On the 10th of this month the UKCCIS board met co-chaired by three Members of Parliament including Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. Since its formation UKCCIS has concerned itself with putting together the structure of the organisation to take it forward and it has now announced a number of working groups.
These include “Better Education” (chaired by Niel Mclean of BECTA), “Public Information and Awareness (Clive Michel of CEOPS) and Video Games (Brian Leonard, retired civil servant). There is also a group known as “Industry Standards” run by Amanda Jordan of Corporate Citizenship. Apparently the name of this group is subject to change. Don’t ask me why.
Whilst the large committe and the high profile board chairs does send out a message undelining the importance of the activity and its level of Government backing you do wonder about the amount of time they are spending deciding on the names of the working groups!
I spent some of this morning with our marketing team discussing our twitter marketing strategy. This is a very new field and it is interesting to see how people go about getting exposure on the site.
For example I get people I’ve never heard of signing up as followers. This prompts me to take a look at their profile and as often as not I sign up to follow them. Voila – their marketing approach worked. I was amazed to see people with 20,000+ followers – who were following similar numbers.
Jeff Pulver, who has appeared before on this blog has launched a call for speakers for a new conference called the 140 Character Conference (if you don’t understand where the name comes from I’ll explain offline 🙂 ).
This is perfect timing in my book. I could have done with it before our marketing meeting this morning because we were learning it and making it up as we went along – “it” being the science of twitter based marketing.
The conference is in New York New York so it is unlikely that I will be going. I will however be following it on line, on twitter of course which I successfully did for Jeff’s SocComm conference last month. Jeff is going after 140,000 online followers for the event.
You can see the conference call for papers announcement here on facebook or sign up for a place here.
The Data Retention Act, which is about Big Brother getting out of control, is being rolled out across the European Union. I’ve posted about it on a number of occasions, including here and here.
The story has taken an interesting turn with a German court pronouncing it invalid. Specifically:
“The court is of the opinion that data retention violates the fundamental right to privacy. It is not necessary in a democratic society. The individual does not provoke the interference but can be intimidated by the risks of abuse and the feeling of being under surveillance […] The directive [on data retention] does not respect the principle of proportionality guaranteed in Article 8 ECHR, which is why it is invalid.”
It seems to me this is going to hot up a little in the UK.
I just got a copy of the Music Tank report on the illegal P2P filesharing problem that has been widely debated in both the music and ISP industries. I even get a mention in it!
The authors have requested that instead of providing a copy of the report I provide a link to their sign up page which seems reasonable to me.
It is definately worth a read if you want to understand what is happening in this space. It expands on some of the stuff I have been posting on the subject.
The Data Retention Act, as you will know from previous posts requires Communications Providers, when requested, to store information concerning voice calls, emails and potentially Instant Messages sent and received by its customers.
I learned yesterday that this will not apply to IM services of companies such as Facebook that are defined as “information society services”. This does tend to make the whole Act an absurdity in my book. Also what happens when Google launches VoIP in the UK? Is Google an information society service?
It would be interesting to understand how the reg will apply to P2P services such as Skype? I’m sure I must have been told sometime.
One of my predictions for 2009 was that mobile VoIP would finally come of age. In the last two weeks there have been significant announcements in this space.
Firstly Google announced a service called Google VoIP that is intended to be a rival to Skype. The service will also do voice to text when someone leaves a voicemail and send it to you via SMS or to your Gmai inbox. Ther service is initially only available in the USA and then only to customers of telephony company Grand Central who Google bought some time ago and have since temporarily stopped accepting new customers.
Secondly Nokia has announced native support for Skype on its new N97 handset available later this year. The Skype service will run over either WiFi or 3G when the former is not available.
However all the mobile networks apart from Vodafone have said they will block VoIP calls over 3G. Whether they do or not it is a fact that VoIP over 3G is not a cheap option. I did a rough calculation last year and the bandwidth costs from handsets are such that the cost would be much the same as if you were making a normal mobile voice call.
Whether the networks block the VoIP traffic or not this is another step toward mainstream mobile VoIP. I will be looking at a similar service myself this year.
