Eye of the Needle by David Needle (bio)

The next great car safety breakthrough could come from outer space.

Ford Motor Company and Auburn University said a joint research project shows global positioning system (GPS) satellites that “talks” to cars could help prevent accidents in the future.

The idea is that a GPS satellite could work as a kind of early warning system that detects when a vehicle is about to lose control, and communicate with the vehicle’s stability control systems and other safety features to prevent a rollover or, in theory, other types of accidents.

Ford said virtual reality tests show that GPS satellites can precisely monitor a vehicle’s motion, which could improve the speed and effectiveness of electronic stability control systems. The car company sounds eager to move ahead with the project.

“A satellite orbiting the earth could someday prevent an auto accident,” said Dr. Gerhard Schmidt, Ford’s CTO and vice president of research and advanced engineering. “We applaud the Auburn team for these advancements and look forward to working together on the next phase of this research, including developing prototype vehicles.”

The research findings will be presented next week at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics in San Antonio, Texas, Oct. 11-14.

The project is part of Ford Motor Company’s $4 million investment in university research programs in 2009 that includes 16 safety projects.

Volvo goes under cover

Separately, Volvo sneaked a preview of its sporty new Volvo S60 not set for release until next year. The company said a disguised prototype S60 sedan was driven through the streets of Copenhagen to test a new safety technology that can detect a pedestrian in front of the car and brake automatically if the driver doesn’t react in time.

Presumably the test was a success based on Volvo’s upbeat release on the project, though I haven’t checked accident reports in Copenhagen.

The new technology, Collision Warning with Full Auto Brake and Pedestrian Detection, will be introduced with the new Volvo S60 in 2010. Volvo said its safety experts have been working with Pedestrian Detection technology for ten years and have already tested it in other cars in other parts of the world.

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October 2, 2009, 12:52 AM

What's the future of advertising?

Google and the Wharton School think it can help provide some of the answers.

The two are teaming up on “Fast. Forward” a new YouTube channel that features short, 30 sec - 3 minute videos from industry and academic thought leaders. The project is an outgrowth of research being done at the Wharton School’s Future of Advertising Project.

Wharton Marketing Professor Jerry Wind told me the aim of the project is to reexamine advertising and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

“And then we thought, ‘Why limit it to our 40 or so advisory members? Why not open it up to a broader audience and the wisdom of the crowds’.”

Google loved the idea and the Fast.Forward marketing channel was born as a partnership between the college and the search giant. Wind said the short videos are just the start.

“The idea is to become the place for credible, objective information on marketing and advertising that’s current and most compelling. We’ll also have links to other publications and research being done at Wharton on many of the topics being covered.”

Also in the works is a recommendation feature that will offer viewers suggestions on similar videos or ones that viewers of the same video also viewed.

How about the viability of YouTube itself as a marketing vehicle as a topic for discussion?

(more) |

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September 23, 2009, 3:20 PM

HP says goodbye to EDS name

The name EDS, long synonymous with high end, IT outsourcing and consulting services, is going away. Today HP brought the consulting giant further into its fold with the announcement that EDS has been renamed HP Enterprise Services.

Hewlett-Packard bought EDS in May, 2008 in a blockbuster $13.9 billion deal.

Before the HP purchase, EDS itself had changed its name from the Electronic Data Systems.

The name change marks the next major step in a year-long integration of EDS into HP and emphasizes the growing global role of enterprise technology services in HP’s portfolio, the company said in a release.

HP also announced its Technology Solutions Group will be renamed the HP Enterprise Business. HP said Enterprise Business will focus on business and government organizations of all sizes. In addition to enterprise services, its portfolio includes servers, storage, software, networking and technology services.

The news comes in the wake of Dell’s mega-purchase (not EDS-size, but $3.9 billion is still a lot of money) of Perot Systems. While HP’s renaming doesn’t appear to change anything operationally, it may serve to underscore that HP has completed the long, painful process of integrating EDS following its acquisition, while Dell’s work with Perot has just begun. HP cut 24,000 jobs at EDS post-acquistion.

“Customers are facing tough challenges in their technology environments,” said Ann Livermore, HP’s executive vice president.

“Challenges such as a rigid infrastructure, increasing applications and information complexity are restricting the speed in which IT can add value to the business. HP is the best at helping customers manage and transform their technology environments to deliver better business outcomes.”

All of HP’s Enterprise Business units will continue to report to Livermore, the company said. Joe Eazor, senior vice president and general manager of HP Enterprise Services, credited the strength of EDS’s services brand, but indicated it will do better under the HP banner.

“Today we are combining the strong services brand equity that EDS has built over the last 47 years with HP’s technology leadership to become the leading IT services provider,” Eazor said in a statement. “We will continue to deliver the same service excellence that our clients have come to expect.”

