September 2007 Archives
Sprint has announced progress with their mobile WiMAX initiative, Xohm, saying they will have the service available in select cities by Q2'2008. The company is enthusiastic about laptop and tablet PC manufacturers claiming they will have embedded Mobile WiMAX in their next generation machines. Sprint has placed a big bet with WiMax. Despite marketing efforts by Intel and the WiMax Forum, the spectral efficiency and overhead signaling in 802.16e-2005 has disadvantages compared with 4G standards, LTE (Long-Term Evolution) and UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband).
Improvements in standards are all about spectral efficiency. The 3G and 4G debate places LTE as leading with WiMAX and UMB competing for second place. 4G is characterized by larger channels (up to 20MHz) and uses the popular OFDM modulation scheme. GSM and WCDMA carriers will follow the 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) path to LTE as the 4G standard. UMTS is the dominant 3G standard and now with improvements brought with HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) and even HSUPA (uplink), we actually see good broadband performance in the wireless wide area network. The second 3G standard is CDMA EvDO (used by Verizon in the U.S.).
What is confusing for WiMax is that the IEEE is already working on improving the standard called, "IEEE 802.16m," due to be ready by 2010. No one knows if this will be backward compatible with today's WiMax implementations. The advantage of UMB is it is backward compatible with CDMA systems even though there is a dependency on a single supplier of chips - Qualcomm. With WiMax-802.16e becoming commercially available in 2008 and Intel's delivery of chips in laptops; it has a strong head start. Intel was instrumental in establishing the explosion of 802.11 WiFi networking. The big difference here is you are dealing with licensed spectrum where the stakes are much higher than merely establishing a de-facto standard such as WiFi. As Peter Gabriel says, "Too much at stake, ground beneath me shake; and the news is breaking." I hope the monkey doesn't get hurt.
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google is reported in early talks to join a group looking to lay a high-speed, trans- Pacific undersea cable that could potentially lead to the Internet company becoming an investor in the project, according to the Wall Street Journal. This could make sense for Google but we still have not seen the how they plan to become a carrier. While there has been widespread "leaks" and news about bidding on wireless spectrum, developing gPhones, municipal WiFi networks, fiber networks and IPv6 addresses, they have yet to deliver a real business plan. The disruption of Internet service last year in China due to earthquakes has prompted other major carriers such as Verizon and AT&T to start new trans-Pacific builds. The bandwidth could be used to provide more reliable Internet VOIP service, video and online office applications. Hey we were just talking about subterranean blues!read more | digg story
There is a cool new Facebook application just out. It's a customizable version of Bob Dylan's music video, "Subterranean Homesick Blues." You enter in your message text into ten boxes and the program customizes itself. Bob himself scrolls through your message in the video. You can then post it to your Facebook profile. Don't tase me bro, it's all done legally. The creators, techlightenment, won the account to create a Facebook application to celebrate Bob Dylan's forthcoming single and his recent album for SonyBMG.
You can see an example on this site by clicking here. If you are on Facebook, you can download the application here.
The guys at Nexcess have been doing a great job helping me configure my Movable Type installation. Their support is great. We recently got the registration working - it was user administration error (me) not the platform. They also got my web services authentication to work so I can blog directly from making a DIGG entry. This is cool pass-through web services in Web 2.0!
