Gut feeling no more - a new device to treat obesity

The WSJ reports on a new medical device approved by the FDA

The device, made by EnteroMedics Inc. of St. Paul, Minn., is the first of its kind to treat obesity by targeting nerves that link the stomach and the brain. The Maestro Rechargeable System would block electrical signals in the abdominal vagus nerve by dispatching high-frequency electrical pulses.

The device is one of a series of products called neuro-modulators that target nerves for a variety of conditions ranging from pain to Parkinson’s disease.

157 patients with the working device lost 8.5% more of their excess body weight than did the control group.

The technology to detect and manipulate the nervous system is getting better. Today, we can get computers to orchestrate bodily functions that we no longer can control, e.g. due to obesity, injury, or brain problems. As the interfaces between biological and computer signals improve, we will see more bio-apps that take advantage of the exponentially growing cloud capabilities.

tags: innovation, control, cloud, interfaces

Cloud security: a new kind of an arms race in 2014

To me, the most interesting high-tech trend to watch in 2014 will be the competition between US government agencies, e.g. NSA, and US private high-tech companies, e.g. Google, Facebook, and others. Given the recent court decision, we can easily predict that the US government will continue intercepting, storing, and decrypting private and commercial electronic traffic. On the other hand, cloud companies like Google built their business on user trust and data security. They've already started the process of rethinking system security, including broad use of strong encryption algorithms.

An implicit assumption in the industry is that if the government can break into your data then any skilled hacker can do the same. In short, the deliberate weakening of security standards creates a direct threat to commercial cloud computing. As a result, we should see an arms race between the government and businesses in the area of digital security. Before, arms races were an exclusive domain of rival governments. Today, the global nature of the Internet brings a new category of players into the picture. We should expect exciting innovations ahead. Maybe even quantum computing will become a reality sooner, rather than later.

tags: innovation, internet, cloud, security, battle

Lunch Talk: (@Google) Signal vs Noise

In the 2012 presidential election, Silver correctly predicted the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Between his electoral and popular vote predictions, he was by some measures the most successful major forecaster of the presidential election. Silver's predictions of U.S. Senate races were correct in 31 of 33 states; he predicted Republican victory in North Dakota and Montana, where Democrats won. --Wikipedia

Nate Silver joins Hal Varian (Google's Chief Economist) to talk about his book "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't" and answer Googler questions.

tags: lunchtalk, control, cloud

Internet cloud is becoming a utility.

Nocira, a startup founded by Martin Casado and Nick McKeown from Stanford University and Scott Shenker from University of California at Berkeley, is pushing for complete virtualization of network services.

Feb 5, 2012. VBeat -- It’s a new version of virtualization, but one for the whole network. With virtualizaiton software like VMware, a single computer can use translation software to behave as if it were dozens of different computers at once. Each “virtual machine” is a compartment within the computer that serves a particular user. But since that user isn’t using the computer, the computer can be rededicated to serve other users. It’s a more efficient way to use computers and serve users. The virtual machines can be created as needed to serve the demands of users within minutes.

 

Nocira's patent application Method and Apparatus for Implementing and Managing Virtual Switches  shows a translation layer sitting between user-level services and cloud hardware. When implemented, this should increase demand for computing power and memory inside the switching fabric. 

tags: cloud, networking, distribution, security

Joyent vs Amazon

Joent is a cloud provider that intends to out-innovate Amazon.

Jan 23, 2012. VBeat -- San Francisco-based Joyent was founded in 2004 and has about 150 employees. It also has offices in Vancouver, Singapore and Geneva. The company plans to announce other “exciting” partnerships in the near future that will enable the company’s services in even more countries.

Here's how they see their  cloud orchestration services

Note that one of the pillars is Node.js - a JavaScript-based web server technology. It's hard to believe that Java Script, a scripting language designed by Netscape to execute simple logic within their browser, is now at the core of a cloud computing architecture. Who would've thunk!

tags: cloud, technology, evolution

The second+ dimension of the Internet infinity.

Here's another piece of data confirming the trend that the web (as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1980s) is going away.

December 29, 2011. VBeat - Most interestingly, however, is the switch from browsing to application usage. In the three months prior to this current study, 42.1 percent more people used their browsers to get information, compared to the 41.6 percent that used apps. Now, however, applications have taken the lead by .5 percent. The percentage is small, but shows a significant shift in how people consume information on their mobile devices.

The new devices (touchscreen mobiles and tablets) provide  a richer set of options for user interaction than the good old web browser on PC. The old web is infinite, but linear. That is, you can jump from link to link in one dimension only. [The original web was unidirectional, but Google made tons of money by discovering a way to go back and forth between links.]

