World Wide Webb

What we can learn from Windows Live

2012-05-07T17:54:00Z

Back in 2005, I had my first visit to Microsoft Corp.’s headquarters campus in Redmond, Wash., just outside of Seattle, with a group of journalists from around the world. We took in a Seattle Mariners game; the Asian journos went batty every time Ichiro Suzuki took to the plate, while I tried to explain to a group of Brits the rules of the game, which are surprisingly complicated when you try to spell them out.

Back at the campus, Microsoft reps were making what was intended to be one of its biggest branding initiatives ever: Windows Live. The platform (was it a platform?) boasted e-mail, Windows Live search, a mapping service, messaging, blogging platform and much, much more. One thing it didn’t boast was clarity. The assembled journalists couldn’t figure out what exactly Windows Live was (was it a platform?). Like baseball, it was surprisingly complicated when you tried to spell it out.

I reminisce for two reasons: I just bought a Windows Phone 7-based HTC Radar smart phone, which is thoroughly integrated with Live; and because Microsoft killed the Live brand the day after I bought it.

To be honest, it won’t affect Windows Phone users. While the service is built around your Microsoft e-mail account, like most others, I stuck with Hotmail rather than Live addresses. Live was really, as a pundit from U.K. tech site The Register put it, “the meaningless umbrella (for) a bunch of online services.”

Despite the marketing effort, Live really never gained traction. With the rebranding of Live Search as Bing in 2009, Live receded into the background. Microsoft had never managed to articulate what Live was meant to be, which was what Google is now: The portal to your online life, with apps, e-mail, search, social and more, all in one place.

This snapped into focus when I was selling the merits of Windows Phone to our IT manager, particularly its integration with Hotmail and the coming Windows 8 operating system. “That’s great,” Mat said, “but my life is in Google.”

That’s a powerful statement.

It’s also a powerful strategy, and one that the IT department can emulate. When considering the architecture of your systems, remember that you want the user’s work life to be in your infrastructure. Building the experience around e-mail is a good start; do the end-user applications integrate with e-mail? Do they share a relationship with the user’s (and the enterprise’s) data? Can the user customize the end point experience to accommodate the way he or she works? Can you create compelling custom mobile apps that keep the user in the system rather than drifting off into the Googleverse?

(This last point, by the way, is also a powerful tool to retain at least some control in the face of the BYOD movement, notes veteran IT pro and analyst Bruce Stewart on our Blogosphere site at blogidol.ca. “Create some attractors: small, quick, cheap apps that provide useful services, but are only available for the platforms you want to support,” he writes. “Not platform — platforms. There has to be some choice left open. Simple apps that make office life easier are a good beginning. Room booking on the fly, for instance. You make these available for, let’s say, three platforms at most … Your apps, in turn, are the opening to the idea of even more app interfaces to your systems. Here’s where you can start to embed the security and integrity controls you need. Meanwhile, you’re producing things that are seen as valuable. That builds your reputation, and the battle shifts from control to, ‘Here’s some money, can you make me a …’ That’s a good place to be.”)

When your employees keep their work life in your systems, it’s suddenly easier to deal with issues like security, data loss prevention, data integrity, master data management … the list goes on and on. There’s a certain Zen to gaining control by letting it go.

Why dumb-down the mobile verson of Windows 8?

2012-04-19T18:07:00Z

Microsoft Corp. announced earlier this week that its Windows 8 operating system who be released in only four flavours, down from the six versions for Windows 7. Peole have long been on Microsoft's case about the complexity of its OS offerings -- Which Windows 7 do you run? Do you remember? Do you remember *why*? -- so this is a step in the right direction, with only two choices for home users, an enterprise version and something called Windows 8 RT, née Windows on ARM, or WOA.

RT will, as its previous name suggests, run on ARM processor-based hardware, which is most of the smart phone and tablet world. But it'll be a stripped-down version that won't be capable of running full-fledged Windows applications, and won't boast some of the enterprise management features that IT departments need.

This provoked a head-slap from me. With huge opportunity in the tablet market and the potential for integration across devices, and all the buzz of the new OS launch, why would Microsoft put a half-powered version of its operating system on the hardware form factor that will almost certainly be the fastest growing in the foreseeable future?

This puts me in a bit of an awkward position, as it baldly contradicts what I've been saying for the past year-and-a-half.

Since Microsoft announced its one-operating-system-to-rule-them-all strategy, putting Windows 8 on not just computers but also tablets and smart phones, I've said it's a mistake. A tablet is really more like a smart phone than a computer; why slow it down with the bloat of a full-fledged computer operating system?

