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December 21, 2007
Happy Holidays
Posted by Doug Webster at 07:37 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
December 18, 2007
What’s on your wish list this holiday season for your Connected Home?
Wouldn't it be nice if all the devices, and technology, in your home worked better together?
Here are some of my thoughts for your shopping list ...
Music – I like having music distributed throughout my home and having a single music library from which I can play my personal library or Internet radio content. Without requiring major home renovation, here’s a cool product that uses wireless mesh technology in your home to do just that. The SONOS system connects to your home network and provides access to all of your music content. It integrates with existing stereo equipment, digital music libraries and Internet Radio, and for a modest amount of money you can add music to multiple rooms in your house. The remote control unit itself allows your digital music collection to be accessed from anywhere in the home; you don’t have to be parked in front of your PC or Mac.
Storage – If you're like me, you probably have a few PCs throughout your home – in the kitchen, in the den and somewhere convenient for the kids. With iPods, digital cameras and camcorders and downloadable movies, there’s an increasing quantity of extremely large, digital content files everywhere. And given that a piece of content is never on the right PC when it needs to be, and I don’t know any home user that has perfected the art of backup, a great addition to any Connected Home is a Network Attached Storage or NAS. NAS takes one or more large hard drives, attaches them to your router so it can be easily shared across your home, and optionally combines it with RAID technology to provide automatic backup by duplicating the content on a parallel disk. NAS systems are available in wide array of prices and capabilities.
Playtime – My kids have told me the ultimate game experience is the Wii. Believe me, you don’t slouch around on the couch with this gaming experience. But at this point, you may have to find one on eBay as most stores seem to sell out of them immediately. In addition to the somewhat addicting sports games it comes with, it has an integrated Opera Web browser and integrated 802.11 wireless networking. The networking and browsers enable downloading of older technology games from Nintendo’s legacy products and also enable Web access. Never before has browsing the Web from your favorite living room chair been so user friendly from simply checking out the news or watching some YouTube on the tube…
Think HD – If it's time to upgrade some of your audio visual equipment like TVs and stereos, there are some great new Connected Home aspects to consider.
Look to add home theater receivers that have wired or wireless ethernet connectivity along with multiple forms of digital audio and video interconnections. These new devices allow you to more easily play your digital music library on your home sound system and also makes connecting multiple high definition sources with that nice new large screen plasma TV really simple.
Blue Ray content is making its appearance on DVD, bringing the HD viewing experience to your home theater with a Blue Ray or HD DVD player.
New Plasma or LCD– Many new TVs come with one or more digital audio and video connections that enable HD hookup to multiple devices.
I wish everyone a happy holiday season.
Posted by Nick Adamo at 11:16 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
GK3 Event on The Future from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
“Knowledge is Power – Experience it! was the key theme of the GK3 Conference held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia last week. The conference tracks were on “Emerging People; Emerging Markets and Emerging Technologies.
There was also a parallel session with the International Task Force on Women and ICTs and the UN Global Alliance for ICT and Development.
Cisco was one of the many companies participating in both the Emerging Technologies track of GK3 and in the International Task Force on Women and ICTs. Michela Cipeletti , Cisco Director Engineering, participated in the ITF/UNGAID roundtable and panel discussions. Both Michela and myself with support from the Cisco Network Academy team, presented the “Becoming an Engineer” tape at the ITF tent in the exhibition hall. There were very enthusiastic discussions with a plethora of people from Mongolia, Africa, Indonesia, Guatemala, Ecuador, India etc.
On December 12, I participated on the Gk3 panel discussion-Emerging Technologies track in the session entitled “The Future of Access.”
The session was quite lively and hosted by Steve Song, Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation.
Other panelists included Allison Gillwald, Research, South Africa; Joe Deering, head APAC Nokia-Siemens; Ross O;Brien, Director, Economic Intelligence Unit, Asia. Steve presented the panelists as artists each painting a view of the future of access from their perspectives.
Nancy White provided the art on the white board as the panelists and audience were interacting.
Whether one spoke about WiMAX/mobility/social networking etc, the most poignant discussion was around Africa and the various barriers to the adoption to these technologies such as politics. In fact, we all concluded that politics is indeed a critical path when speaking about the Future of Access.
Later that evening, Michela and I met some of the Digital Divide Data (DDD), young Entrepreneurs particularly from Laos and Cambodia. These young people are so passionate about implementing a vision/dream and using IT as a base to establish collaborative wealth mainly via education.
Finally on Dec 9-10 there was the i4D Film Festival co-organized by the Center of Science, Development and Media Studies, and Global Knowledge Partnership. The attempt was to bring community of film makers together, "Beyond the Mainstream" where film makers = farmers, vegetable-sellers, slum dwellers, street children.
See also interview with Vint Cerf, Google, “GKP Through the Looking Glass."
