The Geek Mime

Just a decade ago, had you ever imagined people with Bluetooth earplugs talking to their friends about tabloid gossip or business secrets at public places like airports, malls and restaurants? What you see today is people talking to thin air, seeming much like a lunatic of the last century.

Then you guess that they may be talking over their cell phones.
Imagine the future cell phone with more computing power than today’s computers, with a wireless connection to an interactive chip on the lens of your eyeglasses, which will not only display information for you, but also track your eye movements, your hand gestures, and interpret these commands like Project Natal.

Technically, this is feasible today .By projecting images from your eyeglasses on to your retina, you will see an image several feet in front of you.

Now to this you add gesture recognition and interpretation from Microsoft’s project Natal. Just imagine what will you look like replying to an email with these data glasses and using hand gesture at an airport ?

Internet of 2020

Why blog about the Internet? Each individual may have their own reasoning, but I simply can’t live without it. For many of my friends, the withdrawal symptoms from the Internet are worse than abstaining from smoking or alcohol. I know that it is just a series of interconnected machines that are exchanging data packets, but still I cannot live without it.
The Internet is very young- seeded in 1962, but officially born in 1992. In early 2008, Vinton Cerf, the father of the internet, participated in the landing of a robot on the Martian North Pole – the first rover to carry communication protocols, protocols that expanded the Internet to interplanetary proportions. While NASA is spending billions extending the Internet to Mars, down here on Earth, I am still experiencing slow downloads of movies from Netflix.

I hope that the recently allocated $7.2 billion of stimulus money under American Recovery & Reinvestment Act to support the development of broadband capabilities across US will allow for a much faster and richer Internet surfing experience. A couple of years ago, many people started feeling that we already had enough processing power for email, Word and downloading YouTube videos, so that we no longer needed to upgrade. That reminded me of the famous quote from Charles H. Duell, commissioner of US patent office, “Everything that can be invented has been invented”. This perception and two consecutive recessions in a short period led to the stifling of investments in the Internet infrastructure in USA. But as more investments go in and more capabilities come online, a whole new set of new scenarios will come about which have not been envisioned yet. Who would have envisioned Xbox Live multiplayer games, multi-touch Windows, Project Natal, HD videos on YouTube, the iPod and iTunes just a decade or two ago? John D’Ambrosia of IEEE forecasted that Ethernet speed will be in terabit range by 2015.To put things in perspective, with 1 Gbps, I can download one hour of video in 16 seconds, and with 1 Tbps, it will be instantaneous. This kind of bandwidth can enable many new scenarios.

The frequent travelling that executives require to stay connected with their global operations will become less common as the Internet’s potential is developed. Technologies like tele-presence, tele-conferencing and virtual events will be more lifelike and provide a greater user experience. With the recent launch of 3D PC along with Windows 7, we can soon expect to have 3D TV and gaming in our living rooms.

MIT has been posting lectures on YouTube for years, and now professors at Carnegie Mellon have started digitally teaching classes at satellite campuses. Videoconferencing is maturing, as doctors have started monitoring patients around the clock at patients’ homes and as patients can now use video conferencing to reach out to medical specialist on-need basis. One of the most discussed such stories on the Internet is that of Benjamin Burg, a Hawaiian heart specialist who dictated complicated surgery over the Internet to a Guam man across 3500 miles. During this entire procedure, Berg was constantly monitoring every move and vital statistics from sensors in the patient’s heart. Windows Media Center and extender technology allows you to play media from your PC on to your TV. It is not much of a stretch to imagine a scenario when you will be able to record video using a Flip camera or cell phone and stream that directly to your friend’s TV. The Internet usage is going to multiply over the next few years.

The Internet connectivity evolved from wired connectivity – just a couple of decades ago – to wireless connectivity, and to mobile Internet connectivity. The Internet as we know it connects 1 billion users, is reaching out to 2.5 billion cell phone users, and soon to even more people through devices like the TV. The mix of text, images, audio, and video in this high-volume traffic will also change at a fast pace, creating new business processes, models and jobs.

