Whatâs Offline: In Favor of Disruption
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Spotting the next disruptive technology, understanding the future and expecting less from insurance.
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If America Online wants a future, it needs to remember its past.
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Forward to the (distributed) revolution Comment As the Web 2.0 bandwagon continues its rapidly accelerating path downhill towards the inevitable crash we find ourselves at another turning point in the development of the networked world.â¦
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The matter of Scoble vs. Facebook is not about either. It's about the deeper choice we face in all the relationships we choose on the Net: the choice between dependence and independence. read more
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A FEW WEEKS back I spent three days locked up in a room full of Internet experts, pioneers, and thinkers to contemplate the question of how to prevent what the conference&#39;s convenors grandly called the &quot;Internet meltdown&quot;. I was hoping for a particularly ...
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There's a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven't heard any grumbling about this, but it's worth a bit of a grumble. What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time? What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time? It's unthinkable, because the web is built on the Internet and is decentralized and redundant. A single router or server can go down for a few hours, days or forever, and the web keeps on tickin.  Same with email. If Gmail started having twelve-hour planned outages, as much as I like Gmail, I'd switch. I can't be without email for any extended period of time.  Okay, let's give the guys at Twitter credit -- they stopped being flip about Twitter taking naps or showers. No one likes jokes when a line of communication is down. Now I'd like them to take another step. Assuming these long outages are really necessary, explain to us what they're for. I can take a guess -- something about their database needs changing, and all the data in all the files must be processed to implement the change. Any updates made while such a process is running would be lost, so the server must be shut off. But this is just a guess.  Another guess -- maybe they've hired a scaling expert who needs to make one final major adjustment before these outages are a thing of the past? No one would want to make such a promise, that's offering too much temptation to Dr Murphy, but that would be good news. Maybe Twitter is getting on to solid ground, finally.  It's fairly amazing that there isn't a viable Twitter clone out there yet. I'd also like to see something much more decentralized, based on static files, available to any Twitter-like system. It doesn't seem that far out of reach. With all the scaling troubles Twitter has had it's surprising that there haven't yet been any entrepreneurs willing to enter the space as competition to Twitter.  Users and developers are learning first-hand why centralized systems are so fragile. I'm sure they're doing a heroic job at Twitter, the best they can with what they have, but it's not good enough when the service takes a 12-hour break while many of the humans that depend on it are awake and working.
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Internet decisions aren't always made at Internet speeds.
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A global summit aims to lay the groundwork for a new structure of internet governance. Participants, however, have very different visions for the future of broadband deployment, net telephony and other web technologies. By Wendy M. Grossman.
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An analyst rants Opinion Let me begin with a warning that am about to get on one of my hobby horses. This one has to do with the notion that modern wireless and mobile technology is largely about enabling people to become more mobile in the way they live and work, as if they were previously chained to one location and magically liberated by the latest gadgetry and connectivity. The notion seems to be that having access to email and other applications while mobile means that people are getting out and about more.â¦
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Instant messaging is becoming an important ingredient for corporations that want to respond rapidly to demands from inside and outside.
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Sit back on the sofa and get ready for packetized, on-demand, digital broadcasts. By Frank Rose from Wired magazine.
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The internet has dragged a âstuffy old businessâ into the 21st century.
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Business thinks IT is slow and unresponsive. IT knows that the business is totally unappreciative of the fact that while they want to support the business as much as possible, they are effectively doing so wearing handcuffs and chains. Every year for 15 years the gap between the two has widened. Now it is about to fracture forever potentially. But by creating a virtual infrastructure -- creating a connection between the application and data -- we can solve most of today's primary IT problems and re-establish a tighter bond between IT and the business.
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By Siti Syameen Md Khalili  EMPOWERED by the digital revolution, information, communications and multimedia technology users today are all content creators in their own right.
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The Web 2.0-social networking phenomenon's seemingly irresistible force field has ensnared yet another niche: travel.
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I recently participated in some war-game-style what-if exercises with a small group of IT execs. The goal was to stimulate thinking about how corporations can best prepare for, and respond to, significant business disruptions, whether from terrorism, weather, biological threats, or other unexpected shocks.
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Blog: Power failure in downtown San Francisco impacts popular data center, leaving several popular Web sites offline.