Apple has announced that soon we will have access to one of the most missed abilities on the iPhone: cut and paste. I was shocked when the iPhone debuted two summers ago without the ability to copy and paste information at all. It has taken a long time for Apple to correct this issue, but now it seems that we will be able to cut, copy, and paste information between applications soon.

Add to that the ability to search the entire iPhone like the computer it actually is, and I am super happy now. Yeah!

Here is a short list of what the iPhone is getting in this upcoming release:

• Search your iPhone with Spotlight (Cool, usable, and geek-sheik)
• New home screen to the left of the first screen
• Cut, copy, and paste (Gimme now!)
• Send photos, contacts, audio files, and location via MMS
• Push notifications/background running applications (FINALLY!)
• Read and compose email and text messages in landscape
• Tethering your iPhone to a computer to offer Internet connectivity from the phone (Scott can buy an iPhone now.)

This is a list of some items I want for iPhone 3.1:

• I need to store documents on the iPhone using iTunes, not an application.
• Ability to us a full keyboard if I want.
• I want to be able to rearrange the applications in iTunes. This is a no-brainer!

Like I said before, I really don’t see it as a phone… I know, Apple went to all this effort to convince us that it is a phone, but so what? I mean, a Mercedes Benz is a car, but, more than a car, right?

While the iPhone has been in the boardroom for a long time, this release will take the it into the hallways of corporate America. Next we need to see Apple spread the iPhone love to a few other carriers to break the AT&T tax that we all have to pay today.

Matt Williamson
@mattwilliamson

1. COMMUNICATING THE MESSAGE – The Internet with its plethora of social media and communication tools provides an almost free method for communicating the message of the importance of sustainability. The sad reality is that until a shortage, or lack of resources impacts people personally, they are not motivated to do much about the issue. This sets up a tragic situation where the people that have resources to help, are also the most likely to have no personal struggle with sustainability. The people that are most personally impacted are the least likely to have the resources to change things. In order to really create a worldwide movement that might actually get people to care about the long term effects, we have to paint the picture clearly to people with resources. This can be accomplished by leveraging the Internets capability to distribute video and pictures through either user generated content sites like YouTube, or through creating media elements that can be distributed organically through email and Twitter. The Internet has proven to be a powerful force for communicating messages at no cost, and to millions of people. We have never before in history had this capability and it must be used to promote environmental awareness.

2. USING THE INTERNET AS A TOOL TO MONITOR RESOURCES – At its heart, the Web is a transport vehicle for data. When combined with rules based software systems, the Internet can be used to help us better manage the resources we have in better ways. Already today there are many organizations that have monitoring stations around the globe that are using satellite technologies and the Internet to monitor changes in the environment. It is possible to simply go to a Website and monitor changes in the polar icecap in real time. But what if we took this a step further and brought it down to the individual level? We have been toying with the concept of smart homes for years – homes that contain appliances and HVAC that is completely Internet enabled. We also have cars that have computers built in that monitor thousands of pieces of performance – including emissions. With very little effort, we could build a Web-based tool that would monitor our vehicles and homes for the environmental impact and allow us to set rules and notifications when usage is our of tolerance, or when efficiencies could be found. It would be so simple to Internet enable the digital thermostats that many of us have now so that we could control the settings from our cell phone and could optimize resource usage based on weather changes. And how useful would it be for your car to tell you that it is not running efficiently instead of waiting until something breaks before we know that we have been wasting fuel for months.

3. THE INTERNET AND WHITE-COLLAR LEAN – Information technology in general, when added to the communications power of the Internet creates a powerful tool kit for improving efficiency in the white-collar organization. Much like the Lean Manufacturing paradigm that has dramatically improved the efficiency of the manufacturing process (and environmental impact), White-Collar Lean can get rid of huge areas of waste in organizations. When a paper-based process is rebuilt to be paperless, we save millions of trees, the resources to create, handle and then destroy the paper. The reality is we have wonderful tools for truly going paperless with every transaction, yet many organizations just continue to do things the way they always have. The global impact that could be improved by creating electronic workflows would not only save all the physical resources, but would also lower the amount of people needed to support those processes. This in turn allows this staff to be repurposed on more valuable tasks like innovating new products, or to simply be more productive which will lower the FTE’s for many organizations.

4. USING THE INTERNET TO OFFSET THE NEGATIVE IMPACTS OF TRAVEL – As the use of fossil fuels becomes more expensive and damaging to the environment, we are also being handed tools that are enabling our ability to communicate “face to face” in very inexpensive ways. Tools like Skype, WebEx and NetMeeting allow users to have meetings over the Internet in place of getting in a car to drive, or jumping on a plane to fly. There are two specific areas that need to be leveraged in order to lower the carbon footprint of ones career.

­­a. The Virtual Workplace – For centuries, work had to be performed on location because there simply was no way to manufacture, farm, or construct thing any other way. Over the last few decades, we have moved more and more to a knowledge economy that simply does not require people to be at a specific location in order to do a task. Yet we continue to build huge office buildings that we require millions of people to attend so that they can all work at a computer, or talk on the phone. The basis for this is that we must have a team all in the same location so they can more easily be managed and so that they can have a sense of community and culture. If we will simply become more enlightened about building virtual teams that can work from home for the most part, we could dramatically impact the carbon footprint of a worker by lowering the amount of miles they have to drive, and the resources needed to support them in a building. Many companies are making progress in this area and learning that they can provide a very positive impact on the bottom line of the financial results as well. It is time for organizations to make a concerted effort to identify all the areas that could be staffed by people that do not have to attend an office from 8 to 5 each and every day.

b. The Virtual Meeting – Videoconferencing is continually improving on both the quality of the experience and the price. Companies like Cisco are now providing high end systems that mimic an in person experience to a large degree. There are even a few startups that are experimenting with holographic displays that have been used to allow keynote speakers to give speeches to a large audience as if they were standing behind the podium. The reality is that we have the technology to simulate a meeting to a large degree, we just struggle with using as much as we can because we have centuries of inertia that tell us we need to be there in person to have the proper experience. This is starting really change as the Millennial Generation is getting into the workplace because they have grown up using tools like Skype, and video instant messaging to talk (and see) their friends over the Internet for free. They also are perfectly comfortable holding meetings in a virtual world like Second Life using avatars to represent them at the meetings. Note that IBM is currently leading organizations in the effort to use Second Life as more inexpensive and environmentally friendly way to meet with people from multiple countries at one time.

Science fiction writers have long written about the concepts mentioned above. This is just a sign pointing towards how obvious it is that we will one day learn to leverage our technology know-how to lower our impacts on the environment. The real questions is whether we are enlightened enough to be proactive about it, or whether we will wait until the resources become scarce before we use the tools that are right in front of us…

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com

The Cloud used to be reserved for large corporations storing their data in far removed locations, buying computer time from IBM or Sun, or simply  using off-site printers to avoid shipping costs when moving printed materials around the country.

But now, the difference is this: the Cloud has expanded into the suburbs.  The Cloud has become soccer-moms on Blackberrys or iPhones, the Cloud is 6th grade kids using cell phones to text classmates during a basketball game, it is photo sharing sites, wikis about every topic in the universe, and more.

So now that the Cloud is coming to your house.  For instance, I don’t really keep many of my photos on my laptop.  Why would I when I can hit Google’s Picasa photo sharing service from my phone, my laptop, or any other computer on the Internet?  Why waste the storage on my laptop when they are a click away.  If they are on the Internet, doesn’t that mean that they are on my computer too? Sure seems like it.

So how is the Crowd also the Cloud?  Simple, as companies and online applications push computing into the Cloud, they are also pushing it into the Crowd, so that humans are doing the work that applications either fail at, or aren’t good enought at yet.

For instance, Amazon has a tool called the Mechanical Turk that is a perfect example of this. Amazon’s tag line for this service is ‘Artificial Artificial Intelligence’ – that makes me smile.  The basic idea is this: companies or individuals solicit for individuals to complete Human Intelligence Tasks, called HITs.

I signed up complete a HIT that asks for me to make a list of cookbooks on a site.  I complete the list of ten cookbooks that I use and recommend, and they I get paid $0.07 USD.  Not much, but what if it takes me 15 minutes to complete this task and then I move on to another, wash, rinse and repeat.

What I take away from this isn’t that Amazon is helping people make a little money by doing tasks that computers aren’t good at, but rather that Amazon has the ability to learn from all of these tasks.  If Amazon is paying attention to the results, then Amazon can learn to complete the tasks one day on its own.

So imagine this: your teenager signs up on the Mechanical Turk to make some extra money on weekends. She takes her laptop to the coffee shop, grabs a venti chai, and logs in to get some HITS.  In a few hours she has complete 20 and made ten bucks.  Before the end of the days she has made enough to buy the shirt she wanted.  But, more than that, she has added to the cloud of human intelligence, she has increased the knowledge on the Internet.

We are the Cloud.

Product Review

I take my MacBook Pro every where I go.  I work out of a shared office when not at home, and I am not found of the flat-laptop-on-the-desk feel, so I got an Incline Pro for when I travel.  It is small enough to fit in my laptop bag, super light weight, and yet, very sturdy.  Somehow it manages to hold the MBP at the right angle for my typing and viewing. (Before I found this my neck was killing me on a daily basis.)

The Incline Pro looks like it was designed exclusively for the MacBook, and it was.  It has a sleek silver anodized metal with a very open frame.  One of the things I like most about the little laptop stand is that it keeps my computer much, much cooler.  I usually have a lot of apps open at any given time.  iTunes, Quicktime, Safari, Firefox and Entoruage are always open, with Adium and my development environment running too… makes for a warm laptop.

I work with a large group of Mac users and so far every one of them has wanted to steal this thing from me.  Instead of letting them take my precious, I make them all go to the online store and order one.  Problem solved.

Matt Williamson
@mattwilliamson

Please understand that I normally vote Republican, so am no fan of big government, or of even the the Democratic party, however, I am overjoyed that someone in our leadership understands the economic importance of the government being involved in providing fast bandwidth.  I have long wondered how our leaders could not equate bandwidth to the power system, or highway system – both of which they were more than willing to partially fund.  Not only do faster speed improve the overall productivity of the nation by saving millions of hours of wasted time, it also allows developers to build applications with new capabilities that simply cannot exist at slow speeds.

