Travel is expensive - but people need to talk to each other face to face, more than most businesses realise. HP’s statistics for internal use of its Halo video conferencing system show that most of its users aren’t senior management saving a few dollars. Instead they’re the engineers running the production lines sharing tips and tricks with their colleagues half a world away. If you’ve found out how to reduce the defect rate on a certain machine, now all your colleagues get the same information. Video conferencing isn’t a tool for ending international travel - it’s a knowledge management tool that makes it easy for your staff to get to know each other, and to share information.

We can’t all afford $100,000 Halo installations. But we can afford a web cam, a free download of Skype, and a reasonably fast broadband connection. It may not give us Halo, but it’s a step along the road…

Yesterday Skype announced their high-quality video conferencing solution, working with the folk at Logitech to use the latest high resolution auto-focusing web cams. The demos at the launch were impressive enough - text on business cards and on magazine pages was readable, and faces were clear and easy to focus on - especially when blown up to a reasonable size. It’s a lot easier to talk to a full screen image than a tiny window, one of the lessons HP learnt with Halo. The images Skype sends may only be 640 x 480, but they’re smoothly rendered, and stream fast enough to avoid judder and artifacting.

There is one other requirement for Skype’s high quality video. You’ll need a dual core processor. There’s a lot of processing needed to deliver a smooth video stream in real time (as Barbie might say “Large scale matrix manipulations are hard”), and Skype’s tools have become one of the poster children for the multi-core world.

Partnering with Logitech makes sense,too. They’ve been building webcams for pretty much as long as there’ve been webcams (absorbing pioneer Connectix’s QuickCam business), and the latest batch of cameras are booth good looking and powerful. I keep a Quickcam Sphere on my desk, but fully intend to swap it out for one of the new high resolution cameras as soon as possible. After all, they’re now more powerful than my first digicam was…

Bring them all together, and video conferencing becomes everyone’s tool. Need to check that you’re buying the right part from that eBay seller? You’ll get to see it in detail, and check the instruction manual while you’re at it. Want to show off your child’s latest art work to Grandma? That’s easy enough too. Or perhaps you need to see how a business colleague has managed to solve a problem that’s been annoying you for weeks? Just call them up, and see what they did, and how.

Halo may have the guaranteed network and the special meeting rooms, but for that quick call or that instant meeting, the Skype/Logitech combination makes a lot of sense.

–Simon

Web applications are great for the user, because they don’t have to bother about installing or updating them on any PC they use, as long as they can remember the URL. Developers like not having to write an installer or logic to check for updates. But there are plenty of disadvantages; Web applications are rarely as powerful or performant as native applications. How can your PC possibly run a Java application as fast as the equivalent native application when it has to devote resources to running the Java environment itself too ? (And don’t get me started on how garbage collection always kicks in and slows the app down just when you’re in a hurry). Faster PCs, faster network connections and better implementations of Web platforms will help; and if you’re running Salesforce.com most of the work is being done on the Salesforce server, not your PC. With a Web application, the data lives on the service, which is good as long as you can get online and a right royal pain if you’re on a plane or in the middle of nowhere. Even Salesforce.com has an offline client…

All that means there’s huge potential for a way of turning Web applications into something more like familiar desktop applications, with entries in your Start menu rather than bookmarks in your browser. Adobe has been getting a lot of attention with AIR, which uses Web technologies like Flash and CSS to build hybrid desktop applications. Microsoft’s Silverlight is a development platform for the Web in version 1 and a way to build Web apps in real languages like Ruby, Python, VB and C# in v 1.1. And now Mozilla is joining in with Prism. According to the folks at Mozilla Labs “Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.”

Put it like that and it sounds useful; it sounds like a step towards hybrid applications. It sounds like cutting edge development and it’s been hailed as major innovation. And maybe some time it will be. The team talks about a future version that adds extra features like “support for offline data storage and access to 3D graphics hardware”. But what does it do today?
It takes the URL of the Web application and puts a shortcut in your Start menu that launches a new browser window, just without the browser navigation. It uses a cut-down version of Firefox so the window is running in a separate browser process with its own memory rather than adding to the chunk of memory Firefox is already using. And, er, that’s it.

