Chris Gulker: Theory & Strategy

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 15:34:04 GMT

Tony Perkins' eight predictions for 2004 on AlwaysOn Network. Tech IPOs return, Bush will sweep, Sun downsizes and Microsoft makes a hostile, post IPO bid for Google...

Sun, 21 Dec 2003 01:25:03 GMT

Old school social networking as described by David Hornik. LinkedIn won't be replacing that experience anytime soon, but it still seems like software and bandwidth should be able to do something about the 6-degree problem...

Sun, 21 Dec 2003 01:21:51 GMT

Ventureblog is one of 6 or 7 venture blogs that I'm aware of and could be useful if I go ahead and protype the 'strategic workbot' (project name that popped into my head). Ventureblog has categories for different kinds of deals, which could be useful. Next steps, software that automates integration and publishing of feeds...

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 17:02:47 GMT

Streaming people: I was thinking about RSS and some thought-provoking recent articles by Steve Gillmor last night. It occurs to me that you can think of the output of some people - writers, bloggers, business colleagues - as a content stream. They write articles, email, business plans, PowerPoint presos (yuk), snap photos, doodle diagrams and leave voice mail.

If all that stuff was captured in an RSS stream, then you could pull up your own custom mix in an aggregator, and maybe publish it somewhere. At that point, you've just done what most major corporations spend heavily on salaries and related infrastructure to accomplish - you've created a 'work product' - and you might be able to accomplish this without buying office buildings, erecting cubicles and paying for heat, light and so forth.

With a blog account somewhere, RSS feeds, an aggregator and judgment, you might be able to produce a higher-level aggregated stream that, at some level, is basically undistinguishable from what happens every day at big corporations.

A more interesting question is, are there useful streams that are already available from the thousands of free RSS feeds that the web offers? By picking and choosing feeds and items carefully, could I produce something at very low cost that a large corporation or other entity would be willing to pay for? I'm not talking about a newsletter or info service, either. I'm going to investigate this a bit more....

Wed, 22 Oct 2003 23:15:44 GMT

Reykjavik is about to become the first city in the world where every home has a fiber connection. There'll be a conference Novemeber 26-28 to explore the possibilities...

Sat, 04 Oct 2003 23:47:52 GMT

Bill Joy on what's next, a Fortune interview. Co-founding Sun will be a tough act to follow...

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 16:20:40 GMT

Workspot co-founder Greg Bryant responds to Eric Raymond's prediction of Sun's demise on NewsForge yesterday. Greg thinks the 'suits' outnumber the 'hackers' at Sun...

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 00:59:57 GMT

Merrill analyst to Sun: get a grip. Merrill follows on the heels of NewsForge's Chris Preimesberger who offered similar advice earlier this week. McNealy needs to do for Sun what Jobs did for Apple in '98: focus...

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 16:55:04 GMT

Strong patent law does not foster innovation, according to a dissertation by Petra Moser, an assistant professor at MIT's Sloan School, as reported in the NY Times. She studied 19th century innovations and patents, and concludes that countries, particularly developing countries, may be better off without strong patent laws.

Wed, 24 Sep 2003 05:45:25 GMT

Couldn't buy this stuff if you wanted to. Greg Bryant, Workspot co-founder and quintessential innovator, responds to an Infoworld article cited below. The global network may be the best idea ever, imho... where else would you get such an impassioned, and informed, exchange of ideas? And please, everyone, feel free to rant on that theme...

Mon, 22 Sep 2003 16:40:43 GMT

Intel exec: "the U.S. IT industry may be flat to going down permanently. Some of the things going on in government, policy and so on may be leading us right to the demise of the IT industry in the U.S." From Infoworld...

Wed, 17 Sep 2003 05:57:41 GMT

The Sun Ray is a stateless, diskless, OS-less workstation that netboots from a server. Pop a Java card into its integrated smart card reader, and it goes out and finds your desktop and displays it. Future versions will use VOIP to route your phone calls as well. Imagine checking into a hotel, popping your Java card into the hotel thin client, and all your stuff is just there, and all your calls follow you. Now imagine everything goes to your cell phone when you're away from a CPU. That's Sun's vision... They may not have been first to get there, and I'm not sure it will be they who win in this space... but I'm ready for this world. Authentication is a big part of this new world, and how that's done is going to be an important part of whether people are comfortable with their 'life' living on somebody's servers...

Wed, 17 Sep 2003 05:20:01 GMT

SunNetwork took a big chunk out of the day, today. Scott McNealy made some interesting points, going so far as to suggest to a crowd largely made up of IT people that IT was overstaffed by a factor of 10. Sun's strategy, lower prices and "make complexity just go away", is certainly in line with what customers want to hear. Whether they will switch is another question... and Sun's Linux position is still up in the air...

Mon, 15 Sep 2003 21:24:38 GMT

Orion and Mad Hatter: Sun Microsystems is set to announce tomorrow a new strategy for licensing its software to corporations as well as a new Linux desktop. I'll be at SunNetwork tomorow to hear more...

Mon, 15 Sep 2003 16:16:17 GMT

Introducing the "computon," which HP hopes will be the utility computing industry's equivalent to the kilowatt-hour. Utility computing is starting to catch on, but the industry may well want to avoid goofy pricing plans - cell phone and older airline models come to mind - with lots of 'gotchas'...

Sat, 13 Sep 2003 06:03:09 GMT

The Java Card: I visited Sun this afternoon - Curtis Sasaki, VP of Desktop Software Engineering showed me his Java Card, which doubles as his employee photo ID. On Sun's campus, you can sit down at any thin client, pop in your card, and voila, there's your desktop, apps, and email. Curtis admits he has a terminal at home, and the technology works over the Net: "I work too much" says he. You could sell me on the idea of a Java card slot on every computer... anywhere you go, just pop in your card...

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 17:17:05 GMT

CDs are dead according to Forrester Research. "By 2008, 33 percent of music sales will come from downloads, with CD sales down 30 percent from their 1999 peak... As a result, we're about to see a massive power shift in the entertainment industry." They think retailers, not necessarily record cos. and movie studios, will be the big losers...

Tue, 02 Sep 2003 04:19:26 GMT

Labor day: and it's been a busy weekend, much of it spent away from computers. There were two beautiful hikes, one near Loch Lomond in Santa Cruz County and the other in Portola Valley.

Both gave me the opportunity to think as I walked under redwoods, oak and bay laurel. Open Source is really an amazing concept: Linux. Apache, thousands of applications just appear, and keep getting better. Linux is already approaching Windows, if not surpassing it in some areas in utility.

And yet, there's no giant corporation at the root, no huge profit motive driving its many coders. True, many big corprations are jumping on board, and are making money providing service and support, but it's not like Sun, Microsoft et al. in the past.

Open Source just sort of happened: it self-organized out of the potential that awaited a networked world. And its clear to me that the benfits to the world will be very large. Computing costs will go down, computers will become accessible to wider groups of people, and those people will make contributions, both to Open Source and the wider global society.

It's as if Open Source is a model that has much wider applicability than just the creation of good software that happens to be free. Stay tuned...

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 19:34:28 GMT

Market prediction systems: '"tend to predict events really well when no one person knows the answer -- when information is distributed among many people with different knowledge bases," said Joyce Berg, a University of Iowa professor who helped organize the political trading floors. "Markets have been shown to be really good at aggregating that information." '

"The price of orange juice futures has even been shown to accurately predict the weather, noted David Pennock, a senior research scientist at Overture Services who has done extensive surveys on the reliability of such markets."

"Traders on the Hollywood Stock Exchange last year correctly picked 35 of the 40 Oscar nominees in the eight biggest categories, according to The New Yorker magazine." From Wired News...

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 19:25:43 GMT

More on the Pentagon's cancelled Policy Analysis Market. "Projects similar to PAM, like the Iowa Electronic Markets, which speculate on election results, have been surprisingly reliable indicators of what's going to happen next. " according to Wired News. There had to be a way to use this thing without making it an embarrassment... I don't get the feeling that there are a lot of smart people in the current administration...

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 17:28:22 GMT

Pentagon cancels terror futures plan. That was quick... and it only cost us taxpayers $8 million... chump change for the Pentagon...

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 16:41:06 GMT

Folks in Jordan will probably be delighted by this sample contract on the Pentagon's Middle East Futures Market. Place a bet on the overthrow of the Jordanian monarchy... just an example, mind you...

Tue, 29 Jul 2003 16:31:34 GMT

Poindexter, again? The Pentagon has set up an online trading market where people can anonymously place bets on what they feel are the most likely scenarios driven by events in the Middle East. Want to bet that someone will place a suitcase nuke in Israel? The U.S. will invade Saudi Arabia? This is the place. The NYT story says John Poindexter, architect of Total Information Awareness, is responsible for what the Pentagon is calling a new way of predicting events and part of its search for the "broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks."

I didn't make this up: nor would it seem that I'm the only one to think this couldn't possibly be true. According to the NYT, Senator Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota (D), said the idea seemed so preposterous that he had trouble persuading people it was not a hoax. "Can you imagine," Mr. Dorgan asked, "if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in — and is sponsored by the government itself — people could go in and bet on the assassination of an American political figure?" NYT says the White House has already removed the most egregious descriptions from the site, which is budgeted at $8 million... you can register starting August 1 for trading which begins October 1...

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 04:15:01 GMT

'Tolerance of diverse views and of heretics fosters innovation'. Hypothesis from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. Spotted this on a year-old page...

Tue, 22 Jul 2003 16:35:57 GMT

The SCO lawsuit reminds me of the old 'protection' business. This is where a couple of guys hefting bricks would come around a business and say 'pity if your windows got broken', and offer a 'policy' to prevent such a thing. Substitute 'litigation' for 'broken windows' and 'license' for 'policy'... and just a coincidence that Microsoft is involved, right?