Broadband Developments

Yeah, Everyone does these.  Top 10 – etc.

I thought about it.  Techmeme did a nice job of the biggest stories.  Thanks end the end-of-year read.   So, I’ll analyze it.

1. The Yahoo-Microsoft Story – Yeah this had to be the story of the year.  Microsoft overbids it turns out for Yahoo.  Yahoo plays hard-to-get.  Yahoo cozies up to Google.  That doesn’t turn out so well.  Yahoo is worth a fraction of what Microsoft bid for it.  This one is not over by a long shot.
2. Apple Announces last year at MacWorld – The fanboys will be onboard anyway and this was their event.  (FYI – I carry an iPhone)  Apple has plenty of press nowadays, this is not much of a big deal.
3. Google Chrome – So far it has been ho-hum.  There was a big splash, some people tried it, but this is not a world changer as it turns out.  (FYI- it’s my second browser and I love it)
4. Apple Developer Connection – The App Store is the single greatest thing about the iPhone.
5. Google Spoken iPhone App – Cool and wow.  I like the sound of that and it sums up that app nicely.  It really does work well.  Now is this a story of the year?  Um.  It could lead to lots of exciting things, but to me, not really a story of the year.
6. Google/Valve buy – an interesting rumor that didn’t come true.  Google with all that money, all that cash and everyone talking about what to buy.  Kinda funny isn’t it?
7. RIAA Music lawsuits – Dropping the lawsuits against Grandma Jones, it means little as I expect the RIAA to increase the pressure on the internet providers.
8. Google>Microsoft> Digg – Once again see Comment for #6
9. Windows 7 – Reports are saying its a glossy version of Vista.  I think the timing of this OS may be unfortunate for Microsoft – with the economy stumbling and tech/personal spending in a crunch.  If Windows 7 is not a game changer, then this baby may thud.
10. iPhone 3G – This was a story that deserved to be way higher on the list.  Apple finally put it all together and delivered again a “game changer”.

Wasn’t there an Olympics or something?  What about LinkedIn?  I’ve been on that for maybe 2/3 years now, but it seems to really have blown up now.  Facebook anyone?  Twitter?  Not really news, but their influence and presence has grown..

The Zero-day XML vulnerabilities once reported to only be affecting IE7 targets are now prompting warning from Microsoft to its customers across all supported versions of its Internet Explorer Web Browser.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/961051.mspx

Workaround centers on setting Internet security settings to high and disabling the Ole32db.dll via ACL - not an end user-friendly operation.  Apparently the noted attacks have predominantly been noted against IE7 and on Chinese sites.  It exploits the way IE handles XML.  The exploit could potentially be used to access several types of sensitive data, however thus far it is only reported to be stealing passwords for computer games.

There are reports that Microsoft is considering fixing the flaw through an emergency software patch outside of the standard “Patch Tuesday”.

Now is a good time to give Google Chrome a try.

A lot has played out in the UC world over the last couple months and I think it’s time to revisit the question of “What is UC?” and dive a little deeper. In this series of posts I’ll analyze what functional components make up a UC solution and examine offerings from IBM, Cisco, Microsoft and others.

Since the paragraph above is really just a tease on its own, I’ll dive right into an overview of Unified Communications. First, a disclaimer that UC seems to mean something different to each company. This is my opinion based on talking with a LOT of customers and doing a few dozen rollouts. It’s certainly not the only opinion however.

The 2007 Gartner report on UC states:

In a way, identifying who’s doing what in the UC industry is a little premature, because, until the new technologies are really finished or legacy technology is really ready to be replaced, UC has to be viewed as “a migratory work in progress.” However, it is important to track technology developments, products, and services so that IT will be ready to selectively deliver new UC capabilities whenever required.

I’ll start by saying there are two sides to unified communications; well at least two. First is functional, ie. what functions are included under the UC umbrella. The second is a business culture shift, ie. changing the way you to do business to take advantage of UC through communications enabled business processes (CEBP). In this post I’m going to speak more to the first. I’ve done a lot of research on the second only to conclude that the business case, and ROI plan, is vastly different for different companies and users. Thus, it needs to be addressed individually. Beyond recouping conferencing costs from bringing the function in house, the ROI model gets very complex.

Although I’m happy to discuss individual cases on a one-off basis I want to keep the topic of this post more generic. I’ll be focusing on the functional aspects of UC that apply to most, if not all, companies.

