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United Miles In an apparently personal email to me, Glenn F. Tilton, Chairman, President and CEO of says: "Miles previously earned in the program remain in your account, and award travel remains available as always."
But what if no travel remains available?
11:45:17 PM 
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QoS vs. Open Standards Cory on Rod Smith:
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Open standards and quality of service: pick one. IBM's Rod Smith is speaking at the Supernova conference. In his intro, he cites a lot of customer demand for both open standards and quality-of-service guarantees. Aren't these antithetical? If I'm running open standards, then the software at my end of the network can be set to abide by or ignore any signals send by the software at your end (as opposed to a proprietary system where both ends are welded-shut-boxes that always and deterministically do whatever the software author thought was best). That means that even though your software requests a priority level of x and a guaranteed pipe of y, you have no way of knowing whether my software is actually delivering x and y. All you can send me is a suggestion -- not a guarantee. |
Not mutually exclusive. With two clients running open systems and each buying their own service level agreements, the clients could act in a manner similar to cognitive radios with open spectrum, but that's theoretical. But what Rod was talking about was not end-to-end, but enterprise-to-enterprise (which then extends it intra-enterprise to the end, mostly machines for grid computing). This is accomplished via:
- VPNs with QoS guarantees, perhaps leveraging MPLS at least in the core of the service provider network
- Companies buying near wholesale IP Transit agreements with traffic specific SLAs. Each leverages multi-homing that takes into account the cost of Transit and SLAs for each provider. Or is there an open standard Im missing?
What's not open about this all yet is standardization of tiers of QoS from Layer 3 and up. But layer 2 and down is defined by ANSI (a DS-3 is a DS-3). Or is there something Im missing.
11:18:53 PM
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Pooling Risk is Central There was much talk today about what needed to be centralized vs. decentralized. Fundamentally I believe one thing should be centralized -- risk. When different people or companies have common risks, especially tranaction risks, they should be unbundled and pooled. When risks are unbundled, some can be hedged personally or by a company, mostly operational risks, to which decentralized business architectures offer options.
But credit risks cannot, they have to be pooled. Trust and reputation systems need to be centralized to provide the maximum amount of feedback (credit liquidity), or you miss the default transaction that occured with someone in the periphery that should impact credit ratings. eBay is often used as an example of a decentralized reputation system, but it is in fact centralized and governed. When trust and reputation is centralized, it can be hedged through pooling, and as the pool evolves, market risks can be addressed. Much of Howard R.'s vision requires this, so does the topics of the Beyond the Web Panel and so to will the bulk of the infrastructure discussion tomorrow.
6:16:47 PM
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Broadband Media Distribution/ Can't We All Just Get Along?
- Cory Doctorow, EFF
- Morgan Guenther, Tivo
- Sean Ryan, Listen.com, the one independent licensed music distributor
Cory: 1908 sheet music, Marconi, 50's TV, Disney theme park, 70s and 80s VCR (the boston strangler), 95 DCMA, today digitial TV and Broadcast flag -- all Napsterization examples. Broadcast flag wont work, calling for regulation that restricts in all commodity hardware technologies. Some DRM companies that were already compliant signed off, but no participation by rest of tech. Hollywood with drive regulation through:
- Broadcast flag
- Plugging the analog hole, with a cop chip that embeds watermark
- Darknet, the network of computers and users that find ways around this. Solution is redesign the Internet (70% in US) so every packet is inspected for infingement
So where is the tech industry in fighting this?
Sean: Being a label apologist is like voting for Gray Davis. Service focused, $10/mo gives you two streams of 1/4 m tracks. Moving to greater portability. People want to burn, have music in their life and will pay a little for it. Labels are opening up what they will license to them.
Morgan: Current focus:
- Marketing and Financial execution focus, cash flow positive this quarter.
- Transitioning from consumer focus to being arms supplier for the industry (direct to channel shift). PVRs 40-50% of homes in 5 years.
- Innovation - ads, other media
Channel/partner proposition: Living room real estate -- 7 hours/day., what do you want to do with it?
Cory: SDMI hacked instantly. DRM secures people from breaking into their own computers, keep honest people honest, from broadcast in the home.
