50 Trends for 2010 and Beyond. Predictions from TrendCaller.com

1. Global warming shifts focus from CO₂ to soot. While it's fairly well agreed that CO₂ has a warming effect, the frequency absorption effect diminishes for each marginal quantity. Soot has been recognized as a potentially more pressing problem in many recent articles, including those from NASA, Scientific American, BusinessWeek and U.S. News. Soot has a nasty effect of accelerating thawing of ice & snow, as well as inducing precipitation, thus exposing the underlying darker layers to absorb more heat. I even did my own study from GISTEMP data here, showing a potential for soot as a warming accelerator. Perhaps COP16 should be about soot & particulate reduction? Nice health care kicker.
   
2. Major GMO crop blights. Some GMO crops will experience catastrophic disease, pest and weed infestations due to lack of genetic diversity. In case you're wondering, in the U.S., GMO accounts for upwards of 90% of soy, 60% of cotton, and 50% of corn. This will send shock-waves through the food-chain, and an enormous backlash against GMO products and companies who produce them.
3. Continued crop yield downside due to global warming. Not only does warming displace and change weather & precipitation patterns, but it also begins the mountain snow melt earlier in the year than it should, delivering less melt-water in the Spring than expected.
4. Rare-Earth Elements (REEs) crisis. REEs are used in many interesting products from iPhones to electric motors & generators to catalytic converters. A Toyota Prius has 16kg of REEs. Unfortunately, REE mines are concentrated in China, and they're clamping down on exports. REEs are also the "dirty secret" of clean and other technologies as mining them has some potentially awful externalities such as pollution and radiation. Anywhere they exist and are mined, expect export controls, politics, and hedge funds to play. Small dislocations in politically undiversified REE markets mean huge side effects, and soon at that.
   
5. Designer babies will become mainstream. The range of genetic screening tests will increase while the costs of screening will decrease, to the point that designer IVF and prenatal screening will become mainstream. Based on desires of parents to have competitive and healthy children, designer baby screening will be compelling if not feel necessary to parents who can afford it. It may well be incentivized by the health care industry.
6. Postnatal genetic screening: first incentivized, then mandatory. Genetic screening will similarly be applied after birth, ostensibly to catch potential problems early. At first it will be optional and incentivized. Ultimately, it will be mandatory as a way to holistically "drive down health care costs".
7. Dating sites will pick up on the genetic screening craze. Have your DNA associated with your dating profile. Potential mates will have far more search criteria to work with.
   
8. Online medical records will enable huge wave of discoveries and innovations. A vast reserve of (potentially anonymized) data is a fertile ground of new and more accurate studies. The more normalized and complete the data is, the greater the innovation. Expect a big push for various interests to get wedged in between the data and its consumers. Such "brokering" will likely restrict innovation and tend to favor bigger money and political interests. Without such impediments, new innovations would potentially reduce health care costs by a significant amount and stoke a life sciences boom.
   
9. A fat reduction pill will be discovered. Health effects will likely be devastating as people will then continue to do more of what's bad for them without the aesthetic ramifications.
   
10. Out with fission, in fusion. I've had a number of researchers tell me that the viability of fusion is a matter of financing more than time. A fusion startup, General Fusion, was already funded a couple years ago with a 5-year horizon. 12-year radiation half life, what's not to like. The edge goes to the country that attracts the most talent and puts in the most financing.
    
11. The mutual and hedge fund industry will lose ground to online money managers. A new model of online site (like kaChing) lets money managers with good picks and research float to the top, and you can actively mirror their portfolio in your account. Money managers who are really good can go virtual and use the scalability and network effect to their advantage. The added transparency, real-time reporting and research, and potential interaction between clients and their money managers is very attractive. Additionally, the online model will be supplemented with a trend towards 3rd parties who provide services between clients and money managers, such as rotating between managers as macro climates change, fund-of-fund style management, performance tracking, etc. Add in that an API will allow for algorithmic trading, and things get really interesting.
    
12. The room-mate lifestyle will become the norm in countries with over-leveraged housing markets, across all ages. In the U.S. for example, all the inefficiencies have been exploited: the 10-year treasury went from yielding 16% in 1981 to less than 4% today, down-payments went from 20% to negative (cash-out), ARMs, liars loans, you name it. Real estate is tapped. In the age of austerity, the only thing left to do is to have multiple parties per home & apartment. The room-mate lifestyle is in, and will be socially acceptable. The upside is that this will lessen depression and isolation which has swept modern societies. Look to strategic room-mating as a way to reduce the need for other services such as day-care, and to reduce ownership of automobiles and other expenses. Some web2.0 usage will go down as attention spans swing back to dealing with real relationships.
    
