Yankee Group’s mission to chart the future of the Anywhere Network includes figuring out what it actually looks like as it emerges around us. If an informal poll of 250 telecommunications executives at two separate events in London last week is any predictor, the UK’s part of that global fabric must include fiber to the home.

At TEN2008, I shared YG’s forecast for hockey-stick growth in U.S. home bandwidth consumption, explaining that the network effect is not the only thing driving network demand on this side of the Atlantic: video, gaming, and a host of new activities enabled by broadband are causing home appetites for network capacity to explode. Moderator Peter Cochrane polled the attendees on UK household needs, and the group was nearly unanimous in its belief that fiber to the home (FTTH) is the right thing to do right now. (Only a lone banker from JP Morgan Casenove grumbled, “I don’t see how the British family needs more than 3 Mbps.”  Someone sitting next to me said, “Reminds me of Thomas Watson’s famous projection about the world’s need for computers…”)

Then at Yankee Group’s own roundtable later in the week, another group had the same energy on the topic — but further agreed that the British government has a large role to play in ensuring that it actually comes to pass. One participant put it this way: ”Various sources have estimated a UK-wide FTTH initiative as likely to cost between 9 and 15 billion pounds sterling. That’s only 28 miles of highway, a half a bridge, or something else equally modest. Why can’t our government see the incredible value it could create for our economy by pushing this forward?”

Just having survived trips in and out of Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 – stunning for sure, but hard to get to and, as with many airports, a giant chunk out of your day — the sooner we have a high-capacity infrastructure the better. 

[Meanwhile, a group of Swedish communications experts I met with in Stockholm last Wednesday were focused on making the mobile environment deliver on its potential to support Anywhere Consumers. See my summary of their assessment here.] 

My wife and I are tag-teaming being with our youngest son as he’s treated at Massachusetts General Hospital this week. Any hospitalization of a child is hard. But Mass General, along with several other hospitals in the Boston area, tries to counterbalance that hardship with services to make him feel at home. There is the usual TV in the room, DVD players, a fantastic playroom down the hall, and even ice cream socials in the afternoon. But in my opinion, one of the best ancillary services they provide is one that isn’t listed on their Web site and isn’t one you can see. It’s an Anywhere network — a free Wi-Fi connection to the Internet.

Now when we at Yankee Group talk about the importance of ubiquitous connectivity and the Anywhere network, people probably think more of airports and coffee shops rather than hospitals. But in many ways, free Internet access in a hospital is even more valuable than it is in those more mundane places. Why? Because the structured and intensive treatment inside a hospital tends to cut us off from the outside world. Our ordinary rhythms of school, meals, and outside activities get replaced by tests, doctors’ visits, and waiting — lots of waiting. Our normal fabric of social interactions unravels to be replaced by isolation and boredom.

But a networked hospital changes this. Wi-Fi means that parents can read the newspaper without leaving the room and going to the newsstand while kids can keep up on their favorite comics. We can stay in touch with friends and family members by email. My wife and I can rearrange our appointments and calendars as needed as we trade off sleeping at the hospital. I may go to work in the morning, but I don’t have to wait until evening to find out how our son’s day went — I get instant messages during the day. And in those cases where firewalls don’t prohibit it (sadly too often nowadays), my son can even video iChat with me over lunch from his MacBook.

Now some will claim that having free Internet access in a hospital exposes patients to privacy violations, online predators, and countless other online risks. But with todays kids sporting Wi-Fi-speaking Nintendo DSs, Sony PSPs, and cell phones, using a Wi-Fi network is less risky an experience than crossing the street. Not having Internet access in the hospital makes about as much sense to a modern kid as not having electricity.

For kids, the hospital Anywhere network is just a part of life. For parents of kids in the hospital, the Anywhere network is a lifeline. Kudos to Mass General for not only providing world-class health care to our child, but also for connecting him from Anywhere.

I am not a mobile web developer. Rather, I am more of a “weekend programmer” focused on traditional web applications. (I am a co-author of Apache JSPWiki, a Java-based wiki software package. No prizes for guessing that I wrote the security bits.) But even though I haven’t tried to do any mobile development just yet, my iPhone’s web browsing capability has gotten me curious about makes a good mobile application — from the nuts-and-bolts perspective. So it was with great interest that I read Brian Fling’s excellent Web 2.0 Expo presentation, Design and Develop for the iPhone and Beyond. I recommend it highly: not only did Brian teach me a few technical tips, he also clearly explains the mobile development stack, from the mobile operators up through the application toolkits. It’s a cracking good deck, too; almost as elegant and entertaining as Dick Hardt’s rapid-fire Identity 2.0 presentation from 2005.

