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

One word as a focal point for change for 2008 - Collaboration

In an interview by InformationWeek in Mexico this week, they asked me a question that caught me a bit off-guard, at the time. It was something along the lines of: “If there is one word that you believe will be the focus of change for 2008, what would it be?” After I got past the deer in the headlights initial response, I came up with “Collaboration”. It can be applied at many levels to the changes that are underway.

At the cultural level, we’re all familiar with web 2.0 and the collaboration across organizations it supports. Wikinomics states the view of collaboration between organization, increases diversity of perspective enabling innovation and reaching objectives more quickly.

At the software level, the concept of SOA is based upon the collaboration between services, enabling clear separation between the interface and the underlying data, freeing up organizations to focus at a higher (more business oriented) level.

In the hardware space, we have multi-core. It enables multiple processing units to collaborate together on delivering value to the enterprise. To maximize the value delivered by working together, it will require new software and new approaches.

Companies need to be more agile, moving from viewing change as a periodic disruption of the status quo to accepting continuous change as the norm. Information technology (IT) has an important role to play, since it enables agility through collaboration. IT needs to collaborate with the rest of the enterprise in meeting the business objectives, probably until it fades into the business itself.

We’re in a race, and it is not a short sprint, nor is it a long distance endurance contest where the runner is able to alternate between coasting and sprinting to break the back of other runners. The high-stakes race to become the next-generation enterprise is a different kind of contest where the enterprise must consistently run faster and faster to keep pace with the 21st century’s accelerating rate of change. Collaboration at all these levels will be key.

An Internet Operating System

In Microsoft’s latest Architecture Journal (number 13), Donald Ferguson outlined the concept of an Internet Service Bus (ISB). This along with the concept of Network Technology whilst innovative, probably does not go far enough. Most of us have probably spent time thinking about how the internet was going to influence future architectures and it wasn’t until I came across a recent article concerning the slow rate of Vista take-up that I wondered if the internet usage wasn’t some how behind this, and whether the ideas postulated by Clayton Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma were also in full play. In his book, Christensen postulated that there was a tendency to over-provision and to develop functionality and technology that either cannot be used or does not address the actual user need, thereby creating market opportunities for competing products.

According to clickz most people are spending a large proportion of their time both at work and home on the internet harvesting and seeding the vast resources of the web, yet there still seems to be a large amount of money spent on new Application Servers and Operating Systems to essentially host applications that could easily be service based – does there need to be a rethink on how we best utilise the web’s resources?

Our present machine based Operating Systems (O/S) and application servers are very much focused at the PC or machine level and assume a user is able to operate disconnected from the internet. This to a large extent drives a browser based architecture. It assumes that (once the user decides to connect) the browser is the gateway to the internet whereas in reality most computers are permanently connected to the internet. Now superficially one could argue that an expensive computer (all up cost including software) is used to just host the browser and e-mail clients!

What if we turned this around and assumed that there was not only an ISB, but an Internet Computer, or an Internet Operating Systems (IOS). What would it look like, and what could it do? Well, if we looked at this new stack, we would see less focus on the traditional machine based O/S, indeed it would shrink to not much more that a driver and service support framework. The machine O/S could be virtual and would require drivers for local functions like graphics, local storage, mouse, keyboard and network. The machine O/S would provide the necessary APIs for the Internet Operating System that would sit on top of the it and above the IOS would sit the Internet Service Applications (ISApps) that the user would interact with.

The IOS would not be limited to the physical machine for anything other than local processing and rendering of screens – the applications would use Internet Distributed Storage such as (DHT), Distributed Internet Processing Services (through Virtualisation and grids) . The IOS would have drivers to access IDVDs (Internet DVDs), ICDs (Internet CDs), IPrinters (Internet Printers) etc, and these devices would also use DHT mechanisms. Data would be omnipresent and not located on a single server and could be discoverable through a Resource Description Framework (RDF). Embedded would be all the necessary interfaces to exploit to the web – now, in essence the internet is your computer and you might never have to worry about back ups again!

