Monday, March 15, 2010

Coolest US Government Site

If you're a data person you'll love this: http://www.data.gov ... Check it out. Comment (1) #

Privacy in a Connected World

Our colleague danah boyd speaks at South by Southwest: danah boyd (she prefers no caps) gave a cogent and important keynote this weekend at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive on the nature of privacy online. Following two privacy missteps--one from Google and one from Facebook--the Microsoft social media researcher presented an impassioned argument for why privacy is not dead, and how it needs to be addressed online. In her talk, boyd suggested that public and private aren't opposites. Instead, she said, what most people call "privacy" is not so much about keeping information hidden from the world as it is about being able to predict how information is likely to travel once it is shared. As danah rightly points out, privacy does not appear to be a top-level concern for many companies -- even online companies for whom it should be (by way of reference, Microsoft has a privacy lead in every line of business). Changing privacy policies arbitrarily as some companies have reduces individuals' ability to predict where information will go. Further, and equally worrisome of course, is the fact that online conversations (of the sort that appear on Facebook and Twitter) are not transient -- a record of them lives on on a database somewhere -- forever, effectively. Do you want to be accountable for something you said when you were 13? I wouldn't -- but my son will be. PROGRAM NOTE: Again, my apologies for the sparse postings over the past few weeks and months. The book I am writing is now in its final few chapters and it is a consuming task. Comment (0) #

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Consolidation in the MDM Industry

Congrats to our pals at Initiate: IBM said Wednesday that it has agreed to buy Initiate Systems, a privately held company that makes software designed to help health care companies manage and share information. Initiate's software is geared toward customers in both the private sector and government, all of whom deal with a huge amount of health care information across different systems. Initiate's Interoperable Health software tries to help health care companies and government agencies more quickly find and share patient and clinical data, thereby saving them time and money. And Informatica has acquired Siperian as well. Comment (0) #

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Startup Scorecard

Bill Warner, founder of Avid, has a good summary of how to define a successful startup -- I like his comment that we have way, way too many single and doubles. My view is no startup should be satisfied without a realizable plan to hit the home run. Here's the skinny: Single Any growing company that is selling a successful product. This would mean any company that successfully reaches the market and serves a growing need. Essentially, you're on base once you show that more and more people need and obtain your product. Double Any growing company with sales over $10M. Triple Any growing company with sales over $100M Home Run >1B market cap Grand Slam >10B market cap Dominates its market; fast market growth Bill is writing specifically about Massachusetts tech companies but his comments apply generally. Comment (0) #

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

iPad, Blah Blah

Classic Fake Steve post on the new tablet as he "live blogs" the event: 10:56- just like Kindle, only more expensive. and you know you want it. and yes i did once say that e-readers were pointless because nobody reads books anymore. and now i'm making one. does this make sense? absolutely. 11:01- phil showing iWork. now, yes, I did say that there was no point in doing a new device unless it could do things better than a smartphone and a macbook. and yes, um, there's no way anyone will ever believe that a tablet is a better device for doing a spreadsheet or word processor. or any desktop app. but as long as we just keep saying that this is the case, maybe people will believe us. and i know what you're thinking- we came up with a new device and all we could think to do with it is run the apps that run on your iphone, and have a clone of Kindle, and now run iWork apps? um, yes. that's all we could come up with. Comment (0) #

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

The Value of Patents

Via Peter O'Kelly, a Business Week article about patents and who has the most valuable (as opposed to the largest quantity): Nonetheless, a study conducted for Bloomberg BusinessWeek by Ocean Tomo, a Chicago intellectual property consulting firm, concludes that IBM's collection of U.S. patents over the past five years ranks only eighth in value. No. 1 is Microsoft, which ranked third, with 2,906 patents issued last year. As Chair of our group's Patent Committee I can say this is an area we invest considerable energy in and I'm proud of the results of this study. Comment (0) #

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Enterprise Social

Great post by Andy McAfee on the connotations of the word "social" inside the enterprise: "It's technically accurate ...[but] I have rarely come across a word that has more negative connotations to busy, pragmatic line managers inside organizations. The best thing it is is neutral -- the worst thing it is is a sign that we're going to use these tools to waste time, to goof off, to plan happy hour, to do all these social activities. The impression I get from people who make decisions ... is "I'm not running a social club. I'm trying to run a business here." Driving some of Web/Enterprise 2.0 work here I come across this point of view occasionally and I have learned that quantifying the ROI of enterprise social networking is very difficult indeed. On the other hand the value can be immense -- just look at all the Microsoft technical blogs (!) that enable dialog between our engineers and the users of our technologies as an example. The main goal of social networking inside the enterprise is to take maximum advantage of all the IQ you've hired over the years, and while the value is sometimes hard to calculate in advance, perhaps that is the definition of a disruptive change. Comment (0) #

