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June 27, 2006
Quiet Dual Mode Revolution
Please check out Time Warner's dual mode announcement
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=98130&WT.svl=news1_1
Having worked on the Time Warner FSN in Orlando and U.S. WEST's interactive TV trial in Omaha, I can tell you first hand these guys like to push the envelop. Stay tuned for a future blog on this
Posted by Alan Cohen at 11:55 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
June 21, 2006
Follow on story regarding Connected Teenagers
Worth a glance
Tech creates a bubble for kids
Posted by Alan Cohen at 11:13 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
June 18, 2006
Mobility Generation: A Father's Day Epistle
My daughter graduated middle school this week. Sitting in the warm gym, listening to a very articulate 8th grader deliver the commencement address, I found my mind wandering down other paths. Traditionally, I think, this was the moment when flashbacks of your little girl as a baby come to mind: digging out our driveway in Connecticut in her first psychedelic snowsuit; in a mask and fins in Maui pointing at a colorful butterfly fish 10 feet under the surface; bouncing in a tube along Lake Tahoe behind a motorboat. It was that classic moment in every father’s life when Jerry Garcia's Touch of Grey hits home.
"It's a lesson to me
The deltas and the east and the freeze
The ABC's we all think of
Try to give a little love."
When Cathren went to middle school, she decided to enroll in a laptop program. Before the year started, I visited the school to meet with the IT staff, and found some random Access Points scattered around a few classrooms. This would not do at all. Within 3 weeks, a brand new series of Airespace controllers and 60 Lightweight Access Points painted the campus in a seamless and invisible carpet of secure RF. If they were going to explore wireless, I proudly thought, then they need to fly business class!
Over the past 3 years I watched my daughter develop as a student and as a woman, and now realize she is my great prototype for the Mobility Generation. Equipped with laptop, cell phone, i-Pod and an innate desire to learn, she Googles her way through life and school, making strong friendships and nailing down a 4.0 GPA (ok, it's Father's Day; I'm proud). This latter point always amazed me, as she seems to be connected to her friends through Instant Messenger and her dreams through ITunes, all the while she did her homework, her honors projects and organized her social life ALL AT THE SAME TIME. With far few distractions, I never managed to produce the grades and quality of work she shows. So what was going on here?
A few weeks ago, I sat down with Ron Ricci, Cisco's great positioning genius, and we talked about how the generation coming through school can be totally connected to the world through mobility devices, yet still have "great moments of concentration." Clearly my daughter's generation can use all of this technology to harness thought and action, feeling empowered by mobility, rather than overwhelmed by it. To wit, see the raft of new books on how to "unplug" your life. To those people, I offer a Bronx cheer: the Ozzie and Harriet view of technology will leave your children in the dustbin of history.
Having a self-organized, self-disciplined and focused daughter, what, as a father, can I provide in terms of life's lessons, as she already knows how to steer her through the interconnected networks of the world? In the words of William Butler Yeats in his great "Prayer for My Daughter," I could share but one lesson this Father's Day:
"In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned"
Happy Father's Day gentle readers.
Alan
W.B. Yeats
"Prayer for My Daughter"
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind.
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.
I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And-under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.
Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.
It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of plenty is undone.
In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty's very self, has charm made wise.
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
W.B. Yeats
"A Prayer for My Son"
Bid a strong ghost stand at the head
That my Michael may sleep sound,
Nor cry, nor turn in the bed
Till his morning meal come round;
And may departing twilight keep
All dread afar till morning's back.
That his mother may not lack
Her fill of sleep.
Bid the ghost have sword in fist:
Some there are, for I avow
Such devilish things exist,
Who have planned his murder, for they know
Of some most haughty deed or thought
That waits upon his future days,
And would through hatred of the bays
Bring that to nought.
Though You can fashion everything
From nothing every day, and teach
The morning stars to sing,
You have lacked articulate speech
To tell Your simplest want, and known,
Wailing upon a woman's knee,
All of that worst ignominy
Of flesh and bone;
And when through all the town there ran
The servants of Your enemy,
A woman and a man,
Unless the Holy Writings lie,
Hurried through the smooth and rough
And through the fertile and waste,
protecting, till the danger past,
With human love.
"Touch of Grey"
Words by Robert Hunter; music by Jerry Garcia
Must be getting early
Clocks are running late
Paint by number morning sky
Looks so phony
Dawn is breaking everywhere
Light a candle, curse the glare
Draw the curtains
I don't care 'cause
It's all right
I will get by / I will get by
I will get by / I will survive
I see you've got your list out
Say your piece and get out
Yes I get the gist of it
but it's all right
Sorry that you feel that way
The only thing there is to say
Every silver lining's got a
Touch of grey
I will get by / I will get by
I will get by / I will survive
It's a lesson to me
The Ables and the Bakers and the C's
The ABC's we all must face
And try to keep a little grace
It's a lesson to me
The deltas and the east and the freeze
The ABC's we all think of
Try to give a little love.
I know the rent is in arrears
The dog has not been fed in years
It's even worse than it appears
but it's all right.
Cows giving kerosene
Kid can't read at seventeen
The words he knows are all obscene
but it's all right
I will get by / I will get by
I will get by / I will survive
The shoe is on the hand it fits
There's really nothing much to it
Whistle through your teeth and spit
causeit's all right.
Oh well a Touch Of Grey
Kind of suits you anyway.
That was all I had to say
It's all right.
I will get by / I will get by
I will get by / I will survive
We will get by / We will get by
We will get by / We will survive
Posted by Alan Cohen at 09:04 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (3)
June 13, 2006
Missing the Trees by Looking for the Forest
Kathy's comments on payback mirror some of the recent conversations I have had with customers. It seems that in an endless quest to find the killer application, we often ignore the little, but highly valuable ones that lay just below our noses. Just last week, I was espousing the benefits of our location services capabilities to an attentive customer. Impressing upon them the potential richness of our solution, I touched on asset tracking, location-based access control and location aware VoWLAN call routing.
Without batting an eyelash, the customer stared back as if mesmerized by the endless possibilities. Then, with the brevity that is often a hallmark of IT professionals (unlike we marketing folk), the customer stated that location would allow them to maintain a single print server and automatically print documents to the printer closest to the employee.
Location based printing. Not an entirely new concept. Internet based printing services have existed for sometime. Yet, an enterprise managed location aware printing service, now that’s beneficial! Think of all the time saved by mobile employees by not having to locate a printer and install drivers.
Of course, the full accuracy capability of Cisco’s location services is not required for this application to be effective. Still, could it be that sometimes we miss the trees by looking for the forest?
Posted by Chris Kozup at 11:59 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
June 08, 2006
Payback
I had the opportunity to meet with a customer yesterday who was new to his organization, joining his company in a senior level position. He came from a competitor who had wireless in their offices but the new organization did not. Clearly he was going to do something about this. His top of mind concern was as an IT organization, he believed it would be difficult to recruit the best empolyees if they did not have a WLAN; fearing potential candidates would perceive them as luddites (my word choice). Naturally I agreed and continued on with a discussion of productivity, connected meetings, etc. He listened for awhile and then interrupted me to ask one of his team members to investigate how much money they could save on toner. Huh? With a WLAN and laptops they could eliminate (color) hard copy handouts that were routinely used for internal meetings. Payback --it’s never what you think.
Posted by Kathy Small at 05:23 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
The First Mobile Phone Call - Alexander Graham Bell Strikes Again
Peter Judge Mobility Editor of Techworld http://www.techworld.com/html/bios.cfm#judge shared this tidbit with me today
On February 22,1880 Alexander Graham Bell and his cousin Charles Bell communicated over the Photophone, a remarkable invention conceived of by Bell and executed by Sumner Tainter. [Grosvenor] This device transmitted voice over a light beam. A person's voice projected through a glass test tube toward a thin mirror which acted as a transmitter. Acoustical vibrations caused by the voice produced like or sympathetic vibrations in the mirror.
http://www.privateline.com/PCS/history4.htm
Posted by Alan Cohen at 05:57 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
June 07, 2006
It's Not About the Access Point
“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.” - Lance Armstrong
I have been thinking a lot about Lance Armstrong this spring. I am in the market for a new bike, looking to re-ignite my quest to someday ride in the Pyrenees, a lifelong dream. On an off, I have ridden for over 2 decades, about the same amount of time I have been in or around the mobility business. Mobility is an obsession, the desire to connect/unwire/touch something from a distance, wherever, whenever you are.
Today I write courtesy of a Mesh AP painting my backyard with a little 802.11. 15 years ago it was a slower -- but then promising -- CDPD modem connected to a "notebook" computer 4 times the size of my Thinkpad. The same underlying desires and dreams were and are still there for us in the mobility business. If I could paraphrase Lance: "It's not about the access point."
People have been about some form of mobility of communications for time eternal. Petroglyphs on cave walls were about parting information to people generations ahead. Notes in bottles were about sending messages. Messages, mail, messengers and Marconi were all about communicating across distances, from long time to real time.
Cisco recently announced the sale of our 3 millionth access point. That was an eternity ago...like a month or two ago. We've have flown pass that landmark on to new mobility landmarks. And the time it takes to sell another million compresses like a neutron star, like your personal time on vacation during this connected age. 1 million APs is like 10-30 million users. It's like growing a wireless Malaysia.
For the cynics out there, i have one closing thought from Lance: “If children have the ability to ignore all odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from them. When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope?"
Lance was talking about an emotional battle with a killer. Tie a yellow bracelet around your life. It's about mobility.
Posted by Alan Cohen at 07:28 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
June 04, 2006
The Future of Wireless through the Eyes of Our Kids
I am sitting on the deck watching the waves of the Pacific Ocean and my kids starting to stir to life thinking of writing about the technical pros and cons of WiMax vs. WiFi. And I realize that as I watch my kids and their friends play with their IPODs and WiFi enabled portable play stations that they barely know what I do for a living let alone care that WiMax is a wireless protocol targeted for the licensed bands and an alternative to 3G wireless technologies and that WiFi is the protocol of choice for the unlicensed bands. What they care about are their friends, their music and connecting with them.
In watching our kids, I believe we can get a glimpse of the future and what the next generation of wireless and mobility will look like. My kids spend hours IMing with their friends and downloading music onto their IPOds and I am sure are representative of kids around the world. You see them connecting with their friends in new and different ways: Instant messaging, internet, local ad hoc wireless networking and text messaging. You also see them spending hours connecting with other devices, exchanging photos and downloading music into their IPODs and games into their PSPs. In watching how they interact with their friends and music, I am noticing that the access provider and the service provider are separating. In the old days (read that as I am over 40) your phone company provided you access and phone service, your cable company provided you access and TV shows and your mobile operator provided you access and cellular phone service. If our kids are any indication of the future, the service provider of the future is going to be the likes of Google, Yahoo, MicroSoft and your favorite gaming site and the access providers of today are looking to converge to becoming providers of IP access across multiple physical mediums such as cellular, WiFi, cable and fixed line. And watching the Gigabytes of music and photos being exchanged, the wireless network of the future will have 10 times the capacity of today’s networks and be able to deliver a wireless data bit for 1/10 the cost. So while the future is always hard to predict our kids maybe the best crystal ball we have to it.
Posted by Bob Friday at 10:39 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
