Thursday, September 17, 2009

Bluetooff

So whatever happened to this technology..?

A wizard idea, one I first heard discussed by an eccentric Russian we had hired to work in the device lab at Razorfish. We met one summer day at the Lafayette street offices, downstairs in the lab. He explained the coming role and importance that Personal Area Networks would play in the immediate future. PAN's, (not LAN's) for the people.

In one sense he was right on the money. PAN's have indeed become something to be factored into technology strategy in Mobile computing and more recently, consumer products as Bluetooth connectivity shows up in all sorts of white goods nowadays but, the actual implementation of Bluetooth seems to be just as random as it ever was.

My own experiences are one measure of this. I still struggle to get my laptop talking to my Blackberry (as I type this I am instead tethered by a wire) though a different laptop manages it seamlessly. I have yet to manage a file transfer between two Bluetooth devices and yet they all say they support it.

Devices once paired often seem to unpair and can only be reconnected by going through the pairing process all over again with it's seemingly long pauses between recognition and authentication. There is really no reason why exchanging keys between two devices at megabit speeds should take upwards of a minute.

And on that topic, just what is the data transfer rate between Bluetooth devices anyway..? It depends on which version you are using and a summary of versions and features follows courtesy of Wkipedia (usually 98% correct) and the full story is linked:

We will start at version 2.0 as it is already out of date and prior versions seem to have been too flawed for use.

Bluetooth 2.0

This version of the Bluetooth specification was released on November 10, 2004.

It is backward compatible with the previous version 1.2.

The main difference is the introduction of an Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) for faster data transfer. The nominal rate of EDR is about 3 megabits per second, although the practical data transfer rate is 2.1 megabits per second.

According to the 2.0 specification, EDR provides the following benefits:

Three times the transmission speed — up to 10 times (2.1 Mbit/s) in some cases.

Reduced complexity of multiple simultaneous connections due to additional bandwidth.

Lower power consumption through a reduced duty cycle.

Bluetooth 2.1
Bluetooth Core Specification Version 2.1 is fully backward compatible with 1.2, and was adopted by the Bluetooth SIG on July 26, 2007. It would appear to be the version most devices are now equipped with.

Provides more information during the inquiry procedure to allow better filtering of devices before connection.
Reduces the power consumption when devices are in the sniff low-power mode. Human interface devices (HID) are expected to benefit the most, with mouse and keyboard devices increasing their battery life by a factor of 3 to 10.

Secure simple pairing (SSP)
Radically improves the pairing experience for Bluetooth devices, while increasing the use and strength of security.

Near field communication (NFC) cooperation
Automatic creation of secure Bluetooth connections when NFC radio interface is also available. This functionality is part of SSP where NFC is one way of exchanging pairing information. For example, a headset should be paired with a Bluetooth 2.1 phone including NFC just by bringing the two devices close to each other (a few centimeters). Another example is automatic uploading of photos from a mobile phone or camera to a digital picture frame just by bringing the phone or camera close to the frame.

Bluetooth 3.0
The 3.0 specification was adopted by the Bluetooth SIG on April 21, 2009.

Its main new feature is AMP (Alternate MAC/PHY), the addition of 802.11 as a high speed transport.

Bluetooth low energy

On April 20, 2009, Bluetooth SIG presented the new Bluetooth low energy as an entirely additional protocol stack, compatible with other existing Bluetooth protocol stacks. The preceding naming as Wibree and Bluetooth ULP (Ultra Low Power) has been outdated by the final naming as Bluetooth low energy.

Expected use cases include watches displaying Caller ID information, sports sensors monitoring the wearer's heart rate during exercise, and medical devices.

The Medical Devices Working Group is also creating a medical devices profile and associated protocols to enable this market. Bluetooth low energy technology is designed for devices to have a battery life of up to one year.

Let me say that when it works it is nothing short of magical. Playing music from the laptop to the $100 stereo unit in my living room via Bluetooth or letting the kids play music from the new iPod in their pocket is a simple but totally perfect example of how this technology can fill all sorts of gaps currently handled by wires and random sorts of connectors.

The advent of a version to operate at the really tiny power consumption level as mentioned above is very exciting and I can only just imagine how this might impact the medical industry. Think of the opportunities to instantly communicate details of patient data between devices or initiate communications between complex monitoring equipment and the Dr's PDA for an instant update of activity.

Much has been said of the security risks that accompany the opportunity but I think with WiFi ubiquitous we already know this path and what to to do. Most all WiFi networks are pretty well-secured now when needed and between WEP keys and MAC address filtering, not too many holes exist there any more.

The opportunities for this technology are huge....why isn't it working..?

Friday, September 11, 2009

Roots and Shoots and the KM Stumbling Point

Great session of the IKMU yesterday at UNICEF, congratulations to all who put it together, it was a terrific education for me.

I was lucky enough to share a table with representatives from the Health group, the Emergency supply group, from Water and sanitation and Gender rights. It was quite an eye-opener after corporate law and business consulting.

We spent time delving into what these groups use in order to create, diseminate and use Knowledge more effectively and of course, what the challenges are to the above.

A theme that resounded for me was the disparate and decentralized nature of the resources available, the lack of clarity about what and who the resources were and, how to find this information when it was really needed and, as I am learning at UNICEF, when things are really needed, they really are needed.

So my take-away was that, like many other organizations (law firms too) KM has taken root as a bottom up activity with very little profile on the top down radar.

This is a great way to get things going but at a certain point it always stumbles.

You know this point has been reached when the lack of KM responsibilities in people's formal job titles, lack of prescription or formal support in the use of tools and the ongoing lack of funds to do more than simply build a web site staffed by volunteers, become a barrier to the organization doing anything more than KM by Silo.

UNICEF has a recently declared mandate of ten strategic goals, one of which includes investment in Knowledge Mangement and so it seems reasonable to suppose that there is now the top down will to move beyond the stumbling point.

Time will tell.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Office 2007....?

So whats up with Office 2007..?

I have been using it for a year now and my productivity has slowly crept back up to perhaps 60% of what it was with Office 2003.

This is a catastrophic release of any new product. The decision to redesign the interface was almost on a par with the astonishing error of releasing Vista...two zingers in a year...way to go Mr Softee.

I am no longer ranting about this but I have spread the word to as many people as I can: IT folks at big corporations, KM folks in big law firms, friends, family and neighbors.

Why? Because I am hopeful that if enough people simply refuse to upgrade and wait for the next release instead, the next release will restore some semblance of the old interface so we can all get back to work

While Redmond may like to tell us they have boosted productivity with this smart looking redesign, they are all wrong all the way. The whiz kids who did the usability research forgot the simple fact that Word is now a Legacy product (capital "L") and so all changes MUST be retroactively compatible.

There are over 100 million people out there using MS Word daily. Most of us learned it the hard way when we were forced to migrate from Wordperfect etc. We mastered the Word clunky interface and found all the useful but buried commands, eventually learning how to get to them with closed eyes and great speed.

Now in 2007, none of that works anymore.

Simple tasks can take agonizing minutes of searching. You can be trained all over again but the speed is lost....may never come back.

I might just switch to something else altogether.