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I am forever amazed at the creativity of human beings. Look at all the companies we have produced. The trillions of dollars of wealth we have created. It is amazing that our combined genius has dramatically raised the standard of living worldwide over the last 100 years. We should be proud.

But any tool can be used for good as well as bad and the human brain has also been incredible in its ability to perpetrate crimes. In my early computer classes I was amazed to learn of a computer crime which involved bank programmers who were skimming non-rounded interest into a separate account. In other words taking the fraction of a cent of interest that didn't get added to bank accounts and diverting them to another account which the programmers owned.

In the above case the programmers were foiled when the computer system went down and manual systems had to be used. An account with millions of dollars was found as a result.

It seems other early computer crimes like hacking a password files on a UNIX systems to insert a malicious program made famous by the book Cookoo's Egg are now quaint in comparison to the varied computer crimes of today.

Let's explore some recent areas where the human mind has been used to either bend or break the law.

There are also millions of spam sites which fool users into clicking on ads disguised as content. Then there is the problem of competitors clicking on the ads of one another to drive up the marketing cost of the respective competitor.

Social Network Click Fraud

Now the latest trend in the world of click fraud is targeted at Facebook where malicious users create thousands of Facebook accounts (you can hire companies to get these for you at 10 cents per account). The example in this article cites India as a place where such companies exist and coincidentally this is the same country where the Craigslist scam discussed above originated from.

With the global economy being in the toughest shape it has been in for many years and the proliferation of internet connectivity there has never been more opportunity for the human brain to come up with money-making schemes which either bend the rules or break the law.

This of course drives up the cost for everyone else and sadly in many cases means people who aren't aware of the pitfalls on the web are duped out of their money.

In order to help reduce these problems we need much tougher international laws policing malicious users. It is so easy to perpetrate a crime against a person in a different country while remaining anonymous. We need to really have stricter laws in every country and serious enforcement must take place when people are caught. Let's set better examples of the malicious users who are caught so the next scammer or spammer thinks twice before going out and committing that computer crime.

While I do admire the ingenuity of the human brain, it is time for law enforcement to step it up so these users can be locked away forever. Where do we put them all? Well, from what I hear, there should be some space opening up in Guantanamo Bay very soon.

Having never had a chance to write a review about a satellite phone I was pretty motivated to respond yes to the good people at Iridium when they asked if I wanted to run their newest device the 9555 phone through its paces. In order to do a thorough review I took it with me on my travels and made calls in various places where there was typically no cell coverage.

The device itself won't get mistaken for an iPhone - it is many times thicker and has a smaller black and white screen. But what it does do better than any gadget you might read about on popular gadget sites is work everywhere - except indoors. It is a bulletproof device which was designed with users in mind. Iridium execs explain that reliability is key with this phone and so is durability.

It seems like it is made of the same material as the black box on an airplane.

It is also interesting to note that when a company is sure about their market they can really cater to it. The evidence is the company's terminology in their brochure:

 THE ULTIMATE SATELLITE PHONE

The Iridium 9555 is the ultimate in dependable mobile communications. It is a ruggedly built tool, not a toy. It won't play games, take pictures, or play MP3s. What it will do is work. Everywhere. Without exception. Small, sleek and easy to use, it is waterproof and dust and shock resistant. Engineered to withstand the world's toughest environments, Iridium phones have never been more efficient, reliable and effective.

When you open the box the phone comes in you are presented with adapters for every country in the world and just trying to figure out which would work in Sardinia presented me with a challenge. Hint - it was of the two-prong variety.

Here are some shots of the Iridium 9555 from Sardinia

So is it easy to use? Dead easy, yes. I was impressed with the call quality and it even worked when I went indoors - as long as there wasn't a lot of steel over my head. There is also data modem connectivity I didn't get a chance to try.

Other than that there are the standard mobile phone features like SMS, voicemail, address books, etc.

