Archive for December, 2005

James Enck does it here using this tool.

via Eurotelcoblog

Back in 2003, an analyst's report noted admiringly that Intrado provided more than 80% of the nation's 911 service (both traditional telephone and wireless).  But the analyst was cautious about Intrado's future:

It is popular to highlight the importance of emergency services at the state and local level, but to back the rhetoric with funding is another thing.

Since then, of course, things have changed — the FCC has mandated that VoIP services very quickly find ways to provide E911 capabilities to their subscribers.  Intrado has found yet another source of funding.

Not that Intrado was doing badly — far from it.  In several presentations to the FCC over the last year, Intrado emphasized that it counted as its customers all of the Baby Bells, over 40 wireless carriers, and more than 800 cities and government agencies.  It touted its “strong relationships” with over 7700 emergency call centers.  Intrado recently announced that it was now in a position to provide VoIP services with nationwide coverage, through its deals with telephone companies and public safety call centers. 

Intrado is 911 in America.

Here's how it works for VoIP: 

1.  A VoIP customer calls 911.

2.  The call goes to the VoIP provider's server, using SIP.

3.  The VoIP provider then queries Intrado's servers.  Why?  Because Intrado has an amazing database of subscriber address information — 206 million records.  And often people in emergencies can't say where they are, so E911 (or “enhanced” 911) requires that there be a way to associate their location with the call.

4.  Intrado's servers then route the call to the relevant telephone company's “selective router” — the physical piece of hardware that is dedicated to getting calls to the emergency call centers (or PSAPs). 

5.  At the same time, Intrado routes the customer's telephone number and address into the Automatic Location Information Database used for E911 calls in the US.  This is the legacy way of attaching address information to calls, with a twist:  Intrado forces new data into the ALI database at this point in the transaction, tagged uniquely in such a way (as I understand it) that the PSAP operator can pull it out and associate the data with the call.

Intrado is doing all of this for almost all emergency calls in this country — running the database, connecting to the selective routers, associating the call with the address information.  And maybe that's fine.  We wouldn't want to confuse our emergency calls, and Intrado has been doing this for thirty years.

But the part I'm troubled about is the influence that Intrado appears to have had — going slowly here — over the entire E911 for VoIP situation.  Frequent readers know that my opinion is that it made no sense to force the old legacy E911 solution onto all VoIP providers, with its reliance on selective routers (hardware!) and its inflexibility.

But it did make sense to Intrado to have things go this way.  And so they met, month after month, with the Commmission staff, talked on the phone, did their best, and ended up with a lot more business.  AT&T's CallVantage uses Intrado.  Verizon uses Intrado.  Vonage uses Intrado.

Enter Intrado.

It has been great having David Post here in NYC this term.  David is working on a book called Mr. Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace, and I can't wait for him to finish.

In the prologue, David tells the story of Jefferson fighting against the Old World belief that animals and humans degenerated in the New World — that every creature was smaller and less powerful in American than it was in Europe.  To prove his point, Jefferson had an entire [dead] moose shipped to Paris and reconstituted in stuffed form in his entrance hall.  There, see?  Things are large in America!  That moose was seven feet tall.  (You can read another account of this controvery here.) 

(This may be an elk, not a moose, but it is beautifully framed and I thought you might enjoy seeing it.)

David wants to put Jefferson's ideas to work in describing cyberspace as a new place – he's writing his “notes on cyberspace” to reflect Jefferson's “notes on the State of Virginia.”

The great question for me, and the question I put to my class today, is:  What is the moose of cyberspace?  What's the thing you'd show people to convince them that the internet is hugely different from a telephone network or a broadcast system and that entirely new things are possible there?  We've got this unbelievable group-forming-network-of-networks — how do we show people what it is?

Several people said Wikipedia is the moose of cyberspace — an amazing encyclopedia created by everyone.  There were also strong voices for eBay and Google.  Imagine having knowledge at your fingertips, 1/4 of a second away!  That's big.

So — what do you think is the moose of cyberspace?

Thanks to David Post for the idea and Catherine White for the elk/moose picture. 

Next Wednesday evening, December 14, I'll be part of a discussion about Google Book Search.

