The Earth just got one step closer to true global broadband through satellite based communications. With the launch of the Zenit-3SL rocket the Inmarsat-4 F2 satellite brings 3G high speed mobile technology to North America. Their onboard technology is designed to allow people to set up virtual offices anywhere around the world via high-speed broadband connections and new 3G phone technology.
Tag:3g | Posted in: Countries Specific 3G News Americas Canada USA Future Tech
Our 3G Support Service - 3G Future Technology [Daily 3G News]
11:12:51 PM    comment   

The Radio Regulatory Council of the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) have made a recommendation to allocate the 2GHz spectrum to IPMobile Incorporated ("IPMobile"). With this decision, IPMobile will enter the mobile broadband market using TD-CDMA (also known as UMTS TDD), a 3rd generation IMT-2000 technology. By introducing TD-CDMA, as well as a new business model, IPMobile will create a "mobile data communications market" in Japan.
Tag:IPMobile | Posted in: Countries Specific 3G News AsiaPac Japan Business case
Our 3G Support Service - 3G Strategy Definition & Assessment [Daily 3G News]
11:11:59 PM    comment   

The latest issue of SAP's Business Flash newsletter just popped into my in-box. Under the email's catchy headline "Companies That Run SAP Have 32% More High Fives At Their Staff Meetings" runs this sentence: "A recent study of companies listed on NASDAQ and NYSE found that companies that run SAP are 32% more profitable than those that donít." At the end of the sentence is an asterisk that leads to a footnote: "Based on a 2005 Stratascope Inc. analysis of publicly available fiscal results of all non-financial companies listed on NASDAQ and NYSE." OK, I'm intrigued. A broad study that links a particular corporate software program to vastly outsized profits is interesting. I want to learn more.

So I click on a link in the email that says "We invite you to see for yourself," figuring it will bring me to a copy of the study, or at least to some details on the research. Wrong. The link brings me to a marketing page on the SAP site filled with the usual slogans, like "enable business flexibility." The only information on the study is this: "Companies that run SAP are 32% more profitable, according to results from a 2005 Stratascope Inc. study, which analyzed publicly available financial results of NASDAQ and NYSE companies. The study also found that these companies delivered 28% more return on capital. Clearly, SAP customers have a strong track record of outperforming their peers."

Clearly? Seems pretty opaque to me. I mean, where's the data?

Not to be put off, I do some searching, assuming that the details of the study have been published somewhere. Nope. I can't find any trace of this research on the web. I do, though, find the home page of Stratascope, the company that did the research. Its business consists mainly, it seems, of providing IT sales forces with financial data on public companies. On every page of its site is a large promotional advertisement highlighting some of its key clients, one of which is SAP. Hmm. I also find that the chairman and president of Stratascope, Juergen Kuebler, "was employed at SAP AG for 9 years where he was responsible for the sales launch of the product 'R/3 on AS/400' as well as the sales training of the complete staff at SAP AG." Now, the fact that SAP and Stratascope are cozy - and that it's in Stratascope's interest to make its client happy - doesn't mean that Stratascope's research is necessarily unsound. But it does raise questions - questions that can only be answered through a careful review of the research methodology and results. A review rendered impossible by the fact that neither SAP nor Stratascope is revealing details about the research.

This isn't an isolated problem. IT companies are always throwing around seemingly precise statistics claiming to show that their hardware or software is associated with competitive advantage or superior financial results. As far as I've been able to discover, the research is almost always dubious. Either the methodology is flawed (tiny or biased samples), or the research is carried out by the company itself or some sycophantic supplier. And rarely are the full details of the study divulged. IT buyers shouldn't pay any attention to such faux statistics. If a vendor dresses up its marketing slogans with research results, then it should show us the data - all of the data.

11:11:13 PM    comment   

If you have an interest in business strategy, you're familiar with Michael Porter's five forces framework. In his landmark 1980 book Competitive Strategy, Porter overturned much of the conventional wisdom about business, showing that the governing assumptions reflected a much too narrow conception of competition. Companies don't just battle their direct rivals for the profits in a market, Porter argued; they also contend with suppliers, buyers, substitute products, and potential new entrants. Together, these five forces of competition shape the structure of industries, determining how much profit is generated and how it's carved up. Porter's framework has come to underpin the way managers think about - and plot - their companies' strategies.

The world has changed, though, since 1980, and I think the time has come to add a sixth force to Porter's framework: the public interest. In The Public Wants Your Profits, an article in the new edition of Forrester Magazine, I argue that in recent years, as the power of unions and government regulators has waned, the public itself has become a force shaping industries and influencing the generation and distribution of profits. (Just look at Wal-Mart's recent travails, or the pressure being placed on oil companies to curtail their windfall gains.) Traditional "corporate social responsibility" programs, which tend to be operated in isolation from companies' central profit-making functions, are not a sufficient response to the growing power and complexity of the public interest. As I argue in the article, managers need to recognize that the public interest now manifests itself as an economic interest - and hence must be a core concern of business strategy.

