Category Archives: Digital reflections

Self-diagnosis by search engine leads to cyberchondria

I love it. Here is the NY Times article, here is the Microsoft research paper.

Let’s see: Search for "lack of ability to concentrate because of Bloglines"….

Liveblogging from Sophia Antipolis

This are my running notes from visiting Accenture’s Technology Labs in Sophia Antipolis, as part of a Master of Management program called "Strategic Business Development and Innovation" for the Norwegian School of Management.

Accenture’s Technology Labs is a relatively small organization: 200 researchers, 180000 employees in Accenture. There are four tech labs: Silicon Valley, Chicago (the largest), Sophia Antipolis, Bangalore, they should be able to do everything, but in practice there is specialization. The four main activities of the tech labs are technology visioning, research, development of specific platforms, and innovation workshops (with clients, press, consultants etc.) The themes pursued are mobility and sensors; analytics and insight; human interaction & performance; Systems Integration (architecture, development methods); and infrastructure (virtualization, cloud computing).

Kelly Dempski: Power Shift: Accenture Technology vision

The visioning used to be far-thinking, visionary etc., now have a much more immediate focus, want to look at things that you can implement today, make it much more "grounded in reality"

Eight critical trends:

  • 1: Cloud computing and SaaS: Hardware cloud (amazon.com, IBM, Google (now the third largest producer of servers in the world)), desktop cloud (Google, Zimbra, MS Office Live Workspace), SaaS cloud (Netsuite, CrownPeak, salesforce.com), and services cloud (Google Checkout, Amazon web services, eBay, Yahoo)
    • examples: Flextronics has changed over their HR applications to an SaaS model. AMD emulates chips on software for testing purposes, now contract with Sun to do that in the cloud. New York Times had 4Tb of articles that they wanted to translate to PDF: Translated it all twice (because there was a bug the first time), someone went on Amazon with their credit card, uploaded 4Tb, processed it (24h), there was a bug, had to do it again, 48h, total cost $250 on someone’s credit card.
    • issues:
      • data location (where is the data)
      • privacy and security
      • performance
  • 2: Systems – regular and lite
    • SOA as the integration paradigm (regular), mashups (lite)
    • traditional back-end apps vs. end-user apps
    • small number of apps maintained by CIOs vs. large number of User and user-group created applications (long tail)
    • examples:
      • REST is a light architectural approach for interoperability & data extraction
      • Mashups (JackMe (trading platform tools), Serena, Duet (SAP and Microsoft), IBM) becoming more important in the enterprise arena
      • Widgets and gadgets are light-weight desktop UIs that continually update some data
  • 3: Enterprise intelligence at scale
    • combination of internet-scale computing, petabytes of data, and new algorithms
    • almost all the large systems vendors have partnered with or acquired some analytics oriented software company (such as Microsoft acquiring FAST)
    • rampant use of data: evolution through access, reporting, external & internal, unstructured etc.
  • Trends 1-2-3 together: The new CIO
    • hardware and software procured from the cloud
    • business units, end-users create their own lightweight apps
    • The new CIO:
      • "Data Fort Commander" – ensure security, privacy, integrity of corporate data and manage back-end apps
      • "Chief Intelligence Officer" – provide data analysis services & insights to business units
  • 4: Continuous access
    • mobile device "first class" IT object
    • No concept of enterprise desktop/laptop
    • location-based services
  • 5: Social computing
    • amplify and support the value of the community
    • three major directions: Platformization, inter-operability, identity management
  • 6: User-generated content
    • community-based CRM (users making videos about how to run certain kinds of software or build something from IKEA)
    • new forms of entertainment
    • revenue erosion of traditional media companies
    • this has marketing implications: You can measure the sentiment out there in the user community. You switch from advertising to engaging.
  • 7: Industrialization of software development
    • converging trends will increase integration: Predictive metrics, model-driven development, domain-specific languages, service-oriented architecture, agile-development & Forever Beta.
  • 8: Green computing
    • global warming, energy prices, consumer pressure, compliance and valuation
    • switch out energy-intensive processes for information-intensive processes: Electronic collaboration; Warehousing, supply chain & logistics optimization; Smart factories, plants, buildings & homes; and new businesses such as carbon auditing and trading

