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A big day indeed: it’s finally sunny (cause for celebration in and of itself), it’ Friday, it’s the end of the quarter, and we’re about halfway through the year. Our company shipped some major products this week, though for various reasons the press release won’t be out until the second week of July. And I have some other news that will have to wait until Monday, for various reasons.

In the meantime, it’s a good sort of day to sit down and shuffle through the iPod and see what comes up:

1. Bob Dylan, “Hurricane,” (Desire)
2. TartanPodcast, “Sleepy Sunday Show #10”
3. Moby, “Memory Gospel,” (Play: The B Sides)
4. Eva Cassidy, “Songbird,” (Eva By Heart)
5. M. Ward, “Oh Take Me Back,” (Transistor Radio)
6. Neko Case, “Knock Loud” (Fields and Streams compilation)
7. Robert Shaw Festival Singers (Arnold Schoenberg, composer), “Friede auf Erden (Peace on Earth), Op. 13” (Evocation of the Spirit)
8. John Coltrane, “Blue Trane (alternate take),” (Blue Trane)
9. Clem Snide, “Moment In The Sun” (The Ghost of Fashion)
10. The Stills, “Love and Death” (Logic Will Break Your Heart)

There are currently 736,425 benchmarks in the database at geocaching.com. Overall, 82,517 benchmarks have been found and recorded in 114,528 logs. In the last 7 days, 1,007 benchmarks have been logged by 407 users. Four of them were found by me in Greentown, Pennsylvania near Exit 20 of Interstate 84.

I had tried to find a 1959 benchmark named "Burke" a couple of months ago. The eXplorist 600 indicated that I was within a half-mile of and then I realized I would have to trespass on private property to get to the mark -- something I do not do, at least on purpose. I saw a sign nearby labeled Robert Burke Consulting. Upon visiting his web site and seeing that he works with Linux, I concluded he must be a nice person and likely would not mind me giving him a call. Not only did he not mind, he offered to escort me to the benchmark -- he had noticed it in the past and knew right where it was. I met Bob and his four-year old son at his driveway and off we went in his four-wheel drive truck down a dirt road and off into a field. Turns out that Bob's father owns hundreds of acres of land where the benchmark is located. Five generations of his family have lived in Pennsylvania.

Turns out that there are actually four benchmarks (Burke, Burke 2, Burke Reference Mark 1, and Burke Reference Mark 2) all within a couple of hundred feet of each other. Three were placed in 1959 and one in 1967. The descriptions given are accurate for finding them -- but don't rely on lat/lon because those are not accurate. One of them was off by nearly 200 feet. Ater many a wild goose chase, I have learned that the best way to find benchmarks is to carefully read the datasheet. Here is a typical description for finding a reference mark...

REFERENCE MARK 1, A STANDARD DISK STAMPED BURKE NO 1 1959, IS CEMENTED IN A DRILL HOLE IN TOP OF A 2 X 3 FOOT BOULDER IRREGULAR IN SHAPE AND PROJECTING ABOUT 2 INCHES ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE GROUND. IT IS 85.9 FEET SOUTHEAST OF AN 8-INCH TRIANGULAR BLAZED MAPLE TREE, 72.8 FEET SOUTH-SOUTHEAST OF A STANDARD METAL WITNESS POST AND MARKER, 37 FEET SOUTH-SOUTHEAST OF THE CENTER OF A TRACK ROAD AND THE MARK IS ABOUT THE SAME ELEVATION AS THE STATION

The disks were all readable, although there is some corrosion. All are in plain view and the main mark (Burke) has a witness post. If you ever noticed a 3-4 foot long orange stick in the ground with some wording on it, that would be a witness post. It says basically, there is a benchmark nearby and don't mess with it! The marks would have been useful to surveyors and civil engineers decades ago, but with the advent of inexpensive and accurate GPS devices, they have become unnecessary. In spite of this, they are fun to find -- 72 for me so far and only three-quarters of a million or so to go! Lastly, remember the Honda ads from years ago -- "You meet the nicest people on a Honda"? Well, this past weekend I discovered the same thing about looking for benchmarks. If you need any systems or Linux consulting in the northeast Pennsylvania area, pay a visit to Robert Burke Consulting.

