Ubiquitous free high speed wireless: Computing

In my last two blogs, Government and Business, I've discussed some of the impacts on our society of ubiquitous high speed wireless internet. In this post I'll look at the future of the computing industry. I think that this industry will go one of two ways, or perhaps both at the same time. The first route is obvious and is already happening, the second route will probably begin as a backlash to the first route.

The obvious route is cloud computing. As I've said we're already going down this route. The best example of the speed of this transformation is the Amazon Kindle Fire (all three different links). Basically, we will be using less powerful, but still growing in abilities, equipment and pushing the more processor intensive applications out onto a server in the cloud. This will most likely be owned by some private organization. Amazon's Fire is a great example of this because it provides the ability to browse websites at a much faster rate than what's allowed under current network speeds. Even with high speed internet this may continue because it'll fit the website to your screen and make it even faster than over the high speed network.

However, many people are skeptical of cloud computing. There is a sense of a loss of ownership. You become locked in to a specific firm to provide the required services. End User license agreements change frequently and your true ownership of the data and information you place on their servers can change unexpectedly and in ways that aren't in the favor of the users. Additionally, it's been acknowledged by both Google and Microsoft that all data in their cloud servers are subject to the US Patriot Act. This raises privacy concerns for the EU and firms using cloud services.

I think that these concerns will drive another type of cloud computing. I think it'll be something like a personal cloud. It will be similar to working with both a desktop and a laptop at the same time and remoting into the desktop from the laptop, but it will be done seamlessly and transparently. The ownership of the data will be clearly yours and the power will effectively take a phone or low power table and turn it into a fully powered desktop computer. This way the cloud won't be out there and will be easily controlled by the end user. You don't have to worry about the Patriot Act or a company going under, changing rates and other issues like that.

Both of these changes will create disruptive changes within the computing industry. The Kindle Fire is on the cutting edge of this. I fully expect Amazon to create additional applications that will run on the Amazon cloud system. There's no reason not to expect this. It will shift how apps are developed. It will also change who is in the game of creating computers. Dell, for example, will continue to have a major hold over both servers and personal computers, however as we move away from laptops to tablets and phones over time Dell is going to fail in this market. They have been unsuccessful at every attempt to enter these markets. There will be a shift in the players in the market.

These systems will only work with ubiquitous internet connection. They will become more effective as the network speed and capacity increases. Users will become more willing to use the systems as the reliability of the systems increase.

In my opinion these changes will fundamentally change the way that we look at computers. The way we interact with computers and how we feel about the usage of computers. Today they are everywhere, but in the next few years I expect them to become more prevalent as we are able to offload high power demanding applications off of our phones and onto powerful servers.

In my next blog I'll discuss some overall societal changes.

Amazon's Silk

Interesting read on Tech Dirt on Amazon.com's Silk browser. They note that it's a copyright infringement suit waiting to happen. If you're too lazy to read the article, basically Silk will copy whatever website you go to onto it's servers so it can send you a compressed version of it. For instance if a website that you're on has a 3mb picture they'll send you a 50kb picture instead. This does a few things. First, it will help relieve congestion on cell networks because smaller pieces of information are being sent. Second, it will save you data if you don't have an unlimited data package. Finally, it could violate copyright. Why? Because it's copying everything from a website and then sending you the information from a different source. Not only that, but it is effectively altering the picture they are sending you. I'm not sure if there have been any copyright cases based on compressing the quality of a picture, but for all intents and purposes it's altering the picture. It probably should fall under fair use, but you never know some one will probably try to sue over that.

There are some other issues to consider too. The browser has predictive capabilities based off of aggregate users actions. This is actually fairly similar to what Facebook is doing, but there are no implications for ads with Amazon (at this point we don't know if they store individual user statistics). The example they give on the website, is if you go to NYTimes.com and a high percentage of users then click on the business section Amazon will pre-load this information into their severs. This could have an impact on big websites' server loads as well. They could potentially be hit twice for a lot of visits to their site. If Amazon predicts incorrectly, then it will hit the server at least twice.

Another interesting consideration is related to ad revenue. Let's say users of some website like, I don't know KBMOD.com, always visit a YouTube account after reading the front page, let's go with InfiniteSadd, which would then auto play the video that's on top. This of course have the ad pop up on the bottom. Now the question I have is in these situations would this count as a click, or would the ads start to filter out views and click throughs from Silk? The situation, I presented is unlikely as there's no direct link from KBMOD to InfiniteSadd's user profile. But's easy to image that it could work that way.

I'd really like to know more about the user statistics that Silk will be collecting. Since the browser is going to be on their Fire device (who knows could also be an update for older Kindles as well), Amazon will know who is browsing what you are browsing and may actually keep that information in your account to predict your behavior better. I don't see any reason why they couldn't collect that data. I would imagine that it's very technologically feasible to use a larger aggregate dataset for websites you don't frequent, but for your most commonly visited websites for Amazon to have enough usage to figure out where you're going to go next.

I think the browser is a great idea. However, I can also see this turn into another way for Amazon to better target your recommendations. If you are on your Fire and they see where you go, then they will also know what other products you might be interested in that you haven't bought through Amazon before. If they know what interests you then they can put those into your "Silk based recommendations." Now there hasn't been any talk of that yet, but since they are selling the product at a loss they need you to buy a decent amount of product to get a return on their investment. I've seen two values, $50 and $10 losses.

Keep your eyes open for news on this, it could be a copyright and privacy issue before long.