Google

The Mobile Internet: You won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is

Bob Gourley May 31, 2013

Every year Mary Meeker does the tech and business community a great service by researching, analyzing and reporting on the State of the Internet. Her latest presentation is embedded below in slideshare format and is also available at this link.

KPCB Internet Trends 2013 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

This is well worth reading. Mary Meeker is awesome. Things are changing fast in the tech world and this presentation can really help orient you to the situation today and will help anticipate tomorrow.

Here I pull out some factors from that presentation I believe are most relevant to technologists in the federal space.

There are 2.4 Billion Internet users, with growth continuing globally. 244 million Internet users are in the US. We are really wired.
The top Internet properties by monthly visitors are all “Made in the USA”. By monthly unique visitors they are: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, Apple, Glam Media network.
The top global smartphone operating systems are also “Made in the USA.” Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have won. Other platforms exist (Windows, Blackberry and more), but are going to be less relevant going forward. Share of market held by iOS and Android may be fluid.
According to IDC, the amount of global digital information created and shared, from documents to pictures to tweets, has grown 9 times larger in five years to nearly 2 zettabytes in 2011. Driver of this growth is photos, over 500 million uploaded and shared per day, much of that on Facebook and Snapchat. Video contributions up from nothing six years ago to 100 hours per minute uploaded to YouTube. Twitter Vine growing dramatically. Persistent video from Dropcam new entry and growing fast. Dropcam use cases include video telepresence for families.
In social media, Facebook dominates, followed by YouTube, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, MySpace.
Mobile traffic up and growing. All trends point to continued growth with probably 25% of all internet traffic being from global by 2014. There are 219 million smartphone users in the US, so almost 60% market penetration. Globally there are 1.5B smartphone users and over 5B mobile phone users so much more room for smartphone growth.
Tablet growth is faster than mobile growth.
While PCs will always be with us, we have just been overtaken by a wave of mobile (smartphones and tablets). Now standby for a wave of wearables, drivables, flyables, scannables.
In the US, we have always on services connected to powerful devices in homes, businesses and a growing mobile smartphone/tablet base. This is building a growing network of unprecedented computing power and also socially enabled transparency. There will soon be no hiding.

Let me try to boil all that down to what I think is the most relevant point for enterprise technologists:

The dispersing of powerful compute platforms to every citizen will speed the trend of software transforming entire industries. Government thought leaders and those in the companies around them should understand how this trend will change their world and seek to smartly accelerate it.

If you believe that (and I think it is pretty much just stating the obvious), then consider this:

The best at thinking through how this change to mobile will impact the government and federally focused industry are those that are connected themselves. We need more early adopters of mobile devices connected to cloud services who know the government missions and can help think through the best path forward in disrupting the status quo. Therefore, government and industry should empower 100% of their workers with secure, reliable, always on smart devices and should task their combined collective force with transforming the business of government from the inside out and bottom up.
So, everyone in and around government should get a tablet or smartphone and should be smartly connected to their enterprises. Do this for two reasons: 1) The workforce will be better at their job, and 2) The workforce will be better able to drive the transformations of their organizations.

Google Apps Assassinated My Domain – BEWARE!

MattDevost November 23, 2012

I’ve been a long-time user of Google Apps and have recommended it to dozens of colleagues and associates. I currently use both the Standard (free) and Enterprise (paid) version of apps for several very high profile and long-standing domains. I’ve always considered it to be a reliable and cost-effective option for providing core email, calendar, and other services. However, I’ve recently fallen victim to activity by Google that demonstrates how an enterprise is placing their operations at risk if using Google Apps for their domain.

The first indication that there was a problem was an error message on my iPhone indicating that the password was incorrect for the domain in question. Since the password hadn’t been changed recently, I decided to investigate from my desktop by trying to log into the account. I was greeted with a message that stated “This account has been disabled” and a recommendation to change my password if I was having problems.

I followed the process for changing the password successfully and attempted to log in again. “This account has been disabled.” I consulted Google and found no helpful forum or blog postings on how to resolve this issue. I searched for a way contact Google associated with this issue. No luck. There is an option to obtain dial-in support, but that requires access to your account PIN and since I couldn’t log into the Apps admin panel, I couldn’t obtain the PIN. If you call Google Apps support, there is no way to proceed without the PIN.

