Cisco umi, is just such a product.

What is umi?   umi is John Chamber’s delusional Telepresence vision for the consumer.

High Definition telepresence for the consumer, yep you read that right.  Video conference on your HD TV.  With tilt/pan/zoom support and it can even record it for you so you can play back those awkward family teleconferencing moments at a later date.

But wait, that’s cool? What’s dumb about it?   What’s dumb is that it’s $599 for the unit.  While that doesn’t seem all that bad, when you consider I paid less than that for most of my Hi-Def TV’s that’s kind of pricy.

For starters, it’s a consumer product, and Cisco Sucks at anything with a user interface that isn’t command line so expect this to be hard to use.

Second, you will need two of them, so that’s $1200.

For that money, I’d send my parents at the other end a PS3 and a PS3 Eye camera, total cost:  $350.   Then they’d have a blueray player and decent video game system. 

Best of all, NO SUBSCRIPTION fees.

that’s right, Cisco charges you $24.99 a month (1 year contract), or if you’re smart you’d opt for the annual plan for a whopping 9% savings at $274.99 Annually.

I don’t understand what you get for that?  A directory service so you can find your parents/grandparents on the other end?

So you’re looking at $599 x2 and $274.99 x2 for this?  That’s a lot of jack.

Also listed in the things you ‘Need’ are:

- TV with HDMI, while most people have that, I suspect none of my parents or grandparents do (yet), and I have little desire to telepresence with anyone else at this stage.

- Broadband, and a good one, with at least 1.5mb up.   That’s more rare than you might think and that’s just for 720p calls.  1080 requires 3.5mb UP.

Video is what it is, but I know few folks with that kind of reliable up-stream bandwidth.

Given that now FaceTime is free on all apple products and the plethora of other options out there, while they aren’t true HD are far more than adequate.

This is dumb Cisco, very very dumb.

It’s in your best interest to make sure the ‘try’ part works.

We’re re-evaluating centralized Anti-virus and would really like to evaluate AVG’s Network offerings, but it’s proving to be harder than it should be.

We’ve used Trend for the past couple years and it’s been OK.  Recently we’ve had a few things get by Trend and AVG Free has picked it up and dealt with it.  So we’re anxious to give it a look.

We’re Dell fans, especially latitude fans.  Super stable hardware.  We recently did a technology upgrade in our department and switched from the D-Series Latitudes to the e-Series.   We have a handful of e6500′s, a few 6400′s and a couple e4300′s.

For the most part this 1st generation of laptops has gone well.  Not perfect, but pretty good.  The e64/6500′s have seen a few BIOS upgrades that have worked out most of the issues.   The fingerprint reader/software combination (Dell Control Point) is still crap though.  Very unreliable.  Especially when compared the Wave fingerprint software that came bundled with an XPS that I own.

Outside of that they have been pretty good.

The e4300, not so much.

This little laptop is super sweet.  Nice small, fast, good battery life.  But we’re experiencing some hard hangs/freezes.   We’ve tried multiple flavors of OS’s, multiple driver combinations, all with little success.   We’ve also replaced the motherboard in one unit.  The problem persists.

I realize these are relatively new, but it amazes us that a google search for this issue returns nada.  Both laptops behave the same, random hard lock-ups.

It seems sleep/video/audio related, and no we can’t make it happen but it’s enough to send them back for the time being.

We’re working with our Dell rep and hopefully someone from the Brand Team to get to a resolution.  We really want them to work and be stable.  There isn’t another laptop out there that $ for $, feature for feature meets the need.

So if you’ve experienced similar issues I’m interested in hearing from you.

Post a comment and we’ll get in touch.

UPDATE

On Friday the 19th I had a conversation with a Latitude Brand  Manager.  He assured me that this problem is well known, especially with e4300′s running Vista.  A BIOS updated to address this specific freezing issue is in the works and slated to be released on the 29th.

We’re going to hang tight until then.   If this is known inside Dell, and being worked on.  The fact that none fo the Tier 2/Tier 3 Support people had any clue is somewhat bothersome.   We’ll report back if the fix does what it’s supposed to.

One needs only to look at the economic crisis on Wall Street, banking, big business, retail and the automotive industry.  All of these industries are filled with MBA’s and folks who should know what they are doing.  They are supposed to be smart, right?

