Events I will be speaking at ...

I'm happy to say that I've been invited to give a keynote at OSCON this year and I'll also be providing a general session track on cloud computing.

Events I won't be speaking at ...

I've heard of lot of rumblings about various cloud conferences having excessive vendor bias. I suspect I know why.

I offered to speak at two upcoming cloud conferences and have been turned down. Fair enough, I might put a lot of work into speaking but I'm hardly a digerati.

I've then subsequently been told that I could speak if I paid £2,000+ or Canonical hired a booth. Wow, so speaker selection is no longer based upon the topic, the quality of the talk but instead how much cash you've got?

No wonder there are rumblings.

Enterprise 2.0 Summit at Cebit

The Enterprise 2.0 Summit at CeBIT was the first conference that I've moderated. Wow, was I nervous.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, the speakers were truly fantastic, the audience wonderful and the organisers Bjoern Negelmann and Kongress Media had done a fantastic job.

I was also given the opportunity to give the opening and closing talks. So I've made a video of each (I've just re-recorded them as I don't have audio from the conference itself.).

Opening Talk

Closing Talk

There and back again ...

I'm off to Enterprise 2.0 Summit at Cebit.

I'm looking forward to catching up with Jenny and Euan as well as many others (including Dion Hinchcliffe - excellent!)

The schedule and program looks fantastic. Bjoern and his team have put together some outstanding speakers and I get to introduce them all!

There will be ducks ....

CFPs in the wild ....

I've spoken at a number of conferences over the years, however it has been more by accident than design. For those who are interested in speaking at a conference, a key starting point are the "calls for (participation or papers)" or CFPs which are occasionally broadcast on the web. Finding out about these is sometimes tricky, as there doesn't seem to be any canonical source for CFPs.

Now I'm not starting that canonical source (I'm hoping a friend of mine is going to do this) but in the meantime I thought I'd keep a list of current CFPs in the wild.

If you know of any other CFP which should be on the list, please tell me. Thx.

• LIFT 2008, Geneva - 20th Jan
• XTech 2008, Dublin - 25th Jan
• Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco - 31st Jan
• FOSDEM, Brussels - 31st Jan
• OSCON, Portland - 4th Feb
• Agile Development, Toronto - 25th Feb

Phew .... sanity restored.

These days I do very little in the 3D printing world except keep tabs on how the industry is progressing. Awareness of the field is becoming more mainstream now, though I'm not sure if people have really thought through all the consequences yet.

For anyone who is interested, I've created a video (below) of the last fabrication talk I gave back at EuroOscon in Sept. 2006. It covers the usual suspects of fabrication, ducks, open hardware, environment, commoditisation and spime script.

Of course, these talks are never quite the same without the sound of the audience.

Back in 2002/03 when I undertook a development program at the IMD, I really hammered home the point about 3D printing. Most people didn't believe it then and thought I was somewhat odd. They nicknamed me "crazy guy".

Back in 2000 when I talked about it, people always looked at me as though I was mad, and I mean genuinely "mad".

Before that date, people always acted as though I was telling some sort of joke and had forgotten to add the punchline. We never usually got to the "you're mad" stage.

So I must admit I was delighted to recently receive an email from my tutor saying he was reading an article about 3D printing in the NYT. Also, today, I came across Tom Easton's blog in which he says he is going to look at writing a book on the impact of 3D printing and the effects on business models (aka commoditisation of the manufacturing process).

It's amazing how quickly things spread and sanity is restored.

I really hope Tom puts 3D printing firmly on the map, the same way Nick Carr did with commoditisation of IT.

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin

I've uploaded a video of my Web 2.0 Expo Berlin talk below. Unfortunately there was no audio available, so I've had to record myself speaking in the hotel - doesn't seem quite the same without an audience.

I had a small but really pleasant crowd turn up - not surprising since I was up against some superstars from Google.

There is a lot of buzz about open social, I should check it out myself in more detail. I do hope it is as really open as it sounds.

Web 2.0 Expo - Preview

The guys from BerlinBase caught up with me in the corridor at web 2.0 Berlin, so we created a quick video of what I'm going to be talking about on Tuesday. I've posted it here.

FOWA - Video

Mel and Ryan from Future of Web Apps have sorted me out the audio, so I've uploaded the video below.