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September 22, 2009, 7:01 PM

Oracle's Larry Ellison unplugged, part deux

Too much good stuff for even a lengthy blog post about last night’s Larry Ellison’s event.

In my earlier blog I focused on his comments regarding Oracle’s purchase of Sun. “We’re keeping everything,” Ellison said in rousing affirmation of his plan to leverage Sun’s technology to transform Oracle into a systems company beyond just software.

He later called Sun “a national treasure” for its many technology advances. Gush Larry, gush.

In response to some witty, if occasionally snide comments and direct questions on stage by former Sun president Ed Zander, Ellison got a few things off his chest. Want to get him agitated? Just mention cloud computing.

“The cloud is water vapor. My objection to cloud computing is that it’s not only the future of computing, but the present and the entire past, fumed Ellison. “Salesforce.com has been around for a decade and Netsuite longer and people say that’s cloud computing, now Google is too. Everyone looks around and says ‘Oh like yeah, I’ve always been doing cloud computing’ even though the term is only about four years old.”

The reason Ellison is touchy on the subject is because Oracle’s been criticized in some circles for not having a cloud strategy.

“Yeah, we’re dead if there’s no software in the cloud. All the cloud is, is a computer attached to a network. What are you talking about?” he exclaimed, shouting the question every time he made a point to show Oracle already is in the cloud.

He recalled how last decade he was one of the prime movers, along with Sun, of a concept called the network computer that treated computing more like a utility any number of devices and systems could plug in to. The NC never got anywhere because we didn’t have anything close to the broadband infrastructure we have today.

Oracle doesn’t know the cloud? “What are you talking about?”

Ellison said Oracle has offered ERP systems as a service for a monthly fee for the past decade. “You want to call it cloud computing? Fine.”

(more) |

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September 22, 2009, 2:49 AM

Ellison: 'Sun losing $100 million a month'

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Larry Ellison was on fire Monday night. Steve Jobs is the unquestioned master of the pre-rehearsed, carefully choreographed event speech complete with new technology props, but for off-the-cuff, tell ‘em like I see ‘em, entertaining bluster, Oracle’s CEO gets my vote.

Ellison spoke before a packed hall at the Fairmont Hotel here Monday night “in conversation” with Silicon Valley veteran Ed Zander at a Churchill Club event. Zander, now an investor and advisor to various tech companies, has worn many high level hats over his career including president of Sun Microsystems and CEO of Motorola.

(Photos by David Needle)

And since Oracle and Sun had a fairly chummy relationship during Zander’s tenure, I expected mostly softball Q&A banter.

Wrong. Zander was great. He preceded the key question of the night, Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, by asking:

“What could you possibly be thinking, why didn’t you call me first?” Zander went on to detail reasons why the acquisition didn’t seem to make sense. For one, Oracle’s success over the past thirty years has been about a steady drumbeat of software, software and more software available on multiple platforms.

With Sun, said Zander, Oracle’s getting a struggling hardware company that’s losing market share.

Ellison gave Zander an “are you finished?” look and defended the deal.

“We have no interest in being in the hardware business,” said Ellison.

That brought a hush to the room. Here it comes, the conspiracy theorists were right, Oracle is going to jettison Sun’s hardware business.

(more) |

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September 21, 2009, 7:31 PM

Team wins $1 million for helping Netflix

When Netflix decided to try and make significant improvements to the system it uses to recommend movies, the company took a unique approach to getting the job done. Rather than hire more staff, it banked on a unusual form of outsourcing.

The movie rental giant announced the Netflix Prize, promising to award $1 million to anyone who could help it reach at least a 10 percent improvement in the accuracy of its movie recommendation.

That was 2006, three years later we have a winner. A team of engineers, statisticians and researchers cashed into today at an awards ceremony hosted by Netflix. The team “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” is actually the result of merging of three teams that had previously competed against one another in the contest.

After three years of competing it all came down to a kind of crazy ‘We are the World’ finish. The winning team is comprised of software and electrical engineers, statisticians and machine learning researchers from Austria, Canada, Israel and the United States.

(more) |

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September 18, 2009, 3:34 PM

Tech Insider Says Plan B is a Good Thing

Imagine you’re a tech startup with a great new Web service or product idea. You get enough funding to build out the staff and start developing the product in earnest. A year later, you realize the market’s changed; another company already offers 90 percent of the functionality of your SuperWebWonderWidget along with a bunch of features you don’t have.

It’s time to go to Plan B, but guess what? B doesn’t need to mean ‘Beaten’, rather it can be Beautiful. That’s according to Randy Komisar, co-author with John Mullins of the new book “Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model.”

Komisar spoke earlier this week at a Churchill Club event “in conversation” with New York Times reporter John Markoff. As a venture capitalist, virtual CEO and executive of a number of Silicon Valley tech companies (WebTV, TiVo, GlobalGiving, senior counsel at Apple), Komisar has seen his share of firms that had to change business plans quickly.