Cyrille Bataller: Biometric Identity Management

Biometric identification is coming, driven by increasing demand and technological progress. Biometric identification is defined as "automated recognition of individuals based on their physiological and/or behavioral characteristics. Physiological can be face, iris, fingerprint; behavioral can be signature, voice, or walk. Involves a tradeoff, as with all security systems, between the level of security and the convenience of the system. Fingerprint is most used (38%), face is the most natural, iris the most accurate. Many others: Finger/hand vein, gait, ear shape, electricity, heat signature, hand geometry and so on…

Balance between FMR (false (positive identification) m rate) and FNMR, called equal error rate. Iris has an EER of .002%, 10 fingerprints .01%, fingerprint .4%, signature 3%, face recognition 6%, voice 8%. Many parameters in addition to this.

Securimetrix has something called HIIDE, a mobile unit that does a number of biometrics, used in Iran. Voice is very interesting because it can be done over the phone, interesting for call centers, banks etc. Multimodal important, because it is hard to spoof.

Airports is a good example of what you can do with proper identification: You can move 99.9% of the check-in away from the airport. Bag drop can also be almost fully automated. Portugal is the leader in the EU, have automated passport control with facial recognition (scan, use electronic passport etc.). Most people are not concerned very much with privacy given some assurance and convenience. Likely to see lost of automated border clearance for the masses, but also registered travelers that go through even quicker and are interoperable across many airports. One common misunderstanding is that automated identity checking is moving away from 100% accuracy, but human passport/security control is an error-ridden process and mostly automated processes are more accurate.

Antoine Caner: Next Generation Branch

This is a showcase exhibit of best practice banking technology and processes. This showroom has about 40 companies (banks, mostly) visits per year.

Most banks have a multi-channel strategy, have returned from a strategy of getting rid of branches but want to redefine it. Rather than doing low-value transactions, the branches are seen as a mesh network for business development.

Key principles behind the branch of the future:

  • generating and taking advantage of the traffic
  • flexibility throughout the day
  • adaptation to client’s value
  • sell & service oriented
  • modular space according
  • entertaining and attractive
  • focused on customer experience

Examples:

  • turning the branch windows into an interactive display (realty, for instance)
  • Bluetooth-enabled push information
  • swipe card at entrance to let branch know you are there, let your account manager know, apply Amazon-like features
  • digital displays for marketing
  • avatar-based teller services
  • biometric-based ATMs to allow for more advanced transactions, as well as more opportunistic sales applications
  • do both identification and authentication
  • digital pen user interface for capturing data from forms
  • RFID-based or NFC (Near Field Communication) in brochures, swipe and get info on screen
  • "interactive wall" for interaction with clients in information seeking mode
  • visual tracking of movement in the branch
  • modular office that can change shape during the day, reconfigurable furniture

What impressed me was not the individual applications per se – though they were impressive – but way everything had been put together, with a back-office application that can be used by the branch manager to track how this whole customer interface  (i.e., the whole bank branch) works.

Alexandre Naressi: Emerging Web Technologies

Alexandre leads the rich Internet applications community of interest within Accenture. He started off giving some background on Web 2.0 and used Flickr as an example of a Web 2.0 application, where a company use user-generated content and tagging to get network effects on their side. Important here is not only the user interface but also having APIs that allow anyone to create applications and to have your content or services embedded into other platforms. Dimpls is another example. More than one billion people have Internet access, 50% of the world has broadband access, which allows for richer applications. Customers’ behavior is changing – it is now a "read-write" web. It has also gotten so much cheaper to launch something: Excite cost $3m, JotSpot $200k, Digg cost $200.

Rich Internet Application and Social Software represent low-hanging fruit in this scenario. RIA allows the functionality of a fat client in a browser interface, with very rich and capable components for programmmers to play around with.

Two families of technologies: Jacascript/Ajax (doesn’t require a plugin, advocated by Google), and three different plugin-based platforms: Silverlight (Microsoft), Flash/Flex from Adobe, and JavaFX from Sun. All of them have offline clients that can be downloaded as well. A good example is Searchme.com, which gives a better user interface – Accenture has developed something similar for their internal enterprisesearch.

