Miguel PdL

As we were going through the ENABLE WP6 agenda today, it reminded me of Karen’s year 3 multimedia project, in which Karen is helping us give some zip to the ENABLE demonstrator.
Karen has started a blog to record the progress mm3project09, and I have every confidence after meeting with Karen last week that we’ll put together something really neat.

PIctures can tell a thousand tales, and John has recently uploaded a number of interesting ones ;-).
After some reflection at the Jade Buddha temple you would have thought I was well set up for the thoughtful ENABLE workshop. No we really needed a taste for home and so we hit the Octoberfest in Shanghai.
Our friend Niklas from UGOE, was not impressed by the German band!
Yesterday we got a chance to visit the Huawei showroom offices in Shanghai. And they were demonstrating to us some equipment you could only dream about, WiMax and NGN in particular.

I was quite disappointed not to be able to attend the official opening of our offices in Carriganore by the Taoiseach Mr. Ahern. So I spent sometime yesterday looking to the web for a report and it was no surprise to find ENN on the ball “ElectricNews.net:News:WIT gets new telecoms research lab”
The concise overview of the event, indicated that it went extremely well, which was also reflected through the email accounts I have received since. Although the folks on the 1st floor were a little dissapointed that Mr. Ahern didn’t get a chance to see the innovative demonstrators on display.

We’ve had a very warm welcome to China so far (25C). Well I say we as John Ronan is also with me here in Shanghai.
We’re here as part of the IST ENABLE project workshop and at the invitiation of Huawei.
The workshop gets fully underway tomorrow, 16th of Oct, were we plan to cover a number of Mobile IPv6 technical topics, such as MIPv4-to-MIPv6 interworking and SHIMv6.
There’s also a planned Huawei internal workshop to be held at the end of the week, given the packed agenda, there’s only a few free days we get here in China.
We’ll try and make the best of them.

I’ve just spent a couple of lovely days in Bremen (temp avg. 28C) on the inviation of BIBA’s Division IKAP who hosted the German Living Labs Event, at the World Trade Center Bremen
There were an interesting mix of topics, “Towards a European Network of Living Labs”, “Examples and Visions of Living Labs”, “Industrial Perspectives on Living Labs” and “Applications for Living Labs – Specific Scenarios and Customer Groups”. The speakers made a good case and obvious need for the Living Labs concept, but I left feeling that we are truely in the early days of this initiative and there are many things (service offerings) to sort out.
This event was also an opportunity to meet up with all the CoreLabs partners after the summer break. There was loads to catch up on, deliverables to finalise and a Lanuch Event (Nov. 20th) to prepare for.

There area number of other items I picked up from the very interesting HSE workshop last week.
I start with David Kolb’s learning styles model and experiential learning theory (ELT). David Kolb published this work in 1984 but has relevance today. To really get a feel for this work the best reference site / research library is from the EBLS Network.
There are other Experiential Learning articles and critiques of David Kolb’s theory which can be found at the link.
Another book recommenadtion this time from Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation : The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology
Although I must admit, I find the words “Open Innovation”, a paradox, as
Open , according to Webster, has the meaning

having no enclosing or confining barrier : accessible on all or nearly all sides

Innovation has the meaning of

the introduction of something new

But in the business world we have traditionally lived in the closed innovation paradigm, but I am hoping we can change that with the Living Labs.
Following on from this discussion the true promotors of Open Innovation are John Seeley-Brown & John Hagel with their most recent work on Creation Nets [in pdf] . There is some interesting blogs on this, one from John Hagel, and I found another Mediangler with a slight Irish/European perspective.
Maybe it can really happen.

I’ve finally made it to Helsinki, after missing my initial flight out of Cork, I had a worrying wait on the reserve list of the next flight out and once I got it, I then had a very tight connection in Heathrow, to finlly get out to Helsinki. I made it and so did my baggage, which was a surprise, that’s two visits through Heathrow in a week, and it’s not so bad really.
I’m here at the Helsinki School of Economics presenting at the the HSE – 2006 | CKIR Workshop in Helsinki 29-30 August, 2006 which has a theme this year of “The challenge of ‘Open Innovation’ to firms, regions and public agencies’ and a number of the presentations, are attempting to look at the changing nature of service and business development, work and technology in the Internet world.
Into the earlier morning session and I need to follow up on
The Wisdom of Crowds
and
Europe INNOVA initiative presents the first comprehensive cluster mapping report in the EU-10 new Member States

Berlin is massive, it’s such a pity I didn’t have more time to explore, I was mainly in the Tiergarten area and managed to catch the Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag.
As for the topic of the day, the ‘Future Internet’ well there are many, many, many many challenges. In order to focus I started with a look at the Internet Society (ISOC) All About The Internet: Brief History of the Internet article. One key line I took from this “The most pressing question for the future of the Internet is not how the technology will change, but how the process of change and evolution itself will be managed.”
In reviewing this topic, and participating in the days workshop I also found the following EU sources
Report on the “COMMUNICATION NETWORKS OF THE FUTURE” Brussels, 29 March 2006 [pdf]
and
“Visions of Future Generation Networks” (EuroView2006) July 31st – August 1st 2006
quite helpful.

I’m on my way to Berlin tomorrow to participate in a meeting in which the main topic of disscussion is “Technical Challenges for the fuure internet”.
The bar has been set high, really in an attempt to engage the group and to see what really comes out of the session.
While preparing I came across two intersting articles.
The EDUCAUSE REVIEW | Lessons for the Future Internet: Learning from the Past, July/August 2006, Volume 41, Number 4 lays out the basic characteristics of the internet and then the author goes through and describes a few highlights of Internet development in the past 30 years, (In four stages) analyzes some of the policy factors at work in that development, and then suggests some avenues for research contributions to the evolution of the future Internet which include
Basic Research of networking and its underlying technologies
Advanced Network Facilities.
Universal Affordable Broadband.
Middleware (to provide a set of commonly needed software tools that interpose themselves between applications code and network facilities)
Preservation of the Internet Commons.
Also a report from ACMA (Austrialian Communications and Media Authority) called Vision 20/20: Future Scenarios for the Communications Industry – Implications for Regulation has a good insight into what is seen as the networking utopia – of ‘Internet Everywhere’ and it points out some chalenages such as the incentives for government, industry and users in realising the potential social and economic benefits of a world of pervasive communications – an
information-rich world of ever-present connectivity and distributed computational intelligence.

v6 is having its growing pains, but it shall overcome, well at least the roadmap to the new internet will be discussed at the IST 2006 session “The New Internet: IPv6 Drivers & Challenges – The European IPv6 Roadmap” and let’s not forget that if Google are in the hunt for IPv6 as noted by ZDNet in “Google’s secret IPv6 plans” then Europe better have a good plan of how we want to play in this New Internet.