Thought I’d go light on the opinion and heavy on the content. I ran across the following really cool links this afternoon.
Ever wonder how a car can turn -- one wheel must turn faster than the other while both are engine powered? Anyone can say it’s because of the differential but how many of you really know how it works? Check out this old video for a really easy to understand breakdown of a differential. Video automatically starts 1:50 in...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4JhruinbWc#t=1m50s
Another very cool flash animation comes from USA Today and shows how the International Space Station has grown over the years. It’s also very cool:
http://i.usatoday.net/tech/graphics/iss_timeline/flash.htm
Enjoy!
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Microsoft's Real Control Point
I was just reviewing a CNET article written in mid-July following Google’s Chrome announcement. Chrome as you may recall is Google’s new open source operating system. Having been down that road with Sun Microsystems and the Java Desktop System I rolled my eyes. Having also had an outsiders inside view of Microsoft over the years both as a competitive analyst and later as the marketing lead of an interoperability alliance with Microsoft I have seen much of the Redmond stack as threatening to a competitive landscape and the open source community. However I’ve dramatically changed my tune on much of what I think matters.
Over the years we’ve heard of many technologies labeled as architectural control points: operating system, browser (oh how wrong we were there), directory (think user authentication / password access), exchange (control email access) and lately cell phone ecosystem. Each one of these technologies held our attention for a while until something else came along proving the weakness in that as a control point. In many ways you can suggest that all of these technologies in aggregate controlled architectural flexibility and capability. But making that argument would be ridiculous as it remains true with any homogeneous system. The best news to come from Open Source is that there is a focused and strong developer base focused on creating competitive alternatives. Some are better than the proprietary, some are not. As the iPhone has proven, make something that people want to buy and their purchasing power alone is enough to move entire industries and markets. (Imagine the boring world of cell phones if Apple hadn’t pushed the capabilities and expectations for cell phones. It’s quite possible that RIM would still be selling B&W models of the popular Blackberry.)
However undisturbed is one Microsoft control point that we all take entirely for granted: the ubiquitous Office Suite. Having suffered with and been a proponent of OpenOffice I know that there are alternatives actively used by all sizes of organizations. However almost all of us use all or parts of Microsoft Office whether at home or at work. It is my contention as we view the increasingly web-based movement of applications that Office productivity tools will remain mostly on premise and will increasingly integrate cloud service capabilities and services to make application access, integration and synthesis more capable.
The biggest problem no one has solved is how to integrate multiple web services and SaaS applications for reporting, analysis and business intelligence. I recently ran across a company called Pervasive that has a solution to provide across cloud service integration. It appears to be complicated and expensive as a solution goes. But it clearly is targeting an end user need that will only further become exacerbated as more of our lives migrate online. For consumers think about how much of a pain it is to work in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc. Now think how difficult it would be if you had to gather, analyze and report on data from each service regularly. For the enterprise it’s even worse. Salesforce.com, the leading online CRM tool, provides average sales reporting capabilities. Imagine how difficult it would be for someone using SAP ERP, Eloqua marketing/lead management and Google Analytics to create a cross service report for weekly review?! As someone who did weekly reporting across Google, Marketbright, Salesforce.com, Netsuite and Intuit I can tell you that this isn’t just a pain, it’s extraordinarily time consuming as well. I managed this for a company of 50. Imagine doing this for a company of 500 or 5,000!
Now to wrap this back to Office: Office remains a set of tools that we all know and we all have a local license to use. We all know how to use Excel and Powerpoint. We know how to create tags, worksheets and pie charts. Wouldn’t it be great to simply plug in web service content and have it integrate automatically in the spreadsheet we normally use for analysis and reporting? Wouldn’t it be great if that tag were dynamic and could automatically refresh as the web service is updated? Wouldn’t it be even better if we could update sales data in Excel and have that automatically updated in Salesforce? How easy and powerful would Office become then? I wonder if anyone at Microsoft has thought about how powerful Office could become?