I have recently novated three companies ADSL networks to Timico, including health charity “Stroke Association”.
Novation is the process whereby a company hands over its assets to another, in this case we are talking Wide Area Networks. There are a few reasons why companies do this:
Increasing levels of internet usage drives the need for larger BT Central pipes. Disproportionately large steps in costs are incurred when increased capacity is required.
BT Central pipes of 34Mbps or less do not support L2TP, which is the technology basis for the modern MPLS Private Wide Area Networks. PWANs are far more efficient than traditional PPP/IP Sec based Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The Timico network is fully L2TP compliant.
Increased availability is driving users towards faster 21CN-based ADSL2+ connections which require totally separate connectivity infrastructure. Timico provides an upgrade path, so that customers’ users can be automatically upgraded to ADSL2+ as soon as availability to 21CN is rolled out in their area.
To the uninitiated this might all sound a bit boring but in actual fact in these recessionary days it seems that more and more companies that traditionally ran their own networks are seeing that it makes sense to outsource.
The same cost pressures are starting to be seen in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) business with more and more ISPs putting up for sale signs. Small ISPs are struggling to come up with the cash to upgrade their networks. It is important to have cash in the bank these days and looking forwards to the end of the recession I can see the industry in a different shape to today.
Another audio session from tonight’s William Wright’s drivetime show on BBC Radio Lincolnshire. I talk about subjects covered in recent blog posts. Call it an audio blog.
BT’s rollout of 21CN exchanges continues and Lincoln is now up and running – hooray.
I can report that with my previous ADSLMaxPremium connection I was getting roughly 5Mbps. I am now getting 10Mbps. At a guess I am 1km from the exchange.
In my book this is a worthwhile improvement. If you live in Lincoln and want faster internet let me know.
Extremely good dinner (booze-up) last night at Percento restaurant on Ludgate Hill in the City of London. The Internet Telephony Service Providers Assocition periodically holds dinners in town where the great and the good of the VoIP industry get together for a bit of networking.
These dinners are astonishingly good value because everyone speaks frankly about what is happening in the industry and it is a great opportunity to keep up with what is happening out there. There is always a lively debate chaired by yours truly. Steve Ashley Brian of Illume Consulting gave a short talk on the health of the market. Illume’s quarterly survey of hosted VoIP sales is suggesting a definite slowdown over the last two quarters.
My thanks to the evening’s sponsor “Digitalk” and to their MD Justin Norris.
In my systematic tour of the UC09 Exhibition yesterday I sat through my first real life Telepresence demo on the Cisco/BT stand. Very impressive technology. It really was just like being in the same room, such was the quality of the video.
I then sauntered along to the Nortel stand. Nortel have similar technology but seem to have made significant strides in moving the whole online meeting and web collaboration experience forwards.
Project Chainsaw has been in the Nortel pipeline for some time and I was pleasantly surprised in seeing that it was now a production item. It has now surfaced with the marketing moniker “web.alive”, a reasonably descriptive name though I think Project Chainsaw is more impressive 🙂 .
The technology allows you to mimic more of a real world environment. For example it could be embedded into an online “world” populated with shops. You can walk up to a virtual shop and begin communicating with a virtual shop assistant to help you with your purchases, The virtual shop assistant might well of course have a real person doing the talking behind the avatar.
Web.alive integrates with existing enterprise network and security and with existing software tools (so they say). You can check out more on the Nortel Website here and take a look at the Lenovo demo example here at the Project Chainsaw microsite.
I’ve unashamedly nicked a picture of web.alive in action from the Nortel website:
Met with the Home Office, Office of Security and Counter Terrorism (OSCT) today. Not unsurprisingly the OSCT has grown from zero to over 200 staff in 18 months although only three of them are internet oriented.
The department’s mantra is the 4Ps:
Pursue – police & security forces
Protect – making UK a harder target
Prepare – for the eventuality there will be another attack
Prevent – stop people becoming violent extremists in the first place
One of the subjects under discussion was part of the report produced by The International Centre for the Study for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) – blogged about the other day. Specifically how to go about promoting more positive use of the internet.
