But I do have a sense of the history of computers, and like the rest of the world I am amazed by the journey they’ve taken in the last 50 years.  We take for granted our computers we carry around in our pockets -  our 16 GB iPhones and our 160 GB iPods.  In 1980, 2GB of storage meant a system the size of a refrigerator.  Yeah, fit that into your skinny jeans.

This infographic made by onlinecomputersciencedegree.com is a nerdgasm, combining the history and possible future of computing with REM.  Based around their 1987 classic and Independence Day alien-signalling song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine), it charts the shrinking physical size and expanding capabilities of computers from 1958 to 2010 and beyond.

From Jack Kelby building the world’s first integrated circuit in 1958, to the first laptop Osbourne 1 being created in 1981, to current drives capable of holding 2TB in the size of a book – it charts the milestones.

It also begins to speculate about computing in the future – fiber-optic computers that run on light instead of electricity and DNA-based computing that could replicate biological entities in order to solve health problems.

Oh yeah, and of course they retool the lyrics of a great song to say things like  “more efficient software!”

Lenny Bruce Gordon Moore is not afraid. Check it out:

Via: OnlineComputerScienceDegree.com

“I think the pace of consolidation will increase,” stated Michael Dell.  “I think that it favours the larger companies, particularly as the growth is skewed towards emerging countries.

So that means money will be spent more quickly and in larger amounts.  Shareholders may or may not be in love with the idea, but potential acquisition targets are almost surely dancing with delight right now.

And however investors view that last plan, they’re likely to appreciate this other one.  Dell “estimated that 70 percent of IT spending at Japanese companies over the next year will be related to maintenance of old systems and management and only 30 percent on new hardware,” according to Martyn Williams, and then said, “We need to flip that 70/30.”

This plan of attack sounds almost Google-ish in nature, and that’s hardly a bad thing.  One might even wonder if the two companies haven’t been doing a little chatting; they’re both involved in the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, and Dell manufactures the Google Search Appliance.

So from here onwards I am going to spend some time commenting on the superb reply that I got here in ITtoolbox from Jim Johnson over at Making the Business Case for Social Computing – Part Deux, which you can read over here as well.

In that lengthy comment, Jim comes to discuss how both social computing and Knowledge Management "are sitting on the edge of a major bottleneck in IT development" and he gets to describe that bottleneck as the gap between:

"—- separate knowledge and interests —- and —- agreed upon activities, processes and plans."

You would probably need to read the paragraphs that come after that particular quote, because they surely are fascinating. Towards the end of it all, Jim comes to propose a new concept called "Collaborative process development", which he gets to talk a whole lot more over at his weblog ActionMap Waves (Including an intriguing scorecard that, if anything, surely is worth while investigating further).

However, what I found really interesting and worth while noting as well is the following paragraph, just towards the end:

"With respect to the ROI of social networking and knowledge management, I recommend positioning social networking as a supporting tool for the new category of collaborative process development.

If social networking can be seen to accelerate collaborative process development, and reduce some of the 100′s of billions of dollars in waste in IT every year, I suspect that it will get the attention of the CFO."

WOW! There you have it, one very thoughtful approach towards proving the ROI of Social Computing that may well be worth while exploring further. It sounds pretty solid, don’t you think?

However, I am not totally convinced about it 100% and more than anything else because it is placing the focus on something that is just one of the main reasons why traditional KM failed over the course of the years (And those who have been reading this blog for a while would know where I am heading right now).

Yes, indeed, that extra focus on tools and processes is what got us in trouble in the first place. We should not forget that social computing is everything but tools and processes. It is all about the people! It is a philosophy, a lifestyle, i.e. that growing urge from knowledge workers to go out there, connect with other knowledge workers, build further up their relationships and share their knowledge.

That is where a new form of ROI for Social Computing should be based on. If social software is all about knowledge workers involved in different various conversations, the least we could do to showcase a new form of such ROI (much more effective and efficient for social computing) is to place the focus where it should have been all along: on the people!

Those knowledge workers should be the ones defining the ROI of social computing, because, after all, they are the ones living it, so there isn’t probably a better way of defining what it should look like, since they know it better than anyone else. So a good start for CFOs to work their way through ROI for social software is to go where it matters: the knowledge workers themselves. But that would be the subject for another blog post at a later time …

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Paul Henry of Secure Computing first began spreading the word in January about a potentially bad situation with PDF files. Proof of concept code emerged that showed how JavaScript could be embedded in a PDF, to execute when opened.

Henry said Adobe patched that particular problem. Until a flood of PDF spam began hitting inboxes for a few weeks over the summer, and stopping almost as quickly as they started, PDF as a threat left the radar.

After chatting with Henry for this article, I learned there is a new reason to fear the PDF, even though Adobe considers PDF not to be a threat. The original researcher who shared the proof of concept code with Henry in January has done so again.

