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It's worth noting that the cloud certainly has borders. It's the one reality that proves the cloud computing movement may seem at times abstract and vague but in the end it is the international politics of our world that creates some of the deepest issues for its place in the world markets. According to InformationWeek , The 451 Group presented a webcast that showed cloud computing adoption trails in Europe and Asia. About 57% op spending is in the United States with 31% in Europe and 12% in Asia. The numbers get even more polarized when you only look at the adoption for infrastructure as a service. A full 93% of spending is in the United States with 6% in Europe and 1% in the United States. Sponsor The low numbers almost makes it seem like some artificial effect is in play. And in some ways it really is. A lack of European data centers services by the large providers affects adoption. Rackspace, Terremark and Savvis are the primary companies looking to develop a presence in Europe. But they need to build data centers before they can have any real presence there. According to the 451 Group, 99 percent of European businesses are either small or mid-sized organizations. And they have plenty of choices from telecommunications providers. But here is an interesting twist. InformationWeek: One obstacle to both sides is the U.S. Patriot Act, which gives the U.S. government a right to demand data if it defines conditions as being an emergency or necessary to homeland security, and a measure that contradicts that power when the data is of European origin, the European Union's Data Protection Directive. In 2006, the European Court of Justice ruled that an agreement negotiated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was too broadly construed and violated the EU's directive. The agreement was about sharing data on European airline passengers headed for the U.S. The data sought by the U.S. was too broadly construed and violated the EU's directive, the court said. "Both measures could prevent establishing a cloud without borders," said 451's William Fellows. Cloud advocates say services established via an Internet data center should be accessible by people around the world, and they are in the case of Google search or Facebook apps. But when it comes to sensitive data, national borders still prevail because of conflicting laws." The issue is apparent now with Google's issues with the Chinese government. It's not the technology that is making cloud computing an issue. It's international politics. Discuss
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International Politics Slow Cloud Computing In Europe and Asia
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Redmond, Washington's Microvision , producers of miniaturized technologies, announced it has made its first big sale of its PicoP laser projection display engine. The unidentified customer "plans to embed the PicoP engine inside a high-end mobile media player for release in late 2010 and plans to announce its launch at that time." It is worth noting that the company has made technology designed to be used by the iPod and iPhone. Sponsor In early March, the company announced that their SHOWWX projector, powered by the engine, was available for sale to customers in the United States at $549.99. The pico projector uses laser light to produce high resolution, WVGA (848 X 480) images of up to 200 inches at a 5000:1 contrast ratio, which Microvision claims is five times higher than any of its competition. The projector can be attached to a computer or smart phone. It uses no focusing knobs or optics. The company hopes to see a broad spectrum of personal and professional technology devices using the engine and projector. Discuss
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First Big Sale for Microvision's Laser Projection Engine
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In May last year we wrote about the state of Linked Data , an official W3C project that aims to connect separate data sets on the Web. Linked Data is a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, in which data on the Web is encoded with meaning using technologies such as RDF and OWL. The ultimate vision is that the Web will become much more structured, which opens up many possibilities for "smarter" web applications. At this stage last year, we noted that Linked Data was ramping up fast - evidenced by the increasing number of data sets on the Web as at March 2009. Fast forward a year and the Linked Data 'cloud' has continued to expand. In this post we look at some of the developments in Linked Data over the past year. Sponsor Governments Get on Board The most high profile usage of Linked Data over the past year has come from two governments: the United States and United Kingdom. The U.S. was first to open up some of its non-personal data for use by developers, with the May 2009 launch of Data.gov . In January 2010, the U.K. government announced Data.gov.uk - with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. At launch, Data.gov.uk had nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. At the time it was more than three times as much data than the U.S. site offered. Following on from the launch of Data.gov.uk, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a new British Institute for Web Science along with $45 million in government backing. The Institute will be led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and prominent researcher Nigel Shadbolt. This was great news for Linked Data, because according to Prime Minister Brown, the Institute "will help place the U.K. at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies." Commercial Applications There have been commercial success stories too, such as OpenCalais for media, MusicBrainz for music and GoodRelations for e-commerce. There are also many commercial sites tapping into the general knowledge data store at dbpedia.org . However it's relatively early days for commercial applications of Linked Data. We're beginning to see smart people explore potential use cases, such as this list for news organizations , but much of the early implementation is being done by publicly funded entities such as the U.K.'s BBC. The latest version of the Linking Open Data dataset cloud , as at July 2009, maintained by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. Just Get The Data Up There To reiterate, Linked Data is data that has been marked up using Semantic Web technologies such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) or RDFa (a simpler variation). Minus the acronyms, Linked Data is simply structured data . However one of the reasons the Semantic Web hasn't yet been widely adopted, at least commercially, is that it's often difficult or time consuming to mark up data semantically. RDF in particular has a reputation for being painful to code. With that in mind, the past year has been as much about prompting governments and organizations to put their data up on the Web in whatever form they can . Indeed when I interviewed Sir Tim Berners-Lee last July , he told me that he'd be happy if governments "just put data up in whatever form it's available." He mentioned that "Comma separated values (CSV) files are remarkably popular." He'd be much more happier if it was semantically marked up data, using the likes of RDF, but conversion can happen after it's been uploaded to the Web. So overall, Linked Data is still early in its adoption curve. However it's undeniably become a solid on-ramp to the wider Semantic Web and world of structured data. For a good technical overview of the current state of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, see this presentation by Davide Palmisano. Discuss
