internet » Observations of an Edinburgh Chap

Something so obvious Sky has missed it

Oct 122011

Over recent months I’ve been pursuing the goal of a fully-connected home entertainment system. In the living room, the TV, amplifier, Blu Ray player, PlayStation and Sky box are all connected to the house network, and from there they can connect to the internet and to other devices in the house. Upstairs is a connected TV, and a Sky box. In the garage a box smaller than a toaster holds in excess of 100 DVDs and 1,000 CDs, ready to serve them up to any consuming device that wants them.

The Sky box has a network connection, which it uses to augment its “Anytime” service to provide a sort of video on demand. VoD is one of those things that you don’t really think about until you use it. Services such as BBC’s iPlayer, Channel 4’s 4OD and others provide near-instant access to shows that you forgot to record.

My parents have gone a different way. They too have TVs all over the house, but they rely on over-the-air TV, which they record onto a mass of DVD-RWs using a veritable phalanx of DVD recorders. This gives them one crucial advantage over our fully-connected system: They do not have to watch a show on the device that recorded it.

This is more useful than you may initially think. For us, if we record a show on the Sky+ box in the living room, we have to play it back in the living room. If we record it in the bedroom, in the bedroom we must watch. This does not offer the flexibility we need, and is frequently inconvenient. My parents on the other hand, can just whip the disc out, move it to their playback area of choice, sit down and watch.

Why can I not do this with the Sky system? Sure, there are ways to ‘blow’ your Sky signal into another room, but they’re not official, rely on the lower-quality RF signal path, and cause havoc for the person who’s in that other room trying to watch the TV. And that’s before you start worrying about replaying the remote signals from the room you’re in to the room with the Sky box you’re watching.

Why can the two Sky boxes not function as local network peers? It’s not hard to configure a discovery protocol so that they can find each other. They can handshake, and then pass programmes between each other. Record on one box, then stream that recording over the network to another box.

I don’t see a problem with it. Technically it’s a cinch, and there are already all sorts of protocols (such as DLNA) ready-brewed for such activities, including the detection, handshake and streaming transport. I can’t see a licensing issue, since the shows would be recorded and consumed within the same house.

I can only think that Sky has failed to see the awesomeness of such a feature, or hasn’t bothered itself to do the coding.

For shame, Sky!

Center Parcs Whinfell Forest: a data black hole

Internet, Life in General, Technology No Responses »

Jul 132011

A Twitter friend recently wrote a blog post espousing the usefulness of the wireless network facility offered at Center Parcs’ Whinfell Forest establishment. It was a sort of by-the-by assertion in amongst chat about the proliferation of modern data devices.

I was recently at the self-same establishment, and had quite a different experience. I’ve been there three times now, and each time have enjoyed decent enough connectivity. So I wasn’t really in the mindset to unplug for the week. Plus, darling wife has an even stronger internet addiction than I do.

When I arrived at the lodge, first priority was to hook dear lady’s iPad to the WLAN. It went through smoothly enough, and she had little problem for the rest of the week – except on the occasions where she forgot that her phone doesn’t really work any more and left the iPad in the lodge. I pulled out the phone and was confronted with the unfamiliar “No Service” legend. No matter, I’ll just authenticate with the wi-fi and off we go. It was far from straightforward, with many flits between the screens of the logon process. But I stuck with it and got connected.

From an infrastructure point of view, the Center Parcs WLAN is – as pointed out by Mr Louden (above) – very good. Wireless LAN connectivity is available in all of the main buildings, including the Village Centre, Lakeside Inn and Sports Plaza as well as our lodge. I’m not sure how many of the lodges are so equipped, so check your details if you’re reading this prior to a visit.

However, simply presenting a WLAN is not good enough. Far too often I was presented with a screen like this:

No cell, full WLAN, no connection…

Drilling into the properties of the wireless connection I saw the dreaded 169.254.n.n address, meaning that while I was connected, I wasn’t actually connected. No data would be forthcoming. (Again, if you’re reading this as a current/future Center Parcs guest, you should be looking for an address in the 172.13.n.n range, with a gateway of 172.13.1.1).

This happened so often that I went into something of a sullen state. On day 4 I had realised that it wasn’t going to get any better. On day 5 I became recalcitrant. On day 6 I kept forgetting the hopelessness, trying again, and experiencing that bereft feeling once more.

The Windows 7 laptop was a little better at establishing and maintaining a connection, but still, far too often I’d get little pop-up notifications…

Having spent a few days investigating, it seems that Apple iOS devices with 3G capability really do not like intermittent connections. Trying to operate in an area where both wireless signals and 3G signals are present but almost unusable causes the device to go into some sort of paroxysm of truculence. The device appears unable to rapidly switch between connections that are in a state of flux. The Windows laptop, with only its WLAN to use, is moderately content to packet-queue through interruptions of service, where the iOS device just bins the whole transaction, only sometimes telling the app that this has happened. Also, the iOS device is quite happy to report that it’s connected with an autoconfiguration address, where the Windows box immediately flags a lack of full connectivity.

I can only imagine that the explosion in use of smartphones, tablets, netbooks and laptops has caused something of a nightmare for Center Parcs admins. They’re providing a service for 2006 utilisation levels, but now it’s 2011, and families are wandering into lodges with three or more fully internet-enabled devices, and a notion that data is always there.

It’s not really the lack of bandwidth that caused my data funk. It was the gap between expectation and availability. As a long-time cellphone user, I’m used to the notion that signal quality degrades with signal strength, and yet here I was, presented with a strong signal and no usable service. Articles such as Dave’s had led me to believe that Center Parcs was a data haven – a place where one could wander twixt court, pool and tavern, enjoying connectivity in a Martini style.