They talked about “flooding the internet” with positive messages about Muslim groups quitely practising their religion and not indulging in fanaticism that leads to violence. I though the idea of flooding the internet was somewhat ambitious.
What they really mean is that one of the proposals is to educate groups on how to make the best use of the internet to get their positive messages across. Search Engine Optimisation etc. I could imagine the Government secretly paying Google to raise the rankings of websites promoting peaceful activities 🙂 !
It is worth taking a look at at the Alliance Of Youth Movements Summit that took place in New York (New York) in December 08. This get together was part of a drive to promote the positive use of the internet.
The Digital Britain Report is a key part of Government strategy to make the UK a leader where internet issues are concerned. I’m not sure whether I am wrily amused or plain horrified by a comment made to me by someone who had recently met the team compiling the report.
None of the civil servants at the meeting had been on Facebook, or any other social networking websites. In fact none of them seemed to have heard of Twitter. Apparently this engendered laughter all round.
You have to say that this does not bode well for the success of the Digital Britain initiative.
The Digital Britain interim report included a proposal to establish a Rights Agency to supervise the fight against illegal P2P music downloading. More detailed proposals are apparently due out this week and I am told that industry will only have 10 days to respond with comments.
This is a very short consultation period and suggests to me that Lord Stephen Carter has an agenda to muscle through this measure. Whilst I don’t disagree with him – the list of stakeholders is too long to get any meaningful consensus – the notional speed at which he seems to be trying to make things happen here lends itself to mistakes being made.
I can see a mopping up excercise following any legislation to make corrections to laws created in a rush.
A bit of an ambiguous post title but considering this is meant to be a technology blog I get more and more opportunities to comment on political and business issues. Following on from yesterday’s post on the Coroners and Justice Bill today brings a report on how to combat Online Radicalisation and also more on the debate between the music industry and ISPs as YouTube pull the plug on music downloads in the UK.
The International Centre for the Study for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) has produced a report recommending how “the world” should combat this problem. It starts off saying that any efforts to date have been either “crude, expensive or counterproductive” and concludes that we need to spend more time deterring the producers of extremist materials, empowering users to self-regulate their online communities, reducing the appeal of extremist messages through education and promoting positive messages.
Call me a cynic but I doubt that this will get anywhere though I suppose at least they are having a go.
The second bit of news relates to a public spat between YouTube and the Performing Rights Society (PRS) who can’t agree licensing model (ie costs) that will allow YouTube to stream music. Unfortunately this seems to be a theme of any discussion between the music industry and those organisations providing internet services. During my time spent in meetings between the ISP and music industries it seems to me that the latter needs to start exploring new ways of making money, and believe you me I do not in anyway support the illegal downloading of another person’s intellectual property. Link to the Guardian report here though it has been widely reported elsewhere in the UK.
What all this amouts to is a huge change in the way we live our lives. Last night a friend rang me for advice. His broadband connection was down all day and his family was up in arms. Other than suggesting he moves to Timico all I could do was make sympathetic noises and say at least his family would talk to each other that evening – united in the face of a common problem instead of locked away surfing in their own rooms.
Internet security issues were again covered in Parliament last week as the Coroners and Justice Bill was debated in committee. I don’t envy Parliamentarians. The complexities of what they are having to deal with are enormous.
In this case they are trying to improve the law to further protect children from online threats. The opening line of the questioning reads like this:
“It is curious that it is illegal in this country to groom a child for sex but not illegal to groom a child for suicide.”
It is worth reading the rest of the text of that particular section of the debate here. We are bound to see increased legislation in this space I feel.
Unified Communications ’09 is on next week at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. I anticipate there will be 70 or so businesses there pitching their wares, including Timico subsidiary KeConnect which has a joint stand with Cisco.
UC09 is a business to business show. It is worth reflecting on the fact that in the consumer world UC is racing ahead of what is typically available to business. Lets look at my son’s radio programme as an example.
Tom, as regular readers of this blog will know, has his own weekend breakfast show on Siren FM, a local community radio station in my home town of Lincoln (England). He has a website and a Facebook home page. The Wake Up To The Weekend homepage has 318 fans as I write and each show gets around 100 listener contacts/interactions.
Tom’s listeners are by and large teenagers in the Lincoln area. They listen to his show on their laptops whilst lying in bed on Saturday and Sunday mornings. When they want to conatct the show to request a song or enter a competition they send an IM via Facebook, or leave a message on the show’s wall.
Listeners also communicate via SMS and email. I doubt that many make phone calls but if Facebook had an embedded voip client then this would overcome a teenager’s cost objections to talking. The radio presenter could then escalate an IM request to a voice call – to talk to the winner of a competition for example. The show can also post photos, videos and recordings of bands they have had in the studio on the Facebook page.
So where is this leading to? For radio show read business. Companies are more and more going to have to move into this space. Corporate websites are going to change to reflect Facebook and Twitter-type functionality and begin to interact with their customers in real time in new ways.
Integration of a corporate communications strategy with Twitter has already been shown to be highly effective. Initially the domain of large corporates, smaller companies should easily embrace it. Customer care and marketing teams will sit “on the internet”. I anticipate doing this at Timico sooner rather than later.
As a footnote Tom’s biggest fan, me aside, is a person in Lincoln named Les. Les enters every one of Tom’s competitions and has frequent interactions with the show. Looking at his picture on the Facebook site it can be seen that Les is in fact probably in his sixties. This then is not just the domain of the teenager!
PS if anyone is at UC 09 and wants to meet up drop me a line.
Tina Turner was great. Amazing in fact considering she is 69 years old (allegedly). What’s that got to do with a technology blog? Only that I went along to a concert at the O2 Arena last night and was absolutely bowled over with the quality of what I saw.
The quality of the show, the quality of the venue – wonderful acoustics, and the quality of the hospitality on offer. My thanks to hosts, Telcity and specifically sales manager Sharon Newling for looking after us in their suite.
Telecity is one of Timico’s high quality datacentre partners – we have a number of suites and cages at both Harbour Exchange and Sovereign House in London’s Docklands.
Just to round off the story I was pleased to take along with me Barry Skillett of Paypoint and Terence Long of RTP Solutions, both Timico customers. What’s more the O2 Arena is run by AEG, also a customer.
From left to right Barry Skillet, me, Sharon Newling, Terence Long. I am obviously enjoying myself and obviously in need of a haircut!
Hot on the trail of yesterday’s post on the Ofcom decision to waive regulations on the roll out of fibre to homes in the UK Cisco CEO John Chambers has written a guest post on Om Malik’s blog on a similar subject.
I had thought that the Obama stimulus package, which contains a substantial sum of money targeted at broadband roll out, was aimed at standard broadband speeds but it looks as if this is not correct.
It does make you wonder whether the government here in the UK will now look to subsidising the £29Bn it is estimated it will cost to get universal fibre coverage in this country.
Ofcom effectively gave BT the go ahead today for a £1.5Bn investment in a fibre network to provide up to 100Mbps internet access to homes in certain areas. By removing any regulatory barriers that might constrain BT from charging free market pricing for the fibre services Ofcom has set an environment that makes the BT business case for the investment workable.
BT has been involved in a high profile lobbying excercise to get this decision since around the time of the Caio Report last year.
I welcome this move though many people in smaller metropolitan and rural areas unlikely to get access to the service will view it as another step towards widening the digital divide.
You may remember the fuss surrounding the anti-child porn agency, Internet Watch Foundation back in December 2008. The IWF blocked access to a Wikipedia webpage causing much consternation.
The IWF Council is meeting tomorrow for a post mortem on the issue and is discussing setting up a technical workgroup to find a way around the problems created at the time.
The organisation is having to deal with a highly complex issue and there isn’t the space to cover it all here. What is interesting is the fact that the criminals involved are already combating the efforts of organisations such as the IWF.
Illegal images containing child pornography are often made up of thousands of separate images, a single pixel in size and each pixel containing an URL. This way a specific URL does not contain illegal content but the combined effect does.
I’m sure I will have some feedback from the IWF meeting and will report back as and when.
The average punter knows very little about e-crime. I can’t say I’m an expert myself but I had an eye-opening afternoon yesterday at the ISPA Parliamentary Advisory Forum on the subject. Attended by both MPs and industry stakeholders the meeting was standing room only which perhaps underlines the level of interest in the subject.
We use anti virus software in the belief that it stops nasty people putting nasty things on our PCs that will destroy our files. In the early days of e-crime this is what it was all about. Nerds sat in their bedrooms writing viruses with no real objective other than showing the world how big and powerful they were.
From around 2003 all this changed and e-crime became big business and the sad teenagers in bedrooms have turned into professional software writers working for organized gangs.
Now the crooks don’t want to break your computer. In fact they don’t even want you to know they are there. The malware that they deposit on your PC just sits there quietly logging your every keystroke. When you make purchases online your credit card information is logged and fed back to the gangs. The Conficker A virus even made your network run more efficiently so that it could better perform its job.
Until last year, when they were stopped, there were websites such as “darkmarket.com” (Google it for more info) where criminals talked to criminals, swapped trade secrets and engaged in crooked business such as the sale of stolen bank account information.
This criminal activity is organized primarily from the former Soviet Union, China and Brazil. The crooks know how to work the system. They never steal information from their own country. That way if a local police force is asked to assist with an international crime there is less incentive.
The police in Sao Paulo, for example have to deal with a high murder rate on the streets. How do you prioritise credit card fraud overseas in that case when you have limited resources to address problems on your own doorstep.
An Ukranian gang was said to stop the process of infecting a PC if it’s IP address was found to be Ukranian specifically to avoid the attentions of the local rozzers.
So what is being done in the UK to try and combat e-crime? It ain’t easy. Detective Superintendent Charlie McMurdie, who incidentally looked as if she was straight out of an action cop movie, runs the 30 strong e-crime unit at the Metropolitan Police and was speaking at the meeting.
With a team of only 30 people the police have to concentrate on big crimes. If someone rips off £50 from your credit card or bank account they aren’t interested. You are supposed to report it to the banks who then submit a collated picture to the police. In reality much of this type of crime goes unreported so nobody really knows how much of it is going on.
Where the police do get involved is with serial crimes. In other words whilst if someone pinches £50 from your e-wallet they aren’t interested, if someone does it to a thousand people then they are and this has happened in the UK.
Unfortunately, for someone who gets caught the penalties for this type of crime are often very low, community service for example, so the disincentive isn’t there. What’s more e-crime is often zero touch. In other words if someone steals TV programming and sells it to a Russian online TV Channel then the only thing affected is a potential reduction to the revenue stream of the rights holder. The man on the street is unharmed. This makes it less interesting to the police and is why the likes of BSkyB employ former policemen, effectively as revenue protection officers.
It isn’t fair to say that nothing is being done in the UK to prevent e-crime but the whole subject area is a difficult one and merits not only more effort but also improved levels of international co-operation due to the cross border nature of the game. I am afraid this is going to be an uphill struggle.
The Digital Britain report dominates current debate in the UK internet related industry. Its aim is, broadly put, is to promote universal use of broadband and to stimulate the digital knowledge economy thus keeping the country competitive in the 21st century. Although facilitating the plumbing of this digital economy, the Government quite rightly leaves the innovation of new ideas for delivery down the pipes to industry.
New York based innovator Jeff Pulver was a prime mover during the pioneering years of the VoIP industry. He started the Voice On the Net conferences and was founder of the company that evolved into Vonage, the US based VoIP telco. Jeff has since moved his attention to helping to create the wave of the Social Networking technology revolution. Both areas of technology, whilst requiring an underlying network to support them, hinge on the development of new ideas and applications.
TD: What parallels can you see between what was happening in the early days of VoIP and today in Social Networking?
JP: Social Networking has been part of the human experience since there was documented human experience. My focus is on the evolution of social communications, something I call: SocComm and what happens next as the world shifts from a dial-tone generation to a presence based one.
