Text HAITI to 90999 and a donation of $10 will be given to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts in #Haiti.

So tweeted @mGive on Tuesday evening, and so began a sea change in digital fund raising.

Quick and easy: Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10

In the three days since, more than one million such text messages have been sent, bringing in over $10 million to help Haiti’s earthquake victims. Haitian musician Wyclef Jean’s YELE/501501 campaign had collected over $1 million in $5 donations by Thursday. Similar SMS campaigns are underway by International Medical Corps, International Rescue, the Salvation Army, and the William J. Clinton foundation, but it is the “HAITI/90999″ campaign which caught the attention of the Obama administration and was promoted on the White House blog on Wednesday.

We have been tracking the campaign’s progress by monitoring Twitter updates from @mGive, @RedCross, @KateAtState, @dipnote and @WhiteHouse and through conversations with mGive’s PR team:

One million text messages can really make a difference. A larger, interactive version of the chart is also available. mGive provides state-by-state graphs hourly on their site.

A Killer App (pardon the expression) for Mobile Payments?

Nearly a year ago, in his Yankee Group Focus Report, “Driving Mobile Transactions with No Killer App,” my colleague Jon Paisner argued that without compelling, “killer” applications, mobile payments will muddle along for a few years while the industry slowly develops standards and deploys specialized infrastructure components such as NFC readers. During this time, mobile payments will be primarily relegated to convenience transactions, such as in metropolitan transit systems.

But the success of these fundraising campaigns — and the requisite press attention — is introducing millions of Americans to the notion of using SMS for domestic remittances, which Jon predicts to be among the first applications of mobile payments to achieve commercial adoption in the U.S. (see the Yankee Group Anchor Report “Predictions for the 2009 Mobile Transactions Market: Stuck in Second Gear but Poised for Growth“).

In addition to the existence of the requisite SMS donation platforms like mGive, three main factors are now aligned to help explain the success of this week’s campaigns:

1. Mobile devices are increasingly ubiquitous and omnipresent. People are more likely to leave behind their wallets or keys than their mobile phones (see the Yankee Group Report “Riding the Wave from Mobile Commerce to Mobile Transactions“).
2. Texting is common and comfortable. No longer monopolized by teens, people of all ages are increasingly comfortable communicating via short text messages, whether IM or SMS.
3. Texting’s ease and asynchronous nature removes excuses to delay transactions. You don’t need to wait until you get home, find a quiet spot, register on a web site, enter your credit card information, or press “2″ if you want to continue in English. As supermarket checkout aisles have demonstrated for years, removing the barriers between impulse and purchase is the surest way to seal the deal, strike while the iron is hot, and/or employ your favorite sales cliché.

These environmental factors bode well for the adoption of other applications of mobile payments. But wireless carriers take heed: you only get one chance to make a first impression.

Wireless Carriers: Make Charity Frictionless

To their credit, all the U.S. wireless carriers have pledged to waive any and all SMS fees and surcharges incurred by their customers by donating to the HAITI/90999 campaign. PC World has published an excellent round up of which carriers have made similar pledges for each relief campaign:

PC World's round up of which carriers waive SMS charges for which Haiti campaigns

Surprisingly, this not uniformly the case for the other campaigns. Carriers are among the prime beneficiaries of increased use of SMS for mobile payments and other transactions, but only if they take advantage of this spotlight to shine. In a time of such humanitarian need, you do not want to be seen as profiteering.

1. Waive all SMS surcharges for all messages to legitimate campaigns. Announce your intention to do so immediately, and follow through as quickly as possible. There are considerable logistical challenges to track down and vet each campaign, we know, but you have one advantage: at least you know where all the text messages suddenly started going to.
2. Accelerate payments to the charities. Three months to pay out SMS collections won’t cut it; your customers are donating immediately and expect you to pass it along. Kudos to Verizon Wireless for leading the charge here, and to Sprint and AT&T for following suit (see the New York Times Bits blog entry “Wireless Firms Speed Up Texted Haiti Donations“). Hello, T-Mobile?
3. Protect your customers from scammers. You will benefit if people trust SMS and other moble technologies with donations and other payments. Be aggressive with scammers, promise refunds to your customers if they fall prey to a scam. Set up autoresponders to redirect customers to legitimate charities and coordinate openly with your competitors in your common interest.