As you might expect, Iridium hasn't launched an app store but one wonders if there isn't an opportunity for specialized applications pertaining to the markets they cater to such as military, oil and gas, etc.

If I had to ask for more features, a camera would be high on my list as sending MMS messages from remote locations back to the home office could be useful. Video too is another area the company will have to deal with eventually as there may be an opportunity to stream video or send clips in places only this device has connectivity.

Other than that, the Iridium 9555 just plain works. It's looks won't make you the envy of the patrons of your favorite bar or dance club but you will certainly be the popular one later that evening when the party moves to a place with poor or no cell phone reception.

We are in a time of unprecedented financial turmoil and it is apparent to me that productivity needs to increase to help us stabilize the job losses and hopefully get our economy back into growth mode. It is devices like the Pre which will in fact help corporations boost productivity tremendously. Improved communications flow is the lubrication economies need to operate at peak efficiency.

Palm Pre

It's been an event-filled couple of weeks with the rollout of the Palm Pre and new iPhone 3G S and the new 3.0 iPhone OS/software version. I did get a chance to use the Pre and am impressed with how much it reminds me of the iPhone but with more functionality - multitasking and a menu system which makes it much easier to switch between apps. I would venture to say the Pre design allows you to be more productive than the iPhone. Of course the iPhone has more apps (50,000 and counting) but you can run old Palm apps on the new Pre webOS meaning there are more apps available for the new gadget than you may have thought. In addition, the Pre webOS allows traditional web apps to run on the device meaning we can see many new Palm apps that won't take a great deal of time for developers to roll out.

The keyboard is another big differentiator of the Pre and most people have no problems using it based on my informal questioning at the event last week. Personally the keyboard was too small for my fingers and I had to use the fingernails on my thumbs to type. I do remember having to do this on an old Blackberry as well and I am sure over time I would get pretty good at typing on the Pre. Also it is a bit awkward to hold at first but Sprint employees assure me over time it becomes very comfortable to handle.

My informal tests show the Pre is not quite as fast as Safari on the iPhone at rendering web pages. But the flipside is the Pre is pretty snappy when you rotate it - the screen rotates more quickly than the iPhone. I also sense the Sprint EVDO network is currently faster than AT&T 3G.

iPhone 3G S (Yes -- looks just like the iPhone 3G)

So now that the new iPhone is out which device would I choose? First I should say Nokia, RIM and others have solid devices as well but for now let's focus on iPhone versus the Pre. Apple has now fixed a number of problems with the iPhone such as cut and paste, better search, MMS, landscape keyboard and there is now a video camera as well. So the choice is difficult. I would say the iPhone is still the winner for now. I despise the keyboard on the iPhone so you can imagine how good the rest of the device is for me to say the iPhone wins.

However it is worth pointing out that part of the reason the iPhone wins is because of the slew of apps on the market which run on the device. If the Pre can gain traction and wee armies of developers rolling out software which runs on it then it is possible I could be neutral on this race.

There is also the issue of the screen size. I believe every square inch of real estate is crucial on a mobile device. The iPhone is marginally larger at 3.4 inches vs. the Pre's 3.1 inches. The resolution is identical but the added real estate does help when playing games, reading and displaying menus.

One last thought is I am thrilled with the new Apple Find My iPhone feature which will prevent others from going through he lost iPhone ordeal my wife recently dealt with.

Although no one would go on record, my informal Q&A with people familiar with the matter leads me to believe the Pre will soon have a version with a larger keyboard which comes out of the device in landscape mode which will make it competitive with devices like those from HTC - the XV6800, G1, etc.

I should this comparison end by saying the Pre is very impressive based on my quick use of the device. I expect to explore it in more detail as time goes on and give you my feedback.

While I am impressed with Microsoft's Bing search engine it lags Google in Blog and news searches, and is not as accurate as evidenced by it returning screen-scraped versions of original content instead of filtering these results like Google does. Still, the search engine is good and if Google ranks a 9/10 then Bing is 7.5 or so based on my searches to date.