On the other hand, applications that take advantage of the touchscreen interface provide a way to explore the depth of information, i.e. zoom in and out of streams of data. It will take time to create high-performance zoomable streams, but the transition is already under way.

tags: system, evoloution, tool, s-curve, trend, mobile, cloud 

Is your toaster watching you?

CNet reports on Siemens buying eMeter, a big data utility metering software startup.

Note how the article confuses cause and effect. Imagine you are a power utility. When you collect user information once a month no big data processing capability is necessary. But when you collect it every 15 minutes - an almost 3,000 increase in frequency - all of a sudden you have a lot of data to process. Therefore, the reason for new challenge is not the need for improved billing, but the new ability to collect and analyze private information that generate an avalanche of data.

(Dec 5, 2011. CNet) - By collecting data such as customer power consumption every 15 minutes, utilities can automatically read meters and get a better understanding of demand trends. Energy usage information can also be presented to consumers through a dashboard or dedicated device to help consumers lower utility bills. 

One of the challenges for utilities is that water, gas, and electricity meters create masses of data that has to be collected over different networks and then integrated into systems. Tying meter data into billing applications, for example, helps utilities streamline their operations. 

Last week, a lot of consumer wrath was directed at Carrier IQ collecting mobile data. The company was even accused of breaking federal wiretap laws. The case shows that the we are still in early stages of system growth, with most basic security issues unresolved. For example, enterprise use of smartphones  with unauthorized third party software is a huge security hole.

I would argue that, privacy-wise, the new big data capabilities of the utility companies is as invasive as Carrier IQ. By correlating your water, electricity, and internet use data, the utilities can figure out why, when, and how you use your home appliances.

tags: 10X, control,detection, energy, privacy, cloud

What's good for shopping is good for Amazon.

VBeat has an interview with Thomas Kelly, enterprise architect for cloud services at Best Buy:

(November 30, 2011) - Today, Best Buy runs a hybrid cloud with best-of-breed applications and IT governance in place. It also leverages the entire suite of Amazon data products, and even encourages programmers to experiment with new technologies

“Anything without governance becomes a failure potential,” Kelly said. Best Buy manages enormous amounts of data, undertakes hundreds of new IT projects each year and is responsible for continuous lifecycle management, which makes governance a must, he said.

 Amazon is essentially a "shopping cloud" with Kindle Fire as a front end. Soon, no matter where you shop, the chances are your order will be executed by Amazon's servers.

tags: cloud, source, tool, system, commerce, control, synthesis, platform

Human brains as spare parts.

Having an infinite pool of qualified networked workers, i.e. the crowd, allows applications to use them as interchangeable parts. Humanoid, a new cloud-based crowdsourcing service, enforces performance standards among anonymous brain "suppliers".

Nov 2, 2011. VBeat. ”We launched SpeakerText, and it took us about a year and a half to get actual quality results from Mechanical Turk,” Mireles told VentureBeat. The problem, Mireles said, is that it was extremely difficult to ensure the quality of an anonymous, distributed workforce. For every dollar the team spent on labor on Mechanical Turk, it had to spend two dollars on quality assurance and cleanup.

Using statistics to predict how accurately a task will be completed based on a worker’s past performance, Humanoid is able to judge whether a worker is showing signs of fatigue, or if other factors could be interfering with the completion of a task. When these warning signs arise, the job is rerouted to another distributed worker who can meet the company’s standards, so no time is lost fixing work that is not up to snuff.

 The system would make Frederick W. Taylor very proud.

tags: control, cloud, information, commerce, 10X, problem, solution

Healthcare as a social network.

New sensors, many as easy to apply as a small bandage or stick-on tattoo, can wirelessly track body heat, heart rate, perspiration and other vital signs and send the information wirelessly to a mobile phone, tablet or computer.

10-15 years from now this technology will go mainstream. It will produce large amounts of very useful health information that can be analyzed to prevent lifestyle-related diseases: from heart attack to diabetes to carpal tunnel syndrome. Since no doctor today can process that much information, we should expect a revolution in healthcare services. Or rather than expect, we should start making it happen.

Also related: Reality Mining.

tags: health, source, detection, system, s-curve, problem, 10X, cloud

Internet weather forecast: cloudy, with lots of smartphones.

Transition to Internet cloud is becoming unstoppable. One of the strongest indications of impending massive growth is concerted industry efforts to standardize a new technology. By standardizing, market players try to turn a unique technical solution into a commodity so that they can ship boatloads of cheap substitutes as well as complimentary products.

