The idea of being able to use a dual mode handset and roam between 802.11 (WLAN) and 2.5G or 3G networks took a giant leap forward when Avaya (NYSE:AV), Proxim (Nasdaq: PROX) and Motorola (NYSE: MOT) announced that their cooperation is beginning to bear fruit.  The three vendors jointly announced on Tuesday that their platform that will allow enterprise users to get ABC (Always Best Connected) wireless service (either via their corporate WLAN or the cellular network). 

The offering is called "Converged Mobility Solution" and it requires an IP PBX from Avaya, access points (APs) from Proxim  and a call manager gateway and the dual mode handsets from Motorola.  These phones (the Motorola  CN620 Dual-Network Mobile Office Device - MOD) support both VoIP connections when in range of a corporate WLAN (or presumably some WiFi hotspot in the future) and a GSM cellular connections whenever an 802.11 network is not detected.

The MOD can switch from the wireless to the 802.11 network when it is available, as well as hand-off calls from the WLAN to the GSM network when the end-user is no longer in range (depending on what the SNR, or signal-to-noise ratio is).  The handset runs on an embedded version of  Windows CE (4.2) and relies on a dual mode 802.11a/g chip from Texas Instruments.  The equipment will initially run only on 802.11a, however.  The gateway allows for push-to-talk whenever the users are in range of a WLAN. 

Of course, a big part of the equation is when Avaya will find and announce a wireless operator partnership, since sales cannot really take off without some participation from that carrier.  What does that mean for wireless SPs?  Will they be able to match a triple play offering from the wireline counterparts?  Perhaps... But this joint offering is a step in that direction.  A wireless SP could form a relationship with these vendors and then offer a bundle that would consist of X minutes worth of calls on their GSM network (or CDMA 2.5G/3G variant) coupled with Y minutes worth of calls on their WiFi networks.  Hence, a user could take his CN620 and use it for free within his enterprise (with Avaya and Proxim WLAN and IP PBX gear), while incurring one rate when on the wireless network and another type of charge when within range of a publicly available WiFi hotspot.

Update (Aug.3/04): Motorola claims to have solved the battery power issue with this product.  The battery consumption for 802.11 phones is much higher than for the traditional wireless handsets, because of the way the 802.11 protocol works (i.e. the access point, or AP, keeps on checking whether or not all the endpoits associated with it want to make voice transmissions; this periodic activity can draw a lot of battery power over a short period of time, making the duration of a fully charged 802.11 set a lot shorter than that of a typical wireless phone).  Motorola is using a work-around with Proxim that is premised upon a "deep sleep" strategy.  More details will follow in an upcoming post.

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The New York Times had an interesting article yesterday about cutting-edge research that Toyota is performing in striving to make driving more fun.  Four Toyota employees recently were awarded a U.S. patent for a concept car that will enable drivers to better communicate with each other, by empowering the cars to glare angrily at another car cutting through traffic.  The main features include headlights that vary in intensity, hood slits and other detail can that look like eyebrows, eyelids or tears. 

The main idea behind this concept is to make the driver and occupants develop even more of an affinity for their car, thereby creating even more customer "stickiness".  The benefits are manifold:

• to create a more positive mood
• to let the other drivers know about the feelings of a particular driver
• to provide extra feedback and signaling, indicating feelings such as surprise or gratitude for yielding the right-of-way
• to customize a response system that can automatically express some of these emotions, no matter who drives the car

The car's AI (Artificial Intelligence) is pretty sophisticated because of the complexity of determining the appropriate emotion given a certain situation.  Data on the state of the car, the road,  and the driver is gathered and stored on the car's computer.  That intelligent system assigns points to some factors, such as speed, brake pressure, or handling angle, that can, for instance, contribute to a change to an angry mood (from a normal mood). Therefore, when a certain threshold number of points is reached (e.g. potentially pointing to an angry response), the car's computer software will cause the external part of the car to change accordingly.

