XBox Kinect: The new user Interface

Here's my post at YourStory on Kinect. Wonder when Microsoft will create an Official driver for Kinect now that the Open Source driver is available.

YourStory.in: To publish my posts

Worked out an arrangement with yourstory.in to publish my posts on topics related to smartphones,cloud computing and social technology in general. Here's the first post.

The Smart phone War is on

Came across the article from eweek on the latest cell phone sales as reported by Gartner. The article is a jumble of numbers and percentages  that seems to be intent on confusing rather than conveying real information.
Here's what I was able to boil down the numbers to.

• There were 417 million Cell phone shipments in the 3Q 2010 A
• 80.5 million were Smart phones. While defining a Smart phone is one of those 'it depends on who you ask' I gather this is what the analysts mean by a smartphone All iPhones ,All Android Phones ,All Blackberry Phones ,All Nokia phones shipping with Symbian S60 operating system,Windows mobile platform phones and Linux(?) phones.

Here's a Pie Chart  that I quickly put together on the smart phone numbers that I hope simplifies things.

My own Analysis.

1. Android clearly has momentum going for it. With multiple manufacturers putting their weight behind the platform I suppose they would take over from Nokia pretty quickly. I guess Steve Jobs rants and the patent cases against HTC are not misplaced. This fake Steve jobs blog seems to sum  up Apple's fear nicely.
2. Apple continues to have mind share and seems to be gaining at the expense of Blackberry.  Also yes they are extremely profitable so they may be happy not being the market leader but still making tons of money. There is always the fear that this may be a repeat of the PC v/s Mac battle but I do think the times and the markets are different.
3. Blackberry (RIM) will go the Palm way if the Torch and Playbook don't do too well in the marketplace. They do have a dedicated set of users and good phones but the challenge for them is whether they are able to stop Apple from eating into the corporate market. 
4. Nokia continues to struggle losing both marketshare and mindshare very rapidly. With Gizmodo famously refusing to reviewing the N8  saying it's " Like a top-of-the-line horse-drawn carriage released shortly after Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon".
5. I do believe Microsoft is late to the party and I would be really surprised if they are able to go beyond 5% of the market share.

 

New Browser in the fray

RockMelt is a new browser that has Marc Andreeson on it's board of directors. It is a first of a kind because it requires a facebook account to gain access to the browser. From the Video it looks to be highly focussed on social networking.From a study by Nielsen from January 2009 the usage is up 82%. Given the exponential rate of growth I wonder what the numbers are by now? As per the study users are spending about 6 hours per month on these sites. If a study were conducted now I would think you would find it at about 6 hours per day.
The internet has evolved from a place to find information to a place where you connect and do things with the people you know. For a lot of the new generation users Facebook and Twitter are the internet and I doubt if they see a difference between social networking on the Internet and real world (what's that?) social networking. While the early days of the internet was all about being anonymous and having an alternate persona the current generation of users see no necessity in hiding things. Probably because it has always been there for them so the trust quotient is higher.
Have to see how it pans out and if they can do better than Flock  that has been around for about 5 years now. I have signed away all my Facebook privileges to get access to the beta so let's wait and see. Watch this space for more.

Amazon AWS event in Bangalore

There was a huge turnout at the Amazon's AWS event in Bangalore. About 750 people turned out for the event and the buzz was great.
The talk from the CTO was similar to the one he gave in Google Atmosphere talk.  Even after all the talks about how cloud computing it is changing everything it is still mind boggling to see the rate at which things are scaring. One figure he mentioned that Amazon has reduced the prices 6 times in the past year takes a while to get used to. The India market seems to be very important to Amazon. Given the latent demand from SMB's who do not have a significant Web presence yet Amazon seems to be right on the money. There are concerns of latency given that the closest Amazon center is out of Singapore but that in itself should not be a show stopper.
The user talks from Redbus.in CTO and the TataSky were a bit disappointing. While the use cases they mentioned were good their deployments are very small scale with 25 servers at redbus and 50 from TataSky. No what you would call 'cloudscale' deployments.

How to export Google Chrome History to MS Excel

Google does a good job  of keeping tracking of your history of the web sites you have visited. There are add on's that allow for a enhanced version of history. But what if you want to do some of your own analysis or need to search and sort stuff you do want the data in excel.

Here are some quick pointers. 

Google Chrome keeps your History in a relational database. It uses SqlLite a lightweight database engine. It is used by Google,Firefox and on many mobile devices. You can find the table structure of the history database and and an analysis over here

I did try to setup an ODBC driver and access the tables through excel but could not get excel to read the data.
There are tools like sqllitebrowser. but I found the  FireFox Plugin sqlitemanager works very well.
Most of the date time fields are stored in the UTC use Jan 1 1600 as the epoch date or zero time. i.e the number that you will get is the microseconds from Jan 1 1600. If you want to convert it excel time (Jan 1 1900) you can add the following calculation in the sql statement on the field.
fieldName/(8.64*10e9) - 109205. Found this formula courtesy of this site.

• (8.64*10^9) is the number of microseconds in a day.
• 109205 is the number of days, including leap days, between 1601 and 1900. 

Do note that this formula is for GMT and does not compensate for Daylight savings Time.
to calculate to your timezone you need to change the second variable
For timezones ahead of GMT
109205 - (Time Diff with GMT/24)

For timezones behind GMT
109205 +  (Time Diff with GMT/24)
So for India (GMT +5.5) it will be
109205- 5.5/24
For a GMT -1 timezone it will be
109205 + 1/24

The Google App Inventor - Visual Basic of the Mobile Phone market?

Saw the video of Google App Inventor. Seems very promising. he buzz about Google Android is very high at least in the developer community. At the Bangalore Barcamp Android was very high. While iPhone was acknowledged as a platform to know almost everybody was bullish about Android. And no the event was not sponsored by Google.
While the official blog seems to be indicate that they are targeting it to the Education market I do think the market will be bigger than that. looking at the video it seems to remind me and a few others of Visual Basic.
While Visual Basic was mocked around as a toy language it was a huge factor in getting Microsoft Developer mind share in the 1990's.  It hid the monstrous Windows API from you and allowed you to put together applications rapidly. More importantly it allowed programmers to get productive very quickly.
I can go on talking about Visual basic as I spent quite few years of my career on it but that's another story.
What is exciting is that App Inventor can unleash a whole new set of programmers onto the Android platform and give Google the same edge that Microsoft had in the nineties. The availability of an army of developers combined with a vibrant market for third party components (VBX, Activex,...)  simply destroyed the market leader (Powerbuilder) and a host of other competitors (Uniface,GuptaSQL, Delphi,Developer2000) simply fell by the wayside.
True the dynamics and usage patterns of the mobile market are different from the PC market and the client server era but some of the fundamentals still remain the same. Platforms that have a huge developer base will have a huge market edge. With a lot of the handset makers  moving to Android and with 200,00 activations per day Google definitely seems to have made the right moves. And while I am reading the tea leaves Hello Android book is No 2 in the Software Development list at Amazon.
So will App Inventor live up to it's hype? Watch this space as I wait impatiently for access to the Platform.

Unacceptable Content

So I got a rejection letter from Google Adsense. Not worried so much about the rejection but more irritated by the response . Searching the web I found that this is par for course and there a lot of people get a letter like this.
For a company that prides itself in making information easily available it is strange at the total lack of information for the rejection. Seems to me the purpose of the letter is to be necessarily vague so that they don't get sued.
How on earth dose anyone know what policy they  have violated? And as the blog  be at least 6 months old in many Asian countries but there is no 'official' list.
And of course writing this blog post may be deemed 'Unacceptable Content' so I may never get onto Adsense :)

Cloud and the small Business

This article at forbes addresses how small businesses are rapidly embracing cloud and what are the potential success factors needed to address the small business space. All the major players are making products in this space. As pointed out in the article the Cloud does enable the small Business segment to buy and consume services without the pain of buying, setting up and maintaining hardware infrastructure and software products.  

In my opinion selling applications to the small businesses could be  the Long Tail of the Cloud. For those not familiar the Long Tail by Chris Anderson talks about how the internet enabled businesses like Amazon to cater to niche audiences that were not served by big retailers due to the low volume of business. I do not believe that there will be vendor loyalty and the businesses will cherry pick the services from multiple vendors.
Vendors like Zoho are aggressively targeting this space with services in the $10-$12. I do believe that there will be a market for custom applications as well. Maybe not for an individual business but for a cluster of businesses. CustomerSquare run by a friend of mine is targeting specific verticals in the retail space. The cloud   reduces the risk significantly for the small business provider . He pays per month , if it doesn't suit him he can dump it with a second thought. He will not be stuck with a boxed piece of software that lies unused. For the vendor also there is an increasing opportunity to upsell services , add small incremental features ,test market them and get additional revenue. He get's instant feedback and can drop things that don't work out well. No more long product cycles and no more upgrade battles.

