There is all this talk about making companies more agile. And with more than two million hits on Google the term may even be more popular in some circles than Web 2.0 this week. (Well, we can only wish.) Certainly, part of understanding agility is changing how you develop and bring your products to market -- write better code, make more reliable hardware, work more adeptly with Internet services, respond better to customer complaints or suggestions. But another part of agility is understanding the "softer" side of your company, such as being able to better hire, train, and retain your people. Too often management tends to forget that it is the people that make an organization, not just the products.
I thought about this recently for a story that I wrote for the New York Times that is out today about contact management software. I first got the idea from a colleague that I met at the local National Speakers Association chapter here in St. Louis. He had some computer issues running ACT on an old Macintosh. He was keeping the aging Mac around because ACT was essential to running his speaking business and he didn't want to have to a Windows PC just to run the latest versions of ACT. That got me going on the idea for the story, and the Times was interested enough to give me the assignment.
Too often a small business gets wrapped up in the wrong technology and their agility suffers as a result. Actually, it can be any sized business. Take a look at what happened to IBM back in the 1990s when its mainframe-centric world collapsed and they had to reinvent themselves as a software and services company. I was reminded of this when at a lecture last night by Harvard biz school professor Lynda Applegate, who has done some consulting for them over the years. IBM went from the most profitable company in the 1980s to losing billions in 1991.
But a better situation is when a company builds in agility from the get-go. They don't stay small too long because they can grow. As an example, take the woman that I interviewed for the Times who runs her own business in Orlando. When she started her company, she thought she would use a traditional model of having everyone come into a single office. But as she got clients around the country, she realized that this wasn't a workable model.
Part of what was holding back her operations were outmoded contact and sales management tools. The assumption was that a single PC would house this information, and that everyone would create their own documents on their own PCs. As a result, there wouldn't be much need to share data among different staffers. Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
Once they implemented an Internet-based contact and document system, things changed. The firm found out that they could hire anyone and that they can work anywhere. "We didn't intend to run our business in a virtual environment when we got started but realized that we can hire people based on their skills and our needs regardless of their location," says Lara Triozzi, the president of MarketLauncher Inc. But now that they have a taste for the "virtual environment" – meaning that their critical IT components are outsourced and available via the Internet -- they really like it and it is the core of how they will grow their business going forward.
They got some side benefits from this strategy, too. The outsourced contacts vendor that they picked (ACT Remote) also handles all of their security, backups, and tech support, and the vendor also hosts all of their Microsoft Office applications and data, too. Now they have freed themselves from having stand-alone and isolated applications, and can share information around the company without having to worry if someone left something on their PC and didn't come into work that day.
That is what agility is all about.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Friday, November 2, 2007
Are PR people spammers?
Paul Gillin and I do this weekly podcast called TechPRWarStories, and we both have a lot of fun with it. The episodes are less than 15 minutes and talk about issues that pertain to public relations and hi tech, something we both have a little experience with. The latest episode (#33, wow!) we talk about Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson’s anti-spam manifesto, which includes the publication of hundreds of addresses of PR people who are banned from his inbox. I am appalled that Anderson would go so far as to publicize e-mail addresses for every spambot to harvest. Paul agrees, but sees merit in the problem that Anderson is highlighting. Both of us agree that there are tools journalists can use to manage their inboxes more effectively and that the onus is on reporters to become familiar with those tools.
We also discuss Steve Rubel’s blog post this week in which he laments the craziness that has overtaken the Web 2.0 market.
Have a listen, subscribe, send us some comments please!
We also discuss Steve Rubel’s blog post this week in which he laments the craziness that has overtaken the Web 2.0 market.
Have a listen, subscribe, send us some comments please!
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
A new kind of data center testing facility
I let you in on one of my big passions – I have a certain fondness for visiting data centers. Maybe it is the feeling of power coursing through all those racks of servers, or getting access into the inner sanctum of IT after passing through a series of security checkpoints. Or it could be just seeing how all this gear has been wired up. I always was big on looking at the backs of equipment and checking the cables whenever I got a demo from some vendor.
So when the folks at Schneider Electric and its American Power Conversion subsidiary asked me if I wanted to come to their open house of a new kind of data center, they were talking to the right guy, and I jumped at the chance.
The place is an oddity for several reasons. First, it is built like an actual working data center but with one key difference: there is literally nothing inside it. Instead, the mostly empty building has lots of HVAC equipment, electrical power, and plenty of monitoring and modeling tools. The idea is to have "a facility dedicated to practical solutions, not a not of hype," says Aaron Davis, the chief Marketing Officer for the subsidiary.
Schneider built its data center, which it calls its Electric Technology Center, to serve as a test bed for its customers, to show IT managers what they need to do to reconfigure their own data centers as they have evolved from mainframe-centric to house more distributed systems. It is a great idea and overdue. As IT shops outgrow their data center infrastructures, they want to be able to figure out the power and cooling issues and how companies can retool their data centers appropriately.
If you run a data center, chances are you have some pretty old equipment that you'd like to replace but literally don't have the energy to do it. Your raised floors are probably filled with outdated cabling that is so thick you have lost much of the airflow capacity and cooling ducts. Your air conditioning is on overload because it was never designed to cool racks of gear, and the temperature varies greatly from one aisle to another as a result. Your backup generators and power conditioning equipment is probably not matched to the gear it is backing up, and you have no idea of what should be upgraded first.
Wouldn't it be great to model what you need to do, before you actually have to bring servers down and remodel? That is the essence of the idea behind what Schneider is trying to do with its new testing facility, located outside of St. Louis. Think of it as one big (more than 100,000 square feet) big playroom where you can bring in gear and move it around and test various situations before you have to deploy it in your own shop.
Some companies are fortunate and able to rebuild or relocate their entire data center, something that I got to witness first-hand when the data center at the end of my block was rebuilt to new specs. (See the article here on my night at Rejis when they moved their facility just a few feet.)
But not everyone can just take a former parking lot and erect a new building to serve modern needs. Some IT shops have to do a fair amount of retrofitting, and that's where the St. Louis test bed comes in handy. Firms can build racks and lay them out on the floor, and try out different scenarios to measure airflow, power consumption, and temperature gradients for their gear. There are also two huge temperature controlled testing rooms that can rapidly heat or cool down and be used to see what happens to particular gear.
I am glad that the company picked St. Louis to build their facility, because being the data center groupie that I am I hope to visit often and get to see what they are doing with their customers. Plus, it is a really neat looking building that also serves as a showroom for some of the company's product lines. Schneider bought APC earlier this year, and has merged them with their MGE division, which sells electric power control equipment. While most of us know APC from their battery backup boxes (or we should), they also make large-scale rack power and cooling gear that are designed for data center use.
Their push has been to isolate airflow just around the immediate vicinity of the racks, so you are cooling the smallest air volumes and reducing the amount of power for these cooling needs. This has lots of appeal, particularly these days when everyone is going green and when oil prices continue to reach new highs. At the launch event last week, representatives from the US Department of Energy and thegreengrid.org spoke about how they are working together to reduce energy usage of data centers. "This is real low-hanging fruit," said Douglas Kaempf, who runs the Industrial Technologies Program at DOE. The Schneider facility has 7 MW of power supplied by the local utility, which is enough to power a reasonable suburb.
Ironically, the Schneider facility is located in between two massive data centers of Mastercard and Citibank, just the other side of the Missouri River from where one of the worst floods happened about 15 years ago. Don't worry – all three are on high ground and have plenty of backup resources too.
If you are looking at a data center remodel, keep this place in mind. The daily rental fee starts at $5,000, depending on customer needs.
So when the folks at Schneider Electric and its American Power Conversion subsidiary asked me if I wanted to come to their open house of a new kind of data center, they were talking to the right guy, and I jumped at the chance.
The place is an oddity for several reasons. First, it is built like an actual working data center but with one key difference: there is literally nothing inside it. Instead, the mostly empty building has lots of HVAC equipment, electrical power, and plenty of monitoring and modeling tools. The idea is to have "a facility dedicated to practical solutions, not a not of hype," says Aaron Davis, the chief Marketing Officer for the subsidiary.
Schneider built its data center, which it calls its Electric Technology Center, to serve as a test bed for its customers, to show IT managers what they need to do to reconfigure their own data centers as they have evolved from mainframe-centric to house more distributed systems. It is a great idea and overdue. As IT shops outgrow their data center infrastructures, they want to be able to figure out the power and cooling issues and how companies can retool their data centers appropriately.
If you run a data center, chances are you have some pretty old equipment that you'd like to replace but literally don't have the energy to do it. Your raised floors are probably filled with outdated cabling that is so thick you have lost much of the airflow capacity and cooling ducts. Your air conditioning is on overload because it was never designed to cool racks of gear, and the temperature varies greatly from one aisle to another as a result. Your backup generators and power conditioning equipment is probably not matched to the gear it is backing up, and you have no idea of what should be upgraded first.