My own thoughts on this car?  Interesting concept - it's too early to tell whether it will fly in the current state, but there is a lot of potential.  I would personally soup this idea up with a few extra features, including:

• biometric verification (excellent security feature) - I would complement the regular keyless combo lock with a speaker verification system that would match a person's voiceprint 
• a smart traffic system that would get traffic location from WiFi/WiMax dedicated hotspots around the city and warn the driver not to take certain areas (basically, an enhanced version of OnStar, with traffic  
• a speech synthesizer that would give the car a voice and remind the driver to perform certain tasks such as filling up the gas tank, changing oil, adding windshield washer fluid, etc. or even better yet - warning about speed limits or wreckless driving. 

The highly creative patent can also be applied to motorcycles, ships or aircraft.

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When I brought up the topic of digital information capture and processing in an earlier thread, I forgot to mention about a solution which I recently tested at a demo in town.  It turns out that MTS Allstream (TSE:ALR), Canada's third largest communications service provider, also has an offering in this space: Allstream Digital Ink.

The concept is a bit of a twist to the Sony/Philips/E Ink idea, although the difference in technology name is pretty subtle (electronic ink versus digital ink).  The solution relies on a digital pen (and a mini-docking station for the pen), digital paper and some client and integration software (including a registered application handler).  Two client versions exist: one running on Windows 2000 and the other on Windows XP.  The server managing all the data runs on either Linux or Windows 2000.  The mini-docking station plugs into a PC via a USB connection.

The digital pen uses normal ink for writing and scans the paper as things are written via the pen's camera technology.  Allstream maintains that the results are pretty similar to most optical scanners available today, without requiring the infrastructure and costs associated with a high-res scanner.  The ink can be standard ballpoint blue, and there are several vendors that manufacture the pen, including Nokia, Logitech and Sony.  In my demo, I used the Logitech pen shown in the figure. 

The digital paper essentially is any business form with faint watermark consisting of a series of dots arranged in a mathematical pattern.  The idea is for the pen to record its position on the paper as things are jotted down.

While the user fills out the form, the pen captures all the information.  At the end of the process, the user docks the pen and the pen's strokes are sent to a registered application handler via a secure Internet connection.  Handwriting recognition algorithms are applied along with business rules and voila! - the end result is an electronically stored form (which can be converted into data or stored as a high-res image).

The pricing per seat, including the hardware and the software starts at roughly $725, depending on the volume of the deal.  Allstream saw a business opportunity on the bureaucratic modus operandi of North American firms (there are over 1 billion paper forms in the market).  Obviously mishaps happen (about 3% of paper documents are filed incorrectly, and 7.5% go missing).  The costs associated with those incidents can be huge: finding a misfiled document costs Can$120, while reproducing a lost document can entail Can$220, according to a Cap Ventures Inc. 2002 report.  And this is the niche that Allstream is trying to explore.  All in all, it was a pretty impressive demo.

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In April 2004, Merrill Lynch began tracking a bunch of selected publicly traded companies categorized in a new group: the Nanotech Index.  The idea is to monitor the progress of nanotechnology, from 25 companies such as Amcol International (a materials company) to Westaim (a firm specializing in flat-pannel displays and anti-microbial wound care products and pharmaceuticals).   The index will be quoted intraday by the American Stock Exchange under the symbol NNZ.  While it is not an investable product, the index will be a great metric to track the progress of nanotech, and will be rebalanced and re-evaluated on a semi-annual basis.

Nanotechnology can be defined as the science of manufacturing products smaller than 100 nanometers, at which point classical gives way to quantum physics.  The sector might be a bit overhyped, but it is quite promising, as it represents a new step in miniaturization.  The miniscule scale enables the tweaking of things at the cellular level, which can be the catalyst for a plethora of new discoveries in areas such as biodefense, healthcare and pharmaceuticals. 

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Earlier this year (on March 24, 2004), Dutch conglomerate Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG, AEX:PHI), Japanese giant Sony Corporation (NYSE:SNE) and E Ink corporation jointly launched the first consumer application for an electronic paper display module (Sony's new e-Book reader, Librlé. The product became commercially available in Japan in late April and relies on E Ink's novel electronic ink technology which offers a great end-user experience, similar to reading newsprint.

The idea that brought the three vendors was an electronic ink display with a touch panel input device to produce a electronic drawing tablet that comes closer to paper.  The device could eventually be used for freehand computer input, including cartoon drawing and adding annotation to documents, according to the researchers.

Librlé can store up to 500 downloadable books, went on sale in Japan this spring. Its display uses E Ink's technology, which employs tiny microcapsules that act as electronically responsive ink.

