Working hard to pay for life

I’ve moved to Tumblr… http://dbanes.tumblr.com/

or http://davidbanes.com/

I’ll point my www. address over there soon.

Cleartext was one of the first providers of combined business class hosted email and managed email security when we launched ClearEmail in 2005.

Today we are pleased to announce that we’re adding Microsoft Hosted Exchange to our list of services*. Follow this link for our MS Hosted Exchange web page.

Read more here…

There’s exciting news today as we’re launching a new business to sit alongside our established Cleartext messaging business, we’re calling it Cleartext Systems, a trading name we already own under Cleartext Pty Ltd.

Since 2005 we’ve come across an increasing number of small businesses looking for help with their IT systems. Typically they aren’t big enough to have an IT Manager/Director and outsource their IT to a services provider.  This is a good strategy but there’s a fair amount of churn in this sector and tech changes rapidly, open source, mobile, cloud etc.

So there’s a gap in the market for someone to provide independent part time IT Manager/Director services, and that’s where Cleartext Systems steps in. This business is a vehicle for me to use my considerable experience in selecting, building and delivering leading edge IT systems and apply this to smaller businesses.

We’ll be keeping it small, offering to complete short term projects to modernise and streamline a businesses IT through the selection of IT systems and services providers that fit their business.  I’ll also be signing up a few clients on a retainer basis where they need longer term commitments.

I’m excited about this because it gives me way to stay connected to the real business requirements of small to medium businesses which will feed back into our messaging platform at Cleartext. It monetises activity which is already part of what we do in an adhoc manner for clients and takes to market some of what we’ve learnt building Cleartext, the messaging business.

Of course we’ve launched a new online presence for this platform, go and take a look at what we managed to put together in 3 working days.

http://www.cleartextsystems.com/

If this is something you’d like to engage us to do then get in touch now, limited places available!

I just noticed that Twitter for Mac re-writes your timeline to show old style RT’s as new ones:)

We recently had a client ask about using Microsofts new Outlook for Mac on our hosted email and collaborations services, here’s the short version of the quick look into this.

Basically Outlook for Mac 2011 doesn’t support and calendaring standards (put in place by the Internet Engineering Task Force) that allow you to do this.  You’d have to be connected to an MS Exchange server, which leaves a couple of options.

1. Use Apple Mail, Calendar and Address book which all use standards based features, as does Cleartext and setup as per using iCal in Thunderbird for example
2. Do some research (the new Mac app Store?) and try to find an alternative desktop/mobile solution that does what you need whilst still on Cleartext, unlikely to be out there
3. Select an MS Exchange hosting service which will give you this but you’ll loose all the Cleartext OS and mobile neutral goodness and will lock you into Microsoft stuff!

Part of the driving force for setting up Cleartext in 2005 was that we saw a need to offer standards based services to small to medium business because Microsoft was doing such a bad job of providing open platforms that connected to other systems using internet standards and such a good job of locking people into their offerings, neither of which is very helpful when trying to run a business.

I think we’ve been justified in this approach as we’ve got a loyal client base and have seen Microsofts market share dwindle in the face of competition from companies like Google and Apple, but we realise that there are many people out there that don’t really care about long term IT strategy and just want a problem ‘fixed’ with IT.

This is why companies like Microsoft are able to continually put sub standard products into the market place, not helped by the fact that it’s quicker to hack some code together to provide a solution than it is to plan it around formalised protocols etc. We see similar issues in the IM space, web developers regularly create ‘new’ instant messaging platforms using web protocols (HTTP) rather than doing some research and discovering that there’s a standard protocol for IM called XMPP, just like there is for email called SMTP, POP3 and IMAP.

So the long and the short of it is that we do offer what the client needs, meeting bookings with sight of peoples free and busy time but you’d have to move to a standards based platform to use our standards based services, that is Apples built in apps (which are actually very nice to use) or something similar like Mozilla Thunderbird.

The internet was designed as an open interconnected platform but unfortunately there’s a history of companies trying to lock it down with proprietary protocols and ‘lock in’, companies like Microsoft and now oddly enough Twitter and Facebook (Microsoft part owns Facebook).

We’ll continue to be an ‘indy’ software as a service or ‘cloud’ company and we’ll always put three things into our offerings, service, security and STANDARDS.

We recently moved from Australia to the UK for a while to spend more time with extended family and further develop the already growing customer count in Europe.

We thought we’d covered everything in the move but I wasn’t prepared to be told by Apple that if I wanted to switch from the Australian to the UK iTunes store I would ‘loose’ all my content and updates for purchases made in the Au store. Specifically as a heavy iPhone apps user I’m concerned about;

“After you change countries, you won’t be able to upgrade the applications you purchased while your account was set to the previous country.”

