Wait? What? See the article linked below my own footnotes. This mini-ramble is about Hitwise making a graph or something showing something growing or not growing or winning or not winning. I’m not picking on the article or Hitwise per se but the general notion of tracking service utilization in the fast paced world of iterative development with anything but the very broadest and most fluffy of metrics.

Specifically, I question the ‘moving target’ element that Google+ and any such property tracked would exhibit. Consider that the way Hitwise tracks [1] today may not necessarily be the way tracking is done as properties evolve into new signatures, A/B testing, deep personalization, mobile or closed loop networks, leverage of partners or complementary partners, or shifts in the delivery infrastructure to favor SSL enabled experiences throughout [2].

How do such services really compare the signature of today to the signature of next year? How do such services account for the possibility of egregious errors or failure to adequately capture the intentionally or unintentionally obtuse / obfuscated traffic indicators?

Indeed, the quality of the time spent and the sharing gestures (text updates vs. photos vs. movies) may be harder and harder to glean as this data is considered part of the privacy contract and the salable asset of the property. Remember, you are the one feeding the machine as a user. As someone much more clever put it, “if the product is free that means you are what is for sale”.

That may mean third party services that seek to classify and quantify user patterns are forced to disclose methodology in greater detail (ultimately owning up to how little they do know), striking deals with destinations to truly map such trends with a firehouse of data, or they are simply relegated to selling more art than science.

Perhaps being the ‘outside view’ will come to be an even more literal condition.

[1] www.hitwise.com/us/about-us/how-hitwise-works
[2] relegating most characterization to blunted techniques i.e. packet and flow based accounting

source: venturebeat.com/2011/07/22/google-plus-ranking/

As luck would have it, I was fortunate enough to come across two amazing cloud based startup companies, Rarewire and Snap Appointments, that deserve to break the ‘What Happens in Vegas’ vow of silence.

Rarewire and Snap Appointments

How did I come across these two startup companies? Simple. I was invited by Rackspace [1] to participate as a judge in their King of the Apps event for the second round. The first round of King of the Apps included judges such as Robert Scoble, Eric Ries, Stacey Higginbotham, Dave McClure, and Bill Boebel.

For round two the King of the Apps judges included Ted Nitka, Dan Woods, Jonathan Bryce, Andy Schroepfer, and some guy named Jay Cuthrell. We all headed to House of Blues and got to enjoy the pitches while the crowd enjoyed Tex-Mex and taste beverages.

Okay… Here’s the tale of the tape:

Challenger: Rarewire

Rarewire attacks the barrier to entry for content oriented app creation. By focusing on content developers that don’t want to create one-off native apps for iPad the Rarewire team is targeting a much wider audience than iPad developers alone represent. Here’s the video the Rarewire team shared in their pitch:

It’s clear that Rarewire is taking the complex workflow of media intensive content creation and distilling it to a mechanism that liberates content developers — allowing then to move faster and with far less risk than traditional avenues to pad and mobile platforms.

In fact, the folks at CA Technologies use Rarewire for their Cloud Leaders iPad app. You should definitely check it out and get your cloud on!

1st Round Defending Champion: Snap Appointments

Snap Appointments is a 100% Rackspace cloud based SaaS startup. The Snap Appointments team won their spot during the Lean Startup track during SxSW this year. By fusing drop dead simple web based scheduling and just-enough-CRM, Snap Appointments caters to the tens of thousands of small businesses offering appointment oriented services: think salons, dentists, etc. Since SxSW, Snap Appointments has managed to land +450 businesses and see +5000 appointments booked through the service. Since the service is hosted entirely within the Rackspace cloud there is nothing for multi-site companies using Snap Appointments to install — just a web browser and an Internet connection.

Here’s a great video the Rackspace team put together:

Who won? What did they win? Find out now by heading over to read this writeup from the fine folks at Rackspace that made all of this possible and introduced me to these two amazing startups: Rarewire and Snap Appointments!

[1] Disclosure: The Rackspace team got me a very good room rate for my stay in Las Vegas. Thanks again folks!

I’m looking at a draft folder of blog posts I plan to publish but I decided one post needed to go up now — kids and robots.

One of the cool aspects of working at VCE is the ability to participate in various activities and outreach programs from Cisco, EMC, and VMware. One such EMC sponsored opportunity jumped out at me since it involved working with local middle school kids in Wake County here in North Carolina… and ROBOTS.

Guess what? They WON and are going on to the next level of NATIONAL competition… and they can use YOUR HELP.

Moore Square Museums Magnet Middle School and Panther Creek High School bring home the GOLD!

Moore Square Museums Magnet Middle School and Panther Creek HS joined forces to become the first ever VEX Robotics NC State Champions on April 4, 2011 in Greensboro NC.


The Moore Square VEX Robotics Team is an after school club. Club advisor, Mr. TJ Beatty, led a diverse group of 7th and 8th grade students through months of planning, building, testing and rebuilding to prepare for this robotics competition while being sure to stay within the specific parameters given to the team by TSA and VEX. Mr. Beatty boasts about the unrelenting desire shown by his students. “The team met every day before school, two days a week after school and frequently even ate their lunches while working in the lab.” he said.

