the onda

Kevin Kelly's "The Technium" is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs for following the sociology of technology and his latest post on cloud culture does not disappoint. In it, he argues for some of the shifting social and cultural norms that the shift a web-native centralized model for computing (read: the cloud) are bringing about. My favorite— his observation that one of the basic cultural dynamics of the cloud is that we'll become "more smarter:"

Clouds don't have to be smarter than the web we have now, but they are likely to be. The web can be thought of hyperlinked documents. The clouds can be thought of as hyper-linked data. Ultimately the chief reason to put things onto the cloud is to share their data deeply. Not just to have a convenient backup, or to have always on access, which the cloud WILL give, but to be able to weave together the data and interactivity of the parts, and thereby make all the pieces much smarter and more powerful than they could possibly be alone. It is not too much of an exaggeration to think of the cloud as the tool which allows us to share the elemental aspects of our data and activities in a way makes them smarter. The cloud is sort of a hivemind tool. (read the rest of the post)

Thinking about the platform shift from the perspective of the socio-cultural norms that will change with it moves us away from the geeky details of the browser-as-rich-runtime, 3G/4G/5G, and centralizing workloads at huge datacenters to the real game-changing opportunities that will come from threading everyone's activities and data into a natively interoperable set of 24x7 processes that can run semi-autonomously and reach their tentacles into ever-smarter and more portable access devices.

Now that is interesting.

Or certainly more interesting than the future I saw this week at CCA 08, a small conference on the emerging cloud computing architectures and their practical applications. Limited to about 70 folks from academia and business, the two day event convinced me of how early we are in this game— forget analogies about baseball and innings— we don't even seem to have gotten the players on to the field. Other than Amazon and Facebook and a handful of small open source projects, most of the rest of us still seem stuck in trying to bring our old and comfortable 3-tier applications into someone else's datacenter in an effort to cut costs and circumvent half-competent IT departments.

Sure we need cloud portability, sure the security story sucks right now. It'd be great to have better metrics for understanding the cost/cloud unit and I'm sure eventually we'll figure out whether it is 53% or 81% utilization that makes for the break-even point for building your own clusters.

These things seem to be implementation details to me however, and in the meanwhile it's good to see Kelly trying to provide us with some of that "vision thing."

Gruber has a fascinating post about Apple's transition from being a computer company to being a smartphone company where he unpacks the company's earnings call yesterday. What is most remarkable to me about this story is that we are talking about a company that resuscitated itself with the breakthrough hit that was the iPod only to the reinvent itself yet again—while still riding high from the success and profitability of the iPod.

How Apple moved from being just "the mac company," or even "the iPod company" is something that good organizational folks should study for years to come. As someone working at "the printer company" where we seem unable to make a meaningful transition to the next franchise even when the conditions might be perfect for such a transition, I am simply in awe.

No doubt part of it is about the fact that Apple was nearly dead. Jobs clearly has also played a big role with his outstanding stewardship of the Apple magic. But I wonder if the real enabler for these two shifts doesn't stem from Apple's two core strengths: its software DNA and its rabid attention to industrial design.

Both of these seem more transferable to finding the next hit franchise in an increasingly mobile and personal computing landscape. Compare those two core competencies for instance, with ones that Wall Street loves in tech companies like: awesome supply chain management, 20-year long bets on proprietary IP roadmaps, control of the distribution channel, excellence in running large services organizations, and you'll see what I mean.

And of the two I think in that the rabid focus on industrial design seems to me to be related to the first— in that at Apple it's always been about giving the software a physical instantiation in the associated hardware. The iPhone is the best example of this as is their reluctance to dive head first into the exploding "netbook" market. Until they see the opportunity for making the bold move with software (as they did with the iPhone), I suspect they will stay away.

If you loved the replicators Gene Roddenberry introduced in "Star Trek: Next Generation," you should be following the work of all of the folks building out the budding "personal fabrication" industry. Yesterday I ran across this great summary of the various different technologies involved in turning the bits that course through the network into atoms.

This trend is a big deal for 2 reasons. First, as we get closer to bridging the virtual and the physical in all sorts of ways, from exporting the objects we create in virtual worlds to building sensor and actuator based projects that interact with the physical world, the need for custom parts of all shapes and sizes only increases. If we are really going to go through any kind of a physical computing amateur explosion of creativity (as we have multiple times in software), the technologies of custom manufacture need to become accessible to the typical garage tinkerer. Example: the other day, my friend Andy and I were talking about an Arduino-based robot platform and he very quickly descended into talking about "lots" of 5, 10, and 20 thousand which frankly gives me hives.

The second reason why it would be good for hackers, makers, and startups to focus in this space is because small-scale replication appears to be such a disruptive technology that none of the big companies are paying much attention. Working where I do, you'd think that I'd see tons of 3D printing projects sprouting up. Sadly though the reality seems to be that most of the folks I meet on the inside dismiss it as a fad which is nowhere near being applicable beyond a few very specialized industrial verticals (I bet someone probably through the same about vaporizing ink droplets and shooting them at high-speed at paper 25 years ago in the age of toner, but that is a story for another day).

Personally, I am about one late night away from trying to build one of these in my basement. If it wasn't because I have serious doubts about my own mechanical abilities assembling a project as complex as this one, I'd be happy to usher in the era of Skynet with self-replicating robots coming straight out of my basement!

Ever since Sequoia decided to get ahead on the rest of the Monday morning quarterbacks with their RIP Good Times presentation, every Tom, Dick, and Harry angel investor and me-too venture fund has decided to get in on the advice giving about how startups have to conserve cash and get serious about business models.

Come on people, this is like great platitudes from Captain Obvious and friends. Startups are businesses after all which I think means that they should be worried about this no matter what the times are like!

If you want to see a really funny version of the "eat fruit, save money, and exercise regularly" schpiel, go check out what Whiner Jenkins has to say. I have to admit to laughing out loud over this one:

Whiner Jerkins All Hands 10/13/08 - Get more Business Plans

The New Yorker pretty much nails it:

Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.