Other patrickWeb stories about benchmarking

At a speech in New Orleans on Monday I said we were just five percent of the way into the Internet -- that of all the things that could simplify our lives and save us time, only five percent of them are here so far. New companies such as Pandora are pressing the envelope to do great things but unfortunately many existing companies have not kept pace with expectations.

This morning I checked on the status of a medical prescription at Express Scripts, my "online" pharmacy. The web site had an order number but did not show the name of the medication. Clicking on "check status" gave a line that said "In pharmacy" -- since May 6. No information available. Sending an email to them is hopeless -- I have done it before -- they respond to the email by telling you to call if you need information. I called and was told they had received the prescription on May 3 and it then takes them three days to enter it into the system. Four days later they determined that it needs "prior authorization" and so they faxed a form to the doctor requesting that he fax a form to the insurance company who would then need to fax a form to customer service who would then notify the pharmacy it is ok to ship the medication. The pharmacy and customer service are the same company. There is no feedback to the customer at any point. Meanwhile everyone is calling everyone and the doctor's office is so overloaded with calls about prescriptions that you can't get through to them. This is the status of online pharmacy. Five percent would be an overstatement.

Then I made a reservation at Marriott.com. At the end of the form was a "comments" box and I entered some things that I thought would be helpful. Upon hitting the submit button I got an error message saying "Comments too long". The form only accepts 45 characters -- a ridiculous limitation in these days of inexpensive storage. Well designed online forms that limit the text input tell you how many characters you have remaining. Not this one -- there is no indication given of how many characters have actually been entered and the text box actually has four lines of 64 characters each. You just keep shortening and entering submit until it is satisfied. What could they be thinking? The confirming email arrived quickly but because they had embedded some javascript in the email to make it look pretty, it could not be printed. Travel sites generally are getting better but they still do a lot of dumb things.

The point that top management of these and many other companies are missing is that the perception of their company and their brand is no longer based on their past history or even the reputation of their products and services. The way we see them is the way we see their web sites. Unfortunately, a lot of things we see are not pretty. Increasingly our loyalties will shift to the companies who make our lives simpler and save us time instead of frustrating us. Many are trying hard but they have a long way to go.

The month of April had the normal slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. Being "tax" month, the company announced a new solution for optimizing tax auditing. IBM's Tax Audit and Compliance Solution uses advanced analytics to help revenue agencies zero in on questionable tax returns.

There was also a milestone in April. Ten years ago, IBM WebSphere Commerce -- then known as Net.Commerce -- made its debut at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. Thousands of customers later, WebSphere Commerce is one of the best-selling e-commerce applications on the market, running many of the world's top e-commerce sites. Most of the top 100 online retailers use the middleware to power their Web sites that generate billions of dollars of online revenues. I am sure some will say it was great planning, but those of us who were there at the time know that the "ticket server" for the Olympic Games was an experiment. At about $5m in ticket sales it turned out to be the largest e-commerce site on the web at the time. The first real customer was L.L. Bean, Inc. of Freeport, Maine. See the complete history of Websphere Commerce here.

Here are the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.

On Monday and Tuesday of this week a number of analysts and consultants gathered with IBM at an intellectual property briefing in Greenwich, Connecticut. Not as glamorous as the meeting in Rome but exceptionally interesting. The term intellectual property reflects the idea that the subject matter is a product of the mind and that legal rights to the "IP" are protected in the same way as any other form of property. IP is a vital issue for many companies but probably no company has as much influence in this area as IBM. IP is a broad and deep subject but one of the key elements is patents.

