Monthly Archives: October 2008

Palringo adds location notifications

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Geo-centric functionality is more and more a necessity when building social devices, applications, and mashups. The relevance of location to almost every communications transaction is undeniable, and Palringo has embraced this truth by adding location identifiers to Palringo status messages, meaning that your buddy list will now display where in the world you are at the moment.  Good stuff, even if it doesn’t warrant a full-length PR:

LONDON–Oct. 21, 2008—Palringo, one of the most popular instant messaging applications for mobile phones, has added live location information to the latest version of its application—Palringo Local.

Accurate to the suburb or even street level in a city, and to the closest named town in rural areas, Palringo users can opt to display their location alongside their status, for fun, personal, social, business or any other purpose.

Palringo Local goes live today for Microsoft® Windows Mobile® users, and will be delivered as an automatic update for existing users. Roll-out will follow for other popular mobile device operating systems—including Symbian OS™-based phones, Java™, BlackBerry® and iPhone™—completing before the end of 2008. Palringo Local for desktop/laptop editions of the Microsoft Windows® operating system also goes live from today and will be automatically updated.

Palringo enables vocal instant messaging and picture messaging, as well as text-based instant messaging. Knowing the location of contacts adds further richness to the experience and brings benefits in all sorts of scenarios. For example, it may help simply when meeting a friend, or in more sophisticated ways such as assessing whether a conversation will be cheaper to conduct via Palringo than by phone, if to call someone will clearly cause them to incur roaming charges. Palringo is extremely cost-effective to use.

Kerry Ritz, Palringo’s CEO, said: “Since the dawn of the mobile phone era, we’ve all listened into or been part of mobile phone conversations in which the two parties have asked each other where they are—or, with SMS, spent a message establishing those facts. Now, people won’t need to do that; provided someone wishes to ‘show,’ the basic instinct to ‘know,’ even if it doesn’t matter, is satisfied.

“But there are also quite practical reasons for showing your location: if you’re part of a group all meeting in one place, like a sports team; or you want to know where your delivery drivers are without investing in expensive systems. Whatever your reason to show your location, now you can,” he explained.

Anyone using Palringo Local must specifically opt in to display their location; users can opt in and out at will. Even opted in, users retain control over which contacts can see their location. Location may also be set manually.

The popular instant messaging services with which Palringo integrates are: AOL® Instant Messenger®, Google Talk™, Yahoo!® Messenger®, Gadu-Gadu, ICQ®, Jabber® and Windows Live.  People can also use Palringo to contact their friends using iChat®, Apple’s IM application.

Palringo is free to download from www.palringo.com. There are no subscriptions or other hidden charges.

Holy 1997, Batman: Android goes Open Source

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Not a big surprise, here.  This move is definitely in keeping with Google’s other maneuvres, like essentially manipulating the recent federal spectrum auctions and keeping carriers out of unilateral distribution agreements for phones with the Android license.  All moves designed to keep access open, and to keep Google at the helm of web services.

But I’ve grappled with the open-sourcing of Android for a couple of reasons.  When you open source something, it’s either because you’re absolutely desperate to maintain a foothold or create one (like when Netscape Corp. spun off the Mozilla project), because the intellectual property being open-sourced is already stale (the Quake engines, etc.), or because the chances of achieving marketplace competitiveness are actually improved by going open source.  It’s one of the three, in my mind.

Sure, people say the Open Source community provides more abundant creative contribution and discourse, but I don’t necessarily buy that argument.  Don’t confuse Open Source advocacy with volunteerism.   Volunteer programmers get stuff done only when there’s something in it for them.  But real volunteers get stuff done because there’s something in it for somebody ELSE. Any contributions brought to Android by the outside world that are worth assimilation into the project are going to create project management expenses for Google, and the big G has always been an innovation leader (as opposed to a leech), so sucking the community’s cheap or free “cool new ideas” into Android is NOT what Google is up to.

They’re also not desperate for a market share grab.  Android is so far beyond anything Microsoft and RIM have brought to the table that perhaps only Apple’s iPhone is the only valid comparison.  And Apple isn’t running away with the mobile market. There’s just too much entrenchment in the wireless industry, what with all the lock-in contracts and vendor exclusivity and so on.  So Google’s open sourcing is not likely to have an effect on market share, not in the short term anyway.  And it’s clear that the Android technology isn’t what you would call “stale”.

So Google’s move to open up Android has all the appearances of a tactical error.  To figure out the “why”, it’s important to look at the “when”.   The timing of this move is peculiarly unlike previous “big open source” announcements.   Since Android has a ton of buzz and is clearly on the way up, not down, the convential wisdom that only desperate companies open source their stuff does not apply.   Android will be successful in Google’s mind, whether or not it were to become an open source project.

So why? Why now?

According to the official Google posting on the matter, which rightly accuses the iPhone of having a limited, closed distribution channel, the reason for the open-sourcing is to make the platform accessible and free it from the bonds of one hardware vendor or the next.  Open sourcing isn’t necessary to make the platform accessible, of course, but if you’re going to pull out a stop or two, pull ‘em all out.  It’s Google, after all, not Microsoft.

Google sees a future where the carriers and hardware vendors cannot collude because platform choices are going to be made by consumers.   That’s the answer to the “why”.   By giving the consumers at large access to a very compelling (free) platform choice, the carriers and phonemakers have one less competitive advantage in being tied at the hip.  And that is a very good thing.

