Tuesday, July 28, 2009
There we have: more proof that the traditional carriers are very afraid of Google Voice. Now that Google Voice is starting to add new users rapidly, the traditional carriers are waking up. As a result the existing 3rd party Google Voice app for the iPhone has been removed from the iTunes store and Apple is not accepting Google's own voice app for the iPhone. Even though this same Google app already exists for the blackberry and the Android phones.
The official reason that Apple is giving is that this app duplicates functionality that already exists in the iPhone's native apps. This is true, Google voice allows you to make free long distance calls in the USA, send free SMS/text messages to anyone in the USA and make really cheap international calls. But then so do any of a dozen or so VOIP applications that are available on the iPhone already, the most popular one being Skype. Google has responded that they will look into making a browser based version of their application, and then there will be no way that Apple can block the usage of Google Voice short of legal action.
So why are carriers running scared? Well first of all there is the power of Google, nobody wants a giant like this to step into a market. Google seems to be undercutting prices for long distance and international calls as well as for sending SMS/text messages. Especially text messages are currently a gold mine for the carriers, every teenager has a need for texting if they want to keep up with their peers. Google Voice offering free texting means that fewer parents of teenagers will be forced to get an unlimited texting plan. And this explains why the carriers didn't bother blocking the Google Voice app on the blackberry and the Android phones: these phones unlike the iPhone are not very popular with the teenage crowd.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Lessons from Twitter's security breach | Webware - CNET
This so-called Twitter security breach didn't have anything to do with the security of Twitter. Here is (supposedly) what happened. A hacker got the yahoo email address from one of Twitter's employees, managed to get the password, logged in and through reading some emails was able to get into the employee's Google account where he found a bunch of Twitter confidential information.
So why was it so easy to break into the yahoo email account? Well, Yahoo (like most other web portals) has a way to retrieve your password. You simply answer a few questions (like mother's maiden name) and you will again have access to your account. This is how the Twitter hacker got in and this is also how Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account was hacked. And why does Yahoo offer this service? Well a lot of people forget their password and this is the only way that most portals know how to solve this problem.
In order to make them easy to remember people will use simple, short passwords and they will make all their passwords the same. And if they make difficult to guess passwords then they will forget them and the portal will have to provide a password recovery service like Yahoo does. The end result, as we can see from the Twitter and Palin examples is a hacker's delight. So passwords are evil! But can we really do without?
A company called Fortknock which is still in stealth mode is promising a totally secure online experience without the need for passwords. When you login instead of being asked for username and password you are presented with four multiple choice questions about your likes and dislikes. For example "who is your most favourite singer", or "which type of food do you dislike the most". Answers to questions like these are not easy to guess by others and to make it even more difficult for the potential hacker the wrong choices are answers that other people who are very similar to you have given to the same question.
So if for example the hacker has figured out that you are from the Netherlands they might assume that your favourite singer is someone from the Netherlands. But because FortKnock will take the answers from other people who are also from the Netherlands and present them as the wrong choices, the hacker will be presented with 10 popular Dutch singers to choose from. There is a lot of statistical mathematics behind this seemingly simple authentication scheme, that shows that a system like this is just as secure as an 80 digit password that changes every time you login. (Imagine the trouble of trying to remember an 80 digit password ;-) On the user side this is as simple as it can get, you of course can remember your likes and dislikes unlike all those pesky passwords that must or must not start with a number, contain or not contain upper case letters etc. etc.
I found this company's technology so intriguing that I decided to accept their offer to make me a senior advisor, which means I will probably write some more about FortKnock in future blog entries.
Yahoo got started as a search engine, just like Alta Vista and just like Google. Out of these three (there are/were more) Alta Vista is the only one in this list that didn't go beyond Internet search and it is also the only one that doesn't exist anymore. The lesson here is that in order to stay in business you have to do more than just provide Internet search capabilities.
Early on Yahoo decided to become a portal with email, Instant Messaging, Flickr photos etc. etc. So Yahoo might be the RC cola of Internet search but it is number one in web based email and the truth of the matter is that people spend much more time looking at their emails then looking at their search results. In other words email web pages are a much better place to put ads in front of consumers then Internet search pages are.
