NASA 50th

There are more than a billion Internet users in the world and tens of billions of web pages. Things were quite different in 1994 when I first showed the world wide web to the senior management team of IBM. Most of the web sites at that time were government or education related and my favorite back then was NASA which just recently celebrated it’s 50th Anniversary.

Not sure who had the first web site but Internet domains began to be registered in 1985. IBM.com was #11 — registered in March of 1986. NASA was not among the first 100 but when they launched their web site in the 1990′s they had an awesome amount of content. In fact the United States government has set a good example of using the Internet effectively. (See "The Top Twenty Essential US Government Web Sites").

Unfortunately, there was no web when NASA started back in the 1950′s but the anniversary web site has captured the history very well. An animated robot gives a brief intro on how to navigate the site and you get treated to a few tunes from the 1950s (such as "Tutti Frutti") and you can then move through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s and enjoy a lot of multimedia.

Aside from many projects with the shuttle, Mars Rover, Phoenix Lander, the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, NanoSatellites, and countless other exciting areas of exploration, NASA is about to acquire a new supercomputer cluster. NASA partner IBM Corporation will be building an iDataPlex cluster system which will combine 1,024 Intel Xeon quad-core processors with Nasa’s existing Discover computing cluster. The combined system will run at a top speed of 67 teraflops — 67 trillion calculations per second. This will put it well up in the TOP500 List. The new iDataPlex system is made by supercomputer leader Big Blue but is also part of the company’s "’Big Green" initiative. The supercomputer cluster will be running at 40 per cent of the power of predecessors but provide five times the computing power.

The new NASA/IBM system is called the "Discover Cluster" and will be used primarily for modeling of the 21st century climate and analyzing the effects of solar activity on the planet.

Greenland – Part 4 (The Cable)

Last month’s Konference Sarfarissoq in Nuuk was hosted by Brian Pedersen, the CEO of Tele-Post Greenland, and the focus was the impact of the submarine cable which will soon bring broadband Internet to Greenland. A traditional kayak enabled the symbolic landing. The big news since my August trip is the actual arrival of the Alcatel cable-laying ship which brought the trans-Atlantic fiber optic cable Qaqortoq on Sept. 8th and to Nuuk on the 11th. It was a milestone event and the citizens of both towns were understandably excited. They will be even more so when the cable gets hooked up and the fiber is no longer dark.

Brian Pedersen, the chairman Kaj Egede, the mayor and a cabinet minister received the cable it at the shore. The new submarine cable will include four strands of glass, well protected in a multi-layer set of metal and petrol based materials to allow it to survive buried three feet below the bottom of the ocean — in some areas as deep as 10,000 feet below the surface. The four glass fibers will have a capacity of 2 terabits per second. Compared to what the country of Greenland has today this will be a nearly infinite jump.

The cable is nearly 3,000 miles long and links Greenland to Canada and Iceland. Greenland currently connects to the internet via satellite with slow speeds and at times unreliable service. The fiber broadband link will open new opportunities for Greenland as a hub between North America and Europe. In addition to serving as an alternate route for digital traffic, Greenland’s central location may get the attention of companies building Cloud Computing datacenters. Perhaps the Arctic climate could help keep the servers cool.

Greenland – Part 1 (Getting there)

Greenland – Part 2 (A unique place)

Greenland – Part 3 (The Conference)

Printable version of the combined stories

Gallery of pictures from Greenland

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patrickWeb Travel Photo Gallery

Route 7

Someday I will ride the entire 308 miles of U.S. Route 7 but this Tuesday it was just 120 miles of it. The day was perfect for a motorcycle ride — not too hot, not too cold. The north-south highway runs from Norwalk, Connecticut to northern Vermont near the Canadian border. As I was riding north, my brother was riding east from near Utica, New York. We met at the Cozy Corner Restaurant in Williamstown, Massachusetts — home of Williams College — for lunch.

The 240 mile ride offered a scenic view of the Berkshire Mountains plus brooks, streams, rivers, parks, antique shops, country hardware stores, towns, villages, and more antique shops. On the way back I stopped at one of the many nice shops in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Further south I could not resist a slight detour to ride through the West Cornwall one-way covered bridge which crosses the Housatonic River. It is easy to imagine the days of the horse and buggy.

If you are in a hurry, then nothing beats the Interstate Highway System but if you have a little extra time, roads like Route 7 offer a pleasant contrast.