• I know a person with a Masters in Computer Science who also holds an MBA and that literally couldn’t change a toner cartridge in a printer without help.
  (Yes I know they can be complicated, but damn, the instructions are pretty clear on the bag that the toner comes in).

The item that really got my goat today can be found here in the article written on November 28th entitled "You Can Support Headcount and Share of Voice on a Tight Budget" by one; "Alan See", Marketing Genius and MBA.

In this ~750 word article, the marketing genius would try to convince you that during these tough economic times you can "Do more with less" and by doing so you can still build sales leads and retain head count.

On the surface the article looks pretty good.  No, it’s not real deep, not a lot of marketing material is deep.

But the reality is this article spins and skews what went down during this "engagement" in a way that is almost criminal.

"the company increased qualified leads by 7 percent while cutting the budget by 24 percent. The decrease in spending was not the result of reducing headcount. During the campaign, the sales force set three consecutive monthly sales records, as well as three consecutive quarterly sales records."

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? 

Who wouldn’t want to hire a guy who could increase your sales leads 7%, set sales records, cut your budget and allow you to retain staff during these tough economical times?  Oh, and while he’s at it, single handedly increase your "share of voice".

So that’s the spun version of what happened at this "engagement", and as you know there’s almost always two sides to every story.

I’ll try to keep this simple so those with MBA’s can keep up.

Suppose you run a lemonade stand.

Your basic costs include: Water, Ice, Lemons and cups. 

Your primary method for advertising includes:

• Word of mouth (Brand X, our lemonade is delicious)
• Print advertising (Direct, local market advertising, perhaps leveraging coupons to reach your market).
• Direct Customer marketing, via email or snail mail.  (Hey Joe, you’ve enjoyed our Lemon aide in the past, you should try our new pink Lemon Aid)

You’re trying to grow your business so you hire engage a marketing genius.

This new guy has lots of great ideas for focusing your marketing. 

• Fewer Tasters, More Buyers (Marketing term: higher quality leads)
  Specifically he wants to reduce the number of ‘shoppers or tasters’ so that you use fewer resources sampling your products (cost savings). 
  (Bear in mind that tasters and samplers aren’t a burden, and history has clearly shown that the more people you have tasting your product the more people buy)
• Stop/Slow Direct Marketing (decrease the spend, save the headcount)
  Stop doing what you’re good at.  Stop that local or direct marketing that has worked so well in the past.  Stop inviting new and current customers to taste your new flavors, that might waste your time.
• Use Smoke and Mirrors (Marketing term: proclaim yourself thought leaders)
  Instead of spending your hard earned marketing dollars to generate leads (tasters of your product).  Spend it on a thought leadership piece, to educate the market on organic lemon farming, water filtration.  The things that help to make good lemonade.  Nothing directly related to your specific product, just over-all feel good, brand awareness marketing. 
• Get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon (Marketing term: leverage social networks)
  The value proposition here is still debatable.  This too is feel-good marketing.  Being where your customers expect to see you.  Nothing wrong with this just, but be mindful of the time you spend doing it and the ripples that come from it.

There is nothing wrong with thought leadership marketing.  It’s generally a good thing.  But it’s the type of marketing you do "in addition to" what has made you successful in the past, not "instead of".

The problem comes in when you cut your marketing spending on your bread and butter marketing and focus all your internal resources on the other.

What you don’t read about in Mr. See’s article is the flat spin he put the company in by neglecting the bread and butter marketing that the company lives on.

Three months of consecutive sales records?  That’s a true statement that had absolutely nothing to do with his efforts to ‘reduce the spend and save the head count’.  
It’s completely unrelated. 

Did any of his work pay off?  Yes, in some ways it did.

It is true that the thought leadership piece did drive a few highly qualified prospects our way.  A few prospects closer to buying without wasting a lot of time tasting.  If we calculate the true cost of those leads, the cost would be considered astronomical.

In the process of this engagement we all learned a very valuable lesson.

Do what you’re good at, and do it well. Ignore the obvious and it will eventually catch up to you.

Thankfully I don’t have to use one.  But I did get to play with one at a Christmas gathering last weekend.

It was pathetically slow, slow switching applications, slow changing from portrait to landscape.