So, if we believe in the assumption that, from a functional perspective, UC is a platform not a product we must ask what are the parts of that platform? Here’s my take on what every UC platform needs:

Presence engine - A service or function that shows a person’s availability and willingness to communicate over multiple modes of communication. Features include:

· Contextual presence – willingness to communicate over multiple modes of communication (text, voice, video) depending on access and availability

· Integrated presence – Pulls information from other sources (calendar, phone) to automatically update states of presence

· Multi-tiered presence – user-defined levels of access for presence visibility

· Deep presence – More levels than online, offline, away

Instant Messaging - The ability to send text messages and files in one-to-one and many-to-many communication. The features include:

· IM in real-time with others

· Transfer files during a chat

· Escalate IM conversations to richer communication (voice, video, ad hoc web conference)

· IM in a group, more than one-to-one

Federation – The ability to search and communicate across security boundaries, like between partners, in a secure manner.

Public IM – The ability to communicate with popular public IM providers. I never thought this was an absolute requirement but it’s been in every requirements document I’ve seen lately. People are used to IMing and don’t want multiple clients regardless of who they’re communicating with, business or personal.

Audio and Video Conferencing from a desktop client – Normally 2 distinct requirements I never see one without the other so I’m bunching them together. I’m speaking purely PC-to-PC or PC-ConferenceRoom here, not yet into IP Telephony.

Web Conferencing - the ability to host scheduled and ad-hoc meetings including voice, video, data and shared desktop collaboration

· Ad hoc and scheduled web conferences including internal and external participants

· Shared documents and “handout” functionality

· Shared desktop for collaboration

· Support data, voice and video conferencing during meeting

· One-to-many live video streaming (ie. virtual company meeting)

Messaging Platform – A robust enterprise email and calendaring platform. Email has surpassed voice as communication mediums go so it needs to be scalable and reliable.

Mobility – The platform needs to have a mobile client for syncing mail and calendaring as well as IM/presence and other UC modalities.

Collaboration – Some would argue that a collaboration platform should be its own topic. And well it could be, but I feel any UC solution needs to have a strong collaboration story. After all, UC is all about collaboration. Once you find a person and IM them, where are you going to work together?

Extensible API – As I mentioned above, UC means something different to everyone. An extensible API is an often overlooked requirement for extending UC functionality into other applications.

IP Telephony – Often just called VoIP, a UC solution needs basic IPT functions like single number reach, unified messaging (voicemail in email), and click to call. These functions need to be in the same UC client as other functions (IM, etc). No one wants 4-5 clients running to accomplish one communication task.

Google announced on the Google blog this morning that they’re dropping the deal with Yahoo. Instead of standing up to government antitrust scrutiny, they’ve chosen to simply walk away. Personally I think they’ll wait for a “friendlier” government and try again next year; after all they’ve been calling Obama “the Google president” internally for months. However, let’s pretend for a second that doesn’t happen. Google has really left yahoo at the altar for good…

Where does this really leave yahoo? Yahoo must have been counting on this $800 million in revenue to help it float while three feet of sunshine himself, jerry yang, tries to rebuild the failed empire. yahoo may have no choice in the end but to either be acquired at a fraction of what Microsoft offered earlier this year or go the way of pets.com; just another internet company turned bad joke at Bucks. After botching the MSFT deal, yang lost a lot credibility but it was mostly recovered by the Google deal. With that falling apart this morning what does he have to stand on as a leader? For all the smoke and mirrors yahoo is worth significantly less on all levels than before jerry’s grand plan in the post-Semel years.

jerry yang, meet Jonathan Abrams… I think you’ll have a lot in common soon.

UPDATE: Bloomberg just launched this story “Yahoo May Embrace Microsoft Without Google’s Help” making some of the same points I did above. Looks like I’m not the only one thinking this way…

Now this is a huge development in Broadband (Broadband Developments). As you all know I am a huge supporter of the white space intitiative.  Now that the broadcasters are migrating up to the digital channels this freed up spectrum will enable MASSIVE innovation in wireless broadband.  Why?  Two major reasons (there are many others but these are the most relevant imo) 1) battery capacity and 2) antenna technology.

Both of those areas will be able to thrive in the white spaces.  Signals range and strenght are critical to capacity and the white spaces and other frequencies are key.  I can’t wait to see the startups come out of the woodwork to deliver on this new area.

Kudos for Google (and others) to really support this and get behind this to make it happen.

BROADBAND FREEDOM !!

