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Cloud Platforms

Maarten Visser — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 18:23:00 GMT

I watched the TechCrunch Roundtable session last friday about "Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?". The session addressed some interesting questions and was focusing on the issue “Is the cloud really different from the way we work now” and if it’s different, what are the benefits..

One conclusion was: Cloud computing will really change our world (it’s a paradigm shift (the biggest in 20 years) and it’s the next big evolution of the web and the way we use IT as businesses and consumers. The way TechCrunch bring this news: “The Cloud Is The New Dotcom”

One of the topics I liked most where the Background stories from Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) and Amitabh Srivastava (Corporate VP, Windows Azure). They both told a short story about how their companies started with the Ideas for their ‘Platform as a Service’ products (EC2 and AZURE) and what their primary goals are. Check the second clip to see Werner's answer. And Microsoft Vision we know from Ray Ozzie's PDC 2008 keynote.

In my opinion:
Amazon and Microsoft have the best position for becoming the biggest ”Platform as a Service” companies. SaaS is important too, but the platforms will bring the real innovations.

Our current IT and Web platforms are like DOS (poor interfacing and expensive to deploy) and these ‘Platforms as a Service’ (PaaS) providers will bring us the next Operating Systems. A (Web) OS that works on-demand, has pay-per-use and has extremely scalable computing resources without the need for (internal) IT.

I can’t what to bring the first “Cloud OS” based applications in production...

Second attempt to Restart

Maarten Visser — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 04:55:00 GMT

Wow, I tried to restart this blog a year and twenty days ago, but it didn't took off. Let’s see how I will do this time.

Much is changed since i started this blog more that 4 years ago. It's great to see that after 5 years of dreaming about it, Cloud and Grid Computing really are getting mature. Application Server Providers are growing into "Software as a Service" Factories and Cloud Computing Platforms like Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Microsoft’s Web Operating System (AZURE) are flexible, feature rich and extremely scalable.

What good things can be done with this easy Connectable and Extreme Virtualized Computer Grids?

I have some ideas how to use Cloud Computing the way the world could need it. I mentioned some ideas earlier on this blog and I have created a bunch of new ideas in the past few years.…

We are moving towards 2010 and a new totally new decennium is almost starting. Since the “economic storm” started in 2008 company and country budgets are changing rapidly. And for the last decades innovation skyrocketed like never before. The 2010’s will bring a lot of Paradigm Shifts due to the combination of Social and Economic disruptions and the new possibilities of cloud computing , bioscience and nanotechnology.

Let’s try do find positive good purposes for this power.!

Combining the web 2.0 with the Semantic web 0.2

Maarten Visser — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 23:29:00 GMT

During the last three months there was a lot of writing on the net related to the ‘web 2.0’. Reading all this enthusiastic ideas and blogposts gave me a great feeling. And I love trying new internet services, so It has been a great time for me. Some ideas and services where great, others just another mashup of two existing services.

But..

My personal interest was not so much about the web 2.0 (this is a logical next step), but more about the semantic web 0.2 ;).
I have been reading a lot about the developments related to the Semantic web and the standards that are in development now (w3c).

I am convinced that the only way to create a good and lasting platform for future web communities, we need the Web 2.0 standards (RSS, AJAX, Webservices) AND we need Semantic web standards (like RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQ). After realizing this, I took some steps backwards and started thinking about the basics needed to build the first prototypes.

I will post more on this topic soon..

New Insights

Maarten Visser — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 23:02:00 GMT

It's been two months since my last post on this blog. The publications stopped, but I gathered a lot of new insights.

When I started my research on my Gridthinking vision, I was focussing on technologies like RSS and Webservices.
For the last months I did a lot of reading and thinking. This resulted in a better view on the way i see our connected future.

I will try to share all my new ideas before the end of the year..

Connecting brainpower and Brainwaves using GridThinking

Maarten Visser — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 05:54:00 GMT

Do you know the feeling when you are experiencing a 'brain wave' and lots of ideas are just keep up popping up in your head? This can happen after a hour of concentrated working or just happen when you are driving your car…

Well.. I like to distinct 3 ranges of brainwaves.

Event 1: On your own
You can experience a brain wave on your own. If you have a flow of ideas then in most occasions you haven’t got enough time and possibility to write everything down. Because of this you never use the full potential of your creativity.

Event 2: In a (small) group

You can experience this with a group on a specific geographic location. A lot of people cal this Collective Iintelligence. If your lucky multiple people are taking notes or someone is recording the event. It only takes place occasionally that a group of people are experiencing together a ‘common brain wave’ and that results are recorded efficiently.

Event 3: In a large group

You could have a experience where maybe thousands of people share and experience the same brainwave at the same time all at differtent places. This event could maybe never have happened before…

Gridthinking is about finding the technology to realize category 3 events and use this collective creativity to solve the difficult problems on our planet.

If we want to realize this we need a tool that helps us get control on all available streams of information and filter these streams for keywords and concepts that are the most close to our life, work, hobbies and other interest.

All information that's recorded in the world should be automatically gathered and ordered, so that you get control over the information you need to live and on a daily basis. This way you will never have to search for answers anymore. They will be automatically presented based on what you do at the moment or in the phase of your life.