Sean: industry understands burns and streams, not downloads. DRM is okay (not too good or too bad). SDMI was a stupid restriction. There is a chip in the VCR over the past 10 years to prevent tape to tape copying, but there are no smart mobs confronting congressmen about it. Industry is licensing content, but not in all forms -- an improvement compared to two years ago. Still trying to compete with free, which is a toughie.
Morgan: overcame copyright restrictions for timeshifting, time stamping and fast forwarding. Battles now are in the home network.
On Fair Use and Freedom of Speech? Little hope
Morgan: we have tech to allow you to create your own channel by slicing and dicing, but its a grey area about if you can use it. A buffer at the end of a pipe. When will Tivo be software-based? A: It will open as a platform. Cable head-end based file serving isnt the future, its at the edge and the edge will open up to content creators as well as consumers. Sony is the big hope for moving media from device to device (Cory: Sony isnt in MP3, but seeded and supported MP3 companies)
P.S...pray for further disintermediation between content producers and consumers (hate that word), remain vigilant and exercise what few civil liberties you have to keep them.
5:54:38 PM
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Collaborative Business Panel
This panel was interesting in that it came accross as Collaborative business being generally more depressed, compared to other areas being discussed. That's because other areas are at the beginning of the adoption lifecycle and the guys on the panel were more immersed with the key customer issues of the day -- fixing leaky pipes.
Collaboration's proposition is that it saves people's time, above the other stuff. Today time isn't that valuable, so you have less innovation and instead are focused on applying existing technology to leaky pipe hard cost savings problems.
- David Weinberger, JOHO
- John Parkinson, CGEY Americas CTO, has spent $1b
- Narry Singh, Commerce One
- John Hagel, Consulting & Author
Collaboration has no meaning unless you are in France where it has a very precise meaning. Lots of collaborative apps: defining best practices, document management, bug databases, open source, eBay, epinions, smart mobs, workflow apps, sales mailing list.
John P -- there is no good collaborative software. 90% of the difference is email, beyond that its hard to find a difference/impact.
John H -- why still bundle activities within enterprises? collaborative still focused on manual data processing and distribution, not enough time left over for real value added collaboration to enhance processes.
Narry -- is the mandate for collaboration at all time high? High tech is increasingly outsourcing. Now one process has many companies, not one company have many processes. Governance, incentive and dispute management is what's missing(Hard part is changing behavor, IMHO), but that's not a lack of technical development
John P -- the successes have been the bottom up developments. Too much diversity for a good answer to arise.
John H -- agrees on governance. Company most advanced in these issues is a Chinese company, LiYungFong(sp?), loosely coupled business practices because of an absence of tech. Now that web services are available they can code, but not be locked in.
Narry -- but connectivity is not collaboration.
David -- top down demands for governance counters the bottom up development
Rheingold -- dont drop the discussion of social aspects. Englebart quote: people use language, artifacts and training, but people focus on the artifacts
John P -- 3 email populations:
- people who know how to use email
- old folks who use others for email
- others that dont get it
Which purposes did the collaboration tools fail in?
John P -- focus has been in KM, cant entice people to get them to use/share.
Narry -- only 5% of collaborative activity is automated. Buying fails in content (semantics) and context management (exceptions) -- where collaboration breaks.
John H -- on problems:
- Structuring relationships -- a business problem
- Coordinating day to day activities around the process itself -- info aint flowing today, tech is a barrier, web services might address this
- Exception handling -- not much time to deal with these issues
Dave Winer -- Yahoo Groups is good. Used Instant Outlining for collaboration.
Joi Ito -- people collaborate because they enjoy it. take a more anthropological view of technology (Joi is right in some respects, although it doesnt apply to leaky pipes -- the real opportunity is making software adapt to people and social networks, not the other way around)
John H -- aggregate IT productivity benefit specific to industries (6 in the McKinsey study, the one who were driven by a single company to change like WalMart)
Phil Wolff -- loose vs. structured? social software and unstructured solutions that are being widely adopted transitioning to structured world?
Narry: you can only structure processes to a certain point and you need service oriented architectures to get the benefit of the technology.
Doc -- we are hacking the shit out of your panel right now. the organic unstructured activity in the audience vs. structured panel. Narry: Maslow's hierarchy of collaboration.
