Wall Street woes, Silicon Valley is hiring !!

I caught a great post by Claire Cain Miller on the New York Times‘ Bits blog last night about the upswing, so to speak, of the current economic crisis: that is, that if you can’t keep a job on Wall Street, Silicon Valley will take you:

Laid off from your Wall Street job? East Coast venture capitalists and start-ups want you to know they are hiring.

Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital, a Philadelphia-area venture firm, started LeaveWallStreetJoinAStartup.com on Monday, after waking to hear the news that Lehman Brothers was filing for bankruptcy protection and Bank of America would buy Merrill Lynch. Like any good investor, he saw opportunity in the pain.

His plea to the 150,000 financial sector employees who could be laid off: “You might want to consider joining a start-up. These days, start-ups are more stable than Wall Street (seriously).”

More stable than Wall Street? I suppose so, given the recent news, and it’s certainly known that Silicon Valley and Wall Street both compete for the highest level of brain power with regard to their employees. I guess it’s a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty thing.

Of course, not all is created equal:

Of course, start-ups still cannot offer Wall Street’s annual bonuses, free meals and chauffeured cars. But Mr. Kopelman and Mr. Wilson listed some alternative benefits, like stock options, the chance to participate in the creation of something new and an escape from endless meetings and bureaucratic companies.

But hey, we can still dream, can’t we? It’s the workplace of the future: great workplace culture, rather than luxury perks.

What do you think? Should Silicon Valley hire Wall Street’s réfusés? And what would you rather have: Wall Street luxe perks or Silicon Valley-style comfort perks? Give us your 2c in TalkBack.

11.2 million % inflation! How is Zimbabwe surviving

Zimbabwe's inflation rate has just touched a stratospheric level of 11.2 million per cent! Yes, 11.2 million per cent, the highest in the world's history!

Compare that to the rate of inflation in India -- which is hovering at the 12 per cent level and causing so much turmoil for Indians as the cost of commodities rises sharply -- and perhaps you can put things in proper perspective.

And while the world and its brother-in-law shed tears as the United States slips into a recession and major stock markets across the world plummet, spare a thought for Zimbabwe where money has no value, and hunger, poverty and death are constant companions.



Image: A Zimbabwean man holds a new Z$ 500 million note.

Tech will suffer from financial meltdown

Sometimes you have to look around outside of your own personal sector and reflect on the world at large. If you haven’t noticed, our financial infrastructure is tumbling down around our ears. The U.S. agreed yesterday to bail out AIG at the cost of $85 billion. Just like Bear Sterns, AIG is “too big to fail.” The impact on the economy of AIG’s failure would be staggering. As my friend Steve Pizzo writes at News for Real:

If AIG failed, all those banks out there that replaced their regulatory capital with AIG IOUs would be in deep, deep, deep, deep, doo doo. If AIG failed the feds would be faced with the possibility — growing daily into a probability — of having to virtually nationalized a huge number of banks and S&Ls, replacing AIG’s IOUs with USA IOUs. (Yugo Chavez and Fidel Castro would get a good laugh out of that.)

It’s not just the financial sector. This thing will tsunami through the “real economy” – including tech. Jay Bhatti, cofounder of people search engine Spock offered some thoughts on the effect on tech. It’s not pretty:

The big players like Oracle, Sun, Microsoft and SAP … will feel an immediate impact. Financial Service firms are some of the biggest spenders of IT budgets around. I can imagine memo’s coming from the top to CIOs at banks telling them to cut costs ASAP. Naturally, they will start to push back on upgrades to new software (sorry Vista), ask for greater concessions on license pricing, and in some cases, abandon plans for new technology deployments such as new hardware or new ERP applications.

Microsoft will whether the storm, he says, since businesses still need to operate but “I would not be surprised if I heard Sun report: ‘We did not meet our numbers this quarter due to decreased spending and turmoil in the financial sector….’
Bhatti thinks the biggest impact will be on green tech, since those companies require serious capital, over a billion dollars in many case.

With hedge funds imploding, private equity shops dwindling, and banks going out of business, who will be left to write those billion dollar checks for a high-risk high-reward technology in Green? Not Uncle Sam!

I’m not sure I buy this. No one’s been willing to bet on green until the producer tax credit gets extended. The U.S. will need to jump-start new businesses as the traditional economy stagnates. Pushing money into greentech will be an economic stimulus package. Serious government investment in greentech at Defense Dept. scale will be the economic engine that gets us out of some very bad times. An Obama Administration would respond to the challenge; I’m sure McCain would coddle the oil companies for another four years, regardless of the drain on the economy. (And high oil prices create huge negatives throughout all industry.)

Furthermore, Bhatti says, plain ol high-tech startups will be strapped for cash.

When hedge funds were popping up all over the place, they needed a new place to invest their money. One of the investments they started looking into was high tech startups. Entrepreneurs welcomed this with joy. It gave them another outlet to get funding outside of traditional VCs (just look at the private investments made in Facebook less than a year ago). However, with hedge funds now reverting back to their traditional channels and many closing shop, a lot of funding that entrepreneurs were expecting may never surface.

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More info on USB 3.0 emerges

MaximumPC has posted some detailed information on USB 3.0, including a closer look at the connectors and the cable.

Here’s the deal:

• Cables and connectors will be backward compatible with USB 1.1 and 2.0 specs.
• Cable thicker because of the five additional lines (the cable is now about the thickness of Cat5).
• USB 3.0 has a maximum transfer rate of 4.8Gbps.
• Data lanes separate for uploads/downloads.
• More efficient.

Expect USB 3.0 products to hit the shelves early 2010.

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Google can sort digital photos on face value

If the human brain sees a million images per day and can instantly identify them, why couldn't software do that, too? Making such a thing a reality has been the longtime goal of German-born physicist Hartmut Neven, whose facial-recognition software firm was purchased by Google in 2006, with the stated goal of bringing his vision to digital photography.

Instead of sifting through thousands of computer file names and badly named photo folders, what if we could organize our pictures by faces instead, gathering all of our pictures of Mom, Dad and the rest of the brood together?

Neven joined forces with Google's Picasa photo editing and management software team, spending two years developing a tool that could bring photo facial recognition to the masses.

Now the software is here, and Google is winning raves for its accuracy. It's not perfect, as Google engineers point out, but it's still a major step forward.

"I find it interesting to understand how the human mind works," says Neven, who now works at Google as a lead technical manager. "How it is so adept and capable at learning. And the best way to teach the theory on brain functions is to write a program that's quite similar."

Google's face-recognition system ties into Picasa Web Albums, Google's online photo-sharing service. It's one of the search giant's smaller offerings. Web Albums had just a 3.4% share of the online photo market in August, according to researcher Hitwise, ranking No. 5. Market leader Photobucket had a 34.7% share.

Google recently upgraded its Picasa desktop photo-editing application with faster uploading tools. Face recognition, however, happens on the Web. After uploading pictures to Web Albums, you simply click the "add name tag" feature. A group of 200 shots from your family vacation, for instance, will be broken into groups based on the faces — 60 of Dad, 40 of Mom, etc.

Just match names with faces

Your job is to match the name to the face by typing in their names. The idea is that, after each face has been identified and tagged you could use the information to, say, call up a group of photos of brother and Mom together, or you with a specific group of friends, and make an instant slideshow.

