Becoming more location-aware

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With the news that earlier this month the Air Force launched a new GPS satellite that can resolve your location down to a few feet, a growing number of location-based services are getting lots of attention for their ability to create new social opportunities. Just the other day I met up with an acquaintance at a local grocery store: he was updating his status on Foursquare as I was checking to see who else I knew on the service was in the store. I looked around and said hello, and we both went about our business, back to interacting with our iPhones.

While Foursquare.com is the most popular, there are numerous other services including Yelp.com, Google’s Latitude, Whrrl.com, Loopt.com, Brightkite.com, and Gowalla.com. There is even a site called checkinmania.com that will track updates on three of these sites and mash them up on a Google map together. These services all work in a similar fashion: you download the app to your smartphone or use an ordinary Web browser to indicate your current location. The smartphone apps can make use of the built-in GPS to determine where you are and present you with a list of potential businesses nearby. You claim one of these as your current location (or create a new listing) and the app notifies all your contacts where you are. The downside is that you need to create a new network of contacts for each service, although some of them can leverage your existing Twitter or Facebook address list. Users get awarded points for frequent check-ins and get to display that they are “mayors” of places that they frequent. (For some odd reason, I am the mayor a drug store near my sister’s apartment in New York City. Go figure.)

But apart from providing new opportunities for stalkers and thieves (pleaserobme.com is one notable site that used to list homes that were unoccupied based on the occupant’s status messages), what can IT managers learn from these apps?

First, if you are going to get involved with these services, decide early on which one you are recommending, if you are indeed going to recommend any, for your user base to get behind. Each service has its own network and can’t share information elsewhere, other than on Twitter or Facebook. The Wall Street Journal now has an icon where readers can click on an “add to Foursquare” button similar to the numerous “ShareThis” sites.

Second, understand the privacy issues that you create if your employees start using these services frequently. Should you be able to monitor someone’s whereabouts during off hours? What if they are supposed to be a business trip to Boise, but are really having a soiree in Boston? Do the usage of these apps fall under the responsibility of the human resources, legal, or IT departments? Certainly, you should take a look at your existing privacy policies and make sure you are covered. An article that tackles the larger issues (think EZPass toll collection devices and red light cameras) can be found on the Electronic Frontier’s web site here.

Next, if you don’t have any corporate policy with what employees link to their Facebook and Twitter accounts, even their private accounts, now is the time to give this issue more thought. Should your people be permitted or prohibited to tie these location services into their status messages? Should you care that some of the status messages are not suitable for the workplace?

If you have a retail business with an actual physical address, these location services have become new ways to attract customers. You can use the location services to publish limited time discounts or other offers for frequent visitors. Many Bay Area restaurants are doing this, for example, (and even a few here in St. Louis) and the entry cost is minimal. Some consumer product companies are beginning to pitch to Foursquare mayors as the influencers of their particular locations. Writing for a blog seems like so yesterday. And I have written about Aisle411, a startup company that is going very location specific by allowing consumers to find the specific aisle in a big box store that they are in.

Finally, these services can represent yet another tool in the arsenal of digital background checks that hiring managers can use to research your past. That means you might want to reconsider whether or not to post that you are doing shots night after night at the local bar, or even that you are at the local bar night after night.

Vonage softphone for Mac

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If you use Vonage, and you want to be able to make calls from your PC instead of an ordinary telephone, you need what is called a “softphone” client, a piece of software that connects to your Vonage account and dials into the public phone network. You will also need to upgrade your Vonage account with a $10 a month optional softphone feature.

The Windows softphone works reasonably well, but the Mac version is the pits. Over the past couple of months, I have tried a variety of other clients, finally settling on the is-phone Portable version. In theory, any SIP-phone should work, but you’ll need some combination of parameters and configuration help files are very sparse when it comes to setting things up with Vonage. Here is a screen grab that shows you how I did it. Note, you have to use the softphone password which is different than your Vonage account password, and there are some other special settings too.

Computerworld: Six annoying router problems

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These days, having access to wireless broadband is an absolute necessity for home offices and small businesses. And after more than a decade of innovations, you would think that the standard wireless gateway/router would be a picture-perfect product by now. Alas, no. While many routers offer good features, most still come with flaws that can make life a lot harder, such as confounding setups or limited security.