A couple of things have happened since. I've seen Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 side-by-side. WIndows Phone 7 is by far my favourite mobile interface; after years of mobile OSs from Redmond that were awful at best, the operating system team hit this one out of the park. Far more intuitive than BlackBerry OS, much more powerful from a professional perspective than Apple's iOS, not as fragmented as Android, it most resembles the lamented Palm/HP webOS that sank like a stone, bereft of marketing effort. And seeing them side-by-side, Phone 7 and Window 8 on a desktop have a lot in common in terms of navigability.

What about the bloat? I can't speak to the actual footprint of the operating system. But I have seen it run on a Mac Airbook in a virtual machine that was pretty scantily provisioned -- a single 2.3 GHz processor and 1 G of RAM -- and, while it wasn't lightning fast, it was certainly adequate. So sluggishness doesn't seem to be an issue.

So stripping out the enterprise functionality makes this a consumer play, when the biggest opportunity for Microsoft is the tablet as a fully integrated member of the enterprise family. Has Microsoft learned nothing from Research in Motion?

To be fair, the capabilities of a full-fledged Windows 8 on a smart phone would be sorely underused; I stand by my earlier position that a smart phone-specific operating system is needed.

But hopefully, when Intel makes its mark in the tablet market -- it released its first smart phone to the Indian market this week -- Microsoft won't make the same mistake it's making with ARM-based devices.

Trust and empowerment

2012-04-09T18:18:00Z

Monday morning, I came upon a story in one of the subway rags that detailed an altercation that began as a fight over a parking spot and ended with one of the drivers attacking the other with a hammer before driving off with child in a vehicle. It bolsters my case for the argument that the average person’s IQ drops by 30 points as soon as he or she gets behind the wheel of a car, but what struck me as interesting was this sentence: “(Police officers) believe several witnesses may have seen what happened and recorded it on their cell phones.”

It’s a variation on a theme, of course. Police frequently ask witnesses to come forward in cases. The difference is now, with an anonymous e-mail tip, witnesses can forward documentation of an incident without necessarily becoming involved.

The ubiquity of the video camera makes it much more difficult to get away with public crimes. It also can create a permanent record of more private transgressions, like, for example, behaviour at the office holiday party.

In fact, according to research by video platform provider Qumu Inc., 12 per cent of executives worry about that very thing — employees posting embarrassing videos of them from company parties. Fifty-one per cent worry about irresponsible content being posted to the company network

At the same time, none of the execs surveyed had ever seen inappropriate video content get posted. And 73 per cent said employee-generated videos have increased their productivity to some degree. So what gives?

It reminded me of another study, which might seem unrelated, but humour me till I get to the point. A Microsoft Canada survey on the flexible office found that employers and employees alike believed it’s important to have the same capabilities while working remotely as they do in the office (95 and 90 per cent, respectively). But while 55 per cent of employees felt they were more productive working remotely, only 25 per cent of bosses felt their employees were more productive working from home

The common theme: The boss doesn’t trust you, whether or not there’s a valid reason to feel that way

This can be a costly attitude. Despite productivity gains, execs are suspicious of employee video content even with a complete absence of evidence of abuse. Even though 62 per cent of bosses believe they themselves are more productive working remotely, they believe their employees are slacking off when they work from home.

So much technology has been developed with the aim of empowering employees — to work anywhere, to use any device, to provide company content. It’s meaningless without executive buy-in. The most empowering technology is the belief that employees will act in the best interest of the company when they’re unobserved.

Trust them. And install monitoring software.

RIM's salvation: Run the BlackBerry on Android

2012-03-30T14:14:00Z

Research in Motion Ltd., the beleaguered Waterloo, Ont.-based BlackBerry manufacturer, is at a crossroads.

Wow, does that sound hackneyed. Fact of the matter is, RIM's been dallying at this crossroads for close to two years now, not fully committing to the consumer path nor the enterprise road less travelled. (Mr. Frost, my humblest apologies.)

I've told this story a thousand times now: At a conference some eight or 10 years ago, a RIM representative told me I would never see a camera in a BlackBerry. "You know why?" he said. "Because it's not a consumer device."

Not long after, RIM got distracted by the shiny object of the consumer market. The problem was, the BlackBerry OS didn't have a shiny, happy, consumer friendly interface. This problem was compounded by the fact that RIM hadn't developed a product and services ecosystem around the device à la Apple's iTunes and App Store. When RIM eventually came late to that game, the company couldn't attract developers to populate its app store.

Through it all, ex-co-CEO Jim Balsillie focused on marketing the BlackBerry as a consumer device, largely ignoring the company's roots and strength: managing mobility for enterprises.

New CEO Thorsten HInes says RIM was late to the BYOD game, and will have to aggressively pursue partnershipa to get back in the game. Building something around the late and yet-to-be-released BlackBerry 10 OS is not just a long shot, it's a non-starter. On the consumer side, there's only one option for RIM: Google's Android operating system.

