Oliver Bell’s weblog

One of the more enlightening panel discussions in Seoul earlier this week was a discussion between a couple of well known telcos on the issue of Net Neutrality.

The arguments against Net Neutrality have never really been clear to me. Microsoft’s position is to support the drive for continued neutrality of services provided on the Internet, which makes sense to me personally as we deal with issues of connecting diverse communities to the network and see the delivery of services here in Asia that may not be quite so relevant in Western Europe or the United States.

I’ll give you examples of two sets of arguments put forwards by different providers which really brought clarity to the issue for me. For the sake of simplicity (or cowardice on my part!) I’ll just call them “TelCo A” and “TelCo B”, you can easily research (or work out) who holds which position on the issue.

TelCo A was against Net Neutrality, instead putting forwards an argument for what they called intelligent networks capable of doing more caching of data and selectively managing services based upon consumer demand and requirements. The rational behind this argument was based upon a rapidly growing amount of data passing through their backbone services, projected to be around 50,000 terabytes a day by 2010, making it essential to manage data flows to ensure that service would be consistent well into the future.

TelCo B was in support of Net Neutrality, their argument was that innovation on the Internet today is very often consumer and user driven, the role of the TelCo was to provide connectivity not to decide what would run across those connections. TelCo B made a strong case for an open and neutral Internet providing a platform for innovation, increased societal connections and economic growth.

The difference between TelCo A and TelCo B? Simple really.

TelCo A has a substantial investment in copper cable to millions of doorsteps delivering limited bandwidth to broadband users. TelCo B has made huge investments in recent years in delivering fibre to those same doorsteps offering comparably infinite bandwidth to the same households.

A notably simplistic view of the issue, but all the same a clarifying one.

Yesterday I shared the outline of a presentation that I made at the OECD Ministerial stakeholder side meeting that is being held in Seoul this week. I thought that it would be worthwhile sharing with you some of the higher level goals of the BIAC day that I participated in.

The goal of the session was for business leaders from around the world to express their views on the topic being discussed, and reach conclusions that will be expressed in a final report to be delivered to the Ministerial Meeting later in the week.

With the permission of the authors of the final report I thought I would share some of these outcomes with you, they make interesting and thought provoking reading;

We, the business community, envisage an Internet that is global in scope, interconnected in fact, inclusive by design, secure, reliable and available, and serving users who are increasingly mobile.

We see an Internet that is a key enabler of:

A virtuous circle of investment and innovation spurred by a growing ecosystem of services providers, application developers, device and hardware manufacturers

Innovation fueled by creativity, enabled by technology and empowering creators and users

Economic growth and social benefit in national and regional economies driven by new business models, technologies and services, as well as by greater efficiency and productivity of existing business models and services

Expanded access to and quality of education and skills development, including from ICTs,from early schooling through life-long learning, resulting in increased employment opportunities and social welfare, both within and across borders

Increased user choice of applications, products and services, provided through a wide variety of high capacity platforms, which are more available, affordable, and user-friendly

Better access to health care, particularly for those in remote areas or with fewer financial resources, through tele-medicine and related services, applications, and capabilities

Increased participation by individuals in the Internet economy not just as consumers but also as producers of information, content and services within the context of evolving uses of the Internet

Greater respect and empowerment for all stakeholders - building upon cultural, social and gender diversity and improved opportunities and mechanisms for greater collaboration and communication between across those stakeholder groups

Increased trust and confidence in the Internet, its infrastructure, and the applications and services that protect all users, especially children and the elderly

Sustainability and an eco-conscious society driven and supported by innovative ICT solutions

The report then goes on to articulate several areas where the business stakeholders felt that Government policy makers needed to act to carry these ideas forwards;

While business has the principal responsibility to bring expertise, investment and creativity to this process, the appropriate balance of government policies can continue to positively drive the future benefits of the Internet.

