One of the coolest companies using the Jabber XCP platform is Me.dium, which is innovatively presence-enabling the Web. They recently announced raising $15 million in a second round of funding. I am still chuckling at how their CEO, Kimbal Musk blogged about this achievement.

Congratulations and thanks for injecting some humor into the world of presence!

If you haven’t visited Jabber, Inc.’s Website recently, stop by and check out our new look and content.

Jabber XCP has evolved into a highly scalable, multi-protocol platform for presence and real-time messaging. Enterprise instant messaging is but one of many applications of our platform. The revised Website now reflects the true breadth and depth of our business, which remains firmly founded on presence.

We’re always interested in featuring new uses of our platform. If you would like your application featured on our Website, please let me know.

Presence and real-time messaging are core themes of applications and services in unified communications and collaboration. In these user-centric worlds, applications, users, and devices must share presence, messages, and data. There is not (nor will there be) a single communications protocol that spans this diverse and growing universe of communications endpoints.

Based on the activity in our pipeline and the OEM deals we’ve signed (click for a recent example) Jabber is becoming the de facto standard for presence-enabling existing services and applications. Jabber easily bridges legacy and standard protocols to aggregate presence with speed, scale, and security. Jabber, Inc.’s technology is multi-protocol now, and it has the flexibility to extend to future protocols as they become established.

It’s still king says Dow Jones’ Paul Vigna in a recent WSJ OpEd piece (subscription req.)

We had a somewhat different perspective in SIP Magazine last year under the header Context is King.

We don’t so much disagree as believe that the dominant position lies in the software that separates people from the content they want.

Case in point, iTunes sales are rising even as the content they’re selling has remained somewhat static.

On perhaps a parallel tangent, Om isn’t far off in suggesting that IM is the “last desktop app standing.” But I’d argue its more than that, as instant messaging IS the desktop. Or more accurately, the interface through which we manage our presence defines our desktop and at this point it is IM, and (hypothesizing here) the company you entrust to help you manage your presence owns the most consumer trust (and attention).

Of interest to eggheads in recent news is the fact that both Google and Joost use XMPP. I would expect YouTube to integrate a chat function at some point. Joost apparently has one such that you can open a chat and perhaps a group chat around a specific video. Pretty cool community building tool.

But beyond IM and chat, I think Google and Joost recognize that there’s tremendous power in presence-enabling their IPTV platforms. The more of a person’s presence IPTV platforms can consume the more targeted (and lucrative) their advertising slots become.

With the acquisition of Antepo, Adobe has made a deeper commitment to XMPP, joining the ranks of leading technology companies such as Apple, Google, Sun and others. IBM’s recent XMPP interoperability announcement is further evidence of the growing mainstream acceptance of the protocol. With such powerful backing, XMPP has clearly reached a tipping point, achieving recognition as the industry open standard for real-time messaging and presence.

Jabber, Inc. was the first company founded around this open standard (XMPP is also known as the Jabber protocol as it owes its origins and governance to the Jabber open source project). Jabber XCP, Jabber, Inc.’s XMPP-based messaging and presence platform, is chosen by our customers for its scalability, extensibility and multi-protocol interoperability. We recognize that messaging and presence will never be a single-protocol world, but it is nevertheless gratifying to see our native protocol gain such a significant endorsement.

Congratulations to Adobe and Antepo!

Joe Hildebrand, our CTO, recently wrapped up a column for the January edition of SIP Magazine. I won’t give away the article, but one element dealt with the fact that people and machines don’t speak the same language.

It reminded me of a trip to China not that long ago and the chuckles we got from some of the English translations on outdoor signs. We understood their meaning even as they lacked precision, and that is the point:

We knew they meant take caution around the riverbank. Conversely, a machine would have tried to gently dump itself into the river.

We were chatting the other day with an industry analyst and he started reeling off the “Web 2.0″-ish companies he’s working. We asked him about presence, and how these companies are going about making their services live.

The response was surprising and practically made us yell, Why in the world would they do that? You see, many of these companies view presence as core to their offering. Totally agree with them there.

As a core component many of these folks have gone about the business of trying to build their own presence server. The theory seems to be that “our application relies upon the ability of our users to know the presence of their buddies, and we therefore must own the presence engine.”

