Stardust Global Ventures

Twitter almost works.

Jaikue almost works.

Brightkite almost works.

Yes, they all work most of the time, to some degree, but they all have significant shortcomings. They’re entrants in a field that’s being created and defined, but they are baby steps at best.

Twitter is probably the grandfather of the babies. Increasingly unreliable, but still popular. Every time they do maintenance, spotty service follows for a week. Recent noise about their TOS and whether they honor it or change it made for interesting criticism. It’s nice for the simple SMS interface, yet the API has allowed a number of third-party solutions to give lots of users lots of different means to post. And the API has allowed the inclusion of Twitpic for pictures.

Jaiku is nice for threaded conversation and lifestream aggregation. And if you use a Nokia phone, there’s a client. But if you’re on any other phone or Blackberry, well there’s m.jaik, but it’s still basic and rudimentary. Jaiku hasn’t shown an actual enhancement anywhere for users in ages. Google bought them and nothing happened. Like Grandcentral, Jaiku went into a dark hole once Google bought them.

Brightkite has messaging features like Twitter and Jaiku. But the web interface from a phone is in earlyt development. It often doesn’t allow location check-in, posting a note or sending a picture. It has an arcane and complex SMS structure that no user will ever remember, and for all it’s listed features, doesn’t seem to work. In my testing, not a single SMS command has ever worked for anything except to message another user. Checking in at various locations when mobile is a strength, but having to use a laptop browser to do so makes it useless.

What works most consistently? For me, it’s Facebook. Uptime and reliability is decent and the Blackberry client works well. Twitter comes in second for the ease and elegance of simplicity via SMS.

We’re moving…again. Are you surprised?

Our life has been a real whirlwind the past few months. We just moved two weeks ago into a home we really like. We’ve been picturing the summer here walking around the small lake and getting to know our new neighbors. There’s a pool and clubhouse that are really nice. We took lots of pictures, but only posted a few to Flickr.

The home we barely knew

Life is a series of surprises, twists and turns. Ken was in the process of transitioning day jobs in his work with the state when he got an offer that we both felt we just couldn’t pass up. So three weeks after moving into what we thought would be our home, we’re moving again. This time, we’re leaving Olympia and moving to Spokane.

We won’t actually live in Spokane proper, but the Spokane Valley. Ken’s new employer is in Liberty Lake. We’ll be moving over into corporate housing on the Memorial Day weekend. That will give us a long weekend to find our way around the area and get a sense of where we are. Ken goes to work in his new role on the 27th.

If moving isn’t enough to keep life interesting, we’ve been working with our good friend Jeff Pulver to coordinate the upcoming Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and friends) in Seattle . Not only is it a chance to see Jeff again, we’re going to be doing some video as we track A Day in the Life of Jeff for our GeekSpeakTV. To make things a little more interesting, Robert Scoble will be joining Jeff, so this breakfast is with with Jeff and Robert.

Sometime later in the day we’ll kidnap Jeff, and the three of us will be driving to Vancouver after breakfast for Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and friends) in Vancouver the next day. After more video and networking with another great group of people, we’ll hit the road back to Spokane. We’re looking forward to some time alone with Jeff to hear about his new ventures and just spend some time with one of the neatest people we know.

But
wait, there’s more. On July 4th we fly to northern
BC. Many of Sheryl’s things are still in storage up there. We’re going to
load them up, pick up David, and the three of us will then drive back
to Spokane.

Life is going to continue to be busy and exciting for
us. We’re still pursuing all our dreams together. Our daily routine
will change and we’ll adapt as we go. We’ll find a way for a
little downtime for ourselves along the way. Together. We’re doing
everything together. That’s where the real strength lies for us. We
have a powerful, magical bond that we’re protecting forever as we
journey through life, hand in hand and side by side. Hyperconnected and in love!

My pal Andy Abramson just posted this and it’s a pretty thoughtful look at what’s coming in IP communications. As such, it led me to rethink some of my recent comments, and seems a good opportunity to revisit these two subjects.

What’s Next In IP Communications? Here’s An Idea To Look At

Last week two stories seem to generate a lot of interest all across the blogs and in the news. The first was the rumor of a “Skype Killer” being planned by the leading telcos around the world. The second was the blockbuster move by the new WiMax consortium of players including Intel, ClearWire, Sprint plus the cable companies, along with online leader Google, to take over what Sprint and Clearwire were both not really doing yet, that to create a national WiMax footprint here in the USA which will deliver, in theory, both Mobile and Fixed broadband solutions.