Today, the Open Virtualization Alliance, a standards consortium of companies focused on server-side virtualization, announced new membership numbers - 200 from 65 three month ago. According to CNet, the key issues they are trying to address:

• Economics--VMware [the dominant virtualization vendor] currently controls pricing. Having a credible choice gives customers an ability to negotiate with their vendors. An open alternative gives more leverage.
•  ...They [VMWare] are also seeing customers moving from testing private clouds to starting to deploy automated, standardized infrastructure at scale.

Even if the consortium does not succeed for a while - standards always take time - the standardization effort itself shows that:
a) the technology works and many people know how to produce it;
b) the technology scales, i.e. it can be deployed in a large number of instances;
c) the need to scale the technology is real.

In addition to that, Microsoft announced that Windows 8, its next generation OS will be more virtualization friendly than Windows 7, and [separately] the company is in discussions with Comcast and Verizon to enable video streaming to XBox. Again, the intent is to make the cloud cheap and scalable.

tags: cloud, system, s-curve, infrastructure, information, computing, 10X, growth, source, microsoft, internet

Stop digging ditches. Invest in clouds.

The world of books, including basic technologies and business models involved, is undergoing a major change. According to CNet:

Amazon is reportedly planning a Netflix-like subscription service for e-books, in a move that would be another perk for Amazon Prime subscribers.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is in talks with book publishers about subscription access to a library of e-books.

It's quite possible that for certain schools and cities it would be less expensive to contract with Amazon than build and maintain public book collections. Quiet study rooms that libraries provide today can be also replaced with interactive online lessons, etc.

I wish that instead of using stimulus money on roads and powerlines, which are elements of the 20th century infrastructure, we spend our taxes on broadband access and building new educational tools. Rather than forcing Amazon to collect state taxes, the governments should work out deals with the company to provide communities with access to knowledge.

Mr. President, do you hear me?

tags: education, information, distribution, business, model, cloud, 10X, bet, infrastructure

Trade-off of the Day: Ease of access vs Security.

From MIT Tech Review:

Employees using such gadgets to connect remotely to company servers and e-mail accounts can boost efficiency; but the practice also creates security challenges. Companies will have to learn how to overcome those challenges for the distributed office of the future to succeed.

Breaking this trade-off will enable the next wave of internet (for the lack of a better word) innovation. tags: mobile, internet, control, trade-off, information, cloud, breakthrough, growth

How embodied math shapes us, humans.

Kevin Slavin about the world of algorithms (15 min TED video):

"... these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. ... we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control. ... we are writing what we can't read."



tags: problem, solution, control, 10x, tool, cloud, art, science, deontic, video, social, intelligence, scale, detection, creative crowd

My last year's prediction about a steep drop in electronic book prices is coming true. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Amazon.com Inc.'s top 50 digital best-seller list featured 15 books priced at $5 or less on Wednesday afternoon. Louisville businessman John Locke, for example, a part-time thriller writer whose signature series features a former CIA assassin, claimed seven of those titles, all priced at 99 cents.

All-you-can-eat book subscriptions, today we call them libraries, is probably one of the logical scenarios. Amazon or Netflix could become such new digital libraries, providing easy access for various e-readers.

tags: source, payload, service, cloud, distribution, s-curve, maturity, storage

Ultimate cloud computing

Wired writes about a new supercomputing intelligence device in the skies above Afghanistan:

It’ll be floating 20,000 feet above the warzone, aboard a giant spy blimp that watches and listens to everything for miles around.

The idea behind the Blue Devil is to have up to a dozen different sensors, all flying on the same airship and talking to each other constantly. The supercomputer will crunch the data, and automatically slew the sensors in the right direction: pointing a camera at, say, the guy yapping about an upcoming ambush.

The goal is to get that coordinated information down to ground troops in less than 15 seconds.

===

Besides military and law enforcement applications, can we use this technology for improving wireless data communications for mobile devices, e.g. during large public events? Probably, yes. Unlike drones, a blimp in the sky would work better as a local network hub than a communications satellite, just hang a bunch of antennas and solar panels on it. Even better, make the whole thing out of a solar power-generating fabric.

tags: cloud, computers, communications, military, privacy, video, mobile, dynamic, system, control, drones, energy

Cloud computing: the gossip of virtual crops

Each day, Facebook game developer and FarmVille creator Zynga delivers about a petabyte of data — that’s 1 million gigabytes, or more than six Libraries of Congress — for its array of social games, chief technology officer Cadir Lee said.

