I’ve just come back from Stratus’ Continuous Computing Summit in Orlando, where I’ve been looking at what you need to build a computer system with a maximum down time of less than 5 minutes a year…

The biggest message was that it’s not all down to your hardware - surprisingly, considering it was a conference organised by a hardware vendor. Yes, buying a Stratus box with its mirrored hot-swappable hardware will help a lot, but you’ve got a lot of other things to think about, too. It’s a long list, but your business will thank you once you’ve thought about it - and if you’re worried about what your FD or CFO will say, just remind him that less than 50% of businesses survive more than a year after a major data loss.

The usual people and process issues are important, and getting staff trained properly is high on the agenda. Accientally pulling ut a plug or resetting a key router will count as downtime to the outside world. There have been plenty of high profile web sites that have been taken out for hours by a mistaken flip of a power swtich, or a “quick reconfiguration” of the firewall. It doesn’t even need to be your fault - what about the power company, or the telco providing your bandwidth.

If you want to stay up, you need to be redundant everywhere. It’s not cheap. A redundant server alone will cost anything up to $400,000 dollars - and you’ll need to spend as much or even more on building your internal network. Then there’s the need for more than one connection to the outside world (preferrably on opposite sides of the building, so you don’t get taken out by an errant JCB). UPS isn’t enough, so you’ll want a couple of generators too.

You’ll also need to know what’s right next to your office. Buncefield may have been a one in a billion event, but there are oil and fuel storage facilities in trading estates all over the UK - along with a myriad propane tanks. And is that a main road going past? Who knows what’s driving down it today… It pays to be paranoid.

Then you’ll need a backup site. It’ll need to be a fair distance from your main facility, say 15 or 20 miles as a very minimum. You don’t need a complete replica of your operational systems - this is a business continuity site, so you just need to be able to keep your data available, along with key business processes. Not everything you do is essential to running your business, so you probably only need a copy of your HR records, not the full set of HR applications. You will need email, and you will need your CRM data.

Continuous computing, like all of business continuity, is a discipline that requires a lot of thought. Businesses have staff who need to think about many important issues. There’s the FD, the CIO, the CTO, the CSO, even the CMO. But who is the Chief Recovery Officer or the Chief Disaster Planner? Most managers have some responsibilities, but very few businesses have one person who needs to think about how to keep your business going in the event of a major disaster (or even if there’s just a big power cut).

Your old offices may be a smoking hole in the ground, but your customers shouldn’t need to know what’s happened.