Why else do you think Microsoft wanted to pay a hefty sum for Yahoo, it sure wasn't for their search technology. The real reason that Microsoft wanted Yahoo was so it could use Yahoo in its fight against Google. Without Yahoo, Microsoft decided to release their own Internet search technology called bing that now competes with Google search. And no, they will not be able to seriously damage Google's position as the world leader in Internet search, but it will keep Google on their toes, just like Google keeps Microsoft on it's toes with their Chrome Operating System.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Desktop PC Sales Decline For the First Time Since 2001 - desktop pc - Gizmodo
PC desktop sales in Q1 2009 declined 8.1% compared to Q1 2008. And this is not due to the recession because sales of notebook PCs (laptops and netbooks) are up 11.7% for the same quarter. So what is going on?
Well for one the current laptops and netbooks (small laptops) are so powerful that for most consumers they have enough horse power to do anything a consumer wants to do with a computer. Only gamers and video editing enthusiasts need more power than a laptop can provide. Also the price of a netbook (about $350) is much less than that of a full desktop and need I mention laptops are portable?
Gone are the days where you had one PC desktop per family. Nowadays every member of the family has his or her own computer so a laptop makes much more sense. My son always takes his whenever he goes to visit a friend, something he couldn't do with the old family desktop PC.
So what does the future look like for laptops: well, they will either get even smaller or turn into some hybrid netbook/smart phone device that will replace the laptop as we know it. With your new Internet netbook/smart phone you will want Internet connection wherever you go, so a huge market is opening up for netbooks with integrated 3G data plans. You can now get them subsidized from Verizon or AT&T even more blurring the line between smart phones and laptops.
Monday, July 13, 2009
From the headline in this article it sounds like the US and Europe are joining in a anti cyber crime task force. However if you read the details then it become clear that this is not really a giant project that will "prevent identity theft, computer hacking and other computer-based crime".
What is happening is that the Italian post office (PTT), who like all other European PTTs has a banking arm, has build some interesting software to track all the money flowing over the Internet between their 14,000 branches. Other PTTs in Europe are now joining this effort and will use the Italian software to monitor all European money transactions on the Internet. Since a lot of this money flows between Europe and the US, the US secret service has decided to participate, so they can potentially track money transactions that are either illegal or money to be used for terrorist type of activities.
Now don't get me wrong, all of this is very good news, but this is not a pan-European/US joint task force on Internet Security as the headline seems to suggest. Although one could hope that this cooperation will eventually lead to a real task force that will battle "identity theft, computer hacking and other computer-based crime". Because the cyber villains themselves are organized globally across the world the only way to fight cyber crime is by having everyone across country boundaries participate.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
What if your business depends on your Internet connection being available 24/7 without any downtime? What if you are using all of your available Internet bandwidth (capacity) and you want more but your provider can not offer you any more or their prices quadruple if you double your bandwidth?
Until now there wasn't much you can do but now SharedBand a UK start-up that just entered the US market has a solution for both of these problems. When you order their service they will ship you two (or more) standard routers (or you can download their software yourself into your Linksys, D-link or Netgear router). You then subscribe with two (or more) Internet Service Providers (ISP) and attach one router to the first ISP modem and the second router to the other ISP modem and then thanks to the SharedBand software the two routers will work as one; giving you twice the capacity (bandwidth) of using only one ISP and automatically redirecting all your Internet traffic to the working ISP modem in case one of them goes down.
You can even couple together different types of ISPs, for example: one of them can be a cable modem and the other one a DSL line, or combine a cable modem with a 3G data network router, the combinations are endless. $25 per month for two routers and $50 for four routers. (plus one time the price of the routers if you do not install your own software and of course your normal ISP fees).
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
We have seen before that everything that Google does with Gmail, Google apps, Google Voice, Google Wave etc. is aimed at getting people to spend as much time as possible on the Google web pages. All of this so they can spend more time watching the ads that Google puts on there.
The Google app strategy for example, is aimed at getting people to put their word, excel and powerpoint documents on the Google website (so they will spend more time there), but by doing so they started to compete head-on with Microsoft Office.
Microsoft is retaliating by integrating their new Win7 operating system tightly with their Azure cloud offering. With Win7 and the new release of Office your documents will automagically flow between your desktop and your Azure cloud account. So the only way that Google can counter this attack is by providing people with their own Chrome browser and Chrome operating system. Just like Microsoft they are partnering with the hardware vendors who are very willing to ditch Microsoft after so many years of being controlled by them.
The Google Chrome operating system along with the Google Chrome browser is another major step towards the empty PC: a PC/laptop/netbook that only has enough software to get you online and that doesn't store any data itself, all the data and application are in the cloud.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Cisco Won't Take on Amazon in Cloud - Business Center - PC World
Even though we are still in the hype phase of cloud computing and cloud services, smart companies like Cisco are already busy redefining their long term strategy. They realize that once customers do move away from traditional data center based services to cloud based services that the size of the IT data center market will shrink.