Everyone loves hyperbole…or at least extreme positions and tales of gloom and doom: The sky is falling, and the world is coming to an end.

This week, we’re publishing a report called The High Water Mark for Interactive Cable. We’ll also be discussing this report and its findings in a webinar tomorrow.

It’s a far cry from Chicken Little, and we’re definitely not going to say that internet video is going to take over television. Given the negative margins to date, there are many questions that need answers such as business models, distribution and revenues.

And even as internet video taps into the flow of linear television advertising dollars, these are neither the ad budgets nor the types of television that we’re talking about.

Herein lies the difference: when we talk about targeted, digitally-inserted advertising, that’s Below-the-line (BTL) measured performance marketing. But when we talk about large audiences and linear schedules, that’s Above-the-line (ATL) advertising. Apples and oranges.

Meanwhile, there’s linear television, on-demand programming, and interactive video. These are very different things.

So when we say that this is the “high-water mark” for interactive cable, that doesn’t mean that we’re all in behind internet video as the future of television. Tune in tomorrow to learn more.

There is a great T-shirt in the gift shop at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that is brown with simple white block letters which reads “Design will Save the World.”  Such is the feeling that is germinating the Web 2.0 app development world. 

This week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco a number of key trends were highlighted for an industry that is beginning to show its maturity away from guys in garages and into a real business with real economics and revenue models. 

For me the most significant trend is who is being put in the driver’s seat for web application design.  Once the sole territory of the programmer, app development is going through a revolution.  Now it’s the graphic designers who are getting the tools they need to drive the internet.

This is largely being allowed by focussing on scripting, as opposed to pure coding, in the creation of applications.  It’s allowing those more comfortable with manipulating images to make their mark on the app world. Expect to see announcements coming from many of the major brands about evolutions in their products for development and design.

What does it mean?  Well to date applications created by programers have functioned well, but often lack image conciousness or feel.  This change will mean that apps in future will be as aesthetically pleasing as they are functional.  It is also putting more control of web development into the hands of brands and advertisers who want both a great look and functionality in their online presence.

Design will Save the World. And it will Save Silicon Valley.

Yesterday I spoke at Symantec’s Worldwide Sales Conference. The speaking gig itself — a panel on consumer security — was a blast. Byron Achohido (USA Today reporter) moderated. My co-panelists included a representative from the Cato Institute, a Symantec researcher, and a top security architects from Amazon — a person I’d heard of, but had never met. The panel was a lot of fun, and there were few surprises. What was surprising was what I found at the airport today on my way out this morning. Let’s go to the videotape. I arrived at Las Vegas airport around 11AM. After getting through security and to my gate, I began the usual squinty-eyed scan for power outlets — a vulture-like circling motion that I’ve come to recognize in other fellow travelers. Once I found and commandeered a suitable power source, I flipped open the lid of my notebook and looked for a wireless signal. Lo and behold, I discovered that rarest and most delightful of finds: free public wi-fi. When an Anywhere Consumer has a few minutes free and finds something nifty there’s only one thing to do: Twitter the good news, of course! But first, I skimmed the last few days’  worth of tweets using my RSS reader. Then I logged on to the Twitter website directly and sent the following tweet to my ~80 followers: “So Wifi is free at McCarron, which is cool.” One of my former colleagues responded, not more than 5 minutes later, with this: “Free WiFi at McCarran due to strong views McCarren CIO Sam Ingalls.” Fifteen minutes after that a crony at another analyst firm sends me a direct tweet (SMSed to my mobile phone) saying he wished he’d known I was at the Symantec event, because he was there too. To top it all off: I peered closely at my Finder window and noted that Bonjour was telling me that there were at least five other Macs in the immediate vicinity, one of which was named “Book of Power.” What’s remarkable about all this? Nothing, really. Just another day in the life of Ubiquitous Connectivity. But reflecting a bit on the whole thing, I’ve concluded that:

• Free services like Twitter, and McCarren’s wi-fi network — foster novel kinds of spontaneous social interaction.
• The  underlying network protocols — in this case, HTTP (web), SMS (Twitter), Bonjour (local network discovery), 802.11 (wireless) — are less important than the experiences they foster. With apologies to James Carville, it’s the application, stupid!
• Communities like Twitter flourish precisely because of their decentralization, and they illustrate how “circles of friends” provide an important alternative to centrally-managed hierarchies (such as those created by IT departments).

Perhaps the most important lesson is also the most obvious: never mind the technology. Left unchecked, you can waste a lot of time on Twitter.

