markwilson.it

Category: Technology

  • How Steve Ballmer told me what to do with my iPad!

    Yesterday, I had the opportunity to see Steve Ballmer speak to two audiences, first at Microsoft’s Partner Briefing on transitioning to the cloud (#pbbcloud) and then at the UK TechDays Special Event on the future of cloud development (#uktechdays).

    I’m sorry I didn’t catch the name of the guy who asked Mr Ballmer a question about Windows tablets in the TechDays question and answer session, but I was certainly very interested to hear the Microsoft CEO’s reaction:

    Question: “We haven’t had a Windows tablet come out yet […] we do see the prototypes coming out all the time but I do remember you saying that it’s going to run full Windows 7. […] are we going to have like a tablet version of Windows Phone 7 or a tablet of Windows Embedded 7 coming out? […] To me, although [Windows 7] is touch enabled, I don’t think it’s great for a small 7″, 9″ device.”

    Mr Ballmer’s response: “Yeah, what you’ll see over the course of the next year is us doing more and more work with our hardware partners creating hardware-software optimisations with Windows 7 and with Windows 7 Media Center […] Media Center is big and, when people say ‘hey, we could optimise more for clients’ I think what they generally mean is ‘Big Buttons’.  Big Buttons that’s, I think, a codeword for Big Buttons and Media Center is Big Buttons not Little Buttons. I’m not trying to trivialise that – it’s a real issue.

    We’re not going to do a revamp of Windows 7 over the course of the next year for that purpose.  Whether we should, or we shouldn’t, we’ve put all our energy around doing a great job on that and other issues in the next version of Windows so we will do optimisations to have devices that look really good, that run Windows, that are very good for touch applications which we will encourage people to write. We will do things that improve – it turns out that if we just optimise settings and the configuration of Windows it can be a lot more usable through touch, even on today’s systems – we’re doing that work with the OEMs. We’re doing work with the OEMs to make sure that they treat ink also as a first class citizen.  None of our competitors products actually do a very good [job]. I saw a poor guy in a speech I did out down the hall, he had one of our competitors’ devices and he was sitting there crouched over with this thing on his knees, bent and there’s no keyboard – and he was in torture using that poor non-Windows slate device [audience laughs].

    And for some of you, [you] do the same but I think we can make life a little simpler for people, if we do the right job.  Can we do better by optimising – yep – guy’s got one at the back – you can bend over too, I’ll tell ya!  [audience laughs]

    The truth of the matter is the laptop weighs less – you can set it on your lap, it doesn’t weigh anything at that point and then you can type.  I’m not trying to say there’s not a place for touch-optimised slate-based devices, obviously we have shown enthusiasm about that before but you’ll see some optimisations coming in the course of the next year and some of the devices that convert, that have a keyboard, that flip around – I think some of those will be also pretty useful for people in the course of the next year.”

    [I’ve tried to get the text word-perfect here but I was at the back of the room and the audio recording was not fantastic… this is certainly what it sounds like to me].

    The thing is, I was that “non-Windows slate device” user down the hall (and I was the guy at the back of the room when he said this) and the only reason I was in “torture” (which, of course, was a slight overdramatisation for comedy effect) was that I was squashed into a row of seats between two other guys and I was bending forward so that we weren’t sitting there with shoulders pressed together like sardines in a tin can.  I was also juggling a camera (on my Nokia phone), a voice recorder (on my iPhone) and taking notes/tweeting on the iPad whilst listening to Mr Ballmer.  Ironically, the reason I took my iPad to the event was that my Windows devices are so bad for portability (to be honest, so is my MacBook – this is not about Windows but about the device form factor).  My netbook has to be coaxed through the day with Wi-Fi switched off in order to get more than a few hours out of the battery; my 15″ laptop only goes 2-3 hours between charges (newer models may be better, but I can’t change laptops at the drop of a hat); meanwhile, I find the iPad easy enough to type on in landscape mode, it turns on/off instantly and, after 8 hours taking notes and tweeting yesterday, it still had an indicated battery charge of 55%.  If Microsoft produced a slate that did that, I would have been using it but they don’t and, based on what Ballmer had to say yesterday, it may be some time before they finally “get it” (I wrote last month about what I think Microsoft needs to do to keep Windows relevant in the mobile computing space).

    As Mary Jo Foley wrote yesterday, this year’s Windows 7 slates won’t be under my Christmas tree.

  • Publishing: yet another industry clinging on to an outdated business model

    One would hope that, after the much publicised issues that the music industry experienced whilst grappling with digital music distribution, other digital content producers would avoid making the same mistakes. Apparently that’s not so – at least not if the publishing industry is anything to go by.

    I love books. Real books. Dead tree editions full of glorious photographs. I’ll even pay good money for them. But, for magazines and run-of-the-mill text content, I’m increasingly looking towards digital media.

    Take, for example, a well-known personal computing magazine – PC Pro. Last week I was convinced that subscribing to the magazine would be a good idea but I don’t want a paper copy to carry around with me – I have a tablet computer for that – an iPad that, somewhat ironically, one of the magazine’s Contributing Editors, Jon Honeyball, convinced me to part with several hundred pounds to buy. Now the fact that it was Jon who “sold” the iPad to me is not really relevant – there are many reasons that was a good purchase and that’s the subject of another blog post – but I would hope that a computer magazine would be at the vanguard of digital publication. Unfortunately not – the answer I got from the magazine’s publishers was that if I wanted a digital copy, I could download an application from Zinio and read it that way.

    Er… No thanks. I’ll just hold off on that and PC Pro will pick up one less new subscriber this month.

    My problems with this approach to magazine distribution are threefold:

    • Apple provides me with iBooks – a perfectly good eBook reader with support for PDF documents and features such as brightness control.
    • If I buy a magazine from a shop, I can read it and then recycle it, store it (forever if I choose to), or give it to a friend to read (if they don’t mind getting their news/reviews a few weeks late) but the Zinio approach imposes digital rights management on me (or at least some form of copy control).
    • I don’t want another application just to read magazines – not unless its truly innovative and enhances my experience (as the Wired iPad application does by integrating content that’s not available in paper form, such as video).

    Then there is newspaper publishing. I don’t buy a newspaper every day but I will read one of the free newspapers on the way to/from work, catch up on the latest news via the ‘net, and either my wife or I buy a newspaper most weekends. Even though my preferred newspaper is The Sunday Times, Murdoch’s paywall means I will not consume their online content because there is plenty of quality content available elsewhere (e.g. The Guardian website and podcasts such as Tech Weekly, or BBC News – either via the web or in their excellent iPad application). I did consider the Financial Times iPad application – and I even tried it whist it was free last month, but it didn’t give me enough to justify a regular subscription. I’m sorry to say that paid newspapers are a dying medium – which is a shame – as the standard of journalism available for free is not up to the same standards but there is just not enough there to convince me that parting with money to subscribe to a newspaper (physical or online) is a worthwhile investment.

    Books on sale in WH SmithFinally, there are books. I’m not talking about coffee-table books here, but about normal books – the sort of thing you might see in WH Smith or Waterstones. I’m completely at a loss as to why the same book costs the same price, regardless of whether I buy a paperback copy or an e-book. Indeed, given that most of the books I buy tend to be on a “buy one, get one half price” or similar offer the digital versions actually cost more – ludicrous given that there are no printing costs, almost no distribution costs, and that the content creator (i.e. the author) gets paid less.

    [Update: 6 August 2010 @13:06: My assertion that e-books cost around the same as paperbacks was based on Apple’s prices – I’ve since found that Kindle eBooks are available at a substantial discount, just as paper books from Amazon are]

    I did actually buy an e-book last weekend: after my half-read copy of Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street got soaked during a rainstorm on a camping trip, I downloaded the iBooks version and was soon reading again; but I can’t give it away when I’ve finished. Indeed, because e-books cannot be passed on to a friend or given to the charity shop, they have the potential to decimate the second-hand book trade, which should result in even more first-time sales – in itself a reason why the prices should be lower as book sales increase.

    So it seems that publishers – be they magazine, newspaper, or book publishers – are clinging on to a business model that is in decline. I’m sure that we’ll have books on our shelves for many years to come, and printed magazines will survive a while longer (although their days are numbered) but newspapers are already suffering,  photojournalism has pretty much been killed off (the last NCTJ accredited photojournalism course has only just given a reprieve)., and real journalism (I mean journalism, not bloggers regurgitating press releases) is becoming increasingly endangered.

    If only the publishers could learn from the music industry’s mistakes we might see something new, something innovative, something that makes people want to consume their content but, based on what I’ve seen recently, theres little evidence to suggest that they have learned anything.

  • Installing Ubuntu (10.4) on Windows Virtual PC

    I use a Windows 7 notebook at work but, sometimes, it’s just easier to drop back into a Unix or Linux machine – for example when I was checking out command line Twitter clients a few days ago (yes, there is a Windows one, but Twidge is more functional).  After all, as one of my friends at Microsoft reminds me, it is just an operating system after all…

    Anyway, I wanted to install Ubuntu 10.4 in a virtual machine and, as I have Windows Virtual PC installed on my notebook, I didn’t want to use another virtual machine manager (most of the advice on the subject seems to suggest using Virtual Box or VMware Workstation, which is a workaround – not a solution).  My first attempts were unsuccessful but then I stumbled upon a forum thread that helped me considerably – thanks to MrDerekBush and pessimism on the Ubuntu forums – this is what I found I needed to do:

    1. Create a virtual machine in Windows Virtual PC as normal – it’s fine to use a dynamic disk – and boot from an Ubuntu disk image (i.e. an ISO, or physical media).
    2. At the language selection screen, hit Escape, then F6 and bring up the boot options string.  Delete the part that says quiet splash -- and replace it with vga=788 noreplace-paravirt (other vga boot codes may work too).
    3. Select the option to try Ubuntu without installing then, once the desktop environment is fully loaded, select the option to install Ubuntu and follow the prompts.
    4. At the end of the installation, do not restart the virtual machine – there are some changes required to the boot loader (and Ubuntu 10.4 uses GRUB2, so some of the advice on the ‘net does not apply).
    5. From Places, double click the icon that represents the virtual hard disk (probably something like 135GB file system if you have a default sized virtual hard disk). Then, open a Terminal session and type mount, to get the volume identifier.
    6. Enter the following commands:
      sudo mount -o bind /dev /media/volumeidentifier/dev
      sudo chroot /media/volumeidentifier/ /bin/bash
      mount -t proc none /proc
      nano /etc/default/grub
    7. Replace quiet splash with vga=788 and comment out the grub_hidden_timeout line (using #) in /etc/default/grub, then save the file and exit nano.
    8. Enter the following command:
      nano /etc/grub.d/10_linux
    9. In the linux_entry section, change args="$4" to args="$4 noreplace-paravirt", then save the file and exit nano.
    10. Enter the update-grub command and ignore any error messages about not being able to find the list of partitions.
    11. Shut down the virtual machine.  At this point I was left with a message about Casper resyncing snapshots and, ever after leaving the VM for a considerable period it did not progress further.  I hibernated the VM and when I resumed it, it rebooted and Ubuntu loaded as normal.

    There are still a few things I need to sort out: there are no Virtual Machine Additions for Linux on Virtual PC (only for Hyper-V), which means no mouse/keyboard integration; and the Ctrl-Alt-left arrow release key combination clashes with the defaults for Intel graphics card drivers (there are some useful Virtual PC keyboard shortcuts).  Even so, getting the OS up and running is a start!

  • Connecting an E.ON EnergyFit Monitor to Google PowerMeter

    The energy company that I buy my electricity and gas from (E.ON) is currently running an “EnergyFit” promotion where they will send you an energy monitor for free. A free gadget sounded like a good idea (I have a monitor but it’s the plugin type – this monitors the whole house) so I applied for one to help me reduce our family’s spiraling energy costs (and, ahem, to help us reduce our environmental footprint).

    The EnergyFit package appeared on my doorstep sometime over the weekend and setup was remarkably easy – there’s a transmission unit that loops around the main electricity supply cable (without any need for an electrician) and a DC-powered monitor that connects to this using a wireless technology called C2, which works on the 433MHz spectrum (not the 2.4GHz that DECT phones, some Wi-Fi networks, baby monitors, etc. use).  Within a few minutes of following E.ON’s instructions, I had the monitor set up and recording our electricity usage.

    The monitor is supplied with E.ON’s software to help track electricity usage over time and it seems to work well – as long as you download the data from the monitor (using the supplied USB cable) every 30 days (that’s the limit of the monitor’s internal memory).

    I wondered if I could get this working with Google PowerMeter too (Microsoft Hohm is not currently available in the UK) and, sure enough, I did.  This is what I had to do:

    1. Head over to the Google PowerMeter website.
    2. Click the link to Get Google PowerMeter.
    3. At this point you can either sign up with a utility company, or select a device.  The E.ON-supplied device that I have is actually from a company called Current Cost so I selected them from the device list and clicked through to their website.
    4. Once on the Current Cost website, click the button to check that your device will work with Google PowerMeter.
    5. The E.ON EnergyFit monitor is an Envi device – click the Activate button.
    6. Complete the registration form in order to download the software required to connect the monitor to Google.
    7. Install the software, with includes a registration process with Google for an authorisation key that is used for device connection.
    8. After 10 minutes of data upload, you should start to see your energy usage appear on the Google PowerMeter website.

    Of course, these instructions work today but either the Google or Current Cost websites are subject to change – I can’t help out if they do but you should find the information you need here.

    There are some gotchas to be aware of:

    • The monitor doesn’t keep time very well (mine has drifted about 3 minutes a day!).
    • Configuring the monitor (and downloading data to the E.ON software) requires some arcane keypress combinations.
    • According to the release notes supplied with the Current Cost software, it only caches data for 2 hours so, if your PC is switched off (perhaps to save energy!), Google fills in the gaps (whereas the E.ON Energy Fit software can download up to 30 days of information stored in the monitor).
    • You can’t run both the E.ON EnergyFit and the Current Cost Google PowerMeter applications at the same time – only one can be connected to the monitor.

    If your energy company doesn’t supply power monitors, then there are a variety of options for purchase on the Google PowerMeter website.