I decided to post a message on the support forum for Google Apps. After ten days, there were no replies from other users or “advisors” from Google despite my attempt to bump the thread.

So let’s recap the impact to the domain after more than 7 days:

No email – not only could I not send and receive email, when folks tried to email me they got a hard bounce (account disabled). It is one thing to disable access to email, but bouncing email is catastrophic as communications completely fail instead of being queued in the inbox until the issue is resolved.

No App services – Calendar, Docs, Drive, and all Google App services are completely blocked. These are not critical for this domain in particular, but would be high impact if denied for some of my other domains.

Things were starting to get desperate. What could I do to restore email? Migrate the MX entries to another provider?

Ninety-six hours later, still no resolution. I’ve deliberately delayed migrating to another service provider so that I could provide an accurate perspective and timeline for this blog post, but it would appear that Google had successfully denied service to the business with no way to seek resolution.

I’d searched my email for this domain and the back-up email associated with the domain. There had been no correspondence from Google indicating an issue with the domain or an attempt to notify me of an impending or enacted disabling of the account. Google App services on the domain were killed with no explanation and no recourse.

In desperation, I decided to try and social engineer my way to support. I dialed in and entered the PIN from another one of my domains and once I got a human on the phone explained my issue. They promised they would look into it and call me in a few hours. I gave them my home and mobile numbers and made them promise to call back before hanging up. You guessed it, no call back. During that dial-in process, I was able to get a trouble-ticket issued so after a day I emailed Google Apps support in reference to that trouble ticket. Within a few days I had elevated it to a senior support person who suddenly emailed me a resolution:

“I have reviewed you case and can see that your account was incorrectly disabled due to an internal issue which our technical team has now resolved.

Therefore I have gone ahead and re-enabled your account and you should now be able to log in to use Google Apps.

I am sorry for the inconvenience caused. I understand that you were without access to the Google Apps services and I really appreciate your patience whist we have worked through this issue.”

The problem is now fixed, but not without significant impact to the domain in question and no explanation from GOogle as to how an “internal issue” can disable a business for over a week.

If you are currently using Google Apps for your domain, or considering the service, I would recommend you be aware that you are placing your livelihood in the hands of Google, which has no incentive to provide reliable services or support. Google can disable your domain services at their sole discretion with no recourse other than to move to an alternative service provide and social engineer a resolution that took over a week to resolve.

I’ll be looking at Rackspace and Microsoft as alternative service providers and appreciate any recommendations you may have regarding your experiences with those services.

UPDATE – NOVEMBER 25 2012

There has been a lot of great discussion regarding this article here on CTOVision and at HackerNews. As promised, here are some hints and recommendations on how to resolve this issue or at least plan for minimizing the impact to operations.

Things Google should do:

1) Alert the user at their secondary address if domain services are disabled with a time-expiring dynamic link to generate a trouble-ticket if this is in error. As a provider of services (even free) Google is obligated to at least try and ensure that services are not disabled due to an error on their end. Remember, even with free services, you are paying Google with your user data!

2) Allow a secondary mechanism for obtaining the support PIN in the event the admin panel is inaccessible. Perhaps they have you generate a TXT record in your domain DNS that once verified sends and email to the back-up domain email with your customer number and support PIN.

If you are the domain administrator:

1) Store your support PIN in a secure location outside of the Google ecosystem. I’m a big fan of using 1Password for this type of content, but a piece of paper in a safe would work just as well. You need to plan for not having access to your Admin panel.

2) Ensure your DNS is hosted outside of Google. Most registrars provide free DNS services, but I’m also a huge fan of Amazon Route 53. You need to be able to change your MX record to another email provider if the outage becomes unacceptable.

3) Establish a secondary provider in advance so you can hot-swap if you need to. This step may be cost prohibitive to some, but worth determining if the several hundred dollars per year is reasonable insurance in the event your Google services are disabled. For critical accounts, forward the email to the secondary provider account so you have a back-up of the email content as well.

4) Consider purchasing Google Apps through a reseller. Resellers have experience and access to support that normal “small” enterprise users don’t have. It might be worth having that reseller relationship in the event you have an issue like this.

