According to Cisco, the most retweeted status points to CEO John Chambers’ tribute to Steve Jobs.

From what I understand reading Cisco’s corporate blog, The Platform, not only did he not dispense inspiring sales advice, but ElBaradei actually addressed current events, and made some pointed criticisms of the military-led government in Egypt.

ElBaradei said “the army has been mismanaging the transition royally.” And in an overall comment on the Arab spring, he noted that the region has been held back by an “increasing lack of adequate governance.”

But also saw great economic opportunity for Egypt if it got its governing act together. He suggested that fiber optics could be an area of economic growth, earning as much cash as the Suez Canal if Egypt were to become a networking hub for the Middle East.

ElBaradei: “In ten years Egypt will not be dissimilar to what we see in Turkey or Singapore. But we need first to put ourselves on the right track.”

Picture of Mohammed ElBaradei from wikimedia

California’s employment law is more favorable towards employee mobility, Texas is less so. The Texas judge was not impressed by the hasty injunctive order that Cisco had thrown together, and the HP employee was allowed to start his job.

In this battle over employee freedom, it was amusing to read Chandler invoke the names of HP’s founders, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, as folks who managed to innovate without resorting to lawyers. Chandler then lectured and scolded HP’s legal crew, reminding them that trade secrets are protected by intellectual property law, not by non-compete agreements.

Ouch.

That happened in 2010.

By 2050 there will be 50 billion such devices—think coffee makers, cars, trains, refrigerators, gas pumps—that will be notifying and texting each other across the Internet. 

Humans are involved in the loop, but only tangentially.

The example given in the chart describes an Internet-enabled alarm clock automatically going into a snooze mode and a coffee maker with its own TCP/IP stack delaying its brewing cycle because of an online meeting that was pushed back.  Your car then decides to delay its ice-defrosting as well—it was cold last night.

The gadgets all got together, exchanged tweets, and made decisions based on some default configuration rules, or assuming the household had a particularly precocious child, human-crafted if-then scripts.

It sounds all very Jetson to me.

Left out from the scenario is the malicious hacker that sent out a bit of malware that changed the meeting time.

Malware then spreads virally causing all of America to be late for work.

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Casa Mila, Barcelona/Wikimedia

Australian telco rejects femtocell … Intel CEO talks wireless electric lamp … Cisco’s WiFi fail at MWC … Vodafone to avoid closed vertically-integrated systems … Android booth has awesome slide … Euro operators are over-regulated …  HTC Desire S runs Gingerbread … Operators have their own app store …  Augmented reality navigation app

These are a few of the themes and memes that I picked up while checking out the Mobile World Congress web site and scanning Twitter hashtags. 

Another theme that you can’t help but notice is that operators can’t wait to really monetize the mobile app market. Not a surprise, but now with impressive deep snooping gateway routers (Cisco’s ASR 5000), ISPs and wireless providers will be getting much closer to pulling this off with very dynamic and flexible payment models.

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In a post published on Sunday, and in time for the press deluge coming out of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Cisco pre-announced its new “framework” for mobile operators, called MOVE or Monetization, Optimization, and Videoscape Experience.

Run of the mill marketing prose. My attention was instead engaged by a product referred to in some of the MOVE marketing material, Cisco’s ASR  5000  “gateway mutlti-media platform.”

The impressively engineered ASR 5000 could probably stop a Facebook inspired revolution at the speed of a mouse click. And as a propaganda minister, you wouldn’t have to take your country’s Internet off the grid to accomplish this.

About a year old, the ASR 5000 series is a packet crunching wonder. Think of it as a super intelligent router, feeding 3G acronyms, UMTS, CDMA, LTE and WiMax, into its redundant 320 Gbps of switching fabric. On the other side of the switching architecture are positioned “in-line services”—apps residing right on the wire that add the intelligence to route and block packets.

Mobile and wired operators would likely be interested in the highly granular billing and deep packet inspection software capabilities of the ASR 5000.

Based on reading the product literature and a quick dip into the 1000-plus page Product Overview (see reference), I’ll go on record as saying that we, the broadband subscribers of America, can look forward to much more precise bills from our ISPs and wireless providers.

Well, you knew the era of very simple broadband billing wasn’t going to last.

