Amazon adds .NET support for enterprise developers

We have discussed infrastructure services – services that are intended for developers, not end users.

Amazon jumped off to a lead in this space, and many Web sites now use their virtual machines and storage services. They appreciate not having to invest in servers and the easy scalability of these services. The cost is also low because Amazon enjoys economies of scale and expertise in building and reliably running huge data centers.

Amazon has recently cut prices for their infrastructure services, added a service level agreement, and support for Microsoft .NET and SQL server. (They initially focused on Linux). These moves are designed to appeal to enterprise developers.

In focusing on enterprise developers, Amazon is in direct competition with Microsoft. Microsoft will be announcing their entry in this market soon. Rackspace, a large hosting firm, offers similar support for both .NET and Linux. They call it “Mosso,” which means fast in Greek, and claim that you can get started in only 8 minutes.

Web and enterprise developers will need to be able to use these infrastructure services in the future. Would you like to learn to deploy applications in the "cloud?"

Gross contributed product -- the value of Linux

We discuss people's motivation to contribute time and content, and speculate on the total value of contributed content, the "gross contributed product."

In a recent report, the Linux Foundation, estimates that it would cost approximately $10.8 billion to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today’s dollars with today’s software development costs. The market research firm IDC reports that hardware and software spending related to Linux hit $21 billion during 2007, and predicts that it will rise to $48 billion by 2011.

To put the size of the Linux market in perspective, we note that in the year 2007, the GDP of the State of Maine was $48.1 billion, and the GDP of 7 states was less.

How many people would you estimate are employed in Linux-related industries?

A cool, collaborative drawing tool

Most of you use or will be using Visio to create diagrams. I just came across Dabbleboard, a vector drawing service you might find useful.

It is not as capable and flexible as Visio, but it is very easy to use, extensible -- you can reuse shapes and shape libraries you and others create -- and, of course, it is a networked application.

Several people can work on the same drawing at the same time, and the drawing can be made public or shared within a limited group when it is published. You can create libraries based on your drawings, and there are also public libraries and tool kits.

If it sounds interesting, check this how-to screencast.

Dabbleboard has several features that facilitate and encourage collaborative work. What features would you like to see them add? What do you think the community of Dabbleboard users will add? When would you use Dabbleboard instead of Visio? When would you use Visio?

Non-economic motivation to contribute -- Jon Postel

The Internet facilitates collaboration, which is often voluntary. We discuss non-economic motivations for contributing time and effort to projects as well as the social and economic value of those contributions.

Jon Postel who died ten years ago today, led the development of critical Internet organizations and technologies without the economic incentive of an entrepreneur. You can read about his contributions here.

How was Jon Postel "paid" for his work? What was its value to society and the economy? Have you made any unpaid contributions -- perhaps "digging" a blog post, reviewing a product or book, or making an improvement to a Wikipedia page?

Commoncraft -- a business made possible by the Internet

We discuss the falling costs of content creation, publication, and distribution. Commoncraft has built a successful educational video business by taking advantage of these falling costs.

Commoncraft is a two-person (husband and wife) company, and they want to remain small. Low resolution copies of their videos are available for non-commercial use at no cost, and they license high resolution versions for commercial use.

As shown here, they have a very low-tech studio, keeping their investment low. Their time is the only significant cost of producing a video.



Distribution cost is also nearly zero. The non-commercial version of a video is distributed at no cost on YouTube and other video sites. They distribute the commercial version from their own server at minimal cost.

Marketing also costs close to nothing. They post a video on Youtube, and wait for users to find it and tell each other about it. They do "viral" marketing.

If it were not for the Internet, what would it cost to produce, market and distribute short educational videos? Since the cost of entry is so low, a Commoncraft competitor could easily spring up. (They even have a Web page showing how they make their videos). Would Commoncraft have an advantage over a competitor? Would they mind the competition?

Chrome benchmark: math is slow, but will improve -- bad news for Microsoft

Several people ran benchmarks when Google Chrome came out, and concluded that it was faster than Internet Explorer and Firefox. But others, for example this article on 10 things to love (and hate) about Google Chrome, found Chrome to be no faster. Relative speed depends upon the benchmark.

