Kaizen Bits

Everybody is talking these days about a World recession. For me, in the particular case of the US, this is just a normal consequence of subprime junk mortgages and also the normal recessive curve after an ever-growing economy in the last five years. If banks (like Citigroup) gave low quality mortages to every single living entity on planet Earth, now don´t expect everybody to be able to pay.

Regarding Spain, this is not a crisis, this is just balance. Our economy boosted in the last five years due to the brick and mortar bubble. So now it is time to settle down. Also, Spain depends heavily on external investment so if everything goes wrong in the world, it will have an impact on us.

Now, when they talk about recession, they make us think about the last one. That was the Tech Recession: the dotcom bust, the telco meltdown and there we go, bad for the tech industry. I think this is not the type of recession. Our sector will be still healthy. For sure, they will not be as much investment and big numbers as in the last years, but there will also be no unemployment or tech pain.

Yesterday I was in a talk about European Research Council (ERC, for friends) grants. They are actually not grants in the common sense, but research funding for individuals aiming at creating and developing a research ecosystem based on one proposal. The funding is around 1 Meuro. Not peanuts.

What got my attention was the emphasis of the speaker about “competing with US research” as the underlying motto of the ERC. Because it is the ruling champion in research, clearly, but also because Europe could lead a different agenda which was heading to basic research and because we (Europe) believe that we have such potential. The acceptance rate was of 6% and Spain was aligned i this rate with countries such as UK, France or Germany so we are not doing that bad.

The grants I could target are called Starting Grants. Those are tailor-made for less than 10 year-track record researchers and they mean a “pat in the back” for a researcher as the elite. I will submit my proposal next year. The acceptance rate is quite dissappointing, though.

“For humans, honesty is a matter of degree. Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That’s why it’s a good idea to keep engineers away from customers, romantic interests, and other people who can’t handle the truth.”

- Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

Mobility is one of those ways to go. I was thinking (but no time, as usual) of writing about “SMS: From Short Message Service to Semantic Mobile Services”, a simple article which would point out a number of issues about new mobile services. Because in a nutshell, they show the same requirements as Semantic Web Services:

• Data interpretation and mediation
• Process interpretation and mediation
• Data storage and retrieval
• Business logic execution based on data
• Agent interoperability

In all, this whole field looks quite promising since most apps I know are heading towards the mobile (it was time, ages we are waiting for this).

Big news in the software market!! SUN lays down $1bn for software databases ruling champion MySQL. I have remarked many times that the trend of opening software is gathering stream but this is the perfect proof-of-concept.

The perfect answer is found in The Register article:

Judging the value of software companies proves very tough, and judging the value of open source software companies can prove even tougher. With the most popular open source firms, you often find a large gap between a swelling, enthusiastic user/developer base and the much smaller pool of companies actually paying for products or services.
In other words: it is not about customers buying your product and spending a lot in licences, but about MySQL being the databases in ALL projects I know. Because it is nice, simple, reliable and free!! And last, but not least, because MySQL is also the M of LAMP.

“La tendencia irrefrenable de nuestro tiempo es tomar los productos que fueron una vez distribuidos como bienes físicos, convertirlos en datos y descargalos dentro de los hogares”

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail

(Sorry for the Spanish, but it is the first time I saw it in my native language, and I loved it)

Seth Godin puts it clear:
Enciclopedia men hate Wikipedia
And CNET hates Google
And newspapers hate Craigslist
And music labels hate Napster
And used bookstores hate Amazon
And so do independent bookstores.

Dating services hate Plenty of Fish
And the local shoe store hates Zappos
And courier services hate fax machines
And monks hate Gutenberg

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I was wondering if the Triadic Closure effect and some others that researchers from UCLA are trying to verify through Facebook data could be also proved in smaller social networks, like the ones we are developping in my courses. The Triadic Closure is interesting concept in social network theory, first suggested by German sociologist Georg Simmel in the early 1900s.^[1] Supposing that person A has a strong connection to person B and to person C, but there is no connection whatsoever between B and C; when this changes, and B and C become either weakly or strongly linked, there is triadic closure.
This is not only about the Six Degrees phenomenon and this kind of stuff, but also what is the true nature of linking and relationships. I think it would be great to make some surveys in my courses next days, to see if we find (in the ramble of figures) some interesting information.

The year in SN starts for me reading in Ina´s blog about Visible Path and a potential purchase, then about SN Quality vs Quantity and Linked In opening:

The move is one of several LinkedIn is making, including launching a beta version of a redesigned home page, to keep its less flashy but more business-minded contacts network site vibrant alongside rivals MySpace and Facebook. LinkedIn said it wants to be a hub for business information.”

Everything looks good. Thanks, Ina, if your blog would not exist, we would have to invent it

Extra Shot: A book by Rich Ling that analyzes how “the mobile phone strengthens social bonds among family and friends. With a traditional land-line telephone, we place calls to a location and ask hopefully if someone is “there”; with a mobile phone, we have instant and perpetual access to friends and family regardless of where they are. But when we are engaged in these intimate conversations with absent friends, what happens to our relationship with the people who are actually in the same room with us?”

Food for thought, all food for thought.

 Nimuh is an open-source video game, licenced with Creative Commons, taking place in Andalucía. It is based on “Theseus and the Minotaur Mazes” and there are some screenshots here, where you can also download the code.