Beginning this week, you can think of Baltimore as one big hotspot. The computing potential for a city that’s completely wirelessly connected is huge. No matter where you are, you are connected. Simply put, it is the next generation of mobile broadband access.

Tags: Baltimore, Intel, Somewhat Frank, Sprint, WiMax, Xohm, Frank Gruber

Broadcast International’s President and CEO Rod Tiede gives a high-level overview of the IPTV market and the opportunity for broadcaster and cable operators, satellite, and even mobile and wireless providers. Broadcast International and its CodecSys compression technology leverages the limited bandwidth typical of the DSL networks many consumers access, and makes it possible to send up to four times the video channels over the same connection, with no loss in video quality.

Tags: Brad Baldwin, Broadcast International, CodecSys, compresssion, IPTV, RockyMountainVoices, Rod Tiede, video

Hilde Eugelink is communication coordinator with the International Institute for Communication and Development and John Davies is vice president of Intel’s sales and marketing group and the general manager of Intel’s World Ahead initiative.

Tags: Broadband connectivity, economic development, ICTs, Abdul Waheed Kahn, UNESCO, Intel, Hilde Eugelink, Hilde Eugelink, John Davies, World Ahead

Tags: Broadband access, developing world, Third Global Knowledge Conference, the next billion, Broadband services, Millenium Development Goals, economic development, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, connectivity

I caught up with Ken Pawlak, Director, Mobile Operator PCs, Unlimited Potential Group of Microsoft at the GSMA Asia Mobile Congress in Macau. In Part-1 of the interview Ken talks about mobile broadband PCs and laptops and shares the market research findings for these PCs. Don’t go out looking for these PCs or laptops since they will be out sometime early next year.

Tags: GSM, HSPA, Unlimited Potential Group, Microsoft

More about the Connect Africa effort.

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More info from Intel’s World Ahead

Tags: Intel, Craig Barrett, Connect Africa Summit, Kigali, Rwanda, Nigeria, Abuja, Jason Lopez, Connect Africa, IntelWorldAhead

More about the Connect Africa effort

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More info from Intel’s World Ahead

Photo by Zouzou Wizman, via Flickr/Creative Commons

Tags: Intel, Craig Barrett, International Telecommunication Union, Information and Communication Technology, ICT infrastructure, Global Alliance for ICT and Development, UN GAID, Jason Lopez, Lagos, Nigeria, digital divide, Connect Africa Summit, Connect Africa, IntelWorldAhead

Dr. Hamadoun Touré is secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union. His call for what he refers to as a “Marshall Plan for ICT infrastructure development in Africa,” has been heard by the United Nations, and particularly by Intel Chairman Craig Barrett who, leading the UN’s Global Alliance for ICT and Development, or UN GAID, is working to bring the leading ICT companies in Silicon Valley and around the world to the challenges in Africa.

The United Nations’s Millennium Development Goals are driving innovation around the world, as the challenge of reducing global poverty by half by 2015 looms. The Connect Africa effort brings together private enterprise and non-governmental organizations for a two-day summit in Kigali, Rwanda, beginning on October 29, hosted by Rwanda President Paul Kagame and John Kufour, president of Ghana and chairman of the African Union.

Intel’s World Ahead Program, established in May 2006, has already seen the chip maker pledge more than $1 billion over five years to bridge the digital divide and bring full access to technology to the developing world.

Related Stories: IntelWorldAhead

More info from Intel’s World Ahead

Some photos in video courtesy of: Paula Rey, ottmarliebert.com, Steve Evans, David Dennis, Lars Plougmann, BigBlonde, Dylan Walters, Paul IJsendoorn, Angela Sevin, Manuel Ebert, Andy Young, Nir Nussbaum, LindsayStark, Caroll Mitchell, futureatlas.com, Eric Lin, WRI Staff, Stig Nygaard, MadBursts, abaporu, and Miles Rausch of www.newsbleep.com

via Flickr/Creative Commons License

Tags: Broadband, connectivity, Wi-Fi, accessibility, Intel, United Nations, International Telecommunication Union, Connect Africa Summit, Information and Communication Technology, ICT infrastructure, mobile access technologies, Hamadoun Touré, Craig Barrett, UN GAID, Silicon Valley, Millennium Development Goals, Connect Africa, Kigali, Paul Kagame, John Kufour, World Ahead Program, digital divide, IntelWorldAhead

Tags: Verizon Business

Alianza offers the first hosted, fully-integrated IP-based platform for delivering Unified Communications Applications via software as a service (SaaS)s. Value-added applications include VoIP, hosted PBX, IVR, integrated messaging, and conferencing. With business-friendly solutions including a rich help-desk and integrated billing systems, partners can lean on Alianza to drive a new revenue stream from existing customers. Services providers can access Alianza’s partner resources to quickly review the business benefits and ROI models of partner vs. build.

