Disruptive Telephony

Only 40% of Canadian cell phone users password-protect their phones or use other privacy options, a survey by Canada's privacy commissioner found. The results of the 2000-person survey were released in August and written up in a Globe And Mail piece entitled "How private is that text message?".

When I saw the headline, I honestly thought it was going to be something about the security of SMS messages... but in fact it was about the security of the cell phones themselves. If the phones aren't secured then someone can go in and look at your text messages. Ergo... the link-bait title of the article. (And yes, it got me to look.)

Still, it had some interesting data points such as the fact that the users from age 18 to 34 were the ones most likely to use privacy tools, which is good to see, since they are probably the ones pumping the most information out online.

Nice to see, too, that 82 percent did not think police should have access to your online usage info without a warrant.

I was surprised, in all honestly, about the 40% number... I actually might have thought of it being lower as I know MANY people who don't password-protect their phones mostly because of the "inconvenience" of having to enter the password to get into the phone.

And in truth the % who password-protect their phones may be lower... the article says that "only four in 10 people password-protect their phones or adjust privacy settings on personal-information sharing via downloaded applications". The number of people who adjust privacy settings - but don't password-protect their phone - may be driving that % up.

I wonder what a survey like this might find in the United States?

Do you password-protect your phone? (I do)

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Tonight I'll be thinking of all my friends and former colleagues at Voxeo as they launch the Voxeo Customer Summit 2011 at the JW Marriott Grande Lakes hotel in Orlando. With the great theme of "Unlocked and Loaded", they have an incredibly packed agenda that will make it truly an outstanding event. Lots of great technical talks mixed in with business talks... some voice biometrics... product announcements... plus a great party and other activities!

Plus the ever geeky and wacky Chris Pirillo as show emcee and Joseph Jaffe providing the keynote talk... it should be a great time for all!

While I'm no longer a Voxeon, I'll be thinking of the crew there and wishing them all the best. It's a big event and will really help the people who attend to learn so much more about building communication applications using Voxeo's platforms and services. Cool stuff!

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Dilbert nails it... (back in August 2011)

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To I think no one's real surprise, the European Union today gave the go-ahead to Microsoft's acquisition of Skype. Given that the US Federal Trade Commission okayed the deal back in June, there should be no further barriers to the deal. Microsoft issued a very short statement:

We’re pleased that the European Commission has approved Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype. This is an important milestone, as we’ve now received clearance from both the United States and the European Union. We look forward to completing soon the final steps needed to close the acquisition, bringing together the employees of Microsoft and Skype, and creating new opportunities for people to communicate and collaborate around the world.

Jim Courtney took a look at the actual text of the EU ruling and in his post dissects how the commission viewed the consumer versus enterprise space with regard to competion - and how it reached the conclusion that it would be okay for Microsoft to acquire Skype.

For the sake of my friends working at Skype who have been hanging in an uncomfortable limbo while all this gets sorted out, I do hope that the acquisition can now proceed quickly. As Mary-Jo Foley notes, Microsoft has already been working on how Skype fits into the larger world of Microsoft, so hopefully we'll start seeing those actions start moving ahead soon.

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Kudos to my friend Eric Krapf and his whole team for the redesign of one of my favorite sites for VoIP and Unified Communications news:

http://www.nojitter.com/

Way back in late 2007, Eric started as the "lead blogger" for NoJitter as the long-standing Business Communications Review (BCR) magazine shut down its print operation and decided to forge a new direction in the online world.

It's been great to see the growth of NoJitter over these past four years, and it's been great to see so many of my friends within the industry writing there.

With this new redesign, Eric mentions many of the new features, but the one I look forward to seeing most is the better commenting system. That was one major drawback of the previous site... hopefully this one works much better.

All in all I quite like the new look and congratulate Eric and the whole team there on the re-launch!

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If any of you will be in Chicago next week, October 4-6, 2011, for the 7th Annual Real-Time Communications Conference & Expo, I'll be there on the 5th and 6th as a speaker.

I'll be speaking twice. First on Wednesday the 5th at 4pm on "The Current State of VoIP Security", wearing my VOIPSA hat and leading off a series of talks about security. I'll be providing an overview of the main threats to VoIP and communications security in general, leading the way into the two more specific talks following mine.

I'm rather excited that my second session will be my first public appearance wearing my new Internet Society hat (if you are not aware, I've posted details about my recent move) and will of course be about IPv6... more specifically "How IPv6 Will Impact SIP And Telecom".

Due to ongoing events on the personal front, I wasn't sure that I was going to make it out there... and quite frankly there's still a chance that I won't... but I should be out there.

If you look at the conference schedule, the speakers include outstanding people involved with so many different aspects of real-time communications. It should be truly an excellent event!

P.S. You can still register if you would like to attend!

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Who should run the Internet? Should it continue in the "multi-stakeholder" way it has operated so far? Or should governments have more of a say in how it is run?

The Economist captures that argument in a piece out today entitled "A plaything of powerful nations" that reports on the meeting this week in Nairobi of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF). The article rather succinctly covers some of the tension and challenges around public policy issues I briefly mentioned in my recent post about joining the Internet Society.

A key point for me is this (my emphasis added):

The multi-stakeholder approach dates from the beginnings of the internet. Its founding fathers believed that more openness would be both more secure and better for innovation. What is more, since the internet is a network of independent networks, it is hard to construct a form of governance that allows anyone to dictate things from the top.

