Compliantly

Is Nokia breaking into the laptop industry? In late February, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo admitted that the cell phone maker was "looking very actively" into the laptop market. Kallasvuo said that plans to enter the laptop industry makes sense as smartphones, netbooks, and laptops are "in many ways converging."

IT infrastructure and services delivered over the cloud will be ubiquitous within five years, and vendors that ignore the shift from on-premises software to Internet-delivered technology will be left in the dust, IDC analyst Frank Gens predicted at the IDC Directions conference in Boston Tuesday.

"If you are not thinking about and acting on delivering your own offerings through the cloud [within five years], you won't be in the mainstream anymore," Gens said. Avoiding the cloud "won't really be an option."

Gens defined cloud computing as "consumer and business products, services and solutions delivered and consumed in real time over the Internet." More technically, Gens said the cloud is made up of shared services under virtualized management that are accessible to people and other services over the Internet in a pay-per-use and self-service model.

An important distinguishing feature under the IDC cloud definition is the use of Internet standards to connect cloud services to one another and to the systems within enterprise data centers, he said.

Cloud services break down into six main categories, according to Gens -- applications, collaboration tools, storage, servers and processing, IT management, and platforms.

IDC surveys show 26% of businesses using the cloud for IT management, 15% to bolster server and storage capacity, a quarter for collaboration and business applications, and 17% for application development and deployment.

A common perception is that most customers embrace cloud services because of the cost. While that is certainly true, Gens said IDC surveys show the No. 1 attribute driving people toward cloud services is the ease and speed of deployment.

Users are telling CIOs they want faster delivery of services, and the cloud helps achieve that goal.

"That alone guarantees that over the next several years the cloud model will be very important for CIOs," Gens said.

Other big selling points identified in user surveys include lessening the need for in-house IT staff, paying only for what you use and when you use it, the standardization of IT systems, and access to the latest functionality.

The top concerns identified in IDC user surveys are security, performance, availability and barriers to integrating cloud services with in-house IT systems. "We're going to have to do a lot of work around service-level assurance to move this market into the mainstream," Gens said.

The theme of this year's 44TH annual IDC Directions is "ICT [Information and Communications Technology]: New risks, rules and opportunities." Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch and Does IT Matter? is scheduled to speak at the end of the conference.

Recession will be a change agent in the technology world, forcing customers and vendors to adapt to new realities, IDC chief research officer John Gantz said. Whereas IDC was predicting nearly 6% growth in worldwide IT spending back in August, the analyst firm now believes spending will increase by just half of one percent this year. Spending should rebound with 4.4% growth in 2010, IDC forecasts.

"Out there, nothing is familiar," Gantz said. "We're in the midst of the worst economic downturn since before the computer was invented in 1947."

But the move toward cloud computing -- or utility computing as it is also called -- shows that the IT industry is still stable and has room for growth, speakers said. If IT is truly a utility, like water or electricity, it's probably a good business to be in, Gantz said.

Gens, who has traveled throughout the world the past six weeks and spoken with hundreds of CIOs, said "one thing I have learned during this trip … is that this whole topic about cloud, Internet delivery of IT offerings, is really capturing the imagination of a lot of CIOs and line-of-business people out there."

Lots of corporations are eliminating redundancies these days. Now you can do the same in a free web game dubbed Layoff.

Inspired by games that require you to match three objects, such as Bejeweled, you start with a grid of workers. You swap positions of any two workers to align three or more workers of the same type. Then the workers disappear and you are told exactly how much money you’ve saved by eliminating redundancies. Players play from the side of management. The workers are eventually replaced by bankers, who can’t be eliminated.

Some might view it as distasteful, but it’s dark humor with the aim of sensitizing people to problems in a culture where people are often valued as so much cattle. As a reminder that these workers are real, you can read the bios of people who are eliminated in the name of workplace efficiency. The music is cute but has sad undertones.

The game was produced by Tiltfactor and Values at Play, two nonprofit groups working with National Science Foundation and Microsoft funding. Mary Flanagan, digital humanities chair at Dartmouth College, headed the project. She said in an interview that the game has been well received as a commentary on human values. The original idea is more than two years old, before there was a layoff crisis, but it’s timing couldn’t be better. At the bottom of the game window, various messages scroll by delivering economic facts.

“We were trying to make these abstract figures real,” Flanagan said. “It’s kind of a protest game.”

Flanagan said a team of a couple of artists, a programmer and a couple of part-timers was able to produce the Flash-based game, which runs on the PC or the Mac. So far, Flanagan said the game has been received well by the blogosphere and has proven so popular that it’s overloading servers. Flanagan’s overall goal is to create educational video games that aren’t boring.

An extraordinarily important but seemingly mundane computer problem is how to represent different written languages.

Nevermind, just translating words or letters between languages: how about things like the Thai "End of Story" punctuation character, different dialects and inflections in languages, how about making it extensible to new
languages, etc.

Unicode is the system built up to organize the messiness of human written communication and it's a stunning design acheivement how the characters are allocated across the different "planes" of the specification.

Linden Labs (makers of SecondLife) have a Unicode in 5 Minutes wiki page that both succinctly covers the topic and has some really top notch illustrations of the concepts involved.

Web publishers are struggling as advertisers drastically cut back spending in the recession. Online display ads is especially weak, as major publishers fear revenue from graphical ads will drop by as much as 35%-50% for Q1.

But it may not be as bad as a "nuclear winter." Thanks to paid search, industry analysts expect online advertising overall will continue to grow in 2009, though it'll hover in the singles digits.

Apple and Google used to compete in different markets and for awhile, both parties seemed to get along. Google CEO Eric Schmidt sits on Apple's board, and Apple has a partnership with Google, which provides a search engine box on Apple's Safari browser.

Now it's starting to get fuzzy. Google has its own browser, Chrome, which competes with Safari for market share. Google also has a mobile operating system, Android, which is being used on mobile devices that challenge Apple's iPhone.

The mobile software market is considered the next big revenue opportunity. Some speculate that Apple, a clear innovator in this category, may build its own search engine likely for a better mobile experience.

Twitter is the hottest startup in Silicon Valley. The microblogging site hasn't made a dime yet, but that hasn't stopped the company from raising $35 million in venture capital funding. (Twitter has raised $20 million in previous rounds.)

With the new round of cash, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the company has "big plans" to "begin building revenue-generating products." A recent post by Advertising Age lists 9 ways the company can make money.

1. Charge for it
2. Advertising
3. Create a contextual ad engine
4. Charge for analytics
5. Enable Mobile Payments
6. Create subscription based groups
7. A Twitter Pro version
8. Merchandising
9. Sell the company

Flat, potentially flexible organic LEDs are still too expensive to use as a lighting source, but they won't be for too much longer. A new report by flat panel research firm DisplaySearch predicts that the OLED lighting market will "take off" in 2011.

It certainly hasn't taken off, yet. The report's author, Jennifer Colegrove, told the Industry Standard in a phone interview that there are currently "only about 20 OLED lamps in the whole world." The lights are already reliable, energy-efficient, and mercury-free, but no one has yet developed a way to mass-produce them cheaply enough for commercial purposes.

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