When researching my new book, ANYWHERE: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business, I was fortunate to interview more than 50 thought leaders in connectivity. Their input was invaluable and their ideas, advice and examples provide very rich context for the Anywhere vision. I’m sharing selected book interviews through the blog.

In this excerpt from my interview with Axel Haentjens, senior vice president Marketing, Brand and External Communications for Orange Business Services, Haentjens provides his take on how the upcoming ubiquitous connectivity revolution will change how enterprises do business, both internally and with their customers.

What do changes like pervasive connectivity and embedded IP in broader devices mean for enterprises?
I have been in the communications business for 15 years at France Telecom [FT]. In 1995, it was very clear that the desktop had to be connected. Now we’re at the point where we have laptops, BlackBerrys, PDAs, and more. So in the last two to three years, you could access documents and e-mail through a PDA from everywhere — from a train, on holiday, etc. For Orange [FT’s key brand], that translated into a huge success for our Business Everywhere tool. We have more than 1.3 million users.

But this year, we see something else. We’re now at the point of pervasive reachability, where you need to talk to people using various means that are all integrated. We ought to be able to start one way, and then move to another.

And it’s not only human connectivity.

Right. There will be five times more objects to connect than people, at the very least. There are mature applications today in tele-monitoring, fleet management and tracking goods. Orange operates mobile networks in 28 countries, including 15 countries in Europe today: 15 percent of our mobile B2B revenue is already M2M. It comes from SIM cards embedded into devices either for fleet management or remote monitoring, and it’s growing at a rate of about 20 percent per year.

Clearly tele-metering is ready. You’ll find security companies doing it, utilities also, and energy companies doing tele-measuring for gas and electricity. We see a lot of apps in vehicles, helping to manage thousands of trucks via geo-location and route optimization.

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When researching my new book, ANYWHERE: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business, I was fortunate to interview more than 50 thought leaders in connectivity. Their input was invaluable, and their ideas, advice and examples provide very rich context for the Anywhere vision.

I wish we’d had room to incorporate more of our interviews in the book — but with the infinite capacity of the Web, I’m sharing some of them here.

In this excerpt from my interview with Dr. Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com and general partner of Polaris Venture Partners, we discuss the path to ubiquitous connectivity, obstacles to its growth, and how connectivity is accelerating human evolution.

Bob Metcalfe (c) Marcin Wichary

Universal, ubiquitous connectivity—yes or no?

Of course it will become universal. The only exception is the normal one.

What’s that?

Well, if you look at that famous picture of the Earth at night, you’ll see huge swaths of black—for instance, most of Africa.

That’s a pretty big exception.

Right. So it’s a question of time. Impatient people say the digital divide is a condemnation of technology—that it’s nothing short of criminal that we haven’t reached everyone yet. I say, ‘Au contraire. Don’t blame me for not getting them connectivity yet when you haven’t gotten them electricity, roads and clean water.’

You sound like you take it personally.

Sure. You can’t talk about connectivity without talking about Metcalfe’s Law, so how much more personal can it get? It’s not my fault there will be tribes that don’t get connected.

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ANYWHERE the book talks a lot about a future with many more connected devices than those we know and love today. So when I signed our book deal at the beginning of last year, I said it would be a terrible irony if we couldn’t ensure that the book would come out both in hardback and e-book versions simultaneously.

And that was the plan… but e-book publishing is still a bit new and a few technical hiccups stood in the way.

No surprise that I had to withstand a few gentle gibes during our webinar last week, when a few of you pointed out immediately that the Kindle version wasn’t on offer yet.

But as of this weekend, the Kindle version is now available from Amazon. Kudos to McGraw-Hill for pushing this through. We had a quick look at it Tuesday; while you sacrifice a few of the chapter opening graphics, it’s all there and quite readable.  How very Anywhere.

Just in time for Yankee Group’s e-reader forecast, coming out later today!  More ANYWHERE e-book developments are in the works; I’ll post more on this later.

