Posted by: John Savageau in ipv6, ipv4, internet on
May 31, 2009
On May 20th the Office of the US President released a new planning guide for US Government agency adoption of the Internet Protocol, version 6 (IPv6). As the world's largest IT user, once the US Government finally starts moving ahead on a project, the rest of the world will finally need to take some serious notice.
IPv4 addresses are the machine language which tells Internet-connected applications how to find each other throughout the global network of networks. Humans are familiar with names such as www.yahoo.com, however Internet applications and routing devices would see the same thing as 209.131.36.158.
The problem is that Internet Protocol, version 4 (IPv4) address space is nearly exhausted, with less than 15% of available address space remaining (of 4,294,967,296 total available IPv4 addresses). Some experts, such as Paul Wilson (Dir Asia-Pacific Network Information Center) believe IPv4 addresses will start to dry up as soon as soon as June 2011.
A sketchy economy has one very positive benefit - it drives creativity and innovation. Thursday evening (28 May 2009) the Tech Cost Venture Network/TCVN met in Irvine, once again opening the stage to a new crop of entrepreneur candidates, and provided a great seminar on the topic of "Raising Money - Friends, Family, and other Early Capital Sources."
In the fast pitch segment, 10 companies were given 30 seconds to impress a panel of 3 venture capital professionals from the Tech Coast Angels . The "fast pitch" guidelines are pretty simple, you have 30 seconds to present:
- Name, title, and company name
- Market pain or need you will satisfy
- Your solution
- Size of your market
- How you plan to make money
- Why you believe you and your team can execute
- What you are seeking (funding, staffing support, or introductions)
Last night the audience was introduced to several great ideas, including new ideas for coffee making, solar power, online shopping for executives, mobile and PDA phone applications, and a new vegan restaurant. The VC panel selected three finalists, and drilled further into their business plan, asking for clarification on pitch elements, as well as further exploring their business plan and ideas. The winner, the vegan restauranteur, won $100 and some one on one time with the VCs.
The Domain Name System (DNS) gives a human interface to the very complicated Internet numbering and addressing system. DNS allows you to type www.yahoo.com , rather than the Internet address 69.147.114.224, or even worse, one of the new Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) addresses that might look like 2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e8.
Paul Mockapetris, founder of DNS and email, addressed the problem of providing DNS services in a virtual environment during a speech at Interop Las Vegas 2009. While virtualizing DNS in a cloud might appear to be a daunting task, Mr. Mockapetris believes that "it won't take too long for cloud domain naming to become standardized, because after all everthing will still run under TCP/IP - the standard Internet protocol."
DNS becomes tricky in a cloud environment, as domain naming is bound to a specific user or company. www.yahoo.com cannot be used by Google or Microsoft, as it is owned by Yahoo. The same goes for the cryptic IP addresses - as they are provisioned to a specific user.
SocalTech.Com reported on Friday (22 May) that Bill Snitzer has created a new Twitter robot pushing real-time earthquake information to subscribers. @earthquakesLA is a good utility, providing both text and graphic information using data supplied by the US Geological Survey (USGS), including expanded location information.
Twitter is rapidly gaining interest as not only a social networking tool, but also a utility used for emergency notifications. Recent fires in the Santa Barbara area (Jesusita fires, May 2009) moved so quickly that normal city emergency notifications could not meet the needs of residents and students in the affected areas.
Students took the lead in quickly establishing a notification system through Twitter, giving Twitter users the information they needed to both evacuate and avoid getting caught in the path of a killer wildfire. While it is hard to quantify actual results of "TwitterNet" on personal safety in the Jesusito fires, it is safe to assume immediate information at a minimum served the purpose of alerting many people they were in harm's way, and to get to a safe location or rallying point.
Organizers of the Cloud Camp have developed a great venue for training.
