And you are here why?

As members of our society, we generate a ton of data.  Some of this ends up as governmental  (tax information, census), some of it ends up as administrative  (land records, traffic accidents...  yes, a fine distinction, but still a relevant one), and some of it is, well, just data (rainfall). Over the last few years or so, there have been a number of attempts to make this data public - typically under some form of open data  initiative. The general idea, of course, is that once people can start messing with this data, they can come up with all sorts of relevant and fun uses.  For an example, check out what the good people in California have done , and in particularly, the remarkably cool Explore California mashup ...  While their heart may be in the right place, politics usually ends up causing chaos - and when I say politics , I actually mean national security .  You'd be surprised at how much stuff is considered 'dangerous'. Rai...

A nifty study by Facebook on how connected we actually are .  In a nutshell 69 billion friendships.  (Don't get into the Is This Really A Social Graph  argument.  Please) The six degrees of Kevin Bacon , are now effectively Five  degrees of Kevin Bacon .  They're also getting shorter, and could maybe end up as Four  degrees of Kevin Bacon Most of the connections are weak ties , i.e. ones where we are barely/casually/dis-interestedly connected.  We might care about them under certain circumstances, but mostly we don't. The tricky part here is the weak ties  bit.  Its clear that network effects are in play with weak ties, i.e., the more people that are connected weakly, the more likely that some (significant) subset of these people will care about the same thing, hence pushing their strong ties  into caring about it too, hence magnifying the cause (egypt!  w00t!). Fun stuff!

I stumbled upon the iFusion phone dock while searching for something completely different (isn't that the way it always works?  Its exactly like the NVX 610 , just not as spectacularly expensive. Anyhow, its basically a 'desktop dock' for the iPhone, which basically answers the question Why have a separate desk-phone, and a mobile phone?  You should just have your mobile phone, and if you happen to be near your desk, you can take your mobile calls on your desk phone . Ok, I know, you're thinking to yourself "So?  Who cares?" .  A lot of people, as it turns out. You get better voice quality, and its more comfortable to boot (unless you're one of those people who likes to walk around with a headset that is :-) ) Anyhow, I'm now google-ing for an Android version...

Ok, thats really not all that new or interesting, but it is  relevant. I discussed WebRTC before , and its pretty obvious that embedding it in Chrome is a pretty simple way to provide P2P video capabilities easily and natively to most apps. On a related note, anybody note the entertainment around TechCrunch and Paul Kinlan?  He was at a conference where he mentioned that webRTC could allow browsers to 'do' OnLive without plugins - this somehow got translated to Google is building a competitor to OnLive! .   More details here... I love our blogging world...

3 days into a 10 day trip in Italy, armed with nothing but a nokia symbian fone (ok, i have my laptop too, but thats a different issue).  Net result -  every  time I go by a TIM/Wind store, its a struggle to not go in and just by a bloody samsung SII.  Its just sheer force of will (and desire to complete this experiment) that is preventing me from hurling this phone w/ muttered imprecations...

One of my favorite cloud stacks just got a wee bit favoriter - DotCloud just added Redis & MongoDB to its stack.  DotCloud (like Heroku) give users a bit more of an inside view as to what is happening at the infrastructure layer, in keeping with my belief that the future (for now at least) is something-aaS . And, if you feel like testing this, do remember that the only diff 'tween the Free  and Pay  versions is support for multiple data-centers and an SLA.  Makes testing a *lot* easier, ne c'est pas?

To summarize -  people are using "other" services on their phones over non-carrier networks (read wi-fi instead of data, IM instead of SMS, Skype instead of calling, etc.). The study, which was carried out on behalf of Mavenir by mobile(SQUARED), found that a third of operators believe operator traffic from messaging, voice and video calling will decline between 11% and 20% over the next 5-10 years. Another 20% of operators expect even steeper declines in the 31% to 40% range. “The findings confirm what we have found in discussions with the mobile industry,” Mavenir VP Shubh Agarwal said in a statement. “This is one of the primary reasons the industry is currently moving towards an all-IP converged core network accelerated by the deployment of LTE technology. By allowing users to place high definition voice and video calls, chat, share content, and discover new services as part of a globally connected framework, operators can retain and even grow their share of custome...

