Google made a move recently that redefines the company as a provider of voice telephony services. It enabled users of its Gmail online email service to call telephones directly from within their email inbox.

Gmail already featured PC-to-PC calling thanks to the integration of voice and video chat into the service, but this is the first time that the service has integrated calls to telephone numbers. Moreover, it has even made calls anywhere within the US and Canada free for at least the rest of the year, and calls to other countries are available to users at low rates.

This is more of a significant breakthrough than people may have at first realised. There have been various types of player in the world of IP telephony. Vendors of traditional PBX equipment have worked hard to integrate their old legacy devices with new, IP-based telephony equipment. Other companies, which come from an open computing background, have produced their own IP-based telephony ecosystems from the ground up, usually incorporating unified messaging elements that enable them to serve a whole range of customer communications needs. These companies are finding it relatively easy to expand their services into online video communication, as well.

But the Googles and the Skypes (which now has tens of millions of downloads on smartphones) represent yet another generation of IP telephony players, that could radically change the business communications landscape. These players require no hardware, aside from the PC or smartphone that a person is using, an Internet connection, and – optionally – a good audio headset. Google has such command over its users’ information, and publicly accessible data in general, that it can create exciting new communications experiences. Being able to call a business contact directly from email can make business users incredibly productive, encouraging them to get tasks done quickly and efficiently as soon as they arise.

It is easy to see how this telephony capability could be integrated into other services, such as Google Maps and even Google Docs, for example. As soon as this makes it into the mobile space, and users find themselves able to call email contact directly from their phone via 3G data, a whole new world will open up.

We are shifting from an environment in which hardware-centric vendors embrace IP telephony, to one in which software and online services vendors lead the charge, with hardware as little more than an afterthought. No wonder, then, that users placed more than 1 million calls from their Gmail screens in the first 24 hours of launch.

How soon this works its way up from a consumer-focused solution to something more appropriate for business users remains to be seen, but Google has committed to roll this out to Google Apps users soon, many of whom are small business users. Could this be the start of something significant for the enterprise, as larger companies begin to embrace cloud-based services?

In a weird echo from Friday’s post, Point-Topic has confirmed that there are now half a billion fixed broadband lines worldwide. Not that this is any surprise – this landmark has been expected for some time now, and in any case, the exact figure that Point-Topic has from the end of June 2010 is 498 million. It extrapolates that with 1 million new lines a week, this point will have been hit in the third week of July.

What is noteworthy though is the speed that these lines have been added. At the end of the last century, there were only 1.3 million broadband lines around. Most of these were in North America and much of the rest of the world had to make do with modems and ISDN if they were lucky. Remind yourselves of the joys of modem technology with this little trip down memory lane!

Just over 10 years later, the total figure is now north of 500 million. The market spark was really provided by the commercialisation of DSL technology which helped operators use their existing infrastructure – even if many appeared reluctant at the time! China is now the biggest market for broadband and fiber is also starting to make some serious inroads. In fact here at Futurity Towers we have recently had fibre installed and are pretty impressed so far.

So to go back to Friday’s post. To get the next half-a-billion subscribers, we are really going to see prices reduced in emerging markets, so that they can also enjoy the undoubted benefits that broadband brings.

Although shocking, it’s not surprising that a recent study from Ovum has shown that broadband costs in emerging markets remain punishingly high. For example in Nigeria broadband costs were around $2,000 per year, compared to an average per-capita GDP rate of just over $1,000. South Africa had the highest broadband costs of Ovum’s sample, with the annual costs of some services clocking in at a staggering $5,000 per year – and its average GDP per capita is under $6000. According to Ovum – this is three times as high as the rest of the world. Compare this to the UK, where my home broadband costs less than $400 per year.

This cost disparity needs to be addressed, and hopefully will be a topic covered in this week’s Broadband Commission for Digital Development meeting in New York. They are producing a report, which will be available shortly – I’ll report back when I’ve read it.