What a tragedy it would be if the U.S. were to continue to be the innovation leader on planet Earth, yet to lose the overall game because we did not even implement our own innovations as well as others!  Yet this is the situation that is coming true.  It is not a stretch to say that Japan, South Korea and soon China will take technology invented in the U.S. and will prosper with it better/faster than we will.  For example, mobile technology.  I read not long ago that the Japanese make purchases over their mobile devices at a rate 10 times higher than the U.S.  This is not a trend we want to see continue, so I am happy to see Washington kill two birds with one stone in creating jobs and helping the economy by driving improved technology infrastructure.

President-elect Obama gets props from me today…

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com

Voluntary vs. Involuntary…  There are sites that ask people to volunteer their time to help their fellow man.  Wikipedia is a good example of this, as is Google asking volunteers to build help videos for youtube.com.  Google is the master of asking the herd to do work on their behalf as a way to get things done without cost to them.  In fact, they are also a good example of crossing over the line to the Involuntary.  They build an image indexing game that some people fail to recognize as a scheme to index images by leveraging the brain power of the people playing the game.

Social vs. Commercial – Yahoo Answers is a great example of a site where the community of users is crowdsourced to provide the underlying product – which is advice.  Just ask any question and the community at large will give you an answer. On the commercial side of this same model is Name This.  This site pays you to offer your advice to companies trying to develop brand and company names.  I have a friend that has struck gold a few times when his names were accepted.  I think he is up to $90 in income at this point.

Rewarded vs. Unrewarded – Innocentive is a site that allows companies to post problems that they need solved with a specific bounty that can be earned if someone has a solution.  Some of these problems have $1,000 bounties and there is on that is offering a cool $1 million. On the flip side is Dell Ideastorm, and mystarbucksidea, whose sole purpose is to provide a place for customers to give product advice with no reward other than maybe getting these large organizations to improve their products.  In other words, free market resource leveraging the herd.

Crowdsourcing is a powerful undertow on the Internet.  We are seeing just the tip of what will become a very large iceberg.  As time goes on, more and more organizations will clue into the fact that with over 1.5 billion people on the Internet (and growing) there are many people available to get things done.  It is a mistake to ignore this concept – especially in a tough economic market when getting work done on the cheap can pay big dividends.  So the next time you are tempted to point to the printing press as some monumental event in history (which it was,) try using the Internet and its many aspects instead.  When we look back decades from now, we will surely know that the Web dwarfed the printing press as an enabler, if nothing else than because it allowed for the crowdsourcing of millions of people with very little effort.  Not even Stalin was able to pull that off and survive it.

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com

This quote is becoming particularly important as we enter a world with many new types of communication forms. The whole Twitter, Yammer, etc. revolution is creating an instant ability to send content and information across the Earth in real time. Add to that sites like Qik and you have the additional ability to send live video as well. Last week was the first time that I have really seen Twitter and Qik be used in a way that was leveraged by the mainstream media. CNN was providing live coverage of the Mumbai drama in India and as the hotel was under siege, guests that were trapped inside were using these online tools to communicate in real time with friends, family and CNN. At one point, the CNN correspondent had to tell them to stop sending detailed information about where they were in the hotel so that the infiltrators would not be able to see on TV where they were hiding. Contrast that to Nazi Germany just 50 some odd years ago where millions of women and children were killed and people in the U.S. were completely unaware. Life is now and forever changed, because never again will news happen that the rest of the world does not get a chance to be aware of, and share.  All without the filtering system of the media, or the government.  (*** Except in China I suppose.)

These new forms of communication are not just for personal information distribution…  New capabilities to share content in real time can be used to tighten customer relationships – such as the CEO of Zappos shoes using Twitter to communicate in real time with thousands of customers that follow him. If you click on that link, notice that there are almost 30,000 people following him now. On a smaller scale, these new tools can help family members stay in close touch with each other even when separated.  And on the macro scale, they shine a light into the dark areas where evil used to hide.  We have enabled content to be created and to flow so quickly, and inexpensively that information now moves at the speed of thought.  This is simply a new dynamic in the world, and one that is quietly changing dynamics that most people just do not recognize at this point.

So back to the statement that that content is the new democracy.  When information is able to flow in real time, to people everywhere, for free, it creates a world where the consumers of the content get to judge the value.  Anyone can create content, and everyone can judge it for it’s worth by viewing it and possibly passing it on.  This is inherently a democratic process because no one is controlling it.  For those of us that love the free enterprise concept, and freedom in general, we should be overjoyed that the Internet has liberated content to flow so freely.  So the next time someone asks you if you use Twitter, don’t turn your nose up and assume it a tool that only the young generations use.  Take a few minutes and actually see the tool for what it is… Yet another weapon in the war on the havoc that lack of information, or misinformation can cause.  Then open you mind to the fact that services like Twitter are just a beginning step towards real time information that flows for free to anyone that cares to read it.

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com

From the editor:
We want to know, do you Twitter?  If you do, add a comment to this post with your Twitter username, and we will create a page to list all of you.  Technology Story readers are on the cutting edge of enterprise IT, marketing, finance and management; growing this community could help you in ways you cannot yet imagine.

Last weekend on Twitter, I saw a few tweets where a friend had lost a file, and try as she might, she could not find it on her machine, it was simply gone.  There were lots of replies to her about the benefits of Apple’s Time Capsule and the Time Machine application, but she wasn’t on the Mac, so she was lost.  There wasn’t a backup of the file made yet by her OS, she hadn’t emailed it to anyone yet, so it was just gone.  (I use Gmail as a file backup service all of the time – don’t you?)  That made me wonder about how many files are lost or damaged everyday, so I took an informal poll, and I was amazed how many people told me about their file woes.

A few days after that I was in the office where my developers work and I found myself standing at a whiteboard talking to some of them.  I asked them what value they would place on a service designed to upload their files to a cloud based storage service.  They asked for more information — so I described the service as if I was already using it.

I told them that the application would take any directories that they selected, and copy them to the net.  Then it would take the files in those directories and copy them up too, as they edited them, keeping a repository of the files in a chronological fashion, just in case they needed one from yesterday, before they made a bunch of changes that they now regretted.  Then they could retrieve these files from any computer connected to the Internet, including smartphones, and Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs).

They all agreed that they would pay for it.  Especially if it was stored somewhere they trusted, like maybe Amazon’s S3, with Salesforce’s Force.com, or in the Google cloud.

There are products out there today that are doing this for us.  Box, iBackup, iDrive and Mozy are all doing it on the consumer side, while corporations like Barracuda Networks, Intronis, and Symantec are just a few who run reputable services.  So why hasn’t an operating system maker done this yet?  Why hasn’t an OS just incorporated this as a part of the operating system?  Are they gun-shy from the Microsoft lawsuits of the 1990s?

Someone will have to move past this.  Perhaps Apple has this in mind with their me.com platform?  Microsoft is building a credible cloud computing system in Azure, maybe we will see some of this technology spill into Windows 7?  Is Google prepping an operating system built around Android?  Any of these companies are capable of sweeping modern OSes into the next generation.  Think OS 2.0.

Printing In The Cloud

While I have written about products here before, I haven’t really delved into the product review genre before.  But this time I wanted to share more that a passing glance at a little bit of technology that gets it right.  This week I finally made the last leap into the Wi-Fi world at home, with a Wi-Fi enabled printer.  I know, it is horribly disheartening for you knowing that until just this week I was still tethered to a printer at home, but no more.

I unpacked the Epson Workforce 600 printer with one of my daughters, and I let her help me through the setup.  It was easy and fast.  I set it up on my Macbook and on the iMac as well.  Printed some photos and a rather hefty PDF that I needed to scribble notes on.

I was impressed with the speed of the prints, the clarity, the vibrant colors, and the relative quiet too.  It gives me a copier, fax machine and scanner with the printer —  so it is going to fulfill all of my homeoffice needs.  I will let you hit the link below for a full list of the capabilities that the Workforce 600 boasts, but one thing I want to focus on is photo printing.

I told the kids that I would let them print a few photos, so we found the ones we wanted in iPhoto, and in a few seconds the kids had the pix they wanted.  Perfect.

As I was sitting on the couch, printing a file, when I had another idea.  When my family comes out to the house they usually bring their laptops.  (We are a fairly connected bunch of people.)  They all have good digital cameras, digital video cameras and we all put those images on the Internet at various sites.  So I wondered: how long until technology will get us to a point where just walking into a house with a Wi-Fi enabled printer and you have access to it.  No install of drivers, no configuration; just seamless connectivity. Soon I think, soon.

Links:

• For more information about the Epson WorkForce 600, please click here.

Matt Williamson
twitter.com/mattwilliamson

As we sit here today, Microsoft is under heavy pressure from companies that are delivering software in the SaaS model, open source products, and rivals like Google who want to take away whole pieces of Microsoft’s pie.  In order to best defend their territory, Microsoft is not working to introduce new layers of products that can help companies better manage cloud computing environments.  I guess this is their, “if we can’t beat them, let’s join them” approach to innovation.  They have announced a new platform call Azure that will bundle up lots of new capabilities for customers that want to stay with Microsoft as a provider of all forms of digital plumbing.  Here is your warning, the following is from the Microsoft site so it is a bit difficult to digest…

“The Azure™ Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The Azure Services Platform provides a range of functionality to build applications that span from consumer web to enterprise scenarios and includes a cloud operating system and a set of developer services. Fully interoperable through the support of industry standards and web protocols such as REST and SOAP, you can use the Azure services individually or together, either to build new applications or to extend existing ones.”

If that did not make much sense to you, just understand that the team at Microsoft is trying to move from a product world, to a services and product world.  They realize that they will no longer be able to sell Office and Windows in shrink wrapped packages and succeed.  They will have to move into being a cloud based supplier – even on their data center products.  This transition will make or break this stalwart company and although it will not be easy for them, I never bet against them either.  Remember, many people laughed when they got into the game box market and I have observed that the Xbox 360 is doing pretty well these days.

