Personal Cloud

by | Jan 20, 2012 | Innovation Shifts, Tech+Change, Work Everywhere

Second of a Series of Blog Posts from Maremel’s White Paper: Opening Pandora’s Digital Box

 

Cloud: Assumptions and Definitions

Shared content and services on the Internet is not new. 

  • Cloud computing expands shared services with a concept of shared infrastructure elements, which deliver shared content and platforms as an interconnected system.  NIST framed cloud computing as: “on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity or expansion, and measured service” (NIST, 2011).  
  • SaaS, Software as a Service, has been expanding over the past decade.  SaaS provides to customers all layers of service from infrastructure to end delivery of a web-based product.  That service also can be provided in layers of infrastructure and platforms, dropping the costs of launching new businesses upfront.  
  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) then allow other companies to launch platforms and software with scalable storage and delivery.  This model can shift IT growth from a step-function, up-front capital expense to a more fluid, scalable, operating expense (Armbrust et al., 2009).  These systems are deployed across four models– public clouds, private clouds, community clouds, and hybrid clouds–all with different combinations of privacy, ownership, and sharing (NIST, 2011[i]).

To the consumer, SaaS is the public face to their cloud-based media lives and habits.  Consumer products—such as Netflix, Dropbox, Spotify, Tumblr, or other connected services—might be living on Amazon IaaS cloud-based servers and a connecting PaaS platform.

 

Drivers Shifting our Digital Worlds

Three long-running drivers have pushed geometric change in the market for cloud-based media storage:

  • Storage: Costs of physical storage have plummeted, represented by Kryder’s Law[ii];
  • Computing Power: More powerful and smaller form-factor computing, now in our hands as smartphones and tablets, benefiting from geometric improvement in processing capacity predicted in 1965 by Moore’s Law; and
  • Distance: Costs of communicating and sharing content over distances has plummeted over that same time (Cairncross, 1997)[iii].

These three drivers have set the stage for our more complex current media environment of 2012.

Due to the breadth of content available, legally and illegally, consumers have built up large portfolios of existing digital content across a variety of devices and hard drives.  They also have accumulated years of DVDs and CDs.  The ease of saving and storing this content previously was limited to hard drive and shelf space.  Shelf space has not grown in most homes, but the low cost of hard drives has let consumer build up large amounts of digital stuff. 

Meanwhile, consumers have owned enough hard drives over time to realize that they do not provide infinite storage life.  Hard drive failure rates, estimated in mean time between failures in the millions of minutes, have shown in testing to be 2-4%/year, and even as high as 13% in a 2007 Carnegie Mellon study[iv].  In addition, digital stuff is now shared across home networks, computers, individuals, and devices.

Two other factors are shifting cloud-based media needs:

  • Mobility.  The challenge has expanded with the growth in mobility, as tablets and smartphones draw content and leisure time to places other than living rooms and computer screens.
  • Time.  The biggest challenge, which we will engage below as well, is the perception that consumers now don’t have time.  The time to deal with faded hard drives or figuring out how to move content from one system is of high frustration and value.
Training and Converting our Behavior and Needs

As noted above, online SaaS tools for engaging media have been around for a while.  Three drivers are moving consumers into more comfortable adoption: work, tablets, and ease of start-up alternatives.

  • Work-based Attitudes and Training: Cloud computing on the business side has driven comfort with the Cloud.  Consumers have been trained at small businesses and other work environments progressively for many years.  Tools like Google Docs, Google Apps, DropBox, and Evernote have gotten individuals used to user interfaces for cloud-based working.  Email in the cloud, with Yahoo and Gmail, has moved many users into the cloud with email on all devices, everywhere
  • Tablet Momentum: Tablets have been around for many decades, but the growth since 2010 of iPads has increased expectations for users to be able to thrive without carrying around massive hard drives.  iPad and Android-based tablet users expect access on each of their devices and formats.  Handsome user interfaces and added-value visuals are progressively part of baseline expectations on tablet and smartphones.  Increased tablet-based usage rushes more content into the cloud, instead of buying the next devices with a gigantic hard drive.
  • Cloud-Based Infrastructures and Platforms: New services are growing off of IaaS and PaaS platforms.  Shared infrastructures and platforms allow start-up cloud-based media services to launch without independent massive investment in inflexible storage and fixed infrastructures.  A niche, start-up provider can perch on cloud-based IaaS infrastructures for storage and platforms.

