Are Trade Shows reaching the Tipping Point, MacWorld example

Microsoft is pulling out of CES after being there for so long.  Apple pulled out of MacWorld and it has transformed the trade show into a non-tradeshow.

I was in SJ last week, and out nostalgia I went by the Apple store and picked up a apple logo t-shirt that was green.  Am I an Apple fanatic? no.  Did I work there for 7 years (1985-1992)? yes.  Do I have an iPhone 4S and MacBook Air? Yes. What is my next tech purchase? a Verizon Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich version phone. :-)

Going through airport security at SJC a guy asked me if I was at MacWorld.  I was thinking hell no.  Why would I go there?

Here is a Gizmodo article on how MacWorld is now.

Macworld Is Weird Now

I love Macworld Expo. I've gone more years than I haven't out of the last dozen. But for most of those years, Apple was presenting. That's changed.

One of the indicators on how big the event was is the media coverage.  Check out the press room picture.

What is interesting is the guy writing this article for Gizmodo doesn't think of himself as media.

In the past decade and change, Expo went from technology side show to main event. Post-iPod, the press arrived in greater numbers. By the time the iPhone launched, they began showing up in troop trucks. It became impossible to get a good seat. The number of exhibitors likewise swelled. It was chaos. And too normal. All the weirdos left. Or at least, there were so many normal people, the big old nerds weren't as evident. I hated that. And I especially hated the media. Fuck the media.

But then Apple pulled out. And so too did all the hangers on in the media.

One of the top things that exhibitors want besides end users at trade shows is media coverage.  If writers like above hate the media who does like the media?

Is Gizmodo the media?  The author of this post is an editor.  I am confused. :-)

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Are you Ready for the future? Five major shifts

I am reading the book "Grouped" by Facebook's Paul Adams.

Grouped: How Small Groups of Friends Are the Key to Influence on the Social Web [Book] by Paul Adams in Books

$18 online, $30 nearby

    1 review 


By Paul Adams - Pearson Education, Limited (2011) - Paperback - 216 pages - ISBN 0321804112

The web is being rebuilt around people. From travel to news to commerce, businesses are reorienting their efforts around people - around the social behavior of their customers and potential customers. As we traverse across the web, we'll know which of our friends prefer different brands, and this information will be surfaced to us at the most opportune moments - when we're deciding what to buy. In order to be successful in this new social web, businesses will need to understand how people are influenced by their social network. How the people closest to them influence them the most, and how it's more important to focus on small connected groups of friends rather than looking for overly influential individuals. This book pulls together the latest research on influence and social behavior to describe how people are connected, and how ideas and brand messages spread through social networks.

This book is short and has some interesting Quick Tips.

One entry on Paul's blog is here.

Five major shifts

By Paul Adams in Musing

Lately, I’ve been talking to people about five major shifts that I see happening. Each is big enough to warrant a post of its own, so over the next few days I’ll write about each individually, and then write a post about what it means to think of them in combination. I’ll link to all from this post. In the meantime, here are the five major shifts:

1. The amount of information we can access is increasing exponentially.

2. The web is being rebuilt around people, rather than being built around content.

3. For the first time in humanity, social interaction, and influence, are measurable.

4. Technology is driving a large increase in understanding how we make decisions, and it’s not how we assumed.

5. Mobile technologies (phones, tablets, etc.) will change society in ways we can’t yet predict.

I am biased seeing these five shifts, because I have been busy with some friends to build a service that is adapting to all of these.

Are you ready for the five major shifts?

Google's Pulp NonFiction Data Center, Wired Magazine's article on repurposing a pulp mill

Wired has an article on Google's Hamina Data Center.

Google Reincarnates Dead Paper Mill as Data Center of Future

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• By Cade Metz
• Email Author
• January 26, 2012 |
• 6:30 am |
• Categories: Data Centers,Hardware, Secret Servers

Google's Finland data center is the ultimate metaphor for the Internet Age (Photos: Google)

Joe Kava found himself on the southern coast of Finland, sending robotic cameras down an underground tunnel that stretched into the Baltic Sea. It’s not quite what he expected when he joined Google to run its data centers.

In February of 2009, Google paid about $52 million for an abandoned paper mill in Hamina, Finland, after deciding that the 56-year-old building was the ideal place to build one of the massive computing facilities that serve up its myriad online services. Part of the appeal was that the Hamina mill included an underground tunnel once used to pull water from the Gulf of Finland. Originally, that frigid Baltic water cooled a steam generation plant at the mill, but Google saw it as a way to cool its servers.

Not anything really new that hasn't been covered already, but it is worth noting that Wired's coverage reaches an audience maybe 100x bigger than a data center publication.

It does sound like the author was frustrated not getting more info, and closes with this.

The complaint, from the likes of Facebook, is that the Google doesn’t share enough about how it has solved particular problems that will plague any large web outfit. Reports, for instance, indicate that Google builds not only its own servers but its own networking equipment, but the company has not even acknowledged as much. That said, over the past few years, Google is certainly sharing more.

We asked Joe Kava about the networking hardware, and he declined to answer. But he did acknowledge the use of Spanner. And he talked and talked about that granite tunnel and Baltic Sea. He even told us that when Google bought that paper mill, he and his team were well aware that the purchase made for a big fat internet metaphor. “This didn’t escape us,” he says.

By inference is the author complaining by referencing Facebook?

SAP wakes up to what every search developer knows, if you want speed be in memory, never touch the HD

WSJ has an article on SAP's radical new SW.  The data access is all in memory.  OOh.

In-memory computing could be crucial for cloud computing, because offering services online requires companies to rapidly process large volumes of data. In December, SAP said it would pay $3.4 billion to acquire San Mateo, Calif.-based SuccessFactors Inc., which offers online services that help manage employees and carry out performance reviews. The company also paid $5.8 billion in 2010 to acquire Sybase Inc., which makes software that can send business information securely to mobile workers on their devices, easing a potential concern with HANA.

I wonder if the Google and Facebook developers look at this and say this is innovative?

SAP convinced Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, a large university hospital, to drop its Oracle software and switch to HANA. Together SAP and Charité developed a prototype of an iPad software application that uses the HANA machine to analyze three million data points for 140,000 admitted patients annually and determine if they are a fit for a clinical trial. Using the application, the hospital said it reduced the time it takes to find patients from weeks to less than one second.

"We need all this data in real time," says Martin Peuker, deputy chief information officer for the hospital.

Sounds like a problem has solved over and over.  Now that would be scary to SAP if Google instead of Oracle said we can find the patients in your data.

Or Facebook could say this is a social networking problem, we can find the people you should connect with.

Data Center Energy Simulation, Fujitsu's Tool coming soon, an alternative to Romonet

At Fujitsu's North America Tech Forum the green data center topic came up in many presentations.  And, there was a tech booth with Data Center Energy Efficiency through Simulation.  The ideas was announced in 2009.

Fujitsu Advances Green Data Centre Strategy with Total CO2 and Value Analysis Solution

Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe unveils its latest Green Data Centre development at the European Technology Forum

London, 16th Sep 2009 — Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe Limited announced today the launch of its latest Green Data Centre development at the European Technology Forum, hosted by Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe in London (16-17 September 2009). Fujitsu's Total CO2 and Value Analysis solution is the result of extensive research and development, in conjunction with the Carbon Trust in the UK, the company set up by the UK Government to accelerate the move to a low carbon economy.

Based on a core simulator developed through industry collaboration and with the support of the Carbon Trust to analyse energy use and carbon emissions in data centres and identify potential reductions, Fujitsu Laboratories' new technology represents a revolutionary approach. It breaks new ground in enabling a holistic analysis of energy usage within a data centre environment to be captured, quantitatively analysed and profiled, from the physical infrastructure, to the software, applications and delivered services.

Given the demonstration was done by the Fujitsu Labs Europe I was curious on how this product relates to Romonet.

It turns out both Fujitsu and Romonet's came from the same beginnings.

The challenge with any tool from these companies though is going to market.  Romonet is software product you buy.  Fujitsu is looking at lower cost business models that put the product on the web. Later this year Fujitsu's tool will launch.