Materialism doesn’t matter. There, I’ve said it. Nothing material, nothing that you can touch, matters… when talking about computers. See, I’m not that evolved.

Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, my laptop got stolen on the train. Last summer, due to a friend of mine “borrowing” my laptop at an event without telling me, I realised that I better start backing up if this were to happen again. So, on the 27th of December, a day before my laptop actually disappeared, I had a full backup made via Apple’s Time Machine, as part of my weekly routine.

And now, some hardware expenses later, one of which was a gigantic (640 GB) laptop hard drive by Western Digital which I’m loving, I have a different Macbook, but with exactly the same data I had before and am running it like nothing ever happened. And I’m telling you, I didn’t like spending money on this, but having all my data back feels like that money was inconsequential. Backups rock, as does OS X for having backup software built in!

OK, philosophically speaking, I’m still being materialistic about my data. Clearly, I’m not “if you could take one item to a deserted island data, what would it be?” material. But it’s kind of a revelation to me that hardware (and software) and money really is much, much less important than data.

I also hope that this inspires you to make a last minute resolution for 2010. Always back up your data because you never, ever know when it might just be gone.

Vincent

Like

Unlike

I’ve long been an anti-fanboy of online video, for some reasons that I already mentioned. As such, I did not expect a strong response on my recent request for collaborative video recording ideas. Similarly, other efforts at discussing online video production, a topic that I personally find interesting, on Friendfeed and with friends, have been met with little enthusiasm.

So, I have come to the personal conclusion that online video is something that people simply don’t care about (very much). Here are a few reasons why:

1. No success-story on the web: Youtube was acquired by Google, which does not prove its business-model; Loic LeMeur (yes, that LeWeb ‘08 guy) abandoned his video-idea, pretty much; The promising Stage6 by the DivX people was abandoned due to, I believe, excessive illegal content being posted on it, etc. etc. OK, the French Dailymotion is no. 1 on Techcrunch’s new Ranking of European hot startups, but even that service isn’t what I would call the perfect implementation of a video service. As a matter of fact, the only thing that seems to work out is television, Hulu (basically television and US only), and Piracy.
2. Bandwidth: even though bandwidth is clearly increasing, it is still, for any business that wants to set up its own video service, a dramatic weight to carry, at least compared to other content on the web. And what if you want to upload your own video? Prepare to have to wait for a while.
3. Does not speak our language: as I mentioned in my previous “hate-post”, the web is largely text-based and the often non-indexability of video means that it does not interoperate with the most-used web-application: Search.
4. Unforgivingly immersive: I listen to audio-podcasts and music all the time, because it’s compatible with the rest of my lifestyle, e.g. travelling/communiting or doing exercise. You have to give all your attention to video, which I consider a barrier to entry for our A.D.D.-infested society.
5. Expensive to produce video (?): a question-mark there because obviously hardware-costs are falling. But still expensive, as it’s complicated and requires both expensive (in terms of time and money) training, patience (a time-cost) while editing, and the ability to work with specialised (and often expensive) video-editing software.
6. Unforgivingly intrusive: It took me a long time to adopt a webcam, until it was basically built into my laptop. I still don’t like to have to dress (up) and make up my hair just to have a conversation, and all that, even though now I will rarely Skype without it. But I am a, tongue in cheek, modern man, which I can’t say for many of my peers.

These and more reasons is why I suspect that Online Video is not a hot topic and might perhaps never be. If you’re in the midst of an online video startup, I don’t know what to tell you, except I hope it radically improves on what has come before.

Vincent
(Picture courtesy of The Guardian)

Like

Unlike

Dear readers,

For a reunion event of people all over the world that I am co-organising, of which a certain part cannot show up, I am planning to give the latter a chance to send their greetings recorded across the internet and shown in either video or audio-format (with picture) at the event.