13. Flight from the suburbs, into the cities. Public transportation will be increasingly important. Austerity will also drive a trend to go car-less and seek densities within walking distances.
    
14. 3D computer desktops and multi-media will be dominate trends for the next 10 years. If you've seen the recent movie Avatar in 3D, you'll have a good idea just how amazing 3D is. That experience will be popularized for consumer video in the home and will drive a refresh of consumer equipment which is not 3D capable. However, there is also an incredible amount of innovation yet to come in the computer desktop, which already has some 3D effects mapped to the 2D monitor. New ways of visualizing windows and content, and manipulating them will dominate desktop innovation for the next decade.
15. Prostitution will go on-line. The age of the e-hooker is near. 3D consumer equipment supplemented by tactile feedback input-output devices will enable more than just the adult film industry; it will enable sexual services. Once again, the adult industry will drive technology trends. E-prostitutes may be real "service providers" or computer programs, confusing the matter of regulation and morality even further.
16. Social prizes (Nobel, Emmy, Academy, etc) will be increasingly given to political & popular figures in attempts to influence their future actions and make populist statements. Look for the next Nobel prize to be targeted somewhere in what used to be called the "axis of evil". Similarly, awards will be given for films, songs and actors who portray and expose populist themes.
    
17. Growth and innovation will trend in countries with favorable Intellectual Property environments. An IP environment in which there is unlimited financial exposure to IP litigation does not favor small companies, because there is unlimited risk. It is nearly impossible to do proper diligence (say at $50+k per patent) of each idea that a complex technology product uses. The cost of such diligence could far outweigh a given startup's total financing. Lack of transparency of U.S. patents (the 18-month window before a patent app is published, 12-month window from provisional to regular patent filing, and the first-to-invent opaqueness) translate to an incredible risk for small and innovative companies. Small companies are the engine of job growth and innovation. Thus, this growth and innovation will be stymied in IP unfriendly regions and flourish in IP friendly regions. A balanced and sensible patent system might look something like as follows, which let's a small company have known infringement downside costs and still stay competitive if it is innovative. Note that the IP owner is incentivized to strike licensing deals instead of file law suits as follows:
    
1. First to file gets patent rights.
2. Applications are published immediately.
3. Infringement pay outs never total more than 20% of related revenue.
4. Multiple infringement claims vie for a weighted piece of the 20% pie (each new claim reduces the pay outs of the others).
5. Infringement claims only go back to the initial date of the litigation.
18. "Organic Gate". Crowd-sourced testing of organic products will reveal a substantial amount of fraud and heighten awareness of how lax the organic standards are. Commoditized testing will enable crowd-sourcing and extensive databases.
19. A Cloud Computing marketplace will be the next exchange boom. The enabler will be standardized inter-modal data transport ("FedEx net") which will allow tapes/disks to rapidly transfer huge data sets between sites without tapping network bandwidth. Expect an ecosystems of arbitrageurs, futures, derivatives and market makers to materialize. There will be many specialty cloud providers offering unique angles such as "carbon neutral datacenters", scientific computing centric, render farms (for movie animations and gaming), analytic databases, and more.
20. The next Pixar-class animation studio startup will use the cloud marketplace instead of owning it's own render farm.
21. The cure for a number of types of cancer and other maladies will come from the cloud marketplace. Genetic, drug discovery and other life science startups will use the cloud marketplace, followed by established players.
22. Deep video & audio search based on captioning and voice recognition. You will search for keywords, possibly refine by media source, and link directly to a scene in a video or time-frame in audio where the text appears. This will make searching media far more powerful, and will open up new advertising and search revenue opportunities.
23. A global tip-jar based news and media payment system will emerge. Too many one-off accounts and payment sytems are untenable for consumers. A micro-payment based tip-jar system will allow consumers to sponsor various content, potentially anonymize the consumer's identity, and fast forward through video pre-roll and interstitial adverts on-demand. Once popularized, blogging will become a very viable profession for a broader group of bloggers, as tipping will be viable & simplified for free articles as well.
24. What will push big companies to use cloud computing is overcapacity mitigation. Over-planning is necessary for private data centers, generally by a 2x normal load factor, to handle load spikes and future growth. Allowing marginal loads to spill over to public clouds during high demand periods means avoidance/delay of building new datacenter capacity (which is very expensive). Once this trend becomes more commonplace, it will be exploited for energy cost optimizations (using cheaper electricity rates in different areas or time-zones). Ultimately, companies who do not do this will not be as cost competitive.
25. Fault tolerance of data center software will become mainstream. Fault tolerance for virtualization will become commoditized and will drive a trend for increasingly cheaper hardware. Error detection will remain important, but error correction and redundancies (like dual power supplies) will be irrelevant & unnecessary.
26. Pay to enable hardware features will become popular. Processors, hard drives, smart phones and other techie equipment have become more powerful than is generally required. To cut costs of producing many SKUs and to motivate up-sells, pay-to-enable hardware will prevail. Want to enable another 2 processor cores, or another terabyte of disk, or enable 3D video on your smart phone -- pay up.
27. The dirty side of Green will receive more press. The sustainability movement talks about reducing externalities. But nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) is created in the manufacturing of thin-film photovoltaic cells and its 17,000 times more potent at global warming than carbon. As mentioned previously, rare-earth mining has some nasty toxic and radioactive externalities as well as large political risks. We'll here many more aspects of the dirty side of green. These inconvenient truths will be used along with Climate Gate as fodder against clean technology. The clean technology side will botch this debate.
    
