TechContrarian

Why Now?? IM Interoperability

0 Comments Published by Brandon July 15th, 2006

There’s quite alot of discussion lately about Microsoft and Yahoo getting their instant messaging clients to inter-operate in a way that is native to the code put forth by the vendors. As apposed to some sort of hack solution, such as what other IM clients do so that one client logs into multiple systems; attempting to eliminate the need for multiple clients.

Now, this news is extremely significant in that it marks a new trend and new beginning to communicating to a wider audience without worrying which network one of our contacts are using. All IM communities have been waiting patiently for this.

Let’s explore the “why now” question. In my mind, two significant events occured within the instant messaging community all brought forth by one significant market force, Google. One of these significant events was their technology offering which ironically seemed overly simple and under-featured. The technology is called Google Talk beta. The other event was Google’s partnership with AOL. The partnership with AOL is significant in that AOL has a unique market position, in which the company has not developed to increase their revenue stream. Both AOL and financial analysts understand a partnership with the king of Internet advertising should bring some interesting long term results.

According to ComScore Media Metrix, nearly 70 million Americans use instant messaging applications every month and AOL controls more than 50% of the American chat market. Imagine having a conversation and a context aware advertisement streams across the window while you having a discussion. Imagine an unobtrusive advertisement like a hypertext link to a web site related to your conversation. Seems useful enough to me but this can bring in huge revenue. Google and AOL seem to make a good partnership. Google has the technology and the vision, while AOL has the market and is run by business folk with an long history of advertising expertise.

So, combining the IM communities of both Yahoo! and Microsoft gives the two tag team rivalies a similar sized market. Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google have expertise in both instant messaging and web advertising technologies so they can work together towards interoperating between the two dissimilar clients that work over different backend technologies which communicate using incompatible proprietory protocols.

Google on the otherhand embraced open standards and opened their IM infrastructure to all third parties. Given Google’s openness, third party support, and partnership with AOL it was only a matter of time before the big three IM giants started to partner up. And it’s about time, thanks to Google and a desire for revenue growth.

Women no longer need men!

0 Comments Published by Brandon July 11th, 2006

British research scientists from the University of Newcastle have published their recent findings in the journal Developmental Cell that women can fertilized their own eggs from sperm created by stem cells of an embryo.

In the research, the babies in question were laboratory mice but the announcement raises the prospect that women could use the technique to have a human baby. The goal of the research was to uncover the causes of infertility or testicular cancer, which are laid long before a baby is born. The professor behind the research believes that, when safe, the advance could help men with certain types of infertility to become fertile, to remain fertile for longer and, controversially, could even one day enable a lesbian couple to have children that, at the genetic level, are truly their own.

The cells were grown in a laboratory and screened to isolate the spermatogonial stem calls which were grown and then injected into female mouse eggs and grown in early stage embryos. Seven baby mice were produced, six of whom lived into adulthood. The results were not perfect though.

The six mice that survived were all abnormally large or abnormally small, and were infertile. Many developed lung tumours and none lived for more than five months – well short of the typical three-year mouse lifespan. Also, the sperm themselves had shortened tails and were unable to penetrate eggs on their own.

The title of this article suggests that women no longer need men, however nature has created a highly successful mechanism for impregnating females requiring males in that process. Let’s see how fast human ingenuity can figure out a different path that nature hasn’t taken evolutionarily.

Reference: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/press.office/newslink/?ref=1152548813

So many choices

0 Comments Published by Brandon July 7th, 2006

It’s amazing how many choices we have for everything especially when it comes to technology. Everyone wants to make a buck so now we find ourselves with too many choices in consumer electronics, software and other easy to manufacture and distribute products. Of course a cell phone is not exactly easy to make however there are thousands of engineers across the globe who have all read the same books and had the same training and know 95% the same information. I know this is true in my industry. We come up with the engineering plans for the manufacture of a product and we have a company in Tawain or china or some other similar south asia pacific country put its hard working labor force to the task.

Now, given that we are in another industrial revolution, we have all those small “me-too” companies making low to medium quality products with built in obsolescence or as wikipedia is calls is “planned obsolenscence”. This means, we are forced to buy the same product after a given period of time because the product breaks. Companies tells us that we would have thrown out the product anyway and to keep prices lower they don’t manufacture their product with a high quality standard. Well, thanks people but I would like a choice in the matter. Some products that come to mind would be cell phones, personal digital assistants, laptop/desktop computers (post-1999 era), current model plasma screen tv’s.

My friend still has his Apple SE and I am in love with it, especially since it still works. It boots up in seven seconds, the hard drive is original and the screen works fine. If this is the case, then computer manufacturers and hard drive makers and all the rest of them can easily make quality products that work for more than the current expected 5 to 7 years. Try 20 to 30 years as a target.

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