Glen Martin

I saw a television ad the other day that portrayed someone using a cellular phone as a fancy cash card to make a vending machine purchase. As a person who hates to carry loose change - once you start, you suddenly realize you have a pocketful - this spoke to the kind of useful integration into people's lives that a new technology needs to be successful. If you think a cash card is easier to carry than a cellular phone...you're right. But the integration of functions into one device is more convenient still. A cell phone is one device that could act as a cash card, map, traffic-status monitor, voice recorder, and yes, a competitive deep-sea fishing game. That last one isn't a joke, by the way. I hear it's the most popular downloadable content in Japan. Apparently the phone vibrates with the tension on the line. Everyone agrees the wireless industry is poised for incr... (more)

Dial Tone for Business Apps

Around 15 years ago there was a cascading switch failure in the telephone network along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Phones stopped working. So did air traffic control, because information about air traffic was communicated between control towers using the phone network. The failure was caused by incompatible implementations of the interswitch trunk protocols. These specs, while very long and detailed, are necessarily imperfect. With the best of intentions, different development teams interpreted the specs in different ways. When one switch started to fail, it sent... (more)

WS-I and JCP: Creating Value for Enterprises

I'm frequently asked about the difference between portability and interoperability, and am often surprised at how many people refer to one when they mean the other. On the surface, the terms are pretty understandable: interoperability means that different systems will work together. Portability means that systems will work in different places. It's clear that enterprise customers need both. How many times have you heard an IT person say, "Our systems don't need to talk to each other?" or "Our deployment needs are never going to change?" (No doubt such folks still have 640KB PCs ... (more)