Brij Singh's Random Musings

Blog versus journalism

Perry de Havilland writes about the growing importance of blogging -

" Much nonsense has been written about blogs replacing "old media journalism." Let me make it clear that blogs are not in direct competition with reporters and the media empires that employ them. We are evolutionizing journalism, not revolutionizing it, because blogs are primarily about opinion, not reporting per se .."

To me this sounds like one of those quotes which come back after 3/4 years to haunt. Yeah right how can anybody make money out of a website? Why would companies do their businesses over the internet ? etc etc.

In the world where the boundary between opinions and news are increasingly getting blurred its just a matter of time before structured grass-root level blogging will replace the "need" to get "news" from organized media.

I am sure I am not alone in saying that there is a great deal of mistrust out there when it comes to trusting the source and intent of news service providers. Murdochs of this world are literally manufacturing the consent. Chomsky saw this danger long time back and Lessig is also warning about the same kind of dangers.

Blog is powerful and revolutionary because I decide where I put my TRUST. Credibility and immediacy go hand in hand with the trust.

Goldmine or the junkyard

Goldmine or the junkyard ?

I think Waste Management equivalent industry can develop to manage and refurb old computers. To me its a classical creativity contest where its upto our imagination to decide how in many new areas components of old computers can be utilized

From Cnet news: Getting rid of old computers has become a major problem in the past few years. Landfills are becoming swamped with plastic cases. Meanwhile, chips and other components often contain hazardous chemicals such as mercury and lead. While some parts can be salvaged, it can cost companies about $85 to $136 to get rid of an old PC, according to some studies.

Semantic blogging

Interesting paper on semantic blogging

"We then assert that certain ideas taken from the semantic web research programme can enrich and extend the blogging paradigm"

Some lessons learned

Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital - Some lessons learned :

1. If we can sell something to a group of people we know, then we can sell it to anyone.
2. the eternal importance of “wow” design
3. importance of agility of teams
4. importance of learning products cycle and sales cycle, to succeed as an entrepreneur.
5. “incredible” power of the word of mouth
6. FOCUS on a particular segment of the market and be the best in that segment
7. Utmost interest in technology

Its easier to retain once you change the lessons into bulleted list.

VCs: Darwin rules tech jungle

Silicon Valley 4.0 (Its quite funny that our geekiness has spread so far that we started versioning silicon valley itself. How desperately we are for the patch version !!)

Usual yada yada of whats to come -

Technology for the home will likely become a huge growth market, Estrin said. Many of the companies that demonstrated products at the conference, such as home server manufacturer Mirra, hope to come up with products and services that will make it easier for consumers to access work and entertainment files.

Embedded computers and sensor networks that will link products and devices into pervasive networks

Moore said that his firm is focusing on several areas, including biological engineering

Judy Estrin's remark is interesting - "Entrepreneurs, she added, might in the next few years be better off trying to bring their ideas to fruition by working for large companies or selling their start-ups to them, rather than aiming for the historically more lucrative IPO."

Study: U.S. gap in higher ed on the rise

Historically US supremacy in higher education area has been its magnet. Policy makers have something to worry about.

Study: U.S. gap in higher ed on the rise

"Human capital is the coin of the realm," it reads. "Educational attainment, measured in terms of the highest degree or level of schooling attained by the adult population, is the international currency used to assess the strength of a country's economy and its standard of living."

Battered company maps strategy for comeback

I wonder what prescription Clayten has for Sun. If Sun has to cannibalize their cash cow in order to be relevant in future then what all businesses they should exit and which business they should focus on. I would bet my money on N1 and come out completely from SPARC and expensive Solaris investments. Leverage software and heavy lifting oriented in-house expertise and do for Linux what IBM and Redhat is doing. As Jewish saying goes there is a time for everything. Now is the time to keep Scott-mouth shut and do the boring stuff. Wait for the next cycle to do tough talking.

Dissecting Sun's misery :

On paper, the N1 plan looks like a solid proposition that builds on the two dominant industry trends: Web services, for easy integration of systems, and utility or on-demand computing, which lessens installation headaches.

Now, all McNealy and Co. need to do is build it.

"At least from a software perspective, I think they have a good story to tell, and they are doing things to be successful," RedMonk's O'Grady said. "Whether they can execute is up in the air, but customers we have spoken to say this is interesting."

Machines Learn to Mimic Speech

Wired magazine ran an article on advances in speech technology. Probably next year I should attend SpeechTek. Will lots of ideas and software components for voiceML project -

Technology that tries hard to understand what humans are saying, and what they are probably attempting to say, was front and center at the show.

Products such as Nuance's "say anything" natural-language applications allow customers to babble blithely to automated customer service call systems and still be understood, thanks to a database that can quickly extract key concepts and infer intent from what speech programmers sometimes bitterly refer to as "freestyle conversations."

"You have no idea how nonsensical and jumbled an average conversation is until you try to code a computer program that can make sense of it," said George Funtello, a speech application programmer who was among the show's attendees.

comments on innovation systems

Its fascinating to read someone's log of their experience in the seminar, from Innovation Summit :

Alex Cirillo, head of 3M Commercial Graphics, said “Growth is an issue [for 3M]: we’re not a home for indigent chemists.” He noted that the famous 3M policy of giving scientists 15% of their time to spend on the project of their choice not only fostered creativity and innovation, it also fostered collaboration and built allegiances by offering an incentive to scientists to work together, and taking away reasons to say 'no' to other people's projects. Some 3M innovation metrics:

30/4 rule: 30% of the products currently being sold were introduced within the last four years.
2X/3X – Come up with twice as many workable ideas, and three times as many product inventions in the field.

Terabytes, Petabytes and Metadata

Insightful essay contributing to the metadata debate -

Disk capacities double every year, and thus within a decade or so we will be seeing commodity 200 terabyte disks in home PC's. That is an enormous amount of data: by comparison, the entire contents of the United States Library of Congress requires something around a tenth of that, around 20 terabytes, give or take a few hundred gigs. (It's somewhat humbling to think that a person's lifework, say, the collected works of Shakespeare, can easily fit on a floppy disk.)

Put a different way, in 200 terabytes one can store the entire accumulated knowledge of the human race with much more than half the disk to spare.

and comments on this essay.