I hadn’t really given much thought to having my bank account tied to Paypal. The incident got me concerned about the lack of consumer protections that you would normally have with a credit card.    I got quite a bit more concerned when PayPal refused to remove my bank account from being associated with my Paypal account.  We knew my account had been compromised, but there was nothing they would do other than tell me to wait for the dispute process to work.  I was told to wait for 10 days.

As it turned out, Paypal did credit back the $200 (about a week later) and restored my account.  They also sent me an “RSA like” token credit card, which I thought was pretty slick.

In my mind, that wasn’t enough, the support issues trying to protect my account scared the pants off of me. 

My only recourse was to remove my bank account from Paypal, change the passwords, and never use it again.  What a shame.  I have also instructed my bank to not authorize funding from PayPal.

Fast forward to today.  I just read a post about researchers that have been able to crack SSL technology.  The example that they used was hacking into Paypal. So we now have a situation where a great deal of ecommerce is based upon vulnerable technology with very little recourse for consumers to protect themselves against fraudulent attacks.

One of the projects that I worked on was to create a map of customer value transactions across multiple communications channels.  Let me give you an example. 

A customer browses something on a company website, and puts a call into his rep with a technical question. The rep lets the customer know that it will need to be researched and someone else will get back to them. The rep opens up a trouble ticket, which a technician then opens, answers the question and sends an email to the customer.  Simple enough if it works, but is an example of multiple communications channels (web, voice, and email) all being used to process a single question.  Multiply that times thousands of customers, reps, and there is quite a bit of room for gaps.  While common sense recognizes that all of those things are related, most IT systems cannot. 

Our idea was to run correlations across web, voice, and email to make sure that each of the value transactions was a closed loop.  Doing that kind of analysis should help identify trouble spots.  It is really as simple as matching the customer to each of these transactions.  Most IT systems generate the raw transaction logs to do this kind of analysis.

Google recently announced the ability to download Google Voice data as part of the Google Takeout initiative.  Extremely cool, and should work for the kinds of value analysis that I’m talking about. 

Later on, I kind of lost the HTML plot a bit.  I remember getting some warnings on a couple of my websites that I was failing some type of strict compliance, but frankly it wasn’t really that big of a deal.  Like a lot of standards, there was a pretty fair amount of wiggle room for interpretation of the HTML standards.  You needed to test all of your code against different browsers.  It was an economic decision to decide how much time and resources to invest in different browser platforms.

From what I was gathering from the Apple HTML5 buzz, it was definitely worth poking into.  I have been active with mobile platforms which have presented an increasingly fragmented bunch of display options.  Tablets have only made that an even bigger challenge.  It is becoming increasingly clear that the line between web applications and native device applications is getting increasingly blurry. 

HTML5 is intended to bring the web standards up to date and provide a framework for dealing with these issues.  It provides viewpoints as a means of supporting multiple devices.  It addresses video and local databases for offline storage. 

I was intrigued when O’Reilly published HTML5 Mobile Web Development, a video series on HTML5 targeted at web professionals.  My hope was that a tutorial video would address some of the problems in trying to learn from books and provide more dynamic examples.  I really liked the content being presented, such as real life examples of how to structure pages, create a twitter app, add geolocation, and creating databases.

In practice, the videos didn’t quite work out as well as I had hoped.  I found some of the same challenges as I did when I took some pre-recorded graduate classes.  I found that even though Jake Carter was clearly an expert and had structured his ideas well, I had a really hard time keeping focused.  I have come to expect five minute “bite sized” chunks of information, which provide me with the ability to skip over the sections that I understand and go straight to the parts that I don’t.  I frankly don’t have the patience to sit still through hours of video. 

The series would really benefit from even some rudimentary interactivity such as putting a section at the front end describing what the learning objectives for each section were with a test at the end to see whether you had mastered the material or not. 

When videos are structured that way, I can start by reading the objectives, then take the test to find out whether or not I actually needed to watch the entire video.  That was much the same approach that I used with college text books.  If I knew the material and could pass the test at the end, I didn’t watch.  The fact was, I could figure out which of the 12 hours of video that I needed to watch, and which I didn’t.

I like the fact that O’Reilly is pushing the envelope, but found that this format just didn’t work for me. 

Here are the apps on my home page right now. While I have seen a few “Top 25” and “Top 10” app lists, listing the Top 16 made the most sense to me, as that’s what fits on my home page.  While at any given time I may be experimenting around with a half dozen new apps, these are the applications that I use regularly.  I keep the experimental ones on a separate page.  I don’t root my phone.  I work with lots of sharp people that do that, but I rely on this phone to do my job.  Neither Verizon nor my company IT desk really have much patience for support calls that start out with “I have been playing around with the underlying OS…”

Core Communications – 1. Phone,  2. Touchdown, 3. Gmail, 4. Google Voice 5. Messaging, 6. Skype

At its heart, sales is depends upon communicating with people.  I need to be as responsive as possible, in the way that each person likes.  Some like email, some prefer texts, some really only want you to leave voice mail.   I think that three of these apps deserve a bit more information. 

I am on the Verizon network, and they have a special arrangement with Skype so that Skype calls are treated as on network.  I use Skype for the folks that I work with in Europe.

7. Touchdown is a really good exchange client for Android. It costs around $20.  Outlook is nerve center of my scheduling and contact management systems.  Salesforce.com pulls data from it, I use Plaxo to sync my different contact bases to it, and so on.  Touchdown does everything that I would expect, it pops up alarms, keeps the calendar, and handles email.  It works for me, as I am really only looking for a mobile client to keep a pulse on what’s going on.  I’m not sure it would work if it was my only system.

I find smartphones frustrating if you have to do much real work. I prefer to use a full computer for all of the real backoffice work.  I update my opportunities and everything back home, but by keeping everything in Outlook, I make it easy to process my backlog in one go.  

 8. Google Voice has become an important utility for me.  If you aren’t familiar with it, it acts like a combination of call routing and voicemail with online access.  With Google Voice, you get a phone number assigned, which then can be used to ring any and all other lines that you want.  For example, you could give that number to someone, then have it forward to both your desk and cell phone, so that it acts like a “find me, follow me” service.  I use it a bit differently.  I have my calls routed so that my desk phone rings 4 times, then forwards to my cell phone.  It then goes to Google voice (acting as voicemail) immediately.  I do it that way, because if I’m on the phone at my home office, I can see who is calling when it forwards to my cell.  That setup works for me whether I’m in my home office or on the road.  The nice thing is that Google Voice attempts to transcribe the voicemail and shows it to you visually.  The phone signals that a voice mail has arrived, and the text is displayed briefly.  You can then call up the voicemail either through gmail or the Google voice app.  In most cases, just seeing the caller and text is enough for the time.  It also has the benefit of making voice mails easy to forward. 

9. Navigation has been a real savings in time and money, simple as that.  Most rental car companies charge $15 a day.  It is also pretty easy to get twisted up, make a wrong turn on the interstate and spend at least 15 minutes getting lost the first time that you go anywhere.  I typically have a hard copy of directions as part of my Tripit package (more on that below), but the Google Navigator works well.  I have recently started using voice, and so far, it has worked perfectly. 

10. Settings isn’t really an app, but I use it a lot.  Settings is where you switch “airport mode” on and off.  You also go there to tether, manage bluetooth, wi-fi, and other networks, and lots of different things.  It gives you the ability to backup settings offline. I changed the settings so that the button on top hangs up phone calls.  I think that is an accessibility setting. 

I use 11.PDA Net to turn my Droid into a wireless modem when I am stuck for connectivity.  Too often, the connectivity at hotels is either problematic or expensive.  PDA net works pretty well, even with VPNs.  You also need to install a utility on your PC so that it can treat your phone like a modem.  That’s something that you need to have taken care of before you actually need it. 

The main time I end up using it is when I see in Touchdown that I have an updated presentation or contract that I need to get onto my laptop, but don’t have any other access.  I fire up PDA net, download the mail into Outlook, then get on with it.

12. Tripit.com is all about managing travel stuff, although I rarely use the mobile client.  The Tripit.com service is pretty idiot proof, in that you forward an itinerary from your corporate travel to a mailbox (plans@tripit.com).  It then breaks it down into components and saves it online.  

Tripit creates a printable itinerary that includes driving instructions, all of the information about flights, car rentals, and so on.  The Tripit service then acts like an update and reminder service.  It sends me an email or text message if my flight has been delayed.  It also provides some social features so that your trip can be posted on Facebook or LinkedIn.  It isn’t as contrived as it sounds. It effectively becomes an automatic notice for friends and family. We created a Tripit group for our team at work so that we can easily compare notes on itineraries and travel plans.  Tripit becomes a nice little travel process prompter.  It sends out a reminder email 24 hours before flight time reminding that you can check in online, then sends status alerts based upon your instructions.

 As you can see , the mobile client keeps the itinerary details, and if you click on the directions, it will open up and provide a navigation option.  It’s pretty slick all around. 

You can see an example of what a Tripit posting looks like on Facebook.  It will post a notice before the trip saying something like “Don is planning a trip to Chicago” and show the date range.  Like anything else, if you use the standard templates, it looks kind of mechanical.  If you take the time to upload a relevant picture and add some real details, it starts to become more useful. 

I also use 13. Foursquare for similar purposes.  I absolutely like the idea of being in control of when I make my location public. That said, I’m not always sure that I get quite enough value out of Foursquare.  I am using it, because I kind of get the potential, but I wouldn’t pay money for it.  (After I wrote this post, they really cheesed me off by automatically posting a “You Won a “You voted” badge” onto Facebook and Twitter.  I found it a real violation of my privacy. I decide who and when I tell people that I voted.  Major violation! I’m checking out Whrrl.)

The 14. camera and 15. Facebook app are my other two mainstay applications.  I always try to take pictures while I’m with customers.  I’ve gotten some great pictures that way.  The easiest thing to do right now is to send the pictures to Facebook via MMS or email.  You can see the picture from my hotel room in Chicago.  The Droid camera is fine for this kind of thing.  I think that the folks over at Foursquare should think really hard about how they can add the ability for me to create these kinds of messages from a checkin.  As with Tripit, the ability to change the picture and add my own text is all of the difference in the world.  My latest everyday camera has GPS built in.  It seems to me that being able to pick an image is part of the whole “check-in” concept.  It lets me tell people where I am and share it a bit more.  If you compare the picture from my hotel room to the map that was included with the Cheesecake factory checkin, you can kind of sense the opportunity.  The restaurant was really very rich visually, the map doesn’t tell the story. 

The final “must have” travel app is the 16. clock.  It has become my daily alarm clock.  I never call down for wake-up calls anymore.  I also use it for some meetings with people that just don’t seem to have any time boundaries.  When I have a meeting with someone that runs fast and loose with time, I try to remember to set an alarm for 5 minutes before my hard stop.  I warn them that I have a hard stop at the end, then when it goes off, they understand that I need to cut things off and they don’t take it personally. 

These seem to cover the bases for me.  I am always looking for other great tools, but these are my mainstays.  I am looking for a better contact system than comes with the phone, but haven’t found it yet.  

I would love to see comments on what works for you.

I use Skype most often for international communications.  It works and is easy to use.  I find Skype to be a bit ahead of its competition with new features.  They do a good job of presenting a simple interface that you can use for voice, IM, or video conferencing.  In Enterprise technology we call it UC, which stands for Unified Communications.  Skype does that, and it does it pretty well. It has presence, so that you can see when people are available. If they aren’t, you can leave messages that the person will get later.

I used Skype while my son was travelling across Europe last summer.  He was  staying in different hostels in different countries and was “playing it by ear”.  Skype allowed him to stay in touch.  As a parent, it was a joy to see his face and let him see everyone (even the dogs) at home. 

Here is how I understand the partnership.  Skype calls will be carried over the Verizon Wireless voice network, not the data network.  That makes sense to me.  The Verizon Wireless network is already optimized for voice service.   The calls will be converted over to Skype VoIP when they leave the Verizon Wireless network in order to travel across the public internet. So now, if you are talking to someone on Skype, they don’t count as minutes on your Verizon Wireless plan. If you want to jump off the Skype network, you can use Skype Out to call international phones at their rates.

The Skype application will be available to the BlackBerry Storm 9530, Storm2 9550, Curve 8530, Curve 8330, and BlackBerry 8830 World Edition; and the Motorola Droid and Devour; and the HTC Eris.

Industry reaction to the announcement has been interesting.  Quite a few people have focused on the “changing of the guard” from wireless to VoIP.  Others have focused on telco vs. internet types of competition.  Still others focused on who got the better end of the deal.  Given that all of these dynamics were at work, what was most interesting to me was the fact that Skype and Verizon were able to successfully negotiate an agreement that added value to their consumers and to each other.  It isn’t easy.

I look at the Verizon Wireless / Skype partnership as basically adding their networks to each other’s to create a more powerful network for all of their users. Given today’s technical, business, and regulatory environments, both companies should be recognized for taking a step forward for their users.

Chetan Sharma notes that the average industry percentage contribution of data to overall ARPU is now 27 percent, with the U.S. market likely to close in on the 30 percent mark in 2009. Overall ARPU decreased by $0.23 as sverage voice ARPU declined by $0.45 and average data ARPU grew by $0.68. Sprint led in data ARPU with $15.50, followed by Verizon at $14.96. In terms of percentage contribution, Verizon is tops at 29.28 percent, followed by AT&T at 28.74 percent.

As of the end of the second quarter, 65 percent of all U.S. subscribers now use some form of data services. Messaging volume grew 15 percent in Q2, and messaging revenue increased 11 percent over Q1.Subscribers now average nearly 540 messages per month, which translates to close to one message per hour per subscriber. Non-messaging services continue to represent between 50 percent and 65 percent of U.S. operator data revenues.

“Given the strong growth in data revenues shown by the top carriers and the increase in service revenues overall, the worst is over for the U.S. mobile industry,” Sharma writes. “In summary, the recession has been all but a tiny blip in its growth trend and the U.S. mobile market has weathered the downward spiral in economy better than its counterparts in other developed nations.”

For more on the Chetan Sharma report:
- read this release

Related articles:
U.S. mobile data revenues grow to $34 billion in Q2
Forecast: Data revenues growing to $347B by 2013
Mobile data now 20% of worldwide operator revenues

WIP jam sessions include “unpanels” where the goal for facilitators is to ask the right questions and kick off a really good dialog.  With that in mind, I’d like to help get the dialog started here and ask for some help in coming up with some good questions. 

The July 28th conference has sold out, but you can register for a webcast.

The Mobile Peer Award winners of the 2009 edition were announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, this year’s winners were:

• Early stage MobileMonday Community Award – Babajob.com – MobileMonday Bangalore
• Early stage Audience Award – Orbster GmbH – MobileMonday Munich
• Early stage Jury Award – Babajob.com – MobileMonday Bangalore

• Emerging MobileMonday Community Award – fring – MobileMonday Tel Aviv
• Emerging Jury Award – PopCatcher AB – MobileMonday Sweden
• Emerging Audience Award – Unkasoft Advergaming – MobileMonday Madrid

The MobileMonday Mobile Peer Awards Barcelona are among the most influential events in the mobile industry and, with over 1000 attendants, the point of reference in startup innovation during the Mobile World Congress.

The only one of these that I’m familiar with is fring, a pretty cool social networking / voip tool.  I’ve got some homework to do getting familiar with the rest of these applications.  If they are all as good as

g, they will be worth the effort.  None of the Mobile Monday Philadelphia applications made the final cut this year, so that’s a good goal for the year.

The finalists presented at the Mobile Peer Awards 2009 in Barcelona:

EARLY-STAGE STARTUPS

• Addict Digital Media – Mobile Monday Buenos Aires
• aka-aki networks GmbH – MobileMonday Berlin
• Babajob.com – MobileMonday Bangalore
• Big in Japan Inc. – MobileMonday Dallas
• bioLocate – MobileMonday Jakarta
• Dial2Do – MobileMonday Dublin
• Fortumo – MobileMonday Estonia
• Mob4Hire – MobileMonday Vancouver
• Orbster GmbH – MobileMonday Munich
• Oxynade – MobileMonday Brussels
• Tellmewhere – MobileMonday Paris
• Xumii – MobileMonday Sydney

EMERGING STARTUPS

• Aradiom – MobileMonday Istanbul
• fring – MobileMonday Tel Aviv
• Getjar Networks – MobileMonday Lithuania
• Keynetik – MobileMonday Washington DC
• Mobintech A/S – MobileMonday Copenhagen
• PopCatcher AB – MobileMonday Sweden
• Soonr – MobileMonday Silicon Valley
• Unkasoft Advergaming – MobileMonday Madrid

I have been on both the manufacturing and buying side of the electronics industry. New product innovation has always been my passion.  I have been involved in some really innovative new products, such as voice mail, computer music, digital recorders, and in-ear monitoring that have really had a major impact on how things are done.  I have also been involved in some dogs.  About half of my "can’t fail" ideas seem to find a way.

