November 30th, 2007

Video of my Out-of-Box experience with Amazon's Kindle (and some quick impressions)

Posted by David Berlind @ 3:45 pm

Categories: Entertainment, General, Hardware Infrastructure, Personal Technology, Video, Wired & Wireless

Tags: Amazon.com Inc., Video, Amazon Kindle, Advertising & Promotion, Engineering, Marketing, David Berlind

No. It’s not a review of the Kindle, yet. There are plenty of those already circulating the Web and I’ll get to mine (better late than never). But, after missing the Amazon press conference in NYC where the members of the press were offered Kindles to take home and try, I finally was able to get one sent to me and it arrived today. So, before opening it up, my multimedia wingman Matt Conner and I decided it would be best to fire up our camera and videotape the out-of-box experience (literally, out of the box that it arrived in, via UPS).

One thing you may notice: Amazon doesn’t yet have a shipping box (or at least didn’t use one for my unit) that’s designed to fit the Kindle. I’ll bet this changes. They’ll probably have one that says “Kindle” all over it. The Kindle is smaller (and thinner than I imagined). It’s very light. My fellow blogger Josh Taylor noted that it doesn’t have a backlight if you’re going to read in the dark (like I sometimes do next to my sleeping wife). I have one of those lights that you can clip onto your book. The one I have can’t clip onto the Kindle or the leather cover that comes with it (*sigh*). I suspect that outfits like Coach will come out with more sophisticated Kindle carrying cases: ones that come in different colors/patterns, some with built-in lights, pockets, etc.

The Kindle has a USB port on the edge that faces down when you’re reading. I was thinking about how, if that port was on the top edge, I could plug one of those USB-based mini-halogen lights into it and that would work really well as a means for lighting up the Kindle’s “page.” Fortunately, the Kindle uses Verizon’s Sprint’s EVDO network to connect to Amazon.com through which digital copies of books can be purchased and downloaded right into the Kindle. That’s the network with the strongest signal in my house (it’s winter, I’d hate to have to walk down the block to buy a book).

One other industrial design issue: On the Kindle’s backside, there are two power buttons, one for the Kindle’s overall power and one for the EVDO radio that connects to Amazon’s network (don’t ask me why, when I point to this in the attached radio, I call it a WiFi radio. The icon confused me, but it was still a serious brain fart). Neither of the two power buttons are very accessible when the leather case is wrapped around the unit. It’s not a major drag. You can bend the leather back to get at them and, theoretically, you shouldn’t have to get at them very much because of how good the Kindle is at conserving power (I’ll test that). Even so, the buttons in the context of the leather cover could have been done a bit more elegantly.

Josh Taylor called it an ugly duckling with potential. On the other end of the spectrum, Robert Scoble wrote an open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos about what a trainwreck the Kindle is. In general, I think Scoble’s criticisms are good food for thought when Amazon gets around to building future Kindles. But, my sense is that the heart of the market — the one that Amazon really wanted to hit first — is the the one that just wants to read books. In addition to usability issues (Scoble wants a touch screen and thinks it’s not designed for the way people will hold it), Scoble talks about adding social features and an ability to buy stuff for other people (via Amazon). I don’t know about the ergonomics of it (I haven’t tried it enough to comment), but I think Amazon was right to focus on making it easier to acquire and read digital books and to leave the social features for later. Personally, I’d like the social features too. But I have to realize that those sorts of features — features that are in our DNA because of the other digital tools we use (blogs, FaceBook, etc.) — don’t matter right now to most of the people that Amazon is targeting (nor will they matter for the forseeable future).

And it’s not like Amazon is getting serious pressure to stay one step ahead of some competitor. Due to its unique position in the book industry, there really aren’t any other companies that are in a position to efficiently compete against Amazon. Think Dell, but for books. Only in this case, I really don’t see another seller (eg: what Gateway was to Dell) or even a legacy company like Barnes & Noble or Borders coming into the market with something competitive.

I have played with the user interface some. Admittedly, I haven’t read the manual (so some of you will yell at me RTFM). But sometimes, I think the measure of how intuitive something like this is, something that’s geared at the masses, is to intuit how to use it from the user experience without the help of the manual. This was not obvious to me in a couple of cases. For example, when a welcome letter (a form letter) from Jeff Bezos suddenly appeared as a link on the Kindle’s home page, I read it, but it wasn’t intuitive to me how to close it in a way that when and if I came back to it, I could start it over. Actually, I was looking for an easy way to delete it first and I didn’t see that. So, then I wanted to close it. I ended up pressing a button that saved the last page of Bezos’ form letter as a “clipping” (like the way you might clip something from a newspaper), that was subsequently listed on the Kindle’s home page. Realizing that that’s not really what I wanted, I looked for an intuitive way to delete the clipping and couldn’t find that either.

Eventually, after reading the manual, I found the instructions for entering the Kindle’s “Content Manager” and removing both the clippings and Bezos’ form letter. What would be more intuitive to me would be if there were context sensitive menus that could be pulled up on each item (for example, one of my clippings or the letter from Bezos) where ever they are listed as well as when you’re reading them. For example, a simple “Delete This Document” menu choice. I don’t want to presume these don’t exist yet. Such menu choices could easily be available to me. I just have to spend more time with the manual to see if that’s the case and how to activate them (perhaps by pressing the ALT key before pressing the menu button).

One last initial comment. There has been some commentary around the Web about how the display is not color. For reading most books, this isn’t an issue. But for reading blogs, newspapers, Web pages, and other forms of content that the Kindle is capable of gathering, I could see where the Kindle would not be an ideal client device. On the other hand, by choosing to forgo color, the Kindle is saving on both battery life and storage space. What sort of battery life does Kindle take? Color requires a different sort of light which invariably requires more power than is currently required to drive Kindle’s digital paper implementation (which has great contrast by the way). Downloading color content also means the Kindle must download more bits and more bits means more work for the radio. More work for the radio requires more of the battery’s power. Those more bits also have to be stored somewhere.