This year’s competition was titled VEX Roundup. Students were challenged to build a robot that would place plastic donuts onto goal posts of varying heights within the timeframe allotted. The matches were run with 4 robots in the zone at one time operating in a 2 on 2 format. Students had to plan strategies for offense, defense and collaboration. The robots were operated through autonomous (automatic) and driver controlled modes.

The team now prepares to compete at TSA Nationals in Dallas, Texas. This incredible learning experience was made possible by EMC2 from Durham, NC. They sponsored our teams’ start up cost by donating two complete VEX Robotic kits. The Moore Square Museums Magnet Middle School Vex Robotics Team still needs to raise a large amount of money to fund their trip to TSA Nationals. The team is looking for sponsors and donations to help pay for hotel rooms, meals and entry fees. If you are able to help please contact Mr. Beatty at tbeatty@wcpss.net

Support your STATE CHAMPION VEX Robotics Team as they prepare to go to Dallas TX, and compete in the TSA / VEX National Championship — Make Checks payable to “M2M3 PTSA”

The team has done an extraordinary amount of work and added enhancements that go far beyond the first robot prototypes. Some of that work is super secret until they get to the competition floor. A few specific areas that were addressed relate to robot protection strategies and robot power alignment methods.

If you are working at a big company or a startup now, ask yourself how often you stay late to work on something… of how often you find yourself fitting in any spare time you have to work on a pet project or something that really captures your passion.

Guess what?

That’s precisely what these kids are doing right now. They are building sweat equity in their robot creations. And just in case you think this is lightweight engineering… Last week the team was putting together their C programs for autonomous operation.

Also, the team is composed of boys and girls. Women in engineering FTW!!!

Pretty cool eh? Did you get to do stuff like this when you were in middle school??? How can you not help but welcome our new robot overlords?

If you are interesting in adding your support to the team on their trip to nationals you can also reach me via email at work jay.cuthrell@vce.com or simply leave a comment.

Social network privacy concerns? Consider this: Lawful Intercept allows anyone to be monitored in real-time. I saw what you did.

This year I’ll be speaking at SxSW in the Greater Good track on Sunday March 13th at 11am Central in Room 10AB at the Austin Convention Center.

I hope to expand on my prior post CALEA and Me from 2007. Has it really been 4 years? The hash tag for my talk is #ISWYD. Below is a handy Twitter search widget to get things started.

Here’s a sneak preview of my presentation:

SxSW Interactive: Solo

Title: Lawful Intercept: I Saw What You Did

Social network privacy concerns? Step back and consider this: Lawful Intercept (LI) is how all network users are able to be monitored and analyzed in real-time. While many are concerned with privacy on a popular website, LI empowers an elected or appointed authority to know our digital comings and goings around the clock. This presentation will highlight the latest in LI technology, LI challenges , and how each of us can shape future of how LI is perceived and used.

Presenters: Jay Cuthrell

Jay Cuthrell has been coming to SxSW since 2008. Currently, Jay Cuthrell is a vArchitect at VCE (A Joint Venture of Cisco, EMC, VMware, and Intel) working with service providers to deliver next generation datacenter solutions. He is a frequent industry speaker based in RTP, NC and Missoula, MT. Previously, as a strategic technology consultant with cuthrell.com he worked with service providers, startup companies, and investment groups. He has held CTO, VP, and GM roles at Digitel and NeoNova (an Azure Capital and Bridgescale Partners portfolio company) and infrastructure consulting roles working domestically and internationally for Fortune 500 clients. He also served at Scient (formerly iXL now Publicis), Nortel, Analysts International, IBM, and NCSU College of Engineering. He holds a BS in Materials Science and Engineering from North Carolina State University and grew up in Beaufort, NC. His blog can be found at fudge.org

Time: Sunday March 13 at 11:00AM
Venue: Austin Convention Center Room 10AB 500 E Cesar Chavez St Austin, TX
Tags: #ISWYD

If you want to listen along just click through to slide 5 and that’s where the audio picked up during the recording.

Links:

• Lawful Intercept (LI/CALEA) Links & Whitepapers (Computer Forensics, Cybercrime and Steganography Resources)
• Five Questions For Evaluating Lawful Intercept Devices | BreakingPoint
• Newly Released Documents Detail FBI’s Plan to Expand Federal Surveillance Laws | Electronic Frontier Foundation
• AskCALEA – Standards
• FBI — Going Dark: Lawful Electronic Surveillance in the Face of New Technologies
• India backs off RIM, starts on local operators • The Register
• Is Your Cloud System Safe From the Law? | Gov Monitor
• certlock – Project Hosting on Google Code
• Law Enforcement Appliance Subverts SSL | Threat Level | Wired.com
• Man-in-the-middle attack in the SSL scenario – Server Fault
• files.cloudprivacy.net/ssl-mitm.pdf
• Schneier on Security: Man-in-the-Middle Attacks Against SSL
• Increased Wiretap Access for New Communications Tech Urged,
• judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/Landau02172011.pdf
• Exploiting Lawful Intercept to Wiretap the Internet
• Wiretapping the Internet: Inside Government Web Monitoring Efforts – Security – News & Reviews – eWeek.com – eWeek Mobile
• CALEA – MikroTik Wiki
• Secret Wiretaps – Archive Collection – TIME
• “presidential authority to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance to gather foreign intelligence information” – Google Search
• alicebob
• Revision history of Alice and Bob – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• 6.805/STS085: Listening in the Dark
• www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/m010506.pdf
• Welcome to Social Entertainment – Annual Report 2011
• FBI to announce new Net-wiretapping push | Privacy Inc. – CNET News

Here are two visual clues that when put together will make perfect sense to you… or set your mind aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention [1].