These two topics are really pretty central to IP communications as we look ahead. Skype isn’t a panacea, but it’s the largets VoIP deployment in the world, and remains wildly popular. And it’s still growing. WiMax is arguably a successor to WiFi, or a fit somewhere in between WiFi and carrier wireless broadband. It could be the next carrier wireless broadband for data if it really succeeds.

Here’s a point Andy makes that the two technologies may be interwoven –

You see, the genie is out of the bottle and there’s no putting the Skype Genie back in, so another more robust and accepted flavor of IP communications that does the same thing and more, but without the already known concerns that Skype raises, could overtake them in time,
especially if its primary purpose was to supplant the existing analog base of installed users as the telcos move them to IP on their own or see them migrate to cable or WiMax.

I’m not sure I fully agree with the details, but I’m absolutely on the same page as Andy with regard to the problems.

The telcos don’t like Skype. Fair enough. They don’t like competition of any kind. They’ve struggled with it since divestiture of the old Bell System in 1984 and have a a long history of killing competition. But they’ve done too little for too long, and it’s far too late. What was once the leading technology industry (think 1956 and Bell Labs invention of the transistor), has fallen into a malaise of maintaining status quo and a sense of the right to be the incumbent forever.

Skype is in play. It may not be openly, actively courting, but Skype is clearly in play. And eBay has demonstrated their inability to leverage their huge investment in Skype toward any substantial success. Yet Skype continues to grow and improve. There’s been some speculation that some consortium of telcos might actually make a move to buy Skype. I think it’s highly unlikely. One of the biggest negatives Skype has shown is its disinterest in open standards for VoIP. for the telcos to embrace Skype, they’d have one of two paths to follow – (a) radically alter Skype to use open standard VoIP in fitting with their infrastructure, or (b) radically re-architect their own networks to use or add Skype’s protocols.

Either presents major problems, and would take on a lifetime of reinventing telephony all over again. They telcos believe they already know telephony, because they know it as it was. Frankly, they don’t have the innovative wherewithall to pull off either of those options successfully. What they might be able to do is mediocritize Skype by building a series of gateways to the PSTN. This could work from a technical standpoint. It also makes sense from a regulatory perspective to manage Skype in a fully separate environment.

Given the innovation shown by the telcos for the last fifty years (please note the tongue-in-cheek…there has been no substantive innovation by the telcos for fifty years), this last option seems a slippery slope, fraught with business, technology, and customer satisfaction problems.

So pick your analogy. Andy said the genie is out of the bottle. Others have said the horse is out of the barn, the water’s over the dam. For the telcos, their response to the Skype threat is simply too little, too late. Skype came on their horizon at a time every telco executive had been forced to read The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. Every one of them knew full well that disruptive technologies come with a set of known characteristics. Disruptive technologies generally:

• Arrive substantially “downmarket”
• Less complex and expensive (off-the-shelf)
• May sometimes be more costly
• Lower performance than mainstream technology
• Offer lower margins than mainstream technology
• Are introduced into insignificant markets
• May have to make their own markets
• Are perceived as unnecessary by mainstream customers
• Do not fit mainstream value model
• Are difficult to deal with by established players
• Carry significant first-mover advantage

They knew this and ignored Skype until it was too late. Years too late. Skype ate the telcos lunch, and in many ways now has the mindshare that the traditional telcos can never win back. They rested on their laurels as a sustaining technology.

Just as radically as the 3.5″ disk drive disrupted the old traditional disk makers out of business, Skype has forever changed the face of voice communications.

• Of leading 14” drive makers, none survive the 8” drive
• Of leading 8” drive makers, 1 survives the 5.25” drive
• Of leading 5.25” drive makers, only 35% introduce a 3.5” product!

It’s nice that the telcos finally woke up to smell the coffee, but the pot’s almost empty and there’s a hole in your cup. Too little too late. Like many of us have been saying for years to the telcos – the bell tolls for thee.

Andy goes on to bring in the WiMax angle as a related topic –

WiMax. Last week’s announcement of the mega players all joining hands was a very good deal for Clearwire and Sprint.
Clearwire’s investors cashed out. Sprint got someone else to carry the
ball in the USA market, plus this now provides another option to offer
IP based communications versus the already existing 3G solutions.

As a result I chose to think how the very much-ballyhooed WiMax play
could be differentiated versus being looked at as only a substitute for
the mobile phone. As I like to say “too much me too, me also, not me
different” is nothing really new. I mean, what good is going the 4G
route if all it does is give a less expensive experience to make phone
calls on the go, and not work everywhere for many years to come. That’s
what the cable guys already did with VoIP, where the only difference
from what we’ve always had from the phone company is the wire the phone
service travels over and the bill.