What follows are six router problems that, quite frankly, I find the most annoying. I looked for possible solutions, and while I didn’t find one router that addressed all my concerns, I did discover features — and routers — that could make things a lot easier. Read my article in Computerworld here.

Strom’s cable Internet odyssey

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How many cable guys does it take to provide me with Internet service? It sounds like the beginning of a “lightbulb” joke, but this question is pretty real for me. Turns out to be somewhere north of a dozen.

I moved into my new office two weeks ago, but it took until yesterday to get the Internet turned on there. Turns out a combination of factors, aided by some bizarre complications from Charter, my cable supplier, caused the delay.

At the center of my difficulties was my office was using a new street address that wasn’t in anyone’s database – including the Post Office. It took numerous phone calls to find the right person in the City of St. Louis – not exactly your best example of efficient government under most circumstances – before that was fixed. I think. The PO updated their database, but it took a couple of weeks before I could go in to usps.com and see it for myself. Why? Because speedy delivery of Web data isn’t in the PO’s motto.

It is amazing to me that we have such poor Internet delivery in 2010. Back when broadband meant getting 128k ISDN, the phone companies ruled the roost. You could get T1s for thousands of dollars, but you could get them just about anywhere you could string a twisted pair of copper wires. Now the USA is well down on the list of countries that have lots of broadband available to their citizens – indeed, China has more Internet users than we have total population now. And Singapore is putting megabit connectivity everywhere. What happened?

Part of the problem is that we have the absolutely worst communications customer service entities to deal with. They answer the call with “we want to provide you with superior service today” and apologize when they don’t deliver, but they never take ownership of the customer. They can’t marshal the field resources to find and fix problems in their wiring plant. And for communications companies, I was amazed at how often my call was dropped after being on hold for many minutes. Come on, people, this isn’t rocket science. (And given the state of NASA, I am not sure that is a good comparison either.)

Having cable and phone companies compete for Internet access hasn’t helped the customer either. I tried to order just a regular land line from AT&T (who is my local phone supplier here) but was told repeatedly that my address wasn’t in their database. Back to the PO problem. When the AT&T technician coincidentally showed up at my office yesterday, he claimed he couldn’t give me service because I ordered my phone using a nearby address. Yet after spending an hour on the phone with his supervisors, he managed to deliver dial tone to my office. Thanks, Roger, I appreciate that tenacity. But why tell me you can’t do it and then you can?

Meanwhile, Charter took several visits with an ever-changing cast of characters. One time I got the guy that actually laid the cable along the street and in my condo development – he brought a map showing where the lines went. While that was encouraging, trouble was, one of them wasn’t connected properly. That brought out another guy who hooked up one of my missing links. Then another woman came (who was the most entertaining tech among my crew) and told me that I was missing a “tap”. That took someone else to install the tap. Why couldn’t she install it herself? What, they have a tap specialist? Someone else needed to find the right person with a key to open the box that the tap went in. I am not making this stuff up. Then I finally had two guys yesterday that actually had to locate my line and hook things up. At least they came with the key.

All throughout this process, I Tweeted and called various Charter people, trying to plead my case. At one point, I actually tried the live chat feature on their Web site, but that was agonizingly slow and like talking to a six-year old child. There was one woman in their call center in South Carolina, she did take some ownership of my problem but didn’t seem completely in touch with the crew on the grounds around my office.

It shouldn’t be this hard. If we are going to become a first-world Internet country, we need better broadband suppliers who can take customer service to new highs, not new lows.

Tom’s Hardware: Business Continuity Using Citrix XenServer v5.6

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With its latest announcements of XenServer-related products, Citrix has strengthened its ability to provide more capable disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity services using its server virtualization line of products. These have lots of appeal for enterprises that previously would have either considered a full DR solution too expensive or who are using regular tape backups and finding them cumbersome.

You can read this advertorial that was independently written for my old stomping ground Tom’s Hardware (I was their editor-in-chief during 2005) here.

The revolution will be televised

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Those of us growing up in the 1960s might remember the song by Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not be Televised. If you read over his lyrics, you will see lots of cultural references to the era. Remember, Vietnam was our first televised war. Before we had the Internet, we all watched the evening network news and could see the daily battles, body counts, and see for ourselves what was happening half a world away. It was a transformative media moment.

