2008 Young Innovator

2008 Young Innovator

JB Straubel, 32

Tesla Motors

Engineering electric sports cars

As he pulls away from the headquarters of Tesla Motors in San Carlos, CA, JB Straubel apologizes for the condition of the car. The outside looks fine, a gleaming orange. But inside, instruments dangle from the dashboard. A message scrawled on blue masking tape warns that the passenger's-side air bag is disabled. A bell chimes mysteriously. The car had been shipped to England and subjected to vibration tests designed to "shake it apart and kill it," Straubel says. Now it's an engineering car--one Straubel, the company's chief technology officer, feels comfortable drilling holes in and bolting prototype hardware to. "It's pretty much already written off," he says. "But it's also the fastest car in our fleet at the moment."

He punctuates the sentence by hitting the accelerator. Straubel looks remarkably calm as the car surges forward, pressing him into the seat. From a dead stop at the on-ramp, it takes just a few seconds to overtake the vehicles on California's Highway 101. In sports cars, this kind of acceleration is ordinarily accompanied by rapid-fire shifting, but Straubel never takes his hands off the steering wheel. Powered by batteries and an electric motor, the Tesla Roadster isn't bound by the limits of old-fashioned gas-burning engines. At its top speed of over 120 miles per hour, it remains in its first and only gear.

Straubel doesn't come close to 120 miles per hour today. Since the car can accelerate to 60 miles per hour from a stop in just under four seconds, "you get caught up to traffic pretty fast," he says, easing off the accelerator. "It kind of spoils you." It's easy to see why this powerful alternative to gas-guzzling internal-combustion engines (see Hack, "Tesla Roadster", September/October 2008) has generated such remarkable excitement.

Credit: Gregg Segal

Multimedia

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Straubel, more than anyone else, is responsible for the car's impressive acceleration. The Roadster is the first production model from Tesla, which was founded to mass-produce high-performan­ce electric cars. The car's carbon-fiber exterior and aluminum frame, which make it visually appealing but keep it light, are based on designs from British automaker Lotus. Straubel and his hand-picked team, however, engineered the car's brains, muscles, and guts--the electronic controls, electric motor, and battery pack that enable the Roadster to beat many of even the quickest gas-powered cars off the starting line.

Electric cars are best known for their environmental benefits: they produce no harmful emissions, and they're so efficient that they reduce total carbon emissions even if the electricity used to recharge them comes from power plants that burn fossil fuels. But Straubel's achievements capitalize on another, less appreciated advantage. Gas engines deliver their peak torque--the key to acceleration--only within a limited range of engine speeds. Keeping the engine in its optimal range requires a convoluted system of gears and clutches, and acceleration is still compromised. Electric motors, however, deliver maximum torque from a standstill up through thousands of revolutions per minute. That makes it possible to use a transmission with just one or two speeds--and it makes electric cars more responsive than gas-powered ones. Yet most electric vehicles haven't reaped the full benefit of their torque advantage, says Marc Tarpennin­g, one of Tesla's founders. That's because they have typically been underpowered, partly in an effort to make them as inexpensive as possible. Straubel set out to change that.

During his early days at Tesla, the company licensed a number of technologies from AC Propulsion, a small company that had pieced together a prototype electric car with acceleration similar to the Roadster's. Tesla's founders decided to use AC Propulsion's parts to produce their own prototype. But those parts were "ruinously expensive," Tarpenning says, "and no two were alike." Straubel has since reëngineered almost every one of them.

It was soon clear that the extreme torque provided by electric motors can be a problem, especially in a high-powered car. Without a well-tuned motor controller, the torque can jerk the driver around, says Andrew Baglino, one of the engineers Straubel hired. What's more, the complex interplay between the driver's application of the accelerator, the conditions of the road, and the electronic characteristics of the battery and motor can have unexpected consequences. AC Propulsion's controller was "a hokey analog syste­m--messy circuitry that was 20 years old," Straubel says. As he and his team worked to develop a production-ready car, they found that one controller would work well while another would inexplicably fail. "We'd debug it for weeks trying to figure out what the hell was different, and we never could," Straubel says. The unreliable controllers would sometimes cause the motor to jitter. Worse, at times all power would cut out--once, as the car was hurtling down the highway.

Straubel reasoned that a digital control system would solve these problems. Switching to digital would require starting from scratch, but he was sure the new system would both improve performance and speed development. Yet the decision was made to stick with the analog system, in the hope that its kinks could be worked out.

Undeterred, Straubel put Baglino to work on what appeared to be a side project: designing test equipment that put the company's motors and batteries through the paces of simulated driving cycles. This equipment was to have digital controls, which Straubel intended to translate into a digital controller for the car.

Meanwhile, the engineers continued to painstakingly debug the analog system. "It felt silly to be solving problems that we knew we were trying to make obsolete," Straubel says.

After months of working on the digital test equipment, the engineers had learned enough to design a prototype digital controller. It worked, and soon the messy analog system was gone. The jittering and jerking gave way to a digitally controlled, reliably smooth ride--and a car that was, incidentally, far more responsive.

The Roadster's exceptional motor, too, is a tribute to Straubel's persistence. Tesla initially used a third-party transmission that included two gears--one to accelerate from a stop and the other to reach high speeds. The system gave the Roadster a top speed of more than 120 miles an hour. However, the shifting system routinely wore out after just a couple of thousand miles. So Straubel found a way to replace it with a single-speed gearbox. Early on, Straubel and his team had redesigned the patterned metal plates and wire coils at the heart of electric motors to improve both efficiency and torque. But the electronics feeding power from the battery to the motor still limited its output. To exploit the added torque, Straubel added higher-performance transistors and retooled the electrical connections between the motor and the gearbox. These changes increased the torque that the motor could deliver at low speeds and allowed the engineers to use a single-speed transmission without sacrificing either acceleration or maximum speed.

But Straubel's most notable contribution may have been to keep the car from bursting into flames. Tesla's founders decided from the start to power the car with lightweight lithium-ion batteries of the type used in laptops, and they knew they had their work cut out for them. If lithium-ion cells are pierced, crushed, overcharged, or overheated, they can combust. The challenge was even greater because the individual cells were small: it would take 6,831 of them to give the car a decent range. All those cells would have to be wired together into an ensemble that was durable but allowed the charging and temperature of each cell to be carefully controlled.

This was fine with Straubel, who had been building electric ­vehicles since before he was old enough to drive and had long wanted to make a laptop-battery-powered car. Under his direction, all those goals were reached. But along the way, the team discovered that in some (extremely rare) cases, manufacturing defects within a cell could cause it to heat up and catch fire without any outside cause. (This problem led to the recall of millions of laptop batteries in 2006.) Using computer models, Straubel found that if any one of the 6,831 cells caught fire, it could set off its neighbors, starting a chain reaction that could destroy the battery pack and turn the car into a smoldering wreck. Tarpenning asked at the time, "So, JB, what's going to happen to our energy storage system?"

As it turned out, the solution was already at hand, largely because of an argument Straubel had won early in the development of the battery pack. The car's initial design called for air cooling to control the temperature of the batteries and extend their lifetime. But Straubel quickly realized that that approach wouldn't provide the necessary control.

"We had a lot of heated discussions about what direction we should go," Straubel says. But his cool-headed logic, along with some hard figures, won the day. The resulting liquid cooling syste­m--a network of tubes running past almost every cell in the pack--also offered a solution to the problem of the spontaneously combusting cell. With slight improvements, the system was able to evacuate the heat from a flaming cell so quickly that it couldn't set off its neighbors. As with the digital controller, Straubel had been able to find a solution, even if it meant going against the grain.

Tesla began shipping Roadsters this year; the first four were delivered by June. Richard Chen, a former Google product manager who hopes to have his car by Christmas, mailed in a $100,000 check long before the production car existed, and before the company had even announced a price. His excitement is not unique: the car, which has a base price of $109,000, is back-ordered for at least a year.

Its success may have an impact well beyond Tesla's bottom line. Bob Lutz, GM's vice chairman, was quoted in Newsweek as saying that the Roadster was a deciding factor in GM's decision to return to electric cars after abandoning them several years ago. If a Silicon Valley startup can do it, he reasoned, why can't GM? What's more, the Roadster may be changing the image of electric cars and increasing their chances for success. People such as Chen, who got to test-drive the car before finalizing his purchase, are buying it not to save the planet (though the green credentials are a nice side benefit, Chen says) but simply because it's so much fun to drive.

These days, Straubel is focusing on improving the Roadster and engineering a sedan to open up a new, wider market for the company. And tentative plans are in the works for a small car, such as an electric version of Daimler's tiny, inexpensive Smart car.

All that means long days for Straubel, and part of what keeps him going is the belief that he's doing something important: finding a way to deal with the world's energy woes. But he seems most driven by pure enjoyment. That's clear enough when he's behind the wheel of the latest version of the Roadster, whose new electronics can deliver far more power than the first version had. "It's amazing what a few hundred more amps can do," he says, laughing, after a burst of acceleration. "It's fun, huh?" --Kevin Bullis

September/October 2008

35 Innovators Under 35

Technology Review presents its eighth annual list of leading young innovators.

By TR Editors

At Technology Review, selecting the TR35--our annual list of leading young innovators--always produces equal parts excitement and frustration. Selecting just 35 men and women, all under the age of 35, from a pool of more than 300 outstanding nomi­nees is always difficult, but learning of the remarkable technologies they've invented and discoveries they've made so early in their careers is awe inspiring. We select the TR35 on the basis of their accomplishments as researchers, inventors, or entrepreneurs. To help evaluate the importance and impact of these accomplishments, we rely on our panel of experts (click here for a list of this year's judges).

This year's group of innovators is transforming everything from the cars we drive to the way we use computers, treat heart attacks, and manage our e-mail. Several are working on ways to conserve and more efficiently produce energy, others to help us collaborate and connect; still others are taking advantage of the body's capacity to heal itself. As they fight disease, global warming, and the complexity of life in the 21st century, the TR35 aspire to truly improve the world.

Click here for a complete list of the 2008 TR35.

Vision(ary) Entrepreneur

Vision(ary) Entrepreneur

Posted by Christopher Gergen on August 14, 2008 10:21 AM

Here's the basic formula for entrepreneurship: Understand a problem, grasp its full context, connect previously unconnected dots, and have the vision, courage, resourcefulness, and persistence to see the solution through to fruition.

Case in point...

Today, over 400 million people worldwide live in poverty. Most depend on the use of their hands and their eyesight to provide for themselves and their families. As they age, near-sightedness threatens their livelihoods. For more than 40% of these people, a pair of over-the-counter glasses sold in any Western drugstore would substantially increase their productivity and quality of life. But many people don't have access to these eyeglasses.

During dozens of medical missions to the developing world, Dr. Jordan Kassalow, a practicing optometrist and public health expert, saw the problem firsthand. It was obvious that scores of near-sighted people languishing in poverty needed glasses. But Dr. Kassalow also realized that if a member of a community had the right tools and skills as well as access to inexpensive glasses in a range of standard prescriptions, he or she could become that community's optometrist.

That's a classic "win-win": motivated workers gain access to a promising entrepreneurial opportunity (paying twice the wages of typical local jobs), and their customers get inexpensive, yet potentially life-transforming eyeglasses. Dr. Kassalow saw the problem, understood the context, and connected the dots. He founded the Scojo Foundation, now called VisionSpring; its mission is to "reduce poverty and generate opportunity in the developing world through the sale of affordable eyeglasses."

With seed capital from George Soros's Open Society Institute, VisionSpring launched a pilot program in India. Additional support came from a high-end reading glasses company that Kassalow and his business partner, Scott Bernie, started, which donated 5% of its pre-tax profits to the endeavor. As the for-profit organization grew, so did the non-profit.

Today, VisionSpring operates in 13 countries and has trained over 1,200 "vision entrepreneurs" who have in turn sold over 100,000 pairs of glasses in communities with an average daily income between $1 and $4. In 2007, the group also committed to tripling its impact in three years as part of the Clinton Global Initiative. But how?

One of Kassalow's strategies for growth involves an innovative franchise operation in which more than 30 non-governmental partners are plugging the "Vision Entrepreneur" program into their existing economic development activities, reducing VisionSpring's need to build out costly infrastructure.

VisionSpring also launched a five-year, $5 million initiative to build a fully sustainable enterprise, dramatically reducing its ongoing fundraising burdens. (Incidentally, this strategy is becoming increasingly popular among rapidly scaling social enterprises such as College Summit.)

In retrospect, it all seems so obvious and elegantly simple. If one man armed only with eyeglasses and an innovative plan can change so many lives, what other exciting opportunities are out there -- and who's next?

Worksheet: Assessing Your IT Capability

Worksheet: Assessing Your IT Capability

Posted by Susan Cramm on August 8, 2008 10:57 AM

At one time or another, all leadership roles involve some type of IT responsibility, such as serving as an IT liaison, subject matter expert, project or program manager, system or process owner, project sponsor, or participant in IT governance.

Leaders who have worked in these roles do so with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. On the positive side, the prospect of charting new territories is incredibly stimulating. On the negative, it's also frustrating - navigating IT can be like traveling in a foreign country without an interpreter or a guidebook.

It doesn't have to feel this way. IT is just like any other business function - challenged with developing and delivering products and services to demanding "customers" in the context of constrained resources and changing competitive, organizational and technological landscapes.

As a business, the key to success is to understand the lay of the land in order to make smart decisions about how to get the right people working collaboratively on meaningful objectives in a way that delivers against short and long term needs.

Of course, to get the lay of the IT land, you need to ask the right questions. The following is a short assessment worksheet that's useful in understanding current IT capabilities and identifying opportunities for improvement.

The assessment is organized by "the four key IT imperatives", each with a set of questions about the supporting behaviors that contribute to stronger performance. You can download a copy of the worksheet here: IT Assessment Worksheet.doc

Don't try to answer these questions on your own. Cozy up with your IT counterparts and benefit from their expertise. For each question, collectively make a best guess as to performance and impact. Then brainstorm how to address the low performing/high impact behaviors.

By getting the lay of the land as a first step in tackling an IT role, you will be able to work smarter, not harder, and in the process improve IT relationships and contribute to the greater good by making progress against the four key IT imperatives.

How Olympics Branding Is Shaping China

How Olympics Branding Is Shaping China

Posted by John Quelch on August 11, 2008 8:47 AM

The Olympics have long been seen as China's global coming out party. But the event is more than that: The Olympic Games will change China forever.

In preparing for the Games, the Chinese have had to embrace Western standards to meet the promises made to the International Olympic Committee. Many factories have now been shuttered to reduce pollution and improve air quality in the run-up to the Opening Ceremony. Legions of Chinese soldiers have been enlisted to clear algae infestations from coastal waters where yachting races are to be held. Beijing taxi drivers have been ordered not to spit in deference to visiting tourists.

The deadline of the Games gave government officials an event to forcibly accelerate the modernization of Chinese society. World class architectural design and construction standards have guided the building of Olympic venues. Airports, highways and other infrastructure have been upgraded not only in Beijing but in all the cities where Olympic events will be held. Chinese pride and ambition demand that they be the best ever, no matter what the cost, and that Chinese athletes win more medals than any other country.
But when the athletes have gone home, and the polluting power plants come back on line, what will remain beyond the memories and good impressions? The answer is brands. 2008 will not merely be the year of the Olympics. It will be the year of brands. Not only brand China being promoted on the world stage, but also the commercial brands of Olympic sponsors driving home their brand advantage in the domestic Chinese market.

The Chinese are already in love with brands. How can you stand out in a nation of 1.3 billion with high population mobility? Young Chinese are known by the brands they can afford and the brands they display. Via fashion accessories, cell phones and now cars, brand choices are stratifying a hitherto unified communist society. The billions of daily purchases of trusted brand names are an increasing part of the social glue that holds Chinese society together.

From Coca-Cola to McDonalds, from Visa to Samsung, a record 63 brands have paid the IOC more money than ever for their category exclusive sponsorship rights. And, given the size and growth of the Chinese economy plus the undercurrent of concern about China in the West, these sponsors have allocated more of their global Olympics budgets than ever before to marketing their brands in the host nation.

The Chinese are being subjected to a deluge of brand advertising by Western multinational brands seeking to expand their geographic reach beyond the major cities to the outlying provinces. Olympics-related advertising by these brands could exceed $6 billion. Most of this advertising is not directly promoting brand features and attributes. Rather, it aims to wrap the Western brand in the cloak of Chinese nationalism. From Volkswagen's "honk for China" campaign to Pepsi's limited edition of red colored cans accompanying the slogan "Go red for China", Western brands are taking the "act local" mantra to a new extreme. Few brands are implementing a unified global campaign for this Olympics. Instead, they are typically running two campaigns, one for China, another for the rest of the world.

