Usher Blogs

Ironic...

Exactly one day after I all high and mighty about using IM and presence I receive my first instance of SPIM (IM Spam) courtesy of the MSN network and I was unable to access my Yahoo contacts through the Gaim client I use. 

(Full disclosure, Jabber, Inc. an enterprise IM and presence leader is my client).  The SPIM issue is a very strong argument for using an enterprise solution for business.  The Yahoo issue today exposes one of the fundamental problems of business IM, we're all using different services and protocols and rely on too many hacks to get everything working in a single window.  Its time for the consumer services to get serious about interoperation and federation so that IM becomes much more pervasive and useful as a business tool.

There are Only Two Kinds of People...

that I do business with: those that at least tactically understand presence and use IM regularly, and those that don't.

Those of you I regularly play phone tag with know who you are. Better, faster, more coordinated is the work product produced for your peers when we're regularly sharing presence information.  Qualitative data to be sure, but I'd be willing to bet the cost of quantitative analysis that I'm right.

Open v. Closed

I don't think they went with XMPP.  They have a tremendous user network and I think they could have extended their brand better by going open standards.  Google should have made it worth their while to go with XMPP, but alas, Trillian, Gaim, et al will have to learn another protocol (will they ever add Skype?)
Link: Myspace Joins IM Fray.

Macworld's Gadgetbox: Nokia 770 adds Google Talk

Link: Macworld's Gadgetbox: Nokia 770 adds Google Talk.
Google and Nokia are thinking big in this proof of concept device and could dovetail nicely with what Google has proposed for free WiFi.

Reaching for the "Fat Pipe” Dream…

Way back when in 1995 I remember hearing about cable modems for the first time and how they were going to change everything about the Internet.  Later how fiber optics were going to allow my phone company to deliver “every single movie ever made in every single language 24 hours a day” (or something like that, apologies to the original copy writer…) 

Om Malik reports that Google wants to deliver “answers anytime anywhere to anyone, and looking beyond a desktop PC.”  Their plans for free broadband in San Francisco could be an interesting pilot over time that fulfills these promises.

 If they can get their QoS in San Francisco to POTS-standard, and they were to partner with a cellular provider and handset manufacturer, they could create a universal handset for San Franciscans.  Certainly a wireless client can be made (this + this for instance) that will work well with what Google is already brewing, and delivers broadband access within city limits.  You then can have universal voice, universal IM,  and when you’re within WiFi, universal broadband Internet, delivering a lot of the types of services Google wants to sit on top of.  When you’re outside of WiFi coverage you have what amounts to cell phone coverage, courtesy of your cellular provider. 

From a revenue model perspective, Google could have pricing tiers which will raise some very interesting privacy questions.  At free, Google will initially give away the WiFi service.  I don’t think that will change. 

Further down the plank of the the free tier, Google could give away even more (all voice, hardware, TV service, etc.) and in exchange you give them increasingly uncomfortable amounts of personal data.  Google gets to mine your habits, location, etc. and deliver very personalized, time- and location-sensitive advertising.  For San Franciscans on the free plan, Google is your gateway to the world, and the gateway into your life for anyone wanting to sell you anything.  That is the power position.  While advertising has the potential to get creepily sophisticated in this model, I am not opposed to this per se.  I’d like to be able to opt out easily though (irrelevant to me in Denver at this point.)  If our privacy and our personal data have value (which they do to too many entities anyway) I think we at least receive some value for it in this scenario.  We get nothing as it is.

At the other end of the revenue model, you pay for the services you pay for now (i.e. voice, hardware, tv, etc.) and you receive certain privacy guarantees and more commercial-free programming with every dollar your spend.  You as the consumer decide what tradeoffs you want to make. 

It creates an interesting dichotomy to be sure, while possibly helping to bridge the digital divide.  It would create a situation where the poor could be preyed upon, but it would also deliver information sharing tools that help to develop the type of keen minds that make their own choices and tune out bad programming. 

I hope they get the SF contract because I would like to see what they do.  If it’s a crappy land grab, it will fail, if it offers real choices it could be a model. 

The big roadblock to me is how revenue sharing would work between cellular providers, handset makers, and Google, and would how quickly would the advertising become compelling enough for all the players to invest heavily in the partnership.  Would incumbents like SBC and Comcast be willing to relegate themselves to being simply the big pipe and not the brand on the valve?  I guess we'll wait and see.

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Amtrak, Nagin, and Presence

I was watching "Meet the Press" and Russert was interviewing the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin.  Tim reported that Amtrak is saying they offered free train rides out of New Orleans the Saturday night before the storm.  Nagin said he never got that message and would have appreciated it.

In a game of "Who's the Rat?" I think Amtrak is a government-dependent junkie turning a political trick.  Amtrak probably was moving idle assets out of New Orleans, but it is hard to believe that something that bleeds red ink as badly as Amtrak could possibly be horizontally integrated into an emergency management information architecture and participate in a major evacuation on short order. 

Note: we really should commend New Orleans and Louisiana on what overall was a very impressive ability to evacuate a million or so people out of severe harm's way.  I also think we should take Nagin at his word that New Orleans knew it didn't have the manpower to evacuate the 100,000 or so people who for a host of reasons were staying behind.  Getting everyone out is plan A, but to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go into Katrina with the city you've got...they circled the wagons and evacuated most everyone to the Superdome, convention center, hospitals and hotels, and waited for the cavalry.  They did the right thing. 

But back to Amtrak.  They probably were moving idle assets out of New Orleans on Saturday, probably wanted to help, and they probably did have open capacity, but I'd be surprised to hear that they're capable of communicating any of that beyond their existing communications silo. 