I feel like I should go further and tell you about Microsoft’s “Mesh” platform as well,  but that would make things even more confusing.  In a way, I feel bad for them because they are trying to do the right things, but they live in a complicated world that forces them to always be creating new vocabulary and spin on their specific ways of doing what the market is already dictating.  So let’s settle on this for you to watch…  Microsoft has now committed to a new direction of providing services and platforms as a major revenue source.  Keep you eyes on Mesh, Azure, and Office Live because they normally do not get it right on the first try, but they always get it right on the second or third…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

On the Mobile Internet Device front, I personally think that Amazon and Apple could corner the MID market overnight with a Kindle built upon the same OS as the iPhone.  The Kindle is too large to replace the iPhone, G1 or any other smart-phone, but Amazon could offer us the larger screen we want for web browsing, Wi-Fi connectivity, and a cellular phone.  Not to mention the idea that the titles bought for the Kindle could come from the iTunes store or Amazon, then be stored inside the Amazon cloud for when you need more space on the Kindle device.  This is a wishful stretch, I know, but it is a nice thought.  Not to mention all of the other problems that would stand in the way of these two companies working together, like the Amazon MP3 store, and Apple’s long-term goals of cloud-based computing as well.

There has been some movement in taking the virtual world platform Second Life to the mobile market.  Both Sun and Samsung have demonstrated working applications of the online world in the past, but just last month Vollee released a Second Life client for the Nokia N96 3G phone.  This ties into the idea that our online world is coming closer and closer into synch with our real life persona.

If you have ever spent any time in the Google Earth application, you might have seen the 3D buildings inside the application.  To the left, I have included a screen captured image of downtown Denver, Colorado.  Notice anything peculiar about the 3D building?  They have accurate images of their exteriors!  People went out and built factual representations of those structures, right down to the images on the exterior walls.  The current problem is that there are no interiors within the Google Earth application.  So if you office on the 38th floor of a building in your downtown metro, too bad… people will never see your logo in that area.  Google Earth has no way to get someone into a building.  Oh wait, Google bought an in-game advertising company called Adscape almost two years ago, and has recently been rumored to be in talks with Valve, maker of fanboy favorite Half-Life.  So why don’t we just assume that Google is serious on the virtual words front? And we already know that Google is serious about mobile.

Lastly, I want to consider the paradigm of the Three Screens.  It all began on the all mighty television screen.  Content was created for that screen in abundance, and still is, but then something happened.  The Internet sprang forth the second screen, the computer screen, and for a long time we were content with those two screens. Then we wanted a convergence of the content between screens one and two, and so we had that, too.  Then the the mobile phone market gave us faster download speeds and more power processors — so now we want that same content there, too.

Only AT&T has made a concerted effort to develop a Three Screens strategy so far.  The rest of the providers seem to be attacking on disconcerted fronts, under leadership of various offices and without a noticeable strategy.  If you have seen some good examples of a combined Internet, television, and mobile content delivery mechanism, share it with me in the comments below.

By the way, if you are not already on Twitter, start tonight.  If you are in the twitterverse, follow me here, and also follow Amazon MP3 for some really great music deals.  Amazon is using marketing on Twitter to huge benefit, is your company?

Links of Interest:

• Google Earth
• Second Life
• Twinity
• Intel Mobile Internet Devices
• Vollee
• Amazon MP3

Matt Williamson
twitter.com/mattwilliamson
matt@technologystory.com

In fact, remember that CEO I mentioned a bit ago? His company is high technology as well, and it happens to be sitting in downtown OKC.  DocSoft is a search company that specializes in indexing streams of audio or video and offering closed captioning in real-time.

You take that to its next logical step and suddenly you have an agent that could be dropped into a widget on any web site. Give that agent access to your web cam and microphone and you could have your conversations indexed as you speak.  The agent hears that you are talking about a movie you saw in 1997, but you forget the name, so the agent opens a conversation with IMDB and sends that site bits of information from your conversation:

1997, actor name, storyline

Then IMDB replies with a list that meets the criteria your agent has sent, and the widget displays that list for you in a bubble on your screen.

That seems far-fetched doesn’t it?  It isn’t.  Ray Kurzweil is already demonstrating real-time translation between languages.  You can watch a video of this by following the link at the end of this article.  If we are there, then offering for an agent to run known programs, or simple scripts, is not that far behind.

Take Ubiquity for example. (Ubiquity is related to Enso, which I wrote about back in January, in that they are written by the same team, just at different companies.)  Ubiquity is not an application that you install on your computer, but rather an addon that you install into your web browser.  Ubiquity offers you an unending array of useful helpers that can make your Internet experience make more sense in many ways.  You find a term you wonder about… Simple… just highlight it and let Ubiquity define it or offer search results for it. But honestly, that isn’t why Ubiquity makes me happy.  What really makes me happy about Ubiquity is that someone could take it and write a real agent on it.

For instance, if I wanted Ubiquity to check my emails for me and then send a text to my phone when someone special emails me, it could do that.  If I wanted Ubiquity to monitor blogs I select for keywords, and then build a page to display those on a chronological basis, it could do that.  (I think.)

Anyway, all of this is to say that technology is rapidly approaching something we can’t even imagine.  I cannot wait.

Interesting Links:

• Ray Kurzweil video on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVup7Xd4aAs
• Ubiquity by Mozilla http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Matt Williamson
twitter: twitter.com/mattwilliamson
email: matt@technologystory.com

Last week during the VP debate, Current and Twitter held Hack the Debate II, and it looks like it was a great success.  During a wide ranging debate, topic after topic brought out tweets from the Internet.  To be a part of the conversation you only need to have a Twitter account and send your message with the ‘#current’ included in the body of the text.  It is a chance to communicate not only with people who are following you on twitter.com, but with a larger audience following the debate and participating in the online event.  Though I have seen ESPN do this with text messages during really boring Thursday night college football, this is the first time I have seen it executed on such a massive scale and in this format.  It makes me wonder what we will come to expect from our media.  Will we soon have movie theaters offering showings of movies where we can all comment on the scene in real time, and have it plastered on the movie screen?  That would be fun.

This technology is breaking down walls and offering voices to the common man.  You know, you don’t have to live in the United States to have a Twitter account, so anyone in the world can comment on the debate next Tuesday night.  There are a million reasons why this is both amazing and scary at the same time.  Sure, a wacko group of either left-wing or right-wing militants could storm the Twitter site, slam the #current discussion, and ruin it for us all; but the Internet has a way of addressing stuff like that all of its own.

Video snippets from the first two Hack the Debate events:

• Hack the Debate video clip : http://current.com/items/89344298_hack_the_debate
• Hack the Debate II video clip: http://current.com/items/89366256_hack_the_debate_2_palin_biden

This article isn’t really just about the presidential debate, it is about the technology that is augmenting what the debate is for us all.  I cannot even imagine what the next debates will be like in another 4 years.  Will we all be watching those debates on our Kindles and across a myriad of Google Android powered devices?  You don’t really think that Google wrote Android to only run your cell phone do you?

In fact, it would take almost nothing for Amazon to drop the software in the Kindle and turn it into a cell phone, a media player, and an Internet television.  Imagine holding in your hand a smallish tablet with a mobile phone, television and web browser on the screen, all at once.  You can see the debate between the two presidential hopefuls, there are tweets flying all over the screen.  Your phone app chirps at you and suddenly your brother’s face is on the screen too, streaming in beside the debate.  Yep, all doable.

Matt
twitter.com/mattwiliamson

I have been wanting to write this article for months so today is the day…  As I follow the election campaigning and hear all the issues addressed, I am amazed that once again, we have candidates that seem to only deal with whatever the hot topic is of the day.  If the economy is in the doldrums, we here about fixing that.  If we are stuck in a war, we here about resolutions.  We always and forever seem to hear about “change” in each election.  As if this is some magic word that is going to make us all rush to vote for yet the next leader that will get to Washington and run into an impenetrable wall of inertia.  I am actually sad that neither candidate really offers a deep agenda to support the concept of change.  Alas, I am not a politico, but just a technology guy so I will only deal with my little corner of desired change – that being my desire to see to new and dramatic structuring of a technology oversight position on the cabinet.  We added a person for national security, why not to oversee technology expansion?

A cabinet level CTO position would be perfect in order to assure that the US does not fall behind other countries in the use, and support, of the most important utility invented in the last 30 years.  I will submit that running water, and electricity are probably more important, but certainly the country’s technology infrastructure is third.  Depending on whose statistics you believe, we are either 12th or 21st in the world with high speed bandwidth penetration and speed.  We are way behind Japan and a few other Asian nations with wireless capabilities and handheld device usage.  China has just passed us with the total number of citizens using the Internet.  This was bound to happen because of their scale, but should they also have faster access than us?  And what will it mean that there are more Chinese able to use the Internet as a tool to succeed in the business arena? Or to have the ability to educate themselves to a higher degree than our citizens?  Sure, we have the majority of the powerful software and hardware companies based in the US economy, but all that means is that we are the number one tool maker, it does not mean we are the artisans.

Over the long haul, being the provider of technology will only take us so far, eventually the users of technology will out innovate us and we we will be simply the next centuries “manufacturers”. In the US, we have taken a free market approach to providing technology infrastructure.  We depend on the Telco’s and and others to supply what is needed.  Many other countries do not view technology infrastructure in this way.  They see it as a strategic imperative and invest government funds into assuring speed and access to citizens.

A national CTO needs to have an agenda that coordinates providing high speed access everywhere, all the time, but that is only the first step.  Once access is a given (like electricity is now, except in most airports where we all huddle around a few outlets) we need to focus on training more developers, and building our massive cloud computing facilities that can provide cloud services at low prices.  We need to put tax dollars to work building the technology infrastructure that will allow our economy to once again dominate – much like what we did with projects to build roads and highways decades ago. I suspect that while our next president will focus on the pain of the day,  we are at risk of slipping farther behind.  And at the point that we realize we have made a mistake, it will be too late – or at best, take years to get back on track.

We need a technology policy worse than a health care policy, because the truth is, technology could help solve the health care crisis, along with economic woes and the rest.  As I always say, technology is just a tool.  However, it can be like a magic tool in the right hands, with the right palette.  By the way, we actually have an ability to impact this.  Tell everyone you know that you think we need a cabinet level CTO – write it in articles and blogs.  Leaders react when we raise good ideas – if we will just say them loud enough.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

First, let’s take a little time to investigate some of the offerings.  At the high end we have systems like the  Macbook Air from Apple.  While the Air might not have the smallest form factor, it is slim, sleek, and nearly weightless compared to most laptop computers on the market today.  One of the reasons it can be so small is that Apple has moved the CD/DVD drive out of the laptop, allowing for a much thinner base.  On the high end version we also have a tiny, energy efficient, 64GB solid state hard drive.  You can think of the hard drives in an iPod for comparison.  The reason that Apple knows it can get away with such a small hard drive is that they offer their me.com as an alternative to your storage needs.  Me’s storage is built into the Mac OS as the ‘iDisk’ and it looks just like any other hard drive on an Apple.

