hitting the wire*

Pilgrim's Regress?

Caught the 7am flight to Joburg today - damn near missed it after not setting my alarm properly - anyone spot a low flying Golf TDI on the R300 today? ;)  Spent most of the flight reviewing a contract and reading tech articles I never get to otherwise.  Sitting next to me were a couple who looked as though they were retired and enjoying life.

Bloke never said a word, but obviously observed.  As we landed just before 9am, he turned to me with "you can knock off now and go home eh?".  Made me reflect on just how hectic life has become with laptops, cell phones, PDA's, WiFi roaming... the office pursues me into the parking garage, then home, then onto the plane...

I'm writing this from a hotel in Sandton, via HSDPA, while having a simultaneous IM chat to a business associate in Cape Town and another in London, all while streaming ClassicFM from the UK and downloading Google Earth's latest version from the US.  At 9pm for Pete's sake!  I should be getting a life.  At least the Shiraz & the Soweto stew from room service are good. ;)

Methinks we should have no-zones.  Places where you get no cell signal, no WiFi, no broadband, and where your laptops and PDAs shut themselves down and refuse to wake up!  I believe there is place a bit like that in Barrydale? LOL.

the trouble with toyi-toyi'ing

We South Africans seem to have a terrible passive aggressive tendency.  "Hell, this sucks -somebody should do something about it!" I hear this often in various forms and in various forums.  But just ask someone to join you in doing something tangible, concrete, significant or practical, that involves commitment on their part and... ppfffff... they deflate and sidle off. 

Most recent: someone in the ISP industry complained on a local forum mailing list about a certain locally based spammer (http://www.epasella.com/) who it seems remains unrepentant and unresponsive to complaints.  A number of people added their voices to the bitching session.  A plan of action which involves a bit of effort to test the ECT Act, and create a precedent by throwing the book at the guy is suggested.  Ah no! - much easier to continue do what we're all doing and hunker down behind our spam filters and let unscrupulous "marketers" (blech!) flood our abundant bandwidth (huh?!) with junk mail.  SEP.  Someone Else's Problem.  OK, so a few hardly souls did later step up to the mark 'offlist' and agreed to take action. If you're prepared to do - let me know.  If you receive spam from a local spammer - I'm keen to know who are the worst offenders out there - tell me!

Most common:  Bash Telkom in each and every forum about prices, crap service and poor broadband.  They are a product of their environment - why blame a monopoly for acting like a monopoly?  Do you blame and elephant for being an elephant?  Ask anyone to help you lobby Government to change the environment Telkom lives in... aish!  SEP.  By the way - if you think it is easy to be a good telco - think again.  I predict there will come a time shortly when Big Bad Telkom looks surprisingly good at what it does.  (Ouch- it hurts to write that!)

Less toyi-toyi and more action.

knight or knave?

One thing that has always got up my nose is the practice of slagging off the competition during a sales or marketing exercise. If you can't sell your product on its own merits and must strengthen your position by denigrating your competitor, I immediately wonder what you're hiding. It often has the opposite effect on a prospect. I certainly hope no Storm sales person does so!

Now Richard Branson is someone I've long admired for his "goetspe" (how do you spell that word?!), his "do it and be damned" approach to business and for how he has built Virgin into a cheeky, sexy, yet successful enterprise. You can't help being drawn to the man.

But Virgin Mobile's positioning on their late entry into the SA market disturbs me. While the local Mobile Network Operators are far from saintly and their profits are probably in excess of the GDP some small African nations, and prices could be lower here, I'm not so sure Virgin are going to be any more chaste in the long run.

Are handset subsidies a rip off? Would we have the kind of penetration of GSM handsets here that we do without it? Do we choose not to upgrade our phones in return for a month to month contract? Strange that Virgin was the one company that failed to pitch at a recent ITWeb round table debate on handset subsidies. I fully expected them to arrive on white chargers brandishing broadswords. Maybe they were off tilting at windmills instead - who knows.

If they succeed in making telecoms in South Africa more affordable and give us a laugh to boot - all strength to them. Do it with cheek and humour by all means, but stick to cheap calls and can the cheap shots - it makes you appear more knave than knight.

Have I got the bull by the udder here?

Texas University dumps Cisco VoIP for open-source Asterisk

When Open Source voice replaces a traditional PBX, it is one thing; when it kicks out a brand-name IP Telephony system... that really is something!

Paul Vecchiatto of ITWeb reckons Chuck Norris was at the root of this, it being Texas Ranger territory an' all. I tend to suspect the penguins from 'Madagascar' in ten-gallon Stetsons and six-guns... ;)

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/091206-von-sam-houston.html

entering the zone.

Sheesh… I’m feeling old! Spent yesterday out in Philippi at a school - Masivuke Primary - we’re hooking them up to Internet as part of our Corporate Social Investment programme. Crawling through ceilings and climbing up and down scaffolding took more out of me than it should have! Too many hours behind a keyboard and screen – time I got a more active life.

I digress though. “OfficeZone” is not a new concept. Neither is VoIP, IP Telephony, Asterisk, etc, but I am really excited about an opportunity we’re exploring with two local Cape Town based companies though.

