Despite the fact it won’t be released until later this year, Google Wave is already be hailed as the latest in disruptive technological innovation. Perfectly in sync with online communications’ accelerated merge towards singularity, Google Wave is an integrated email, web chat, IM, and project software. Welcome to the latest advancement in the new communication paradigm.
Adam
Interactive Services
Ashworth College
Even late adopting Twitter cynics might need to listen up as Google’s Larry Page recently admitted that the world’s most powerful technology company is currently falling behind Twitter in the “real time” information wars. Beyond the celebrity hype and media obsession, Twitter is at its’ core a paradigm shifting information communications tool, one that is playing a radical role in the development of tomorrow’s semantic web environment. Check out the following article to learn more and be sure to follow Ashworth College on Twitter as well!
Adam
Interactive Services
Ashworth College
As someone who floats through the real-time stream to service, inform, and share information content with our various Ashworth College student communities, I’ve had an opportunity to watch the Internet literally being reinvented as it happens. As with any other paradigm shifting technology, the revolution in web and mobile communications, essentially still in its’ beta stage, is placing an incredible amount of pressure on traditional web sites/pages to evolve their services, features, and interface designs to compliment the speed of the the stream. The following article from Techcrunch provides a great overview of the challenges being faced and the “big picture” implications of the real-time stream.
If you’d like to keep up with Ashworth College in the stream, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Thanks…
Adam
Interactive Services
Ashworth College
Just when you think that Google might have a search competitor in the highly hyped, but yet to be released computationally driven semantic search engine, WolframAlpha, the stealth masterminds at Google are primed to launch a data structuring monster known as Google Cubed. Check out the video above and read Michael Arrington’s blog over at Techcrunch to learn more. Somebody stop them!
Adam
Interactive Services
Ashworth College
According to a stunning report released by Nemertes Research last week, the Internet is running out of bandwidth. The report predicts that consumer demand, already growing at 60 percent a year, will start to exceed supply as early as 2010 because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry Web sites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer. This is not the first industry based report to announce this approaching dilemma. U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T released identical findings last April in a presentation made in England. At the same time, AT&T reported that they alone are spending 20 billion dollars to upgrade its backbone network, this only part of the 130 billion dollars being spent worldwide.
Another recent study by the University of Minnesota also estimated that traffic was growing by at least 60 per cent a year, although that did not take into account plans for greater internet access in China and India. So with all this money being spent on infrastructure, why are we seemingly running out of bandwidth?
The answer according to experts is streaming media. YouTube it seems has changed everything. According to the Nemertes Report, the amount of traffic generated each month by YouTube is now equivalent to the amount of traffic generated across the entire internet in all of 2000. A perfect example is the fact that 100 million people have streamed the Susan Boyle’s video alone in the past couple of weeks. Another so-called “net bomb” being studied by Nemertes is BBC iPlayer, which allows viewers to watch high-definition television on their computers. In February there were more than 35 million requests for shows and iPlayer now accounts for 5 per cent of all UK internet traffic. Again, AT&T reported similar statistics in their report last April. Their report stated that eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today.
Indeed the amount of traffic generated on the Internet today is inconceivable. Analysts express such traffic in exabytes – a quintillion (or a million trillion) bytes or units of computer data. One exabyte is equivalent to 50,000 years’ worth of DVD-quality data. Monthly traffic across the internet is running at about eight exabytes.
The analysts behind these predictions are not stating that the Internet is going crash. What they warn of is the possibility of Internet brown outs throughout the world. Computers will be disrupted and will be clipped from the Internet for several minutes at a time throughout the day. At a time though when many businesses are moving their IT operations to a “Cloud Computing” model, Internet dependability will be critical.
There are a number of experts who question these dire predictions but no one questions the idea that future Internet demand is growing exponentially. Says one AT&T Vice President, “In only a matter of years, the Internet traffic generated by twenty household will exceed the total Internet traffic of today.”
Brad Rudisail
Computer Network Technician-Network Security Instructor
Ashworth College
Steven Wolfram is regarded as one of the most brilliant physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and all around geniuses of his generation. Creator of the groundbreaking computational software program, Mathematica, and author of an equally breaking scientific treatise, A New Kind Of Science, Wolfram’s efforts are consistently marked by radical innovation.
Scheduled for a May launch, there’s been an incredible amount of buzz in the tech world about Wolfram’s latest project, a potentially game changing “semantic” search engine presently known as WolframAlpha. It’s obviously too early to tell if WolframAlpha will be capable of reinventing search as we know it, but this promises to be a very compelling project to follow.
Adam
Interactive Services
Ashworth College School Of Information Technology
Seen by many social media insiders as a sign of Facebook’s growing concern over Twitter’s explosive rise, Facebook has launched its’ open stream API that will provide users with greater control over content and developers with direct access to the source itself. Perhaps motivated more by necessity than choice, but this is nonetheless a sign of Facebook’s increasing openness.
I just finished reading Scoble’s take on this initiative and he raises several interesting points. Check it out here.
Adam
Interactive Services
Ashworth College
Video courtesy of David Leach at ZDNet.
I went to an IT seminar the other day. One of the subject presentations concerned the topic of Unified Communications, also known as UC. UC has been around five years or so. Traditionally it has referred to the process of converting Voice over IP into email, thus allowing someone to read their voice mails in Outlook. Today, UC encompasses the entire gamut of digital communications – Voice, Email, Text, IM, etc.
