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Israel today lifted its ban on the iPad . After two weeks of banning the popular tablet computers, the Ministry of Communications is allowing them in and returning the confiscated tablets. Moses Kahlon, the Minister of Communications, announced the lift in a press release . The original decision to ban the iPad was made without the minister's knowledge, inspiring a governmental squabblefest in Israel. Sponsor iPads were initially banned out of fear that the the tablet's wireless would interact improperly with communications frequencies because they did not adhere to Israeli Wi-Fi standards. Technical tests carried out by both the ministry and an international lab proved that this was not so. The Ministry is allowing the importation of only one iPad per person.There is no information explaining this restriction in the press release. If there is no risk, it does not immediately make sense. Discuss
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Israel Lifts iPad Ban
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Haartez reported today that the Israeli government has banned the iPad. "(T)he Communications Ministry has blocked the import of iPads to Israel, and the customs authority has been directed to confiscate them," wrote Bar Ben Ari and Zohar Blumenkrantz. The ban appears not so much to be the result of a coherent technical decision as a nutcluster of bureaucratic infighting. Sponsor The Communications Ministry engineers apparently refused to pass the device, since its WiFi operates to different standards than Israeli WiFi, which are similar to European standards. However, the instruction to ban the device was made without the approval of Communications Minister Moshe Kahlon. "The head of customs at Ben-Gurion International Airport said yesterday they have confiscated 10 iPads, including those their owners declared," Haaretz reported. The owners are being charged a fee for every day their iPads are held in a government warehouse and the government is refusing to say whether the iPads will be approved or how they will need to be altered to conform with Israeli law. "Paging Captain Yossarian. Paging Captain John Yossarian to the customs authority, please." Discuss
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Israel Vs. iPads
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Last month the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab ran an event at the Stanford Business School, called The Internet of Things: Sensors Everywhere . The video of the event was recently put up on YouTube . We've embedded the entire hour-long video below, along with a 2-minute video snippet which we think budding entrepreneurs should take note of. If you have time, the entire event is worth viewing. It delves into current successful use cases for Internet of Things. Panelists include representatives from HP's sensor networks division, a medical software company, and a company which provides sensor-enabled products for vending machines. Sponsor The first speaker was Michael Chui, a Senior Fellow at McKinsey Global Institute. He explained that the Internet of Things is about incorporating sensors and actuators into physical objects, which "make the physical world part of an information system." Chui noted that the Internet of Things is ramping up for 3 main reasons: 1) sensors are getting better, faster, smaller, cheaper, more plentiful; 2) networks are everywhere (pervasive, if not quite ubiquitous yet); 3) our new ability to analyze data that these network sensors generate and being able to control the actuators. Chui then went over the report that McKinsey released last month ( our summary and analysis ). We've excerpted a couple of minutes from the end of Chui's presentation, when he talked about potential applications for Internet of Things. If you're an aspiring entrepreneur, this is well worth watching. The rest of the event focused on commercial solutions using Internet of Things. An example is vending machine software company Cantaloupe Systems . Co-founder Anant Agrawal said that for his company, "the Internet of Things eliminates the guesswork." Cataloupe Systems provides sensor-enabled software for vending machines, which gives vending machine companies hard data with which to run their businesses more efficiently. Here's the full video of the forum: Hat-tip Ethan Bauley from HP Communications, who pointed to the video in a RWW comment . Discuss
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Internet of Things: Opportunities For Entrepreneurs
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Today, email is nearly as ubiquitous as the computer itself. It offers a simple process that "just works" for most users and it has become a defacto communication process for enterprises and individuals alike. YouSendIt found its place in the evolution of email by providing existing email users a solution to a common problem - sending large files. Along the way, the company has leveraged its position in cloud based solution to offer additional benefits to its users. Sponsor What do we Know about Email A few things about using email that define it as a communications tool. Each message can be targeted to a person, a list of people, or an entire group of people. Individuals can respond to the message, ignore it, or mark it as Spam. It's security and privacy model that starts as opt-out, rather than op-in. Meaning that if you get an account *anyone* can send you a message. Spammers are the single largest sender of email traffic. Email messages can include file attachments that offer a way to send a file from one computer to the user on another one. Improving the flow of attachments is part of email is that YouSendIt specializes in. Large Files Needed a Home For both user experience, technical infrastructure, and cost reasons many email systems cap the size of attachments they allow to pass through the gateway. Large files are routinely blocked, causing email users the challenge of figuring out another way to get them across the network. One way to think about it, is that large file attachments "real" home is not the inbox, but more rightfully the filesystem (aka My Documents). And, increasingly these files are being stored in the cloud rather than the filesystem. A diagram describing how it works shows how it creates a new channel for connecting the user to their file, while continuing to use email "as-is". Collaboration Happens: Did You Get my Email? By offering a cloud solution to deliver the files, YouSendIt was also able to track whether the recipient downloaded the file. The company currently has has about 5 million "file batches" sent per month with over 10 million downloads. On average, each file is being read by two persons on the other side and the sender is able to see which ones. This audibility provides YouSendIt users a way to close the loop and gain a deeper insight to the status of their communications. Imagine the sales person, who sends a brochure to the prospects, getting a report back for who opened it and who didn't. It automatically separates out the interested from the others and gives an opportunity to target the next message. Email is a social application that has it's own rules and nuances - Google reminded the world recently with the launch of Buzz that connecting email and social networks is harder than it looks . YouSendIt might be onto something. Instead of reinventing the entire social context of email, the company is focused on enhancing the existing email system as it works today. YouSendIt Adopts the Enterprise Microsoft Exchange has become the dominant email system in the enterprise. YouSendIt spent a lot of time working closely with Exchange and it's client counterpart Outlook to bring its cloud-based attachments solution to the platform. This solution offers an approach to a gradual transition to cloud computing - one message at a time. Change is in-the-air around collaboration and email. We wonder if the next generation of email going to evolve into the killer app for bringing social networking it into the enterprise. What do you think, will email ever fade away? Discuss
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Blazing the Path to Email Collaboration: Without all of the Buzz
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Twenty-year PR veteran Sean Garrett just announced that he's leaving the communications startup he helped found five years ago and taking a new position as vice president of communications at Twitter. Garrett says he's been consulting for Twitter for the past few months, via 463 Communications . Twitter has been hiring fast lately, often picking up smart people working at partner companies. Sponsor Garrett is a UCLA grad in Political Science and first worked in the office of California Governor Pete Wilson in 1990. He went on to do PR with many of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley. Garrett created an account on Twitter on March 8th, 2007 (co-incidentally, one day after I joined, so our anniversaries are coming soon, Sean!) and pays attention on Twitter to people like Mike Masnick of the tech blog TechDirt and maverick PR guy Jeremy Pepper . Twitter desperately needs communications help. The company has grown in importance faster than it's been able to keep up with. Garrett's phone will no doubt be ringing off the hook. He'll be working in the Communications Department with Jenna Sampson , who came from Yahoo!, former CNN correspondent Alexa Lee and Emily Pinkerton , among others. You can follow all four on Twitter via this list . Discuss
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Twitter Hires New VP of Communications
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