PlanetLab: Making a New Internet

[via Abhay Bhagat] Technology Review writes about "a grass-roots group of nearly 100 leading computer scientists, backed by heavyweight industrial sponsors, is working on replacing [the current Internet] with a new, vastly smarter model", eventually enabling us to (among other things):

forget about hauling your laptop around. No matter where you go, you’ll be able to instantly recreate your entire private computer workspace, program for program and document for document, on any Internet terminal;

escape the disruption caused by Internet worms and viruses—which inflicted an average of $81,000 in repair costs per company per incident in 2002—because the network itself will detect and crush rogue data packets before they get a chance to spread to your office or home;

instantly retrieve video and other bandwidth-hogging data, no matter how many other users are competing for the same resources;

archive your tax returns, digital photographs, family videos, and all your other data across the Internet itself, securely and indestructibly, for decades, making hard disks and recordable CDs seem as quaint as 78 RPM records.

The focus is on making the network smarter.

Syncato

A new tool has surfaced - Syncato. From the Syncato introduction:

Syncato is a weblog system designed to extract the maximum potential from the content of your posts. All posts in Syncato are stored as XML within a native XML database and are searchable using XPath queries. This includes the ability to execute XPath via a URL from within your browser.

What this really means is that the limitations on how you use and reuse the content on your site is only determined by how you markup your posts. For minimal reuse you can just use standard XHTML, but the real power of Syncato comes when you go beyond that and add additional markup to increase the meaning of your content. What you want to do is up to you. The more information you add to your posts the more useful it will be to you and to others.

In reality Syncato is much more then just a weblog system, it's an XML fragment management system. Those fragments can represent weblog entries, comments about those entries or just about anything else. Using the facilities of the system you're then free to combine those fragments together however you desire. And just as with your weblog entries, your XML fragments are available via XPath and HTTP.

Richard MacManus writes: "Syncato can aggregate "XML fragments", which includes comments on a weblog. So could I include in my blogroll several XPath queries to aggregate conversations I'm interested in? Instead of making an RSS feed out of a comments thread, which is what I originally suggested and which some people have already implemented on their blogs, I could run an XPath query from within my blogroll which would aggregate comments from that same thread. This process has the advantage of being driven by the weblog reader, rather than the writer. i.e. it's not up to the weblog writer to produce an RSS feed, the reader can simply run some XPath queries to effectively create their own feed. The power to aggregate shifts to the subscriber rather than the producer, which is where it should be in the Two-Way Web. Of course this means that producers have to write their posts in valid XML, but that is where Syncato comes in - it's a weblog authoring product that produces valid XML. Further, because each comment is a unique chunk of XML, you could aggregate more than just a single conversation thread (that is attached to a single weblog post). Using XPath and associated XML technologies, you could pick up comments on a particular theme or topic from the whole weblog - or extended further, the whole blogosphere. How rich would conversations be then!"

WeblogsInc

A new bloggin venture is launching - WeblogsInc. From their site:

Weblogs, Inc. is a B2B Web site dedicated to creating niche Weblogs (a.k.a. blogs) across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product.

Weblogs, Inc. is creating a new layer on top of the traditional business-to-business media that:

saves professionals the time associated with reading dozens of B2B publications by providing a non-stop, top-level summary of the news;

provides analytical tools that give readers the ability to sort and search stories by subtopics within an industry;

gives users the ability to participate by engaging in discussions, ranking stories and by submitting their own “blogs” (i.e., pointers and summaries of stories on other sites); and

promotes fairness and truth in reporting by acting as a public forum where industry professionals can participate.

The idea looks interesting. I wrote to them a few days ago asking for more information, and haven't yet received a reply.

Meanwhile, Wired News has more, quoting co-founder Jason Calacanis:

Calacanis' goal is to turn Weblogsinc into an umbrella for blogs, a for-profit center that dishes daily on as many as 300 topics and scores revenue from sources like advertising, events and classified listings. He expects the topics to fall under four main categories: media, finance, technology and life sciences.

For now, Calacanis' plans for Weblogsinc are unclear. He does say that before too long he plans to introduce some well-known members of the digerati to his fold. But once again, he's not naming names.

What he will say is that he expects Weblogsinc will have little problem bringing in revenue, especially since the more individual blogs it has, the more opportunities for ad sales and conference tie-ins it will spawn. And once the word gets out about Weblogsinc, he argues, the more bloggers will want to hop on board and share the wealth.

"A thousand dollars a week in ad revenue (per blog) is not that hard if we can scale," he says. "The architecture is already built, and it scales nicely. We can just add more weblogs."

Nick Denton has some advice on niche B2B vertical sites, and thinks that "Calacanis is making a few mistakes, and will have to alter course if he's to be successful." Nick's two micro-sites (Gawker and Gizmodo) only do about USD 2,000 a month each in ad revenue, barely enough to cover costs.

Intel into Telecom

Barron's writes about how Intel may be doing to telecom what it did to computing:

To hasten the day that e-mail, voice and television converge over one network, Intel's making a new push into telecom gear. Eric Mentzer, the head engineer from the Intel Communications Group, showed the developer's meeting how Intel is pitching standard parts to telco suppliers that traditionally designed their own chips. "This is a megatrend that's going to change the communications industry over the next ten years," Mentzer told me. "It's inevitable."

