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Exploring the science and magic of Identity and Access Management
Tuesday, March 19, 2024

3 billion minutes per day

Identity
Author: Mark Dixon
Friday, March 28, 2008
4:05 pm

As reported by Computerworld earlier this month, Intel Senior Vice President Arun Chandrasekhar identified social networking as the phenomena that will drive the future of mobile Internet growth.

“Social networking is the engine that will drive demand for the mobile platforms, according to Chandrasekhar. That technology has surpassed pornography as the biggest bandwidth-consuming application on the Internet, he said. Worldwide, consumers spend 3 billion minutes per day on social networking, but most of that is on PCs over fixed broadband connections. People want to be able to do it wherever they are, he said.”

I probably used up more than my fair share of those 3 billion minutes today myself, posting to and browsing Twitter, Twitxr, Flickr, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The sheer volume of this statistic offers interesting questions: How many millions of people, each with a personal Identity, participated in this phenomena today? What is the average time each person spent? To whom are they connected? What are their interests? What do they really seek? How will those needs be satisfied? How many more will participate tomorrow?

A phemomena of this magnitude presents huge economic opportunity for those involved. The question is, how? I believe the answers lie in learning how to effectively deliver personalized value to people, many of whom, like myself, like to be served, not exploited.

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Identity Management Roadshow Series

Identity
Author: Mark Dixon
Thursday, March 27, 2008
2:40 pm

Y’all are invited to join us at the Sun Microsystems Identity Management Roadshow series kicking off in Dallas on April 22nd. I will speak at the Dallas event and subsequent events in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Mexico City. We will focus on how to move beyond compliance to capture true business value through Identity Management. Hope to see you there.

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What in the world is the Fedlet?

Identity
Author: Mark Dixon
Monday, March 24, 2008
9:30 am

What is the Fedlet? Frankly, I don’t know. My colleague Daniel Raskin promises to let us know soon.

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Twitxr – Sharing Mobile Photos

Social Media
Author: Mark Dixon
Saturday, March 22, 2008
10:23 am

I stumbled across a fun little social networking service this week that makes it easy to share photos from my mobile phone. Twitxr (pronounced “Twitcher”) allows me to post photos via email to the Twitxr site, which will, in turn, post the photos to my Flickr, Twitter and Facebook accounts. The Twitxr site includes a Google Maps mashup that shows where photos have been taken, using an address placed in the email subject line.

My Treo 700p camera is not too good, and the process of sending photos from the phone by email is cumbersome, but Twitxr is certainly a step in the right direction of making posting and sharing photos an easy thing to do.

A Twitxr badge showing my latest Twitxr photo is also included on the right sidebar of my blog. Please take a look, sign up to follow me, and join me as a Twitxr friend.

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PlusMo – Take This Blog With You

Blogging
Author: Mark Dixon
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
12:36 pm

Subscribe to Discovering Identity on your cell phoneIf you glance at the left sidebar on this blog today, you will see a striking resemblance of me on a little phone. If you click on my face, you will be taken to the PlusMo website, and led through a simple process to enable delivery of this blog and many other news feeds to your mobile phone. The PlusMo application was easy to configure, simple to download and a delight to use. If you can stand to see my face as an icon on your phone, I think you will enjoy the service.

Thanks to my colleague Dave Williams for pointing this out to me.

Plusmo uses the IBM Java Virtual Machine on my Palm 700p device. Plusmo runs on almost all J2ME, Windows Smart Phone, Windows PDA, Blackberry and Treo phones.

The Plusmo technology is described in this excerpt from their website: “Plusmo’s patent-pending Widget Engine has a tiny XHTML based microbrowser with Javascript and a complete framework to install, provision, render and manage mobile widgets. Plusmo is packed with smart mobile features to enable instant access to all your personalized information. Background downloads, smart synchronization and local caching enable widgets to run offline even when there is no data connectivity. You will also save on network bandwidth with built-in compression and incremental updates.”

Give it a try. It’s great stuff!

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No Margin for Error – Deteriorating Customer Service

General
Author: Mark Dixon
Saturday, March 15, 2008
5:34 am

It is just before 5am in the San Jose airport. I am sitting in the very seat where I sat yesterday afternoon when, 20 minutes before we were supposed to board an already delayed flight, it was abruptly announced, “Your flight has been cancelled.”

No explanation, just “It has been cancelled.” Only later, after probing, did someone explain that it was a “crew problem,” but no real information was shared about what had really happened.

The remaining flights to Phoenix were both oversold, so I could either wait standby for a connecting flight for Phoenix that I probably not get on anyway, or wait for an early morning flight. I opted for the Friday night in a cheap hotel. Only after I complained about the $10 dinner meal voucher was I offered a second $10 voucher. The two vouchers almost covered a simple meal in the hotel restaurant.

Perhaps, you say, I shouldn’t complain, that many other passengers were affected the same way.

However, I remember several years ago that I was stranded overnight at Dulles airport by a freezing rain storm that left the taxiways so slick that airplanes couldn’t even get to the runway. United Airlines could have blamed it on the weather, but they put us all up in an upscale Marriott hotel and provided a wonderful buffet dinner in the hotel ballroom.

