Alec Saunders SquawkBox

At the Ottawa Barcamp last month the Ottawa Tech Wiki announced that they were going to have a usergroup meeting.  Well, it's happening.

 The 1^st user group meeting for the Ottawa Teck Wiki will be held: Thursday, April 26, 2007, Time: 5:30pm to 7:30pm Room 4359 Mackenzie Building, Carleton University. If you are an individual interested in helping to define the Ottawa Tech Wiki please attend the first user group meeting.  Please register here. Free Pizza will be served, and they need to know how much to order.

I'm jetting out of here tomorrow to the Gartner Symposium, invited to speak as one of their "cool vendors".  Here's what Gartner had to say about why they picked us:

Enterprise users aren't lacking in ways to communicate — with multiple phones, e-mail systems and messaging platforms, users spend too much time managing their communications systems. Presence is a solution to this problem, but managing presence is a manual process prone to error. iotum automates presence management, resulting in more accurate and easy-to-use communications systems.

What Gartner is keying off ties back to our concept of New Presence.  Except for the rare individuals who want to drink from the presence firehose — consuming everything from location to mood to status (can you say Twitter) — presence needs to be mediated to be useful.  Our ability to automate presence management is based on two elements: context and relationship.  We gather all the raw presence information from where it's being created, massage it, and present it to the requester, filtered based on the relationship the user has with the requester.  With Talk-Now it's possible to be seen as unavailable to some people, available to others, and busy but interruptable to still others, all depending on the relationship you have with the user.

And in my opinion, and Gartner's too, that's pretty cool.

RIM has been slowly expanding its footprint beyond BlackBerry devices.  The company seems to have concluded that its future is in software, and the hosted services that are attached to that software.  BlackBerry Connect is software, which exists today, and allows access to BlackBerry services via a Nokia E-series phone, such as the E-61/62.  News.com reports this morning that RIM will also provide a software suite for Windows Mobile devices later this year.  Ovum provides more detail, including that the BlackBerry suite will run as an application on Windows Mobile devices, and that it provide a "more or less complete" set of APIs which will allow enterprise applications developed for BlackBerry to run on Windows Mobile.

An interesting strategy seems to be developing.  By moving the BlackBerry suite lock stock and barrel onto the competitions devices, RIM may expand the distribution footprint of the BlackBerry software dramatically. The risk, however, is that customers may simply view this as a stepping stone in a migration from BlackBerry to another platform.  What are they really playing for?  Control of the handset, domination of the mobile email market, perhaps both?

UPDATE: more details in RIM's Press Release.  And BlackBerry lovers will get a kick out of CrunchGear's reaction: "Basically, it means your T-Mobile Dash, HTC Libra, and Motorola Q won’t suck as much anymore."

It looks as if FON has hit the jackpot with a distribution deal with Time Warner. Time Warner will let its home broadband users turn their connections into WiFi hotspots.  They hope to provide cost effective WiFi hotspots for consumers who just want to check email, or do a little casual surfing.

FON USA CEO Joanna Rees has been widely quoted as saying that they're going to take a shot at the T-Mobile hotspot service, but it seems unlikely to me.  Business users, especially travellers, use these hotspots in airports and at coffee shops where (a) the franchise is already locked up by T-Mobile and (b) there aren't any residential broadband users waiting to donate their bandwidth.

Jeff Pulver has weighed in on the Vonage / Verizon dispute, asserting that FWD had an implementation that pre-dated the Verizon patent by two years.  Moreover, he also states that it was publicly disclosed in 1996 in a book he published, two months before the Verizon patent was filed.

I could have applied for a patent on the name translation function in October 1995, but I viewed the not inconsequential cost of the FWD project as a contribution to the public domain. I even published a book "The Internet Telephone Toolkit" with a detailed description of FWD written in January 1996, two months before Eric Voit filed the patent application for Verizon. Nothing in the description section of Verizon's patent would surprise members of the IPhone email discussion list I managed, yet the prior art disclosure does not reference FWD or the IPhone mailing list.

The claims that the court found were violated were

15. A method comprising: 

receiving a name translation request at a server coupled to a public packet data network;

executing a conditional analysis in response to the name translation request;

if the conditional analysis produces a first result, translating a name included in the name translation request into a first destination address;

if the conditional analysis produces a second result, translating the name included in the name translation request into a second destination address; and transmitting a response message containing the first or the second destination address to a calling device for use in establishing communication at least partially through the public packet data network.

20. A method as in claim 15; wherein:

the first and second destination address includes a numeric Internet Protocol address; and the second destination address further includes information relating to call routing via a public switched telephone network.

It's hard to understand how the fate of the VOIP industry can hang on a simple if-then-else statement.