Posted by Monique Morrow at 11:06 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
December 14, 2007
Seeing is Believing
One of the cool things about working for Cisco is being able to use all the technology. Aside from the IP phone on my desk that I use everyday, I often use TelePresence to conduct “in person” meetings with people from my team who are located around the globe. TelePresence was a hit from day one with customers, partners, and suppliers eager to get on board. According to a recent study we did, TelePresence will represent a $4B new service revenue opportunity for service providers by the year 2011. Do you have your order in yet?
Listen to a recent conversation about TelePresence (held over a TelePresence session) between myself and Al Safarikas of Cisco on the service provider opportunity with TelePresence - I'm the one on the other side of the screen.
Posted by Jeff Spagnola at 10:18 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
December 10, 2007
The Doctor will See you NOW
Speeding up wait times before, during, and after a visit to the doctor was the motivation behind Greg’s award winning suggestion on in our Connected Life contest. The Texas native (Hook’em!) is a radiation oncology resident physician about to take his board exams (which his winnings will help fund) who has had first hand experience in dealing with the delays caused waiting for information needed to effectively and efficiently treat patients. His idea was the e-medical card, which he described this way:
“E-Medical card. Eliminate waiting time at the doctors office by adding chip in medical cards that could be scanned when the doctor comes into the examining room. You could secure it using existing technology (i.e.,fingerprint technology). Once scanned, it would immediately pull up your medical history. It would be scanned at the end of the visit for billing. These devices could securely to send diagnostic info, x-rays, test results, etc. to specialists. Imagine what this could do in the medical field!”
He added that such technology is especially important in rural areas. Unlike the concentration of expertise at large, urban hospitals, rural medical facilities often have to rely on remote expertise, which can only add to the treatment delays. Greg expanded the concept even further to assist Emergency Medical Technicians in ambulances as well, which could help provide much more than convenience but, in the end, actually save lives. Greg describes his idea here:
Some of these capabilities are fortunately available now, at least in part. These can not only provide better healthcare and experience to consumers and greater efficiency and productivity for the medical field but also some unique managed services opportunities for providers. All users want high levels of resiliency, security, and availability that providers can deliver, but for healthcare, the need can quite literally be a matter of life or death.
Thanks to Greg for sharing his idea (and best of luck for your upcoming board exams!), and stay tuned, as we’ll have some more winning ideas for the Connected Life coming soon.
Posted by Doug Webster at 03:28 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
December 04, 2007
My Connected Life Mash-up
Omari from Virginia was one of the runner up winners in our Connected Life contest. His idea was to take all of the mash-up sites available on the web (such as those that blend applications such as realtor listings and a satellite map), mash them up further and making it mobile. You can read more about it here. Think of it as a presence-based facebook-google-linkedin-tomtom application for your handset so that as you move, the network can alert you to the things you care about and help give you a better experience. I can imagine something like this telling me:
“Great sushi place ahead”
“Turn right to make it to your meeting on-time”
“Dave’s in town, too, and is only a block away”
(If it could also tell me when I am wearing mismatched socks or have a piece of apple stuck in my teeth, that would be a bonus…)
All of these applications are available on their own on the web and represent the first wave of mash-ups; Omari is taking it two steps further by blending the already blended applications even further, effectively making an infinite number of possibilities to customize it to your interests and needs. And by making it mobile, it personalizes the experience even further, allowing the network to move with you instead of you moving to the network.
A couple of years ago, one of my closest friends was college was staying at a hotel a block away from me as we both were in London on business for the week. Since we live thousands of miles apart, it would have been a great opportunity to meet, catch up, and admittedly have a couple of pints (John Smith’s Extra Smooth Bitter for me, please). Unfortunately, we didn’t realize the coincidence until a month or two later on a phone conversation. It was a great opportunity lost. Omari’s idea would help to minimize the chance of that happening again and showcases the increasing relevance that network can have on lives, wherever we may be.
Posted by Doug Webster at 07:27 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
December 03, 2007
The Gaming Explosion
In my last post, I explained how integrating IP and DWDM layers closer together helps providers to scale their core networks. Last week, the world’s largest computer festival got underway and proved the IPoDWDM technology’s ability to deliver on that promise.
DreamHack Winter 2007 just ended at Jönköping in Sweden with around 10,000 attendees plugging their own computers to the network specially setup for the event. It’s focused on everything you can do with computers, a lot of gaming and communication, but also programming, designing, music composing, plus a variety of other activities. The hunger of these bandwidth-gorging, network-gaming attendees knows no bounds. And thus, at the core of the network lies the world’s fastest router – Cisco CRS-1. TeliaSonera, the bandwidth provider for DreamHack, chose to deploy this router at the two locations of Jönköping and Stockholm interconnecting the 300 kilometers distance by 40Gbps IPoDWDM technology.
This event attracts die-hard gaming enthusiasts from Europe and further beyond. It is billed by the Guinness World Records as the world’s largest LAN party. In Sweden DreamHack has broken into the top 12 sporting events nationally. Players are looking to compete in the popular World of Warcraft championships, QuakeWorld and Counter-Strike tournaments.
A long time back it was Greece, and in this century Sweden. Is this the beginning of the new e-Olympics?
Posted by Kelly Ahuja at 07:59 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