[1] Yes. Blazing Saddles.

It’s been a good week so far.

First, OPASTCO’s Roundtable quarterly has published my article “Keep Your Head in the Clouds”.

Second, Marketplace from American Public Radio interviewed me by phone and quoted me.

Third… well, there isn’t a third.  So, I decided to reorganize a few of my more popular posts (according to Google and Bing based on their respective webmaster tools) as well as collect some of my presentations and writing samples online.

Specifically, I’m organizing my references to cloud computing, virtualization, data centers, data mining, applications, and technology trends for service providers and the enterprise:

Service Provider Industry and Technology Events

• “2010 a Service Provider Odyssey” www.slideshare.net/qthrul/2010-a-service-provider-odyssey
• “Keep Your Head in the Clouds” www.slideshare.net/qthrul/keep-your-head-in-the-clouds
• “Design Impact” www.slideshare.net/qthrul/design-impact
• “Google Wave” www.slideshare.net/qthrul/google-wave-demo
• “Higher Prices for Paying Attention” www.slideshare.net/qthrul/higher-prices-for-paying-attention
• “Wireless Spectrum and Technology Trends” www.slideshare.net/qthrul/wireless-spectrum-and-technology-trends

Service Provider Industry Blog Contributions

• “Financial Weather Report: Increasing Clouds” www.telecompetitor.com/financial-weather-report-increasing-clouds/
• “So P2P is now Legit?” www.telecompetitor.com/so-p2p-is-now-legit/
• “Blurring the Lines of OTT and IPTV” www.telecompetitor.com/the-blurring-lines-of-ott-iptv/

My Blog

• “On Data Centers” fudge.org/on-data-centers/
• “Get Off of My Cloud” fudge.org/get-off-of-my-cloud/
• “The Waiting” fudge.org/the-waiting/
• “Color Nicolas Gone” fudge.org/color-nicholas-gone/
• “Danger Will Robinson!” fudge.org/danger-will-robinson/
• “Social Telecom” fudge.org/social-telecom/
• “Face Time” fudge.org/face-time/
• “Are You Being Served?” fudge.org/are-you-being-served/
• “Airwaves vs. Airlines” fudge.org/airwaves-vs-airlines/

I’m glad that my blog is the fastest growing and my clients get a kick out of reading updates but if I added all my prior presentations I’m sure I could swamp it.  So, I’m going to try and keep the stage out of the blog.  Maybe the next conference where I speak will have a converged approach to camera, presentations, and moderated feedback.  We’re getting closer to that I think but it’s still very scattershot across the trade and conference industry.

Lately, I’ve been good about weekly updates in my Friday Fudge series.  Again, I’m trying to avoid topical of the moment “how do you feel about X” posts.

Are you more interested in vision?  Or, are you just waiting to see what I’ll type up next and be pleasantly shocked or surprised? :)

The notion of “link rot” comes up from time to time in blog type discussions where someone has a passing preservation or historical bent.  The real-time nature of content being consumed and the promoted concepts of brevity have led to the perceived need for short URLs.  Now witness the glory of short URL services.

Of course, this isn’t new. In fact, the bulk of this post comes from a year old comment I made over at VentureBeat that was previously unavailable to refer back to when VentureBeat wiped all legacy comments (WordPress?) from view before importing them back into DISQUS.  I don’t know what the URL anchor to my comment would have been within WordPress but Google cached a copy and I was able to find it.  Lucky huh?  Lucky probably won’t work long term though.  You see, the article was relating to short URL’s or so-called URL shortening services.

What I had to say then is the same thing I have to say now about these short URL services:

Let’s hope they have an archive.org export or database escrow in their funding plans.

Here’s what I mean:  I’ve been using LiveJournal for a long time (+10 years in fact).  One of the things I loved about LiveJournal was how easily I could post links to my favorite cNet articles from news.com. It was awesome. I could post a link, a comment on it, and it was fun to share with folks/etc. Of course, this was before this whole share-centric web evolved before our eyes in the past few years.

One of the areas I’ve been interested in lately in the wake of our here today and gone tomorrow approach to the web has been link rot. After reviewing some of my entries from years gone by on LiveJournal, my comments and links to news.com just don’t make any sense now.

Why?

Well, the URL’s I posted don’t go anywhere useful, there is no context relevant SEO word loading… etc.. etc… it’s just a 404 Not Found redirecting to a page with no help or relevant hint as to what I was referring to or talking about. I also learned that “Hah, this is cool!” does not make for very good metadata. Lesson learned.

So, I have to wonder how long short.url/something will really be available for the long haul… whatever that long haul might be. If a tinyurl.com or the many clones die… what happens to their hash database tables that present the magic 301 redirect to where you would be going? What about that? Does it matter?
To that end…

tinyurl.com/thiswascool10yearsago
and
bit.ly/thiswascool10yearsago

The other thing that has come up with services such as Twitter and Facebook that increasingly take over third-party functions and make them core functions.  In the case of short URL and redirection, doing a double redirect will likely have different approaches to “protect” those using the service. This could be interstitials, Digg-like bars that frame content, or any of a variety of methods that just alter the status quo of how things work(ed) when navigating the web.