The same applies to Chinese brands such as Lenovo and Haier that are seeking to leverage Olympics sponsorships to enhance their global stature. Lenovo, which acquired IBM's PC business three years ago, has invested around $100 million as the first Chinese company to become a global sponsor of the Olympics. Through doing so, Lenovo expects to increase its brand reputation and market share in China as much as in the rest of the world.

But where will this vast consumption of brands lead? Choice is good. Engaging with brands is fun. Media diversity, fueled by brand advertising, is welcome. But one can't help wondering whether too many Chinese are consumers first, and citizens second. Perhaps more economic freedom will lead, as many hope, to increased demand for political freedom. Or will the fruits of a growing economy and the passion for consumption be the distraction, the narcotic that postpones the day of political reckoning for the still dominant Communist party?

Read more on the Olympics:

• 8 Simple Steps to Winning Eyeballs in Beijing
• The 3 Levels of Branding at Beijing

This post is based on Professor Quelch's August 11, 2008 article in the Financial Times entitled "Brands Act Local To Woo A Billion Chinese Consumers"

The euro-area economy

That shrinking feeling

Aug 14th 2008
From The Economist print edition

The credit crunch started in America, but Europe may yet prove the bigger victim. A first article looks at the euro area, a second (see article) at eastern Europe

Illustration by Peter Schrank

EUROPEANS might be forgiven for feeling bruised. The housing bust across the Atlantic was the trigger for the credit crunch, so justice demands that America suffer most from the fallout. But America has not so far followed the script, weathering the storms better than it expected. Its GDP suffered a tiny decline at the end of 2007, but it grew at an annualised rate of around 2% in the second quarter of 2008.

Europe is struggling to stay above water. Figures released on August 14th showed that the euro-area economy shrank at an annualised rate of 0.8% in the second quarter, the first such reverse since 2001. Nor are things likely to improve soon. A closely watched survey of purchasing managers in manufacturing and services slumped in July to its lowest level since 2001. Business confidence has turned down sharply in all of the three biggest economies in the euro area: Germany, France and Italy.

Indeed, in the second quarter GDP fell in all three countries, paring their annual growth rates (see chart). That Italy slipped is no surprise; even in brighter times for the world economy, it has struggled to maintain its growth. Meanwhile Spain’s GDP has predictably stuttered as it endures a painful shock from its burst housing bubble. More alarming is the step back by France and Germany, which seemed sturdier than their southern neighbours.

In truth, the 2.0% annualised fall in German GDP in the second quarter makes its economy seem in worse shape than it is. A warm winter allowed more construction work than usual, spurring an aberrantly large rise in first-quarter GDP. The second-quarter decline is partly a payback. Yet there are worrying signs that the export motor that drives the German economy is sputtering. Orders for German engineering goods fell in June by 5% from a year ago, according to VDMA, a Frankfurt-based industry group. Foreign orders fell by 7%.

Thomas Mayer, an economist at Deutsche Bank, detects feelings of dismay in Germany at the economy’s deterioration. After all, this was one of the few rich countries that skipped the global house-price boom. And unlike America, Germany is a supplier of global credit: its current-account surplus was a hefty 7.7% of GDP last year, according to the OECD. Mr Mayer thinks there is a belief in Germany that “we didn’t do all those bad things, so it’s not fair that we are suffering”. What is missing, he says, is any recognition that Germans profited from the credit-fuelled global boom, that “they were part of the game” as suppliers if not as consumers.

The rest of Europe was hardly immune from housing mania. House-price rises in Spain, Ireland and France during the boom years outstripped even America’s. Ireland’s housing bust may yet prove to be the most dramatic of all. Its GDP, which grew by 6% in 2007, is likely to shrink this year, according to the Economic and Social Research Institute, a Dublin-based think-tank. Ireland is too small for its economic troubles to pull down other countries much but Spain’s economy has enough heft to inflict collateral damage (see box). Spain accounts for one-eighth of euro-area GDP but until recently was generating a much larger share of consumer spending and new jobs. Now the Spanish consumer is in retreat—retail sales fell by almost 8% in the year to June—and unemployment is rising.

The Spanish collapse has hurt firms in other euro-area countries. German and Italian exports to Spain have slowed sharply since last year, according to Julian Callow at Barclays Capital. French exports to Spain are now falling. Prospects for sales outside the euro area have darkened too. America’s economy is doing well partly because it is sucking in fewer imports. Britain, the euro-area’s other main export market, is on the brink of recession.

Hopes that spending by consumers in the thriftier parts of Europe would make up for lost exports have been dashed. In less troubled times, the marked acceleration in wages and salaries in the first quarter would soon push up spending. But because of sharp increases in food and fuel prices, fatter wage packets have barely kept up with inflation, which is now 4%.

Nor has thrift yielded much reward. When the economy was strong, most consumers were cautious about saving less and spending more (the euro-area saving rate has barely budged in the past three years). Now, when fears of jobs losses are rife, they are even less inclined to splash out. Retail sales across the region fell by 3.1% in the year to June. Even if there were a desire to borrow to finance spending, banks might be unwilling to meet it. Loan growth is wilting and a survey by the European Central Bank (ECB) suggests that lending conditions are becoming stricter.

No wonder business confidence is flagging and companies are pulling in their horns. Until recently, capital spending was one of the main drivers of economic growth. Firms were keen to invest on the back of healthy profits, solid foreign demand and hopes of a pick-up in consumer spending. Despite the credit crunch, banks seemed content to offer loans to companies for buildings and equipment, even as they recoiled from lending to households. But now loans to companies are slowing as well—a sign that firms are cutting back. Stronger wage growth and high commodity prices have squeezed profits, and export order books are suddenly thinner.

The economy’s downward lurch puts the ECB in an awkward spot. It raised its main interest rate to 4.25% on July 3rd to show that it was serious about controlling inflation, which is well above its target ceiling of 2%. The rate-setters’ fear was that inflation would persist if firms and households used today’s rate as a benchmark for future wages and prices. They are right to worry. In Italy and Spain, wage growth is picking up even as unemployment rises, because of contract clauses allowing workers to be compensated for higher-than-expected inflation.

The good news is that the drop in oil prices may mean that euro-area inflation has peaked. But it will start to fall back only towards the end of the year. The ECB will be reluctant to cut interest rates until it is sure that the inflation danger has passed. By then, the euro-area economy may already be in recession. Mr Mayer reckons that the ECB will attempt to revive it by cutting interest rates to 3.25% next year. But until then, it is hard to see what else might lift growth. Many Europeans will feel that they deserved better.

Monday, August 11, 2008

A Bridge between Virtual Worlds

Second Life's new program links virtual environments.

By Brian White

The first steps to developing virtual-world interoperability are now being tested between Second Life and other independent virtual worlds, thanks to the launch of Linden Lab's Open Grid Beta, a program designed for developers to test new functionality. The beta program will allow users to move between a Second Life test grid--a set of servers simulating a virtual world--and other non-Linden Lab grids running the OpenSim software. OpenSim is an independent open-source project to create a virtual-world server.

The discussion of linking together today's virtual worlds is not new, but this is the first running code that demonstrates previously hypothetical approaches--another tangible sign that Linden Lab is serious about interoperability. "We are still early in the game. The point of the beta is to give the rest of the development community the chance to try the protocols themselves," says Joe Miller, Linden Lab's vice president of platform and development. More than 200 users have signed up for the beta program, and currently 15 worlds have been connected.

In order to test virtual-world interoperability, a person needs at least two virtual worlds. For Linden Lab, theOpenSim project was a natural choice. It began in January 2007 at the nexus of two open-source projects--one to reverse-engineer the Second Life server APIs, and the other Linden Lab's open-source viewer initiative. The goal of the OpenSim project is to build a virtual-world server that supports the Linden Lab viewer or a derivative.

Today, there is a flourishing OpenSim community with 26 registered grids hosting approximately 2,300 regions. While this is certainly a small number compared with the 28,070 regions that make up the Second Life main grid, it still represents a significant number of independent virtual worlds. The open-source nature of the project, combined with the number of participants and the shared support of a common viewer, make OpenSim-based worlds ideal for interoperability tests.

Interoperability is the future of the Web, says Terry Ford, the owner and operator of an OpenSim-based world called 3rd Rock Grid. Ford is also participating in the program. "It may be [in] OpenSim's future, or maybe another package will spring up, but just as links from a Web page take you to another site, people will come to expect the ability to navigate between virtual worlds," he says.

Ford is Butch Arnold in Second Life, Butch Arnold in 3rd Rock Grid, and Butch Arnold in theOpenLife grid, and that's kind of the point. No one wants to have as many avatars as they do website accounts, but there is a fundamental difference between accounts, which hold data like a shopping cart, and avatars, which contain data regarding a person's virtual-world appearance. IBM's David Levine, who has been closely collaborating with Linden Lab on the interoperability protocols, says, "You don't care if your shopping-cart contents in your Amazon account [are] the same as other shopping carts. However, if you were moving region to region and had very different assets in each, that would be a problem."

Yet many efforts to let users share their avatars on the Web have not been successful. Levine says that the Open Grid Protocol has a chance because it is less ambitious. "We are not trying to do it across the entire Web. The focus is on the Linden main grid and a set of broadly similar grids."

To use the beta program, a participant starts an application called a viewer, the best example being the Second Life client. The viewer renders the virtual world and provides the controls for the avatar. Just like using a Web browser to log in to a website, the viewer is where a log-in request is initiated.

The log-in request is sent to the agent service, which stores things like the avatar's profile, password, and current location. As part of the beta, Linden Lab has implemented a proprietary version of the agent service running on a test grid. The avatar service now contacts the region service for the right placement of the avatar in the virtual world.

The region service is basically the Web server of virtual worlds. It is responsible for simulating a piece of the virtual landscape and providing a shared perspective to all avatars occupying the same virtual space. A collection of regions is called a grid. Linden Lab has proprietary code running all the Second Life regions. The OpenSim project provides source code that, when built, allows anyone to run his or her own region service.

From that point on, there is a three-way communication between viewer, agent service, and region service to provide the user's in-world experience. When the user wants to move to another region, he issues a teleport command in the viewer, and the same process happens. But in this case, the user is not required to log in again, even if the destination region is running on a non-Linden Lab server.

Last fall, Linden Lab formed the Architecture Working Group (AWG), which is the driving force behind the Open Grid Protocol--the architectural definition of interoperability. The team decided that the first step was to focus on the areas of log in and teleport. "We started with authentication information and being able to seamlessly pass the log-in credentials between two grids run by different companies," says Levine. "Many people ask me, 'Why did you start there?' Well, you can't do all the rest until you get logged in."

Miller says that in the next 18 months, a user can expect to see a lot of activity in the area of content movement. "How do I move content that is mine, purchased or created, between worlds safely and securely? The AWG has a lot of great thoughts on how this could work," he says.

Brian White writes a virtual world blog, Virtual White: An Exploration of Virtual Worlds.

Linking worlds: Two avatars, Brian White (left) and Butch Arnold, meet in 3rd Rock Grid, an independent OpenSim-based server.  Credit: Brian White

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Commanding Your Browser

A new interface bypasses the mouse for some complex tasks.

By Kate Greene

The beauty of today's search engines is their simplicity. Type a few keywords into an empty box, and see the 10 most relevant results. This week, Mozilla Labs expects to launch a similar interface for its Firefox Web browser. The new interface, called Ubiquity, lets users carry out all sorts of complex tasks simply by typing instructions, in the form of ordinary sentences, into a box in the browser.

For example, to e-mail a paragraph or picture from a Technology Review article to a friend using Ubiquity, simply select the text or image, press a keyboard shortcut to reveal an input box, and type "e-mail to Max."

"You just type in things that feel natural to you," says Chris Beard, vice president and general manager of Mozilla Labs. Ubiquity, which is based on the Javascript programming language, will open an e-mail client and paste the highlighted text or image into a message. It will even guess which Max in an address book the snippet should be sent to, based on previous e-mailing patterns.

Credit: Technology Review

The idea, says Beard, is to make it easier to find and share information on the Web while avoiding cumbersome copy-and-paste instructions. Traditionally, if you want to e-mail a picture or a piece of text to a friend, look up a word in an online dictionary, or map an address, you have to follow a series of well-worn steps: copy the information, open a new browser tab or an external program, paste in the text, and run the program.

A common work-around is to use browser plug-ins--tiny programs that connect to other applications and can be added to the browser toolbar. For instance, StumbleUpon, a Web service that lets users bookmark and share interesting Web pages, offers a plug-in for Firefox so that new sites can be added or discovered with a single click. But adding multiple browser plug-ins takes up valuable screen space.

Ubiquity aims to eliminate both tiresome mouse movements and the need for multiple browser plug-ins.

The idea isn't unique to Mozilla Labs. Researchers at MIT have published work on a similar interface, called Inky. Another project, called Yubnub, allows people to quickly perform different online operations, such as searching for stock quotes, images, or items on eBay using the same text field.

What distinguishes Ubiquity is that it's being released as a Mozilla Labs project, which immediately makes both the program and its underlying code available to people eager to test the interface and contribute design and programming ideas to improve its functionality. Also, notes Mozilla's Beard, Ubiquity is highly customizable. From the start, the interface will come with built-in instructions or "verbs," such as "e-mail," "Twitter," and "Digg," but Beard expects people to add many new ones.

The project is being released in an early form--version 0.1--so it's not expected to work perfectly straightaway. Also, Beard doesn't assume that it will change the way people interact with their browser overnight. "Most people in the world will continue to use mouse-based interfaces," he says. But a language-based interface like Ubiquity could ultimately supplement the mouse, much as shortcut keys already do, he says.

Time for Dreams---Lang Lang & Schiller

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

A Spherical Camera Sensor

A stretchable circuit allows researchers to make simple, high-quality camera sensors.

By Kate Greene

Today's digital cameras are remarkable devices, but even the most advanced cameras lack the simplicity and quality of the human eye. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have built a spherical camera that follows the form and function of a human eye by building a circuit onto a curved surface.

The curved sensor has properties that are found in eyes, such as a wide field of view, that can't be produced in digital cameras without a lot of complexity, says John Rogers, lead researcher on the project. "One of the most prominent [features of the human eye] is that the detector surface of the retina is not planar like the digital chip in a camera," he says. "The consequence of that is [that] the optics are well suited to forming high-quality images even with simple imaging elements, such as the single lens of the cornea."

Electronic devices have been, for the most part, built on rigid, flat chips. But over the past decade, engineers have moved beyond stiff chips and built circuits on bendable sheets. More recently, researchers have gone a step beyond simple bendable electronics and put high-quality silicon circuits on stretchable, rubberlike surfaces. The advantage of a stretchable circuit, says Rogers, is that it can conform over curvy surfaces, whereas bendable devices can't.

The eyes have it: This camera consists of a hemisphere-shaped array of photodetectors (white square with gold-colored dots) and a single lens atop a transparent globe. The curved shape of the photodetector array provides a wide field of view and high-quality images in a compact package.
Credit: Beckman Institute, University of Illinois

The key to the spherical camera is a sensor array that can withstand a curve of about 50 percent of its original shape without breaking, allowing it to be removed from the stiff wafer on which it was originally fabricated and transferred to a rubberlike surface. "Doing that requires more than just making the detector flexible," says Rogers. "You can't just wrap a sphere with a sheet of paper. You need stretchability in order to do a geometry transformation."

The array, which consists of a collection of tiny squares of silicon photodetectors connected by thin ribbons of polymer and metal, is initially fabricated on a silicon wafer. It is then removed from the wafer with a chemical process and transferred to a piece of rubberlike material that was previously formed into a hemisphere shape. At the time of transfer, the rubber hemisphere is stretched out flat. Once the array has been successfully adhered to the rubber, the hemisphere is relaxed into its natural curved shape.

Because the ribbons that connect the tiny islands of silicon are so thin, they are able to bend easily without breaking, Rogers says. If two of the silicon squares are pressed closer together, the ribbons buckle, forming a bridge. "They can accommodate strain without inducing any stretching in the silicon," he says.

To complete the camera, the sensor array is connected to a circuit board that connects to a computer that controls the camera. The array is capped with a globelike cover fitted with a lens. In this setup, the sensor array mimics the retina of a human eye while the lens mimics the cornea.

Stretchable mesh: The square silicon photodetectors, connected by thin ribbons of metal and polymer, are mounted on a hemisphere-shaped rubber surface. The entire device is able to conform to any curvilinear shape due to the flexibility of the ribbons that connect the silicon islands.
Credit: Beckman Institute, University of Illinois

"This technology heralds the advent of a new class of imaging devices with wide-angle fields of view, low distortion, and compact size," says Takao Someya, a professor of engineering at the University of Tokyo, who was not involved in the research. "I believe this work is a real breakthrough in the field of stretchable electronics."

Rogers isn't the first to use the concept of a stretchable electronic mesh, but this work distinguishes itself in that it is not constrained to stretching in limited directions, like other stretchable electronic meshes. And importantly, his is the first stretchable mesh to be implemented in an artificial eye camera.