The Internet Computer user experience would now be one where the net was the source of a vast array of semantically aware resources, drivers, components or web services that could be provided by vendors and exploratory service providers. The users might now build the functionality they need through defining a simple orchestration or workflow patterns or indeed build the functions by just dragging and dropping applications components or services into a container. The IOS platform would of course come with preconfigured ISApps, such as email, browser, word processing, spreadsheets, electronic banking etc. However, should a better service came along that provided a better grammar checker, spelling checker, or text formatter within a Internet Word Processor application, then the user would have total freedom to swap out any component of the ISApp and configure it as he or she pleased. Service releases, updates and patch pushing would be a thing of the past. Or how about an application that without human intervention managed your travel itinerary whilst you were travelling through the intelligent orchestration of services working to your basic business rules, making sure everything is running smoothing, or as Dan Ferguson suggested, ‘running in the cloud’ with your IOS now being part of the cloud as well.

Workflow is coming…

Sometimes I feel like Chicken Little. Ever since I first saw the early work on Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) back in early ’03, I’ve believed that workflow will fundamentally change how organizations create and use software.

I’ve written a number of blog entries where I’ve typed about workflow. Rick Cook at CIO just wrote an article about Making Workflow Work and Flow for You. It reminded me how little most organizations have moved down this road. In the article he describes how workflow can increase clarity, reduce latency and costs as well as some common problems people encounter.

WF is embedded in both Vista, Server 2008 and SharePoint 2007, as well added to XP and other server OS from MS. Most of the workflow capabilities that we’ve had to write in applications all these years can be transferred into a more flexible solution, as part of an apps modernization effort. Freeing up resources as well as adding flexibility for the organization, since one of the advantages of the workflow approach is you're not locked in as you implement. You can make many kinds of changes to a workflow process quickly even after it has entered production. In Rick’s article he talks about the efforts of other companies as well.

Since I am writing about flow oriented coding, I also had a few moments to play with PopFly over lunch. PopFly is a tool from Microsoft to facilitate rapid mashup assembly. I found it intriguing.

I drew together a few mashups to get the feel for the graphic assembly environment and wrote a tiny block of my own. Unfortunately, every really interesting thing I thought of was beyond the grasp of my meager JavaScripting skills. I guess I’ll have to work on that. There are a number of companies working on these mashup creation tools.

Central electricity management in IT

In one of the podcasts I listen to they were talking about how folks in the northeastern US and the UK are starting to put natural gas power generators in their homes to generate electricity as well as heat their houses. Any excess power generated can then be placed back on the power grid. These devices can be controlled (to some degree) by the power company. This would allow the power company to fire up these generators on those peak electricity demand days so they’ll not have to build another power generator. The reason why it is limited to the northeastern US is because of high energy costs making it cost effective. The UK is providing tax benefits in addition to their high energy costs.

The IT version (I’d heard proposed by a hardware company) is to put CPU clock regulation under central control and allow the IT organization to turn down the power consumption of the CPUs on days when the organizations power usage is getting beyond a limit. The problem with this perspective is that it implies that the value generated by computing is independent of instructions executed. Those instructions should be generating value to the business. I’m sure there are cases where this could save the organization money, but it could easily be a frustrating experience. It might be simpler just to force all the machines into a sleep state unless user interaction takes place, but that capability already exists. The other interesting issue with this proposal is that the organizations who are the most cash strapped and want to do something like this would need to replace all their hardware, so I doubt that it would ever happen.

There are better techniques to enforce system configuration settings now, so you can strongly encourage people to use the power settings on their existing devices constantly.

Outsourcing should be Innovative

Yesterday Franz Johansson (of The Medici Effect) spoke to a number of EDS folks today. Most of what he talked about was how innovation is generated at the intersection points. The discussion made me wonder more about the barriers to innovation, particularly for outsourcers.

Outsourcing by definition, is a clash between cultures: between the existing organization and the newly injected outsourcer. If handled effectively, it should cause a flurry of innovative activity, since it is an intersection point. The outsourcer should be looking at the different ways this organization works compared to the other customers and the customer at an influx of new (and possibly uncomfortable) perspectives, tools and approaches.

