MacWorld '07: Seems like 1984 all over again...

For those not old enough to remember "1984"

I Miss You, Though I'm Not Quite Sure I Love You

"I miss you, though I'm not quite sure I love you.
All I know's I like my music sad.
Crystal days I'm pensive, thinking of you,
And while you're gone, I'm never really glad.
I think of love as some enormous sea,
Tempestuous or still, but never ending,
Something that once there will always be.
But that is not the message that I'm sending.
Missing you, for me, is something new:
An opening into my changing heart.
Love is something that I won't yet do,
But feeling what I feel for you's a start.
Love, like prayer, should not be lightly said,
So I'll just say, "You're in my heart" instead!"

Saul Williams - Poet or Rapper?

actually who cares.... this guy rocks!

rapper


poet

Get this video and more at MySpace.com

Amazon Unbox: they just don't get it do they?

Why Amazon should stick to SOA and not waste time (here, and here, and here) with selling Movies to the consumer..

leave it to companies that do get it...

Amazon S3: Data Storage Services

Its happening quicker than you and i probably realise.

Many of us are still struggling with laptop hard disks that are filled to the brim. We all carry our own USB keys. Many of us have bought unwieldy External USB hard disk enclosures and Network Attached Storage (NAS) that are now an emerging too fill the SOHO market segment.

But all of this is just, a precursor to where were heading. Which is online storage. No need to rely on localised hard disk storage.

Who says this better than Google: "With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc), .... We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today..... the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache"

Today, the only real large scale provider is Amazon. Amazon's s3 Web Services, provides a pay-as-you-go utility model for buying and using storage over the Internet. Essentially you need to sign-up for an Amazon S3 account, you are provided with your own Access ID and Secret Key for encrypting and decrypting your files on the network. If you lose it then you've lost your files its as simple as that.

Anyhow, i downloaded client tool (which relies on Amazon S3), called Jungle Disk (they even have a Mac client), and use that to connect to the Amazon service.

Its a fairly rudimentary client, but looking at the sheer size of resources behind Amazon S3 (e.g. Microsoft may be outsourcing some of their storage to them and smug-mug pass over 10Tb of pictures through Amazon S3) you kind of realise that this is a pretty sophisticated operation.

Am i ready to drop my iTunes music over into the big cloud, not yet. But its certainly the starting point for me to rationalise and make my content better shared between machines.

Mumbai 7-11 Blasts: "Govern or get out"

After the killing of 190 and injuring 650 people in Mumbai -- this the outcome of 8 highly targeted bombs on the Mumbai metro during rush hour, one wonders how much more should the citizens of India take?

The choice of Mumbai was not designed to unsettle the financial capital, but really meant to raise communal tensions between the Hindu majority and muslim minority. The riots in Gujarat are still not forgotten by the locals and lets now forget about the Mumbai blasts in 1993.

We don't need to look that far back, only last year Islamic terrorists bombed the holy Hindu city of Varanasi.

It beggars belief that India now has a Prime Minister who is completely at ease at talking about macroeconomic and how the diaspora can be unleashed across globe, but yet when slapped in the face countless times with blatant attacks on Indian sovereignty, can only meekly state: "Do not be provoked by rumours. Do not let anyone divide us. Our strength lies in our unity."

Its time for India to step up and deal with these Al-Qaeda terrorists. Both Lashkar-e Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad are part of the terrorist infrastructure that has many sympathisers in Pakistan. This continued passive, tacit and turning a blind-eye support for terrorism must stop.

Opposition party, Advani, summarises it well about the situation for the Indian PM: "Govern or get out".

On another sad note, still lingering from the tragedy of the Mumbai bombs, im surprised at the lack of news coverage from the British press, in comparison to the London and Madrid bombings. Picked politics, captures my sentiments more succinctly, "clearly the death of nearly two hundred and injuries of thousands of wogs was not good enough for the Dail Mail, Daily Express or the Metro to make it front page news. Fuck them. "

This is a timley reminder, for me at least, of how important it is to continue blogging.

Time to move on....

first Robert Scoble, then Bill Gates, and now Om Malik.... all within the space of a week....

is there some kind of cartel or collusion hapenning, where everyone agrees to ditch in their job at the same time for maximum news exposure?

I guess Gateas has realised that curing Aids in Africa is more important than the next operating system. But, why-oh-why, did he not make that noble decision about 5-years ago? -- it would have been better for everyones sake!

