(Credit:
Wolfram Research)
Stephen Wolfram has a track record of scientific breakthroughs and some controversy. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1979 when he was 20 and has focused most of his career on probing complex systems. In 1988 he launched Mathematica, powerful computational software that has become the gold standard in its field. In 2002, Wolfram produced a 1,280-page tome, A New Kind of Science, based on a decade of exploration in cellular automata and complex systems. The book stirred up a lot of debate in scientific circles. Legendary physicist Freeman Dyson described the tome as "a case of style over substance." (See Steven Levy's Wired profile of Wolfram).
In May, Wolfram will unveil his latest creation, now called Wolfram Alpha. It applies his work with Mathematica and NKS (A New Kind of Science) to Web search. "All one needs to be able to do is to take questions people ask in natural language, and represent them in a precise form that fits into the computations one can do," Wolfram said in a recent blog post. "I'm happy to say that with a mixture of many clever algorithms and heuristics, lots of linguistic discovery and linguistic curation, and what probably amount to some serious theoretical breakthroughs, we're actually managing to make it work...It's going to be a website: www.wolframalpha.com. With one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms," he added.
It follows the Google principle, with a simple input box, but takes a different approach to rendering search results. Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, which developed Twine, an ambitious "interest network" Web application based on semantic Web technologies, said that Wolfram Alpha may be as "important for the Web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose."
Spivack shared his initial impressions of Wolfram Alpha based on a two-hour conversation with Wolfram.
"Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn't merely look them up in a big database."
"In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn't understand the question or the answer, and doesn't compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge."
Spivack gave some insight as to how the Wolfram's search engine works:
Wolfram Alpha is a system for computing the answers to questions. To accomplish this it uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, that represent real-world knowledge.
For example, it contains formal models of much of what we know about science -- massive amounts of data about various physical laws and properties, as well as data about the physical world.
Based on this you can ask it scientific questions and it can compute the answers for you. Even if it has not been programmed explicity to answer each question you might ask it.
But science is just one of the domains it knows about--it also knows about technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, travel, people, music, and more.
It also has a natural language interface for asking it questions. This interface allows you to ask questions in plain language, or even in various forms of abbreviated notation, and then provides detailed answers.
The vision seems to be to create a system which can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media).
Wolfram's engine isn't going to replace Google, according to Spivack, although he suggests Google would like to own it.
"You would probably not use Wolfram Alpha to shop for a new car, find blog posts about a topic, or to choose a resort for your honeymoon. It is not a system that will understand the nuances of what you consider to be the perfect romantic getaway, for example--there is still no substitute for manual human-guided search for that. Where it appears to excel is when you want facts about something, or when you need to compute a factual answer to some set of questions about factual data."
For now, we'll have to wait until May to see whether the Web and scientific worlds embrace Wolfram's Alpha as a major mathematical and engineering breakthrough.
Read Nova Spivack's "Wolfram Alpha is Coming -- and It Could be as Important as Google"
See also: VentureBeat: Wolfram Alpha -- it's like plugging into an electronic brain
With 2008 coming to an end, the data miners at Google, which performs more than 60 percent of searches worldwide, have compiled their Zeitgeist lists of the most popular search terms.
These latest lists include these categories: U.S., top of mind, politics, trendsetters, showbiz, sports, and around the world.
In the category of fastest-rising global searches (comparing 2007 with 2008 searches), Sarah Palin comes in at No. 1 and President elect Barack Obama at No. 6, trailing "beijing 2008," "facebook login," Tuenti" (the equivalent of Facebook in Spain), and "Heath Ledger."
In other words, Sarah Palin's more than 15 minutes of fame catapulted her into the search stratosphere.
Fastest rising global searches
1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers
Google also looked at trends, such as green issues, social networks, and most popular cocktails. The venerable martini tops the cocktail list, while Facebook is the top social-network search term.
(Credit:
Google)
From a global perspective, Google's YouTube was the most pervasive search term of 2008, making almost every country list and topping many of them. The growth of YouTube, which is the sources of about 40 percent of video streams in the U.S., indicates the massive shift toward Web video from other forms of media and entertainment.