The clickable front, button simulator, was a nice touch.  But the Pearl like keyboard in vertical mode is horrible.

I hope Blackberry can fix these issues.   It will not replace my 8830, or my iPhone which is still a sub-par enterprise device.

So basically, everything you’ve read on the Internet is true.  This phone sure is pretty but its poorly executed.

Well lo and behold…  The kids got talent.

I just learned that a fellow co-worker is also a cartoonist.

Check it out over at WeakCity.com, some are actually funny.

http://www.weakcity.com/

Tableau…

A product manager pointed out this product when I was showing her our new MS Analytics (olap) implementation a couple weeks ago.

They have some great examples on their site of just how powerful this product is.  http://www.tableausoftware.com/learning/examples

It is spendy, $1500 per named license + maintenance.

It’s primarily designed to go against Excel or table data, but it works with olap cubes as well, or at least somewhat.  Just enough to get you excited then you find out there’s a number of things you can’t do.  Hopefully this will be enhanced in a future version.

It works outstandingly well if your data is nice and pretty.  Normalized well.  Of course all of the sample data falls into that category.   It also works well against SQL, gain if your joins are easy to do.  It would be nice if they had a visual tool for creating joins.

Even so, I highly recommend it.

We have approximately 12 Blackberries from various carriers using our Blackberry Enterprise server.

About once a month one of them will just stop working.  Typically this is usually a device over seas or a device that one of our guys who travels over seas uses.  He’ll make a call to his provider (T-Mobile) to change his plan to something over seas and the break his data package nearly every time.

The conversation usually goes like this:

Salesperson: Is BES working?  I haven’t gotten email in a couple days.
Us: Yes, all 11 other phones are currently working and show activity as recent as a minute ago.  What did you do?
Salesperson: I called (T-Mobile) and asked them to change my plan for international use.
Us: call them back and have then fix your stuff.

Today was special though.  Another user who’s carrier is Cincinnati Bell (ATT under the covers regardless of what the tech support m0m0 tells you) called.

User: I messed up my Blackberry, can you re-activate me?
Us: What did you do?
User: I installed Blackberry desktop manager at home to sync my contacts at home too.
Us: That’s a bad idea, wipe the device and reactivate your password is xxxx.

A few hours later:

User: It won’t activate.
Us: After poking around on the BES server we can’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work.    Let’s call your carrier.

Placing call to carrier…

Tech Support:  How may we help you?
Us: A user jacked up his Blackberry and we’re trying to figure out why it won’t re-activate.  Can you look and see if there have been any changes?
Tech Support:  Why yes, I see we changed your account 48 hours ago.  The BES plan is now $20 more than the Consumer plan so we changed you to the consumer plan.
Us: WTF?  So when were you going to let us know this happened?
Tech Support:  I don’t know if they are going to send a letter out or not.
Us:  So 6 months ago we purchased the phone and told you we were going to use it with BES and you sold me a $30 unlimited plan.  Who made the decision to simply disconnect us from our company server?  Who there thought, Oh, this user doesn’t need the corporate package?  Let’s just cut them off at the knees.
Tech Support:  Let me transfer you to someone that can help.
Tech Support 2:  So I understand you’re unhappy about the price change?
Us: No, what I’m unhappy about is that you just broke my connectivity to my employer without warning.  That you made me look stupid to IT because I thought I may have jacked up my phone, or that their stuff was broken.   What I’m upset about is that I’ve spent quite a few hours figuring out how I might have done this, and IT has spent time looking into a problem that isn’t theirs.
Tech Support 2:  I understand, I can reactivate your corporate package, and offer you a $20 credit for 6 months will that help? 
Us: Yes that will help.

The price increase doesn’t bother me, most corporate data plans are around $50 a month.  What bothers me is that these fine folks couldn’t plan ahead 30 days and warn the user that the cost will go up unless they choose otherwise.   Instead they decided for this user that they no longer wanted/needed the package and defaulted him to a package that for the same cost did absolutely nothing for them.

Thanks, Cincinnati Bell Wireless.

What’s a Linked In Whore?  Where do I find one?   Are they cheap?  Just what will they do for money or a connection?

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past couple years.  Linked In was one of the first online contact managers/social networks.  Probably not the first, but certainly one of the better, and one of the first to embrace Web 2.0 stuff.   So it’s kind of like FaceBook Lite, without all the touchy feely “Come be my friend stuff” and about 11 million times more professional than MySpace.

It’s supposed to be more professional, more business like.   Store your contacts online, see who they know, etc, etc.  Through these connections you can ask to be introduced to your connections, connections.  If you’re in public relations or sales this is probably a good thing.   They do try to protect you though.  Just because you can see my connections doesn’t mean you can contact them.   Instead you have to ask me to be introduced.  You get to play match maker.  Instead of going up to the woman in the bar and asking her out, you have to ask a friend to introduce you.  Again this is generally good because it’s on the Internet and you don’t know these people, it’s also virtual, so you can’t turn them down directly or slap them if it’s appropriate.  So a referral is generally welcome.  But Linked In whores are screwing this all up.  They’ll introduce anyone to anyone.

My 115 legit connections link me to 730,400 other professionals and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.  It might be a good thing if I were selling something directly, or in the job market.  Otherwise not so good.

For the record I submit if you have: (500 or more connections) you’re a Linked In Whore.

This means you’ll link to anyone just for asking.  You have no scruples.  (You’re also likely to be a recruiter which only validates that you have no scruples).  I also proclaim that if you have 500+ connections you don’t know most of them, and couldn’t recognize them if you saw them.  No way no how.   So why are you connected to them?  Why am I connected to you? 

Of my 115 connections I’ve personally met probably 110 of them.  In fact that’s one of my personal criteria for linking with someone.  I’m sure I have a few (less than a dozen) with whom I’m only vaguely familiar with.   What value is there to having them on my list?  I’ve probably done business with them or may want their opinion on something, some technology, or maybe some person some day.  Everyone else is out.

All my bad Linked In experiences come from Linked in Whores.  Generally connections to them, like a bad STD, they just want to spread.  They want me to introduce them to my connections and I don’t know who they are.   Just because they are connected to someone they must be good right?  Uh, no, especially when their a whore connected to another whore.

The biggest epiphany for me came from Sales people using Linked In.  (Generally also connection whores).  These typically seem to be those those that I’ve met in the past, or one of their co-workers.  If I’m not a customer now, what makes you think that just because you’ve found a way to be connected to me via a group or other connection that I want to buy stuff from you now?   I don’t.  I don’t like cold calls, I don’t like solicitations for business.  I don’t want that through Linked In.  Linked In for me is a network of people I trust.  I submit that nobody knows and fully trusts and respects 500+ people.  Not for any length of time.  Not really.

If I were Internet Czar, I’d make these connections expire.  If you haven’t contacted me and I haven’t contacted you in 6 months to a year, then I don’t really know you, don’t do business with you and probably don’t need you.  But more importantly I don’t need you or any of your connections trying to sell me stuff.   Maybe they don’t really go away, but they go into a “Time-Out” state where they can see my connections, but none of their connections can see my connections.  I *might* need them someday, that’s why I probably Linked to then in the first place.  

If you find yourself in job seeking mode you can ask your connections to hook you up again or take you out of “Time-Out”.   Yeah, that would help out a lot.

The Internet is full of wonderful stuff, but as with anything else in life it only takes a few to screw it up for the rest of us.

I received an email this evening informing me that my XML Data Feed account was now subject to new terms of service.  In order to continue using it, I needed to log in and agree.

The big part that stands out for me is this:

“YOU MAY NOT USE THE SERVICE TO CREATE WEATHER AND WEATHER-RELATED PRODUCTS TO BE DISPLAYED ON HANDHELD OR OTHER WIRELESS DEVICES”

Highlighted below for clarity…  Nice…

So, I suppose I could still use this for weather display on my site, but who the hell wants that?  Do you really care what the weather conditions are, on or around what ever web site your visiting?

If when I need weather data I know where to go look, weather.com being one of them.

Clearly they don’t want additional traffic that they can’t get revenue from?

That’s OK, I’d rather not publish or link to data that is usually wrong more than it’s right.

Granted the software is still beta, and I’ll try not to beat it up based upon that, but I will expose some of the issues that may or may not be a problem for switching from a CrackBerry to iPhone.

First some clear facts:

1. Edge simply blows.  It’s too slow for this.  Things are good when on Wifi, but edge…  Not good.  (3G should fix this right?)
2. The Microsoft Active Sync stuff leaves a little to be desired.  If your organization really leverages the security and lock down aspects of Black Berry Enterprise server you may have a hard time convincing them to let you do this.  (I’ve played with ActiveSync in the past with WinMobile phones and it’s been better than it currently is on the iPhone.  Again, it’s still Beta so we’ll see).
3. I have not tried to nuke the phone remotely from the Exchange console.  I will try that later this week.

First things first, it works, or will work at some level.  If you’ve totally been brainwashed into the BlackBerry messaging management then you probably aren’t going to like the way Apple, the iPhone, and ActiveSync work.  Simply provide your account details, and viola, your contacts, cal and mail are synchronized as it should be.

Email:

Blackberry sort of consolidates all your inbox messages if you so choose (and I do).  Meaning messages that are filtered and put into other folders by default are still in my messages application on the BlackBerry if I choose to sync those underlying folders.   With ActiveSync you only get notified of new items in the inbox.   This could be bad if you organize your inbox as I do.

If I wanted to know about new MGMT_Meeting emails which are filtered into that folder, I won’t know unless I look there.  That folder isn’t initially sync’d until you open it.

Mail works and is beautifully rendered as you’d expect.

It doesn’t appear to support landscape mode which kind of sucks for some emails.

Beta Warning: So far email notification has been spotty at best.  There are times I’ll open mail and the last updated time will be hours behind the actual time.  The mail app hangs a lot.  Generally 2-5x a day I’ll need to hard boot the phone.  It handles some attachments well; Excel, Word, even Cisco Voice mail messages are playable, others, not so much.  I have a couple attachments that will hang the phone in a really bad way, one is a pretty simple PDF.

Contacts:

Contacts work just as you’d expect them too.  Create contacts in Outlook and they magically appear on the iPhone with full details including the photo.

This is the most stable part of all of it at this time.  I have no complaints or issues to point out here.

Calendar:

This is where things get quite fugly.  First, you end up with a second Calendar.  One which can still by synchronized with iCal, and another that goes with ActiveSync.  While you can turn off the iCal synchronization within iTunes I haven’t found a way to delete it from the phone.  As a result you end up with two calendars without visual clue as to which one is which.  You can pick which one is the default, but again, it’s not immediately clear which one is which.

1. There is no week view.
2. Meeting invites work provided you’re the one invited.  Standard Exchange/Outlook responses are:  Accept, Decline, Tentative.   Apple however chose; Accept, Decline, Maybe…
   
3. There’s no facility to invite someone when creating a meeting or scheduled item (I hope this gets fixed).
   

Last but not least is the keyboard.  Nope, it’s not tactile, no you really can’t two-thumb type worth a damn (at least I can’t yet) and the predictive text will bite you when you least expect it but it’s pretty good otherwise.  I suspect that a good portion of Blackberry users primarily ‘read’ and don’t respond to anything in detail.  If you’re that type you will be just fine.  It takes some getting used too and touch is a big thing.   It took me quite a while to adjust to the Blackberry’s lack of touch screen when coming from a Palm even though it had a keyboard, I still used the touch screen a lot.  After using the iPhone I again found myself wanting to touch the icons on the Blackberry.  If there is an adaptation of Graffiti for the iPhone that would rock as well.

So all in all this looks very promising.   The data speed has to improve, reliability has to improve.   The email management will force me into a different email organization paradigm but I could probably work that out.   It is a straight forward shift from the Blackberry to iPhone?  No.  But I think this will make a lot of people happy in the long run.  As of now the Beta stuff is getting better,  Beta 3 was more like Alpha 1 to me.  It was completely unusable.  Beta 4 is much better but still not usable enough.  I still have to carry the Blackberry.

More later as things progress.

Of course they say; “The server is fine”. So I’m looking for some good tools to prove them wrong when I can’tget to it.

I stumbled on host-tracker.com tonight and it’s pretty sweet.

It’s not fast, but the data they give you for free is pretty cool.

So yeah, currently, as in right now, the server is doing just fine.

Give it a look…

I guess it’s kind of slow if you’re viewing this from Iran or Germany, but that’s not our biggest target audience…

If you know of other good testing tools please post them in the comments.