EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Read and Respond to What the EDS Fellows Say About Technology

More On Robot Autonomy

Even though we are in the early stages of robotic technology evolution, it is important for us to consider what our expectations for the future should be. This BBC article ahead of a public debate by a part of London’s Science Museum lays out a few scenarios that may not have occurred to many of us. I think that it is notable that the scientific arms of governments are beginning focus on this sort of debate.

The article is about autonomous robots; not like simple autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners of today but the highly sophisticated and potentially dangerous evolving military robots that will soon be with us. The article downplays “robot rights” as a sensationalist distraction and focuses more on the direct impact to humans, something to which we can easily relate.

It raises several important questions that will surely evolve into spirited debates as this technology progresses. Not that most of these arguments are new, they have been emerging abstractly in literature for over 50 years, but as we come closer to the realization of robotic autonom, we are transitioning from literary speculation to real action. This article does a good job by giving us an early taste of the unfolding controversy.

Blu-ray Versus HD DVD Still Not Settled

Here we are, almost a year into this battle and there isn’t yet a clear winner. The opposing camps are HD DVD and Sony Blu-ray. It appears that Sony has wised up a bit since it lost the old Betamax battle so it is banking on winning this one by sporting more available movie titles and aggressively pushing out players by bundling them with other products. If number of discs sold is going to ultimately decide this issue, then I would have to say that Sony currently has the lead. Here is an article that supports that stance but, for reasons I can’t really explain, I have personally been rooting for HD DVD; though after reading the reference material I don’t know why (maybe I just like underdogs).

Complicating matters is the issue of player sales. Pricing for standalone players is clearly higher for Blu-ray but, by bundling a Blu-ray player in every Playstation 3, Sony has given a jumpstart to the adoption process. Even though X-Box does have an add-on HD DVD player, it is an uncommon option so its impact is minimal. Additionally, recently surfacing information about Apple’s inclusion of Blu-ray support in its next OS could further help Sony’s cause.

Finally, there is the issue of movie studio support. In this regard, Sony clearly has the lead with exclusive support from Sony Pictures (Columbia and MGM), 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney, Pixar and Lionsgate. Other major movie producers including Warner Brothers, New Line, HBO and Dreamworks support both formats while only Universal Studios and NBC Studios give exclusive support to HD DVD.

Though it’s true that there isn’t yet a clear winner and contrary to the conventional wisdom where price drives choices, it looks like Blu-ray has the edge.

Motion Detection For Mobile Phones

Motion Detection has been in a number of devices for a while now, but until the appearance of the Nintendo WII’s motion detecting wireless controllers, it wasn’t widely exploited as a component of the user interface (UI). When Apple splashed its upcoming iPhone at MacWorld, motion detection as part of the UI was one of the breakthrough features as well. Clearly this is an idea that’s time has come as reflected in this article about New Japanese mobile phones that tap into the motion detection UI craze.

These early examples of motion detection capabilities for UIs are likely only the beginning. Expect to soon see more and better implementations since it appears that this technology is now moving into rapid adoption.

Cyber Clones Are Here

Virtual Clones may well become our digital substitutes in the virtual world. With social networking gaining so much popularity and virtual worlds springing up like dandelions, doesn’t it make sense that we should have a cyberspace stand-in while we are off in the real world?

This article on the MIT Technology Review talks about a publicly available beta implementation of this Virtual Clone concept. I went to the site and interacted with some of the Virtual Clones that I could access and, although I didn’t get into any deep conversations, I did find that a well trained clone could serve as both a stand-in and an answering machine (the conversation is logged for the clone owner).

Color Barcodes

With a number of vendors looking to get into the alternative barcode game, this BBC article on Microsoft’s color barcode approach is an interesting read. While this idea, at first glance, seems redundant, these “barcodes” aren’t intended to be a replacement for standard UPC barcodes (which are read by manufacturers, vendors and carriers); they are instead positioned to be more consumer oriented. Rather than requiring a specific hardware scanning device, these barcodes can be decoded by software from a photograph. This will give a whole new set of capabilities to camera phones and Web cams as they serve to make this coded content accessible to end users.

Imagine being able to get up to two pages of help text directly off of a product’s nameplate. No more searching for missing manuals to figure out how to reprogram your alarm system, coffee maker, sprinkler system, etc. Just pull out your camera phone, point it at the barcode and read about it or link to its informational Web page.

The 'Pre-Bloated' PC

A recent Apple Macintosh video ad called “Stuffed” takes an amusing jab at PC software bloat. This article from CNET serves as an interesting validation of that ad while filling in the details of why PCs come from the manufacturers with so much pre-loaded “software.” While push-back from consumers is beginning to cause some manufacturers to engage in strategies that allow purchasers to scale back on such pre-loads, the problem will likely persist because it is a matter of pure dollars and cents.

Apple Macs come without so much bloat (only a few programs are preloaded) and Cnet's article quotes a source who states that this is possible because Macs cost more than PCs. In effect, the article states that pre-loaded PC software serves as advertising, which the PC manufacturers are being paid for. This additional per-PC revenue improves the margin allowing minimum acceptable profitability to be maintained wile lowering the price to the consumer.

As both an Apple Mac and a PC User, I understand the difference between pre-loading fully functional programs and a little “trial software” versus “pre-bloating” a PC with a few low-end software titles and all manner of non-functional ad-ware. I also understand that we pay more for higher quality products. Since it is actually the PC vendors that decide how they wish to compete on price, quality, features, etc.; should I conclude that most of them, in a stunning example of groupthink, have chosen to compete primarily on price? What about customer satisfaction; is it no longer part of the formula?

Having purchased two Macs and three PCs (different brands) over the past few years, I know the difference between quality and price. When I unpack a Mac, I plug it in, and I start using it. When I unpack a PC, I spend the next few hours cleaning up the hard-drive. Is it any wonder that Apple’s “Stuffed” ad is getting more than its share of attention?

.corn bubble

I was reading an article in CNNMoney.com about the current state of corn supply and demand. It made me reflect back on my agrarian background and the amount of time I spent in the field growing up and the skin cancer I’ll likely have someday to prove it. The farming profession is definitely the ultimate professional gambler. They have much at risk and so much outside their control.

It does worry me a bit, since Corn is not the best ethanol generation alternative, since it takes so much energy to produce and convert into ethanol. The current high demand could be undermined by other techniques. On the other hand, there is an industry that knows how to produce in volume across a wide cross section of the US today. A bird in the hand is worth two in the field. The ability to use other products like sugar, silage, or even purpose grown or waste cellulose to produce ethanol have less greenhouse gas impact, but need a different set of infrastructure to be produced. There have been numerous podcasts on NPR Science Friday and Scientific American on these alternatives.

The current IT industry focus on energy consumption, CPU utilization improvement through virtualization as well as reduced heat production and energy loss through new

Google Does Presentations Too

Google continues its expansion into applications with a new online presentation software and service. My first blog entry on the topic of Google getting into software focused on Google Apps. This MSNBC article describes Google’s new presentation software offering and how this offering completes Google’s office suite.

A second topic in the above article discusses the reaction of both AT&T and Microsoft to Google’s intent to aquire DoubleClick, Inc.

While the information about Google’s presentation software is interesting, the part about competitor reaction to Google’s acquisition of Double Click is enlightening.

Telepresence and Tomorrow's Road Warrior

Good telepresence solutions do exist so why is the adoption and proliferation of this alternative to travel so slow to take hold? In one of my blog articles, I discussed some of the advancements in telepresence and my own experience with a solution called Teleportec (a very good solution that is now over six years old). In that article, I expressed my belief that the success of telepresence for remote conferencing really depended on camera placement, high definition life-sized images with smooth video and well coordinated high fidelity sound (perfect lip synchronization is a must). Those were the technical challenges, and they seem to have been solved fairly well over the past several years. I didn’t really focus on cost or culture, but I probably should have.

Although I have seen some evidence of activity on the high end of the cost scale, affordable solutions (the kind that would translate into rapid adoption) haven’t yet appeared. Certainly potential money savings through decreased travel should have had a significant impact on the acceptance, demand and proliferation of telepresence, but it continues to gain market very slowly. It will apparently take more than good technology and defrayable costs for telepresence to make drastic changes to our meeting habits.

MSNBC’s Practical Futurist, in an optimistic article about the future telepresence, sees adoption coming as a result of the currently unfolding zeitgeist. With cultural factors like global climate change potentially inhibiting travel and a youthful net savvy replacement workforce that is comfortable with cyber-communication, the article makes a good point. Even so, it is difficult to nail down a time-frame.

I’m not exactly part of a youthful workforce, but I do see the appeal in decreasing my time spent traveling, particularly when it comes to typical and frequent "face to face for an hour but travel all day" meetings. I remain puzzled that there isn’t more of a telepresence push considering what a time and money saver it could be.

