3SuperHeroes

Floating IT

This falls into the category of, "it's such a great idea, why didn't I think of it."

CNN reported that Google is hoping to launch the computer navy, with IT data centers on barges powered by electricity generated by waves. As reported by the London Times, the barges would be 11km off shore.

Google has filed patent applications for these data centers, with electricity coming from a variety of sources including wind and wave power. A few interesting things to consider because these data centers would be out in sea, not close to port. At the top of my list are staffing and managing this hard to reach data center (talk about a "remote work assignment" and the benefits of cheap water cooling.

Electric Mini Cooper is "not just for Berkeley"

I casually noted on my Facebook status that I was “looking at the new Mini Cooper electric”, thinking that my friends would make a few comments about how it’s 100% wishful thinking that my wife and 3 kids could fit into a car with batteries for a back seat. A basic social networking “dream on buddy” kind of reaction. Instead, the public and private comments were of the “hey dude, you can only find it in LA and it’s waaaaayyy expensive” variety. That may be true, but putting aside the cost ($25k more than the standard car), availability and lack of big crew practicality, the reviews are pretty positive.

Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google Acquisitions

I was recently searching the web for a list of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft acquisitions and found a great chart by Library House. The data started in mid-2006 and extended through mid-2007. All companies were sorted into specific categories and close examination revealed interesting trends. I have updated the chart through April, 2008 and added several new categories along the way. The new data comes from a variety of sources including news articles, company press releases and even wikipedia.

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Several classifications don’t exactly fit but were used rather than adding new categories. My priority when adding the newer acquisitions was to identify the higher order trends, and some specificity was sacrificed. For example, Index Tools is listed as a “Development Tools” company rather than a web analytics company. The “search” category of was added due to Microsoft's purchase of Fast Search and Transfer in January 2008. Surprisingly, before adding that one data point, no search companies were listed on the chart. Click on the picture below for a full page view.

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Some quick observations:

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Microsoft has some serious acquisition momentum right now. The recent purchase of Rapt for advertising price optimization, Danger for mobile, Kidaro and Calista for virtualization, and Credentia and Komoku for identity/security is an interesting way to start 2008. Their focus until recently was more enterprise and advertising with some mobile, maps and social networking.

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Other than the Doubleclick purchase closing this month, Google has not purchased anything lately. Maybe their recently announced strong quarterly results will open their deep pockets again. The variety of color in the chart’s Google column shows a broad investment strategy across video, security, advertising, blogging, mobile, maps, presentation and other topics. This is consistent with their strategy of building a diverse technology infrastructure for their data center and product lines.

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Yahoo! keeps rolling in spite of Microsoft breathing over their shoulder. With FoxyTunes (music), Maven (video) and Index Tools (analytics), they continue their focus on advertising and eyeballs/community.

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On the lighter side, researching this chart uncovered a few April Fools Day jokes including Microsoft buying and then bundling open source with Windows, and Google making an unexpected move.  

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What's next?

Welcome to Menlo Park, CBS

CBS is opening a permanent office in Menlo Park, CA, and I want to the be first to say, "thanks for the local tax revenue." One more fully occupied Silicon Valley office building is a good thing.

The recent press highlights that CBS wants to be located closer to where the engineers and business talent live. While their Sand Hill Road location is really in VCville and RecruiterTown, it's closer to the engineers on highway 101 than New York City or LA. So far, CBS has talked to 387 potential investment targets in the last year, investing $300M in over a dozen companies. That must have been an incredible year of speed dating at Il Fornaio.

My unsolicited advice: Don't "look for the next YouTube, only a year earlier in their development" as Quincy Smith, head of CBS Interactive, commented recently in the Financial Times. Google is still struggling to monetize video while their analytic tools lack the ability to show enough detail around who is watching what part of the video and when to drive advertising context and relevance around the content.

It's not enough to focus on the content in order to attract a younger audience to CBS properties. This is a great goal, but compelling content is only half the picture. The other half is user experience and stickiness, and that requires community, quality, security, and support of screens smaller (phone) and bigger (television) than the connected PC.

Here are the three big paradigms rambling around my brain as I head off the Web2.0 Conference in San Francisco next week. The topics are valid for CBS and if I find Quincy Smith at the Web2.0 conference, I'll tell him myself.

1) The emerging social influence model and how it helps to quantify social marketing campaigns aw well as monetize user generated content (UGC) and professionally generated content.
2) Client virtualization as a form of client-side security for safely browsing and consuming UGC, user generated applications and other applications.
3) Connected and disconnected application models and the analytics behind it all that track the many dimensions of content consumption in order to drive highly relevant advertising and community building.

Punk'd on April Fools Day

I got punk'd on Tuesday, April Fools Day, by one of my staff. I expected an email with the annual careerbuilder.com top 10 list of practical jokes (I like #3 this year, but #7 just seems more familiar) and I should have seen this prank coming, but I didn't.

It was a pretty hectic day with its fair share of fires when I received an IM requesting emergency feedback on a new technology proposal from a product development team. My security expert then started walking me through a seven slide presentation on Write-Only Memory or "WOM" (yes, I know, but I was busy and gullible...) code named Peak Creek and why it's good for software companies. Here's slide #3.

As a guy with a Electrical Engineering Degree who studied device physics, the "can be carved and shaped with household tools" should have been a red flag.

Nope.

And then the "if power is low, user rubs on hair" bullet should have knocked me to my senses.

Nope.

While the next three slides showed ridiculously low cost projections and glowing press quotes, I was still going strong.

