In decades past, the health of an economy could be measured in steel shipped, hard goods sold or jobs filled. In an information-oriented economy, should you measure health by IT spending? If so, then we’re definitely looking at a turnaround for the good.
No surprise, 2009 was a bad year for spending on hardware, software, networks and related services. At $3.2 trillion, worldwide IT spending slipped 4.5 percent in 2009, versus 2008’s total, according to Stamford, Conn., research firm Gartner Inc. Now, Gartner says that IT spending for 2010 will climb by 5.3 percent to $3.4 trillion.
Now for the glass half filled/glass half empty part of the equation.
For the “half filled” view, celebrate the fact that the market is showing solid growth. For the “half empty” view, note that a 5.3 percent increase on a small 2009 base number largely gets you back to where you were in 2008. That was a year that ended in economic disaster, but only after most capital spending probably had taken place in the first half of the year.
The real test of whether IT spending growth is cause for celebration will be whether Gartner is right about its estimates for 2011. Gartner projects steady growth for the IT industry next year, with estimated increase of 4.2 percent to reach a spending level of more than $3.5 trillion.
So, half filled or half empty? Or have these big picture stats lost their relevance in your little niche of the market?
Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie and a bunch of other heavy-hitters from Microsoft are named as inventors on a newly issued patent for a “personal data mining” system that would analyze information and make recommendations with the goal of aiding a person’s decisions and improving quality of life.
The patent was issued this week, based on a September 2006 patent application. I’m not a patent examiner, of course, but as I was reading, I couldn’t help but see similarities to what other companies have been doing for a long time. For example, one potential application cited in the patent would have the system make suggestions or recommendations “with respect to books to read, movies or plays to see and/or places to visit” based on “a user’s determined interests and correlations of other users’ interest.”
Those aren’t the only potential applications of the Microsoft patent, but at its core, isn’t that what Amazon.com has done, and patented, dating back at least a decade?
At any rate, maybe there’s more nuance here than I’m perceiving. The newly issued Microsoft patent essentially takes data mining concepts used by businesses and adapts them for personal use.
“Personal data mining mechanisms and methods are employed to identify relevant information that otherwise would likely remain undiscovered,” according to the patent abstract. “Users supply personal data that can be analyzed in conjunction with data associated with a plurality of other users to provide useful information that can improve business operations and/or quality of life. Personal data can be mined alone or in conjunction with third party data to identify correlations amongst the data and associated users. Applications or services can interact with such data and present it to users in a myriad of manners, for instance as notifications of opportunities.” (more…)
Startup guru Don Dodge has gotten so much coverage since being let go from Microsoft, and subsequently hired by Google, that frankly I’ve pretty much tuned it all out. That said, his post yesterday on his discovery of Macs is worth a read — not because of any major new insights into the age-old Mac vs. Windows debate, but because of its implicit message about the technological blinders dutifully donned by many Microsofties.
This sentence, in particular, caught my attention: “After years of defending Microsoft against the Apple fanatics I decided to go to the other side of the road to see for myself,” Dodge writes.
Good for him, but the fact that he hadn’t seen the other side of the road as a Microsoft employee is a symptom of a larger problem at the Redmond company. Loyalty to and appreciation for your own products is nice, to a point, but after interacting with people at Microsoft for the better part of the past decade, I’ve never quite understood, logically, why it’s taboo for its employees to use competing products.
Of course, the company isn’t alone in this cultural tendency, but in my experience, Microsoft is exceptional in its fanaticism. If anyone doubts what I’m saying, flash back to September at Safeco Field for a moment.
Another example came recently on the Daily Show. “I am a very loyal Microsoft user,” said Bill Gates when Jon Stewart suggested that his departure from day-to-day life at the company would let him use an iPhone.
“We Bing, and we Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing, at least all the time in my world,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer during his recent Consumer Electronics Show keynote.
Really? That’s too bad. Out here in my world, we Google and Yahoo and Bing and use anything else that will help us find what we’re looking for. I’ve been “Binging” more than usual lately, not out of blind loyalty, but because in some situations I prefer the results it delivers, and the experience. But I’m also constantly comparing those results to other search engines, to make sure I’m getting the best information — in the same way I experience Windows and OS X and Linux and as many other types of technology as I can get my hands on. (more…)
The MIT Media Lab’s Pranav Mistry recounted the history of his SixthSense project at TED India this week. SixthSense started when Mistry took the rollers out of two computer mice (mouses?), attached some pulleys, and made a glove-like hand-gesture interface. Moving through SixthSense’s evolution, Mistry talks about some Internet-synced sticky notes, pens that draw in three dimensions, Google maps that interact with physical objects, and other things that, if said by anyone else, would just be crazy talk.
From there, he explains how he inverted the process, in an effort to “paint the physical world with that digital information.” He started with a projector mounted on his bike helmet that would project pixels onto the physical world. He added a camera and the system eventually shrank down to the pendant we recognize as the current incarnation of SixthSense.
In the video, Mistry demonstrates the system by casually doing things that shouldn’t make any sense: Digitally painting on a physical wall, taking a photo of the Boston skyline by framing it with his index fingers and thumbs, dialing a phone number on numbers projected on his palm, watching video of President Obama’s MIT speech on a print newspaper; reading a tag cloud — “comedian,” “geek,” etc. — that appears on comedian/blogger Baratunde Thurston’s shirt when Mistry meets him; playing a video game on a piece of paper; and copying text and charts from the regular kind of paper and pasting them to his crazy, digital paper, just by picking it up and moving it.