I'm going to be giving a re-run of the talk at a small event called TEN (a mix of Cambridge and London based geeks) organised by Rufus Evison and John Woods. It's in London on Wednesday 31st at 6pm at the Pitcher and Piano, 42 Kingsway, just near Holborn Tube. It's fairly informal and limited in size, but you're welcome to turn up - just ping us an email and I'll ask them to add you to the invite list.

I'll also cover some of themes which I'm going to explore at Web 2.0 Berlin.

Still no video?

Nope

In the meantime, I'll just note that Tim is talking about Atoms, a field which I have taken an interest in for some time.

I've dug up an old presentation from 2003, which I gave a slightly modified version of at Euro Foo in 2004.

It's a bit basic, well it's a bit pants .... but it serves as a very general introduction into the field. So I'll post the slides here.

[Corection - had some problems with slideshare - so I'll just provide a link to download the file or you can go to slideshare directly.]

I should really post up the EurOscon version as a video ... but since I'm going to be combining this with the FOWA stuff - including the different metholodogies needed for CA / CODB, the stack is bigger than just SaaS / FaaS / HaaS and the problem with patents & ROI - all into one monstrous web 2.0 expo talk, I thought I'd wait.

Audio --

Still waiting for the audio, so the video will be a bit later.

In the meantime I've posted the slides with slideshare. For some reason the encoding they use has messed up a few slides and the transcript is just gobbledygook and I can't seem to find a way of removing it.

I note that they use S3 - and for some reason this crashed my preview in blogger - oh well. Still at least it's a fairly easy way of getting slides up, though not quite as easy as video.

The previous talk ...

Whilst I wait to get my hands on the audio for my FOWA talk, I thought I'd post a video of my slides from OSCON 2007. It's an earlier and shorter version.

I'll be exploring all these themes in more detail at Web 2.0 Expo in November.

With thanks ...

Just finished my talk at FOWA, I'll upload the presentation tomorrow.

Before I do, I just want to say thanks to two masters of public speaking - Robert 'r0ml' Lefkowitz and Damian Conway.

Any small skill which I have in this field, I have learned from these fine speakers and I would encourage anyone, who has the chance, to listen to them.

I'm a great believer that plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery. So when it come to defining a new computing term, rather than using the neologism, fungitility, I took Robert's advice:-

instead of using words which already have common uses, we should dig up archaic words which might or might not have related meaning and just use those, since no one knows what they mean anyway and it makes you sound erudite to use them.

So Patration it is. Obviously, everyone knows that patration means “the freedom and portability to move from one service provider to another without hinderance or boundaries"

Thank you Robert and thank you Damian.

Also thanks to Ryan, Simon, Lisa, Mel and Dan who made my attendance at FOWA such a pleasure.

And now for something completely different

Well, after almost seven years at Fotango - I have decided it is time to look for a new challenge. I've had a wonderful time at Fotango, the team has been outstanding and a real pleasure to work for.

I'm intending to finish my employment in October, which will give enough time to manage a handover.

After that? Well I've a few ideas .... I'll see what happens.

My one regret, is that we didn't get to open source Zimki and instead we have had this period of uncertainty over the month or so. I'm still hopeful that Zimki will be open sourced, it is in my view the right thing to do and there is a huge potential for new business.

This is my first OSCON, and overall it has been excellent ... interesting talks and a good chance to meet up with friends again.

Despite my usual nerves, the keynote went quite well ... I can now afford to take some time to relax.

Free Trade ...

Mike Olson commented that low cost distribution has been the key benefit of open source. He says that this can be achieved by other models and open source of the code is itself not key, merely a tactic.

I agree with Mike that access to read or modify the source is not the key benefit of open source. Most people rarely do this. According to Rishab Ghosh's FLOSS report many people aren't even aware that the technology they use is open source.

Question -"Do you use open source?"

Answer - "No, we use apache and linux."

However, a consequence of open source is freedom. With open sourced code, there is no market exclusivity and no lock-in to a vendor. Competition is on service alone, it creates a more perfect market.

With the future utility computing worlds of HaaS, FaaS and SaaS - where the need of a service is ubiquitous - this distinction is at the heart of the looming battles between monopoly providers and a marketplace.

So is the benefit of open source that the code is open .... absolutely, it's everything.

Shooting the messenger ...

At the executive briefing Eben Moglen lambasted Tim O'Reilly for his apparent focus on the trivial for the last decade and not the big issues about freedom.

Now I greatly admire Eben, his work on GPL and his passionate speeches about freedom.