The problem with playing "Who's the Rat" is that you come out ahead only by losing less.  Because the truth is, even if Amtrak knew all they could know about the trains they had that were in a position to help, mayor Nagin's office had no way of putting that information to good use.  In this game, Amtrak probably also contacted the mayor's office leaving Nagin to look like a lying-to-cover-my-own-ass politician. 

The enormous challenge for FEMA is that the Federal Government does not have a grip on the how to manage the mass of information needed to marshal all of the assets of the Federal Government in a disaster.  At the same time, state and local governments, NGOs, and civilians have no way to reliably put this information to use were it readily available. 

What lacks on the national level is a securely federated identity and presence management system.  When the mayor issued the voluntary evacuation order, or even when the President declared a state of emergency, a federation should have occurred between all relevant nation, state, local and even NGO information chains that pooled all available emergency assets. 

(This means that at every level of government there has to be superior monitoring of what assets exist, their precise location, their capabilities, and their state of (dis)repair.  It also means you have to know the location, role, and availability of your human resources...no small challenge.) 

Were this system in place when an emergency alert occurred, locals access and sort through a mass of information by simply requesting what they need and leaving it to the power of presence to sort out which resources best suit their need, how they get them, and whatever else they need to know about them.  In the case of New Orleans and Amtrak, a local church could have called an emergency call center asking for help evacuating some of the elderly in the neighborhood.  The call center could have then informed them of train availability.  Knowing where the city's buses were could have allowed the call center to arrange a pickup or encourage the church to organize volunteer drivers.  If the church could relay their volunteer information back to the information pool, those volunteers could be tapped for other evacuees as well. 

This oversimplifies the architecture I am sure, and certainly overlooks the legal and privacy issues involved.  On the other hand, that can and needs to be managed if we are to expect seriously responsive government in times of crisis.  Here the Federal Government can play a constructive role as information clearinghouse and provider of very big assets. 

Skype and eBay...

There is chatter that eBay plans to buy Skype for several billion.  I don't know the veracity of the rumor, though its been reported in the WSJ and Reuters along with a host of blogs.  Arienna Foley thinks it is crazy,  Dan Gillmor finds it puzzling, and Fred Wilson doesn't see the synergy.  I think a lot of other people are probably scratching their heads as well.

I think they're missing the point, if true I don't think it has anything to do with eBay moving outside of its core business, I think it is eBay's way of tapping presence.  With Skype, eBay buyers could see if eBay sellers were online and ask them questions right away, facilitating eBay's core model.  With Skype's voice conferencing (and perhaps text conferencing too) down the road eBay could move to a more engaging style of live auction where bidding is more real-time.

What I don't get is the price...I don't presume to know what Skype is worth and a few billion may be right on the mark.  But if eBay is after the presence and voice piece they could build or buy the technology themselves for a lot less...just ask Google.

Modular, Distributed Nervous Systems

I was talking with a Professor of Neurology (a.k.a dad), recently and we got onto the topic of Jabber, Inc., a client of mine for 3 years. I recounted for dad a media pitch we used to explain the importance of presence information in real-time government scenarios copied below: (reader note: there are real life examples of this stuff I just can't say much about them.)

Take the following example. Along I-80 in Nevada :

A state trooper on a routine traffic stop notices something suspicious. The driver is not intoxicated though his eyes are red and the car seems to smell heavily of flowers though none are present. The driver has done nothing illegal other than speed, so the officer issues a speeding ticket and lets him go. In processing the ticket, the officer notes his suspicions in a secure and global chat room.

Upon receipt in the chat room, several people are notified based on various settings including origin of the report and keywords. For instance, the trooper's direct supervisor receives the information as part of a regular review of what his troopers are observing. Seeing no patterns in this information it is discarded by the supervisor. However, at the CDC in Atlanta , an on-duty analyst is alerted because of the combination of key words/phrases, 'eye irritation' and 'strong floral scent.' The analyst in Atlanta sends an instant message to the trooper asking for more specifics. Now concerned, the analyst invites the trooper, an FBI agent in Washington and the trooper's supervisor to a text conference where the CDC analyst explains the driver may have been exposed to the nerve/blister agent Lewisite. Immediately, an all points bulletin is issued for the driver who is subsequently stopped for further questioning.

In the same way, seemingly incongruent small points of information from around the globe can be brought into centralized text conferencing rooms where based on availability, area of interest, and expertise the information is monitored and patterns can be more easily found.

His reaction was “that’s essentially how the brain works.” It takes in raw sensory data, adds to it context based on a set of variables and instructs the body what to do next. More recently, I was reading an old Gartner research note (12/17/2001) on the arrival of ENS or enterprise nervous systems. Without saying the word presence, the authors described pretty well how the ability to process presence variables and add context to data is a foundation of the ENS.

When the light bulb went off, this is what I wrote:

Presence In People:
Time, Place, Mood and more are:

• Human presence variables
• Variables that affect how we process sensory inputs

Human Central Nervous System (CNS)

• Processes sensory inputs and variables
• Adds context to raw data

Contextual Data

• Informs our actions, especially in crisis

Presence in Networks:
Time, Place, Connectivity, Mood and more:

• Are network presence variables
• Affect how information is sent, received and processed

A Distributed Nervous System

• Processes distributed presence variables (data, apps, srvcs, human attributes, etc.)
• Adds context to distributed data streams
• Distributes contextual data to where it is needed

Contextual Data

• Enables better informed decisions to be made faster
• Enables informed decisions to be distributed widely and appropriately
• Distributed decisions are made with centralized cohesion

I think the seeming parallels between how the human brain processes decisions and how advanced and intelligent networks are beginning to make them is fascinating stuff. To me it seems like decoding the human genome. Only it can’t be reverse engineered. Meaning we’re working forward defining a proliferating number of presence variables and coding how they change the handling of ever increasing streams of data.