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FaceBook at Five Percent

by Andrew McCaskey
FIve Percent of Internet Time

The CommScore announcement that Facebook now consumes five percent of the time that Americans spend online is not surprising. The fact that Farmville turnips wither and die if they are not watered each day by a returning player is going to insure that there are sixty million people who return. Add in the hundreds of thousands of Baby Boomers who discover Facebook each day, and the multiplication of Fan Pages. And the amount of minutes multiplies like.. well, rabbits in Farmville.

All of that lurks somewhere between interesting and profound. If you are a casual observer of trends, the interesting part makes sense. And if you are a part of the traditional media, particularly television it could easily havea a profound impact on your business livelihood. Simply put, neither virtual farmers, baby boomers or just about anyone else are holding up their end of the bargain. Other than the rapidly aging out populations over 65 that never made the transition, television viewership continues to drop in favor of smaller screens.

Five percent is not much. But as the maxim goes, 5% of something beats 100% of nothing every time.

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Electronic Frontier Foundation

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Production Schedule Change

by Andrew McCaskey
Some changes in the production schedule for SDRNews are going to take the program to three days a week for the next few weeks, as well as some holiday scheduling. Part of the plan is preparation for the coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show, and part of the plan is a change in the business model.

I’ll be sharing parts of the upgrades and information on the Facebook Fan page for SDRNews, and looking forward to your comments there.

On CES, we have some really exciting news : The TPN field team has been invited to produce a portion of our CES coverage live from the NBC-Universal booth on two days during the CES Show. As more details become available, we will be certain to share. Also, the Geek News Central 24 hour podcast is coming up this weekend December 12, and we’ll have some more CES related announcements at that time as well.

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Twoddler: Twittering Toddlers from Bart Swennen on Vimeo.

Twoddler

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ChromeOS a Narrow Hit

by Andrew McCaskey
But Not the Mass Market

With all the discussion on Google’s Chrome OS – I think that this first set of devices is going to hit a portion of the mobile professional market, but is going to miss the mass market. Two reasons: Price and Familiarity. A true mass market is going to take several years to develop, and mid America is going to continue to vacuum up replacements from the Walmart, Sam’s and Best Buy channels to gradually replace their aging WindowsXP systems, and they are going to do that with the familiar, not with the evolutionary.

A very large segment of the population has just moved in to computer literacy and are at the stage where the ability to function in Microsoft Word and Excel are proudly hard won skills. While many of us with technical skills and early adopter attention spans are freely moving to Windows7 ,OSX or the latest Ubuntu distro, many people have only recently climbed on to XP. Even though Chrome is the logical choice (considering the amount of work that is actually done outside of a browser), the ability to toss in a game from the Walmart discount bin for the kids or to have one of the teenagers in the house stock up an iPod with iTunes is going to be a killer if it does not work on the next PC as well as it has on the one that’s five or six years old and being replaced.

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Zeppelin by Renault

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Dual Urban Time Bombs

by Andrew McCaskey
There are two types of urban time bombs that were bought to the foreground by the story this week from the Washington DC area – when a single failure in a 1970′s vintage computer system took out 750 traffic lights and, for at least two days, threw the lights of Montgomery Country Maryland into un-synchronized chaos.

First, it’s hard to imagine that there was a conscious design choice made that put that into a single point of failure mode. Probably the system had been extended, patched and add-on over the years so that it would have been almost impossible not to have this incident some day. There have got to be a number of similar embedded systems throughout the country with exactly the same set of potential issues and failure potential. The second problem more easily overlooked is the fact that those who designed, installed and maintained those systems are either gone or headed out the door, as retirements. Even a young engineer of the 1970′s is headed into retirement or a second career – and has little or no interest in going back to the days of relays, ladder logic and dedicated controllers. Unlike COBOL skills, there are not too many places to keep those sorts of electrical, mechanical and discrete logic skills alive. That’s the second time bomb. Ticking away even faster than the first. After all, the hardware was pretty solid. Must have had some good designers.

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Zyxio Breath Control System

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Speaking Radio, Data and Telephone

by Andrew McCaskey
Speaking Radio and Telephone

The recent problems and the virtual collapse of the AT&T network from overload congestion with iPhone data traffic has received a lot of press. Now, some hope that the problem may not be as serious as thought: although someone will end up with some serious explaining to do. It appears that at last some of the problems may be due to misconfiguration of routers in the AT&T network.

The problem is in the cross disciplinary nature of the beast. A telephone company has to employ radio in a data networking problem. In addition to the organizational challenges, there’s a cultural one as well. I’ve observed each of the three worlds up close (adding maybe a fourth one with broadcast engineers) and there is absolutely a total difference in vocabulary, approach, standards and expectations.

The wireline engineers in control of some of the settings that put “maximum buffering” into the system – resulting in ping times up to eight seconds. What should have happened is much smaller buffers that would allow short term blockage to occur and then prompt temporary but automatic fallback in speed that would have removed the congestion. Add in radio effects of jitter with mobiles in motion, and it’s a wonder the system ever settles in as well as it does.

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Sean Parker’s Web 2.0 Summit Presentation

New Era of Network Service

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Verizon Bets Motorola

by Andrew McCaskey
In the Droid

The current Verizon campaign is one that is certainly going to win some creativity awards in the advertising business. Whether or not it sells phones remains to be seen. It may have, in the words of the BoyGenius Report been sufficient to scare small children.

