Month: May 2004

Buy your latte in two seconds flatte

conference 005.jpg
Dexit Inc., based in First Canadian Place in downtown TO, has been making a big push in giving out these little RFID debit tags. They also offer a sticker version that adheres to your cellphone, but since it’s permanent glue and you’re going to want to chuck your phone in two years time, the sticker doesn’t seem prudent.

Basically, they work like iPass keyring fobs; you just wave it in front of the Dexit scanner at a participating retailer, and away you go. No PINs or swiping required. You can fill them up with a maximum of $100.

My first worry, solvency, as been largely mitigated. TD Canada Trust and the National Bank of Canada seem to be backing them financially, and both Telus Mobility and Bell Canada have marketing arrangements with them. They’re also pushing for an IPO.

The bad news: It’s still only supported by a small number of merchants, virtually all of them fast food joints, in and around First Canadian Place. However, Dexit is also cleverly supported at Ryerson and York cafeterias – captive young savvy audience, check!

There is also a price for the convenience. The tags are free, but it costs $1.50 per cash refill. In a world of no-fee Internet banking establishments, the question becomes one of utility. How much time do you really save? A few seconds of fumbling for change or punching in a PIN? Is that worth a minimum 1.5% on your purchases (assuming you refill a full $100)?

The ruggedness of the RFID tag itself is also dubious. Silverlotus’s Dexit tag has been banging around her purse for a couple weeks, and its lacquered label has already begun peeling off.

Village pillage

A Duck.jpgTomorrow will be our big Doors Open excursion, but today, we decided to poke around the neighbourhood, check out some garage sales.

Saw a Macintosh Classic for $3. Not sure if it worked. I really, really wanted it. Other interesting things on sale:

  • The Book of Mormon
  • Holiday Inn complimentary soaps and shampoos
  • “Spice World“, on VHS
  • A rather nice Chinese wood carving display
  • an Ewoks lunchbag featuring Wicket and Princess Kneesa

We then tottered off to High Park to see Colbourne Lodge, and see the wildlife at High Park. Despite the many warnings and signs forbidding the feeding of the animals, they seem quite portly all the same.

Duck and cover

Wow, more really vague warnings of terrorist attacks. How can these alerts be constructive to the average person, I have no idea. Did you know that when the blackout of ’03 occured, all the news immediately thought it was a terrorist attack? (It was, perhaps more troubling, really due to the fact the aging US energy infrastructure hasn’t been properly funded or upgraded in decades.) I fear that when and if a real threat arises, the people will start ignoring the Politician Who Cried Wolf.

But hey, maybe if we keep the populous scared and insecure enough, they’ll consume and keep consuming. Keep buying those gas masks and Cipro pills; live each day as if it’s your last. Keep X-raying shoes and frisking grannies at airports. Why scrimp and save for that bungalow-sized SUV? Buy it now in easy monthly payments, while you still can! Besides, you can drive it over lesser cars with it when the time comes to escape the dirty nuke.

When did this culture of fear become to be considered as normal?

Just add some butter

“You can’t just live on potatoes and lobsters forever,” Richard Kurial, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of PEI. “You can’t live in isolation. One of the things to bring to the table is a smart, educated population.”

And that’s what the university in the tiniest province in Canada is going to do. UPEI’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Culture, Multimedia, Technology and Cognition will create a digital library of Maritime cultural artifacts from PEI and New Brunswick. It will be powered by a custom-built IBM eServer Bladecenter – and $1.3 million in funding.

Cultural artifacts include literature, images, audio and video. Researchers will use the archive to produce multimedia learning environments and courseware. Then they’ll conduct studies on their learning effectiveness, monitoring “behavioural patterns” such as “brain waves, heart beat [and] eye motion”. Researchers will then take this information to generate better learning environments, and how to adapt them to unique cultures. I wish them luck.

