Tech Miscellanea

The Robots of CES - Technology Review

2012-01-21T18:52:00.001+11:00

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The Xybot turns an ordinary iPhone into a mobile avatar. A phone docked into the robot streams video of the person controlling it using an app running on another iPhone.

Xybotyx of Littleton, Colorado, which makes the robot, was founded by two engineers who met while working on NASA’s Phoenix Mars rover. The Xybot will be released in March at a price of $111.11.

Helluva lot cheaper than a presence bot. Another example of the ubiquity of the SmartPhone making computing / networking / etc effectively free.

Cartels Are an Emergent Phenomenon, Say Complexity Theorists - Technology Review

2012-01-21T18:29:00.001+11:00

in a population of a million agents over time period of a billion iterations and more.

The results make interesting reading. It turns out that a crucial factor is the speed at which buyers and sellers react to the market. When buyers react quickest, sellers are forced to match the best possible value for money and prices tend to drop.

By contrast, when sellers react quickest, they are quick to copy others offering poor value for money. This reduces the number of sellers offering good value for money in a vicious cycle that drives prices as high as possible.

This is the emergence of a cartel and it happens in these guys' model without any collusion between sellers. Instead, it is an emergent property of the market place that happens when the sellers outperform buyers in the way they react to market conditions.

Cool result from computational economics. I wonder if similar things occur throughout the dynamics of new product adoption.

Good insights into the future of Computer Interaction and todays blithe assumptions

2011-11-11T07:03:00.001+11:00

take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit.

What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?

I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.

Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.

Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future.

To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

HANDS MANIPULATE THINGS

via worrydream.com

Excellent points on limitations of our current magical devices. Highly recommend that you read the original rant from Bret Victor. http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

The reality is that there is no more embodied approach for devices extant as yet, with possible exceptions of robotics homebrew/arduino/etc. However these certainly don't have anything like the levels of 'magic' interaction that we're enjoying today with the 'pictures under glass'.

I'm not holding my breath for new approaches any time soon, but longer term ...

Cool company - BuildAR - building blocks to make Augmented Reality creation easy ...

2011-09-11T04:40:00.001+10:00

What will you build?

Augmented Reality (AR) overlays information, images, 3D objects, audio and video onto your view of the real world around you.

Create your own mobile AR projects easily with no development required & link your content to the real world!

via buildar.com

Steps to technology ubiquity - virtualizing the underlying complexity ... Looking forward to seeing more from these guys.

The books business: Great digital expectations | The Economist

2011-09-11T02:18:00.001+10:00

TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books. The drift to digits will speed up as bookshops close. Borders, once a retail behemoth, is liquidating all of its American stores.

via economist.com

Ongoing sad times for the local bookstore.

Isn't this part of a larger trend, building 'cloud' / or ubiquitous connectivity and information into all of our lives. The same trend impacting IT across the board. Bringing both disruption of our comfortable ways of doing things, and radical new capabilities?

Game Theory

2011-09-11T02:08:00.001+10:00

It is possible that Richard Thaler changed his mind about economic theory and went on to challenge what had become a hopelessly dry and out-of-touch discipline because, one day, when a few of his supposedly rational colleagues were over at his house, he noticed that they were unable to stop themselves from gorging on some cashew nuts he'd put out. Then again, it could have been because a friend admitted to Thaler that, although he mowed his own lawn to save $10, he would never agree to cut the lawn next door in return for the same $10 or even more. But the moment that sticks in Thaler's mind occurred back in the 1970's, when he and another friend, a computer maven named Jeff Lasky, decided to skip a basketball game in Rochester because of a swirling snowstorm.

via www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu

A deep diver into the anatomy of premature scaling - lessons for startups and others

2011-09-11T02:07:00.001+10:00

via startupgenome.cc

Scaling operations (optimizing for a given product/customer assumption) before confirming that it's _real_ is a bad idea - Startup Genome shows some good data on this for startups, and probably a bad idea for others with new product hopes.

The end of software transparency? Sculpture showing all the boards that are cut from a single log - 22 Words

2011-08-23T16:11:00.001+10:00

via twentytwowords.com

Fantastic sculpture.

It brings to mind that more and more we are operating on the level of the black-box, of magickal thinking, of objects and processes that 'just work' ... until they don't. That computing was once transparent, but is no longer. Consider most of your mobile phone experiences, hopefully fantastic, but when it stops you must find an expert, or replace the now no-longer magickal, now 'imp free' device.

In many ways, this is the goal of the 'consumer' device.

Living in an age of magic made real is very appealing in many ways, we can ignore the constraints of time and space to communicate with our friends and colleagues all over the world. We live in an age where the combination of skills can solve most any problem, as argued persuasively by Matt Ridley in his optimistic talk on ideas 'having sex' http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html. But, increasing it feels like we're losing the ease, from earlier generations, of being able to understand the underlying process, of unpacking all the way down to creating that water wheel, etc. Of being able to tune our own car engine, or indeed to fix our TV. Indeed, it seems that we've become so very good at using modules, at sub-processes, at, arguably, code/module re-use. And where, ultimately does this leave us? How complex an infrastructure might we be able to maintain?

The reality is that this is not a new thing, indeed it has been going on in computing repeatedly as we create a useful abstraction: adders, CPUs, memory, virtual memory, virtual users, virtual machines, and so on. What's new is that we're heading to an age where the outcomes from computing are more and more 'commodity', packaged, wrapped, and protected from meddling. More and more .. part of the world.

This is not a new process. Indeed, the reuse of modules for factories, for commodities, for food, for almost everything in the modern economy is created in such a way. Leonard Read had a wonderful essay in 1958 showing that no one knew how to create 'even' a pencil http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/i-pencil/.

Software is more and more just a component piece for pretty much 'everything'. We can see this in the move from transparency to packaged objects designed to be opaque. This is the transition for software, for computing, to be absorbed, as never before, into the broader economic process.

Andreessen - Why Software Is Eating the World => Perez - the dynamics of bubbles and golden ages ...

2011-08-23T15:34:00.001+10:00

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.

In an interview with WSJ's Kevin Delaney, Groupon and LinkedIn investor Marc Andreessen insists that the recent popularity of tech companies does not constitute a bubble. He also stressed that both Apple and Google are undervalued and that "the market doesn't like tech."

In short, software is eating the world.

More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, "Isn't this just a dangerous new bubble?"

I, along with others, have been arguing the other side of the case. (I am co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, which has invested in Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare, among others. I am also personally an investor in LinkedIn.) We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses.

via online.wsj.com

Nicely argued techno-optimistic view on the future for software from Mark Andreessen.

