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

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

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

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 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

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

Anyway, it all started with making use of Adobe AIR to play around with a couple of Twitter clients: Snitter and Twhirl, which was causing some kind of weird white screen Windows crashes. Looks like Adobe AIR Beta 3 still produces those crashes on the Windows machine. And lo and behold one of those crashes, while I have been away on vacation, is the one that has caused me an enormous deal of trouble.

Yes, that is right. I thought, ok, Windows crashed again. No problem, used to it for a while now, I would re-restart and back to normal. Or so I thought. When trying to get Omea Pro back to life I got a nasty error that didn’t allow me to start up the application as normal. It was asking me if I would want to load the data from previous backups. I tried a couple of them I had from the past and to no avail either. I still couldn’t load it and slowly started to get worried about the whole thing.

I searched and searched all over the place for similar symptoms to the one I was experiencing and found nothing! I reported the problem in the Omea Pro forums nearly a month ago and not a single word! I contacted several folks from the support team and still nothing! I just couldn’t get Omea Pro started to get back to my archives and daily feed readings.

By then I was seriously doubting I would ever be back to normal with my favourite feed reader client. No response in the forums, nor from the support team, nothing I could do to fix it that I didn’t try out already. Yes, I know, plain desperate!!

Well, for those folks who may have been using Omea Pro for a while you would remember how it used to an application that you would have to pay some money for. Then after a while something happened and it became freeware and, supposingly, Open Source. And, unfortunately, that is where it went down hill, because from there onwards the lack of support and commitment to a great product has left it in shambles and without a clear guidance of where it will be heading. Perhaps the next step would be to kill it. Permanently. Forever.

I know that is not a good thing, nor a good signal for the thousands and thousands of people who are currently using it. But let’s face it, if you are in trouble, you are on your own. No support, no commitment to help out. Nothing. You and your machine hoping it will be fixed. But it won’t. That is just what happened to me in the last few weeks, while I was away during the holidays.

End result? Hummm, how can I say it? … I still cannot access Omea Pro, getting the same error messages, help is not coming any time soon from anywhere, not even from the people who supposingly fully support it. And to my increasing frustration, while all of this was happening, I realised that I would no longer be able to access over 100,000 articles from several hundred feeds over the course of the last three years that I have been accumulating! All of that is now… gone!!! For good! But that is not all of it.

One of the great features from Omea Pro was the fact that you could create various different annotations for each of the articles, so over the course of the last few months I developed the habit of drafting blog posts directly into Omea Pro which I could then paste into my favourite offline blogging clients and share across various different blogs, both internally and externally. Alas, that is also now gone!!! All of those drafts I had put together and which were going to hit my blogs at some point in time are now locked and cannot get them back! OUCH!!! That is exactly how I felt when I first realised about it!

By that time I was in full panic mode. Losing over 100,000 articles of feed readings is not pleasant at all, but losing the several dozens of drafts I had is just something I am not going to get back any time soon either! Double ouch!! So … fast forward to today, nearly a month afterwards. Still cannot access Omea Pro, lost the over 100,000 articles from all of my feeds from the last few years, lost as well all of the different drafts I had piled up over the course of months. Lost my faith in technology. For good. At least, till I can ever manage to get that data back, which is not looking good thus far, I must say.

Oh, and all of this happening as well with the several dozen feeds I have got for behind-the-firewall resources. So if anyone out there was hoping I would be sharing a particular blog post, both internal and external, on a particular blog entry from last year, I am afraid that is a thing of the past! It’s not going to happen. At least, not any time soon!

So is this the fate of freeware, Open Source? Can we rely on such applications where the support goes from being incredibly good to incredibly bad, or non-existent, in just a few weeks? I surely hope that this is not the case, but right now I feel like I have just lost three years of my Internet / Intranet history. Just like that! In a split second! And without remedy!!

And to think that I have been recommending Omea Pro all along as one of the best, if not the most powerful, of offline feed reader clients?!?! I think that this is going to change. And now! If you are one of the folks who I have been recommending this particular feed reader for some time, I guess that by now you may be worried about what might happen. Yes, you should be. I wouldn’t want any of you folks having to go through the same thing I have gone through in the last few weeks. Thus here I am, writing this blog post encouraging you all to start moving away from Omea Pro and as soon as you can. Because once you encounter a problem, you are on your own, with no further help, nor support and wishing you had changed whenever you had the chance.

My chance was when I moved to the MacBook Pro and started making heavy use of Vienna, which I really really like at the moment, and which has made my life easier back again. I mentioned I had the chance, because I wanted to migrate the stuff from Omea over to the Mac, but I didn’t do it fast enough and now I am facing the consequences. Never again, I tell you. So much so, that was the last drop that filled the glass for my final move away from Windows. Right after that happened I haven’t looked back! I haven’t even turned on any longer the Windows box. Perhaps wanted to save myself the grief of knowing the data is there, but cannot access it. Perhaps it was just the right move and start with a clean slate for 2008. No regrets. Who knows.

The thing is that I am surely never going to recommend Omea Pro any longer to anyone who may be asking for options. I know I lost three years of Web feed reading and several dozens of draft blog posts, so the last thing I would want to do is to send you through to the same hassle. No, I am not going to do that. If you are looking for a Windows based offline feed reader, I have been hearing lots of good feedback with regards to FeedDemon, which, by the way, is now available for free, and which I hope doesn’t go through the same situation that Omea Pro ended up in.

Oh, and if you are using a Mac, Vienna still rules.

Finally, one other thing you may want to do is to have a backup plan. I got myself two actually: BlogLines and Google Reader. Although right now I am not using either of them. Still prefer the Mac & Vienna experiences. And if you haven’t tried them out, by all means, go ahead and do that. You will see what I mean.

And with this long blog post (I really needed to get it out of my chest) I can certainly conclude that my full migration into the Mac environment is now completed. Yes, I know, it was a painful ending, a very painful ending, but … the future is bright and that is what matters.

Tags: JetBrains, Omea, Omea Pro, Syndication, Feed Reader, RSS, Atom, Windows, Adobe, Adobe AIR, Snitter, Twhirl, Twitter, Technology, Web, Internet History, Mac, MacBook Pro, MBP, Apple, Google Reader, BlogLines, Simplicity, Ease of Use, Productivity Tools, Vienna, Freeware, Open Source, Knowledge Snippets, Knowledge Tools, Information Tools, Productivity Tools, Support, Lack of Support, Commitment, Lack of Commitment

I was so excited to see how the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland is driving innovation in the AR space into a new level that I took the opportunity of taking a whole bunch of pictures with my Nokia N95. Now the quality may not be that outstanding as you would have expected, but I would include over here as well a good number of the pictures I took. And for the rest you would have to head over to my Flickr account, where I have put them all together.

But for now, I am just going to point you to the presentation materials which I have already uploaded into Slideshare and which you can find the direct link to them over here, so that you can just sit down, relax, and enjoy the trip down the Augmented Reality that Charles took us through over the course of one hour. Just fantastic! And, if not, judge for yourself:

You would have to agree with me that it surely is quite an interesting slide deck. Well, don’t forget to check out the section with the different videos so that you can see and get exposed to some of the stuff that these folks have been doing all along in the name of innovation. Some excellent stuff!!

Tags: IBM, iForum, iForum 2007, Innovation Forum, Zurich, Switzerland, Events, Innovation Events, Innovation, Slideshare, Charles Woodward, Learning, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, AR, VTT, Finland, Technical Research Centre of Finland, Technical Research Centre, Flickr, Nokia, N95