Tags: Mobile 2.0, Smartphone, Shel Holtz, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Offline Collaboration, Socialtext, Nokia, N95, iPhone, Apple, iPod, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Productivity Tools, Prosumers, Knowledge Worker

And continuing further with another weblog post on Mobile 2.0, it looks like things are just about to get even much more interesting. While some folks out there are debating whether one smartphone is way better than the other one (More on that in another upcoming post, by the way), news items keep popping up indicating how crucial mobile devices are becoming for the knowledge worker in order to help them be as productive as making use of their own computers while at the office. In particular, I enjoyed quite a bit this quote from Shel Holtz’s post:

"It’s another sign that the cell phone is becoming a more ubiquitous communication tool; companies not preparing content and services for the cell phone (as, for instance, the Mayo Clinic has) need to start strategizing."

He is just so spot on! While I was attending the IBM’s Collaboration 2.0 conference event at the beginning of July in Somers, NY, one of the main discussions that I engaged with from various folks was the subject that for Social Computing to really reach and penetrate the Enterprise in a successful manner, not just for early adopters, it would need to start doing some serious work in a couple of areas: offline capabilities and mobile 2.0.

If we have already seen how social software is moving slowly into the offline area, like Socialtext, for instance, it was about time that some focus would be put together for the mobile devices market and start putting together some thoughts as to how it would potentially work. I do realise that just having one social software tool going offline is not going to be enough, on the contrary, we would need to get many many more for that shift to be significant. However, I am sure that over the course of the next few months we will see how that will change and for the better. More than anything else because we would not have a choice, seeing how the workforce is becoming more and more mobile as time goes by.

With the mobile market things would be different. Why? Well, maybe because there are already a number of devices that are helping the mobile workforce become as productive as whatever you may have thought from the past while they have been working at the office. There is no doubt that as more and more knowledge workers get to perform their jobs in a distributed manner they would be demanding such changes, if they haven’t happened already.

That is why, when I decided to go mobile 2.0 myself, I needed to ensure that it would be meeting my needs right away; I didn’t think I would have been able to wait that long. That is why when looking at how the mobile market is positioning itself I decided to jump for what I thought, still think, is one of the best options available out there. Yes, indeed, Nokia, and the N95.

This is probably as close as it would get from me to talk about the iPhone, which, in fact, I am not. Don’t worry. Main reason being that I do not think it is ready for the knowledge worker just yet. It may well be for the prosumer market, but I think it is way behind what a knowledge worker would want to have in order to be still as productive as ever. It is exactly the same thing as what has happened with the iPod.

When I finally decided to buy one, because I thought it was ready, I went for the one on 30GB, then the year after things were not enough and bought another one for 60GB and when you thought you were settled down, there comes the 80GB video iPod, which is supposed to be the latest one, despite rumours of the next generation coming up shortly. As a knowledge worker, do I want to keep buying whatever the same mobile device year after year just because the previous version has got some fundamental lack of capabilities? I don’t think so. I just want a mobile device that would last me for a few years, pretty much like I am with my notebook.

I want the job done, and not necessarily be in with the latest prosumer gadget that everyone wants to have. That is probably why I really love the way the iPhone has shaken the mobile market, pretty much like Nokia did in the past, but then again, it will be far too long for me to get my hands on it. Not on v2 or v3, but more on v5 or v6, when I know that device will be providing me with what I am currently getting with my N95 at the moment. Pretty simple: it just works and it does all what I want it to do, not what people keep telling me it would be cool it would do.

That to me is the key differentiator from any mobile device out there for the mobile knowledge worker. That is why the N95 exceeded my expectations from day one, and still does big time!, and why I know at some point I will own an iPhone, but this time around I learned my lesson and it will not be any time soon! Not, until it provides all I need it to do.

Tags: Nokia, N95, Wi-Fi, No Gateway Reply, Wireless, Router, Troubleshooting, WEP, WEP Key, Encryption

One of the different consequences that I suffered from last week, while I lost my Internent connection for several days, was the fact that when I got everything back to a normal status I could no longer connect my Nokia N95 to the Wi-Fi network. I tried everything I could think of and nothing. It wouldn’t connect. I talked to a whole bunch of folks and most of them advised me that it might have been a problem of incompatibility between the N95 and my new wireless router, so was kindly asked to check that out with my Internet provider

However, before spending some time doing that, I thought I would check things out through our good friend Google and see if folks were having the same problems as myself with that nasty error message: "No Gateway Reply". And lo and behold plenty of folks have been having similar issues to the ones I was experiencing. Very nice! Things were looking good!

Unfortunately, none of the solutions offered in the various forums, I tried them all, did the trick for me. A bit disappointing, seeing how many folks have encountered a similar problem in the past. Was starting to get a bit frustrated as well, thinking that I was not going to get the N95 to work again with the new router.

Then, all of a sudden, I remembered something that really did the trick for me. And, like usual, it was a rather simple solution. Yes, indeed, simple things work the best, don’t they? In this case it was a problem with the WEP key that I was using for my wireless router and which my N95 apparently accepted in the first place, but still didn’t allow me to connect to it.

That is right, to fix the "No Gateway Reply" error on the N95 I just needed to change the WEP encryption key from the 13 alphanumeric combination that the router came with by default to a string of 26 Hexadecimal (Hex) characters (0-9 and A-F). And voilá! Problem fixed! I can now browse again the Web with the N95 in the same protected environment I was having before the router crash. Way cool!

And, of course, since I couldn’t find this other solution to such error, I decided to blog about it, hoping that those folks who may be searching for this problem are able to find another solution to the problem, apart from the ones that other people have been suggesting all along.

Time now to continue experimenting with that fascinating world that Mobile 2.0 really is …

Tags: Corporate Blogging, Enterprise Blogging, Blogging Adoption, Metablogging, Blogs, Blogging, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Collaboration, Penny Edwards, Wikis, Mareike Swania, IBM

One of the things that I really enjoy quite a bit from the summer is to get in touch with some of the incredible talent that is floating around all over the place from remarkably smart students putting together their final thesis, papers, dissertations, or whatever other research term you would want to make use of, around the subject of Knowledge Management, Collaboration and Social Computing. I just wish I could spend some more time hanging out with them and learn what’s in their minds and what they are after. After all, very soon they will be the main workforce in the corporate world, so it gives me a perfect opportunity to find out some more about some of my near future colleagues ahead of the curve.

Alas, my daily work duties do not allow me to spend as much of that time as I would have wished for. Thus you get to turn down some of those offers here and there from those folks who would love you to participate in their research papers and it really is a pity, of course, but there is just so much that we can fit in within a day of work, right?

However, every now and then you get hit by a specific piece of research that you find quite fascinating and that you would want to hear some more about. And, of course, you try to make time for those interviews and share your two cents worth of comments. Remember the weblog post I shared not long ago around the research that Penny Edwards is doing on Management of Wikis in Business? Well, here is another one for you.

I am loving it! All of this amazing talent wanting to help figure our what’s going on around the subject of social computing within the corporate world. Check out the following request I received a few days ago from Mareike Swania:

"We are currently conducting research into the topic of internal blogging within companies.
As part of this study we are inviting company bloggers to complete a short questionnaire in the form of an online survey available at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=lyaeUenyBMkZDwXKRMRd7w_3d_3d

The questions deal with some general questions about your blog, about your motivation to blog and the impact of your blog.
All data collected will be anonymous, and in the written report of the research it will not be possible to identify the individuals who contributed to the study, nor their affiliations.

Should you be interested in the findings of the research once it is complete, there is a place on the survey to leave your email address to which a report will be sent.
If you have any questions about the work, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Thank you for participating."

Of course, I couldn’t help but to chime in and spend 5 minutes going through the survey. I found that some of the different questions Mareike has put together do match most of my main interests behind corporate blogging, specially after being over 4 years at it myself inside IBM. I am really looking forward to checking out the results that I have already signed up for, when completing the questionnaire, as I am sure it would help me understand a lot better how most people out there are blogging away behind their own corresponding company firewall. Here is the thing though. Why not spend five minutes of your own time and fill in the survey as well?

Or even better, why don’t you create a blog post, too, behind the firewall, or externally, whatever, and you encourage folks to participate, too, so that the data becomes even much more useful and relevant than what it may well be already? It’s going to take about 5 minutes, or less, depending on how fast you type, but one thing for sure is that spending those few minutes over there is going to be very helpful for us all to understand what is going on behind the corporate firewall on how different knowledge workers have been adopting weblogging, or not, in order to help boost their knowledge sharing and collaboration capabilities with other knowledge workers.

Thus, go ahead, start spreading the message around on Mareike’s fine piece of work put together thus far and let’s revisit the results later on in the year. I bet they would bring a few surprises here and there! No doubt.

(Thanks a bunch, Mareike, for reaching out and for wanting us to be a part of your research! Looking forward to seeing the results of it!)

Tags: Robert Scoble, ScobleShow, Scobleizer, Drew Clark, IBM, IBM Venture Capital, Zimbra, GMail, Jajah, Facebook, LinkedIn, XING, Lotus Connections, Connections, Mashups, alphaWorks, QEDWiki, Mobile 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Innovation, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Social Capital, BlueTwit, Dogear Nation, Emerging Technologies

This is some really good stuff, indeed! I am sure that by now you may have been able to check it out already (Since Scoble runs one of the most popular video shows there is out there!), but just in case you may not have just yet, let me share with you a couple of comments as to why it would be a good thing for folks out there to go through one of the latest interviews that Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) did with one of my fellow IBM colleagues: Drew Clark, co-founder of IBM Venture Capital and Director of Strategy at IBM.

This almost one hour long video cast with Drew and Robert would be something I can highly recommend if you would want to check out some of the various initiatives that IBM has been involved with over the last few months, or, alternatively, this would be one of those interviews that would certainly help shed some light as to why IBM seems to keep re-inventing itself over and over again, despite what some other folks may be saying heh

No, seriously, I have gone through the one hour interview myself and Drew has done an incredible job in describing some of what is going on inside IBM in various different areas touching base on hardware, software, services, etc. etc. The most relevant part of the interview though, for those of you who follow this weblog on a regular basis, I can imagine it would be from minute 30 onwards where Drew starts talking about how some of the latest emerging technologies: Zimbra, GMail -specially around the subject of outsourcing e-mail, Jajah, social networking, Facebook, LinkedIn, XING, Lotus Connections, corporate mashups, alphaWorks, QEDWiki, emerging markets within the mobile space, or mobile 2.0, in short, Enterprise 2.0 technologies, and very clearly indicates how they are shaping the collaboration and knowledge sharing landscapes within the corporate world and beyond, that we may all have been exposed to thus far.

Later on in the interview they both get to talk about other interesting social software tools like Twitter, Pownce or Jaiku (Micro-blogging, Web presence tools that help distributed knowledge workers keep in touch with each other and share bits and pieces of information that their own social networks may find interesting and relevant to help build further up their social capital skills. The bar now is set up at IM or higher, yes, that is right, no e-mail, no phone calls!) and what they would be like behind the corporate firewall. At this point in time, I just couldn’t help thinking about BlueTwit, IBM’s attempt towards bringing Twitter capabilities inside of the firewall (You can read / listen to some more about it over here, by the way, in case you may not have been exposed to it). Good stuff!

And from there onwards the interview got better and better, but instead of detailing some more about it, I am just going to leave you with a couple of quotes from Drew that I am sure would make you think for a bit and perhaps tease you some more into going through the entire interview itself:

"[It is all about] Understanding the value of the Web as a platform … as a service delivery platform". [Starting to leverage the Web up to such potential, delivering Web technologies sooner] […] "It is all about delivering value".

[…] "We need to be able to evolve … with the world. We are still here"

"We Are not Your Father’s IBM"

Tags: Metablogging, Blogs, Blogging Style, Brevity, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Learning, Collaboration, Blog Addiction, Mingle, Syndication, Twitter, Community

I knew that I would be coming around this one at some point in time, indeed. After four years of actively weblogging in several different places, I had to admit it, once and for all: I am a blog addict! There! I have said it! At least, that is what Mingle thinks about me when I went ahead and tried to answer the question How Addicted to Blogging Are You? According to the test itself I am 88% addicted to it and without a remedy, I suppose:

88%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

I guess I never thought I would have scored that high, although I still see that there is a staggering 12% left to be able to say that there is no cure for me any longer!

Last week, you probably noticed how, due to the different Internet connection problems I had, there was some light blogging for the first part of the week. Well, I guess you always have to look at the positive side of things. Those first three days of being disconnected from everything gave me a great chance to do a massive catchup with all of the different pending RSS / Atom feeds I had (Some of them from as far as March 2007!). Ouch!