Social Software: Accenture has its own internal version of Facebook. Youtube is also a possible corporate platform where people can contribute screencasts of all kinds of interesting demos and prototypes.

Kirsti Kierulf: Nordic Innovation Model for Accenture and Microsoft

Accenture and Microsoft collaborating (own a company, Avanade, together), and have set up an Innovation lab in Oslo called the Accenture Innovation Lab on Microsoft Enterprise Search. Three agendas: Network services, enterprise search (iAD), and service innovation. Running a number of innovation processes internally. This happens on a Nordic level, so collaboration is with academic institutions and companies all over.

Have made a number of tools to support innovation methodologies: InnovateIT, InnovoteIT, and InnomindIT (mind maps), as well as a method for making quick prototypes of systems and concepts for testing and experimentation: 6 weeks from idea to test.

Current innovation models are not working for long-term, risky projects. Closed models do not work – hence, looser, more informal and open innovation models with shorter innovation cycles. Pull people in, share costs throughout the network, Try to avoid the funnel which closes down projects with no clear business case and NIH. Try to park ideas rather than kill them.

Important: Ask for advice, stay in the question, maintain relationships, don’t spend time on legalities and financials.

Andrew Sullivan on blogging and essaying

Andrew Sullivan has a thoughtful essay in The Atlantic on blogging and what it does for writing – his own and others’. Blogging is a substitute that frees the writer’s mind and increases the premium on orderly thinking:

A blogger will air a variety of thoughts or facts on any subject in no particular order other than that dictated by the passing of time. A writer will instead use time, synthesizing these thoughts, ordering them, weighing which points count more than others, seeing how his views evolved in the writing process itself, and responding to an editor’s perusal of a draft or two. The result is almost always more measured, more satisfying, and more enduring than a blizzard of posts. The triumphalist notion that blogging should somehow replace traditional writing is as foolish as it is pernicious. In some ways, blogging’s gifts to our discourse make the skills of a good traditional writer much more valuable, not less. The torrent of blogospheric insights, ideas, and arguments places a greater premium on the person who can finally make sense of it all, turning it into something more solid, and lasting, and rewarding.

Good stuff. Read it.

A profile of a Enterprise 2.0 employee

Excellent idea from Andy McAfee: What is your of Web 2.0 employee profile? Here is one option:

Small firm, large firm, we are all equal now

Hal Varian has a good post on the democratization of data over at the Google blog – in short, that small firms now can access information and analysis (including consultants) much like large firms can.

My interpretation: Information access is now close to free. What you now need is understanding. That takes people, and if you can access the smart ones in person as well as their explicated output, you will do well.

Little brother pretty fast

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (available for free download here if you don’t want to buy it) is a "young adult" book on the topic of surveillance and personal freedom and privacy. The story is about Marcus, nicked M1k3y, who after a terrorist attack hits San Francisco gets detained by the DHS, denied his rights, and decides to take revenge. This involves quite a bit of hacking, security, cryptography and subterfuge.

The purpose of this book is both to tell a story and to teach the (young) reader something about personal freedoms, critical thinking and how to preserve your privacy in an increasingly connected and digitized world. This shows – there are some quite detailed discussions of this, somewhat simplified versions of Cory Doctorow’s speeches and writings on these subjects.

I sort of liked the book – it is important from the perspective of raising a generation of youngsters that know enough about the technology to maintain some sort of privacy, and encourage creative thinking – loosely defined as demanding logic and actions in proportion to consequences from the authorities. Cory’s book has gotten to the NYT bestseller list, and deservedly so. This is something to be happy about, for Cory spreads the word of his book electronically (as well as the book) and this nicely vindicates that strategy and points towards the future for aspiring authors. And, as someone struggling to get young people to read about and be interested in technology – not just what it does and how it looks but how it works – I see the value in the book.

But I do wish the literary qualities, such as the plot and the character development, were a bit more ambitions. On the other hand, Neal Stephenson does that, and Little Brother is an excellent introduction to Cryptonomicon, which set the reader up for the Baroque Trilogy and the idea that, well, history matters.