Air farce

Saw this in the Toronto 24 Hours newspaper: Apparently there’s an unofficial bit of a Canadian election tradition for reporters to nickname the campaign jets used to shuttle the political parties around. Liberal Party candidate and current Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Boeing has been christened the “Minoritair”, winning out among other popular monikers, such as “Millionair”.

There is some word that reporters have assigned NDP Party leader Jack Layton’s plane the “Hi Jack”, but everyone is afraid to say the word out loud.

Two top ten lists for today

Doblin Group’s Ten types of innovation. I am amused that both Starbucks and Walmart are used as examples in innovating via process. Starbucks innovates by supporting their workforce, generating an atmosphere of hip, happy employees. On the other hand, Walmart innovates by optimizing their processes and screwing their employees, so they can deliver the cheapest stuff you’ll find on this green earth.

As an aside, FastCompany also has a link to Doblin co-founder Larry Keeley’s “Ten Commandments for Success on the Net”. Written in 1996(!), it describes how the decentralized and transparent nature of the Internet has changed the logic of business. This is what we’re seeing today in the open source phenomenon.

Linux’s best feature yet – an anti-sue filter

One of my colleagues recently raised the question of litigation threats in regards to open source. As open source gains prominence in corporate North America, it becomes a juicier target for patent infringment lawsuits. In a way, it’s quite flattering; the big tech companies are so awash in lawsuits to the point that getting sued can be viewed as a sign of virility.

However, as open source projects are typically not rich enough to hire a batallion of black-suited lawyers, the open code policy can become a liability for everyone involved, including the corporate users it is wooing.

Of course, it’s a two-way street. Because code is open, developers can police themselves to ensure no plagarized code ever gets checked in. But my colleague pointed out that searching for prior art is tricky even for a seasoned patent agent. For open source to gain acceptance in the corporate boardroom, the code has to be 110% secure from messy IP lawsuits.

In light of the agonizing SCO v. IBM case, many third-party Linux distributors have stepped up to tha plate to offer legal indemnification to its customers. Red Hat’s Open Source Assurance Program is a good example of this. (Hiring some new legal muscle doesn’t hurt, either.)

Linus himself has made it easier to track changes with their new Developer’s Certificate of Origin. This way, every contributor must “sign off” on his or her code changes. The development path becomes documented much better and as a result, infringment claims become easier to source.

Pamela Jones of Groklaw laments, “It’s a crying shame watching Linus having to learn the dark side’s wicked ways so as to route around them, but to his credit, he is learning and applying his brains and skills to the task.” However, I’ve argued that open source software’s major failing is not technical in nature; it’s the perception that they’re diamonds in the rough. Indeed, this is yet another step to garner the trust and legitimacy that Linux deserves.

Along the way to the conference

Probably the coolest discussion I had on VoIP was with my taxicab driver on the way to VON Canada 2004. Wearing a smart sport jacket and Bolle sunglasses, he expounded his advanced telecommunications theories to me as he navigated the streets of North York.

“I see a lot of Bell trucks everywhere,” he said. “Are they doing network expansion?” I pointed out that it could just be regular maintenance, although Bell is currently deploying OPI-DSLAMs to grab more ADSL customers. He shook his head. “No, they must be laying fibre. The future is in fibre.” He concluded that “Bell Canada sold BCE Emergis to get the money to expand their network before anybody else does.” He also pointed out that there was no longer any money in phone services, while waving his tiny cellphone at me. “Bell wants to expand into Voice over IP, and video!”

When I asked him how he learned about all this stuff, he proudly proclaimed, “I listen to 680 News on the radio, all day!”

Everyone should be given a tickertape parade

Just finished off Gene Kranz’s Failure is Not An Option. This is the story of 1960 America’s push into space and beyond in the eyes of a NASA flight controller. He covers his tenure at NASA, from the botched “four-inch flight” of the first Mercury-Redstone rocket to Apollo 17, the last mission to the moon in 1972.

The world of the flight controller was not a glamourous one. Long hours, lengthy absences away from sleep or family, checklists and constant vigilance were the norm.