Yes, that is right, in those first three days I went through over 42,000 articles, news items, blog posts, etc., you name it! and while going through them, it just made me realise about the huge amount of different conversations with some really great topics related to KM that have been going on out there and which I kept neglecting over and over again, not going through them soon enough.

That got me thinking, indeed, as you may have guessed. They say good weblogging is all about linking, linking, linking, i.e. getting out there and dive into the different conversations that are taking place, instead of just focusing on your own weblog. I guess that is basically what I have learned while going through those several thousand entries. Somehow I have the strong feeling that I have been linking, indeed, but perhaps not often enough. Too much stuff going on out there that I should have been aware of, but that I didn’t get a chance to chime in when I could have.

Perhaps, lately, I have been placing too much focus on this particular weblog without looking out there for some more interesting stuff that is going on at the moment. Well, time for a change, then, don’t you think? Yes, I think that today is a good day to get things started, now that I am fully recovered from my Internet connection problems from last week. So here it goes.

From now onwards, and for the next few weeks, I am going to be running a little bit of an experiment and a change in the direction of my own blogging style and see where it would take me. Perhaps nowhere, perhaps where I should have been all along. Don’t know, we shall see. Time will tell.

As a starter, and this coming from someone whose candid feedback I really appreciate a great deal! (Thanks for that, J.!), from now onwards weblog posts are going to be a lot shorter than what they have been lately. Yes, I am going to keep things short and sweet and see if I am able to get the message across in the same way. I know I am not doing a good job with this particular entry, so there may be the odd long weblog post here and there, like this one, but they are going to consistently get shorter and shorter, although perhaps not at the level of Twitter’s 140 character limitation, if you know what I mean heh

Secondly, then I am going to be linking to a whole bunch more conversations that I should have tapped into a while ago, but that I didn’t. Now it would be a good time to get things going. There may also be the odd day where I will not be sharing content over here directly, but more commenting on other people’s blog posts and I may make a quick reference to them so that you get to check out where I have been hanging out.

And, finally, for those weblog posts where I am going to keep things short, I am actually not going to be including any of the pictures that I have taken from the places I have visited or where I am currently living. That way I will not divert your attention from those shorter entries and every now and then I will share separate weblog posts sharing some highlights from the places I may have visited or checked out further, like I used to do till not so long ago.

Thus with all that said, I think it is a good time now to stop and let that blogging addiction kick in again, continuing to put together some other posts to share over the course of the next few hours. Oh, and since you are an integral part from this particular weblogging experience, I would really appreciate if you could share a comment or two on the new direction I am taking, whether you like it or not, or whether you would love to see something else in here. Let me know (Offline would work, too!) if I am on the right track … or not. After all, remember that this is a two way conversation and without your feedback I am not going anywhere! And probably that blogging addiction would die out at some point in time, too! Are you going to let that happen? I am not… heh

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Collaboration 2.0, Web 2.0, Learning, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Simplicity, New York, Somers, Madrid, JFK, Las Palmas, Travelling, Beekeeping, Beekeeper, Bees, Anastasio Marcos, Extremadura, Apihurdes, Euromiel, Cooperative, Consortium

As I have just mentioned in a previous weblog post, this article is a follow up from the one I have shared earlier on, detailing some of the highlights from the trip to Somers, NY, to attend IBM’s Collaboration 2.0 conference event that took place last week. It is another story. And probably a little bit longer than expected, this time around from something that happened on my way to JFK from Madrid and which I will remember for years to come! That is how inspirational it was, indeed. Read on…

To begin with, things got off to a lovely start when I was seated by the emergency exit. Lots of room and space to open up my notebook and do some serious catchup on stuff I have meant to read for quite some time now. Nice! Next to me, a gentleman in the mid-50s, perhaps, very quiet and very familiar with being on a plane. Very good!

We took off and, like it usually happens, specially in those long flights where you are going to be stuck for several endless hours, my next-seat neighbour and myself started up some casual conversation, probably, as a result of both of us wanting to be polite to one another. Remember, being stuck on a seat for 7 hours and 45 minutes is not that very pleasant, is it? Even more if you are travelling on economy.