Yet as the article notes, many governments would like to try - and the power struggle is really only beginning.

There are definitely going to be some interesting times ahead...

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NOTE: While I am now employed by the Internet Society, I am NOT involved with the public policy activities of the organization and all comments and viewpoints expressed here are entirely mine alone as an individual.

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Did Amazon just fork the Android operating system with their Kindle Fire? That's the question asked at Mashable today in a post "Amazon Kindle Fire Just Hijacked Android where it was noted that all the promotion around the Kindle Fire did not mention Android. The key piece to me is this:

Amazon is not the first company to use Android for its devices, only to customize the UI and add its own App Store...

Still, Amazon’s customization of Android goes above and beyond re-theming the interface. Amazon has created its own apps for email, video playback (using Amazon Instant Video), music and books...

Amazon is using Android 2.3 as its base, not the tablet-specific Honeycomb, and we expect that the company has taken the opportunity to optimize 2.3 specifically for the Kindle Fire’s hardware.

Likewise, instead of applying tweaks to the basic Android web browser, Amazon chose to build its own: Amazon Silk...

The tragedy here is that the Amazon Kindle Fire will undoubtedly be a very popular device. At $199, I can see many people picking these devices up.

And it could be a great opportunity to bolster the Android ecosystem.

To encourage and nurture a further competitive marketplace for apps.

But the challenge is stated well in the Mashable piece:

We expect Amazon to start courting Android developers to make customized Kindle Fire-specific versions of their apps.

It's not an Android device... it's an Amazon device. And though it may use Android as a base, it has a highly customized layer on top.

Do we now have effectively yet another application ecosystem?

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Congratulations (I think) to my friend Alec Saunders for taking a new role as "VP of Developer Relations and Ecosystem Development" for Research In Motion (RIM), makers of the Blackberry line of mobile devices.

Or perhaps condolences are in order... somehow he has to make developing for the Blackberry sexy again to all the app developers who focus these days on the world of iOS/iPhone/iPad and the Android platform.

Alec certainly has his work cut out for him. As he writes in his post today announcing the news:

Over the last few days I’ve been in San Francisco at the Mobilize conference, and speaking with developers. It’s clear from those conversations that the primary problem we face is lack of support from application developers. My team’s job is to correct that – to win the hearts and minds of mobile developers again.

"Lack of support" probably doesn't go far enough as a statement. Any of a zillion charts will show you Blackberry's rapidly declining marketshare (particularly in the US). iPhones are dramatically outselling Blackberries and Apple is poised to launch iPhone 5 / iOS 5 / iCloud next week, pretty much assuring even more of a boost to the iOS platform and developer ecosystem.

On the Android side, recents stats show twice as many people buying Android devices as iPhones... and today's mega-launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet is going to light an even larger flame under the Android ecosystem.

Plus, add in Microsoft and all they are attempting to do with the Windows Phone platform...

And somehow... in the midst of all of this...

Alec is going to try to get developers excited about developing apps for the Blackberry???

Not just for the Playbook, mind you, but for the traditional Blackberry platforms of "BBOS" and the new QNX platform. As he says in an interview posted on RIM's Blackberry Developer Blog today:

Developer evangelism is all about personal contact, listening, responding, and educating. We’re going to work very closely with the developer community, expand on support and programs that make it easy and rewarding for developers to create apps, be in the midst of developers to understand their needs and secure a great developer experience, and identify and remove the barriers developers face in supporting our platforms and doing business with us.

It's a tough task, made even more challenging by RIM's recent earnings report (or lack thereof), but if anyone has a hope of pulling it off, it's Alec. He's an exceptional communicator, marketer and salesman... and brings both a great technical depth and ability to communicate in "regular" language.

I do seriously wish him all the best! I've been a long-time fan of the Blackberry, even though I myself changed mine in for an iPhone back in 2008 or so. RIM has done some pretty amazing things in the mobile market, but as Gizmodo recently noted ("How RIM Could Save Itself"), RIM tied itself to the enterprise so tightly that it missed out on the rise of smartphones in the consumer space - and the corresponding move of those "consumer" smartphones back into the enterprise.

What will their future look like? Can they win back developers? Can they make the Blackberry ecosystem sexy again? Can it claw its way back into being a player in the smartphone market?

Alec's got a challenge before him - and I look forward to seeing what he'll do!

P.S. Up to join in the challenge? As Alec notes at the bottom of his blog post, he's hiring developer evangelists...

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Other notes about Alec's new role:

• Jim Courtney at Voice on the Web with a long, thoughtful piece on Alec's past and what this all means for RIM.
• Andy Abramson at VoIP Watch

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Image credit: me. Taken at ITEXPO East 2010 in South Beach, Miami :-)

Stuck somewhere without a computer but with an iPad? My former colleague Chris Matthieu just posted this amusing video today of how he used only his iPad to create and deploy an application using the Tropo cloud communication service. I don't know what amused me more - that he wrote the app using his iPad... or that he filmed himself using his iPhone! Quite a deft bit of handling to make it all work:

You can, of course, register for a free Tropo.com account and start creating your own voice/SMS/IM/Twitter apps using languages like PHP, Python, JavaScript, Groovy and Ruby...