In and out of the Clouds

Cloud computing is certainly emerging as a new paradigm for supporting aggregation of data and computational resources. With the emergence of data centres, it is very likely that such capability will be the basis for future resource provisioning in distributed systems -- especially with the capability to undertake service aggregation (mashups) across multiple providers. A key concept in Cloud computing seems to be the idea of virtualization. Two contrasting stories indicate how Cloud computing is being viewed today -- whereas the New York Times thinks this is an important emerging trend (mentioning a few companies already utilizing this technology), the BBC thinks that fault tolerance, reliability and privacy are likely to be limitations for actual take up of Cloud computing ideas. The Economist has also published recently about Cloud Computing -- primarily treating this as a means to support services on large scale data centres. Will be interesting to see how this field matures.

Self Parking Car

Check out the Volkswagen Tiguan -- a self parking car. The car first measures the size of the parking space, and then controls the steering wheel. Nice!

Machine Mashing

Being able to integrate content from devices across the network is one of the aims of Microsoft's Live Mesh -- which enables sharing of folders between PCs and mobile devices. This is a really useful technology for many people today who have a number of machines distributed across their home and work environments. Another approach similar in scope is the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS), which enables centralization of user profiles in one place, so that multiple Yahoo applications can make use of these. Y!OS also enables Yahoo apps to be integrated using mashup technologies, and makes use of the centralized profiles to enable users to more seamlessly access additional apps.

Standardising Social Networks

Google has invested a great deal into Open Social -- a common API for developing "social applications" -- enabling groups of people to interact with multiple Web sites, and exchange data with people. A number of applications are now making use of the Open Social API. Many appear to be applications that one can use alongside FaceBook, and one in particular, developed by NewsGator talks of "Social Sites 2.0"! Many of these rely on the use of RSS feeds (with RSS readers and writers) as a means to exchange/share data between sites. A concept also popular with Yahoo Pipes. Interesting to see how Open Social is taking off, and providing the basis for a new type of distributed application.

Financial Markets Data

Financial markets react in different ways to every day events. Relating how this happens, i.e. how market trends are influenced through news, has been the domain of traders in a number of financial institutions. Australian-based SIRCA is now taking data from Reuters and making this available to academic institutions and other financial companies. They provide the TAQTIC engine to aggregate, summarize and publish financial data -- often leading to very high data volumes. A very interesting use of large scale data Grids.

Europe's top 100 from Red Herring Magazine

There are two tech./business trends magazines whose opinions I truly respect -- Wired and Red Herring. Recently, Red Herring revealed it's Top 100 European tech entrepreneurs. A very interesting collection of companies -- ranging from news categorization company Newstin to Rummable -- a location based "social discovery" tool.

How does Google make money?

According to a report released on April 21, 2008 from Millword Brown Optimor the total worth of the worlds top 100 brands is 1.94 trillion US dollars in 2008. Most interesting of all, the world's top brand today, worth over 86,000 million US dollars is Google! A brand that has now surpassed world leaders such as Coca Cola, Microsoft, Nokia, Marlboro, McDonalds and GE. What does this mean? Well, today, Google makes more advertising revenue than mainstream UK television channels such as ITV. According to a report from the UK Times Newspaper, Google generated over £325 million of advertising revenue between July and September 2007 -- surpassing that of ITV (even when taking into account advertising revenue from sporting events such as Rugby). Do these statistics indicate a potential future change in the way individuals interact with media? Is on-line the future of information dissemination and mass marketing?