It’s a new way to embed JavaScript in those files. The researcher told Henry he will not share proof of concept code this time. Malicious uses of the technique, which has been disclosed to Adobe, could be easy to replicate from the POC.

The example POC from January could show the local C: drive’s contents upon execution. Attackers could create something exploiting this newest embed threat that would steal files and upload them, or download malicious files from a remote server.

The widespread use of PDF in business environments, not to mention the Web 2.0 crowd’s love of embedded content, could turn a corrupt PDF into a full-fledged outbreak. Systems running anti-malware scanning should fare better against arriving PDF malware, but all computer users should be as wary of PDF these days as they are of any content or links sent by unknown users, or unexpectedly from known senders.

Google, Apple May Partner On Cloud Computing

“Cloud computing is the hot new thing in the world of technology right now,” writes Wired’s Fred Vogelstein.  “Apple makes beautiful hardware, but it hasn’t improved on .Mac, its cloud based storage offering, in years.  You get 1GB of storage on .Mac for $100.  That’s laughable in an era where you can get double that for nothing.”

But that’s exactly where Google would come in.  “We’re a perfect back end to the problems that they’re trying to solve,” Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, told Vogelstein.  “They have very good judgment on user interface and people.  But they don’t have this supercomputer (that Google has), which is the data centers.  What they have is a manufacturing business that’s doing quite well.”

And if the word of one CEO isn’t good enough for you, Vogelstein has collected a comment from the other one, as well.  “In response to a question last week he actually agreed, adding ‘stay tuned,’” writes the Wired author.

So it appears that finding out what Google and Apple are up to is more of a waiting game than anything.  People such as Michael Parekh and MG Siegler will be glad to know that an answer could come as soon as Monday, at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2007.

1. Price. Will cost $5,000 to $10,000 and only be available to commercial customers (hotels, casinos, etc). Price depends on number of units purchased.

2. Consumer availability? They are working on other surface computing products, but didn’t have anything to announce yet. There are a few roadblocks to getting one of these in your home. First, it’s expensive to build one because it needs holographic glass, an enclosure, a projector, two cameras, and a computer. Second, they still are working on software so that it actually does something beyond the whiz-bang demos they showed off this morning on stage.

3. Demos won’t all work the way it seems in the videos. The demos you are seeing of photos flying out of a digital camera when placed on the device? That requires that digital camera to be synced and “tagged” with a bar code. The table can see bar codes on things, but you’ve gotta stick a bar code on them first. My cell phone hasn’t been tagged. Neither has my digital camera. So, if I put them on the table they wouldn’t do anything.

4. Microsoft isn’t writing all the software. I asked whether we’d be able to play Blackjack on a table. They (the Microsoft team) couldn’t answer. That part of the functionality will be left to third-parties to write. So, a table that is in a Sheraton property might have completely different functionality than one somewhere else.

5. Can’t scan paper yet. Some of the scenarios I saw demoed included scanning of paper and documents. That isn’t yet included in the current version.

6. When will it be out? It should be installed at first customers by the end of the year. First public demos (other than at this week’s “D” conference) will be in June in New York at a Starwood property. I’ll try to get more info on that.

I’ll keep trying to get more answers and I encouraged the team to come over and answer the questions people left in my comments.

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Funny, he was at the Maker Faire last weekend talking to everyone and showing off his latest thing. He builds demos for Bill Gates and he was the one who first showed me the PlayTable. Now called “Surface Computing.”

He handed me a stack of glass chips. I put one down. It revealed a video playing on the surface. You can see the same demo now two years later. My demo was of a prototype at Microsoft’s TechFest conference which was for employees only.

Anyway, surface computing is real and is wild. I want one of these in my house, but it is too expensive. Anyway, here’s how it works:

1) It has a piece of holographic glass that can display images that a projector shoots at it.

2) It has a projector underneath.

3) It has two cameras, aimed at the glass which can triangulate on objects on it.

4) It has software, written in Windows Presentation Foundation, that take advantage of the new hardware.

So, how does it recognize the glass chips placed on top of it? Easy, each chip has an invisible bar code in infrared-reflecting ink. Your eye can’t see it. The cameras can.

The problem is the expense. It costs a few grand for the glass, another grand or two for the projector, $50 for each camera, and then you need a computer underneath.

Which is why they didn’t announce you can buy one of these for your house.

Other cons? This thing does a killer demo. But can it do much more than the demo videos show? I’m not yet sure. It’s the kind of thing that’s killer for the first couple of hours but that gets old fast if there aren’t a bunch of real-world applications that you can do on the thing.

I’m watching the videos and seeing a lot of those same kind of killer demos but not much that would make me spend $5,000 on one of these.

How about you?

One thing, though. I love Andy Wilson. He’s an amazing developer. To me it’s totally amazing that he was helping kids out at Maker Faire. I wanted to grab each one of them and say “do you have any idea who you are talking with?”

