Tech Nomad

Silicon Valley Report

The San Francisco Chronicle has an article on state of the valley report by Joint Venture Silicon Valley. According to the article...

Unmistakable examples of the region's vitality include Google, whose success has overshadowed its Web predecessors Yahoo and eBay, not to mention valley stalwarts like Intel and Hewlett-Packard. The report notes the growing importance of the region's biotechnology industry and the emergence of nanotechnology expertise in places like NASA-Ames Research Center.

But the most tangible icon of the new, uber-creative, consumer-driven valley is the iPod music player, a device so wildly successful that roughly 100 were sold every minute during the fourth quarter of 2005, according to Apple Computer Chairman Steve Jobs, whose career exemplifies the valley's penchant for rising from the ashes.

"We are shifting from an economy that is industrially focused to one that relies on creativity for the consumer,'' said Mountain View economist Doug Henton, principal author of the report. He cited the iPod as the sort of hit Silicon Valley is uniquely positioned to create thanks to the talent available here.

The report should be an interesting read when it is released on Friday.

Nokia 770 WiFi Device

According to this WSJ article, Nokia's 770 is sold out! They are now ramping up production to meet unexpected demand. What is surprising about that is that it is not even sold in stores. You can only buy it from the Nokia web site.

Kari Tuutti, spokesman for Nokia's multimedia division, said the company plans to broaden distribution to include retailers of mobile phones and electronic gadgets. He said sales expectations for the 770 initially had been conservative, as it is an entirely new product category. Nokia wouldn't provide specifics on production and sales numbers.

Mr. Tuutti said Nokia is in talks with broadband Internet service providers and Wi-Fi network operators about offering the 770 as a bundle with services. This could increase volumes for the product, because it could be given away just as mobile phones or digital TV set-top boxes come free with a service contract.

I like the idea of this device. I can never seem to find a comfortable position to use my laptop when I am reading news or responding to quick emails while relaxing. This device seems to have the right form factor for that and other uses such as when you are out-and-about.

Om Malik wrote an early review of it here. Russell Beattie posted about it too.

Performancing Firefox Extension

I am trying out this Performancing Firefox Extension for blogging. The user interface is a bit chunky but if the tool can improve my blog editing experience I will keep it.

Perhaps the coolest feature is the in-context invocation. You can start blogging while still reading the article of interest which is easy with tabs but is way more flexible with Performancing. Check it out.

Link: Performancing Firefox Extension

Is Enterprise Software giving way to Service Models (SaaS)?

Is 2006 going to be the year that on-demand/SaaS models eventually surplant traditional enterprise software?

A recent article in the Investor's Business Daily talks about the growing demand for on-demand software.

Even Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, (MSFT) expects on-demand software, also called software as a service, or SaaS, to soon become the standard for business computing. That's quite a leap, coming as it does from the head of the world's largest software maker, almost all of it still conventional software.

"I think when we look back five, six, seven years from now, all software will evolve to be a service," Ballmer said in a speech this month in Washington, D.C.

Just a few days before Dan Frost of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote:

In one of the biggest technology trends of the year now ending, Benioff's model -- alternately known as "on-demand" software or "software as a service," in which companies no longer buy multimillion dollar suites of software but instead pay a few hundred or thousand dollars for programs that run over the Internet -- is catching on fast.

Mobile Phone As Home Computer

Philip Greenspun talks about using a mobile phone as a computer. He may be onto something. Since these devices have added so much functionality that is too hard to use, in their current form factor, and yet they still are not good phones perhaps we should convert them into inexpensive computer terminals!

Link: Mobile Phone As Home Computer.

If you are an architect and want to run a computer-aided design program, the PC is great. If you are an electrical engineer and want to design circuits, a PC is great. If you are a filmmaker and want to edit video, a PC is great. For all of these customers it would be difficult indeed to supplant the PC. For a large segment of the market, however, the PC represents confusion, misery, and wasted hours.

Microsoft's "Leaked" Services Disruption Memo

Microsoft is re-inventing itself again. This time around internet services. A memo from Microsoft's new CTO, Ray Ozzie gives some indication as to where Microsoft is heading...

Link: The Internet Services Disruption.

And the work of these startups could be improved with a 'services platform'. Ironically, the same things that enable and catalyze rapid innovation can also be constraints to their success. Many hard problems are often ignored the most significant of which is achieving scale. Some scale issues are technological and result from the fact that they are generally built on application server platforms rather than high-scale service platforms. But new services also need to build user communities from scratch generally by word of mouth. Many fund their sites using syndicated ads, but have a difficult time transforming their services into higher levels of commerce. Some seek to incorporate client software into their user experience, but then need to reinvent software deployment, update, communications and synchronization mechanisms. User identity and cross-service interoperability mechanisms are still needlessly fragmented. Intuitively there seems to be a platform opportunity in providing such capabilities to developers in a form that retains the speed, simplicity and loose coupling that is so very important for rapid innovation.