John P -- ERP was largest waste of money undertaken by civilization in two centuries. Narry: formatted data, transaction backbone. Issue is getting ERP to work with heterogeneous data and people.
P.S. -- The Key Issue: people's time isnt valuable right now and the value proposition of collaborative software is saving time. Also great to see Narry again.
5:52:10 PM
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Mitch Kapor Some kinds of centralization is very helpful.
Chandler - open, multi-platform email, calendar & contacts
- Groove serving large enterprises (he is on their board), Chandler can be more P2P and serve differrent markets
- Distinction between clients and servers isnt always clear
- Using Jabber to find others
Great products always focus on the pragmatics while embodying a ideal spirit.
Q&A
- On open source...More successful projects need an internal structure, large companies can also contribute their programmer's time.
- Why not doing something new...Email is the productivity application, its not a small topic. It is something new, but you have to start with what people understand...its an information management platform with a radically different idea behind it. Being able to move from structured to unstructured views and change the structure on the fly. Similar to the semantic web, having the software actually know something. Distributed security built into it from the beginning.
- Glen Flieshman: can you make do with slower links. A: both high and low bandwidth needed. They need a base level of bandwidth and the ability to burst (the most common requirement)
- Q: Mirror worlds and scopeware. Scopeware organizes a pool of information along a time-line. CS professor at Yale: key organizing metaphore was not time, but narrative. A: have timeline interface, its modular, and he is interested in narratives which are not linear in time
- Q: Is this more than an email client? A: see the mission statement. Lesson of Lotus: if something is widely adopted you get enormous leverage. Leading with the application piece while designing the platform at the start. Could build full equivalent of finder/file manager.
- Dave Winer: how does this compare to Lotus in how you relate to your dev team? A: Mitch focuses on front-end and user and depends upon people he respects for back end. More open to new ideas than before, such as from Mitchell Baker for processes for community design. Clearer in his role as a decision maker. Organizational design is so he can be there for years.
- In release 1.0 its not a Blogging tool. Beyond that its possible, open possibilities. Even word processor and spreadsheet.
- Cory: liability of email retention. A: policy management features
- Doc: who has picked upon the project A: resonates with big players, foundation interest, team building
5:43:56 PM
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Panel: Beyond the Web
- Jeremy Allaire
- Mike Helfrich, Groove Networks
- Karl Jacob, Cloudmark
- Doc Searls, Linux World
Intro: web is at its core a centralized client-server application architecture
Karl: P2P Spam. 230k registered users since June. Shift from stove pipe companies (Amazon) to consumer-defined (e.g. Classmates.com emerging from inside the network).
Mike: P2P decentralized Collaboration application. Circumvents the inefficiency of centralized IT. Clusters within the enterprise, rapid formation of teams and supporting applications -- a need in business and in modern government. Adaptive systems -- Social Software. Rich Clients for use in perhpheral infrastructure enviroments. Speed and self-healing. Rich person to person interactions vs. rich person to information.
Doc: Decentralization = N-x architeture. Big companies didnt invent the net, technologists did. Trends start with technologists, not customers (or technocrats for that matter). Self-fulfilling vision of a place: no one owns it, everyone can use it and anybody can improve it. Google is a monopoly, but Technorati adds value. WiFi...Arraycom uses smart antennas for cellular broadband. Internet services we dont have yet but are going to be deployed: IM, identity services. Create the infrastructures that others can build upon.
Panel discussion:
Mike: CIO of DoD recognizes customer determined interoperability (standardization) is key. Great DoD (see post on FCS & Embedding Training) examples of Advanced Distributed Learning using rich clients and institutionalization of knowledge.
Karl: Emergent behavior and network adoption is quicker than you anticipate. Real-time trust evaluation and feedback.
Jeremy: Web not good at Immersive media, multi-user experiences, sophisticated user action
Doc: Email is not a rich experience, but everone needs it.
Marc Canter: HTML is limiting coordinates, time (it is real), media mgmt.
KnowNow: open sourced a component of its architecture
Karl: eBay and Amazon's biggest cost is servers and network, push it to a P2P. What do you open source from these models? Ratings systems?
Mitch: Power of social networks. Military has social set of practices that makes it work just as well as the hierarchy. Makes the same point as my post on Social Software. Community is leadership and guidance that brings people together.