"What we're doing is taking measurements," says Mike Horowitz, the Google product manager who oversees Picasa. "We're looking at the special elements of the face — where the eyes and nose are, for instance, and trying to make a prediction."

Chris Chute, an analyst at researcher IDC, says photo recognition is something consumers will latch onto, because it solves a growing problem. "We're taking more pictures than ever before, because we can, and the ability to organize them is up to the user," he says. Since many people don't like to take the time, "Anything that makes it easier for them will be greatly appreciated."

Privacy a concern

Facial-recognition applications are a growing phenomenon. Authorities in Germany and England are testing computerized facial recognition in conjunction with new biometric passports. Passengers go through security and deal with computers, instead of humans.

But can computers be trusted? How much do we want them to know about us? In the Tom Cruise film Minority Report, a computer spits out personalized ads directed at the character everywhere he turns.

Google has been a frequent target of criticism on privacy issues, and tech bloggers have weighed in on the new face-tagging feature.

"I don't like it at all," says Rob Williams, who blogs for the Techgage website. "Google knows what I search for, where I live and how much time I spend on websites. Now they know what my friends look like, too. That's just too much."

Horowitz says the tagging feature is "opt-in," so only people who choose to use the feature do so. "Turn face tagging off, and all the data goes away."

For a scientist like Neven, there's no such thing as too much information. Before joining Google, Neven taught computer science at University of Southern California, then started his own company, which became Neven Vision.

"We were a start-up and had to make money, so we turned to Europe, where cellphones were more advanced, and worked with brand marketers," he says.

His goal was to use software to recognize billboards and other objects. He worked toward getting snapshots from cellphones to return information about the product.

In one European promotion for Coca-Cola, people were asked to take a quick camera phone shot of a Coke can for instant registration in a sweepstakes.

At Google, Neven would like to see his software advance to the point where it can eliminate many of the mundane uploading tasks camera hobbyists now encounter.

For instance, once the application learned the faces you regularly photograph (like your spouse and kids), you would not have to manually tag photos when you transfer them from a camera to your computer — the software would do that for you.

"We want to make it increasingly automatic and seamless," he says. It's not there yet — but it will be, promises Neven.

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Google's Android phone will be unveiled Sept. 23

T-Mobile plans to show off the first wireless phone powered by Google Inc.'s much-anticipated Android software system at a Sept. 23 news conference.

Although T-Mobile intends to demonstrate the phone for reporters and analysts invited to next week's event in New York, the handset isn't expected to be available in stores until next month.

More specifics about the phone's shipping date and pricing are still to come. T-Mobile is expected to subsidize part of the phone's cost for buyers who agree to subscribe to the carrier's mobile service.

The phone, made by HTC, has generated a big buzz because it will be the first to use Google's Android software, which is supposed to make it easier and more enticing to surf the Internet on a handset.

Google is counting on the software, announced last November, to help sell more advertising by encouraging more people to use its Internet search engine and other services while they are away from the office or home.

T-Mobile's phone will face stiff competition from Apple Inc.'s iPhone, which is Google's largest source of mobile traffic so far, and Research In Motion's BlackBerry. If Google realizes its ambitions, hundreds of different mobile devices will run on the Android system.

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Opportunity knocks in Canada for U.S. immigrants

Fawad Rehman can't wait to show his adoptive country his entrepreneurial streak.

Rehman, an immigrant from Pakistan, plans to start a business school, similar to the one his family runs back home, and a construction business.

A big obstacle stands in the way, though: He doesn't know which country will adopt him, the United States or Canada.

Rehman, 29, an information technology consultant who lives in Columbia, Md., is in this country on a temporary H-1B visa, the kind issued to skilled workers for up to six years. He wants to become a permanent resident.

But he isn't sure if or when that will happen. So, about a month ago, he applied to become a permanent resident in the province of Alberta, Canada, through a special program that fast-tracks applications from skilled immigrants in the United States. If he qualifies, he could be approved in less than a year.

In the United States, that could take at least three years. And it's not a sure thing, because an employer must sponsor the worker.

"I want to start these businesses," Rehman says. "But I'm not trying here yet because I don't know if I will be here permanently."

At a time when the immigration debate in the U.S. is tied to national security and tightening borders, Alberta is urging immigrants to cross over and come north.

Since the Alberta government started recruiting immigrants in the USA in April, it has aggressively courted people such as Rehman, who are here on H-1 or E-3 visas for specialized work in technology, health care and other fields. Alberta needs to fill high-demand jobs, including pharmacists, iron workers and architects.

The province, which has a population of about 3.3 million, is experiencing explosive population and economic growth, particularly in oil and natural gas production. "It's virtually full employment in Alberta," says Gary Mar, Alberta's official representative to the United States.

Skilled immigrants in the USA are attractive because they have North American work experience, know the culture, speak English and assimilate quickly, he says.

In the U.S., the federal government handles immigration. In Canada, provinces have some authority for the skilled workers they recruit, says Wendy Blackwell of Alberta's Ministry of Employment and Immigration.

On Monday, Alberta immigration officials held an information session for about 200 immigrants at the Canadian Embassy in Washington. They were at an area job fair here Tuesday and planned to attend one in Maryland today. They have traveled to Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Palo Alto, Calif., and will be in New York City next month.

So far, about 500 people have submitted initial applications for permanent residency, Blackwell says.

The program appeals to skilled immigrants who are frustrated with the U.S. immigration system, she says. Getting permanent status here can take years, and some immigrants complain because their spouses aren't allowed to work.

Alberta's program grants eligible applicants and their families permanent residency in six to 12 months and allows spouses to work. Those interested don't need to secure a job before applying.

"People say it's so difficult for them here," she says. "The people who have been coming to see us have been the well-educated, people that are concerned about the way the U.S. economy is going, people that really want to start looking at other options."

Saskatchewan, the province east of Alberta, also is growing rapidly and needs workers, says Rob Norris, the minister responsible for immigration. It, too, is considering recruiting skilled immigrants in the USA, he says.

Jeff Lande is senior vice president at the Information Technology Association of America, a trade group that lobbies for more visas for skilled workers and legal permanent residents, known as green-card holders.

He believes most immigrants aren't leaving willingly. "If they have the option of staying in America, where they have established roots and jobs and contacts, chances are they would," he says. "Because they cannot get that green card, they look at options elsewhere."

Peter Njoroge, 26, visited Alberta's booth at the job fair. He came to the USA from Kenya as a refugee in 2001 and says he's upset by the pace of the immigration process. He's not eligible for Alberta's program because he's not on a skilled-worker visa, but Blackwell says people like him might get temporary worker visas that could lead to permanent residency.

"I love the U.S.," he says, "but if it means my life's going to get better by living in Canada and getting the process taken care of, I'll definitely look into it."

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Google wants your Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL contacts

A Googling Google reader noticed that their Sandbox iGoogle page had a new link on it today — unfortunately, subsequent attempts to see it were fruitless. He says the link was something like "Find friends that are using iGoogle", and clicking it took him to an interesting page.

This "Chat Import" page asks you to provide your Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL username and password so that it can scrape all your contacts. From there, it can figure out if any of them already have Google accounts — and if they do, it will let you import them directly into your Chat list. Don't worry though, Google says they won't store any of your credentials for those other services without your permission.

What do you think about Google asking for usernames and passwords for other services?

