I was promoted a couple of weeks ago. This was something totally unexpected but it turns out that I am now just a step away from becoming a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, which just a month ago seemed like an impossible goal to achieve. It won’t be easy but I will certainly do my best to try to reach that position.

The best part of the promotion is that I got a larger, closed office. When you spend as many hours as I do at work, you want to feel at home at work. I therefore decided to decorate the walls by hanging pictures of all the tech luminaries that have left their mark on the computer industry as well as the products they brought to market. In a way,this is my personal Computer Hall of Fame.

Well, it turns out that this is much easier said than done. If you look on the web you will not easily find many pictures or stories from our recent past. Try for example looking for images of Sir Clive Sinclair (the man who brought us the ZX 81 and the ZX Spectrum computers) and you will be disappointed by the results. Same story for Sir Alan Sugar, the founder of Amstrad, who brought us the CPC 464 back in the eighties. You may think that this only happens to brit aristocrats, but you would be wrong. I tried to find a picture of former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner and could only find a small picture on IBM’s corporate site. Even worse, I could only find two poor quality pictures of Adam Osborne, the man who brought us the first commercially available portable computer, and passed away just five years ago. There isn’t much information about him in Wikipedia either.

In general, most companies will carry current pictures of their top executives but except for a small number of honorable exceptions (IBM and H-P mainly) they don’t seem to care much about preserving their history. The situation is obviously much worse for dead companies like Netscape, Amstrad or Atari which do not have curators interested in preserving their legacy.

With the Internet focusing mainly on recent events, if we are not careful, in a couple of years we will have lost a large part of our recent history. There are a couple of nice sites that deserve praise, for example folklore.org which extensively documents the history of how the original Macintosh was built, but that is obviously not enough. It would be nice if there was a place for all of us to collaborate on preserving the exciting stories of the computing revolution. On wikia there are 28,586 Star Trek articles, but there is nothing comparable for the computer history. That is really sad.

Everyday you hear about globalization. It just seems that every single day our earth is becoming smaller and smaller. Global brands like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Starbucks are found everywhere. People all over the world are complaining that nations are losing power and independence. They claim that all important decisions are now taken at a supra-national level (this is specially true in the EU). But is it really true? Sometimes I wish it were. You see, I am Dutch but I was raised in Switzerland, attended college in France and Spain before getting my first job in Canada. I now happen to live in Mexico, but as many other things in life this is due to circumstances, and circumstances may change. That means that for me, as well as a growing group of people who have become used to live all around the world, the nation system doesn’t make much sense anymore. It simply places too many artificial barriers that make life ridiculously complex when it doesn’t need to be.

Despite all the talk about globalization, most of the changes that have happened over the last decades have mainly impacted corporations. At the individual level there are still many barriers protecting nations which make the life of people like myself difficult. I think that these barriers can easily be grouped in three kinds, commercial, financial and legal.

The commercial barriers are starting to crumble. It is becoming very difficult to limit the sale of a product to a single country or region or use differentiated pricing policies around the world. The gray market which quickly appears when artificial product availability and pricing is introduced by the manufacturer is taking care of the problem in most cases. However, there are still important issues impacting global consumers where I feel totally unprotected. One case is for example DVDs. The introduction of regions makes it impossible for me to buy a Spanish Blu-Ray disk because it will simply not play on my American PlayStation 3. The same happens with console games. Music is another sector that needs to be liberated. It doesn’t make any sense that I can easily buy a French CD from Amazon.fr but that I cannot buy from the French Apple Store. The problem is that I do not feel that anyone is fighting for the global consumer. We really need someone to pick that fight for us. These issues should be discussed at an international level, for example by the WTO.

On a financial level, I strongly believe that individuals deserve more freedom. We should be allowed to easily open a bank account anywhere in the world. Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to avoid paying taxes, I just want to move my money where I can get the best returns. I would love to invest in the US through online brokerage companies like e-trade, but I can’t. It doesn’t matter if I have access to all the required information to find interesting investment opportunities. Because of all the legal barriers imposed to individuals, there is no way for me to invest in Serbia for example, now that they are moving closer to joining the EU. I would love to sell Euros and buy Dollars now that it is clear that the current exchange rate is taking a terrible toll on the European industry and that the ECB will have to lower rates, but that is not going to happen either because I cannot have an Euro denominated account in Mexico, despite being a customer of a global bank based in Europe. That drives me crazy. I do understand that if we liberalize the financial system this could be a great opportunity for drug lords and other evildoers to abuse the system, but I still believe that something needs to be done to help individuals take their financial decisions freely. Moving exclusively to electronic currency could be the solution to start eradicating crime and allow for more (supervised) financial freedom.