Yet, innovation from outsourcing seems to be an on-going concern. Could it be that organizations don’t allow enough conflict – or (at least) don’t bring it to the surface and cultivate it to some extent? It should be different. It should be uncomfortable. If it is not, is there an opportunity being missed? In Franz’s presentation he talks about having diverse perspectives working together and that diverse teams are more productive. In addition to that, there needs to be governance to bring that conflict (innovation) to a practical and useful conclusion.

When two organizations come together should be the time ripe for rapid innovation, since any team that works long enough together will begin to settle into a pattern of behavior. So to keep an on-going relationship alive means bringing people in from outside who can shake things up. It should be a good thing even though issues are going to be brought forward that some people would rather have kept hidden. As long as the organization can accept a degree of experimentation and (heaven forbid) failure, the ball should move forward. Winston Churchill said: “If you are going through hell, keep going.” I don’t think he meant just keep doing the same thing over and over -- instead we can be creative and overcome.

We Need Better Electrical Power Generation and Storage!

The topic of power generation is getting more and more interesting everyday. From mega scale to nano scale, researchers are focusing on creating and storing electricity in novel ways. When you think about how important electric power is in modern technology its no wonder, electricity is at the core of today’s digital technology. As we push mobile technology toward new horizons I worry about permanent (ok, semi-permanent) portable power and how the lack of it will limit us. I haven’t heard of a “cool” law governing the evolution of power generation and storage (like Moore’s law for transistor density or Kryder’s law for disk drive capacity). Perhaps this is because power generation, although much older than digital technology, is still in its technological infancy (or maybe I should just stop looking for patterns in everything).

I do feel that, with alternative energy high on the world’s list of priorities these days, promising research should easily find both investors and markets; I just wish things would move a little faster.

What will computer usage be like in 2012?

I sat in a meeting the other day talking with a hardware provider about what their desktop environment will be like in a few years. During the meeting I started to wonder what amount of time workers will actually spend tied to the desktop. It seems that organizations are using handheld devices for more and more of their interaction. Adding a few additional capabilities (e.g. support for workflow forms) will shift even more work to handhelds. I can already use Live Communications client and access corporate email in real time.

We were talking about having virtualized environments that encapsulate applications on the desktop for security reasons. Essentially, each one sits in their own virtualized work area. When I mentioned that if we can actually do that, why wouldn’t we allow for migration of the application to the handheld device. So at the end of the day I can just pick it up and continue working with the capabilities of the handheld. When I get home I plug it in and have my home computer provide its enhanced interface. The rest of the folks didn’t quite know what to say.

Assuming that we don’t let the desktop applications bloat to take advantage of all the increased capabilities of the hardware, the hand held devices are increasing in capabilities to the point where they should be able to handle virtual machines. In the gaming space, there have been console game emulators on handhelds for years. We just need to do the same for business and that should give us all a bit more agility.

Warp Speed Computing

There’s been talk for a while about the slowing down of Moore’s law, for a variety of reasons like: gates are only 5 atoms thick, can’t get the heat out of the chip, etc. Various techniques are being used to get around this limitations, like multi-core. Frank Vahid at U of Cal Riverside is working on research that leads to processors that can optimize on the fly. In some situations, it claims to be able to process work 1000 times faster than conventional microprocessors, by using field-programmable gate arrays.

When a program first runs on a microprocessor chip, the chip monitors the program to detect its most frequently-executed parts. The microprocessor then automatically tries to move those parts of the program to a special kind of chip called a field-programmable gate array, or FPGA. “An FPGA can execute some (but not all) programs much faster than a microprocessor – 10 times, 100 times, even 1,000 times faster,” explains Vahid.

The Precursors To Smart Dust?

When I read this article about the worlds tiniest radio I didn’t expect it to be much more than fluff. Then I remembered an article that I had just read about tiny solar cells and it didn’t seem so fluffy anymore.