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Google announced today that they are launching AdSense for Mobile joining a number of other players such as Yahoo, Microsoft, Nokia and Time Warner who have launched similar services. Most industry observers believe there is a strong market for advertising on mobile handsets given the growth in the number of devices in the world. The article references several research firms with market estimates forecasting aggressive growth rates for both mobile search and display advertising. Here is where I have the problem. The success of AdSense depends on search, that's how it works. On a mobile device you do a search and you see AdSense ads come up - presumably in a browser if your PDA or device is so configured. The web experience on Blackberries, RAZRs and other handsets with homegrown Internet browsers are extremely cumbersome to deal with. These devices represent 80% of the market, not the 20% comprised of full feature-rich PDAs like iPhones, BlackJacks and other handsets will full operating systems & browsers. The other option that might be more interesting is getting AdSense to work without mobile search. This might be accomplished by utilizing the back-channels in the spectrum to push content to devices that are in idle mode or just connected to the towers. In 2005 we began seeing carriers opening up their handset portals to Google and Yahoo thereby moving aware from their wall-garden approach for Internet access. The old approach to mobile search was a convoluted connection of WAP, third party mobile portals, search engines, carriers and handset cooperation that resulted in a very poor user experience. You could pull pieces of the ecosystem out to separate the supply chain for a white box solution but there were still too many connections that needed to be made. The other big problem I see here is the revenue model. Mobile Internet searches are not optimized for content buying or advertising because most of the results are informative rather than point-of-sale oriented. Today on the web, you click-through on the AdWord link, that's how people get paid. Ideally you want real mobile commerce where you would buy something with your device and your charge would show up on your carrier bill. Don't get me started with carrier billing systems - they are brobdingnagian complexity of how to extract revenue from the traditional mobile world.
Yahoo announced yesterday it is acquiring Zimbra for $350
million, some industry observers think Zoho may be next. We have seen an uptick
in the drive toward integrated collaboration applications among the big players
either organically or through acquisitions. Zimbra supports MS Exchange and
Apple Mail clients and servers. They also have mail support for Blackberry and
Windows Mobile. Google Gmail already has many of the features that make Zimbra
interesting for Yahoo. For example, Gmail can enable users to retrieve package
tracking data; all using AJAX popups and rich-client UI's sans postbacks. Many
Web 2.0 features already present in Google, for example Maps, have just
appeared in Yahoo platforms. Even Apple is gearing up iWork 2008 for the
enterprise, I have seen an increase in Apple within the enterprise lately. IBM
announced today they will offer free open-source programs for word processing,
spreadsheets and presentations based on Symphony and OpenOffice.org. All of these applications are geared toward
sharing and collaboration. Using standards such as XML, and direct-drive
publishing to social networking sites using web services provides formidable
competition to Microsoft Office 2007. Microsoft notes (no pun intended for
Lotus Notes!) they have 500 million users of Office worldwide. Last count,
Zimbra had about 6 million paid mailboxes. There is still a big market and most
users have more than one email client in use. Microsoft has not been successful
in establishing Office Open XML as a standard with the International
Organization for Standards (Geneva). IBM, Google and Sun support the OpenDocument
format based also on XML and has been approved as an international standard. Use
of AJAX and even VOIP is nothing new here but Zimbra has done a good job
briefing key analysts and showing how their applications are used in a
corporate setting. They have a good customer base and group of loyal users,
especially in higher education. Their offline tools and mashups are
particularly useful in a corporate environment for distributed teams. Yahoo in
most people's minds is still focused on the consumer and this makes sense for
home and personal use.
The financial backing of Yahoo should help Zimbra drive further into commercial environments. Most enterprises have their own well-established email, contacts and calendaring infrastructure. Now IT has to contend with business users demanding richer collaboration tools with better web user interfaces and performance. Interoperability among email platforms is becoming more essential to widespread adoption of newer web-based, client-side enhanced applications such as Zimbra. Document conversion is not completely error prone either which forces some level of standardization among major enterprises.
In my post on CIO.com, I talk about how Web 2.0 technologies have a consumer-side economic model of use and consumption that may be at odds with the policies of IT management. Many IT executives have expressed interest in Web 2.0 attributes such as Wikis, blogs, user-generated content and the like, but many do not know where to start.