Possibly the best proof of the value of expanding connectivity is the role it plays in providing healthcare in emerging markets. As I mentioned in today’s webinar, during the research for our book I spoke with Dr. Hamish Fraser, director of telemedicine for Partners in Health, asking him about the importance of network access in how care-givers connect with patients.

“Where we work, connectivity saves lives,” he said very simply. “The network lets us find patients, alert them to the arrival of medications, and monitor their health. When we can do that, people’s life expectancies rise — we’ve proved it. And when their children live longer, the parents invest more in their development.”

Partners in Health has done ground-breaking work in Haiti, training Haitians in community healthcare and creating Haitian-staffed hospitals around the country that have changed, and extended, many lives.

Following the devastating earthquake this week, their hospitals thankfully are still standing. If you’re looking for an organization that is on the ground in Haiti already and can benefit instantly from your support by increasing its supplies of medications, bandages, and more, please consider going to www. pih.org and making a donation on line.

For some context on the challenges of helping Haiti, see Tracy Kidder’s excellent editorial today in the NYT.

Thanks to everyone who joined us in the webinar today, officially launching our new book ANYWHERE: How Global Connectivity Is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business. For the discussion, I was joined by five terrific thought-leaders in the connectivity space:

• Glenn Lurie, President, Emerging Devices, AT&T
• Walter McCormick, President & CEO, U.S. Telecom Association
• Paul Sagan, President & CEO, Akamai Technologies
• Sriram Viswanathan, VP, Architecture Group, Intel
• Nigel Waller, Founder & CEO, Movirtu, Ltd.

A special thanks to each of them for taking the time to chat about Anywhere and illustrate their own business’ opportunities and challenges. If you missed the presentation, the replay is below–I would be delighted to hear your thoughts.

The webinar runs about an hour: audio (mp3) and slides (pdf).

We interrupt your New Year’s resolution-making for an important announcement. ANYWHERE: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business (McGraw-Hill) is officially shipping from all major booksellers.

[As a one-time resident of the great city of Philadelphia, PA, I was delighted that the first reported in-store sighting of the book was at the Barnes & Noble in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia. ]

Our official launch of the book is on January 14th, with a webinar where I’ll talk about the book with some of the thought leaders who contributed to the research.  Sign up to join me here.

Keep up with all our doings around the book’s official launch by checking the book’s website, where we’ll be posting book signing events, reviews, and other launch activities.  Plus, because we did so much research for the book that we weren’t able to include in the book itself, we will be augmenting the website with in-depth interviews and resources over the next few months.

If you’re a YG client, you can read this recent report I wrote based on book interviews with two creative entrepreneurs bringing Anywhere opportunities to emerging markets.

Happy 2010 to everyone. We all managed to make it through 2009. Now let’s get back out there and build the Anywhere Network.

After the financial services sector, the industry that’s shown the greatest capacity to innovate with technology has been the gaming sector. (I will pass on what may seem like a glaring opportunity to editorialize.)

A story in today’s NYT profiles smart-phone style wireless gaming devices being introduced in Nevada casinos to allow more frequent betting on sporting events.

Besides the devices themselves, which fascinate me as I look for new wireless items in our lives, the most interesting aspect of the story may be the impact that portability of wirelessly-supported gambling has on sports betting. Which is the enabling of what the gaming firms call ‘in-line’ gambling — betting on the outcome of events within a sporting event, such as a football kickoff.

Once we can do things Anywhere, the likelihood of doing them will rise. Same for shopping, media consumption, and more. To enterprises interested in the Anywhere Consumer, Anywhere devices are More of Everything devices.

Consumer research is great. Just when you think you could be smart enough to predict the answers you’ll get, consumers surprise you. Which is the whole point of asking, really.

Browsing the most recent results of our monthly survey of North American consumers about device connectivity, I came across two data points, each interesting enough on its own but fascinating in opposition.

Exploring connectedness in the North American home, we asked about connected devices — the ones we have and the ones we want. Of over 3,000 consumers who own one or more devices among a popular collection of consumer electronics technologies (HDTV, set-top boxes, digital cameras, e-books, PNDs and the like), we asked them if the items they own were equipped with connectivity technology. That is, could they be networked to a wireless router in the home, for instance, or connect to the net directly?