11:10:12 PM    comment   

Yesterday, I questioned some undocumented research that SAP claims shows its customers are much more profitable than other companies. Today, the Financial Times reports on research from the Hackett Group, a benchmarking firm, which indicates that it doesn't matter whether your enterprise resource planning system is from SAP or Oracle or PeopleSoft: "they're basically all the same."

Hackett examined a big group of large companies. It culled out the 25% that had the most efficient back-end processes (the ones automated by ERP) and found that about a third of those companies used Oracle, a third used PeopleSoft (now owned by Oracle) and nearly a third were SAP users. (Just a few had other vendors' ERP systems.) It then looked at the other 75% of companies and found that the proportions using each of the main vendors' packages were about the same. The lack of variation suggests, as the FT reports, "that their impact on efficiency and effectiveness is the same."

Here's how Hackett's research guru Philip Carnelley sums up the findings: "Every way you look at it, it doesn't make a difference. There are aspects that are quite different in terms of the architectural side but in terms of features and functions they are all very comparable products." Is this news? Not really. Back in 1998, Oracle's then-president Ray Lane said, "customers can't find 5% difference among SAP, PeopleSoft, and us."

So what does matter? Standardization and simplicity. A lot of big companies run different ERP systems in different units, a messy problem that can be exacerbated by mergers and acquisitions. Such fragmentation leads to complexity, confusion and high costs, and consolidating the systems offers the opportunity for big gains. As Carnelley says, "It doesn't matter which way they simplify, but simplifying is a good thing. The 'world class' organisations tend to have only one ERP system."

ERP is infrastructure. Rationalize it.

11:09:34 PM    comment   

Ray Ozzie's vision is now Microsoft's vision. That may be the most important message of the "leaked" Microsoft memos (I put "leaked" in quotes since it's obvious, as John Battelle points out, that these documents were intended to be made public from the get-go). Bill Gates's memo is just a cover note to Ozzie's agenda-setting memo. It's Ozzie's letter, Gates writes, "which I feel sure we will look back on as being as critical as [my] Internet Tidal Wave memo was when it came out." That's the sound of a baton - a very heavy baton - being passed.

Gates's desktop era is over. Ozzie's internet era has begun. Up until now, Microsoft has looked at the internet through the desktop; now it's looking at the desktop through the internet.

Ozzie's memo is very good. If you want an introduction to what's often called "Web 2.0," you could do worse than start with this document - not least because it doesn't use the term Web 2.0 at all. Three things leapt out at me:

First, Ozzie seems to truly believe that the advertising model may be as lucrative for the software business as the licensing model has been. "In some cases," he writes, "it may be possible for one to obtain more revenue through the advertising model than through a traditional licensing model. Only in its earliest stages, no one yet knows the limits of what categories of hardware, software and services, in what markets, will ultimately be funded through this model. And no one yet knows how much of the worldís online advertising revenues should or will flow to large software and service providers, medium sized or tail providers, or even users themselves." Shifting away from the licensing model represents an enormous risk for Microsoft - a risk that could, under a worst-case scenario, prove fatal. It's a risk that Ozzie doesn't seem to shy away from.

Second is Ozzie's recognition that proprietary data formats, which have always been crucial to Microsoft's success, may be turning into liabilities. He writes: "For all its tremendous innovation and its embracing of HTML and XML, Office is not yet the source of key web data formats ñ surely not to the level of PDF." This, too, implies another fundamental break with Microsoft's heritage.

Third, and related, Ozzie explicitly embraces a truly open platform: "Weíll design and license Windows and our services on terms that provide third parties with the same ability to benefit from the Windows platform that Microsoftís services enjoy. Our services innovations will include tight integration with the Windows client via documented interfaces, so that competing services can plug into Windows in the same manner as Microsoftís services." Now, maybe this is just boilerplate to keep the lawyers happy. But I don't think so. I think it's another admission that the pillars of the old Microsoft are crumbling. They'll hold for a bit longer, but in the meantime a new foundation needs to be poured.

11:08:44 PM    comment   

Most of the current discussion about the big changes under way in computing focuses on the software side, particularly on the shift from locally installed software to software supplied as a service over the internet. That's what all the Web 2.0 fuss is about. Less attention has been paid, so far, to the equally dramatic shift that the new utility-computing model portends for hardware. The ability to deliver ever richer applications from distant, central servers will lead to the increasing centralization of hardware components as well - and that, in turn, will open the door to hardware innovation and entrepreneurship.

Take Newnham Research, a startup in Cambridge, England. It's developing the thinnest of thin clients - a simple monitor adapter, with a couple of megabytes of video ram and ports for a mouse and keyboard, that plugs directly into an ethernet network. All computing is done on a central server, which can be either a traditional server or an inexpensive PC. The only thing delivered to the monitor, directly over the network, are compressed pixels. The device is called Nivo - for "network-in, video-out."