A lot of companies in the enterprise IT space like IBM, Microsoft, and even Symantec are changing their strategy by becoming a full cloud based service provider, meaning they are providing SaaS offerings as well as capacity (online storage or server capacity). Cisco, however is concentrating on extending their SaaS offerings by improving and extending their WebEx collaboration and IronPort services and it is using it's Unified Computing System (UCS) markitecture to sell their hardware products to whoever wants to build and efficiently manage either traditional data center or cloud capacity. In other words they are not building cloud capacity.
This seems like a smart move to me, after all in the end the cloud capacity will be a commodity and the real differentiator will be the quality, ease-of-use and longevity of the service being offered. Cisco's USC will help the cloud capacity providers to inexpensively manage their servers and storage while at the same time helping the traditional data center customers to easily move towards cloud based services.
Dell puts customers on fast to storage efficiency - Nationmultimedia.com
Dell together with CommVault is trying to boost sales of their PowerVault DL2000 backup product by providing free consultancy. This game is all about the SMB backup market. The larger enterprises all have made their choice for a backup (and archiving) solution a long time ago and unless something drastic happens with the supplier they will stick with their choice.
The reason that a backup or archiving product is so sticky is that once you switch you basically loose all of your old backups and archives unless you also spend a ton of money converting them. And even then sometimes the conversion can not be done at all!
So DELL and CommVault together (along with a lot of other players) are targeting the SMB market that is finally starting to see the need for a proper backup and archiving solution. There are two major items when dealing with IT solutions for the SMB space: one they are very price sensitive and two they do not have their own IT department that they can rely on to make a choice this important.
So this is why DELL is providing free consultancy which is focusing on how data de-depulication can save the customer lots of money. I am sure the consultancy will be full of DELL "sponsored ads" but I would urge any SMB IT manager to go and find out where to save money, because once you start archiving and backing-up there is no going back.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
AdMob Report: Apple Gains in Mobile Usage
It looks like the iPhone is not just another smart phone. iPhones (and the non phone version the iTouch) are responsible for 70% of the 3.8 billion ad views done in the USA by smart phones. Worldwide the iPhone does 31.4% of a total of 8 billion ad views. So isn't it about time to target ads to the iPhone specifically?
As the numbers seem to indicate the market is ripe for targeting web ads specifically to iPhones owners. Originally the average iPhone user was the early adopter type, but now that the iPhone is affordable with even a $99 version it will be hard to correctly target the ads to the individual. So what is needed is a new type of iPhone application that will collect users browser history, what kinds of apps are installed and which ones are used most frequently etc so that a better user profile can be established and the ads can be targeted more specifically. Privacy concerns aside it might even be an ap that once installed will give you a discount on your mobile phone plan. So who will build this?
Monday, June 29, 2009
Nokia and Intel Look to the Future of Mobile Devices
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Vodafone promises indoor mobile signal boost - V3.co.uk - formerly vnunet.com
AT&T to Unfurl 3G Access in 850MHz to Enhance Coverage (Phone Scoop)
Thursday, June 18, 2009
I bumped into Replify a few months ago when they were presenting for only 5 minutes in one of those marathon sessions where you listen to quick pitches from too many companies. Replify caught my attention because they claimed to drastically speed up WAN traffic. After talking with them for a bit longer than five minutes I started to understand what it is they are doing.
Let's say a sales person is accessing the company email and file server via a VPN connection. Depending on where the sales person is the connection might be slow or it might be fast. As a side note: I have noticed in my travels that a lot of hotels proudly claim to have a T1 connection to the hotel, but what they don't realize is that T1 means 1 megabit per second, which is already much slower than most home DSL connections, and that things get even slower if you have 100 guests in your hotel all sharing this 1 megabit per second. 100 guests sharing 1 megabit, you do the math and you will get something resembling dial-up speeds.
Replify to the rescue; their product has two parts, one part is installed centrally inside the company and the other part is installed on the laptop. Both parts once installed will make a copy of all the Internet traffic sent and received. Then when you are about to send a bunch of data over the link that you have sent earlier, then instead of sending the data it will just send an instruction to the other side as to which part of the previous data stream it should reuse.
So if for example you download a large file from your central file server, make some small edits, and upload the document back to the office, then it will in effect only send the changes you made to the other side, since most of the document is already on the server. Same goes for when you receive an email with a large attachment: you will have to wait a while before the attachment is downloaded but when you click on forward, the new email message with attachment is send almost instantaneously because the other side already has the document.