The legal front is the most complex and where more work is required. Taxation and retirement benefits for example are regulated by law and represent a major issue that countries have been trying to solve through bilateral agreements. However, if there is no such agreement in place you may be out of luck. Say for example that you worked 40 years in total, 20 in one country and 20 in a different country. You may qualify for retirement in any of those countries after working for 30 years, but if there is no agreement to recognize the years worked in the other country you may end up not qualifying for benefits in neither country. In general laws are still designed to protect citizens who live and die in their home country. This simply does no longer represent the current situation of an increasingly large population group and inadecuate laws are reducing worker mobility. If countries are serious about attracting talent they must make sure that situations like the one I described are avoided.

The problem is in many ways cultural, people are not used to this new situation. Most people still expect your nationality to describe you. However, those traveling to France will be very disappointed if they expect to only see white people wearing bérets and carrying baguettes under their arms on the streets of Paris. The world has changed. You would expect large Internet companies like Yahoo or Google to understand the problem, after all their reach is global, right? Wrong. They still assume too often that because someone connects from a certain country they are citizens of that country and that they behave in a predictable way. For example, when I connect to the US Yahoo main page from Mexico I get an ad for the Mexican soccer section (I couldn’t care less for Mexican soccer). When I connect to Google from Brazil, I get my search results in Portuguese. When I try to see the goals scored by Real Madrid on marca.com, I am denied service because I am connecting from outside of Spain. All this is simply ridiculous. Of course, I have the option to fight back, I can use a proxy server in the US or in any other country to fool the system, but why should I have to? This happens to some degree even in the US. That is why a device like the slingbox has become popular. People want to see their home team games while on travel. Consumers demand freedom and they will ultimately get it, even if they have to bend the rules.

I do not expect changes to happen quickly. Politicians do not have any incentive to help people like me. For starters, we do not live in our home country and too often we do not vote or represent a political force. Besides, the issue is complex and international cooperation is needed to solve the many problems that I have briefly outlined. As usual, governments are playing catch-up with the social issues that are grappling the world. Globalization is happening and not just at the corporate level. Governments need to adjust to a new reality and they need to do so very quickly because the amount of people who are becoming global citizens is growing exponentially and we are increasingly asking for solutions to our new problems. However, this issue needs also to be tackled by corporations who need to work with a new kind of customers who expect truly global service from global companies.

Earlier today, Ryan Naraine reported for eWeek that “PayPal, one of the brands most spoofed in phishing attacks, is working on a plan to block its users from making transactions from Web browsers that don’t provide anti-phishing protection”. The reason behind this decision is that “browsers that do not have support for blocking identity theft-related Web sites or for EV SSL (Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are considered ‘unsafe’ for financial transactions”.

This announcement has generated a lot of concern among Mac users since Safari, the most widely used browser on that platform does not support EV SSL. Even though I do use Safari as my main browser on both Mac and Windows, I do agree with the decision. The reason is simple, even though it is very simple to avoid phishing attacks on any computer by just pointing your DNS information to OpenDNS, few know how to do it or even understand how phishing works. Those who complain about the decision are obviously not aware of the size of the phishing attacks and the amount of fraud they represent. If PayPal’s decision forces Apple to implement EV SSL support into Safari, I will certainly not complain. It is great to have a fast and standards compliant browser, but security for the technologically challenged users should be a major concern for Apple.

However, there are more reasons to back PayPal’s decision. Too many users are still using old browsers and this his slowing down the adoption of new technologies. I would love to see more companies to stop supporting old versions of Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. That would really give web developers an opportunity to create great innovative applications. Right now, people too often prefer to use those old versions because there are still sites that require them. If large sites start requiring newer browser versions, those old sites will face increased pressure to modernize. That cannot be bad for the industry or the end-users.

Digg has bothered me for quite a while. It is a good source for news as I do not have to scour the web for interesting stories. However, if you are looking for objectivity you will have to look somewhere else.