So, highly recommended. Wonder when we will see the first Norwegian translation? (I have translated for Cory before, but am a bit under the weather here. Anyone for a "dugnad"?). It is not like anyone needs to ask permission…

(On a side note, the paper copy I got from Amazon had half of page 197/8 torn out. Rather than sending it back to be replaced (which I know Amazon would do without argument), I printed out those pages from Cory’s web site and put them inside the book. Saves work and time. Same thing as when I switched from a static web page to a wiki for my course syllabi – now the customers, i.e., my students, fix broken links without bothering me…..)

One danger of search-collected newspapers

United Airlines’ share price dropped 76% when Google News erroneously picked up a six-year old story about UAL filing for bankruptcy and pushed it to the front page.

Not that this couldn’t happen in any newspaper, but Google News is automatically generated. This opens for interesting possibilities in pump-and-dump….

Classic writing…

ACM Ubiquity re-published something referred to as a classic today, which to me came as a surprise, especially since, well, I wrote that thing in an hour or so as the result of a direct question from John Gehl, former editor. But hey, being called a classic can’t be all bad, can it?

Alternatively, cucumber season is raging across the pond…

Google Chrome

Google is announcing Google Chrome, an open-source browser tailored to, amongst other things, the multimedia rather than text-oriented uses of the web according to this comic by Scott McCloud (warning – slow site at this point). Here are some screenshots – looks to me like they have taken ideas from Opera (thumbnail navigators) as well as Firefox (autocomplete, private browsing). A nice feature seems to be the memory leak monitor – some web pages can cause a lot of memory problems (Incidentally, I installed AdBlock Plus in my Firefox version, which helps a lot.) See Slashdot for the usual comments, Nick Carr has a discussion about this as an important step towards cloud computing (and the goal of Google being to upgrade all browsers). Mozilla says they are not worried about the new competition No points for guessing what is going to be the top search term and discussion topic in the blogosphere this week.

image

Google Chrome, if it is to take off, needs to become a real competitor not to IE or Firefox (they can easily implement most of the added features) but to Vista. And the only way it can do that is by integrating the various Google applications (search, Calendar, Docs, etc.) into the browser. It also needs to be faster than IE or Firefox, and to handle upgrades easily. My guess is some kind of offloading to server-based rendering, much like Opera Mini is doing, making it easier to provide regular HTML to cell phones and the like. If it displays Google apps faster (and more reliable – Youtube is not persistently good on Firefox) than anything else, then it could quickly become important.)

Another way to gain share would be to exploit the enormous collection of user stats that Google has, to produce something that tries to guess the intent of the user and provide suggested links and user-influenced interfaces. Information systems these days is more and more about guessing the users intent rather than having him or her specify it up front, and Google is well informed (too well informed, some would say) about what we like to do.

Update 8/3: Have installed it. Runs fine. Memory management as good as advertised. Won’t be switching over from Firefox soon, but we’ll see over time. As for the story behind Chrome, Steven Levy has a good writeup, as usual, in Wired.

Wikipedia maturing

Nick Carr is snarky about Jim Wales’ new slogan for Wikipedia (“the online encyclopedia in which any reasonable person can join us in writing and editing entries on any encyclopedic topic,”) as opposed to the previous free-for-all. But he misses the point: Any business or endeavor with strong network externalities goes through phases of growth, and Wikipedia is now transitioning from “need stuff” to “need better stuff”.

My Master and executive students have been editing Wikipedia as part of their courses for 5 years. The comment when we started was “boy, this is fun”. Now it is “it is really hard to create new articles, we either get shot down or the topic is already covered.” Life is easier in the Norwegian version (170K entries) than in the English one, where norms are nailed down and text quality, at least on any substantial entry, is high.

Progress, the revolutionaries become the incumbents, life goes on, etc., etc.

Disrupted presentation at Open Nordic

Here (PDF) is my presentation from Open Nordic 2008.