It’s useful, but it’s not new and it’s not revolutionary. If a Web application is the only tab in any browser window you can minimise it to the task bar – like you used to before we had tabbed browsing. Although when Prism was still called WebRunner the idea of a separate window in a separate version of Firefox was about isolating extensions so that one site didn’t interfere with another…

Having an icon on the Start menu is one less step than opening a new browser window and clicking a bookmark, but I could do that by creating my own shortcut. And if you start Firefox or Internet Explorer from the Start menu instead of opening a new tab from an open browser window it starts as a separate process anyway. Add –k to the shortcut and IE opens in kiosk mode (if I was using OLE automation I’d use –embedding to suppress the toolbars and the rest of the browser UI); you can do the same thing for Firefox with its own switches. Microsoft has had tools to package a local Web site up as an application for years – but until we got online applications it wasn’t an interesting thing to do.

If you want to do something that really brings a Web app to the desktop you can use the rather nifty Bubble tool from http://www.3d3r.com/bubbles/ to wrap a URL up with an icon to show in the system tray, set it to load at Startup and include Grease Money JavaScript page handlers and custom shortcuts. You could build your own custom menu that lets you open the spam folder in Gmail or jump to your most commented photos in Flickr by right-clicking on the icon. Bubble turns notifications from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Google Calendar into balloon alerts in Windows, and it lets you drag photos onto your Flickr Bubble window and have them uploaded.

Bringing Web applications to the desktop and integrating them with the power of the desktop means a lot more than nailing them into their own browser frame. If you want your Gmail offline you’re going to have to use a desktop client or wait for Google to make it work with Google Gears – so if the next version of Prism adds offline support it will be a big step forward. But until it does something useful Prism is doing nothing  more than making pretty colours.
-Mary

Is bringing out a Vista update the same week as Leopard goes on sale (at last) a reminder that Vista is still there or a reflection of the fact that Apple gets more attention than Microsoft for similar features and a fraction of the number of users? Of course it doesn’t help that Microsoft had to update the update to stop it killing a few PCs with older USB chipsets, but extra battery life will be very welcome, especially on ultraportable devices that Vista tends to thrash rather hard.

Also out this week are Microsoft’s quarterly figures. All the numbers are good news for Microsoft because you can’t argue with a 27% increase in revenue that’s the fastest growth in any single quarter for the last seven years (especially when it’s also an increase in profits). It’s good news for Xbox (because of Halo) and for Windows in general (because of the strong growth in home PCs and notebooks). It’s good news for the work Craig Mundie has put in fighting piracy because there’s growth in the pirate strongholds of Russia and China.

And it’s good news for Vista as the sales figures continue on the same trend as previous reports (http://www.itpro.co.uk/features/113417/windows-vista-100-days-later.html); by September 31 it was up to 85 million copies compared to the 45 million copies XP sold in the first nine months. Looking back at 100 days and five weeks, sales are increasing - just as they did for XP.

So even without SP1 coming out Microsoft is well on track for the 90 million copies of Vista IDC predicted for the end of the year. According to Microsoft 80% of those Vista copies are still on new PCs rather than upgrades, although it’s seeing “double digit” growth in SA agreements covering Vista and the people who do go out and buy a boxed copy (more people are buying boxes of XP) get a premium edition.

That doesn’t mean the mass enterprise adoption Microsoft would love to see; you’re still not likely to see Vista on the average business PC.

Server and tools did well too, and the February launch of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server and Visual Studio should keep up the momentum. Dynamics had a slowdown; growth in billing went from the usual 21% to 18%. It’s not clear if that’s temporary or a sign that Salesforce.com and NetSuite and the rest are having an impact.

With the EU saga finally settled and the revenue juggernaut thundering along and a 2% stake in Facebook to give them something to do with the aQuantive acquisition (making money out of the ads), Microsoft ought to be looking good. So why is it that Leopard is going to look like a fat cat?
-Mary

Spam is a nuisance but you can run spam filters on your mail server, tell users to check the junk mail folder in Outlook from time to time, sigh over the bandwidth and disk space you’re wasting on spam and ignore it, right? Not quite.

Spam used to be a sign that there’s one born every minute. Someone somewhere is buying badly spelled blue pills and counterfeit software from spam mail; if no-one was buying there wouldn’t be any point. There are still people making money out of spam suckers - mostly the pump and dump stock messages that make people feel they’ve got an inside tip that will make them as much money as the private equity fat cats. The latest stock dump scam is sending out voice ads disguised as music tracks; instead of a song you get a fake news announcement for whatever worthless shares the spammer has just bought cheap and wants to sell at the inflated price you’ll push it up to. And of course phishing mail is a licence to print money - or at least move it from the gullible to the devious.

But an awful lot of spam is ticklers to see if your email address works and Trojans to infect your PC and turn it into a zombie. It used to be that America was the number one source of spam because a combination of Florida’s bankruptcy laws (you never lose your house) and New York mobsters meant you could make money from sending spam for people who really had something to sell. Now one in every three spam messages comes from a US computer because unprotected PCs in the US are sending the spam to each other in a bizarre zombie feeding frenzy. 

As far as the Internet is concerned, the US is a third world country; the definition of broadband sounds like ISDN on a bad day and the dominance of Qualcom means EVDO and 3G will carry on dividing the market and nibbling away at each other until WiMAX wins the war. It’s the same with spam; the other big offenders are South Korea, China and Hong Kong, Russia and Brazil making up the next 20% of spam. It’s not a question of high PC ownership meaning high spam either; those nice Canadians generate only 0.8% of all spam, because the government actually started doing something about it in 2004.

The UK generates a little over 2% of all the spam around, which is far better than the US, but couldn’t we manage to match Canada? Do your bit. Extend the anti-virus software you use on office systems to the home machines of your users. It will stop them bringing viruses in on USB sticks and make sure their home PCs don’t turn into zombie spammers. Just think; the bandwidth and disk space you save could be your own.

On an average day over a hundred spam messages make it through to my junk mail folder and two or three make it right into my inbox. The spam filters in Exchange catch hundreds more. How much space and time is spam costing you?
-Mary

I recently took a trip back home to Jersey. Early autumn is one of the best times to see the island - the weather is usually sunny and warm, and there aren’t too many people around.

Jersey’s bus service is about to launch one of the more innovative SMS services we’ve seen. Each bus stop on the island has been given a 4 digit number - which have been painted on each stop. Text the number to a short code run by one of the local mobile operators, and you’ll get back a message that tells you when the next bus is due to arrive.

It’s a good idea, and even better when you realise that narrow reads mean that are no bus shelters at most stops. If you want to get a bus in the rain, you can see when the next bus is due without getting soaked in one of the island’s many winter rainstorms.

There’s one big question though - how does the service now when the bus is due. Will the buses be fitted with GPS units, reporting their positions back to a central controller that then sends out ETAs based on real information, or will it just be a look-up to a timetable service that doesn’t know about roadworks, diversions or the rush hour? If it’s the later, then the service won’t be a success. It needs to be one that can help people trust public transport - something vitally important when dealing with bus services in rural parts of the island.

We all want more intelligent, flexible public transport. Tools like this (if implemented with the right back-end) could be a better way of delivering an effective rural bus network. Let’s hope that MyBus has made the right choices.

The only sound in the flat recently has been coughing as I’ve been slumped on the sofa battling with a Vile Cold and Simon has been away. One of the press releases that caught my befuddled attention between coughs was one about monitoring in a French nuclear power station based not on pressure, temperature or radiation but vibration and sound. It’s not safety monitoring as such, but it’s aimed at avoiding unplanned maintenance. It’s the difference between waiting for SMART monitoring telling you your hard drive is failing and noticing that the drive has started to sound like a hover mower; SMART monitors 30 attributes related to performance and reliability but sometimes your ears can tell you your server is in trouble before SMART does. It’s time we got the machine listening to itself.

Audio files are much smaller than video files. A high quality camera costs ten times as much a high quality microphone and interpreting video footage means analysing the entire image, but you can filter out known noises like air conditioning or the normal sound of machinery - Paris Smaragdis of Mitsubishi’s research lab has been working on how to use this for several years (http://www.merl.com/people/paris/projects.html). It’s easier to tell the difference between a phone ringing and a door squeaking than it is to tell whether someone is saying ‘four candles’ or ‘fork handles’ and even a mobile phone has enough processing power to recognise sounds like footsteps in an empty room . You can use that to tell the security camera where to point - or to tell the security guard which of fifty cameras have a picture worth checking out. You could tell which conference room is always full of people talking, which is nearly always empty and which gets used by people typing away getting some real work done - which helps you know if you need to plan for more conference rooms or give people real offices instead of cubicles.