Wouldn't it be great to model what you need to do, before you actually have to bring servers down and remodel? That is the essence of the idea behind what Schneider is trying to do with its new testing facility, located outside of St. Louis. Think of it as one big (more than 100,000 square feet) big playroom where you can bring in gear and move it around and test various situations before you have to deploy it in your own shop.
Some companies are fortunate and able to rebuild or relocate their entire data center, something that I got to witness first-hand when the data center at the end of my block was rebuilt to new specs. (See the article here on my night at Rejis when they moved their facility just a few feet.)
But not everyone can just take a former parking lot and erect a new building to serve modern needs. Some IT shops have to do a fair amount of retrofitting, and that's where the St. Louis test bed comes in handy. Firms can build racks and lay them out on the floor, and try out different scenarios to measure airflow, power consumption, and temperature gradients for their gear. There are also two huge temperature controlled testing rooms that can rapidly heat or cool down and be used to see what happens to particular gear.
I am glad that the company picked St. Louis to build their facility, because being the data center groupie that I am I hope to visit often and get to see what they are doing with their customers. Plus, it is a really neat looking building that also serves as a showroom for some of the company's product lines. Schneider bought APC earlier this year, and has merged them with their MGE division, which sells electric power control equipment. While most of us know APC from their battery backup boxes (or we should), they also make large-scale rack power and cooling gear that are designed for data center use.
Their push has been to isolate airflow just around the immediate vicinity of the racks, so you are cooling the smallest air volumes and reducing the amount of power for these cooling needs. This has lots of appeal, particularly these days when everyone is going green and when oil prices continue to reach new highs. At the launch event last week, representatives from the US Department of Energy and thegreengrid.org spoke about how they are working together to reduce energy usage of data centers. "This is real low-hanging fruit," said Douglas Kaempf, who runs the Industrial Technologies Program at DOE. The Schneider facility has 7 MW of power supplied by the local utility, which is enough to power a reasonable suburb.
Ironically, the Schneider facility is located in between two massive data centers of Mastercard and Citibank, just the other side of the Missouri River from where one of the worst floods happened about 15 years ago. Don't worry – all three are on high ground and have plenty of backup resources too.
If you are looking at a data center remodel, keep this place in mind. The daily rental fee starts at $5,000, depending on customer needs.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Choosing a toll-free number
When was the last time your had a business with a toll-free number? Was it back in the mid-1990s, when the "new" area codes 888, 866 and 877 started showing up?
My step-daughter recently asked me "what the deal was with the 877 area code?" She grew up in an era when long distance was always free on her cell phone. It got me thinking about how things have changed with Ma Bell (even saying that will date me, I am sure).
I had an 800 number back in the day when I thought it was important for people to easily call me. This was when I had 128 kbps ISDN "broadband" Internet, and had to pay something like two cents a minute for each call to my ISP (that cut down on my surfing time, to be sure). Most of the time I got wrong numbers, which I paid I think regular long-distance charges for. I think my business phone bill was around $300 a month, including the ISDN access.
Fast forward to today, where my personal phone bill is around $200 a month and the thought of having a "dial-up ISP" and ISDN puts you back in the cretaceous period. Of course that includes several cellular lines, DSL, and unlimited wireline long distance. But there are still some situations where you might want to have a toll-free number for your business, or even personal needs. So what do you do?
The easiest and cheapest way to get a toll-free number is if you already are a Vonage VOIP customer (there are still a few of us diehards around). It costs an extra $5 a month with a $10 activation fee, and you have your choice of 877 and 866 numbers with 100 minute in-bound calls. The number is tied to your existing Vonage line, of course, and it takes seconds to sign up via their Web site. Clearly, these guys get how to do self-service features.
If you aren't a Vonage customer and don't expect a lot of calls, you can get a toll-free number from Ureach.com for $10 a month that includes 30 minutes of inbound calls on one of their messaging plans. After that, the price is 7 cents per minute, which can add up. A better deal is a plan from OfficeDepot.com, where the same $10 a month gets you 200 minutes, and then 4.9 cents per minute after that.
And PhonePeople.com is just one of a number of Web sites that allow you to type in your name or some catchy seven-letter phrase and see if you can match it to a particular toll-free number, where the first 100 minutes will cost – you got it -- $10 a month plus a $29 activation fee. They offer all the various toll-free prefixes too.
There are a number of differentiating features on all of these plans: some will send your voice mail calls to email-based notifications and voice attachments, some will allow you to have multiple "extensions" on your line for different users, some can forward to different numbers or have a "follow-me" type of service, and some will have toll-free fax tied into the voice line too.
Speaking of Ma Bell, I tried to get information from AT&T's various Web sites about toll-free numbers, but wasn't able to find anything even after I entered my login information as one of their customers. That is shameful, and just goes to show you how far we have with toll-free calling.
My step-daughter recently asked me "what the deal was with the 877 area code?" She grew up in an era when long distance was always free on her cell phone. It got me thinking about how things have changed with Ma Bell (even saying that will date me, I am sure).
I had an 800 number back in the day when I thought it was important for people to easily call me. This was when I had 128 kbps ISDN "broadband" Internet, and had to pay something like two cents a minute for each call to my ISP (that cut down on my surfing time, to be sure). Most of the time I got wrong numbers, which I paid I think regular long-distance charges for. I think my business phone bill was around $300 a month, including the ISDN access.
Fast forward to today, where my personal phone bill is around $200 a month and the thought of having a "dial-up ISP" and ISDN puts you back in the cretaceous period. Of course that includes several cellular lines, DSL, and unlimited wireline long distance. But there are still some situations where you might want to have a toll-free number for your business, or even personal needs. So what do you do?
The easiest and cheapest way to get a toll-free number is if you already are a Vonage VOIP customer (there are still a few of us diehards around). It costs an extra $5 a month with a $10 activation fee, and you have your choice of 877 and 866 numbers with 100 minute in-bound calls. The number is tied to your existing Vonage line, of course, and it takes seconds to sign up via their Web site. Clearly, these guys get how to do self-service features.
If you aren't a Vonage customer and don't expect a lot of calls, you can get a toll-free number from Ureach.com for $10 a month that includes 30 minutes of inbound calls on one of their messaging plans. After that, the price is 7 cents per minute, which can add up. A better deal is a plan from OfficeDepot.com, where the same $10 a month gets you 200 minutes, and then 4.9 cents per minute after that.
And PhonePeople.com is just one of a number of Web sites that allow you to type in your name or some catchy seven-letter phrase and see if you can match it to a particular toll-free number, where the first 100 minutes will cost – you got it -- $10 a month plus a $29 activation fee. They offer all the various toll-free prefixes too.
There are a number of differentiating features on all of these plans: some will send your voice mail calls to email-based notifications and voice attachments, some will allow you to have multiple "extensions" on your line for different users, some can forward to different numbers or have a "follow-me" type of service, and some will have toll-free fax tied into the voice line too.
Speaking of Ma Bell, I tried to get information from AT&T's various Web sites about toll-free numbers, but wasn't able to find anything even after I entered my login information as one of their customers. That is shameful, and just goes to show you how far we have with toll-free calling.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Learning from NASA
I spent a day at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week while I was attending a user group conference nearby in Orlando. As my wife and I rode around the vast complex, I thought about the many things that public relations and tech marketing folks can learn from the way NASA tells its story to the public.
I admit it – I am a space junkie and grew up fascinated with astronauts and the whole lunar landing thing. Growing up on Long Island, I knew that the local space contractor was Grumman and that they built the spidery lunar lander, and even had a model of it in my bedroom too. Later, I spent some time at the Cradle of Aviation Museum which isn’t far from where Lindbergh took off for Paris, and got to meet Fred Haise, one of the Apollo 13 astronauts (Bill Paxton plays him in the film version) when he gave a lecture there several years ago. (Just to complete the connections with Lindbergh, now I am living in St. Louis. He also wrote his memories when he was living in Port Washington, NY, where I lived for many years too.)
What made the visit to the space center memorable were the testimonial videos from long time NASA employees – they were short, You-Tube like segments about people that had rather odd jobs, but took pride in doing them -- for decades in some cases. As an example, the various pieces of each shuttle need to be put together in a special building called the Vehicle Assembly Building and then towed over to the launch pad. The guy who drives the tractor that tows this multi-million ton rig talked about how he isn’t exactly NASCAR material – the tractor’s maximum speed is one mph – but when he gets to the pad he has to position the rocket within a sixteenth of an inch for it to be properly launched. You could see him positioning the rocket with a joystick in the video and wonder how cool is that?
Another video was about the guy who runs the recovery operations to pick up the booster rockets once they are ditched in the ocean. NASA recycles them but first they have to track them down after the launch and the process isn’t easy. We saw videos of divers wrangling the boosters – everything is bobbing up and down in the ocean while the drivers try to attack the lines to tow the rockets back to shore.
