As I am back home already from another wonderful event in Madrid (At IBM’s Innovation Summit Pro-voke) and already spent most of my day catching up with things, both at work and outside, I thought I would finish off the day (And get started with the weekend!) by posting this blog post, which has been in my mind for a few weeks now. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. I put together two different versions of this entry, but I wasn’t too much convinced about either of them, more than anything else, because they were poignantly negative. So, in the end, I decided to go with this lighter version of it. Much better.

If you have been following this blog for a while now you would probably know how most of this year I have spent it travelling all over the place participating at various conference events, as well as talking to various different customers around the topic of Social Computing, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration and Communities, amongst some others. You would probably also remember how the number #1 issue I have been experiencing all along has been connectivity, or the lack of, better said.

This blog post is a reflection of what most folks have been talking about mobile connectivity and how pervasive it has become nowadays. Well, allow me to state quite the opposite! All along, whether we like it or not, we have just been living an illusion, a chimera. A myth! And even today I am much more convinced than ever before!

In a very interesting, enlightening and at the same time provocative blog post, my good friend Jevon MacDonald encouraged all Enterprise 2.0 vendors to start paying more and more attention towards the mobile market when designing and making available Mobile 2.0 applications. Well, while he brings in a whole bunch of really good points, I am going to take things even further!

Before we start demanding for Enterprise 2.0 vendors to provide us with Mobile 2.0 apps., let’s get back to basics and ensure we can all GET CONNECTED to the Internet in the first place! Yes, indeed, not matter how cool, user friendly, sexy, helpful, resourceful, appealing, etc. all of these mobile 2.0 apps. would be like, if we CANNOT connect to them, they are useless! Now. And forever!

This is perhaps, to me, the number one caveat from adopting social computing and social networking tools, both inside and outside of the corporate firewall! Not the tools themselves, nor the cultural aspects, nor the knowledge workers themselves (Or the businesses they work for!), but the availability of a stable, reliable and scalable broadband network connection throughout!

That, to me, is the main issue that is stopping us right now from a wider adoption. Specially for those of us who are more mobile than never and who are starting to rely more and more from a good and reliable Internet network connection.

Yes, I know that some of you may well say that things have improved over the last couple of years and everything, and that may well be the case, but this year and, specially ever since I started giving up e-mail at work (And use much more heavily social software instead, therefore living more on the Web), I have been able to prove, time and time again, how such network connectivity is not as pervasive as we thought or expected it to be! Anyone remember a recent conference event they have been to where the Wi-Fi connection has been good throughout the entire event? Right now, I am having problems myself coming up with the name of one of them!

Here is the latest example, which is partly the reason why I am putting together this blog post. As you well know, since mid-September, with the holidays and a couple of business trips, I have been more on the road than working from home. Yet, the connectivity has been horrendous in the three countries I have been to during that time (Spain - Barcelona / Madrid, London & Mechelen, Belgium).

While I have been on holidays in Barcelona the first few days I stayed at a couple of good hotels, right in the city centre, and although they offered FREE Wi-Fi, I wasn’t able to connect to either of them for whatever the reasons. In London, I had a very similar problem while I was presenting at a Web 2.0 conference and in Mechelen much of the same in another hotel right in the city centre!

That’s why a few months back I eventually got the recommendation to finally get a SIM card that would allow me to work not just with voice, but also with data, wherever I would be travelling. And I did. It was Yoigo. And I was happy. And it was all joy. And I thought to myself all of my problems would be solved once and for all! No longer would I need to depend on a network connection other than that one from Yoigo. Ha! Poor thing! A myth! Like I said.

To start with, back in May, and while in Germany, I had a taster of what roaming charges are like using a SIM data card. A few MBs downloaded and a phone bill of nearly 100€! Nice one! Not really!!! (Yes, I know you are going to say I should be using MaxRoam, and I would probably have a look into it, but will it offer me a decent broadband capability or just another analogue one, because if that is the case, I’ll pass & save the money for something more productive!).

