I have decided, and I haven’t told my wife this, that my house needs to be a case study for the connected home. The technological home of the future.  The question is what does this connected home look like?

I have Cat 5 cabling downstairs a switch, wifi and shortly I will have FTTC. This is all very well but other than working from home occasionally and accessing the internet what am I going to do with it all.

I would welcome suggestions for services or technology that will be of use in the home that I should be testing.

Thanks in advance

That’s all folks.

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My wife Anne is away this week visiting her parents. Son number one is at University and son number 2 (kid number 3) has gone skiing so at home we have me, daughter number 1 (kid number 2) and son number 3 (work it out). I am nominally in charge.

Before she went Anne printed off a detailed schedule – who is doing what, where and when and how much cash I need to dish out to who for school dinners (the Trefor Davies scheme for avoiding making packed lunches), bus fares etc etc. I specifically asked her not to prepare menus for the week because I figured that us kids could then have a few treats – chips, curry, pizza etc etc.

This is where it starts getting hard. I don’t know whether anyone else out there realises  but you have to plan some of these things in advance! Some of the ingredients we have – sausages I was able to find in the freezer yesterday but could I find the fish fingers? Hell no! Fortunately they are for tonight and having chatted to the boss today and casually slipped in the subject into the conversation I now know that they are in the other freezer. Okaay.

What I have just done is uncovered a huge new market for husband household management services/call it what you like. The fundamental building blocks are all there.

We have online calendaring and scheduling, a connected home and technologies around that with a little tweaking can help me. I’m not asking much. I want to be able to browse the family larder online and click on the few menu items that take my fancy. I might even want to be able to select from a list of possible recipes based on available ingredients known to be present. Eg for fish fingers read fish fingers and chips, fish fingers sandwiches, fish fingers provencale etc (can’t actually think of any other ff related recipes – should have used a better example – mince perhaps).

I need to be told where in the fridge/freezer/shelf these ingredients are in order to make life easy for myself – why not ? I didn’t put them there so I might not even know the colour of the packet I am looking for. All this needs to happen via a social networking interface that allows me to send Instant Messages to my remote supervisor requesting support or escalating difficult management decisions. I might even want to occasionally click to convert the IM into a voice or video call.

Tasks for the forthcoming day need of course to appear on my smart phone as scheduled jobs. There is nothing to stop this happening right now other than the reticence of a wife who has better things to do with her time than sit at a computer all day entering data.

The list of things I could do with is endless. I’m sure I have enough washed and ironed clothes to last me the week. She is due back on Saturday but what if she is delayed? I think Waitrose does laundry doesn’t it? will they come round to pick it up? Can I arrange it online? Who is going to babysit on Tuesday night? What setting does the school PE kit need to be on the washing machine tonight to be ready for Wednesday?

The software that sorts all this might be expensive but there is going to be a serious market demand for it.

Concierge ? Concierge? Are you there?

PS in case anyone really wants to know yesterday I cooked a fine beef stew that saw clean plates all round. Tonight it is fishfingers, chips and baked beans, tomorrow it is pizza (nice ones from Waitrose), Wednesday it is beef pie made with leftover stew and puff pastry, Thursday is is chicken marinaded in Nando’s with pitta bread and mixed leaf salad and Friday we are getting a takeaway curry. Anne will not be away too long as she knows I will bankrupt the family on expensive food rather than use economic ingredients bought by shopping around (but who has time? – they need an online service:)).

PPS Unsympathetic comments will not be tolerated on this particular post. Lifestyle criticisms and reference to political incorrectness are not allowed – I am looking for empathy. Evidence of a deep admiration for clearly visionary content will also be well received.

That’s all.

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Some time ago I mentioned we were working on a new service status update page for the Timico website. Well the status of this service is now “up”. It’s been in testing for some time but I welcome any comments or observations as you come across them.

There is a lot of system development going on at Timico. Ultimately I expect the service status page to be integrated with our newly rolled out Service Now implementation although there are a few hurdles to over come first not the least being the amount of deep jargon that seems to fly around incidents and on ticketing systems. The service status page needs to be easy to read and understand. I am also wary of a status that always shows up a green so in our case the fault stays visible for 7 days after it has been fixed. If you sign up to email alerts you can get access all historical data prior to that.

One thing that caught me a bit by surprise was the number of service types we have to cover. It’s only when you see them all graphically illustrated in front of you that it hits home. Mostly they all come as facts and figures on reports.

You can see the new service status page here. Note that this site is hosted at a totally separate external location – if the entire Timico network crashed you would still be able to see that it has done so!

That’s all folks

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I have just decided that someone needs to invent the email “like” button. When someone sends you an email saying, for example, “that was a great blog post Tref” it is a real waste of everyone’s time and effort to reply saying “thanks very much”.

Really what we need is a means of communicating back a thumbs up or a like without the original sender having to open the email just to read the word “thanks”.

Simple.

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2012 is expected to be a big year for growth in Internet use in the UK. We have the Olympics, para Olympics, the Queens Diamond Jubilee, Wimbledon and the West Indies, Aussies and South Africa over on cricket tour (if I was them I’d be avoiding this country next summer but hey…). Oh and let’s not forget the European football championships from 8th June til 1st July. England qualified I believe?!

There is more sport but by far the biggest Internet traffic news item for 2012 is that Netflix is coming to the UK. For the uninitiated, Netflix is a movie screening service in the USA that accounts for something like a quarter of all Internet traffic in that country.

At LINX75 today the launch was a particular subject of discussion – these things are often all network operators talk about. It affects capacity planning. Word has it the expected UK launch date is 9th January 2012 with a press event planned at the Cavendish Hotel in London. The launch in Ireland should follow one day later on the 10th.

Netflix is likely to have more of an effect on consumer ISPs than those serving the business market although no ISP will remain untouched. Considering that one of the biggest influencers on broadband costs is bandwidth it will be interesting to see what happens to average broadband pricing.

If Netflix is successful then the early January launch should have a significant impact on Internet usage habits in the UK. It will represent a step function rather than the series of spikes normally associated with one off events (though these one off events seem to be merging into one continuous one off event!) My guess is that all this online streaming is also going to act as an accelerator for FTTC signups.

Life in this industry continues to be full of interest and excitement.

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2012 or as the BBC puts it “Summer of Sports on Steroids” ¹ is going to be another milestone year for the ISP industry with the UK playing host to the Olympic games and another record anticipated for internet traffic levels. On Wednesday at the ISPA conference we had Jane Weedon, Controller of Business Development at the BBC talking about their preparations for the games.

The coverage in 2012 is going to be comprehensive with pretty much 100% of the sport available to watch as it happens – up to 27 simultaneous channels at the peak towards the end of the second week. This will have grown from perhaps 15-20% of coverage at the Sydney games 35% in Athens and 65% in Beijing (click on the header photo for graphic illustration).

The peak traffic during the South Africa Football World Cup hit 450Gbps with everyone going online to watch the England v Slovenia match. For perspective this year so far iPlayer traffic has peaked at 220Gbps.

So look out ISPs.

The forecasting of traffic levels for these games is in reality going to be very difficult. On the higher demand side the games are on home territory and will appeal to a wider demographic than the Football World Cup. To counter this device proliferation may lead to the streaming being distributed over a wider range of media – 3G mobiles and tablets, public WiFi zones, offices providing big TV screens and the fact that many folk may well take the two weeks of the games off on holiday.

Medals success for Team GB is also going to be an influencing factor.

The Beeb has gone into significant detail in estimating demand on a session by session basis and has come up with a forecast of  10 x the traffic levels for London as they saw in Beijing. That’s 1Terabits a second ²  at the peak in streams averaging 1Mbps.

That’s enough Olympic bits for the moment but there is so much interest in this subject looking ahead I’m going  to be looking out for more Olympic stories to share.

¹ Steroids is perhaps an unfortunate word to use in this context

²  Nobody is going to hold them to this forecast but it certainly gives us all an indication of what to expect

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I know I said I might well have bought my last laptop for the family but my wife’s 10 year old PC is spinning the last few thousand rotations of its hard drive and software is starting to malfunction.  So she is getting our daughter’s 7 year old perfectly good machine and we are buying the final year 6^th form girl a laptop.

The Tesco website has an Acer 5742 for £399. It has an Intel Core i3, a 750gig hard drive and 4 gigs of RAM.  The crunch though is the copy of Microsoft Office 2010 home and business £204.22. She ain’t getting that.

It’s a graphic illustration that the money isn’t in the hardware but in the software. You do also have to wonder how long there is going to be cash in the software, especially when one of the problems we have on the 10 year old PC is finding the original CDs.