Growth infrastructure: Something SMBs struggle with

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Growth infrastructure?  What’s that?

Well, put simply, a growth infrastructure means being prepared for, and embracing, the factors that affect change in an organization’s technological competitiveness.  These are factors such as the competitive climate of a particular industry, the trends and curves of I.T. best practices, and the cost-value ratio of technological investments.  There are four elements to a growth infrastructure, and every SMB needs to cover these four elements in their I.T. strategy:

1. A “value over cost” attitude.

2. Pro-active network maintenance.

3. An effective telecommunications approach.

4. Utilizing specialization effectively.

That first one is a big one–how are I.T. organizations to remain competitive when the defining element in their view of investments is cost and cost alone?  I see this all the time, and I’m very sensitive to the need to do business cost-effectively. After all, I’m a business owner, too.  But the time-cost and long-term effect of a poor attitude about cost ultimately burn the organization and cost it more.

Let me give you an example. Let’s take equipment replacement.  PCs have a lifespan of three years on the coasts and probably five years in the midwest.  At a cost of a thousand bucks per PC, you really have to argue that the two year disparity is worth the $400 savings you reap by holding on to your PCs an extra 2 years is really equitable to the lost productivity, maintenance costs, and OEM software discounts you lose by doing so, rather than just replacing the PC on a normal timetable.   I can assure that it costs more than $400 per two years to support an outdated PC. Indeed, if you replace one power supply and upgrade memory one time, you’ve just spent close to the original cost of the PC, accounting for replacement parts and installation time.

That’s probably the purest and simplest example of how a lax attitude about the cost and value of I.T. investments incurs costs over time on an organization. And it also sums up the position of many business managers in the midwest.  Doing business in Cleveland, I see it all the time. Consultants who work for my company have conditioned our customers to adopt a more progressive attitude about vigilant I.T. investment. We train our customers to look beyond one-time capital expenditures and dig deeper into the ongoing cost of managing a network.  Looking at these investments in terms of value and benefit justifies costs and ultimately saves our clients money–and realization of investment benefits is the cornerstone of an I.T. growth infrastructure.

Another element of the growth infrastructure phenomenon is the notion of pro-active maintenance.  Most of our customers are small businesses with fewer than 200 nodes on their networks.  Typically, our customers don’t have I.T. staff, but there’s a threshold where customers feel they must employ I.T. people in order to meet their internal support needs. Unfortunately, this threshold is far lower in their minds than it is in mine.  An unstable I.T. atmosphere demands constant attention, but a proactively maintained network environment requires far less attention and absorbs far less capital.

How many I.T. people in the SMB space are pro-actively performing tasks such as consistency-checking their active directory databases?  Defragmenting their Exchange information stores?  Taking diagnostic readings on storage systems on a weekly or monthly basis?  Measuring network speeds and thruputs on a regular basis?  Performing scheduled test restores from backup media?  Scavenging user accounts on Windows servers and other devices? Researching KB Windows Update patches for potential compatibility issues before installing them?

Fact is, nobody is doing this stuff, because in-house people tend to be too busy with trouble tickets to have enough to pay attention to this stuff. Ironically, these proactive activities reduce trouble tickets and contribute to a more stable environment. Heck, even checking the timestamp on your server’s virus definitions is probably something you never do.  Why? Because you don’t have the time.  Yet these activities are the second hallmark of a growth infrastructure. By proactively maintaining a network, it’s much easier to say “yes” to new technological initiatives, because proactive maintenance breeds familiarity and readiness.

The third item in a growth infrastructure strategy is an effective telecommunications approach. This is a difficult one in the midwest, and in rural parts of the U.S., where inconsistent deregulation has made a mess of price consistency, and inexpensive fiber is practically non-existent outside of “skyscraper islands” where it costs the phone company almost nothing to off it.  Keep in mind, this isn’t lower Manhattan. This is the suburband midwest. Fiber just doesn’t exist out here.

So what is one to do about metro-area and wide-area connectivity? The only answer is to treat high-speed private connectivity as a cost of doing business and adopt it anyway, despite its high cost.  Regionally, midwestern cities and towns have fallen behind the coastal cities and tech super-centers (San Francisco, New York, Chicago, San Diego, and so on) in this area because they refuse to “adopt down” the cost of good telecom.  And the result is that they become less effective competitors in their industries.

The last item in a growth infrastructure is specialization.  SMBs, this is crucial: why would you take your full-time I.T. staffer and throw him on a server upgrade project that’s going to take him two weeks to complete?   Sure, it’s his job right?   Consider that your in-house I.T. staff does one, two, or three server upgrade projects per year while balancing his other support duties.  Also consider that there are I.T. consultants who do two or three hundred server ugprade projects per year and have no other tasks competing for their time when they’re on your project.  Now, comparing your in-house I.T. guy versus a contracted consultant on a server upgrade project, who do you think is going to get that server upgrade more effectively and quickly?  The guy who does it all the time and has nothing else to do, or the guy who rarely does it and has a full plate?

If you’ve got that idea that an effective growth infrastructure is all about attitude, you’re right.  Midwest SMBs, it’s time to adopt a new attitude.