Given the lack of any real competitive pressure, I think Amazon picked the right sacrifices to make. More to come. Check out the video.

November 30th, 2007

Some brutal honesty about the iPhone's faults, and about that need for 3G (or 3.5G)

Posted by David Berlind @ 2:07 pm

Categories: Apple, Entertainment, General, Mobile, Personal Technology, Telephony, Wired & Wireless

Tags: Apple iPhone, Web, HSDPA, Phone, Network, Battery, AT&T Corp., Apple Inc., Hyatt Hotels & Resorts, 3G

Back when the iPhone came first out and I bitched and complained about its significant faults (lack of a replaceable battery was tops on my list, but the slower of AT&T’s two networks and the soft-keyboard were others) to the point that I recommended waiting for v2.0, I took a bit of heat. Depending on who wrote to me (e-mail, via the Web, etc.), I began to think that I was the jealous bully who got up and kicked the other kids’ blocks over in kindergarten. A lot of that inbound came from people I didn’t even know and while I always like to hear alternative points of view from ZDNet’s readers, I really started to think I was the one who was nuts when people that I’ve grown to know and trust — ones who bought iPhones on their own — started telling me I was the one on drugs.

How much of what they were telling me was true and how much of it was just an unwillingness to admit that the damn thing has its faults? Or maybe they just weren’t taking advantage of everything the iPhone does and if they were, they just might find out that they might have been better off waiting for 2.0, provided 2.0 gets it right. For example, why buy an MP3-capable smartphone with a Bluetooth radio in it if that phone can’t work with stereo Bluetooth accessories (headsets, speakers, etc.).

<sidebar> There’s some speculation that the actual Bluetooth radio in the iPhone capable of supporting the A2DP stereo Bluetooth profile, it’s just that the derivative of Tiger that runs on the iPhone doesn’t fully support it. This theoretically could change if Apple offers an OS upgrade to a special iPhone derivative of Leopard.<sidebar>

But forgetting the Bluetooth stereo support for a minute, my biggest issue with the iPhone was its lack of a removable battery. If for example, you were using the iPhone to do all the great things that it can do, sometimes simultaneously (after all, if you’re not going to, why drop so much coin for it?), there was no way in my mind that the phone’s battery could last as long as you’d expect one that’s not replaceable to last. I forgive phone manufacturers like Motorola (I have the Q) who make phones that do lots of things (make calls, check email, browse the Web, play videos and music, take pictures, etc.) and as a result, drain batteries dry before dinner time. That’s OK (although I wish someone in the truth and advertising department would start to require the equivalent of a battery disclosure label, above right, on devices like the smartphone….. see more on my mock up here).

The laws of physics are working and while plenty of people think of Apple CEO Steve Jobs as though he’s some sort of god, even he can’t change the laws of physics in a day. What’s unforgivable to a lot of people is the idea that their phone won’t be available to them as a phone by the end of the day. For this, many people depend on the availability of replaceable batteries. I have two for the Motorola Q that I use and I keep them with me most of the time.

For people with big fingers (me in included), I also had a thing or two to say about the soft-keyboard. There are now several innovative handset designs out there that have figured out a way to conceal not just a hardware-based numeric keypad, but a separate hardware-based keyboard as well. Not that this is something I really expect Apple to change in v2.0, but Helio’s Ocean (see my video here) comes to mind. It’s very innovative and couldn’t Apple do something similar? I’ve used Apple’s soft-keyboard and like the idea that I if I press the wrong key, I can slide my finger to the left or right to get the correct one. That’s impressive (I wish other soft-keyboard would do the same thing). But it’s not the same as having the hardware keyboards.

I also thought Apple’s TV ads that claimed the Web experience on the iPhone wasn’t the “mobile Web,” that it was “just the Web” was off the mark. Perhaps Apple has a different definition of the mobile Web than I do, but to me, when I think of “just the Web,” I think of the broadband experience you get on your PC when you’re sitting at home or in a WiFi hotspot. The iPhone has a WiFi radio and its Safari browser is so superb that, as long as you’re connected to a WiFi hotspot, I’d agree, it’s the Web (or as close as you going to get to it on a screen of the iPhone’s dimensions). But most of the people I’ve spoken to (OK, not everybody) agree that the majority of the time they have their iPhone with them, it’s connected to AT&T’s network and not a WiFi network. And the slower of AT&T’s two networks at that.

Here again, in fairness to Apple and the choice it made, it’s not clear that picking the faster of AT&T’s two networks would have made a difference. Yesterday, fellow ZDNet blogger Russell Shaw posted a blog under the headline The three reason why [a] 3G iPhone won’t matter that much. To be honest, none of what he said resonated with me. For example, I don’t understand the point about how the slower radio didn’t matter to the so many people that purchased the iPhone. Really? A lot of people buy products only later to be disappointed by some feature. If there’s one point about the iPhone where the friends of mine who own say, “well, that’s true,” it’s the point about the Web experience being very slow — more like the mobile Web — over AT&T’s network (whew, at least some vindication).

More compelling however (on the question of whether 3G will really make a difference) were the arguments made by Carl Howe who wrote about how there’s more to 3G networks than performance. Like latency. And that there are other mitigating factors that could impact the performance of the final user experience besides just the raw bandwidth available to the end user. He answered his critics a day later, but that doesn’t change the fact that there could be some truth to what he’s saying. A 3G network, or even a 3.5G network may not matter. Or may not matter much. A WiMax network would matter (hmmmm).

The rumors are pretty strong that Apple will have a 3G phone in ‘08. One potential downside is that the 3G radio might drain the battery even faster than the current 2.5G rated radios. Of course, we won’t know the truth about the total impact of a 3G radio on the iPhone’s user experience or battery life until a 3G iPhone exists and we can compare. So, I’ll back off on the “wouldn’t buy one until it has 3G” point for now.

