Web and TV

The Web is already the platform for the TV, one good example is the BBC iPlayer, “With BBC iPlayer you can catch up with the programmes from the past seven days you've missed or want to watch again free of charge by playing them direct on the BBC iPlayer website or downloading them to your computer. As long as you are in the UK and connected..” [1] But this new service from the BBC is bringing an important issue about who should pay for extra network costs, this is really a hot issue because on-demand TV is the trend and the people are already using it (that’s the reason of a service). Something that is for sure is that internet service providers (ISPs) will have to upgrade their infrastructure if they want to still in the business because there are hidden costs for watching TV online. [2] One solution for the TV online is the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and is already developing.. “Broadcasters and content providers consider P2P as a future-proof, universal, and ubiquitous two-way (interactive) distribution mechanism. Initially, P2P will complement the existing distribution mechanisms such as satellite, cable and terrestrial networks, but ultimately it may supersede them. The P2P-Next Project extends the notion of a conventional media distribution network. It introduces a concept of on-demand, personalised, and social network. “[3] That’s a perfect solution because TV online is there for millions of users.

Another type of TV is fastcompany.tv, they have a different service it’s a Web exclusive channel and all the videos are oriented for the Internet, Robert Scoble is doing an amazing job there. [4]

The Web is morphing and creating new fields, we are going to start to use it more and more and new stuff will come up in the future. But not only you can see all what you get from the Web in computers and devices, now you can see all that stuff in a normal TV that’s using Nintendo Wii the BCC iPlayer is working with that too. [5]

[1] http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/help/about_iplayer/
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/04/
hidden_costs_of_watching_tv_on.html
[3] http://www.p2p-next.org/
[4] http://www.fastcompany.tv/
[5] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/04/
bbc_iplayer_on_wii.html

La decisión de conquistar el exoplaneta Yecta (Ficción - capítulo 1) / The decision to conquest the exoplanet Yecta (Fiction - chapter 1)

This post is in Spanish I will translate to English as soon as I can, because I want to be part of this world wide conversation (the default language is English). This post is the first one about how could be the conquest of new exoplanets, is complete science fiction (if its possible to call that), I made up everything. Why I am writing this type of post?, because I believe next century will be the space conquest.

Este post es el primero de una serie de escritos acerca de cómo podría ser la conquista de nuevos exoplanetas, es ciencia ficción (si es que se puede llamar así esto), todo es inventado. ¿Por qué escribo este tipo de post?, porque el próximo siglo va ser el de la conquista del espacio.

La decisión de conquistar el exoplaneta Yecta (capítulo 1)

Estamos un poco más de la mitad del siglo XXII DC, para ser exactos en el 2157 (200 años después del inicio de la conquista del espacio por el Sputnik de los soviéticos en 1957). Se ha creado una comisión multi-civilización para poder organizar la conquista de cinco exoplanetas habitables para los seres humanos. Estos exoplanetas se llaman Yecta, Presina, Bacs, Trepid y Zapit, fueron descubiertos en 2050, 2085, 2105, 2115 y 2130 respectivamente. El planeta más cercano se encuentra a 300 años luz que es Yecta con una masa el doble que la Tierra y con el 65% de su superficie con agua. Gravita alrededor de una estrella que es la mitad de nuestro Sol, pero suficientemente grande como para calentar al planeta, se encuentra en la galaxia Retfer-508. Yecta tiene una fauna y flora muy desarrollada sin embargo no existe vida más inteligente ni desarrollada que los humanos, lo que existe es un animal llamado Yectabulus que es el más inteligente según las investigaciones hechas y probablemente sino hay intervención de ninguna clase en el futuro podría llegar a dejar de ser un animal y convertirse en una especie inteligente y dominante en ese planeta, pero eso esta descartado, ya que los humanos están dispuestos a colonizar el planeta y convertirla en la segunda Tierra. ¿Por qué queremos ir a otro planeta?, hay varias respuestas pero las principales son: estamos sin recursos para alimentar y dar trabajo a los más de 20 mil millones de humanos, problemas con el clima y existe el miedo latente que brote alguna epidemia mundial.

La coalición de todas las civilizaciones ha llegado al consenso que ahora somos una sola mega-civilización los Terrícolas y estamos preparados para ir a conquistar planetas, así daremos el paso a la inmortalidad como especie y asegurarnos que la humanidad siga creciendo. La coalición ya ha estado trabajando en juntar y anidar todas las tecnologías que cada civilización ha ido desarrollando a lo largo de estos últimos 100 años. Es sorprendente como algunas sociedades han llegado a desarrollar tecnologías tan sofisticadas, como la computación donde las cadenas de bits son representadas a nivel sub-atómico, además de poder representar la data y hacer cálculos muy complejos a través de concentraciones químicas (computación química) que pueden ser robots amorfos (tipo gel) con la capacidad de separase y convertirse en robots más chicos y trabajar independientemente, la Web y la realidad virtual ha convergido y nos ha dado una nueva dimensión muy compleja; la robótica más la inteligencia artificial ha logrado la creación de robots que continuamente aprenden y toman decisiones y nos ayudan en diversas tareas; la nanotecnología que esta en todo lado; la hibernación humana; naves espaciales que vuelan a velocidades supersónicas duplicándose incrementalmente cada minuto.

Son las 15:00 horas en la ciudad de Bruselas y se va a dar inicio a la convención para definir como se va a realizar esta conquista que compete a toda la humanidad.

