If you haven’t been swept away by the flash flood of green tech and green groups sprouting up these days, you must be living under a rock. Everywhere I turn, there is a new green company and a new green trend. Just last week at the Connections Digital Living Conference, a company that shared the stage with us was successfully touting it’s eponymous Green Plug technology. That same week I was invited by Premier Power to a party at a green bar, the Temple, where, according to the invite…”Green is Glamorous.”

Is it a bubble? Almost certainly there are bubblicious aspects to what has been happening - lots of money flowing into an unproven and low P/E industry, but greener technology is an essential ingredient in the future of technology if not the future of the entire planet.

I’ve heard some great ideas - and my favorites so far are the ones that are simplest. Easier ways to recycle. Solar powered NOCs. Universal plugs for devices and gadgets that save waste (and the amount of weight I have to pack when I travel). Solar powered device chargers. Solar powered Wi-Fi access points. And just so I don’t focus exclusively on a theme of devices and Wi-Fi here - I must admit to be a fan of the green bar

Here’s a short list of companies and blogs I consider worthy of your consideration:

Green Wi-Fi
Solio
Premier Power
Temple
Vertography
Green Plug

Check these out and let me know your favorites too.

All this week, at the Connections Digital Living conference we’ve heard about how seamless connectivity is de rigeur for making digital living in the home and on the go a reality. Phil McKinney from HP projected that this would be ubiquitous by 2010 - and I suggested that Devicescape had a way to get us there.

The attached connections-digital-living-devicescape presentation, given on stage at the conference yesterday by Simon Wynn, VP Products at Devicescape, goes into more details of our role in making access seamless - and driving value for you.

Devicescape is showcasing our technologies this week at the Connections Digital Living Conference in Santa Clara, CA. This is a great location for us, since nearly ever session, at some point, discusses how essential “seamless connectivity” is to growing the digital living business - and hey - this is what we do.

Yesterday, we announced our essential role in enabling seamless connectivity and how we are constantly advancing our technology to improve ease of use and access for consumers. Access to services on the internet is the driving force behind device uptake - but what is holding growth of this industry back is that access is still too hard.

In the home, people need one touch set up. In the office, secure and fast connections. On the go - access everywhere. In essence, people want magic in the background - everywhere they go for everything they do.

That’s a tall order - but we’re working on it. And with our partners and all the big brains like these with us here at this conference, we’ll be getting there soon.

Are you connected? Do you stay connected to the internet, your work, family and friends via your laptop, mobile phone or iPod touch? Do you watch digital TV? I bet you do – and about 1000 people in Santa Clara today bet you partake of this digital life and will do more of the same in the very near future. In addition, analysts and industry pundits here at the Connections Digital Living Conference predict that you will be joined in your digital life by many, many more people.

While predictions are flying and new technologies being celebrated and bandied about –one thing from day one of this show sticks with me:

Phil McKinney, VP and CTO of the Personal Systems Group at HP predicts that by the year 2010 consumer and business alike will expect and demand seamless access from all their devices. Phil talked for a while about how consumers will demand the “perception” of always-on connectivity.

Imagine if you really could get connected to the internet as easy as dialing your cell phone. Imagine that information and data was able to easily stream back and forth between you and whatever internet site held the key to your desire of the moment – wherever you go. How much more could you do in a day? This could touch every aspect of life: work life, home life and even your leisure.

The Valhalla of always on is definitely not with us yet. There are still islands of Wi-Fi, GSM is still too expensive and getting connected is still to hard – but things are getting better all the time. Here at Devicescape, we’ve long been an advocate of seamless connectivity. Getting connected – especially when you are on the go – is just too damn hard. This holds us back. Not only the business of devices, services and operators – but as consumers. We’ve made some improvements already by bringing our Devicescape Connect solution to you. Now you can get quickly and easily connected at work, home and hotspots worldwide.

But more advances are needed - and more advances are coming…stay tuned and stay connected.

