I had a pleasant, unexpected benefit from a small investment today. Last Saturday, I signed up for Sprint mobile broadband service, with the expectation I could save our company money by not paying numerous hotel, airport and coffee shop ISP charges. This evening, I took a 90 minute ride from O’Hare airport to St Charles, IL (I had no idea it was that far). Thanks to the Sprint broadband service, I was able to send and receive emails the entire way. Can’t do that on WiFi! My little investment just bought me an unexpected hour and half of valuable time.

Technorati Tags: Sprint,
WiFi,
Mobile Broadband

Way back in the early days of the popular Internet, the first magazine advertisement I ever saw for a website was a full magazine page in a computer trade publication. The page was all black, except for the very bold, white letters: www.blackbox.com. A powerful, innovative message had been skillfully delivered to its intended audience by a purveyor of stuff that connected to the Internet.

Time will tell whether Sun’s provocative annoucement of its own Black Box will be as compelling. It is certainly intriguing now – a fully-functional, self-contained, rapid-deployment data center in a shipping container. What New Orleans would have given for a few of them last year!

It looks like the sky (or Mars) is the limit.

Technorati Tags:
Sun Microsystems

For some reason, whenever I hear the term “Mashup,” I think of mashed potatoes. Must be my Idaho upbringing or the delicious garlic mashed potatoes I ate at the Three Forks restaurant in Dallas last night.

Yesterday, I was discussing mashups – the Web 2.0 kind – with my my colleagues. Some of us prefer to use the more sophisticated term: Composite Applications.

My colleague Joe Palastro pointed me to the programmableweb mashup matrix, which currently catalogs 1035 mashups in a matrix that shows the intersection between services that have been mashed together (e.g. 23 mashups integrate Google Maps and Flickr services).

Mashups using Google Maps are the most popular. WeatherBonk is an interesting example of mashing weather information onto a Google map. It did a good job in Mesa, Arizona, but alas, had no significant information for Erdenet, Mongolia, where my son currently resides.

I found the Mobiledia Cell Phone Reception and Tower Search somewhat more interesting. This site features “searchable databases of over 121,000 cell phone tower locations registered with the FCC, and over 27,000 cell phone carrier comments submitted voluntarily from real customers using their service all over the U.S.” It will show cell tower location on Google Maps. I now know why my kids’ T-Mobile phones get such poor reception at our house.

The Yard Sale Map in the Bowling Green, Kentucky, Daily News is a quaint little example of how to monetize a mashup. If you buy a two-day classified ad for your yard sale, rather than one day standard ad, they will put you on the map. Did you know (or care to know) that you can find this stuff at 248 ASHTON CT? “Hidden River Cherry Table w/6 chairs-$300; sofa table- $150; Kinkade table w/4 chairs- $200; Basset Full or Queen bed for $200. Good condition! Call 799-2440.” Or just follow the map.

The trouble with these examples and several more that I poked at is that I find them to be intellectual curiosities with limited commercial value. I think the basic mashup business challenge is how to provide a juxtaposition of services in such a compelling way that someone is willing to pay for the composite service. Here are some ideas of little mashups that would be useful to me:

• Medical service providers authorized by my health insurance plan shown on a local map.
• Book or article suggestions based on articles I read
• Restaurant, entertainment and ATM locations based on my current business travel itinerary and hotel location – available on my PDA.
• Map yellow pages search results onto a local map.

But the mashup I really need? Provide me a composite view of each of the customers for which I am responsible, including Wall Street Journal details, corporate locations/addresses, news reports, products we have sold to the company, sales opportunites and forecasts, potential/active/completed projects and technical support cases. All this information comes from different sources within and without Sun Microsystems. Mashing this information together in an interactive, easy to use composite application would really make my working life much simpler. Simpler translates to business value, which should translate to money.

Just one more mapping mashup suggestion. Please show me potato crop yields, acreage under cultivation, processing plant capacity and current potato prices everywhere potatoes are grown and mashed. (It’s an Idaho thing.)

Technorati Tags: Mashup,
Composite Application
Idaho Potatoes

Contrarian: “a person who takes a contrary [opposite] position or attitude”

Sun Microsystems celebrates the contrarian state of mind. If you want a good read about an intriguing collection of smart people, take a look at the Contrarian Minds Archive – The engineers, scientists, and dreamers of Sun Microsystems.

These aren’t new articles. Most have been around for some time. But they are new to me. I found this page yesterday while searching for a picture of Sara Gates for my last blog post. I found that the quotations of some of the people painted a colorful picture of the Sun culture:

Scott McNealy: “If your strategy isn’t controversial, you have zero chance of making money.”

Jonathan Schwartz: “Name a project we’re working on, and I’ll tell you why it’s contrarian to the market’s perspective.”

Whitfield Diffie: “Imagine code arriving over the Internet. It presents its credentials and says, ‘I can prove I don’t eat children for breakfast; I rarely eat children for lunch.’ You know: all these things you’d like to know about a program if you’re going to invite it into your home.”

Greg Papadopoulos: “We’re doing this sweeping simplification around software, operations, processors, and system design while our competitors believe that this stuff is inherently complex and you need to throw a lot of people at it.”

Technorati Tags:
Sun Microsystems

Spurred on by Mary Mary, I dusted off the cobwebs of my mind and posted a comment on her blog about my favorite WWW memory. I share it with you here:

In 1994, after I learned about the WWW, I gave several lectures in the Phoenix area to introduce the web to a wide variety of groups, including the Harvard Business School Alumni Association, the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce and the Arizona Software Association. I would connect to the Internet via a dialup connection and and give the audience their first glimpse of the possibilities of the web. For one example, I would visit a site hosted in Jerusalem which showed a photo of the Dome of the Rock mosque to illustrate how the historic spot of ground on which that mosque was located, held sacred by Judaism, Islam and Christianity, could be explored from afar by the magic of the Internet. Now, 12 years later, the reach of the web has expanded exponentially, and the political and religious tension around that little spot of ground in Jersusalem is literally broiling – all reported, of course, on cnn.com.

Technorati Tags: WWW,
Internet,
Jerusalem

Thanks to Kirk for pointing out a great little Flash-based timeline showing key events in the last 15 years of the World Wide Web. The related BBC article, How the web went world wide, is a good read.

Technorati Tags: Internet,
World Wide Web

After seeing a trailer for the new animated feature film Barnyard, I’ve anxiously awaited its release. The comic rebellion of barnyard animals against stupid people appeals to my rural sensibilities.

What a delight it was to learn yesterday that the Sun’s x64 systems played a key role in making the movie: “The producers of Barnyard believe the Sun solution might represent the first time a studio has relied entirely upon 64-bit technology to render a full-length animated movie.”

I just can’t wait to see the kid-tipping scene.

Technorati Tags:
Sun Microsystems,
Barnyard

I’ve been attending the Sun National Sales Meeting this week. Much has been said about the “4 S’s” – Servers, Storage, Software and Services – that comprise Sun’s product portfolio. In a humorous introduction to the Systems products, the MC remarked, “You can’t download these puppies from the Internet!.”

Au Contraire! Well … you can’t technically stuff a SPARC box through your Ethernet connection, but the computing capacity of these systems can be easily accessed through the Sun Grid at the fixed rate of $1/CPU-hour. Its kind of like the fact that you can’t download an electric generator through your wall outlet, but plug in the lamp and you get light. The electric utility takes care of the complexity, while we just enjoy the outcome. It’s a pretty compelling concept.

And by the way, you can explore the Sun Grid at “network.com,” a catchy URL for a service from the Company that proclaims “The Network is the Computer.”

Technorati Tags: Sun Grid,
Sun Microsystems

It is early in the morning in Florida. I arrived in Orlando last night in preparation for a long week of internal Sun meetings. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up, did a bit of personal study and began to prepare for the day. I’m sure grateful for high speed Internet access. In the past few minutes, I was able to access a number of web sites, write some emails and otherwise participate in cyberspace all because of the high speed connection in my hotel room.

I paused a moment to reflect on the first times I carried a laptop computer on business trips. I carried a tool kit that included alligator clips, screw drivers and various adaptors, all in hopes that I could find the right signal leads in the telephone to connect a 1200 baud modem and get access to my cc:mail account back home. We’ve come a long way!

Technorati Tags: Internet

I was delighted to learn today of a successful system implementation led by a good friend, Bala Subramanian, with whom I worked at Oracle a few years ago.

Dekalb County, Georgia, recently implemented a 311 Citizen Help Center system. As Unisys Project Director and Technical Architect, Bala managed the overall design of the Oracle CRM system and led the project through successful production deployment.

Congratulations, Bala, on a job well done.

Technorati Tags: DeKalb County,
311,
Unisys