However, I am a need of the appropriate service that can facilitate this process. Essentially, I am looking for:

1. Something that is web-based and does not require a user to install software on their computer
2. Something that will take video and/or (preferably both, but not necessary) audio
3. Preferably at an adequate resolution / audio quality to be played on a large screen in front of a large room of people
4. Something that I can export into an application like iMovie for Mac or Windows Movie Maker
5. As this would likely be a compilation of 50 or so people, something that requires minimal effort on my part, except for setting up the service, doing the downloading, and post-editing.

I realise that this is likely unknown territory for many of you, as it is for me, but I think would actually generally be pretty cool and hope to brainstorm about your ideas and/or the possibilities/limitations with you.

Any ideas?

Vincent
(Picture courtesy of Kimpton Middle School)

Like

Unlike

It’s funny how our thoughts evolve from one day to the next. Which reminds me that we need to adapt our About page to reflect that a little more, as it’s about 2 years old. My thinking about Always-On Devices comes from a simple pain that I feel when I miss “a moment.” Sometimes I wish that I could… well Andy Warhol in Miraclemen phrases it much better than me.

In Alan Moore’s & Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, Warhol’s existence is not painted in a very colourful light (pun intended). He has been resurrected as a machine into a society where money no longer plays a role and is very depressed. So his ability to record everything is really not very meaningful to him. Having only read this part of the comic last night, already my sentiments about Always-On are changing towards… and what would it accomplish?

I recently visited an Art Exhibition of independent artists in Maastricht and tested out a little what an Always-On Device would look like to me. I used my camera, a Canon 870 IS, as a recording device, which I held in front of me while walking through the crowd.

I managed to capture the people experiencing an exhibition, a piano player who was adding atmosphere to a room full of art, just hypnotically playing a few notes over and over. What actually intrigued me the most, I captured maybe two dozen miniature sets for the Maastricht Opera house. It was very surreal, the sets which were made out of cardboard and wood mostly, were 3-dimensional, and I was floating with my camera device around it and through it even, capturing it all at angles never deemed possible to me before. As if I was my own film-director.

Of course, apart from the disappointing battery-life on my camera, clearly not designed for video-recording, and the occasionally funny looks that I got, the real challenge is to make that data actionable—a big priority in everything I do. It is a matter of transforming the raw footage into a tight package that can be consumed by others, and the question is really, should this be the responsibility of the creator or of the consumer…?

With us having reached and surpassed the age of the mashup, it makes less and less sense to continue to try and re-invent the wheel, rather delegating that task across far more… interested people (in the area of video-editing at least), of which there is no shortage, as long as the tools and the specific community exists. Clearly, that kind of methodology requires a lax attitude about copyright.

To recap, so that it doesn’t seem like I’m entirely floating in thoughts, an Always-On Device would need:

1. A willing human recorder
2. A recording device designed for capturing experiences
3. A way to process that information into “usable bits”
4. A favourable legal environment
5. And a willing consumer

I’ll leave the question of “do we even want it?” for smarter people than me to decide. In the mean time, I will continue my search for point 2 and 3 on that list (more on this blog, if successful).

Until after Paris,
Vincent

Like

Unlike

My sentiments about online media aside (I think it’s despicable the way media-companies treat consumers, particularly outside of the US), it has always bothered me to use Last.fm for a number of reasons. Here they are:

1. Last.fm, apart from being happy to pull my listening data into their site, does not integrate with my listening habits Whats.O.Ever. My method for managing music, perhaps determined by owning an iPod, is entirely dominated by iTunes and the usage of the device itself.




2. Last.fm does not play on the road (let’s ignore the iPhone radio app and that eventually all devices will be connected to the internet)




3. Last.fm does not acknowledge that I give different stars (= degrees of love) to songs (instead I have to “love” a song manually).




4. Discovering new music through Last.fm’s radio does not easily lead me to purchase the actual song




5. One cherry on top is that Last.fm now wants to charge me for using the radio, even though I add to it by playing my songs.




