Quote
"I can’t think of anything that demonstrates the sovereign nature of the self better than a blog.” - Doc Searls
About the Author
Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive,
and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative
and social technologies. His new blog is Message.
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Monthly Archives
September 11, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I received email from a reader today suggesting a take a look at Skype, whose peer-to-peer text and audio IM solution is in beta and can be freely downloaded. The company was founded by Niklaus Zennstom and Janus Friis, two of the founders of KaZaA, and they are continuing their efforts to apply peer-to-peer technology to provide mass market breakthrough technologies.
I fiddled with the client, and was really happy with the speed and performance both in text and voice chat. The voice chat (unlike Yahoo and MSN solutions) did not involve using a wizard to test the various settings of my microphone and so on -- which is a good thing if your microphone and speakers are already configured correctly, but may be bad if they are not. I thought the quality was slightly better that sample audio chats that I had later on with MSN and Yahoo, but still reminded me of talking to someone's cell from your cell -- even with full duplex there seemed to be some cutout. On the other hand, the guy I was chatting with did not have a headset and was simply using his laptop's embedded microphone. Note that this was with full end-to-end encryption of the audio content.
I presume that Skype plans to roll-out video at some time in the future, a capability already supported by MSN and Yahoo. (I intend to test these existing services in the next few weeks when my new laptop arrives.)
In principle, Skype audio can burrow through firewalls, NAT, and routers without configuration changes, unlike some of the stories I have heard about MSN and Yahoo audio. However, the company hedges: "In short, Skype works behind the majority of firewalls and gateways with no special configuration."
Skype does not have a central network like MSN, Yahoo, or AIM, aside from providing a centralized connection to the network for creating initial user information and to connect when coming on-line. A distributed and dynamic mechanism to manage the status and IP address of those participation is maintained in a "Global Decentralized User Directory" that they call Global Index. As they state, "The Global Index technology is a multi-tiered network where supernodes communicate in such a way that every node in the network has full knowledge of all available users and resources with minimal latency."
I guess I would be willing -- as a private individual -- to tap into the Skype network to save money on audio conferencing when compared to telphone. The challenge for Skype is to get those already happy with Yahoo and MSN (and soon, AIM) audio solutions to switch over. And of course, to roll out video. However, corporate users may be less happy about the peer-to-peer approach, even though the traffic is encrypted, since it will tap into computer resources of those PCs on the network.
The success of Skype seems to hinge on the degree to which the other services are blocked by firewalls, NAT, and routers. Over the next few weeks, I will continue to compare the service side by side with contacts working behind firewalls, etc., and see if there is a real competitive advantage there.
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| Category: Telecommunications
September 10, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
OracleWorld is being held this week in San Francisco, and I had the chance to speak with Glen Vondrick, CEO of FaceTime, at the conference yesterday. FaceTime introduced an integration of its technology with Oracle's Application Server Portal at the conference. FaceTime is a leading player in the exploding market for enterprise instant messaging management solutions (archiving, security, and secure gateway technology for interconnecting public and private instant messaging networks) as well as real-time applications that leverage instant messaging (such as IM-based all center solutions).
Vondrick is very pragmatic, and has guided FaceTime through a very fast growth curve, based on listening to "what paying customers are willing to pay for," as Glen puts it. Clearly, real-time enabling the Oracle portal technology must be one of those critical needs. Oracle has yet to release instant messaging in its own Collaboration Suite (see Oracle's Angle: Second Generation First Time Out), but plans to do so in the first half of next year. Even so, FaceTime's solution will serve a critical purpose, which is serving up presence information in the portal about those using public networks (such as AIM, MSN, and Yahoo) or those using other enterprise instant messaging products -- FaceTime is partnered with IBM Lotus and Reuters, to name only two enterprise instant messaging providers.
Facetime has posted some impressive stats, such as gaining more than 50 of the top 100 global financial services firms as clients, to no small degree because of the company's history of listening to the customer. But the integration with portal technologies like Oracle opens up larger opportunities for the company, and a broader application for real time collaboration capabilities than simple instant messaging.
I have been writing for the past several years about the coming "war of the stacks" (see Get Real) where the major players in enterprise architecture integration will push instant messaging infrastructure deep, deep into the service stack. This means that IBM, Microsoft, BEA, and Oracle will be competing around these capabilities along with the ongoing battle around portals, application servers, middleware, and the like.
FaceTime, and its competitors, like IMlogic, Akonix, and IM-Age are likely to become critical pieces in the chess match between these enterprise architecture giants. I will be profiling all three companies in the next week or so, as well as digging into their strategies for future growth and success.