Back in the early days of VoIP we had dialup and slow computers and limited quality for the voice experience but it did not hold back a generation of people who were hobbyists by night but technology explorers by day who experimented with the technology and understand the power of what it meant when voice could be an application and no longer be a utility service.
I believe the advent of the widespread availability of social networking platforms such as Facebook and twitter are going to have a more profound impact on the future of communications in the next 5 years ahead than what we have seen in the VoIP space in the past 15 years.
TD: Aside from the by know well known business models associated with advertising, where do you see the moneytization of Social Networking?
JP: I am not a fan of pushing business models into nascent industries. Business models are disruptive to innovation and should never be forced into an ecosystem. What we will see emerge is another example of how disruptive technologies change the face of business in ways that were obvious to some by blindsided by others.
I believe presence will be moneytized with the advent of social communication. Presence will emerge to be a 25 billion dollar business.
TD: The battle against regulation of VoIP in the USA has been a feature of your career activities over the past ten years. Is there a similar debate to be had in the space you are in now?
JP: The fight is about to begin. Any platform which attracts 175 million active users (and growing) will get the attention of the government. My challenge is to see this space remains regulation free for the foreseeable future. (Maybe this is the foreshadowing of a future unannounced statement from me. hint hint)
TD: The UK has traditionally been strong in the production and delivery of content such as music and TV and this is recognised as a strength that our Government wants to maintain. Do you see any signs of internet innovation coming out of the UK in other areas?
JP: There were other signs in the late 90s and the post dot-com bubble but at the moment there are not a lot of hi-tech UK companies on my personal radar. I would like to change that.
TD: Can you paint a picture of life in the new Socially Networked world
JP: It is world where people are more real, we know the identity of the people we are communication with and a world where each of us contribute daily to the social sculpture known as the Internet.
TD: Whilst initially slated as a consumer oriented technology, Social Networking has now been adopted by large corporations as a marketing tool. Do you have an example of where this has worked successfully?
JP: Just ask the CEO of Zappos – @Zappos on twitter. They did a billion dollars in sales in 2008 and they have just about their entire organization focused on social media and on twitter. The Blue Shirt Nation of BestBuy is another example. This is the case where BestBuy launched their own internal social network for 130,000 people. These enabling technologies can and will change the world.
TD: Thank you very much for your time Jeff. You have had a punishing travel schedule over the past few months promoting Social Networking and have now started to raise the bar with conferences such as SocCom. Please accept my best wishes for the success with this activity.
Thanks for the opportunity to be read today. If you would like to learn more about my activities, please visit my blog – http://jeffpulver.com/ and follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/jeffpulver .
The Digital Britain report dominates current debate in the UK internet related industry. Its aim is, broadly put, is to promote universal use of broadband and to stimulate the digital knowledge economy thus keeping the country competitive in the 21st century. Although facilitating the plumbing of this digital economy, the Government quite rightly leaves the innovation of new ideas for delivery down the pipes to industry.
New York based innovator Jeff Pulver was a prime mover during the pioneering years of the VoIP industry. He started the Voice On the Net conferences and was founder of the company that evolved into Vonage, the US based VoIP telco. Jeff has since moved his attention to helping to create the wave of the Social Networking technology revolution. Both areas of technology, whilst requiring an underlying network to support them, hinge on the development of new ideas and applications.
TD: What parallels can you see between what was happening in the early days of VoIP and today in Social Networking?
JP: Social Networking has been part of the human experience since there was documented human experience. My focus is on the evolution of social communications, something I call: SocComm and what happens next as the world shifts from a dial-tone generation to a presence based one.
Back in the early days of VoIP we had dialup and slow computers and limited quality for the voice experience but it did not hold back a generation of people who were hobbyists by night but technology explorers by day who experimented with the technology and understand the power of what it meant when voice could be an application and no longer be a utility service.
I believe the advent of the widespread availability of social networking platforms such as Facebook and twitter are going to have a more profound impact on the future of communications in the next 5 years ahead than what we have seen in the VoIP space in the past 15 years.
TD: Aside from the by know well known business models associated with advertising, where do you see the moneytization of Social Networking?