I created a Google Spreadsheet that computes 200 sines, cosines, squares and square roots. Recalculation was noticeably slower with Chrome (23 seconds) than Firefox (2 seconds) or Internet Explorer (10 seconds).

The bad news for Google is that they will have to improve the efficiency of their math libraries. The good news is that Firefox has demonstrated that it can be done. More good news -- the user will not have to install new software when it is ready. It will automatically download when the application is used.

The bad news for Microsoft is that they too will have to improve the speed of math calculations in Internet Explorer. That will not be difficult for them to do, but doing so will have a bad-news side effect -- it will narrow the speed gap between Excel and Google Spreadsheet.

This is just one example. Microsoft will be forced to improve Internet Explorer to keep up with Google, Firefox and others. But every time they improve Internet Explorer, they chip away at the advantage their dedicated Office applications have over the network applications of Google and others. The performance gap between desktop and network-based programs narrows.

Can you think of other new technologies that painted an old technology into a corner? If you were running Microsoft, how would you deal with this situation?

Encouraging Android and iPhone application developers

We discuss the importance of building communities of users and of developers.

Google and T-Mobile just announced the availability of the first phone running Google's Android operating system. Android is strategic for Google because it is bundled with their applications, and they are entering the mobile Internet access market along with the Apple iPhone.

Both companies are trying to attract application developers for their platforms. Apple has established a $100 million venture capital fund for start up companies with ideas for interesting applications and has an iPhone Developers Program where developers find tools and technical and business information.

Google also understands the importance of developers to the success of Android, and they have allocated $10 million for awards for innovative applications. The first set of winners has been selected, and the second round of competition is under way. The ten top applications in the first round are here.

Apple has created an online store to help developers sell and distribute their applications, and Google has announced their intention to do the same for applications that run on Android phones.

To encourage development, Apple distributes free applications at their store, and charges a reasonable commission on commercial applications -- they hope to profit by selling more Apple hardware. Google will be selling advertising, not hardware, so they hope their store will encourage both software developers and handset manufacturers to adopt the open-source Android platform.

Finally, and this is highly speculative, Android is Google's operating system for mobile Internet access devices -- might they one day release a full-scale version for the desktop, competing directly with Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple OS X? Microsoft and Apple adapted their desktop operating systems to hand-held devices -- might Google be planning to adapt their hand-held operating system to the desktop one day?

Is Google truly competing with Apple? Does it help or hurt Google if someone buys an iPhone instead of an Android handset?

17 percent of European households now use VoIP

We discuss VoIP in class. A recent market research report shows VoIP growing rapidly in Europe. At the end of 2004, 1.9 million VoIP lines were in service, equivalent to just over 1 percent of European households. By the end of 2007, Europe was up to 25.3 million lines and 17 percent of households.

As shown here, VoIP service is growing faster in Europe than in the US, and is eating into the traditional switched circuit revenue of the phone companies.

Do you ever use VoIP? If so, do you use an Internet program like Skype or do you get your service from a phone company?

Fiber now connects 3.76 million US homes

We discuss home connectivity. Today, DSL and cable are the most commonly used home connectivity technologies, but we expect that, in the long run, we will have fiber links to our homes. Today, that is far from the case. A recent market research report estimates that fiber now passes 13.8 million U. S. homes and 3.76 million are broadband subscribers.

What percent of US homes is 3.76 million? Providing fiber links requires investment in equipment and trenches and installation -- which neighborhoods will operators focus on first? Will all neighborhoods eventually be served?

Synchronizing data for offline work

We defined network applications, as opposed to stand-alone applications, as those in which either the data, programs, or both are stored on the network.

All network applications store data on a server, but some also store copies of the data on the client. That enables a user to work when off line -- perhaps when traveling -- and automatically synchronize the data on the two machines when the client re-connects to the network.

This short video illustrates offline editing while using Zoho's Writer word processing service, and you can read more about it here.

Note that it uses Google Gears, an open source program that must be installed on the client computer.