Dell has released their version of a netbook with the Inspiron Mini 9.  It is small by any standard, the screen is 8.9″ compared to the 13″ display on the Macbook Air, but the draw here is not just its small form factor, but also the small price.  Where the Macbook Air comes in two flavors, from $1799 to $2598, the Inspiron Mini 9 is only $349 for the Linux powered model with 4GB of hard drive, and $399 for the Microsoft Windows version sporting an 8 GB hard drive.  Those low prices could drive the market to adopt the Mini 9, from parents grabbing them for the tweens, to the college crowd snapping them up for the perfect laptop for the party/study/travel/social computing platform.  By the way, the gang at NotebookReview.com did an excellent review of the Mini 9, and you can find that here.

Besides the native Linux operating system offered on the Mini 9, another feature that has attracted me to this netbook is that it comes bundled with Box.net’s online storage solution.  Dell is offering 2GB of free online storage with every Mini 9 they sell, and you can easily up that by spending a little extra at Box.net.

I spent some time with Sean Lindo from Box.net this afternoon.  I had some questions about where Box.net’s cloud storage stood today, where they are headed and how they will handle the growing adoption of online storage in the market.  The following is part of our exchange via email.

MW: With more hardware providers offering online storage solutions as real-time storage alternatives, will we see the reintroduction of a network based computer, like the one Oracle offered a decade ago?

SL: Most definitely. We’ve already witnessed a host of truly web-oriented computers come to market from the most established players in the business. As an example, Dell recently partnered with Box.net to provide Inspiron Mini 9 users with our online file storage and collaboration services. When Asus introduced the Eee PC, many thought it was a nice toy for the gadget crowd. But then HP introduced the Mini-Note, and Dell’s come out with the Mini 9, which looks like a fantastic product. And let’s not forget, while it doesn’t play in the same price range, Apple’s MacBook Air is a computer that relies heavily on accessing data and content via the web and wireless networks at home and on-the-go.

I think the difference today is that the industry is providing consumers, both in the home and the enterprise, with a more complete solution than before – web connections are accessible wherever people go, sleek and powerful web-based applications are in place to help people access their data wherever they are and online storage has become more secure, reliable and inexpensive. Of course, there’s more work to do. But because of these trends, PCs don’t have to rely so much on data stored on a local hard drive. It can simply tap into information and applications that are reliably hosted online.

In addition, I think open standards have really helped move this notion of a network-oriented computer forward. More consumers can take advantage of innovative solutions from so many companies out there. Box.net, through our OpenBox platform, gives consumers the power to use files stored on Box.net with applications they like. We make it really easy for third party developers to write apps that seamlessly access data our customers store on Box.net. It’s a very user-centric approach we take pride in promoting.

MW: How is Box.net planning to scale in the coming years as we shift from a desktop based storage society, to the Internet cloud based, storage seeking society of the future?

SL: Box.net has been successfully scaling its service over the past 3 years we’ve been in business. We have a competency around managing large amounts of data, while ensuring that data is stored redundantly and securely. Our growing base of 2 million users reflects how well we’ve been able to keep up. We’re certainly excited to see this massive shift of users to web-based storage, and we’re ready for it.

MW: Do you personally see storage becoming a commodity in the new computing paradigm? By that I mean will storage become less of a thought in our minds when we think of computers? With online storage being a cheap and ostensibly limitless alternative to local hard drives, will we cease to worry about how big our hard drives are, knowing we can simply rent more storage as needed?

SL: Yes. In many ways, online storage on its own is already a commodity. Box.net has been successful because it’s never been about storage for us. The company was founded to address a problem, which is how can people access and collaborate on all their data wherever they are, in the simplest, most reliable and secure way possible.

While I couldn’t use the entire conversation in this article, I wanted to include most of it because Sean’s words are foreshadowing where we are heading in many ways. Sean tells us that it has never been about the storage, and that makes complete sense.

How soon until the computer on my lap has GSM built in and offers me a history of where I have been?  How long until I can record every conversation and store it online for later retreval?  Soon, all of that and more, especially as the price for storage falls into the basement.  Google gives me 17 GB just because I use a lot of their services.  It just makes sense to offer me free storage so that they can show me ads wrapped around the services I like to use.

As soon as the industry realizes that storage is like good coffee in the diner, you just give it away so that people eat the pie; then we will see a huge explosion of applications that thrive upon large data sets.  We already have some WiFi in major cites, Starbucks, Panera Bread and even some McDonald’s with hotspots – so your online storage is accessible when you are getting coffee or lunch, but we need WiMax before this makes sense for most of our data.  If you store the majority of your documents on the cloud, well, then you need the cloud all of the time.  It isn’t enough to have your Internet connectivity just at home, the office and the occasional public hotspot, we need the wireless carriers to blanket the nation with fast, reliable Internet connectivity.  And I want it now.

Lastly, let’s not forget that we also need some killer apps to usher in the need for more cloud-based storage.  Maybe Twitter will offer me a couple of gigs worth of storage so that I can automatically store any document someone sends me on the service.  They don’t allow that yet, but they will.  Maybe an application that Perhaps an application will offer to catalog all of your media, and then give you a social network of people who like the same movies and music? Techno Mule is doing that to some degree already, but there is more on the way.  A lot more, I hope.

Matt
twitter.com/mattwilliamson

Equipping an everyday item with either the intelligence to ‘know’ about itself and communicate with the Internet, or giving it the ability to be named, and known, by the Internet, will have ramifications that cut across our society.  From the mundane examples of your chair notifying the maintenance staff that it needs servicing, or perhaps your lost book lets you know that you left it in the conference room; to the extreme example of your sunglasses feeding you a constant stream of news from around the world.  The network connected copier-scanner-printer in your corporate mail room already tells the staff when it is running low of paper and ink, but one day soon the bundles of paper might let you know that there are only ten of them left, and now you need to reorder.

As the idea of the Internet expands to include light bulbs, kitchen appliances, and doors; we will see a shift in what we consider the computer to be as well.  Today I can buy a Chumby (see the cute little guy in the picture to the left) and put it on my nightstand.  It’s an alarm clock, an Internet radio, a box with widgets flowing in over the Internet.  I can check my Twitter account, my Facebook notifications and catch up on the latest news, weather and stock prices; and all before I roll out of bed in the morning.  In the near future, this might all be embedded in your bathroom mirrors.  So while you shave or put on your make up, you will read your blogs and watch a web cam pointing at a peaceful lake setting.

No longer will we think in terms of ‘getting on the Internet’, but rather the Internet will surround us at all times.  Our cars will be connected via WiMax networks so that the continual stream of information follows us from home, to the office, and back again.  The Cloud that we talk about will grow to include items and places, not just far off remote computing environments.

The Internet Of Things Cuts the Cord

Last week, Intel demonstrated a wireless power system to recharge batteries utilizing a magnetic field, this alone could enable electronic devices to remain connected to the Internet at all times.  If you can remove the tether from the iPhone, from the Blackberry, from any device; they could be online at all times.  Simply putting your phone, camera or laptop near a charging station will one day fill your battery to full.  More than that though, we will see retailers offering charging stations on counter tops and tables as well.  So you get a mocha and charge your iPhone while you enjoy it.

If you just step back and watch how fast technology is changing our lives, and how fast that technology is advancing itself, you will come to this realization: that the shape of things to come is drastically different than we can even imagine; and our imagination is good.   In 1999 I was using Java, an open programming language developed by Sun,  to do a lot of web development.  Even back then Sun was pushing a technology to enable devices to communicate with each other across the network.  That was almost a decade ago, and since then we have seen a huge advancement in these technologies.  Now our devices are smaller, faster, require less power and are more durable.  They are living in our products and contain code that allows them to upgrade themselves when needed.  How cool is this stuff?

Links:

• International Conference for Industry and Academia – http://www.the-internet-of-things.org/
• Wikipedia Internet of Things entry – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things
• MIT Experimentally Demonstrates Wireless Power – http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/wireless-0607.html
• WiPower – http://www.wipower.com/
• Intel cuts electric cords with wireless power system – http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jn6duu12s7ujb6ByZ1wuv389gooQ
• Kevin Kelly and the Next 5000 Days of the Internet @ TED – http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html

Matt
matt at technologystory dot com

p.s.

Did anyone happen to see the movie Terminator? 

 You get a short amount of words to explain your current situation. Tell people where you are, tell them how you feel and why it matters.

See, all that, and I still had five characters left over, too. Why is this important, and how is it changing the Internet?   Okay, so here goes: These tiny blurbs are streaming across the ‘Net on web sites, phone applications (SMSs on older cell phones), and even on giant LCDs in Times Square and downtown Tokyo.  The blurbs, micro-objects really, are not intrusive, because you have to subscribe to a user to see their posts in your stream.  But if you want to see the entire flood of messages on a system like Identi.ca, you need only go to the home page and watch it flow past you. (Like this stream on Rejaw: http://rejaw.com/everyone or this one at Jaiku: http://jaiku.com/explore)

The majority of these micro-blogging systems are built to utilize the XMPP standard, which has been around since 1998 when the Jabber project hatched it.  XMPP stands for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, which is an open, XML-like protocol, that is a decentralized alternative to the centralized, corporate-owned, anachronistic instant messaging systems like AOL and MSN.  While I have nothing against corporate-owned systems per se, I am all for the decentralized platforms that take advantage of the cloud structure that the Internet is rapidly adopting.  From the open source Laconica server, which is written in the open source PHP language, to the Linux, Apache, Python, and MySQL-driven code of Pownce – open is good.  Nyet?

This cloud-like structure is amazing for a lot of reasons, but we need to focus on something that is maybe only a few months away.  Imagine your workday when your gadgets, calendars, emails, co-workers and even your car can send you XMPP messages when needed.  For these short, to the point messages, you wouldn’t dirty your email inbox; but rather they would flow into your XMPP stream as needed.  An impromptu meeting is taking place and your CTO needs you… chirp.  Your iPhone battery is complaining because you forgot to charge it last night when you collapsed in the hotel room… chirp.  Even better, your Gmail account sends you a message that it is getting close to being low on disk space… chirp.  Tivo wants you to know that the original Planet of the Apes is on tonight, chirp.  Ooh, I love this one, your refrigerator sends you a message like this one: If U want ur cereal in the AM, U betr get some milk!

