*michael parekh on IT*

ON A PICTURE-PERFECT UNIVERSE

COME TOGETHER

A pretty full first day at TED 2008 yesterday, as can be seen from TED's Bruno Giussani's post here (Ethan Zuckerman and Boing Boing also have great posts on the day's proceedings).  There were emotional extremes with speakers discussing the various forms of Evil in this world, and our definition of Beauty.

The one that stayed with me the most was this presentation by surfer physicist Garrett Lisi.  Here's how Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder describes it (image from Lunch Over IP):

" Garrett Lisi is introduced as a surfing physicist working on a grand unified theory - E8. He wants to find all the particles and forces that make a complete picture of our universe. He starts by making fun of himself, coming onto the stage and saying "Woah dude, check out those killer equations!"

But he wants to talk about particle physics without using equations. He starts showing images of corals. Coral polyps branch into copies. So do universes.

He shows a funny slide of the Shroedinger's Cat problem (for comic effect, he puts Erwin in the box, and the cat gets to run the experiment). We see Shroedinger branching like a coral polyp in the unopened box. Quantum physics says "Everything that can happen does."

The four different known forces have different kinds of charges. The hypothetical Higgs particle gives mass to things, and the  Large Hadron Collider that's about to go into operation will hopefully prove the existence of Higgs particles.

Electric charges are combinations of two different charges, hyper charges and weak charge.

Strong interactions between quarks are happening millions of times a second, holding atomic nuclei together. These particles are at the very limit of our knowledge. The known pattern of charges could come from a more perfect pattern that gets broken. to do these we need to introduce new charges with new directions.

He shows a colorful animated pattern of elementary particle interactions. The interactions are taking place in the 8th dimension. Some of the places where there should be particles are blank. They need to be filled in with currently unknown particles.

What's one reason E8 is so appealing to him? "At the heart of this mathematics is pure, beautiful geometry."

There were a number of presentations at TED by rocket scientists laying out the latest bits of how we understand the universe.  Garret lisi was the first one to suggest, and show with beautiful animations, how the equations that describe these theories, may come together into something that is utterly beautiful and symmetrical (I'll update this post with links of the presentation and animations  from TED when available). 

A lot of this is still unknown, and a lot more needs to be researched and understood.  But it was good to be able to think that the universe could be a deeply pretty picture.

ON A STOLEN MACBOOK AIR

MB, CALL HOME

(Updated:  see below)

No, it wasn't my MacBook Air laptop that was stolen.

But one belonging to an attendee at TED 2008 was stolen today.  There was an almost audible gasp from the audience around me, when Chris Anderson, TED curator, announced this at the end of the afternoon sessions.

As the owner of a shiny new MacBook Air, i could empathize what a loss like that would feel like.

But it got me thinking...how difficult would it be to develop a Mac software application that a user could install on any MacBook of recent vintage, that would do the following:

1.  The application would be activated the first time the stolen laptop would be connected to the internet, and report the IP address, and other related network information to the user, and the software security service provider. 

So far so good.  I understand there are applications that one can buy for both Windows and Macs that can do this already.

2.  But this being a Mac, the application would perform an additional task.  Given that every Mac laptop comes with a built-in camera, and microphone, the application would automatically do the following when turned on by the thief and connected to the internet (wireless or wired):

a) Take several pictures and email them to pre-defined people, including the owner, and the software security provider.

b) Record the ambient sound in the room for a pre-determined time and send the audio file on as well.

c)  Then of course shut down the machine and lock down the user data using the File Vault capabilities of the Mac's operating system.

Come to think of it, this idea can be applied to an iPhone, or any camera-equipped cell phone.  Not to mention any Windows laptop with a built-in camera.

But it'd be really cool if something like this was available on the Mac first.

And it would be ESPECIALLY COOL if Apple took the initiative to add this as an operating system feature in the next version of OS X Leopard.

It'd take the burden of taking security precautions of the user...just like Apple's Time Machine  product innovation.

What do you think?

Update:  Within minutes of twittering about this, I got this tweet back from Gia Milinovitch:

"Do you mean something like this for stolen laptops? http://www.orbicule.com/undercover/

The application seems to do most of the things wished for above.  Will download it and try it out, and look for reviews on the web.  Now, all Apple has to do is buy the company and make it part of the OS.

Thanks, Gia!

ON A BRAIN BUSTING KICKOFF TO TED 2008

MIND TRAVELS

TED 2008 kicked off it's five-day conference strong in Monterey, CA and Aspen, CO yesterday, with presentations by folks like Stephen Hawking and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (the spiritual leader, not Ravi Shankar, the musician. and father of Norah Jones).

You can get a good sense of the proceedings from the TED blog here, the Twitter feeds by many attendees here, and this terrific rundown by Bruno Giussani here.

