Panda.moan.i.am

Don’t you just love Pandas? How can you not? They’re such cuddly little furry guys. Well, some of them aren’t so little but even the Giant Pandas are still cute and cuddly. Having said that, it’s sad to bid a fond farewell to a couple of lovable pandas that are about to leave zoos in the United States for new homes in China. It’s all good, as they are simply moving into the next phase of the panda conservation and breeding program.

Even so, they’ll be missed by panda lovers back here. If you hurry, you can still visit and say good by to Tai Shan at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. The last day is Wednesday, February 3. Visitors can get panda buttons at the and the opportunity to send a goodbye card that will be sent to China. On February 4, Tai Shan leaves the Zoo for Dulles International Airport and a direct flight to Chengdu, China. He’ll be accompanied by Mei Lan, a three-year-old female panda born at the Atlanta Zoo.

The Giant Panda is native to mountain ranges in central China and is one of the world’s most beloved and endangered species. Habitat loss coupled with a naturally very low birthrate have made conservation efforts critical if future generations are to have the same pleasure of their company as we do. Right now there are as few as 1600 giant pandas in the bamboo forests of China plus another 160 or so in zoos and breeding centers around the world.

All pandas in American zoos are leased from China for terms of 10 years, with the provision that offspring born in the zoos are to be sent to China. Tai Shan was born in 2005 to Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, the National Zoo’s second pair of giant pandas. Mei Lan was born in 2006 at the Atlanta Zoo to parents Lun Lun and Yang Yang.

If you have succumbed to “panda-monium” or simply enjoy visiting them at zoos, watching their stories on TV nature shows or viewing their antics on YouTube videos, you may be interested in some of the Tai Shan memorabilia offered by the National Zoo. They’ve got postage stamps, key chains, magnets, mugs, socks plush pandas and T-shirts. The Atlanta Zoo even has a Giant Panda Cub-to-Go box with a plush panda cub, photo collage, giant panda fact sheet, cub photo and personalized certificate of sponsorship. Your purchase supports panda cub care at the Atlanta Zoo and conservation work they do around the world.

Another way to show your interest in pandas is by wearing the Panda Poken. This clever little guy not only reaches out a hand in friendship, but acts as your personal assistant in sharing contact information with other Poken wearers you meet. You simply touch the hands of the Poken together and they glow green indicating and an electronic interchange has taken place. You can each plug your Poken into your PCs or Macs and sync your contacts on your personal online Poken Hub. It gives you a picture of the person you met, along with whatever contact information they want to share. That’s things like name, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN pages, and perhaps phone number. It’s so much cooler than the old paper business cards. You’ll find yourself on the lookout for other Poken and may even want to give them as gifts... especially to anyone suffering from panda separation anxiety.

Integrating Social Media And Reality

We live in two separate worlds, with one foot in each. There’s the virtual world of texting, email, online shopping, Internet search, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN. Then there’s the real world of food, shelter, family, friends, and work. The two intersect, but they’re not tied together in any robust way. Well, at least until now.

It only makes sense that someone would come up with a solution to link the virtual and physical worlds we live in. That solution is something called Poken. As you might suspect, it has both physical and virtual components.

The physical component is called a Poken. It’s an electronic gadget packaged to look like an avatar or a flash memory device. The business end of the device is encapsulated in a white four fingered hand that has a button in the palm and lights that glow from within. What you can’t see is a coil antenna, microprocessor, USB drivers and a watch style battery.

The way you use Poken is to carry the device on a lanyard around your neck or clipped to your jacket, backpack, or bag. When you encounter someone else with a Poken you can request an exchange of contact data, much the same as requesting or offering a business card. Touch the hands of the Poken together and they’ll sense each other’s presence. After a wireless exchange of links, both hands will pulsate with a green glow to announce their success in the encounter.

Now for the virtual component. You plug the USB connector of your Poken into your computer and automatically upload the day’s contacts to your Poken Hub, a personalized online portal. After entering your ID and password, you can see your contacts organized in lists or displayed as virtual business cards along a timeline. Unlike paper cards or scraps of paper that you’ve used to jot down names and phone numbers, the Poken Cards show a photo of your contact.