What has happenend since that time? I think two factors are particularly relevant:

  • Airlines in general have lost the concept of putting customers first. It has become an ingrained culture to trivialize the impact airline decisions have on real people. Passengers are just necessary irritants, to be herded around and treated as chattel. I don’t mean the usually kind and courteous people on the front lines who have to put up with the pressures from above and the frustrations of mistreated passengers. I mean the management of the airlines who exploit the very people who keep them in business.
  • There is absolutely no margin for error. Any hiccup in the system disrupts any hope for predictability. Flights are too often way oversold. Crews are scheduled so tightly that there is little flexibility. And the weird seniority issue that still separates US Airways and America West policy is ridiculous.

I guess I’m old enough to remember when customer service was the hallmark of business, not an oft-trumpeted but seldom-executed mantra. Focus on the customer, we used to say, would yield positive business benefits. Service, rather than exploitation, was the watchcry.

“High fuel prices! Too much competition! Wall street expectations!” Airlines act like petulant teenagers – blaming their failures on external factors rather than admitting the consequences of their own actions. External factors are important, to be sure. But as one who travels the unfriendly skies nearly every week, I believe that airlines are prime examples of the modern business trend to forget the hands that feed them.

Travel safely, my friends.

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Autonomic Communication

General
Author: Mark Dixon
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
3:35 am

My colleague Wedge Greene of LTC International recently introduced me to an intriguing concept, Autonomic Communcation, by sharing a presentation he gave at the OnPoint “Transforming OSS” conference in Dallas on February 7, 2008. I had read earlier about the work IBM has been doing in autonomic computing, when I worked with a small company, Lockstep Systems, that had technology for automatic restoration of hacked web sites. Wedge’s presenation was the first information I had read about the application of autonomic principles to large computer networks.

In his presentation, Wedge proposes that networks should be “self-organizing and self-managing,” exhibiting characteristics of:

  • Self-configuration
  • Self optimization
  • Self-healing
    • self-monitoring
    • self-diagnostics
    • self-restoration

He furthermore proposes that such autonomic networks can be built with existing technology and with known skills, but to do so requires the will to act by technology vendors acting in harmony with each other.

Wedge suggests the following forums for further participation in this subject:

Additionally, I found that Wikipedia had an interesting article on Autonomic Networking.

This is certainly an intriguing subject with strong benefit if it can be applied on a broad scale. I plan to keep my eyes peeled.

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Progressive Convergence: My “Personal Device”

Identity
Author: Mark Dixon
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
3:27 pm

Personal Device: ” … intended to convey a sense of the aspirations or character of the bearer.”

In a conversation with a telco executive recently, he remarked that their company had stopped referring to “smart phones,” but rather favored the term “personal devices.”

His comments triggered some fun memories. I thought of the time way back in 1978 when I sat down with a colleague and sketched out a concept for a hand held electronic notebook and calendar device. Surely, we thought, we could add calendar and note taking functions to electronic calculators to make something really useful. We each signed the pages of our engineering notebook and vowed we would become millionaires and change the world. But we were just naive, inexperienced junior engineers who had no idea about how to bring such a thing to market. Our little idea made it no further than the pages of our notebook and the shadows of our dreams.

Fast forward to the Internet boom in the late 1990’s. I was shuttling around the world every week with my colleagues at Oracle, carrying three personal devices – a cell phone, a pager and a Palm Pilot. I would frequently remark that these three indespensible gadgets should be combined into a single device.

Three years ago, when I bought my first Treo, Progressive Convergence became reality for me. My personal device that took the place of three became an indespensible part of my Identity – a literal extension of my persona.

But now? I’m back to carrying three personal devices – my Treo, my iPod and my Magellan GPS navigator (split personality, you ask?). I have still not found the best functions of each device in a single unit. However, the phenomena of Progressive Convergence will undoubtedly quickly bring the best merits of all these functions together in a single device.

So, what do I really want in a personal device? I’m not sure I really know, because someone will undoubtedly offer up something I hadn’t thought of. But here are some ideas:

  • It must be small but usable – like the Treo or iPhone, but thinner, fitting compfortably in the palm of my hand.
  • It must have a wide variety of interoperable, easy to use, highly personalized functionality – telephony, messaging, web access, video, music, navigation, to-do lists (does iPhone have that yet?), payment services, note taking, audio transcription, still/motion camera, plus more to come, I’m sure.
  • It should be dockable into the user interface of choice: large screen/keyboard in my office, TV in my living room, driver/navigator control in my car, keyboard/screen in the airplane or taxi, medium sized electronic tablet for notetaking … the concept is to bring the brains to the UI, not the other way around.
  • The device needs fast processing power, large local storage, fast network bandwidth and immense, rapidly accessible network storage.
  • Why not a super thin client with all the intelligence and storage in the data center? Because I still like to be in places on this old world where cell towers are yet to be a gleam in someone’s eye, where I am alone with my thoughts and my little Personal Device.

The crazy thing about this? I am sure that I have grossly underestimated what my personal device will be like in 10 or 20 years. I’m still amazed when I think about what the last 20 years has provided. I can’t wait!

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Ohm!

Humor
Author: Mark Dixon
Saturday, March 8, 2008
8:02 am

I got a kick out of the Frank and Ernest comic today. Sort of like Dilbert learns meditation.

It’s a engineer thing.

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Oh, to be an Astronaut!

General
Author: Mark Dixon
Friday, March 7, 2008
5:07 am

When I was a little boy, I wanted to be an astronaut. These NASA photos from a recent space shuttle mission made me feel the urge all over again!

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