Random Thoughts

Solitude in Technology Age

The world is definitely different now. Your smartphone never leaves you, even as an alarm clock for your morning. You are now wearing smart watch and of course watching smart TV every day. Friends from Asia nowadays all pop up on WeChat. Your college, high-school, middle-school classmates all over the world, whom you haven’t heard of (most likely have forgotten) for decades, all started to send you invites to join the group chats or friends’ lists. Your remote siblings, relatives, even your 70 or 80-year-old parents who barely can maneuver a computer mouse, now happily send you a voice message any time or write messages in local languages with their fingers. …

It is indeed an intriguing time. As if our past, present and future are starting to merge and get all entwined in this technology age. You are very occupied, so occupied that can rarely find any moment of solitude. Modern technologies seem to empower us but at the same time diminish us.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), a Canadian thinker, philosopher and communication theorist, once said “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us. ”

With so much happening around us every day and in such speed, we become oblivious of where we are or who we are. We can know so much about everything else, but so little of ourselves. In this age, everyone gets connected but quickly forgotten. We have no identity other than an icon or avatar on our smartphones, tablets or TV console. And everyone seems to be the same.

McLuhan also noticed, “For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.” It will become more challenging for us to remember that within the limited span of our lifetime, limited minutes in every day, we need seriously dedicate some time and energy to pursue what values most to us. We may be busy with many contemporary pursuits, conformed to many social norms, but there are also things in the world that are simply timeless or make one a unique self – which may only need a little solitude to take notice.

On Leadership and Management

Challenges to Today’s IT Managers

IT managers seem to be living in a sphere of paradoxes these days. With the rapid shifts of many technologies, business models and processes, from traditional server and desktop software support to today’s cloud computing and service-oriented models, from past role-based IT structure to today task-focused realignment, from clearly defined functional teams to highly mixed and collaborative environment, the calling for new management thinking, models and skills is imminent.

A few of these interesting paradoxes to today’s IT managers include:

1. Bold initiatives vs. Business-as-Usual

Nowadays there is no business-as-usual with all the disturbances and changes around IT businesses. Management whose goals are to maintain a steady growth in functional scope likely find themselves walking towards an obvious dead-end. It’s a demanding world for IT managers as new technologies, new concepts, new markets call for bold initiatives and actions towards uncharted territories in order to stay relevant.

2. Delegation vs. Details

To be effective, experienced managers must know how to delegate. Yet in order to show competence in today’s fast-moving IT environment, managers are expected to stay hands-on and understand all details of the ongoing business, technical or otherwise, and be able to articulate every detail to higher management at any time. As things are moving faster and changes are constant, a balancing act is harder and harder to achieve. Situations can get ridiculous.

3. Role-based vs. Skill-based Team Building

Increasingly IT managers are no longer managing a functional team of similar job requirements and skillset. Today’s IT environment often assigns a manager to lead a new initiative or deliver by projects and milestones. Under such a situation, a team of versatile skills are needed to fulfill the delivery requirements. These members with the needed skills, especially those who possess new skills or be able to quickly acquire new skills, can often be called upon to assist other concurrent projects in the larger organization. The concept of “a team” is more a collection of needed skills. An IT manager becomes more of a recruiter or facilitator than a traditional “manager” to fit into such a picture.

4. People vs. Cost

In many large IT organizations, one of the central theme in the adoption of new technologies is to significantly drive down the cost. At the meantime, modern technologies and automation are indeed replacing many human jobs, especially those with manual labor or tasks. RIFs, layoffs are so often these days among large companies’ IT organizations. However we often hear that a good manager must first be a people manager. In an unstable or relentlessly cost-driven organizational environment, this paradox can add to tremendous stress.

5. Experience vs. Everything New

Expectations are high for today’s IT managers in a traditional organization. They need maintain existing business operations fully functional without major troubles, and lead transitions and new initiatives at the same time. They need to be experienced leaders and people managers who can gather together diverse, shared or often newly recruited resources to perform, and concurrently deal with the constant demands and changes of the organization. They need know their daily business in details, and also keep themselves up-to-date on rapidly emerging new concepts and trends in the markets. A complete new set of skills is in urgent need for IT managers.

What are the solutions to these paradoxes? TriStrategist thinks that these daunting challenges to IT managers could be a direct signal that some fundamental changes to the structure or management concepts in IT business may be due. In today’s highly technology-driven environment, new thinking to both organizational structure and management as a science is clearly needed.

