Disaster Technology for Myanmar/Burma aid workers

There is an ongoing crisis in Myanmar (Burma) in the aftermath of cyclone Nargis. The ruling military junta is finally allowing humanitarian organizations into the region after denying access for almost a week. The situation is grim, and you can help by donating to organizations like: Doctors without Borders, Direct Relief, and UNICEF.

There has been some incredible discussion on the humanitarian tech and Geo lists in the past 24 hours around adapting/improving existing collaboration services to work with the tools in the field. Mikel Maron and I will be speaking about this at Where2.0 next week, and it looks like some exciting work will be happening there and at WhereCamp.

Eduardo Jezierski from InSTEDD is currently working to localize the Sahana Disaster Management System

Jonathan Thompson's organization, Humanlink, has been working on adapting technology for aid workers for some time. You can follow recent developments on the Aid Worker Daily blog.

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Ignite Sf Slidecasts Available

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Two weeks we had an Ignite at the DNA Lounge where 17 great speakers shared their thoughts. Rashmi Sinha, one of the founders of the newly funded Slideshare (congrats!), kindly synced the audio to the slides for all of them.

The embedded slidecast is an informative talk by Yahoo's Christian Crumlish on antisocial design patterns. io9's Annalee Newitz talkd about how you to can get into Giant Monsters and John Adams spoke about how he created a digital message board for our SF venue, the DNA Lounge. For something more on the humorous side click-thru for Ted Rheingold's 2009 Report About the Online Activity of Cats and Dogs.

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The battle for the cloud

Andy Kessler has a great op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, The War for the Web:

Microsoft was smart to walk away (for now) from its $44 billion bid for Yahoo. It's never good to overpay. But the software giant - whose stock has flatlined for eight years - was onto the right strategy in looking to the Web for growth....

With the Microsoft/Yahoo deal breakdown, everyone assumes Google walks away with the prize. Not so fast. This contest is just starting. For Microsoft or Google or anyone else to win, they need four key elements of an end-to-end strategy:

- The Cloud. The desktop computer isn't going away. But as bandwidth speeds increase, more and more computing can be done in the network of computers sitting in data centers - aka the "cloud."...

- The Edge. The cloud is nothing without devices, browsers and users to feed it....

- Speed. - Speed. Once you build the cloud, it's all about network operations....

- Platform. ...Having a fast cloud is nothing if you keep it closed. The trick is to open it up as a platform for every new business idea to run on, charging appropriate fees as necessary....

Andy's analysis is all in those ellipses. Succinct, on-point, and refreshingly insightful about the true drivers of Web 2.0. And I can't help pointing out that the Wall Street Journal has now noticed the fundamental premise of our Velocity conference: "Once you build the cloud, it's all about network operations."

If Velocity were a movie, don't you think that quote might be on the movie poster?

The Corporation's Two Bodies

The New York Times quotes Laura Martin of Soleil Securities, as saying "This is management putting its employees and its job security ahead of current Yahoo shareholders' interest." The sense of horror here--that management could actually put the interests of employees ahead of the interests of investors--is interesting, to say the least. It raises an important question that's really almost theological in nature. It is most certainly theological in, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote, "the promised land where every coin is marked In God We Trust, but the dollar bills do not have it being gods unto themselves. ("Autobiography," A Coney Island of the Mind, 1958, New Directions)

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Mondrian, Just the First Internal Google Tool Be Released Via App Engine?

Guido van Rossum, creator of Python and Google employee, has released a version of the internal Google code-checking tool Mondrian via the Python mailing list (text after the jump). The new app is called Code Review and was built with almost all new code on the Django framework. Code Review uses a lot of the same concepts and infrastructure that Mondrian does including Big Table.

There are differences. Code Review uses the open source software control system Subversion (also the backend of Google Code) whereas Mondrian works with Perforce, the commercial tool used internally at Google. Code Review will eventually be made open source.

Mondrian first became public at a Google Tech Talk. At the time Niall Kennedy wrote up a great summary of the talk.

It's great that Guido is releasing this and that Google is letting him. I am impressed. Could AppEngine be the way that Google releases its most useful internal tools? I've talked to several Google employees about the amount of code Google open sources and it's always less than they would like. The problem they face is that the code is tied to Google infrastructure and the hours required to de-couple it make the projects a non-starter.

Previous to the release of App Engine (and thus the exposure of Big Table) Code Review would have been one of those non-starters. Since he was able to rely on the Big Table implementation in App Engine the job became a lot easier. What other tools of Google's would you want (any of these)? I wonder if anything new will come out in time for Google I/O.

