Yesterday I met with a company in Paris to progress a business opportunity, on which I will report later. They are deploying a computing device in customer homes, which connects by wifi to the Internet. Some people call this ‘ambient intelligence‘. The connectivity is absolutely essential to the operation of the device. However, it turns […]
After having lunch in the spanish town of La Jonquera, I noticed a lack of standardised electronic payment infrastructure at the restaurant’s cashier. In the picture, four separate devices for handling card transactions can be seen. Apparently, the spanish banks have not yet been able to agree on a shared digital infrastructure.
One of the big projects I am working on right now is directory services for identity management. In these directories digital identities such as loginnames, addresses, access rights, etc. are stored. With an adequately structured directory service, the proper management of access rights becomes a lot easier, which translates into cost savings and better security. […]
Network neutrality has become the topic of intense discussion and legislative action.See the Washington Post , a Wikipedia article, and CircelID. What is the issue? On the one hand people argue for ‘universal service’ that say that one person’s bits should not be treated differently from another person’s. This compares to the idea that the […]
New technology brings new risks. We used to think that data was safe behind big walls in high-security datacenters. Then came the internet. I still remember when there was an internet without firewalls. Ah, those were the days. The universities and other users were not the only ones to profit from the new technology however. […]
A lot of my work involves consulting with organizations on the consolidation of their digital infrastructures. Recently for example, I worked with a client in a pan European telecommunications cost reduction effort. They were spending several million Euros a year across 27 countries. A substantial fraction of that cost was in mobile voice. With other […]
Wikipedia is just one of the new infrastructures for collective knowledge that are appearing. Others are flickr and del.icio.us, to name a few. I am using the word infrastructure here precisely because these are platforms on which multiple users converge, creating a collective value. These infrastructures are typically heralded as ‘a good thing’, for a […]
In most countries, if you buy a new mobile subscription the mobile phone company has an attractive offer for you. If you would just subscribe for a 2 year contract and commit to a monthly minimum spend, they will have a nice phone for you. Just how nice is this offer? Should you go for […]
Your online identity might reveal more about you than you can imagine. Howdoes it feel to be confronted with that? Today I visited a theatre festival (Festival aan de Werf,http://www.festivalaandewerf.nl/) where the Dat-a project(http://dat-a.z25.org/ partly in Dutch) examines this in a theatrical way.It can give you quite an uncanny feeling, even though their RFID liketechnology […]
This weekend, I was cleaning out old files, and came across some industry outlooks made by market research and consulting firms a few years ago. In it were predictions of the distant future (say 2005 …), you remember the inflated expectations people had back in de dot com boom days. It turns out that most […]