Google wrote and supports Gears as an open source project -- what is their reason for doing so? Why is Gears strategic for Google?

Miniature projectors

We discuss technology progress, which, when significant, can lead to completely new applications.

A year ago, we noted some newly developed technology for miniature projectors. 3M has now announced a projector using that technology. The list price is $359, the display resolution is 640 by 480, and it is reportedly bright enough to project an 11 inch image in a lit room. This projector is a stand-alone device designed to connect to a laptop or PDA.

Other companies are working on similar products. If that leads to continued technology improvement -- lower cost, smaller size, higher resolution and brighter displays -- we may see projectors bundled into phones and PDAs.

What technology barrier may keep that from happening?

Senator Kohl questions cellular competition

We discuss the competitive nature of the US cell phone and ISP markets. Generally speaking, ISPs and cell phone companies oppose regulation, arguing in favor of private enterprise and competition. Is there competition in these markets? Let's look at text messaging.

In 2005, each US cell phone company charged 10 cents to send or receive a text message. No doubt they had different cost structures and strategies -- you might have expected one of them to cut their price to try to win new customers. Well they did change their prices -- today they are all charging 20 cents.

Do you find that surprising in this competitive marketplace? Do you suppose their costs rose during those years? Its only fair that they cover their costs, right?

Text messages are transmitted in 140 byte (1,120 bit) packets -- 1,120 bits delivered for 20 cents. How much would it cost to deliver a recorded song at that rate?

Let's be conservative and assume the typical song is 2 minutes long. If it were encoded at 256k bits per second, the rate Apple iTunes uses for premium recordings, that would be roughly 30,720,000 bits -- the equivalent of 27,429 text messages. If a music vendor like Apple charged the same rate per bit as a text message vendor, a song would cost around $5,486 to transmit, yet Apple manages to sell and deliver songs, and make a profit at $1.29 per song.

US Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI), chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, recently asked the presidents and chief executive officers of the four largest wireless telephone companies to justify their text message rates. In a letter, Senator Kohl requested an explanation from Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, which collectively serve more than 90 percent of the nation's cellular phone users.

Do you think the cellular market is competitive? The Internet access market? What do you think Senator Kohl is planning to do?

-----
Update 3/13/2015

WhatsApp reports that it now has 700 million monthly active users sending 30 billion messages a day. For comparison, the global SMS system sees about 20 billion messages a day.

Here is the decline of SMS in several nations:

Senator Kohl's call for action went nowhere, but he needn't have worried -- no monopoly lasts forever.

Will Google Chrome paint Microsoft into a corner?

Google recently announced their Chrome browser. They released a beta version that lacks many of the planned features, but they claim that it is more stable and secure than the competition, and explain why that is so in this neat comic book presentation.

They also say JavaScript programs run very fast when using Chrome. Chrome trounces other browsers when running benchmarks that Google designed. In some other benchmarks, it is still faster than Firefox and much faster than Internet Explorer.

When does JavaScript speed matter? We discuss dynamic Web applications, in which programs are downloaded to the client when the user visits a Web site. Those programs are typically written in JavaScript, so they will run much faster on Chrome than Internet Explorer.

Google is betting on network applications, and speed is critical if their networked word processor, spreadsheet, and other programs are to compete with Microsoft Office. A networked word processor or spreadsheet program has advantages over a stand-alone program like Word or Excel, but also has disadvantages, one of which is being slow. If Google Docs runs a lot faster with Chrome than current browsers, it will appeal to more people, and perhaps eat into Microsoft's very profitable Office sales.

If Chrome is a lot faster than Internet Explorer, customers will adopt it. But, ironically, if Microsoft counters by improving the speed of Internet Explorer, they will hurt Office sales.

Microsoft Office is sold by their Business Division, where fiscal 2008 consumer revenue dipped 2 percent, or $80 million. Microsoft analyst Joe Wilcox thinks this is the start of a "gradual, but later rapid decline." Faster browsers will accelerate the decline.

As communication technology improves, will Google's network application strategy gain or lose advantage over stand-alone software? How about improvement in storage technology? How about improvement in electronic technology?