Satyam set to downsize 9% of its workforce

Hyderabad: Satyam Computers, which has just started giving pink slips to its
employees, could potentially downsize its workforce by a whopping 4,500
employees. This translates to a little less than 9% of the 51,000 employees
that the company employs. Company sources say 1,500 employees have been put
under the performance improvement plan (PIP)—euphemism for employees put on
watch list and asked to shape up or ship out. Apart from this, 3,000 others
have not been given any increment in the last appraisal cycle, thereby
indicating that their services are dispensable.
"This 1,500 plus 3,000 equals 4,500, which indicates the total number of
persons who could be eased out of the company,'' the source said.
Intrestingly, on Friday, all employees received an e-mail from the
company chief Ramalinga Raju warning them, especially the ones on the bench,
to not bunk office and be in their best 'dress code', failing which they may
face strict disciplinary action.
Last week some 400 employees from across different locations of the
company were given the pink slip, of which 150 were from Hyderabad. Sources
also indicated that after getting the message many among the 3,000 have also
started leaving their jobs on the own. But an estimate of the employees who
have left is not known.
A Satyam spokesperson said: "The bottom 5% of those who have got a bad
appraisal are put under PIP and given dummy projects to prove themselves. If
they fail they will be shown the door.'' But some of them marked for PIP
said they have been given very little time to come up as winners. However,
even as it downsizes, Satyam continues to hire new employees in thousands.
Over 40% of them are fresh blood just passing out of college.
The spectre of retrenchment is creating panic among employees of India's
fourth largest software company. "Of the 12 people working in my project,
five were suddenly asked to resign, failing which, the company warned, it
would fire us. Everything came without warning,'' said a techie pleading
anonymity.
Employee sources say the plight of the 3,000 who have not got any
increment is pitiable: They are neither on the bench nor into any
highrevenue earning project.
"Some of us cannot quit even though we know we will be eventually sacked.
That's because we have paid a bond amount of Rs 2 lakh undertaking to serve
the company for two years,'' said an employee. Industry analysts say that
despite the current economic slowdown—due to which big projects aren't
coming the way of Indian IT companies—Satyam is still maintaining a buffer
of 3-8% on the bench. "It's like a contingency plan,'' says an analyst.
"Sometimes when a big project comes all of a sudden and the company can't
show enough resources which could be employed to deliver the work, the
company could lose deals. Which is why this inexplicable behaviour,'' he
adds.

Tech experts see a 'cloudy' horizon in Washington

Internet users have jumped head-first into the world of cloud computing, but both policy makers and the public have a lot to learn about it, tech experts said Friday.

Cloud computing will "transform how we do computing--and not in 10 years, but in four or five," said Mike Nelson, a visiting professor at Georgetown University's Center for Communication, Culture, and Technology and a former tech policy adviser under the Clinton administration. "This is going to change everything we do with computing, and there are lots of policy implications."

Nelson participated in a panel discussion of cloud computing hosted by Google on Friday. The discussion coincided with the release of a report by Pew Internet and American Life Project showing that 69 percent of Internet users have engaged in some form of "cloud computing" but most had high levels of concern about how their data on the cloud could be used.

"Most users understand enough" to feel comfortable with cloud computing, Nelson said, "but they don't understand what can happen to that information. There's a definite need for education in that area."

He said politicians needed to learn more about the implications of cloud computing as well, so they can "future proof" the new policies sure to be proposed in the near future. A whole host of issues are likely to be addressed, he said, from privacy and piracy to pornography and policing.

"The government has an almost unlimited capacity to screw up things," Nelson said. "We've got some huge challenges ahead of us."

"Cloud computing" refers to moving tasks typically handled by nearby PCs or servers--things like storage, software execution, and computation--to a remote server somewhere on the Internet. Cloud computing can refer to specific services on the Internet, such as photo editing, or to generic foundations, such as computing capacity.

Most Internet users engaging in cloud computing--56 percent of them--are using Web mail services like Hotmail, while 29 percent of Internet users have used online applications such as Adobe Photoshop Express or Google Documents, according to the Pew study. Forty percent of Internet users have engaged in cloud computing for at least two activities.

Despite the popularity of cloud computing, 90 percent of cloud application users said they would be very concerned if the company storing their data sold it to another party. Sixty-eight percent said they would be very concerned if their data were used for targeted advertising, and 49 percent said they would be very concerned if their data were given to law enforcement.

(Credit: Pew Research Center)

The high use of cloud applications combined with people's concerns shows "people use it more than they understand it," said John Horrigan, Pew's associate director for research.

Ari Schwartz, vice president and chief operating officer for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said there should be enough protections and privacy options for consumers online that "we should get to a point where it doesn't make a difference" how much users understand about the privacy risks of cloud computing.

"Consumers expect their information (on the cloud) to be treated as if it were stored on a home computer," Schwartz said.

He noted that once a user moves his data online, he loses the Constitutional rights he would have had over the data on a home computer.

"We hope that interpretation will change over time," he said.

Nelson said that with respect to cloud computing, "today we are about where we were in 1993 with the Web," but that "we need to be working on policy problems now."

"You have to have leadership that believes in empowering the user and the citizen," he said.

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Porn on a plane: Flight attendants want filters

Coffee, tea or porn? "I don't think so," say American Airline flight attendants.

(Credit: American Airlines)

Leaders of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents some 19,000 workers including American Airlines flight attendants, asked American Airline's management this week to consider adding filters to its in-flight Wi-Fi access to prevent passengers from viewing porn and other inappropriate Web sites while in-flight.

A union representative told Bloomberg News that attendants and passengers have raised "a lot of complaints" over the issue.

American Airlines is one of several airlines testing in-flight Internet access as a way to lure more passengers. American has been offering the service on a limited basis since August 20th on some flights between New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and between New York and Miami. The cost of the service on cross-country flights is $12.95, and it's $9.95 on the New York to Miami route.

The current program is in a 3- to 6-month trial period, and the airline plans to review usage and feedback on the service at the end of that period, an American Airlines spokesman told Bloomberg.

The controversy has stirred up an ongoing debate about whether Internet access in public places should be restricted. Earlier this year, the Denver International Airport took a lot flack for blocking access on its free Wi-Fi network to Web sites that officials deemed offensive.

The argument was made by Denver airport officials that users must abide by their rules because they are providing the service for free. But that case is harder to make for in-flight passengers, who are paying for Internet access.

Given that people are packed onto planes literally elbow to elbow, it's often hard not to at least glance at the laptop screen of the person sitting next to you. But airlines have not banned people from reading pornographic magazines or watching their own DVDs on flights. And it's just as easy for someone to view a DVD of an adult video on a laptop or flip through Hustler as it is to surf porn Web sites.

The truth is that it hasn't been a major problem on flights thus far. In fact, American Airline's spokesman Tim Smith told Bloomberg that the "vast majority" of customers already use good judgment in what's appropriate to look at while flying versus what's not.

And he added, "Customers viewing inappropriate material on board a flight is not a new scenario for our crews, who have always managed this issue with great success."

What do you think? Should airlines filter Internet access at 20,000 feet? Or should they just stay out of the censoring debate?  

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The edge-centric Internet

Why isn’t the edge of the network the center? More computes and storage gets shipped to consumers than to Internet data centers, so consumers should help power the Internet. And get paid for it.

P2P vs Internet data centers
A new project, spearheaded by National ICT Australia, is now part of a €50 billion program to investigate innovative technologies. The project is called Nano Data Centers (NADA) and is part of the future Internet initiative.