Even so, I wouldn’t buy one just yet. That’s because I think that now that the honeymoon has worn off, people are being more honest about their iPhones. People like Thomas Nelson Publishers president and CEO Michael Hyatt who, under the heading Second thoughts about the iPhone, wrote:

I’m thinking very seriously about giving up my iPhone and going back to my Blackberry. I know, I know. I was initially so enthusiastic.

I’m certain that same initial enthusiasm was the source of a lot of pushback I got on my iPhone assessment. Hyatt continues:

Initially, it was a good experience. I loved the user-interface and Apple’s elegant and simple solutions. However, I am now beginning to wonder if I made the right decision. Today, after a full day of travel, I am frustrated and ready to give up.

Hyatt goes on to elaborate on five points that are getting under his skin

• The battery life is insufficient
• The keyboard is more trouble than it’s worth
• AT&T coverage is often spotty
• The calendar doesn’t automatically sync
• I don’t use the other applications that much

Quite frankly, neither Apple nor AT&T bear any responsibility for points 3 & 5. I have a zillion times over said that the three most important things to think about when getting a smart or cell phone are coverage, coverage, and coverage. If you are buying a phone that has trouble connecting to its service provider while you’re at home, in the office, commuting, or at one of your other favorite haunts, you’ll end up being very disappointed. A handset that can’t connect to its network is of little use to anybody and no network has perfect coverage everywhere. This is why I often suggest that before you go buying a smartphone for all its great features, find out what service it attaches to, find someone else who has a phone or handset that’s provisioned by that service, and ask to borrow their handset for a few hours. Then make sure it works in all your favorite places and along your favorite routes. If it doesn’t, think twice about buying anything that works with that network.

On point #5, it’s not like the iPhone’s features weren’t public. Shame on anybody who pays a premium for a bunch of features in any product and ends up not using them.

The first two points however (the keyboard one of which is somewhat echoed on O’Reilly’s site) hit very close to home. They’re two of the primary reasons I can’t own an iPhone and that I’m looking forward to a future version of one that has replaceable batteries and a hardware-based keyboard.

Contrary to common belief, I don’t hate Apple. If it solves those two major problems and makes the iPhone available on a network that actually floats around my house (primarily Verizon, but I just noticed an improvement in T-Mobile’s signal), I’d probably buy one in a heartbeat. A MacBook Pro too, if Apple gave it a pointing stick (as shown in this “prototype”).

November 29th, 2007

OpenDocument Format community steadfast despite theatrics of now impotent 'Foundation'

Posted by Dan Farber @ 1:17 pm

Categories: General, Government, IT Management, Legal, Office 2.0, Open Source, Software Infrastructure, Web technology

Tags: W3C, OpenDocument Format, IBM Corp., OpenDocument Foundation, ODf, Matusow, OpenDocument Format (ODF), Emerging Technologies, David Berlind

When in mid-October 2007, the OpenDocument Foundation (ODf, yes, that’s a little “f” that’s not to be confused with the OASIS- and 400-member strong OpenDocument Alliance-backed big F-ODF: the OpenDocument Format) announced that the World Wide Web Consoritum (W3C)-backed Common Document Format (CDF) was the heir-apparent to what it believed was a dead-on-arrival OpenDocument Format, many confused the ODf to be one in the same with the ODF and the latter to have one foot in the grave. Given the striking resemblance between the names and acronyms of the Foundation and the Format, that mistaken obituary was an easy one for casual observers to write. Especially given the way Microsoft, the company whose Office empire is probably more threatened by ODF than most people realize, capitalized on the confusion by spreading its own FUD on the story.

But that and other FUD couldn’t be further from the truth. Based on dozens of interviews that I’ve conducted over the last few weeks, the OpenDocument Foundation, whose three principals are Sam Hiser, Gary Edwards, and a legal eagle who goes by the nickname “Marbux,” went out on a very thin limb where no one else — not the vendors behind ODF, not OASIS (the consortium that hosts the technical committee responsible for the standard’s development), and not the World Wide Web Consortium (chaperone to the Common Document Format [CDF] standard) — was willing to join them.

Not only does it appear as though they were on a thin limb with their opinions that ODF should be buried and that CDF should take its place, they crawled out even further when they publicly disclosed that the W3C and IBM shared those opinions as well. Any statements corroborating the ODf’s position from either organization, particularly IBM given the millions of dollars it has invested and continues to invest in ODF, could very well have cast a dark shadow on the productivity document standard that just recently earned its stripes as an international standard from the International Organisation of Standardisation (ISO). It’s an honor that Microsoft’s competing Office Open XML (OOXML) has so far been denied (but it is up for reconsideration next year).

Citing specific interactions (conversations, emails, etc.) with the W3C’s lead contact for CDF Doug Schepers and Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for IBM’s Lotus Division (where IBM’s collaboration technologies are developed), Edwards claims that both organizations were supportive of his and Hiser’s belief that, at the expense of ODF, CDF should be the strategic target for anyone seeking to store their documents in a file format that was universal, open, and that provided a clear transition path from formats that predispose or lock customers into certain applications like those (formats, applications) from Microsoft.

It is true that Edwards and Hiser interacted with both the W3C and IBM. Unfortunately for them however, this is where Edwards’ and Hiser’s recollections of those interactions varies wildly from those of Schepers (W3C) and Heintzman (IBM).

One thing that’s important to keep in mind about how standards are set (and how decisions are made in technical committees at consortia like the W3C [CDF] and OASIS[ODF]) is that the process often involves vociferous debate among those involved. To the extent that many of the participants who contribute to technical committee meetings are also employees of vendors with some interest in the standards associated with those committees, part of their roles in the process is to represent those interests. Since not all vendors’ interests are aligned, disagreement and debate comes with the territory. They’re to be expected. But so too is a willingness to compromise. At some point, in the name of progress, everyone who participates in the standards setting process knows they may have to give-in on certain issues that may be of import to their employers.

