Podcast - Collaboration On The Go, Episode 03 - Overlooking the Nevada sunset, I relaxed back in my hotel room, grabbed a comfortable seat in an armchair, and kicked off my final report from IP4IT. In this episode, I continue to talk about a few more vendors at the expo, recap a few more panel conferences, rant about web conferencing marketers and complain about overpriced coffee. All in under 15 minutes. Download this episode here.

The music featured in this episode is called "Music for a Future City", by Camtarn. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Podcast - Collaboration On The Go, Episode 02 - I recorded this podcast immediately after the first day of the expo came to a close. This episode features highlights of some of the vendors I've met and touches on the call center panel discussion. Download this episode here.

The music featured in this episode is called "Music for a Future City", by Camtarn. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Podcast - Collaboration On The Go, Episode 01 - Recorded at 4am, I touch on expectations from the show and the future of trade shows. Download this episode here.

The music featured in this episode is called "Music for a Future City", by Camtarn. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Just a quick report from the IP4IT conference. Today was my first day at the expo. Speaking from my perspective as a member of the media, this has so far been a worthwhile trip. The vendors sent their technical people down, instead of just the marketers. I'm now covering messaging and collaboration technologies at Network Computing, and would say about half the vendors here fit in my coverage area. The other half are VoIP vendors. That's Sean Doherty's area. And a third half are vendors I've never heard of before, but do some neat stuff, like Cylogistics. They make a low cost web conferencing appliance. Of course there are the big names here like Siemens, Intel and Cisco, but I find the smaller vendors to be the most interesting booths to stop by.

At a panel discussion today, there were two companies featured who implemented an IP telephony solution. A question was brought up as to why they purchased a system from a smaller, not-a-household-name vendor. In other words, when you think IP telephony, throw out the first three names you'd think of. Both of the panelists stated that many of the existing telecom equipment providers, even more so than the big VoIP vendors, were slow to innovate. The lesser known vendor responded faster to feature requests and were on the front lines of innovation.

By the end of the week, I'll have a few podcasts up with my improvised thoughts about the show and what I've seen. These will be the start of a new Network Computing podcast series, and I should have more information available in a week or two.

As we enter the brave new world of Internet phone and VoIP, this short from 1927 makes you think. People used to not know how to *dial* the phone. Wild.

No wonder QuickTime VR hasn't taken off. Ever try to make a QTVR movie? I'm attempting to do so right now, and finding authoring tools for free or under $100 is rather difficult. If anyone has ever made a QTVR movie on the cheap, I'd like to hear from you.

Continuing from yesterday, I was searching for a video adapter. Al took the initiative and called RadioShack before we left. They had a 6 foot S-video to RCA cable. Perfect! "That'll be $40, plus tax". Oh hell no (looking at their website, Radio Shack did sell what I wanted online, at competitive price, but that was discovered just a few minutes ago). Head into Circuit City. This is a store that's dedicates 40% of their floor space to televisions. Nope, they don't have what I need. They did have a $229.99 surge protector for home theaters. Yes, that's twenty thousand, nine hundred ninety nine pennies. I'll let you guess who makes it (I'll give you a hint, they sell a $1499.99 'voltage stabilizer' surge protector too).

How about CompUSA? Al picked up a cool external bus powered USB to laptop disk drive converter for only $20, but alas I was without my video converter. Finally the last option, BestBuy, 4 minutes before closing. They had it, and for only $24.99. This thing should cost $10 at most, and that's being generous. It's just a little bit of plastic and metal. It shouldn't cost that much to develop and manufacture. Still, I was in a bind, so I bought it. Video has become way to damn complex on the consumer side. Composite video, component video, 4 pin s-video, 7 pin s-video, HDML, DVI, HDCP, IEEE 1394, 780p, 1080i, 480p, 480i...

