A Silicon Valley Insider

Start-Ups at Stanford BASES 150K Challenge

Sat, 11 May 2013 15:37:47 -0700

(B) I went yesterday to Stanford University’s BASES (Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students) for their 150k Challenge. And, I had a blast! One of my favorite moments was when I met a very humble student from the Electrical Engineering School who developed a control system which monitors the daily growth of the plants and accordingly changes some of their environment parameters such as light and temperature.

But first for those who are reading this blog far away from Silicon Valley, what is BASES? Well.
“BASES is at the heart of student entrepreneurship at Stanford, as one of the most established and well-known student-run entrepreneurship organizations in the world. Our mission is to promote entrepreneurship education at Stanford University and to empower the next generation of brilliant entrepreneurs. We work with budding entrepreneurs, exceptional students, and prominent professors and investors in order to unite the worlds of entrepreneurship, academia, and industry.”

Yesterday, BASES has its 150k challenge where many new Stanford incubated ideas were competing to receive a check from the $150,000 budget allocated to the event. There were a few facts that surprised me during the day.

First, I love to go to this kind of events and what surprised me at the BASES 150K Challenge was the high quality of the product concepts displayed. I would say that in a lot of start-up competition events they are more “not-so-good” ideas than “good” ones but at BASES, it is definitely the reverse, and the proportion of “good” is definitely high.

Probably because a lot of ideas are the fruit of many hours of PhD research; or simply because it is easy to build some unique intellectual property in a world-class university by aggregating different minds from different schools with unique expertise. Let’s not forget that innovation grows well in crowded smart areas.

Second, I was surprised to see so many health-care ventures. It looks like every student at the Medical School wants to be an entrepreneur.

Third, I saw a lot of clean-tech ventures while VCs in Silicon Valley have given up on investing in clean-tech since ROIs have not been so depressing the last few years.

Fourth, all teams seem to have a good mix of both technical and business students.

Fifth, Stanford is really about open-source. Many teams included students from Berkeley and other local schools even UCLA!

The event had three programs: an E-Challenge, for non-profit start-ups; a Social-E Challenge for start-ups looking to have a social or environmental impact; and a Product Showcase which had 50 product demos! Incredible!

Following were the winners - all of them are worth spending some time studying...

E-Challenge Winners:
1st place, $25,000: AWAIR
AWAIR is a medical device company that develops patient-centered airway products for the intensive care unit.

2nd place, $12,500: Resido Medical
Resido Medical is developing Serenity, a medical device that reduces hand tremor in patients suffering from Essential Tremor.

3rd place, $7,500: CinderBio
CinderBio technologies have the potential to make cellulosic biomass a practical and profitable renewable energy source by significantly reducing biofuel production costs and fundamentally advancing enzymatic cellulosic degradation.

Honorable Mention, $2,500: ChemoFilter
ChemoFilter is a minimally invasive disposable catheter medical device that could be inserted into the veins of the body similar to a central IV line to directly filter drugs or therapeutic particles out of the blood stream.

Honorable Mention, $2,500: ALICE
ALICE is an artificial intelligence construction scheduler that can reduce schedule durations by an average of 45% as compared to leading industrial solutions.

Social-E Challenge Winners:
1st place, $25,000: Anjna Patient Education
Anjna Patient Education is a non–profit organization dedicated to empowering patients to take control of their own health through mobile (SMS and voice) technology.

2nd place, $15,000: AdaptAir
AdaptAir is an innovative product for pediatric patients in the developing world who suffer from life-threatening respiratory illnesses.

3rd place, $5,000: Flamestower
FlameStower is an energy product design and manufacturing company that has developed a small, portable generator to capture heat energy from campfires, cookstoves, any open flame, and convert it direct into electricity.

3rd place, $5,000: Vynca
Vynca is a comprehensive technology platform whose vision is to integrate healthcare information across inpatient (hospital) and outpatient (clinic) settings.

Product Showcase Winners:
1st place, $20,000: ALICE
ALICE is an artificial intelligence construction scheduler that can reduce schedule durations by an average of 45% as compared to leading industrial solutions.

2nd place, $15,000: Stratio
Stratio produces the world's first portable infrared sensors, which unlocks the potential for infrared vision (including personalized medical diagnostics) in smartphone and other handheld devices.

3rd place, $10,000: Flamestower
FlameStower is an energy product design and manufacturing company that has developed a small, portable generator to capture heat energy from campfires, cookstoves, any open flame, and convert it direct into electricity.

Honorable Mention, $2,500: Medable
Medable breaks down the traditional silos of healthcare to unite providers, patients, and data by integrating mobile apps and body sensors to create a data-driven dialogue.

Honorable Mention, $2,500: Refresh Innovations
Refresh Innovations produces the Refresh Card, a patent-pending, all-in-one contact lens storage case & solution package that is the size of a credit card.

Note: The picture above is the beautiful Stanford Arrilaga Alumni Center. This place has both a beautiful inside with even a grand piano and a beautiful outside.

Copyright © 2005-2013 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com.

Lean In with Sheryl Sandberg Interviewed at the Computer History Museum by Eric Schmidt

Thu, 9 May 2013 14:28:06 -0700

(B) I went yesterday, with my Dearest Friend, at the Computer History Museum listening to Sheryl Sandberg interviewed by Eric Schmidt about Lean In. The event was sold out! And, I was part of the 1% minority of men attending the event. I have never seen Ms. Sandberg before, and I was impressed by not only her beautiful mind but also her high level of inspiring energy and enthusiasm.

Ms. Sandberg obviously described her Lean In cause, about the status of women in our society, explained in her book. She gave many down-to-earth tips for young women in the audience from how to achieve a greater leadership status, to being smarter in day-to-day work and personal life.

Mr. Schmidt had extremely well prepared this interview and injected a delightful but sometime risky sense of humor into the interview.

It was enchanting to appreciate the tone of the relationship between the two since Ms. Sandberg was interviewed by her old boss while now competing with him.

If I can only take two points from Ms. Sandberg interview...

First - one of her career advices: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, get on, don’t ask what seat.”

Second - one of her personal advices: “The best decision they (women) can make is to pick a good life partner, one who will support them and pick up their share of workload.”

Watch the video below for more about what Lean In is all about...

Copyright © 2005-2013 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com.

Investing Like David Swensen

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 02:38:29 -0700

(B) For Mr. Swensen, the famous Chief Investment Officer of Yale’s endowment fund, there are three sources of returns: asset allocation, market timing and security selection. Active portfolio managers attempts to time the market and successfully choose which stocks to buy or sell. Over time, very few managers (if any) succeed consistently in both of those attempts.

Market timing proposes to overweight or underweight a certain asset class in the short-term. This demands forecasting the direction of the market which requires assessing the impacts of future worldwide economic, social and political events into the stock market. Most economists fail even to forecast the timing of a recession. And, the relationship between the ”causes” and the “effects” of stock price variations can only somewhat and sometime be understood after the facts.

Security selection is a zero-sum game since for every investor who is rightly buying a security there is another investor who is wrongly selling the same security (and vice versa). Over time, most funds that are buying and selling securities are underperforming the market indexes. However, investment selection plays a role in illiquid market such as investing in private companies.

Mr. Swensen outlines that most of the return of a portfolio results from asset allocation. The best asset allocation favors equity, embraces many types of assets, and carefully considers the implications of taxes. As stated by Nobel price Harry Markowitz, diversification is a “free lunch” which provides higher returns for a given level of risk or lower risk for a given level of returns. Ideally, each asset class should be at least between 5 and 10% of the total portfolio, and no asset class shall be amounting to more than 25 to 30%.

Over the long-term, equity wins over bonds but bonds can lower the risk of a given portfolio. According to Professor Siegel’s Stock for the Long Run, one dollar invested in stocks in 1802 would have grown to $8.8 M (all gains and dividends reinvested) in 2001, while it would have been only $14,000 for one dollar invested over the same period in long-term government bonds.

For retail investors (you and me), Mr. Swensen advises to invest in six types of assets:
domestic equity, foreign developed equity, emerging market equity, domestic fixed income, inflation-indexed securities, and real estate. Real estate combines both attributes of equity and bonds and provides lower returns than equity but higher risks than bonds.

So here how to invest as Mr. Swensen:

• Domestic equity: 30%
• Foreign developed equity: 15%
• Emerging market equity: 5%
• Real estate: 20%
• US Treasury Bonds: 15%
• US TIPS: 15%
• Total: 100%

Note: The picture above is from Nice in France.

Copyright © 2005-2013 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com.

Investing Like Nassim Taleb

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 02:09:07 -0700

(B) As we all know, Mr Taleb, the mind behind the concept of the Black Swan, suggests to always favor in what we are doing being exposed to positive Swans (the Swans that provide a positive impact) and avoiding as much as we can to be exposed to negative Swans.
The long term performance of a portfolio is not smooth and steady over time but largely determined by a few significant market moves generated by Black Swans. The occurrence of any Black Swan that trigger market bubbles (positive Black Swans) or market crashes (negative Black Swans) contribute to large creations or destructions of wealth in a portfolio.

A non conventional investment practice to pursue Mr. Taleb’s strategy is to be hyper conservative when exposed to negative Black Swans, the ones that crash the stock markets and to be hyper aggressive when exposed to the positive Black Swans, the ones that can lift the markets.

For Mr. Taleb’s being hyper conservative implies investing 85 to 90% of his portfolio in Treasury bills to avoid any market risks while being hyper aggressive implies investing the remaining 10 to 15% of his portfolio in venture capital where the downside is limited (the worst case is that all the money is lost) but where the upside can be very significant (start-up acquisition or IPO). Returns from the treasury bills will offset losses from venture investing.

So here is how to invest as Mr. Taleb:

• Treasury Bills - 85%
• Venture Investing - 15%
• Total: 100%

Note: The picture above is from Nice in France.

Copyright © 2005-2013 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com.

Start-Up Village at South By Southwest 2013

Fri, 8 Mar 2013 18:56:58 -0800

(B) Every year, I am noticing a bigger crowd from Silicon Valley going to SXSW in Austin. Besides Le Web in December in Paris, this is probably becoming one of the most “must-see” and “must-be” conference for technologists. SXSW is about music and film where technology is called interactive (probably not the best word). But with the evolution of computing technology becoming more consumer-oriented over the last 15 years, SXSW is probably a good framework to get the state of the art in social media, games, mobile apps, and web entertainment. Twitter in its early days got a significant boost from SXSW.

SXSW has a Start-up Village and even a Start-up Accelerator forum during the conference. Following are the new ventures that were part of Start-Up Village this year:

Bloomfire A Knowledge sharing tool for the modern workforce. Bloomfire helps you capture, display, save, and share information, connecting people who have the knowledge with those who need it.

CityBot Citybot is a mobile app that creates personalized itineraries for visitors both new and familiar to a city.

Close.com Bringing true relationships together in a fun new way.

CloudBees Build, run and manage your Java apps in the cloud with the CloudBees Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Cogsy Taking the BS out of getting a custom site and managing it. We're going to make businesses better and save them time and money. We're not stopping until we're everything to everyone. $20 a month. Websites for the rest of us.

Collaborizm A new approach to serendipitous discovery for collaboration. Collaborizm offers intelligent matchmaking for projects and collaborators, simplified project management and communication tools and a diverse community based on shared values.

Crowd Act Crowd Act Inc is a Calgary, Canada based start-up and launching the beta version of crowdact.com, a subject-based social media and network in SXSW.

eevzdrop eevzdrop is a fun, new way to share your day-to-day life experiences with the rest of the world through audio recordings.

Glocal Glocal provides stories to the world's communities from the people who represent them.

Guide Guide turns your favorite online news and social streams into video. Guide's TV news style format allows you to watch your favorite content instead of having to read it.

Hater A mobile app that allows you to share the things you Hate. Hate on celebrities, politicians, bad service, too much traffic, and annoying Facebook “friends.” Simply, your random daily Hate.

Jobhuk "Crowdsourced Hiring" Jobhuk helps leverage the human network to Hire and Get hired via Referrals. Pays referrer on successful hires.

Light of Creativity Light of Creativity is a startup company that presents LIGHT, a Web System that helps record, organize and share your life.

Not it Labs Not iT is a smartphone app that helps groups of people who live, work or play together to delegate real-world tasks from a gamified hub.

Social ID Social I.D. presents ASKIE, your personal mobile “Ask the Audience”. Askie is an app that is all about advice, whether you're giving it or getting it.

Speeker Speeker is a mobile social network where people can openly share pictures, news, and opinions based on proximity.

Talentwire Talentwire powers talent acquisition for the #open era. Leverage your team's expertise and culture to attract and engage a higher level of better matched candidates.

Transporter Transporter is an online, but off-cloud social storage solution for privately sharing, accessing and protecting all of your valuable files.

Userify Userify is a mobile and agent-based platform for secure public cloud User Management and supports both SSH and API role-based authorization and authentication.

Copyright © 2005-2013 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com.

Innovation Sandbox at RSA 2013

Fri, 1 Mar 2013 15:35:28 -0800

(B) For the last few years, the RSA Security Conference holds on Monday before the security conference starts, the Innovation Sandbox which showcases a number of emerging security technologies and start-ups. Last year, the winner was Appthority. This year, the winner was Remotium. Following is the complete list of the finalists:

Bromium
Bromium vSentryTM is a centrally managed security solution for physical and virtual desktops which eliminates costly remediation by automatically discarding malware. Bromium LAVATM (Live Attack Visualization & Analysis) provides detailed insights into attack origin, techniques and targets.

Light Point Security
Light Point Web Enterprise is a secure web browsing solution to protect enterprises from web-based malware. It isolates each employee’s browsing session within a one-time-use server-based virtual machine that is destroyed immediately after use.

Nok Nok Labs, Inc.
Nok Nok Labs’ solution leverages the existing security capabilities on a user’s device such as a built-in fingerprint sensor, web camera or integrated security chip in order to user-friendly strong authentication to any application, using any authentication method on any device.

PrivateCore
PrivateCore’s vCage is the first software to transparently protect any application while in use on commodity x86 servers. By encrypting data during program execution, vCage’s software-only full-
memory encryption protects data from unauthorized physical access and malicious hardware devices.

Remotium, Inc.
Remotium is a mobile security technology that secures corporate assets for the BYOD trend. Remotium solves a host of security problems by using a unique virtual-instance technology that runs mobile applications on public or private clouds and streams the visualization elements to the mobile devices.

Silent Circle
Created by Navy SEALs and Silicon Valley cryptography experts, Silent Circle is a global encrypted communications service offering a comprehensive suite of simple yet secure tools for your mobile devices - encrypted video, phone, text and email.

Skyhigh Networks Inc.
Skyhigh Networks allows every business to safely and simply leverage cloud services (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS) by addressing the pain it has with the viral, uncontrolled adoption of cloud services by its employees, especially from personal mobile devices.

Spotflux Inc.
Spotflux is a cloud based solution for device security and privacy. By protecting and scrubbing internet connectivity using real time analytics, Spotflux protects PCs, smartphones and tablets with little to no impact on responsiveness or battery life.

VICTRIO, INC.
Victrio provides powerful new security to financial call centers - it detects fraudsters during calls by silently screening their voice/audio against a fraudster database sourced by historical fraud calls. Once profiled, a fraudster can't elude Victrio screening.

Wickr, LLC
Wickr is a free app designed to send self-destructing messages and media while leaving no trace. Users send free, anonymous and secure media, including text, photo, video, voice and PDFs to other Wickr users.

Copyright © 2005-2013 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com.

Dell Going Private

Wed, 6 Feb 2013 09:00:42 -0800

(B) Probably one of the best comments that I have read about Dell going private is the Bloomberg interview of Edward Conard, a former private equity investor from Bain Capital. Long story - short... This is an “old school LBO deal at a very low valuation, paying down the existing debt, shielding the earnings from taxes, converting ordinary income into capital gains”...but besides the LBO mechanics, the key takeaway is...surprisingly...”There is nothing that Dell could do as a private company that they could not do as a public company”...

Copyright © 2005-2013 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com.

Seven Aspects of our Culture

Sat, 2 Feb 2013 15:57:42 -0800

(B) Do you remember “People Express” or the “HP Way”? I believe that they are still part of the basic case studies in business schools to learn about the value of corporate culture. Start-ups are driven by passion. But passion is a fire that weakens over time if the company does not have any culture that can sustain it. I learned a long time ago that you lead by example. And culture is made by the leaders.

In one of his blog posts, Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist, has an introduction about what management teams should be about:

“Companies are not people. But they are comprised of people. And the people side of the business is harder and way more complicated than building a product is. You have to start with culture, values, and a commitment to creating a fantastic workplace. You can't fake these things. They have to come from the top. They are everything. There will be things that happen in the course of building a business that will challenge the belief in the leadership and the future of the company. If everyone is a mercenary and there is no shared culture and values, the team will blow apart. But if there is a meaningful culture that the entire team buys into, the team will stick together, double down, and get through those challenging situations.”

A few blogs have commented recently about Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg stating that Netflix’s company culture document “may well be the most important document ever to come out of the Valley.” I did read again Mr. Reed Hasting’s presentation about Netflix seven aspects of culture - and yes - there is a wealth of thoughts into that presentation about managing people...

Copyright © 2005-2013 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com.

Jeunes diplomès où trouver la securitè de l'emploi?

Sat, 2 Feb 2013 15:00:00 -0800

(B) The famous French newspaper “Le Monde” had an article quite characteristic of the European culture this week-end: “Jeunes diplomès où trouver la securitè de l'emploi?” - “Young graduates where to find job security?”

The article starts with that premise:
“La promesse de la sécurité de l'emploi devient ainsi un facteur d'attractivité important pour les entreprises qui souhaitent recruter des jeunes diplômés inquiets face à la dégradation constante du marché du travail.”
“The promise of job security becomes an important factor for companies that want to recruit graduates worried about the continuing deterioration of the labor market.”