  • Why CEOs don’t blog/tweet

    Yesterday, I tweeted about a Harvard Business Review article published by Bloomberg that asks “Is the typical CIO a ‘Gear Guy?’” and it reminded me to post something about Rob Shimmin‘s talk on “Why CEOs don’t tweet” at last month’s Dell B2B Social Media Huddle (#dellb2b).

    It was a fascinating talk and I hope Rob won’t mind me sharing the key points in this post.

    Setting the scene

    • Very few CEOs blog or tweet (and even fewer in the B2B world).
    • All CEOs are good communicators but their skills may vary according to where/how they are communicating (face to face, auditorium, etc.)  Your CEO may be nervous in front of some audiences – so look at them and see where they fit.

    Should a CEO communicate using social media?

    • Maybe not? Some CEOs have unbelievable restrictions on what they can say and their message may be scrubbed clean until the point where the content is not that useful.  One example is Jonathan Schwartz (former CEO of Sun Microsystems), whose current blog is titled “What I couldn’t say…”.
    • The primary reason that CEOs don’t blog or tweet is time. Use of social media needs to be transparent and, if a blog is ghost written, then it’s important to say so.  Rob spoke of how some CEOs sits down with the guys who write their posts at 8am each day and tell them what they are thinking.  Others want to write for themselves but it’s difficult to switch someone from “command and control” mode to “talking through a keyboard” (unfiltered).
    • Permanence is another consideration (the United States Library of Congress is cataloging all tweets) – think about what happens when two organisations are competing and they later merge – those blog posts and tweets are still there for all to see their previous history of conflict!
    • CEOs may also have some restrictions around what can say (for example as a result of regulation, fair disclosure).
    • For B2B CEOs, control is a big issue – it’s difficult for them to let people say what they like in social media!  Lawyers and HR may also have a view.  Then consider that social media reaches a wide audience and impacts buying patterns… whereas B2B CEOs worry about a small number of important contacts.
    • All CEOs are interested in recruiting great talent and getting message to staff in event of crisis.  Often, organisations are collaborating with other partners on a product or service – they can’t be completely open but there is a need to collaborate externally [and to communicate internally].
    • B2B and B2C communications are closer than many might think. Rob’s example was that, if British Airways’ engine supplier is “volcanic ash friendly”, that could impact on a consumer’s airline choice (i.e. B2B becomes B2C when the public are interested). And even if there is no risk (i.e. that all jet engines are equally ash friendly, or not!), there may be a perception of risk by the public – again, B2B organisations need to think about what the public thinks as a B2C organisation would.  In essence, it’s important to think “if my customer’s customer is interested in something, what am I doing to address it?”

    Triggers for B2B social media communications

    • Crisis (fixing negative PR [BP must surely be upset about the @BPGlobalPR Twitter account!]).
    • Competition (sounding knowledgeable on a topic that people care about (they have a good approach to xyz… should we have?).
    • Cost effectiveness (i.e. – look at the reach of various social networking platforms – although it’s important to consider richness, not just reach).
    • Powerful channel (recognising that social media can play in important role in communicating with both customers and employees).

    Using social media for B2B crisis management

    “Seeing a CEO grapple with social media can be a bit like seeing your Dad dance at your wedding with baseball camp on backwards!”

    [source unknown]

    • A crisis isn’t the time to launch a social media presence – the CEO’s message can be passed out through existing channels and other (often younger) more, technologically-savvy people in the organisation can get the CEO to comment through their blogs.
    • In a crisis, suddenly everything is watched and old, previously uninteresting content becomes interesting (so, because of permanence, it’s important to future-proof the message).
    • Some CEOs will take well to social media, whilst others are not so comfortable – it’s important to play to your CEO’s strong points.

    Social Media is on the B2B RADAR

    • Social media can have a negative effect too – in the recent British Airways strike negotiations, a senior Union leader provoked controversy by tweeting from the negotiation table (and then compounded the issue by tweeting as he enjoyed himself at a football match, whilst passengers were grounded by strikes).
    • CEOs make mistakes like the rest of us but, if they have a good setup around them, they can survive; however CEOs are less likely to survive contention (particularly if old content is surfaced later) than “Jake from marketing aged 24” is when he tweets about suffering from a hangover.
    • CEO use of social media should be about: earning trust; having an industry voice (building communities); monitoring issues (getting ready to react to consumer’s needs and concerns); talking to employees (listening too); driving innovation (encouraging idea sharing); and recruiting talent (leveraging connections).

    The top 10 challenges for Heads of Digital Communications (HDCs)

    1. Lack of understanding
    2. Loss of control
    3. Demographic apartheid
    4. Fragmentation of media
    5. Speed of change and response
    6. Rules of engagement
    7. Privacy and corporate security
    8. Finding good people
    9. Lack of effective metrics
    10. Ownership of digital

    (From Watson Helsby Executive Search’s “Digital Communications and Social Media: the challenges facing the PR industry”) – more quotes include:

    “Under 30’s are the digital natives – but they lack the all-round communications skills, gravitas and credibility.”

    “Digital communications is a destabilising force in a bureaucratic environment.”

    “38% of HDCs were in favour of a total ban on social media in the office.”

    Cornerstones for CEO communications

    • Consider all audiences – you can no longer speak to just one.
    • Think before you speak – consider the “New York Times Test” (never write down anything you would be uncomfortable seeing in tomorrow’s New York Times).
    • Consider content rather than tone – strip away any negative tones and focus on the issue.
    • Scope – decide early what’s in and out.
    • Know your influencers – who must be reached in a crisis.
    • Be honest, open and transparent.

    Credits

    This post is based almost entirely on the presentation that Rob Shimmin (@robshimmin) gave at the Dell B2B Social Media Huddle – the original deck is on Slideshare.

    Incidentally, I notice that, when Rob’s slides were uploaded to Slideshare, the title was changed to “Why CIOs don’t tweet” – that would be an entirely different discussion…

  • Windows 7, BitLocker, Ubuntu, and the case of the missing disk partitions

    Last Thursday was probably best described as “a bad IT day” – over the course of the day I “lost” the partition structure on my netbook’s hard disk, and then got it back again.  It all started because I wanted to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu – and, although I’ve still not managed to acheive that goal, I did learn a bit about recovering Windows along the way…

    Since last October, my netbook has been running Windows 7 Ultimate Edition with a BitLocker encrypted hard drive.  It’s been working well but I wanted to fire up an installation of Ubuntu from time to time, so I decided to see if I could dual-boot the two systems.  Clearly I wouldn’t be able to run Ubuntu from a partition that Windows had encrypted (I did briefly consider running Linux as a VM) but I was able to shrink the Windows partition in the Disk Management console and free up around 60GB of hard disk space, with a view to following Microsoft’s advice for dual booting Windows and Linux with BitLocker enabled (although my netbook does not have a TPM so I’m not sure if it would work for me).

    I tried to run the installer for Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition but it saw my disk as one chunk of unallocated space, with no existing operating systems installed.  As I knew there were two NTFS partitions there and I didn’t want to wipe them, I quit the installer and rebooted into Windows.

    It seemed logical that BitLocker was preventing Ubuntu from seeing the true state of the disk, so I first tried disabling BitLocker, and then removing it altogether (the difference between disabling and removing BitLocker is described on the Microsoft website).  Unfortunately that didn’t make any difference, as far as Ubuntu was concerned, the disk was entirely free for it to do as it liked.

    I checked in Windows and, as I thought, it was a basic disk (not dynamic), so I tried rewriting the master boot record (MBR) using the bootrec.exe utility with the /fixmbr switch (as described in Microsoft knowledge base article 927392).  That still didn’t help and, after crowdsourcing for advice I tried a number of utilities to take a look at the disk:

    • Acronis Disk Director Suite agreed with Windows – it saw that I had 64.42GB of unallocated space at the end of the disk, plus 2 primary NTFS partitions (100MB System Reserved and 84.53GB with Windows 7 on it).  It also confirms that the disk is an MBR type (0x0AA55).
    • Ubuntu’s disk utility also saw the NTFS partitions, but thought the disk was a GUID Partition Table (GPT) and complained when I tried to create an ext4 partition in the free space (the message included reference to “MS-DOS Magic” and said that the disk looked like a GPT disk with the remains of an MBR layout present).
    • Gnome Partition Editor (GPartEd), when run from the Ubuntu installer CD, thought the disk was 149.05GiB of unallocated space, but, when run from the GPartEd Live CD, it saw the NTFS partitions (as unformatted) and even allowed me to create an ext4 partition in the free space at the end of the disk.  Unfortunately that also prevented Windows from booting…

    At this point, I had no operating system at all, so I booted from a Windows 7 System Repair Disc I had created earlier (just in case).  I tried to repair my system but the message I got back said:

    “This version of System Recovery Options is not compatible with the version of Windows you are trying to repair.  Try using a recovery disc that is compatible with this version of Windows.”

    Not too many clues there then… only when I tried to reinstall Windows (thinking it might put the OS back and move the old installation to Windows.old or something similar) did Windows Setup give me a helpful message to tell me that the disk had a GPT layout and that it couldn’t be installed onto such a disk.  It turns out that was as a result of my efforts to create an ext4 partition in the free space at the end of the disk but, sure enough, when I booted into Windows PE and ran diskpart.exe, disk 0 was showing as type GPT.  Thankfully, diskpart.exe was also happy for me to run the convert mbr command (also described in Microsoft knowledge base article 282793), after which I could run a Startup Repair Recovery Tool from the System Repair Disc.  At the end of this, I restarted the netbook and Windows 7 came up as if nothing was wrong… phew!

    Incidentally, if Windows thinks the disk is not empty, it will not convert from GPT to MBR, so the trick is to use something like GPartEd to make a change (write a partition in the empty space and then remove it again), after which the convert mbr command will work.  I know this, because I borked the system again as I tried once more to see if either the Ubuntu Disk Utility or GPartEd would create the disk layout that I required.  They didn’t, and the Ubuntu installer still refused to recognise the existing NTFS partitions (Ubuntu’s dual-boot advice doesn’t really seem to explain why either).

    I’ve tried the alternative installer for Ubuntu Desktop too but that also sees the disk as one big 160GB lump of free space.  Unfortunately the Ubuntu installer for Windows (WUBI) won’t help as it installs Ubuntu side by side on the same partition as Windows and, critically for a portable device, does not support hibernation.  What I still don’t understand is why Linux utilities think the disk is a GPT disk, and Windows sees it as MBR… as William Hilsum tweeted to me, “[perhaps] Bitlocker does more at the disk level than [he] thought”.

  • Useful Links: May 2010

    A list of items I’ve come across recently that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:

  • So you think Social Media is a fad?

    One of the videos I saw presented at last Tuesday’s Dell B2B Social Media Huddle was Erik Qualman’s (@equalman) Social Media Revolution (refresh).  Set to the tune of Fat Boy Slim’s Right Here, Right Now, this video gives a whole load of statistics (the sources for which may be found on Erik’s Socialnomics Social Media Blog):

    For those who can’t see the video, here are the stats:

    • Is Social Media a Fad?
      Or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?
    • Welcome to the revolution
    • Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30 years old
    • 96% of Millennials have joined a social network
    • Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
    • Social Media has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the Web
    • 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. met via social media
    • Years to reach 50 million users:
      • Radio 38 years
      • TV 13 years
      • Internet 4 years
      • iPod 3 years
    • Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
    • iPod application downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months
    • “We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it.” – Erik Qualman
    • If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 3rd largest
      [behind China and India, ahead of the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh…]
      Yet QQ and Renren dominate China
    • US Department of Education study revealed that online students out performed those reciving face-to-face instruction…
    • 80% of companies use social media for recruitment
    • % of those using LinkedIn…95%
    • The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
    • Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway, [or] Panama.
    • 50% of mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook
      Imagine what this means for bad customer experiences
    • Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé
    • Some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
      Instead they are distributing eReaders, iPads, Tablets
    • What happens in Vegas stays on
      Facebook
      Twitter
      Renren
      Kohtakte
      Flickr
      YouTube
    • YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world
    • While you watch this [4′ 26″ video] 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
    • Wiki is an Hawaiian term = Quick
    • Wikipedia has over 15 million articles
      Studies show it’s as accurate as Encyclopaedia Britannica
      78% of those articles are non-English
      If you were paid $1 for every article posted on Wikipedia you would earn $1712.32 per hour
    • There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
    • Word of mouth [leads to] World of mouth
    • 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
    • 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands
    • Do you like what they are saying
      about your brand?
      You better…
    • People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
    • 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
    • Only 14% trust advertisements
    • Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
    • 90% of people skip ads via TiVo/DVR
    • Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas [2009]
    • 24 of the 25 Largest Newspapers are Experiencing Record Declines in Circulation
    • 60 million status updates happen on Facebook daily
    • We no longer search for the news, the news finds us…
    • We will no longer search for products and services
      they will find us via social media
    • Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
    • Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men
      Listening first, selling second
    • The ROI of Social Media is [that] Your Business Will Still Exist in 5 years
    • Still think social media is a fad?
    • Welcome to the World of Socialnomics
    • Are You Ready?

    The video is really an ad for Erik’s book (Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business) but those statistics are pretty compelling… so, do you still think Social Media is a fad?

    Me neither.

  • Sumvision Cyclone Micro: some advice for using this inexpensive media player

    Last week, Joe Baguley tweeted about a media player he had bought for his kids for just £18 (after discount).  The device in question is the Sumvision Cyclone Micro HD HDMI Upscaling Multimedia Player Adaptor and, as the name suggests, it’s a nifty little box to upscale standard definition/DVD video to high definition (HD).  It works just as well for those who don’t have an HD television as it comes with a composite cable to hook up to most TVs (including my aging Sony Trinitrons).  Basically, this tiny box of tricks takes a memory card or USB 2.0 input and provides HDMI 1.3 or composite A/V output, for not very much money at all.

    Unfortunately, many of the forums/online retail sites that review the product are full of people saying “it doesn’t work”! I spent some time working on some of the issues that people were having and thought I’d post the results here in the hope that it’s useful to others.

    What’s in the box?

    Unfortunately many of the questions I saw on certain forums were asking (repeatedly), “does it come with…” so, just to make it clear, this is what you get in the box:

    • Media player.
    • DC power supply (5V, 2A).
    • Remote control.
    • Composite out cable.
    • Mini-CD with instructions.

    There is no HDMI cable, and European users may need a composite to SCART converter (which should cost no more than a couple of quid at your local electronics store).

