The Pulver Report: October 16, 2000
In this Issue:
Heard on the Net
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the email.)
Iceland is the 2001 Capital of the IP Communications World
I recently had the opportunity to visit Iceland (again) and
spoke at Agora, which was billed as an event "Bringing Visions of
the Future to the Present". Being made to feel like a Telecom
Prophet, I spoke about the future of Internet Telephony,
Instant Messaging and Presence.
New readers of The Pulver Report may not know that Iceland leads
the world in both Internet penetration (over 80% of the Icelandic
population) and most recently, in Wireless penetration.
As such, being a speaker from outside of Iceland, I felt like I
was at a distinct disadvantage, since it is the people of Iceland
I believe who are living in the future, in the "always on world",
especially with respect to deployments of IP based Communications,
and being from the US, I was from the present past.
While I was in Iceland I had a chance to spend time with
Gudjon Mar Gudjonsson, who can be best characterized as a
"parallel entrepreneur". Gudjon has many diversified interests,
making him one of the people directly responsible for making
Iceland the 2001 Capital of the IP Communications World.
Reykjavik is the home of many innovative startups which include:
Islandssimi ( http://www.islandssimi.is ), an Icelandic Nextgen Telco,
Lina.Net (http://www.lina.net ) which is making the broadband home
a reality, Maskina (http://www.maskina.com ), which is playing
in the wireless location based services space, HomePortal ( http://www.homeportal.com
)
which plays in the Broadband Home space, as well as OZ.com ( http://www.oz.com
).
Iceland will be the first country able to observe on a national
basis the reality of IP based communications and the benefits that
IP lead innovations can bring to the future of communications
and to society.
For startups and established companies from outside of Iceland who
want access to a live beta test environment to see how their
technologies play out in an advanced Internet culture, Iceland is the
place to be.
Jeff's 20th High School Reunion...
Back in 1995 when I used to publish NetWatch, my writing partner,
Leonard Czajka used to talk to me about his idea of the killer
application for the web, "The High School Project". Web sites
like ClassMates.com ( http://www.classmates.com ) have entered the
space since Leonard and I last spoke, but the thought of serving
the interests and needs of people with fond memories of high school
still remain.
In the days leading up to my 20th High School reunion, I found myself
visiting ClassMates.com to check up asynchronously on some of the
people I knew in High School and watch over time a number of
people from my high school class log in and self-identify themselves.
Sometimes the anticipation felt leading to an event is more
enjoyable than the event itself. I'm sure there was a time when a
reunion was planned by a group of alumni (and maybe it is still
done in some places) but for the Great Neck North High School
class of 1980, the reunion process was outsourced to a professional
high school reunion company, Reunions Unlimited ( http://www.reunionsunlimited.net
).
While this may make sense for those without time to plan a high school reunion,
the end result is an event without any personalization, run by people who have
no
connection to your past and who appear to take little interest in
their own job. "Another night, another reunion" seemed to be
the motto for those unfortunate enough to sit behind the tables
handing out badges to the attending high school alumni.
While I feel the experience would have been different if it
was a pulver.com production, if there was even a little community
building done in advance of the reunion, the event could have
been a lot more fun.
The class of 1980 didn't experience PCs, spreadsheets or word
processing growing up and was a generation behind those who
take email and instant messaging technologies for granted.
While many of the people from my graduating class became:
Teachers, Doctors, Lawyers, Investment Bankers, TV Producers,
I found it difficult to synchronously communicate in five words
or less the space I came from.
While attending the reunion I quickly also realized that
high school was over twenty years ago and some of the people
I never got to know twenty years ago, I wasn't going to get
to know anytime soon.
This said, I do think it would be cool if the name badges which
were given out had some kind of location based technology embedded
in the name badge so it would be easy to quickly find your old friends
on a mobile internet device which worked well in low light environments.
It is in situations like my high school reunion that I also think
instant messaging technologies could be applied, so if properly
planned, a high school reunion could first take place virtually
using IM technologies. If the entire class were to first meet
on the net, maybe a week before the reunion, we could speak in a
voice enabled web portal and/or text chat as a group and instant
message each other at will. After experiencing a virtual
reunion, the group would have a week to get to know each other
again and attempt to renew their high school friendships. Another
advantage is that classmates who are not able to travel to the
reunion might still be able to participate in the virtual
reunion.
I expect future high school reunions will take place on the net.
Maybe for our 25th reunion, I will be able to convince my
classmates to participate in a virtual reunion which takes
advantage of both location based presence and instant messaging
technologies.
Streaming Video has become real in 2000
Someday this year, Streaming video became a reality.
While I've been a fan of streaming media for quite some time, I was
until recently convinced that it would be my kids who take advantage
of streaming media since they would grow up using it from the start
rather than constantly comparing it to broadcast TV.
While walking around my office, I've noticed an increasing number
of my staff receiving huge email attachments which contain video
clips. This could be a sign that video on the net has become
mainstream. Personally, I've stayed away from streaming video
for quite some time since I found it hard to get excited about
a 6-8 frames per second 160x240 image.
A funny thing happened to me recently on the way to the movies...
The other night I decided to go see Almost Famous. Before going
out to the movies I visited Moviefone.com ( http://www.moviefone.com )
and after looking up the local movie times, I took a look at the
movie trailer and was instantly hooked. The video technology in
the latest Real Networks ( http://www.real.com ) client when viewed
on my broadband home network (dedicated T1) was truly impressive
to a jaded Net video person. Another fun part of Moviefone.com are
their clips of moviegoers opening night reactions.
I strongly recommend to readers of The Pulver Report who also consider
themselves jaded of net video technologies, the time has come to
take another look at streaming video the next time you have broadband
access to the net.
For more clips about Almost Famous, please visit:
( http://www.film.com/filmsites/almostfamous/media.html )
BBH Fall 2000 Recap: They came from A(ustralia) to Z(urich)
-- Sandy Teger and David Waks
For those who weren't able to join us at Broadband Home Fall 2000
(Oct 3-5 near San Francisco), there was a loud and clear message:
the Broadband Home is "the next big thing". It's happening not just
in one or two places - this is a global trend.
The 230 attendees representing 17 countries provided a wonderful mix of
cultural, technological and industry perspectives, shared both in and
between sessions as well as at our Wednesday night party. Special thanks
to all the presenters and moderators, as well as to those who traveled
from around the world to join us -- prizes for delegates who traveled
the farthest go to four "Aussies" and two from Bangalore, India. Our
personal observation was that many delegates were so knowledgeable in
their fields that they could easily have been speakers.
A key theme of the conference was that speeding the reality of the
Broadband Home requires collaboration across multiple industry sectors.
To provide the applications consumers want, we need content and
applications, broadband pipes to the home, residential gateways, home
networks and broadband appliances (including PCs and TVs and new devices)
-- plus ways to provision, install, maintain and bill for services. And
without understanding the implications of new applications on various
solution components, the solution won't work.
One message from our opening talk was echoed many times: for the
Broadband Home to grow beyond a niche market, we've got to reduce
complexity. Sandy showed pictures of the maze of wires, boxes,
schematics and instructions needed to operate and connect the
Teger-Waks voice, data, audio/video and lighting systems as an
example of what the vast majority of consumers will not put up with.
Although technologies and products are available to do lots of
nifty things, not every home has a system administrator like Dave.
For him, the Y2K problem in our plant lighting system or the
mystery of why Sandy's email stopped working were "fun and
interesting puzzles" to be solved. For Sandy, they were frustrating
obstacles to getting things done. The San Jose Mercury News picked
up on this issue -- check out their story on the conference
at ( http://www.sjmercury.com/business/top/027647.htm )
Once you get beyond the first stage of the Broadband Home -- connecting
multiple PCs to each other and a high speed Internet connection
-- the requirements of some parts of the solutions change. For
example, Peter Michel, President and CEO of Brink's Home Security,
pointed out that for broadband-enabled home security, "always on"
is
what's most important, not high speed. The requirement for high
reliability is not just about meeting some theoretical metric of
five or six "nines", but may be a matter of life and death.
Similarly, home networking for connecting PCs at high speed with
the Internet is not particularly demanding. But once rich media
and telephony applications become part of the mix, the networks
must accommodate isochronous (time dependent) traffic. Make TV or
HDTV part of the mix and the bandwidth requirements suddenly
grow; the 2 or 10 Mbps of today's technologies are inadequate
and need to grow to 25 Mbps or so to do the job.
Wireless home networking is a very attractive way to get rid
of all the wiring required today. But the industry does not
have a consistent message for the consumer, with at least four
different technologies being discussed -- HomeRF, 802.11b,
802.11a, and Bluetooth -- each suited to a different mix of
perceived consumer requirements, price points and market timing.
A key message of the conference was that cool technology is
sexy only to technologists. That's not to say that there weren't
lots of discussions about the relative merits of various
technologies. But as our content and applications speakers pointed
out, those choices are really all about "plumbing" -- once the
right plumbing is in place, all the user cares about is whether
the water runs or the lights go on or the cool new apps work!
John Kernan, CEO of the Lightspan Partnership, pointed out that
kids using Lightspan's innovative educational applications are
learning more and improving their test scores. It's not because
of the sexy technology used to implement the applications, but
because the company has applied their key insight: the same
techniques game developers use to hook kids on their Sega
Dreamcasts and Sony Playstations can make learning a compelling
experience.
This is just a sampling of what went on at BBH Fall 2000. The
upcoming issue of the Broadband Home Report will cover it in
more depth. If you're interested, subscribe now by
visiting ( http://www.thebroadbandhome.com/report/subscribe.html )
We have started to plan our next event, Broadband Home Spring 2001,
which will take place February 27 through March 1 in Miami.
Mark your calendar now to save the dates!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
pulver.com 2000/2001 Calendar: ( http://pulver.com/conference )
October 25-26, 2000 - The pulver.com Wireless Internet Summit
New York, NY
( http://pulver.com/wirelesssummit )
November 13-15 - VON Asia 2000, Hong Kong - JW Marriott Hotel
( http://pulver.com/asia2000 )
November 28-30, 2000 - Fall 2000 Presence and Instant Messaging
Santa Clara Marrio, Santa Clara, CA
( http://pulver.com/im2000 )
- 2001 Events -
January 18-19, 2001 - Bandwidth Trading and Minutes Brokerage Summit,
Ritz Carlon, Maui, HI
( http://pulver.com/bandwidth)
January 23-25, 2001 - Winter 2001 VON Developers Conference,
Sheraton Gateway Hotel, Burlingame, CA
( http://pulver.com/developers )
February 6-8, 2001 - Annual IP Telephony Executive Summit,
Sophia Antipolis, France
(Invitation-only event)
February 27-March 1 - Spring 2001 Broadband Home
Miami, Florida
( http://www.thebroadbandhome.com )
March 20-23, 2001 - Spring 2001 Voice on the Net
Phonix Civic Center, Phoenix, AZ
( http://pulver.com/von )
April, 2001 - Geolocation Opportunities 2001
Tokyo, Japan
May 22-24, 2001 - Spring 2001 Presence and Instant Messaging
Boston, MA
June 11-14, 2001 - Summer 2001 VON Europe
Stockholm, Sweden
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Please send your comments and feedback regarding this issue of
The Pulver Report to jeff@pulver.com.