|
Sunday, August 31, 2008 |
|
|
Greenland 2008
|
|
|
Saturday, August 30, 2008 |
|
|
Greenland - Part 3 (The conference)
Brian Pedersen kicked off the conference by describing how the Tele-Post vision of a "Global Greenland" continues but the mission is changing from “communication without borders” to "a global Greenland - in the middle of the world". He said the submarine cable would put Greenland on the net in a way that creates Safarissoq -- the name for the part of a stream where the speed accelerates. The result he said will be to strengthen the economy of the country and create new jobs. Flemming Jensen then took the stage in his tuxedo and began an eloquent speech. It was in Danish and I did not understand a word of it but people began to laugh. At first I thought he was just a good speaker with some added humor but by the time the audience was nearly rolling on the floor in laughter I realized he was something much more. I later found out he is an actor, director, and comedian from Copenhagen. His multiple appearances on stage added a great deal to the conference. Jesper Refiner had the toughest job at the conference. He was responsible for the overall program including the roles, rules, logistics, flow, support and administration. He did not a marvelous job of coordination and only one person let him down. A translator had been hired to enable non-Danish speaking attendees (like me) to listen through headsets. The headsets were available but due to ideal hunting conditions in the North and labor rules to the left, the translator called in "sick". I believe my wife and I were the only ones of 250 attendees that only understand one language, so although we enjoyed meeting many new friends and speaking with them in English, the conference was 99% in Danish. Preben Mejer, a founder and distinguished technologist of innovationlab, set the technical stage with a broad view of consumers on the net to 3D printing to intelligent band aids. After lunch, yours truly gave a talk (unfortunately I could not do it in Danish) about "The Future of the Internet". I won't repeat my key messages which can be found throughout this blog. In a short TV interview afterward a reporter asked what impact the emergence of broadband in Greenland would have on the "remote" areas of the country. As she asked the question it came to me that the impact will be that there will be no such thing as "remote". A great idea from any part of Greenland will be shared with the rest of the world and vice versa. Tom Friedman had it right -- the world is flat. Speaking of broadband, Lars Tofft -- president of Ericsson Denmark -- drilled down on what broadband is all about. He painted a vision of mobile broadband being much faster in the not too distant future than wired broadband is today. This will open up the possibilities that Preben and I had outlined earlier. Like the other presenters, I could not understand the words they said but I could tell from the slides that all the speakers were all on the same page. Day 2 focused on applications: e-Home, e-Health, e-Ducation, e-Citizen, and e-Trade. The speakers were all superb and then there were buses to take people to local venus such as the hospital to see the applications in action. Søren Duus Østergaard from IBM Denmark did an excellent job of summarizing the day in his blog. Throughout the conference there were demonstrations in the lobby of the Katuaq cultural center and the public was invited to visit. There were crowds throughout both days right up to the end. There were many school children who visited and they loved seeing and holding the Pleo baby dinosaur. One of the other big draws was 3D printing. It was amazing to see a nice vase "printed" each few hours. The most impressive demo to me was the haptic feedback device. It is a bit hard to describe -- one of those tings you need to "feel" to believe. You move the hand-held cursor over a "rough" object and you can "feel" it in the device you are holding on to. A lady described how she was planning to sell seal skin purses on the web by allowing people to be able to "feel" the texture of the skin on-line. The potential for engineering collaboration is quite evident. The flight from Nuuk to Keflavik on the way home was uneventful and followed by a 45 minute ride to downtown Reykjavik. Unfortunately it was cold and raining but it was still a nice walk around the harbor and the city. Dinner at Laekjarkrekka was outstanding. I added it as a five-star in the favorites. The flight back to JFK was followed by a short flight to Mt. Pocono and then a half-hour drive back to the lake. It was nice to get back but we have fond memories of new friends and a place we had never before visited.
Favorites , Internet Technology , Mobile , Travels August 30, 2008 04:28 PM |
|
|
Thursday, August 28, 2008 |
|
|
Greenland - Part 2 (A unique place)
Vikings reached the island in the 10th century from Iceland and Danish colonization began in the 18th century. Greenland was made an integral part of Denmark in 1953 and joined the EU in 1973, but withdrew in 1985 in a dispute over fishing quotas. Greenland was granted self-government in 1979 although Denmark continues to exercise control of Greenland's foreign affairs in consultation with Greenland's Home Rule Government. A vote by the people is coming up shortly to determine if Greenland should become a fully independent country. It would be presumptuous of me to say I know the Greenlandic people, but I can say from what I saw on the flight from Iceland and around the area of downtown Nuuk, that the Inuit people are attractive, hopeful, and very self-sufficient. Like all counties there are those that are dependent on the government but in Greenland it seems most people can live happily from the bounty of the land. Greenland is slightly more than three times the size of Texas and is very rich in natural resources including coal, iron ore, lead, zinc, molybdenum, diamonds, gold, platinum, niobium, tantalite, uranium and, of course, fish, seals, and whales. Hydropower is also natural and there is the possibility of oil and gas. A priority is the protection of the arctic environment and the Inuit traditional way of life, including whaling and seal hunting. Internet connectivity in Greenland is via satellite. It works but is not very fast and not always reliable. The new submarine cable, currently being laid at the bottom of the ocean, will include four strands of glass, well protected in a multi-layer set of metal and petrol based materials to allow it to buried three feet below the bottom of the ocean -- in some areas as deep as 10,000 feet below the surface. The four glass fibers will have a capacity of 2 terabits per second. Compared to what the country of Greenland has today this will be a nearly infinite jump. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the potential that the increased bandwidth will offer. More on that to come. There are some pictures in the photo gallery. As usual, I have to confess that I am not a very good photographer. The iPhone takes pretty good pictures in good sunlight but unfortunately we did not have any of that during the trip. Greenland is a beautiful place and hopefully some of the pictures will at least give a clue.
