Yawn.

I hope this doesn’t bring us closer to legislation. Point is, if Joe Customer gets pissed at his service provider because of such tactics, he’ll just leave that service provider. The market solves the problem. Too conservative an approach, you say?

What about all these people bandying about terms like ‘discrimination’ to evoke feelings of humanism in this matter? We’re talking about packets, here, not lives. There is no civil rights movement in the telecom industry, just a bunch of (ingenius and deserving) startups teaming with Google to prevent Bell and Warner from bluffing their admittedly very heavy upper hand and making things sticky for a few years while the Internet access market, dominated by the few and privileged, corrects itself and the SpeakEasy-type service providers rediscover the niche of “no-frills-no-penalties” access.
But the startups have got to know resorting to such cheap linguistics tactics is about as low as you can get. We’re not talking about discrimination on the basis of race or creed (things that actually matter). No, we’re talking about discrimination on the basis of acceptable use, and, yes, abuse. The access providers are well within their moral boundaries to massage traffic to suit their profit needs. And if their customers get pissed off about it, well, those customers will just leave.

Filling the role of O’Reilly’s now-defunct eTel conference, eComm is organized by luminary Lee Dryburgh, who’s done an admirable job lining up critical sponsorships like GigaOm, SixApart, and Voxbone.  But this is no ordinary business conference. It’s the impromptu coffee talks and sidebar discussions that make events like eComm so important. An idea is shared, a handshake happens, and a partnership is formed.  You could be witnessing the birth of the next Twitter, the next Google, or the next Facebook.

So get there–speakers from Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and other clutch hitters will be in attendance. Critical mass has formed around the communications revolution. The masses want institutional and technological change. There’s a will. eComm is the way.  Get there.

The way it works, the Gizmo backend server uses IM to collect your Myspace account information and then logs into your account, parses information out of your profile, and sends you text-based alerts when that information changes. Yeah, really–that’s about ALL there is to it. Oh, and it will forward MySpace IM messages to and from your phone. But you can’t browse your MySpace buddy list unless you want to send texts back and forth to the IM-based “agent” they’ve built.
Not exactly the kind of interactivity I was hoping for. Let’s hope version 2 is more fruitful.

People drive old beat-up cars until they just won’t run any more. And 4 billion nodes is plenty, at least for a while.

Well the reserve price has been met. But by whom? Some say Google. Other say Google has no real interest in the spectrum, but has been submitting bids just to get the price over the reserve threshold and into the range where open access is required–because that benefits Google whether or not they own the spectrum license. It will be interesting to see who the winner is, and how they got there

- A slow, multi-year put-down of Yahoo Messenger as users are transitioned over to Live services.

- A new ad-federation effort centered on Yahoo’s superior content services rather than on Microsoft’s lamer MSN-vintage stuff.

- A  further Windows-ization of Yahoo services. (Certain non-Windows OSs have always been excluded from parts of the Yahoo party.)

-  The Vista angle. The push for Vista will be aided by the mindshare Microsoft would gain vis a vis Yahoo’s content empire. Make a few things Vista-only, and the customers will come. Kind of reminds me of how Microsoft bought Bungie, a Mac developer who was designing a Mac game called Halo, and then promptly made their flagship project the killer app for the Xbox.

-  A bigger outlet for Facebook, since Yahoo’s got a slew of non-2.0 users to sell to, and Microsoft owns a sizable piece of Facebook.

Worse, three different phone reps at Windstream told me three different things about the availability of a complete refund to my account because of the mixup. One told me it would be no problem. Another told me they could pro-rate the current month and knock the balance down a bit. The third told me just no, no, no.  What’s worse, the callback I requested from a higher-up never happened within 24-48 as promised by the rank-n-file I talked to.  That was a week ago. I currently have a consumer advocacy buddy of mine working on the matter.

1. Implement (and stick to) a regular regimen of jogging. I had it going pretty good last summer but these brutal north coast winters have a tendency to keep you indoors.

2. Land 2 or 3 new clients in the periodical publishing business. My company has a great consulting approach that shows how to integrate WordPress into a professional-calibre workgroup web publishing solution for people who make magazines and newspapers.

3. Hire a business development executive. Again, my company is growing, but our ambitions are very high, and we’re in this for the long haul. So grabbing and retaining a top-flight BDE is on my to-do list.

