Musings of a Computing Professional

Buy-Side and Sell-Side Analysts - An Analysis

2012-01-27T21:15:00.000-08:00

Recently, I had opportunity to attend an SVForum SIG meetup on "Cloud M&A: Buy-side and Sell-side Dynamics in 2012 and Beyond". I had to get clear on the two concepts of Buy-Side and Sell-Side before I went into listen to the panelists. This exercise in learning itself was an eye-opener on how phrases get into usage in natural languages.

To begin with, Buy-Side and Sell-Side are not exactly what they seem. Let us start with some definitions, from Investopedia:

The side of Wall Street comprising the investing institutions such as mutual funds, pension funds and insurance firms that tend to buy large portions of securities for money-management purposes.

Read more: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/buyside.asp

The retail brokers and research departments that sell securities and make recommendations for brokerage firms' customers.

Read more: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sellside.asp

Buy-Side analysts seem to be really doing what the phrase seems to suggest: Analyze stocks and other instruments to help in potential, eventual, buying of the equities. The Sell-Side analysts, on the other hand, deal significantly with retail investors, and can enable or, influence, buy or sell decisions by the retail investors.

If both buy and sell decisions are enabled by these Sell-Side analysts, why call them only Sell-Side?

Google Maps and Bangalore's Namma Metro.

2012-01-05T07:29:00.000-08:00

Google has seen it fit to map different parts of the world, and Bangalore, India, is no exception.

Recently, on 20 October 2011, a segment of the Bangalore Metro, between Baiyappanahalli & M G Road, went online for passenger traffic.

Namma Metro Route Map

While the route map of the Namma Metro, shown here and provided by the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL), offers a logical view that is helpful in a lot of contexts, it is sometimes also valuable to have a view that is superimposed on the geography-based map of Bangalore, of all the stations that currently serve passenger traffic. There is also a list of stations in the rail network, provided on the BMRCL web site.

It is said that the rail system offers free Wi-Fi connection on the train to all of its riders.

This Google map given below is a public map and I expect to update it to match the state of the Namma Metro in the coming months and years.

View Namma Metro (Bengaluru) Google Map in a larger map

Other information Namma Metro on the Internet:
Namma Metro on Wikipedia.
Bangalore Metro Map by MapsofIndia.com.

A Review of Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

2011-08-03T21:11:00.000-07:00

In this book, the author, Malcolm Gladwell, hammers home how and why certain individuals have succeeded enormously, i.e., are outliers, by leading the reader from the obvious observations to the more non-obvious conclusions:

"It is not the brightest who succeed. ... Outliers are those who have been given opportunities -- and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them."

"To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success — the unfortunate birth dates and happy accidents of history — with a society that provides opportunities for all."

After chronicling the lives of many successful people, and making some interesting observations along the way, Gladwell concludes that success is not completely inherent to an individual's IQ and other genetic factors, but is influenced rather heavily by circumstantial factors as well.

The book is written in a story-like style, makes for captivating reading, and is full of very insightful comments, some of which are given below.

Excerpts from the book.
Characteristic	Page	Excerpt
Hard work	39	"... once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it ..."
Practice	40	"The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything", writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin ... And, what is ten years? Well, it's roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice."
Practice	42	"Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good."
Accidental presence	64	"If January 1975 was the dawn of the personal computer age, then who would be in a best position to take advantage of it? ... Ideally, you want to be twenty or twenty-one, which is to say, born in 1954 or 1955."
Intelligence	101	"... general intelligence and practical intelligence are 'orthogonal' ..."
Parenting	104	"[sociologist Annette] Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style 'concerted cultivation'. ... Poor parents tend to follow ... a strategy of 'accomplishment of natural growth'. ... But, in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. ... The heavily scheduled middle-class child is exposed to constantly shifting set of experiences."
Parenting	107	"... Lareau describes a visit to the doctor by Alex Williams, a nine-year-old ... and his mother... Alex is used to being treated with respect. He is seen as special and as a person worthy of adult attention and interest. These are key characteristics of concerted cultivation. Alex is not showing off during his checkup. He is behaving much as he does with his parents — he reasons, negotiates, and jokes with equal ease."
Human memory	229	"... Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. ..."
Schooling	252	"The KIPP program represents one of the most promising new educational philosophies in the United States."
Who are the Outliers?	267	"It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein. Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our behalf. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities -- and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them."
Book's lesson	268	"The lesson here is very simple. ... We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think that outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at Bill Gates and marvel ... But that's the wrong lesson. ... If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success — the unfortunate birth dates and happy accidents of history — with a society that provides opportunities for all."