Being able to see pictures of the people you’ve met displayed along a timeline makes it easy to remember where you met someone and who else you met at the same time. But that’s just the half of it. Those Poken Cards, the virtual representation of a business card or address book entry, have names, phone numbers, addresses and website links. It’s whatever information you and those you meet have chosen to share. The popular social media sites, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN have familiar link icons on the card. There’s also room for hyperlinks to other sites, such as your blog or business website.

This is how Poken tightly integrates the process of meeting people in person with meeting them again online at the familiar social networking sites. You don’t have to think about who goes with what site, because it’s all tied together on the Poken cards you’ve collected.

Five Years Of The Explainer

T1 Rex’s Business Telecom Explainer celebrated it’s 5th anniversary this month, with well over 800 posts since 2004. We started off with a mission to explain the intricacies of telecommunications services and offer competitive service options to businesses. This mission has expanded to include a host of products, services and issues of interest to our readers. As we get ready to enter the second decade of the century, let’s see if we can make sense of what happened in the “aught” years of the Millennium and where we might be going next.

As the name implies, this explainer blog was launched in conjunction with T1Rex.com. T1 Rex came to be because of a new invention in the world of telecommunications. A company called Telarus developed a software process called GeoQuote (now patented) that automates the pricing of commonly used business telecom services. The focus was T1 lines, which are the most common professional grade voice and data connection for most businesses.

Prior to GeoQuote, the way you got a quote for a T1 line was to submit an inquiry form or answer questions over the phone and then wait a week or two while your request was passed through channels and your quote was manually calculated. With the GeoQuote automated quote form on T1Rex.com, a curious business manager or network engineer could enter some basic information online and get a quote that was better than 90% accurate in less than a minute. It’s even more accurate today and there are many more options than just T1 lines.

GeoQuote upended the marketing of telecommunications services the same way that the IBM computer changed accounting, numerical control changed manufacturing, and computer aided design changed engineering. Once automation gets into a process, everything happens faster and with fewer errors. The productivity increases can be orders of magnitude above what they were with the old manual processes. There’s no going back.

We’re all getting a taste of this in our private and well as business lives. Social Networking has emerged in the last few years to revolutionize how we communicate. Remember when everyone wanted to make a website? Hardly anyone builds sites anymore unless they have a very specific business or special interest need. Websites were replaced by blogs. Blogs are being replaced by social networking sites like MySpace, FaceBook and LinkedIn. Do you still email? Twitter is the new email. It nicely complements and integrates with cell phone text messaging.

Even Twitter may seem like yesterday’s news later this decade. Most cell phones now have cameras with fairly good resolution and the ability to take short video clips. Picture and video messaging are gaining popularity. How soon before there’s a video screen on a service like Twitter so you just click for a short video message? Video and audio won’t replace text, of course. There are too many situations where you need to communicate briefly and with stealth. They’ll simply add another dimension.

Video is the long heralded “killer app” for the Internet. You know what a phenomenon YouTube has been. Now TVs and Blu-ray players come Internet-ready so they can play those YouTube clips on the big screen and also access full length network programs on the Web. You can catch up on many TV shows you missed by watching them on your computer. But you know that you really want to lay back in the recliner and watch them on the TV. That’s going to be common very, very soon.

Video conferencing is breaking out of the corporate conference room and onto the desktop right now. My iMac came ready to video chat with a built-in camera and microphone. Many other computers, including laptops and netbooks, are similarly equipped. As I write this, the airlines are busy tightening security because of terrorist attack that almost succeeded. Some of the new rules are going to make an annoying travel experience nearly insufferable. That, combined with the Great Recession that may linger for years, is going to get a lot of business people and casual travelers thinking about alternatives. In many cases, a convenient video conference can do the job of a personal visit. As this catches on, you can expect a push to improve quality and ease of sharing photos and videos similar to what Cisco calls Telepresence.

Video conferencing is also going to be big on cell phones. If people can walk down the street working their thumbs while staring at text on a screen, they can certainly watch the person they are communicating with in real time. To think that they laughed at Dick Tracy’s wrist TV in the 60’s. We wouldn’t even settle for a screen that small anymore.

