I remember moving to the U.S. in 1993 exactly because it appeared to be a country certain the glass was half full. Fast forward, 17 years later, things seemed to have changed along the way – it is as if a growing lack of self confidence started replacing this country’s long-held trust in the power of risk-taking and go-getter success.

Where am I going with this you ask?

No, I won’t discuss the state of national health care here. Nor is this the place to ponder over where exactly US education stands, or whether immigration reform is getting a fair shake.

But the telco guy in me can’t help but notice — even broadband is getting the evil eye these days.
Read the rest of this entry »

Received my cell phone email bill the other day.  I never go over my voice/text limits and I have an unlimited data plan - so unless I’m traveling, my cell phone charges tend to be very consistent.  I couldn’t help but notice, though, that this bill was $10 higher than usual.  While I’m no fan of AT&T’s network quality (more on that here), I’ve found them to be pretty on top of things, billing-wise - so I was a little surprised.

Off to their website I went, looking for whatever annoying new fee, tax, or disputed charge that was surely there waiting for me - with that familiar old feeling of cell-phone-company-fear-and-loathing already coming on, I logged on to my account….

Read the rest of this entry »

Yup! Still in Vegas, still big, the annual consumer electronics bonanza we fondly refer to as CES drew to an end yesterday.

First off, although more crowed compared to last year, the popular trade show giant still seemed somewhat off from its previous record attendance. But hey, who’s counting, or not happy about the lack of past years’ never-ending cab and bus lines in front of hotels.

Instead, relative to previous years anyway, CES 2010 seemed much about “quality before quantity”, with some really interesting and innovative nuggets across a still impressive line-up of exhibitors.

So, what are my primary take-aways?

Read the rest of this entry »

This one’s a somewhat lighter post, mainly a few observations about how, of all things, New York City weather, social networking and mobile technology all seem to gel quite effectively these days.

Last week, just back from the ITP Spring Show at Manhattan’s Tisch School of The Arts, I took a quick break strolling across Union Square, on my way to Yaron Samid’s latest NY Video 2.0 meetup event.
Read the rest of this entry »

A quick update on my recent ever got pinged by your CEO? post, and some related commentary on online social media in the enterprise world.

Presumably by way of a forward-thinking PR department close to Deutsche Telekom management (indeed my employer), I recently received a LinkedIn invite to connect to DT CEO Rene Obermann.
Read the rest of this entry »

I recently attended my first conference by live webcast - Media Summit New York.  Streaming was handled by scribemedia, which did a very nice job of it.  I wasn’t able to sample every panel because they were only shooting in one of the two session rooms, but it turns out there was something about “tele-attending” this conference that almost made up for that…

First, I’ll admit it - while I find the technology to be valuable in certain situations,  I’m by no means out there on the evangelical front lines of social networking (in fact, it’s only recently that we’ve twitter-enabled ourselves here at digitalmissive.com).

As a bit of a skeptic to begin with, I’ve also been a little ambivalent towards the combination of social networking and long-form premium internet video.  I’ve just felt there wasn’t a huge value-add there; that lean-back television viewing is by its nature a primarily passive pastime, and that the average viewer would not care to chat and text while watching their favorite show form the couch - and to the extent internet video is all about the ability to view content non-synchronously, real-time chatting about a show in progress isn’t really possible anyway.

But that was before I had the  experience of chatting and streaming during that first Media Summit panel - compared to sitting there silently in a live audience with perhaps one chance to interact briefly during the Q&A, watching the stream while having the option to freely exchange thoughts and opinions with my fellow cyber-audience members was really exciting.  I almost felt myself wondering if I would actually prefer watching the live stream to being there in person - just for the chatting alone.

Overall,  though, of course the advantages to attending these events in person trumps the live chat advantage - but how ironic, that attendance at panel discussions on the potential disruptive nature of internet video could end up being affected by …internet video.

So, mea culpa.  I get it.  Social networking and video can be cool - especially for events such as conferences.  Back at home on the next generation of internet-enabled televisions, it could be great, too - for sports, politics, and maybe American Idol.

But great enough to make implementing a keyboard-like interface?  I’m still not sure…

CeBIT, held each year in Hannover (Germany), is the biggest technology show in the world.  What makes it larger than CES is that rather than limit itself to consumer electronics, it includes both home and office technology - in other words, all things digital.  I’m not at the show, but having read a few of the articles starting to show up online (the show’s currently running until March 8th), one company stands out as having at least a few good ideas:  Asus.