Newnham, which is being backed by Atlas Ventures and Benchmark, isn't producing its technology in volume yet. On its site, it suggests a few applications tied to the ease with which you can drive multiple monitors from a single PC, but it's easy to think of much broader applications as well, particularly in schools, shops and small offices.

One nonprofit company, called Ndiyo, is already putting Newnham's hardware innovations to work - as a way to deliver computing to people who haven't previously been able to afford it. Ndiyo began with a simple goal: "Instead of starting with a PC and seeing what we could take out, we began with a monitor and asked what was the minimum we had to add to give a workstation fully capable of typical 'office' use." It's created a system, using open-source software like Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, and Evolution, that allows a half-dozen users to share a single PC simultaneously, all doing different things. Need to add more users? Add another PC to create a little Linux cluster, and off you go. (For more details, you can download a pdf presentation from Ndiyo.)

Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie talk about the disruption of the software market. Hardware's going to go through a disruption, too - and it's about time.

11:08:09 PM    comment   

As Apple's designers and engineers toiled away at creating an iPod that could play video, Steve Jobs kept telling reporters that a video iPod was a dumb idea. Even in late September, a couple of weeks before the video iPod's unveiling, he was saying "that the market isnít yet right for personal video devices." So is Steve Jobs a big fat liar? No, he's a smart businessman.

"Transparency" is a big buzzword these days. To succeed in today's interconnected world, the common wisdom says, you need to let it all hang out - expose your data, expose your processes, expose your plans. One prominent management consultant's message, according to CIO Insight magazine, boils down to "bare it all and share it all." Call it the slut strategy.

Now, there's a lot to be said for transparency, and for modular processes. But it's easy to go too far - to make your company so transparent, so connectable, that you turn your entire business into an easily copied (and easily discarded) commodity. Even in the Internet Age, a company's competitive advantage still hinges on what, to outsiders, remains hidden, obscure, and hard to replicate. Google has made a lot of its technology transparent, but the essence of the company, the source of its advantage, remains opaque.

Openness and honesty are good things. But let's not lose sight of the enduring power of secrets and lies.

11:07:30 PM    comment   

I had almost come to believe that Peter Drucker was immortal, but sadly it's not so. He died earlier today, at 95. Drucker was one of the great writers on business and management, who over the course of 70 years tirelessly championed the dignity and the intelligence of workers. In his 1946 book Concept of the Corporation, he made an eloquent case against mindless bureaucracy, arguing that managers should give workers the power to make decisions and take the initiative. A radical thought then, it's become the common wisdom today, though few businesses actually live up to Drucker's ideal.

There are good obituaries in the New York Times, Financial Times, and Business Week, and Drucker's grandson, Nova Spivack, has written a tribute on his blog.

11:07:02 PM    comment   

While all of us are delightedly prancing around, flaunting our geegaws and doodads, a very large question keeps lurking round the corner and avoiding our scrutiny. We need to stand up and understand who the end consumers of all our value added services are. Granted that this is a mass market where numbers matter more than anything else. But even in the most mass of all mass markets, surely marketers take a look at the sales and poke their noses behind the numbers. Too often, we are involved in elaborate discussions of what the end consumer wants and does not want, what he/she likes and does not like, what is suitable and not suitable for him/her. All these discussions - and many of these are held with our operator partners - really amount to nothing because we land up speaking in thin air.
There is little substance to what many of us say other than a bodily stance âo[base "] an inclination of the torso, a raising of the eyebrow and even a deepening of the voice to imitate Pacino - and when we are confronted by people more knowledgable than us, we tend to retreat silently or worse, dismiss knowledge as some kind of arcane leftover from an older time. This is much like that other greatly lamentable industry of TV airtime selling, where a lot of folks tell a lot of other folks a lot of stuff based on very little and they all go and have a drink together. We who come from that industry or industries related to it, know how the PRP Nairs, the Anand Regos, the D. Shrirams and countless others have fought hard to introduce accountability to TV buying and selling. There are some who have managed to go some of the distance - but for the better part, we all know that the pomaded hair and slick smile still holds sway.

VAS And MIS
Our industry is still in an early stage and we need not go down that road - it benefits few. We must also understand that unlike TV, value added services is an area where the most accurate representation of consumer usage is actually very easily available. All we need to do is look at the billing records of each of the services we run. Typically, the MIS report one gets is a top down report that provides broad swathes of information at one stroke. It is in the raw files behind this data that the real gem lies. Each data transaction will give us the following- the name of the operator, the name of the market, the date and time of the transaction, the message sent by the user, the content received by the user. In other words, it gives us information under all the key segmentation variables except demographics. When the like cases are put together across a considered period of time, it is easy to anticipate that broad clusters based on one or more variable would emerge.
I am no statistician but I know from personal experience that this can often uncover startling truths. There are segments already. These segments are NOT entirely pricing based - and how could they, when prices of competing services are tightly controlled? Demographics do not need us to go into confidential operator data - a lot can be gleaned from intelligent extrapolation, media consumption analysis and observation.

