French startup Bluwan has finally launched two weeks ago in Milano. Founded in 2005 by former Thomson/Thales executives, the company was kind of acting in stealth mode until the FTTH Council Europe' Conference recently held in the Fashion' s european capital city.
Here's the promotional video of their unique solution, so-called FTTA Fiber-Through-The-Air. Don't be confused: there's no fiber here but the trunk network. There's even no laser beam as the video may suggest - remember FSO Free Space Optics ? Actually, Bluwan has developped a quite interesting multiplexing technology that allows "the aggregation of multiple independent channels (modems) through [our] wideband radios and antennas onto a single air interface."
Being involved with Ultra-Broadband deployment in Rural areas, I'm convinced such a solution must be part of the portfolio of networks operators : faster and cheaper to install than wireline/optics, Radio fits well with mainstream needs in most parts of the country but dense areas. What mainstream needs ? TriplePlay. Telephone, Internet, Television. Downstream apps, actually. Because the only yet radically crippling limit of this FTTA technology is the rather impossible symmetrical mode - as with most of the Wireless Access technologies to date.
Post-scriptum : Among all the ultra-broadband wireless technologies available today for access networks, I do prefer Free-Space Optics. Simply because it's way safier than Radio in regards of signals' s confidentiality. Of course, one may be able to tap in the laser beam to "listen" the actual communications. However, such a hack is much more difficult to achieve, compare to pure radio comms. In the case of BluWan, the interesting thing is the fact that its founders come from one of the key suppliers of the Defense/Military sector. Hence I would rather double-check the security issues with BluWan' engineers before deploying my first FTTA link...
Yesterday, french telcos Orange and SFR announced their co-investment on two suburban towns in the "Greater Paris" (french joke) area, to roll-out FTTH Fiber-To-The-Home. They also announced the possible creation of an open joint-venture that would serve as operators' s operator for medium dense areas.
Of course, this is a smart move, considering the Fiber-Broadband plan to be unveiled by the government on Monday the 18th of January. No need to sport an MBA to understand that France Telecom and SFR have set up a nice trick to get public funding in order to build their own next-gen access networks.
Now, it may be useful to get back a few months ago, and read this post and this one written by Jean-Michel Soulier, CEO of french-canadian operators' operator Covage. Here's what Jean-Michel proposed before the whole attendance at the yearly forum held by Regulator ARCEP last September.
- the territory could be split in 4-5 segments representing approximately 1m households each in semi-dense areas (this assumes that private initiative will cover dense areas, which according to operator Free is easier said than done).
- a national consortium would be set up with the largest operators and the French national bank CDC. The consortium would in turn establish a subsidiary in each of the territorial segments.
- In each segment, a neutral operator would be selected for the deployment and operation of the FTTH network, in association with the local communities willing to participate in exchange for some ownership in the network.
- the large operators, as members of the national consortium, would commit to use the consortium's FTTH lines in order to guaranty the business case and the ability to raise additional financing.
That is a simple plan, quite easy to implement, and above all: it ensures Open Neutral Access.
Which Orange-SFR public-money-vacuum-cleaner new venture surely won't.
The FTTH Forum organized earlier this week in Lisbon by HanseCom has been quite a nice success, with a large audience, mostly coming from Portugal of course.
I was the only French, together with Roland Montagne of IDATE, to speak at the conference, which was pretty much held by the "Dutch Connection" ! A piece of evidence that the Open Neutral Access approach is still not a standard thinking here in France...
Actually, I was supposed to be part of two panels : the one on Muni Fiber, and the one on new cabling techniques. I must admit : due to my hectic agenda over the last few weeks and my current focus on Rural Broadband, I totally forgot the second point and did only prepare the first. I realized my mistake... the morning before the panels, scheduled in late afternoon !
By chance, Hassan Clausen, Managing Director of HanseCom and organizer of the event understood pretty well the situation, and let me withdraw from the New Cabling stuff, which gave him the opportunity to get 3 speakers at each panel. I'm glad my mistake finally allowed Uffe Mogensen, CEO of GM Plast, to deliver a fantastic presentation on micro-trenching techniques.
So, as planned, I did present the Bottom-Up approach for deploying Fiber in Rural areas. To start with, I explained why the usual way of deploying municipal Fiber-To-The-Home networks in France is never satisfying for the citizens - see Pau Broadband Country or Gonfreville-l'Orcher : as the people were not involved in the project at the very beginning, they are to reject it quickly as soon as something goes wrong.
That's where the "Top-Down" strategy fails. Enters the "Bottom-Up" approach : help the people solve a real problem in their daily life - what we B2B marketeers call "the customer' s pain", and go a step beyond by offering them something else on top of the solution used to fix this problem. Work with them to define the solution, work with them to test and implement it. Doing so, you will get the citizens adopt the solution, as they are part of its design' process.