The innovation will likely have some concerns raised as it becomes more pervasive and visible to the masses.  What is less likely is that the bank shot will work 100% of the time. That’s the part of this that hasn’t been explored at high volume.  Ultimately, this comes down to the desire to recreate AOL key words or somehow create artificial scarcity in name space.

Let’s just hope those crazy combination bank shots are recorded somewhere for posterity and that someone made enough money to license re-runs.

By contrast to the previous article regarding BlackBerry Internet Service, the method for augmenting your own SPF record for using FreshBooks is much more succinct. Encourage other providers of outsourced communication follow this FreshBooks approach and reduce the complexity of SPF record augmentation.

www.freshbooks.com/blog/2008/09/09/freshbooks-now-supports-spf/

Example:

$ host -t txt somedomainyouareusing.com
somedomainyouareusing.com text "v=spf1 a:smtp01.bis.na.blackberry.com a:smtp02.bis.na.blackberry.com a:smtp03.bis.na.blackberry.com a:smtp04.bis.na.blackberry.com a:smtp05.bis.na.blackberry.com ~all"


The audience for the talk was amazing. They provided very insightful questions. In fact, I think the Q&A lasted longer than my talk! My slides are available here:

During the presentation I got to mention companies like Square, TopSpin, SlideShare, and Foursquare among others.

Movies to watch (in order): Looker, We Live in Public, Life 2.0

If you attended my talk and have any questions, please feel free to ask away in the comments section below.

Thanks!

-Jay

I’m still thinking that checking in is still too much work. It’s the same if not greater friction of the earlier iterations of the “simple” Twitter update. You know, Twitter, the application used by every single mobile phone on the planet. Oh wait.

So, what is the solution to the greatest problem of modern times?

Okay, it’s not the greatest problem of modern times unless you are a hipster that trades in social currency. But I bet there are some folks with discretionary income that might represent a market for this.

First, the good news: multitasking mobile devices are going to open up possibilities that were previously reserved for… oddly enough, decidedly non-social software solutions.

For example, the parental-only access child tracking applications are an interesting approach and could be extended to social graph. Consider Verizon’s Chaperone Family Locator as one example. Problems? Sure. Cross platform? Nope. Ubiquitous? Hardly.

Hint: Get to work startup companies.

Taking a harder edged approach, the corporate truck roll and fleet management tools already capable of real time dispatch/routing could be watered down. Problems? Cost. Cross platform? Irrelevant. Ubiquitous? More than you think.

Hint: Expect some purpose built startup companies.

The masses might like to be able to see screen that lets them know where they can run into others and retailers might want to drive flocculation of consumers. The weighting of this will be a critical line to toe.

The current FGO friction needs to move from Neo’s following of the white rabbit to a more realistic notion of friends and family flash get together as a vibration in consumer pockets.

What might such a screen look like? A few folks are getting closer to connecting the dots.

Now imagine this being the neighborhood you are in or the commute that is achievable given a walk, public transportation, a bike ride, a car ride, calculations for traffic, weather conditions, and conflicts with your calendar… not to mention all the locations along the path you take that might be able to get your attention on the way there.

And now… courtesy of the year 2006:

Real soon now?

I had a lot of fun and kept up with the pace of 15 seconds per slide pretty well even if I did trip up a few times. The format is a challenging one but that’s the fun part too.

This was my slide deck….

Controlling the mic most melodic was MC Zach Ward (@zachward). Let’s just say that MC Zach Ward touched us all in ways that ranged from appropriate to slightly more appropriate while exhibiting the grace of a man in tights. On the assist was the #OurHashTag team keeping it nailed down for all involved. They even streamed it live and saved it for posterity (my presentation is at the 1:43 mark but watch em all!).

The other Ignite presenters were an absolutely amazing bunch and it was an honor to share a stage with them. They were in no particular order based on my mental notes:

Charlotte Goodman-Smith and Christine Fawley (@LearnPleasure) boldly went where no man has gone before… but probably should. And often.

Janet Kennedy (@jkennedy93) gave us all pause to think about what a few cents mean and could mean to others.

David Millsaps (@eyevariety) of New Raleigh made the case for hitting the books again and thinking about social with that in mind.

Jess Commins (@renewabelle) made sure that everyone would think about caulk in ways that make a old man blush and a young man squeal.

Henry Copeland (@hc) made sure we all knew that warts can kill startups.

Lisa Creech Bledsoe (@glowbird) rocked the stage and convinced everyone to consider becoming a woman… a boxing woman.

Ryan Boyles (@therab) detailed his plans to avoid skateboarding zombies along a post-apocalyptic path on the way to SxSW.

Evan Carroll (@evancarroll) explored what happens to your digital self when your real world self ends up in a flower pot.

Natasha Crawford (@natashacrawford) convinced us to dip our pens in the home ink instead of the company ink.

Jay Dolan (@jaydolan) made the case for shutting the laptop, turning off the iphone, and following dreams instead of avatars.

Elizabeth Gardner (@WRALweathergal) humbled everyone attending with her relentless nap-free day serving up the new of localized precipitation and average kinetic energy.