Net reaches out to final frontier

A programme to kick-start the use of Internet communications in space has been announced by the US Department of Defence. The Internet Router Protocol in Space (IRIS) project will put an Internet router in space in the first quarter of 2009. The Iris project has been given the go ahead after winning funding from the DoD, under the Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD) programme.

IRIS will initially support voice, video and data communications for US troops using IP (Internet Protocol) standards; The system is designed to support IP packet Layer 3 routing or multicast distribution, which can be reconfigured on demand.

Deploying routers on satellites would allow them to communicate directly with one another, rather than sending it on a round trip via ground stations, reducing delays between remote terminals by using fewer hops, saving on satellite capacity, using fewer frequencies for each message and offering greater networking flexibility.

"IRIS extends the Internet into space, integrating satellite systems and the ground infrastructure for warfighters, first responders and others who need seamless and instant communications," said Bill Shernit, CEO of Intelsat general.

With IP becoming more prevalent for use in space, NASA and Internet pioneer Vint Cerf have also been investigating the possibility of using internet technology across the solar system although no definite timescale has been announced for the interplanetary Internet.

Are you ready for SaaS?

Or maybe the question should be is SaaS ready for you? I’ve been doing a bit of research on Software as a Service (SaaS) over the past week and there seem to be a number of key points that organizations need to understand if they are going to be successful with the service delivery approach. These are stream of consciousness, so hopefully they’ll be coherent outside my context!

I pulled together a number of questions that an organization should think about:

1) Do you know the functionality you want and does it exist in a SaaS offering?
Not everything that the market says can be delivered as a service that will meet your needs. Do you know the service levels (SLAs) that you need? Do you know your disaster recover requirements? One thing is for certain, if you don’t know what you need, you shouldn’t buy it as a SaaS until you do.

2) Are there policies or regulations that will prevent you consuming SaaS?
Will the security policies of the provider meet your needs? There are a number of requirements in some industries about the movement of information between organizations. These requirements needs to be well understood as part of the process of defining your needs. Security is a high priority concern for most service providers so you can be sure they’ve thought about it, but the phrase ”trust, but verify” comes to mind.

Is it OK that you don’t own the Intellectual Property?
Since you will be using a service provided by someone else, they will likely own the IP. Your competitors may end up using the same service. If you have grave concerns about this, it’s a red flag. The reason the SaaS approach should work is based on economies of scale. If you need a great deal of customization in order to use it, you’ve either picked the wrong service or are not a candidate. There should be little or no customization.

3) Do you require real-time, custom integration with enterprise systems?
Most SaaS solutions are not built to have real-time integration with other enterprise solutions, except through the standard service interfaces provided. The nice thing about SaaS solutions is that they should be build conforming to a SOA. If you require the service to be tightly integrated, the economy of scale is likely out-the-window.

4) Do you know what you’re going to do with your in-house support team?
Since a SaaS solution is provided as a service, there should be little need for an in-house team or the hardware they were using. Moving these folks on to something else will be part of the business plan, and it is going to have impact.

5) Do you view the functionality as core to the revenue generation of the company?
If the process differentiates your organization from the rest in your industry, you probably shouldn't go to SaaS. Unless you believe that the advantage of your process is short lived. As I mentioned earlier, the issue of IP ownership comes into play here as well as the SLAs to ensure that you’re protected.

6) Does your company have a preference for capital over operational expenditure?
Since SaaS is a service, it will be all expense.

7) Are you risk averse?
There will be a great deal of change and change always involves risk. If the company does not tolerate change, this could be a problem. Fortunately, the SaaS provider has done this before so they should be experts, and come with a plan.

Since leveraging existing functionality is the basis for the SaaS business model, one of the things that needs to be looked at closely is the reporting capabilities of the SaaS vendor. Make sure that those reports meet your needs. If it ends up that you need some kind of custom data warehouse to meet your reporting needs, I’d have the concerns about integration expressed earlier.

Related to these issues is how your company works with partners. Since this is a strategic relationship, the SaaS partner will need to be worked with closely. Don't assume that they know what your needs are or that they are going to go in the direction you need. There needs to be communications, like never before.

If SaaS is not right for you, there remain numerous options available to address costs, but that’s a whole other subject.

Rocking the processor world?

I was looking at Jonathan Schwartz blog today and saw that Sun has received first silicon of Rock. I’m always interested in what’s happening with Multi-core technologies and this one (with 16 cores on a chip, each one running multiple threads) should really be interesting.

There was also an article in “The Register” that covered Rock, but like most things in The Register, I take it with a grain of salt.

