Le Tour de France 2007 - Stage 8 - Oh the pain

A Danish 'chicken' takes the stage and the lead; Mick Rogers falls, dislocates shoulder and calls it quits.; Moreau attacks anything that moves. And, distressingly, O'Grady - out. McEwen - out. The GC is all over the place and it'll be on again after the rest day. Well it's exciting but it would be nice to see some racing rather than so much crashing. I'm a bit afraid to get on my bike now, watching all of this falling.

Pretty cool network management tool

I stumbled over this one, Spiceworks and thought I'd share it with you. Basically it's a network-based device discovery and management tool. It may sound dull but it's (a) free and (b) works. If you have a small LAN and hanker after something that looks around and monitors your devices - workstations, routers, whatever - this is worth a look.

Dave Ulrich on HR's arrival - or not

Dave Ulrich is famous enough in the HR game - at least amongst those who study HR, anyway - that he's always worth reading just in case. In this article in Workforce Week he stresses the need for HR to remember to explain the value it is adding to the business as well as trumpeting what it does. Selling HR, is how I'd put it.

The Business of Virtuality

The most obvious business connection is with Second Life - if only because it's had good media coverage and many corporates like IBM and Dell have built virtual spaces there already. IBM in particular (yes, yes, I work for IBM and these are my opinions, not necessarily the company's) has made a name for itself with virtual representations of open-level pro tennis matches that re-create reality ball by ball. But a metaverse of 3D worlds is being used by small and large compaines alike to promote products, hold special events, generate innovation and generally just "be there" in case it does take off. Consider these metaverse-related options...

Octaga... very business oriented, building visualisations in 3D of major projects like highways and corporate training simulations.

The Torque Game engine... very much a games engine but capable of relatively easy development and with low-latency Internetworkability - so bringing lots of people together in a virtual world - perhaps a business world - over 56kbit modems or better is a reality. C2C Simulation use TGE in their military and 'cultural' simulations.

An alternative games engine is Unreal... and it has an extensive portfolio of successful games to demonstrate its impact on the market.

Or consider the big player in MMOG, BigWorld... offering what appears to be a comprehensive suite of development and server-based operating environments that will robustly support massive multiplayer online gaming, or perhaps your corporate virtual needs.

Perhaps Open Source is your preference? Check out the Croquet Consortium... and Qwaq, a virtual corporate collaborative forum built on OpenCroquet.

Or, lastly, how about the big-iron MMOG BitVerse? Yes, I know, more IBM content but it is an interesting take on what can be done with Linux running on some big-iron servers. Taikodom from Brazil's Hoplon is the offshoot virtual social, or perhaps sci-fi, world.

Anyway, if none of that interests you I'll let you go and do some Google searches of your own... maybe start with Kaneva?

Did I mention Ford?

Ford continues to divest... after picking up all sorts of problem children that don't fit the Ford brand, and then finding that they don't actually, umm, fit, Ford has been dumping them whilst it can, and desperately using the cash released to bolster itself in a losing global play. Aston Martin is the latest to be sold. Did Ford really think Aston fitted under its wing?

I get annoyed at this rubbish

Ok, I just get annoyed, period. We all learnt about the greenhouse effect at school, right? It has never been a secret that burning coal and gas released greenhouse gases. We've known this for a few hundred years, and we've "buried" the problem until it got so bad we had to do something about it. No amount of hoping that the Earth is so big and we are so small we make it go away. We are small in comparison with the entire planet but are so numerous and voracious that inevitably we will - if we haven't already - reach the point where our consumption and pollution will impact the planet's thin but vital atmosphere. So here we are.

And yet car companies like GM still want us to believe there's a place for fat cars and big engines. Yeah, right. Like a museum.

Now GM wants us to believe that such big cars 'have a future' and indeed there is a market, so they will sell. But this is a shrinking market. GM says it has learnt from the 80s and 90s and is now aimed 'in the right direction', but how can we believe this when publicly they say the opposite? If GM wants to tie its future to the past, fine, I like tradition and history too; but it's a long way from being relevant to the marketplace. Either this GM rep (in the link above) is telling tales to bolster local (Aussie) off-shoot Holden (likely), or the company is so obsessed with itself that it can't figure out what the market wants. Let me tell you: high quality, refined, less thirsty and more efficient cars.

The mainframe goes green for IBM

One impact of global climate change will be the need to conserve resources - and one way to do that is by consolidation. In some ways this will seem like going 'back to the past'. For example more consolidated travel by public transport, less of the individual transport we have become accustomed to. The IT field is awash with individual manufactured items - from PCs to MP3 players - and unless the power needs of these devices can be met efficiently (perhaps more solar panels on MP3s and mobiles) then they too will need to be re-thought. Of course just making them is a resource hungry process, too.

The Australian Financial Review reports on IBM's mainframe resurgence. I work for IBM and own some shares, but this is not necessarily my opinion, or that of IBM itself. In any event, here's a bit of the article: Mainframes return to the main game, 30 April 2007, by Joshua Gliddon. "Some 130 kilometres east of Portland, Oregon, in a small US town called The Dalles, search engine company Google has built a giant data centre on the banks of the Columbia Rover. Its reasons for doing so have less to do with cheap labour and land than with access to cheap and relatively clean hydro-electric power.Google is not the only company building data centres where power is cheap. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft are in on the act. The latter has committed $US2 billion ($2.4 billion) to its data centre strategy. Many data centres are made up of thousands upon thousands of cheap, replaceable commodity computers. These computers can chew through huge amounts of power and generate extraordinary amounts of heat, The cooling towers in Google’s The Dalles facility are four storeys high."

Which highlights one problem - massive numbers of individual servers out there, all drawing power. And IBM's solution? IBM's Bill Zeitler said that, "instead of putting together lots of servers in a data centre, companies would move to high-end machines, or even mainframes that could “virtualise” or pretend they are lots of computers running on one box." And he went onto say, “Clients are telling us that they simply can’t get enough power into their data centres to deal with the increasing number of servers,” Mr Zeitler said. “If you can do 60 times the work using the same amount of power then there’s an incentive to move to the high-end UNIX or mainframe environment.”

Let's see what Google does to solve this problem. They are famous for re-using and chaining together massive numbers of 'el cheapo' servers in a fault-tolerant network, rather than designing or simply buying a high-end machine or 2 to do the job. It's a strategy that has paid dividends for Google. They may have more ideas up their sleeves... or they too will be looking at consolidation and vitualisation.

So how does Google actually stack up?

As a search engine, PC World reckon Google wins - just. They also suggest that their search-engine competitors are doing some innovative things that go beyond mere lists of results on a page. Check it out here.

Clearing the desk

Some things that I have on my desk to share with you today...

• Video site Metacafe looks cool... as does this Blinkx search for Alfa Romeo vids.
  
• My tumblr site is aggregating feeds from twitter and my blogs. That's cool.
  
• Jaiku does much the same but differently.
• Wharton updates us all on Russia's growing wealth (via PetroDollars, of course). Watch out for the Russian bear, it may become an economic powerhouse afterall.
• Network World reports on 'non-solicitation' clauses in IBM outsourcing contracts (doesn't mention it works both ways, by the way. OK, I work for IBM and these are my views only, not necessarily the company's, and I'm not a legal eagle either. Setting aside the thought that it should be upfront (and maybe it is?) if you are an outsourcer and have spent money and trained up staff to provide services to a client, how fair is it that the client, perhaps secretly intending to insource or just wanting to save on training and recruitment costs, offers that particular worker a job? On one hand sure, why not, it's a free country. On the other it's like free recruitment - you get to trial workers for free and virtually get a guaranteed star. At the very least should they reimburse for the training costs.? Maybe. Or impose some other restriction, which is just another way of adding "cost" to what would otherwise be a frictionless transfer of "star performers" from the outsourcer to the client. Hmmm.
• More on IBM... InfoWorld reports on IBM's embrace of MySQL (a competitor of their own DB2).
• And don't forget GeoMonkey for Google Maps with a difference.
  

Manyworlds

An excellent resource - you could call it thought leadership for business (they do) - but it's just darn interesting! Book reviews. Articles. Insight. Manyworlds. Check it out!

MBA - yes or no?

Did I need to get the MBA? No, not really - I'd probably have the job I have now at the same rate of pay. What I didn't know about ROI, payback and IRR I may have had to find out by trial and error rather than by sitting in a lecture room. But to be frank my online MS Excel training courses (done mostly on the train to and from work) have proven to be more valuable to me.

The MBA has come in handy, though. It's like being given the key to some arcane lingo - the language of business. Now you can get this key from a mentor, or from a book or a website. Or you can get the MBA, the key and the piece of paper. The advantage is that you have that piece of paper, and that helps to "prove" that you have opened the door. You still have to demonstrate your competence on the job, though. If you already have a good job and simply want to progress then get a mentor instead and do some private study. However if you want "in" then some prospective employers will expect to see that piece of paper first.

So would I do it again? Yes, if only because I enjoyed it, got to network a bit, proved to myself I could still achieve educationally and - most importantly - got a stack of great text books to keep.

Google and the ripoff merchants

Google tries hard - perhaps too hard - to use its "smarts" (the fancy, arcane and secret algorithms it's famous for) to outwit the shonky operators who lure lots of clicks via cheap Adwords search terms, only to offer them pages of hi-return ads. And gets written up in Forbes. Another fascinating read, from any perspective.

Resources for business brains

My online strategy? Basically look at and subscribe to everything then slowly weed out the chaff. Let things percolate slowly. You may think YouTube a dud but 6 months later it's gained critical mass. It happens over and over again. Look at MySpace, or the fast growing virtual world at Second Life. Now one day someone will integrate all of these social networks and kaboom. In the business of online business it's keeping your eyes open to new ideas that matters. Audio remains big on the web and in real life, and tools like Pluggd and Talkr have got to have scope to grow.

And use the resources like MBA Depot. It was a great source of articles during my MBA study and remains very useful.

