A great opportunity to learn about ONF and see OpenFlow in action will be at Interop this coming week May 10-12, 2011, in Las Vegas. The entire InteropNet Lab booth is devoted to OpenFlow (with at least 15 exhibiting companies), a panel on the Real Next Generation Network will be held Wednesday May 11 from 3:15-4:15 in Breakers L (featuring the inventor of OpenFlow), and ONF itself will conduct an information session on Wednesday May 11 from 11:00-11:45 in Reef C (all at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Conference Center). Come see me. There will be food!

What’s especially cool is that new networking functions and operating modes can coexist with current networks on current networks without disrupting existing modes. Thus the exciting possibilities can be explored in an evolutionary fashion, compatible with current equipment. Moreover, because these new methods can be developed on existing networks, not just special-purpose, experimental ones, they can be tried at the scale of today’s real networks. No one can ever afford to build experimental networks of anywhere near the scale of real ones, yet scale matters. So I think we are going to see a blossoming of innovation in networking that is better tailored to applications and users and that the public at large will benefit from.

First, the iPad spells – in my opinion – the decline and ultimate end of the single-purpose appliance. That includes all the e-readers, new Android-based virtual office phones, individual airplane movie players, and pocket game consoles. Nine months ago I was excited by the move in the single-appliance world to common platforms like Android and iPhone OS. Boy, that was a short trend. Android, iPhone4, and just maybe (though not likely) WebOS (HP/Palm) will survive but the plethora of single-purpose appliances will not. It’s not just that people won’t want to own, maintain, and carry around a bunch of these but that they will not be as economical to produce and so will fail in the marketplace.

At this point I cannot predict what other than the iPad will serve as the platform for all the virtual appliances. I hear of such diverse populations building iPad applications in a big way – I’m thinking enterprises of all sorts and senior citizens – that the herd of iPad imitators being developed by all the usual suspects cannot help but dwindle. Pocket devices will include those based on iPhone and Android operating systems; I am hard pressed to find any others, and that includes WebOS, Symbian, and Windows Phone 7.

Observation number two is that I see cloud computing pervading not just markets and applications but – more importantly – people’s thinking. The distinction between public clouds and private (enterprise clouds) is important from a policy and management standpoint but it is not significant from a strategic one. At one end of the spectrum, nearly every startup company I know just automatically assumes it will run its servers and storage on AWS or equivalent. It’s like “who needs to mess with that stuff when Amazon will do it, especially if we hope for a sudden surge in traffic just as soon as our product catches on, which could be any moment, you never know?” At the other end, factors driving enterprises to cloud computing include everything from cost and performance (per usual) to, suddenly, energy saving. Just look at the improvement multiples from Arista Networks’ cloud switch in these three categories if you’re not convinced. In between, entirely new business models are being created because cloud computing makes not just a quantitative difference but also a qualitative one.

For example, I have been heads down working with an eye-tracking startup (www.locarna.com). Eye tracking has been a niche market for neuroscientists and, more recently, website designers (using cameras mounted in or adjacent to computer screens to determine what on the screen draws your eye’s attention). The industry is structured in an old-fashioned, way: a few companies sell (expensive hardware), a small number of customers buy them either to conduct research with or to offer research services with (especially market research), and large product companies buy expensive services to conduct eye-tracking studies on a few subjects (which is all they can afford). You probably have not heard about eye tracking even though it’s been around for, oh, a hundred years.

I think the problem is that it’s arcane, expensive, and standalone. Locarna is unique in envisioning mobile, real-world eye tracking as a cloud service. Free the customer from having to wrestle with the computing to analyze the raw video from the eye tracker and simplify the equipment deployed in the field to simple glasses only. The upshot is quite profound: a democratization of eye tracking so that all kinds of organizations (think schools, clinics, mom-and-pop retailers, startup companies) can take advantage of its benefits, and a fundamental increase in its value by the accumulation of comparative data from what would otherwise have been disconnected studies. I’m not saying you will suddenly find eye tracking front and center in your life, but watch this space.

For this year, the first Macworld since Apple announced a year ago it would no longer participate, we signed up online a year ago, not only to secure free admission but also to provide the organizers with some incentive not to cancel the show. It fell during the Presidents Day long weekend so my son did not in fact have to miss school, so up we went on the Friday. We were in and out in ninety minutes.

