(empo-tymshft) VDI and thin clients in the 21st century

I've previously noted that there is nothing new under the sun, and that one could argue that a virtual desktop infrastructure, especially when used with thin clients, is similar to the multi-user computers that some of us were using three or four decades ago.

How did we get here? InformationWeek describes some recommended steps for setting up a virtual desktop infrastructure.

If security is of paramount importance, desktop virtualization can bring major, cost-effective improvements. By centralizing desktop resources in a secure data center, it's much easier to keep sensitive information from leaving the organization. Of course, depending on whether you use all thin clients or have some older PCs mixed in, data may still leak out through flash media, removable hard drives, and other peripherals, so standard endpoint security software should still be employed in tandem with VDI.

In addition, thin clients use only a few protocols to make and sustain connections to desktop images in the data center, in contrast with typical desktops that may use hundreds of different protocols, depending on applications. Fewer protocols always equals better security.

I've read the full report that is referenced on this page, and although I can't reprint what InformationWeek said about certain things, I can certainly link to Citrix's comments on Campbell Union High School.

Campbell Union High School District serves seven high schools, 7,500 students, and 650 employees. It supports about 2,500 desktop devices and 17 computer labs—each with a teacher and approximately 35 desktops—and over 100 applications, including Microsoft® Office, Photoshop CS and AutoCAD.

Sounds complex. And it is. And it's expensive.

Campbell Union had a four-year refresh cycle, which meant it had to retire and purchase approximately 500 machines a year. “It cost about $1,100 to replace a physical desktop, and that’s a half a million bucks a year [and] in four years, I’ll have the same problem.” In these difficult budgetary times, this is a large expense for a public school system.

But Campbell Union faced other issues. Because all applications had to be resident on the desktops, it “meant that as the kids move from classroom to classroom, they don’t have the same application from place to place. It also meant that kids in a class had access to applications that maybe they shouldn’t have, which creates distractions.” In addition, having 2,500 individual desktops meant a lot of time spent on maintenance: IT staff traveling to all the desktops to patch and maintain them, which was a logistical and budgetary challenge.

VDI, coupled with thin clients, addressed these issues.

“On a four-year basis, which if you look at the inventory refresh cycle alone, we’re going to save $1.2 million.”...

“We are virtualizing the computer labs,” Kanavel says. “Students can access their programs from home as well as the classroom. They can go class to class and those profiles follow them. This will give students the flexibility to continue work on projects at home as opposed to coming in after school and having to wait for a computer to become available.”

Hey, let's face it - when I was done working on my DEC PDP 11/70 terminal, I couldn't just log in from a Mac in my dorm room. For one thing, the Mac didn't exist yet.

Of course there are perceived drawbacks to such a system - I seriously doubt that many companies would put the last.fm client on their virtual desktops - but from a corporate perspective, the solution is mighty attractive.

Carol Bartz and the Intangibles

In a previous post that compared the accomplishments of Carol Bartz and Mark Zuckerberg, I looked at Bartz from a quantitative perspective - for example, the fact that Yahoo's revenue is much greater than Facebook's.

But there are some non-quantitative factors that are fascinating. I'm just going to look at one of them.

As Loren Feldman has noted, Bartz has extensive business experience. But her initial experiences with 3M were, on the surface, not that spectacular. You see, Bartz joined 3M at a time when television's Mary Tyler Moore show was considered revolutionary because Moore's character was a woman professional at a Minnesota news station. And the fictional Minnesota news station was idealistic, compared to Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. For one thing, she really stood out:

Bartz joined 3M in 1972 as the only woman professional in a division of 300 men.

3M had to learn some things, and unfortunately, Bartz paid the price.

She was fired during her first week at her first job at 3M because of some scandalous - and erroneous - speculation. The company mistakenly assigned her to share a hotel room with a male colleague during a business trip, she said in "Betting It All." She switched the reservation to a single room, but office rumors flew. The company dismissed her, only to rehire her the next morning.

She survived that episode, but finally quit in frustration four years later, after (in a fairly famous story) someone at 3M made an unfortunate comment.

[Bartz] quit in 1976 after being refused a transfer to headquarters. In an interview with More Magazine, Bartz recalls, "They told me to my face, 'Women don't do these jobs.'” She replied, “I'm out of here,” and she immediately quit.

Well, times have changed. Mary Richards got fired from her TV job, Bartz has made billions for Yahoo and other companies, and no one would dream of putting 3M's Angela S. Lalor and Joaquin Delgado in the same hotel room.