The Importance Of Metrics
This, then, needs to be the solid rock on which our business runs - metrics. The way in which different companies will choose to use metrics will differ, of course. But just as in the case of Internet advertising, the domain of value added services will be subject to exacting measurement. It already is, in a manner of speaking, because we all agree on the final purchase of mobile content as the ultimate yardstick and we all do know that billing and metrics are two sides of the same coin. Where we often fail is in the prediction of who is going to buy what and why. The very initial days when we could blast service messages to end consumers in bulk and trust at least 10 per cent of them to buy some of that stuff, are behind us.
There are many competing companies in this field, even on the same operator deck and now we must also understand that there are mobile content brands coming in with adspends unheard of before. The negotiation, so to speak, between the mobile consumer and the mobile content seller will become more and more complex. The shops are going to become stacked more and more with all kinds of goodies and the timespan to convince each person to choose YOUR stuff will be shorter and shorter. Those companies who recognize the power that they hold in their hands already, will be at a huge advantage. They will sell more, much more efficiently and they will be the ones who will hold hard, knowledge-based engagements with operators. They will be the ones who will lead the charge towards new paradigms of B2C and B2B relationships.

(Kaustuv Ghosh guest-blogs invariably every week. He works as Country Manager (India), Mobile 365, an international mobile messaging solutions company. The views expressed here are his own. Contact the author at kaustuv.ghosh@mobile365.com)

Kaustuv Ghosh's previous columns:
Digital And Development
On Branding Of Mobile Content And Applications
How About A Newspod, Mr Jobs?
On Mobility And The New Nomads
[ContentSutra]
11:05:40 PM    comment   

By using SupportSoft SmartAccess, Bharti can automatically determine if a customerâo[dot accent]s computing system qualifies for a high-speed connection and enable the customer to self-install their broadband Internet service. With SmartAccess, Bharti can reduce time consuming, costly household installations by Bharti service technicians and lengthy subscriber calls to customer service representatives for assistance. Through use of the software, Bharti can transition from assisted installation for all broadband subscribers to nearly 100% subscriber self-installation.

11:04:57 PM    comment   

Related:
India's Mobile Boom Continues; GSM Adds 2.11 Million Subs In October [ContentSutra]
11:03:46 PM    comment   

"Southern (emerging) markets like India and China will be key in our future development from Hollywood to Bollywood and Chinawood," Olivier Lafaye, Thomson's president for Asia, told reporters on the sidelines of a conference organised by the International Finance Corporation.

11:03:07 PM    comment   

Related:
WorldSpace Is Rocking In India; 114% Growth In Subscriber Base In Q3
WorldSpace Plans $100 Million IPO, To Invest In India Too [ContentSutra]
11:01:36 PM    comment   

A new addition to DoCoMo's 902i series went on sale today in Japan — the F902i, by Fujitsu. With this generation of phones DoCoMo is really pushing security — not because of any kind of recent increase in crime (I mean this is Japan, people are so polite they ask before stealing something) — but probably more to do with the fact that all new phones work with NTT's recently-introduced "osaifu keitai" ("phone wallet") service. Noteworthy points about this particular model, which has biometrics and uses the Mincho display font, after the jump...

— it has a fingerprint scanner to effectively lock / unlock the phone's features.
— the outer shell has an unorthodox round screen, suitable for displaying an analog clock.
— the display uses a font (Mincho) commonly used for print, which is easier on the eyes than the pixelly screen fonts usuallly found on such devices.

Other than that, this model features camera, mp3 playback functionality and all the usual bells and whistles we expect from a modern handset. Well, that's all very pleasant, but colour me a heathen if I'm the only one getting a little bored with phones coming out week after week with the same functions. So what do I look forward to? Personally, I'm a big fan of the ever more complicated and /or bizarre names they give to the colour variations of these phones and Fujitsu's 902i doesn't disappoint; one of the colours being the quite-possibly-female-oriented "Fairy Lavender".

Docomo F902i by Fujitsu [Product Page]
How to use osaifu keitai - a flash animation [NTT Docomo]

Docomo Cell Phones on Ebay [US Shipping Available]

10:51:53 PM    comment   

Hey, girls, do you believe in rootkits? Well Sony's got something to say about it, and it goes like this: poison every piece of media that comes through your front door with badly written malware. Infect Macs and PCs indiscriminately and cause all sorts of bad will in the techie world. Then pretend it never happened and offer a skeezy/non-existant removal option.

