Posted by John Patrick on Feb 28, 2006 in
Conferences,
IBM,
Internet Technology 
Today I attended the IBM Open Source Analyst Briefing which was held at the Marriott in Stamford, Connecticut. I will post a story about what I learned later but first I would like to share something about the Marriott. The hotel had a "Wired-for-Business" connectivity offer which enables guests to "Work smarter with unlimited…" in-room high-speed Internet access plus local and long distance phone calls. The cost is $9.95 per day. Not bad compared to many places. For me, using EV-DO is much better. I am already paying a monthly fee for it and it works more or less everywhere — but I have to admit it is expensive. I suspect many guests do not have EV-DO and may not want the WiFi offering. They will be confronted with $1.00 for the first 30 minutes of a local call, MCI "daytime operator assisted" rate plus 55% hotel surcharge for long distance plus a "connection charge" of $4.99 for each U.S. long distance call and $9.00 for each "International" call. This is one of many examples of companies exploiting those who are part of a declining market for old-fashioned services. Why would anyone pay $4.99 plus $1.00 for a call that they could make on their cell phone — probably within their covered minutes. As for international calling, there are many choices including Skype and my people which allows you to transfer from a cell phone to your home and then to a VoIP connection to Europe for less than ten cents per minute. Disintermediation is happening all over the place. Next time you need to call 411, try 800-FREE-411 instead.
Posted by John Patrick on Feb 25, 2006 in
WiFi 
Some of us have long envisioned WiFi being everywhere and the rollout is well underway. Hotel, coffee shop, and airport WiFi is now taken for granted in most parts of the world, but the reach of WiFi is now extending beyond those venues. On the SAS flight home from Copenhagen (connection from Oslo) this past weekend, it was very nice to have WiFi aboard the Airbus A330. The Connexion by Boeing service is provided by Airbus’s competitor. At $26.96 (including all fees and taxes) it was a bit pricey but for an eight hour+ flight it was nice to be able to send and receive email, update the web site, and IM with friends and family from 40,000 feet!
The next big thing with WiFi is to have it on our mobile phones. The Sprint PPC-6700 was the first Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphone in the U.S. but now Verizon has its own version of the same phone, called the XV6700. Both models have bluetooth and EV-DO, the wireless mode that cellular operators say is broadband. It is actually pretty fast but even faster is WiFi and both of these new phones have it. In Japan there is more choice of WiFi phones and more WiFi access points too. As more major American municipalities blanket their cities with free or low-cost WiFi our "long distance" experience will be different. Instead of paying $1.49 per minute to call Europe with Verizon, you will be able to call for a nickel or so per minute with Voice Over the Internet using WiFi. I expect to see many more phones be introduced that sport the WiFi capability as the price and power requirements continue to drop.
Eventually, anything electronic will have a WiFi chip in it and be connected to the Internet.
An early adopter of the idea is Toshiba with their TDP-SW20U WiFi-equipped business projector. The benefit is that you can place the projector and laptop anywhere in the room without having to worry about cables. This would have come in handy for me over the years. I remember flying to Seoul, Korea for a speech and being given a small table on the floor in front of the stage with a four foot cable to the PC. I had to give the speech from the floor standing in front of the screen. The other nice thing is that multiple users, with multiple laptops, can share a WiFi projector without having to switch cables and playing musical chairs in the boardroom.
We can expect many more WiFi-enabled devices to come. You can follow WiFi developments at JiWire.com.
Posted by John Patrick on Feb 23, 2006 in
Blogging 
We have all read the "hype" about blogging over the past few years. More recently there was a story saying "Blogged Out — The Fad May Be Fading". The reality is that the reality is bigger than the hype and we have only seen the beginning of the blogging revolution. I have no doubts that blogging will continue to change the way information is created, published, distributed, syndicated, archived, and searched. I did my best to lay out a point of view on this in a story called "The Babel of business: do we over-communicate?". The story was pubhlished last month in a magazine called the European Business Forum. The web version is now live here.
Other patrickWeb "in the news" stories
Posted by John Patrick on Feb 22, 2006 in
People 
I suspect a lot of us would have more time in the day if it were not for Su Doku. Apparently, Sudoku was seventh of the top one hundred web searches for 2005. I can see why — it is really addictive! Similar to a crossword puzzle but totally numeric, the idea is to fill in nine rows and nine columns plus nine 3×3 matrices, all with the numbers one to nine with no duplicates. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend it — good brain food!
