1) A form of central storage that my multiple devices can access

2) A backup/replication scheme that doesn’t depend on any one device to operate it

The answer to this would appear to be cloud storage. However, there are cost and performance issues which I believe will exist for quite some time to come. Currently, getting 300GB of online storage from Apple would cost $750 a year ($50 per 20GB), a price I’m not willingly to pay. Cloud storage is also much slower to access that your local SCSI/IDE drive. The cloud may be the answer for mission critical back-ups (like contacts, low-res photo copies, email) but it won’t be storing my 4 hours of safari videos anytime soon. The solution I need is a central (cloud) based service that co-ordinates my local resources. I want to tell a service that I have 4 devices, 1 NAS, and 2 external drives and let it coordinate the (wireless) repication of data across my devices. I want backups, local caches, and true synchronization of versions, all coordinated without needing to plugin to, or depend upon, a single device.

Maybe I’m being too short-sighted, and the cloud will provide all sooner than I think. I note with interest that Google now requests local storage access rights on my iPhone. The recognition of local storage, and its many advantages, I believe is key, and the sooner someone starts to manage it centrally for me, the better!

* A move to SSD (Solid State Drives) will decrease storage capacity in the short to medium term given the increased cost of this medium. SSD’s are being adopted to improve battery life and  performance.

Maybe I am wrong, but the appeal of having a storage unit that I can plug my camera and video camera into without the need to go near a PC seems huge. I want a NAS that simply sucks files from my devices. I can then later edit/alter/view them on a PC if I wish, but I want files taken from my devices with the same ease I put electricity into them. However, the industry doesn’t seem to agree with me, as I cannot find any mainstream prodoucts making use of USB On The Go. Why is this? Is it a conspiracy by PC manufacturers, or are the storage product people just very conservative. Whatever the answer, please consider me officially in the queue for a storage appliance that ‘pulls’ data from my digital devices.

Firstly you must ensure that your user base is no more fraudulent than the population at large, or more specifically, the customer base of your competitors. In that way, while good users may object to paying fees, they have no lower price alternative (from companies with a cost and therefore long-run price advantage over you). Step two is to attract less fraudsters and/or block more fraud. Fairly simple really. Doing this requires deep IP which comes at a high fixed cost. This fixed cost makes achieving scale essential to winning the game and is one of the key assets of large payments players. As fraudsters prey on the weak (and good users abandon the weak) gaining a lead on your competitors quickly is key - a sort of most secure car on the road approach to security versus an unbreakable door approach. Finally you need to start engineering out the cost of fraud, by either passing the cost on to 3rd parties or removing the aspects of your service that enable/attract fraud in the first place.

PayPal lost $9m to fraud in its first year. Fraud prevention is an expensive game to learn, and one that directly affects the bottom line. In tight margin businesses it can be the deciding factor between profit and loss. And in payments, which is a vey tight margin business, fraud is a core business competency. If you operate in payments and are experiencing above average fraud, and cannot pass this cost on to consumers (for the good reasons mentioned above), you should look t merchants to cover the cost. If they are unwilling, and your increased cost of fraud comes with no incremental upside to merchants (e.g. greater customer reach, lower checkout abandonment) - you should perhaps reconsider the game you’re in!

Perhaps the most worrying development in the barage of new asynchronous communications technologies (by asynchronous I mean communication mechanisms with no limit to how much information can be pumped at you) is Google Wave. It explicity unifies email, IM and ‘track changes’ style functionality for document management. A simple highlighted bold line in your ‘inbox’ could represent a simple ‘hi ya’, or a very serious change to a legal document. With no clear way to differentiate one from another, the risk of missing and important ‘message’ in the midst of pleasantries, typos corrections, and general work banter is a very real prospect.

I’d like to see Google’s engineers turn their attention to tools that help manage a recipients precious bandwidth to read information. This would require an effective way to prioritise ‘messages’, or restrict the receipt of messages based on the available bandwidth. I haven’t a solution to this, but it would probably involve some sort of contention mechanism, where people would vie for attention, competing for a limited amount of mental real estate. As important as the technical solution, whatever it may be, will be the social norms/expectations that evolve around it.

Twitter is as much social phenomenon as tech innovation. That said, lets just focus on the tech for a moment. Twitter usernames are like a lazy, somewhat jumbled email address, the @ is in the wrong place and the domain name is missing (e.g. gmail.com). Essentially all usernames currently are assumed to be tied to a single provider of identities (i.e. Twitter Corp itself). But what if the protocol were to be extended a little, to break this assumption and enable multiple providers to issue usernames, just the way email works (you could be truly radical and just use the email address as the username if you liked). Could Twitter function if multipe providers were involved, and would Twitter Corp need to consent, or would the co-operation of the leading 5-15 Twitter Client providers be enough?

