eWeek reported today that Lenovo will use text messaging to add an additional layer of security to the company’s line of ThinkPad notebooks. Basically, using the WWAN capability, a user can remotely shutdown and/or lockout a missing or stolen computer. Presumably, you can also get indications back that the message was successful.

This new security feature allows a user to send an SMS (short message
service) text message from a cell phone to a Lenovo ThinkPad that has been lost
or stolen. Once the kill command is sent, the lost or stolen ThinkPad is either
disabled immediately or the notebook is disabled after the PC has been turned
back on, said Stacy Cannady, Lenovo’s product manager of security.

That’s a great example of real time communications enhancing the business process, especially using a mechanism like SMS that’s universally available.  I particularly like the wide applicability this could have to all sorts of remote devices, procedures, etc.  Hmmm…. current regulation hamstrings the simple provisioning of an inbound SMS message, but boy, wouldn’t that be a great little add to an application?  You could use Twitter direct messaging, but that’s a bit clunky…. but still…. hmmmm.

As I sit here just a few miles from where the original was held, I wanted to extend to all of you a Happy Thanksgiving. For those of you outside of America, Thanksgiving is our annual holiday where we gather with family and friends, eat and drink ourselves silly, then wake up hung-over the next day to spend all of our money on Christmas.  No really, that’s what we do.  We blend the deadly sins of sloth, gluttony  and consumerism to make the ultimate holiday. I suppose Thanksgiving is now surpassing Valentine’s Day as my favorite holiday, which is saying a lot for me. 

The original settlers that started the whole Thanksgiving thing were called “Pilgrims”, people so uptight that the English kicked them out. (How uptight do you have to be for that to happen?) Like many who went to my high school, I count six of the Mayflower descendants as my family, including John Howland who fell off the boat half-way across because he was drunk (this is the oral tradition in my family), and Elizabeth Tilly, the poor fourteen year old girl John married after her parents died, proceeding to impregnate her some fifteen times in twenty years.  Growing up, we saw many visitors looking for their Mayflower descendants, which still causes me to ask… why?  Near as I can tell, the Pilgrims were long on fortitude, God and fornicating. Not much else.  And, given that my family has been stuck on and around the Cape Cod sandbar for, oh, almost 400 years only proves that Pilgrims lead to massive imbreeding and a distinct lack of ambition.  I can drive to Plymouth Rock from my house in about twenty minutes; you would have thought my family would have gone a bit farther in life.

The church my family attends is one of the oldest Congrgational Churches, gathered in London in 1616, and deported soon thereafter to the Cape’s sandy shores.  At the Sunday service, as is the tradition, the minister read an account from the first Pilgrim Thanksgiving:

You shall understand, that in this little time, that a
few of us have been here, we have built seven dwelling-houses, and four
for the use of the plantation, and have made preparation for divers
others.  We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and
sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of
the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which
we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors.  Our
corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of
Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth
the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very
well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling,
that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we
had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as
much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a
week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms,
many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their
greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we
entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which
they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon
the captain, and others.  And although it be not always so plentiful as
it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far
from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

And what do I hear? Entrepeneuring. Pilgrim venture capitalists sticking the fish on top of the corn, with a successful exit. Unfortunately, the business plan didn’t work out  for the peas. Market timing, apparently.  Indeed, it continued with a man named James Otis, a member of our church, who travelled to Boston and gave the famous four hour sermon that included such gems as “No taxation without representation” and “Every man’s home is his castle.”  Modern translation: founders dislike preferential shares.  The Native Americans? Management consultants and contractors.

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving to you – wether you be Pigrim, founder, venture capitilist or glutton.  At least we can be thankful that 2008 wasn’t like 2009 promises to be.

Well, the good news is that smart phones are still projected to sell well in the new year… the bad news is that it’s really hard to convince your boss that the new copier will double as a smart phone. A recent study from ChangeWave notes a historic collapse in project IT spending in 2009, punctuated by the fact that this is the time of year when spending normally picks up.  Ouch.

