Visited countries

I was following a trail though flickr and found this little nugget



create your own visited country map

It's sad...I've only visited 11 countries (4%)...wow I have a lot to do!

At least I've done a bit more in the States, but still only 2/3 of the way there:




Kipp

Network Effect

So, Metcalfe's Network Effect is kinda cool. I just experienced it recently as fellow from the Scottish Borders. John Connell works for Cisco as their Education Business Development Manager for the Emerging Markets.

John recently spent a brief time in Liberia, hence the connection. Check out blog and his photos. I definitely agree with his thoughts on open source and the role it will play in helping build a platform for education, especially in developing countries. He discusses the OLTP approach, but notes some of the shortcomings especially in countries like Liberia that have effectively zero connectivity outside of the capitol city.

The other critical issue (and one that is even more basic) is access to power. As Russell Southwood of Balancing Act discusses in a recent article on Power, the lack of power makes nearly everything else harder and more expensive. While we (in the US anyway) complain about the cost of gas, we have the luxury of worrying about the cost -- very few people in Liberia have a chance to even experience electric power (other than that produced by the various diesel generators --which mostly produce a lovely odor for people to experience).

Another recent connection thanks to the connected world was an introduction to a member of the parliament in Uganda. I'm hoping to get another perspective on ICT policy development from Edward Baliddawa thanks to an introduction from my friend, Josh Jackson at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.

I hope to extend these connections in the near future!

Kipp

Reflections on Atlanta Motor Speedway

Kinda cool... one of my photos from a trip to the AMS was included on schmap.com.

The photo:

History of the Internet - 6 minutes

I was wandering around a great telecom policy blog (CyberTelcom) and stumbled on a video of Ethan Zuckerman ( -- who, btw I spent some time with at a technology for reconciliation conference event last year). The video has Ethan going through the history of the Internet in a very entertaining fashion and getting through some 40 years in just 6 minutes and covering such things as the emoticon and MMORPGs in the process.

Oh, and just to tie it in with an event I'm planning on Net Neutrality, I got to CyberTelecom via the Google Policy Blog talking about the topic...





Kipp

The Left and the Right War

So, last spring (2006) I wrote a little paper on what I called the 'Left War', looking at the primarily Latin American swing towards the left and it's impact on the US and our international policies.

After pondering it some more, I would say that we are embattled in at least two simultaneous non-traditional war fronts. On the one hand, we have the Left War, battling what we perceive as a socialist revolution that threatens some of our democratic principles. It's clear that the socialist reform is appealing to the public at large -- at least at first. It is unclear how long the legs are on this movement, but as long as it is propped up by petrodollars, I imagine it can have a pretty good run. And Chavez seems to be doing a heck of a job rallying the troops right now, supported by grandpa Fidel and mini-me Evo Morales in Bolivia.

On the other hand we are fighting what I call the 'Right War'. In this case, it's seems to be about who is Right -- in the righteous way. But really it is a battle of the the Extreme Right in which the religious fervor has short circuited common sense and declared that there is only one Right. The Middle East represents the nexus of the battle for us, but you can see the spread around the world and locally.

Africa seems to be off on it's own doing its darndest to itself (well, after the rest of the world mucked with it and then ejected), however, there appears to be a growing strength inside of Africa, but it will take a long time to mature and recover, but there are indications that it can happen. There are many continuing issues, not the least of which is Dakar followed by Somalia and the horn in general. I see the Africa conflicts as related but largely independent of the Left and Right fronts. Certainly you can find connections to both fronts in action, but they appear to be offshoots rather than primary centers.

What's interesting is when these new fronts get together with our old Cold War center -- and you can see this with Chavez meeting with Iran and then going over to the Russia to stock up on weapons, including the latest expectation that he'll buy a few submarines to patrol his oil shipping lanes. So now we have an interesting confluence of the new Left and Right supported by the old guard (Cuba, Russia).

Of course there are a lot of other countries wanting to be in the mix in case we get bored...

Kipp

Minutes as Money

Since my travels to West Africa, I've definitely been pondering the impact of mobility on not just communications but life in general. With mobile phones as the only means of two-way remote communication (unless you can afford a VSAT installation) in Liberia and the lack of financial infrastructure, I've been looking at how to leverage the mobile infrastructure to make remote banking and remote microfinance a possibility.

This blog from Om Malik discusses how minutes have become currency in some areas -- and how it has become a business for many. The article references an iAfrica.com entitled "Africa's cyber currency".