Basically, we've got a Mac version of the DRM that infects XP machines. When you pop in the disk, it installs a few excellent pieces of warez and angers me. I'm so done with physical media. ITMS/bittorrent all the way from now on.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of anyone installing kernel extensions on my Mac. In Sony's defense, upon closer reading of the EULA, they essentially tell you that they will be installing software. Also, this is apparently not the same technology used in the recent Windows rootkits (made by XCP), but rather a DRM codebase developed by SunnComm, who promotes their Mac-aware DRM technology on their site.

Boycott Sony products: Sony music CDs can install kernel extensions on Mac OS X [MacDailyNews]

10:51:10 PM    comment   

There is nothing uncool about this wireless earbuds concept from Plantronics called Versa. The design uses a miniaturized base outfitted with Bluetooth to connect to your cellphone, and RF to connect to the actual earbuds. Plantronics claims this technology is only "a year or two out from being ready to launch," but don't chuck your old buds just yet. The design comes in three styles: long, slim and metallic for men; a chrome necklace design for women; and a universal necklace/clip combo with colored anodized aluminum for teens. The design firm One & Co, creators of the Nike Triax and the PalmOne Zire 72, first unveiled this concept a few months back — but no one seems to have noticed until now!

Plantronics Versa [One & Company (via Core77)]

10:50:40 PM    comment   

Epson has announced a new synthesis chip, the S1V30100. I have yet to find a good piece of hardware or software that is capable of reading text in a clear manner that doesn’t sound like dyslexic stuttering robot, so I can hope this one is better. The big kicker is that this chip also supports five different languages at the moment with many others being developed. It uses the Fonix DECtalk v5.0 engine for the text-to-speech function. Going to be integrated into PDAs and smartphones? We can only hope.

Epson Chip Can Read Text… [I4U]

10:49:47 PM    comment   

Step 1. Make absolutely sure you have a volume operating system, and tons of ISV's. (And there you were thinking I was going to focus on hardware.)

Step 2. Have the fastest chip on earth.

Yes, the ordering is deliberate, and yes, my view is that software generally, and operating systems specifically, are the primary differentiator in microprocessor battles. Here are a few examples.

If you don't have a fast chip, but you have a volume operating system, time's your enemy - but you'll live to fight another day. Witness the enduring value of Intel's Xeon platform, which despite AMD Opteron's widening performance lead over Intel, has a legacy of support from Microsoft Windows (and Red Hat and Solaris) to carry it long into the future. It'll likely lose share between now and 2009, but it's certainly still in the game.

Let's look at the opposite scenario. Imagine you don't have a volume operating system, but you have a fast chip. In my view, that fight is futile. There are innumerable examples from history - the most famous, of course, being Digital Equipment Corporation's (now HP's) Alpha. Which despite blowing everyone away with performance (in its day), lacked either a volume OS or support from independent software vendors (ISV's). It died a lingering death. Intel's Itanium, which lacks a volume OS and ISV portfolio (and no, saying "Linux" doesn't count, you need a branded product name and version to which an ISV can qualify), is on this path.

So now, let me fall on my sword about Sun's microprocessor roadmap for the past few years. Unlike the late 90's, where Sun had a commanding performance lead, starting in early 2001, we couldn't claim we were satisfying step 2 of the two steps above - for many tasks, our older UltraSPARC chips weren't faster than IBM's Power5 (or Intel's Xeon). Luckily, we had an extraordinarily high volume operating system in Solaris, along with a big community of ISV's and software supporters who filled in our gaps. Yes, we lost share, but we still ship billions in servers a year.

The saving grace for Sun was that customers could run Solaris on x86 and x64 platforms. (In fact, I was with a big bank yesterday doing a very cool deployment of Solaris on Dell systems). Customers have a choice. Proving we encourage the choice, during that period, we added AMD's Opteron to our product family (read THIS!), and are now among the fastest growing x86/64 vendors out there (we've gone from something like 99th in the market, to being the 6th largest vendor, with #4 in our crosshairs). Customers also found the transition to Red Hat Linux to be an option - which thankfully kept them on Unix, and is now simplifying the transition back to Solaris.

But IBM's recent Power5+ announcement was odd - in that what we were expecting wasn't what IBM delivered.

Granted, I didn't get invited to IBM's P5+ roll-out. I was expecting yet another of IBM's periodic, methodical improvements. Something similar to the 2002 upgrade from POWER4 to POWER4+ - in which they executed flawlessly to increase speed, lower cost and power consumption. They did everything they could to make the chip work better at less cost. And that's what initiated a very tough period for Sun.

But the newly announced POWER5+ seemed anti-climactic - no higher frequencies. No improvements to memory. Not even a reduction in power consumption (making the POWER name, with oil at $70/barrel, particularly ironic). About the only tangible benefit listed for POWER5+ over POWER5 was a smaller die size - a manufacturing benefit for IBM.

The new POWER5+ is sitting today at the exact same performance point that the old POWER5 reached over a year ago. IBM has stood still - long enough to open a window of opportunity for Sun.

