Nothing to Declare

What perfect days these have been for working from home - perfect, that is, had my ADSL connection been working. Eleven o’clock yesterday morning was the time the deity of all things connected chose to break the link between my home network and the wider world. I have been stumbling along for the past 36 hours in the nether world of GPRS, trying to cope with 9MB emails and voice calls all coming down the same line. I could resort to a good old modem connection, but there is no wall socket in my office so I’d have to perch in the kitchen, not ideal.

It is quite fascinating - just at the same time as we (at Quocirca) are putting together a report on the importance of email, that this should happen. The psychological state one finds when one’s email is no longer available is akin to losing one’s door keys or address book: email has become a prop upon which other functions take place, and without which we start to flounder. Or at least, I do.

Now, there’s an excellent word.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Metro RFID shop of the future yesterday. For a number of perfectly valid reasons, as I arrived in Düsseldorf I took a taxi to the only fragment of address I had - namely the above, which I knew was situated in a suburb called Neuss. Before long we pulled up at what appeared to be a hypermarket. “Shop of the future,” I thought. “I wonder what’s inside.” So I paid off the cab and waved him on his way. After a few minutes of walking around, the truth dawned. This *was* a hypermarket, absolutely of the present. All rather surreal - or rather, real, when I was expecting pretend. It wasn’t a problem - very kindly, the store manager (I sat in his office like a kid who’s lost his mum) sorted me another taxi and I was on my way.

RFID turns out to be a lot more simple, interesting and complex than I previously understood. Simple - it is no more or less than a standardised code that can be attached to any object and thus linked to a piece of data, somewhere. Interesting - from a philosophical standpoint, we have seen a major evolution of our understanding of data with the arrival of XML - again a simple construct but which enables data to know something about itself. RFID extends this concept into the physical world, enabling a wealth of innovation to be built on it. Complex - nobody knows exactly where this takes us, and there will be a number of technological, practical, and even socio-political challenges to be faced along the way. For the moment there is time to consider all of these things as the technology is not quite yet mainstream. RFID tags still cost about 30 cents each, which is prohibitive for many applications, and the scanners and other kit items are a long way from being commodity items.

Retail is currently leading the way, but my guess is that the first opportunities lie in other domains - tagging of tapes and optical disks for more efficient archiving, for example, tagging of fine arts and museum items to simplify inventory taking, maintenance of asset registers by medium and large organisations (as anyone who’s had to crawl around under a delivery of 50 tables, label them up and log their asset numbers will understand). Easy-to-access information about poisons, solvents and so on. Ski passes. Recorded delivery and restitution of lost parcels. Military procurement. Drug labelling. The possibilities are endless. The challenges are endless too - not just integration and data cleaning but security, civil rights, the power of the major corporations, fraud, misuse and so on. The important thing at this stage is to be informed.

I can do no more than mention this as I don’t claim to understand the full picture. $40 billion of debts have been written off with immediate effect, saving an estimated $1.5 billion a year in interest payments. Clearly there are a raft of conditions (which is the bit I don’t fully grasp) but the write-off has to be seen as a good thing. What is now required is that us decadent westerners get to grips with what caused the situation in the first place and our role in that, and we also apply some conditions on ourselves to ensure it cannot get to the same state again.

When I put the case for Plaxo and LinkedIn on the Register a few months ago, I made the point that the tools that come with these services are worth signing up for even if you never connect. Well, they’re getting better. LinkedIn now has a downloadable toolbar for Microsoft Outlook that offers a “grab” button, so you can select a chunk of text from an email which contains name and address informaiton, and it will automatically create an address book entry for you. If this was built in to Outlook, but its not so this is a good start.

The LinkedIn upload from Outlook still doesn’t work with Firefox by the way. Firefox is a great browser but if it wants to be ubiquitous it’ll need to cover all uses - some sites I go to can’t support it either, at the moment.

I’ve created a puzzle I’m calling Alphadoku - ambitiously, I’ve also registered the domain. I know this is based on the Sudoku principle, if anyone’s seen anything similar I’d appreciate knowing but I haven’t seen anything like it myself.

See here for more information.

I’ve just received my first phishing email to my work account - a pain as it indicates my name’s now on some spamtankerous list. I’ve pasted it below: it gives us one more reason why people should learn to read and write properly, as anyone could then tell there is no way it would come with a corporate seal of approval. “thank you for co-operation” indeed.

Dear HSBC Bank member ,

This instruction has been sent to all bank customers and is obligatory to follow.

Last week I was in Monaco – at a Dell Product Showcase. Particularly interested to see the multimedia applications and the games – we don’t get as much exposure to this side of things as I’d like, and not just for gadget value. Every time I talk to people in the “production industries” – gaming, film, music, TV and so on, I realise that these people see the creation and distribution of entertainment and information as a universe in itself, like a sphere with a number of exit points. When we talk to the content distributors, not least the service providers, it is clear that they see themselves as the universe, as a sphere with a number of entry points and a limited number of conduits towards the consumer. Not that either is right or wrong, just that the best perspective has to be to see the structure that can be created by both. Some people get how this should look, but many do not, and so they remain inside their spheres.

In the evening we somehow manage to get into the local club – a place called Jimmy’z. In the knowledge of the early start the next morning and having been up since 5 in the morning, I duck out about midnight. The next day I discover that Bono was in the same bar, apparently surrounded by numerous girls and a smaller number of hefty men. The body mass probably just about balanced out.

Just on the Eurostar on the way back from presenting at an IBM event, on Project Portfolio Management. It would be very dangerous for anyone to pretend that “portfolio management”, “programme management” or other such topics are somehow new – rather, what we are seeing is that the tools are starting to support the concepts in a more comprehensive way than they have in the past. The hard bit, as Lawrence Webb would say, remains in the human layer.

Today, I’ve mostly spent coming home – making my way to the Gare du Nord via various cafés, stopping for espresso and email before moving on. I walked through the Marais and to my favourite corner of Paris, the Place des Vosges, which somehow maintains its sun-dappled serenity despite the noise of scooters in the background. The meaning of mobility to me is to be able to keep up with the job (white collar in my case) from a Parisian street, as easily as from an office desk. We’re still a long way from that but perhaps that’s a good thing – imagine the chaos if everybody started taking their work to the public parks.

Reality check – three hours on the Eurostar and I’m just about caught up with my email. One can have too much accessibility.

My latest Silicon.com article is up, asking whether businesses can benefit from DRM. In short, the answer is - yes.