I beg to differ. Your service also needs a web server, and a bunch of hardware, and network connectivity, etc. Do you need to build all of those components yourself? I would argue that for many of these companies, presence is backend functionality, the application they build on top of it and how they market it should be their core focus.

At Jabber, Inc. we’ve already done the hard work with a massively scalable presence server that will interoperate with any network and just about any device. You can embed Jabber presence into just about any application and aggregate the presence from other devices and applications as well.

To illustrate the point, we recently closed a deal with a Web 2.0ish company which had been using an open source presence server (which is a nice way to get started.) But once they realized that their application and the success of their business was predicated on the ability to support millions of users, they had to go shopping and arrived at Jabber, Inc. because we’re the only store on Massively Scalable Avenue.

When Jabber, Inc.’s far-flung road warriors got caught by the recent snowstorms, presence was our first line of communication. Some stranded travelers wrote custom presence messages such as “stuck in Dallas, call my mobile”. Others used mobile IM to see who was available at headquarters to help them make new travel arrangements. In one case, colleagues on separate trips were able to meet up to share a rental car back home. With presence so ingrained into the Jabber, Inc. culture, no one was unaccounted for and people got help in real-time.

With the New Year, Jabber, Inc. enters its eighth year in the presence business, so it isn’t surprising that we use presence technology almost instinctively. What I find surprising is that there are so many organizations that are entirely presence-free. Sure, plenty of people are using enterprise and public IM to get their work done more efficiently, but typically, presence is only used to see if someone is available for a phone call or IM session. This situation is going to change radically in 2007.

I hereby go on the record boldly predicting that 2007 will be the Year of Presence in mainstream IT. Business decision-makers and IT professionals will realize that it is imperative to presence-enable communications and business processes, just as it was imperative to network-, then Web-enable business applications and processes in the 1990s. Be presence-enabled or be square. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The principal catalyst will likely be telephony, the technology invented 130 years ago, in the Centennial year of the United States. All forms of real-time communications benefit from presence and phone calls are the mainstream real-time communications medium. As digital telephony makes deeper inroads into the enterprise, presence will tag along and become integrated into the basic infrastructure of business.

While there will be growth in the business use of IM, that isn’t my point. The high-order bit is that from this point forward, real-time presence will be a basic information technology requirement. It all started with the dialtone. In the Web 1.0 era, Scott McNealy coined the term “big friggin’ WebTone switch” to capture the imperative of Web-enablement.

We are now entering the mainstream presence era, where aggregating and pervasively embedding presence becomes a business-critical IT mandate, just as becoming Web-enabled was back when Scott McNealy first spoke about Webtones. Jabber, Inc. has a programmable and scaleable real-time presence engine, which is an excellent foundation for the Big Friggin’ Presence Switch.

Best wishes for a happy, prosperous and presence-enabled New Year!

Goodness gracious, social networking is so in that it is a key element of Time’s Person of the Year!

Whenever something gets hot, there is bound to be backlash. Enter the concept of anti-social networking, which has been gaining momentum in the blogosphere following the explosion of social networking sites. This movement is the antithesis of social networking, as presented in anti-networking sites (some starting as sarcastic jibes) such as isolatr and snubster, where you can create a list of people to erase from your communications sphere of influence.

It may seem counterintuitive, but just as presence is key to effective social networking sites, presence is also critical for anti-social networking. You have to know the presence of specific people, places and things if you want to avoid undesirable situations. Or at least, you need to know they are not where you are. The announcement of a child-tracking service using GPS-enabled mobile phones has set off predictable teeth-gnashing about privacy concerns. I’m concerned about privacy, but this type of service doesn’t send me into Orwellian cold sweats. I have quite the opposite reaction. If the network knows where I am, it can help me avoid undesirable situations, such as crowds, traffic jams and yes, even people that I would just as soon avoid. If used creatively, presence technology can enhance privacy.

The anti-social pioneers tend to be a bit harsh, writing about things they despise, abhor, detest, etc. This extremism runs the risk of throwing a useful concept out with the hatemongering bathwater. Anti-social networking can be useful - even among friends! Most humans, at least occasionally, want to do things alone or with a very specific other person. Or, an activity that might be fun with a few people, becomes grueling when the crowds packs in. Presence information can help run the interference necessary to achieve these ends.