 

[i] National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) working definition of cloud computing, the 16th and final definition has been published as The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing (NIST Special Publication 800-145).

[ii] Chip Walter (2005,July 25). “Kryder’s Law: The doubling of processor speed every 18 months is a snail’s pace compared with rising hard-disk capacity, and Mark Kryder plans to squeeze in even more bits,” Scientific American.

[iii] Francis Cairncross (1997). The Death of Distance: How the. Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press).

[iv] Bianca Schroeder and Garth A. Gibson (2007). “Disc failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you?” 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, p. 1-16.

 

Digital “Storage” of our Digital “Stuff”

by | Jan 18, 2012 | Innovation Shifts, Personal Innovation, Tech+Change, White Papers, Work Everywhere

First of a Series of Blog Posts from Maremel’s White Paper: Opening Pandora’s Digital Box

 

“Storage”: An interesting word in the context of “digital stuff.”  Like the word “collect,” storage implies that it is our “digital stuff,” that we have ownership rights to it.

Storage, as a social metaphor, brings with it context from our daily, physical lives. It may bring to mind Public Storage units, areas under overpasses where we put the detritus of our lives: mom’s sofa, the wagon wheel coffee table that we fight over, or three rooms of furniture as we downsize homes.  Storage bears echoes of George Carlin’s 1986 comedy routine about stuff to hold our stuff in.


He detailed how we have stuff everywhere and have some stuff that is more important than other stuff, which we want to keep with us always. Our digital stuff holds many of those same traits: we have digital stuff all over the place, some is more important, and some we want to keep with us always as well.

Email has become a “gateway drug” for the cloud, training users to expect abundance of digital storage.  Digital storage was framed for many years as precious, to be used wisely.  Previously, companies chastised their employees about using too much e-mail space through automated warning messages.  Expectations have escalated since 2 MB in free email storage was offered by Hotmail in 1996.  Yahoo started at 4 MB in 1997, and Gmail started its beta with 1 GB in 2004.  Yahoo joined in with unlimited storage in 2007, and Google upped the game soon after with its “Infinity Plus One” storage plan, which has grown individual storage now to more than 7 GB for free unlimited storage for Gmail[i].  Hotmail has since moved to “ever-growing,” nearly unlimited storage, continuing to change social norms about digital storage expectations.

Entire business ecosystems have sprung up, dealing with sharing, backup, and cloud storage.  These tools have shifted home and business users to consider storage issues such as ubiquity, mobility, sharing, multiple devices, and permanence.  Despite these roving ambitions, most people’s work and social habits have not kept up.  Products have launched to help us filter and gather our email, though the majority of users still let the content swamp us out and push into unfiltered folders.

2011 was a year of many media “cloud” storage toolset launches, with more solutions to this “problem” on the horizon.  Cloud-based content storage now reaches into consumer lives as well as business services.  Digital media is a growing percentage of our personal digital storage.  As a digital culture, we also are rethinking storage as to digital media.

This transition brings with it a series of questions about this “problem,” and about the relationships between the consumer and cloud-based media storage in the future:

  • What are the problems that companies and consumers are trying to solve with cloud-based media storage?
  • Is this time a transition while we are in changing habits of mobility, sharing, and recommendation with tablets and smartphones?
  • Is it a transition, with different trajectories for our existing digital stuff and entirely new behaviors with new acquisitions and our own digital media creations?
  • How might this transition drive permanent changes in our concepts of content ownership, collection, and storage?
  • How will this change our willingness to pay for storage and to pay a premium for ownership?

Further, playing off of the George Carlin riff on stuff drives two related questions:

  •  What do I expect from the stuff I need to manage my digital stuff?
  •  Is the nature of stuff itself changing?

The music and book media sectors have been facing these issues head-on.  Their company leaders have been forced to rethink what the context and containers for our media content mean in an environment of abundance.  They have been rethinking books and music in a terrain of fluid data and scarcer time.  Other sectors, including video and even education, may find ideas from looking to other media platforms and sectors for pain points, challenges, and new business models.

This blog post from Maremel’s white paper will continue in three steps:

  • Drivers that are accelerating cloud-based consumer media storage,
  • Challenges to be met as Pandora’s Box opens, and
  • Opportunities that lay beneath, beyond the popular discussions about content in the cloud.

