Communications

Where's the money in Communications for 2009 & beyond?

Sorry, no magic answer.  But I look forward to eComm 2009 to provide a lot of ideas in the first week of March.  The speaker lineup is posted and the list is both impressive and diverse.  Like last year, the format is a single track with a veritable firehose of information, mostly in 15 minute and 5 minute talks.

Based on last year and what I know of the speakers on this year's list, it fair to say Lee Dryburgh has done an excellent job of picking interesting and bleeding edge speakers.  I'm also on the speakes' list and I have to say I'm working hard to make sure my 15 minutes lives up to expectations.

Even though this is a terrible time for conferences, eComm has signed up an impressive list of sponsors.  The facility (The San Francisco Airport Marriott Hotel) is larger this year and so there is still room for additional attendees, but early bird prices end this week.  Also the extra 20% off you can get my mentioning my name ends this Friday, so if you are thinking of attending sign up this week.

So here's the deal, if you mention my name you get 20% off.  More specifically, if you enter the promo code "BroughTurner" (case-sensitive) at the appropriate point during registration, you'll get 20% off the registration fee.

Best conference bet for 2009 ― eComm 2009, March 3-5, San Francisco

I attended a number of conferences in 2008, both interesting and not so interesting.  One conference stands out, for the range of interesting speakers and the variety of interesting people I met.  That was the first Emerging Communications Conference, eComm 2008, organized by Lee Dryburgh.  Many of talks from this conference are available on Slideshare and as podcasts on IT Conversations.

eComm 2009 is scheduled to take place at the San Fransico Airport Marriott, March 3-5, 2009.  I highly recommend you check it out.

This is not a trade show with vendors hawking today's products and multiple tracks full of vendor product pitches. 

Presenters have been chosen for the quality of their proposals:  is it new?  is it disruptive?  what will the audience learn?  (As an adviser, I've been in on those discussions).  Like last year, the format is one track spread over three days, with 15 minute presentations, 5 minute lightning presentations, panel discussions and social time.  It all adds up to a veritable fire hose of information.

There's a list of speakers here.  Major topics for 2009 (so far) include:

* Mobile Social Networking (MoSoSo)
* Open Handsets & the Open Ecosystem
* Both Voice and Video Evolution
* Convergence of Media with Personal Communications
* Open Spectrum
* Open Communication Platforms
* Leveraging Cloud Computing
* Social Computing
* Towards 4G Wireless
* P2P and Decentralization of Telecoms
* Communications enabling business processes, especially B2C
* New Forms of Contactability and Connectability
* Emerging Markets

And last, but by no means least, if you mention my name you get 20% off.  More specifically, if you enter the promo code "BroughTurner" (case-sensitive) at the appropriate point during registration, you'll get 20% off the registration fee.  This works now, while early bird rates are in effect, and I'm told it will also work right up to the last minute ("late", not on-site registration), although then it's 20% off the full conference rate, and only if the event is not sold out!

I hope to see you there.

Human nature can't endure the current rate of change - from 1883!

I had an interesting discussion over dinner last night with a mother whose daughter is in college.  She was relating how her daughter follows the news, gets her opinions, etc.  Of course her daughter was blogging and using social networks to keep multiple lines of communications open at once.  This led to the typical lament, "the world is changing more rapidly than I can understand."  We hear this in many contexts.  Here's one that's fairly far afield for me, but still typical:

...technology is changing at a pace without precedence in human history. One day's marvel becomes a necessity of ordinary life the next. Rapid technological change permeates the whole of human existence, exhausting our mental ability to comprehend and cope."

By amazing coincidence, yesterday I also stumbled on this article from the Atlantic Journal written in 1883.

"The world is too big for us, too much is going, too many crimes, too much violence and excitement. Try as you will, you get behind in the race in spite of yourself. It's a constant strain to keep pace... and still, you lose ground. Science empties its discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment. The political world is news seen rapidly, you're out of breath trying to keep pace with who's in and who's out. Everything is high pressure. Human nature can't endure much more."

Indeed, earlier technology transitions have also upset people -- think of the Luddites responding to the industrial revolution.  While the pace of change may be increasing, emotionally disturbing change has been affecting individuals for several centuries.

Skype - MySpace integration falls short

In a recent article over at Skype Journal, I lamented the fact that Skype had not built it's subscriber base as rapidly as I'd hoped or as rapidly as QQ in China or even (perhaps) Windows Live Messenger.  Shortly after I wrote those words a friend pointed out the MySpace-Skype announcement from last October.  It sounded like just what I'd been adovocating, i.e., Skype cuts deals so they interoperate with as many communities as possible thus growing the range of people I can connect with.

I immediately went to my (otherwise little used) MySpace account to check it out.  Unfortunately, the integration between MySpace IM and Skype only applies to voice!  You can't chat between the two services.  What good is that?

One of the significant features that Skype introduced was the idea of combining presence, text chat and voice conversation in a single user interface.  That value is lost when the MySpace - Skype integration is restricted to voice calling only.

Asian innovation in mobile social networking

I'm continually amazed at the East-West cultural gap (that's between Asia and the US/EU, not between Boston and Silicon Valley).  It goes both ways, but as an American Internet and mobile enthusiast with Asian connections, I'm usually struck by US ignorance of Asian Internet and mobile services.

Today, China has the worlds largest mobile population and the worlds largest Internet population.  Korea is a leader in high speed broadband, as is Japan.  Japan is also the #2 economy in the world and arguably the world's leading mobile society.  Surely it's worth the time to understand what's happening in their markets!

For a change, over the weekend, I stumbled on an excellent presentation, What Asia can tell us about mobile social networks, from O'Reilly's conference, Graphing Social Patterns East, held in June in Washington DC.  The presenter was Benjamin Joffe who resides in Beijing where, among other things, he's the founder of Mobile Monday Beijing.

Some of his numbers may be a year old, but the impact is clear.  Asian services like QQ (740M registered users), CyWorld (used by 90% of young Koreans) and Mixi (10M mobile users in Japan) typically started before Facebook, have many more features, and are profitable!
Here's Benjamin's features list:

Check out the entire presentation.  Well worth the effort!

Woman in High Tech — Is it getting better?

Woman's Radio News has a great interview with Dr. Dawn Nafus about her upcoming appearance at eComm 2008.

Dawn Nafus, Ph.D., an anthropologist at Intel, discusses why a technology company would have an anthropologist on staff, and exactly what she does for them. Dawn will be speaking at the eComm Conference being held March 12 - 14, 2008 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Her topic will be “Context Aware Technologies” and how they can assist different cultures and countries around the world.

About 4:30 minutes into the interview, Pat Lynch asks Dr. Nafus why there are only a few women on the program at eComm and indeed at most high tech conferences.  She doesn't have a simple answer but she does point out it's a myth that women's position in high tech is getting better gradually over time, at least in Silicon Valley.  Silicon Valley is very young in the grand scheme of things, it has little or no history.  And yet, it has reproduced the male dominated culture that was a characteristic of older industries.  Now older industries are improving at a greater rate than high tech.

I just recently read Herman Goldstine's classic history of the early days of computing, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann.  Interestingly, some women play key roles, not just Ada Byron (Lady Lovelace), but multiple women during and after WWII.  And when I think back to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) that I joined as a student in the early 1970s, there were more women involved in programming, and the mathematical side of the computer industry than in traditional industries.  Also my first part time job was with a small company where 25% of the software staff (1 out of 4) were women.  :-)

Recent counts by VC Christine Herron of women at high tech conferences range from 13% to 18%.  Many old line industries have changed.  But not high tech?

I look forward to hearing Dr. Nafus speak on "Context Aware Technologies" at eComm this coming week.  Hopefully I'll also get a chance to talk with her, as she mentioned some references to recent literature on women in high tech.

Emerging Communications Conference 2008

I'll in California quite a bit in March and April, but the highlight is my first week, when I'll be speaking at a new conference, eComm 2008, March 12-14.  While the conference in new, the community is established and fascinating.  eComm 2008 being put together by Lee Dryburgh, who was on the program committee for O'Reilly's eTel conferences.  When O'Reilly cancelled eTel 2008, Lee took the initiative to keep that incredible community alive.  He was soon joined by many others.

Click through the logo at the left for conference info.  Right now there's a board of advisors, an incredible list of speakers with more on the way, a wiki and a Facebook group with 170 friends!

The first thing I look for in a conference is interesting people, then new ideas.  eComm promises an abundance of each.  The focus is next generation personal communications and the schedule is set up for rapid fire delivery inlcuding many 5 minute and 15 minute sessions.  As far as new ideas goes, this will be a fire hose!

*** Correction: 12/21 ***

The conference is being held in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.  This easily beats the typical conference facility, but it means there are only 300 paid admissions available.  Registration has opened, here.  If you register before the end of 2007, the $1495 registration fee is marked down to $1195.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Who will unify my communications?

2 email accts/ 7 email aliases/ 4 IM accts/ SMS/ this blog/ Bloglines (238 feeds)/ BlogRovR (480 feeds)/ LinkedIn/ Facebook/ Myspace/ Twitter/ 23 other "social" networks/ 3 PSTN accts/ 2 mobile accts/ Skype/ FWD/ ... 

...accessed via 3 different PCs and 2 different mobile handsets, at least on most days.

These are not just information flows — most have associated directories of friends, business associates and other acquaintances.

One year ago I wrote:

...  I already run four instant messaging clients on my laptop.  A single client would be nice, but it's not that important.  Once we finally learn how availability should work from an existing player like Skype or from an entirely new overlay network (as Skype was a few years ago), then we can worry about consolidation.

Now I'm not so sure. 

Who will aggregate this flood for me, in some convenient and semantically meaningful way?

Where is the tool that lets me organize my diverse connections?

There's an opportunity here for a new class of solutions...

LiveWire Mobile — new brand for well established business

This morning, NMS Communications launched LiveWire Mobile as a new brand for our mobile applications business.  I'm leery of re-branding exercises but this was long overdue as our mobile applications business is substantially different and independent of our traditional developer focused business.  Now LiveWire Mobile is operating as a distinct division of NMS with this new logo:

LiveWire Mobile focuses on mobile personalization services, including our well established ringback tones business.  That makes LiveWire Mobile a market leader from inception, as our ringback tone service is deployed with over 30 operators around the world.  The most recently new operator announcement also came today — it's Virgin Mobile USA.

Mobile Personalization

Mobile personalization services hit some years ago with ringtones and wall papers.  Many think of ringtones as a content business, and yes, there is a content sale in many cases.  But whether it's ringtones or ringback tones, the key motivation is the human desire to personalize our possessions and our environment. 

Today, ringtones are widespread and revenue growth is slowing.  However, ringback tones are still in the early growth phase, at least in Europe and North America.  Ringback tone penetration is over 55% in Korea, but less than 10% in the US.

Besides the established ringback tones base, LiveWire Mobile has plans for additional network-based message and subscriber-focused personalization services — stay tuned.

UPDATED:  Here's the link to a press release with more info (in PR prose...).

Community goes mobile, when? how?

Some notes from the first after lunch session at Connect 2007 in Madrid yesterday, entitled Community Goes Mobile.  Dave Penny (VP Biz Dev at NMS) moderated, with panelists:

• David Springall, CTO, Yospace
• Stuart O'Brien, Editor, Mobile Entertainment Magazine , Intent Media
• Gerrit-Jan Konijnenberg, CEO, Comsys
• Peter Karney, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, NEC

The first key point is communities don't align with operators.  The lead example in every market is SMS.  Until there was universal connectivity, SMS never took off.  David is particularly vocal that social networks have to span multiple operators to succeed.  This is interesting as Yospace currently runs SeeMeTV for 3 in the UK and Look At Me for O2 in the UK and a similar service for 10 other operators in various countries.

Big discussion of charging models.  If Facebook is free on the Internet, why pay for mobile access.  Conclusion, you'll never get someone to pay per transaction, but you might get someone to pay an Internet access fee, especially a fixed known flat rate fee (like x per day for all day and y max for all month Internet access).

Another interesting point is that mobile operators are doing deals with Internet brands (like Vodafone UK with MySpace) because the Internet brand has more recognition than the mobile brand.

Of course there are no operator representatives on this panel to hold up their end...  :-)