6. A second cherry on top is that Last.fm is now, indirectly through CBS, giving information about what we listen to and who we are, to the RIAA, a US organisation that probably also shares that information with other international organisations.




7. The only use Last.fm seems to have is vanity, in the sense that you can see what songs I loved (when I love them) and I can make pretty graphics of my listening habits (makes for an interesting poster).

So, as of this week, I am deleting my Last.fm account.

That doesn’t change that I am a fervent listener of music and it also doesn’t change that I believe deeply in the concept of sharing music. I like finding nice tracks to play at parties and equally I like finding tracks for some of my friends that I can only connect to online. There is no legal service that allows me to do this. As a matter of fact, in the Netherlands, I should even be paying a licensing fee if I play music in public or for too many people at once!!!

In comes Drop.io, a file-sharing service that recently added Facebook Connect as a way to share stuff only with your friends. Drop.io fills the void that Last.fm leaves in the following ways:

1. It has an integrated player that is very elegant and can also be accessed and added to via many different devices.




2. I can restrict access to my files to my Facebook friends only (evil internet lawyers can get lost).




3. It’s free for using 100 MB storage and charges a very fair $10 per gigabyte per year.




4. Any loss in statistical “vanity” data can be compensated by using iTunes and starring / sorting your files accordingly.

That’s it. Of course I will not be sharing songs that are copyright protected (and, of course, if we’re not Facebook connected, you will never know for sure )

Vincent

Like

Unlike

I hate Windows Explorer and I hate Mac OS X Finder, but what I hate even more is when applications try to replace them by moving all the files into a new, more app-friendly structure. Plenty of examples on the Mac-side, I am, not sadly, no longer an expert on Windows software.

The problem with the Finder / Explorer is that, while they are perfectly suitable for storing and organising files, they are painfully lacking in presenting files in a way that a human or group of humans can understand. The problem / opportunity is also that Explorer/Finder is the standard in as far that every organisation uses it to organise their files. Replacing it by a information system that uses its own proprietary structure to organise files, people, and activities just adds to the learning curve, particularly if, as most experience shows, the software ends up not being that great and the company has to switch.

So, what I’m looking for is the following. An application that:

• works on Macs and PCs (The first is not an absolute prerequisite, it’s only because I work on a Mac)
• Better: is either web- or LAN-based (solves the cross-platform problem)
• acts as a front-end for the explorer, without actually changing the locations of files (except if a user wants it)
• allows users to:
  • sort files into “playlists,” again without changing the location of the files;
  • give long descriptions to files, not just available in a hidden “info” section;
  • assign files and tasks to groups and group-members;
  • assign due dates / sync with calendars;
  • etc. etc., you get the idea.
• Can certainly cost money, must be licensable on a company-basis, and must have a trial period of at least 3 months (it takes at least that long to deploy, adopt, and adapt it on an organisational level).

It’s such an obvious thing that such a software probably already exists. If you know of a good one, please let me know in the comments or per mail.

Vincent

Like

Unlike

I spent quite a lot of time evaluating smart-phones this last week, including having hands-on time with the Nokia E71, the Blackberry 8900, the iPhone & iPod Touch, with a firm eye on their capabilities as a mobile computer, more so than a mobile phone or a mobile entertainment device.

My conclusion: the iPhone (or respectively iPod Touch) are interesting insofar as interfaces are concerned that either require mouse-like interaction or that require no interaction whatsoever, e.g. listening to music. And it’s pretty consistent with my first post about the iTunes app store, where I wrote that developers should focus on developing games and other visual applications, rather than on typing-intensive apps.

Now I may be perfectly wrong about this and if you’re a long-time iPhone / iPod Touch user and are able to type long messages without a problem, please drop a comment.

There’s no denying that the Apple gadget (whichever version) is h.o.t. But I think it’s a matter of the software-features being over-hyped and people forgetting that the hardware isn’t mature yet.

