Kaizen Bits

Glup, I am blogging way too much today, but it´s Friday and I am catching up with quite a lot of RSS Feeds and breaking news I couldn´t even have a look at the last weeks.

There we go with the breaking news: Twitter Value is 1 B$. Quoting literally: “The investor group is expected to include mutual-fund giant T. Rowe Price Group Inc. and private-equity firm Insight Venture Partners, which would be new investors to Twitter. Existing Twitter investors, including Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners, are also expected to participate in the round, according to the people familiar with the plan.”

Once more, I will say it loud. I don´t understand the Twitter fever

I want to congratulate the co-organizers of the Joint WSEC09- SyMos09 who was celebrated this week in Mexico City. The event was a tremendous success and, despite, I could not attend, I am pretty sure that this is a step forward in the understanding and acceptance of Cloud Computing as a new reality in the Latin American, or Mexican, in particular, researh area.

I was quoted in this article at the Emprendedores magazine, “El Momento de los Valientes“, where, together with other academics, I was discussing a number of interesting concepts in current entrepreneurial landscape.

In particular, I was talking about the “eco-entrepeneur” which has a twofold view. On the one hand, it is an emerging class of entrepreneurs that are focusing on the “sustainable economy” concept and whose business model could be very well based in applying that model to a already succesful business or to a new upcoming one. On the other hand, it could also be a Green IT entrepreneur: somebody who found out who costs could decrease dramatically by using current “cloud-oriented” technologies.

Enjoy it!

Reading all what I needed to know about Service Cloud 2, the new evolution of Salesforce PaaS I can´t keep thinking what the open-source community could do for the cloud. This is what we are trying in one of our research projects, but since even Apple is starting releasing their star code in open source like with Snow Leopard Grand Central, I think the research community should start yielding open-source clouds or at least cloud service related.

It´s quite a long time I have been not only reading, but thinking of the Lexus product line. Lexus is not only the premium brand of Toyota, but also one of those brands I do not see that often in Europe but I definitely deem as a top class one. Last night I was driving also one of those and I am even now more interested.

Today I started my lectures, and remembered having read the “Good Enough Revolution” article in Wired. I was thinking of implementing this “good enough” (or bad enough, depends how you look at it) paradigm to several other sectors.

For IT, it´s clear it´s working, specially in pictures and videos, low-quality stuff in YouTube has been longly watched. This could have some similarities with the low cost model that has spreaded over all kind of business models, from the IKEA revolution to the airlines. Spanning over other business domains is currently one of my concerns.

Can you think of any?

Today El Pais, the Spanish top newspaper published an article about SONAR (indra-y-varias-universidades-desarrollan-un-buscador-financiero), about flagship project with Indra Software Labs, the University of Murcia and the Instituto de Empresa.

The project started in 2007 and it was originally intended as a key attempt to provide a fully-fledged semantic based application for a particular domain. Since its inception, SONAR suffered the rise of Google Finance, which overlapped its functionality (hence showing us we were on the right track) and fortunately derived also into SONAR2, a project we are still working on, based on SONAR from the information management perspective but extending its scope to decision support systems, chartist analysis and fundamental analysis.

I am very happy about the results of the project and from here I would like to congratulate all who contributed in its success.

Resistance is futile, clearly so I am back to blogging again. Actually, I got plenty of topics over the sumer but I am currently striving for organizing the upcoming semester lectures, setting up my cluster and having all projects ready. We had an incredible success in terms of funding last months, so I am sure this is gonna be a very interesting year.