Archive for March 29th, 2010
FourSquare for the Enterprise: Give it Two Years, Max
In the past few weeks we’ve seen more references to FourSquare as a potential enterprise tool. The discussion represents an emerging law of Enterprise 2.0 Inevitably, a consumer trend in the social technology space will start to seep into the business world. Hutch Carpenter of Spigit says it is a two-year lag before the enterprise adopts a social computing trend. He writes that wikis emerged in 2002 as a consumer tool and by 2004 came into the enterprise. Social networking emerged in 2006 and by 2008 had made its way into a business context. Microblogging hit in 2007 and by 2009 it became a central part of the Enteprise 2.0 suite. Sponsor And so as the social concept of location based networks emerges in 2010, Carpenter’s bet is that we will see location based networks arrive into the enterprise by 2012. For reference, Spigit is an idea management platform. It is referenced by Dennis Howlett in the comments of Mark Fidelman’s CloudAve post as a company that could potentially enable this capability. “If i’ve understood you correctly what you are suggesting sounds fine in theory but i’d prefer solutions like Spigit which do a very good job of surfacing peer reviewed ideas but using algorithms that avoid the inevitable gaming problem.” Using Carpenter’s theory, here are some additional possibilities we can think of: IT Admins may have control over who is able to post to their location and in what context. Location-based systems will be required for some jobs. Permissions will be controlled by a business manager or IT administrator. A new generation of location-based applications will integrate with microblogging platforms. Web-oriented dashboard environments will provide live updates for managers to get an immediate view of their team with updates that are filtered to different communities based on the employee’s work role. Foursquare and Gowalla will be important for adoption but the first dominant player will probably be a new company or a company with an understanding of the importance of location-based systems. These outcomes do seem plausible. In the current generation of Enterprise 2.0 applications, we see the emergence of similar trends. IT Admin is becoming a basic requirement for cloud-based, collaborative applications that serve the enterprise. We could name everyone here but just look at the latest crop of new arrivals. Both Novell’s Pulse and Status.net make this requirement standard in its microblogging applications. How location based networks affects the way we view employees will become one of the most important issues in this brave, new world. Enterprise data, bound together by data analysis, may become such a tightly woven fabric that recommendations can be made at each check-in. Suggestions about work habits may become part of the network. How we view our basic civil liberties will be challenged. But in the end, we’ll keep looking out two years, waiting for the next consumer wave while managing the reality of working in a transparent universe. Discuss
Boom! Tweets & Maps Swarm to Pinpoint a Mysterious Explosion
What would you do if you heard a giant boom and you didn’t know where it came from? If you’re like thousands of people in Portland, Oregon, you might hit Twitter and Google Maps to participate in the city-wide exploration of a slightly frightening mystery. Last night at about 8 p.m., people in a big part of the city felt their windows shake and no one could tell them what caused it. Was it a sonic boom? An angry deity? Even the mayor himself tweeted this morning that he was looking into the sound. In the meantime, thousands of people were using the hashtag #pdxboom and adding themselves to a hastily configured Google Map showing where they lived and how loud the boom had been there. In just a few hours, a pattern emerged, with reports clustering around one city park. This morning the police found a detonated pipe bomb there and cited the Google Map in their announcement. Sponsor Pausing the Stream Reid Beels is a designer, geo-developer and one of the community organizers of Portland’s forthcoming conference Open Source Bridge (“The conference for open source citizens”). Beels says he was sitting in a restaurant in southeast Portland when he heard the boom, and saw tweets streaming in about it within minutes. He searched Twitter for “boom” and “explosion,” limiting the results by location. Within five minutes, he says, a hashtag had emerged: #pdxboom. What was the #pdxboom, people wanted to know? Some people said it sounded like thunder. Lots of people said it sounded like an empty trash dumpster crashing on the ground. They mentioned their locations in their Tweets and Beels quickly grew frustrated that all this data was just streaming into the ether, lost from analysis. So he threw up a Google Map with instructions to put a pin in your location and describe how the boom sounded to you. Within an hour 100 people had placed pins on the map. Beels and developer Audrey Eschright came up with a color coded system to describe the intensity of the sound, and began retroactively coloring in pins based on any comments people left. Then they found out that Google Maps will only display the 200 most recent pins placed in a public map. Beels’ friend Aaron Parecki wrote a script to download the map’s data every fifteen minutes. That came in handy when a few hours later someone vandalized the map by dragging a large number