Thus, when travelling abroad I realised I would still have to go through the same painful experiences, as I have been going through all along. Then I thought, ok, I can make use of Yoigo within my country. Their SIM data card prices are, indeed, very competitive and probably the best in the market at the moment, but, as you will see in just a paragraph or two, it is just not good enough!

Yes, their pricing model is very competitive and very attractive, but then again, we come to the problem at hand. Their coverage and bandwidth is just appalling! Awful! Terrible is probably a mild word! As bad as having a modem dialling through an analogue line! (Yes, indeed, those kind of speeds!). And it would not matter where you are. While I was on holidays in Barcelona I couldn’t reach most of the Web sites I wanted to go to. While I was in Madrid this week, I had the same issues! Over and over again! And don’t even mention the opportunity to connect consistently to VPN networks. Not a chance either!

Oh, don’t take me wrong. It works! It loads pages, like your e-mail (Which I no longer use myself, remember?) or like http://m.slandr.net (Which is one of the many Twitter mobile Web sites), and which displays very little traffic. But as soon as you go into some heavy Web sites, like most social networking sites, or grabbing your RSS / Atom feeds, or something so relatively simple like loading a simple Web site with a few graphics and images, you can surely put yourself together to wait for two to three minutes before it loads! Yes, two to three minutes! (You see? I didn’t say analogue for nothing).

As you can well imagined, all of what I am talking about above comes from my experiences, while I was in Barcelona and Madrid, but, mainly, in Barcelona. Since I thought such service was rather unacceptable, I decided to call the support folks for Yoigo. And what happened? Well, the usual stuff.

Yoigo is one of those mobile operators that has got a catchy phrase to capture customers: "Verdad Verdadera" (Something like "Truthful Truth"), indicating how they are much much different than other mobile providers, not only on their pricing model(s), but also as far as their support goes! Ha! Too funny! How wrong!

Not to worry, I am not going to share another horror story on my own HelpDesk experience with them. I think you can imagine it by now. However, what I am going to say though is that when contacting them to check out why that response time was so appalling I got two messages back: first one, sorry, we have got a general problem in Barcelona (Sorry, that was not accurate. I had the same problem for the 9 days I was there! And also in Madrid!) and, secondly, a bit more serious than the first one: they wouldn’t guarantee that the SIM card would provide the speeds advertised, so I was advised on something they would not do anything about, because it’s just not part of their covered support.

And I went … WHAT?!?! You kidding me? You may be saying that, but certainly you are more than happy to put the bill together and send it across at the end of the month, right? No matter what. Even though you don’t offer a guarantee it will get connected with the specific speeds mentioned? Hummm, how that does make you different from other providers? Let me tell you something. It doesn’t! It just makes you much of the same. Abusive with your customers with an attitude like you take it or leave it. Your choice! (How wrong, once again!)

Not going to comment much more on it all, because I know nothing is going to happen. I don’t expect them to read this blog post, I don’t expect them to react to my concerns of their NOW high pricing for the very poor / quality of service they provide) and to be honest I just don’t care anymore. I gave them plenty of opportunities to do something about it, and they didn’t. And, well, my opinion today (And, like I just said, I think I have given them far too many opportunities to change things… Sigh) is that Yoigo is just like another mobile provider abusing from their Internet mobile end-users with very high prices and very poor connectivity capabilities, which is really sad, because they were really promising quite a different story!

Yes, I realise I may be asking for too much, i.e. a mobile Internet broadband connection that just works, but to be honest, I am starting to prefer to be disconnected and live without it, than with the growing disappointment and rage of a service I am paying fully for, yet, I cannot make use of it as advertised!

How "truthful truth" (Verdad verdadera) can that be? When will telcos understand, once and for all, that they are the key towards making the bountiful world of the Internet available to us all. That they are just bottlenecks stopping our adoption of such valuable resource as the World Wide Web not just to improve the way we work, but also the way we use it for our personal benefit? That they are missing a HUGE opportunity to partner with Enterprise 2.0 vendors to empower us to get the most out of Social Computing to help us connect with one another across the globe to enhance our own personal business relationships?