5) There is a way to generate a Support Ticket in a circumstance like this, it is just hidden behind several layers. I was able to discover it through my conversations with Google, so if you are having this issue here is what I recommend.

On your Google Apps login page, select the link that says “Can’t access your account.”
Upon solving the Captcha on the next page look for a link that says “Reset your administrator password by domain verification”
On the next page, enter a valid email address.
On the following page, under item 3, you’ll see a link to contact Google support. That link is

https://support.google.com/a/bin/request.py?contact_type=admin_no_access

As of the date of this update, you can navigate directly to that link to generate a support ticket.

Virtual Reality Past, Present, and Future: Part 2

DillonBehr November 24, 2011

This post is a continuation of last week’s post, which outlined the history and current state of Virtual Reality. Today, I look forward into the future of the technology and examine its potential national security implications. To read part 1 and catch up on the topic check out last week’s blog here.

In the future, it is possible that nearly every aspect of warfare training will have some sort of virtual reality component to it. Everything from combat, to medical help, to driving and flying, to language will be linked together in a complete virtual world that can be simulated before testing in real life. Imagine a multi-national exercise the size of Operation Red Flag, taking place in large virtual labs. Of course, most military strategists still hold to the fact that no amount of virtual training can replace the need for physical training. But advances in this realm will continue to challenge that thought pattern.

Advances in the field of virtual reality could bring the above scenario into an all-level training program. Ralph Ernest Chatham foresees a day when VR is integrated into all of the services ways of training, and keeps a vast database of training logs. In his vision the training module can even monitor participants attention (eye movement), and will alert if a trainee tries to skip over a section of the reading. In his example, a pilot trains on some skills to refresh, and is linked up with two other pilots training as well elsewhere in the world. It creates an avatar for the 4^th pilot and they all take off together for a practice mission. Once in the air they can be linked up with soldiers on the ground doing their own missions, in this context language training. The system realizes that the soldier on the ground needs medical training and has one of the pilots shot down. The soldier aids the fallen pilot, and continues on another mission. After this is all done, everyone can return ‘home’ and conduct an After Action Review. The training records are updated and the AAR information is submitted and analyzed by the system to make the experience better or more realistic in the future. This happens continuously, always keeping service-members up to speed on current Standard Operating Procedures and training material.[1]

There are advantages to VR technology being implemented and for the United States to continue pursuing advancements. Some of them are discussed below.

Superior Training. VR provides a realistic environment for service-members to train in. It can start with relatively simple tasks and progress to more complex scenarios. It aids in giving leaders situations in which they must make a quick decision and can provide appropriate responses based upon good and bad decision-making. Virtual reality will allow different units to train together without having to travel to different bases, negating huge logistical issues. It provides realistic training environments for flying, driving, language, medical, shooting, and a whole host of other skills a service-member would need to know. VR can take trainees out of a traditional classroom, where attentions can easily wander, and put them in an immersive environment that forces them to react. VR can also assist in acclimating service-members to the rigors of real combat, potentially limiting the effects of combat on the psyche and reducing potential cases of PTSD. This will add to the capabilities of our armed forces.

Better Operational Awareness. Commanders need VR technology as well. The virtual workbenches mentioned above like the Dragon System will be integrated more and more into command posts. They will allow troops on the ground to project their precise location onto a map back at a headquarters location, where a commander can make decision based upon accurate real-time information from the battlefield. Someone in the rear will be able to pinpoint each individual soldier and be able to direct him or her to where the enemy is. This will eventually incorporate all assets available to the commander, including aircraft, long range artillery, and naval resources, allowing him to make the best decision based upon all information available.

Cost Savings. Virtual reality is quite expensive to setup and maintain right now, but advances in processing capabilities and graphics displays will continue to drive down the cost of these systems. For training simulators, the cost has to be looked at from a long-term perspective. It might be expensive initially, but in the long run, after running hundreds of soldiers through a tank driving and firing simulator, the cost of that system will seem miniscule compared to having real tanks on hand for such training. Logistical costs will also be slashed significantly by eliminating the fuel required to operate aircraft, ships, tanks, and other vehicles. Fuel will also be saved by allowing units to train together in different parts of the world, likely even with allied troops in other countries. Using VR will also help save ammunition. These cost savings can be passed down in different ways, from increasing salaries for service-members to reinvesting in R&D efforts.

Safety. One of the most important benefits of using virtual reality for military application is the potential of saving lives and reducing injury. Many injuries are created in training environment before soldiers even reach combat. VR used for scenarios like parachuting, shooting, and urban combat can greatly reduce the risks to soldiers. Realistic combat scenarios can even offer some sort of pain-based reaction to being shot, without an actual physical injury. This type of realistic training can help teach a young soldier to keep his head down when under fire, or to learn the difference between cover and concealment. Training individuals in medical scenarios will lead to more lives being saved on the actual battlefield as well. Further, better battlefield awareness for a commander can help save lives by him being able to accurately direct troops away from danger or on the best route toward a target.

Virtual reality has come a long way since Ivan Sutherland created the first light pen to interact with a computer. Advances in computer technology have paved the way for simulators, realistic training scenarios, and better battlefield awareness. As technology in this field continues to improve over the years, it is important for military decision-makers to continue to implement it in ways that are meaningful and realistic. It is also important to remember that no amount of virtual reality will be able to replace real-life training. A soldier depends upon his buddies in combat. If he never trains directly with other humans or in real environments, exposure to elements in a virtual world will be of no comparison to the real thing, and he will falter when confronted with it. Nevertheless, virtual reality technologies should continue to be pursued, as they are a great way to reduce cost, save lives, and empower our next greatest generation of military men and women.

[1]Chatham. R.E. (2003). A Possible Future for Military Training. DARPA. Retrieved from https://campus.georgetown.edu/@@/23BC4B7810D027E5CE92F7A587E2CE63/courses/1/SEST-562-01.Fall2011/content/_2089300_1/DARPA_TrainingVision_5D8BF.pdf

Google Surprise: A change in intent regarding China

Bob Gourley January 12, 2010

Google did something brave today. Something I never thought they would do. They stood up to communist china. And they did what they did with a speed and certainty that should make us all proud.

In a blog post on their official site, Google discloses what they know of several attempted penetrations of their Gmail system. They also indicate that there have been unauthorized accesses to user accounts, probably by theft of user passwords.

In a blog post titled “A new approach to China,” Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond laid out more information that clearly points to China and their government as the party benefiting from these attacks. Part of that information is the targets of the attacks: Chinese human rights activists. They also discovered that accounts totally unrelated to these attacks have also been compromised, indicating that “we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.”

Drummond ends the post with:

“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.”

I am really pleased with Google about this, for many reasons.

One is that Google holds a great deal of information from companies and private citizens and it is good seeing them take steps to defend it against even the most significant threats.

Another is Google is clearly taking a stand regarding human rights. It seems rare to have a company do that.

In closing, a reminder from Confucius:

To see the right and not to do it is cowardice.

p.s., Microsoft, Cisco, HP, Apple, Oracle, what do you guys think about this? What do you see as right?

Cloud Computing vs. SOA: Look for a cross-over in hype

Bob Gourley July 29, 2009

Cloud Computing is one of the many things enterprise CIOs, CTOs and other engineers will master in delivering capability. I believe in the power of new Cloud Computing technologies and concepts and think we should all continue our focus there.

I have said, and still say, the same thing about design approaches like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The constructs, methods and models of SOA are good practices that result in good designs for enterprises. It is smart to separate data from application logic and smart to enable agility and mashups the way good SOA design does.

But a key problem with SOA was the hype associated with it. Everyone started using the term the way they wanted to. And every IT vendor came out with their definition of SOA. And every system integrator tried to sell us buckets of their SOA. And every trade journal ran SOA articles. And too many CTOs, myself included, said too much to our customer/users about the promise of SOA and that contributed to our users increasing their expectations over what SOA would deliver. The result of all of that, the over hype on SOA sometimes caused distractions. The cure: CTOs focused on what SOA meant for their specific organizations. It is still a great construct and by focus it is delivering value.

There are now clear indications that the hype around Cloud Computing is going to ramp way up. In fact, a quick search on Google Trends indicates searches on the topic of Cloud Computing, while still lower than searches on the topic of SOA, are rapidly gaining while searches on SOA are declining. The two are headed for a cross-over.

The graph below reflects this (a live version of this graph is at Google Trends).

Here are my views of the “So What” of this information. For the Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Officer or other enterprise technologist who must really deliver, I’d recommend you brace yourself for a flood of hype. You have probably already seen indications of this. But if trends continue the amount of views you (and your bosses) will be asked to consider and deal with will accelerate dramatically. Your defense against this will be the strength of your own position in Cloud Computing. Therefore, I strongly recommend you personally think through what Cloud Computing means to your enterprise. Also, think through your definition of cloud computing. Hopefully the NIST definition will suit your use, since the more people who form up on that the better.

And you may want to think through which Cloud Computing related events you will attend and speak at.

And you may want to think through you who personally believe the strongest IT players are in the Cloud Computing world. I have my list. Let me know if you want to compare notes sometime.

Any thoughts?

The Future of Cyberspace Security: The Law of The Rodeo

Bob Gourley October 20, 2008

This is an update of my now annual assessment of the future of technology associated with good and evil in cyberspace which was first posted here.

Cyberspace is our interconnected information technology.

Predictions of the future of technology are increasingly starting to sound like science fiction, with powerful computing grids giving incredible computational power to users and with autonomous robots becoming closer and closer to being in our daily lives vice just in computer science departments. Infotech, nanotech and biotech are fueling each other and each of those three dominate fields are generating more and more benefits that impact the other, propelling us even faster into a new world. Depending on your point of view the increasing pace of science and technology can be good or bad. As for me, I’m an optimist, and I know we humans will find a way to ensure technology serves our best interests.

But a sad fact of the human condition is that bad people will likely be with us long into the future. And sometimes good people can be tempted to do bad things, so we really need to engineer solutions that
keep the bad guys from benefiting from technology and keep those who can sometimes be tempted from giving in to their darker side.

So is is possible to engineer perfectly secure systems? Consider the law of the rodeo: “There’s not a horse that’s never been rode, and not a rider that’s never been throwed.” I like the analogy since it reminds us that all computer evil can be mitigated. But it always fights back. Good and evil will continue a fast paced rodeo dance long into the future.

To engineer secure systems for the future we need to continually assess where we are and what the near term future holds for our technologies. Here is a couple short predictions that could be useful
in this discussion.

Remote power is here today and will soon be widely distributed. This will allow small power consumption devices (like keyboards, mice, bluetooth headsets, hearing aides, small sensors) to be provided power by RF energy.

– Power generation from motion is almost ready for prime time. This will allow devices to gain energy from vibrations, like the vibrations in a bridge when a car passes over it, or the vibrations in a wall of a
building when the wind blows past it, or the vibrations caused by a person’s movement through the day.

– Communication capability (bandwidth) between fixed facilities will increase 1000 fold over the next five years. Cellular systems are on a dramatic improvement slope. My view: AT&T seems to lead in speed this year. Verizon will probably lead next year.

– More users will be on the net. There are about 1.3Billion PC’s connected to the Internet today. There are about 3.3Billion active cell phone subscriber accounts today. Those numbers will grow.

– Storage, especially flash storage technologies, is decreasing in price so much we can afford to store data anywhere on almost anything.

– Chips are being designed in ways that actually beat the old Moore’s Law projections. This is being done by placing many cores on one chip. Very high data rate capabilities are being connected directly to the cores on these chips.

– RFID is becoming so widespread we can place devices on everything that allows devices to report back what they are and what they are for and where they have been.

– All this capabilities are being networked together, including increasingly direct device to device connections via capabilities provided by enhanced protocols (especially IPv6).

– Consumer devices, especially consumer communication devices, are becoming increasingly capable. What used to be called a cell phone is now a phone/video recorder/video editor/entertainment/mobile office device with location aware data (GPS).

– Web2.0 and Social networking sites/tools such as Facebook will expand till one day 100% of the population will have active, up to date, authoratative online profiles.

– Cloud computing capabilities are not only being delivered to companies, but to end users. Google leads the pack in this space, but Microsoft and Adobe are up and comers.