An interesting article in the latest McKinsey Quarterly has identified 10 technology-enabled business trends that it says is reshaping enterprises worldwide. Many of the trends are close to our heart at Orange Business Live! and the article follows on from a similar piece from McKinsey written two-and-a-half years ago. The 10 technology trends it has identified are:

• Distributed co-creation moves into the mainstream: using the web to bring communities of interest together and collaborate for product development, marketing or customer support. This trend has grown out of the success of initiatives such as Open Source software development andWikipedia;

• Making the network the organization: opening the borders of the enterprise or functional groups to enable wider collaboration towards common goals. Other networks include online labor markets such as Mechanical Turk or advertising contest services such asZoopa;

• Collaboration at scale: the increasing importance of collaboration technology and tools to help knowledge workers increase their efficiency and boost overall “organizational capital”;

• The growing ‘Internet of Things’: we cover this topic regularly in the blog – most recently in an interview with Geoffrey Zbinden from Orange. It is where objects are equipped with sensors and communication capability and can make processes more efficient or create new business models;

• Experimentation and big data: with the amount of data captured and processed by enterprises ever increasing there is a potential to glean business intelligence and redesign business processes on the fly or keep on top of rapidly changing market trends;

• Wiring for a sustainable world: this trend refers to the continuing importance of green IT and the push towards IT for green, which has been extensively covered by Orange blogger Axel Haentjens, for example here;

• Imagining anything as a service: there’s little doubt that cloud computing is a major trend in enterprise computing and software as a service and infrastructure as a service have entered the general lexicon. Network service providers have been tipped as future leaders here by analysts Ovum as I wrote last week in the blog;

• The age of the multisided business model: this refers to new business models that don’t fit into the neat B2B or B2C categories, such as the “freemium” model, where some customers get free services supported by those who pay a premium for special use – Flickr is an example of this;

• Innovating from the bottom of the pyramid: the increasing importance of innovation in developing markets, such as rural Africa, where mobile banking is taking hold in a big way. Again covered in Live!;

• Producing public good on the grid: the final trend is the role of technology in imporving public service, such as e-Government or even initiative such as FixMyStreet.com, where citizens can report problems such as flytipping.

This article first appeared in Orange Business Live! http://blogs.orange-business.com/live/2010/09/mckinsey-indentifies-collaboration-internet-of-things-and-cloud-as-key-business-technology-trends.html

Generally these days, when we think of virtualisation, we think of it in the context of IT infrastructure. But the notion of virtualisation goes far beyond servers and storage, and has profound cultural and economic ramifications. We’re becoming increasingly disassociated from our physical environments, and in many cases, I don’t think we realise it.

The symptoms of this disassociation can be very explicit. Most recently, two Korean parents were sentenced after letting their baby daughter starve to death while they busied themselves playing online games. They neglected the real world, while immersing themselves in a virtual one.

Most discussions of those who live too much online focus on the obvious issues: gaming addition, a preoccupation with cybersex, or an unhealthy obsession with Facebook. It’s easy to point out that many of us speak to more people on Facebook in a day than we speak to in real life. All of these are well-made points, but they’re only part of a broader issue.

The pervasive nature of virtualisation also affects our economy and society in broader ways. Our supply chains are so virtual that we can switch suppliers thousands of milles away in an instant. The virtualisation of our housing by interpreting it in terms of credit default swaps led us to forget how much they were really worth, and when someone realised that, it tanked the economy.

Tech can bring us wonderful benefits. It enables me to speak to my children and see and hear them, even when I am in a different city. I can pick the brains of a large community of extremely smart people, without leaving my chair. And every time I turn on my Mac, I’m bathed in new ideas. It’s the most intellectually stimulating place on the planet.

But in acknowledging all that, we must also acknowledge the downsides. Virtualisation involves the abstraction of the logical from the physical. In that sense, it naturally tends to alienate us from our physical environments, and with that, comes a sense that we have forgotten how to live in the moment. I worry that younger generations in particular, as plugged-in as they are, will lose this.

Eventually I think the pendulum will swing back to a point where we rediscover the value of the physical. But in the meantime, I hope that in the meantime, an over-reliance on technology at the expense of engagement with our environment won’t leave us spiritually bankrupt.

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Carrier Ethernet is a continuing hot topic in networks as it sweeps all before it. However, there is often some confusion about what it all means and how it is distinguished from traditional Ethernet. This article from Jim Theodoras, Chair of the Carrier Ethernet Subcommittee, Ethernet Alliance explains the some of the key issues about the Carrier Ethernet. His key points include:

• Carrier Ethernet has evolved to specifically carry disparate traffic from different subscribers. Each subscriber’s particular packets are therefore packaged up and transported undisturbed from one location to another, this provides traffic segregation and security;
• The first attempts to combine multiple subscribers Ethernet packets ran into all sorts of trouble because of inconsistent use of LAN addressing between different subscribers, in other words it was hard to identify who was what;
• Standardisation of hierarchical MAC addressing was required so that carriers could have their own addressing schemes, which were separate from their subscribers’
• Virtual LAN (VLAN) tagging allowed carriers to identify and separate traffic from different LANs. This has now expanded to allow double tagging to meet the needs of carriers for video traffic, etc.;
• Quality of service (QoS) is a key area of development. Simply marking a packet as a priority is not enough and Hierarchical QOS is helping carriers identify latency-sensitive traffic amongst a deluge of non-critical packets.

