For all the SXSW rookies or those who can’t clearly remember what they experienced at last year’s Geek Bacchanalia, here’s this year’s guide to SXSW Interactive survival and success:

• When you’re here, always call it “south by.” If people don’t know what you’re talking about, they are not people you want to talk to anyway.
• SXSW started as a music festival. It’s still a festival. It is *NOT* a tech or business conference. Approach it like ‘Spring Break for Geeks’ and you’ll have the right mindset.
• SXSW is about relationships, old and new, and soaking up the scene.
• All the action @ the convention center is in the hallways.
• Don’t book yourself back-to-back-to-back in sessions. Instead, hit a few that are super-relevant to what you do, attend at least one keynote so you can say you went to one, but spend the majority of your time meeting people and interacting with them.
• For a session you for-sure want to attend, be outside the door at least one hour before that session starts. Don’t worry about the wait. Some of the best connections and conversations you’ll have will be in line waiting for a session.
• Most of the real innovative thought and “what’s next” will happen in the tiny meeting rooms in the hotels five blocks from the convention center (the show is about 3x larger than Austin can accommodate, so sessions are in hotels all over town)
• Stay flexible and be ready to change your plans instantly. Serendipity rewards flexibility and spontaneity at SX (no, that’s not a typo, that’s your chance to practice saying “south by”).
• Be ready for 18 hours of continuous, heavy phone use. Bring extra batteries or an external, rechargeable power source.
• Don’t get too hyped up about anybody you meet or connect with. Almost *nobody* follows-up after SXSW. If you want to sustain a relationship or connection, it will be on you to do it.
• Try to spend at least 15 to 30 minutes a day watching the scene and immersing yourself in the energy at different locations:

• Charging station @ the convention center
• Hilton main lobby
• Hilton 4^th floor lobby (startup accelerator)
• Vendor/brand reception/party (too many to begin to comprehend until you witness it for yourself)
• Local club/bar (best scene is not 6^th street, seek out the other areas of downtown for more interesting interactions)

And, very important:

• Pace yourself. Drink a lot of fluids. Load up on “Airborne” every morning to ward off the exotic mix of worldwide germs. There is no shortage of parties, receptions and general festivity. It’s a long show. Save some energy for the last days.
• Bring lots of business cards. For all its techiness, it’s still a physical business card show.

[edit: added need for 18 hours of phone power]

[great additional points in the comments on this post]

The question is: If you start with a laptop that has Windows Vista, that is, Windows Vista that has never, ever been updated since the day it was brand-spankin’ new, how many updates does it take to get it current?

The moral of the story is: There is no free lunch. I spent the 2011 Christmas Holiday enjoying great food. In exchange, I fixed Shaun’s laptop. Fair trade.

On Tuesday, 5 July, she told me about the trip by way of a hand-made book.

Read the rest of the story of the book and our trip to see the last shuttle launch here: http://www.hackneys.com/docs/one-more-shot.pdf

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/02/dell-latitude-e6410-e6510-finally-make-it-to-us/

(click on any photo for larger size)

How this came about is, I’ve been waiting for the new Intel  i7 CPU update for the Dell Latitude to come out for months now.

My old Latitude is literally wearing out, so I’m limping to the finish line with it. Every day brings another prayer, another incantation and another stuttering trip through a day’s productivity, ever uncertain that I’ll reach tomorrow with a functioning computer.

Consequently, I’ve been monitoring the tech blogs and Dell’s site closely for signs of the updated Latutude’s arrival and spotted the 6510 and 6410 on Dell’s web site the first morning they were available in the U.S.

In the previous days I saw the new model numbers start to appear on the Dell site’s laptop accessories listings, so I knew the new laptops themselves were imminent. Sometime between 11:30 PM 30 March when I checked before bed and 6:30 AM on 31 March when I got up, the new models went live on the Dell U.S. site.

I ordered my 6510 while I drank my first cup of coffee that morning.

I do not know if mine was the first consumer order or not, but I doubt it. There was probably some guy in his pajamas sitting up all night, every night, waiting for them. That wasn’t me since I was, officially, sleeping every night. And besides, prior to their consumer launch the 6510 and 6410 were available to enterprise customers and large institutions for pre-order, so there wasn’t going to be any iPad level hype surrounding being first in line.