WiMax as a substitute for the mobile phone is a boneheaded idea for the reasons Andy states.He’s pretty open with his “too much me to, me also, not me different” description of ideas he sees as off the mark. I tend to be less charitable and call a boneheaded idea just that. A carrier-based approach to WiMax will take years to deploy. I compare carrier WiMax with ISDN in the United States. Never has a technology cost so much, to do so little, and arrive on the scene so late. By the time ISDN for consumers was generally available, it was overpriced, under-featured and obsolete. So now the telcos are going to make WiMax the next ISDN.

Sprint is among one of the least innovative companies I’ve watched for the past ten years. They’re slow to market with solutions that under-deliver, if they work at all. So know they’re going to partner with Clearwire. I’m just not as impressed as a number of my colleagues.

The success of WiFi has not been driven, extended or enlarged by the pitiful efforts we’ve seen that put WiFi in Starbucks and McDonalds. WiFi succeeded because it was unlicensed spectrum that you and I could deploy quickly, easily and cheaply in our homes, offices and businesses. Just like the disruptive technologies Christensen so aptly described, WiFi came in at the low end of a different market. It created its own market. I don’t believe WiMax has that same kind of potential. It’s too direct a competition potentially to existing wireless technologies. I believe we’ll see WiMax widely deployed, but it’s not a wireless technology I believe will sustain momentum long enough to become a major incumbent technology…at leastw not with the carriers driving it. They’ll drive it to mediocrity in their effort to stave off their own painful death while they tell themselves they’re innovating.

The next generation of wireless isn’t here yet. I don’t think we’ve really seen it yet. While the US runs a 2.5G network at best, much of the world is moving toward real 3G wireless. 4G is another animal and what we’re seeing today is a lot of experimentation in the space as players try to find the technology mesh that will gain the critical mass of user acceptance.

I don’t think this mesh will come from any company we see today as a telco. The telcos are innovating us into the dark ages of FCC largess protecting their business. The telcos exist in an environment of cronyism, back room handshakes and political contributions. That’s an approach that may stave off death a while longer, but it won’t create an environment where innovation thrives. They’ve still got their heads in the sand. While they’ve been beat over the head with a clue-by-four repeatedly for years, the telcos, to a very large degree, still haven’t a clue. They don’t have a ten year roadmap that’s got any grit to it.
Technorati Tags: telcos, WiMax, Skype, 4G, next generation networks, unified communications

Among her accomplishments that have brought her so far in life, she’s now recognized as a published author. I’m so proud to have her join me among the authors at Realtimepublishers.

Sheryl Breuker has more than 15 years of experience working with communications and information technologies. As an independent consultant and analyst, Sheryl is an experienced thought leader who studies emerging communications technologies and how they integrate with existing operations in both enterprise business and society at large. Sheryl has crafted strategies globally for both public and private sector organizations, providing written analysis of complex technology and business integration strategies. Sheryl consults with a number of vertical market segments ranging from high-tech innovators to winemakers and restaurateurs. She has successfully guided a number of these organizations in integration of new technologies into their legacy voice and data networking environment in support of an emergent competitive corporate culture. Sheryl’s series of Incidental Interviews have been widely acclaimed as she probes how technology leaders see their vision of the future. Sheryl consults, writes and speaks about the rapid evolution of unified communications in areas of mobility, video collaboration, and convergence with existing business applications. Sheryl is deeply entrenched in the evolution of social media and how evolving conversational tools reshape business operations and work flows. She lives in Olympia, WA. Sheryl is a principal with Stardust Global Ventures (http://www.stardustglobalventures.com) working on technology, social media, and the impact on business and society. Her Gabby Geek Weblog, home of Incidental Interviews, is online at http://www.thegabbygeek.com.

I got a note from my good friend Pat Phelan, CEO at Cubic Telecom, yesterday afternoon while out running an errand about a new service called Twitterfone. You can see the press release down below. It isn’t VoIP, but this is a really fascinating example of where voice services are heading.

Please bear in mind that I was out in mobile mode, with only my Blackberry, so all I’d actually seen initially was the flurry of chatter on Twitter about Twitterfone and the expected flurry of test posts as people try it out. Sheryl and I got invitations to join the beta, but weren’t back at the office until last night to actually get that done. For those of you who follow me at all, you know I’m an avid Twitter user, and have been since it was Twttr, long before it caught the wave of popularity. Sheryl and I use Twitter as part of our work at Stardust Global Ventures, and it’s an integral part of our daily life.