Oh, and a few years ago, John Leo reported about an interesting Post-It Note from 3M:

Until recently, for example, the 3M company put out post-it notes with the printed message: "Men have only two faults: everything they say and everything they do."

Dangerous decentralization

In a previous post, I observed that in the political realm, even so-called grass roots organizations are highly centralized. While such organizations claim to be the voice of the people, in reality the role of the people is to take orders from Beltway-based consultants.

Obviously businesses face similar issues. On the one hand, businesses want to provide a cohesive, common picture - hence, centralization. On the other hand, businesses want to harness the power of their employees to come up with creative solutions - hence, de-centralization.

Jim Clemmer tells of an organization that tried to do both:

We once halted an executive retreat and everybody went home after the group of seven division presidents and corporate staff vice presidents couldn't agree on whether their values were centralization or decentralization. Trying to do both at once was ripping the organization apart. The CEO never could decide which direction he wanted to commit to. He was eventually fired as frustrations and infighting rose while organization performance fell.

Clemmer himself has a clear preference regarding centralization vs. decentralization:

I am an extreme (some might argue dangerous) decentralist. Since I began my management career, I've given people high degrees of autonomy. I've run even small organizations to the point of such inefficient decentralization that people are running their own show. It works.

Clemmer's argument is that decentralization provides positives, and centralization negatives, that aren't necessarily captured by the metrics that many centralized organizations use.

What doesn't show up is the alienation, helplessness, and lack of connections to customers or organizational purpose that centralized bureaucracy often brings. The energy-sapping and passion-destroying effects of efficiencies may save hundreds of thousands of dollars. But traditional accounting systems can't show the hundreds of millions of dollars lost because of lackluster innovation, mediocre customer service, uninspired internal partners, and unformed external partnerships.

Notice that Clemmer is not only looking at things that could conceivably be measured - customer service quality, for example - but also "opportunity cost" types of measures - the strategic alliance that was not made, the product not invented.

Because some of things can't be measured, perhaps the best way to measure the value of decentralized is to find two similar firms - one centralized, one decentralized - and see which one performs better. Unfortunately, Clemmer's article fails to name any specific companies that follow a decentralized model. However, Clemmer's website includes a list of clients who have attended his seminars. While some of these clients are personnel/human resources groups and the like, it's instructive to look at the technology companies that are listed. Now this doesn't mean that the organizations themselves follow Clemmer's advice, but at least someone in the organization is paying lip service to being interested in them.

Advanced Technology Systems
Algorithmics
Aspen Technology
Bell Canada
Canadian Information Processing Society
Canadian Radio Common Carriers Asociation
Co-Operator's Data Services Ltd.
Communitech Technology Association
Entourage Technology Services
IBM
Ironside Technologies
Internet World
J.D. Edwards
Lumonics
Maritime Tel & Tel
Matsushita Electric (Panasonic, Technics, Quasar)
SAP
Sasktel
Software Support Professionals Association
Stentor Canadian Network Management
Sun Micro Systems
Symantec Corporation
Targray Technology
Xerox

Now I'm not familiar with many of these companies, but it's amusing to note that two of them - J.D. Edwards and Sun Micro Systems - are now part of Oracle. And Xerox is probably most famous for letting its technological advances be used by other companies (Apple and Microsoft in particular).

Does anyone know of an example of a firm that is decentralized, and successful?

Hashtag (and service name) of the day - #wherecampsocal

Some item names are perfect from day one, while other item names take a while to grow on you (for example, Moon Unit Zappa). But when I saw (in AnyGeo) a reference to "WhereCamp," I was hooked.

WhereCamp, you see, is for geographic information systems professionals.

The AnyGeo post referred to the upcoming WhereCamp SoCal (hashtag #wherecampsocal). As I write this an exact location (and time) has not been selected, but details should appear at http://www.wherecampsocal.org/ when they are available.

WhereCamps have been held in northern California (April 2010) (Twitter @wherecamp), Quebec (March 2010), and London (March 2010).

I'm waiting to see if WhyCamps begin to spring up. Note that I'm talking about "whycamp," not "why camp," the latter being a question that has been answered in verse:

Have a blast and laugh all day. Then you’ll know the Kanata way. Swim, canoe or shoot a bow and steal the show. Feel free to laugh, but not to frown. You’ll have a blast, just come on down!

Spend a week you’ll understand, why Camp Kanata rules the land. Once you leave we’re sure you’ll miss all of nature’s splendid bliss.

This raises the question - what rhymes with Tetrox?