Eariler this month, I spoke with Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla and creator of JavaScript. We discussed the development process for the open-source Firefox browser, the status of Firefox mobile, and new competition.
Eich maintained that increasing competition from Google and Apple, as well as Microsoft, is good for developers and users. It also helps that the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation garnered $75 million in revenue, mostly from its search partnership with Google, which ironically just launched Chrome, a competitor to Firefox. With $33 million in expenses last year, it appears the Mozilla team is well funded to continue development at a rapid pace and attract top talent.
Regarding competition with Google's Chrome and other browsers, Eich said:
It's really a neck and neck race. There is a contest going on not only between Google and Mozilla but also Apple to have the fastest JavaScript engine, to have the best performance on various benchmarks. This is great. Competition is good for users and for Web developers. Another focus for us, especially for me is the Web developers...We are right in there, we are slugging it out. On the Google benchmarks their JavaScript engine is faster, on Apple's benchmarks we're faster than Google currently. It is going to vary, you are going to see it go back and forth, so it is only going to go up, which is the best thing for developers and that is what we are focused on.
Watch the video
OpenSocial is growing up fast. What started out as Google's effort to create a common application programming interface for developing small applications that can tap into multiple social-networking services is becoming a full-fledged development platform.
(Credit:
Ben Metcalfe)
According to the OpenSocial Foundation, it has garnered a potential audience of 600 million users, with 7,500 compliant applications developed so far and 20 containers (hosts for social applications) supporting the APIs within the last 12 months. The Google spin-off incorporated itself as a nonprofit foundation to ensure support from a broad range of social-networking competitors, including Yahoo, MySpace, Hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, and Xiaonei, China's largest social network.
Giants Facebook and Microsoft, however, have so far not jumped on the OpenSocial bandwagon. Facebook has 125 million active users around the world, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seeking to establish Facebook as an "open" application platform and so far is holding off on endorsing OpenSocial. Facebook investor Microsoft, which last week introduced a social dimension to its Windows Live platform, is in the midst of rolling out a cloud services development platform.
David Glazer, director of engineering at Google
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET News )The large OpenSocial contingent, plus Facebook and Microsoft, are all advocates of open Web standards, but they are in a competition for developers. "Everyone doing social stuff is interoperable at some level of the stack," said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google. "Facebook and Microsoft are using a big chunk of the open stack. Open architectures are all converging. It's moving fast--last year, there was no such thing as a social platform."
He pointed to collaborative efforts on OpenID, OAuth, and Portable Contacts as examples of open Web standards that are in various stages of adoption. But the OpenSocial notion of "write once, run anywhere" doesn't fly without Facebook and Microsoft joining in, or the three major platforms providing a level of interoperability and compatibility beyond common Web standards.
OpenSocial is also being positioned as more than a platform for basic widgets (gadgets in Google parlance). "We are going to see application-to-application hooks, which will blur the difference between things in the box (container) and lots of different surfaces working together," Glazer said. "We will definitely see enterprise applications."
There might come a day when Microsoft Office or Google Docs & Spreadsheets are among the top OpenSocial applications, said Alan Hurff, senior vice president of engineering at MySpace and president of the Board of OpenSocial. However, enterprises more slowly adopt new technologies, such as social networks and mashups, and must have a return-on-investment justification to fund deployments.
Some of the future improvements to the OpenSocial platform will include better development tools (Visual Studio-like tool to speed development), payment platforms, analytics, cross-container portability, and mobile-application support. "We need to make it easier for developers to build applications, reach users, and make money. From where we started, the platform has gone a long way in the right direction," Glazer said.
In regards the OpenSocial code, version 0.9 is due out at the beginning of next year. Glazer was asked to speculate on when version 1.0 would be released. "The functionality of 0.9 feels 1.0-worthy. But we don't want to stretch beyond what we know," he said.
OpenSocial is still an infant, but it has big ambitions to stretch out as a major application development platform for the cloud.
Updated at 11 a.m. to clarify that the change.gov site with the YouTube video of the Obama's radio address has text links to the same video on AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. YouTube still has premier position as the secretary of video...