In the short term, USA has to catch up with the much more developed networks of Japan, South Korea, and other Asian countries. In 2007, the median US broadband speed was 5 Mbps, as compared to 63 Mbps in Japan and 49Mbps in South Korea. Research has shown a correlation between broadband reach & speed with economic growth, increased productivity, technological innovation and quality of life. Unfortunately, such growth may also come at a cost as it accelerates disruptive forces which for example, can decimate newspaper and print media industries. The players in these industries will have to adapt to the “new economy” or face bankruptcies. These technological changes are like hundred year floods – some companies will drown, and some will be catching more fish.
In addition to the improvement in broadband speed, the Internet will become smarter as technical innovations of Internet infrastructure starts driving new business models like cloud computing, virtual healthcare and Individualized mass education. As these business models start taking root, they will start putting pressure on the organizational models, which in turn may evolve to become more widely distributed, and at the same time, more collaborative. Of course, the way we interact with the government is going to evolve very fast. The definition of privacy and safety will evolve as we understand the challenges of identity theft, corporate espionage and the government watching our every move.

The extreme flexibility of the Internet makes long term predictions very difficult even for a professional futurist. Even though I want to predict that by 2020 there will be more Internet connected devices than the human population, but I know that vast majority of the Internet’s uses and applications have not been envisioned yet. Based on the pace of new ideas, standards, inventions and innovations it is hard to predict the vast majority of applications that we will be using in 2020.

But one thing is certain –the future of the Internet is our future. Are you ready for it?

Bing.com – A Decision Engine

By now, Microsoft clearly understands that world doesn’t need another search engine and it understands how Google makes money on its search engine. It is a multibillion-dollar market, and Microsoft wants to have a slice of the cake. So Microsoft is positioning Bing as a decision engine, renaming Virtual Earth to Bing Maps and making “Farecast technology” part of Bing Travel. Microsoft is also making the mobile edition available for cell phones and other mobile devices at m.bing.com.

Bing - A Decision Engine

With the aim of leading users to more confident decisions, Microsoft identified three design goals to guide the development of Bing:
1. Deliver great results
2. Deliver a more organized experience
3. Simplify tasks and provide insight

Bing also innovates on core search areas such as:

• Entity extraction and expansion
• Query intent recognition
• Document summarization technology
• New user-experience model that adapts to query types to provide relevant and intuitive decision-making tools.
• Deep Links – allows more insight into what resources a particular site has to offer
• Quick Preview – a hover-over window that expands over a search result caption to provide a better sense of the site’s relevancy
• One-click access to information through Instant Answers
• Preview videos in the search without having to visit YouTube directly

In nutshell, this is an attempt is to make Bing well suited for task-centric searches. Many users are impressed by the progress, while Matt Cutts of Google may not be impressed yet. Only time will tell.

Some of the key differentiators from Google are:

• Searches for videos – returns clips that can be watched by simply moving your mouse over the results.
• Cash back – when you buy products from certain merchants that have a Bing symbol displayed next to their links.
• Related searches – Shown in the upper left hand side of the results page
• Travel related searches – searches like “Seattle to NY” return a ticket price at the top of the results.

There is a huge focus on Travel, as Microsoft research shows that 45 percent of people use a search engine to select a flight or hotel. According to a recent survey by Bing Travel, 52 percent of potential travelers search three or more sites before booking their airfare. Forty-two percent of travelers spend between one and four weeks weighing their travel options and 17 percent spend more than a month.

Bing Travel’s key features include the following:

• Price Predictor – Bing Travel predicts whether the price of a flight is going up or down.
• Rate Indicator – Bing analyzes historical rate data from thousands of hotels to determine whether the current price is a good deal, or not a deal at all.
• Travel Deals – Bing Travel shows the best airfare and hotel deals it has and will even show why particular flights are considered deals.
• Comparison Flight & Hotel Search – Bing Travel allows refining results quickly: nonstop flights only, specific airlines, hotels within a mile of an address, and many more.
• Fare Alerts – Most airfare price drops last less than 48 hours, so people need to be ready to jump when a fare falls. Fare Alerts will notify people if the fares for their trips drop, allowing them to catch lower fares.
• Original travel editorial content – Bing Travel combines editorial content from MSN Travel and Farecast to create an in-house team of experts who write daily articles, features, slide shows and blog posts

Microsoft is finally rising to the search engine challenge. Steve Ballmer publically announced his goal of making Bing second most popular search engine in next 5 years. Data issued by Stat Counter on Thursday June 4th 2009, showed that the goal had already been achieved:

• Google: 71.47 percent
• Bing: 16.28 percent
• Yahoo: 10.22 percent

Bing - Stat Counter Global Stats

On a global basis, the company said it saw a similar trend:

• Google: 87.62 percent
• Bing: 5.62 percent
• Yahoo: 5.13 percent

Just for fun, try to search the following on www.Bing.com

• Microsoft
• Google
• Yahoo
• Any other company

All of this is good, now show me the money . Before Google’s debut, all the websites owners were trying to bring people to their web site and keep them on the site. Longer the user stayed on the site, more money site owner made by showing more advertisements. AOL, Yahoo, MSN were all in the same boat. Then came Google. Google makes money when you leave their site. The sooner you click on one of the sponsored links, the faster Google makes money.

Now that you understand the incentive, let’s talk about the behaviors that this incentive drives. Now it has become more important for Google to show you the most relevant advertisements rather than the most relevant search results. This makes the quality of search results a second priority.

To focus on the first priority, Google democratized the advertiser market and brought mom and pop owners to the same level as large corporations by allowing everyone to bid for search words on a level playing field. With these 10’s of millions of advertisers and 100’s of millions of search words up for auction, Google spends most of its efforts and energy on relevance of advertisement rather than search quality.

Yahoo and Microsoft have been evolving on the Search relevance with a hope to catch up with Google, but the main battle is yet to be fought in terms of acquiring the paying advertisers, as these advertisers bring the money to the table.

It once seemed inevitable that Google would forever rule the world of search, but Microsoft and Yahoo are not yet vanquished. Will Microsoft’s knight in shining armor – Bing – prove mightier? Or is the world forever fated to use Google?

 

What are your thoughts on Bing? How do you like the search engine’s results compared to Google’s? Share your thoughts here…

Google Wave

 What is Google Wave? It is a new communication service that Google unveiled at Google IO this week. It is a product, platform and protocol for communication and collaboration designed for today’s world. Is that too much of technical jargon…let’s make it simple…and take it in chewable bite size…

It is like reinventing email that was designed 40 years ago i.e. many years before internet, wiki, blogs, twitter, forums, discussion boards etc existed. The world has evolved, but we are still hooked to “Store-and-forward” architecture of email systems which  mimics snail-mail. In spite of the technological advances, we are living in highly segmented world, with information living on islands – emails, blogs, photo, blogs, micro blogs like twitter, web collaboration, net meetings, IM and so on.

In Google Wave you create a wave (can be an email or IM conversation or a document for collaboration or to publish on a blog or just to play a game) and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. You can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. Google Wave an HTML 5 app, built using Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other desktop functions like drag-and-drop. It has concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. This means Google Wave integrates email, IM and collaborative document creation into a single experience. The most important feature is that you can also use “playback” to rewind the wave to see how it evolved. My elder son was very excited to see that. He said “If I am playing chess with my friends using Wave, I will be able to rewind and replay it to see every move. WoHoooooo..”

 

Both of my sons (13 & 14 years) and I spend 80 minutes of quality time together to watch this video and had an hour long discussion over dinner about how Google Wave will shape the future. My elder son was so excited that he wanted to use some of these ideas in the computer game he was coding, before he went to bed.

 

Google Wave can also be considered as a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves. The Google Wave protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

 Vic Gundotra of Microsoft fame is now leading this effort as VP engineering at Google. Lars and Jens Rasmussen (brothers) who came to Google with acquisition of “2 Tech” in 2004, have been driving this effort at Google for more than 18 months. They also have credible history and star reputation at Google as creators of Google Maps.

The underlying assumption is that a large scale disruptive innovation can dislodge the existing leaders and give an opportunity to other to take leading positions. Hence an attempt to create an online world where people can seamlessly communicate and collaborate across various information exchange scenarios including  email, IM, blog, wiki and multi-lingual (including translation) . With this bold move,  Google is trying to overcome the challenges of integration by hosting the conversation object on the server, allowing multiple channels of interactions and breaking many barriers in the process. The service seems to combine Gmail and Google Docs into an interesting free-form workspace that could be used to write documents collaboratively, plan events, play games or discuss recent news. Google has announced this as an open source project and is publishing all the standards at www.waveprotocol.org The ripples of this Google wave have potential of impacting the technology world for decades to come.

 

Some helpful links:

Main Site: http://wave.google.com

API: http://code.google.com/apis/wave

Federation Protocol: http://www.waveprotocol.org

Web Toolkit: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit