Hot Technology 2010

Aussie Rules interviews Michael Chanter - IT General Manager at Frontline - where he explains in layman’s terms the five technologies of the moment:

1. Utility storage: growing at 30%p.a.
2. Application virtualisation: one copy of the application per enterprise. Kept at the data server, pushed onto the client per need
   
3. Cloud computing: applications, storage, processing provided as an on-line service (examples)
   
4. Unified communication: an application that combines variety of communication modes (e.g. Google Voice)
5. Green IT: save power expense required for running storage and application servers

Here's the extended list, The top 10 for 2010, by Gartner.

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WebFuture

"What I love about the Internet is that it's an innovation engine. You see things come out of nowhere and they'll just catch fire."

Leonard Kleinrock

It was 40 years ago, when the Internet 1st was formed by establishing data connection between the two computers at UCLA. Things have moved along a fare bit since those days, where the current web space is dominated by SaaS news. What is the next big wave to come?

Web3.0

View more presentations from Johannes Bhakdi.

Whichever direction future developments end up taking, the Semantic Web will likely be the part of it. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, talks about it in The future of the Web as seen by its creator. The excerpt is via Coleman:

So, for example, if you are looking at a Web page, you find a talk that you want to take, an event that you want to go to. The event has a place and has a time and it has some people associated with it. But you have to read the Web page and separately open your calendar to put the information on it. And if you want to find the page on the Web you have to type the address again until the page turns back. If you want the corporate details about people, you have to cut and paste the information from a Web page into your address book, because your address book file and your original data files are not integrated together. And they are not integrated with the data on the Web. So the Semantic Web is about data integration.

When you use an application, you should be able to put data there so that you could configure that data. I should be able to inform my computer: “I’m going to that event.” And when I say that, the machine will understand the data. The Semantic Web is about putting data files on the Web. It’s not just a Web of documents but also of data. The Semantic Web of data would have many applications to connect together. For the first time there is a common data format for all applications, for databases and Web pages.

Web Based Applications

The time is ripe for the SaaS. Sunny's Cinergix, since its early days, is gaining the momentum by getting the recognition in the blogosphere for the recently out of a beta Creately.

They made it to the semi-finals of The Best of Rich Internet Applications 2009.

Other notable lists covering the current cream of web-based applications:

• 50 Most Usable RIAs
• Top 10 Web Collaboration Tools
• Top 10 Underhyped Webapps, 2009 Edition

My favourites:

• Google: Mail, Notebook, Calendar, Docs, blog, Task
• Creately - diagramming
  
• Box - storage
  

Experimenting with different presentation tools:

• MindMeister,
• Prezi,
• 280slides

-trying to figure out what's the best way for me to a) learn and b) communicate during the personal brand (career) development.

• ActionMethod

- Action Method is a more sophisticated tool for managing tasks within projects than Google Task, yet not as complicated as MS Project. It allows for collaboration and delegation of tasks. Highly recommended for students (group projects).

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Info Addict

Whereas, I pride myself of (relatively) easily adapting to new situations, and thus not holding onto old habits too rigidly but rather finding ways to modify them and/or embrace new, the craving for the new information has been ever present one. My Google Reader feeds span many different topics and too many subscriptions that require some organisation and direction through filtering in order to acquire more focused knowledge. Than again, variety is the space of life where creativity brews readily.

This article, nicely explains our constant desire for 'more (...)' fuelled by curiosity and envy. It cites number of psychology studies to explain the information addiction. Though, it can equally help with better understanding of any other over/consumption.

More than helping with the addiction, my interest in the article is in understanding how a good advertisement makes a product insanely desirable.

Interesting...!


Credit: 'insanely' great => Apple 1984.
Article: Aaron via Twitter.

No effort gets wasted

“Be not afraid of going slowly, be only afraid of standing still.”- Chinese Proverb

The title of the post might seem false, or at least foolish (-ly optimistic) at the 1st glance. But, I am a firm believer for a long time now (guess, I had no other choice). I´ve had these BS kind conversations with quite a few senior citizens (the kind who´s been enjoying their retirement for a while), and many of them presented gems along the lines of hope and perseverance. Keep plugging on, and the benefit of the current turmoil will some day be one of, if not the main, reasons for success, happiness... Btw, on this note, they also advised to be patient.

