Economics

The power of pull in the clouds

The tech industry is moving from push to pull, author John Hagel III says.

Hagel, chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge and co-author of "The Only Sustainable Edge" and "The Power of Pull," spoke with me Thursday at the Structure 2010 conference in San Francisco about how IT needs to change in the age of the cloud and the potential of moving from push to pull in business processes.

Hagel's latest book, "The Power of Pull," is co-authored by John Seely Brown and Lang Davison and is focused on how to address the most pressing challenges in a rapidly changing, increasingly interdependent world.

According to Hagel, "pull" starts with a broad business issue: for example, looking at long-term changes in a business environment to show how well a company is doing over a period of time. According to Hagel's research, some metrics, such as return on assets, have shown that there are statistical issues--both legitimate and anomalous--that raise all kind of questions and show that not enough companies look for long-term sustainability.

With far less predictability and stability in markets and in business, "pull" has become more relevant than "push." There is a disconnect between management practices and the way the world has changed.

Hagel outlines three stages of how we're moving from push to pull:

Access--being able to get the resources you need. This is an area already being addressed by Google and other search engines that provide answers to queries. Attraction--you don't know what to look for, but there is opportunity to increase unexpected encounters. In this case, the goal is to find inadvertent patterns or dynamics that can then be reacted to. Full potential--ultimately, this newly discovered knowledge leads to performance improvement.

Cloud-based systems and services are an entry point to exploit the full potential of the vast amount of data that is always in play, but they tend to be stuck on the edge of organizations and practices, while the core of the process still needs to be addressed.… Read more

IBM chief scientist seeks patterns in patterns

Despite what is often considered to be a conservative approach to business, IBM has no shortage of big thinkers who use their skills both internally and externally to influence the way the company thinks about technology and how it applies to business processes.

This week I met with Jeff Jonas, chief scientist, IBM Entity Analytics, to talk about how predictive analytics is moving into new realms of big data and how companies are using software to deal with the deluge of information.

Jonas joined IBM in 2005 when Big Blue acquired SRD, a company he founded to develop so-called extraordinary systems with specific data analysis tasks, such as facial recognition and analysis systems casinos use to catch cheating gamblers.

The main thrust of Jonas' research right now is trying to figure out ways to better take advantage of as much data as possible as fast as the transaction is happening--with an eye toward real-time predictive analytics. This is basically pattern detection in real-time, based on patterns that may or may not exist already.

Jonas explained that you may not know of a pattern, but you want to find one, and that many might be interesting but they don't always matter. In the casino example, bad guys are looking to perform channel separation by mixing and matching, people, places, and things, but the casino needs to do channel consolidation to aggregate information and determine an immediate course of action.… Read more

Combining cloud and open source for phone calls

A new service called OpenVBX from cloud-communication provider Twilio hopes to change the way we think about and deploy phone services for businesses large and small.

Twilio provides a programmatic approach to phone calls much in the same way that we apply business logic through HTTP or XML for complex applications.

OpenVBX is a Web-based phone system that provides for virtual phone numbers as well as a wide range of other functions that are programmable through the OpenVBX plug-in API in PHP OpenVBX lets you take advantage of all of Twilio's integrated services, like text to speech, voice transcription, … Read more

Bringing customer intelligence to the iPhone (Q&A)

In a recent conversation about predictive analytics, I learned how Wal-Mart Stores uses statistical modeling to better understand the habits and tendencies of its customers--and how businesses can use this data to drive competitive pricing to dominate a market.

Imagine that same type of customer intelligence, delivered almost instantaneously, into the hands of store managers on-site or corporate executives on their iPhone or iPad.

That's what Medallia, a provider of customer feedback and performance data software, aims to provide with a new offering this week on the heels of the new iPhone 4 announcement. Medallia gets its information from … Read more

How AT&T made Steve Jobs look bad...again

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, CEO Steve Jobs had an embarrassing onstage moment when he lost his Wi-Fi connection during his keynote presentation as he tried to download files to demo the difference in screen quality between an iPhone 3GS and the new iPhone 4.

The download failed, and his demo crashed on the new iPhone 4 because he couldn't maintain a solid Wi-Fi connection.

Certainly not the optimal time for a demo to fail, but at least now Jobs knows how iPhone users feel every day, as we suffer with AT&T's poor cellular network performance. And it should be pointed out that device tethering between attendees' laptops and cell phones may well have reduced these issues, if only AT&T allowed users to tether.

After the initial crash, Jobs later came back and asked people to turn off their access points (as in their MiFi, which is a line of compact wireless routers produced by Novatel Wireless that act as mobile Wi-Fi hot spots).

Jobs claimed that there were 570 of them in that hall. As Sam Diaz at ZDNet pointed out, "The problem is that if 10 percent of the 5,000 people in an audience create their own Wi-Fi networks in that room, there are now 500+ 'networks' all competing for the same wireless spectrum to transmit those signals--including the original Wi-Fi networks that the presenter has established in the room."

