Live Mesh

I had the 'honour' at being at the launch of Microsoft Live Mesh yesterday.

It promises a lot: ultimate, seamless connectivity for all devices, cameras, PCs, smartphones, even Macs. Unfortunately at the moment that's all it is, promises.

I have been given access to a special invitation preview, that I've signed up for but hasn't yet yielded an account. From what I can make out though, at the moment all it is is file storage. Put some files in the cloud and access them later. useful, but not ground-breaking.

Now, I know there is more than that to come, but at the moment that's it. It feels to me like a rushed announcement before the ink is dry on chapter 1 of the Live Mesh novel. I'd expect to at least get to the end of the first act.

Web 2.0 Expo - Berlin

Last week was a refreshing change. I realised that it had been a long time since I'd been to a web/development conference rather than one with a mobile industry focus.

That said the conference venue was dreadful. It was a cold, souless place in the middle of nowhere. The session rooms were a long way from the keynote hall which in turn was a long way from the exhbition hall.

During one of the keynote session (held at lunchtime which was very civilised) the organisers asked for a show of hands for next years venue. Barcelona seemed to get most votes, so here's hoping.

The quality of speakers and sessions was generally good. Highlights include:

Ajit Joakar (while he wasn't fondling or looking at his BlackBerry during is presentation!) delivered his view on the Mobile world. There wasn't a lot new in it for me, but judging by the size of the audience and the positive feedback he received the web world is definitely trying to understand the mobile world.

James Kalbrach delivered a interesting review and recommendations around Tag navigation. As the concept of self categorisation with tags is gaining ground on more and more sites, this is going to become more and more relavent. Not just in the UGC world either.

The session on getting UCD (User Centred Design) to play nicely with Agile development given by Leisa Reichelt was another session worthy of note. It was a bit heavy on the introduction to Agile methodologies for me but the 'meat' about how to integrate user interaction designers into the agile development process definitely stirred some thoughts. In fact it was probably this session that generated the most items on my post-conference book order.

So it was worth going. It was the first time this conference had been run so there were bound to be some teething problems. It was a bit also pricey but subject to the agenda and them changing the venue I'd expect to be going next year.

The Space Tag Continuum

I've been at Web2Expo the last couple of days and at a session on Designing Tag based Navigation I got involved in a discussion about multi-word tags and how they should be input.

There are many sites out there, Flikr,tag cloud shown below, being a prime example, where they only support multi-word tags if you enclose in double quotes. Surely this is just poor design. It's a requirement enforced by a development decision rather than actually giving thought to how a user thinks.

Tags are used to categorise artificts, be they pictures, blog posts, documents or whatever. When you want to categorise something, often a phrase is best, eg: New York, New Years Party 2007, or Dan's Birthday.

Amazingly, to me anyway, people in the audience thought it was perfectly reasonable for the user to be required to either remove the spaces: NewYearsParty2007; or use double quotes: "News Years Party 2007". You'll notice above New and York appear has separate tags while some people have adapted their entry to remove the spaces for newyork.

To the first one I say there is no such word as NewYearsParty2007 and to the second one I'm not quoting anyone. We forcing the users to adapt their natural behaviour to fit a system that could just be designed better.

When we write lists, in English at any rate, we delineate with commas. What's wrong with doing that when inputing tags? Even better make it culture specifc.

I've posted previously about Normobs, I wonder if we need the concept of Norwebs (Normal Web Users). For those in the UK, I know it's also the name of a utility company but I don't think there's a trademark collision.

While it's easy to get excited about the possibilities of the latest web applications for them to realise their true potentional, we must remember the Norweb, for they are many and they are right ;-)

Mission Log, star date 28-10-07

I encountered a strange new world...

It was a success.

This was always more of a market research exercise for us than a customer acquisition drive or partner sourcing exercise. I have to admit I was a little sceptical about the value we would get from being part of the mission. We were planning to go to CTIA Wireless anyway, why did I need the help of the British Consulate?

Josianne Gros-Louis, Vice Consul for Communications, and her team put me straight. Thanks to the various events they put together, I met everyone I needed to meet and learnt loads about the market.

Meeting the industry analysts was the big success story of my mission. Mike Sigal of the Guidewire Group and Derek Kerton of the Derek Kerton really allowed me to pick their brains.