Nadia Moffett (@missncusa2010) showed us what it means to change lives by building relationships and being Miss NC!

Chris Moody (@cnmoody) highlighted where customer acceptance begins and bias ends in how you form a team of rock stars and the crucial entourage of dumb.

Charlotte Moore (@cavaticat) put forth the argument that a five letter word synonym for woman is cylon and there should be a massively multi-muliebrity meeting of minds.

Laurie Ruettimann (@lruettimann) finished strong with a hard hitting expose on the intricacies of gaming business social networking sites using tomcat tomfoolery.

George Smart (@georgesmartTMH) showed us homes that created by artists for artists in residence and those that host them.

Bethany Smith (@bethanyvsmith) opened strong with a second slide that said it all made everyone that followed her question the decks yet to be shared.

Dan Wilson (@danwilson) delivered dry humor with a heaping helping of health wisdom and confirmed that 30 minutes is actually 30 minutes while confirming he should be run for State Treasurer.

Last but definitely no least — a huge thanks to the VENUE, SPONSORS, and the VOLUNTEERS that made the night possible!

More added as I think of it… :)

Thanks Raleigh! Thanks Ignite!

This is great. I mean, now I can watch TV while I watch TV.

This will be useful in my attempts to subjugate the sheepish masses that stare into such trappings of this modern world and its mortal coil.

The first thing I’m a gonna do is anodize that mofo’s backside with some seriously sick overlays and distress the bezel with some copper flake and gunmetal blue.

I’m looking forward to having a free hand. Finally.

I’m planning to review the comprehensive meta coverage provided by Techmeme and weigh this against prior economic comparisons at the leading gadget review sites while simultaneously trying not to SQUEEL WITH GLEE WHEN I GET MY HANDS ON ONE AT THE APPLE STORE.

About a year ago I spoke in front of the Atlanta Telecom Professionals (ATP) audience on the topic of social media and telecommunications. It was a great crowd.

I was also afforded a glass of Scotch. Trust me when I say the crowd was great regardless of the Scotch I had consumed as the panel pulled together. It doesn’t get much more telecom focused than the group of folks assembled that evening.

The panel included me. Oh, and AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast… oh wait… Comcast ducked out on the panel. More on that later.

I was on the panel to represent the outsider. I wasn’t a carrier. I wasn’t a wireless operator with spectrum, lobbying forces, and a war chest. I was just a person lucky enough to know folks that knew folks that might enjoy my specific brand of insight and humor on the stage.

As I sat in front of the assembled group with the titans of telecom to my right and to my left I remarked to my fellow panelists that I’d be putting my favorite devices in front of me. To my left I placed my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry International Edition and to my right I placed my AT&T Wireless iPhone 3G.

One of the benefits of Comcast not showing up was that we could talk about them. Good times. Good times.

Anyhow…

Before I arrived for the panel I jotted down some notes. I had some ideas that I really wanted to throw out there and see if anyone grabbed on to what I was saying. You never know how that approach will work out since panels are often driven by the need for consensus and keeping things on a timeline. Often, the panel is driven quickly to Q&A.

The question for telecom is how well has the social toolset served them and when will it serve them or their subscribers — and can this be a relationship as social between the cold exterior of a conglomerate media machine and the monetized unique personal attribute collection formerly known as a subscriber.

Looking back a year later, here are my notes — not predictions but my own reflections and the observations of others about the connections made possible by what was happening in social software spaces and how this might be applied to telecom or affect telecom:

Base decisions on most recent parallel events vs. previous events.

I was imagining a screen that tracked keywords in a disposition code format of lifestream updates for the CIDR blocks known to the telecom that represent a given area that was referenced against weather patterns to provide a living view of plant.

Sure, it’s something for the big screen in a NOC. But does it have to be? Couldn’t these interfaces be nimble enough for the important items to bubble up to a CSR view or a executive manager view?

The notion of stratification by CLLI codes would be a good example. Basically, some variety of feedback loop with a base station or aggregation node view is important. i.e. subscribers being vocal (or silent) in a localized view format

You want to see that a lull or non-characteristic gap in updates for a geocode set turned out to be a plant dip. All of this would play back against a lower sub screen view of the network as a whole to determine if there is a degradation or other anomaly not presently identified and tracked adequately.

This could be two users in the same CIDR block where an update arrives via third party API to talk to an account or rep much in the same way power outages attempt to use callerid to fast track tickets for outages.

Distributed network monitoring and SLA based on channel mix bundle for customer class action crediting for outages

This might have some meat to it. After discussing this amongst some others in the same general field I am in the consensus was “yeah, why not”. In general this would form the basis of an ad-hoc class action customer experience fee recovery system.

Assuming the AUP/ToS did not preclude a resident agent/process with this goal in mind (and really, that’s not the point) one could feed back a quasi-SLA to residential tiers of service. This is part of my larger focus on the shift to a truly utility approach to granular billing if “the cap” ever makes it out of the ham fisted iterations we’ve seen so far.

XMPP of the customer experience as a sparkline

This was pretty simple in that seeing a lot of chatter about your brand from accounts known to talk about you might be an interesting data point for marketing groups and operations teams. Fake meme and trending notwithstanding. :-)

Unprecedented access to correlate and improve plant and service delivery

One idea was to make a simple mailto link in a follow up email with five options that generate updates to social networks indicating your level of satisfaction with the provider. Since the panel, the API options have exploded for gaining feedback including the ubiquitous click here to share on Facebook and prefab Twitter responses.

Just as there are sites the give a shortcut to bypass inane IVR there is Twitter and Getsatisfaction and Uservoice or even Atlanta’s own Skribit

A frustrated subscriber wants to get issues resolved. It’s very simple.

The subscribers might not know what a back channel is but they would probably call or interact if they could update from a SMS to their provider when the broadband is out — something as simple as the word “down” or “not working” where the provider is digesting streams is one thing but the goal here is Digg for Down and Outage situations.

i.e. I’m having this issue — with 10-100 subscribers saying “me too”

Remember, a growing number of subscribers have multiple networks at their disposal. Just like the legacy view is “call if you have a problem” a new view is Twitter updates, smartphone access, etc. So, being down doesn’t mean being silent.

As with all these new social tools for gathering and refining feedback, the critical step is to test and think about how obtuse the tools are implemented. Don’t make extra work. That just frustrates the subscriber even more.

DSL Reports will move beyond a bulletin board of threaded discussion to a real time mediation of issues and “me too”

This is the notion that subscribers will form pools of affinity and the Fan pages that will not be a scripted corporate controlled medium. It may not be the most exciting news story but for a provider — this is shaking in your boots level technology — but only for the providers that choose not to participate and let the chips fall.

I’m seeing this happen as DSL Reports refines their hierarchy (shades of Usenet?) for discussions. When I was thinking about this originally things like Stack Overflow came to mind.

Again, this is about regular subscribers. So, the tin ears have to be small ones for any UI/UX approach.

The classic oversubscription on plant in favor of highly asymmetric links to Internet egress will be challenged as publish and cloud applications push the envelope

I’ve repeatedly said that asymmetric broadband is going to be a thing of the past. We have applications that stream updates in realtime more now than the year prior with no easing to the trend. For every optimized code loop the software world throws into production, a new nimble startup will figure out a new payload to push the limits. And in that push — the upload will be as critical as the download. The new downstream is the upstream.

Slingbox proved people want to bring their unique video experience from their homes. Now, you have companies like Spawn Labs that are making that pull and extend experience with gaming consoles.

What we might still call TV’s are going to be shipping in the wake of CES with ever increasing symmetric communication. Skype (big TV brands) or something like a TinyChat (thinking Walmart brand TV’s) is going to push against the notion that an ADSL link or the pitiful cable modem package of many down and few up is acceptable.

The application mix and managed routers will evolve to WAAS like features that improve branch to branch experience

I wasn’t specifically calling out Cisco solutions but this was something I obviously had in mind. At work, everything you experience with broadband at home is a reasonable (if not double) expectation for business class services at a job site. Yet, business class services often are slower in areas where higher speed residential broadband is available.

During the panel, things like cloud computing and low latency or high throughput applications came up as reasons why the business class expectations will change. IP Centrex phone services based on VoIP with a SIP trunks model is growing at a faster pace now due to economic benefits but it is unclear that the connectivity has kept pace.

That said, the point of bringing up Cisco’s role in this was to point out that the same topology and traffic management concerns of larger enterprises is now being packed into the form factor of a common Cisco ISR and would likely become a fire and forget feature to address chatty and high overhead protocols. The availability of such technology will mean a lot to the small remote office connected to a regional office. The natural conclusion is to see this played back in subscriber CPE.

Putting the intelligence in endpoints is the key to seeing benefits overall. Again, it’s about pushing the envelope with what social oriented technology brings as a demand.

VoIP and general voice costs will continue a race to zero

Does this really come as a shock? It got a laugh of course.

What this really means longer term is that all providers have to get into a higher value service. Since the panel there have been any number of big things happen in this area from Google Voice to all you can eat packages.

The important point is that there are still challenges to how providers plan to fund initiatives and relying upon the legacy service model or product is flawed thinking. Flawed might not be the right term but in the absence of seeing Skype embedded in more places more of the time there is a closing window on the POTS and circuit-switched world.

Social services will deprecate younger buyer concern for uptime and availability premium as part of lowered expectations from growing up mobile I.e. All providers suck

This was the concept of how mobile phone call quality and Twitter Fail Whale and cryptic web errors gained a fever pitch status with younger users. In fact, the older users see this as well but they remember when things like uptime and availability meant something and how a land line call really did sound better.

The term users is also key. Subscribers vs. users is a word choice I try to be careful with in panel settings. Generally speaking, the provider has to handle the customer and the manner in which a designation is applies tells a lot about the background and direction of a service and company as a whole.

When you think about a concept like price elasticity, you have to wonder about lock in as a viable model when the youth market has been raised to see fads come and go online and in communications.

What happens when AT&T becomes a Friendster to a new Facebook?

Remember, it’s not always going to be an absolute assumption that the bigger players win. The FCC tremblings and rumblings even before the panel indicated things might just change (for once) in how we think of a nimble operator or service provider.

Younger consumers will assume that the provider knows more about them and will be less tolerant of flawed CRM

In the face of privacy and how providers treat CPNI, there is a desire to opt on either the side of flat out ignorance or the Sprint Now Network commercial. Some might view this as a all or none proposition. So, which is it? Full on unfettered use of DPI with tremors of conflict in other nations quashed and monitoring in a dystopian future… or not so evil aggregation of personalized trends to give you a better service?