The first question is: is there an Open Neutral Access Fiber nearby ? If the answer is "No", then... well, look for alternatives (which are not part of this discussion, sorry !). If the answer is "Yes", then the next question is: can Fiber help solving the problem ?. If the answer is "No", bad luck for me (and you, BTW ;-). If the answer is "Yes", then let's work it out with the customer, er., the Citizens.
That's the Bottom-Up approach for deploying FTTH Fiber-To-The-Home, starting by the Church. Why the church ? Simply because in each and every small city or village out there, there's a church - or a synagog, or a mosque, or a temple, whatever religious construction that is (or was...) the heart of your town, with active social life around, e.g. a pub, a grocery store, a book store... The idea is that simple : get the Fiber to the very heart of your village, and get the people build a community around it. They will adopt the project, because they will be part of it, playing an active role.
Actually, that's nothing new. Think of the Web 2.0 stuff: how did all those famous startups which we all know today, the Facebooks, the Twitters, the YouTubes, proceed at the beginning ? Got an idea, test it among a bunch of buddies, then once the idea went polished enough, extend the testing phase to a larger audience, who will help fixing the bugs and adding new features, then launch the product publicly. And still keep their users onboard by creating a true community spirit. There's no difference with what Seth Godin, the iconic Marketing guru of the Blogosphere, calls the Tribe.
In the business, how do you get customers to use your product ? You do evangelize them, right ? Here, with Municipal Fiber-To-The-Home networks, all we need to do is the same. Hence the Church.
Let me evangelize you. Here is the presentation, available for download on Slideshare. I give three examples of actual projects based on this bottom-up approach.
Disclaimer : I'm currently working as a consultant for two of those municipalities: Montmirail and La Grande Paroisse. The two projects are ongoing, both in the preliminary phase of network design and definition of the first targets (low-investments, boot-strapping...). The project concerning Val d'Isere has not been approved yet - we just started the discussions a couple of weeks ago.
Post-scriptum : this idea of bringing Fiber Broadband to a community is pretty well spread in the Anglo-Saxon part of Europe, not speaking of the US of course. See what fellow Guy Jarvis is doing in the UK with his FibreStream organization, or Frans-Anton Vermast of i-NEC in the Netherlands and elsewhere (interview by Costas Troulos of Broadband Prime here). Although this kind of spirit is not that common here in France, I'm convinced that involving the people right from the beginning of a project as big as bringing fiber to their home is the only way to go when public money (means your taxes and mine) is at stake. Frans Anton has found a nice tweak to the FTTH acronym in the Municipalities environment : FFTH, Fiber FROM The Home...
Tomorrow Wednesday, I will be in Lisbon, Portugal, for the first time ever. Never been there before, even when I was Business Dev EMEA at Agilent Technologies. Maybe that's why I lost a quite big tender with a new entrant back in the Bubble Era. I shall come back to this story someday, because it's a typical example of the Bid2Win fundamentals.
Anyway, the point of this post is: I've been invited by HanseCom to speak about "Fiber in the Municipalities" at the FTTH Forum conference, to be held November 4.
I'll present three examples of the bottom-up approach here in Rural France. Fiber-To-The-Church, that is !...
The conference takes place at the VIP Arts Hotel in Lisbon. As I'll fly back home on Thursday morning, feel free to send me a tweet @mduchesn if you're in town. We'll discuss Fiber To The Marina ;-)
Since I'm more and more involved with local projects here in France, I've decided to launch a new blog, to be french-only.
The reason is simple: I'd like to share ideas and facts with French people who don't speak nor read english at all.
Second: as the projects I'm working on are looking after french, rural, local territories, I'm not sure sharing even a small piece of information would be of interest for you my dear non-french readers.
However, I'd like to tell you that this new blog is hosted on the Posterous platform, which I'm discovering today. It's just a fantastic blogging tool: easy, simple, intuitive, yet powerful (e.g. the PicPosterous app on the iPhone).
For those of you who seek informations and/or jobs in the Optical Communications sector, here are your new companions : FiberNews and FiberJobs, which you can follow on Twitter respectively here and here.
Of course, those are RSS feeds which I've put together thanks to Yahoo!Pipes and other cool Web 2.0 tools (BTW, have you noticed how the expression "Web 2.0" is old fashion those days ?).
FiberNews delivers news on FTTH worldwide, and FiberJobs delivers job postings related to FTTH (US only for the time being). Simple, isn't ?
French incumbent France Telecom-Orange is entering the age of Smart Moves, thanks to its CEO Didier Lombard. See this announcement. Remember the late 90s ? France Telecom was leading the Global One consortium. Now they're going global, as one.
For those of you who still wonder what's this 'Twitter' thing everybody in the Blogosphere is writing about, here's THE pitch, by the folks at Common Craft. Just lovely AND effective, as usual.