The goal: learn how to deliver data from the edge of the network instead of from costly, power gobbling Internet data centers.

Consumer driven to consumer powered
Google is famous for using consumer grade technology to build the world’s largest and most powerful data centers. This project asks “why don’t we use the technology that consumers are already buying to build virtual data centers?”

We already do. The Folding@home project already uses the power of PS3’s and PCs to perform computationally costly research on game consoles. P2P file sharing already spreads bandwidth among many servers.

The technology is there.

The business model
ISPs could package up unused storage and CPU cycles from their subscribers and sell them to major content and service providers. The ISP could charge a third less than what those resources would cost in a data center, keep half the money for themselves and be give the other half back to us.

At my house we currently have close to a terabyte of unused disk and 7 cores that are typically no more busy than any other PC. And that is without a PS3.

Amazon charges about $.15 a gigabyte for storage space. If my ISP sold it for $.10 per gigabyte and gave me a nickel of that, I’d be getting $50 a month just for storage. That would just about cover my broadband connection.

Is it green?
Google noted in their paper Powering The Warehouse Size Computer that provisioning power cost as much as 10 years of power. The power distribution units, the diesel generators, the power monitoring and isolation equipment, all cost a lot of money. And then there is the air-conditioning equipment.

Spread that across 150 million American homes and that power provisioning cost goes away. We’d still use the power but we wouldn’t have to build and transport all that equipment to a data center.

The Storage Bits take
America probably won’t be able to take advantage of this concept due to the slow build out of our broadband infrastructure. But the basic idea is a good one.

Why build what consumers already own?

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U.N. agency eyes curbs on Internet anonymity

A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.

The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the "IP Traceback" drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public.

The potential for eroding Internet users' right to remain anonymous, which is protected by law in the United States and recognized in international law by groups such as the Council of Europe, has alarmed some technologists and privacy advocates. Also affected may be services such as the Tor anonymizing network.

"What's distressing is that it doesn't appear that there's been any real consideration of how this type of capability could be misused," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. "That's really a human rights concern."

Nearly everyone agrees that there are, at least in some circumstances, legitimate security reasons to uncover the source of Internet communications. The most common justification for tracebacks is to counter distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks.

But implementation details are important, and governments participating in the process -- organized by the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N. agency -- may have their own agendas. A document submitted by China this spring and obtained by CNET News said the "IP traceback mechanism is required to be adapted to various network environments, such as different addressing (IPv4 and IPv6), different access methods (wire and wireless) and different access technologies (ADSL, cable, Ethernet) and etc." It adds: "To ensure traceability, essential information of the originator should be logged."

The Chinese author of the document, Huirong Tian, did not respond to repeated interview requests. Neither did Jiayong Chen of China's state-owned ZTE Corporation, the vice chairman of the Q6/17's parent group who suggested in an April 2007 meeting that it address IP traceback.

A second, apparently leaked ITU document offers surveillance and monitoring justifications that seem well-suited to repressive regimes:

Steve Bellovin

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/mccullagh.org)

A political opponent to a government publishes articles putting the government in an unfavorable light. The government, having a law against any opposition, tries to identify the source of the negative articles but the articles having been published via a proxy server, is unable to do so protecting the anonymity of the author.

That document was provided to Steve Bellovin, a well-known Columbia University computer scientist, Internet Engineering Steering Group member, and Internet Engineering Task Force participant who wrote a traceback proposal eight years ago. Bellovin says he received the ITU document as part of a ZIP file from someone he knows and trusts, and subsequently confirmed its authenticity through a second source. (An ITU representative disputed its authenticity but refused to make public the Q6/17 documents, including a ZIP file describing traceback requirements posted on the agency's password-protected Web site.)

Bellovin said in a blog post this week that "institutionalizing a means for governments to quash their opposition is in direct contravention" of the U.N.'s own Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He said that traceback is no longer that useful a concept, on the grounds that few attacks use spoofed addresses, there are too many sources in a DDoS attack to be useful, and the source computer inevitably would prove to be hacked into anyway.

Another technologist, Jacob Appelbaum, one of the developers of the Tor anonymity system, also was alarmed. "The technical nature of this 'feature' is such a beast that it cannot and will not see the light of day on the Internet," Appelbaum said. "If such a system was deployed, it would be heavily abused by precisely those people that it would supposedly trace. No blackhat would ever be caught by this."

Jacob Appelbaum

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/mccullagh.org)

Adding to speculation about where the U.N. agency is heading are indications that some members would like to curb Internet anonymity more broadly:

•  An ITU network security meeting a few years ago concluded that anonymity should not be permitted. The summary said: "Anonymity was considered as an important problem on the Internet (may lead to criminality). Privacy is required but we should make sure that it is provided by pseudonymity rather than anonymity."

•  A presentation in July from Korea's Heung-youl Youm said that groups such as the IETF should be "required to develop standards or guidelines" that could "facilitate tracing the source of an attacker including IP-level traceback, application-level traceback, user-level traceback." Another Korean proposal -- which has not been made public -- says all Internet providers "should have procedures to assist in the lawful traceback of security incidents."

•  An early ITU proposal from RAD Data Communications in Israel said: "Traceability means that all future networks should enable source trace-back, while accountability signifies the responsibility of account providers to demand some reasonable form of identification before granting access to network resources (similar to what banks do before opening a bank accounts)."

Multinational push to curb anonymous speech
By itself, of course, the U.N. has no power to impose Internet standards on anyone. But U.N. and ITU officials have been lobbying for more influence over the way the Internet is managed, most prominently through the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia and a followup series of meetings.

The official charter of the ITU's Q6/17 group says that it will work "in collaboration" with the IETF and the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center, which could provide a path toward widespread adoption -- especially if national governments end up embracing the idea.

Patrick Bomgardner, the NSA's chief of public and media affairs, told CNET News on Thursday that "we have no information to provide on this issue." He would not say why the NSA was participating in the process (and whether it was trying to fulfill its intelligence-gathering mission or its other role of advancing information security).

Toby Johnson, a communications officer with the ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau in Geneva, also refused to discuss Q6/17. "It may be difficult for experts to comment on what state deliberations are in for fear of prejudicing the outcome," he said in an e-mail message on Thursday.

When asked about the impact on Internet anonymity, Johnson replied: "I am not fully acquainted with this topic and therefore not qualified to provide an answer." He said that he expects that any final ITU standard would comport with the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It's unclear what happens next. For one thing, the traceback proposal isn't scheduled to be finished until 2009, and one industry source stressed that not all members of Q6/17 are in favor of it. The five "editors" are: NSA's Richard Brackney; Tian Huirong from China's telecommunications ministry; Korea's Youm Heung-Youl; Cisco's Gregg Schudel; and Craig Schultz, who works for a Japan-based network security provider. (In keeping with the NSA's penchant for secrecy, Brackney was the lone ITU participant in a 2006 working group who failed to provide biographical information.)

In response to a question about the eventual result, Schultz, one of the editors, replied: "The long answer is, as you can probably imagine, this subject can get a little 'tense.' The main issue is the protection of privacy as well as not having to rely on 'policy' as part of a process. A secondary issue is feasibility and cost versus benefit." He said a final recommendation is at least a year off.

Another participant is Tony Rutkowski, Verisign's vice president for regulatory affairs and longtime ITU attendee, who wrote a three-page summary for IP traceback and a related concept called "International Caller-ID Capability."