Historically, vendors like Lucent Technologies and Nortel Networks custom-built their hardware and software. Now, nearly 30 companies have designed products that hew to an industry standard, called ATCA, which allows gearmakers to mix and match their circuit boards in a chassis. By year end, a new version of the Linux system software should be ready to run on Intel processors and this Linux will be sufficiently failsafe to satisfy telecom carriers. Lucent and Nortel haven't publicly joined in this movement toward modularity, but NEC announced a product for wireless phone carriers that's made from off-the-shelf parts like Linux and the Intel Pentium chip.

Mentzer thinks a new generation of network processor chips from Intel and other vendors will enable telecom vendors to build systems around programmable chips instead of custom chips dedicated to single networking chores, like encryption. Such data-packet processors are improving in the same way as the Pentium processors that power computers. Programmable packet processors would make telecom gear cheaper to build and upgrade, says Mentzer. The communications carriers are demanding these off-the-shelf economics, says the Intel engineer, to keep up with rising traffic at a time when revenues are flat. "Standing still is a death spiral," he says.

Will off-the-shelf economics mean PC-industry economics for networking gear? Ever since Dell Computer started selling its own networking gear, investors have fretted that switches would become a "hollowed-out" commodity like PCs. Cisco Systems has maintained its 20% profit margins by judiciously using proprietary chips and software. For his part, Intel's Mentzer thinks that communications gear is a long way from standardization let alone, commoditization.

Interesting: an Intel-Cisco battle seems to be in the offing.

Related Entries:  [All]
Intel's Community PC [May 31, 2006]
Harnessing Collective Intelligence [May 19, 2006]
Intel's Problems [May 2, 2006]
Intel's Transformation [January 2, 2006]
Intel CEO on $100 Laptop [December 16, 2005]

Microsoft's Project Green

Information Week writes on "a little-known project involves hundreds of developers, writing a new set of business applications from scratch." The focus is on SMEs. The key points:

- Microsoft aims to write new financial, human-resources, distribution, and other enterprise-resource-planning modules, so as to, according to Paul Hamerman of Giga "integrate the entire Microsoft stack, from back-end systems and operating systems to the Office applications."

- "The rationale for Project Green is that, in order to get the kind of deep and wide integration that increasingly defines all Microsoft software, the company had to write applications using its own programming languages, development tools, and APIs."

- "A linchpin of Project Green is the Business Framework, middleware for connecting applications with Microsoft's operating systems and server software. The Framework will handle object mapping, forms rendering, metadata descriptions, metadata services, and other core functions so that Business Solutions programmers and independent software vendors don't have to do that work themselves."

- Microsoft CRM is a step in this direction.

This is akin to what I like to think of as "Visual Biz-ic".

Map-based Information Visualisation

Tim Bray helped define the XML standard. He is currently focussed on "the visual representation of data with his company, Antartica, which sells tools that display information from Web searches, corporate portals and other sources in an intuitive map-based format." Some excerpts from a
News.com interview:

It's Antarctica's hypothesis that by putting a graphic interface somewhat in the spirit of the desktop metaphor on complex information spaces, we can open up the value in there. In our case, the metaphor isn't a desktop--it's a map.

There are really two ways to get information: search and browse. And browse has a lot of potential. But to work, the drill down has to be intuitive. It cannot be stupid. You have to be really aggressive about bringing the relevant stuff to the top. You can't force the person to go through multiple levels to get to what they want.

It turns out that the display technique that returns the most amount of data per square inch is cartography. That's why we're using a map metaphor.

TECH TALK: An Entrepreneur’s Early Days

An idea fertilises with a mind to give birth to an entrepreneur. The life of an entrepreneur is not an easy one. Extinction in the form of death is always lurking around the corner – the first mistake can be the last. And yet, as the entrepreneur progresses from childhood to maturity, there is a thrill that nothing else can quite match. For adventure seekers, an entrepreneurial venture is the ultimate challenge. So, what are the challenges that entrepreneurs face during their early years? This is what we will examine in this series.

Embryo

The pre-birth stage of an entrepreneur’s life has a key question that needs answering: to make the leap or not. Even as there is a day job, the mind roams free – imagining various new worlds and ideas which can be created. At the same time, there are many concerns – where will the capital come from, what if one fails, does one have the capability to become an entrepreneur. In many ways, at this time, it is better not to know how high the mountain that needs to climbed is – because then the journey may not even start.

For many, this stage is where the mind games never end. The infinite series of What-Ifs always scare. For many, the risks of being an entrepreneur are too high – when the only guaranteed reward is the journey. There comes a time when one must make the decision – to jump in, or forget about it. While opportunities are always there, there is always a crunch time for an entrepreneur-to-be. There is a wafer-thin margin which separates the two worlds – one with its clear, laid-out path up the corporate ladder, and another with its glorious uncertainties. It is a mind game, and which only the prospective entrepreneur can play out.

For me, the decision to become an entrepreneur was made very early in life. It is what my father had done, and it seemed the logical thing for me to do. The seed was sown at home – in what I saw of my father. Even when I worked in the US for a couple years, I realised it was only a matter of time – that one day, the calling would reach a crescendo, and I would have to heed its call. After two years of working, I finally called it quits and embarked on life as an entrepreneur. There were many ideas of what I wanted to do – the primary one being to build a software products company out of India. It was a dream that would have to wait a decade before I got an opportunity to try to make it happen.

I am now in my third innings as an entrepreneur. The first lasted two-and-a-half years and ended in failure. The second lasted five years and ended in my business being sold. The third began two years ago. How it will end I do not know. What I can say is that each of the experiences has been unique and challenging in its own right.

Tomorrow: An Entrepreneur’s Early Days (continued)