The United States granted the first patent to Samuel Hopkins of Pittsford, Vermont in 1790. Mr. Hopkin's idea had to do with making potash which in turn was used in making glass and in various industrial processes.Two other major patents granted the same year were related to making candles and milling flour. Earlier this year the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced that for the thirteenth consecutive year, IBM received more patents than any other private sector organization in America. No company, other than IBM, has yet been granted 2,000 patents in any year while IBM exceeded 3,000 four years in a row and last year had 1,100 more than anybody else. IBM has a portfolio of more than 40,000 patents globally and has another 21,000 U.S. patent applications pending. Potentially more significant than IBM's leadership in creating inventions is the fact that it is giving away thousands of patents. See Patent Commons (January 2005).

The industrial age focused on proprietary innovation and patents became the key differentiator for technology companies such as IBM. In the 1970's and 1980's there was a lot of cross-licensing to provide freedom of action; e.g. IBM cross-licensed with many other technology companies so that it could be able to ship it's products without any concerns about patent infringement. Since IBM's inventiveness created a lot more patent licensing income than licensing expense, the IP business became a major source of income -- to the tune of a $1 billion per year and mostly profit. Now that the industrial age has given over to a knowledge economy based on collaborative innovation, IBM has begun to re-evaluate it's IP strategy and begin to leverage IP as a new source of business growth.

Since IBM has a very large group of engineers and scientists who are prolific inventors, the patent portfolio is sure to grow and the income from it will be significant for quite some time. The company has more than 1,000 active licenses whereby companies pay IBM to use it's patents -- that represents about a third of IBM's IP income. Another third comes from joint development; e.g. with Sony, Toshiba, and Samsung where the companies work together on a project and then share the results. A prominent example was the development of the Cell processor which is used in the new Sony PS3 game console. A final third of IBM's IP income is from the assignment of patents for things that IBM invented but does not want to pursue on it's own -- digital cameras, liquid crystal displays, the laser used in eye surgery, setup boxes, and many other things.

Technologists working in healthcare and education cheered the move by IBM to allow them royalty-free access to its patent portfolio for the development and implementation of selected open healthcare and education software standards built around web services, electronic forms and open document formats. If new application software is developed in these key industries, society is better off and IBM will get it's fair share of the hardware, software and services opportunity. Very smart. To leverage internal ideas, IBM has created ThinkPlace -- a next generation suggestion program where employees don't just submit an idea and hope to get an award but where they tee up an idea and enable others to build upon the idea and collaborate to take it to the next level. IBM is also leveraging it's IP by using it to solve problems for it's clients through services engagements. For example, a group of PhD's from IBM Research helped a limousine company optimize the routes of it's cars to minimize wait time and fuel costs

The world of patents has become ever more complex across the spectrum of collaboration and competition as the world has moved from proprietary to open -- as the world has gotten flat. Patents issued have skyrocketed in the past dozen years -- more than 150,000 patents issued in 2000, and so have patent suits. The thousands of suits are taking a huge economic toll and in many cases are stifling innovation. Patent reform has become urgent. IBM is not waiting on the sidelines. It is taking a leadership role and encouraging progressive changes. For example, it has launched initiatives to improve the quality of patents by developing and proposing an index to evaluate if a patent meets the standards of patentability -- in other words, to test if the patent is really legitimate. These efforts are not just for IBM but for the entire economy. Hopefully the politicians, many of whom have links to trial lawyer associations, won't kill the pending patent reform legislation.  

Other patrickWeb patent related stories
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The final afternoon of the Business Leadership Forum focused on the big picture -- of both global political factors and technology. A panel included Karl-Heinz Grasser, Federal Minister of Finance for the Republic of Austria. He spoke about how governments can not only avoid being an obstacle to innovation and growth but also encourage competition thereby creating more jobs. The panel was bullish about how the information revolution -- ushered in by the microprocessor in the early 1970's and the Internet of the 1990's -- has led to an explosion of new products and new business models, However, there was a consensus that retaliation from poor economies and over-regulation by some countries could stymie the growth. 