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The State of Linked Data in 2010
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It's a sunny afternoon in San Francisco and health care is in the air. I'm sitting at the the Peet's in the SF Ferry Building eating a vegan ginger cookie and waiting for Matthew Holt, founder of The Health Care Blog and the leader of Health 2.0 conference to show up for an interview. He arrives wearing shorts and a Health 2.0 t-shirt, and has his dog with him. He tells me he jogged to our location on the bay from Health 2.0 headquarters seven minutes away. It's a beautiful day - and here in the United States, the health care reform bill just passed. ReadWriteWeb's founder and leader, Richard MacManus, joins us, and we dive into a conversation on the revolution underway in cloud, mobile, and social health tools. By the end of the day, we were left with one question: Will health care reform build a health Internet, or will entrepreneurs do it because they can? Sponsor A Brief History One nice thing about profiling the thoughts of bloggers is that they leave a trail to track them down. Here are a few of Holt's social and technology posts on The HealthCareBlog : A new campaign against childhood obesity Aneesh Chopra on txting in Haiti PatientsLikeMe buys ReliefInSite Here are a few of MacManus' posts at ReadWriteWeb that track to health care: McKinsey: Get Ready For Sensor-Driven Business Models iPhone Apps For The Masses: Health & Fitness Health 2.0 Through the Eyes of a Diabetic - One Year Later Health Care Reform is like Ice Skating in San Francisco A phenomenon I see every year in San Francisco in December is the setup of the ice-skating rink. Palm trees and skaters. For children and adults alike, it's a way dream about a past and present, whether real or fiction. And, yet, while good for humanity, something about it doesn't quite hold the spirit of the pristine pond and cabin by the lake. We know, even though the ice is icy, generators are pumping along the edges. It's not quite pristine, and it's not quite ours. That's how health care reform feels - a victory indeed - but for some reason not a personal win. Somehow, reform feels artificial and hard to grasp. A small part inside of me wants to scream out, "is there an app for that"? Is it One Big Health Cloud? To get the conversation started, I asked Holt and Macmanus, "What is your take on cloud computing for healthcare?" Holt asked in return, with a grin, "What exactly is the cloud? Is it a thing, or is it a collection of services that are connected together?" We discussed this question in practical terms Holt : "Here's a question: Will Salesforce's cloud be merged with other organizations' contacts, and will we have shared controls? Is that the difference between cloud computing and SAAS?" We came back to our business, blogging. Blog software like Moveable Type (RWW) and WordPress (The Health Care Blog) generate common feeds in simple formats (RSS) that can be used and mashed up in all sorts of ways. But, that doesn't mean that MT and WordPress themselves are hot swappable, as there are controls, widgets, and other tools that are optimized in the application layer. Perhaps, in this way, EHR (Electronic Health Record) systems can be thought of as a blogs, where people are the categories, and events are the posts. If so, what is needed for health care information exchange is a basic feed for key members of the exchange: doctors, patients, pharmacies that connects new systems on top of it. For health care exchange, connecting patients is so much more than connecting infrastructure, platforms or software. Like all good software, it's about finding the shortcut. We should endeavor to find, build, and monetize the simplest exchange that will drive the future generations of meaningful interoperability. As we spoke, a light turned on. Is Health Part of the Internet of Things? Macmanus : "Health devices are one of my favorite use cases for the Internet of Things. Let's take the example of a blood pressure monitor. It's a portable device that augments your life and well being, and the promise of connecting to other things and streams is real". Holt : " ...and look at these devices closer - we see they are intelligent, self adjusting, and include feedback loops and reminders. Thse devices are starting to connect to the Internet and to people." "And what about the Wii," he continued. "The Mii is already virtual me, and the WiiFit is compelling and network enabled". All of us noted that Nike's work in this area is inspiring - from ease of use to business model implications, there is something great going on with the Nike + sensor and the company's broader ambitions. We realized that technology has already started a revolution in health - and it's getting traction. Macmanus : "I'm fresh from SXSW and have location on my mind. We heard that FourSquare is at work on a next-generation feature on websites, where checking in will connect virtual and real worlds. Also, with innovations like self-tagging StickyBits and Microsoft Tag floating around, real-world augmentation is starting to take form and connect with the Internet world." Holt : "UPC tag scanners, such as mobile phone bar code readers like ScanAvert connect real world things to facts about them, such as ingredient and nutrition information." We were reminded of the Quantified Self movement. This is a meetup that has growing momentum in the SF Bay Area and around the country. It is a place where self-reporters get together and share war stories. Organized by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, it combines what's on the cutting edge and our overwhelming fascination of creating a digital diary through logging data about oneself. And, best of all, the meetings focus on "What did you learn about yourself," which focuses the meetup on us, not just technologies or business models. We learn that our motivations matter. Let's Run it All on Amazon and Get Scale The tools are ready, entrepreneurs are on board, and we all believe that the cloud is here. But, what about the data? That is a tougher question, and a familiar storyline of permissions, identity, matching, EDI, XML - it's enough to make you sick considering all of the potential work to align it all. In the spirit of the shortcut, the three of us came up with an idea: What if instead of connecting all of the hospitals, instead we connected every person in the U.S.? What if we would each have a server in the cloud, tuned to receive and share our own health transactions? This health server on the network would run software to receive files, add streams and connect devices under our direct control. The three of us did a bit of back of napkin work and believe that we could outsource the entire thing to Amazon for about US $1 billion yearly. This would cover server fees and data access for every American to have their own instance of server optimized for transmitting health information Here's our math: 300 million people [multiplied by base fee of $30.00 per year multiplied by the .1 concurrent utilization rate. Build a cloud architecture that reduces the cost by 10 times by leveraging computing systems that spin up on demand and therefore dramatically reduce physical costs. We think this type of math, however crude (and perhaps wrong), is worth thinking about as we spin up the servers for health care reform. We're Convinced: People Eat, Sleep, Pirouette, Take Pills By the end of our conversation, Macmanus, Holt and I were left with an invigorating idea about the new health care reform: It isn't a thing, it's a moment in time. Innovations for health care are already springing out of the Web and will thrive on their own merits, so the job of health care reform technology should be to instigate this innovation, stat. What would you do if offered a fixed bid contract for $1 billion annually to build a new health cloud for America? Who would you bring along to get the work done? Photo credit: abhijittembhekar Discuss
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Healthcare Reform is a Cloud: Interview with Matthew Holt & Richard MacManus
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Reporters Without Borders released its annual report [ PDF ] on online access today. They call it Enemies of the Internet, and it shows a world where online censorship, intimidation and worse is increasing. It's not surprising that as access to the Internet expands, more and more dictators and tyrants will try to suppress it. But what's troubling about this year's report is the inclusion of two democratic countries: Australia and South Korea. Sponsor Both countries were included in the report's Under Surveillance list - a sub group of the main Enemies list. Australia's proposed online filtering system is something RWB says it has "never before seen in a democracy." Additionally, in the state of South Australia it's now against the law to be anonymous online if it's in the context of an election. In South Korea, a new censorship law allows for five-year prison sentences for anyone found using the Internet "to disseminate false news intended to damage the public interest." The same law requires online visitors to register their real name and national ID card number when visiting sites with more than 100,000 members. Here are a handful of the worst violators of online freedom of expression on the Enemies of the Internet list: Burma Two high-ranking government officials have been sentenced to death for having e-mailed documents abroad. Net censorship is a serious matter in Burma. Massive filtering of websites and extensive slowdowns during times of unrest are daily occurrences for the country's Internet users. The legislation governing Internet use - the Electronic Act - is one of the most liberticidal laws in the world. China As its polemic with Google and the United States on the Internet's future unfolds, China continues to intensify Web censorship, faced with an increasingly forceful online community.The much-vaunted promises made by organizers at the open ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have proven to be mere illusions for the world's biggest netizen prison. Expanded dissemination of propaganda, generalized surveillance and crackdowns on Charter 08 signatories are commonplace on what has become the Chinese Intranet - with significant consequences for trade. Egypt More than a mere virtual communications tool, the Egyptian Internet has become a mobilization and dissension platform. Although website blocking remains limited, authorities are striving to regain control over bloggers who are more and more organized, despite all the harassment and arrests. Iran Iran, one of cyber-censorship's record-holding countries, has stepped up its crackdown and online surveillance since the protests over the disputed presidential reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009. The regime is demonizing the new media, which it is accusing of serving foreign interest.While a dozen netizens are serving out their terms in Evin Prison, bold Internet users are continuing to mobilize. Saudi Arabia An emerging bloggers' community is up against harsh censorship. These bloggers are confronting the traditional forces of Saudi society, which are attempting to prevent the Internet from becoming a forum for free discussions. Saudi Arabia is one of the first countries to have been authorized to write Internet domain names in Arabic.The Internet penetration rate, currently estimated at about 38% of the population, is rising. How- ever, it is still one of the most repressive countries with regard to the Internet. Syria Syria is reinforcing its censorship of troublesome topics on the Web and tracking netizens who dare to express themselves freely on it. As a result, social networks have been particularly targeted by omnipresent surveillance. The promised technological improvements are slow to materialize. The authorities' distrust of the potential for dissident online mobilization may be playing a role in this delay. Vietnam The progress made by Vietnam in the domain of human rights, which allowed the country to become a member of the World Trade Organization in 2007, is nothing but a distant memory. As the 2011 Communist Party Congress draws nearer, the regime is muffling dissident views on the Internet, and its first target is critics of the country's policy toward China. Discuss
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'Enemies of the Internet': Not Just For Dictators Anymore
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