The best part of the complex for me was the actual firing control room that has been reassembled and shows you what happened the moments before and after one of the Apollo launches. Those of us that grew up glued to our black and white TVs watching many moon launches will find this the iconic techno stage setting fascinating, and it was great to see the attention to detail – the various instrument panels lit up as they came into play during the countdown. Now we have space entrepreneurs that can run their launches remotely over the Internet with just a small staff.
What was special about the space program, then and now, is that it takes the right mix of teamwork and selflessness and ingenuity to pull all this technology off. And while the shuttle fleet is aging, it is a testimonial to how many of them we have launched successfully and how well it really works. While some might argue that sending people into space is a luxury we can’t afford, I like to think that the innovations and sense of discovery continue to inspire many of us in the hi-tech field. I give NASA a lot of points for doing such a great job, and the next time you find yourself in the area do plan on spending some time at the space center, and maybe skip a day at the theme parks that ring Orlando.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
New VOIP Services
I had a chance to compare two new Internet phone services from Ooma and MagicJack. Let me summarize what I have learned in the table below:
So what are these new services? Ooma is a small box about the size of an answering machine that hooks up to both your broadband Ethernet and your land voice line. MagicJack is a bit bigger than a USB key drive that connects to your computer's USB port. They have very different approaches, and are not for everyone.
MagicJack is a way to supplement your existing landline or cellular service. If you have a loved one that is living overseas, or someone who travels a lot, then this makes sense. At a fixed price of $40 and $20 for the second and subsequent years, it is a low enough price point that you can send it to someone living abroad, have them register with a US phone number, and then you can have cheap unlimited talk time. The nice thing about the gizmo is that you can either hook up a standard analog phone to it, or use whatever PC-connected sound device you'd like: it can toggle between both. It doesn't yet have many local phone numbers -- when I tried it out, I could get as close as Memphis but nothing in Missouri as yet. But this is becoming less of an issue as many people have unlimited long distance plans anyway.
Ooma is much more expensive, and I am not sure where their market is: at $400, you have to make a lot of calls and the device requires a lot more commitment. You need to make changes to your landline calling features too. Its niftiest feature is the ability to give you a second outgoing phone line, so you can get around a chatty teen who is always tying up your phone. But it has very poor customer support despite some initial buzz and a high initial cost to get their gear.
Both Ooma and MagicJack come with their own voicemail box that can send you email notifications, which is becoming standard in the VOIP world. Both supply unlimited calling in the US or North America, with additional per-minute charges to places beyond. Both support the better E911 services that aren't the norm with most VOIP suppliers: ironically, Vonage offers a competitive USB gizmo called the V-phone, but 1) you need to sign up for a Vonage service plan to use it and 2) it doesn't support E911, instead, emergency calls get routed to a Vonage operator.
The other entry in this sweepstakes is Skype. They of course only work on your PC, but they do offer Macintosh support, something neither the V-phone or the MagicJack presently have. They are a bit more expensive if you buy all the various options (you need Skype In to get a fixed phone number so people can call your PC at $60/year and Skype Pro to make outgoing calls at $36/year ) than either USB device, but they do offer local numbers in various countries, should that be important to you or if both of your frequently called parties are outside the US. Their Pro plan allows unlimited outbound calling to phones in whatever country you assign your phone number to your account.
What you pick will depend on a lot of different circumstances: if you are looking for a complete replacement of your landline phone with an Internet solution, I still think either Vonage or AT&T CallVantage is a better way to go than any of these products. If you make a lot of international calls to different places, then probably Skype is your answer. If your teen or traveling salesperson is tying up your phone or racking up cell minutes, then any one of these might be a lower-cost alternative if you want to keep your existing landline.
Clearly, the VOIP market is undergoing a lot of change, and a lot of players will come and (like SunRocket) go. As someone who uses Vonage daily for the past four years, I am watching avidly what is going on.
| MagicJack.com | Ooma.com | Vonage.com V-Phone | Skype.com | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Initial cost | $40 for first year | $400 | $40 |
| |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Recurring cost | $20/yr following years | None | plus monthly Vonage service | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 911 features | Uses E911 PSAP | Uses landline 911 (2) | Use Vonage PSAP | None | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Headset or analog phone? | Either supported | Analog Phone | Neither needed (mic included) | Headset + PC | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Free calling area | North America | USA | North America | Various countries (1) | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Mac OS X support | Not yet | Uses phones | Not yet | Yes | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Notable features | Headset or phone | Second line | Built in mic | International reach | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Drawbacks | Few area codes yet avail. | Customer support | Tied to Vonage account | Dicey p2p network issues | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Email voicemail notifications? | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| (1) Skype pro provides unlimited calling in a single country that you receive the phone number for. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| (2) Please note that in order for the ooma system to work, we will add call forward busy ("CFB") when we provision your line, for which you will owe your landline phone company associated monthly charges | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
So what are these new services? Ooma is a small box about the size of an answering machine that hooks up to both your broadband Ethernet and your land voice line. MagicJack is a bit bigger than a USB key drive that connects to your computer's USB port. They have very different approaches, and are not for everyone.