Ready to print daily Su Doku puzzle
Posted by John Patrick on Feb 21, 2006 in
IBM 
"Intellectual Property" has been behind the scenes in years past but has now become a front and center issue. Some argue "IP" is what makes the world go round and is a great American strength and some argue that anything anything anyone invents should belong to everyone. I believe most would agree that the truth is somewhere in between. If a company spends millions of dollars on capital equipment they should be able to expect to get a return on the things they invent as a result of the investment without fearing that another company will take the invention and profit by producing the product with no development investment. At the other extreme if someone gets a patent for "e-commerce involving left-handed people who buy things online on Tuesday afternoons", most people would agree that this is an abuse of the patent concept and it surely doesn’t represent "Intellectual Property". Most of the IP world is somewhere in between these extremes and the issues are diverse and complicated.
The largest patent producer in the world (for well over a decade) is IBM Corporation and it seems reasonable for the company to take a point of view on the subject of "IP". To widely share their views, IBM has launched a new podcast series, "The New Intellectual Property (IP) Marketplace," which is now airing on ibm.com The first episode in the series features my former colleague Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM vice president of technology strategy and innovation. Dr. Wladawsky-Berger (he goes by Irving) explains the importance of patent quality and how the ability to share ideas stimulates innovation. He also gets into some of the heavier issues such as transparency, integrity, and mechanisms for establishing fair prices for IP..
I look forward to the future episodes of the series. In the meantime, I can highly recommend Irving’s blog.
Other patrickWeb stories about innovation
Posted by John Patrick on Feb 20, 2006 in
Healthcare,
IBM 
Pandemic viruses are one of the most threatening things that most of us can contemplate. Fortunately, some big guns are aimed at the potential problem. The Scripps Research Institute and IBM have announced a new collaboration called "Check-mate" which will capitalize on Scripps Research’s world class research in biochemical modeling and drug discovery and IBM’s expertise in computational biology and supercomputing. The joint research team will use IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer, the world’s fastest supercomputer to simulate how the potential pandemic virus ticks and devise models of containment.
The joint team will leverage their expertise in bioinformatics, structural biology, life sciences, functional genomics, systems biology, and medical informatics to accelerate an understanding of infectious diseases such as Avian Influenza. Rather than wait for a crisis and then try to figure out what happened, the team will build digital representations of these complex viruses pro-actively. The initial efforts will focus on the genetic variations of the viruses and potential methodologies to anticipate and contain the disease. Hopefully, the result will be an improved way to fight pandemic viruses before they become a plague — “Checkmate”.
patrickWeb stories about computational biology
Posted by John Patrick on Feb 18, 2006 in
Internet Technology,
Mobile,
Travels 
The snow on Wednesday was melting fast, the temperature was in the fifties, and the motorcycle ride was nice. Seemed almost like Spring, until I landed the next morning in blowing snow in Oslo, Norway. The snow has been continuous for the past two days but it does not seem to slow the Norwegians down even a little. I have seen kids on skis going up hill and senior citizens navigating the streets using ski poles instead of walkers. Where I am staying in Holmenkollen, near the famous Olympic ski jump, the hotel is full of kids ready to participate in a national ski competition this weekend. While they are flying down the slopes tomorrow, I will be flying to Copenhagen and then on to Newark, New Jersey and home.
The purpose of the trip was to visit with Opera Software ASA where I am a board member. Opera has a lot of exciting things going on. Just this week they announced that it will deliver the Web to Nintendo Dual Screen users. The Opera browser will be sold as a DS card (think of it as a game cartridge). Users simply insert the card into the Wi-Fi enabled Nintendo DS, connect to a network, and begin browsing on two screens. In the U.S. most people don’t browse on any handheld screens and now the Japanese are doing it on two screens!
Potentially even more profound is that Opera Software and Freedom Media just announced the world’s first mobile AJAX application using Opera as a "platform". In a nutshell AJAX is a set of Internet standards that allow the creation of applications that act and feel as though they are desktop applications, but they are actually web pages residing on a server somewhere on the Internet. After the web page is loaded, it quietly works behind the scenes to deliver data to the web page so that rather than "re-loading" a web page, the content of the page is changed in front of your eyes. Opera calls this new kind of application "Opera Widgets". This is the beginning of something big. What is profound about Opera widgets is that since they "live" on a web server, you can access them from anywhere — your PC, Mac, Linux setop box, game console, PDA, or your mobile phone. Stay tuned.