The Reserve Bank's virtual museum

Well it's an interesting diversion from working on spreadsheets. Check it out here. It's pretty cool in a central-bankish sort of way.

The description: "A virtual tour of the Reserve Bank of Australia's Museum of Australian Currency Notes is now available. The interactive features of the tour include zoomable images, 360° panoramas and streaming video."

Not sure this is a good idea but here it is...

I'm not sure that Forbes intends to bring anything remotely resembling positive attention to the evil and corrupted forces behind email scams, but they have made it mildly amusing:"making his Fictional 15 debut: spam entrepreneur Prince Abakaliki of Nigeria. Abakaliki is notable for being the only fictional character on our list who regularly e-mails real people, usually begging for assistance in recovering large sums of money. We estimate Abakaliki to be worth more than $2.8 billion."

The Forbes Fictional 15 here (includes oil billionaire Jed Clampett, by the way).

War between the formats hurts uptake

Well price hurts uptake too. Why don't you toss a coin and pick between Blu-ray and HD-DVD? (Wharton's excellent article here.)I suspect that the cashed up early adopters will buy both and the less affluent will go with what looks coolest, spec-wise. So we'll see sales of both for a while until content kicks in... since you can't as yet record to either format content will be king. Which looks like a Blu-ray win to me, at this stage. But is it so?

History tells us that the 'better' Beta lost to VHS because of content - but the proliferation of VHS machines played a part, too. The lower cost machine built up more content and it all snowballed. What will make Blu-ray snowball? Games consoles? Content? It's a maybe on both counts. What could stop Blu-ray domination? Well history also tells us that what was a mess of CD, CD-R, CD-RW and other combinations of plus and minus got sorted out - to a large extent - by machines able to cope with multiple formats. Maybe that will happen again?

It's fun to watch, anyway. The fight between formats, I mean, not necessarily the content ;-)

IBM on InnovationJam and Thinkplace

IBM recently showcased the top 10 ideas generated by its employee and client online "jam". In essence the company opened up a site that allowed access to its staff as well as clients in an effort to get a wide-ranging conversation - a brainstorming - happening on future needs and possible solutions. It's mostly worthy stuff as well as potentially profitable, if the research department can make it workable. I like the "jam" idea but it does get a bit hard to see what's happening when 150,000 people are simultaneously involved. Hey, I work for IBM and I participated - but these are my opinions and not necessarily those of the corporation. It was crowded in there.

Anyway, it's come up with some good ideas - check it out at InfoWorld.

GM, hydrogen and sustainability.

Read this (from Carsguide.com.au) and have a laugh. Firstly: "The eco-friendly cars hold the potential of zero emissions and a sustainable source of energy produced when hydrogen and oxygen are mixed." How can a car be eco-friendly? It takes energy and resources to make it, distribute it and service it. It takes energy to melt it down and recycle it. It requires roads, which tar over the soil that would otherwise support plants and animals. Need I go on? It's not 'eco' friendly at all. And what the heck is 'a sustainable source of energy when hydrogen and oxygen are mixed'? Where does this 'sustainable' energy come from? By using energy to break water into hydrogen and oxygen? Where did that energy come from? Thin air?

It gets better - or worse, if you like: "Car makers claim they need help from governments in developing the infrastructure for hydrogen fuelling, he (Rick Wagoner of GM) said. 'Developing new technologies is really a team sport that requires business and governments to work together,' he said. 'It's doable, it's not that expensive, but it's going to require some work.'

It's not enough that car companies can wreak havoc on the environment and expect communities to fork out billions for road infrastructure, they also expect a subsidy for being such nice people. Please, please - catch a train instead. I love cars but I don't expect them to subsidised to the hilt. If they are worth having - and they are - they should be priced to cover the real cost - the opportunity cost - of what we lose as well as gain. And they should bear the full cost of the infrastructure. Only then will we appreciate how much it really costs when we jump in the car to go a kilometre down the road to buy some bread or milk.

These market distortions - call them externals if you like - are hiding the real cost of what we are doing to this planet. Wake up. Get a bike instead!

Another view of powerhouse India

Another view of the problems and successes of powerhouse India, from Forbes mag. A good , balanced review of the outsourcing issue plus a few anecdotes and examples of rising fortunes in IT manufacturing and the price to be paid for success. The upshot? As India rises, so do the expectations. It'll level out in the end and jobs will change but - yes - there will still be jobs.

Potential dangers with "proximity" cards

Do you have a proximity access card for your secure building, or a credit/debit card with 'tap and go' or some other variety of proximity based radio transmission of your account info? How secure do you imagine those transmissions to be? Are they encrypted? Do the POS terminals decrypt the signal, then? Do they? Are you sure? Did you ask your bank?

Well at least these RFID-based things are convenient. They must be coupled with encryption in order to defeat 'eavesdroppers' who can use sensitive antennae to pick up the RFID signal and save the info for nefarious use. If you have multiple such cards then at least you have muddied the electronic waters a bit, but a single card is prey to short range transmission - and reception. Maybe that guy in the queue behind you is reading your card right now... read the full study here (from the University of Massachusetts).