28. Thin computing will rule. Devices which act as a remote display and input/output but harbor no data or real computing capability will be very popular. They can be extremely cheap (slim bill of materials), are great for security because the data does not exist on the device, can't be searched at the airport, and are much more data compliance friendly. Thin computing devices will enable the modernization of education in developing nations due to their low unit and IT costs (centralized management) and are interesting for home users who want a tablet like device but don't want to deal with data syncing issues between their laptops and PC.
29. Cloud computing security will be the new anti-virus.
30. E-book readers will converge with tablet computers. And will be used heavily for news and netbook like uses. They should also act as a bigger screen for your smart phone.
31. Pushback against RFID on personal items. Apparently Las Vegas casinos have very advanced RFID sensing technologies to identify customers and prevent fraud. And to know what drink to comp you with. For the rest of the world, people will push back hard on RFID embedded in things they commonly carry on their person. If there was one last bit of privacy left in the World, it goes out the door with RFID.
32. Air filtration will become popular in the home & office. With rising awareness of soot's health issues, and sizable growth in emerging economies, air filtration will enjoy significant growth. Offices and homes should be fitted with high-tech filtration systems which filter ultra-small particles, first as a differentiator and then as a necessity to stay competitive.
33. Data centers will go subterranean. Under ground is always cool and as computing moves to the cloud, more compute will be concentrated into large data centers. These "nerve centers" will be subject to more physical attack risk. Desert locations will ironically be interesting, as free sun energy on top and cooling below make a good combination. Similarly, locations near oceans (wave energy) will be interesting.
    
34. Every form of governmental fee will increase in the US. None of these increases will be included in the cost of living benchmarks. Parking tickets and moving violations will sky rocket.
    
35. Populist sites will arise to punish stocks of corporations, banks, and politicians who are not aligned with the people. Think, the Huffington Post's "Move Your Money" on steroids.
36. Defined benefit pension plans will die. They have to, as many pension plans are broken in future terms. That's what happens to Ponzi Schemes, they don't last forever.
37. The retirement age for Social Security will become floating and be keyed to demographics & average life expectancy. This won't totally fix things, until retirement is keyed to when you have enough money stored to stop working.
38. The Federal Reserve will pay an increasing interest rate on deposits. It has to entice depositors (banks) from withdrawing their deposits and dumping the dollars into the economy (inflation). The interest rate will need to be continually bumped up to stave off an inflationary death spiral, because if inflation exceeds the interest rate, banks will yank their money out and do something else with it.
39. Commodity speculation will meet controls to prevent "melt-ups" as nearly all commodities reach peak production. As soon as its known that a given commodity has reached a peak status, speculation and contango are nearly guaranteed to make money outside of short-term gyrations. Yet they add no real value and boost prices. Controls will be applied. One such example is to disallow buying and selling of commodity and futures except to real producers and consumers of the commodity. This will be circumvented one way or the other. Already, hedge funds own a lot of farm land.
    
40. ARM loans will dominate now that Freddie Mac / Fannie Mae have a blank check. Given an increasing interest rate environment, this will be another attempt at bailing out the housing market, ostensibly predicated on rates which will increase later "when the housing market returns to normal". This will prove to be a bail out for housing sellers, a sucker punch for housing buyers (a purchase price lift followed by a slump), and a form of bail-out meets indirect quantitative easing as the government sponsored entities crowd out the mortgage market and effectively set mortgage rates.
41. Upon another economic leg down, gold will surge first, then commodities. Commodities will outlast. Gold is a call option on credit and fiat currency instabilities with a strike price somewhat above $0 (it's intrinsic value) and an expiration of the time that commodity stockpiles stop being plentiful and people need to start trading/bartering. With peak everything in site, the last part is worrisome about gold. Gold is under-owned by many countries who produce valuable things that other countries need. When the crap hits the fan, countries who have something with tangible value will want something else of tangible value in return. At that point, you'd be better off owning copper, steel, wheat, cotton etc. Before that point, the premium in gold will likely sky rocket while the commodities take a dive following economic activity.
    
