World Wide Webb

Be there or be square: HackerNest Toronto on Monday, Feb. 25

Dave Webb — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 20:48:00 GMT

Once a quarter, staff at Oanda – a foreign exchange trading platform developer and one of Toronto’s best kept technology secrets – lock themselves in the office for 24 hours and hack. Not just the developers, either; the whole staff contributes. According to Oanda staffer Liam Lahey (in the spirit of full disclosure, he’s a former colleague and good friend of many years), it’s an outpouring of creativity that doesn’t always produce results that will become part of its flagship trading engine (though it’s cool to hook up the coffee-maker to the network so you can order a cup from your desk and be notified when it’s ready), but it often does. A recent hackathon, for example, produced the new fxTradeNOW browser extension.

Then someone suggested Oanda turn that focus outward. To that end, the company is sponsoring the next three monthly HackerNest Toronto get-togethers. The first, this Monday, Feb. 25, at 8 p.m., is at the Centre for Social Innovation Annex at 720 Bathurst St. The tech social is an opportunity to discuss trends in the IT industry, and attendees also get their hands on Oanda’s open API to develop on the platform. For the company, it’s an opportunity to recruit talent, nurture an ecosystem of partners developing on the API, and give a little back to the tech community in Toronto.

Registration is free at http://www.meetup.com/hackernest/

Why the BlackBerry 10 launch mattered as much as the features

Dave Webb — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:07:00 GMT

I’ve long said the Research in Motion – wait, sorry, that’s BlackBerry now – had to knock it out of the park with its new operating system. Users have drifted away to sexier smart phone offerings, and the company that was then known as RIM was trying the patience of the faithful with delay upon delay. Well, if it performs as advertised, BlackBerry genuinely has reinvented the mobile computing experience, and the OS makes Apple and Android devices look cheesy. (Yes, I’m ready for the hate-mail from the fanbois.)

RELATED: What's at stake for RIM

I won’t bother documenting the features. I just spent the better part of two hours frantically tweeting them. You can get your fill of that from @cwceditor, on the hashtag #BB10 or BlackBerry10, or, for that matter, on any news-gathering organization’s Web site. There is something significant about the launch aside from the features.

There was something very Apple-esque about the New York launch of BlackBerry 10. It was flashy, multimedia, worldwide, and even had a stab at the Jobsian late reveal with the announcement of Alicia Keys as the company’s new global creative director. CEO Thorsten Heins's tieless suit look is no match for the late Steve Jobs’s jeans and turtleneck, and he and the execs tapped to launch the OS weren’t as slick as Steve and company, but there was an enthusiasm and approachability that’s been lacking lately. Whatever the polar opposite of aloof is, that’s the image that BlackBerry’s trying to project.

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Will BlackBerry 10 be enough to turn around the company's fortunes?

And that’s what’s significant: They’re trying to project an image. Rather than rest on the laurels of its enterprise server and wildly popular messaging platform, BlackBerry has shown it’s willing to put in the marketing spadework. They want you back, they want app developers, and they’re willing to put in the effort. It’s an ironic role reversal. Apple now looks like the complacent company, with nary a true innovation since the iPad. And the products just aren’t sexy anymore. So … the ball’s in play, as of Feb. 5 in Canada. Will we see iPhone-like lineups for product releases? Not likely. The BlackBerry faithful aren’t that slavishly devoted. Like the company, they project a different image than Apple does.

Predictions 2013: Can Whitman dig HP out of its hole?

Dave Webb — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 20:59:00 GMT

IT Business editor Brian "Action" Jackson is cracking the whip again, demanding more predictions from a soul wounded by the backlash against its predictions in re: Research in Motion yesterday. (Note to detractors: I'm slowly coming around to your point on there being room for more than three mobile OSes. Very slowly.)

Predicting the future of troubled companies is dangerous territory, fraught with strong opinion and best avoided. Less said the better. So, what's on the agenda today?

Oh, crap. Let's talk Hewlett-Packard.

HP's board of directors was famously called "pathetic" by Forbes contributor Eric Jackson, while the Wall Street Journal once wondered if it was the "worst board ever." Those sentiments were largely aimed at the company's record of hiring and firing CEOs. Mark Hurd was making progress clearing the smoking wreckage left behind by Carly Fiorina's purchase of Compaq (which had recently purchased mainframe company Digital Equipment) and failure to strike an over-priced deal to purchase Pricewaterhouse Coopers when he was sacked by the board over a sex scandal that involved no sex. Oracle's Larry Ellisons called it "the worst personnel decision ever" -- boy, the ultimates fly when people talk HP -- and put his money where his mouth was by hiring Hurd.