It is worth mentioning that Bing is doing a good job spidering the web but still doesn't seem to do this as quickly as Google in many cases. On a positive note, yesterday I wrote a blog entry with the term "packet triplication" in it. Prior to posting I noticed Google had very few pages with the term in its results. Today both Bing and Google have my blog entry with this term on their first pages for searches on this term. Interestingly Google ranks my entry as the #1 result while Bing ranks my entry and my blog home page as #3 and #2 respectively.

Microsoft's search challenge of course is not just search quality but their brand. Are they MSN, Microsoft, Live or Bing? It is worth pointing out that if you enter live.com into your browser it takes you to Bing. So you might think Live is dead. But no... Enter mail.live.com and you are taken to the Live email sign-in page. If it is confusing for me and I am researching the matter, how will the typical consumer make sense of it all? If the company can stop changing names and confusing the market for a few years, Bing could actually take market share from Google.

Yesterday Bing had an Alexa rank in the 500 range (1 being the best ranking) and this was down from the multimillion range in the prior week. Today it has dropped to 1,070 which is a sign that people checked out the search engine and then went back to using Google.

Bing's Alexa ranking is dropping (getting higher/doing worse) after less than a week

Still, old habits die hard and it will take many years for a significant amount of users to switch to Bing and if it isn't better than Google the question many will ask is why even bother?

I spent much of Sunday in Manhattan with the family and while there stopped by one of our favorite restaurants for lunch. A bit later in the day my wife realized her iPhone had gone missing. The last place she knew she had it was the restaurant so we placed a call only to learn it wasn't there. We then walked back to the restaurant and conducted an exhaustive search with the help of the manager and still nothing.

On our way to the restaurant I sent an SMS to the lost phone asking for someone to call me to return it. There was no response to the SMS or the 10 phone calls I placed - the phone was on vibrate by the way. At dinner my wife began to tell me all of the personal and confidential information this phone had on it and my jaw dropped. It occurred to me that the financial damage to an individual from the loss of a smartphone is equivalent to the damage inflicted on a business. It was at this point I realized the distinction between personal and business smartphone has eroded. These miniature computers we walk around with can sink us if they get into the wrong hands.

It was at dinner where I decided to send another SMS but this time I included the offer "$200 reward." Still nothing but I got to thinking it would make sense to at least change my wife's email password so the new owner of her phone couldn't send messages on her behalf. There was no security on the phone so existing messages could not be safeguarded and Apple has no way to remotely wipe a device like RIM and Microsoft do.

Still, my wife couldn't rest till she found out what happened and she was convinced her phone got thrown away with a bunch of napkins and subsequently wanted to visit the restaurant again. I was thinking to myself, is she going to dig through the napkins to find the phone? I just couldn't see this happening - besides who would confuse an iPhone in a pink protective case with napkins anyway?

When we got to the restaurant we realized it was very busy and I thought the odds of finding it now was basically zero. Then I realized that my wife has a Bluetooth headset that she occasionally uses. I asked her to take it out and turn it on. I called her phone. Her headset rang. Bingo - the phone was in the restaurant. We told the manager who started to take the matter more seriously when he realized the headset was working.

The manager and my wife started to walk around the restaurant to determine where the phone was based on the strength of the bluetooth signal. Thankfully the signal died when they got near the dirty napkins.

The manager then went to the table where we had eaten and started moving customers around as he searched the ground. Minutes later a busboy asked what they were looking for. Once told, the busboy went to a drawer and voila - my wife's phone appeared. Thankfully we hadn't cancelled the service - we were imagining someone racking up huge international calling bills on the phone - thankfully it seemed no one touched it.

On the screen were various messages about missed calls and of course the reward. Boy was my wife happy. A subject of lively debate on the way home was whether the phone was going to end up on eBay that night had we not gone back and whether the busboy still had a job.

iPhones can track their position and if only there was a way to run background applications on the device we could have tracked the phone's location through a service like Google Latitude - which by the way is slated to be included in the next iPhone.