Freedom is an acute issue for me. I'm concerned about the culture of fear and also the culture of vulnerability that we have allowed to grow as we have sleepwalked into the surveillance society within the UK. I'm more than aware of how rights have been eroded. I'm a great believer in more not less freedom.

However, any idea needs mediums to spread through in order to be heard. Tim has done an enormous amount of work in spreading the meme of openness to both the technical and business communities.

I say "openness" because this meme is not just about software (open source) but has spread to content (Web 2.0), hardware (open hardware), businesses (E 2.0) and it continues to spread further.

This meme carries the ideas of freedom. As such it needs to be defended, supported, and disseminated. It's anything but trivial.

While Eben makes valid points, Tim didn't deserve the blunderblus that Eben fired.

JSOPs .... buy, buy, buy.

Carrying on from my last post, I want to breakdown the terms SaaS, FaaS and HaaS.

SaaS (Software as a Service) is simply where your data resides in an application from a SaaS provider.

Ideally you want to be able to move your data from one provider of that application to another and know that service will continue to work - you're just switching provider after all. This means the application has to conform to a standard - whether it's a standard for a CRM app or a standard for ERP app or whatever type of app it is.

Before anyone argues that you cannot create standards for such apps, Salesforce supports the case that you can. Where an app is ubiquitous in an industry, it's just a cost of doing business and not a form of competitive advantage. You may want your own special flavour of electricity - I want mine standard, bland, reliable, competitively priced and to come out of a plug.

The common service providers of a standard app worry about how this app is delivered, the infrastructure, how it works and the service. As a user, I care that my data works here with this CSP of CRM and that I can swap to this CSP of CRM because of price or better service or whatever. No lock-in, no exit fees and no hidden surprises.

FaaS (Framework as a Service) is simply where your data and your application resides in a framework from a FaaS provider. Early examples of this include Zimki and BungeeLabs but neither are open sourced yet. [Dec'2009 - this is now known as PaaS or Platform as a Service]

The same is true with FaaS as it is with SaaS. I want multiple providers competing to give me the best price and service, a competitive utility market, with no lock-in, no exit fees and an easy swap from one provider to another.

HaaS (Hardware as a Service) is simply where your data, your application and your framework resides in a machine environment (virtual or otherwise) from a HaaS provider. Again the same rules apply, I want no lock-in, no exit fee and an easy swap - hence open source standards are again the order of the day.

I met Jeff Barr some time ago. I told him that in my opinion the smart thing would be for Amazon to open source EC2 & S3, encourage competitors and compete on price and service - take first leader advantage, establish the market. If they don't, someone else could disrupt their market by doing this to them. I asked Werner the same thing at FOWA and he talked about their "secret sauce". I reckon all that is needed is an open sourced utility computing engine being adopted by small ISPs and they are going to have a fight on their hands.

Monopoly vs Market - who do you think is going to win?

Of course, once this starts to happen, and it is fairly inevitable it will for infra-structural like services, there are whole new opportunities that appear. From exchanges to brokers.

Why bother dealing with a H/F/SaaS provider directly if portability exists, just get a broker to manage the service on your behalf to constantly get you the best price at the quality you need.

Think I'm kidding? Nope, this is where it is going. Which is great for business, the open source world and the new markets which will establish but a complete nightmare for those still selling an ERP app (as opposed to the manner of its use) as a source of strategic value.

If you don't like change, you're really going to hate the future.

All of this stuff has been obvious for about a decade, we waxed on about it at EuroFoo '04 and many of us were delighted that Carr had firmly put the subject on the map.

The first shoots of this have only just started to appear over the last eighteen months and sometimes these things take time.

A future exchange in computing resources? A futures market? Swaps on JSOPs (JavaScript Operations).

You betch'a.

Six years from now, you'll be seeing job adverts for computer resource brokers.

[Update July 2013 - I originally thought the smart play with Amazon would be to open source the technology to prevent themselves being disrupted by an open source play combined with exploitation of constraints e.g. increase demand through a price war beyond ability of Amazon to build. In this I was utterly wrong. 

What I hadn't factored in was the CEOs / CIOs of their competitors being so completely dozy and dopey that they would allow Amazon to walk away with the market right under their noses. You live and learn. Never underestimate the blindness of competitors.]

Web 2.0 Berlin

I submitted a proposal for Web 2.0 Berlin about a week ago, and then received a email from Brady about helping out in the advisory board.

Wow .. I didn't know what to say, other than "yes" of course, I'm very flattered.

So first order of the day, was to email (a very un-web 2.0 like approach) some friends and contacts I respect about their views on good speakers, what they would advise etc.