read more | digg story
ECS (E-Commerce Service) from Amazon is one of the best ways
to make money on the Internet. They have spent ten years and over $1 billion
developing a world-class web service that millions of customers use daily. Developers
can build ECS interfaces to their applications that leverage the data used by
www.amazon.com, including the items for sale, customer and seller
reviews. This also includes most of the functionality that you see on their
site, such as finding items, finding similar items, displaying reviews and
product promotions. ECS is a web service and application programming interface
(API) that is accessible with either SOAP or REST protocols. You can build your
own web store to sell Amazon items or your own items, it's an engine you're
getting. ECS is free but something alarming may be developing. A Canadian
startup, TXTReviews, which allows people to get book and movie user ratings via
text message, says they're being shut out of Amazon web services. Amazon admits
that they limit access to mobile-focused companies to ECS. Presumably, this is because
they say the mobile space is in its early stages. The Amazon infrastructure EC2
or S3 web services are free in exchange for driving traffic back to Amazon's
site. On a mobile device, that may not be possible depending upon the availability of
a suitable browser or a wide area wireless connection. TXTReviews uses SMS, not
a web interface. Amazon would like customers to shop on their site, making this
of mutual benefit for the developer and Amazon. Device limitation should not be
a factor as new standards for m-commerce are required to facilitate true mobile
commerce.
Facebook has grown quickly but has only taken in $35 million
in venture financing. According to its investors, it is on track to hit $150
million this year in revenue. In 2006, Facebook was valued at $525 million and
received $25 million in funding. The next round of financing will value
Facebook much higher, some investors like Peter Thiel think they could be worth
around $10 billion. Don't count out the other guys, even though MySpace numbers
are dropping, a recent internal Google video leaked detailing plans to
integrate some of their offerings into a 'facebook' like experience. They would
accomplish this by combining Picasa, GTalk, Calendar and Reader.
They will need
to beef up their address book functionality and make considerable upgrades to
Google Reader.Every interaction will be managed by a complex web of dynamic feeds based on preference and collections. Google wants to create some standards so users can notify aggregators of their update feed across syndicated content and other Web 2.0 venues. It's all about who can get the applications out faster and grow membership and use of those apps the fastest. One simple application on Facebook called "Visual Bookshelf" helps members find new books by providing recommendations from reviews written by their friends. The company who created the application, Hungry Machine LLC, says the application is adding 10,000 users a day. They have a link back to Amazon and a commission is generated for each book sold online. Visual Bookshelf didn't replace what Amazon does; it merely provides a plug-in gathering point to enhance the Facebook user experience -not requiring them to leave the site to look for books. It's a different channel to market. That's the way you monetize the Facebook effect - rather it be with Google or any other Web 2.0 company.
According to recent reports, pernicious code is being spread through an instant message syntax that sends a message to Skype users directing them to click on what appears to be a .jpg file. When the user takes the bait, it unleashes a worm (W32.Pykspa.D - a nasty bitmap file of soap bubbles contained in the Windows installation directory). Many IT professionals and analyst firms such as Gartner Group do not recommend enterprise users install or use Skype. However, surveys have indicated a high percentage of professional workers regularly download and install applications such as Skype onto their corporate laptops and PCs. With 200 million users, hackers cannot resist the installed base of Skype users. Even though these events set back the image of Skype, Skype still makes headway - note the recent announcement that Wal-Mart has agreed to sell Skype's service.
Then there's Apple with a year-old
QuickTime vulnerability that affects Firefox and iTunes. Petko Petkov (aka pdp)
posted proof-of-concept code showing how QT formats can be used to hijack
systems. Firefox recommends installing NoScript, a Firefox extension to
protect. However, most users run software in default mode without knowledge of
what to turn on or off that protects against malicious code. How often have you
been browsing for WiFi access points only to find some SSID named 'linksys' with
no security whatsoever? We have been accustomed to living with these sorts of
threats, just look at how large the anti-virus and intrusion detection software
has grown over the years.
read more | digg story
A recent BusinessWeek article cites "sources" close to Steve Jobs that Apple may enter the January 16th spectrum auction by the FCC. The 700MHz spectrum is some of the best because at these low frequencies, it can penetrate building better and provide better data & internet access. The minimum bid if $4.6B and Apple has $14B in cash. Both Google and Apple could really drag down their profits by getting into the cut-throat service provider business. The name of the game here is coverage. Jobs has made a point that WiFi is better than 2.5G and 3G, true, but it does not have the coverage model that WWAN does. Factor in the lack of WiFi roaming and you end up with a very fragmented network. Network aggregation like what iPass does might work however. Imagine having an Apple or Google SIM chip to place in your device of choice. Apple sales of the iPhone has already exceeded 1,000,000 units in only 74 days. The Internet companies getting in the business will be the next inflection point of the Internet as we know it today.