Obviously, most of the companies mentioned in the article as being attractive to young graduates, because of their ability to offer job security are state-owned company such as La SNCF, the French railroad company. SNCF does not have any competition, and enjoys a sustainable growth as the train because of its attractive price compared to flying for short distances and its convenience for offering departures and arrivals in the downtown of metropolitan areas makes it an attractive transportation means.

Unfortunately, the article does not mention that maybe such trends can only continue to accelerate the deterioration of the labor market.

Young graduates are the ones that can bring to life new innovations, new ideas, new technologies, new services, new start-ups...If instead they focus on looking for “safety” instead of “opportunity”, the job market is unlikely to grow since they are the ones, and the only ones, who can grow the job market.

Europe why don’t you want to be in the game anymore?

Copyright © 2005-2013 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com.

Byron Wien’s Ten Surprises for 2013

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 17:52:47 -0800

(B) There are a few long-timers on Wall Street that I will stop whatever I am doing to listen to them on CNBC. One of them is Byron Wien from the Blackstone Group (another one was Barton Biggs). This is the 28th year, Byron has given his views on a number of economic, financial market, and political surprises for the coming year. His first surprise for 2012 (which I did not believe at that time) was that “the extraction of oil and gas from shale and rock begins to be a game changer.” Byron defines a “surprise” as an event which the average investor would only assign a one out of three chance of taking place but which Byron believes is “probable”, having a better than 50% likelihood of happening.

Byron’s Ten Surprises for 2013 are as follows:

1. Iran announces it has adequate enriched uranium to produce a nuclear-armed missile and the International Atomic Energy Agency confirms the claim. Sanctions, the devaluation of the currency, weak economic conditions and diplomacy did not stop the weapons program. The world must deal with Iran as a nuclear threat rather than talk endlessly about how to prevent the nuclear capability from happening. Both the United States and Israel shift to a policy of containment rather than prevention.

2. A profit margin squeeze and limited revenue growth cause 2013 earnings for the Standard & Poor’s 500 to decline below $100, disappointing investors. The S&P 500 trades below 1300. Companies complain of limited pricing power in a slow, highly competitive world economic environment.

3. Financial stocks have a rough time, reversing the gains of 2012. Intense competition in commercial and investment banking, together with low trading volumes, puts pressure on profits. Layoffs continue and compensation erodes further. Regulation increases and lawsuits persist as an industry burden.

4. In a surprise reversal the Democrats sponsor a vigorous program to make the United States independent of Middle East oil imports before 2020. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude falls to $70 a barrel. The Administration proposes easing restrictions on hydraulic fracking for oil and gas in less populated areas and allowing more drilling on Federal land. They see energy production, infrastructure and housing as the key job creators in the 2013 economy.

5. In a surprise reversal the Republicans make a major effort to become leaders in immigration policy. They sponsor a bill that paves the way for illegal immigrants to apply for citizenship if they have lived in the United States for a decade, have no criminal record, have a high school education or have served in the military, and can pass an English proficiency test. Their goal for 2016 is to win the Hispanic vote, which they believe has a naturally conservative orientation and which put the Democrats over the top in 2012.

6. The new leaders in China seem determined to implement reforms to root out corruption, to keep the economy growing at 7% or better and to begin to develop improved health care and retirement programs. The Shanghai Composite finally comes alive and the “A” shares are up more than 20% in 2013, in contrast with the previous year when Chinese stocks were down and some developing markets, notably India, rose.

7. Climate change contributes to another year of crop failures, resulting in grain and livestock prices rising significantly. Demand for grains in developing economies continues to increase as the standard of living rises. More investors focus on commodities as an investment opportunity and increase their allocation to this asset class. Corn rises to $8.00 a bushel, wheat to $9.00 a bushel and cattle to $1.50 a pound.

8. Although inflation remains tame, the price of gold reaches $1,900 an ounce as central bankers everywhere continue to debase their currencies and the financial markets prove treacherous.

9. The Japanese economy remains lackluster and the yen declines to 100 against the dollar. The Nikkei 225 continues the strong advance that began in November and trades above 12,000 as exports improve and investors return to the stocks of the world’s third largest economy.

10. The structural problems of Europe remain largely unresolved and the mild recession that began there in 2012 continues. Civil unrest subsides as the weaker countries adjust to austerity. Greece proves successful in implementing policies that reduce wasteful government expenditures and raise revenues from citizens who had been evading taxes. European equities, however, decline 10% in sympathy with the U.S. market.

Every year there are always a few Surprises that do not make the Ten because either I do not believe they are as relevant as those on the basic list or I am not comfortable with the idea that they are “probable.” Below are several “also rans” which did not make the Ten Surprises.

“Also Rans”

11. Having traded below 20 for most of 2012 the VIX Volatility Index surges 33% to 30, providing a bonanza for traders. The decline in the S&P 500 increases market volatility.

12. The Newtown, Connecticut, massacre finally convinces Congress to do something about gun control. As a first step they ban future civilian purchases of automatic weapons, including handguns, with clips of more than ten rounds and require more extensive background checks on all gun purchases. “It should not be easier to buy a gun than rent a car” becomes a slogan.

13. Frustrated by an inability to increase revenues through raising income taxes, Congress begins to consider different approaches. There is more talk of a value-added tax as well as a wealth tax, and these ideas appear to be slowly gathering momentum.

14. Congress decides that high-frequency and other computerized algorithmic-based trading practices are putting the individual investor at a disadvantage. A transaction fee designed to slow down frenetic activity and protect against “flash crashes” and glitches is imposed on intra-day trades.

15. The planet finds itself saturated with technology. Semiconductor companies, software providers, social media favorites and personal computer manufacturers all report disappointing earnings and provide discouraging guidance. They lead the overall market lower. Users finally agree the present state of the art is fast enough and connected enough, and that they have more “apps” than they know what to do with. Apple bucks the trend and trades above $700 as its products continue to enjoy enormous success abroad.

Note: The picture above is from NYC.

Copyright © 2005-2013 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com.

Tech Innovation in the 70s and 80s - Organizational Seeds for Innovation

Fri, 7 Dec 2012 11:00:29 -0800

(B) Foreword: I re-read and copied in the following article sections of a paper that I wrote a long time ago that analyzed the concepts for innovations in a tech organization. Although most of the principles for an organization to seed innovation has not probably changed since the 70s and 80s - a lot of companies, markets and technologies mentioned in this article have significantly changed - and in the 80s Microsoft replaced IBM as the big elephant - so the industry focus shifted from challenging IBM to challenging Microsoft. Understanding Microsoft’s weaknesses was key to create a competing venture to Microsoft.

There are two kind of innovations: incremental and radical. Incremental innovations provide significant feature improvements to existing product lines. Radical innovations are very rare: the first spreadsheet, the first groupware software, the first neural network. Most innovations are incremental.

After the Apple II, Apple has never brought a radical technical innovation. A lot of the Macintosh features came from the Apple Lisa and the Xerox Star. After the Macintosh, most of the Apple computers brought some incremental benefits but never radical changes. After Ingres launched one of the first relational databases, most of its innovations were incremental: Ingres improved its database with distributed functionalities. Informix tailored its products for the UNIX market. And, Sybase pushed the client/server architecture.

Companies should challenge themselves both through radical and incremental innovations. Radical changes should not scared top management. They create new opportunities. Incremental innovations should be focus either to meet new customers requirements or to extend initial markets to new users.

Does that mean that only small companies can innovate since large companies have always several product line legacy? No - Hewlett-Packard was able to do it. John Young was able to move HP from its original test and instrument markets to the mini-computer business by giving a large amount of freedom to his various organizations but keeping them, at the same time, focus on the same goal: building UNIX minicomputers with the HP’s RISC Precision Architecture. Hewlett-Packard found the trade-off between the entrepreneurial culture in the various parts of its organizations, and the interdependence required for them to work toward the same directions.

But how to formulate how innovation should be generated since innovation, by definition, requires to challenge established ideas to create new technologies?

Some basic research showed that the most innovative high-tech companies shared some "critical success factors" to push innovation. Here there are:

Small is beautiful and less is more (E. Shumacher):
The last thing that you must worry in technology is economy of scale. R&D cannot involve thousands of engineers. Gordon Bell who led the PDP 11 and VAX projects within DEC told once to Tom Peters: "I've never seen a job being done by a five-hundred-person engineering team that couldn't be done better by fifty people.”

Why do you think that John Ackers in June 1991 was ready to do anything to make a deal with Apple after John Sculley showed Pink and explained to IBMers that Apple wanted to be a software company. Because he knew that the 33,000 IBM programmers wearing dark suits cannot do the job of 100 Apple programmers wearing tee-shirts.

Within small groups, it is easier to motivate, coach and empower people than it is in a group of one thousand people. Within small groups, the technical focus cannot be lost. Within small groups, commitment and passion can be shared.

Passion is everything:
Few high-tech companies succeed without passion. As Tom Peters said: " many passionate entrepreneurs fail. But that's not the point. Almost none without passion succeed. The odds are stacked so high against the entrepreneur that only irrational commitment i.e. passion, emotion stands even a chance of carrying the day."

• Is Microsoft Windows for DOS the best PC operating system? No, Apple has designed the best PC operating system.
• Is Microsoft Word the best PC word-processor? No, Software Publishing Corporation has designed the best word processor.
• Is Microsoft Excel the best PC spreadsheet? No, Lotus has designed the best spreadsheet.
• Is Microsoft Lan Manager the best PC network operating system? No, Novell has designed the best network operating system.
• Is Microsoft Multimedia product the best multimedia environment? No, Apple has designed the best multimedia product.
• Is Microsoft Windows for pen-based computer the best operating system for pen-based computer? No, GO Corporation has designed the best pen-based operating system.
• Is Microsoft Access the best PC database? No, Borland has designed the best PC database.
• Is Microsoft Workgroup for Windows the best Groupware software? No, Lotus has designed the best Groupware software.

Steve Jobs twice in his life led the most advanced product in its market. The Macintosh was far more advanced that the IBM PC. The NEXT workstation was more advanced that the SUN workstation. Even with the most aggressive hiring program of engineers, Microsoft has not been able in any of its market to design the best product. Bill Gates has only one goal: the monopoly of the software industry. Microsoft engineers are not managed to love and challenge the technology. Microsoft culture is not toward designing quality products, it is toward being present in the market whatever the market is.

Try, try and try:
At Intel, risk-taking is promoted by management. In high-tech, success is achieved through risk-taking. Risk taking means trying unusual things and accepting to fail. In this process a lot of mistakes are made. But companies as individuals must learn that failing is the necessary step toward succeeding. If IBM was successful with its RS 6000 workstation, it was because IBM failed with its PC RT workstations. If Apple was successful with the Macintosh, it was because Apple failed with the Lisa. Failures hurt in the short term but make companies stronger if they continue their passions.

CEOs formulate the end not the means:
Ex-DEC CEO Ken Olsen, CEO Scott McNealy at SUN, ex-HP CEO John Young, all of them defined their jobs of CEOs as setting up strategic goals, providing some kind of vision and challenges, and creating the right environment for innovation. Management cannot try to define how each component of a product shall be. Management should not formulate what innovation should be but what the environment for innovation should be. It is up to the engineers and marketeers either to come up with the ideas that make the vision come true or to suggest some elements to the management to built a vision.

Move People, encourage communication, reward innovation:
I met a few weeks ago an Engineer from the Santa-Theresa IBM Lab in San-Jose. Both of us met after having been interviewed by the same company. He showed me his resume. I was completely surprised. After graduated with a MSCS, he spent five years in the design of drivers for optical storage, basically doing the same thing each year. He was bored of what he was doing and wanted to leave IBM to work on new object-oriented environment technologies.

At Microsoft, most engineers after graduation work in the same field for several years as do IBM engineers.

Gene Amdhal ex-IBM superstar mainframe designer and founder of Amdhal considered that when a small group work together, each member of the group tends to specialize. Each engineer tends to handle the same part of the project each time and to build some kind of expertise. Amdhal believes that expertise is dangerous to innovation. Once they get some expertise, engineers continue to do things the same way.

The best structure is to get a mix of engineers with some high-level of expertise in the field of the project with experienced engineers without the expertise in the project field added with a couple of young graduates. In every case anyway, the imperative is to move people on a regular basis either to new technologies or new products.

The second trick in managing people is to facilitate communication. The “management by walking around” or the “coffee break” of HP, and the “beer bust” of Tandem every Friday are some means to create an open environment. An high-tech culture must encourage people to express their most crazy ideas, and to turn them into profitable innovations. Managers should have an open door policy.

The last trick is to reward innovation and success. Performance evaluation and salary should be based on the contribution of each engineer to have brought some personal added-value to the team project.

In conclusion, management style should emphasize openness and communication. Risk-taking should be promoted. New engineering ideas should be tried. Everyone must have the opportunity to be heard and to have the opportunity to make vital contributions through innovations. Success should be measured by this contribution.

Copyright © 2005-2013 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Tech Innovation in the 70s and 80s - What did IBM Miss?

Wed, 5 Dec 2012 11:00:03 -0800

(B) Foreword: I re-read and copied in the following article sections of a paper that I wrote a long time ago that analyzed the innovations that where not invented by IBM but shaped the computing industry. The list is impressive:

• CRAY created the supercomputer market with the CRAY 1;
• Convex created the mini supercomputer with the Convex C1;
• Amdhal created the IBM-mainframe compatible market;
• Tandem created the fault-tolerant computer market;
• DEC created the minicomputer market with the PDP;
• Apollo created the workstation market;
• Apple created the personal computer market with the Apple II;
• Compaq created the IBM-compatible PC;
• Ingres created the relational database market;
• WANG created the word processor market;
• Lotus created the spreadsheet market with 1-2-3;
• Borland created the PC database market;
• Lotus created the Groupware software market with Notes...

However, IBM invented the RISC architecture and the Relational Database Model but...

The RISC architecture project was killed within IBM. The reason - RISC was considered as a threat to its mainframe business in the 70s. But in the 80s, Dr. Patterson at UC Berkeley led the design of RISC 1, which became the foundation of the SPARC architecture for SUN MICROSYSTEMS workstations, that SUN licensed to AT&T, ICL, LSI Logic, Philips, Xerox, TI. Meanwhile, Dr. Hennessy at Stanford University started the MIPS project. After completed the project in 1984, he took one-year leave, and founded MIPS Computer Systems which sold the MIPS RISC architecture to DEC, BULL, SILICON GRAPHICS and TANDEM (SILICON GRAPHICS bought MIPS in 1992). It was several years, after MIPS and SUN, in the late 80s that IBM finally launched its own RISC architecture on a new line of workstations: the RS 6000.

The Relational Database Model was first defined by Edgar Codd in 1969. Because the relational model emerged just as IBM was preparing to ship its IMS indexed file database, the project remained at a research stage. It was 10 years later that IBM announced its SQL/DS and DB2 relational database. Meanwhile, several companies in Silicon Valley, ORACLE, RELATIONAL DATABASES (renamed later INGRES and bought in 1990 by ASK), SYBASE and INFORMIX created a multi-billion relational database business.

Small tech companies were free of many constraints that limited IBM's innovation. These companies were not bound by the constraints of multiple product lines. They did not need to worry about preserving compatibility with outdated product lines or with products from other divisions of the company. At IBM, it took a lot of efforts between divisions to make products compatible with one another. Start-ups did focus on functionality and performance when they designed new product features. Therefore while change was often IBM's enemy, it was an opportunity for other companies.

In the mid-90s, Lou Gestner after being name new IBM CEO re-introduced innovation at IBM. Probably one of the main reasons why IBM has been able to last since then.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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The Three Open Source Business Models - Open Source as a Tool (OST) as a Platform (OSP) and as a Business (OSB)

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 13:14:15 -0700

(B) FreeBSD, Java, Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python, Wikipedia, WordPress, Hadoop...the list goes on-and-on of projects that have been open sourced. In the 80s, software was about standards. Customers wanted standards so that they could deploy products from various vendors and ensure interoperability of those products in their networks. In the 90s, software became free. Netscape and Microsoft started to give their browsers away for free but charging for their server software, in the case of Netscape, or desktop operating systems, in the case of Microsoft. And from open standards to free software, Linux, Java and Apache brought us into our new world of open source software.

There is obviously a major difference between an individual or a group of individuals that are pursing open source software as a non-profitable project versus a business that is pursing open source software as a profitable project. For a business, being a student of the market, I am finding out that open source can be used as a tool, a platform, or can entirely be the foundation for that business.

Open Source as a Tool (OST):
All technology companies are now both consumer and producer of open source software. By integrating open source codes into their products, tech companies do not have to reinvent the wheel and can focus on developing software that are required for their products. By releasing open source software, tech companies can leverage the open community to enhance the code that are using in their products. A good example of that model is Facebook which is both a consumer of open source software - Facebook has been using open source software MySQL and Hadoop - and a producer of open source software - Facebook has open sourced its internal database system Cassandra and its Hadoop querying and managing datasets Hive.

Open Source as a Business (OSB):
Red Hat is probably the company that has the most popularizing that opportunity around Linux. The basic idea here is to take a “free” open source project and provides “paid” bug fixes, support, and training around that project. But the recent change in the market place is that instead of building a business around an open source project, the open source project becomes the business itself. Start-ups are making now the software that they are designing as open source software instead of proprietary software. In the short-term, obviously returns on open source software are much lower than on proprietary software. But in a fast-changing or very competitive market, a start-up with no brand and no installed base might make a strategic decision to go with the Red Hat model instead of the proprietary Microsoft or Oracle model. A good example of that use case is MongoDB, a NoSQL start-up which has open sourced its software while building a business around it. When the market is a niche with not many competitors, it makes sense for a start-up to go with the proprietary software path. Otherwise, open source might be part of the strategy to build the business. And not only start-ups such as MongoDB are adopting that strategy but also established software company such as VMware which has spin-off a new cloud open source offering: Cloud Foundry.

