Friday, July 08, 2005

Google Again

I might as well rename this the Google blog. Where do they keep coming up with these new ideas? I think it is that all their worker bees are required to spend a day a week thinking up new ideas. Maybe that is the trick not emulated elsewhere. Like their click through text ads. It is turning the ad industry upside down.

Now Google is in news investing into a broadband over power lines company. Once something like that happens, Google stands to conquer the world. With universal broadband, the entire humanity is one mind. One big mind. One huge mind. Each particular human mind is but a neuron then.

You can't have internet access without electric power. And so marry the two. The electric power and broadband. Now that is revolution, it was not Lenin's 1917.

Plus, broadband is not one thing. It is a spectrum. There is really slow broadband like in the US, and a really fast one like in Korea. The electric line broaband is much faster than even the one in Korea. Now that would be broadband.



Google's got the vision. Kudos. Looks great from the angle of the end user.

Okay Google, now integrate MathML to Blogger. That is one gaping hole. And it is not even difficult. The know-how is already there. It just has not emerged a priority.

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Sunday, July 03, 2005

The $100 Computer

Wow, it is happening.

My current business involvement is at the level of group dynamics, which I fancy to be at a whole different level from things like software, even biotech. Those are down there!

A few years back I was trying to launch a series of companies, which was at the level of software. I must admit I have toyed with the idea of an Internet Computer. IC. Like the PC succeeded the mainframes, the ICs would succeed the PC.

But it is already happening. And I am happy for it. The Indian $100 computer.

This is a big deal. One difference is it is not totally tied with the internet. It still does a bunch of offline stuff. Which is good. For the Indian context.



My vision was more of like a computer that is always online, and there is nothing to be done offline. You have Linux that supports Firefox, and that is all there is to it. And then you scale back to the hardware level and get rid of all the extra bells and whistles.

I am surprised Larry Ellison is not jumping on the idea bandwagon. The guy was trying to push something called a Network Computer back in 1995. It did not take off, but I think his vision, slightly modified, has oomph.

If you have ICs, all the data crunching happens on servers. And that is the only way Oracle could fathom taking over Microsoft.

But the thing about the computer industry is, it is a great marketplace. It is truly hard to predict winners. The situation stays fluid and rightly so.

I mean, if you are a dot com company, your competition is only a quick click or a quick Google search away. You sink and swim fast. But then you can also come back fast when you sink. If you keep working, and keep offering the very best you might have to offer.

I don't think the IC vision is going to be anything dramatic. The PC itself will likely morph beyond recognition.

There was Steve Jobs with his bells and whistles recently. He was boasting you can get weather reports on your PC with Apple's new operating system, and I am thinking, why would I want to do that? I already have been doing that online. Well, maybe not me, because I am not much of a weather person, but I mean, that option has been online for ages now. That is when I realized the PC is not going too far from here.

The online world is the new western frontier, and worldwide too.

No, it is not outsourcing. That term is so racist. People who realize Indians are no longer just subsistence farmers, they get thrown off balance. What is happening is new jobs are being created in India. Trade is a good thing. Just because that trade happens online and is worldwide does not make it suddenly bad.

Go India!

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Google Video Has Hit The Docks

I am aware of how often the Google name has cropped up at this blog, but there is a method to the madness. Google stock price is now where the Microsoft stock price was in the late 1980s: you ain't seen nothing yet. Gates himself has said Google is the first company to be directly challenging Microsoft. It is almost a generational change. Microsoft in Eisenhower or Bush Sr., Google is Kennedy or Clinton. Something of that sort. And now Google has been in news for its video display and 3D maps. In the previous generation, there was a lot of vaporware. Google on the other hand surprises you. They don't tell you what they are working on, and boom, they have something new to offer. They are a software company like Microsoft. Yahoo is more a content and aggregate company. But Yahoo is pretty cool too. At the least it will keep Google on its toes.

My recommendation on Google stocks: buy and stick to it for a decade. It will keep splitting. They are going to keep innovating until the PC as we know it is a goner.

The split thing, that is what happened to Microsoft.

What Google needs to work on is MathML for Blogger. As it is, you can do text, audio, and now video. Soon there will be money transfer. That leaves one big gaping hole: MathML. Or its equivalent. One should have the option to insert mathematical equations at Blogger. That is one big amiss. I emailed them about it. I am sure some others are having the same thoughts. But I have not seen the idea discussed publicly at any Google forum.



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Saturday, February 05, 2005

Internet Phones, Video Blogging, Nano

Say if a city like New York is bathed in Wi-Max, wireless broadband, do we end up with mobile phones that are internet based that are very cheap, like $10 a month, or maybe even free, because imagine the boost to a city's productivity! Already Vonage offers unlimited calls to US and Canada for $25 a month. A nice reason to ditch your traditional landline altogether. And because of its features like being able to check voice mail over email from anywhere, and your ability to take the phone anywhere with you that has broadband internet, it can give some serious competition to the traditional cellphone.

For me, I like the regular size keyboard of my laptop. That is why I am not big on comupters that are the size of cellphones. Plus, being offline and away from phone rings is also important: for solitude and reflection, for study time, reading paper books, time to listen and watch uninterrupted, thinking, for face time and socializing, bonding. Always-on is not good. On-whenever-you-want, but not always-on.

I can't wait for video blogging to become an option, like text and audio are now with Google's Blogger. Perhaps Google will take its Blogger to that level. You want to be able to upload and not have to worry about hosting, kind of like digital photos at Yahoo Photos. At that point, everyone anywhere becomes a media house in his or her own right. Ah, communication.

And, I just found a bunch of articles on Nano at the BusinessWeek site, a few also 0n BioTech.



Come to the think of it, Newton was an alchemist. The nano people join his ranks. I guess the idea is to set up industries at the level of atoms. Some possibilities: "superefficient fuel cells," so you don't have to keep recharging your batteries that often, your laptop can stay unplugged for days and still perform, talk about mobile; "golf balls designed to fly straight," "carry computing beyond today's silicon and transistors," "pint size laboratories" for doctors and nurses, "nano sensors" to detect "anthrax and sarin," and so on.

What really makes my day - I am not a golfer, it is not physical enough for me - is this: "Toward the end of the decade ... new computer memories composed of nanoparticles could conceivably pack the digital contents of the Library of Congress into a machine the size of a yo-yo." Every human thought that ever came into any human mind and got recorded could be stored away forver. Every scientific writing, every painting, every piece of music, every book, article. Ever written, produced, composed, painted. To be written, produced, composed, painted. Everyone will have access to everything. For free. To be supported by the ad model. Food, water, and internet access for everyone on the planet.

You can't even begin to imagine the synergies.

Economic growth can be limitless because it is not to do with natural resources, it is to do with the human mind. And the mind knows no limits to its creative power. This generation's greatest achievement is the next's virgin territory.

The human mind is the least tapped natural resource. And much of the hindrance comes from our primitive arrangements in group dynamics, where we tolerate people getting in each other's way. The scarcities are truly "artificial," man-made.

It is possible to imagine the per capita global income hit $20,000. Within decades.


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