Mitsubishi already has a PVR and DVD player that uses crowd noise to tell you which bit of the game you recorded is likely to have a goal - or something else worth watching. The Motion Smoothly 3 software on the FOMA D903i mobile phone picks out video highlights using the same techniques. The MPEG-7 standard includes sound indexing that can detect speech, singing, environmental noises, animal sounds, musical instruments and musical genres - imagine getting a playlist of audiobooks or relaxing music without having to tag everything by hand.
Smaragdis has just finished a project in Kentucky, using the microphones in cameras pointed at a dangerous intersection to listen for horns blaring, tires squealing, bumpers crunching and the typical sounds of an accident. The camera has a recording buffer of a few seconds and the audio analyser works fast enough that it can tell the camera to save that footage, turn on and catch the whole incident on tape - the emergency services know when there’s a problem and you don’t have hours or days of footage to check through when you want to find out why the intersection is so dangerous. The system can also detect sirens from an ambulance or fire engine and switch the traffic lights to let it through.

A friend in California put in a new home alarm system recently, complete with a function that call his mobile phone as well as setting off the alarm if it thinks it’s detected an intruder. The problem is - all you can hear over the phone is the alarm. Machine listening could filter that out and just play you the suspicious noises. It might even know the difference between me coughing on the sofa and a burglar coughing on the roof.
-Mary

Linux isn’t ready for the mainstream notebook but apparently it’s going to be the salvation of the mobile market. Even if you’re convinced by that, the question is - which Linux?

Intel is backing the Moblin initiative for an interface layer on Ubuntu and Red Flag - to my mind a good way to go because interface is key for mobile devices; compare the front ends on both the HTC Touch and Origami launcher for UMPCs which are perfectly designed for the thumb, and the shock of getting dumped into the standard, stylus or mouse proportioned OS underneath. 

Nokia has Maemo, which hasn’t got much of a foothold but does think about the touch interface. If you tap the same input box with your finger instead of the stylus you get a keyboard sized for your finger the usual stylus-sized keys and menus also scale up for fingers and down for the stylus. That means applications can automatically adjust to the way you’re using  the device without the developer having to code that up every time  - and it’s the applications need an appropriate UI as much as the OS navigation does.

Trolltech has its own platform as used by Motorola in the Ming. We could count Mac OS on iPhone as it’s a BSD at some remove. And now ARM is setting up the Linux Mobile Computing Platform based on Gnome Mobile and an as-yet unannounced distribution. Unless that’s one of the  ones listed above and Gnome Mobile works with the other interface layers, you know what you’ve got? YAMLP.

The ARM initiative is aimed at the traditional mobile phone folks, from Samsung to Marvell and Texas Instruments running an embedded system so you can run the same apps on lots of different phones, which Java phone game developers would welcome with open arms. Intel and Nokia are starting with Linux for what I think of as next-generation Web pads, which is what the iPhone really is but Intel is planning to push down into the phone space as well if it can get the power budget low enough. What makes a smartphone a computer rather than an appliance like a feature phone isn’t the operating system that it uses or the built-in features - it’s whether you can install the applications that you choose. That’s where the arguments about the iPhone really start; you can dig around and interrogate the platform and derive the API, and you can install applications - and Apple can send can update that turns any iPhone hacked to run those applications into a pretty paperweight until you ask for a new SIM and start again.

Windows based UMPCs are too big and too clunky and the batteries don’t last for long enough. But you can run all the applications you use on your standard PC. They may not look as good and we badly need an adaptive interface for Windows that deals with pen and finger as well as keyboard and mouse. And you absolutely need to remember that like any portable a UMPC isn’t connected all the time and probably has low bandwidth when it is. But it’s a PC with all the richness of the PC ecosystem. All these other platforms will have their share of applications - but if there aren’t enough applications to make Linux the dominant desktop platform, how does having this many variants of distribution and interface layer for mobile devices that are already a challenge to develop for make Linux the best idea for ultramobility?

– Mary

The news that Microsoft has decided to make the source code for the .NET Framework visible to developers debugging their applications has caused something of a storm in a blogcup.

Let’s deal with the two main comments first. Yes, it’s not open source (but then Java operated in just this way for a long, long time), and no, it’s not a trap for Microsoft to thump Mono with an intellectual property suit (ROTOR’s been available for a long time now, and it gives much more access to the .NET source than this move, seeing as it includes a version of the .NET virtual machine…).

So, all the controversy aside, what does this move actually mean?

To start with, it’s all about delivering better applications. Refactoring and optimising .NET code isn’t the easiest of tasks. Too often you find that the class you really need to work with is sealed – and your debugger can’t go any further. Is the bug in your code the result of something you’ve done, or is it a problem with Microsoft’s code? Could there have been another call you could have made that could have done it better?