(via Reddit Programming)

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Facebook App Categories Ranked By Usage

We have been tracking the usage in each individual Facebook application since the launch of their platform, so I have been following the discussion questioning the utility of the majority of applications published to date. A lot of Facebook applications are perceived as "time-wasters", but I should caution that the number of apps in a category do not translate directly into active users:

As an example there are much fewer Dating apps than Sports apps, but Dating apps generate far more active users. Moreover, Messaging generates more active users than other "less useful" categories, and has grown the fastest over the last month:

Developers select the categories for their applications, so besides double-counting apps that are assigned multiple categories, inconsistencies in how the developers assign their apps to categories affect the results. We addressed some of these issues by categorizing the top applications ourselves. For more on the Facebook Application Platform, check the most recent edition of our research report. Also, Roger Magoulas of O'Reilly Research will present some of our most recent findings at the upcoming Graphing Social Patterns conference.

Virtual Earth V2 vs. V1

I'm at Microsoft Research's Location Summit (last year I was a speaker, this year an attendee). They've got a variety of speakers from MSR, academia and MS product groups.

Steve Stanzel of the 3D Imagery Group (3DI) just spoke about Virtual Earth V2. They've had 3D data since November 2006 (Radar post). There are now nearly 300 cities are in 3D. Recently 4 cities were launched as V2 cities.

What's the difference between a V1 and a V2 city? As I see it and understand it there are two main differences. The first is an improvement in texture quality (which makes the building look more real). In V1 the textures came from aerial imagery (the top-down view). Now they have added oblique imagery (the 45 degree, Birds-Eye view that shows the sides of buildings). The building geometry is still 2.5D, but the new textures make the buildings seem a lot more real.

The second difference is a large increase in buildings and entities in the city. The first edition of Virtual Earth featured the taller buildings in the city, ignoring most of the one and two story houses. In V2 they increased the number of buildings in a city from around 6,000 to upwards of 150,00. Most of those increases came in the suburbs. They also added some great detail work in the form of trees. In Denver they've rendered 300,000 trees in their exact locations. The trees come from a set of standard models. A model is placed in a specific spot based on the height and diameter of the real tree (wow).

The work that the Virtual Earth Team has done is very impressive. Much of it is built on the technology attained with the acquisition of Vexcel and Geotango. Vincent Tao, the founder of GeoTango and now a Director with the Virtual Earth team, will be speaking at Where 2.0 on May 13th.

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More On High Performance Websites

Last week Steve Souders, the author of the O'Reilly book High Performance Web Sites and creator of Firefox plugin YSlow, presented his latest website performance findings at the Web 2.0 Expo (I made him promise that he would present new content). He's still developing the final set of guidelines, but here is what he so far:

1. Split the initial payload


2. Load scripts without blocking


3. Don’t scatter scripts


4. Split dominant content domains


5. Make static content cookie-free


6. Reduce cookie weight


7. Minify CSS


8. Optimize images


9. Use iframes sparingly


10. To www or not to www

As I finish chapters I’ll talk about my findings at conferences. My slides from Web 2.0 Expo last week contain information about the first three rules. In the future I’ll be speaking at Google I/O, Velocity, OSCON, and The Ajax Experience, so please come see me if you’re there. Also, I’ll write a blog post about each chapter. (Posts on Rules 1-3 are coming soon.)

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Web 2.0 Expo: Clay Shirky's Keynote

The videos for the Web 2.0 Expo Keynotes are available on Blip.tv! I've embedded video of Clay Shirky's excellent keynote above. In his talk Clay discusses many of the concepts from his new book and explains why sitcoms are "cognitive heat sinks". A transcript of his talk is available in his post Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.

Shame on Who?

Being the object of strong opinions--and even conspiracy theories--is all part of the day's work for companies (and people) who are part of the web's open, fast-moving, and ultimately democratic culture. Usually, we let the wilder stories run their course, and we've found that the web community does a good job of fact-checking as well as opinion-sharing. No wonder Wikipedia works.

But in the past few days, a story has bubbled up that I want to acknowledge. Last Thursday, Daya Baran of Silicon Valley WebGuild posted Shame on You Tim O'Reilly, in which he asserts that O'Reilly asked Google to withdraw support for the WebGuild's "Web 2.0 Conference & Expo" because we didn't want the competition from his conference. Today, he included the post in his email newsletter to WebGuild members and I received a couple of inquiring emails from friends.

I'm not sure why Daya decided to bring this up now -- I assume it's an attempt to get publicity for his next gathering. Back on January 1, Michael Arrington first made the issue public in his post WebGuild Using Questionable Tactics To Promote Events (also see Silicon Alley Insider). We were, in fact, concerned that the name of the WebGuild event was so similar to ours. We tried to personally contact Daya many times (via email, phone calls and a certified letter), from October through December. He didn't respond. For the record, we never asked (and we certainly didn't demand) Google to withdraw support of WebGuild or its events.

So, a cordial exchange devolves, four months later, into public name-calling. This one will run its course, as they all do (for example we are now working with Tom Raftery of it@cork on the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin), but it seems a shame for all of us to spend time and energy on this when there are so many interesting and useful things more deserving of our attention.

Missed Twitter Questions from Jonathan Schwartz Interview at Web 2.0 Expo

In the Jonathan Schwartz interview at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco yesterday, I screwed up. After learning we weren't set up for audience Q&A with microphones, I thought, "well then, I'll just suggest to the audience that they twitter questions @timoreilly, and I'll check my phone during the interview." I kept checking, but no questions. Bummer. Not till I heard complaints afterwards that I hadn't asked any of the questions did I do a little digging, and discover that I had twitter set to show me only @ replies from people I'm following. Bad idea.

To all of you in the audience, a big apology for the screwup.

However, I did collect all the questions after the fact, and forward them on to Jonathan to answer by email. The questions and Jonathan's answers are below. I've presented it as if it were a twitter interview, snarfing up the questions from tweetscan, and then getting Jonathan's twitter image from his own feed. [Another big oops: that isn't really Jonathan's twitter feed. Will take out links till I get the correct one. Thanks to Scott Ruthfield for the heads up.] But in reality, he answered the questions by email, after I sent him the whole group in one email message.

triplebsoul : question for Sun " how is sun planning to balance environmental issues with scaling computing needs (power consumption, etc) "
2008-04-25 12:32:48

JonathanSchwartz: Sun's going to stretch the limits of engineering and our collective imagination to make the world's most efficient datacenter infrastructure - from OpenSolaris power management, to Blackbox datacenters. And although that's obviously important to our business, and to the planet, what matters most in managing environmental risk is the world's appetite for power - if that continues along the pace it is, we can slow the growth of power demand through datacenter innovation, but I doubt we can stop it. Every 100,000,000 new PC's in the world creates the need for many, many, many megawatt power plants.

cynthiagentry : ask JIS about the role of academia in the future of Sun, and in the future of Web 2.0
2008-04-25 12:32:46

JonathanSchwartz: It's hugely important. The majority of the world's change agents, media consumers and entrepreneurs graduate from universities every year. There's a reason Sun stands for "Stanford University Network." That's the world from which we spawned, that's the world we focus on with open source technology (you might remember we just concluded an agreement with the People's Republic of China's Ministry of Education to build a national curriculum around OpenSPARC and OpenSolaris - made possible by our IP being free and open...).

Sierralog : Question to Jonathan: Did you ever assess the success of you corporate blogging in terms of "ROI" and if so, how? Thx
2008-04-25 12:31:51

JonathanSchwartz: No. It just seemed like an IQ test. If I talk, people that are interested listen. If I don't speak up, they have nothing to hear.
 

amitc : Q for Jon: Beyond MySQL, Sun boxes and Java, what else does Sun has to offer Web Devs, PMs & Entrepreneurs?
2008-04-25 12:29:44

JonathanSchwartz: Um - that's certainly a good start, isn't it? :) I guess the majority of our focus within the next twelve months will be around our data management and storage offerings - starting with ZFS, and the potential of dual-licensing it under the GPL to see its growth within the Linux environment (alongside MySQL). As you'll see with our rolling out of network.com services, we plan on offering a ton of developer infrastructure as a service, as well.

buildakicker : How can this web2.0 help out or even work within the government?
2008-04-25 12:29:29
 

JonathanSchwartz: Hm - that's up to the government, no? We serve a lot of government customers, and they're very, very interested in network computing. Governments exist to serve the people. The people have internet connections. Put two and two together - you get governments interested in the web.

JesseStay : does he anticipate a fallout of original MySQL users or fork in the mysql code and how will they handle that if it does happen?
2008-04-25 12:26:30

JonathanSchwartz: I'm not anticipating a fork - Marten Mickos (SVP, Database Group at Sun, former CEO, MySQL) made some comments saying he was considering making available certain MySQL add-ons to MySQL Enterprise subscribers only - and as I said on stage, leaders at Sun have the autonomy to do what they think is right to maximize their business value - so long as they remember their responsibility to the corporation and all of its communities (from shareholders to developers). Not just their silo.

I think Marten got some fairly direct and immediate feedback saying the idea was a bad one - and we have no plans whatever of "hiding the ball," of keeping any technology from the community. Everything Sun delivers will be freely available, via a free and open license (either GPL, LGPL or Mozilla/CDDL), to the community.

Everything.

No exception.

coogle : One question I have for him is how the Sun acquisition of MySQL is going to impact the open source space and Sun long-term?
2008-04-25 11:12:36

JonathanSchwartz: It's going to open a flurry of doors for MySQL, and it's going to open a flurry of doors for Sun. It already has - as I said, the MySQL team just closed the single largest deal in the history of MySQL, a $10m deal to a global technology company. I'm pleased as punch with the progress we're making there, and we're deluged with inquiries from traditional enterprises (vs. Web 2.0 companies) wanting to know how to get enterprise support for a product they've used in development, but have, until now, not felt comfortable putting into commercial deployment. Now they feel comfortable deploying it - and we're right there with them to help make it happen.

And we're investing heavily to build a whole spectrum of products optimized for MySQL - stay tuned, you'll start seeing some amazing stuff.

rghanbari : For Jonathan Schwartz: What does Google app engine mean for Sun? Programming/deployment model makes Sun platforms irrelevant
2008-04-25 11:07:50

JonathanSchwartz: You know, one wonders how we can generate nearly $14,000,000,000 in revenue when I keep hearing technology x, y or z makes Sun irrelevant. Microsoft tells me MSN Search makes Google irrelevant. Not sure I buy that. OpenOffice doesn't make Microsoft Office irrelevant, either, it creates competition (that's why we have about 100,000,000 users!).

Competition's a good thing, it creates choice. Rumor has it developers like, and value, choice. Throw a sheep at me when that stops being true.

andrewsavikas : EC2 and AppEngine get a lot more attention that sun's grid (cloud) offerings. why is that? who's using sun's grid?
2008-04-25 11:05:47

JonathanSchwartz: Tons of high performance computing customers use our grid - we never targeted the mass developer. But stay tuned, you're going to see a lot more about network.com within the next 6 months.

GraemeThickins: Please ask Schwartz how much time he spends/day writing for his blog & how that's changed over past year; also, does he Twitter?
2008-04-25 11:03:33

JonathanSchwartz: Yes, I Twitter. No I won't tell you my user ID.

And the amount of time I spent writing my blog depends upon what I have to say, and what's going on in our business. It varies dramatically, unlike the amount of pressure I feel from the imaginary editor that sits on my shoulder telling me it's been two weeks since I've posted anything pithy.

mkrigsman: Ask Jonathan Schwatrz why IT departments are so scared of web 2.0 proliferation. Awkward question for him, but he's a big boy.
2008-04-25 11:02:10

JonathanSchwartz: The companies I talk to aren't scared of innovation, they're in love with it - it's a source of business value and competitive advantage. Companies scared of IT are likely to be buried by their competitors that aren't.

Sun's customers, bluntly put, are those that see IT as a weapon. Those that see it simply as a cost... good news, they'll be able to reduce their costs, given clouds and free services and labor arbitrage, to near zero. But we'll be far more focused on those delivering the network services to them that make that transition possible.

It reminds me of a discussion I had with the CIO of an oil company. He started the meeting by telling me "I don't understand why Sun's still around, IT's a commodity to me, who cares?" Until I reminded him his business just delivered more in quarterly profit than we delivered in annual revenue. And his business was built upon selling a...

Commodity. In his case, oil.

Commodities are where are all the money is, just ask Google, Verizon, Goldman, Sachs or Exxon. But commoidities also require R&D - those that couple the two, R&D and an ability to navigate commodity markets, tend to do rather well.

timoreilly: Thanks a lot for agreeing to take all these extra questions, Jonathan!
 
 

JonathanSchwartz Thanks, again, Tim - it's always a pleasure to hang out.

Web 2.0 Expo: A Visualization of Current's Top Videos

In the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes we've been experimenting with a segment called "What X Knows". The Web 2.0 services that we use learn a lot about their users. We asked some of those companies to share some of their info-porn with us. Current, the user-generated TV channel, made an under-one-minute visualization of the videos from their site that have the most views. The embedded video shows an image for each video; each image stays up in proportion to how popular the video was.
This technique makes for a very interesting video and is a great model for how to visualize this type of data.

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