–Simon

Smartphones, CrackBerries and ultra portable PCs ranging from tiny to just small enough to carry all the time are making us more effective on the move - and stretching the working day.
A couple of years ago I met and IT admin at Superdrug who was very happy to start in on his work email on his BlackBerry on the train to work - because it meant he could leave at 6pm rather than 8pm, because 20 minutes sorting things out in the morning avoids two hours of fixing things in the afternoon. Put remote access software on your smartphone and you can go out for dinner and connect in to restart a service rather than having to hang around the data centre half the evening (assuming you’re doing it securely). Outlook web Access, VPNs, Terminal Services, remote connections - with broadband you can get the same access when you work from home as if you’re in the office, which means the last obstacle to flexible working is the attitude of your manager.
There’s a terrible culture of ‘presentee-ism’ in the UK; no-one wants to leave the office before the boss. And managers don’t trust themselves to manage remote staff: if you can’t see your staff working, how do you know they’re actually doing anything? Well, you can go by results and trust your staff to do their job, or you can go by monitoring and make sure they’re not doing something other than work. I’d suggest the former because Big Brother isn’t the way to get the best work out of people: most people have pride in their work, and if you manage people well they will carry on being responsible even if you can’t see them.
Plus monitoring is going to give you some scary results. People do more with their PCs than spreadsheets, email and the odd game of solitaire these days. Some of it’s very productive - sorting things out in a quick IM conversation rather than going back and forwards for ten emails, researching things online, reading the technical blogs from Adobe and Microsoft to figure out solutions, flipping through books on O’Reilly’s Safari site (I haven’t looked at an O’Reilly book in print for months but I refer to them all the time), checking train times for a trip to a branch office, checking out the satellite view in Google Earth so you have an idea what the branch office building looks like so you can find it more easily or a quick look at BBC News to stay current on current affairs in case something happens that might make a difference to your business.
Some of it’s borderline work: as Anil Dash from Movable Type said to us last month, “if you have 50 employees at least one of them is blogging on company time so it might as well be about company things”.
But there are a lot of Web pages being accessed from work networks that you couldn’t say are anything to do with work. In the businesses that ScanSafe monitors, 49% of Web traffic in was recreational or downright not work-safe - gambling, music, porn. ScanSafe counts webmail in the 49% of traffic that’s not real work and I think I agree, but it’s probably better to keep planning five a side at the weekend off the company mail system, which could mean the figures come down to something a bit less like the Friday afternoon before you go on holiday.
Businesses don’t want employees wasting time and costing the company money for the bandwidth they’re using; ScanSafe customers are blocking ads (14%), chat and IM (12%), webmail (10% - and I’m not sure that’s a good thing), gambling, music and adult content (4% each). Blocking gambling sites is up from 3% in January, though you can’t tell whether that means more employees are trying to put a fiver on the 3pm at Kempton from the office or more businesses are worried they might.
Working from home, we have a semi-permeable working day; we can start late, stop for coffee (or a family emergency), go for a meeting and work in the evening to make up for it. By the look of it, many office workers are making a similar choice - taking some time for fun in the day and taking some work home to balance it out. Does that make you more relaxed or more stressed? How long can you actually be productive for without a break? How much of reading press releases and technology blogs is research and how much is displacement activity to avoid actually doing some work? What really counts as work, how much of it should you be doing and who gets to measure? Technology has given us a lot of possibilities and our culture hasn’t caught up with all of them.
-Mary

Mary: A couple of times a year, we catch up with Mark Anderson, a technology futurist who told Apple to take back Steve Jobs and calls Microsoft’s old monopolist ways “Bill’s billion dollar mistake”. He predicted outsourcing, VOIP, grid computing, laptops in schools, the rise of Microsoft (he couples them with Intel, Cisco and Dell as the four horseman of the apocalypse, taking the market up or down), Microsoft’s slide from dominance and half a hundred other trends we’ve seen come through.

Last week he was in town to talk to the CEOs and CTOs who read his newsletter and score how he’s doing on his ten predictions for 2007. Of course, being Mark it’s never actually just ten predictions. Leaving aside the purely economic and political ones (and while oil prices going and staying high affects everything and Russia turning back into a dictatorship is disturbing, we’ll skip on those), he’s saying for 2007:

1) We get e-phones in the US – phones you can pay with. The end of your wallet.

Mary: I love the idea – but mobile operators don’t want to be banks. Orange will do phones that can be Oystercard-style tickets but not this year and not for real payments.

2)

Authentication everywhere will be everywhere. – including thumbswipes on phones

Simon: Toshiba have just added them to their new smartphones. Next we need the applications, and perhaps the fact that Orange will be launching NFC applications in France in 2008 could drive this forward.

Mary: Microsoft has a prototype of CardSpace for Windows Mobile and the ITU has a working group on identity and authentication for telecoms.

Simon: If Symantec are right, and an identity can be purchased for less than $20, it’s a matter of when biometrics and two-factor authentication are everywhere, not if.

3) We see the first year of the electric car.

Mary: I’d say the year of the electric sports car, with the Tesla coming along. And clean technology is going to bring out a lot of new businesses…

Simon: I recently spotted a charging point for electric cars on a street in Covent Garden. Run by Westminster Council, it used tag-based payment for on-street charging and top-ups.

4) Online ads keep growing – at 20-30%. The river of money keeps flowing.

Mary: I agree with Mark when he calls Google the most unstable financial instrument known to man but the money is still coming…

Simon: One thing to note is that the proportion of ad spend per viewer is considerably lower for Internet advertising than for equivalent audiences in other media. If there is to be parity, then there’s still several tens of billions of dollars of ad money out there.
5) Parallel computing becomes everyday. “we turn the computer on its side and run many processes instead of trying to cram more electrons into a single channel”.

Mary: Mark is worried that we don’t yet have the compilers and languages and algorithms we need, after all this time building the hardware and I have an idea why. Parallel programming is hard!

Simon: Parallel programming is hard, but we don’t only need parallel programming to take advantage of multicore processing (at least not with the 2 and 4 core systems around now). Virtualisation is an old technology that has come back with a vengeance, and we can place virtual OS partitions on separate cores.

We also get scheduling advantages, with OSes being able to allocate applications to separate cores. On the programming side managed languages make it easier to write thread-safe code, and Intel is working on delivering compilers and libraries that can take advantage of the innate parallelism in common algorithms. Just parallelising your sorts can have a big advantage!

Mary: to start with just running Windows means running several processes in parallel, but in the long run I want my apps to speed up individually.

Simon: Adobe has said that it’s written its next tranche of applications to take advantage of multi-core systems. Let’s wait for the Photoshop benchmarks!

6) The year of the Flash wars. “we are looking at a year when 17 new chip fabs will be coming online, and most of them are in the NAND business. This means flash memory prices take a dive, flash-based computers take hold, and everything that can use memory will, and more of it…”

Mary: How much did you say a 2GB SDHC card is now?

Simon: I’ve just seen an advert for 4GB SDHC cards for less than £17… Which reminds me, I must order a couple!

Mary: Does it matter that it’s slower flash rather than faster flash?

Simon: Not really, unless you’re doing sports or news photography, where you need a fast write speed to clear the camera memory. Most casual photography is relatively slow, taking time to set up images. Occasional reaction shots can be accounted for by having enough fast in-camera memory to hold 5 or 6 images. Phones and MP3 players can deal with slow writes using cache RAM again, but they’re generally taking advantages of flash memory’s relatively  fast read speeds.

Mary: how about for ReadyBoost? Or hybrid drives and RAM drives like the one Sandisk is promising? I don’t think hard drives go away…

Simon: No, spinning disk is just too cheap to ignore - and it’s going to get cheaper (and faster). I remember a conversation with a lead researcher at Ricoh’s labs who pointed out that it’s actually more expensive (in terms of worker productivity) to delete files from disk storage than to just buy more disks when you need them.

7) The iPod keeps its hold in the MP3 player space but iTunes slips in favour of music services that let you do more with music. The Zune will be considered a failure, no matter how modest Microsoft says its sales targets are.

Simon: Hype will always bite back. The Zune’s not a bad device, just rushed. I suspect we’ll see the usual Microsoft path of a version 1.0 that tests the waters, a 2.0 that tries out more features, and a 3.0 that uses market data from the first two attempts to come up with something quite palatable.

Mary: as for iTunes, the EU is already having a pop; fairly I’d say given that musicians on the iTunes store who want to sell music without DRM aren’t allowed to. And SanDisk will clean Zune’s clock with a true wi-fi media player. Microsoft has a really flexible DRM model in Playready. And excuse me while I yawn about the iPhone. A phone OS is a very hard thing to get right and just being able to tap instead of click a button doesn’t make a slow interface fast…

Simon: The DRM issue is on that’s going to keep hobbling the music industry. As one pundit pointed out, you know your business model is trouble when you have to resort to legislation to prop it up. It’s interesting to note that one pointless restriction is going away - there’s no region coding on any shipping HD video media, BluRay or HD DVD.

Mary: HD DVD doesn’t have and won’t have region coding: Disney asked for it and the steering committee said ‘are you mad?’ and then Disney went to Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray does have regions (and they’re not the same as the DVD regions) and the option to code a disc to a region but I honestly can’t tell if anyone is using the regions on discs. Incidentally, that’s one in a long line of reasons why I prefer HD DVD…

One-to-one computing becomes a normal alternative for teaching: The question no longer becomes should kids have their own computer, but when can they.

Mary: It ought to be a no-brainer: why should you go to a special place to use a computer at school when you’ll be on it for your whole working life?

Simon: The child-centric user interface of the OLPC is impressive, and sets the stage for a rethink of the way we use and relate to computers. There are also people looking at how we can get educational software onto familiar devices, like PSPs and Gameboys. We’re living, at least in the West, in a world where computation is pervasive – and we need to take advantage of the processor rich environment we live in.

Of course, it’s getting the content that’s the biggest problem. The BBC has been forced to close down large pieces of its educational service, and the open platforms, like MIT’s OpenCourseware are focused on secondary and tertiary education. There needs to be more of a focus on what the Americans call K12, our primary education. The development of content for the OLPC will help a lot here.

9) This will be the Year of Microsoft, as the company releases both flagship products and tries to sell more games than there are birthday cakes. For the second reason, I think the growth rates in technology will be on the high end, perhaps 12-15%.

Simon: As Mark says, Microsoft is the elephant in the room. I personally don’t expect Office and Vista revenues to rise significantly until the end of the year – and not because of buying cycles, or PC refreshes.

What will drive Vista and Office is what always drives Microsoft adoption, the real jewel in the Microsoft crown: a new release of its development tools. Yes, you can use a service pack to build Vista applications with Visual Studio 2005, but it’s really an XP development platform no matter how you dress it. Vista application development will wait until after September and the release of the next Visual Studio, currently codenamed Orcas. Then there’ll be a Vista-centric development platform in place, and Vista-ready applications will start to appear in droves.

Mary: Vista-centric apps would be nice. Actually just Vista drivers would be nice! But really what people will wait for is Vista service pack one - even though Vista is designed for a flow of improvements rather than a yearly big bang. And Microsoft was smart enough to announce a service pack for this year so everyone can buy it this year and start hammering the hardware manufacturers for drivers…

Simon: Well, the XBox 360 favourite Geometry Wars is now out for Vista. See you when I’ve beaten my high score!

One thing about travelling on the tube these days: you’l always have something to read. Overground you can be reading your RSS feeds on your Blackberry, underground, well, there’s bound to be a copy of Metro or London Lite or theonewiththereallyannoyingrunonname somewhere to be found. Of course if you’re really lucky someone will have left something a little more interesting behind…

Those newspaper copies in the carriages add up to tonnes of rubbish a day that need to be dealt with by London Underground. If only we could read eco-friendly publications like IT Pro underground (made with recycled electrons) rather than tabloids that leave ink all over your fingers. Well, soon we’ll be able to, as the first line to get underground mobile phone coverage (and mobile data) has been announced. April 2008 will see the Waterloo and City line wired up for a six month trial.

Each train will have a repeater that will forward GSM signals to and from base stations in tube stations (will that make them base tubes or tube bases?). These will be connected into the main networks, with a shared service so that all the mobile operators will get access to underground users. That’s the same systems as used on many other metros the world over, including in Paris and Hong Kong.

If the trial’s successful the rest of the network should get coverage sometime in 2009. There’s also the possiblility that the new wireless infrastructure will support DAB radio and WiFi in the future.

A broadband tube? That’s something worth thinking about - you’d be able to commute without leaving your Second Life or missing that World of Warcraft raid. Of course there are also more practical uses - catching up on email, downloading the latest copy of a presentation from the company network (though you may want to invest in a screen cover to hide your business secrets from prying eyes).

– Simon

This week has seen duelling green policies from both sides of the political spectrum. One thing they all seem to agree on: air travel is a bad thing, and it needs to become more expensive. Putting the rights and the wrongs fo the argument to one side, it’s likely we’ll see a significant increase in the cost of business travel over the next few years.

So how are we going to cope?

The answer’s been with us for a while, and Cisco is now putting its money on the table to link the solution’s market leader with its networking equipment. Web conferencing has been around a good few years now, and WebEx and its competitors (like Adobe Connect and Microsoft’s Live Meeting) have grown by offering tools to help businesses share information over the Internet. WebEx’s investment in what it calls its MediaTone network has been considerable, giving it a hefty private backbone for bandwidth-intensive services - and a hefty advantage over its competition.

Tools like WebEx allow business users to have all types of meetings, without leaving their desks. One-on-one meetings can be qucikly thrown together, sharing documents and presentations and using teleconferences and chat tools to talk around the task at hand. You can quickly add participants, and can have an entire team working together. That’s all very well, but WebEx’s tools also allow you to host massive one-to-many meetings, with Q & A sessions. You can even record a session for later replay.

It’s no substitite for a face to face meeting - yet.

As available bandwidth increases, along with computing power, WebEx will be able to increase definition and fidelity, making it easier for video and voice conversations. Web conferencing tools when done right, will be able to break down barriers and turn a monitor into a window on the world. Recently I saw an experimental HD video conference, and the quality was spectacular. It did take up a fair chunk of the Lambda Grid research network, but it was streaming a real time signal at more than twice the current HD-TV resolution. But you could feel that you were in the same room as the Japanese research team on the screen, half a world away.

If we’re going to get that level of service, we’re going to need better networking equipment, and dedicated quality of service implementations that can prioritise traffic appropriately. That’s where Cisco comes in, as it’s able to add code to its routers to help WebEx traffic get from the public Internet to the MediaTone network more efficiently. There’s a lot of synergy here - a compelling service that’s almost become a verb, and a networking giant that’s not yet made a huge impact on the software world.

Bring WebEx and Cisco together, and that high resolutuion electronic face-to-face meeting may not be so far away.

So what does this look like in the bigger picture?

I used to read the Whole Earth Review regularly (up and until its untimely demise, now I read O’Reilly’s Make for a similar approach to the world, with a little less eco-sensibility). Its motto, “Access to Tools and Ideas”, fits in nicely with my geek-liberal approach to the world. If something’s broken, we don’t fix it by going without the thing that’s broken - we get out the tools and fix it. And if there’s a good idea out there, we need to share it with everyone. Each issue of the Whole Earth Review was full of writing that left you thinking, and full of lists of tools that made you want to go out and start using them.

One issue of the magazine was guest edited by Bruce Sterling. In it he made a case for what he called a bright green, or “Viridian” approach to green issues. Green technologies could help solve complex problems, providing tools that could repair the damage caused by older, broken, technologies. A lot of money is going into high-tech green research, and into high-tech green businesses. After all, full-spectrum LED lightbulbs aren’t going to appear out of the blue…

The Cisco/WebEx tie up is a viridian approach. If air travel is currently broken, then how can we use technology to replace it, or make it less damaging? HD-quality web conferencing could just solve that problem. Steve Jobs could give an Apple keynote from his office, Bill Gates could talk to a virtual CES from his living room, and me, I could have a meeting with a Silicon Valley company without a week’s worth of jetlag.

You know, that doesn’t sound to bad to me…

–Simon

We’ve spent the week at PMA in Las Vegas  - the camera equivalent of CES and CeBIT - and we’ve seen some interesting new cameras, and some interesting trends. More cameras can detect faces and adjust the lighting, exposure, flash setting and white balance to produce better portraits. HP’s new R837 adds tools to remove facial blemishes and fix glowing ‘evil kitty eyes’ in pet photos to the red eye removal and slimming effects in the current models. You can also create panoramas in the camera as you take multiple shots, all of which means less work to do when you get your camera back to the office.

