Two news reports, within a week or two of each other, cause me both excitement and concern. 

The first, a report by Information Gatekeepers Inc. highlights the recent very rapid increase in sales of “Active Optical Cables” and makes predictions of dramatic future growth.

The second reports that EMCORE Corp., has received a patent award for its Active Optical Cable technology.  US Patent No. 7,494,287 B2 with “…broad claims covers all fibre-optic active cable applications…”.

Of course the industry is not short of reports that claim exponential future growth for almost every conceivable technology.   In the past most of these seem to have been based on minimal actual data and maximal imagination.  However, this time the claims seem credible.

The concept of an “Active Optical Cable” is so simple it is almost trivial.  You integrate optical transceivers into the ends of an optical cable and provide standard electronic interfaces to connect to user equipment.  With recent improvements in optical transceivers this has become relatively easy.  At very high speeds (above 10 Gbps) Copper cables are problematic even in short distance applications.  Fibre is lighter, easier, offers very greatly extended distances and solves the problems associated with “ground loops”.  Most existing equipment has copper interfaces built into it so an AOC can just “plug-in” without change to existing equipment.

Initially applications are for relatively short-distances (a few 10’s of metres) such as interconnection of high-performance computers, servers, routers etc. within a central computer complex.  Such high-performance complexes are no longer the sole preserve of the pure R&D and scientific world but are increasingly being adopted by businesses for applications such as simulation, modelling and computer-aided design.  However, one supplier is reported to be targeting longer-distance applications and is reported to have announced AOC’s of up to 3km in length.  Of course, you don’t really want to “pull” a cable that has bulky integrated equipment on its ends through a long and convoluted cable-way either.  Importantly, AOC’s can mitigate the reluctance of many users to install fibre.  To many users fibre seems difficult to use and if familiar copper will do the job then why change?

Someone designing an AOC can design the whole link (transceivers, fibre, connectors etc) to optimise its cost/performance without needing to be constrained by “industry standards” or what other suppliers are doing - all you have to do is conform to the electronic interfaces at the cable ends. This should encourage rapid innovation and development. A potential disadvantage is that centralised Network Management systems do not get access to detailed performance and management information (error rates etc.) as seen on the optical segment of the link.  At the distances involved this may not matter.

The worrying part is the “broad claim” of a patent.  If this patent is for the detail of a particular implementation then it should be applauded.  If it is for the overall concept then we have yet another example of the patenting of a very obvious generic principle.  The principle of replacing an “electronic” link with something else even by use of devices integrated within the cable has been in wide use for many years.  I have not been able to find sufficient detail to decide.  But it’s a worry.

Of course the AOC market may well have a limited lifetime.  When computer-room equipment becomes routinely available with optical interfaces built-in then advantage of AOC’s will vanish.  In the meantime which may well be 5 or more years there seems to be a market there.     

This week while on a business trip to China I had some time for shopping on Saturday in Shanghai’s Huaihai Road. It is one of the major places to go to for the Chinese who are looking for brands and good quality. Prices here are about 1/4 to 1/2 of what you would have to pay in Europe I think, whereas high-end brands are actually even more expensive. Laptop computers, for example, are about the same price or slightly more expensive compared to what they would cost from an online store in the US.

The department stores were packed and, in contrast to 12 years ago when I first walked along this road, people are actually buying and not just looking. Discounts were offered everywhere and this is done slightly differently here. It goes like this: on every purchase exceeding e.g. 200 Yuan you get a 100 Yuan discount. I was told that not long ago one department store here had offered a 50% discount, leading to such strong demand that the crowd had burst through the shop window and the police had needed to come to the rescue.

Seeing this action here, I think there is a good chance that China is on its way to replacing the US as the world’s number one consumer country. No idea if this is also the official government strategy, but whether planned or not it seems to be happening. That’s at least my take from this Saturday afternoon’s stroll along Huaihai Road. BTW, I also had a visit to a movie theater to see the great movie Slumdog Millionaire. The Chinese asked me if it still looks like that in India today; sadly, it is the case. Even worse, this happens in a country proud of their computer science people and spending money on flying to the outer space, but not taking care of millions of people living on garbage hills. In comparison, China shows much more responsibility and humanity I think than India, which is sad, and one of the reasons I have not yet been attracted to visit India.

It is in general better to talk about the good things and best practices rather than the bad ones. This holds true even if one can often learn more from the bad or the things that went wrong.

But today I am sitting for the second time this week at CDG airport in Paris, and using the Wifi login from Hub Telecom. They seem to have a sort of monopoly here, as I could not find other service providers to use - in public areas, at least. Lucky for them, as I would certainly have dropped them by now and never, ever used them again in my life. Reason for this is that it took me a totally frustrating 30 mins to figure out how to log in using their entirely user-unfriendly website. The screenshot below shows you the starting screen; now, guess which button you have to press to be able to sign on using your credit card?

The answer is: you need to click on the red bar that looks like a normal menu bar. The fact that they then switch from English back to French again was not a problem for me, but I would guess that many non-French speakers dropped it there and then, despite being the “smart” ones who managed to actually clear the first hurdle. Particularly as they made the biggest button on the credit card form page the “Annulation” (Cancel) button all in red. Even more of a problem for me was that they had the form field for the bank card number that you find on the back of the credit card also sort of hidden on the page, so that I got stuck there for a couple of minutes, too!