Therefore, for this vision to be realized, certain framework conditions must be put in place through multi-stakeholder cooperation to support the development of a broad range of sophisticated and increasingly “real-time” services transactions, communications, networks and interactions. Among these conditions are:

Support for innovation and investment

An environment characterized by appropriate incentives and legal protections, where innovation and creativity can flourish across communities, business models and disciplines

Open, fair and competitive marketplaces for new and existing market players

Incentives for investment in high speed communications infrastructure and next generation networks, as well as new media and information technologies, that will provide adequate capacity, security and capabilities for future Internet supported development and connectivity

Respect for Intellectual Property rights, and further development of systems to enforce those rights

Transparent legal and regulatory frameworks that are applied fairly with predictable outcomes

Focus on privacy and security

Continued and enhanced respect for both the privacy of personal information and the benefits of global information flows and practical solutions that might be applicable such as outreach, coordination and accountability across and for all stakeholders

A stable, reliable and trusted infrastructure capable of addressing and responding to emerging risks and threats

Better disaster preparedness in co-operation with the private sector

Market driven standards

Respect for recognized international standards that are established through market-driven, consensus-based mechanisms

As you read this text remember that it is being expressed in terms that are designed to be relevant at a ministerial or national policy level, not to directly address technical issues or debates - although of course the two are closely related. Many of these issues and statements are in the realm of the obvious for the technical community, but it will still take time before policy makers completely buy into the arguments that are being made in support of the Internet as a commerce and service delivery platform.

If you’re interested in reading more then the document can be downloaded from the BIAC site here.

As the week has progressed there have been a few debates that have been both fascinating and enlightening, I’ll try and find time later in the week to document a couple of them.

Earlier today I had the honor of participating in the Business Stakeholder meetings being held in Seoul preparing for the OECD Ministerial Meeting on “The Future of the Internet Economy” that will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

My input to the meeting was pretty straight forwards, the goal was to demonstrate that the evolution of services offered by software has been on a steady trajectory for some years now, and at every stage has offered an increased level of opportunity for those who choose to take advantage of the services offered by the network - then to go on to talk a little about what the future might hold and how government could support that future.

The evolution of the network and the increased level of opportunity that can be witnessed at various points in time is obviously interesting to watch.

Twenty five years ago the PC was a stand alone device offering little or no options for connectivity for the average user or business, as a result data was also stand alone and the effectiveness of your device directly related to the amount of data that you had personally spent time inputting.

Some fifteen or so years ago we moved on a step, the world started to talk about client-server computing and the PC began to integrate with services that were offered by an organizations data center - the PC suddenly became a lot more useful, but in many if not most cases that usefulness still ended at the boundary of your own organization.

Ten years ago the Internet began to become mainstream, some had been using the services of the Internet for longer, many had not. It does not need to be said that this was a pretty revolutionary point in time. Suddenly individuals could search for and obtain information on just about any topic they could dream of. At the same time huge opportunity opened up for business, allowing companies new and old to open store fronts that reached many hundreds of millions of customers.

Then the final stage I talked about was the idea of seamless computing, again a concept that is familiar to many in the technical world, a concept that allows diverse organizations to share data and business processes to build new services that were previously just not possible. This era includes many of the ideas that are still evolving around cloud computing and hosted services.

I chose to talk about the future in the form of three scenarios, looking at the future for the highly connected individual, the highly connected business and the highly connected society. In all three cases we can already see trends and expectations starting to emerge. Much of my presentation focused on extrapolating these trends, predicting the future is a dangerous game, who am I to say what will or won’t become components of how we live our lives in the future.

If you’re interested you can see the details of the presentation here, but at a high level the idea was to provide more empowerment for connected individuals, more opportunity for the connected business and to focus on an increased level of individual participation in the connected society.