Engadget, a tech blog, monitored the updated Latitudes through their design and regulatory approval process, as well as their intro in foreign markets such as the U.K. After I ordered mine, I emailed the Engadget reporter who wrote the U.K. story for Engadget and used their “Tip Us” feature to give them the news. It took them more than a day to get it posted. Note that, yes, I waited until my order was in the queue before unleashing the masses straining to buy new Latitudes who might have delayed mine. Mea Culpa.

 The Dell Latitude series laptops are built and optimized for IT deployment in large organizations. The Latitude line has design requirements of five years of design and utilization stability for accessories, such as power supplies and docking stations, and 18 months for the design model (the laptop models themselves). This aids people responsible for purchasing, configuring and deploying large fleets of laptops in their organizations to buy products that will stay viable for lengthy time-cycles in their organizations. In addition, they are designed and built to withstand the rigors of delployment into the hands of a typical corporate workforce. That means getting coffee spilled on the keyboards, being dropped off of conference tables and desks, being plugged into outlets all over the world, getting punched when bad news comes in, etc.

After years of loyalty to Thinkpads, which I used for our entire field force in my last company, I bought our original D620 Latitudes on the recommendation of my brother, Jeff, whose company, Emerson, had excellent experiences with large deployments of Latitudes.

At the time, I needed two identical laptops, one each for Steph and I, that could survive going overseas for a few years.

I took my Latitude D620 out  of the box, plugged it in, loaded some software and ran it non-stop for a few weeks at 100% CPU load rendering video files for a massive family history project.

Between then and now my D620 traveled all over the world, from the world’s driest desert,

to the 100% humidity of the Amazon basin rain forest.

It spent a lot of time in the salt air of the beach at sea level,

and at very high altitudes for weeks at a time, such as on this road at over 16,000 feet  (4,877 meters) elevation.

While in some very unlikely places, such as next to this glacier,

I used my D620 to write thousands of emails, scores of blog posts, dozens of essays, a few white papers and two books.

As well as editing, processing and posting tens of thousands of photos.

(click photo for full size collage)

Including a few from some very special places,

and a few from places where we had absolutely no idea where we were.

So, now, after several hard drive and memory capacity upgrades, after thousands of hours of 100% load usage, after literally wearing through the keys, and after zero failures, it’s finally time to retire the trusty Latitude D620.

The King is dead. Long live the King.

The equity split was Wozniak 45%, Jobs 45% and Wayne 10%.

Wozniak recalls, “Steve had 45 percent of this partnership, I had 45 percent, and Ron had 10 percent, because both of us agreed that we could trust him to resolve any dispute, and we would trust his judgment.”

So what ever happened to Ron Wayne, a guy who had 10% founding equity in Apple?

Wozniak relates, “I had no money and Steve had no money. We didn’t own cars, we didn’t have savings accounts, we didn’t have houses. So Ron Wayne figured they’d come after him for his golden nuggets that he kept under his mattress. (He actually tells me it was in a safe-but he was afraid they’d come and get his gold.) So he sold out. It was too risky for him, so he sold out his 10 percent of Apple to [us] for a few hundred bucks. Maybe $600, maybe $800, maybe $300-but   a few hundred bucks. And this was even when we had an Apple II designed and were heading toward future business. He was just scared that something was going to catch him.”

Apple’s market capitalization this morning is $181.7 billion, with a B. If Ron Wayne had stayed around (and assuming no dilution), his 10 percent of Apple would be worth $18 billion. With a B.

Fear, thy name is Ron Wayne.

Sources:

• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston
• Yahoo! Finance

Even though we all know this story and can intellectually recognize that it is a required component to make a capitalistic economic system work, when push comes to shove, or more realistically, padlocks come to factory gates, things get a lot tougher. When long-standing, treasured companies die, such as Maytag, it is traumatic, especially for the local communities.

If they are big enough or politically well connected, governments sometimes step in and prop up dying businesses. In the last year we’ve seen multiple examples of this in vehicle manufacturing, insurance, financial services and banking. But even while entire economies are distorted by artificial means, the market keeps changing and creative destruction keeps happening.

As an example, consider these two ranked lists of the world’s highest market value companies in the technology, media and telecom segments from 1994 and 2009.

(Click on image to view full size)

Note that only 12 companies made both lists. Fully 60 percent of the world’s leading companies in 1994 disappeared from the top 30 list by 2009, and in some cases, disappeared altogether.

In addition, entire market segments shifted, with media sliding from 15 to 5 percent of the total market value in 15 years.