DEMOfall 2008 in San Diego

DEMO continues to be my favorite conference — the semi-annual event took place this past week in San Diego, California. It was an uneventful trip from Palo Alto, where I had visited Mediazone, and on to San Francisco for a flight with Southwest (possibly the best airline in operation in the states) to San Diego to join the DEMO opening reception.

There were some key trends that were reinforced at DEMO again this year. Many companies in some way talked about mobile. Most companies either provide a web service or use web services as their platform. The term "cloud" is seeping into the vocabulary. Most companies were media related in some way or provided or used social networking. None of these things are new, by any means, but DEMO confirmed their strategic importance and demonstrated significant implementations. I don’t think any of them have cracked the code so to speak but there were many that had exciting visions and demos. I visited the ones in which I had the most interest. Chris Shipley kicked off the conference with insightful comments about the industry. (See the Demo blog for more on her thoughts). She talked about how the web has evolved from banking and buying things to a social web with a lot of user generated content to a web that will create real market value. Only a small percent of Internet users actually take advantage of the potential of the social web. This next phase will bring down the barriers: syndication, distribution, constant connectivity, on demand and lead to the distributed web. There will be new devices, new protocols beyond the desktop and mobile. Collaboration will become purposeful, not just "social". All this will be accompanied with advances in usability, security, and authentication.

The Demo conference allows entrepreneurs to show off new gadgets, software, hardware and business ideas and enables the press, analysts, investors, and technology enthusiasts to assess what they see. The product introductions that take place reveal key technology trends over the coming 12 to 18 months. This year there were 72 companies showing off — each getting six minutes on stage to tell their story. Chris screens the companies and introduces them to the audience. After the main tent sessions the attendees get to visit with the companies in the "Demo Hall". There isn’t time to visit all of them so I try to
be selective — I visited 25 of the companies this time. Some of the ones I found interesting follow. They are in no particular order.

If you asked me which of the 72 launches I found most interesting I would have to say Telnic, Ltd., the "dot tel" company. Having yourname.tel will allow you to store, update and publish all your contact information and web links directly on the Internet. This is not a web service — the data is actually stored in the infrastructure of the Internet. The heart of the Internet is the DNS — the Domain Name System. Among other tasks, the DNS translates humanly-meaningful domain names (like amazon.com) to the numerical address (like 72.21.210.11). The names and numbers are stored in special purpose computers that are scattered around the world. With dot tel, companies or individuals will be able to have their contact information stored there too. It will be the one official place to have directories for people and companies. You will be able to choose how much information you want public (maybe just your name and your web site or blog address) and which data you want to be private.The private information will be encrypted and can be selectively shared with people or organizations that you authorize. People will be able to reach you on their mobile with the touch of a button through the dot tel directory. No web site or hosting is involved. I think this will be a big deal.

Plastic Logic, Ltd. showed an e-book that can display full-sized documents. It is like an 8.5 x 11 Kindle and will replace a briefcase full of documents. It was sort of a computer but not really a computer. I am a bit skeptical on this one.

A number of companies showed how the web is gradually replacing television as we know it. Use your favorite search engine and take a look at
Awind Inc.,
RealNetworks, Inc.,
beeTV,
RemoTV, Inc.,
Invision TV, LLC, and
ffwd.com, Inc. Or just revisit the DEMO Conference Agenda for links to what Chris and team thought about them.

A handful of companies showed products that make creating, sharing, and consuming digital bits more enjoyable. See
UGA Digital, Inc.,
Trinity Convergence, Inc.,
Blue Lava Technologies, Inc.,
Kadoo Inc.,
MixMatchMusic, Ltd.,
Photrade, LLC,
MeDeploy, and
The Echo Nest Corp. Photrade is yet another company in the digital photography space. They will allow you to share and protect photos you take, purchase photos that others have taken, and make money from your photos. With the plummeting of high quality digital cameras and the availability of software that can make an amateur photo look professional there is a growing market here.

Mobile will become a bigger and bigger part of our lives.
Maverick Mobile Solutions, Pvt. Ltd. has a solution that protects your phone in case you lose it. It sets off various bells and whistles. Not a bad idea as we put more and more personal data on our phones.
G.ho.st lets you put your PC on your mobile phone. You have to see it to believe it.
WebDiet claims to make losing weight and getting healthy easy by using your mobile phone to enter everything you eat and get an analysis that optimizes your diet. If you want to chat and share more with your friends take a look at Xumii.