• First of all: touch-keyboards, really? It just doesn’t seem precise enough for accurate typing.
• Second: 400 dollars/euros for 32GB of space seems way over-priced, more so because it’s also a video-device and increased video-quality also comes with (much) increased file-sizes. Add to this that streaming video from your Mac doesn’t seem possible, unless you employ one hack or the other.
• Thirdly, I think that the web2.0 hype of developing application after application after application has strongly spilled over to the iTunes appstore, which is one of the few digital venues to have some kind of business model, but it totally overshadows any hardware deficiencies the iPod and iPhone may have (and I mean that only in terms of typing and storage, as I think apps for gaming and other entertainment work perfectly fine).

My gut tells me that iPods are mainly for entertainment and not productivity and even so that there’s a better deal to be had waiting for at least another generation beyond this.

Once again, I’m very open to you (trying to) convincing me that I’m am completely and utterly wrong.

Vincent

Like

Unlike

Context: I’m currently in discussion with a number of companies that are involved with SOA-vending & -consulting. As a result, I’ve been studying up a little on this market and hope to learn more by writing about it. Note: Since I know, judging by the response to other articles on enterprise-software, this isn’t exactly the most sexy of topics, I expect the number of comments to be minimal.

Jeremy has already written about this topic (primarily in terms of Software-as-a-Service (Saas) and Software + Service (S+S)) before (here, here, and especially here), so I won’t go very deeply into it, but SOA is roughly defined as:

“guidelines that allow software developers to design systems in stand-alone chunks of computer code, each specifying the critical outcomes, performance metrics, and interfaces between a discrete activity and other services.” (Src: HBR, June 2008)

If that’s a little abstract, I see it as a selling you a ticket to Lego-land, where you can play with legos all you like, those lego-blocks representing individual applications that can be used by businesses through a web (SaaS) or hybrid (Software+Service) interface, and Lego-land being the SOA-system that integrates all of them for you. This is opposed to the historical approach of buying a lego-box, which you eventually replace by another and another (side-prediction: we will eventually see Lego-world online).

SOA’s value-proposition

While traditionally it has been so that in order to compete in a technological world, you have to be technological, the idea of SOA is to remove that element, instead allowing individuals and businesses to focus on what they do best. I, personally, like that very much.

Other, more measurable advantages are that it is dramatically more cost-efficient. If you imagine that 5+ years ago, every company had to either invest into a powerful wide-area network (WAN) to be able to centralise IT-services, or replicate islands of IT-systems for each business-location, SOA removes that idea entirely, using a freely available infrastructure, the internet, and removing the need to build IT anywhere, instead paying-as-you-go for singular services that an external provider hosts and distributes. Added to this is the idea that performance now becomes accountable, in the sense that it is covered by contracts (e.g. QoS or SLA), something that was much harder to do with a permanently employed IT-staff.

With all these advantages and several more, it is no surprise that, in 2007, over 50% of mission-critical IT-projects were estimated to be SOA-based, a figure which is believed to increase to 80% in 2010 (these figures are from Gartner and may be US-only).

SOA’s hurdles

While this sounds pretty great, anytime you’re talking about system-wide change, you have to consider that this will meet resistance and involve a great many stakeholders, i.e. take a lot of time. And the question is here, who will you talk to as an SOA-vendor? Will it be the business-side of your client, as you are selling easy-to-understand lego-blocks, or will it be the technology-side, as you are selling technology? This is a serious question, so please answer it in the comments!

Added to this, a SOA-deployment is a strategic issue for your customer, meaning that your selling-proposition will also need to include the option of strategic support, aka consulting-services. This means that technology-only SOA-providers (vendors) will likely have to work with third-party consultants that pick-and-choose the best SOA-package for their client.

Related to this, the lego-like quality of SOA, which promises values like agility, flexibility, price, and reuse, and several more, all very important in this recession-prone time, also mean that someone can quite easily replace your service with someone else’s legos. Arguably this is much less the case if you provide an architectural framework and focus on building ecosystems (create lock-ins). But that is easier said than done, and as such this is a field dominated by few big players that buy up smaller ones.