If we look at XMPP like this, then we can see that there are countless uses for micro-messages.  In the corporate enterprise environment, I would like to see more integration between our CRM and ERP tools, an XMPP application could easily facilitate this for us.  A work flow would instantiate itself when a predefined criteria was met on the CRM side.  Perhaps a marketing campaign has just terminated itself and now we can evaluate the ROI.  So, the CRM dips into the back office data to scour all sales for the period the campaign was valid.  The CRM finds all coupons redeemed, slices those down to the coupons of interest for this particular campaign, runs the sales and gross margins, as well as what we might have lost for the shipping we gave away.  Once all of this is complete the CRM sends a micro-message to the ERP system.  The ERP system takes these numbers and updates the Manufacturing system, as well as the Supply Chain Management system. A predefined plan executes to spin up production on the items which sold best in the last campaign. Neat, huh?

It sounds like there is a lot of work to do, and there is, but this is a great time to be in the trenches.  So many possibilities, so many tools, and so many problems that we might be able to solve with technology — where before we have been using disparate systems, brute force, and the Sneakernet.

Links:

• Identi.ca
• Jaiku (Google owns this service)
• Laconica
• Pownce
• Rejaw
• Twitter
• XMPP server platforms
• MarkMail search on XMPP

Matt
matt (at) technologystory.com

p.s. I didn’t even get into the rich-media side of micro-messages in this article.  Sites like 12seconds.tv are pushing this faster and faster still.

Last week I was contacted by the team at LOUD3R. This site, or collection of sister sites, is not a semantic search engine, but rather a network of collected, sorted and categorized sites in topical sections. As they said to me:

(We) are not really search-based, but are focused more on finding and aggregating news for particular subjects. (We’ve) built a network of sites, each dedicated to a different niche topic (sneakers, cricket, baseball, etc.) The real goal is to cut down on the noise and bring the best, fresh news to enthusiasts of a given topic.

It turns out that LOUD3R is using “semantic language processing and human editorial input” to restrict and direct the flow of information and make it more relevant. This means that humans are making sure that this information is pertinent to the goal of the site, as well as restricting any information from the sites that the LOUD3R team doesn’t care for. Nothing wrong with being selective when it comes to the information they are willing to serve.

A few examples of LOUD3R sites: DECANT3R.com is devoted to wine and the wine making world, GLACI3R.com is all about the environment and being green, and the timely SUMM3R.com which focuses solely on the Summer Olympics in China. The network sites all follow the same basic look and feel principles, which only makes sense as the CEO and founder, Lowell Goss, was the User Interface chief at Yahoo once upon a time. I am sure we will see more networks like the LOUD3R system spring up.

Where LOUD3R aggregates news posts from around the Internet and then classifies them and places them on various niche sites, there are other sites that take a different approach. Both Alltop and popurls have built networks that grab headlines from around the internet and offer them to site users in formulated and organized fashions. Alltop began its life after the gang at Truemors watched the popurls site send them as many visitors as Google did. Suddenly they wanted to roll their own site of aggregated feeds.

Everything from Aviation to Mixed Martial Arts to Yoga gets categorized and fed via RSS streams from blogs, news sites and even applications like Twitter. Readers can hide content if they decide they would rather not see those sources, but other than that you are pretty limited on what you can and can not do with the sites. Where the Alltop system really shines is how the community has helped to build the sites listed. In fact, the Alltop team specifically mentions the Twitter community in this light. I also appreciate the Alltop crew’s candor on the About page:

If you’ve gotten the impression that Alltop is not based on computer algorithms or popular voting, you’d be right. We are highly subjective and judgmental.

Nothing wrong with that at all. I know, you thought I would rail on and on about how we need to get the machine to offer us the unbiased view of the sites listed, right? Sure, that is exactly what I want, but I think sites like Alltop and popurls offer an excellent first step. We can’t get the machine near the correct rule unless we understand them ourselves. Letting the hive, that is, the Internet community itself, decide and move the segregation of information from here to there is the only way that we can eventually get the true semantic search engines to understand and provide us with real tangible results.

Matt Williamson
http://twitter.com/mattwilliamson
matt at technologystory.com

Losing this information to the dark corners of our networks, hard drives and cold storage can no longer be tolerated. Enterprise search has been around in some form or another for more than a decade, but now, with the looming future of semantic search engines we are poised to really gain some ground.

Semantic search differs from the traditional Internet search engine greatly.  Today we use Google, MSN, Yahoo and the rest to find sites where we can then look for information, soon we will use semantic search to actually find the information.  Instead of the search engine running algorithms to make a plausible guess about the character of the information, a semantic search engine would attempt to ‘understand’ the information.  To understand this information the engine must discern what the words mean in conjunction with the surrounding words, and then build out a contextual relationship of what the words, sentences, and paragraphs could mean.

Let’s look at this with a real world example.  If I tell you that I am hungry and that I am looking for a good orange, you know that means the fruit.  But most of today’s search engines will pull up any reference to the word ‘orange’.  The fruit and the color are using the same word, so how do we differentiate? A rule here could be that if the engine finds words related to the food it adds a point in that direction.  So there might be a list of known words associated with food.  Words like these: citrus, fresh, juice, mandarin, blood and navel appearing before the word, it means that we are searching for the fruit.  If the word burnt is in front if it, the we mean the color and not the fruit.

When Microsoft acquired Powerset last month they added a whole new dimension to the Search Relevance team at Microsoft.  Powerset made a name for itself by allowing web users to search through the Wikipedia information.  I picked something that I thought would be a good trial.  How old was Tesla when he died?  Google could not provide me with a return while Powerset offered me 458 results.  On the very first entry I can see that Tesla died impoverished at the age of 86.  Good work.

Google is excellent at finding data and then letting me perform the research.  Powerset seems to be very good at doing some of that leg work for me. True, I could have just hit Google and asked it to find me anything at all about Tesla on the net but that result set is 620,000 strong.  Not too likely I will read all of those pages to find my answer.

Semantic search will change how we interface with the Internet at the core, and that should change the way we think of data in the office as well.  As those same technologies roll into the enterprise we will see a different paradigm emerge.  No longer will we drop countless documents into directories on the shared network drives and forget them.  We will instead place them in that drive and let a local search engine index them and serve them back to us when we either request them or need them.

We are all familiar with the idea that we can perform the search ourselves to find data, but more and more we are able to set up rules and let the search engines notify us when something we care about is found on the Internet.  In the office we will one day set up some of those same rules, or use some that are set up for us by the search provider.  I have yet to see any products that are ready for prime time on the company network, so before you get close to a purchase, run that application on your data to see what happens.

I can see the CFO using a rule set that alerts his email when a document with expenditures is found and indexed.  Perhaps the Marketing director wants to know when a document is found that contains user feedback about the corporation or even a competitor.  This is starting to get interesting.

Links:

• Google search of Wikipedia “How old was Tesla when he died?“
• Powerset search of Wikipedia “How old was Tesla when he died?“
• Information Week article about semantic search in the enterprise.

Matt
@mattwilliamson

In the beginning, there was the banner ad.  A company that I started was the main vendor for AOL as they grew up and we got paid tons of money over 4 years or so to develop the banner ads for AOL.  This meant that we learned by experimenting on the market: what colors to could and should use, how to build in animations to attract attention, and therefore what not to do as well.  It was a blast to be pioneering this first tool in Internet marketing business.  It was all about click through rates.  We lived and died by how many people clicked on the banners.  Man, have things ever changed.

From there, we quickly jumped to large systems that would track information on users by putting “cookies” on their computers.  Cookies are tiny little text files that look like gibberish to you and me, but the computer reads them and learns all about you on a particular site. So, we would know who the user was, or at least what they have clicked on in the past.  This allowed us to have an inventory of banner ads, and then we could drop something on the screen that would be interesting to a user – instead of the shotgun approach we had been using prior to this development.  Users at that time thought this type of targeted marketing was an invasion of privacy because we were storing information about them and using it to customize the advertising they would see.  Our argument was that we were doing them a favor because they only had to see banner ads that might be interesting – we saved them time in some way.

Wow, if they only knew how much their privacy was getting ready to be brokered.  Pretty soon companies that tracked user information and behavior were scouring the world for data on those users so that they could improve the ability of an advertiser to deliver targeted content.  This got so bad that a woman had a breast exam, was diagnosed with cancer, and started getting emails 2 days later from a support group.  Problem was, she had not told anyone about the diagnosis – no one.  So she researched how this information got out and found that the hospital was selling diagnoses to marketing companies.  This ushered in the era of HIPAA regulations.  All that aside, the era of targeted marketing was here.

Targeted marketing as a concept is brilliant, effective, and in many ways, actually does benefit the consumer.  Instead of running a TV commercial that is going to shotgun the general audience with products that might be specifically for a male or female, advertisers can now run ads that only I, as a male, might be interested in.  That is good for me.  Also the click through is higher.  The fine line here is that targeted marketing can be taken to an extreme.  How much information about me should an advertiser get to have?

For example, today I got a picture in my email from a friend that showed a streetview of my house from Google Streetview.  It showed my two cars in the driveway.  Google will certainly use this service to allow advertisers to place marketing geographically, and to let people “see” any place they choose directly from a computer anywhere in the world.  With just my name and an address (which any company can get) they now have the ability to see where I live in detail, what we drive, and even us walking around the yard if the timing is right.  The next step may be that Wal-mart starts selling the data on what products I buy.  They could do this today.  What if the utility company starts selling usage data, and information on when people move?  There is actually no end to data that is not restricted legally today that could be sold.

The bottom line is this: online marketing is quickly building a targeted model that is deep and robust.  They are doing this from the pieces of information they can gather on us.  This is a bigger list than  you think.  Next posting I will share with you some of the more interesting targeting marketing going on.

Scott Klososky
Scott@FPOV.org

I am frequently on several social community sites; in fact I just leave them in my tabs on Firefox for when I want to flip over to them.  I use Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo almost every day, and I check in on several smaller ones when something reminds me to do so, or when I get a message on one of them.  I have also moved away from several communities over the years.  I left MySpace, not because I was lonely there, but because it was like high school.  Too many silly things on pages, too many goofy designs and the songs blaring at me, maybe I just got too old?  Facebook has a nice collegiate feel to it (no more high school for me) which is appropriate as it began life as a social site for college students and grew into the work-place.