JP: I am not a fan of pushing business models into nascent industries. Business models are disruptive to innovation and should never be forced into an ecosystem. What we will see emerge is another example of how disruptive technologies change the face of business in ways that were obvious to some by blindsided by others.
I believe presence will be moneytized with the advent of social communication. Presence will emerge to be a 25 billion dollar business.
TD: The battle against regulation of VoIP in the USA has been a feature of your career activities over the past ten years. Is there a similar debate to be had in the space you are in now?
JP: The fight is about to begin. Any platform which attracts 175 million active users (and growing) will get the attention of the government. My challenge is to see this space remains regulation free for the foreseeable future. (Maybe this is the foreshadowing of a future unannounced statement from me. hint hint)
TD: The UK has traditionally been strong in the production and delivery of content such as music and TV and this is recognised as a strength that our Government wants to maintain. Do you see any signs of internet innovation coming out of the UK in other areas?
JP: There were other signs in the late 90s and the post dot-com bubble but at the moment there are not a lot of hi-tech UK companies on my personal radar. I would like to change that.
TD: Can you paint a picture of life in the new Socially Networked world
JP: It is world where people are more real, we know the identity of the people we are communication with and a world where each of us contribute daily to the social sculpture known as the Internet.
TD: Whilst initially slated as a consumer oriented technology, Social Networking has now been adopted by large corporations as a marketing tool. Do you have an example of where this has worked successfully?
JP: Just ask the CEO of Zappos – @Zappos on twitter. They did a billion dollars in sales in 2008 and they have just about their entire organization focused on social media and on twitter. The Blue Shirt Nation of BestBuy is another example. This is the case where BestBuy launched their own internal social network for 130,000 people. These enabling technologies can and will change the world.
TD: Thank you very much for your time Jeff. You have had a punishing travel schedule over the past few months promoting Social Networking and have now started to raise the bar with conferences such as SocCom. Please accept my best wishes for the success with this activity.
Thanks for the opportunity to be read today. If you would like to learn more about my activities, please visit my blog – http://jeffpulver.com/ and follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/jeffpulver .
66% of the global routing table is carried by LINX. This means an Internet Service Provider can connect their customers to 66% of the webservers (is websites) in the world just by hooking up to LINX at their Docklands locations. Using Peering Exchanges like LINX allows us to cut down on expensive internet connections.
LINX has 57 of the world’s top 100 network operators as members, including 16 of the top 20. This confirms the not-for profit organisation as one of the world’s leading peering points.
In 2008 they had 13 membership cancellations of which 8 were consolidations. There are a further 6 consolidations in the pipeline. An indication of the ongoing rationalisation of the industry.
Finally I have put a pie chart together illustrating the distribution of ports at LINX in terms of 100Meg, Gig and 10Gig Ethernet. Not shown are stats that the 10Gig ports are on the rise and the 100Meg, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the rise in internet usage, in decline.
Dame Stella Rimington is in the news today attacking the government’s postition regarding data retention. This is in tune with comments previously made on this blog.
I sympathise with the need to guard against terrorism but you do get the feeling that we are moving backwards. When I was growing up we were hit with propaganda about the communist enemy. A police state where people were frequently spied upon just in case they had views that were contrary to official policy. Increased levels of surveillance in order to catch terrorists is undoubtedly going to impact on many innocent lives. If we are not careful we will end up mimicking the police states that we were cricisising not so long ago.
Datacentres are quite a hot topic in the Internet Service Provider world, and their costs are rising, largely due to the increasing costs of power and cooling.
In the UK the major datacentres have typically been located in London’s Docklands. This is because Docklands is where most of the world’s major network providers connect. The cost of connectivity has traditionally been far too high to locate critical network infrastructure outside the capital.
I am sat in the LINX meeting in London writing this post listening to Bob Harris, Technical Services Director of Telehouse, one of the major datacentre players in Europe. Timico is already located in Telehouse North and East. Well the news is that they are building a Telehouse West (not particularly new news).
What is interesting are the financials associated with this project.
