Month: January 2003

RFIDs and Life in 2013

ZDNet envisions an RFID-centric view of a day in the office in 2013:

It’s 7:00 am. Gregor Samson parks his car in the company garage and heads for his office. An embedded sensor in the car confirms that Gregor has arrived and is parked in his assigned spot.

The door to reach the lobby opens automatically as Gregor’s RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag and facial patterns are recognized. He heads for the coffee station to rev up for the day. The coffee maker knows his preferences from his RFID and starts cranking out a double latte with lowfat milk. The economy is tough, so the company is charging a nominal fee for beverages. The coffee machine wirelessly communicates the charge to Gregor’s account.

As Gregor walks down the hallway, he scans his PDA, which is fitted on his left wrist, for the latest messages and sports scores. Sensors in his eyeglasses allow him to scroll without touching the device.

Continue reading RFIDs and Life in 2013

10 Emerging Technologies

Tech Review “identifies the developments that will dramatically affect the way we live and workand profiles the leading innovators behind them”:

Wireless Sensor Networks
Injectable Tissue Engineering
Nano Solar Cells
Mechatronics
Grid Computing
Molecular Imaging
Nanoimprint Lithography
Software Assurance
Glycomics
Quantum Cryptography

Oracle’s Strategy

From Barron’s:

Oracle’s business consists of three basic elements. At the heart is database software, which accounts for 80% of its software-licensing revenue. The enterprise-software business is smaller, but crucial to Oracle’s growth. Two-thirds of Oracle’s revenue actually comes from services, primarily annual fees for technical support and software upgrades, which run customers about 22% a year of what they originally pay for their software.

Oracle faces two key challenges for its core database operations. The first is the maturity of its market. Some analysts doubt growth in database demand can now exceed single-digit rates. Oracle also faces competition from two formidable rivals: IBM and Microsoft. The strength of IBM remains the mainframe. Microsoft, meanwhile, is the leader in simpler departmental databases.

An update on Oracle’s Collaboration Suite…

It has long been Ellison’s mantra that 95% of all data don’t yet find their way into databases. That’s precisely the story behind Oracle’s Collaboration Suite, software introduced last summer. Aimed squarely at e-mail server software such as Microsoft Exchange and IBM’s Lotus Notes, Collaboration Suite takes e-mail, voice mail, calendars, Word documents, Excel files and PowerPoint presentations, and stores them all in an Oracle database. Oracle thinks this approach can greatly pare administrative costs and provide new functions such as voice mail in users in-boxes while allowing them to stick with their Microsoft Outlook desktop software.

While the product has been slowly gaining traction, it’s hard to predict whether it can eat into the installed base of Exchange users. Ellison says he could get 10% of the market — or 50%. “The interesting thing about Exchange is that it was a little departmental system, never intended to be an enterprise-wide mission-critical system. It doesn’t have the security, it doesn’t have the reliability, and it’s very labor-intensive to operate. We think we can cut your labor costs by 90%.”

..and on its applications software business:

Oracle thinks it can rev up applications sales by offering them to customers as a service, via its nascent outsourcing division. It’s the return of an idea that popped up in the bubble days — the application-service provider. But this time, it makes sense. Buying, administering and maintaining enterprise applications and the associated hardware and storage costs a fortune. So rather than handle it in-house, why not outsource to Oracle? The company now offers customers the option of handing over administration of their applications, whether at a customer site, at Oracle or at a third-party location. So far, about 500 Oracle customers have signed on; the company says outsourcing grew more than 50% in the latest quarter, though from a small base.

The idea, says Oracle’s outsourcing president, Tim Chou, is simply to reduce the administrative costs of running software, which by some estimates runs as much as four times the original cost of the application every year. In other words, Chou says, pay $1 million for a software license, and you’ll shell out about $20 million to support it over five years.

Continue reading Oracle’s Strategy

IBM attacking Sun with Linux

From Barron’s:

IBM has made Linux a commercial factor. Linux specialists like Red Hat Software were there, sure, but Red Hat’s still losing money on operations, with revenues running at an annual rate of just $100 million a year. And while the inventors of Linux may have thought they were creating an alternative to the software monopoly of Microsoft Windows, IBM has used Linux as a brilliant attack on Sun Microsystems. Sun’s most successful business is the sale of proprietary computers running Unix software, an operating system similar to Linux.

Giving away Linux on cheap Intel-based hardware, IBM can undercut the price of Sun’s computers and still make money on proprietary IBM software and consulting services. At LinuxWorld, IBM announced new Linux computers and a Linux version of its Tivoli software for automating data centers.

While IBM profited nicely on December quarter sales of $24 billion (nearly half of that from consulting), Sun still suffered a slight operating loss on $2.9 billion in sales for the same period.

Continue reading IBM attacking Sun with Linux

Network Theory

From NYTimes:

Network scientists study networks: collections of people or objects connected to each other in some way. Think of the 1.5 million Manhattan residents or the 30,000 genes inside a human cell. Such networks, scientists argue, behave in ways that can’t be understood solely in terms of their component parts. Without knowing what every single person or object within the network is doing, they say, it’s nevertheless possible to know something about how the network as a whole behaves.

Stated that way it sounds simple. But as an intellectual approach, network theory is the latest symptom of a fundamental shift in scientific thinking, away from a focus on individual components – particles and subparticles %u2014 and toward a novel conception of the group. As Mr. Barabasi, a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, put it: “In biology, we’ve had great success stories – the human genome, the mouse genome. But what is not talked about is that we have the pieces but don’t have a clue as to how the system works. Increasingly, we think the answer is in networks.”

Continue reading Network Theory

TECH TALK: The Rs 5,000 PC Ecosystem: The WiFi Advantage

The Rs 5,000 PC (5KPC) is not going to bring about a revolution on its own. It needs to leverage other developments and technologies which together can enable the formation of an affordable computing ecosystem. Last week, we discussed briefly two of the elements of this ecosystem: the thick server and open-source software. The thick server is the one which does all the computing and storage. Open-source software is the platform for the applications. There is one additional element of the ecosystem we need to discuss before we go ahead: WiFi.

WiFi (802.11) offers wireless communications using open spectrum (2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz) at speeds ranging from 11 Mbps (802.11b) to 54 Mbps (802.11g and 802.11a). The cost of wireless access points has fallen to under USD 100, while the cost of the cards required in the computers is down to under USD 50. In the next year, the incremental cost of adding WiFi to a computer is likely to be under USD 10 (Rs 500), as companies integrate the technology on to the motherboard itself. Hotspots (public wireless access points) are sprouting up all over the place in many countries.

Wrote William Gurley of Benchmark Capital in his recent Above the Crowd newsletter:

WiFi is to 3G as the personal computer was to the mainframe.

In the early days of the PC, most people considered the initial market for the IBM/Intel/Microsoft-based personal computer to be fairly narrow. In 1980, no one envisioned that one day you might run your company’s entire ERP system, or power a massive array of web sites on this technical architecture. However, the “increasing return” forces highlighted above eventually created a product that, from both a feature perspective and cost perspective, was appealing to a much broader array of applications and uses than ever previously envisioned.

This exact thing is currently happening with 802.11. This tiny, and increasingly inexpensive radio is already shockingly versatile. The same $30 radio can be used to serve wireless connectivity in your office, connect both your PCs and your multimedia in your home, and provide coverage to a police force across an entire downtown area. Add a Pringles can as a directional antenna (no kidding!), and this $30 radio is capable of providing high-speed, line-of-sight connectivity at a distance of 10 miles. In fact, the majority of the volume in the line-of-sight fixed wireless market has shifted almost entirely to low-cost 802.11 radios.

Originally designed to connect PCs and handheld computers to the network, people are now using these low cost radios for an increasing number of diverse customer applications. In remote areas, 802.11 can be used as a DSL alternative. Hospitals are using 802.11 not just to connect doctors and nurses but also to connect hospital equipment. 802.11 is a wonderful solution for industrial sensors in remote monitoring as well as control equipment designed to intelligently manage such things as power and HVAC systems. You can even use 802.11 to build an extremely cost effective video surveillance network. It is also feasible that 802.11 will be the driving force behind a wholesale conversion to VOIP and an entirely new phone structure in the enterprise.

So, why is WiFi almost free? The answer is (1) because the price of the parts could go as low as $5 over the next five years, and (2) because the entire PC industry has a vested interest in seeing 802.11 dominate over 3G. As such, within a matter of years, 802.11 will be a standard feature on every single portable computer, with a marginal cost to the consumer of $0.00.

Tomorrow: The WiFi Advantage (continued)

Continue reading TECH TALK: The Rs 5,000 PC Ecosystem: The WiFi Advantage

EasyInternetCafe

A Newsweek article about the future of Internet cafes caught my attention. I have been thinking about how cybercafes need to become “telecentres” – a kind-of cross between the cybercafes as we know them and Kinkos, providing computing and communications services. They can become tech service points for the have-nots in the emerging markets. These telecentres (or tech 7-11s as I used to call them earlier) can be a good opportunity for our thin client-thick server solution.

The Newsweek article talks about easyInternetCafe:

EasyInternetCafe is a subsidiary of easyGroup, run by a fleet-footed entrepreneur named Stelios Haji-Ioannou.

EasyGroup hopes to do the same with Internet cafes: the Times Square cafe has extremely low overhead and prices. At the front, customers line up to put cash into vending machines that give them credits for online usage. They then pick out any empty computer and log on. Depending on time of day, the price ranges from a maximum of $4 an hour down to-say, at 3:00 AM-twenty-five cents an hour, averaging about $1 an hour. In short, its demand-based pricing that adjusts constantly, exactly the way airline seats are sold. You can even buy access, at a discount, for a date several months in the future.

EasyInternetCafe is no-frills: no printers, for example. If you want to print, you email the document to yourself and visit a Kinkos. And no technical advice, eitherwhile techs fix broken machines, no one will tell you how to insert a photo into your e-mail.

EasyGroup, having thoroughly field-tested its automated model in London and Manhattan, will now roll out fifteen-computer versions that fit in two hundred square feet-basically Internet cafes in a box-across the US. Theyre aiming to put automated Internet access inside existing establishments such as McDonalds or Burger King, and also to offer it as a franchise opportunity. And theyre looking as well at the developing world, where low-cost public Internet access is increasingly crucial.

Forbes (free regn reqd) also had an article on them in December and provides additional context:

Stelios has sunk $130 million into his own 23 large branded internet cafes and now claims to have the model just right.

Stelios figures that he’s reduced costs at his cafes by 75%, mostly through labor savings. His new 35- to 75-screen model, virtually staffless, will be profitable if he can get $7 per PC per day. That’s attainable, he says, considering stores are typically open 16 hours a day.

Stelios says that the challenge now is to get his smaller, stand-alone internet concessions into libraries, airports, hotels, bus stations, restaurants and movie theaters and to franchise the chain as much as possible. The plan is to have 2000 outlets in three years.

“Just about every High Street shop or restaurant has 150 to 300 square meters somewhere that is underutilized. My job now is to try to unlock that space. It depends of course whether these people will feel comfortable with our brand in their shop, but that’s the challenge: convincing them that we are good for their primary business. The most expensive dining area is an empty dining area,” he says.

IBM’s Linux Strategy

From News.com in a broader article on Linux, starting with some OS history:

Windows trounced OS/2 in a furious operating systems battle back when George Bush Sr. was president and Lou Gerstner was still busy at RJR Nabisco trying to sell folks more Velveeta and Tang.

Smartly retiring from a contest it had little chance of winning, IBM left the field to Microsoft, which cemented its desktop dominance and emerged as the most powerful software company in history.

There things stood for over a decade, but–F. Scott Fitzgerald aside–there are second acts. In this rematch with Microsoft, Big Blue has the stronger hand, owing to its very public embrace of Linux three years ago.

IBM is bent on making a commodity out of Intel-based hardware with an operating system derived through the open-source process. Its pitch to corporate Unix customers running Sun Microsystems’ Sparc or other proprietary chips is that Linux on Intel offers virtually the same performance–but at a far lower hardware price. Once they bite, that then opens the door for IBM to rake in the money selling middleware and services.

If IBM pulls it off, Microsoft risks getting cut out of a lot of corporate business.

Action@Home

From BusinessWeek: “Much of the truly exciting innovation in technology is now being developed for consumers.”

It adds: “The real key to the exciting new products on display at CES — and soon, at a discount electronics chain near you — is that all these digital products are starting to work together in ways that make them much more useful. It’s now relatively painless to film a child’s birthday party with your camcorder, edit it on your PC, and burn it onto a DVD to send to relatives. Technofiles can display their own digital photos on their digital TVs’ vibrant liquid-crystal displays. Or they can send audio files from a PC over their home wireless network to the new “media hub” — a combination digital hi-fi stereo receiver, media server, and wireless router (think of a souped-up set-top box) — in their living rooms.”

End-to-end Network

Writes David Isenberg (IEEE Spectrum) on the move of network intelligence to the edges rather than being centralised:

The Internet, the world’s overarching end-to-end network, is now the connectivity medium of communications. Yet telephone company networks are still centralized networks designed for a single application, voice. Phone companies still make more money from voice than from other network traffic, even though the volume of data traffic now exceeds voice. Furthermore, Internet voice is getting better and betterits quality can, in fact, far exceed the “toll quality” voice of plain old telephone service.

In addition, smart end devices can set up and manage telephone calls far better than a centralized network. (Why dial a number when you can double-click on it?) In fact, when voice is implemented in end devices, the ability to mix it into other kinds of interactionsonline game play, collaboration, mutual Web surfing, and many more yet to be discoveredthe idea of a “call” as a special, discrete event could well disappear.

The Internet stands on the brink of making the entire functionality of the telephone company obsolete. But that’s not allwith access improvements within the grasp of today’s technology, the Internet can do video entertainment better than broadcast, cable, or satellite television can. The Internet stands on the brink of subsuming the value of all existing special-purpose networks.