What this memo details is an ambitious undertaking whose targets will be quickly changing. The fast rate of internet technology innovation leads me to believe that many assumptions underlying this strategy will have changed several times before Microsoft figures out how to deliver it's first iterations. I wonder if Microsoft can pull this off. Cringley is more critical.

Link: Microsoft Is Leaking Internal Documents to Make Us Think They Have a Plan.

Looking at Ray Ozzie's memo, it is rich in generalities and lacking in specifics. I found it helpful to again step into the shoes of the consumer or corporate IT buyer. What APIs and what services would Microsoft offer that I'd be willing to buy? The internet has provided us many new ways to do business. But are there even more big untapped business ideas out there? If Microsoft could break open a new market, that would be exciting. But is there a new market to be opened?

My top 6 .mac requests

More and more I find myself using web-based email. The availability of computers and wireless access "everywhere" means that I tend to leave my machine at home more times these days. I also use mobile devices to check email and to do web searches. I am not alone. I meet more people who are abandoning desktop email tools in favor of web-based ones and this trend will continue as the quality of web-based communication tools available from companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft get even more compelling. Here are some things that I think Apple has to do to keep .mac viable.

1. Give users a free level and a for-cost pro level
I have set-up several users with new Macs lately and find it frustrating that they cannot get a free .mac account to get them quickly started with Mail and iChat. Apple makes this too difficult. Why not be more competitive with Yahoo and Google and give users a free, ad-supported level in addition to a paid-for pro-level that includes more storage and other services.

• free level - email, Address Book, iChat, iCal, manual "synch", 1GB storage, ad-supported
• pro level adds - iSynch, Blogs, Groups, Photo Albums, iDisk, Backup, domain name hosting, 2GB storage, $99 per year

2. Give users a simple, stable, and meaningful URL
The .mac URL is too complicated. It is difficult to share what you cannot remember. I meet people at parties who want to see my photos but I can't remember the URL to tell them. Why not simplify this? And while you are at this can you please host our domain names as part of the for-pay pro level?

• mylogin.mac.com for the free level (example: mysite.mac.com)
• domain name hosting such as www.mysite.com for the pro level

3. URLs to calenders should simpler and be integrated into .mac interface
When you synch iCal the URL to the on-line version is something I have never been able to remember. It is not even integrated into my .mac site. This sucks. Why not simplify this?

• mylogin.mac.com/calender for the free level
• my domain name/calender for the pro level

4. Integrate AJAX into the user interface
It is time to catch-up with the state-of-the-art in web applications. My .mac web email, contacts, calender, and groups applications need a more interactive user interface. AJAX?

5. Better search, threaded discussions, and tags
It is very difficult to find my .mac email messages on the web! On my desktop Spotlight rocks! But on the web I can only search by the subject and to/from lines. Threaded discussions, popularized by GMail, make it so much easier to follow a discussion and find related messages. To use these two features I forward my email to GMail. Tags would be a nice addition, allowing further categorization of email.

6. Mobile access
I have tried to access my .mac account from a Blackberry and a Treo. I needed to search my Address Book for a phone number that was not in the mobile phone. The user interface was slow and frustrating. The interface has many irrelevant large images and frames/tables that get in the way of a tiny screen. This is fast becoming an important use case.

Many people I know would love to get .mac accounts but cannot justify the cost given that similar services available from Google, Yahoo, and MSN are free. The larger user-base generated by the free users may create an ecosystem that can be taken advantage of by Apple and Macintosh application developers to:

• sell new services
• create gaming networks
• enhance communications - chat, talk, video
• add more communications and network services into their application

My friend Brian feels differently. He says:

All I have to say is UGH! My e-mail isn't broken! Jesus, do the people who make these applications live and work in the real world? Where the F#$k is the business case for an AJAX e-mail client? If these people worked on something useful like recognizing the fact that someone has just asked me to join them on a phone call at xx:xx and placed that as a "tentative" meeting in my calendar I'd be in nirvana. But instead of working on this problem, they decide to go and write another stupid e-mail client using the latest hyped up technology. Shame on them.

