Cognitive Surplus

For all the talk of disruptive technology in the publishing and media worlds, it isn’t easy to be an optimist these days. But it’s hard not to notice that Clay Shirky, one of the digital age’s most original, engaged thinkers, is remarkably sanguine about the prospects of new media-especially for a man so immersed in discussing its problems.

Cognitive Surplus, the new book by internet guru Clay Shirky, begins with a brilliant analogy. He starts with a description of London in the 1720s, when the city was in the midst of a gin binge. A flood of new arrivals from the countryside meant the metropolis was crowded, filthy, and violent. As a result, people sought out the anesthesia of alcohol as they tried to collectively forget the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

For Shirky, the gin craze of 18^th-century London is an example of what happens when societies undergo abrupt changes, such as the shift from rural agriculture to urban factories. Life becomes a bewildering struggle, and so we self-medicate the struggle away. But Shirky isn’t a historian, and this isn’t a history book. Instead, he’s trying to grapple with our future. As he notes, the second half of the 20th century has been defined by a similarly difficult social transition, as we move into a post-industrialized world characterized by the incessant flow of information.

So what has been our gin? Shirky’s answer is simple, perhaps too simple. He argues that the television sitcom-those comic soap operas that saturated the airwaves for decades-was the alcohol of post-war societies, “absorbing the lion’s share of the free time available to the developed world.”

Clay Shirky looks at “cognitive surplus” — the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we’re busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we’re building a better, more cooperative world.

Clay Shirky believes that new technologies enabling loose ­collaboration - and taking advantage of “spare” brainpower - will change the way society works.

Clay Shirky’s work focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting. In his writings and speeches he has argued that “a group is its own worst enemy.” His clients have included Nokia, the Library of Congress and the BBC.

They’re online, prowling the world wide web. Shirky describes this shift in media consumption as a net “cognitive surplus,” since our brain is no longer mesmerized by the boob tube. Needless to say, he describes this surplus as a wonderful opportunity, a chance to get back some of the productive social interactions that were lost when we all decided to watch TV alone. And when this new pool of free time is combined with the internet-a tool that enables strangers all across the world to connect with each other-the end result is a potentially vast new source of productivity. “The wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource,” Shirky writes. Furthermore, the web allows people to “design new kinds of participation and sharing that take advantage of that resource.”

In 2000, following “an intuition that the internet was turning social“, Shirky turned to the fledgling phenomenon of online social networking - an obscure concept back then, but which has since evolved into MySpace, Facebook and Twitter to become the web’s primary purpose for billions of people all over the world.

Internet enthusiasts come in two flavors: utopians and populists. The rhetoric of both camps is revolutionary, but the revolutions are different.

Utopians believe that the Internet provides promising new solutions to our most intractable problems. With enough tweets, all global bugs-war, poverty, illiteracy, fascism-can be quashed.

Populists promise no such lofty goals. They see the profound social confusion sown by the Internet as a historic opportunity to snatch power from elites and their institutions and redistribute it more evenly among netizens, the ordinary citizens who have been empowered by the Internet. Like the participatory democrats of earlier eras, the populists want a more direct democracy, and they think that most social institutions, from the traditional media to political organizations, are unnecessary ballast.

Shirky now teaches new media at New York University, and in 2008 published his first book, Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together, which celebrated individuals’ new power to communicate, organise and change the world via the web.

His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned - and so it came to pass.

* NB: Lets watching PC-TV, the New era From TV to PC

Virtualization Technology in The Clouds

Virtualization technology is most popular in the server world, virtualization technology is also being used in data storage such as Storage Area Networks. Virtualization allows users to consolidate physical resources, simplify deployment and administration, and reduce power and cooling requirements.

In the virtualization or clouds era, people should Forget the desktop. The future of computing is in your browser. Now, the convergence of the next set of things are going to impact the Web, which the cloud and mobile are changing the structure of the Web and therefore the vantage point–the browser–as your gateway. But the architecture of a mobile client coupled with a big back end in the cloud applied to the desktop is changing everything as well. Because browsers I think generally are becoming thinner and lighter at the core with the extensibility that we talked about before around the Mozilla.