An inconvenient truth

i think its time to wake up, i think its time to realise that guzzling chevs' and over heated Google datacentres are a no-no...

"How cool is that?"

I have an article featured at Deepak Chopra's blog.

My personal blog has become way too techy over the years... perhaps it will change now :)

thanks
Suresh.

Apple MacWorld 2006: Lets start taking bets.....

You can see Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld 2006 here (from Tues 10ths Jan 9pm Pacific Time)

1. Replacement of the iPod Shuffle with a Nano variant? (e.g. Shuffle with screen or 1Gb Nano)
50% probability

2. Full length wide-screen iPod 6G
20% probability

3. Mac-Mini on Intel + Front Row 2.0
90% probability

4. iBook on Intel
100% probability

5. 42" and 50" iMac Intel + Front Row 2.0 (although possibly not branded as iMac)
SK: 80% probability

6. iTunes 7.0 + QuickTime 7.0 (its been a whole 6-months after all!)
SK: 60% probability

7. more video and tv and movie content on iTunes (including and we can only hope -- the full catalogue of Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears music videos).
SK: 100% probability (not sure on the later)

8. iLife/iWork '06 Updates (This is a given stable of MacWorld -- im informed by Jody)
100% probability

9. Aperture price reduction (to take the fight to Adobe)
50% probabilty

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 + Extensions

Over the last 2-months, ive been really getting into Firefox, ive found some quite useful extensions and scripts that extend the browser to my specific needs. For the hardcore browsers out there, download in the following order:

Firefox 1.5
The latest version of Firefox released in November 2005.
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Google Toolbar for Firefox
The best way to surf and browse the internet.
http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/

Google Blogger Web comment for Firefox
A dynamic list of wesbites/comments that people have made about the current page that you are browsing. http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/webcomments/index.html

Tabs Session Saver
Re-opens previously running tabs before your browser was shut/closed.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=436&application=firefox

Tabs Mix Plus
Provide a much detailed control of tab behaviour, a must for hardcore surfers.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1122&application=firefox

del.icio.us Toolbar for Firefox
A great way of tagging and bookmarking your favourite sites from any machine
(A pity that Yahoo have bought them)
http://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1532

Greasemonkey Script Manager
A javascript engine which enables developers to write simple scripts to manipulate your web pages.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&category=Popular&numpg=10&id=748

Greasmonkey script(s)
Hundreds and hundreds of user developed Javascript plugins for Greasemonkey.
http://userscripts.org/

Update:
One other one to keep an eye out for is AllPeers, its a file sharing extension which uses one of the Peer Networks (possibly BitTorrent) -- its not available yet.
http://www.allpeers.com/more_f.htm

Ray Ozzie memo: Microsofts Services strategy

Dave Winer has posted 2 e-mail memos, from Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie, on the next step forward for the company.

Clearly Ray has had time to talk to the product teams, senior management and developers and has finally taken stock of the situation.

Ray Ozzie mentions some key tenents:

1. The power of the advertising-supported economic model.
2. The effectiveness of a new delivery and adoption model.
3. The demand for compelling, integrated user experiences that “just work”.

Fundamentally, Ray's memo is a more than just a call to developers and product teams about service-enabling their assets. Its a an action-plan. Driven by end to end user-driven scenarios, something that Ray is very good at, from these use-cases, he will drive architectural design decisions and map that to current and fututure products/services.

I think this is not a good time for Microsoft, yet you can't but feel that finally they have someone at the top of Microsoft that actually gets it. What Mcirosoft has delivered as Ray has said is a 80% solution. In the post-"Vista/Office12" wave we will see a fantastic level of seamless integration of technology that weve not seen before, his past efforts with Notes and Groove should give us some inclination of the potential.

I have still some doubts though; Microsoft needs to balance Enterprise revenue models with Consumer/advertising revenue models. There needs to be harnomy between product and services -- the old mindset to lock-in services and products just won't cut it.

Windows "Live"

Fantastic! -- Reported by TechCrunch. Its Windows even when its not Windows! "Windows Live (beta)" is Microsofts go-to-market branding that will encompass its next geneartion SAAS (Software As a Service) strategy.

Its the harmonisation between Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office applications, and Microsoft Services (Windows Live). We have seen this brand used in "Live" Meeting and XBOX "Live".

As Ray Ozzie mentioned here, the iPod and the Blackberry were "perfect examples" of how to create a tightly designed user experience from hardware, to software to services.