The fiber-optic communications community' s reference Lightwave magazine will host its first online virtual conference & tradeshow: Optical Access '08.
Optical Access '08 will be held Thursday, December 4, 2008, from 10:00am to 4:00pm EST, on the Web.
Says the press release:
The event will feature a full roster of live, on-demand conference
sessions plus a virtual tradeshow floor complete with exhibit hall,
media center, and networking lounge.
Vincent
O'Byrne, senior member of the technical staff at Verizon, will kick off
the day-long agenda with his 10:00 AM EST keynote address, "A Carrier
Perspective on Next-Generation Optical Access." O'Byrne will give the
Verizon viewpoint on what's ahead for FTTH, including technology
requirements and deployment strategies.
[updated 10/7/08 4:36PM CET] See this 1Gbit/s trial in Amsterdam ? Imagine the same type of apps (3D-HDTV for instance), right at the size of your district. A true field trial. That's what the Pau Greater Area and its Pau Broadband Country FTTH platform can offer to you Next Gen Apps vendors and to you Heavy Bandwidth Consumers. Plus, Pau is a bit south of Amsterdam, which makes it a slightly better place for work and fun - as long as you prefer sports & nature lifestyle rather than nightlife in a city that never sleeps ;-) If I were a NGA vendor, I would do the testing in Pau and the implementation in Amsterdam...
Absolutely marvelous. See here by yourself. Thanks to the folks at Digg for this fantastic app.
Once you're in the Digg' s Labs site, you may want to play as well with Stack, BigSpy, Arc, and Pics. Better go there during lunch break or at night, otherwise your day will be screwed ;-)
Whilst the french community is busy preparing the Grenelle du Très Haut Débit, where some members of the French Government will (hopefully) unveil its plans for fibering (hopefully) the country, others are working hard to make things real.
Congratulations and all the best to Geoff Daily, the organizer of this fantastic event for all of us evangelists of broadband, open neutral networks.
I've embedded the interview of Terry Huval, director of LUS Lafayette Utility Systems, by Geoff, for you to get a flavor of what's going on in the US those days.
Ed. note : I can't stop thinking about the situation if Napoleon didn't sold Louisiana to the US two hundred years ago. Maybe France would have been the true leader of the Broadband communities movement...
I personally have been calling for a FiberCamp since more than a year or so. Unfortunately, this country doesn't seem ready for the kind of * Community thinking * that's required for such a workshop.
I just received my iPhone 3G this morning. Setting up the whole thing was a matter of minutes, thanks to iTunes and... MobileMe, which worked quite well for once.
Now, the question is : what am I going to do with the "old" one ? Simple : I will use my 1st gen. iPhone as a portable device, for presentation and training events. Actually, it turns out that an iPhone without its SIM card is... an iPod Touch (with a camera ;-).
You can then use this 1st gen. iPhone to display photos and videos, listen to podcasts, etc. Connect it to a TV or a video projector, and boom, you get the ultimate presentation gear. Which you can even leave to your customer after the show *. Bonus : if you come close enough to a WiFi hotspot, you gain access to the Internet and all your favorite Web 2.0 apps...
That is the beauty with everything Infinite Loop : you never throw an Apple-branded device away. You can always recycle it for a different usage. I mean, not as Michael Arrington does with his Mac Mini...
* This is a wonderful sales trick I've learned at Agilent Technologies. Each time we were demoing our flagship product - the Mini-OTDR - to a new prospect, we were offering a free loan right on the spot : "we can leave it to you right now, so you can test it by yourself", and that was it. We knew this "try & buy" proposal was a killer.
French entrepreneur Jean-Michel Planche recently launched internetforeveryone.fr, a new initiative aimed at promoting an open, neutral and free Internet for everyone (french-speaking volunteers : feel free to join here). Of course, this initiative is the french equivalent of the well-known and pro-active internetforeveryone.org which focus on the US.
Beside all the sociological and ethical aspects, which are fundamentaly the most important ones, hence our priority number one, there's all the technological stuff to be adressed. From the very roots of the Internet (i.e. the IP protocol, Ethernet, etc.) to the less high-level kind of matters such as fiber networks installation and maintenance, we must to re-invent the whole thing.
With for some, like network construction, a pretty deep impact on Social : building Fiber-To-Every-Home networks will require tens of thousands of workers - meaning will create tens of thousands of jobs (100,000 in France alone for the next 5 years, shall the telcos push the ignition button). Just like the construction of railroads in the 19th Century gave jobs to thousands of emigrants and locals in North America ***.
That's what makes Jean-Michel' s initiative so exciting - and challenging. For once, we can be part of a World-Changing project.
Now, why now ? Why is it mandatory to * re-invent * the Internet, as opposed to enhance/upgrade/patch the existing infrastructures, protocols, topologies, etc. ?