As it happens, I agree with his view that we're reaching a new plateau of productivity with software. I found it striking that his argument is a point in time illustration of the forecast from (the worth a read) "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages" from Carlotta Perez in 2003 about the relatively predictable cycles of adoption and economic shift for major technological innovation and the expectation, as one of her reviewers put it on Amazon that we "are in the last throes of a technological bubble and just preceding the next period of productive improvement and profit from the disruptive technologies in the 1990" Check it out http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1843763311.

Interesting times for the software 'game' ...

Adventures in Capitalism: The Lesson of Dropbox: Usage = Value

2011-08-16T01:16:00.001+10:00

Links to this post

The Lesson of Dropbox: Usage = Value

Word on the street is that Dropbox is about to raise a major round of financing at a $5 billion+ valuation. While some will cry “Bubble!”, I think there's a different lesson we can learn: Usage = Value. Let's face it–Dropbox isn't the ...

Posted by Chris Yeh at 11:55 AM

Create a Link

via chrisyeh.blogspot.com

Usage + 'Stickiness' = value
Dropbox is a great example, it's baked into too many day to day personal processes to be easily displaced.

Citrix Startup Accelerator - what's new and different?

2011-08-02T04:29:00.001+10:00

Apple now driving SmartPhone growth in USA?

2011-07-01T02:13:00.001+10:00

via blog.nielsen.com

The ongoing battle between Android and Apple for mindshare.

Inspiring - visual thinking video on Michael Wolff from Intel (via @maverickwoman)

2011-06-14T07:51:00.001+10:00

The cloud (xkcd)

2011-06-07T00:28:00.001+10:00

Skype ID will be a slipstream online login for Microsoft

2011-05-11T16:37:00.001+10:00

via businessinsider.com

I found the news that Microsoft is acquiring Skype interesting. Major acquisitions like this have all sorts of unexpected implications and ripples across many markets.

The blogosphere has been alive with the discussion over whether the acquisition makes sense or not and the sorts of things that Microsoft might do with the Skype technology, much of which is pretty cool, but in general somewhat hopeful. There's also been some discussion over Microsoft 'buying' customers. While the acquisition is certainly multi-faceted, I suspect that buying customers is just about sufficient to justify the deal.

First, consider the value of an online customer for various types of business - the chart above gives some ideas - I'd tend to assume that the annual value of a given online user to Microsoft is somewhere between Google and Yahoo, both being advertising driven, let's say $10 annually. Given which, it is well worth spending somewhere well North of $10 for each customer acquisition.

Skype apparently has 107m users who use the service at least once a month, and 663m registered users. Microsoft is paying $8.5b for the privilege of access to these users. Microsoft is paying as little as $8 per active user. However, conversion rates would dictate that only a portion of these users come across to the Microsoft services (if 10%, that's $80 per user!).

However, I think that the conversion rate could be much, much higher. If we consider that one of the major challenges to customer acquisition is the effort involved in setting up a new account on a new service (I've called this friction in my last post).

Imagine if Microsoft were now able to do away with that process for new users. Rather the user, many of whom stay logged into Skype 24x7, is automagically provided access to the Microsoft online properties as a result of their Skype authentication. Indeed, one might modify some elements of Skype to make this an easy and perhaps natural extension of the Skype experience.

Notice that this scenario not only builds the user/customer base for the Microsoft online properties, but it also gives Microsoft a new way to compete with Google in creating data profiles of very large numbers of users.

Does this make sense to you?

Friction Free Computing

2011-05-10T04:03:00.001+10:00

Friction free computing

Posted by Michael Harries on May 9, 2011

Does your software reduce friction?

Last week I used the Mac App store to install Citrix receiver for OSX. This is a such a streamlined experience. Start the app store, login with iTunes credentials, and I’m ready to go. Installing the receiver itself was trivial and it worked immediately. It was easy to purchase a bunch of other apps as well (Such as ‘ommwriter‘, another great simplicity app).

That was fun, but at much the same time I was dragged into the morass of reinstalling some other apps off DVD, network drives and the web. Having to find license keys, credit cards, and navigating different installation scripts.

Talk about different worlds.

This is a great example of frictionless computing. It rocks. And it doesn’t sap my energy on an activity that should be simple. Why waste creative focus on mundanities? If there’s any task that should be automated, it’s one that affects so many people, and costs productive time.

So, my question to you. Does your product or startup reduce friction? Are you making it easy for people to use your IT service? How much inertia do your customers need to overcome to get started? How much can you replicate the out of box experience of the Mac app store? This is the age of consumerization; The user is king; and there are any number of alternative distractions to the task of learning to find, install or enroll, sign in, let alone drive your software.

Citrix gets this simplicity. Do you?

via citrixstartupaccelerator.com

Test-prep startup Grockit teams with charter network KIPP to gamify school | VentureBeat

2011-05-05T06:28:00.001+10:00

If only schools were addictive like Farmville, maybe we could fix our education system.

That’s the thinking behind a partnership announced today between the high-profile charter school network KIPP and test-prep startup Grockit, which applies social gaming principles to studying. Grockit is backed by, among others, Marc Pincus of Zynga, the company responsible for our nation’s mass addiction to breeding virtual cows. Like Farmville, Grockit incorporates social-gaming elements such as badges, points and leaderboards, as well as live chat and rewards for social interaction to draw its users in.

via venturebeat.com

Four square style check in with level up ... like getting to level 80 in WoW

2011-05-05T04:57:00.001+10:00

no matter how successful SCVNGR became, it was going to have trouble ensuring that people kept coming back to the local businesses they were checking-in/playing at. So he started a pilot program in Boston and Philadelphia that gives users better and better deals as they continue to come back to a restaurant. Priebatsch doesn't say it explicitly, but it's pretty clear he sees LevelUp/SCVNGR mashup as the company's future. "Pure checking-in isn't going mainstream," he says, "Mainly because it gets boring." LevelUp is a way to get around that.

via tech.fortune.cnn.com

Tablet market playing by netbook rules or by mobile phone rules?

2011-04-29T23:58:00.001+10:00

In terms of manufacturing, the age of tablets is different from the age of netbooks mostly because there is no way to make a cheap tablet. You only have a certain, finite amount of space inside a small tablet case and, more important, tablet PC parts are expensive and often custom-built. Touchscreens are expensive because mother-glass manufacturers see Apple buying up their stock and they hope to make a killing. Flash memory is expensive because, well, Apple bought it all. And the tablets themselves are expensive because Apple set the prices. If Motorola could have gotten the Xoom below $250 I’m sure they would have but, given that there is a more popular alternative out there that costs twice as much, playing a scorched-earth pricing game would leave money on the table.

But manufacturers can’t “beat” the iPad because they’re still playing by netbook rules. As Stephen Elop said, there will soon be “200 tablets” on the market and only one clear winner. But hardware manufacturers are like sharks – they can’t sit still. They need to produce products constantly, no matter the popularity, and as a result, on the aggregate, no one device they produce out of the other 199 can touch the reigning king. It may sound hyperbolic but it’s true. However, they’ve been surprisingly reticent to produce many tablets. I’ve heard it said over and over: “If RIM had released the Playbook a year earlier, they would have owned the space.” Instead they announced early and hemmed and hawed and then released a device that is potentially superior to the iPad but, in practice, little more than a smooshed out Blackberry smartphone.

via crunchgear.com

Nice insight from the supply chain side.

There Are Now More Free Apps For Android Than For The iPhone: Distimo

2011-04-29T04:22:00.001+10:00

via techcrunch.com

Great data. Particularly the balance of free versus paid applications across iPhone versus Android. Does this mean that direct pay for applications is less effective in a 'Googly' experience, Or does the Android app business model make it more appealing to provide a free application that is monetized elsewhere?

Android market doesn't pay?

2011-04-29T04:16:00.001+10:00

Undesirable customers

Instapaper Free always had worse reviews in iTunes than the paid app. Part of this is that the paid app was better, of course, but a lot of the Free reviews were completely unreasonable.

Only people who buy the paid app — and therefore have no problem paying $5 for an app — can post reviews for it. That filters out a lot of the sorts of customers who will leave unreasonable, incomprehensible, or inflammatory reviews. (It also filters out many people likely to need a lot of support.)

I don’t need every customer. I’m primarily in the business of selling a product for money. How much effort do I really want to devote to satisfying people who are unable or extremely unlikely to pay for anything?

(This is also a major reason why I have no plans to enter the Android market.)

via marco.org

Android is winning the numbers game - no surprise - it's free and very capable. But we all know that that this is not the main story. I find it fascinating to explore how these worlds diverge even as the headlong rush to mobile proceeds.

One key area of difference is in the apps. Indeed, Marco Arment goes so far as to include the Android market as one to avoid as they are unlikely to pay for an app. (The rest of the article is also worth a read.)

I'd love to hear your impressions.

Niche play du jour - a 'Public Folder for Gmail.

2011-04-29T03:27:00.001+10:00

Google Blew It – And This Startup Seized The Opportunity

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry | Apr. 26, 2011, 9:03 AM | 8,660 |
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inShare34

Microsoft Exchange, the company's enterprise email suite, has this feature called Public Folder that enterprise users love that lets them share an inbox.

Businesses have been clamoring for that feature in Google Apps, Google's web-based rival to Microsoft's enterprise productivity software, for years.

And now French startup RunMyProcess has built it, calling it Shared Inbox.

RunMyProcess says it integrates neatly into Google Apps because it's on Google Apps marketplace and, at $10/user/year, is cheaper than Microsoft Exchange. RunMyProcess CEO Matthieu Hug tells us that they built the feature, which is massively used in enterprises for things like customer support, because of countless customer requests. He tells us it's a big reason why companies are afraid of switching from Microsoft Exchange to Google.

This helps Google, but it's a bit embarrassing that a startup had to build a feature that should be part of the main, standalone product. Some enterprise customers complain that Google doesn't pay enough attention to their requests, and Google's cloud-based offering have failed to make a big dent into Microsoft's huge enterprise software business.

Don't Miss: Who Said That? 10 Unbelievable Quotes From Microsoft Execs →

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via businessinsider.com

Leveraging cognitive shortcuts from one (well loved?) app into another.

I find it fascinating that features like this, from a technical standpoint pretty much trivial, and for most of us just not part of the email experience, are often a key part of business processes.

Android more desirable than iPhone! Difficult to believe ...

2011-04-27T01:54:00.001+10:00

via blog.nielsen.com

I find this a fascinating outcome - yes, Android should be very successful, but I find the higher levels of desirability suspect given relative market positioning. Possible reasons:

* Availability at relatively low cost -- yes (and getting cheaper)
* Usability - hah - not really
* Saturation advertising -- great to bump up wireless data usage, so very appealing to carriers
* Link to Google (for many synonymous with 'internet')

Amazon and the cloud rules of engagement.

2011-04-26T01:51:00.001+10:00

Amazon’s outage in third day: debate over cloud computing’s future begins

April 23, 2011 | Dean Takahashi
7 Comments

As Amazon’s web services outage passed its third day, the debate on the future of cloud computing is underway. The outage is costing web sites such as Reddit and Quora considerable losses as users turn elsewhere to get their social media needs met.

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud service hosts thousands of major web sites that rely on it to serve pages to users. And users rely on these services to store their personal accounts and data remotely. So when the EC 2 service goes down, so do the web sites, and that means users can’t log in to access their data. It’s a big hiccup for an industry that is supposed to grow to $55 billion by 2014, according to market researcher IDC.

The duration of the outage has surprised many, since Amazon has a lot of backup computing infrastructure. If Amazon can’t safeguard the cloud, how can we rely on it? So the debate begins on the future of cloud computing and what to do to make users and companies put their trust in cloud vendors such as Amazon.

via venturebeat.com

While painful, this is a healthy transition. Infrastructure as a Service is part of the IT toolkit, but requires a healthy does of risk assessment. Without signals that warn of risk, it's all to easy to collectively overcommit to an approach, and finish up with another textbook (sub-prime style) system collapse.

Startups (and resource constrained) have no choice but to accept limited redundancy or single points of failure, but enterprise computing requires that redundancy be designed into the system. This is the point made by George Reese of O'Reilly, overstated, but apt http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/04/the-aws-outage-the-clouds-shining-moment....

My view - this is part of our collectively learning the upsides, downsides, and rules of engagement for shared 'cloud' resources.

DesignerfWill the Next Zuckerberg Be a Designer, not a Hacker? - Technology Review

2011-04-26T01:18:00.001+10:00

Natural interfaces? Controlling Prosthetic Limbs with Electrode Arrays - Technology Review

2011-04-26T01:16:00.001+10:00

Coiled conduits: The microscopic channels in this polymer roll are the right size and shape for bundles of severed nerve cells to grow through them. The scaffold, augmented with electrodes, is intended to transmit electrical signals between an amputee’s nervous system and prosthetic limb.
Credit: Ravi Bellamkonda, Georgia Tec

Human-Machine connectivity progress. Another step toward 'natural' interfaces?