The presentation closed with some suggestions for government policy makers around areas that need focus and attention as we create a secure and inclusive internet for the coming years,I outlined the following;

• Provide a framework and foundation for innovation and sustainable growth through the promotion of intellectual property rights, choice and interoperability and a competitive environment for software innovation;
• Promote the open and free flow of people, products, services, and ideas through free and fair trade, preserving freedom of expression online and supporting immigration policies that foster cross-border educational and professional opportunities;
• Create a more trustworthy computing environment by strengthening laws around cybercrime, online safety and privacy in accordance with global and regional norms including the Council of Europe’s Convention on cybercrime and the OECD and APEC Privacy principles;
• Transform education, learning and access to technology and promote innovative IT solutions for healthcare.
• Most important of all… move beyond “The Internet Economy” and return to “The Economy”

The final point is very important here in the Asia Pacific region, and probably other areas of the world as well. I still see many governments in the region segmenting their digital strategy and leaving it to be dealt with by an IT agency or individual technocrats.

The idea of the internet, and the benefits that it brings to individuals, businesses and society as a whole is no longer a new one.

Eventually I would like to think that we will stop thinking about “The Internet Economy” or “eGovernment”, and start thinking about “The Economy” and just “Government” - where technology plays a pivotal but tightly integrated role in the way that services and government business process are delivered.

I meant to talk a little about this last week, but got wrapped up in a customer event in Korea for a few days.

Two weeks ago the World Congress on Information Technology was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  It was a huge event bringing together technology and policy folks from all around the world to discuss the future of the industry that we work in and share good practices from around the world, I’m told that around 20,000 people turned up in total.

Two interesting stories that I enjoyed from the WCIT event.

The first was an appearance by Bill Gates, not in person but as a hologram. This is the first time Bill has appeared this way at any event, and it was fun to do it here in the region. Rendering work for the hologram was done by a Malaysian company called Fat Boy Records, and it came out really well.

My colleague Stephannie Chin has a video of it over on her blog, the hologram itself was near life size but looks a little smaller in the video!

For PR reasons we were not supposed to speak for the company but now that it’s almost a month over, I can now tell you that Bill did make his appearance in WCIT but only virtually.

Maybe in this increasingly green world this is a far better way for executives to present at events rather than burning jet fuel.  Hop on over and have a look for yourself.

The second story to share was an MoU signing with another Malaysian company called QubeConnect, they provide an open source based IP telephony platform that is garnering more and more attention here in the region.

The MoU provides for an agreement between Microsoft and QubeConnect to work together and share protocol information that will allow integration of their telephony platform with Microsoft OCS.

Edwin Yapp at ZDNet Asia carried the story;

Dinesh Nair, co-founder and CTO of QubeConnect, said Wednesday Microsoft OCS runs on the Windows platform and as such, its reach is limited to users and organizations on the same platform.

“Using our solution, users on either open source or other proprietary communications platforms will be able to communicate with Microsoft’s OCS seamlessly,” Nair said, during the deal-signing on the sidelines of the World Congress of Information Technology (WCIT) held in Malaysia this week.

Interoperability comes in many ways, while the world is very focused on the big announcements that come from Microsoft (for example, ODF support in Office), personally I find the smaller relationships like the one with QubeConnect a lot more exciting, there are an increasing number of those underway - especially here in Asia.

As I travel around Asia the term “Creative Economy” is one that comes up more and more frequently, it is a concept that has been around for a while but only recently seems to have earned a place in discussions around information and communication technology here in the region.

The concept of the Creative Economy is a straight forward enough one, the Wikipedia article I have linked above describes the concept as;

The phrase Creative Industries (or sometimes Creative Economy) refers to a set of interlocking industry sectors, and are often cited as being a growing part of the global economy. The creative industries are often defined as those that focus on creating and exploiting intellectual property products; such as Music, books, film, and games, or providing business-to-business creative services such as Advertising, Public Relations and Direct Marketing.

This definition is a very western one and clearly applies well to industry sectors you would expect to find a clear focus around in Europe and North America. In conventional terms it is, of course, also applicable to Asia but when I hear it used here there is also a more relevant local meaning.

One of the challenges that many of the emergent economies appear to share at the moment is around finding ways to protect and capitalize on their traditional industries, including handicrafts, artistry, performance and so on. Many of these traditional industries can be quickly copied and mass produced elsewhere, an ongoing risk for local businesses and livelihoods.

As a result discussions often revolve around how countries in the region might protect both the ownership and integrity of these traditional industries while at the same time planning for the future. In many cases this involves looking at the policy that is needed to help these traditional industries thrive and grow, and the legal framework that has evolve to protect them.

We are left with the question “What has all this got to do with Information and Communication Technology?”

An interesting point of evolution. A common theme appears to be that the work that many countries are undertaking today to build their Creative Economies is being done with the goal of laying the foundations for the development of new industries including ICT.

A strong understanding of the countries business structures, protection of intellectual property, mentorship and solid investment frameworks all helping protect the existing industries that are important today, and prepare countries for the industries that they want to build for tomorrow.

The principal here is pretty straight forward, beginning with a framework that supports the growth of existing industries in the region makes a lot more sense than trying to create a framework for an industrial sector, such as ICT, that represents future as apposed to current growth. At the same time legal and policy frameworks being built today are already taking future needs into account and preparing countries for the exciting future ahead…

A couple of posts caught my eye this morning, representing very closely related discussions from opposite sides of the globe.

One from New Zealand, and a second from the United Kingdom.

Rod Drury, CEO of Xero, shares some insight into discussions taking place in New Zealand around how to encourage increased growth in the local IT industry by putting the right policy framework in place.

Some of the conclusions and ideas include;

Some of the general themes we’d like as an industry would be around

• Encouraging more people into the industry
• Certification programs
• Immigration
• Education

But what would be some specific and measurable things we could achieve if we worked together?

Here are some that I’ve been thinking of.

1. Establishment of an ICT procurement ombudsman, so that procurement issues can be raised without the vendor being penalized in the market.
2. A work visa program between New Zealand and Silicon Valley so that we can send our talented people up to work there for a few years and bring experts down here tightening the relationship between ourselves and the center of the tech universe.
3. R&D tax credits limits lifted if you are exporting products developed from that R&D.
4. The industry supporting Government initiatives on Online Identity Management for individuals and businesses facilitating electronic commerce. We could lead the world here.

Rod goes on to invite wider participation in this conversation, I suspect he is looking for strong voices from New Zealand, personally I think this is a good discussion to be having across the region.

There are some interesting ideas being raised in the comments.

At the same time my colleague Jerry Fishenden posted a list of sound bytes from NESTA’s Innovation Edge event that was held in the UK this week.

The final quote that Jerry picked up gives a lot of food for thought;

“In the 20 years to come there will be more innovation and disruption than in the last 100 years”

Every national government should probably be asking itself how it prepares for the significant change that will be driven by innovation in the IT industry, how it will position it’s local economy and how it will manage the social evolutions that these changes will bring.

The whole list is worth a read, and I think complements the conversation that Rod is having in New Zealand pretty well.

Much like the current dip in activity around eGovernment, discussions and policy that relate to how we create the right environment for a thriving IT industry in countries around the region seem to have slipped in priority over recent years.

It is encouraging to see these conversations appearing back on the agenda and bringing forth new thinking and ideas.

When I was setting this blog up I happened to also be playing with some of the Windows Live services for another project and for fun thought I would tie in free email @osrin.net for anybody who wanted it using the Windows Live hosted services.

It was easy to set up, and there appear to be over five hundred people who have since signed up to use it - or at least registered accounts.

Setting it up was very straight forwards. Just a few easy steps;

1. Register the domain that you want to use - MSN will provide some options for domain hosting as well as you sign into the domain management in step 2 if that is easier for you
2. Go to http://domains.msn.com and register your domain with the hosted services site
3. Note down the mail servers that MSN allocates to you
4. Edit the “MX” records for your domain to point to MSN’s servers. Most domain management companies offer you an easy way to do this.

From there MSN provide you with a sign-up link and graphic that you can provide to your users, to check their mail they just need to go to http://mail.live.com and sign in.

I pulled the links out of the graphic and integrated them into my site template instead of using the graphic directly.

As a domain owner MSN provide you with a limited view of who is using your domain, you can see how many people have signed up along with their user name and actual name (assuming they typed one in at signup). You can delete accounts through the management interface, but you obviously have no access to the users actual mailbox.

For a small business, a small government, a school or just somebody wanting to offer mail to family members it could not be easier.

That is pretty much it.

In recent years one of the more entertaining parts of working for Microsoft has been watching some of the innovation coming out of Microsoft Research.

On the wires today is news of a beta release of the Worldwide Telescope project.

The tool brings together a combination of images, looking up at the sky and down at the ground - stare into the stars, or reverse the angle and zoom into your street or home town instead.

The full press release can be found here;

The service goes well beyond the simple browsing of images. Users can choose which telescope they want to look through, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Spitzer Space Telescope or others. They can view the locations of planets in the night sky — in the past, present or future. They can view the universe through different wavelengths of light to reveal hidden structures in other parts of the galaxy. Taken as a whole, the application provides a top-to-bottom view of the science of astronomy.

“Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” said Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “I believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the way we view the universe.”

My wife’s grandfather was an astronomer and scientist by the name of Kenneth Franklin who among other things is co-credited with discovering that Jupiter emitted radio waves. These were the first detected radio signals from another planet.

I only got the chance to meet him twice, but I’m pretty confident he would have liked this project!

Cast your mind back to last November and you may remember Microsoft committing to working with the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium to produce a translator to their DAISY XML file format (translating WordprocessingML to Daisy DTBooks format), this allows anybody with OpenXML files to convert them for use with a wide array of assistive technologies.

I’m pleased to say that as of today the translator is available, and will run either in the shell in Windows (right click to translate, just like the ODF translator) or will integrate well with Microsoft Office.

From the Microsoft press release;

Microsoft Corp. today joined with industry and advocacy group leaders worldwide to launch new software that will make it easier for anyone to create documents and content that will be accessible for blind and print-disabled individuals. The new “Save as DAISY XML” add-in, designed for Microsoft Office Word 2007, Word 2003 and Word XP, will allow users to save Open XML-based text files into DAISY XML, the foundation of the globally accepted DAISY standard for reading and publishing navigable multimedia content (www.daisy.org).

It is also worth noting that the code for the translator is up on SourceForge if anybody wants to go take a look for themselves, again from the press release; 

The “Save as DAISY XML” add-in was created through an open source project with Microsoft, Sonata Software Ltd. and the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium and can be downloaded by Microsoft Office Word users for free at http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/daisy.

The open source nature of the Open XML to DAISY XML translation project enables technologists to utilize the source code and other resources for their own applications. As Open XML adoption continues to expand across the software industry for use on various platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac OS and the Palm OS, solution providers interested in creating their own Open XML to DAISY XML translators can reference information available through the SourceForge open source project site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxml-daisy.

I’m generally pretty easy going, there isn’t much that annoys me in life, but like most people I have a couple of unexplainable pet peeves.

This week has involved a series of meetings in Berkeley, CA and the hotel that I’ve been staying in has spent the week doing one of those annoying things.

If you stay in pretty much any hotel today and you will find that they are making some token gestures towards environmental sustainability, usually you’ll find a card that needs to be put on the bed if you want the sheets changed and instructions in the bathroom suggesting that you hang up your towels in the morning and use them again.

I’m a big supporter of every small step that any organization takes in this regard, and the idea of hotels using a little less detergent or energy on a daily basis is a very good thing in my opinion.

At the same time though many hotels have not quite got their complete environmental sustainability agenda worked out.

A small (but frustrating to me) example in many hotels is the newspaper that sits on the floor outside of my room when I wake up in the morning, I never read it and I doubt many other guests read it either. Most of them probably pile up in a corner of the room until the day the guest checks out then they get thrown out.

Whenever this happens I’ll generally stop by the front desk and ask the hotel to stop delivering the daily paper… this place though, like a number of other hotels I’ve stayed in this year, agreed not to then when I opened the door the following morning there is ANOTHER newspaper sitting there.

If you’re staying in a hotel anywhere in the world then I’d ask that you join me in raising this with the management when it happens, we should push hotels to move forwards and complete the agenda of environmental sustainability that they have started with the linens in your room, but don’t yet seem to have worked out in other parts of their business.