Cloud Computing - Harnessing the Client side power

A common vision of cloud computing is of massive data centers running in remote locations and clients utilizing the power over the network.
One aspect of the Cloud computing that I still believe is in infancy is in utilizing the client side computing power.
This team here  at MIT used a cluster of Nokia N900 smartphones to deploy a version of MapReduce called misco.
While there are challenges with reliability and network failure there are a lot of potential ways in which this could develop and I am going to indulge myself a bit in some fanciful thinking.
 The co location and GPS capabilities are fairly well developed in the telecom world. What if the smartphones within a particular network tower are able to automatically form a collaborative network?Wouldn't that lead to faster responses and quicker processing for a map reduce kind of  problems. We could be looking at self forming networks that could be used in disaster recovery efforts.
And what about within a private area like an office or a university campus? The availability of these client side devices are fairly predictable. You could expect these devices to be available during the working hours. The organization can potentially harness this additional capacity. This 'loosely coupled network' will require an intelligent design to manage  it effectively but it does open a lot of possibilities. While the processing power of Arm processors may not be much compared to Server processors they are quite powerful. And with ever increasing power on the client side who knows what this may lead up to?

World's Toughest Sudoku - Solved

Here's a solution to the 'World's Toughest Sudoku' puzzle that is doing the rounds of the news.

Not sure what the basis is for calling it the toughest sudoku puzzle but here is the solution.

Allow me to gloat over it :). Used my own excel sheet that I developed a little while ago. Took about an hour to solve it. Would be very tough to do it manually on a single sheet . The solution needs multiple iterations. Much easier to do conjectures using the computer as it's easy to rollback at any stage.

Is Cloud a throwback to the mainframe era?

A common refrain that we hear is that cloud computing is nothing new but a fall back to the centralized model of computing that existed in the seventies. After all Virtualization is a technology whose origin goes back to the mainframe days and languished while the desktop took sway.
I do believe that people are missing the point about the cloud by comparing it to the mainframe era. Yes it does mean more centralization of resource pools but there are some fundamental differences.
Mainframe computing was about efficient utilization of scarce resources. Everything from CPU, RAM , storage and network were expensive and the goal of the mainframe operating systems and the system administrators was to ensure that these resources were utilized to the maximum and that there was no wastage. The decision to use 2 bits to store the year and not 4 was purely driven by the fact that storage was extremely expensive.
Cloud Computing is more about getting more out of abundant resources. The cost of computing resources (except network bandwidth) has become really trivial and are hardly factors in the decision making process.
Amazon's EC2 was really about generating revenue from idle resources and ensuring that their vast computing resources get better utilized. We can get terabytes of storage available at cheap rates but a service like dropbox offers convenience and an easy way to manage your storage needs across machines.
Cloud computing is about gaining efficiency in managing the computing resources. So while the cost of processing power and storage has fallen exponentially the limiting factor is in managing these resources.
If you are looking to use dropbox do use my referral link as both of us can get an additional 250MB more that way.

Restarting My Posts

Ok Now that I have moved on from my job and have cleared my head on what I want to do (I think!) here's my first post after a long break. Plan to blog a lot more now and enjoy doing it.

Cloud computing's impact on large vendors

Came across this interesting article on Informationweek on how the CIO of CommonWealth Bank of Australia is looking to take on the established vendors by establishing a secure cloud platform for banks.

Michael Harte looks like an unlikely flag bearer of the cloud revolution After all it is a bank not a Silicon valley start up. Shouldn't he be worrying about security? As one of the major vendor's CEO would tell him 'cloud security is vague and unsecure' and then the company will tell you what he really meant they can help by offering more consulting and services to secure the cloud.

It can also be argued that he is just looking at getting better deals from the vendors But the pain it for real. To quote him from this article

“When you look at [cloud computing] from an enterprise point of view you’d say, hell we’re really stuck in an old IT model. We’ve got 50 to 80 per cent of all of what we spend a year tied up in infrastructure and that infrastructure isn’t conferring any strategic advantage; it’s just a cost of doing business,” he said..

A more important point is that the issue is not about saving costs but really about getting a return on the money that get's spent. Paying annual maintenance contract's on fast depreciating hardware is not a great way to spend your IT budget.

I am sure this echoes the sentiments of CIO,s around the world and will be watched very closely. If it suceeds it will go a long way in dispelling the perceptions around cloud security. After all we do trust our money with the banks don't we?

Cloud Computing and Costs - Operational costs

Continuing from my previous post on costs i would now look at operational costs and the impact of cloud computing on operational costs.

