Steve’s Tech Journal

OK, I think it worked. If you are reading this, and it looks normal, if definately did work.  Now to get comment moderation and stuff sorted out, then to move on to exploring the new features.

This weekend I will be upgrading Steve’s Tech Journal to Wordpress 2.0. That’s all you really need to know. If you have any problem and still can’t access my site by say Monday, then either get in touch or send your favorite php / mysql hacker to bail me out

I’ve been really happy with my choice a year ago to use Wordpress, but it did lack a few features most notably the ability to easily upload and link photos. Wordpress revamped their authoring environment in January, with 2.0, and added this capability and significantly cleaned up the UI. They’ve now made a couple minor fix/improvment releases and are at 2.0.2. Where hopefully I will be by the end of the day!

F2C is wild, unlike any other conference I attend although I’m not sure I’d even call it a confernce. It’s kinda like a debate, a party, an interactive dialog, and performance art all in one — maybe it’s just best labelled as a “gathering”. The live chat session is a cross dialog between the speaker and the audience. At times it converges and stays on the same topic, at times it diverges pretty wildly. This place could be the definitive example of how value still penetrates with continuous partial attention.

Anyway, here’s some random links and quotes from today, selected entirely based upon personal whim of what I found interesting and/or thought to capture at the time:

Who owns the net?
Doc Searls on saving the net
Danah interviewed by Bill O’Reilly on Myspace
The internet mapped onto OSI
How GM destroyed public transport to sell more cars..

Martin Geddes against net neutrality, “don’t fossislize the internet in 2006″.
Clegg Ivey from Voxeo, “telecom sucks, the internet is amazing, now telecom’s suckiness is threatening the internet”.

The award to the most off topic discussion goes to those discoursing on Shannon’s limit. You know who you are.

And of course, my notes from today wouldn’t be complete without a compliment to the music of Joe Craven, our musician in residence who is playing now as I finish this post.

Couldn’t make it to Freedom to Connect this year? Bummed because you’re not listening to Tim Wu talk right now?

Go ahead and tune in: live audio is here; live chat session is here, login as a guest. I’m Steve S. Be careful though, the chat session is live in front of 200 people.

BTW, Tim just got applause for saying “the problem with these companys [telcos] is that some people there still think the customer wants them. The customer doesn’t want them, the customer wants to get to other things, *through* their network”

One of my goals at VON was to dig a bit deeper into IMS, and I had good intentions on sitting in on a few of the IMS sessions. Then the VON blur and too many meetings overtook me, and I didn’t manage to attend the sessions I had hoped to. I did have a couple hallway conversations about IMS, though:

I bumped into Henning Schulzrinne while completing the scavenger hunt to visit 18 vendors and get a sticker from them, in order to obtain a free slingbox. Henning was doing the same thing so we teamed up. We navigated the show floor together, with conversation like “Wait a minute, we missed NeuStar, they are in booth 867″. It was a bit surreal walking around doing this with the father of SIP and RTP, but VON is like that . While thus engaged in completing our quest, I asked Henning what he thought about IMS. Below is how I recall he answered:

Well, it’s a bit too early to tell. It depends on what the carriers do with it, if they use it to build a closed network that keeps non-carriers out, then it’s a bad thing. Otherwise, it seems mainly to enable some new approaches to billing. As far as the protocols go, they are not what I would have designed, but I can live with them.

[Henning, if I got that hopelessly wrong pls write to me and I will correct it.]

I also had fun querying Brough Turner on this topic. Brough is one of the deepest thinkers and strongest advocates I know for consumer net access and the innovation created with the “stupid network”. Brough introduced me to people like David Isenberg, whose conferences, along with similar forums at VON, have helped form my views on network policy. Brough and I have enjoyed many an hour talking about the merits of network neutrality legislation, vs. the need for competition at the edge (3rd pipe), why he’d like to own his own fiber to the CO, why ‘real broadband’ is 100mbs symmetric, and the consumer wireless mesh. And … Brough is co-founder CTO of NMS Communications, a company that amongst other things is … busily building and rolling-out IMS platforms.

Our conversation went something like this:

Me: Brough, I’ve got a question for you?
Brough: What is it?
Me: IMS ?!?!?!
Brough: [laughs]
Brough: I look at it like this. We had the IN [Intelligent Network] for 20 years, and it created 3 services [CallerID, CallWaiting, CallForwarding]. It will take 10 years to build the NGN [IMS] network, and maybe a few services will come out of that too. And in the meantime, the carriers and TEMS are going to need to buy a ton of hardware and software, and NMS is in the business of selling those things.

Lastly, Richard Stastny was kind enough to send a comment to my prior post on IMS, informing me that the IMS pictures I referred to were in page 25 of his presentation. I finally had a chance to sit down and go through the full presentation. It’s quite an excellent discussion of the internet, and the carrier / ITU vision of a the Next Generation Network (NGN) based on IMS. Not only that, but it appears to have been originally delivered in Rome — che bello! Highly recommended if you want an overview primer of what’s going on here.

Spring VON ended a week ago. I flew back home on Friday and promptly came down with the flu. All week I’ve been recovering, and playing catch-up on assorted work deadlines that my illness had delayed. But finally tonight I have a moment to sit down and reflect on a pretty incredible week for IP Communications and the VON franchise.

The theme for this VON was “the eve of disruption”, and this was the show where I would say the other V in VoIP, that is to say Video, finally shared equal billing with Voice. The Slingbox was front-and-center (and in fact available as a take-home prize to a few hundred fortunate souls of which I am one, but more on that in another post). This device hooks to your cable box, and rebroadcasts your video feed over IP — to other rooms in your house, to your hotel room, to your friends, in fact to anywhere you want it on the internet. But, beyond the slingbox what really blew me away even more was BrightCove’s Industry Perspective talk.

BrightCove is a video broadcast platform for IP video. Think of it as a broadcast station to run your own ipTV station. What it enables it truly amazing. Put your clips up, and the world can come and watch your streaming video. Build a brand, syndicate other video content. Roll your own TV station. And, anyone could do it, even my brother. Check out what these two guys have cooked up at barrio305 (and also here).

Broadcast industry — watch out. The day has come where I as a TV watcher can go to interesting places with just my browser and broadband. The day has come where a garage outfit can reach a viewership. In a word: (massive) disruption. (OK that was cheating cause I snuck in the word massive so it was really two words). The long tail is about to be applied to TV, an area that desperately needs more choice than 150 channels of cable trash.

This was the theme of Jeff Pulver’s kickoff perspective. Jeff went on stage naked without powerpoints, and I think it was one of the most engaging talks I’ve heard him give. He introduced the theme the perfectly, making the segue from Voice-over-IP to pervasive IP communications in an impassioned and at times improvised talk, spinning his 3×5 notecards onto the ground when he was on a roll. He knows disruption is here and he’s loving every minute of it.

Other perspectives of note:

• Richard Notebart, CEO, Qwest — Richard used his session to present a carefully constructed argument for a two-tiered internet, and threw Qwest’s hat in the ring as moving in this direction. I found this ominous, at the same time I respected his style and his courage for travelling to this particular venue to unveil Qwest’s position
• Brough Turner, CTO, NMS — Brough gave a “new” talk, in that he talked about trends he hasn’t touched on before. Mobile. Asia. What happens in society when you have 100% broadband penetration, and true broadband (100mbps symmetrical)
• James Enck – I am like James Enck’s biggest fan. He had a hilarious presentation that started with pictures of people saying “I’m gonna destroy telco” in one way or another. Bill Gates. Niklas Zennstrom with Meg overwriting his words. I was dying laughing, but I noticed not everyone else was and I think I got a few funny looks. Anyway, do not miss James delivering a presentation on the state of telecom.
• David Isenberg’s Dr. Suess poem about net freedom and telling people to come to Freedom to Connect (but that’s also another post) (but, in case it takes me a couple days to get to that post, sign up quick, the event is selling out)

On another note, VON always has a great party and this year was no exception. Check out Jeff’s pics of the Counting Crows. Kellan and some friends from odeo came down, and we had a great time.