Internet Technology , Travels , iPhone August 28, 2008 10:23 AM |
|
|
Wednesday, August 20, 2008 |
|
|
Greenland - Part 1 (Getting there)
Other than normal late departure from JFK, Icelandair's Boeing 757 made the flight to Reykjavik, Iceland in just six hours. After a three hour layover we boarded the 38 passenger Dash 8 twin-engine turboprop for a three and a half flight to Nuuk, Greenland. The flight was uneventful for the first three hours when the pilot then announced that the Nuuk Airport was closed due to high winds and heavy rain and that we would be diverting to Kangerlussuaq (also known as Sondre Stromfjord and one of four airports in Greenland) for a refueling to enable us to make a second attempt for an approach to Nuuk. The Kangerlussuaq airport was interesting in that there did not appear to be any roads in the vicinity. One of the Greenlandic passengers told me that the main purpose of the airport was to accommodate flights that are unable to land at Nuuk. There were eight planes there waiting to head for Nuuk. (I later learned that there are not many roads in all of Greenland). We were the first flight to finish refueling and depart for Nuuk. After an hour of flight we entered a holding pattern and the pilot told us he was hoping to get an opening in the clouds and more importantly a break in the winds so that he could attempt a landing. Being a pilot myself I have experienced landing in high winds and even extreme cross-winds but never before have I experienced winds like those at Nuuk. The pilot told me the winds had been 68 knots but they had subsided to 48 knots when he decided to make the landing. The buffeting was tremendous and once the Dash 8 was on the ground and had reached a full stop it felt as though the plane was still flying. People in Nuuk say that Greenlandic pilots are the best in the world because they constantly experience adverse conditions and are always on their toes. I was quite impressed with their skills and calm. We were met at the airport by Anders Læsøe who is VP of Business Development at Tele Greenland. Tele was the host for the Sarfarissoq -- En Rejsei Fremtiden, a conference about the future of technology. More to say about that in the next posting. Nuuk (known as Godthåb in Danish) is the capital and largest city of Greenland. It is located at the mouth of a very large fjord called Nuup Kangerlua on the west coast of Greenland, about 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle (and 2,300 miles from home). The population of Nuuk is roughly 15,000 or 40% of the entire country. Approximately 80% of the population were born in Greenland. There were some exciting things at the conference that I will describe shortly -- I learned a lot and met many new friends. There is a very big and special thing happening for the people of Greenland. You can get a preview in the following video.
|
|
|
Saturday, August 16, 2008 |
|
|
Supernova 2008 - Part 6 (final)
This will be my final comments about things I learned at Supernova 2008 in June. The prior comments are all in the conference section of patrickWeb. A "People" panel was moderated by BJ Fogg, whom I first met when he presented YackPack at Demo a few years ago. The research shows that people are endlessly creative, that the majority of most people's time is spent offline, and that there are very large differences between the skills people have in using the Internet. There is a correlation between skill level and willingness to share -- the more people know about the Internet the more likely they are to share what they know. Some argued that the skill level is a function of priority given. I am certain of that point. I know many people who could be web savvy if they wanted to be but they would rather play golf or work in the garden. Nothing wrong with that. There is a social technographics ladder that includes people who are inactive, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, and creators. Some postulated that user background is related to digital media savvy but that it is not an age thing. Another study however showed a very strong correlation between age and these various categories. The study would suggest that at my age I should be technologically inactive! I guess I just don't fit the mold. Social information discovery is a relatively new term but the phenomenon has been around from the beginnings of the Internet -- you can ask a question and get a lot of people to answer. Sharing today is still done mostly in email which puts high social activation energy on the sender but social networks are changing this. We will share a lot more in the future. Social sites are causing an evolution to the entire web becoming social. User generated content used to be something you go to a site to do like epinions.com or or ticketmaster to find out what people are saying. The problem is that you don't know the people who are making the comments. In the emerging social web you can see what your friends and colleagues think or what they are doing or what the friends of your friends think about restaurant, book, or movie. It is much more relevant. There are a number of inhibitors to social networks reaching their potential. Our identity is too fragmented -- logins and passwords galore. We have profiles here, there, and everywhere. Applications are incompatible among the various social networks. I am optimistic that this will all come together in a way that meets our security and privacy expectations. The short answer to these concerns is the evolution of standards. OpenID is trying to create a single identification that you can use at any web site. Oauth is an emerging approach for authentication so that you can allow access for a web site to get information about you from another web site but