2007 February

iChat at 75mph

February 27, 2007 By Steve Borsch 5 Comments

Even though I’m probably coming across as a giddy little kid or some geek, think about the ramifications of this kind of access to high resolution communications.

Somewhere near Atlanta, GA — as we sped along at 75mph — my wife called my daughter on her cell phone from her office. So I fired up iChat and requested a video chat with her since, like yesterday, I was connected to Verizon Wireless via my Treo on my laptop. Not only did it connect, but we talked for several minutes. You can see the video quality which is incredibly good.

Again, I’m on the Interstate highway system where wireless coverage is usually pretty good and it drops off dramatically the further you migrate from these major arteries. However, unless you’re completely aware of the continued build-out of wireless network footprints and the continued acceleration in speed of them, you might not bother to embrace technologies like these or even try ‘em out to see if they might be of any benefit to you. Some day we’ll all have rich, robust visual communications technologies like this at our fingertips and the wireless internet will be so seamless and so ubiquitous it’ll seem like the air we breathe.

Then wait to see what Internet-centric applications appear!

Filed Under: Innovation

Internet Access at 80MPH

February 26, 2007 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

My daughter has finished her work in Fort Lauderdale, FL and — after shipping her car to her in January since it was far cheaper than renting one — I flew down on Sunday to drive home with her this week.

As part of my experience on this trip (besides great quality time with my girl and client work I’ll be performing) is to live with various technologies and assess first-hand the current ubiquity of Internet access (especailly Wifi) throughout the southern States.

For the last half hour I’ve been connected to the Internet while she’s been driving 80mph (yeah I know…the speed limit is 70mph but people are going by us like we’re standing still). I connected to my Treo 700p (I’ve got Verizon unlimited broadband on my account) via Bluetooth and it’s amazingly rock solid. I’ve been averaging just over 300kbps download and 84kbps upload speed (I’ve checked it three times and averaged it). While slow by typical broadband speeds, this is still incredibly useful.

Besides just the usual productivity stuff I now have access to, we had no idea where we’d stay when we got to the northern part of Florida. I researched hotels, found one and proceeded to book the reservation online and it worked flawlessly! Using Google Maps, I now have PDF’s I’ve printed in a folder on my computer desktop with detailed directions (though I also have Google Maps on my Treo…but this gives me A LOT more pixels to gaze at).

Granted we’re on the Interstate highway and these corridors are typically saturated with connections but still, I can’t help but be delightfully amazed that I’m sitting here typing this and on the ‘net.

Filed Under: Technology

Web 2.0: A New Economic System?

February 26, 2007 By Steve Borsch 4 Comments

Observers who study and research culture — anthropologists and those that focus on cultural or social aspects of this discipline — have a method and a rigor that help them to see what others don’t. Howard Rheingold is just such a person and this Business Week interview (from August of 2004 I might add) hints at what I and others are talking about with Web 2.0: a new economic system is emerging.

From the interview:

Q: What will all those trends (open source, Wikipedia, Google page ranking, Amazon’s recommendation engine and user reviews) produce ultimately?

A: All these could dramatically transform not only the way people do business, but economic production altogether. We had markets, then we had capitalism, and socialism was a reaction to industrial-era capitalism. There’s been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production.

But I think we’re seeing hints, with all of these examples, that the technology of the Internet, reputation systems, online communities, mobile devices — these are all like those technologies…that made capitalism possible. These may make some new economic system possible.

This is worth stopping and thinking about since it informs what I do for my work…and should inform everything you do regardless of your business or organizational bent. As you look at what you’ve made money at in the past — especially if you’ve made really great gross margins opening yourself up to potentially be disrupted out of business — this idea of mass collaborating with the connected world’s free effort and energy is either disturbing or liberating. Depends on your view.

I’m not an economist nor an anthropologist. I’m not a meteorologist either but I don’t need the weatherman to tell me the sun is shining. What *is* important to me is to tap into the observational knowledge of people with the skills and tools who can predict with some level of certainty what might happen (it’s why satellite imagery, weather pattern measurements, modeling and Doppler radar have given meteorologists pretty damn good predictive analytical tools).

Howard Rheingold is one such observer. Another is Yochai Benkler, professor of Law at Yale and author of The Wealth of Networks and the paper Coase’s Penguin. A third is Don Tapscott who recently released his solid overview entitled, Wikinomics. If you’re a leader in your company or organization — or want to be one — I’d heartily recommend you get your head around the concepts and arguments these three (and others) have been seeing and bringing forth for some time. Your future depends on it.

Filed Under: Web 2.0

Why I Continue to NOT use Yahoo

February 24, 2007 By Steve Borsch 4 Comments

From the very early days of the Internet, there was something messy to me about Yahoo’s approach with a directory of Web sites that felt inefficient and that the onus was on me to drill down until I finally discovered what I was looking for on their site. Their home page also always seemed incredibly cluttered…as though an accountant was in charge of design and efficiently using up every pixel of white space.