The camera's resolution is 256 pixels. At the moment, it's difficult to improve resolution due to the limitations of the fabrication facilities at the University of Illinois, says Rogers. "At some level, it's a little frustrating because you have this neat electronic eye and everything's pixelated," he says. But his team has sidestepped the problem by taking another cue from biology. The human eye dithers from side to side, constantly capturing snippets of images; the brain pieces the snippets together to form a complete picture. In the same way, Rogers's team runs a computer program that makes the images crisper by interpolating multiple images taken from different angles.

The most immediate application for these eyeball cameras, says Rogers, is most likely with the military. The simple, compact design could be used in imaging technology in the field, he suggests. And while the concept of an electronic eye conjures up images of eye implants, Rogers says that at this time he is not collaborating with other researchers to make these devices biocompatible. However, he's not ruling out the possibility in the future.

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Cloud Computing's Perfect Storm?

An Intel, Yahoo, and HP initiative will use large-scale research projects to test a new Internet-based computing infrastructure.

By John Borland

Last week, Intel, Yahoo, HP, and an international trio of research institutions announced a joint cloud-computing research initiative. The ambitious six-site project is aimed at developing an Internet-based computer infrastructure stable enough to host companies' most critical data-processing tasks. The project also holds an unusual promise for advances in fields as diverse as climate change modeling and molecular biology.

The new array of six linked data centers, one operated by each project sponsor, will be one of the largest experiments to date focusing on cloud computing--an umbrella term for moving complex computing tasks, such as data processing and storage, into a network-connected "cloud" of external data centers, which might perform similar tasks for multiple customers.

Credit: Technology Review

The project's large scope will allow researchers to test and develop security, networking, and infrastructure components on a large scale simulating an open Internet environment. But to test this infrastructure, academic researchers will also run real-world, data-intensive projects that, in their own right, could yield advances in fields as varied as data mining, context-sensitive Web search, and communication in virtual-reality environments.

"Making this marriage of substantial processing power, computing resources, and data resources work efficiently, seamlessly, and transparently is the challenge," says Michael Heath, interim head of the computer-science department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an institute that is part of the alliance. Heath says that for the project to be successful, the team, which also includes Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Singapore's Infocomm Development Authority, needs "to be running realistic applications."

Much of the technology industry has recently focused on cloud computing as a next critical architectural advance, but even backers say that the model remains technologically immature.

Web-based software and the ability to "rent" processing power or data storage from outside companies are already common. The most ambitious visions of cloud computing expand on this, predicting that companies will ultimately use remotely hosted cloud services to perform even their most complex computing activities. However, creating an online environment where these complicated tasks are secure, fast, reliable, and simple still presents considerable challenges.

Virtually every big technology company, including Google, IBM, Microsoft, and AT&T, already has a cloud-computing initiative. Farthest along commercially may be Amazon, whose Web Services division already hosts computing, storage, databases, and other resources for some customers.

The new cloud-computing project will consist of six computing clusters, one housed with each founding member of the partnership, with each containing between 1,000 and 4,000 processors. Each of the companies involved has a specific set of research projects planned, with many broadly focusing on operational issues such as security, load balancing, managing parallel processes on a very large scale, and how to configure and secure virtual machines across different locations.

Researchers will be given unusually broad latitude to modify the project's architecture from top to bottom, developing and experimenting with ideas applying to hardware, software, networking functions, and applications. Project managers say that one goal is to see how changes at one technical level affect others.

"In the cloud, we have the opportunity for integrated design, where one entity can make design choices across an entire environment," says Russ Daniels, chief technology officer of HP's cloud-services division. "This way, we can understand the impact of design choices that we make at the infrastructure level, as well as the impact they have on higher-level systems."

HP, for example, will be focusing in part on an ongoing project called Cells as a Service, an effort to create secure virtual "containers" that are composed of virtual machines, virtual storage volumes, and virtual networks. The containers can be split between separate data centers but still treated by consumers as a traditional, real-world collection of hardware.

Among Yahoo's specific projects will be the development of Hadoop, an open-source software platform for creating large-scale data-processing and data-querying applications. Yahoo has already built one big cloud-computing facility called M45 that is operated in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University. M45 will also be folded into this new project.

Running in parallel with this systems-level research will be the assortment of other research projects designed to test the cloud infrastructure.

Computer scientists at the Illinois facility have a handful of data- and processing-intensive projects under way that are likely to be ported to the cloud facilities. According to Heath, one key thrust will be "deep search" and information extraction, such as allowing a computer to understand the real-world context of the contents found in a Web page. For example, today's search engines have difficulty understanding that a phone number is in fact an active phone number, rather than just a series of digits. A project run by Urbana-Champaign professor Kevin Chang is exploring the idea of using the massive quantities of data collected by Web-wide search engines as a kind of cross-reference tool, so that the joint appearance of "555-1212" with "John Borland" multiple times online might identify the number as a phone number and associate it with that particular name.

Heath says that other projects might include experiments with tele-immersive communication--virtual-reality-type environments that let computers provide physical, or haptic, feedback to users as they communicate or engage in real-world activities controlled remotely over the Web.

In an e-mail, Intel Research vice president Andrew Chein said that other topics could include climate modeling, molecular biology, industrial design, and digital library research.

"By looking at what people are really doing, we will learn about what is really important from an infrastructure perspective," says Raghu Ramakrishnan, chief scientist for Yahoo's Cloud Computing and Data Infrastructure Group. "We already know enough to put forth systems that are usable today, but not enough that we can deliver on all the promise that people see in the paradigm."

Microsoft after Gates

After Bill

Jun 26th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Microsoft knows what it wants to do when Bill Gates leaves—but the road ahead will not be easy

New York Times/Redux/Eyevine

“DOES Microsoft still have a big, hairy audacious goal?” Not everybody would presume to ask Bill Gates a question like that. But Mr Gates was this week due to remove himself from the firm’s day-to-day business, to become its non-executive chairman, and Tim O’Reilly, a noted internet guru, felt emboldened to commit lèse majesté. Putting “a computer on every desk and in every home” had been the original mission of Microsoft, which Mr Gates founded more than 30 years ago. But now the job is pretty much done, at least in the West, and Microsoft is the world’s largest software company. What is its mission now, Mr O’Reilly recently asked at a technological shindig, called “All Things Digital”—other than just to sell as much software as it can?

Mr Gates (pictured with Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, left, and Ray Ozzie, chief software architect, right) is leaving Microsoft for the charitable foundation he set up with his wife, Melinda, even as his firm is in some disorder. Windows, Microsoft’s all-conquering operating system, has become so complex, some say, that it is collapsing under its own weight. Its latest version, Vista, is not a complete flop, but it is a huge disappointment. Many users prefer the previous one, XP, and Microsoft is already hyping the next, Windows 7. Microsoft is also struggling to keep up with Google, its main rival. It recently announced a product that pays consumers money if they buy something through an advertisement next to its search results—a gambit that smacks of desperation. And the firm’s aborted bid for Yahoo!, an online giant, has done nothing to reassure investors. As a result, Microsoft’s shares continue to do worse than the industry average. Some observers have started to wonder whether Microsoft should not break itself up—for instance into a legacy business, containing Windows and Office, a service unit, and games, where the company has recently been most innovative.

Mr Gates’s reply to Mr O’Reilly was not entirely reassuring. The firm, he said, now has dozens of “quests”—revolutionising television, automating data centres and creating software ten times faster. Perhaps this fragmentation of Microsoft’s ambition is only natural. In its 33 hectic years the company has swollen to nearly 90,000 employees (see charts); revenues this year should exceed $60 billion and net income reach almost $18 billion. Even Microsoft’s own senior executives struggle to grasp its growing empire. The firm now sells 75 different products, many of them in lots of versions.

In fact Mr Gates could easily have given a more pointed answer. Of all that Microsoft hopes to achieve in the post-Gates era, one goal dominates all others—even catching Google. That is to become the dominant force in the forthcoming era of cloud computing—or, to refresh Microsoft’s original mission: “to supply services to every desk, to every home and to every hand”. That ought to be big and hairy enough to satisfy even Mr O’Reilly.

To understand what that means, and the difficulties it poses Microsoft, start with the idea that computing is undergoing one of its great periodic shifts. In its early days, most computing took place on mainframes. Ever-falling costs led computing to shatter—first into minicomputers, then into personal computers (PCs) and, more recently, hand-held devices. Now communications is catching up with hardware and software and, thanks to cheap broadband and wireless access, the industry is witnessing a pull back to the middle. This is leading much computing to migrate back into huge data centres. Networks of these computing plants form “computing clouds”—vast, amorphous, delocalised nebulae of processing power and storage.

Service with a simile

Marc Benioff, a cloud-computing pioneer and the boss of Salesforce.com, which helps firms manage their customers on the web thinks this will spell the “death of software”. Rather than being a big chunk of code sitting on a hard disk on your desk, software will come “as a service” over the internet through a browser. This idea is also espoused by Google. Although the online giant is best known as the world’s biggest online search and advertising firm, it now also offers many other services—plenty of which compete with Microsoft’s PC programs.

Not so fast, says Mr Ozzie. He has been Microsoft’s chief software architect since 2006 and will steer its technology after Mr Gates goes, while Mr Mundie will take over as the company’s long-term thinker and public face. “Whenever these things happen, people think that it is going to be a complete extreme shift,” Mr Ozzie says. “But in reality customers are very pragmatic and figure out the right mix of old and new stuff.” This mix, he argues, will depend on where people are, which device they use and what they want to do. Instead of the death of software, Mr Ozzie speaks of “software plus services”—the title of Microsoft’s new strategy.

He thinks of cloud computing differently. Fewer people will put the PC at the centre of their computing universe; it will be one of many devices connected through the web, which Mr Ozzie calls the “hub”. But what sounds like bad news for a firm making PC software is in fact a huge opportunity, he says—because this new set-up sits well with Microsoft’s DNA. The heart of its business has always contained a simple, powerful idea: find a market that is global in scale—one that is split between lots of vendors and so dysfunctional; then integrate the various parts into a “platform” and develop its chief applications; and finally, build an “ecosystem” of developers writing programs for it.

This has been Microsoft’s approach to its largest products—with Windows as the most successful. Versions of this operating system run on over 90% of the 1 billion PCs in use, because Microsoft has excelled at building an ecosystem around its platform, in particular by giving developers the tools for their job. This supercharged what economists call “network effects”: the more applications run on Windows, the more attractive it becomes for users; that, in turn, attracts more developers, and so it goes on. Although Mr Ozzie hesitates to put it in such terms, his goal is to create a kind of Windows in the cloud. “If you were to build an operating system today,” he explains, “it would not be a single piece of software that operates a single computer.”

He is first tackling device integration. In a recent internal memo, which Microsoft made public, Mr Ozzie talks of “a personal mesh of devices—a means by which all of your devices are brought together, managed through the web as a seamless whole.” This mesh will make sure, for instance, that devices automatically synchronise important files, such as an address book, and that one device can control the others. Windows has other similarities with the platform Microsoft wants to build in the cloud. The firm plans to provide developers with tools to weave services together into new offerings. And it will give them ready-made routines, such as checking a user’s identity, tracking his location and processing payments.

The club in the cloud

As with all big ideas emanating from Redmond, Mr Ozzie’s vision has provoked strong reactions. Here we go again, says one side, who think they have spotted a monopolist’s latest plan for world domination. Welcome to the club, comes the retort from the other. Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com and others are already building similar platforms—Microsoft is just a Johnny-come-lately hedging its bets.

Needless to say, things are a bit more complicated. Mr Ozzie’s plans amount to more than a dominant software company trying to protect its franchise. Building a platform for the cloud does not seem such a bad idea, since it is precisely what many in the industry are trying to do. Yet the cloud will be based more on open standards than on proprietary technology. It is too big and too diverse to be dominated by one provider. And governments would be unlikely to allow one firm to control such an important infrastructure.

As Mr Ozzie rightly points out, it is the very essence of the shift towards services, that computing now allows for applications and data to sit where it is technically most appropriate—or, just as important, where users prefer. And people are not about to throw out their powerful PCs or other “client” devices anytime soon, not least because they will sometimes be offline. Even Google is now offering software that allows its applications to be used off the internet.

The problem is that, so far, Microsoft does not have much to show for its plans, says Brent Thill, director of software research at Citi Investment Research. Take Windows Live, a collection of online services that in 2006 Mr Ozzie called the “hub to bring it all together”. Many of Windows Live’s services are derivative and few have a lot of users. Recently, Microsoft said that it will shut down some services, including Windows Live Expo, a listing service for classified advertisements.

Worse, Microsoft has not got much to show for its huge investments in online search, the killer application in Google’s cloud. The firm’s market share in search is only 8.5% in America, compared with Google’s share of more than 60%. As a result, Microsoft’s online-advertisement platform has not succeeded either. That matters, because even if companies pay for their cloud services, most consumer services will be funded by advertising. This explains why Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s boss, was prepared to pay $47.5 billion for Yahoo! The online giant would have been an “accelerator” in its quest to catch up with Google in search and advertising.

But those setbacks should not obscure that Microsoft has a plan—and is willing to put a lot of money behind it. It is spending billions to build a network of data centres, a huge infrastructure to cope with the expected demand for all its software-plus-services business. The company does not disclose how many computers now populate its server farms. It says only that it is adding 10,000 servers a month, which is roughly the total number used by a company like Facebook.

What is more, Microsoft has already spent the past couple of years writing software for its new platform. In April Mr Ozzie presented a first chunk, called “Live Mesh”—in his words, the “connective tissue that brings together devices in the cloud.” It will enable users to synchronise files on lots of computers as well as to a web desktop in the cloud, for instance. More will come in the autumn, when Microsoft is likely to publish some new tools for developers.

Microsoft is further along with its new services than most think. Health Vault, launched in October, is not just a place where people can store their medical details online, but a service that can connect to all sorts of monitoring devices, as well as software used by hospitals and doctors. Microsoft is likely to come up with combinations of consumer and institutional data in other areas, such as education. It hopes they will become the killer aps of the new platform, rather as Word and Excel were for Windows.

Microsoft’s familiar products are also being recast for the cloud. Sometimes the change is modest. The latest versions of Office, the software package that includes Word and Excel, enable users to share files and collaborate. Mr Ozzie argues there is no demand for a fully featured web-based version, (though, it has to be said, the old desktop-bound Office is one of Microsoft’s biggest money-makers and one of the main reasons for people to use Windows). Other overhauls are more ambitious. Customers will soon have the choice of running Microsoft’s business programs, such as its mail-server software, Exchange, on their own computers or in the cloud. Chris Capossela, who oversees this shift at Microsoft, expects half of the mailboxes managed by Exchange to be online.

This flurry of activity in Redmond does not guarantee Microsoft success in the cloud. Top of the list of Redmond watchers’ worries is the firm’s culture and management. Mary Jo Foley, a long-time Microsoft correspondent, thinks it will lose something vital when Mr Gates walks out of the door. She concludes in her recently published book “Microsoft 2.0” that if “Microsoft were still the company it was ten or 20 years ago, with the simultaneously ruthless and cautious Gates at the helm,” she would have “no qualms” about predicting its success.

The firm has become bloated, insiders say. “It’s a huge problem. Microsoft has so much raw potential, but it needs extreme leadership to break out of the bureaucratic morass it encumbered itself with,” says the book’s foreword, written by “Mini-Microsoft”, an anonymous blogger-cum-employee who is required reading for Microsoft watchers.

If Microsoft has made one excellent hire in recent years, it is Mr Ozzie. Although he is unlikely to become a public figure in the mould of Mr Gates, he is more in tune with a style of computing in which everything is connected. He understands that a take-no-prisoners attitude will get you only so far. Mr Ozzie is also level-headed, hands-on and a brilliant technologist. He himself wrote much of Lotus Notes, an early collaborative program, and came to Microsoft when it bought his latest start-up, Groove Networks, in 2005.

Yet some think Microsoft needs more fresh blood in its upper echelons. Although some veterans have recently left and some new executives have been hired, many senior positions are still filled by people who have been with the company for more than a decade, says Michael Cusumano, a professor at the MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the author of a book on the inner workings of Microsoft. Can a veteran leadership team, he asks, foresee how the software business will change? And can it attract a new generation of employees to the company?

Billet doux

Microsoft is no longer the chosen workplace for many young geeks. Second-generation internet firms, such as Google and Facebook, have more “mind share”. The same is true for investors and users, which is partly why Microsoft will launch a $300m rebranding campaign later this year. To make Microsoft hip again, the firm has hired one of America’s coolest advertising agencies, Crispin Porter+Bogusky.

EPABye-bye, Bill

Microsoft’s image is still tarnished by the antitrust saga of a decade ago, when it was judged to have abused its Windows monopoly. That would prove a more serious stain if it stops consumers from trusting the firm with their personal data, a necessary part of many cloud services. After similar antitrust woes, IBM took decades to shed its reputation for being overbearing and arrogant. It managed partly by becoming a champion of industry standards and open-source software.

Microsoft is treading a similar path. The firm has already changed—whether the American and the European antitrust actions have tamed it, or customers want different behaviour, or Microsoft has just grown up. It has become more open—it no longer wants to lock the world into its own proprietary technology. “We have matured a lot,” says Mr Mundie, who spearheaded this opening-up.

Microsoft has indeed done many things that would not have seemed possible a few years ago. It has embraced industry standards, published “interoperability principles” that guide its developers, and released thousands of pages describing how its programs work together, so that rival products can join in. To boot, Microsoft has accepted that open-source software is here to stay. It has adopted some of the techniques of volunteer developers, given them code and even put some open-source code in its programs.

Still, many do not believe in the new Microsoft. When Information Week, an American computing magazine, surveyed some 500 technology professionals, more than half said they thought that Microsoft’s openness was mostly a publicity campaign. In a recent speech that was widely interpreted as taking a swipe at Microsoft, Neelie Kroes, the European Union’s competition commissioner, said that governments and businesses would do well to use software based on open standards. And Matt Asay, a blogger and executive of Alfresco, an open-source software company, speaks for many in the open-source movement when he says that Microsoft “is the only major software company other than SAP that has not fully engaged with the open-source community.”

Microsoft’s approach to open source hints that the firm has not yet made up its mind what it wants to be. Even as the company seemed to have made peace with the other camp, signing licensing deals with open-source companies, it accused open-source software fans of violating 235 of its patents and threatened legal action.

The defining test of Microsoft’s openness will be whether it tries to use its monopoly on the desktop to gain an unfair advantage in the cloud by tightly integrating—or “bundling”—software and services. Critics say the firm has already tried to favour its online search service in its Windows Vista operating system, but backed off when Google complained. Mr Mundie, however, is eager to offer reassurance: although Microsoft will make its software and services work well together, it will do nothing unlawful, he says: “The company has been quite clear how we are thinking about interoperability.”

Microsoft is in transition. “The Road Ahead” will not be as straight or as smooth as it was on the cover of Mr Gates’s bestseller, written in 1995. Yet Microsoft is unlikely to hit a wall, as IBM did after Mr Gates steered his own big shift in computing all those years ago—if only because Microsoft has a clearer view of the future. And if the worst happens, watch out for Mr Gates returning to put his creation back in the fast lane.

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

A New View for Documents

Browser-based technologies aim to make it easier to view documents online.

By Erica Naone

A new tool for embedding documents on Web pages is cropping up on sites as diverse as the storage service Drop.io; LabMeeting, a social network for scientists; and the Obama campaign's official blog. Launched earlier this year, the format, called iPaper, is technology from Scribd, a company that hopes to become the sort of clearinghouse for documents that YouTube is for videos. With iPaper, the company offers a browser-based system for viewing documents that retains their original formatting and can be employed by the 98 percent of Internet users who have installed Adobe Flash.

Although most Web pages are documents, they often don't display consistently from one browser to another, and it can be awkward to navigate through a large document if it's displayed as a series of connected pages on the Web. Alternatively, when individuals want to share documents with each other, they can have compatibility problems. For example, the new .docx format created by Microsoft's Office 2007 can't be accessed by many other programs, including earlier versions of Office. One traditional method to solve both of these problems has been Adobe PDFs, which preserve formatting and can be opened by most computer users.

Web words: Documents can be embedded in Web pages using Scribd's iPaper, which allows users to quickly navigate its pages, search, and copy and paste.
Credit: Scribd/Books iRead

However, Jared Friedman, chief technology officer of Scribd, sees a need for a solution to the problem that's built specifically for use through the browser. He says that browser-based versions have been built for most essential desktop programs. "In some sense, Adobe Acrobat is among the last programs to migrate online in a Web-based version," Friedman says.

Web-based software is typically stripped of some of the specialized features available in desktop versions but has added social features. IPaper is no exception. Users can convert documents, including PDFs, Word documents, and rich text files, into iPaper by uploading them to the Scribd website or to a website that supports Scribd's system. Readers can navigate documents by scrolling or flipping to a tile view, search them, and copy and paste. They can also share them, embed them on other sites, and, if the publisher chooses to allow it, download them in their original format to view offline.

FlashPaper, an earlier technology from Macromedia, inspired Scribd and iPaper, according to CEO and cofounder Trip Adler. Since Adobe didn't continue to support the product after it acquired Macromedia, Scribd decided to build its own version from scratch. The iPaper technology is built using Adobe Flash, and it streams documents to a Web page. This allows a reader to jump smoothly to page 500 of a document, for example, even if the rest of the document is still loading. Although Flash has recently become easier for search engines to index, Friedman says that streaming documents can still be a problem. Scribd supplements iPaper documents with a searchable format that crawlers can read.

Pages and pages: The iPaper viewer supports several ways of navigating a document, including scrolling, a tile-based view (above), and book mode, which shows pages two at a time. Credit: Scribd/Books iRead

Adler says that Scribd is still experimenting with business models, although the company has seen its technology adopted fairly widely. Storage companies such as Drop.io and Box use iPaper to allow their customers to view the items they have in storage without having to download them. Adler says that the Scribd site currently gets 21 million visitors a month. He notes that the company may make money through ads embedded in documents (a feature that's already available) or through buying and selling documents.

But Scribd may have more to worry about from Adobe than it thinks it does. Al Hilwa, program director for IDC's application development software research, says that Adobe has been working to fuse documents with Web presentation. He adds that the company has begun incorporating Flash into PDFs and making its various document technologies available through Acrobat.com.

Indeed, Adobe says that FlashPaper is not abandoned technology. Erik Larson, director of product management and marketing for Acrobat.com and the former product manager for FlashPaper at Macromedia, says, "FlashPaper as a product is no longer being developed, but FlashPaper as a concept is alive and well." He adds, "FlashPaper has become a set of Web services on a set of servers in the cloud."

Monday, August 04, 2008

Tracking a Shopper's Habits

Infosys's sensor network turns stores into mini-Internets.

By Michael Fitzgerald

Infosys may have solved a $100 billion problem for companies in the retail business: how to tell whether their promotions really work. In the process, Infosys has also created the potential for stores and consumer-goods companies to track things like traffic and inventory in real time.

Consumers like Procter & Gamble and the retailers they sell through spend more than $100 billion per year to promote products in stores, according to Forrester Research. They pay fees for shelf space in stores, including premiums to have their products at eye level. They pay for special promotion stands. And although they pay for armies of checkers to see whether retailers follow through on the deals, it's a system fraught with error, says Forrester analyst George Lawrie.

"Stores make lots and lots of mistakes," Lawrie says, noting that at many retail stores, the people who stock the shelves may have little or no interaction with the people who make the promotional deals. "In the big brands, the CFOs know they've had to hand these funds over to be eye level on aisle number one, and they don't know if it's really happening, and they're beginning to start to ask if the stores can prove it."

So Infosys, which counts 12 of the world's 20 largest retailers among its current customers, has developed ShoppingTrip 360, a hosted software application that can track shoppers and inventory, using wireless sensors placed on shelving, promotional displays, and shopping carts. The sensors, which use the 802.15.4 wireless protocol to connect to each other in a mesh network, can send information such as where shoppers stop in a store, what products they pick up, what they put back, what they put in their cart, and whether a product is out of stock. Infosys has also developed an application to let consumers in the store use their cell phones to get information such as store maps, or to access an online shopping list or collection of recipes.

"This, we believe, is the next wave of innovation in the retail space," says Infosys cofounder and CEO S. "Kris" Gopalakrishnan. He notes the push by retailers in the 1970s and '80s to develop electronic data interchange, as well as the 1990s push into e-commerce. He says that Infosys is trying to usher in the in-store Internet.

Retailers and consumer-goods makers typically get data on a daily basis, from point-of-sale scanners. Getting better data about product sales was a big reason why retailers like Wal-Mart and Target pushed radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, minuscule radio chips that were expected to replace the bar code on individual products. But RFID chips remain too costly to be ubiquitous, and Lawrie says that they may never be. He says that the cost of the chips, coupled with the substantial amount that retailers would have to spend to outfit their stores to work with the chips, have limited interest in RFID.