Determining the location of important assets will only become more important in my opinion and already there are devices which give you NSA-like security at affordable prices. Case in point is the GSM Handheld Tracker by GADGET.BRANDO.COM.HK. This pocket-sized device gives you the ability to track a car, person or any other object while allowing you to receive speed alerts, movement alerts, setting up a geofence and it can communicate via SMS.

Handheld Tracker Components

I consider this incredible functionality for $133 and I would imagine some parents would consider it a perfect stealthy addition to their teenage kid's cars.

It is worth pointing out that virtually all other phones besides the iPhone do allow multitasking so you should explore installing geolocation software in case your device goes missing. In addition you may want to take a moment and think about whether it makes sense to store social security and credit card numbers on your device. One last precaution - set security on your phone if you think it is important to protect your phone, email and other details. I would opt for a password to pop onscreen after an hour of inactivity - it will be annoying but give you added peace of mind if you and your phone do ever get permanently separated.

In 2001 when the PDA market was all the rage and smartphones didn't really exist, a company called Interactive Intelligence a leader in the contact center space saw an opportunity for a development platform called Mobilite (pronounced as if you are French) which would allow developers to develop once and have applications run on any mobile device.

The idea was genius and ahead of its time so Mobilite was shelved sometime later.

I couldn't help but think of this product as I spoke with Rhomobile Founder and CEO Adam Blum who was telling me about his company's open source mobile application framework Rhodes which lets you quickly build native mobile applications for all smartphone operating systems: iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android. Blum emphasizes that applications can take advantage of native GPS, PIM contacts and camera and that they are native, not just web applications optimized for each platform.

Another company in the space is PhoneGap and Blum explains that Rhodes focuses more on business applications while PhoneGap focuses more on consumer apps.

This graphic was chosen due to its looks and may or may not be related to the subject matter in this article -- depending on your perspective.

He went on to tell me Wikipedia rewrote their iPhone application using the Rhodes framework and used 20% of the code needed in Objective C and the resulting program also ran faster. He further went on to explain that while you may imagine his development environment is slanted heavily towards the iPhone, the reality is objective testers have shown applications run the same across all platforms.

Blum was Director of Engineering for Good Technology and explains he saw $200 million pushed into the company and as a result 200 engineers worked to get an email client on three smartphone operating systems. This lunacy (my chosen term, not his) made him decide to launch a company to stop the madness and his twelve-person company is looking to make mobile application writing more efficient.

In our conversation Blum explained that he believes it is virtually impossible to develop to more than two device operating systems beyond version 1.0 without some sort of cross-platform development application. He further explained that such an environment needs to be open-source in nature and as such his solution is completely open source.

As mentioned above there is a strong business focus here so new features are to added to the development environment with business developers in mind first.

Blum also told me his company is well-positioned in this economic environment as they are solving a pain point - one that has a high-degree of urgency. He concluded by saying, "What would you do without it?"

With that Blum and his 12-person company may have made some software development history by announcing RhoHub, perhaps the first development-as-a-service offering for mobile applications.

What are the benefits to developers? Well first of all you don't need to have a variety of development environments and disparate computers in your company in order to develop mobile applications for multiple devices. In addition, the company offers up a provisioning server and can even host the application and allow users to download the correct version based on device.

If you are developing mobile applications it is apparent you need to support the iPhone, Palm, RIM, Nokia, Android, Windows Mobile and Blum thinks Linux Mobile is going to be a contender as well soon. You obviously can't be an expert at all of these environments and you will obviously benefit from some sort of cross-platform development tool like the one his company sells.

But before you go out and trash your Mac and start developing your iPhone apps on the web, you should be aware that Apple's App Store seems to be rejecting a high number of applications which are being built on cross-platform development tools. This could have something to do with the major changes in the iPhone 3.0 OS coming soon but for now it is too soon to tell.

