Drone Graffiti (Droffitti?)

A lot of people are having a lot of fun with Drones. Cool article in Wired. Cool Video of KATSU's Drone Paintings:

Hosting a very timely CTO Summit on Drones on June 11th. We are also organizing a Drone Petting Station :-)

Pic Credit: Preeti Gujral

Recent Evolutions of the Internet

At the CTO Roundtable this morning, Steve Crocker, long-term CTO Roundtable member and Chairman of the Board of Directors of ICANN (the not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with global participants that coordinates the governance of the Internet) led the discussion with two of his colleagues: Leslie Daigle, Chief Internet Technology Officer for the Internet Society, and Jamie Hedlund, ICANN's Vice President of Government Affairs - Americas.

Jamie provided an overview of the new how ICANN is rolling out gTLDs (Generic Top Level Domains). This will allow the creation of a whole new set of domains like .bank, etc. The idea is to try and make the internet more open and create a pathway for further innovation. It reamins to be seen if this options will start expanding internet URLs away from .com, that now has over 100 Million names. The thinking is that communities built around these new top-level domains will develop enhanced features that better serve the goals of the community members. Also, ICANN, for the first time, is moving away the closed-door selection process that they followed to date to a more open and democratic process.

Leslie then talked about why she believes that 2012 will be the year of IPv6. As we have now allocated most of the 4Bn IPv4 addresses, the long-term way forward is IPv6. IPv4 addresses are bing sold at approximately $11 per address. She believes that this will drive adoption. Also, several large content providers are permanently moving to IPv6 as the default. Let us see if 2012 turns out to be the year of IPv6.


pic: sunset over first snow in 2012

Games @ Work
Over the past six months, I have been thinking about the potential use of gaming within the enterprise. The explosive growth of Zynga and other social gaming companies demonstrates how engaging the combination is. In addition, we humans respond extremely well to rewards: loyalty programs, bonuses, etc. Reward programs are also widely used to incent certain customer and employee behavior.

Recently, I came across a new term for this trend - Gamification. I like the Wikipedia definition: The use of game play mechanics for non-game applications.

Game theory is beginning to be widely used to influence customer engagement, behavior and even employee productivity. This BusinessWeek article has examples of use of game theory at a broad range of companies: SAP, Hilton, Siemens, UPS, Nissan, Target, etc.

Earlier this week, Gartner, jumped on the bandwagon with a bold statement: "over half of innovation will be gamified by 2015". Here is a ZDnet story covering Gartners' report in detail. Gartner is advising that "Enterprise architects, CIOs and IT planners must be aware of, and lead, the business trend of gamification, educate their business counterparts and collaborate in the evaluation of opportunities within the organization".

I am pleased that we at the CTO Roundable of Washington DC sensed the trend early and are putting together our next Summit on "What CTOs should learn from Gaming" in early fall.

Image: Pacman by Preeti

CTO Roundtable: Big Data
Interesting discussion led by Michael Brown, CTO at comScore at our CTO Roundtable breakfast meeting.

Michael and his team manage and analyze one of the largest datasets processed by a local company. It is fascinating how thinking has to evolve when the volumes reaches billions of rows of data per day. Some of the key takeaways for me were:

• Leverage sort before processing
• Shard the dataset to create smaller more manageable files
• Parallel processing improves turnaround and allows for scalability
• Open source tools have reached a level of maturity to be relevant solutions to consider
• Most of the processing is now accomplished on smaller commodity machines
• Machine memory is more of a limiting resource than hard disk
• Solid-state disks can be selectively used to improve performance for IO intensive processes
• Security is best managed by selectively separating and focusing on securing sensitive data
• SQL is still king as it is very easily grasped by non-technical folks. Therefore, it is easier to find and develop talent with SQL skills.

Micheal has clearly lived through the evolution of technology for managing Big Data over the past 10 years. I enjoyed the event a lot.

Collaborate, Innovate ... Succeed
7th Annual Washington Area CTO Roundtable Summit
The event (on Sept 24th) was a huge success. Doug Solomon (IDEO, Apple, Plam) and Vint Cerf (Google, Father of Internet, MCI, etc.) were exceptional. Collaboration is a hot topic and the two of them led a very thought provoking and interactive discussion.

Doug shared how IDEO launched a very successful internal collaboration platform. Key takeaways: Keep it simple, make it useful, eliminate friction and reward participation. It is obvious why IDEO is one of the leading design firms in the world.

Vint started with a brief talk on what one must think about in the context of enabling collaboration. He did not use any slides. He is a very engaging and insightful speaker.

Vint and Doug then led a discussion directed by questions from the audience.

We got very positive feedback during networking. This is the third event we held since I took over as President of this invitation-only group. I believe that it was clearly one of our best!

Ning worth $560 Million
WOW! Here is the post by Marc Andreessen. They are seeing a 1000 social networks being created per day. Earlier today, I read on Demo.com that there are 70+ products competing in the space. That is a lot of social networks.

The demo article also talked about several products that build social networks around events:

Small World Labs, introNetworks, CrowdVine, Leverage Software, and EventVue are among the ...

I browsed some of the sites. Hope to use one of these products to build an on-line collaboration site for the CTO Roundtable.

Google AppEngine offers free Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing is the future of Infrastructure. Google, having built one of largest and most impressive computing infrastructures, is jumping in with an offer for developers to host their applications for free. Their solution is called AppEngine. The blogosphere is rife with predictions (GigaOm, TechCrunch) that Google will give existing services (Amazon Web Services, etc.) a run for their money. Time will tell if the features offered free will be sufficient.

The Washington Area CTO Roundtable (full disclosure: I am the President of this group) will discuss the topic at a sold out event at the end of this month.

Security Implications of Web 2.0
The CTO Roundtable of Washington DC (I am the President of this group) held its bi-monthly meeting on Friday. The topic "Web 2.0 security challenge" obviously hit a chord. We had record attendance.

Andre Yee discussed how the emergence of Web 2.0 and SAAS has completely bypassed the enterprise perimeter. The problem is real ... users are publishing (frequently by mistake) corporate information on the web and accessing corporate SAAS applications with no validation or control from the enterprise. There is a strong push to make corporations liable for the use of P2P networks by employees from within the enterprise.

A few interesting aspects Andre discussed included:

• encryption on the network, though very useful to hide information on the internet, is also making harder for enterprises to monitor for leakage of confidential corporate information.
• AJAX, widely used to deliver Rich User Experience, is very vulnerable to new threats

I think we will be hearing a lot about these threats in 2008.

Event Management

Just came across a review of eventwax, a free tool to manage event registrations. Will give it a spin when I get a moment. Will love to use it or a competitor (let me know if you know of one) for our CTO Roundtable events.

Always on the Net:
During his very engaging talk at the 5th annual CTO Roundtable summit, Walt Mossberg talked about how, in the future, the network will become invisible. It is very common for us talk about the internet a place we go to get information or to complete a transaction. As broadband wireless becomes pervasive (and hopefully cheaper), every appliance, consumer electronics device, automobile, computing device, etc. will be connected to the network all the time. I wrote about the impact of "always on internet" on automobile navigation with the device from Dash Navigation. The collaborative navigation feature alone completely changes how we get from one place to another.

In the future, we will stop going on to the internet because it will be a utility available to us everywhere we go (just like power). As Walt described, we do not talk about connecting the coffee bean grinder to 120V grid or connecting the coffee machine to the power outlet. Similarly, we will stop talking about the network as a place we go to.

Expect a whole lot of life-changing innovation driven by being always on the net!

What a relief: ip and http are world-wide standards - no adapter hell for this utility!

The New Digital Divide: Personal vs Enterprise Technology

The Annual CTO Roundtable Event was held at the very impressive CIT facility in Northern Virginia. Walt Mossberg (WSJ) and Todd McKinnon (salesforce.com), each presented their vision of the future of consumer and enterprise technologies.

Todd kicked-off the event with the salesforce.com view that all enterprise applications will be delivered as a service (SAAS). He emphasised the value of multi-tenancy in reducing the operational cost of applications and is confident that the SAAS vendors will narrow the gap by quickly delivering consumer-side innovations to the enterprise. Of all the SAAS vendors (I have first hand experience having worked for Brassring, an ASP in the recruitment space), salesforce.com is the most successful and well known. I am quite intrigued by their release of apex on-demand programming language.

Walt, on the contrary, believes that corporate IT departments are the main impediment in the way of end-user requirements driving the corporate IT agenda. As expected, Walt presented a very controversial view point, making the event very interesting and successful. He was insightful and very entertaining.

I will get into the details of both views in future posts.