    Remote control issues

    The remote control looks cheap (it is!) and has blue text on black background making it difficult to read.  In addition, the buttons may be difficult to press but it’s functional.  Some people are complaining of interference with their TV functions – I didn’t experience that but I guess it depends what TV you have.  Remember this unit only costs around £20 and you get what you pay for!

    If you don’t want to use the remote control that comes with the Cyclone Micro, there are reports that it will work with a Logitech Harmony One.

    Unable to access external hard drive

    This issue seems to be pretty common and is probably one of two things:

    • Disk (partition) format: according to Sumvision, the Cyclone Micro can read USB devices with a FAT, FAT32 or NTFS file system, or MS, MMC, SD or SDHC cards with FAT or FAT32.  Note that does not include ExFAT, or any Linux/Unix file systems. I’ve used an 8GB Sandisk Extreme III SDHC card (straight from my wife’s Nikon D40) to view pictures (in .JPG format) on the Cyclone Micro, as well as a FAT32-formatted USB thumb drive and an NTFS-formatted external hard drive with a variety of media types.
    • Power: If your hard drive won’t work with the Cyclone Micro, it’s probably down to the power it needs.  Some drives need more power than others. Sometimes they are supplied with a Y-split USB cable and, as the Cyclone Micro only has a single USB port, that won’t allow enough power to be provided.  If your device works off a single USB port, or has its own power supply, it should be OK.  I used a Freecom ToughDrive 120GB with no issues.

    Unable to play .AVI files from compact cameras

    I have a Canon Ixus 70 and, like many compact digital cameras, it can record video.  The resulting files are 640×480 @30fps, in a .AVI container format and GSpot informed me that they use the Motion JPEG codec.

    Although the files show up in the menu on the Cyclone Micro, any attempt to play them results in an unsupported format error message.  Converting the files to Xvid format (e.g. using WinFF, with default settings), resulted in a .AVI file that could be read and played by the Cyclone Micro. [Credit: I got the idea of using WinFF from Jake Ludington’s post on converting AVI to iPod-compatible MP4]

    Unable to play MP4 files

    I’m still not entirely happy I have found the final answer to this but, according to Sumvision, the Cyclone Micro can play MPEG1/2/4 (.MPG, .VOB or .AVI), DivX (.AVI), or Xvid (.AVI), as well as ISO files using these formats.

    Certainly none of the MPEG4 files I produced worked (they were not even displayed in the menu on my Cyclone Micro, which is running firmware version 3.3) but programs like WinFF or Handbrake should help here (indeed, in testing, I successfully converted an H.264 .MP4 file to .AVI using WinFF).

    Alternatively, ripping DVDs to .ISOs is faster than transcoding them, and it seems to work a treat.  Windows users could probably use something like Lucersoft ISO Creator (or any number of tools) but I followed Slash Dot Dash’s advice to create a .ISO CD/DVD image on a Mac:

    1. Insert media.
    2. Type drutil status to get the device name for the DVD drive.
    3. Unmount the media using diskutil unmountdisk devicename (e.g. diskutil unmountdisk /dev/disk1).
    4. Create a .ISO using dd if=devicename of=filename.iso bs=2048 (e.g. dd if=/dev/disk1 of=myvideo.iso bs=2048).
    5. Sit back and wait for a while (you should be able to hear the DVD spinning so you’ll know its working).
    6. Test the image by mounting it with hdid filename.iso (or opening it in Finder).
    7. Eject media and (optionally) burn the .ISO or, in this case, copy it to a device that can be read by the Cyclone Micro.

    The resulting .ISO file should play on the Sumvision Cyclone Micro. Just to be clear, I’m not condoning making copies of copyrighted material (although it may be legal to make backup copies for personal use in certain jurisdictions, sadly not in the UK though) – I’m assuming the DVDs that you want to copy are home movies, etc.

    Summary

    This post covers some of the more common issues that might be experienced when working with the Sumvision Cyclone Micro.  Whilst it’s not without its faults (H.264 and Motion JPEG support would be a huge step forward), I guess issues like the ones described in this post should be expected with such an inexpensive device. If I find any more tips and tricks, I’ll post them on this blog.

    Further reading

    The following resources may be useful for additional technical information:

  • Configuring a Cisco IP phone for VoIP using SIP – revisited

    Cisco logoA couple of years ago, I blogged about getting my Cisco 7940G IP Phone working with SIP firmware and an external VoIP provider (in my case, it was Sipgate).  I also wanted to get a couple more Cisco IP Phones working – the Cisco IP Communicator softphone and a 7911G for my wife’s business but, unlike the 7940 and 7960, these phones use a different configuration file format – an XML file that I’d never managed to get working properly.

    Now, with the help of Garry Martin, I’ve got the 7911G working.  Hopefully the IP Communicator will follow soon but, for now, this post describes the steps I needed to take.