The Internet and the presidential election

We eventually learn to use new media, but at first we mimic old media. For example, this 1952 presidential ad for Eisenhower is like a radio jingle with crude animation:



It seems goofy today, but was made by intelligent, creative people at the time.

Many people feel that John Kennedy was the first presidential candidate to effectively use television. Checking his commercials from the 1960 campaign, we see sincere statements by the candidate, attack ads and celebrity endorsement ads as well as Eisenhower-era jingles. Kennedy also had the ability to speak directly to the voter as shown in this clip:



Earlier, Franklin Roosevelt broke new ground by communicating directly with the people in weekly fireside chats on the radio.

The Internet is today's new media. Howard Dean and John McCain pioneered in using the Net for fund raising during the 2000 and 2004 elections, and both of the current candidates are using it for position papers, fund raising, community formation, video, instant messaging, Twitter streams, email, etc. this year.

In this interview, Phil Noble of the consulting firm Politics Online says Obama may be to the Internet what John Kennedy was to television and the New York Times published this excellent article on the importance of the Internet in the campaign on the day before the election.

For more examples of presidents using radio and television, see the archives of presidential speeches at the University of Virginia and presidential campaign commercials at Living Room Candidate.

Have you registered with either (or both) the presidential campaign sites? Have you contributed to a candidate on the Internet? Have you created blogs on either campaign site? Do you see differences in the way Obama and McCain are using the Internet?

Consumer electronic devices on your home LAN

We talk about home LANs and their eventual convergence with consumer electronics like TV sets and audio equipment.

This New York Times article surveys some of the Internet-ready consumer electronic devices that were shown at a recent German trade show.

Do you have a home LAN? If so, is your TV, sound system or any other consumer electronic device connected to your LAN?

Technology transitions -- the early days of the Web

Today's freshman cannot remember a time before the Web, but, at first, HTTP and HTML were just newly proposed protocols without users. In the early 1990s, email, file transfer, network news, and remote login were important Internet applications. We also read documents from Gopher servers, and found them using search services like Veronica, WAIS, and Archie or a directory called "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web," which was maintained by two graduate students and later renamed "Yahoo!".

Gopher sites had tables of contents with links to documents, but no links within documents. The text could not be formatted (as we do with HTML today), and there were no images, only text. Web files were larger than Gopher files, but that became less important as communication speed -- faster modems -- improved.

As with all technology transitions, the Web protocols co-existed with Gopher and related search engines for some time. John December, a graduate student at the time, documented this transition period and his outlook for the Web in a book and in this article.

Can you give an example of another emerging application that depends upon increased communication speed? Increased storage capacity? Increased computation speed?

Computer science research leads to commercial products

Computer scientists at universities and the research labs of companies like Microsoft, Google or IBM work on new ways of doing things that may one day be used in commercial projects. In addition to theoretical studies, they often build hardware or software prototypes that test and demonstrate their ideas. (The slogan "demo or die" is common in such labs).

They also publish papers describing their work in technical journals and conference proceedings. One can get a glimpse of the future by reading those papers and attending conferences. For example, the 2008 conference of the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH for short) was just held in Los Angeles. Projects presented at SIGGRAPH foreshadow tomorrow's image and video editing programs. For a first look at features that might one day be in Photoshop or Windows Movie Maker, check these projects:

• Three-D photo viewer: combine many photos of the same object (like the statue of liberty or Notre Dame Cathedral) into a panoramic scene over which the user can pan and zoom.
• "Unwrap mosaics" for video editing: modify an object like a person's face in one still frame, and have the change propagated automatically throughout the video.
• Using photographs to enhance videos of a static scene: combine a video of a scene with a few still photographs to enhance the video by improving resolution, dynamic range, or touching up or removing objects.
• Face swapping: automatically replace faces in photographs.

You will find demonstration videos and technical papers at each of these sites.

