Telstra Technology Day 2013

I attended the Telstra Technology Day 2013 which was a show case of technology solutions by eight of Telstra's technology partners. The exhibiting companies were:

* Ericsson * Motorola * IBM * Alcatel Lucent 

* Netgear * Microsoft * Cisco * Accenture

Alcatel-Lucent had an impressive booth (with chocolates and lollies) where they were showcasing a customer self help solution. It is web portal where users can enter the fault (eg: Broadband not connecting, Foxtel picture breaking up, T-Box not connecting to net) and follow steps to go try and resolve the issue. The portal also allows users to modify various usage settings. I asked the question of how long it takes to develop a walk-through for a new product, and they said its quite quick because they base it on existing customer service workflows. I am sure this had some more capability, but I was not able to spend much time there.

Connected Vehicle - The ALPR camera is below
the steering wheel, towards the right side.

I spent some time at the Motorola booth as well, and they were featuring their Police In-Car system. It
involves a touch screen, high-speed Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system, data recorder and comms system. The ALPR system automatically scans plates against a pre-loaded database. As the squad car drives around the cameras would read plates, and the officers will be alerted if a 'wanted' plate is found.

Microsoft's entertainment offerings which did not seem to gain much interest among the visitors. Other featured solutions included a supermarket stock recorder, a comms system for mining indistry and cloud based products. Ericsson were promoting its 'Connected City' concept, a close collaboration with Telstra.

Resilient City - Proactive City - Greener City

Citizen-as-a-Sensor

What does that mean?

I came across the term yesterday for the first time, and wanted to know more. IBM were showcasing their product offerings that use it, and I stopped for a chat.

IBM had been tasked with identifying citizen movement trends in Istanbul to assist in that city’s future planning of roads and public transport. The city officials needed to know how, where and when the masses move. In smaller areas this can be done via aerial tracking and sensors (for vehicular traffic) and manually or via turnstile tracking for public transport. However, having to monitor millions of people travelling in every direction IBM took novel approach using mobile carrier location data. Partnering with Vodafone, IBM got access to the mobile carrier’s Home Location Register (HLR) data and carried out Big Data analysis to establish the people movement trends they needed.

In addition to the obvious benefits for planning public transport and roads, people movement data can be handy for retail strategies (branch locations and open hours), traffic planning, insurance, public safety (where and when to provide security), road works planning, etc. It could also provide interesting insights in to crowd behaviour following irregular incidents/event s (weather events, public disturbances, major sports events, etc.)

This is ‘treasure from trash’ solution.... or rather more akin to producing energy out of corn husks or renting out your back yard for your neighbour's cows to graze J. Normally, the masses of HLR data would be give limited value, and only just for the mobile carrier. The mobile carriers would be interested with the numbers within an area at various times, but would be less concerned with  the movements of individual users. Opening up this data to government and others creates a potential new revenue stream for a Telco, and broad benefits for the public (by way of more targeted services).

So what are the limitations?

The most obvious is that not everyone has a mobile phone, hence students and lower income people may be under-represented in the numbers. Secondly, unless you get all the mobile carriers you only get a sample. Another is that you need to perform some hefty Big Data analysis, which is a specialized area and could be costly. Hence, various assumptions will need to be made and possibly some tweaking of the data.

Overall, when speed (translating to cost savings and quicker solutions) is more important than accuracy, this is a very good method.

Telstra Connect 2013

Observations and some images from the Telstra Connect 2013 Exhibition (Coming soon)

It was a good showcase of modern and future technology innovations by Telstra's partners.

Connect 2013 - Melbourne, Australia - July 2013

One of the interesting innovations I saw was on 'work spaces of the future'. These are technology enabled, new-concept work spaces to accommodate present/future work trends and to save on expensive office space. I spoke to a rep from Steelcase who explained to me a novel concept they had promoted to Telstra.

SteelCase solution - the portable trolley cabinet 

Taking the Telstra head office as an example he said that they have assessed that of the 3000 (from memory) assigned there, only 60% are at their desks at a given time. The solution involves open access desks with monitors, power and data connections, and each employee getting a portable trolley cabinet for their belongings. Employees would then book a seat (presumably on-line), collect their cabinet from a storage area and push it over to the booked seat. He mentioned that this method would enable 30%+ more staff to be assigned to a building, there by saving rental, energy and other costs.....

[Time to think].....

Interesting. Some practical issues can be foreseen, and employees would have limited opportunity to 'personalize' their workspaces. However, an interesting idea never-the-less.

TedX – A positive global phenomenon

I had come across TedTalks on YouTube only in the last couple of years. It has become a global phenomenon and... as global phenomenons go, this is one of the very few that actually advances humanity rather than drag it back (vide Rihanna, Kesha and Jersey Shore). When you attend a Ted session you have no idea what the topics will be, but you can be assured that they will be interesting, thought provoking and hopefully motivating general interest topics. I would put this up there with the Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org) and Wikipedia as invaluable global initiatives that have a profound impact on global knowledge.

I was very happy to hear that my company Telstra had organized a TedX event for staff. Telstra IT’s iTogether team had done the groundwork to bring a licensed Ted event to us, and they should be commended for that. TedXTelstraMelbourne was held on 23.05.13 at the Telstra HQ auditorium in front of a packed audience.

First to speak was Chris Vani, a youth advocate for Autism Awareness. He first spoke in third person of a autistic boy who went through great difficulties in his formative years, but through help from teachers and his parents, was able to largely overcome the condition and even make the most of the heightened brain activity that was part of his condition. He then revealed that the boy was none other than he himself. Leonardo da Vinci and many other greats are thought to have been autistic. Chris’s main message was that we need to get them to understand their condition and believe ‘that they can’.

Secondly, we watched a pre-recorded video of Jason Fried who spoke on the topic of ‘Why People Can’t Do Work at Work’. Is work the best place to work?, Managers are there only to interrupt us, Why do we have so many meetings?, We need log periods of uninterrupted time to get anything productive done – were some of his key points. He was an entertaining speaker and some of the points did encourage thought, even if not entirely practical.

Next up was Ramali, a ‘spoken word performer’ (first time I heard that term). As I learnt, it refers to a person who recites a free verse poem backed by gestures and expressions. Her two poems ‘History’ and ‘Future’ were beautifully written, and performed equally well. In History, she spoke of ‘my history’ almost as an past-significant-other who she had good and bad times with, and learnt a lot from.

I must say here that when they introduced Ramali’s presentation as a poetry reading, I was taken aback a little because I wasn’t expecting poetry. Then again I suppose that is part of Ted – its general interest. There may have been many few who would have thought they are not into poetry who would have ended up  enjoying it.

Dr. Jason Fox
(Photo: Telstra Intranet)

The last speaker Dr. Jason Fox was a very interesting character. He was a young PhD who was quirky and funny, but obviously brilliant. His topic – ‘Make Clever Happen’ – was on what we can learn from video game designers about how we can keep people (staff) engaged and motivated. The most popular games have three key elements – Goals, Challenges and Quick Feedback. If we can bring those elements in to our work place employees would feel much more fulfilled.

I had the pleasure of meeting Jason during the post event fellowship, and had a very good chat with him.

Then it was time to head home... rather more refreshed than usual.

TPG to build their own Mobile network in Aus?

This morning we hear how the 2013 Wireless Spectrum Auction went yesterday. Telstra as expected has paid $1.3bn for a decent chunk of spectrum to help maintain its superiority in terms of 4G offerings. Optus has spent half that amount. However, the most interesting news is not even that Vodafone (VHA) has not forked out any cash. It is that a new player has made its intentions clear.

TPG has been doing well as a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) using Optus' network with a customer base of about 300,000. But it is a big move to enter the fray as the fourth mobile network. They have the advantage of a familiar brand name and image thanks to their popular broadband internet offers. Customers would expect similar low cost plans as well as some attractive bundles.

TPG has proven their capability, and the tech savvy young generation knows TPG well. Their broadband plans had a lot of word of mouth buzz. They really have potential to eat in to the profits of the big players. Lets wait and see.

Camping in BPM Territory

In my new role I am finally able to spend some quality time on a particular business/technology domain - Business Process Management. The previous role as an Integration PM gave me broad exposure to a wide range of technologies from mobile networks to digital video transmission to virtualized IT environments to enterprise application deployment. Having that broad view was fantastic, but I did wish I could stay long enough to go deeper in to a couple of those areas.

Thus, having been a bit of a gypsy I have now set up camp for an extended period in BPM-land. The concept has been around for some time, and BPM based architecture (i.e- Service Oriented Architecture- SOA) is still on its way up and is likely to be relevant for a while to come. Many larger companies have picked it up in a big way having made expensive and extensive transitions. Several large software houses have built their product strategies around it. If they can sell their BPM software to a company, they can package many other products that complement it. (Having said that, one of the biggest features of BPM s/w is its ability to integrate cross-platform).

Its getting late...
Will add to this soon.