Recently in Hyperconnectivity Category

The AC Milan football/soccer team has won 18 officially recognized international titles, more than any other club in the world.

To enhance its performance, MilanLab was established in 2002 as the team's High Tech Scientific Research Centre, the primary purpose of which is to optimize the psycho-physical management of the athletes.

To this end, they have partnered with Microsoft to develop a UC-enabled athlete monitoring system to track the total state of physical, mental and social well-being of each athlete, balancing three principal functional levels: neurostructural, physio-chemical-biological, and mental. The ultimate objective is to manage optimized training programs around these dependencies, void injuries and speed up recovery when injuries occur.

Interestingly, league rules prohibit sensors on players during games, but there are no such restrictions in practices.

UC comes to play to enable richer communications among personal trainers, management and the athletes. Needless to say, the system will stress UC usability beyond the office environment having to cater to the whims of some thirty multimillionaire athletes;)

Not surprisingly, not much information is available on the status of the system, given it's highly competitive nature.

The first "speedcabling" competition recently took place in Los Angeles. This new geek game is based on unraveling the rat's nest of wires found beneath most computer desks, as people connect an assortment of storage, scanner, printer, camera etc to their PCs.

But this may be a short-lived "sport" as Wireless USB, complemented by WiFi and Bluetooth, emerges as a solution to everyone's below-the-desk Hyperconnectivity challenges.

Briefly Wireless USB (technically USB3.0) is a hub and spoke technology, creating a cluster of up to 127 devices. To achieve up to 480Mbps (equivalent to USB 2.0) at distances up to 3 meters, Wireless USB uses low power ultra-wideband (UWB) transmission over an extremely wide spectrum (technically from 3.1 to 10.5 GHz), and will coexist peacefully with other wireless technologies such as WiFi and Bluetooth.

I don't know about you, but this would definitely eliminate a major headache for me.

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times. "Hyperconnectivity is a megatrend whereby everything and everyone that can benefit from being connected will be connected."

The other side of the Hyperconnectivity coin, and to great degree a key enabler, is the megatrend that everything (not yet everyone!) that can benefit from being digitized will be digitized.

I see three reasons why these are two sides to the Hyperconnectivity coin.
1) Once content (music, books, photos/painting, medical records, movies) are digitized, add some headers to this digitized content and you have packetized data ready to go.
2) Once content such as audio and video are streamed over the network, then it is trivial to store them for later retrieval, analysis and replay. Think about it. This has led to the rapid replacement of analog security cameras by digitized and packetized systems running on IP and PCs.
3) The above digitization is focused on audio, image, video and data, but the technology for cost effective digitization now can sense and measure a hundred different physical and environmental conditions including temperature, humidity, pressure, acidity, air quality, movement, radiation level, and so.

Low cost and high capacity storage and processing of digitized content and low cost and high capacity networking of packetized content together make Hyperconnectivity inevitable.

And we're seeing these coming together everyday in our pockets, in our homes and at work. For enterprises, it's all about converting Hyperconnectivity challenges into huge opportunities to make or save money and to make the world a better place.

Olive Riley, an 108 year old with 70 entries on her blog, died recently in Australia. Olive, who started blogging just last year, has seen a century of technology development go by. Just imagine Olive's technology world when she was 15 (in the photo).

When I tried to get on her blog, I got a screen stating 'due to overwhelming demand this page is currently not available". Not that surprising, as her blog was ranked 7000th earlier this year, out of 80 million blogs (or 'blobs' as she called them) worldwide.

Thanks Olive for reminding us all that you're never too old to get hyperconnected.

Well I have talked about Hyperconnectivity and the fact that everything will get connected, but I hadn't thought of memory cards. Here's a memory card with integrated WiFi for transferring your favorite photos.

If I have said it once, I have said it a hundred times….”Hyperconnectivity is a megatrend whereby everyone and everything that can benefit from being connected to the network will be connected.”

And that includes enterprises themselves!

