I just returned from OMD (Online Marketing Düsseldorf), which great, insightful and filled with very productive meetings. Great people and a great event if you are doing anything in the field. I also met Nico and had a great chat with him before and especially at the OMD-Party; Motto: Online geht das (Online it works). You can see me smiling at him and raising a beer here. Lots more photos from the event can be found here. Looking forward to next year.
Monthly Archives: September 2004
Bloglines Web Services
Mark Fletcher just posted about Bloglines Web Services, a new system from Bloglines which will be fully announced with a press release tomorrow, but Mark could not hold out and wait any longer, so there goes the announcement and it’s something that will likely help remove a problem with RSS that some have started to see.
The problem comes from the fact that RSS Readers will query a feed several times a day and can potentially create huge Bandwidth need on the side of the publisher. Bloglines Web Services help soften that problem because they will offer feeds directly through a RESTful API. Through the API Bloglines acts as a RSS cache and also helps feedreaders to only query well-formed RSS 2.0 or OPML. The coolest bit though is why I really use Bloglines. It allows me to read my feeds whereever I am and only have unread feeds, independent on where I read the other ones, on the next computer. Through the API, desktop readers can now sync via several computers! Congratulations on the move Mark and congratulations to the entire team! On to downloading Feeddemon to try this out 
Update: In Feeddemon you simply subscribe to http://rpc.bloglines.com/listsubs , then enter your username and password and you are good to go. It doesn’t seem to sync with my online subscription just yet, but I might not have the beta version that Mark talks about.
Update 2: Feeddemon seems to ignore the categories that Bloglines sends over. These should become channels.
This is getting serious
A new conglomerate is in the building at the moment. This is getting serious. Joi just announced his investment into Flickr. I presume Loic will be next. Then between them they will have close ties to Six Apart (ok, very close there 
), Technorati, Linked In, Flickr, Creative Commons and Socialtext. .. I actually don’t know what else there is but it’s getting interesting. I somehow want a part in that
Quasi Philosophical
Scot posted about the wonderful quote by Donald Rumsfeld and the making of the music for it. Check it out: The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld. Very cool!
Skype and VoIP
TJ alerted me in this post to the fact that I might be underestimating Skype. This comes in relation to my last post on the subject. I will gladly stand corrected, but for now, I am just not sure. Of course Skype is very powerful, I do not doubt that, but it is not a standard. I might not know enough about the Skype internals to really bring a final qualifying verdict, but from what I know now, it is not SIP and therefore not the standard the world is moving to.
I know about the Skype bit of the PocketPC, I am sure they will do a Symbian Version at least when Nokia’s new 9500 Communicator comes out with WiFi. There are real opportunities for Skype, no problem with that. The real problem is that there are a lot of VoIP providers (I have started a list of them here for Germany) and that you will have tons of phones for that, tons of client software, tons of innovation we haven’t thought of yet. Think of a least cost router that has 20 different VoIP accounts in different countries and routes your calls always via the local service for cheapest rates. There is lots of stuff there and stuff that Skype cannot compete with because it is a closed system.
Sure, Skype will be big, but that’s not really the point. The other stuff will be bigger. And I already have some problems with Skype, the biggest one that it doesn’t keep my contact list on the server. I need to add my contacts again and again and again and I do have different PCs.
Organizing for Innovation: Understanding Innovation
Organizations need to innovate. But how do you manage and develop innovation? You can do radical and incremental innovation. Radical is often in impact and is mostly made up of lots of incremental steps though and then they will likely need further incremental steps to blossom and sometimes they depend on the right environment to work out. Another thing is to use technological fusion to bolt different things together to a new whole. Product and service innovation will later need a lot of enhancements to flourish. Process improvements often reduce costs and improve performance.
It’s going too far
As I am summarizing my MBA Course on my blog, I get some interesting feedback from time to time. Now the feedback is turning into a tiny, but weird, discussion. I have been getting tons of comments on a post from 2003 entitled Analyzing the Industry Environment. People kind of ask me if I can send them a Porter 5 Forces Analysis for the hotel industry or the airline industry for example. Around the middle of the comments you will see a post from myself saying that I can’t do that. The comments continue. The fun starts at the last two comments (at this time). On September 18th, David asked if I had a Porter’s 5 Forces of the airline industry for him. Now Steve replied that he hopes that David gets “done for plaigerism” (I think he means caught for plagiarism.) and that he will report him to his tutor. Boy oh boy, I am starting to be a trouble maker with the OUBS Blog.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Episodes Available Online
I just
read on Slashdot that the Radio Show of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy can be found online. You can choose Real or WMP. Very cool!
“You Don’t Know Jack About VoIP”
That’s the title: ACM Queue – You Don’t Know Jack About VoIP – The Communications they are a-changin’.
And it’s a very good article I have to admit. It gives a great explanation of ENUM for example:
ENUM. The best-understood and most widely deployed name resolution system today is the DNS (domain name system). In the DNS, names are written from right to left, with the most general part of the address on the right, and more specific names written to the left (e.g., http://www.ietf.org). In the PSTN, telephone numbers are written from left to right, with the most general part of the number written on the left and the more specific toward the right (e.g., 1.212.543.6789). ENUM calls for telephone numbers to be written DNS-style, rooted at the domain e164.arpa. So, 1.212.543.6789 becomes 9.8.7.6.3.4.5.2.1.2.1.e164.arpa. Interestingly, each digit is treated as a subdomain. This allows ENUM to ignore the nuances of country codes, city codes, etc. that vary broadly worldwide. When this address is queried, the DNS can return a specific IP address corresponding to the telephone number, or it can return a rule for rewriting the original number into some other form. For example, rules can be returned to rewrite 1.212.543.6789 as sip:36789@nyc-gw.example.net, sip:caryfitz@service-provider.com. ENUM offers the possibility to reuse the worldwide DNS for VoIP. ENUM is a standard set by the IETF as RFC3761.
The cool thing about this is that you can publish your phone number, manage where you are at, and when an ENUM capable device calls, then it is directly routed to the right phone. Add location based services to that, and you might get some cool stuff.
In Germany you can go to Portunity and order for free (currently) a place for your phone forwarding. You can then check up on your ENUM entry at enum-center.de.