Spell checking in an e-mail client is also one feature that is lacking in a lot of apps. This, in my little world, is essential since I suck at psellig. Drag and Drop! Who F#$ing cares! I want to see an e-mail/calendar client that shows me collisions in my schedule when someone proposes a meeting time. I also want it to seamlessly integrate with my wireless devices (read cell phone) so I can make sure that I can bring my schedule with me. How come with all the freaking "technology" we have, I still don't see a place to put a location into my calendar in terms of street address? And, why can't my calendar link to a traffic report to suggest a departure time? I'm sick of technology for its own sake. Let's make the web and all the freaking information out there USEFUL! People like Zimbra should be shot down early in the VC funding stages. I don't understand how people like them get $$. So they come from Weblogic? I can't believe someone would invest in their marketing hype when Weblogic is getting killed by JBoss and others.

Alright, enough of my banter and short tirade. Someone needs to produce an app that has the features I discuss above. The app needs to ALREADY EXIST. Forget making another e-mail client. Clients aren't broken, people are ;)

Think about information enrichment instead of making yet another clone of something that is already out there and maybe we'll see some freaking innovation again.

Race-Based Medicine

A variant of leukotriene A4 hydrolase, a gene involved in leukotriene synthesis, has been found to  increase the risk of heart attacks in African-Americans.

Link: NY Times.

Among Americans of European ancestry, the variant is quite common, but it causes only a small increase in risk, about 16 percent.

The opposite is true among African-Americans. Only 6 percent of African-Americans have inherited the variant gene, but they are 3.5 times as likely to suffer a heart attack as those who carry the normal version of the gene, a team of DeCode scientists led by Dr. Anna Helgadottir reported in an article released online yesterday by Nature Genetics.

What is happing to the RDBMS?

I cannot make out what is happening in the database field.  The open source projects have yielded robust RDBMS tools that provide all the basic functionality needed by most applications.

The mainstream commercial RDBMS vendors are beginning to offer "free" versions of their flagship products. These versions have limitations but are  more complete than previous "lite" versions.

Sun recently announced that they will integrate a version of PostgreSQL into of Solaris. This is significant given that SUN is the first platform Oracle has shipped on for years and SUN owes most of it's "large iron" sales to Oracle database installations.

Oracle has been more focused on expanding their application offerings by acquiring other application vendors. The database engine itself has not seen any significant improvements since Oracle 8.

Microsoft, as far back as 2001, has made announcements of it's plans to replace Windows File System with a version of the SQL Server database engine. But this must have proved harder than expected as it is still not available.

Google's Base may point the way to the concept of database technology as a service. In this case free, ad-supported database functionality without the hassles of deployment hardware, installation, or maintenance.

Is the RDBMS as we know it getting assimilated?

Open source RDBMS include:

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Ingres

Available so-called "Free" RDBMS are:

• Microsoft SQL Server Express
• Oracle 10g Express
• DB2 Universal Server Express-C

iPods, iTunes, and Movies, Oh My!

I have been wondering about what the contents of Apple's announcement next week might be.

If the announcement has something to do with video then something substantial has changed. Steve Jobs has always maintained that a Video iPod did not make sense because "no one walks around watching video". So something much larger must be the "....and one more thing." What if it is right under our noses? Some interesting tidbits:

1. iTunes
Great client with great digital content. The client runs on Macintosh, Windows, and now a mobile phones. iTunes now has stores in all the key markets. It supports high definition H.264 video in addition to MPEG4. It has a great world-wide content caching and delivery infrastructure via Akamai.

2. Mac Mini
The Mini has a great form factor - you can move it anywhere - even in the living room next to you new flat-panel TV. The mini has built-in Bluetooth and WiFi. It plays DVDs and has DVI output.

3. The Movie Studios
Ticket sales slowing. Movie distribution is costly. No one has cracked the "on-demand" movie distribution problem. I recently read an interview with a movie studio head who was saying that they would have on-line digital distribution ready by the end of this year.

What if the announcement is that Apple has reached an agreement with several movie studios to distribute movies through iTunes so that you can now attach your Mac Mini to your LCD or Plasma TV, download Hi-Def movies from iTunes and then play them "on-demand" through your home entertainment system. In addition, you could copy the content to some sort of Video iPod so that you can continue to watch your movie on the plane or train later.

The big deal is the distribution of digital content through iTunes and using the Mac Mini as some sort of "set-top box" or "Media Center". That brings together the digital content creation family (iMovie, iPhoto, Garageband, iDVD, and the Pro Tools), the digital content distribution (iTunes), and digital content consumption (Mac Mini - Media Center, iPod, Video iPod, etc).

Apple has the technology to do this. All that is left is getting the lawyers to agree.

Update: So the Mac Mini with Remote did not happen this time. FrontRow is very interesting technology and makes the Mini next to a flat screen idea even more viable. Perhaps Apple is waiting for the cheaper Intel-based Minis to ship this Media Center thing?