The Personal Via Dolorosa of Technology Adoption

It’s always the same, this via dolorosa of technology adoption. The long arduous wait for the idea to take hold, what seems obvious to become commonly accepted, and always the journey: never ending and the weight of our wants unbearable. With every new step we delude ourselves and assume the end is nigh but the path is long, rarely a sound of success, mostly modulations of optimism and pessimism.

It takes fifteen years for a research idea to get to the main stream, a department head at Bell labs once remarked. I hope he is wrong, at least this one time. Elisha Grey, who had been working on the telephone contemporaneously with Bell, gave up on the idea, unconvinced about the public adoption of the technology. He was surer of the prospects of the business telegraph, a hope now consigned to the recrements of history. And it was left to Strowger, trying to save his dying mortician’s business (always the puns keep coming!), to invent what is essentially the quintessential user interface of telephony, the telephone number dialing system. It took a long time for the investments to go in for the infrastructure to support Strowger switches.

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the initial team at Google benefited from advice from an anonymous source, to keep the search engine user interface as simple as possible, to less than a dozen or so words on the first page. Strowger’s invention, on the other hand, replaced a simpler user interface (voice commands to a human operator) with a more complex interface (remembering and dialing sequences of numbers). No, it wasn’t ease of use that “made” this invention of Strowger; it was the fact that consumers could reach anybody in the world when they wanted. The scalability of the network was achieved.

The age of the telephone numbering system has come to an end. No one can remember phone numbers anymore. There are far too many of them. It was easier when one had two friends with telephones, a family number, and numbers of a few business colleagues. In the age of Facebook and Twitter, this is an impossibility. It not only beggars ease of use, it is also not scalable in the multiple of networks we all use today.

The technology to solve this issue has been available for some time now. It provides a network intelligence that provides user’s presence, availability, status and capabilities to people and devices. This information resides in the network’s ether and can be manipulated by people and/or devices. If we need to reach a person it will not be necessary any longer to troll multiple chat networks to find them online, or sift through Facebook status notifications to ascertain their mood or availability for a friendly chat. Rather, our device will show, in our contact list, this information gleaned from the network ether, and when we send an inquiry, then, seamlessly and obtrusively deliver it to wherever and on whatever device they happen to be using. Mr. Watson! Come here, Bell is supposed to have barked into his telephone, I need you! We can go back to the days of asking for whom we want to converse with, leaving the “reachability” problem to the network.

The technological underpinnings for constructing and deploying an ether are available and I am hopeful that the technology will bear fruit and not be desiccated.

Minsky once famously remarked that all business will be show business. Perhaps so, but it seems that before that, network business will be the business of auto-attendants, mediating our every act of communication.

Of User Interfaces and Media Sharing

In 1891 A. B. Strowger changed the history of the telephone system by inventing the Strowger Automatic Exchange, a switch that allowed callers to dial the number of the called party instead of asking an operator to connect the call. In my opinion nothing as revolutionary has been done to the simple old telephone call; supplementary features such as call waiting, call forwarding and voice mail, to Webb's patent on toll-free calls, nothing comes close. One reason for my view is that it introduced the world to a most powerful, easy and intuitive user interface. It is said that a large part of Google's success in the search engine business is due to its extremely sparse and simple search engine user interface. Obviously, a lot of technology goes into the search engine hidden behind all the simoplicity of the user interface. The telephone pad of the phone is the classical example of a simple user interface. Nobody on this planet needs to be taught how to use a telephone to make a voice call.

I like inventions that do not disturb the user interface of a voice call. I was part of a team that invented Voice over IP (VoIP) backhaul technology (Class 4 switching) at Bell Labs in the 1990s. That invention did not disturb the dialpad user interface. In Video Sharing, we have another invention that also does not disturb this user iterface. It allows a caller to initiate a voice call to a called party and, during the call, have the option to add multimedia objects (live video, images, photographs, music, stored video, etc) to the ongoing voice call. It allows an enrichment of the voice call. The underlying nature of this new service is fundamentally different from video telephony, in which the aim is for the caller and called party to see each other. In the new service the goal is for the caller and the called party to share the same object, to share an experience that enhances the information content of the voice call. The shared experience may involve an event taking place external but concurrently to the ongoing voice call (e.g., a child's first tentative walk), it could be an image captured moments ago and being shown to a friend and discussed, or an object that was downloaded earlier but has cropped up in the conversation, or an object that was viewed earlier that can be accessed online and shared while on the call.

Many people when they first hear of this invention classify it as User Generated Content. However it really is not about content as much as it is about enhancing a phone call, making it richer. It is much more an enrichment of the voice and an increase in the information content of the transaction that is the main goal of the voice call. In an ever-changing and rapidly dynamic world, a world in which we live now, sometimes a voice call just does not have the information carrying capacity we need to convey the message. And converting a voice call to a broadcast to one's social network could be priceless. This is the raison d'etre of mobile telephony based share services.

IMPROVING THE TAKE RATE OF REAL TIME SHARE SERVICES

We take many things on faith, or belief, or just because we have been told that it has been so for a long time. Or perhaps we were exposed to it when we were all young. Everyone who has attended school learns the arithmetical fact that "minus times minus is plus." And yet extremely few people know the reasoning behind this rule. Why do we think it is true? I have asked high school mathematics tutors and they suddenly discover they are late for an appointment. W. H. Auden even wrote a couplet that goes:

Minus times minus is plus
The reasons for this we need not discuss

What does this have to do with Video Share, the new wireless service being offered by certain mobile carriers, you ask? Just that everyone who first hears of this service assumes that it will catch on like fire. That it will be the next new "hot" thing. And yet the few times that it has actually been offered to the public, the take rates have been less than impressive. The only shorter lines in town have been of people who have refused bailout funds.

Those of you who know this service will recall that it enables a telephone caller to add one-way video to an ongoing call using the builtin camera in the handset. The party receiving the call then sees ("See What I See" was the original name of the service) what the other party is showing on their handset display screen. So the voice conversation can be annotated with a live video feed. And, as I said above, everyone who first hears about this service thinks that it will be more popular than Obama in a certain village in Kenya. And yet, no one seems to know why the public isn't clamoring for the service.

The simple answer is that the architectures being used to deploy Video Share inhibit call completion in many situations. The conditions under which a normal telephone call can be up-converted to a video share call are just too onerous as the service is being rolled out today. The caller and receiving party both need to be in 3G UMTS coverage, both need to be subscribers of the service with the same carrier, both need to have compatible handsets loaded with the proper clients. The number of subscribers represented by these conjunctive intersections is very small in any new launch. Consequently, after a subscriber has tried it and failed a few times, they never try again.

To put it in somewaht different terms, the current Video Share architectures seem to be ignorant of Metcalfe's Law, viz., that the value of a network increases super-linearly (let us not debate whether it is O(n^2) or O(log n)) with compatible end points.

The way around this problem is equally simple. The number of opportunities to up-convert a voice call need to be increased. And this can be done by adding a server into the call that allows most up-conversion attempts to succeed. If the receiving party is not in coverage, or does not have appropriate UMTS coverage, or incompatible handset then the server acts as a proxy for the receiving handset and stores the video feed, making it available to the receiver (and any other authorized subscriber) at a later time, or immediately via a PC interface. The video feed can be directed to an IP-enabled TV or display screen in close proximity to the receiver. Thus, not only more up-conversion attempts will succeed, receivers who are not subscribed to the service will be tempted to do so in a viral manner. Various organizations including GSM Association and RCS (Rich Communication Services) have recognized this reality and are looking to incorporate a server-based architecture for share services.

The other obvious advantage of this proposal would be that the server would allow inter-connections between the calling mobile and social friends of the caller on social networking sites, thus increasing the number of compatible endpoints even more.

Real time, peer to peer implementations of share services will suffer from coverage and handset compatibility problems. The take rate of these services can be increased by adding a server to the call model.

This brings me back to the connection with "minus times minus is plus." This rule in inextricably linked with the law of distributivity of multiplication. You can not have one or the other. Both provide support and bolster each other. And that, gentle reader, was the point with share services and their relationship to application servers.