Categories
End User social networking

twitter in action in Lincolnshire with possible prison riot

Last night I felt I was part of a real life drama.  I live over the fields from Lincoln prison.  In Lincoln they put the prison in the best part of town to make it quicker to lock up the burglars when they catch them 🙂

As I was hitting the hay I could hear a lot of loud noises coming from the direction of the prison together with dogs barking.  I sent out a tweet to this effect and was immediately contacted by a couple of BBC journalists asking for more info.  There have been other prison riots in the UK this week so the tweet was topical.

Independent verifiaction suggested that there was no activity outside the gaol.  After about 10 – 15 minutes I checked again and it grown quiet again.  Presumably the noisy prisoners had been locked back up again.

I guess the point of this post is the observation that twitter is really a newsfeed rather than a social networking tool. You also have to be watching it all the time to catch randomly generated news, as my two BBC contacts must have been. 

It is also usable as a marketing tool and interestingly as such it offers a highly targeted approach.  Twitter users have to be searching for specific news items.  I follow too many people to be able to sensibly catch all their tweets so I would have to be looking for, say, “Lincoln prison riot” to read any news about this. 

The same the applies for product marketing.  If I wanted to push Timico’s MPLS capability on twitter the chances are that people reading that tweet would be specifically looking for information on MPLS.

Categories
Archived Business

Green shoots of recovery

We have had a real winter this year.  The weather has been authentic and the world is in an economic crisis.  This week I spotted some green shoots.  Picture below – see it as it happens on www.trefor.net.

new growth forecast
new growth forecast
Categories
Business engineering

Cisco on acquisition trail

I see that Cisco is notionally on the acquisition trail which doesn’t come as a surprise.  It is a good time to be cash rich.

It wouldn’t surprise me either to find out that Cisco has been sniffing around the Nortel Carrier Division.  It would be a great fit.  I don’t think it will be too long before we find out.

We haven’t really seen consolidation happen on the big scale in the tech world yet this turndown.  Timico has picked up some ADSL customers from defunct ISPs and may yet pick up a business or two.

Tiscali has been trying to be “consolidated” for a while now but is struggling to make it happen!  It should only be a matter of time one way or another.

Categories
Business mobile connectivity

Manx Telecom or sometimes you just have to have fun

I’m on holiday this week but in the interest of keeping the momentum going on the blog it is worth posting some relevant collateral. You will have to scroll down to the bottom to get the association with technology.

The video below was taken on Saturday at the breakwater in Peel in the Isle of Man – very stormy but also quite exciting.

 

The next day it was calm during which time the “stills” were taken.

Peel Harbour - traditionally home of the herring fleet
Peel Harbour - traditionally home of the herring fleet

 

lifeboat at the quayside by the castle in Peel.
lifeboat at the quayside by the castle in Peel.

 

still waters after the storm
still waters after the storm

 

So where is the link with IP technology?  Actually the Isle of Man was the original test bed for the 3G network.  I grew up here and I recall on one visit home making one of the first commercial 3G calls to Mitel in Canada, my then employer.  A long time ago now.

3G wasn’t IP at the time of course.  My belated thanks to Richard Fletcher of Manx Telecom for that call.

Categories
End User internet social networking

Grand National hot tip #GrandNational

This is another Twitter experiment.  If anyone really wants to know I have an each way bet on Cloudy Lane and Irish Invader.

Footnote Monday morning:

I wanted to see if the post title would attract many visits via twitter.  It didn’t especially, even though I used the two most popular twitter search strings at the time in the title.

Categories
Business internet

#G20 summit security kept crowds away

The G20 summit has been all the news this week.  I had planned to go to a Networking Brainstorming Breakfast co hosted by my friend @JeffPulver,  @PaulWalsh and Lauren Feldman.

I was concerned that the level of security surrounding  the G20 would be prohibitive for travelling to London but I went anyway and to my surprise there was no one in town!  No traffic, no queue for the taxi, no problem:-).

This was my first time at an event organised by Paul Walsh and I was pleasantly surprised.  85 or so people turned up with an impressive roster of CVs from the new media and communications community. 

Now here are some interesting stats:

all of the attendees were on twitter – no surprise there
45 of the attendees had their own blog  (I even met some who read this blog which was quite pleasing)
40 of them were either founders or CXO of businesses
Ireland and the USA was represented as well as the UK

A significant number of people present, a third maybe, were in the media and pr game with a slightly lower count from the communications/telecom world.