How much does novelty and notoriety sell ? It may be that Verizon knows their audience very, very well – and that this approach is sufficient to attract younger customers onto their first smartphone platform. It might well be that the anti-iphone is just what the doctor ordered for that marketplace. If parents have Blackberry or iPhone, then a phone with coolness factor, optimized for texting with friends but with the programability to add apps as they move from one fad to the next might be a winner.

Verizon will have to be very careful. If they begin to restrict apps or cripple the Android platform there are plenty of other carriers that might be able to step in with even cooler hardware. If the Android performance begins to suffer as apps are added or the network starts to get overloaded, Verizon may find itself in the same boat as AT&T.

Motorola ? Motorola has so much riding on the success of this phone that a market stumble by Verizon – for all it’s success in years past- could approach a fatal error. It’s like watching someone at the Blackjack table playing your last house payment. You know he’s good but if the cards aren’t counted right, your house is the one that goes. {sharethis}

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Gyroscope Bike

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HP SuperDome – Amazon Mode

by Andrew McCaskey
Scalability Rules

The HP Tech Day had some deep dive content that kept a number of the invited guests busy – for example, Ben Rockwood http://www.cuddletech.com/blog wanted to dispense with the GUI’s, spend the day on the command line and with ample supplies of coffee get to the bottom of all this.

Since I’m not a professional IT admin, that had a little less appeal – although to be honest, I was able to follow the demos at the command line as well or better than the GUI based ones – I think simply because it was in smaller chunks.

What I did get from Richard Warham’s talk on Adaptive Infrastructure was a sense of how HP has implemented the scalability of resources for front end, middleware, and back end database processing and how a cleverly set up SuperDome system with multiple cells, processors and memory can flex with demand, order level, web traffic and database calls dynamically. Old school “more blades” thinking reminds me of Scotty on Star Trek, throwing in more crystals and hoping that it holds together through the attack. The new scalable resources mode seems a lot more elegant.

The other connection made for me was the similarity to Amazon’s EC2 cloud based service – exactly the same notion of allowing developers to have a variety of images or templates for highly tweaked configurations – to be called up at will – allowing production and dev sites to be resident on the same hardware.

The final wrap-up with the business case from John Pickett told about a customer that had 30 different OS variants/patch levels/versions deployed – each reduced into an image template that salvaged original investment in code – but allowed the savings in energy costs and maintainability.

The difference, though in responsiveness and control and speed has got to be major. As soon as we can get the videos posted, I think you’ll learn a lot, even if IT is not your career field.

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Google Wave Tutorial

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HD Radio Tries Again

by Andrew McCaskey
Let’s See How You Add This Up

CBS Radio has announced that they will be adding an HDRadio channel in four markets – Chicago, NY, LA and San Francisico – programmed with material developed by Last.fm. All of this by mid-October.

If the traffic levels that we have seen at the last four CES shows are any indicator, this is a snoozer of the first order. HDRadio is quickly on the track of BluRay as far as expensive, un-needed and manufacturer driven, in the face of streaming audio, mp3, and web based streaming with connectivity that’s on the way from outlets like Last.fm, Stitcher, and Pandora.

It’s better than the current fare – but the whole thing is about choice -successfully pushing the content and business model in another direction is pretty unlikely. Just watch Sirius-XM and see how that works.

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Google Listen Not the Podcaster’s Friend

by Andrew McCaskey
May Not Be the Podcaster’s Friend

Right now, the experiment is limited to the Android platform on T-mobile – but if the Google Listen project in Google Labs broadens to the iPhone, it might not be the best news for Podcasters.

The way the system appears to work, a user puts in a keyword or keywords, and there is a search for recent podcast episodes that contain the word. Apparently this is a result of a Google more or less realtime transcript service that moves the audio into written, indexed and therefore searchable form. Google Listen then gives the listener a group of podcasts that contain that episode, and begins to play.

The good news for the podcaster ? Thousands of additional listeners for that episode with the keyword. The bad news ? One download, pulled into the Google system and then pushed out in the Audio stream.

Plus, and unanswered question: If say 50 podcasts have the keyword, which podcast gets the pole position ? First in the queue adds another dimension to paid adwords, the keyword pay per click.

It’s early to say what’s going to happen, but there are a lot of podcasters watching. {sharethis}

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Hide Cable Clutter

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Microsoft Has Peaked

by Andrew McCaskey
Microsoft Has Peaked

It might be thirty years more before the end, but Microsoft has peaked. The article today in the MIT Technology Review (An OS Built for the Cloud) had, about three pages it, the most revealing sentence of them all:
“Paul Maritz, chief executive of VMware, who was once the Microsoft executive in charge of the operating system. By and large, he has noted, “people are no longer writing traditional Windows applications.”

For all of the discussion on the timing of the Chrome OS, the competition from Google in the App space, the rise of netbooks, mobile phones, and cloud operations – this one sentence will, over the long term spell the end of the Microsoft era of domination.

It is interesting to note that of all the Microsoft products, Sharepoint is the strongest business. Why ? because it provides enterprise customers with a “safe” way to allow their users to have walled garden experience that replicates the cloud based apps such as blogs, wikis, IM and microblogging that are available for free outside of the Microsoft bubble. This is going to be the future of Microsoft, as long as they can keep people inside the walled garden.

The MIT article went on to say, as impossible as it might sound today, had you said in 1970 that ATT was doomed to be a shadow of its former self in 30 years, you’d have gotten some strange looks as well.

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Cheap Multi-Touch Surface

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