September 28, 2006

My Life Online

Last week I received my long awaited Sony mylo (which stands for My Life Online, and is NOT CAPITALIZED), a personal communicator that used Wi-Fi rather than Cellular technologies to support its communications capabilities. The mylo, according to Sony's marketing spiel, allows you to put the "entire world under your thumbs" (take that, Mick Jagger), and allows you to "take the best part of your computer with you" wherever you go.

http://www.learningcenter.sony.us/assets/itpd/mylo/prod/index.html

While I will let Sony do the heavy lifting here in describing all the cool capabilities of the mylo-- and there is a lot going on in this device including email, music, video/photos, chat, etc. -- what is interesting about this device it that it has not linkage to the cellular world and only uses Wi-Fi hotspots to gain connectivity to the Internet. Indeed, the PSP/Gameboy meets Sidekick meets Pager meets IPod's primary communications tools are Instant Messenger and Voice Messaging from Google(talk), Yahoo and Skype.

A true child of the Web 2.0 Revolution, the mylo assumes voice and text messaging will be free and that access to the Internet will also come from Hotspots, which could be free or for pay. It bundles a JWire application to help you find open hotspots by geography. Okay, the real world, today, does not work that way, but as Hemingway intoned at the end of The Sun Also Rises: "isn't it pretty to think so."

Call this the first "crossover" device of the Mobility Generation, it's an opening salvo in the shape of things to come for computing, communications and gaming. http://blogs.cisco.com/wireless/2006/06/mobility_generation_a_fathers.html

Imperfect and expensive, like all first generation miracles, it has the whiff of the inevitable. As the gamers and Mobility Generation enter the workforce, they will increasingly dictate not only how we communicate, but how we work, carrying the openness of youth into the mores of the work world. And, like the earlier generation, which brought PCs into the workforce, against the wishes of IT management, we will be under their thumb.

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September 21, 2006

Green Day for Wi-Fi, For Cisco

I was walking up 8th Avenue in Manhattan yesterday, listening to Green Day on my IPod, as I wove my way through the pedestrian tango of Midtown.

“Time grabs you by the wrist and directs you where to go”

I grabbed Unstrung’s Dan Jones by his wrist and pulled him into the new Hearst Tower, which has been officially designated the first building to receive a Gold LEED certified rating for "core and shell and interiors" in New York City from the United States Green Building Council. Building on a series of "diagrid" traingles, reaching upwards, like a series of giant glass and metal slashes 46 stories into the sky, the Hearst Tower is a marvel of technology, ecology and architecture. And – this is where Dan comes in -- it turns out Hearst has deployed a Unified Wireless LAN throughout the entire 856,000 square feet of the Tower, to help it meet both its mobility needs as well as support its green strategy. http://www.unstrung.com/document.asp?doc_id=104257&WT.svl=news2_1

Rising out of the stone Art Deco shell of the earlier Hearst building, the 46 floor tower

- Used 20% less steel to construct
- Reycled 90% of the materials of the original building
- Is furnished with bio-sustainable materials for the furniture and carpeting
- Uses sensors (vs. light switches) to turn off the power in rooms when no one is in them
- Uses RF shielding to keep the building cool (and, interesting, lowers the amount of RF signal bleed out of the building)
- Collects rainwater from the room which is collected in a 16,000 gallon tank to provide a magnificent waterfall in the atrium and cooling for the lower floors. For more on the Tower: http://hearst.com/tower/

Hearst deployed 260 Lightweight Access Points and 4 WLAN Controllers to provide pervasive mobility services to the more than 2000 employees and thousands of annual visitors working in the Tower. The WLAN connections are delivered through Mobile Access’s Distributed Antenna System (DAS), which also delivers cellular connectivity across the building from base stations from Cingular, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

So can wireless be a green technology?

Seven environmental drivers stand out how:

- Seamlessly roaming around the building (including the magnificent atrium), increases productivity and more fully utilizes the available space
- Providing guest networking features allows other users to access the network and avoid traveling back to their offices or to a hotspot
- The DAS system reduces cabling:
o Requiring less metal to be used
o Fewer cables to be pulled and powered (e.g., POE).
o Efficiently deliver multiple wireless signals to users while preserving the key features of the Unified system
- Reducing costs and energy expended in moves/adds/changes as people change workspace
- Supporting location-based services such as asset-tracking can save time and energy.
- Enabling real-time access to Web 2.0 types of info and systems can reduce both increase worker productivity and eliminate to print documents or carry CDs or DVDs for accessing relevant work media.. [Warning: Relevant Diversion Alert] The 400 CDs worth of music on my IPod, if they are all delivered digitally, eliminate the need to burn CDs, wrap them in plastic cases that will sit in garbage heaps for thousands of years.
- Supporting, over time, additional environmental sensors

Imagine using the technology we build to reduce strain on precious earth? Wow, my benchmark lesson came from a company in the printing and media business?

Today our CEO John Chambers, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, announced a signficant Carbon Reduction Initiative, as ever, showing Cisco's focus on using our own technology to run our business more efficiently. Now we are using our technology to reduce carbon emissions. For more on this effort: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2006/ts_092106.html?CMP=ILC-001

For me, it was a green day in New York. Or as Green Day said in their song “Are We the Waiting”:

“Starry nights, city lights coming down over me
Skyscrapers, stargazers in my head.”

You thought I was going to say Rosebud?

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September 15, 2006

Enter the Era of Pervasive Mobility

Today closes my first week at Cisco. Starting a new job is always momentous, but this one is even more so. I’ve been in the wireless industry for 10 years – a virtual dinosaur – and for the bulk of that time, Cisco has been the networking force in wireless. The acquisition of Aironet in 1999 set the industry on a growth curve that hasn’t slowed since.

And that brings to me why this job is so interesting. For 10 years, I’ve been with small companies fighting to gain mindshare in the shadow of Cisco. I’ve done a lot of interesting things and I’d like to think along the way helped a lot of customers, analysts and press understand the exciting new world of wireless and what possibilities it brings.

But I sense that the opportunity is bigger now.

While there is still plenty of innovation in Silicon Valley start ups, the era of wireless as I knew it has ended. When I started, there were four ‘major’ players in the wireless LAN space – Aironet, BreezeCOM, Proxim and Symbol. That’s it. Now, when you look at the wireless landscape, there are literally hundreds of companies. Wireless LAN, mesh, point to point, point to multipoint, WiMAX, RFID, Zigbee, 802.15, sensors, security, management, voice over Wi-Fi, etc. And that’s just technology companies. When you look at the extended space of application providers that are building their businesses on mobility and wireless, the number explodes. Companies like Jambo http://www.jambo.net that are using the ubiquity of Wi-Fi combined with the popularity of social networking to bring people together. My kids will grow up with capabilities like this in their personal mobility devices (I don’t even want to call them smartphones as who knows what they will be able to do in 10 years) and will wonder how mom and dad used to meet people ‘in the old days.’

One era has ended, and I hope to help usher in the new one. An era of pervasive mobility. Not just voice calls. Not just the ability to connect. That you can do today from almost anywhere. But so many times that connection is barely usable, and certainly not enjoyable. How many of us have tried websurfing for simple things – like the nearest Italian restaurant – on our phones and given up. The speed, the device, the information display, the lack of context – so many things that limit the experience.

But the ability to have the same experience – be it professional or personal – as you would if you were ‘wired’; that is the promise of pervasive mobility. To be in the company meeting while in a taxi riding from the airport. To collaborate on a powerpoint presentation while on the train commuting to work. To download direct to the HD player the kid’s movie you left behind while driving to Tahoe. (My personal dream to eliminate the stacks of DVDs we currently bring….)

Much of this is in sight, but so much more remains to be done. And this brings me to why I’m at Cisco. Of all the companies in the world, only Cisco has the means and the wherewithal to usher in this new era. No other company can deliver both the vision and the products that will enable the enterprise, the public sector and the individual to grab an IP pipe anywhere – indoors or out, still or in motion - bringing life’s experiences to them wherever they may be.

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September 12, 2006

Collaboration, Wi-Fi and Sept. 11

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a reception for all the parties involved in the Silicon Valley Wireless Mesh Network: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/technology/06wireless.html?_r=1&oref=slogin, the winning bidders (including Cisco), the Silicon Valley Partnership, city managers and IT folks, public policy experts and a coterie of other interested parties. While much has been written about this network and mesh networking in general, I will pause on replaying this for the moment as there was another element to the day worth reflecting upon.

September 11 was a moment in our country's history that left a deep emotional and physical gash in the landscape. Yesterday morning, I had a chance to speak with my uncle, Bradley, a retired telecommunications field service engineer who actually managed to get out of the 18th floor of WTC 9 minutes before the building collapsed (he was, on that fateful clear morning, no joking, installing Cisco routers at the Federal Reserve). We talked about his memory of the day and then our conversation then drifted to a discussion of what I was working on, and that led to our discussion of the Silicon Valley Wireless Network.

We talked in the easy way we have about what occured in Palo Alto on 9/11/06, almost 5 years to the hour when the towers fell down: how a group of men and women from differnet walks of life, from different parts of the economy, representing different groups could come together to launch a project that could serve so many.

What I remember most about 9/11 was how our nation came together in that time of crisis, to support each other and focus on the greater good of the nation, of the wounded, the survivors, and the comfort of the grieving families and friends of those who had lost loved ones. 9/11 is poignant and always current to me. I grew up in New York and watched the World Trade Center towers go up: it was the engineering feat of my childhood. My college roomate's father was the architect for the Port Authority who designed the restaurant that became the Windows on the World.

I hope our project in Silicon Valley becomes a digital Windows on the World: a bright shining, engineering feat. But more: a model for the entire world on what we an accomplish working together. For Silicon Valley is a lot like New York: we are a community that is blessed with a remarkable model of integrating people, ideas and ambition. The sheer number of immigrants to this tech mecca (myself included) are fortunate to become instant residents. Just as the Internet flattens the barriers of time and space for all kind of communications and information, so I hope the Silicon Valley Mesh Network flattens all kinds of cultural, economic and technical barriers that can benefit from being connected to the Internet anytime, anywhere.

The Silicon Valley Mesh Network, when completed, will be a great symbol of an entire community that came together to do something. How American. Or, to paraphrase the American writer, Thomas Wolfe (I am partial to Look Homeward, Angel), perhaps our large, beautiful, pervasive network can become "How New York." As Wolfe wrote: "One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.” He could have been writing about any day in Palo Alto.

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