When will they realise they are missing out on a GREAT opportunity to build long lasting, fruitful working relationships with those of us who are constantly travelling on the road and who have a growing need to be constantly connected?

When are they going to join the 21st century once and for all? That century of the Knowledge Economy where everything flows and where making connections in the social computing space will become essential to conduct business? Am I just asking for too much? Is that all just that? An illusion? A myth?

Like I said half way through, Jevon mentioned how Enterprise 2.0 vendors need to start paying attention to the mobile market. Well, I am just going to take things into a bit more of a fundamental premise saying that, for that to happen, telcos need to stop being the bottlenecks and become more of the enablers for that interconnected world we have all been longing for all along!

Will they be ready at some point? Will Yoigo ever adopt and embrace their own slogan? Or will they just be like all of the others? Well, I don’t know. We shall see. I am just glad, for now, that I am back home and with a Wi-Fi connection that just works

Have a good one everyone! (The search continues … )

Tags: Yoigo, Mobile Providers, Mobile, Mobile 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Pervasiveness, Connectivity, Internet, Availability, Scalability, Reliability, Accessibility, Mobile Workforce, Telcos, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Communities, Jevon MacDonald, Verdad Verdadera, Broadband, Customer Support, HelpDesk, HellDesk, Bad Customer Support, Twitter, s.landr.net, MaxRoam, Spain, Barcelona, Madrid, London, Mechelen, Belgium, IBM, Innovation, Getting Connected, Constantly Connected, Always ON, Always On Line, Travelling

Last couple of days from last week have been incredibly busy at work and didn’t give me much of a chance to go ahead and create a blog post over here. I guess that being featured on the corporate Intranet Web site to share your story on how you have moved away from e-mail can surely be a hit for various different folks! Well, that’s just what happened last week and still going on this week. Not to worry, I shall be blogging shortly on my take of what has happened last week as far as my new adventure of re-purposing e-mail is concerned.

However, for this blog post I just wanted to share one more thing towards what I call integration nirvana on the Mac! Yes, that is right, if not long ago I mentioned how I was actually quite happy with having Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta for the Mac up and running and how a few days later I managed to get working as well IBM’s Lotus Sametime 8 standalone on the Mac, here we go with the next achievement in that integration nirvana on the Mac!

Yes, that is right! That is a screen shot of my Lotus Notes 8.5 beta for the Mac, fully integrated with the embedded version of IBM’s Lotus Sametime 8 and all of that connected to through the main Messaging server we use at IBM. I know that for most folks this may sound like "Well, big deal! So what?", but to me, this surely confirms the commitment that I can now kiss good-bye my Windows environment and welcome the Mac as my new productivity tool to get the job done at work, just as effectively as I could have done it on Windows, or, better, said, ever so much more effectively!

And it works beautifully, too without hindering my machine to a haul whenever I have multiple applications open. In this case the MacBook Pro is rather happy to allow me to keep working without having to go through innumerous issues.

Next challenge? Getting Lotus Sametime Unyte to work on the Mac from a presenter’s perspective to do seamless screen / file sharing! Wooohooo! Full integration nirvana coming through!!

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Windows, Apple, Mac, MacBook Pro, Lotus Notes, Notes, Lotus Notes 8.5, Notes 8.5, Beta, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Sametime 8, Productivity Tools, Knowledge Tools, Collaboration, Instant Messaging, Groupware, Social Software, Social Computing, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Collaboration Tools, e-mail, email

I am sure you would all remember how excited I was about making my full transition from my Windows notebook to my recently acquired MacBook Pro with the installation, and successful setup!, from the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta client for the Mac. So far things have been running pretty smooth and I can certainly confirm that the user experience is just from another world! It simply works! Well, to add further up into the excitement, here I am putting together this blog post where I am sharing what, to me, was the last collaboration tool I needed to have it in my Mac to completely move away from the Windows environment. And never come back! Yes, I am talking about IBM’s Lotus Sametime 8!