In summary, the insight in this book is something every parent would do well to keep in mind, as a child is being reared into adulthood.

Prospect for Biotechnology Graduates, 2011.

2011-06-30T16:06:00.000-07:00

Recently, someone asked me what the prospects would be for biotechnology graduates after a bachelor's degree and after a graduate degree. Naturally, answering the request would require some researching, and this blog post is the result. To begin with, we need to distinguish between two terms¹ [Click on the hyperlinks to see definition on the dictionary's web page]:

Biotechnology. n. the manipulation (as through genetic engineering) of living organisms or their components to produce useful usually commercial products (as pest resistant crops, new bacterial strains, or novel pharmaceuticals); also : any of various applications of biological science used in such manipulation.
Bioengineering, Biomedical engineering. n. 1: biological or medical application of engineering principles or engineering equipment —called also biomedical engineering 2 : the application of biological techniques (as genetic recombination) to create modified versions of organisms (as crops); especially : genetic engineering

It is not important whether the foregoing definitions are universally accepted, but we will use these definitions in the rest of this blog post.

US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects the job market for [US] engineers in 2018 at 1,750,300 and, for biomedical engineers, at 27,600.² This number, to my mind, seems awfully small for a total engineering population of 1,750,300.

BLS' View of Bioengineering and Biotechnology
	Bioengineers	Biotechnologists
Alternate terminology	Biomedical engineers	Biological scientists
Employment in 2008	16,000	91,300
Employment in 2018	27,600	110,500

US News and World Report - Best Graduate Schools

When you search for the word 'biotechnology' on the US News and World Report's Best Graduate Schools web site, you are led to Best Biomedical and Bioengineering Programs! In other words, the definitions given earlier are not applied by US News & World Report. The top 10 best engineering schools in biomedical and bioengineering programs support a total of 20,974 graduate students in March 2011.

Google Search for Graduate Assistantships

If you click on the image below, you will be taken to a Google Search browser window with the search words — "(biotechnology OR bioengineering) graduate assistantships" — already filled in.

As an example, the Department of Biology at Northeastern University provides graduate assistantships worth $28,252.50/year, along with remission of tuition for full-time graduate students.

Sample Salaries from a Job Site

The job site Simply Hired compiles average salaries of different types of jobs that it promotes. While this may not be a good measure of absolute salaries, it can give a good sense of relative values of the salaries.


Type of Job	Salary/year³
Software engineer	$72,000
Bioinformatics engineer	$71,000
Biotechnologist	$65,000
Medical Doctor	$59,000

¹from The Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

²The BLS is remarkably silent about software engineers, and projects 'other', presumably including the software types, at 195,400 in 2018.

³As of 1 July 2011.

Why I (almost) like Bangalore.

2011-02-03T20:03:00.000-08:00

My present visit to Bangalore grew partly out of a desire to take part in the UVCE Mega Reunion, and partly out of an approximately once-a-year visit to be with my octogenarian father. It has been nearly a month since I arrived at the Bangalore airport and, after taking in Bangalore in some of its awesome variety, I have reflected here on why I almost like Bangalore.

In his book The World is Flat, first published in 2005 and now newly republished as 3.0, Thomas Friedman has colorfully introduced Bangalore in story fashion through his experience in the golf course in the central part of the city.

"No one ever gave me directions like this on a golf course before: ... 'Aim at Microsoft or IBM'. I was standing at the first tee at the KGA Golf Club in downtown ... I had come to Bangalore, Indian Silicon Valley ...' .

Today, if you visit Whitefield — now considered part of Greater Bangalore —, you will see many more buildings, many of them high rises, that belong to who's who of multi-national corporations (MNCs) in the IT and other industries. Thus, as an IT professional, you simply cannot be lost in Bangalore. If anything, there is the added dimension of dealing with the Indian psyche to all of the rest of what is involved in an IT transaction.