This is probably not a problem for those who only visit very specific Digg sections like Technology/Apple you or Gaming/XBox. You know what you are getting into. Those sections have fanboy written all around them. I don’t think that anyone reading the news posted there have any objectivity expectations whatsoever.

On the other hand, if you enter a more general section such as World & Business/US Elections 2008 you may think that all positions will be equally (or at least proportionally) represented. If you think so, you may be in for a big disappointment.

Today I tried to submit a story published on the Yahoo front page about how Hillary Clinton was now leading the polls among Democrats. I don’t really want Clinton to be elected President but I wanted that particular news to get posted on Digg since Obama suporters have clearly hijacked that section of the site (previously Ron Paul supporters had done the same on the Republican side). I was just trying to get some balance into Digg because I naively though that the problem was that only positive news for Obama were being published. I was wrong, dead wrong.

It turns out that the news had already been submitted by someone else. That should have made me happy, right? That is what I wanted, a positive note for Clinton in an ocean of notes favoring Obama, providing some well needed balance in my quest for objectivity. Well, let’s say that I was deeply disappointed (this is probably the understatement of the year). The person who actually submitted the story first is obviously an Obama supporter. Instead of titling the story “Clinton leads the polls” or something similar based on the actual content of the article, he decided to name it “The Media Is Already Gearing Up To Justify Clinton Winning”. With such an absurd title it is likely that most Digg readers will never read the actual note, which probably was the intent of this person from the beginning.

Since the same article cannot be submitted twice, it is easy to play the system. A partial solution would be to have Digg automatically use the original article title. However, this is hard to implement from a technical perspective. The problem here is that as long as some of those who submit stories are more interested in publishing their point of view than in hearing all the facts, a site like Digg will never become a trusted news source. While traditional media has its own share of flaws, it still beats hands down unmoderated web sites. That is why I do not see established newspapers going down anytime soon.

Today Toshiba announced what everyone in the industry had predicted since Warner decided to withdraw support for their high-definition DVD format, HD-DVD is dead. The decision to discontinue this technology will cost Toshiba hundreds of millions of dollars. They are not the only losers, though. About a million customers had bet on HD-DVD and now they are stuck with obsolete players (that fortunately can still be used as upscaling DVD players) and media. However, beyond all those abandoned customers, there are some companies that stand to lose big time from Blu-ray’s victory.

The first victim is certainly Microsoft’s XBox 360. In January, for the first time since it was launched, Sony’s Playstation 3 outsold the former console by a comfortable margin n the U.S. I expect this to happen again at least over the next few months as many gamers who are now realizing the value of the PS3 as a next generation DVD player are moving in flocks to buy the console. Just look at what regular users are posting on the Internet and you will see that the mood over the PS3 has clearly changed. Microsoft is mulling a Blu-ray external player for the XBox 360 but that could not be enough to reverse the trend, unless they reduce the cost of their Elite console significantly.

Other victims include online video providers such as Microsoft (through XBox and Media Centre PCs) and Apple. Until now, most customers compared the quality of digital downloads to DVDs, mainly because high-definition DVDs had failed to catch on due to the lack of a unique standard. That is now going to change, and even though it is now possible to purchase and rent 720p movies over the Internet, this media is no match to Blu-ray movies. That really means that wide adoption of Internet movie downloads will be delayed. Don’t get me wrong, it will happen, but physical media will still reign for a few more years until faster and cheaper Internet connections become available. This is certainly not bad news for those of us not living in the U.S. There are still many legal and distribution issues that need to be sorted out before all countries in the world can have access to Hollywood and other dream factories media from around the world through the Internet, legally. Knowing that in the meantime there will be a physical alternative is tranquilizing. I would hate to be stuck for another decade with DVDs on high-resolution screens.

The 2008 Consumer Electronic Show is winding down. As usual, there were lots of announcements, although very few were actually significant. Following that trend, Bill Gate’s farewell keynote was fun but light in content. This certainly marks the end of an era. We will miss you, Bill.

In fact the most discussed topic during this week at CES was the decision taken by Warner to abandon the HD DVD format. It is widely expected that this announcement will quickly lead to the demise of this format. This is certainly a victory for consumers, even though Blu-Ray is more expensive than HD-DVD, and sends a clear message to the CE industry (Sony included) about the need for standardization.