Mike also gave me a real taste for the bay-area entrepreneurial approach. Do it, don't mess around, if you're going to launch, launch big. A company in stealth mode is not interesting, it has nothing to say. Try not, do or do not, there is no try.

Actually that last one was Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, but you get the idea.

The approach is infectious. I left San Francisco pumped full of entrepreneurial vigour, with a head overflowing with ideas and the knowledge that the market was ready for us.

I call that a successful trip.

Enhanced Mobile Messaging: What’s Beyond SMS?

Summary of the panel session I mentioned over. First up were T-Mobile giving a carrier's perspective. The crux of their vision was a standards lead, interoperable messaging service that would embrace availability and group sending.

VeriSign must take the tenacity plaudits for continuing to beat the MMS drum. Their view is that what people want to do is Point - Shoot – Share and that is what MMS is all about. Interoperability is here, growth rates are higher than SMS, though this is with far lower numbers.

The representative from OZ talked at great length and clarity about mobile IM blurring boundaries between PC and phone. In his view the phone would become the laptop and the PC would be a research and media station.

Another interesting observation was that social networking sites are really just one-to-many IM. Email use is dropping in preference to networking services like Facebook, Bebo, et al. People will be members of multiple communities and will interact with them based on their context.

Kirusa talked about the success their having in the emerging markets with Voice SMS. You dial * followed by the number and record a voice message. The recipient receives an SMS with instructions to pick it up.

In their opinion, this fills the void in the communication matrix for asynch voice between voice calls and voice mail in the same way SMS sits between IM and Email.

This was a theme extended on by Pinger, a bay area start-up providing voice messaging services. You send someone a voice message, they receive the call and can then reply straight away. That way you get the personality and mood of voice without the hassle of navigating a voice mail system.

So what do I think?

Voice messaging is interesting and the guys at Pinger seem to be making it very simple. I'm not sure it will ever surpass textual messaging. That is definately here to stay, whether we record on the phone using speech recognition (not covered in the session) or type it in it's the most efficient way to send a message as well as to receive one.

For me what is really going to change is context. The context of a message is going to alter how we receive and respond it. I believe that people will want their communications organised around context. This will require a move away from pure messaging clients to tools that are designed for the type of communication we undertake depending on whether we're talking to friends, family or work.

The Facebook for BlackBerry app is a good example of this. This is great for communicating with friends but I wouldn't use it to communicate with family or work colleagues.

This is a step towards the bearer becoming less important ie SMS, Email, MMS, SIP, etc. As one person put it during the session:

We rely on people to be human routers

This is a recurring theme of visions of the the future of messagimg but one thing is standing in the way it becoming a reality, pricing.

While different messaging bearers are priced differently, people are going to have to be able to make a decision. However, ff the carriers decided to make it all the same rate, or even flat rate, this is a very different story. Applications or the networks could then make the decision for us, we don't care we just want the message delivered.

So, as usual, the carriers hold the key. If they decide, messaging utopia could well be within our grasp.

Americans don’t get mobile like we do. Yeah right!

Attended a great panel session about the future of mobile messaging titled Enhanced Mobile Messaging: What’s Beyond SMS? I’m going to post separately about the services discussed but in writing it I realised the session had crystallised some feelings I had about what I’d been seeing here.

I really got the impression that feeling a bit disgruntled about being left behind in the whole SMS thing and being seen as laggards by us in Europe, the Americans are determined to be at the forefront of the next wave.

Similar sessions I’ve attend at the couple of Global Messaging Congresses have come up with some similar ideas, but none of these had the clarity of vision or left me with the impression that they were going to happen anytime soon.

Innovation just seems to ooze out of everything IT in the San Francisco Bay area. I found the whole visit quite inspiring for that reason. There is a buzz around, an assumption that the status quo is there challenged.

A key aspect of the approach is to just go out and do it, it might just work. Do it without the carriers first, get traction with real customers and if you get enough of them then it’s a no-brainer for the carriers.

While the US carriers are generally lambasted for their control-freakery and protectionist approach I think they’re in a far better position to make some of these things happen than in Europe. They have complete control over the handsets so if they want to ship a new feature they can make sure it get’s everywhere.

I think we’re in danger of being a bit complacent, viewing our US cousins and their clunky handsets with a misplaced superiority while we stroke our shiny new Nokias.

People use mobile services that help them run their lives. Shiny new handsets quickly lose their lustre.

Facebook for BlackBerry, my view

I think it's really well done.