Android has a product, service and content ecosystem that rivals Apple Inc.'s iOS. RIM, with a useful OS several months out on the horizon, will never catch up. On the consumer side, RIM could rebound by focussing on building the best freakin' Android phones we've ever seen. The BlackBerry brand still has some cachet, especially in Canada. Use that. Don't bother with a doomed effort to build a rival OS.

This would allow RIM to focus on a market it can really own: enterprise management of consumer devices. That's where RIM has potential for a BYOD play. It'sFusion management architecture is a great step in that direction, but it's received virtually no marketing effort since its launch.

The BlackBerry operating system is the albatross around RIM's neck. It has to be ditched so the company can focus on battles it can win.

Social media signal-to-noise ratio

2012-03-26T17:51:00Z

I don’t generally turn to the sports pages of the Toronto Star for technology insight, but it does pop up in odd places on occasion.

Case in point is Monday’s sports media column by Raju Mudhar, whom I used to see frequently on the technology beat. I can’t pin down exactly how long ago it was, but the grey that appears to be in his head-and-shoulders shot wasn’t there. But I digress.

Part of Monday’s column was devoted to TSN shifting coverage from the finish of a tight NCAA basketball championship to the women’s world curling championship last Thursday, “triggering outrage from basketball fans on Twitter.”

TSN’s logic was that the basketball game in question was “bonus” coverage (the feature game was on TSN 2), it was available on CBS, and Canada’s curling team faced a crucial match.

“Despite the NCAA game being available on CBS, and TSN pointing to it, the outrage from basketball viewers was vicious,” Mudhar wrote. “Muddying this was that while it is clear most curling fans aren’t as social media savvy as hoops fans, traditionally the ice sports get really good ratings here.”

TSN stuck with the entire March Madness game on Saturday, and even if it had been the plan all along (the conflicting curling match didn’t feature Canada), the decision had a whiff of flip-flop, of caving to social media pressure, to it.

Mudhar may be making presumptions about the social media savvy of curling fans, but let’s face it: Shaquille O’ Neal tweets, Russ Howard doesn’t. One March Madness-hash-tagged tweet was retweeted almost 600 times; the hash tag #curling draws about a dozen tweets an hour. If indeed TSN flip-flopped to appease NCAA fans based solely on social media reaction, it was a mistake.

TSN’s decision was likely based on more factors than that, but it does serve to illustrate the importance of understanding social media signal-to-noise ratio. If the bulk of your customer base isn’t social-media-oriented, it’s possible to sacrifice their wishes for the demographic that makes the most noise, whether that’s good for the majority or not.

This is the importance of knowing your customers before you try to get to know them better through social media.

***

Thursday is D-Day for Thorsten Heins. His first delivery of quarterly results for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. will be under a microscope, especially given last week’s news that the Apple Inc.’s iPhone had surpassed RIM devices in quarterly sales volume for the first time.

Not a whole lot appears to have changed under Heins’s watch. Other than delivering as promised on a new operating system for RIM’s PlayBook tablet, there are no signal victories here. Rebel investors have been quiet of late, apparently mollified by changes at the executive level, or perhaps recognizing that the constant bickering that drove down RIM’s share price was a shot to their own foot.

I don’t anticipate a wild rush for the exits by shareholders. For one thing, many of them will be pot-committed by now; bailing with the stock so undervalued would be too much of a haircut. For another, co-founders Jim Ballsillie andMike Lazaridis are still the largest shareholders in the company.

Where your digital life is

2012-03-19T18:50:00Z

I’d been impressed with Microsoft Corp.’sWindows Phone 7 at its launch, but have only recently had a chance to play with a phone running the operating system at length. The phone is anHTC Radar running on Wind Mobile, and the combination of smart phone and operating system is a good one.

The phone has a 400 by 800 pixel, 3.8-inchGorilla Glass screen, built-in 5-megapixel camera, stereo FM radio, 8GB of memory (not expandable, unfortunately), and 512MB of RAM. In other words, it’s a smart phone. What distinguishes one from another is becoming less and less about the hardware. The dreaded word “commodity” springs to mind.

At risk of sounding an awful lot like a marketing type, the differentiator in the smart phone market is the experience, and that comes down, for the most part, to the operating system and how it’s packaged with apps and online services.

(Apropos not much, I was called out by a stranger at my local for constantly referring to the BlackBerry’s OS, even though much of the time I was referring to the user interface. Another story.)

Microsoft’s mobile ecosystem (sorry, more marketing talk) is interesting to compare with those of other mobile players. It’s built around Windows Live (or Hotmail, to those of us who’ve had accounts for ages). SkyDrive hosts files, including audio and video, online, for accessibility anywhere. Xbox Live connects to the gaming experience. The integration of Microsoft Office applications is the best on the market, and documents are accessible through SkyDrive.