Kevin: the spam problem with open networks? Karl: 99% of the people agree on what is spam, community is self-regulating. Simple rules, complex results. Trust the network. Thinking in the small to define the rules. Large companies could set these kind of rules and then turn it loose. Identity good for centralization, authorization, ratings too.
Karl's points bringsup a big point to me -- elements of a service or relationships or architecture that contain risk should be unbundled and centralized. Centralizing risk allows the pooling of risk. Pooling is in contrast to unbundling risk under centralized control. The analogy is MS's Passport (control) vs. Visa (pooling the risk of banks).
Doc: infrastructures: of the net itself (Vint Cerf, infrastructure is the protocols) vs. application overlays.
Dan Farber: Amazon provides a personal infrastructure. Balance between having a real business vs. creating open innovation is as big a question as De/centralization balance.
Dave Winer: Amazon & eBay opening identity, or a consortium
Standout issues:
+ Again, trust
+ Content production costs for individuals
+ Meta data capture costs
+ Identity
+ Directory
+ Security
5:43:20 PM
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Jeremy Allaire, Macromedia Here via a static-y (thanks to POTS component) webconference.
Access platform on client devices is emerging. 3 Trends:
- rich clients and tranformation of user experience
- web services and distributed data and logic in the network
- momentum for broadband
Rich Clients -- Media rich fomats has evolved, but clients have not. Clients provide:
- rich runtime to provide experience over network
- integrate all forms of media into the runtime itself
- enable a two way or n-way real-time based architecture
Web Services -- Web content APIs are where the innovation is, early manifestations of the semantic web. Granularization of content and application and business data. Full meaning of software as a service is missing from Web service discussion, need the whole product discussion, not just protocols
Broadband -- Q3 growth rates in adoption of avg. of 20% CAGR. WiFi growth. 300 WiFi tech companies.
5:42:24 PM
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Rod Smith, IBM Fascinating to me, but much of IBM's new commodity management model, wasn't understood enough to be explored by the audience. So the focus was from web services to the consumer in the value chain. The missing piece was data commodities to web services.
On Demand
- Responsive in real-time
- Variable cost structures
- Focused on differentiating
- Resilient, Global
Drivers for Next Gen Biz Apps: inter-enterprise, integration & QoS. Coordinating decentralization
Requirements:
- Integrated
- Built on open standards - what's new is standard process is quicker
- Virtualized
- Autonomic
Question of QoS tiers for commoditization. This is not an issue, IMHO -- there are over 150 grades of West Texas Intermediate Crude WTI -- the largest oil commodity contract. I doubt anyone in the room gets commoditization, but they will.
Great questions in the summary slide:
- What if integration costs went to zero?
- What if IT disolves into the fabric of a company?
- What happens when integration decisions happen at <web service> deployment time or connection time... or business contract time?
The real opportunity is accelerating the Innovation-Integration cycle.
Floor questions:
- Tom from UCB asks for examples of web services that delivers business value today. WebBeacons took an internal app and ASPed it to eliminate 15 people who manually proceessed their trucking procurement 3 days to 4 hour turn around time, reduced cost by $1m. e2open, UDDI and SOAP, now up to 600 companies integrated.
- Dave Winer asks about Patents again. IBM has not patented what's in SOAP.
- Follow Marc's question on patents, IBM asks startups they work with to adhere to open standards (which costs them considerably) -- reasonable answers.
- Isen: IBM had the world by the short hairs, but is now relatively decentralized. How do we help Microsoft change like IBM did?
- language change
- connected with customers to get their view of the issues
5:41:46 PM
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Dan'l Lewin, Microsoft This was ugly. Perhaps for good reason, but the Ad Hoc got a little Ad Hominim.
3 phases of the web...
- TCP/IP - Connectivity
- HTML - Presentation
- XML - Programmability
Dartmouth invented timesharing and viewed Amiga as a graphic network client in 81 to allow kids to play Star Trek.
Clusters Define an Era -- enabling tech, spect exuberance, crash, strong build out to come (Juglar infrastructure adoption wave). What's revolutionary is how we swung from server centric (3270 in the 70s) to client-centric (File Sharing, 80s), to server (HTML 90s) -- and now XML era is both, what Dan calls the Empowerment Revolution.