If you are a programmer type, there is sufficient reason to be effective from being in Bangalore too, thanks largely to cloud computing. Dijkstra made the observation, in his famous 1972 Turing Award lecture, that programming is probably the most complex in terms of the orders of magnitude that the human mind has to conquer: 10¹⁰. While Dijsktra's comments were focused on a software system programmed on a single computer, the advent of cloud computing adds a new spatial dimension to the order of magnitude¹, not to speak of the higher-speed electronics, which itself can add 3 more orders of magnitude, from microseconds to nanoseconds. So if you are a programmer interested in dealing with taming programming complexity, you can do so quite effectively while being in Bangalore.

Google Maps is another major boon to the chaos inherent to the Bangalore I grew up in, in the 1960s and 1970s. During this visit, I have never had major difficulty to get to anywhere within the city and, that too, by the Volvo bus transport, thanks to the Bangalore Google Transit Trip Planner. What is required is a bit of taming of what you type into the Google Maps' search window: I have discovered for example that, if you do not include street address, or door number as it is generally known here, the positioning of your location of interest is reasonably accurate, and that is good enough for getting you around.

Nearly any problem that needs a solution in the Indian society needs to be highly scalable². Consider the mundane problem of outfitting the entire city of Bangalore with proper infrastructure of footpaths — or sidewalks, for the American reader. You have to be amazed why, in the last 4 decades, the quality of these footpaths has not improved at all! Take the Outer Ring Road³, for instance, as shown in the Google Maps Web Element at left. In some sections, in J P Nagar, pedestrians are forced to avoid the footpath and walk on the road, by the curb! Forget uniform paving on the footpath, the granite slabs intended to cover the drainage system are regularly missing near the Outer Ring Road underpass at J P Nagar 24th Main Road! Why is this? Is the problem so complex that it cannot be suitably solved? I'll leave the reasons to the reader's imagination.

In summary, if you can make do with traffic imperfections, including insufficient concern for pedestrians, there is sufficient excitement in the Bangalore air. And, that is enough for anyone, with sufficient non-concern toward traffic and pedestrians' problems, to like the city.

¹In a Special Report: The World's Largest Data Centers, we learn that the largest single building data center is about 1.1 million square feet.

²This statement is true not only of India, but also of China; both are countries with more than billion people.

³When it was first conceived, Bangalore city limits were probably within this envelope. Now, of course, the city has grown beyond the Outer Ring Road, thus mocking the use of the word 'Outer'. That is besides the point.

Do We Know What Net Neutrality is?

2010-11-17T15:04:00.000-08:00

There has been so much misunderstanding about net neutrality in the press — you can sense it even in the transcript below — that I felt it appropriate to transcribe excerpts from an Eric Schmidt interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco recently. The logic provided by Eric Schmidt appeals to anyone's sense of what net neutrality should be.

In particular, the ability of a service provider to charge differently for different grades of service must be maintained. (Similar to First Class and Economy class on air flights).

[Aside. It is interesting to note that many of the noteworthy cloud-based services — e.g., AWS, Cisco Webex/Umi, Google Apps, Salesforce.com — work just fine, even though they are all delivered through "economy" class Internet access in the last mile. End of Aside].

The interview is conducted by John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly. The link for the video is provided below:

Now, at about the 0:28:30 instant in the video, the conversation focuses on net neutrality.

Battelle [00:28:10]: "... the question of net neutrality and the question of openness are often, sort of, mashed together, as sort of similar, philosophical ... "

Schmidt [00:28:20]: "Of course, they are quite different."

Battelle [00:28:22]: "I am curious if you can, maybe, take a minute to educate us on how you came to the joint statement you made with Verizon on the issue of net neutrality, in particular the idea that, well, in the open wired web, net neutrality means (a), and on the wireless web it means (b) ..."

Schmidt [00:28:45]: "And which is precisely not what we said. A little bit of background, it is helpful by the way to define the terms. So, net neutrality has for Google for many many years, and I think for responsible people in the industry, has meant that if you have one data type — video or whatever — the telecommunications vendor won't unfairly penalize their content over the others of the same type. It explicitly allows for discrimination between different types, so you could prioritize video below audio, for example, or SMS or whatever — a networking decision. And, we Google have always been in favor of that, and we continue to do so. The telcos, as a general rule, are ok with this, if you actually talk to them, because they are not really doing it and ever since Comcast's experience with BitTorrent, which is sort of a complex narrative — you know they saw the public's reaction to what was essentially a minor example of this problem, where they were doing traffic shaping. So, I think everybody understands how sensitive people are on this. So, the problem with the telcos as an aggregate — I am using the cable companies as well — is they don't want to be regulated. And, if you talk to them privately, what they will say is 'We are sort of OK with this but the one thing we do not want is the Government writing regulations, we just left 30 years of regulations'. So, our idea was to start the process of trying to put an industry agreement together, I think let us focus on wired. Now, why would you focus on wired? In most cases, the choice you have for high quality wired connection consists of 1. So, it is not as competitive a market as wireless, right? And, we figure competition will probably keep wireless under control. And, Verizon, to their credit, was willing in principle to agree with this as a policy statement. So we jointly announced, the two of us together thought that it was a pretty good idea. We did that in order to try to encourage more conversation about this in the industry ..."

