The battle of the network giants and a good business idea.

Went on a road trip with some colleagues on Monday and Tuesday. I was actually thinking that it was going to be a little light on content, but it was surprisingly successful. We met with Nortel on Monday afternoon, went to a Cisco VOIP demonstration on Tuesday morning, I think Nortel once again demonstrated that they just don't have the marketing panache of CISCO. Everything CISCO do appears to be much more polished, right from their slides to their homogeneous product line. They just bought out a company called Airspace that Nortel had invested a considerable amount of time and money in developing a partnership and reselling to customers. Now that Cisco have bought the company, they have had to find another partner. Can you imagine being the Sales guy that has to go back to your clients and say hey "remember that wireless solution we sold you? Er, well, we have a different one now and want you to move in that direction" It was that kind of crumbling vision that led me to dump Nortel back at UNBC. Nevertheless, they are friendly and knowledgeable guys and always give us plenty of their time even though they are likely run off their feet. Plus from a technical perspective I still greatly respect each of them.

Nortel were also telling us about a VOIP demo they had done for a client where one of their engineers was working in the same lab and unplugged their connection. OMG! Of all technologies to have to say, well really this works. The biggest argument of every old timer telecommunications manager fighting the shift to an all out VOIP infrastructure has been the reliability. Of course all us data guys know the technology works, but it certainly needs some special attention. But try swaying an old telecomm guy after demo where the technology failed! Funny thing was, Cisco were demo'ing some of the Contact and Relation Management integration they offer, and that demo failed as well! I understand this is a complex scenario to set up, and I really understand how difficult live demos can be. But for goodness sakes, if you are trying to sell people on the stability of a technology, keep it friggin' simple and stick to something that will work for sure. It actually took away from all the cool stuff that did work during the seminar.

On our way home we then had a big discussion on smart homes and how the housing industry here in Kelowna, and probably in many other cities, is really missing that key integrating component. We came up with a cool solution for centralizing a couple of clustered servers with massive mirrored disks that would handle all the Voice/Data/Video/HVAC for the house along with different options for a new install and a retro fit. I'm going to have to start working on this and coming up with some practical solutions from a personal interest perspective rather than a business objective. However I think this is definitely something that would take off were the right marketing applied to it.

On another tech note, my Laptop Ethernet controller has decided to bite the big one. Of course I don't really have time to spend fixing it and have found a work around in the mean time. Occasionally the machine hangs during POST, but I can usually get it booted up eventually. This is a very dangerous game of course, especially around Exam time. One of my colleagues has also had the same problem and had the motherboard replaced. These IBM laptops have not had a good track record so far! I would likely go for a Toshiba or a Dell if I had a choice.

Podcasting and MSN Video

I've been using RSS aggregation for the past several months somewhat effectively, but although I had always heard about PodCasting I have never actually looked into it. Well yesterday I read an article referencing it and thought I would procrastinate on doing some prep by reading up on it. Turns out this is just an RSS feed with attachments, or enclosures as they like to call them, the attachments being mostly media file like MP3's and WMA files. I can always read faster than these guys can podcast the news items at me, but it's a great way of catching up while driving or allowing you to do some mindless grunt work while still catching up on the news. Although I download it to my PC right now, I'm going to use Ipodder to get them to my PDA and listen to them on the way to work or waiting around throughout the day. Cool stuff! Although this is all audio stuff, you know the video is just around the corner, especially with Microsoft getting into the game with MSN Video to the desktop or PDA.