Representing the OpenDocument Foundation, Edwards and Hiser were both participants in the Open Document Format technical committee work at OASIS and respected ones at that. But somewhere along the line, their beliefs regarding ODF and CDF could not be reconciled with the positions of the other committee members. Pretty much everybody I spoke to agreed that this was one of those disagreements that happens in the standards setting process where someone wasn’t going to get their way. It happens. It’s a part of the process. But what happened next is not nearly as common. Claiming that the OpenDocument Format wasn’t nearly as “open” as its supporters claimed it to be, the ODf walked off in a huff.

If IBM or Sun, two of the OpenDocument’s Format’s biggest supporters walked away in such a “huff,” it probably would have meant the end of the OpenDocument Format. But in the bigger picture of the OpenDocument Format, between its backers at both OASIS and in the OpenDocument Alliance, the OpenDocument Foundation’s irreconcilable differences with the rest of community were just that: irreconcilable differences that lacked any potence to affect the momentum or direction of the Open Document Format. Unfortunately for the OpenDocument Format community, the ODf’s “huff” was a molehill that became a mountain when, in addition to the ODf<>ODF naming confusion, Edwards and Hiser not only became very vocal about their convictions (convictions that are voluminously documented in easy to find passages around the Web), they cited the W3C and IBM as having tacitly endorsed those convictions.

This is where Schepers (W3C) and Heintzman (IBM) as well as others in both organizations feel as though Edwards and Hiser are grossly misrepresenting the content of their interactions. According to W3C spokesperson Janet Daly, when Schepers first heard of the Foundation’s interest in CDF, he did what the W3C often does — he reached out to the Foundation with an invitation to further the conversation. According to Daly, “Any time it looks like a third party may be doing interesting work with one of our recommendations (that’s W3C-speak for “standards”), it’s not unusual for us to want to learn more.” But this is where the W3C’s account of that “conversation” and Edwards’ account differ. Whereas the W3C viewed the “conversation” as par for the course outreach, Edwards’ e-mails to me describe the ODf’s interactions with the W3C as more of a relationship that had to be kept secret from OASIS. Wrote Edwards to me via e-mail:

….When the Andy Updegrove published his article (W3C’s Chris Lilley: CDF Not Suitable for Use as an Office Format Can’t Replace ODF), a member of our team sent a copy of earlier eMail exchanges with our W3C contacts to Updegrove arguing that Andy’s article mis-characterized both our relationship with the W3C and, the work we were doing with CDF and WICD. All of which is true.

There were however a couple of problems with this action. For one thing, we were not authorized by our W3C contacts to share these discussions with anyone, let alone the lawyer for OASIS who had already declared a hostility to anything the Foundation might do….

….I hope you can understand our reluctance at this point to discuss this issue in detail or provide evidence certain to compromise the positions of innocent and sincere bystanders.

The implication of Edwards’ note is that the conversations with the W3C had matured far beyond a level of basic outreach and involved a relationship that saw merit in the Foundation’s thinking about CDF as a better strategic format for universal document interoperability than ODF.

The W3C however has a different version of its interactions with the Foundation. The reference to Andy Updegrove’s interview with the W3C’s Chris Lilley (who is also intimately familiar with CDF) is significant. In that interview, Lilley flatly rejected the idea that CDF should be the target in the world’s search for an open, universal file format for productivity applications:

So we were in a meeting when these articles about the Foundation and CDF started to appear, and we were really puzzled. CDF isn’t anything like ODF at all – it’s an “interoperability agreement,” mainly focused on two other specifications - XHTML and SVG. You’d need to use another W3C specification, called Web Interactive Compound Document (WICD, pronounced “wicked”), for exporting, and even then you could only view, and not edit the output.

The one thing I’d really want your readers to know is that CDF (even together with WICD) was not created to be, and isn’t suitable for use, as an office format.

In a subsequent e-mail to me, Sam Hiser argued that the Foundation’s words had been twisted and that it never suggested that CDF would take the place of ODF. However, in both e-mails to me and posts to the Web, Hiser and Edwards have made it clear that the day that ODF-supporter and Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez resigned was the day that ODF died, in their estimation. In his e-mail to me, Hiser wrote:

It’s unfortunate you’re pointing to the Updegrove|Lilley statements. They are as confusing as can be…Right about now Andy’s bloated corpse may be floating down [Boston's] Charles [River] and Chris [Lilley] is doing his best to shade for his W3C colleagues his 180-degree incorrect statements.

On November 10th, in a public thread on the OpenDocument Fellowship’s Web site, Edwards wrote:

Chris Lilley’s comments are in direct opposition to those we received a week ago from Doug Shepers, the head of the CDF Workgroup. doug however asked that we not publicise his comments until Sir Timothy has had a chance to weigh in.

In my interviews, not only does the W3C reject the reference to W3C director Sir Tim Berners-Lee as a fabrication of the facts and stand behind Chris Lilley’s statements 100 percent, the W3C also remains emphatic that its conversations with the Foundation were never more than cursory in level. In fact, Read the rest of this entry »

November 27th, 2007

If Skype was disruptive to telcos, then Cubic Telecom is their nightmare (and good for you)

Posted by David Berlind @ 8:29 pm

Categories: General, Hardware Infrastructure, Mobile, Personal Technology, Telephony, Web technology, Wired & Wireless

Tags: SIM Card, Web, Ireland, Phone, Call, Skype Technologies S.A., Telecommunications, Wi-Fi, Service, MaxRoam

A few weeks prior to my scheduled departure for Dublin, Ireland where I ran the most recent Mashup Camp, I started handing out the phone numbers of my hotel and traveling companions to people who might want to reach me while I was over there. For cell phone usage, I’m a Verizon Wireless customer and, like Sprint customers, Verizon Wireless’ network is based on a radio technology (CDMA) that doesn’t work in Europe. In other words, the radio technology in my phone is incompatible with the radio technology (GSM) that blankets all of Europe. My phone doesn’t work there.