Mario Monti, President of Bocconi University and commissioner in the European Union for ten years, was quite optimistic about the EU -- a market of 480 million people -- and said that the EU itself is an innovation. He said that Europe is much more like the U.S. than it was. It is now a single market, has a single currency, and has been expanding market reach around the world. The shortcoming is that Europe, unlike America, does not yet have a constitution. This results in an economic disadvantage because the European community can not make a decision for the total. The European economy is not innovating quickly enough and in fact some countries are protecting the past at the expense of the future. Mario says it is time for "naming and shaming" the laggards through peer reviews. Then he got more specific -- "Germany, France, and Italy are behind on liberalization of service markets and have resisted initiatives to increase competition". These three countries will have a negative impact on the Euro which in turn will hurt the rest of Europe. Mr. Monti's presentation was sobering but hopeful. He said the EU has a lot of good features, that it can protect intellectual property but also move against monopolies such as Microsoft. The key to get innovation going in Europe is for the EU to innovate itself by completing it's constitution.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger kicked off the final segment of the forum, which focused on the future. IBM supports Linux because it is a great operating system for computers. Irving introduced Linus Torvalds the developer of Linux which he published as a student in 1991. Don Tapscott, a widely acclaimed author, who invented the term "paradigm shift", then moderated the final panel which included Linus, Nick Donofrio, executive vice president for innovation and technology at IBM, and Ann Mettler, executive director and co-founder of The Lisbon Council. It was a wide-ranging discussion. Linus is an incredibly humble guy. He said he has no vision, just looks 5 cm ahead before each step, and loves to solve technical problems. Linux is successful, he says, because both the development and the decision making are distributed -- a "built-in meritocracy". Don asked why volunteers worked on Linux for no economic return. Linus said, "if you were all engineers, you would not be asking that question". Open source software is viable in most all software areas, with the only exception being niche markets which are too small to get adequate collaboration. "Open source will take over most all infrastructure".

Ann said there is a huge gap between businesses which are moving ahead rapidly and societies which feel left behind. The key problem is that the economy is 70% services but the regulations and governance are still based on an industrial model. She believes that government should learn how to innovate from businesses. "Politicians are clueless about the discussion of the past day and a half". She says that businesses need to share their leanings with society. The labor market in Europe is flat because companies do not want to hire and that is because the laws are so onerous. "You can hire but you can't fire". Labor reform is needed desperately.

Nick says' It' s all about change". IBM is doing a balancing act by supporting both open things and proprietary things. The company is generating a lot of patents but also giving away a lot of patents to move the ball forward in key markets such as healthcare and education. "The world can move ahead faster if the OS is Linux -- it is good enough and a "blow for freedom". A California venture capitalist asked about business ethics and Nick was very aggressive in his response saying it was not optional for companies to be totally and completely ethical in every respect. (Having been at IBM for 38 years, I can say I never ever had a  concern about ethics at the company). Nick summarized that anyone can innovate if they are willing to change. "If nothing changes, nothing changes". Sam wrapped up the conference by saying corporations need to be transparent. Their ultimate responsibility is to create value for the constituencies: stockholders, customers, employees. He walks the talk.  

Intro to Roman Rendezvous Stories
Index to Roman Rendezvous stories

Following Nakamura-san at the Business Leadership Forum would not be easy but Sunil Bharti Mittal, CEO of Bharti TeleVentures Limited had quite an amazing story to tell. Bharti is India's leading mobile operator and one of the top five companies in India. Revenue per month per person has shrunk from $30 to $8 and he believes it will go to $3-$4. The good news is that the number of users has gone from 2 million to 90 million. India is a huge consumption economy because there are so  many young people -- 50% are under 25. He expects mobile phone users to grow from 90 million to 300+ million by 2009-2010 and his strategy to address the market has been to give away everything except the customer ; i.e. outsource everything except the customer relationship. IT was outsourced to IBM -- a $1 billion contract. Networking was outsourced to Nokia & Ericsson. Call centers were outsourced to an IBM joint venture in India. Mr. Mittal said their growth (1 million new customers per month) could not be achieved without having outsourced to top partners. Complete alignment is achieved and the business model becomes predictable. Innovation in many areas including "Lifetime Validity" where incoming calls are free to customers for life. The theory is simple, if people receive a lot of free inbound calls, they will eventually *make* calls, which are not free. His goal is for his many partners to be happy -- not to laugh but to smile. He hopes to grow from 7 billion minutes per month to 20 billion.  

