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This is NOT photoshopped! Just cropped a bit.

Two companies are here with tools to facilitate blogging in schools. Of course, this is pretty tricky to do right. In a world where authorities are blocking access in a CYA fashion, it’s nice to see these tools here to allow kids to blog and email in a safe and controlled way.

ePals has a nice looking system, and a good team here at the show. ePals is cool because it allows kids to interact in a safe environment - but interact with other schools around the world. They are approaching this as a world-wide linking thing rather than the simple and lame approach of just blocking access to blogs. Their UI is nice and clean, friendly, easy and even includes a translation feature - this is a REALLY cool idea. It’s nice to think of kids being able to communicate with other school kids in Spain, say. They are doing the same with email, and appear to be leaders in this  field.

The other company here doing similar stuff is Gaggle.net. They have a blogging component, but seem to be focused on email. They offer the same translation options, but include some anti-pornography stuff, and monitoring.

I’m down in San Fran for COSN - a networking show for school teachers, and adminstrators. Mitel has a booth here, showing a cool school telephony app we put together, and a broadcast app that the Mitel Custom Apps group put together that uses IP speakers to broadcast throughout a school.

Feedback is along the lines of:

• “COOL” you can take attendance using a phone.
• OR, uhm, WHY would I want to take attendance using a phone?

Really, the coolest stuff we’ve done is the broadcast alert using the phones themselves. You can go to a web page on a PC, select a broadcast alert message, click “Send” and the alert shows up on every phone in the school - complete with blinking lights, a message on screen, including an evacuation route map, and an audio announcement that plays an alert sound, and says what to do. What’s cool, is that this uses the built-in voicemail system in the 3300 for the announcement - so no extra hardware required. Very cool.

One company with some cool stuff here is Promethean - they have a very nice looking educational application, with lots of interactive stuff, and these really cool little remotes that let the class interact, vote, and contribute to what’s going on. Their UI looks REALLY good - very clean and easy to use, yet powerful.

My brother is flying down tomorrow - we’ll be touring the town, including dinner at Chez Panisse, one of the best restaurants in the US! I’ll let you know how that goes…

Here are some pictures from San Francisco.

Integrating phones and PCs has been talked about for a long time now, but it’s rarely done well, if at all. I couldn’t even find any examples of this sort of integration in a quick web search - so we’ll use some softphones for our examples.

Designers seem to think that when using a phone via a PC, we want it to look like a phone! For some crazy reason, we’ll want to press keys on screen that look like the buttons on our phone, and we’ll want the same display. The reasons for this are obvious: The user is “used” to this interface, or the designers have simply ported the in-phone firmware to a PC, and wrapped it with an image of the phone. Or, maybe the phone started out as a lab simulator, got seen by marketing, and turned into a product.

Here’s a couple of examples:

Cisco

And Avaya:

These lovely bits of s/w engineering are great for debugging your phone programming, but suck as a phone replacement, even if you’re on the road. Who wants to look at a HUGE image of a phone on screen, even in Cisco’s “Screen-Only” view!

These things are hard to dial, hard to manipulate, and just plain huge!

The buttons on a phone are designed to be easy to press with your fingers, to provide tactile feedback, to be designed for the size of average fingers and hands, to be easy to manufacture, and to fit in your office. NONE of this translates to an effective UI on a PC screen.

Trying to take those design values, and building a PC-based phone is just silly.

What we did:

• We built the tiniest app we could,
• We started with a bunch of buttons, but quickly narrowed it down to two,
• We integrated with Active Directory and your Outlook contacts, so your phonebook is always up-to-date and accessible,
• We integrated with LCS and MSN Messenger for presence,
• We integrated with MSN Desktop search - so you can find things like files and emails based on caller ID,
• We pause your music when you’re on the phone,
• We’ll pop up an extremely unobtrusive toast window when an incoming call occurs (you can turn this off),
• If you want, we’ll open an Outlook contact, or do an MSN Desktop search on incoming call,
• You can drag a phone number into the wee text box, and we’ll dial it,
• You can highlight a number in ANY APP, and click one key - and we’ll dial it,
• We set your MSN presence to “On the phone” when you’re on the phone,
• We’ll set you MSN presence to Do not disturb when you set Do not disturb on your phone, and visa versa,
• And, we made it as small as possible!
• And, we made it smaller! This app runs down in your taskbar, or can be run completely from a tray icon!