HP replaced Hurd with Leo Apotheker, recently fired by ERP company SAP, a man with no hardware experience whom half the board had never met. His first strategic move was to announce he'd spend the next year deciding whether or not to sell off HP's personal systems group, raising questions about the long-term viability of new product. His interregnum lasted all of 11 months.

When board member Meg Whitman was named CEO in September 2011, she quickly kiboshed the PSG spinoff, a widely applauded move. The markets originally rewarded this, with HP stock climbing steadily from $23 to $30 over the next six months. Since then, though, it's been a steady downward spiral through successive poor earnings announcements, climaxing with the write-down of $8 billion in November, $5 billion associated with the purchase of Autonomy under Apotheker, and the accompanying accusations of misrepresentation and shoddy auditing by Deloitte and KPMG. The lawsuits have just begun to fly, and the stock is mired at about $14.

There were high hopes for Whitman as a steadying hand, thanks to the dot-com monster eBay that she built. She had no tech hardware experience, but had market cred and a solid track record. All the same, HP's share price is a little more than half the price it was when she took over. She's repeatedly called the HP turnaround a multi-year journey. We've entered Year 2 heading in the wrong direction. There's going to be a lot of pressure on Whitman to show results by her second-year anniversary in September. At HP's Discover conference in early December, she boasted that HP has a strong cash flow and is No. 1 or No. 2 in every market it's entered. Her strategy, built on cloud computing, big data and security, looks compelling from a technology perspective. I think the Street will see that, too, if Whitman can deliver a quarter or two without enormous write-downs and show the company's moving toward profitability. So ... I say there's improvement at HP in 2013, but the company's a long way from being fixed.

Predictions 2013: A turnaround year for RIM?

Dave Webb — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 21:29:00 GMT

Editor Brian Jackson over at ITBusiness.ca is getting all over us about posting some predictions for next year, so I'd better get at it.

Here's the coward's way of putting it: "2013 will be a critical year in determining Research in Motion's future -- or if it has one." Meh. Take a stand, will ya?

A braver man would say unequivocally that "BB10 will be the magic bullet that slays the vampire sucking the life out of RIM." Note that I never said I was that braver man.

Let's go through the checklist of things that must happen for RIM to turn around and head back to relevance.

1. On Jan. 31, when RIM unveils its BlackBerry 10 devices, people's reaction had better be to hyperventilate with excitement. BlackBerry 10 has to be the slickest, most intuitive, most powerful mobile operating system on the market if RIM is going to bring defectors back into the fold and steal share from the three major OS players it'll be competing against.

2. Did I say three? I meant "two." Because if Windows Phone 8, with its cross-device ecosystem and captive body of ISVs actually gains traction over the holiday season, taking enough market share to become relevant, RIM will be buried. Windows Phone share is possibly the biggest threat to RIM's recovery, next to a BB10 flop.

3. RIM must retain its enterprise market share. New CEO Thorsten Heins has made some good noises about returning to RIM enterprise roots and focussing more on those customers. That's a good strategy, since I wouldn't bet anything of value on RIM winning a lot of consumer share in the near term. (I'm reading today that RIM will be surpassed by iOS devices in shipments before the end of the year, which is not a good sign.)

4. RIM must license that killer OS to other hardware manufacturers. RIM has gained a reputation for unimaginative devices over the last couple of years, where as handset makers like Samsung and HTC have been hitting home runs on the hardware side. Samsung, in particular, has been garnering brand loyalty with its Galaxy line. RIM's got to take advantage of that.

5. RIM has to put some marketing muscle behind its Fusion mobile management platform. This dovetails with Point 3, above. A promising development for RIM when it was announced almost a year ago, Fusion has had minimal profile since. Others are quickly jumping on the cross-platform management bandwagon, and quickly. RIM will have lost a key differentiator if Fusion doesn't get more traction.

6. RIM has to win developers, not carriers. Come on. Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer doesn't even consider the BlackBerry a smart phone. It's about the apps.

That's a lot of ducks to line up. Nos. 1 and 2 both have a fighting chance. As for No. 3, RIM may have to regain rather than maintain enterprise footprint. As for No. 4, at least Heins has entertained licensing, though it's not likely soon. Fusion's boat may have already sailed. And No. 6? Well, that depends on No. 1.

