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I realized Christmas was different this year. It is the first year I can remember in recent times, that hasn’t involved the gifting of some electronic gadget.  Of course there were many differences, but I can’t overlook that one.  That is significant.

What do you give two of the most hyper connected people on the planet for a gadget? I could have gotten an N810. I could have given one, too! I didn’t and Ken didn’t. I’m not sure why. We shopped, spent hours online and in malls shopping. The truth is, not one time did either of us even mention we hoped to receive a nifty or hot gadget. Who’d a thunk?

Don’t think nothing was thought of, or nothing was purchased to enhance connectivity. I did get some stocking stuffer U3 drives. (4 gig each) I certainly purchased a few gadgets for the kids. Michelle got a new Nokia cell phone (I bought a plan so she can actually use it!) I got David an ipod nano. We’re just trying to figure out how to put music on it with my itunes. That is a lesson in frustration. Actually the gifts for both the kids were frustrating from the human perspective.

First, David has a nano and I have an original video ipod 30 gig. In other words my itunes, and all the music is attached to MY ipod. I can authorize a computer to access the itunes or share with it. I don’t want to do that though. I want to give him only HIS music. I want to keep my pictures and my files intact on MY pc and not share to his nano all my pictures. David doesn’t want many of my files, either music or picture. I finally got itunes to only add the pictures that he wants and I made sure to NOT register his ipod. He must do that when he gets home.

Moving right along. ;o)

Michelle’s new mobile phone. Hm, well, it’s not a top of the line nokia, but still quite nice. We needed her to have the ability to call or text us when she comes for a visit. Michelle has gotten lost every time she has come here, and we have had to drive to meet her and find her. (Next year is a gps!!!!!)

Once opened, we had to activate the new phone. Well…we tried to read the instructions, but we kept getting directed to the ‘buy a new phone’ page. I didn’t want to buy a new phone because I already had. Eventually we did get it activated and we discovered Michelle is a bad as her mom. She LOVES texting and LOVES ,gadgets. She always maintained she would never use them, but once in her hot little hands. Michelle was using a cell phone like she had for years. ;o)

That is really the end of the holiday story. Mostly. Between us we got books, a leather jacket (red and MINE) clothes, kitchen gadgets (cuisinart espresso maker etc.) Ken designed a gorgeous dog tag, (necklace) for me with a special phrase. I got Ken a collector Peter Pan original book. Traditional stuff mostly.

It was a nice Christmas. But it’s over. Times are changing. I wonder what gadget will be important next year? I bet we’ll both covet something. That’s what we do. It’s what brought us together. Certainly one aspect of it.

Happy Holidays since Christmas is over for now.

Art Rosenberg always writes some pretty thoughtful pieces over at Unified-View. I’ve only met Art once, but have read his work for a long time. The other day he posted his thoughts on How Mobility and UC Will Really Change The Pace of Business Communications in 2008.

Art’s post set me thinking about unified communications, mobility and social network attributes in a slightly different want as I look ahead to 2008. I really encourage you to go read Art’s full post, but in the meantime, I’ll share some thoughts.

UC Means All Business Communications
Now that the term “unified communications” (UC) has subsumed real-time telephony, wired and wireless connectivity, and all forms of messaging, it has become synonymous for all aspects of business communications. It has also become increasingly difficult to define everything that UC is really supposed to do for the enterprise. Microsoft and its Alliance partner Nortel wisely recognized this problem last year, and proceeded to establish hundreds of demonstration sites around the world in order to show business management what UC does for business operations and end users, rather than just explain how the technology infrastructure works.

This is a call to the burgeoniong unified communications community. Business communications and real-time telephony are what business cares about. I’ve written recently about VoIP being pumbing, or simply more infrastructure. Art’s saying something very similar. It’s not about technology. It’s about business. The industry has to wake up to that.

Simplifying The User Perspective of UC – Contacting People Quickly Any Way
…UC is all about making contact and communicating with people easily, flexibly, and quickly in a variety of ways.