Lets break this down into some more detail (please comment to help develop this further). Twitter provides a few functions:

1) Free hosting of people’s ‘micro’-blog posts (no issue here with multiple providers, this is how ‘macro’-blogging works already)

2) Easy maintenance of who you are following (no issue here, RSS already enables you to ‘follow’ across multiple blog hosts)

3) The ability to message a user / blogger publicly (no issue here either, this just requires you to ‘post’ your own ‘comments’)

4) The ability to message a user / blogger privately (this is basically email forwarding and isn’t an issue)

5) The ability to search all posts by all users - in real time (I’m sure Google would be willing to offer this if pushed!)

Is this thought so radical or could Twitter be opened-up, without Twitter Corp driving it? It could help drive innovation, share the server bill around, and keep the service true to its add free roots. The value would then truly be in the ’social momentum’ behind the idea (and not the tech platform), and that value would be retained by those who’ve created it. The idea may not only appeal to the rebel forces, but also the big incumbents who’d like to neutralise a new threat, and stay hip with the kids.

* I’ve deliberatly not addressed the model where by all Tweets are private and need constent for people to follow.

To help me know who knows me via my various mobile numbers, I want an easy way to see (online) the telephone numbers of anyone who has ever called me (a look-up to map numbers back to IDs would be nice also). If I needed to retire a number I could easily identify who would be affected and share a new number with selected individuals if needed (via automated SMS perhaps).

Elements of this system could be achieved with products available today. I could setup multiple SkypeIn numbers and route them to my mobile, but I’d have to pay call forwarding charges. To avoid the call forwarding charges I could run a VoIP client on my phone, but there are reliability and battery issues with this. In neither scenario do I get an easy way to manage and share my various phone numbers with my contacts (and by ‘contacts’ I mean anyone who has actually contacted me, rather than those I’ve choosen to invest time recording - interestingly none of the contacts management systems I know store what ID you shared with someone, they all take ‘you’ as a constant).

On the dial ‘9′ for urgent feature, this could be done by IVR perhaps, but would be best if it didn’t incur call charges before you answered (best for the consumer that is rather than the telco). In fact the whole multi-number, multi-priority system could be implemented via IVR, with temporal passcodes, priority prompts and more, but the screening is all a bit too obvious (especially on the multi-number front).

Marketing is tough, but playing with the product (your train set) is cool. You add a new feature, it’s there for you to see. You change the design and hey presto you’re achieving something. On the  , the 5 sales calls you made have gone nowhere. Over time, to keep your spirits up, you turn to the product for a bit of a pick me up. Soon your laying out all sorts of funky new train tracks and having a great time playing with Thomas and his Friends. The more fun with the train set, the less appealing those sales call seem - you may even be waiting for Version 2 before you make them (now this is a sure sign you’re in trouble, and need to put Thomas, Percy and James away).

To avoid ending up like a chimp in a cage playing with his what-nots, make sure to set hard boundaries and objectives for externally facing activities. If you don’t have the luxury of having dedicated departments to perform each function, make sure you are forcing yourself to allocate enough of your day to each task. This is not rocket science, but it is easy to go astray. Be proud of you product now* and go sell.

* eBay and Twitter never got round to site design or graphics consulting, yet they are all doing fine and will sort these problems out later!

Sockington is not Jason Scott, his owner and I presume keyboard assistant. This statement is true in so far as Frasier is not Kelsey Grammar, and Carrie is not Stephen King. James Bond is also not Ian Flemming, in fact James Bond is not just a subset of Ian Fleming’s mind. James Bond is now happily continuing life after Ian died back in 1964. Who would you prefer to owe you money - James or Ian? Sockington or Jason?

Sockington has earning potential, and given his high profile, a need to protect his good name. Jason hopefully is earning a good wage himself, but perhaps has less need to keep his identity clean. He could go bankrupt, adandon his creditors, change his name by Deed Poll and all potentially without impacting his earning power. Sockington on the other hand lives and dies by his personal brand. So how important is it to link Sockington to a ‘real’ identity, when so much value is tied up in his ‘virtual’ ID? Do I need to know who Sockington is, or do I just need to know what Sockington earns?

Lending to Sockington without knowing the ‘real’ identity behind him, is in many ways no different to lending to a Limited company. In a limited company the creditors have no lien on the assets of the people behind the company, nor can the force the owners to work. They simply lend on the basis that the company has more interest in existing than not. I’d lend Sockington money, and if he didn’t get a ‘job’* to pay me back, I’d come after that cat with Marmaduke until he made good!

* a few Google Adwords perhaps.

XOBNI is a must-have tool for anyone who uses Outlook. It is quite simply wonderfully useful. It should, and maybe will, be built into Outlook. It provides the search functionality Outlook so desperartely needs (and does so in a more stable way that the google desktop plugin). Xobni also links everyone’s email to publicly available Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, saving you googling them. It has a host of features to help you track conversation threads, find files, map relationships, and track general stats on who you communicate with. Download it today.