Someone sent me this chart which is supposingly presented during 21st Century Communications World Forum by Marconi. Unfortunately, I could not find the sources nor the data point to support this. Have anyone seen this before?

And before anyone asked, yes, I did tried to google for it but no answer. Or rather, I get very conflicting answers like this which say no, and OTOH, this and this that say yes. Isn’t Google great?

btw, I love the the latest Van Gogh Google banner. ;-)

Although I missed Infocomm Technology Roadmap 2 weeks ago in Singapore (I was at ETech), the folks here have recorded the session. So earlier this week, I spend sometime watching John Seely Brown speech on The Common Sense Model.

1. Supply Push –> Demand Pull, e.g. Mass Media –> Search Driven Ads

2. New Forms of Social Capital & Knowledge Sharing, e.g. Open Source and Wikipedia

3. Entertainment – from Passive to Active, e.g. MMORPG (3 slides on Warcraft¹ :-)

4. Extended Forms of Literacy, moving from learning to read/write text to watch/create multimedia content

5. Rise of the Creative Class, e.g. The Long Tail, Pro-Am(atuer)

Nothing surprisingly to many of us here but John did a great job delivering the message.

Most important of all, much of the ITR5 are very hardcore technology about IT infrastructure, wireless, wired nano-tech, bio-tech and very little on actually how people are using the technology so John’s talk certain brings in that balance. And it really makes my job a lot easier now – I was told the ideas I have are too “soft” but hey, the “soft” one is where all the exciting stuff is happening!

And I really like the word “Common Sense Model”. It would be very nice if the world is guided by the “common sense principle” rather then by obscure rules. Frankly speaking, I don’t know what is in section 251(d)(3) of Communication Act of 1934, as amended (see FCC text) but most importantly, does the decision meet the common sense test? Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. *sigh*

But of course, I suppose “Common Sense” also depends who you speaking for. For consumer, the common sense would be that anything that encourage competitions (lower price!), freedom of innovation (better product & service!) is common sense. That would not be so if you are a corporation who is losing control of the market. (Hint: It is time to review your business when you have to sue/fight your customers).

Lets hope Common Sense prevailed.

¹ Incidently, I got my WoW during my US Trip. Both my wife and myself are now addicted to it.

Remember my personal iTunes server I setup last year? I upgraded it a couple days ago to daapd-0.2.4 which support playlist. And I also added iTune streaming over the Internet so now I can listen to my music library whereever I am, thanks to Rendezous Proxy ;-)

The latest news is Juniper snaped Kagoor up for 64.5M. See articles on Red Herring and Forbes. Actually 64.5M might be considered cheap considering the potential of Kagoor of its session border controller.

But what could this means?

Is it because Juniper starting to see Kagoor making headways with the Tier-1 carriers (ie, their customers) => Tier-1 carriers entering VoIP space? Or is it because Juniper taking a bet with Kagoor to enter this space?

OTOH, it is hard to believe Juniper taking a “bet” so I’m more incline to think it is the first.

There is an article on CNet with a misleading title The U.N. thinks about tomorrow’s cyberspace

The International Telecommunication Union is one of the most venerable of bureaucracies. Created in 1865 to facilitate telegraph transmissions, its mandate has expanded to include radio and telephone communications. But the ITU enjoys virtually no influence over the Internet. That remains the province of specialized organizations such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN; the Internet Engineering Task Force; the World Wide Web Consortium; and regional address registries.

It is important not to equate UN with ITU (an agency under UN). UN is thinking of Internet Governance but it is charted WGIG. It is also important not to equate ICANN as Internet Governance. ICANN is part of the picture but not the whole. These differences maybe subtle but are world apart in the debate on Internet Governance.

Corrections aside, I am extremely happy to hear Zhou say “I do not consider ICANN an enemy…We tried to support ICANN as far as we could but on the other hand you see that ICANN’s mandate seems to be a little bit unclear…“. Now lets see if ICANN community would also play nice.

btw, my position on ICANN and ITU is that both of them are here to stay so please learn to live with each another (as noted in my previous entry).

Incidently, ICANN also just published Telcordia Report on .NET registry. The winner is Verisign.

I was looking around for mplayer doc today to use an obscure function but imaging my surprise when I get to mplayer homepage:

This site has been shut down because of numerous patent violations in MPlayer. The other free software multimedia players are next.

Multimedia is a patent minefield. All important techniques and formats are covered by broad and trivial patents that are harming progress and alternative implementations, such as free software multimedia players.