Unfortunately, my mistake, I sent out one email to all thirty-eight at the same time. It didn't take long to be told of my error!

However, I did get some very interesting replies, suggestions and had a discussion with Ben about Security and his feeling this is missing from the conference.

Well it's a valid point, and one I'll raise.

Now, as for trends ... well I don't agree with Ben that there are NO significant changes occurring.

I'd argue that change is constantly occurring, and the most significant seem to be driven by the meme that is "open source" causing a faster dissemination of novel and new ideas, an acceleration in innovation and increased creative destruction.

Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, utility computing etc are all consequences of this as the once novel and new becomes ubiquitous and common.

Now this was part of something which I started to write some time ago about the "entropy of innovation" - I'm very good at lame titles.

Anyway, today's discussion sparked a conversation with Jenny Ambrozek, so I'll add my notes that I made during and shortly after the FAST conference - they are very rough, and at some point I'll get my note book out and write a clearer post.

Rough thoughts

The open source concept created communities around creating software systems. However the meme has spread up the stack of software (from just operating systems to system applications to entire business applications) and out of the stack (creative commons on content, images etc).

The idea of communities sharing and collaborating on information which is often provided freely in an "open source" manner is what is starting to impact traditional news media. In the same way that open source collaboration became faster than proprietary development, the same would seem to be true in information aggregation.

The hidden power behind this all is that open source removes barriers to dissemination of ideas and content. This spurs on innovation, as it accelerates the rate at which the novel and new becomes ubiquitous and common.

You can see this effect in other areas, hence wikipedia become quickly the main source of knowledge on the internet - precisely because of its open and free nature, precisely because this encourages collaboration. If you don't encourage collaboration, then because of the open and free nature someone else will - hence the trio of open, free and collaboration are always combined.

This meme will travel into processes, including business processes and many other areas of human endeavour. It increases collaboration by removing the barriers of secrecy and the illusion of arcane knowledge. It's strongest affect is where it impacts infra-structural services - those used by all. Had HTTP not been released in an open and free manner, the world wide web would not have become the force it is today.

Hence enterprise 2.0 for me is merely an extension and spread of this meme into an organisation. Ultimately I expect to see more openness and collaboration between organisations as a result - hence my theme about the necessity for openness in business at Andrew Mcafee's session at FAST and why I agreed with Euan Semple's default position that the simplest thing is to do nothing ... it's going to happen to an organisation in any case ... assuming the organisation chooses to compete in this new world.

Federation ...

I've waxed lyrically for a very long time about the distinction between CODB (cost of doing business) vs CA (competitive advantage) in IT, commoditisation of IT and the need for a "national" grid of utility computing resources.

We covered many of these subject in detail, along with 3D printing & worth based development back in Euro 2004.

So it is interesting to see how things have developed since that time and a lot of the new companies arriving on the scene.

There are so many it is difficult to keep track, but I noticed recently this announcement of a SaaSGrid. The concepts seem similar to our Borg system (which we've been using internally since about 2003) and Zimki (which previously was called libapi and internally is known as fish - more on the naming of Zimki.).

A platform you can build another application on, you charge for it with a utility pricing model and you sell it forward with a utility pricing model. Excellent.

Though they don't seem to have launched yet, it is interesting. However, there is one disappointment for me - "do it all without technological lock-in" and "host it with patent pending scaling and reliability technology ...".

The key to generating a true federated grid and avoiding any lock-in, is and has always been an open and free standard (i.e. running code, an open source reference model for implementation which defines the standard). I'm talking at OSCON this year and most of my talk will be on this matter.

The people behind SaaSGrid seem to be Matt and Sinclair from SaaSBlogs. They seem smart enough cookies, and I wish them best of success.

I hope they consider the whole open standards issue of a federated grid, because this is where the real battle will be fought and is it really to everyones interest to create multiple competing standards?

My ignite talk

Mark Fowler has very kindly put my Ignite talk about commoditisation concepts onto Viddler.

This is a general light hearted overview of the ideas. If you want to get more details about what we are doing in this field, or find out about the open sourcing of Zimki then check the Zimki blog or come and see us at OSCON '07.

Now this was a talk prepared whilst jet lagged, with short notice (i.e that afternoon) and with the rule of 70 slides in 5 minutes. I was still writing it just before presenting.

Scary stuff....

I didn't quite make the 70 slides in 5 minutes, just over, but it was sooooo close.