Video is what has gotten the telecom carriers scared stiff, and for good reason. Just like the move from email to interactive Web sites forced the upgrade from dial-up to broadband, the move to video and high definition everything is forcing carriers into a bandwidth upgrade. Verizon has wisely started deploying fiber optic to the premises before demand makes it mandatory. The cable companies are deploying DOCSIS 3.0 for the same reason. There will soon be no such thing as too much bandwidth. For business locations, the best answer seems to be Ethernet over copper or fiber. When multiple business locations outside of a metro area are involved, MPLS networks are the emerging leader for high bandwidths at reasonable prices.

It’s the cellular carriers that feel faint at the thought of everyone having a smartphone. Their thousands of towers were equipped to efficiently handle telephone conversations and text messaging. Light duty Web surfing and limited multimedia is being accommodated with 2.5 and 3G upgrades. But they will need 4G and a lot of it to handle the load of HD video streaming on a near-continuous basis. Even the FCC is already wondering if there are more over-the-air TV channels it can repurpose for cellular broadband. There’s a real danger that there just isn’t going to be enough spectrum to go around. At sometime during the next decade you can expect a major fight to ensue over what is the “best” use of the choice VHF and UHF frequencies.

A new technology we’ve just started following is called Poken. It’s wireless, but what’s called near-field wireless. Using low frequencies that won’t be part of the TV/Cellular/Microwaves slugfest, Poken devices exchange information when they touch each other. The idea is to replace business cards and social business cards with an electronic data transfer and a portal to manage the contact information. It nicely supports hot links to your current social networking and business sites, for instant access by those you contact. Poken is already hugely popular in Europe.

Well, this is almost certainly the tip of the technology iceberg. Many exciting developments in the coming “teens” decade haven’t even emerged yet. It’s our plan to be writing about them as they do, and I hope that you’ll be with us for what is bound to be an exciting time.

Do You Have A Poken Card?

You know how much business has changed since the rise of the Internet. You wouldn’t think about looking for a new job and ignoring all the online employment sites. You wouldn’t consider cutting out ads in the newspaper and completely ignoring the employer’s web sites. In fact, you almost certainly have a website for your own business. You also have email, instant messaging, and accounts for social networking sites like Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn. In fact, you’re proud to say you’ve been proactive in keeping up with the latest developments in technology and the online world. So, where’s your Poken card?

Don’t tell me that you’re missing out on the move to electronic business cards. OK, it’s true that this development is taking off far faster in Europe than in the US. But electronic contact management is here now. It’s just a matter of time before you become a pokenite or are left behind with the crowd that still uses typewriters and those mechanical pop-up address books.

Poken S.A., the Swiss company, has created a new technology with a complete support system that changes the process of exchanging business and personal contact information. It’s often described as an electronic business card because it is a direct replacement for the 3.5 x 2 inch cardboard slips that we’re accustomed to offer at any business encounter. You set up a Poken card to mirror what you put on a business card. But being electronic, the links you publish are active. You also have real, working buttons for your social networks. Here’s a screenshot of my poken card. Online, all the links are active.

The electronic card replacement is only one aspect of the Poken innovation. The real magic is in how you exchange cards. You exchange paper business cards by handing over a physical product. You poken, or exchange electronic business cards, by wirelessly transferring a number code. That code uniquely identifies you and your card, which is stored in an online database. The code you receive is stored, with up to 64 others, in the memory of your Poken device. When you plug the poken into your computer, those contacts are uploaded to your account where you can see them in a list and a timeline display with pictures. That timeline is an excellent memory jogger to help you associate names and faces by when you met them.

Have you been missing out on an important productivity enhancing development? It’s not too late. You still have a chance to get in on the leading edge of electronic business cards for your company, interest group, convention, political organization, or other opportunity to connect people with a common interest.

Christmas Gifts For Boomerangs

Are you shopping for boomerangs this year? No, not the curved aboriginal hunting tool. These boomerangs are kids that went off to school, tried to make it on their own, and were smacked down by a couple of stock market crashes and a hideous job market in the short first decade of this century. Now they’re back living with mom and dad and trying to figure out what to do next. Hence, the boomerang moniker. So, what do you give a boomerang as a holiday gift?

