OnLive Desktop Plus Puts Windows 7 on the iPad in Blazing Speed - State of the Art - NYTimes.com

David Pogue reports on the commercial realization of a new compression/streaming technology from Steve Perlman, one of the creators of QuickTime.

OnLive Desktop Plus Puts Windows 7 on the iPad in Blazing Speed - State of the Art - NYTimes.com:

Here is OnLive's demo on youTube:

Why does this matter? One thing is clear when you talk with CIOs about preparing for the future: they have to deal with their current reality of legacy applications and client-server technologies, not just throw everything out and rush headlong into a future of stateless computing and cloud delivery.

OnLive started as a game streaming technology. I saw Perlman introduce it at the MIT EmTech emerging technology conference in 2009, and immediately thought "this could revolutionize desktop virtualization!"

In fact, that is just what OnLive is about to do. It offers enterprises a way to deliver all the legacy applications and the Windows desktop environment to nearly any device, including iOS and Android. It leapfrogs one of CIOs' biggest hurdles by enabling stateless delivery to non-stateless devices, and with content that was not designed with device independence in mind from the start.

Here is Perlman's presentation from EmTech, he is part of a longer video, and his segment begins at about 47:00.

Steve Perlman at Emtech 2009, demonstrating OnLive

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Mozilla to challenge big players in mobile web - San Jose Mercury News

I first reported on the Boot2Gecko project last August; here's an update. Google's Chrome OS expresses the stateless concept, but only for the laptop/desktop. For stateless computing to see its true value, we also need stateless phones, tablets--virtually every connected device.

Mozilla to challenge big players in mobile web - San Jose Mercury News:

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How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did - Forbes

This is a great "era of you" example, and a caution. Extreme personalization meets big data--but almost backfires due to consumer invasion of privacy fears.

How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did - Forbes:

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This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business | Fast Company

This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business | Fast Company:


If you care about your business in the 21st century, please make time to read this article.  Here are two important ideas from Fast Company:

1. "The pace of change in our economy and our culture is accelerating--fueled by global adoption of social, mobile, and other new technologies--and our visibility about the future is declining."  


2. "The next decade or two will be defined more by fluidity than by any new, settled paradigm; if there is a pattern to all this, it is that there is no pattern. The most valuable insight is that we are, in a critical sense, in a time of chaos."

Chaos-surfers.  Image from Fast Company

Understanding the Infrics.com big ideas is one key to riding change successfully.  Although there is chaos, there is an underlying pattern of emerging technologies and societal trends.  I won't attempt to predict the exact shape of the future, but I do believe you can focus your attention on key ideas, and take actions that prepare you and your company to cope and thrive. 

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So Much Fun. So Irrelevant. - NYTimes.com

So Much Fun. So Irrelevant. - NYTimes.com:

Op-Ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times. On the surface, this article is about the way political campaigns don't talk about real issues; get to the second paragraph, and his issue is straight to the point about Infrics.com era of you coverage.

"The I.T. revolution is giving individuals more and more cheap tools of innovation, collaboration and creativity — thanks to hand-held computers, social networks and “the cloud,” which stores powerful applications that anyone can download. And the globalization side of this revolution is integrating more and more of these empowered people into ecosystems, where they can innovate and manufacture more products and services that make people’s lives more healthy, educated, entertained, productive and comfortable."

The moral: bandwidth enables job creation. Tech power to the people.

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So, who is behind all this? Introducing a new kind of resume

Part of the reason Infrics.com exists is to provide a voice for my ideas about the future of technology, business, and society.  I have done a lot of work doing research for others.  On this site, you've seen the ideas that reflect my own original work, based on my IT career that started answering help desk phones, took me into C-level strategy meetings, and included a lot of discussions with leading IT vendors about the future.

Infrics.com is also designed to make my research, analysis, social media, and journalism skills visible to a prospective employer--contract, commission, or full-time.  One of the frustrations for the latter goal is that conventional resumes and conventional wisdom about them (summary form only, use lots of keywords to get caught by automated scanning systems, keep it to only 2 pages) leaves most of my talent unseen.

In consultation with a recruiter and career coach I trust, I've looked at his samples of great resumes that broke that mold, and taken a different tack with my own.  It starts with a this 10-second story about my value, a "Donald Ham Venn diagram."  At a glance, you or a prospective employer can see where I come from and where it's valuable.  You'll also learn the four ways that value becomes tangible, and meet the idea of a "fox" in the enterprise.  What are the other three?

Take a look.  If you've found value here in all the free content on Infrics.com, I'd appreciate your help to let people know I'm available, your consideration for consulting or contract roles in your own company, and your good wishes to help me continue this work -- making a good living by doing it.

Donald Ham's resume 

From ReadWriteWeb: CIOs see consumerism as threat

Read this on the ReadWrite Enterprise site and see if it doesn't sound familar:


CIO survey: consumerism threatens the enterprise cloud



One quote in particular is comment-worthy:  "Consumers just have unrealistic expectations for the levels of services that IT departments are capable of delivering, say 74% of CIOs surveyed worldwide and 81% of U.S.-based CIOs. As a result, IT departments are having to be tasked with delivering functionality levels and multiple device support that they're not even ready for."

This is exactly what we've been discussing in the "era of you" series, and is a natural corollary to the conversation I reported with Podio's Ryan Nichols.  The IT organizations as they exist in most enterprises, and by association the businesses they serve, are threatened by the expectations of their users, and by the services those users can deploy themselves without an IT department at all.

The quote from CIOs has a hidden prefix: "As we operate today, if we don't change, we can't meet consumer expectations."  The logical extension of that quote is this: "we have to do things differently in order to meet those expectations."

Three things to start changing today: the big ideas

1. Get your services house in order.  Structure data, infrastructure, ERP, and other elements that are mission-critical but unrelated to competitive advantage so they can be delivered as reliable, repeatable, recomposable services.  Manage complexity here to enable the flexibility you need at the user level.  This is hard work, but it's crucial to your success. 
2. Get out of the business of managing devices.  Virtualize users' desktops, adopt stateless devices, sunset old client-server technology wherever possible, require new applications to be web-enabled.  Secure your data and quit thinking that securing the device is your responsibility.  Once you are stateless, every app and all the data lives in the cloud, and the device has virtually no security risk anyway.
3. Organize for less command-and-control, more responsibility moved to individuals and teams. No organization can compete well in an era of empowered users when everything is subject to committee, cover-your-ass stagegates and approvals, and "I can't budge until I'm 100% certain I won't be blamed for doing the wrong thing" thinking.  

The fears about consumer demands are very real.  Moreover, in an improving economy, those consumers inside your company and without will vote with their feet, and take their skills and their business to those who implement the action points above.  

How much longer do you think you can get away with inaction?