From the desk (and BlackBerry) of Keith Parnell

We all knew this was coming. The 8-18 year-old generation is tomorrow’s business leaders. This generation will be 100% connected when they hit the workforce because it’s been a normal way of life all of their lives.

A national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that … today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

How does this compare to your digital life? The technology is here today to retrieve, and have pushed to you, any type or massive amount of information you could imagine. Whether you want to or not, the means to make you more efficient is here in our laptops, smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. Are you taking full advantage of the digital revolution?

Photo credit: waxmerchant

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On Twitter? Follow me at @parnellk63.

Listening to Dandy Life by Collective Soul.

Amy Standen reported on NPR that the phonebook is long past its designed use and consumers (all of us) don’t want them. I tend to agree with this as more and more Americans become so dependent on their mobile devices. What do you think?

Amy’s report -

In the U.S., we produce 804,000 tons of phonebooks every year. That’s the statistic that comes from the EPA. It’s over five pounds of paper for every man, woman and child, including those too young to pick up a phone. One California lawmaker says it’s time to stop printing so many phonebooks.

Full report on NPR.org here.

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On Twitter? Follow me at @parnellk63.

Listening to Turn the Page by Bob Seger.

I stumbled across this really cool interview Robert Scoble (Rackspace Hosting) did with Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group, formerly of Forrester Research) and Ray Wang (Altimeter Group, formerly of Forrester Research). I can’t remember the last time I didn’t stray from a 27 minute video. These guys are fascinating and definitely forward-thinkers that you should follow.

My takeaways from the video:

“Sometime real-time is not fast enough.” - Jeremiah Owyang

Translation: We must think about what will happen tomorrow and predict moves, changes, issues, and trends.

“B2B and B2C is dead.” - Ray Wang

Translation: Because of the ‘best of breed’ concept between on-premise information storage and cloud computing, the fundamentals of relationships are changing.

The Social CRM Space is becoming evermore dominant. Mapping out your social graph is what companies are doing today in preparation for tomorrow. Facebook wants to become an identity company, not a social network. Their vision is that wherever you go on the web, your Facebook friends go with you.

“I put that [RSS Reader] away. Most of my traffic is coming from Twitter.” - Jeremiah Owyang

Translation: We cannot afford to not have real-time data today.

iPhone vs. BlackBerry vs. Android - “Definitely iPhone because its platform is easier to build on.” - Ray Wang

Translation: A lot of developers will be able to build on the iPhone platform much easier than any other. Simple for the developer means power and more technology for the consumer and enterprise user.

Special Note: This may be the first time any comment has intrigued me about the iPhone. Being a BlackBerry evangelist (!), I’ve always contended that BlackBerry will be tops for a long time. I’m interested now in the iPhone purely because it could solve some of the limitations I have now with mobile technology.

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Listening to I Still Believe by Norman Brown.

Full story from CIO.com here.

Microsoft says, umm, no. Our product is better and we’re going to get close to making it affordable for small businesses.

Microsoft has cut in half its per user per month list price for Exchange Online services and cut by 33 percent the price of its Business Productivity Online Services suite of online productivity applications.

The drop from US$10 per user per month to $5 for Exchange Online is significant because it brings Microsoft much closer to the price Google charges for its Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) suite that is anchored by Gmail. In addition, Microsoft said allowable mailbox sizes would go from 5GB to 25GB, a move that ups Microsoft’s stake in the so-called “bottomless” inbox war with other online providers.

Good to see Microsoft still pushing forward with listening to its users. First Windows 7, now Exchange Online.

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Friends poll:
What cellular/data service provider (based on first hand experience) has the most saturated coverage areas across the majority of the large metropolitan areas in the United States? 3G is a must.

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

I’m at this month’s Internet Marketing & Technology meeting in Chesapeake. The speakers are discussing the advantages of both the iPhone and the Blackberry line.
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Have you ever said that to yourself?

You know you’ve said, I want a tool that will show me how to become a millionaire without trying or investing and without risk.

You know you’ve said, I want a tool that will type this letter for me.

You know you’ve said, I want a tool that will make this sandwich for me AND cut off the crust.

Well, here’s the tool that I want -

I want a tool that will 100% sychronize my social media discussions. When I write a blog post that automatically flows down to the JASEzone, then to Twitter, then to FriendFeed, then to Facebook, I want all of the separate discussions from each of my networks to automatically synchronize themselves on my WordPress blog so that I and my network can see the complete discussion from across that Internet in one place.

Maybe that tool is out there somewhere but if it is, I haven’t seen it yet. Why not? In today’s technology blast, and the online social networking blitz, why can’t I get a simple communications tool that will make my networking more efficient? Why should I have to visit each of my networks to make sure I don’t miss all of the discussions?

Could someone get on that please? Thanks. Call me when you’re done. Or better yet, reply to this post on Facebook and make it so that it will show up on my blog for comment discussion.

Okay, I didn’t mean that as harsh as it sounded. But my life is digital. My family knows that. My friends know that. Most everything I do in my professional and personal life is captured in some way on some media platform.

I tweet my work. I tweet about meetings. I tweet about clients. I blog on several different blogs. I take photos like crazy with my BlackBerry and immediately email them to TwitPic which autoposts to Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. I take videos with my BlackBerry and live stream them to Qik which autoposts to Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. I tweet about my wonderful family. I tweet while on vacation. Heck, I even tweet while at Major League Baseball games.

I am digital. I am live. Hear me roar.
I get questions all the time about taking a break from being digital. And I always answer with the same response - “why?” I enjoy being digital. There’s no stress for me to being digital. I don’t need that break that some people might. In all actuality, I’m a bit uncomfortable not being readily connected.

