Over the past few years virtualization technology has proven itself as a valuable and green technology. What is virtualization technology? Simply stated virtualization software provides a platform that allows multiple instances of other environments/operating systems to operate simultaneously on one physical device (usually servers). Since most of the time most servers use only a fraction of the available resources this allows a much better overall utilization of the most important resource – electricity. It also equates to cooler server rooms that are doing the same job with less physical machines. It is therefore reasonable that this technology could be used in other environments and why not mobile?

The top benefits of Virtualizing the Mobile Device

1. Support for multiple environments
2. Easier product development cycle
3. Extend Legacy software window
4. Improved Security
5. Cost Savings

Support for multiple environments

Because a virtualized environment is operating system agnostic phone vendors can develop both their own Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) and use other popular operating systems such as Android, Linux, Symbian or even Windows. These environments could even be multiple versions of the same Operating system allowing you to operate both a work/security optimized version as well as a personal version all on the same phone, securely and easily.

Easier Product Development Cycle

Since there is a consistent platform that sits between the phone hardware and the operating system engineers will not have to re-invent their products for every new hardware platform that OEM’s produce. This will mean instead of designing 2, 3, 4 or even more versions of an RTOS or OS builds they can build one and it can be used across all virtualization equipped phones. This equates to major cost savings as well as shorter development cycles for new products.

Extend Legacy Software Window

By controlling the underlying system you now have the flexibility to continue to run older versions of software on a newer phone without having to port them over to the platform. This will increase the window of time that a given RTOS or Operating System build can be used.

Improved Security

It has already been suggested that a security optimized version or “work” version of an OS could be offered adjacent to a personal use environment. In addition to that flexibility there is definitely some innovation occurring from the security perspective. Open Kernel labs run their OKL4 Microvisor in the privileged secure cells. This information was provided directly via OKL:

“Mobile/embedded virtualization, as realized in the OKL4 Microvisor, works by using on-chip memory management to isolate guest OSes from one another. On architectures lacking hardware-assisted virtualization (e.g., ARM), OKL4 also employs paravirtualization to replace privileged instructions in guest OSes with calls to OKL4 “hyper APIs”. Paravirtualization ensures 100% isolation among Secure Cells with minimal overhead compared to native (bare metal) execution.

OKL4 is unique among mobile virtualization platforms in several ways. First, it implements “true virtualization”, fully isolating and managing all guest OSes as equally “untrusted” software in Secure Cells (virtual machines). Second, OKL4 is built over a real-time microkernel, with a small memory footprint for easy certification (minimal trusted computing base), and with APIs to support stand-alone software in lightweight Secure Cells (e.g., shared device drivers). Third, OKL4 provides secure and configurable communication among guest OSes, allowing safe sharing of system devices and other resources.”

Joe’s Security Summary – some very sophisticated security apparatus have been used to allow secure multi-use of phones. This will allow users the flexibility of using their work phone for personal use without worrying about compromising the work environment.

Cost Savings

The independence achieved via the virtual environment also creates additional cost savings above and beyond those already addressed in the product development and legacy software support. OKL CEO Steve Subar gave an example where the end user price of the Evoke phone was cut substantially because of the flexibility of screen choices. At the manufacturing level they saved ~$45 which equates to ~$100 Wholesale and up to ~$200 retail. This coupled with the ability to use single core processors and smaller batteries can drastically reduce the overall cost of the phone to the end user.

Conclusions

While really only scratching the surface here of what is really an impressive and exciting technology this should serve as a good primer into some of the benefits it offers. Since there are benefits for OEMS, wholesalers, providers, businesses and consumers alike it is likely that this technology will continue to proliferate in the marketplace.

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1. Helping Friends
2. Building Influence

Helping Friends

Since your paper.li papers can be about lists, people or hashtags – there is great opportunity to help people. How is that you ask? Well if I make a Joe Hackman daily, it will feature my tweets and the tweets of my followers to generate the article content, videos, etc for the feature. Being mentioned in a daily, or anything, is almost always good for a Twitter user (unless someone is complaining about you!). The other thing it does is build back-links to your sources articles and blogs. We all want to be found, being linked to will benefit your sources SEO. When you start to think through the list feature, hashtags, etc, you start to understand how there are many ways to help your friends achieve the mentions and back-links for better SEO.

Building Influence

This point is fairly simple, people like to be featured in your paper for the reasons above and for another important reason. It is great to have your content recognized and shared. In this case you will receive recognition for following others. How? By following anyone on Twitter they have a chance to be featured on your paper, if they are feature and they actually are paying attention they are likely to appreciate it. This means that if you produce a paper.li your sources on Twitter are more likely to be recognized and recognize you. That is influence. Of course you could also record a cool video and write about it in your blog then direct people to read about it. I think that might add a bit of influence as well.