Bayer and Bayer are now just Bayer

While researching the story of two separate Vince's Spaghetti locations - one in Ontario, California, the other in Torrance, California - I ran across this explanation:

After 25 years of working with the family, Vince and his brothers agreed to go their separate ways; Vince sold his interest in the Ontario location and moved with his wife Louise, daughter Rosemary (affectionately known as DeeDee), and her husband Bill, to the South Bay.

This is from the Torrance side; the Ontario side does not mention it.

As I was thinking of this split, I was reminded of another corporate split - one that occurred under very different circumstances.

I am, in the eyes of some of you, quite elderly. In fact, I am so elderly that when I was growing up, children and adults would use aspirin for pain relief. (And yes, my family did have a horseless carriage.) And one of the leading aspirin brands was Bayer.

Some time later, I ran across some gardening supplies, also from Bayer, but with a different logo.

I knew bits and pieces of the story, but hadn't really looked into the whole thing. But I did know that Bayer AG, a German company founded in 1863, underwent a forced reorganization in 1917:

The effects of the war were devastating. The company lost most of its foreign assets and the export markets - upon which the company's further development depended - remained largely inaccessible. Bayer's Russian subsidiary was expropriated as a result of the Russian Revolution. The company's U.S. assets, including its patents and trademarks, were confiscated in 1917 and auctioned off to its competitors. Sales in 1919 amounted to only two thirds of the 1913 figure.

While the competitors were able to benefit from Bayer's aspirin patent, others who acquired German patents weren't so lucky. The story of the German dye patents is quite interesting:

The German patents, which were confiscated by the U.S. government during the war, could not be duplicated by Du Pont’s chemists. The patents were written in a purposely vague manner with key information omitted. It was apparent that the patents could only be worked by a chemist “skilled in the art”, meaning an experienced German chemist. For many years this obfuscation helped Germany dominate the global dye market and limited U.S. attempts to enter the field.

Back to aspirin. Here in the U.S., the Bayer brand was acquired by Sterling Drug, which eventually became Sterling Winthrop. Therefore, back when I was growing up, Bayer was not manufactured by Bayer.

In fact, I was under the impression that this was where it stood today, and I start writing this post assuming that there were two Bayers, just as there are two Vince's Spaghetti chains. What I didn't realize, however, was that there was another acquisition in 1994.

In 1994, Bayer AG purchased Sterling Winthrop's over the counter drug business from SmithKline Beecham and merged it with Miles Laboratories, thereby reacquiring the U.S. and Canadian trademark rights to "Bayer" and the Bayer cross, as well as the ownership of the Aspirin trademark in Canada.

Unfortunately, by the time that Bayer finally reacquired the U.S. rights to Bayer, aspirin had become old-fashioned, if not downright evil. But one decade's hero is another decade's goat, as this Bayer page shows.

We want to assure you that Bayer Aspirin products do not contain acetaminophen.

Somewhere or another, Friedrich Bayer is smiling.

Originators vs. Mega-improvers - @scobleizer vs. @1938media on Mark Zuckerberg and Carol Bartz

Robert Scoble wrote a Sunday post entitled Why Mark Zuckerberg should have a Carol Bartz moment. Without going into the soap opera details, let's just say that Scoble thinks that Zuckerberg should nor worry about his detractors. (As for Scoble's main point that Zuckerberg should perhaps concentrate on behind the scenes tasks, see my Disqus comment at Scoble's post.)

In the course of his post, Scoble compared Zuckerberg to others in an attempt to put Zuckerberg's achievements into perspective. This is what he said.

1. He has — in less than seven years — created a company that has hired more than 1,000 people. How many other USA companies have hired 1,000 people in Silicon Valley in the past five years?
2. His company has been valued at many billions of dollars.
3. His company has created a platform that supports, among many companies, Zynga, which also has hired 800 employees (it’s only two years old) and my friends are throwing around valuations of billions for Zynga.
4. His company has 500 million people using it around the world and most love it a lot. My wife still is effusive with love over Facebook.

He’s done 100x more in his few years of running Facebook than Carol Bartz has AT ANY COMPANY! In her entire career!

Enter Loren Feldman, who (and again I'll avoid most of the soap opera) is not necessarily Robert Scoble's biggest fan. After reading the post, Feldman tweeted a few items, of which this one is most relevant:

Did Scoble REALLY say Zuck has done more that Bartz?

This prompted me to ask Feldman to flesh out his thoughts.

@1938media What measures would you use to say Bartz has done more than Zuckerberg?