I got my hands on a video conferencing product which will appear in next month's sneak preview section. Actually I got two of them. This product (I can't say who makes it yet) is designed to be used in a conference room to room scenario, not on a desktop PC. I opened the box and looked at the AV connectors on the unit. I see a white RCA jack. That must be for the left audio channel. I see a red RCA jack. That's for the right audio channel. I see a jack with four pin holes and a bar. Oh yeah, that's an S-Video jack. Hmm. There isn't an RCA video jack. Well there goes my plan to connect one of the units to my 13" TV, which only has RCA jacks. I look on the back of my 30" TV. Surely that has S-video. Nope, just RCA as well. Maybe the surround sound receiver has an S-video jack. Nope, all RCA and optical ports there. I don't have any devices that can handle S-video? My digital camcorder has an S-video input jack, but I don't think video conferencing should be reviewed on a 3" LCD screen. I could configure the unit to output video via the VGA port. I only have a 17" VGA monitor. Damnit, I want to use this product on the biggest screen I have, and that's the one in the living room. Converter cable! I need an S-video to RCA converter. My PowerBook has an S-vid out port. I remember it came with an S-vid to RCA converter cable. Problem solved. Guess again. That was a 7-pin male S-video to female RCA connector. The video conferencing unit has only 4 pins. I'd have to rip 3 pins right out to plug it in, which isn't an option I want to consider at this time. I want to complete this review by Monday at the latest, since we have our yearly NWC editors meeting on Wednesday. It's 7pm on Friday. The vendor wouldn't be able to ship me any suitable parts until Monday at best. This will require a trip to the store. I call up my friend Al, and we head to the mall. Story continues on Tuesday.

July is setting up to be an interesting month for the Syracuse NWC staff. I've almost completed my evaluation of IP accessible KVMs. They work decently well for people connected on T1 or Cable/DSL lines, although even at 100Mbps you can't get a true on-console feel. There is always a bit of a delay and lag with the screen redraws. I also have a ton of equipment shipped to me for this article. Approximately 17 appliances, 40 dongles, 20 KVM cables, 17 power cables and a couple of serial cables are sitting on racks and in boxes behind me. I'm getting ready to start a video conferencing review in a few weeks. It deals with hosted solutions, so fortunately I don't need to worry about setting anything up beyond a few client installs of Windows.

In two weeks I'll be heading to Chicago along with the rest of the staff. We try to do this every year, where we can all get together in a room and talk about the upcoming year, new initiatives, coverage areas and so forth. It's also the time to plan the editorial calendar for 2006. Some cover stories can take up to six months to complete from start to print date, which is why we plan far in advance. The edit cal isn't set in stone, and we've been known to dramatically change stories from what was previously planned based on the market and industry shifts. If you have any story suggestions, including reviews and workshops, feel free to email them to me or the other beat editors by next Tuesday. I have already gotten several story ideas from fellow readers, and they're all quite good.

We're preparing to move the lab too. Next week, my lab will move about 75 feet to the west and 20 feet up. We actually have two labs in Syracuse. I'm in the Machinery Hall lab along with Bruce Boardman and Secure Enterprise's Mike Fratto and Joanne VanAuken. The other is the SciTech lab, housing Ron Anderson, Sean Doherty, Dave Molta and Pete Morrissey. These two labs are in separate buildings located about 500 feet apart. We will be moving into a single, completely remodeled, unified lab next week. The best part is that there will be an attached enclosed machine room to house the computers and air conditioner. No longer will I need to hear the whir of fan blades and air compressors. Sean's automatic two pot caffeine coffee maker is the second best part.

Woo!! One of the most useless, pointless programs ever written, Conan The Librarian, has been ported to Mac OS X. Conan tells you to shut up when the sound from the computer's microphone reaches certain levels. Install this on a loud coworker's machine as a reminder that people need to work, not listen to personal conversations on speakerphone.

At least as a standalone OS X application instead of a system 7 extension, it's less likely to crash the Mac outright.

"Akonix has published its June Threat Watch for instant messaging networks, citing a 400% increase in IM attacks during Q2 2005 as compared to last quarter."

"The IMlogic Threat Center, the industry’s first global consortium to provide threat detection and protection for instant messaging (IM) and peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, today issued its Second Quarter 2005 report on the rise of IM security threats. The report demonstrates a sharp increase of over 2700 percent in new IM threats including viruses, worms, spam over IM (SPIM), malware and phishing attacks."

Sounds like a good time to read our newest issue. We cover digital convergence, security and affordable IT in this feature on IM security.

Podcasting is now officially mainstream. Is this because Apple has released a new version of iTunes that supports podcasting? Sure, that's partly to blame. The podcast directory is a great way to see just how much is out there. There are hundreds of podcasts available for preview. But podcasting is being picked up by radio organizations out there, more specifically talk radio. I'm a bit of a talk radio junkie, and so are millions of other people. Rush Limbaugh's 20 million listeners hear the word podcast several times a day. Sean Hannity is podcasting. Glenn Beck is podcasting. I think Laura Ingraham is too. Just about all of Air America is available through the iTunes browser. That's a massive amount of people who are being informed about podcasting, and it's not just techie IT people. It is changing the face of talk radio, let alone Internet radio. Miss a show, no problem. Can't listen at noon, no problem. Want to listen to Rush and Hannity? No problem anymore. Download the program, load it on your ipod, get the FM broadcaster adapter, and listen in the car. I just wish it was easier to split up and edit an mp3, which you just can't do in itunes. These podcasts can get very large, and I don't want to store 30MB when all I want is a 3 minute segment.

Anyone doing video conferencing for small meetings? I'd like to talk to you about the experience, issues and effectiveness. Drop me an email.

A few months ago, I did a video conference meeting between myself, a PR rep of a web-based video conferencing vendor and their product manager. The conference went smoothly. My webcam worked fine. I was able to see other participants with excellent video quality. There were no technological problems at all. But it was also the most stressful vendor briefing I've ever done. Being on camera and watched, I felt a need to constantly appear interested, attentive and not distracted. Not that I normally blow off vendors and pretend to listen to them in a briefing. But you know how when you're on the phone, you sometimes look around the room, wave off coworkers to say you're busy, play with a pen on your desk, or refresh your email inbox to scan for urgent messages? You can't do that while being constantly watched on a webcam. Taking notes, which often require you to look down, may also be interpreted as disinterest through the webcam's eye (and sometimes, I don't want the caller to know when I'm taking a note). The whole process seemed a bit too unnatural. Maybe that feeling goes away with time.

Of course, there is also the fact that showing up on a video conference in a bathrobe, uncombed hair and poofy bunny slippers gives off a slightly unprofessional image.

2) Foundry makes one bigass switch. Have you read the specs on the best of interop winner? 3.84 Terabits per second, up to 4,000,000 routes, 1,000,000,000 packets per second.

3) If you fly Delta, you can experience the joy of having peanuts served to you as a snack. This time they're honey roasted.

4) High definition video conferencing. Lifesize had a demo featuring an employee in their Texas office (I think it was Texas) doing magic tricks on a large HDTV. I find something quite disturbing about introducing a new technology with magic. Still, the image quality was extremely good. I was standing about two feet away from a 40 inch display (give or take a few inches), and noticed very little if any artifacts. Polycom had a side by side demo of standard definition and high definition conferencing. The Polycom HD product won't be out for a few more months. The downside is that HD conferencing requires a whole megabit of bandwidth. I don't think HD conferencing is going to set the world on fire anytime soon. It's a great improvement, but the bandwidth costs are a bit high for today's WANs.

5) No DC power converter shall enter my household without first being labeled. I have three orphaned wall warts, and don't know what they go to. Everything is being labeled from now on.

6) Replacing a four year old wireless access point and three inch antenna with a brand new access point that has dual 6.5 inch antennas will increase your wireless happiness. Also, any program or configuration tool that has the word "smart" in it, isn't. Thank you, 'Smart' configuration tool from an unmentioned consumer wifi card manufacturer, for handling the wifi configurations instead of just letting Windows XP do it. Fortunately I figured out how to install the wifi card driver without installing the smart config utility, thus saving me from a constant cycle of system crashes.

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When I think of video conferencing and reasons for people's reluctance to use it, high definition isn't on my list. I haven't even been sold on HDTV yet. I've noticed that no store or location promoting HDTV has done a side by side. What I want is a demonstration where a HDTV is on the left, and a standard TV of similar quality (a mid-level HDTV vs mid-level traditional TV) is on the right, and I can see the difference. I'm hoping a vendor at N+I will do that demo.

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It's not that web video production is expensive or difficult to set up. Digital video cameras are available for a few hundred dollars nowadays, even a simple $30 webcam would be sufficient. There are plenty of free video capture and editing tools out there. The problem comes down to the nature of video itself.

Text blogging is just like writing a newspaper column, but with more spelling errors. Podcasting actually allows you to hear reflection. Things like humor and sarcasm tends to get lost in print. Video blogging brings along a visual medium. This means that people have to actually watch the video for the visuals to have any impact, right? I've looked at a bunch of the early video blogs this morning. Most of them are horrible. Boring, dull, uninteresting to watch talking heads with poor lighting. Nobody wants to watch a talking head for five minutes straight.

Then again I found some interesting ones. There's this one video blog about digging for Civil War relics in Virginia. It was quite interesting to watch. Text blogging just requires you to write. Audio blogging requires you to 'write' and orate. Video requires writing, speaking, acting, cinematography, lighting and sound considerations, editing and directing. It's by far the hardest medium, but allows for the most creativity.

I'm not targeting any particular video blogger in this piece, so if you are one don't take offense. I might not be talking about you in particular. However the medium has to improve for it to gain momentum, and early video bloggers can influence the direction. Keep the quality high, and the medium will gain respect and admiration. I don't think diary style video blogs will ever be interesting. What I see as growing are web series, like personal television or public access shows. Although lowering the barrier of entry always causes more crap to appear (look at the number of good webcomics versus the number of bad ones), it lets amateurs and hobbyists have an outlet for creativity. We're in the Age of the Digital Amateur, and that's a good thing.

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Let's look at them. The newly approved ones:
.JOBS - seems dumb to me. How many people will this affect?
.TRAVEL - Another one that's too niche to matter. Comeon ICANN, get out of niche markets.

And those still being considered:
.ASIA - This makes a lot of sense. Approve it.
.MAIL - Still a bit niche, but could be handy for hosted mail providers.
.TEL - This would be great for a VoIP DNS service. Instead of calling a phone number, you dial a person's DNS entry (call Mike.DeMaria.TEL). Approve it.
.XXX - The argument I've heard for this was that it'd be easy to filter out porn sites in the workplace or schools. Which is exactly why porn sites won't use it and will stay in the .com,.org and .net spaces. That said, having a .mature or .adult domain could make some sense. It'd let a person run a not-safe-for-work site without worrying about getting it's visitors in trouble.

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I know, we've heard chicken little arguments from security vendors in the past. However there is real meat here. Exploits have been discovered on most of the major public IM systems, and viruses can be sent via file attachments. Of course, there are the wonderful social engineering attacks. "This is 'Bob' from the advanced QA division. I'm trying to VPN in, but can't remember what the IP address of the VPN server is. Can you help me?"

Network Computing has said in the past that it's best not to have your company use a public IM server for your instant messaging needs, but to roll out your own system such as Lotus Sametime, WiredRed epop or Jabber. Combine that with an AV product and you can solve most of your IM problems. Yet, I'm wondering if this is good but useless advice for a large portion of our readers. After all, one benefit of using AIM is that you can communicate with other AIM users. If your company has it's own internal IM system, it's hard to talk to people at other companies, or personal contacts on AIM/Yahoo/MSN/ICQ. I know, you shouldn't be having personal IM conversations at work. You shouldn't be making personal phone calls either, but everyone does.

Which brings me to my point. Should we be looking at and reviewing IM security add-on products? Of course, Akonix and security vendors will say yes. But is this something that's being used or desired in the enterprise, or just small to midsize markets? Please email or leave comments in this post. I'd like to know if you're protecting public and/or private system IMs, want to do so, or think it's a waste of money.

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DNS is good.
Consolidating all DNS servers into two cities is bad.
Governments shouldn't get involved in DNS.
More useless domain suffixes.

How does something like this cost a million dollars?

In unrelated news, there are four Verizon trucks outside my home, a back-hoe and a three foot deep hole. That's usually not a good sign.

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Wow. And I thought ICQ was developmentally dead two years ago.

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I don't think anybody is expecting VoIP to remain unregulated forever. Heck just the prospect of finding a new tax source is tempting enough to a politician. Emergency calls will certainly be one of the first things to be regulated. The traditional telcos have many regulations on 911 access, availability and reliability. These policies don't exist with the current VoIP providers. There are two reasons why I personally haven't switched to digital cable phone service. The first is that fax service is unreliable. The second is that I don't think sacrificing reliable 911 service, especially during a power failure, is worth the $15 a month difference. Vonage is trying to be a replacement to the traditional telco providers. That should require equal protection, access and reliability to 911. I don't personally care if that sets back VoIP rollout to consumers, or raises the costs by a few dollars every month. The last thing I want is to take one step forward technologically, and two steps back on public safety. I don't think anyone will argue that 911 access isn't a good thing.

I'm not sure how "VoIP provider" will be determined or how to limit it to just companies like Vonage. I wouldn't call AOL Instant Messanger a VoIP provider in the same sense, nor should any and every product that can do voice be taxed or regulated. I'll leave that determination into the politician's hands for now, since they'll ultimately come up with one on their own anyways. Let's just hope that when regulations come, and they will come, the right people are on those committees.

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