It wasn't until I saw the product picture on the last slide, which looked surprisingly like styrofoam packing material, that I knew I had been taken for a ride and should check the hallway for Ashton Kutcher.

By the way.....  I looked for him, too.

Nope.

I'm now soliciting ideas for revenge on April 1, 2009.

Highlights from Mashup Camp

Mashup Camp last week in Mountain View was my third. Two years ago, the technology was pretty new and the buzz was around new business models and monetization. Last year it was about tools. Yahoo! Pipes was relatively new, Popfly was in Beta and there was big conversation around platforms and programming languages. This year, big impressions were made by the next round of tools.

My two personal highlights: the conversation by Zude had the crowd asking tons of questions about how to mash together content from different sites and in different formats where everything is essentially a mashable object. My buddy Rob Ennals had a loyal following around Intel Mash Maker, which is far more mature this year than it was last year.

Better Blog Comments with Disqus

Every time I get a blog comment, I like to check out what I can about the person (if they are not a regular reader) and what brought them to the blog. Sometimes, someone is responding to a discussion about their company or my comment about their blog post. Even then, it's not straightforward to see what other topics and blogs that reader has commented on and whether their comments are in response to my post or another comment.

This is especially a challenge for the high-traffic blogs I read including well-known blogs like techmeme, Groundswell and HipMojo and corporate blogs inside my company's firewall. Recent posts by executive staff have generated hundreds of comments within a very short time, with repeat comments by prolific bloggers, frequent answers by other bloggers and intersecting conversations that are difficult to follow and may reference a person's comments on other separate blog posts. And that makes reading blog comments a real drag.

Disqus solves many of these challenges. You can check out my first Disqus experiment here with Daniel Ha's quick answer to my question. It's free to develop a Disqus profile and free to add Disqus to your blog. When writing comments, it's easy to track your contributions across Disqus-enabled blogs, develop and build a reputation, and link readers to your social networks and net content.  As a blog reader, it's easy to check out a commenter's profile and comments across several blogs and follow conversation threads within comments. As a blogger, it's possible to be more responsive to comments and have better control over comment junk and spam. Disqus is a healthy advance in making comments a more valuable contribution to the blog post and something actually worth reading

Silverlight on Nokia S60s running Symbian

Microsoft announced this week that they are porting Silverlight to the Nokia S60 series running Symbian in addition to the previously announced plan to port Silverlight onto Windows mobile-based phones. This is the first major win for Silverlight on phones. Adobe has been pretty quiet in the press about this development even though this Nokia deal challenges the dominance of Flash Light on phones.

Most interesting is how this announcement, made public on the eve of the MIX08 show, reinforces the very public race to "out-iPhone" Apple with rich internet applications and customizable UIs. Carriers all recognize the urgent need to have a highly graphical and intuitive competitor to the iPhone. Add to this the interesting datapoint in Google's recent Annual Report highlighting a 50X better advertising response rate on the iPhone than on any other phone and this Microsoft win at Nokia is the starter's gun for the next phase of a great race signing up software developers and phone platforms.

Israel Web Tour 2008

The California Israel Chamber of Commerce put on the Israel Web Tour this week at the Microsoft Mountain View Campus. Fifteen Israeli startups in the web2.0 space showcased their products in mini-showcase over breakfast and then presented to the crowd of about 150 people. The morning also included a few panel discussions on the future of net and rebirth of silicon valley.

The 15 companies were selected from over 90 applicants. All companies have strong ties to Israel either because they are based there or were started there. The common problem statements forming the value propositions for these companies is "the web, your way".
1) Search is not relevant enough and needs to be more targeted and personal, 2) Shopping should come to the user, not the other way around, 3) Web usage should be personal and aggregated, whether talking about social networks, virtual worlds or personal utilities (banking, traveling, communicating), 4) Creating and finding Rich Internet Content needs to be highly targeted, easy to generated and distribute and fun, 5) today's web analytics don't reveal the true influence model of your content.

Here's the list of the 15 companies:

Moka5 Client Virtualization

I enjoyed breakfast with Moka5 CEO Bill Demas, talking about their solution for the virtualized fat desktop. I say "fat" desktop because the Moka5 solution is different than a standard VMWare VDI solution residing on a terminal where limited system functionality exists outside the virtual solution.

This is referred to in the the original Stanford University research paper written by the company's founders as a "cache-based system management model". The Moka5 engine allows users to subscribe to and run virtual appliances developed and managed either individually or by a company. These contained software environments are each called a "LivePC" and can be written on your own or subscribed to from the Moka5 LivePC library. A developer can keep the LivePCs local or leave them with Moka5, who hosts their library of LivePCs with Amazon.

The virtual environment can be downloaded and stored either on a PC client or USB stick. Moka5 also has a partner agreement with Iron Key, a company run by my buddy Dave Jevens. Here's an interview with Moka5 from the last VMWorld.

I downloaded the Moka5 engine onto my notebook last night and played around with the "Fearless Browser" LivePC which is automatically distributed with the engine. The whole thing runs on top of the free VMWare Player. Putting aside the occasional cursor bugs I discovered (and Bill readily owned up to), it was very cool. I logged onto GMail, sent a few emails to friends, played around with the anonymous browsing feature. I also downloaded the LivePC of the game Quake 2 and exploded a few aliens.

I can see this being a great way for sales teams to quickly demo software products on the PC of a potential customer by just pluging in a USB drive, leaving no footprint when they leave the room. I can see this also satisfying the safe "multiple personality" of a home PC used by the kids for homework, parents for family management and several family members for a home business. Check it out.