What's more, RFID raises privacy concerns that ShoppingTrip 360 might not. Infosys says that its system is completely anonymous, unless the consumer agrees via cell phone to tell the system who he or she is (and consumers can opt to identify themselves based on just their shopping-cart number). Infosys says that it will pay to install the sensors in stores, charging retailers only for the data that they want to use.

"I'm charging to tell them when stocks are reduced by a certain percentage, or when a consumer redeems a coupon through their mobile phone," says Sandeep Dadlani, global head of sales for Infosys's retail unit.

Exactly what the data will cost is not yet determined, says Gopalakrishnan. He says that Infosys is piloting the system at a number of large retailers in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Girish Ramachandra, head of the innovations practice for the Infosys retail unit, says that it is no harder to install its wireless sensors than to set up a wireless router in a home. Initially, it will take a week per store to deploy and test the system.

Infosys says that it is ready to offer three things: "heat maps" of stores that show levels of inventory, levels of inventory at the fronts of shelves, and concentrations of shoppers in the store; a smart shelf pad with a built-in wireless sensor that is powered by the store's lights; and a shop-by-cell phone option, which lets consumers get recommendations or coupons on their phones.

Infosys thinks that there will be many other applications it can develop for the system, such as a "perpetual checkout" service that would let shoppers ring up their goods as they put them in their carts, allowing them to walk out of the store when they are finished shopping. For apparel retailers, the company is developing smart mirrors that will recommend combinations of clothing and automatically notify salespeople to bring things for shoppers to try on. Infosys could develop an application to let stores employ the sensor networks to manage energy usage. And it intends to open its development platform so that other companies can create applications for the service as well.

Forrester's Lawrie says that without seeing the system in action in a store, it's too early to say how well it will work. But if the system works as promised, he says, "this would be a huge breakthrough."

Monday, August 04, 2008

Chinese entrepreneur dreams of a global brand

By Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) _ His company's gadgets are barely known abroad. But Aigo CEO Feng Jun, a boyishly exuberant walking advertisement for the fast-growing Chinese electronics maker, is out to change that.

Seconds after meeting a reporter at a business conference, the burly, baby-faced 39-year-old whips an Aigo computer memory card out of his wallet and throws it to the floor to show its durability. He plucks an Aigo digital camera off his belt and snaps pictures. Then he plays back the conversation on his MP3-equipped watch, also from Aigo.

"We want to be another Samsung, another Sony," said Feng, who started the company in 1993 with $26 from his mother.

Feng is a prominent member of a wave of entrepreneurs striving to break with China's status as a cheap, anonymous factory and join the global elite of consumer brands that create profitable technology. They are a key element of the national image that China's leaders hope the upcoming Beijing Olympics will showcase to the world: bold, creative, high-tech and international.

More importantly, the shift is a step that economists say China must make if it is to move up the economic ladder and continue its rapid growth.

It is too soon to know which, if any, of China's would-be global brands will succeed, said Stefan Albrecht, a McKinsey & Co. senior partner in Beijing.

Most successful so far is Lenovo Group Ltd., the world's No. 4 computer maker following its 2005 purchase of IBM Corp.'s PC unit. Other aspirants include appliance maker Haier Group and TV set manufacturer TCL Group, which owns the Thomson and RCA brands.

China's advantage is still low costs, not creativity, Albrecht said. But he said the Chinese brands that succeed should climb the ranks faster than their Japanese or Korean predecessors, because Chinese companies adopt new products or strategies more quickly and are willing to expand by acquiring established foreign outfits.

"For some Chinese companies, you could argue they need only five to 15 years to develop a global brand," Albrecht said.

Feng is candid about Aigo's daunting challenge in persuading foreign customers to pay brand-name prices for made-in-China goods.

"Perhaps consumers all over the world will think China is all low-end. But we want to be the high-end," he said in an interview at Aigo's headquarters in Beijing's Haidian district, the base for Lenovo and other technology companies. "To change that view is very difficult, but we have no choice."

The aspiring gadget king wants to use the Olympics to boost Aigo's brand abroad, marketing translation devices for visitors. In Europe, Feng is trying to raise Aigo's profile by paying to display its name on the McLaren Formula One team race cars.

Feng represents the second generation of Chinese technology entrepreneurs.

In the 1990s, foreign-trained scientists came home from the United States, Australia and elsewhere to found Web sites and other companies.

In contrast to their science backgrounds, Feng studied civil engineering -- the classic grounding for earlier generations of communist technocrats -- at Beijing's Tsinghua University, the alma mater of President Hu Jintao. He then got a master's in business administration from Peking University. He has never lived anywhere but the Chinese capital, though he is studying English and says he might like to go to Harvard.

Such homegrown success stories are beginning to emerge as China's fast-developing economy and education system start to offer the training and experience that technology entrepreneurs once could get only abroad.

Feng worked for a government construction company before he quit to start Aigo -- known in Mandarin as Aiguozhe, for "Patriot" -- in a cramped apartment to sell keyboards to China's infant computer industry.

He made his name not as an inventor but as a hard-driving salesman. A biography published last year, "Patriot: Feng Jun" by Huang Qiuli, dubbed him "Five-Yuan Feng" for his willingness in his lean years to slash the profit margin on a keyboard or computer housing to five yuan (85 U.S. cents at that time) to close a sale.

Aigo took off in the mid-'90s when it started making portable computer memory devices. Today, it is China's biggest producer of them, including the credit card-size 30-gigabyte unit in Feng's wallet. Aigo has expanded the range of products sold in its orange-and-white packaging to include digital cameras, MP3s, portable media players and a digital microscope. Its 1,700-member work force includes 700 people in product development.

Revenue is growing 60 to 70 percent a year, with 80 percent of profits plowed back into research, Feng said. He declined to give figures but BDA China Ltd., a Beijing research firm, says Aigo's 2006 revenue was 2 billion yuan ($290 million).

Aigo's growth has made Feng a star in the Chinese business press. The World Economic Forum, known for its annual Davos conference, named him the only Chinese member on its list of Young Global Leaders.

Still, Feng's company faces the same handicap as other aspiring Chinese brands: it has yet to develop a unique, must-have product -- its equivalent of an iPod -- with fat profit margins. That leaves Aigo vulnerable to pressure from other low-cost competitors.

Despite his boyish energy, Feng dresses in the standard Chinese executive's blue suit and talks the MBA talk of corporate strategy. His management ideology, dubbed "Six Win," stresses to employees that Aigo cannot succeed unless its partners and customers do too. Feng refers to such mutual benefit as "1 + 1 11."

To stay in touch with consumers, Feng requires his executives to spend one day a month working the complaints counter at an Aigo service center. Product development specialists put in time as salespeople.

Feng's latest attempt at a signature product is the Aigopen, a gadget that reads aloud when pointed at specially printed books or maps. Beijing's imperial palace has ordered them to use with its exhibits. Aigo also sells an Aigopen-equipped Olympics Encyclopedia.

Feng opened a European office in France last year, followed this year by its first U.S. office in San Francisco. He put off expanding into the United States until Aigo could set up service centers, which he says is key to a premium brand. Feng said that for now, Aigo has no plans for foreign acquisitions.

"We want to do the Europe market last year and this year," he said. "Next year will be the United States. Step by step."

___

On the Net:

http://www.aigo.com

The world's biggest arms exporters

Arms exports

Big guns

Jul 29th 2008
From Economist.com

The world's biggest arms exporters

JUST five countries supplied 80% of global arms exports between 2003 and 2007, according to a recent report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a think-tank. SIPRI counts the deliveries of large conventional weapons, each of which are assigned a value according to cost, strategic importance and other criteria. America supplied a third of global exports by this count, with South Korea and Israel the main buyers. China is Russia's best customer, taking 45% of its total exports. China is also the largest recipient of imports, accounting for 12% of the global total. Other big importers include India and the United Arab Emirates.

AP

The world's highest-denomination banknotes

Banknotes

Hey big spender

Jul 28th 2008
From Economist.com

The world's highest-denomination banknotes

HYPERINFLATION requires a good head for figures and a sturdy wallet to hold wads of low-value paper money. Goverments have attempted to keep pace with hyperinflation by issuing ever-higher denomination banknotes to replace worthless notes that might as well serve as wallpaper. Last week Zimbabwe's central bank unveiled a 100 billion dollar banknote to cope with inflation running at 2.2m%. On Sunday July 27th the bank changed tack and announced it would be lopping off a string of zeroes on replacement notes, in what passes for economic reform in stricken Zimbabwe. But Robert Mugabe has some way to go before he can claim for his country the accolade of printing the highest-denomination banknote. A note issued in post-war Hungary came with a mind-boggling 19 digits.

Corbis