Find A Way To Go Faster!

Chris Bishop is an e-business strategist at IBM and he has a passion to keep abreast of the latest in e-business technology advances. He and I spent an hour late last year talking about the future of the Internet and Chris published the discussion on an IBM intranet site. He titled the interview "Find A Way To Go Faster!", and made it available for sharing here on patrickWeb.

CB: What are you currently telling business leaders about where future value lies in evolving Internet technologies?

JP: A lot of big changes are being driven by the Internet. It is causing a rebirth of ideas that had formerly been impractical. An idea - no matter where it comes from - can be accessible immediately. Leaders of institutions such as hospitals, schools, government should be envisioning the concept of modeling the end result and then reverse engineering to build systems which make that happen. In business, we had had the barter system   & give me cow and I’ll give you some grain& . Then the concept of mercantile exchange appeared and then business processes that evolved in silos. Now we are talking about integration of processes. I feel that too many companies are focused on the end state, and are ignoring the current day to day challenges around what they could be doing right now to be a more effective e-institution. (read more)

Internet Technology March 31, 2004 07:09 PM

Phishing Update

In the Inside ID Conference report I mentioned "phishing" as one of the types of fraudulent activity that is happening on the Internet. There was a news story about phishing in the past few days -- it is clearly on the rise and something to be quite careful about. I have personally received three phishing emails this week and it is clear that the perpetrators are getting very clever. In addition to the basic fraudulent attempts to get personal information from others, the emails use"spoofing". Spoofing is a technique -- unfortunately not hard to do -- whereby the "from" address is modified to make it look like it came from a legitimate source. Here are the three emails I received and some advice on how to deal with them. (read more)

PKI March 30, 2004 11:37 AM

Radio Talk Show

Sanjog Aul is the host of the AVVAL Radio Talk Show on Technology. The current series is entitled "Managing Technology The Right Way!", and I spent an hour talking with Sanjog this past Friday morning. We talked about blogging, WiFi, and generally about the future of the Internet. I enjoyed the discussion and unlike the last time, there was no power failure! The archive of Friday's show is now live. If you are interested, just click on the listen link.

Internet Technology March 29, 2004 06:20 PM

Talking With Your Browser

Someone recently said that using Google has added 20 points to our IQ. Other than using Google, however, most of us use a browser the same way we used it ten years ago. We type a url and wait for the web server to return the requested page to us. Opera Software ASA is changing the model. In partnership with IBM Corporation, Opera has developed a new browser that will allow you to use your voice to request web pages -- and the browser will talk back to you. "Good morning, John. Where would you like to go". "Weather Underground", I might say. "What city?", the browser replies. "Phoenix, Arizona", I say. "Sunny and 92 degrees today. Tomorrow will be partly cloudy and 88. The next day will be sunny and 85". "Anything else?", the Opera browser says. "Technology News", I say. "Headlines", the browser responds. After reading the top ten stories, the browser says, "More headlines?". "Full story, I say". "Which story?". "Opera". The browser says...

"Opera Sings with IBM's Speech Technology: New version of Opera Embeds ViaVoice from IBM"
"Oslo, Norway and San Francisco, CA - Mar. 23, 2004"

"Today at AVIOS, SpeechTEK 2004, Opera Software announced the upcoming release of a multimodal desktop browser that incorporates IBM's Embedded ViaVoice speech technology. By leveraging IBM's voice libraries in this version of Opera, users can navigate, request information and even fill in Web forms using speech and other forms of input in the same interaction". (read full press release)

Internet Technology March 28, 2004 10:44 AM

PC Forum - Day 3

PC Forum day 3 opened with a talk by Eric Johnson, Norman Eig Professor of Business, Columbia University School of Business called "Defaults have value(s): How Do People Really Behave on the Web?" His bottom line was that defaults have a huge impact on consumer behavior and he illustrated this point with many examples. He also showed studies revealing how the background image of a webpage has a big effect on consumer willingness to buy from that site.

The first panel was "Content: How Users Make it Their Own", moderated by Hank Barry, Partner, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. The panelists were Lisa Gansky, Chairman & President, Ofoto, and GM, Digital Imaging Services, Eastman Kodak, Rob Glaser, Chairman & CEO, RealNetworks, and Shane Robison, Executive VP & Chief Technology and Strategy Officer, Hewlett-Packard. There was a wide-ranging discussion about how users interact with content and even create content. Hank said that 44% of web users have actually created some of their own content on the web. Tools like TypePad are making this really easy to do. Updating a geocaching expedition log is another example of the idea of the "writeable web". There was a lot of discussion about the music business and changing distribution mechanisms and business models. (read more)

Conferences March 24, 2004 01:35 AM

PC Forum - Day 2

PC Forum day 2 was one of the best in all the 12 years I have been attending. It started out with Esther interviewing with Eric Schmidt, Chairman & CEO, Google. He wouldn't talk about the rumored IPO but he was very bullish about the potential for Google. Eric then joined in on a panel, "From Player to Platform: The Context Makes the Connection",along with Jon Miller, Chairman & CEO, America Online and Dan Rosensweig, Chief Operating Officer, Yahoo!.