ChangeWave’s latest corporate IT purchasing survey shows an
accelerating collapse in U.S. business spending that has reached
historic proportions – with record pullbacks occurring both in the
current 4th Quarter and going forward.

In one of the survey’s few upbeat findings, the corporate smart phone
market continues to show growth – with Research in Motion (RIM)
maintaining its huge lead, but Apple (AAPL) continuing to make inroads
in small to medium-sized businesses.

Hey, remember the telecom nuclear winter?  Could it be that all of our bad karma has been accounted for?  God, I hope so.

If you need another sign that we’re heading straight for the web-as-platform application world, look no further than the recent announcement from Hoover’s of their Hoover API. Apparently done in partnership with Mashery, the Hoover’s API allows your business process to access data from Dunn and Bradstreet from your application.   Geez, if the ultimate symbol of old school business inteligence has got an API, I sure hope you all do.   The API is pretty wide, covering information like company and key employee information, all the way down to competitor information.  Can you imagine having a caller ID that you can use to prompt business intelligence, all the way down to what the caller’s competitors are doing today?  How about adding to your salesforce process the ability to add appointments based on recent credit movements?

HAPI is my API of the week.

I’ve been pounding the “culture as programming” drum a while now.  The skill set and world-view of every engineer is shaped not only by their education and the work experience, but by the history of their mentors and role models.   Thus, not only have telecom’s applications been siloed, but the technologies, architectures and approaches have been as well.  It is obvious to me that as important as Web technologies are and will be, the culture divide between the more experienced and newly minted participants might be even more important.

I really feel this when I visit GitHub.  GitHub is an online service that provides source code control for developers.  For the non-technical reader, a source control service keeps snapshots of all of your source code, so that you can easily track what changes, go “back in time” if you need to, and manage contributions from many developers such that they don’t step on each others toes. Source code control is absolutely nothing new, and has been a staple of software development for nearly thirty years.  Any large development organization implements source code control, and depends on it.   However, GitHub is the next generation’s take on this old tool, and I think provides us with an interesting lense to understand the future:

• GitHub is a “social code hosting”, allowing you to easily subscribe to other people’s code bases. You get a complete RSS feed of what they are doing. You can branch your own code off of theirs so  you can change it if you want, and there’s a mechanism by which you can give it back with your changes.  In the past, source code control was tightly controlled by the software engineering organization.  Instead of the modern ethos of peer-to-peer, the past was very top down.
• GitHub makes the individual programmer the focal point, not the organization itself. This means that github makes complete sense if you are a single developer. In the past, source code version control was optional for individuals, and even for small groups, but never optional for larger groups.
• GitHub is about public communication: a very common way to communicate the existence of, and get the support for, your software project is to put it on GitHub.  There just was no analog to this in the past.
• GitHub is frequented and developed by the young.  The parent company “Logical Awesome”, has a simple website, without all of the management bios and traditional menu driven design of older companies.  They have a picture, and a contact link. That’s it. I happen to love their picture, which says it all for me.  I suppose I’m way too old and experienced to declare that my codes are perfect, but I appreciate the testosterone. I really do.

Seeing as this is a holiday week in the United States, I’d like to keep it a little light – here’s a great little mashup I found as a tribute to the new culture of technology:

Star Trek – DJ Spock

After a few months of rumors and speculation from those in the know, Twilio has made it’s debut. Twilio is the latest in a march of Web telephony service providers like IfByPhone, Jaduka, Ribbit and CloudVox, all vying for programmer’s hearts and minds.  I’ve had a brief opportunity to peruse the functionality and documentation on the site…. here’s my two cents:

• Good job on Twilio’s straight-forwardness.  Twilio has an easy to understand pricing model, well within reason for application developers, and one that assures that they have some sort of decent margin.  Although I personally think they could have made even more money by charging by the transaction, the minute model is no shock and is quite fair. 
• I’m happy to see the RESTy nature of the API, making it fairly easy to pull out your PHP, Ruby or Objective-C tool-kit for application development.
• At the risk of alienating my friends at Voxeo, I’ve had it with XML-based languages.  Twilio’s language, unfortunately, captures the worst of all worlds.  Unlike Voxeo with their pre-eminant VoiceXML and CCXML hosting, you can’t take your application anywhere else because the Twilio XML language is proprietary.  Ick. Did I say I’ve had it with XML based languages? Ick ick. (Actually, if I search my heart, the only reason I ever put up with CCXML in the first place is because Voxeo does such a damn good job hosting it. Otherwise, I have no patience for it.) That said, the language does span the most imporant five verbs for Voice Mashup development, so I’ll give it a few points for that. In general, though, hard to see that somebody who actually likes CCXML would choose Twilio over Angel, Voxeo or TellMe.
• I’m also thinking that web designers will prefer ifByPhone’s HTML centric approach over on the fly XML creation or REST interfaces.   The ifByPhone technical approach favors those who are DHTML centric; not really thinking that Twilio will be something they will prefer. So, as far as adoption, my bet is that the creative Ad agencies continue to favor the folks from Chicago.
• How about those flex and flash developers? Given the choice between Ribbit and Twilio, who do you think they’ll choose? If you are in the Adobe camp, I think Ribbit’s a better choice for you.
• Perhaps you’ll be like me, and be a Ruby-ist and a fan of Adhearsion. In that case, go off to CloudVox and check out what they’ve got cooking. Not everyone ends up as a Ruby guy, and that’s just fine, but every really creative mashup guy I know uses it exclusively.  (Should give a telegraph shout out here, but I still can’t get my head around a MVC treatment of voice. I probably need to evolve.)

Ok, so if you aren’t a VoiceXML guy, or an DHTML dude, or a Adobe jock, or a Rubyist, you are still in the Twilio camp.  I happen to favor now prime competitor Jaduka here, if only for their labs-application creativity and massive head start.

Ok – in all seriousness, what am I looking for? Where’s the hole?

• Give me some unique functionality.  I love what Orange is doing with their developer program. Isn’t there anyone else out there that can bring that amount of richness in an API? There must be.
• Give me something that integrates really, really well. Twilio gets high marks from me in making it easy (really, very easy) to signup and deploy a service.  Now, make it really easy for me to integrate into my exisiting infrastructure and applications. Even better, make it easy for anyone who’s a Serena or Jackbe developer to integrate.
• Can we just get a little smarter about our APIs? If you are BT or Deustche Telekom, you really have to supply solid and basic APIs – your ten thousand large companies need them, and you need to provide them.  But, if you don’t have a footprint the size of a continent, you gotta move the ball forward.

That all said, congratulations to the Twilio team on their launch.  If I were an investor, would I go in on this one?  Yes, but only on the fall down theory: there are enough large carriers that need this functionality that one will fall down and need to purchase them for it.  Oh shoot, I forgot about Broadsoft’s Xtended developer program.  I take it back.

Ok – time for cringing again.  The fine folks at Broadsoft forwarded me a copy of my talk at the Broadsoft Connections Show, where I demonstrated the Disaster Dispatcher. The Disaster Dispatcher is a voice mashup written on top of the Broadsoft Extended interface, Amazon’s EC2 and Twitter.  I’m making this application open source, so if you want a copy of it, just speak up.   Again, thanks to Broadsoft for their support, and to all of you who showed up for the session!

Wow. Was that a good time or what?

Thank you to everybody who came out last night for the dinner last night! Lee and I had a great time putting it together, and it was really nice to have a chance to sit down with fifty people I deeply respect and admire.  The food was excellent, the wine flowed, and it was a great time to meet with old friends and make new ones.  (You know, the people who actually understand what you do for a living.)

