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Cisco Visual Networking Index, Runs on Windows, Sold on a Mac

As someone who works in marketing, primarily for tech companies I take pride in the accuracy of how things are represented. When I’m involved in a technical demo, it works like it is supposed to or (if not developed yet) is animated in a way to simulate reality. What I can’t do though is show something functioning in a fictional environment which is why I get so frustrated when I see things like The Cisco Visual Networking Index …

Cisco Visual Networking Index Free Application

Sure it’s possible that a Windows user has a DVI connection hooked up to their Apple Cinema Display, but the chances of that being a reality are pretty damn slim. This seems like a classic case of the art director just doing what they felt looked best and in this case it’s lame. My eye saw the monitor and the application before I realized (a moment later) that I was looking at a Vista desktop.

hat tip – NextNY

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Cisco to Push into Home Electronics – Why?

I get and respect Cisco’s desire to dig deeper into the home, but I am not convinced that a piece of consumer electronics gear is the way to to do it.  According to the NYT, Cisco is looking to develop a “a digital stereo system that is meant to move music wirelessly around a house.”

I can’t help but wonder why Cisco is not simply focusing on enabling the connectivity and distribution piece on the network rather than going for the end-point.  I’d rather have something neutral that provides access to content (and not just music btw) where I want it – whether that’s in my house or pushed out to my mobile device.  The limited info on the upcoming Cisco product seems to limit the usefulness to a connected audio component.  These typically sit in your stereo rack connected to your home network and stream content through as through it was in your audio player.   Sounds a lot like Sonos, AppleTV and quite a few other boxes that have been sold with considerably less success.

There’s no magic bullet here.  In order to get your entertainment connected and distributed you need to have a way to either view or here it in every room which means cables or wireless kit.  We chose the wired route and centralized most of the equipment into a couple of racks beneath the basement stairs.  Each room in our home in which we planned for AV has speakers installed in-wall we’re able to select any source from any room.

My original AppleTV recently had it’s brain expanded through Boxee and now can play both the (limited) protected content we have from iTunes as well as any other file we happen to have accessible.  Cisco is going to have to win over Apple unfortunately in order to earn access to the iTunes ecosystem and I just don’t see that happening anytime soon either.  So far, the standard fault of every media streamer is that it can’t play iTunes DRM … I don’t see how Cisco’s solution solves any of this.  Another box to setup and futz around with as a source?  No thanks.

I was given a demo of the Nokia Home Control Center solution at Nokia World and it will take a very different approach.  Instead of trying to provide a streaming end point, Nokia is shooting for a more centralized role in your home and one that I frankly would have expected from Cisco.

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Where’s my Federated Presence?

It’s easy to maintain a single status line across services which lets you report the same update across your social services.  I tend to use Ping.Fm mainly which lets me deliver cross-service updates via email, IM and web including mobile.  What’s missing in this age of unified communications though is the ability to share a richer level of presence.  

By presence of course I mean my actual presence – am I in a meeting, on the phone, on the go or even in a different timezone from you.  All of this information can be relative input for deciding how to best get in touch with someone and there is still no way to do this effectively outside of the expensive enterprise route from companies like Cisco, Avaya, and Microsoft which also require that you use their solution exclusively without taking inputs from other sources.  Of course these inputs should be definable so I don’t share random personal bits with business contacts or important business information across to my Facebookfriends but I realize that’s a degree of complexity that might be more challenging.  Still even the “basic” federation for presence seems to be missing …  

The key thing here is that I don’t want anyone else to have to install or use a particular service for this to work.  I just want this solution to deliver the right level of detail to the right service so my various contacts are informed appropriately.  Not too hard right?