It is quite easy to think of moving to a Computing As A Service environment where we would pay a monthly fee to access home computing resources. It would have to be reasonably low cost because there are six of us in the family. We probably buy on average one new machine every 18 months to two years. If that works out as £400 a pop then the value is around £17 a month to cover all six of us. Call it £25 with software.

I would buy at that price, in perpetuity almost, though as the kids leave home we would need fewer seats. I doubt that I’ll have many vendors queuing at the door. They will almost certainly be expecting £25 per person in which case it doesn’t fly for us because that would obviously be £150 a month.  That’s roughly the equivalent of 50 pints of beer!

It’s the shape of things to come though.

PS the daughter will have to live with open office or perhaps Google docs. Perfectly good. Also the shape of things to come.

PPS I doubt that we will spend 400 quid on a laptop either. There’s a bit of squeezing to be done on that price I’d say.

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My wife’s PC has nearly ended it’s useful life. It was bought for our oldest son at the age of 10. He is now about to start his second year at university and is already on his second laptop.

During the intervening ten or so years the PC has been flattened and rebuilt a couple of times. For a few years it was the “family” computer and thus had every kind of game added and removed and goodness knows what other software.

Now it is clunky, takes ages to boot up and a source of frustration for the love of my life. To make things worse last weekend my daughter did something to it and now Microsoft Office does not work. The original CD was lost some time ago. Doesn’t sound good.

Last night I set Mrs Davies up with a Google account including gmail, calendar and Google+. She can now access her emails from any broswer, see my diary (a constant source of anoyance to her over the years is that my electronic diary does not replicate to her calendar on the wall) and see all the family photos backed up to Google+.

She might even be induced to join Facebook now that her brood is gradually fleeing the nest. This will be one of the primary ways of keeping in touch with the kids. One by one her pals are getting in on the social media game, probably for the same reason.

I did download Open Office for her so that she had a short term way of reading docs sent to her via email (in the intervening time) but she has no need for complicated software packages such as perhaps Photoshop that might still need a PC to run.

She is only a small step away from not needing a PC. In fact all that is holding her back is the cost of the tablet that she will want as a replacement.

It is only a matter of time…

PS I know that some of you will snort at this saying your family is an Apple household and have been sharing calendars etc for some time. You must remember that you are still very much a minority.

PPS it seems ever clearer that the next year or two are going to be very critical for Microsoft which, XBox apart, risks being of hugely reduced relevance to the Davies household.

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I had a full day of meetings in London on Wednesday. At 2.30pm I finished one and I needed to be in Westminster for the next one at 3.15. It was a beautiful sunny day so I decided to walk and made my way down through St James’ Park to Horseguards Parade.

We do have an impressive capital city and I happened to be there as they were changing the horseguards. With a few minutes to spare before the meeting I joined the tourists and got my Galaxy S2 camera out. As I was taking a photo the camera rang! Annoying huh? They will add phone functionality to useful personal gadgets.

That particular photo was lost but I took an important call. A few minutes later I continued down Whitehall and was about to take a photo of the yellow painted amphibious landing vehicle that is used for guided tours when the same thing happened again! I missed that pic but no matter – at least I got one of the horseguards

With all these photos it’s no wonder I’m using so much storage but I can’t be alone in this. Seeing as it’s Friday there is a prize for the best story of photos or any other smart phone activity being interrupted by a phone call.  Photos relating to competition entries will be published subject to editorial approval.

PS  prize as usual is a highly sought after Timico mug.

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Last night my wife was trying to upload some photos to albelli.co.uk to generate a hardcopy album. She  wanted to take advantage  an offer from the Daily Telegraph that ran out at midnight.

The uploading did take some time but I guess the albelli servers were busy because of the promo deadline. Fair  enough. Shortly after 11pm she tried to complete the order but the discount that came with the offer no longer seemed to apply. One unhappy wife pulled the plug on the deal.

I tweeted this and had a response from a follower who had the same problem. It looks as if the set up on the server had the offer timing out at 11pm instead of midnight. Not good but mistakes do happen.

This morning I got a response from @albelli_UK with apologies for the problem and asking for more details.  By 9.40am they had sorted it out and my wife is now very happy with their service.

This is a great example of how Twitter can be used as a customer service tool.  Albelli has turned the situation from having negative PR to positive one and won over a customer. Note they will still have to offer a competitively priced service – my wife can very easily find out what the competition is up to on the wild wild web

PS yes this is the same telegraph that was hit by a DNS hack last night – as far as I can see the problem is still there at 11am on Monday morning.

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