michael coates, a pragmatic evangelist
December 24, 2008 Leave a comment
In front of my house, looking east from earlier today.
Note the beautifully flocked forest in the distance .. that glorious lumber is going to break free in tonight’s rain and knock out our power. Lake Forest Dark, perhaps?
This is an eight-shot stitch using Windows Live Photo Gallery.
December 23, 2008 2 Comments
I’m already seeing a large number of references to "Web 3.0"; the purported ‘next web’.
Kids: the web is version-less, completely hackable, mashable and unfinished (but in good ways) .. do you really think that Web 2.0 isn’t any more than Web 1.999?
To refer to improved user experience (UX), including better interfaces and heavy media integration, I’ve been referring to the "next-generation web". But even this pales in comparison to the bigger picture
At one point in the future, we might be able to say things like:
However, without the "other Web x.0 companies do" means to differentiate, can we really identify a 2.0 / 3.0 company out of the crowd? Who can say that some of the companies might just "grow" into another version?
I believe the web to be version-less. We may eventually have historical references, but for now, anarchy (but with a profit motive) is king.
So: for the present, I think I’ll stick with Web .Next.
December 22, 2008 Leave a comment
Not so you’d think .. the view from my front door, December 2008.
This is an eleven-shot stitch using Windows Live Photo Gallery.
December 15, 2008 Leave a comment
Even in this economy, Microsoft is not slowing our internal innovation efforts. One needs only to listen to Rick Rashid of Microsoft Research during his PDC08 keynote to confirm this. Microsoft Research remains well-funded, our customer and partner outreach programs work diligently to deploy our technologies in interesting and monetizable situations and we’re on top of most of the spaces "outside the box".
Microsoft recognizes innovation is an integral component of our growth and success. In fact, innovation is critical to the growth, success and wealth of all companies and of entire countries.
Evaluating innovation? That’s another matter. On one level, you can stand back and say "cool" or "wow" (check out "It’s About the Business, You – The “Wow” Factor (Part 1)" and "It’s About the Business, You – The “Wow” Factor (Part 2)" from a few years back). The key thought in those writings: different audiences have different reasons for saying "wow".
Is a "wow factor" enough, though? In a challenging economic environment, wouldn’t you want to consider a profitability (top-line expansion or bottom-line reduction) component as a means to prioritize innovation paths? Probably. But is it worth the risk of stifling innovation?
As important as evaluating innovation is evaluating the factors that nurture, encourage and reward the acts of innovating. What makes innovation happen in one environment over another? Many firms are trying to sort this, and similar questions.
The answer that rises above all others is a mysterious and intangible thing commonly called Corporate Culture. Companies who employ innovators and have a record of successful innovation efforts will likely bring them into the public eye to talk about it. You will, no doubt hear a quote about their corporate culture and how it fosters innovation.
A recently released paper titled "Radical Innovation Across Nations: The Pre-eminence of Corporate Culture" addresses this. The paper was authored by Rajesh Chandy, a professor of marketing at University of Minnesota, Gerard Tellis of the University of Southern California and Jaideep Prabhu of Cambridge University. The paper calls out:
Very interesting concepts and well worth a read.
December 14, 2008 Leave a comment
I wondered if Connor was going to get into this act. I still wonder ..
.. he’s not, don’t worry. I’ll likely hear about mentioning him in this post .. it’s fun to see if he’s reading.
Back to Vampires. It’s the new dark thing:
Are you vamp? Is your showgirl mother? Can you set me up?
Have you had your Clamato today?
There is more hazing to be had, per se.
December 2, 2008 Leave a comment
Back in 2005 (Christmas Eve, in fact), I posted “Einstein was right (again)”, pointing to a EurekAlert post confirming NIST and MIT had confirmed the famous mass-to-energy equation.
Now I hear a team consisting of French, German and Hungarian physicists have confirmed this (again).
Not sure who was first (but three years is a bit of a gap, to be sure).
From the more recent post:
According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.
The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent?
The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.
In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.
Here are links to both posts, for those who need to confirm:
Of course, this only proves that a quantity of energy can be converted from a quantity of matter, and that a quantity of matter can be converted from a quantity of energy .. not that the latter has been performed.
November 21, 2008 Leave a comment
Color me busted. Don’t I look good?
Right after publishing “Is the Cloud Getting ‘Clouded’” I got a ton (well; a lot for me) of email questioning my analogy of “overloaded terms” as comparing SOA to the Cloud.