The Expo was confined to Moscone North; there was nothing at all in Moscone South, and all the sessions for the paid attendees were in the meeting rooms in between. These are not huge.

We went up and down every aisle; we missed nothing. There were two larger presentation areas, one for general topics (like best of show awards) and the other exclusively for music; we saw them mainly as places to get off our feet for a few minutes. There was one aisle for iPhone apps, which I wanted to see. My son, on the other hand, said there are 140,000 apps on the App Store; why waste your time on these few dozen? I didn’t see anything I wanted.

Microsoft had the most ridiculous stand. They had people bouncing around wearing costumes representing the icons for the Microsoft Office applications. We stayed away. No, we ran away.

HP had a stand, much smaller than in previous years, all about printing and imaging. The one cool thing was a large-format printer (maybe 40 inches, not 80 inches). I got some advice on scanning problems. Hardly any other major companies, and no really big stands.

There were a couple of places showing small accessories, a Dr. Botts stand for example and some stands with iPhone cases, even one with iPad cases. But no place to buy batteries, external hard drives, or other real hardware.

Nope, no wow this year. No oomph. No information. My son will be in college next year so if I go it will be alone. At this point I don’t see much reason to do so.

What will this buy you? Easy language translation and customization, for starters. Deep and creative integration into workflow software, for another. This latter is what I’m hoping for. Let’s connect these telephony-based communication possibilities with the Enterprise 2.0 stuff (which I wrote about in an earlier blog entry). Let’s make the Glass Platform screen a window in or an extension of the PC screen. Or the Smart Phone screen. Let’s link to remote or administrative operation. Already this pretty package works for both on-site (PBX) and hosted (central office) solutions.

Will desk phones go away altogether? It’s hard to say; perhaps some IT administrators wish they would. But if they’re around for long I guarantee this is what they will look like. (And increasingly as apps for existing tablet computers like the iPad or Xoom.)

And now?
I was reminded of the chasm when I attended VoiceCon recently. This all-things-VOIP conference shared a trade-show floor (at Moscone in San Francisco) with Enterprise 2.0, and thank heavens it did. All the major VoiceCon vendors showed their Unified Communications solutions, which appeared to me to merely glom together things we have been using for years, and by “we” I mean all of us with gray hair and traditional work practices. Worse, a number of the smaller vendors were showing new desk telephones, which basically have changed hardly at all in 20 years. They still have a handset, pushbuttons, and a display (which my phone in Switzerland had in 1990). This is new? These things can’t get any more archaic.

The Enterprise 2.0 vendors, on the other hand, showed exciting, if not fully mature, products for communication, collaboration, and documentation, which is how a lot more work gets done in organizations these days. Their wiki and blogging tools were very cool. But they were poorly connected to the voice mechanisms. When are these two communities really going to connect? I think I can help here.

The Journal maintains that email is too limiting and ineffective compared to the new media, especially the social media. I’ll get into that more in another post (especially regarding Twitter, IM, and text messaging for short, immediate communications) but right now I want to concentrate on the notion that longlasting interactions will be by voice or video.

Take a look at the WSJ article, the section entitled “Into the River”. I read this in 46 seconds. Then I went back and spoke it, as if I were leaving voicemail for someone. 112 seconds. I can understand how a video can convey images you cannot otherwise describe adequately, but the circumstances under which a voicemail is more efficient than written delivery of the message are limited indeed.

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• Have a destination (i.e., goal) in mind when you start out.
• Pay attention to your revenue model, not just the size of your community.
• Start a social media war with something bigger than you.
• Host a live event.
• Add value when you post.
• Become a “brandividual”; you can even mix business and personal so long as you are true to your own persona.

I also enjoyed a couple of memorable observations from Louis Gray (of FutureWorks):

• “The Internet was built to waste time.”
• “Everything your customer is doing is more interesting than what you are doing.”

What I liked about that last one is the primacy of the customer. I can’t tell you how many startup entrepreneurs I have talked to who are mostly into the phenomenon or the technology and cannot articulate a meaningful, customer-oriented value proposition. I think that if you don’t know who your customer is, you don’t have a company.

Overall, the chaos around social media is a constructive one. No one can predict what will settle out and be valuable to much of society, but for many entrepreneurs the price of admission to the effort is low. After all, it’s only a SMOP.