Based on what I can discern from Sun this chip will address many of the floating point issues of the Niagara chip (whose focus was mainly on integer parallel processing). It looks like there will also be Niagara 2 in the latter half of the year.

A while back I wrote about some concerns related to multi-core (e.g., licensing). These kinds of advances really makes me wonder what software possibilities will take place with the parallel capabilities these chips will bring to market. Hopefully Model based development will be ready for this.

Second Life Hype

In a bizarre yet amusing twist, Linden Labs has invited the FBI to send its real tentacles into the virtual world in a search for potential illegal activities. Is this just a publicity stunt or should we really be worried about Second Life becoming a hotbed of criminal activity? Further, does sending the FBI into Second Life to look for possible illegal activity really have any value to the taxpayer?

Look, I am as open minded as most when it comes to the Internet, virtualization and digital technology but isn’t this FBI twist just a little presumptuous. If the intention behind this invitation to law enforcement is to increase Second Life's publicity then I get it, and it did; but given the problems we have in the real world isn’t such a request both wasteful and laughable?

In “A brief history of the virtual world” by Bruce Damer, we get a good feel for the current state and future potential of virtual worlds. I have no doubt that the concept will mature and become a staple in cyberspace. I question whether the time has really come to start treating Second Life as the long awaited virtual world “killer app” when it appears to be just another grand experiment. Perhaps that's the reason for my bewilderment with respect to the timing of this whole FBI thing.

If we want to look at the potential for crime in a virtual world, shouldn’t we look at artificial economies; particularly when they have connections to our real economy? In a virtual world, do we need safeguards akin to those used in national monetary and banking systems? Safeguards that protect virtual dollars from real world dangers like insider manipulation, counterfeiting, theft and inflation? What will be the impact on a real participant’s real world worth when a virtual economy crashes or the virtual world itself comes to an end? Perhaps Linden Lab should have invited the SEC to have a look at Second Life as well.

Second Life is not unique in its ability to generate real value for virtual currency. Long before Second Life was touting its “economy,” games like World of Warcraft and Ultima Underworld were generating real dollars from virtual activities. In Ultima Underworld (UO) clever users have found ways to duplicate items, including virtual gold, and ultimately convert them to real dollars using eBay and Web based game trading sites. Industrious World of Warcraft (WOW) users can get to real dollars by gold farming and selling artifacts.

Like Second Life, video games such as World of Warcraft (WOW) and Ultima Online (UO) are clearly virtual worlds. WOW and UO just happen to be game worlds as well. Is Second Life really anything more? Am I wrong or would Second Life benefit if it were even half as much fun or engaging as WOW or UO?

So, with so much opportunity for crime out there in all those virtual worlds, as a virtual FBI agent, in which world would you want to spend your time looking for crime?v

Improper Payments Act of 2002 - 5 years later ...

More than 4 years ago, congress passed the "Improper Payments Information Act of 2002," requiring agencies to assess the risks of making improper payments. This included a statistically valid determination of the amount of improper payments in their programs, identification of the root causes, a plan to reduce improper payments in those programs that are deemed vulnerable, and an annual report to identify the risks and reduction methods. Since the agencies began to address the root causes of “improper proper” payments in 2004, the agencies (not including state agencies) have been able to reduce improper payments from 3.9% in 2004 to 2.9% in 2006. While these percentages seem low, consider it with the understanding that Federal agencies make more than $2 trillion in payments to individuals and a variety of other entities each year and $1.7T of this is at risk for improper payments.

Approximately $45B of the federal government expenditures to individuals was improper! Surely more can be done to reduce this.

Social welfare and health and human services agencies around the world globe are evaluating the potential benefits that Identity Management (IdM) solutions can offer. Expected benefits include increased program integrity, reduced fraud and program costs, improved public service and access, and enhanced benefit utilization analysis and targeting of interventions to improve program results. Key to achieving these results is the ability to validate an individual’s identity at point of enrollment and, in some cases, to verify identity at the point of delivery of public benefits. While the results to be achieved are intuitive on the surface – reducing improper payments (fraud) – a survey of existing experience that defining a business case and establishing a quantitative return on investment can be a significant challenge. In my opinion, Identity Management (IdM) solutions may achieve expected outcomes and thus justify the investment. Check out some case studies.