4. Get back to the tropics for a visit. Southern Florida would even be sufficient. I need some sunlight, man.

5. Get to bed by 11 pm every night. Nuff said. This might permit me enough energy to turn out another book!!
6. Get my hands an the new 810 Internet Tablet from Nokia and hack it into the best turn-by-turn navigation system money can buy.

7. Figure out how to get a contract-free, SIM-unlocked iPhone so I can poke around with the SDK when it shows up.

8. Get moved into a permanent office space. We recently moved out of our office in Elyria, OH, and we’re considering moving into the Great Lakes Technology Park on the campus of Lorain County Community College.

9. Figure out how to get uPnp working between the PS3, Wii, and Mac. So far, no luck.

10. Build a life-size Star Wars replica prop of some sort.

1. By June, my hair will be shoulder-length. Don’t believe it? On the solstice, I’m getting a buzz cut. All true.
2. I dropped out of high school in 1993 and later got my diploma endorsement from an adult education program in Detroit. I’ve since realized that school matters. I also realized that the publishing industry doesn’t care if you’re a drop-out, as long as you know how to write. How about that.
3. I own Best Technology Strategy Inc., an executive consulting and technology patent research company based in Cleveland, OH. My business partner is an Air Force Vet and a high school graduate and a college graduate

4.  My favorite color is blue. Not sure why–it’s a serene color and there’s very little in nature that’s blue that’s not desirable. Blue sky, blue ocean, blue cheese. All very good stuff.

5. I have two of the awesomest people on the planet as my children. They are the most beautiful and perfect humans I have ever met!

6. My first computer was a Timex Sinclair ZX81. Second one was a Commodore 64. Third was an Amiga 500. It was all downhill from there.

7. I love Apple products but refuse to be a poster boy for Apple.  That’s why I don’t have one of those free Apple logo stickers in the rear window of my Pacifica.

8. I operate a recording studio in my basement for fun and practice music recording and production as a hobby.

I’ll tag some folks in the next post, gotta get moving! See you soon.

Then came the era of superstardom, brought on by previously unparalleled success of performers like Elvis Presley, the product of the early national broadcast networks. Give me geographic ubiquity in mass media, and I’ll give you a superstar. American Idol shows us the formula for marketing a superstar: more is better. More TV audience, more distribution, more touring, and, perhaps most importantly, more mileage on the tour bus.

The notion of “if you can’t make it on the national stage, you just can’t make it in the music business” has been more and more true since the days of Ed Sullivan. The ‘discoveries’ and ‘big breaks’ that happened before the national broadcast networks were much smaller: a couple of kids playing guitar on a local radio station to a listening audience of only a few hundred would’ve been considered a big break in the days of Fats Domino and earlier.

This is localism, of course. The evidence of localism in the early recording business is all over the early art: Frank Sinatra sang songs about cities (New York, New York, et al) because it was the local community that patronized the pioneering artists in the art of recording back in those early days.

Times, as they do, have changed. Today, we have national and international superstardom as a requirement for commercial success in the music business–meaning that, for an artist, the availability of a viable entrance into the greater market is slim to none, and that, for the listener, the availability of locally relevant music choices is practically nonexistent.

Sure, there are local artists. Guys who finance their own recordings and dump tons of time and effort into the best production they can get: usually a local studio that charges thirty bucks an hour for a mixing engineer that’s got stars in his eyes. These guys often make good music, but because they aren’t willing to shlep along earning a hundred bucks a night for years, they go nowhere, their audience doesn’t typically rise dramatically, and they remain locked out of the larger scene, relegated to the unfortunate status of “indie”.

A while back, I wrote that iTunes ought to be on the forefront of promoting independent music in a hyperlocal way by allowing artists to submit their songs in the same fashion podcasters are enabled to submit their podcasts. That was a year or so ago. Not much has changed. iTunes’ cues are till taken from the big labels that represent the lion’s share of the music they purvey. Local or indie music gets little to no attention while the stars who are already stars get pushed over the top.

But the model of Web 2.0, the democratization of the web that was such a buzz concept in 2006, allows for a conduit like iTunes to return artist recognition to the state it was in before Ed Sullivan, before national television, before the domination of a handful of low-output record distributors who refer to themselves as studios.

But how?

- Allow indies to upload and manage their music profiles on iTunes in a fashion similar to iLike or MySpace.