UPDATE: I just discovered that surface computing was being worked on for more than five years now and that it highlights one of several directions that were pursued within the Surface Computing team, under Eric Horvitz, at Microsoft.

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Conducted by Gelb Consulting Group in February of this year, The Microsoft High-Performance Computing Oil and Gas Industry Survey indicates that providing geoscientists with the latest and greatest in computing technology could increase overall oil and gas production.

Gelb tallied results from over 100 oil and gas industry experts from around the world. Findings of significant mention from the study include:

·    Eighty-one percent report that more ready access to high-performance computing capability could increase oil and gas production.

·    Eighty-six percent have computing power at their deskside, and 69 percent prefer computing power at their desktops.

·    Sixty-one percent believe that having the capability to run additional tasks and iterations will reduce project risk.

·    Fifty-six percent prefer to schedule their own jobs to a technical computing or HPC cluster rather than refer to a cluster administrator to manage the job queue.

·    Forty-seven percent say their computing-intensive scientific applications require multiple iterations.

·    Twenty-five percent of computing-intensive scientific applications still take from overnight to more than a week to run.

“Since the mid-1990s, the upstream oil and gas industry has had the goal of achieving dramatic cost savings in the area of technical computing,” said John Elmer, president of Gelb Consulting Group.

“This goal is being achieved today. For example, it used to be the case that geosciences applications managers would not let go of their UNIX machines for mission-critical applications. The tide has now turned with smart-client PCs and applications reaching a level of maturity, reliability and stability that has caused even the skeptics to trust a move to Microsoft Windows.”

“This new approach to high-performance computing doesn’t replace supercomputers in oil and gas. Instead, it makes technical computing more available to more people at a lower cost,” said John Fikany, vice president of the U.S. Manufacturing Group at Microsoft.

“By using Windows Compute Cluster Server, geoscientists are empowered to more easily access, analyze and garner deeper insights from complex data and information — ultimately getting oil and gas from the subsurface to the pump faster, more efficiently.”

IBM and Microsoft were in that position in the two prior Computing Ages, but now Google owns the Internet. David Beisel is not convinced and feels a Fourth Age of Computing is on the way where Google will need to get involved in a new ball game. That new ball game is the Mobile Web.

The Mobile Web has even greater economic potential than the traditional Web as visited by desktop PCs. .. and despite the best efforts of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with its Mobile Web Initiative, it may not end up as they would wish as One Web. There is a fundamental disconnect between agreeing Standards and competing in a fast moving technology where there are mega-bucks at stake. If in addition, the Standards are tough to apply in order to achieve that One Web, then in practice it may not work out even if many would wish to apply the Standards.

The other factor is that many involved have lived through the Internet tidal wave and may see all this from their Desktop PC perspective. That One Web should just spread out so that it becomes the Ubiquitous Web. Doesn’t that seem a natural evolution to follow? Well natural evolution is fine provided we don’t run into a disruptive technology that changes all the ground rules. It may even be so cataclysmic that it deserves the title, transformational technology. Some observers would apply that description to the whole Mobile world.

That is at the heart of Mobile Persuasion @ Stanford University with its tagline, “Changing people’s beliefs & behaviors with mobile technology”. Cameron Moll summarizes another very important article by Tomi T Ahonen entitled, “Putting 2.7 billion in context: Mobile phone users“. That would certainly confirm that Mobile Phones represent a transformational technology. Ahonen’s final paragraph points out the urgency in all this.

Whatever your business or interest, going mobile now will give you a competitive advantage. But going mobile next year will be a desperation move to stay in the game. Don’t miss out on this. Mobile is the biggest opportunity going. Where is your business? Where is your mobile strategy?

The fact that Google may have been the winner in the Third Age of Computing is no guarantee of success in a completely changed world. There are already some powerful entities in the Mobile world. Google may already be Celling Out (free subscription required), but that doesn’t yet seem to be showing results. Even a Google-positive article, Hooked on Google (free subscription required) showing Google is leaving Microsoft in the dust, had a sting in the tail.

In brand new areas, like mobile devices that connect to the Internet, Microsoft is holding its own against Google. According to Telephia, a research firm, 3.7 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers are visiting Microsoft’s mobile Web sites, compared to 3.5 percent for Google.

But even in this area, Microsoft is still No. 2. Kanishka Agarwal, vice president of mobile content for Telephia, said Yahoo is No. 1 with 5.9 percent of subscribers due to the popularity of Yahoo mail.

It will be interesting to see what develops during 2007 in this fast-changing Mobile world.

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Barry Welford, President of SMM Strategic Marketing Montreal works with business owners and senior management on Internet Marketing strategy and action plans to grow their companies. He is a moderator at the Cre8asite Forums and writes on current issues on the Internet and on the Mobile Web in three blogs, BPWrap, StayGoLinks and The Other Bloke’s Blog.