Trend of Technology

Neuromorphic Technology

No computer chips today can compete with a functional human brain in the power of information gathering, intelligence and energy efficiency, yet with its moderate size. That is because a human brain functions drastically different from today’s computers. But what if future computers adopt the brain neuron structure and start processing information by logics closer and closer to the ways a human brain works? If with huge amount of processing power and memory storage available, would computers one day indeed surpass the brain power? The answer has become increasingly difficult to come by.

Scientists and engineers together have been trying to build a brain-like computer for decades. With the concepts of Artificial Neuron Network (See our earlier blog on Artificial Neuron Networks ) and advancement in computer engineering, a modern computer chip designed without a conventional powerful central processing unit (CPU), but with millions of parallel “neurons” and connecting “synapses” packed into a single unit to simulate one brain function, e.g., one cognitive ability, may well come closer to capture that specific brain function after repeated learning, storing and processing information. When a large number of these special units combined together in a coordinated fashion, a “machine-made brain” may just be born. Thus “neuromorphic computing” evolves from here. IBM, Qualcomm and several other chip designers and manufacturers have been experimenting with the ideas with great progress in recent years.

Besides enhanced “brain-like thinking” capabilities of such machines, another key benefit from neuromorphic chips is the energy conservation. Information storage and processing are now arranged inside the same interconnected neuron nodes. The cost of energy and heat from the switching, such as those in between memory and CPU in conventional chips, has been drastically reduced, resulting in better performance in general.

Due to its significant disruptive nature (to both future hardware and software) and high potential commercial clout, the World Economic Forum’s Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies ranked neuromorphic technology as one of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2015. The interesting facts today are that although prototypes of the neuromorphic chips are available, great software to demonstrate their “brain” power are yet to come out.

What are the best ways to test the intelligence level of a machine-made brain? And where would we use it first, on a robot called Chappie?

Business Strategies

The Potential Drawbacks of Doing-it-Yourself with Cloud

The No.1 initiative in many of the large corporate IT departments nowadays is about moving to the cloud platform. Bank of America, SAP and many other large companies in non-tech industries are trying it. The decision of getting on either Public, Private or Hybrid Cloud largely depends on the nature of the business, the security concerns and the decision drivers of the company management. Today because the cost of building a cloud-ready modern data center can be much cheaper than in the past, due to both the best practices from Google, Facebook, etc. and downward hardware cost, many security-sensitive companies may decide to build Private Cloud only and completely on their own, although they may have to work with certain technology vendors here and there. TriStrategist thinks that such a decision has several obvious drawbacks.

1. Lack of central vision, planning and design for an extensible platform for potential future needs in cloud.

In a huge enterprise that has been running on traditional IT models for decades, new ideas are often tested on a small scale and initiated by a few departments first. Same are true for testing out the cloud, with only limited design, planning and views of the company. For example, some may start by moving applications on virtual machines; some may interpret cloud services as moving to fee-for-service models between departments, etc. Few people, including management, fully understand cloud computing concepts and technologies in the market. However modern cloud service platform is a gigantic disruptive wave that can disrupt the entire IT operations, resource utilizations and existing internal business models. It’s hard to implement a comprehensive and cohesive cloud platform and service model without considering the IT for the enterprise and the future needs of the company as a whole. Piecemeal implementations could most likely be short-sighted, costly, incompatible or redundant with each other.

2. Lack of right resources and skillset for an efficient implementation.

Cloud and related technologies, such as Big Data, etc., are mostly new. Many companies simply don’t have the right resources with the skills needed. A cloud platform for a large company usually has to embrace many mixed technologies, from hosting infrastructure and virtualization to automation and self-service, etc. It’s often difficult to find people who understand the linkages between different technologies for a smart design. Hiring outside consultants may not help much either since many of these consultants from a particular technology vendor tend to only know about their own product than understand the enterprise’s complex needs and multi-technology environment. Cloud computing also demands new skills. For example, automation development skills are usually hard to be filled by traditional DBAs or IT support staff.

3. Lack of versatility in modern technology infusions.

Cloud technologies are fast evolving. New technologies, new concepts and new tools mushroom every day. Therefore an enterprise cloud platform needs to be open so that it can leave room for future better technologies to fit in. Initial implementation only by internal people tends to follow the least-resistance path which could result in a lack of extensibility and versatility when future needs demand them.

What would be a better approach? TriStrategist thinks that companies inexperienced with cloud, especially those outside technology industry, should try a more open-minded approach in building the cloud at the beginning. Under a comprehensive company-wide vision, business segments with less security constraints should consider first using established Public Cloud providers. The goals are twofold: a fast and cost-effective implementation; collecting experience and training its own staff at the same time. This may be a smarter shortcut to get a extensible Hybrid Cloud for a company’s future needs than taking the painstaking novice effort to build-your-own internal cloud which could surely encounter unexpected problems. A company’s long-term visions should also bear the open-mindedness for its own sake.