While it wasn’t live, it was very powerful TV. We had the full filtering and editing prowess of the network TV news organizations, with reporters on the ground and editors back in New York to package it neatly into 22-minute programs. We had Uncle Walter and Chet and David to tell us what was the significance of what we were seeing, and we had a simple us-versus-them war (which we lost big time, by the way). How simple those days seem now.

This week we witnessed another transformative moment, using the Internet and live streaming technology as another weapon. This time we are seeing events from the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, as a group of boats were stopped by Israeli military on their way to try to break the Gaza blockade. The flotilla came well prepared, not with traditional weaponry but with TV cameras and Web uplinks to broadcast what was going on to the world at http://www.livestream.com/insaniyardim.

The Livestream.com site is a tool that anyone with a Webcam and a broadband Internet connection can quickly become their own broadcaster, and the site carries thousands of live video feeds all day long.

Max Haot, Livestream’s co-founder said in the New York Times that he thought about whether to censor the live flotilla video but decided not to do so. He thought the Gaza flotilla was “a controversial but genuine humanitarian mission.” Still, he found himself thinking that his company needed policies in place to handle live videos of conflicts in the future. “After the events unfolded, I spent most of my Monday wondering if we had helped terrorists or a great humanitarian cause.”

Part of the issue was that we could watch the scene unfiltered, yet we still don’t really know what happened. Were the flotilla organizers humanitarian aid workers or terrorists with a very clever propaganda agenda? Who attacked whom? Was the concrete and steel being carried by the flotilla going to be used in Gaza to protect civilians or store munitions? What we do know is that at least nine people were killed during the raid. What we don’t know is how many Gazans and Israelis die every day because of the sad circumstances there. What we forget is that Gaza is run by a group that doesn’t even want to acknowledge Israel’s existence. The deeper that I and anyone else dug into this, the more unanswered questions I came away with.

Perhaps as the other journalists who were on the boats can tell their stories we can assemble a more complete picture. (The Israelis confiscated their equipment shortly after they boarded the boats.) But one thing is clear: Wars will be fought in real-time in the future, with world-wide audiences. In the words of Scott-Heron, “You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.”

“[Israel] may be a start up nation, but we are bricks and mortar communicators. Our adversaries have control-alt-deleted us,” writes Amir Mizroch, the executive editor of The Jerusalem Post, in Wired.

Looking it up in Dictionary.com

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When was the last time you actually hauled out a printed copy of your dictionary and looked up the meaning or spelling of a particular word? I am thinking for me it has been at least a decade, and indeed I don’t even own a printed copy anymore. Who needs all that paper when there are so many fine Web sites, such as M-W.com, dictionary.com, and even Google will give you a definition if you just precede your word of interest with the word define.

But looking stuff up on the Web is so last year; now we have an app for that. Several apps, of course: on the Apple AppStore, there are four free apps, including two from Dictionary.com for the iPad and the iPhone apiece. And Dictionary.com has apps for Blackberries and Android, as well as providing definitions on its Web site too.

The vendor has actually taken the time to analyze how people use their apps and Web site to look up words. And they found some very interesting trends that I will share with you here. For those of you that are word nerds, enjoy.

First, iPhone users are more utilitarian and just want to get a definition in the moment. They use them mostly during the workweek. Same with the Blackberry and Android app users. iPad users are looking for entertainment, if such a thing could be said about dictionary usage. They are more likely to play the audio files to hear pronunciation, getting the word of the day, and actually playing games with their dictionary apps. They use their app on weekends more too and spend about 25% more time on the app per session than the other users.

Second, the mobile apps are getting more usage than the Web site, about two or three times more often. It seems that people want to get definitions when they are in the moment. I am sure the Dictionary.com apps have settled quite a few bar arguments. But what is also apparent from the Dictionary.com usage data is that “people are just as interested in word discovery when there’s no immediate need,” says the press release from the company.

So when you think about developing the next great iPhone app, think about these analytics. Spend some time reviewing your user data to see trends and patterns, and think about ways that your mobile app can complement the content on your existing Web site. Satisfyingly, one of the most often searched-for words using the Dictionary.com app is erudite. You’ll have to look it up.