• Get a corporate wireless plan and save half. Stop reimbursing individual-liable cell phone bills and move everyone to a single, corporate plan. Apply a fair standard to qualify employees, adopt a common platform (like BlackBerry), and leverage your concentrated spend to provide better and more consistent support to more employees than you do today. Our test SMB saved $96,000, or 47 percent in the first year alone — and eliminated dozens of paper expense reports each month.
• Ditch your mail server(s) and save over 80%. Moving from traditional Lotus or Microsoft premises-based e-mail application to a cloud-based messaging solution like Google Apps Premier Edition saved our model SMB a staggering 83 percent (about $64,000) in the first year. The three-year savings approached 90% (more than $200,000).

“Less” and “worse” all too commonly follow budget tightening, but “different” gives “better” and “more” a fighting chance.

Outdated, obsolete -- but useful again with DTV

With the transition to broadcast digital TV (DTV) in the U.S. — whenever it’s going to happen — outdated, obsolete “rabbit ears” indoor antennas are poised to become a viable threat to cable and satellite TV providers, especially as consumers become increasingly budget-conscious.

My eyes were opened to this threat recently when my parents asked me to connect a digital converter box to the small, 5 year old LCD TV my mother uses in the kitchen. I was naturally concerned that they had (1) attempted a technology purchase without seeking my advice and (2) had gone to Radio Shack to do it.

But what a pleasant surprise the Zenith DTT901 digital converter box turned out to be! (The Shack took care of them — thanks, guys.)  For about $20 (after coupon), that little TV suddenly had the best picture in the house:

• Digital-perfect reception of all of Boston’s network affiliates (and then some), and several new sub-channels to boot
• Automatic scaling, zooming, and cropping of HD and SD programming
• An on-screen program guide

And since all of Boston’s DTV stations are currently UHF, they don’t even need the VHF “ears” extended (only channel 7 is currently scheduled to return to its old VHF frequency after the transition’s analog shutdown).

Clearly, this is not the broadcast TV of my youth.

Broadcast TV then

Back then, living 25.5 miles southeast of Boston’s primary broadcast towers in Needham, MA (thanks, AntennaWeb!) meant that we had a VHF/UHF antenna on our chimney, just like everyone else.  Ours rotated, though, controlled by an unapologetically analog dial which made a satisfyingly mechanical “thunk” as it stepped the mast from NW to SSW to try for Providence stations too.

Broadcast TV now

Picture quality was mediocre at best. Snow, static, ghosts, waves, whatever, whenever.  We signed up for cable as soon as it became available in our town and never looked back.  We switched to digital in the early 1990′s as soon as DirecTV receivers hit the magic $99 mark.

But with DTV so easily available, of such high quality, and with such advanced features — for free — why would anyone in the city or suburbs ever pay a $9 or $10 monthly fee for a barebones “local TV” package again?

For cable and satellite providers feeling pressure on the high-end as consumers respond to the economy by shedding premium channels, this new threat to the low-end is unwelcome indeed. Multi-play packages and other retention efforts (such as Cablevision’s Optimum WiFi deployment) become all the more important, but must be targeted carefully, like the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, not haphazardly like Jimmy Carter’s boat oars.

1. Nielsen Media Research estimates that 7.8 million households were still unprepared for the transition as of December
2. funding to support the change is “woefully inadequate” — the converter box coupon program ran out of money early last week
3. insufficient funding and education will hurt “the most vulnerable Americans”: the elderly, the poor, and the rural

Allow me to translate:

1. People procrastinate.  And somehow the cure for this is for the government to procrastinate for them.  A real concern is that the sudden economic slowdown has interfered with people’s plans to upgrade their televisions.  But you don’t need a new television — or even a converter box — if you already subscribe to basic cable (or satellite).  And study after study reveal that the cable bill is one of the last bills people stop paying during times of financial hardship; premium channels and pay-per-view add-ons may be among the first to go, but basic cable (or satellite) is here to stay.
2. Congress underestimated the demand for free money.  This is especially surprising as they have so much practice, but fortunately the fix is easy: simply appropriate more funds to the existing program (starting by recapturing funds for already-expired coupons) or change the coupon program into a rebate program.
3. If you’re old, poor, and/or live in the sticks, messing with your TV is just piling on.  Pardon me, but when politicians speak of “the most vulnerable Americans,” is it unreasonable to expect the topic at hand be more weighty than a daily dose of Dr. Phil?  We’re not talking about access to healthcare, education (sorry PBS), or the court system.  Furthermore, Nielsen’s same transition readiness survey from December found households led by adults aged 55 and older to be prepared at twice the rate of those led by adults under 35.  And as someone who used to drive through West Virginia, trust me — rural America is quite aware of satellite TV.