Simply type a couple of characters of the first or last name (or company) of the person you want to call, and immediately, a list pops up with all the matches!

The app searches your corporate Active Directory and your Outlook contacts. It finds all phone numbers and pops ‘em up. Now, simply choose a number and click or hit Enter.

When you’re on a call, you can control the phone, put calls on hold, hang up, all from this wee UI.

When an incoming call occurs, the Caller ID is shown in the text box. You’ll see the caller’s name and number. You can create a contact with a click, do a MSN Desktop Search, program a speed dial, all with a click or two.

We think this is desktop telephony done right!

This application is available at the end of March for the Mitel Navigator, and a few weeks later for the new Mitel 5300 phone sets.

Update:

You can find the Mitel Navigator version of this application HERE.
You can find the Mitel 5330/5340 version of this application HERE. (soon)

I’m heading down to San Francisco and San Jose for the next couple of weeks to cover the COSN educational trade show, and then the Embedded Systems Conference.

We’re thinking about creating some EDU telephony applications so the COSN conference should be a good place to check out what’s happening in this space.

Our attendance at the ESC is less assured - we’re still waiting to hear from the organizers whether we’ll be allowed to attend. Wish us luck!

Mitch Brisebois over at SensoryMetrics posted an interesting entry about a site where you can check to see if your website or blog is blocked in China!

As Mitch says, we’re in the “cool crew” - we’re blocked!

I’m pretty sure that every blog hosted on WordPress is blocked. I tried our other sites: www.InGeniusPeople.com and www.ReviewOttawa.com - and they were both in the clear.

How cool is that!

So, we still can’t send emails from our Blackberries. We tried for two days to fix this ourselves, and finally called RIM. Remember that this was a RIM Blackberry Enterprise Server installation that has been functioning flawlessly since it’s original (and harrowing) install.

Monday, after waiting for TWO HOURS, a support technician answered, and we were redirected to a knowledge-base article, then pretty much hung up upon.

And that didn’t fix anything.

Tuesday evening we called back, waited on hold for hours, then had a pleasant 2 hour call with a RIM tech support guy in Singapore, who went over our entire Blackberry Enterprise Server installation with us, then decided that the problem was actually a Microsoft failure, and directed us to a Microsoft knowledge-base article.

And that didn’t fix anything.

But, we’re a bit further. Apparently anyone with a Blackberry, who ALSO has admin priviledges can no longer SEND mail from their Blackberries.

What I can’t understand is that we’re having this huge issue, a local hospital is having this issue, but I don’t see it being reported anywhere in the blogosphere!

Update: WE’RE BACK!!!! Our blackberries can send mail again! We updated to the latest service pack (the brand-new SP2) on our servers, then updated some DLL’s (CDO files), re-ran the DST patch, ran the set-send-as script as mentioned in Matt Roberts’ comment. Note, we had run this script before, but it hadn’t worked. It all sounds pretty simple in retrospect, but it was quite the pain while in progress…

So, it wasn’t quite post-apocolyptic as failures go, but we’ve certainly had a rash of issues that may or may not be related to the DST change this weekend.

• We can’t send mail from our Blackberries. This is apparently a known issue with the Blackberry Enterprise Server, and we have tried dozens of “fixes” all weekend. Still can’t send mail.
• A hospital just down the road is having the same issue with its Blackberries. Nobody can send mail! What the heck does THIS have to do with a tiny DST fix? What is RIM doing about this?
• A ton of my appointments in Outlook are off by an hour. It appears that any appointments created by someone else are off by an hour. Ones I’ve created myself are OK.
• The time in our Terrastation is off - it’s an hour ahead of what it should be! Like, it skipped ahead by TWO hours in celebration of DST. So, this is screwing up our builds.
• A hard disk in our Terrastation has died. Luckily, it’s limping along OK in a failure mode till we swap in a new disk.
• My ReplayTV box has died between Saturday and Sunday. It just displays “Please Wait” on screen. This REALLY sucks since this is an old ReplayTV that includes the “automatically skip commercials” option that can’t be purchased any more. And, it’s the ONLY reliable PVR in our house since the Rogers Scientific Atlanta 8300HD sucks so much.
• Any shows that were scheduled to record on the Rogers Scientfic Atlanta 8300 HD on Sunday did not record properly - but, shows scheduled for later in the week are OK somehow.
• We are not a large company, but our IT guy was working on upgrading our workstations, and pushing upgrades out to our Blackberries for the week prior to this weekend. So that’s a cost to us as well.

