Broadvoice VoIP Underwhelms
Hmm... I'm a little bit ticked off at my VoIP provider today.
Things just randomly stopped working. And of course there's no one at the "24 hour" support center to answer email or phone queries.
Their guarantee is a 30-day money back affair, but I feel as if I've been strung along with acceptable service for 30 days, then dumped into a no-refund pit.
And... it seems that
the better business bureau considers them under-performers as well.
I didn't lose a lot of money, but hell, Skype-In / Skype-Out seems like a better deal than ever after dealing with these bozos.
Their prices are pretty low, but their service level is lower.
Do yourself a favor and stay away from these guys.
Tags:
broadvoice,
VoIPupdate 5/28/2006I was just about to cancel my BroadVoice service when one of their service reps convinced me to give them a second try. I did, and it's a month later and I'm experiencing the same problems with my BroadVoice account. More info at
BroadVoice Class Action Suit?.
Build your own mobile phone
i hate my phone
I admit it. I hate my mobile phone. It's a "Grade A" piece of junk. It's the worst phone in the world, save for all the other phones I've seen. Last year I carried a Sony-Ericsson T610 with integrated Bluetooth support, the ability to sync address books and calendars with my Macintosh, and a digital camera that is only "mostly" junk. I'm about to move back to my trusty Nokia 5195 whose most advanced feature, as far as I can tell, is the ability to choose between fifteen preset monophonic ring-tones. No Bluetooth. No Camera. No WAP. The phone rings, I answer it. When I want to dial out, I key in the number and hit the big button.
It's not that I don't like the new devices. They are engineering masterpieces. Consider that your typical phone now has a screen resolution, computing horse-power and memory footprint that would rival early Macintoshes; all in a few ounces, run on battery power and (mostly) costing less than a hundred quid. But for all their hardware beauty, we've yet to find a user interface or software build that is satisfying.
users don't know how to use these technological marvels
In a recent phone conversation with a friend, I needed a phone number of a mutual acquaintance. My friend had the number in his mobile phone, but it took several minutes for me to convince him that he could review numbers stored there without hanging up. The sad part of this is that upon discussing the incident with friends who are responsible for the software in some phones, they laughed at what they viewed as "stupid user behavior." Tsk. tsk. If your phone software is so good, why do most of your customers persist in erroneous beliefs about it's function?
innovation isn't coming from the big corporations
Chris Heathcote is a user experience manager at Nokia. In a posting last year,
On Mobile Handset Usability and Design, he touches on the fact that some people don't like certain aspects of their phones. But his solution is to push people to buy two (or three or four) different phones to be used simultaneously. I can understand that someone might want a simple phone just for talking (like my Nokia 5195) and a phone with a large screen if they want to have mobile email or a phone with a large hard drive and quality sound hardware if they want to use their phones like iPods.
But I fear the response from the carriers will simply be to offer two or three different form factors with the same, broken software on each. What motivation do they have to change? The vast majority of their customers are not "power users," and the prevailing thinking seems to be that selling content is the new royal road to riches for network operators.
For the operators, the height of software design is something that's just good enough to prevent a Naomi Campbell style attack from disgruntled users that plays videos, custom ring tones and an MP3 or two. The carriers see this as a great way to make money, and for the most part I don't begrudge them. As long as their video download services don't get in the way of me making phone calls, I'll be happy.
innovation is coming from the customer base
There are a couple of very good books about "User Innovation" by
Eric von Hippel. von Hippel is a MIT professor at the
Sloan School of Management, and he's got an interesting idea:
innovation doesn't come from big companies; it comes from their customers. In his books
The Sources of Innovation and
Democratizing Innovation, von Hippel details how communities of innovators bend, mutilate and re-purpose high-tech products until they solve a user problem.
"roll your own" mobile phone
After reading von Hippel's books, I'm not surprised to discover that there is a small (but growing) community of people out there building their own phones. An article running in
C|Net last year introduced
Surj Patel , Deva Seethram, and
Casey Halverson, who are snapping together their own phone hardware from
Gumstix modules; little tiny boards built for tinkerers.