Mr. Yang Mingsheng, President and CEO of the Agricultural Bank of China, was the only speaker who did use English but the simultaneous translation to Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, German, and English allowed all of us to hear what he had to say -- which was a lot. The bank has 500,000 employees and 28,000 branch offices. Although I could not understand a word of what he was saying without the headphones, I could tell that the speaker was very articulate, enthusiastic, and confident. 95% of all bank services are available online. The bank has 400 million depositors, 12.4 million outstanding loans, and 220 million credit cards issued. They have introduced many e-banking and mobile products to their customers. This is being done by centralizing IT infrastructure. Mr. Mingsheng is both a ceo and a member of government. For hobbies he writes poetry and plays the violin. His speech covered every aspect of consumer and business banking services. I don't think a similar presentation by Citigroup or JP Morgan Chase would much if anything that ABC isn't also doing. 

Pierluigi Bernasconi, CEO of an Italian electronics retailer called MediaMarket. The company is the No. 1 consumer electronics retailer in Europe with 66 stores in Italy, more than 500 stores in more than a dozen European countries, and a new web-based business in Germany. One of their stores is the largest in the world -- it has six floors of consumer electronics products. Steady growth over the past decade has taken them from $4 to $16 billion. They have taken an innovative business model approach whereby they have two different store brands (MediaMarket and Saturn) that compete with each other. They believe that "self competition" results in better service and price to the consumer. Fifty million people per month spend time in one of their stores.  Mr. Bernasconi described an intensely competitive environment in Italy from 4,000 photography shops, 6,000 telephone stores, e-retail sites, hyperStores, and in the future new channels such as Digital Terrestrial TV.  In spite of this the company continuously outperforms the competition and gains market share. They have been using the web for sales and communications since 1995. Utilizing advanced IT the company has integrated all their distribution channels. They believe that communication is key and will result in customers thinking of MediaMarket or Saturn as the first choice as a place to get information and subsequently purchase. Their strategy is to exploit multi-channel strategies -- tying together so a person can call from land line or mobile, surf via the web  connect via digital terrestrial set top box, or visit in person and all the experiences are recognized and tracked.  

Intro to Roman Rendezvous Stories
Index to Roman Rendezvous stories

I was anxious to get going so I quickly selected three geocaches that were closest to the hotel -- Forum's Revival, Coliseum, and Circus Maximus -- downloaded the latitudes and longitudes into the Magellan eXplorist GPS and hit the street. It would have been much better if I had done some better planning, reviewed the logs of others who had found the caches, and selected caches that had maximum odds of me finding them. As they say, haste makes waste.

No map in hand, I headed down the Via Veneto toward the Forum following the arrow on the GPS. I was so confident there would be plenty of time that I stopped along the way at a small sidewalk cafe called Berzitello's and enjoyed a plate of spaghetti. From there I meandered from street to street following the arrow until I reached the Forum. The IBM Business Leadership Forum focused on "Innovation that Matters". The Roman Forum obvioiusly focused on innovative structures -- especially impressive considering that many of them are nearly two thousand years old. It is a marvel that they were constructed.

After taking a few false entries I finally got to the spot -- or so said the GPS. There were a number of logical hiding places within twenty feet of the waypoint and I searched many of them. After more than a half-hour I gave up and headed for the Coliseum. At least I would find the other two caches. The Coliseum is an enormous place and there were thousands of people touring the ruins. The eXplorist said the cache was just 300 feet away. Sounds simple, but with the huge circumference and multiple levels of the Coliseum, it was not at all clear where the cache might be. If you are an experienced geocacher, you know what I mean. Sometimes you are a few hundred feet away but there is a river with no bridge in between. After an unplanned tour of most of the Coliseum, I found the spot, but not the cache. The latitude/longitude) was near a meadow and a wall just a couple of hundred feet from the main entrance to the Coliseum. After a half hour, I reluctantly gave up. Sound familiar? Well, at least I will find one of the three. Off to walk to the Circus Maximus.