Scott Bell, chief technical office at Alianza, introduces Brad Baldwin to the value proposition and opportunity offered to service partners.

Tags: Scott Bell

In other news, Intel will launch Santa Rosa Refresh in January 2008. It’s an update to Intel Centrino processor technology that includes the next-gen 45nm high-k mobile processor (codenamed Penryn).

Perlmutter also showed the next generation Montevina processor technology that is set to roll out in mid-2008, which includes the Penryn mobile processor and the next-generation chipset with DDR3 memory support. This is notable for being Intel’s first Centrino processor for notebooks to offer the option of integrated Wi-Fi, WiMAX wireless technologies for greater wireless broadband access.

Anand Chandrasekher, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Ultra Mobility Group, discussed the personal mobile Internet, and Intel’s “silicon roadmap” that will deliver radical reductions in power requirements and package sizes. He also announced a range of leading industry players working with Intel to establish the MID and ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) categories. In a talk entitled, “Unleashing the Internet Experience,” he also covered the upcoming Intel Menlow platform (including a new processor, codenamed Silverthorne - lots of detail can be found on John Spooner’s blog), and the Intel “Moorestown” platform — System on Chip plus a Communications Hub.

The talk also amounted to a check-in after last April’s announcement at IDF Beijing of the MID Innovation alliance with Asus, BenQ, Compal, Elektrobit, HTC, Inventec and Quanta. Chandrasekher was able to show working prototypes from many of the partner companies, emphasizing the significant progress that’s been made over the past six months.

Also announced were strategic collaborations for MID and UMPC efforts — a step forward for Intel’s “Full Internet in Your Pocket” vision.

And the keynote included what Intel billed as the “world’s first demonstration of Adobe AIR Application on Intel Menlow-based platform” — designed to extend the reach of rich Internet applications.

Go Mobile - Click Here for MIDs and UMPCs

Tags: David (Dadi) Perlmutter, Anand Chandrasekher, Fall IDF, Dadi, mobile computing, WiMAX, networking connectivity, Santa Rosa Refresh, 45nm, mobile processor, Penryn, Montevina processor, Anand Chandrasekher, Ultra Mobility, ultra-mobile PC, UMPC, Intel Menlow, Silverthorne, Moorestown, System on Chip, MID Innovation, Full Internet in Your Pocket

Tags: webcasting, CU-SeeMe, webcams, Ustream.tv, John Ham

This podcast was commissioned by Success Magazine.

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Tags: Mobile, Anita Campbell, Small Business Trends, Jeff Zbar, Pamela Baker, Success Magazine

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More info from Intel’s World Ahead

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Tags: Intel, Craig Barrett, United Nations, IntelWorldAhead

The podcast was made possible by Intel.

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Tags: United Nations, Craig Barret, Intel, Global Alliance for ICT and Development, Sarbuland Khan, IntelWorldAhead

Commissioned by Intel.

Related Stories: IntelWorldAhead

Photo used under Creative Commons license

Transcript:

Host: Jason Lopez – PodTech
Guest: Sarbuland Khan – the UN
Guest: Craig Barrett – INTEL

Jason Lopez – PodTech
I’m Jason Lopez for PodTech.net. The United Nations faces some of its biggest challenges yet with global issues like World Hunger, Healthcare, Education, and Economic Development in third world regions. The UN has reached out to Silicon Valley for help with the solutions.

Sarbuland Khan – the UN
There are eight goals. Among them is to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Reduce infant mortality and improve Maternal Healthcare, improve the Environment, improve Gender Status, and Health and Education, Universal Primary Healthcare, Universal Primary Education. Now, these are very ambitious goals.

Jason Lopez – PodTech
That’s Sarbuland Khan, Executive Coordinator for The Global Alliance for ICT Development under the United Nations.

Sarbuland Khan – the UN
The last fifty or sixty years of development has shown that the present model of development does not deliver on large scale. We have achieved success at small scale level but to scale it up and achieve universal approaches and solutions is very difficult.

Craig Barrett – INTEL
We tried to make it very clear at the first meeting we had that; this is not a debating society not a talking society.

Jason Lopez – PodTech
Craig Barrett is Chairman of the chipmaker Intel and was appointed to the Chairman of The Global Alliance for ICT Development. The alliance is a Public–Private Partnership between IT companies and the UN. Later this month, Barrett hosts representatives of the UN and IT partner companies in a meeting to identify ways that Information Technology can help solve some of the world’s most significant problems. Barrett says The Global Alliance has already started to lay the groundwork in few areas.

Craig Barrett – INTEL
One is Broadband for Africa, one is wiring up digital services, one is a — kind of a volunteer core of IT specialists to go around the world to help implement these things. Another potential area is IT and Communication Technology for the disabled or the handicapped. But, we are not trying to solve World Hunger, we’re not trying to do everything for everybody, and we have made it very clear that it’s not a debating society, it’s an action oriented group. If we don’t get action, we don’t get results and I think everyone will get tired very quickly and go away. My job is to make sure that we don’t talk a lot, but we do a lot. The technology we bring to the game could not be more important and it’s a kind of the cream has risen to the top and we are involved in this very high level, very important, very basic activity. We just happened to be at the right place at the right time, in terms of what the world needs and what governments around the world want from its citizens.

Jason Lopez – PodTech
It may come as a surprise that information technology is revolutionizing among other things the way modern hospitals operate. That kind of expertise could have a major impact on merely delivering healthcare in third world regions. For podtech.net I’m Jason Lopez.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Intel, United Nations, Silicon Valley, Craig Barrett, The Global Alliance for ICT and Development, Jason Lopez, IntelWorldAhead

Transcript:

Host: Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Guest: Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
Guest: Andy Randall - MetaSwitch

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
This is PodTech.net. Gary Kim is Editor-in-Chief of IT Business and Andy Randall, VP of Marketing at MetaSwitch, join PodTech.net in conversation with Andy Randall and Gary Kim at a breakfast panel sponsored by MetaSwitch at the World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida.

What we are going to focus this discussion around is what it means to be a service provider in the current climate for CLECs?

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I think it’s a really interesting time for service providers that you see the rise of Google, YouTube, all of these Internet based applications and service providers are really juggling within this to try and work out what is it that they are actually providing. Is the application that they are providing transport access to the Internet at large or can they really move up the value chain in terms of services? I think for lot of carriers they are finding it struggle to actually work out where they are on that ladder and even though they want to move up, it is a very different mindset and it becomes a different kind of challenge for them to build, build the applications and it’s all about how fast they can move. I think that’s the large part of it. Carrier tends to think in terms of years and Google thinks in terms of days or weeks. What do you think Gary?

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
Another way to explain what Andy just said is that something really good or something really bad could happen to the entire global telecom industry, which is about a trillion dollars a year, in annual revenue. So, the really good thing would be that we succeed in creating applications that are like voice on your mobile phone or voice on your PBX at the office, or voice at your home phone, you get paid for providing that application. The really bad thing that could happen is we windup being just providers at the pipes that allow those things to be created. Those things get created by other parties that are not affiliated with you a business sense and you don’t capture much of the revenue from it. So, it’s a huge challenge, it faces all service providers not just the CLECs and it’s an issue we’re going to be facing for the rest of our professional career, that’s very clear.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
One of the things that came up in panel discussion had to do with differentiation or convergence between services for home use, mobile use and enterprise use. What are the challenges for service providers with regard to this kind of convergence?

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I think those are distinct areas of applications right now. I think the big difference we are seeing at the movement is in terms of video applications. The residential subscribers — the activity that’s happening there is all about video on demands, IPTV and the Internet based video sites. You’re seeing the content creators putting their shows up on the Websites for download. Now, this is completely disintermediating the whole distribution setup is being put in place over the last 75 years. That’s the huge shift in terms of the residential space. Different kind of dynamics happening in the business space, that where that overlap, this happening and this came up in the panel discussion and I think this is really important. I don’t think people are paying enough attention to this is that, the home workers and home office and the mobility of the worker to go beyond their cubicle to mobile space and into there home. I think the service providers that can really capture this dynamic both addressing all of those residential requirements and tie that back into the office environment, that for me could be a killer app, for any kind of service provider.

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
One of the great inversions we might be seeing and I could be quite wrong about this, is that traditionally the really interesting things human beings can do with communications, start in the business sector, get use there, people get familiar with it and then start they using them at home, fax machines, best example then. What we have seen I think in the last couple of decades though is that the fax machine was about the last technology that actually originated in the office, so much brought home, I think everything else one can make an argument.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Or email, well email.