Instead, I found myself in a data black hole. It was depressing. Perhaps not as depressing as the little skip of joy my heart did when the car picked up a 3G signal some half mile from the exit of the park, but depressing nonetheless.

And what should Center Parcs do about this? One of two things: sort it out, or switch it off. Better to have nothing at all than the unmet promise.

How not to lose your shirt when the Social Networking bubble bursts

Internet, Life in General, Technology No Responses »

Jun 052011

June 2011, and there is increasing chatter in both tech and financial journals that social networking is the new bubble. What follows is my own opinion on this matter, although I must give props to Mazher Abidi (@mazherabidi) for confirming that I’m not wholly on my own in this train of thought. Clearly, you must carry out your own due diligence on any financial decision you take, rather than taking my opinion – or anyone else’s for that matter – as gospel. Caveat Emptor here perhaps more than anywhere.

It seems clear that the sunrise period for social networking is over. Already some of the bigger names have folded, faded or otherwise imploded, including the pioneering Friends Reunited, darling of the music world MySpace, and only real rival to Facebook, Bebo. And where there have been failures, there have been successes. It is hard to analyse the Social Networking landscape without coming to the conclusion that there is now a “big three” who will proceed through to own the sector.

Facebook counts 7% of the world as active users, with over 30 billion pieces of content shared each month (source: Facebook Press office). It is the darling of interpersonal relationships.

LinkedIn has gained real traction in creating connections between professionals. With more than 100 million users (LinkedIn Press office), LinkedIn has gained traction where other “global address books” (to borrow a term from Microsoft Exchange) such as Plaxo have not.

Last of the big three is the transient microblog service Twitter. Twitter has polarised people like few other tech services I’ve experienced. People either ‘get’ Twitter, or they don’t. There aren’t any official figures for the userbase, but the figure is somewhere between 200m and 350m users on a month-to-month basis (FT.com article quoting Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, sub req’d). Activity on the site is very high though, racking up some 1bn tweets every six days.

The consequence of these three players emerging to prominence is game-changing for others in the sector. Organisations with designs on overtaking one or more of the above services are setting themselves up for a big fall. Darlings of the previous tech bubble Google have completely failed to set up a viable social platform, having tried twice with Buzz and Wave. And while Apple has reconfigured itself as a purveyor of objets desire and taken themselves out of that space, Microsoft is looking increasingly archaic. Actually, Microsoft has made even more of a hash of social networking than Google. It has Hotmail (launched in 1996) and MSN Messenger (1999), both of which offered software-as-a-service and realtime person to person interaction before anyone even knew what SaaS was. That Microsoft failed to capitalise on these platforms shows how badly they got their internet strategy wrong. And that Google doesn’t have a social platform shows that you need something compelling, not just a bunch of coders and a bunch of hardware, which has characterised Google’s portfolio to date.

In my view, key to the health of the bubble is the spa-day-discount specialist Groupon. Last week Groupon announced plans for an IPO, selling off part of the business at a price that would value the whole at more than $20bn (source: The Guardian). Even in reporting this extraordinary valuation The Guardian couldn’t help itself from racking up a slew of investors and analysts whose view was that $20bn was either fiction or fantasy. Certainly it seems unlikely that a business whose 2010 revenue was $713m could justify a Price/Earnings ratio of 28x. And with only 80m users, more than 7x the staff base of LinkedIn and a 2010 loss of $413m, investors would have to be in it for the long haul.

Surely as a tech business, the way to make money from Social Networking now is to conceive a product which complements one of the big three, not competes with them. The model for this has to be London startup TweetDeck, whose multi-platform application provides a consolidated control centre for social networking power users. TweetDeck’s vision must always have been to make themselves an invaluable add-on, and consequently to be bought out by one of the networks whose content their application so expertly manages. And so it has come to pass for TweetDeck, bought last month by Twitter for $40m.

In this light, Groupon’s position is interesting. Its $20bn valuation surely prices it out of most takeover markets, but its best hope for success is in integrating with another network with a pre-existing userbase and considerable social traction. Then Groupon could scale back its sales force, because companies pleading for people to “Like” them on Facebook would have an integrated Like & Reward structure. Groupon’s overheads, and effort of doing business could be all but eradicated overnight with a Facebook tie-up. However, unlike Twitter, Facebook has been remarkable for how unacquisitive (if such a word exists) it is. Facebook’s platform and APIs are its property, and it has made no attempt to control its channel partners. To the extent that there isn’t even an official bespoke iPad app for Facebook. Twitter is still looking for a way to properly monetise its platform, so any business looking to join up that has a similarly onerous financial input stream is not a logical target. And there has to be a real question of affordability for Twitter. Finally, Groupon’s product and service model are too far removed from LinkedIn’s for a tie-up between those two to make sense on any level.

So with a crazy-seeming valuation, and no ready-made partners, what can Groupon do to take the next step as a viable ongoing business?

There’s a panoply of examples of “old” businesses buying “new” businesses, and vice versa. The AOL-Time Warner merger is possibly one of the best known, and that didn’t really go well for either party. Most recently was Microsoft’s borderline-insane purchase of Skype for an eye-watering $8.5bn.

Thinking along these lines, there’s a potential white knight in Groupon’s future, and that would be Google. The world’s largest ad broker needs a mechanism to move its business model into meat space in order to continue its expansion, and Groupon could be just the ticket.

It’ll be interesting to see how this one plays out over the next year or so. As cash-rich companies look to grasp the social network nettle, and new social startups with vapourware revenue streams & red mist balance sheets struggle to align themselves with partners from old or new sectors. Just look for companies with massive user bases, low startup costs, or value-add propositions for established players. The gold rush is over, but there are some nuggets in the stream for those who do their panning carefully.

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