There are many other elements of the future relevant to security discussions, but the projections above lead to some interesting conclusions on their own. So lets think through some of the impacts
of the above.

– Bad actors who want to exploit systems will increasingly not have to worry about them being powered off. They will be on all the time.

– Bad actors will increasinly be able to expoit social systems to gather data pre-attack. However, the powerful trust models of social networks may offer a counter to some of these attacks.

– Many paths into devices will be available for unauthorized users to exploit. And if they are compromised by people or code that intend on generating denial of service attacks, huge amounts of bandwidth will exist for them to attack from.

– When a bad actor gets through defenses into data stores, they will likely find a wide range of data to exploit, since it is becoming so easy and low cost for us to store everything.

– Having things networked together means it can be easier to penetrate a target by finding one weak link that is connected to the infrastructure.

– Areas of people’s lives they once thought private, especially their cell phones and the data on their cell phones, are increasingly becoming attractive targets to hackers.

What is needed in an environment like this? I can’t pretend to know all the solutions but here are a few points I support:

– Enhanced firewalls and intrusion detection devices.

– Better configuration control, for all devices. When a device is out of configuration is must be brought back into compliance immediately.

– Better laws and treaties concerning cyberspace. Deterrence policies by governments.

– More attention to standards and to industry organizations (including supply chain quality organizations) is a must.

– Better training and education for all (I mean ALL) humans connected to the grid.

– Better, continuous upgraded anti-virus solutions.

– Automated response to attacks.

– Enhanced, easier to use encryption.

– Enhanced, more secure identity and authorization technologies.

Is Your CTO Making You Stupid?

Bob Gourley September 17, 2008

Nicholas Carr writes in ways that makes people think. I really enjoyed reading his latest in the Atlantic titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” This article covers some rather significant trends that IT is pushing into the global social fabric. The changes he talks about are disturbing. They are infecting people like a fast spreading disease.

There is a chance you are suffering some of these symptoms yourself, so by all means read the article.

Or if your attention span is going, here is how Nicholas Carr describes the symptoms :

” Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. ”

I hope you dive deep into the Carr article for more details, but if you have the disease yourself you might not. So here is a gist of key points:

Google and others have made research simple and fast and easy.
Almost all data can come into your head via your browser.
People read fewer (or no) books.
People are loosing the ability to read and retain info from long articles.
The Internet, through your browser, is the medium of choice. Newspapers and print are on the out. TV is heading out fast.
We also write through the web, and that is changing the way we think.
We too frequently are relying on computers to mediate our understanding of the world.

What do we do with this cautionary info? One immediate think all of us should do is remember to carve out time in the day, every day, to read, write and think.

But if you are an enterprise technologist you should also consider what this means for you and your organization. Some ideas:

The systems you are designing, developing and fielding to your workforce may serve your workforce better if their interfaces are more intuitive and less textual. People will want to interface with enterprise systems they way they interface with the Internet (present your applications through browsers and summarize results and seek rapid human feedback on what they like or don’t like about the results).
To the greatest extent possible, build systems that present fast results.
And present information in ways that let humans interact with it.
And present information in ways that ensure the humans are in charge of the process and in charge of assessing the relevance of results.
Don’t stop innovating.
Stay on the net yourself so you can track where it is going.
Get engaged in social media (if you are not already). That means Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Twitter (especially Twitter– it really changes your mind).
Translate those many lessons into the enterprise technology you field.

If you can do that and if you can stay focused on the mission all your users will thank you, and in many ways I think you will be helping make your organization smarter. If you don’t do that then the odds are great that you will just be part of the noise. You may even be contributing to making your organization stupid.

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions on that topic?

More items of interest from CTOvision

The greatest new technologies (and great drama too!)

Bob Gourley September 7, 2008

I like technology and I like drama. These are two of the greatest of human creations. And they can be even more interesting when combined.

There has been some real drama in the West Coast tech scene the past few weeks, heating up to a boil in the last few days, and about to come to a head tomorrow.