Tonight is Game 1 of the Red Sox’ five-game divisional series against the Angels, which creates two near-certainties: Another Sox/Yankees ALCS; and “worker productivity” becoming an oxymoron at offices throughout New England tomorrow. This thing doesn’t start till 9:37 p.m., for Hendu’s sake, and postseason baseball tends to go well with alcohol.
But what baseball taketh away, it can also giveth, or whatever. The sport has inspired some nifty innovations in analytics, robotics and … let’s call it life sciences.
MIT News Office photo
• In spring training, the Sox, who even give their IT guy World Series rings, supplemented hitting coach Dave Magadan with the MIT Media Lab, naturally. For the last few years, researchers from the Media Lab’s Responsive Environments Group, has been strapping sensors to minor leagers while they’re batting at the Sox camp at Fort Myers. The info from accelerometers and gyroscopes could provide insight on differences in swing mechanics during a hot streak or a slump.
• Using an arm developed at MIT, University of Tokyo researchers have developed baseball-playing robots that could make the Fall Classic either more interesting, or entirely pointless, to watch. Think of all the time and money the Sox would save on scouting, not to mention free agency. And J.D. Drew would presumably be injured far less often if he were a robot. (more…)
It was the latter last night, as the Mass Technology Leadership Council held the latest of its monthly Tech Tuesday events at Microsoft Corp.’s New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, affectionately and appropriately known as NERD. The topic of the evening was the gaming sector in the Bay State, as MassTLC celebrated the official launch of its digital gaming cluster with a report on the local industry.
Tech Tuesday attendees rock out to The Beatles: Rock Band at Microsoft NERD.
To help set the gaming mood, folks from Cambridge neighbor Harmonix Inc. set up a full set of its now ubiquitous fake instruments for attendees to try their hands at The Beatles: Rock Band. After a demonstration by Sean Baptiste, Harmonix’s manager of community development, who rocked out with other players from companies like GamerDNA Inc., game geeks from the crowd decided to step up and try their hand at being an erstwhile John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr or even George Harrison.
With the smell of pizza, beer and soda in the air, it could have been any basement in the Greater Boston area — if that basement was on the 11th floor of a building on the Charles River and could hold 200 people.
Fu is a computer science professor doing research on preventing implanted medical devices from being hacked. At the 2008 Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas, Fu and his team of researchers showed it was possible to get information such as Social Security numbers and medical diagnoses from implanted devices. They also showed that by impersonating the computer a defibrillator communicates with and wirelessly changing the settings, a hacker could send a fatal shock to a patient’s heart.
At the time, MHT talked to Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center researcher William Maisel, a member of the research team, about the project. In the video above, Fu explains his research at another hacker conference, Black Hat 2008.
Other New Englanders selected:
José Gómez-Márquez, director of MIT’s Innovations in International Health
The AP is reporting a Skype virus making the rounds can record phone calls made over the service, save the audio as an MP3, and email it to other computers. The hack taps into the computer’s OS to record the computer’s audio before it’s encrypted by Skype.
Mudge
Former L0pht Heavy Industries hacker Mudge, aka Peiter Zatko, a security researcher at BBN Technologies, just got back from Italy to find BBN had been bought by Raytheon. Via email, he said the Skype virus tactic isn’t new, comparing it to hackers stealing banking information by recording keystrokes.
“The fact that this is relatively well known does not speak well for the progress that our consumer computer security has made over the years,” he said.
The issue stems from the multitasking we demand from our computers — different applications have different security needs, but the OS doesn’t serve them.
“Would you be happy if you could play video games and listen to online music at the ATM when you walk in to your bank? I wouldn’t. I want that system to be specific and dedicated to processing my bank requests,” Mudge said.
The AP report suggests the virus works better as a targeted attack, rather than a widespread virus. To defend against it, Mudge suggests disabling Javascript and similar programs in your browser; disabling HTML and content rendering in e-mail programs; being savvy about e-mail attachments and links and Internet sites; and running each application on a separate virtual machine, then reverting to a clean install state. And he said all that is just a start.
“Once your computer is compromised, it doesn’t matter if you are using encrypted network communications … you’ve lost,” he said.
New Atlantic Ventures managing partner Todd Hixon calls on East Coast innovators to change the local culture and rise up against Silicon Valley:
… We in Boston should take advantage of being the underdogs: create our own “rebel alliance” to shake off the yoke of California tech giants and VCs. California is a bit complacent in its achievement, and mired in fiscal crisis. Our society has entered into a period of reform. New technology drivers are emerging (biotech, clean tech) in fields where Boston has strong resources.
The first domain name ever registered — Symbolics.com, in 1985 — has been bought by domain speculator XF.com:
Symbolics, Inc – a spinoff from the MIT AI Lab – was a computer manufacturer headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts and later in Concord, Massachusetts, that designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machines, single-user computers optimized to run the Lisp programming language. The machines became the first commercially available “general-purpose computers” or “workstations” way before those terms were coined.
In decades past, the health of an economy could be measured in steel shipped, hard goods sold or jobs filled. In an information-oriented economy, should you measure health by IT spending? If so, then we’re definitely looking at a turnaround for the good.
Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie and a bunch of other heavy-hitters from Microsoft are named as inventors on a 
The patent was issued this week, based on a September 2006 patent application. I’m not a patent examiner, of course, but as I was reading, I couldn’t help but see similarities to what other companies have been doing for a long time. For example, one potential application cited in the patent would have the system make suggestions or recommendations “with respect to books to read, movies or plays to see and/or places to visit” based on “a user’s determined interests and correlations of other users’ interest.”
It was the latter last night, as the 
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