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.

Historically, administration of the internet (that same internet that now supports billions of dollars of e-commerce) has been a remarkably communal, non-commercial endeavor, depending on a loose collection of several multinational government research agencies and non-profit corporations.  That such a non-centralized and flat coalition of groups and interested individuals could successfully manage the astronomical scaling up of the internet we’ve witnessed over the last few decades is truly amazing, yet largely taken for granted.

These days, though, one of the primary long-term trends we’re seeing is the emergence of the Content Delivery Network – in essence, a privatized internet.  The growth of these additional proprietary layers is primarily driven by technological considerations – both internet video and cloud computing are placing demands on the internet Vint Cerf could not have imagined.

However, the end result could well be the marginalization of today’s egalitarian public internet (we’ve already touched on the growing presence of proprietary content delivery networks and Google’s pursuit of transcontinental fiber here, and on the resulting implications for Net Neutrality here).

CDNs and proprietary backbone links both represent workarounds of the public internet routing structure, but there’s another part of the internet undergoing similar changes: the Domain Naming System (DNS).   While routing is all about numeric IP addresses, DNS is about mapping these unfriendly numeric addresses (such as “216.239.113.101” or “2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334” in the case of IPv6) to more human-appropriate names such as “digitalmissive.com”.  In other words, DNS is essentially a massively distributed database – yet one the fulfills an absolutely crucial function, if you think about it.

However, as impressive as DNS is, it’s also a key point of vulnerability – if you want to see what a jungle it is out there on the internet, just try maintaining your own publicly exposed  DNS server and watch the attacks launched against it (trust me on that one).  Furthermore, it’s not a very transparent system, and any changes made to a DNS record can take over a day to fully propagate across the entire system.  It only follows then, that as with routing, proprietary DNS systems would emerge, representing the next step in the ongoing privatization of the internet.  And so we have Dynamic DNS and firms such Dynect.  Dynect offers enterprises using distributed cloud computing applications a highly optimized private dynamic DNS system – including additional features such as load balancing, traffic management, and failover.  As with CDNs, all this functionality is localized to the end user via Dynect’s geographically diverse network of data centers, to help minimize exposure to the increasingly strained and messy public internet cloud.

Clearly, there are sound technological reasons for the emergence of these additional privatized layers of the internet.  As for what it means in terms of the nature of the internet itself going forward, I’m less sure.

Any thoughts?

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.

As nice as the device is (and the more I use it, the more I like it), I’ve again found myself once again with a few thoughts on what could make the iPhone even better…

a (ahem) better network In a previous life, I wrote a fair amount of music for television commercials.  Once I was called back to do some alterations on a spot for an aerosol carpet deodorizer because of changes required by legal at the ad agency – in the commercial, the effectiveness of the product was illustrated using a (somewhat silly) ‘odor-smelling wand’ prop.  However, it was discovered that the number of (entirely fake) beeps coming from the prop didn’t accurately match the (entirely real) numbers coming from the focus group, so the spot needed to be reedited – such is the attention paid to truth in advertising and potential litigation.    How then does Apple get away with showing 3G web pages loading this quickly in their iPhone 3G ads?  (I mean, whose little blue Safari browser bar moves across that quickly?)

Good old-fashioned voice coverage is even more of an issue, though – I (along with an informal sampling of my fellow NYC iPhone users) are still occasionally suffering from the AT&T dropped call syndrome, and what’s worse is that despite having all the latest firmware upgrades, I still have to stand in the far corner of my living room to get enough bars to make a phone call from my apartment – and this is a 7 minute subway ride from Manhattan (i.e. not exactly the boondocks).   Even in the middle of New York City, coverage can be spotty:  I recently stood on the corner of 14th St. and University Place (Union Sq.) and had no voice service whatsoever (incredibly, I had to walk west along 14th St. past 5th Ave. before I had any bars).  The AT&T cell network needs some work, at least in the New York City area.

system-wide ‘undo’ It’s a little surprising the iPhone is missing a global ‘undo’ command at the operating system level, but I’m guessing it’s the result of a conscious design decision to keep the iPhone OS as lean and mean as possible (in computer science terms, a global undo requires a certain degree of ‘statefulness’, but the iPhone is largely a stateless device).   However, as iPhone Apps get more interesting and powerful, the lack of an ‘undo’ command is only going to become more of an issue (and meanwhile, what if you delete an SMS conversation by mistake?)
One cute idea would be to leverage the iPhone’s onboard accelerometer (which makes how the device itself is held a user input for flipping the display axis and for certain games) – because a rapid physical shaking of the iPhone would make a neat ‘undo’ command, wouldn’t it?  (reminding us all of our childhood Etch-a-Sketch…)

system-wide text ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ Again, a pretty basic function, but one the iPhone doesn’t support.  Here’s a great mockup of how this could work – from vimeo, a video sharing site I like a lot.

axis flipping for the mail app Again, back to the accelerometer – I get a fair amount of HTML emails. While the iPhone does a good job displaying them, it would be nice to be able to hold the device lengthwise and view what are essential web pages with the wider horizontal aspect ratio – as I’m already able to do with the browser, camera roll, and video player apps (and since the functionality is already in place for those apps, it would be very easy to implement).

