virtual world

You Really Have to See This: From MIT Media Lab

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Words can hardly describe how neat this technology is.  I’m excited and enthused for many reasons, including the potential power of this technology to help us all make better decisions and of course to bring even more fun to our lives.  Watch and let your imagine go… Think of the wonderful ways we can interact with data to do good things in the world. 

Other thoughts:  Look for the dynamic, moving newspaper.  Yet again there is more evidence that Hollywood is driving enterprise technology.

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, Computer Security, CTO, Disruptive IT, Enterprise, knowledge, Technology Leadership, The Future of Technology, Thin Client, virtual world.

Is Your CTO Making You Stupid?

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Nicholas Carr writes in ways that makes people think.  I really enjoyed reading his latest in the Atlantic titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"  This article covers some rather significant trends that IT is pushing into the global social fabric.  The changes he talks about are disturbing.  They are infecting people like a fast spreading disease. 

There is a chance you are suffering some of these symptoms yourself, so by all means read the article. 

Or if your attention span is going, here is how Nicholas Carr describes the symptoms : 

" Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. "

I hope you dive deep into the Carr article for more details, but if you have the disease yourself you might not.  So here is a gist of key points:

  • Google and others have made research simple and fast and easy.

  • Almost all data can come into your head via your browser.

  • People read fewer (or no) books.

  • People are loosing the ability to read and retain info from long articles.

  • The Internet, through your browser, is the medium of choice.  Newspapers and print are on the out.  TV is heading out fast.

  • We also write through the web, and that is changing the way we think.

  • We too frequently are relying on computers to mediate our understanding of the world.

What do we do with this cautionary info?  One immediate think all of us should do is remember to carve out time in the day, every day, to read, write and think.

But if you are an enterprise technologist you should also consider what this means for you and your organization.  Some ideas:

  • The systems you are designing, developing and fielding to your workforce may serve your workforce better if their interfaces are more intuitive and less textual.  People will want to interface with enterprise systems they way they interface with the Internet (present your applications through browsers and summarize results and seek rapid human feedback on what they like or don't like about the results).

  • To the greatest extent possible, build systems that present fast results.

  • And present information in ways that let humans interact with it.

  • And present information in ways that ensure the humans are in charge of the process and in charge of assessing the relevance of results.

  • Don't stop innovating. 

  • Stay on the net yourself so you can track where it is going.

  • Get engaged in social media (if you are not already).  That means Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Twitter (especially Twitter– it really changes your mind).

  • Translate those many lessons into the enterprise technology you field.

If you can do that and if you can stay focused on the mission all your users will thank you, and in many ways I think you will be helping make your organization smarter.  If you don't do that then the odds are great that you will just be part of the noise.   You may even be contributing to making your organzation stupid. 

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions on that topic?

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, Cloud, collaboration, Connect, CTO, Disruptive IT, Enterprise, Google, Gourley, innovation, knowledge, LinkedIn, Mashup, Moore's Law, R&D, Ray Kurzweil, SOA, Social Computing, standards, The Future of Technology, Twitter, virtual world, Web 2.0, Web Services, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Yahoo.

The National Security Implications of Free 3D in a Browser

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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.  

This entry was posted in Bill Gates, chief technology officer, collaboration, CTO, Current Affairs, Disruptive IT, DOD, DoDIIS, Enterprise, Facebook, Gourley, Great CTOs, innovation, LinkedIn, Mashup, microsoft, R&D, Ray Kurzweil, Technology Leadership, telepresence, The Future of Technology, Thin Client, Twitter, virtual world, Vision, warfighting, Web 2.0, Web Services, Web/Tech, Weblogs.

Microsoft Surface uses Jet to accelerate demand

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This is the third of three blog posts on technologies encountered during my visit to Redmond. This one is on Microsoft Surface. 

(First a note:  although this is about Surface, Microsoft also announced another hot capability called Sphere.  For more on that see the blog of the CTO of Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments- Lewis Shepherd)


Microsoft Surface is something you may have heard about in the press.  For
those of us who experimented with technologies like the “Touch Table”
from Applied Minds we already have familiarity with the basic concepts. 
You interact with data using your hands.  But there is something dramatically different with the Microsoft Surface. 
The biggest thing is that it is designed from the ground up to work with the rest of the technology stack.  
You need smart programmers and integrators still, but it is easy
for technologists to work with this system so it will very likely
proliferate. 
Many software packages already exist for it, and more are being written all the time. 
It will be used in the National Security space really soon. 
It is just a matter of time before it is.  And its cost will ensure that it is widely used. 

Read the rest of this entry »

This entry was posted in Bill Gates, collaboration, CTO, DHS, DIA, Disruptive IT, Gourley, innovation, Intel, Mashup, microsoft, Ray Kurzweil, Technology Leadership, The Future of Technology, virtual world.

Special Request: Collaboration Tool Survey

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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

This entry was posted in Adobe, collaboration, Connect, CTO, Current Affairs, Disruptive IT, endeca, Enterprise, Facebook, IBM, LinkedIn, Mashup, microsoft, Open Source, telepresence, The Future of Technology, Twitter, virtual world, Web 2.0, Web Services, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Yahoo.