The idea of using mobiles to reach the unbanked is taking root, but my sense is we are very much at the cusp of understanding the impact, capabilities, and issues -- which is why I find it an intriguing topic for further research.

More Net Neutrality

I'm working on putting together an event to discuss/debate/argue the merits and issues surrounding Net Neutrality. As such, I'm always interested in well considered arguments as well as those that come from an emotional or political angle. It's a very touchy subject for some, and covers everything from government intervention, to oligopoly market manipulation, to business models, to competition, to politics -- from wired to wireless -- from state to global. It has many facets, so having a good understanding of all of the different elements is helpful.

Here are some recent articles I've read (and I'll inject my editorial note here):

- Political (and largely baseless): Should there be neutrality in the Net? "Because Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have promised special treatment for leftist websites and blogs if net neutrality passes."

- Wireless Net Neutrality: From Tim Wu, pushing the idea of net neutrality and open access towards mobile devices (read: cell providers). Wireless Net Neutrality: Cellular Carterfone on Mobile Networks

- Academic articles and definition: Tim Wu's work

I tend to give weight to the well researched and documented arguments rather than specious non-referenced, emotional/political arguments, but that's just me...

Invisible Web

Been pondering what the 'Web' is today. Over the last 15 years, it has morphed, grown, changed, evolved into something that is really beyond the web.

As defined in Wikipedia, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web WWW]: The World Wide Web (or simply the "Web") is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet. With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks.

But to see the 'web' of today, it's much more than that. It has enabled/spawned things like Second Life, blogs, facebook, youtube, mash-ups, etc. etc. etc.

But what are the common themes? Where is it going and where will it be in 10 years? One overriding current in the present/future web (and technology in general) seems to be the consumer aspect. Most innovations are being driven by these massive social and end-user experiments and they gradually seep back into the corporate arena (there are many examples of this from IM to mash-ups to blogs to open source to eBay to wikis to rss to Second Life).

It seems these massive dynamic social networks that are enabled by the web are what's driving a lot of the new technology and behaviors. Perhaps this 'Social Web' is a theme. I think it is something that needs to be understood, and especially in context of enterprise computing in which the slow uptake by 'stodgy' businesses can certainly impact their ability to compete in tomorrow's landscape.

Beyond the social aspects, it seems that we are starting to see the 'structure' of the web (links, pages, protocol, device) disappear with the content and the interactions becoming the dominant visible feature. This is a good thing, when the technology starts to disappear and the functionality becomes the dominant feature. I'd refer to this as the Invisible Web -- it's the infrastructure and all of the various technical underpinnings that enable this new, emergent types of interactions to take place. Note that I use invisible web different from 'dark web'.

So perhaps an evolution of Webs could be:

- World Wide Web
- Data Web
- Transaction Web
- Semantic Web
- Social Web
- Web 2.0
- Invisible Web

With the invisible web, it's not the pages, the links, the data, the network, the device, that are the driving visible features. It's the interconnected, free association, anywhere, anytime type of interaction that is enabled that is the dominant feature.

Kipp

Click FraudWall

I mentioned Jim Pitkow's Attributor launch recently...well, he's also involved with another company that looks to be addressing something like a $900 million/year problem [1], that of click fraud. The new company, FraudWall Technologies "combines cutting edge science with the aggregation of data and characteristics from networks, search engines, and advertisers into one complete scalable solution". Very interested to learn more about how they are trying to solve the problem. Clearly there are some existing measures in place to deal with this, but they are insufficient to deal with the sophisticated attacks that have been devised (and the low-tech methods like using extremely low labor to thwart automated analysis). I imagine there are a number of heuristics that can be devised to thwart these attacks, hope they have hit on some good ones!

[1] One estimate puts the amount of click fraud at 14%. Since they also estimate that about 40% of the online advertising is click-based and they expect over $16 billion to be spent on online advertising this year, click fraud would account for some $900 million.

GDP of US states versus other countries

RandomRoger caught this map which equates the GDP of various countries with the GDP of the states in the US. Interesting if not useful...but farily amazing if you think about it much...

Kipp

Web rights

A buddy of mine, Jim Pitkow and his latest company Attributor was featured in a Wall Street Journal article today talking about the technology these folk have created to scan the web for content as a means for tracking digital rights use/abuse on the web.

This could be huge, with the explosion of images, audio, and video not to mention the massive amounts of other intellectual property published on the web -- being able to track this could be an important piece to the puzzle on how to keep the web semi-organized and 'safe' for all publishers of content.

Having spent some time with DRM systems, I've always been suspect of how such systems can scale and survive on the Net. Some of them have been closed systems that require all things to be under one tent. All of them have suffered from the ability of smart people to 'break' their system, thus rendering them ineffective and setting up an arms race between the DRM and the hacker community.

On the other hand, tracking content on the web has been a challenge due to the massive scale that must be dealt with. A different kind of search engine, in this case dealing with finding and tracking specific pieces of information through, one can imagine, some form of fingerprinting technology that they've developed. A very interesting problem, I hope they've found a way to crack it.

Very cool stuff, and good luck to the Attributor team!

Kipp

Weather anyone?

From the MIT Technology Review, I caught the personalized weather forecast that IBM's supercomputer is spitting out. The article talks about why this resolution can be beneficial and what some of the downsides are.

Personalized Weather Forecasts by Duncan Graham-Rowe
An IBM supercomputer forecasts weather down to a one-kilometer resolution.

Pretty nifty animations (well, time-lapse jpegs) of tempature, cloud and precipitation, wind and surface conditions.

Now, can you link this to an investment strategy?

Kipp

BCS - Bracket Can Succeed

What if the BCS had a tournament -- okay, so it's not an original question, but still a good question. Buddy of mine (Greg Mills) sent me this, a hypothetical bracket given the final BCS standings this year. That would be a fun set of games to watch. I don't think any of them are easy, but some have a much higher probability. USC/LSU, the battle of the TLA (three letter acronyms) would be a good game. Oh come on BCS, where's the spirit of adventure? I think this could work....

Oh well, I'm sure Auburn would argue that they should have been in the bracket, but instead they get to play Nebraska!

Kipp

Peter Freeman moving on from NSF

Our very own (Georgia Tech) Peter Freeman officially announced his departure. This was not a surprise move, term expiration and all. A nice write-up can be found at the CRA site as well as on the NSF site.

He's staying in DC to work for The Washington Advisory Group. This looks to be a high-powered consultancy group that helps various organizations in R&D and higher education, presumably with a perspective towards policy and other strategery work...

Peter was the Dean of CoC the first time I came to Tech and I have fond memories of his tenure here as well as the work he has done at NSF.

Kipp

$100 Laptop or $15 Mobile?

Motorola's chairman David Brown thinks they will have $15 mobile phones available by 2008. The impact of this is likely to be quite large. As the article states, they think this could add another 100 million people to the wireless world a year.

Another interesting statistic is the one cited from a 'recent study by the London School of Economics' which states that a 10% increase in mobile penetration leads to a .6% increase in GDP (also mentioned back in July in an article on the Economist). After doing some digging (don't you hate it when 'journalists' cite studies but don't actually have any reference to said citation!), I believe they are referring to a paper entitled "The Impact of Telecoms on Economic Growth in Developing Countries" which was written by Leonard Waverman, Meloria Meschi and Melvyn Fuss [1].

Anyway, it looks like the wireless world is benefitting from a number of efforts which include the OLPC $100 laptop and the MOT $15 mobile. Both efforts are good and will have impacts which we can't predict just yet. The $15 price tag sure makes things even more interesting in the developing countries where connectivity is still the major stumbling block even if you were to give away computers. GSM providers have continued to expand their coverage, and with the pre-paid model of network access, they have a huge advantage over any deployment of laptops (unless the laptops come with GSM modems)...

Kipp



[1] Waverman, Meschi and Fuss, The Impact of Telecoms on Economic Growth in Developing Countries, Africa: The Impact of Mobile Phones, Vodafone Policy Paper Series 2 (March 2005)

Tech and elections - GA not doing so well

CNET just came out with a 'Technology Voter Guide' in which they rate various politians based on their pro/con- technology voting record.

Georgia not only had 2 of the worst performers (Lowest scoring House Democrat - John Barrow @ 25% and Lowest scoring House Replican - Lynn Westmoreland @ 13%), we hve only 2 politicians that scored above 500 (Chambliss @ 60% and Kingston @52.63%).

This puts GA in 38th place as a state...sad...

Kipp

Wireless Meant To Be Free(ish)

While not really free, the idea behind FON is through sharing your network, you get access to others' networks, thus expanding your ability to be online. This is sort of the seti-at-home model for networks -- by giving up your 'excess/wasted' bandwidth, you can make the world better.