O'Reilly [00:30:50]: "But, at the same time, the FCC was really in the middle of an initiative here and we took the wind out of their sails."

Schmidt [00:30:59]: "I am not sure I completely agree with that because we spent a lot of time with the FCC and, indeed, the FCC was in a series of meetings which we were in, and all of that. I was heavily ... I am very good ... I am close to the chairman, and so forth, I disagree with that rendition, and that is a different report."

O'Reilly: "I talked to Julius [Genachowski, FCC Chairman] at about that time, he was a little taken aback ... "

Schmidt: "Well, I did the same ..."

Battelle: "Fortunately Julius is here, and we could talk to him about that too ..."

Schmidt: "So, the effect of this was that unfortunately election fever took over, I don't think anything is going to happen until January, February, probably nothing for a while longer ..."

Battelle [00:31:40]: "There is a core agreement that, at least it came across, I think it is more fair to say if you can explain ... that wireless is different from wired but yet we open this conversation with 'wireless is extraordinary, important and distinct, and we need to be very careful ... '

Schmidt [00:31:50]: "I wouldn't ... I wouldn't be too ... I wouldn't obsess about this too much. I understand that all of these things matter. What we were only trying to do here is to move the ball a little forward. If the ball doesn't move forward because we didn't do it, somebody else needs to move it forward, we are just trying to be helpful. With respect to wireless, the conclusion we came to was that wireless is very very competitive, which I think is true. ... That doesn't mean ... and, so, if your view is that it should also be regulated, then that is a fine view, but we generally prefer competition to produce the right outcome."

Battelle [00:32:20]: "But, as you said, the principle of net neutrality, as you described it, just to make sure I understand it, should apply absolutely to wired, but not necessarily to wireless, is how I read it.

Schmidt [00:32:35]: "We didn't actually say that. What we said was that, [we could] after lots of arguing with a partner/foe in the debate, we came to common ground in this area. So our proposal was that wireless stuff we will deal with separately, which is not the same thing as what you said ..." [00:32:50]

What Makes a Good Teacher?

2010-09-27T09:28:00.000-07:00

Today, President Obama announced his initiative to recruit 10,000 more Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) teachers in the next two years.

That'll set you thinking: What makes a good teacher? Of course, teachers are necessary to guide the students to a particular learning goal, be it learning an algebra, a calculus, a quantum mechanics, how to program a computer, etc. However, in reaching these various goals, a student will need to successfully negotiate suitable, intermediate, learning milestones. Thus, an effective teacher will be able to define, and guide students through, these intermediate milestones too.

Therefore, once a learning goal is established, a teacher will have to define suitable, intermediate, learning milestones in reaching that goal, so that students can be helped. At a macro level, this is seen clearly in university curricula where a certain course cannot be taken by a student without his/her getting a passing grade in a prerequisite course.

If you now consider that the purpose of life is self-realization — See, for example, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs —, an immediate next step for self-realization teachers is to determine the intermediate learning milestones towards that goal. (Commentary on what those intermediate learning milestones can be is for another blog post).

A corollary: If we want self-realization as a goal to be applicable to all of humanity, it seems to me that a society or a community that incorporates such intermediate milestones into its everyday life is better poised to lead its members towards that goal.

On the article "Are There Jobs That Can't Be Outsourced?"

2010-09-15T00:53:00.000-07:00

If you read the articles in "Are There Jobs That Can't Be Outsourced?", and the accompanying comments, you begin to wonder whether the US Government has appropriate policies that encourage job creation within the US.

In the opening speech today at the Cisco Financial Analyst Conference, CEO John Chambers hoped that the tax treatment of corporate cash outside the US would become conducive to repatriating those funds back into the US, thus encouraging the funds' expenditure within the US border.

