Thanks Erik for sending the link!

The question is can you spot the PC in the picture?

Still happy with my switch to Mac OS X, it’s working really well for me. The only hazzle has been moving my e-mails from Outlook, which I in the end decided not to do (in theory you can import into Thunderbird on Windows, and then import the Thunderbird files on the Mac Mail, but it will never import all of your e-mails, due some differences in how Thunderbird stores the files).

I think that Leopard will be a nice step forward as well, so will be interesting when that comes out, with some updated features.

Been quite busy working on the latest startup projects, most notably GlocalReach that is doing a funding round right now, and have not had too much time for blogging. Will do better to keep blogging a bit more!

I am not getting a Mac because they make better laptops than Lenovo, they don’t. They make good laptops, but Lenovo Thinkpads still are better laptops in terms of performance, durability, battery time etc and more suited for my needs. Windows Vista however is not suited for my needs, so that is my primary reason for switching to Mac.

Also I hope that Steve Jobs statements about “nobody is using Java anymore” was a mistake; with a few billion devices (many of them are mobile phones) that support Java, a lot more people use Java than Macs… Besides personally it’s a must, even though I don’t normally do any development work; I need to test things that comes from the development (which a lot of it is Java based server applications) in the various startups I work with and some of the most common productivity applications that I use everyday are written in Java, so when choosing Mac; Java support is a must for me.

So now that I got my new MacBook Pro yesterday, and started installing all the stuff I work with (including VMWare Fusion, to use my Windows artifacts during the transition), all in all I am happy with the 15.4″ 2.4GHz MacBook Pro that I bought, it is really fast, and even Windows XP inside VMWare Fusion boots in a matter of seconds (Windows Vista on my old Thinkpad, although the fastest available when I got it, 2GB RAM, High-speed disk, 2.0GHz Laptop takes almost a minute).

My first impression and thoughts about the machine (and ideas for improvement):

• Higher resolution display for the 15.4″, my 4.5 year old Thinkpad, has 1400×1050 on 14″ display, which is actually a quite good resolution, 1440×900 is a bit low, a higher DPI gives much crisper graphics and text (even new mobiles like the new Nokia Communicator has a higher DPI than 15.4″ MacBook Pro).
• Optional Trackpoint, I think I will get used to the Mac Trackpad, it’s quite good for Trackpad, but it do not have the precision and ergonomics of a Trackpoint (the latter, quite a good aspect of, you do not need to move your hand going between typing and moving the mousepointer).
• Disk encryption like the Thinkpads have.
• Built-in WWAN (but don’t do it like Lenovo, thery were the first in the world to launch this in 2005, but the models were only sold with SIM-locked subscriptions, which means these models where not sold i most parts of Europe, due to hard do agreements with all different small Telco’s). There are many
• Longer Battery life, although it is quite acceptable, the Thinkpad X series is quite unbeatable (7 – 9 hours of actual usage, not fictive hours).

Overall I am happy with my Switch to Mac, and I think that both the hardware and the new environment will serve me well for my work needs. But I am hoping that now that Apple have a momentum (Apple grows faster than PC) they will keep it up and get some of the features needed to make Mac a fully-featured Business laptop as well.

After my summer vacation I will try to elaborate a bit more on my ideas of the Semantic Web, and some ideas for new projects that that will accelerate the use of the Semantic Web.

“Search engine giant Google has slammed Sweden’s proposed wiretapping legislation as illiberal and incompatible with Western democracy.”

More information here.

Fortunately the legislation was postponed, even though the former Swedish government’s major party (Social Democrates) are pro the wiretap proposal, the smaller parties in the parliament managed to post-pone the legislation of it for at least a year. Hopefully the opposition will gain some momentum by then. I wonder what RFA (Swedish NSA eq.) will use their new super computer for if the proposal is not passed to legislation.

So Lenovo basically sells Laptops to customer that pay for the hardware, get a locked WWAN card that they only can use with a certain provider.
The thing is there are lot’s of providers, outside of the US, and if you live there or just want to use your Thinkpad there you are out of luck, seems like either the Operators are going to put the laptop industry to a grinding halt for innovations (or their use) just as they have done for mobile phones.

Well, operators are just happy giving customers this experience, and Lenovo do not care to much about selling additional machines for European customers (or people roaming in Europe), they offer some options with Vodafone, but Vodafone is not even in all countries in Europe, and only offers the Thinkpad 3G locked-in solution in a few. So even though Lenovo was the first in the world to sell laptops with built-in 3G, in most countries in Europe it was first introduced from other manufacturers a year later. And still is not available in most European countries.

This is the pace of innovation in the world of GSM operators, so just as somebody said in their presentation on Von Spring Europe 2007 this week, “The biggest problem with GSM is the operators”.

Part of the problem is regulation (either too much, or inappropriate), where existing Telecom operators are using the regulations to enforce their existing models, and the regulations are keeping new players at an noncompetitive position. For example some countries has legal requirements for a regulated operator to terminate International call in the country of origin (mostly due to requirements for military agencies to monitor traffic).
Another thing is IMS, that is based on being non-open for third-party services, is deployed to allow operators to apply traditional Telco business models to new services carried over IP, and keep control of services, end-to-end. The operators will close of any of competition’s services, if a cable/broad-band operator offers a pay-ed for Video service, they will block Joost, if they offer or own a paid for dating Community, they might block-out match.com and so on, or why not steer their users to use their own Internet Search service (where they are generated ad-revenue) and block of Google.

Now you might think that, no one would be a customer of a Internet service that blocks of Google today, and they won’t be blocking Google, but they will be blocking any future Google’s, YouTube’s, MySpaces or other upcoming services just as the Mobile Operators has done.

IMS (IP Multimedia System), developed with-in 3GPP, is a service delivery platform supplied by companies such as Ericsson, Nokia etc (traditional Telco solution suppliers), to integrate Voice, Video between phones, mobiles and computers using IP. It has been created basically so that the operators can build n-Play services that they control and effectivly control which services you can use from your Internet connection, just as on your mobile, where an operator can close the built-in VoIP client of certain mobiles so that you can not use that over your WiFi connection at home or at a hotspot.

Some links:

• http://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.110807 (Computer Sweden, Swedish)

1. Ubiquitous connectivity as Sheldon Renan (founder of Wibiki) spoke about with his concept of Netness.
2. Open standards and less regulation.
3. Lot’s of room for third party applications.

Simply put, we need less of the old telco-world of regulations, device lock-in, high-date rates, monstrous roaming charges, and is instead flat-rate IP-based connectivity at home, in mobiles and just about everywhere.

On that platform of a ubiquitous IP-infrastructure we can have triple-play, quad-play, penta-play or whatever, everything is just another service or application over IP, may it be Video, Voice etc. And we will see convergence between applications and new types of applications with Voice or Video applied.

This will create room for innovation, new types of services and application and true convergence. But also the lower barrier of entry works both ways, new services will have more competition and hard to create and maintain barriers of entry, so this create some new challenges to consider, most notably:

How to create business and make money in a world with-out scarcity?

Or perhaps with less scarcity, the ones that manage to-do this, will succeed in the long run. Or perhaps just find scarcity in other ways, such as having a better service, or a more innovative service etc.

I travel quite a lot and I always carry my laptop with me, so a light and sturdy, well-designed Business laptop like the Thinkpad is what worked very well for me for the last 10 years or so, so Steve Jobs, here’s my wish list for new portable business Macs:

• Make a Tablet Mac as an option, why should one have to run Windows to use a tablet PC?
• Better battery time, the Thinkpads give me up-to 8 (or more) hours of actual run time on one charge (the MacBook homepage says 5.5 hours, people tell me ~ 3 hours is typical).
• Trackpoint, I know most people used the cheaper PC laptops and got used to the pad. But The TrackPoint is addictive and works really well for me, in fact so well, it’s major feature when buying a new laptop (I even have a IBM Trackpoint keyboard for my Mac Mini).
• Better Graphics, I would actually like real graphics performance (not for games but for business apps), like I can get with the Thinkpads, HP’s, Dell’s etc.
• Built-in 3G, why would I have to get a PC to get built-in 3G cards, these are available as standard mini-PCI cards.

So Steve, keep up the good job with the Mac OS X, steal some ideas from Lenovo and build the best portable business Laptops.

The original is at: http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=81

One of the companies targeting this is Mobispine, that provides a high-quality Java based mobile client for image and video blogging, as well as consuming your favourite RSS-feeds, and it works with most Java capable phones on the market.

Google and Yahoo are also starting to target this area, with Microsoft not too far behind, and the main driver behind many of these applications is to capture an quickly emerging mobile ad market.

Resources

• Sony Ericsson
• Mobispine

This is primarly due to Web-TV services like, YouTube, Google Video or Joost that stream video over the Internet, so why are they raising these claims? I already pay for the bandwidth I have/use! So now all of a sudden they want to charge extra for the same bandwidth!

I think this is because they want additional revenue (which is totally understandable, who wouldn’t), but I think the main drivers are:

1. They see a potential of tapping into somebody else’s revenue stream.
2. Many Telco’s also own Cable distribution networks or are starting to offer IP-based digital TV.
3. Many Telco’s have a traditional non flat-rate business (mobile phones, traditional telephony).

Old Telcos
And generally it is the old Tele and cable companies that raise these questions, some of the pure broadband operators discard the claims and says that they would charge more for the services providers using excessive bandwidth (which is IMHO ok, when I host my server I pay for the bandwidth I use, I a min. amount is included and if I would use up enormous amounts I would pay an additional fee for that).

I think this is another way of the Telco’s trying to keep their old paradigm, this is why deregulation of Telco’s and ISP’s to create competitiveness is so crucial. It is more of a rule in monopoly countries that the national Telco filter out VoIP, WebbTV (and for non-democratic countries it’s generally content based filtering as well, such as in China).

What can you do?
Make sure you use your consumer power, and switch to the competitive ISP’s or broadband companies.

These number reveal that at most 2 percent of the Skype software downloads reflect users online, and that downloads reflect almost a 3x download of Skype per user. No account for the users that have multiple devices, like one for the Office, one at Home etc (and when did I want more numbers? This seems very Telco 1.0, I want fewer more intelligent numbers instead!)

With the 171 million users reported that means a max of five percent of the installed user base with accounts are using Skype at any one time. The key number that is missing is how many Skype users convert to some paid Skype service. That information remains a mystery so while eBay reports gross aggregated dollars generated from Skype they don’t provide the breakdown that shows where the trends are going:

1. eBay has not been reported the number of paid Skype In numbers in service (I have three in various parts of the world) and after a year or more Skype still calls this a Beta service.
2. No information is available yet from eBay on Skype Out minutes sold or consumed.
3. What’s more is there hasn’t been any public commentary on what is called breakage, or the unconsumed minutes by users who bought SKype Out credit and just never used it.
4. No stats are available of users who have purchased and used Skype Voice Mail.
5. No stats are published about conversion to Skype Add-Ins, the adoption levels, use and how much money is being generated in around the Skype eco-system, etc.

When it comes to telling the numbers, Skype’s between a rock and a hard place.

Report these types of numbers and they present a compelling case to the more mainstream companies and users who have yet to see the value.

At the same time if they actually reveal the numbers in clear the operators might begin to see the Skype threat more clearly, which in turn may cause them to embrace the Skype alternatives that are based on SIP that would give them something to offer to keep their existing customer from leaving. Some of the operators are already starting to offer SIP based services (e.g. I can get a SIP trunk instead of PRI trunk form my company from some operators in Europe as well as SIP based VoIP for consumers).

There are some serious things to think about regarding the Skype phenomenon:

• Skype uses proprietary protocols, it can not be connected to standard (SIP) devices, equipment and software.
• Although an impressive user base, compare number of users to the number of phones in the world.
• Compare the number of call minutes consumed over Skype compared to traditional Phones.
• Also, what do Skype provide you with that your traditional Operator do not except cheaper calls? Cheaper calls is a fact, and they will continue to be cheaper (my girlfriend has a none Skype phone at her home with free national calls, except mobiles, for a fixed low monthly fee).

I think there are tremendous opportunities with Voice services carried over the Internet, just as we are seeing new types of online Web services coming to existence everyday because of the inherit open architecture of Internet technology, this will happen for Voice, but it won’t happen with a proprietary protocol!

Once the thinking on all fronts changes Telco 3.0 will be here, by then I hope to have started some interesting startups in the Voice 2.0 / Telco 3.0 or however we decided to hype the next wave of voice communication.

Voice 2.0
Voice 2.0 promise to deliver new types of voice services integrated with IP services, everything from integrating phone calling to your website (cheaply) to add-on services such as unified messaging, routing, switching, forwarding calls “internally” to a colleague at another office, in another country, automatically connecting to your mobile phone when out-of-reach from your local VoIP connection to services yet to be imagined.
Many of these services has been around for quite some time for the big companies that bought the big and expensive (not just to buy, but to operate) digital PBX’s. Now these services
will be available to private individual, one-person company, or virtual companies (a number of freelances working together over the Internet). Small entities will be able to act even more as the big ones.

I think 2007 will be an interesting year in the VoIP and Telco arena, with a number of interesting startups surfacing.

Resources
Some interesting companies in this area.

• GrandCentral.
• iSkoot.

• There was a lot of talk largely because PC servers are today used for more critical and demanding applications (haven’t we heard this for quite awhile? But it takes time for things to become a reality and sink in), and the management and utilization problems are growing to the proportions of those old demanding systems and applications that we got rid of ages ago, ironic perhaps?
• CPU vendors realized this and started position products in this arena, both AMD and Intel have announced and are delivering CPU’s with hardware virtualization support. Others as well; Sun’s new multi-core T1 supports virtualization.
• OpenSource Xen made it’s entry into the market, putting pressure on established vendors such as VMWare to provide more widespread solutions.
• During 2007 we are seeing virtualization hardware support in commodity products (even most notebooks sold in 2007 will have virtualization support).
• Windows Vista Server will support some type of virtualization.