In a series of e-mail messages, Rutkowski defended the creation of the IP traceback "work item" at a meeting in April, and disputed the legitimacy of the document posted by Bellovin. "The political motivation text was not part of any known ITU-T proposal and certainly not the one which I helped facilitate," he wrote.

Rutkowski added in a separate message: "In public networks, the capability of knowing the source of traffic has been built into protocols and administration since 1850! It's widely viewed as essential for settlements, network management, and infrastructure protection purposes. The motivations are the same here. The OSI Internet protocols (IPv5) had the capabilities built-in. The ARPA Internet left them out because the infrastructure was a private DOD infrastructure."

Because the Internet Protocol was not designed to be traceable, it's possible to spoof addresses -- both for legitimate reasons, such as sharing a single address on a home network, and for malicious ones as well. In the early part of the decade, a flurry of academic research focused on ways to perform IP tracebacks, perhaps by embedding origin information in Internet communications, or Bellovin's suggestion of occasionally automatically forwarding those data in a separate message.

If network providers and the IETF adopted IP traceback on their own, perhaps on the grounds that security justifications outweighed the harm to privacy and anonymity, that would be one thing.

But in the United States, a formal legal requirement to adopt IP traceback would run up against the First Amendment. A series of court cases, including the 1995 decision in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, provides a powerful shield protecting the right to remain anonymous. In that case, the majority ruled: "Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority."

More broadly, the ITU's own constitution talks about "ensuring the secrecy of international correspondence." And the Council of Europe's Declaration on Freedom of Communication on the Internet adopted in 2003 says nations "should respect the will of users of the Internet not to disclose their identity," while acknowledging law enforcement-related tracing is sometimes necessary.

"When NSA takes the lead on standard-setting, you have to ask yourself how much is about security and how much is about surveillance," said the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Rotenberg. "You would think (the ITU) would be a little more sensitive to spying on Internet users with the cooperation of the NSA and the Chinese government."

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India needs a key stroke for its technology

The rise of India’s $64bn information technology and outsourcing industry has been praised by the world as a great success story.

Financial services, telecommunications and retail companies in the US and, to a lesser extent, Europe, would find it difficult to draw up a business plan without factoring in that India will take care of the “back-office” work.

However, what seems to puzzle many – academics and industry specialists alike – is how India’s IT and business outsourcing industry has managed to keep going despite a growing shortage of talent.

India’s universities churn out thousands of engineering graduates a year, some estimate the number to be as high as 500,000. However, according to India’s IT industry lobby, Nasscom, only about 25 per cent are suitable for employment.

The problem is even bigger when it comes to highly-skilled labour; the country produces only 7,000 PhDs a year in science, engineering and technology subjects, according to World Bank estimates. Microsoft India last year went as far as saying that India’s shortage of computer science PhDs is so dire it could threaten the country’s role as the world’s outsourcing hub.

The World Bank has made it clear in a report that if India wants to retain its role as market leader in the business of outsourcing, it needs to invest more in higher education, with a specific focus on engineering and IT.

However, not withstanding these alarming messages, the IT services industry hired 375,000 people in 2007, and is expected to take even more in 2008, according to Nasscom.

With demand for outsourcing on the rise, how do Indian IT champions such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Wipro cope with the lack of talent?

A report by Duke University says they have overcome deficiencies by investing thousands of dollars in their own training and development facilities, with the aim of turning non-IT graduates into programmers.

Just as bright IT graduates are lured by careers in banking and finance, IT companies have started recruiting people from the healthcare sector, for example, including doctors, nurses, and paramedics.

“Because they are investing in, cultivating and empowering their employees, Indian companies can hire bright but largely inexperienced talent and train them to be world-class engineers and scientists,” said Vivek Wadhwa, of Duke University and the report’s lead author. “India is proving what a nation can achieve when it invests in upgrading the skills of its workforce.”

Infosys – for example – hired more than 30,000 new graduates in 2008, most of whom have spent time at the company’s Global Education Centre in Mysore.

By the end of the year, or early 2009, Infosys hopes to complete its second training centre, which will enable it to train 40,000 graduates a year. The more than $400m cash injection to create Global Education Centre 2, “will be the largest corporate investment in educational infrastructure in India and one of the largest globally,” says Narayana Murthy, chairman of Infosys.

“The scale of investment is a testimony to our willingness to invest in future business needs ... Investment in training is a huge necessity for knowledge-based corporations.”

However, training ought not to end after the first couple of months. In this fast-changing sector, it is essential that employees keep learning. For this reason, Satyam, one of the largest IT service groups, is investing $8m to develop online education to help its staff stay up to date.

Top management is directly involved in the recruitment and development of new employees from very early on: 20 of its 80 senior executives mentor students on various campuses and many others serve as guest lecturers in the hope of inspiring a new generation of IT enthusiasts.

Retention of personnel remains a serious problem among Indian IT companies; many experience a 15 per cent annual attrition rate. But Duke University’s study points out that “annual attrition rates in the 20 to 25 per cent range are not uncommon in the IT services industry in the US”.

In the long term, the real risk is the sustainability of a system that sees private companies taking on most of the financial burden of training employees.

The founder of a venture capital firm in Bangalore says it is unwise for the Indian government to devolve a great deal of training to private companies because in the future they might decide to move elsewhere, leaving a vacuum.

For companies such as Infosys and TCS, it may make more sense to start looking for opportunities elsewhere.

Aegis BPO, an outsourcing company owned by Essar Group, has recently invested $250m to buy PeopleSupport, a US IT services group, which has operations in the Philippines and Costa Rica. Although Aparup Sengupta, the company’s chief executive, says the move is not due to a lack of talent in India, he does suggest there are other spots in the world that offer the same if not better opportunities than India did at the start of the outsourcing boom in the 1990s.

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Space offers high-speed net access to Africa

Greg Wyler, a US technology entrepreneur seeking a worthwhile project after selling his semiconductor cooling devices business, found himself in Rwanda two years ago, trying to bring internet access to one of Africa’s poorest regions.

After rebuilding a communications tower at the top of the 15,000-ft Mount Karisimbi and laying a 450km fibre network to schools and universities, Mr Wyler realised that the problem was bigger than just connecting people’s homes to the internet, it was more an issue of a lack of a telecommunications network to link the homes to.

“It’s easy to build a WiMax [wireless data transmission] tower, but if you’re 5,000 miles from a fibre network, you can’t provide fast internet access,” he says.

The solution was to move on from this network in Rwanda to an altogether more ambitious effort to rethink the telecommunications backbone in markets where a comprehensive fibre network will not make commercial sense for many years, if ever.

What started as a series of Powerpoint slides only began to gain momentum a year ago, when Mr Wyler caught the attention of John Malone’s Liberty Global cable group, HSBC’s private equity arm, and Google, the US search engine group.

Since then, the three partners have injected about $20m each, and raised a smaller sum from Allen & Co, the media investment boutique, to bring the project to a stage where it is ready to announce an order for the satellites that will form the network.

The partners have been attracted by a confluence of technology and demand which has made viable Mr Wyler’s vision of using satellites instead of fibre to provide the “backhaul” connection between telecoms core networks and the cellphone towers springing up in even the remotest areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Existing fibre networks are only viable where there is sufficient demand in the end location, making them useless for most rural areas. “In places like Africa, the cost of bandwidth is 20 times what you pay in the US,” notes Larry Alder, product manager in Google’s alternative access group.