<sidebar>Research in Motion’s BlackBerry 8830 World Edition is sold by both Verizon Wireless and Sprint and has three two radios in it: GSM and CDMA, and WiFi. So, it is the one phone from the two carriers that can roam to Europe provided you have the necessary roaming agreements in place. Hold that thought.</sidebar>

At some point over the years, I could have switched to one of the carriers (ie: AT&T or T-Mobile) whose phones can roam to Europe. But my travels to Europe were too infrequent to warrant the change especially given how AT&T and T-Mobile have almost no signal in my house while Verizon Wireless’ service penetrates almost every nook and cranny of it.

I’ve digressed.

After sending a variety of numbers to a variety of people who might have needed to reach me while in Europe, LouderVoice.com CEO Conor O’Neill wrote back and asked if I had tried Cubic Telecom’s MaxRoam service. He subsequently put me in touch with the company’s CEO Pat Phelan who in turn made sure a MaxRoam-enabled phone was waiting for me at my hotel when I arrived in Dublin.

At the very least, MaxRoam is a big money-saving SIM card
Phelan’s biggest problem when it comes to plowing MaxRoam’s way to success will be in communicating what it does. At first, MaxRoam comes across as a service that can save you a lot of money on roaming fees if you’re one of those international travelers that spends a lot of time on your cell phone where ever your travels take you around the world. For example, according to the roaming calculator on T-Mobile’s Web site, if I’m an American in Europe with a T-Mobile-provisioned phone, the per minute fee when placing a call in Ireland or the UK is 99 cents per minute. The same 99 cents per “Ireland minute” goes for AT&T according to its table of roaming charges per country.

International travelers are so sensitive to roaming fees that they will often acquire a temporary SIM card in whatever country they are traveling to and swap that temporary card into the place of the SIM card that came with their phone from their native carrier (ie: T-Mobile or AT&T). SIM cards for those not familiar with GSM-based carriers are small cards that are inserted into the phone. Once a SIM card is inserted into a phone, the phone takes on the “personality” of the SIM card. For example, whatever phone number and carrier is associated with that SIM card becomes the phone’s phone number and the phone’s native service provider.

To save money, an American international traveler traveling to Ireland might remove his/her T-Mobile or AT&T card and replace it with a Vodaphone SIM card (Vodaphone operates a GSM network in Ireland) that’s associated with an Ireland-based phone number. As a result, any calls s/he makes or receives to or from other Ireland-based numbers are charged according to Vodaphone’s local service charge as opposed to T-Mobile’s or AT&T’s international roaming charges. Depending on how often one travels and how much they use their phone while traveling, the savings can be substantial.

At the very least, Cubic Telecom’s MaxRoam offers one of those SIMs that international travelers can buy to dramatically reduce the cost of roaming internationally. The cost to get started is basically 30 Euros, 5 of which are credited as a prepay to your account (for making calls). Through the MaxRoam.com Web site, you can always “top up” your account (load up your prepayment “bank”).

An unlocked phone (one that, unlike Apple’s iPhone, will take any SIM card) is required and according to the calculator found on the MaxRoam Web site, an incoming call from the USA to a MaxRoam-based phone (one with the MaxRoam SIM in it) in Ireland would cost 24 cents per minute (a savings of 75 percent over what AT&T and T-Mobile charge per minute). An outgoing call from Ireland to the USA would cost 36 cents per minute (roughly a 64 percent savings over AT&T/T-Mobile) and a call to a local number in Ireland would be 31 cents per minute.

Kind of like Skype
To see MaxRoam as just another one of those SIM cards that you put in your phone to save money when roaming internationally would be a huge mistake. If that’s all you want it for, then it is definitely that. But it’s also much more.

After having used MaxRoam for a bit now, I see a lot of similarities to Skype. Perhaps the easiest similarity to grok is the way, through Skype’s Web site, you can acquire phone numbers (known as a “Skype-In” numbers) that when dialed, will ring through to your Skype client (could be software running on your PC, PDA, or smartphone or hardware like IPEVO’s Solo).

Via Skype’s online service, not only can you aquire and load with prepaid credit new Skype-In phone numbers, you can pick the home country of those phone numbers even if they’re different from the country you live in. For example, if I wanted, I could acquire an Ireland-based Skype-In number, the primary advantage of which accrues to people in Ireland who want to call me without incurring international long distance charges. To you, as a Skype user, you reap the huge benefits of the same dirt cheap telephony that has always been the domain of Skype since the service is primarily a Voice-over-IP (VoIP)-based service.

Like Skype, Cubic Telecom’s MaxRoam offers you the same ability to login into your account on the MaxRoam Web site, acquire a number that’s local to any one of 28 supported countries, and have that number ring directly through to your “client.” Number acquisition appears to vary in cost between 1 and 2 Euros per month. But, whereas that “client” in the Skype world must invariably have access to the Internet (in other words, its a Voice over IP call), in MaxRoam’s case, the client is an actual phone that connects to a cellular network, but that can optionally also connect to and use the Internet (provided a WiFi signal is accessible, see below for more on that).

Today, as Cubic Telecom brings its service online, the phone it is providing to customers at a cost of 99 Euros is Pirelli’s DP-L10. Customers will have their choice of two user interfaces — the one that normally comes with the DP-L10 and Windows Mobile 6. Included in the phone is a Cubic Telecom client that can make calls over the Internet (the user decides if calls should be made via WiFi or over the cellular network). By next year, the company plans to have similar client software for all of Nokia’s S60-based devices (eg: the N95). Via its Web site, the company will also offer a Windows-based “softphone” that Cubic Telecom customers will be able to download and install on their PCs. If those customers have a DP-L10 sitting next to their PC when an incoming call comes in, both the softphone and the physical phone can be optionally set to ring simultaneously (via a special burst ring mode, discussed below).