There are useful services like Yahoo Finance that I use daily. Yahoo News often is either sent to me by a friend or colleague and I frequently end up at a Yahoo page following a link. But sometimes I just want to be entertained or catch up on the news without any technology getting in the way.

This morning I’m up early and decided to find the video of the rats caught scurrying about a Taco Bell in New York City. Yahoo has the Associate Press story with associated video footage.

I click to open the video in Firefox on the Mac and wait….and wait…and wait. Just the commercial for NetFlix…no video of rats running around (and it never does play, by the way). Next I open Safari in case there’s a hiccup with the dozens of plug-ins I have running in Firefox. I wait…and wait…and wait…no video…ever.

Sigh…

I launch Parallels and fire up WindowsXP and go to the story. The NetFlix commercial plays and within seconds the video plays. I get to enjoy the appalling spectacle of rats in a restaurant and get to reminisce about the cockroaches I’ve watched climbing walls while trying to swallow my fast food in Manhattan.

Everything is current on the Mac including the Flip4Mac plugin that allows Windows Media to play in Mac’s Quicktime player. I used to have issues with CNN’s site playing video as well as my local CBS affiliate (which has just bypassed the issue altogether as their parent Viacom has chosen Flash video as its format) but they have taken a strategic, non-vendor-centric media delivery method that works and makes it easy for us, the user.

I’m not sure what Yahoo is or is trying to be. Buying Flickr; creating Yahoo Pipes; embracing virtually all the Internet-as-a-platform standards without trying to control them all like other media-wannabee tech companies we know; these are all incredibly smart moves. But if they can’t get drop-dead-basic stuff like video to play on ALL platforms without ANY hiccups, they have to stop pretending they’re a media company.

Filed Under: Technology

An Embarrassment of Riches in Digital Content

February 23, 2007 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

As I get ready for a trip, I found myself in front of my computer this evening picking-n-choosing podcasts to subscribe to and load on my iPod. Since I’m so busy and have so much content to prioritize and consume — and generate myself with my blog and podcast — that it’s been a few months since I really took the time to poke around iTunes and see what’s there.

Holy Schnikey! I hadn’t realized that there was such an enormous wealth of new stuff. TV news, public radio and more has flooded the iTunes podcast section. Though I should probably pay closer attention, I hadn’t and was a bit stunned.

Since I usually like thought provoking podcasts, public radio is more to my taste than alot of other content. IT Conversations is another favorite as is the Social Innovation network.

This reminded me of my post from January of last year entitled, “Information Overload: Can You See What’s Coming?” that said in part:

The river of content is flowing faster and faster. This river of content available on the internet is reaching flood stage and is in a variey of media types. As newspapers, magazines, radio and television lose eyeballs to the internet and become ever more desperate to cling to their advertisers, they are finding increasingly garish and dumbed down methods of getting the attention of the eyeball owners back (which, in my view, will only push people away faster).

As broadband continues its adoption and more people get on the internet and attempt to connect their own dots, it’s becoming exponentially more difficult to see or tap in to the collective consciousness and stay on top of changes in an industry, area of interest, or even to stay relevant in the workplace. Primarily it’s more difficult to understand change and to see disruptive technologies or business models coming…and having time to act.

Even entertainment options are accelerating. There are more DirecTV channels than I could ever watch. I’ve pared down the number of shows I TiVo since I could barely keep up with what I really wanted to watch. I recently took out a machete to my RSS aggregator to cut down the number of blogs I track (currently over 200) and news sources (35). It was becoming too much and I just felt anxiety over all of it.

In his book “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less“, Barry Schwartz argues that the proliferation of choices essentially causes us to be paralyzed with indecision.

Why You Should Care About the Open Solutions Alliance

February 21, 2007 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Just came across the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), “a nonprofit, vendor-neutral consortium dedicated to driving adoption of comprehensive open source business solutions” and am so pleased to see SpikeSource and CollabNet — along with Sourceforge and others — playing such an integral role.

Why should you care?

There are over 140,000 open source projects listed on Sourceforge. Some are incredibly active…others less so…but there is such a wealth of useful software available that it’s creating a baseline of information technology products that the world is leveraging. The result is that all of us can then strive for ever higher possibilities in efficiency, creativity and innovation driven by technology and the Internet as a platform for the future.

I’ve personally installed and learned (albeit from a high level) a couple of dozen of the most popular projects in content management, blogging, ecommerce, forums, courseware and groupware as well as other categories. Here’s the kicker: it’s VERY difficult to coordinate and orchestrate (as an administrator) a deployment of these packages since every administration model and user interface is different…and forget about it if you’re just a power user trying to deploy something for your non-profit or small-to-medium sized organization. You wanna make ‘em present on a Web site like they’re an integrated whole? Whaddya nuts! Better hire a bunch of really smart developers and keep your fingers crossed that you’ll be able to upgrade any of these software offerings individually without breaking integrations and thus your Web asset/site/application.

Want to present them to your customers, prospects or constituents as a whole offering that looks-n-feels like one, holistic Web asset/site/application? Again, good luck and happy budgeting. Want to teach and train others on how to deploy and use all of them? Time and money is all you need and alot of hair ’cause you’ll be pulling most of it out of your head.

Why else should you care?

The Possibilities of iReader by Syntactica (and its underlying engine)

February 20, 2007 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Was delighted to spend time today at the Minnesota headquarters of Syntactica talking about today’s release of iReader. Henry Neils CEO, Ward Johnson VP Sales and Fred Sweeny CEO of Assessment.com (a sister company) met with me to talk about the launch.

Instead of doing a review (since there’s already a great one done by ReadWriteWeb), I’d instead like to do what I love to do best: toss out ideas and tell you why this company and their offering needs to be looked at very, very closely if you’re a Web 2.0 developer or care about knowledge, innovation and ideas — and why the timing couldn’t be better for them to have leapt into the Web 2.0 game.

First off, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners Lee has been the top evangelist for his concept of the Semantic Web. Having data-wrapped-around-the-data you need to obtain — so machines can help us decide what’s relevant and contextual to what we’re seeking and deliver it to us and be somewhat self-aware — hasn’t worked since no one seems to be participating.

The Semantic Web is a lofty and worthwhile goal, but just like a bunch of smart people trying to determine what the taxonomies need to be within which information should reside, the Web, blogosphere and sites like Flickr and TagWorld have instead embraced the much messier tagging concept and allowed people to create folksonomies instead…and it’s exploded in use.

Guess what? People don’t organize. We throw stuff in closets and kick stuff under the bed when company comes. We search for filing systems and buy millions of organizers that often go unused.

In today’s tsunami of content that is accelerating because it can (storage costs falling, bandwidth increasing, computing horsepower growing more robust by the year) and coupled with (OH MY GOD!) even MORE coming with all the user generated content…there is no human way to gather, track or even hope to match data to data and stay abreast of some concept or create, innovate or invent new things.

Today I track hundreds of blogs and dozens of traditional news sites. I emptied my news aggregator this morning before breakfast by skimming articles and collecting the ones I choose to delve into later on…but there are now 596 articles there for me to ~~read~~ skim. But what if there are jewels in the areas I care about posted by a brand new blogger that I don’t track? What if that blogger is a Professor at University of Oxford and is the world authority on a subject I care deeply about?

iReader is a web browser plug-in that can quickly abstract a hyperlink on a page and tell you what the concepts are on the linked-to page so you don’t have to go there…or choose to leap out to it. Sounds simple and it’s cool for certain, but what I learned about today was more about what’s going on under-the-covers which, most interestingly, is available to developers via their API…

…and this is where it gets interesting.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Innovation

Changing Nature of Work and Your Value Online

February 20, 2007 By Steve Borsch 3 Comments

Two buddies of mine, serial entrepreneur George Johnson and business change agent, Jeff Staggs, started Entrevis and their “A Better Way to Live and Work” program. It’s a very solid process to walk through with any of the 17-21%+ of workers dissatisfied with where they are and helping them walk down a path (e.g., see “20 Percent of Workers Plan on Changing Jobs in 2007” and “One in Five Government Workers to Leave Jobs in 2007“. That path starts with a persons own vision, their values, what they think their purpose is, and the other dozen or so lessons coach them to partnering, negotiation, their business plan, execution, etc.

I’ve gone through the program with amazing results. Still…I’ve been kicking around ideas with both of them as they strategize over increasingly better ways to align with the macro trends in the world…namely that the lifetime corporate models of work, typical staffing models, opportunities to mass collaborate on the Internet all point the way to the changing nature of work AND that each of us need to find containers within which to put our personal value propositions. Let me go a little deeper on this…

Think about the modern corporate organization and its just over 100 years of existence. From this WikipediaÂ article on the corporation comes this quote from Adam Smith’s the “Wealth of Nations” which criticized the corporate form because of the separation of ownership and management.

The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other peopleâ€™s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own…. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.

The modern corporate entity is, as Smith points out, an abstract one by its very nature. Remarkably complex and with numerous layers of specialized functionality, making it work as a whole is an ongoing challenge. With little true ownership by those that work within the corporate structure and loyalty (by both sides) fleeting, its no wonder that people are searching for meaning and aligned jobs while corporations are seeking human resources that provide a competitive advantage. Now throw in the explosion in instant and cheap communications, idea generation, knowledge transfer and social connections that the Internet has enabled and the corporation itself is undergoing massive shifts.