The first surprising result: while most of those owned items aren’t connected, and some are, a good quarter of the responses for each device was “I don’t know.”

It’s OK; I’ll wait while that sinks in for you.

“I don’t know” if my digital camera is connected?  If my netbook, set-top box, or HDTV is connected? A typical “don’t know” response rate for simple technology questions in a panel like this might be closer to 5%. But the lowest “don’t know” response was 17%, for e-book readers. The highest “don’t know” was a shocking 42% — for set-top boxes!

Something is seriously wrong with both the marketing and the user experience for these devices for such a large proportion of recent buyers to be unable to answer this question. I wonder if the very question created confusion for those consumers. They may have said to themselves, “Gee, is it? Maybe it ought to be — that is, if I was smart enough to buy the right one. Maybe I just didn’t notice.” You almost could picture respondents making a mental note to check their device the next chance they get.

The second interesting data came when we asked consumers with specific plans to buy one of these products in the next 6 months whether they would be looking for connectivity as a feature. Notwithstanding the uncertainty about the stuff we have already, the appetite for connectivity came through loud and clear. About 30% of consumers with purchase intent said that connectivity is at least an 8 in importance on a scale of 1 to 10. Including those who gave it a 6 or better, the responses swelled to 60% affirmative. This is consistent with the behaviors many of us have begun to exhibit around technology: we want our things to be as mobile as we are.

[The interesting question then: how many of the consumers who didn't know if their current technology is connected are among those who prize connectivity in the products they haven't yet bought? Stay tuned; that's a bit of analytical finesse we'll do and I'll share in a follow-on post.]

That’s the demand side: enthused but muddled. What about the supply side? I ‘ve railed at the consumer electronics sector for at least a year, complaining about a paucity of device innovation in the face of a looming opportunity to completely reinvent the sector with entirely new devices and experiences.

I’m not alone. I chatted the other day with Steve Tomlin, the founder of Chumby Industries, a guy who is very smart about connected devices and who helped in the preparation of our book. The company recently came out with the Chumby One under the key CE $100 price point, now back-ordered through the holidays. What’s his take on the CE sector’s response to the connectivity opportunity?

“It almost seems as if everyone is waiting for Apple to eat their lunch all over again.” Tomlin’s referring of course to the rumored Apple tablet product.  ”They’re competing with an imaginary device, and assuming they’ll lose badly. And it could be true: maybe people with Kindles will end up looking like dorks whenever that comes out.”

But what about netbooks–this year’s early success story in new connected devices? “I don’t get netbooks. They’re the same as laptops–processor, screen, memory, the same stuff. The important distinctions among consumer devices are not in the components. They are in the use cases–what you expect to do with them.”

His take on many devices is that they don’t enable the passive, sit-back use cases we frequently want. In that context, the netbook isn’t much different from a smartphone, about which he complains, “A smartphone isn’t anything for you at all until you tell it what to be. But a Chumby was designed to be a passive experience. It is not a desktop full of icons waiting for your attention to be useful. When you’re not telling a Chumby what to do, it still knows what to do. You turn it on, and it happily marches along.”

Where are the next opportunities for the CE sector? ”The kitchen. It is the staple idea of all futurama thinking, but there is a real hub opportunity there for photos, the family calendar, recipes, visual voicemail, etc.  And the home phone is clearly due for a complete overhaul anyway– it has hardly changed in the past 10 years while all this evolution has hit the rest of our devices. There are something like 10 million total fixed-line phones out there now, and no one is making money on them.”

What about the car as a platform for more consumer connectivity? “Taxis clearly are an opportunity, and Chumby is playing there. But given what’s happened in the economy and in Detroit, things have slowed down a lot in consumer automotive. So the gestational period for that is beyond my attention span.”

Meantime, may your holidays be filled with all the devices you want–connected ones, of course!

With the global recession sending not just companies but public-sector budgets into massive decline, lots of pols want to know what to do to help the major growth engines in their regions spin back up.

