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

2008 The year of thin-client?

Over the last couple of months SUN, Microsoft and HP have all announced hardware and/or software designed to support thin-client computing. Added to this, Gartner analysts have expressed doubts over the future of Microsoft Windows in it's current form. There are lots of buzzwords in all this: thin-client, flexible client, virtualization and so on. So is 2008 the year when thin-client computing finally catches on in the user community?

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The Long Tail

A lot has been written about the Long Tail, a re-cast of the "80-20" rule in business terms. Basically, specific retailers with low distribution and inventory costs can afford to have a large number of low-turnover items on hand, thereby creating a niche market for specific items of interest to specific market segments (or consumer markets).

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There is Better and There is Better...

In reading Ray Kurzweil's article Making the World A Billion Times Better, we need to start asking ourselves: where is technology leading us to. Think about a mobile phone for instance. When the first mobile phone call was made in 1973, the phone weighed in at 2.2 pounds! Now 3 oz is the new norm! At the same time, however, the phones got smaller and smaller, thereby reducing the keypad to sizes that are only useable by teenagers or people with small fingers. This technology advance is an improvement from a size (i.e. weight) perspective, but not necessarily from a size perspective...is better really better?

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Is the Market Ready for “Green Services”?

At the moment there is a lot of discussion going on around Green IT. In the broadest sense, Green IT can be defined as the practice of deploying and using Information Technology (IT) as efficiently as possible. Based on this definition, the concepts of virtualization, power management, technology refresh, and mobility can all be encompassed under the Green IT umbrella. Even from a data center perspective, the focus is on data center design, maintenance, and operation. As such, the overarching end-to-end data center Green Services solution may be there in practice, but it does not come to the forefront.

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Retailers at the Gate…

From a study by comScore, we can conclude that the current social networking society includes visitors that frequent retail site more often than the average Internet user. That brings to bear an interesting point of marketing: could and should these social networking sites adjust themselves and open up for more targeted marketing towards this very interesting market segment (from a marketing and advertising perspective).

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Will Physical Media Go the Way of the Dinosaur?

According to EMC's Worldwide Information Growth Tracker, we have created more than 112 exabytes of information so far this year, with an anticipated compounded growth rate of almost 60% between now and 2011.  By contrast, it is estimated that in 2007 the British office workers printed up to 120 billion pages. This amounts to a paper mountain over 8,200 miles high!

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Gaming and Business

In reading "Wargaming, the business", one can imagine that a simulation of a complete enterprise is created that over time can model different scenarios and associated outcomes. If we take a step back and see how teenagers and pre-teenagers are working and interacting with technology (specifically simulation and gaming), we gain an insight on how corporations have to adapt in the future.

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Will Technology Become “Free”?

With Moore's Law still alive and kicking in the processor space, similar trends are taking place in the network space (Gilder's Law) and storage area (areal density law). These three technology laws, if taken at face value, would indicate that a fixed amount of money would provide you with double the amount of storage, processing capability, and network capability within an eighteen month time frame.

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Enterprise Mobility?

I finally made some time to go over some of the magazines and articles that were collecting dust. Charlie Bess' blog on the 8 Technologies to Master in '08 combined with recent article published in Asia on the Read full entry...

A Different Kind of Cloud Computing

In reading through the recent blog on cloud computing, my mind started wandering to this very topic. However, I was not thinking about cloud computing in the "traditional" sense of compute-as-a-service, but in a more controversial fashion.

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Expanding Access to the Night Sky

A few weeks back there was the announcement of The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) by Microsoft research. It is a visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the ground- and space-based telescopes. Although it is not available publicly quite yet, there are some other sites for those who can't wait and have too much light pollution to see the sky at home.

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Opportunistic Computing in the Cloud

I've been thinking more about the entry the other day on heeding Moore's law.

I've had a few conversations with folks in other organizations about cloud computing. I am always fascinated by their almost blind focus on cost reduction. I see real opportunity for the shift in the value side. Value is what makes IT relevant. An exclusively cost focus is why IT doesn't matter.

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What’s time for anyway??

I remember hearing the story once of a mother who was taking her daughter to the zoo. They were rushing from place to place and the little girl was frustrated by the harried pace and her inability to enjoy the experience. She asked her mom "Why can't we look at everything?" The mother stated "We don't have time for that." The girl's response was "What's time for anyway???"

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Mind control interface

Kas Kasravi (another EDS Fellow) pointed me to a new product coming in the fall, that was in the area of one of my predictions for 2008. The Emotiv Epoc is a device that claims to be able to use brain activity to control games... I'm sure this will be a case where if effective the number of uses will expand far beyond game play. The use by stroke patients and others who have lost movement or limbs seem clear.

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An example of simulation and process modeling

There have been a number of entries in this blog on the use of simulation and modeling and the effect on IT of the future. I've seen a number of modeling tools, but this week, (as part of EDS' Top Gun Program with Oracle), I was able to see some of the more recent work on the BPA Suite.

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