It's great that President-elect Barack Obama is delivering his regularly scheduled Saturday address in both audio and video form. After using the Internet to help him get elected and connect with younger voters, it's clear that his team will continue to exploit the media to deliver its messages and stimulate dialog.
Obama has chosen to upload the video of his Saturday address to Google's YouTube, by far the most dominant video-sharing service, and embed the video on his Change.gov transition site.
The video has already garnered more than 500,000 views, and this is just the beginning of the Obama's administration's use of video. Post-inauguration, there will likely be a White House YouTube channel to push the administration's agenda and to hopefully to provide more transparency.
My question is why favor YouTube? It's obvious that YouTube is the way to reach the most people. According to Nielsen Online's VideoCensus, Google's service served 5.35 billion video streams in September 2008. Yahoo, the closest competitor, had 264 million.
But why should the incoming president, or public official, favor one Internet video service over another? Yahoo, MSN, Blip, Veoh, and other video-sharing sites shouldn't have to lobby the White House for equal time or at least some time. I am sure the choice of YouTube was practical, and has nothing to do with Google CEO Eric Schmidt's very public support of Obama.
Implicit product endorsements are difficult to avoid for any public official. If Obama prefers a BlackBerry, Apple can't do much to fix that problem. But, Obama is rarely seen in pictures with his Blackberry and The New York Times reports that he is going to have to give up his favorite communications device.
In the case of uploading video, the Obama team can create its own branded, video-sharing service neutral video player that allows anyone in the world to embed the content. That might be a more equitable way for Obama to spread his message, and he could still have a YouTube channel.
(Credit:
change.gov)
On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I talk about the tanking economy, the challenges facing an Obama administration CTO, and Microsoft's search quests with Verizon Wireless and Yahoo.
The holiday shopping season is looking grim as Circuit City files for bankruptcy and Best Buy lowers its forecast for its fiscal year. When will it ever end?
President-elect Obama has called for a national CTO. Given the complexity of technology infrastructure, the abundance of projects, the squeeze on budgets, and policy controversies, this will be an extremely challenging position.
We also discuss Microsoft's next moves to increase its share of the search market, with Verizon Wireless or Yahoo, or both.
SAN FRANCISCO--"We don't control the platform. It's magical when it belongs to all of us." Those were the words of Vic Gundotra, who spent 15 years at Microsoft and is now leading Google's application development efforts. He was speaking about the open Web, and Google's open sourcing of much of its code to the developer community at large at the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday.
David Treadwell, vice president of Live Platform Services, took issue with his former colleague's statement about Google not controlling the platform. "If you want to be open, where is the open search and ads?" he said. Gundotra responded that not all parts of the platform have to be open. "The Internet has places to build businesses," he countered. Gundotra closed with, "The big story over the last 10 years is Windows versus the Web, and the Web has won." Treadwell just smiled or grimaced and let it go as the panel came to an end.
Google's Vic Gundotra and Microsoft's David Treadwell
(Credit: CNET News/Dan Farber)It's clear that Google plans to use its free and open Web strategy to attack Microsoft, but based on the PDC announcements last month the Windows company has a lot of ammunition to fight back.
This week Microsoft gave evidence that it will continue to be a major force for at least the next decade. The company outlined its products and strategies that more fully embrace the "cloud," such as the Azure set of cloud services; Web-based, lighter-weight versions of Microsoft Office applications; and the latest iteration of the Live Mesh middleware. Google may have won the search war, but Microsoft isn't about to cede the global cloud to the search engine giant.
Ray Ozzie explains Azure to CNET News correspondent Ina Fried.
As in past epochs in its 33-year history, Microsoft ties its success to the developer community, having an army of loyal, or at least well or modestly compensated, software warriors. The Microsoft mantra is: "Build a platform and an ecosystem of developers, partners, fans, and people willing to spend their money will follow." A compelling platform and the potential to reach a large audience of buyers, which Microsoft can deliver, attract the developers, who build the applications and services that attract consumers and business users.
Microsoft also now understands that its platform must span every kind of device--PC, notebook, smartphone, car, home, etc.--and offline scenarios. Microsoft missed the Web search revolution, but it's not going to miss out on the much bigger revolution--the move to the cloud over the next two decades.