I am becoming less excited about Facebook, even while many are clamoring to get onboard.  I find that most of the Facebook applications are wearing me down.  Don’t send me a gift, no more flowers, I do not have time to fight pygmies in the jungle with you and I am not that good at Scrabulous anyway.  While I applaud Facebook for getting a lot right, especially when it comes to opening the system to third party developers; they need to reign in some of the applications.  I don’t know, maybe I should have the option to elect out of the application invites totally, or select that I only want to see those invites from a very small group of my closest friends? (Oh man, now you know you aren’t in my closest friends group, I declined the invite.)

LinkedIn is clearly the community site of choice for the professional crowd.  It feels like a business environment too; look and feel especially.  They cater to my business needs rather smartly.  Where did I work, what did I do,  who did I work with, what did I think of them, what did they think of working with me;  what associations or groups am I a part of in my professional life?  LinkedIn is also moving out on to the cloud with an open API and integration with sites like the New York Times and tools like Xobni.

We are still in an awkward stage with these community sites and wondering how they affect us and what they mean to the Internet in general.  Could these closed communities be the future of the web?  Are we watching the net shrink itself into small gated communities or are we seeing those communities build mass transit lines between them?  I hope it is the latter.

Micro-blogging applications like Twitter and Spoink are all the rage right now, and I am on Twitter all day too.  (Not addicted! But I cannot wait to tweet this post…)  Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn all have a ‘What are you doing right now’ or ‘What are you working on’ tool that is in effect an embedded Twitter on those sites, but you have to turn to aggregate feeds like Plaxo and FriendFeed to get them all together.  Perhaps Google’s Friend Connect or an API like it will serve to unify the crowd soon?  I hope so, but I also dread that just a little bit, that innovation I mentioned earlier, I want more of it, not less.  I do not want people to innovate new uses for a single tool, but rather we need to see data integration across many platforms.

As the community scene advances, the Social Media movement is growing up too; and along with it so is a new generation of social savvy users.  My children are already using avatars to talk to friends from school this summer, not to mention the new friends in other countries they meet on the net.  On my Blackberry, I post to Twitter instead of calling everyone to tell them who I just ran into at the bookstore, and I cannot help but wonder how long until my son is sending me private messages to let me know he aced his test.

I want to hear from you now.  Use the comments below to tell me what sites you frequent and how you use them.  If you are bold enough, share some of your tweets too?

Matt
twitter.com/mattwilliamson

Links of Interest:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_Collapse_Disorder
• http://www.scrabulous.com/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-blogging
• http://www.google.com/friendconnect/

It has been rumored that they want to integrate virtual functionality on top of Google Earth and let people create a parallel virtual universe that sits on top of the real globe.  In other words, I could teleport to the headquarters of the company that I want information from and just walk in the front door of their 3D building represented in the StreetScape environment, and talk to an employed avatar. Maybe I am right on with this, or maybe they have other plans, like letting their avatars walk through the Internet in new ways.  I just wish they would be clearer about what their intentions are because the Lively site smacks of an early beta.  Not that I am against early beta’s, I just wish I understood more of how they see this capability really being leveraged.  I actually would have been happier had they bought Second Life from Linden Labs and used it as a launching pad for future plans…

Another new site on the virtual front is Vivaty.  Their angle seems to be creating virtual spaces that can be used inside of platforms like Facebook and MySpace.  Although they get points for mixing two popular paradigms, I still wonder why creating yet another set of virtual rooms makes sense.  If they cannot be connected to other virtual worlds, it just seems like an orphaned use of the technology.

Providing a space for avatars to talk, while not standardizing the avatars across platforms just does not seem to have legs to me.  I am sure that we will see many players enter this game, but only a few large ones survive.  People will want a robust world, with robust capabilities, and one avatar.  No way are they going to create multiple avatars across 5 different platforms.

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com

With the recent announcement by Apple that the .Mac platform is morphing into the new MobileMe system, I think I am going to make a conscious choice to work at home from now on.  MobileMe is a push technology that offers your email, calendar, contacts and files all to your PC, Mac, iPod or iPhone.  OK, we are all familiar with how Microsoft Exchange pushes our email to our Blackberry or Microsoft smartphone, so this is not a new idea in itself. You just need to buy a server, hire your administrators, set up your domains, build out Exchange and then buy the seats for Outlook; simple.  Another thing that really excites me about this is that this technology is open to anyone who wants to buy it for themselves at the $99 a year price. On Apple’s MobileMe you use the email reader you are happy with or the platform’s built-in email application on me.com.  With this being a paid service from Apple there are no ads on me.com, which makes me wonder what Google’s Gmail will do to up the ante? Another question this begs an answer for is how long can the CEO of Google sit on the board at Apple?

MobileMe is supposed to release tomorrow night at 8PM, which comes just before the release of the second generation iPhone on July 11th.

Sun’s Telework Study

Sun Microsystems has been allowing workers to utilize non-traditional working environments for years.  With 56% of their workforce, some 19,000 employees, either working from home or in a flexible office, Sun is obviously not dabbling with this idea, but has embraced this as a productivity enabling ideology.  Until now Sun only hinted that this was also about the carbon footprint and energy savings, but according to a recent study Sun found that powering office equipment accounted for only 1.7% of the employees total carbon footprint while the commute itself was 98%.  By eliminating commuting by 2.5 days per week, employees reduce their energy used for work by the equivalent of 5,400 kilowatt hours each year. Multiply that by the 19,000 people Sun has working from home and you see a massive savings.  Bravo Sun.

Moving more and more of our daily grind to the cloud is a good idea in my book.  Sun already sells its’ servers as an eco-friendly solution, the argument is that as you spin up more services or you upgrade existing in-house applications, you move them to a hosted service, or at least host them on a server designed to require less energy. This goes hand in hand with what Scott has been preaching as well: that we are rapidly moving into a new era of online productivity.  With companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Sun all offering new ways to push the work load from the corporate server room to the distributed cloud of the Internet we will also see a shift how we view the office as well.

Perhaps I need to start a chain of Wi-Fi enabled offices that cater to young professionals.  I could sell expensive coffee and offer comfortable seating with places to plug in all of those gadgets too.   I think I might be on to something with this…

Links:

• Telework.gov
• The Telework Coalition
• Should Your IT Staff Telework? @ Network World
• Sun’s Flexible Work Program – OpenWork
• MobileMe Features

Working at home,

Matt

Microsoft is bolstering its search strategy by buying Powerset today.  If you are not familiar with Powerset, you will be.  Powerset searches the Wikipedia site, nothing amazing there, but they do it in a slightly different way.

When you use a search engine on the Internet today, you are providing a keyword or phrase and the search engine tries to provide you results that best match your request according to an algorithm.  Google does an excellent job when you ask for news articles about someone, or an event, or web pages with a certain bit of information, but try to ask for the names of the forests in Europe.  Asking for data is one thing, but asking for answers, that is altogether more difficult.

Powerset uses a technology that they built to allow computers to understand human language.  Semantic searching can be demonstrated simply with this example: ‘I want to see the Amazon’ vs. ‘the game was on Amazon’.  A semantic search engine would see that, read it and know that the first is a statement about the region known as the Amazon, while the second is in reference to Amazon.com.

While Powerset is not ready to give us a window on the whole Web, they are showing us that the Wikipedia is more important than we might have thought.  I only hope that Microsoft doesn’t gut Powerset and push it in to the other Microsoft search offerings, but rather uses that technology and grows Powerset as well.

Adobe Says Search Flash

Now that Adobe’s SWF file is opening up, Adobe has given code to the search engine giants Google and Yahoo that will enable them to more accurately search flash files.  Google has been able to ‘look’ inside Flash files for years, in fact we ran tests a few years ago where we placed text inside the Flash files on one of my sites that was found nowhere else on the site, sure enough, Google indexed it and pointed to the page where that Flash was embedded.  With Adobe’s help, now Google is proud to let us know that they are ‘seeing’ the Flash file as a user would.

“We’ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed.” — Google

Video, audio and graphical content is still not indexed by the search engines, but this is a major step in the right direction.  How long until Google Video is indexing the audio tracks from any Flash file it finds?  That would open up all of YouTube and news streams from around the world.

Good job Adobe.

Seeing Data

Understanding information is a major challenge facing corporate IT departments world-wide. Visual dashboards have come a long way from the static bar graphs in your Excel files, but we still have a long way to go. We are close to the moment when data will fly around the screen in an organic, understandable, and intuitive way; allowing even the marketing types to understand digits for a change. (I am a marketing type, so I can say things like that.)

While some vendors have quickly taken advantage of new resources as they appear, on the IT side we are still waiting for a unified system. For instance, exposing data from your CRM application shows a window into the bowels of the corporation that beforehand only supply-chain personnel might have known about. If packages are stacking up in the warehouse because they cannot ship without cog 1.1, this is an issue. Now however, Flash-enabled dashboards, with click and drag functionality, allow us to see and manipulate the data in real time.  This new window shows us how KPI would be affected by fluctuations in campaigns, sales, development cycles and other factors like manufacturing costs or fuel expenditures.

To get a view into the future of data visualization we only need to see a project called New York Talk Exchange, currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.  Using data provided by AT&T you can see all phone calls originating in New York City that are international in destination.  Watch this Quicktime movie to see it in action.

Projects like the NYTE and others in that same vein are breaking open the flood gates of new ways we can see, understand and manipulate data.  My children will think that data always moved around the screen in relationships that made sense.  Yes, we will always have spreadsheets and accounting systems with static numbers on a grid layout, but we will also push a button and see those numbers come to life.

More reading:

• FLIGHT404 – Visualization that offers your imagination something to grasp
• Visual Complexity – For a dizzying array of projects designed to showcase data, check out VC!
• Corda – Professional dashboard applications
• iDashboards - Professional dashboard applications

Matt Williamson
mattw.usmc-@-gmail.com

So how much faster is the Internet 2? Check out the chart at the right to see where we are. Just so you can understand this, most organizations are currently at the 1988 speeds on the chart. The bottom line is that the next generation of the Internet will be MUCH faster than what we currently use. It is now an appropriate time to ask the “so what” question. Good question, and let’s address it.