Great Innovation is Global

2011-04-24T14:48:00.001+10:00

I'm excited - really excited - to have made the move to the Citrix Startup Accelerator from Citrix Labs. So much so that I've moved my family from Sydney to Silicon Valley to make this happen. (We're settling in nicely, thanks.)

Under the circumstance, it shouldn't be a surprise that I think great innovation needs a global focus, which is why the Citrix Global Challenge is critically important for the Startup Accelerator. To kick this off I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the types of technologies and directions that are most interesting for the Startup Accelerator.

The list on the site talks about trends like 'mobile', 'cloud' and 'consumerization'. These are somewhat broad and the flavor of the moment, indeed, most of the breakout companies for the last few years could be described using these terms. To improve clarity I'd like to give an indication of one investment sweet-spot, what I call 'Alternative futures of the desktop.' Citrix has long pioneered alternative desktop visions, and is the leader in Virtual Computing - so new ways to solve the desktop problem are particularly interesting.

Primadesk is our first Startup Accelerator investment. Their vision is to let you "Search, manage and backup your personal cloud data with one simple interface no matter what device you use."

The challenge is that we have too many options for personal data in the cloud.I use Gmail for personal email, but also have old accounts on Hotmail and Yahoo. I have documents in many services ranging from files on the Mac, Google docs, Simplenote, Evernote, and half a dozen others. My backups are a mixed combination of Mozy, S3 (Jungledisk), and my home NAS. The founder of Primadesk recognized that these all act as silos, solving many individual problems well, but leaving severe compatibility gaps.

Primadesk simplifies access to your distributed personal digital assets. Their software gives you a single view of all those silos, allowing you to; search across all your documents and mail; backup from one service to another; drag and drop photos from one site to another. This plays into on of the themes where Citrix has long led: new desktop possibilities, new ways to provide the desktop experience.

If your startup has new approaches to desktop computing, to the use of mobile, or emerging use cases, we'd love to hear from you as we call for Citrix Global Challenge applications in Silicon Valley, Boston, Cambridge, Bangalore, and Sydney.

Behavioral Economics and Banking - (Tech Review)

2011-04-05T17:16:00.001+10:00

"There was a designer somewhere in the process who has thought about every single touch point, every single aspect, and has just made every single moment as valid, as graceful, as appropriate, as possible," he says. BankSimple is due to launch this year.

To design the experience, they looked for insights from behavioral economics, which relies on psychology to understand economic decisions. For instance, it's easier to get people to try something if they have to opt out of it rather than opt in. The team applied this insight to a feature of the bank that allows people to set aside funds toward a particular goal; it's not a separate account, just a line highlighted on the screen with a label like "Hawaii trip" or "new laptop." To encourage customers to try the feature, BankSimple starts them with the goal of saving $1,000 in an emergency fund.

There is something magical about taking a different tack on an existing problem. This sounds very appealing, but I wonder what happens to the user enthusiasm the first time all that hidden complexity surfaces in a SNAFU.

The disposable Android - Securing All Androids Proves Tricky - Technology Review

2011-03-19T02:38:00.001+11:00

Fixing phones properly requires hardware makers to create their own updates incorporating Google's fix; they test those updates and pass them on to carriers, who also test the fixes before pushing them out to customers. Apps for Android devices, including ones developed by Google, could be updated through the Android Market, but system software has to be updated through the carrier's channel.

Android is a great model for adoption, but less so as these complex software artifacts become broadly spread, and poorly maintained.

On the other hand ... for the handset manufacturers, this is a not a completely bad thing -- they'd likely prefer that you throw it away and get a new one.

Indeed, for many people, it will be easier to discard the current phone, and purchase a new one without the limitation. Today this is relatively expensive -- tomorrow much less so. A cheap, disposable access point. Interesting times.

Mashing the table and the surface to get chatty coasters - Tech Review article

2010-12-08T04:03:00.001+11:00

Coaster to coaster: Jack Weedon demonstrates his communicative beer coasters with Sara Smith, another student from Newcastle University’s Culture Lab.
Credit: Newcastle University

Communications

Let Your Coaster Do the Talking

An interactive surface encourages conversation by letting coasters communicate.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

By Duncan Graham-Rowe

Once the hallmark of lonely barflies, playing with your beer coaster could actually help you socialize, thanks to a smart bar surface that brings ordinary coasters to life.

The coasters communicate by sending messages across the surface. The messages are meant to act as icebreakers between bar patrons, says Tom Bartindale, who invented the coasters with fellow postgraduate student Jack Weeden at Newcastle University's Culture Lab. "It's a starting point for an actual conversation," Bartindale says.

Great thinking in this prototype around embedding smarts into specific context. Check out the full article at http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/26833/?nlid=3855&a=f

Phones that Know Their Users by How They Walk - interesting

2010-09-21T17:28:00.001+10:00

Smart Phones that Know Their Users by How They Walk

Biometric security is obtrusive--unless it's on all the time, analyzing your gait.

Your smart phone is a hideous liability that renders you increasingly vulnerable to a host of fraudulent activities...

The problem is that unlike your bank's website, you use your phone throughout the day, which makes tapping in a password over and over again so impractical that few users bother to lock their phones in this way. ...

For passive biometrics to work, the more measures of the "youness" of you they can gather, the better. ...

Gait analysis is a tried-and-true method of passive biometrics, your gait being a very individual and hard-to-imitate trait.

I love this alternative 'context' based security for mobile devices.

It raises some interesting practical questions ... What happens on those rare occasions when one is actually doing some work, at a desk, for a couple of hours? Would you need to get up and walk to answer a call?

Would your doctor (or health insurance) insist that you use this?

Check out the original for more details. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25767/?nlid=3518

Cybernetic body upgrades - iArm (via @nambor)

2010-08-31T11:15:00.001+10:00

via iarm.de

Our shiny cybernetic future?
Does it run Windows?

Great piece by http://iarm.de

Nice insight on telcos driving Andriod success (TechRepublic.com)

2010-08-24T10:08:00.001+10:00

Google Android began with the greatest of intentions — freedom, openness, and quality software for all. However, freedom always comes with price, and often results in unintended consequences. With Android, one of the most important of those unintended consequences is now becoming clear as Google gets increasingly pragmatic about the smartphone market and less and less tied to its original ideals.

Here’s the dirty little secret about Android: After all the work Apple did to get AT&T to relinquish device control for the iPhone and all the great efforts Google made to get the FCC and the U.S. telecoms to agree to open access rules as part of the 700 MHz auction, Android is taking all of those gains and handing the power back to the telecoms.

via blogs.techrepublic.com.com

Good article from Jason Hiner, on Android is becoming a way for telcos to regain/retain carrier lock-in. Lovely illustration of market dynamics.

Worth a read: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=5855#

Sledgehammer for privacy? Change Your Name to Escape Google Permanent Record

2010-08-17T12:02:00.001+10:00

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has a great way of making public statements that are at once frank, unorthodox, thought provoking - and a little frightening. This weekend The Wall St. Journal ran an interview with Schmidt that offered tidbits like that on a wide range of topics. One statement in particular, that Schmidt thinks teenagers should be entitled to change their names upon reaching adulthood in order to separate themselves from the Google record of their youthful indiscretions, is something worth stopping to take note of.

via readwriteweb.com

It's revealing that the privacy solution from Google is to 'change your name'. The obvious question one might ask, is exactly how long this might work for if taken up by a significant proportion of people?

I would expect substantial competitive pressure for search engines to find the match. And indeed to force it to the front of the queue, much like the extremely frustrating google auto-correct option on possible mis-spelling. "Did you mean:"

In any case, read the original article for more info: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_ceo_suggests_you_change_your_name...

C.K. Prahalad - constant focus on weak signals - great quote - great article

2010-08-11T12:38:00.001+10:00

Every one of my research projects started the same way: recognizing that the established theory did not explain a certain phenomenon. We had to stay constantly focused on weak signals. Each weak signal was a contradictory phenomenon that was not happening across the board. You could very easily say, “Dismiss it, this is an outlier, so we don’t have to worry about it.” But the outliers and weak signals were the places to find a different way to think about the problem.

via strategy-business.com

A wonderful quote from Prahalad, he of the bottom of the pyramid, and core competencies. I recommend checking out the whole interview at http://www.strategy-business.com/article/00043?pg=all.

Crowd Sourcing not a perpetual motion machine - duh!

2010-08-11T11:03:00.001+10:00

Take This Blog and Shove It!

When utopian ideals crash into human nature—sloth triumphs.

Illustration by David Plunkert

In the history of the web, last spring may figure as a tipping point. That’s when Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”—a site that grew from 100,000 articles in 2003 to more than 15 million today—began to falter as a social movement. Thousands of volunteer editors, the loyal Wikipedians who actually write, fact-check, and update all those articles, logged off—many for good. For the first time, more contributors appeared to be dropping out than joining up. Activity on the site has remained stagnant, according to a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind the site, and it’s become “a really serious issue.” So serious, in fact, that this fall Wikipedia will turn to something it has never needed before: recruiters.

via newsweek.com

Important reality check. Crowd sourcing is fascinating, and cool, but driven by exogenous factors -- much, one might think, like open source.

All the fun of the PC - First Trojan for Android Phones Goes Wild

2010-08-11T10:57:00.001+10:00

Google Android phones must be popular - they've just been targeted with their first Trojan. An SMS Trojan called Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer.a has already infected a number of mobile devices, according to security firm Kaspersky Lab. Purporting to be a harmless media player application, the Trojan, once installed, actually sends out SMS text messages without the users' knowledge or consent.

via readwriteweb.com

There will be a lot of mobile device management companies thrilled to see this news.

The big questions:
1. How susceptable are SmartPhone (hand held computer) operating systems to this type of attack, or indeed to all the varients that occur on the desktop?
2. How will organizations cope with managing and securing, not just Windows devices, but the menagerie of emerging SmartPhones and tablets.

Technoist Parade - fun visualization

2010-08-09T18:59:00.001+10:00

Impressive technology from MSFT Research - Street view will never be the same

2010-07-29T10:46:00.001+10:00

via neowin.net

Worth a look - a true navigational aid, in a way that today's street view technologies don't achieve. Impressive shift in the state of the art.

India's $35 touch-screen computer - could change BRIC internet from mobile focus?

2010-07-26T10:40:00.001+10:00

India unveils prototype for $35 touch-screen computer

The Indian government has unveiled the prototype of an iPad-like touch-screen laptop, with a price tag of $35 (£23), which it hopes to roll out next year.

via bbc.co.uk

I want one.

If this price point can be reached in practice, could it change the trajectory toward small screen internet in developing areas? I think it could have a massive impact, and will be tracking this area closely.

The Internet is a Western - cowboys, hackers, heros and villians (via @andragy)

2010-06-16T08:08:00.001+10:00

via andragy.blogspot.com

How the Internet embodies the cultural myth of the Western. Academic and provides valuable insights into many of the prevailing, and unstated behaviors driving Internet businesses.

Places many of the Internet movers and shakers into mythological context. Also starts with Australian Comms Minister Conroy as sheriff or Indian. An insightful essay from @andragy.

Bladerunner today - Incredible agility from autonomous flying robot (vid)

2010-06-10T09:56:00.001+10:00

Impressive, awe inspiring and frightening.

Check MIT Tech Review for more details - http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/25302/?nlid=3087#

Great post: Apple's secret weapon: consumer education | Tablets | MacUser | Macworld

2010-05-28T16:46:00.001+10:00

Apple’s sales record here is even more impressive if you factor in that iPad is a new class of device, somewhere between the phones and computers that most consumers understand. It’s also a category of device that’s vexed every vendor who’s tried to enter this space over the last decade.

So how did Apple do it? Why did Apple succeed where no one else has and how did they do it so quickly?

The answer is, it took a decade of education and teaching. The key to Apple’s success is that the company often takes the time to explain things to the consumer that no other vendor bothers to do. By keeping a laser focus on key features and introducing them one at a time over a period of years, Apple taught and evangelized everything the consumer needed to know to understand the iPad from day one. Without that foundation, it’s not likely the product would have been nearly the success it has been.

via macworld.com

Full post http://www.macworld.com/article/151606/2010/05/gartenberg_ipad.html

Excellent description of the magic of creating new consumer markets through gradual familiarity.

Everyone is on the tablet bandwagon: OLPC is now a $75 Android Tablet

2010-05-28T16:36:00.001+10:00

Negroponte: One Laptop Per Child is now a $75 Android Tablet

Posted by Seth Weintraub

May 27, 2010 2:57 PM

The former head of MIT's Media Lab said the next OLPC device, the XO-3, would be a 9-inch tablet made by Marvell and running Google's Android OS.

