SAY WHAT AGAIN, I DARE YOU

Note the language is NSFW by any standards, but is a great demonstration of all the things you can do with Google Wave.

Video via - mashable

note: People viewing this in facebook have to go to the original site to view the video

Dell Enters US Celluar Market [Morning Links]

Lady : Is this my train?
Station Master : No, it belongs to the Railway Company.
Lady : Don't try to be funny. I mean to ask if I can take this train to New Delhi.
Station Master : No Madam, I'm afraid it's too heavy.

Now onto the serious business:

• It appears that Dell will be entering the US cell phone market with a new Android Device.
• Want a cell phone sized projector for your office? Now you can have one for $219.
• Google is holding a Chrome OS event to let you know all about their new OS.
• First a customs lady asks me if I am attempting to sneak an Aardvark into the country, and now a company named Aardvark releases a new social search.
• Security "pros" suggest that cloud computing services need to mature before you can store your enterprise data on them. Although, they coincidentally don't mention any companies by name that need to mature.

Have a good day folks.

Google Wave in 10 minutes

You know what the best way to find out what Wave is all about? Get an invite. They have tons of information in their waves to you.

Someone has a Google Wave Invite

And that someone isn't you :) Just kidding. There is really no reason to be mean. As soon as I can send out invites, and have a chance to play with it, I will send them. Is it strange that it is 11:30pm on a Sunday and I am more excited about this than the entire day of football and drinking that just passed? Probably. GOOGLE WAVE!!! Expect updates shortly.

Enterprise Search

Google will be holding a webinar tomorrow (the 8th of October) at 11am (EST) to address corporate strategy revolving around bringing Google like searching to the enterprise.

Thinking Differently

The picture is me breaking the airline laws and using an electronic device while we were landing. Not a bad shot for a cell phone camera photo. Also, this entire post isn't about LaGuardia. It is just kind of long, and I'm not sure where I was going with it, but hopefully it is worth the read.

Flying into LaGuardia Airport is unnaturally high on the list of things that I love to do. The way people act and feel when they are about to land at Vegas, or some Caribbean Resort is the way I feel every time I land in the good old LGA. I suspect I am in the very small minority in this regard, but it doesn't change the fact that I get inexplicable amount of joy from it.

Let's start with the landing, the view can be absolutely stunning if you are in a holding pattern. There are other places in the world that generate reactions from a plane full of people, but few cause people to get out of the seats and stare over people's shoulders while flight attendants beg people to return to their seats. The fact that you usually only get this view in a holding pattern makes it even sweeter. People are already angry that they are delayed, and are now further delayed due to air traffic,* but everything they feel melts away as soon as they start looking out the window. You hear strangers talking to other strangers urging them to look through the window like they are witnessing USA Hockey beat the Russians in the 80 Olympics, or Barry Bonds going for home run number 71. Everyone starts opening their shades, and for a minute or two the plane is in silence with the occasional, "wow." You can feel the enthusiasm and the awe from the first time fliers. It's like the fourth of July fireworks finale times ten. It's the land of opportunity in all its excess and glory. Night or day, it makes you think that NYC should always be seen from the air and that everyone should see it at least once. Or as the guy on my plane yesterday said, "Y'all know, I was angry as hell that I had a stop over in NY, but that right there made the extra three hour delay worth every minute," with a thick southern accent. Little did he know, he was flying into LaGuardia and would soon regret uttering those words.

* I say further delayed because you are always delayed when flying into LaGuardia.

Which brings us to LaGuardia the airport. From a conventional airport standpoint, LaGuardia sucks, and I mean really, really, really sucks. Most airports these days are huge wide open areas that you must take moving walkways, and escalators to navigate through. LaGuardia on the other hand, feels like you just landed on 7Th avenue and 42ND street. There are literally hundreds of people in any terminal, and the path from gate to gate is no bigger than the double with of a sidewalk. There are no giant screens telling you which flight is where. There is no friendly staff member willing to help you get from point A to point B. Hell, if your connecting flight is on another airline, there is not even an air-tran or a bus to take you from one location to another, which recently inspired this conversation between an employee and a customer in the American Airlines terminal:

Customer: "Where is the air-tran to get to the Delta terminal?"

Employee: "There is no air-tran."

Customer: "What do you mean? Then how do you get to the Delta Terminal?"

Employee looking annoyed: "You walk."

Customer: "But I don't see anything that says Delta."

Employee: "It's because this is the American Airlines terminal."

Customer: "So how do I get there?"

Employee: "You go outside and walk down the street.*"

Customer: "How will I know which one it is."

Employee: "It will say Delta on the building."

Customer: "You mean I have to go outside?"

Employee: "Yes."

Customer: "But, it's raining?"

Employee: "They sell umbrellas."

* This is an actual street with passenger cars, cabs, and buses.

The conversation went on for awhile longer, but you get the point. It's so user unfriendly that people don't know how to react. One of my favorite parts of getting off an American Airlines flight is watching when people reach the stairs. They stop, look around in utter confusion, and ask, "Where is the escalator", or "Where is the elevator," and of course, there isn't one. As a result, they just stand there, flabbergasted at the concept of having to walk down two flights of stairs in an airport with your carry on luggage. If it were an operating system, there would be no point and click interface. Maybe it would just have a black screen and dashing light that says please enter your next command with a smilely face that mocks you. All of these experiences, from the actual flight, to the airport, to the car, puts you in the perfect state of mind. NYC is a great place to live and visit, but you have be able think for yourself and act quickly, otherwise it will simply overwhelm you. LaGuardia might be a miserable airport, but I love it.

What does this have to do with business or technology? Well it came to mind when reading this article by Joe Posnasky about how small market baseball teams cannot hope to compete with teams like the RedSox and Yankees if they use the same methods, scouting tools, and strategies, and how people would rather appear to be conventional knowing they are going to fail, than be laughed at for trying something new that might give them the possibility to win. This is all covered in depth in the book Sway, but for some reason the article got me to write about it.

Whenever I speak about technology transformation, everyone wants to know the best technologies, and the best strategies that the best businesses use. I try to tell them that regardless of how great some new technology is, if it doesn't fix a problem that you are tyring solve, then it is a waste of your time. Yet more importantly, just because the RedSox of your industry do things one way does not mean that it is the only way to do business, and just because they are successful does not mean you will be. Chances are, you are not the RedSox and your front office doesn't have the resources or ability to do what they are doing, but that doesn't mean you cannot be successful. You just have to define what successful means to you, and then create a strategy to meet that goal that fits your business. If you just have a strategy that says I want to be the best, you are going to fail because it's not a clearly defined and as a result isn't actionable.

It's like this. If you are going to build a new airport, the first thing you have to do is decide on your goal. Who are you trying serve? You could get the funding and designs to build the most state of the art airport in the world, and compete with the best in Dubai, or Hong Kong. Or, you could get people in and out of the airport as fast as possible and design an airport after LaGuardia. Either way may bring success or failure, but they are different. Sure you might get laughed at for copying LGA, but you might be onto something (from an upkeep cost, and surprising user satisfaction). On the other hand, you could follow the trend and build another Tampa Interantional or JFK. Unfortunately, there are simply not enough Steve Spurriers in this world.

And because no conversation about airlines would be complete without a George Carlin reference, here is video for your amusement (language not safe for work):

The Big Switch: Rewiring the world [Book Review Time]

I took this past Monday and Wednesday off because I had to run some errands, and because I have to work this Saturday and Sunday. Such is life. During the down time (like waiting in line for HOURS at the passport agency), I was able to read a book that I've been meaning to read for a while.* The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, has been one of the more influential books explaining cloud computing and the future of the World Wide Computer (a.k.a. the programmable Internet). Nicholas Carr, the man who threw the IT world up in arms by saying IT doesn't matter, writes the book to show the strong correlation between the invention of electricity (from Edison) to the networked cloud, or the World Wide Computer (to Google).

* You'd be surprised how fast you can read when you are stuck in a room with absolutely nothing to do but wait.

Still with me? Now that I am finished reading it my gut reaction is that this book is crazy. Not crazy because Mr. Carr is wrong (in fact I think he's right about the vast majority of what he covers), but crazy because of the manner in which the information is presented. As a result, I don't even know where to begin. I am going to try, but bare with me here if I start getting long winded.

He opens the book with his first experience in the cloud and explains how, in the very near future, you will buy your storage for your files, your CPU power, and the memory to run your programs as a metered service that will be accessible as a jack in the wall and plug directly into your monitor. You will no longer have a personal computer, just a screen that gets everything from some outside source. All of your data and applications will be accessible from anything that has an internet connection (TVs, phones, monitors, cars, anything). Just like you pay some company like Florida Power for your electricity, you may soon pay Google, or Amazon, or Microsoft for computing power. The era of personal computing (as in actually owning a PC) is dead. Or as he puts it:

"The time of Gates and the other Great software programmers who wrote the code of the PC age has come to an end."

Note that the above quote is not taking place in the future. It is now - as in the present day. He really lays it on thick about all the different companies using the cloud today, how you are using it, how companies can save tons of money with it, and how it is the natural progression of computing.* He covers what happens to a society when something revolutionary becomes a GPT (General Purpose Technology) as a sort of warning to us as to what might happen when computing becomes a utility (using electricity as the historical example). How when electricity became a GPT the world lost its collective mind at the possibility for the future. How the fact that connecting us all, and seriously personalizing our online experience could really drive us further and further apart ideologically. Bla bla bla I could go on, but you don't care.

* This is not the crazy part of the book

What is really Crazy (and that is Crazy with a capital C) is where this is going. Erich Schmidt, he of the 1 dollar salary, and Google have some RIDICULOUS ambitions. To start with, what do you think Google Book Search for? Was it this:

"We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," the engineer told him. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."

Their first goal is to make Google an AI living being, similar to HAL 9000 without the whole "Kill Humans" bug, to have it know all the world's knowledge, to be able to read and actually understand everything on the web. That is goal number one. Goal number two is, well let's just use his words:

"Eric Schmidt has said that the company's ultimate product, the one he's 'always wanted to build', would not wait to respond to his query but would 'tell me what I should be typing.' It would in other words, provide the answer without hearing the question."

How would they do that? Simple. They would achieve it by inserting a chip into your brain so that Google could read your thoughts and respond to them. I wish I was joking when I was typing that, but that is seriously their second goal. In a speech to Stanford, he envisioned a time where you would think something, and Google would whisper the answer out of your cell phone. How far is that time in his mind? 2020-2o40. Where you would never forget anything, because google would record and search your memories. To make us better. Crazy right?

So in conclusion, THE book about cloud computing, while it has a ton of cloud information in it, is really about how the World Wide Computer will affect us in all aspects of our lives: from enabling us to challenge existing economic models and wealth distribution, to governments and corporations controlling manipulating us at a far greater level than was ever thought possible. At the same time, it covers the possibilities of how it might eliminate major corporations, and how it might completely eliminate the middle class. How having unlimited computing power can give us the ability to cure the world of all its evils, or how the botnet can be used by a small group of people to wreak havoc in the world using DDoS attacks to ruin companies and economies (see Twitter). Etc, Etc. It is a coinflip of possiblities, which is really probably as accurate as you can get. It's really a great book, and one that I will read again, but right now I just need to digest it.

One of my favorite nuggets of information, and what I think is an overall theme of this book is in the era of Internet Privacy, which by now you should realize is a myth*, Google has promised to remove your personal data if you no longer use Google for 2 years. However, the catch is that you cannot use any of the applications during that time, or the clock...starts....again :) Now you know why you get all those features like GMail, Google Images, Google Maps, Google Reader, Google Voice, Google AdWords, Google Notebook, for free. You can try to fight it if you want, but just like electricity, this progression is inevitable. Might as well enjoy the ride.

*Read that link

Have a good day and remember, you are always, and will always be monitored.