New Florence. New Renaissance.

VoIP Wars - sobering realities

With all the excitement around Sykpe, GoogleNet, Apple's move to integrate the cell phone and the iPod that Om and John write about, it is easy to forget SBC and Verizon. BusinessWeek has a nice article on the two US communication giants. Post-ATT acquisition, SBC is expected to be $ 99 billion. Post-MCI, Verizon is expected to be $ 93 billion. Post respective acquisition, SBC and Verizon will control 80% of the corporate market.

Yes, domestic US long distance rates have been beaten down, but international rates are still wildly inconsistent. Try calling from one European country to another on a US cell phone plan. It is cheaper to fly thereWhen you see what corporations pay for wireless (cells, PDAs, WI-FI roaming etc), data services, videoconferencing and whole bunch more it explains why connectivity is still the single biggest line item in many CIO budgets.  For most families, the landline, cell, broadband cable and related equipment plans are a sizable "utility" spend - since the majority still buy connectivity on a fragmented basis.

So, yes new competition is good, and good old fashioned negotiation is still needed just as CIOs and regulators may be starting to feel sorry for the "BabyBells" and other national carriers.

Technology Innovation and Prince Charles

Prince Charles in an interview with ABC News  said this about technology, "If you make everything overefficient, you suck out, it seems to me, every last drop of what, up to now, has been known as culture,"

"We are not the technology. It should be our ... slave, the technology. But it's rapidly becoming our master in many areas, I think," he said.

May be he does not realize how many classical composers are now downloaded in MP3 format. How many period pieces are available in DVD format. How museums and libraries are benefiting from technology. How WI-FI and WI-MAX will allow rural living to continue and get richer.  How even his beloved polo is being helped along.

The tech world needs to win him over. As part of the first generation of royalty to have grown with television and computers we need him as a fan...

Software Innovation - Optimize Magazine square off

Optimize Magazine asked me to provide commentary on whether innovation is lagging in the technology industry, especially software. Here is my column. The opposing viewpoint in the Square Off comes from David Thomas of the Software and Information Industry Association.

My points:

a) we are actually seeing a lot of innovation - Florence during the Renaissance
b) CIOs are, however, in a dark mood as most of their spend is on utility v/s innovation
c) the big software vendors,  however, are only spending 15% of revenues on R&D
d) most of their R&D is going in to "tinkering" - as even Steve Ballmer of Microsoft acknowledged recently. Most of the innovation has come from smaller software vendors.
e) CIOs should negotiate hard to get an "innovation dividend" from the vendors and assign that instead to their own innovation "tiger teams" as I have profiled in my category Innovative Business Uses of Technology

Enjoy the cheap seats!

Tom " Passion" Peters

If you have ever seen "Mr. Excellence", Tom Peters present on stage you understand the meaning of the word passion. The man who made "Management by Walking Around" mandatory corporate behavior walks so much around the stage, you worry about his exhaustion.  So it was great to see this inspirational post from him. Even when you are dog tired (and God who would not be after a 76,000 mile trip)  what you are working on may be the most important thing for your client or customer...find that extra ounce of energy.

I posted this blog under the Innovative Uses of Business Technology category because Tom continues to exhort excellence, creativity, breakout performance. As I have written before CIOs should be pushing to get an Innovation Dividend and then doing their own applied innovation as Hertz, Starbucks. Jetblue and others have done. As they do so, Tom's zany, think out of the box concepts are just as important as building blocks of emerging technology.

Tom  is also a very generous blogger. Many of his prolific presentations and publications are free for download on his blog under resources.

I find it ironic that the Forbes tirade against blogs recommended publishers sue bloggers for copyright violations. Pretty soon - it may be the other way round. Tom (and many other bloggers) offer the world so much for free.

Keeping on walking, Tom!

Innovation by Re-organization?

3M has long been known as an innovator. 

But as this Business 2.0 article mentions "A little over five years ago, several top executives at 3M called together their senior managers in R&D to show them the not-so-rosy writing on the wall. The company’s annual revenues were stalled, and the new-product pipeline was inefficient and unpredictable. Groups of researchers had become too fragmented to develop ideas that led to breakthroughs or blockbusters. In short, innovation at the century-old American icon needed a reorg. Soon thereafter, newly hired CEO James McNerney -- a Jack Welch protégé who had been a finalist for the top job at GE -- tapped Larry Wendling, the vice president in charge of 3M’s central R&D lab, to rev up the company’s invention machine."

Reorg as the solution? Too many corporations reorg every few months. What is interesting about this story is how the re-org  re-energized innovation - the relevant kind that yields new revenues and profits. Read on...

3M has long been known as an innovator. 

