Pitos Blog

Joining the ranks of the growing number of news aggregation and research sites is Silobreaker, which I first met at Demo 2008.  Two things catch my interest with Silobreaker - try it by clicking here for a search on the topic ‘Google’

• The result displayed for a search is mult-dimensional or multi-media or whatever you want to call it. In addition to the usual top stories about Google (for example) you find the top Videos about Google, a histogram showing article volume about Google over the last week, a concept network around Google. a map showing where in the world people are writing about Google. And more. Check it out yourself to see what I mean.
• Silobreaker has made an effort to understand the semantics of the search, so if you type in the beginning of a search word, say “Boston” it displays a list of companies, places, people and keyphrases that start with Boston, and lets you disambiguate. That means to me that they are keeping track of the meaning of what you are searching for, which bodes well.

Anyway, play with it. It’s cool.

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Who said “your TSA don’t dance and your USPTO don’t rock and roll?” (One free copy of BlogBridge for all of you who get the reference without using Wikipedia)

Here are two cool examples. First up, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) now has a blog that seems to be much more than a bunch of pre-digested PR drivel, but instead posts from actual people with actual knowledge about TSA and their mission.

From their blurb:

“This blog is sponsored by the Transportation Security Administration to facilitate an ongoing dialogue on innovations in security, technology and the checkpoint screening process.” (from The Evolution of Security)

By the way, a plea: please name your blogs in a way that it doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out what it is. How about calling it the TSA Blog? Duh.

But it is quite interesting, for example, from a few days ago:

“Saturday morning, a Transportation Security Officer working the x-ray machine saw two razor blades in what appeared to be a book in someone’s carry-on bag. During the bag check, the razor blades were found inside the pages of a Bible, and bag belonged to… a priest. Can’t make this stuff up.” (from Saturday Morning, Strange But True…”)

This blog and the way it is being written is a Very Good Idea. I just hope that the politicians don’t grab hold of it and turn it into another propaganda portal.

So that was the dance part, here’s the rock and roll.

The USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) has created a very cool site to allow peer input about patents that are being sought. From their blurb:

“Peer-to-Patent opens the patent examination process to public participation for the first time. Become part of this historic pilot program. Help the USPTO find the information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications. Become a community reviewer and improve the quality of patents.”

So this is kind of a social network to assist the patent office in filtering out bad patents more effectively, something that they have failed to do often and have been heavily criticized for.

The cool thing is that they seem to have thought this through quite well. Particularly the way peer input is used or not used as part of the patent review process seems to protect against competitors trying to somehow manipulate the process. And the site is attractive, sensible in its design, incorporates video and tutorials etc. A thoroughly modern effort. And a valuable service. Kudos!

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Here’s a new online light weight database product that picks up where QuickBase leaves off and goes crazy. It’s called blist. It has a far snazzier (and more complicated) user interface than Quickbase.

In good old SAT fashion, Quickbase is to Blist as Google Docs is to Buzzword, which by the way, you should check out also!

I am not taking sides, but next time you need a web based, light weight, list or database, you should check out both QuickBase and blist.

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Do you get fund raising / spam phone calls from very persistent, insistent callers asking for money to ‘Support our Veterans’? I’ve gotten them more than once, and have even donated. For some reason it has stuck me that these particular calls were unusual in the high-pressure tactics they used. So I was interested when I came across this:

“The public has rightly shown its empathy with wounded and troubled war veterans, contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to private charities that claim to have the veterans’ best interests at heart. A new study details rampant abuses of the money flow.” (from The New York Times)

I don’t know what to make of it, but it does feed into my suspicions.

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I came across this note that the fairly famous spat between Apple Gossip site Think Secret and Apple Inc. has been settled:

“We understand that Nick Ciarelli, the journalist who ran Think Secret, is “very satisfied” with the settlement. While it is sad that Think Secret will be closing its doors, since it was a valuable news source, Ciarelli is now free to move on to other things…[snip...]” from Electronic Frontier Foundation

It’s too bad. Think Secret was a valuable resource. I wonder where Nick will turn up next.

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In the context of the current Wall Street excitement, I received a letter of assurance from a mutual fund manager saying, among other things:

“Dear Investors,

While the recent downdraft in worldwide equity markets may be unsettling, there is a great deal in our investments to engender optimism. In fact, we believe that we are witnessing an incredible investment opportunity for those who are able to exhibit some fortitude.

We have endured similar experiences in the past.

If the history of human affairs can be summed up in simple terms, it would be by the phrase: “This too shall pass.” In our opinion, the current crisis will end sooner rather than later.”

I don’t know, in my opinion a significant part of human affairs can be summed up in these simple terms:

“It seemed like a good idea at the time”

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Chris Herot writes about a new product called RulesBase: Check out this post from Christopher Herot’s Weblog:

“I had a visit yesterday from Steven Ginzberg and Jack Schatz of Gray Box Software. They showed me a new financial analysis and modeling tool - RulesBase.

A mutual friend had noticed a resemblance to a product from my first start-up, Javelin Software, and suggested they seek my advice. I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently advising startups on other technologies with which I’ve worked - audio, video, wireless, social networks - but this was definitely a flash from the past.

Javelin was a financial modeling package that was based on formulas instead of cells, and used GUI and windowing before Windows (Steve Balmer paid us a visit and asked us to consider porting it). It beat Excel for Infoworld’s Software Product of the Year, much to the consternation of Bill Gates. The company never did displace Lotus 123, but Lotus did pay the compliment of implementing many of Javelin’s features in Lotus Improv. The company was acquired by IRI which later became part of Oracle.

(from: RulesBase)

One other product in the ‘everything old is new again‘ category is Quantrix, who say:

“Frustrated with error-prone, inflexible spreadsheets? Quantrix is multi-dimensional business modeling & analytics software used by business and finance professionals for: Forecasting, Budgeting, Strategic Planning, Risk Modeling, Data Modeling, Much More….”

Unlike RulesBase, which so far is only available on Windows, Quantrix works on Windows and Mac (and Linux).More fun and interesting for me, Quantrix is based on a fairly faithful knock-off of Lotus Improv, with improvemetns and additions. Very cool!

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I’ve written about some of the considerations that go into the choice between physical infrastructure and new SAAS services such as Amazon’s S3 and EC2. I also covered why the fact that you are comfortable relying on a hosting provider for rack mounted servers (so called ping & power) doesn’t mean necessarily that you would come to the same conclusion about SAAS services.

Here’s what the Wall Street Journal had to say about that tradeoff just a few days ago:

“Today was a bad day for a new computing model that could one day be the norm. Amazon’s S3 service –which companies can use to rent data storage on Amazon’s tech gear — crashed this morning, knocking many small businesses offline and highlighting one of the model’s drawbacks: You’re putting your operations in somebody else’s hands.” (from Is Amazon’s Small Crash a Giant Crash for Cloud Computing?)

In researching these three posts, I came across this which reminded me that this wasn’t the first time this happened, I guess not surprisingly:

“Cautionary tale indeed. It’s the other side of the wonderful world of mashups and web 2.0 and web services and all that jazz. If I build my product on the back of your service, then the quality of what I deliver depends on your carrying through on your promises. Not a very strong position to be in.” (from A cautionary utility computing tale - or the dark side of Mashups)

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On a project I worked on recently, I asked myself whether I should make one or more of Amazon’s awesome web services (AWS - Awesome Web Services) a mission critical part of the infrastructure of the product. I wrote yesterday about the considerations that go into deciding to rely on services like Amazon’s web services as key infrastructure components.

Of the five I mentioned, these two considerations were especially confusing to me:

• What is the comparable reliability?
• If the whole scheme doesn’t work out, how hard is it to switch?

On the one hand, the reliability of running a bunch of servers in a data center is fairly well understood, as well as the contingency plans to deal with hardware and software failures.

On the other hand (using S3, the storage service as an example,) the expected reliability is more or less unknown - although preliminary data is highly positive - and S3 is the only service of it’s kind, so that there is a certain unavoidable amount of lock in.

I expressed that as the rhetorical question,

“Do I really want to entrust a business critical function to another company - if they decide to shut me off, my business is dead in the water.”

Sounds ominous, doesn’t it?

But wait, I entrust running my servers to a hosting service, don’t I? If they shut me off I am kind of dead in the water too, aren’t I? What’s the difference?

Relying on your hosting provider for ping & power has a different risk profile than relying on a SAAS provider for disk & cpu in the cloud

Here’s why I say that:

1. There are many many hosting providers (ISPs) to providing ping & power. It’s a vibrant and competitive space.
2. We understand them well. We understand their services, their pricing, their terms of service.
3. They generally rely mostly on a well known and understood set of technologies, interfaces, software and hardware.
4. It is feasible to switch from one to another.
5. It is also feasible (and many do) to have parallel relationships with two totally different hosting services so if one shuts down, crashes, goes out of business, or whatever, you can seamlessly switch to the other.

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Several products I’ve worked on recently have relied on Amazon’s really impressive web services. I’ve written before about how much I admire services such as S3 and EC2, solid, commercial quality infrastructure services.

They address (and? or? solve) a big problem that application builders have:

“How many servers will I need, how many users will I have, how much storage will I need … and in the end, how much will all that cost?”.

They solve this by offering key components of infrastructure as a “software as a service”, SAAS. Starting with permanent storage, which is delivered by S3, followed by computes or servers, delivered by EC2, and further followed by a growing variety of other infrastuctural services.

Let’s look at what questions to ask when deciding to use any of these services. For example, when deciding to depend on Amazon’s S3 storage service (delivered over the internet, no hardware required) instead of buying a series of file and database servers (hardware) you need to consider the trade-offs:

1. Given my expected growth, what is the comparable cost?
2. What are my options in each case if my growth doesn’t actually develop as I expect?
3. What is the comparable performance?
4. What is the comparable reliability?
5. If the whole scheme doesn’t work out, how hard is it to switch?

You see that you end up with a fairly tricky decision matrix. More tomorrow on how I solved this dilemma.

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