We’ve just finished a interesting assignment covering Orange Business Services’ annual customer event Orange Business Live! as part of a team of internal and external bloggers from France, UK and Belgium. The idea of the coverage was to show that interesting things happen at shows like this by publicising it to the outside world in real time. Stories,photos and videos were published to the Orange Business Live! blog and to the Orange Business posterous page. I wrote a round up of some of the stories that the bloggers wrote in this post and the social media presence was so successful that the new Orange Business Services CEO Vivek Badrinath came and checked us out himself.

Should CIOs blog? Should they tweet, or otherwise engage with social media? It is a question that IT executives should increasingly ask themselves, as they attempt to fight their corner within organisations that can be sceptical about IT as a function.

Blogging, once a pastime for celebrity followers, cookery buffs, and movie fans, has increasingly become a corporate activity as companies understand and embrace the appeal of social media. It can be used as a way to encourage conversations between executives and others in the industry, and with customers. It can be used as a platform to hammer home a particular message, or to promote a particular category of product. For CIOs, who in many cases are managing a transition for the IT function within their companies, it can be a useful way to make themselves heard. It is a pursuit followed by several high-profile CIOs, including Vivek Kundra, the CIO for the US Federal government.

For years now, IT departments have been considered a cost centre within organisations. IT executives constantly have had to battle boards that are unwilling to spend money on what they see as a cash drain on the organisation. However, in the last couple of years, some companies have begun maturing to the point where they see IT as a potential centre for revenue. The savvy CIO understands this transition, and the associated requirement for a more strategic conversation between the IT function and others in the business. If organisations can be persuaded to view IT strategically – as a business partner which can help to drive growth in new and interesting directions – then CIOs can manoeuvre themselves and their departments into a more advantageous position.

A blog is one way to help demonstrate thought leadership both within an organisation and further afield. It also helps to promote a CIO personally as a strategic thinker who can be relied upon for a visionary approach. Here are our top tips to help new CIO bloggers to make their mark:

Break new ground

There are plenty of blogs that say nothing. An online platform for discussion that simply spouts conventional wisdom is almost worse than no blog at all, because it casts the author in the role of follower, rather than leader. Find something new to say, and say it in an engaging and entertaining way.

Find a cause

One way to demonstrate a visionary approach and develop a distinct personal voice is by embracing a subject as yours, and using your blog as online platform to help win over others in the industry. Think about broad topics, such as accountability, service culture, or operational security – something that will identify you as a pioneer with a passion.

Market your blog

Develop reciprocal links. Twitter your blog, and use the blog to expand on some of your Tweets. Comment on other peoples’ blogs and add value to the conversation, rather than blatantly using others’ comment sections as a means of promoting your own outlet. It is also a good idea to promote your blog in areas that will attract like-minded people. User group web sites and discussion boards might be a good example. Measuring and monitoring is part of a good marketing strategy. Services such as PostRank Analytics provide analytics services that can help you to monitor the coverage that your blog posts are getting across various social media services.

Blog short, and blog often

Short, snappy posts of a few paragraphs are better than infrequent, longer posts. Busy readers like smart, informative content that they can digest easily, but they also like to keep coming back for more. Infrequent blogs make you seem inconsistent, and will discourage people from subscribing.

Check in with HR

You don’t need to rock the boat to make some interesting waves. Even bloggers that do not promote themselves as employees of their particular company can be subject to disciplinary action if they overstep the mark and say things that may bring their employer into disrepute. It is therefore imperative that bloggers capitalising on their executive position within a particular company should ensure that what they are saying does not cause any conflict with that company’s message. It would be wise to check in with human resources and with other board members to get the go-ahead to blog as an executive within your organisation

Make your blog last longer than your job

Your vision should outlast your tenure at any one company, and so should your blog. Use a personal URL wherever possible, so that you can take your online location and your blogging history with you where ever you end up. Phil Windley started blogging when he was the CIO for the State of Utah, for example, but has since maintained it while in multiple positions and roles in the tech industry.