42. Reserve nations, not reserve currencies. A cascade of nations will eliminate derivatives, use of leverage and deficit spending. Money will flow into those nations as safe havens as fiscal sustainability will be the new reserve currency. Elimination of the fractional reserve system will also boost a nation's status. If these nations are smart, they'll buy up and stockpile commodities.
    
43. Some American influential states (also the ones in the most debt/trouble) will negotiate back-room bailouts and special deals. This will create tension which will evolve into inter-state protectionism in terms of commerce, taxes, power and water distribution, etc. This will not end pretty.
    
44. Incomes will continue to decline in over-extended economies. As the real estate markets correct and the room-mate society progresses, some areas will begin to be cost effective again by way of lower salaries necessary for employees to support the cost of living. This will not be good news for the auto industry or big appliances which can be shared when people double up in apartments/homes.
    
45. Many derivatives will be voided out. Once a few parties walk away from derivatives contracts, a cascade of parties will do the same. A quadrillion of notional derivatives will vanish.
    
46. Web-services-wide transactional engine will be the new Oracle. Whereas the focus was on transactional processing within a database engine, the new frontier is orchestrating transactionality across a disparate set of web services.
47. A new VC or startup funding model using many small non-accredited sums will emerge. It will use the collective (crowd-sourced) power of participants to do diligence, finance, and valuate startups. Many participants will also find interesting work this way.
48. ARM Holdings will rise to become interesting in the server market. Thus far it has focused highly on power efficient chips for small devices. However, it has pulled out the stops to create a high performance server design. Server software design is moving to higher level languages where underlying architecture (traditionally x86) is less relevant. Even on consumer devices, ARM based netbook designs are coming with an Android OS. Ultimately, compute per watt and per dollar will reign. And that's where ARM lives.
49. Death of the monolithic consumer OS, rise of the "swarm OS". Software components/applications of the new order of OS will pop out of your notebook and onto your car's in-dash GPS system. Or snap to a server somewhere on the cloud to keep running while you power the device down. Or snap to your TV. Etc. Ultimately, you can re-convene all the software on your desktop. Think application Legos meets a swarm of bees. Flexibility and mobility are the future. Monolithic is last decade.
    
50. The value of vision will rule. MBA skills will be thought of as commodity. The Stone Age lasted about 2 million years, the Bronze Age about 2000 years. Twitter is 2.5 years old. The accelerating rate-of-change of technology will continue. The margin of time for jumping on markets after they have materialized is gone. The ability to be fast followers has mostly vanished. When a technology generation lasted 10 years, you could spare 2 years to wait. Now markets have to co-materialize with the enabling technology. In a number of cases, multiple technology and startup plays have to co-materialize together. This is not your father's startup/innovation environment. Going forward, visionary skills reign supreme. Most VC firms will perish without them. Ditto for companies of all sizes. There will be a CVO (Chief Visionary Officer) role, and they'll be more revered and better paid than any other position.

Disclosure: related IP, no positions

Reducing atmospheric soot a leveraged global warming play

There's been a lot of discussion of late regarding the contribution of soot and other particulate to global warming. Washington's blog did a nice job of summarizing why soot reduction is important to climate efforts. NASA has been studying the effects of soot for some time. And when Scientific American, BusinessWeek and U.S. News wrote about it, it got me thinking...

In specific, I wondered how much warming comes from areas which are "susceptible" to melting, as a proxy to measure soot's potential influence (light absorption, inducing precipitation, and resulting exposure of darker surfaces under snow & ice)? Fortunately, it's reasonably easy to do a proxy study after a trip to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies to download some GISTEMP data and after doing some programming handywork.

The findings are telling! Warming is accelerated much more (2x or 3x) in areas which fluctuate on either side of freezing, and no so much in areas which remain frozen or never freeze. This may warrant more serious consideration of soot's effects.

What I calculated was the extent (in terms of time and degrees Celsius) spent on both sides of the freezing point for each station. If for example, a given station in the GISTEMP list experienced temperatures always below (or always above) freezing, then it is taken to have no vulnerability to soot-induced thawing. For each of a station's monthly datapoints, I summed up separately the distances above and below freezing and took the minimum of the two. The result is an approximation of the potential for warm days to thaw the freezing from the colder days. Below is a graph showing the results, where I binned and averaged stations together that fell into various "thawing vulnerability" buckets (X-axis), along with corresponding averages within each bucket of 100-year warming trends for the related stations (Y-axis):


The bin labeled "None" holds stations which had all temperature readings below or all above freezing, but not a mix. As the graph progresses to the right, the X-axis shows increasing amounts of vulnerability to thawing, as an increasing amount of freezing temperatures were offset by thawing temperatures (and shown parenthetically is the number of stations which were binned into the designated range). To clarify/exemplify the methodology, if 4 months of data read [-5, -5, +5, +10], then I would sum 10 degrees of freezing and 15 degrees of thawing, resulting in only 10 degrees worth of "thaw vulnerability". Over 4 months that would be (+10 / 4) = 2.5° C/mo. That would dictate the bin in which I would then include the station's normal 100-year warming trend (as calculated by a least squares regression across the most recent 100 years of the station's temperature data). And within each bin I used a simple average of all included stations' 100-year trends, the Y-axis above.