The first OLPC was an underpowered, 'designed-by-committee' laptop that cost at least double of what it was supposed to. Most importantly, didn't adapt to the needs of the children who used it. For instance, it didn't have a method for non-Latin characters to be input. It was also made of plastic and had moving parts that would often break in rugged environments.

At CES in January this year, that will change, according to Nicolas Negroponte.

The new OLPC devices will take the lead from Apple's iPad but use Google's (GOOG) Android OS, at least initially. The keyboard will be virtual and be able to adapt to different languages.

via tech.fortune.cnn.com

While this smacks of me-too-ism, it makes a lot of sense.
1. No moving parts and solves language-specific keyboard issues by using a soft keyboard.
2. Allows for external keyboard and mouse -- decent sized soft keyboards are fantastic, at least compared to small soft keyboards, but they just don't cut it in comparison to the physical for touch typists.
3. It leverages from the new commodity components.

(Finally, I suspect that by the time this comes to market, a low end data connection will become standard.)

Check out the original article for more. http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/05/27/negreponte-one-laptop-per-child-is-now...

TEDxSydney at Carriageworks May 22nd 2010

2010-05-23T23:10:00.001+10:00

Normal.dotm 0 0 1 274 1566 Citrix 13 3 1923 12.0 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false

The crowd was cool, the coffee was hot. It rained so hard we had to swim the last block to Carriageworks for TEDxSydney but that sure beats swimming across the ocean to be part of the TED crowd in California or at TED Global in the UK later this year. (Michael’s going. Andra’s not. L )

Some TEDxiles even sat all day on the concrete in the frigid foyer in front of a giant TED screen just to be part of the event. Although there were plenty of activities that only happened in the ‘forum’ including speaker Q&As chaired by Craig Reucassel, Red Room poetry, videos and music.

Some highlights of the event for Michael were:

Michael Cathcart - “The Water Dreamers” which described our transition from a nation of water hugging, bush fearing aliens in Australia who thought Lake Eyre was the heart of the land, to a more reconciled nation who recognize Uluru as our spiritual centre.

Andrew Kuper – “Leapfrog” the microinsurance business which aims to end world poverty. Andrew is a governance and globalization expert who is putting microfinance to work in a novel and profitable fashion.

Mr Percival – extraordinary vocal artist who lights up the stage with his love of performing.

Some highlights of the event for Andra were:

Greig Pickhaver (aka H.G. Nelson) – was very funny and very persuasive. HG for President! I would like to see all sporting spectators put on exercise bikes to power the grid. In fact, it doesn’t seem funny at all now.

Rob Adams – concrete visions for transforming cities into sustainable enjoyable places to live with twice the number of people. Melbourne is leading the way.

Fourplay – fab string quartet who ranged from modern classic to a kind of world metal in the final number with Bobby Singh.

END: Those who’ve been to a TED reckon that this was a TEDxtra good. And those who want a repeat will find the videos on TEDxSydney website soon. And so everyone left happy.

Nanobots -- Simple but impressive DNA Robots

2010-05-17T15:03:00.001+10:00

Its precise structure and ability to bind with other molecules makes DNA an attractive scaffolding material for nanotech researchers. Scientists have already used DNA to construct two-dimensional patterns, three-dimensional objects, and simple shape-changing devices. Now two teams of researchers have separately made complex programmable machines using DNA molecules.

DNA assembly line: An atomic force microscope image shows gold nanoparticles on a DNA track.
Credit: Courtesy of Ned Seeman

Researchers from Columbia University, Arizona State University, and Caltech have made a device that follows a programmable path on a surface patterned with DNA. Meanwhile, researchers from New York University, led by DNA nanoarchitecture pioneer Ned Seeman, have combined multiple DNA devices to make an assembly line. The nano contraption picks up gold nanoparticles as it tumbles along a DNA-patterned surface.

The two machines, described in today's Nature journal, are a possible step forward in making DNA nanobots that could assemble tiny electrical and mechanical devices. DNA robots could also put together molecules in new ways to make new materials, says Lloyd Smith, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Robots might have the ability to position one molecule in a particular way so that a reaction happens with another molecule which might not happen if they randomly collide in solution," he says.

Miniature DNA Robots (autonomous agents) -- is this the nanorobot future?

Check the article for more info: http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/25287/?nlid=2983&a=f

Personalized services create new security holes - good article from Technology Review

2010-04-21T15:43:00.001+10:00

Personalization is a key part of Internet search, providing more relevant results and gaining loyal customers in the process. But new research highlights the privacy risks that this kind of personalization can bring. A team of European researchers found that they were able to hijack Google's personalized search suggestions to reconstruct users' Web search histories.

Google has plugged most of the holes identified in the research, but the researchers say that other personalized services are likely to have similar vulnerabilities. "The goal of this project was to show that personalized services are very dangerous in terms of privacy because they can leak information," says Claude Castelluccia, a senior research scientist at the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, who was involved with the work. The work will be presented this summer at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Berlin, Germany.

Good point - yet another "cloud" risk factor. There are many other reasons to be wary of search personalization - I see it making the web ever less global, more local, more "tribal", more solipsistic. Blog cooking on this topic 'The inverting Internet Mirrorball'.

Rocket Car Day 2010 - a huge blast :-)

2010-04-13T13:08:00.001+10:00

Rocket lobsters and careening corn cobs: street races are a real blast

ELLIE HARVEY
April 12, 2010

Full steam ahead... a couple of hundred people gathered in Marrickville yesterday to watch contraptions being propelled by C4 rockets. Photo: Dean Sewell

A TENNIS racket, a teddy bear, even a cooked lobster and a corn cob - if a rocket can be strapped to it, it is a worthy entrant.

What started as the obscure passion of a few mates - launching model rockets into the sky - has become somewhat of an underground phenomenon, with a couple of hundred people turning out yesterday afternoon to watch the rocket races in the backstreets of Marrickville.

via smh.com.au

Many thanks to the organizers of Rocket Car Day - my family had a blast :-) 4 of 5 of us are in this picture.

We had no cars this year, but have done in the last couple of years, and will do next year. My pictures to come soon (assuming any came out OK). In the meantime, check out http://rocketcarday.com.

Classic disruptive strategy illustration from Google

2010-04-13T08:05:00.001+10:00

via techcrunch.com

I love this chart from Google on their Google Docs strategy. Whether or not a true representation of their strategy, it is an appealing illustration of moving a product toward a set of product charactoristics that exploits emerging customer needs, and does so in an area where the incumbent will struggle to follow given the inertia of a massive (and profitable) existing customer base. (Popular books on these strategies include 'Innovators Dilemma' and 'Blue Ocean Strategy', but these are not new ideas.)

Today's improvements include GoogleWave-like instant collaboration, and radically improved formatting. For more details, see http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/04/new-google-docs.html.

Open questions:
Is this "disruption" in action?
Do these changes make Google Docs more viable for the small business? (I think yes)
Is live collaboration of this type a sufficiently large need?

The counter view -- is this just a matter of Google Docs putting a pretty picture on a very slow catch up with Microsoft functionality?

Interesting times.

Fascinating - The Science of (on screen) Aesthetics by @songcarver

2010-04-04T04:23:00.001+10:00

via vimeo.com

Fascinating. Particularly his observations about physiological reasons for ease of viewing rectangles with rounded corner rectangles, and implications of motion blur.

A Philosophy of Cloud - understand the trends, leverage the technologies - cross post from Citrix Community

2010-03-25T12:04:00.011+11:00

24 Mar 2010 01:18 AM EDT

A Philosophy of Cloud - understand the underlying trends, leverage the technologies

[ Tags: trends , future , team-citrix-labs , team-executive-cto , nonspecific ]

posted by Michael Harries

Understand the underlying trends, but leverage the technologies

Cloud computing is about making enterprise quality technology available to every company. It's about reducing costs. It's about increasing agility. It's about consumer ease of use. It's about making computing into a utility. It's about outsourcing. It's about dynamic capacity.

Well yes, but ...

Cloud computing is best understood, not by talking about SaaS, PasS or IaaS or any other *aaS (footnote 1). Ultimately cloud computing is a transformation driven by several key technological shifts bringing about new ways to achieve old goals and enabling some new solution categories. It's a computing transformation that is only just beginning.

Cloud computing is best understood as a "phase shift" or industry-wide disruption, emerging from combinations of a small number of key technological factors. To explain, I'll use Professor W. Brian Arthur's framework from "The Nature of Technology". Arthur is a chaos scientist/economist noted for his seminal works "studying the impacts of positive feedback or increasing returns in economies, and how these increasing returns magnify small, random occurrences in the market place." (Wikipedia) These principles are especially significant in technology-specific industries. Arthur's most recent work "The Nature of Technology" looks at how technology changes over time; how it 'evolves'. Here's a small (paraphrased) portion of his framework.

Technology: includes physical devices, processes, organizational structures. Technologies are overwhelmingly made up of other technologies as sub-components. The PC, for example, has various modular pieces of hardwire that are technologies in and of themselves, such as power supplies, hard drives, graphics cards, CPU, etc. Each of these again can be considered as having sub-components - less easily swapped, but sub-components (technologies) nonetheless that can be replaced at the design time (such as a new bus architecture for a CPU, etc).

Domains: Technologies can be thought of as occurring in groups or domains - electronic, quantum, etc. This is related to the leveraging of common phenomena, but also to the nature of human specialization. Self similar types of components will be clustered. Some examples of this might be car mechanic, or computer engineer, or robotics engineer. Generally speaking technologies will be created from components that arise from skills/knowledge in a given domain.

Technological change: does not occur like animal evolution - with random changes to the chromosome or by random combinations of pairs of technology characteristics. Rather, engineers or innovators will be aiming to achieve some goal and to improve the state of the art. Much of this change comes about by steady improvement in the components making up a given technology.

Rebasing: Rapid change (Sometimes called disruptive change) occurs when solutions for a given problem are radically improved by replacing components of a technology with components from an entirely different domain. One example from computing is the way that the mainframe was replaced by the micro-computer. Relatively quickly the whole world of IT underwent a major change in cost, complexity and capability. Similarly, the airplane was transformed by the jet engine, the camera by digital recording.

Cloud Computing Drivers

Cloud computing fits the definition of rebasing described by Arthur. A number of major shifts (technology rebasing) are impacting the world of computing simultaneously. These include:

The Internet

Commoditization

Virtualization (all flavors)

Let's look at these in turn.

The Internet: we're still seeing the impact of the internet rippling through our computing landscape. Adapting to computing shifts can take time, and require levels of familiarity and trust to be built, as well as understanding the broader opportunities that arise. Internet cost models, architectures, and business models are becoming understood, but are still rapidly evolving. The ubiquity of the Internet is the major driver for cloud computing.

Commoditization: is part of the natural process of the technology. In this case, two major commoditization factors affect cloud.

IT as a business commodity: IT is no longer a business advantage, but a cost of entry. In other words, "IT doesn't matter" (Nicholas Carr (footnote 2)) Whether this is absolutely true is very arguable. However there is no argument that business IT is a maturing industry. In such a world, competition moves toward doing the same old things, but more efficiently. For example Software as a Service, by and large, is about addressing known jobs (such as sales force automation) with some changes in capability, flexibility and price. (Of course there are exceptions.)

The x86/Windows monoculture: Intel and Microsoft have driven an extremely successful ecosystem of high volume, low cost chips and computers that have enabled an enormous part of our computing world today. "Monoculture produces great yields by utilizing plants' abilities to maximize growth under less pressure from other species and more uniform plant structure" Wikipedia. Monocultures are also susceptible to shocks. So the right (or wrong) push can have a huge impact across the whole monoculture. That is to say, the ubiquity of a given architecture raises the potential impact of certain technological innovations.

Virtualization: including desktop virtualization, presentation virtualization, application virtualization, storage virtualization, server virtualization and many more. These technologies provide a way to separate one "level" of an environment from another; they provide an 'abstraction' layer. Abstraction and virtualization is a consistent theme through the history of computing - think about virtual memory, virtual users (in which each user appears to have a whole computer), virtual disks, and many, many more. While none of today's batch of virtualization is strictly new, the fact that they are being rapidly adopted by the (monoculture) market is very telling.

Together these factors lead to a dramatic re-basing of our computing environment, at an unprecedented scale. While cloud computing is the term du jour, it is representative of a shift in all of our computing toolkits.

Cloud is an ephemeral term, representative of a particular point in a larger scale rebasing of Information Technology to fully take advantage of the global Internet, a primed state of commoditization, and the broad adoption of a broad range of virtualization technologies.