Some more things, which I haven’t researched, are the degree that open source is a factor/issue here, and different revenue-models.

Grasping the paradigm-change

On the customer-side, there’s two ways of seeing this trend. On the one hand, extreme efficiencies, which also follows Nick Carr’s view that IT is no longer a competitive advantage. On the other hand, you’re giving away a lot of responsibility, which can be bad in two ways.

One, you’re giving away a lot of power to an industry, which will continue to consolidate. It’s something that may not be a problem now, but may become one.

Two, delegating a problem does not necessarily solve it. Taking the retail-industry, the biggest problem here is logistical inefficiencies, caused by delays, unnecessary replication of processes, or otherwise. Here, SOA, as long as it spans across the value-chain of manufacturers-transport-retailers-customer, is clearly a good thing. But it still requires a solid understanding of how IT does and can help your supply chain reap better results, something an independent SOA-vendor may not do as well. My opinion here is purely hypothetical, but it may be worth investigating how the masters of retail (Wal-Mart, Tesco, Carrefour, etc.) solve it. And if this is a problem, I imagine it is elsewhere too.

The SOA playing field

This post is getting a little long, so I’ll briefly go into this. Following Forrester-graphs show the players in the integrating corner of things (consultants) and, on the right, the vendors (also note the time-difference (the second one is Q4 2007) and region). You can find the originals here and here.

Clearly this industry is very layered, with some offering the complete package, including strategic assistance, and others providing either the SOA or a part of it (SaaS or similar). There is a lot of movement in this field with players buying each other out or moving into related industries, either on the hardware or software-side.

Final thoughts

Because I’m not a soft-/web-ware guy, I’m still very much undecided whether to head in the software-only direction myself, though I see much merit for an integrated business-consulting + software-deployment approach, and I also prefer selling Lego-blocks to rubber-trees. Feel free to convince me of your points of view.

All of this was initial thinking of course, and as such I’m happy to hear if you have anything to add or if I made some obvious mistakes. Again, considering the relative unsexiness of this area, I don’t expect too much

Vincent

Like

Unlike

I consider myself a “power buyer” on Amazon – having ordered and read for the last decade or so between 20 and 30 books every year, for sums of money far from negligible, at least to me.

This being said, I’ve never been more unhappy about my experience as a customer. Here are 5 free pieces of advice from too faithful a customer:

1. The company pretends to invest millions in its customer relationship management systems, but why on Earth Amazon never implemented any Fidelity / membership program? Even the worse companies in the world, customer service-wise (yes you’ve recognized them, I’m talking of airlines), have membership /faithfulness programs. I would be delighted to gain some travel miles or free mp3 as a reward for being a long time customer.
2. Books purchased via the one-click purchase button should be automatically removed from one’s automatic recommendations, wish list & shopping cart. Why would you want to recommend a book already acquired and shipped to the actual same customer in the past? Today, you face a high risk of ordering a book twice because of that.
3. Amazon seems to consider that none can purchase a book anywhere else than on their store. I think users should be granted with the possibility to mark a book as already acquired (somewhere else), either on Amazon (they should make this automatic though, but I’m so desperate…) or elsewhere.
4. Even worse, when these books are already in the shopping cart (or mention “In your shopping cart” already), that is to say between my wallet and Amazon’s and their warehouse and my shelves, Amazon still finds ways to recommend them. Don’t they think I already know the book if it’s included in either my shopping cart or my wishlist?
5. This one is more a back office thing. But aren’t you guys all about dematerializing the bookshopping experience? So why can’t I find ‘.pdf’ed invoices in my “account info” space? I still need to keep these blue bills for ages: I know you legally have to send these, but why don’t you help us get rid of the tons of paper we receive.