As can be seen from the graph, stations which have more "thaw vulnerability", record substantially more average global warming trends. I added the overall 100-year warming trendline on the graph, the average of participating stations as if they were placed all in one bin. Apparently, "thaw vulnerable" stations are leveraged to global warming at 2x to 3x overall rates. And so, a reasonable inference may be that reducing soot is a highly leveraged way to reduce global warming as soot would have the most impact on areas which are vulnerable to its thawing effects (and those areas happen to be leveraged to warming trends).

As "soot capture" is relatively less expensive than "carbon capture", and given its potential leverage, it also makes for a strong investment case. And by the way, reducing soot comes with an enormous "knock-on effect" of reducing a massive amount of health-care related issues surrounding respiratory problems.

Methodology note: I screened for stations which had a 100-year data series which ended within the current decade (assuming the most recent 100 years would likely yield more accurate readings than otherwise). Fwiw, the chart looks fairly similar if I use recent 50 or 75 year series instead. I also screened out stations in areas which were marked as having 2mm or greater populations (to remove "heat island" effects), though this didn't matter very much.

Disclosure: no positions

Cloud Pipeline: future of inter cloud provider sneaker-nets

One of the notable frictions surrounding use of cloud computing providers has been the difficulties in getting large data sets into and out of the domain of the cloud provider. Once your data set grows beyond a certain level, it's just not feasible to use the public network to transfer it. Amazon, in May 2009, began addressing this friction by offering an import feature, whereby one can ship them data (on an external SATA/USB drive), and they'll load it into their S3 storage service. And just recently, Amazon added a similar export feature. This is extremely useful between the customer and Amazon, but I believe it's only the beginning of a trend in what's to come to inter cloud "sneaker nets".

There are a slew of interesting use-cases of transferring data sets between various forms of providers, without the customer ever touching the data, nor ever sending physical devices. This of course, would dictate there being some (set of) standards/formats for inter-provider transfer. There are obvious and well known uses such as shipping data off-site for DR (Disaster Recovery) purposes. If the the DR site is also a cloud provider, the transfer should optimally occur between the two providers without the customer being involved in sending media devices. Under the right circumstances, data could be sent directly from the source to destination provider, eliminating the need for the destination to send a media device at all; that would remove one delivery day from the equation. Doing this would likely require some combination of the data being encrypted and the media being properly scrubbed from its previous data. Or starting with a pool of fresh devices on the source provider side, and shipping the used device back to the customer from the destination provider side, with the extra cost of the device added.

"Cloud Pipeline"

A more efficient and seamless transport of large data sets will be a key enabler that will allow the cloud computing landscape to evolve in usage and in number of providers. With that evolution will come a lot of other "touch-less" uses, such as exporting your database through FedEx from a provider such as Amazon to a database analytics specific provider who houses an army of specialized columnar analytics database engines. Or perhaps to a provider that specializes in render farm activities, real-time 3D server-side rendering, massively parallel HPC (High Performance Computing), compliance, de-duplication, compression, bio-informatics, or a host of other specialties. One could actually set up a 'pipeline' of cloud services in this way, moving data to the stage in the pipeline where it is most optimally processed, based on capabilities, geographies, current pricing, etc. Perhaps the next big Pixar-like animation studio company will make use of a Cloud Pipeline. Or perhaps the next big biotech company. It wouldn't be surprising if they start out with some stages of the pipeline in-house, and farm out an increasing amount of work as the cloud evolves.

Cloud Marketplace

Ultimately, there will be market places for cloud computing. But initially, many things must be developed and normalized/standardized before the compute side has the full potential of being "marketized". One example is e-metering, which can't be simply bolted on as an after-thought, but needs to be deeply integrated into layers of the cloud fabric. That may take quite some time before it becomes marketplace friendly.