One good approach might be to give them something that will help them get back on their feet again. Cash is always nice, but it may go as fast as it came. Besides, who has a really significant amount of cash to dole out in these hard times? How about something that can do a lot of good for a little money?

One characteristic of the Millennial generation is that they are tech savvy and like to connect socially. One excellent tool for making connections, including those connections that might lead to a job offer, is a cell phone. But aren’t cell phones and plans a real luxury for someone out of work? Not if you don’t have to pay extra for the phone or buy a separate second service plan.

Here’s what I’m thinking. Your cell phone plan is about to expire. You want a new model phone, anyway. So get yourself a new phone for free and a substantial package of minutes. But don’t buy an individual service plan. Instead, buy what’s called a family plan. You still have a certain number of minutes each month and you get a single bill. But a family plan can have multiple phones on it. Get that free phone for yourself when you order cellular phones and service online and then get a second free phone that you can give to your progeny. Remember, you didn’t pay anything extra to get that second phone. If you can trust them not to hog all the minutes (under threat of being disconnected), you’ll only pay marginally more for the service plan. You can even add a third line for a spouse, all on the same plan.

How about a nice set of business cards to had out to potential employers and anyone who might be helpful? Don’t pay for those either. For just the cost of shipping, you can create a set of 250 custom business cards online for that special someone and have them sent to you ready for wrapping. They can thank you by handing them all out to good prospects in the next year.

Even better than traditional business cards is an inexpensive new gadget called Poken. It’s a wireless USB device packaged as a small character or flash drive. The owner creates one or more business and personal electronic cards which can be shared with other Poken owners. The process involves touching the devices together in an electronic handshake that transfers the contact information. A free personalized online hub organizes the contacts you make and helps you know more about them and how to get in touch. This “Y” generation will easily embrace Poken, as they’ve adopted MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter for social networking.

Do these sound like good presents for young adults living at home? Now that you think about it, they sound pretty good for any age and even those who have already left the nest.

Poken Around For Business Leads

How do you approach business networking situations? Is it still the old handshake and business card? There’s a new, more edgy approach. It involves leveraging technology to exchange and organize your day to day business contacts. If you’ve been thinking about bringing social media and viral marketing into your business plan, don’t make a move until you discover Poken.

Poken is both a device and a process that upgrades the traditional business card. In the days when your name, title and phone number were king, the little paper handout was all someone needed for their files. But now that everything is computerized in databases and online, business cards, Rolodex files and address books fall short. There are devices out there that will read your card and create an electronic version. But why not go electronic from the start?

Meet the pokenPulse. It looks like the USB flash drive you carry around now. It is. In fact, it functions as a 2 GB solid state memory dongle. But notice something else? That white hand on the side is more than just a logo. It’s a functioning near-field wireless transponder. When two of these devices touch, the hands glow green to indicate that a data exchange has occurred. That’s you and the person you just met exchanging electronic business cards. Do this all day and then download the results when you get back to your computer.

The contact data you acquire is securely uploaded to your own private pokenHub, an online storage for all your contacts plus a timeline based organizer. If you can remember roughly when you met someone or who you were with at the time, you can find the contact you have in mind even if you long ago forgot their name.

Poken is about more than just names and phone numbers. The electronic record also carries email addresses and website links. Your contact will not only discover what organization you work for, but can instantly get the personal and marketing information you want them to have. You don’t have to go about stuffing brochures in their pocket. They’ll be getting the links to your online presence at the same time you exchange names and numbers.

Who can Poken benefit? Anyone who meets people as part of their job... or wants to. This ranges from empowered teams, corporate trade shows, salespeople on the lookout for new prospects, edgy companies looking to expand awareness of their products and services, technical experts wanting to connect with other techies, and so on. If you use a computer and the Internet in your work, Poken can probably enhance what you are doing.