With intelligent switches like the ASR 5000, we’ll see tiered billing taken to a potentially nit-pickingly complex extreme. Just as we were getting accustomed to data usage billing, we’re at the start of a new era of broadband accounting based on criteria reflecting when (as in time of day) and how long we’re connected to a  specific web site or service, the content being transferred, or the application that was used.

It’s all possible.  And there’s a lot of flexibility given to operators through, to use a tech-marketing cliche  I found sprinkled in the manuals, “rules.” In other word, this thing can be programmed with flowchart-like workflows to accomplish astonishingly detailed per packet processing and filtering.

There’s nothing inherently wrong in analyzing packets, say in a tiered billing pricing model. In economist-speak, the operators are engaging in price discrimination, usually a sign of market power but not illegal.

In the US, at worst, the ASR 5000 might lead to lots of angry billing disputes and consumer complaints best handled by the FTC. And depending on how the FCC’s net neutrality non-blocking rules fare, the ASR 5000 could enable operators to violate open internet principles.

But in the rest of the world, the ASR 5000 deep packet inspection prowess lends itself to more sinister intentions. It could quickly allow a state-controlled ISP to filter undesirable content (tweets with specific hashtags) or completely block rebellious websites (Facebook).

There wouldn’t be a need to bring the entire network infrastructure off-line. The ASR 500o allows blacklists—check the manual, it’s one of the features—to be configured that would block connections at the edge of the network, acting as a virtual policeman cordoning off streets, but letting the rest of the traffic to continue around the obstructions.

And I don’t want to go into the ASR 5000′s potential to monitor traffic or it’s ability to steer URLs to fake sites, in so called man-in-the-middle schemes.

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• For Service Providers, the Opportunity to MOVE to Great Profitability (cisco.com)
• Enhanced Charging (cisco.com)
• Cisco ASR 5000 Product Overview (cisco.com)
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• Out of Egypt Censorship, US Tech Export Under Fire (yro.slashdot.org)

And by regular folks they mean TV-watchers with an Internet connection but without a laptop and video camera.  I’m sure Cisco business development crunched the numbers and decided there’s a ton of money selling  $600 set top boxes with a $24.99 monthly charge to this segment.

The other perpetrators involved in this scheme include BestBuy, which will sell the gear, and Verizon, which plans to resell the service to its Fios customers.

Umi may make sense for computer illiterate, TV-centric types. Cisco’s umi commercial  envisions theatrical families who perform little skits for their friends, letting you in their words, “be with them.”

I do get the idea and raison-d’etre behind umi. But I suspect that for computer phobic types, it is probably just easier to go next door and chat with a neighbor.

Considering the state of the economy, you wonder about the consumer’s appetite for paying $25 monthly for something that can be had for free. Maybe this market segment doesn’t own a cell phone, so Cisco assumes they’ll have a little money to spring for Internet video.

On the other hand, doesn’t that computer illiterate but friendly, extroverted family in the commercial know a 14-year old in the neighborhood who can set them up with Skype?

?

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The hardware and OS are just the stage and props for the real act: the “Flare Experience,” which is Avaya’s voice, video, and data collaboration extravaganza. And based on the slickly prepared video presentation I saw, it is a nicely designed app that makes unified communications—as it’s called in the enterprise world—a working reality. An “A” to Avaya on this effort.

I didn’t see a live demo of Flare in the hands of a reviewer, so it’s hard to know what this is really like. Keep in mind that Android’s Froyo (their latest release) is, in the words of Google’s director of mobile products Hugo Barra, “not optimized for tablet use.”

Another fact to consider: The Flare is priced— for now anyway—at somewhere between $1500 – $2000. Cisco’s Cius is pegged at around $1000.

The real question for me is whether an independent market for enterprise-only Android tablets can grow and evolve in the onslaught of amazing consumer Android gadgets armed with scarily powerful Cortex A-8 processors  (read Samsung Tab) and, of course, Apple’s iPad.

While trying out the impressive Samsung Galaxy S and the new Motorola Droid last month, Dr. Smartphone and I were force to conclude the obvious fact:it is hard to duplicate Apple’s iPhone.

Which is to say that Android OS and its apps are not as smooth, fluid, and integrated as they should be. Avaya appears to have gotten around these quirks with their Flare Experience, which is a complete unified communications environment, one which you presumably have in the foreground while in the office.