It seems to use the standard email notification system but intercepts the messages before they get into the main BlackBerry inbox. You then get a little facebook icon in the alert are on the BlackBerry home screen.

It doesn't have applications it's really about seeing the status of your friends, poking them, writing on walls and exchanging messages with them.

There's been a lot of talk at CTIA Wireless about mobile device applications just focusing on what the mobile user needs. This follows those principles.

When I'm out and about, the most important functionality to me is communication. Zombies, film quizzes and all the other stuff that you do when you're a bit bored is a lot less important.

Actually what this does for me is change facebook into a powerful, realtime, communication service, rather than something I do when I'm looking for a diversion from whatever I'm working on.

Take this thought forward and email is no longer a communication application but it becomes just a transport layer for a richer, contextual communication paradigm. If I want to communicate with my friends I use facebook, for work I use Outlook.

Crazy valuations or not they are shaking things up. I was a little sceptical about facebook before but the more I get familiar with what they're doing and how they're doing it, I'm becoming more and more impressed.

It's also made me want a BlackBerry Curve, the photo tagging feature looked very cool and my trusty old 8707 just 'aint gonna cut it in the new era.

BTW, BlackBerry screenshot created using BBScreenShooter. You have to also download the BlackBerry JDE (90MB+ which you have to register for) but the application worked a treat, very simple.

Facebook app for BlackBerry - looking very cool indeed

At the keynote from Duncan Moskovitz, co-founder of facebook, and have just downloaded the BlackBerry app they've announce and it looks very good, very well implemented.

Proper review later.

Steve Ballmer, professional pit-bull

The keynote today was from Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. The first thing that came into my head as he strode out and launched into his speech was that he was one scary man. You could almost see the veins in his temples pumping as he delivered the wireless world according to Microsoft.

This was taken to a new level when he brought out his senior product managers to demonstrate some key software. The only way I can describe their demeanour was petrified.

Forget the jocular atmosphere they were trying to portray. The heavily scripted nature of their exchanges with Steve merely emphasised the terror that was looming, umistakeably behind their eyes.

One of the demos actually went wrong, Live search not returning any results. It must have been expected because quick as a flash a new mobile device appeared with the search results pre-loaded. Odds on that guy being moved to the dull end of the Microsoft product portfolio.

Even Steve Largent president of the CTIA who was chairing this event got in on the act. Apparently he was 'very pumped' about some of the stuff Steve was taking about. If you don't believe me check out the full transcript of the keynote.

As you probably tell there was nothing new, inspirational or earth shattering about this keynote. Facebook man is up tomorrow, let's hope he's going to be disruptive.

Something simple, small and nice on the hip

This is a quote from today from one of the panelists (from Sprint) at a educational session I went to today at the CTIA conference.

What was he talking about?

He was describing a BlackBerry and it was said as he flicked his hip towards his hand.

I was on stitches, until I realised everyone else was nodding sagely. 'Yes', the rest of the audience agreed, 'I can see the new Curve looking great on my hip'.

It's a very different mobile world over here and not just because they keep their mobile phones in belt mounted pouches. The carriers are king, everything goes through them.

People buy their phones from them. Not from intermediary like Carphone Warehose but from the network. In the UK we often choose a handset then choose the network (carrier) that offers the best deal to get that handset, complete reverse here.

The networks also control access to their customers with absolute ruthlessness. All SMS services have to be run through shortcodes, period. Virtual mobile numbers, dynamic sender not a chance, or as I was told by one of the networks tonight.

We're not even listening to business cases, it just 'aint gonna happen.

From a European perspective this is astounding, completely alien. But hey, these are very successful businesses serving the most demanding consumers in the world, right?

Time will show whether the Rest of the World model will eventually prevail. In the meantime while we talk of a global economy, culture really is everything.

IP07 - Please call someone

Popped into IP07 this week, the annual exhibition covering the convergence of voice data and video over IP networks. This produced a pretty eclectic mix of exhibitors. To give you a flavour:

• BT and Thus with their managed network services,
• Dialogic with their telephony cards,
• Microsoft of course (what it must be like to have a marketing budget for attending every show almost irrespective of relevance).
• Symantec and IPSwitch offering network monitoring management tools (we use WhatsUp)
• Nokia with all sorts of device management offerings as well their obligatory sexy handsets in glass case
• eFax with the internet faxing service
• Coms, a hosted VoIP provider
• Nortel, Mitel and Avaya offering their particular take on the next generation PBX.