Making debugging easier is a win-win for Microsoft. Yes, people can look at their code and suggest ways things could have been done better, but also developers can improve their applications and make their code run more effectively. Getting feedback will help improve .NET, and better applications will make the platform more attractive to developers. The ability to debug into closed classes is one that will make it easier to refactor code, and to make better use of the available functions – and making the code visible should reduce Microsoft’s support headaches. Just how do you help debug code that can’t be sent to you to check?

The initial tranche of code isn’t the whole .NET framework – the rest is due to follow – but it’s some of the most important elements:

Base Class Libraries (mscorlib.dll)
ASP.NET (System.Web.dll)
Windows Forms (System.Drawing.DLL & System. Windows.Forms.dll)
ADO.NET (System.Data.DLL)
XML (System.Xml.DLL)
WPF (System.Windows.DLL)

The more I learn about what’s coming in the next Visual Studio, the more I’m looking forward to the release. Microsoft is definitely learning from its competition, and delivering the tools and features that developers need.

–S

It’s Monday, we must be in North Carolina. We are, in fact, visiting SAS and this morning we had a fascinating conversation with Dr Jim Goodnight, the founder and CEO. Two things he said particularly struck. One is that many of the companies doing business intelligence are really just looking up details in a database and making it look pretty while SAS focuses on what he calls the ‘heavy lifting’ - true business analytics that model not just what your company is doing now but what your company is about to do. The other was that SAS could give a company a list of the customers they would lose in the next three months - and a report on whether they’re profitable customers you want to hold on to or time-wasting makeweights you’re happy to do without.

This afternoon we spent an hour on the phone to Virgin Atlantic all told, and for far too much of it I felt distinctly like a makeweight. Planning ahead for our next US trip, we wanted to book flights to CES in January and do it using all the miles we’ve accumulated this year. Not only will we want to see all the new gadgets, but McCarron Las Vegas is putting in the same RFID luggage tracking system used at Hong Kong airport - a much needed upgrade that might stop the luggage carousel grinding to a halt every ten minutes - and it will be interesting to see if that changes any other airport business processes.

Problem was, Virgin hadn’t credited the miles for some of our recent trips, leaving Simon 27 miles short on the total. we rang up; could they transfer miles between us? No. Could they credit the miles we were both missing? Tap, tap, tap; hold please. Mary’s flight was credited instantly and as it was all going to well we clicked the button to book her flight. But Simon’s flight, the one that actually needed the miles? Hold please. Hold some more please. And hold one more time: sorry, it’s not coming up on the system, did he actually take the flight? As it wouldn’t come through and the support team had gone home, why didn’t I phone the US office. Ring, ring; we explain again and emphasise that we’re in the middle of booking the flight online and don’t want to lose the booking. Hold please. First I was on hold so long that I got transferred to another agent; then I was on hold for half an hour, on and off, as they said they would check - hold please, no they couldn’t - hold please, I have a message, no I still can’t - hold please, I have another message - no, you have to send an email to do this.

In the end we gave up and bought enough miles to make up the difference, went back to the booking - and found the Virgin site had closed for the night. A Web site that closes for the night! Because you’ll never want to book your next flight while you’re still abroad, or if you’re a shift worker or just an insomniac. At this point I lost my temper and when I discovered that the main Virgin number was also closed phoned the Upper Class number and asked them to solve the problem.

If I’d had the same runaround from Virgin I’d had on the other three calls I’d have been off to the British Airways site even though they don’t fly to Las Vegas and don’t let you fly in different classes on each leg of the ticket. I might even have remembered that we had planned to try out MAXjet who can be as little as twice the cost of a Miles flight on Virgin for a seat that reclines to 160 degrees , although you have to get out to Stansted. But I got an extremely helpful agent who didn’t quibble or ask if I was accredited to phone the premium number or say I should try to book online, whizzed through the booking, sorted us out seats together - and charged us less for Simon’s ticket counting the fuel surcharge and taxes converted out of dollars than I’d paid on the Web site.

I don’t know whether to wish that Virgin was using SAS instead of the class of Flying Club card you have to decide who gets helpful service on the assumption that I fly enough to be a valued customer - or be glad that they weren’t because that way I couldn’t get out of being classified as unwanted. I do wish they’d either get with the 24-hour society and flexible working or just credit us the miles we’ve earned to start with. My time is valuable - but I’ve also just cost them nearly an hour of not helping any other customers either. An intelligent business wouldn’t be wasting that money.