Role of the DataCenter in Delivering the Mobility Experience

I have been pondering the interlinkage between the evolution of the datacenter and the delivery of the mobility experience on our smartphones and tablets. Companies like Amazon and Apple, along with many mobility app providers are living through these two forces that are fueling each other's growth.

Here are the questions that I am exploring

1. What is the organic linkage and trending of mobility subs and applications vs. usage of datacenter capacity and virtualization?
2. Do they DataCenter solution teams understand the challenges driven by mobile apps, the constant roaming etc of the mobile experience? Do they incorporate these or are they mostly focused on providing the best infrastructure for appls and virtualization?
3. Are there good ways to solve problems that touch both ends, such as security, experience optimization, monitoring etc by a single provider? It is interesting to observe that many of the Data Center solution providers do not have significant presence on the mobile client, and vice-versa.

As more services move to the cloud and are delivered into a mobility environment, these questions are going to spawn more solutions, and of course startups...

Chime in to the discussion.... More to come as I explore the space.

WIMM Labs

I attended the Mobility and Gadget Summit organized by the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley yesterday. There were the usual pitches about the evolution of the market, Wi-Fi etc. Several new and interesting ideas were noteworthy:

1. WIMM- This is a lab that is churning out wearable computers. The concept is novel- how small can you bring computing into and what do you do with it?

2. Honest Technology: Home and portable office devices using the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band to transmit video from the iPhone, iPAD, Android Phone to a gadget attached to a TV. The company representative admitted that when sending HD video, a home access point running 802.11g would be basically saturated!

Overall, it was a good crowd asking great questions and capturing the momentum on mobility.

USA has more cellular connections than people!

Today, I attended a review of the recent CTIA show, at the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley. It was a good way to learn about all of the significant news from the show, without having to travel and stay at a hotel for two days...

A few fun facts drove very exciting discussions. First, the US now has more cellular connected devices than people. about 330M devices vs 300M population. Unlike other parts of the world, where many people have two phones, or phones with two SIM cards, the US population demonstrates a faithful commitment to their mobile service providers? So, where do these mystery devices come from? It turns out that cellular connected tablets, cars and Kindles now make the difference!

Second, the value or Siri is becoming more apparent as users take advantage of its features. The deep integration of Siri into iOS enables all applications to take advantage of Siri capabilities vs. running a separate application. I have not tried Siri myself yet. If you have, please post a comment and let us know what you think.



Happy mobility!

Steve Jobs passed away

Steve Jobs died today. The Apple web site is showing a full page picture. There is full coverage on the WSJ as well.

Many of us have enjoyed the fruits of Steve Jobs' vision, with the myriad of products and more importantly, experiences he has delivered to the world.

With this news, I reflected upon Steve Jobs' impact on my personal life. I had purchased an Apple IIPlus on November 3, 1981. A date I still remember, when I brought home the creme colored box that I had paid $1081.00 which came with a gargantuanm 48K of memory. I had to use a casette recorder and an old TV until I could afford to buy floppy drives and a green screen 9 inch monitor...

That experience was the catalyst that eventually brought me to the Valley. I started with the ability to program on my own computer, to writing and selling my first software product and then building the hardware, and so it goes. A career and personal journey that Steve Jobs guided with his vision...


Thank you Steve Jobs for all of the wonderful experiences  you have brought us.  There is a bright star in the sky for you. You will be dearly missed.

Managing Hype Curse-Apple's challenge

After making my bold predictions yesterday about the iPhone 5 today's post will be about why Apple didn't deliver upon these predictions. Did you think I was going to admit I was off ?

Apple has build such as huge wave of expectations around a new iPhone 5, that the announcement of the iPhone 4S landed with a quiet THUD... Any iPhone 4 user will tell you that it is still a fantastic product, crisp in its responsiveness and very much an elegant design. A faster CPU will always help and faster downloads will certainly increase the responsiveness of cloud applications.