Speaking of edgy. The pokenPulse is just one model of the Poken device family. It’s popular with technical people and executives. But if you want attention, consider wearing one of the Poken characters, such as the Ninja, Space Alien, Panda, Cave Man or Vampire. People are going to ask what that is around your neck and that gives you an opportunity to converse. Others who are already Poken-enabled will instantly recognize you as someone in the know and worth meeting. Take a second and give them the “high four” with your Poken character. It will likely turn out to be a valuable exchange.

Business Cards Go Green With Poken

Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen
Going to slip under the sea
As the ocean warms and the nasty storms
Are convinced we can’t do three-fifty.

The start of the climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark this week has me waxing lyrical. Despite the deniers and the cynics who are convinced we can no more get to 350 ppm of CO2 than we can stop sucking high fructose sugar water in the handy 2 liter travel bottle, I remain hopeful. People nay-sayed acid rain until it started dissolving war memorials and everything else made of stone. Then we up and stopped it in a matter of a few years. This, too, will be dealt with.

With green the theme, I’m onto something that may well change the way we network. No, not a threat to Ethernet. This is about person to person networking. You know, the kind where you all get in a room and start passing around business cards. In just a matter of minutes you have absolutely no idea which face goes with each card or what these people really have to offer. Isn’t there a better solution in these 2.0 everything days?

There sure is, and it’s gaining momentum as we speak. It’s a technical solution consisting of a small hardware tag and a complementary online portal in the cloud. Is there any doubt that technology would once again step up to save the day?

The solution I’m talking about is called Poken and it rhymes with token. The token is a small plastic device that looks either like a standard USB flash drive or a cartoon character. It your choice of whether to go hip or go square. They work the same.

Each device has a big white hand with four fingers. It’s looks so friendly. That’s by design, of course. When you meet someone else that has a Poken, you touch their hands together. They start glowing green to indicate something electronic is going on. That something is a data transfer over a low frequency near field comm link. You send them a small data dump that has your name, phone number and social networking links. They reciprocate by sending you the same. It’s all stored in the Poken.

When you are done for the day or just get into an upload mood, you pull out the hand and plug it into a USB jack on your computer. You are automatically connected to the pokenHub, a personalized portal that uploads the contact info stored on your Poken and displays it in a timeline format. If you can remember about when you met somebody or who you were with at the time, you can likely find them right away and see just what they’re all about. Data transfers and your portal are secured. That’s handy if you don’t really want to admit knowing some of these people.

This probably isn’t the end of business cards as we know them. After all, we still need to use something for a bookmark. Or do we? That Amazon Kindle and the new Barnes & Noble e-readers are about to pull the plug on book printing. In a few years... who knows?

If you’d like to learn more about Poken and perhaps get your sales, marketing or project team connected, then you should Meet Poken. If you are more of a lone wolf, you can simply order one of these for yourself and use it at clubs, class reunions or other get-togethers where you may want to rekindle and old friendship or get to know someone new. Will they Poken you? Of course. Who can resist a three eyed space alien, a panda or a vampire that hangs around your neck?

Poken Enhances Face to Face Social Networking

When you meet new people and want to get contact information, what do you do? Grab a napkin and scribble down their name and phone number? Write something on your hand and hope you don’t sweat it off before you get home? Present your little cardboard business card?

Lame!

Just as FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter have enabled online social networking, Poken is bringing face to face contacts into the 2.0 era. They do it with a little device called a Poken. A Poken is something like a token. Actually, it’s more like an amulet. It’s magic power comes from the electronics inside.

For most people under the age of geezer, one of the many standard Pokens with the big hand will work just fine. But if you are concerned that less progressive CEOs at the Country Club will point and laugh at that panda hanging around your neck, there are business grade Pokens available. The PokenPulse looks like any other USB flash drive. If anyone observes you touching flash drives, they’ll just think you’re in a secret society and become insanely jealous. You can decide if you want to let them in on the secret or just watch ‘em suffer.

Could Poken be the next craze in business and social networking? I can see this taking off at trade shows, business networking events, job fairs, speed dating and anywhere else lots of people want to share info with lots of other people. Has it piqued your curiosity? If so, learn more and get your own Poken right now.