The end of the phone number is in sight

We’ve been without our phone numbers for a month. How have we managed?

The post-telecom era – still undefined but less fuzzy.

Ecomm’s goal was to define the post-telecom era. One possible future is that content for the crowd in the cloud will print money for all of us! Also we can all now be our own GSM operator (local laws permitting).

The importance of being available – (tech stuff)

Westhawk Ltd had a contract to implement a high availability database backed SIP service – what did we use – and why?

The importance of being available

To lose one server, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness. (as Lady Lady Bracknell didn’t say in ‘The importance of being Earnest” ) – how to build a high availability telephony service using open source components.

The way to an exit.

This is the second part of my notes on Essential Mediatech 2008.

The whole crowd had basically one strategy for dealing with 2009 – try and survive it – in the hope (rather than expectation) that 2010 will be better.

Indeed the only people who still seemed cheerful by the end of the day were…

The top 100 mediatech companies 2008

I was at Essential Mediatech today,

There was a lot going on, lots of interesting people and (at least at the beginning of the day) a surprisingly bullish attitude. To give you a feel for the crowd, there were almost no t-shirts, lots of suits, a few ties and quite a few cufflinks.

The new rock and roll. Which is it – Telephony 2.0 or Web 2.0?

Quick summary: Telephony 2.0 is about money – Web 2.0 is about users. Rock and Roll was about both in huge quantities.

The merchant of Prato

I’ve been re-reading “The Merchant of Prato” by Iris Origo. 

The central character – Datini – works away from home a lot, his relationship with his young wife is strained, she spends too much on the housekeeping, he doesn’t entirely trust his business colleagues, he lives in fear of sudden changes in tax regimes. He uses cheap labour from eastern Europe and his religious friend councils him to give more to the poor. His wife can’t conceive, he has an affair with a girl half his age producing a child that was probably his,  he repents, they patch it up etc.

Think I’ve been reading airport novels again ? Well no. Dantini is a real person, a 14th century Italian merchant who made a vast trading empire which he left to charity when he died. The reason we know this is that he was an egotistical pack-rat. He kept all his records and donated them to the city of Prato on his death. The city promptly lost them for 300 years. Which turns out to have been a good thing as we now have the most detailed archive of letters, accountbooks, menus, shoppinglists and bills providing an incredible insight into his life.

As you can see people haven’t changed much since then.  But some things are utterly different. The other woman- was a slave – he bought her. (He subsequently freed her and arranged a ’suitable’ marriage).

Communication was also different. Running a multinational business was a game of patience and huge risks. Basically, you found an adventurous trustworthy young man, you train him, then send him by ship with a pile of your money to (say) England act as your agent. You tell him the sorts of things the English make that you can probably sell (most often wool). The trip takes a few weeks, he settles into the Italian-merchants-in-London scene, and come the summer buys wool at some locally reasonable price.

The agent sends the wool back by ship to you – it arrives at least a year after you sent him out. You now have to hope that the price you can get for the wool is higher than what it cost you to get it. It may not be, but it might be higher elsewhere, you may choose to ship it on, or sell it to a merchant who has an agent in a city where wool is more in demand. If you had know that, you might have had your agent ship it directly there, but he didn’t know that when he sent the ship.

Which brings me (finally)  to the point, information traveled no faster than goods. (Ok, a fast courier might trim a few percent off the the time taken by a tonne of wool). These days physical stuff takes much longer to travel than ideas do. This fundamentally alters the way markets work, the way we do business and increasingly the way we conduct our social lives.

Imagine the value of singe message from Datini to the agent – “Austere Pope elected – buy black wool and send to Rome.” Huge – but only if none of the competitors had that information and connection. So the value of a medium is all about timing, content and provenance, not the medium itself.

Modern telephony fails to capitalize on this distinction.  A 5 minute call between location A and B is few cents, irrespective of the importance of the message. There is no club-class for Voice. For a crucial business call, sealing a deal, I might be prepared to pay 10$/min if it provided me with critical benefits. So what sort of benefits might add a factor of 1000 to the value of a call? 

1. provenance – If I know exactly who I am talking to (and even perhaps their legal role?)
2. security – certainty that the call won’t be intercepted by my competitors
3. un-deniability – The carrier could produce a recording in the event of a legal dispute
4. standing out from the crowd – If I get a call and I know the other side is paying $10 per minute then I’ll probably answer it even if I have no clue what it is about. (LinkedIn are heading this way with InMail – a sort of hyper expensive Email) 

Conversely there is a largely untapped market in almost free calls – a kind of ambient call, where 2 or more people hangout over the phone whilst doing other things – cooking, homework, watching webTV or whatever where there is absolutely no need for any of the above features.

Would Datini have remained faithful if they had had Facebook and MSN ? Maybe, but probably not, the internet hasn’t changed human nature (yet).

The VC’s holiday home

Your startup is like a holiday home.

the 2008 Leeds Barcamp

It was great to get over to Leeds and chat with all the bright folks at BarCamp Leeds.

Lots of good conversations, talks and food. (and beer, except I was driving – sigh)

Highlights for me were:

 Katie Lips talking about “12 startup mistakes not to make” except that it was 13 by the time she spoke (no, she hadn’t made a new mistake on the day, she’d had – in true web 2.0 style – added an extra one ‘contributed’ by the community). I especially liked the advice to not hide your support forums, on the basis that on balance your users are on your side and it provides a way of showing the world that you are listening. On the other hand I’m guessing she doesn’t have young children as she advises working at home to save money on office space – wouldn’t work for me!

A long technical discussion with Robert Burrell Donkin about email, how broken it is, and how it might get fixed. We talked lots about protocols and how badly the existing 7bit 1980’s email protocols suit the modern multilingual world (”Back then all the mail admins knew each other”). We also touched on how self perpetuating  a tech community can be. The complexity of the current email solutions tends to make it very difficult for new (competitive) entrants, combined with the fact that once you have made the personal investment in learning all the tricks, it is harder to see the benefits of radical simplification. We agreed that anger at the inadequacies of the current mess is probably the force that will tip email into the 21st century. That and the fact that the Russians want the internet to work for them too

A chat with Imran Ali about the ethics of online jounalism and how it can be done _better_. In retrospect I think we might have been talking about 1.0 (private sources, hoarding etc) vs 2.0 (communal, open, transparent).

I was shocked by a couple of things:

I found myself almost convinced that  I wanted to try out Adobe Air during the talk on DoJo and Air, the feeling faded as I drove home, but still it was definitely there …. 

I was also taken aback at the fact that several people said “My health has not been good for the last X years”, what is this? – have we all been hacking too hard, something in the Leeds coffee, or just a co-incidence?

I’m really glad I made it (close run thing, I didn’t know I could untill 9pm the night before). Thanks to everyone for organizing it! Also thanks to folks for putting up with me playing Devils Advocate on more than one occasion (you know who you are).

As an added bonus, the scenery on the M62 inspired me – I had a couple of great ideas, more when I’ve patented one and thought through the other