Tearing the Roof off a 2-Terabyte House

I was home last night playing with the new Kinect, integrating it with Twitter, Facebook, and Zune. Particularly because of the last service, I was glad that I got the Xbox 360 model with the 250-gigabyte (gb) hard disk drive. It holds a lot more music, or photos, and of course primarily games and game data.

So we wind up with goofy scenes like my wife zooming along yesterday in Kinect Adventures’ River Rush – not only my photo (right) but in-game photos taken by the Kinect Sensor, sitting there below the TV monitor.

Later as I was waving my hands at the TV screen, swiping magically through the air to sweep through Zune’s albums and songs as if pawing through a shelf of actual LP’s, I absent-mindedly started totting up the data-storage capacity of devices and drives in my household.  Here’s a rough accounting:

• One Zune music-player, 120gb;
• 2 old iPods 30gb + 80gb;
• an iPad 3G at 16gb;
• one HP netbook 160gb;
• an aging iMac G5 with 160gb;
• three Windows laptops of 60gb, 150gb, and 250gb;
• a DirecTV DVR with a 360gb disk;
• a single Seagate 750gb external HDD;
• a few 1gb, 2gb, and a single 32gb SD cards for cameras;
• a handful of 2gb, 4gb, and one 16gb USB flash drives;
• and most recently a 250gb Xbox 360, for Kinect. 

All told, I’d estimate that my household data storage capacity totals 2.5 terabytes. A terabyte, you’ll recall, is 10¹² bytes, or 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) bytes, or alternately a thousand gigabytes.

The So-Called Secret Courier Video

What is the “user interface of tomorrow”? In the past I have chronicled some cool Microsoft Research prototypes of flexible touchscreen interfaces – and even touchless interfaces!  And now this month one of my friends in MSR, Mary Czerwinski, has written in Venture Beat that “those types of interfaces could be the tip of the iceberg”:

A whole new set of interfaces are in the works at various stages of research and development… I have colleagues working on tongue-based interaction, bionic contacts lenses, a muscle-computer interface, and brain-computer interaction.” – Mary Czerwinski

Not bad! But working devices along those lines are several years away, so for now we’re stuck with the tablet form-factor as the primary basis for natural input. I’ve used a tablet PC on and off for the past five years, happily. My wife now uses an HP tablet.

So I’ve been eagerly following the blogosphere’s hyperventilation about the much-rumored, still-unseen Apple tablet computer, which has been variously described as being close to launch, far from launch, and non-existent.

 

Gartner sees Hype Cycle for Social Software

Fact: Gartner now says that “Web 2.0 software” is falling from its “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and is on its way to a “Trough of Disillusionment.”  However, Gartner finds that wiki software has traversed that path already and is now well on its way up again to mature enterprise acceptance as a valuable productivity tool.

Analysis: Gartner’s just released their 2008 “Hype Cycle” report on Social Software – you know, stuff like public virtual worlds and Web 2.0 tools.

(I don’t know the legality of republishing the actual chart itself, so I’m not including it; I use the Microsoft enteprise license to access Gartner research.  I do note that a Web 2.0 enthusiast from the Netherlands has already posted the new Hype Cycle chart another new and related Hype Cycle chart, on “emerging technologies,” as a Flickr image here. There’s great overlap between the two reports.)

I’ve written before about the usefulness of Gartner analyses; I have to admit that Hype Cycles are my favorites. There’s something about internally debating their judgment calls as your eye travels the path, from pre-adoption “Technology Triggers,” through the bubble-esque “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” and right down into the depths of the “Trough of Disillusionment.” 

If you’re an enterprise IT guy, in a CIO or CTO role or investigating/recommending/approving new technology investments, you really wind up focusing most time on the slow ascending climb to the right of the chart, what Gartner calls the “Slope of Enlightenment.”  Just as in the old days when corporate “data-processing” chiefs lived by the mantra “No one ever got fired for buying IBM,” today’s CIO’s rely on technology that has essentially graduated to Gartner’s “Plateau of Productivity.”

Several other initial observations on the chart:the two Hype Cycle charts:

• Newest disruptive technology trigger charted: “Erasable Paper Printing Systems,” something being researched by numerous large companies like HP and Microsoft as well as already in startup mode, but pegged by Gartner as still 10 years or more from mainstream adoption
• Microsoft’s Surface has achieved brand dominance, as Gartner puts “Surface Computers” on the rise in visibility
• Other key investments of Microsoft Research are validated with positive momentum ascribed to “Mobile Robots,” “Augmented Reality,” and “Green IT,” though only the last one is within 5 years of mature adoption
• “Cloud Computing” is still on the rise, not having peaked in hype yet, though many would find that hard to believe – with its Time Magazine cover last year, it’s practically reached the point of being satired on The Daily Show
• “Public Virtual Worlds” are right alongside “Web 2.0” in still heading down toward their disappointment trough
• Furthest to the right – meaning most mature and enterprise-worthy – is the seemingly venerable “Basic Web Services.”

I really like these reports for a number of reasons – among other things, it looking at them together makes clear the social aspect of a number of more mature technologies (Tablet PC, Electronic Paper) which I favor, and which too often are recognized only for their technical aspects, not the socially enabling and disruptive benefits within and across organizations. 

The Gartner report also allows the blogosphere and twitterverse to step back from the moment-to-moment faddishness of the social software sector, and reflect upon the larger context of the individual technologies.  One measure of health: not a single technology earned the dubious distinction of “Obsolete Before Plateau,” a mark of shame which Gartner regularly applies to technologies that are getting hype but show no longterm promise.

Taken together, the social software space appears robust and very, very interesting.  Get a hold of the full report, it’s worth it.

Note: post updated 8/12/2008 to add references to a second Hype Cycle report on “Emerging Technologies”

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Up Late? Innovate.

Here’s some quick thought-provoking advice from Phil McKinney, who runs HP’s Innovation Program Office.  (Phil has his own blog as well, but the advice comes from an interview yesterday in the San Jose Mercury News.)

Q. One of your tips for innovation is to stay up late, because that’s when your filters are down. (The mental filters that rule out wild ideas, which might turn out to be good ones.) Do you still do that?

A. “Oh yeah, it drives my wife crazy. The idea really is to go back to things you’d do before you were successful, before you learned that you’ve always got to be on your guard.”

Man, do I swear by that!  Phil has some other points that I’m less enamored with, mostly because I don’t believe he’s thinking very radically.  His point that in the future we might be data-mining healthcare histories is undercut by the fact that we’re already doing it, as I blogged yesterday. 

Another less-than-startling prediction: We’ll still be using Second-Life style virtual worlds two decades from now?  Please!  I suppose we’ll also still be changing toner cartridges!!

Check out Phil’s blog, it reflects his innovative thinking better 🙂   But don’t read it till after midnight…

 
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TechFest and its Value

I am spending much of the week at Microsoft Research’s annual TechFest, which is proving to be an absolutely mind-blowing experience.  So much, so cool, so out there….

There’s been some good press about the show already (ComputerWorld, and ITWorld for example), and the official Microsoft TechFest site has a wealth of material.  The media were allowed in on the “Public Day” to report on a carefully selected subset of the projects being displayed. But I think the coverage has missed an important difference between this show and something like COMDEX or CeBIT.