Open Source as a Platform (OSP):
I would consider Open Source as a Platform as being an intermediate business model between OST and OSB. In that case, the investments in the open source software are being leveraged by proprietary software that are revenue generating. A good case study of that model is Android that is an open source software for smartphone and tablet manufacturers but being monetized by Google by Google Search, Google Maps and other Google applications that are the sources of advertising revenues to Google.

As open source business models are evolving, so do are their licensing terms. From the Apache license that stimulates fast adoption of the software by fundamentally enabling anyone to contribute freely to the code to the GPL license v2 or v3 that controls the changes that can be made by the contributors to the source code, we shall expect more new creative licensing models in the soon future.

Note 1: Open Source as a Tool (OST), a Platform (OSP), and as a Business (OSB) are not-standard terms but I made them (haha...) to better explain my classification.

Note 2: The picture above is from the Open Source Initiative.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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When Are We Going to Stop Using Coal to Produce Electricity?

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 14:45:56 -0700

(B) We had a great and bad news this week. The good news first...The US Energy Information Administration has released a new report which concluded that the “U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions resulting from energy use during the first quarter of 2012 were the lowest in two decades for any January-March period. Normally, CO2 emissions during the year are the highest in the first quarter because of strong demand for heat produced by fossil fuels.

However, CO2 emissions during January-March 2012 were low due to a combination of three factors:
• A mild winter that reduced household heating demand and therefore energy use
• A decline in coal-fired electricity generation, due largely to historically low natural gas prices
• Reduced gasoline demand.”

Now the bad news...
“A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said the E.P.A. had exceeded its authority in the way it apportioned the cleanup work among 28 upwind states” - see the article from the New York Times for more details.

We need to stop using coal to produce electricity! We are so much damaging our environment by doing so!! No one has probably better describe the negative effects of coal on our climate change than Dr James Hansen from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Please read his publications, think, and act.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Prioritizing Features in a Product Road Map

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 09:00:56 -0700

(B) Better, faster, cheaper. That was the three words that were written on the white board of a senior product manager working with me in my first Silicon Valley start-up. Below those three words were written:”Pick only two”. A better product with more capabilities can certainly be faster but not cheaper. And a better product that is cheaper is unlikely to be faster. While a faster and cheaper product will not be better. Life is always full of trade-offs!

So how do product managers and their product development organizations decide to prioritize the product features through the multiple releases of a product? And ensure a better and faster product, a better and cheaper product or a faster and cheaper product, in particular, for High-Tech products that are always the result of market and technology changes.

Success in developing a road map lies into establishing a product vision that is shaped by major release milestones. A road map generally defines the product evolution over 3 to 5 years with significant details for the next 18 months. Releases must be scheduled over a given period, on average every 6 months for a software product and 18 months for a hardware product.

For each product release, the product manager must develop the requirements of all feature candidates and prioritizing the ones that will be developed and marketed in the release.

The Secret Sauce of Product Feature Prioritization:

Every development organization is challenged through the product life cycle to prioritize the features for a new product release. When developing version 1.0 of a new product, all features are new. After the first release, some features will be new while more and more development will be spent on enhancing previous features developed.

The first “secret sauce” of product feature prioritization is in the balancing act of creating new features while at the same time enhancing the existing ones. That process can end for market reasons such as the product target market or application has changed. Or it can end for technology reasons such as the product underlying architecture and technology is becoming obsolete and not cost effective anymore.

The second “secret sauce” of product feature prioritization is in the second level of prioritization that is prioritizing among themselves the new features and the enhancement of the existing ones.

Product Feature Creation:
Following are some guidelines to prioritize new features.

Trading versus Investing:
In finance, there are two kind of investors: the trader who has a short term outlook and the investor who has a long term outlook. While traders succeed by focusing on the next market moves, long term investors succeed by rightly allocating their capital to diversified assets.
When prioritizing features, product managers need to be both traders and investors at the same time. Like traders, they need to focus on the short term and assessing which features are needed to enable successful customer sales in the coming quarters. Like investors, they need to focus on their long term vision and built over each release the product capability that are required to achieve that vision in the market place.

Prioritizing features is always a difficult balance between trading or short term sales requirements and investing or long term product vision requirements.

User versus Architecture:
Simply put, there are always two product layers: a layer that is offering the features to the user, and a layer that is providing the architecture for the product. The temptation for every release is to privilege user functions versus architecture functions since the business case is much easier to establish for the former. However, if too much effort is spent on providing user features over the medium term, the product architecture will reach a limit in supporting the breath and depth of those user features.

Prioritizing features is always a difficult balance between user features and architecture functions.

Market versus Customer:
Junior product managers make that mistake all the time and do not necessary realize the difference between a market feature versus a customer feature. Any product features must be foreseen without the specific application or environment of a customer. Ideally, a road map aims in its early phase to target a well defined market segment and from that position to expand to other market segments. A market feature appeals to all customers of the targeted market while a customer feature can be sold only to a set of customers.

Specific customer features cannot be part of the overall feature prioritization and must be considered as a separate business case than the underlying one of the product.

Leading versus Reacting:
Feature prioritization must take into account the competitive environment. Core product features position the “Sweet Spot” of the product target market or application. Products lead in the market place where they shine the best. Enhancing or at least maintaining the product features that establish the leadership of the product is always a must. However, competitive products have strengths that are generally targeting the weaknesses of the leading products or might come up with new features that are more innovative than the leading product.

Prioritizing features is always a difficult balance between building on the strengths and intellectual property of the product in order to lead while reacting to the product weaknesses and innovations leveraged by the competition.

Product Feature Enhancement:
Following are some guidelines to improve existing features. All those enhancements need to be prioritized over multiple releases.

Resiliency, Availability and sometime Scalability:
Every product must be resilient and offering capabilities that mitigate the risk of a failure, Every product feature must be available and working according to the product use case. Most network-based or product that do have a function in a given network must scale as well to large traffic flows, large number of client devices. large number of end users or subscribers and so on.

Initial product architecture must be improved over every release to increase the resiliency, availability and scalability of the product.

Deployment, Configuration, Usability:
Products must be simple to deploy in particular products that interface with a range of other products. Products must be easy to configure. Product configuration should be automated as much as possible in order to leave only the options that are required to have a needed customization. And last but certainly not least, products must be doing what they are supposed to do with the highest level of usability.

Never forget the product deployment and configuration and its usability when prioritizing product features.

From Release 1.0 to Release 3.0:
Successful new ventures are started with “passion”, and grow with “experience”. The same is true for products. The 1.0 product release is the most creative and the most challenging. The 2.0 release is generally a release to fix the many bugs of the 1.0. It is only at the third release that most products achieve their complete maturity and as a consequence their market leadership.

Initial product features for the 1.0 release are built with passion. But overtime for the 3.0 release, enhance them with the experience that has been acquired through the development process.

Leverage Customer Product Experience:
Most product managers will tell you that the initial product positioning of the product is not what it ends to be or its final “sweet spot” in the marketplace. Customers are like kids who never read the product documentation and use the product in many ways other than the one that the product was supposed to serve initially. Build a critical feedback channel in order to integrate the voice of the customers and make sense of those feedback that will dictate the best features for the best use case of the product.

The customer experience of a product is never the one from the lab designer. Over time, product features can be significantly enhanced with the imagination of the user.

Horizontal, Vertical and Geographical Segments:
Market opportunities to grow a product line must be investigated beyond the existing target segment such as new horizontal, vertical or geographical segment. Horizontal product features must be used across a large population of customers while vertical product features are used by a limited population of customers defined by key attributes such as demographic, industry or application specific and so on. If they do exist, products must be localized to the local requirements of their geographical use.

Ideally product features should be prioritized for an horizontal market segment, expanded latter to multiple vertical market segments and across geographies.

In Summary:
Every product starts with a small number of features. To grow into success, product managers need to expand the suite of their product features. The challenge for every product team is to master the process of prioritizing those features in order to create new ones while improving the existing ones.

Creating a product road map is definitely an Art!

Note 1: I dedicate this article to my sister who always reminds me that I should spent more time on my own research than studying researches from other beautiful minds.

Note 2: A lot of the secret sauce described above can also be applied to non-high products in particular consumer and industrial products.

Note 3: The picture above is The Venus Genetrix, a First Century Roman Marble.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Big Data - Parallel Programming - MapReduce and Hadoop

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 14:31:46 -0700

(T) One of the many challenges of providing cloud-based consumer Web services is first to invest in the required computing infrastructure, and second to maximize the ROI of that infrastructure. Parallel computing is the way to go to distribute the tasks and the loads of a cloud-based application over many computers to concurrently leverage hundreds if not thousands of CPUs, storage, I/Os. And, parallel programming is the way to design the cloud-based application that will run over large sets of distributed resources.

To simplify data processing on large clusters, two Google engineers Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat imagined the MapReduce concept. MapReduce enables to perform simple computations while hiding the details of parallelization, such as data distribution, load balancing, and fault tolerance. Google has implemented MapReduce for processing large amounts of raw data, such as crawled documents and Web request logs. A typical computation of MapReduce processes many terabytes of data on thousands of nodes. One of the advantages of MapReduce is that it is easy to use. MapReduce programs are as easy as parallel programming can be.

The basic principle of MapReduce is its division of the computation into two parts: a Map, and a Reduce. Map basically processes all the data, splits them into sub-parts, and sends the sub-parts to different nodes, so that all the pieces run at the same time. Reduce takes the results from the sub-parts, and combines them back together to supply a single output data.

This model comes from the Map and Reduce combinators from Lisp and many other functional languages. In Lisp, a Map takes as input a function and a sequence of values. It then applies the function to each value in the sequence. A reduce combines all the elements of a sequence using a binary operation.

As in Lisp, MapReduce takes conceptually inputs as a list of records. The records are split among the different machines by the Map. The result of the Map computation is a list of key/value pairs. Reduce takes each set of values that has the same key, and combines them into a single value. So Map takes a set of data sets, and produces key/value pairs; Reduce merges the results, so that instead of a set of key/value pair sets, you get one final result.

MapReduce has been implemented into the open source software Hadoop. It has received many contributions from major Web-based consumer companies such as Yahoo, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Written in Java, Hadoop scale to petabytes of data, implements a MapReduce engine, and its own Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). On July 2011, Facebook announced that their Hadoop cluster had grown to 30 petabytes of data! A commercial version of Hadoop is marketed by cloudera.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Big Data - NoSQL versus SQL Databases - MongoDB versus Drizzle

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 14:31:39 -0700

(T) While database engineers from the last two decades were trained to develop with SQL databases, the new generations of engineers are trained to develop with NoSQL databases for Big Data applications. NoSQL databases addresses the requirements of huge amount of data on distributed architectures with the resiliency that legacy SQL databases cannot. NoSQL databased have been pioneered by many Internet companies in particular Google, Facebook, and Amazon. At its Google IO 2012, Google presented a deep dive analysis on the use cases of NoSQL versus SQL databases.

Among the NoSQL databases which are getting market traction, MongoDB is definitely the most popular ones. MongoDB is the product of 10gen, and is written in C++.

MongoDB provides a data model that stores rich objects in a set of hierarchical documents, called BSON, rather than rows split across multiple tables as implemented traditionally in a SQL database. This data model results in expanded documents, rather than new rows, tables, and columns. As a result, transactions remain simple even as the data model evolves. If, for example, ten new fields are added to a document, the query time to fetch that document does not increase.

The second major attribute of MongoDB is its horizontal scale. Instead of expanding the database with bigger servers, the database has been designed to operate over multiple servers. This enables as well transparent upgrades to the latest server technologies while keeping the existing data models.

The third and last attribute of MongoDB is its ability to run in cloud environments leveraging virtualized infrastructure. Capacity can be added through on-demand virtual machines, or to compensate for the performance of individual server nodes.

Besides MongoDB document-based architecture, there are a number of other emerging NoSQL databases, in particular:
• CouchDB, another open source database, with a document-oriented architecture like MongoDB, that uses JSON for documents, JavaScript for MapReduce queries, and HTTP for requests to the data store;
• Casandra, an open source database system started at Facebook to handle big data workloads across multiple data centers where servers can to be added/removed on an on-going basis; Casandra can be considered as having a node-based architecture;
• Neo4j, an open source database developed by Neo Technology that is among the most popular NoSQL graph databases. The data model for those databases is a graph structure very similar to legacy object-oriented databases’ data models.

But if you need to work on a SQL database, you might want to consider Drizzle that has been forked from the popular MySQL open source database. The Drizzle team has removed all non-essential code, has re-factored the remaining MySQL code into a plugin-based architecture, and finally modernized the code base moving to C++.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Big Data - Web Application Services - Node.js versus Tornado

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 14:31:35 -0700

(T) To cover the capital investments (CAPEX) and the operating investments (OPEX) required for a cloud-based infrastructure such as the ones from Facebook, Yahoo, or Amazon, in order to provide a consumer Web-based service, you will need to come up with a business case that generates several billions of dollars a year. To provide a Web service to over 100 millions of consumers, you will probably need to invest over a billion dollars to build a datacenter. To operate that datacenter, you will probably need to spend over a hundred millions dollars a year.

Emerging cloud-based applications have three attributes: first they need to support thousands of concurrent users and clients; second they are data-intensive: they process a lot of data and generate in that process more data; and third they are real-time.

Among emerging development platforms for backend Web services, go to any conference, and you will hear about Node.js.

While JavaScript is the de-facto standard to integrate scripts into Web pages, Node.js does not implement JavaScript for frontend but for backend applications. The large number of developers with JavaScript expertise has certainly contributed to the success of Node.js.

In a nutshell, Node.js provides server-side C/C++ libraries that runs into a JavaScript (JS) engine. The JS engine is based on open source Google’s V8 , written in C++, and implemented in Google Chrome. In addition, to Chrome V8 C++ libraries, Node.js adds a number of key networking libraries for TCP/DNS/HTTP.

In order to scale to a large number of clients, and to provide real-time intensive data applications, Node.js architecture is event-driven and performs asynchronous and non-blocking I/Os at the kernel layer. This architecture is more efficient in terms of CPUs and memory than a synchronous blocking I/O architecture that requires more threats to support the direct associations to the network connections. By not systematically associating connections and threads, Node.js needs only a main event loop thread, and many but fewer kernel threads to perform the required I/Os.

Node.js was created by Ryan Dhal while working at Joyent. It is part of Joyent’s cloud offering SmartOS.

However, if you have a pure Web background, you are likely to have designed many Web sites in Python and Django. An alternative but less popular to Node.js is Tornado.

Tornado has a very similar architecture to Node.js but is written in Python instead of JavaScript. Tornado was created by Bret Taylor for social media updates FriendFeed, a company that was acquired by Facebook. Tornado is now part of Facebook Open Source contribution.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Our Universe - The More we Try to Understand it - The More it Challenges our Man-Made Theories

Wed, 4 Jul 2012 09:49:22 -0700

(E) From the early days, philosophers have been philosophizing about human civilizations sculptured with two antagonists forces: love and hate, and four elements - the earth, water, air, and fire. Physicists have been theorizing about our Universe with many atomic and subatomic particles, and four fundamental forces: the gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces, that have started to take shape during, and after the Big Bang.

Through his Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein explained to us that the gravitational force is a deformation of space and time, and other physicists through the Inflation Theory based on the Relativity explained to us that our Universe is expanding under the effect of dark energy.

Through the Standard Model, physicists have been explaining to us the dynamics of subatomic particles resulting from the interactions of the electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces.

Finally through the M-Theory, physicists have been explaining to us that particles are one dimensional strings like the notes that a musician can play on her violin, and have attempted to unify the Theory of Relativity that explains our Universe or the very big with Quantum Physics that explains the behaviors of photons, electrons and other particles or the very small.

One of the most daunting concepts of the M-Theory is that it attempts to provide an explanation of what happened before the Big Bang, proposing that our Universe is of one of many Parallel Universes.

Within the Standard Model, almost 50 years ago, many physicists predicted the presence of the Higgs boson, which is thought to be the reason for the existence of the mass in other particles, and perhaps to reveal the characteristics of dark matter, for which we have no understanding what so ever but is considered as giving most of the mass to our visible cosmos. The Big Bang generated particles that do not have mass, but acquired it through the Higgs field, giving birth to the story of our universe and the story of life on our blue planet.

And, for the last few years, one of the goals of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator of the CERN, near Geneva, was to finally detect the presence of the Higgs boson at the origin of the Higgs field.

Finally, the CERN today presented and celebrated their latest results in the search for the long-sought Higgs boson, and provided strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson.

Are we getting close to understand our universe? Maybe! But history has shown us that the more we try to understand our universe, the more it challenges our man-made theories.

References:
www.cern.ch
www.youtube.com/user/CERNTV
www.quantumdiaries.org/

Note: The picture above is from the CERN - other pictures are from Wikipedia.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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How to Win an Hackathon?

Sun, 1 Jul 2012 17:39:07 -0700

(T) Over the last year, I have attended many hackathons, and in that course learned many new technologies. Hackathons are a great way for developers to learn new programing languages and tools, brainstorm and share new app and product ideas, meet and network with other developers, and finally but not least evaluate if an existing project or apps could have some market traction, and potentially could lead to a new venture.

Yes, I know a lot of hackathons are organized over the week-end. But they are worthwhile attending for building your expertise, and expanding your network. A lot of hackathons start with tutorials, and when organized by a vendor provides a lot of valuable and free resources.

Seeing other developer demos is a great way to stimulate your own creativity. And demoing your work is a great way to find out if you have demonstrated a technical achievement or if your idea has a business potential.

It is always a good idea to come to an hackathon with an idea and a teammate, but never hesitate to go to an hackathon without an idea and without a teammate.

The key to win an hackathon is to quickly define what you will be demoing, and from the demo work backward to what you need to code. You do not need to code all the features but after you have clearly articulated the concept and the value of your apps that you want to demonstrate to the audience, show (and before that only code) the features that will make the most impact in the demo, and require the least amount of programming.

Two critical success factors in winning a hackathon are first starting with an efficient distribution of the tasks between the team members that leverage each team member expertise, and second manage efficiently the workload with the very limited time offered for the hackathon.

Finally, always give yourself sometime to test and practice the demo before its final presentation, and think about the key takeaways that you want your audience to remember.

You do not need to always start from scratch at an hackathon. I have seen many developers modifying and testing an apps that they have already developed previously.

And, I have seen some hackathons offering prizes of several thousands of dollars. Not a bad way to spend a week-end when it is raining outside. Unfortunately, it is not raining very often in California.

Note: The picture above is an hackathon that I attended last year from Corona Labs.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Après Trente Ans Le Minitel Nous Tire Sa Révérence

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 11:45:56 -0700

(B) Today after 30 years of services, the Minitel “nous tire sa révérence”. The 700,000 Minitel
subscribers in France will not have accessed anymore to the first worldwide online service before the existence of the World Wide Web - Yes the WEB! From the 50s to the 80s, each of the major European countries had one network operator - France Telecom in France, Deutsche Telekom in Germany, Telefonica in Spain, British Telecom in the UK, Telecom Italia in Italy - supplying all telecommunication services to the whole nation with no competitor. As a result, those operators in particular France Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, and Telefonica enjoyed strong profitability, reinvested their cash flows into a state of the art network, building year-after-year the first SS7, X.25, ISDN, and optical networks. But they did not stop there! They heavily invested into their Labs and R&Ds, researching, not only new network architectures and new networking protocols, but also new consumer products that could expand their telephony services, and could be marketed to their subscribers.

In particular, France Telecom’s Lab called CNET (Centre National d’Etudes des Telecommunications) - France Telecom later changed its name to Orange and the CNET to Orange Labs - pioneered many inventions including first electronic switch Aristote in 1963, first geostationary telecommunications satellite in 1967, one of the first packet network Transpac in 1978, ATM packet switching technology in 1984, many new types of ISDN services, called Numeris, in 1987...The CNET was the Y Combinator of many of French technology start-ups that were directly spin-offs of the CNET like Stanford University has been the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley.

Among those inventions, the CNET pioneered the Minitel, the first online service before the Web. The Minitel did propose many services, such as booking a train ticket, checking bank accounts, looking for employment, even dating services known as “La Messagerie Rose”. All those services were developed over the years, and all have been re-invented for the Web. But the initial goal of the Minitel was to provide online telephony white pages services, and the Minitel terminal was given to France Telecom subscribers for free to save printing telephony directories. In 1995, the Minitel reached a peak of 20 million subscribers having access to 25,000 services.

The Minitel pioneered videotext services that are based on another invention, the Téletext which provides a digital transmission of text pages, and is still being used today to display news information by French TV stations.

With the worldwide deregulation of telecom services, which started in Europe in the 90s, innovation has certainly slowed down among network operators, and it is very unlikely that Orange will market a new service like the Minitel ahead of its time in the soon future. That time is over.

References:
Wikipedia: Le Minitel and Orange Labs - CNET.

Note: the picture above is one the early Minitels from France Telecom - Orange.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Corona - A Cool Cross Platform Mobile Game SDK

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 09:57:26 -0700

(T) In January 2011, the Corona SDK got an incredible level of attention from game developers, from all over the world, when ABC featured Robert Nay, a 14 years old developer, and his game Bubble Ball.

This week, Ansca Mobile, the company behind the Corona SDK, changed its name to Corona Labs, and has been improving over-and-over its SDK, and its resources for its game developer community. Corona Labs was started by two guys in a garage in Palo Alto, CA: Carlos Icaza, the Manager, and Walter Luh, the Architect, who worked together on Flash Lite at Adobe. Corona is basically a cross mobile development platform that provides a full integration with the mobile device’s capabilities such as camera, accelerometer, magnetometer, video player, compass, GPS…

The same code can run natively on multiple mobile platforms without the need for the developer to recompile it. The development is done in Lua which is a very easy scripting language to learn. The SDK is mostly for 2D games, leverages OpenGL graphics, and integrates a fantastic physics engine. The advantages of the Corona platform is a much faster and easier development effort than a native SDK.

Following, as an example, are a few lines of code to demonstrate how to create a slider control:

Corona Labs has been expanded its development platform to enterprise apps, eBooks, and integrating for better game monetization both ad networks and cloud-based analytics.

Following is the complete listing of the APIs of the Corona SDK, and an introduction to the SDK by Walter Luh, himself:

Reference: www.coronalabs.com

Note: The picture above is the game Bubble Ball.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Dell Moving from PCs to a Provider of Enterprise Solutions

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 16:34:21 -0700

(B) It is interesting to see the transformation of Dell from the early 90s to the beginning of this decade. While Dell was in its inspection a provider of PCs leveraging Intel processors and Microsoft operating systems, and the company core competences were in supply chain management and channel marketing, the company has now two focus: consumer and enterprise. The consumer business is only 20% of Dell revenues while its enterprise business is over 50%. And, Dell is not only selling PCs anymore but also storage, networking, security and services; product lines that Dell acquired from many companies such as Perot Systems, SonicWALL, Wyse Technologies and many others.

Interviewed by Maria Bartiromo this week on CNBC (http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000095849), Michael Dell is explaining the shift of Dell strategy, through acquisitions, to provide enterprise products and services. Dell is now the number 3 PC maker (after HP and Lenovo), and plans to cut more than $2 billion in spending during the next three years by cutting down its supply chain and sales organizations. Michael Dell also said that the company would offer a quarterly dividend that will start at 8 cents a share.

Interesting to compare Dell’s transformation to the one of IBM and the one that HP is presently going through (see our previous blog post: When Technology Kills Technology).

IBM shifted from being a one stop shopping vendor for everything to being a provider of enterprise services, servers and software, selling its PC division to Lenovo, and its networking division to Cisco Systems while acquiring over 70 mid-sized enterprise software companies since 2001 such as Cognos, Sterling Commerce, BigFix.

At the same time, HP expanded its PC division with the acquisition of Compaq Computers, expanded its networking division with the acquisition of 3Com, and expanded its service division with the acquisition of EDS. Now HP looks very much like IBM was 15 years ago.

Note: the picture was taken from the CNBC interview on June 12.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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From Satellites to Microscopes the New Use Cases for our Smartphones

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 17:20:53 -0700

(B) Besides portability, our smartphones have many features that our desktop computers do not have. They can see - they have cameras that can be moved. They can feel - they have sensors. Combined with mobility, vision, sensors, and their low costs, smartphones are providing a number of use cases, that are today just the top of the iceberg, that we will see in the future for mobile devices.

Yesterday CellScope Inc., a spin-off of CellScope, the microscopy and medical imaging lab of Professor Daniel Fletcher from UC Berkeley, has raised its first round of financing. Professor Fletcher creativity was to turn a smartphone into a microscope for critical health care needs in developing countries. And CellScope Inc. will launch a smartphone enabled as an otoscope for remote diagnosis of pediatric ear infection.

Last year, I attended a presentation from NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA about one its latest projects: PhoneSat (@NASA_PhoneSat on Twitter), an ultra low cost satellite that leverages smartphone technology. PhoneSat 1.0 was a satellite with minimal basic functionality — to stay alive in space for a short period and send back monitoring and picture data — which has been tested to and passed NASA environmental testing specifications, and yet whose part costs amount to only $3,500! Now NASA is working on PhoneSat 2.0 which will have a completely functional satellite bus, including a two-way radio to be able to command PhoneSat from the ground, solar arrays to enable it to run a long duration mission, and a system of attitude control.

And, creativity is not limited to Universities and NASA...

I met last year an engineer who built a bicycle safety device for his kids: basically the safety device or smartphone was monitoring the surroundings of the kid while he was biking to prevent any accident with a car.

And this year, I met a team at Startup Weekend, who was thinking to use a smartphone that could be holds by a blind person to remotely help him or her to freely move.

May be the most important use cases of our smartphones will not be for communication, Web surfing and playing games but to solve new problems where mobility, vision, sensors and low costs can be combined together.

Note: the picture above is from CellScope.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Social Ecological Systems

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 09:59:18 -0700

(E) I had the opportunity to attend in 2010 a talk organized by the Center of Ethics at Stanford University from Elinor Ostrom about “Understanding Social Ecological Systems”. Professor Ostrom was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Economics for her work about “Governing the Commons”. She pioneered the research about how social, economic and political forces and structures shape and transform our ecological systems. Following is one of her papers that I found useful to summarize her work: “A diagnostic approach for going beyond panaceas: 15181.full.pdf”.

Today, Ms. Ostrom left us at the age of 78 while losing a battle with cancer. Ironically, her last article “Green from the Grassroots”, about the coming United Nations Rio+ 20 summit, was published the same day in Project Syndicate. Following is the conclusion of her article (not a good one to say the least):

“We have a decade to act before the economic cost of current viable solutions becomes too high. Without action, we risk catastrophic and perhaps irreversible changes to our life-support system.

Our primary goal must be to take planetary responsibility for this risk, rather than placing in jeopardy the welfare of future generations”.

Note: the picture above is Ms. Ostrom.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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When Entrepreneurship is not Possible Intrapreneurship Might Be an Option

Sun, 27 May 2012 07:55:57 -0700

(B) It is always much easier to acquire a company than to successfully integrate it, nurture it and expand it within the acquirer. In most cases after the acquisition, the management or the engineering talents, that were at the origin of the product concepts, left to pursue other opportunities, and over time the products acquired are discontinued. So, it is very rare if a company is expanding the product line of a start-up acquired ten years ago, and even more unique if the same team that was running the start-up before its acquisition is the one at the head of the product expansion ten years later.

But so is the case at Alcatel Lucent who acquired in 2003 Timetra, a Silicon Valley start-up, based in Mountain View, which developed a metro router for network operators to offer VPLS or Layer 2 Ethernet VPNs to their enterprise customers. Timetra Networks was one of the very last service provider networking start-ups, with Vivace Networks that was acquired by Tellabs, to be funded during the Internet bubble of 2000. For a telecommunications equipment vendor such as Alcatel Lucent, IP routing and networking are one of the key areas for future growth with LTE, optical transport and VDSL.

Nearly ten years after the acquisition of Timetra, Alcatel Lucent has just expanded Timetra’s 7750 SR metro routers to core Internet routers with its recent launch of the 7950 XRS competing head to head with Cisco CRS and Juniper T Series core routers. 70% of the team that started Timetra is still at Alcatel Lucent, and the engine in the design of the 7950 XRS. And, the routing product line of Alcatel Lucent generates only $1.6B of the $15.6 B revenues of the company, but 35% of its profits.

So why is the story of Timetra very different from most start-ups acquired? Simply, because there is not much opportunity for the Timetra team at Alcatel Lucent to leave its present company, and to start another company in the Valley. The state of the networking industry has matured as did the PC industry a long time ago. When was the last PC start-up? Same story for networking start-ups targeting the infrastructure of network operators. They have not been “any” for the last ten years.

So if you are in a market where entrepreneurship is not an option anymore, you might still have the opportunity to be an intrapreneur. That is what the team at Timetra did.

Reference:
For more on Intrapreneurship:
Intra-Corporate Entrepreneurship from Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot
Gifford Pinchot’s blog on Intrapreneurship

Note: the picture above is the Alcatel Lucent 7950 XRS.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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When Technology Kills Technology

Thu, 24 May 2012 10:04:35 -0700

(B) The day that she started her new job, Meg Whitman was interviewed on CNBC by David Faber, and to the question why did she accept the position of CEO at Hewlett Packard she responded “Because HP matters to the technology industry, to Silicon Valley, and to the US”. Yes, most of us who started in the early stage of the computing industry would not want to see HP disappearing from the industry.

But what can you do when over half of your revenues are in declining markets? Very little - so the challenges for Ms Whitman are daunting to say the least.

We do not print anymore - we only scan documents from time to time, and that need is likely to disappear in the future as well. We are using less and less PCs (and Mac) and more and more for basic computing (Web surfing and e-mail) our smartphones and tablets. While most of HP’s declining revenues are from PCs and printers (PC and printers were $15.5 B while the company total revenues was $30.6 B for its FY Q2 2012 quarter), revenues from servers, software and services, assuming that HP can grow them, are not compensating yet for the decline.

While HP bought Compaq under the leadership of Carla Fiorina, and HP streamlined its operations under the leadership of Marc Hurd, IBM was growing its service business, buying small software companies, and expanding its line of data center servers. HP failed to leverage its acquisition of Palm and its Web OS to pursue the smartphone and tablet markets.

So what are the strategic options for HP to reinvent itself? There are not so many. HP is facing a strong leader Lenovo, in China and in emerging markets, that are the last market segments where PC sales are growing. And, HP has such a broad product portfolio that it cannot focus as IBM does and has mastered to do so on services and software.

The story of HP reminds me of the one of Netscape (although the end of Netscape was due to its competition not because of the introduction of new technologies). When Bill Gates decided to give away for free Internet Explorer, he put Netscape out of business. Over night Netscape had half of its revenues disappeared. Netscape tried to grow its Web server product lines to compensate for the lack of browser sales but failed in doing so and was acquired by AOL. Sad story for a company who marketed one of the first browsers, and invented two key Web technologies: JavaScript and SSL. Ironically, Mr Marc Andreessen is on the board of HP today.

Yes, we agree with Ms. Whitman, HP matters to Silicon Valley and to anyone in the technology industry. But never forget that the best companies that brought incredible technologies to the market place such as HP are also vulnerable to the introduction of new technologies.

Note: the picture above is the garage where HP was started by Bill Hewlett and David Packard.

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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From JavaScript to Dart

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 05:20:32 -0700

(T) Over the last few months, a few Google engineers have been presented Dart an open source Web programming language started at Google in many meetings in Silicon Valley. Dart aims to be another option to JavaScript for writing scripts embedded in Web client applications. Dart’s goals according to Google are to provide a structured yet flexible Web programming language, for all types of Web devices, running across all major browsers while still providing a syntax and tools familiar to developers.

Dart is an object-oriented language (class-based, single inheritance) and leverages a C-style syntax. It supports interfaces, abstract classes, and reified generics. One of the key features of Dart is its optional support of static types in the code. Static type annotations can provide clear documentation of the code, while type-checking tools can be used for debugging. Programmers can migrate an untyped prototype to a higher performance application with typing.

Dart applications are designed and launched using the Dart Editor based on Eclipse, and run within a virtual machine within the browser for Google’s Chrome or compiled into JavaScript to run in Microsoft’s IE, Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari.

As an open source project, the success of Dart will depend of its adoption in commercial products which will requires that the Dart VM is supported natively in the major browsers from Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla, a major challenge to overcome.

Code Examples:
Defining an interface:
interface Shape { num perimeter();
}
class Rectangle implements Shape { final num height, width; Rectangle(num this.height, num this.width); // Compact constructor syntax. num perimeter() => 2*height + 2*width; // Short function syntax.
}
class Square extends Rectangle { Square(num size) : super(size, size);
}

Untyped Code that create a new class "Point" with two parameters x and y, and two methods: scale () and distance ():
Class Point {
var x, y; Point(this.x, this.y); scale(factor) => new Point(x*factor, y*factor); distance() => Math.sqrt(x*x + y*y);
}
main() { var a = new Point(2,3).scale(10); print(a.distance());
}

Typed code that ensures that x,y, and factor are of type num, and that a Point contains two values of type num:
Class Point { num x, y; Point(num this.x, num this.y); Point scale(num factor) => new Point(x*factor, y*factor); num distance() => Math.sqrt(x*x + y*y);
}
void main() { Point a = new Point(2,3).scale(10); print(a.distance());
}

Link from an HTML page to a Dart program. Here is the proposed new MIME type, “application/dart”:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Simple Dart Web App</title> </head>
<body> <h1>Simple Dart Web App</h1> <h2 id="status">dart is starting up...</h2> <script type="application/dart" src="SimpleDartWebApp.dart"></script> <script
src="http://dart.googlecode.com/svn/branches/bleeding_edge/dart/client/dart.j s"></script>
</body>
</html>
var x, y; Point(this.x, this.y); scale(factor) => new Point(x*factor, y*factor); distance() => Math.sqrt(x*x + y*y);
}
main() { var a = new Point(2,3).scale(10); print(a.distance());
}

References:
www.dartlang.org
Google Blog

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Lua The Favorite Language for Game Developers

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 10:00:50 -0700

(T) The popularity of Lua is huge among game developers. Lua has been used by many game programmers, from Angry Birds to Bubble Ball (the popular iPhone game from 14 year old Robert Nay). Roberto lerusalmischy, the author of Lua, was teaching, this quarter at Stanford University, a computer science class, and presented some of his thoughts about the design of Lua: Sone Thorny Points in the Design of Lua (ws2011.pdf).

The originality of Lua is its ability to reuse existing code, adapt and reshape that code. Lua provides a component-based approach to software development. A Lua application consists of high-level components that are written in C/C++, and are unlikely to change during the development of the application. Lua is a simple: a 14 years old teenager can develop a popular application in Lua. Lua has among the scripting languages an efficient implementation. Lua can be extended through external C/C++ libraries - Lua itself implements most of its own functionality through external libraries. Finally, Lua is very portable, providing the same code across virtually all platforms, even MS-DOS and old IBM Mainframes.

Those four major characteristics are a perfect match for the needs of game developers who have many native C/C++ libraries that provide all the basic low level functions required for their games. Game developers use Lua to design or update a game while re-using all their C/C++ libraries for the fabrics of the game itself such as physics engines, graphics and animations, interfaces and networking, ads and analytics, hardware and platform specific libraries for storage etc...The game is designed in Lua but most of the code generated by the game and executed by the CPU is in C/C++.

Sample Code:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/SampleCode

References:
www.lua.org

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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From Java to Scala

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 07:15:14 -0800

(T) Martin Odersky, professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and author of Scala (Scalable Language) recently came to Silicon Valley, and presented the new features of Scala 2.1 in a few meet-ups (What’s Next for Scala: ScalaNext.pdf). Scala is gaining some market tractions for large scale business applications. Businesses want to maximize the productivity of their developments while designing and implementing applications that are reliable and scale. At Twitter for instance, the core messaging queue of Twitts was redesigned in Scala to better scale due to the exponential increase in the number of Twitts with only 1,500 lines of codes. Twitter Software Engineer Robey Pointer made that (his) code available as an open source project: http://robey.github.com/kestrel/).

Scala is the fruit of early work from Martin Odersky to improve Java for scalable and concurrent programming. To that end, while all the object-oriented programming features of Java have been kept, Scala changed the syntax of Java in order to provide functional programming. The result is that Scala is a general purpose programming language which provides a seamless integration to Java while reducing code sizes by 2 to 3 compared to Java programming. The Scala compiler produces compatible Java byte-codes that can run on the Java VM. Scala programs can leverage existing Java libraries, and can call Java programs (the reverse is also true).

While Java was adopted over night by the industry as the language for Internet applications in 1995, Scala, which was started in 2003, is slowly getting more traction.

Feature Details (from scala-lang.org):
Object-oriented programing:
In Scala, every value is an object. Types and behavior of objects are described by classes and traits. Classes are extended by subclassing and a flexible mixin-based composition mechanism as a clean replacement for multiple inheritance.

Functional programming:
In Scala, every function is a value. Scala provides a lightweight syntax for defining anonymous functions, it supports higher-order functions, it allows functions to be nested, and supports currying. Scala's case classes and its built-in support for pattern matching model algebraic types used in many functional programming languages.
Scala's notion of pattern matching naturally extends to the processing of XML data with the help of right- ignoring sequence patterns. In this context, sequence comprehensions are useful for formulating queries. These features make Scala ideal for developing applications like web services .

Statically typed:
Scala provides an expressive type system that enforces statically that abstractions are used in a safe and coherent manner. In particular, the type system supports:
• generic classes
• variance annotations
• upper and lower type bounds
• inner classes and abstract types as object members, compound types
• explicitly typed self references
• views
• polymorphic methods
A local type inference mechanism takes care that the user is not required to annotate the program with redundant type information. In combination, these features provide a powerful basis for the safe reuse of programming abstractions and for the type-safe extension of software.

Extensibility:
In practice, the development of domain-specific applications often requires domain-specific language extensions. Scala provides a combination of language mechanisms that make it easy to smoothly add new language constructs in form of libraries: any method may be used as an infix or postfix operator, and closures are constructed automatically depending on the expected type (target typing).
A joint use of both features facilitates the definition of new statements without extending the syntax and without using macro-like meta-programming facilities.

Code Examples:
http://www.scala-lang.org/node/219

References:
www.scala-lang.org

Copyright © 2005-2012 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Durban Very Small Steps for a Daunting Challenge

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:24:17 -0800

(E) There was a lot going on this week for the media. European countries (to the exception of the UK) agreed on monitoring their budget deficits at their (last?) debt summit to save the Euro. The race for the US President election is starting to be interesting. In Africa, Tunia has a new constitution, while Ivory Coast and The Republic of Congo are going through some challenging election processes. And, last but not least, in Silicon Valley, we are waiting for the IPO of Zynga anytime soon!

And by the way, there was also the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban in South Africa. The conference that the media did not much covered over the last two weeks. Out of a sample of a few major publications that I read every day: The New York Times, Le Monde, The Financial Times, The Economist, only the Economist did outline Durban as the first headline on its site over the week-end.

So what was accomplished at Durban?

A proposed agreement (to be further negotiated) that binds 40 wealthy countries (including the US, China and India - out of 190 countries that were present at Durban) to legally commit to reducing their carbon emissions by 2015, and makes that agreement operational in 2020. One difference between the Durban agreement and the Kyoto protocol is that Kyoto was only signed by the developed countries (to the exception of the US) while the Durban agreement has been signed both by developed and developing countries. However, there is no mention in the agreement of how much those carbon emissions will have to be reduced by. But the Durban agreement includes “an acknowledgement that there is a widening gap between the mitigation efforts currently promised, and those required to keep warming within the broadly recognized 2°C safety limit.”

The Durban agreement will replace the Kyoto Protocol that was enacted in 2007, and was due to expire next year. Governments that are part of the Kyoto Protocol agreed in Durban to a second commitment period to the protocol that will last five to eight years (though Russia, Japan and Canada have said that they will not be part of it). The Kyoto agreement requires countries to reduce their collective greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2% from the 1990 level initially over a five-year period from 2008 to 2012.

In addition, an agreement in Durban was also reached on a global “Green Climate Fund”, which will provide $100 billion that rich countries have promised to make available to poor ones by 2020, to help them cut their carbon emissions and to adapt to climate change. However, there is no mention in this second agreement of how those $100 billion will be financed.

So what should have been accomplished at Durban that was not accomplished at the previous climate change conferences namely Cancun in 2010 and Copenhagen in 2009?

I) The world needs to cut its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions sooner rather than later and sharply rather than lower to avoid a potential increase in average temperatures from 1820 below 2 0C or 3.6 0F considered as the tipping point beyond which climate change become uncontrollable. That goal translates on a different scale, that the world’s governments must succeed to cut worldwide CO2 emissions in half, from the 1990 levels, by 2050 with specific targets mostly for 2011, 2012 and 2015 and not for 2020 or 2040 when it will likely be too late! 
II) Nations should be accountable to insure their emissions targets. This is to avoid the failure of the Kyoto protocol where most of the 38 industrial nations (the EC, Japan and Canada) which committed to reduce their emission targets of 5% in 2012 might not honored their commitments. Lack of reduction of emissions shall result in the payment of a nation carbon tax to a Global Climate Change Fund (GCCF).  
III) Deforestation, which is responsible for around 20% of the concentration of CO2 into the atmosphere, should be stopped in particular in Brazil and the Amazon, Indonesia, New Guinea and Congo. Appropriate programs and funding should be investigated and implemented to help those countries to fight deforestation by breaking up the demand for the lands and the wood and providing alternative economic developments that are not linked to deforestation. 
IV) Together the United-States and China emit 40% of the world’s greenhouses. China is now the first worldwide emitter with 6 billion of tons or 4.58 ton per habitant and the United-States the second emitter with 5.9 billion of tons or 19.78 ton per habitant. As the two economic leading powers of the world, both the United-States and China shall lead the world to a decarbonized economy. Both the United-States and China are the world’s heavy coal-using economies (others are India, Russia and Australia). 50% of the electric power is generated by coal in the US and although China is clearly leading in renewable energies, it is still building a coal power plant every ten days (coal is primary, by its molecule structure, carbon and so generates more CO2 than oil or gas do). 
V) In order to realistically achieve emission targets, nations shall investigate, co-operate and implement bottom-up policies and practical measures to insure decarbonized economies first by maximizing energy savings and second through the development and financing of large scale sustainable cleaner technologies for power generation, industry production, transportation (both for aircrafts and cars and trucks) and heating buildings. 
VI) The rich countries (the most CO2 emitting countries) should help the poor ones (the least CO2 emitting countries) in particular in the South Hemisphere, in Africa and in tropical regions that are the most vulnerable to desertification and water stress to quickly introduce new programs to adapt to climate change. Funding to that end shall come from the Global Climate Change Fund (GCCF). 
VII) The path to a decarbonized world can only be built with a global cooperation between countries. The world need to put the research and development efforts and the financing for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), technologies that will provide environment sustainability, in parallel to operational policies and tactical measures for climate-change mitigation and adaptation.

So was Durban a sucess or a failure?

By all means when you considered what should have been accomplished, and what was accomplished, Durban is a failure as was the previous Cancun and Copenhagen conferences.

Even as previously noted, the participants to the Durban conference acknoledge their failures by including “an acknowledgement that there is a widening gap between the mitigation efforts currently promised, and those required to keep warming within the broadly recognised 2°C safety limit.”

At this point in time, only 34 countries that signed the Kyoto protocol are still commited to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions - those countries exclude the US and China. Besides that, there is no present goals to reduce further any time any greenhouse gas emissions. That is what the Durban agreement is supposed to define before 2015 with an implementation planned for 2020! When it will be obviously too late. That simply failure!

So what is next for you and me, your country and my country, and the world?

Continuing the path to an ever expanding carbonized economy is taking the risk that global society will not flourish anymore. We all know that. The world’s current ecological developments are unsustainable. If we continue living and working in the developed countries as usual, and if we start working and living in the developing countries as the developed countries do, we are taking a significant risk of future humanitarian, social and economical crises. Mankind present disruption of the Earth’s climate and depletion of the Earth’s resources are causing the rapid destruction of life-vital ecosystems. And those two trends can only become worse with a growing human population and the access to higher standards of living in the developing world. We can only use the Earth’s lands, water, biodiversity and energy in a sustainable way. Further disruption of the Earth’s climate and further depletion of the Earth’s resources will at least limit, if not endanger economic prosperity for ALL on the planet.

Every nation has not contributed in the same way to the present concentration of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But climate change is borderless. Every population, society and nation is affected in various and subtle ways. Change to the climate by one nation will affect itself as well as all other nations. Climate change is breaking century of diplomatic games. Cultural, economical and military competitiveness are no-sense in the context of climate change. Actions to block the consequences of climate changes must be shared globally with the same determinism and anxiety across world nations. Climate change is the business of every nation. And of EVERYONE! 
Reference:
United Nations Framework on Climate Change

Note: the picture above is from the Unitied Nations Conference at Durban.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Thinking Green This Holiday Season

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 08:11:44 -0800

(E) I received this week-end some simple and great tips from the San Mateo recycling center to think green this holiday season. Statistics show that during the holidays, household waste increases by 25%, or nearly 1 milion tons of additional garbage a week. Following are a few holiday waste reduction tips:

“Shoping in your hometown can help save gas, time and energy. If every family reduced gasoline consumption by 1 gallon, we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1 milion tons!

Consolidates your purchases into one bag, or better yet, bring your own reusable tote bag when shoping!

Save a tree by purchasing a living tree. Living trees can be planted before the holiday and enjoyed throughout the year.

If the Internet is accessible, consider sending electronic holiday cards this year. If every family reduced their mailing list by just one card, we would save 50,000 cubic yards of paper!

Favor zero waste gift ideas such as gift certificates, concert tickets, home baked goodies or potted plants. And wrap your gifts with old wallpapper, fabric or canvas.”

Fore more holiday recycling ideas:

Recology San Mateo:
http://www.recologysanmateocounty.com/holiday_tips.php

Ca.gov Recycle:
http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/publiced/holidays/

Note: the picture above is a winnery in Napa.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com

No To a Collapsing Europe and the Return of the Great Recession Part II

Sun, 2 Oct 2011 13:48:50 -0700

(B) We did painfully learn in August of this year, during the US debt ceiling crisis, how it is difficult for one country to do the right “thing”. Now imagine, how difficult it is for 17 countries to do many right “things”, especially if first those right “things” to do are quite complex to achieve, and second if the 17 countries have not in place the appropriate structure to implement them!

So what Europe should do, why Europe is not doing it, what the rest of the world should do, and what are the risks both for the Europeans, and for all of us...following is a simple FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions):

What should Europe do?
• Stop European auteristy measures - The European Central Bank (ECB) should lower interest rates and favor credit easing
• Provide a large scale liquidity program to assist Italy and Spain that are solvent - The present European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) of 440 Billion Euros being approved is not enough to respond to the needs of Italy and Spain that might require from 2 to $3 Trillion Euros
• Manage an orderly default of Greece through a retructuring of its debt
• Provide the equivalent of the 2008 US TARP program to recapitalize European banks to avoid a European credit crunch
• Germany should favor policies that are not by nature austere but stimulate internal consumption

Why is not Europe doing it?
• Europe has a monetary union through the Euro but no political, economic, social and fiscal union. In a nutshell, the German workers do not feel that they need to pay for the misfortunes of their Greek peers

What should the rest of the world do?
• The US, Japan, Canada, England and other Western Countries should have monetary and fiscal policies that simulate their economies and feed worldwide economic growth
• Fast developing economies such as China that rely heavily on exports should develop policies that simulate their internal demands

What are the risks?
• The risks are very high both because of the complexity of the macros, and the lack of time to soften a brutal delevering of debt burden European countries and banks
• A very weak Europe will weaken all other western countries, and all developing countries. The best scenario would be slower growth of worldwide economies, and the worst scenario would be another 2008 Great Recession.

For more food for thoughts, please read, listen, understand, question, agree and/or disagree with the following:

Professor Nouriel Roubini:
His latest thoughts:

• “How to Prevent a Depression”, Project Syndicate, September 19
• “Risk of a Depression is Huge”, Emerging Markets, September 26

PIMCO Mohamed El-Erian:
• “Europeans must not let their “Washington Intervention” go to waste”, Reuters, September 26

George Soros:
• “The Road from Depression”, Project Syndicate, September 29
• “Does the Euro has a Future”, The New York Review of Books, October 13

The Economist:
“Until politians actually do somethhing about the world economy...be afraid”, The Economist, October 1st

Note: the picture above is La Fountaine Saint-Michel in Paris.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com

Internet Performance Optimization The Mobile Web

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:58:55 -0700

(T) The new challenge to optimize the performance of the Internet is “ideally” to provide for mobile users a near zero latency experience to the Mobile Web. While for the last two decades, optimization was about a faster network and faster servers, optimization for this decade is about faster content from faster Web sites. In other words, optimizing the Mobile Web requires mostly optimizing the content both in the network and at the Web site. Most of the initial requirements to reengineering the fabric of the wireline Internet by increasing significantly its bandwidth and improving its data transmission have been accomplished, although new enhancements will certainly continue.

Now, the new challenges are first to optimize the content to provide a simliar experience as the one that users expect on wireline networks while the bandwidth of the wireless network is still being limited. Second as the number of users is increasing especially for the Mobile Web (but as well for the wireline Internet), Web sites must always be optimized to accomodate a larger number of users distributed geographically over the world. According to Yahoo, a 400 ms slower Web can translate from 5 to 9% drop in full-page traffic.

There are two complementary approaches to optimize the Mobile Web: network operators can optimize the mobile content in their networks, and content providers can optimize their Web content. And, in general the more the faster!

Optimizing the Web Traffic for the Mobile Web:
On wireless networks, video is the dominant driver of the Web traffic and can produce up to 40% of the traffic. Most of the video traffic, at any given time, is driven by a small number of videos that are downloaded by a very large number of users.

But even the bandwidth of 4G/LTE networks (5 to 12 Mb/s downlink – 2 to 5 Mb/s uplink) is not enough to accommodate the growth of the media traffic. If the traffic is not routed over WiFi networks (802.11n can provide up to 600 Mb/s), the media must be compressed in the network.

Network optimization of the mobile Web is performed by an inline HTTP proxy (identical to a firewall application proxy). The majority of the data compression is achieved through lossless and lossy optimization at the content layer while some level of data reduction can be achieved at the application layer (such as parallelization of content downloads), and at the transport layer (such as aggregation of TCP tunnels in particular if a client is used at the subscriber’s device).

Optimization generally compresses the HTML, JavaScript and CSS content, provides inlining of JavaScript and CSS content, and gzip many popular Web objects (such as HTML text, Microsoft Office, PDF, XML…). Part of Web optimization can also include lossy optimization of JPEG, GIF and PNG images. Lossy image optimization involves generally multiple quality levels for the user - the more the content is optimized, the lower is its resulting output quality. The average data reduction in HTTP web browsing for a smartphone can range from 20 to 50%.

The Web media (e.g. the video and audio) can be lossy optimized as images included in a Web page. Lossy media optimization involving generally the transcoding and lower frame rates of the media. The average data reduction in HTTP video bytes for a smartphone can be from 15 to 30% for lossless optimization, and from 0% to 35% for lossy optimization.

Optimizing Web Sites for the Mobile Web:
The Yahoo Developer Network and Web Performance Engineer Steve Souders have identified 35 best practices to optimize Web sites for faster speed-up. Those practices are divided into 7 categories: content, server, cookie, CSS, JavaScript, images and mobile. Technique 33 and 34 are specific to the Mobile Web. Technique 1 to 32 and 35 applies both to the wireline and wireless Web.

Following are the details of those 35 techniques:

1. Make Fewer HTTP Requests
2. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
3. Add Expires or Cache-Control Header
4. Gzip Components
5. Put Stylesheets at Top
6. Put Scripts at Bottom
7. Avoid CSS Expressions
8. Make JavaScript and CSS External
9. Reduce DNS Lookups
10. Minify JavaScript and CSS
11. Avoid Redirects
12. Remove Duplicate Scripts
13. Configure ETags
14. Make Ajax Cacheable
15. Flush Buffer Early
16. Use GET for Ajax Requests
17. Postload Components
18. Preload Components
19. Reduce the Number of DOM Elements
20. Split Components Across Domains
21. Minimize Number of iframes
22. Avoid 404s
23. Reduce Cookie Size
24. Use Cookie-Free Domains for Components
25. Minimize DOM Access
26. Develop Smart Event Handlers
27. Choose <link> Over @import
28. Avoid Filters
29. Optimize Images
30. Optimize CSS Sprites
31. Do Not Scale Images in HTML
32. Make favicon.ico Small and Cacheable
33. Keep Components Under 25 KB
34. Pack Components Into a Multipart Document
1. Avoid Empty Image src

Good Readings:
RIM’s SlipStream Web Multimedia Optimization Technology
The Yahoo Developer Network
Steve Souders‘ Web Site and Blog

Note: the picture above are my personal BlackBerry and Playbook.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com

Internet Performance Optimization The Early Days of the Internet

Sat, 3 Sep 2011 15:29:29 -0700

(T) When Pathfinder was about to land on Mars in 1997, the challenge for NASA emerged paradoxically not in space but on earth on the Internet. The 20 NASA mirrored sites around the world had to serve a demand of 32.8 M hits when several computer-networking problems occurred. A router, at the NASA Ames site in Mountain View, CA which was not properly configured, caused the site network to be unusable. Several Web servers ran out of disk space and crashed. And the memory of the two major Web servers at NASA’s JPL, connected through two T3 lines, had to be quadrupled.

In 1995 after the Internet became a commercial entity, the response time of web pages for every Internet user was very noticeable. Internet networks were overloaded by the rapid growth of Web servers.

The first factor in latency was (and still is) in the way that HTTP works with TCP/IP. As an application protocol, HTTP makes a very inefficient use of TCP. HTTP requires many TCP connections to be created and destroyed per Web page transferred. HTTP ignores some of the fundamental concepts of TCP/IP design. However, it is the remarkable congestion control mechanisms of TCP/IP which saved the Internet from the famous prediction of Bob Metcalf, founder of 3Com, about the collapse of the Internet.

Web servers were (and still are) generally not the bottlenecks, except in very few cases, such as in the NASA example. Processing of HTTP required no more than 5% of the utilization of a server. A typical UNIX server could on average handle 3.5 millions hits/day. There were however some cases in which Web servers could become bottlenecks. A Web server could only handle a certain number of simultaneous connections, and a connection was not released until the HTTP request was serviced. If responding to the request took a large amount of time (such as in the case of retrieving large video files from the disks or if a lot of computation was needed for a search engine) then the Web server could starve for connections. And incoming users would see increased numbers of “server not responding responses” as connections could not be serviced.

The major and practically only source of Web latency was (and still is) in the network. Contributing first to the network latency is the bandwidth of WANs. A WAN could inject as much as 100-500 ms of latency even when the link is not fully utilized. Upgrading a WAN link from T1 to T3 would only improved latency by 20% for transferring a Web page from Boston to San Francisco despite a 30,000% increase in bandwidth!

Contributing second to network latency was routing. With the exponential increase of Web traffic, routing was degrading at an alarming rate. Internet routing was becoming very unstable with routes fluttering that is changing between sources and destinations. Some research on the Internet backbone showed that BGP updates, the Internet routing protocol, were dominated by pathological or redundant updates adding more traffic to the Internet. Routing instability led to general network instability.

Further research on Internet packets revealed that Murphy’s law was in full force. All assumptions about network behaviors were violated. Packets were frequently lost, corrupted, or arrived badly out of order.

The only solution to reduce latency in the Internet was believed to be through the deployment of reverse proxy caches that could disseminate the content of Web servers function of the demand of their contents.

But a few technology breakthoughs significantly contributed to improve the performance of the wireline Internet. Internet routers became much more efficient at processing packets. A new protocol was created MPLS (multi protocol label switching) to enable network operators to better deal with network congestion. And, large deployments of optical transport and optical switching equiment led the network operators to catch up with the demand of Internet content.livepage.apple.com

Unfortunately, network operators invested in so much network equipment, that their costs grew much faster than their revenues leading to the rise of the telecom bubble that burst in 2001.

Good Readings:
Van Jacobson, “How to kill the Internet”, SIGCOMM’95, Cambridge, MA, August 05
L. Zhang, S. Floyd, V. Jacobson, Adaptive Web Caching
C. Labovitz, G. Malan, F. Jahanian, “Internet routing instability”, SIGCOMM’97
Vern Paxson, “End-to-end routing behavior in the Internet”, SIGCOMM’96, Stanford, CA, August 06
Vern Paxson, “End-to-end Internet packet dynamics”, SIGCOMM’97
Requirements for Traffic Engineering over MPLS

Note: the picture above is a “Gelb Rot Blau” from Vassily Kandinsky.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com

Natural Quantum Computation

Sun, 7 Aug 2011 09:29:36 -0700

(T) D-Wave, a start-up based in British Columbia and a spin-off of the University of British Columbia, has been working for over 11 years on quantum computation. In 2007, D-Wave presented an early prototype of its quantum computing system at the Computer Museum in Mountain View, CA. And in May this year, D-Wave announced the first sale of its quantum computing system to Lockheed Martin based on a quantum annealing processor. At the same time, D-Wave scientists published the results of their research “quantum annealing with manufactured spins” in Nature Magazine.

As its name implies, a quantum computer attempts to process information leveraging the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics. In traditional computers, information can have two digital states 0 or 1. In quantum computers, information is modeled after atoms that can have more than one state simultaenously, a fundamental law in quantum mechanics called quantum superposition. As early as 1982, well-known physicist Richard Feynman pioneered the idea of simulating quantum mechanical objects. In 1985, Oxford University Physic Professor David Deutsch proposed a simple abstract machine, that he called the quantum Turing machine, that captures all the power of quantum computation based on quantum gates (qbits). And in 1994, Peter Schor from AT&T Bell Labs developed the first quantum algorithm to perform efficient factorisation of integers, a very useful computing application in particular in cryptography, and out of reach for traditional computing systems.

Building “universal” quantum computers is still a challenge (if you are optimistic) or a dream (if you are pessimistic) first because of the complexity of designing large number of interacting qubits, and second because of the interaction of those qubits with their surronding environment that can prevent them from efficient quantum computation, an effect called decoherence.

D-Wave natural quantum computer (NQC™) is built around superconducting processors designed to enable quantum annealing algorithms. Many computationally impossible problems can be reduced to finding the ground state of a system of interacting spins such as the Travelling Sales Man or the Spin Glass. Or quantum annealing enables the search for the ground state of a quantum system. To that end, D-Wave NQC implements a programmable quantum spin system, in which controled individual spins and their couplings perform quantum annealing, and then determines the state of each spin. D-Wave NQC implements an artificial Ising spin system involving an array of eight superconducting flux quantum bits (qbits) interconnected as a bipartite graph.

Simplified schematic of a superconducting flux qubit acting as a quantum mechanical spin in the D-Wave system - circulating current in the qubit loop rise to a flux inside, encoding two distinct spin states that can exist in superposition

D-Wave NQC demonstrates that a programmable artificial spin system can be manufactured as an integrated circuit implementing a quantum algorithm to solve hard combinatorial optimization problems found for instance in software engineering, financial risk analysis, or bioinformatics. D-Wave’s experiments provide a valuable framework for investigating the physics of interacting quantum spins, and a brilliant step toward the exciting quest for a universal quantum computer.

References:
D-Wave Systems
D-Wave Blog: “Hack the Multiverse”
Nature Magazine, “Quantum annealing with manufactured spins”, May 2011
D-Wave,“Implementation of a quantum annealing algorithm using a superconducting circuit”, March 2009

Note: the picture above is D-Wave 128 qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum optmization processor.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com

The Real Value of Social Networks

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 15:27:35 -0700

(T) A few years ago, a friend of mine told me that he was using LinkedIn instead of scaning people business cards. Keeping business cards of people that we met in business meetings has always been a challenge. And, I know very few people who have ever taken the time to scan business cards that were given to them. LinkedIn for your professional network and Facebook for your social network both solve that problem: keeping the contact information of your network updated. That was probably the initial value of the first generation of social networks which is to keep, update and organize your contacts, and to faciliate your communication, through e-mails, chats and now video calls, with our network.

But the real value of social networks, and what is driving their growths is undoubtly in sharing. No one has probably better describes it than Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine:

“Everything that can be shared will be shared. We are just at the beginning of this movement. Sharing can enhance the value of whatever we share. We are now sharing things, we never thought we would, like information about our friends, locations, investments, health, memories, expectations, and activities. Privacy is a concern, but most people don’t mind sharing this information in the right context.”

Think about it - “sharing can enhance the value of whatever we share” - how many types of social networks we have already and could have, and how many usages from those networks we have already and could have based on the benefits of sharing - we are just at the beginning of that trend:

• Creating a Facebook page to start a revolution: “We are all Khaled Said”
• Buying clothes, according to your lifestyle or your community, through ModCloth instead of going to Macy’s
• Using Facebook and Twitter to find an organ transplant that is most likely to match the donor and save a life - The Dragonfly Effect from Professor Aaker
• Discovering, experiencing and sharing paintings that you love, and new ones that you will love with Artfinder
• Getting local restaurant recommendations from your friends through Foursquare when travelling to a new city or a new country
• Buying technology stocks with other technology investors through StockTwits
• Finding new products and stores that you might want to buy with Svpply
• Sharing your hobbies so that you know what’s going on through Facebook groups or Google + Circles
• Creating a personal brand or marketing a small business with Twitter
• Finding victims of natural disasters, eathquakes or tsunami - with Google’s Person Finder - or finding victimes of wars and genocides - such as the Remember Me Project from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Sharing your private memories and good times with close friends and family using Path
• Using Facebook as the worldwide white pages phone book to reconnect with people from your past
• Using LinkedIn to post a resume and find a new job

The Web is clearly moving from web pages and e-mails to being rebuilt around people. As very well explained by Paul Adams, User Experience Manager at Facebook, we all live in networks of small connected groups, and we are influenced by the people around us, mostly the strong ties in our networks.

While the Facebook, LinkedIn and new Google + of the world are going to compete by providing new applications for their users leveraging their existing massive data or by being the social platform for third-party applications such as Facebook for Zynga social gaming, a large number of social start-ups such as Etsy, Tumblr, Path, Quora, Namesake, StockTwits, Artfinder, Svpply, Foursquare, ModCloth...are emerging.

And between one dominant social platform such as Facebook, and the new social start-ups, users will have to decide if they want to have only one social graph (which is probaly what both Facebook and Google want) or a “portable” social graph, such as a phone number, that they can carry and use over many social apps and services.

Note: the picture above is the wall from Repower America.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com

The Urgent Need To Quickly Restructuring The Greek Debt

Sun, 3 Jul 2011 18:32:32 -0700

(B) The Greek debt crisis started over a year ago. And Europe does not seem close to a resolution. It is even worse: the opportunity for the European leaders to avoid a terrible disaster is quickly shrinking. The consequences for Europe, and the rest of the world of Greece defaulting on its debt will be distratous leading without a doubt to another financial crisis, and a global economic recession similar to the ones that we had in 2008. And, we are getting extremely close to that inacceptable point of no return.

Greece is insolvent. Its public debt is 160% of its GDP. However, European leaders, instead of considering it as a solvency crisis, have considered it as liquidity crisis, lending more with the help of the IMF to Greece, and asking for more austerity measures that the Greek do not seem to accept.

At this point in time, there are only two possible outcomes: Greece defaults on its debt - the most likely scenario as of today - or an orderly restructuring of its debt is being proposed, if European leaders act quickly, that could save Greece, the Eurozone and the world economies.

Professor Nouriel Roubini has clearly articulated how to propose an orderly restructuring of the Greek debt:

“If the PIIGS (Portugal Ireland Italy Greece and Spain) can’t inflate, grow, devalue, or save their way out of their problems, Plan A is either failing or is bound to fail. The only alternative is to shift quickly to Plan B – an orderly restructuring and reduction of the debts of these countries’ governments, households, and banks.
One can carry out an orderly rescheduling of the PIIGS’s public debts without actually reducing the principal amount owed. This means extending the maturity dates of debts and reducing the interest rate on the new debt to levels much lower than currently unsustainable market rates. This solution limits the risk of contagion and the potential losses that financial institutions would bear if the value of debt principal were reduced.
Policymakers should also consider innovations used to help debt-burdened developing countries in the 1980’s and 1990’s. For example, bondholders could be encouraged to exchange existing bonds for GDP-linked bonds, which offer payouts pegged to future economic growth. In effect, these instruments turn creditors into shareholders in a country’s economy, entitling them to a portion of its future profits while temporarily reducing its debt burden.
Reducing the face value of mortgages and providing the upside – in case home prices were to rise in the long run – to the creditor banks is another way to convert mortgage debt partly into shareholder equity. Bank bonds could also be reduced and converted into equity, which would both avert a government takeover of banks and prevent socialization of bank losses from causing a sovereign debt crisis...
The creditors and bondholders who lent the money in the first place must carry their share of the burden, for the sake of the PIIGS, the EU, and their own bottom lines.”

After the financial crisis of 2008, the West cannot afford further economic crisis. And it goes without saying it, that an orderly restructuring of the Greek debt requires a stronger Europe, that includes not only a monetary union but also both a fiscal and political union, and that every European country will have to share the burden of the Greek debt.

References:
Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mill, “A Loan and a Prayer”, Project Syndicate
Joschka Fisher, “Does Europe have a Death Wish?”, Project Syndicate
The Economist, “If Greece goes...”
A Silicon Valley Insider, “The Public Debts of the Developed Nations Could Well Lead to the Next Financial Crisis”

Note: the picture above is “The Venus de Milo” from Le Louvre.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com

Risking its Position of Saver of Last Resort

Sat, 2 Jul 2011 12:53:34 -0700

(B) According to the Economist, the US only known instance of a technical default occured in 1979 when the US Treasury failed to redeem $122 million of Treasury bills on time. The reasons for that default were: high interest from small investors, a delay in raising the debt ceiling, and an equipment processing failure.

Today that default would cost $86 billion a year or 0.6% of the GDP! Interviewed on CNBC, Mr. Alan Greenspan summarized it very well: ”without raising the debt ceiling, the US will default on everything, and will lose its position of saver of last resort”.

While US politicians are taking an unaceptable amount of time to discuss the debt ceiling which should be raised since it is money that is (unfortunately) due already, the real challenge for the US is not its present debt ceiling, but how quickly to start reducing its astronomical $14.4 trillion debt (as of June 29, 2011) or approximately 98.6% of its GDP for 2010 (source: Wikipedia)!

According to Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, authors of “This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly”, “a 90% ratio of government debt to GDP is a tipping point in economic growth. Beyond that, developed economies have growth rates two percentage points lower, on average, than economies that have not yet crossed the line”.

The longer the US waits to take the path toward fiscal sustainability, the more dramatic and the more limited will be its options, ranging from fiscal austerity to structural reforms.

What is saving the US is that the dollar is still fortunately the world reserve currency, and the US has the largest and most liquid debt market. But over the last few years, foreign investors have less invested in the US (one of the reasons being obviously the decline of the dollar itself), and more in non dollar assets, and that trend is being expanded by the fact that even US private investors are investing more and more abroad.

As of January 2011, foreigners own 32% of the total US debt of $14.1 trillion, and if China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and other foreign investors lose their confidence in the US, not only will they reduce their willingness to invest further but they will ask for higher interest rates.

2010 US Category Spendings (from Wikipedia)

To reduce its debt, it is obvious that the US must quickly review and evolve its present entitlement programs, with Social Security and Medicare being first, and has to combine in some way raising taxes, and probably creating new ones, while lowering its spending, and in particular first, its defense budget. In 2000, the US government revenue was at 19% of its GDP, and spending at 18.5%. The result: a budget surplus. Today, revenue is at 14%, and spending at 23%. The result: a deep budget crisis! This trend needs obviously to be reversed.

Nobody wants to pay taxes. But as Alan Greenspan said rightly “taxes can be as low as possible but not with borrowed money.”

Finally, reducing a budget deficit is like reducing global warming. Actions cannot be scheduled to occur in 15, 10 or 5 years from now. Decisions and actions to reduce the budget deficit by cutting spendings and increasing taxes must occur now.

2010 US Receipts & Expenditures (from Wikipedia)

References:
Alain Greenspan Interviewed on CNBC: http://bit.ly/jh6ZNd
The Economist - America Debt Ceiling: http://econ.st/mp65Yv
A Silicon Valley Insider - The Public Debts of the Developed Nations Could Well Lead to the Next Financial Crisis: http://bit.ly/q20h3b

Note: the picture above is “Portrait de Dedie” from Amadeo Modigliani from the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com

What Kind of Cloud Do We Want?

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 15:21:54 -0700

(T) Thirty years ago, Ken Olsen, founder and CEO of Digital Equipment, never believed in the PC. His argument was that “why someone would use a PC when much more computing power is available to you, if you just connect a VT 100 terminal to a VAX”. What Mr. Oslen, although an outstanding engineer and entrepreneur, missed was that for users “personal” computing was more important than “powerful” computing. And over the years because of Moore’s law and better software engineering, Mac and PCs have become very persuasive in our daily personal and work life.

Eleven years ago, I was sharing a taxi going to a meeting in Chicago with a sale engineer, and that was the first time, as far as I remembered, of someone going to a meeting without his notebook but just with his BlackBerry. Over the last ten years, we have moved from “desktop” computing to “mobile” computing simply because “mobile” computing has just become more convenient than “powerful” computing.

I can only find two roots to cloud computing…

The first one is the concept of “thin client” that Sun Microsystems pioneered with the JavaStation. The major goal of the JavaStation was to lower the cost of operating clients in the enterprise by substituting PCs with JavaStations (whose OSs were a Java OS and had a Java browser). Google’s Chromebooks are following the same fundamental concepts of the JavaStation except that Chromebooks are designed to operate not with an enterprise server but with cloud services. And the simple reason for that is that over the last 15 years most of the user traffic has moved from local networks to the Internet.

The second root of cloud computing that I can point to is Hotmail. Hotmail was the first web-based e-mail service, and was very successful because it enabled users to check their personal e-mails at work, and at early Internet cafes. Over time, web-based services have exponentially expanded to consumers with iTunes, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, GoogleMaps, Skype, Twitter and so on.

Today cloud computing services considered that the client is the browser. Furthermore, the browser can have the same fabric as its underlying operating system as in the case of Sun’s JavaStation, or becomes the operating system itself as in the case of Google’s Chrome.

Do we want all our applications to have the browser as the only client?

Probably not. This is the problem that many of us have run in many occasions. There are some applications that can be designed for the browser, or more exactly for some applications the browser can provide a sufficient user experience but there are many applications especially rich user interfaces or computing intensive I/O applications for which the browser does a poor job. A typical example is an enterprise network management application that might requires to display some complex system configuration or network topology maps.

Do we want all our applications to be cloud-based?