On Leadership and Management

Amorphous Business

In a recent interview with WSJ, the well-known former GE CEO Jack Welch and his wife Suzy Welch mentioned that the internet has made today’s business amorphous and more competitive than ever. “Now everyone knows everything”. And in fact everyone can compete on almost everything.

It is definitely a fact that there are no longer protected territories in today’s business environment. With the right ideas, all businesses, no matter small or large, can penetrate into each other’s territories and penetrate into once drastically different industries with unprecedented ease enabled by the unprecedented speed in technology innovations.

Such examples are plenty today:

– Telecommunication once had been a long-standing industry with a few larger players. However, Google has started laying out Fiber Optic cables in cities and offering internet services directly to customers.

– Auto industry was straightly a territory for “Big Three” in the US for decades. However a few years after the dust of “the Rusty Belt” has settled, technology firms Google and Apple are now rolling up sleeves to build a future technology-driven automobile industry.

– Since the major consolidation from 50+ companies in 1980s, about 90% of the American media services (news, newspapers and TV programs, etc) have been controlled by 6 large corporations such as News Corp, Disney, Time Warner, GE, etc.. Yet today, numerous startups are entering into the online “social media” arena, which has forced these large media giants to spend millions on acquisitions to stay current. For example, News Corp spent $25 million in 2013 for Storyful, a Dublin-based “social news” startup. Moreover, Netflix or even Amazon are also becoming TV content providers which are directly competing with them.

– The very ancient businesses of money transfers, currency exchanges or loan-making are no longer banks’ protected space today. Growing numbers of tech startups are now offering global money transfer, peer-to-peer lending or digital currencies such as Bitcoin.

These stories are everywhere. Almost no traditional industry has escaped the current waves of threats. Welcome to the age of disruptive innovations!

With the right innovative ideas, technologies can enable everyone to get into everyone else’s business, by new products, services or unique business models. The business competitions are no longer limited to a particular industry, territory or country, but can appear in every corner on the globe. With the transparent and amorphous nature of the business of this age, the challenges are increasingly daunting for today’s business leaders. While businesses with legacies face huge changes and transformations, however new businesses demand broad mindsets and bold innovations, they also require focus and sustainable growth. We will likely expect many more business lessons along with exciting growth or survival stories, as if everyone is learning on the same page.

Trend of Technology

The Future of Personal Vehicles

Americans’ love of automobiles has always been legendary. A personal vehicle is not only a personal transportation means, but also a symbol of freedom and (almost) personality. After all, a car is usually the second largest purchase we make in life, right behind buying a house, and we are at its close company every day.

A car is also a complex technology ensemble. Unsurprisingly, with the backdrop of today’s exciting technology developments on all fronts, so many new innovations can be assembled and reflected in the making of a car. If one looks at 2015 new models of cars or trucks, technology connectedness has already become a common theme with most of the vehicles equipped with touch-screen GPS and mobile connections. Navigation, communication and digital media services are easily present.

Auto industry is due for some truly exciting changes. Google’s driverless cars are already a reality although yet to be commercialized. In progress today there are new design ideas with augmented-reality technologies which can turn a windshield into a 3D computer-graphic display of navigation and other key information. Apple, known for its revolutionary innovations on personal devices from its recent past, is now gearing up to make the next revolution in automobiles. A recently disclosed project called “Titan” piqued interests of many on what Apple may come up – an electric car competing with Tesla or a whole new level of technology experiences in a personal vehicle?

Many modern-day thinkers and leaders have already given plenty of thoughts on the future of transportation. Rapid changes of the world and societies will push for drastic departure from the traditional business models and vehicle designs in both automobile and transportation industries. Bill Ford pointed out the future need of a transportation ecosystem and a personal vehicle as a component of mobility and connectedness. Elon Mask went further and released a design of a super-fast hyperloop as a future mass transportation channel (See pic), which is targeted to solve many of today’s transportation challenges in highly congested areas.

Elon Mask's proposed Hyperloop
Elon Mask’s proposed Hyperloop

Technology will only enhance future individual freedom and mobility. Driverless cars will have their own usefulness and super-fast mass transit will surely be in the picture of future transportation, but people’s love of the freedom of driving is not going to wane. In fact the true revolutions in personal vehicles are indeed coming with the concept of “driving” redefined. Having appeared in the sci-fi movies multiple times, flying cars have long been dreamed of and imagined for decades in the past. Today many attempts are well on the way for these personal aerial vehicles (PAVs, see pic). With FAA’s quick catch-up proposals on drones these days, it’s reasonable to assume that regulatory limitations on many future unthinkable will not be too daunting after all in a changing world.