Last month, at the Aspen Forum, Intel CEO Paul Otellini warned the audience, as reported by CNET:

Unless government policies are altered, he predicted, "the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here."

And, he further observed on how the Government's efforts have worked so far:

"Every business in America has a list of more variables than I've ever seen in my career." If variables like capital gains taxes and the R&D tax credit are resolved correctly, jobs will stay here, but if politicians make decisions "the wrong way, people will not invest in the United States. They'll invest elsewhere."

Is the US Government listening? The policymakers need to work this problem at a global level: Every government has an obligation to provide a decent living opportunity to its citizens.

Tidbits from the opening session of the Cisco Financial Analyst Conference September 2010

2010-09-14T16:30:00.000-07:00

If you watch John Chambers' presentation on the opening session of the Cisco Financial Analyst Conference of today, it is difficult not to make a couple of these observations:

The demonstration of a highly collaborative educational environment is very eye-opening, and it amplifies the distinction between an Apple iPad and a Cisco Cius. The power of collaborative information exchange seems to have the so-called network effect built into it. Once students around the world start making use of this device, it is easy to imagine Tom Friedman's recent observation: In a flat world where everyone has access to everything, values matter more than ever.
John presents excellent arguments as to why commoditization of Cisco's market segment is a distant one: Architectural play, that involves numerous products and processes integrating them. A single product solution cannot even come close. The slide presented on this topic, shown here, is very self-explanatory.

Finally, it looks like there will be dividend on Cisco stock, with 1-2% yield, starting from FY 2011, and we are already in the new fiscal year. With the stock closing at $21.45 (+$0.19) today, you can expect to get dividend income anywhere from $0.21 to $0.42 per share of stock; or, even if the stock doubled by July 2011, you may be able expect $0.42, or 1%.

Disclaimer: I am an individual investor in Cisco stock.

On a Cloud Services SIG Meeting of the SDForum.

2010-08-25T12:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I attended a Cloud Services SIG meeting of the SDForum on Migrating Enterprise Apps to the Cloud. Two companies -- Makara and Appirio -- presented their approaches. Makara provides a platform through which you can create private clouds, irrespective of the underlying IaaS cloud, and has an interesting method of defining cloud computing by negation. Appirio described the issues in migrating enterprise apps to a specific PaaS cloud, namely Force.com.

Dave Nielsen, one of the co-chairs of the SIG, threw open a challenge at the conclusion of the session. Can we work together to provide a concise 5- or 6-word/phrase characterization of cloud computing? In the more than two years of his organizing cloud camps, he has encountered various different definitions. He is preparing one himself and would find others' views valuable.

Here's my attempt at providing a succinct definition, listing what I consider are orthogonal characteristics:

Cloud computing refers to secure compute and/or storage and/or networking resources that can be obtained on-demand, through self-service, and that are elastic.

The individual characteristics can be elaborated as follows:

secure. If the subscriber of the service cannot be assured that his environment is kept private to his project team members, then the usability of the service is simply not there.
on-demand. If a service cannot be obtained as and when required, it is not a sufficient enough improvement over traditional enterprise IT practices.
self-service. An individual must be able to obtain the service at the time of his choosing, rather than be at the mercy of an another, an IT administrator. This kind of instantaneous self-service has substantial implications for project execution.
elastic. Once obtained, the subscriber must be able to scale the service up or down, depending on the needs of the problem being solved in the cloud. [measurable. If the service being obtained cannot be measured by the subscriber, the subscriber cannot, at his convenience, alter the parameters of the service. One can argue that elasticity implies measurability. To quote Lord Kelvin: "If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it." ]
compute-network-storage configuration. There are problems that can be solved by a single CPU with some storage, but there are increasingly many more problems that can exploit a cluster of CPUs, a bunch of storage devices and effective networking among the former two. This characteristic, with greater control of intrinsic parameters of the service, is more relevant to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), whereas all the other three characteristics listed here applicable to all the NIST-defined deployment models: IaaS, or PaaS or SaaS.

Note that multi-tenancy is implied; if any individual can obtain a service, another one can obtain too and , thus, multi-tenancy is implied. However, security cannot be left unmentioned in any definition.

NIST's Cloud Computing Definition and Deployment Models

2010-08-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

Of the various definitions of cloud computing floating around, I perceive that the NIST definition is the one most referenced. NIST prescribes 5 essential characteristics of cloud computing, 3 service models and 4 deployment models.