Up till not so long ago I was actually using Adium to connect to our internal Sametime server(s) and must confess that the user experience was not as good, probably because of how much I have gotten used to other Sametime related real-time collaboration tools, like Notesbuddy, IBM Community Tools and lately Sametime 7.5.1. The cons have been so numerous that all along it felt kind of crippled, blind, numb, so restricted, in short, such a sense of not getting the most out of it all.

So when today I had the chance to finally manage to connect my Lotus Sametime 8 to our internal Sametime server(s), I was just ecstatic! And big time!! I am back in business! And enjoying every minute of it with one IM client that expands further and beyond around the concept of Instant Messaging, real-time collaboration and social networking across teams and communities. I am sure that during the course of Lotusphere 2008 you had a chance to get some exposure on the huge buzz around what is happening in this space with Sametime 8. Well, not to worry, as time goes by, I am hoping to be able to blog some more about it so that you folks get a chance to see what I meant when I said, I am back in business!!

For now, here is a lovely screen shot I took today with Skitch (Whoooaaahhh, do I love this massive productivity tool quite a bit or what?!?!)  of Sametime 8 running quite happily on my MacBook Pro (Contact list not showing to protect the privacy from people, by the way, in case you are wondering why it is showing empty):

Rock on!!

Tags: IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Windows, Mac, MacBook Pro, Lotus, Lotus Notes 8, Notes 8.5, Notes 8.5 Beta, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Sametime 8, Sametime 7.5.1, Adium, Notesbuddy, IBM Community Tools, ICT, Lotusphere2008, Skitch, Productivity Tools, Collaboration, Online Collaboration, Real-Time Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Software, Plugins, Eclipse

Remember when not long ago I created a blog post where I was mentioning that one of the things I was really looking forward to from the IBM Lotusphere 2008 event was getting my hands on the new Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta for the Mac? Well, things have moved on from the time where I was mentioning I was having a couple of issues with it and over the weekend I have just managed to fix them by simply doing a replace of the mail file template with the latest release of the v8 mail file template. And now… it works!!

Actually, it rocks, because, as you would be able to see from the screen shot, I have reached Inbox zero on top of it and it surely looks rather nice being able to play with a very solid release, even though it is still beta, and getting rid of all of the e-mail that may have come over the weekend. Oh, and at the same time check out some of the nifty features that are coming along, like the embedded RSS / Atom feed reader client that, although simplistic, it sees to be the only one keeping up with the heavy update of Web sites like Twitter.

W00t!! Yes, indeed, can you imagine? My mail box running hand in hand next to my Twitter feed? How cool is that? And that is just the beginning, because I am surely going to enjoy this beta release before we move into the next one. First, time now to explore all of the different capabilities, like installing plugins, hacking the Welcome / Home page, etc. etc.

Who said that Mondays couldn’t be fun? Well, mine is so far…

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Lotus Notes, Notes, Notes 8, Notes 8.5, Notes 8.5 Beta, Mac, MacBook Pro, Apple, Notes Client, Productivity Tools, Performance, Eclipse, Lotusphere, Lotusphere2008, Twitter, Syndication, Inbox Zero

Like I have mentioned in another blog post yesterday, this surely was one of the major announcements I was actually really looking forward to during the IBM Lotusphere event… And now that I am back at work, I am just this close to having it fully operational, and running pretty smooth, too, … on the Mac!!

Like someone I know would say … W00t!!!

(I can’t wait to have those issues sorted out and start using Notes 8.5 on the Mac running faster than anything I have seen so far, both on Windows and the Mac!!)