My experience at this conference – the audience was interested and had good questions, by the way – was rather unnerving. As is my wont, I was sitting in the audience listening to the speaker before me, fiddling with my own presentation (I have found that starting for or against the previous speaker when you are late in the day in a conference helps the audience anchor what you are saying. Plus, sitting in on the previous speaker gives you an idea about what the audience wants.)

Anyway, I had saved my presentation, and when the other speaker had finished, I pulled out the power cable from my Lenovo X61 Tablet laptop to walk up and check that it would work with the projector.

And then my laptop just died. No sign of life, no reaction when cycling power, no reaction when taking out the battery, nothing. Dead as the proverbial doornail. My guess is a short in the motherboard or something like that – the newer Lenovos operate on a 90W power adapter and I have a feeling that they are pretty cramped in there, with more power running around than you would like.)

Foldershare logoWell, for once the backup system worked, as did everything else. Knut Yrvin put up his laptop (running Linux, incidentally), I logged on to my account at Foldershare.com, and lo and behold, the presentation which I had saved just minutes earlier was there in all its glory. Downloaded it to Knut’s’ laptop, opened it (in OpenOffice 2.4), and it ran like a charm.

Backup and interoperabilty, folks. It’s the new black.

I can’t recommend Foldershare highly enough. A life-saver. It can sometimes be tricky to install on some corporate networks, but boy, what a tool. Get it. It is free from Microsoft and, to quote Jerry Pournelle, It Just Works. Get It Now.

Now I just have to hope that my hard disk can be salvaged – while I have backup of my documents and email, there are some files and programs that for various reasons (mostly sloth on my part) were not backed up. As for getting a new laptop, that may take a week or two, but since summer is coming and I am mostly working from home anyway, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

SIm card as platform

I am at the Open Nordic Conference in Skien (about two hours south-west of Oslo), listening to Lars Ingvald Hoff from Telenor R&D talking to a bunch of developers about the new, platform-like SIM cards coming out.

The new SIM card has plenty of memory "gigbytes", USB interface (means you can get data from the SIM card real fast), virtual machines (or at least virtual memory areas, closed off, called SSDs). Tele operator has control of the card, application developers can install SSDs (whatever they are) that run in a sandbox. One business model may be that operators will charge rent for space on the SIM. Seems like a pretty full architecture to me. Translation HMTL to APDU (command language for phone) in a web server on the card, so in principle you could move your cell phone onto the net. Alos has a "Java Card", where you can to some extent can have interoperable applications running between manufacturers. Secure and certified environment, not full Java stack , but a pretty good selection. Standards based, not operator-specific.

FC: New short-range communications protocol, can be used to access payment terminals and similar, secure devices.

Apps can be downloaded and installed via a variety of protocols (among them BIP (Bearer Independent Protocol) directly to the SIM card.

In other words, mobile phones are going to open up to a much larger extent. I predict that the SIM card over time will become you – an identification and payment device.

Future future SIM card – you will get IP stacks, threads, full Java virtual machine, will look more and more like a server.

Will the real security please stand up?

Peter Cochrane has it right – our preceptions of security and risk are way off. The single most dangerous thing I am doing today is probably driving my daughter to school. The most dangerous part of an airplane trip is driving to the airport. And the biggest security threat to your infrastructure is the employee who inadvertently posts your marketing plan on a world-readable wiki or stores his password on a Post-It note under the keyboard.

Michael Pollan says something of the same in In defense of food – that low-fat diets cause you to eat processed food and trans-fats, which are unhealthy. Instead, you should eat fresh, varied and pleasing food.

In other words, use common sense, taste buds, and simple mathematics.

Trouble is, that approach is hard to productize and market…..

Shared blindness

Ben Elton: Blind Faith, 2007

Ben Elton describes a society where reason is not allowed – where everything is based on faith and feeling, where everybody has to share what they are doing, where everything is ostensibly permitted, even encouraged, where everyone is famous. By law.

This world is a Web 2.0 version of 1984, nightmarish in its shallowness. Elton manages to make it both scary and believable – aside from the the inevitable screw-ups when it comes to technology (the hero creates some software that is decidedly primitive given real search-engines’ capabilities for sentiment analysis and finding links between information items.