Smart dust is a concept that technology futurists throw around with reckless abandon. For most of us the concept is interesting but the current state of miniaturization and power generation tells us that the actual implementation of smart dust is something for the very distant future.

The two technologies demonstrated in these articles, when combined, bring that distant future much closer. Combining MEMS power generation with MEMS micro radio would have been sufficient, but the technologies in these articles go a step further, allowing us to conceptually take the whole smart dust idea from the MEMS to the NANO scale. With such technology on the horizon, it makes me think that the really big issues around smart dust won’t be based on technological feasibility (as I had previously thought) but will instead focus on security and privacy issues.

Big System is Watching You

There is an interesting article that discussed the ability for computers to monitor the amount of thought you’re giving to what you’re working on. The folks at Tufts University say they are trying to tell how overworked, under-worked if they’re working at all. They do this by measuring the volume and oxygen level of the blood around the brain.

Besides the obvious uses that appear negative, this should have some great application to user acceptance testing to identify a poor user interface that is overly complex. I can see this being extended into stimulus initiation on a slow day…

Mobile 2.0 for the Enterprise and the Individual

In this month’s IEEE Computer magazine was an article Five Enablers for Mobile 2.0 by William Griswold. He also gave a presentation based on the same material at the Microsoft Research Facility. Much of what he presents appears to be based on the same foundation that I’ve talked about on this blog, that mobile devices in some ways are more limited, but in other ways have significantly greater capabilities for the enterprise application.

He lists 5 capabilities that are special to Mobile that future application will capitalize on:

1. In situ computing – the ability to integrate the mobile app. into everyday activities. (e.g., asking questions in large or remote meeting)
2. Context awareness – Since the device knows its location and the activities it can provide the user and the enterprise greater context awareness. (e.g., tell me when someone on this list is near me).
3. Microtasking – attention engineering using display and notification capabilities and context to augment the user in coping with divided attention.
4. Public display – facilitating public interaction based on common location (e.g., here are my thoughts from this vantage point)
5. Proactivity – using the notification capabilities of the device to cause action based upon predefined rules (e.g., when you get home call the insurance company that is triggered when you actually get home)

By combining the geographic information capabilities of the device with rule’s engines, whole new levels of productivity can be had. One area that was not mentioned was the use of multiple perspectives of the same event. If everyone has the ability to pull together their unique perspective via the mobile device into a holistic view, our level of understanding of what actually happened increases.

I was in a discussion with a large chip vendor the other day and one area that I was pushing them on is taking advantage of virtualization and greater capabilities in the mobile devices. We should begin to integrate these devices as one of the security factors (e.g., something you have). For example, authorizing access when you are near a device, so that when you are logged in and briefly step away someone can’t access your session (assuming you took your phone with you). I also pushed for migration of sessions from desktop devices, to mobile devices. If the app is running in a virtual session anyway, just migrate it over to a virtual session on the mobile device so that I can continue using it. Once I get to my destination, migrate the session to that new device as well. It’s easy, it’s only software. ;-)

Release Date Set For Leopard, Apple’s Next Mac OS

From the time that it was first officially announced the iPhone has been the big story for Apple. Even the release of a new batch of iPods barely got noticed by the media. Here we are, over three months after the iPhone’s release and, for more bad than good reasons, it continues to be the big story for Apple. It just so happens that the latest iPhone news is more about what Apple is doing to reign-in the iPhone’s potential than how great the iPhone is or will be; but that’s a blog for another day.

There was a time that Leopard, Apple’s next Mac OS, was the talk of the town. Beginning with Steve Jobs’ keynote address at WWDC 2006, Apple’s next big thing was going to be OS 10.5, also known as Leopard. It remained the big story until Jobs’ keynote address at MacWorld 2007 where the iPhone was first officially announced. Things have circled back around and once again it is time for Leopard to get some much deserved attention. To that end, Apple has just proudly announced that delivery of Leopard will begin on October 26th.