Google is building a competing ecosystem from the ground up with similar characteristics and a desire to attract millions of developers. Amazon is pushing its elastic computer cloud, and Rackspace, EMC, IBM, and many other companies are trying to get a piece of the action. Most the cloud companies are focused on hosting services, but the biggest piece will be platforms-as-a-service with developers creating and running their applications for on a cloud operating system.
An early example of this trend is Salesforce.com's proprietary Force.com platform. Sun Microsystems, the company that coined the phrase "The network is the computer," has all the pieces to construct a planetary cloud but seems to be missing from the discussion. As my friend Steve Gillmor notes, Sun is on the ropes.
Openness is a major issue as the global cloud materializes. Businesses don't want to be locked into a particular cloud, and also want various clouds and services to interoperate via standards. Speaking at the Professional Developers Conference last week, Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie said that the foundation level in the operating system cloud would run in Microsoft's data center, but SQL services, .NET, and Live services can be mixed and matched by developers inside and outside of the company's datacenters. The Azure cloud is also cross-platform, but the various clouds will extract a toll and by nature it won't be dead simple to move applications using foundation services from one cloud to another.
Microsoft's cloud computing efforts have gotten off to a slow start compared with competitors, and it's on the scale of a Manhattan Project for Windows. Azure is in pre-beta and who knows how it will turn out or whether consumers and companies will adopt it with enough volume to keep Microsoft's business model and market share intact. But there is no turning back and Microsoft has finally legitimized Office in the cloud.
Ray Ozzie has a track record of slowly but surely getting things done and Microsoft is famously persistent and cash rich. But building a platform, or Internet operating system, at planetary scale supporting billions of users and trillions of transactions per day, and having fleet Google as a primary competitor will be a major test of Microsoft's brain trust and resolve. Don't be surprised to find a recharged Bill Gates parachuting into the fray as Azure evolves and the cloud war for developers escalates.
See also:
Scoble: Never underestimate Microsoft's ability to turn a corner
Guest post: Jean-Louis Gassée explains how Microsoft's future business model will borrow from both Apple and Google to compete with the free world of software. The essay was originally posted on Monday Note.
Jean-Louis Gassée
(Credit: Dan Farber)Unix is the problem or, rather, the free Open Source implementations of its function set called Linux and FreeBSD, to name the best-known variants. While Windows Server and Exchange still reign for many Enterprise applications, tens of millions of Web sites run on Linux of FreeBSD software. Further, the Open Source nature of such software encourages sophisticated users to modify the operating system to fit their specific hardware configurations or applications requirements. For example, Google designs and manufactures (!) its own servers and customizes the Open Source OS they run. There's even a rumor they "roll their own" 10-gigabit Ethernet switches but I don't know vouch for that one. In any event, imagine how much the Google account would be worth to Microsoft if the Mountain View company used Windows Server? Knowledgeable readers will immediately object: Google running Windows Server isn't realistic. Not for price reasons but because Microsoft's server software isn't technically suitable for large "server farms" such as Google's. True. It'll be interesting to look at what Microsoft uses for its own Live cloud. In the past, Microsoft has had to resort to "other" server software for applications such as Hotmail. But, "scalability issues" (the ability to grow to serve very large server farms) aside, Microsoft is losing against free server software for the millions of simpler Web servers sprouting all over the world. And, as Linux and its cousins mature, they will inevitably make inroads in Enterprise applications where Microsoft still leads. Open Source competitors to Exchange do exist, they're not yet a strong threat but, if they keep improving, they will erode Microsoft very juicy server business.
On the desktop, Linux is trouble again, but much less so than in server farms. For consumers, as opposed to technically versed sysadmins, ease of use is still a strong plus for Windows. I bought two identical Asus EeePC netbooks, one running Windows, the other a Linux distribution. Windows is still much easier to use and update, Linux is still a little rough on normal humans. One example out of many glitches: the version I used didn't remember Wi-Fi access points and passwords. I had to re-enter everything each time I turned the machine on. This type of problem has prevented Linux from gaining much ground on the desktop.