What separates the Windows Phone experience from the Google experience is the fact that in its coming Windows 8 operation system, Microsoft is going to extend the user interface theme (the so-called Metro interface) to the desktop. Google doesn’t have a desktop (don’t seepeople running Android on anything other than a phone or a tablet). Apple doesn’t have the e-mail integration. So it’s a pretty solid play by Microsoft.

But (you knew there was a “but,” didn’t you?) there is something that stands in the way of the Windows mobile play. Our IT manager, Mat Panchalingam, put it aptly in an as-yet unaired video interview. After using the beta of Metro-style Windows 8 for a few days, he had remarkably good impressions. However, “My life is in Google,” he said.

The entrenchment of Google is probably the single biggest barrier to Microsoft’s mobile success. People like Mat, whose e-mail, applications and search are bound up in Google, aren’t likely to shift their lives over to the Windows Live ecosystem. This is more of a barrier even than the Apple cool factor (or Research in Motion Ltd.’s enterprise security angle; Microsoft can tell a pretty good story there, too).

After years of truly horrid mobile devices, Microsoft finally seems to have got it. Did this mobile play come too late? Microsoft has missed boats before. But the company has shown in the past the ability to catch the market PDQ once the sights are aligned on the right target. Google and Apple may have huge head starts, but it rarely pays to count Microsoft out.

Can we just say no to the BYOD movement?

2012-03-12T18:51:00Z

Toward the end of our teleconference briefing with Cisco Systems Inc. CTO of security architecture Nasrin Rezai, I opened the Q&A with the stock question I always ask whenever someone brings up the issues of security and the bring your own device movement.

"Why don't we just say no?"

Maybe it's because I'm an old coot, maybe it was the walking to school uphill bothways in the snow, but the Millennial sense of entitlement to bring whatever device they want into the enterprise regardless of its security profile rankles, quite frankly. Where's the backlash from IT? (I wanted to ask our own director of IT about this, but he was on his iPhone.)

The truth is, of course, that some organizations, or at least branches of organizations, do say no. And that not only applies to the BYOD issue, but also to social media and other employee-related risk vectors that are deemed too, well, risky for the organization's security posture and regulatory regime, says Rezai.

"BYOD doesn't mean the same thing to everyone," she said. Distinctions are made based on the user community; contractors and partners might not have the same access as full-time employees, for example. It's all about visibility into the devices and their context. "The trick is, if I want to say yes, how do I do it?"

Allowing employyes to choose their own devices or use social media in a work contextallows the organization to set up a governance regime at the door. Negotiating the rules of use is the collaborative job of business sponsors, human resources, and IT. "Legal needs to be very much involved in that," Rezai says.

While I buy into the productivity boost of a mobile device, I still feel that a consistent device profile is necessary. With apologies to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, employee self-actualization is pretty much the top of the pyramid, whereas information security is a more fundamental need. I might not be alone in that thinking, but my side's not likely to win this battle.

Tim Currie, Cisco Canada's vice-president of borderless networks, reminds me of the rogue Wi-Fi access point issue of a few years ago. When APs became inexpensive and easy to configure, they began popping up everywhere in the enterprise Unfortunately, with no policy for them to conform to, they went largely unsecured. An unsecured access point was the flaw in the TJX data breach in 2006 to 2007 that allowed theives to make off with the financial information of more than 90 million customers. People will do these things behind the enterprise's back.

I have a bone to pick with that argument. When thewave of employee-enabled wireless APs hit enterprise IT, enterprise IT hit back. IT didn't issue policies; IT put its collective foot down.

One difference is, for better or for worse, BYOD is a deluge, not a wave. "They're doing it anyway, and corporate data is being exposed," Currie says.

The bottom line is, as Rezai says, "Don't let BYOD happen to you." Have a strategy and governance model, and be prepared.

A big data 'aha' moment

2012-02-28T14:12:00Z

It may be a buzz phrase, the cloud computing of 2012, but I do find big data analytics fascinating. It's just the way my mind works; give me a big enough survey sample, and I can entertain myself with pivot tables for hours on end. But I felt I needed a better grounding in the concept, so I asked the folks at SAS Canada for a schooling. They connected me with Paul Kent, SAS Institute Inc. in Cary, N.C. Kent is the vice-president of platform research and development for the company.

(I also spoke to Pat Finerty of SAS Canada about the evolution of analysis, from data mining to big data, in this video.)

It's a given that technology changes everything, but that's particularly true in the big data analytics field. The ability to process the analytics of billions of lines of data in memory, innovatons like the Hadoop MapReduce framework for distributed computing, and high-performance computing grids make it possible to perform analytics on ever increasing amounts of data in near-real time.