What and why will it be used?
The most definite use is on servers where one will make administration a lot more managagle and make it easy to move complex applications (consisting of a number of components) between systems. I could however imagine using virtualization on my next laptop, image having a really small system that boots up and handles storage etc from where I could put my “application environment” (i.e. Windows), will make my 3 to 6-monthly reinstalls of Windows to keep it running ok a lot smoother (all my files will be on the small Linux file server). Maybe not the scenario that will be used by most computer users, but as the technology matures and is packaged even the less techy-savvy computer user will probally start using the technology.

Good time for specilist startups
There are a few Opensource providers that provide good technical solutions, but there is room for a number of local specialist startups that provide expertise and some packaged OpenSource solutions (together with custom software) around for example Xen.

History of Virtualization
Although virtualization has been around for quite some time since IBM invented the concept of virtual machines in 1967 and have been available in their mainframe servers, mid-range and later the UNIX (AIX) based servers. Other vendors have provided similar solutions through-out the years.
Resources

• Will Novell buy Xen?
  
• Definition of Virtual Machines.
• Last three months on Virtualization on IntelINews.

Here is one example I found on YouTube.

How do we flatten the organisation?

I am not thinking about the traditional sense of removing hierarchy (that is a separate thread), but I am thinking back to Thomas Friedmans book “The world is flat” and how Internet and web technology (Web browsers, workflow software etc) has enabled a global workplace, where a service can be seamlessly be performed by somebody next door or on the other side of the globe. How do we move that into the organisation? I am thinking about not how to out-source the work, but more of a leadship challenage; how to move that thinking vertically and get all workers invovled in the processes that change and evolve the organisation? Current Internet tools (and peoples knowledge about using web based applications) creates tremendous oppertunities, but I have seen quite a bit of IT projects with-in organisations that have provided all the tools, but people never use them, sometimes it’s lack of training, but often it is lack of motivation. My experience is that technology is easy, people are not.

The outsourcing companies in India pay their workers a very good sallary, and there are enough of skilled, motivated people that want to make use of their skills to raise their standards of living, so motivation is a lot easier. In the western world it’s not uncommon for workers to complain about not being able to influence their workplace at the sametime they do not use the tools at hand to do so.

How do we motivate people to use the tools that would flatten the organisations, and make them more agile, motivate the good brains to be part of the various processes that produce new and improved services and products?

EDA
So what is EDA? Well EDA paves the ground for the real-time enterprise where different IT systems act together in real-time and are triggered by business events, such as purchase order completion, systems failure or any other condition that could arise with-in the enterprise IT systems.
EDA is not new at all, it has been used for more complex software applications such as operating systems or systems management tools, and sophisticated developers at financial institutions for a long time.

ESB
The ESB concept also allows a very elegant way of pulling together different disparse systems developed in different technology using XML messages, compared to SOA, you do not even have to bother with Web Services, each system (which becomes a ESB service/component) just send and receive messages on a “intelligent” bus, that routes the messages to the appropiate systems according to it’s configuration.
So for example if you have web based storefront, that uses an ESB to do credit card validations using a service/component on the bus, let’s say you just bought a separate service or software that adds another 30% accurancy in detecing frauds, to integrate this software, you attach it to the bus, and configure the bus to funnel all messages through this new service/component. You do not need to change the two existing services at all (web storefront or the existing credit card validation).

According to Gartners Roy Schulte, around 2007 Event Driven Architecture (EDA) adoption will begin be more widespread.

Some brief comments for the day:

Renaissance? – of networks that serve end users not absent owners – Malcom J Matson – oplan foundation
Good presentation about the telecoms industry and their [in Malcom's view] obsolete business model, by the founder of colt communications. Intersting view on the development of telecommunications, more information available at the oplan website.

Steve Coast – OpenStreetmap
Cool project to gather map data from the global community to build non copyrighted maps, todate it has 21 Million GPS points and started wuth hardware donated from the university, but has out-grown this to accomodate the processing demands for aggregating the information One member builds stress maps (aggregated stress levels for people in different areas).

Demo of Underskog.no
User community for friends to blog, pictureblog etc. Does not accept new users todate, but could be an interesting up and coming community.

PirateBay
The piratebay guys had the server consficated yesterday, but are here to tell about their website and that they are back tomorrow. On the question of if this is right, or why they are doing this? – “If you do what you want with your Internet and I will do what I want with mine”
For me this says alot of why a lot of people are so dedicated of doing things on the Internet, just because it can be done, and because it’s not owned by somebody else (everby owns their Internet…).

Mobile 2.0 – Social Renaissance – ahtisaari.typepad.com – www.aula.org
Good presentation about Marko’s ideas and thoughts of Mobile 2.0, going from the 1.0 that was driven largly by operators Phone subsidies. This paved the way for widespread usage of mobile phones (2 Billion todate).
Marko’s view on the challenges and oppertunitues of the 2.0 of mobiles