Now it’s the browser on whatever device it might be. It might be your mobile handset. It might be your PC. It might be your Apple, your Mac. But in all cases you have a lot of flexibility now to connect to a gigantic computing resource. So if you think about what the desktop was and is still to some extent today as a foundation of what the browser–the use case–what the browser will displace. So on a typical, let’s say, a PC platform that the largest volume application probably is Microsoft Office. So what do you have in there? You have an e-mail client. You have a word processing package. You have a way to make presentations or documents. You have a contact manager, calendaring device.

If you think about what a browser is in the new world that might in the browser case be a tabbed browser where you can click on one click like you would click on Microsoft Office to open it. With one click now under a group tab you can open up a spreadsheet, like, you know, Google’s  spreadsheet or Google Docs. Or, you know, word processing or a calendar. All those things now come with one click on a Web interface that used to be a multi-hundred dollar, thousand dollar software package per unit from Microsoft. So it’s going to be a different world.

Cloud Computing Grows Up

In 2009, the cloud went from a vague concept to a must-have technology. It’s always fun to watch the emergence of new IT trends and how quickly concepts and products evolve in the early stages. Never was this truer than with cloud computing and what the industry witnessed around its evolution. Over the past year, cloud computing has captured significant attention of CEOs, CIOs and IT personnel alike, as businesses began to investigate the value of moving certain workloads to a cloud model. Facing mounting pressures to provide better services quickly, while reducing costs, many IT decision makers found the economics and capabilities of cloud compelling. Here are a few significant highlights:

1. Private clouds get a seat at the table.

Over the past year, companies from markets ranging from financial services to retail executed proofs of concepts and pilots of both public and private clouds. This wide-spread experimentation has matured the usage of private clouds, and in many cases, has become the primary focus for most enterprises. In fact, based on IBM research, we know that a private cloud is more likely to be seen as appealing to clients than public clouds (64% vs. 30%.) Private clouds take the concepts and technologies leveraged by large cloud-based service providers, and applies them to internal data centers. This entails pooling of resources, leveraging virtualization and delivering IT services via dynamic provisioning and a self-service portal.

The results of a private cloud model are astonishing. For workloads such as pre-production test systems, clients of IBM have seen eight-month return on investments and have cut overall IT expenses by up to 60%. Much of these savings comes from improved utilization of resources brought about by virtualization and resource pooling. But the real advantage of cloud comes in labor savings. A well-defined private cloud can deliver certain IT services for 20% or less of the labor required in traditional IT delivery models.

2. The “opening” of the cloud.

Most cloud service providers had proprietary interfaces for requesting resources and/or running on their cloud infrastructure. This has changed over the course of the year, especially with the concepts of open standards and open source emerging as vitally important to the success and stability of cloud computing.

A key event in the opening of the cloud was the publishing of the Open Cloud Manifesto in March 2009. The purpose of the manifesto was to spell out the key elements of an open system and to push for these elements to be present in the emerging world of cloud computing.

The Open Cloud Manifesto stresses the following:

–Cloud vendors should work together to define open solutions to address cloud challenges like security, integration and interoperability.

–Cloud providers should not use their market position to create vendor lock-in.

–Cloud vendors should embrace existing standards where they apply, and work together to create new standards where required.

–Cloud community efforts should always be customer-driven.

–Cloud standards groups need to stay coordinated to ensure there are not competing open standards in this emerging area.

Since the introduction of the manifesto and its associated Web site, there are now close to 300 supporters of the initiative.

This is only the beginning. There are now numerous efforts underway to standardize on key elements of the cloud computing model–APIs, data formats and protocols, for example. The Web site reveals an impressive list of efforts currently underway.

3. Public clouds are ready for the enterprise.

The evolution of cloud computing is somewhat reminiscent of the dawning of the Internet age back in the ’90s. Remember when we all said we would never put our credit card numbers on the Internet? Well, those days are long gone; most of us have several Web vendors with whom we entrust our personal information, because online security has matured.

