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July 28, 2006
The Protocol of Transformation
I am jealous of kids born in the 80s. I'm not going to lie and say that it was great being a kid in the 70s. Its not because the video games were better - I love the Atari 2600 and Lincoln Logs.
Wanna know why:
Remember them - more than what meets the eye? I always wanted a Transformer. So if you are reading this and you are your 20s - I'm jealous.
I've always wanted to transform! Right now, on the last Friday of Cisco's fiscal year - I think I might have.
I first worked in Wireless in the early 1990s when I was working for Xircom, at that time we were doing 2 Mbps frequency hopping wireless. It was fun, but it was a 'nice' to have - not a 'gotta have' technology. So I worked on a bunch of other cool technologies in the interim.
In 2003 I had an opportunity to get back into wireless and I jumped at it. Wireless is the natural state of communications -there is no doubt about that, but it is also the natural state of being. I marvel at how I can be in Madrid airport and video conference with my nephews.
With wires, I always felt that time was my enemy - I *had* to be in a specific place at a specific time so that I can *connect* and get or send some information.
Without wires the world is my connection. Information is a moment away - I can look up the surf report, I can find out the entire cast of 'Clash of the Titans', and as Peggy Casey points out - I can look for love no matter where I am.
Wireless transformation is also a group experience. I've learned that wireless is a key ingredient in one of my favorite things in the world: Organic creation.
I can't tell you how many times I've been in wireless meetings with people where ideas flow, we collaborate, and use 'wireless' as a tool for intellectual stimulation.
I also love how wireless connectivity brings us together. I was in Europe with family, and we were having a healthy debate about Jason Giambi's batting average while with the As. I took out the laptop, and my whole family was huddled around it while we talked about batting averages.
I downloaded the info wirelessly.
Working in wireless has brought me close to a fantastic group of people and changed me! Cisco's Wireless Networking Business Unit (or WIN-BOO as we affectionately call it) is comprised of a bunch of people that have a lot of passion about being disconnected (from wires). Working with everyone here has tought me a lot about acceptance and vision. Everyone has a vision for a wireless world, and I've come to accept that a wireless world is the way of the future.
Sure I don't own a transformer, but in the last few years I've learned that there is more than what meets the eye in the people around me and the world around me. Wireless was the catalyst for that change.
Posted by at 04:17 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
July 26, 2006
How to tell if Mobility is a necessity?
There have been good discussions on this site about mobility and how it has been deployed in interesting ways, nearly absorbed in the DNA of how we conduct business. But how do we determine if it is a business necessity and not a nice to have?
Here are my top 10 signs mobility is on the cusp of being more than a nice to have:
1. It is pervasive, not just in conference rooms or in the hands of the sales people.
2. The early adopters don’t need a business case in order to invest in it – imagine if you had to create a business case for email
3. The hockey stick analyst forecasts charts now look like baseball bats…. it is summer after all
4. My doctor weighed me prior to my annual checkup and was not concerned that my Treo was attached to my belt
5. You can get high speed and decent coverage indoors, outdoors, except when your device turned off
6. Wi-Fi was an answer to a Jeopardy question last week in the rhyme-time category
7. Flight attendants ask you to turn off WiFi devices as part of their boarding announcements
8. Business travelers select hotels based on in-room wireless to be able to use their laptop while stretching out on the “heavenly bed”
9. Now that the job market has picked up, you turn down a position because they don’t have a wireless network.
10. Give me your best reason here
Posted by Kathy Small at 05:17 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
July 24, 2006
Mobility, In Human Time
We of the Mobile Visions blog love it when a blog sparks a reader to post a comment. First of all, it shows that there is life beyond the typeface, but more importantly it provides a sanity check for our ideas.
I noticed that Alan's Instant Mobility post inspired a reader to write in (see the comment section). The reader claims that the need for continuous mobility is overstated. In fact, the reader makes the statement that he'd rather do without it in favor of conducting business at a much slower pace. I believe the phrase he used was "in human time".
I have been thinking about this concept of human time. I would like a definition. It seems to me that human time is dependant not only on the individual, but also on the environment.
Consider the days of Columbus. A trip from London to New York (had it existed) would have taken months. Steamships would cut that time to weeks; early aviation to several days; and modern jet engines to a matter of hours. What had previously been considered a normal amount of time was continually decreased with advances in technology.
Of course, each new technology isn’t completely at the expense of the former. Even today people can choose to travel from London to New York by boat. Most don’t. Why would you, right? Air travel is a much more efficient use of time.
The same is true for mobility. While some may be adverse to change, the fact is that technology initially disrupts and then it is absorbed. People adapt to change, eventually. So, while our reader may question the need for “instant mobility” as described by Alan, the future is clear. Continuous connectivity that is time and location agnostic will become just as common as a flight from London to New York.
Change is opportunity.
John F. Kennedy once said, "Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."
Posted by Chris Kozup at 10:11 PM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
July 13, 2006
Instant Mobility: FEDEX Meets Instant Karma!
For WHATEVER REASON, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about music and Matt Glenn’s columns, thinking how a music provides an explosion of ideas –some good, some bad, some part of our society and some confined to the dustbin of history – rocketing across our society for the past few hundred years without the ubiquity of the Internet, currently “googling” us down the yellow brick superhighway.
For the past few years, Wi-Fi mobility has burst on to the scene, a veritable revolution in how we communicate and who controls networks: very upsetting to the old order of wireless networking. What comes to mind is John Lennon’s “Instant Karma.” I am not sure John would have approved of my borrowing, here, but give this piece a chance::
“Instant mobility's s gonna get you,
Gonna knock you off your feet,
Better recognize your devices
Wi-Fi’s in everything you meet
Why in the world are we here,
Surely to live connected to the air,
Why on earth are you there,
When you're ev'rywhere,
Come and get your share.”
Increasingly, wireless is revolutionizing how PEOPLE connect, how applications are morphing to meet our changing work- and life-styles.
In the post-Centrino generation, mobile workers would gain access to wireless networks in an asynchronous manner and the way we worked, the way we collaborated, has been dictated by these islands, these pockets of rapid connectivity.
We are now moving more rapidly to a world of ubiquitous mobility, where we go from quick bursts of connection to great moments of continuous collaboration. To this, I can offer one analogy. Let’s talk about our friend Horatio, who is a big traveler. Let’s look at his day from a current mobility perspective
7:45 a.m., Hortatio logs into a Wi-Fi Connection from his room at the castle. He downloads a pile of email and scans the Monday pipeline report
9:45 a.m.: Horatio stops for a cup of joe at Starbucks and starts flirting with Gertrude on Yahoo Instant Messenger
12:00 Horatio arrives at work. At 1:00 pm he learns about a serious deal his team is trying to close, just as he is about to step into a cab for the airport.
2:00 p.m., Whie on his flight, Horatio reads an urgent, 3 hour-old email from Polonius, warning him to be careful with using company capital in the transaction. Horatio forwards it to the deal team
8:00 p.m., Horatio lands in JFK, and uploads 40 emails related to the deal. He logs on again at 10 p.m. at the hotel and learns his company lost the deal. Why did they lose? They did not offer vendor financing and the competition did.
So what happened here? Horatio appeared to be emailing his team, but in actuality, he was in and out of touch during the transaction, popping into the email conversation periodically (sound familiar?). He went asynchronous is a real-time, live world. It’s kind of like the FEDEX package tracking application:
- June 1, 6 a.m., Pick up Yorick’s skull in Finland
- June 3. 3;30 am, sorted in Memphis, TN
- June 4 2:00 pm, arrived in Denmark
- June 4 6:00 pm, on truck for delivery to Ellsinore Castle
- June 5: 7:30 a.m., delivered to Ellsinore. Signed for by Claudius
Next year, how would have this been different? 2 years from now, Horatio
- Wi-Fi in Hotel
- Mesh in the city on the drive
- Wi-Fi on the airplane, via satellite connection to the Internet
- Mesh network on landing
- Wi-Fi in the hotel
He could have been in touch all of the time and no detail could have gotten past him. In his own words:
“Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he
leaves, what is't to leave betimes?”
Posted by Alan Cohen at 12:40 PM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)
July 12, 2006
Romance and Wi-Fi - Locating A Match
Yesterday, I found myself day dreaming while I was at work. Sitting at my desk, I was lost in the land of what-if. I used to do this in high school about boys I thought were cute. Now, I do it about products that I’m driving to market. Yes, I day dreamed about applications for location services.
This isn’t to say that romance in the head is dead. It’s just that, like all good platforms, the human brain can be used for many applications. As I wandered off into fantasy land, I tried to imagine how our clever customers and creative partners will use our free Wireless Location Appliance API to create exciting, innovative, and useful new applications for location services. Here are some ideas....
On May 29 Alan Cohen blogged about how Appear Networks deployed a landmark location service in the Stockholm subway and earlier this year Bronson Healthcare Group shared how they are using Cisco location services to track wheelchairs to avoid searches and patient waiting.
I was a candy-striper while I was in high school and I know how frustrating it is to look for wheelchairs – let alone missing patients. I lost a patient once. My 14 year old heart rate soared in fear. If the hospital where I volunteered had had Cisco’s 802.11 location services, I could’ve looked at the Cisco Wireless Control System (WCS) interface to see where my patient was, based on the location of her Wi-Fi enabled IV pump. Instead, since this was pre-Wi-Fi, I ran between floors, eventually finding her in the gift shop, sheepishly stuffing a chocolate bar into her pocket. She’d snuck off to buy a forbidden candy bar.
Other industries besides healthcare and transportation are embracing location services. Rental car agencies, airlines, manufacturing facilities (Boeing Turns to WLAN When A Key Part Goes Missing), retail stores, finance organizations, public agencies and warehouses can use Wi-Fi location services to track assets, inventory, or people to improve their business operations. Location services are helping organizations find rogue access points, track the movement of Wi-Fi enabled devices, issue location-based alerts, enforce business policies, and troubleshoot the network. With location services, workflows can be streamlined, assets can be managed more efficiently, and the WLAN will stay more secure. All of this reduces operating costs and improves business productivity.
Now, instead of the childhood game - Tag You’re It! It’s the business imperative: Tag It - To Track It!
And then, there are the fun uses for location services. My co-worker Matthew Glenn, suggested to me earlier today that on-line dating services could offer a Wi-Fi location service for their members – Wi-Fi alerts whenever they’re near someone that fits their profile. In dating, proximity is everything. So why not meet a potential love-match when you’re out for coffee, at a concert, or shopping at the grocery store? Yes, I can see the Wi-Fi Date Zone sign on college campuses or on airport kiosks, right next to the Wi-Fi Zone logo. Just imagine the telemetric data that could be made available! Obviously, Matt has focused his Wi-Fi day dreaming on areas other than I have. :-)
So, how will Cisco’s partners and customers use the free Wireless Location Appliance API? They’ll develop new location-based applications that support business critical services, streamline operations, reduce costs….and make our lives more fun!
As for me, I don’t have my Wi-Fi Date Zone device yet, but if it’s available while I’m still dating, why not? As for my day dreaming, will my director ever know that I was lost in a fantasy land while at work? Nope. When he logged into our internal Cisco WCS with the Cisco Wireless Location Appliance, my Wi-Fi UserID showed that I was sitting at my desk….diligently working. Location services can see where you are ….but they can’t read your mind.
Posted by at 04:16 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
July 09, 2006
The NYSE and the future of Wireless WiFi networks
Quite often you find an organization that pushes a technology to the edge of its capability so as to provide a glimpse into the future of that technology. The NYSE and the wireless network installed across the NYSE trading floor is one of those cases.
The requirements at the NYSE pushed the limits of wireless WiFi technology in the areas of reliability, redundancy, roaming and capacity. The trading application being used on the trading floor required zero packet loss and equal performance across all traders. In terms of redundancy, half of the wireless network at the NYSE can go down and still be fully operational. In terms of capacity, it can provide 256kbps to over 100 traders gathered in a couple of 100 square feet. In terms of roaming, typical handoff times had to be on the order of 10’s of msec and occur every 8 seconds for a fast moving trader. I worked for over a year on the wireless network at the NYSE in designing, deploying and testing it. And what is currently operating on the trading floor is an 802.11a picocell network with 4 – 6 APs typically covering every square foot of the trading floor and up to 10-12 APs in some areas. Additionally a custom 802.11 client with a preemptive roaming algorithm capable of handling a trader walking across the floor roaming every 8 seconds through APs typically covering 100 to 300 square feet. Many of the technologies needed in the NYSE wireless network such as variable receive sensitivity for creating picocells, secure fast roaming and preemptive roaming are now in Cisco’s unified wireless product. So while the wireless network at the NYSE took a significant amount of effort and a custom client, it demonstrates that wireless LAN networks can and are being used for critical business applications and has the technology deployed at the NYSE becomes productized, wireless networks in most organizations will increasingly move from the status of a convenience network to business critical network.
Posted by Bob Friday at 10:40 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
July 06, 2006
Personal Stocks and (Rock Solid) Wireless Bonds
On the topic of "payback" I'll mention a personal anecdote and say a few words about Cisco's focus on wireless as a critical business capabilitiy.
It's not until you lose something, even temporarily, that you realize how valuable it is. My wife and I rely on wireless at home and we go virtually apoplectic when it stops working. A few weeks ago I was making a carefully timed stock trade over breakfast and my wireless connection went down right in the middle of the transaction. I spent ten minutes fiddling our (consumer) access point and tearing my hair out to get it running again. By the time it was back up I lost $300 on the trade.
Moral of the story? Never try to time the stock market. And...make sure your wireless network is rock solid if you're betting your business on it :)
I recently spoke with Oisin McAlasdair, one of the guys managing Cisco IT's internal unified upgrade. There will be 6000 unified access points spread across 400 buildings worldwide with 300 controllers managing them. Why bother with such a major upgrade?
It's not that Cisco's existing autonomous network is deficient. We've been using it for five years, with fifty thousand daily users. In a recent study of twenty five thousand Cisco employees forty two percent claim that the WLAN is their only method for accessing the network and each person gains an average of 1.5 hours of productive time a day using wireless.
As with many new technologies, it's the organization playing catch-up with its people. In this case Cisco recognizes wireless as a business critical network and not just a convenience. A simple outage across even a small number of access points can cause man-days or weeks of lost productive time.
There are a number of reasons to upgrade the network to unified (I'll leave the marketing to other venues). But, it's the right strategy for Cisco and it'll be the right strategy for many other organizations as they come to see wireless as a critical business capability. Day trading over breakfast is one thing, but keeping fifty thousand employees productive is quite another.
Posted by at 09:50 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
In the age of bare hands and cast iron - Vacation Missive
The great Irish, Nobel Prize Poet Seamus Heaney is one of my favorite writers. In his newest collection, District and Circle, he reflects on the mechanism of farming, weaving it with the circular, pattern of life and even the weather and earth itself. In the opening poem of the slim, powerful collection, "The Turnip-Snedder," he reflects:
"'This is the way God sees Life,'
it said, 'from seedling-braird to snedder,'
as the handle turned
and turnip-heads were let fall and fed
to the juiced-up inner blades,
'this is the turnip-cycle,;
as it dropped its raw sliced mess
bucketful by glistening bucketful."
In some ways, I am starting to see the technology cycle of the mobile industry turning, "bucketful by glistening bucketful," across the fabic of our societies. Yesterday cellular, today Wi-Fi, and who knows, tomorrow, WiMAX, turns the handle of mobility.
Juxtapose this against my visit to London last week. Walking my footsore, but always good natured little family across the amazing sites and vast flush of humanity of this most utilized of world cities, I could not help think about how technology washes across the metropolis, generation by glistening generation, to alter the lives of the city dwellers, but not necessarily changing the city itself; making a rapid snedding -- if you have not got it yet, it means cutting -- of people's communications patterns. Nonetheless, if you are near Westminister, you can feel time pass in 15 minute increments. Reading Dickens Hard Times during the first part of my visit, I remembered that not every age of technology was welcome by he masses impacted by it.
During the end of the trip, we motored down to Winchester, to walk the nave of the 900 year old Cathedral -- built to order by William the Conquerer -- strolling the monuments and carvings of saints, kings, bishops statesmen, and writers. Winchester Cathedral is one of the oldest great medieval churches in the world, home to the Winchester bible, a 12th centruy illuminated manuscript, which alone is worth the risk of driving on the other side of the road :-> It was the great technology accomplishment of its day.
http://www.winchester-cathedral.org.uk
Only Jane Austen (who is interred in the Cathedral) could have dreamt up our hurried entrance at the end of the day where the organ and choir were deep into Evensong.
Remember readers, we who move technology may only be lightly moved by it. In the age of bare hands and cast iron, technology, mobility are tools, for life itself. To borrow from another Irish poet will:
"Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!"
Posted by Alan Cohen at 04:39 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