Feldman replied:

@empoprises Dollars earned for her companies, products shipped, years in business, anything else?

Let's look at one of Feldman's points - dollars earned. As it turns out the Wall Street Journal recently looked at this:

By revenue, Facebook has a long way to go to catch up to its more established rivals. The social-networking site earned more than $500 million in revenue in 2009 and is forecasting revenue of more than $1 billion in 2010, according to people familiar with the matter. Yahoo earned $6.5 billion in revenue in 2009, mostly from advertising.

So it's obvious that Bartz today is producing more than Zuckerberg today. And clearly Bartz has the advantage of the "number of years in business" measurement.

But there's one difference that the numbers don't show. Look at Carol Bartz's biography. Kara Swisher links to another Wall Street Journal article, this one from 1992. Before commenting on the new CEO of Autodesk, Bartz, the WSJ writer stated the following:

Though the world's sixth largest PC software company, Autodesk is hardly a household name for a couple of reasons. One is that it dominates a niche: software that allows relatively inexpensive personal computers to produce powerful models for engineers, architects and other professional designers.

The other reason is Autodesk's founding genius, John Walker, a reclusive programmer who doesn't allow the company to distribute his picture or publish it in its annual report. In a rare interview granted for this article, a prickly Mr. Walker insisted that a reporter sit in front of a video camera, declared that Autodesk claimed a copyright on the ensuing discussion and debated the meaning of each question.

Just as Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software supplier, is an extension of the personality of William Gates III, Autodesk is largely a creature of Mr. Walker.

Stanford University notes what happened next, when Bartz ran the show:

During her tenure, the company diversified its product line and grew revenues from $285 million to $1.523 billion in FY06.

However, before Bartz arrived, Autodesk was already making $285 million a year. By definition, Facebook was making $0 a year before Zuckerberg. Again, Bartz's accomplishments at Yahoo will build upon those who have come before her. There are many people - Thomas J. Watson Jr., Thomas J. Watson Sr., Meg Whitman - who have made their employers much stronger, but they were able to start from something that already existed.

Regardless of who actually created Facebook, it's undeniable that Mark Zuckerberg was the one who had the drive to make Facebook a success. In that sense, you can claim that Zuckerberg - along with similar people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs - created something out of nothing. Compare that to Carol Bartz, the Watsons, Meg Whitman, and others who created something big out of something small.

Which is more important?

If you're an accountant, you'd rather have a mega-improver like Bartz. (For Feldman, who concentrates on the bottom line for his clients, this makes sense.)

If you're a futurist, you'd rather have an originator like Zuckerberg. (Scoble, the admitted shiny new toy lover, is also looking for for businesses and ways in which they can improve - this means looking at brand new stuff.)

Which would you rather have?

Improve Ur Speling Skilz And Ur Garanteed a Job

In the process of writing another post, I ran across this article in which a change to Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame was suggested. The article dates from February.

Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) should be ousted from the Baseball Hall of Fame because of his block on extending unemployment benefits, according to a group that advocates for the unemployed.

Now while I believe that any organization can set up their own criteria for "hall of fame" selection, and that any competing organization can set up different criteria, I personally fail to see the relevance of Bunning's vote to his baseball career.

So which advocacy group wanted to can Bunning?

“The most obscene thing he can do is prevent jobless Americans from getting their $350 a week unemployment check,” Rick Sloan, acting executive director of Ur Union of Unemployed, a grass roots organization for unemployed Americans, told The Hill.

Yep, that's Ur Union of Unemployed. With a "ur." This allows them to refer to themselves as U Cubed, but a misspelled group name doesn't necessarily help the image of the unemployed.

So who is this grass-roots organization?

Ur Union of Unemployed, nicknamed UCubed, is a community service project of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).

Calling this professionally-sponsored group "a grass roots organization" is like calling the Pacific Gas & Electric-sponsored Taxpayers Right to Vote a grass roots group of average taxpayers - taxpayers like Greg Pruett.

Back to Ur Union of Unemployed. There does appear to be a grass root element of the organization - they have set up various cubes, including this cube in the Inland Empire - but like any political organization, there is a question as to whether power flows from the top down to the locals, or from the locals up to the top. Actually, there's no question on this - even so-called "local grass roots" groups take their marching orders from national headquarters.

Who cares what the official voices say? (When other usurp the official authority)

This post talks about Major League Baseball, but the points apply to just about any sports league out there.

The league is the self-appointed keeper of all statistics related to league play. But fans often quibble with those official statistics.

The most recent example is Armando Galarraga's perfect game that wasn't.