On the other side of the equation, we're collecting more and more data to analyze. The evolution of data analysis is inextricably linked to the evolution of data collection. In the early days of computing, data was part of the application itself. Move along to the transactional data base model, and data is collected from outside the application, but complying with a specific structure of fields. Now, the sources of data aren't so structured: we're dealing with documents, images, and media files, often without the appropriate meta data; geo-location data that may or may not be associated with a transaction; social media feeds wherein context is everything; metering data from electrical grids; all manner of telematics from vehicles, production machinery, etc.

I remember a story from the days of yore, when data mining was a fresh concept. A colleague of mine called out a representative of one of the vendors over the beer and diapers issue: analyze enough transactional data, and you'll find a pattern that suggests people who buy diapers also buy beer, so a retailler can organize the shelves accordingly. Said colleague's complaint was that the company rep was presenting this as a fact, rather than a theoretical example of the patterns that data mining can unlock, and factually, it wasn't true. It's an item of small relevance, but for the fact that it lodged the beer-and-diapers model of data mining in my head for the ensuing 15 years.

And it's a handy model to have when the skeptical say that big data analytics is just a jumped-up version of data mining. It highlights the fundamental difference, and my discussion with Kent crystalized it: data mining is transaction-focused, teasing patterns out of information of limited scope, whereas big data analytics has a behavioural focus. We're not concerned with the transaction, according to Kent, but with the behaviour that leads to the transaction. Of those many new types of data outlined a couple paragraphs ago, almost all are related to behaviour.

That was my big data "aha" moment, and it fundamentally changes my understanding of analytics.

Canada 'gets it,' Cisco CEO says

2012-02-23T14:41:00Z

Last time Cisco Systems Inc. CEO John Chambers was in Toronto, he and Ontario Trade Minister Sandra Puppatello announced a memorandum of understanding that would seeCisco and the province invest almost half a billion dollars in research and development facilities in Ottawa and Toronto, the vast majority of the money being Cisco's. It's the kind of cash commitmentment that we don't often see from the other Tier 1 players in the technology market. Given the opportunity at a videoconference briefing on Wednesday night, I asked Chambers what he sees in Canada that maybe the others are missing.

Canadian politicians, at all levels and across all parties, Chambers said, are willing to work with businessto foster investment. It's not simply about tax incentives, though competitive tax policy is important. There's a fundamental change in the political landscape. For the last decade, Chambers said, politics has determined economics. For the next decade, economics will determine politics.

"Canada gets it better than anyone else," Chambers said.

Chambers covered a lot of ground in a wide-ranging exchange with reporters from half a dozen North American media outlets, asking almost as many questions as he answered.

* On Cisco's need to "reinvent itself" some 18 months ago: Symptomatically, the company missed a market transition, Chambers said. Cisco saw its government sales growth drop from 20 per cent to -8 per cent; its competitors didn't. The company was launching new switches on five different platforms, but had to sell more because the refreshed switch lines required fewer boxes for the same throughput. The company's engineering was organized by product, while customers were buying architectures. Major growth was coming from emerging markets, requiring a geographic organizational re-org. And, tellingly, while Cisco was still selling product to enterprise and service provider customers, execs weren't being asked to present to customer conferences on innovation.

Cisco has reinvented itself several times in the past, Chambers said, but the goal now is for the company to constantly reinvent itself, rather than once every five or seven years.

* On Cisco's challenge of Microsoft Corp.'s purchase of Skype in a European Union court: "I have a tremendous amount of respect for Microsoft, Chambers said, and while CIsco will compete aggressively in the collaboration market, there are other areas where Cisco and Microsoft work together. The suit is to ensure Microsoft doesn't block other video calling services from its WIndows platform. Open standards allow the market to move forward faster, Chambers said.

The customer shouldn't have to be the systems integrator, he said. "(Customers say), we not only want you to interoperate, we expect you to interoperate."

So why didn't Cisco buy Skype before Microsoft picked it up for $8.5 billion last May?

"We had a chance to make that acquisition a long time ago," Chambers said. But it would have been hard to explain to Cisco's service provider accounts. "We don't compete with our customers," Chambers said.

* On rumours CIsco is getting out of the set-top box business: While Chambers doesn't normally go out of his way to be in the press, rumours of Cisco pulling out of the set-top box market had to be shot down quickly. How, he asked rhetorically, could he explain to service provider customers Cisco was pulling out of a business where it had 23 per cent growth last quarter, and that those customers depended on for a revenue stream?

"We have a lot of weaknesses, and I have a lot of weaknesses as a leader," he said, but lack of transparency isn't one of them. "We don't bluff. We don't say anything we don't mean," he said.

Four years from now, video will be the predominant communications media, Chambers predicted, and most of that video will go to set-top boxes. Pull out of the market? "It's not even discussed at Cisco."

* On buying, and subsequently killing off, the Flip consumer video camera business: "The timing was wrong in the sense that we couldn't pull it together fast enough," Chambers said. The FlipShare media file organizer should have been in the cloud, he said. "We got outmanoeuvred."