Dan said that Yahoo!'s goal is to give people what they want, when they want, how they want it, on whatever device they want. Jon said that in the past few months AOL has begun to feel they may be gaining in their war on spam even though they are seeing more than 2.5 billion spam emails daily. Dan said that more than 90% of the spam to Yahoo! users is caught. That means that the incredible amount of spam that people see is less than ten percent of what actually gets sent.

There was a lot of discussion about social networks such as Orkut and LinkedIn. I don't think these are for everyone but they clearly are part of the emerging social software models. I finally threw in the towel and joined LinkedIn. (read more)

Conferences March 22, 2004 08:13 PM

PC Forum - Day 1

PC Forum is one of the conferences I most enjoy because it always try to look at the big picture. Esther Dyson opened the conference by announcing that her company, Edventure Holdings, has been acquired by CNET (see full press release for details). The agenda this year is focused on looking at the world and the US political scene through the lens of IT. The opening day of the conference was about "Globalization".

The first panel was about worldwide economic development, free trade, and the impact of "off-shoring". Narayana Murthy, Chairman, Infosys Technologies (and one of the many good speakers/panelists at the conference) made a really good point that the various geographies of the world will ultimately see value in "coming together" and will begin to break down barriers. His proof point was how the European Union came together for that very reason. Louis Rosenthal, Executive VP, ABN AMRO Services Company was skeptical about this point and believs that in some cases the barriers have actually increased. He also expressed a view that much of the debate about "off-shoring" is political noise that will go away after the U.S. elections. The others on the panel viewed the issues as more fundamental. Off-shoring is missing the bigger point which is that the world is globalizing. Diana Farrell, Director, McKinsey Global Institute said "competition is at the heart of productivity". The bottom line was a view that globalization means new markets and new jobs as long as countries don't over-regulate. (read more)

Conferences March 22, 2004 01:43 AM

Rounding The Cape

We just turned north after rounding Cape Horn, near the bottom of the Earth. Less than four hundred years ago, people still thought the world was flat and that ships would "fall off" the globe if they went too far. Once that belief was shattered, mariners headed out onto the oceans, many seeking passage around the South American continent. Magellan navigated a passage through a complicated series of channels at what was then thought to be the most southern part of the continent, but in 1615 two brothers from Holland discovered Cape Horn, truly the southern most land mass of the continent. We were fortunate that the weather allowed us to see the full expanse of the region. Often the famous rough seas prevent this. The next stop will be the Falkland Islands and then on to Bueons Aires.

After traveling through the Magellan Straight, a good part of the day was spent in Ushuaia. It is the southern most city in the world and almost seven thousand miles from New York. Prior to that was the Fjords of Chile. There are many pictures and links to share but that will have to wait until I get back. This posting was made from a WiFi connection and satellite link from an onboard Internet Cafe.

Travels March 14, 2004 08:51 AM

Be Back In Two Weeks

There is a long queue of things to write about but it is time for a break. I will be out of the country for two weeks. I'll be posting the next story on March 21.

Blogging March 5, 2004 10:55 PM

Blogging and Spam Update

One of the ways that you can tell if a new Internet technology is going to be successful is to look for skepticism. When people begin to say the hype exceeds the reality, it means we are on the way toward the reality exceeding the hype. I am not referring to new business models that are going to make water run uphill, but rather to fundamental technologies such as the Internet itself, the Web, Java, Linux, WiFi, and others. All of those were discounted in the early days. Blogging has now entered the phase when we can be sure it will be enormously successful and change the fundamentals of how information is written, distributed, syndicated, and archived. How do I know? A recent story by The Associated Press proclaimed that "Blogging still infrequent, study finds". The study found that somewhere between2 percent and 7 percent of adult Internet users in the United States are bloggers. The implication of the story was that "only" 2-7 percent of Internet users were blogging. I find the 2-7 percent number extremely encouraging. (read more)

Blogging , Internet Technology , Personal Computing , Public Policy March 4, 2004 10:44 PM

My Office Is Open

In a recent post I mentioned that I had built a spreadsheet with OpenOffice. OpenOffice.org is an open-source application and it is free. I do not use it because it is free. As I said in the ZDNet interview, the issue is not "free" -- the issue is "freedom". OpenOffice is a multi-platform office productivity suite compatible with all major file formats and it runs on both Windows XP and on Linux. I use both operating systems and I don't want to have to remember the idiosyncrasies of two different office suites. OpenOffice is identical on the two platforms. Some people worry about file compatibility, but I have not found that to be an issue. (read more)

Personal Computing March 1, 2004 10:28 PM