Just a quick check-in from Shenzhen, China where the weather is a balmy 85 degrees and what feels like 120% humidity. I have endured 18 hours of flying [in coach] and the aforementioned soupy weather to attend Huawei’s Global Industry Analyst Summit. I was compelled to attend this conference given the colossal impact Huawei’s market presence has on the carrier equipment and services market and was eager to hear an update from their execs on corporate strategy and a review of 2007 results. What we saw and heard was clearly impressive…however, Huawei still has some growing up to do if it wants to crack into the top 3. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since Microsoft announced plans to purchase Yahoo!, I’ve had the same conversation with dozens of reporters about whether Yahoo! is trying to get a higher price. It’s a ludicrous effort, but there are many within the financial community who want to net everything out to price. They say that Yahoo! just wants more money.

I’ll propose a different story. Suppose you and your spouse/partner/friend find that perfect fixer-upper of a house. It’s been neglected for several years, but you buy it anyway. You hire an architect, a project manager and a contractor to make it all happen.

And just when you’ve gutted the house, someone shows up an offers you a few dollars for the whole thing. They point to the bare stud walls and missing plumbing. There’s a pile of trash in the front yard. The unwanted buyer points to all these things and suggests that it isn’t worth that much but that they’ll pay you a premium anyway.

But your goal is to live in the house when it’s done. It’s to wake up in the master bedroom and to have coffee in the breakfast nook.

That’s the fundamental difference between Yahoo! and Microsoft. Yahoo! wants to run the company they’re in the process of re-building. Their goal isn’t to sell out today.

And let’s remind everyone that Yahoo! continues to make money. Lots of money.

So this is now just a battle of the wills.

And Yahoo!’s financials are out. They pretty much speak for themselves.

Guess the renovation is going as planned. On time and on budget.

As the media and technology industries collide, we find ourselves using two sets of terminology to describe a common experience. To the technology industry, networks are anywhere and to media companies, content is everywhere. Technologists talk about users, programmers about viewers and audience, and marketers about consumers.

A few days ago, Emily Green posted on Media’s Anywhere Future and brought up a couple of ideas worthy of further discussion. In an anywhere (and everywhere) media environment, we talk often about brands as static entities: marketers that invest in advertising as part of a way to build an abstract concept that we call “brand.” Emily talks about brands in this way in her post, and she alludes to something that she calls a “threaded media experience.” She’s dead-on with the idea, and the media industry is abubble with the discussion of what they call cross platform. Advertisers refer to this same thing as cross media.

I’d like to take this a step further to say that technology is driving brands and media in co-opetition to define and monetize the cross-platform media experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week Yankee Group published a research note I wrote on “single site browsers” — a new twist on the venerable web browser that restricts a user to a single site. Single site browsers (”SSBs” for short) aren’t well known, but I believe they could do much to solve some of the web security problems we’ve been seeing over the last few years.

Rather than prattle on about SSBs, it’s much easier to show you what one looks like. Here’s a screenshot of Mozilla’s SSB application, called Prism, which is based on Firefox. For Mac-heads, Todd Ditchendorf has created a Safari-based SSB with his Fluid application.

The basic idea is that IT admins (or even end-users) tell Prism to create an SSB application for a specific site — in this case, www.americanexpress.com. Once created, a special desktop icon is added to the user’s desktop that launches that website. Put simply, SSBs turn websites into desktop applications.

What’s neat about SSBs is that they represent a rare confluence of interests between security people and web developers. Web developers like to create software and websites that look good and do cool things. Security people prefer to reduce functionality of software to just the sparsest subset that can be secured adequately. In this case, the developers have oriented their energies in a direction that also leads to more security. Because SSBs can, by definition, browse to only one website, many of the web-based attacks against users (phishing, cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery) won’t work. This is great news for users, and we think that banks and other e-commerce website operators will want to take a close look at SSBs, not least because the price is right (”free-as-in-beer” as Slashdotters say).

As I was writing this note, I circulated a draft of the note to a cross-section of web developers, security researchers and financial institutions to gauge their interests in the technology. We think SSBs represent a great way to “brand” a website and keep users safer, all at the same time. The feedback I got was mostly positive. A few callers on a call I did with  the Financial Services Technology Consortium (FSTC) voiced some skepticism about SSB. I later found out that the most skeptical ones worked for vendors who sold browser protection software! Why am I not surprised?

The research note, From Anywhere to Somewhere: Single-Site Browsers Keep Users Safer, is available to Yankee Subscribers. All users (even non-YG customers) can view the short presentation I gave to the FTSC. I welcome your feedback.