One of the things that always frustrates me when I travel is the high cost of Internet access, especially at hotels. Oddly enough, it seems to be the premium hotels that charge extra for access, while the lower end chains give it away for free. I checked into a hotel near Heathrow Airport in London a few weeks ago and noticed that they had an “Executive Upgrade” which included Wi-Fi access and breakfast for $20. When I asked about the costs for Wi-Fi alone they told me it was $30. I guess the thinking there was that executives would be so dumb they’d need big help figuring out which one to choose!

Anyway, I went with the upgrade, but amazingly they warned me that I likely wouldn’t be able to actually access Wi-Fi from my room but I could certainly use it in the lobby. Now that’s great service. At least breakfast was ok.

It’s long been a bone of contention for many road warriors to pay high access fees when traveling. The all you can eat cellular data and Wi-Fi plans we have enjoyed at home suddenly rack up enormous roaming fees, and we encounter high price “session islands” like these hotels. Most of the time you don’t need access for long periods of time: just a quick sync of email, a VoIP call to the office or home, or wrangling with your flight operator’s website for non existent upgrades. To pay $10, $20, or $30 for that privilege is just plain maddening.

Recently Devicescape started a field trial of a new service we’re calling Devicescape One. It allows you to get access at a wide range of commercial Wi-Fi networks and pay by the minute. Devicescape One isn’t meant to replace your existing subscriptions or change your belief that Wi-Fi should be free. It’s there as a complement and an alternate to buying expensive session passes that are more than you need.

I had the chance to use Devicescape One on my last trip across Europe and a week later in Asia. It gave me access to several large networks which weren’t handled by roaming arrangements with my home Wi-Fi subscriptions. Even better I avoided using cellular data, where you pay by the KB instead of by the minute (one Outlook sync contained a 7MB Powerpoint presentation but it transferred in less than a minute!) For me, the minute by minute approach has broad appeal.

We’re running this Devicescape One field trial to check out the technology and assess the usage patterns and interest. There’s no guarantee that we’ll actually turn this into a real live service that costs our members anything, but it seems clear that this kind of scheme has its place and a partner of ours may like to use the capability.

Right now, we’re offering the trial to a limited set of Devicescape members. When you sign up we give you up to 120 minutes of Wi-Fi time. There is ZERO cost involved and no obligation. If you’re interested in joining the trial, you can sign up here. Note: you need to be an existing Devicescape member first.

Word has it that the iPhone is encouraging use of mobile applications. This phone boasts a 90% customer satisfaction rate (according to Apple) and reports rates of mobile browsing use at a whopping 98%! Add to this that 80% of owners report using 10 or more features - and you surely have a device that is driving experimentation and innovative use.

But these impressive stats don’t include the number of people who are really experimenting and being innovative with their iPhones.

At Monday June 6th’s iPhone Developer Conference, Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed that Apple has sold nearly 6 million iPhones in the nearly one year since it’s launch. Estimates are that up to 10% of iPhone owners have “jail broken” their iPhones to add third party applications. If true, that’s about 600,000 people who are really experimenting with their phones and pushing new boundaries. Some claim this number is over one million.

We’ve been recipients of the value this creates in the market - as have you. The value to us is fairly direct. Our Devicescape Connect solution for the iPhone has been downloaded more than 325,000 times - meaning that half of all iPhone “innovators” have found our app and were interested enough to give it a try.

The value to you: more orthogonal but no less real. Some percentage of people wanted more than was being prescribed by Apple - and they found a way to get it. These people pushed the envelope for others and helped advance the industry by giving voice to demand. Because of them, millions of applications have flooded into the phones of brave iPhone owners, and this trend will continue. Apple has opened the doors to third party apps themselves: For business reasons and to satisfy demand. Their applications still come with a new prescription: Apple will allow certain and sanctified applications to be purchased from certain, sanctified places.