What a great summary right there. Simplify. That sounds easy, but I realized how hard it is. Let me give you my perspective. Simplification is something that small, creative innovators do well. Simplification comes from companies like MOBIVOX, iotum, Cubic Telecom, GrandCentral, and the like really provide powerful tools that simplify life for users. When’s the last time you really say Cisco, Nortel or Avaya simplifying things for your communications needs? Really?

That’s part of the changing landscape that will impact unified communications and social networking in 2008. More powerful tools with simpler interactions are going to be a very hot item. They’re where the quickest successes will be found. That means the majority of innovative changes, the ones that catch our attention, will still be coming from small innovators next year. They’re the people to watch.

Here’s Art’s take on the traditional industry -

On the other hand, traditional telephony will be a big target for the most drastic changes in business contact procedures, since it has traditionally been based upon the inflexibilities of wired connections, restrictive user interfaces, and location-based devices. So, not only will business calls “integrate” with flexible messaging facilities, but, from a user perspective, all aspects of traditional call management will be changing as well. Much of what will happen to business call management will be derived from the experience of traditional customer call center technologies that can now be implemented more efficiently through IP telephony infrastructures and multimodal endpoint devices.

My view is more direct. Traditional telephony is a dead business that hasn’t keeled over yet. When I left Lucent Technologies in 1996, I told friends that I thought the old AT&T, Lucent and everything that spun out of that was a dead industry. But that like a large animal shot on safari, it would run for miles and miles before it finally fell over dead. It’s an industry that was repeatedly shot and has been running for a long time now, but still bleeding profusely. The traditional carriers are flagging and faltering. They haven’t innovated in years. That ability is gone from their genetic makeup. Sure, they may have divisions or business units that offer wireless and innovate a bit, but let’s face it, the traditional telcos aren’t she sharpest knives in the drawer. They only surprise with the stupid things they do.

When is the last time a traditional telephone company surprised customers with something really new and innovative? Think hard. Real hard. Was it direct dial long distance? or touch tone dialing? Look at your phone. Unless you have an iPhone, you’re using a very old and tired UI to do anything with it. That ten-digit touch pad was an interface to an old network. The new network of today really needs a more useful interface – one that’s simple and powerful.

Here are some areas where Art sees unified communications impacting business communications -

• “Contextual” Presence and Availability
• Proactive Notifications From Automated Business Process Applications
• Multimodal Messaging Communications
• “Instant” Conferencing

These are important because they’re all about the things we’ve been watching for a while now.

Presence and availability aren’t new concepts, but they’re becoming key attributes that successful business people have to manage. That’s a social media overlay into business service networking that’s on a collision course. It’s what I’d call a cataclysmic event on the horizon. And my prediction is that Microsoft will be a non-player, fumbling with how to get in the game and own that segment. They want it badly. I don’t believe they have a clue where to begin. They may indeed become a dominant player at some point but Microsoft is like the traditional telcos when it comes to innovation – it simply isn’t there.

Proactive notification is a vital part of the evolution to a Software Oriented Architecture (SOA) in some fashion. It’s all about making business processes and workflows interact easily with network communications services (voice, video and data). This is the convergence we’ve been talking about for ten years now. Tight coupling between business applications and network services will engender a change in corporate culture that will enable some companies to become the new enterprise we’ve never seen before. Some enterprise will become the nimble, innovative giants that have only been dreamed of. They’ll dominate their respective markets. They’ll also be incredibly vulnerable since they can be leapfrogged by a competitor at any point. That’s going to drive a time of mergers, acquisitions, and bloodletting across the industries involved.

Multimodal Messaging Communications speaks to me as mobility. What to we really want? Ubiquituous, easy access, anywhere, any time. We want always on, always connected, always ready to go services. This is a combination of mobile computing services and enhanced wireless networking. Technologies that couple with tools to give us powerful resources. I like to call it casual computing, but mobile computing will also do. It’s the always on mentality. That’s something that  Sheryl and I experience every day of our lives as a hyperconnected couple. I believe, Sheryl and I believe that the world is becoming more hyperconnected. We realize that our particular integration of mobile and network technologies into our daily lives isn’t the norm today. But we believe that’s changing for many people.

Instant Conferencing that Art mentions is a sore spot for many. Anyone who’s ever had to set up a conference call on the fly knows what a nightmare that can be. Even when we set one up in advance, the industry is fraught with a feature set that’s daunting and and uses an arcane set of keystrokes (mostly on that obsolete ten0digit dial pad) to operate. The conferencing segment of the industry really needs to be wiped out, and a fresh start. But there’s hope and light. iotum recently put up a free conference calling application on Facebook that gives a glimmer of hope to how conferencing might be set up in a business environment one day soon in an SOA world.

I think the key point, the real power in Art’s post, comes in the closing section – Managing The New I/O For Business Process Applications – People!. Then again, he’s a great writer who knows how to set us up. It also made me think of one of my favorite books of all time, Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology by Darrin Barney. The core concept is that we, as humans, are now really an I/O tool of the network, the large I Internet that collects and gathers information about everything on our planet. In short, we feed the machine. And after all, isn’t the Internet really a large data collection engine gathering input from all of us for the biggest data warehouse ever imagined?

Technorati Tags: unified communications, mobility, casual computing, always on, hyperconnected couple

My friend, Andy Abramson, wrote an interesting blog post today. He talks about the new wave of hardware that is both interesting and purposeful, and how the hardware companies are essentially mashing up with software companies to create tools that are potentially more useful and definitely geared to specific intent.

Purpose Built Devices Are Coming To The Forefront
food, voip, wine, hotels, working anywhere, …
Andy Abramson [9:16am]

At the recent Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in London this past October, Intel’s representative gave a very well put together presentation that left me feeling that we’re heading not towards “convergence” but instead “divergence” and that as a result we’re going to be seeing more purpose built devices that do one thing great, with some sideline features that compliment.

[Read The Rest of Andy's Post]

New technologies are riveting. The future of IM is a story yet to be told. It is one I will be watching, probably participating in, in some fashion.

Doc Searls posted this interesting view to the social networking concept the other day. I’ve been mulling it over a bit as I try to develop my own response.

The only real social networks are personal ones

Should Brands Join or Build Their Own Social Network? is the question Jeremiah Owyang raised yesterday on Twitter and in facebook. If you’re a facebook member, you can participate. I am a member, but I’d rather not. At least, not there.

All due respect (and I respect Jeremiah a great deal), I’d rather talk outside the facewall.

Forgive me for being an old fart, but today’s “social networks” look to me like yesterday’s online services. Remember AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve and the rest? Facebook to me is just AOL done right. Or done over, better. But it’s still a walled garden. It’s still somebody’s private space. Me, I’d rather take it outside, where the conversation is free and open to anybody.

[Read Doc's full post]

There’s one area where I can’t quite agree with Doc, although I think his core message is pretty much on target. He said “I’d rather take it outside, where the conversation is free and open to anybody.“

I can agree with that for people like he and I. I think it’s a fair and accurate statement for people who are active bloggers, podcasters and users of the wide array of today’s social interaction tools like Twitter and Jaiku.

Where I feel like i have to disagree is when it comes to something like Facebook. Yes, it’s still a walled garden. I won’t dispute that a bit. But it’s also an enabler of social networking. Think of the number of people using Facebook to send messages, share pictures, and interact that don’t have any other blog or web presence to speak of.

Those of us who’ve used these tools for years find that we drift from one to the next. In large part, we’re pulled along by our own circle of friends. We tend to hang out in those places where our friends congregate. We move from one network to another not because of some cool new web interface. Rather, we move because we follow our circle of friends. We flock with our flock.

Facebook as a walled garden is simlar to AOL or Compuserve of old to some degree. But it’s also become a draw for people who don’t have an online web presence elsewhere. There are plenty of people on Facebook who aren’t anywhere else online. LinkedIn, while focused primarily on business relationships, is much the same way.

Like Doc, I’m a huge fan of open conversation. That’s why this is posted here. To share with anyone who might choose to read and comment. But, if I choose to ignore Facebook the way Doc describes, aren’t we excluding those who are inside the garden. Doc was talking about how brands engage in social network arenas. I know his views on brands differ a bit from mine. But the old school brand mentality is still drawn to an audience driven by a set of demographics. It seems to me that there’s huge value to be added by walled gardens like Facebook if they can (a) tear down or minimize the walls to the outside, fostering more open dialogue, and (b) make users feel safe, comfortable and wanted in a way that engenders more free sharing of some basic demographic information. It’s the same mindset that makes targeted advertising palatable.

Technorati Tags: Doc Searls, Facebook, social media, social networks

Posting to get Stardust to our Technorati profiles.

Ken’s Technorati Profile

Sheryl’s Technorati Profile

In my typical wandering ways, I ran across an article this morning about business and social networking. Interesting to me because Ken and I have been discussing the value of the social network, such as facebook, twitter, and jaiku.

We follow a large number of people on all of the above, and we have our own followers as well, but how will business use the social network? Is there a benefit? And what happens should a business choose not to use the social tools readily available?

One of the more obvious business tools that is also a social outlet is Linkedin. I use linkedin, but only recently started seeing value in it. Largely because as a stay at home mom I wasn’t clear on the benefits. I still struggle with understanding them, but have accepted the connectedness is key for networking and maintaining relationships.

At Stardust, obviously we need the connection. It is one of the advantages we offer. We are a connected team and clearly value social networking.

Maybe a better question to ask is can a business survive without social networking on the web? Will facebook ever be considered a normal part of the business work ethic? It’s an interesting consideration.

Here is yet one more perspective to think about. Is the social network really just a “white elephant” as suggested? Your call.

Businesses warned: Don’t rush into Web 2.0

Social networking could turn out to be a costly “white elephant” for businesses that rush to invest in the technology.

Many companies are thinking about whether they can take advantage of social-networking technology but analysts at Gartner are warning corporates against getting caught up in all the Web 2.0 hype.

[Read More Here]

Here’s an article that caught my eye on CNET News.com this morning.

Companies warned not to rush into social networkingMany companies are thinking about how they can take advantage of social-networking technology, but analysts at Gartner are warning against getting caught up in the hype.

Businesses are advised to consider certain issues before investing in or developing internal social-networking tools. These include protecting personal intellectual property, as well as people’s preference for using existing nonprofessional, external networks such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace.com.

With Facebook saying it will license its developer platform to other organizations, it also could become even easier for companies to develop their own social networks.

But the Gartner report says the hype around social networking doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a mature enough technology to make it a critical business requirement.
[Read full article]

Gartner has a long history of taking the most conservative of approaches and not rapidly embracing emerging technologies quickly. I’ve often referred to the Gartner Magic Quadrant series and the Magic Quadrant of Mediocrity, not because the companies and solutions they tout are truly mediocre, but because they always seem to be on the trailing edge of adoption.

Gartner says that social media technology isn’t mature enough to make it a criticial business requirement. I don’t agree. It’s a rapidly emerging tool that’s becoming more vital to success in business every day. The problem is that businesses aren’t investing resources to understand how to capture the value. The value proposition of social media isn’t understood by enterprise business. I don’t think Gartner understands it either.

What they do understand is their suggestion that the value lies in the content rather than the product. While that’s true, it points out the shortcoming of their entire line of thinking. or organizations in today’s information economy, content is where all the value is. Gartner, and many businesses who heed their reports, focus on products. They’re looking, not for an innovative solution that leads to competitive advantage and success. Rather, they look for silver bullets. They want that magic product that can be purchased that will solve business problems.

The root of business strategy and success doesn’t lie in the products use, but rather how they’re used. How people share content. Sometimes that content is purely social in nature, like we often see on Twitter and Jaiku. In enterprise business, that content, that social media, is business intelligence.

Here at Stardust, we firmly believe that people, the knowledge they bring, and the way they collaborate around information is the key to success. For business, rather than reinventing social media by buying and implementing costly new software applications, the real value is in understanding and leveraging the readily available networks and tools that already exist.

Technorati Tags: Gartner, social media

Added a link to this from friend Euan Semple

Ignore Gartner
If you are spending lots of money you are doing the wrong thing anyway!

This morning Ken and I were passing notes back and forth, discussing social media, social technologies in a more humanitarian evolution. It occurred to us what a unique opportunity a social network such as facebook, or myspace, has.

I joined Little Geeks not long ago. This is a group dedicated to taking old computers, reworking them, and giving them to children. There are any number of groups such as this, One Laptop Per Child is another one that comes to mind.

The question I have is how likely is it that a site like facebook can actually be effective with regard to establishing itself in the Not For Profit Business model?

To be honest, I look at the various causes, and have recruited my share of people to said causes. The effectiveness of it eludes me. How effective can it be if all you do is get people to acknowledge the cause? If you get 10 people to ‘join’ the cause, but that’s as far as it goes, how viable is it?

On the other side of the coin, not acknowledging the cause, not acknowledging the need lends itself to self absorption and indicates lack of consideration for humanity. Is it enough that we draw attention to a cause? Are sites like Facebook taking on the role of benefactor or advocate of humanitarian pursuits?

The social media technologies have a tough row to hoe if they are to compete with the traditional Not For Profit venues… or do they?

Social Networking for the Socially Minded

District Firm Razoo Joins Other Web Site Builders Trying to Reinvent How People Give Money to Charity

By Zachary A. Goldfarb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 17, 2007; Page D01

The office of Razoo on Connecticut Avenue blends two distinct cultures common in Washington.

It has the feeling of an Internet start-up, what with programmers clicking away, big flat screens, an espresso machine and funky green carpet. Yet the photos on the walls from Rwanda and other poor countries and the 11 employees, age 23 to 33, suggest it could just as easily be a nongovernmental organization.

[Read Full Story Here]

As we’ve been gearing up to unveil our plans here at Stardust. one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is how social media, social networks and the like lap into both business processes and our personal lives. When we talk about the social network phenomenon, I’ve always said that while I am a member of LinkedIn and Facebook,for example, neither one is my social network. I used them for discretely different purposes. While I actively use the other services like Twitter and Jaiku, they aren’t my social network either. They’re simply tools that ease how I provide information to my friends, family and colleagues about my status in the world – where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking.

For me, my social network is a blend of personal social friends and family and my array of business colleagues. The truth is, most of my business colleagues are my friends in other ways. My personal and business lives overlap in a large way. But my social network can’t be confined to something like Facebook. About a year ago the way I explained this to a set of students I was talking to was simply to say “My space is infinitely bigger than Myspace.” The truth is that my social network exists in my Blackberry. And my Nokia N95. In my N800 and my laptop. It’s in Outlook and Gmail/Gtalk. Our individual social network is accessible to each of us in the time and place we choose to use it based on the tools we find that ease our access.

As we all move to a more hyperconnected state of being online, I’ve seen this become true for many people. Many of us are more mobile. more dynamically involved in a wider variety of work projects than we have ever been. Yet we are also more connected than ever. Wireless broadband and WiFi services put much of the world into a perpetually connected state. Those of use who carry multiple devices equipped with multiple connection modes find ourselves hyperconnected all the time.

As a digression, Sheryl and I find ourselves as a hyperconnected couple, which gives us a unique opportunity to explore some of the nuances of this paradigm shift. As both life partners and business partners, we experience daily the benefits, and the challenges of living a hyperconnected life.

Thinking about social media and networks led me to reconsider how businesses approach customer relationship management (CRM) with software applications. I’ve been making notes for months about how I use the tools already mentioned here as my own personal relationship manager tool set. Recently I read the following from Tom Evslin with glee, because it’s so in tune with my own thoughts.

Personal Relationship Manager

Tristan Louis coined the term “personal relationship manager” in a brilliant post on his blog. With his kind permission, we’re adopting PRM to cover much of what we’re building at FWD International. We’d been searching for a descriptive phrase to describe what we’re up to; Tristan nailed it. Not only did he come up with the right phrase, he also wrote a cogent and complete description of what a personal relationship manager should do (we’ll quietly add any features we missed to the development schedule).

“What I want is a view of my relationship with people that would group:

• The basic type of address book information available in my address book and/or on my PDA and/or phone.
• The rich email discussions I have had with said people
• The similarly rich IM discussions I have had.
• SMS or MMS discussions synched from my phone.
• Social Networks interactions
• Feeds for the person (to things like their blog, their last.fm account, etc…)
• Trackbacks and other blog related discussions.”

[Read Tom's full post]

For me, the catalytic point may be nitpicking. I don’t like the idea or the acronym PRM any more than I like CRM. I think it tries to do to much in terms of pigeon-holing something we need to make simpler. It’s relationship management. I worked in sales for a number of years. There’s an old adage that people buy from people. The same is true everywhere. We don’t manage people. We use tools to manage, or more accurately nourish, our relationships.

Relationship management, business or personal, is about how we relate to people. It’s not about the tools we use. The tools we use foster stronger relationships only when they put us at ease and are simple to use.

CRM, PRM or RM – whatever acronym you choose, isn’t about APIs and features. It’s about a comfortable way to work that doesn’t change how we interact with family, friends, colleagues, customers. The primary focus can never be the tool. It can never be the process. It must be the relationship.

This is an area I’ll be exploring much more deeply as we evolve here. I’m intrigued by how people use the same tools in very different ways to maintain and nourish their relationships, business and personal, in all facets of life.

Technorati Tags: social media, relationships, relationship management, Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, hyperconnected

In this initial unveiling, Sheryl Breuker and Ken Camp invite you to come listen in as we talk about our new efforts at Stardust Global Ventures. Keep in mind that we’re a hyperconnected couple who use and view technology with a very forward looking set of eyes

This podcast is a simple recording as we talk about what some of our goals and ideas are. You’ll hear where our interests lie, the areas we’re focusing on, and what we see as some of the hottest things on the horizon as mobile and casual computing efforts blend with mobile solutions to enhance productivity and connectivity.

We hope you enjoy listening to us chat about some of the opportunities we see on ahead. We hope you’ll come visit us here regularly.

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Technorati Tags: Stardust Global Ventures, stardust, Sheryl Breuker, Ken Camp, podcast, social media, mobile computing

As we get ready to unveil our plans and efforts here at Stardust Global Ventures, we thought we’d post a brief video so that those of you who’ve only read our writing or heard our podcasts could see us to get a sense of who we are.

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Technorati Tags: Stardust Global Ventures, Sheryl Breuker, Gabby Geek, Ken Camp

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Not quite ready to go live with this but it is getting closer. Here’s a little example of some of the work being done. Funny how the geek in us still accepts traditional tools for working out the details.

We’ve been in stealth mode planning for a while here. We’ve been quietly laying the framework of our plans and crafting our ideas over the past couple of months. We both have been anxious to begin but felt we didn’t want to really unveil what we’re working on until we were ready.

Today we decided that one of the best drivers and motivators for us to proceed is to quit thinking inside our own heads and start doing. We’re working at a more feverish pitch now, getting ready to unveil our ideas for all to see. We’re working on the basic pages and background info here for the web site.

Consider us a work in progress as we explore, evolve and spawn new ideas.