The story is this:

Two great expos for high tech startups are the DEMO conference and the TechCrunch50.
DEMOfall08 will be in San Diego. According to their website, Chris Shipley has been around the globe gathering info on the best new technologies and has brought them into one place for this conference. 72 new digital technology products from 11 countries will be introduced. A record crowd of over 800 have registered already. This looks like an awesome conference and I can’t wait to read about the
presentations and study the companies. I’m sure I’ll find candidates for my own list of top disruptive technologies from what I read from this conference. For more info see: http://demo.com
TechCrunch50 is Sep 8-10 in San Francisco. It has a goal of bringing the best start-ups and launching them in front influential VC, corporations and the press. Many companies also give demos. It seems to be about twice the size as the Demo conference, about 1700 attendees are expected. Between the two conferences this appears to be the one with more VC and big company attendance, but I am only basing that on a review of the website. The website, by the way, shows an incredible panel of experts. These are really the greats in the community. Experts judging at TechCrunch include Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Dan Farber, Bradley Horowitz, Joi Ito, Tim O’Reilly, and Robert Scoble, to name a few. Here too, I’m sure I’ll find companies that need to be on my early warning screen of disruptive IT. For more on TechCrunch, see: http://techcrunch50.com

So now you see the drama? How could these two great conferences end up being held at exactly the same time?

The way this started, as far as I can tell, was captured in an April blog post from Henry Blodgete. He said, I quote:

Now that TechCrunch and Jason Calacanis have scheduled their TechCrunch50 start-up celebration conference at the same time as IDG’s DEMO start-up celebration conference, the allegations are flying:

Who moved whose conference to kill who.
Who ripped off who.
Who’s screwing who.
Who’s greedy, mercenary, abusive…
Etc.

The drama really heated up a few weeks ago when the long running tension was written about by the New York Times. An article by Brad Stone put it this way:

Demo, a 17-year-old conference franchise owned by the technology
publisher IDG, has served as the springboard for hit products like the
Palm Pilot and the TiVo digital video recorder. In San Diego during the
second week of September, 70 start-ups will pay $18,500 each to make a
six-minute presentation to a crowd of investors, journalists and
others. To Michael Arrington, the elbow-throwing, supercilious founder of
the popular Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch, Demo’s business model
amounts to “payola.”

From that article, leaders and associates of both Demo and TechCrunch began exchanging heated posts and interviews.

Here is one from Michael Arrington titled “Everyone Needs To Calm Down” Mr. Arrington asks folks to chill, but calls the Demo conference unethical. I guess I like the way he says what he thinks. But I
don’t think his post will calm anything down!

Here is one from Chris Shipley who says she has had it with the shoddy reporting, invective and arrogance that has attended most of the commentary. The following are some quotes from her post at: http://guidewiregroup.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/shoddy-reporting-invective-and-arrogance-yeah-i-want-some-of-that/

QUOTE:

When in a twitter I bemoaned the lack of original reporting (only one reporter (cnet) and exactly zero bloggers writing this week about this silly DEMO v TechCrunch episode actually contacted me), the infamous blogger Robert Scoble suggested that if I’d blog my opinion, he’d link to it. Does that mean that a perspective only exists or matters if it’s expressed in a blog post? Or that Robert’s just moving too fast to do any investigation outside his narrow medium?

Scoble’s not the only guy living in the rarefied air of the echo-chamber. Sarah Lacy, who works for the much-respected Businessweek.com, conducted a five-minute video interview with TC50’s
Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis, during which the two leveled the usual slander. Did Lacy fire one tough question at the two? Did this journalist call me or the DEMO organization to get a response to serious accusations? Um, the answer to that would be “no.”

In fact, a few weeks ago, when Mike Arrington wrote an assumption-based and error-filled story that demanded an apology from the DEMO organization for a comment that was clearly not made by or on behalf of anyone at DEMO, Lacy picked up the story and wrote with righteous indignation that slander was the highest insult that could be leveled against a journalist. Did she call me or DEMO before posting her story? Again no.

UNQUOTE

So, what’s my take on all that?

It is my intent to follow, from afar, both conferences, and review all I can read out of both. I’ll make my own assessments on which hot new technologies are of interest to me, and I’ll try hard to help my
associates, friends and readers know my opinion by updating my blog here. Stay tuned to my list of disruptive IT:

And I’ll also keep tracking the drama.

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