MagicJack is a way to supplement your existing landline or cellular service. If you have a loved one that is living overseas, or someone who travels a lot, then this makes sense. At a fixed price of $40 and $20 for the second and subsequent years, it is a low enough price point that you can send it to someone living abroad, have them register with a US phone number, and then you can have cheap unlimited talk time. The nice thing about the gizmo is that you can either hook up a standard analog phone to it, or use whatever PC-connected sound device you'd like: it can toggle between both. It doesn't yet have many local phone numbers -- when I tried it out, I could get as close as Memphis but nothing in Missouri as yet. But this is becoming less of an issue as many people have unlimited long distance plans anyway.
Ooma is much more expensive, and I am not sure where their market is: at $400, you have to make a lot of calls and the device requires a lot more commitment. You need to make changes to your landline calling features too. Its niftiest feature is the ability to give you a second outgoing phone line, so you can get around a chatty teen who is always tying up your phone. But it has very poor customer support despite some initial buzz and a high initial cost to get their gear.
Both Ooma and MagicJack come with their own voicemail box that can send you email notifications, which is becoming standard in the VOIP world. Both supply unlimited calling in the US or North America, with additional per-minute charges to places beyond. Both support the better E911 services that aren't the norm with most VOIP suppliers: ironically, Vonage offers a competitive USB gizmo called the V-phone, but 1) you need to sign up for a Vonage service plan to use it and 2) it doesn't support E911, instead, emergency calls get routed to a Vonage operator.
The other entry in this sweepstakes is Skype. They of course only work on your PC, but they do offer Macintosh support, something neither the V-phone or the MagicJack presently have. They are a bit more expensive if you buy all the various options (you need Skype In to get a fixed phone number so people can call your PC at $60/year and Skype Pro to make outgoing calls at $36/year ) than either USB device, but they do offer local numbers in various countries, should that be important to you or if both of your frequently called parties are outside the US. Their Pro plan allows unlimited outbound calling to phones in whatever country you assign your phone number to your account.
What you pick will depend on a lot of different circumstances: if you are looking for a complete replacement of your landline phone with an Internet solution, I still think either Vonage or AT&T CallVantage is a better way to go than any of these products. If you make a lot of international calls to different places, then probably Skype is your answer. If your teen or traveling salesperson is tying up your phone or racking up cell minutes, then any one of these might be a lower-cost alternative if you want to keep your existing landline.
Clearly, the VOIP market is undergoing a lot of change, and a lot of players will come and (like SunRocket) go. As someone who uses Vonage daily for the past four years, I am watching avidly what is going on.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Rewriting computing history with Colossus
What if I told you that a secret project conducted more than 60 years ago held the true origins of the modern computing era? And that the country behind this project did such a good job erasing its tracks that it did itself a disservice? And that many of the things invented during this project would only be realized with modern-day PCs?
It sounds like a made-for-TV movie, and it should be, and finally -- Now The True Story of Colossus Can Be Told (cue announcer and swelling music).
The world's first electronic digital computer wasn't developed on American soil but presaged by nearly two years during an intensive British top-secret wartime effort called Colossus. A team of engineers built the room-sized computer for a single purpose: to decrypt German military radio transmissions. The original designer died without ever receiving any acknowledgment or acclaim accorded to many of his American computing counterparts, yet he was responsible for the first implementations of program-controlled logic, parallel processing, variable programming, hardware interrupts, optical reading of punched paper tape, shift registers and other things that are now common to the PC lexicon. Some of these innovations took a decade or more to implement elsewhere by others.
And lest you think that Colossus was so old school slow, consider this: It was so massively parallel and efficient at what it did that a modern PC programmed to do similar code breaking tasks now takes about as long to achieve the same results!
There were actually ten Colossus models produced during the war by a team led by Thomas Flowers, who worked doing telephone switching research before and after the war at what was to become British Telecom. By a series of fortuitous circumstances, Flowers was originally hired for another project, and took it upon himself to develop Colossus using his own designs.
Why are we just figuring its place in history now? Several reasons: first, the Brits have finally declassified the key documents and lifted gag orders on the project, and as a result a wonderful book is now out by Oxford University Press.