 

[i] Now adding 3.3 MB each day to the limit, per Google.

Infographic and Data Visualization Tools Galore

Infographic and Data Visualization Tools Galore

by | Dec 18, 2011 | Innovation Shifts, Tech+Change

UPDATED March 2013

We enjoyed recording webinar sessions with Marc Johnson of marcato multimedia, which will appear later on Emmys.com for the Television Academy’s new educational series.  We compared notes on resources available to create infographics and data visualizations for presentations and storytelling.  I had begun a broader search, and created this list to share with Marc and readers of my blog.

A Bit of Background on Infographics

Infographics have been adopted by newspapers, PR, and others who want to share complex information for audiences to pass along.  Sharing JPGs can be easier than sharing links, and has been referred to as linkbait in its ease of drawing social media links and referrals.  Infographics are part of a whole spectrum of info-glut or infoporn.  Job titles in this space also get expansive, including  information artist, information designer, data enterprise editor, and visualization scientist.

I’m just a social scientist dealing with change management, however.  I’m also amused at all the great tools out there at our disposal as less sophisticated storytellers using diverse sets of data.

Some Good Examples of Infographics

Some remarkable articles share regular “best” infographic lists, “how to’s,” and methods articles.  Here’s just a few for perusing:

Enjoyable Infographics Tools

So what can we use to tell digital graphic stories?  I’ll start with easier, and work to more complex.

Playing with Words

  • Wordle – http://www.wordle.net – fun tool to turn words from documents into word maps
  • Tagxedo — http://www.tagxedo.com – similar to Wordle, Tagxedo lets you create word clouds and sculptures from URLs, Tweets, and other social media documents, as well as export them into a variety of formats.

Playing with Maps

We can tinker with maps, both as pre-made images as well as data-driven tools.

Playing with Concept Maps

Several tools let you expand how you lay out concept maps and linked ideas:

  • FreeMind — http://freemind.sourceforge.net – I enjoy this free tool.  Graphically simple, it lets you play with a free tool for mind mapping that can be adapted into all sorts of other applications.
  • Webspiration – http://www.webspirationpro.com – I miss its freemium mode; it now has a trial period and then costs $6/month.  I found Inspiration and Webspiration wonderful for group presentations and immediate work.
  • VUE by Tufts — http://vue.tufts.edu  — I really enjoy this “Visual Understanding Environment” tool, which combines concept maps with search and graphics.

Playing with Presentations, Charts, and Graphs

I tend to live in PowerPoint, and enjoy some of the extenders that work with it.  Beyond PowerPoint, there are some great presentation, chart, and graph tools.

Presentations

  • Prezi — http://www.prezi.com — My recent undergraduate class spent half of their projects in Prezi, which has a zooming camera metaphor across a vast digital white board.  They enjoyed putting in music, video, and other embedded content.  I got a bit dizzy, but enjoyed the creativity.
  • Sliderocket — http://www.sliderocket.com — Several of my students enjoyed using Sliderocket for class presentations.  It gave them a robust and elegant toolset to work with.
  • Brainshark — http://www.brainshark.com — Friends who are professional business development executives heartily recommend Brainshare as a way to pre-package and present content at a distance.  We’ve just started working with them as a teaching/broadcasting medium here at Maremel.

Graphs and Charts

  • Gliffy — http://www.gliffy.com/ — I just found Gliffy, a great diverse creator of charts and graphs.  Different versions of it work with different social workspace/sharing software:
  • Many Eyes — http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/ — an experiment by IBM Research and the IBM Cognos software group let users create and evaluate data visualizations.
  • GGobi — http://www.ggobi.org/ — free data visualization tool for your datasets
  • Mondrian — http://www.rosuda.org/Mondrian/ — open source toolset for charting and graphing data plots and more complex graphs and data-driven visuals
  • OpenDX — http://www.opendx.org —  Older open source software, based on IBM’s visualization data explorer.
  • Spotfire — https://silverspotfire.tibco.com – a whole visualization suite, free for individuals for the first year, then $99/year thereafter.
  • Visualizefree — http://www.visualizefree.com/ — Sampler of more complex system; shows real-time images from the FAA of flights as a sample
  • Mycrocosm — http://mycro.media.mit.edu/ — quirky tool to create displays of your own personal data that you can input by cell or email and track

Playing with Motion Charts

  • Hans Rosling’s Gapminder Foundation worked with Trendalyzer, which then was sold to Google in 2007, then folded away when Google Labs.
  • VIDI — http://www.dataviz.org/ — VIDI Data, run by the Jefferson Institute, provides a visualization module for Drupal CMS to show motion charts, timelines, geodata, and comparative data.
  • TrendCompass — http://epicsyst.com/trendcompass — lets you add your own data to their data visualization tool if you register
  • Eurostat Explorer — http://www.ncomva.se/flash/explorer/euro/ — sample with EU data that can be played with using a motion graphic.