Be sure to watch the video for additional tips and subscribe to my Youtube Channel if you enjoyed this post. I’d also love to hear your tips about how to utilize paper.li.

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Each idea had its perks and this is a pretty major birthday for me, but today I had an idea while driving on highway 24 west bound towards downtown Oakland. I was thinking about the Vegas trip idea and listening to Counting Crows “Carriage” cranked up and I caught a view of the bay bridge, San Francisco and fog seemingly stalled at the edge of the SF skyline. I was feeling exceptionally grateful and fortunate for my life, family and “where I am at” and thought a trip to Vegas while fun lacked the kind of meaning that I want my this coming chapter of my life to have. The idea that popped into my head was donating my birthday to charity.

How do you donate your birthday?

I know it sounds like a strange idea, but the next step for me was thinking about all the projects my Rotary Club, District and PR group have that I could work on. I also thought about the blogs, websites and Facebook pages that all sorts of local non-profits that I’ve supported, helped or been exposed to over the past couple of years. More importantly I thought about the volunteer opportunities that might exist to donate some time to help others.

Action Plan

The plan involves 4 steps:

Steps 1 to 3 being done offline or already complete, that left me with a list of things to do if no-one has hands on opportunities or requests.

Default Go-to Activity List

Kind of a short list, but it’s also an ambitious list by itself. If you’re interested in following the effort I will tag everything I do with #40thpledge so you can search via Twitter, Google or even as a Tag on this blog.

Update 8/29/2010 – One of my friends over at Amplify.com was asking me about updates on this effort. Here is how my day went (quick summary I want to record a video later)

1. Many of the 11 non profits responded, 2 of them had tasks for me for Saturday.
2. One task was to talk to husband of the founder of the Booker T. Washington Empowerment Network about using Social Media (Youtube and Facebook mostly).
3. Another task was to help Sonrise Equestrian Foundation with Ranch Cleanup.
4. Since this was only part of the day I planned to work on a website for Rotary in the Valley, a group of 6 Rotary clubs regional effort.

Booker T. Washington Empowerment Network

I spoke with Anthony on my drive to Sonrise Equestrian. We discussed how to use the Facebook pages, Causes and some best practices for Facebook and Youtube. Anthony is pretty sharp he knew the right questions to ask and I am confident that he will be able to effectively execute. If not I’m prepared to advise them on an ongoing basis.

Sonrise Equestrian Foundation

The founder of this wonderful organization is Melanie Burke, after she spoke at my Rotary Club earlier this year I invited her to be on my Podcast. You can listen to that interview here. I spent 4 hours at the Charles Wilhelm Training Center – the ranch that hosts Sonrise. I was teamed up with a few other volunteeers carting in broken down asphalt into the back yards of the horse stables. The challenge with this job involved clearing the thresholds and the stuff is heavy and difficult to spread. I learned it helps with drainage in the rainy months. We also repaired one of the stables with some plywood sheets. Evidently sometimes horses lay down too close to one side of the stall and don’t realize they can just roll over so they panic and kick the heck out of the wall. Wow I would not want to be anywhere near that when it was occurring. My time working with the Sonrise volunteers was the highlight of my day. She has a very supportive group of people that help her, and when you meet Melanie or hear her story you will probably understand why.

Rotary in the Valley

Since I was out of requested tasks to do I looked at where I could have the most impact using my skills. I can navigate my way around WordPress fairly well and there was a site that needed to be built for Rotary in the Valley. It is still a work in progress but you can check it out here. This site is a team effort of the 6 San Ramon Valley Rotary club’s PR chairs. I happen to the PR chair for the Danville/Sycamore Valley Rotary for the 2010-2011 year. Our fearless leader is none other than THE Bill Randall, our District 5160 PR Chair and Alamo Rotary past president. Bill drives the bus and we all do our best to support his efforts. Rotary is very important to me and the benefactor of the majority of my community service outreach time.

Summary

Ultimately I do what I do for my benefit, but I am always thinking about my son and the importance of setting an example for him. I learned about the importance of serving others through my mother. She used to bring me and my other siblings to visit elderly people in the local convalescent hospital. I know she also volunteered throughout her life and the things I do know about probably only scratch the surface. My mom passed away 10 years ago and I suppose for me being able to give back and follow in her footsteps to some degree is really a celebration of her good example. I hope as a result that this has somehow inspired you.

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. ~William James

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It is a simple idea, I promise. You propose changes to any website, the intermediary website will allow commentary and a preview of what the proposed changes would look like. That content can then be used by the target of the proposed changes.

