Tech Policy

Software as a Service - Hosted Everything

I've been working at a Software as a Service company in Hawaii now for the past year. The concept is pretty simple, instead of hosting software applications in your own data center over your local network; we host them on our servers and you access your software via the internet through a browser.

For many of us, accessing software over the internet has become second nature. We get email from Yahoo, maps from Google, share photos on Flickr, connect on Facebook. For the first time, consumer applications such as these has led the way in IT. Business applications such as hosted Microsoft Project have been stuck in the corporate data center for the last 30 years since the client-server architecture became popular in the early 80s.

The  famous Moore's  Law which says that computer processing power doubles every two years. Grove's Law says that bandwidth doubles every 100 years. So even though the computers and servers have been powerful enough for a while to serve business software online, the pipes haven't been fat enough. Ever since the fiber optic buildout of the late 90s, that barrier has broken down and all kinds of interesting possibilities are emerging.

A great book on this topic is The Big Switch by David Carr. David talks about all the possibilities that are opening up in the fields of Software as a Service and cloud computing. But even better, he traces the history of computing, and draws some striking parallels between the early days of another grid-based service: electricity. The slides below are from a talk I gave last week at the University of Hawaii's CyberPizza. Its just an outline of the speech, but draw heavily from this book.

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Carbon and Wall Street

Part of the discussion at the WSJ Eco:nomics conference:

Interesting stuff.

Oil Prices touch 110

Oil contracts for April delivery touched 110 dollars today. The chart above shows the May contracts which are not much behind.

About two and a half years ago, I stated:

"The price in December 2010, when adjusted for inflation so it's stated in 2005 dollars, would be at least $80 per barrel. I am willing to put 10 dollars on that."

Assuming a 3.2 year over year increase in CPI (the actual rate from 2005-2006 according to BLS), 80 dollars in 2005 is about 88 dollars in 2008 and 94 dollars in 2010.

Fun, Inspriational Speach by Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch is an amazing guy. Virtual reality prof at CMU who recently diagnosed with cancer. This is his last public speech. This talk changed my whole day. He's more fired up about life then most healthy people I know.

Amory Lovins at TED: Oil End Game Video

Amory's a great speaker, and has inspired many

Ireland Bans the Incandescent Lightbulb

from the EE Times. 

LONDON - Ireland is to ban the traditional lightbulb with householders forced to switch to new long-life low-energy bulbs.

Legislation is being introduced to ban the sale of the normal incandescent lightbulb from January, 2009 so as the normal lightbulb breaks, householders will have to replace them with the more environmentally friendly long-life bulb which uses far less energy.

In a 'Carbon Budget', Environment Minister John Gormley, announced the ban and said "By getting rid of these bulbs we will save 700,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year," he added. It has been estimated that consumers will save €185million in electricity costs every year as a result of the measure.

Google your DNA for $999. 23andMe

23andMe will decode your DNA for $999. Spit in a cup, send it in, and a month later they send you a genetic profile in the mail. You'll learn, is your daddy really your daddy. Are you susptible to any terrible genetic diseases, do you have what it takes to be an Olympic sprinter or, even better...

Are you more closely related to European royalty or American outlawry? Use 23andMe's Ancestry tools to find out whether your maternal lineage links you more closely to Marie Antoinette or Jesse James. Your 23andMe account also connects you genetically to many other celebrities and historical figures, from Bono to Ben Franklin. Read more about 23andMe's celebrity features.

Mike Arrington brings up some good policy points.

..What if this information becomes public? What if I can’t get health care because of the results? Call me a luddite, but this is a whole new class of private information that previous generations didn’t have to deal with. Our laws are waaaaay behind the curve here when it comes to protecting us. ...

23andMe has strong security features in place to keep my information fairly secure. But there’s a big hole in the plan - what if I simply send in someone else’s spit? What if it’s someone I’m thinking about marrying? What if someone does that to me? There’s no way to stop people from spending $1,000 and getting a full genetic download of ME, in all my flawed glory.

Andrew Myer's is raising money to test his DNA with 23andme. And, he's going to be blogging the whole experience. 

This service is being run by  Anne Wojcicki, Google co-founder's Sergey Brin's wife. 

Clean Technology Venture Capital Heaing Up

Via TechCrunch.

To me, the fact that clean energy technology is getting lots of venture capital money is THE best sign for it taking off mainstream. Whats amazing to me from the post below is this:

Clean Tech as a Percentage of Total Venture Capital

2005: 0.2 percent
2006: 6.7 percent
2007: 10 percent*

Those are some very big numbers.

It is not just Google that is investing in clean tech these days. Green energy startups are cleaning up on Sand Hill Road as well. The National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Financial put out some figures today on the amount of U.S. venture capital going into clean tech startups—some of the startups are overseas, but the money came from U.S. firms. (You can download the full release here). During the first three quarters of 2007, VCs poured $2.6 billion into clean tech startups, compared to $1.8 billion for all of 2006, and a mere $533 million in 2005.

How does this compare to venture capital going into Internet startups? According to the NVCA, here are the stats for U.S. venture capital invested in Internet startups over the past three years:

U.S. Venture Capital in Internet Startups

2005: $3.61 billion
2006: $4.96 billion
2007: $3.86 billion*

*(through 9/30)

So far this year, VCs are putting two-thirds as much into clean tech as they are into Internet startups. To put this into perspective, for the first three quarters of 2007, clean tech investments represented 10 percent of all venture fundings, compared to 15 percent for Internet investments.

Clean Tech as a Percentage of Total Venture Capital

2005: 0.2 percent
2006: 6.7 percent
2007: 10 percent*

IEA Worried about End of Oil

The International Energy Agency, where I used to work, released their annual World Energy Outlook for China and India last week.

Wired has a good, but somewhat alarmist overview article.... worth reading.

"All countries must take vigorous, immediate and collective action to curb runaway energy demand," Nobuo Tanaka, head of the IEA, said. "The next ten years will be crucial for all countries... We need to act now to bring about a radical shift in investment in favor of cleaner, more efficient and more secure energy technologies."

Update from Adam Smith

Adam is back!