One of the most powerful presentations of the afternoon for me was the one by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who gave an incredible, personal account over an 18 minute presentation of her own stroke almost a decade ago, and the long path to fully recovery. 

Like so many others, I have a loved one (my mom), who experienced a stroke a few years ago, and have struggled trying to understand what something like that really involves since then.

Bruno describes Jill's presentation well with this passage, along with a picture of the real human brain she used to explain what was going on where:

"Jill Bolte Taylor is incredible: she's a neuroanatomist (brain scientist) who has suffered a stroke and studied it "from inside", as it happened, while her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness.
It took her eight years to recover, and to become a spokesperson for the possibility to come back.

"I studied the brain because I have a brother who's been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals diagnosed as "normal" and those diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder?
On the morning of December 10 1996, I got my own mental illness: in the course of four hours I watched by brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process information. I could not walk, talk, think.

If you've ever seen a human brain (she shown a real human brain -- picture above): it has two hemispheres.

The right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while the left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. So they process information differently, they think about different things, they care about different things, and I would say that they have very different personalities. Our right  hemisphere is all about this very moment, right here right now. It thinks in pictures, Information in the form of energy sterams in simultaneously through all of our sensory system and then  it explodes into what this present moment feels like. I'm an energy being connected to the energy alla around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. And through that we are all connected. And in this moment we are perfect, whole, and beautiful.

Our left hemisphere is a very different place. It thinks linearly and methodically. It's all about the past and about the future. It's designed to take that collage of the present moment, and pick out details after details, categorize them, associate them with all of what we have learned in the past, and project into our future possibilities. It thinks in languages. It's the internal chatter that connects us to the external world. It's the calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. And most important it's the voice that tells me "I am". And as soon it says that, I become separate from you. That's the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.

On that morning I woke up to a pounding pain on the back of my eye. It just gripped me, then released me, then gripped me, then released me. I got up trying to perform my usual routine, jumping on my exercise machine, and I realize that my hands look like claws. It's like as if my consciousness had shifted away.

I got off the machine and walked and realized that my body had slowed down, every step was very rigid. I stood in my bathroom ready to go into the shower and looked down at my arm and realized I could no longer define the boundaries of my body, of where I begin and where I end, the molecules of my arm were like blended with those of the wall, am all I could detect was energy flowing.

Then the chatter in my brain went silent. For a moment I was shocked to be in the total silent. Then in an instant my left hemisphere came back online, and I realized that I needed help; then I drifted out again, into "la-la-land"; then in again. I was walking around my apartment, telling to myself: I have to get to work. Then I realize: I'm having a stroke. And my left hemisphere tells me: wow, this is so cool, how many brain scientists have the chance to study that from the inside?

But I need to get help. I get to my office, I pick up a card, I can't figure out what's on it, my brain is back in la-la-land. Then I have a wave of clarity. Drifting in and out. (She goes on describing the difficulties of dialing a phone number and communicating to get help, unable to read the number, "because the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background"), and then I would wait for a wave of clarity. It took me  45 minutes to find the right number.

I'm in an ambulance towards the hospital and I realize that I'm no longer the choreographer of my life. Maybe the doctors will give me a second chance, maybe not. And right there, I just feel my spirit surrender -- I say goodbye to my life.
When I awoke, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. My life was now suspended between two strains of reality: information streaming in but I could not pick voices out from the background noise. Sounds were so loud and chaotic. I just wanted to escape because I could not identify the position of my body in space. I felt enormous and expansive, and my spirit soaring.

I found nirvana. I remember thinking: there is no way that I can squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside my tiny body. But then I realized: I am still alive. And if I found nirvana, then anyone who's alive can find nirvana. And I pictured a world full with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate people who knew that they can come to this space at any time. What a gift a stroke can be to the way we live our lives. That motivated me to try to recover.

Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and removed a blood clot the size of a tennis ball. It took me eight years to completely recover. So who are we?

We are the life horsepower of the universe, and we have the power to choose moment by moment who we want to be in the world, we can choose the consciousnesses of our right hemisphere or that of our left hemisphere.

These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe the more time we spend choosing the peace of our right hemisphere, the most peace we will project into the world and more peaceful our planet will be."

I've excerpted the full presentation from Bruno's post to try and convey the emotional impact of a presentation like this.

It was a riveting presentation, and I'll put up a video link from TED when available.  It really is a big step towards not taking one's brain for granted.

By the way, I'll be twittering (aka Twitter blogging) a fair bit from TED most of this week, joining in the conversation by many other TED attendees who're also twittering the conference.  This list by Austin Hill is a good place to keep track of these tweets.  My twittering of the conference can be accessed at my Twitter link here.

More to come.