In general, though, while the AT&T network is a disappointment, the device itself certainly is not – and recent sales figures reflect just how popular the iPhone has become: during the last quarter, Apple sold 6.9 million units, more than were sold during all previous quarters combined. In fact, over the last quarter, the iPhone sold more than any other mobile device (smart phone or not), beating out both the (often free) Motorola Razr in the consumer space and the RIM Blackberry line in the enterprise space.  Further evidence of the iPhone’s success can be found reading between the lines of a recent blog post from a Microsoft blogger concerning the new Office 2008 web apps and cross-platform cloud computing – iPhone compatibility is given top billing, over even Mac OS compatibility.

So the iPhone is a hit – as a believer in the importance of good product design, I’m glad to see it.

The AT&T network, though, remains a work in progress – at least in our neck of the woods.

While we’re on the subject of record long tail voter aggregation and its impact on democracy, the unprecedented accumulation of small-size incremental financial contributions during the current US presidential campaign marks another success story for the long tail of citizen ingenuity.

According to OpenSecrets.org, over 90% of an impressive $640 million raised by the Barack Obama campaign came from individuals rather than corporations or entrenched interest groups.

And the bulk of that was contributions under $200.

Amazing what a lot of a little can accomplish in its aggreate value – to the benefit of all.

On that note, for all you digital media marketers out there (opportunistically speaking, of course), the current long tail campaign donation phenomenon clearly demonstrates the significant power of consumers’ take on ”motive and opportunity”.

From digital video and online books to for-pay widgets and Twitter posts, monetizing the long tail of any of these things depends on whether they truly matter to people and their lifes.

Meaning, if “the cause” is right, wallets open up.

It clearly worked during the recent Presidential campaign. What does that mean to future branded product campaign designs?

To be sure, way way before Chris Anderson’s pointed Wired article (re)discovered the right side of the curve for us, something as old, tried and proven as democracy knew to utilize the long tail phenomenon all along; to ensure that all, not just a select few partake in shaping government at large.

So, in many ways, we’re only coming full circle here.

Who knew? Democracy as an ingenious grass-root marketing campaign.

Glad it worked so well this time.

As it stands, this country is about to (re)discover the power of long tail voting.

Not since the 60s has the United States seen this kind of voter turnout. Individuals previously ignorant to the democratic process are expected to come out and vote in what clearly is a historic election.

We, members of the digital technology and media industry, have used the long tail idea gladly and often, at least since Chris Anderson’s highly recognized Wired magazine article about “the few that dominate”.

We have since flocked to the long tail concept to describe how the aggregate number of individuals previously ignored by commercial systems can populate and popularize anything from micro blogs to amateur-produced snack-size videos, or en-gross selling of long forgotten books on amazon.com.

The same “saftey in numbers” phenomenon may now be just what it took to change the direction of an entire country.

While the latter remains a promise until proven, no matter who you vote for tomorrow morning, the former is happening as we speak.

Already a record number of those previously discouraged or put off by politics have returned from their voting duties; young, first-time voters, african-americans, hispanics, immigrants, all joined by millions of others in a common believe that its worth standing in line for hours on end, convinced that the time and cause is right.

Of course our industry’s arsenal of lingo would be incomplete if we couldn’t add to the long tail moniker all sorts of related terms.

Think discovery, collaboration, and sharing. Add hyper-targeting and monetization to understand how much the past 21 months of presidential campaigning have benefited from their first dabble with Web 2.0.

Not to mention the unprecedented number of supporting broadband connections that helped to fuel the national debate.

Still, it is not entirely clear whether any side has gained on the other in its particular ability to leverage the long-tail power of the Internet.

It just might simply be a zero-sum game.

But hey. Who’s counting?

For now, let’s go and vote!

PS: For those of you eager to combine your long tail capabilities until the very last second of the democratic process, go to Current TV and fire up your Twitter and your Digg account.