Not sure if this is a joke or not but I already feel the pain. For those who don’t know, mplayer is the swiss-army knife for video files which runs on multiple platform (Linux, Mac, Windows). It can play almost any sort of video file you throw at it (avi, rm, mkv etc) with a variety of codecs (xvid, divx, mpeg2, mpeg4, etc), any number of audio codecs (mp2, ac3 etc), play vcd, play dvd, audio ripping, video ripping, remixing, transcoding, resampling, fix broken video, etc etc – so much so that the man pages runs into 10s of pages and no one can remember all the options and switches available.

From a humble little project started in 2001, it has become the most important OSS video app we have now but it is no more. :-(

Update 1hr later: Okay, my timing was a bit bad – they just changed the frontpage to say “This headline might soon become a reality due to the numerous patented techniques MPlayer implements.” with a link to the page below. Fooled me there :P (Hecked, I am the early April Fool :P)

I just discovered Singnet is offering IPv6 Trial to its ATM or Lease Line customers. And they also have a very cute IPv6 test modeled after the famous dancing turtle @ kame.net.

I have been thinking about Naked DSL ever since the story about FCC is about to grant Bellsouth naked DSL petition broke a few days ago. And of course, the subsequent suspension of various states decision by FCC.

Most propongates of IP Telephony considered Naked DSL as absolutely neccessary to get VoIP adoption. Afterall, why bother with VoIP if you are forced to take up POTS before you can have your DSL to get IP Telephony. From that perspective, the decision to have Naked DSL is fairly simple one – no way we should grant Bellsouth petition.

But that’s coming from an evangelism point of view, one that may not convience many people who do not share the vision of IP Telephony. I shall give an alternative perspective why Bellsouth petition is dangerous. My argument is based on two assumptions:

1) First assumption is we believe in Free Market (and I absolutely do believe in Free Market). Free Market means we allow a competitive market to sort out the winners and losers. In this argument, we should allow Bellsouth to makes it own business decision to offer Naked DSL or not, excuses or not. They may choose to offer naked DSL like Qwest or they may not. If they didn’t then competitions like cable who does not bundled with POTS may be more attractive to consumers, and Bellsouth will lose market share.

2) Second assumption is we believe that monopoly (regardless natural or coercive) have to be regulated (or deal with by other means, e.g. antitrust) to ensure general public interests are not been abused by the monopoly. In this regard, Bellsouth petition should not be granted in areas where Bellsouth is a monopoly without alternative competitions. It wouldn’t be a competitive market if there is no competitions, would it?

Following these two assumptions, Bellsouth petition to pre-empt PUCs from mandating it to provide Naked DSL should not be granted by FCC. Instead, PUCs are in a better position to judge if Bellsouth odd to be regulated or to be allowed compete freely because siutations are different in different part of US.

While I like the concept of naked DSL, I think the decision to mandate Naked DSL or not would differ from places to places – ie, it is not a uniform yes or no. (Regardless how much I like IP Telephony, I believe in Free Market even more.)

But it is even harder in the context of Singapore, where only 1 in 5 broadband users are on cable, a market with choices but not quite competitive. Should we mandate Singtel Magix¹ to provide Naked DSL because they are a market monopoly or should we let the market forces works itself out. For that, I am still thinking…

ps: Please note the disclaimer below : I do not speak for IDA here in this blog.

¹ Singtel Magix is the sole DSL provider in Singapore. Everyone who provides DSL like Singnet or Pacnet is a reseller of Singtel Magix.

Wohoo! Yahoo released a Creative Common Search Engine!

Actually, this isn’t the first. Creative Commons actually also developed their own search engine. They mention it is based on Semantic Web (yah!) at ETech last week. But Yahoo! probably has the ability to reach more people and bring awareness to Creative Commons.

Now, all eyes is on Google :-)

Incidently, Lessig has this to say

This is exciting news for us. It confirms great news about Yahoo!. I met their senior management last October. They had, imho, precisely the right vision of a future net. Not a platform for delivering whatever, but instead a platform for communities to develop. With the acquisition of Flickr, the step into blogging and now this tool to locate the welcome mats spread across the net, that vision begins to turn real.

Yahoo! may be late to the party but they certain got the right ideas :-)

Russell has a very good article about all the different mobile gadget form factors. I like the diagram he has particularly as it is a fairly good summary of all the form factors we seen so far.

We already see devices that ‘transform’ itself to multiple form factors. For example, the Motolora MPx or Nokia Communicator that can either be Talking or Typing to the even more extreme Zaurus which can be Typing, Reading, Watching & Listening. (Damn no talking yet!)

As we see more function convergence, I expect we will see more and more of such ‘transformable’ devices. How cool!