An umpire’s tears and admission he blew a call failed to move baseball commissioner Bud Selig to award Armando Galarraga the perfect game he pitched....

Selig said Thursday that Major League Baseball will look at expanded replay and umpiring, but didn’t specifically address umpire Jim Joyce’s botched call Wednesday night that cost Galarraga the perfect game....

A baseball official familiar with the decision confirmed to The Associated Press that the call was not being reversed. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because that element was not included in Selig’s statement.

You can bet that before this is over, a Congressional investigation will be launched - all in an effort to reverse the official Major League Baseball record of perfect games.

My question - why bother?

Just because Major League Baseball says that it is the official arbiter of all statistics doesn't mean that it's true. Anyone can get a hold of the data and make any call that they want. To prove this, I am immediately launching the Empoprises Center of Baseball Statistics.

And the Empoprises Center of Baseball Statistics hereby officially declares that Armando Galarraga pitched a perfect game earlier this week.

And as long as I'm at it, the Empoprises Center of Baseball Statistics officially declares that the record for most home runs hit in a single season is held by Roger Maris.

Now some may argue that the Empoprises Center of Baseball Statistics is not necessarily a reliable source. And frankly, they'd be right. But what if a Bill James or someone else with impressive baseball credentials were to go out and say that they were keeping official statistics...and everybody decided to use THOSE statistics instead of Major League Baseball's statistics?

A silly idea, you might say. There would never be a case in which a third party's decisions would take priority over the decisions of the league.

I will respond in three words - Bowl Championship Series.

The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) is a five-game showcase of college football. It is designed to ensure that the two top-rated teams in the country meet in the national championship game, and to create exciting and competitive matchups among eight other highly regarded teams in four other bowl games.

And the BCS is independent of the entity that supposedly governs college football, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

Of course, what this means is that the U.S. Congress, rather than going after the NCAA, now goes after the BCS. This resulted in this impassioned statement:

In a letter responding to U.S. Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Bowl Championship Series (BCS) Executive Director Bill Hancock today stated his strong belief that decisions about college football should be left to people in higher education.

The press release was artfully worded, by the way. Note that Hancock didn't say that decisions should be left to educators. But I digress.

These sports experiences, of course, can be extrapolated to business in general. If you have problems with the entity that is supposedly governing your industry, set up your own entity. Happens all the time.

(empo-plaaybizz) A mundane application for Evoluce screens

Wow, two natural user interface posts in two weeks! (Here's the previous one.)

I peeked in my Natural User Interface FriendFeed room recently, and saw that there has been a lot of talk about Evoluce. Back on May 7, @multitouch1 tweeted about a video from Evoluce.



As you can see, the Evoluce technology is highly dependent upon hooking to features that are already present in the Windows 7 operating system, as well as various technologies such as Flash and Java. (The product page specifically lists support for Windows 7, Java, XML, and TUOI.)

The product itself is called the Evoluce ONE.

Evoluce ONE

47-inch Multi-touch Full HD LCD Screen

Evoluce ONE is a 47-inch interactive Full HD LCD Screen with true multi-touch and multi-pen (multi-stylus) functionality. Evoluce ONE delivers sharp, bright images for sophisticated multimedia applications ranging from educational teaching and learning environments to medical imaging and interactive gaming.

Engadget has briefly mentioned the technology in English and German posts.

Needless to say, the gaming crowd (which can drive innovation) has weighed in on the screen. My favorite comment:

That guy sucks at Tic-Tac-Toe.

Of course, if you're buying a 47 inch monitor to play Tic-Tac-Toe, you're probably Paris Hilton.

Foursquare enters non-location territory (Go Lakers)

During a Twitter search for information on the Lakers-Celtics game (going on as I type this), I ran across this interesting Foursquare badge:

Celtics - Finals 2010

Stand up! You've unlocked the Celtics badge for showing your Boston pride. Watch the Celtics take on the Lakers in The Finals 2010 on ABC! "Go Celtics!"

Unlocked by M.Fachri on Fri Jun 4, 2010 at 9:29 AM.

Wondering how I could earn the Lakers counterpart, I found this explanation:

Now, if you are a Foursquare user, you can get a new badge just by shouting "Go Lakers" or "Go Celtics." Foursquare will then automatically award you with either the Celtics 2010 badge or the Lakers 2010 badge. Show your support for which ever team you are rooting for by shouting out there names in the Foursquare app for your mobile device.

So I shouted, and earned the badge.