But what’s the harm?

There are many moving parts to the digital TV transition, with the February 17 analog cutoff mandated in the Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005.  In preparation for this transition, television stations have been broadcasting digitally on temporary frequency assignments, mostly in the UHF band.  A delay would require these broadcasters to continue to operate and maintain their analog facilities.

700MHz bandwidth auctioned = UHF Channels 52-69

At the same time, the FCC has already sold UHF channels 52-69 to wireless carriers (primarily Verizon Wireless and AT&T) in last year’s much-publicized 700MHz. auction for their 4G deployments.  ”Falcon_77″ on the AV Science (AVS) Forum has done an amazing job compiling a complete database of U.S. TV frequency assignments including these transitional assignments.  Currently there are 335 stations broadcasting in this 700MHz block.  Of these, 141 are transitional digital stations; the other 194 are legacy existing analog stations.

We are very late in the game to throw a monkey wrench into this bandwidth handover. For not only is the auction concluded — and nearly $20 billion collected from the winners — but on January 6, the FCC even granted the licenses to use these frequencies.  And these licenses all expire on February 17, 2019, so the $20 billion dollar clock is about to start ticking.

So soon after this fall’s economic shocks, so firmly in the midst of general economic uncertainty, and so close to such an historic transition of power, now is not the time for government to erode further our confidence in its ability to provide a stable, fair, and transparent regulatory environment. With so many comparisons to the Great Depression being thrown around so casually, read The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes for a reminder of the grave ramifications when businesses lose faith in the government’s ability to apply regulations consistently.

10. Twitter is the new Facebook
9. AT&T/Verizon/IPTV subscribers will exceed 7 million in U.S.
8. Mobile becomes the key to quad-play success

Top 10 Consumer Predictions for 2009: #10-#8 podcast (mp3 / 11MB / 11:59)

It’s that latter bit — the ability to share physical devices and substitute disk files for CD-ROMs and hard drives — that quickly led to my second “a-ha” moment: hey, that “hard drive” I added to that vm is just a big file on my computer.

As you know, everything that makes a computer unique is stored on disk: the operating system, applications, configuration settings, even the dreaded Windows registry — usually in hundreds or thousands of files scattered (and hidden) all over your disk. But when that “disk” is just one big file on a physical volume, suddenly it doesn’t seem so hard to back up, copy, clone — even version control — whole computers at once.

Virtualization, SAN, and software vendors offer a lot of bells and whistles — snapshots, real-time replication, volume mirroring, differential backups, etc. — but it is the “atomic” nature of virtual machines which make them so easy to back up and restore. And that sounds like the beginning of a disaster recovery strategy, doesn’t it?

In his recent Yankee Group Report Virtualization Eases Disaster Recovery, Zeus Kerravala argues that virtualization technologies bring full-fledged disaster recovery plans within the reach of SMBs.

Think about it — no business is too small to copy some (large) files offsite. As we march towards Anywhere, broadband connectivity will only become more widespread and affordable. ($1000 per month buys our office a 100 Mbps Internet line. Remember when a 1.5 Mbps T-1 cost more?) And when you can already rent storage by the month from Amazon S3 for $0.15 per GB, it’s hard to argue that a basic DR plan is out of anyone’s reach.

Consider a secondary site

Zeus goes a step further and recommends SMBs consider including a secondary site in any DR plan. Setting up a secondary site “in the old days” (i.e., pre-virtualization) usually required purchasing identically configured hardware to hold your data and to run your mission-critical apps. As a result, few projects to build secondary sites ever made it past the cost estimate — even among larger enterprises.

But the increased server utilization made possible by a serious virtualization program can free up decent hardware to be used in a secondary site. Your mileage may vary, but when Yankee Group undertook our crash virtualization program last year (“Project Shrinkray”, prompted by the move of our Boston headquarters), we were able to free up more than half of our production servers. And the footprint of our remaining servers was small enough that we saved money by moving them all to a nearby AT&T data center rather than building a server room in our new office. It also helped that our new home sits on a SONET ring — the Anywhere Network will come via whatever access technology makes sense.

It’s funny. It seems that whether we need a secondary site for a DR plan or a new order management system, we CIOs are always running into the same, familiar question: should I build it or buy it?