I think we will see a great example of that with the XBOX 360, a huge investment by Microsoft which goes beyond just gaming, it could easily become the centre-point for many of Microsofts other strategies around building tightly coupled hardware/software/services.

In terms of the announcements yesterday?
- early 90's - Microsofts energy was put into creating Windows "New Technology" (NT)
- mid 90's - Micorsofts energy was put into embedding Internet/Media experience into Windows.
- 2000's - Microsofts energy was put into .NET and Web Services strategy.

They stumbled a bit after that, and had this grand vision of connection people, devices, and services through "hailstorm".

The last 5 -years has been painful partly through trying to converge technologies streams into a big bang product roadmap, most of which will be released soon, .NET 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, Vista, SQL 2005.

But in the next 5-years, we'll see Microsoft tinkering less in that space, with putting more of a concerted effort on the User experience (not User Interface / not Product!) but my Identity, my Devices, my Work, my Perrsonalisation and my Events.

We will see a new abstraction of "the Windows API". It won't be Win32 or WinFX. But more likely WinLive Web Services API. All XML based contracts.

Ray Ozzie spent a long time talking about Ad Revenues being a $150bn industry by 2015. So wheres the lock-in? That bit is not clear. You'll still need Windows to truly use these Services. Microsoft needs to tread carefully here, but i suspect they are realising that lock-in through their software platform (to generate license revenues) isn't going to run in the long-term (not outside the Enterprise anyway), its going to be about converting users into revenue generating consumers for advertisers.

MSN used to be a place where Microsoft used to place executives before retirement. If i were to believe how Microsoft is positioning MSN against Windows Live, its clear to me one is designed for syndicated content (where current advertisers are at) and the other eventually will become the place for contextualised content (and where advertisers might go to in the future.)

Google Base -- for a new Generation...

With all the multitude of ways of storing infromation, both structured and un-structured, we still dont seem fully liberated even when we store what is essentially simple data-sets, lists, hierarchically-structured information... on the Web.

Our information, like bookmarks, to-do lists, recently listening to music, wishlists, birthdays, calendars are all sitting on different peoples websites....

Google has realised that there are many companies (Web 2.0 style) that are offering just that... But in reality... there are only a couple of ways to skin a cat...

And whilst people are getting excited that Google Base is supposed to kill e-bay, we just need to realise that there's just a bunch of journalists and Marketing research Analysts out just getting a bit excited.

Its not about killing e-bay. (far from it)

But it is about thinking about solving a problem implemented many times before, in a simple and easy way and (as Garret Rogets over at ZDNET says...) about making money through search on this structured data.

Google wants to build a hosted database service, which relies on Google's highly scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure, to provide an easy way for users to create their own data. That is searchable through its Search engine, that can provide targetted ads to subscribers of that data.

Think about it, you could expose that data, using RSS/Web Services (cos its SOA world out there), and you can then skin your own application using AJAX or Ruby on Rails...

Google has spent most of the last few years trying to organise the worlds data, most of which has been unstructured in web sites. Google is trying to find ways to organise structured information in a way that has never been done before. But also to unlock data held in websites which have been closed to Googles spider, in short this is a great monetization opportunity for advertisers who will be able to aggregate better quality information about subscribers.

And what we will be witnessing are the first steps of unleashing a new paradigm for building data-centric web applications.

OJOS: Collaborative Machine Intelligence

This is a company who has been getting a lot of attention from people. They have, in a very short space of time, acquired office space, developers, some very smart Computer Scientists and loads of VC money.

I think they have come up with an idea, which hasn't been thought about before and extends and builds on the principles of Web 2.0.

In short: Riya (formerly OJOS) = Flickr + Tagging + Human Learning + Visual Processing + AI = Automated Photo Tagging.

The software and Computer Science research to get computers to recognise a visual image has been improving in relation to the processing power available. Yet with all these advances nothing could bootstrap the machine learning process better than the ability for humans to 'teach' a computer on how to identify an image. This is where the collaborative tagging capability comes into play.

We have seen examples of where collaborative filtering to use the wisdom and knowledge of crowds to accurately determine whether an e-mail message is SPAM.

I think Riya is trying to take advantage of all the images that have been human "tagged" and correlate this with its own AI / Pattern Recognition engine.

In short... after the 1000th image of an iPod is uploaded on a blogger site or Flickr, Riya will have learned not only physical dimensional qualities about an image -- but also tagged data about it... -- Anyway thats my take on what these folks are up to...