Surj and his partner
Deva Seetharam have been patiently blogging their progress. And they're starting to garner a fair amount of interest. Earlier this year, they spoke at O'Reilly's
Emerging Telephony Conference, apparently to a receptive crowd. And other "do it yourselfers" are starting to take note as well. While Halverson, Patel and Seethram are concentrating on computing hardware and software, other phone components are being handled by the net community. Earlier this year a post appeared on Surj's website from Gregor,
offering to help out with prototyping of handset thermoplastics.
And there's also
Harald Welte's project page. Harald is simply trying to get stock mobile phone hardware to behave the way he wants (and Harald's idea of how a phone should behave includes hacking the user interface for Motorola's line of Linux based mobile phones.)
the mobile phone homebrew club
But I'm not sure I'm ready to tackle porting any of the modern VoIP clients to a 186x240 pixel screen. Nor do I think it's going to be easy to squeeze Firefox into a typical mobile device. But that's okay... I suspect that by the end of the year there will be several "Homebrew Mobile Hacker Clubs." In the spirit of the
Homebrew Computer Club from the mid 1970's, groups like this could generate something resembling true innovation in the mobile handset market space. In "Democratizing Innovation" von Hipple points out nearly a half of "user innovators" called on at least three to five people to help them with their designs.
Every month there's a new guess as to who will ship the first phone with "such and such" a feature. My guess is once we see a couple homebrew mobile phone clubs form, we'll no longer expect innovation from the corporate giants.
By the end of the year I suspect we'll see one or two companies with hacker-friendly mobile phone kits. In two years I predict we'll see a "Maker" MVNO.
Tags:
mvno,
VoIP,
Innovation,
Wireless,
Mobile Content,
Mobile Phone
MacOS X on Dell PCs?
Several weeks ago my friend and co-blogger Matt Hamrick sent out the following email in which he speculated that Apple might be able to use Vista's delay as a strategic opening to start licensing OS X for commodity PCs. Dell, HP, Compaq and Gateway could use OS X as a "new" operating system to draw holiday shoppers to purchase their wares. Here's the email:
On Mar 25, 2006, at 10:48 PM, Matthew S. Hamrick wrote:
Hey Guys...
So right now in my studies we're talking about business risk and finance. Specifically, how risk drives expected and required rates of return. I've been telling people my take on the software business: you've got market risk, schedule risk, quality risk and risk that you're customer's or partners will implode. In the course of the discussions I mentioned that many people in the mobile phone development community like Linux for many reasons. It has a generally high quality level, and we know what's in it and there's enough transparency over at kernel.org to get a good guess for when future features will be available. Plus... even though the core OS itself is free, there are a lot of value-add services that are available from a wide variety of sources. As my final dig, I added the lines, "Contrast this with Microsoft's recent efforts."
Microsoft has been experiencing horrid delays with Vista, if we are to believe the industry press. I've been around long enough to mostly ignore the press, but word from the GDC and Microsoft itself seems to corroborate some of our worst fears. Microsoft is reducing the degree to which smaller third parties get to share in the revenue stream by broadening it's product line to compete with it's former partners and customers. If you're a small company and you want to make money by playing in the Microsoft sandbox, the correct action seems to be "get acquired" or "run a mom & pop PC support shop." Margins on PC hardware and OSes have been falling for years, and offering support or network installs or typical consulting style business is one way to win (although at a business that traditionally has a low P/E ratio and medium to high risk.)
Plus... Uncle Bill's army is delaying Vista until after the 2006 Xmas season.
I happened upon this blog entry that's fairly interesting...
http://cestockblog.com/article/8018
But before reading it... think about it... You're Dell or Compaq (or even Sony) and you're trying to move product for the Xmas 2006 season. Microsoft will be talking a lot about Vista, so there's a good chance that consumers will hear that it's going to be released in January 2007. The guy who wrote the blog post above is guessing you'll see a whole lot of "Free Upgrade to Vista" stickers, and that people will just not be interested in them. Maybe they'll want to wait until Jan 2007 to buy the complete system...
But there is another thing they could do... Bundle MacOS-X for Intel on Dell and Compaq and Sony machines. Heck, maybe even Gateway could get in on the game.