Microsoft sees strategic value in IPv6
because, among other things, it eases the process of setting up peer-to-peer
(P2P) gaming programs and migrates customers to IPv6 as IPv4 addresses get used
up. On the down side, however, IPv6 can also double Vista's attack surface. Several
leading security analysts are recommending you disable Vista's IPv6 capability
by turning off Teredo tunneling through the network.
Teredo/Miredo is available for the most popular operating systems allowing you to penetrate popular NATs and Firewalls. It can likely allow you bypass any blocking or censorship policies on your network. It even works from China, so you can use it to read your favorite blocked sites. Improper use can be dangerous to network managers.
Lockeed Martin is one major company rolling out IPv6, "eating their own dog food." However most enterprises realize making IPv6 do every single thing that IPv4 can do is no easy task. Many switches (which don't need to support IPv6 to transport IPv6 packets) only support management over IPv4. Firewalls and load balancers lack functionality, and although a lot of software already supports the new protocol, there is also a great deal of software that doesn't. Not to mention people having trouble getting network-attached printers to work. Unless it's possible to make the modifications in-house or get a vendor to make them promptly, supporting IPv6 often requires workarounds in the form of reverse proxies. For the time being, most companies are still waiting to see how this develops. Google is an LIR (Local Internet Registry) and has snapped up a huge block of IPv6 addresses. They own about 79 billion billion billion addresses (that's 2 to the 96th power). IPv6 will allow Google to index every device on the planet (think M2M).
As RIM continues to grow, most well capitalized companies lose their chance to acquire it. You begin to only have Cisco, Microsoft, IBM and maybe Motorola or Nokia with the financial ability to do so. Ostensibly, Microsoft buying RIM makes sense. One reason: RIM is growing; Microsoft is not. With RIM's licensing model they aim to be the Microsoft of the wireless messaging world and have made remarkable inroads over the years. RIM creates the dominant platform in wireless messaging and a stable technology stack that other vendors can build and sell hardware and software. (Sound like somebody you know?).
RIM's email technology is built for the server and should be part of an operating system. Why would you want to handle messaging with the dependencies on the medium in which those messages travel? That's what RIM does when they install the server software in enterprises and in telecom carrier data centers. By integrating RIM messaging software in the OS, the solution becomes more economical and easier for IT to manage.
Developers writing software for the PC market are riding an anemic market in terms of growth. Not so with messaging and unwired devices. There is more innovative development of wireless applications as the number of installed devices reaches prodigious proportions. The only challenge I've heard from developers is writing code for RIM is burdensome compared with writing on Microsoft platforms. Assuming Microsoft keeps the RIM operating system around (another blog topic indeed), they would need to include a robust RIM SDK and developer plug-in to their much-acclaimed Visual Studio.
The naysayers claim that Microsoft would have never let a real acquisition target get to $40B before taking it out. Also the incompatibilities between the two operating systems make it like mixing oil and water.
With $61B in cash, Bill and Steve have a fat wallet but that doesn't mean the money is burning a hole in their pocket. Could this a pairing off? Can Microsoft with RIM compete with Apple and Google in the long run? I'm not sure buying RIM is enough. Google appears to be getting into the phone business as well. Think Gmail messaging on a Google platform funded by the Google ecosystem.
The Google Phone gets real as various scribes hint at prototype features: The Boston Globe on its Qwerty keyboard and three-dimensional animated buttons; Om Malik on its specialized browser, mobile-Linux OS and Java apps; TechCrunch on how Google's Gpay mobile-payment system could be the Google Phone's killer application; and Rational Security on the ads Google will run on the phone to make it free. Is this the beginning of free phone service?
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