Then, read this interesting news by VentureBeat, dated July 23d and titled "Hackers begin to exploit a critical Internet flaw". I'm no Networking (the technical sense ;-) specialist, but I know what a DNS server is (thanks to my early days with HP). So, if this news is true, I understand the potential danger of such flaw. Here's the extract of the article that will help you novices to understand too :
The bug is in the Domain Name System, or DNS, which is the system for
translating the locations of network computers into Internet addresses.
The flaw is in the design of the DNS protocol itself and is thus not
limited to any single product that uses it. If someone hijacks a DNS
server, they can redirect an unsuspecting Internet surfer to a
malicious web site. A hacker targeting an Internet Service Provider, or
ISP, could replace the entire Web (as accessible through that ISP) —
search engines, social networks, banks — with their own malicious
content. DNS is used by every computer on the Internet to know where to
find other computers. Those attacking corporations could reroute
network traffic and capture emails and other sensitive business data.
Don't you think it's time to think again ?
*** you may call me an utopist or a fool. Then, ask yourself the question : what is the REAL reason for all those FTTH nets' construction delays ? Answer is simple : lack of (skilled) resources.
Just installed Twittervision on my iPhone. Absolutely stunning app. The potential uses in business are countless. I better hurry up creating my Web 2.0 start-up in Pau ;-)
Verifying my .Me settings this morning, I've realized something : since I bought my iPhone 8 months ago, I never used again the automatic reply feature for emails when traveling.
Since the advent of Lotus Notes and MS Outlook, the typical auto-reply looked like this one :
Dear Sender,
Thank you for contacting Marc Duchesne. I will be on a business trip until October 31st. During that time, I will have limited access to my e-mail. I will respond to your message as soon as possible.
I apologize for any inconvenience, Carpe Diem, _Marc
Now, thanks to the iPhone, I don't care mind being abroad on the road : I ALWAYS have access to my e-mail. Will I reply to them "as soon as possible", that's another story !
According to LightReading, " the 50-Mbit/s FiOS package will be offered for $90 per
month in New York and Virginia, and at $140 per month in all other
markets. The 50-Mbit/s downstream speeds will be coupled with the
20-Mbit/s upstream speeds Verizon began offering in October 2007."
Writes McConville, " Verizon’s ultimate goal is to enable 100-Mbit/s downstream
to each FiOS subscriber. The carrier says it has successfully conducted
100-Mbit/s field trials with employees, but hasn't yet set a timetable
for a commercial launch.".
Bokay. That's a truly compelling offer for the lucky FiOS' subscribers. But this is still an annoucement. For people - read Online Gamers, developers, entrepreneurs - looking for ultra-broadband access today, there's a place on Earth where they'll find 50Mbit/s upstream & downstream, immediately : Pau, France.
For less than $53 per month, installation and first month for free*.
Since decades, Australian and Californian surfers move to Biarritz for its beautiful spots. Why wouldn't the young *Net* generation, online gamers first, move to Pau for its blazzingly fast broadband access (and its wonderful landscapes in the meantime) ?
ps : 100Mbit/s is also commercially available, since a couple of years...
As I'm involved in the creation of a "FTTx School" here in France, Cisco' s Telepresence system is one of the tools we're investigating for us to deliver training courses and seminars over fiber. An amazing piece of technology, Telepresence makes StarWars' R2D2' s holographic videos real.
My lucky buddy Jean-Hughes Lauret is to get one system soon, for his academic purposes.
See what how you will soon be able to beam Princess Leia here.
More on Cisco Telepresence system ? You may want to start there.
Also, you may get info about Cisco' s initiatives to reduce carbon emissions here.
post-scriptum : thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the reminder.
Still not the colorful experience of a real journey at the Wafi City (for instance), but a true step towards full 3-D online shopping.
Let the fiber shine in to our homes, and we'll probably get real-time person-to-person interaction like in the real World.
Since I came back in the training business a year ago or so, I decided to drop the traditional slideware stuff * for a more 21st Century stylish method : use the Web 2.0 gear such as YouTube for tutorial videos, Picasa for real world photos, and more recently Facebook for post-training social and collaborative networking (note : all free apps, as I want to keep the learning materials costs as low as possible for the customers).
However, whilst going whole online digital is nice because it's hype, I still need a paper board to explain a lot of things, which a video clip will never replace (except perhaps those made by the folks at CommonCraft).
I love paperboards : it forces you to go crisp & clear, splitting your explanations into simple/one-page explanations - as Twitter forces you to write a message in less than 160 characters. Over the last 15 years that I was delivering training courses and sales seminars, I've collected lots of my paper rolls, for me to keep record of the interesting discussions with the attendees.