The essential characteristics and the service models are well understood and well accepted. The deployment models deserve some additional discussion.

From an accessibility point of view, the private, community, public and hybrid deployment models share the following structural properties [All cloud deployments are multi-subscriber; multiple users provide the strength of cloud computing economics]:

Private clouds are dedicated [to one enterprise], but multi-subscriber [to enterprise's employees and/or partners].
Some cloud deployments are multi-tenant and multi-subscriber; most of the public clouds fall into this category. And, one can imagine private clouds hosted on public IaaS clouds.

Now, the four deployment models that NIST prescribes really are specialized instantiations on top of the dedicated & multi-subscriber or multi-tenant & multi-subscriber properties. For example, as NIST definition itself notes, a community cloud can be economically hosted on a public cloud. And, the hybrid clouds include traditional IT implementations in addition to [multi-tenant and] multi-subscriber clouds.

What is the upshot? While multi-subscriber quality is essential for cloud computing, multi-tenancy improves that economics in an orthogonal dimension, and the resulting economics is multiplicative! We need a characterization of cloud platforms based on such orthogonal considerations. Of course, the key for increasing adoption of multi-tenant solutions is security assurance [See a related blog post by Ted Schadler of Forrester].

Honorable Janardhana Swamy with Indian Institute of Science alumni in Silicon Valley.

2010-07-10T14:50:00.000-07:00

It is heartwarming and uplifting to listen to the Honorable Janardhana Swamy, Member of Parliament of the Government of India, who spent a few hours this morning amongst his fellow Indian Institute of Science alumni.

The value of this meet was not only that he is one among us Silicon Valley engineers, but one who has taken an extraordinary sequence of decisions culminating in his being elected to the Lower House or Lok Sabha — लोक सभा — of the Government of India. In the nearly two hours in which he chronicled his journey from Silicon Valley through High-tech jobs in India to, finally, the Indian Parliament, he pointed how media can be exceptionally powerful in today's world in influencing voters' education.

He has, since taking office, been engaged in the creation of an ecosystem of institutions — Indian Institute of Science, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Defence Research & Development Organization, Indian Space Research Organization, et al. — in his native Chitradurga district of the Karnataka state.

An important thought one comes away with after listening to him is that only high goals, coupled with the ability to assess and solve the intermediate problems that will inevitably be presented on the way to the goal, can achieve the seemingly impossible.

On the Pricing of Web Applications.

2010-05-17T23:28:00.000-07:00

The blog post titled Account Sharing lands Goldman Sachs in Court, is not only a wake up call to enterprises, but also one for the content providers.

One of the reasons why the account sharing mentioned in the blog post happens is because of the pricing of the service. Yearly pricing models tend to produce the account sharing behavior whereas monthly, or pay-as-you-go, pricing tends to avoid account sharing. Salesforce.com's is an example of monthly pricing.

So, the moral of the story is that content providers can facilitate proper subscriptions from enterprises by offering proper pricing models.

Do CEOs of Collaborating Companies Talk to Each Other?

2010-05-11T16:45:00.000-07:00

I guess there is room for all kinds of corporate behavior. In EMC: Enterprise data centers won't all flock to the cloud, where we learn about new storage solutions — called VPlex — from EMC, we also learn the following:

Tucci also criticized the data center verticalization strategy that companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Cisco are taking, saying it will lead to a new kind of lock-in that will ultimately lend itself to inefficiency. He said EMC’s private cloud strategy swaps out verticalization with virtualization and allows all of your data center solution providers — even EMC competitors — to plug in.

Now, you will recall that the Virtual Computing Environment collaboration was setup with good amount of fanfare: Power of 3 - VMware, Cisco, EMC and so on. You would think that there is a better way for EMC to promote the launch of VPlex than to deride a collaboration partner, in this case Cisco, right? Wrong. EMC finds it necessary to talk down Cisco.

The power of a coalition such as the VCE lies in the integration and the attendant advantages: data centers can deploy well integrated pieces rather than waste precious time in stringing together components: servers, networking, storage.

I guess it takes corporations of all kinds to make up the world.

[Why] Is JavaScript Popular?

2010-05-06T07:52:00.000-07:00

When one has to extend the experience of web browsing beyond what comes out of browser-makers, a key programming language that everyone seeks refuge in is JavaScript.

In my previous post, I wrote about Google Apps Script that enables customization and integration of Google Documents and Products through JavaScript that is executed on the server, in the cloud.