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
Sure, it starts in the home and then at some point so many people are using it the enterprise has to respond. I would argue to a certain extent broadband access itself, email, instant messaging, blogs, wiki’s, the use of Internet – open internet right, all of that was created by demand of users that found these things useful and then now the IT departments of the enterprises have to respond and that’s a pretty big shift. I think all of this in that the service provider community need to spend more time looking at how consumers use technologies because those things are going to wind up in our offices, there’s no question about that.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
And this is kind of where managed services comes in, especially maybe for small to mid size business, they don’t have the in-house expertise in their IT departments, nor perhaps the person power to deal with the IT demand of this rapidly changing environment.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
I was at the trade show the yesterday I was just talking to some customers who — I am talking to how they handle this kind of situation of particularly the kind of things David was talking about with quality of service, but not just in terms of the last mile to the enterprise, but actually going and replacing their network infrastructure, managing the local area network remotely over that wide area network and that’s I think even see more of that where service providers, point to demarkation of the service providers changing from where the T1 goes into the office building, right down to the desktop and they are taking on more of the management if it uses desktop of the network infrastructure and the entire IT applications of the small — particularly small business obviously at a point.

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
One of the ways to illustrate what Andy is saying I think is that just as people customizes their cell phones by ringtones, we maybe moving towards world and hopefully we are, where end users can actually create their own custom applications, that maybe actually useable just by them personally at the office and it could be that Tom in the cubical next to me doesn’t want to do this, he may create entirely different applications and that’s just a fundamental shift in a way that we have always operated. Always before it’s been — we service providers will decide what you need, package it up, create it and sell it to you and now we maybe opening up our networks a little bit more and with that allows people to create the things that they decide they want without us having to intervene in the middle of it, which is a certainly great thing.

Andy Randall - MetaSwitch
This is the most profound time of challenge that I have ever discovered in all my years, being in the business and it’s a time of great opportunity, not just great risk, I mean both of them are present to you, but both of them are addressed.

Gary Kim - IT Business Wire
I think it’s all about carriers realizing that business model is changing. We could not to see a change in technologies, but also change in people are getting the services from based upon which of the carriers that are embracing those can build these today.

Catherine Girardeau - PodTech
Andy Randall of MetaSwitch and Gary Kim of IT Business, thank you so much for joining me on PodTech.net.

Gary Kim is Editor-in-Chief of IT Business and Andy Randall, VP of Marketing at MetaSwitch, at the World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida, this is PodTech.net.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Gary Kim, Andy Randall, MetaSwitch, CLECs

Transcript:
Host: Jim Leach - PodTech
Guest: Nicholas Carr

Jim Leach - PodTech
Welcome to this edition of Thought Leaders, where we bring you candid conversations with the people whose research and writings are guiding the buyers and suppliers of Information Technology. I’m Jim Leach. Today, we’re delighted to welcome Nicholas Carr, acclaimed business technology writer and strategist. His writings include the article, ‘IT Doesn’t Matter’, published in the Harvard Business Review, the follow up book, ‘Does IT Matter?’, and his most recent paper called ‘The End of Corporate Computing’, published in the MIT Sloan Management Review. Thanks for being here Nick.

Nicholas Carr
Sure.

Jim Leach - PodTech
I guess it’s possible that someone involved in Corporate Computing has been on a remote island for the last three years and has not heard about your ideas regarding Information Technology and Competitive Advantage. Could you summarize for us your thesis?

Nicholas Carr
Sure. The basic thesis is that Information Technology is maturing like other technologies have in the past, and as it matures it becomes more commonplace, it becomes cheaper, more accessible, companies learn how to use it and share best practices. All of that tends to diminish its ability to set one company apart from other companies. So it neutralizes its ability to provide Competitive Advantage. It’s still essential, you can’t operate without it, but it’s harder and harder to get and sustain an advantage. Therefore, what I conclude is that companies need to shift the way they approach IT, in their investment in it, to looking at it more like a shared infrastructure, that you want to operate as efficiently as possible, but don’t think you’re going to innovate your way to a Competitive Advantage.

Jim Leach - PodTech
I guess the good news is that your ideas have encouraged a healthy dialogue between IT people and business leaders. I guess the bad news is sometimes that dialogue can get quite emotional. I’d imagine you’ve heard just about every kind of criticism there can be for your ideas. Can you tell us what some of the good ones are and how you’d respond?

Nicholas Carr
Most of the media criticism came more from the IT vendor world than from the user world. There have been interesting commentaries from both sides. I think there are two criticisms that I think are particularly interesting. One is that everything I say doesn’t apply to IT, because IT is so flexible and because it consists of software that you can program to do different things. So it’s very different from railroads, for instance, or the telephone network. I think that’s true to the extent that it accurately describes the flexibility of IT, but I think IT as its used by business is still subject to the same competitive and economic and technological forces that any other business resource is subject to, in that overtime IT behaves in the same way. It becomes harder and harder to get advantage.

