Dan Pitt

This Macworld was probably my last

Dan Pitt — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:33:18 +0000

One pleasure of living in the Bay Area is that I get to go to Macworld every year for only the cost of a Caltrain (commuter rail) ticket, around eight bucks. I’ve been going every year, just to the Expo (trade show), with my son, who is now 18. (We always manage either to get a free Expo pass or pay at most ten dollars.) I would take him out of school for most of the day, usually a couple of days after the Steve Jobs keynote so we knew what the news was. We brought our lists of problems to try to solve and gear we wanted to find and buy. We often watched the main Apple presentations on their new products and tried them out on the huge Apple stand. I frequented the HP stand (usually gigantic) with questions on scanning and printing, always ragged on Adobe for no longer having a native Mac version of Framemaker, and flitted between the virtualization companies whose products allowed you to run Windows on the Mac. Oh yes, I talked to Microsoft a lot. My son wanted to see everything having to do with playing and composing music and using the iPod. And we wanted to be part of the celebration of Macolytes. We brought our own lunch and spent four or five hours there.

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.

A new office phone: a big step in the right direction

Dan Pitt — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:44:40 +0000

I got to see a demo of the new enterprise desktop phone from Cloud Telecomputers, called the Glass Platform, and it’s a huge step forward from the tired, pedestrian sorrows I saw at VoiceCon. First of all, it’s almost entirely touchscreen (about 8 inches), with two or perhaps three real (but tiny) buttons at the bottom. All dialing (when you actually have to tap a keypad) is on the touchscreen, as are all other telephony functions. The success of this product, which is still in final development, depends on the appropriateness and ease-of-use of these functions, which is where the primary great aspect of this instrument comes in: Its operation system is Android. So all the great features, functions, and applications will be written by ISVs on the open API that Cloud Telecomputing is releasing. (This is pretty much the regular Android API but for the larger screen.)

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.

I used to like telephony

Dan Pitt — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:12:29 +0000

The old days
I started disassembling phones as a boy, which was a bit risky since only AT&T owned the instrument and you could not go to the store and buy a replacement if you broke it. There was no such thing as spare phones for experimenters. I worked on speech compression in graduate school, and was fascinated by signals, bandwidth, filters, and the like. I almost began my professional career designing digital central-office switches and PBXs at Northern Telecom in Creedmoor, North Carolina, but got a better offer from IBM in Durham and instead worked on data networks (especially LANs). For a while there was some interest in carrying voice on early LANs, like IBM’s token ring, but that went nowhere commercially. Then we tried to harmonize datacom and telecom technologies with asynchronous transfer mode. Only the standards weenies made out well on that one. Finally, with the advent of switched ethernet, it became possible to carry voice calls on ethernet networks. But carrying the voice was only the tip of the iceberg. The control plane and billing presented much greater challenges. So we’ve seen quite an evolution of IP-based telephony systems for toll bypass on the Internet, enterprise systems, and just about everywhere else. And lately the rage is with SIP (the session initiation protocol). I have no gripe with the SIPification of everything – indeed it’s probably a necessary step – but voice is still living in a different world from the rest of the Internet revolution, and it’s mostly a yawn. Too bad. I used to think it was cool.

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.

My ears are slow

Dan Pitt — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:03:32 +0000

The Wall Street Journal recently did a piece on the end of the email era.

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.

Downtown Palo Alto Restaurants site has moved

Dan Pitt — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:44:11 +0000

Dear loyal follower,
My opinionated compendium of downtown Palo Alto restaurants now has its own site (www.downtownpaloaltorestaurants.com) and is no longer on www.danpitt.com. As you can see, I am using www.danpitt.com for my blog on matters technical and otherwise. Yes, there is a link to the new restaurant website (on the right) but it’s better that you know exactly where it is.

If you were subscribing to the RSS feed on the restaurant website, you will be getting postings from danpitt.com, which you can keep or delete as you prefer. If you want to get back on board with the restaurant postings, simply resubscribe by clicking here. My Rants&Raves page also allows your comments, so please feel free to offer your feedback (to me and the other site visitors). Thanks for following!

Dan

Impressions from WebPlay conference on social media

Dan Pitt — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:10:30 +0000

The WebPlay conference was held 19 November 2009 at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale (www.plugandplaytechcenter.com). The speakers and panelists mainly offered advice to startup companies seeking to exploit social media for their business, if not actually monetize it. Twitter was the hottest topic, in all its variations (and with the CTO of TwitVid on a panel). Here are a few choice pieces of advice:

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.