Anyway. "What do you do for a living?" - He asked. "Me? Well, I work with computers" (Yes, I know, I always start with that one liner. I guess I don’t want to put people off right away saying that I do Knowledge Management. In the past, more than once, I got weird looks from people when I used to say that, so initially I tend to leave it as vague as I can). "How about you?" -I continued. "I am a beekeeper" -he replied.

WOW! "That surely is interesting! So, you really are a beekeeper, eh?" -I commented back, to which he replied he surely was. All of his life, after having learned the job from his father and his grand-father. Goodness! How cool is that? I got to sit next to someone who has been doing something that I have found truly fascinating for a number of years, but that I never got around finding out some more about it, specially given the recent news about those lovely creatures disappearing in the millions out of the blue in several countries. And growing…

Of course, he right away got my full attention and I think he enjoyed it as well getting all of my attention, while we embarked in one of the most incredible conversations I can remember about one subject that surely I didn’t know anything about, but he had enough patience to explain to me all of the inside-outs of how it actually works. Yes, indeed, fascinating is the word that would certainly describe most of what I have learned during that conversation. Too much to describe it over here, I am sure. Perhaps at some other time. Here is though a link to an article (Spanish-only, unfortunately) that would provide you some more background on the nature of some of the conversations we had.

So after a couple of hours of conversations I asked him why he was always travelling so much to various different countries all over the world and he basically mentioned that he is the president of a local cooperative of beekeepers in Extremadura, who tries to keep things organised and under control, so he gets to travel quite a bit to learn from what other beekeepers in other countries are doing and then share that information with other members of his cooperative. And I went and thought … WHAT?!?!?! Why is it that you do it again?

Well, according to him (Paraphrasing his words, of course), he is part of a community of folks, i.e. the cooperative, with a common and shared mission and a set of goals (i.e. Earn their living as beekeepers), who work collaboratively in getting the job done while contributing to the well being of the environment and he gets to travel to all of those different countries to meet up with other beekeepers -from other communities- so that he can learn, exchange knowledge and collaborate with them into fixing some of the different key issues they face (i.e. Disappearance of the bees, for instance, amongst others), so that when he comes back he gets together with his community and transfers all of that knowledge to his colleagues so that they also acquire that same knowledge and therefore are able to do their jobs better, while contributing to fixing a global problem, locally.

And I went … Whoooaahhhh!!! My goodness! He basically just described my daily job as a Knowledge Manager supporting global communities to empower them to share their knowledge and collaborate with others in order to fix whatever issues they may be facing. Pure KM in very very simple terms. How incredible is that? While we are all focused on trying to find out the killer definition for KM, here we go with this travel-mate of mine describing exactly what it is all about in very simple, yet very effective, terms and without causing a single doubt about it.

When I told him that was exactly the same kind of thing I tend to do on a daily basis but in the IT industry (In computers, that is), he right away got it and we came into the equally rewarding second part of our conversations: the impact of technology in our day to day life, and how excited he was about having access to something so vast, so resourceful and so insightful as the Internet, where he could share information with others while reading through those resources that mattered to him the most and, as a result, become a much better informed individual trying to get the job done while collaboratively working with other members of his community. There I was, sitting next to someone who loved being on the Internet, reading stuff about beekeeping, exchanging e-mails with useful and relevant information, listening to his iPod, travelling with his notebook all over the place, in short, making the best out of what IT had to offer him. And that in his mid-50s! Just brilliant!!!

In the end, and for the first time in years, we actually spent the entire 7 hours and 45 minutes talking about a huge amount of topics that made the trip not only quite enjoyable, but one of those life-enriching experiences that would remain with me for years to come! Remember when I blogged about my meetup with Denham Grey (One of the most relevant KM thought leaders) in Cincinnati last year? This one highlight was just as good, if not even more! So much so that we actually forgot to exchange business cards, or e-mail addresses or simply our names!

Yes, I know it happens. But thank goodness for Google, because thanks to some of the conversations we had I found out that the cooperative’s name is Apihurdes and the name of the gentleman I had some really great conversations with was someone called Anastasio Marcos. And look what he is up to now (Link in Spanish, but basically a consortium).

(What a great pleasure, Anastasio! And I do hope to see you soon at some point! Best of luck in your new adventure!)