Next to having al the necessary information in your face, you can also publish feedback back into these steams of information. This drops of feedback can grow into ripples and by floating true the ‘world wide information streams’ these ripples will soon be visible again in your ‘real-time filtered information stream’, so that you get answers and results from unlimited angles and sources.

Realizing Collective Intelligence with the Semantic web

Maarten Visser — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 00:30:00 GMT

I have realised that a big part of my ideas around the concept of GridThinking are about using the Semantic web to realizing Collective Intelligence.

This can be done by the first building blocks of the web 2.0. To name some: RSS, OPML, REST and/or WS-* (webservices).

We got to the point that we can start building this concept, based on standard that will probably last a while…
If you want to read more views and ideas on the Web 2.0, check the TalkDigger for some interesing Links (like the web20 tags on IceRocket, Del.isio.us , Feedster, Technorati.....) While getting information based on the 'web20' Tags.
Google also does a nice job! This by displaying some intersting links of diffrent ' TAG collectors'. Even one that i didn't know of yet...

GridComputing vs GridThinking

Maarten Visser — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 09:35:00 GMT

With GridComputing computers share resources, CERN's definition: The Grid: "a service for sharing computer power and data storage capacity over the Internet".

A part of 'GridThinking' could be in the same direction: GridThinking is: "a service for sharing brain power (input and feedback) and memories over the Internet”.

The ThinkGrid

Maarten Visser — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 02:23:00 GMT

I seems like a good idea to find new ways for adding posts and comments on blogs as 'branches of a mindmap'. This way conversations, discussions and related items can get connected based on the contents. Like this you will have structured commenting and you would be able to navigate trought comments on a post, based on your deeper interest and directions you take within the branches (in the comments or added facts).

If you want to add comments or participate in a discussion, it would be very easy to directly publish your input (like text, media or other files) and also connect to multiple existing 'information branches' in other mindmap structured discussions. When all of this would be done wih the same standards, you will get a very interesting three dimensional connected representation of topics and comments.

Yes, in a big way this is already happing in the form of blogging, comments, permalinks, tagging, folksonomy, social networks and services like Technorati, Bloglines, Newsgator, Del.isio.us and more.

The technology that these services are based on are extremely interesting, because they ad the 'community aspects' we know in 'real life socializing' like direct suggestions, shared interests and opinion leaders. The aspect of 'mass communication' add the 'human factor' to clustered publications. And things will really become interesting when information will automatically be sorted and formatted in a way that it best fits you information need.

We need to think of more effective ways of structuring and consuming information.

I'm missing a ratingsystem based on what a person did and published in the past. I want a rating system based on the quality of earlier publications (rated by people who read the article and based the amout of refferes and coments). And it would be nice if whe had more parameters to determine how valuable a publication is, for example based on the tags that are associated with it

I think that everybody will agree if i say that at the moment there is lot's of work to be done. Where do we begin and what will be the technologies that bring the best thing for mankind? Tagging done by people is ok, but it would be better to just tag persons or topic hosted by persons. Who want to tag by post? Leave this to computers, who can do it based on content or the behaviour that subscribes and besed on desktop and server algoritms.

So another way for realizing mindmaps or clustered content, could be done using Semantic Analysis and Desktop Visualization. There are many studies and articles on the subject, like for example This one. Just use a algorithm as 'BI clustering' (a dataminig term within Business Intelligence) to analyse the content of a post, the rating of the person who added it, related topics and automatacally add tags based on this. This could also be done based on the text you wrote, the referrers, the comments, analysis of added mediatypes, idtags, descriptions in the file format, the application (and configuration) used for publishing and the context of the publication. And last, you could have 'business logic' at the client (the user consuming a publication) which automatacally send ratings to the publisher based on browsing behavoir (how long is a posting viewed) or other smart ways (like on what topic or tag the post was automatacally added by the desktop software (configured by the user)).

When tags are automatically added to all publications, and the comments are automatically linked to other publications from individuals, organisations or related facts (from online knowledage portals and encyclopaedia's) and all this is in RSS… Then we are building an interesting network of related publications. The, next we have the challenge of building intuitive interfaces to navigate to this 4D network of related information and find ways to rate and sort this data based on your personal interests.

Summary:

This idea comes down to creating new ways for connecting and sorting internet publications, based on a combination of 'social tagging and rating' and using software algorithms (business intelligence) to do the tagging and rating. It's about connecting information, people, thoughts and visualizing large amounts of data in a way that it will fit our personal information needs. This system could also be used for monitoring topics, events and trends.

Extended Metadata Tags for Grid Thinking

Maarten Visser — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 02:09:00 GMT

Gridthinking is about the key technology behind the first version of a Computer Network that realizes Collective Thinking between the community of internet connected people who wish to share information and thoughts on all kind of subjects and interests. (related blogs)

Gridthinking could be about the Google Grid. But is more that this alone. Yes it's about recorded media (EPIC?), but it's also about people and the possibility to real-time share thoughts with the rest of the world no matter where you are. And GridThinking is connecting al related thoughts and finding the right thoughts, ideas and facts just at the moment you need them (or even didn’t know you needed them).
GridThinking is about a new evolution in collaboration and communication and large parts of it can be build with technology that's available today (the web 2.0)....