Let me clarify a bit for you on what I mean by being “digital”. I don’t mean just having access to my social media channels, although they are important to me. My BlackBerry and notebook give me a safe place to write my thoughts, for my blog and for private. They give me quick access to my huge music library which is a great stress reliever for me. They give me a way to collect and view my vast photo and video libraries. They provide me a way to quickly Skype (audio or video) call with my Nicole or my daughters or my Mother.

So you see, being digital is not a burden to me at all. Being digital is my way of life that provides me the most efficient, profitable and comfortable way to manage my time, my daily tasks and my stress.

Besides, I love my job. My job is my life. My family and friends are my life. And my life is digital. So why would I want to change that?!

From Wired.com -

MIT Chasing Down Phantom Traffic Jams
MIT mathematicians have developed a model that aims to explain phantom traffic jams - those backups which occur for no apparent reason - in the hope engineers could design build better roads to minimize the odds of them happening.

Very cool, smart guys. Can you please come to Norfolk (VA) and study the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel?

We have run the course, given open source a fair shake and have come to the conclusion that we cannot resolve ourselves to an alternative solution. Microsoft Office wins.

We (JASE) made a very serious effort to migrate away from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org. We wanted it to work but open source didn’t take care of us in the end. Sad thing is, we love OpenOffice.org. What there is of it, that is.

What do I mean? WHERE’S THE EMAIL / SCHEDULING / TASK MANAGEMENT CLIENT? We can’t move to a solution that’s half a solution no matter how cheap (free!) it is.

We tried Gmail (yuck!). We tried Microsoft’s new Windows Live Mail (better than Gmail but not there yet). We tried Thunderbird. We tried Evolution. We tried several others. None come close to Outlook. Not even close on any level.

So there you have it. Microsoft Office wins by default for being a complete suite of tools for our daily needs.

Funny, that’s what we say about our organization- a full-service marketing and advertising agency. I guess we proved our credence is applicable in most any test case.

No need for those expensive satellite feeds anymore, I’m guessing. When you have a story to report just whip out the laptop, throw in the air card from your favorite ISP, and pop open a Skype video connection back to the office / television station.

I snapped this photograph real quick tonight with the BlackBerry while watching the 11:00 PM news on television on WTKR TV 3 in Hampton Roads (VA).

Good for WTKR! Very resourceful reporting from Mexico.

Very cool carry, touch devices of relevant sizes. Awesome technology!

You wouldn’t be surprised if I told you it was Microsoft, would you?

Future Vision Montage (1:55)
Envision how emerging technologies, evolving trends, and global change might come together to improve our lives at work and home across multiple real life scenarios. To see and download current prototypes we are exploring to help us realize this future vision, go to www.officelabs.com.

Our marketing, advertising and technology team has published a new videocast for download at http://www.jasegroup.com/resources/videocasts/twitter_101_outliers_and_open_source/.

Stop in and let us know your thoughts. Have a great weekend!

Topic: Twitter 101, Outliers and Open Source
Discussion on a recent Twitter 101 conference with the Hampton Roads Internet Marketing & Technology Group, social media, Outliers book by Malcolm Gladwell, success being a product of a person’s environment and self-drive, new software developments including Internet Explorer 8 and Windows Live Mail, and the cost and efficiency advantages associated with open source OpenOffice.org.

One of our tech guys published this article on our company blog last week. I thought I’d pass the information along to my tech readers.

By David Poole, 2007/04/02
What is the best way to store an IP Address in SQL Server
Imagine that you are asked to design a database for a data analysis team to perform web site traffic analysis. This brief will have many requirements and amongst them will be the need to store IP addresses.

Search engines such as Google have a fixed range of IP addresses so the team can easily separate out traffic from true visitors Vs traffic from bots. Although the team have a good rudimentary knowledge of T-SQL the data must be relatively simple to query. So with regard to IP addresses the requirement is as follows:
- Store IP addresses efficiently
- Allow retrieval of IP addresses in a machine readable format
- Allow simple querying on a range or ranges of IP addresses

If traffic to your web site is high then the choice of data types is going to be important. You could keep the IP address as a VARCHAR(15) but given the nature of what an IP address actually is, 4 integers in the range 0 to 255, this seems a trifle wasteful.

My initial thought was to use techniques described in Lee Everest’s article Introduction to bitmasking in SQL2005 but if you read the forum discussion of the article you will see an interesting suggestion by Joe Celko.

So what possiblities do we have? Let us consider the ip address 192.168.0.5

Method: VARCHAR(15)
Storage: Between 7 and 15 bytes
Comment: Stores the IP address in human readable but this is wasteful.

Method: BIGINT
Storage: 8 bytes
Comment: We can represent our IP address as 192168000005. It is stretching the definition of human readability somewhat but this depends on your audience.

Method: INT
Storage: 4 bytes
Comment: Our IP address is no longer human readable being represented as 1084751877.

Method: Four separate TINYINT fields
Storage: 4 bytes
Comment: Our address is now both efficient and human readable just as Joe Celko pointed out.

SQL 2005 CLR User Defined Types
SQL2005 provides us with one other possiblity. The .NET assembly user defined type.

I was fortunate to go on the Microsoft “Updating Your Database Development Skills to Microsoft SQL Server 2005″ (Course 2734B) which included an IP address UDT. As I am not sure of the copyright issues surrounding the code for the UDT I am not including the source code here but the UDT provided the following functionality.

- Accept an ip address in the form nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn
- Return the individual bytes of an IP address
- Return the string representation of the IP address
- Return a varbinary representation of the IP address
- Return a string with the PING command and the IP address. I removed this from the code as it was irrelevant.

Get David’s full article here.

More cool stuff from Razorfish -

DaVinci is a prototype/experiment that blurs the lines between the physical and virtual world by combining object recognition, real-world physics simulation and gestural interface design on Microsoft Surface.