The German consumer test magazine Stiftung Warentest looked at 16 anti virus software packages and compared PC load, help functions, features and price with each other. The top three were from GData, BitDefender and F-Secure. Looked at the list from the bottom the worst are from CA, Panda and Agnitum. That CA is the last of all the tested programs is due to its high toll on PC performance, lack of help functions and this for the highest price of all tested programs. Three free programs were tested as well and landed in the middle and these were from AVG, Avira and Alvil. I personally would have done this test differently though. Strong protection is key, but then I also find it very important to not put too high load on the CPU. I had installed programs in the past that when they updated the virus library or when they checked on e-mails or starting up programs took the full CPU power and I could not work for a while anymore. I find this entirely unacceptable. Looks like the winner GData falls into that category although I have not personally used it so don’t know it first hand. What the test also looked at were help features. This seems not that important to me though either. What should be much higher on the list is a fully automated while safe operation. You don’t really work with a virus scanner but expect it to do its job well and does this in the background and maybe only informs you of certain actions it does. Not sure how the results of this test would have looked like then, but I guess GData would not have been on top then anymore. I am currently using Kaspersky and it does fulfill all of my criteria extremely well (no CPU stress, super safe, reports occasionally on actions it does so you can or also cannot change it) but landed only on place 4 of this test. So I recommend to not take this test too serious but decide for yourself what is important for you.

2009 will be the year where more and more businesses take a serious look at how they can make use of the intelligence found in social media platforms. Now salesforce.com, the leading online CRM software, is also looking at Twitter, and has included it into their Service Cloud offering, after also doing this for Facebook. Missing from the list so far are LinkedIn and XING, but as these professional contact lists will include more features to network (e.g.  what you are working on) this will change, I think.

There are still many companies out there who believe that with sending out a few press releases monthly to a list of journalists, analysts etc. would be money spend wisely. But let’s face the truth: it is not.

I know of not one single journalist nor analyst in the ICT industry who reads daily dozens of press releases from companies. So if you or your PR agency still keeps sending it to them then you keep wasting your time and money. If you still think you need to send out press releases to the world then at least use an online service such as one from the list below. This will cost practically nothing, which is not surprising as the service they offer is done with the click of a return button once you have been set up in their system.

Now you might ask, “OK, what would be a better way to get attention?” The only way to start is to create outstanding, clearly differentiating content with whatever market/sales tool you use: website, whitepapers, customer success stories, newsletters, magazine articles, blog content etc. Only if you do that will you be able to get attention, have people read what you have to say and most importantly come back to you whenever they need advice in your product market. You will have managed then to become a thought leader in your industry, which is the starting point for any good public relations. And once again, this is not a press release translated and distributed internationally in all kinds of local languages; that even if you hand-deliver it to them, they won’t do anything with it. And lastly, please measure the success of any PR campaign done in real numbers which is e.g. people coming to your website, to your blog, downloads of info material etc. and it is not number of times shown in magazines or news portals (news clippings) but number of times someone from your target group actually reads it. This can be measured as well and you have to do so if you want to know what is going on.

- prweb.com, 80-360 USD
- prnewsdistribution.com, 130 USD
- wiredprnews.com, 10 USD for Small Office Business Release
- prnewschannel.com, 150 USD
- prfree.com, free
- pravenue.com, free
- prurgent.com, free

Have you ever tried to explain to someone what a Wiki is? If so you probably noticed that this can be difficult depending also on the person’s IT know-how. So here is a presentation that does that quite well for IT guys and the following video does it for non-IT people too:

Yesterday comScore published that from Jan. 2008 to Jan. 2009 the number of people accessing the web using mobiles doubled to 63 million per day in the U.S.

If you think that this was mainly done using smart phones then you are wrong: 70% are still using “ordinary” mobiles.

The most popular applications you can see below with news and information access the number one and with social networking or blog sites having the highest growth rate and landing on second place already overall.

I think this is very exciting news for everyone involved in the mobile data business.

This week Google announced Google Voice or at least prepared the public that it is coming soon as the service right now is only available for existing Grand Central users. Grand Central was acquired by Google in 2007.

Most comments in blogs and news portals missed to report about the potential that lies in Google Voice though.  So far practically all of Google’s apps lacked the potential to create any - sizable - income stream next to their search ad business but I think Google Voice could actually be the base for lots of additional business - if they want to use it that way. We are talking here about unifying voice and data and controlling both for the masses. The idea is not new and there are many business solutions available already that offer this but no mass market one that I would know of. If I would be a company in one of the following areas I would be nervous right now: SMS web clients, voice mail, VoIP (ala Skype), IP video conferencing. These are the obvious ones. But what about these here: ringtone downloads, mobile app downloads or e.g. any voice recognition enabled applications? And of course the Google mobile phone platform Android will profit from it too it can be assumed.

Google Voice could become the platform for all that, I don’t see why not. If there is anything that Google knows best then it is scalability so that won’t be an issue. Of course operators - mostly - don’t like Google and here is the challenge for them. Maybe at the end it will be the same as with all their other new things though. They become irrelevant by themself and serve only one purpose: to help bind more folks to Google search. In that case noone has to become nervous but simply better and maybe cheaper too. And if not? Well then it is up to everyone to think how much do we want Google to know about what we do on the web and with our phones.