But as this Business 2.0 article mentions "A little over five years ago, several top executives at 3M called together their senior managers in R&D to show them the not-so-rosy writing on the wall. The company’s annual revenues were stalled, and the new-product pipeline was inefficient and unpredictable. Groups of researchers had become too fragmented to develop ideas that led to breakthroughs or blockbusters. In short, innovation at the century-old American icon needed a reorg. Soon thereafter, newly hired CEO James McNerney -- a Jack Welch protégé who had been a finalist for the top job at GE -- tapped Larry Wendling, the vice president in charge of 3M’s central R&D lab, to rev up the company’s invention machine."

Reorg as the solution? Too many corporations reorg every few months. What is interesting about this story is how the re-org  re-energized innovation - the relevant kind that yields new revenues and profits. Read on...

Economics in New Florence

Wow can you have great taste and less filling? Innovation at utility pricing? Can you get to the New Florence and not spend your life savings?

See this story on Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite in Business 2.0. Look the economics today compared to just 7-8 years ago.  Intel based hardware, open source, global labor, search based marketing, (and likely some software as a service). He says from idea to launch cost him $ 3 m at Excite, and only $ 100K on his new venture Jotspot.  Wow, even if the ratio was 3 to 1 rather than 30 to 1, it would be impressive.

I am even more convinced the bigger software and services vendors are Killing the Golden Goose.

Wow can you have great taste and less filling? Innovation at utility pricing? Can you get to the New Florence and not spend your life savings?

See this story on Joe Kraus, co-founder of Excite in Business 2.0. Look the economics today compared to just 7-8 years ago.  Intel based hardware, open source, global labor, search based marketing, (and likely some software as a service). He says from idea to launch cost him $ 3 m at Excite, and only $ 100K on his new venture Jotspot.  Wow, even if the ratio was 3 to 1 rather than 30 to 1, it would be impressive.

I am even more convinced the bigger software and services vendors are Killing the Golden Goose.

Emereging Technologies: ExtremeTech

In keeping with the theme of Florence during the Renaissance, this is part of a series of posts around what various industry influencers consider promising - or in some cases over hyped - technologies. It goes way beyond the current buzz around Web 2.0. Some technologies/tools are available today - others are still a work in progress, and applications will take a while to be commericially viable. Not all may directly influence information technology, but as we know advances in most branches of science eventually impact others.

I liked the taxonomy ExtremeTech, a Ziff Davis site uses to organize its materials on emerging technologies

3G Networks- The evolution of wireless networks into voice, video and data. 

Bio Chips- Technology inside the body.

Digital Paper- Foldable, persistent electronic displays and e-ink. 

Digital Rights Management- The war over content, and the rights to use it.

eBooks- Publishing in the electronic age. 

Fiber- Last-mile, high-speed broadband.

Fuel Cells- Techniques and implementations of alternative fuels. 

GPS- Finding your way in the digital age.

Grid Computing- Distributed computing, thousands of servers, one Web site.

Identity Management - The pros and cons of warehousing personal information.

Internet2- How the next-generation Internet is being used. 

IPv6 -Tracking the shift toward the complex, next-generation IP addressing scheme.

LCOS- Liquid Crystal on Silicon technology, displays and enhancements.

Mesh Networks - How WiFi networks are being tied together into municipal broadband.

Nanotechnology - Enhancements in science, medicine and technology at the molecular level. 

Organic LEDs - The problems and potentials of low-cost, self-luminous displays.

Photonic Computing -Computing with light—instead of electricity. 

RFID -Dog tags for the digital age—the devices and the deployments.

Robots - The evolving robot, in automation, medicine, and the home. 

RSS -The evolution of content distribution on the Web.

Satellite Radios - Coast-to-coast radio, in your pocket and your car. 

Sensors -Without sensors, there is no detection. And with no detection, there is no control.

Smart Home - How technologies like voice recognition, Bluetooth, and Z-Wave will automate the home of the future. 

Solar Power- How researchers and corporations are using the sun as an alternative fuel source.

Ultrawideband - From Wireless USB to wireless surround sound, UWB is leading the way. 

VOIP -The handsets, services, and technologies allowing you to make phone calls over the Internet.

WiMax - Intel has high hopes that this will replace DSL and cable broadband. We’ll tell you if it will. 

Zigbee -Making sense of this cool-sounding technology for unwiring home automation.

Emereging Technologies: MIT Technology Review

This is part of a series of posts around what various industry influencers consider promising - or in some cases ove rhyped - technologies. It goes way beyond the current buzz around Web 2.0. Some technologies/tools are available today - others are still a work in progress, and applications will take a while to be commericially viable   Not all may directly influence information technology, but as we know advances in most branches of science eventually impact others.

