was the first time a video event was really, truly better online than on TV. That's a watershed event, IMHO.

3) They launched their mobile search using InfoGin's transcoding technology. Web search, yellow pages (local) and product search all derived from their existing websites (aolsearch.com "enhanced" by Google, yp.aol.com, and instore.com). Using this same technology, look for AOL to quickly get a lot more mobile content up and running soon.

4) They launched competitive online services such as the My AOL RSS aggregator home page and "AIM Mail". The My AOL page is good looking and functional giving My Yahoo! a real competitor for the first time in a year or so. And though the email is lagging everyone (Y! Mail, GMail, HotMail) it's a core service they now offer and I'm sure updates will be coming quickly.

5) They relaunched the AOL Instant Messenger client with a nicer interface, and an innovative marketing site called AIM Fight which is really going get people (kids especially) to recruit others to download AIM and sign them up as buddies. This is a brilliant, brilliant idea.

6) They bought XDrive. I just found this out this morning, and it's an amazing purchase. Read my post about XDrive from February to know why: They have a streaming media solution based on the MP3s and other content you store on their servers. Also read my startup plans back in March 2003 under the section "mDrive" - the idea being that every mobile phone should have their own server-side space to offload content.

7) They bought WildSeed today and created a new division called AOL Wireless Group. I've never heard of WildSeed, but they (like many other companies like it) make phone personalization software. This is key to improving the dismal end-user experience that mobile users have to deal with right now. Look for custom mobile AIM clients in the future, or even an AOL Phone.

Finally, remember that AOL still owns the Netscape trademark and browser as well as WinAMP and others (like AIM) and they're owned by Time Warner, which gives them access to a huge amount of original content. I think anyone who's forgotten about AOL or discounted them has to rethink these guys - they really are giants and they've awoken. Check out their list of services - it's like a full-on portal filled with people came out of nowhere. They have 10+ years of understanding how online communities and online consumer services work, and they're now focusing that experience on the Internet at large, as well as mobile devices. Think about it...

Definitely a company to pay attention to. Anything else I missed?

-Russ

Update: I do remember WildSeed - they're the snap-on intelligent cover guys. Also I just remembered that AOL also owns Tegic, the guys who own T9 (the technology synonymous with predictive text input). Finally, someone in my comments pointed out that AOL Video has tons of stuff available now in addition to Live 8. Very interesting. By weblog@russellbeattie.com. [Russell Beattie Notebook]
8:40:40 PM    comment