But one big trend is not making you wait until you get back to the office at all. Nikon demonstrated uploading images from the new Coolpix S50c directly a photo hosting service by connecting directly from the camera to a wireless access point. That’s handy although there’s the question of how much battery power it takes and whether you’ll always be able to find free Wi-Fi to send images. Sony is using Wi-Fi G in the Cybershot G1 to send images back to your PC without plugging in - or direct to another camera; Fujifilm is using the high speed infra-red IrSimple standard for PC connection and sharing photos to other cameras. And Samsung showed off using Wireless USB (based on Ultra-WideBand networking) to get images from your camera to your PC without the hassle of associating with your WiFi access point.

The fewer cables the better (especially when we’re packing for a trip like this - four days in Vegas and the power supplies and cables take up almost as much room as our clothes in the suitcase). But none of these solutions is ideal. IrSimple takes very little power but IrSimple isn’t common yet so you need two Fujifilm cameras or one of a handful of PDAs from the Far East to use it. Wi-Fi is common but takes power and getting connected will men either finding a free network or struggling with passwords and authentication on your camera - as usual the hotel network here means turning on Wi-Fi, loading any Web page which gets redirected to the hotel gateway and agreeing to a page of conditions. Wireless USB is promising - no association to sort out and less power needed. But it will only really work with your own PC and it does still take power so Samsung is putting it in the dock: plugging in with one cable for power isn’t much less hassle than plugging in the USB cable too, but it does mean you don’t have to be in cable distance of your PC. HP combines the camera dock with a photo printer; add Wireless USB to that and it could be handy.

HP also scores extra points for putting a mini USB port on its new cameras for charging, and for supporting tagging in the camera, along with Sony. That means you can pick the images you definitely want to print, email or use for the brochure you’re putting together when you’re checking the images on the camera on the way back. You can also start tagging images in a format that’s compatible with Vista to make sorting and searching easier. That could save a lot of time, but it’s a bit annoying that you have to choose new tags in advance because you can’t create them on the camera.

Another HP innovation that sounds very promising but might run into some snags is DreamColor (http://www.hpdreamcolor.com/) - a colour matching technology based on HP software, ICC profiles, printers with built-in calibration and the work HP has been doing with Dreamworks on the new Shrek movie (hence the name).  The idea of matching colours across different devices - including different printers and different papers - is something we desperately need.  From getting the same colour in your logo on the Web and on your business cards to getting photos that look the way you intended them to, colour matching is far more than just looking nice and today it’s far too difficult to achieve (if you can manage it at all). We’ve seen standard after standard not get anywhere because not enough companies sign up and it’s hard to see how this will become the open standard HP’s digital imaging VP VJ Yoshi suggested it should be, without Epson and Canon and Sony signing up. Cameras can be factory calibrated to produce images other devices can work with; adding automatic calibration to printers and monitors is going to add something noticeable to the price. On the other hand it would be hugely useful - rather more so than a camera that plugs in with one cable rather than two.

If you have the money to spend on Microsoft Live Communication Server, a PABX from Siemens and the time to integrate it all, you can get voicemail showing up in your inbox along with your email.

If you don’t, do it on the cheap with a number redirect service like YAC (www.yac.com), dmClub (www.dmclub.co.uk) or even Tiscali’s Netphone service.

This gives you a single number to pass on to people, which will ring on your office, mobile, home and any other number you add to the list in turn. If you don’t pick up the caller leaves a message as usual - but instead of you having to dial in and collect the message, these services will send it as a WAV or MP3 file attached to an email. You can play that back in Outlook - and if you read email on your phone and your phone can play music tracks, you can get voicemail for all your numbers on your mobile phone. This works well on Windows Mobile phones and on a number of other phones that can play audio files (although oddly not on the BlackBerry Pearl and 8800 even though they have a media player). And while it’s a little more expensive for people to call the 070 numbers these services use, it doesn’t cost you anything.

One nice thing in Outlook 2007 and Vista; Windows Media Player runs as a preview inside the message so you don’t need to load the app separately.

-Mary