Leopard adds over 300 features to Tiger (OS 10.4), some of which will be appreciated by a few but many of which will be popular for most users. Of primary importance is that many of these features will serve to up-the-ante for other PC operating systems - a long term benefit for the industry. I personally look forward to re-engineering my current Mac back-up processes by replacing them with “Time Machine”, one of the more sophisticated features of this new OS. Other features like enhanced synchronization capabilities will assist me when it comes to keeping my desktop and notebook in synch while “Dashcode” will allow me to add some custom conveniences. If you’re interested in viewing a complete list of all of Leopard’s new features here is where you should go.

With the iPhone, new iPods and Leopard launched, what will be the next big thing for Apple? Maybe some old business could be re-examined - I have a suggestion, how about opening up the iPhone; if not for other carriers then at least for installed applications.

A Panel Discussion for Sun’s Customer Engineering Conference (CEC)

This week I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion for Sun’s Customer Engineering Conference (CEC) that was moderated by Jim Baty. The CEC had a definite green theme to it with a real focus on reuse.

This was one of more memorable panels I’ve participated in, partially because Jim and I were able to sit down for a few hours the night before and talk about our views on the future. There was an amazing about of similarity of perspective, considering I work for a services company and Jim works for a product company. Hopefully, we’ll have follow-up meetings where we can have a more diverse group to talk about futures.

The other members of the panel were:

• Dileep Bhandarkar - DE, Global Foundation Svcs for Microsoft
• Eric Billingsley - Sr. Dir., eBay Research Labs from eBay
• Jeff Routledge - Dir, Systems Infrastructure for MySpace at Fox

The panel discussed many of the topics I’ve written about on this blog:

• The end of programmers – the growth of consumer 'programming'
• The end of computers - replaced by services and SaaS
• The end of personal computers - the impact of ubiquitous computing
• The end of 'western' computing – the impact of computer use throughout the world
• The end of IT – is IT just part of business and not a standalone entity

Even though the other panel members were not services organizations, there was a great deal of common perspective. Even though I tried a bit to be controversial, I didn’t get any of them to bite. We got most of the issues on the table at breakfast before the panel that may have helped not catch anyone by surprise.

I realized now we did not talk much about in the panel was the security implications. We talked about the new skills and tools required, but not about how information will be controlled and managed. We also didn’t cover the implications of incorporation of enterprise workflow and the increased expectations this will place on “generic” service. This would be an interesting topic to continue to discuss.

I’ve not heard anything from my friends at Sun about how they thought it went. Since I learned some things along the way, I thought it was worthwhile and would definitely do something like this again. I was also able to do a podcast with Don Grantham EVP of sales. He hosts the Voice from the Field podcast within Sun where he interviews clients… about their thoughts on working with Sun.

Automating Corporate Knowledge Management

Corporate Knowledge Management (KM) is a topic that I have dabbled in frequently over the past 10 years or so. It is one of those areas that, until the mid 1990s, had been largely ignored by IT. One can even argue that the need for automating Corporate KM is a direct result of the complexity that IT, and technology in general, bring to the table.

The problem that we seem to have when it comes to automating corporate KM is that many formal KM practitioners are obsessed with the wrong things – like trying to unconditionally guarantee the accuracy of all content. This is because they assume that the average knowledge worker is somehow devoid of the ability to discriminate between good and bad information while their endorsing experts are somehow endowed with all the right answers. I contend that, if your intention is to use corporate KM as a substitute for experienced knowledge workers, you are doomed to failure. Given the current state of information technology, corporate KM should be a tool to assist knowledge workers, not eliminate them. It is only through true collaboration that corporate KM will evolve into that ultimate relevant and crucial corporate system.

So what are some of the next steps for corporate KM? As you may have guessed, I have an opinion. If you are interested read my article “Do you Know What I Know, How To Build Intelligent Knowledge Networks” in the most recent issue of EDS’ Synnovation Magazine (go to page 8). Whether you agree with me or not, it should be clear that the challenge for corporate KM today is more about creative automation and less about bureaucracy.