I met some interesting people including @dailytwitter, @jobsworth, @stevekennedyuk, www.patphelan.net, Andy Evans of NetCommunities and others.

I can’t tell you where the new world of communications technology is taking us but I can tell you that there is a lot going on in London in this space right now.  It is like the VoIP industry was back in the late 1990s.  Many newbies,  many of whom will fall by the wayside but some exciting new businesses will come out of it.

Categories
End User internet media

TV license fee for internet watching

In my mind the clock has started ticking ever so quietly for the end of TV Licensing.  A review of the TV License fee by the BBC Trust looks at the issues associated with collecting TV License revenues for the BBC.

The report says “The licence fee collection is currently heavily reliant on the fact that almost 98% of households still use television sets (although this number has declined very slightly in the last year from 97.61% to 97.37%) and that viewing on new technologies tends to be supplementary to viewing on television.”

However “research for the BBC Executive shows that 40% of students in halls of residence use a laptop as their main way to watch TV”. iPlayer.

With almost half of all children leaving school now attending an University of some description this suggests that in time a large proportion of the population will move to watching TV online. 

This will present huge issues in collection of the license fee and will almost certainly join the regulatory debate that includes how to police illegal P2P music and video downloading.  Business models in the media industries are bound to have to evolve.

Footnote:

The report covers the problems with collecting the License Fee and specifically mentions the difficulties of proving whether a household has a TV or not.  The Davies household, after 20 or so blissful years of isolation,  got a TV for the first time ever 4 years ago following demands from our increasingly vociferous daughter.

Around 6 years ago we did a house swap with some Californian friends who, horrified at the lack of a TV in the house (how do you keep the kids quiet?) borrowed one and took out a license.  They went home and cancelled the bank payment standing order which triggered a stream of increasingly threatening letters demanding money.

Initially we ignored these but eventually complained to our MP, Gillian Merron, who got tough with the TV License Authority (or whatever their name is) and sorted it.  My issue was that I was offered two means to tell them I didn’t have a license, either by paying for a premium rate phone call or for a stamp.  As a fascist anti TV type this was objectionable to me.

Imagine how I felt when I eventually bought a TV and had to ring the same premium rate number to pay for a License.  I could feel the surprise, nay contempt,  at the other end of the phone of the call centre agent who could clearly see my record of complaint on this subject.

One of the many side benefits of when the kids eventually leave home is that I will be able to get rid of the TV again and, no doubt, renew my battle with the TV Licensing Authority.  Unless, that is, they introduce draconian measures that say if you own a computer you have to pay for a license!

Categories
Business engineering

Timico Introduces Intelligent Ceiling Tiles at Ipswich NOC

Innovation is in the blood of every engineer at Timico . 

When I told the netops team that one day Timico will be a global organisation and the Network Operations Centre will have to operate a “follow the sun” timetable they went away to think about it. 

Turns out they were all very happy working in the UK and the prospect of moving to new Timico NOCs in California, Hawaii and the Maldives held no attraction.

The outcome was the intelligent ceiling tile. This (pat pending) idea allows engineers to replicate conditions in these sunny locations by chosing the weather for display on the ceiling above their desks. They normally chose a sunny cloudless day, in line with the follow the sun support policy.

Sometimes clouds get added, just for a bit of variation, with the occasional hot air balloon floating gently by. You can even have seagulls, without of course the droppings which can be a problem in the outside world.

Turns out this has benefits not anticipated in advance. Because the ceiling is always sunny, staff don’t notice when the heating has been switched off – even in the middle of winter. This has saved Timico thousands in heating bills.

The Timico NOC now also has the most highly qualified set of engineers of any company in the world. As well as the weather the ceiling tiles can display text such as crib notes for professional development courses.

After only one week at the NOC a graduate engineer is guaranteed to pass a Cisco CCNA exam. The CCIE only takes 6 weeks. The developer, Ian Christian, received his PhD during during the pre-rollout testing phase of the project.

All good reasons to work for Timico 🙂 .

Categories
Business internet

Russian Billionaire Pays For BT Exchange To Be Moved

Russian oil magnate Vladimir Lotsadoshski has paid BT an undisclosed sum to move the Mornington Crescent telephone exchange closer to his home.

The London based billionaire was getting fed up with the speed of his broadband connection. BT had told him it was down to the distance of his house from the exchange. Having just spent £100m on his new pad overlooking Regents Park he decided it would be easier to move the exchange rather than move house.