Example: Twitter’s very own @comcastcares

As I was saying at the start, Comcast ducked out on the panel. This was unfortunate because I actually think they were to be commended for their role in adopting a back channel to augment their existing channels of communication with the subscribers.

Comcast has issues. The difference now is all their subscribers flock somewhere other than a support line to complain.

If you are a service provider, expect this is happening in your subscriber base as well. In fact, bank on it.

One thing to take away though is the almost lancing effect @comcastcares has on the pressure of a subscriber issue. In general, if the broadband is down one might wonder how you reach them — simple — Twitter is a backchannel available through just about any mobile device with a data plan or even SMS

Service providers: your suck cannot hide

One of the more prolific writers at the time of the panel was MG Siegler, then of VentureBeat. MG was a technology and services early adopter then and has continued to be an early adopter at TechCrunch and as a perfect example of the new type of subscriber all service providers will have to contend with now: power subscribers

The power subscriber is the service provider equivalent of what Enterprise 2.0 faces with their own power users. Enterprise and service provider are still vastly different worlds, so I think it is important to highlight the differences since there is a distinct economic associate for subscribers. The subscriber pays for and expects a service level.

For a power subscriber to take note of an issue is the moment a service provider has to take note as well. It’s not just the fact that service providers find themselves providing connectivity or a service used by industry pundits. It’s more than that. It’s the fact that those pundits are connected with wider audiences that can quickly and efficiently compare notes on a provider in much lower latency ways than ever before.

If there is a service blip, people will know.

In there is a service issue or quirk, people will know.

A power subscriber like MG Siegler is an example of someone that has kept track of their issues and has a long memory. He is not alone. His series of articles on AT&T and iPhone issues were and are relentless. When his coverage and TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington coverage becomes content placed in syndication on the Washington Post, watch out folks. The FCC might just notice.

What this translates to for service providers that have come to be regarded as lethargic is simple: if you have problems, the new social tools available will amplify and coordinate the uprising from your subscriber base locally, regionally, nationally, and perhaps internationally. If you get picked up by tech press for having issues, it is a very short walk to the end of the mainstream press channel.

So, in the end, what social telecom might really mean is a implicit expectation from subscribers (users) of a service that works well almost all of the time. The keys to achieving this will involve using the same technologies within the service provider that their own subscribers are using outside the service or on the very same service itself.

To be clear, my comments/opinions will reference Comcast but this is not meant to single out Comcast. I’ll just use Comcast since it is more succinct to use than the mouthful facilities-based Internet egress broadband provider which is often conflated with the term ISP. What I am saying applies across the board to all service providers going down this cap path.

Hi Future Man. Welcome to 1996. Here’s an AOL diskette with 20 FREE HOURS.

I stand by my comments during the recent TelcoTV panel “Dumb Pipe Strategy” at TelcoTV 2009 in Orlando. We had a very packed house for that panel. In a nutshell, my point was that any attempt to widely push this notion of a cap against a subscriber base is foolish — the tools that the industry vendor ecosystem is providing simply do not address the use case scenarios we are going to see from connected products. We are moving to a set and forget world of simplicity.

This is almost as ham fisted as the ubiquitous “Check Your Online Time” from the days of POTS dialup. That failed miserably as well when broadband arrived as an always on service. Why? It’s simple. It is not natural consumer behavior to launch another web page and sign in to see what you’ve actually used.

Furthermore, the analog dialup world analogy falls apart since we’re not dealing with nailing up circuits for dialup. Remember, this is the same Comcast shouting about how great DOCSIS3 is. The feedback already arriving as comments on the Comcast blog are very telling. Expect this to explode in Comcast’s face somewhere, sometime, someplace soon. As one comment puts it, Comcast is essentially promising a super fuel rocket car service that will allow you to run the 1/4 mile… but crash into a wall of overage charges without a parachute. Sounds awesome.

The team within Comcast that is responsible for this cap needs to accept two facts:

1) A cap, while potentially a very profitable endeavor, sets an adversarial tone with subscribers much like those banking fees we read more about in the news in the wake of financial scandal. (see also: too soon?)

2) Subscribers will not accept (with a long term ARPU view) any ham-fisted iterations of a “cap” or a “bucket” or “tokens” unless it is a seamless and consistently pervasive part of the service. (see also: backlash)

In short, Comcast needs to go back and put on their thinking caps with the internal project and not foist the alpha against all subscribers. The best practice would be to stick with friendlies — not employees — and gather feedback that is published for all subscribers so that everyone knows what is happening around them. Yes, that’s right. There should be a real time updated dashboard of the network utilization showing all their subscribers at the street, local, city, and aggregate view supplied if they really want subscribers to know that “we are all in this together”. If you’ve ever shopped or been a part of a mutual, membership, or a co-op you’ll know that sounds familiar. Comcast better have their playbook ready because you can bet the vocal opposition to the cap isn’t going to sit idle.

Granted, I actually think caps, once all the use case scenarios and vendors come together to support it properly, will have a place. However, it’s not the one Comcast is ready to accept and not the one they are chasing now — see my blockquote above — but it is one that is highly disruptive.