PS II: To be sure, while both campaigns leveraged the long tail power of the Internet, they also knew that a linear TV feed was still a medium key enough to agree to last minute Saturday Night Live appearances or to buy millions of dollars worth of traditional broadcasting airtime to get the message out. Shelly Palmer’s recent post makes several salient points on the deliberate old-school-ness of those decisions. Be sure to check it out.

The New York Times has discovered (or rediscovered) thin computing: a small simple device (or ‘terminal’) with just enough under the hood to send mouse & keyboard clicks to a server upon which all the applications actually ran.  Initially hyped as a challenge to Microsoft’s domination of the workplace desktop, the concept had its 15 minutes as The Next Big Thing a few years back, only to fall from favor due to network performance issues (while it’s acceptable if an application is a teensy bit slower over the network, sluggish mouse/keyboard response is a non-starter for most users).

But look at the advantages, though: rather than a $1000 workstation with Windows and Office installed, we’re talking about a simple paperback-sized box and monitor for $400, all in.  Granted, MS Terminal Server (and especially Citrix) licenses do cost, but on the other hand consider that there’s no fan noise, no hard drive failures, no long boot-up time, no virus susceptibility, no user-installed malware, space savings, power consumption savings – the list goes on and on.

And I speak from experience – several years ago, as the network administrator for a small business with half a dozen retail and office locations spread across  the country, I moved a good portion of my remote users to these devices.  This not only solved my problem of how to install and maintain remote these workstations, the client (who was growing quickly at the time) loved the immediate hardware savings (which more than made up for the terminal server licenses).

I was a hero; life was good (in a keep-the-trains-running job like network administration, you remember those win-win moments).

While I chose devices from Wyse, as the NY Times article points out, thin client computing is becoming The Next Big Thing all over again – so there are more and more manufacturers out there.  So many, in fact, that it begs the question:

What about the home market?

What I’m getting at is the return of the web appliance.  Like thin clients, this is another concept from a few years back that never quite took off – the only difference being the addition of an onboard web browser of some sort (maybe the well-received Opera browser, since Sony is already embedding that into its new Internet Video Link hardware).  Because in a world of Hulu, Flickr, and Google Docs (services which, unlike Windows Terminal Server or Citrix, are generally free), a simple little box with a browser and a handful of drivers for peripherals would just about do it for a lot of folks, wouldn’t it?

Clearly, cloud computing is The Next Big Thing now – at least Google thinks so, and Microsoft thinks so too.   Are there potential network reliability and privacy issues related to cloud computing?  Sure.  On the other hand, though, consider the upside: cheaper, simpler, instant-on hardware.

So thin computing is back. Again. Who knows, maybe the time is finally becoming right again for the web appliance too; maybe the browser is the new operating system.

Interesting! A number of German towns actually started objecting to Google’s Street View cars mapping the country’s streets and roads.

The idea that there is “someone, all the way from America” to photograph local streets, homes, and people for the rest of us to retrieve online (understandably) raises some concerns.

To put things into perspective, imagine someone from Germany – or any other overseas country for that matter – deciding to send black-colored vans with roof-mounted cameras down main street USA.

Remember, there’s still a considerable number of people that have never heard of Google, let alone used it.

To be sure, on both sides of the Atlantic, plenty seem increasingly concerned personal data protection is being ignored as more information is digitally disseminated and stored outside our reach.

From state-side online trolling and Google’s recent Chrome browser launch, to Germany’s scandal over T-Mobile subscriber data theft, these are only a few examples of what might go wrong if digital data gets misappropriated.

Add to that the latest uproar over Skype’s leak of Chinese dissidents information, and it becomes clear why public trust in personal digital data privacy is waning fast.

Of course, the trojan horse of personal digital data capture has been out the barn for years.

Google and other software vendors have long been aggregating civic data sets, to fuel both innovation and commercial interests wrapped in a single free and “viral” application.

Plenty of us have come to appreciate that and gladly use resulting applications to make our lives easier.

Clearly, if we want our location-based services to actually work and function as we would expect them to (ever sat in a car and the GPS system lead you the wrong way?), we will need to let someone collect prerequisite hyper-local information to improve personalized application capabilities to the benefit of you and I.

Even if things don’t quite go as planned?

In a recent conversation with a European friend of mine, he mentioned his ability to discern from Google Earth images that it was his very own neighbor that had rudely parked in his spot the day his area was “data captured”.

He then went on to tell me about a female resident nude-bathing on the rooftop of an Amsterdam apartment building, only to be camera-captured, you guessed it, by Google Earth.

Clearly, on the user-side of the discussion not everything is perfect in geo-tagging land, but most of us have long and willingly participated enjoying the mostly productive advantages from actual usage of such application and the underlying data harnessed.