The book is a huge 460-page tome with many details about the code breaking process directly from the people who worked at Bletchley Park and Dollis Hill, the government labs involved. This is a collection of first-person accounts and you get to see the enormity of the task and exactly how critical this effort was towards winning the war. If you got excited about crypto stuff in the DaVinci Code then you will have lots of hours of fun trying to work through the examples the authors provide. (And my thanks to my original writing mentor, Grant, for turning me onto the book.)
The book's author and organizer is Jack Copeland, who is a New Zealand professor and responsible for the AlanTuring.net archive. Turning, a name familiar to many of us, was intimately involved in many things Bletchley Park but not the brains behind the hardware of Colossus.
Second, owing to an odd set of circumstances, all but two of the machines were immediately destroyed after V-E day in 1945 on Churchill's command. Had more evidence survived, it might have become as notorious as the American ENIAC, which has gotten most of the credit for the early computing innovations. The two units were used by the British Government for several years for code breaking purposes, presumably. And recently, a project to rebuild one machine has been successful, and was tested with breaking some historic codes.
Third, the veil of secrecy around this project was colossal, too: despite the thousands of people employed during the wartime effort, there were few leaks. Maybe the Brits are better at keeping secrets than us Yanks, but the amount of containment and compartmentalization was austere. Thousands of people worked at close quarters yet never asked each other what they were actually doing on the project. Parents didn't have idea what their children were working on – indeed, one of the younger Colossus team members was so concerned that all of his contemporaries were off fighting (and he was just a mere geek-in-residence) that he asked to be reassigned because his father was beginning to wonder what he was doing. His superiors arranged to have an army officer visit his parents and reassure them that the son was involved in a major military project, and just because he wasn't shipped to the front lines he was still a key part of the war effort.
Despite the secrecy, engineers kept a few pages of design notes about the project and now a group of academic researchers is using this information to try to reconstruct Colossus and the German encryption devices it managed to break. There are exhibits at Bletchley Park as well, someday I hope to see those in person.
There are some modern lessons to be learned from Colossus:
"The only dependable way of protecting corporate and government computer networks today from the criminal trespasses of hackers is to hire from their top echelon on the principle of fighting fire with fire," ways Donald Michie, one of the younger code breakers at Bletchley park. He talks about how the code makers and the code breakers were never allowed to communicate and indeed were two separate government organizations, thus serious flaws were never fixed on early encryption machines. Many of these flaws introduced incredible human errors that allowed the Brits a way into decrypting the German transmissions.
A second lesson is how critical Colossus was towards the overall war effort. Many Americans like to think that we played a key role in winning the war, and certainly without our men and material things would have happened differently. Yet, the book describes the moment that Eisenhower changed his plans for the D-Day Normandy invasion based on the Colossus decrypts. Indeed, one of the Colossus machines was finished just hours before he had to make this decision. The decrypts made it possible for him to monitor German counterstrike efforts before he attacked the beaches and place his troops accordingly. There are several other examples throughout the book about other moments where Colossus saved lives – including German ones, too.
Third, reading the descriptions of the Colossus team and their exploits, I got the feeling that Bletchley Park was a very unique place in Britain's military history. People were addressed on a first-name basis, and civilians and soldiers worked side by side. Many of the people employed there were just out of high school, if that, and the team leaders had to find motivational ways to keep the place running 24x7. There is a lot to learn from in these sentiments for anyone who manages a team of people.
Finally, there is also an understanding the role of secrecy in an open society. I don't think anyone would argue that Colossus needed to be a secret during wartime. The issue is how it was revealed to the public, and how long it took before the exact details were openly available. Given that the events of the 1940s are just now coming to light, perhaps we need to keep this in mind when we think how the innovations we create during our modern era can find their way into the future public domain.
I highly recommend this book, and hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
It sounds like a made-for-TV movie, and it should be, and finally -- Now The True Story of Colossus Can Be Told (cue announcer and swelling music).
The world's first electronic digital computer wasn't developed on American soil but presaged by nearly two years during an intensive British top-secret wartime effort called Colossus. A team of engineers built the room-sized computer for a single purpose: to decrypt German military radio transmissions. The original designer died without ever receiving any acknowledgment or acclaim accorded to many of his American computing counterparts, yet he was responsible for the first implementations of program-controlled logic, parallel processing, variable programming, hardware interrupts, optical reading of punched paper tape, shift registers and other things that are now common to the PC lexicon. Some of these innovations took a decade or more to implement elsewhere by others.
And lest you think that Colossus was so old school slow, consider this: It was so massively parallel and efficient at what it did that a modern PC programmed to do similar code breaking tasks now takes about as long to achieve the same results!