Playing with Images

Playing with Data Resources

There are lots of extensive tools to work with large public databases.

Additional Tools

“But is he happy?” Ian Richie’s TED Talk about Missing the World Wide Web

“But is he happy?” Ian Richie’s TED Talk about Missing the World Wide Web

by | Oct 19, 2011 | Innovation Shifts, Tech+Change

TED.com inspires, thrills, amazes, saddens, and enlightens.  I enjoy getting their regular email blasts as to new videos, learning something new each time.

This cycle I’m bemused.  Ian Richie spoke about how, at Owl, he missed “getting” the World Wide Web when Tim Berners-Lee came to him.  In his talk, he brought me back to Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” from The Atlantic in 1945.  He brought me back to thinking of how we look at and miss innovations.  He also brought me back, in a closer timeframe, to my current enjoyment of Christensen, Roth, and Anthony’s 2004 “Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change” on how we have missed and found past innovations.

I spend a lot of time with my classes and learning partners on trying to look with a critical lens at change and its impacts.  Sometimes part of the challenge is to recognize how we are refolding data, time, and space when the idea walks in our door.

Digital Media 101 Panel at Digital Hollywood

Digital Media 101 Panel at Digital Hollywood

by | Oct 2, 2011 | Events and Projects, Innovation Shifts, News and Updates, Tech+Change

We are hosting a Digital Media 101 Panel at 10 am on October 17, 2011 at Digital Hollywood (http://www.digitalhollywood.com/). We’ll be at the Ritz Carlton in Marina del Ray, CA, as part of the Digital Hollywood series of workshops and seminars.

Pre-Day Events – The Strategic Sessions
Monday, October 17th
10:00 AM – 11:15 AM

Track II: Poolside Screening Tent I
Digital Media 101 – The Primer – Multiplatform Trends,
Search and Social, Deals and Financings – A Prep Course for Getting the Most Out of Digital Hollywood

This energetic three-guru panel will get you ready to hit Digital Hollywood at a full run. We will share big trends, via news and data visualizations of recent statistics, to allow early participants a chance to get their bearings ahead of the sessions. We’ll hit what is happening in film, TV, music, advertising, search, social, publishing, mobile, multimedia, and that thing called “transmedia.” We’ll touch on recent deals and comparative sector trajectories. Get ready for an hour and a quarter of a full fire hose of information…plus a way and place to ask the questions that you haven’t wanted to ask in a detailed media sector session. You’ll walk out of the session ready with new ideas—and with even more questions to ask over the next few days of Digital Hollywood.

  • David Tochterman, Head of Digital Media, Innovative Artists; adjunct professor, Syracuse University
  • John David Heinsen, CEO & Executive Producer, Bunnygraph Entertainment, Inc.
  • Dr. Gigi Johnson, Executive Director, Maremel Institute
Mixing Technology, Media, Education, and Social Change

Mixing Technology, Media, Education, and Social Change

by | Aug 27, 2011 | Tech+Change

We stand at a crossroads of change.  Powerful forces are transforming what is possible in media, education, and other cultural industries.

Maremel builds learning environments and organizational change opportunities with its partners for social change.

Maremel Institute

  • Builds learning programs with universities and other organizations–how to teach executives and students to embrace and understand how technology-enabled change
  • Builds training and professional development programs for adult and higher education on technology-enhanced teaching and learning.
  • Advises organizations how to bolster forward-thinking change: across whole organizations, departments, or executive teams.

Maremel Media

  • Builds interactive and live media for education.  Our videos and live events help schools, teachers, adults, kids, artists, and other individuals embrace how to work with technology for their own lives.
  • Builds multimedia content platforms for higher education use.
  • Produces socially conscious media for teaching about history, storytelling, and technology.  This media includes live events, music, and multimedia content.

How can we help you?  How can we help your organization?  Your future?