The challenge for Zynga is unique compared to other large sites that are “read-only” or “input-only,” such as photo-sharing sites like Flickr or e-commerce sites like Amazon.com, Lee said. Zynga instead faces an environment that is constantly updating, with each new crop planted or fertilized and each message left on a friend’s farm.

In many ways today's gaming environments create a ubiquitous communications fabric reminiscent of the planet Pandora from James Cameron's movie Avatar; environments where virtual plants and animals communicate to real people, generating enormous streams of information, connecting experiences bordering on magic, giving players a feeling of being a part of a growing social organism.
It would be an interesting experiment to use these messages to drive Leo Villareal's LED art mentioned in my previous post. Some incredible light patterns may emerge from the gossip of virtual crops.

tags: games, cloud, information, communications, environment, virtual, art, 10x, content, synthesis

More on Amazon from VentureBeat:

Amazon Web Services has become a huge business, with revenues of $500 million in 2010, according to UBS Investment Research. And that success is due in no small part to the rapid rise of social games such as FarmVille on Facebook.

...Amazon hosts six to eight of the top 10 games on Facebook at any given time. That includes top Zynga and EA Playfish games, meaning that hundreds of millions of players are playing games on Amazon’s servers, without even knowing it. Overall, Amazon has hundreds of thousands of customers in 190 countries for its web services. It also powers big operations such as Netflix, NASA, Autodesk, NASDAQ and the New York Times.

Cloud services is only about 2% of Amazon's revenue. But still it's a good, and growing, chunk of change. I wish I bought their stock around July 1, this year.

tags: cloud, information, service, source, games, virtualization, commerce

Prisoner's Dilemma: PC vs mobile

Prisoner's Dilemma is a descriptive title for a strategy problem in game theory. It got its name from a hypothetical situation when two prisoners who stand accused of committing a major crime, e.g. an armed robbery, are interrogated separately by the police. The police have arrested them on a smaller charge and currently doesn't have any direct evidence that connects the prisoners to the armed robbery. If both prisoners stay silent they will receive a short sentence of several months in jail. If both of them confess they get 5 years in prison each. If one of them confesses, but the other stays silent, the first one goes free, while the second gets a 10 year sentence. It's a famous example - you can read an extensive description of how it works in Wikipedia and other sources.

Obviously, it would be better for the prisoners if both of them stayed silent and as the result got the lighter sentence. But game theory analysis shows that the most likely outcome of the game is when both of them confess and each gets 5 years in prison. The key to understanding this craziness is to appreciate the fact that the prisoners cannot communicate with each other and they don't trust each other. As a consequence, they choose to confess and get 5 years, rather than stay silent and have the other guy confess, which would cause him go free and you'd get 10 years in prison.

Now, let's turn to consider the world of mobile communications. It seems to me that Apple and Google are playing Prisoner's Dilemma in this space. Had they decided to cooperate in making iPhone a dominant destination device for media and cloud services, both companies would have benefited enormously: Apple on the hardware and media side; Google on the search and cloud computing side. But, Google seemes to choose the "confess" position. That is, rather than building apps and services exclusively for iPhone/iPad/iWhatever, they make an extensive effort to develop software and services for competing hardware. As a result, we can observe how Apple and Google are increasingly becoming marketplace adversaries. For example, recently Apple announced iAd, its own ad platform, which threatens Google's ad business on iPhone.

This situation stands in marked contrast with the 30-year old Intel-Microsoft relationship that made both companies dominant in their respective hardware and software PC business domains. Comparing the situations, I can't help but conclude that there's a lot more trust and communication between PC industry leaders than between Apple and Google.

tags: battle, technology, strategy, system, information, evolution, competition, mobile, cloud

A healthcare system for trucks

Large fleet operators, such as UPS, Hertz, FedEx, and others, perform regular scheduled maintenance on their vehicles. UPS has moved one step further and introduced a "lifestyle-depended" maintenance system, which takes into account real-time and historical diagnostics data. The data is gathered by a "dumb" telemetry device embedded into each truck, then transmitted, stored, and compared to similar information captured from other trucks. As a result, the company is able to save millions of dollars by discovering and changing patterns of behavior of truck drivers, mechanics, and suppliers.

For the sake of comparison, UPS runs a population of tens of thousands of trucks. This is the size of a small town in the US. And we don't have anything even close to such lifestyle-oriented healtcare system for humans. Trucks' health is better managed than people's.

tags: detection, control, storage, distribution, problem, solution, information, cloud, health, 10x,