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Joaquim Menezes wrote a pretty interesting article about IPv6, in which he interviewed yours truly about the latest on this technology and when it would replace IPv4, which is version 4 of the Internet Protocol, currently used throughout most networks.  The article got printed in several sources, including ITBusiness.ca, CRM News, Linux News and e-commerce Times, among others.

Joaquim did a great job at explaining the issues in a very straightforward way... I highly recommend you read his article, but without delving too much into the nuts and bolts of the technology, I just wanted to highlight the following:

• the IPv4 address space probably won't be depleted until 2007-2010, given all the stop gap solutions employed (e.g. NAT, CIDR)
• NAT will still need to exist even after the advent of IPv6, since it will have to be used for all IPv4 to IPv6 translation points
• there will be 3 strategies used to migrate from IPv4 to IPv6: address translation (techniques to enable IPv4 devices to communicate with IPv6 gadgets), dual stack (allowing IPv4 and IPv6 to coexist on the same network), and tunelling (using to connect IPv6 islands

Obviously, the uptake will vary according to the market segment, with infrastructure vendors and SPs embracing IPv6 before consumers and the enteprirse.  Joaquim also captured well the three key catalysts for IPv6: security (harder for hackers to impersonate others), savings (a lot of extra manual configuration is no longer going to be required) and support for mobile computing (users will be able to achieve seamless roaming in a much simpler fashion, without the need of work-arounds).  And on that mobility promise lies the best prospect of growth for IPv6 in the enterprise and carrier space.  A lot of wireless operators are seeking bundling of IP data services and voice functionality - to create their own kind of super-bundle... and IPv6 can be instrumental in achieving that objective.

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Verizon (NYSE:VZ) announced today that it is introducing its VoIP service to consumers throughout the U.S.  The much awaited product launch comes after some other players - some established (such as AT&T) and others new entrants (such as startup Vonage) - already had introduced their own VoIP offerings.

For the longest times, RBOCs were hesitant to offer VoIP services, since they undercut their main business of connecting calls over copper.  However, they had no choice but offer the service, because of the appetite of some cable players to encroach in the territory (Time Warner Cable, for instance, plans to make the service available to its customers by the end of the year) and the success that some startups have had (Vonage has captured more than 200,000 customers, many of which migrated away from their traditional phone lines).

Subscribers signing up with Verizon's DSL service will pay $34.95 a month for unlimited local and long-distance calls within the U.S. whereas customers having another ISP will be charged $39.95 a month for the same service.  This compares with a monthly rate of $59.95 for unlimited local and long-distance service over traditional lines.

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AT&T Wireless (NYSE:AWE) announced today that it was launching 3G wireless services in four major U.S. markets: Detroit, Phoenix, San Francisco and Seattle.  The introduction of 3G service satisfies an agreement with NTT DoCoMo (NYSE:DCM), which had previously made an investment in AT&T Wireless ($9.8 billion back in 2000, corresponding to a 16 percent ownership in the operator).  Insiders say that this requirement needed to be addressed in order for AT&T to proceed with the pending $41 billion merger deal with Cingular Wireless, which expects to launch its own 3G service sometime next year. 

The company had planned to reach this milestone sooner, but a tough telecom environment coupled with technology glitches caused delays in the project.  Despite that, AT&T anticipates to extend 3G services in Dallas and San Diego before the end of 2004. 

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NASA recently released photos from lapetus, Saturn's outermost large two-face moon.  Lapetus has a bright, heavily cratered icy terrain and a dark terrain.  An interesting tidbit on the Cassini mission is that the spacecraft is named after Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, who discovered lapetus in 1671.

Since the discovery, scientists have been puzzled by the fact that the moon has two hemispheres: one dark (the side facing forward) and one light (the trailing hemisphere, which reflects about 50 percent of sunlight).  Lapetus always shows the same face to Saturn, and it is hoped that the Cassini mission will be able to finally discover the reason behind the mysterious dichotomy.  One theory is that the dark hemisphere is being coated with particles being ejected from Phoebe, a tiny Saturn moon.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was in Toronto this past week to attend the company's Worldwide Partner Conference and held an interesting interview with CRN (Canada / Computer Reseller News).

Topics discussed included:

• a "super" or universal CAL (Client Access License) option, bundling rights to many more server offerings than are now included in the core CAL
• the Biz Talk Server 2004
• the upcoming release of the next Windows Server upgrade, code-named R2 (due out in late 2005)
• Windows Marketplace, an online store initiative
• OS and Office migration update

The interview is interesting reading, however there was no mention about other interesting topics such as Longhorn, Indigo, LCS and Live Meeting.  Some folks such as Sand Hill Rd. VC guru Martin Tobias are predicting that Microsoft will push Longhorn even further out (from 2007 to 2009), so it would have been interesting to hear Ballmer's take on that topic.   more »

Computerworld had an interesting article on security and how much damage viruses are causing to the IT industry.  The article discusses the results of a joint research project undertaken by the EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit) and AT&T.

The results are staggering: the damage caused by hacker attacks went up from US$ 3.3 billion in 1997 to 12 billion in 2003.  No wonder why security is one of the leading IT spending categories in terms of growth.  This year alone, enterprise security budgets are expected to increase by 13 percent. 

Another shocking fact uncovered by the research: 83 percent of these attacks are originated internally.  But here is the ultimate shocker: almost 4 out of every 5 employees admit to having clicked on an e-mail attachment sent from an unknown person last year.

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Mitch Kapor posted last week in his blog the new features in the latest release of Chandler, a next-generation PIM (Personal Information Manager) written in an open-source language called Python.  This powerful application will be able to manage personal user information in a straightforward manner, in addition to facillitating data sharing and collaboration.  The product roadmap calls for extensive customization capabilities, in addition to other high-volume power user features.

The most recently tested version of Chandler (Release 0.3) was built on February 26th, 2004.  Eventually, as the program picks up steam and gains increased popularity, it may become more appealing to enterprises at large, particularly due to the fact that it is an open source application.  Wouldn't it be interesting to see an enterprise vendor such as Avaya, Cisco or Nortel to pick up the source code and customize a version of Chandler for their own IP PBX?  That could be a distinct possibility, if the popularity of Chandler increases and if it turns out to be in fact easier to use than most proprietary PIMs (e.g. Cisco's Personal Assistant).  Granted, those are two big "IFs".  Regardless, even under this hypothetical scenario, vendors embracing Chandler would have to hide the "hooks" into their IP PBXs, and offer the application itself for free (of course, as for those hooks, that would be a completely different story).

One of the key advantages of open source development is that OSAF (the Open Source Applications Foundation) can quickly experiment with and implement drastically different UIs in ways that other PIM vendors with established end-user bases simply cannot.  The result is the promise of a superior end-user experience.

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Wired magazine recently had an interesting story on FCC Chairman Michael Powell, who just started his own blog.  The main idea is to give an opportunity to techies and lesser known entrepreneurs to voice their opinions on topics ranging from VoIP regulation to the transition to digital television, and even using airwave frequencies between television stations for new wireless services.  Another reason why Powell claims to have started the blog was to motivate the high-tech industry to get involved with regulatory issues earlier, rather than later, when these technologies become mainstream.

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MIT's Tech Policy blog reported on an interesting technology being developed in Japan: optical camouflage.  Researchers there are focused on developing the illusion of invisibility - much like in James Bond 007 movies or on Alice (a 1990 movie directed by Woody Allen starring Mia Farrow, William Hurt, Joe Mantegna and Alec Baldwin).   

The system is actually pretty simple, involving a mix of light-sensitive and light-emitting devices attached to an adapted reflective surface.  The devices are connected to a computer, which simply projects on each side whatever is on the opposite side. 

From the above picture, we can see that the result is more translucent than fully transparent, but there is potential for real invisibility, although with a lot more complexity.  In order to achieve full invisibility, the background must be captured from all angles and the camouflage itself needs to display it from all the perspectives simultaneously.  This entails a minimum of six stereoscopic camera pairs, in order to capture the scene from every single viewpoint. 

Source: University of Tokyo   more »

Martin Tobias recently posted his take on the most recent "Future in Review" (FiRe) conference.  Originally founded by Mark Anderson, FiRe is a PowerPoint-free tech conference striving to provide an accurate view of the tech industry in the next 3-5 years.  This year's edition, held in late May in San Diego, counted with the presence of cognoscenti such as Barry Diller, Ray Ozzie, Mitch Kapor, Lee Hartwell, and Josh Wolfe, among others.