But the inter-modal data transport (aka "sneaker net" or "FedEx net") level is a level of abstraction at which a cloud marketplace gets interesting in the shorter term. Here we have the opportunity for a given data set to be copied or multiplexed to a set of receiving providers, based on pre-arranged or real-time market criteria. It may be that by the time the data movement occurs, a provider may have come available who can process the data more efficiently, with a lower pricing for the same efficiency, or perhaps just in a more geographically or politically friendly locale. Perhaps a given provider just rolled in a bank of analytics database engines, or maybe they added banks of GPGPUs. These are the kinds of events that could make one provider much more competitive in the market (10 or 100x). As long as a customer can periodically and inexpensively transport copies of their data to another (backup) site, much of the tie-in problem vanishes. It becomes more of a data format standards issue, one that the customer has more influence on.

Keep in mind a related cloud marketplace would require APIs; orchestrating workflows across a cloud pipeline with real-time market based routing would need them. ;-)

Disclosure: no positions

Server side Android, a Google version of Amazon's EC2

While everyone contemplates the place that Android will hold on the mobile device, in home entertainment and on the netbook, there is another interesting use-case for Android that's not yet been talked about. There's no reason that Android, as a complete OS, application stack and ecosystem (including the app market), has to be run on the client side. In environments where multiple users might want to use the same client hardware (monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc), such as at the office, the thin-client model could be a very useful way to access any given user's Android session. This way, the Android session can be displayed at any end-point, be it a desktop, notebook, meeting-room projector, or even smartphone device. Using a VPN or even SSL protected web browser session from home, a user could also bring up their work Android session.

And of course, as soon as one contemplates serving Android sessions from a server farm, virtualization springs to mind. While one could put each Android its own VM, Android is ripe for an application style of virtualization, having only one kernel and multiple application group boundaries. One can achieve much higher consolidation ratios that way. With whatever choice of virtualization style, one can then imagine that the Android sessions are not necessarily constrained to any one company's private datacenter/cloud, but could also be served from a public cloud. If a public cloud provider can put sessions close enough to a given user's current location (networking latency wise), this proposition gets really interesting. For one, because Android could work its way into the consumer and enterprise VDI spaces. And two, because Google owns a lot of datacenters and could potentially go beyond the OS/application stack space, and into owning the execution of user sessions as well as maintain all their data. This would be likely be a reoccurring revenue (rental) type of service, and open the door to some premium options such as backups, latency/bandwidth QoS, execution locality zones, etc. Kind of the Android desktop version of Amazon's EC2/S3 web services.

There are a number of interesting ways to enhance the server-side Android model. For example, one could allow an Android session to seamless migrate from execution on a server to execution within a local hardware environment (using a VM or otherwise). So for example, if you want to "snap to local device", then execution migrates to your local device and the display interface originates from the local hardware rather than be remoted. There's no reason the user has to see or care about this transition. If you want to "snap to home entertainment device", then your Android session moves seamlessly to your TV. Ditto for the display on your car or netbook. To pull this off, it helps if the environments synchronize in the background automatically. And of course, doing all this on any real scale, means one has to have access to a hearty (Google) sized infrastructure.

Adding in one more piece of the puzzle, a thin-client style tablet (or other form factor) which I wrote about recently, would be an excellent way to access a server-side Android session without ever having any hardware smarts or locally resident data (which can be lost of stolen), and yet would also provide a larger interface for smartphones etc. This kind of device could be manufactured inexpensively on mass scales because it has very little in the way of hardware requirements (runs only firmware). But would be a big opportunity for Google branding and penetration into new markets, and would be a gateway to the evolution of for-pay Google services as mentioned. Perhaps this would be something manufactured by the ODMs such as Compal.

But the discussion isn't nearly complete until we talk about gaming! Server side rendering is a new trend, which decouples the amount of compute power from the end-point device, allowing less capable devices to display amazing server-side rendered games (see my previous article). And it has some of the same requirements as above, in terms of placing the sessions close to the end-point (latency wise), having enough data centers to cover important geographic areas, etc. And a hearty amount of the popular smartphone apps tend to be games, making a great synergy with a "cloud based Android". This style of computing could usher in a new era of phenomenal photo-realistic gaming, decoupled altogether from the underlying client-side hardware. Write once, game anywhere...

Disclosure: no positions

Fault tolerance a new key feature for virtualization

VM migration has been a key feature and enabling technology which has differentiated VMware from Microsoft's Hyper-V. Though as you may know, Windows Server 2008 R2 is slated for broad availability on or before October 22, 2009 (also the Windows 7 GA date), and Hyper-V will then support VM migration. So you may be wondering, what key new high-tech features will constitute the next battleground for differentiation amongst the virtualization players?

Five-Nines (99.999%) Meets Commodity Hardware

One such key feature is very likely to be fault tolerance (FT) -- the ability for a running VM to suffer hardware failure on one machine, and to be restarted on another machine without losing any state. This is not just HA (High Availability), it's CA (Continuous Availability)! And I believe it'll be part of the cover-charge that virtualization vendors (VMware, Citrix/XenSource, Microsoft, et al) and providers such as Amazon will have to offer to stay competitive. When I talk about fault tolerance, I don't mean using special/exotic hardware solutions -- I'm talking about software-only solutions which handle fault tolerance in the hypervisor and/or other parts of the software stack.

Here's a quick summary of where the various key vendors are w.r.t. fault tolerance. Keep watch of this space, because the VM migration battle is nearly over now.

VMware's product line now offers Fault Tolerance, which they conceptually introduced at VMworld 2008. This was perhaps the biggest wow-factor feature VMware talked about at that VMworld. FT is not supported in VMware Essentials, Essentials Plus or vSphere Standard editions. It's supported in more advanced(/expensive) versions.

In the Xen camp, there are two distinct FT efforts, Kemari and Remus. Integration/porting to Xen 4.0 are on the roadmap. If/when that occurs, the Xen ecosystem will benefit. After battle-testing, it's easy to conceive of Amazon offering FT as a premium service. It does after all chew through more network capacity, and will necessitate extra high level logic on their part. There's also a commercial FT solution for XenServer from Marathon, called everRun VM.

Microsoft appears to be leveraging a partnership with Marathon for their initial virtualization FT solution. This is probably smart given it allows Microsoft a way to quickly compete on fault tolerance, with a partner that's been doing FT for a living. One would imagine this option will come at a premium though, perhaps a revenue opportunity for Microsoft for big-money customers, with an associated disadvantage vis-à-vis similar features based on free Xen technology and massive scale virtualization (clouds). That may make Marathon a strategic M&A target.

Licensing Issues, Part II

Just when you thought software-in-a-VM issues were mostly resolved, the same questions may be raised again for FT, given there is effectively a shadow copy of any given FT-protected VM. It's not hard to imagine Microsoft aggressively taking advantage of this situation, given they live at both virtualization/OS and application layers of the stack.

Networking is Key

Fault tolerance of VMs is yet another consumer and driver of high bandwidth, low latency networking. The value in the data center is trending from the compute hardware to the networking. FT is another way-point in the evolution of that trend, allowing continuous availability on commodity hardware. You probably won't run it on all your workloads (they will run with a performance penalty), but you might start out with the most critical stateful workloads. If you want to do this on any scale, or with flexibility, architect with lots of networking capabilities. For zero-sum IT budgets, this would mean cheaper hardware and better networking, something that might be a little bitter-sweet for Cisco, given its entrance into the server market.

Disclosure: no positions

Apple Tablet-killer: the Thin-Tablet

While the 'net is abuzz over rumors of the Apple tablet, I'd like to point out a category of device in a form-factor that doesn't yet exist, but would be a killer product. It's also what I believe the CrunchPad tablet should have been designed to be. And that's the "thin^2 tablet". By thin, I mean it's physically thin in dimension, like the iPhone, but it's also thin in the sense that thin-clients are thin when they have nothing but firmware to access a remote server.

The problem I see with a rumored $800-ish device of that size, is that it's highly likely the same buyer will also own a smartphone. For the CrunchPad, at a rumored $400-ish price-point, it's hard to buy into the couch-surfing, coffee shop sipping usage model. In either case, if you already have a capable smartphone, home & work PC, and/or just have an available WiFi network, why duplicate functionality, applications, and user configuration and data files across multiple devices? One company that has identified this kind of thinking is Celio, with their REDFLY product that I wrote about previously. Rather than fall into the trap of providing yet another software stack (see the myriad of netbook-specific OS variants for example), this class of device provides remoting of the end-user experience (screen, keyboard, mousepad, etc) from a local smartphone.

But what I'd like to see is a product that advances in two areas vis-a-vis the REDFLY. First, rather than depend on a smartphone, why not support remote display protocols directly over WiFi etc? Currently, REDFLY is focused on what I call "local remoting". I'd like to see "remote remoting" (as well as local). If you're surfing from your couch, chances are you have WiFi. Why do we need an OS? You can tap directly into your home PC, or run a session from the 'net. Maybe even from Amazon. If you're on the go, why not use the tablet form factor device as a terminal for your smartphone? Just leave your smartphone in your bag, and talk via bluetooth. At home, hand the thin tablet to a family member and let them tap into their own custom environment.

Outside the consumer market, a thin^2 tablet is an excellent proposition for businesses. You can hand them out to employees, walk around the office, take them to meetings, take them home, etc. And data files are never copied to the device. For the educational market, it makes for a universal window into whatever software infrastructure is used (Windows, Linux, etc). Why force making a choice? IMO a sleek, affordable, multi-touch, thin^2 tablet would be the ultimate CrunchPad type of effort.

Beyond that, I'd really like to see thin tablet devices having a dual-mode screen that can function as e-paper, like the Kindle. And flipping mobile device virtualization on its head, why not run Android sessions in the cloud, and remote them back to the device? Then you can tap into your mobile environment from anywhere (thin tablet, home or work PC, web browser, e-console of your car, etc). This would be ripe for an application-level of virtualization (same Linux kernel, multiple application groups) to get really high server utilization ratios.

Who would make such devices? Well, probably at the end of the day there's no margin in the hardware side of this. But there is a lot of business value in the branding and ecosystem enablement. Which is why I think Facebook, Google or Amazon should make one. Any takers?

Disclosure: no positions, related IP

A business model for Twitter, Google-style

While the scale first style of attacking a market is still be proven out, getting a critical mass is mostly certainly a key element in the success of a social networking startup. These kinds of startups can pop up seemingly overnight in mass quantities, and one of the key ways to compete is to create an extremely rapid growth of user base and establish a site or service as de facto (and a verb) for the space it's in. This describes the trajectory that Twitter appears to be on.

Scaling to 1 billion users for any one startup is monumentally difficult. Scaling to 10 billion, given the current population, is impossible. Sometime before reaching either size, a startup needs to transition into a real business model. There's always the M&A path, but having a real business model amps up the M&A valuation significantly. In that spirit, here're some thoughts about some changes Twitter could make to allow them to "turn on the revenue" tap when they need to.

Two things I see holding Twitter back from gaining serious revenue potential are 1) you can do a lot from a twitter client without visiting the twitter site and 2) lame SMS-style messages lack much of the richness which would otherwise enable monetization opportunities, as I describe below -- the kinds of things that Google capitalizes on. And as I'll explain, if you can fix #2, you get #1 for free. So really, I believe enhancing Twitter messages will be a key factor in their future business proposition.

To be brief, twitter messages hail back to SMS (text) messages, which are limited to ~160 characters. After reserving 20 characters for the user name, you're left with 140 characters, the size of the Twitter-colored text you just read. If you want to add in a link, you probably will use a URL shortening service and lose another 20 characters or so of text space. There's not heck of a lot you can do in that amount of space. Some people claim this is part of Twitter's charm. Blaise Pascal might have claimed "The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter." In any case, I'd claim they're giving up significant revenue potential. To demonstrate my point, here's a hypothetical tweet (minus the sender info), which includes a shortened link but no other mark-up:



And here's a similar tweet, if tweets were allowed to be marked-up, both explicitly by the sender and implicitly through automatic means:



A number of improvements are shown: 1) the sender was able to mark-up the phrase "Tesla Model S" with a URL, 2) the phrase "electric car" was highlighted automatically by a keyword (perhaps advertising) engine, 3) the phrase "pic of prototype" was linked to an image file the user attached, 4) a map of the sender's previous or current location is displayed, 5) a (potentially targeted) advertisement is displayed, and 6) a voice version of the message is linked to (could be the sender's recording or voice synthesis). Additionally, links can redirect through Twitter (as shown), so that Twitter can more dynamically decide where to redirect them and collect much richer analytics. The links could also include the Twitter viewer's user name to give further info (not shown).

How would this all work? First is the ability for users to mark-up tweets, attach files, and provide lots of other rich info and meta information. Second, Twitter clients need to be updated to access a much richer API and display richer tweets. But what about SMS? I believe the key here is to separate out the tweet message body from all other stuff (mark-up, attachments, meta info), or at least provide/generate a fairly equivalent alternate text body. This will be passed through to SMS. To make the experience much better though, one could effectively merge the SMS reader and a Twitter client on mobile devices. When an SMS tweet comes through, the client/reader could initially display it in raw form. But as soon as the device reaches networking availability, the client could negotiate with Twitter to identify the message (e.g. each side runs a hashing function on the message body) and convert the SMS tweet to its associated tweet ID in the API world. The mark-up and related info could then be retrieved and used to re-display the raw tweet in its much richer form. Essentially this gives a consistency between the SMS and client worlds, but allows messages to come through SMS (given its robustness and availability w.r.t. mobile data). It also allows words to be used where shortened URLs are currently placed (as shown), since mark-up is moved out of the message.

Many other capabilities could fall out of this: e-biz cards, signatures, per-tweet backgrounds, etc. But the win on the business side is that some Google-class services can be applied, and there is much room for differentiating pay-vs-free accounts. For example, paying accounts might be free of advertising keywords, get indirected less through the Twitter site, perhaps be offered more mark-up capabilities (or at all), get text to voice synthesis for their tweets, etc. This would bring Twitter to a higher plane for use as a professional marketing tool. All without breaking the lowest-common denominator (SMS) as a transport.

And might I suggest a "Twitter Platinum" feature, messages greater than 140 characters...

Disclosure: no positions, related IP