From a manufacturer’s perspective, it is surprisingly easy to create Frankenstein’s line extension.  You start with an existing product, then add features for some other hot trend in the market that customers are buying.  That seems obvious doesn’t it?  Take something that people want, add a new feature that they want, and you have a solid product that people want more than they did before. 

Here was the first such innovation that caught my eye at the show.  I believe it is called the Soundmaster Vulcano Lamp Digital Music System.  It has an alarm clock and is iPod compatible.   I do not know whether it was a music system, lava lamp, or alarm clock first, but to my knowledge it is the first to put them all into a single device.  If that wasn’t good enough, now you can plug your iPod in.

I am genuinely on the fence about the SamsungW7900 cellphone projector.  It’s a cellphone and it’s a projector.  The device is a bit bigger than an iPhone, but has a 10 lumen projector inside.  Every time that I go schlepping into a presentation with my laptop and projector, I wish that something like this existed.  On the other hand, I normally only use a projector when I have six or more people and I have lots of information that we need to review.  The presentations tend to get big, especially if you have lots of graphics let alone video.  My concern is that the lamp is not bright enough and that relying on the cellular bandwidth for large presentations would be problematic. 

That having been said, as I start to think about different uses, I  imagine using the cellular connection to allow someone to stream video remotely to the projector.  That could work in a semi-permanent installation or could be used to insert advertising in different places.  It would eliminate the need to install a monitor and data connection. 

At that time I was supporting Verizon for one of the Bell Labs legacy companies.  I was also advising the Democratic side of the Senate.  At that time, the Senate couldn’t figure out why the service providers were not taking advantage of tax incentives to build out fiber to the home.  My recommendation at the time was that they shift the incentives away from running fiber all the way to the home, rather simply to bring it to the neighborhood.  The fact is that policy and incentives can only influence corporate behavior so far.  There still needs to be a sound fundamental strategy and business case.

At that time, Kevin was focused on the disruptive potential of Voice over IP (VoIP) technology to level the playing field and drive new waves of innovation.  At that time, I was working on a project to provide Verizon with a large scale centralized softswitch so that they could offer VoIP to their customers.  At that time, there were quite a few religious battles over whether intelligence belonged in the core of network or at the edge.  The answer has turned out to be “it depends” and “both”.

Edge devices have become smarter and more complicated, which in turn has driven the need for networks to become much smarter too.  Many functions, such as security, make more sense in the core than at every single end point on a network.  We also continue to put more intelligent routing capabilities like MPLS into the core network, which in turn makes it possible for more power and control to be out at the edge.

Recently, I have been working on IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network design.  IMS is, in essence, a very complex network architecture that enables  networks do some very simple sounding things.  IMS will allow end users to pick and choose the applications that they want, independently of the network that they are on.  You could pick which voicemail that you want for both your desk phone and cell phone.  You could choose a speech to text engine that you want to work across all of your communications.

My hope is that powerful network designs like IMS will enable the collaborative environment that we will need to drive the next wave of innovation.  We need small agile companies that are willing to take risks and create innovative new products.  We also need well managed companies that can be trusted to execute capital intensive network build-outs that take decades and cost billions of dollars.  These companies need to be methodical and extremely efficient.  We need both these types of companies to play nice together.

There is a great opportunity in front of us, to unleash a new round of productivity increases.  Success, however, will not be achieved by picking one side at the other’s expense.  Our technology policy will need to be as intelligent as the networks themselves.  We will need to recognize and reward the type of behavior that we want from our service providers, such as efficient use of capital, reliability, predictability, while at the same time laying down clear rules for how we want their networks to behave in order to create a fair playing field.  The disruptive innovators also have to take on some risk as well.  I don’t think that they should expect free communications services any more than they should expect free electricity.  A business model that relies on getting an essential production component for free is not sustainable in the long run.

Kevin is the right guy to help create this kind of collaborative environment.  He is passionate about the need to drive innovation and improve personal productivity.  He has also been a relentless advocate for net-neutrality.  He has taken companies to task for peer to peer blocking, but has also been quick to recognize when big business gets it right, like with Apple’s App Store and Verizon’s Open Development Initiative, both of which are focused on creating collaborative eco-systems to drive innovation.  He also works really hard.