A few weeks before the P5+ announcement, we announced our own upgrade to our UltraSPARC IV processor. The new UltraSPARC IV+ is a completely revised design, which boasts a doubling of performance, a smaller die and lower power consumption. And unlike IBM, which is confining P5+ to a few of its low-end systems, we already have UltraSPARC IV+ rolled out across our entire line of mid-range and high-end servers.

And we're just getting going.

Real soon now (we've said January, but there is that holiday rush to think about), we'll be introducing our new Niagara-based product line. As I discussed a while back, Niagara is our internal code name for a radical shift in computing, and a redesign of SPARC. Niagara systems take the concept of dual core processors (with which most of you are familiar), and goes to an absolute extreme - building 8 cores, each capable of running 4 jobs simultaneously (4 threads), onto a single chip. Doing the math, we'll be delivering a 32-way chip, running 9.6GHz, which sips power (about 70 watts). On performance-per-watt metrics, we believe we'll be a factor of 5 better than what IBM just announced. A factor of 5.

The chip is built for Solaris, and built for the internet - for jobs like searching, web serving, video streaming or ripping through database transactions (we will be admittedly weak for bomb simulation). Niagara will run existing Solaris apps without recompilation - offering complete binary compatibility for the massive SPARC installed base, and a simple recompile to move from x64 (or vice versa). There will be nothing like it in the industry - and its arrival will give us the two strongest industry standard server lineups the market's ever seen.

But these things tend to go in 5 year cycles. Where we led in the late 90's, IBM exploited our weakness to lead until this year. And in short, the environment's right for another shift. SPARC was part of the first wave of RISC processors that dominated high-performance computing in the mid- and late-80's. In 1990, IBM introduced POWER, dominating until we introduced the first generation of our 64-bit UltraSPARC processors in 1995. Which dominated until IBM introduced their totally redesigned dual-core POWER4 in 2001, which dominated until this year. Now it looks like the pendulum is swinging back in our, and AMD's, favor - for a while.

Add in what Intel announced a few weeks back, with analysts predicting no recovery until 2009, and it appears SPARC and Opteron are set to lead the pack on 64-bit performance, on volume operating systems, and on giving customers the choice they want - until well into the future.

But returning to Step 1 above, the key trend to watch is Solaris's volume - as we transition from a company in which SPARC drives Solaris adoption, to one in which Solaris drives systems opportunity (x64 or SPARC). With Solaris blowing past 3.2 million licenses downloaded this week, 80% downloaded to non-Sun hardware, it's now effectively fueling awareness and demand.

And given those numbers, it's obviously helping out Intel's Xeon, too.

Now, about running it on POWER5+...

[Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog]
10:49:09 PM    comment   

To get an idea who Nokia had in mind when it designed its sleek, stainless steel encased 8801, consider this: The 8801 is available for pre-order from Neiman-Marcus, and rings in at a wallet-busting $900. With its arrival, expected here in the US in the next few weeks, Nokia is signaling its intention to pursue the same flighty Hollywood starlets that helped make the Sidekick one of this year’s biggest mobile phone success stories.

So what else does the 8801 deliver besides a hefty price tag? While it can’t match some of the latest high-end phones for features, the 8801 delivers a surprisingly good tri-band radio—no dropped calls, clear call quality throughout the Bay area (on the Cingular network)—in addition to some basic, if necessary, features including Bluetooth, an integrated SVGA camera and both a FM radio and integrated digital music player (it plays AAC and MP3 files).

The included Nokia PC Suite software made it easy to synchronize contacts and calendar information between a PC and the 8801 via Bluetooth. Apple Powebook and iBook owners looking to synch PIM data will need to buy PhoneDirector for $29.95, which will make synching up data a cinch. Finally, the 8801 offers EDGE-speed downloads and 64 megabytes of memory to store Java apps, pictures and even video clips.

Ultimately, the goal of the 8801 is to be seen and heard with it. The brushed steel exterior gleams, a unique slider-design that hides the 8801’s (too small) keypad, and the crisp 256K TFT display let the 8801 rival the RAZR and other design-first cellphones for sheer visual appeal. And every detail—down to the ringtones that Ryuichi Sakamoto composed for the 8801 at Nokia’s request—screams luxury. At nearly a grand, it’s not cheap, but if you want to fit in with Hollywood’s A-lister’s this may be just the phone for you.

Review by Matt Maier, wireless and gizmo correspondent for Business 2.0 magazine. Subscribe to his Weekly Wireless Report.

10:48:24 PM    comment   

According to Slashdot:

Amazon.com has a new program that wants you to ‘Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it.’ (example: ‘Is there a pizza parlour in this photograph?’). For each task you complete you get a small payment, usually ranging from a few cents to a little under a dollar. It’s named the Amazon Mechanical Turk after a famous hoax from the 19th century. Kill time and get paid in tiny increments to boot!

As if to prove there’s nothing new under the Web, here’s my prior art from 2000, when I worked at Oracle. (Note: this was done in my own time, and isn’t Oracle intellectual property. But I did pitch it to Oracle as an idea.) What’s interesting from a telco perspective is their failure to further develop the payments and small transactions side of their business. They should be in a great position to broker small payments between network users. The mobile operators are starting to make a go of it, with some success using kludges like reverse SMS. The landline operators haven’t really tried. (As usual, micropayments got caught up in a “content is king” miscalculation as payment for media, rather than focusing on user-to-user payments.) Perhaps if the billing platforms had been just a bit more open, things would be different?

Interestingly, Paypal has become the “banking parasite” equivalent of the VoIP parasites like Vonage. To operate fully Paypal requires you to back up your identity with existing banking products like a checking/current account and credit card. The banks pick up the expensive sales, marketing, credit control, operations and fraud costs of these products. By making two small random deposits into your account, Paypal gets to suck out some custmer data — the association of a person and account. They can be assured of its authenticity, all without having to make a business development deal with a bank anywhere. My bank now doesn’t allow automated establishment of direct debits (I have to fill in a hand-written form), which helps them to stymie companies like Paypal leaching off their business model. The banking equivalent of port blocking! Funnily enough, telcos have credit-checked customers whose real addresses are known. But that information hasn’t been capitalised upon in any horizontal business model extensions.

Anyhow, back to the main story. As a follow-up, I wrote:

The attached typemein.com proposal is really part of a bigger picture. What I’ve proposed - snippet data entry - grabs one of the lower hanging fruit on a big tree. In the longer run, what I’d like to create is a form of exchange for unskilled and semi-skilled on-line labour.

Hopefully that’s an Amazon patent application poisoned with a bit of prior art.

So, from historical interest, here’s the lightly edited version of my original paper. Read, and weep about another missed telco opportunity. Warning: Long, laboured, and only marginally on-topic.

10:47:54 PM    comment   

Will mesh networks necessarily evolve in an ‘open’ direction? I see this as an assumption, and one which is not necessarily true.

We’re seeing a progression in the nature of tele/com over a 50+ year period. Pre-Carterphone and the deregulation process, you owned nothing. You might even have been forced to rent your CPE from a limited telco-controlled selection.

30 years from now, we anticipate a complete reversal. The users, directly or indirectly, come to own the network. That could be via direct ownership, such as mesh or customer-built fiber; indirect, via some co-operative, housing or municipal association; or “reversed” where the other “end” of the end-to-end stupid network is someone like Google who subsidises connectivity. In any case, the telco has no more say over the transport than the company who laid and maintains the road outside your house has over where you drive.

We’re just in a messy middle transition phase with some unfortunate path-dependent detours.

The physics suggest a very large future for mesh networks. We can make up for hard Shannon limits by substituting computational effort in the devices. This computational effort is currently limited by our technology and imagination rather than physics, and seems set to remain so for several decades to come.

Now for the hard question: will the co-operative, open model of the IETF/IEEE necessarily triumph in implementation of mesh networks?

Future A: We end up with self-configuring, open, abuse-resistant mesh networks that easily attach themselves at suitable points to open Internet long-distance backhaul. The problem is mainly one of technical co-ordination (e.g. as the Wi-Fi alliance does for 802.11 interoperability).

Future B: We end up with closed mesh networks “owned” by those with the greatest distribution muscle. These need not be telcos; indeed, MotoNet and NokiaConnect are just as likely. The problem becomes one of economic co-ordination. For example, Nokia mesh devices are more attractive because Nokia has negotiated a broader coverage of back-haul provisioning and interconnect agreements; and Nokia’s 30% global market share gives it a decisive distribution advantage in attaining a critical mass of devices.

(If you’re a long-dated bond holder of a mobile operator’s debt, you’re excused now if you need to make a quick trip to the barf room, since neither scenario seems to play well for you.)

I find it really hard to discriminate between these futures. Are closed networks like Skype an inevitible short-term solution to integration issues of new technology, with the long-term always the property of open networks?

Sticking with the app layer as an example, will Skype prosper because it’s “cost of entry” is zero, unlike the prior closed e-mail operators like Compuserve? What are the real determinants of whether networked systems become ‘open’ or ‘closed’? Do those terms really have meaning?

Open for comments!

10:47:25 PM    comment   

This is the first of a trio of little articles on people intermediating telephony in different ways to add value and bypass traditional toll charges.

There are many providers of cheap dialling service in the UK. The windows of local ethnic shops are covered in adverts for them. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that London is the dominant hub of intercontinental traffic exchange in this hemisphere. Calls are very, very cheap. I can call people in the US for less than the usual intra-US long distance call rates. National calls are cheap, too. For instance the 18866 access code gives you unlimited UK landline calls for a 3p (about 5¢) flat connection charge. No metered calls, unless you really like paying.