- Equip GarageBand and Logic Express with mastering capabilites so that indie artists can give the best presentation possible on iTunes.

- Highlight indie artists in a geographic or hyperlocal fashion.

- Allow indie artists to compete on a level playing field–even setting their own price. Podcasts are free after all. Surely there’s a way to allow indie artists to distribute a few tracks for free, especially if it means increased revenue for the greater distribution system.

The net result, if local music were allowed to flourish, would be that the high cost of promoting and maintaining a big-label offering would shrink, international superstardom would be less of a pre-req for making money in Hollywood and Nashville, live performance would become a profit driver for the person doing the promoting (the label), distribution of recordings would diminish as the main revenue stream for the person doing the promoting (again, the label), and all studios, be they in Hollywood or Akron, could offer a high number of artist-products that are actually profitable.

And profit, in art and science, is the name of the game.

I can tell you that for me, 2007 was one of the most turbulent and challenging years of my entire life–well it WAS the most challenging. So much happened so fast; the whole year seems like a blur when think about it all.

Blogging has been down, and I’ve been less in touch with the excellent people in my industry than I’m comfortable with, but I’ll excuse it, because my business continues to cook up new offerings and growth.  And that’s a good thing.  My priority list, in order of importance, goes something like this: my kids, my business, blogging, the music business, and dating.

But tonight I’m going to a prime steakhouse to “just chill” with my date and ring in the New Year the traditional way, the bubbly way. I’m more excited about 2008 than I am about what unfolded in 2007. The future is bright and baseball season is just around the corner… Happy New Year to all my associates, friends, family, and readers.

But it’s a great slogan because it so aptly describes the present state of high-speed communication. It captures the paradigm shift that we’ve seen just the last few years: that the network indeed is made of endpoints (people), but it serves the COMMUNITY of people. As community has usurped point-to-point in our view of networking, the Internet and telecomm are at a crossroads not likely to be reversed over in the coming years. Everything is changing, accelerating, pulling more mental capital into the evolving, democratizing, business-model-bending world of accelerated social communication…

…and the heaviest hitters in this industry are all going to be gathered at EComm 2008, March 12-14 in Silicon Valley. Not going? You should be. The biggest players are sending their brightest thinkers to tell you how the world of speed communication is growing. So are the smallest players. Speeches will be given and toasts raised while backroom conversations will hatch ideas that may just transform your world, perhaps even shaking up the foundation of telecomm, a global infrastructure in which we’ve invested a trillion or more to get us where we’re at now. The question is–what’s the next trillion going to do?

Find out in March.

Who’s going to win the ALCS?  Of course, it was the Red Sox versus the Indians for a chance at the World Series, and we all know what happened. The Indians choked bigtime and the Red Sox took the ALCS in 7 games, going on to sweep the Fall Classic against Denver.  Interestingly, you favored the Indians by a whopping margin. One cool tidbit–the Rockies swept their way to the World Series and then got swept, while the two Indians series were the only ones (including the division series) that weren’t sweeps.

Back in July, I asked “in 24 months, where will Vonage be?”  Overwhelmingly, your answer was “liquidated via bankruptcy” though a few of you seemed to think Vonage will be acquired by an established telco. Perhaps 2008 will be the year Vonage becomes relevant again, but I doubt it.

In January, I posted a poll asking who is going to win the Super Bowl? You said the Bears would do it. Not so much.  The Bears got absolutely spanked by Peyton and the Colts.

When the iPhone was introduced at MacWorld last winter, I asked: iPhone: Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down. Your response, by a 90%+ margin, was definitely thumbs up.

- Protect the lucrative, platform-neutral, and fan-adored Blizzard franchises from being eaten up by the Microsoft and made Windows/Xbox-only, a la Bungie and Halo (which originally was a Mac game).

- Give Vivendi a way to compete with EA Games, whose cash cows include such perennially-oriented franchises like Madden and the Sims. People buy the same game over and over year after year from EA–Vivendi wants to figure out a good way to capitalize the same way.
- Accelerate the likelihood of Blizzard console franchises.

- Bring some speed to the appearance of Diablo 3. Blizzard has been mum on the second sequel to their previously bestselling game (at least before World of Warcraft was born), but Diablo fans are fierce and will gobble anything up with a Diablo III logo on the cover. Perhaps this merger will give them the developmental leverage to finally make it happen.
- Hopefully bring back some of the old-school studio mentality and creativity that has been absent from Activision since the late 1980′s, but is beating strong at Blizzard.