This will NOT stop the innovators though. Consumers want what they want. Trends start regardless of marketing, restrictions and rules.

Smart businesses don’t sue or brick their customers, because they understand that innovation is by nature disruptive and The customer is always right.

One of the questions we’re asked most frequently in our forums is how to use Devicescape with Truphone on a Nokia S60 device like the N95.

There are a couple of ways you can use Truphone with Devicescape on the N95, which you choose is really down to your personal preference:

1. Using the TruWizard, you can set up Devicescape to be one of your automatic connection networks, and prioritise it above or below any other networks as you want. This allows you to use Wi-Fi when you’re in range of a network that you can connect to, even a hotspot one, but fall back on your 3G network when you don’t have Wi-Fi coverage.

2. Or, if you live in an area without 3G coverage like I do, you can ignore the TruWizard completely and just use the Nokia’s built in VoIP tools for connecting via Wi-Fi whenever it is available, using Devicescape to aggregate all your Wi-Fi networks into a single Wi-Fi IAP. The Truphone installation process will set up a standard Nokia VoIP connection (a combination of SIP settings and Internet telephony settings). Once installed, the standard Nokia VoIP tools can be used to connect and disconnect the TruVoip service instead of the TruWizard application.

In both cases, if you spend much of the day within range of Wi-Fi, you’ll probably want to disable the automatic connection to save on battery life - with Truphone connected over Wi-Fi, my N95-1 lasted around 2 hours which is much too short to be practical! My personal preference is to use the Nokia VoIP application to connect to Truphone when I need to make a VoIP call. Remember to disconnect the service again when you hang up, otherwise you’ll drain the battery again.

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As with all technology - its what it does for us and not what it is that matters. In an effort to focus on what it does, this month we will be examining mobile VoIP - or voice over Internet protocol. In this installment, we’ll look at what Mobile VoIP is and a provide a quick overview of the industry and environment. Future installments will review how you can use mobile VoIP on your devices.

What it is:
Mobile VoIP is simply VoIP access via a mobile device. The power of VoIP is that it allows inexpensive or even free calls to be made over the internet. Now with Mobile VoIP, you can take the freedom and flexibility of VoIP with you wherever you go. There are numerous VoIP clients for mobile devices including ones from Skype, fring, Gizmo and Truphone. There are many other VoIP providers, but all of these mentioned have clients for smartphones and/or Internet Tablets. Four technologies are required for mobile VoIP: a device, client software, a wireless network and a VoIP service.

Industry and Environment:
VoIP itself first came on the market in the early 1970’s (pre-history I know ;-). According to VoIP Monitor, revenue in the total VOIP industry in the US is set to grow by 24.3% in 2008 to $3.19 billion. Mobile VoIP is estimated to grow to US$12 billion by 2010 in Europe alone. Skype is perhaps the best known VoIP client and last year they reported half a billion downloads and this year they are approaching a billion downloads

Benefits of Mobile VoIP:
The big benefit is that VoIP saves you significant $ca-ching$. Costs saving come primarily by reducing or eliminating roaming rates and fees, as well as high fees for international calls. The best value for folks who live in the US (where most plans allow you to roam across the country) is using VoIP when traveling outside of the country or for making international calls. In Europe, where crossing a border can be minutes away and mean the difference between included coverage and roaming rates, mobile VoIP is even more popular.

In short, mobile VoIP is an easy, effective and inexpensive way to stay in touch when you are roaming or making international calls.

The importance of the iPhone to next generation devices is profound and therefore the importance of this device to us at Devicescape is likewise monumental. By all accounts, the iPhone recorded sales of 5.4 million devices in its first 10 months. Some say this is equal to the number of devices Nokia sells in a week, so why all the hub-bub about iPhone and not Nokia?

The iPhone isn’t just a mobile phone. It’s in a special category of “smartphone” - and it charged out of the gate and captured 28% of the smartphone market within 6 months of launch. That’s a pretty spectacular market share for a new entrant into a fairly well established market.