In fact I wonder if we could ever again live without?

But brand and user perception differs among cultures. Any company seeking to expand and succeed beyond its own boarders needs to be able to address local idiosyncrasies first.

In other words, what is felt productive and OK in parts of the US can easily be misconstrued outside.

Unless you adopt to the local “lingua franca” of regional acceptability, people will have a harder time understanding you and the products you seek to offer over time.

Who knew? A Twitter feed, large on a flashy screen, during a live conference workshop Q&A.

While attending the recent Web 2.0 Expo software love fest in New York, what struck me, those Twitter posts came from audience members right in the same room, only steps away from a microphone and free to pose the same questions to everyone “organically”.

Rather than raising their “analog” hands and voices, they opted to type questions into a digital device.

Afforded seeing everyone’s “twittered” questions come in live, this seemed info overkill, distracting from the verbal live discussion unfolding at the same time.

Later, walking past the Web2Open area (set up for free-wheeling “anti-conference” discussions among peers), more participants seemed tied to their handhelds and laptops then actually talking to each other face-to-face.

All in, to get real people to engage in real meetings was never easy.  With the advent of Web 2.0, could we have added yet another layer of complication?

No doubt, despite its relatively short existence, Web 2.0 (the trend, not its name-sake conference) has had fundamental, positive impact on consumer digital life.

But during this industry conference, the community of evangelist and software architects seemed surprisingly stuck between “old world” idiosyncrasies and “new world” paradigm. (In all fairness though, some Web2Open discussion certainly did take place).

In his most recent testimonial ad,  Sprint CEO D. Hesse makes a valid point. ”Technology is only great when you know how to use it”.

Web 2.0 Expo attendees certainly know how to “use technology”.

But even to the best of us, it seems still somewhat awkward to navigate both analog and digital worlds simultaneously – especially if both are “anywhere, anytime” and “always on” to reckon with.

So, what is the right mix of “synthetic” communications and “organic” conversation at the dawn of the 21st century?

For anyone with interest in the bigger picture behind all of this, during the conference, Intel social scientist, Genevieve Bell, gave an impressive to-the-point presentation.

Wanna’ discuss this further?

Please no analog “old world” calls.

Instead, post a digital “new world” message right here.

Oh wait, why don’t we talk AND twitter ;-)

That’s it. Just like that. One morning you wake up to find most of your emails emptied, gone, vanished – never to be retrieved again.

Well, that just happened to me. But what happened really?

A happy Yahoo! Mail Plus customer since February 2003 – a full five years of my personal emails dissolved into thin air this past week.

A moment of panic ensued. Then I started thinking.

The good news: I discovered that Yahoo! has a toll-free number to call (still relatively untypical for a .com), their customer service rep was exceedingly helpful and to-the-point, without schmoozie upselling attempts and just a minimum number of subservient “we-love-you-Mr.-Customer”.

And yes, I did get my follow-up call the same evening, just as promised.

The bad news: In a heartbeat Yahoo! (accidentally?) removed a full five years of my personal email communications with friends, family and many other folks I care about – only to confirm Yahoo! had forever deleted thousands of my digital messages off their server farms.

To me, that real question behind this unexpected personal data kill: In our hyper-social, interconnected world, what role does our email communication really represent within our personal sphere?

Certainly not as direct and personable as a one-on-one phone call, email is faster to-and-fro sender and recipient than, let’s say, a letter or a fax.

Conversely, email lags the speed of instant messaging and typically is slower than a briefly “spit-out” Twitter-style micro-blog post.

Of course email is searchable. In fact, Yahoo!’s recent free browser update improved my ability to turn scant bits of memory (… didn’t what’s-her-name’s email mention “engagement ads”?) into a series of (mostly relevant) hits.

Try that with past voice mails , letters or faxes received. It will not work.

But did I hold on to years of emails because I really needed to, or simply because I could? 

And what meaning do personal emails occupy in my daily life in terms of actual productivity gains?

Pushed by Google’s competitive Gmail launch, in May of last year, Yahoo! responded by offering “unlimited email storage” capabilities.

At one fell swoop, I was confronted with the pleasures of an all-you-can-eat email depository.

But just because competition got tough on Yahoo!, and storage cost had fallen dramatically, doesn’t really mean myself (or most anyone) actually needed the extra space and ensuing clutter.

Leaves my postmortem analysis with the legal aspect of my involuntary email vanishing act.

In short, a look inside Yahoo!’s service agreement failed to provide detail into the liability aspect of emails lost. (Do I actually have recourse here?).

But then again, it’s too late anyway.

What’s gone is gone, forever in the heavens of the Internet ether.