It’s kind of scary seeing my mug on John’s post from the 27^th about GIPS mobile offerings.  However, as has been widely published in sources like Engadget, Gizmodo and the New York Times, there has been a crack in Apple’s normally impenetrable veil of secrecy around new product developments with the exposure of a prototype of Apple’s next generation iPhone.  The fact that the device has a front facing camera is the best response to the piece covered in John’s post.

A frequent criticism of Apple is that they don’t do anything that revolutionary.  It is that claim that makes Apple’s success all the more spectacular and game-changing.  Portable .mp3 players existed long before the iPod, but Apple’s entry changed not only the company, but the entire industry.  Similarly, the iPhone and the iPad were neither the first smart phone nor the first tablet PC on the market, but their introduction and resulting success have changed their markets significantly.  With the iPhone, hundreds of thousands of applications have proliferated, creating a whole new market for applications developers (historically a weakness for Apple).  Adding voice and video to some of these applications will enrich the experience for the end user.  To be sure, mobile video conferencing is again not a new category, as AT&T introduced video share about three years ago.  However, the service was not very usable and the device support was not where it needed to be.  However, with the introduction of frame-by-frame access to the camera which is included in iPhone OS 4 and the front facing camera which appears to be part of the 4G design, Apple will be poised once again to change the game with mobile video conferencing.

Now, no discussion of the leak would be complete without mention of the heavy handed response of Apple and the local authorities against Gizmodo and the individual who found the lost device.  However, coverage of that topic should be left to the professionals…or at least the fake professions at The Daily Show: 

I believe that this week’s news about Google’s threat to pull out of the Chinese market has far reaching implications for the ultimate opportunity to provide more openness.  David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer was interviewed earlier this week on CNBC (my apologies in advance for the really lame graphics, sound effects and screaming reporter):

Although Gmail was not yet a service available on google.cn, it was a service that many Chinese used on gmail.com.  And email is only one of the beneficial services available on Gmail.  Gmail (and its tightly associated Gtalk) is one of the leading providers of HD Voice.  Local Chinese Internet service providers Baidu and TenCent also offer HD Voice, but their ability to interconnect Chinese with international callers may not ultimately be as powerful as Google’s capability to do so.

During graduate school at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, I participated in a two week seminar in China on the ins and outs of doing business there.  Besides being very impressed with what I saw and the companies that I visited, it was very clear that there were a multitude of challenges to succeeding and that the effort was not for the faint of heart.  In many of the articles that I have read in the last week, I was surprised to read the speculation that Google’s true motivation for its actions was the second place ranking of its search engine.  Considering the challenges involved, I think that Google has accomplished a lot in the short time that it has been engaged in China.

Ultimately, voice and video over IP has the power to connect people in ways that aren’t fully possible via email or other more static information technologies.  This ability to connect and exchange ideas is an opportunity that all nations benefit from.  Hopefully, the Chinese government and Google can come to a mutually beneficial arrangement to provide the Chinese with the ability to reach out and connect with the rest of the world.  They have a lot to learn from us, and we have a lot to learn from them.

You have probably heard talk of Internet Service Providers (ISP) controlling the traffic that runs on their networks. Their goal is to cut special deals to speed certain web sites, to slow other sites down, or to just block certain content from crossing their wires.  See this informative video for a primer:

Or this humorous coverage from the Daily Show:

This is potentially a real problem for communications as delay is one of the main impediments for natural feeling and high quality voice and video over IP.  Worse yet, an ISP might choose to block voice and video over IP in hopes that subscribers will use their other services for communications.  This is already the case to a certain degree with Apple’s restriction on the use of the iPhone for VoIP over AT&T’s cellular data network.  The most famous contest to support Net Neutrality, the unfettered flow of all traffic over the providers’ networks, came when the FCC ruled that Comcast should stop its restrictions of BitTorent.  As discussed in this article at the time by Saul Hansell of the New York Times, Comcast complained that BitTorrent users were a small percentage of their users but were taking up a disproportionate percentage of their network capacity.  By ruling against Comcast, the FCC declared their support for Net Neutrality.  There has been a wealth of efforts to advocate for Net Neutrality including Save the Internet and We Are the Web.  Even President Barack Obama has come down on the side Net Neutrality in his Tech Innovation Agenda and as his remarks on May 29^th, 2009, on securing our nation’s cyber infrastructure:

Unfortunately, as Marvin Ammori has recently posted, there is a serious threat to Net Neutrality in the way that US courts might interpret the government’s imposition of Net Neutrality on the cable companies.  He writes that one of Al Franken’s key questions for Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor will be her stance on the issue of Net Neutrality.  Ammori states in his article that it is possible to interpret the First Amendment itself as forbidding network neutrality.  Clearly, though it seems counterintuitive that the First Amendment could be used to restrict what you can do on the Internet, there will likely be a lot of effort by the major providers to defend their right to discriminate traffic.  Hopefully the intent of the First Amendment will prevail over the interests of the corporations, and the Internet will be allowed to server the interests of all of its users.