Many have been quick to point out that Blu-Ray’s victory may be short lived and that in the near future digital downloads will replace physical media for high-end video. No need to be a rocket scientist to know that this is true. Still, it will take a couple of years before most people in developed markets can download a 20GB file in less than two hours (the average movie viewing time). That means that there is an opportunity for movie studios to make some real money out of HD media over the next five years or so.

What is interesting, is that unlike previous revolutions (CD, DVD, Blu-Ray), digital downloads will not compete with previous the standard by offering higher quality but instead will focus on convenience exactly like the iPod which offered less audio fidelity than CDs but was much more convenient. Right now we still do not have the iPod equivalent for digital video. Sure, media centers and next-gen consoles like the XBox 360 and the PS3 are attractive for those who get their content illegally and store it on a collection of big hard drives but what about the average user who wants access to a large library of content, potentially all movies ever made? The solution is clearly a video on demand (VOD) system and not a media centre.

Apple, Microsoft, Google, cable companies and many others seem to have understood that trend perfectly well and are racing against each other to be able to be the first company to provide a viable solution. Right now cable companies offer a very limited amount of titles and CE companies until now had no rentals, which is key to succeed in this market. That will change quickly, starting next week with Apple expected announcements. However, competitors will follow quickly as this is in the best interest of content owners. Since there is no standard for video rentals we can expect competition to be as harsh as the blood bath we witnessed during 2007 Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD death match. However, in this case the consequences for consumers may be much more beneficial. Since rentals disappear after viewing the movie, the is no concern about losing your investment. Consumers will take their decision based exclusively on price, ease of use, media quality and library size (as well as product availability and awareness).

Who will win this war? Google, Apple and Microsoft are already well positioned as they have demonstrated that they know how to handle large collections of digital media. In the short term Apple has an edge with the popularity of the iPod, while Microsoft can leverage their huge XBox installed base. Right now I am discounting Sony which is in my opinion more focused on making Blu-Ray a complete success than in competing in this emerging market. In the end, it will come down to each company’s ability to partner with content producers as well as creating attractive, reasonably cheap devices. Since this will be a long war, expect the company with the most focus to ultimately win.

I have never been a customer of Citibank-Banamex. When I landed in Mexico about 15 years ago I started working at a rival (much smaller) bank called Bital (now HSBC) and for me it was much easier to open an account there. I have never switched, not that HSBC’s service is stellar but at least their Internet banking works pretty well.

My wife, however is a Citibank-Banamex customer. She normally does her banking transactions over the phone. However, today she wanted to access her account using the Internet. She called me and asked me to help her, because she was having trouble. It turns out that Banamex only supports IE and Netscape 7. Their error page even tells Mac customers to download either product. They do not seem to know that both products have already been discontinued, which is quite amazing.

The fact is that I have been working with Citi quite closely recently as an IBM Software Architect. They are big Java users, mostly a BEA shop but they have recently started to adopt WebSphere Application Server. From what I know, there is nothing in their current software architecture that would stop them to support either Firefox or Safari. That makes the situation even harder for me to understand. As I told them in an e-mail, it is easier for us to switch banks (and more likely) than switch computers. I do not believe that their customer service department understands that it is very likely that about twenty percent of their customers do not use IE as their default browser. Otherwise, they would probably avoid to ignore/upset such a large constituency.

I am sincerely surprised that in early 2008 we still have to educate such large corporations about standards, but it is clear that we have to. That is why I urge all Citibank-Banamex customers to send a complaint using the e-form that can be found here.

P.S. Yes, I have tried to change the user-agent to IE 7/Vista on Firefox and I was able to bypass the test, but all I got a blank screen. Anyways, I am not really interested in outsmarting their system, what I want them is to fix it.

I am somewhat disappointed that Apple hasn’t announced some kind of upgrade to the Apple TV so far. Sure, the device works as advertised and I am extremely pleased with mine, but the fact that the device has not been updated to support the new iPhoto events made me expect a product refresh for the holidays.

Right now, the Apple TV is still a good value proposition for those who store large amounts of pictures in iTunes and buy TV episodes through the iTunes store. However, since TV shows are only available in the U.S. and in the U.K. (although there doesn’t seem to be a large selection available there) that severely limits the potential of the device.

