Tomorrow night will be the premier of their new show "Penn and Teller Tell a Lie" on the Discovery Channel at 10:00pm eastern.  I’m sure it will be awesome.  The preview that I saw has flamethrowers and all kinds of coolness.  The idea is that they put forward 7 pretty unlikely scenarios, one of which is a lie.  The others while hard to believe are true.  The challenge for the viewer is to figure out which one of the bunch is the fake.

As you can see from the app screenshot above, the first episode involves steering a plane with its doors instead of the rudders.  The concept of the show is that they take The iphone app allow you to vote real time while watching the show. 

I had been indirectly involved in the text messaging for American Idol, and I have always wondered why more interactive TV has not been more widely adopted.  I guess American Idol wasn’t successful enough. People talk about "engagement", but tend to actually just broadcast. 

All of it has got my attention.  I’m really looking forward to watching it tomorrow.

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. 

It was a very pleasant surprise to see the Motorola Xoom, which is also in tablet form. It has some features that I think that I like better.  The product launched at the CES in Las Vegas.  Part of what I liked was that, like the Droid before it, the Xoom is a product of a collaborative effort from Motorola, Google, and Verizon. Each company leverages their unique value proposition to bring effectively a “best of breed” product to market. 

Motorola has made a very nice piece of gear.  It is designed to be upgradeable, it has good performance, and seems very well built.  Verizon is providing the always on connection, first in 3G, with the ability to upgrade to 4G as it becomes more available.   Google is contributing the next major version (version 3.0) of the Android OS, which has been nicknamed “Honeycomb”.  Honeycomb is a major revision of the Android OS designed to support tablets.  I really like that these three have figured out that users want to see the plan and understand how these things will evolve.

I don’t think that I can capture much reality about the user interface in words and pictures, but the Honeycomb interface provides a dynamic and intuitive menu and control interface that is easy to call up, and can automatically disappear and free up screen real estate.  My take was that it felt very much like how things should work. 

The interface uses a card stack kind of approach for content, which also seems pretty straightforward.  All told, it looks like a powerful OS that doesn’t intrude on what you want to accomplish. 

I liked this device a lot.  It is expected to be released in February.   I don’t personally see the need for 4G right now, but really like that I can upgrade in a while once the rest of the ecosystem is ready.

Motorola Xoom specs

* 10.1-inch 1280×800 resolution display
* Android Honeycomb 3.0 OS
* Nvidia Tegra 2 dual core processor
* Dual Cameras
* 5 MP rear-facing camera with dual LED flash
* 2 MP front-facing camera
* 1GB RAM
* 32 GB inbuilt memory
* Micro SD support
* Wi-Fi 2.4GHz & 5GHz 802.11b/g/n
* Bluetooth 2.1
* 3.5mm audio jack
* micro USB 2.0 HS
* 730 g weight
* 249.1mm (h) x 167.8mm (w) x 12.9mm (d) – dimension
* AAC, AAC+, AMR NB, AMR WB, MP3, XMF support
* 10 hour video playback – battery

While women play an increasingly important role in making money, many have a knowledge gap when it comes to finances and building wealth.  This can become a real problem, particularly if divorce, job loss, or other major life events happen.  And sooner or later, some of these things do happen. 

Delivered in crisp daily doses, Daily Worth provides genuine and intelligent financial advice.  It strikes me as a nice balance of content and reinforcement.  By that, I mean its one thing to make a New Year’s resolution, and quite another thing to stick to it all year.  For most of us, building up our net worth is a life long process. 

Looking at Daily Worth brought a few questions to mind.  Is a woman’s perspective on finance that different from a man’s?   I wondered how differences in math education affect financial intelligence.  I also wondered if community participation like this has an impact on actually changing behavior.  The best that I could think to do was to send trial copies to a bunch of women that I know and ask them for their comments and feedback on Daily Worth.

I’ll interested in following this along as it develops. 

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.

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.

As the US’ largest wireless network services provider, Verizon joins Vodafone, China Mobile, and SoftBank, representing Europe, China, and Japan respectively.  “This partnership will enable four of the world’s leading mobile operators to pool their combined expertise, innovation and scale for the gain of customers across the globe,” said JIL Chairman Masayoshi Son. “As well as driving innovation in the mobile developer world, this initiative is set to empower consumers by giving them access to a range of easy-to-use and compelling Web applications that will enable them to get even more benefits from their handsets.”

Mobile computing has the potential to quickly outpace traditional computing platforms.  This will only happen if mobile computing can deal with the challenges that come along with fragmentation.  There are at least nine pretty strong smart phone manufacturers.  They include Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, RIM, Apple, HTC, and Palm. We then add another tier for the leading Mobile Operating Systems (OS).  They are Symbian, Apple, LiMO, RIM, Microsoft, Palm, and Android.  Add to that 8 or 9 mobile browsers, different customer languages, and service provider networks, and the fragmentation challenge for developers starts to become obvious. 

JIL widgets offer developers a application layer that can sit across these different device/OS/browser/network combinations in order to isolate the applications function and user interface from the specific handset.  This widget layer should benefit developers, service providers, and end-users alike.  Developers should benefit from a consistent platform standard and extremely large market.  End users will benefit from applications that look and feel the way that you would expect them to even on different devices and networks.

The JIL website is pretty thin on details as of this writing, but there is talk of launching in the second half of 2009.  Your guess would be as good as mine, but I would expect them to start with SDKs to support Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Android out of the box.  Symbian will give them the lion’s share of the existing OS market.  Windows and Android bring with them already existing developer communities that have been working with widgets (and gears) for some time now.

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.

One of the key premises of the event is the idea that the days of the vertically integrated organization that characterized the industrial age are over, along with the company test labs that drove their innovation.  AT&T’s Bell Labs, IBM’s Watson Research Center, and XEROX’s PARC all are iconic labs that represent some of the era’s leading innovators.  As those vertical mass production corporations have evolved, so has today’s innovation laboratory, which is no longer contained within a single organization.

I was lucky, having grown up in the Princeton area to become involved with the David Sarnoff Labs at a pretty young age, and got to know some of the people that helped develop some really pivotal consumer electronics technology, such as the VCR and lots of hi-fi audio technology.  Much later on, I wound up working for two different parts of the Bell Labs legacy, Telcordia and Lucent.

I always enjoyed watching the presentations from the advanced research teams, because first, and foremost, most of them have really good senses of humor and put on killer presentations.  The second point was that it always felt like looking into a crystal ball and seeing the future.  The painful reality was that most of the really, really cool research stuff was pretty far away from the pedestrian commercial world of selling stuff and making this year’s numbers that I live in.

I think that the focus on strategic alliances to drive innovation is right on the money, although probably closer to the more tactical “while I still have a job” couple of year range, as opposed to the more realistic 20 years that it takes for most really revolutionary designs to find a commercial marketplace.