It is to this last group I turn for an interesting insight.

I attended presentations by both Mitel (about Presence) and Avaya (about connecting mobile devices with the corporate PBX) and both had a recurring theme:

Please make voice calls.

People are increasingly using email and text messaging to communicate rather than picking up the phone. If you sell voice systems, this is bad news.

There was talk of the scourge of email trails and how organisations are becoming paralysed as people covered their backsides and cc’d the world. People are using email to hide but are being increasingly overwhelmed by more and more messages. If everyone just picked up the phone, they claimed, life would be better and things would get done.

Picking up the point about hiding, the man from Avaya did have the decency to mention voice mail, the original communication avoidance tool.

There will always be people who want to avoid direct communication but this can be for a number of reasons, not necessarily just because their work-shy.

I use a mix voice calls, email and text to better manage my communications. The choice is a function of the information to be exchanged, my availability and location as well as that of the other party.

Voice calls are if I want to discuss something now or just want to make the communication more personal

Emails are if it’s something that I don’t need an answer to straight away or I’m expecting the other person to consider or research a response

Text is when I’m mobile or I know the other person is, or I don’t know where they are. If it get’s complex or drawn out I’ll generally move over to a voice call or email from my BlackBerry

Receiving and answering a voice call is incredibly interrupting. It stops you dead in your tracks, preventing you from completing what you are doing. Interrupting someone while they’re mind is elsewhere forces them to readjust their thinking and as the caller, you have to negotiate the preamble while this happens before you can have an efficient conversation with the other party.

Email and text on the other hand allow the recipient to complete the task they are currently undertaking. This is far more efficient for both parties.

Send them an email or text and you give them a chance to respond coherently. I’m not saying they will, I’ve fired off far too many reactive emails and texts in my time, but they can.

Whether they do or not is a function of them not the communication method. Impromptu voice calls promote this kind of behaviour.

I'm on a mission

I'm taking part in a UKTI trade mission to CTIA Wireless in San Francisco in a couple of weeks time. Three days of networking, talking and meeting, including a 07:30AM networking breakfast organised by the Canadian Consulate.

I would never consider myself a champion networker, I'm not even sure what would constitute one. However, I'm really looking forward to it.

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft is giving one of the keynotes and I understand he's an entertaining speaker. I saw Bill Gates speak a few years ago and he seemed more other-worldly. Though it was in London so he could have been jet-lagged.

It's not all good news mind you. Seems I'm going to miss the keynote from Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of FaceBook as well as the mBlox party because I'm flying home on Wednesday night after the mission program finishes.

The real focus of the trip is to find out what the US and Canadian markets would make of business messaging, Esendex style. There is a lot of talk in the press and blogs at the moment about people in the US embracing text messaging, be that SMS or other, thanks to American Idol and other media embracement of this communication channel. However, the vast majority of the commentary focuses on the consumer.

It's the same in the other markets we operated in. I think the MDA in the UK are the only body that I've come across who have consistently talked about, and researched, business messaging.

Are US businesses ready?

We have a reasonable number of US customers already, especially given we've never really promoted ourselves across the pond, so I'm confident. But, there's nothing like talking to people and that's what my trip is about, to find out.

Internet World 2007 - Web Marketing

The big 3 in search engines were out in force, almost in inverse proportion to the popularity of their search engines.

Google were tucked away in a little ante-room. We already are avid users of Google Adwords and Google Analytics for marketing and tracking purposes so I decided not to trouble them with a demo.

Yahoo had a very purple stand in the main exhibition area with some typically high quality elements. It is noticeable the stark difference between the companies that have makreting budget of which shows like this are a small part and those for which it's almost everything. Yahoo's sales pitch seemed to be all about what was coming in the next release of their ad management system, basically catching up with Google.

The Microsoft Live adCenter stand was enormous, monolithic in proportion. Had a good chat with a trendy young thing who showed we how I could target people who were searching for xboxes, well 3% of those who did an internet search.

What was interesting though was their demographic profiling. Thanks to the world and his wife having an MSN or Hotmail account, they can use the cookie that they leave on the computer to reference the demographic data associated with their account, primarily age and gender. Now that made me feel a little uneasy as a web user but as a web marketeer that's fantastic.

One of the issues we have with our SMS trial is the number of school children who sign up for some free messages with no intention of buying. Now we do block email domains like hotmail.com and yahoo.com but to not show our adverts to people under 18 would save the click through costs.