While it is obvious this sort of solution is necessary, we need to watch what companies like Apple and others do to existing customers of cross-platform tools before jumping in too quickly.

This entry from the company's blog may prove useful in your decision-making process.

The drive for more bandwidth does not slow - even in a global recession some reports show bandwidth needs increasing at rates higher than 100% per year on carrier and enterprise networks. The trend towards more collaborative applications, video, VoIP and cloud-based services are no doubt just a few factors in what seems to be just the beginning of a global bandwidth binge showing no sign of slowing.

Enter Expand a company focusing on application acceleration over WANs who is looking to help solve the branch office bandwidth drought. The company makes its living selling a variety of appliances which they say will increase ROI and stretch IT budgets further. These devices are optimized for datacenters, branch offices and regional offices.

The company counts Fidelity National Insurance, Piconol, Antarctica NZ, Targus, DISA and Evans Fruit Company as some of its customers and has partnered with Vision Solutions to provide more efficient disaster recovery services.

At Interop 2009 in Las Vegas, the company unveiled a new solution they hope will become widely deployed on global networks. Simply put they have unveiled a free Mobile Accelerator Client which gives some of the benefits of an appliance but at a much lower cost. Well actually it is free so you don't get much cheaper. The catch? There is always a catch right? Well not really - you just pay for maximal concurrent users.

How is the performance you wonder? The graph below was provided to me to give an indication. Freestyle means you are alone, Collective means you are sharing a virtual cache and Slipstream means you are utilizing an appliance.

In order to get an idea how the mobile client works you need to better understand Expand Networks and their approach to WAN optimization. They have developed a technology called HIVE which is a clever acronym which stands for Heterogeneous Intelligent Virtual Environment.

The H in Hive tells us that the solution works on various platforms. If you are hoping one of the platforms supported is Apple, keep waiting as XP, Vista and Windows 7 are the only ones on the list so far.

The I standsfor intelligent and of course the software is smart - butone could argue in fact that all software is smart. Except perhaps for applications that let you turn your mobile phone into a virtual beer.

The V standsfor virtual and in this case is actually a solid descriptive word - not just marketing as the mobile client uses p2p technology to enable a branch office with multiple clients to take advantage of a pooled virtual cache. So if Donny in HR downloads a 10 gigabyte video file which five other users need later in the week, you can all tap into the file from Donny's computer rather that all wasting network bandwidth by downloading the file again and again. And you thought Donny had nothing to offer.

I almost forgot - the E stands for environment meaning the software knows if it is in a branch office without a nearby appliance or in the home office where there is an appliance or alone by its lonesome. In each case it adapts and utilizes a byte and object level cache to maximize performance.

As you might imagine, the system knows how to allocate bandwidth according to your QoS policies - it is Intelligent after all.

I spent some time with company representatives David White, Efi Gatmor and Adam Davison as they told me about their product and shared the benefits of their HIVE technology for information technology decision-makers worldwide and mentioned that the software can be rolled our via silent install using an MSI package if desired.

One point the trio made which is important to repeat is that in a typical branch office which does not have technology to take advantage of a shared cache, you can have clients competing with each other for bandwidth as they are utterly blind to the needs and presence of the other clients. When you think about it, a shared cache is infinitely logical and as the need for more bandwidth increases we can expect this sort of technology to be deployed in more and more corporate branches.

As companies roll out more cloud computing applications and install IP communications solutions, focus on compliance and centralized backups, we can only expect the opportunity for Expand Networks dare I say - to Expand?

Cloud computing is one of the hot sectors of the information technology space. Without a doubt it is emerging as a trend which has the potential to change the way corporations operate. Already consumers are becoming comfortable with clouds as they upload their photos, videos, email, blogs, documents and spreadsheets to a variety of services which live somewhere... everywhere. Just as consumers have pushed companies they work for into accelerating deployment of VoIP and smartphones, expect cloud computing to become popular in part because we are all comfortable using the technology in our personal lives.