After some time, as he pressured more people to turn off their cell phones and put their laptops to sleep, he managed to do the demo. CNET's own Rafe Needleman made the excellent point that your bad network is not my problem on his ProPR Tips blog.

It's understandable that Jobs would get upset about something not working in a demo, but it's shocking that the company didn't set up a special network for him, instead hoping for the best on a consistently flaky Moscone Center Wi-Fi network. And, of course, the demand for everyone to comply in their own best interest to see the demo is so typically egotistical of Apple that it's not even shocking anymore. … Read more

Virtualized desktops in the cloud age

Virtualization is a major component of cloud computing, but the primary focus has been on virtualized server instances running on cloud providers such as Amazon EC2.

There is little argument that applications running in the cloud offer many attractive advantages, but ultimately users need to be able to access their data from any device and the data itself must maintain the highest levels of synchronization and integrity.

One of the big challenges is the fact that users are comfortable with fat applications (generally meaning, not browser-based) for a large number of tasks. And while Google Docs and the like are great supplements for large apps like Microsoft Office, they've yet to supplant them completely.

To avoid disrupting users too much, and avoiding the necessity of rewriting applications to be browser-based, many IT organizations turned to desktop virtualization tools to solve the problem.

Desktop virtualization was supposed to solve one the biggest headaches in IT: managing and securing corporate desktops in a more effective way. From IT's perspective, it's much quicker and easier to manage all the company's virtual desktops than physical distributed desktops. When it comes time to roll out a software update, they can automatically deploy it to all virtual desktops at once, rather than going machine-to-machine and uploading the software manually.

There are many options when it comes to desktop virtualization, but generally the "solution" most people think of is virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

VDI has a number of strengths such as cost reduction and management efficiency as well as a number of drawbacks, such as a lack of offline capabilities. But the core problem is that VDI puts an entire desktop that's not built for the cloud into the cloud. It just doesn't make sense to take your fat desktop and OS and stick it right onto the cloud. … Read more

Turn your iPad into a Web server

Japanese software development shop FreeBit recently announced "ServersMan HD," an application that makes your iPad act like a Web server--allowing documents and files to be uploaded, downloaded, and viewed on the device.

Currently, the primary way to get files on and off of the iPad is through iTunes syncing or e-mail, or by using an online service such as Google Docs that stores your files in the cloud.

And while odds are you won't be building an iPad-based data center anytime soon, this application, like others, helps to prove the use case of cloud-based storage for tablets … Read more

'R' language bringing statistical analytics to the masses (Q&A)

I recently had the chance to discuss the open source 'R' programming language with Revolution Analytics CEO and founder Norman Nie.

Revolution is the commercial organization supporting the open-source project and contains a number of technology bigwigs, including Nie himself, who was the co-founder of analytics firm SPSS and led the company as CEO/chairman of the board for more than 40 years before selling it to IBM in 2009 for $1.2 billion. The company has enjoyed some outstanding press mentions, despite the fact that the product appeals to a very specific user base.

R is similar to other programming languages like Java and C, but holds particular appeal for statisticians because it contains a number of built-in mechanisms for organizing data, running calculations, and creating graphical representations of data sets.

Considering predictive analytics is not on the tip of most people's tongues, I set up a Q&A with Nie to get a basic overview of why R matters and how Revolution plans to commercialize the software. The edited transcript follows:

Q: What exactly is 'R' and why does it matter? Nie: Simply put, R is the most powerful statistical computing language on the planet; there is no statistical equation that cannot be calculated in R. This gives it unparalleled ability to sort through data sets and do predictive modeling. This is particularly relevant in today's business intelligence environment, given the explosion of big data and the increased emphasis organizations are putting on advanced analytic techniques.

R is also open source, so there is a community that is over 2 million users strong behind it. It is particularly well entrenched in academia, where today's university students (and tomorrow's future statisticians) are being trained almost exclusively on R. … Read more

NoSQL goes mobile with the help of CouchDB

If there is one aspect of mobility that has yet to live up to user expectations, it's the ability for data to be accessible in near real-time across multiple devices.

Despite all the advances in technology, including a wealth of Wi-Fi and 3G networks, many devices become impotent without an Internet connection.

This issue becomes even more apparent when you are dealing with browser-based applications and smartphones that don't have multithreading functionality to maintain state across applications and data stores.

I recently had the chance to chat with Damien Katz, the creator of CouchDB and CEO of Couchio, … Read more

Sourceforge eats its open-source dogfood

You might not recognize the name Geeknet, but you probably know its popular tech sites such as Sourceforge, Slashdot, Ohloh, Think Geek, Freshmeat, and the recently acquired Geek.com.

When Geeknet opened a new data center in Chicago two years ago, the network operations team wanted to centralize management of hundreds of systems serving the Geeknet Web network.

Geeknet's servers run 100 percent open-source software, including CentOS Linux, and a number of open-source Web servers, mail servers, databases (MySQL, Postgres, Memchache), along with a large number of source code repositories running Subversion.

The company needed a monitoring and management … Read more