And I’m not even mentioning transnational use of Amazon (if you acquire a book on Amazon.com rather than on Amazon.yourcountry login in with the same email address, it’s not removed from your country’s wishlist) or the interface here. Or… let’s mention it before we leave the floor: Amazon’s interface wasn’t so much more convenient back in 1997 or so than it is today. I’m surprised because every engineer from Amazon I’ve met was super bright, but if I were an e-Commerce entrepreneur today I would definitely embrace rich media and video category marketing as a paradigm to set a new user experience standard.

To everyone: as you will have understood, I’m not so happy with my experience as a customer on Amazon. Any alternative?

Like

Unlike

I’m exhausted and it’s only half of the study trip, but I enjoy SO MUCH going with a great bunch of cool guys to amazing companies like OQO, Netvibes, City Council of SF, l’Atelier US, eBay, Box.net, SRI, Stanford, Meetro and tomorrow Twitter, Neocase, Microsoft, Google, Plug & Play, the Churchill Club, XOBNI – & the day after Orb Networks, Orange, SAP, PodTech, Bizanga + great VCs like Jean-Louis Gassée, Vincent Worms from Partech, Matt Lecar from Partech, Sven Strohband from MDV & Jeff Clavier from SoftTech VC + Marylène Delbourg-Delphis, who actually recruited Guy Kawasaki out of Apple & François Laugier, a prominent lawyer in Silicon Valley….that I haven’t had the energy to blog recently. At night, after 7 visits during the day, all I think about is collapsing.

We’re only half way and here’s our program (below). I’ll make sure I blog extensively as soon as I find some time – although I’ll have to blog on TechEd in Barcelona first. I’m late, I know.

Like

Unlike

In the previous episodes of this serie, we’ve addressed the Availability, Scalability and Performances aspects of HA Architecture. In this one we’ll concentrate on the future of these architectures and the emerging technologies to tackle specific HA constraints.

Technology Trends

The future is a G word : GRID. Grid of memory, grid of CPU and Grid of disks. The main limitations today is to have this one to one relationship between the application and the physical server on which the former is deployed. Hence the main trend of the market today : to virtualize servers by using Network Access processing, memory and storage.

Network Accessed processing

This is the Grid of CPUs. Azul Systems offers some sort of Java mainframe, a box containing 768 CPUs and 700GO of memory. Applications are deployed on blades as usual but these blades contain a proxy to the Azul box : whenever CPU process is required, the blade proxy hands it over to the Azul box which is configured to allocate a certain number of CPUs for that very app.

Websphere XD also offers new possibility on CPU and servers virtualization.

Network Accessed Memory

Terracotta offers a solution for Network Accessed Memory. This is a server managing objects lying in network memory. Thus differents applications running on different JVMs and different servers can share the same instance of a given object. Client applications just need to import the terracotta client libs and define in a description XML file the objects and attributes to be shared and that’s it !

Main issue here with the open source version : 2mn start up time. This would then create a main Single Point Of Failure in the system.

Network Access Storage

SAN (Storage Access Network) offers a very robust and efficient solution for network repository. Communication are fiber channel based and therefore very performant .. but very expensive. This already is commonly used and it has paved the way for the above 2 other solutions of network access services.

Like

Unlike

If you’re serious about software development &/or IT infrastructure, you can’t miss the Tech Ed developer training event between November 5th and November 9th in Barcelona. All the best developers from the very best European software publishers will be there. And I’ll be there too (as the outlayer, the worst developer in the room), to support IDEAS startups Chief Technical Officers making it to the EMEA TechEd. A few days ago, I chose the sessions I am going to attend. It’s going to be a great learning experience, not to mention the fun side as I’m going there with a bunch of wild animals from the French Developer & Platform Evangelism group of which I belong to at Microsoft. So, here’s my agenda for Tech Ed:

Mon, 5 Nov 2007

Putting the User Back into Architecture

Windows Live Platform: An Open Discussion

Why Software Sucks

Principles and Patterns of Security

Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate’s Opinion

Implementing Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition

Tue, 6 Nov 2007

ASP.NET: Why, What, How and When?