Of course, bringing a paperboard roll back home works fine when you travel by car, but it's a bit more tricky when you fly. Thanks to Apple, this issue is over. I now capture all the relevant stuff with my iPhone, and upload it on the MacBook right away. That makes the paperboard digital ;-)
* note : I'm thinking of using cartoons such as this one to explain and share complex stuff in the next future.
So-derle, the Green Fiber Evangelist' video collection got a huge success last week at the training I was delivering to a french telco. For the second time since a quarter of century, I haven't used a single slide as my fiber optics training materials but a web page.
The first time I used a navigator instead of M$ PowerPoint was back in 1996, when my friend Didier Boucher and myself were touring France to evangelize installers and end-users. By then, Netscape Navigator was our best companion, displaying the html pages I created with GoLive and the likes.
Last week, Firefox 3.0 beta and the amazing add-on PicLens were on the party. Thanks to the Internet. Means, thanks to the connection to the Internet. Because, unlike 12 years ago when all the html and jpeg files forming my presentations were on my Mac's hard-disk, today the whole stuff is... on the Cloud. YouTube, Picasaweb, Facebook, etc. : they're all online.
That's the bad thing when you're a connected guy like myself : you do rely a lot on the Internet. It strucked me the hard way this morning, when I was to go on the Green Fiber Evangelist blog to start the training session I'm delivering this week at a large install company : got no LAN connection to start with, hence no Internet connection, hence no online videos, hence no *live* training materials.
Then, the IT guy came to the rescue after lunch, to give me the IP address, DNS servers, proxy settings things to help my Mac go online. It worked, except for one little tiny detail : this company forbids some websites, among which... YouTube. Bye-bye the Green Fiber Evangelist blog (at least for the rest of the week here ;-)
This is kind of weird : a 6,000 employees firm who wants to penetrate the optical networks installation & maintenance business don't authorize ubiquitous access to the Net. By the way, only 600 (six hundred) people out of those 6,000 have an email address. 10%. Who don't even get access to the most popular websites in the world. As my dear former boss Robert is used to say : "there is room for improvement" !
Anyway, Accor hotels do provide free WiFi to their guests. So, thanks to Accor (and Orange), I'm posting this text from my hotel room. After an hour or so spent on downloading all the Green Fiber Evangelist videos on my Mac, with TubeTV.
That's the lesson of the day : never rely too much on the Net. Download vids and pics and copy them on a USB key before going to the customer. And start evangelize people : you need an internet connection to get on the Cloud ;-)
Why spend time on training course slides and notes design and edition, when everything you need is available on the Net ? Provided that people better remind images rather than text, YouTube is one of the new companions of the teachers, trainers, and instructors of all kind, together with Wikipedia and a few other Web 2.0 tools. Here's a collection of videos I've put together for fiber optics training - most are in english, some are in french. Enjoy, and feel free to use. The playlist is available here.
French startup IM-Translate is born, offering the first online instant translation of instant messages:
Immediate translation of instant messages.
You do nothing differently — IM-Translate™ integrates seamlessly into your existing IM application — just type as usual.
Forget copy, pasting or jumping back and forth to a web-based translator.
Your buddy receives your message plus a translation — instantly.
You see the translation of the text you typed.
You also receive your buddy’s messages in both languages.
Free! — Downloads in seconds with broadband.
First IM app targeted : Windows Live Messenger, aka MSN.
As I told my friend Georges, CTO of IM-T, they should release a Mac version as quickly as possible, since Mac users are more suited for beta testing campaigns : we love giving feedback, for the developers to enhance their products.
Also in the pipe : the app for Google.
Interesting : IM-T is formed by... US citizens and registered in... France, for some legal and market issues.
IM-T is a typical Web 2.0 start-up : of the six co-founders and team members, nobody knows more than two others face-to-face. They never met altogether so far ! Their collaborative tools : Google, Skype, and email.
One of the founders is my old buddy Georges Pantanelli. A french High-Tech industry veteran, who relocated to the US in the 90's. Georges got his american passport two years ago, in San Francisco. The lesson : in California, everything is possible for those who have the entrepreneurial spirit.
See here. The Flip is a brand new camcorder made by Pure Digital Technologies "for the rest of us".
Simple, easy to use, and just enough features for 80% of the population. On top, the Flip is pretty much affordable for most of us (at Agilent, I've learned not to say "cheap" ;-).
Definitely a gadget that could have been designed by Apple. Which, I suppose, has served as a model for the definition and creation of The Flip.
Luckily enough, more and more people go to the "About Me" section of this blog. Unfortunately, the more I read it myself, the more I think it's not appealing enough. Too much of a light resume.
The fact is, the people who go to the "About Me" page of a blog want to know who's the author, his background for sure, but mainly his current activities, hobbies, passion, or whatever make him write this blog.