Probably not. Even if the application can be done within the browser, I feel sometime that I do not want the browser to do it for me. For instance bookmarking. I can use Delicious to have always my bookmarks available across my BlackBerry, Playbook and Mac. Unfortunately, Delicious breaks the organization of the bookmarks that I have with my browser. Therefore, I have to export my bookmarks and import them across my devices: smartphone, tablet and notebook through a USB – which is non sense! Ideally, we want the cloud to keep not only our data and back-ups updated but also the state of a work in progress that we might do over multiple mobile computing devices - and with those devices running native device applications that have some benefits over web-based applications. Those benefits can be features or better performance. Apple is starting to head into that path with iCloud. iTunes, by leveraging iCloud, keeps the songs that you purchased across Apple clients, and enables to download those songs across any Apple device.

Do we want all our data in the cloud?

Last May about 200,000 Citibank credit card customers in North America have had their names, account numbers and email addresses stolen by hackers. Earlier this June, Google announced that the personal Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including senior U.S. government officials, had been breached. Last April, the Sony's PlayStation Network was shut down after a massive security breach that affected more than 100 million online accounts! Also in April, hackers penetrated a network operated by data marketing firm Epsilon that handles email communications for JP Morgan, McKinsey, Best Buy, Target, Walgreens, Marriot. And, the list goes on...

Even RSA, a leading security firm, had a security breach earlier this year that disrupted the use of their security tokens to authenticate access to corporate networks for many of their customers.

Until Citibank, Google, Sony, RSA start encrypting their customer data in their clouds, the best way to guarantee that if data is stolen, it will not be accessed, do you want to have all your data in the cloud? Probably not.

And, if you have sensitive data in the cloud, make sure that you did encrypt them yourself before giving it to the cloud provider.

Note: the picture above is from Point Reyes south of San Francisco.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com

The Seven Forces That Are Expanding the Web

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 15:51:16 -0700

(T) At the Web 2.0 Expo 2011, last month in San Francisco, Kevin Kelly from Wired Magazine described extremely well six forces (I am adding a seventh one - connecting) that will contribute to expand the Web as we know it today:

1. Screening:
The screen is the destination for all data: screens are surrounding us in all sizes and shapes...

“Screens are proliferating into every part of our lives. A couple of decades ago, everyone thought that the web would be like TV, with 500 channels. But now the screens in our lives are taking the web everywhere, to the screen in Starbucks, smartphones, tablets, the living room, the workplace, etc. The question is, could one screen rule us all?”

1. Interacting:
User experience is moving on the Web from typing and reading, to full body interaction...

“Like actor Tom Cruise manipulating images with his hands on a holographic computer in Minority Report, we are now interacting with content all over the web. And when we interact, the web responds by adapting to our behavior. It’s possible for Web apps to measure our every move when we’re using them and then report detailed analytics to their developers. Those developers can then take that feedback and adapt their apps to better suit us. This feedback loop is making web apps better and better. It’s as if they’re reading our emotions and are becoming two-way windows.”

1. Sharing:
Anything that can be shared will be shared: friends, locations, investments, health, memories, expectations, hobbies...

“Everything that can be shared will be shared. We are just at the beginning of this movement.
Sharing can enhance the value of whatever we share. We are now sharing things, we never
thought we would, like information about our friends, locations, investments, health,
memories, expectations, and activities. Privacy is a concern, but most people don’t mind
sharing this information in the right context.”

1. Flowing:
Data is flowing to us in “always-on” real time streams from everything, and everywhere: RSS feeds, music, videos, games...

“The metaphor for the original personal computers was the desktop. In the Web, the metaphor changed to the page, as in Web page. Now, the right metaphor is flowing, or streaming, like streaming movies. We click on a movie site and expect the movie to start streaming to our screen in real time. Streams are everywhere now, on all of those screens in the screening trend. We can watch movies, listen to music, play games, and participate in conversations by tapping into these streams on the Web.”

1. Accessing:
Instead of owning content, files, software and computers, we will be accessing “everything” from the cloud...

“We used to own everything, like movie disks or computer game disks. Now, if we are surrounded by streams, we don’t care if we own them. We can rent them instead. On Netflix, you don’t need to purchase a movie. You can just pay to access it when you need it. With books, you won’t collect a library; you’ll download what you want five seconds before you read it on your Amazon Kindle eBook reader. Music will likely go the same way. If you can access your collection from anywhere by logging into the cloud, you won’t need to own it. All of the music on the planet can now fit on one 6-terabyte hard disk drive in a computer you can buy for $585. But there is no reason to carry it around.”

1. Generating:
In oder to increase its value, content will be generated by providing a unique experience that will be hard to copy...

“These days, anything digital that can be copied will be copied. So the goal is to make something that can’t be copied. If users generate their own content, personalize it, or customize it, then they’re creating something of value. Focusing on that is where you can be successful. Musicians have had the problem of digital piracy for years, and it has wiped out the old music industry.” But musicians should charge more for live concerts, an experience that can’t be duplicated so easy.”

1. Connecting:
Anything that can be connected will be connected: home appliances, medical devices, smart grid meters, car computers...

“One of the values of the Internet is in connecting many types of heterogenous networks. That value can now be brought to many devices, that are now dump but are being computerized and so more intelligent, adding both value to the Internet and getting value from the Internet. Everything in the home, in the car and in the office becomes a node on the Internet.”

The Web Business Model:
“Wherever the attention flows, the money will follow.” (hopefully!)

Reference:
The full video from Kevin Kelly’s keynote at the Web 2.0 2011 Expo in San Francisco:

Note: The picture above is from Kevin Kelly’s presentation.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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The Creative Mind

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 13:08:08 -0700

(E) Creativity in arts, science and technology is about bringing change. Painters reveal new colors to our eyes, musicians new harmonies to our ears, scientists explain us why, and engineers design new tools. But it is only over time that we will be able to assess how creative or innovative a new art, theory or design will be, what will be its impact, and how valuable it will become to our culture.

The creative mind is unique by his ability to adapt to new situations and to leverage whatever is at hand to reach his goals.

He obviously shares a great amount of wonder and interests to develop what he should work on, and a great amount of openness and sensitivity to feel what could be changed.

In order to create, the creative mind develops a wild imagination with a sense of reality to come up with the next big thing. When working at his art, he generally combines playfulness (because of the enjoyment for his art) with discipline (because of his dedication to his art). And, he is at best performing in an harmonious and helpful surrounding and environment.

The creative mind is generally perceived by society as rebellious and independent. He often exposes himself to pain and suffering because of his deep sensitivity. How not to be devastated if no one cares about a new book or a new formula?

All major creative breakthroughs never come in one day, but after many years of perseverance. It is the enjoyment of producing his arts or discoveries that stimulates the passion and the dedications of the creative mind to pursue his own muse.

References:
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, Happer Perennial
Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers, Creativity in Business, DoubleDay

Note: The picture above is an art student studying at New York MoMA.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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The Creative Team

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 11:16:07 -0700

(E) What do engineers, product managers, entrepreneurs who started with a few ideas, a few tools, and a few dollars have in common in generating a tremendous amount of value for their companies. Simply said, all of them started by identifying exciting problems, and then relentlessly working to solve them by challenging common assumptions with, in most cases, very scare resources.

Innovation starts first with observation. Business and technology problems are abundant for those willing to investigate them. Defining the right problem to solve is often more difficult than solving it.

Second, innovation grows in places where people can share their thoughts. Creativity requires trading ideas. That is the reason why students at Universities or engineers in Silicon Valley can innovate: there are many venues around them to explore their ideas.

Third, innovators challenge existing assumptions. Innovators will foresee if common solutions can be improved, common solutions are not addressing the right problem, or if the problem is not properly defined.

Fourth, space and time are critical for teams to innovate. Surroundings need to accommodate team interactions. And, deadlines pressure the team to come up with a working plan.

Sixth, with well defined and tight rules, teams work harder to achieve their goals. Teams that have loose working rules, lose over time their senses of purpose. Innovative teams need to balance in their work enjoyment with discipline.

Seventh, innovative teams experiment a lot of options, willing to learn from their mistakes in the process, until they find the only path that will result in the best solution.

But in the end (eighth), the most innovative teams are the ones that always carry the attitude to endlessly overcome any barriers toward a successful outcome. That is very often how you can recognize if you have a creative team or not, and if you should invest or not in that team.

References:
Tina Seelig, Ingenius Levers for Unlocking Creativity, Stanford 2011 Entrepreneurship Week
Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Harper & Row Publishers

Note: The picture above are four musicians from the Chamber Music Festival Music@Menlo.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Fukushima Nuclear Plant BP Oil Spill How Many Disasters Before We Plug the World with Solar Energy

Sat, 9 Apr 2011 08:13:54 -0700

(B) Journalist Lisa Katayama, from TokyoMango, based in San Francisco is telling us how the people of Japan have learned to live with earthquakes, rebuilding their lives and their cities. But she believes that this time is different, and that Japan might change as a consequence of what happens on March 11, 2011 leading to over 20,000 people missing or dead, and over $200 billion in damages.

After the BP oil spill from last year, the Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daichi nuclear facility is another major event that should deeply challenge our present worldwide production of energy.

Fukushima will not be the last major nuclear power plant disaster:
The advantages of nuclear energy are obvious: plentiful, scalable and cost effective, and nuclear energy can directly produce the electricity that we desperately need. No questions about that! But nuclear energy has a long list of challenges that have never been overcome. No solution has been found yet to the disposals of nuclear waste from the nuclear reactors. And, there are the obvious risks of nuclear materials getting into a terrorist group or the risk of a nuclear plant being attacked by a terrorist group. And, we are discovering with the present disaster at the Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power station that even in the most advanced countries in producing nuclear energy, nuclear plants can have reactor meltdowns.

Finally, can you believe that twenty five millions of New Yorkers are within fifty miles of the Indian Point nuclear plant in Buchanan, NY, and that the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California is built directly on a geological fault line, and located near a second fault? This is too wrong!

The BP Oil Spill will not be the last major offshore drilling disaster:
As the world's reserves of light oil are depleted, the oil industry is exploring and producing more oil from deep offshore wells, and unconventional reserves such as tar sands (or bitumen), and maybe in the future oil shales that are all likely to impact significantly more the environment.

The BP Oil Spill has been the largest environmental disaster for the United States with over 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The fabric of life itself has been destroyed for many generations in the Gulf.

But, it seems that we have not learnt any lesson from the BP Oil Spill. As reported by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, deep water drilling permits are being issued with the same flawed blow-out preventers, and with the same emergency response plans that have been used by BP. Deep offshore drilling carries the same risks now that it did before the BP Oil Spill. This is unacceptable!

We do not have many options to produce clean and safe energy:
Natural gas is not a solution as it impacts the environment. Clean coal and carbon capture (CCS) could be a solution, as it does not impact the environment, if and when it works. Biofuels are taking lands from the earth ecosystems, and from food productions, and are therefore not solutions. And wind, hydroelectricity, geothermal and ocean waves cannot scale.

Solar energy is the only ecological, plentiful, scalable, safe, and cost effective energy that can directly produces the electricity that we need.

There is a vast amount of solar energy to harvest, and we need to start urgently heading down that path. We need both the private and the public sectors to massively invest, and we need quickly to embrace new policies and regulations to plug the world with solar energy.

We cannot take the risk to have another human and ecological disaster as the present Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant or the BP Oil Spill. The planet resources and ecosystems are already too stressed out. We need to run the country and the world with clean and very safe energy.

References:
About the Fukushima nuclear plant:
Nassim Taleb: Time to understand a few facts about small probabilities (142)
About the BP Oil Spill:
Forensic examination of deepwater horizon blowout preventer
CNBC Rachel Maddow: Dubious assurances on deepwater drilling safety
About the Diabolo Canyon nuclear plant:
CNBC Rachel Maddow: Diablo Canyon nuke plant wants more.

Note 1 : The picture above is the PG&E Diabolo Canyon nuclear plant.
Note 2: The second picture is the blow-out preventers from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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The Global Consumerization of Information Technology

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 14:16:17 -0800

(B) I kindly disagree with savvy investor Jim Cramer who likes to repeat, over and over, that
the Mobile Internet Tsunami is the biggest trend in Information Technology. I would rather consider that the Mobile Internet Tsunami is a big wave from a bigger Tsunami: the Global Consumerization of Information Technology. That trend has its roots in both Moore’s law and the openness of the Internet. From mainframes to minicomputers, from minicomputers to client/servers, from client/servers to the Internet, and finally from the Internet to our new age of mobility, technology has always offer more computing and communication power in a smaller form factor, and at a lower cost. And with the Internet, technology has moved from being critical to business productivity to being critical to how we all live. There probably has never been a better proof of the consumerization of Information Technology that the recent political events in beautiful North Africa, in particular in Egypt and in Tunisia, where a Facebook page such as “We are all Khaled Said”, can be instrumental to start a revolt, which can turn out to become a revolution, that spread across multiple countries.

The consumerization of information technology is already changing in many ways how technology companies must design and market new products, in particular:

User experience is the “only” feature of a technology product:
When consumers are using technology products in their daily lives, how well technology products provide them the experience that they are looking for is key to the product success.

Kids are the first adopters of new technologies:
The best focus group in technology are kids; and for two reasons. First, kids have no technology background so they are the fastest group to adopt new technology. Second, kids have little money, so they will always figure out to push the limit of any given technology.

New technologies are moving from the home to businesses:
New technologies are first embraced by consumers, and brought by consumers into their work. The technologies that we like outside work are the ones that we want to use in our work.

Everything starts from your BlackBerry:
With the latest generation of smartphones that we are carrying 24 x 7 with us, technology becomes entrenched to the most intimate moments of our personal lives.

Everything needs the cloud:
We get our music from iTunes, we connect with friends through Facebook, we find our directions through Google Maps... As consumers rely more on the Internet to live, cloud services are becoming the new architecture for any new Internet services.

Consumers need a store:
To sell consumer products from phones and pianos to clothes and fashion, you need a store where consumers can ask questions and get the devices, they love, repaired. Consumers do not want to torture themselves all day, all night to make technology works. They just want to go to the store, and get the help that they need.

Branding is key to marketing new technologies:
Technology companies have over time learned from the fashion, food, entertainment and car industries on how to create a brand. As many technologies are being used by consumers, brands becomes very critical to technology companies to focus on their target segments.

The most valued technology company is a consumer technology company:
In 2010, Apple passed Microsoft as the highest market capitalization technology company by Wall Street. As the consumerization of information technology grows, most of the growth of the NASDAQ will likely comes in the future from consumer-based technology companies. Facebook will certainly not be the last one.

Privacy is the major barrier to technology consumerization:
I strongly believe that consumer technology companies are not taking consumer privacy as seriously as they should be. Monetizing to the extreme what consumers search or like is a double-edged sword that could quickly lead a technology consumer company to market failure.

Information technology is now about connecting everyone and everything for everyday life and work. And, it is a real time global phenomenon. The consumerization of information technology is here to stay for a long time. No country can live any longer in silos. And no one can close the Internet.

Note: The picture above is an Egyptian mural painting that I own.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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The Quest for Highly Efficient Solar Photovoltaics Cells

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 13:41:13 -0800

(T) Countries and regions with very high electricity costs and a lot of sun shine are the first adopters of solar energy. In California, the average cost over 30 years of electricity provided by a PV cell is $0.28/kW-hr while the average cost of electricity is $0.13/kW-hr and peak rates are $0.29/kW-hr (as always those do not include externalities dues to the impact on the environment of non-renewable energies).

So, we definitely need to lower the cost of solar energy and to that end, we need to improve existing technologies and looking forward to new disruptive technologies.

Conventional solar cells technology are based on a p-n junction that generates an electric field that will provide electricity when light is absorbed. P-N junctions have a maximum solar light conversion efficiency of 31% called the Shockley-Queisser limit assuming a junction band gap (or energy gap) of 1.5 eV for the silicon.

Today’s multicrystalline (c-Si) silicon solar cells is the most popular technology achieving efficiencies from 15 to 18% and a module cost of $3 per watt (in addition with the cost of the DC to AC inverter and the installation on an existing home, the total cost reaches $7.5 per watt in the US). Chinese solar cell manufacturers are selling crystalline silicon PV modules for $2 per watt!

SunPower designs and markets the most efficient crystalline modules reaching 21.5% efficiency. SunPower’s technology, invented by Dick Swanson and called backside contact cell, is based on p-n junctions made in high quality silicon that are located at the back of the solar module.

Competing with crystalline technologies are thin film solar cell technologies where only a thin film of semiconductor (silicon) is deposited by low cost methods on a glass substrate.
The cells can be directly integrated into the roofing material. The p-n junction is based on Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) and thin film solar cells can achieve efficiency of 11% at a cost of $1 per watt. First Solar is the market leader for thin film solar cells. And, thin film solar cells have reached a market share of 20% while crystalline silicon solar cells have now a market share of 80%.

There are many start-ups which are working on improving existing technologies such as Nanosolar, Solyndra, MiaSole, and may others. But while those start-ups are working on the next commercial products, there is a considerable amount of academic research on significant black swan technologies.

One of the first disruptive technologies is to increase the efficiency of a solar cell by stacking multi-junctions (at least three instead of two). High efficiency III–V compound semiconductors are good candidates for fabricating such multi-junction solar cells but the costs of manufacturing them is much more expensive obviously than two junction cells.

Another black swan is to design solar cells with very large numbers of single crystalline nano-wires, which are about 60 nanometers diameter and 20 micrometers in length, with unique electrical and optical properties. Nanowires have multiple ways to boost efficiency but the most critical one is that the path of the electrons through the wire is unaffected and thus suffers less energy loss which leads to a higher efficiency.

Another nano-technology, like nano-wires, is photonic crystals for which certain wavelengths can pass through the photonic band gap while light in other ranges is reflected. As such by "redirecting" unabsorbed photons back into the silicon, photonic crystals can improve efficiency.