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| Category: Technology
September 09, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Kathy Englar invited me to meet with some of ActiveBuddy's sales and marketing team yesterday, briefly, on my short trip to the Bay Area (attending the OracleWorld conference, about which more later).
I had a chance to meet Kerry Christensen, the VP of Sales, who has been with the company only a few months, but seems to have a really good feel for what's involved in enterprise sales based on his 15+ years in the EDI software space and his more recent tour of duty with Liberate (Larry Ellison's foray into the world of cable).
ActiveBuddy seems to be continuing on with a very determined sales campaign, and have some new high visibility customers. As just one example, Comcast has rolled out a self-help customer support bot on their website, called AskComcast. As a Comcast customer, I can attest to the horrible customer support that Comcast has offered in the past. I played with the bot, and got some relatively good responses to simple issues, like configuring my email client. I can see how this will offload customer support reps from the mundane and leave them more time to deal with larger problems (like my aggreived call last week, when I discovered Comcast has installed a new email management program that limited me to no more than 20 outbound emails/hour, without informing me).
Kerry also mentioned that Verizon will be rolling out an ActiveBuddy solution for self-help customer support (as well as several internal, undisclosed projects).
Looks like ActiveBuddy is riding the self-help customer support wave, and hard. Companies are looking to cut costs, and it is an interesting paradox (to paraphrase Larry Ellison) you may need to be willing to spend less to offer better customer support.
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| Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I read at Gizmodo that French woman was 'texting" -- SMS instant messaging -- at 170 km/h and crashed into a police car, killing two policeman and some other bystanders.
I recall an moment of absolute terror when I narrowly escaped death while I (I admit it!) was IMing on my cell phone driving down 101 in California, because I didn't have the phone number for the person I was late to meet. I am now reformed. I pull over to IM.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology
September 05, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Bob Woods, the highly regarded former editor of Instant Messaging Planet, had been involved in Imvector, an instant messaging start-up, for a ten month period, but recently left to pursue new opportuinities. He contacted me today to let me know that he making a big transition into outside sales for Arch Wireless (www.arch.com), which sells one- and two-way paging/messaging services, along with many other wireless services (but not voice). He will be working out of their Tyson's Corner VA offices. Seems that Bob has been bitten by the sales bug after his experiences at Imvector.
(By the way, here's a link to an issue of Message that profiles Imvector.)
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| Category: Business
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I had a long chat with Mike Jones, president and partner of Userplane, yesterday regarding the company's A/V Instant Communicator technology. The company has developed a audio, video, and text instant messaging solution geared built on Macromedia's Flash Communication Server. Mike's group is one of the pioneers who are developing very sophisticated applications upon the Flash Communications Server, in essence treating Flash as a application development, programming system, app server, and web-based portal technology.
One of the most compelling arguments for looking at this technology is that the free Macromedia Flash plug-in is installed in almost 90% of connected desktops, and is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux. And even PDAs.
The A/V IC product is geared toward online community use, such as a on-line dating site or a company's on-line help desk. And because of Macromedia's built-in optimization of streaming, video and audio is handled easily. Flash will recognize a video camera attached to your PC and will immediately start using it, without any real fanfare. While video on PDAs may not be perfect, video works well on all computer clients, and audio and text everywhere. The company has a variety of technical approaches to handle the integration of existing users into the system, so that presence information can be managed.
I didn't dig into the numbers, but Userplane's A/V Instant Communicator sounds affordable, and perhaps more robust than Java-based competitors in this market niche. And certainly lower cost than heavyweight corporate IM solutions. For smaller companies, the product might be an cost-effective replacement for corporate IM.
One of the interesting features is the ability to log video and audio as well as text messages that are sent through the system. Based on similar technology, the company has created A/V Recorder, an application that allows the user to create streaming video that will be delivered, again, through the flash plug-in. I learned that the company has near-term plans to partner with another firm to support a video blogging service, which will enable blog authors to incorporate video recordings into their existing blogs. I plan to test that out here, soon.
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| Category: Technology
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I was contacted earlier this week by Stewart Butterfield, the visionary behind Ludicorp and that start-up's massively parallel role-playing game-in-progress, The Game Neverending.
Over the next few months, Ludicorp will be actually rolling out the gameplaying part of the Game. In the meantime, he has enlisted a seemingly fanatical group of beta testers who are working hard to smooth out the communication infrastructure for the complex and highly social (and neverending) game that Stewart and company envision. The idea is a complete social world, with individuals wandering around encountering other folks, bumping into objects, buying land, setting up businesses, forming cults, making war. (Reminds me in some ways of the virtual world in the Neal Stephenson book, Snowcrash).