of markers outside the town. It was trivial to roll back to the last valid data. The local TV news and the newspaper ran stories about the boom, and pointed their audiences to the Google Map. Thousands of people visited it, and just under 1,000 added a pin marking where they where and how loud the boom had sounded to them. It became clear that the boom originated near the Sellwood Bridge; a big cluster of red markers surrounded the area, especially to the east. Thousands of people are still streaming in to look at the map; at the end of the day it’s now approaching 70,000 views, even if the mystery, if not the crime, is solved. Some people thought it was a precursor Earthquake Boom . (I woke up convinced my house was in an earthquake.) But the Portland police went to a park in the area most filled with red flags on the map and found a large detonated pipe bomb. A Portland police spokesperson said the maps and tweets were very helpful. A topographic view of the map made some inclined to believe that cliffs across the river and low-hanging clouds combined to make the sound travel as far across the city and in the direction that it did. That Was a Practice Run Beels says two big lessons came out of the experience for him. First, the tools they used were easy and fast, but they were also quite limited. Google Maps in particular was capable of multi-user collaboration but did poorly when it came to displaying a large amount of data. As Eschright wrote after the action, “It’s not the best platform for a couple hundred people, many without prior experience editing maps, to be using all at once.” Inspired by campaigns like CrisisCampPDX and the CrisisWiki , Beels says the community is interested in setting up an installation of open-source, crisis support software Ushahidi on standby in case a real crisis has to be dealt with. Beels says he’s inspired not just by what was done in this situation, but by what it revealed about the future. “The community of people who will search for things online and go out of their way to try to figure out what’s going on,” he says, “is larger than you might think.” Marshall Kirkpatrick is leading a webinar for Poynter’s News University on Thursday about how location services are changing the news . Discuss
Earth Hour: Is it Time to Virtualize the Electrical Grid?
Another Earth Hour has passed by this weekend. Electrical systems across the globe were shut down to observe, for an hour, that energy is precious. In this moment, we also acknowledge that as humanity, we have the power to do better for ourselves. One great thing about Earth Hour is the photos. If you haven’t yet, check out the brilliant photo essay at Boston.com on Earth Hour 2010 . If you haven’t taken initiative to shut down your computer yet, read on to get a refresher on how better computing resource utilization creates a better world. Sponsor Earth Hour Translates to Megahertz The link to energy and efficiency is clearly evident in the data center. Where electricity is bundled in time units, processing is calculated in megahertz. We can see how important the work is at Intel and others (AMD, IBM, Apple) to get higher processing per energy consumption at the core. In the data center, applications and processes drive resources, as well as flows of traffic from users. In a way solving the challenge of energy efficient data centers is where information management and physics collide. Higher utilization is the promise of server virtualization. However, like in many things, scaling up is harder than scaling down. The tricky part is the linkages across the network, storage. These configurations are where further opportunity exists to abstract the workload, infrastructure, and energy to orchestrate a flow of resources that turn off and on when needed. In this way, we wonder, will find ways to connect energy consumption to workload – and cost. Is Energy Social? We see a time in the future where personal computing is a utility, and the plug knows who we are. With smart homes, mobile computing, and personal health records, it has to be so. One thing that struck a note with us about Earth Hour is how easy it is to do locally. All you do is turn off the switch. In California, there is a very lively discussion on automated, or “smart” meters from the default electrical company, PGE. See (some) of the dialog on PGE’s smart meter site on Facebook. On one hand, having computerized meters gives the needed management to observe consumption in real-time and optimize the grid. On the other hand for many users, this type of oversight needs to be tied to consumer privacy and pricing. As shown with Earth Hour, there is an important social component and to giving back to the world, not just the shareholders. People question the intentions of a monopoly and as people we seem to get a better win with a simple, “Turn it Off” where we get a chance to contribute by ourselves. For us, Earth Hour represents people rallying for the future. Around the world, from Sidney to Singapore, Buenos Aires to Boston people are doing it because we are a people – not to support the systems. Here’s to hoping that someday we can all check in to Earth Hour in a way that turns off our gear, lights, and grids – if only for a moment. Location Matters. Huddling Up to Where its Warm Oregon’s has a lot of natural resources. From salmon, honey, and redwoods, to mobile technology, the state is blossoming like spring. One interesting trend are the massive data centers popping up