Tell me if I’m wrong but I thought the internet was global and we lived in a globalised world, why does my right to use copyrighted material that I’ve paid for cease when I change countries, and what happens when I go back.

More importantly does Apple have jurisdiction to impose these conditions on me?

I’ve posted a copy of the email I got from them on this issue, click through to read.

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Continue reading →

I will be presenting at Sea Beyond – Mobile Real Time Communication & Collaboration technical event in France.

Presenting Cleartext’s work on real time microblogging over XMPP and making an announcement about Cleartext’s technology in this area.

For more information on Sea Beyond go to the events web site.

I get asked this occasionally as we’ve worked with Jive for about 5 years. If your main requirement is content creation and management with some social connections then it probably is. I’ve no doubt there are a lot of ‘me to’ products now, but Jive do understand the issues better than most in this space.

The other serious option we discuss with clients now is building their own, sounds extreme I know but if you’re going to blow a $100k (1200*60 + setup costs) in the first year then ongoing licence costs for years 2 and 3 you’ll end up spending half as much.

This is the route we took with CRM, instead of a $15k 3 year SalesForce type deal we spent about $8k building something that was 100% fit rather than an off the shelf product that has to be customised or we’d have to change our processes to use.

I wouldn’t have suggested this a a few years back but the Web 2.0 revolution delivered some really cool rapid development platforms that can create great Enterprise 2.0 solutions.

If you’re cashed up, in a hurry and don’t mind fitting in with Jive’s workflow go with Jive SBS. If you want to keep costs down, have something that works well for your organisation and can wait 3-6 months build your own.

My 2c on bad policy and uninformed commentary http://www.cleartext.com/blog.html

This last week we officially launched our live services and desktop messaging app. We’ve been in pre-release and talking to clients for a while now and even managed to sign up some early users. Read more here.

I just checked my Facebook Privacy Settings ‘What your friends can share about you through applications and websites’ and the ‘My Birthday’ was still enabled – That’s a real privacy and identity theft risk as fas as I’m concerned and should be OFF by default.

Did you know that you could be recommending products and services to people on Facebook? Check out the ‘Facebook Ads’ section in you ‘My Account’ settings and turn off this feature if you’d rather not be unwittingly promoting advertisers products.

So Facebook is STILL failing on the privacy and safety issues for me, you may want to do an in depth review of ALL the settings in your Facebook account.

This article on The Australian’s web site talks about issues around tweeting. Cleartext’s platform can address some of these issues.

The article demonstrates why Cleartext ESM exists at all. What a great side story to run as the Logies was being aired, if only the news producers had known it was happening, sounds to me like The Age hadn’t a clue until Tuesday!

quote.. ‘Deveny was one of many comedians and journalists who gleefully “tweeted” during the TV Week Logies’, were the news agencies tracking the event on Twitter?

1. If she was tweeting using Cleartext ESM Desktop The Age would have an archived record of the tweets (if it was company policy or a contract requirement).
2. If a news organisation had ESM they could be tracking that conversation as it happened.
3. It reminds us that journalists have already gone online and Twitter IS being used by them (so some form of policy and technology to enable and control the activity is needed)

Another quote from the article;

‘”Definitely it would serve media organisations well to have a clear policy in place for social media and their uses, considering in the media sector there’s a blur between the line of journalists blogging or tweeting in a personal capacity and the fact they’re associated with the media organisation,” says Blake Dawson media lawyer Jeremy Storer.’

Yes they should, and the technology to help.

And another;

‘”Then from the journalist’s side of things, they need to be aware whatever they’re publishing is going to be read, not only by their employers but by the wider community.”‘

And archived for later eDiscovery if they are using Cleartext ESM.

And another;

‘This month a British Labour candidate, Stuart MacLennan, was sacked after his “offensive” tweets appeared in a newspaper.’

If they were on Cleartext ESM the bad language would have been filtered out.

So in summary, not only does Cleartext provide a platform for gathering, searching and filtering ‘tweets’ we also provide technology to mitigate some of the risks of open social media.

To see how long it takes FeedBurner to find this… I think the prior post got picked up quickly just because I’d just signed up

I just hooked up by blog (http) to Googles FeedBurner service (http -> pubsubhubbub) and in turn to a PubSubHubbub -> XMPP Gateway hosted on Google App Engine.