only certain information you have authorized, not all the information. OpenSocial is developing an approach to allow a Facebook application to work at MySpace or any other social network. Google Friend Connect is attempting to bring all three of these together into a social web. Although I remain optimistic about the concerns, a panel on "Privacy and Security in the Network Age" with Moderator Andrea Matwyshyn (Wharton), Bruce Schneier (BT Counterpane), Fran Maier (TrustE), Gerard Lewis (Comcast), and Lauren Gelman (Stanford CIS) dug into some of the stark realities. They attempted to answer the question of whether we are entering an era where individuals gain new control over their public personas, and powerful means to leverage reputations or will we be forced to abandon any hope of protecting our privacy and trusting what we encounter online? Although he claimed to be optimistic, Bruce Schneier, a world renowned expert on privacy, was actually quite gloomy. Everything we do creates a transaction record and the resulting data records have value to others. Storage costs online are now so cheap, nothing gets thrown away. Google, your wireless provider, your healthcare insurance company, etc. all save every piece of data about you and what you do or look for. The trend will accelerate. There are many invasive technologies out there -- surveillance video cameras will be so small in the future that we won't know they are there. Our every movement will be captured. Soon we will be living in a world where no conversation will be private. While some frame the debate as security vs privacy, Bruce framed it as liberty versus control and said that "data is the pollution of the information age". In spite of these pronouncements, the experts are short term pessimistic but long term optimistic. Me too. The government may be watching us but we can watch them too. The final session I attended was about Broadband Policy. The United States now ranks 15th in the world in terms of availability of broadband to consumers. We had a discussion about what we would do about it if we became policy advisor to the new president. We came up with the following. A lot of us suggested getting rid of the FCC. It's an ineffective political entity. Other suggestions were to map the gaps where infrastructure and users are and are not, take spectrum policy and flush it, take on universal service and revamp it to focus on broadband instead of pay phones, Un-ban municipal wireless broadband, and benchmark the US against other countries. There are some good things happening such as Verizon's deployment of optical fiber but overall there is not enough competition and there are too many lobbyists seeking protection for large telecommunications companies. When I spoke at the World Wide Web conference in Paris in 1994 the U.S. was the Internet leader. France was skeptical to be kind. Today France is enabling WiFi throughout the country and partnering with utility companies to offer broadband at 100 times the speed of what the U.S. telcos define as broadband. I would like to be more optimistic on this front but I do not know of another industry (telecommunications providers) that have so many lobbyists urging protection and so many customers who are locked into services that they don't like. Conferences , Internet Technology , People , Public Policy , WiFi August 16, 2008 11:15 AM |
|
|
Sunday, August 10, 2008 |
|
|
IBM Happenings: July 2008
Cloud computing will become more and more pervasive in the news over the next few years. So far it has been mostly consumer facing activity such as what Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple, and others are doing, but behind the scenes IBM is investing heavily. The clouds that IBM operates are more enterprise, education, and research oriented. The company is
spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create two ultra-sophisticated data
centers that will power the cloud computing model that in turn will enable large institutions to offer their clouds to their customers. Another way to say it is that IBM is creating a cloud of clouds.
IBM is also providing advanced new server hardware to enable others to build clouds. Microsoft is among the first to implement IBM's iDataPlex system, a new category of server that brings supercomputing power to cloud environments. IBM is also going green -- the latest Supercomputing Green 500 List shows that 39 of the top 40 systems ranked on supercomputing energy efficiency
are IBM-based. The company is designing technologies to cut energy use in half by 2010, while increasing computing capacity by a factor of 10. On the people front, IBM's new Corporate Service Corps program is getting some well deserved headlines. A software-development manager from IBM's Raleigh, North Caroline office spent July in Timisoara, Romania, where he helped a furniture manufacturer become more efficient and more computer-savvy -- offering his expertise for free. With Mr. Chakra in Timisoara were eight IBM colleagues from five countries. Each was assigned to help a different company or non-profit organization, sharing their experience and cultural backgrounds with the local staffs and one another. It is analogous to the Peace Corps. In the short term there is a lot of skills transfer but in the long term IBM gains a foothold in emerging markets and the assignees gain a tremendous breadth of experience which prepares them for key roles as the company continues to grow as a global leader.
|
This was my first trip to Greenland and Iceland. I have been fortunate to visit many countries around the world but have never been to these two unique places. Thanks to 
The 
Thoughts about the conference to follow shortly, but since 
The security line after checking in at 