The Mornington Crescent exchange has been moved to a derelict plot of land near Camden Market. Lotsadoshski is reported as being extremely pleased with the speeds he is now getting on his ADSL line and is now able to watch Russian soaps online in full screen mode.

Unfortunately the move has resulted in a barrage of complaints from other BT customers who are now further from the new exchange than they had been before and whose ADSL speeds have dramatically slowed down.

Apparently BT has made so much money on the deal that it could afford to lose a few customers and the BT stock price rose 10% this morning with the news. The old BT exhange has been turned into a luxury hotel.

Categories
Business security

Docklands security – further note

The G20 Summit is of course taking place at the Excel Exhibition Centre in the Docklands.  The big day is Thursday when the leaders are all there.  They are expecting demonstrations around Canary Wharf and Custom House, Prince Regent and Royal Victoria DLR stations will be shut (and possibly Bank).

The recommendation is not to go anywhere near there this week if you can help it.

Categories
Business datacentre security

Security Tightened at London Datacentres for G20 Summit

Security is already pretty tight at our London datacentres.  This coming week will see security stepped up further as the G20 Summit takes place in town.  I’m not going to go into any details but at least BT are less likely to have any 21CN line cards stolen next week.

I’ve also had a number of meetings rescheduled from next week due to “security concerns”

Categories
End User fun stuff

Encarta – the passing of an era

Microsoft is closing down Encarta, its paid-for online encyclopedia.  It now holds such a small market share, 1.27% according to The Register,  that it is no longer viable.

I imagine few tears will be shed.  It is worth noting though that this really does represent the passing of an era.  Not “the Encarta era” but the era represented by the likes of Encycopedia Brittanica of which Encarta was just one of the last in the line.

In its time Encarta represented a big change in the market.  Up until then Encyclopedia Brittanica was sold mostly by door to door salesmen and came in around 30 large bound volumes.  As a kid I would have loved to have had a set but it was also impractically expensive for my parents.  I imagine that salesman only needed one sale to live off for a week. 

The word encyclopedia will probably now disappear into the history books having been replaced by wikipedia.

Categories
Business internet

Tiscali heavily criticised on BBC

Tiscali featured on the BBC’s Watchdog consumer programme tonight.  A number of unhappy people were heard venting their fury about the company’s service levels.  I suspect that if they focussed more on their most important asset, their customers, they wouldn’t also be in the news because of their financial woes.  It takes a huge amount of effort to win new customers.  Businesses neglect them at their peril.

This is one reason why businesses in particular need to make sure they have a business oriented, responsive,  service provider.  Tiscali is aimed at a low cost market.  At the end of the day you get what you pay for (or not as was the case on Watchdog!)

Categories
Business internet security

Conficker worm update

I hadn’t realised but the Conficker worm is programmed to go live on April 1st.  This malware has already been the source of problems for IT managers but nobody knows what it is really destined to be used for.

Currently it accesses 250 ip addresses from which it can take instructions.  On April 1st this is due to rise to 50,000 which makes managing any attack a lot harder.  The nature of the attack to come is still unknown.

The good news, and the point of this post, is to update readers on the fact that over the weekend industry security specialists have finally identified how to “fingerprint” Conficker.  This means that simple security scanners can be used to detect whether it is on your PC. 

Previously it has involved length full virus scans on computers.  A process that when multiplied by the number of PCs in an organisation could have been impossibly long and consumed huge amount of IT support effort.

Because April 1st is so close the recommendation is that you check with your security vendor to see whether they have an update and to implement that update asap.  Don’t take any risks.

Categories
internet social networking

Twitter experiment

Twitter has been in the news a lot recently.  It’s been around for 3 years and I started using it a year ago to experiment and to understand what it was all about. 

One year ago it wasn’t really clear where it was all going but I could feel that there would be some uses.  In the meantime celebrities have latched onto it and it has been a way of following news as it happened.  Also my experience with “attending” the SocComm conference via twitter was an education.

I began to get followers who I had never heard of and when looking at their own profiles they had many thousands of followers and were in turn following thousands.  It looked then as if people follow people who follow them.

I began an experiment by randomly following others who were either following or being followed by people that were following me, if you follow my drift.  I got these results:

twitter-trend

There is obviously an increase in followers in line with those being followed.  This not massively scientific but interesting nonetheless. There is a scenario whereby if I spend enough time at it 25% of everyone on twitter would be following me.  Of course I’m not going to waste my time doing it and I’m sure the dynamics change with volume. 