Over the years we’ve heard of many technologies labeled as architectural control points: operating system, browser (oh how wrong we were there), directory (think user authentication / password access), exchange (control email access) and lately cell phone ecosystem. Each one of these technologies held our attention for a while until something else came along proving the weakness in that as a control point. In many ways you can suggest that all of these technologies in aggregate controlled architectural flexibility and capability. But making that argument would be ridiculous as it remains true with any homogeneous system. The best news to come from Open Source is that there is a focused and strong developer base focused on creating competitive alternatives. Some are better than the proprietary, some are not. As the iPhone has proven, make something that people want to buy and their purchasing power alone is enough to move entire industries and markets. (Imagine the boring world of cell phones if Apple hadn’t pushed the capabilities and expectations for cell phones. It’s quite possible that RIM would still be selling B&W models of the popular Blackberry.)
However undisturbed is one Microsoft control point that we all take entirely for granted: the ubiquitous Office Suite. Having suffered with and been a proponent of OpenOffice I know that there are alternatives actively used by all sizes of organizations. However almost all of us use all or parts of Microsoft Office whether at home or at work. It is my contention as we view the increasingly web-based movement of applications that Office productivity tools will remain mostly on premise and will increasingly integrate cloud service capabilities and services to make application access, integration and synthesis more capable.
The biggest problem no one has solved is how to integrate multiple web services and SaaS applications for reporting, analysis and business intelligence. I recently ran across a company called Pervasive that has a solution to provide across cloud service integration. It appears to be complicated and expensive as a solution goes. But it clearly is targeting an end user need that will only further become exacerbated as more of our lives migrate online. For consumers think about how much of a pain it is to work in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc. Now think how difficult it would be if you had to gather, analyze and report on data from each service regularly. For the enterprise it’s even worse. Salesforce.com, the leading online CRM tool, provides average sales reporting capabilities. Imagine how difficult it would be for someone using SAP ERP, Eloqua marketing/lead management and Google Analytics to create a cross service report for weekly review?! As someone who did weekly reporting across Google, Marketbright, Salesforce.com, Netsuite and Intuit I can tell you that this isn’t just a pain, it’s extraordinarily time consuming as well. I managed this for a company of 50. Imagine doing this for a company of 500 or 5,000!
Now to wrap this back to Office: Office remains a set of tools that we all know and we all have a local license to use. We all know how to use Excel and Powerpoint. We know how to create tags, worksheets and pie charts. Wouldn’t it be great to simply plug in web service content and have it integrate automatically in the spreadsheet we normally use for analysis and reporting? Wouldn’t it be great if that tag were dynamic and could automatically refresh as the web service is updated? Wouldn’t it be even better if we could update sales data in Excel and have that automatically updated in Salesforce? How easy and powerful would Office become then? I wonder if anyone at Microsoft has thought about how powerful Office could become?
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
A Ghost in the machine
Having worked in some form of alternative desktops for many years -- from alternatives to Windows, Linux-based desktops and applications, thin clients and most recently desktop virtualization solutions -- the other day something very different caught my eye: G.ho.st or Globally Hosted Operating System.
So there are two unique and newsworthy angles with this story. I’ll start with the one that seems to have gotten the most press: the company is based in Israel but all the programming and code jockeys are Palestinians working in the West Bank. In other words, these two traditional enemies have teamed up to create a really cool technology software offering although most have not been able to meet face-to-face. My guess is that they have purchased some very expensive video teleconferencing equipment and work virtually. I do hope that some very smart marketeers at Plantronics or Cisco have provided them with either free or seriously discounted hardware because this angle to the company is not only unique but would make a tremendous success story. Hopefully the Israeli government will also notice that working together is a whole lot more economically conducive than fighting -- or, in this case, limiting travel between the two regions. Considering neither the West Bank nor Israel is very large I’m sure that the Palestinian contingent isn’t physically more than a few miles from the Israeli half of the Company. It’s too bad they can’t physically connect.