Cloud Computing and Information's Mines

“The World’s primary compute is or could be Google’s cloud, its a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates one million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes.. A move towards clouds signals a fundamental shift in how we handle information. At the most basic level, it's the computing equivalent of the evolution in electricity a century ago when farms and businesses shut down their own generators and bought power instead from efficient industrial utilities.” [1]

As you can see we are in the path to change the way we interact with information, humankind is in constantly move (traveling around the world), we need to access to our information in every place, we have laptops, mobiles as devices to access information, but where do we store our files, calendar, apps, etc ??, it can be saved in the devices, but if I want to backup all my information, how and where do I put it ??. Its clearly that the answer is in the big cloud, almost like the matrix it can do all that stuff, so where do we go next??, that’s a very good question, I think that we are in an early stage about the cloud computing, people have to get use to have their information in the cloud and trust the way we do with electricity. The cloud will be there for hundreds of years, the next step is to manage the way we put our digital footprint on the net and be able to retrieve all that digital footprint the we as humankind left. Another thought that come to me about the cloud is the huge information that it has/have, every cloud could be seen as a mine, digging all those mines will be a very challenging task, in the future those clouds will have all our information recorded.

“Humanity emits the data, and a handful of companies—the likes of Google, Yahoo!..., or Amazon.com …—transform the info into insights, services, and, ultimately, revenue … Yahoo Research Chief Prabhakar Raghavan, "there are only five computers on earth." He lists Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. Few others, he says, can turn electricity into computing power with comparable efficiency. ”[1]

Very interesting the way those companies use the information to gain revenue, that’s that way this information economy works out, making profit from the services and the information that we put in the Internet. I can see many application that could be developed using web intelligence, is just amazing how we are getting more and more connected between us and the mass information that we generate every second.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_52/b4064048925836.htm

The birth of a new science - The Web Science

For all of us that follow the Web environment, this news is great. What are the implications??, there are many, now we (human beings) will study something that we make every second, is our own material made by millions of persons with different thoughts, this is like a new mine (information mine) that we will going to dig up maybe for ever, is an endless resource, and the best thing is that we are the contributors of it. In the official web site said “The Web is the largest human information construct in history. The Web is transforming society. In order to...” [1] the answer is in our research.

“This is a multi-disciplinary effort to study the web and try to guide its future… Sir Tim explained that there were now more web pages than there are neurons in the human brain, yet the shape and growth of the web were still not properly understood” [2]

Is the beginning of a new science that will help a lot to understand us.

[1] http://webscience.org/

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7299875.stm

Image Search Engine in third place!!

My friend Javier Montoya [1] (he has a MSc in Computer Science and his field is image recognition) and me suspected that image search was already a trend, but that was an assumption based in our observations and requirements, today we read that Google Image Search is the third engine most popular [2]. This corroborate that vertical search engines could be a serious competence for the classical engines, you could say that this image search engine is just another feature in Google engine, that’s truth but the fact that is the third one most used means that is already an important type of query and I’m convinced that the merge of image retrieval and web intelligence could make a really useful and powerful tool that has many interesting features, is just the beginning of a new era??.

[1] http://www.lis.ic.unicamp.br/~jmontoya/

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7226100.stm

Yahoo in the middle??

After read some articles about the Microsoft move, its obvious that is a big issue especially for Google that is concerned (Microsoft is worry too in a different way). Google has a point when it said that Internet openness and innovation are very important for the users. About the openness its important to develop web-apps (web-services) with the industry standards in order to avoid monopolies approaches and use the best, innovation on the other hand is the core of the Internet’s success and growth, they also have another point when they addressed: “Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?”[1]. But the Internet is a complete different platform than the operating system (OS), this runs on many servers (most of them use Linux) that are distributed around the world, this mean that the information / knowledge (data) is in many servers and not in a unique computer, which makes the Internet a perfect environment for innovations. With that type of environment like cloud computing (users can store information and use apps in a complete online environment), could be the next default step for users and Google might be developing now some OS for that (they are already building an OS for mobiles), maybe Microsoft is afraid about that possibility. At the middle of this issue is Yahoo because it has useful apps and millions of users, but I think that it cannot develop a new OS that could run on a cloud computing environment (that’s Microsoft possible one concern now) and also it cannot eat more slices from the advertising cake that Google eat up more and more (75 percent [2]). So that puts Yahoo in the middle of both companies.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/yahoo-and-future-of-internet.html

[2] http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/feb08/
02-03Statement.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases

[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7225599.stm

[4] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/
how-google-could-keep-yahoo-from-microsoft/index.html?ref=technology

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/technology/
04yahoo.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

Microsoft and Yahoo merge??

When I read that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo for 44.6 USD billions, I just said WOW!!. I don't think that Yahoo is worth that, especially now that its shares are down and they could not make a real competence to Google last year (2007), the company is clear losing territory on the Web arena, while Google is still growing and making a lot of money. For me is obvious that Microsoft has realized that there is some king of Googlelization going on, that's a threat for them, but the point is that Google has figure out long time ago (maybe since its beginnings) that software has become a service and should be free in some cases. This paradigm works complete different because the product must be on the Web, friendly and very useful, it must give value to the users' information and those things has been Google's goals. Another threat for Microsoft, Yahoo and also Google are the vertical search engines that are going to be more popular, those engines will have more web intelligence (Web 3.0) algorithms, so the user experience will be complete different, I mean the websites are going to be more intelligence and the merge between the Web and the virtual worlds will definitely change the way we perceive the Internet. About Microsoft and Yahoo they will have to work together in putting the Office suite online, that's basically the main product of Microsoft and Google is developing that, actually they have already a suite online, on the other hand Yahoo has Flickr that has many users and has become an example of how users interact with the applications and also has a huge image database, the challenge that both companies have are enormous, they must eat up more slices from the advertising huge cake and put more software as services, they might have to re-design their business model.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7222114.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7222199.stm
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/technology/
01cnd-subyahoo.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin