AOL, Yahoo and MSN Link to Offer Instant Messaging to Businesses

According to a Washington Post report, America Online Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo plan to link instant messaging services for use in the workplace. Use of instant messaging has doubled in the past year, with more than 2 billion messages sent and received over the America Online network daily, according to a report by company officials. The new services that will be offered are electronic recording and saving of instant messages, secure communications guarantee and ability to store and receive instant messages. (Source: Washington Post) "

Wow... with all the fights in the recent years against inter-operability, this step is really cool. What I am curious about, is how companies will manage the IM policy... before locking people into one IM providor (usually MSN) allowed them to be able to curb personal use. IM hasn't been something welcome in many businesses as a tool, and I am curious what is the marketing model for the new service. hmmm..

Boeing Switches to VoIP

Boeing announced plans to drop wireline phones in favor of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. With 157,000 employees and worldwide operations, Boeing is the largest company to adopt the technology. The move is expected to give other companies the confidence to make the switch to VoIP. The swap is expected to take 5-7 years. (Source: Chicago Tribune )

This is fascinating! With all the fights over how to make more money for the government and FCC, how to tax it, how to regulate it, Boeing is making a big statement. This must be at least somewhat of a threatening move to wireline providers. Business customers are such a large portion of their income. I wonder how much effect this will have.

Qualcomm Tests Wireless Call Aboard American Airlines Flight

Qualcomm announced the first wireless call aboard American Airlines was a success. Qualcomm tested their code division multiple access (CDMA) technology from 25,000 feet. Overall calls were generally good, although there was a delay of about one second in voice communications and some calls were dropped. The company hopes to eventually see the use of wireless phones legal aboard jetliners. Currently the Federal Communications Commission bans the use of wireless devices aboard commercial airlines. Qualcomm now plans to spend two years testing and studying whether signals interfered with the jet's system. (Source: Associated Press)"

Just a few weeks ago NYT ran an article on a cell-phone related incident when a woman was taken off the plane for not wanting to get off the phone. Now qualcomm is working on making this kind of incident history. Go Qualcomm...

Customers Drop Wirelines In Favor of Wireless

Many people have decided to toss their wireline phones and opt to use only wireless. According to a Wall Street Journal report, 5 million people dropped their wireline service in 2003. While many companies are making efforts to offer traditional services to those who have dropped wirelines, some services are still not available. DirectTV and Dish Network, the leading provider use wirelines to bill customers for services such as on-demand movies and DirectTV's premium sports package. Some credit card services such as Citigroup and American Express require a wireline to verify address information. The report also says that many home alarm companies must be tied to a wireline in order to call the customer when the alarm is set off, others generally charge an extra fee to offer back-up communications options. Although many companies still require the use of wireline, they are making efforts to offer services to customers that have chosen to toss the line and go wireless. (Source: Wall Street Journal)

This is an interesting point. With ubiquity of the phone, we have created an infrastructure that depends on its existence inside a residence, as a method of verification of existence of place. The presence of a wireless phone merely verifies existence of person which is at odds with the old infrastructure. It takes time to re-adjust. Curiously, one of my interview subjects had mentioned that she was thinking of getting a wireline because she felt totally helpless and unable to call her husband once when a satellite went down. Wireless has a bit to go to reach the reliability of wireline it seems...

Journalism = reporting facts?

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > State of the Art: Microsoft on the Trail of Google - instead of wasting 2-pages worth of everyone's time, why didn'g David Pogue just write - I hate Microsoft, they are talantlessly trying to get at Google, I am feeling slighted, they suck. That pretty much sums up the article... And it doesn't even have a good sense of humor about things...

Work inwading the spaces between

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Destination Wi-Fi, by Rail, Bus or Boat is an article that hails advances in Wifi offerings on commuter transportation like buses, boats and trains. At the moment, commuters can work on their laptops through the commute (some trains offer power plugs at the seats) but not surf the web. With the rollout of wifi, commuters will be able to be connected throughout the commute.

In thinking about spaces and my current research, I've been exploring the idea of the space-between spaces, the transit, the vaccuum of getting from one place to another, where we actually spend most of our lives. Having spent a considerable time in LA, I am intimiately familiar with the frustration of "traffic time" and the feeling of wasted minutes that could be spend on doing something more pleasurable. While WiFi in the car would not help, WiFi in a public transport (if such a luxury is available in this country) would make up for that feeling of "lost time". or would it? There is something about being in the space of the car or a train, that space that is free to be occupied by reading a book unrelated to work, checking up the newspaper, doing the cross-word puzzle, listening to musc, thinking. The time that everyone agrees is spent well (getting from place to place) and, until now, could not have been coopted by demands of a gruelling work-pace. The "me" time... Maybe, being able to get those few emails off during a commute and finishing that presentation would be a nice change, making the work-day a little shorter. I doubt that would be the outcome though. Instead, there will be more of tunnelling into the echo-chamber of your own interests and opinions inside the vast space of the Internet. Living up to the expectations of connectedness, where the commute time is still not "work" time but "connected" time, which creates expectations of immediate response regardless of presence, location, breaking down of public transport... the idea of "stranded" just doesn't put us nearly as far beyond the reaches of our daily grind. Is that a good thing? can we be more efficient in styling our lives in such a way that we can get more done and enjoy more life? or is it a bad thing? feeding an addiction, strengthening the leash of connectedness, disconnecting us from paying attention to our immediate surroundings. The jury is still out... though I wonder...

WiFi - there does exist a business model?

"Starbucks announced it had T-Mobile Wi-Fi installed in more than 3,100 U.S. cafes. Starbucks recognizes that the Wi-Fi service has helped the company retain customers longer and at off-peak hours. Wi-Fi users visit Starbucks locations an average of eight times a month, are online for approximately an hour, and arrive after the morning rush. There are currently more than 4,700 HotSpot locations throughout the U.S. (Source: IT Web) "

Considering that T-Mobile WiFi service is a paid service (and its not cheap), the fact that Starbucks is seeing benefits from offering it, suggests that there exists some kind of a business model in offering WiFi. I haven't seen any numbers from locations that offer free WiFi though, I wonder if the effect is the same.

Living in Oregon, its nice to be able to find a zillion locations with free WiFi. I am sure there are some numbers available on the business impact of this service since all the coffeeshops that offer it are not chains, and focus on building a community of a sort. On the other hand, one has to KNOW that there is free wifi at a particular coffeeshop, while with Starbucks, you know they have T-Mobile (or are at least more likely to have it). Just how much of that use is accounted by travellers, I wonder?

OregonLive - LP headquarter relocation story

Oregonian LP-headquarters relocation story was an interesting piece to add to the interview Scott Mainwaring and I had just finished a few weeks prior with the "Hunter" family the day before they moved to Nashville as part of LP relocation. Unlike the executives though, I do not think this family will be taking part in charity balls of the same scale. They comprise some of the corporate charter plane support staff that LP moved along with everyone else to their new Headquarter location. I am curious just how different was the moving experience for the executives and for this middle class family.

The New York Times > Technology > You've Got Mail (and Court Says Others Can Read It)

The New York Times > Technology > You've Got Mail (and Court Says Others Can Read It)

This article in the New York Times only underlines the idea that persistence of digital content is something that most of us have not yet come to grips with. Yet most of our digital content is stored somewhere, most of us do not know where it is. the initial fascination with the Internet and its ability to provide individuals with anonymity has turned out to be a rosy dream, while at the same time, the Internet has killed any pretense at anonymity and privacy. As digital communications expand in size and frequency, while laws refuse to properly address privacy issues that emerge at the same time, erosion of personal liberties and privacy will continue without most individuals realizing what is happening.

RFID use & life between the seams

IBM Opens Test Center in France International Business Machine Corp - reads the tagline, explaining that IBM has opened a test center for radio frequency identification (RFID) in Nice, France. The center was opened in an effort to make sure chips, readers, and software work together. Approximately 1,000 part-time and full-time employees are currently working on RFID for IBM. RFID allows product information to be read automatically and wirelessly. Organizations that are already using or plan to use RFID include Wal-Mart, airlines, pharmaceutical companies, and the U.S. Department of Defense. IBM expects that by 2009, fifty percent of all products will be tagged. (Source: CIOL News)

Curious... despite my initial negative reaction towards RFID, as far as I understand the technology, what it WILL do is make it harder for people to steal and easier for companies to keep track of their products and merchandise. On one hand, this makes perfect business sense. Companies invest into a technology that will reduce problems with inventory tracking. On the other hand, it makes me wonder how this will affect the low income working world, which is often still built on a strange system or barter, theft, things falling between the cracks. Many of the low-income workforce are people who have fallen between the cracks, who live on the things that are uncounted, forgotten, seamlessly removed from the "real" world. As the stock of easily accessible small item-foraging reduces due to better systems for accountability, how will these populations adjust? The uncounted, forgotten, between the seams of the social system people. Those that are payed far less than what one can live on, but survive none-the-less through creating a system of favors, barter and a world that is oddly reminiscent of Gaiman's London Below...

As someone who has spent several years living partially submerged into a place where barter was a way of life and a system that worked better than the job you had, which paid next to nothing and was more of a labor of love, I wonder how would existence of a better accounting system would have affected that world? I would be wrong to say that this is the first step in that direction. As technology permeated the business world, the employee-based barter system has had to adjust, with an understanding of the "damn computers" and creation of new system of barter that made use of the new loop-holes. When ski-resorts started using scanners, matching bar-codes with people's names, printing tickets on sticky paper, making it impossible to remove from your ski jacket once attached, the dirtbags developed systems for skiing on the same ticket during different parts of the day trading off, ways of taking off sticky tickets and still make them usable, etc.
When bars started using computers that controlled what drinks were served and how much... wait-staff and bartenders developed ideas of the "spill fund" and "wrong drink order".

Much of the new technology is used to control the "little" people of the working world, where these people survive on knicking the system here and there, dropping underneath the money-economy to the level of barter economy that allows them to survive the harsh realities of an ever-more expensive life-style. The race is on with the RFID... we shall see?