Most commercial communication satellites are in geostationary orbit, with fixed beams, which limits signal strength and bandwith. Established satellite operators such as SES Global and Eutelsat, which rely on geostationary constellations, have focused mainly on developed countries.

The 16 satellites with which Mr Wyler’s O3B Networks will launch are closer to earth, thereby providing a stronger signal than existing commercial satellites, and use rotating beams that can be targeted to focus bandwidth on the areas where it is needed. Unlike some other satellite communications pioneers such as Iridium and Inmarsat, which have no mass customer base, O3B Networks will not attempt to deal directly with consumers.

Instead, it will sell capacity on its satellites to telecoms companies that are building out networks of mobile communications towers to meet rising demand in emerging markets.

The growth in the number of mobile phone users in emerging markets is high. In Africa, for instance, annual mobile customer growth is close to 60 per cent, underscoring Mr Wyler’s confidence that there is “tremendous” pent-up demand.

If successful, O3B Networks could sharply reduce the cost of providing high-speed data services in many countries. Leased lines can represent up to a quarter of mobile operators’ costs at present, and their margins are already being squeezed by rising traffic volumes.

Google says it will also accelerate the pace of internet adoption in such markets. “This unleashes a lot of entrepreneurs to build local networks,” says Mr Alder.

To succeed, the partners must raise another $700m. It could face competition from established operators, such as Globalstar, which offers satellite phone services direct to consumers in many parts of the world and will upgrade its offering using similar satellites to O3B. But if the plan works, says Mike Fries, chief executive of Liberty Global, “it seemed to us like one of those rare chances that could go from zero to 60 very fast”.

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Infosys nervous after Tata factory dispute

Jitters from a dispute over the Tata Group’s plans to build the world’s cheapest car in West Bengal state are spreading to other Indian companies, with Infosys Technologies warning on Tuesday it might also be forced to rethink its plans for the state.

Infosys said the dispute, in which protesters have blockaded the site of the partially built factory for the Tata Nano car, was making it apprehensive about its own proposal to set up a Rs5bn ($127m) software development centre in the state. “Singur has created fear in the minds of India Inc and like all other companies we are watching the developments very closely,” said Infosys, India’s second-largest outsourcer. The dispute over Singur has worried corporate India because the Tata group is seen as the most acceptable face of capitalism in the country due to its extensive corporate social responsibility programmes.

There are concerns the controversy could not only undermine industry in West Bengal, the most important state in India’s under-developed eastern region, but also hurt foreign investor sentiment in the country.

The state’s main opposition party, the Trinamool Congress, besieged Tata’s partially built factory near Calcutta last month with mass protests amid claims the plant is being built on fertile agricultural land seized by the West Bengal government from farmers.

The Tata group, which wants to launch the Nano next month with a price tag starting at Rs100,000, has warned it will pull out if the issue is not resolved.

The opposition at the weekend suspended the protests after crisis talks with the government, with the two sides forming a committee to hammer out a resolution to the issue.

But there is still concern the dispute could reignite at any moment if the two sides cannot reach an agreement on additional compensation for those farmers the opposition says were evicted to make way for the plant.

Infosys said on Tuesday it had not pulled out of West Bengal and was not planning to. But it added: “We will rethink and re-examine our proposed investment if need be.” When it announced the West Bengal development centre in April, its chief executive S Gopalakrishnan said he was “impressed with the efforts of the state government in attracting such investments”.

In spite of positive signs from the negotiations over the dispute on Monday, the two sides appeared to be moving further apart on Tuesday.

The Trinamool Congress has told reporters it wants 300 acres from within the 1,000-acre Nano factory site to be given back to farmers, while the government has said they will be given land but mostly from other areas away from the plant.

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NVIDIA slapped with securities lawsuit

Graphics giant NVIDIA has been hit by lawsuit which claims that the company breached US securities laws by concealing for at least eight months the fact that its GPUs were affected by a serious thermal defect.

The lawsuit, brought against NVIDIA by New York law firm Shalov, Stone, Bonner & Rocco, claims that CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and CFO Marvin Burkett knew about the existence of the GPU problem as early as November 2007 but that no public announcement was made July 2 2008. Following this announcement NVIDIA’s stock price tumbled by over 30%.

The lawsuit is seeking class action status against NVIDIA and unspecified damages.

What seems to be a cornerstone of the case is the fact that HP has issued BIOS updates in an attempt to minimize the effect of the flaw eight months before NVIDIA made an announcement to investors.

From the lawsuit:

According to multiple public sources, the earliest of the BIOS updates was issued by Hewlett-Packard no later than November 2007. Although NVIDIA and the other Defendants were almost certainly aware of the underlying problem earlier than this, the fact that they had knowledge of the flaws by November 2007 is beyond serious debate. Nevertheless, for at least eight months, Defendants concealed from NVIDIA investors these defects and their obvious impact on the Company’s financial condition and future business prospects.

If you skip to paragraph 25 of the lawsuit you will see this post I wrote back at the end of July being quoted extensively.

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SAP teams up with InnoCentive; Software IP questions abound

SAP is partnering with InnoCentive, an “open innovation market place,” to link so called “seekers,” or companies looking to solve a business problem, with “solvers,” developers that can save the day. For instance, SAP is looking for someone to create novel uses of social networking in enterprise applications.

The partnership, announced by Zia Yusuf, SAP’s executive vice president of global ecosystems and partner group, kicks off with three challenges and offer three prizes.  Yusuf made the announcement at SAP TechEd in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

SAP’s InnoCentive partnership is a sign that the software giant is probing the enterprise 2.0 concept a lot more.

The first SAP challenge is the easiest. Create a video for $5,000 that will be “aimed at energizing the recruitment, educating on “how to” engage in the community, and showing the vibrant activity and value of existing and new SAP Community members. ”

Sounds easy enough and you have a Dec. 8 deadline. The other two have more ROI attached to them.

The other challenge, for $10,000, covers “Unified Web Service Error Handling.” SAP is looking for “a method that simplifies unified web service error handling by consuming applications in multi-vendor Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) environments.”

And finally is the most interesting one–social networking for enterprise applications. The prize here is $10,000. The deadline for both the Web service error handling issue and social networking is Oct. 8.

Update: David Ritter, CTO of InnoCentive, said in a press conference that the company has been facilitating IP transfer for 7 years and has added software in the last year. Procter & Gamble has been the leading proponent of these idea exchanges as has pharmaceutical research firms. SAP is a big win for InnoCentive and there’s an equity investment involved.

InnoCentive in May raised a B round of venture funding worth $6.5 million from Spencer Trask Ventures, a New York-based firm.

When asked about intellectual property challenges, Yusuf said SAP would rely on InnoCentive’s ability to facilitate transfers. Ritter added that there are many models used between solvers and seekers and challenges can be tailored to what a company is comfortable with. Yusuf added that SAP has been facilitating idea exchanges on its open developer network for years.

The companies have also released a statement.