Lakers - Finals 2010

Stand up! You've unlocked the Lakers badge for showing your L.A. pride. Watch the Lakers take on the Celtics in The Finals 2010 on ABC! "Go Lakers!"

Unlocked by John B. on Thu Jun 3, 2010 at 7:34 PM.

Technically this is not a location-based badge, but I'm sure that the folks at Disney are happy with this crowdsourced promotional effort. (Technically, however, Disney is not getting a benefit from me; since the Los Angeles ESPN radio station is hard to pick up in the evening, I'm listening to the game on a local Inland Empire affiliate, KSPA.)

HP shares a (can't say that word) idea

Today's Los Angeles Times includes a story entitled Manure could power data centers, Hewlett-Packard scientists say.

According to the Times:

HP scientists have proposed using a biogas recovery system that would convert livestock waste into methane, to be used as fuel to generate electricity for data centers....

But that's only half of the story. As you probably know, data centers generate a lot of heat. The HP scientists propose to use the heat "to assist the process of converting the animal waste into fuel."

Patel's HP biography indicates an interest in "thermal management." The HP site also links to a YouTube video on cow dung powering.



(Picture source, license)

High Fructose Corn Syrup BEFORE New Coke was Introduced

Even as I was writing my Saturday morning post, I suspected that I may have to retract one statement in it. While talking about TIME Magazine's criteria for its 50 worst inventions "that just didn't work out," I noted that one of the inventions, New Coke, seemed to fit the criteria.

But I had a nagging feeling in my mind that New Coke actually didn't die, and that the whole episode was part of a conspiracy:

Eventually, Coke co. claimed (quite rightly) that people missed old Coke and demanded its return. As a consequence, Coke vowed to rerelease the original Coke as Coke Classic. They never did. What they did do was bring back the original recipe, but with (significantly cheaper) corn syrup instead of sugar.

However, while it's undeniable that most Coke sold in the U.S. today uses high fructose corn syrup, snopes.com takes issue with the timing cited by the conspiracy theorists:

In 1980, five years before the introduction of New Coke, half the cane sugar in Coca-Cola had been replaced with high fructose corn syrup. By six months prior to New Coke's knocking the original Coca-Cola off the shelves, there was no cane sugar in American Coca-Cola. Whether they knew it or not, what consumers were drinking was 100% sweetened by high fructose corn syrup.

I was unable to independently verify snopes.com's claims about the introduction of high fructose corn syrup in old Coke - and, needless to say, Coca-Cola doesn't necessarily volunteer this information. But if this is true, then I guess that New Coke can truly be categorized as a failure.

What about DEPUTY mayors in Foursquare?

In a surprising sort of way, I was an early adopter of Foursquare - at least in the Inland Empire of California. In fact, at one point I won the Super Mayor award for holding down 10 mayor positions at once. But as time passed, the number of my mayorships dwindled, until I was down to one mayorship.

Now I'm up to two again.

I just ousted Cynthia C. as the mayor of Costco on @foursquare! http://4sq.com/vJYdj

As I write this (and it could change by the end of the day), I am the only recognized mayor at the Costco in Montclair, California, and Cynthia C. is now not recognized at all.

This points out one issue with Foursquare - there can only be one mayor at a time. And if you're not the mayor, you can be buried in the slew of visitors to the location. And if you lose a mayorship, it's often hard to get it back.

But what if Foursquare recognized deputy mayors, or somehow had a leaderboard of the top n people at any location?

Now some people may argue that this is part of the communist liberal agenda, in which true leaders are not recognized and everybody gets credit.

But on the other hand, is the naming of a single mayor for each location so exclusionary that some people may just give up on Foursquare altogether?

The inventor of germ theory, and of modern marketing

I was walking through Costco with a young relative who noticed the large shrimp that were available for sale. I took the opportunity to introduce the relative to the concept of oxymorons.

I don't know if Salisbury steak is technically an oxymoron, but some people are emphatically opposed to it. Fed Up With Lunch encountered the dish in April:

I don't know what else to say aside from that was no steak.

It intentionally wasn't. James Henry Salisbury (1823-1905) was ahead of his time:

As a young M.D. of only 26 years, he announced to the world what we now accept as "germ theory." He was fiercely criticized in Europe and America and it would be almost two decades before Pasteur, Huxley, and Tyndall finally recognized his theories and continued this important study.