£165m over 5 years (£80m over 1st 2 years for the first two floors)
5 floors with 985 sq metres per floor
425 racks per floor providing 4KW per rack = total 2125 racks
Business plan to fill the facility over 3 – 5 years
That works out roughly at £78,000 per rack or just under £20,000 per KW. In terms of contribution to the operating costs the capital depreciation is £258 over 25 years, which is incidentally a long time in this game – 10 years might be considered more normal and the period has been arbitrarily chosen by me for illustration. Remember this is before anyone starts charging for operating costs.
I think the costs of this project point towards a trend to start building datacentres outside of London. Communications costs have plummeted and service providers and businesses are going to start hosting all but their most critical, perhaps latency sensitive, infrastructure outside the M25.
You can follow the progress of the Telehouse West building on their webcam here. I’ve pasted a picture of a typical backup generator that is used by datacentres to give you a feel for where the costs are incurred.
PS I don’t think there is room for a Telehouse South, in case anyone was wondering.
The BBC today has reported that Italian crooks are using Skype to avoid detection by police who use traditional wiretapping to monitor phone calls. The Skype signaling and media path is encrypted which makes it very difficult to tap into. Also because, as a Peer to Peer protocol Skype doesn’t use any centralised servers that might be able to be monitored it adds to the difficulty for law enforcement agencies.
The whole problem is then compounded by the fact that because VoIP/Skype is a very nomadic service, ie you can use it from any internet connection anywhere, it becomes difficult to track the location of a caller.
This is a problem being looked at by Ofcom as part of the process of caller location identification for the emergency services. Currently if someone makes a 999 call from an unknown address, it is difficult to pin down where that call is being made from, at least in a timely manner.
There was a high profile Canadian case where someone dialled for an ambulance and it went to a location three thousand miles from where the call was actually being made from because the address held by the operator was not the address from which the call was being made.
When a VoIP call is made the details of the call logged by the Internet Telephony Service Provider include the IP address of the originating party. If you are an Internet Service Provider (note the distinction between ITSP and ISP – an ITSP often does not provide the underlying broadband service) you can correlate this IP address with a physical address (ie house number and street).
The problem is that this is a manual process and would likely take hours at best and potentially a couple of days. This is a process that could be automated but it is something that would probalby cost billons to implement universally in the UK.
I’m sure there will be more to say on this subject in 2009. As a final note it is often said that the security forces, aka GCHQ and CIA et al have not cracked the Skype encryption technology. I find this difficult to believe.
RIM has announced its latest upgrade to the Blackberry Enterprise Server. BES5 notionally provides a number of improvements (one might reasonably expect! 🙂 ) but one in particular caught my eye.
A BES sits LAN side of a corporate network and access to it is via an encrypted 3DES (or higher) path. Being LAN side is allows useful access to a company’s intranet. However what it didn’t do, or at least not without the involvement of a third party application, was to give access to computers on that LAN. This meant that accessing data on corporate servers was not straightforward.
With BES5 you can also access attachments within calendars. This is very useful in my mind. I often store location information for meetings in my calendar but my Nokia E Series phones don’t provide me with access to any of the notes. At least if they do I can’t see how.
I am indebted to one of our Blackberry gurus Will Curtis for the BES update. He has his own mobile gadget oriented blog with a post on this subject if you want to know more.
One of our account managers told me in passing that a customer of his had just shut up shop. Bad news I thought. Is this going to be the way of it in 2009?
The good news though is that what they have actually done is closed the office and moved their 5 members of staff to work from home to conserve cash. Their VoIP subscriptions, which they were already using flexibly from both office and home, will just follow them.
Business is still there to be grasped when times are hard.
I see that Microsoft has offered a $250k reward for the arrest and conviction of the authors of the Conficker worm. This is the one that was causing Timico customers issues in the run up to and over the Christmas break.
I did suggest to one of our tech support guys that were he to admit to the offence the rest of us (who would have pocketed the cash) would be eternally grateful. Funnily enough he didn’t think it was a good idea.
I do get images though of a bounty hunter turning up at the Microsoft HQ in Seattle with a guilty looking nerd roped kicking on to the saddle of his horse.