Update 2:  Ritter had a Q&A with fellow Enterprise Irregulars including Dennis Howlett and Michael Krigsman. Some key themes:

• We came back to intellectual property questions repeatedly. Ritter argued that InnoCentive’s model worked for pharma and consumer goods because the R&D model was broken. Costs were going up with little return. After all, you can’t create all the good ideas. “SAP saw that potential (for software),” said Ritter. “It may take time but it could represent in the long term a fundamental shift.”
• Mark Yolton, senior vice president of the SAP Community Network, said the company will be “careful about the challenges we put out” so it doesn’t give away competitive edge. Yolton said it will use InnoCentive as “an extension of products.” Yolton added that it’s day one and SAP is focused on using InnoCentive for things around the edges. Translation: SAP won’t be posting NetWeaver challenges. When asked about whether SAP was taking full advantage of InnoCentive Yolton said the plan is to start out cautiously. Ritter said that approach is common to the adoption curve.
• Challenges can be run anonymously by SAP if there are sensitive items. Yolton added that InnoCentive will be adopted more and more culturally. SAP can also turn its developer community on to InnoCentive. And anyone can be a solver for SAP–including an Oracle employee.
• Yolton said that SAP won’t get involved in IP transfer and crafting challenges and the prizes. InnoCentive will run things in the background. Key theme for the transaction is that InnoCentive requires a solver names his or her employer and signs a waiver giving up claims to the intellectual property. For instance, an SAP employee couldn’t be a solver since there may be proprietary information divulged.
• Yolton added that SAP will have a clean room to make sure that it doesn’t acquire “contaminated IP” that may lead to legal trouble down the line.

Ritter added that the InnoCentive-SAP partnership is a learning experience and both parties have “eyes wide open.”

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Slowdown sees groups cut IT spending

More than 40 per cent of large businesses have cut their IT budgets this year because of the global economic slowdown, according to a report set to be released on Tuesday.

Forrester, the US-based research company, found that 43 per cent of companies have already cut their overall IT budgets in 2008, while 24 per cent have put discretionary IT spending on hold.

Although the overall figures indicate a reduction in IT spending, the report highlighted wide differences between countries, sectors and types of IT spending.

“This is not an across-the-board spending slowdown. The impact of the economy on IT budgets varies widely by industry and geography,” said John McCarthy, an analyst at Forrester. “Some industries are like ground zero for financial problems, such as financial services, construction and autos. The further you move away from those industries, the less severe the problems are.”

For example, 49 per cent of financial services companies have already cut back on IT, compared with 39 per cent of media and entertainment companies. Almost half of all US companies have cut their IT budget, compared with 28 per cent in Germany.

The use of offshoring is becoming more common, with 43 per cent of companies stating they were looking to use this type of service, compared with only 9 per cent that use it at present.

The cutback in financial services reflects the slowdown in the banking sector, although several large IT contracts have been signed since the start of the credit crunch. Autonomy, the UK search software company, recently signed deals with Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch worth more than £150m ($263.5m).

Further, a recent survey by Temenos, the Swiss banking software group, reported that only 11 per cent of banks thought their IT budget would be cut.

The report was based on the responses of 947 IT managers in North America and western Europe.

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Someone Stole Your Cell Phone? Tell It to Phone Home

Maverick Mobile Solutions, an Indian company that makes mobile applications, has a new way to protect your cell phone: tell it to follow the lead of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and “phone home.”

Or, to bring E.T. into the 21st century, “text home.”

If your phone is lost or stolen, the application, called Maverick Secure Mobile, encrypts your data, sends you a text message with the location of the phone and, best of all, plays an annoyingly loud siren to torture the thief.

The application was unveiled at the DEMO technology conference in San Diego, Calif., this week, where it provided a few minutes of “comic relief,” according to Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat.

The Maverick software is hidden on a phone, so a potential thief can’t tell whether or not your phone has it. You give the company a second phone number — your spouse’s or a friend’s, for example. As soon as a thief replaces your SIM card with his own, the phone encrypts all of your remaining data, like your phone book, photos or text messages, so the thief can’t see them. It also sends that data to your second phone so that you have it.

Then you can start playing tricks on the thief. By sending text message commands, you can see all the phone calls and text messages he sends or receives and any new contacts he enters in the phone book. With a feature called Spy Call, you can call your phone and eavesdrop on the thief’s calls — without him knowing. Then, when you get really exasperated, you can make the phone play a blaring siren. Just when he is about to toss your screaming phone in the trash, you can send him a text message with your name, location and, if you want, a reward for returning the phone.

Although the product is currently in beta, Maverick has a deal with Nokia to begin distributing the anti-theft application on Nokia phones, according to DEMO. Maverick makes other mobile applications, games and content, including popular memory cards pre-loaded with games, applications and Bollywood films.

The company suggests that its new anti-theft application could also be used by parents who want to track their kids. With its eavesdropping and siren-playing capabilities, I’m sure users will come up with many more mischievous uses.

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Ubuntu should not copy the Mac

Ubuntu is putting serious investmentinto improving the interface of its Linux.

Mark Shuttleworth wants Linux to become comparable to the Apple Macintosh, quoting the watchwords of Web 2.0:

1.     Make your site visually appealing,

2.     Do something different and do it very, very well,

3.     Call users to action and give them an immediate, rewarding experience.

Good idea. But the Ubuntu Developer Summit is taking the wrong approach.

It is past time for open source to become truly innovative. The Macintosh interface is a nice point-and-click interface, but that's all it is.

We need something completely different. How about a high quality voice interface, based on Perlbox? (The graphic above is from Perlbox.org.)

Perlbox already has a KDE interface, and three years of work behind it. It may not be all it can be. What could it be with a few million development dollars?

My friend Lamont Wood has been working with voice recognition technology and says some of it is now ready for prime time. By that he means it can be 95% accurate at 120 words per minute.

True, he was testing a proprietary product, but I am first contemplating an open source voice interface, not a voice-based word processor. The parts to do something ground-breaking appear to be here.

Besides, there are millions of visually-impaired folks, like my mom and my friend Jim Pettigrew, who have been totally left out of the computer revolution until now. Why not bring them in?

If Ubuntu is ready to be truly competitive, then that says to me it's ready to innovate. And if voice isn't your favored direction, what is?

 

Content Delivery Networks (CDN) – a comprehensive list of providers

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What is a Content Delivery Network?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen. This will help scaling a web application by taking a part of the load from the service servers.

You can find more about CDNs here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Delivery_Network

 

Some large services use their own Content Delivery Networks, but sometimes it is more effective to use a third-party CDN provider. Plentyoffish.com, for example, uses a third-party CDN (it can't afford to have its own CDN). Both Myspace.com and Friendster.com also use a CDN.

You can see in the image below how Peer1 Networks from Canada has its own CDN setup. This kind of setup is applicable to most of the Content Delivery Networks infrastructure.

There's an inflation of services which offer content delivery solutions and venture capitalists still pump money into more CDN solutions.

 

Below is a comprehensive list of Content Delivery Networks (CDN) around the globe (in no particular order):

 

• Akamai, the 800-pound gorilla of Content Delivery Networks and the company that made CDNs famous with a record-setting IPO. It's core offering is distribution services (both http content and streaming media), and it has recently unbundled other services, including network monitoring and geographic targeting. In April 2000, Akamai purchased InterVu; in 2005, Akamai purchased Speedera, and in 2007, Netli. It has an impressive list of customers, including some big names:  (Adobe, Myspace, Monster, NBA, BestBuy, Cabela's, Reuters, Verizon, Yahoo, IBM, US Airforce, Travelocity, Sony, CNET, NTT, AMD, NASA, etc.)

 

• Limelight Networks  offers an advanced Content Delivery Network for Internet distribution of high-bandwidth media such as video, music, games, and downloads. It also has some big name customers (Amazon, Akimbo, iFilm, MSNBC. LonelyPlanet, Valve, VideoJug, etc)

 

• EdgeCast  is a Content Delivery Network offering video, games, music, content, and live events solutions all for the same low price. It also provides website acceleration for increasing web site performance and speeding up page load times, as well as advanced reporting and analytics. It seems it is preferred by some Web 2.0 companies (Jaxtr, Mashable, Blip.tv, Mahalo, etc).

 

• CDNetworks  is the Asia's largest CDN service provider and provides content acceleration with a global network of POPs. Their customers includes Toyota, K2Network, Nexon, Megastudy, NCSoft, etc.

 

• Amazon Web Services  not only offers cloud computing and database but also storage. It uses the Amazon powerful infrastructure.

 

• BitGravity  is a Content Distribution Network, established in 2006, and provides services for the delivery of audio, video, software, and advertising. It built the first CDN for Interactive Broadcasting, which is optimized to deliver affordable, HD-quality video on demand, live broadcasts, and interactive applications for massive audiences on the Internet.

 

• Peer1  has a unique Rapid Edge technology which provides global load balancing across its network of caches with on-demand propagation. Plentyoffish.com is one of their customers.

 

• UpStreamNetworks  is a division of ServePath (West Coast's premier managed hosting provider) and Silicon Valley's leader in Windows and Flash streaming.

 

• ATT Intelligent Content Distribution  is a network-based Content Delivery Network service that replicates information across the Internet. The content is replicated across multiple sites and on multiple servers within a single node. These service nodes are connected through AT&T's global IP network and are located in AT&T Global Internet Data Centers and Service Node Routing Centers.

 

• GridNetworks  provides the underlying technology to streams high-quality television content over the internet and into homes. Its architecture is part traditional CDN, part peer-to-peer (P2P) network.

 

• MoveNetworks  is using Microsoft's Silverlight to stream HD quality television. ABC, Discovery Channel, Fox, Televisa, ESPN360, Oprah are some of their customers.

 

• EdgeStream  provides video delivery solutions (high definition), including a complete software platform from client to server and a distributed and fault-tolerant CDN network.

 

• Velocix  has a unique approach on content delivery (video, games, software): pay per delivery (if the delivery was successful) not per GB, like many other CDNs. Their customers includes BabelGum, Bollywood.tv, Chic.tv, AC Milan (famous European soccer club).

 

• Panther Express  offers video, audio, graphics, and games content delivery solution at affordable rates. They've also implemented the bandwidth throttling, which limit the rate that the browser downloads the video, saving bandwidth costs. StudiVZ, the German Facebook clone and one of the busiest European social networking sites, is a Panther customer. LiveJournal, mochi Media are some of their other customers.

 

• BroadMedia  is a premier Japanese Content Delivery Network specialized in video, games, broadcasting and mobile services.

 

• InterNap  leverages their Performance IP^TM solution to quickly and securely stream and distribute video, audio, advertising and software to audiences across the globe through strategically located high-capacity data centers. They bought VitalStream CDN in 2007. Their customers includes Diesel, Saatchi & Saatchi, Ice.com, PlanetVU, MyStack.

 

• Digital Fountain  is specialized in high quality video content delivery.

 

• Level3  offers full suite of scalable CDN services and gives you access to the customizable services you need from a single, trusted provider.

 

• Mirror Image  provides a proven Content Delivery Network for digital media that ensures the best possible user experience while enabling companies to minimize their website infrastructure investment and operational costs. Forbes, NOAA, Pacific Sunwear, Ansari X Prize foundation, adECN are among Mirror Image customers.

 

• NaviSite  supports the complete Content Delivery chain: from hosting, transcoding, and content publishing to content delivery and reporting (electronic file delivery, content streaming, website acceleration, online video publishing platform).

 

• Accelia  is another distributed content delivery service for static and streaming content focused mainly in Japan.

 

• SimpleCDN  is specialized in delivery of software files, video and images (pay per file). It provides an advanced global content delivery platform all for one price, without complicated usage and storage charges, contracts or long setup times.

 

• CacheFly  technology uses Anycast to instruct carriers routers to make connections to the best available point-of-presence for the end user. By combining anycast with their unprecedented international footprint, CacheFly has built the next-generation in Content Delivery Network. They specialize in software downloads, website performance, streaming media, podcasting. This seem to be another CDN preferred by some Web 2.0 companies: Revision3, Ars Technica, Pluck, BetaNews.

 

• Nirvanix  is a premier Storage Delivery Network (SDN), Amazon S3 equivalent. The SDN is powered by Nirvanix's patent pending Internet Media File System (IMFS), a clustered file system that includes all of Nirvanix's globally distributed storage nodes under one namespace. Axentra and Free Drive are some of their customers.

 

• Solid State Networks  is a hybrid peer-to-peer (P2P) and HTTP Content Delivery Network specialized in software, video and games (especially games) delivery. Acclaim, Zyon Games, Alchemic Dream are some of its customers.

 

• ValueCDN  is an European low cost Content Delivery Network. It can be used for images, stylesheets, JavaScript, Flash and other files.

 

• NTT Communications  offers SCD (Smart Content Delivery) technology which uses three components (load balancing, global load balancing, reverse-proxy caching) to work together for faster download times, faster connections, steady video streams and reliable managed services delivered across your Internet solution.

 

• Swarmcast  is a CDN specialized in video delivery only (HD video hosting, streaming, live events, downloads).

 

• BitTorrent  is a P2P (peer-to-peer) content delivery solution. BitTorrent DNATM is a content delivery service that uses a secure, private, managed peer network to power faster, more reliable, more efficient delivery of richer content. BitTorrent DNA works with your existing CDN or origin servers, seamlessly accelerating your downloads or HTTP media streams. BitTorrent DNA enables websites to seamlessly add the speed and efficiency of patented BitTorrent technology to their current content delivery infrastructure, requiring no changes to their current Content Delivery Network (CDN) or hardware in the origin infrastructure.

 

• Verisign Mobile Content Delivery Network  can help content providers to deliver and bill for nearly any type of mobile content and messaging using a distribution network for mobile media and applications that reaches over 2 billion wireless subscribers throughout North America, Europe, and other countries.

 

• Technicolor  is a purpose-built network for large object delivery, engineered from the ground up to Microsoft's exacting standards for long form and HD content delivery. Big names like Warner Bros, Walmart, Hitachi, Paramount, Imax, Xbox Live, EMI, National Geographic, Microsoft, NBC Universal are among their clients.

 

• Ignite  provides the industry's most secure and scalable Content Delivery Solution, enabling customers to efficiently publish, deliver, and manage digital assets - from rich media content for training or communications to software patches and virus updates - to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Canon, Miller, Huntington, Sabre Holdings, Accenture, RadioShack are Ignite's customers.

 

• Coral is a free peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem. They have 260 servers worldwide, for now. Looks like they have a long list of users.

 

• HighWinds is leveraging the company's high-performance RollingThunder™ network and user-friendly StrikeTracker™ media manager and reporting dashboard to globally deliver content, videos, live events and other media. It sets the pace among CDNs by offering advantages in data center peering, real-time analytics, instant account provisioning, complete content control and massive scalability. It seems also that it provide services to some other CDN companies like Technicolor, Solid State Networks.