Eventually, Salisbury began looking into the causes of disease, and reached some interesting conclusions:

He believed that vegetables and starchy foods could produce substances in the digestive system which poison and paralyze the tissues and can cause heart disease, tumors, mental illness and tuberculosis. He claimed our teeth are "meat teeth" and our digestive systems designed to digest lean meat, and that vegetables, fats, starches and fruit should only be 1/3 of our diet. Starch was digested slowly, so it would ferment in the stomach and produce vinegar, acid, alcohol and yeast, all of which were poisonous to our systems. His cure for this was his special diet....

The Dittrick Medical History Center records that his preferred diet was coffee and "lean chopped beefsteak." I don't know who actually named the meat "Salisbury steak," but the name has stuck.

It should be noted that the recipe has evolved over the years. Associated Content has the original recipe:

Dr. Salisbury's original "steak" recipe was very simple. He prescribed lean ground beef, pressed together, and broiled. He suggested it be served with butter (?) salt and pepper, and Worcestershire sauce and eaten three times a day (!!?).

Then again, Dr. Salisbury lived for over 80 years. Maybe it was the coffee.

On Cliqset

In the process of a vanity search, I saw the Louis Gray (who apparently conducted his own vanity search) used Cliqset to bookmark one of my blog posts. I hadn't heard of Cliqset, so I decided to investigate, beginning with Gray's blog. While Gray mentioned the service in a March 2010 post, he said more in a January 4 post:

Today, Cliqset, which is chomping on the heels of FriendFeed in the features department, if not the activity department just yet, added several new capabilities that make the site very compelling - including my personal favorite, highly customizable streams by service and individual.

Gray's summation of the company's focus:

The company is focused on become a highly functional swiss army knife for Web service updates from around the Web, and now, native on the site.

And Gray isn't the only one to compare Cliqset to that other service. Emily of Uhhmm News made the same comparison:

The question is will it grow pass were Friendfeed was at one point or will it get bought out by some large company....

Emily then said:

If Cliqset gets past where Friendfeed was during its glory days I think it will become a giant website. If it is bought out before then it will fall to the ground as Friendfeed has.

While compete.com shows a major spike in Cliqset's usage since January, it still has a way to go to get to FriendFeed's usage levels. While this could certainly happen, what is the compelling reason for people to set up a separate Cliqset account?

And you do have to sign up. Unlike sites such as Brazen Careerist which support credentials from other services (in this case Facebook Connect), Cliqset apparently requires that you set up your own account. Even when clicked the button to indicate that I was a Google user, I was still asked to define a user name and password. Since I'm personally on service overload at this point, I passed on the opportunity.

If you want to check out people who are more determined (or less lazy) than I am, then check out Louis Gray's Cliqset feed, Kol Tregaskes' Cliqset feed, and Cliqset founder Darren Bounds' feed.

Version 1.0 provides the opportunity, version 3.0 rescinds it - the future of 4sqsearch?

When a software developer puts out version 1.0 of a product, there are things about it that are really really bad. Even if the product had a stellar product manager, not all customer needs can be anticipated.

To meet the needs that are not met by product version 1.0, other developers may pop up and offer these features.

Eventually, the original software developer wises up, realizes that its software is deficient, and either buys the other companies (e.g. Twitter buying Summize) or offers the features themselves.

Think about this normal course of events as you read about the service that Julio Fernandez tweeted about - a service called 4sqsearch.



I took the service for a spin by searching for "yogurt" in Upland, California, and did not get the result that I expected (see the source for all things Yogurtime - well, the former source, I guess). Instead, I was referred to Razzle Dazzle Frozen Yogurt on Arrow Highway (Foursquare page here).

I'm not sure why Yogurtime didn't show up, since its Foursquare page also includes the "frozen yogurt" tag. However, this is presumably an issue with the Foursquare API, not with 4sqsearch.

But how long will it take until Foursquare discovers that 4sqsearch is addressing a deficiency in Foursquare's own search feature? And when Foursquare makes this discovery, what will they do about it?

But time-consuming narcissism is a good thing (TIME, Mashable, Foursquare, and Farmville)

TIME magazine has created a list of the 50 worst inventions, using the following criteria:

From the zany to the dangerous to the just plain dumb, here is TIME's list (in no particular order) of some of the world's bright ideas that just didn't work out

The full list includes items that appear to meet TIME's criteria, such as New Coke, but others on the list seem to have worked out just fine. Perhaps I should talk about Auto-Tune on my Empoprise-MU music blog, but in this post I'm going to limit myself to the two inventions that Mashable discussed.

Foursquare...made the list for promoting narcissism. Time.com’s Kristi Oloffson acknowledges its potential for being useful with coupons, such as Starbucks’s recent promotion for its mayors, but dismisses it as “another layer onto a generation living virtually.”