More significant to those outside that industry, the Asia/Pacific region rose from a trivial 1.63 to a second place 17.02 percent of total market value. Along the way, the Asia/Pacific region eclipsed Europe and is well on its way to overtaking North America.

What drives these massive changes? Along with global shifts associated with the rise of China, fundamental chapters of the evolution of technology and its implementation have repeatedly fed into and accelerated the creative destruction cycle.

We are currently in our fifth primary cycle of computing technology:

1. Mainframe computers
2. Minicomputers
3. Personal computers
4. Desktop Internet
5. Mobile Internet

In the first four cycles, there were clear winners, companies that dominated the cycle and realized huge market valuations. For instance, Unisys did very well in the mainframe cycle, DEC in the minicomputer cycle, Compaq in the personal computer cycle and Netscape in the Desktop Internet cycle. As you will notice, none of those companies is currently dominant. In fact, with the exception of Unisys, none even exists today.

Over the last 50 years there is only one company that has done well through all cycles, ranging from near monopoly to significant player: IBM.

How did they do it? For one, they reinvented the company on a regular basis, breaking apart entrenched and crusted cultures and business divisions. And secondly, they never stopped investing in research and development.

As an example of that commitment to research, IBM ranks number one in U.S. patents awarded in 2009.

As you’ll notice, six of ten of the top U.S. patent producers were in the 2009 top 30 valued companies ranking.

While there is no way to guarantee that any company can and will survive the changes from internal market cycles, such as the rise of the mobile internet, and external influences, such as the rise of China, constant innovation and invention has a proven track record over the last 50 years with IBM.

However, history has taught us that innovation and invention, in and of itself, is not enough. Kodak invented digital photography but the inertia of Kodak’s business model based on analog photography prevented them from capitalizing on it. Xerox invented the personal computer, graphical user interfaces, the mouse and the Ethernet, among other things, but Xerox’s business and sales model inertia rooted in leasing high profit margin copiers to large corporations prevented them from capitalizing on any of those world-shaping innovations.

Invention is one thing. Changing corporate culture to leverage those inventions is quite another. Companies that demonstrate the courage of vision and the ability to execute constant alteration of their business model to leverage new invention and innovation significantly increase their chances for ongoing success.

There are only two things for certain:

1. Creative destruction of companies and market segments will continue as long as capitalism exists.
2. The top 30 market valuation list of technology, media and telecom companies will look different in 2024 than it does today.  

It will be very interesting to see if IBM, or any of the other survivors from 1994, appear on that list.

*****

Sources:

• IFI Patent Intelligence
• Morgan Stanley
• FactSet

30 December 2009

In August of 2002 I endured a personal challenge. At the time, I was sitting on a bar stool at a friend’s house in my Iowa home town listening to a classmate prattle on about 9/11 and all of America’s associated failings and shortcomings. He was a friend of mine, and we’d spent time with him, his wife and kids, but that didn’t change the fact that he knew just about zero regarding the subjects he was sanctimoniously preaching about. My challenge was that I did—in detail. But I couldn’t talk about it.

Consequently, I had to sit there until I couldn’t take it any longer. Wallowing in my lack of available candor, I resorted to an alcohol fueled, not-so-brilliant rejoinder along the lines of “You’re full it.” Only I didn’t say “it.”

We are likely to see a similar blast of ill-informed, half-informed and outright ignorant rants about America’s failings and shortcomings related to this year’s Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s attempt to blow up a U.S. bound passenger jet. Just as with my classmate’s ill-informed passion without supporting knowledge and understanding, these rants, attacks and assertions will likely do more harm than good and simply degenerate into yet more useless partisan sewage.

The rants will center on the processes that allowed a man whose own father had reported as a radicalized Islamist to buy a ticket with cash and check in with only a backpack and yet not receive secondary pre-boarding security screening. The assertions will center on the databases where the information about terrorists is stored and made available to all relevant U.S. security agencies and organizations. The challenge is that the failures in this case are not about process or technology, they are about humans and human behavior.

A month after 9/11, I wrote in my industry magazine column a call to action to create the information systems that can (and, when properly implemented, do) identify terrorists within the available data sets in our society. That column, “We Can,” became a rallying cry in the data management industry, and was used as a template and an inspiration for many systems that followed, including some involved in this situation.