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It isn’t often that a technology company breathes out the anger and breathes in the love, but that’s exactly what Adobe did – at least on the surface – with Apple the other week. The firm ran an ad on the popular online blog Engadget, along with a statement [PDF] in the Wall Street Journal, telling the world just how much it ‘hearts’ those piloting the Cupertino Death Star. What on earth inspired it to do that?

 The underlying text gives us some insights.

What we don’t love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it and what you experience on the web.

Oh dear.

In case you haven’t been following, Adobe is upset at Apple for not supporting its Flash multimedia technology on its latest device, the iPad.

 The iPad is the most sought-after tablet since Moses came down the mountain with a present from the Big Guy.

Actually, we could run for quite a while with this analogy. Steve Jobs is something of a god-like figure at Apple. Back in 1985, Jobs resigned in what amounted to a corporate crucifixion, after the board ousted him from the company. 

Then, in 1997, in a kind of second coming, Apple bought him back to revitalise the company, and he did it in style. He resurrected Apple from a firm with a confusing plethora of mediocre products to one with a pure, piercing design vision. He took the firm from losses of roughly $1bn in 1997 to profits of over $8bn on revenues of $43bn last year. No wonder the world listens to him, especially when he makes the odd infrequent posting on the Apple web site, such us his Thoughts on Flash (aka the Book of Jobs, chapter 1, verse 1).

Jobs explains in that post why Apple won’t allow Flash on the iPad or the iPhone. In short, he says that it isn’t open, that HTML 5 (the alternative, as-yet unratified standard that Apple has adopted) supports the majority of web-based video, that Flash is woefully insecure, that it drains battery life, and that it doesn’t support the touch-based interface of which Apple has become so proud. All of this is true. In particular, the reliability and security issues of the Flash player are well documented, and there have been several zero-day security flaws within Adobe’s Flash player in the past year.

The problem for Adobe is that the iPad is a very significant product. We were sceptical when it first appeared. It didn’t support Flash, which still litters large numbers of web sites. It didn’t have a camera. There was no multi-tasking. It seemed, in short, like an iPod Touch on steroids. Then, we got to play with one. 

It’s a more significant product than we thought. The large format screen, combined with the instant-on functionality, and the ability to point and swipe using the multi-touch interface, creates a new computing experience. It separates the productive mode of computing – the mode where you write, as I am now, or create a spreadsheet, or design a graphic – from the consumptive mode. The latter is the mode where you absorb information from the web and interact with applications and web sites without trying to crank out work.

 The iPad recasts this consumptive model of interacting with the web and with local applications as a ‘sit back’ experience, rather than a ‘sit forward’ one.

The difference between the two shouldn’t be underestimated. Until now, we have consumed content online in a ‘sit forward’ model that puts us at odds with the device we’re using. Perching ourselves on a chair, or balancing a notebook on our lap on the sofa and fumbling with a mouse or trackpad isn’t the ideal way to surf the web and watch video. But holding something like an electronic notepad in the crook of your arm while lounging in an armchair and pointing directly at the screen with your finger is very conducive.

 Marry that experience with the native Cocoa software framework in OS X, and you get some stunning results, particularly when creating applications to present magazines and newspapers.

Publications such as Time, Vanity Fair, the Financial Times and Wired are already offering their publications as Cocoa-based applications for the iPad, and they change the reading experience dramatically enough to make the hardware platform an important development.

The iPad isn’t perfect, but it’s a stunning start, especially considering the largely ineffectual attempt that Microsoft made with tablet computing in 2002. And it’s the start of a new model for consuming content that could represent a ray of hope for the ailing print publishing sector. For publishers, the chance to redefine interfaces for the consumption of information from the ground up is a liberating experience. It could represent the beginning a swing back toward quality in content that the online world has needed for a while. Citizen journalism and crowdsourcing most definitely have their place, but since Web 2.0 first appeared, we have largely ignored the curatorial element that used to define quality in information. The iPad and other products that will undoubtedly follow might just kindle its resurgence.

That’s why Adobe should be worried. Flash was supposed to be the presentation technology that allowed content publishers to communicate with audiences in new and exciting ways. The problem is that the hardware and operating system platform is an intimate part of that communication. Unluckily for Adobe, the hardware and operating system company that finally got it right is an old partner that grew away from it over the years, to the point where it doesn’t respect Adobe’s key web multimedia product and doesn’t want the code in its back yard.

For all these reasons, Adobe stands at a crucial juncture in its history. Fanboy adulation aside, the iPad is hugely significant. And with Apple not on its side, Adobe will need all the friends that it can get.

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