Like Skype, when sending or receiving calls over WiFi (as opposed to GSM), Cubic Telecom’s customers will experience significant savings. Inbound calls are free. Outbound calls are charged at 1 cent per minute.

In a screen gallery that I’ve prepared to go along with this blog post, you can see how (a) users of the MaxRoam service would access their online accounts to acquire new numbers from different countries and do other things like trigger forwarding and (b) how the Pirelli DP-L10 can be programmed to work with a WiFi hotspot and then optionally make a phone call over that WiFi connection.

The MaxRoam SIM will work with other phones (for example, any unlocked GSM phone) but the WiFi calling feature will only be available to supported phones since there’s no prevailing standard or ubiquitously available software for placing plain old telephone system (POTS) calls over IP networks.

So, in some respects, Skype and MaxRoam are the same. In others, they are a bit different. Both Skype and MaxRoam can route calls between VoIP and POTS. Users of both can associate numbers that are local to other countries with their accounts (and in MaxRoam’s case, those numbers can be associated with the phone’s GSM connection or its WiFi connection). But whereas Skype is natively VoIP, MaxRoam can natively be one, the other, or both simultaneously. It’s up to the user.

And it’s the “simultaneous” point that has me also likening another aspect of MaxRoam’s service to Jangl (see my write-up of Jangl, including a podcast with its founder) and GrandCentral (recently acquired by Google). Among the many things these services do (other similar services listed here), their biggest claim to fame is Read the rest of this entry »

November 26th, 2007

Face it: Your health records will one day be a matter of public record

Posted by David Berlind @ 2:21 pm

Categories: General

Tags: Patient, Consultant, Health Care, Record, Computer, Vertical Industries, Benefits, Healthcare, Productivity, Enterprise Software

I just got done reading Lisa Vaas’ coverage of another fumble in health data. This one hails from Canada where, according to Vaas’ coverage in eWeek:

….on the evening of Nov. 20, a consultant employed by the Provincial Public Health Laboratory was contacted at his home office by an unidentified security researcher. The researcher told the consultant that he was in possession of patient information stored on the consultant’s computer. That patient information includes names, MCP (Medical Care Plan) numbers, age, sex, physician and test results for infectious diseases, including HIV and hepatitis…

I’m trying to imagine what it might be like to have just learned that you are HIV positive, perhaps looking to keep that information close to the vest, only to suddenly find out that the information was made public by way of some security snafu with one of the umpteen organizations/individuals that came into contact with your highly sensitive data. This episode which involved a consultant who, by possessing a PC that had all the data on it, was violating some policy. It is eerily reminiscent of the 26.5 million Veteran’s Administration patient records (including those of 2.2 million troops on active duty) that fell into the wrong hands (temporarily, thankfully) by way of an analyst who had the records on his computer.

It was only last week that the UK was reeling from another similar health data snafu. On the very same day that officials learned of Canadian breach (November 20), the UK’s HM Revenues and Customs agency was owning up to its loss of the “confidential details of 25 million child benefit recipients that had been stored on two computer disks.”

The question these breaches bring to mind is the degree to which our confidential medical records can really be safeguarded. Given the number of people that have access to them, the path the data takes from one organization to another, etc. — the idea that this information can be guarded as though our national security depends on it is a pipe dream. Although it hasn’t happened yet, it will only be a matter of time before some huge quantity of confidential records is indelibly published to the Web in a way that cannot be taken back. These breaches will range from the inadvertent (honest mistakes) to the purposeful (eg: disgruntled employees) and don’t be surprised if some cases involve blackmail, zombie computers, and members of organized crime that are beyond the reach of the local law.

As much as I hate the idea, I’m beginning to accept the fact that my health data may one day be a matter of public record. What about you?

November 26th, 2007

Tech Shakedown: Kodak's Web site charging outrageous per-photo shipping fees

Posted by David Berlind @ 10:02 am

Categories: General, Personal Technology, Technology Shakedown, Video, Web technology

Tags: Coupon, Online Photo, Eastman Kodak Co., Problem, Site, Photograph, Qoop, David Berlind

Proving that the devil is in the details when it comes to shopping online (and how shipping fees can easily wipe out any potential savings), Kodak’s online photo gallery is charging an outrageous 4 cents per photo when someone orders 4×6 prints for delivery. The issue was brought to my attention by my wife who, in the course of ordering 2055 4×6 prints for delivery, discovered the shipping fee was going to be a whopping $83.55 for the site’s slowest form of delivery: 3-5 days (continued below……)

…continued from above

As can been see from both the graphic above as well as the attached video, the charges for faster forms of delivery are even higher ($113 for 2 business days and $139 for 1 business day).

This gets to one of the big problems with online photo services. Once you start using one extensively as we have, switching to another is difficult if not impossible because of the work that would be involved in moving your pictures to a new service. In other words, now that we are dissatisfied with Kodak, how might we switch to another service with so many of our photos trapped in Kodak’s Web site? The problem is identical to the one where you become reliant on proprietary software to the point that converting your data would be so prohibitively expensive and/or time consuming, that you just suck up whatever costs the software provider decides to hit you with down the line.

As you can see from the video, there is a way to get free shipping on orders of $50 or more. But here again, Kodak gets bad marks because, instead of simply applying the special offer to qualifying orders as it should do, in order to take advantage of the free shipping, the customer must (1) know that that offer exists, and (2) enter a special coupon code (FREE2SHIP) during the transaction process in order to take advantage of the special offer. Today for example, when I visited kodakgallery.com, the coupon was not listed prominently on any screen that a user might typically encounter in the course of ordering prints for delivery. It is however listed under a link on left-hand side of the home page that says “View Current Deals” (which leads you to this page). In other words, this is a deal that’s currently available to site users, but perhaps not always. Additionally, the fine print on Kodak’s Web site makes it clear that once you use a coupon, you won’t be able to re-use it in the future. The coupon’s restrictions proviso says “One coupon redemption per customer.”