Recommended.

Signatures by fax, and security in context

(this is a work in progress, thought I would write this in public and see what reactions I get)

Bruce Schneier, the world’s leading authority on security, writes well about why we accept signatures by fax – noting that it works because it is done in context, everyone understands how insecure it is (except in the relatively rare instances when they don’t.) One thing is that we tend to think of new technologies in terms of old technologies: The physical signature can easily be faked with a fax, even easier when we start to use scanned PDFs – in fact, gluing in a copied signature becomes the standard way of doing things for most people.

I am currently thinking about security in a next-generation employee computing setup, where corporate infrastructure has retreated behind a browser and the end user can buy whatever he or she desires – be it a Mac or PC, laptop or desktop, cell phone or public terminal. Every user comes in via the public Internet, even if he or she is physically sitting right next to the server park.

From a security standpoint, this is actually a simplification, much as you simplify PC provisioning when you switch everyone to a laptop. Sure, many of the users don’t need a laptop, and a laptop is more expensive than a desktop. But differentiation has its costs, too. And it is much easier to make a desktop out of a laptop – in essence, all you need to do is sit still – than it is to to do it the other way.

If you move to an architecture with corporate infrastructure and personal, private terminals, you remove the inside-or-outside-the-moat distinction companies often naively use as their main security barrier. Instead you must verify everyone’s identity in terms of the information and functionality they can have access to. You need to specify this as a very granular level, and will need a well defined hierarchy of access rules. You will also, like Wikipedia, need to have a way to track who has done what where, and make it easy to reverse whatever changes has been done, should it prove necessary.

I am less certain that you need much of a standard for what should run on the clients themselves – surely we have progressed to a point now (or will in the near future) where end users can take responsibility for keeping their own technology’s reasonably updated and secure? We probably need to rethink security in terms of consequence management, in the sense that we need to make the consequences of poor security become apparent to the end user. The analogy is to car safety – for all the nagging about putting on your seatbelt and monitoring speeding, nothing would reduce deaths in traffic as much as a mandatory large spike sticking out of the steering wheel, instantly impaling the driver should he or she crash or suddenly brake.

(and that is as far as I got before the telephone started chiming, and it was time to scoot off for meetings and other things that eat up your day. I will be back. Comments, of course, are most welcome.)

Scarce Resources in Computing

New essay in ACM Ubiquity: Scarce Resources in Computing, about how we adapt our use and organization of information technology around what at any point is the scarce resource.

Comments welcome!

My computer setup (testing notes)

I am testing various pieces of equipment on behalf of the IT dept. at the Norwegian School of Management, and this post is a second report on how it is working (the first one is here, in Norwegian.)

X61 Tablet with two 22'' widescreens

My new setup (as pictured) is what I think ought to be the new standard for faculty: A decent laptop for travel and a good setup (with large screens) for office work. The technology components here are: Lenovo X61 Tablet, docking station, keyboard and mouse (with cable, I really don’t like wireless keyboards and mice) and two Samsung SyncMaster225bw 22” screens, held together with a Matrox DualHead2Go Digital Edition. This gives me a 3360×1050 screen (16 bit color, 60Hz).

All in all, a pretty good setup, though I am still ironing out a few kinks. Some details follow:

Continue reading →

Cellphones against poverty

Excellent article about how cellphones reduce poverty from New York Times Magazines.

Door close button unmasked

According to this great essay in the New Yorker, the “close door” button in most elevators does not work (unless you are a fireman with a key). This is something I have long suspected, since noticing how Americans bang on it and Europeans ignore it, with no noticeable difference in elevator speed.

Via Boingboing.

PS: The elevator industry is really interesting from a commercial viewpoint – the ultimate example of the razor-and-blade business model (install it cheaply and live off the service contract) as well as infrastructure technology (which you only notice when it break down.

PSPS: And yes, the elevator bank at the New York Marriot Marquis must be the slowest in the world.

Email vs Wiki

This picture really says it all:

email vs wiki

(From Chris Rasmussen via Anthony Williams. Apologies for repeat to my BSG Alliance colleagues, but this one is definitely one for a wide audience.)