A year later I wrote a follow-up column titled “They Can’t,” which mourned the year lost to U.S. agency bureaucratic infighting, turf wars and the agencies and departments willful ignoring of simple, basic lessons that the data professionals in my industry had learned long before. Sadly, some of those basic lessons cited in that 2003 column are still at work today, six years later, in this attempted bombing.

In particular, two examples still ring true today. First, as in John Poindexter’s disastrous Total Information Access (TIA) initiative, there is very little demonstrated understanding of how the world works in the way today’s systems are implemented. Second, as in Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s comment, “It’s about protecting their turf and their jobs. That runs 180 degrees counter to what this nation needs at this moment.”

Here’s how it played out this time. In our fishbowl of American society, people buy airline tickets with credit or debit cards. Anyone walking up to a counter to buy a $2,831 ticket with cash, as the bomber did, is immediately suspect, and the cash purchase is grounds to flag the reservation, ticket and boarding pass for additional security screening, including interviews and physical inspection. However, in the developing world, including Accra, Ghana, where Abdulmutallab bought his ticket on 16 December, cash is king for all purchases. People in the developing world, especially Africa, do not commonly carry credit cards. For instance, Nigeria had about 600,000 credit and debit cards for its 149,000,000 people in 2007. Consequently, airline tickets in the developing world, including those to travel to the United States, are typically purchased with cash.

Where do people come from who attempt to, or succeed, in blowing up airplanes? The overwhelming majority originate in the developing world. However, the U.S. system for flagging tickets purchased with cash does not require foreign airlines, including those serving the developing world, to provide that data. While the U.S. does require all airlines to transmit in advance a complete passenger manifest of the names of everyone on every inbound flight to the U.S., the agencies involved ignore a datapoint, cash purchase, that is a key differentiator to separate regular travelers, such as business people or frequent leisure travelers, from those who are not.

Is this because the people involved with the systems have no exposure to or experience in the outside world? Hardly. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), Timothy Healy, is a former U.S. Marine pilot. The principal deputy director of TSC is Don Torrence, who served for 24 years in the Army in a wide variety of intelligence roles. The deputy director is Zandra Flemister, who spent more than 30 years in State Department posts all over the world, including a recent posting in Islamabad, Pakistan.

The TSC’s vision is “To be the global authority for watchlisting and identifying known and suspected terrorists.” Their mission is “To consolidate and coordinate the U.S. Government’s approach to terrorism screening and facilitate the sharing of terrorism information that protects the Nation and our foreign partners while safeguarding civil liberties.” How they do it is: “The Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) maintains a consolidated database of the names and other identifying information for all known or suspected terrorists, known as the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).”

On their web site, they state that: “The TSC supports federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal law enforcement agencies and some foreign governments that conduct terrorist screening by making the TSDB information available to them for screening purposes. TSC’s 24-hour call center also supports agencies’ terrorist screening processes by determining whether the person being screened is an identity match to the TSDB. TSC supports terrorism screening at agencies like the State Department (passport and visa applications), the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (border crossings and international flights), the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (immigration and citizenship applications), and the Transportation Security Administration (domestic flights). The TSC has also made Terrorist Identities Information accessible through the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) system to law enforcement officers, including 870,000 state and local officers nationwide, adding those resources to the fight against terrorism.”

So there you have it, the single, unified, “go to” source for terrorist identity information for all relevant agencies, departments and law enforcement organizations in the United States, as well as some foreign governments: the TSC’s Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).

That single, unified, “go to” source is managed by people who have extensive, first-hand knowledge of how the real world works. And yet the system to determine if people boarding planes bound for the United States should receive secondary screening and inspection lacks two simple rules, two simple logic tests. Test one, does this person exist in the TSDB data, yes or no. Test two, does this ticket have characteristics that make it unusual, such as a cash purchase, no checked in bags or a one way ticket, yes or no. The first of these two simple logic tests would have flagged the bomber as soon as he purchased his ticket. The second would have flagged him when he showed up to check in for the flight.

Clearly, the people running the TSC program know enough about how the real world works to know those two simple tests can and should be applied against their data. Why isn’t it applied when it makes so much common sense to do so?

The answer is related to the second issue: “It’s about protecting their turf and their jobs.”

The reason why the bomber could walk onto that plane, the reason why his name did not trigger a response in the FBI’s TSDB terrorist database, the reason why he did not merit additional security screening by the systems based on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) Selectee or No Fly databases that are derived from the TSDB, is that he didn’t exist in any of those databases. When he walked onto Northwest Flight 253 the bomber’s name, his database record, only existed in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) created and maintained by the Terrorist Identities Group (TIG) located in the Information Sharing and Knowledge Development Directorate (ISKD) of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).