Technology Review, asssociated with MIT, had this list in May 2005

Airborne Networks - An Internet in the sky could let planes fly safely without ground controllers
Quantum Wires - Wires spun from carbon nanotubes could carry electricity farther and more efficiently
Silicon Photonics - Making the material of computer chips emit light could speed data flow
Metabolomics -A new diagnostic tool could mean spotting diseases earlier and more easily
Magnetic-Resonance Force Microsocpy:  The promise is a 3-D view of the molecular world
Universal memory: Nanotubes make possible ultradense data storage
Bacterial Factories: Overhauling a microbe’s metabolism could yield a cheap malaria drug
Enviromatics: Computer forecasts enhance farm production and species diversity.
Cell phone viruses: Wireless devices catch bad code through the air and then infect supposedly secure computer systems
Biomechatronics: Mating robotics with the nervous system creates a new generation of artificial limbs that work like the real thing.

This is part of a series of posts around what various industry influencers consider promising - or in some cases ove rhyped - technologies. It goes way beyond the current buzz around Web 2.0. Some technologies/tools are available today - others are still a work in progress, and applications will take a while to be commericially viable   Not all may directly influence information technology, but as we know advances in most branches of science eventually impact others.

Technology Review, asssociated with MIT, had this list in May 2005

Airborne Networks - An Internet in the sky could let planes fly safely without ground controllers
Quantum Wires - Wires spun from carbon nanotubes could carry electricity farther and more efficiently
Silicon Photonics - Making the material of computer chips emit light could speed data flow
Metabolomics -A new diagnostic tool could mean spotting diseases earlier and more easily
Magnetic-Resonance Force Microsocpy:  The promise is a 3-D view of the molecular world
Universal memory: Nanotubes make possible ultradense data storage
Bacterial Factories: Overhauling a microbe’s metabolism could yield a cheap malaria drug
Enviromatics: Computer forecasts enhance farm production and species diversity.
Cell phone viruses: Wireless devices catch bad code through the air and then infect supposedly secure computer systems
Biomechatronics: Mating robotics with the nervous system creates a new generation of artificial limbs that work like the real thing.

"The Deep Web"

While all the recent buzz is on the New Web - the congruence of the mobile web, blogging, podcasting, new Media -, several different data points this week brought to mind the Deep Web. As the site says the "60 largest Deep Web sources contain 84 Billion pages of content. For comparison, Google (the largest Crawler-based search engine) indexes 4 - 6 Billion pages."

I was talking to a Gartner executive last week  about the potential threat of blogging to their business model. If you buy in to the fact that Google and other search engines are becoming the de facto search interface for even corporate users, the likely search results on technology topics show blogger opinions first, then those from industry media, finally some publicly released industry analyst results.  If eyeballs are important, the analyst firms are losing that battle. 

Then I saw this Business 2.0 list of  "technologies that change everything" - and "Deep Web search" is one of them. It lists Google, IBM and Yahoo and a few specialist vendors as those to watch in the category. Oracle and Microsoft are noticeably absent.

Finally,  major book publishers sued Google this week for its attempts to digitize copyrighted materials - Google's attempt to make the Deep web a little "shallower".

I imagine the battles to digitize proprietary and other "deep" content and to optimize every growing search/database access is going to be just as fascinating to watch as the New Web evolution. 

Keeping the US competitive

A wide ranging set of observations and recommendations about keeping US competitive especially with growing concerns about competition from Chindia came out last week from the US National Academies of Sciences. See the entire pre-publication copy of "Rising above the Gathering Storm" here.

Four high level initiatives recommended by the powerful committee (CEOs of Intel, Exxon Mobil; Presidents of Yale and MIT, 3 Nobel prize winners among them):

a) Ten thousand teachers, 10 million minds - increasing investment in K-12 science and math
b) Sowing the seeds - investments in basic research
c) Best and Brightest - incentives for Americans and immigrants and doctoral and other foreign students
d) Incentives for innovation - IP protection, tax incentives, broadband ubiquity

Now for some action...

A wide ranging set of observations and recommendations about keeping US competitive especially with growing concerns about competition from Chindia came out last week from the US National Academies of Sciences. See the entire pre-publication copy of "Rising above the Gathering Storm" here.

Four high level initiatives recommended by the powerful committee (CEOs of Intel, Exxon Mobil; Presidents of Yale and MIT, 3 Nobel prize winners among them):

a) Ten thousand teachers, 10 million minds - increasing investment in K-12 science and math
b) Sowing the seeds - investments in basic research
c) Best and Brightest - incentives for Americans and immigrants and doctoral and other foreign students
d) Incentives for innovation - IP protection, tax incentives, broadband ubiquity

Now for some action...