Telematique, water and fire.

Trying out Snap Shots

As I return to tending the blog, I've installed a nice tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles , LinkedIn profiles and Amazon products , display inline videos , RSS , photos and stock charts .

Snap Shots often presents you with the information, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you "look ahead," before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out. I'd like to get your reaction to the tool, so please let if me know if it's an asset or a distraction.

The Age of Stream

Nova Spivak (the father of Twine) has an excellent post on how the Web, or rather it's use by the consumers of the Web, has morphed. I've had many of the the same thoughts about the way in which Web usage (and the value of the web) has changed to be more than a hyperlinked collection of information nodes that the end user 'navigates' in a form of active, directed exploration. The earliest Web explorers set out to traverse the linkages, which remained fairly static. Now, with the rate of new linkages, new sources and the rapid revision of existing structures, the Web is so immense and so plastic that our efforts are focused on the nature of the new, the rates of change and managing both the volume and complexity.

From the very early days of the Web, we've seen attempts to create the means by which information "comes to you." I think of the excitement I felt when using some of the earliest publish-subscribe services that delivered content by email, the streaming "tickers", and eventually the RSS feed and the feed reader. The Stream, however, is a different beast. Consider Twitter and other micro-blog offerings that seem most popularly associated with "social media." In some sense, the microblog is the analog of the "dumb network", where the application of filters and searches and selective attention is made NOT at the source (the publisher) and NOT only at the sink, but in combination (i.e., a easily modified subscription to multiple sources, plus the late-binding application of filters by the recipient and consumer).

Nova poses a few excellent questions in this post, and it's kicked off a number of worthwhile, Sunday-morning reflections and ideas. Welcome to the Age of Stream.

Is the Stream What Comes After the Web

... One of the most difficult challenges will be how to know what to pay attention to in the Stream: Information and conversation flow by so quickly that we can barely keep up with the present, let alone the past. How will know what to focus on, what we just have to read, and what to ignore or perhaps read later?

Recently many sites have emerged that attempt to show what is trending up in real-time, for example by measuring how many retweets various URLs are getting in Twitter. But these services only show the huge and most popular trends. What about all the important stuff that's not trending up massively? Will people even notice things that are not widely RT'd or "liked"? Does popularity equal importance of content? ...

Attention Span 2009.04.26

What caught my eye and engaged my time this week:

SAP Virtualization Week

The third 'virtualization week' in the annual series and the third I've attended. I've always learned a lot at these events, and it's one of the best venues to meet and truly converse with other attendees. Always a pleasure and thought provoking experience.

Under the Radar Cloud Computing 2009.04.24

Dealmaker Media's series of conferences -- this one showcased startups in the cloud computing arena. Another great source of timely information, zeitgeist and good conversation.

OVF

This is a long-standing soapbox. I've found it frustrating to be so uninformed about the DMTF's efforts regarding the creation of OVF 1.1 and 2.0. By keeping even the highest level indicators of charter and objectives under wraps, the DMTF is doing themselves (and those of us who aren't members of DMTF) no favors. It leads us to expressions of concern and frustration like Lori MacVittie's OVF: A few layers short of a full stack.

IP Address Management

Folks like Greg Ness at InfoBlox are doing a great job educating the technology public about the state of IP address management in the enterprise, and the (surprising) diseconomies and threats involved. But, I found Denise Dubie's article on Managing IP addresses with free tools quite worthwhile, both for the pointers to interesting OSS projects but also as an anecdotal reportage of IT management's reaction to the issue.

information aesthetics

Feeding my amateur's love of data visualization, I just re-discovered this site.

Newsmap

A heatmap style visualization of breaking news. Multiple languages, organized by country and organized by high-level topic areas (e.g. world news, national, business, sports, ...)

World Builder

A holodeck environment designer creates the ultimate romantic bouquet for his love, including obsessing about the one flaw he sees after it's too late to fix.

World Digital Library

The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. High quality, high resolution photos and scans of documents, maps and artifacts from as early as 8000 BC to the present. More of a memory palace than a library.

Nexenta

ZFS based open NAS/iSCSI for the enterprise, based on virtualized storage.

VMware's vSphere

What can I say? The dog-and-pony show this week was pretty good. The amount of really new information about feature and function was nominal, but the understanding of packaging, pricing and the timing starts to provide a sense of its impending release to the world at large. Oh, and a pretty good "guide" to what's happening in vSphere.

Cloud Slam '09

A virtual conference on Cloud Computing, presented via WebEx, April 20-24. I'm not sure if one can still register in order to get access to the recorded sessions. I certainly HOPE so.

How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write

Steven Johnson's very perceptive (as usual) and thought provoking article on eBooks, eBook readers and the nature of book publishing. (WSJ online, so it requires subscription.)

BumpTop

This UI almost makes me want to use Windows... ALMOST...

PeopleBrowsr

And, in the continuing taste testing for twitter clients, I'm finding that I'm using Nambu and Seesmic Desktop almost exclusively, but just found this one this morning and ... it's close to overwhelming. Browser based, and therefore requires you to provide your twitter credentials to them...(which I'm loath to do unless they've been vetted): 'PeopleBrowsr is a simple visual dashboard that adds more power to Twitter, your other online identities and those of your friends.'

Before providing your login information, use it by selecting the 'skip login' URL. I've tried it with my test account using Safari 4 beta, and it's REALLY good!!

Update:

A couple I forgot ...

AGPL

Matt Asay's article was one of the best I encountered this week in my mini-project to look through the issues regarding OSS licensing and the deployment of such projects as services.

Reading Design Fiction

Bruce Sterling rarely fails to entertain and enlighten. This is some wonderful insight into the culture that fosters science fiction.

What the user base genuinely wanted was immersive fantasies. They wanted warmly supportive subcultures in which they could safely abandon their cruelly limiting real-life roles, and play semi-permanent dress-up.

News Timeline

Andy Hertzfeld's latest and greatest. Well done!!

adaptive computing, Cloud Computing, cloud interoperability, cloud standardization, OVF, SAP, VMware

Return of the Prodigal Blogger

I realize that I haven't been adding posts to the blog for quite a while. It's not that I haven't been working and certainly not that I haven't been writing.

Running a startup is time consuming, but I can now say that we're at the "next phase" of the company, in which everyone is not required to take responsibility for every function. With the enlargement of our engineering group and the establishment of a crack product management team, I actually find myself with time to think about strategy and actions with a time horizon greater than two weeks.

Among my other resolutions, I'll start to post more.

Clone? Split Personality? Confusion.

Over the course of the past week, I've noticed references to Rich Miller about topics I'm likely to write about, but don't remember having posted.  The first thought... Have I been blogging in my sleep?  Am I leaving my short-term memory at the door?

No.  It's an inevitable result of having a common name.  It's happened before, and will certainly happen again.  This time it's Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledge.  Rich is a noted technology journalist who's had the good judgement to be interested in the next generation data center.  I've only recently found his site, and enjoy reading it.   It will go on my site's blogroll in the next day or so.


Technorati Tags: utility computing, data center

More on Utility Computing Standards

The conversation about which I wrote has been getting appropriate attention and more people with credentials weighing in.

James Urquhart points to utility computing market's need for "a standard for server (VM/framework/application/whatever) portability across disparate utility computing service providers."

To which I say: Amen. He then (correctly, IMHO) questions the ability of the virtual appliance concept by itself to be the answer. I got on a soapbox yesterday regarding a standard representation or description of VM assemblages. Were that available, it would go quite a distance to addressing the problem James points out.

For added goodness, Bert and Simon have commented on the post, summarizing their respective points of view. Simon's comment succinctly sets the context by stating that the creation of a non-proprietary standard and encouraging its adoption through open source availability is "...based upon the assumption that you have an engine with allows for portability between one CSP (common service provider) and another." This is the precondition I wish I'd stated as well as he has.

To return to my point: The engine to which he refers will require an accepted standard of description or, perhaps, of prescription. What's needed is a uniformly understood representation of VM assemblages: the application level components (VMs or physical servers), the network's components and the connections that lash them together as a functioning system. A standard limited only to VM description and representation of individual active units is necessary but not sufficient to meet the goal.

Service Level Automation in the Datacenter: utility computing

Recently, I have been telling anyone who will listen that this nascent utility computing market is still searching for a standard for server (VM/framework/application/whatever) portability across disparate utility computing service providers. I like the concept of a virtual appliance, but we need a (non-proprietary) standard, or we need another portability mechanism besides VMs.

Technorati Tags: utility computing, virtualization, standards

Technorati Tags: Standards, Utility computing, virtualization

Email and the Five Conversations

Isabel Wang has an interesting post on her blog in response to Google's announcement of their Postini acquisition.  (BTW: Congrats again, Tim!)  In it, Isabel makes the point that email (like many of the newly arrived interpersonal and group messaging technologies) is a means to an end.  She then references Matt Howard's (and SMBLive's) concept of the 5 Conversations, of which I wasn't aware until now. 

Worth the read and the follow up to 5 Conversations.

isabel wang's blog: Email is not a killer app!

...But email is NOT a killer app (let alone THE killer app)! Instead, what SMBs really want is a coherent, 360 degree solution for managing their front- and back-office operations. As SMBLive CEO Matt Howard puts it, running a business is all about maintaining 5 conversations: you use office productivity apps to organize your own ideas, collaboration platforms to share information with colleagues and partners, transaction and contact management tools to keep track of current vendors and customers, sales/marketing/networking services to connect with new ones...