out of the ground (like Facebook and Google ) that have been placed close to energy resources. In several small towns in Oregon, modern high-density computing environments are being deployed next to the oldest technology for generating power, the dam. These services show that tariff’s and pricing do matter when it comes to energy and how it converts to the bottom line to the leaders in cloud computing. Computing Matters: A Few Green Guides Resources to Consider Intel : Seeing the Sensitivity of Server Refresh is an Intel internal review of ROI of pulling in newest versions of server technology and doing technology refreshes. Density does matter. VMware : This energy efficiency analysis walks us though the concepts of energy efficiency by pooling servers as virtual resources. The Gartner quote below us how serious energy is ties to computing costs. “Gartner estimates that over the next 5 years, most enterprise data centers will spend as much on energy (power and cooling) as they do on hardware infrastructure.” Even if all of the technology was free, energy would still a very significant expense in running a data center operation. VMware also shows that energy saving can be viral , or can expand into other areas of the corporate environment. Earth Hour is a Question, Not an Answer One of the best aspects of Earth Hour is that we know it won’t work for the real-time web. We aren’t ready to shut down the Internet, or data center. Instead, as technology leaders, we may be able to design systems that react and become more efficient. With time, perhaps the Internet at large will “go dark” for an hour or so per year in celebration. For us, Earth hour was a trigger to consider the impacts of energy and look at it as a system, instead of a free resource. We compiled a few questions for enterprise managers considering how to tie global movement and questions into the day job: Earth Hour has a .9% difference in the electrical grid in some areas. We know virtualization offers more. What number are you using in your enterprise for virtualization energy savings? How long will it take for electrical grids and computing grids merge? Will it happen in our lifetime? Would your company be able to take down your network down for an hour with the flip of a switch? What part of the infrastructure would you be the most concerned about? How high of a priority is it for your organization to reduce it’s energy footprint? Photo credits: demorganna & xshamx Discuss
Weekly Poll: Is Oracle a Cloud company?
In our poll last week, we asked: “Does it Really Matter How Cloud Computing Is Defined? ” This week, we want to know: “Is Oracle a cloud company?” The questions have some relationship as how we defien cloud computing has some impact on the way we view a company and its overall vision. As for the overall debate, most of our respondents to last week’s question agreed with the RedMonk team on this one. The number one response : “It’s simple. Just think of cloud computing as servers, middleware and apps.” The interest in this topic is shifting. About 100 or so people responded to the poll, compared to past polls that have had more than 1,000 votes. Maybe the more legitimate question should be: ” Does it NOT matter at all how cloud computing is defined?” Sponsor
Dean of Lean Eric Ries Announces Scholarships for Lean Startups
Eric Ries, the driving force behind the lean startup movement , announced Sunday on his blog Lessons Learned the creation of two scholarships for lean startups to attend upcoming conferences. A lean startup is one that takes advantage of various techniques and technologies to produce a product at minimal cost, while continually revising and iterating based on customer feedback. Sponsor The newly announced scholarships will provide lean startups with the opportunity to attend the Startup Lessons Learned conference in mid-April and the Web 2.0 Expo in early May. The Startup Lessons Learned conference is a pet project of Ries’, and is sponsored by the company he helped co-found, IMVU. “This conference will be the first of its kind: an opportunity to have a conversation about the future of the lean startup movement,” writes Ries on his blog. “We want everyone who can contribute to that conversation to be there, regardless of their ability to pay.” Ries has also distributed discount codes for the conference to leaders of various Lean Startup Meetup groups. Those attending the event will have the opportunity to learn from an impressive list of speakers, including Steve Blank, Dave McClure, Damon Horowitz and Max Ventilla of Aardvark, and even Clara Shih, whose book The Facebook Era was mentioned in our Weekend Reading series. The second scholarship provides access to the Web 2.0 expo and to its Lean Startup Intensive , which Ries agreed to organize with the promise of the scholarship opportunity. Applications for the two scholarships are open until April 12 and April 15, respectively. Lean startups have been growing in popularity as startups learn to become more independent and to make more from less, especially in these rough economic and tepid venture capital times. It only makes sense that Ries would organize these scholarships since most lean startups that would benefit from attending these events might see them as unnecessary costs. If your startup is looking to run on a low burn, applying for these scholarships is a great idea for the opportunity to learn from and network with other entrepreneurs with lean experience. Discuss