Here is Larry Page’s Post

Posted by Larry Page, Co-Founder and President of Products

All eyes are on the presidential election today, but another important vote just took place at the Federal Communications Commission. By a vote of 5-0, the FCC formally agreed to open up the “white spaces” spectrum — the unused airwaves between broadcast TV channels — for wireless broadband service for the public. This is a clear victory for Internet users and anyone who wants good wireless communications.

The FCC has been looking at this issue carefully for the last six years. Google has worked hard on this matter with other tech companies and public interest groups because we think that this spectrum will help put better and faster Internet connections in the hands of the public. We also look forward to working with the FCC to finalize the method used to compute power levels of empty channels adjacent to TV channels (we have a number of public filings before the commission in this area and it is a vital issue in urban areas).

I’ve always thought that there are a lot of really incredible things that engineers and entrepreneurs can do with this spectrum. We will soon have “Wi-Fi on steroids,” since these spectrum signals have much longer range than today’s Wi-Fi technology and broadband access can be spread using fewer base stations resulting in better coverage at lower cost. And it is wonderful that the FCC has adopted the same successful unlicensed model used for Wi-Fi, which has resulted in a projected 1 billion Wi-Fi chips being produced this year. Now that the FCC has set the rules, I’m sure that we’ll see similar growth in products to take advantage of this spectrum.

As an engineer, I was also really gratified to see that the FCC decided to put science over politics. For years the broadcasting lobby and others have tried to spread fear and confusion about this technology, rather than allow the FCC’s engineers to simply do their work.

Finally, I want to applaud and thank FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, the other commissioners, and the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology for their leadership in advancing this important issue. And, thanks to the more than 20,000 of you who took a stand on this issue through our Free the Airwaves campaign, the FCC heard a clear message from consumers: these airwaves can bring wireless Internet to everyone everywhere.

Posted by Larry Page, Co-Founder and President of Products

Story on Cnet about Google’s rise in the web server market. Here’s some highlights from that article.

Google operates about 10.5 million Web sites in October, a 411,000 increase from September, according to statistics released Thursday by Netcraft, which monitors what software is used to host Web sites.

The figure comes from monitoring what Web server software is in use to deliver Web pages to people’s browsers. The top two packages are Apache and Microsoft’s Internet Information Services, but Google has been catching up since.

Netcraft found 182 million Web sites total, of which 10.5 million used Google’s software. Apache ran 91.5 million of htem, and Microsoft’s IIS ran 62.8 million.

That gives Google about 5.7 percent share, according to NetCraft. But the fraction rises higher to 10.6 percent when measuring “active” sites, which screens out a lot of domains that just have a token Web pages with no real content.

Google’s own Web server software is gaining popularity compared to the top software products, Apache and Microsoft’s Internet Information Services.

Google said in a statement, “The Google Web server is a custom-built server that runs on Linux.”

By Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise

The reliability of cloud computing has been a hot topic recently, partly because glitches in the cloud don’t happen behind closed doors as with traditional on-premises solutions for businesses. Instead, when a small number of cloud computing users have problems, it makes headlines. As with most things at Google, we are fanatical about measuring the availability of Gmail, and we thought it best to simply share our reliability metrics, which we measure as average uptime per user based on server-side error rates. We think this reliability metric lets you do a true side-by-side comparison with other solutions.

We measure every server request for every user, every moment of every day. Any millisecond delay is logged. Over the last year, Gmail has been available more than 99.9 percent of the time — for everyone, both consumers and business users. The vast majority of people using Gmail have seen few issues, experienced no downtime, and have continued to have a great Gmail experience, with exception of an outage in August 2008. If you average all these data together, including the August outage, across the entire Gmail service, there has been an aggregate 10-15 minutes of downtime per month over the last year of providing the service. That 10-15 minutes per month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds here and there. A very small number of people have unfortunately been subject to some disruption of service that affected them for a few minutes or a few hours. For those users, we are very sorry. And for Google Apps Premier Edition customers, we have extended service level agreement credits to them.

So how does greater than 99.9 percent reliability compare to more conventional approaches for business email? We asked some experts. Naturally, the normal caveats apply for on-premises solutions, since each individual business environment will vary, depending on server reliability, staff response time, and actual maintenance schedules for each application.