All of this is done without changing any of the infrastructure. The Replify client on the laptop talks to the Replify server in the office and together they figure out what the minimum amount of data is that needs to be send and after the data stream leaves the Replify client or server it looks just like the original data stream. Depending on your situation you can save quite a lot of bandwidth and time. Replify as such of course also makes a great performance enhancer for any type of cloud based services.
Monday, June 15, 2009
There are lots of rumors on TechCrunch about Google Voice (previously known as Grand Central). One rumor is that they will support number portability (so you can take your current mobile phone number and make it your Google Voice number). Another rumor is that Google Voice is about to be launched to the public. Right now only a few beta testers and people who had signed up with Grand Central before Google bought them are the lucky ones who can use all the great features of Google Voice. I am one of the lucky ones ...
Google Voice, once rolled out to the general public will become a major telecom player. Google voice has some great features and really cheap, no commitment needed, international calling rates.
Just have a look at all the great features that it has: whenever someone dials your Google Voice number you decide which phone(s) it will ring on depending on time of day and who is calling. Some callers can be send straight to voice mail, while the pesky ones can be send directly to number unobtainable (meaning they hear a sound that indicates the number they called no longer exists). Once your real phone(s) are ringing you can pick up the call at any one of them and with a single push can transfer a call from let's say your mobile to your land line in case the call runs long and you do not want to waste your battery or minutes left in your plan. Or transfer it from your land line to your cell phone in case you have to get on the road.
We all know how hard it is to take notes while driving and talking on your cell phone, so Google Voice allows you to record (part of) the conversation which is then stored online in your Google Voice account. That way you can go back to your online account and make proper notes on what was said.
All voice mails are accessible from the Google Voice website and they are transcribed to regular text, so you can use Google search to find a voice mail. TXT/SMS messages send to your Google Voice number will be send to all designated mobile phones and copies of all messages are stored in your online account so again you can use Google search to find a particular TXT/SMS message. you can even send TXT/SMS messages from inside your browser, which makes it a lot easier to send information from a PC to a cell phone (just cut and paste).
The Google Voice online address book is integrated with your Gmail account and if you set it up to sync with your iPhone or Blackberry then all your contacts on your phone will be your Google Voice contacts.
With Google Voice you can make free calls inside the US and Canada and really cheap calls elsewhere in the world. The calling rates are competitive to Skype and all the other VOIP providers.
In other words the telecom industry will never be the same.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Why is Symantec partnering with HP for their online backup service?
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Sunday, June 07, 2009
From a study done by PayPal one may conclude that the Dutch are the most naive about internet security, only 23% of the Dutch worry about loosing their digital identity versus 90% of Americans. But does being aware really make you safe enough on the Internet?
There are countless ways in which your identity can be stolen or your computer can be infected even if you run the best anti virus software out there.
You click on the link and are taken to a web site that might or might not be interesting to you and before you can close the web page, a piece of malware will creep into your browser and from now on every time you visit a web site your user name and password are transmitted to the hackers web site. In other words your identity was stolen and all you did was click on a link on a trusted web site.
Another way is to change the way authentication is done on important web sites such as your bank, your online trading account and even PayPal. However changing the way you do authentication has to be done carefully; yes you can design some draconian method that will be very safe, but make it too draconian and you will scare away customers. It is time something is changed in the online authentication space.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Yes Google will become Big Brother, because users don't care
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Below is my BIO for more details please visit my linked-in profile.
My expertise areas are in Cloud Computing, Cloud Services, Cloud Storage, Virtualization for both the Enterprise data center and the desktop, Enterprise and Consumer Security, Enterprise and Consumer Backup and Enterprise and Consumer Storage technologies. I also have identified and continue to monitor the top ten technology trends that will have a serious impact on the software industry. I currently am or was on the technical advisory boards of SonaSoft, BlueGem, Qlayer, SocialText, Panta Systems, and Transitive.
For the last 10 years I worked at Symantec (before that VERITAS) where I was the senior director of the Technology Scouting Group in the office of the CTO . In this role I scouted out thousands of technology companies that were or should have been of interest to Symantec/VERITAS. Also in this role I identified and monitored those technology trends that will have an impact on the software industry. Before that, I spend more than 10 years working at AT&T Bell Labs in the Netherlands. I have over 20 software patents in my name in the areas of virtualization, system and network management, and storage technologies. I have both an MS in mathematics and an MBA in telecommunication.
I am also a "leader" consultant at the Gerson and Lehrman Group (GLG) where you can contact me in case you want to hire my consulting services on any of the topics discussed in my blog.