EU Project MyCopter Flying Car
EU Project MyCopter Flying Car
Bearing the speed and boldness of the current age, the début of flying cars in reality is within sight. Some news even said that the first one may be on sale as early as this year of 2015!

Global Business Environment

Will Africa Be the Next Frontier for Internet Innovations?

The disruptive nature of the Internet and the innovations sprung from its fertile ground have been the dominating theme of the 21st century so far. The trend will likely continue in the years to come. Today globally there are about 3 billion internet users (half from China with its population size), but the number could easily double in a couple of years, counting in mobile populations. Underdeveloped areas with large population concentration are expected to have the fastest growth.

Looking back, the internet market in China truly started booming with innovations only after Year 2000, when the Trans-Pacific Fiber Optic Cable Network was built and put into service (See TriStrategist’s 2013 blog on China’s Internet and Mobile Market). Before that, the networks and servers there were so slow to the outsiders that few from the West ever heard of any internet startup from China. Among the early innovators, Alibaba was founded in 1999 and Baidu was founded in 2000. Good timing seemed to have definitely played some roles in the success of these Chinese internet companies. Since then, the internet and mobile infrastructure in China have leapfrogged many of the western countries and enabled many more innovative startup companies, such as TenCent (the developer of WeChat) and Xiaomi (today’s largest smartphone maker in China), to mushroom and blossom onto the global stage of internet and mobile competitions in a few short years. As we know today Alibaba is now a $150 billion company and Xiaomi valued at $45 billion.

Looking at the remaining continents in the global village, Africa has long been neglected as the poor and unstable backcountry. Yet things are quietly changing. With 16% of its one billion population online, it already has the fastest growth of new mobile subscribers in 2014, surpassing even China and India. Companies like Huawei have long been working there to build telecommunication infrastructure and sell low-cost mobile phones. In recent years, Google has made huge investments with Google Blimps, satellites and fiber optic cable network to link Africa to its global internet expansion plan (Also see earlier blog on Google’s Disruptive Innovations). Late 2014, Google announced another $60 million investment for a new undersea fiber optic cable network from U.S. to Brazil, allowing data transfer speed up to 64 terabits per second. By its completion in 2016, it will ensure Google’s internet services to run smoothly all the way to the southern end of the African continent. Its Brazilian partner plans to directly connect Brazil to Africa via undersea fiber cable network at the same timeframe. With these factors and the attentions nowadays from big global companies and investors to the untapped markets, Africa is definitely posing as the next exciting frontier for many internet innovations in the coming years.

Although the current internet-enabled GDP is still very low in most of the African countries, timing seems to start favoring Africa. Following China’s internet growth model, African continent will benefit from the leapfrog in infrastructure building with even newer technologies and faster networks. Its huge young populations and growing middle-class are ripe for mobile innovations which can bypass the earlier web-based internet models. The disruptions have already been happening in finance, education, health, agriculture and many other areas. The economies are growing more rapidly with internet and mobile services in many countries there. The stability of the political situations is also improving with the information access getting more easily and freely, and the education level edging up.

We should be very optimistic that the world is evidently becoming a better place with internet and technology innovations.

Trend of Technology

Statistical Computing Language R and Its Potential Disruptions

In business environment, we are used to see Excel pivot tables, dashboard applications and data-and-chart loaded PowerPoint presentations for mission-critical reporting. Today, R language and extended tools have the potential of combining all of these functionalities, especially for statistical data analysis and data-driven graphical presentations into one dynamic workflow.

R is an open-source programming language for statistical computing. It has gained much popularity among data analysts and data scientists today. R objects and libraries support a wide range of statistical tools and graphical techniques. Its object-oriented programming model allows easy extension of R among other software programming languages. For example, it can combine C/C++, Fortran to handle heavy computational tasks and at the same time be called within JAVA, .NET or Python for business applications. It also supports a LaTeX-like documentation format.

The extended family tools of R are booming in open source world. RStudio, an open source startup, offers R Shiny Server, a web application framework based on R to produce interactive web applications and visualizations. R Shiny Server supports many data-binding widgets that can be easily dragged into web UI. Along with more sophisticated graphic tools such as Google Charts (with googleVis package, an interface of R and Google Charts APIs), many interactive pivots or dashboards can be built on the fly and displayed dynamically. With the ability to combine coding on the same page of the presentation, it offers greater capabilities in allowing dynamic contents online. One of the typical example is a Motion Chart (see pic), used for finance, traffic, voting, and many other areas that requires instant statistical handling of large amount of dynamic data and fast visual displays. These charts automatically bind data point-by-point on UI by design.