I’ve been carrying the Nokia N81 8 GB phone in my pocket for several days now and this much is certain: it’s an awful lot sweeter than its predecessors, for the most part. Everything about it is better–the form factor, the color, the display, the keypad, the whole nine yards.

The N81 8GB, as the name would indicate, offers 8 GB of internal solid state storage, putting it on par with an iPhone or solid-state iPod as far as media storage. With built-in Realplayer software and integrated music browser and player, the N81 8GB makes an ideal media instrument. If you’ve been thinking about combining your music player and phone into a single device, now might be the time. The N81 even has stereo speakers in the enclosure (as does most of the N-Series), allowing you to monitor the media player without the need for headphones. And of course, if you need headphones, Nokia provides earbuds in the box.

There’s a lot to love about this device. It feels better than the other phones in the N-Series that I’ve tried–especially the N73. I’ve noticed that with some of these phones, it’s hard to know where to place the phone against your ear when you begin a phone conversation, and you sort of had to move the earpiece around on your ear until you hit the sweet spot. Not so with the N81 8GB–it just feels right.

The N81 8GB offers a 2 megapixel digital camera with flash, though the lens cover (which is clear plastic) doesn’t offer a protective, closeable cover, as on some of the other N-Series phones. Over time, I suppose this could lead to scratches that might make the camera less effective. But then again, if you really need a great camera, you’d be better off with Nokia’s flagship N95, which has 5 megapixel imaging and a Weiss lens to boot.

Gamers will enjoy the N81 8GB, as it comes with three pretty nifty demo games and access to Nokia’s N-Gage gaming platform. The three demos include a 3D soccer game and a fabulous-looking side-scrolling space shooter (which is impossible on the scale of an old Psygnosis game and visually reminiscent of one as well). Though I struggled with the controls for these games, I suspect that’s because I’m not very good at video games and not any fault of the device itself. On either side of the earpiece is a cradle-rocking button bar that lights up when game mode is active and more or less disappeared at other times. Pretty nifty.

As with some of the N-Series phones, built-in GPS allows you to interact with Nokia’s superb mapping/tracking program, though I’ve not had occassion to putz with it yet. There are a few other goodies as well: finally, a good calculator program, for one. And a caller-facing camera lens for video calls and self-portraits. The call-quality on the N81 8GB is typically good and sounds identical to the N95 (the only Nokia phone on which I’ve had any real issues with call quality is the N73).

Casual users of the media features may be satisfied with the N81 8GB’s relative small display (though it’s at least as big as the new iPod Nanos), but I can’t see myself watching anything more than a 2-minute YouTube on the phone’s display, since it is rather small. Of course, if it were any bigger, the phone would be a hooptie. Size versus functionality is a big gamble for the phone makers, and the N81 8GB strikes a very good balance.

The phone’s user interface is quite snappy. It has an updated look with more depth than previous N-Series devices. The only time this phone has responded slowly was while navigating SMS messages, but, again, that could be a Ted thing. I have like 2000 text messages in my inbox and I never bother deleting anything. (Though the N81 8GB does make it a little too easy to delete stuff–the Clear button is in the spot where the hangup button is on all the other N-Series phones.)
As usual with the N-Series, I’m glad Nokia has kept the charger receptacle the same size, as I can use the N81 8GB with my mobile charger, the same one that works on the other N-Series phones I’ve tried. In addition, my 3G SIM card went right into the N81 8GB with no issues (though it was a little hard at first to locate the SIM card slot–they’ve cleverly hidden it away in a slide-out clip under the battery), and Nokia Transfer Wizard utility transferred my address book and calendar in about 5 minutes over Bluetooth from the previous phone I’d been using.

I suggest you give the N81 8GB a shot. If you need a phone that does it all–this might be it.

Obviously in certain verticals, this isn’t the case. And delivered in certain substrates, such as a printed magazine (which takes months to copyedit and layout and weeks to print and distribute), people may pay a subscription fee. But generally speaking, paying for news is just so 1987.

So how do news media make it up? Content, content, content. Newspaper publishers, listen up. The way to attract revenue is to build social communities. Facebook is demonstrating this lesson, capturing the hearts and minds of news consumers that the newspaper will never, ever have a legitimate shot at unless they learn this lesson too.