With that said, the truly interesting part is that they have done so much virtually maybe the lesson for the rest of the world is that you really don’t need the physical barriers that we have come to take for granted. The G.ho.st solution -- and I’ve only done some cursory trials with the software provide a very unique and quite capable approach to virtualizing a desktop. They have virtualized the entire GUI, application and file base to a cloud and have optimized the delivery to run fairly well over an internet connection. In other words you can access your true desktop with a desktop experience (as opposed to a file or application experience) from a web browser. You get file to device synchronization (plug in your cell phone or MP3 player and it will synch content), access to applications and drag and drop file management right from the web interface. Oh, and by the way, the web interface looks an awful lot like a Linux GNOME desktop. (For those of you not familiar with GNOME just replace what I just said with “Windows desktop.”) There are many companies looking to control the desktop and it’s functionality by moving the OS and applications back to a server but this is the first that actually delivers a full Windows replacement as a web service.
We hear so much hype around Cloud Computing -- and interestingly not much about its greatest challenges such as analytics or cross platform BI -- but I’ve not seen an alternative to the entire client delivered via Cloud Computing until now. Unfortunately you’ll always need some kind of hardware platform to deliver access but I can now see a future where that platform becomes as vanilla and general purpose as a Netbook has promised but not yet delivered.
For more information check out: http://g.ho.st/
So there are two unique and newsworthy angles with this story. I’ll start with the one that seems to have gotten the most press: the company is based in Israel but all the programming and code jockeys are Palestinians working in the West Bank. In other words, these two traditional enemies have teamed up to create a really cool technology software offering although most have not been able to meet face-to-face. My guess is that they have purchased some very expensive video teleconferencing equipment and work virtually. I do hope that some very smart marketeers at Plantronics or Cisco have provided them with either free or seriously discounted hardware because this angle to the company is not only unique but would make a tremendous success story. Hopefully the Israeli government will also notice that working together is a whole lot more economically conducive than fighting -- or, in this case, limiting travel between the two regions. Considering neither the West Bank nor Israel is very large I’m sure that the Palestinian contingent isn’t physically more than a few miles from the Israeli half of the Company. It’s too bad they can’t physically connect.
With that said, the truly interesting part is that they have done so much virtually maybe the lesson for the rest of the world is that you really don’t need the physical barriers that we have come to take for granted. The G.ho.st solution -- and I’ve only done some cursory trials with the software provide a very unique and quite capable approach to virtualizing a desktop. They have virtualized the entire GUI, application and file base to a cloud and have optimized the delivery to run fairly well over an internet connection. In other words you can access your true desktop with a desktop experience (as opposed to a file or application experience) from a web browser. You get file to device synchronization (plug in your cell phone or MP3 player and it will synch content), access to applications and drag and drop file management right from the web interface. Oh, and by the way, the web interface looks an awful lot like a Linux GNOME desktop. (For those of you not familiar with GNOME just replace what I just said with “Windows desktop.”) There are many companies looking to control the desktop and it’s functionality by moving the OS and applications back to a server but this is the first that actually delivers a full Windows replacement as a web service.
We hear so much hype around Cloud Computing -- and interestingly not much about its greatest challenges such as analytics or cross platform BI -- but I’ve not seen an alternative to the entire client delivered via Cloud Computing until now. Unfortunately you’ll always need some kind of hardware platform to deliver access but I can now see a future where that platform becomes as vanilla and general purpose as a Netbook has promised but not yet delivered.
For more information check out: http://g.ho.st/
Thursday, August 6, 2009
How big is a Trillion anyway?
Making the news over the last few months is the term “trillion.” As in the budget deficit has ballooned to $1.5 trillion dollars, and the budget debt has grown to $12 trillion dollars.
The thing I’ve noticed in the tech industry is that we tend to the micro and nano; there is so much value in making something smaller and cheaper... thank you Gordon Moore and, quite frankly, Sony for driving this point home.
