The Week in Geek – Dec. 4, 2006

Second Life Lessons
Frankly, I find Second Life a bit creepy & weird (although I was able to create a little bald virtual ‘me’ that can fly). But, there are a million registered users of the cartoonish, attention-grabbing virtual world. The Linden Labs effort has increased nearly 1,000% this year, and has been the subject major press coverage including a BusinessWeek cover story and a front page story in the NY Times ‘Escapes’ section. News agency Reuters has assigned a reporter to Second Life full time, IBM’s CEO has held a press conference there, as has Presidential hopeful, Virginia Governor Mark Warner, and Ben Folds rocked out online with his fans’ avatars. But the site also has its mischief makers & bugs. Vigilantes have released logic bombs that cause virtual buildings to disappear or that freeze user computers. The controversial clothier American Apparel has seen virtual protests that reflect outrage over its real-world advertising. The avatar-shielded may be emboldened to behave more outlandishly in their attention-grabbing corporate disgust than they’d ever express in person. And as few as 60-90 simultaneous users at an event can cause hiccups. The American Cancer society was forced to turn away potential donors at a Second Life event, while another bug has caused avatar clothes to disappear during mass gatherings (ack!). Second Life is the best known of several somewhat similar efforts that also include Korean import CyWorld, There.com and ActiveWorlds. Fortune’s Kirkpatrick suggests Second Life (or its competitors) may be more important than MySpace.

When MIPs Are Free
Computing power is often measured in MIPS (million instructions per second). Chris ‘Long Tail’ Anderson & Good Morning Silicon Valley share word that we’ve recently reached a consumer processing point of a penny a MIP. In the article above, blogger Alec Saunders does a great job summing up the advance. Saunders points out that in 1977, a DEC Vax 11/780 was a 1 MIPS minicomputer, and the Cray-1 supercomputer delivered 150 MIPS at a price only governments & the wealthiest of firms could afford. Just 7 years ago, a Pentium III/500 delivered 800 MIPS. A year later the Playstation 2 brought 6000 MIPS along side your TV. If you’ve got a Blackberry Pearl, or Nokia N93 smartphone you now carry 2000-era desktop processor speeds in your pocket. Saunders writes. “If the current trend holds true, and we can each carry 20,000 MIPS of processing power in the palms of our hands by 2012, what will we do with that power?” It’s worth speculation. Moore’s Law means today’s strategists have to be fortune telling futurists, planning for technical disruptions that are today seem impossible.

This PC Wants to Save the World
The $100 laptop has a name – the XO. Gone is the crank to power it (it broke off in Kofi Annan’s hand during an earlier demonstration). Instead the computer gets its juice from a pull cord (think starting an old lawnmower but with you providing all the gas). Boot up it up & you’ll hear a few bars from U2. The device will run Linux & an AMD processor, have a bright, readable display that can rotate for laptop or tablet use, a spill-proof keyboard, 3 USB ports, flash RAM but no hard drive, stereo speakers, mesh networking, and the eBook reader is a Wiki! Initial price – $150, but given Moore’s Law (see above) it should drop to $100 by ’08. 5,000 units manufactured by Taiwan’s Quanta have rolled out for testing. Among the major commitments: Quadaffi will give one to each Libyan school child & Shimon Peres plans something similar for West Bank Palestinians. The video featuring the project’s visionaries is compelling – transform education in regions where students are lucky to get 2 hrs. of face-time with a teacher. More details can be found in TechReview’s cover story on Philanthrophy’s New Prototype. Fortune’s recent article on ‘Tools for Better Living” (not yet online) points out the logic of computer-based training to wipe out illiteracy and the huge impact of getting even simple mobile phones into the hands of the poor. If a farmer can get prices for goods, then they can decide whether or not to make the trip to market. The phone is the tech here & Motorola’s Motofone F3 will be a cheap world-changer. This is the kind of tech that directly fuels opportunity for recipients of microcredit, the major innovation from this year’s Nobel peace prize winner. In a world of Wal-Mart & McDonalds protests remember that done right business & tech are forces for immense good.

Upward Mobility
In Boston, the new Charlie system allows payment with the tap of the plastic card (tip: replace the Charlie Tickets with the new Charlie card for quick boarding). But the rollout has been complicated & filled with delays, so I’m longing for the S. Korean system that allows payment with the wave of a mobile phone – no tokens, fiddling with bills, or in-out card reading. In Japan ‘contactless’ payment will total $900 million this year. Banks will embrace it to cut identity theft & fraud because on avg. people realize their phone is gone within an hour vs. a day or more for a missing wallet. By the way, it’s time to stop calling these products cell phones. Two of the technologies about to be rolled out – WiMax and WiFi – don’t use cell towers. Once again Japan & Korea are in the lead with WiMax rollouts in major cities, but WiMax should have a footprint covering 1.5 billion potential users by ’08. Sprint plans a US WiMax network starting next year. Boost Loopt and Helio Buddy Beacon are among the new services that not only tell your location, but can share your 20 with your friends, too. Two guys used a similar service, Mologogo, to hitch rides coast-to-coast from people who monitored their progress online.