According to the research firm Radicati Group, companies with on-premises email solutions averaged from 30 to 60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and an additional 36 to 90 minutes of planned downtime per month.1

Looking just at the unplanned outages that catch IT staffs by surprise, these results suggest Gmail is twice as reliable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more reliable than a Microsoft Exchange-based solution that companies must maintain themselves. And higher reliability translates to higher employee productivity. Gmail’s reliability jumps to more than four times as reliable as a GroupWise solution and 10 times more reliable than an Exchange-based solution if you factor in the planned outages inherent in on-premises messaging platforms. But this isn’t the only way Google Apps helps businesses do more with their resources. Compared to the costs of Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus or Novell GroupWise — including software licensing, server expenses and the labor associated with deploying, maintaining and upgrading them on a regular basis — Google Apps leaves companies with much more time and money to focus on their real business.

We are now extending what we’ve learned from Gmail to the other applications in Google Apps.

Today, we’re announcing that we will extend the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. We have been delivering high levels of reliability across all these products, so it makes sense to extend our guarantees to them.

More than 1 million businesses have selected Google Apps to run their business, and tens of millions of people use Gmail every day. With this type of adoption, a disruption of any size — even a minor one affecting fewer than 0.003% of Google Apps Premier Edition users, like the one a few weeks ago — attracts a disproportional amount of attention. We’ve made a series of commitments to improve our communications with customers during any outages, and we have an unwavering commitment to make all issues visible and transparent through our open user groups.

Google is one of the 1 million businesses that run on Google Apps, and any service interruption affects our users and our business; our engineers are also some of our most demanding customers. We understand the importance of delivering on the cloud’s promise of greater security, reliability and capability at lower cost. We are hugely thankful to our customers who drive us to become better every day.

Cloud computing is all the rage.  We’ve been covering it here at Broadband Developments since we started this blog in June 2008.  Just search on Cloud here on the blog for all the blog posts.

Microsoft announces Azure - here is Mary Jo’s post.

Am I bullish on Microsoft with the cloud?  No not really.  I’m confused is this part of their Unified Communications or Online plans?  I’m neutral because I think that Microsoft could do some compelling things if they can just get the formula right.  I will start covering this.  In the past stuff from Microsoft has been a big yawn.

Today, during a keynote speech at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC2008), Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp.’s chief software architect, announced Windows Azure, the cloud-based service foundation underlying its Azure Services Platform, and highlighted this platform’s role in delivering a software plus services approach to computing. The Azure Services Platform is an industry-leading move by Microsoft to help developers build the next generation of applications that will span from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and deliver compelling new experiences across the PC, Web and phone.

Ozzie described how this platform combines cloud-based developer capabilities with storage, computational and networking infrastructure services, all hosted on servers operating within Microsoft’s global datacenter network. This provides developers with the ability to deploy applications in the cloud or on-premises and enables experiences across a broad range of business and consumer scenarios. A limited community technology preview (CTP) of the Azure Services Platform was initially made available to developers in attendance at PDC2008, giving them a chance to try out its features and functions and plan for their own future development.

“Today marks a turning point for Microsoft and the development community,” Ozzie said. “We have introduced a game-changing set of technologies that will bring new opportunities to Web developers and business developers alike. The Azure Services Platform, built from the ground up to be consistent with Microsoft’s commitment to openness and interoperability, promises to transform the way businesses operate and how consumers access their information and experience the Web. Most important, it gives our customers the power of choice to deploy applications in cloud-based Internet services or through on-premises servers, or to combine them in any way that makes the most sense for the needs of their business.”

Empowering Cloud Development With the Azure Services Platform

Unlike many of today’s service-based solutions, the Azure Services Platform provides developers with the flexibility and ability to create applications while taking advantage of their existing skills, tools and technologies such as the Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio. Developers also can choose from a broad range of commercial or open source development tools and technologies, and access the Azure Services Platform using a variety of common Internet standards including HTTP, representational state transfer (REST), WS-* and Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub).

Key components of the Azure Services Platform include the following:

State-of-the-Art Datacenter Infrastructure

During the keynote, Ozzie said of Windows Azure, “It’s designed to be the foundation, to be the bedrock, underneath all of Microsoft’s service offerings for consumers and business alike.” Los Angeles, Oct. 27, 2008. Click for high-res version.

Microsoft also described the importance of building robust datacenters in delivering online services. Over the past year, Microsoft has opened major datacenters in Quincy, Wash., and San Antonio, with additional centers scheduled to open in Chicago and Dublin, Ireland. Microsoft is leading the way in services infrastructure with innovative use of shipping containers as flexible and portable housing for servers, providing 10 times the density and dramatic savings in power usage. Supporting the Microsoft software plus services strategy, Microsoft’s datacenters serve up e-mail accounts, Web pages, instant messages, photos, videos, software programs and search information to millions of Internet customers worldwide.