There were more than a half-dozen companies showing off new ideas for protecting and managing digital assets. As we move more and more of our pictures, conversations, movies, notes, documents, etc. to the digital world, the security of them becomes more and more important. One of the companies I found quite interesting in this area is Usable Security Systems, Inc. UsableLogin is their product and what they are trying to do is make passwords as we know them obsolete and give us secure access to any web site. All you have to do is recognize a picture you have chosen and remember one simple codeword to log in securely. Some of us have more than 100 login/password pairs. I think Usable may have a problem getting some banking sites to cooperate but even if just 80% of the sites you visit could be handled with a single password that would be a very good thing. The Founder & CEO, Rachna Dhamija, did her PhD in security at Berkely and she gave a very good demo. See it here.

As a security aside, if you use Gmail, I highly recommend selecting the https option in the settings. This doesn’t guarantee security but it does insure that the data going back and forth between your computer and Google is encrypted.

There were many more great demos. Browse your way through the DEMO Conference Agenda and see what catches your eye.

The flight back to New York on American Airlines offered an unexpected surprise. GoGoInflight offered broadband Internet service. The price was $12.95 and the performance was excellent. I ran a speedtest and found the results to be better than what I get from Comcast Cable at home. The WiFi connection works with both laptops and any mobile phone that has WiFi (like the iPhone).

Other patrickWeb stories about conferences

Mediazone

The 4:45 AM departure from home last Sunday was not a barrel of fun but the flight to San Francisco was uneventful and was followed by a visit with Mediazone in Palo Alto where they were having a management conference.

Mediazone is an extremely interesting company that I was not previously familiar with. They are based in Palo Alto but are owned by a company called Naspers — a $2.6 billion media giant in South Africa (a part of the world I had been fortunate enough to visit in March). Mediazone creates and operates a set of targeted social media destinations, centered on passionate audience interests that incorporate a rich set of video, audio, text, community and interactive user controls.

An example would be their RugbyZone — if you like Rugby you would surely love RugbyZone. This is just one of Mediazone’s highly targeted segments of content. They don’t try to be all things to all people but they do go very deep in their specific "vertical" segments such as Rugby, Motorcross, Wimbledon Live, and IndyCar. I have always believed that other than perhaps Google, specialized web sites have the most to offer. Ten years ago I was an advisory board member at space.com and we found tremendous interest on the part of "space junkies". People who care about a narrow segment tend to be deeply interested. They are willing to register and participate in the community of users and generate content themselves. The challenge is how to make money at facilitating the community and providing high-value content.

The answer is elusive and nobody has cracked the code just yet. The Wall Street Journal has a subscription model where subscribers pay $99 per year. They have unique content and a broad array of tools and content creditability. Most sites are not able to command such a fee. The dominant model today is advertising wherein sites are able to get a premium fee from the advertisers who want to reach a targeted audience. Someone selling rugby shoes is presumably willing to pay more for an ad at RugbyZone than for an ad at a "horizontal" site which may have more visitors but not the narrow interest. Another model is Weather Underground. For an annual fee of $10 you get a version of the site that has much less advertising. In other words you pay to not get advertising. I don’t claim to have the answer but my advice on the topic is always the same — offer great service and offer choices. A membership site might charge $69 per year for a standard subscription, $89, for an "ad free" version, and $29 for subscribers who are willing to accept unlimited advertising and provide profile information about their desires. When combined with great service, careful listening to the feedback, trying new models, and iterating quickly the result will be the highest possible odds of finding the right model.

On from Palo Alto to San Francisco on Southwest (possibly the best airline in operation in the states) to San Diego to join the opening reception at Demo.

IBM Happenings: August 2008

The month of August is a slow one in many parts of the business world — but not at IBM. where the month was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. One of the many interesting projects involved helping preserve Alaskan language and culture.
LitSite Alaska is bringing native language and stories to life using IBM technology which converts to text to audible speech.

The LitSite Alaska interactive Web site has a wealth of information, insights and stories about the history, diversity, culture and traditions of Alaskans and the IBM speech technology is bringing the stories life. A visitor could just read the stories but Alaskans believe that the ancient tradition of oral storytelling is more effective and it helps preserve native Alaskan language and culture. The oral tradition, an integral part of the lives of Alaska Natives, is in fact essential to learning and to passing on cultural knowledge and life skills. More than 1,000 pages of text have been enhanced with audio files using the IBM WebSphere Voice Server text-to-speech software. The audio files even include uncommon pronunciations of Alaskan native names and words such as KwaashKiKwaan, Tlingit, and Inupiaq. These words remind me of things I heard in Greenland.

Complete index of IBM Happenings