Now throw in the disruption of outsourcing, specializations that perish and retraining that takes years — coupled with the masses that are working in jobs that pay the rent but are misaligned with what each view their mission, values and purpose to be, and you have a climate ripe for disruption and change.

So what does this have to do with you and what can you do about it?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Blogosphere

Would you like RFID’s with your burger?

February 18, 2007 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is becoming increasingly ubiquitous due to its advantages to allow physical goods to be tracked in a supply chain. This has enormous implications for manufacturers, shippers and resellers to wring out inefficiencies in the supply chain and thus reduce costs and increase product availability.

But what if this tracking extended to you?

By way the Institute of the Future comes this very good post that is at once exciting and at the same time deeply troubling…especially when it describes the Kodak patent for an edible RFID tag and the New Scientist sums that patent up thusly:

The tags would be covered with soft gelatin that takes a while to dissolve in the stomach. After swallowing a tag a patient need only sit next to a radio source and receiver.

They stop working when exposed to gastric acid for a specific period of time, providing a subtle way to monitor a patient’s digestive tract.

Kodak says that similar radio tags could also be embedded in an artificial knee or hip joint in such a way that they disintegrate as the joint does, warning of the need for more surgery. Attaching tags to ordinary pills could also help nurses confirm that a patient has really taken their medicine as ordered.

Great benefits for health matters…but just like the governmental justification for tightened security (the war on terror) or accelerating surveillance on the Internet (we’re combatting child porn…if you protest you must be FOR child porn, heh?) those of us with knowledge of the possible downsides, privacy and security implications of an ingestible tracking device — which will eventually be incredibly small — is indeed troubling.

If you don’t think that tracking or even hacking an RFID tag — and probably even one ingested — is too tough and probably a non-issue, read this Wired article.

Filed Under: Current Affairs, Innovation

Using Mac, Windows and Linux

February 17, 2007 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Tonight I finished the installation of Ubuntu Linux inside of Parallels running under Mac OS X…and spent some time goofing around with it, the Windows XP install I did last evening, and tweaking some stuff on the Mac OS on my new MacBook Pro. None of what I’m about to write (about using multiple OS’es on one computer) is new, but I’ve got one perspective you might find enlightening.

Having grown up in the personal computer business and used operating systems on microcomputers as well as workstations, minicomputers and from a teletype connected to a mainframe (back in high school), I’ve come to appreciate the expertise and artistry needed to pull off the virtualization needed to run mutliple operating systems on one computer.

But that’s what the team at Parallels has done. While I won’t play games on the Windows installation or do media work on either Windows or Linux, they nonetheless run fast enough that both are indistinguishable to me from what I experienced on the HP Pavilion laptop (a 3ghz, 1GB ram computer) that I recently gave to my niece. That alone is amazing.

But what astounds me is Coherence, a feature in their beta release that allows Windows applications to run like they were native Macintosh apps (see a screencast here). This is a big deal, since power users like me can run apps that are only available on other platforms on an as-needed basis. I’ve already found this to be *very* useful since I could now help a colleague troubleshoot a PC-version of Skype which is just different enough from the Mac version that having a copy on my own machine allowed me to help him.

Here’s another example: there is a great little application for managing wireless networks that has no parallel (no pun intended) in the Mac or Linux worlds. At this moment and this version of Parallels, I have to click inside of the window running Windows and manage the application in that manner. In the next release, I can just fire up the application and Parallels, hide the running Parallels window (running Windows), and have just the application in the dock available to me.

Apple’s Boot Camp is an inelegant solution since it forces you to reboot to use either operating system. Rumor has it that in Apple’s new OS called Leopard, Boot Camp *may* allow Parallels to "point" to the Boot Camp Windows install instead of creating a virtual instance. That means that one could install Windows, boot an Intel Mac and run it as a Windows machine (for gaming or other CPU intensive activities) or run a virtual instance so all the Windows applications are available for day-to-day personal productivity.

Just like when my Dad and I went to Germany in 1997 for a trip to find our ancestry and just goof around, I smiled when he kept remarking on the plane ride over, "Geez….can you believe that Johann and Suzanna (my great, great grandparents) took one month to get to Minnesota when they emigrated…and we’ll be to Frankfurt in a mere 8 hours?" Even though I am hyper-aware of all the changes that are coming so am rarely stunned by disruptive technological entries, I still am amazed that I’m typing this on my laptop, in my living room, connected to the Internet (a global network!) through the air, and have Windows running in the background and Linux just installed. Oh yeah….and I just got done watching a video and downloading some podcasts.

Filed Under: Innovation