Accenture said it expects the traditionally linear user experience equation will be complicated by new factors in this new converged world: new spaces, faces and places.

Not surprisingly, there will be the digital age user – born between 1978-2006 – who perceives IT as a natural component of their lives. But less obviously, citizens will play a role as they increasingly look to IT for work and recreation. Also, the middle-class will emerge alongside a diminished affluent market. And, markets like China and India will emerge.

But this predicted 10x growth can only be reaped by those businesses that know how to harness that opportunity. In particular, they first need to acknowledge that a converging world creates a new kind of user, and with that user comes a new set of expectations, and even challenges like diminished loyalty.

In theory, that sounds straightforward enough: acknowledge user needs and tailor products and services for those specific needs. But even today, before the linear equation has yet to become overly-complex, user expectations aren’t always met. The mobile market, for instance, often churns out gimmicky gadgets with cool functionality that satiates the hunger of the early adopter and technology enthusiast. But the early adopter and enthusiast form but a niche market. Yet handheld devices are a ubiquitous technology, and the average user is often sidelined by the vendor in an effort to go to market with cool products. Even today’s mobile developers admit the average user is an untapped market yearning for practical functionality for every day use.

If we can’t meet the more basic expectations of the average user in a pre-converged world, harnessing that golden growth opportunity that tomorrow’s world of new markets and new users promises may be trickier than we think. Perhaps figuring out how to conquer existing markets is a good way to prime oneself for a new world of complex emerging markets.

(There are some words that are guaranteed to drive traffic when used in headlines, viz, “iPhone,” “porn,” and “Britney Spears.” Perhaps “Britney Spears iPhone porn outrage” is the perfect storm of a headline. But I digress.)

On Thursday, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers asked the CRTC for a cease-and-desist order against Bell, bringing the long-simmering Net Neutrality debate to a boil. Make no mistake — the CRTC’s decision on this matter will be precedent-setting. A CAIP victory could entrench the principle of Net Neutrality in Canada, without going the American route of trying, and failing, to pass legislation guaranteeing equal rights to the Internet backbone.

Reader comments on the story were uniformly critical of Bell, much of them along the lines of “typical monopolistic behaviour.”

“This level of anti-competitive behaviour from Bell should be expected,” commented Myrcurial. “Anyone remember the Centrex crisis from the mid-90s? The Canadian Association of Internet Providers was formed in 1996 as a direct response to Bell retroactively making significant changes to contracted services.”

“Does this move not negate any and every contract Bell has with any of its clients?” chimed in Samantha Vickers. “Nothing I signed on for stated anything like this…I would not have agreed to it either.”

And Roland, from Surrey, added this heavy-with-bakery-analogies posting:

“I believe what’s really going on here is that Bell is trying to train it’s consumers on all levels to expect ‘less’ (all in the name of helping the movie/music industry and of course us from ourselves). So if the consumer expects ‘less’ of the pie than what they paid for that just leaves more ‘pie’ for Bell to re-sell, without having to bake more ‘pie’ (costly upgrades to actually service the client).”

Getting hungry now.

We’re interested in your two cents. Visit the story and add a comment, add acomment to this blog posting, or visit the Net Neutrality Resource Centre we’ve put together in response to the reader reaction.

From a Microsoft perspective, this really is all about Google. Microsoft’s Windows Live ecosystem, positioned as a Google-killer, simply hasn’t gained the traction Redmond would have hoped, not even simply in the search field — people still “Google” each other, they don’t “Windows Live Search” each other, even if every browser upgrade installs a Live Search box in the menu bar. (Tangentially, why did Yahoo never push its identity as a verb? You never hear of someone “Yahooing” information. Serious oversight.)

Incorporating the Yahoo audience, though, and synthesizing the complementary technology (Y!M already works with Live Messenger, for example) could buy Microsoft the market share it didn’t realize it didn’t have the patience to build. Product for product, business line for business line, MS/Yahoo would line up nose to nose with Google.

There’s also the captive market, subscribers to ISPs like Rogers who’ve thrown their hat in with Yahoo. I’ve had the same Rogers e-mail account for years; I’m not about to go through the hassle of changing horses just because new ownership’s in town. And, let’s face it, the battle for the desktop is over and Microsoft won, at least on the consumer front. (People who are involved in tech tend to forget the real world doesn’t give a rat’s about Linux, they just want The Sims to work.)

