Just getting back to the groove - back in Bombay - and in the midst of shifting homes.  There's been so much activity in the blogosphere lately - and so many neat items in my news aggregator i want to talk about - just listing them here as a reminder to me :

• KM Europe - Lilia, Ton, Lee Bryant (sad to have missed him in London) and many others have been posting their notes and views and links to some really cool presentations
• All the recent VC and merger activity around social networks and social software - Huminity gets funding, Ringo gets acquired by Tickle/Emode, LinkedIn and Friendster get funding, Spoke raises another $10m  .....
• Posts from several people on RSS / weblogs and Knowledge Management / corporate blogging 

But first - i must complete my series on my meetings with bloggers :)

9:22:37 PM    comment []  trackback []

Its all happening in the VoIP arena - telcos are beginning to offer VoIP to its DSL customers. 

I am convinced that this technology will really take-off big time once its taken off the computer onto a handset.  Especially in a country like India where PC ownership is low, and one million new cell phone users are added every month. 

Lawrence Babbio, vice-chairman of Verizon, made this announcement :

"VoIP for the mass market is coming," said Babbio, "and just like with LNP (local number portability) there is nothing anybody can do to stop it." Babbio said Verizon would be very aggressive in meeting or beating the pricing of any consumer VoIP service. The company is currently planning a two phase strategy. Phase One, beginning in Q2 2004, will be a non-QoS consumer VoIP offering that will be positioned as a second line service for DSL users. Verizon will either outsource the service or build the application itself. They will offer several plans for local/LD/international calling, as well as free on-net calling. It will also include numerous Web-based features, such as a voice portal, voice-dialing, web-based voicemail, and address book integration. Phase Two, beginning in Q4 2004, will be a managed network, QoS-based VoIP service designed to meet Verizon's traditional wireline quality standards."

Two points of view on this piece of news : 

This is absolutely the right transition for a company like Verizon to make, though it will be difficult to pull off. Many of us have long intoned the mantra that "voice is just another application on converged data networks." We're finally seeing it happen big time.  [Werblog]

I've emphasized part of the quoted passage because I think it spells out what is wrong with so many large companies.  Here we have something like VOIP which is potentially great for consumers and has been a commercial possibility for at least a couple of years and these guys are finally admitting they can't stop it.  Which says to me that they don't give a rats about the customer.  They might as well say:

"The customer will get what's in our interests to give and like it.  Oh and we've all merged together to avoid competition.  And don't think of starting a new venture in this area, we'll sqush you like a bug."

Where was the vision to say "This is a great thing for customers, how do we make the most of it?"  Like the RIAA dinosaurs these guys can't see past their narrow short term business interests to the longer play.  In this they do not serve real shareholder interests because they don't build long term value, instead squandering opportunity on shoring up dying business models.  [Curiouser and curiouser!]

8:31:41 PM    comment []  trackback []

Now theatre comes to computers - here's an article about playwrights experimenting with a new form of delivery : [New York Times: Technology] 

Sounds like an interesting experiment - perhaps more like an interactive computer game - am wondering whether it can ever replace the joy of a night out at the plays - or the ambience of a live performance and live audience !

"The project is called the Technology Plays, a theater experiment that is trying to take the old man-versus-machine theme to new extremes. The writers, led by Mr. Dresser and Mr. Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Ironweed," have fashioned an unsettling exhibition challenging conventional notions of what theater can be and how it can be delivered.

Mary Valentis, an English professor who produced the plays, said the intent was to meld classic storytelling with new technologies to invent a new kind of theater and to raise questions about how technology has reshaped humanity"

"...... In hindsight, Richard Dresser says, the commission was a painful test for a playwright, and he took it only because he thought nothing would ever come of it. But then the project landed a grant, and he was faced with what he had promised to do: write a seven-minute play about the interplay between man and technology, without live actors, to be told through machines to one person at a time.

"It took away everything I use as a playwright, basically," he said.

But the more Mr. Dresser, the author of "Rounding Third" and "The Education of Max Bickford," among other plays, meditated on those restrictions, the more he felt inspiration rising in his chest. After all, machines had insinuated themselves into the lives of people in a thousand forms, he said, so why shouldn't theater strike back and insinuate itself into machines? "

8:11:39 PM    comment []  trackback []