Some researchers at the UC Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory have produced a white paper attempting to pin down a definition of “cloud computing”.

Cloud Computing is a new term for a long-held dream of computing as a utility, which has recently emerged as
a commercial reality. Cloud Computing is likely to have the same impact on software that foundries have had on the hardware industry.

Read more at abovetheclouds.pdf.

Convergent technology can seem complex. Particularly if you embrace the idea of different people using the most appropriate devices they have, at whatever time and place that suits best. An application, service or product is not just a web application or a mobile product, or a facebook plugin. It’s all of them according to the needs and preferences of the users and customers.

But there’s a point where convergent solutions become even more complex. When all these different modes of use are happening at once it can seem like chaos.

Last year, on another blog, I wrote about the untapped potential of the apparently simple “clicker” devices becoming popular in education. From a convergence point of view the response from potential users has been mixed. Institutional inertia is a major barrier to the uptake of even such simple possibilities.

On a more positive note, Olivia Mitchell wrote How to Present While People are Twittering, which encourages presenters to embrace the “back-channel” offered by services such as twitter.

As yourself – how open are you to the possibilities offered by the convergence of disparate communications technology into a “back-channel”?

I’m sure you have heard it, or maybe even based a business on it. The idea that “legacy”, or “low spec” or “dumb” mobile phone handsets will soon fade away, as everyone upgrades to iphones, blackberries, androids and the like. The fairytale continues with the implication that this will leave the market open and desperate for whatever web-in-your-hand application is being pitched at the time.

The saddest part of this story is that the same assumption has been trotted out for years, and the promised smartphone dawn has never come. Headlines shouting about billions of devices and the huge potential of mobile business can easily be read the wrong way. Globally, cheap and simple communication devices are still outselling all kinds of smart phones. Even in developed areas the proportion of users with smart phones is tiny.

The much touted 11% or 12% smartphone sales does not translate to 11% or 12% smartphone users. Current figures estimate between 4 and 6 billion active mobile phones, but smartphones are only in the tens of millions. This means that phone users are buying ten times as many “dumb” phones as “smart” ones, and there are hundreds of basic mobile phones in use for every one smartphone.

Image by Esthr

A bit of thought should help explain why this is the case. It’s a truism that people are different, and the mobile phone market has expanded to its current size largely by exploiting those differences. Advertising targets individual devices at every identifiable niche: the budget-conscious get cheap and simple, the style conscious get broad colour and accessory choices, business buyers range from sedate to pretentious, and all the other options which pack out a typical phone retailer. If what drives the sale is the colour and the association with a celebrity, why cut into your profits by jamming in expensive smartphone features? If what drives the sale is the low cost of rental, why cut into your profits by including copious data transfer?

That seems compelling enough, but even so it does not include the enormous number of older, limited devices already in use. Many reasons, including cost, familiarity, and general lack of desire to change, act to ensure that existing handsets will not go away any time sooner than a generation or so.

Basing a business model on the dream that everyone has, or will have, a smartphone merely leaves you fighting with all the other similar dreamers for a fraction of an already miniscule market. Worse than that, a market already flooded with free (or mostly free) products and services. Sure, there are a small number of people making quick cash in the iphone application market. But remember that there are also a lot of people making money selling ringtones, images and the like for old, dumb phones. And a whole lot more people losing money in these same areas.

It can be a tough choice, but for me the key value-add for any business which wishes to make a profit in mobile is to realise that mobile devices merely form part of a much broader picture. Break down the imaginary walls between device types: web users typically find it easy to click, drag, scroll and type, users of simple phones generally find it easy to speak and listen, or perhaps send SMS text messages, or even USSD. Set-top box users might find it more comfortable to view rich video information while pressing next, previous, play, and fast-forward buttons on a TV remote. And yes, smartphone users may prefer to poke a screen with a stylus, or swipe it with finger gestures.

Once you step back from the assumption that smartphones are a single market for an isolated product, you have the freedom to evaluate the markets, costs, timescales and return on investment of providing support in your application for all these different types of devices, and grow your customer base organically into untapped areas.

As a sound bite: Make smart choices, don’t just assume smart phones.

Mobiles are unique – if you want to miss out on the opportunity they represent, you could choose to see them as just slow computers with tiny interfaces and dodgy Internet connections. Then try to squeeze in your traditional applications; try squeezing the office desktop metaphor with its sedentary documents into a device the size of a mouse!

Alternatively, see them as the most personal, social and dynamic of devices that are becoming connected to the Internet. Now a multi-billion-scale global opportunity opens up to you. That’s customers and dollars! In trying to grasp this, some are calling it ‘Mobile 2.0′, by analogy with its sibling, Web 2.0.

Duncan Cragg gets the point of modern convergent technology. Well worth a read for anyone interested in this space.

Read more at The Mobile 2.0 Killer App is the App Killer.

I have heard the term “technical visionary” as a job title recently. This is a not a traditional and well-understood title, so I thought I’d look around to see if I can work out what it might entail.

Rags Srinivas, CTO of Sun’s Technology Outreach team seems to qualify as a technical visionary. His background includes teaching and software development. As for key responsibilities, he cites:

• Think ahead: What’s down the road?
• Help steer along technology releases.
• Support the rest of the staff

In the field of industrial physics, it appears there is a more rigorous definition:

Industrial technical visionaries are defined as ‘technical individuals who effectively synthesize multiple technologies and business strategy to identify new and innovative breakthrough products and processes’.

In August 2007, a paper was published by the IEEE titled Motivating Technical Visionaries in Large American Companies (login required). Although skirting around an exact definition of the role, the paper does discuss some ways to recognise or characterise a technical visionary:

Technical visionaries, while rather rare, and thus, difficult to systematically study [19], [63], are instrumental to the new product development (NPD) portfolio through their ability to spot and see the potential for breakthrough opportunities, and as such, are part of the key to success for many technology-driven organizations.

The new product development literature focusing on the fuzzy front-end of the NPD process has hinted at the idea of a key individual who is responsible for creatively melding the technology and market insights that occur during this stage [36], [41]. The opportunity recognition literature supports this view as well [8], proposing that it takes a very unique person who possesses both technical and market vision to be successful at identifying opportunities.

Because technical visionaries are, by definition, different from the typical population of engineers, we also expect them to be motivated somewhat differently than more typical or average engineers. The creativity literature suggests that they will be motivated by the job or problem at hand [55], [58] and by the amount of freedom that they receive [58], and that these factors will influence them more than they influence other technical professionals.

Outside the corporate and academic world of definitions and job titles, there exist people popularly accepted as technical visionaries, such as Wayne Green, characterised by radical thought:

Wayne … still has the dynamism and ability to ‘think outside the box’ that has driven him throughout his life.

and strong opinions

Wayne seems to have had views on everything, so it’s a certainly that almost everyone will disagree with him on some point or other.

There don’t seem to be many job openings on the job sites for technical visionaries, but I did find one which describes the desired skills as:

• Excel in multiple programming languages
• Both the left and right sides of your brain work! (well-rounded)
• Not afraid of taking risks and challenging conventional wisdom
• Have an entrepreneurial, whatever-it-takes spirit
• Like the excitement of working within a small start-up team
• Have high energy and enthusiasm towards what you do

Although these sources all differ on some details, the general sweep of the descriptions seems to be the broadly the same. I’ll try and summarise them into a single definition.

A Technical Visionary has a varied background (technical, teaching, a bit of business etc.), possesses both marketing vision and very good technical skills, has enthusiasm and strong opinions, is not afraid of challenging conventional wisdom, has a whatever-it-takes spirit, and is motivated by challenges and the freedom to address them.

Above all, such people are rare and very valuable. So if you find any, do whatever it takes to keep them and use them to benefit your business!

User interface design is more than just screen design, it is about the journey the user takes to accomplish their goals.  Remembering that could have saved this particular organisation a lot of money.

Marc McNeill  keeps an eye on the business impact of usability, in particular the difference between interface design and interaction design. The user journey | dancingmango.

Jason at productivity software startup “37 Signals” posts a reminder that chopping between tasks has a cost in both time and quality.

If you want to do great work, focus on one thing at a time. Finish it and move on to the next thing.

Read more at Multitasking is the fastest way to mediocrity.

This looks very interesting, although it is at an early stage right now. A system for building and managing cloud-hosted applications, using XMPP as a communication subsystem.

InfoQ: Engine Yard Releases Cloud Management Framework Vertebra

I have just listened to an excellent podcast interview with Andy Singleton from Assembla in which the discussion ranges around his extreme views on how to run highly productive distributed software teams.

Top tips include “don’t interview when hiring”, “don’t estimate work”, “don’t do conference calls”, etc… Contentious, but very well explained and justified. This podcast is so packed with thoughtful stuff that I’m sure I’ll listen to it again.

Podcast on Managing Distributed Agile Projects

Interesting post about the different usage and expectations of mobile search and general search. In short, location matters.

ShareMe -The Mobile Future : Mobile Search is Not GOOGLE SEARCH