So, how would MS/Yahoo stack up against Google? On some fronts, it’s an even match. But Google looks more like the New England Patriots every day. The overpayment for YouTube is beginning to look like genius. Blogger’s a more attractive engine than Windows Live for people who want a share of incremental ad and affiliate revenue. MS gets Flickr (good) and has a tiny share of Facebook (your 15 minutes are almost up).

But any discussion of Google in a competitive sense has to acknowledge all that dark fibre the company picked up for cents on the dollar in the last crash, and the enormous block of IPv6 addresses assigned to it recently. A Google-aligned ISP could offer consumers static IP addresses, not the dynamic nonsense we have to put up with today. (Shall we resurrect Google’s TiSP?) And whoever knows what they’re doing with the fibre ain’t talkin’ …

The subject of compute personalities came up in the discussion (or, more accurately, workload personalities). There are a finite number of these archetypes, according to Hillier, based on memory, read/write, I/O, CPU, etc., activity. A data warehousing system, for example, is predominantly read activity, with periodic bursts of write activity. OLTP has a more balanced read/write ratio. (Heavy duty number crunching, like calculating pi to the 10 kajillionth decimal place, doesn’t have much of either, but the CPU is pretty absorbed in the task.)

So one approach to virtualization, says Hillier, is to shack up complementary system on the same box, thus avoiding processes that spike at the same time and have a conflict over system resources. Makes sense. It’s the Odd Couple approach to virtualization; you can be reasonably sure that when Felix wants the duster, Oscar isn’t using it.

But there are other ways to make resources go further, says Burton Group’s Chris Wolfe. For example, identical VM images running similar tasks could share ROM pages, with the according performance and resource economy effects. (Call it the Conjoined Twin model.)

Both good arguments for some virtualization analysis software.

BTW, both Network World Canada and Computerworld Canada have new home pages within the IT World Canada site. Visit them.

The company has since announced a mobile development platform, Android, which wasn’t the branded mobile phone watchers were anticipating with bated breath, but still made you wonder: What are these people up to?

I’m standing by the conspiracy theory that Google wants to be a guerilla wireless carrier, though SeaBoard Group principal Iain Grant disagrees. Iain feels the spectrum buy is about shaping the net neutrality debate; you can read more here. But I like the planks of the alternative wireless carrier theory, some of which I outlined when Android was announced: Google has what may possibly be the biggest stash of dark fibre in the U.S.; it has a huge block of IPv6 addresses; it has a platform for developing mobile handset applications; now, if all goes to plan, they’ll have a chunk of wireless spectrum that is a) required to be open to access by any device regardless of manufacturer and 2) in the 700 MHz range, where TVs used to live.

Analogue TV dies in the U.S. in 2009. Analogue TV signals are spectrum hogs. Forcing broadcasters to go digital frees up about half the radio spectrum that was devoted to television broadcast. What’s different about the resulting “white space” as compared to the wireless spectrum that Canada is raffling, er, auctioning off next summer that it’s comparatively low frequency — 700MHz instead of two-plus GHz. As you can read here, that lower frequency makes it easier to push signals farther. It’s better at penetrating obstacles. There’s more range for less power, perfect for, say, really long-range Wi-Fi transmission, which would play into Google’s strategy quite nicely.

Make sense to you?

Watch what Google does with this. That same spectrum will eventually come up for auction in Canada (probably after 2011), and Google’s strategy could be a model for an enterprising Canadian player to ape.

With no one in the driver’s seat at Sprint — CEO Gary Forsee having been nudged out a month ago — it shouldn’t be a surprise that the brakes might be applied to a deal this big for now. Expect both parties to be back at thetable some time soon. And don’t expect this to slow momentum in Canada toward more WiMax pilots and rollouts.

What this might mean, though, is good vibes for LTE proponents. The competing 4G standard is presumed by some analysts to be the eventual winner on the wireless broadband front, but it’s hampered by WiMax’s two-year head start.

And, of course, it extends the lifetime of relevance for public and municipal WiFi.

Gotta confess it was a zig when I was anticipating a zag, and it leaves me with many questions. If anyone cares to set me straight on them, hey, I’d be grateful. In no particular order:

• This is a consumer play for the most part. Are consumers actually using the “smart” in smart phone? Anecdotally, aside from the RIM-addled e-mail addicts, I’d say not many people are looking to the phone for Internet-based applications at this point, the experience being as excruciating as it often is.
• How far does this ad subsidy model go? If every phone call is brought to me by Axe deodorant body spray, then every single call, every single feature, all my long distance, had better be free (and I mean free as in free beer, not as in free speech).
• And, as ever: What is Google doing with all that dark fibre? There’s long been speculation that the cable Google picked up for pennies on the dollar after the dot-bomb will be used to create an “alternate Internet” (in conjunction with the huge block of IPv6 addresses it’s registered). Mayhap it’s for an alternate telco model … is it a huge stretch to an ad-supported, IP-based wireless network in most of the major cities in the U.S.?
• What compelling applications do you foresee on the new platform that will make you run screaming to a dealer to pick up an Android? 

The first fax machine was invented in 1861 and, amazingly, the need for fax capabilities is still demanded by business today.

In the first half of 2007, the market for MFPs (or All-in-Ones) with fax capabilities has grown 25% from the first half of 2006.  This is happening in a situation where the MFP market itself has only grown 5% over the same period of time.  Meaning that nearly 40% of MFPs shipped in Canada in the first half of 2007 had fax capabilities.

Now there is a chance that end-users are finally realizing that there are fax capabilities within many MFP models (IDC does not track the stand-alone fax market) but the tenacity of fax technology and the fact that it is still relevant is incredible.

For some reason, scanning & emailing (or scanning to email) just isn’t cutting it.  Perhaps people like hearing that familiar fax squelch when a connection is made.  Or they enjoy that lonely time standing in front of the fax ensuring it goes through properly.  I don’t know but to heck with the notion of the paper-less office, we’ve got to at least get to the fax-less office first.

By Joaquim P. Menezes -

“Our tick-tock strategy” – is how Intel CEO, Paul Ottelini, described his company’s game plan to alternate the latest silicon technology, with a new microprocessor architecture.

Otellini’s presentation at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco was calculated to impress.

And some of the stuff he outlined did sound impressive.

For instance Otellini held up a plate-size wafer containing what he said were the world’s first 32-nanometer (nm) semiconductors.

There’s a huge gee-wiz element to this technology.

32-nm enables the creation of transistors so small that more than 4 million of them could fit on the period at the end of this sentence.

Okay we’re impressed. But what’s the practical benefit of this super-shrink technology?

Intel is going to produce 32 nm-based commercially available chips in two years, and in the meantime, it says it will start shipping the industry’s first mass-produced microprocessors based on 45-nm technology Nov. 12.

So what’s the deal here?

Are we just witnessing another phase in the  ongoing game of one-upmanship between Intel and arch-rival AMD, which has also announced plans to produce 45-nm and 32-nm chips in mid-2008 and 2010 respectively.

Otellini did take pains to emphasize that there’s far more to this technology than the “wow” factor.

“Smaller is better, smaller is cheaper,” he said.

Basically, it’s the same logic we’ve heard from electronic components manufacturers: smaller components ultimately benefit consumers.

That’s because with component size shrinking – in the case of devices, such as PCs, cell phones etc – a lot of more juice can be packed into a little space.

And Otellini introduced the “green” motif as well.

He said Intel’s 45-nm Penryn processors are expected “improve energy efficiency”, while providing a 20 per cent performance increase.

Some analysts like Doug Freedman, an analyst at American Technology Research Inc. have noted that there’s nothing surprising in Otellini’s keynote.

True enough. After all, Intel isn’t the first to announce 32-nm chip technology.

In May, a group of chip makers led by IBM Corp. agreed to further collaborate to jointly develop this technology. 

But the fact that Intel has publicly announced its schedule for commercially producing both 45 and 32 nm chips, may give the company an edge over other players who have also made forays into this space.

As Freedman also pointed out, Intel’s roadmap tends to be conservative, and the company is well on track to meeting its time line.