Two key innovations: net & portable decices. Drives new app model. Blocks: xml web services, user experiences (clients + servers + services), and services that span system, geo and other boundries.
Oh goody, here come the questions:
- Marc Canter: will my.Net services be available to smucks like us or only .net subscribers!!!? A: Yes, kind of, if you are a developer with money for us. Schema is not open.
- Dave Winer: Patents? Why trust a convicted monopolist with your identity? A:___
- Third party opportunities? A: Large enterprises, primarily.
- Mitch Ratcliff: the startup question, A: leveraging component assets an opportunity, not devices, not schema.
- Marc: Show leadership to not license the schema! License the runtime.
- Davd Isenberg: Licensed vs. unlicensed -- makes me realize how MS is tantamount to a spectrum license tax for web services.
Dan'l is a great and brave individual for coming here. And this is getting fun.
5:38:20 PM
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Howard Rheingold Howard: "When power is decentralized, new opportunities arise for new types of collective action."
text messaging allows redistribution of memes to the entire phone book in two thumb strokes
characteristics:
- two technologies converging to make a third and distinct, which may even be attractive to segments that didnt even use the other two
- role of young early adopters/adapters
- PC in 80, Net in 90 -- Moores Law and other factors insure technologies evolve in their quantitative power that enable qualitative evolution
Volunteer grid computing (SETI, Protien Folding project) shows quantitative power of collective action. Science is a form of collective action. Decentralization of literacy & printing press enabling scientific and political collective action
Primitive reputation system of eBay (bi-directional nested feedback) works to form collective trust. Markets are a form of collective action (heterarchy is actually a better description). With trust (from 3rd party) I can engage in one-off transactions on the street (ride sharing example).
Location-based services leveraging social network-based reputation ratings. GPS coordinate-based newsgroups. RFID tags enabling information to be inserted into things (this is Saffo's long time ago prediction of unbiquitous sensors).
Available today: UPC bar code reader tied into Google identifies maker, lawsuits, political watchdog groups -- almost like decommoditizing the PR of CPGs.
Having this information changes the way you percieve the world, as well as those you go through the world with.
Political struggles over these technologies (DCMA, etc.) have to do with:
- closed systems trying to remain closure
- who controlls innovation (teenage hackers vs. Disney employees)
From the audience:
- Dave Winer interjects that we are inventing new monopolies (Google, how open a system will it remain, competition in what you can search for),
- someone else interjects the concern of decentralized mob rule -- Howard agrees there are scary aspects of this.
- Cory: We can build collective action, but we are not good at sustaining collective action. H: By short cutting the deliberation process it may negatively effect democracy
- Kevin's early example of collective overload when he included an email address for a ~94 FCC public comments generated 350k reponses
- Democracy by Disclosure book provides cases of how requiring corporate information disclosure leads to better compliance/performance, but collective action differs
- Kevin asks what historical mistakes can be avoided.
The core issue of how this threatens democracy or markets hinges upon how these technologies support existing social networks. If these are simply tools that can flow communication to the 12 closest people to the key political decision maker.
Demographic parallel with baby boomers timed with technology maturity are the big trends that make smart mobbery probable. Age impacts what generation of technology is primarily adopted...its kind of like how your favorite songs are the ones that were playing when you first fell in love...15 year olds are adopting mobile phones and instant messaging...leading to a huge demographic block that expects mobility, presence, and real-time connectiveness.
What I like about Howard's views how he is discovering key themes that may make the world a better place, and its something he obviously cares about. Also, places of political strife are where they need smart mob technology the most, and it just so happens that the lack of terrestrial infrastructure (POTS, CATV) are generating the wireless infrastructure in these places.
5:36:34 PM
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Opening Remarks by Kevin Why Decentralization?
- Scale
- Leverage People
- Networked Computing is becoming a commodity (hear, here!)
Barriers to adopting Decentralization
- Reliability, Security, Manageability
- Reinventing value chains -- the quest for new business models
- Balance openness vs. control
5:35:49 PM
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WiFi Guru Needed Despite the help of a network admin and smart people sitting next to me, I can't connect at Supernova or tell why. Downloading drivers -- but other advice would be appreciated. Couldn't blog the conference live, nor participate in the parallel world. So following are posts from my notes.
5:32:21 PM
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