A Proposal Regarding High Tech Immigrants to the US

The topic of H-1B visa’s has always been a hot one.  In the current economic climate there are plenty of American tech workers looking for work and therefore this special visa program is under increasing scrutiny.  I have many friends and associates and family members who have either lost jobs or found themselves in positions they would not prefer due to the current economic meltdown and my bias is to side with them on this.  We need to rethink the nation’s objectives regarding the H-1B program (you can read more on the H-1B visa program, including criticisms, at wikipedia).

We Have A Cyber Czar, and He Has Spoken

A debate has been running for months both among government thought
leaders and the technical literati on whether or not the US should appoint a
“Cyber Czar” who can exert authority over IT security in the federal space or perhaps even
aspects of the nation’s IT defenses.  This is a complex discussion
that has had some of the greatest thinkers in and out of government
involved.   A great snapshot of issues and the opinions of many well
reasoned experts are expressed in the CSIS report “Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency“   and other
thoughts are here: The Future of Cyber Security and here: Threats In the Age of Obama .

Unfortunately for those who would like to still debate and discuss this
issue, there is already a Cyber Czar who can accomplish most all his
objectives in our networks.  His name is Russian Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin.  This former KGB operative now controls Russia with an
iron fist and has shown others again and again he will exert influence
anywhere he needs to in order to accomplish his objectives.  He will
use tanks when required and cyber when desired and combinations when it
suits him.  There are indications his agents are also in our networks
now.  If our objectives are to keep players like him out, we cannot say
we are accomplishing them.  If his objectives are to get in, then we
can say he is accomplishing them.  Till this situation changes, we
need to confront then this new reality:  Vladimir Putin is the Cyber
Czar.

We have our own great technologists and wizards of cyber, of course. 
And we have great hero entrepreneurs of technology who have built the
cyber world we all use today.  One of those greats is Michael Dell,
creator of an idea and corporation that develops, manufactures, sells
and distributes personal computers we all depend on.

But he is someone who will now think twice before thinking he can
interact as a peer to Cyber Czar Putin.  After listening to Putin’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Michael Dell
praised Russia’s technical and scientific prowess and asked a nice,
friendly question:  “How can we help.”  As a former govie CTO I would
get asked that type of question all the time from industry and really
appreciated it whenever a senior thought leader would ask that.  But
not Czar Putin.  He did not appreciate that at all.   Putin was
offended by the assertion that the mighty Russia might need help in anything Cyber.
The exchange is captured here on YouTube:

Fortune: described the exchange this way:

“Putin’s withering reply to Dell: “We don’t need help. We are not
invalids. We don’t have limited mental capacity.” The slapdown took
many of the people in the audience by surprise. Putin then went on to
outline some of the steps the Russian government has taken to wire up
the country, including remote villages in Siberia. And, in a final dig
at Dell, he talked about how Russian scientists were rightly respected
not for their hardware, but for their software. The implication: Any
old fool can build a PC outfit.”

Clearly cyber domination is personal with Putin.  He is the Cyber Czar. 

I think I should end with a plea to all who care about cyber freedom and all who know the potential positive contributions of IT:  Please don’t be
pleased with this current situation.  Please don’t just think the title
of Cyber Czar I’ve now used to describe Putin is something we should be
proud of.  It is not.  We should continue to act till we are able to
assert that we are masters of our own networks.  Our nation’s
intellectual property, including the intellectual property of all our
companies and citizens, is too important to let it be given away
without at least a cyber fight.

The Technology Implications of the Obama Win

There are several megatrends sweeping the technology industry today.  Some of them are about to be accelerated.  

I like to use five key topic areas to track megatrends in IT: 

- Convergence and trend towards unified communications and user empowerment
- Globalization and increasing internationalization of IT and demographic shifts
- Increasing open development of software and hardware
- Power, Cooling and Space (PCS) impacting data centers and every place computing is done
- Increasing pace of technology development and probability of disruption

Over the past two months two major events have occurred which are impacting these trends.  

The
first was the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the resulting cascading
effects on the financial industry.  The impact on IT spending and the
movement of more enterprises to grid/cloud computing because of that
are still being assessed, but for some thoughts see: Wall Street Crisis

The second was the Presidential election of Barack Obama.   

The greatest new technologies (and great drama too!)

I like technology and I like drama.   These are two of the greatest of human creations.  And they can be even more interesting when combined.

There
has been some real drama in the West Coast tech scene the past few
weeks, heating up to a boil in the last few days, and about to come to
a head tomorrow.

The story is this:

- Two great expos for high tech startups are the DEMO conference and the TechCrunch50.

