Archive for November, 2006

Ma Bell should have been Ma Meucci

Friday, November 17th, 2006

Looks like the votes are in, only 130 years late. This time it was not due to Florida voters and hanging chads. No sooner do I make a reference to Alexander Graham Bell than a definitive revisiting of history shows that Alexander was really another corporate mogul an not the lonely inventor, slaving in the lab. No less than the US congress has weighed in on this matter. Alexander Graham Bell was not the inventor of the telephone.

These things are always hard to take. –cognitive dissonance or something. We have been lying to school children, your Trivia Pursuit cards are wrong and who knows how many other games. Its like Men in Black had blinded us for our own good, or for what.

According to this referenced link Antonio Meucci was the true inventor some years before Bell. These things can lead to all kinds of name-calling and accusations of who did what, especially with ethic pride fueling views. That’s why we have the Men in Black to save us from all of that, but alas they were busy keeping us from thinking about aliens. So we have to deal with this confounding information.

I always liked the reference to the giants upon whose shoulders we stand upon in creating the future. I have made reference to standing on the shoulders of midgets to somehow make it seem less important, but it is an essential element for all “new” ideas. We see the same thing today with patent action, as though whoever has the resource to make the patent claim is necessarily the inventor. This is a tough game for those of us living in the trenches and it is equally tough for history to assess.

What is an invention or more when is it an invention. Surprise, it has been all about rights. We still work to establish such rights, but fortunately much of invention today is about speed and execution. This is a good thing overall. The challenge is then not really in the inventing, but exploiting. We think this is may be different today, but maybe it is just the speed of action. Ask Antonio. He just was beaten to the market. The payday does not come in the lab.

Posted in Tech Life, Telephony | 32 Comments »

Alexander Graham Bell Returns

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

One concept that is some times hard to get a grip on is voice as an application. It is central to the future of what we have known as telephony. It is so different that I find myself wishing for a new word, and not Voice 2.0 as much as we are into this generational naming. That is not to say that I have not been tempted, and may yet, reveal my mapping of telephony. Suffice it to say that VoIP as a technology is not a 2.0 contribution to the telephony concept.

So there he was in the lab, and only a single connection to his assistant. The need was for a simple application, to communicate an immediate need to come for assistance. “Watson, come here – I want you.”

Due to the technological state of the last century we were left to create a network built on connectivity, so that only after the connection was made could we make a request. The entire infrastructure was designed to connect and we paid for connection, even by the minute. Amazing sometimes that we still do.

Now in this century we are all connected—already. We IM, therefore we are. It is no stretch to see that as email is an application and IM is an application, now we have returned to voice as an application. Welcome back Mr. Bell.

Noted with the passing of Alexander Graham Bell’s granddaughter. She was the last person with a direct connection to Alexander Graham Bell. It is hard to imagine anyone who could have more of a connection to all of us who never knew him. And now we can appreciate telephony as an application, just as it was for him on March 10, 1876.

Posted in NextGen Telephony, Product | 743 Comments »