Cyberattacks Continue

A large and coordinated attack: Computer attacks on Google that the search giant said originated in China were part of a concerted political and corporate espionage effort that exploited security flaws in e-mail attachments to sneak into the networks of major financial, defense and technology companies and research institutions in the United States, security experts said. At least 34 companies - including Yahoo, Symantec, Adobe, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical - were attacked, according to congressional and industry sources. Google, which disclosed on Tuesday that hackers had penetrated the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights advocates in the United States, Europe and China, threatened to shutter its operations in the country as a result. UPDATE: More on this -- an appalling turn of events -- In a world where vast amounts of personal information stored online can quickly reveal a network of friends and associates, Google's move to protect individuals from government surveillance required quick action. In early January, Tenzin Seldon, a 20-year-old Stanford student and Tibetan activist, was told by university officials to contact Google because her Gmail account had been hacked. Ms. Seldon, the Indian-born daughter of Tibetan refugees, said she immediately contacted David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer. "David informed me that my account was hacked by someone in China," Ms. Seldon said in a telephone interview. "They were concerned and asked whether they could see my laptop." Ms. Seldon immediately changed her password and became more careful of what she wrote. She also allowed Google to examine her personal computer at the company's request. Google returned it this week, saying that while no viruses or malware had been detected, her account had indeed been entered surreptitiously. Google confirmed Ms. Seldon's account of events, but declined to say whether it had notified other activists who might have been victims of hacking. It is not clear who, ultimately, is responsible for these attacks, to be clear. But the question that is before the Obama administration is what to do about them, and, ultimately, if governments are behind them, at what point do they become acts of (cyber-) war worthy of retaliation? Comment (0) #

Thursday, January 7, 2010

3D Camcorder

On my wish list (but not for a while at $21,000) -- a 3D camcorder from Panasonic: Via Slashdot. Comment (0) #

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Architecture, Identity, and Terror

Some valuable and insightful posts from data experts suggesting that data sharing, and identity resolution technologies, if better used, could perhaps have thwarted the Christmas Day terror attempt. Our pal Jill Dyche writes, President Obama addressed the Christmas day terror attempt in his White House briefing this afternoon. He acknowledged that the U.S. government had botched terrorist tracking and that the system had failed. He admitted that each agency took responsibility for its own stuff. He also confessed that there was a lack of information sharing, that various government agencies had failed to pull it together. The subtext was that current practices and the best of intentions aren't enough when it comes to the war on terror. Obama sounds like a lot of corporate executives I've met. They admit that the individual departments are working hard and may be meeting their individual goals. But then something stupid happens. The company loses its largest account or a competitor beats them to the punch on a new product. The hard fact emerges that the company could have used its information better. And that siloed organizations beget siloed data. The IT challenges facing both the US government and the planet at large are significant. There are technical issues surrounding identity resolution, as Informatica VP Chris Boorman notes. Identity resolution is not simply recognizing that "John A Smith" may equal "JA Smith" may equal "Mr John Adam Smith III," although that is a key component. This is a problem that every large organization with a large number of customers or other constituents must address. Identity resolution is fundamentally a matching problem. For example, you can make assumptions that if John Smith's address is the same as JA Smith's they are the same (or their might be a filial relationship). But then matching addresses can be a particularly gnarly problem: is "31 Elm Street" equal to "31 Elm St" equal to "Elm Street a few blocks down from Starbuck's"? This makes identity resolution probabilistic and not deterministic. Now, this can have ill effects. 60 Minutes did a segment a few years back on all the (thousands of) people named "Robert Johnson" who were placed on a watch list and had to verify identity, in a time-consuming process, at the ticket counter every time they flew. (I have personal experience with this since I was also on this list for several years.) On the other hand, ensuring that the probability of a match is extremely high is a clear and important goal for algorithm developers. This is nowhere made more clear than in this report by the Center for Digital Government, "Resolving Identity: The Importance of Who's Who and the Search for the Perfect Engine." Bottom line, a core, authoritative notion of identity is essential to our security and safety in the modern world, but we should not underestimate its difficulty. Now, the processes surrounding the exchange of such information are equally challenging, although the rewards can be very high. In the 1970's, BKA (German equivalent to FBI) chief Horst Herold used data mining to discover the location of a Baader-Meinhof cell, perhaps preventing violence or loss of life. But there was a problem with Herold's approach in that it was subsequently shown to have been illegal, violating German privacy laws, and the same issues apply today both inside the US as well as across national borders. What sorts of processes can we put in place to legally allow the exchange of this sort of information? What information elements and attributes can be exchanged between which groups? Within the US the DoJ and the DHS are creating the National Information Exchange Model but the tension between privacy and security remains a conundrum. Solving it -- or even making progress against it -- will yield great benefits. Comment (0) #