It seems that Apple is working with the movie studios to offer online movie rentals. That could prove to be a smart move as it it obvious that nobody wants to go to Blockbuster to pick a movie and deal with late fees. Such an initiative could provide a much needed boost to the Apple TV sales. I am not sure that it will be enough, though as competitors are moving fast too.

For example, DivX recently announced that Sony had licensed their technology for the PS3. That means that PS3 customers will be able to use a single device to play games and view both blu-ray high-res movies as well as DivX content downloaded from the Internet (not that I would ever do that…). That is a great value proposition. You can now get a PS3 for US$499 and that includes 15 Blu-ray movies if you buy the device from Wal-Mart. Even if you price each movie at US$15, that puts the cost of the device at US$275, that is US$24 cheaper than the Apple TV.

From what I have been reading, I am not the only one doing the math and many are seeing the value that the PS3 delivers. It seems that Apple needs to do something quickly if they want to move more Apple TVs during the holidays and extend their current lead in the digital download market to the living room. However, time is running out, only three days to black Friday, and if Apple doesn’t release any updates to the device by then, we can be quite sure that there will be no updates until next year. That could be a big mistake.

It is usual for employers to google for possible candidates in order to find out more about their personal interests and their past. That is why many are trying to alert the younger generations to be careful about what they post on the net. Reckless comments, visceral reactions can come back to byte you years later because once you have written something it may be impossible to take it back.

On the other hand, just like having no credit history makes it difficult to apply for a loan, it may become harder for those with no net presence to apply for a job. I see it in my job. I prefer to hire people who have a web-site and who participate in open-source projects. That means that if I do not get any search results when googling for someone, I consider that a negative. This may be related to the fact that I work in a high-tech industry, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this trend had already become mainstream in other industries, since online reputation is becoming harder and harder to separate from real world reputation.

This phenomenon could have unintended consequences for several social groups. The first one is women. Since it is common in many countries that women adopt their husband last name and considering that marrying multiple times in a lifetime is becoming more prevalent, large chunks of their online history could easily be lost to those who do not know all the different names a woman may have used. This could have unintended beneficial consequences for those interested in burying old stories but it could also lead to a situation where women could be perceived as having a less “interesting” professional past. There are many solutions to this problem, but my personal favorite is to have women keep their maiden name all their life.

Another group we need to be concerned with is the one living on the wrong side of the digital divide. If less web presence leads to less opportunities, we must make sure that everyone has proper access to the internet and that schools teach the importance of online reputation. This could, by the way, also help improve good judgement in adolescents who tend to say or write things without measuring the consequences.

None of my previous comments should indicate that I am against anonymity on the web. I am not, on the contrary. Without anonymity there is no freedom, but you cannot spend your life writing only anonymous comments. Sometimes you will have to show what you stand for, what you believe in or what you know. That is what will be used to build your image and your reputation. This cannot be achieved anonymously.

I bought an iPhone while in Miami last week, just before boarding the Enchantment of the Seas. I hoped to get one of the last 1.02 firmware phones made by Apple but was unlucky (it seems that iPhones are still going extremely fast and that Apple stores restock very often). As a result, I was left with a useless US$399 brick, since I had no intention whatsoever to activate the device with AT&T.

Fortunately the iPhoneDev team was hard at work hacking the newer 1.1.1 firmware. By the time I reached the Bahamas, they had already found a way to activate the phone. The procedure isn’t very straightforward but now with iNdependence it has become fairly easy. That allowed me at least to start using the iPhone as a nice, expensive iPod. However, I didn’t have to wait for long to unlock the phone since developers released anySIM 1.1.1 yesterday and soon after getting home I was enjoying full phone functionality.

I must say that I am extremely pleased with the device. For the first time in years I no longer have three devices hanging off my belt. Gone is my trusty Palm as well as my (not as trusty) Sony-Ericsson cell phone. Now everything I need is finally delivered by a single device. I even look slimmer!

There is a downside, though. It turns out that all my IBM colleagues now want an iPhone and they all seem to expect me to unlock it. In fact my first incoming call was from a friend who had already heard that I had unlocked my phone. My first assignment will be tomorrow. I hope everything works well. I should probably print a disclaimer and hand it out to my friends. Nah!