Masood Mortazavi's Weblog

Wednesday April 06, 2005

[ Telecommunications ] IP Multimedia Subsystem on FT-IT Review

When I was a graduate student doing general research in the areas of computational fluid dynamics and physics of fluids, my advisor used to say that if a field of enquiry had made it to The New York Times Tuesday science column, it was time to get out of that field because it had become too mature and advanced for pure research.
This Wednesday, talk of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) seems to have arrived on the pages of Financial Times' IT Review (Paul Taylor, "Testing Time for Operators in a Brave New World," FT April 6, 2005, Page6). That simply means that IMS has now become officially perceived and recognized as a mature, stable technology. We have known about its advance and have been following it keenly but now, the readers of the FT will also be exposed to it. That's FT-IT Review for you, and it shows that FT writers are at least keeping their eyes on the ball.

(Also of note, in this week's FT-IT Review, is the announcement that Dan Gillmor has joined FT's team of columnists.)

Telecommunications, Technology, Mobility, Internet.

2005-04-06 22:42:33.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Technology ] In Parise of Paper

Let's face it. Paper as a "technology" works really well.

"Man Reading Paper" by Neil Moffatt
When I unfold my paper copies of The Wall Street Journal or Financial Times every morning (if I have time to do so), they are about twice as big as the largest desk-top flat-screen around, and I don't even need to remind the reader how much lighter and easier to carry a paper edition is to the hand. Talk about mobility!
Most astonishingly, paper editions offer us an extremely flexible viewing and reading environment.
I can fold my paper editions (or some sections of them) to almost any useful size for reading, down to the size of the viewing area offered by a typical PDA, in a matter of seconds.

In fact, paper editions are laid out, purposefully, to allow such flexible handling, folding, carrying and reading by the "user." Not only can we fold them in all kinds of useful ways, we can also use our fingers as page marks, and of course, our knowledge of the physical placement of stories, gained through repeated reading, helps us navigate very quickly to the secions or articles we want to read.

This provides only a glimpse of it all, or at least all that is open to first-level perception. The mysteries of how our fingers, hands and the rest of our limbs are involved in memory, perception and comprehension requires a more in-depth reflection.

And, of course, I would like to mention the powerful selectivity of the paper imposed by its very finite extent.

When I hold the paper edition of the Financial Times in my hands, I know what I'm holding, what to expect there and what not. For my particular purpose, the value of the Financial Times flows from these expectations, based on the material it routinely includes but also on its intentional and selective exclusion of material.

The efficiency and effectiveness of the paper edition of newspapers leaves me dumbfounded.

We only come to notice and reflect on such mundane givens and advantages when a "replacement" technology lays a claim on the domain of an existing one.

Reading, Technology, Paper, Art, Mobility, Newspapers.

2005-04-06 12:53:59.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Web ] Funny Fraud

This morning, The Wall Street Journal carried a very interesting story by Kevin Delaney about online advertising auctions and "click fraud," when a "fraudulent clicker" clicks on a search ad with ill intent ("In 'Click Fraud,' Web Outfits Have a Costly Problem: Marketers Worry About Bills Inflated by People Gaming The Search-Ad System," WSJ, April 6, 2005; Page A1).

"Something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because potentially it threatens our business model," according to the CFO of the largest search company.

The story also describes how advertisers bid for favorable placement. I wonder whether the auction for the bids is a blind one but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

Fraud, Advertising, WWW, Click, Regulation, Auctions, Business.

2005-04-06 11:46:49.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.