Paul Allen’s Continuing Impact On SETI

A new alien signal hunting telescope has been inaugurated, dubbed the ATA (Allen Telescope Array) honoring Paul Allen, whose family foundation is a major contributor to the project and the SETI Institute in general. For the SETI Institute, the ATA is a long awaited technological leap. With two purposes in mind, the ATA project is expected to go a long way in both advancing the science of radio telescopes and enhancing the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

The science behind the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence has been instrumental in bringing forth a number of technologies that had previously been confined to the lab. The most famous is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seti%40home distributed computing project. As with the ATA, SETI@home had two purposes. The first was to demonstrate the practicality of distributed grid computing and the second was to support the scientific work in progress at SETI. This early widespread implementation of what was the first publicly deployed example of grid computing was successful in demonstrating grid computing’s practicality - but, while it is still in operation today, it has yet to turn up a confirmed ET.

That’s where this new telescope comes in. It will significantly increase the speed at which the sky can be surveyed because this newly designed radio telescope has four major advantages over the existing ones. Those four advantages are:

1. A wider field-of-view (17 times that of the famous Very Large Array)
2. Instantaneous frequency coverage from .5 to 11.2 GHz (unprecedented in radio astronomy)
3. Multiple simultaneous backends (splitting signals to multiple experiments)
4. Active Interference Mitigation (capable of observing frequencies also used by terrestrial transmitters)

The initial phase of the project will include an array of 42 antennas so advanced that they can observe several star systems, simultaneously, while monitoring 40+ million radio channels. Once completed, the project will have amassed a total of 350 antennas; a considerable increase over the initial 42.

Paul Allen’s continuing support of SETI will not be fully appreciated until we receive our first verified intelligent extra-terrestrial signal. Though that first contact has been illusive, thanks to Paul Allen, our chances for future realization have substantially improved.

Web based applications use on Science Friday

NPR has a radio show called Science Friday that is part of Talk of the Nation. They break up the hour long program into a set of podcasts. One segment from last week covered Web based applications. I thought they only lightly touched on the security issues of using these services. It may be fine for personal usage, but I know of few organizations that will let their proprietary information be stored on-line in locations that another organization controls with little if any real restrictions on how that organization will use/mine the information.

There were a few calls from the audience about this issue, but it just was not addressed. This is an issue that needs to be thought through. My kids were a bit shocked when I told them that all their SMS messages were probably stored somewhere. Of course, I was concerned that they were concerned! Imagine how companies feel about this same issue for their documents.

For example: Google’s privacy policy around Google Docs states:

“Google's servers automatically record certain information about your use of Google Docs. Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (e.g., storage usage, number of log-ins, actions taken), data displayed or clicked on (e.g., UI elements, links), and other log information (e.g., browser type, IP address, date and time of access, cookie ID, referrer URL).”

It also states that Google adheres to the U.S. Safe Harbor privacy principles, but that’s not quite enough. It seemed a bit unclear if they mine the information stored in Google Docs. All the companies that provide these kinds of services need to be a bit clearer about what they will or will not do with the documents stored in their service.

Getting Innovation from an Outsourcer

I was reading an article in CIO titled What Does It Take to Get IT Outsourcers to Innovate? and it resonated well with my experience. One of the quotes pointing out an overlooked opportunity was:

“Give the outsourcer a position in your organization so that they can understand what’s going on in your business and give them the opportunity to earn that $4 million by coming up with innovative project ideas” from Ed Hansen, partner in law firm Morgan Lewis.

Many times relationships are commoditized to the point where this kind of discussion never takes place and very operationally focused people manage the relationship on both sides and real business value can be difficult to generate.

Another item discussed is the SLA trap. There needs to be some balance between innovation and operations. Granted everyone “wants it all”, but as organizations innovate there will be disruption. Operations focused personnel are reluctant to do anything that disrupts service levels. That’s where ITIL processes around change management can be used to make the implications of those changes active decisions and not passive ones. Having the outsourcer more aware and involved in the business means they’ll understand issues like: retailers don’t like to make changes between Halloween and New Years… these change window issues differ by industry and organization and the support team needs to be close enough to the problem to understand the risks.