(Photo by David Needle)

For example, he recalls when he was a director at Tivo in the company’s early days when its focus was on home networking and licensing its technology to companies like Sony and Philips. “That was in the late 1990s when they hadn’t figured out entertainment was the opportunity,” he recalls.

A more recent example that Komisar is involved in is Cooliris, a Web service that’s been out a few years, but hasn’t found its footing despite changes to its original model. Cool Iris is designed to bring a more visual navigation to the Web, its latest iteration is a nifty “3D Wall” for speedier image searching of Google, YouTube, Flicker and other services.

Komisar says it brings an “Apple-like elegance” to surfing the Web. “My guess is there will be a Plan C, ” said Komisar.

(more) |

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September 14, 2009, 4:04 AM

Oracle goes on a Sun offensive

Enough already. After being bashed by vulture-like competitors for months about its commitment to Sun, Oracle is starting to fight back. As my colleague Andy Patrizio noted in several recent articles, HP and IBM have rolled out the red carpet for Sun customers to migrate their way, while aggressively questioning whether the Sun hardware line has any future at all.

Oracle’s acquisition of Sun recently won U.S. regulatory approval but now is hung up by the EU’s regulatory arm. The EU is eyeballing a relatively small part of the deal, namely the fate of Sun’s mySQL as an open source alternative to commercial databases like Oracle’s and others.

This stands to hold up the deal’s approval into early next year, presumably leaving Sun to twist in the wind that much longer as the vulture’s circle.

Not so fast, says Ellison. Over the weekend, Oracle made the surprise announcement it plans to introduce “the world’s first OLTP Database machine with Sun FlashFire Technology” on Tuesday. Sun’s FlashFire is Sold State Disk (SSD) technology that presumably will speed up Oracle’s database performance significantly.

The event at Oracle’s headquarters will feature Ellison and Sun’s executive vice president of systems John Fowler. It will also be Webcast.

(more) |

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September 14, 2009, 3:48 AM

The Android announcement you might have missed

SAN FRANCISCO — Motorola and T-Mobile had the big news at last week’s Gigaom Mobilize conference. Motorola finally unveiled its strategy for a line of Android-based mobile devices and T-Mobile unveiled the first model, the Cliq, due out in the next few months.

But upstart mobile provider INQ, made a bit of Android news of its own. During an onstage interview, INQ’s feisty CEO Frank Meehan, announced his company is going to use Android for devices in the works for release next year.

He didn’t provide many other details other than to indicate his company, whose phones are available in a handful of countries outside the US (the UK, Ireland, Australia, Italy and Hong Kong), will continue to target what he says is the 85 percent of the market the more expensive smartphone makers ignore.

While lauding the iPhone as “a beautiful consumer device” Meeham claims in Europe it’s primarily sold to consumers over 35. “The under-35 is an iPod market, but they can’t afford the iPhone, particularly in the UK. That’s a market that’s extremely hungry that we serve.”

Talking in general about mobile trends, Meehan said he expects devices that feature more interactivity and advances in touch input.

It’s innovate or die in the mobile space, according to Meehan. “You have to have a hit product every year and be forward thinking,” he said.

INQ’s approach is to think application rather than generic mobile device. INQ gained attention when it launched the so-called “Skype phone,” a mobile device that featured low-cost Skype calling as well as Facebook and Windows and Live Messenger built in. (Photo by David Needle)

Two other devices in the INQ stable are the Mini 3G “The pocket communicator for everyone” with Twitter and Facebook built in, Skype integration and application switching. There’s also the INQ Chat 3G, featuring free push Google GMail, integrated Twitter along with Facebook, Skype and IM.

(more) |

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September 11, 2009, 6:36 PM

Apple's iPhone phishing expedition comes up short?

Security researchers are warning that the recent 3.1 update to Apple’s iPhone software doesn’t prevent phishing attacks consistently or as well as the company’s desktop version of the Safari browser. The anti-phishing feature should warn users when they may be visiting known phishing sites designed to illegally capture user’s personal information.

But researchers at both ZScaler and Intego say they were able to visit a number of known phishing sites using an iPhone and the Mobile Safari browser without any warning.

Conversely, the desktop version of Safari blocked access to those same sites. Both companies listed examples in blog posts of phishing sites they were able to visit unimpeded. In one example, Intego says it was able to visit a phony PayPal site on the iPhone that was blocked by Safari on Mac OS X.

“Apple released iPhone OS 3.1 and once again specifically called out phishing protection,” said Zscaler’s Michael Sutton in a blog post. “In fact, within the Safari settings, there is now a Security section with a Fraud Warning option.

“By selecting this option, which is on by default, you will be “warn[ed] when visiting fraudulent websites”. Sounds great. The problem? It doesn’t work.”

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