If you were keeping count, there were ten distinct U.S. government fiefdoms in the preceding paragraph, each with its own stakeholders, bureaucracies, budgets, teams, managers and directors. Each fiefdom is competing for its own recognition, its own advancement, its own expansion, and, most importantly, its own budget. And remember, that paragraph only addressed one single set of data. Take that paragraph and multiply it by the hundreds to thousands of data sets involved in terrorism and you start to get an idea of the challenges involved around “It’s about protecting their turf and their jobs.”

(click on image for large version)

In this case, even though the bomber’s father had met with the American Embassy to inform them of his son’s activities and indoctrination, and the relevant agencies, including the CIA, FBI, DHS and the Department of State, met to discuss the situation, the bomber’s identity never made it past the TIDE data set into the TSBD data set.

No one paid any attention to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as he checked in with no luggage or boarded the plane with a bomb between his legs because his name was still stuck upstream, never flowing down the chain into the actionable data sets that the systems use to ring alarm bells, get people searched and prevent them from flying.

Why was it stuck? It was stuck upstream due to human decisions. The process for the first step in the data flow, from the TIDE data set to the actionable TSDB data set is: “Every evening, TIDE analysts export a sensitive but unclassified subset of the data containing the terrorist identifiers to the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) for use in the [United States Government’s] USG’s consolidated watchlist. This consolidated watchlist, which is a critical tool for homeland security, supports screening processes to detect and interdict known and suspected terrorists at home and abroad—for example, the Transportation Security Administration’s “No Fly” list and the Department of State’s visa database, among others.”

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s name was in the TIDE data set, placed there by field agents in the U.S. embassy in Nigeria. The agencies and department involved, the NCTC, CIA, FBI, DHS and the Department of State, did not see fit to move his record downstream into the actionable data in the TSDB and other subsets.

Why didn’t they move it? Because they were trapped within rules of human behavior related to information.

The challenge the NCTC, CIA, FBI, DHS and Department of State failed to overcome is a primary rule of information everywhere, whether it’s information you have or your work team has or your company has or your country has—that rule is: My information is, by default, more accurate and reliable than anybody else’s information. A fundamental human behavior attaches primacy of accuracy and relevance to any information that you, your team or your tribe possesses. Others’ information is always suspect, if for no other reason, that it’s not your information.

This rule of human behavior as it relates to information leads to individuals and groups forming a “silo” of information that is simultaneously jealously guarded from others to protect it from contamination and relied upon for most, if not all, decision making. It is commonly the primary, if not sole, source of information since any other source of information is, by its very nature, inferior.

Your information is better because it came from your information feeds (sources) (which you trust, again, largely because they are yours rather than due to any objective measure). Your information is better because the only modifications to it are the ones you deem worthy and correct (again, largely because they are yours rather than due to any objective measure).

In addition, your information is better because it is exclusive and unique because you control access to it. You only share it with selected individuals, groups, tribes and organizations who you have decided pose no threat to you and your stakeholders. Consequently, your information is never subjected to questioning, critical thinking or objective review.

In the case of the Christmas bomber, both of these factors, the primacy of self-sourced information and the controlled access to information, played a part.

Regarding primacy of self-sourced information, according to a U.S. administration official, there was “insufficient derogatory information available” about the bomber to move his database record downstream from TIDE for inclusion in the single, unified, “go to” source for terrorist identity information for all relevant agencies, departments and law enforcement organizations in the United States, as well as some foreign governments: the FBI’s TSDB.

The reason they thought there was insufficient derogatory information available is that the initial tip that introduced the U.S. government to the bomber came from the bomber’s father. And, if there is one ironclad rule in the agencies and departments of the U.S. government it is that while other agencies’ information is, without exception, inferior to our agency’s information, information provided by citizens—mere mortals—is, without exception, useless. The bomber’s father, Umaru Abdulmutallab, a respected retired banker, was unaware that reporting his son to the United States intelligence community would draw a collective shrug.

The reason why the bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had an active multiple-entry U.S. visa was because the Department of State didn’t consider the information provided by his father, a citizen—an outsider, was worthy of their time, attention and energy—in short: their work—to revoke it. The reason why the bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, did not appear in the FBI’s TSDB database or the TSA’s Selectee or No Fly databases was because they did not consider information provided by his father, a citizen—an outsider, was worthy of their time, attention and energy—in short: their work—to include the bomber’s record.