With faster speeds we will be able to do the following things that are difficult or impossible today: 1 – Deliver a high definition television experience on any sized screen – including multiple screens at the same time in a house.  This will radically alter how we have experienced television to this point because it will just become content that can be delivered to any of the three screens we own. 2 – Further enable cloud computing.  With speed and storage restraints taken off, there will really be little need for an organization to own their own servers and deal with backup and disaster recovery issues.  We will just be able to rent all of our software, all of our processing capabilities and storage.  We will only need a device to display and take input (voice, or keyboard.)  All the files and software we now host on our PC’s and servers will be better off, and easier to manage in the cloud.  We have a good start on this paradigm with what Amazon, Google, IBM and Salesforce.com are already providing.  Internet2 levels of speed will make this model soar. 3 – We will see an explosion of new technologies that do real time monitoring of everything in our lives – aggregated to a Web page.

With no bandwidth constraints, every device in our our lives will output status to a dashboard that we configure to help us run our lives.  Again, we have the beginnings of this model with refrigerators that monitor the status of groceries, cars that have computers to monitor all elements of performance,  and alarm system that can monitor any movement in the house.  With the new level of speed coming, it will become practical to have all of our “things” in life communicate with us so that we can make decisions based on status.

I relish living in a world where I can monitor 100 aspects of my life while I am on the road just by looking at my PDA.  Add a rules based system to give me alerts based on certain conditions of my “things” and my life can start to be on auto pilot.  For example, when the oil needs to be changed in my wife’s car, the vehicle let’s me know and then generates an automatic email to her to remind her.  The possibilities are endless!!!

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com

XOHM has announced that in September 2008 Baltimore will be the company’s first city-wide hot spot.  This means that XOHMers will be able to stay connected to the Internet, at broadband speeds, no matter where there are.  So pick up your laptop and walk out of the office, sit on the couch or drive down to the park, it won’t matter, because even driving across the city you will have access via the XOHM 4G network.  (The 4G means ‘fourth generation’.)  A seed change is about to happen in America, not over night, but slowly we will see major metropolitan cites joining the rank of the gifted with these city wide 4G networks.

Some very interesting things were mentioned in the press release that Sprint put out:

1. Intel will work with manufacturers to embed WiMAX chips into Intel(R) Centrino(R) 2 processor technology-based laptops and other Intel-based mobile Internet devices, and will market the new company’s service in association with Intel’s performance notebook PC brand.

So this means that Intel will work to expand the number of devices that can connect out of the box to the WiMAX 4G networks.   Cameras, phones, laptop, mobile internet devices and even the ones we have yet to realize we need.

2. Google will partner with the new Clearwire in the development of Internet services, advertising services and applications for mobile WiMAX devices. In addition, Google will be the search provider and a preferred provider of other applications for the new Clearwire’s retail product.

Google, by buying in to this new venture, has made sure that they are in the thick of any advertising agreements with the WiMAX carrier.  I imagine Google is hungry to be the advertiser that has reach to the street level, not just the home PC or the office when it comes to online advertising.

3. Google will partner with the new Clearwire on an open Internet business protocol for mobile broadband devices. The new Clearwire will support Google’s Android operating system software in its future voice and data devices that it provides to its retail customers.

We will have to see how this plays out for Google’s Android, but it doesn’t hurt anything either.

4. Sprint and Google have also entered into an agreement related to Sprint’s mobile services, whereby Google will become the default provider of web and local search services, both of which will be enabled with location information, for Sprint. Sprint will also preload several Google services – including Google Maps for mobile, Gmail and YouTube – on select mobile phones and provide easier access to other Google services.

I think this one is huge for Google, and likewise, for Sprint too.  Sprint has had to sit back and watch the flock of people walk in to AT&T to grab up the iPhones, perhaps this will offer them some more compelling reasons to shop the Sprint network once the Android phones hit the market.  Imagine your Android Google phone being on the 4G network at all times. Your company will not send your a page that the report is done, rather they will email you the entire report and you will have it on your phone.  Perhaps you won’t even have to burn your cell phone minutes to talk, but instead just use some VoIP application to talk.

Add to this the recent announcement that Sprint, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Clearwire, Intel Corporation, and Samsung Electronics have joined forces to create the Open Patent Alliance to aid in accelerating the adoption of WiMAX standards, and we can see the industry starting to coalesce around a real standard.  The OPA will pool the patents related to the WiMAX technology, act as an education platform for the WiMAX ecosystem and also offer accounting schedules for the memebers.

Hopefully all of this means that we will have devices, from phones and cameras to computers, sitting on the same wireless broadband network.  In fact, I spoke with Susan Johnston at Clearwire and she told me that they have plans to deploy mobile WiMAX service later this year in the following markets: Portland, Oregon; Las Vegas, Nevada; Atlanta, Georgia; and Grand Rapids, Michigan.  While I do not see Oklahoma City on this list, I am still excited.

Matt

p.s. Hey Susan, Oklahoma City is really cool too!

Lately, I have been thinking about another step past this concept where the devices literally have the same electronics and just come in different sizes. So a television and PC would use the same keyboard, and voice commands with the only difference being the size of the screen and the room they are in. Both would have a hard drive, both have processing power, and the same connection to the Internet. In fact both devices are connected within the home and settings on one, can transfer to the other. You handheld is just a smaller version of the larger devices with less storage and a smaller screen, but other than that, the same capabilities. Mix this vision with the concept of cloud computing and you really end up with devices that are simply screens with input methods. All of the real storage, applications, and processing is done in server farms thousands of miles away.

I am just leaving Las Vegas and was being told about the new gaming machines that are not dedicated to any one type of game. These boxes allow the user to pick what game they want to play, and then use a card to place bets, and then the lucky ones get to gather the winnings if there are any. This allows the casinos to provide a much more sophisticated ability to let users pick games, change games on the same box, and be cashless. All of the odds, updates, and alterations can be changed on all the boxes with a click of a key at headquarters. No more slot mechanics and quarter girls walking the floors. Since they are really just pushing a piece of software to a screen, they can push the same capability to any screen in the world over the Internet. The only things stopping this are the regulations that are relaxing all the time. I share this example only to show that the next phase of the Internet will be a world where we have many different sized screens that are appropriate for the location we are in, and the content that goes to them will be generic in that it can go to any one of the three screens, anywhere those screens exist.

Scott

I have been aware of Twitter for a long time, and had an account from the beginning, but I only really started paying attention in the last few months. I have more than a few friends who microblog on Twitter, so I wanted to stay abreast of what they were doing and where they were. For instance, if Scott is traveling he usually sends a quick text to his Twitter account saying that he has landed or is in some city preparing for a meeting or giving a speech. So even though I might not speak with Scott in person or on the phone for a couple of days or even a week, I am aware of his schedule and what he is working on.

Taking the idea of microblogging to the enterprise we find companies like Apple, Dell, CNN and JetBlue. JetBlue uses Twitter to communicate with customers on a basis that before the Internet simply was not feasible. From weather updates to actual conversation about JetBlue offerings, we have what I consider the first steps of a seamless global conversation between consumers and producers. For instance, take this exchange on Twitter:

@steverubel BetaBlue is the name of a single plane within our fleet used as a test bed for new products and services -currently testing WiFi 03:10 PM June 04, 2008 from web in reply to steverubel

JetBlue had mentioned on a tweet that BetaBlue was testing well. BetaBlue offers access to Exchange, Gmail, AOL Mail, Hotmail, Windows Live Mail as well as shopping on Amazon.com while in-flight on a test plane. Another Twitter post asked about the iPhone and then the conversation leads to Steve Rubel asking how many planes are equipped with BetaBlue. We go from what might have been a simple, static press release, to a real conversation with actual information and interaction. That is what the Internet is about.

I said earlier that Twitter is not a calendar, an email platform or even a system to gain information about your competitors; but with some imagination it is all of those. Searching Twitter is something that could lead to some excellent demographical information. Summarize has done a very good job of providing an interface to delve deep into tweets. If you are wondering who’s talking about the iPhone, and what they are saying, you just need to search Summarize for references to the iPhone. Perhaps you are taking the pulse of the Internet about Cisco? Well, according to Summarize, someone named Frater_Phoenix is in Second Life at the Cisco Technology Center.

If you were to plot where someone has been by their tweets that would be very marketable information. A service of Bright Kite allows you to post your physical location to your Twitter account from your cell phone automatically. You can post your location at anytime in the Twitter interface, but Bright Kite wants to make it happen for you. Perhaps Bright Kite, or another start up, will plot all of those people on a Google Map and offer them discounts when they are close to fast food chain or the local Barnes and Noble? Discovering where people are at any given point is easy enough with Twitter, if they want you to know.

That leads me to Twittervision, a site that made me smile. Twittervision takes Twitter posts and shows you in real time where they originated from around the world. As long as the person posting has a location defined on Twitter you will see the post show up on a Google Map with their image and the post. It is addicting and beautiful in some ways. You are watching small pieces of peoples lives as they flash up before you.

For all of its uses, Twitter does have a penchant for going down on occasion (heavy load plays into this problem) but I can live with that as long as the company is making smart choices with technology and striving for uptime. Granted, I don’t lose money when Twitter is down, but I do get twitchy.

We have yet to see the killer app for businesses using Twitter, but at least some forward thinking companies are testing the water. It is clear that we continue to evolve our technological brains and this is just one more branch on the Internet family tree, but I am excited about the leaves.

Some Twitter links of interest:

• Matt Williamson
• Scott Klososky
• Apple
• CNN Breaking News
• JetBlue
• Dell Outlet
• Twittervision
• The New Yorker

More reading:

• Twitter on SouthwestSEO
• SU Com article about Tweeting

Excuse me, I need to go tweet this post.

Matt

All of the mobile Internet devices I’ve been ranting about lately utilize some kind of tiny memory; whether that is a small form factor hard drive or flash RAM, depends on the maker. Devices like the iPhone, and its iPod cousins, have traditionally used hard drives to achieve greater storage capacities, but now that Intel is showing off its latest success we might soon see more device makers moving into flash RAM for price and durability considerations.

Intel and Micron have teamed to produce a new NAND flash chip that is on a smaller scale that previous versions, yet still holds 4 GB of memory. Shrinking the chips from 40 nanometers to 34 nanometers might not sound all that impressive to you at first, but realize that any miniaturization typically means less power use and of course, smaller form factor. But, the interesting thing about this chip is that you can stack them to offer devices up to, and over, 64 GB or RAM. Suddenly the power consumption falls, while the available storage space jumps into the range that you need for rich media such as music, video and applications.

