Kaizen Bits

I was in Murcia last days and I did not find the time to update my feeds, but the brutal net cut of Myanmar is definitely an episode on a “communications war”.

Since the very first uppraisal of the monks because of price increase in petrol (in a country with one of the biggest natural gas resources in Asia), blogs and the Web became a big player in the conflict.

I was this summer in Thailand and Lao, amazed of seeing the importance the Web has gained for these countries (somehow underdevelopped) in Southeast Asia. I wrote a post about the situation in Lao, but failed to write something similar about Thailand.

Once more, the Web has been a vehicle to oppose the brutal military, a cruel fascist totalitarian Government by means of words, opinions and pacific complaints. I guess Sir TBL should be really satisfied.

We got a paper accepted at the IADIS International Conference, which will take place in Vila Real, Portugal, north of the Tras-Os-Montes region. The paper abstract follows:

With the widespread use of Web Services, conversations among trading partners through this technology enabling a business transaction have raised a number of issues. Protecting sensitive information, ensuring non-repudiation and policy-aware identity management have become critical and attracted a lot of attention.

In this paper, we present a knowledge-oriented policy-aware framework to enable Web Services conversations addressing these potential caveats taking the Punch-Out B2B protocol as the driving real-world scenario.

This paper is mostly based on the work of my PhD thesis, particularly with B2B protocols such as the aforementioned Punch-Out protocol, worked out by the IBM during the e-Commerce boom of the late nineties.

Word in print is that Echostar, third cable media provider in the US, has paid 380 M$ for Sling Media, king of Placeshifting. So far, I had never heard about this interesting business (or should I say techonology-oriented) model where media is streamed so that watching or listening to live, recorded or stored media on a remote device via the internet or over a data network.

“Sling maintained two offices – one in Silicon Valley and one in Bangalore, India that was responsible for crafting together the chips that provide the Sling magic. Their founders would often return my calls sitting in transit somewhere half way around the planet, visiting the labs in Bangalore”, says the article by GigaOm.

In a world of ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous streaming and content sharing is at hand. I am currently reading about pervasive devices and I start understanding what is the potential of this approach: media is everywhere… on a stream.

Last Monday I was at my first PhD viva as a member of a PhD committee. The degree was awarded with honours, suma cum laude, and it was a great experience for me. It reminded me that the real importance of these occasions is showing progress in research and excellence at work: food for thought.

Next Thursday, I will be attending the PhD defence of my friend and colleague, Paco García Sanchez, at the University of Murcia. I have followed his work very closely in the last three years. Good luck, Paco!!

In Slashdot, they point at the way companies are realizing the benefits of P2P technology. Benefits include distributing patches for World of Warcraft or simply software components providing updates.

Not oly numbers are growing for http video streaming, but also P2P is simply a reliable better alternative to watch video. Actually,  there is much more going on, particularly on TV torrents, “When ‘piracy’ is easier than legal purchase“ ,or with these interesting set of posts (in Spanish).

Could you think of more uses of P2P?

Currently, SAP is thinking of going small. Following the WSJ article, the German software vendor (first and only real one in Europe) is “introducing simplified and cheaper business software aimed at small and midsize companies “.

As the article points out, SAP grew “selling the programming equivalent of a Mercedes-Benz — large, expensive and engineering-heavy applications that help the world’s biggest businesses manage everything from payroll to manufacturing and billing”. That was good so far, but since many ERP went open source and there are ever-growing approaches on the Web covering the SAP spectrum, this is a very interesting strategic movement.

On Friday, I could not attedn the WeekendDance Festival in Madrid because of professional reasons, snif, snif. I had to finish some stuff and a peak of work took me by surprise so I missed the impressive Massive Attack and the overwhelming, never enough worshipped by me, Faithless.

It may sound a bit weird for some of my readers but I really like electronic dance music, even some trance waves.  Actually, first time I heard Insomnia, one of the greatest dance songs of all time, I was very impressed (and young, very young). Faithless made me listen to more of that music. Obviously, I mostly like rock, pop and also flamenco, very much, but dance music has always had a little punch in my heart

Well, I actually have no clue why I am writing all this, except that I wanted to give a small hommage to Rollo and the others, so… here we are

(Btw, the picture, as usual is taken from my last days in Seoul, Korea, these are hot spicy noodles… I missed them a lot!!)

Today I read about LaFlecha.net, an interesting “newspaper” about science and technology on the Web. I sometimes show business models on the Web always based on ads revenue, but this time I noticed that despite the bloggin boom of the last, say, three years, ongoing initiatives like this one are very interesting.

Hence I wonder about new formats in “cyber-journalism”. What about a TV for the “early adopters”? There you have MobuzzTV, a real nice Web-TV with daily shows and newsrooms. So what about a similar platform oriented to the non-tech, with mind-blowing reports and documentaries…

I guess the main problem is that revenue is hard to get or even reach the break-even. However, with an inititial investment and some good luck (or A-bloggers or A-campaign makers) this could change… so has LaFlecha achieved. Congrats to all of them.

I found out today yet another “outrageous bill“. Our for many years “only telco”, Telefonica, has been charging us the insane and absolutely crazy amount of 46 euros simply for the fact of having a phone line.

Deep breath. How can this be possible? I have lived in three countries in the EU and hired telecommunications services. None of them included this crazy tax for the simple fact of having a wire plugged. And despite that, our Government still complains because of the huge Telefonica fine (peanuts for them, but that is another story) from Brussels given the competence barriers to potential competitors in ADSL providers.

I do not care if Telefonica was a scapegoat for the fine. Probably it was and Brussels found the Spanish telco giant a good target. But the reason was also very likely the huge amount of problems Telefonica always showed to share and care with their rivals. And the bill I received is simply another proof of how they still charge for the only thing in which they could always stand above: being the owners of the wire. Just like that.

Ioan Toma published this interesting article about Grid and Web Services (which I co-author but this is accidental, kudos to him) in the Special Issue on “Advances in Grid services Engineering and Management” at the Multiagent and Grid Systems Journal.

It is a good survey about discovery in Web Services and despite, little by little, I am just running away of this research line, I presume there are many good points to consider. This is something that will pop up again when trying to enrich Rich Internet Applications or any other kind of applications. Good job, Ioan.