All they need now is to improve on 3% of searches.

Internet World 2007 - Mobile

The Mobile zone was the area in which we've been exhibiting over the past few years and the numbers of exhbitors was probably the smallest I've seen it. In the early days it was the only place businesses like ours could profitably exhibit to the buying community.

I remember Esendex,mBlox, HSL, Netsize, MX Telecom, Bango and a host of other smaller players crammed together into one corner of Earls Court. We were rubbing shoulders together like posturing males during mating season. It was an exciting time, everyone was trying to mark their particular territory while trying to work out what everyone else was doing.

Today it was left to the newer entrants to the SMS service provider market like PageOne, txtNation and Dynmark to keep the flag flying. One of the guys at Dynmark did a great job of launching into his pitch and then backing out gracefully as he read my badge.

Internet World 2007 - CMS (Content Management Systems)

We have developed our own CMS at Esendex. This was born out of the frustration of not finding a solution that met a requirements in the market. These requirements are:

• Friendly URLs, not the usual 'content.php?id=1234' which means nothing to either search engines or humans
• Multi language support
• Static site mirroring, from our central site to satelite hosting around the world
• Integration with our existing application platform

It looks like our search maybe over. If the demo and chat I had with the Neal Perry and his colleagues from EPiServer is anything to go by.

EPiServer CMS

The EPiServer system is a CMS focused on delivering web site content, but it's killer feature for me is that it's a set of Microsoft .net libraries that can be embedded into existing ASP.Net sites. Given that our web site, applications and web services are all based on the .net framework you can see that this could be compelling. Further, our in-house team has developed everything you see and use on www.esendex.com. So we have a team with the skills and the will to do the integration, allowing us to maintain a seamless web experience.

We then got onto discussions about the 'warm web-site' where interactions are tracked and categorised allowing content and service to be tailored to the individual. Customer service and sales agents to contact people live, while they are interacting with the site, knowing what they've been looking at or having an issue with. This also allows the web site to adapt it's content to the the user. So if a user generally looks at information on APIs, they can be shown more detailed, tailored information as they explore the site.

So the demo will be downloaded and the support evaluated. Here's hoping the search really is over.

Internet World 2007 - Earls Court

Spent the morning at Internet World 2007 this morning. This is an annual exhibition showcasing all that's essential and groovy for conducting business on the web. This was the biggest I'd seen the show in several years of exhbiting/attending. CMS (Content Management Systems) seemed to occupy a huge zone along with zones for email marketing, affliate marketing, web search and a much smaller mobile zone than previously.

Nice to see a couple of customers there. Solid State Group and M-Send have both been with us for a while. Experian were also represented in a number of guises

Also represented were EazyTiger who were launching their new EazyCommerce platform at the show. We are currently working with Gary and his team on a new version of our web site so it was good to see he had a legitimate excuse for not working on our project ;).

Other notables were the enormous stuffing and folding machines that were being put through their paces in the Direct Mail section. Pity the poor guys at Yahoo whose stand was right next to one of the noisier ones.

The offer of adding a dating channel to our web site form the very nice lady as I walked past the White Label Dating stand. Not quite sure how that would fit with the Esendex corporate web strategy but I welcome comments.

And this poor guy who didn't notice this error dialog on his large presentation screen.

Some more posts to follow on specific areas of the show.

Global Messaging 2007, let the train take the strain

Just booked my ticket for Global Messaging 2007. Last year it was at the Business Design Centre in Islington, this year it's in Monte Carlo. I wonder how they'll compare!

Journey there should be interesting. My first thought was to fly but it meant I had to get to an airport, fly to Nice, then get a train (or pricey taxi). All of which sounds like aggravation, especially when you factor in all the waiting around you end up doing at airports.

An alternative occured to me, why not train all the way. So I did some digging and this is what I'm doing:

• Nottingham to London - Midland Mainline
• London to Paris - Eurostar
• Paris to Monte Carlo - SNCF sleeper service booked through Rail Europe

Price-wise it's pretty much the same as flying once you factor in the transport either end and the cost of two additional nights in a hotel. Plus, I get to leave later and arrive home earlier as well as assuaging some of the carbon debt I'm in for all my flying of late.

But most importantly, I get to pretend I'm James Bond. Just hope the Aston is waiting for me at the other end.