Nothing people get when reading my own stuff. At least not in a proper "elevator-pitch" manner...
That's why I'm to rewrite this section sometime over the week-end. Easter is supposed to be a new start, isn't it ?
Back from San Diego, I had a meeting yesterday night in Paris with the VP Sales & Marketing of a new startup working on some *fiber network monitoring* stuff. I can't disclose anything of course, just that it's about Fiber-To-The-Home.
Things we've discussed until late in the evening were on the forthcoming changes in the optical comms industry per se and our own lives.
Like this one : thanks to FTTH and 40G/100G/etc. networks, we're going to be "online" everywhere anytime, with our entire "life" relying on *The Net*. Fine.
Now, since we'll do everything - working, watching TV, training, sharing life, etc. - through a single fiber strand, this one better stay up and running 24/7 : we won't accept being cut off for 2 days until the Repair guys come in. Hence the need for monitoring systems, which would look after the faults on the fiber right up to our living room.
A tremendous challenge, provided the numerous FTTx networks topologies and technologies. A challenge which requires to think out of the box. Something the legacy Test & Measurement firms can't do. Something a well funded startup can do. How much do they need ? $5m. Which is not that much for a solution which will help change the World (because it'll guarantee your fiber stays okay).
Ed. note : French world-famous blogger Loic Lemeur got $6m for his Web 2.0 video-sharing platform. Raising $1m less to produce something which really serves the World shouldn't be that much a problem. At least in a perfect World...
As a presenter who like to travel light - I'm a bit tired of opening up my laptop at each and every security check in the airports (even if it's a MacBook), I'm currently testing a new way to rehearse and do presentations whilst on the road (or in the air).
Here's the 7-steps process :
1. with Apple' Keynote, create the simplest slides set possible, following Guy Kawasaki' s 10/20/30 rule and Garr Reynolds' s Zen approach,
2. export the Keynote file to both Powerpoint and Acrobat file formats,
3. upload the three files onto Zoho Projects,
4. import the PPT file into Zoho Show,
5. send the PDF file to myself on my .Mac account,
6. copy the three files on my favorite USB key,
7. check the availability and integrity of all those files (takes a few minutes only).
Then, I can :
a) access the slides from anywhere in the World, thanks to the Web 2.0.
b) download the PDF onto any PC or Mac once on site.
c) review the slides on my iPhone.
The latest proves to be the most interesting part of the experiment. For instance, I can rehearse my presentation in the airplane, without needing to grab my MacBook. Also, I don't fear intrusive eyes from the guy next seat, see what I mean ?
Just discovered a new cool stuff this morning, thanks to an unknown reader of FiberGeneration : plusmo.
Here' s the brief review by Jessica Dolcourt for Webware back in September 2007 :
"Plusmo's mobile widgets application is a cool way to read RSS feeds on your cell phone or PDA, but that's not the only reason it was named a finalist on the Webware 100 list.
In true Webware fashion, Plusmo's site offers hands-on excitement--the chance to publish and share widget mash-ups and create an iPhone widget from templates. Users can also make personal blogs available as a Plusmo widget, and can install a browser bookmarklet or Yahoo plug-in to snag feeds while they surf."
When you think about it, Fiber-To-The-Home is the ultimate experience for outside plant technicians. For the first time ever, those folks are working right in front of the end-user.
That implies a lot of new behavior for the OSP people, as they are kind of the front-desk of the service provider. To make it short : the guy who's installing the fiber at the subscriber' s place is also the ISP' s sales rep.
Hence the need for coaching the OSP technicians to customer-facing situations. Be the best sales rep. That's quite an interesting challenge, for both the trainers and the installers themselves. Have a look at this video, and you'll understand why.
CNN Dubai reports : " High-technology services across large tracts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.
Hi-tech Dubai has been hit hard by an Internet outage apparently caused by a cut undersea cable.
Industry experts are blaming damage to two undersea cables but it is not known what caused the damage.
Reports say that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain Pakistan and India, are all experiencing severe problems.
Nations that have been spared the chaos include Israel -- whose traffic uses a different route -- and Lebanon and Iraq. Many Middle East governments have backup satellite systems in case of cable failure."
As stated by one of the interviewed ISPs, this pretty severe outage is a wake up call for the region. But also for the whole Telecoms industry : it's time to stop lay offs and start lay out new cables. Dear submarine systems makers, you've got a bright future ahead of you !
Just like in the mid-90's, when the big projects such as FLAG and SeaMeWe appeared.
The difference ? Today, there are people at the end of the fiber. Applications. Business. Users.
It's showtime for the real Net Economy, folks !
Read full article here.
Thanks Laura for the heads up.
"About Pau : the 6,000 active subscribers milestone will be achieved within the next couple of weeks.