Yahoo Introduces BrowserPlus™

Yahoo’s new BrowserPlus™ gives web developers the fire power to compete against desktop developers. With the proliferation of technology like Google Gears and now BrowserPlus™, we are creeping towards a true web operating system, not just ‘web‘ pages, sites or application.

BrowserPlus™ allows for the storage on your local hard drive of data to be used by your browser. Normally the web browser only stores and retrieves small bits of information, like images and cookies, but BrowserPlus™ can store data, manipulate and send data back to the web application that you are using. More than that though, and perhaps more powerful yet, it can update signed applications on the fly without restarting the browser. To me the only issue is that the developer still needs to write these applications for both the Windows and Mac platforms, once we are past that, then the real gains happen.

Copyright Information On The Run

I have been following the Viacom suit against Google and its child company, YouTube. Viacom is claiming that Google is hurting Viacom’s business by allowing clips of Viacom shows to be loaded onto the site. That thought alone made me wonder about copyright infringement on the Internet. Technorati follows 112.8 million blogs on a daily basis, but there are more out there and more popping up daily. Technorati does exactly what a lot of us do, they really only count the ‘known’ blogs. Do we count MySpace and Facebook blogs? Both of them can contain news and information about anything and anyone.

If Viacom’s suit brings about some kind of change in how companies like Google view information then we are in trouble. Google is saying the same thing already, they are telling the courts not to hold them liable for what their users post on YouTube. As an author I understand wanting to control where my words are used and who could perhaps claim them as their own, but as a blogger I also see the threat in a company claiming I cannot utilize some of their information in my post.

Just yesterday, another group announced they are suing Google for republishing information. This time it is a group of Belgian newspapers, suing Google under their umbrella organization, Copiepresse. They are seeking $77 million and a court order that would preclude Google.be and Google News from including their stories. I personally use Google News all day long and I can tell you that I would never have found a tenth of the articles I read daily without the site indexing them for me. In my opinion Copiepresse should be thankful for inclusion on the Google sites, I am sure more readers means better ad sales, at least it used to.

Matt

Interesting Site of the Day: I have been experimenting for about a week with Topicle, a new site that allows your to create your own search engine for free. No, you can’t brand it with your own logo or look and feel, yet, but I like how quickly you get something up and functional. In about three minutes I had added a few URL’s for my search engine to index, I simply allowed in only websites that compliment searching for technology news in the enterprise; Slashdot, Information Week and TechCrunch among them, and then I published it: http://technologystory.topicle.com/

The hope of the Internet world is resting firmly on WiMAX for the foreseeable future. There are several large players in the WiMAX world, and they are finally working together instead of warring. Intel® is building the WiMAX technology into their Centrino® based laptops later this year.  Once that is in place we will hopefully see a wider adoption with other providers jumping into the fray.  I am personally hoping to see some of the cable Internet carriers getting in on the action.

Sprint’s XOHM WiMAX network is in soft launch mode in Baltimore, Chicago, and the Washington D.C. areas with employees currently. Last August Sprint announced they would be investing $5 billion into the WiMAX network, a show of support for the business model in the long-term.  Once more devices are WiMAX enabled there will be a real market here.  According to Sprint this service will be data-centric, meaning that geographic locations with high data use will get the XOHM rollout first. So I read that to say that XOHM will target more urban areas.

Clearwire, taking a different tactic, has already launched many mid-size cities around the nation. According to the company they are slow growing and as such have not moved into any large metropolitan areas yet. I spoke to a Clearwire representative this morning though, she assured me that once they move in to major cities the service will work seamlessly, whether in a large, concrete and steal high-rise, or sitting in your backyard surfing the ‘Net while the kids are swimming.

All of this news is good for the Internet in general: more connectivity, more devices, more information.  As we move from the living room wireless connectivity to the coffee shop and then out into the world we will see things happening that only futurists were talking about before.  Right now when your college kid snaps a picture with their favorite 10 megapixel camera they need to tether it to their laptop and load it into MySpace, or Facebook or Flickr; but soon enough they will snap that picture at their friends house and the camera itself will log into the site of choice and upload it for them.

We may see a proliferation of unedited content hitting the Internet like never before.  Think about a future where every person you know has a YouTube channel with live streaming video uploaded as it happens.   Think about your daughter’s basketball game being broadcast live on a niche video site that catalogs and searches all basketball games across America.  You are in the stands watching the game, but you are also holding your iPhone with real-time stats and rankings provided by Google or some other technology giant that figures out how to catalog, search and index live video.

I could spend the rest of my day writing scenarios of speculative science fiction about the world of tomorrow.  Everything from flying cars to personal rocket packs for every kid, but this is not the world we live in.  Instead I think we will see a linear progression from the Internet as we see it today to one where we have the entire Internet in our hands whenever we wish.  Web sites will be written not for mobile devices, but rather, mobile devices will work with any web site.  The web page you see on your home computer will look and act the same on your iPhone, Blackberry or any other Mobile Internet Device.

Mobile computing will come alive in an atmosphere where we are always connected to the Internet, not at today’s cell phone speeds, but at  cable and DSL speeds.  Once we become accustomed to the technology, and the idea that data is no longer something that we have to wait for, then we will see a real shift.

Matt

Interesting Site of the Day:  daylife is a news site that takes the Web 2.0 experience to the extreme.  What I really enjoy about the site is how I can stumble down the news in an organic fashion.  I read an article about the unrest in Tibet and from there I found connections to stories and topic vast and far-reaching.

I was speaking to a friend this morning about my ideas for communication between a group of people within a shared network; as in your friends. I was trying to explain where I thought we might be heading, he smiled as it dawned upon him, and he shared my vision. This was the example I used:

Tim carries a mobile computing device that is connected at all times to the Internet, an iPhone in this case. His iPhone plays a tune that tells him that his wife has just logged in to her instant messaging application. She sets her mood in the application as ‘Sparkling’ and then his iPhone plays another tune that he recognizes as signifying her mood is good.

If we take this up a few levels we can quickly see a new world of communications emerging. I can see building an application that would show soft colors around avatar icons that are tied to your friends. So your wife is in a good mood and she has a nice sunshine-yellow hue around her avatar. Your friend Bob is stressed at his office, so his icon is a bright green color and it radiates.

Perhaps as Microsoft and Apple begin to move more and more of their development to the mobile, and ultra-mobile computing platforms, we will see an influx of new ways to stay in touch, and in tune with, each other.

A decade ago I carried a text pager.  Man, I was cool then huh?  On that text pager I could read news and all kinds of information about the ISP i worked for at the time.  Today I carry a Blackberry that has almost the entire web on it.  I can play on my Facebook account or read the entire Wiki-universe if I want, but I am still not connected to my friends like I want.

The group of people I hang out with are pretty techy I guess, but there are a couple in that circle of friends who still carry simple flips phones with zero Internet access.  For the ones who are connected, either with a Blackberry or an iPhone or even a few with Windows CE phones; I want to see more about them.  How about we share what we are listening too?  Maybe we can share where we are on a map, or maybe we share our calendar?  Hmm, a calendar that is set up so we can all see what the rest of the gang is doing and where?  Pretty cool, especially for the college crowd or those of us who think we are better if we are connected. There are a lot of Internet connected cell phones in my immediate family too.  I can think of a lot of ways to leverage that.  Maybe I set up an alert to notify me when my wife is in the local Target Supercenter? I am almost always wishing I could have stopped her before she leaves Target.

Speaking of things that might make mobile computing less taxing… One thing I would like to see is a new way to use passwords. I hate trying to get my strong passwords into tiny keyboards. Capital letters, exclamation marks, underscores and numbers: that is all hard to do on a small keyboard, you know? So how about this scenario; present the user with a screen showing a grid of random images: a dog, a ninja, the sun, an airplane, a daffodil, a ’64 Vette, a lighthouse on a seascape, clouds and guitar in random order on the grid. Each time the user logs into a particular application they have to get the correct images in the correct order.

Much simpler, right?

On the hardware front Intel recently demonstrated their new Atom chip for their Mobile Internet Devices, MIDs. Back in 2006 Intel and Microsoft co-launched the UMPC platform for mobile computing. UMPC, which is a catchy acronym for ultra-mobile personal computer, is really just a clunky under-powered Windows computer. Now Intel has tapped a Linux distribution to run the MIDs instead of the Microsoft OS.

So back to outsourcing and crowdsourcing… Technology has had a lot to do with the whole paradigm of outsourcing work. It’s only because of the ability to easily and cheaply communicate with people around the world that we can even use this model. Add to that the fact that a large amount of the outsourcing that is being done relates to or uses technology in some way. We are now able to create computerized workflows that let US based people do part of a task, and then automatically route other parts overseas. I see no reason that outsourcing will not continue to flourish, and that the workbases will exist in countries all over the world. In fact, we will one day stop thinking of workbases in terms of India, China, Malaysia and the like. We will simply deal with companies that specialize in different forms of outsources and services. We will look at quality and price statistics and make a choice as to who we want to hire to do a task based on our needs for quality, speed and cost.

Technology will continue to facilitate our ability to advance the outsourcing model. And maybe the next really interesting step is crowdsourcing…

Crowdsourcing is a word that has been in our vocabulary for 18 months or so and it first appeared to describe the method by which Wikipedia and other user-built sites got created. Then we began to find interesting business ways to leverage the Internet herd. We started tapping them for opinions, and to answer questions for each others (yahoo answers) and even to create indexes for pictures on Google through games. The natural progression had to be finding ways to crowdsource work that is now being outsourced. In other words, spread it out over hundreds of disparate workers around the world and let them be paid in small pieces for the bits they do within specs. Last week I read a story about a major company that has divided up a large software project into small pieces and has posted the work on the Internet with the associated pay. Programmers around the world can simply apply for a piece, write the code, and submit, and once it is tested and passes, they get paid. Over 100 programmers are going to build the application and they will never sit next to each other and will never set foot in the home office. This is sign of things to come, and you heard it here at Technology Story. Ten years from now, this type of work dispersion will seem a normal part of life.

So what do you think that will do to change the way people are “employed”?

Scott

Editor: Picture Credit: Prokofy Neva (a.k.a. Catherine Fitzpatrick)