After all, it’s what happens after the ink dries that really matters on both sides of the table. The relationship should develop into a partnership where ideas and concerns flow freely. Once it hits the slippery slope of a “vendor” relationship, it will be difficult to gain that ground back for both parties.

I’ve written about outsourcing and innovation in the past, and still thought the CIO article as useful addition.  There was also some analysis from Cutter on Multisourcing that missed some of the points made in the CIO article. Hopefully, those will be included in their future analysis.

OnStar’s Next Frontier – Remote Control

General Motors’ OnStar system has been around for several years and has become very popular by offering remote, location aware services to its consumers. Some of those services include remote unlocking, vehicle location, turn-by-turn directions and emergency response (automatic on air-bag deployment). This recent article about OnStar’s plans for a new feature called Stolen Vehicle Slowdown takes it to the next level. With this new feature OnStar, once notified by the owner of a stolen vehicle, can work with police officers to stop a stolen vehicle via remote control rather than engaging in a potential high-speed chase.

The article rightly points out that this is a significant milestone, not so much for its particular purpose (stopping stolen vehicles) but for its more general impact; the mass-production of remote controlled automobiles. Granted, what we normally think of as a remote controlled vehicle would have more capability; including control of the throttle, brakes and steering - but one out of three is still a milestone.

Foreseeing that consumer worries about the abuse or misuse of such a system could negatively impact sales; GM will give OnStar customers the ability to opt out of the feature at any time. Still, GM’s research on the matter indicates that 95% of its subscribers will choose to keep it.

A Novel Approach To Video Sharing For Profit

Blinkx is an Internet video search company in London that will allow consumers to make money on embedded videos. This New York Times article spells out the details for what may become a new trend with substantial grass roots appeal.

Though the idea isn’t totally new, Google’s YouTube and Revver have advertising revenue sharing for videos, the Blinkx approach seems considerably easier to engage. All one needs to do is submit a posted film clip to Blinkx so that it can be indexed and categorized. The host web site ultimately receives payment. An additional benefit is that Blinkx has capabilities that are well suited to the Internet’s language diversity since it will offer video searches in French, German and Spanish along with English.

In a marketplace dominated by YouTube, long term success for Blinkx is an unknown, perhaps it is even doubtful; but, as in all business, competition is good. At a few pennies per click, a popular video could make more than a few bucks for its host and that could make Blinkx prime Internet real estate.

I think this is one worth watching.

Google and IBM Join Forces

While Google gets much credit these days for innovative Internet solutions, IBM (at least historically) gets credit for large scale compute applications on mainframes. When you combine IBM’s expertise with Google’s and you make the result readily available to academia, as courseware and infrastructure, the impact could be significant and long term.

Based on this announcement, IBM and Google are planning to team up to do just that. The expected result is to get more brainpower focused on Internet-scale massively parallel compute models for the future. When you consider that both Google and IBM are supporters of Open-source, as is academia, you realize that this could also be a big boost for the Open-source movement.

To get a feel for just how much impact this initiative may have, consider the universities that have chosen to pilot the program:

• Carnegie-Mellon
• MIT
• Stanford
• UC Berkeley
• University of Maryland

I have to say, the future of Internet-scale computing is looking up!

Chatterbots and Living Virtually

A few weeks ago I mentioned the possibility of having your ideas live on after you're gone. It looks like a company called Lifenaut is trying to make that a reality. It allows users to create a sociogram showing connections to people they have met over the course of their life. They also provide a chatterbot (chatbot) that can read the user's profile and respond to general questions for you.

"In the future, the chatbot will become increasingly knowledgeable about the user's profiles and mindfiles, and infer information from tagged multimedia files," according to Bruce Duncan, Managing Director of Terasem Movement Foundation.

The viability of chatterbot technology continues to advance. There was a great story on the SciAm Science Talk podcast (on Sept 26th) of an AI researcher that suddenly realized he’d been corresponding with a chatterbot at a Russian dating service – after talking with it for more than four months.

Maybe it will get to the point where I can mail in my presentations and have a chatterbot step in for the Q&A portion.