Cut Costs and Unlock Innovation

Services technologies, when employed alongside other core technology enablers such as virtualization and modeling, will result in dramatic benefits for customers’ IT departments. Specifically, these technologies will enable a new and more dynamic world, where IT departments can drive down operating costs, focus their spending on systems that differentiate the business, and ultimately enable IT to become a more strategic asset.

“Only a few companies in the world can bring the promise of cloud computing to reality, and we are excited about the strong capabilities of the Azure Services Platform,” said Paul Farrell, senior vice president of research and development for Epicor Software Corp. “We believe that Microsoft’s initiative and leadership in software plus services will be beneficial to Epicor customers as we architect our solutions to optimize for cloud and on-premises solutions.”

Android is now open source.  Android will change the nature of communications and collaboration only if the apps get developed. The success of the Apple App store is a strong indicator that the Google Android marketplace for apps will be a home run.

Why? Two reasons: 1) apps are need on the edge of the network and 2) developers can succeed on this platform because of open source.

Android is the first free, open source, and fully customizable mobile platform. Android offers a full stack: an operating system, middleware, and key mobile applications. It also contains a rich set of APIs that allows third-party developers to develop great applications.

To get started with the source code, see Get source.

If you are an application developer, visit the Android SDK site.

Video of program is here

here is the info from Google on Android

Today is a big day for Android, the Open Handset Alliance, and the open-source community.  All of the work that we’ve poured into the mobile platform is now officially available, for free, as the Android Open Source Project.

You’ll be hearing a lot about Android devices.  We’ve all put a lot of effort into the first Android device, and I’m really happy with the way it turned out.  But one device is just the beginning.

Android is not a single piece of hardware; it’s a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations.  Everything is there, from the bootloader all the way up to the applications.  And with an Android device already on the market, it has proven that it has what it takes to truly compete in the mobile arena.

Even if you’re not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer.  Interested in working on a speech-recognition library?  Looking to do some research on virtual machines?  Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution?  All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and some of the best development tools I’ve ever worked with.

Have a great idea for a new feature?  Add it!  As an open source project, the best part is that anyone can contribute to Android and influence its direction.  And if the platform becomes as ubiquitous as I hope it will, you may end up influencing the future of mobile devices as a whole.

This is an exciting time for Android, and we’re just getting started.  It takes a lot of work to keep up with the changes in the mobile industry.  But we want to do more than just keep up;  we want to lead the way, to try things out, to add the new features that everyone else is scrambling to keep up with.  But we can’t do it without your help.

What will you do with Android?

Walt Mossberg has a detailed review on the Android gPhone.  This past weekend Loren Feldman had a review.  These two reviews cut across the spectrum from Loren to Walt.

Here is Walt Mossberg’s review

Here is Loren Feldman’s review

Some text hightlights…

I have been testing the G1 extensively, in multiple cities and in multiple scenarios. In general, I like it and consider it a worthy competitor to the iPhone. Both devices run on fast 3G phone networks and include Wi-Fi. Both have smart-touch interfaces and robust Web browsers. Both have the ability to easily download third-party apps, or programs.

But the two devices have different strengths and weaknesses, and are likely to attract different types of users.

If you’ve been lusting after the iPhone’s functionality, but didn’t like its virtual keyboard or its user interface or its U.S. carrier, AT&T, the G1 may be just the ticket for you. But it does have some significant downsides.

By far, the G1’s biggest differentiator is that it has a physical keyboard, which is revealed by sliding open the screen. The keyboard proved only fair in my tests, with keys that are too flat and that can be hard to see in bright light, and with a bulge in the body on the right side that you have to reach over to type.

The G1 has a slick, clever touch interface to go along with its keyboard, and it includes a powerful new operating system. The touch interface is fast and smooth. It’s also much easier to place a phone call on the G1 than on the iPhone. In my battery tests, the G1 lasted through the day, but I had to charge it every night. The built-in download store for third-party programs, called Market, worked well in my tests. The G1 is tightly tied to Google’s online services.  I found the G1’s user interface inferior to the iPhone’s. It lacks the iPhone’s ability to flick between multiple pictures and Web pages, or to zoom in and zoom out of a photo or Web page by simply using two fingers to “pinch” or expand the image.

Loren’s video review

Walt’s video review