The latest in this push is in San Francisco, they are kicking off a Freedom Friday event to give away these standard Linksys routers with special firmware that provides the ability to offer up your network for others use while still protecting your internal network. In exchange, you can get access to others who are doing the same. I have my FON router, but haven't seen much usage, and haven't found any place where I've been that I could hook up to another FON network, but still hoping they grow!

I think FON should hook up with the actual PHONE companies to expand their smart phone offerings, like what T-Mobile has done with their dual Wi-Fi and Cell Service offering. You can learn more about it at www.theonlyphoneyouneed.com. Now, if you could expand the offering beyond their hot-spots through some kind of connection to FON...

The next few years should be interesting as Wi-Fi not only reaches critical mass, but we come up with more ways to open up private networks to exand the bandwidth and coverage available to users. I did read a paper on the use of open Wi-Fi networks for mobile vehicular access. The bandwidth/throughput is somewhat limited due to the acquisition rate and the mobile nature, but it is possible. Some applications will need to be modified to make it work in a discontinuous mode, but it will happen.

Kipp

Jerircho

I caught an episode of Jericho recently -- an end of the world TV show focused on a small fictional town in Kansas named Jericho. According to those who edit wikipedia, the best fit for an actual Jericho is Oakley, KS and was chosen for its realtive isolation from major cities.

As I've always said, I grew up in the middle of nowhere -- less than 100 miles from Oakley/Jericho! So I guess I should head back to the farm in the event of a nuclear war, especially since Atlanta was one of the first cities to go in the TV show...

Kipp

Home from Liberia

Well, I made it home again after a couple weeks in Liberia. The experience was amazing, and the people were incredible. Tere were aspects of the country which were better than expected, and some that were worse. There is an amazing amount of work to be done to get the country fully operational.

The total human capacity in the country is still devastated by the war, 15 years of broken educational systems, broken governmental systems, broken industry -- has left many gaps in the capabilities. It has also devastated any institutional knowledge that was present before the war.

There is an underlying current that seemed to have a push/pull against the international community. A couple of paraphrased quotes:

- The UN is helping, but all of the money goes back out of the country to these high paid consultants
- They want to make the country in their likeness (e.g. western)
- The WorldBank is trying to impose their ideas on us, but they don't understand the situation (e.g. we're different)
- We should ban export of raw materials (even go so far as to follow Bolivia's lead and nationalize resources)
- We want foreign investment and competition, but 'need' state owned entities with special priveleges (e.g. telecom, power, media)

There is also a sense of lost opportunity, especially noticeable in the telecom sector. The country missed several opportunities during the last decade with resepct to spectrum licensing and it seems they want to somehow turn back the clock to recoup those lost revenues. But going back is not the path forward. Dwelling on the past way of doing things, the misssed opprotunities, will only exacerbate the problem.

We need to some fresh thinking -- if you are building a country with a fresh start, what should you do? Unfortunately, as it currently sits, it isn't a fresh start, there is baggage all around that are left overs. Nonetheless, it is an opportunity to set things on a path forward not backwards. How should a country handle it's raw resources? How should the country attract foreign investment? How should the country build it's educational system? These and many more questions can be looked at with a fresh perspective.

The Liberian diaspora have an important role to play. As a cross between foreign investment and local investment, they are likely to be more able to understand and take the risks needed to invest in the country. They can assimilate ideas from other regions and apply them to the context of Liberia. They can provide anchors for other investments. But, they also must force out the culture of corruption and ensure that they do not contribute to the continuation of bribery and cronyism that can leave the country in a state of decay.

According to many who have been working in Liberia over the last several years, it has come a long way from the bottom. This may be true, but there is still a long way to go to get the country truly operational. I hope our work can contribute towards some of that progress by helping the government embrace technology as a lever for many of the other sectors that are being built/rebuilt.

Kipp

View from the top

View from the top
Originally uploaded by kippster.

There used to be a 5 star hotel up here, but no more. From here, everything looks quite normal. But as you've seen, and as we've experienced, it's far from normal, but not as bad as some would have you believe.

The Masonic Temple, which is quite impressive even in it's post-war state, is also located up here. The building is actively used by the lodge members here (one of which which we met).

So long from my last full day here, tomorrow should be bit more calm with only one meeting before flying out....

Kipp