So, we’ve had a number of issues - and we’re a small shop. Multiply this by millions of companies around the world and the true cost of this DST thing become apparent - it’s billions of dollars!

And, what do you wanna bet that on the day that the DST *usually* changes, there will be a ton more issues as PC’s that weren’t upgraded decide to update to “DST.”

Fun times!

Update: We run a bunch of stuff on vitual servers, mostily for testing. We noticed that  our virtual servers had actually jumped forward by TWO hours over the weekend. Looks like the DST change occured once on the host machine, then once again on each of the virtual servers! Locked us all out of LCS on those machines! SO, beware if you are using virtual servers!!!

Stopped by the Branham 300 event last Thursday, straight off the plane from Orlando and VoiceCon. Wayne Gudbranson gave a nice welcoming speech, followed by a few words from Mayor Larry O’Brian. Larry gave a few callouts to his buddies in the crowd, then went into handshake mode, circulating among the crowd of be-suited executives.

Here’s a story with coverage focusing on Ottawa.

Here’s some photos of the event.

We spent the final day of the Expo part of the show doing tons more demos of our software, and zipping around to all the other exhibitors, checking out their wares, and scoring some freebees for the kids back home.

Some thoughts:

• Microsoft is really entering the VoIP market. They’ve clearly identified this as a major source of revenue for themselves, and are demoing a pretty solid solution. But, not perfect. The phones they’re using do demo their stuff are really cheap USB phones. Sure, they have a handset and speakerphone, but these are not business quality phones by any means. At a time when most phone manufacturers are adding hi-fi audio, these phone sets just don’t cut it. Also, their system is good for basic business use, but the larger manufacturers have been spending years adding needed features for hotels and businesses that really take advantage of the telephony platform - from things like sophisticated voicemail features for hotels (clear your voicemail when you check out) to things like twinned cellular phones that cleanly handle a call being answered on the cellular. Also, your phone system is dead when your server or your PC is dead. This is really a show-stopper for anyone with some real-world experience with Microsoft’s product line. Microsoft is certainly a force we’ll all have to deal with, but they aren’t there yet for anything but the 3-10 user office.
• I was really surprised at the offerings from Cisco, Avaya and Nortel. From the point of view of the services we can provide on a phone (full, sophisticated, web applications) - the competitors offerings are terrible. Many of them rely on a Citrix backend - you need to set up and install a full Citrix server to use it. And the applications you can develop can only use plain HTML. So, forget any of the cool live presence applications we’ve developed. You are stuck with static content on the phone. And, all three have terrible displays - very small, hard to read, very difficult to format content for, and they have very few push-buttons - so it’s terrible for navigation. Really the dark ages. If you are interested in any sort of interesting content on your phone, forget about Cisco, Avaya and Nortel. Go with Mitel.

Today started early, with a VIP preview at the Mitel booth. CEO Don Smith gave a short talk, then we started doing demos of our new technology - and literally haven’t stopped all day!  This is a long show -  it closes at 7pm each day and started at 10:30am for us this morning.

Here’s today’s pictures on Flickr.

I did a bit more digging on SIP enabled appliances today - Tom Hoover at Valcom who was quite involved in the engineering of their SIP based paging server. It’s a nice system where you can attach entrance-way speaker boxes with a call button. The button press initiates a SIP session - allowing the user to talk to a person, or a VM system, and the system can send a command back to energize a relay contact in the box for door lock control. Their system also allows full SIP based paging, with message storage, and the ability to handle live, recorded or scheduled messages, and up to 65,000 speakers (!!!). Nicely done.

Sun is showing a cool thin client PC BUILT INTO THE BASE OF A PHONE! Talk about saving space. The system even allows for call center users to log in and out by simply shoving a card into a slot on the front of the unit,  like a waitress at some automated restaurants. Very cool.

WAY TOO MANY people are walking around with Bluetooth headsets. They will soon realize how silly they look.

And, there’s a courtyard outside near the show which I’ve dubbed Cellphone Alley - at any time of day there are 10-20 people walking around doing the “phone walk” where you talk, and wander about, shuffling your feet or kicking at some pebbles. Pretty funny.