Something that has come out of this excercise is a slight increase in visits to trefor.net due to traffic from twitter.  So if I was focussed on nothing but growth in my readership, which I’m not because I also have a day job,  amassing huge numbers of twitter followers would probably be a good  thing to do.

Also it gets to the point where there is so much twitter traffic it gets difficult to see the wood from the trees.  It then becomes a kind of ticker tape where you randomly glance ast tweets.  Twitter has I’m sure got a lot of evolving to do.

Categories
Business internet security

UKCCIS board meets

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!

Previous posts on UKCCIS here.  Latest UKCCIS newsletter newsletter-no-5-march-2009.

Categories
End User social networking

test for twitter

Just added a plug in to wordpress that automatically posts blog entries as a tweet.  Marvellous.

Categories
Engineer internet voip

IETF 74 and SIP

10 years ago this month saw the publication of RFC2543 which was the first proposed version of the SIP standard that is now used an almost all internet telephony services.

This is being celebrated this week at IETF74.  The Internet Engineerng Task Force is the body that maintains standards  for internet related technologies.

SIP was initially championed by a small number of people that included it’s inventor Henning Schulzrinne, Jonathan Rosenberg, Jiri Kuthan, Henry Sinnreich et al.

At around that time I was being asked by my then employer Mitel to set up a product line that was based on open standards.  There was quite a choice to chose from.

MGCP was adopted by the cable community in the USA and by a number of ITSPs.  However the problem with MGCP was that it had a relatively small feature set which meant that service providers had to develop their own extensions to provide saleable services.  Thie meant that MGCP quickly became non standard as any venbdor would have to support multiple flavours of the protocol.

Then there was SGCP, or skinny. This was a Cisco proprietary protocol.  Whilst potentially this had initially the largest market opportunity it did tie you into Cisco.

So SIP was the obvious one but it took a long time for the market to appear, particularly as the turmoil around 9/11 hit the dot com intustry.

I spent 4 years service on the board of the SIP Forum from around this time.  Being around during the early days of a technological revolution was exciting and I am fortunate enough, with Timico, to be able to continue the ride.

Check out the Facebook event surrounding this anniversay here.

Categories
Engineer internet

The Internet Protocol Journal

Geeks are a great breed and I am pleased to say our NetOps team is 100% staffed by them.  They are a real asset to our business.

If you ever want to test whether someone is a geek or not you have to see what reading material they take to the “smallest room” . 

At the Timico NOC there are copies of Cisco’s “The Internet Protocol Journal” left there to ensure optimum use of time.

The journal also provides the facility with an N+N level of resiliency making it a Tier 4 toilet.  I’m pleased to say we have never had to resort to a failover.  Read on!

Categories
Business internet social networking

140 Characters Conference – pulver on twitter

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.

Categories
Business internet security

German court declares against data retention act

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.

The link to the whole article is on the vorratsdatenspeicherung website 🙂

My thanks to James Blessing for this link.

Categories
Business internet

Music Tank Report on P2P Music Piracy

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.

http://www.musictank.co.uk/reports/filesharing/for-free

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.

Categories
End User security spam

Spam not Spam

I have recently started corresponding with Randy Abrams of anti virus company www.eset.com.  He has commented on some of my posts in the past.  He offered this postulation today:

“Sometimes I receive spam from legitimate companies. They shouldn’t be spamming me, but this isn’t the Viagra, Rolex, and other run of the mill spammers I am talking about… these are generally IT companies.

So, I am considering automatically subscribing these spammers to Industry News with an email indicating that they have been subscribed and can choose to opt out. Your thoughts. Good idea? Too good for them?   Give it a try?”

My standard response to legitimate spammers is to reply to them asking whether they have read www.trefor.net?  It seems only fair.  They are sending me unsolicited mail.  It’s amazing how many of them then do read the blog,  I get quite a lot of positive feedback this way.  I’m sure some of them are reading this post now 🙂 .  I have a fairly relaxed view on life.  We are all trying to earn a living.  We all need to be friends within sensible bounds.

Categories
Business internet voip

Data Retention Act Absurdity

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.

Categories
Business mobile connectivity

Mobile VoIP action hotting up

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.

Categories
Business internet

Novation, novation, novation

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:

  1. 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.
  2.  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.
  3. 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.

Categories
Business media

BBC Radio Lincolnshire drivetime technology slot

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.

wwrightdrivetime

Categories
broadband Business

21CN in Lincoln

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.

Categories
Business voip

ITSPA Dinner

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.

Categories
Business internet UC

Project Chainsaw web.alive and Lenovo

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:

webalive_meeting_800x493