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Lotus Notes, Notes, Notes 8, Notes 8.5, Notes 8.5 Beta, Mac, MacBook Pro, Apple, Windows, Notes Client, Productivity Tools, Performance, Eclipse, Lotusphere, Lotusphere2008

What happens when you find out that your Internet connection has been down for two days in a row and with very little you can do about it to try to fix it? I guess some people would take a couple of days off, others would get some stuff done around the house and, finally, some others would be anxiously waiting for it to come back to life as soon as possible and therefore would keep playing around in front of their computers for hours and hours no end. Well, in my case it was different. Yes, that is right. The last couple of days my Internet connection has been down. Again. Something that I couldn’t do anything about, or so I was told. Since Saturday afternoon till Monday late noon I haven’t been able to do anything other than watching the magic screen hoping it would pop up a message when ready to go. But nothing came through till a few hours ago after two painful days without being connected. I guess you tend to appreciate what you have, when you don’t have it any longer, right?

Now this was happening right after I came back from holidays and it was probably the last thing I wanted to go through, specially contemplating the massive catchup I had to go through. Still, it happened. So after the massive catastrophe I’ve been experiencing with the loss of loads and loads of feed reading materials with Omea Pro, I thought about taking a much more proactive approach towards things and, finally, decided to venture into trying out what I think is one of the most impressive applications from the new Mac Leopard system: Time Machine.

You would remember how in the past I mentioned how I have successfully upgraded my MacBook Pro to Leopard in just a few simple-enough-to-follow steps. Ever since I did it I have been enjoying some of the really nifty new features put together, but I never thought I would be trying out Time Machine so soon. Yet with the huge mess I’ve just been through with Omea Pro I thought what a better way of getting things going with Time Machine today, now that I cannot really do much work without being connected to the Internet? WOW!! What an experience!!

During the Christmas holiday, I actually got two external hard drives as presents and after having moved all of the information away from my Windows machine, I thought I would engage further with the next challenge: making use of Time Machine on the Mac. Well, I am using the word challenge here, but must say that it has been everything but that! In just a few very easy to follow steps I have been able to put one of the hard drives to good use and start backing up my essential Mac files. And all of that within a matter of seconds!!

Then a couple of hours later to finish off doing all of the backups and before I knew it everything was ready to go!! As easy as that! I have now got all of my Windows and Mac stuff fully backed up with Time Machine and I surely feel much much better! Backing your stuff in real time should be as effective and efficient as this particular application does. And the way to navigate through it to find your stuff? Goodness! That is even better!!! I am surely loving it!

And now that I come to think about it, having lost over three years of Web feed readings may have been a good thing, after all, because thanks to that unfortunate incident I decided to take the plunge and start making use of Time Machine, way before I was even thinking about giving it a try. And so far it is looking incredibly better than whatever I would have expected in the past! Just brilliant! If backing up stuff from your computer was ever designed to be elegant, smart, graceful and effective then Time Machine is your solution! And without a single doubt!!

I just wished that such an option would have been available for my Windows notebook. Unfortunately, the two backups I had didn’t work and therefore lost it all. Hopefully, now that I got everything sorted out to work with Time Machine I may no longer be running into the different issues I’ve gone through the end of last year and beginning of this one.

If you haven’t tried out Time Machine just yet and you are using Leopard on a Mac, let me take this opportunity to encourage you all to get yourself an external hard drive and start making use of it. It will all just as easy as plug and play, select a couple of options and start backing up! Nothing else needed! Oh and all of that taking place in the background, while you may be working on something else, and without taking a huge amount of resources! Another big plus!! Once again, just getting stuff done! Because that’s how computers were designed to work in the first place, right? … And I am surely glad that someone has taken that task and provide us with an application that, if anything, is state of the art, unprecedented and a must-have at all costs. Just the way I want it: stuff that works! And beautifully!

Tags: Mac, Apple, MacBook Pro, MBP, Time Machine, Backup, Back up, Omea Pro, Productivity-Tips, Productivity-Tools, Effectiveness, Efficient, Elegance, Ease of Use, Smart, Beautiful Design