One project I’m particularly fond of (probably because I worked on it) is the subject of first the case study. It focuses on a state that has long used finger imaging as part of the eligibility determination process. The program began as a demonstration project for a single county, with the objective of using biometrics to deter and detect fraud. Specifically, the pilot program’s principal purpose was to establish that problems involving multiple case fraud in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children’s program (now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF) could be detected and prevented in a cost-effective manner. Evaluations of this demonstration project reported a net savings of more than $60 million after project costs were taken into account. While the use of biometric capabilities may not be common practice today, it is evident that many governments across the globe, including the agencies responsible for social welfare, health, and human services, are beginning to evaluate the viability of IdM solutions to meet a myriad of business objectives.

With $1.7T at risk for improper payment each year along with other drivers for exploring IdM solutions, agencies (both state and federal) must base their solutions on a clear value proposition that balances desired results with an acceptable cost; minimizes cost and risk by utilizing existing infrastructure or “piggybacking” with concurrent implementations like seeking to take advantage of the multiple uses of verified identities (and possibly the physical card/credential itself) from programs like Real ID.

Image Keyword Imperfections

Google Images will allow you to search for pictures on Internet Web pages using text keywords as search arguments. Searching for an image using text keywords is a simple process provided that the images being searched can be associated with accurate descriptive keywords. As I noted in a previous post, one of the ways Google gets keywords for pictures is by leveraging its user base. This is because humans are still the most accurate way to determine the keywords that best describe an image. Another way is by using the text that is in context with an image, but that suffers from accuracy problems since the nearby text isn’t always about the image. So let’s just say that there is a scarcity of accurate keywords for most of the images on Internet Web pages.

The key to better and more accurate image searching may lie in new techniques being developed that enable computers to derive keywords directly from images, perhaps even on-the-fly. Once such techniques begin to take hold, more of the Web’s images will be searchable.

Unfortunately, the ability of computers to determine keywords for subjective concepts like happiness or disappointment is still many years away. While improvements in non-subjective keyword assignment will improve pure image search capabilities we will probably have difficulty finding images using subjective concepts like happy, sad, ugly or beautiful. Is it reasonable to expect computers to determine key phrases like “a happy family scene” or “a depressing situation” with any level of accuracy? Even human subjective judgments about such things suffer from considerable ambiguity.

The Pendulum Swings on Consumer DRM

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is used in the consumer arena to protect the copyrights of digital content by attempting to disable re-distribution (copying) while Enterprise DRM (also known as E-DRM) is used to control access to digital corporate content. Consumer DRM is the focus of this news.

EMI, the world’s largest independent music company, announced its intent to sell DRM-free music files across its entire digital repertoire. Not surprisingly, Apple’s iTunes Store will be the first to market this DRM free content. This may be EMI’s response to a proposal that was recently proffered to the music industry by Steve Jobs, but I personally didn't expect anything to happen this soon. Since EMI is only one of the four companies to which Jobs made the proposal (the other three companies were Universal, Sony BMG and Warner Music) consumer DRM’s ultimate destiny remains unknown, but EMI is the first major record company to take this bold and popular step.

The arguments on both sides of consumer DRM as it relates to the music industry have gone on for years, so this announcement represents a significant and potentially game-changing event. While EMI is only one company, its stance will matter. Even with just 10% of the US market, it is still one of the Big Four record companies. It is clear that the music business will carefully watch the impact of this strategy on EMI's bottom line but make no mistake, consumers and record companies alike should rejoice if DRM is the ultimate loser.

Over-hyped being over-hyped

I was looking at an article in Computerworld about over-hyped products, and I found the whole approach a bit disturbing.

The premise of the article is determining what technologies were the biggest flops. I don't believe it was the technologies they're looking at, but the initial implementation. Using their premise, you could say that the initial Wright Brothers plane was a flop because they didn't sell many of that particular model.

Some of the examples they've included were:

• Lisa -> Macintosh and window based systems in general
• Newton -> PDAs
• Dot.bombs -> many of the current ecommerce leaders

Granted there were a few technologies that didn't go anywhere. For example Digital Audio Tape, but that was probably due as much to market pressures and legislation as anything else. And the digital techniques used moved into other implementations.

I did see one that I seemed to be able to support and that is "the paperless office." I don't know that there is any less paper than there used to be, it is just a different kind. I don't get paper memos anymore, but I get enough other paper each day to make up for it. On the other hand, the paperless office technologies now permeate many products and services.

Many technologies seem to have been subsumed, seamlessly into daily life (e.g., smart appliances), while others (e.g., Push has evolved into RSS) were implemented differently. In many cases it was the move from proprietary to open that allowed the adoption emergence.