Scott Loftesness

Heading East

Heading for the east coast this morning on business. Should be fun!

Using airline club wireless while waiting for the flight (why isn't this bundled into the exhorbitant annual membership fees?) -- along with HotSpotVPN for a little added security over the wireless link.

Roll the Stones Away!

Happy Easter! Pray for Peace.

Google Web Browser?

Todd Bishop points to the letters written in response to the recent Newsweek cover story on Google. Wonder what it would take to port Safari to Windows? With Firefox, why bother?

Interesting also to note that the Seattle-PI's RSS feed appends a ?wbfrom=rss to the URL link above -- allowing them to track clicks as having been sourced from their RSS feed.

Manager or Leader?

After listening to yesterday's testimony by National Security Advisor Condolezza Rice I was struck by how she sounds so much like a smart administrator and so little like a strong leader.

Black Swans Ahead, Not Behind

Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out a flaw in the 9/11 Commission's mandate.

The greatest flaw in the commission's mandate, regrettably, mirrors one of the greatest flaws in modern society: it does not understand risk.

The focus of the investigation should not be on how to avoid any specific black swan, for we don't know where the next one is coming from. The focus should be on what general lessons can be learned from them.

And the most important lesson may be that we should reward people, not ridicule them, for thinking the impossible. After a black swan like 9/11, we must look ahead, not in the rear-view mirror.

[Tnx: Tim]

Innovation at Adobe

Wharton's posted a great interview with Adobe Systems CEO Bruce Chizen

Hubbert's Peak

Princeton Professor Emeritus Kenneth Deffeyes spoke about the end of the oil age at the WTF 2004 conference. A near transcript of his talk is available on the Fast Company Weblog.

It's not outside the realm of possibility that there will be an international effort to seize the Middle East's oil fields. But to go back to your industry, the two realms are going to diverge. There's going to be a big squeeze on hauling molecules while there's increased capacity to move bits. The EFF folks get a lot of mileage out of the frontier theme. It's the Wild West. Well, my great grandfather drove cattle on the Chisholm Trail. I'm afraid that my grandson will have to drive cattle on the Chisholm Trail to make a living.

Sunny ID's?

Dennis Fisher reports in eWeek on how yesterday's Sun/Microsoft lovefest could help accelerate federated identity cooperation.

Goodbye Ron!

We get so used to what's familiar in our lives. Indeed, we take the familiar for granted, don't we?

Today, San Francisco's KCBS traffic and weather anchor Ron Lyons retired this morning at the end of the 9 o'clock newshour.

I was in the car this morning driving from meeting to meeting as Ron introduced his last traffic report at 9:58 AM and followed by the weather. It all ended so abruptly -- the pressures of radio not permitting enough time to truly say goodbye.

During an earlier break this morning, Lyons spoke of his friendship with and admiration for former KCBS anchor Al Hart -- and Hart's decision a couple of years ago to leave KCBS to care for his wife.

Lyons spent 49 years in radio -- most of them in San Francisco. For the last 17 years, he was one of the best at KCBS. His special voice and unique touch during the morning hours will be missed.

Blown Away

Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach shares his learnings from his first trip to India.

First impressions are superficial almost by definition.  But more often than not, they end up pointing you in the right direction.  Quite simply, I was blown away by what I saw on my first trip to India.  It’s a land of great contrasts, to be sure -- strength in human capital and technology coexisting with backward infrastructure and heart-wrenching poverty.  But there is no doubt in my mind that the balance has shifted.  After decades of stop and go, the critical mass of a new approach to Indian economic development now appears to have been attained.

Design

Mark Fletcher comments on making design assumptions in building services today.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again, modified slightly. When designing a service, assume hardware is free. Assume processing power and storage are infinite. Because they approach that over time, and limiting them does your service more harm than good. In addition, I think at this point you can also assume that bandwidth is free. That certainly wasn't the case in the mid-1990s. But there's now a glut, you can get very good deals on bandwidth these days, and it's only getting better.

Blow Up the Bridge

I couldn't agree more with Peggy Noonan's reaction to yesterday's atrocities in Fallujah.

It would be good not only for elemental justice but for Iraq and its future if a large force of coalition troops led by U.S. Marines would go into Fallujah, find the young men, arrest them or kill them, and, to make sure the point isn't lost on them, blow up the bridge.

Here's some more background on the culture of Fallujah.

"If I kill someone from your tribe, I know another member of my tribe will definitely be killed,'' he says. "But people in Fallujah have learned that when they kill Americans nothing much happens. They learned that the Americans have different values, and this makes killing an American less dangerous than killing someone from another tribe."

And, from the mother of Jerry Zovko, one of four killed yesterday in Fallujah:

"It was the hardest day of my life," Zovko's mother, Donna Zovko, said during an interview with the Associated Press in her suburban Cleveland home. "Jerry was a man with a principle, an idea," his mother said. "He loved people. He wanted the world to be without borders, for everybody to be free and safe."

Oh, and by the way, Senator Kerry should be completely outspoken on this subject as well -- outspoken in his anguish at yesterday's events but, more importantly, fully supporting the appropriate response.

Google's Gmail

Fascinating to read about Google's new Gmail offering.

I'll bet Microsoft's Hotmail team has never even thought about the value they could have extracted from very large user mailboxes and content driven advertising. Instead, they launched into an endless series of upgrade strategies, shrinking a user's free personal mailbox and trying to upsell to larger.

More about Gmail from John Markoff of the New York Times.

After reading Markoff's story, it's perhaps not the case that Google intends to mine email content to drive advertising targeting. Guess we'll just have to wait and see what actually gets introduced? By the way, the press release is dated April 1st -- fools anyone?

Breakfast at Buck's

Read all about Jamis' new book.

People

David Hornik shares a correspondent's perspectives on what really matters: people! Amen!

Google Adjusts UI?

It looks to me this morning like Google has subtly changed its search results user interface pages. Froogle has been added as a "tab" and the AdWords and sponsored ads have shed their deeper color highlights.

More Identity

Some notes from a conversation about identity at this week's PC Forum. It shouldn't be this hard!

Meanwhile, out in the real world a couple of identity-related trends are worth watching. For example, Digital Persona just announced 3.0 of its "total password automation solution". What's this thing do? Basically, it allows you to use your finger as your proxy for managing the over 100 passwords that Andre talks about.

But most of us don't spent every waking hour at our desktops right next to our Digital Persona reader. Pay by Touch, a San Francisco-based startup, is pursuing a similar strategy out in the real world -- allowing you to use your finger as your proxy for your wallet. If you're out jogging without your wallet and need a bottle of water for the run home, you're set -- if you're enrolled in Pay by Touch and your local grocer has signed up for the program.

Will it be biometrics that provide enough incremental value to drive the next round of identity management applications?

Nail on the Head

Mark Pilgrim hits the nail on the bread...er, head! Or, is it on the thumb? Maybe it's a thumbnail instead?

Meanwhile, Phil Windley points to InfoWeek's article on identity management.

ID-management vendors such as BMC Software, Computer Associates, IBM Tivoli, Netegrity, Novell, Oblix, and RSA Security have promised for years that their software would deliver those benefits.

However, there are few industrywide standards and most applications are proprietary. This forces companies to install a hodgepodge of software and devote a great deal of time to getting the apps to work together--even before making them work among businesses.

More Thoughts on SixApart's TypeKey

[Update: The start of a comprehensive FAQ on TypeKey is now available.]

There's been a bit of a backlash among some folks about SixApart's announcement of TypeKey, an authentication service intended to address the problem of weblog comment spam.

While I know nothing more about TypeKey beyond what's been provided so far on their web site, it strikes me that this early reaction is overblown. There's a clear need for a solution to the problem -- real pain is involved. I cheer the SixApart team for putting forward an approach -- for actually doing something about it.

While a more weblog-specific approach is probably what SixApart is doing with TypeKey, what would be most interesting to me would be to learn that TypeKey is actually going to build upon the work done over the last couple of years on federated authentication by the Liberty Alliance.

Let's not forget that Liberty began primarily as a reaction to that last great centralized authentication service announced on the web, Microsoft's Passport (currently called .NET Passport). Microsoft targeted commercial web site owners as their targets for monetizing Passport and got almost no adoption (eBay allows its use). Passport could be quickly morphed into a service for dealing with weblog comment spam -- but probably won't be. Instead, Passport appears to be dying on the vine in Redmond. Passport appears to have been forgotten as a possible element in Microsoft's overall anti-spam initiatives.

LOAF

Joi Ito points to LOAF, a new approach to distributing collaboratively information about your social network.

LOAF works by including a cleverly encoded copy of your address book email addresses on every email you send. Recipients of your emails can then use your encoded social network information in combination with others they receive to determine if random emails they receive come from senders within that broader social network ("friend of a friend") or not.

My Myopia

The photos at My Myopia continue to impress!

Gates Foundation: Investment Holdings

Curious how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is investing its money? Checkout this SEC filing reflecting holdings as of 12/31/03. What's interesting is the absence of any technology holdings -- it's mostly a big S&P; 500 holding, drug/medical, media/cable, travel and garbage collection (!) companies.

Sifry on Technorati

Dave Sifry did a very nice job at this evening's Future Salon talking about what he and his team are up to at Technorati.

Amazingly, Technorati continues to discover about 11,000 new weblogs each day and is rapidly approaching having a total of 2 million weblogs in its index.

When asked about the company's business model, Sifry emphasized business intelligence services as the primary focus -- presumably based upon mining all of that indexed data to develop results of value to business customers.

Using Syndicated Data in Financial Services

Interesting comment about the future for syndicated data from an eWeek interview of Tim Bray -- who's just joined Sun to help in a number of areas:

I also think that RSS is going to have a huge application in simple things like watching my bank account and credit card statements—things that are updated irregularly but you want to know when they are, but are not person-to-person individual messages. The spectrum where RSS is a winner is bigger than people suspect at the moment.

TypeKey Authentication Services

From out of left field comes a federated identity scheme called TypeKey. Developed by SixApart, TypeKey is designed to reduce weblog comment spam, an increasingly difficult problem. Most interesting is SixApart's comments on other uses of TypeKey:

We'll be providing documentation on how to integrate TypeKey authentication into your own applications shortly after the service launches. At that point, there will also be information about what is required to make use of TypeKey services in commercial applications.

FYI, this weblog runs on SixApart's TypePad service.