And the iPhone isn’t just stealing away existing marketshare - its expanding the market for smartphones and increasing demand. This smartphone market had been largely aimed at business and enterprise users and the iPhone is really aimed at traditional Apple markets - cools and creatives. This has opened up the smartphone market to new audiences that have not previously been targets. Called the “iPhone Effect” by industry analysts, ABI Research now predicts that the smartphone market will grow from around 10 per cent of total handset sales in 2007 to 31 per cent in 2013 driven by the iPhone. At Devicescape, we’ve seen our own iPhone Effect. A member survey completed in June (just before the launch of the iPhone) showed that 5% of Devicescape members were students. In December of 2007 - this was up to 24% - driven largely by the iPhone. These same students then later helped us add hundreds of universities to our network - which further drove university and student uptake. The very fact that the iPhone is driving students into the smartphone market is pretty cool for everyone - including Nokia and RIM. These companies actually benefit by the eduction Apple is bring to the market about what a smartphone is - and who its for.

Today Steve jobs stood on a stage in San Francisco and brought out the next gen iPhone - starting at $199 - and students around the world pricked up their ears to listen. And the rest of us - as students of devices - would be wise to pay attention. Our world just got bigger and the bar just got higher.

Sometimes with advances in technology, people assume the use patterns of a previous system on the new. This happened with cars - which were referred to as the horseless carriage (and we still talk about horse power in our cars today). It happened with films - which were originally shot only in the framing of the proscenium arch. (It took DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to shift to shots of close ups, jump cuts, and tracking.) And it’s happened again and again in the tech industry.

It makes sense why this happens. People look for patterns and always want to compare something new to something known. But understanding the true value of new technologies often requires breaking free from the paradigms of the past. Today’s Wi-Fi and internet enabled devices are an excellent example.

Today’s devices have more processing power than the Nasa computers that originally put men on the moon - but they are not computers. What a consumer wants from their handset or smartphone isn’t a computer. They don’t want to have to wait while it boots up, they don’t want to have to log in and enter passwords and they certainly don’t want to have maneuver through menus to get the data they desire or take the actions they want. So it’s clear what people don’t want. What they do want is dictated by the device. If you bought a smartphone, you want:

1. a phone
2. calendar
3. email
4. messaging
5. all other stuff (I put games, music - even a camera in this bucket - but this is a personal assessment)

Other devices are even easier. You buy a digital camera with Wi-Fi access - you want a decent camera first. Media player = I want media. Internet Radio - I love music. GPS = I don’t want to stop to ask for directions, so I seriously don’t want to stop and log in ;-). Because people want different things from their devices than they want from their laptops, we can expect different use patterns for how, and why and where these people access the internet from their devices.

It’s exactly this new paradigm of use that Dave Fraser recently spoke about with the keenly insightful journalist Byran Betts of Tech World.

Bryan’s article begins:
“Making sense of who does what in the wireless business can be tough work” but as the article goes on it begins exploring ways that devices are different from computers. Dave weighs in on this:

“…Devices are not like PCs - they are more batch-orientated. There are some browsing devices, but most are more purposeful, and typically it’s a single-purpose device that gets the market share - think of movie players and games systems.

“For example, your digital camera could send a photo to Flickr or your home PC. There’s a job to be done - the device wants to get on the network, do its thing, then get off again. Very few will want to stay on for long, that’s just for browsing or games.”

So - what do YOU think? Would you ever want to surf on your camera? Do you think your radio needs to be always online, or should it update your music (ala Slacker) and disconnect? Isn’t considering an internet radio a computer the same as considering a car a horseless carriage?

I think we need to let go of the old paradigm and allow these next generation devices to be simply - “service enabled” and empowered by the internet. This frees businesses and consumers to explore the new devices in an appropriate context and find the true values that these will afford. These devices are “computer-powered” but are not computers.