- DEMOfall08 will be in San Diego.   According to their website, Chris
Shipley has been around the globe gathering info on the best new
technologies and has brought them into one place for this conference. 
72 new digital technology products from 11 countries will be
introduced.  A record crowd of over 800 have registered already.   This
looks like an awesome conference and I can't wait to read about the
presentations and study the companies.  I'm sure I'll find candidates
for my own list of top disruptive technologies from what I read from
this conference. For more info see:   http://demo.com

- TechCrunch50 is Sep 8-10 in San Francisco.   It has a goal of
bringing the best start-ups and launching them in front influential VC,
corporations and the press.  Many companies also give demos.  It seems
to be about twice the size as the Demo conference, about 1700
attendees are expected.   Between the two conferences this appears to
be the one with more VC and big company attendance, but I am only
basing that on a review of the website.   The website, by the way,
shows an incredible panel of experts.  These are really the greats in
the community.  Experts judging at TechCrunch include Marc Andreessen,
Marc Benioff, Dan Farber, Bradley Horowitz, Joi Ito, Tim O'Reilly, and
Robert Scoble, to name a few.   Here too, I'm sure I'll find companies
that need to be on my early warning screen of disruptive IT.   For more
on TechCrunch, see:  http://techcrunch50.com

So now you see the drama?  How could these two great conferences end up being held at exactly the same time? 

The way this started, as far as I can tell, was captured in an April blog post from Henry Blodgete.  He said, I quote:

Now that TechCrunch and Jason Calacanis have scheduled their
TechCrunch50 start-up celebration conference at the same time as IDG's
DEMO start-up celebration conference, the allegations are flying:

Who moved whose conference to kill who.
Who ripped off who.
Who's screwing who.
Who's greedy, mercenary, abusive…
Etc.

The drama really heated up a few weeks ago when the long running
tension was written about by the New York Times.   An article by Brad Stone put it this way:

Demo, a 17-year-old conference franchise owned by the technology
publisher IDG, has served as the springboard for hit products like the
Palm Pilot and the TiVo digital video recorder. In San Diego during the
second week of September, 70 start-ups will pay $18,500 each to make a
six-minute presentation to a crowd of investors, journalists and
others. To Michael Arrington, the elbow-throwing, supercilious founder of
the popular Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch, Demo’s business model
amounts to “payola.”

From that article, leaders and associates of both Demo and TechCrunch began exchanging heated posts and interviews.  

Here is one from Michael Arrington titled "Everyone Needs To Calm Down" 
Mr. Arrington asks folks to chill, but calls the Demo conference
unethical.   I guess I like the way he says what he thinks.  But I
don't think his post will calm anything down!

Here is one from Chris Shipley who says she has had it with the shoddy
reporting, invective and arrogance that has attended most of the
commentary.  The following are some quotes from her post at: http://guidewiregroup.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/shoddy-reporting-invective-and-arrogance-yeah-i-want-some-of-that/

QUOTE:

When in a twitter I bemoaned the lack of original reporting (only one
reporter (cnet) and exactly zero bloggers writing this week about this
silly DEMO v TechCrunch episode actually contacted me), the infamous
blogger Robert Scoble suggested that if I'd blog my opinion, he'd link
to it. Does that mean that a perspective only exists or matters if it's
expressed in a blog post? Or that Robert's just moving too fast to do
any investigation outside his narrow medium?

Scoble's not the only guy living in the rarefied air of the
echo-chamber. Sarah Lacy, who works for the much-respected
Businessweek.com, conducted a five-minute video interview with TC50's
Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis, during which the two leveled the
usual slander. Did Lacy fire one tough question at the two? Did this
journalist call me or the DEMO organization to get a response to
serious accusations? Um, the answer to that would be "no."

In fact, a few weeks ago, when Mike Arrington wrote an
assumption-based and error-filled story that demanded an apology from
the DEMO organization for a comment that was clearly not made by or on
behalf of anyone at DEMO, Lacy picked up the story and wrote with
righteous indignation that slander was the highest insult that could be
leveled against a journalist. Did she call me or DEMO before posting
her story? Again no.

UNQUOTE

So, what's my take on all that?

It is my intent to follow, from afar, both conferences, and review all
I can read out of both.  I'll make my own assessments on which hot new
technologies are of interest to me, and I'll try hard to help my
associates, friends and readers know my opinion by updating my blog
here.  Stay tuned to my list of disruptive IT:  http://www.ctovision.com/disruptive-technology-list.html

And I'll also keep tracking the drama.  

The National Security Implications of Free 3D in a Browser

Jeffrey Carr sent a short broadcast via Twitter the other day: “

New post on 3D imaging and Virtual Earth – mind blowing video http://bit.ly/3SxtdA “  

Jeffrey was blogging about a capability shown in the short clip below:

As you watch that, keep in mind that what you are seeing is a capability that can run on any PC that can run Internet Explorer (which is just about all of them).
The clip shows a capability that Microsoft’s Caligari toolset “TrueSpace” has to build high resolution 3D models then upload them into Virtual Earth.

Currently national security planners, as well as others with mission needs for geospatial information, have many choices for solutions.  But most good solutions require loading specialized software on the workstation.  This includes, of course, Google Earth.   Google also provides 3D creation capabilities with Sketch-Up.  And that is a powerful combination.  But the need to load programs on workstations and move data to workstations complicates enterprise IT solutions.  Additionally, Google Earth is reportedly not accurate in elevation measurements.   Now the new capability shown in the YouTube clip indicates a solution that can give highly accurate 3D models to planners everywhere, and it can do that without having to instal large stand alone apps on workstations and without having to move large datasets to the workstation.    