Barb Darrow at GigaOM assembles the case that SAP should 'go cloud'. "...others said SAP has a cloud deficit that it should address.  (given SAP’s installed base of ERP users, it needs to) “take the Software-as-a-Service path to the cloud.”  “They need to build, buy or partner on SaaS ERP apps , or closely associated business apps as services to then move toward cloud values,”  I fear this may be a bit of a cart-before-the-horse  situation.   Cloud  isn't the solution to all problems, it is part  of the solution, and it really depends on what the problem-space is, i.e., you might have SaaS, IaaS, PaaS , or the new trend something-aaS . Based on this view, I'd say SAP's big gap is that they need to expose themselves a lot more to others, i.e., work on (drastically) simplifying and pushing out their APIs,, and building out an eco-system where their clients and partners can share tools, techniques, and best-practices. In many ways, most SAP ...

Hat tip - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Everything Apple Really? This is news? What next?  Macintoshs to include Tint Control ? (Bloom county reference, for those who care...) Apple now accepts Chinese yuan for App Store purchases Apple wants to make it easier for customers in its fastest growing market to get their hands on software, which is why it started accepting Chinese yuan for App Store downloads on Friday. The change i...

An IBM survey of IT Professionals (yeah, yeah, whatever those are) shows that (my comments in italics ) 75% are working on some  type of Mobility solution I'm not surprised that there is that much mobility work going on.  Given the prevalence of smartphones in the world, we'd be dumb not to be focusing on Mobility 70% are doing Android (iOS - 49%, Windows7 - 35%) I wonder how this survey was conducted.  Pretty much everybody I know is working on both .  The key is, which one comes first, and which one fast-follows . In the cloud world, people are currently working on  virtualization  and  storage , but moving to  new applications I'm somewhat surprised at people still working on virtualization  and storage .  Seems like most of the work in this area is done, or has gotten highly localized and/or feature-specific, as in 'adding storage to apps'. ( see /bin ) Most of the work involves either extending current functional...

From VentureBea t - Wealthy, Male, Gaming, Pet Owners.  Really.

It may be overly touristy, and somewhat hokey, but it  is  a beautiful area, and this  is  a disaster.... Rick Steves' Europe: Hi From Rick: Cinque Terre Disaster Thirty-two years ago, I met two American college girls while hitchhiking in Switzerland. They were studying in Florence, and I asked them their favorite place in Italy. They surprised me by naming a place I had never heard of before: Cinque Terre. Curious, I headed south and discovered a humble string of five villages along Italy's Riviera coast with almost no tourism...and, it seemed, almost no contact with the modern world.

(in Hungary, of course). Its a town in Hungary where they basically ran Fibre everywhere, as a basic infrastructure play.  It worked quite remarkably well.  The video is somewhat advert-ish, but the essential benefits do  come forth.  Broadly speaking Its keeping the young 'uns in town after they graduate, since they are 'connected' - its also stimulating startups Its also keeping older people (60+) more 'connected'.  (Makes sense, as anyone with kids knows, Facetime/Skype has *huge* uptake amongst the previous generation) Its green, and  lower cost, since it makes telecommuting actually feasible and realistic Its good for industry, helping out with supply-chain management, logistics, and ERP Communication is, of course, dramatically simpler, easier, and lower cost Its a boon to the media/advertising industry, since its trivial to move data Retail benefits, with the ease of melding the web and Brick&Mortar Its remarkably cheap - it costs ba...

BGR summarizes the result of an iPass study on phones in the workplace .  Money quotes... “BlackBerry has not really fallen from the top spot in so much as other smartphones have grown faster,” "Android...21%' "8% of mobile workers said they intend to purchase an iPhone in 2012, 11.2% are planning to buy an Android device and 3.6% want a Windows Phone. Only 2.3% of workers have plans to buy a BlackBerry next year."

From the world of Behavioral Economics - Kahneman's book is both fascinating and depressing.  Depressing, because it is never entertaining to realize that we are not the rational beings that we (and all of the Chicago School doofi) believe ourselves to be. Go buy it, and read it..   Thinking Fast and Slow ... p.s.  For those who are unaware, Kahneman & Tversky are - effectively - the parents of Behavioral Economics.  They collaborated on prospect theory , which focuses on how humans handle decisions involving risk (in the real world, i.e., these aren't the optimal  decisions that rational beings - whatever those are - would make, but ones that actually  get made by humans...).  Tversky died in 1996, and Kahneman received the nobel prize for their work in 2002.

For those who care... Kindle Fire just started shipping yesterday and a super easy one click root / jailbreak solution is already available. We went through the steps, were able to reproduce it and duplicate the end result and we also streamlined it a bit especially for the ones that do not excel in computer skills so here it is for your Kindle Fire rooting / jailbreaking pleasure. What is the root process bringing to the table? The possibility to install Google Android Marketplace (remember, by default Kindle Fire only comes with Amazon Marketplace), sideloading books on Kindle Fire is another enticing possibility as well. (more...)

Speaking as a frequent traveller, I feel  much  safer now... TSA Puts Off Safety Study of X-ray Body Scanners - ProPublica After promising an independent evaluation of X-ray body scanners, the head of the TSA now says he’ll put it off pending an inspector general report on the machines.

Hat Tip - Tyler Cowen

Hat Tip - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Yup, thats the number.  300 Billion.   The amount Italy needs to roll over next year.  Who d'you think is going to buy all those bonds?  Especially with everyone (banks in particular) desperately trying to get rid of the ones that they already have? <cough>ECB</cough>

ServiceMesh seems to be on a bit of a roll nowadays.  They just scored $15M from Ignition  to (one presumes) expand their offerings and their geographical footprint.  Mind you, the latter is somewhat interesting since they exist to help enterprises control/manage/track their Cloud Services, which are - kinda - geography neutral :-) Regardless, this is a space that historically companies like BMC and HP have lived in.  They have been somewhat slow to adapt, though BMC has been making relevant noises vis-a-vis their Cloud LifeCycle Management line.  ServiceMesh's 'secret sauce' is that they are actively pushing their Agility Platform , a one-stop shop that (supposedly) brings the benefits of 'Agile' across an enterprise's IT services. (At this point, my snark sensor kicks in, wanting to point out that it might be easier to teach an elephant to tango, but hey, whatever).  Still, it does look kinda nifty - largely because they have nice APIs. Probably ...

Seriously Shatner is approaching Norris -ian proportions (or, for my Tollywood brethren, Rajnikant -ian)

Its always nice to suddenly discover a classic  trope, especially one that has been around for a long time, but which you just hadn't noticed.  I present to you - Vasquez Always Dies When two  Action Girls  are featured in the same film, invariably the tougher, more competent, more aggressive and less feminine character will die, despite being better equipped for the situation at hand. This can range from appearance ( if one woman is wearing sensible shoes, and the other is wearing high heels ), personality, or other traits . (more...)

Who knew! It turns out that the data are actually against it - Nepotism makes companies underperform... Pérez-González, Francisco 2006. "Inherited Control and Firm Performance." American Economic Review , 96(5): 1559–1588. I use data from chief executive officer (CEO) successions to examine the impact of inherited control on firms? performance. I find that firms where incoming CEOs are related to the departing CEO, to a founder, or to a large shareholder by either blood or marriage underperform in terms of operating profitability and market-to-book ratios, relative to firms that promote unrelated CEOs. Consistent with wasteful nepotism, lower performance is prominent in firms that appoint family CEOs who did not attend ?selective? undergraduate institutions. Overall, the evidence indicates that nepotism hurts performance by limiting the scope of labor market competition (more...)

Apropos a discussion I was having with  + Ben Phenix  and  + Nicole Paolini-Subramanya  about the right to assemble - ProPublica has a rundown, with commentary from Geoffrey Stone (author of the truly excellent book on the evolution of Free Speech -  " Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime: From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism ") Just How Much Can the State Restrict a Peaceful Protest? - ProPublica If the First Amendment guarantees the right to peaceful protest, why do peaceful protesters get arrested -- and sometimes pepper-sprayed and beaten up? We take a look at the legal precedents. (more...)

It strikes me that, for the last ten or so years, I have been deploying Telephony as a Service. So? Note that this isn't Telephony running on Freeswitch running on AWS ( Twilio ), or Telephony running on Asterisk running in our datacenter  ( Fonality ), or even Telephony running on a Huge Solaris Cluster Somewhere  ( Broadsoft ). The point here is that the type of service I built doesn't neatly break down into the oh-so-neat layers that you always see in these type of diagrams If anything, what I've built is more like where the various parts are all munged into one somewhat nebulous cloud. " But!" , I hear you start, " But!  How can you build anything to scale when its all cloud-y and nebulous-y!? " The easy answer, of course, is to wave my hands and say something mysterious and profound, like "Exelsior!" or, "Erlang! ". The reality, however, is that in the fine, you will find various elements of Infrastructure, Platf...

Google is opening up their engines for you to crunch on - basically, if you're data is BigTable -able, then you could run your crunch-jobs up in Google-space.  Which is all well and good, but it is getting quite apparent that the ability to crunch is really not the gating factor anymore.  Take the  democratization  of NoSQL (Hadoop, BigCouch, Mongo, whatever), add in a  soupçon  of AWS, find an erlang developer or two (so you can do real  distributed development :-) ), and your ability to crunch is limited only by your wallet - and not all that much at that. The gating factor, of course, is Visualization .  Knowing what you are looking for is easy.   Finding something you weren't expecting is hard , and doing this quickly and easily is, well, close to impossible .  Thats where the emergent breed of BigData Visualization companies are really starting to shine.  Me, I'm quite partial to WeAreCloud (Bime from France) .  T...

Sooo, I took my phone w/ me to Toronto (cousin's wedding), intending to use it as my camera.  I could go on about the effectiveness, functionality, pros/cons, etc., but its really quite simple. No Zoom =:= Deal Breaker Yup, thats pretty much it.  Back to the Panasonic ultra-zoom (zs10) for me... (I know, I know.  There is a time and a place for everything.  And it looks like I'm now going to be lugging around three  cameras.  The P&S, the SLR, and the phone.  Joy.  My life is a *lot* simpler now.  Clearly)

He captures it thusly What  is  true is that Europe is in the middle of a textbook liquidity crisis. Banks are not lending to each other — and the ECB isn’t stepping in to solve the problem. This is a serious structural issue with the way that the European monetary system was constructed: the ECB is tasked only with guarding inflation, and not with ensuring the health of the banking system. Individual national central banks are meant to do that. But they can’t print money — only the ECB can. So when there’s a liquidity crisis, no one’s able to step in and solve it. Note quite close to Krugman's one sentence , but close enough, eh? What has happened, it turns out, is that by going on the euro, Spain and Italy in effect reduced themselves to the status of third-world countries that have to borrow in someone else’s currency, with all the loss of flexibility that implies .

Ericsson has a new report out which obsessively details the growth of Mobile Data and Traffic.  You can go read the whole thing (hey, I did!), but there are some highlights which are quite relevant 1) People use less than 5GB/month.   If you eliminate file-sharing and video, this is pretty much a guarantee.  And yes, the 5GB includes online media. 2) Hogs watch videos .  On the other hand, people that use more than 5GB/month are almost certainly going over by watching videos.  Which also makes sense - after all, its tough  to suck up data without streaming video! 3) Metro areas are growing . The largest growth in subscriber base is going to be in Metro areas.  Given the already high density in these areas, and the crappy existing quality, it pretty much guarantees that we're going to see more wi-fi/femto-cell implementations a-la Republic wireless 4) No Videos during dinner .  Mobile PCs (?laptops on the road?) are lar...

Tellabs has a long paper out ostensibly showing that the ISPs should move to a 'Smart Pipe' world, for the betterment of mankind.  I won't bore you with the details (if you feel like it, read the summary here ), but in a nutshell, it says that Smart Pipes are needed to 1. Ensure that data is transported efficiently so that capital and operating costs are minimised...  2. Improve user experience by matching the performance of the network to the nature of the application or service being used... 3. Charge appropriately for use of the network... I'm not even going to bother getting into any of the above. Really. I mean, seriously.  Whats the point?  Its basically a flame-bait, just thrown out there However, I do  want to use this as an opportunity to bring up a paper by Cheng, Bandyopadhyay, and Guo, talking about Net-Neutrality in terms of Game Theory *. It takes the idea of Network Optimization  (or   its Evil Twin, Network Thrott...

You know, and I know, that Video Chat isn't taking the world over by storm, even though it is supposed to happen Any Day Now.  The lock-in factor is definitely a  culprit - think of all the services out there, and how none  of them inter-operate Skype GTalk Hangout Tango FaceTime TinyChat oh, the list goes on.  And none  of them work with each other.  Mind you, this is even before we get into Device issues (quick!  Can your Polycom work with eyeBeam?), not to mention the horror that is 'Standards' (For some fun bed-time reading, check this out! ). Enter WebRTC .  Its a simple standard that enables Javascript based RTC.  The API document may look complicated, but it really is not.  Much more importantly, it is simple , open, and did I mention, simple * ?   Serge LaChapelle of Marratech fame is now over at Google moving 'em into the WebRTC world **.  Expect to see the fruits of this work to show up in G+ Han...

Yap was one of the big names in Voice Recognition - powering a lot of the voicemail transcription market -  till they suddenly went silent on 10/20/2011 (Silent Thursday?).  The rumors were rife - everything ranging from software breakdown, to Filipino strike, to (the most baffling one) Sneaky Verizon Ploy.  It turns out the truth was a lot less strange - Amazon bought 'em out to (most likely) embed in the Fire.  Its certainly an anti-Siri ploy, but I guess we'll find out about the Fire rumors Any Day Now...

Another day, another BigData investment - this time with Kontagent getting a bunch-a money from Battery, Maverick, and Altos.  The particular angle here is that Kontagent focuses on Social Analytics, in particular, gaming.  Their secret sauce is in helping 'social gaming' folks figure out how to get their users more engrossed.  I assume this is essentially BigData merged with a healthy dose of Behavioral Psychology (shades of Kahneman & Tversky ).

Hat tip - Rands in Repose

Really. Don't believe me? Check it out...

From the NY Times , the story of how a financial advisor lost his house. The dumb part --> I should have known better. No matter how well things are going, borrowing 100 percent of the purchase price of a home is not a good idea. I shouldn’t have relied on someone else to make that calculation, let alone the guy who was making money putting me in the loan. I was a financial adviser, and I never sat down to figure out what it would take to make this work. I just wanted to believe him. And it was so easy to believe he had been right, at least at first. We loved living there. The children went to an awesome public school, and we made some great friends. I could ride my bike to Red Rocks, the wilderness area outside of town. And for a time, the real estate market erased any doubt I may have had. It just kept going up. The smart part At first, I dismissed the idea of a short sale. Late that summer, I sat down with a really close friend in Las Vegas, someone I looked up to. He cut...

Sigh.  I actually see this as potentially being useful.  Which is both horrific, and tragic, given my built-in luddite-loathing for our consumer-culture ... Anyhow, without further ado, Wikets ... The web is chock full of reviews, but I can see Wikets taking off because it makes the process remarkably simple, more intimately social, and actually rewarding. Users can compile lists of recommended products to share with their friends and favorite other users’ recommendations by either sharing them as a “Re-Rec” or marking them on a “Wishlist.” They can also use Wikets to ask for specific recommendations. While recommendations can only be created within the iPhone app, they can be shared over Facebook and other existing social networks and viewed by others on the web. When people buy products a user has recommended on Wikets, the user is rewarded with “points” that can eventually be converted into gift cards. (more...)

BigData used to be about scientists moving tons of data around.  Guess what?   Its the same thing all around again !  And its all new!  W00t! Ok, to be fair, its about the need to move  all this data around, instead of just processing it in situ . He ascribes this massive amount of data to the emergence of cheap compute, better imaging and more information, and calls it a new way of doing science. “In every area of science we are generating a petabyte of data, and unless we have the equivalent of the 21st-century microscope, with faster networks and the corresponding computing, we are stuck,” Szalay said.

Yet another article about how wireless providers need to get more money from consumers .  Money quote The end game for operators is to figure out how to get people to use less data or pay more for the privilege, while also steering users to content that  makes users happy  without straining the network. So maybe they offer unlimited Facebook and charge more for Netflix. After all, the last thing they want to do is to scare people from signing up for data plans for fear of expensive overage fees.... The point here is that as operators try to change the way they charge, because the current models aren’t economically sustainable for them, consumers have to believe the deal is reasonable. That’s why I’ve been a proponent of measures such as data happy hours or other plans that incent users to use the network during non-peak times. Doing so helps manage congestion, and can still generate revenue for carriers. The entire article sounds like the discussion we had (and are ...

An article on working with graph-like data on Cassandra , which basically translates to make it all a really long row with timestamps for column-ids. The cost of denormalisation is duplication of data, and in this case we have duplicated each message by copying it to the timeline of every user who follows the author of that message. This means we incur a write cost when broadcasting a message, since we must insert the same message multiple times. Luckily for us, Cassandra is optimised for high write throughput (writes perform only sequential I/O) and it is this performance profile of Cassandra that allows us to trade some write speed for increased read throughput. It works (and how!), but its this kind of bigdata solution that gives me the jeebies...