An Example

For example, let’s say you visit a blog and you read an article and really like it but have ideas how it can be improved. If you provide proofing services this could be career oriented outreach. You use the browser add on for the proposing website and it brings you to an editable version of the page. You make the changes you would like to “propose” then tweet it out to Twitterverse, Share via Facebook, clip via Amplify, etc. The blog owner may notice a trackback, a google alert or some analytics data. They can organically discover the modified version of the article. They can even grab the proposed changes and insert them in the blog, preferably including some citation to the individual that modified the content. This could be enforced via some type of embed option. There could be a social network built out of the proposing website, voting on the best changes, recognition, prizes and awards.

Provide input

Now that I’ve shared the root idea, would you like to propose features to improve this idea? Or maybe you want to ship me chests full of money, armies of interns and great advisers to try it out, either way I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Today was a crazy day, even for a Monday. Monday’s can be a little challenging you never know what can go wrong with technology over the weekend. People arrive to their businesses to discover that one of their computers won’t power on, or perhaps there was a sustained power outage and something isn’t working. Typically for that reason I don’t schedule appointments on Monday, they sort of schedule themselves. Today was an exception, I had 2 things scheduled – a meeting with a new prospect at 11:00AM and an Amplify.com community chat podcast at 1:00PM.

When I got to my desk at 7:45AM I noted that extra issue #1 had already arrived via Email, within 10 minutes I was on the phone with one of my clients about a computer that had been moved and was not quite functioning right. By a little after 8AM the immediate issue was resolved but I had added another stop to my day for 10AM. By 9AM I received a call from another client, evidently one of their machines did not check in to work. I now had zero time windows long enough between 10AM and 2:30PM to run to Oakland to see to this latest issue. While in route to my 10AM I called to confirm the Amplify.com community chat with Eric Goldstein, thank goodness Eric wanted to postpone – there were big changes due out Thursday and we rescheduled the chat to Thursday afternoon. The next couple of hours were just a flurry of activity. By the time I realized I had to notify everyone on Amplify, Plancast and Blogtalkradio of the change I was sitting in line for a quick on the go lunch at Burger King.

Being the IT tech guy that I am I hopped out of my car and grabbed my backpack out of the trunk and set it on the passenger side floor of my car. I pulled out my small netbook, a USB cable and made sure my Droid Phone was handy. With my laptop tethered to my Droid phone I powered it up. My passenger seat was not the best desk but it would have to do. After jostling around while still inching forward in the drive through line I managed to type in my super complex password.

“Warning …. Low Battery Life…..”

Oh snap, you’ve got to be kidding me. I would have to find an alternate solution. While driving on the 680 Corridor I did a voice search on my Droid for a Peet’s coffee, why Peet’s? Because their wifi doesn’t require a login, just a simple code that is provided by the cashier. I have not tested Starbuck’s since they went free wifi, so it may work the same way. Didn’t find a local Peet’s that way, so I tried Panera Bread. Same story. Finally while driving through LaMorinda I used the Places app and chose Coffee Houses. There’s a Peet’s! Thank goodness Honda’s let you plug stuff into the Navigation while driving, I pulled off the freeway and had the address set before I got to the stoplight. It was right around the corner – Score 1 Location Based Search.

Needless to say Peet’s was a welcome environment I was able to plug-in and get all the updates put into place and quickly get back on the road. It cost me $2.00 for a coffee that I didn’t need but I thought to myself as I was driving down the road I could always buy a shirt that says “Powered by Caffeine”.

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I recorded this screencast for people who don’t want to wait for a decent plugin for the Twitter Tweet Button. There are some ways to add this to the single post template manually but with my template it was a complete nightmare to do. Until a plugin is released I this might help you add the new button to your WordPress blog:

This video does provide information on how to use the append plugin to add code or text to every page/post or both:

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You can check out Good News on Youtube or visit their Facebook page.

“The chips can be stacked against you but that doesn’t mean you can’t make it.” – Sean Kennedy

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Sign up for an account

Before you navigate to Blogtalkradio.com to create your account login to Facebook if you have an account there. It will definitely save you time because you can “Connect with Facebook” option instead of the full blown manual account creation. Once you are at Blogtalkradio.com choose the Create Account option in the upper right hand corner of the landing page. That will bring up the registration page where you can use Facebook to connect or manually add the information. If the Facebook option doesn’t work or if you don’t have a Facebook account, just go ahead and fill out the information in the sign up form. You will need to confirm manual setup via Email, the system will send you a message to your Email address from service@blogtalkradio.com to the Email address you provided. Once confirmed you can login and complete your profile.

Using the chat, favorite programs, adding friends

Once you are authenticated to the system you can access the podcast(s) you want to and participate in the chat. While logged in you also have the benefit of favoriting shows, becoming friends with other users and even setting up your own free podcast. If you’d like to connect with me at Blogtalkradio visit my show’s page.

No Internet Access during the episode? No Problem.

Every episode has a dial in number that you can call. Just keep in mind the free accounts have a limit of 5 callers so you may have issues getting through. My program is upgraded and allows up to 50 callers so if you get a busy signal the first time you might want to keep trying.

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