I think the less visible and more significant aspects of the iPhone 4S are buried inside the case:

1. CDMA and GSM network technology in one phone: It appears that there is one product model that supports both. This helps CDMA users with travel outside of the CDMA network range, particularly for Verizon users who conduct business outside of the US. While not  a large population, clearly one that racks up large monthly bills. New York City glitterati that hate the large gaps in ATT coverage in the city's concrete canyons can now have their cake and eat it too. Also, for many corporate accounts, having international roaming access is check-list item. This phone covers those use cases. Apple has likely used a Qualcomm chip set that allows for both radios to co-exist at minimal incremental cost.

2. Much Faster graphics: Apple is claiming 7x graphic performance: Sony and Nintendo, watch out on this one. Apple is taking clear advantage of its position as the uber mobile experience device to make further forays into the gaming space. Observing the usage of my iPhone 4 (by our five year old) and my 8 year old daughter's IPhone 3GS usage for gaming purposes, I can attest to the ease of use and convenience of having games on hand wherever we go. I wonder who is the winner of the graphics chipset award on this one.

3. Sprint as a channel: Sprint was the last large mobile network that Apple had not served. capturing another 20 million subscribers and their long-term loyalty is a considerable feat, likely enabled by the iPhone 4S, and its successors.

Now, lets get back to what I said, and why they did not deliver:


1. More COLOR choices: Too complicated to manage the logistics I suppose. It took Apple a year to deliver white. How about a cover anyone?

2. Larger screen, in the same frame size: This is likely reserved for iPhone 5.

3. Thin is in: iPhone 5.


4. Addition of Near Field Communications: iPhone 5.


6. Mini Me: Yes!! Apple is coming to grips with the need to capture the broader base of the mobile phone pyramid. In Apple's case, this is the middle girth, not the very bottom base- that's for the iPod shuffle... Pricing the IPhone 3GS at $0 was a good move. As long as applications work reasonably well and downloads are at acceptable speeds, there will be plenty of takers of IPhone 3GS's.

Happy iPhoning

Admitting the obvious- Mission Statement Change

Its been a long time coming. I have felt it creeping up on me for several years now. I must confess that admitting this, I thought, would be capitulation. Then I realized that I was already living this in my daily life, so might as well  preach what I practice...

I changed the headline of my blog today from Telecom Life to "Mobility and Cloud Life". The first part is my personal passion. Delivering a seamless experience of a mobile life to people in their personal and work lives, which are more often than not, intertwining. What we care more about it what we do and how it brings value- Personal enrichment, satisfaction, earnings and more. How we do things have often evolved..

We sometimes think that technology has enabled us to do things differently. My personal belief is that technology is simply manifesting our desires and is getting closer to how we really want to experience life in its fullest. Imagine how life was in Paris, Istanbul and New York 100 years ago. The social networks of the time were probably as fast as Linkedin and Facebook of today- within the city limits. The new mobility experiences are simply expanding the geographic reach and keeping the engagements going 7/24. Otherwise, our yearnings to connect are the same as before.

Please enjoy this haunting song performed by Rokia Traore, complements of TED. Only can the global networks and cloud can deliver the emotion of sounds from far away lands so vividly...

More on the Cloud life in a subsequent post.

Soundhound is AMAZING! Ultimate Expression of Mobility

As we live our mobile lives, work, play, home life appear to intertwine themselves ever more. I notice myself wanting to reach different information at the whim of the moment, and my iPhone always seems to be ready to serve.

Today's AHA experience was with SoundHound, an app on my iPhone. I was shopping at Trade Joe's (more on that on a separate post) where I heard a song being played in the store. It was one of those tunes that I had listened to on the radio countless times but had not been able to catch the name. It also seemed from a long time ago that it just was not being played on the radio often anymore.

There was a lot of chatter, with Moms shouting at kids, grand mothers chosing picking cans etc. I simply pointed my IPhone to the ceiling speaker and activated Soundhound. Within 6-7 second, I had the name.

I pressed the Download from ITunes logo. Within 20 seconds, connected over the free ATT Wi-Fi from Starbucks near the parking lot, I had my song for a mere $1.29.

This is the ultimate expression of MOBILITY. Not just the fact that I am mobile, but that I did something on the spot, that would have been a considered magic just a few years ago.


In case you are curious of what song deserved so much commotion, it is Voices Carry by 'Til Tuesday