ON VISIONS OF MOBILE COMPUTING PLATFORMS

STRETCHING

This BBC News piece on Nokia, titled "Nokia morphs itself from within", got me going this morning, primarily due to this sub-headline:

"Nokia is the world's largest mobile phone maker and with more than one billion handsets shipped is by extension the world's largest computing platform."

The author goes on to buttress this statement with Nokia impressive standing in the handset vendor world:

"Every day Nokia sources 329 million parts and builds a million phones in 100 plus handset models and distributes these phones in 70 different languages to 150 countries.

But as phones become less about making calls and more an extension of our connected lives, Nokia is transforming itself from a hardware company into something more converged. It's not the parts that matter but what use those parts are put to."

It even generously lets a Nokia spokesperson explain how this yet unrealized, and idealized "mobile computing platform" may come to be:

"We're not a cell phone company we're a software and services company as well," Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president at Nokia, told BBC News."

The piece then goes into the various initiatives underway at Nokia facilities around the world, to make this "vision" a reality.

I wouldn't have had any problem with any of this if the sub-headline quoted above simply stated that Nokia "hoped" to become the world's largest computing platform, rather than the assertion that it already is the world's largest computing platform.

Let's state clearly that what they're really hoping to be is the "world's largest mobile computing platform". 

This is an arena that a number of other companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and Apple amongst others have been toiling away for a while now, and have greater dibs saying they're creating a computing platform than Nokia.

Nokia as impressive as it is, is a very successful global vendor of handsets and other mobile technologies.  And it's been a great stock over the last year.

Their products are used across a range of wireles carriers in many countries, but they do not constitute a "computing platform" per se.

The BBC should be more rigorous in it's reporting here.

ON ATTENDING TED 2008

HERE WE GO AGAIN

I'll be attending the TED 2008 conference in Monterey, California over the next few days.  If your plans bring you there as well, and would like to connect, do drop me a line here. 

As the TED website describes it, TED is about:

"Many people come to TED seeking something out of the ordinary. A chance to mentally recharge. A chance to step back and consider the really big stuff that's happening. A chance to understand life in a richer way."

Mostly, TED is an opportunity to catch up with old friends and new, across the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design.  As in the past, I'll post about interesting presentations and encounters.

See you there.

ON A NEW TECH HUNTING SEASON

JUMPING IN

Don't know if three data points make a trend, but with the unsolicited $2 billion bid for game software company Take Two by Electronic Arts, we now have at least three 30% plus premium bid deals for public technology companies in a depressed stock market.

The other two of course are the on-going bid for Yahoo! by Microsoft, and the just accepted $2.4 billion deal for Getty Images by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman.

With the tech sector battered more than most in this most recent correction, and still relatively strong growth fundamentals, it shouldn't be surprising to see more of this in the coming months.

Both strategic and/or financial buyers seem anxious to take advantage of the relative bargains in the public markets, assuming of course they can finance the deals via their balance sheets despite a tough debt financing environment.

At least someone putting their toes into these turbulent tech waters.

ON AN INDIAN SOFTWARE "PRODUCT" COMPANY

TRANSITIONS

This Forbes article titled "The Smartest unknown Indian entrepreneur" maybe a tad gushy, but rightly highlights an Indian software company of note:

"Entrepreneur Marc Benioff is afraid of him. Venture king Mike Moritz wants to invest in him.

You have never heard of Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of AdventNet, the company behind newly launched productivity suite Zoho."

It's really about Zoho, as the article explains:

"Zoho does everything that you would do with Microsoft Office. It also has a hosted customer relationship management service that is free for very small companies and only costs $10 per user per month for larger ones. It competes with Salesforce.com     (nyse:  CRM ), which charges $65 per user per month.

Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com, has made an offer to buy Zoho for an undisclosed amount. Benioff seems appropriately nervous, since Salesforce.com's sales and administration costs are high, eating up most of his earnings. Can he afford to compete if Zoho undercuts him at such a dramatic scale?

Vembu has turned Benioff down."

AdventNet is a $40 million revenue business throwing off $12 million in profits this year, with Zoho not yet meaningfully contributing to the financials.

But this is not just about a cool software business.  Here's why the company is notable:

"Vembu has a very exciting opportunity ahead of him. What the Chinese have done in manufacturing, he is showing that the Indians can do in software: undercut U.S. and European software makers dramatically.

Not in information technology services. Not by body shopping. Vembu has done something few Indian entrepreneurs have been able to achieve--build a true "product" company out of India. This is not a head count-based business model."

Having followed AdventNet and Zoho for some time now, it's good to see the company getting a little media exposure in the U.S.  Agree with Forbes here...this is one to watch.

What'll be more interesting if it serves as a model for other Indian "product" software companies, much like Wipro did for the Indian IT services industry.