So if you’re going to stand out from the crowd, you’d better be good.

What attracted me to DialAbroad was its unique unbundling of the telecom business model, and their blending of wireline and wireless toll re-intermediation.

To obtain credit they use reverse premium SMS, where you text a string to a short code number and are dinged a few pounds by your cellular operator. The cellco takes a cut, and passes on the bulk to the partner. This becomes your credit balance, nominally the same amount as you were charged. You then dial the access number, dial a PIN (if not from your cell phone), and drain down your credit balance. In additional you use minutes at the usual rate (i.e. virtually free on landlines, and cheap inclusive ones on mobile).

This is different from many of the other cheap dialling plans. They either rely on direct regulatory mandate to get access (such as the 18866 example), or directly piggy-back on mid-rate tolled calls like 0870 numbers that offer revenue share. In this latter case, you might be paying 15p/minute to call an 0870 number, 4p/minute goes to the partner, and 2p/minute is used to pay for international call termination, leaving a small profit for the partner.

The advantage of the DialAbroad way is that mobile users are calling a standard number which can be part of heir inclusive minutes, whereas whacky numbers like 0870 aren’t inclusive and are often charged at high rates.

I don’t normally use any of these services — I don’t make enough non-Skype calls for it ever to be worth my while shopping around! But for your benefit, dead reader, I spent my £3 and made a test call to my US SkypeIn number. It works!

So as an example of the different functions of an operator being separated and re-mixed, I can’t find a better case. Payment and access separated and re-modelled. A brilliant arbitrage play, if only subtly different from the bog-standard norm.

So I contacted one of the founders, Chris Smith, for an interview to find out more.

Telepocalypse: What difficulties have you encountered in getting your business set up?

Chris Smith: The main difficulty was largely a technical one; how to integrate an incoming and outgoing facility into one account to try and reduce roaming charges. The amount of research and development was vastly in excess of what we had originally expected.

T: Have the telcos or regulators put up and barriers in your way?

CS: Not yet! We did carry out some preliminary talks with OFCOM [the UK regulator] to check that our position was secure and that the mobile operators could not simply deny access to our service, and were told in no uncertain terms that OFCOM only really deals with BT and competition issues related to BT.

T: Do you think that the telcos will restructure their international call pricing as a result of your service?

CS: Undoubtedly, yes. The industry generally is moving away from voice to data to maintain AMPU in the realisation that voice margins are going to be cut to the bare bones in the wake of competition anyway. The cost of roaming data is certainly going to be the next point of attack for us - currently you could find yourself paying up to £10/mb when travelling abroad.

T: What about your customer base or business has surprised you most?

CS: We were surprised that our customer base is made up mainly of normal people, not the early adopters and technophiles that we expected. It seems that almost everybody is aware of the prohibitive cost of roaming and now they have a comprehensive solution.

T: How do you see the future for businesses like yours 2-3 years out from now?

CS: Telecoms changes very quickly so it is hard to predict. Clearly the mobile operators will respond and price will once again be the key driver - we feel we have a very robust business model and pricing structure and intend to compete with the big 4 for some time to come.

So in conclusion, whilst DialAbroad is hardly going to lead the Voice2.0 charge, it renders the carrier into separate “dumb payment service” and access pipe. And it’s an interesting example of the 2rd law of telecom: for every toll booth, there is an equal and opposite bypass. Many thanks to Chris for sparing the time to talk. I wonder if any of the telcos will take the hint and realise that all those CRM systems, billing engines and retail outlets make them look rather like banks? Who said you needed to make money moving bits when you can do it moving money?

UPDATE: Here’s a typical convenience store shop front from my cosmopolitan neighbourhood.

10:46:51 PM    comment   

I’ve bought about £3000 of Sony equipment in the last 6 years or so, and undoubtedly have piles of Sony-issued CDs and movies.

I don’t foresee myself spending another penny with them until they repent. DRM is clearly incompatible with general-purpose computing devices. It’s one thing to build a closed product like the iPod with clear boundaries and expectations, quite another to launch a quasi-criminal broadside against your customers’ PCs to install DRM measures.

Hey, how about the Million Blog Challenge: 1,000,000 blogs with their templates re-written so every post starts and ends “*** Don’t buy Sony products until they respect their customers: www.sony-screws-your-pc.com ***”. Maybe that’ll get their attention? Time for a PledgeBank initiative?

Childish lashing out? Not a patch on the damage Sony’s done to their customers and people’s confidence in their computers, electronics and media.

If one wanted to be vicious and infantile, it would read “*** Samsung make great displays, phones, laptops & the new XBox is cool, so why buy Sony? www.sony-screws-your-pc.com ***”.

Meow.

10:44:29 PM    comment   

Word reaches your Sniffer that there may be a very simple explanation for why Telefonica is happy to pay so much more for O2 than the market expected: they're buying a pig in a poke.

10:43:18 PM    comment