    Installing the SIP firmware

    Just as with the 7940, I needed to load the firmware using a TFTP server – in my case it was a simple case of adding a few extra files to the existing server – I used v8.5.4 of Cisco’s SIP firmware for the 7911 and, once the phone located the server and found the term11.default.loads file, it pulled down the remaining firmware images and updated itself.

    Next up, I created two configuration files: XMLDefault.cnf.xml (note the case); and SEPmacaddress.cnf.xml.  Just as for the 7940’s SIPDefault.cnf and SIPmacaddress.cnf, these configuration files provide default and device-specific settings respectively.

    The TFTP logs show the phone attempting to load some other files too (CTLSEPmacaddress.tlv, English_United_Kingdom\tc-sip.jar and English_United_Kingdom\g3-tones.xml) but the fact they don’t exist doesn’t seem to matter.

    The last file that the phone downloads is dialplan.xml.

    SIP Providers

    I mentioned that, with my 7940G, I connect directly to Sipgate and I initially tried to do the same thing with the 7911G but it doesn’t work.  This is where Garry helped me out – he’s already been through this with a 7965G – and he found that the newer Cisco IP phones will attempt to register using a high port number but expect a response on the configured VoIP Control Port. To make this work, they append the rport parameter on the VIA headers in SIP registration.  This is RFC compliant but doesn’t take into account the symmetric network address translation (NAT) workarounds that some providers have in place to maximise device support.

    In Garry’s testing with a few different providers, he found the SIP Proxy Voxalot had a Web UI option for Symmetric NAT enable/disable that allowed his 7965G to succesfully register, and both SIP Providers VoIPtalk and Orbtalk worked without modification. However Sipgate (like me, his main SIP provider) failed consistently.

    The workaround we used was to use another SIP Proxy (Sipsorcery) to act as a broker between SIP providers (although, in my case I only use one provider). Working with Aaron (Sipsorcery creator and admin), two changes were put in place. The first was for Aaron to remove the troublesome rport parameter in the top VIA header for phones registering against Sipsorcery with a specific UserAgent. In Garry’s case the UserAgent string was “Cisco-CP7965G/8.5.3”, and in mine “Cisco-CP7911G/8.5.3”. The second change was to apply a dialplan on our accounts that modifies the bindings for SIP responses that use high port numbers.  My dialplan is called incoming and it contains the following Ruby code:

    bindingURI = sys.GetBindings()[0].ContactSIPURI
    bindingURI.Host = bindingURI.ToSIPEndPoint().SocketEndPoint.Address.ToString() + “:5060”
    sys.Dial(bindingURI.ToString())

    Once I’d made sure that my SIP account had appropriate incoming and outgoing dialplans, my registration authentication failures went away – for reference, the outgoing dialplan that I use contains:

    sys.Trace = true
    sys.Dial(“sipgate”)

    Where sipgate is the name of the SIP Provider that I have registered on Sipsorcery.

    A few more things to know

    Unlike my 7940G, the 7911G configuration needed to know about my external IP address for NAT purposes.  Without the <natAddress> parameter I could call out, but the phone didn’t ring for inbound calls and so I didn’t answer, meaning that callers were redirected to my Sipgate voicemail.

    At this point, my configuration should have been working but there were still some issues. Rather than embarrassing myself by pointing out my stupid firewall (mis)configuration issues, I’ll highlight some key facts:

    The control ports that are needed for SIP communications are:

    • SIP: TCP and UDP 5060.
    • SIP-TLS: UDP 5061.

    Some more ports are needed for the actual communications – these are called media ports (RTP/RTCP) and are configurable in the phone configuration files but both TCP and UDP ports are required, generally for Cisco products in the range 16384 to 32766.  Two ports are required for each media stream – an even numbered port for RTP and the next higher odd numbered port for RTCP. So on a 2-line Cisco phone, you need 4 ports (say 16384-16387), and on a 6-line phone, you need 12 ports (say 16388-99).

    If you use multiple phones, you’ll need to think about assigning different port numbers (e.g. 5062/3 for SIP) and using IP address reservations with appropriate IP filters set on your firewall.  I haven’t done this yet – it could be the subject of a future post as I still need to get the 7940G and the 7911G working in tandem, once I’ve sorted out a second power supply, or some Power over Ethernet (PoE) for the handsets.

    Remember that, just because you have selected a certain range for media on a given device, doesn’t mean that the remote party will use the same range so only set the destination port numbers in your inbound firewall rules, not the source port numbers (i.e. allow responses from any source port to be passed through to the appropriate destination media ports).

    Finally, some tools that may help (if you don’t have a good friend who’s already gone through this, like I did!):

    • Wireshark is great for seeing what the SIP/RTP conversations look like (e.g. SIP authorisation issues, one-way conversation streams, etc.).
    • Sipsorcery has its own console and, not only can the event * filter be used to trace proxy activities and interactions but event full gives an extremely verbose log.