But this could change: the success of netbooks, their large unit volumes could encourage a manufacturer such as Asus, Acer or Lenovo to invest in the needed polish to make a Linux-based netbook as easy to use as a PC or Mac -- or close enough at a much lower price. And the name, netbook, reminds us it might not need today's (or is it yesterday's?) full suite of robust desktop applications to succeed--it will run applications on/from the Cloud. Imagine a Google netbook.
Lastly, smartphones. Ballmer tries to change the subject by suggesting Apple ought to license its iPhone OS as opposed to keeping it all to itself. Let's skip over Microsoft's proprietary Xbox and Zune software and, perhaps, the upcoming Danger smartphone. Danger, the maker of the Sidekick PDA, is the company Microsoft bought earlier this year,. Microsoft has been selling Windows Mobile licenses for close to eight years now. In the licensing business, the iPhone isn't the real competition, Android is. How do you compete with a free smartphone OS, and a good one at that, which is supported by Google Cloud applications?
My guess is Steve Ballmer is working on a combined answer, one that is sketched before our very eyes already. Microsoft's Live services are but a rehearsal for a much bigger act, Microsoft's Cloud OS, sometimes called Strata. And, based on Microsoft's own Cloud services, we'll see a Danger-based smartphone, as proprietary as the Xbox and the iPod competitor Zune. Put another way, Microsoft's future business model will borrow from Apple and Google, it will have two components: proprietary devices and "universal" Cloud services. And like its models, it will attempt to extract extra profits by nicely tying both components together. For example: iPods are tied to the iTunes service, Android phones might (we don't know yet) better enjoy Google applications.
Interesting times ahead.
Jean-Louis Gassée is a general partner at Allegis Capital. Prior to his venture capital career he founded Be, Inc., which was sold to Palm in 2001. Gassée also held several positions at Apple Computer. He started Apple France in 1981, and in 1985 became president of the Apple Products Division. Earlier in his career Gassée as worked at Data General, Exxon Office Systems and Hewlett-Packard.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt
(Credit: Dan Farber)According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the Internet is a "cesspool" where false information thrives. As reported by AdAge, Schmidt was addressing his remarks to magazine executives who were on a pilgrimage to the Googleplex.
The cesspool is one of the byproducts of the Internet. With no barriers to entry and nearly frictionless production and distribution, it's easy for false information, lies, doctored images, and other forms of deception to infiltrate the Internet. Web crawlers aren't particularly good at making judgments about the truthiness of digital matter, and the wisdom of the crowd can't keep up with the river of data streaming online.
Schmidt gave the magazine publishers hope for their future. Brands, he said, are the way to rise above the cesspool, and of course he is right. The corollary is that advertising via Google and its brethren is an essential way to build and sustain a brand.
But brands, even those with long, venerable histories and massive ad budgets, can be decimated as we have seen over the last decade and in the current economic nuclear winter, with banks, automakers, publishers, and retailers fading away.
Offline revenues, especially for newspapers, have been in steady decline, and online revenues are not making up the difference. As a result, there is less editorial investment from so-called mainstream media in the primary and investigative reporting that is often fodder for blogger refactoring. But the blogosphere and newer online publishing entities, such as GigaOm, Politico, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, and VentureBeat, are bringing new, or at least alternative, voices into the mix, contributing far more to the good side than to the cesspool.
Schmidt and the magazine publishers reportedly expressed concern about the cost and quantity of what high-value (exemplary journalism) content. "Narrative sustains the [media] business...but the future of high-quality journalism is a huge problem. A reasonable prediction is that there will be fewer voices. More money is needed to fund high-quality work," Schmidt said as reported by the Huffington Post. With a major economic contraction underway, funding high-quality work will become even more difficult.
Relying solely on advertising revenues hasn't proven to be a winning strategy for most publishers. Unfortunately, Web users come from a place in which paying for content is not part of the culture. If people are willing to pay $4.99 for six hamburger buns or $3.50 for a simple cup of coffee, why aren't they willing to pay for content they value? One can only assume that people are willing to settle for content of generally less value that is free of charge--or that hamburger buns are more essential to life than a good, well-researched story.