Another disruptive technology is to generate electricity not only by light absorption but as well from the heat accumulated by rooftop solar panels. Stanford University pioneered that process called PETE and demonstrated that PETE could double the efficiency of existing solar cells.

The last black swan that could lead to even more efficiency is intermediate band solar cells that are single junction cells introducing multiple band gaps (see slide below) . Different options have been proposed to produce intermediate band solar cells in particular quantum dots, that are, simply said, extremely small semi-conductors more closely related to atoms than bulk material because of their discrete quantized energy levels. Unfortunately, no intermediate band materials has been realized as of today.

Resources:
GTM Solar News
Stanford Center for Advanced Molecular Photovoltaics
Silicon Valley Photovoltaics Society (SVPVS)

Note 1: The first three slides are from Professor Mike McGehee from the Materials Science and Engineering department at Stanford University.

Note 2: The last slide is from Doctor Wladek Walukiewicz from the Solar Energy Materials Research Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Note 3: The picture above is a SunPower installation of a large scale solar PV power plant for the US Air Force.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Entrepreneurship Europe versus Silicon Valley

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 15:15:26 -0800

(B) I had the opportunity to attend one of the sessions of the Stanford School of Engineering
speaker series on European Entrepreneurship and to listen to the flamboyant Loic Lemeur CEO of Seesmic and founder of LeWeb. In his talk Loic echoed the same points that Rodrigo Sepulveda did in a very good interview from TechCrunch about the French start-up market. And having some exposure both to Silicon Valley and to Europe myself, I can echo the same key points as well (but in a very different flavor):

Europe lacks a vibrant M&A and IPO markets:
To the exception of the UK, most of Europe is lacking a vibrant M&As and IPO markets. Successful US technology companies provides very profitable exits to their venture investors. This lead to a cycle where more money is invested and more start-ups are created. In Europe, public traded companies are not ready to value leading edge companies as much as in the US and to acquire them to grow their businesses.

The European market is still very much fragmented:
A large homogenous market has made the US such a driving force to create wealth and that what is making China also such a driving force to create wealth. There is room for any company for any industry in the US to grow, and to leverage later that growth in Europe and Asia. In Europe, start-ups have to overcome the differences in terms of markets, regulations, and labor for each country. Both US and Chinese companies can scale very rapidly giving them a sizable advantage over European companies.

The myth of the US hero entrepreneur:
In the US and particularly in Silicon Valley, the myth of the hero technology entrepreneur is attracting the best minds to the industry. While the old team of entrepreneurs Steve Jobs, Scott McNealy, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison is starting to retire, a new team Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Pincus is starting to shine. Europe does not appreciate its entrepreneurs as much as the US does.

Over time, multiple generations of entrepreneurs create multiple technology waves:
This is the reason why Silicon Valley is so ahead of Boston, New York, Raleigh, Seattle, Denver or Austin in the US as a technology economy and so ahead of Europe. Entrepreneurs are creating over their lifetimes multiple companies and investing in multiple companies.

Silicon Valley is a big campus from San Francisco to South San Jose:
This makes Silicon Valley the place to be for the Internet and the computing industry. Silicon Valley companies can find venture funding, hire employes, partner with other companies and acquire or be acquired.

But...while the Europeans are enjoying a shorter work week and the US has a deteriorating education system...
Incredibly talented, energetic and focused Amy Chua and other Tiger Moms are producing the prodigies of tomorrow in business, technology and the arts. But it seems that Tiger Moms can be found more in Asia than in both the US and Europe giving tomorrow edge to Asia over both the US and Europe.

C’est la vie!

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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Der Schauspieldirektor What do We have Left from the Previous Decade To Address in the New Decade

Sat, 1 Jan 2011 06:16:47 -0800

(B) If the XX century was the one of globalization, the XXI century will have to be the one of sustainability. The first decade of this new century has been the theater of a worldwide renew of terrorism activity, growing economies in the developing world, and a severe global financial crisis. We are starting 2011, with a long list of things to do, many left over from the previous decade.

We Still Need To Put in Place a Sustainable Worldwide Economic Development:
Let’s not carry our journey toward an unsustainable economic development for 2011 and beyond as we did over the last decade. The world needs to put the research and development efforts and the financing that will provide environment sustainability, in parallel to policies and measures for climate-change mitigation and adaptation. We need to accomplish many many things, and at least:
• Stopping the destruction of the Earth ecosystems
• Transitioning to sustainable electricity that do not use any fossil fuel
• Efficient buildings that make a better use of energy (for home, businesses and governments)
• Sustainable transport that do not use any fossil fuel
The path to a decarbonized world can only be built with global cooperation between all countries. We have a shared planet.

Soon 7 Billion on the Planet Putting More Pressures on Water and Food:
Producing more clean water and food for a growing world wide population is still going to be a major challenge for many countries of the developing world as well as many parts of the developed world. We will reach 7 billion between 2010 and 2012 and 9.2 billion in 2050 according to the projections of the United Nations. Growth in the world human population is coming mainly from Asia (in particular China and India), and Africa with the remaining from South America. But with higher standards of living and better education, fertility rates in the developed world have been rapidly dropping. If instead of being 7 billion of human beings on our planet, we would be only 3.5 billion, just half of it, the fundamental questions of “why, what and how” to pursue sustainable economic development would not be a priority.

The New Comers to the Developing World: Africa, Vietnam, Turkey, Indonesia...
Vietnam, taking the lead over China for outsourcing, Malaysia and even Thailand, despite its political turmoil over the last two years, are enjoying strong economic growths in Asia. But probably, the biggest economic development to come in Asia might be Indonesia that benefits from a growing and large middle class, and a relative political stability. In the Middle East, Turkey is emerging as the most vibrant economy. And Latin America with stronger democracies, and under the leadership of Brazil and Chili will still keep its pace of expansion (to the exception of Mexico that has not solved its drug war). But the hope is that in this decade, Africa could emerge from its poverty. Africa’s emerging economies are South Africa, Egypt, Algeria, Botswana, Libya, Mauritus, Morocco and Tunisia. Together those countries match the average GDP per person of the BRICs. Those new BRICs countries are the ones with political stability, controlled inflation, diversified economy and a young population.

Failure from the US and China To Establish Coordinated Economic Policies:
Following the 2008 financial crisis, the overspending (or deficit) countries such as the US and most of Western Europe (the UK, France, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Iceland) as well as Dubai, and Australia have started a massif effort to deleverage, by reducing both their private and public spending, and importing less. Unfortunately, while the deficit countries are spending less, the underspending (or surplus) countries countries such as China, Germany, Japan and some Asian developing economies have not been spending more on both private and public consumption, and saving less. As a result, we have a global excess of productive capacity due to a shortage of aggregate global demand. The failure in particular from the US and the Chinese governments to establish global policies to correct those trade imbalances is reducing the prospect of global economic growth for everyone on the planet.

Solving the Currency Crisis, the US Dollar, the Chinese Renminbi and the Euro:
While the overspending countries have a depreciation of their currencies (in particular the US dollar and the Euro) in order to reduce their trade deficits, the underspending countries have resisted the appreciation of their currencies (in particular the Renminbi) because they are either unable or unwilling to reduce their savings, and sustain growth through higher spending on their domestic consumption. As a result, the only way the deficit countries can achieve real depreciation is via deflation while the surplus countries have growing risks of inflation.

In Europe, while maintaining the eurozone with a weaker euro strengthens the German economy, the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) countries with their large external deficits are still very much in need of strong financial supports in order to be maintained within the Euro as they implement painful fiscal and structural reforms. More than ever, Europe needs to leverage the benefits of the Eurozone and a single currency.

Economic Growth is Much Needed in the US and in the Europe to Reduce Unemployments and Deficits:
While the developing world is expanding in the planet and so reducing global poverty, the US economy needs growth after a recovery simulated by the government stimulus anquantitative easing from the Federal Reserve. But so far, US corporations, which are operating very profitably, are not investing in the US but growing their workforces mostly outside the US. The US is still facing many internal challenges: housing crisis, degradation of its education, health care costs, and an aging infrastructure. Europe needs badly policies that restore competitiveness and growth. Many European countries need the courage to free their labor markets, liberalize some of their national services, and correct abuse or misuse of some of their social programs. Without growth, it will be difficult both for the US and Europe to lower their unemployment rates and stabilize their public and private debts as a share of theirs GDPs.

Successes in addressing all those challenges for 2011 and beyond will require global cooperation, global innovations, global policies and global regulations.

Globalization has both benefits and requirements.

References:
“How to avoid a double-dip global recession” Nouriel Roubini
“A survival strategy for the Eurozone” Nouriel Roubini
“The US-China dialogue of the deaf” George Soros
“Where are the jobs? For many companies, overseas” Pallavi Gogoi
The World in 2011, The Economist
“The Road to an Unsustainable Economic Development for 2010 and Beyond” A Silicon Valley Insider
“Our Journey to a Sustainable Economic Development for 2010 and Beyond” A Silicon Valley Insider
“The Public Debts of the Developed Nations Could Well Lead to the Next Financial Crisis”, A Silicon Valley Insider.

Note: The picture above is one among many theaters. Der Schauspieldirektor is a divertissimento from Mozart.

Copyright © 2005-2011 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
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If Jim Cramer and John Doerr are not Investing in Clean Tech Who Will?

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 06:33:32 -0800

(B) During the last week of November, the exuberant Jim Cramer from CNBC held a Green Investment Week. But paradoxically, investing for profits in Green does not assume investing in the emerging providers of the Green economy for Jim. “I hope it’s the soul-crushing revelation that saving the environment and making money in stocks to augment your paycheck are incompatible goals in this particular market”. To make the point even more clearer: “I want you to forget the wind-power clean energy” Cramer suggested to his viewers. “That is a money loser. So is solar”.

So what did Jim Cramer recommend? First, to sell all pure clean tech players such as First Solar (FSLR) or EnerNOC (ENOC), and investing in companies such as Baldor Electric (BEZ), maker of energy-efficient industrial motors, CSX (CSX), a railroad company, Ameresco (AMRC), a provider of building energy efficient systems, and Clean Harbors (CLH), the largest operator of hazardous waste disposal.

Last month while announcing the hiring of Mary Meeker as a the new high profile Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) partner, John Doerr sent some mixed messages about his future investments in clean tech: “We still believe there are enormous opportunities in green technologies” he said, “there will be bigger than billion-dollar IPOs in the next 12-to-18 months. But what’s going on in the Internet is tremendously exciting too. We can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

KPCB’s clean tech portfolio includes a range of large bets like Tesla’s competitor Fisker Automotive, regenerative fuel cell maker Bloom Energy, low-cost solar film maker Miasole, and smart-grid technology company Silver Spring Networks.

So if Jim Cramer does not want to invest in public clean energy providers and John Doerr is preferring investing his money in the iFund (iPhone apps) and the sFund (social networking start-ups) instead of private clean energy providers, WHO WILL? Let face it, if we do not change something and very quickly, simply said NO ONE!

So what do we do? There is only one solution: new policies that provide the adequate regulations, funding and taxes to support the clean tech industry, and make it more profitable than the fossil fuel industry.

And let be smart, there are solutions to make the clean tech industry economically attractive , and forcing the energy migration from fossil fuel energy to cleaner ones.

Following is a simple proposal from economist Jeffrey Sachs (published recently in project syndicate).

“We need to induce power suppliers to adopt low-carbon energy sources. Suppose coal produces electricity at a cost of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour, while solar power costs $0.16/kilowatt-hour. The tax on coal-based electricity would have to be $0.10/kilowatt-hour. In that case, consumers would pay $0.16/kilowatt-hour for either coal or solar. The utilities would then shift to low-carbon solar power.

Politicians are loath to impose such a tax, fearing a political backlash. A feed-in tariff subsidizes the low-carbon energy source rather than taxing the high-carbon energy source. In our example, the government would pay a subsidy of $0.10/kilowatt-hour to the solar-power plant to make up the difference between the consumer price of $0.06 and the production cost of $0.16. The consumer price remains unchanged, but the government must somehow pay for the subsidy.

Here is another way. Suppose that we levy a small tax on existing coal power plants in order to pay for the solar subsidy, and then gradually raise consumers’ electricity bills as more and more solar plants are phased in. The price charged to consumers would rise gradually from $0.06/kilowatt-hour to the full cost of $0.16/kilowatt-hour, but over a phase-in period of, say, 40 years (the lifespan of the newest of today’s coal plants).

Assume that as of 2010, the entire electricity system is coal-based, and that the electricity price paid by the consumers is $0.06/kilowatt-hour. By 2014, suppose that 10% of the 40-year transition to solar power has been achieved. The consumer price is raised 10% of the way from $0.06 to $0.16, thus reaching $0.07/kilowatt-hour.

The coal tax for 2014 is then set at $0.01/kilowatt-hour, which is just enough to pay the needed solar subsidy of $0.09/kilowatt-hour. Solar producers fully cover their costs of $0.16/kilowatt-hour, since they sell power to the consumers at $0.07/kilowatt-hour and receive a subsidy of $0.09/kilowatt-hour. A small coal tax can support a large solar subsidy.

Suppose, further, that by 2030 the transition to a low-carbon economy is halfway completed. The consumer price for electricity is now set at $0.11, exactly halfway between $0.06 and $0.16. The coal tax is now raised to $0.05/kilowatt-hour, just enough to cover the solar subsidy of $0.05/kilowatt-hour. Once again, the solar producers cover their costs exactly, since the subsidy of $0.05/kilowatt-hour closes the gap between the consumer price ($0.11/kilowatt-hour) and the producer cost ($0.16/kilowatt-hour).

Let us presume, finally, that by 2050, all electricity production has made the transition to low-carbon energy sources. The consumer price finally reaches $0.16/kilowatt-hour, enough to cover the full cost of solar power without a further subsidy.

This approach allows higher consumer electricity prices to be phased in gradually, yet establishes strong, immediate incentives for adopting solar power. Moreover, the government budget is balanced every year, since the coal tax pays for the solar subsidy.
The actual transformation in the coming years will have one major advantage compared to this illustration. Today’s solar power plants might cost an extra $0.10/kilowatt-hour compared to coal, but such plants will be much less costly in the future because of improved technology. Thus, the magnitude of subsidies needed in a decade or two will be lower than they are today.

Energy debates in the US, Australia, and other countries have centered so far on introducing a cumbersome cap-and-trade permit system. Every major user of fossil fuel would need to buy permits to emit CO2, and those permits would trade in a special marketplace. The market price of the permits would be equivalent to paying a tax on CO2 emissions.

Unfortunately, cap-and-trade systems are difficult to manage and don’t give clear signals about the future price of permits. Europe has adopted such a system, but other parts of the world have repeatedly rejected it. In fact, Europe’s biggest successes in promoting low-carbon energy have come from its feed-in tariffs, and carbon taxes in some countries, rather than its cap-and-trade system.

The time has come for the US, China, India, and other major economies to declare how they will foster their own transition to a low-carbon economy. A small and gradually rising carbon tax that funds a feed-in tariff system could win political support in the US. It could also help to foster consensus among the major coal-based economies, including China and India.

There really are effective long-term solutions to manmade climate change that are politically acceptable and feasible to implement. It is time to embrace them.”

And, it is time to make the clean tech industry so attractive that both Jim Cramer and John Doerr are dying to invest in it.

Note: The picture above is Green Still Life from Pablo Picasso.

Copyright © 2005-2010 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com

The Race to Faster Data Rates WiFi Moving Soon Beyond 1 Gbps

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 16:42:48 -0800

(T) I am a strong believer that WiFi will be the most ever deployed networking technology with Ethernet. There are two reasons for that. First, is that businesses have been replacing Ethernet with WiFi networks. No other technologies has ever been a threat to wired Ethernet. Second, is that cellular networks are presently not able to provide the bandwidth required to support the emerging very rich media applications of the new Mobile Internet. In the lab, 4G LTE can provide up to 100 Mb uplink and 50 Mb downlink but present commercial deployments of LTE are just offering 10% of those numbers. We prefer using WiFi instead of cellular. We are only using cellular for the Mobile Internet when WiFi is unavailable. The only occasion where we are not using WiFi even when it is available is when we have to pay for it (consumers do not like to pay for something that they are used to have for free).

WiFi is every where, even in the planes and particularly in our homes. Beyond eliminating wires at home for the TV, the printers and the other devices, WiFi is generating new types of applications by enabling our home devices to be connected. I can record my sister composing on a piano, improve the recording on my Mac with GarageBand, and finally have it played on my stereo systems.

Not only WiFi is everywhere at work, at home, at the coffee shop, at the library, at the airport but WiFi is scaling.

The present IEEE 802.11n has brought some significant improvements to previous 802.11 a/b/g in particular by supporting OFDM (the most efficient encoding technique to multiplex the signals), MIMO (multiple inputs and multiple outputs that enables both the transmitter and the receiver of the wireless signal to have two or more antennas), efficient MAC aggregation of smaller frames into larger ones, more efficient MAC acknowledgment, and some power savings. 802.11n, operating from 2.4 Ghz to 5 Ghz, can scale from 54Mb/s to 150 Mb/s, can combine two 20 Mhz adjacent channels therefore leading to a maximum data rate of 600 Mb/s when MIMO with two inputs/outputs is employed.

While 802.11n has been very successfully adopted, IEEE is presently defining 802.11 ac that should operated in the 5 Ghz band and be compatible with 802.11 a/b/g/n. 802.11 ac will likely use wider channels, perhaps 160 Mhz, be MU-MIMO, multiple users MIMO, and likely to reach 1 Gbps.

At the same type a number of vendors formed the Wireless Gigabit Alliance and are proposing a new specification called WiGig, and a candidate to the new IEEE 802.11ad to scale up to 7 Gpbs!

Definitely, WiFi has everything that it needs to keep going.

Note: The picture above is the Mac store on Fifth Avenue in New York.

Copyright © 2005-2010 by Serge-Paul Carrasco. All rights reserved.
Contact Us: info at asiliconvalleyinsider dot com