Now, with this additional flexibility at the server, you can expect more adaptation of product and computational functionality by Internet application users themselves by using JavaScript.

The use that JavaScript can be put both in providing Rich Internet Applications — e.g., Google's Gmail — on the client side and in customizing server side logic in the form, for example, of Google Apps Script will only increase the popularity of JavaScript. Even if other languages -- Java, C++, Ruby on Rails, etc. -- are used for implementing server-side functionality, there is a certain homogeneity that is brought about by the use of JavaScript on both sides.

Google Acquires BumpTop.

2010-05-02T15:32:00.000-07:00

Google acquisition today of BumpTop is an exciting prospect for making a non-browser based OS irrelevant as the future unfolds. You can even see a multi-touch interface version in this YouTube video.

The future desktop, and TVs, will definitely deserve this; maybe some laptops and netbooks will get this as well.

On a Blogger's Meetup.

2010-04-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

Blogging is an activity that has gotten well fostered, thanks to the web. I had an opportunity to participate in a meetup conducted by Bill Belew, for bloggers. In addition of course to Bill, I met bloggers who focused in a wide variety of interests:

Different kinds of chocolates
Writing about Writing
What you sow, so you reap, a healthy approach to living
IT Tutoring
Individual Approach to Financial Management
Promotion of English among Chinese
Boomer Grandparents
Raw Foods
Fierce Planet, on Earthquakes and Other Natural Disasters
A new blogger who is focused on art

It is quite refreshing to see that blogging as an activity is not only very mainstream, but can be harnessed to generate some side income as well.

An interesting factoid: Nearly everyone else in the meetup used Wordpress; I was the only Blogger user.

Scripting for the Google Web

2010-04-11T17:58:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago, Google announced the availability of scripting for the web for Google Apps Standard Edition customers too. If you play with a little bit, you will begin to see the power of JavaScript in its ability to provide meaningful automating capability to web documents, particularly as it is being promoted by Google.

A very interesting application in automating -- screenscraping as it is called by the author -- can be studied here:
Screenscraping With Google Spreadsheets App Script and the =importHTML() Formula.

While the Internet is well known to be a great equalizer, it is also true that it also a great personalizer, thanks to scripting everywhere -- at the [browser] client and in the [server in the] cloud.

A Benefit of a Cloud-based Service: Immense Scalability.

2010-03-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

Recent hack-ins into Google infrastructure are definitely disturbing. While we can imagine all kinds of preventive measures — intrusion detection systems, intrusion prevention systems, borderless security, etc. — Google's introduction today of a method of detecting suspicious account activity is a highly useful one. It enables every account holder to detect any suspicious activity in his/her Gmail account.

Thanks to the fact that Gmail is cloud-based, every Gmail user gets this feature instantaneously. With apologies to my fellow Frenchmen: Vive la Scalability.

Microsoft has done some good things for the web browser industry too.

2010-03-04T20:47:00.000-08:00

For all the flak that Microsoft has had to take in recent weeks on IE6, it was heartening to learn when Crockford, Yahoo!'s JavaScript Architect, mentioned yesterday that it was Microsoft's contribution to the Document Object Model, that all HTML elements were made script-able, that has provided lasting value so far, for the browser platform.

A couple of other noteworthy points:

"With Ajax, the source of innovation shifted from the browser makers to the web developers. Ajax libraries."
"Ultimately, we should seek to replace the DOM with an Ajax-influenced API."

Crockford is an engaging speaker who sprinkles his talk with very effective humor. This particular talk was how the Ajax technology came about. You can review all of his talk, including video & transcripts, on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog site.

As I have listened to Crockford on the 4 out of the 5 sessions so far, I cannot but come away with the feeling that many of the mistakes of the past would not have been committed in the latest specification.

The future of web-based applications is definitely brighter.

On CrisisCamp Haiti Silicon Valley

2010-01-17T20:04:00.000-08:00

It is amazing to realize how remote technical experts can help in disaster relief efforts even as they start far from the point of disaster. Clearly, it is the power of the Internet. A case in point is my experience yesterday afternoon with the CrisisCamp Haiti Silicon Valley in Microsoft Campus, 1065 La Avenida Street, Mountain View, CA.

The sheer energy in the cafeteria was unbelievable!