After dinner was over, both Lee and I decided that we had to do it again – so stay tuned.  Again, thanks.

This Sunday morning, as I fumbled to find my tie, I turned on a Sunday morning news show and listened to the pundits. As I listened to their analysis of what this election meant, I remembered a passage from Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance talking about arbitrary ways we divide up problems, and how that simple thing affects how we see them. In the show, the question about the election was wether or not it was a repudiation of the Republicans, or an acceptance of the Democrats. I wonder if it was something different: a vote for a different generation of politics and politicians.  Perhaps John McCain, for all his service and character, was simply too old and old-fashioned for the majority of the electorate, whereas Barack Obama was connected both technically and socially despite his youth.  Barack comes from the “new normal”: a multi-racial immigrant family with at least one divorce, an e-mail and text message sending man – a politician who says “Yes, I inhaled. That was the point.” Bill Clinton’s commentary of sixteen years ago was in no small part motivated by the fact that most of the electorate at that time could not spell “bong”, and couldn’t name any of their friends that smoked up either.  How much credibility would Barack lose if he claimed the same lack of inhalation today?

I often feel like I stand on a bridge across a canyon, and in more ways than one.  I am 41, which means I’ve been in communications for about twenty years. When I started, telecommunications was a different game. There were no cell phones, no voice over IP.  The answers for next generation services had something to do with AIN and ISDN; PBXs were big, expensive and disconnected from anything else.  The 1986 Telecommunications Act was just passed, and computers were no where near powerful enough to be credible platforms for telecommunications applications.  When I meet younger engineers now, chances are they have no deep knowledge of SS7 or anything like it.  They live in a world that is dominated by the cell phone and the Internet.  For them, the ITU is worse than irrelevant – it’s generally unknown – again proving that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s apathy. The new ITU is the IETF, and between the two, you can see the cultural divide.  The ITU approach is straightforward: all the big vendors fly away to some foreign city for years to completely determine the next communications standard, and when it’s done, they spend a few more years developing it for the market.  The IETF is as straightforward: go off and build something, and once you figure out how it worked, write it down and send it in.  Can you imagine a Facebook or Google coming out of the ITU? Yeah – me neither. Can you imagine anybody writing the thousands of pages required to describe IMS and submitting that to the IETF? At one time, Henning told me that SIP was the longest specification in the entirety of the IETF, at the same time we were embracing it because of it’s relative simplicity compared to the other ITU based protocols available.

For these basic cultural reasons, is it hard to see that the future of telecommunications development must inevitably turn towards web-centric methods, tools and approaches? As those older than me near retirement, they will pass the mantle over to a younger generation, already deeply educated and bought-in to an Internet view of the world. As much as the older generation valued reliability and stability, the newer generation values innovation and integration.  This sub-conscious pull will color our future.  The challenge?  The older generation sits on a business model that works, and works remarkably well.  For all the bluster of Web 2.0, very little of it can challenge the fundamental business of the phone… and the chasm is created.

Over time, I expect the pendulum to swing widely towards web approaches and technologies, and many fewer engineers running around who deeply understand how today’s telecom infrastructure works. But let’s face it, I love the Ruby guys I hang out with, but not one of them has the engineering chops to design the next generation G.7xx audio codec or the channel equalizer for the next ADSL modem. They are rare today; getting rarer by the day.  You simply cannot, without a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Digital Signal Processing, get those sorts of jobs done.  So, although the pendulum swings, one result is that the guys left in the old school can reassert their value in the industry.  Thus, the bridge exists for a while.

As I mentioned yesterday, Shai’s video at the eComm show was an excellent example of a company pitch.  Shai sent me a link today; spend the two minutes to look at it.  If you can’t do this for your company… maybe you should call Shai for some pointers.  Even though I’ve been aware and supportive of Fonolo for a while, I was not able to accurately and quickly explain what they do until I saw this video. Now I can.

Shai Berger, Fonolo