Check the pictures for some Alligator shots. For those who don’t believe the hotel has live alligators in the atrium. The alligators and the turtles live happily together on a rock, waiting for their pm feeding.

Day One at VoiceCon was pretty exciting - we spent the morning getting our booth ready - last minute tune-ups on the demos and applications we’re showing. I get the sense that Mitel is demonstrating a ton of really new innovative stuff compared to what I saw at other booths - lots of same-old same-old…

Pictures from today are here on Flickr.

Some highlights from the show today:

• Asterisk/Digium showing a hardware appliance running Asterisk Business Editon, with 8 analog ports, 4 lan ports, and in a really sexy package about the size of two paperback books. You configure the hardware through a browser, plug it into your lan, plug in some phone lines or analog phones and go! You’re online. It appeared to have a CF card slot - probably for voicemail storage. Very nicely done. This company will go far.

• is||coord from Switzerland was showing their SIP softphone - with a nice API. I’ll be talking to them in more detail in the next couple of months. Odd name.

• Saw a couple of companies with SIP speakers - for public address systems in schools, etc. Cool market I had heard about, but hadn’t realized how big this is. I guess if you’re a speaker company, this is the only way to innovate - but it’s a really useful item - since it eliminates having to run more cables around. I guess we’ll run everything off of an ethernet cable before too long.

• Avaya is giving away Segways, and I am SO entering this contest. They are giving away huge-ass off road Segways. Very cool.

• Microsoft has some really nice stuff happening with Office Communicator and the latest Exchange server. You can truely build a PBX with voicemail with MS products now. Scary for the old-guard. Of course they have really nice integration between applications - assuming you are running the latest version of EVERYTHING. So, start saving your upgrade pennies. Microsoft is working with Mitel - their integrated solution appears to be the most advanced of the big phone companies.

• Most of the phones are still pretty lame (are you listening Cisco, Avaya, Nortel?) The screens are small, and they just don’t get the power of running decent applications on the phone. Nortel’s solution is to run a Citrix back end and have the phone be a dumb device that displays static images. Also, they said that users don’t want this functionality, and are worried about security. I imagine they’ll change their tune when they actually release something. I think what users actually want is powerful, useful applications - that are secure.

The Gaylord Palms is impressive. Their atrium is HUGE, and has Alligators. How cool is that!

I’m heading down to Orlando tomorrow for the VoiceCon tradeshow - I’ll be in the Mitel booth unveiling a bunch of terrific new software we’re releasing this month. Here’s the deets:

• Integrated Office Navigator and Integrated Office Companion - these two desktop applications work hand in hand with the Mitel Navigator phone and the new Mitel 5330 and 5340 phones. They are fantastic desktop applications that behave exactly the way PC based phone apps should - they are as near to invisible as you want them to be, utterly friendly, fast, and provide a ton of really useful features. At the minimum, the apps are simply a tray icon - or you can expand it out to be a desk-band application running in the task bar. The apps tie into Microsoft Exchange, Outlook and  Active Directory, to pull up your contacts with a couple of keystrokes of their name or company. They also tie into LCS or MSN Messenger for presence. If you want to call someone, type a couple of characters of their name, up it pops, click enter, and you’re dialing them! The apps have tons more features - pausing music when you’re on the phone, popping up contacts or MSN Desktop search on incoming calls, dialing highlighted numbers in *any* application, and on and on. VERY VERY cool applications.

• We’re also showcasing our new Intelligent Directory application, which runs ON THE 5330 or 5340 PHONE ITSELF! This amazing application allows you to access your Outlook contacts or your corporate Active Directory straight from the phone, with an extremely simple UI, full searching, customized speed dial list, automatic “most recently called” lists, etc. It’s a really fun application.

• We’re also demonstrating some financial applications in conjunction with the Mitel Turret phone, and some really cool Educational (K-12) applications for the 5330 and 5340 phones, built on the Mitel HTML Toolkit application platform. The EDU app includes tons of features like  managing attendance, dialing students and their parents, and some really cool broadcast announcement applications and duress capability.

We’re at the show from Monday to Wednesday, and we’d be very happy to demonstrate our stuff if you happen to drop by the booth!

Check back for more highlights from the show.