The other criticism is that there are exceptions to my rule. I think that’s absolutely true and very important to recognize that there are some ways that some companies can apply IT, that they do get a Competitive Advantage, and really when you look at those, what you see is they tend to be very narrow, very specialized applications of IT, and very tightly tied to their own business processes. So, if you do something different from your competitors and can use IT in a way to make those things even more distinctive, then you can still get a Competitive Advantage, but it tends to be very, very, as I said, narrow, specialized things. The vast majority of your IT spending probably is not strategic.

Jim Leach - PodTech
In your most recent paper, ‘The End of Corporate Computing’, you suggest that IT is shifting from being an asset that companies own, to being a service that they purchase. Can you walk us through that idea?

Nicholas Carr
After writing ‘Does IT Matter?’, I started to think about, okay, given the fact that so much of IT is now infrastructural, that everybody has to buy it and use it, but they use it in very similar ways, what does that mean for the way its applied to companies? I think what we’re seeing is that it makes a lot of sense to begin to centralize and consolidate IT assets in utilities and provide those basic IT capabilities as services that many different companies can share.

What you get through that is you get much more efficient use of your assets, rather than every company having to go out and buy and maintain its own data center and all its own applications. You can consolidate all that, get it much more cheaply, much more efficiently, but also much more flexibly because you’re not locked in to whatever you happened to buy at any given moment.

Jim Leach - PodTech
That idea sounds compelling. Do you think it’s for real?

Nicholas Carr
Oh I do, I think one of the main reason’s its for real is that now we have the distribution capacity, the network, what was the electric grid before and its today the Internet. Particularly, the broadband Internet with all the fiber optic cable that’s been laid, that gives you the transport mechanism to supply lots of, even very sophisticated IT capabilities from a distance, from a centralized utility. I think we’re seeing companies moving that way, both on the hardware side and increasingly on the software side as well.

Jim Leach - PodTech
So let’s move now from the theoretical to the practical. If indeed IT does lend itself to commoditization, do you have any suggestions for the IT professional out there for how they can maximize the value they deliver to their business, their organization?

Nicholas Carr
I think the first thing you have to do is take a very skeptical look at your own IT operation and say, “Is this stuff that we’re investing in and innovating in, is it providing us a competitive advantage or is it something that all our competitors are doing either now or will soon do?” If its in the latter category, and I think most IT is now, I think you should look for how you can capitalize on commoditization and on the utility model by consolidating your assets, by standardizing them and by beginning to prune them. To move the assets out of your own control and your own ownership over to utility suppliers and begin to move to the model that says IT shouldn’t be an asset that you own, but should be a service that you can buy for a monthly fee, in essence.

Jim Leach - PodTech
Well, recently you’ve been writing about innovation. I was reading on your Blog about the conservative innovator and the prudent innovator. Innovation seems to be the next big buzzword in business today, can you tell us a little bit about your thoughts regarding innovation?

Nicholas Carr
Sure. First of all, innovation is absolutely critical to the vast majority of companies to gain a competitive advantage. The danger is that companies begin to see innovation as an end in itself and start to think we should innovate everywhere and every aspect of our business should be an innovator, and I think that’s a mistake. I think the prudent innovator looks at those particular areas where a competitive advantage might be gained and focuses their innovation in those particular areas, because the problem with innovation is that it tends to be expensive and risky. So to innovate everywhere is just a recipe for wasting a lot of money, but if you can target those few areas where you can gain an advantage, then it can pay off in space.

Jim Leach - PodTech
It’s been great spending time with you today, Nick. We really appreciate it. As a thought leader, your ideas are shaping business strategies, can you give us a little insight into what you see is the next big thing, what are you working on now?

Nicholas Carr
Well, I’m working on another book that will go into this utility model, and what it means when we start having the Internet as kind of the universal grid for computing and software capabilities. So, what I’m going to try to do is look at it, what it means, not only in business, in terms of utility suppliers there, but in terms of companies like Google, which are in many ways utilities now, that use the Internet to provide very sophisticated services. I think as this plays out, we’re going to see it have all sorts of economic and social effects, and my hope is to probe some of those in my next book.

Jim Leach - PodTech
Well, our thanks again to Nicholas Carr, a business strategist and writer, and thanks to you for joining us for this edition of Thought Leaders.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Thought Leaders, SAVVIS, Nicholas Carr

Tags: Larry Gerbrandt, Nielsen Analytics, John F. Ince, digital media, broadband, mobile devices

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