To support this intensely social scene, Ludicorp has developed a few interesting concept around instant messaging.
He has defined two sorts of social groups: Circles and Orgs. Circles are egalitarian, and all members has similar rights and controls. Orgs are more like hierachical organizations, with those higher on the totem pole limiting or directing the choices and rights of those subordinate to them, like military or religious groups.
But for both sorts of groups, the Game supports group presence: associated with the group information is an icon that presents a 'completion bar' icon -- like the one used for installing software -- that indicates the number of online group members relative to the overall number. Stewart plans for a variety of more complex sorts of presence -- indication of group status ("voting" or "working independently") or goals ("Looking for allies" or "trying to sell copper") for example.
I am very taken with group presence and its possibilities in the business context: business process status ("awaiting signoff from Bill") and project status ("90% completed"), as only two basic examples, could be transmitted through group-oriented buddy lists in an economical, concise, visible, and real-time fashion.
I was also intrigued that the system supports a scalar approach to degree of relatedness, including acquiantance, friend, close friend, soulmate (they are changing that name), and enemy. I think all social systems need a way to designate enemies.
My personal interests are not the game itself, per se, but the constructs that Stewart and company are developing to support rich, real-time interaction for online communities. I'm sure there will be lots to learn from watching what happens at The Neverending Game.
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| Category: Art & Entertainment
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Courtesy of Ed Brill (and CRN), I see that IBM is planning to release the long-awaited 6.5 version of Notes this month. 6.0 was released at Lotusphere, and the 6.5 beta was released in the spring, but IBM is pushing to release this month (surprise) to beat Microsoft's Office 2003 Live Communication Server offering to market.
This release is particularly interesting relative to the Industry Insider because IBM (Lotus is just a brand nowadays) is integrating instant messaging into 6.5, and creating a new 'rich client' for Notes that incorporates the functionality of the Lotus Instant Messaging (formerly Sametime) client. From one perspective, this is simply a way to reduce the number of client apps running on the desktop. However, from another perspective, it can also be viewed as a move to block other IM vendors from moving into the Notes userbase.
Note that IBM has also announced (although they have no press releases at either IBM or Lotus websites on these announcements) that Notes is viewed as an element of the IBM Lotus Workplace initiative, which includes Workplace Messaging and Lotus Instant Messaging. And, in time, the two technologies -- Workplace Messaging and Notes -- will be consolidated as a single technology.
IBM seems to be trying to hold on to what they've got, and who can blame them? The real juncture for Notes and Sametime users is downstream, when the somewhat murky future plans for Workplace become more clear and they can begin to plan what transition to make: from Lotus to IBM, or from Lotus to other vendors? A very dangerous period of time for IBM, and likely to trouble not a few of their current clients, given all the architectural changes, brand shifts, and organizational shuffling going on.
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| Category: Technology
September 04, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
New "Message is the Medium" column at Knowledge Management magazine, called Faster Knowledge. Extends the observations of David Reed about the value of networks, into the real-time communication era. "Boyd's Law, or the Law of Synchronization Amplification:
As companies seek to increase their individual responsiveness and decrease the impacts of volatility in their markets they will increase their synchronous communications with partners, but the net effect will be an increase in asynchronous operations of the meta-enterprise.
This seeming paradox is simply explained. A real time enterprise will have more frequent communication with its partners -- passing information from application to application, or conducting real time communication between members of real time communities -- and as a result, the latency in information transfer decreases.
This means that companies in the meta-enterprise are free to take action on this lower latency information earlier, increasing overall performance across the meta-enterprise. Or put another way, decreasing latency in the individual communication events translates to higher probabilities of increased parallelism in the overall network. This emergent property of increased real time communication in networks is exactly the value creation that David Reed was getting at.
In human terms, and leaving the queuing theory aside, this value increase grows from the power of social groups. Its not quasi mystical chaos theory -- it's just practical."
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September 03, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
New "Social Commentary" column at Darwin, where I profile VisiblePath, a very focused relationship management application.
[from Cracking the Social Code]
I think VisiblePath has cracked the code for enterprise adoption of social networking technology, which gets down to business basics and leaves the social altruism aside. It's not just building a better Rolodex: it's keeping your network happy, and at the same time making your partners' wallets fatter when they throw you a lead.
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Culture | Technology
September 02, 2003
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Kapi Attawar has left Endeavors Technology, whose Magi IM instant messaging technology I have reviewed in the past, where he was serving as VP Marketing. Joe Anzenberger has been promoted to VP Marketing, and he and I will be speaking later this week regarding the direction for Magi IM.
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| Category: Business
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