My home state is no exception; the meltdown in Massachusetts tax revenues caused a gap of at least $600M in the state’s FY2010 budget, putting us in the top 5 in absolute size of gap when we’re 15th in population. A recent gathering of some of the good and the great in the state’s tech sector, attended by our governor, assessed the burgeoning reach of the digital technology sector in the state’s economy and considered prospects for stimulating its growth.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick admiring my moderating? Or my haircut?

The good news: the state’s tech hub has fared better than other sectors, and by many measures — VC investment, attractiveness to entrepreneurs, more — is the second-ranked state in the U.S. (following of course the state with the biggest budget woes by far).

The bad news: the number of things we could consider doing to help is legion. Participants debated changing state laws regarding non-compete agreements (which personally I believe is a red herring, but that’s another post), the role of the academic sector in creating awareness of the local employment opportunities for students after graduation, and more.

I led the Q&A, but the entire time I just wanted to yell out: “Build out the network!” In my opinion, the expansion of a high-capacity, intelligent network infrastructure is the single biggest contributor to economic productivity we have available to us, either at the state level or worldwide, because it:

1. Brings service work to people in remote locations (where factories may have closed or other options are limited)
2. Attracts businesses to the area that depend on network capacity and speed
3. Helps businesses eliminate physical infrastructure expense
4. Recaptures productivity from workers on the move

Happily, the first question the governor was asked touched on the state’s leverage of federal broadband stimulus funds. The Anywhere Network needs to get to the towns of western Massachusetts just as much as it needs to reach India and sub-Saharan Africa.

Calling all marketers: How do you sell a network?  While operators fear their offering being reduced to nothing more than dumb transfer of bits, the actual internal complexity of their infrastructure gets more impressive every day. But I’m a geek. That stuff doesn’t lend itself to mass-market messaging.

Talking the other day about the most important attributes of networks, I said they were reach (where does it go), capacity (how much traffic can it support) and intelligence (how much software in the network helps bits move around with other useful stuff to the right places at the right time).

Verizon Wireless is doing a yeoman’s job of talking about reach and capacity. With Google taking over our map consciousness, who’d have thought that it would be a network taking over the use of maps in marketing?

I haven’t seen a network operator in the U.S. or elsewhere yet talk about its network being more intelligent than the other guys’. While networks are indeed getting more intelligent with the addition of technologies like IMS, SDP, DPI and whatever other TLA* I’ve forgotten to mention, it may take another couple of years before operators figure out how to translate those assets into a simple, clearly-articulated marketing message for their clients. So I guess we have to wait for the competitive battle over network IQ.

So what about speed? From gamers to financial services firms, many network users know that they want the fastest possible network. But it might be a case of the positive (going fast) not being as compelling in marketing messages as the negative. Fast is nice — but missing out on something is bad. When offered the chance to pay a higher toll to use a less congested lane on the highway, the most compelling way to get my attention would be to suggest that if I don’t do it, I might be late for my meeting. Put up a clock over the roadway and estimate the arrival time at an exit using the main path versus the low-congestion path.

The way to sell the negative when it comes to network speed, is to talk about latency. But then that’s one of those words we geeks favor that makes normal people’s eyes glaze over.

Akamai, the content and app delivery network people, has struggled with how to talk about this, using words like acceleration. Their messaging includes discussions of latency using lots of facts and figures. Cable operator Comcast takes a softer, more comedic approach, linking slower networks with turtles. These approaches to marketing network speed, or the lack of latency, fall at either end of a spectrum: very techie (which admittedly Akamai’s customers may require) versus very cutesy.

There must be solutions in the middle. The experiences we can all relate to are missing trains and airplanes. The movie image of subway doors closing on the smirking bad guy, just as our hero in hot pursuit rushes down to the platform only to see the train pull away, is familiar yet compelling. Network marketeers need to develop our sense of urgency around the negative impact of slow networks. Missed messages, missed packets, missed trades… lateness means missing out.

*TLA of course stands for Three-Letter Acronym; along with its sibling the FLA, irresistible candy to tech geeks and policy wonks alike.