Why? To prove that you can get almost any web based content into an XMPP based platform like Cleartext ESM. I’ll post a screen shot of this post in ESM Desktop as soon as it shows up

– UPDATE! That was quick – FeedBurner has grabbed the post and pushed it to the XMPP gateway, which in turn pushed it to my ESM stream….

For those still wondering this is what a prompted Tweet looks like, note that it’s staying at the top of the tweet stream, despite the fact that it was posted 10 hours ago;

Here are a couple of screen grabs of Cleartext ESM desktop client. Showing the rich design features of this RIA (Rich Internet Application) for chat and microblogging.

Detail of the 'bookmarks' for various services

The Twitter Platform’s Inflection Point

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/04/the-twitter-platform.html

and a follow up…

Evan Williams’s Message to Twitter Developers

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/evan-williamss-message-to-twitter-developers/

My view is that the killer app is microblogging – that’s what many people have missed, just as email was (is) the killer app that kicked off when federated email _arrived_ on the net in the 90′s.

I was going to post a comment on the NY Times article but I have to register first, which I won’t do. NYT need to open that up, they’ll get more comments on there articles and more traffic if they let people post without registering.

New OR (Michael Osterman @mosterman) policy study: 19% of decision mkrs are very concerned about sensitive/confidential info being sent out of their orgs through Twitter.

Cleartext ESM - Twitter Data Leakage Study

This is good news for Cleartext as our ESM (Enterprise Social Messaging) platform provides a solution to this concern in that we archive and can word filter micro-blogging.

Finally XMPP at Facebook – only client-server at the moment though, but that’s a good start…

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=297991732130

Here’s a screen shot of me connected using Psi for Mac(also available for Windows). As you can see I’m not a huge Facebook user

I thought people would like to have a peek at a screen shot of the current development version of the Cleartext ESM (Enterprise Social Messaging) desktop client.

Cleartext Enterprise Social Messaging

It’ll be a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux and included in our XMPP SaaS IM & Micro-blogging offering which will be available Q2 this year.

Think of Cleartext ESM as an XMPP IM platform that supports public IM and micro-blogging over XMPP(via gateways), includes URL shortening, character count and various Twitter specific functionality.

Contact us if you’d like to be on the beta program, we’re particularly interested in hearing from organisations looking to roll out IM or micro-blogging for their staff and require word filtering and archiving etc for compliance reasons.

I’ve had enough of being ripped off for mobile data roaming so I’ve sent this to Orange UK and Vodafone Au. You’d think that as a Vodafone client my data costs would be the same both here and in the UK, or anywhere else for that matter.

Running an international SaaS (Software as a Service) business I know that ‘international’ data doesn’t cost 10 times ‘local’ data, imagine Cleartext charging clients in the USA ten times what we charge people in Australia… it’s time the mobile data rip off was stopped, much like the EU’s hammered telcos for voice roaming recently.  So here it is;

—
Attn: Customer Service management, Product Management.

bcc: Vodafone Au, Orange UK and my blog.

re: international mobile data roaming is still painful, it shouldn’t be.

I’d like to lodge a complaint about the amount of our latest Vodafone (mobile number 0*** ***1) bill attached, and the quality of technical and customer service (rude, unhelpful staff) at Orange (mobile number 0*** ***5) High Wycombe store.

Before travelling to the UK from Australia I enquired about mobile broadband via my iPhone and was informed that I could purchase a mobile data roaming plan for about $300 that gave me a couple of hundred megs of data. Obviously running a small business and staying online whilst in the UK this is just not economical so I decided to get a mobile broadband dongle in the UK. For example about $80 gets 2-3Gb of data,

On arriving in the UK we chose a dongle from Orange because the Vodafone staff in a retail outlet told us that coverage was not good in our locations, Orange said they had good coverage. The reality was that Orange had almost no 3G coverage so we returned the product and purchased a Vodafone dongle, this worked very well and we were happy with the results.

However during the period that the Orange dongle was less than useful I had to connect and used my Vodafone iPhone with mobile data roaming. I did this for about a week, (recall we were snowed in) switching data on and off as needed. The end result is not nice with a bill for ten times my usual monthly bill for 3G data.

Orange: Your service did not worked as explained by your retail staff, our plan was cancelled, but we were still billed via our credit card, this has now been corrected. BUT your staff would not refund the cost dongle, even returned in good packaging. What use is a dongle with no service, what would your industry body or trading standards think of failing to address a faulty product/service combination?

Vodafone: Having been a customer for many years I’d like some negotiation on this invoice and a credible explanation of the excessive charges incurred, especially in the contexts of the European Unions recent ruling on mobile roaming. Running an international Software as a Service business I fail to understand these excessive data costs, even allowing for differences in international market pricing for data I’d still only expect a maximum of double the fees.