A use case:  Imagine a USMC team preparing for an evacuation of a group of citizens.  They shift into their Rapid Response Planning Process (R2P2) and move out.   Although this process ensures all available information is used and can accomodate information from external sources, the urgency of the mission means it will proceed no matter what.   No one involved is going to waste time trying to download new software programs or test applications or risk breaking systems that are working well.  New data is fine, but new software is not needed.   This 3D model that runs in a browser could be of tremendous use at times like this.  If the data is there, models can be presented to the planning team and they can visually walk through buildings before their mission.  The models can be provided from locations far away or from local data if available.  And they can be presented on any computer with a browser.   

That is just one use case.  Many more can be brainstormed by planners, and I’d recommend this dialog get underway soon.  But there is actually another meta-point to make.   Consider the fact that this dialog can start much earlier in the process because of new web2.0 capabilities.  Thanks to Jeffrey’s micro-blogging on Twitter and the Google YouTube posting on his Blog, the national security community has some early warning on things we should be thinking through.  

My recommendation:  If you haven’t done so already… sign up for Twitter.  If you’d like to see some good feeds to follow start here.  

Inspiration Innovation and Motivation for the CTO

Looking for a little inspiration and motivation to drive your innovation?  Take a
short break from the daily grind and watch the top ten TED talks of all time: 

http://www.ted.com/talks/top10

From the TED site:

With speakers like neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor and global health
expert Hans Rosling, the list proves one of the compelling ideas behind
TEDTalks: that an unknown speaker with a powerful idea can reach — and
move — a global audience through the power of quality web video.

My favorite, for some reason, is the incredible undersea videos of David Gallo (see Underwater Astonishments).  I’ve already written a bit about another favorite, the Photosynth demos of Blaise Aguera y Arcas (see “Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo“). 

As for TED, it stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds.  TED holds an annual conference where the world’s greatest thinkers come together to exchange thoughts.  These talks are made available to the public.  So you don’t have to be invited to the conference to benefit from the knowledge exchanged there.

After watching the top ten talks, you may want to consider signing up on the TED site.  Membership is free (but joining the site doesn’t mean you can attend the conference! read more about that on their site).

Special Request: Collaboration Tool Survey

With the help of vizu.com I have just created an online survey I’d appreciate you taking a quick look at.  The survey is located at this link:   http://www.ctovision.com/collaboration-tool-survey.html  and is also, for now, along the lower right hand column of the CTOvision blog.  You can enter your responses either place for a look at results. 

The point of the survey is to get a quick feel for collaboration tools that CTOvision readers use.  I don’t know what results to expect, but if there are conclusions of note I’ll blog about them here.  

Thanks in advance

Bob

Enter my office: using Adobe Acrobat Connect

I have picked a primary online meeting tool for my consultancy (Crucial Point LLC).  Although I will use any tool a client or associate needs me to use, the tool I prefer is Adobe Acrobat Connect.  

Why did I select Adobe Acrobat Connect?  A key reason is that no downloads are required for this to work (assuming, of course, that you have flash player installed on your system, which 98% of the computers on earth already do).

Adm. Stavridis: Think, Read, Write and Publish, and Blog Too

In a previous post I mentioned the AFCEA/JFCOM Joint Warfighting Conference.  I’ve e-mailed friends and associates more detailed thoughts on the significance of the conference.  If you would like my views drop me a note and I’d be glad to share.  

During the conference there were several very important messages for CTOs, including a few controversial points I’m still trying to think about how to diplomatically blog a
bout.  One topic I’d like to discuss now is encouragement from Admiral Stavridis, the four star USN commander of U.S. Southern Command.  He strongly supports and encourages leaders to publish, and I think that is a message all CTOs should listen to.  

A good summation of his call to publish is on the Signal Scape blog at:

Adm. Stavridis: Think, Read, Write and Publish

Here is a quote from that entry:

Adm. James G. Stavridis, USN, commander, U.S. Southern Command,
stepped away from

I’m so tired of pot shots from the peanut gallery

I saw an article title pop up in my RSS reader today that made me think "Oh no, here we go again."  The title in the news feed was "Behind US Intelligence Failures."  I immediately thought this was another re-hash of major failures to predict the course of human events.  It is important for us to confront why it is impossible to know the future, so there is nothing wrong with studying and writing about failure, but I get tired of the way most in the press seem to think they could do better, and I really get fed up by cheap shots from the uninformed.  But what the heck, I clicked on the link.

Much to my surprise, the link lead me to a very well written article in the Washington Post titled "The Real Intelligence Failure? Spineless Spies."  It was not written by a reporter trying to look smart.  It was written by one of the greats from the intelligence community, Mark Lowenthal.  This article is well worth a read, and I hope it is debated and discussed by all citizens interested in national security.

But, this CTOvision blog is for enterprise CTOs.  So I guess I better mention the hook for CTOs.  This is it:  Mark's article focuses on the core mission of the intelligence community, which is