The case of Pixar Animation illustrates the research-commerce relationship. In 1986 Pixar, then a brand new company, showed its first film, a short called Luxo Jr., at the SIGGRAPH conference. Watch Luxo Jr. and you will note things like the accuracy of moving light, shadows and reflections and the sinusoidal movement of the lamp cord when Luxo jumps. Achieving that sort of realism was state of the art research in 1986, therefore relevant for a scientific meeting. (The creation of a cute character was not science, but story telling art). The interplay between research and commerce continues -- Pixar employees presented a technical paper and a course at SIGGRAPH 2008.

Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists watch developments at research conferences like SIGGRAPH for ideas -- what are some other computer science conferences?

How can we achieve broadband competition?

We have discussed Columbia University Law Professor Tim Wu's wireless policy recommendations. In a recent NY Times editorial, he addresses broadband policy in general. Wu compares the US telephone and cable companies control over Internet connectivity to OPEC's control over world oil production and price.

Wu says Americans spend almost as much on bandwidth as we do on energy, and both are important to the economy and quality of life. (See our exercise on the cost of home connectivity and content).

He is aware that the US connectivity has fallen behind many developed nations, and feels we need to act to increase competition. He suggests municipal networks, customer owned fiber, and more license free spectrum. He concludes that "there is a pressing need to explore all alternative supplies of bandwidth before it is too late".

Roads, sewer systems, electricity and water are often supplied by municipal, state or federal government agencies. Do you feel there is a role for government in broadband communications? Can you state an argument for government participation? Against it?

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are free services that help you improve your Web site and increase traffic and visibility.

Google Analytics:

Google Analytics enables you to track traffic and visitors to your site during a given day, week or month. The reported statistics include:

• the number of visitors
• where they were located (city, nation, region, continent)
• how many pages they viewed
• which pages they viewed
• which browser and operating system they used
• what their screen resolutions and connection speeds were
• how many came directly, from search engines, or from referring sites

(You can see a call to Google Analytics just before the "/body" tag at the end of my home page. A call like that one must be inserted in every page you wish to track, but it can be inserted automatically using an "include" file).

Google Webmaster tools:

Google Webmaster Tools report information their search engine finds when "crawling" your pages. Information includes:

• diagnostics -- which pages on your site have problems like broken links?
• top search queries -- which queries returned your site and what was its rank?
• external links -- which sites link to your site, and which page do they link to?

Google Webmaster Tools also enable you to upload a sitemap file for your Web site. A sitemap file is a list or your site's URLs. Adding a sitemap file to your Web site will improve your Google searches (though Google does not reveal how they use the file).

A sitemap file must be in a standard (XML) format, and creating one by hand would be tedious. Luckily, there are a number of programs to automatically generate sitemap files. Maposite.com is a handy service for generating sitemap files. Once you have generated the file, you upload it to the root of your Web site, and let Google Webmaster Tools know it is there.

Wikia search combines explicit and implicit user input

We discuss the importance of user supplied content. For example, all Wikipedia content is explicitly entered by users who create and edit entries.

Google also uses user supplied data. The more links there are to a given page, the higher its search ranking. Every time someone creates a link to a Web page, they implicitly give it a vote. They do not have to take extra time or effort -- the value of the data to Google and the Internet community is a by-product of creating the page.

The Wikia search engine uses both implicit and explicit user input. A Wikia search turns up listings similar to Google's, but lets the user evaluate and comment on the search results. To test it, I did a vanity search on my own name.

As shown here, Wikia found my home page and a number of other pages containing my name, and displayed them in the conventional Google style:



But, unlike Google, there are several input options on the right side of the screen. A user can edit, annotate, spotlight, comment on or delete the search result. As shown here, I spotlighted the entry and added a comment stating that this was my home page:



Wikia is separate from Wikipedia, but Jimmy Wales was a co-founder of both. You can read an interview of Wales on his hopes for Wikia search here.

Do you consider del.icio.us tags explicit or implicit? If you did a search, would you take the extra time to add comments to the result?

