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The Future of Cyberspace Security: The Law of The Rodeo

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This is an update of my now annual assessment of the future of technology associated with good and evil in cyberspace which was first posted here.

Predictions
of the future of technology are increasingly starting to sound like
science fiction, with powerful computing grids giving incredible computational power to users and with autonomous robots becoming closer and closer to being in our daily lives vice just in computer science departments. Infotech, nanotech and biotech are fueling each other and each of those three dominate fields are generating more and more benefits that impact the other, propelling us even faster into a new world.   Depending on your point of view the increasing pace of science and technology can be good or
bad.  As for me, I'm an optimist, and I know we humans will find a way
to ensure technology serves our best interests.   

Read the rest of this entry »

This entry was posted in AFCEA, CCSA, CERT, chief technology officer, Cloud, collaboration, Compliance, Computer Security, CTO, CTO Principles, Cyber Initiative, Cyber War, CyberTrust, Disruptive IT, DOD, DoDIIS, Enterprise, Great CTOs, Identity Management, Information Warfare, innovation, microsoft, Moore's Law, Network Security, ODNI, Open Source, R&D, Ray Kurzweil, Robots, Social Computing, The Future of Technology, Thin Client, Triumfant, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web Services, Web/Tech, Yahoo.

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 greatest new technologies (and great drama too!)

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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.  

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, Cloud, collaboration, Computer Security, CTO, Current Affairs, Disruptive IT, Enterprise, General Musings, Google, Great CTOs, innovation, knowledge, R&D, Social Computing, Technology Leadership, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web Services, Weblogs, Yahoo.

How to use the CTOvision site

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The following are some power user tips for making the most out of the CTOvision.com blog. 

1) Fresh content is always on the main page at http://ctovision.com, but previous content is organized into five key sections which you can navigate to by use of the "Sections" menu on the left column.  The sections are:

2) You can use/consume/syndicate our content by use of our RSS and Atom feeds.  More info is available here: http://www.ctovision.com/syndicating-ctovision-con.html  That page has a link to  "Subscribe in a reader."  That will take you to a feedburner site of CTOvision content that can be consumed in almost any reader or Web service.

3) At the top left of the blog is an e-mail sign up box.  This will
subscribe your e-mail address to receive a note each time a post is
made to CTOvision.com 

4) Every page of the CTOvision site has a news ticker along the left column.  This automatically defaults to display news with the term CTO in the feed.  But you can click other buttons listed there to automatically display news of some of the greatest powerhouse IT firms.

5) Every post on the site has a rating where users can click on a number of stars to give some feedback on the value of the post.   Your votes here are very much appreciated.   Directly under the rating stars for the post you will see a list of suggested reading that is automatically generated by the "Outbrain" service that CTOvision uses.   Outbrain selects those sites based on article content and how you have voted, so they should be of interest.

6) To make maximum use of the CTOvision site, consider connecting to me via Twitter.  Every page on the site has a link at the top right column that says "Follow Me on Twitter."  Or click this link.

7) The site also has a search box, powered by Google.  This is the best way to get to deep, buried content.

8) Other features include a list of the top blogs of interest to the Chief Technology Officer and a list of sites of some of the great thought leaders in our community.

9) There are many pages of independent content relevant to the CTO that can be found through search.  A list of these pages can be found in the lower left column.

10) Every post has a link to comments for the post.  This user contributed content is frequently the most important content.  Please visit it to review the postings of others and please leave your own thoughts if you can contribute to the dialog.  Posts also have an ability to let you easily share to Facebook and del.icio.us and Digg.

Thanks for reading the site.  If you know of a chief technology officer who could benefit from the dialog on CTOvision.com, please forward this note along.

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, CTO, Facebook, Great CTOs, Technology Leadership, The Future of Technology, Twitter, Vision, Web 2.0, Web Services, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Yahoo.

A Google Knol on Disruptive Technology

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Google just opened up their Knol capability to all Internet users.  The Google concept for a Knol is that it is an authoritative article about a specific topic.   It is a unit of knowledge.   People can write what they want, but the idea is that they should put their name on it so there is some way to measure credibility.  Others can contribute to the knol in measured ways.  For example, a setting can be selected so that anyone can edit the entry, or anyone can suggest entries, or no one can suggest changes.

From the Google Blog entry:

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people’s heads:
millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit
from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute
their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

The
key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author
(or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s
their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be
multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.

Sounds cool, so I thought I’d give it a try.  The first and most important step was trying to think of a subject to write about.  I decided to take the easy way out and self-plagerize myself.  I copied my list of disruptive technology and created a knol based on it. 

I found the knol page was very easy to configure.  Within about a minute I had my account active and copied in a bio so anyone interested could read about who I assert I am.   I copied in my info on disruptive IT and hit publish and my knol was up.  You can check it out here:  Disruptive IT knol.

So far, I have to admit, I am not impressed.  How could this be of more value than the list I already maintain? 

But I’ll keep an open mind for a little while.  My goal is to keep that list up to date with new information that will be of actionalble use to the enterprise Chief Technology Officer (CTO).  If the knol concept enables a wider swath of people to read and contribute to that list, then it may be a useful concept.  If, however, it generates no new information for me or my readers, then it will probably be easier for me just to maintain the list on my blog.   Stay tuned and I’ll post more info on this topic after I see results.

This entry was posted in chief technology officer, collaboration, CTO, Disruptive IT, Enterprise, General Musings, Google, Gourley, Identity Management, innovation, knowledge, Mashup, R&D, Technology Leadership, Web 2.0, Web Services, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Yahoo.

Disruptive Technologies List Updated

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The list of the positive technologies I believe all enterprise Chief Technology Officer s should be tracking has now been updated.  Please check it out at: 

http://www.ctovision.com/disruptive-technology-list.html

I try to keep this list up by remaining in dialog with enterprise CTO s and soliciting their feedback on the list.  I also keep watching what the venture capital folks are investing in and try to closely track what the big IT firms are up to.   The result is the list.

I’ve also started writing slightly more detailed reviews of key positively disruptive technologies.  I post them under titles “Disruptive Tech:…” and you can find links to those pages on the right hand side of the CTOvision.com blog.

For now this list includes:

See also:

http://www.ctovision.com/2008/02/it-disruptivity.html

This entry was posted in Adobe, Bill Gates, chief technology officer, collaboration, Computer Security, Connect, CTO, Disruptive IT, endeca, Enterprise, Google, IBM, innovation, microsoft, opsware, Technology Leadership, telepresence, The Future of Technology, Triumfant, Web 2.0, Web Services, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Yahoo.

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.

Blackberry and Google Contacts Synchronization

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Google_logo
Some tips for those who need to synchronize Blackberry and Google contacts: 

– There is not a single easy way, at this point.  In the near term you can expect a small sync system either provided by Google or Blackberry, and I would guess that would be out about the same time as the Blackberry Bold, but that is just speculation.  

– Make use of Plaxo.  Tell Plaxo to use Google Contacts as a sync point (it is just one way sync for now, Plaxo pulls your Google contacts).   Plaxo can sync with many systems, but for some reason it is just one way with Google.

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This entry was posted in collaboration, Enterprise, Facebook, Google, Identity Management, LinkedIn, Mashup, microsoft, SOA, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web Services, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Yahoo.