The other panelists are Allan Adler, of the American Association of Publishers; Paul Aiken, of the Author's Guild; and Cameron Stracher, of New York Law School.

It's free — it runs from 6:30 to 8pm at the bar association building at 42 W. 44th in New York City.

We had our organizational call this afternoon to prepare for the panel.  It took no time and we were all very polite to one another.  I'm open to all suggestions for transformational arguments — things I can say that will make the other side suddenly see a shaft of light descending from the ceiling, accompanied by a fluttering and well-read spirit from the future.

But I'll start by making sure we all have our facts straight.  Snippets, folks, snippets!  And the libraries are using their digital copies to make books available to the blind and disabled!  And it must be that the publishers have it in for libraries — they can't stand the idea of all this free-form borrowing.  If that's the case, why haven't they sued the libraries?

Or is this whole fight just a holdup?

AP reported yesterday that the head of the European Publishers Council has Google on his mind.  According to the Publishers Council:

The value of content must be understood by consumers so that new business models can evolve. Industry must have legal certainty and the confidence that their intellectual property will be protected.

What Google does is respond to search queries by providing snippets — thumbnail pictures and a line of text here, a line from a page there, a headline — and helping people get to where those things were posted.  That's pointing, not copying, and it's a key element of Web 2.0. 

The publishers, and the news agencies, are having trouble with this evolution — heck, they had enough trouble with Web 1.0, much less the groupness we're seeing now– and are relying on incumbent laws (like copyright law) to protect their ability to charge for content.

But there's a great opportunity here that shouldn't be missed:  news companies can become not only providers of great stories (well-researched, well-written, unlike blog posts) but also  sources of order.  There is so much information now — we need help!  We need priority, and sense of impact, and sense of global connections.  We need visualizations, and links, and commentary.  All of these things are valuable.  We'll pay — with our attention, our loyalty to the brand, and maybe even with money if the reporters' own personalities are allowed out to play.

A search engine, alone, can't provide this kind of judgment.   Not even Google can say which story is likely to have an important impact on our collective future.  There is a Web 2.0 model for publishers, and they can only get there by letting go.

The ICANN official board meeting just ended.   During the morning, Vint Cerf read this statement about the com set of issues:

The board has listened long and hard this week to all constituencies with regard to the .COM agreements

We are deeply grateful to the efforts made by all constituencies to respond to the board’s invitation to organize comments on the proposals and to provide, where possible, concrete suggestions for improving them.

We are also very grateful for the time each constituency spent going over with the board their ideas and reactions.

We ask the staff to accept any further written comments until December 7 and to produce for the community a public report summarizing, analyzing and organizing the feedback provided on the .com and settlement agreements by December 11.

We recommend that staff approach VeriSign with the results of the report on the proposed contract and settlement. We remind all parties that the board has not yet agreed to the terms of the contract and settlement.

We also note the existence of a policy development process on new gTLDs and strongly believe that this PDP should be informed by the results of the comments received on the proposed contract for .com and settlement with VeriSign.

I am looking forward to the board's continued strong and detailed involvement in this process of dialogue, and I want to underscore the importance of the GNSO's policy development process in developing a framework for all of this.

Bret Fausett has been collecting podcast material.  Joi Ito has been busy blogging.  Me?  I've been in a very analog mode — taking notes with pen and paper, standing around in the hallways talking to people, and thinking about paths forward. 

Jordyn Buchanan made a good point at the meeting between the Board and the registrar constituency this afternoon.  Why don't we have a policy framework for registry agreements?  Why can't the negotiators of those agreements have policy advice from the community in advance?  Just a question.

Wendy Seltzer at today's ALAC meeting said that it's really difficult to persuade people to be interested in ALAC — here's the pitch —

If you form an organization, you can join ALAC.  You can't join as an individual.  And if your group joins ALAC, you can then work on forming a regional group-of-groups.  And if you do that, your regional group can work on getting someone on the ICANN nominating committee.

That doesn't sound gripping, does it?  There's got to be a way to facilitate individual participation in ICANN policy processes that will attract people. 

So I'll go back to analog mode now, and hope that the bloggers here are capturing what's going on.  The Public Forum will be webcast tomorrow, and will be worth watching. Go here to see the schedule.