Based on the map, which is pretty accurate thanks to Benoit's outstanding work, one can note that Pau is the ONLY european city south of the Loire river (means, where weather conditions are wonderful for most of us ;-) that offers up to 100Mbps connectivity to enterprise & residential customers."
Belgian startup Radionomy has been officialy launched yesterday night in Paris, from the Eiffel Tower (where the very first TV signal has been broadcasted some decades ago).
According to the Radionomy folks, the concept is pretty simple :
With Radionomy, everyone is finally going to be able to create their own radio station on the Internet!
It’s easy.
By tapping into the contents of vast music libraries.
By integrating their own musical creations.
By adding their own audio content, sequences, reports and podcasts.
It’s free.
Radionomy will broadcast these radio stations around the world and take care of all costs, including royalties. Radionomy even shares its revenue with radio station creators, based on the size of their audience.
Pretty cool, huh ?
So, we're going to see - er., hear - tons of "Pirate" radio channels, just like in the good old days of Radio Caroline.
Will be interesting to watch the outcomes. How this concept will find users, and how those ones will use it.
What's quite funny to me is the fact that the WebRadio concept emerges AFTER the WebTV stuff, whilst the original technologies were on reverse order : Radio first, then Television.
Also funny to me, the fact that Radionomy launches whilst traditional radios start doing live TV webcasting of their shows and programs.
Conclusion : Convergence is coming fast. Within the next couple of years, we're going to have a brand new "Web" space, where everyone will be able to create, share, and use any kind of content that will be available one way or another on the Net. Exciting.
To subscribe to the Radionomy Beta Testers Waiting List, follow the link here.
I'm currently testing the new Zattoo Beta application. Just blazingly simple.
Says the US startup' website homepage : "Zattoo is live TV on your PC - it's the football game as you chat, the news as you email, and your favorite soap as you pay your bills. Zattoo is also TV when you don't have a TV - it's the channels you want, when you want, where you want.".
Thanks to Zattoo, I'm relieved now : I'll be able to watch Roland Garros and The Tour de France whilst "working" at the office next summer. Pretty cool, huh ?
Seriously speaking, Zattoo is the application lots of us were waiting for since a while : an easy way to watch free TV live channels on our computers.
Now, the question is : how will Zattoo make money, provided that the software is supposed to be free of charge ? The answer may be in the Partners page :
Partners
Zattoo's customers are end users: people who appreciate high-quality, quick-start, long-play video from multiple channels available on one browser. Broadcasters and advertisers are our business partners.
Broadcasters
The ability of broadcasters to reach large audiences via the Internet has until now been limited by the unfavorable economics of Unicast, whereby for each additional audience member a broadcaster has had to incur additional cost. Zattoo solves this problem with our peer-to-peer distribution architecture, which allows broadcasters to reach ten times the audience with no additional infrastructure investment. For the cost of serving 10,000 users with Unicast, broadcasters can now serve 100,000 users with Zattoo.
Zattoo provides broadcasters with compelling competitive advantages beyond reducing operating cost. Zattoo gives broadcasters the technology to deliver streaming with vastly increased quality, reliability and unmatched video smoothness. Furthermore, Zattoo enriches the user experience by integrating compelling multimedia elements, thus making the Zattoo experience stickier than traditional TV.
Zattoo enables advertisers to leverage the most successful web-based advertising methods in combination with the best attributes of broadcast television "spots" by supporting banner ads, targeted text ads and video clips. Advertisers understand the inherent strengths and value propositions of each method and can make an educated investment to reach specific audiences. Furthermore, advertisements can be sourced from ad specialists and integrated without modification, leveraging de facto industry standards.
So, correct me if I'm wrong : Zattoo gets (or will get) revenues from both the channels broadcasters and the advertisers. I understand the earlier, but don't get the later one yet : does that mean we will experience complementary ads during the live program ? Such as embedded contextual advertising, for instance.
Think about the combination of a live transcription system (used in live captionning) together with customized/localized advertising content : you're watching the latest '24' episode (well, once the writers' s strike will be over ;-), Jack Bauer is driving the brand new Ford SUV, and boom, you see a beautiful ad banner urging you to call your local Ford dealer... That is the power of TV thru Internet : UCC "User Customized Content", as opposed to the UGC User Generated Content.
The question is : could Zattoo be the Next Big Thing ? When it's about watching live TV on a PC, probably yes. Is that what the people want (watching live TV on a PC), I don't know. On the one hand, some want a PC on their TV, on the other hand some want TV on their PC. The right answer is called something like "convergence", isn't ?
So, what do I Average Joe want ? I want Zattoo on the iPhone. I have VOD already (iTunes, YouTube), now I'd like to get live streaming too. Because I'd like to be able to watch Roland Garros live whilst Im' sitting in a High-Speed Train.