Some on the mails were from CTO-types and techies of companies with whom I am working (thanks for reading! Click on my ads and buy a lot of something!!).
To avoid giving my opinion multiple times in emails, I’ll state it here. To those of you who emailed me: expect this link when I respond. Please note: this is not by way of defense, but rather of discussion .. I stand ready to receive all flames and pragmatic corrections to my words. With more brains and opinions, we are smarter overall.
First: I am not comparing “SOA” to “Cloud”. Some infrastructure and integration bits aren’t too far off though, a number of parallel technologies and methodologies exist:
Your application makes the calls and then acts on the return values to continue the work you need to accomplish .. but that really wasn’t my point.
By way of background, I published “Services Orientation – The Architecture Formerly Known As SOA – Introduction” a few years ago. In this post, I made the statement that I felt the term “SOA” was misused as a noun. I feel SOA to be a paradigm or a methodology, rather than the modified noun usage, e.g., “Our enterprise sports a ‘services-oriented architecture’”.
Yeah: let the grammar police arrest me for nuance. I will smile and nod.
In the same way, the purposes of the “Clouded” post was to point out my feelings that “Cloud” is being misused, although not quite in the same way: Cloud has become the “catch-all” phrase for services in the sky, however, at the 100,000-foot level:
The same “Cloud” (services and storage in the sky via the Internet), but different implementations, requiring different development architectures. However, similar web service access methodologies between the three. Clear as mud? Write me and I’ll connect you to the right folks on our side.
P.S.: On SOA, why just an “Introduction”, you might ask. You might also ask “where’s the rest of the posts”? To be frank: I got busy. By the time I got back to that series, many of the questions I raised were being answered by myself and by others. It is totally my fault for not connecting the bits together. Write me, and I’ll send you links that help, or take a call with you to help sort it.
November 21, 2008 Leave a comment
.. from the onslaught of two noses.
With apologies to fellow Evangelisto, Steven Woodward .. someone caught us in a candid (and spirited) chat whilst on an offsite in August 2006. A boat was involved, but obviously not a hairdresser. I was 20 pounds heavier at that time.
Steven and I have sent out an APB for the camera-carrying offender.
November 20, 2008 1 Comment
A bit. Not only is the term getting overloaded, dramatically-different offerings are being lumped into the single term: “Cloud”.
A hazard of bleeding edge technology, I guess .. remember how SOA was / is similarly overloaded?
Caveat: by the time you read this, it will already be out of date as the players are modifying their offerings and new players are entering the market.
Windows Azure, Google AppEngine and Amazon EC2 have different approaches and have staged server some level of service functionality in the sky. IBM has made announcements, and so on.
At the 100,000-foot view:
VCs, angels and investors can benefit from Cloud offerings in a many ways:
Some thoughts:
Which approach is right for you and your company?
November 18, 2008 Leave a comment
Traffic monitoring is nothing new. The passive collection of data using cameras, radar and other devices has been going on for years.
Mapping services from Microsoft (Bing Maps), Yahoo! (Yahoo Maps) and Google (Google Maps) even provide convenient overlays for the state of traffic atop their maps.
Oh. Bing Maps and Google Maps also shows traffic on secondary roads, giving you a true opportunity to select a different route.
I posted “Tracking Movement and Progress via Bluetooth” back in May, citing the intent of the Indiana DOT to track vehicles and pedestrians using Bluetooth transmissions. Even though Bluetooth is a very close-range signal (less than 10 meters in most low-power situations), sensors could be placed to collect information from passing vehicles (or people).
This kind of crowdsourcing is very powerful; big globs of data collected by ambient means (sensors listening for signals) can be presented to a system ready to aggregate and report status in real time.
Note that I didn’t say “analyze”. Real-time analysis is left to the user (you need to look at the roads you might travel and decide which routes to avoid). Ideal use of mobile device, I’d say.
Analysts and engineers could rehydrate and create models with the collected data after the fact. Performing BI and data mining operations, they could advance some hypotheses to improve traffic.
Long story short: the better the data (quality and quantity), the higher the likelihood analysts the opportunity to evaluate current patterns and applying this knowledge, make improvements to the traffic systems.
Comparing improved quality and quantity metrics to existing data collection methodologies will improve the ability of analysts and engineers to design better solutions and speed us on our way.
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