After all, every enterprise has suppliers, customers, and partners, who are all part of an expanding ecosystem Increasingly, work will be performed wherever it can be most cost effectively done, with much less regard to the organization of the doer (employee, partner, contractor, open source contributor, whoever). This is very different than the vertically integrated industries of the last century.

What will help make this happen? One word: FEDERATIONS.

Federations are all about extending trust across domains.

Federated unified communications systems will enable effective real-time collaboration anytime, anywhere over any media; and federated SOA-based cross domain business processes will accelerate the delivery of products and services to customers.

Federations will not only impact how work is done, but how it is organized across, what some call, the virtual or Hyperconnected enterprise.

It’s not as far out as you think. For example, Nortel and Microsoft are federated today when it comes to unified communications, selectively exposing presence and directories across these two companies.

“The boundary between work and personal connectivity for the hyperconnected is almost nonexistent. Two-thirds use text or instant messaging for both work and personal use. More than a third use social networking for both. “

This comes from a white paper resulting from a Nortel-funded IDC information worker survey.

This trend is hard to fight (and would be counter-productive) as in many environments, information workers are encouraged to take their work home, and to respond to business-related queries off-hours.

The implications are clear. Personal use and IT support policies will need to be adjusted to reflect this new reality. Security will likewise need to reassessed both in terms of networking and business/customer data retention.

What can you do? Well, for example, technology exists today that allows your employees to publish only their work numbers and still be accessible on their cells; cell numbers can be reserved for personal use.

We had a very interesting day with a number of journalists, all heavy bloggers, who visited us at the Nortel R&D worldwide headquarters in Ottawa.

The focus of the day was demos of some of our pre-product innovative/incubation R&D in areas such as virtual reality conferencing, embedding communications into business apps, and Web 2.0 and beyond.

What became obvious to the group was that Nortel competencies in real-time communications, scalability and reliability, had high value in turning virtual reality technologies into potentially much more user friendly and more powerful business tools.

A recurring theme was that "There is no I, there's only we", in Andy Lippman's words, who joined us for a good part of the day. He's mid-way through his sabbatical as a visiting fellow at Nortel from MIT. "Second Life doesn't solve business problem, this does" quipped one of our guests.

Solving business problems is the theme of a white paper I recently wrote on Hyperconnectivity and enterprise transformation.

The first posting resulting from this visit came from Rich Tehrani of TMCnet fame.

We all accept that hyperconnectivity is coming- everyone who can benefit from being connected will be connected using whatever device he or she is using. But in fact, it's happening faster than we expected.

A Nortel-funded IDC survey of nearly 2400 information workers around the world found that 16% of them termed 'hyperconnected users' (with another 36% of 'highly connected users' waiting in the wings), rely on and expect a range of mobile, unified communications and social networking capabilities, in their work environments. But user pull for personal productivity tools is not sufficient for a business case to invest in unified communications and related technologies.

What is clearly needed is a business push for these types of group and enterprise productivity solutions, based on opportunities to accelerate the business.

Help is at hand. These same hyperconnected users can act as agents of change within the enterprise to rationalize user pull and business push for unified communications.

Hyperconnectivity is a megatrend whereby everything and everyone that can benefit from being connected will be connected.

The down side is that things that don’t deliver business benefit can also be connected.

And today marks the thirtieth anniversary of spam- it first appeared on the ARPAnet on May 3 1978, as an over exuberant entrepreneur tried to promote his products by sending out an unsolicited bulk emailing.

The term ‘spam’ appeared some 15 years later (15 years ago) and has been highly disruptive to residential and business users alike.

According to Spamhaus, 90% of email today is spam with a mere 200 spammers accounting for 80% of this number!

Wouldn’t we all love to take away the privileges of hyperconnectivity from these 200? Unfortunately spam is one cost of openness that hyperconnectivity implies.

The implication for the industry is that there will be a continued requirement for intelligent network and application layer technologies within a layered defense architecture, to counter spam and its relatives (e.g. IM spams sometimes called SPIT).