Cluelessness Volume III

I can't swing a dead cat without finding an example of bad communication. This time it is France that takes this week's prize. On July 14, Bastille Day, the French government launched france.fr which was to be a global and multi-lingual portal for all things French -- tourism, investment etc. The problem was that the same day that the site went up it then came back down and has not come back to life since. Visitors to the site receive the following message, "France.fr, a complete and complex site, is temporarily unavailable. We are in the final phase of our audit to find out the causes of the technical failures which led to us closing the site, and are close to finding a solution. We would like to thank all the web users who helped us spot the bugs. We aim to have the site fully operational again in the second half of August, and can confirm that a version with a participatory dimension will be released in November. Thank you for your patience." At least the SIG, France's government information service, bit the bullet and re-set expectations with a new availability date. What I don't understand is how they got themselves into this mess in the first place. I mean this is cyberspace not outer space and creating a website -- even a complex one -- is not like sending astronauts to Mars. This has been an embarrassment for the French government. Maybe it is because the web is inherently a bottom up environment and not top down. The most visited websites -- Google, Facebook, eBay -- were bottom up / entrepreneurial ventures. Maybe this is why Microsoft has struggled with Bing and Live. At this point the damage has been done and my advice to the SIG would be to ensure that when the site launches it works flawlessly -- even it it means delaying the launch past the late August date. The last thing the SIG needs is to make the headlines again with a buggy site.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité and Universal Access to Broadband

The 14th of July, the national holiday of France. A day filled with military parades, fireworks and patriotism. As I was watching President Nicolas Sarkozy reviewing the troops on the Champs-Elysées, I thought about the values of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité and how France has provided universal healthcare, five weeks of vacation and a 35-hour work week for its citizens and wondered if it would follow Finland's lead and declare access to at least 1 megabit per second broadband a right for all citizens. Residents of Helsinki have had reasonably priced broadband access for quite sometime but rural Finns -- approximately four percent of the population -- have had to do without. And, without some form of government support, it would be prohibitively expensive to reach those four percent. What is interesting is not that the Finnish government is providing another benefit to its citizens but rather that it has realized that broadband access to the Internet is an essential development tool -- as essential as providing electricity to rural America was in the 1930s. Without broadband Internet access rural Finns would essentially be cut-off from the rest of the world. With it, they have similar access to commerce, culture, communication and information that their urban Helsinki countrymen have. Now that is what I call closing the Digital Divide.

Smartphones a big hit in France

I came across an interesting article in Les Echos this week. According to a survey by GroupM and SFR, four million French connect to the Internet daily from their smartphone -- that's about one of every thirteen citizens over the age of 15. Mon Dieu! However, only 18 percent of mobile phone users have a smartphone. The moral of this story seems to be if users get their hands on a smartphone they will use them and use them a lot. Orange, with its recent announcement of a range of Android-based phones from Sony Ericsson, LG, HTC and Samsung for less than 49 euros, is well positioned to make customers out of the the 82 percent of French mobile phone users who don't yet posses a smartphone. If the smartphone market booms in France, as it appears to be primed, it will be a welcome boost for the economy overall as carriers, equipment providers, handset manufacturers, mobile content developers and advertisers all stand to benefit.

Is Cloud Computing Bringing us Back to the Future?

ThoseinMedia, a web site where media professionals connect and blog, has a group on the social networking site LinkedIn where it promotes itself as "THE group for Media Professionals." Its membership includes people working in social, online and broadcast media, advertising sales, PR, SEO and pretty much every other media category you can think of. It's a popular LinkedIn group with thousands of members and as you'd expect, its members are highly engaging. If you work in media and you're not a member, you'll be doing yourself a favor by checking it out. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm a member.

Exactly three weeks ago, an online marketing and social media strategist for a U.K. provider of domain names and Internet services -- GroupNBT -- posted an open ended question to the ThoseinMedia group on LinkedIn: "Cloud Computing - What's your take on it?"

Three weeks later, group members continue to post responses to Francois Hotte's seemingly innocent question -- though the question isn't that innocent since Hotte's company sells a "Virtual Private Server" which, he says, is a "similar product to Cloud computing." Ok, so he's selling a bit, but I give him credit for engaging the group's membership on a very interesting topic.

What's really interesting to me is that responses to the question are coming from all corners of the world and from a broad range of industries and professional disciplines; and from the very young and the not-so-young. If it takes a discussion of cloud computing to get Gen Y talking with Baby Boomers, then it's a good thing.

One year ago, McKinsey&Company published "Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing" and in it claimed there are 22 separate definitions of the cloud. One year later, and based on some of the opinions reflected by ThoseinMedia group members, it isn't clear if we're any closer to a unified definition. But what is clear and what is important is that the discussion around cloud computing is at a fever pitch. It's become a lightening rod for some of the most stimulating and provocative thinking in technology in recent memory and marketers and communicators everywhere are spending cycles trying to help their customers find clarity in the clutter.

I hope the thread on ThoseinMedia continues. If we keep working on it together, I bet we get to the point where we can agree on what cloud computing is.

Here are a few of my favorite comments from the thread:

"Like many others I hate the term 'cloud computing'. It's BS. The cloud is just the internet."

"I've seen EMC cut huge checks for not being able to protect and serve remote data. IBM shovels cloud computing services like they're going out of style, and they're no experts either."

"The term 'Cloud Computing" may have a marketing connotation, but its widespread adoption by companies offering web-based applications means the 'cloud,' as it were, really is different than just the plain-old Internet."

"The simplest cloud computing I use is zumodrive. It is easy to use and it allows me to access my files regardless of where I am."

"Cloud is not the internet...What Cloud is, is the business model that takes virtualization and makes it a profitable opportunity for infrastructure providers on a 'one to many' basis -- build it once and sell it to many uses."

"Think of the Cloud Server as the mainframe, and each computer connected to it as a 'smart terminal' capable of processing its own data. ...Today's Cloud Computing almost brings us full-cirlce, back to the mainframe-terminal relationship."

"With iPhones, iPads and other devices like these for on the go and on the spot information, 'Cloud computing' is only going to increase. Welcome 2010 (grin)."

And this one from the head of a NYC-based marketing and advertising firm: "With all due reverence to the interesting insights offered above, I would just like to point out that the term 'cloud' in 'cloud computing' is a decades old reference to the original cloud-like diagrammatic representation of Public Switched Telephone Networks."

Is that really true?