There were actually ten Colossus models produced during the war by a team led by Thomas Flowers, who worked doing telephone switching research before and after the war at what was to become British Telecom. By a series of fortuitous circumstances, Flowers was originally hired for another project, and took it upon himself to develop Colossus using his own designs.
Why are we just figuring its place in history now? Several reasons: first, the Brits have finally declassified the key documents and lifted gag orders on the project, and as a result a wonderful book is now out by Oxford University Press.
The book is a huge 460-page tome with many details about the code breaking process directly from the people who worked at Bletchley Park and Dollis Hill, the government labs involved. This is a collection of first-person accounts and you get to see the enormity of the task and exactly how critical this effort was towards winning the war. If you got excited about crypto stuff in the DaVinci Code then you will have lots of hours of fun trying to work through the examples the authors provide. (And my thanks to my original writing mentor, Grant, for turning me onto the book.)
The book's author and organizer is Jack Copeland, who is a New Zealand professor and responsible for the AlanTuring.net archive. Turning, a name familiar to many of us, was intimately involved in many things Bletchley Park but not the brains behind the hardware of Colossus.
Second, owing to an odd set of circumstances, all but two of the machines were immediately destroyed after V-E day in 1945 on Churchill's command. Had more evidence survived, it might have become as notorious as the American ENIAC, which has gotten most of the credit for the early computing innovations. The two units were used by the British Government for several years for code breaking purposes, presumably. And recently, a project to rebuild one machine has been successful, and was tested with breaking some historic codes.
Third, the veil of secrecy around this project was colossal, too: despite the thousands of people employed during the wartime effort, there were few leaks. Maybe the Brits are better at keeping secrets than us Yanks, but the amount of containment and compartmentalization was austere. Thousands of people worked at close quarters yet never asked each other what they were actually doing on the project. Parents didn't have idea what their children were working on – indeed, one of the younger Colossus team members was so concerned that all of his contemporaries were off fighting (and he was just a mere geek-in-residence) that he asked to be reassigned because his father was beginning to wonder what he was doing. His superiors arranged to have an army officer visit his parents and reassure them that the son was involved in a major military project, and just because he wasn't shipped to the front lines he was still a key part of the war effort.
Despite the secrecy, engineers kept a few pages of design notes about the project and now a group of academic researchers is using this information to try to reconstruct Colossus and the German encryption devices it managed to break. There are exhibits at Bletchley Park as well, someday I hope to see those in person.
There are some modern lessons to be learned from Colossus:
"The only dependable way of protecting corporate and government computer networks today from the criminal trespasses of hackers is to hire from their top echelon on the principle of fighting fire with fire," ways Donald Michie, one of the younger code breakers at Bletchley park. He talks about how the code makers and the code breakers were never allowed to communicate and indeed were two separate government organizations, thus serious flaws were never fixed on early encryption machines. Many of these flaws introduced incredible human errors that allowed the Brits a way into decrypting the German transmissions.
A second lesson is how critical Colossus was towards the overall war effort. Many Americans like to think that we played a key role in winning the war, and certainly without our men and material things would have happened differently. Yet, the book describes the moment that Eisenhower changed his plans for the D-Day Normandy invasion based on the Colossus decrypts. Indeed, one of the Colossus machines was finished just hours before he had to make this decision. The decrypts made it possible for him to monitor German counterstrike efforts before he attacked the beaches and place his troops accordingly. There are several other examples throughout the book about other moments where Colossus saved lives – including German ones, too.
Third, reading the descriptions of the Colossus team and their exploits, I got the feeling that Bletchley Park was a very unique place in Britain's military history. People were addressed on a first-name basis, and civilians and soldiers worked side by side. Many of the people employed there were just out of high school, if that, and the team leaders had to find motivational ways to keep the place running 24x7. There is a lot to learn from in these sentiments for anyone who manages a team of people.
Finally, there is also an understanding the role of secrecy in an open society. I don't think anyone would argue that Colossus needed to be a secret during wartime. The issue is how it was revealed to the public, and how long it took before the exact details were openly available. Given that the events of the 1940s are just now coming to light, perhaps we need to keep this in mind when we think how the innovations we create during our modern era can find their way into the future public domain.
I highly recommend this book, and hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
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About Me
- David Strom
- David Strom has looked at hundreds of computer products over a more than 20 year career in IT and computer journalism. He was the founding editor-in-chief of Network Computing magazine, and now writes for Baseline, Information Security, Tom's Hardware, and the New York Times.