* On being active on the mergers and acquisitions front: "We don't compete against competitors. We compete against market transitions," Chambers said. "Each of us, if we miss market transitions, it's going to cost us." If he feels the company is missing a window, Cisco will acquire the companies and technologies it needs to stay on top. "Yo're going to see us get more active in the M&A market.

A time to make promises and a time to deliver

2012-02-14T20:34:00Z

Greg Reed, CEO of eHealth Ontario, paints this scenario: It's delivery day, 2015. We're gathered outside the low-slung bunker of a data centre. Someone ceremoniously flips the Frankenstein switch. Millions of disks spin to life. Lights across the province momentarily dim as its long-planned health network comes alive.

It's not gonna work that way, Reed told the Economic Club of Canada at an event on Wednesday.

There's been a dearth of media coverage of eHealth Ontario in recent months, and that's been by design.

"A decision we made two years ago was that it was time to start delivering results instead of making promises," Reed said of the low profile, acknowledging a "legacy problem with (the eHealth Ontario) brand."

As you may recall, in the media, the words "eHealth Ontario" and "scandal" once went together like "peanut butter" and "jelly." In August 2009, CEO Sarah Kramer was forced to resign over what some media described as $1.4 billion in wasted money. (Ontario auditor general Jim McCarter described those charges as wildly exaggerated, while acknowledging there had been large-scale waste.)

Reed took over on April 1, 2010. Since then, it's been about getting things done, even if it's incrementally. Reed puts it this way: Three years ago, eHealth Ontario was a scandal; two years ago, it was a turnaround; last year, it started delivering on its electronic health record promises.

After flying under the radar for a while, Reed used the Economic Club venue (amid a flurry of public policy announcements from provincial and federal politicians -- he said he felt like "a public servant walking in traffic") to showcase some of the progress made.

First of all, re: the above-mentioned Frankendata centre, it just won't work that way. When envisioning a provincewide electronic health system, consider this, he says: If a patient in Windsor gets sick, he goes to his doctor. If he gets really sick, he might go to a local hospital. If he gets really, really sick, he might end up at London Health Sciences Centre. He's not, however, going to be transferred to Thunder Bay Regional Health Centre. Rather than rip and replace systems across the province, eHealth has focused on helping local networks of health providers connect, using disparate systems, and developing the hooks to make them interact and allow provincial data to be plugged in.

He touted a number of delivered, functioning systems that, compared to the original vision of Canada Health Infoway, might seem like small victories, but they have immediate impact nonetheless.

* One hundred forty thousand times a year, a patient who is discharged from hospital ends up readmitted within a month. Reed says studies show that a follow-up with a family physician within a week cuts that number substantially. While paper hospital discharge records take two weeks to reach a patient's GP, they can now be delivered electronically within hours. This saves on the cost of readmitting patients.

* When a patient arrives at one of the provinces 100 trauma centres with a head injury, he or she immediately gets a three-dimensional CT scan. The province now has one of its 70 neurosurgeons on call at all times to remotely view digital versions of the scan and instruct ER teams. Patients don't have to be moved until they're stabilized, if they have to be moved at all.

* eHealth is ready to roll out a laboratory information system that not only cuts delivery time for test results from weeks to hours, it better secures patient information. Paper records get mailed to the wrong address or faxed to the wrong number; the lab information system requires two-factor authentication to access records."We have a lineup of doctors and hospitals that want to use this," Reed said. "This could be one of the most meaningfulthings we do in the history of eHealth Ontario.

* Reed said the potential of an integrated health network was most clearly demonstrated to him at Hawkesbury General Hospital, not far from Ottawa. Admissions was swamped with patients and families transferred from smaller hospitals; paramedics and their vehicles stood by idly because they couldn't leave until their charges were admitted. Meanwhile, transfers from Ottawa Hospital were already dispatched for rooms and treatments. When they arrived, hospital staff already knew who they were and what treatment was required.

eHealth Ontario has been flying under the radar for a while. But, apparently, things have been getting done. "We don't have to wait until 2015 to start delivering results," Reed said. So forgive him if the organization slips under the radar again.

Another year of Alternatives

2012-02-14T13:32:00Z

IT World Canada has been a media sponsor of Neilsen Consulting Inc.'s Know Your Alternatives conference since its inception last year, and I've participated as a panel discussion moderator for both events. It's billed as a different kind of IT trade show, and it is: it's very muchc network- and telecom-centric, and it's oriented toward networking opportunities among the users, vendors and consultants there.

There were some notable changes at this year's show, not the least of them the new venue. Having outgrown its downtown Toronto hotel venue of last year (which was claustrophobic enough to provoke a panic attack), the event this year moved to the North Hall of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. This helped accommodate the exhibition floor, a new feature for this year's event.