Operational costs are costs that you incur to run your business. The salaries you pay employees, your electricity telephone bills are examples of operational costs.

From an IT perspective In information technology, operational costs are the price of running of IT services on a day-to-day basis. Operational costs may include expenditures for staffing, hardware maintenance, electricity, software procurement, storage rental and security.

Cloud computing can potentially reduce your operational costs just like any other service provider.

Here are a few factors on cloud computing and operational costs

• Economies of Scale Due to the sheer size of their operations the Cloud service providers are able to achieve a higher efficiency of cost than a small or medium data center.
• Higher R&D spend from the cloud provider. A typical data center has one administrator for 30-40 servers. Amazon/Google through better design have manged to get that to one administrator for a few hundred servers. The service providers will continue to innovate and pour money into reducing costs as it gives them a competitive advantage. These costs will typically be passed on to the customer.
• Costs on security. While the jury is still out on whether the cloud is more secure than the data center or less secure organizations will have to spend more money on security at least in the beginning. Cloud security is fast evolving and visibility on this front is limited. But while security is the number one concern it is not an hindrance to move to cloud computing.
• Networking costs. While the cost of bandwidth has reduced drastically it is definitely not come down to zero. Costs have to be incurred in doing a network analysis of what it will cost you to move and access your applications on the cloud. It is also necessary to know how rapidly your network service provider can respond to increased demand time from your end and what his typical turnaround times are.

You need to consider the tradeoffs as well. While a cloud service provider may provide you lower operational costs you no longer have the luxury of dedicated personnel and a dedicated data center. It is necessary to understand what Service Levels the service provider is committing to and what service levels you are getting from your own IT processes.

Another misconception that gets thrown about in the talk is that capital costs are bad and operational costs are good. What you must really look at is the total cost to produce a service or a product. The decision making involves not just costs but other factors as well. If you are in a price sensitive industry going for the lower cost option will enable you to be competitive. If you are in a rapidly changing , fast moving marketplace where Time to Market and agility are valued then you may go with the higher cost option to gain that competitive edge.

Some Notes from the Google Atmosphere Conference

Just finished viewing most of the Google Atmosphere conference videos.

The talk by Geoffrey Moore was the one I enjoyed most. He is a very eloquent speaker and gave a great perspective on how the IT industry has evolved and what are the driving forces about the adoption of cloud. It's a no fluff presentation on the outlook for the next 10 years.

Mark Benioff the founder of Salesforce.com was pushing cloud 2.0 the next generation of salesforce tools based on social media concepts.

I think there are a lot of mindset changes that come in with the cloud and that was visible in the messages that came out from many of the speakers.

Collaboration is one of the key drivers of cloud com

• If you are collaborating just be Email that's bad and terribly inefficient. As many studies/surveys have established the latest generation of users simply don't use email at all. Social media like Facebook/Twitter are the preferred modes of communication. The Salesforce,com Chatter tool seems to be modeled on this concept . As Marc Benioff put it the new generation of workers would want to use tools they are comfortable with. The challenge of course would be to get the current workforce to change and adapt to the new 'always on' way of thinking and working.
• The idea of 50 persons simultaneously modifying a Google Doc was both impressive and terribly scary. But it is probably a better way of doing things rather than pushing umpteen number of versioned files across email and then trying to reconcile them. This may actually be the biggest driver of Google Docs adoption. Sure Microsoft Office has these features but Google has removed much of the complexity behind sharing.

One thing for sure. The talks reaffirm the growing importance of cloud computing. Whether we like it or not we have to alter our thinking patterns. Our thinking has to evolve to accommodate the cloud. Yes we can use the much maligned phrase of paradigm shift to describe it or we can dismiss it as hype or even diss it like Mr, Ellison but the reality is cloud is here to stay.

Just discovered the Google Cloud Conference Atmosphere videos. There are about 10 videos presenting Google's world view on cloud computing. Halfway through the Keynote and it is quite engaging.

Cloud Computing and Costs - Capital Costs

One of the biggest marketing pitches about the cloud is how it will dramatically reduce the cost of IT spends and how businesses will be freed from the tyranny of big name hardware vendors and the software vendors. The truth I am afraid is far from that. Cloud computing being a disruptive technology will impact the industry. We will see a shakeout and a new order will emerge in the due course of time. I will leave the impact that Cloud computing is having on the industry to another blog entry and focus on costs.

Borrowing from Wikipedia cost is the value of money that has been used up to produce something, and hence is not available for use anymore.