This past Friday was SUPPOSED to be a vacation day camping at the best urban campsite that I know of at Kirby Cove.  However, with a major integration of our video technology underway at a top tier Internet Service Provider (stay tuned for news), duty called.  And to reach out to our Swedish Engineering team, I needed only to use my Samsung Omnia from Verizon to help coordinate some last minute details.  Late Thursday evening, my first stop down the information superhighway on my Smartphone was an application called Nimbuzz (see John’s mobile HD voice post from last week).  With Nimbuzz, I was able to see all of my IM contacts’ presence and use HD voice to talk to Magnus at the start of his Friday morning workday (all from the convenience of my handset over the data network!).  I was also able to send off a few quick messages to other team members regarding a few other ongoing projects and stay on top of my email for any urgent issues.  Then, I participated in an hour and a half long conference call using the dial-in portion of GoToMeeting from Citrix Online (See Larry’s personal breakthrough post from March).  All of this technology allowed me to be very productive and completely untethered from my office.  It is possible that my post does not surprise you, and if so, I am glad.  The promise of these technologies is beginning to receive wide-spread recognition and use.  However, this was my view of the full moon rising over The City, the Golden Gate Bridge and the beach at Kirby Cove:

This was my office furniture:

And my office equipment:

I was talking to Jan the other day about how little American television broadcast news actually reports news.  Is it because they have spent all of their money investing in visual effects and so little on paying reporters to gather the news?  As a case in point, the election coverage last Fall introduced a number of very expensive effects.  I found an interesting article in Broadcast Engineering discussing some of these effects and their relative impact.  I am not saying that the virtual interviews done by CNN weren’t a creative way to have an interview with someone who might be a world away (parodied here).  I think that there are really good uses of telepresence which can be augmented by the projection of somebody not in the room in a way that makes you feel that they are.  John Chambers from Cisco recently demonstrated this in India. On NBC, I also found it interesting how by twisting the rendered images of two talking heads slightly towards each other, there was more of an impression that they were in fact talking to each other instead of into space.  However, the content is still the key ingredient in making these effects matter.  Getting back to the conclusion of the article in Broadcast Engineering:

Despite all the technology, the most memorable part of the night featured no special effects at all.  President-elect Barack Obama’s dramatic appearance and speech before 1 million-plus emotional people in Chicago’s Grant Park was watched by more than 71 million viewers. 

Clearly, having meaningful content to broadcast is key to successful television just as having something meaningful to say is the key to successful communication.

I saw a very interesting article on the Washington Post’s website today about continued growth in the consumption of mobile video.  The article by James Quintana Pearce highlighted the results of Nielsen’s report, Tuned into the Phone: Mobile Video Use in the U.S. and Abroad, and found that there were over 10 million mobile video viewers in the US in Q3 2008.  Another interesting discovery in the article is that long-form videos, like a full TV program, were amoung the most popularly viewed content.  What I find most interesting about this is that users’ acceptance of watching a full-length program on their cell phones may signify their willingness to use the medium for 2-way real-time video communications.  There are already mobile video communication services available in the US – AT&T was one of the first carriers to provide a Video Share service with its launch in 2007.  Nicole Lee of CNET in her July 27, 2007 review pointed out that unfortunately the service only provides one-way video.

In October of last year, GIPS launched its VideoEngine Mobile which facilitates the integration of high-quality video over IP into its customers’ mobile applications.  As the penetration of smartphones continues to grow (the Nielsen includes information about the growth of equipment capable of displaying video), the prospect of two-way video communications is becoming a reality.  At this month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, GIPS is partnering with Movial to demonstrate their mobile client built on the GIPS VideoEngine.

Today I saw an article on the new VON website. (Yes, after years of decline and a major hiccup this Spring with the mysterious disappearance of VON Europe, they seem to be back with solid web presence, plans for a print magazine, and a Fall show in Miami. It will be interesting to see if they can rebuild their momentum.) The article cited President-elect Barack Obama’s comments on his Economic Recovery Plan during his weekly address on the official Change web site. It is interesting to note how different our economy is now than during the Great Depression and the New Deal. Therefore, it is important to include the Internet as part of our critical economic infrastructure. Here is a brief excerpt from his address:

As we renew our schools and highways, we’ll also renew our information superhighway. It
is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here,
in the country that invented the internet, every child should have the chance to get online,
and they’ll get that chance when I’m President – because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s
competitiveness in the world.

Obama’s Address on His Economic Recovery Plan

As purveyors of voice and video over IP, investment into the infrastructure necessary for the successful utilization of our technology is obviously an encourging development. However, it is truly a far reaching opportunity for the US, and by extension the entire global economy, to facilitate productive growth and productivity gains through investment into bandwidth and access to the Internet. Contrary to the comments [pdf] of Rick Wagoner, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of General Motors, to the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on November 18, products developed with technology are part of today’s real economy and need similar government infrastucture investments as any other industry.