(If you entered the North Hall from the Skywalk, as I did, you would have circled around a huge exhibit floor, with a vast number of exhibitors uncrating displays. For a moment, you might have gone, "Wow, I didn't expect a show this big." Then you'd have realized it was actually the floor for this week's auto show.)

Maybe more significant than the bigger crowd and the bigger venue, though, was the change in focus. The buzz last year was all about exit or retention strategies for network gear from from failed Nortel Networks , with recent buyer Avaya flying the Don't Panic flag, while other vendors seized the opportunity to try to get a foot in the door.

This year, the bring-your-own-device phenomenon was front and centre. This surprised me some; while BYOD has been the buzz-abbreviation of the last 12 months, KYA is a network-oriented show. I hadn't thought it immune, but I didn't expect BYOD to be on everybody's lips.

At the closing panel featuring executives from four major hardware manufacturers, all pointed to BYOD as a major influence in the near future for networking pros. Mike Ansley, managing director of Cisco Canada's partner organization, spoke of "the tyranny of consumerization."

"The idea of a unified endpoint is gone," he said.

The notion that the IT department has to accommodate whatever whimsical device an employee chooses to use just because the VP of Finance insisted on using his iPad at work has always rankled for me. So it was refreshing to hear some realism on the BYOD front from Pejman Roshan, who heads up ShoreTel's mobility business.

Roshan's wife, coincidentally, works for Cisco (they are going to have some conflicted kids). She's one of the 12,000 Cisco employees who decided to go with Apple's Mac for a desktop rather than a Windows-based PC. Support for those desktops (actually, more likely laptops) is peer-based through a Wiki' not through the IT department.

Users accept that they might be ostracized by IT, Roshan said, but they'll still bring their own devices to work. "You're on your own if it doesn't conform," Roshan said, and that seems like a reasonable compromise between nailing down the company desktop and supporting dozens of platforms.

Mickelson hunting online defamer

2012-02-03T16:46:00Z

I was once an avid, though terrible, golfer. I haven't hit the links in four years, and I haven't followed the pro tour as closely as I used to. However, I can say, from what I recall, that Phil Mickelson -- Lefty, as he's often called, left-handers being so rare in the sport -- was never a favourite golfer of mine. His short game was inconsistent. His judgment was suspect. I didn't like his tempo.

I *can* say these things. Freedom to criticize golfers is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, though I can't remember under which amendment. I cannot say things like, "Phil Mickelson's wife had an affair," or "Phil Mickelson fathered and illegitimate child." This, under Western law, is defamation -- slander if spoken, libel if it's of the printed or pixellated variety.

Mickelson is, as we speak, having Quebec ISP Videotron dig up the identity of one "Fogroller," who apparently published just such accusations in comments posted on Yahoo Sports last November. It was a bit of an indirect route, though not too complex: A San Diego Superior Court subpoenaed Yahoo, which identified Fogroller as a Montrealer, with Videotron as his ISP. (I'm saying "his" because, though I don't know who tis is, only a guy would be such a dolt.) Mickelson then filed suit in a Quebec Superior Court to force Videotron to reveal the identity of the user. According to the Associated Press, Videotron is happy to provide the information.

Good on them.

It's not just the anonymity of the Internet that makes dumb people do bad things. Being abstracted from the physical can also be mistranslated as abstraction from the law. But at the heart of it is a culture of entitlement. I'm entitled to free music, free movies, free software. People who wouldn't consider shoplifting download pirated content. Whether or not the content distribution model is broken, there's no excuse for theft. Likewise, there are limits to freedom of expression. The freedom to swing one's arm ends where another's nose begins, says the adage. And hiding behind an avatar and a pseudonym is not going to protect you when cross the line. Your right to privacy is not more important than another's protection under the law.

Conversation with a hacker

2012-01-18T22:28:00Z

As I wrote in another post,my Yahoo and Facebook accounts were compromised this morning, with some scam artist claiming to be me, in London, mugged and broke, looking for someone to wire him money. A suspicious friend, Lawrence Cummer, engaged him in a Facebook chat. Here's the transcript (the time is 10:52 Eastern).

16 minutes ago

Dave Webb

Hi
how are you doing?

13 minutes ago
Law Cummer

Hi!
Good, how are you?

Haven't seen you on here in a while.

13 minutes ago
Dave Webb

Am not too good at the moment
In some kind of mess

12 minutes ago
Law Cummer

Oh no. What's up?

12 minutes ago
Dave Webb

Just writing to let you know our trip to London United Kingdom,has been a mess

10 minutes ago
Law Cummer

Are you OK though? (Sorry if I'm being thick, mess can be health, ugly situations, a lot of things.)

Do you need help with anything?