Before taking Kodak to task over these fees, I paid a visit to Qoop.com, one of the partners to Yahoo’s Flickr.com photosharing Web site. Qoop is a service that will drop ship prints of your Flickr photos for you. The site has an interactive shipping calculator into which I plugged the number 2055 for the number of prints and it offered the following results:

• DHL Ground: $19.18
• DHL 2 Day: $48.13
• DHL Next Day: $35.19
• USPS Standard Mail: $39.04

In other words, for less than half of what Kodak charges for it’s slowest form of delivery, I can get next day delivery from Qoop! (excluding special promotions or memberships, both sites charge the same standard per-print fee to make the actual 4×6 prints: 15 cents).

I’ve already done one Tech Shakedown of Kodak (regarding Vista incompatibilities that so far, to the best of my knowledge, have yet to be resolved). But this was another that I couldn’t let slip. The fees are ridiculous.

Update: Kodak has issued a response to this Tech Shakedown

November 21st, 2007

How Microsoft could save businesses time & money when it comes to patching Windows

Posted by David Berlind @ 3:27 pm

Categories: General, IT Management, Security, Software Infrastructure, Web technology

Tags: Software-as-a-service, Microsoft Windows Update, Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, Customer, Server, Truth, Microsoft Corp., Option, Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems

A ZDNet reader that goes by the name of R.E. Riker posed an interesting question to me via e-mail the other day. He asked if maybe, giving the high frequency of updates that it issues for its operating systems (in his case, Windows XP), if offering more frequent Service Packs or update roll-ups wouldn’t be the more sensible thing to do for some of Microsoft’s customers.

In my back and forth exchange with Riker, I learned that he maintains about 70 systems in an environment where new updates from Microsoft must be tested before they are deployed. This can’t an unusual requirement out there in the business world.

For Riker, Microsoft’s monthly issue of such updates (on the second Tuesday of each month) makes such testing impractical. On the other hand, if Riker waits for Microsoft to issue the next Service Pack (which could be years), that’s too long for the systems he oversees to go without certain critical updates. Especially security-related ones. In his first e-mail, Riker wrote:

I would like to see Microsoft offer an option for security patch rollups at least on an annual basis (maybe semi-annually). In other words, compile an update containing all of the security patches for the past year (or half-year) that we could download, test, and then apply to our machines. I know ideally it would be better to apply the monthly updates, but that just isn’t feasible for many people, myself included. But I don’t want to stay completely unpatched or wait years on end for the next service pack. Trying to talk directly to Microsoft is next to impossible for us small fries. Would you be willing to maybe at least broach the topic either directly with them or through a blog? Thank you for your consideration.

I responded to Riker asking why he just doesn’t turn off automatic updates and then deploy them on a less frequent basis. Riker responded:

The option to turn off automatic updates and only update manually would be fine if it were only one or two machines. Going beyond that it becomes rather inefficient considering just the bandwidth alone.

And, well, I currently support 30 XP boxes with probably 40 more yet to upgrade (that’s right, we have 40+ machines on older OSs) . Of course, MS’s solution would be to upgrade all our PCs and set up a [Windows Server Update Services] Server. Ummh, well, first, if I had the resources for that, I probably wouldn’t be here begging. Second, I have a problem with a company asking us to shell out even more money to solve coding problems in their software! [DB's note: He has a good point. According to the WSUS requirements page, Windows Server 2003 is required. In other words, keeping XP up-to-date requires additional software licensing and hardware investments, not to mention time].

I guess what I am trying to find is some balance between not patching immediately (which just doesn’t work for us for multiple reasons) and going unpatched until a service pack is released (which is too long to go unpatched). I don’t feel like that is too much to ask especially in an environment where the hacking has gone professional. It was bad enough trying to cope with the script kiddies. We can’t compete with professional hackers as it is, but we don’t stand any chance at all with unpatched boxes. As small as we are, we’ve already seen some spear phishing attacks.

Finally, if he could have it his way, Riker writes:

Realistically, I don’t think I could do it more than twice a year. And I am certainly open to some other mechanism as long as it is relatively user friendly and I can download it once (even if it involves multiple files as long at that doesn’t get completely out of hand like the update catalog), test it out on a machine, and then apply it to the rest of them.

So, I did what Riker asked. I checked-in with Microsoft and here’s the response that was offered by a spokesperson:

Customers have many choices for servicing Windows. Windows Update is designed for customers who want to update individual PCs as Microsoft releases updates – either automatically or when the customer is ready. A second option is Windows Server Update Services, a free server role for Windows Server customers, which allows network administrators to control the distribution of updates across their network. Other options include full-featured software management tools like System Center as well as 3rd party programs.

Microsoft traditionally releases security updates on the second Tuesday of each month and encourages all customers to install them as quickly as possible. The servicing tools mentioned above are designed to make this as seamless as possible. Microsoft is in constant communication with its customers to better understand their needs and desires and builds its products and services to meet those needs.

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s response will be of little consolation to Riker who would easily fall behind if he relied on self-patching via Windows Update, but according to a schedule he sets (instead of Microsoft’s). Furthermore, I think Riker’s subtle point about who should bear the cost associated with patching numerous systems in a business environment is dead-on. After all, a good many of the patches that Microsoft issues are to deal with defects in the operating system.

I’m not saying “defect” in a negative way nor am I derogating Microsoft for the situation. The truth is that no software — not Windows, nor any of its competitors, nor any applications — is without its defects. The question is, if software is defective and the customer will require it to be patched and there’s a need for something like WSUS in order to manage the that patching according to business requirements (as is proven by the very existence of WSUS), then should the customer be expected to bear additional cost to get that WSUS functionality, or should it be offered for free? Or, should the customer be expected to bear the additional time and expense of aquiring, deploying, and maintaining a server on which to run WSUS? (WSUS is a free download but Windows Server 2003 is not).