The presentation discussed industry trends and how those trends are forcing businesses to turn to or expand their UC operations. One of the more interesting terms mentioned throughout the morning was “Human Latency”. An example of human latency is voice mail. When a customer leaves a voice mail for you, there is a latency period in which you must be alerted of the voice mail, check your voice mail, and then return the call. As anyone knows, it can take hours if not days to get a return phone call. In the fast paced life of today, there are a number of people for which human latency is no longer an option, thus these people do not leave a voice mail. Yes, traditional voice mail is becoming antiquated. In fact, according to industry experts, there is a segment of our society who will not use the telephone at all in dealing with a business. This is forcing companies to transform their Call Centers into Contact Centers as a growing number of their customers do not use a telephone, preferring text, IM or some other type of digital format.
Another term discussed in the presentation was the idea of Presence. Twitter is an example of presence. It confirms to people what your current status is and if you are available for communication. Again, growing numbers of customers are expecting to be able to view the presence status of their assigned sales person, agent, etc. Should the person that they wish to contact not be present, the customer will simply move on to someone else or another organization that allows them instant presence and communication access.
Another trend that is spurring the demand for UC is the nomadic worker. According to statistics, less than 2% of employees actually work at their employee’s headquarters. A majority work at some type of satellite office but many are classified as Nomadic workers. These can be sales people, support staff such as IT personnel that travel to multiple locations, etc. These employees must have the ability to receive communications of all types while on the go throughout the work day no matter where they may be.
UC even plays a role for back end staff who work at a stationary location. Enterprise IM is being used by companies today to take full advantage of the knowledge base of the organization. Should an employee need an answer to a question or require information, he or she can issue the question or request to all the staff members of a certain department or the entire organization itself and receive an reply in a matter of minutes.
Unified Communications if a booming industry and one with seemingly infinite short term growth.
Brad Rudisail
Computer Network Technician-Network Security Instructor
Ashworth College
An ongoing part of any corporate IT budget is the maintenance and support costs required to keep much of their equipment running efficiently. A product’s support cost is basically a yearly subscription for free software updates and patches as well as free technical support should it be needed (and there is needed one day). Most of the time, it allows the customer to upgrade to a newer version of the application should it be released within the time period of the support contract. This feature alone can save an organization thousands of dollars in the cost of upgrading. Eventually upgrading to a newer version is inevitable anyway as vendors will discontinue supporting older versions eventually. These costs can easily go into the six digit range.
For those of you who have a licensed copy of antivirus software of some sort on your computer, you are already familiar with the concept. For instance, let’s say you have a copy of Symantec‘s latest AV software on your computer and you have a twelve month license for it. This means that for 12 months, your computer will continue to grab all the latest Symantec antivirus updates throughout the term of the license. It will also allow you to acquire technical support of some type depending on the terms of your license free of charge. This entails either telephone or email support. Should you choose not to renew your license or subscription, the application will continue to operate and protect your computer according to the antivirus definitions it has as of the final day of the former license period. You will also not be able to obtain future technical support.
For instance, the network that I manage has a firewall to protect it. Each year we purchase a maintenance and support license for it in order to continue to get the latest patches and updates for the firewall software and for technical support. Because the firewall product is software based and does not offered in a preconfigured device, we have it running on a server which also has a service and support contract. The total yearly service and support cost for the firewall is about ten thousand dollars. In an earlier blog I talked about the prominence of Blackberry servers in networks today. We purchase a yearly Blackberry Support license for patches and updates and of course tech support. The cost structure for it is based on the number of blackberry subscribers that are serviced by the server. Again, the Blackberry Server software runs on a server which also has a yearly support contract.
Support costs go out the roof when one starts talking customized database software. Oracle, the largest database software vendor in the industry just increased their maintenance contract costs to 22% of the initial purchase cost of the software. Believe it or not, it is not uncommon for a medium sized organization to spend a half million dollars on such a software application. Large organizations can easily spend a million dollars, which translates to and annual expense of $220,000 for patches, upgrades and tech support. In a slow economy, some organizations are starting to balk at these costs. There are two options for companies not willing to continue paying for support. The first of course is to depend on your own staff for support. This sounds much easier said than done however. The other is to seek out third party support vendors who can support your products at a lower cost than the manufacturer. This is an option that is starting to appeal to a number of customers.
Brad Rudisail
Computer Network Technician-Network Security Instructor
Ashworth College
I was recently perusing an IT industry magazine which had three full page ads for a company called 1&1. The purpose of my calling these ads to attention is not to call attention to this company as I haven’t been to their website myself, but to call attention to them as a sign of where IT continues to head to; Cloud Computing.
The first ad page advertised their domain name services. As an indication of how much the cost of purchasing domain names is, they offer free private domain registration, a service which hides the personal information of the domain name owner such as address, email and other contact information. This service has been up to now an additional cost service by any domain name company I have been familiar with. The second page focused on their web services which offer 10 gig of web space for as little as $3.99 a month with 2 gig of email space. Only one dollar a month more gets you 250 gig of web drive space. Do you get the idea that web hosting costs next to nothing today?
The final page concerned their various offerings of online servers. This is the newest trend of cloud computing today. Rather than you purchase a server and house it at your business, making you responsible for its uptime and maintenance, you simply rent one of their servers to house your applications and data and access it through the Internet. They offer a server with dual core processors, 4 GB DDR RAM and a mirrored 500 GB Hard Drive for less than $200 a month. They also offer enterprise services such as email server hosting and SharePoint server hosting. This takes the burden of managing your own email or SharePoint Server away from you and hands over the responsibility to someone else.
These series of ads clearly show the many Cloud Computing type of offerings available today by many companies today and the prices is very affordable for even small business owners.
Brad Rudisail
Computer Network Technician-Network Security Instructor
Ashworth College
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