10 minutes ago
Dave Webb

I was having a great time until last night when we got mugged and lost all my cash, credit card and cell phone It has been a scary experience, I was hit at the back of my neck with a club. Anyway.I'm still alive and that's whats important

8 minutes ago
Law Cummer

Holy ***. That is terrifying. Can I help? Do you need me to call or get in touch with anyone, or anything?

8 minutes ago
Dave Webb

I'm financially strapped right now and need your help

7 minutes ago
Law Cummer

Give me a shout by phone.

7 minutes ago
Dave Webb

I need you to loan me some $$...I'll refund it to you as soon as i arrive home

3minutes ago
Law Cummer

Are you able to give me a call?

What I find truly fascinating is this dork thought he could pass himself off as me to someone who actually knew me well enough to wire me money.

Diary of a hacked account

2012-01-18T21:40:00Z

For those of you who are wondering, I am not in London, I was not mugged, and I don't want you to wire me money.

Both my Facebook and Yahoo accounts were hacked this morning, and I'm now intimately familiar with the anxiety of small-scale identity theft. I say "small-scale" because so far, the accounts have only been used to deliver the old London mugging scam. Fortunately, most of my contacts have had enough exposure to this sort of thing to know better.

About 10 a.m., I got a phone call from a friend who'd seen me a couple of days ago and knew I wasn't in London. Then another. And another. At one point, I had someone on my desk phone, someone on my cell, and my second line flashing an incoming call.

(In the meantime, unbeknownst to me, a suspicious firend was having a Facebook chat with someone claiming to be me, spouting the same story. When he insisted the imposter call, the conversation ended. It's transcribed here.)

I assume e-mail was pouring in, too, but there was no way for me to know. My password had been changed. When I used the e-mail recovery function to wrest control, it was changed again within four minutes and the e-mail address associated with the recovery deleted. Great. Now the asshat had my work e-mail address.

Our CIO directed one of our IT consultants to do nothing for the next two hours but watch for anomalies and secure every corporate account I had access to, which turned out to be quite a few. Meanwhile, a panicked Twitter post paid off. Yahoo's director of Canadian PR called and promised to put me in touch with the company's concierge service.Ten minutes later, we were securing the account. (As of now, I haven't heard back from Facebook, but to say they're "looking into it." I've locked the account since; I don't know how effective that's been.)

Cassie, my concierge, explained the spooky part that had been worrying me: how the scam artist changed the password a second time. Another e-mail account was associated to the Yahoo account, so when Yahoo sent an alert notfying me of the passward change, the scammer got it, too. Little security hole there for Yahoo -- that notification should only go to the account selected for password recovery, since it has a link allowing a password change.

I am trying very, very hard to turn this into a learning experience rather than let the anger and frustration consume me. It's a teachable moment. What have I learned?

* I am an intelligent Internet user. I do not answer e-mail from people I don't know. I don't register for forums. I have minimized the information I give out on Facebook. Someone still got my password, whether by keylogger (possible) or by gleaning enough information from Facebook and other sources to make an educated guess at my password.

* Not so intelligent: Using the same password on multiple accounts.Especially since the password contained some personal information to make it easier to remember.

* You know how experts keep telling you not to write down your passwords? Don't listen. If you have six accounts and can remember all their passwords, they're not strong enough. Write 'em down, keep 'em in your wallet. And consider a password manager likeLastPass or 1Password. There's the added bonus of evading keyloggers, as the application generates the password, not the keyboard.

* For individual account passwords, use a random password generator like Free Password Generator.

As for the asshat who tried to punk my friends, listen: If you're trying to con people, at least have the guts to do it in person. I'll be ready, and you'll be sorry.

There's no escaping Tebow

2012-01-10T22:07:00Z

I can't bear any more Tim Tebow, but I just can't escape him.

Tebow, for those of you who don't follow NFL football, read newspapers or own a TV, is the evangelical quarterback of the Denver Broncos. His throwing mechanics are ghastly. His timing is suspect. He has none of the qualities one associates with a professional QB. The only thing he does right is win.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I am a Green Bay Packers fan, through and through. I bleed cheese. The last team to defeat the Packers in the Super Bowl? The Broncos.)

And pray. Prayer's not that unusual in NFL games, but theTebow prayer stance -- on one knee, forehead bowed against his fist -- is particularly, well, prayery. And he does it an awful lot.

I thought I'd be safe from Tebow in a tech journalism job. But no. I read today that when he completed an 80-yard pass-and-run to defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers in last weekend's playoff game, Tebow broke a Twitter record, garnering 9,420 tweets per second. How does this stack up? The death of Osama Bin Laden peaked at 5,106.

If you can't beat 'em, shake your head and join 'em. If you haven't started doing it already, try Tebowing. Get pictures of yourself in unlikely locations, ala planking (remember that?), assuming thetrademark Tebow prayer stance, and post 'em online.