I’ve already written about how the time is right for netbooks - Asus has a 60% share of the European market and a 30% share of the worldwide market - so they’ve been doing something right.  In addition, the company has some serious plans for bring the Google Android operation system to the netbook.  It’s worth noting that while Android has had the iPhone headwind to fight in the smartphone market, no such incumbant hands-down winner exists in the netbook operating system market.  In fact, with netbooks gaining traction, Android evolving, and a lightweight netbook version of Windows 7 on the horizon, the netbook OS market could prove to be a major front in the epic battle between you-know-who and you-know-who.

But I digress.  Let’s talk some gizmo. At left is an Asus “concept netbook.”   It starts with the tablet computer concept from a few years back and takes it a step or two further - a completely touch screen-based interface, and a second monitor.  Although not yet commercially available, a few thoughts do come to mind:

• The clamshell design nicely solves the problem of maximizing screen real estate while at the same time protecting the portable device’s touch screens.
• To the extent a touch screen Netbook interface becomes popular, XP Home becomes obsolete as a netbook OS, forcing Microsoft’s hand in getting a Windows 7 Netbook OS out there quickly.
• Is this the perfect Kindle platform, or what??



Speaking of touchscreens - here’s an interesting device, looking very much like the result of crossing a computer keyboard with an iPhone.  While adding a touchscreen to a keyboard is a cool enough idea in and of itself (and as the most cost-effective way to enjoy the next generation of touch-enabled operating systems, probably something we’ll see a lot of), there’s more here than meets the eye: this is actually a netbook running XP Home! With an 802.11g wireless interface and a wireless HDMI interface (that’s a new one on me), you’ve yourself got a cable-free internet streaming solution, as well as a computer for the coffee table and the couch.  It’s my feeling users would be more interested in the former than the latter, but either way, a pretty cool device - and another idea that’s hard to imagining not becoming popular.

Back from CES - the annual Consumer Electronics love fest in Las Vegas,  (OK, I am a bit late posting this) - I am actually pretty psyched about what’s coming down the consumer electronics pike this year.

As CE devices get faster, smarter, and increasingly untethered, the “on-your-terms” digital lifestyle proposition pitched to us for all these years seems a considerable step closer to its “anywhere, anytime” goal.

Yet, despite years of impressive CES innovation hoopla, I continue grappling with a personal observation I lovingly coined the “Star Trek bottleneck”:

CE designers’ propensity for innovation seems directly proportional to their lifetime exposure to, yup, you guessed it - the popular Starship Enterprise television series.

OK, I am kidding. But as with any good joke, there’s some truth to it.

To stick with the Star Trek analogy - short of time travel and “beam me up Scotty” - is there anything in CE land that Captain Kirk and his crew didn’t have that’s not readily available to us in stores today?

There’s the wireless video monitor and the wrist-band smart phone, plus the super-smart refrigerator, remote home security, and a growing number of cute gadgets.

All set in slick form factor, of course, all with build-in intelligence processing more information ever faster. Good ol’ Gene would have been proud.

In other words, it’s as if this past-century icon of sci-fi television continues to haunt our 21st century CE designers to this day.

Of course, I have no empirical data, no scientific studies. Just a pretty good hunch, mixed in with a healthy dose of cynicism, about why today’s CE industry seems unable to think more innovatively about, well about innovation itself.

Maybe it needs a new and decidedly young(er) generation of CE designers to get us beyond my “Star Trek bottleneck” dilemma? One void of stylized sci-fi TV exposure and implicit 60ies and 70ies ideas of what innovation should be.

But than again, no matter what any new group of CE designer may come up with, it still needs to stay sufficiently functional and attractive to consumers, right, or it simply won’t sell?

So, maybe it’s not just about passing the CE design torch on to the next generation, but also about our own limitation as consumers to desire (and then use) something entirely different from what we collectively perceive as “innovative” today? 

So where might we be heading next?

My guess on this, next-gen CE devices will focus on software rather than hardware, and regard bolstering quality-of-life as a key goal.

That next evolutionary step in consumer electronics might then have less to do with form factor (that’s largely covered ;-), and much more with adding previously unavailable intelligence inside and outside existing hardware concepts.

The key driver - and blocker at the same time? Our collective ability to imagine beyond the obvious.

Any of this probably not for CES 2010. But hey, let’s see what CES 2020 will bring.

On the eve of the 2009 CES show, perhaps it’s time for a few more thoughts on what should prove to be The Big Story at this year’s show: televisions and set-top boxes with internet access baked in, for direct internet video access.

For the last few years, numerous companies in the ‘computer’ business (on either the hardware or software side) have made repeated attempts to market solutions involving the PC as viable long-form internet video delivery platforms - with little to no success. Lately, though, perhaps enough anthropologists and/or behavioral scientists have been hired to finally convince at least a few of these companies that despite all the bells and whistles, a computer might never be a television after all (as they say in the south, “you can put a brick in the oven, but that don’t make it a biscuit”).

So while certain companies might have enjoyed a substantial technological head start in internet video, through a stubborn insistence on leveraging the home computer, the opportunity was missed. But no matter: here comes the CE industry - as of Thursday in Las Vegas, it’s their market now.

Apple undertook a conscious expansion into the CE industry several years ago with the iPod (in fact, dropping ‘Computer’ from their corporate name) - is it too late for other computer-centric companies to make a similar move? 

The recent Intel/Yahoo initiative is a particularly interesting case in point.  Both companies, as Yahoo Connected TV vice president Patrick Barry poetically puts it, “emerged from the ocean of the PC”.

Intel Intel has been especially forward-thinking regarding the convergence of the home computing and consumer electronics industries for some time now, having launched the Intel Digital Home Group several years ago.  The interdisciplinary Digital Home Group, active in both processor design and standards development, is particularly close to my heart, as it’s made up of social scientists as well as computer scientists.

Yahoo We’ve been pretty hard on Yahoo lately, but they do have some heavy OEM hitters lined up to implement their embedded internet TV ‘widgets’ system: Sony, TiVo, and Samsung. Also worth noting, the Connected TV initiative intends to follow a purely advertising-supported model, and studies routinely show consumers prefer advertising to subscription fees.  Lastly, yet another issue (and one that holds true for all internet video contenders) is the remote: as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently noted, a Nintendo Wii-like pointing remote will likely be required as internet-enabled television hardware matures.

At any rate, given their recent setbacks, this could be Yahoo’s last best shot at redemption - so look for them to bet the farm (or “throw the long ball”, for you American football fans) on this one.

This doesn’t happen every day.

Rene Obermann, the Deutsche Telekom CEO himself, just pinged me, inviting me to connect to his LinkedIn profile. 

Now, two things came to mind instantly: Who else at DT got pinged? And why so late at night?

As to the former, it seems fair to assume the same invite went out to 200,000 or so of my other Deutsche Telekom colleagues around the globe.  (Because, although a Deutsche Telekom employee, I am certainly not close enough to Mr. Obermann to qualify for a personal one-on-one invite to his social network. More about this later).

As to why so late at night, myself in New York right now, my Blackberry took notice of the invite to connect to Mr. Obermann at a surprisingly late 10:43 PM EST.

Which means someone in Germany - where DT’s HQ resides - got up rather bright and early (4:43 AM to be exact), to get this out to me.

So what does this all mean?

A)  No doubt, when the top executive of a multi-national company pings you via LinkedIn, you know Web-based social networking has hit mainstream.

That’s a good thing I suppose. (Even when you know, it is his PR team that drives the initiative).

B) Driving traffic worth 200,000 individuals (at least potentially) towards a single social network doesn’t happen every day. Not even at such a popular site as LinkedIn has become.

On balance though, I don’t think they’ll mind.

C) My guess is more messages will be forthcoming from my CEO; presumably all via internal PR, all DT-related I suppose, and designed to induce informal dialog, outside corporate walls and a T-branded environment.

Whether this is going to work, let’s see. But I am certainly smitten by this new openness permeating not just inside DT’s CEO office, but in many other places these days.

Then I got really curious.

What if all the CEO’s of other leading European telecom giants have long been on LinkedIn, and I just didn’t know.

Could Rene be late in this, merely following and not leading his peers into the nebula of Web 2.0 ?

Well, turns out, France Telecom CEO Didier Lombard himself is currently not on LinkedIn. But the company maintains a corporate profile, so far with 556 FT employees auto-grouped by LinkedIn under the corporate umbrella.

Telecom Italia Franco Bernabe is indeed on LinkedIn, but so far with zero connections. What went wrong there?

Then there is BT CEO Ben Verwaayen. Yes, Ben does maintain his personal LinkedIn profile. Even better (little did I know), we are only two degrees removed. 

Tuns out, his profile page only shows a single connection so far. And the one connection separating Ben and I is someone with 500+ connections. Hardly a quality contact, I suppose.

And how about closer to (my) home, the US? Are the leading US telco CEOs populating LinkedIn?

As of my writing these lines, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is curently not present with a profile.

Neither is Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg. 

Either they (and their PR team) haven’t gotten to it, I am thinking, or they (and their PR teams) found it simply not worth their while. Who knows?

Backt to Rene Obermann. Unlike the other telco CEOs on LinkedIn, he publicly distributes a Gmail address, and has set his profile to allow insight into who else is connecting to him at any time.

This signals a level of engagement interests way above and beyond his telco peers.

Upon my last check, though (at 12:03 AM EST), his public LinkedIn profile still showed a mere eight connections.

While not overly impressive, heed the time difference, folks. I suppose some of my colleagues have literally yet to wake up to their CEO’s surprising early morning ping.