This one should be easy, I told myself. Out in the open, nothing tricky about it. I got to the exact spot and searched high and low. Empty handed again. The good news is that I logged quite a few miles of walking on a sunny day. The weather was perfect. After meandering through the streets of Rome back to the Via Veneto and the hotel, I went straight to geocaching.com and read the logs of people who had found (or attempted to find) the three caches. If only I had done that *before* the search. It was tempting to head out again but the day was late and the miles of walking were enough -- and I had a plan for the morning.

Since I knew exactly where to go I knew I could hire a taxi for an hour, get to all three cache locations, and still get back in time for the opening of the Business Leadership Forum. Forum's Revival was still no piece of cake but I was able to find it in less than ten minutes. I signed the logbook, removed a travel bug, hid the tupperware container back in it's place, and headed back to the taxi. At the Coliseum, I went to the exact same spot as the afternoon before and recognized all the clues from the logs -- but still could not find it -- a big dissappointment. On to Circus Maximus to look for the microcache. Traditional caches are in tupperware containers or ammo cans. Microcaches are much harder to find -- they are usually black 35mm film containers -- easy to hide in a very small place, in this case in a three-foot high wall behind a loose stone. With two out of three finds, I declared victory, headed for the hotel, put on a tie and took a shuttle to the Auditorium Parco della Musica where Sam Palmisano kicked off the day.

As usual, I apologize for being a poor photographer, but I do have quite a few pictures to share here on flickr.


Intro to Roman Rendezvous Stories
Index to Roman Rendezvous stories

It’s been 11 days since I started my Google experiment, and I’m ready to declare it a success on all fronts. Not only did Gmail, Calendar, Finance, Search (and my browser of choice, Camino) live up to expectations, but I discovered some features and found the whole experience liberating and efficient.

Here’s a recap — tool by tool, again.

Camino

This little sharp-shooter didn’t miss a beat as my home base for email, calendering, stock quotes, and other daily information needs. In addition to the Google products that I was officially evaluating during this experiment, I ended up leaving Basecamp (for work) and Backpack open in Camino most of the time too. It was nice to have all of this information in one spot.

(Techie sidebar: Unlike Firefox and Safari, Camino’s memory footprint stayed nice and small over the course of the week. Even now, after running non-stop for 11 days, it’s using 581 MB of virtual memory and 85 MB of real memory. Not bad!)

Gmail

Did you know that Gmail has keyboard shortcuts? I didn’t. Other pleasant surprises include smart reply behavior, excellent handling of attachments and great built-in search (okay, that’s not a surprise, but it is pleasant!).

Perhaps the only downside to Gmail was getting weird looks from my co-workers. (Them: “You’re one of those now?”) Guess I’ll have to get used to it, because I’m fully converted! So long, Mail.app; it’s been fun.

Google Calendar

All around, Google Calendar feels like a nice step up from 30boxes. I barely used the Quick Add feature, instead opting to drag my events into place the “old-fashioned” way. I also appreciate the custom view (mine’s five days), Gmail integration and snappy performance at all times of the day and night.

Everything else

• I ended up using Google Local/Maps a lot more than anticipated. One handy feature is the ability to send business info (from Google Local) to your phone.
• Speaking of Maps — I used a couple of Google Maps Mashups a lot in the past week. Gmaps Pedometer is an oldie but goodie for figuring out how far I rode, and Yelp’s Maptastic is killer for finding a place to eat in a certain part of town.

All in all, a resounding success. Bravo Google! Imagine if they could apply this kind of innovation and quality to their advertising business… then they’d have something. (Kidding.)

For those of you playing along at home — how did it go? Any grand successes or failures?