Additional information:
CrisisCamp Silicon Valley on Facebook
Crisis Commons

Nexus One versus iPhone 3GS

2010-01-05T19:11:00.000-08:00

After Google announced Nexus One this morning, there have been several comparisons available on the Internet, e.g., Nexus One vs Motorola Milestone vs iPhone 3GS. This blog post is an attempt to compare the iPhone and Nexus One in tabular form.

Property	iPhone 3GS	Nexus One	Comments
Price	$199 (2-yr)	$79 (upgrade), $179 (2-yr), $529(none)	Nexus One is slightly cheaper.
Weight	135g	130g	Both are equal.
Display	3.5", 480x320	3.7", 800x480	Pictures will appear crisper with the Nexus One: Larger resolution in almost the same real estate.
Camera	3MP, autofocus, no flash	5MP, autofocus, flash	Better resolution camera and flash!
Video	VGA(640x480) up to 30 fps	720x480 pixels at 20 fps	Nexus One is inferior for motion (fps)?
CPU, RAM	600MHz CPU, 256MB	Qualcomm QSD 8250 1 GHz, 512MB	Faster CPU for Nexus One.
Carrier	at&t	T-Mobile; Any, but no support for high speed packet access (HSPA)	Since the Nexus One comes unlocked, you can use any carrier. If data speed is important, stick with T-Mobile.
Location	Accelerometer, digital compass, Assisted GPS	Accelerometer, digital compass, Assisted GPS	Both have similar characteristics.
Non-volatile storage	Built-in 16GB hard disk	Removable 4GB Micro SD (expandable to 32GB)	Expandability may be an advantage for Nexus One.
Battery	Built-in, 1219 mAH, Talk up to 5 hrs, Standby 300 hrs, Internet 5 hrs on 3G	Removable, 1400 mAH, Talk up to 7 hrs, Standby 250 hrs, Internet 5 hrs on 3G	Nexus One has slightly better capacity, is slightly better for voice, and slightly inferior for Standby.
Multitouch experience	Quite uniform	Not many apps exploit it (in Jan 2010).	Nexus One is inferior.
Peripheral interfaces	iPod connector, Bluetooth	mini USB, Bluetooth	Nexus One has no proprietary interfaces.
Software Features	Google Voice is still being evaluated.	All text fields can be spoken to. All of Google software.	Nexus One may have an edge.

What is the bottom line? It is difficult to say without experiencing both the devices but, on "paper", Nexus One appears to have an edge, particularly if you ignore non-availability of multi touch experience uniformly in the Nexus One.

Mashable's Ben Parr provides a non-committal assessment at the CES.

Newer is better, isn't it?

Subsequently, we found out about Erik Chang's writeup comparing 4 devices:

Find the best cell phone plans and more graphics at BillShrink.com
AppleInsider publishes another comparison:

IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, ..., CaaS?

2009-11-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

In recent years, cloud computing has gotten everyone excited, and rightly so. After all, who does not like the scalable, elastic and near-instantaneous access to computing (and storage resources)? Today, we learn the formation of the Virtual Computing Environment, a joint partnership among VMware, Cisco & EMC.

With increasing complexity of cloud implementations, it becomes necessary to create an abstraction that hides the details of server CPUs, storage and the networking needed between them. Where would this abstraction live? Where else? In the cloud, public or private. The vBlock package definitions seem to offer a good start for this abstraction. Perhaps we can regard vBlock as Cloud-as-a-Service or CaaS, to accompany the three others - IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

Is 50Mbit/s enough of backhaul bandwidth?

2009-09-23T10:48:00.001-07:00

If we say there are about 1,000 subscribers per cell tower and each will need about 1 Mbit/s bandwidth, 50 Mbit/s will only serve about concurrent 50 users well. Is this enough?
in reference to: Unstrung - Fixed/Mobile Convergence - Sprint: Please, Sir, Can We Have Some More Ethernet Backhaul? - Telecom News Analysis (view on Google Sidewiki)

IEEE's 125-year Anniversary in Silicon Valley.

2009-09-17T07:56:00.000-07:00

As professionals, it is always valuable to take stock on how far we have come. The IEEE 125-year anniversary event at the Computer History Museum yesterday was one such. One quick takeaway from the presentations that Vint Cerf and Howard Charney gave is that the future will be even more exciting than the past!

Vint related how round-trip computer-based translations can sometimes go awry:

"Out of sight, out of mind" when translated to Russian and back to English got translated as "invisible idiot".