Farmville made the list for being a time-suck and an addicting game that Dan Fletcher says is “hardly even a game,” but instead a “series of mindless chores.” He’s quick to point out that the game has captivated the interest of millions.

If you want to see TIME's full reviews of these inventions, go here for Foursquare and here for Farmville.

While I acknowledge that Foursquare is narcissistic and Farmville is a time sink, I noted in a Mashable comment that there is a product that is both narcissistic and time-consuming that TIME wouldn't even think of putting on its list.

The iPod.

For products, narcissism and time-wasting are actually GOOD things, and even if the activities seem silly, you can't deny that they can become important to people.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to return to my Starfleet Commander game.

Robot sorting, revisited

One year ago today, I wrote a post about research at Carnegie Mellon that purported to allow a robot to sort items. As I noted, this is a challenging task.

But Carnegie Mellon isn't the only entity that is working on this. There's also Willow Garage:

Robotics company Willow Garage has started a two-year project to work with institutions from around the world on new applications for its robot: the PR2. Each of 11 teams will work on their own projects, but will share their code with each other and the rest of the world. Everything created will be open-source....

One of the teams is from MIT.

Folks at MIT's CSAIL lab, meanwhile, will work on object recognition and putting away groceries.

I searched the MIT CSAIL website and could find no mention of groceries, but perhaps the project described here may be related to the Willow Garage effort.

Feature-based object recognition for objects that do not have features.

Tomatoes are currently recognized using a feature based approach. In a learning step a set of features are trained that are reliable indicators of the object that needs to be found in the image. In a convolution step unknown images are convoluted with each individual feature, which then “vote” for the object location in the image. It turns out that this approach works well for objects that have distinguished features or textures but less so if distinctive features are rather part of the background than the actual image – as it is the case for tomatoes. We would thus like to extend the current algorithm to better cope with this particular type of objects.

This project requires solid programming skills in Matlab and C and a good understanding of mathematical concepts such as convolution and probability. Experience with OpenCV is advantageous, but can be acquired during the project.

Contact:
Daniela Rus(rus@csail.mit.edu) and Nikolaus Correll (nikolaus@csail.mit.edu)

I hope that the designers are taking care to ensure that the robots do not squeeze the tomatoes.

(Picture source, license)

How a data deduplication report resulted in data reduplication

I've encountered this a few times already, and I just encountered it again.

When Motorola sold my division, I ended up being associated with a new company, and I also ended up with a change in job responsibilities. However, I still had a number of old accounts that were tied to previous information, such as my old e-mail address and my old job title.

I was reading my print copy of InformationWeek, and noticed an article on data deduplication. The article contained a blurb saying that you could download a free report, and since the subject was of interest to me, I decided that I would do so.

Then I remembered that to download the report, I would need to provide my TechWeb login...which was tied to my old Motorola e-mail address.

This reminded me that I had received an e-mail from InformationWeek, asking me to renew my subscription. I hadn't done anything with it at the time, because I suspected that the information was out of date and would have to be updated.

Time to fix all of this, I thought, so I logged into TechWeb to change my email address.

I couldn't.

So I started to create a new TechWeb account with my new email address. Because of cookies or whatever, the registration screen was populated with information from my old account (for the most part; for some reason I had to re-enter my country and state). Everything was going well, until...

...I was told that the onscreen nickname that I had chosen was in use by another account.

So then I logged into the old account, changed the old account's onscreen nickname to some gibberish (something along the lines of "iamtryingtocreateanewaccount" - I wonder how my old TechWeb posts, if any, will show up?). I then logged into the new account, re-entered the city and state, re-entered the old onscreen nickname, and things worked wonderfully.

Of course, I then decided that this would be as good a time as any to renew my InformationWeek subscription. As it turned out, the InformationWeek data didn't coincide with my new TechWeb data, or my old TechWeb data, but was associated with a different set of data, tied to a third email account (the intermediate email account that I used during the transition).

So now, with all three account records corrected to show the same information (except for the fake onscreen nickname for the Motorola account), I proceeded to download my free report on data DEDUPLICATION.

Hmm...I can offer a suggestion to reduce data duplication issues...

An odd battery seller

I was searching Google Shopping for batteries for my laser pointing device, and ran across an interesting merchant.



Now I've never heard of a battery-operated condom. Either I've led a sheltered life, or they sell more than condoms at Condom Country.

(Insert your own crude joke about a laser pointing device here.)