The second factor, controlled access to information, was manifested by multiple U.S. agencies who had, but did not effectively share, information about the bomber’s movements, his plans, and the plans of leaders of a branch of Al Qaeda in Yemen who were talking about “a Nigerian” being prepared for a terrorist attack. This jealous guarding of information is particularly galling to U.S. taxpayers who have invested billions of dollars since 9/11 to prevent this specific thing from happening. Ironically, both the NCTC’s TIDE and the FBI’s TSDB claim they exist and are funded as a direct result of the 9/11 commission’s recommendation to end information hoarding and facilitate information sharing.

Unfortunately for the commissioners and the American taxpayer, you can build as many multi-billion dollar technology systems as you want, but you’ll never overcome the human desire to prevent others from accessing internal, captive (siloed) information. This is especially true if others might use that information to advance their agenda (read: increase their budget at the information holder’s expense), gain publicity or elevate their stature above that of the information holder’s. In this contest, bureaucratic organization and tribal priorities trump national priorities every time.

Even after all the lessons learned from 9/11, even after all the billions of dollars spent, even after all the new and reorganized bureaucracies that have been created, the people we depend on to provide our security consciously chose to ignore information because it was provided by a mere citizen and also consciously chose to not share what self-sourced information they had in hand. 

Viewed objectively from the outside looking in, these decisions seem ridiculous. Viewed from inside any one of the agency and department fiefdoms involved, they seem logical and essential to “the only valid information is our information” and “we do not share our information” characteristics of human behavior.

When you combine the lack of applying first hand knowledge of how the world actually works with active resistance to non-self-sanctified information with a deeply imbedded loathing to sharing information, you end up exactly where we are right now—relying on the ineptitude of terrorists and the courage of passengers to keep the planes in the sky.

Seven years after my August 2002 personal challenge, I now endure another. Every day brings a new round of finger pointing between governments, parties, agencies and departments attempting to deflect responsibility for letting a known suspect with known Islamist beliefs with known co-location to known Islamist terrorist cells with known ticket and check-in terrorist characteristics to blithely board a jet bound for the U.S. with a bomb strapped to his crotch.

Eight years ago I wrote that my peers, the data professionals, had the experience, capabilities and technologies required to connect the dots of terrorism.

Seven years ago I wrote that the agencies and departments of the U.S. government, due to willful ignorance and blinding self-interest, could not.

They still can’t.

*******

Distribution and Excerpts:

• This document is available here: http://www.hackneys.com/docs/theystillcant.pdf
• This document may be distributed in its entire, unaltered, unedited, original form.
• Excerpts may be made and distributed if attributed to this author, Douglas Hackney, document and source.

Notes:

• All information included is public source / knowledge
• My inability to discuss what I knew in August 2002 was and is due to confidentiality agreements, non-disclosure agreements, contracts and organization/entity policies
• While positioning citizens and the information they provide as useless may seem a harsh indictment of federal agencies, I know this for a fact based on our own experiences. I can state unequivocally that if you tell the FBI, DHS, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and U.S. Customs about a multi-convicted felon who is committing a crime, they will ignore you.

*******

Sources:

• Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
• Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
• Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
• U.S. Department of State
• U.S. National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)
• U.S. Government Accountability Office
• Wall Street Journal
• New York Times
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Associated Press
• Reuters
• Ideaion News Press
• Creditcards.com

Not seeing any need to rush into this, I took my time before committing. I especially felt there was no need to rush into this since when you’ve been away for a while and you come back here, everyone looks very, ummm, tethered to their smartphones.

Nonetheless, I could see that given we were going to be here for a while, I might as well jump in, especially considering it would help me to evaluate opportunities for a few business models I was considering.

The first trigger point was when Steph was unpacking her office stuff out of storage and found her old Palm. She was giddy, since she was looking for a way to have her calendar with her while she was out of the house. Instead of either a) installing and supporting the LG application for her laptop that would synch her ancient cell phone to Outlook, or b) installing and supporting the ancient Palm application that would synch her equally ancient Palm, I chose c) and bought her an iPhone, which, since it’s from Apple, doesn’t require any support and never fails. Ever. At least that’s what I told her.

It was all enlightened self interest. It would allow me to play around with the iPhone OS and apps, as well as have one less thing to support in her information and productivity environment. Admittedly, that would be along the lines of one less grain of sand on the beach, but every little bit helps when it comes to supporting Steph and her digital domain.

But for me, after getting her iPhone set up and working with it a bit, I was still undecided. I also played around with a few Blackberries of friends, relatives and at the Verizon store.

While doing research on the mobile market in general, it became clear that the iPhone market was stuffed with existing applications and business models. If not mature, it was certainly crowded.

The same can be said for the Blackberry market: very robust, very mature, very stable.

So both of these options looked more than viable from the smartphone standpoint, but not very exciting in the market segment upside department.

Both were great devices, enthusiastically, even fervently supported by their patrons. OK, yes, some iPhone owners do cross the line into full-on, post-Kool-Aid, cult levels of rabid to violent defensiveness. Strand Consult, in a recent analyst report, even compares fervent Apple defenders, including some of the press, to Stockholm Syndrome hostages. But that didn’t put me completely off of the iPhone because I personally know several iPhone users who do not foam at the mouth. Most of the time.

In the end, my bottom line evaluation was:

• iPhone – great UI, good to very good ease of use, more apps that you could ever wade through, ubiquitous accessories, and it includes the fruit logo guaranteed to gain you acceptance in certain quarters.
• Blackberry – rock solid OS, secure platform, badge of honor in any corporate meeting room, fledgling app store and the best physical I/O device in the business (depending on the model).

Touch decision. But I had to choose one or the other.

So, my decision was: neither.

Instead, I waited until early November and bought an Android OS based Motorola Droid when they launched. I spent a few weeks with it, exploring the device, the apps, the OS and the user experience. Three days short of my 30 day cut off to return it, I mailed in the rebate form and locked on the typical American mobile carrier service agreement handcuffs.

Like the iPhone and the Blackberry, the droid is not perfect. However, unlike the iPhone and Blackberry, it’s a high growth market segment with a lot of opportunity. And it’s got some “the new new thing” buzz around it.

Biggest upsides:

• Verizon network; no comparison between the real-world network experience between AT&T & Verizon, and that’s not even including the 3G aspect. AT&T itself admits its calls in the NY City metro area are dropped at higher rates than its internal standards. And that’s in New York City for goodness sake. Imagine what it’s like out in the hinterlands that lie between the Hudson and east LA.
• Open platform, and it has been rooted for those so inclined.
• Open development environment and market; no mysterious and arcane application screening process by Apple app store gatekeepers (although I understand the business reasons why they do this, and I would too if I was in their position).
• Great screen.
• Multitasking (multiple open applications)
• HyperGeek developer community and nascent tribe (read: If I need to recruit some Ruby On Rails developers I might gain a little street cred by flashing my droid).

Biggest downsides:

• Verizon network; uses CDMA, so unless I’m going to one of 40 or so countries that have some CDMA network coverage, it’s worthless overseas as a phone.
• Lacks the trackball/trackpad of the BB, which is, IMO, by far the best user I/O device in any smartphone. Ever.

Biggest surprises:

• I thought I had to have a physical keyboard but use it very little.
• The small screen size of a smartphone vs. a laptop is less limiting than I anticipated for most things I do.
• I’ve been using it for reading more than my Kindle. Especially useful for couch surfing, research, newsfeeds, etc.

Realities:

• The droid is not an iPhone and never will be. The iPhone wins the ease of use and optimized customer experience hands down. The result of this is the anti-iPhone (as in everything it is not) marketing campaign. I think the droid team did a pretty good job picking a marketing strategy. There was very little potential in anything other than an “uncola” approach.
• The droid is basically a tribeless device. You are not going to automatically gain entrance into the cool hipster or locked-in corporate type tribes with this smartphone. While researching smartphones I found a story about a guy who went to D.C. for a new job and was told that he’d have to swap his iPhone for a Blackberry or it would destroy his career chances. The same would probably work in reverse if he was going to certain careers in LA or NY City. The only place the droid is cool right now is at meetups of Android OS / app developers. And that will last precisely until the next coolest Android OS phone hits the market.  

Observations:

• Smartphones are a little about telephony and a lot about a pretty powerful handheld, networked, mobile computing and media device with significant levels of internal telemetry.
• The potential of this intersection point of capabilities (telemetry, geolocation, computing, media, network & communication) have not yet been even partially explored. Yes, even with the iPhone’s 100k apps. Not even close.