When I started using Twitter, it was SMS only, so it required a mobile phone to use. Now it seems to have come full circle, as Twitterfone enables people to use their mobile phone rather than the browser. Huh? Yep. The difference is that you can now phone in a message and have it post rather than key in an SMS text message. It also posts a short URL that links to your recorded audio.

Like a great many people, I use Twitter almost entirely via mobile on my Blackberry, and I like the raw simplicity of the SMS interface. I find many add-on tools make Twitter more complex and are something of a nuisance. The web interface enhancements seem to wipe out the simple elegance of Twitter with undue complexity. But adding voice to the mix is a very different enhancement and opens new vistas in human-to-network resource interaction.

I’m not sure the concept bedazzles me initially, but it’s interesting. I’ve played with SpinVOX and Utterz in the past. Both can do a similar type of thing – variations on a theme. Both of those implementations work pretty poorly in my experience. Speech recognition software however is improving at a rapid rate and if Twitterfone can do speech to text conversion cleanly, there could be some real value. Given the global audience on Twitter, the language and pronunciation variations could prove challenging.

That challenge was on my mind while I out in mobile mode, only on my Blackberry. That’s when I got this message via Twitter on my mobile –

To be fair, it’s the only one of those I saw, but very few of the people I follow on Twitter are using Twitterfone so far. I know it’s in invite-only beta mode, so I expect some glitches.

This morning I tried it out myself for the first time. Here’s what Twitterfone posted. If you click the graphic, you can hear what I said.

Twitterfone did a reasonable, but not quite perfect job of speech-to-text conversion.

Given that both Twitter and Twitterfone are free services, and Twitter has proven time and again that it’s not entirely reliable, they make an interesting match for social networking tools. Now it’s pretty easy to make a phone call and post to Twitter. You can actually speak a three minute message and the beginning will post to Twitter (140 character limit). People who want to hear the whole message can click through on the web to do so. On my Blackberry, I can click through and read the transcribed text, but not play the audio.

Being able to post to Twitter via a phone call somewhat troubles me as much as it intrigues me. The stream of Twitter messages is filled with useless drivel as it is. I’m as guilty as the next of posting useless information that’s only noise to the world at large. Now we all have an easier way to post as we drive or are otherwise occupied. That’s a mixed blessing.

I know two of the founding investors, both friends I think highly of. I’m really curious what their long range plans are. Is this for publicity or do they envision a monetization scheme that enables monetization. So far Twitter doesn’t have any monetization mechanism, so now we have another free service enhancing a free service. I’m not sure where the survivability might be. It seems potentially rather tenuous. But Pat and Florian are very bright guys with a great handle on the business, so I’m interested in what their vision is.

Pat and Florian, how about a podcast briefing on here?

Twitterfone inaugurates voice-to-Twitter service

• Allows anyone to send updates to Twitter by calling a number
• Voice is automatically transcribed to text

Twitterfone www.twitterfone.com – an Internationally backed voice to text message service launched today in the US, UK and Ireland.

Twitterfone voice-enables Twitter, a text message rebroadcast service and the hottest social networking service at the moment. With Twitterfone, people can dictate text messages via their mobile to be sent out to everyone on their Twitter social network.

Twitterfone investor and Cubic Telecom President Pat Phelan stated “Right now the million active users of Twitter use cell phones or computers to send and receive short bursts of texts to each other. Millions of messages each day are sent like this but while Twitter is one of the truly mobile social networks out there, there are times when users on the move cannot stop what they are doing to key in a message.

Twitterfone improves upon Twitter by allowing us to make a voice call which is turned into text and sent out to our network of friends. This only costs the price of a local call, no matter how many it is sent to. With hands-free kits common in cars it now means we can text each other without taking our eyes off the road and our hands off the wheel.”

How Twitter works:
Once people sign up to Twitter, they can subscribe to receive updates of users and receive them via the web or a text message. Web gurus Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble have over 20,000 subscribers each and even the Los Angeles Fire Department and the English Government are now sending out text updates to people via their Twitter account.

An alliance of international high-tech and telecom companies provide the technology platform behind Twitterfone. Geneva-based VOX telecom provides calls routing, Redwood City, California-based Zong powers mobile enrollment and transactions, MAXroam powers the telephony intelligence system and Dublin firm Dial2Do supplies the core speech recognition which is at the heart of Twitterfone. Dial2Do CEO Ivan MacDonald stated

“We’ve been involved in the space where the phone system meets the web for a long time now, and naturally we’ve been fascinated by the rise of Twitter. Increasingly, we’ll see “web 2.0″ services that people use primarily from their phones. Projections are that mobiles will become the dominant way of accessing the Internet, and a lot of this will be done via voice interfaces. We are very pleased to see Dial2Do add even more value to an already extraordinary service.”

Phelan added “We built this because we are all avid users of Twitter and have made some excellent business connections and friendships from it. We decided to see what we could contribute to the service and with our telecoms backgrounds the Twitterfone idea fitted perfectly”.

Twitterfone is in invite beta at the moment meaning that only those that have been sent invites can join up. There will be regular releases of invites and Twitterfone says they have planned for a million sign-ups over the next year.

Twitterfone inc is a privately owned corporation

Twitterfone investors are Pat Phelan, David Marcus, Florian Seroussi, Sean O Sullivan and Ivan MacDonald.

Technorati Tags: Twitterfone, Pat Phelan, Twitter, speech-to-text, voice recognition

We have many developments that have taken place recently. Difficult to chronicle them all, and we didn’t have the energy to qik video most, though we did do a video of our new house once we got moved in. Tired? Oh yeah! We spent the last several days moving, situating ourselves and unpacking the whole mess. Which means, ultimately, our online time has been limited.

As limited as our online time has been, we’ve still been doing our best to read some blog posts and generally keep up with our myriad of online/offline friends. A few posts have sort of stood our for me, forcing me to question my presence as well as my ability to maintain integrity in blogging and using various media tools.

This morning I read on Facebook a post written by Jeff Pulver. Jeff is an interesting guy. One of my favorite reads actually. He intrigues me because his mind is incredible. He has more ideas than probably anyone I know. But maybe it just seems that way?

What Jeff Pulver has the ability to do is capture a thought and express it, garnering a great deal of consideration in the world of technology. That is something I wish I could do. Not necessarily garner the attention, though obviously I am an attention seeker, but have my thoughts matter somehow, yes.

This morning is no different with regard to my enjoyment of Jeff’s writing. His post, “The Digital “Me” – Welcome to Life 3.0″, talked about living digitally and how people know each other in todays world. He suggests that people may think they know him because he is so public, writing, using video, audio and really so many different tools to get his content displayed in one way or another, but the question really is do we know him? I mean, is it possible to have enough content out there that people truly know you even if they have never met you or talked to you? I wonder about that.

Ken and I post to a lot of different places for a variety of reasons. We post pictures to flickr to share with our family and friends what we’re up to. We post to our blogs, our thoughts and our visions. We post to twitter to give quick updates or touch base. Facebook we use as a sort of playground as well as a place to see what some of our non twittering friends are up to, and jaiku we use to have conversations with people, sometimes only chiming in to something someone we know has thrown out there for discussion. We do use video on seesmic and a few other places, though most of our video goes through our GeekSpeak TV show.

Why did I mention all of that? I still want to know if people think they really know me/us because of all they read. On the one hand I think there are things people absolutely know that they wouldn’t know unless reading and paying attention to our various feeds. But who am I? Does the digital life make it easier or more difficult for people to connect and really gain a sense of who those they follow are?

My 2 cents… for family members, the non-tech sector and even some of the more tech savvy family and friends we have, our various postings absolutely allow them into our lives to share and almost feel they are participating with us. But here’s the catch. Those people actually know us. They have a sense of our value system, our views of the world. They know, for instance, the struggle I had in getting a treatment for my son to improve his bone density. They also know how much energy I spent at hospitals and doctors offices while he was being cast or getting the casts off. They know other things too, like what my favorite color is, that I don’t like onions because I get nauseated when I eat them. (I won’t mention what they know about Ken because he can divulge that or not as he sees fit)

I think maybe it’s not possible to know as much as we think we can just by reading feeds. My sense is that it can prevent the actual interaction because people don’t feel they need to communicate as long as they can catch up reading the various posts. I also think our society is becoming less interactive physically and more interactive technologically. I don’t honestly know if thats a good thing or a bad thing but it is part of the evolution we’re all taking part in.

My guess is that we won’t learn the really important things if we stop meeting each other face to face. I just wonder where we’re all going to wind up. Is it possible to be too connected? Time will tell. In the meantime, I’m going to go read a blog.

Technorati Tags: seesmic, facebook, flickr, twitter, jaiku, ken camp, jeff pulver, sheryl breuker