Option 1: Build It

Assuming you have (or can free up) enough servers to meet your computing requirements, I would argue that you’ve cleared the biggest cost hurdle. While data center space isn’t getting any cheaper — though this may change with falling energy prices and the sudden economic slowdown — other factors are working in your favor:

1. Free (as in beer) virtualization software. Microsoft’s entry into the virtuallization market is pushing prices down, as we warned earlier this year. In response to this increased pressure on the low end, VMware is now giving away its ESXi Hypervisor. You would still need to pay through the nose for extras like VMotion, but I’d skip them for your secondary site. Or you might opt out of the VI/3 family entirely for VMware’s long-free Server product running on, say, a CentOS Linux server. (And don’t forget open source virtualization alternatives like Xen which ships with Red Hat and SUSE Linux, if you’re so inclined.)
2. (Almost) free storage. Newegg, my personal choice for personal purchases (sorry, no corporate P.O.’s), is selling 1.5TB Seagate SATA drives for $130 (with free shipping . Or be conservative and pay $180 for the 1TB “enterprise” variety rated for 24×7 operation. How many do you really need to hold all of your live data?
3. “Offsite” may be closer than you think — like under your desk. If your critical systems are already sitting in a safe, professional hosting facility (and they should be), consider using your office as your “secondary” site for these systems. Or better yet — a branch office.

Option 2: Buy It — Anywhere

I enjoy fiddling with server guts at least as much as most IT guys, but sometimes I just don’t have the time. Cloud computing is the latest class of offerings being made possible by the emerging Anywhere Network. In Considering Cloud Computing for the Anywhere Enterprise, Carl Howe segments the cloud computing landscape and presents these offerings as a way to jumpstart your company’s evolution towards an employee-centric Anywhere Enterprise. Just google for VMware hosting providers or refer to VMware’s “vCloud Service Provider” list to find “Infrastructure as a Service” providers who will be happy to take all those little files — I mean servers — off your hands.

And don’t forget about DNS. If you do ever need to cut over to your secondary site — and assuming at least some of your critical systems are publicly available — a web browser is all you need to make the required changes with a hosted DNS provider like my favorite DynDNS.com. You may already have this capability (for free) where your domain is registered. Don’t forget to add this login information to your DR documentation.

Which option is right for you?

For my money, it’s hard to beat a couple of monster machines slapped together from spare servers and giant SATA drives. But you and your IT team must have the skill-set — and interest — to build it and maintain it. One quick test: did you click on any of the links to Newegg above? Have you heard of Newegg before? What about your team? If the answer to these questions is “no,” implementing this solution probably won’t be as much fun as it sounds.

From an accounting point of view, computer upgrades should be capitalized and depreciated accordingly. If your financial circumstances favor capital expenditures over opex spending, that could be reason to lean towards building your solution — and don’t forget that you should also capitalize an outside consultant’s fees to help with the initial implementation. If you choose a services-based approach, now is the time to account for these expenses in your 2009 budget.

However you account for it, virtualization — along with cheap storage locally or in a cloud on the Anywhere Network — has eliminated much of the cost and complexity holding most of us back from implementing a workable disaster recovery plan. So now what are you waiting for?

T-Mobile picture frame podcast (mp3 / 3.2MB / 06:53)

Yesterday the FCC voted unanimously to resolve three issues which have been hanging like so many chads before the commission:

• the merger of Sprint and Clearwire to clear the way for the new, WiMAX Clearwire
• Alltel’s acquisition by Verizon Wireless
• the unlicensed use of “white spaces” between TV channels

As the trusted advisor to so many in the communications ecosystem, we have followed each of these issues closely, but it’s the last one — the unlicensed use of white space spectrum — which strikes me as revolutionary as the results of this historic election cycle.

You can think of it as “WiFi on steroids”, as Google co-founder Larry Page calls it, but it’s really another building block in what we call the Anywhere Network — the ubiquitous, high speed, digital network which will seamlessly connect us all. Google and its tech giant allies have liberated the static between the TV channels in the VHF band — not to build a new cell network, but to create a new free access channel.

No one block of spectrum or regulatory framework will create the Anywhere Network we envision. By necessity it will evolve from different technologies and available spectrum, taking on national and regional flavors as well — especially in these early days. But unlicensed access (read: free) to so much lower-frequency spectrum (read: it reaches through houses and apartment buildings) offers fertile ground for experimentation and innovation.

I don’t know about you, but I have had enough of red and blue maps. With the yesterday’s regulatory landslide, it’s time for the engineers to get to work painting the country a pretty shade of Anywhere.