The biggest benefit to openness is the enormous and expanding universe of apps. It’s also a curse. No doubt there will soon be a can’t-live-without Android business app that will be a source of headaches for IT technicians trying to achieve a harmonious ecosystem on all those Flares and Ciuses that will surely make their way into corporate cubes.

This is precisely the reason for having a business appliance— legacy office phones and Blackberries—in which all the integration glitches have been worked out and firm-wired for you.

We don’t live in a world of static business telephony appliances anymore. This leads to one of my motifs: openness has an evil side.

I’m not a robotic Apple apologist by any standard, but there are tremendous advantages to having quality control over the apps and an all-seeing-intelligence (Apple) designing the hardware and OS.

While some consider a closed wall approach a chink in Apple’s armor, this works out to just what’s needed in a closed business world.

Even if we discount Apple’s business ambitions for the iPad (silly), consider this: it is hard to see why businesses, even large ones, would lock into a high-priced Android gadget from their PBX vendors when the consumer market offers less expensive and constantly improving wares.

The enterprise-only Android tablets will have a rough and uncertain ride.

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Perhaps only a company of Cisco’s still considerable market heft can foist its recently revealed Cius (pronounced “see us”) tablet on the citizens of cubeland. Many of the tech bloggers are underwhelmed and ask the question, “Why?”.

This tech blogger has the same query. Once upon a time the gadgets in the office were not obtainable on the street; now consumer gadgetry is far better than what’s available or officially allowed in walled off corporate castles.

For the record, the Cius is a 7” tablet that supports a multi-touch screen, WiFi/BlueTooth, HD video (720p), HD audio, 8-hour battery, and front and rear (for taking pictures of your coworkers?) facing cameras. The company expects to ship the tablet in 1Q2011.

Price? Under $1000. (long pause) Now for the intriguing part: Cius will run a modified version of  the Android OS.

You can see the Cius being lightly demoed at the Cisco Live 2010 conference by Jim Grubb with John Chambers looking on. Inexplicably, the demo centered on its use in a classroom environment. Not sure why they think school districts will spring around $1k for teachers and their students when most laptops and netbooks that the kids are lugging around (in more affluent suburbs) or the computers already in the schools perform better.

To make a teacher work out lesson plans and take attendance on this teeny thing is just plain cruel. And will students actually want to video conference their social studies teachers?

Pardon my grade-school level Spanish, but no mas!

The smart move, of course, was to make Cius part of the Android ecosystem and let the growing community of developers fill in the app holes. I’m sure this openness strategy has not gone unnoticed by Cisco rivals. It will therefore be interesting to see how Avaya responds with its planned tablet, which was indirectly referred to by Senior Vice President Dr. Alan Baratz— he called theirs a chameleon device— back at Voicecon San Francisco 2009.

While I think education may be a challenging vertical for the Cius to gain a foothold, the medical and hospital environments look more promising. With over $19 billion set aside in federal stimulus money for health IT, there’s now both an opportunity and the money to pay for upgrading medial record keeping.

In theory, doctors and nurses may find this small device and the thin client architecture it supports appealing: medical records can be securely examined and updated, and staff can collaborate within the Cisco framework (Telepresence, WebEx).

The Cius is not an iPad killer in the enterprise. By the time the Cius makes it to market, the iPad will have sprinted further ahead with a new release, and who knows, it may boast haptics feedback, making this just plain irresistible.

I don’t see tech savvy employees or for that matter, the most tech-resistant managers, embracing this Cisclet thing over the iPad.

However, for the traditionally technologically resistant medical industry, the Cisco Cius may find a niche, and for Cisco it is a well positioned funnel that taps into the rising health IT revenue stream.

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A federal jury in Texas decided in favor of closely held Commil USA in its patent infringement suit against Cisco. Commill USA owns a fixed mobile convergence patent that was developed by an Israeli tech company, also called Commil.

The Israeli company, started by three engineers in 2000, gained early success with a networking architecture to switch calls between Bluetooth and cellular.

With the networking industry’s move to WiFi , Commil couldn’t develop a similar type of technology and the company was closed down by CEO Yuval Duvev.

Duvev sold the patent to American investors. Motorola and Aruba Networks were also named in the suit but both settled with Commil before the trial.

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