Comcast should be looking to another area facing a challenge: power. Wait? What? Yes. Mobile broadband wireless companies are already selling pay as you go today with some degree of success. There is a reason why the power industry that now faces a new consumer behavior of being more “green” is hiring mobility billing specialists for software development — mobile figured out how to squeeze more regular ARPU. You say Comcast gives a brain dead report on what you used for bandwidth in terms of breakdown by service (video streaming, downloads, web surfing, music, etc.) and I’ll walk you to the side of your house to watch the power meter spinning with cryptic gauges that mean very little to most people.

Finally, Comcast has to be willing to accept a type of subscriber they do not have today. Comcast has to service any subscriber that desires a cap because for the 5 months that they don’t use the service out of 12, they get a bill for $0.00 dollars. Think about that one for a moment. It’s not that crazy an idea. As it stands today, the meter is running — but it isn’t running properly.

There is a coming proliferation of alternative viewing solutions for the largest screen in the home: the living room flat panel. As the notion of three screens (PC/Mobile/TV) cements into designs and product roadmaps, the wave of sub-$300 devices primarily connected to the home TV (rapidly becoming a glorified monitor actually) will be popping up in greater frequency and with a greater reliance upon software and Internet connected defense against obsolescence.

While communications companies wish to be a part of this, consumers will be drawn to simple solutions. Rapid iterations of hardware solutions is not an area that communications companies are known for. “New every two” may be fine for a mobile phone but it smacks of a throw away mindset and culture that is unsustainable.

TiVo is an example of a company that got “simple” right through rapid iteration. The TiVo approach is heavily weighted to software design principles over hardware design limitations. i.e. once something is connected in a living room you don’t want to have to move to change it.

In the 70′s the digital living room was sending your child to the TV to adjust knobs. In the 80′s the digital living room was a VCR blinking 12:00. In the 90′s the digital living room was a DVD player that skipped. As we round out this decade, we want personalized, and socially stratified high definition content that is always connected and as simple as moving a magic wand… or fishing around in our pockets.

Perhaps in the next decade we’ll get just that demand of this decade. For now, we just have to allow for the desktop PC and laptop to become that VCR… that has no place in a modern living room.

I have decided to join a global movement that is bringing much needed attention to cancers that affect men. I’m doing this by growing a Moustache this Movember, the month formerly known as November. My commitment is to grow a moustache all November and I am hoping that you will support my efforts by making a donation. The funds raised go to the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LIVESTRONG).

What many people don’t know is that 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime and testicular cancer is the most common cancer in men aged 18-35. Facts like these have convinced me I should get involved.

To make a donation, you can either:

• Click this link to donate to my team online using your credit card or PayPal account , or
• Write a check payable to ‘Movember Foundation’, referencing my Registration Number 144915 and mailing it to: Movember Foundation, PO Box 2726, Venice, CA 90294-2726.

All donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

The Prostate Cancer Foundation will use the money raised by Movember to fund research to find better treatments and a cure for prostate cancer.

The Lance Armstrong Foundation will use the money raised by Movember to fund:

• The LIVESTRONG Young Adult Alliance program which has the goal of improving survival rates and quality of life for young adults with cancer between the ages of 15 and 40.
• Research initiatives to further understand the biology of adolescent and young adult cancers.

This is meant to be both positive and fun… and in that regard I welcome you to select and vote on what style moustache I shall be growing for this worthy cause and join my team! :)

Vote for what I should grow:

Join my team:

Please consider joining my team “FATUOUS WEASELS” if you want to combine facial fuzz forces!

About Movember:

Background: TechCrunch is having their RealTime CrunchUp event and solicited comments from the founder of Gmail, FriendFeed — Paul Buchheit — now at Facebook. Comments don’t appear to be working so… as I was trying to say:

Facebook has demonstrated very clearly (so far) that their approach to “email” is that it only has a place within their silo — or at best as a one way notification to any other email service.

The swatting away of my question at TC50 by the Facebook “outreach” team on noreply@facebookmail.com vs. the elegance of FriendFeed really summed it up as follows:

Facebook Hates Email

I’ve got plenty of opinions on email and the future but Facebook has done nothing visible to endear, promote, or improve “email” [1]

My only reservation in all out condemnation of Facebook’s approach to email is that Paul is in their house now. Whatever that means… it does offer some amount of hope.

[1] feel free to serve up crow filled links to refute this

Update: January 12, 2010 Hell freezes over

As you might expect, there are other resources elsewhere to temper and consider.  I’d recommend starting with official sources first and foremost:

The Official Audience Conference Resource List

Additionally, there are several summaries emerging from others that attended the event:

• Audience Conference Reaction
• Review of the Audience Conference
• You Should Have Been in the Audience
• What It Means To Be An Audience
• Jerry Garcia Would Have Loved The Audience Conference
• Quarantined Conferences: Claustrophobic Technophiles or Attentive Audiences?

Hopefully, you reached this page because you were curious enough to look at the other side of my business card. Hey… I like curious. So if you got this far, we’ve learned a bit about each other. As you recall, I’ll be in NYC through Saturday before heading back South to speak at TelcoTV in Orlando and be part of Atlanta Startup Weekend. So, feel free to track me (qthrul) in real-time. And it goes without saying, but “we should keep in touch“.

Lastly, sorry about my appearance but I’m growing a moustache for a good cause :)