P.S.  The author of the article does a detailed interview with the founder, which has a lot more detail on the various product lines and their history.

ON JAPAN'S LATEST BROADBAND STEPS

LEAPS AND BOUNDS

Last fall I posted about how the U.S. is falling behind countries like Japan, South Korea and others, in the broadband speeds available to it's citizens.  Well, CNN has a story that suggests that the lead may expand in the near-term (see the full Techmeme discussion here).  Here's the highlight:

"Japan launched a rocket Saturday carrying a satellite that will test new technology that promises to deliver "super high-speed Internet" service to homes and businesses around the world.

The rocket carrying the WINDS satellite -- a joint project of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries -- lifted off its pad at 5:55 p.m. (0855 GMT).

If the technology proves successful, subscribers with small dishes will connect to the Internet at speeds many times faster than what is now available over residential cable or DSL services.

The Associated Press said the satellite would offer speeds of up to 1.2 gigabytes per second.

The service initially would focus on the Asia-Pacific region close to Japan, a JAXA news release said."

What's amusing are the applications the press release cites that'll be enabled by new broadband vehicle:

"Among other uses, this will make possible great advances in telemedicine, which will bring high-quality medical treatment to remote areas, and in distance education, connecting students and teachers separated by great distances," JAXA said."

I remember those two applications being cited when the first dial-up, internet networks were being rolled out over a dozen years ago.  Including them in any broadband update announcement is like a beauty queen claiming she yearning for world peace in her interview.

Tom Evslin explains in a related post why the latency off this geostationary satellite won't allow a lot of normal web applications,including the ones cited in the press release, to work as expected.

But hey, it sounds good in a press release, so they go with it.

The more things change...

ON A LITTLE FACEBOOK FATIGUE

QUESTION TIME

This commentary by Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC News, on Facebook's recently  declining growth rate in the UK, had me nodding a bit in agreement:

"Facebook - it's so over. That's been the tenor of most of the commentary since Thursday's figures showing a slight dip in Facebook's UK users.

The general feeling is that the kids, with their minute attention spans, have already tired of the social networking site and moved on to something more hip and happening.

I think the opposite is true - that Facebook's new wave of older users have decided it is just not worth the bother and are now leaving it to the kids."

The metaphoric nodding got more vigorous when it came to this bit:

"...by then I was already finding that many of my wrinklier Facebook friends had tired of the ceaseless vampire-biting, hugging, poking and other daft aspects of the increasingly cluttered and annoying site.

Their status updates started to say "...falling out of love with Facebook" and then they disappeared altogether."

Separately, TechCrunch has a post on how Facebook's U.S. metrics are leveling off as well.

And although we can all point to anecdotal evidence that suggests that some of us may have gotten tired enough of Facebook that we're visiting and using it less, the long-term potential utility of a service like Facebook keeps us interested enough to check back every now and then.

We all likely have a list of features that we'd love to see on Facebook, that if implemented, may get us back to using the service a little bit more, perhaps with the same level of excitement we all felt when we first encountered the service.

But it's tough to implement features at the same pace when the service has been growing at the rate it has to date around the world, and still keep everything ticking just right.  This gap between Facebook's promise and it's potential is something I've talked about before.

And even when Facebook does implement a wished for feature, like the ability to group friends, for instance, the implementation may sometimes leave us wishing for more.

So a little Facebook fatigue is not a bad thing, nor unexpected.  As long as the service comes back and manages to surprise and delight us again, even if for just one more time.

ON KICKING OFF APPLE'S MOBILE PLATFORM

IT BEGINS

Well, we're getting close to the end of February, which means about the time Apple promised to roll out it's SDK (software development kit) for the iPhone.

It's one of the critical elements that should help Apple to merge it's iPod and iPhone franchises into a global mobile computing platform with few equals over the next couple of years.  With a little help from Apple's iTunes store.

As this piece in Wired News reminds us:

"Apple's upcoming iPhone software development kit will do more than enable programmers to create new software for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

It will also turn iTunes into a software store, because Apple will probably use iTunes as the primary distribution vehicle for what's likely to be a massive community of iPhone software developers. In so doing, it could usher in a new way of buying low-cost software that's both easier and faster than downloading shareware or purchasing shrink-wrapped boxes."

And it's a substantial platform already:

"An estimated 35.7 million people use iTunes, according to Nielsen Online. Based on the figures Apple CEO Steve Jobs provided at this year's Macworld Expo, Apple has now sold more than 4 billion songs through its iTunes Store. By some estimates, 20 percent of the U.S. population now purchases its music through iTunes.

Whether the store is ultimately the only venue for distributing iPhone and iPod Touch software or not, using it for app distribution means that many third-party developers will have the chance to get their software noticed by a huge base of users."

It all kicks off at the end of this month.  Ready or not.