He lists all his missions unequivocally and chronologically, treating the good and band with an even hand. In other words, like a flight control mission log. You get the impression that space travel was both for the brave and the insane; astronauts were crammed into metal capsules with controls a mere three feet from their faces, strapped to thousands of gallons of rocket fuel, and governed by spotty radio communications with finicky, primitive computers at ground control. What they lacked in technology, however, they made up for in tenacity and perseverance.

This inside look shows a multitude of serious problems that were encountered and solved. The Apollo 11 lunar landing was almost a NoGo because the lunar module’s computer was overloading. Fortunately, the flight controllers had dealt with that very scenario on their very last day of simulation training. It wasn’t a matter of luck – it because of the extremely talented and meticulous folks at Mission Control.

When Apollo 1 caught fire on the launchpad, incinerating the innards of the capsule and its three astronauts in a matter of seconds, Kranz told his staff, “Let us get good and angry – and then let us make no more mistakes.” He attributes the ultimate success of Apollo to the perished astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee, for setting their priorities straight:

“From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough and Competent’. Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for.

“Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.”

Of course, the astronauts themselves also displayed calm and focus under pressure. The Apollo 15 astronauts worked so hard running science experiments on the moon’s surface that their fingertips turned black from hemmorhaging as their fingernails scraped against the inside of their gloves.

Most of you will remember Gene Kranz as Ed Harris’s character in Apollo 13. Kranz has an amusing anecedote to that: “In the movies, the controllers always stand up and cheer each mission event, but if a controller ever did that before the mission was over and the crew was on the carrier, that would be the last time he sat at a console.”

Enterprise attitude beyond this point

I find that VoIP, hypermedia, and open source have similar characteristics and objectives: they are all based on a decentralized network of users, sport an advanced form of modular flexibility, and they all are disruptive technologies that obsolesce the middleman monopolies – the telcos, the mainstream media, and the software corps, respectively.

So it didn’t suprise me very much for VON Canada 2004 to have a panel titled, “Blogging, Wikis and Twikis in the Enterprise”. Unfortunately, it also didn’t surprise me to see only nine attendees in the room, myself included.

Half of them did not know what blogs or wikis were, so Ronald Gruia of Frost & Sullivan started off with definitions. He defined blogs as periodic posts typically ordered in reverse chronology. He defined wikis as webpages where any one user can freely create and edit content at will. He defined a “twiki” as a wiki with revision support. (I called him out on this one, pointing out that any wiki system worth it’s mettle has content control. He admitted that in his haste in creating the presentation, he may have made an error. Twiki is just the brand name for yet another kind of wiki – albeit a pretty robust one.)

In identifying areas of disruption:

  • news dessimination and user comments = blogs?
  • whiteboard collaboration apps = wikis?

IP telephony involves OPEX savings in order to drive higher revenues per employee. Blogs and wikis can do the same, by driving higher enterprise collaboration. [Ronald Gruia writes: “IP telephony sales pitch is changing from OPEX savings to higher productivity. Lower OPEX does not necessarily drive up employee productivity. But the apps will.”]For example, Wikipedia, an online wiki started in 2001, now boasts more words than the Encyclopedia Britannica. Every article was written voluntarily by someone on the Internet, and the content is typically high in quality.

James Thompson, CommPartners and moderator of the wiki VoIP-Info.org, cites the real reason why blogs and wikis are the next big thing: they have an extremely low barrier to participate. You only have to type your words in, and the document engines do the rest: HTMLizing, timestamping, and archiving.

And yet, I see companies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on large, unwieldly CMSs with pretentious interfaces and daunting access restrictions. Employees fumble with Outlook, sluggishly sifting through hundreds of emails and sharing enormous 50MB PowerPoints.

Meanwhile, teenagers and university students use lightweight blogging and wiki systems, available as free and open source software downloads, and share their minds with the entire world.