While you contemplate that question, perhaps Microsoft will consider this suggestion which I’ve sent to it through my contacts: If there was ever a great opportunity to leverage the benefits of software-as-as-service, then perhaps this is it. Why, for example, couldn’t Microsoft host a multi-tenant WSUS server on the Internet for free? One that system administrators like Riker could turn to for the same WSUS functionality that they’d get if they ran WSUS locally, but without the headaches of running their own WSUS server? Would there be issues (like security) to work through? Sure. But Microsoft is capable of working through them and to the extent that it’s always looking for ways to better service its customers — especially the finicky small to medium businesses that are tough to satisfy — wouldn’t a hosted version of WSUS make sense?

Are you (or should you be) running a WSUS server to better manage the patching of your client systems? If Microsoft offered a cloud-based version of it — one that was integrated into its Windows Update service in a way that allowed you manage all of Windows’ patches on your schedule, would you take it? Or, even if you wouldn’t, should you still be asked to bear the cost of running a local WSUS server even though the purpose of it is largely to manage “manufacturer defects?”

What do you think?

November 21st, 2007

12 spam research projects that WON'T make a difference

Posted by David Berlind @ 12:16 pm

Categories: General, Security, Software Infrastructure

Tags: Solution, Anti-spam, E-mail, Spam, Viruses And Worms, Cyberthreats, Security, Spam And Phishing, David Berlind

Today, InfoWorld has a story headlined 12 research projects that might make a difference. For starters, it is pretty infuriating to me when I visit a site I like, like InfoWorld, and the minute I arrive on the page, the audio from an advertisement starts blaring through my computer’s speakers. The other night, this happened to me while I thought I was browsing in silence next to my sleeping wife.

Although it’s not the sort of invasion that spam is, I feel as though this sort of taking over of my system is in the same vein. It feels like someone is taking liberties with my system that I don’t want taken. I could understand if I was visiting a page that had nothing but a multimedia element to it (eg: audio or video). Even many of those pages default to a mode that requires the user to push the play button first. But where a text-based page is definitely the expectation of the end-user, those expectations should not be met with blaring audio from an advertisement. It already sucks how some video advertisement-bearing pages slow down the overall page-load time in order to cache the video up. But if you want me to continue to visit your site, default the audio to off and and if the auto-playing video or animation is something I desparately need to hear, I’ll turn it on thank you very much (if the powers that be at ZDNet ever think otherwise, I will speak up).

OK, now back to our regularly scheduled programming: InfoWorld’s story on 12 promising research projects. If I could say something to the author of that story, it would be that so long as any anti-spam solution is not deployed universally throughout the Internet’s e-mail system (in other words, so long as some anti-spam tech is not a standard), that anti-spam solution actually makes the spam problem worse. You read that right. Worse. Proprietary anti-spam solutions make the global spam problem worse. They are digging us deeper into the hole that the Internet is already in because everyone who makes those solutions is under the false belief that “s/he who is finally successful at filtering out all spam while allowing the legitimate mail in wins.”

I know I sound like a broken record on this. But when will the world (and especially journalists who cover e-mail security) finally realize that InfoWorld’s story is a headline that gets repeated year after year after year after year. Yet despite the ritual, the only result we continue to see, year after year, is that spam keeps getting worse.
Year in and year out, hundreds of anti-spam solution providers contact me to tell me that I have it all wrong and that their solution is actually the one that will make a difference. But no anti-spam solution provider is dumb enough to promise that if I buy or use their solution, it will guarantee that when I send mail, it will actually get into the intended recipient’s inbox without mistakenly being classified as spam and being filtered off into a spam folder where the recipient might never see it. And herein lies the real problem with spam: So long as there are no standards and we rely on an ever increasing number of proprietary solutions to solve the spam problem, the deliverability of legitimate e-mail will never be guaranteed and in fact will become even less reliable. Let’s face it: The deliverability problem of legitimate mail is actually worse than the spam itself. Much the way spam is on the rise, so too is the number of false positives. So too are the number of e-mails from our banks and other financial institutions that we won’t even open for fear that they’re phishing attempts and that they’ll surreptitiously do something to our systems or finances. The sooner the world admits to this reality, the sooner we’ll see an improvement to the situation.

The only way anti-spam vendor X can guarantee that when I send legitimate mail to someone else that it won’t get falsely flagged by the recipient’s anti-spam system as spam is if the recipient is also using vendor X’s system. In other words, vendor X’s antispam solution has to be deployed universally. In other words, it’s a standard (strangely, most antispam vendors recognize this as being true and think that somehow, based on antispam prowess alone, they can wipe out all the other antispam solutions and be the last man left standing. It’s a pipe dream). On the other hand, if I use vendor X’s proprietary system and the recipient uses vendor Y’s proprietary system, there’s no way for the two to interoperate in a way that keeps legitimate mail from getting falsely classified as spam. Unfortunately, so long as we keep coming up with new anti-spam systems and those systems get deployed to just a portion of the Internet’s e-mail systems, the problem gets worse.

In other words, the more proprietary approaches and solutions that are out there and that the world buys into (and that the press endorses), the worse the problem gets because we distance ourselves even further from what the true solution needs to be: something standard — something that’s inherently built into every e-mail system (regardless of who makes or provides it) much the same way all the current solutions know how to send and receive mail to and from one another (they work over a standard called the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).

As I’ve said before, the only breakthrough that will matter will be when MAGY (pronounced “maggie”; Microsoft, AOL, Google, and Yahoo) finally gets together and commits to jointly supporting the same technical solutions. Until then, everything else is nothing more than placebos, leading all of us to false hope and an ever-worsening situation.