I’m a huge fan of visualization technologies as a tool to better understand and communicate the esoteric. Thankfully some smart people have now given us new ways to visualize the enormously large “trillion.” Consider:
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
A million minutes ago was – 1 year, 329 days, 10 hours and 40 minutes ago. A billion minutes ago was just after the time of Christ.
A million hours ago was in 1885. A billion hours ago man had not yet walked on earth.
A million dollars ago was five (5) seconds ago at the U.S. Treasury. A billion dollars ago was late yesterday afternoon at the U.S. Treasury.
A trillion dollars is so large a number that only politicians can use the term in conversation... probably because they seldom think about what they are really saying. I’ve read that mathematicians do not even use the term trillion! Here is some perspective on TRILLION:
Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000. The country has not existed for a trillion seconds. Western civilization has not been around a trillion seconds. One trillion seconds ago – 31,688 years – Neanderthals stalked the plains of Europe.
Thanks to Tysknews for this wonderful illustration. This was taken from: http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Taxes/million.htm
Want to SEE a trillion dollars? Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmxU2IqhnjM&feature=related
The thing I’ve noticed in the tech industry is that we tend to the micro and nano; there is so much value in making something smaller and cheaper... thank you Gordon Moore and, quite frankly, Sony for driving this point home.
I’m a huge fan of visualization technologies as a tool to better understand and communicate the esoteric. Thankfully some smart people have now given us new ways to visualize the enormously large “trillion.” Consider:
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
A million minutes ago was – 1 year, 329 days, 10 hours and 40 minutes ago. A billion minutes ago was just after the time of Christ.
A million hours ago was in 1885. A billion hours ago man had not yet walked on earth.
A million dollars ago was five (5) seconds ago at the U.S. Treasury. A billion dollars ago was late yesterday afternoon at the U.S. Treasury.
A trillion dollars is so large a number that only politicians can use the term in conversation... probably because they seldom think about what they are really saying. I’ve read that mathematicians do not even use the term trillion! Here is some perspective on TRILLION:
Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000. The country has not existed for a trillion seconds. Western civilization has not been around a trillion seconds. One trillion seconds ago – 31,688 years – Neanderthals stalked the plains of Europe.
Thanks to Tysknews for this wonderful illustration. This was taken from: http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Taxes/million.htm
Want to SEE a trillion dollars? Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmxU2IqhnjM&feature=related
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Update on pico projectors
Last week I wrote about the evolution of the presentation projector and how cool it will be (one day) to see projectors as a native part of a cell phone. That day is far closer than even I thought. Nikon just introduced a camera with a built in projector:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/nikon-crams-projector-into-compact-camera/
Very small step from there to the cell phone!
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/nikon-crams-projector-into-compact-camera/
Very small step from there to the cell phone!
Friday, July 31, 2009
Bing vs. Google - There's another to consider
Yesterday Yahoo and Microsoft finally announced their search partnership. If you haven’t kept up on how Google is changing the shape of their competition, Yahoo decided to get out of the search business and have agreed to outsource their search service to Microsoft. This comes at a great time for Microsoft as they finally have what should be considered a viable search alternative in Bing. If you haven’t yet checked out Bing you should just for the user experience. Bing provides an option when you roll your cursor over the search results to view the content on the link without actually clicking on the link. With that said they’ve had some significant indexing issues and you won’t find exactly the same kind of results that you will in Google. Microsoft claims that they have indexed the most significant results but good indexing takes time so if you’re looking for some a bit more obscure you may be disappointed. (On a side note I have been frustrated over the lack of indexing my personal consulting site www.baer-consulting.net. While it showed up in Google the day after I went live, it still, two weeks later, has yet to show up on Bing.)
Following the ultimate implementation of Bing on Yahoo -- this deal should take a good six months to roll out -- consumers will have to choose between Google and Bing. The only remaining alternatives are a collection of third tier players including ask.com among others. (Remember askjeeves?) But actually there is another alternative: WolframAlpha. Have you checked that engine out? If not, you absolutely should! (www.wolframalpha.com) For a subset of search needs WolframAlpha clearly exceeds anything offered by Google or Bing. Are you looking for the answer to a mathematics equation? Chemical formula or historical information on a date? You need to check out WolframAlpha! Not only does this site approach search in a different way, its results are far superior for its focused type of searches over any rival.
It’s been so de rigueur to type your own name into Google to see how high you may rank in their search results -- come on, you know you’ve done it! With WolframAlpha, it’s way too much fun to type in your own birth date or hometown! Check it out. If you’re as geeky as me you’ll bookmark it immediately!
Following the ultimate implementation of Bing on Yahoo -- this deal should take a good six months to roll out -- consumers will have to choose between Google and Bing. The only remaining alternatives are a collection of third tier players including ask.com among others. (Remember askjeeves?) But actually there is another alternative: WolframAlpha. Have you checked that engine out? If not, you absolutely should! (www.wolframalpha.com) For a subset of search needs WolframAlpha clearly exceeds anything offered by Google or Bing. Are you looking for the answer to a mathematics equation? Chemical formula or historical information on a date? You need to check out WolframAlpha! Not only does this site approach search in a different way, its results are far superior for its focused type of searches over any rival.
It’s been so de rigueur to type your own name into Google to see how high you may rank in their search results -- come on, you know you’ve done it! With WolframAlpha, it’s way too much fun to type in your own birth date or hometown! Check it out. If you’re as geeky as me you’ll bookmark it immediately!
Monday, July 27, 2009
So how cool will this be?
Over ten years ago while I was living in Los Gatos I met a wonderful couple from North Carolina. They were our next door neighbors. Thinking out of the box they came up with a great idea: “drive-in movie night.” Play a movie on their VCR and output via an inFocus projector borrowed from work onto a large white sheet hung over the garage door. What a phenomenal idea and great invitation to friends and family to pop the popcorn and watch movies with the neighborhood. I know that quite a few of you have amped this idea up with DVD or Blue-Ray, surround sound and an even bigger bed sheet. The amazing part about this is how much more advance the projectors have become.
A few years ago a friend of mine was looking into investing in a new home theater system and ran across a couple of HD projectors specifically designed to project in widescreen HD. Major benefits: small footprint, scalable image from 26“ to 110”! Big drawback: any ambient light washes out the image. In other words if you’re watching during the day you better have the best black out curtains.
Funny thing is that since I went on my first sales trip I always dreamed of better image quality coupled with more portability. Sure projectors have shrunk to a very useable size of a large paperback book but I’ve dreamed of an even smaller and more portable version. Well my dream is almost a reality. PicoProjectors -- projectors so small that they can be embedded in cell phones -- represent the ultimate in capability and form factor. Afterall my cell phone is nothing more than a handheld computer. I can install applications, edit MS Office documents, view images and watch movies. Wouldn’t it be great if I could project my sales pitch or movie onto a wall for all to see? And do that without plugging into a separate device? Soon you will be able to do all this!
Pico Projectors for mobile phones:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10284209-52.html
A few years ago a friend of mine was looking into investing in a new home theater system and ran across a couple of HD projectors specifically designed to project in widescreen HD. Major benefits: small footprint, scalable image from 26“ to 110”! Big drawback: any ambient light washes out the image. In other words if you’re watching during the day you better have the best black out curtains.
Funny thing is that since I went on my first sales trip I always dreamed of better image quality coupled with more portability. Sure projectors have shrunk to a very useable size of a large paperback book but I’ve dreamed of an even smaller and more portable version. Well my dream is almost a reality. PicoProjectors -- projectors so small that they can be embedded in cell phones -- represent the ultimate in capability and form factor. Afterall my cell phone is nothing more than a handheld computer. I can install applications, edit MS Office documents, view images and watch movies. Wouldn’t it be great if I could project my sales pitch or movie onto a wall for all to see? And do that without plugging into a separate device? Soon you will be able to do all this!
Pico Projectors for mobile phones:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10284209-52.html
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