Last thing on Zattoo before a more deeper review some time later : the folks there seem to care about their users. As an example, I've received the invitation to download the beta in french, although the company is based in the US (as far as I understood on the 'About' page). The set-up is quite fast and simple too. Pretty neat stuff, Folks ! Keep going ;-)
Back in 2000, I titled the brief report of the OFC Optical Fiber Communications exhibition to my management at Agilent Technologies : "The Magic is gone." The whole Telecoms industry was ruled by marketeers, and Fiber was no different. The Lucents, the Cornings, the Pirellis : they were all selling wonderful shiny proprietary solutions to hungry customers (the new telcos which were popping up like hell everywhere on the Planet), totally forgetting that what made the Optical Communications industry in the past was Innovation.
Fact is, until 1998 the fibers were sporting strange names, such as "ITU-T G652". Everything changed in '98, when Corning came out with its Leaf, Lucent with its TrueWave, or Nec with its Lucyna. Since then, marketeers took over the business, leaving inventors and researchers in their labs. The best example : the Pirelli Telecoms booth at OFC'99, with an... italian motorcycle as the only product on stage.
For people like myself, whith a technical background, a marketing position and a customer-focused mindset, the outcome was obvious : a total lack of real customers' s needs, leading to what happened to be a violent downturn.
Today, almost 8 years later, my feeling is that the Magic is back. Reaserchers and innovators can talk to end-users again. See this product presentation video by... Corning : for the very first time since a decade, a new product is a true solution to a real customer problem.
This article, by Ray Le Maistre, International News Editor at the mandatory Light Reading, demonstrates once again that my country (France. You know, the little old piece of european land ruled by a superb showman) is truly leading the Telecoms World. But nobody here knows it, including our Emperor, ooops sorry, er. President, unfortunately.
Want to know why my home-country is going mad those days ? Read this true story on our "new" President, who just made it on TechCrunch, by the way. Jaw-dropping. When the journalists at your top-5 medias are unable to double-check an information, you're in big trouble.
post-scriptum : Congrats anyway, Mister President ! ;-)
The CES big circus has just started. If you can't make it to Las Vegas, you can still attend the show and get the whole flavor of it... on the Web.
See here, here, and here. Lesson : WebTV is the future. And the present, too, should you have a broadband access.
Post-Scriptum : I wonder if the folks at the Optical Society Of America are going to offer the live coverage of the forthcoming OFC-NFOEC exhibition in San Diego next month.
The old story about Alexander Graham Bell stealing ideas for the telephone from someone else resurfaces, with a new book due to be on the shelves on Jan. 7.
Quote Yahoo! : In "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret," journalist Seth Shulman argues that Bell — aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt patent examiner — got an improper peek at patent documents Elisha Gray had filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first.
If you are interested in learning more on this long-lasting dispute " Who Really Invented the Telephone? ", the Telephone Tribute report here has the answer(s).
More on Shulman's perspective in the article here.
Post-scriptum : this story makes me think about my own idea. What if, in 100 years from now, somebody else than me will be credited for the reinvention of the Test & Measurement industry ? Well, I have the answer (al)ready : no one cares about T&M ;-)
Photo credit : Per Hardestam. Photo available on Stock.xchng here, royalty-free as usual.
Among many key figures which help understanding the real situation in regards of Broadband access & use, the one about the perception of the Internet by Disabled persons (page 39) is quite questioning : the Internet, which normally should be considered as one of the most powerful tool to get Disabled people on board, is not. There is a good news behind the bad one : there is plenty of stuff still to be done for real innovation and entrepreneurship in this domain. "Change the World", right ?...
ps: also found in this presentation, the Virginia Tech’s eCorridors Broadband Access Map, that enables real-time, bottomup broadband mapping. Got to find the same for Europe. Or create it if it doesn't exist yet !...
Digging the Web for data on FTTx Fiber-To-The-Something key players in the Bay Area, I found this 125+ pages document. Quite an extensive overview of the FTTx markets, although the study is dated 2003. Considering that the Telecoms industry just recovered by the end of 2006, IMHO most of the informations you'll find in there are still pretty much relevant - simply change names when M&A apply.
Ehrhardt & Ehrhardt consulting firm website here (in Dutch)
French entrepreneur and Internet pioneer Jean-Michel Planche aka JMP recently asked his blog's readers for their "Computing DNA" (note : link in french).
Writing down my own, I realized the true meaning of the Moore's Law.
For those of you who know '24', this video shows how Jack Bauer's journey would have look like back in 1994. Who knows how it will look like in thirteen years from now ?
Direct link to the video here.
Visit College Humor website here.
I am a Cycling Freak, Tennis Fan, and Fiber Broadband Evangelist.
Among other things, I am currently managing the deployment of the World's largest Public Fiber-To-The-Home network aka "SarkoFiber".
*** Disclaimer : this is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, no matter who he is. ***
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