Ten technologies to watch

The Gartner Group, a prominent IT consulting and research firm, has published a list of ten technologies they believe will change the world in the next four years:

1. Multicore and hybrid processors
2. Virtualization and fabric computing
3. Social networks and social software
4. Cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms
5. Web mashups
6. User Interface
7. Ubiquitous computing
8. Contextual computing
9. Augmented reality
10. Semantics

One can argue with the choices -- they were probably dreamed up in a brainstorming session around a conference table. One can also question the value and expertise of consulting firms like Gartner, as Robert Cringely did recently. But, this still serves as a checklist of technologies to keep an eye on. At the very least, you should have an idea what each is.

You can join in on a discussion of Gartner's list at Slashdot.

Which of these technologies seems like the most fun to work on? Gartner is only one of many IT consulting and research firms -- what are some others?

Free tools for working with Flash video files

Flash (.flv), probably the most common Internet video format, is used by Youtube and many other sites. If you download a video, you you might want to convert it to another format, strip off the audio as an .mp3 file, or edit it. Check out this list of free tools for processing Flash video.

Senator Lieberman objects to terrorist video on YouTube

We saw earlier that al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades were using Google Earth to site targets. Terrorist organizations also use the Internet for recruiting, logistics, propaganda, etc.

Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, asked Google, the parent company of the YouTube, to "immediately remove content produced by Islamist terrorist organizations" from the site and prevent similar content from reappearing.

Google, refused stating “While we respect and understand his views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone's right to express unpopular points of view.”

A spokesperson for Lieberman then stated that the senator found the response unsatisfactory and was troubled that the company "does not appear willing to change its guidelines to prevent foreign terrorist organizations (as designated by the State Department) from posting videos used to radicalize followers and incite them to violence."

Evidently Lieberman feels that the Islamist organizations have a right to free speech in the US, but that Google does not have the obligation to publish their speech.

Every nation makes some attempt to control Internet content. Some ban pornography, others the sale of Nazi memorabilia, etc. Do you think Google should comply with Lieberman's request? What are the moral considerations? The practical business considerations?

User supplied content and network effects

We discuss the value of user-generated content. An early example was Amazon.com, which beat a better established competitor, Barnes and Noble, by encouraging people to submit reviews of books.

Wikipedia and Craigslist are two other well known examples. The Wikipedia Foundation, which runs one of the most visited sites on the Web, had only 14 employees as of March 2008. Craigslist had only 23 employees in October 2006 yet it was one of the ten most visited Web sites, as we see here:



This list may be exaggerated -- other companies like the BBC and Disney have diverse interests going far beyond their Web sites and revenue at Craigslist is far below the other companies on the list -- but it makes the point that providing a uniform place for users to post their content is sufficient to build a very valuable service.

Ebird provides another example. Ebird is not commercial -- it is a citizen science site, operated by the Audubon Society and Cornell University, where bird watchers can submit their observations. Ebird gives individual bird watchers a secure, handy place to store their observations, and the collected data may be analyzed for scientific purposes, as we see in this map showing the US Osprey population:



Services which, like these, grow in value as the number of users (content contributors) grow, are said to enjoy network effects.

Can you give examples of other services that rely on users for content and enjoy network effects? Can you think of such a service that might be of value to students on our campus? To students world wide?

Clearwire, Sprint, Intel and Google shoot for mobile Internet access

We discuss mobile connectivity. Today, third generation cellular is the most common means of mobile connectivity, but wireless communication using WiMAX technology is becoming available for both fixed and mobile applications.

Sprint and Clearwire have planned WiMAX deployment for some time, but they have now formed a new company and taken in strategic partners Intel and Google. The new venture, also called Clearwire, plans to be available to between 120 and 140 million people by 2010. That is only about 40 percent of the US, but it is significant.

Intel is a leading WiMAX hardware vendor. Today's laptops usually have WiFi radios for local area connectivity, and Intel wants tomorrow's laptops to also have WiMAX chips for wide area connectivity. Google is interested in mobile computing and wants their applications, Youtube videos and ads to be on every cell phone and mobile Internet access device.

If you could get high speed mobile access using a handheld device like an Apple iPhone, what would you use it for? How much would you be willing to pay for the mobile service? Would you want your phone to be separate from your Internet access device?

Clearwire hopes to be available to 40% of the US population by 2010 -- which areas will get service first?