Granted, there are still very bitter memories of what happened to the Mac clone market in the 90's, but considering where Apple's getting it's income, there might be a strategic "in" here. Microsoft is shutting out small developers by competing with them. From a third-party perspective, MacOS-X on commodity Intel hardware doesn't look all that bad. There are plenty of tools bundled with the OS, but plenty of opportunity to provide better versions of browsers, encyclopedias, email clients, games, etc.
Apple's money seems to be coming from iPods and manufacturing PC hardware is an increasingly lower margin game. So maybe this is the year that Apple ditches it's desktop hardware, admits that people buy it's hardware for the software and provide Xmas shoppers in 2006 something to really talk about.
Of course "bitter memories" and heartbreak characterized the state of affairs the last time Apple tried to license their operating system to third party hardware manufacturers. (See the Wikipedia entries for
Power Computing and
Macintosh Clones for more information.) From this episode, we can say that tying one's future to a single company, especially one with Apple's labile reputation, is not a behavior that encourages long term survival. But I suppose the same could be said about putting only Microsoft operating systems on one's hardware.
But the interesting part of this story is that industry maven Robert X. Cringely is entertaining the same notion (from his April 6, 2006 web epistle,
A Whole New Ballgame):
I predict that Apple will settle on 64-bit Intel processors ASAP (with FireWire 800 please), and at that time will announce a product similar to Boot Camp to allow OS X to run on bog-standard 32-bit PC hardware, turning the Boot Camp relationship on its head and trying to sell $99 copies of OS X to 100 million or so Windows owners.
Tags:
macintosh,
apple,
boot camp,
macintosh clone,
cringely
What's in a Name?
I spend an awful lot of time at work talking about security policy. It's part of my job; I'm a security architect at PalmSource / Access. When I use the term "security policy," I'm talking about a set of "assertions" managed by a competent authority that controls some software program's security defaults and its response to security-related events. This makes sense; before I was a software architect sort of guy, I was a software engineering sort of guy. When I look at a PC, a mobile phone or my Dodge Grand Caravan, I see software.
Not so for other people in the security ecosystem. If you do a Google search for "security policy," the current top hit is a description of the
SANS Institute Security Policy Project. If you read a little bit into the document, you can tell pretty quickly that they're using the term "security policy" to define the set of activities and processes an organization uses to ensure the "security" of their systems. The security policy the SANS Institute is talking about might have a statement like, "new users must receive approval from their manager and the manager of IT before getting an account on a particular system." Or something like, "the administrator for a particular system must see an approval message from a potential new user's manager and the manager of the IT department before provisioning an account."
In my world, security policy clauses sound more like, "if the message is not signed by an end entity whose public key was certified by a certification authority I explicitly marked as a 'trusted remote administrator', disregard the message and potentially generate a logging message about the attempt."
If you go a little further in the Google search results, you can find a link to the
Center for Security Policy that pays people to think deep thoughts about national (and international) security. This is something mostly different from my day job...
The differences between the interpretation of the term "security policy" are subtle, but important. Organizational or operational security policies like the ones described by the SANS Institute Security Policy Project describe what
people are supposed to do in certain circumstances. Security policies that I work with tell
software programs what to do. Finally, the Center for Security Policy develops policy guidelines that help lawmakers and government officials decide what
entire nations should do.
So I can't help but think about the following confusing example: "The Center for Security Policy recommended a security policy that the US federal government direct its IT managers to establish a security policy that requires configurable security policies on mobile devices."
Confusing, no?
The confusing language even got us in trouble at work; one of my coworkers with more of an operational background still uses the term "security policy" to refer to organization's "operational security policies" while I, with more of a software engineering background use the term to describe "software security policies."
I started to use the term "Software Security Policy" until someone pointed out that many organizations use that term to describe an organization's operational security policy as it applies to software installs. Look at the
Software Security Policy from Purdue University's IT Department. Nothing whatsoever about how software is to interpret operational security policy, it's all about what people should do.
What about
device security policy? Nope. The Meta Group used that as a synonym for "operational security policy."
In an effort to ease up on some confusion, I recommend we reserve the term "organizational security policy interpretation and enforcement by trusted software agents" or OSPIaEbTSA for short.
Tags:
security policy,
security,
policy
