News

Stories and news that found their way to me this week

31 December 2008 By bfadmin 0

Some cool stuff happened onto my screen this week. It happens every day, no doubt, but each of these gave me pause.

1. World-Changing, Far-Future Technologies are Nearer than You Think

I found this post on greenbiz.com today very interesting in that it addresses technology very much as I think of it: static v. dynamic systems, merging of disciplines through (and not before) innovation, complexity, radical acceleration of technological evolution, and what the author terms "radical contingency". This last bit refers to what we like to think of as "game changers", pointing by example to the integration of technology into humans and not just the other way around. Pretty awesome food for thought as some of us contemplate personal projects for 2009.

2. TripIt is way better than Dopplr

So instead of painstakingly entering each leg of a journey into dopplr.com and getting some really usable results, so just forward your email itineraries (travelocity, expedia, kayak, any airline, etc) and tripit.com will parse it automagically. It really is a great example of using the stone (email) to kill goliath (data entry) by way of the slingshot (their amazing email parsing technology). With similar results.

3. Verizon, Why You Gotta Mess With My Settings?

Om Malik discovered that Verizon recently messed with his phone's settings. This has me equally freaked out, and fearful of what carriers will do with that kind of power if it goes unfettered by consumer noise.

4. Stanford Business School Publishes “NetApp and the Challenge of Global Leadership” Case Study

Globalization is a tough nut, and it's so interesting to me that NetApp has been singled out (given how their stock is performing). They have a great product set, don't get me wrong, but I'm intrigued as to how this company - that produces very energy-efficient products that actually, well, WORK - differentiated itself.

Social Web as Budding Civilization

17 May 2008 By BrianFending 0

In an interesting post by Dan Farber yesterday, he drew the comparison of the battles between companies firmly entrenched in the development of social media ("the social Web") such Google, Facebook, and MySpace, to early American colonial efforts. Sure, they have the same goal - but what can they agree upon? Okay, not a perfect analogy, but:

Taking a historical perspective, the social-networking community hasn't formed its Continental Congress to unite the colonies with a common vision and approach for openness. It's a political and economic, not a technical, issue. The technical building blocks, such as OpenID, oAuth, and OpenSocial APIs, for an open social Web are taking shape.

So what DO they agree upon? I'm not sure that the organizations mentioned above, and to which the Big Players have committed PR time and in some case resources, are the stellar examples of a true Congress that they could be. Nobody but nobody is really opening up their APIs for integration with these "open" APIs in the way that would draw everyone to giving up individual rights in interest of the greater good. Google's own "do no evil" mantra was even called into question (read the article). Additionally,

The Data Portability Project is developing guidelines and has the endorsement of the big social-networking players. But endorsement doesn't mean they are gathered together to create a common social layer for the Web. It's time for the social networks, like the 13 colonies in 1774 banding together to be free of British authority, to unite and manifest that the Web is by and for the users.

Right. The colonies took a really, really long time to do that. And so we wait. How do we move it forward when the really big issue is openness? The only answer I come to is a lot of the work from the entire community that I suspect engineers from all camps are already engaged in: matching the OpenSocial APIs with the Google Apps and Facebook Apps APIs, and uncovering a Killer App for social media connectivity in the process, probably igniting lawyer letters about violations of terms of use/service the same day.

But, at the end of the day, do we all get the right to own virtual guns? I say we need to start collecting them to find out. And by THAT, I mean we need to start building our own Killer Apps.

Enough with Saas, now there's DaaS!

12 May 2008 By BrianFending 1

DaaS (DBMS as a Service) is yet another acronym that I pray will not catch on, mostly because it doesn't add any value for anybody but the first-adopter vendors. This recent article in InfoWorld tells how database vendor Vertica is collaborating with Amazon on a move to offer its database management system (DBMS) as a hosted service on Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing Infrastructure (EC2), a take on Software as a Service (SaaS), etc, etc. The net here is that what costs ~$150K/month to host a 500GB 1TB [edit] data warehouse inside an end-user company gets slashed to $2K/month for a 500GB store [edit]. Of course, these numbers come from the vendor and who KNOWS what creative licensing math went into the ROI calculation [see comment]. But it's compelling. [edit: a Vertica employee corrected a few details, but the story remains compelling. I encourage you to read the InfoWorld article (link above) and his comment.]

Here's the Donald Feinberg (Gartner Group) analysis:

Cloud-hosted database management systems (DMBS) hold little value to the end-user type IT and department-level organizations. [...] Another, although related to the software vendor, is when a BI app vendor puts their app on top of Vertica and sells to their clients as a package. [...] They could now sell just to the end-user (bypassing IT and red tape) and install it fast with the correct resources for the end-users on EC2, assist the end-user loading data and the users are off and running.

That's interesting - take IT out of the BI mix and you have end-users getting to their "one version of the truth" using a packaged software. So long as the tools / data can support reporting without an inherent "slice & dice your way to fun and profit!" capability, I think this is good. But the IT Analysts will remain involved in the setup of such instances until there exist Business Analysts not influenced by sales & marketing execs. Call me paranoid.