This belief is a tad stronger in me after the last night. Instead of working on the assignment or sleeping soundly, I could do neither. My brain was running on the overdrive, connecting many dots that have been accumulating between my (klempavi) ears throughout my prolonged relationship of procrastination and academic assignments. The end result of the sleepless night is a feasible idea that can bring a great, tangible benefits to many. Unlike previous ones, I´ll keep this cat in a bag for a while longer.

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Ps: ...or in Einstein´s words: Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

Pps: ´dot connecting´ phrase inspired by Steve Jobs´s speech.

Another Cat out of a bag

I've talked about ideas being cheap when telling the story about how I had the idea of something that became YouTube before YouTube came about.

Well, here's another one: On-line ERP for SMEs.

This kind of a web application would fit under a more general term used today, the cloud computing. ComputerWorld quotes the researcher who predicts that: "By 2013, at least one-fifth of enterprise IT workloads will be managed in cloud computing environments"

I've had this idea since the Sydney trip back in 2002. It came about during the 'under influence' conversations with one of Titania's friends, a waiter, I met during the trip. And unlike with the 'YouTube idea', there was actually something tangible behind this one: I had the business domain name registered.

It wasn't much, but it's a progress...

Onto the next one...!

Ps: luckily, unlike the transporter to cover wast distances in space, transportation to the next idea is readily available ;)

Stay hungry...

Steve Jobs at Stanford graduation 2005:

stayFoolish...!

Another possibility...

It looks like that when I grow up I'll have improved chances of getting a (real) job in Europe: "The EU, which lags behind the United States and Japan in terms of funding for research and development, aims to become the world's most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy by 2010." Btw. Yes, somewhat selfishly, I hope that sooner rather then later Cro will be "one of Europe's Stars" (T. Ivčić).

Choices, choices...

In my opinion this is a good 'problem' to have, a quality, or even a privileged 'problem'.

Yesterday I updated my Personalised Google page with more feeds to address the current interests (human sciences and more techie news...). Ray told me once that 'one's research should be about pursuing one's interest'. Unsurprisingly, I went on to generalise this by saying that 'not just research... a life should be about pursuing one's interest', which has underlying assumption that "All life is an experiment." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

So now when I logged in and noticed the feed titled Human Journey, it was a no-brainer click. It leads to the blog entry with the interesting line:

"The art of living is, in its essential meaning, a development and transformation of the power of inward choice."

This is nicely complemented with the inquiry that was part of Luka's eM signature "What is the best use of my now".

Either way, a 'problem' or with 'transformation of the power ', with 'best use', or whatever else might be applicable to choices, when it comes to our own, I hope we can all join Frank Senatra in singing:

I’ve done it my way...!

Ps: off to get that lecture material ready for this Monday :)

Ideas...

...are cheep. It was at one of DIS Phd seminars where I first heard the story that ideas are like mushrooms after the rain - when the conditions are right they pop-up all over the place. The same, or at least very similar ideas tend to surface at a particular point in time and context. [The moral of the story for the Phd students was to publish early and often.]

I never considered myself to be an Idea person, until the last year when my Honours supervisor Sandrine mentioned it quite a few times... didn't want to argue with her on that one. Guess that's just one of those relative adjectives.

Well what has my emotions kind of split tonight is the article about the rumoured acquisition of YouTube by Google for a cool $1.6 billion. See, the idea of doing something with a user generated video content on-line was between my ears for about a week or two even before I read about this new website called YouTube in MX newspaper on one of my daily train rides from the uni to home.

My initial reaction was 'F, if only....' But luckily my reasoning is much quicker these days as I got to be quite good at shortcutting my initial, occasionally not so positive thoughts. So the 2nd reaction was ' Hey, that's cool! The same mushroom that pooped up between my ears has turned out to be a very lavish one.' This makes me optimistic, maybe as Ray once said it, unreasonably optimistic, that eventually there will be a time, the right time, when I'll act in time to turn one of my ideas into the lavish mushroom.

Ps: Repetition of the word 'time', in the previous sentence, reminds me of a line someone once said: 'Timing is everything.'