Martin's insights are, for the most part, bang-on, including his skepticism on WiFi carrier models, which I also happen to share.  But most of us in the blogsphere will be happy with his NEW prediction: blogging software will gain significant market share in the web authoring and content management business.  Tobias also predicts that blogs will move upmarket into the enterprise sector, again, agreeing with what I had presented at VON Canada earlier this year in a panel on blogging.

His article is definitely worthwhile reading... 

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As soon as the news of Google's GMail application (still in Beta mode) were proliferated across the cyber space, one suspected that competitors such as Yahoo! and MSN would soon introduce new features to make their offerings more competitive.  Just on the storage limit front, the new GMail product easily eclipsed its peers: 1,000 MB of space versus 6 MB for Yahoo! Mail and only 2MB for Hotmail.  Yahoo was the first one out of the block, boosting the storage space for its free webmail service users to 100 MB.  MSN followed suit by boosting its free storage to 250 MB.  Nothing exciting about these two announcements, particularly considering that storage is getting increasingly cheaper (for instance, Google claims that it can offer 1 GB for under US$2 per user).

But introducing slight changes on the user interface and adding more storage alone will not suffice in the e-mail wars.  Microsoft and Yahoo must also pay close attention to providing their online e-mail applications the necessary support so that the developer community could start writing third party software that can further boost their functionality.  Case in point: GMail already counts with a variety of extra applets, such as PGtGM (Pop Goes the Gmail), a program that sits between the Gmail web server and a user's e-mail client and converts messages from web format into the POP3 format that most e-mail clients (such as Outlook or Lotus Notes) can understand.  Other apps include:

• G-Mailto: enables a mailto:// URL to open up a page with GMail's compose window
• GMail Loader: allows a user to import mail into GMail
• GTray: Windows system tray notifier for new GMail mail.  

These are just a few of the many new third party GMail apps that are being made available, which will definitely help drive end-user adoption.  Eventually, some of their functions could become incorporated in the Google mail application.  We will definitely be hearing new similar developments on the Microsoft and Yahoo side... the e-mail wars are just beginning to warm up!

UPDATE: a friend of mine told me today that an Israeli company (Walla) also offers a 1 GB e-mailbox free of charge: http://www.walla.com

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NASA is still tracking one of the strongest space storms on record, as it reaches the edge of the solar system. The solar storms blasted through Earth in late 2003 and according to NASA astronomers, are now some 13 billion kilometers away from the solar system.  The fast and intense flares emanating from the sun began last October and November, sending billions of tons of electrified gas at speeds up to 5 million mph.  These 10 powerful solar flares shot up extreme doses of X-rays and other radiation, along with slower-moving storms of charged particles.  Since that time, the waves have slowed down to a speed of about 1.5 million mph, and according to calculations, should reach Voyager 1 (almost 9 million miles away, representing the furthest located human-made object) sometime late this year or in early 2005. 

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NASA released on this past weekend some pretty interesting photos taken from the Cassini spacecraft as it passed by Saturn's big moon named Titan. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.  The cost of the mission, which was launched in 1997, is pegged at $3.3 billion.  There will be a lot more photo opportunities for Cassini to photograph Titan during its four year mission, with an extra estimated 45 more flybys of the moon scheduled (coming within 600 miles of the moon). The Huygens probe will be sent into Titan's atmosphere in January, and will send pictures back to Cassini as it makes its descent by parachute.

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Bank of America published last week the results of a survey that it conducted with 100 enterprise CIOs or decision makers about their expected IT expenditures over the next 12 months.  The findings were published on Forbes.com and indicate that roughly 70% of the respondents are forecasting their applications budgets to go up within the next year.  The main application categories expected to benefit from the rise in enterprise software spending are business intelligence, compliance and financial management.  

Other Wall Street firms confirm the optimism in IT expenditures.  Earlier this year, Merrill Lynch analysts announced their forecast for global IT budgets, pegging the growth this year at the 2-3% range.  All these numbers show that the malaise that affected the sector in the past couple of years seems to be finally waning.

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