Build Your Own Software Factory

Understanding Software + Services

Improving Software Safety and Reliability

Applying Ergonomics to the User Interface

Wed, 7 Nov 07

Exploring the Building of Software + Services

Applications with Microsoft S+S Reference Bits

Communities? Can They Really Help My Business, My Day-to-Day Job, and My Career?

Identity for .NET Applications: A Technology Overview

Agile Development with Team System

Thu, 8 Nov 2007

Exploring Event Driven Architectures

Self-Paced Hands-on Labs and CommsNet Open

ASP.NET Roadmap

The Irresistible Forces Meet the Moveable Objects Auditorium

Understanding the Data Mining Add-Ins for Excel

Software Plus Services

Fri, 9 Nov 2007

Blogging Panel

Top 10 Mistakes Developers Make – Tales of an Over-Worked IT Pro

Windows CardSpace Case Study 1: Identity Providers – Experian

The Future of IT

Web Application Security

Not bad, is it? I look forward to being there sooo much. And on top of that, I have many friends to visit in Barcelona.

Like

Unlike

Picture saw on brandinfection thanks to Robert Scoble on Twitter (see twitt here saying “Microsoft should really be freaked out”). I  hear here and there that one out of five laptop sold is a Mac in 2007.

This is massive considering the bulk of the enterprise market consumes PCs: it basically means Apple wins 30% – 35% of the consumer laptop market in 2007.

What the picture doesn’t say though is that one could take thousands of pictures showing PC-only rooms. In this very case, it seems Apple has struck a deal with the relevant high school to make sure every student has a Mac laptop.

But I still bet it would’ve been impossible to take such a picture 5 or even 3 years ago. Good job Mister Jobs…

Like

Unlike

Here’s a little fact sheet mixed with some thoughts on Green IT. Green IT is a truly serious topic that should be thought over and tackled over a long period of time. There is not one answer to the sustainable development challenge. On thing that’s pretty sure though is that Information Technology, an industry that grows steadily, represents a part of the problem and probably has the potential to generate the bulk of the solution.

CURRENT SITUATION

• According to the Gartner Group, 2% of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are generated by computer networks. Airlines are responsible for the exact same percentage of gas emissions. This figure is bound to increase due to the fact that 3 million new Internet users join the web every month – the bulk of them surfing from their cellular phones; and the huge investments Web players do in datacenters (I noticed something like one third of funds raised by self-hosting SaaS or web startups are aimed at datacenter investments).

• Consider a file. In its entire life cycle, it will consume 10 times more energy than it took to create because: it will be edited, saved, stored on a client hard drive, printed, sent by email, stored on a server, etc. For every new file created, 400 Gbytes of bandwidth need to be added to the Internet (think Video on Demand or advertising banner…).

• Every second that passes sees 24 Kg of PCs produced, 1.8 tons of raw materials aimed at the Information Technology market, half a ton of CO2 generated by hardware heat, 108 Kg. of PC-related garbage.

• Today, there are about 315 million PCs obsolete enough to need a recycling. Huge market! Any creative entrepreneur in the room?

• 2 billion more Internet users will cost 3 times more energy to connect.

THREATS

• Permalinks urge servers to be connected 24/7/365. Albeit it unleashes positive collaborative energies, Web 2.0 is extremely resource consuming.

• VoIP is a fantastic cost-killing opportunity. But it increases traffic dramatically. This issue will have to be tackled at some point. Again, there is huge a market for a VoIP secure compression standard just in case some genius entrepreneur happens to read these lines. We are still in need of an MP3 or DivX standard for IP voice messages.

• RAID redundancies imply  purchasing 2 hard drives. Which actually increases consumption by a factor of 2.

• Cellphones do more and more things everyday. Will a printer be embedded in every mobile phone in a future?