In the corporate world here in South Africa VoIP is mostly used within the LAN environment for IP Telephony (by a few brave souls who paid a whack for brand name IP PBXs) and outside of the LAN environment as a means of Least Cost Routing – this is where we at Storm have focused. The impact for small and medium enterprises, especially where call volumes are large and the budget for an IP PBX is just not there, has been limited. That is changing.

Asterisk, a Free Open Source Software based IP PBX, is growing in popularity. Originally in the twilight zone haunted by geeks with an aversion to sunlight and an affinity for coke (the fizzy liquid sort!) and pizza, this Linux-powered PBX is putting on a suit and tie and offering to work for very little pay. We’re now seeing large call centres running on Asterisk.

When Storm first started offering VoIP services, there was a fair amount of sceptiscm. “Does this really work?” “What kind of quality can I expect?” “What is it going to cost me?” were some of the questions we were asked. But “what risk am I facing here?” was one unspoken question seldom voiced, but there.

The idea of replacing your trusty(?) old PBX with “something that runs on a PC” is a scary thought to most businessmen. So, Rob Lith of Connection Telecom and I agreed to explore the opportunity of creating a solution where you can migrate painlessly from “the old” to “the new” at very little cost and very little risk. As yet there is no product and we’re doing what I usually refer to as “eating our own dog food” – testing it on ourselves. I’m keen to hear from interested parties – either those who would like to be beta sites or those that might like to play the role of “install and maintain’” partners in areas outside of Cape Town. If you want to know more – download the slides I used at CITI’s ICT conference a few weeks back or drop me an email.

Download risk_free_ipt.PDF (807.5K)

But the kicker, and this is where things get real funky, is being able to set up a cell phone like the Nokia E61 (you can buy them at Vodashop’s countrywide) to become a wireless PBX extension while you’re in the office (the “OfficeZone”) – or at home (the “HomeZone”)! The phone can sense your WiFi Access Point when you come within range, switch over to VoIP over WiFi and register on your Asterisk PBX. Leave the AP zone – it reverts to GSM. How cool is that?

We hope to have something to start inflicting on willing victims by the end of this year, but watch this space for more! ;)

Connection Telecom is one of the leading Asterisk development outfits in the country. Clarotech is a well established, well respected IT infrastructure company. Storm, well we do a bit Voice and Data here and there! ;)

IP rules OK!

I guest-lectured at my "alma mata" (UCT) last week to the Marketing students on Broadband (Download broadband.PDF), having twisted the arm of Janine Carpenter (COO of Quirk) to cover the impact of Broadband on Marketing -  then rambled on too long and left her too little time! - sorry Janine :(.  I was trying to encapsulate why the Internet Protocol has become so pervasive and so important in all our lives.    The following slide I reckon sums it up for me.

The first quantum change came when the 1's and 0's shouldered analog communications aside.  When you're a receiver of information and all you're expecting is 1 or 0, you can make a pretty good guess at what you are meant to be receiving, even if the values you're seeing range between 0 to 1 - (<0.5=0, >0=1).  Can't do that with analog - you have no idea what it should be. Thus ISDN was as revolutionary to telecoms as CD's were to the music industry.  Even though Broadband has eclisped ISDN, IP has built on that change, just as mp3's have built on the move from analog to digital sound.

It is not so much that IP does a better of job of being a wheel in the communications machine, it is just that it is like the flat board that comes with the lego set on which you can build whatever your imagination comes up with.  It is a foundation for multi-anything development.

The lowest common denominator.

fertilising your own grass.

Met with Henk Kleynhans of Skyrove for a cup of hot chocolate today to explore synergies between Storm and Skyrove.   It struck me while he enthused about what he is doing to facilitate the spread of WiFi hotspots and internet access in general, how many different people have pitched me with different business propositions in the last year.  Henk has a great concept, and before I'd left the restaurant-cum-coffee-shop I'd already canvassed a potential user and set up contact with the owner.  But...

I know that one thing that has made us successful as a company in a competitive environment (funny how there is so little competition for basic telco services and infrastructure and yet the ISP market is such that prices have only gone one way - down - since I can recall) it is that we have focussed.  When we've put a simple product offering in the hands of the sales force, with a clear, no-BS message, and kept the operations as uncomplicated as possible, we've done well.  As soon as we've tried to spread ourselves too wide, the energy dilutes and we slow.

The trick is to play to your strengths, know what you are, what you want to be, and how you want to become what you want to be.  I'd love to chase every one of the opportunities that pop up, but we'd be chasing our tails before long.

While many business users will opt for 3G/HSDPA, there seem to be an increasing number of people who work from home, but need cheap, flexible office space.  What better than the local coffee shop, where you can pay as little as R0.35/MB for your internet access, and have coffee on tap and a work surface with ablutions available. 

Will we focus on Skyrove?  I doubt it will become a core product for Storm, but I'm going to put the concept to the test at our local watering hole, and I have no doubt we'll find some value.  Now, if we can bundle Skyrove with every Storm account and make it easy to locate your nearest Skyrove hotspot... methinks this has legs!