Overall not much has changed over the last 10 years with regard to mobile roaming, either voice or data. I’d have thought that by know I could simply plug my iPhone into my laptop and get a data connection anywhere Vodafone has coverage, globally, without feeling like I’ve been ripped off. Charge a premium yes, but 10 times, that’s just outrageous.

Looking forward to some constructive dialogue on this issue.

best regards,

David Banes
Director & CEO, Cleartext
Director & Secretary, Internet Industry Association
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• New computing strategy: iPhone + 2 x iMac (home & office), #iPad replaces MacBook for sofa & travel email & surfing.
• #iPad case, first time I’ve seen a portable computer with a custom made case for years. Last was my Olivetti DOS laptop in 1989 I think
• RT @DDrazic: Will iPad have arm strap so I can out do those dudes at the gym that strap iTouch and iPhone to their arms when training?
• RT @jamiepride: On reflection the iPad is targeted at netbooks – will be interested to see how competition to plays out in this space. #ipad
• #iPad conclusion for someone with an iPhone & new MacBook Pro. Luxury coffee table item, but worth popping into your Apple store to play
• So the magic in the #iPad is the software, ignore the ‘overgrown iPhone’ look and lac of connectors etc

Well it’s looking like it…

—-

cleartext01 ~: telnet chat.facebook.com 5222

Trying 69.63.181.104…

Connected to chat.facebook.com.

Escape character is ‘^]’.

quit

<?xml version=”1.0″?><stream:stream id=”none” from=”chat.facebook.com” xmlns=”jabber:client” xmlns:stream=”http://etherx.jabber.org/streams” version=”1.0″><stream:error><xml-not-well-formed xmlns=”urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-streams”/></stream:error></stream:stream>Connection closed by foreign host.

cleartext01 ~:

—-

Listen to Conroy on filtering, is he deliberately missing the point?

It’s not about performance and what you’re blocking it’s about the fact that a western democracy is putting a Chinese type firewall in place.

Let’s not even get into effectiveness, URL addresses change far faster than a government department can keep a list current and much ‘bad’ material is in fact NOT sent by web but by encrypted email and p2p.

I was flicking through an older Slideshare presentation called ‘Microblogging via XMPP‘ (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) and it occurred to me that whilst there’s no doubt Twitter has redefined public internet messaging it’s not speeded up one to one or one to many communication, in fact it’s slowed it down.

Take the points from slide 6:

London – Calcutta, message + reply (Peter Saint-Andre)

• 1800: 2 years (ship)
• 1914: 1 month (steamship)
• 1950: 1 week (airmail)
• 1980: 2 days (overnight mail)
• 1994: 10 min (email)
• 1999: 1 sec (IM)

It suddenly struck me that because Tweets are sent and received via HTTP polling the delivery time is more than a 1999 IM.

So a quick test between 2 Twitter accounts using Tweetie and Seesmic to DM saw 2 mins 55 secs for the send and 2 mins 29 secs for the reply. That’s 5 mins 24 secs for a simple “Hi” and “Hello” back. Interestingly I got the email notification of a DM before either Twitter app picked up the DM.

So our new bullet point would be;

• 2009: 5 min  (micro-blogging)

It’s entirely legit to say that services like Twitter are a whole new category and aren’t supposed to be real time, but how many users of such services expect them to be? I know a few people that think Twitter is close to IM, when in fact trying to have a one to one conversation over twitter isn’t really possible in the same that it is over instant messaging.

So it’s with this in mind that many people, including Twitter during mid 2008, looked at XMPP to help deliver a more real time experience for micro-bloggers. In fact the ‘Microblogging Over XMPP’ specification was updated mid 2008 and describes a way to deploy close to real time micro-blogging.

Some alternatives to Twitter use XMPP (Twitter dropped ‘official’ support mid 2008) gateways, services like Jaiku, identi.ca (status.net) and FriendFeed. XMPP has also been picked up by Google for GTalk and Google Wave, WordPress and Yahoo! for various projects.

Many people, myself included, use an XMPP chat program to ‘tweet’ via these gateways so that we can microblog and IM from the same application. (In fact Cleartext will soon be releasing such an app).

So Twitter will probably do just fine with long gaps between messages and HTTP polling but my intuition tells me that in an age when everyone wants more and faster ,that an XMPP based real time federated micro-blogging service may just catch on and even replace IM.

I’d like to see that bullet point read;

• 2010: 0.5 sec (real time micro-blogging)

David Banes.

Footnote: There’s also an open microblogging standard called, Open Microblogging, but this is HTTP