SOLUTIONS

• Multi core processors (produce less heat, more powerful)

• Grid (calculation resource mutualization)

• Working from home from time to time saves time (you don’t waste 2 hours a day in traffic) to yourself and money to your company (more time to work resulting from commute time saved). Furthermore, leaving the car in the garage lowers CO2 emissions.

• Bicycles to go to work (see the Velib initiative in Paris, designed and operated by JCDecaux & user interface + inventory system built on the Microsoft platform) cf. picture above

• Electricity consumption optimization software solutions like IDEAS program startups KalibraXe (a marketplace that allows your company to lower its electricity bill through lowering sourcing costs by making suppliers compete on price) and DOTVision Streetlight Vision (that help cities reduce their electricity bills: who hasn’t  seen a street lamp switched on during the day?). Both ‘undergo’ severe 4-digit growths and I actually believe there is a huge market for clean tech + software solutions. Most of the time, sustainable development and economic performance constrains are aligned. I don’t think these could ever part ways.

• Creative ways to lower server load: use [RSS + cache] combinations as included in Google Reader or use solutions like FaceBook in consumer environments, or blueKiwi in enterprise environments to lower the number of emails, which reduces storage and bandwidth needs through centralizing all the information within a social entity on one single location (eg Facebook group or blueKiwi topic board).

• This is something we do at Microsoft: every file printed out has its own cover sheet mentioning the author. This way, people save the first page (that mention the author) by putting it in a recycling bin and are bound not to take print outs that aren’t theirs – you know, when you realize you took someone else’s printouts – it’s often too far to go and put it back…

• Use recycled paper for draft printing AND corporate communications AND product brochures. Basically, use recycled paper as much as you can. Some people say the recycling process is more energy-intensive than the process of destroying. I don’t believe recycling has no future: I see it as a very convenient solution to start working in the right direction.

• Server virtualization has turned the tables: running many environments on a single machine made the computer industry paradigm shift from “1 application = 1 server”. In many companies, when there used to be 8 servers used at 10% each, you now find one server used at 80% of its capacities + 1 back-up server. On top of that, it all results in costing less in Air Conditioning to keep the room cool. I therefore bought some VMWare stock recently …

Like

Unlike

I’ve begun to realize how serious the very idea of privacy can be jeopardized because of the web. The web can be a pandora box that may profit malicious folks.

This blog post was triggered by an encounter that I will remember for a long time. Last week, I met, in a semi private, semi professional context, an entrepreneur, someone that shouldn’t have known anything about me but that basically knew everything about me before we even met.

He showed me:

- my CV and professional network through LinkedIn

- who I hang out with through Facebook

- ‘what I’m doing’ through Twitter (although my Twitter has become private since then)

- where I went, how I and my sybils look like through browsing my pictures on Flickr

- my private address thanks to a ‘Whois’-ization of Tech IT Easy

- what I think, how I think, through reading the blog posts I’ve published for 15 months

- what I bought and sold on different eCommerce platforms

- the authors I like, the books I read, the movies I watched, etc. on U.[Lik]

- the videos I published on various VOD platforms

- how I react through all the comments I left on many different blogs

- the articles I read on del.icio.us

…and a lot more public things that I promised I wouldn’t mention here. All I can say is that it was bloody (UK; in US, that would turn out to be ‘fucking’) scary.

The guy actually knew more about me than my own self.

Fortunately, his whole idea was about tackling such identity issues on the World Wide Web. The idea was brilliant, but as I told him: executing and establishing a strong market position will be tough. Anyways, the meeting couldn’t be more eye awakening.

Identity Management on the WWW is a very serious issue, a high stakes poker. I decided to save 2 hours to myself every week to brainstorm alone on this issue: what kind of information am I okay making public, what kind of information that I leave public today should I turn private tomorrow, how do I protect myself and those that I love from intrusions, etc.

This is a very serious issue. Probably one of the top three current challenges the Internet is facing.

Like

Unlike