Does Microsoft Drive Innovation or Play Catchup?
Microsoft’s $7.5 billion R&D budget dwarfs the total sales of most of its competitors. Yet the firm faces more challenges now than in the last decade. Apple, Google, and Linux are nipping at different parts of a giant long accused of buying rather than innovating itself away from competition. Several of the firm’s major innovations including the IE browser, Halo, and PowerPoint came to Microsoft through acquisitions. Tech mavens Dave Winer & former ‘softie’ Rob Scoble debate innovation in the WSJ – the debate is a good primer on MS growth & challenges. Not mentioned in the debate – in some areas MS is getting better. The rule-of-thumb used to be “fear MS version three” (the first two are terrible). But in-house developed XBox v.1 was best-in-class tech, XBox Live smokes the competition, and XBox 360 is a year ahead of PS3. New MS Tools like LiveWriter (blogging), Photosynth (photo viewing), and the super-groovy Virtual Earth 3D haven’t gotten the attention they deserve and all are free. On the topic of innovation, Office 2007 will be a radical departure from prior versions. The GUI does away with the traditional menu & toolbar setup in favor of a new tool called the ‘ribbon’. The ‘ribbon’ UI will be available to other firms, royalty free, provided they don’t use it on a competing product. The BusinessWeek cover story on the ‘Soul of a New Microsoft‘ points out that the father of Zune went to our Commonwealth Ave. rival BU (as noted in earlier WiGs, a BC alum was key to the iPod’s creation). We’ll be visiting with the XBox team & an alum strategist in Windows Mobile as part of January’s Grad TechTrek.

YouTube Coming to Cell Phones
Verizon Wireless has sold 20 million phones with VCast, but only 2 million use the service. In an effort to boost demand, the carrier will begin offering select clips from Google’s YouTube. Just don’t watch while driving.

Cisco: Acquisition Happens Quickly But Integration Slow (podcast)
Knowledge@Wharton offers a great primer for our students visiting (or interviewing with) Cisco. The once most-valuable-firm-on-the-planet enjoys a 70%+ share in some segments for equipment that powers the Net. The firm has grown through over 30 acquisitions – the biggest being Scientific Atlanta (set top boxes) and Linksys (consumer WiFi). Most big acquisitions fail, but Cisco has an amazingly successful track record. Here Cisco Director of Acquisitions Graeme Wood share the secrets of the firm’s acquisitive success.

You’re So Predictable: Creating the ‘Smart’ Google
As Fortune points out, ‘search’ is what you do when you’re looking for something, ‘discovery’ is when something wonderful that you didn’t know existed, or didn’t know what to ask for, finds you. Google’s the $145 billion winner in search, but discovery? No winner yet. NetFlix’s recently strong results show there’s value in recommendations (despite Scott Kirshner’s woes in a recent Boston Globe piece). Other efforts at constructing the algorithm of ‘you’ show promise. Pandora’s music discovery service has four million users and a rabid following. There is a human element – the ‘Music Genome Project’ has 45 analysts ranking 15,00 songs a month on 400 characteristics to assist in the mapping. Another effort to watch – Slide, started by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. Levchin crafted algorithms to determine the percentage likelihood that a given user was a fraudster. Tweak the math a bit & you can determine the likelihood of interest in a broad range of products. Boston-based ChoiceStream provides this sort of collaborative filtering to AOL, Blockbuster, iTunes, and Directv while Amazon & NetFlix roll their own best-in-class offerings.

10 Best Jobs
Money Magazine lists the 10 best jobs and once again Tech leads the list. #1 Software Engineer. #7 IT Analyst. And for those who combine marketing with tech there’s #6. My job (college professor) is #2. The photo spread at Boston.com shows BC’s own Maxim Shrayer showing his stuff in the classroom.

Internet’s Patron Saint Overlooks BC’s Data Center
Geeks the world over are known for putting their stamp on work spaces – one of my favorites was the fire pole linking the engineering & marketing floors at the HQ of the old Mac hardware firm General Computer Corp. in Cambridge. But how many can boast a stained glass likeness of the patron saint of the Internet overlooking their servers? A multi-colored rendering of St. Isidore of Seville (the Net’s patron saint) radiates from a stained-glass window onto Boston College’s newly relocated & renovated data center in Saint Clements Hall (formerly part of the Boston Archdiocese). Fittingly both geeky & Jesuit.