A Motion Chart Example
A Motion Chart Example

For enterprise users, the power of full automation on many data-driven business reporting is within reach. To use R-series tools, a backend data pipeline still needs to be built but not complicated. Today data analysts in many companies are exploring these tools to gain instant business values and visibility out of the typically tedious and often offline data analysis work. For example, eBay has been using R Shiny Server for reporting eBay Partner Network analytics.

Would R and its family tools be a disruptive solution to Excel pivots and PowerPoint for data presentations? Maybe. Only time will tell.

Trend of Technology

Columnar Database and In-memory Processing

Columnar Database, precisely as its name, means a database that primarily stores and processes data by columns, rather than by rows. Most of the traditional relational databases and OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) cubes store and access data by rows. Due to the increasing challenges brought by today’s Big Data problems, which require ever faster processing of huge amount of non-relational data, columnar database is referred more frequently in present-day database technology discussions.

The major advantages of columnar database are typically twofold: First, it offers more efficient compression of the data in storage blocks, which results in overall less storage space and smaller amount of data to load onto disk or memory. Second, due to both the compression and self-indexing nature of the columnar data, it can drastically reduce disk I/O requirements and offer much better query performance, especially for those column-oriented operations such as SUM or COUNT. If the query operations are performed on limited columns only for a large data set with millions or trillions of records, columnar database usually offers notable performance improvement. Today’s well-known commercial products of columnar database include HP Vertica and Amazon Redshift (in AWS offerings), etc.

With memory chip technologies keep improving, RAM price dropping and non-volatile memory technologies readily available at present, in-memory processing or in-memory database (IMDB) becomes naturally affordable and popular. When the entire database or large blocks of data are stored and directly processed in memory, without disk I/O overheads, query performance can be significantly faster and predictable. Under such scenarios, the performance differences of row-based vs. column-based processing for a standard-size database may be less of a concern. Many enterprise database providers are exploring in-memory processing as their fast DB or Big Data solutions today. For example, in-memory options in Microsoft SQL Server 2014, IBM Informix, Oracle RDBMS, etc.

In the coming cloud world, distributed data stores will become more common. When huge amount and large variety of data need to be accessed across various storage units and processed at the same time with hybrid processing nodes, smart optimizations on storage, retrieval mechanisms and query performance may still demand careful considerations. We will likely see more data technology innovations and solutions with more intelligent designs and optimization algorithms built in.

Random Thoughts, Trend of Technology

Virtual Reality or Parallel Reality?

If ever possible, we all crave for expanded realities beyond the plain physical world that is experienced only through our limited basic senses.

From motion detection, eyeball tracking, to an instant fantasy world by putting on some 3D goggle or headset, human-interacting media reality or virtual reality (VR) are definitely joining the new technology fanfare nowadays. Whether it is Google’s expensive Google Glass, Oculus Rift VR headset (Oculus was purchased by Facebook in 2014), Razer’s OSVR headset, or the coming Sony, Samsung and many other vendors’ new VR gadgets, the current-day implementations of the VR are to distort our brain to accept the existence of the virtual world and the virtual connections with the visual contents presented – as if we are living and reacting at the same time with another place outside our immediate physical, where we seem to be, see, hear and touch with the objects and surroundings presented in the media or game. However in such scenarios, our brain always knows in advance that these are pure “virtual” and not real.

Star War Hologram Jedi Meetings
Star War Hologram Jedi Meetings
TriStrategist thinks that the frontier of the VR technologies will well be moved outside content visualization and gaming soon enough. In fact some of the best VR ideas we hope to see in the future and have imagined so far are again already in the sci-fi movies. Those Star War Jedi meetings had great communication channels where everyone can be called upon in real time through holograms no matter where their physical bodies are traveling in the universe. The realization of such VR technologies may not be far at all, just as we have to believe that humans could definitely colonize other planets with the advancements of technologies in the not-so-distant future.

To expand our actual reality, one way is to create another virtual or fake “reality”, then trick our brain to believe it and gather our basic senses around it. However, through further studies and advancements of modern physics, cosmology, biology, neuroscience, psychology, and of course aided by future technologies, we may well discover the existence of real ultra worlds which are yet to be detected or proved today. The parallel universe and wormhole theory could be the start, but the existence of other parallel realities could also be valid although they are still beyond our scientific understanding or even imagination today. Nature has vast unknowns waiting to be explored by us which could fundamentally change our concepts about space, time, energy, the power of our brain and undefined senses. If one day the parallel universe or parallel reality is proved true, we will be thrilled to no end. As we open our minds, seek and believe, the possibilities will be truly endless.

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