Objective - bring the masses quickly up to speed on cloud computing. Oh yes, and do it in an interesting, painless venue that not only informs, but also inspires and motivates attendees to become viral cloud evangelists. Several hundred people showed up for the Cloud Camp at Interop Las Vegas, showing not only intense interest in cloud computing, but also interest in a creative training environment organized locally by Dave Nielsen and Sam Charrington.
The cloud camp has a very unique structure:
Interop Las Vega can be boiled down to a single topic - cloud computing. Lots of variations such as cloud security, cloud provisioning, cloud storage, cloud everything. And SoCal companies were right in the center of attention.
Monday kicked off with the Enterprise Cloud Summit, which attracted nearly 300 attendees. The speaker lineup was pretty impressive, with the focus on introducing the cloud concept and opportunity to business and enterprise users. The conference also sponsored "Cloud Camp," which was a highly interactive training seminar for cloud students which ran well into the night.
Some very good speeches and presentations on the topic. Two Southern California companies kept coming up in the presentations and discussions as being both thought leaders, as well as powerful factors within the cloud industry.
Engineers are a funny breed. We spend much of our lives being skeptical, proving or disproving ideas and theories. At the same time we crave new ideas and technologies.
Those engineers who are creative and develop new ideas often lack skills needed to turn visions into useful products. Enter OCTANe, fuel for the entrepreneurial spirit in Orange County and Southern California. OCTANe's goal is to fuel "innovation development" in Orange County and Southern California by connecting people, capital and technology. OCTANe accelerates entrepreneurs and company development for Orange County's information technology and biomedical industries.
On May 14th I attended an OCTANe's weekly event entitled "Entrepreneurial traps - Tips for developing companies. What the big guys know but won't tell you." The speaker was Mr. Rich Henson, co-founder of Source Scientific, and Irvine-based biotech product development company.
Posted by: James C. Roberts III in Untagged on
May 11, 2009
Summary- Newspapers Innovate: An innovative approach to newspapers is being launched in the Czech Republic: A (very) well-funded group will open cafes linked to the newsrooms of hyperlocal papers (to be published by the group). Many Europeans like their espresso with their newspaper (and vice versa) so why not?
Yes, we have promised that this blog is not about newspapers, but we cannot help but look for innovations while all around us people are singing dirges. The New York Times reported that a new venture has launched in the Czech Republic to publish hyperlocal newspapers in four cities and to open associated cafes. View NY Times Article
PPF Group will soon publish multiple local newspapers on a weekly basis, in addition to multiple websites (can you say “repurpose?”), plus they will open cafes that will be next to—I mean right next to—the newsrooms for these papers. Literally, the door will be open to the newsroom of each paper.
Posted by: John Savageau in san diego, jobs, high tech on
May 11, 2009
BizJournals posted their 2009 Top 100 Tech City Center listing on Monday. Three SoCal locations ranked within the top 25 tech center cities, including San Diego (6), Los Angeles (12), and Oxnard/Thousand Oaks (17).
San Jose topped the list, with the San Francisco/Oakland area coming in 4th.
BizJournals' methodology for ranking tech centers looks at a combination of factors, including:
President Barak Obama recently (in March) appointed Vivek Kundra as Chief Information Officer for the US government, a new position needed to bring US Government IT policies and spending under control. In addition to holding the purse strings for federal government spending, he is also responsible for directing technology development strategies (and hopefully national tech leadership strategies). President Obama announced the position with the statement "I have directed him to work to ensure that we are using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations."
In a recent speech at the Potomac Officer's Club in Washington DC, Kundra stated "for too long the federal government has had a self-image that it can't innovate - I reject that view." Kundra continued to emphasize "Technology investments for technology's sake are useless, we need to be where the people are." This includes closer government collaboration with the private sector, with a special focus on cloud computing.
One of the first steps the government is taking to support American companies working in cloud development and commercial cloud services is to assist in defining the concept of both cloud comuting, and cloud infrastructures. This task was given to the non-regulatory National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). While this might seem a bit pretentious on the side of the government, the reality is the US government is by far the largest user of Information Technology in the United States.
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