Obviously, 2013 is a critical year for RIM's future. But I don't think anything gets resolved in the next 12 months. Like HP's turnaround (next prediction), this is a multi-year journey. I say a mild recovery on all fronts for RIM, but in December 2013, the company still won't be out of the woods

My credit card went to Argentina and didn't even get me a crappy T-shirt

Dave Webb — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 18:14:00 GMT

It hasn't been my year, online security-wise.

As some of you may recall, my Facebook and Yahoo accounts were hacked a couple of months ago. Either that, or I really was mugged in London and needed money to get home. While Yahoo's concierge service had my e-mail account back in my hands in pretty short order, Facebook promised to help, then completely disappeared on me. The account's still frozen.

In more recent non-travel news, apparently my credit card went to Argentina without me.

Making an online payment the other day, I noticed my balance was considerably higher than anticipated. I flagged it with the bank, but since transactions take a couple days to post, there were no suspicious transactions.

I went on vacation, much of it spent at an isolated cottage a 15-minute boat ride from civilization -- no TV, no computer, no store, no reason to use my credit card. While I was gone, the credit card company left a voice mail on my office phone. I returned the call Monday morning.

"We've had a few suspicious transactions on your credit card account," a rep told me. "Do these names mean anything to you?" He rattled off several transactions from retailers in Argentina. I've never been. I guess my credit card got wanderlust.

Clever people, whoever bought my account information (for I presume it was expose in a breach and auctioned). They began with a credit to my account, thus establishing a transaction history. Then they began to pluck transactions from the account.

Fortunately, the bank's algorithm was cleverer. Mind you, it had a hint in the form of a transaction at a downtown Toronto restaurant a few minutes before I was supposedly on my South American shopping spree.

The rep reversed the charges, no muss, no fuss, which was at once encouraging and unnerving. Encouraging in that I wasn't compelled to jump through any hoops to prove I hadn't made the purchases; unnerved at how routine the agent made it see: "Yup, we'll take that one off. This one? No? Okay, we'll take that one off ..." These scams are so prevalent, a bank was giving me money back, virtually no questions asked.

No matter how low-profile you are, expect cybercrime to affect you. After these two incidents (and how many more did I overlook?), I'm beginning to treat it as routine myself. Yes, plan for worst, take all the necessary precautions. But don't expect that to be enough. You and your enterprise will be a target. Vigilance is necessary, before and after the fact.

This generational shift is not about the hardware

Dave Webb — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 19:57:00 GMT

Worldwide personal computer shipments just filed their seventh consecutive quarter of flat sales growth, according to research house IDC. If that was the economy of an industrial nation, it’d be cause for wariness, if not outright alarm. Although, given the current economic climate, some European nations might be quietly pleased.

IDC suggests it’s tablets and smart phones that are eroding PC sales. Which makes sense; last year, iSupply forecast that Internet-enabled consumer electronics devices would surpass PCs in sales in 2013, and that day might come sooner.

In a ComputerWorld (U.S.) article, analyst Zeus Karravala called it “a generational change … this isn’t a temporary phenomenon.” His reasoning: While PCs are great for information creation, tablets and smart phones are better for information consumption, “and we’re mainly consumers, not creators.”

While I agree with Kerravala, a very intelligent man who’s enlightened me more than once in an interview, I’d substitute “content” for “information.” Therein, in my opinion, lies the generational shift.

Information is suited to a keyboard and a monitor. A smart phone or a tablet, though they may have virtual keyboards and are essentially just display devices, has neither. No one refers to a tablet’s 10-inch monitor. So information, while useful, is less accessible to a tablet user than content.

Give a tablet user content, now, and he’s, well, content. Something he can get his hands dirty with, so to speak, something he can dig into with his fingers and interact with. (There’s a reason writers at the U.K. Web site The Register refer to tablets as “fondleslabs.”)

You could say my argument’s based on a faulty semantic premise: that information isn’t a form of content. And, of course, information is a form of content. But when we view it as simply information, it imposes a particular role: to inform. Content not only informs, it engages, it interacts, it entertains.

When we view the act of information creation as content creation, when we go through that looking glass, it changes the nature of the information our systems and applications must create.

And given it’s becoming a tablet world, we have to change that perspective now.

Lessons learned from Toronto City Chase

Dave Webb — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 15:44:00 GMT

Alicia and I did the Mitsubishi Toronto City Chase on Saturday. Well, we *started* the Mitsubishi Toronto City Chase, but that's Part 2 of this blog post.

The City Chase is a Canadian creation that's run around the world now. Think of it as a scavenger in which, instead of collecting items, you have to perform challenges. You get clues as to the location of the challenge; you work out where they are, then develop a logistical plan to getting through 10 of them within six hours. It's a blast.

It's also now impossible without a smart phone or encyclopedic knowledge of geography, history, music ... well, pretty much everything. At this year's event, we were dependent on a smart phone simply to get the clue sheet in the first place; clues to the two distribution points were given only on Twitter. I'd seen a clue sheet from a past event and was able to work out most of them without recourse to research. Without Google, this year's event would have been a complete bust.

Social media was woven into the very fabric of the event. Teams shared solutions to clues, wait times at some of the challenges, and general information about the event. It's astute marketing on the part of the organizers. I can foresee within a couple years a City Chase with no paper clues.

As for Part 2 ... the race inspired a mobile app idea, though probably not the kind you figured.

Our third challenge involved an improvised water slide down the bank at Greenwood Park, which is one of your premier toboggan hills in the Riverdale area. Soaked down by a fire hose (important note: water from a fire hydrant is glacially cold), we flew down a plastic sheet, maybe 75 to 100 feet long and covered in soapy water, on our backs. When Alicia got to her feet at the bottom of the hill, her eyes were glassy. "I hit my head. Hard," she said. I wanted to call a stop to it, but there was another challenge at the bottom of the hill, which she accomplished with considerable co-ordination. But by the time we got to the top of the hill, it was clear she wasn't in the game. She was aware that a) we were in an adventure race; b) it was Saturday; and c)what time is it again? but that was it.

We ended up in the ER at East York General Hospital. Alicia was diagnosed with amnesia, not a concussion. In our three hours at the ER, Alicia could not retain the answers to the questions she asked, over and over again:

"What happened?"

"I hit my head on a water slide?"

"That explains why my shorts are wet."

I am very patient with those I love. The other people in the ER, who were likely having a miserable day -- I mean, you don't generally have your most fun days in an emergency room -- who didn't know what a wonderful cook she is, what a wonderful relationship she has with my daughter, how funny she is, were likely ready to lynch us. So I created an FAQ for her. In one of the notebooks we'd been using to work out clues. I listed the answers to the questions she was asking over and over again. She flipped compulsively through the five or six pages of notes, about once a minute. She laughed at the same points every time, because it was all new to her. (She practically peed herself laughing every time I explained to her she'd forgotten that she had amnesia.) After a while, when she asked me a question, I would point at the notebook. Fascinatingly, she new what page the answer was on and would flip to it every time, although she couldn't retain the answer.

This is wholly suited to a mobile app: an easy-to-update, evolving FAQ for people with a persistent memory problem. The fact that Alicia new where to find the answer, though she couldn't remember the answer itself, is a critical aspect of the solution, as is the fact the questions tended to be in repetitive patterns that evolved over time.

She's fine, by the way, though she'll probably never remember Saturday afternoon.

Gen Y: More tech savvy, less security conscious

Dave Webb — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 20:00:00 GMT

A recent study released by Check Point Software Technologies Inc. notes that older users are more concerned about computer security than their millennial counterparts, which seems counterintuitive in many ways. Generation Y grew up techie, and are, to use a sweeping generalization, more knowledgable about technology than Baby Boomers. They are more likely to use online commerce. Yet, according to the survey, only 31 per cent of Gen Y users ranked security as the most important consideration when making computer-buying decisions, compared to 58 per cent of Boomers. The formula seems to go: Security consciousness increases with age. In which case, I should be battened down like Fort Knox by now.

Perhaps the explanation is that Generation Y grew up with pervasive technology that offers a relatively seamless user experience, compared to that of those who grew up on command lines. Perhaps it’s the fact that so much of their lives can be managed online. Whatever the case, they’re not paying for antivirus software (and, of course, Check Point would like them to do so).

It’s troubling because this dovetails with a sense of entitlement about using their own devices in the corporate environment. A growing number of those devices are smart phones, which are much more difficult to protect both from malware and from theft than a desktop computer.

And it’s troubling because, as any security pro will tell you, security awareness is probably the most important defence for the network and the endpoint. These people are aware of the implications; they just don’t follow security best practices.

This should leave security and network pros very leery of personal devices on the network. A very specific BYOD policy is a first step, but without ruthless enforcement, can you be sure it’s being followed?

What we can learn from Windows Live

Dave Webb — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:54:00 GMT

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?

Dave Webb — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:07:00 GMT

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

Dave Webb — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:18:00 GMT

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

Dave Webb — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:14:00 GMT

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

Dave Webb — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:51:00 GMT

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

Dave Webb — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:50:00 GMT

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?

Dave Webb — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:51:00 GMT

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.