Social networks form communities of people with mutual interests. But what happens when mutual interests conflict? When you are after a resource in short supply, letting your friends know your plans could be counterproductive. The law of supply and demand can be cruel when supply is limited and something comes up to drive demand…such as a discussion within your social network. If I want a quiet vacation on a secluded beach is it wise to share my plans with all of my buddies? Are tickets tight for a game or concert? Then it’s probably not a good idea to chat about going until I’ve bought my own tickets.

Then there is the benefit of exploiting low-priced resources in good supply - getting a deal on things in times of abundance. I want my week at a secluded beach house, but at a low price. So I get a deal on the house because I am notified in real-time that someone just cancelled their reservation. That’s a presence change: From reserved, or not available, to available, by the way.

How about avoiding the crowds to have a better shopping, dining, entertainment, travel, etc. experience? Consider the class distinctions in air travel. First Class means more personal space, better food and less hassle…a better service experience, in other words. What if there were ways for companies to provide a superior service experience to their customers, just by letting them know when they can enjoy more privacy, quiet and elbow-room? Enterprises that figure this out are going to have some of the most loyal customers and profit handsomely from their efforts.

The concept of load balancing - allocating work to resources with spare capacity - has been around for a long time. From movie matinees to grid computing, profitable efficiencies are realized by utilizing otherwise slack resources. The quantitative gains have been studied and documented in operations research and systems management disciplines.

But the brave new opportunities are qualitative: The focus is on providing a better experience for humans, instead of machine utilization improvements or optimized process efficiency. This brings us back to the secluded beach vacation. The current model follows first class air travel - I want space, I pay for it. But the new presence-enabled model lets me find times and places where the beach is most likely to be all mine - without additional charge to me, but with incremental revenue to the owner of the house.

I hope I don’t see you there!

Right Model Wrong Architecture vs Right Architecture Wrong Model

…Or more simply Microsoft vs Google

Interesting remarks from Bill Gates chronicled by Liz Gannes of GigaOm.

According to Liz:

We each got to ask Gates one question. I asked which applications he forecast to live within the browser and which outside of it.He replied that the distinction would come to be silly from a technical standpoint, but that the necessary movement toward web APIs does present challenges on the business side. “One of the things that’s actually held the industry back on this is, if you have an advertising business model, then you don’t want to expose your capabilities as a web service, because somebody would use that web service without plastering your ad up next to the thing.”

His solution wasn’t very specific: “It’s ideal if you get business models that don’t force someone to say ‘no, we won’t give you that service unless you display something right there on that home page.”

Then for the tease: “And, you know, [inside the browser and outside the browser are] moving towards each other, but there’s still a bit of a barrier there, and new technology, things we’re working on, really will change that.”

Interesting in a few respects. On the closing quote, we were talking with a journalist yesterday who reminded us that way back when Microsoft was making the case that the Internet was just an extension of WindowsNT. Hmmm…

All kidding aside, I think Bill is definitely onto something here. If apps and data are going to primarily live in the cloud and we’re going to access them as Live Services, there are two fundamental issues that must be dealt with (and probably many more as well).

1) Scale of the presence engine. Live Services need presence, and making everything live exponentially increases the number of “presentities” (the network nodes and data streams on the network that publish and subscribe to presence information). This is no longer one person one device type presence but one person many devices, many applications, data stores, etc. How well presence scales becomes super relevant in this scenario.

2) You’ve got to have an extraordinary level of trust in the provider of Live Services that they are going to protect your data and deliver services when you need them.

Google presents a real challenge to Microsoft because they have already embraced Live Services and have the infrastructure and architecture to roll them out broadly. But…do you trust a company with an advertising model to protect your privacy and other data? They make their living off of selling your information after all.

Microsoft on the other hand has an infrastructure and architecture that doesn’t lend itself very well to rolling out Live Services. Its applications are heavy and its development model (Ray Ozzie’s initiatives notwithstanding) has not proven itself nimble in a “Web 2.0” sense. That said, they don’t rely on advertising and have a history of providing trusted (albeit security deficient) applications.

At present, there is no one company covering these issues comprehensively. Microsoft must build scalable presence, Google must build trust. At Jabber, Inc. we’re watching this looming battle with the inherent interest of an arms dealer.