Cloud computing is following a similar path. Although few are ready to move mission-critical or sensitive applications to the cloud, enterprises are starting to embrace public cloud service providers as part of their overall IT strategy. Public clouds offer the opportunity to offload certain workloads from the enterprise data center ,creating flexibility in space utilization, people utilization and capital utilization.

Today, the workloads moving to the public cloud include pre-production systems, collaboration software, batch analytics and virtual desktop images. As the security and reliability guarantees of public cloud service providers improve, more workloads will be ready for this type of outsourcing. IBM, for example, is focused on providing the same level of SLA assurances that enterprises hold themselves to. It won’t be long before we start seeing production and other mission-critical workloads out on the public cloud.

This year was a key year for cloud computing. At the beginning of 2009, most of the discussion around cloud was definitional in nature: What is cloud and how can it help me? By year end, much has changed; most of the discussion is around economics and how best to leverage cloud computing technologies.

Virtualization Versus the Cloud

A new layer of software, typically running in a far-off data center, tricks users into thinking they are using a desktop PC like before. It used to be that something virtual wasn’t real. And that clouds were just that–those puffy things in the sky. Today we have the tech industry terms “virtual computing” and “cloud computing,” which often get mixed up. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to tell them apart, and it involves hearkening back to the age-old distinction between hardware and software. When you’re talking about virtual computing, you’re invariably talking about hardware; specifically, making PC-style hardware available to users in a new way. A new layer of software, typically running in a far-off data center, tricks users into thinking they are using a desktop PC like before.

Cloud computing, by contrast, usually refers to the sorts of software that run once a computer gets turned on. The “cloud” indicates that the software is hosted in a data center, not sitting on your desktop. If you use Google Docs instead of Microsoft Office for your word processing or spreadsheets, that’s cloud computing. You can mix and match these two approaches, undertaking cloud computing on a nonvirtual, traditional PC. And the opposite: You can use traditional, Office-style programs on a virtual PC.

Not Everything Will Move To The Cloud

Some applications will be better off running on internal networks. So what better place to look at how data management is changing? Forbes caught up with John Engates, Rackspace’s chief technology officer, to talk about the evolution and where things are likely to go in the future.

We started with Linux servers. Windows came later for us. Today what’s different is that we do it for much larger customers and we manage a much broader set of applications. For all of them we manage up to just under the application, including data center network servers, operating systems, databases and application servers.

Customers bring all kinds of applications to us, but what’s underneath those applications is common among our customers. It’s the same flavors of Windows or Linux or the same hardware platforms and storage platforms. We work with the customers to support those applications, so it’s an extension of their IT operation. There is obviously some gray area in between. We’ll work with the customers to make it work and will bring in whoever it takes and sort out the problem.

Paying by the hour for CPUs or by the gigabyte for storage are necessary financial models. Companies are trying to take advantage of that. Sometimes it’s hard because the applications aren’t written that way, but more and more they are being architected like that.

Our customers traditionally have looked at infrastructure-as-a-service, so they’ve had administrative access to the applications. What’s next is moving up the stack to offer platform-as-a-service. It’s between the infrastructure and the application. A business could take a platform and build their tools right on that instead of worrying about the underlying infrastructure. This is targeted more at a developer instead of a systems administrator.

The Evolving CIO

“About 15% of CIOs are working in highly effective enterprises,” says Richard Hunter, a Gartner fellow and vice president. “In 1975 if you were the head of data processing and you had an online transaction processing application, you were doing fine. In 1985 if you had good information management and data warehousing, you were doing fine. In 1995 if you had a global enterprise resource management operation up and running, you were doing fine. In 2005 you needed to be connected to every other enterprise on the planet in a meaningful way. The problem space just keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

CIO Priority: Virtual Collaboration

The video conferencing market grew 30% last year as businesses continued to cut travel budgets for meetings. Gartner predicts that by 2012, video conferencing will replace 2.1 million airline seats per year.