There are various kinds of cost and we will see what impact cloud computing has on them.

Capital costs. These are the costs you incur for fixed equipment or assets. With respect to IT we can consider the cost of servers, real estate space, cooling equipment, network gear and cabling to be all part of the capital costs. Apart from the cost of buying capital goods there is an associated cost called depreciation. Depreciation very simply put is the expense that reduces the value of an asset as a result of wear and tear, age, or obsolescence. With continued innovation the rate of depreciation in the computing industry is very high. Thanks to the hyper competition and high degree of investment by the computing industry in R &D Moore's law continues to be sustained. The value of your equipment falls dramatically with each passing day and that does reflect in your balance sheet.

Small and Medium Enterprises

Cloud computing has the biggest impact on capital costs especially for small and medium enterprises. You don't own or build all this equipment except for the client machines and minimal networking equipment. You are able to free up capital to grow your business. Put more towards marketing, hiring more people or towards other measures to grow the business.

Animoto and SmugMug are two examples of startups having successfully leveraged the cloud. All these firms have been able to rapidly bring out new products and services with minimal or close to zero capital investment on IT equipment.

Venture Capitalists

Cloud computing is also a big hit with the Venture Capital community . As per industry figures going around for quite some years only 5% of the startups succeed and last beyond 2 years from opening shop. Given the reduced capital spending and the rapid time to market that is possible with the cloud for the VC's Cloud computing is probably the best thing since sliced bread!

Large Enterprises

For large enterprises that have large investments in existing data centers the savings in capital costs may not be significant. Also given that these companies get the best volume discounts from suppliers like HP,IBM and Oracle setting up in the cloud may turn out to be more expensive. That does not mean the large companies are shying away from the cloud. Reducing the capital costs is always welcome for a company irrespective of the size. It makes the company more agile and responsive to fast changing market conditions. With a slow down in demand a company using the cloud can simply reduce their consumption of services from a cloud provider and in case of a fast turnaround they can ramp up as quickly. In a traditional data center setup ramp up and ramp down is not easy. Long procurement cycles (typically varies between 2 weeks to 3 months), high setup and configuration costs, ongoing maintenance costs and low utilization of resources are factors can make data centers seem very inefficient as compared to a Cloud computing setup.

As Nicholas Carr wrote way back in 2003 IT does not have strategic value anymore and is moving towards being a commodity. So far large enterprises cloud computing can also be seen as the next logical step in outsourcing. Running Data centers is not their core competence so outsourcing them would be logical. All the major hardware vendors (HP,IBM,Dell) have service offerings around outsourced data centers and there are a lot of hosting providers as well. Cloud computing brings about some more abstraction and a higher service orientation.

To summarize I think Amazon has put it best in this eweek article

"There is a big savings in capex and cost but what we find is that one of the main drivers of adoption is that time-to-market for ideas is much faster in the cloud because it lets you focus your engineering resources on what differentiates your businesses."

Cloud computing and Costs

Watching with great fascination on how the discussion on cloud computing and costs is evolving.

On one hand we have the famous New York times case study that every presenter worth his salt talks about in an introduction to cloud computing. And then we do have blogs tell you that cloud computing will end up costing you more money.

Talk to a CFO and he will tell you that he is waiting for a positive ROI from IT right the days of client server computing !

Cloud computing or for that matter all of IT is more than just cutting costs. It is about empowering you to deliver new services and products to your customer in rapidly shrinking time frames. Veterans of the dot com boom/bust will remember the phrase Internet time and how things had to be rapidly done to keep pace with the market place. While we can debate on the real value of the dot com boom and look back with nostalgia on the excesses of that time the fact remains that the Internet has led to a drastic reduction in product and service life cycles. We can see the same leap happening with cloud computing. For businesses IT has gone from an enabling factor to a constraining factor.As this blog from Elli Lilly points out it is all about getting faster responsiveness from IT. The ability to cut the lead times from 90 days to near zero should tell you that it is more than just cost.

Cloud computing allows you to rent IT services v/s having to buy , build and maintain the service. Using a car analogy if you are a periodic user of a car it will be cheaper to rent. If you do use the car everyday then you will probably be better of buying it. Do remember these are not exclusive options. You may choose to rent a car for a weekend trip or a larger car if you have guests visiting you. Same thing with cloud computing. You get an additional option that you can choose from. It gives you a flexibility that wasn't available earlier and trying to quantify and compare the value with what didn't exist earlier is quite challenging.

Stay tuned for more thoughts on cloud computing and costs.