It is now Saturday morning and still snowing. If I thought the hotel was crowded with young people, it was nothing compared to the airport. Seems that every family in Norway is on their way to somewhere for a winter break. I asked one young man where he was headed and he said Florida. He was ready for a break from one of the world’s great winter wonderlands. SAS hosed downed the wings really well before we took off in the snow.
Posted by John Patrick on Feb 13, 2006 in
People 
Reading biographies of presidents and other famous people was of great interest to me as a young child. The one I remember most vividly was that of Benjamin Franklin. Born in Boston, Benjamin Franklin was an ambassador of goodwill around the world but was also a printer, writer, inventor, and scientist. Three hundred years after his birth in Boston, Franklin is still of great interest in Philadelphia where there is a reconstruction of his home. The Library of Congress has created a web site that pays to homage Franklin and chronicles his involvement in the Continental Congress and the Treaty of Paris. The most interesting part of the site is the document area which includes his design for a stove, his 1775 plan for a colonial confederation, and the founding charter for the American Philosophical Society.
Posted by John Patrick on Feb 12, 2006 in
Conferences 
My apologies for making an error in the link to my Top Ten Demo picks. I have corrected it — the link is here. The top ten is actually eleven and I do not mean to imply that there are really the "top" in the sense that they are the best. They are the ones that I happened to see and found most interesting.
It was such an exciting week at Demo that it is hard to summarize. There are many reviews of the conference on the web and you can find some of them at Kaboodle (one of the companies that debuted at Demo). There were sixty-eight companies showing off their latest and greatest — the Demo site has the full list with links to the companies, so if you want to know what is hot take a look here and click the + sign next to Demo 2006 at the top right of the page.
The product least expected but perhaps most enjoyed by the 700+ attendees was the MooBella virtual ice cream vending machine. After attendees made touch-panel choices from up to 96 combinations of flavors and mix-ins, the machine mixed and instantly froze fresh ingredients to produce a delicious scoop of ice cream within 45 seconds. The only drawback I could see was that there was no chocolate. Apparently, that flavor (favorite of 20% of the market) poses special challenges due to the viscosity of cocoa powder.
There were a number of themes that emerged at DEMO. Collaboration was one. Chris Shipley said that 2006 will be the year of collaboration. Demos included virtual meeting platforms, tools that in effect allow people to act as librarians and share their findings with others, and tools for collaborative software development. Another theme was vertical search. Google and Yahoo! are great but highly specialized searches offer much better results. Examples shown included shopping, entertainment, software code, healthcare, and politics.
Mobile applications are still somewhat limited by tiny screens but innovative new ideas were shown that make cell phones more useful than ever. One company showed a phone being used as a personal trainer during exercise. It kept track of your pace and location and plotted results on the screen. Another small device was shown that allows complete control over the phone, music, and every aspect of things going on in the house.
Security solutions were shown to protect our identity, protect our networks, stop spam and viruses at the door, and diagnose Internet traffic and catch malware before it gets to our systems. Biometric technologies were shown to allow secure payment and authentication. I look forward to some of these technologies being used in healthcare.
Through two FutureScan panels I attempted to help the audience see the future of security and computational biology. On the security panel we discussed the general state of Internet security (not healthy) but more importantly some of the research that may lead to a healthier net. To me the most promising thing is PKI. I have written much about this here. The computational biology panel was mind-blowing for most of us. Systems biology models, redesigning proteins, and learning about our genetic history will affect all of our lives. There was a great deal of interest in The Genographic Project. (A dozen DNA kits were given to the audience — you can get your own here). If you are interested in learning more about the human genome, the panelists recommended Genome by Matt Ridley. I am reading it now. We were all extremely fortunate to have had some of the world’s leading experts share their thoughts on the panels. You can find links to all the panelists here.
The most asked question between Demo attendees at breaks and meals is "See anything interesting?". Chris Shipley, Executive Producer of the DEMO Conferences, introduced sixty-eight companies — there was definitely something for everybody. I was not able to visit all the companies or hear all of their pitches, but at the end of this story I will mention eleven companies that I found most interesting — "My Top Ten Picks"