Understand the underlying trends, but leverage the technologies

To anyone who makes it though this large blog post, I'd love to hear what you think,
Michael
__
Dr Michael Harries, Senior Director Strategy, Citrix Labs
@michaelharries

NOTES
1. This is seen in the overlapping and merging of these categories (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS), in the fact that much is missed (Desktop, Storage, Network, etc). Far more appropriate to move to terminology like 'software', 'platform' and 'infrastructure'.
2. It's not surprising that Nicholas Carr followed "Does IT Matter" with his cloud book "The Big Switch", given that the commoditization of IT is such a significant driver for "cloud".

—

Finally, here's a great quote on Complexity Theory from W Brian Arthur:

"Complexity theory is really a movement of the sciences. Standard sciences tend to see the world as mechanistic. That sort of science puts things under a finer and finer microscope. In biology the investigations go from classifying organisms to functions of organisms, then organs themselves, then cells, and then organelles, right down to protein and enzymes, metabolic pathways, and DNA. This is finer and finer reductionist thinking. The movement that started complexity looks in the other direction. It's asking, how do things assemble themselves? How do patterns emerge from these interacting elements? Complexity is looking at interacting elements and asking how they form patterns and how the patterns unfold. It's important to point out that the patterns may never be finished. They're open-ended. In standard science this hit some things that most scientists have a negative reaction to. Science doesn't like perpetual novelty."

Extract from Wikipedia

via community.citrix.com

This is relatively dense, but the message is simple. All that we are hearing with the word 'cloud' in it, is merely a shorthand for a particular point in the evolution of the Internet combined with a firestorm of virtualization technologies giving us a rapid shift in what's practical for mainstream adoption of IT.

Ada Lovelace, the story - Prezi - for schools (and the rest of us) - created by @andragy - Happy #ald10

2010-03-25T12:04:00.009+11:00

Ada Lovelace (for schools) on Prezi

** I recommend following the link so that Prezi can be viewed at full resolution **

Congratulations @andragy on this very cool, very fun Ada Lovelace Presi for Ada Lovelace day. Featured on http://findingada.com.

Highly recommended reading for all. Great reviews globally. As some in the twitter space said, "with comixes"

Here's to more women in IT and tech.

Michael

Hyperreality or cyberspace - real social media experts (philosophers) (essay from @andragy)

2010-03-25T12:04:00.007+11:00

via scribd.com

"Baudrillard's hyperreality is not a map at all, but a participative process that may shape us, or may allow us to shape our surroundings. There is no other controller. Governance is our own hands but is set to mass agendas. The cybernetic loop has closed on postcapitalist society and cyberspace."

This is dense, but well worth the read. This is also fascinating material to consider in greater depth. It provides a perspective well beyond the technological utopian view that pervades so very much of our industry.

(I also love the perspective of our society as a cybernetic loop -- it fits very well with the dynamics of the IT industry, and provides an interesting counter-perspective on notions of 'the singularity', suggesting that many elements of 'merging with the machine' are already at hand.)

The Mediator Pattern for Desktop and App Virtualization » copy of my Citrix Community post

2010-03-25T12:04:00.005+11:00

15 Mar 2010 10:47 PM EDT

The Mediator Pattern for Desktop and App Virtualization

[ Tags: xendesktop , xenapp , receiver , team-citrix-labs ]

posted by Michael Harries

What does a pattern mean to you?

The modern software idea of Design Patterns comes from work done building out a language of patterns for architects. This idea has been a profound influencer of software design approaches and was pioneered by the 'Gang of Four'.

Pattern thinking has also been applied to architecture, and to broader notions of IT design and management. For example "Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management , Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children". This book provides actionable patterns for treating IT like a business (and is highly recommended).

I would like to propose an important pattern that sits between enterprise architecture and application architecture for virtual desktops and virtual applications.

MOTIVATION: In today's era of rapid change and consumerization all users have growing expectations from their enterprise computing systems. This raised expectation is generally portrayed as affecting only end users, but the reality is that these users include the business owner (aka The guy who pays the IT bills). This raised business expectation is much like when the microcomputer revolution hit mainframe/mini IT shops (and it was equally tempting for business to 'go around' IT - at the time by purchasing PCs, now by moving to SaaS). We have an environment with ever higher expectations of IT.

At the same time there are ever more desktop and hand-held device types. We are amidst a transition from a period of relative end-point homogeneity (Windows, Windows and Windows) to a period with multiple desktop environments (increases in Macs and Linux) and where most internet access will occur from a heterogeneous range of hand held mobile devices. This is a new game, a new paradigm, and one that is not going away any time soon. (I've talked about this elsewhere).

IT is facing dual challenges of increased agility expectations and increased device heterogeneity. This is a problem because traditional end-point management leads to 'installation inertia'. That is, each carefully crafted desktop image or application install becomes yet another point that must be rebuilt with every application or architectural change. Like a poorly lubricated engine, the whole system is impaired and in many cases can all but grind to a halt. This friction costs you, and your company, money every day.

(Applicator virtualization and desktop virtualization in all its variants (e.g. Flexcast) act to reduce this friction. This is a key attribute of all types of virtualization - they reduce the friction, the inter-linkages, between layers.)

The Desktop and App Virtualization Mediator Pattern

THE PATTERN: So, to come back to the notion of patterns ... In traditional software pattern terminology, there is a pattern called a mediator. This pattern acts as a way to manage communication between large numbers of frequently changing objects. The idea is that by having a module, or program that acts as a connector between these different components - it avoids propagating changes from one object through all others it touches by isolating the changes in the meditation object.

This is exactly what we achieve with desktop and application virtualization. Changes can occur in any application without affecting end user devices. At the same time end user devices can be completely changed without affecting the applications. Hence, the Desktop and Application Virtualization Mediator Pattern is the right way to manage the device/application nexus in your IT infrastructure. It avoids the installed application inertia trap. It reduces friction and increases your Enterprise Architecture agility.

WRAP: This pattern fits between enterprise architecture and application architecture and it matters. (Hat tip to Michael Keen who has been talking enterprise architecture/application architecture as strategy for some time.)

Let me know what you think.

via community.citrix.com

There seems to be a great deal of 'design pattern' books on the market, I thought it would be interesting to look at how they could be used to motivate the use of a desktop/application virtualization strategy.

The future of mobile devices, the internet, and us

2010-03-25T12:04:00.003+11:00

via slideshare.net

Great Danah Boyd Interview (at SxSW) - realities of digital native, privacy and location

2010-03-25T12:04:00.001+11:00

via blog.pepsicozeitgeist.com

Great interview with Dana Boyd on her work at Microsoft Research - nice primer on realities of the web/social net for the "digital native", and a couple of pointers on how location changes a lot of social games. If you prefer text, check out her articles at http://www.danah.org/.>