While email can play a role in these interactions, it's a means rather than an end. A means whose usefulness may one day end. As Dennis Howlett writes on ZDNet: "I see a combination of Twitter and Facebook as having the potential to replace 90% of the email I receive while improving my personal productivity." ...

The Symbiosis of SaaS and Soft Appliances

Phil Wainewright starts out characterizing the packaged software appliance as a competitive offer to SaaS.  But, toward the end of the piece, he opens up the argument to say that "... SaaS vendors shouldn't see software appliances as competition.  Indeed ... managed appliances will probably become part of most SaaS vendor's infrastructure, deployed where it makes sense to handle certain operations on customer sites or otherwise outside of the vendor’s own data centers." 

While this is true, Phil's missed an important point:  SaaS vendors are the direct beneficiaries of "soft appliances", since they are an excellent means of implementing and deploying SaaS on a "virtual data center."  That is, the SaaS provider will employ infrastructure on demand, packaging their multi-tenant offers as soft appliances that can be provisioned as customer demand warrants.  Companies such as 3Tera make a strong case for (and hopefully a good business from) precisely this scenario. 

The bottom line is that SaaS has much to gain from embracing packaged software appliances, as both an infrastructure for on-demand service and as an on-site adjunct to their network-resident services.

» SaaS and the packaged software appliance | Software as Services | ZDNet.com

... Put all of these considerations together and you can see that appliance packaging — especially of open-source platform components — is a way of eliminating a lot of the problems associated with conventional software; but without moving entirely to a vendor-hosted SaaS model. “This is independent of the delivery model,” says Dietzen. “This is about cutting the cost of owning and running the software.”

So there’s a sense in which appliances are not so much a part of the SaaS model as competition for it. The appliance model provides many of the benefits of SaaS without forcing customers to store and access their data outside of the firewall. With a product like Zimbra, where the most intensive use is within the organization in any case, and where integration to other on-premise facilities such as telephony equipment is often important, it is often very difficult to argue for off-premise deployment anyway because that simply adds unnecessary cost and network latency. ...

On the other hand, there are many more applications that run much better off-premise because they involve a lot of interactions beyond the firewall anyway. So I think SaaS vendors shouldn’t see software appliances as competition. Indeed, as I hinted at the outset of this article, managed appliances will probably become a part of most SaaS vendors’ infrastructure, deployed where it makes sense to handle certain operations on customer sites or otherwise outside of the vendor’s own data centers. This assertion is especially credible if you count client-side platforms such as Silverlight, Apollo, Google Gears and so on as part of the managed appliance spectrum.

Technorati Tags: software appliance

Haskell's time has come.

A post in O'Reilly Radar pointed me to the kick-off of an "open book" project regarding Haskell, one of the more notable functional programming (or data flow programming) languages.  My recent conversations with Tim Oren have renewed my interest in data flow / functional programming in support of complex modeling applications.  (Truth be told -- my role as an advisor to Vextec also plays a big part in that renewed interest.)

Real-World Haskell » Blog Archive » Real-world Haskell: it’s time!

Bryan O’Sullivan, Don Stewart and John Goerzen are pleased, and frankly, very excited to announce that we’re developing a new book for O’Reilly, on practical Haskell programming. The working title is “Real-World Haskell”. The plan is to cover the major techniques used to write serious, real-world Haskell code, so that programmers can just get to work in the language.

Technorati Tags: Haskell, functional programming, data flow

Safe Data Sharing

If there's been a noticeable lull in the number of posts to this 'blog over the past month, I have a particularly good excuse.

In August I left Univa, where I've been since co-founding it in early 2004, and returned to the Bay Area full time. After two months of mutual due diligence, I have joined Safe Data Sharing Inc. as CEO. SDSi is a startup located here in Silicon Valley, which has operated in "stealth mode" for a little over a year. I am pleased and honored to have Tim Oren join me as the company's CTO, and can't speak highly enough of Arturo Bejar and Scott Loftesness, the other members of the Board.

The company's technologies allow the enterprise to share its sensitive data in ways that eliminate the risks of exposure - inadvertent or intentional. Using multiple patent-pending technologies, SDSi puts data owners in control of how sensitive information is shared, combined, analyzed, or released. At the same time, SDSi datashare technology protects the data such that there is no risk of exposure or breach. We have an incredible basis on which to start and have every reason to believe that the initial pilots of the technology will start before the end of the year.

You'll notice that the fledgeling website includes a blog, which a number of us will be populating with observations and discussion. I encourage you to visit as the company and the website take shape. It's also my intent to continue blogging here at Telematique.

Technorati Tags: Entrepreneur