The numbers:

            Global GSM users: ~4,000,000,000 (4 billion)

            Global CDMA users:  ~423,000,000 (423 million)

Apple iPhone apps:  >100,000

Android apps:            ~20,000

Android apps market: 37.7% paid, 62.3% free.

Projected sales for Motorola droid between launch 9 November and year end: 1,000,000.

Smartphone OS sales in North America, Q2 2009 (prior to droid launch):

1. Blackberry, 5,500,000
2. Apple 2,600,000
3. Windows 984,700
4. Symbian (Nokia) 383,600
5. Android 380,000
6. Other 480,300

Global mobile sales, Q3 2009:       308.9 million, 0.1% increase year over year

Global smartphone sales, Q3 2009: 41.0 million, 12.8% increase year over year

Global mobile manufacturers’ market share, Q3 2009:

• Nokia: 36.7% (down 1.5%)
• Samsung: 19.6% (up 2.5%)
• LG: 10.3% (up 2.5%)
• Motorola: 4.5% (down ~4%)
• Sony Ericsson: 4.3% (down ~4%)

Global smartphone manufacturers’ market share, Q3 2009:

• Nokia: 39.3% (down 3%)
• Research In Motion (RIM)(Blackberry): 20.8% (up 4.9%)
• Apple: 17.1% (delta not reported) (7.04 million units in Q3)
• HTC: 6.5% (delta not reported)
• Samsung: 3.2% (delta not reported)

Futures:

• An Intel backed 4G standard named WiMax (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is currently rolling out in limited markets in the U.S., including here in Austin, Texas (see photo). A competing standard known as LTE (Long Term Evolution) will begin rollout in 2010 to 2011. U.S. WiMax provider Clear states their speed is 6 Mb/sec (mega bits per second) downstream and 1 Mb/sec upstream on its 2.5 Ghz (gigahertz) network. European LTE 4G system provider TeliaSonera promises speeds of 20 to 80 Mb/sec on its 2.6 Ghz network. Actual LTE data rate will depend upon the frequency at which your local system operates. For instance, Verizon has committed to cover the entire U.S. market with LTE at 700 Mhz (megahertz), which will probably deliver lower data speeds than higher frequency band systems. LTE is the clear winner in this global standards battle, even though it will be later to market, as it has majority support among infrastructure and device manufacturers, and carrier networks.
• It wasn’t that long ago that we all got very excited about moving from a 10 Mb/sec hard wired network to the then-new, blazing 100 Mb/sec copper network. A global standard 20 to 80 Mb/sec. mobile network added to a two to five years increase in computing power at the handheld smartphone level adds up to some very interesting possibilities.
• The mobile development market will remain fragmented. As if the world needed it, Samsung recently announced it would build its future smartphones on its own, proprietary OS named bada. Consequently, the cross-platform development frameworks space (Rhomobile, PhoneGap, Appcelerator, etc.), which implies, if not promises, “build once, run everywhere,” will continue to exhibit rapid growth. Acquisition of the leading players may happen prior to IPO, with appropriate suitors being the hot question of the moment.
• In addition, mobile fragmentation is not just limited to the OS, it also includes the delivery of media, specifically video. In the long term, HTML 5 may handle video adequately all on its own. Prior to that, the pending release of an updated Adobe Flash player browser plugin will help it be fairly mobile ubiquitous. However, Flash will never reach the 96.71% market penetration it enjoys on the web on smartphones, if for no other reason simply because Apple won’t allow it on the current iPhone platform as a browser component, although they will allow standalone iPhone apps to display Flash based content. Consequently, video Content Delivery Networks (CDN) that handle all necessary scaling, formatting, presentation and delivery to all mobile platforms from a single segment of video media will remain viable for the near- to mid-term.
• The majority of the world’s mobile users are using 2G phones on 2G networks. The highest growth rates in mobile are at the high end with smartphones and at the low end with very low cost plans, such as $2 or less per month, especially in India. While most people concentrate on opportunities at the high end, the numbers on the low end (3.5 billion users) are staggering. It’s important to remember that even 2G phones can do text.

The Clear WiMax marketing balloon drifts over our neighborhood on local market launch day morning, 10 December, 2009.

Sources: The Register, Strand Consult, Gartner, Cnet, Wall Street Journal, Wired, AndroLib.com, 3G Americas, StatOwl.com. Gartner press release is here: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1224645