Tom The Architect » Jon-Udell

Hints of Opportunity

Tom Carroll — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 04:46:54 +0000

Jon Udell writes in A new breed of highly-available serverless applications:

Amazon’s S3/SQS duo is a green field that invites entrepreneurs to think way outside the box.

I have already proposed prototypes that can take advantage of these services. Amazon will not be the only provider of distributed storage or messaging services (see cleversafe). These services plus the services from Google are just the beginning of a whole class of services that will drive innovation. Start-ups will be able to take advantage of the more efficient cost model and the increased flexibility. I also agree with Jon that SPDADE applications are going to become even more powerful as they integrate with services like S3 and SQS.

Check out Amazon’s S3 and SQS and let your mind run wild.

Link Summary:

Jon Udell’s RSS feed
A new breed of highly-available serverless applications

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)

Attention economics, ah the possibilities

Tom Carroll — Wed, 10 May 2006 05:03:46 +0000

As I think more about the economics of Attention I am struck by the silos. Everyday of my life my attention is disrupted by the constant silo switching. I spend 2 to 2.5 hours per day driving to my place of employment. Today, that time is better spent thanks to my self programmed iPod. There exists a huge problem maintaining the flow of information into and out of my commute silo. I have to spend time to deliver information into that silo and its a pain in the neck, sync, plug in, navigate, unplug, plug in navigate, and unplug every day. So here is what I think would be nice.

In the evening as I review my schedule for the next day, iTunes detects my car as a device on my wireless network. iTunes updates my car with the content I have added and allows me to program my drive to work with content. My calendar also detects my car as a device on my wireless network (or as a client via EVDO, a nod to Steve Gillmor) my temporal data gets downloaded and is used to prime my navigation system. The car then could make suggestions regarding when and where to get gas based on price, route changes based on live traffic data, and provide access to my voice mail. The opportunities are all over the place. Why can’t I sync my contacts in Google or yahoo bidirectionally with my cell phone.

Creating attention efficiencies for people in their daily lives is just obvious. Jon Udell writes about the broader value of attention efficiency and effectiveness [1]. Technology has consistently increased the productivity of the individual within the context of a specific task. How about life productivity, how about increasing the continuity of experience of my life, I would be willing to pay for that. In the end, all the players (companies, customers ect..) will have to focus on collaboration, continuity of experience and increased situational awareness.

Links:
[1] Attention economics: by Jon Udell

Correction

Tom Carroll — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 05:42:32 +0000

In my blogability post I misspelled Mr. Udell’s first name. The correct spelling is Jon, my apologies to Jon Udell. I really need to get a better fact checker.

VMs

Tom Carroll — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 05:33:29 +0000

Jon Udell had a really interesting post detailing the number of Virtual Machines that reside on his various computers. I agree it would nice to see Sun increase its support for development of other languages based on the Java VM. I attended JavaOne in 2004 and there was a session on Groovy. I’m not sure that Groovy has been widely adopted and that Sun is willing to invest in taking the Java VM into the multi-language arena. Microsoft on the other hand seems to be ready and able have .NET be the multi-language VM of choice. I would think that Microsoft would be the choice to win the non-windows .NET VM competition. Thinking about it a bit more there are a large number of people that would prefer Mono just because its not directly from Microsoft.

Blogability

Tom Carroll — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 05:58:09 +0000

I was listening to the ~~Gilmore~~Gilmor Gang Disclosure gang podcast I believe ~~John~~ Jon Udell brought up (52:53 minutes in) the overwhelming amount of punditry in the blogisphere. He thought initially that people would be using their blogs to maintain a “Narration of their work”. He was unable to find many examples of people narrating their work. The gang also talked about the constraints that exist for the average person when blogging. Well I can confirm that the restrictions and conflicts listed both real and perceived are accurate. The acceptance of blogging has yet to penetrate many large corporations. It is sad at times because I would love to share in more detail the things that I am passionate about. The dilemma is that which I am passionate about makes up a good part of my work hours. So I can feed my blog only bits and sanitized pieces of my passion.