Recently at Interop 2009 in Las Vegas I spent some time with Jason Liu the CEO of Univa, a company which is at the heart of the cloud computing market. A conversation with Jason - and I had two, one where I was taking notes and yet another which was on video camera and will be posted soon, is like drinking from a garden hose of valuable cloud-based information. This is Liu's fifth venture backed company (he came onboard 2 years ago) and being able to articulate a vision is obviously one of the reasons investors seem to be drawn to him.

Liu started the conversation with his definition of cloud computing - there are five categories...

1)      Boundless applications

2)      A pooled set of shared resources

3)      A service based approach

4)      A virtualized environment

5)      Metering (Liu says this is an addition from analyst firm Gartner Group and billing could be tied to this attribute)

He went on to explain that future clouds will be a mesh of private/public information and the primary driver for keeping private clouds will likely be security concerns.

His company is involved in providing intelligent dispatch, a term which describes cloud computing middleware which handles application prioritization. The founders of Univa were the founders of Grid and as such they have been at this game for a decade. And the experience counts as there are tremendous levels of complexity in dealing with masses of servers, software and users while trying to optimize application delivery and performance based on preset rules.

Univa adds intelligence to clouds and Liu feels carriers need a solution like their Reliance product so they can more rapidly roll out cloud-based offerings which offer the ability to more easily provide service-based pricing. Liu further explained Reliance 3.0 has decoupled the "brain" from the provisioning meaning you can now use their solutions on virtually any infrastructure.

Cloud computing has tremendous potential and is also one of the more complex solutions in the enterprise and carrier technology space. If there is one constant that came out of my conversation with Jason Liu it is that that as cloud computing becomes even more complex, laden with applications and users, you will eventually have to add intelligence. It would seem Univa is well-positioned as the world comes to it.

Even before it was trendy, I was a fan of 3D HD voice - In fact back in 2004 I featured DiamondWare onstage at ITEXPO in Miami as a killer app. Over the years DiamondWare began integrating its technology into a virtual world and eventually the company was sold to Nortel and became part of web.alive which I covered here.

My last visit to the Ottawa campus of Nortel consisted of meetings with the tech team who told me they eventually see avatars everywhere - on cell phones, computers, etc.

Since that conversation I have been looking for signs of avatar/communications integration and I did compile a list of vendors who had an avatar strategy.

But here is the reality - if we are going to start seeing more avatar integration in telecom it has to come from our kids - just like text messaging, Twitter, Facebook and lots of other interesting technologies we once considered oddities.

Recently I learned that Second Life - the popular consumer based avatar laden community generates 15 billion minutes of web voice - or VoIP calls. And this reminded me of the popularity in the early days of Twitter and Facebook.

It remains to be seen if avatars will become mainstream but I get the feeling that this technology may just follow Twitter as a hot new thing everyone jumps on in years to come.

If you are looking to take advantage of avatar/communications integration the question you need to ask is whether you want to get involved now, before it becomes hip and trendy or wait for Oprah and Ashton to jump in first.

Back in January of this year I mentioned the possibility of antitrust moves towards Google from the Obama administration. I even mentioned Eric Schmidt bodying up with Obama to protect the search leader. A new article in the New York Times delves deeper into the potential for a government breakup.

Based on the article, what Google has in its favor is that it is helping consumers by giving away services for free. What is working against it is the ability to leverage its dominant search position to launch new services which can kill off competition quickly and efficiently.

If history is a guide, Microsoft and Yahoo! will not be a threat to the company from a search perspective and Google's services will only get better. As the search leaders' offerings improve, more and more companies will be very vocal in their complaints to the government. This will increase scrutiny on the company which could slow it down.

But even if the government slows Google's development down by 50% it will likely roll out new services faster than virtually all the competition. Still, one slip-up could land Google in big trouble - the company has become synonymous with the internet and is slowly replacing Microsoft as the company striking fear in the hearts of start-ups and their investors.