Indeed CIOs are actively pursuing strategies to enable virtual collaboration.
Filippo Passerini, uses virtual reality to simulate product launches in supermarkets. Previously the product launches entailed physical mock-ups, and even incremental changes significantly increased costs. Virtual reality streamlines P&G’s product launch process, adding efficiency and velocity.

As I look at the tide washing over global business culture, I am delighted to see the success that virtual collaboration technologies are having at the moment. A full-blown telepresence suite costs $300,000, not something an SME or SOHO business can afford. I see a golden opportunity for those who can bring high-quality interactive rich media collaboration technologies to the SME and SOHO desktops.

CIO Priorities: Accenture

The ‘CIO Priorities’ series attempts to gain insights into one of the most serious, interesting, and challenging questions facing the technology industry, which, as you might have rightly guessed, is “What are the priorities of enterprise CIOs today?” I decided to start with technology-focused consulting companies, because it is through these companies that we can obtain insights into both the priorities of their internal IT as well as the priorities of their clients through each company’s consulting lens. In this article, I talk with Frank Modruson, the CIO of Accenture.

Frank categorizes his priorities into two camps: effectiveness and efficiency. Companies usually try to strive for efficiency at the start, and then get to effectiveness because the efficiency quest focuses directly on cost, and hence its impact on the bottom line is seen more quickly. The main priority that Frank named was collaboration and telepresence, which fed into both the effectiveness and the efficiency camps, given its game-changing nature and its direct contribution to bottom line savings through reduced travel costs. Accenture rolled out ‘Accenture Collaboration 2.0,’ its internal collaboration platform, last year. In addition to building telepresence capacity internally, Accenture is also federating its telepresence capacity. Federation refers to the concept of extending collaboration networks beyond the organization. Accenture now has now federated 31 companies and has close to 600 federated telepresence rooms, touching close to 2 million executives worldwide.

Other priorities on the effectiveness side have been ECDM (Engagement, Contract and Delivery Management Applications), and applications that help build strong pricing and forecasting capabilities. On the efficiency side, other priorities have been re-doing the entire communications network and focusing on the cloud. Focusing on the network, while contributing to “efficiency,” has also played on the “effectiveness” side by helping to build a robust network infrastructure to support the requirements of telepresence. On the cloud front, Frank believes that the focus on the cloud and SaaS applications is here to stay, because it is an efficiency play, enabling organizations and individuals to maintain a smaller infrastructure and fewer applications.

After discussing the nature of Accenture’s recent priorities, I asked Frank if these priorities were a result of a change in strategy due to the tough economy. That explains the focus on collaboration, ECDM, and other similar projects.Finally, I asked Frank what he felt was the next big technology wave.

Technology’s Language Barrier

A simple cultural and linguistic misunderstanding caused the confusion; in China, women don’t normally change their names when they get married.

Moreover, global popular culture is dominated by English-language television, music, film, print and social media.

English-speaking nations are much closer to the saturation point when it comes to Internet use, so non-English-speaking nations represent the bulk of future growth.

E-commerce hinges on language, too. To be sure, passing information through systems designed by people speaking different languages and using different writing systems can increase the level of vulnerability to translation errors.

Complicating matters further for Anglocentric systems, most characters in China and Japan have multiple pronunciations.

KFC’s slogan “finger-lickin’ good” was mistranslated into Chinese characters that meant “eat your fingers off.” But China was opening up to foreign companies, and The brand name Coca-Cola  in China was first translated as a phrase pronounced Ke-kou-ke-la.

Organizations need to create a seamless cross-language flow of information for gathering and managing crucial identifying data. To meet these challenges, information technologies must be smarter, beginning at the design of data intake processes and throughout record storage and linkage.

From the standpoint of the Asian users who will enter information, data entry must be clear and unambiguous, designed according to local understandings of names. At the same time, to compensate for the inevitable errors, retrieving the many possible variants of a single name requires sophisticated, culturally sensitive search and match techniques.

The modification of names is nothing new. As Asia flexes its growing economic muscle, smart companies must be prepared to handle the ensuing tsunami of cross-language data.