Bob's blog
The blog of Bob
Communities and Participation
There's been a lot of news about Sun's contributions to open source communities lately, but this page has a great list of some of the projects that we're involved with including Project DReaM.
Posted at 08:40PM May 21, 2007 by bs in General |
MTB and Music - Finding your path
"Mountain biking is a misunderstood sport - especially when you miss the technical section you thought you understood." Chris Cannon
Understanding content, like understanding mountain biking is different to everyone. In mountain biking, there's a flow and rhythm to a trail that each rider needs to understand for himself. On the trail, every rider and bike has preferences that lead him down the trail - only experience and time will let him know if he's chosen the right line through. There's something about finding a way to clear an obstacle that's very satisfying. Then, there are things that you just have to be there to appreciate - for example, Tim riding a singlespeed on La Ruta de los Conquistadores is probably one of those:
Of course, music appreciation is also an individual experience but being with friends just enhances the overall pursuit. When I started to explore the 2,000 acres of trails near my house, having a friend guide me was required. It not only enhanced the experience, but helped me find my way. When you're exploring the thousands of songs or potentially millions of tracks - how do you find your way to search the music for things that you might like?
Paul Lamere from SunLabs has been looking at the very question. His Search Inside The Music "SITM" project has been exploring how can you recommend music based on audio traits rather than just metadata or referrals. This will connect you to similar genres of music or cross-genre music that's related to each other. The benefit of using the audio traits combined with user-generated suggestions or other metadata is that it expands the potential kinds of music that you may like. The only way a person can suggest a song is by listening to it and deciding that it's similar to another. SITM compares the audio characteristics and help you to discover music that you didn't know existed or hadn't listened to. It can also link to different types of music that a someone may not think to compare.
There's an interested mash-up at Snapp Radio for you to see. This is an interesting evolving area for content in general, not just how to just discover content that's appealing to you - think about the thousands of videos that will be uploaded to YouTube today or the number of amateur (and not so amateur) band pages that are posted on MySpace . Finding a guide through the explosion of content can't just be through social bookmarking sites like deli.co.us or slynkr!- a content recommendation engine will help to guide the users to more content that's useful to them.
Posted at 02:13PM May 21, 2007 by bs in General |
Innovation, Passion and the Long Tail
I've been impressed by the passion that I've seen in a few conversations over the last couple days. You wouldn't think that would be very surprising, but the level of passion and amount of creativity is inspiring. I work with a range of media and entertainment companies from large conglomorates to internet start-ups. The commitment varies greatly and so does the inspiration - it's not a question of big or small companies, it's more about the project and the excitement that you can see from the stakeholders.
What's interesting to me is how that passion drives innovation around community and long tail content. Multi-modal access methods allow for more flexibility in how your access and interact with content. Just think about a three screen experience - watch a movie on your TV, trailers or shorts on your mobile device and a mash-up on your computer. I think that the more you can tailor your viewing experience to your particular context, the more meaningful and the more personal that interaction can be. That's why there's a demand for more content, not just a change in what content people want to see or hear.
There's been a lot of talk about the demise of linear television lately. It's true that time-shifted and place-shifted TV usage will continue to grow, but there's still a need for professionally produced programming that will not go away anytime soon. You can see a lot of tremenously creative and entertaining content on community sites, but chances are that you will not want to see it on your HDTV and you will have to search in order to find something that's entertaining to you. Of course, you may have to search through 300 channels in order to find something entertaining on TV as well.
The volume of content available also helps to drive communities around things that people are passionate about. There are growing communities around many disparate topics and users can add to the community in their own unique way. The experience of what users contribute helps others value those contribution and in turn determine trust for other users. If someone consistently helps and contributes, others will tend to trust that person in the future. The transparency of the web helps to evaluate everyone's contribution.
The breadth and quality of content available on the web will only continue to grow. If today's passion and innovation are any indication, more compelling content is on the way. I keep thinking about Jonathan's blog - "the network is the movie theater". Come, enjoy the show and bring your own popcorn!
Posted at 04:46PM May 15, 2007 by bs in General |
JavaOne begins!
There's a lot of interesting news coming this week from JavaOne , but I thought this was really cool - How often do you see Jonathan writing about transcoding and content delivery in his blog ? I think he has coined a new phrase "the network is the movie theater". That sums up a lot of the work that we've been to doing to help content owners deliver their content to consumers who want the content when and where they want it. Today, that drives complexity in the distribution process but the goal is to enable more flexible consumption models which will help streamline the process.
Posted at 12:12AM May 09, 2007 by bs in General |
Springtime in San Diego
This is a great time of year to visit San Diego - of course, a lot of people would say that there's never a bad time to visit San Diego. I was attending the Annual Research Meeting for the ISIC .
The kick-off dinner featured RADM Mark T. Emerson who is the Commander, Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center (which includes the school known as TOPGUN ). The Admiral still flies jets with the students and has some very interesting stories. He talked about the Navy in general and some of the challenges that they face at the Center. There's a tremendous amount of information generated from the exercises - everything is instrumented and recorded for playback. They play the data through a simulator with all the students and review their performance. Imagine that data running through a Darkstar gaming environment. At the Center, everything is networked and connected to a simulated command and control aircraft. They can get a real-time view of the pilot's performance, much as they would in the field. It was inspiring listening to a guy who can still go "6 bills" with the best of the best.
The next day we had a full day of speakers, starting with Hal Varian, professor at UC Berkeley and working with Google. He gave an interesting talk about information economics and how the ability to collect and disseminate information affects both organizations and contractual form. I received a copy of his book and I'm looking forward to reading it.
We ended the day with a tour of the UCSD Supercomputer Center (which has a lot of Sun equipment - thanks!). The Center is big enough to have multiple groups of systems and storage, including one cluster of five StorageTek Powerhorn tape libraries just to collect data from the grids. We then walked over to the Calit2 Immersive Visualization Lab. This was really impressive - they have a new 4k projector and showed some sample content. The difference from a standard movie was tremendous - the higher resolution using JPEG2000 gives a beautiful picture for the big screen. The guys at the lab had some very cool things to show us. There was a stereo display that they're using with some molecular data from the Supercomputer Center to explore the molecules. They also had an immersive display where you could navigate through space using a remote - the technology is good enough to "feel" the movement as you fly through space.
It was an interesting way to spend the day and hear from both academic and corporate viewpoints.
Posted at 11:42PM May 08, 2007 by bs in General |
Tribeca Film Festival
I've always like the ideas behind the Tribeca Film Festival - it's a great way to showcase lower Manhattan and bring world class talent and content downtown. After all, if you can make it here...
This year turned out to be a great experience for me (and for Sun). We're a Friend of the Festival this year and that gave us the chance to introduce the Sun Streaming System at TFF. Our launch event team put together a terrific evening that included a preview of the new Edward Burns film Purple Violets . As part of the festival, two of the producers were at the event and talked about the film and their work. The film is shot mostly in Manhattan and filming was completed amazingly quickly. I spoke with Aaron Lubin (below left) before the movie about the challenges of shooting digitally and one of their big challenges is audio levels. Interesting, since many companies have the same problem with audio levels as they transcode for distribution. Here's John Fowler (center) with Aaron and Pamela Murphy before the showing:
The movie was a huge hit with the audience as was the new Sun Streaming System. We had a demo system running in the foyer with sample content and applications to show the capabilities of unicast streams. I had the pleasure of recording a podcast hosted by Hal Stern with Henk Goosen, Director of Engineering in the Systems Group about the Sun Streaming System. This solution has intrigued customers and partners alike while we've worked through development and beta testing. The capacity and performance of the StreamSwitch (introduced as the Sun Fire X4950 Streaming Switch) makes an interesting core system for distributing a large number of unicast streams. That flexibility makes possible difference content distribution and advertising business models. The supporting components and partners work to builld an eco-system for distributing content to large numbers of subscribers.
Today, my celebration of the film festival continued with a visit to see one of the new films with my family. My daughter was quick to choose Andrew Waller's movie Taking 5 based on the actresses and the music. It was a great movie for the girls, they enjoyed seeing some familiar faces in the cast and the music was great. We got a chance to meet the director and cast after the movie - a very good Sunday in the Big Apple. Special thanks to the director's mom for a taking a picture of the girls with the cast since I forgot to bring my camera...
Posted at 10:59PM Apr 29, 2007 by bs in General |
April showers? It's been pouring!
So, it's been a busy few weeks - it's been pouring both literally and figuratively. California for EBC visits and HANA meetings then off to Las Vegas for NAB and then back home. It definitely seemed more like winter though before I left.
Just to catch up a bit, I met with some very interesting new customers a few weeks ago. One is a Web 2.0 startup that's rocketing towards a beta launch. They have a compelling approach to building a community site and we spent a lot of time talking about architecture scaling and growth to support application flexibility and user demand. From there to another customer that's experienced huge growth over the course of the past year. It's a good problem to have, but they're essentially a start-up within a large company. We talked about things like performance management and operational efficiencies plus ways to re-architect while continuing to support their exponential growth.
I got back in time to leave again for Las Vegas - this was in the middle of the rain storm that would flood (thanks for the picture Anthony) many parts of NJ. At least it was dry in the desert. NAB was amazing this year - which meant that I was scheduled from early morning until late at night. New customers, old customers, new projects, project expansions - all different kinds of meetings. But, there was a common feel to the meetings - customers were convinced that digital media is key to their continued growth and that Sun servers and storage were the choice that could help give them a flexible, scalable and reliable platform. We announced some interesting customer references at the show - like Elektrofilm , as well as, new partners - Sun's carrier-class X64 systems and storage have now been tested to support the IPTV solutions from Microsoft .
There was a lot of focus on transcoding as part of a multi-channel, multi-platform delivery system. People are making it work, now they're just looking at more efficient ways to deliver that content so that they can continue to increase their distribution deals. I'm still amazed by how many different form factors and codecs need to be supported for different devices. I think most companies make between 12 and 20 different variations of their content.
I also sat on a panel with Artesia Technologies and Bearing Point to talk about how to plan for a digital asset management project and reviewed a recent customer success. I talked about the DAM reference architecture that we developed with Artesia and WGBH. The key message is that technology is stable and reliable - plan your project around your particular workflow - then implement as a structured project to acheive your goals.
It was a very tiring, but good week. I always like the Las Vegas view at night:
Posted at 04:19PM Apr 27, 2007 by bs in General |
Look! Up in the sky...
Here's the Eco-box in transit flying into the Menlo Park campus. Pretty cool!
Posted at 05:30PM Apr 07, 2007 by bs in General | Comments[1]
Java Gaming and the CGO
Way back in the last century, I met our Chief Gaming Officer when he was still just Chris. We spent a good portion of a very long flight from Asia talking about how Java would make a perfect platform for gaming. I'm not sure that not even he knew how right he would be. This was a case where passion and vision have gone a long way to help evangelize and grow the Java platform in the gaming industry.
Content drives network growth (See here) . A lot of my activities with customers and industry groups are involved with making content more available. It's amazing to see the variety of content accessible from a multitude of devices. Gaming is no different.
A few weeks ago, we announced the public availability of Project Darkstar at GDC. In this case, "availability" means the source code will be available under GPL license for commercial use. The response to this has been tremendous. There's a Darkstar playground that will be available in about a month (applications are being accepted on the website). You can listen to an interesting interview with Chris and Karl Haberl from the GDC show floor . Also, take a look at the MPK20 demo built on the Project Darkstar infrastructure - it's pretty amazing.
Congrats to the Project Darkstar gang! Looking forward to seeing what's built on this exciting platform.
Posted at 06:07PM Apr 04, 2007 by bs in General |
Open Work 3 unveiled
Today Sun unveiled Project EcoBox, the next generation OpenWork 3.0 for executive mobile workers. As proof that the concept is compelling, both Jonathan Schwartz and Greg Papadopoulos moved their offices into this executive suite based on Project Blackbox. To ease their adjustment, the office includes amenities such as a loft bed, wine cooler and the optional executive patio(with hot tub and bisto set).
It's not just any company where the execs would do this - that's why we have the vision "The Network is the Container [tm]". Of course, other employees are equally as excited about the possibility of an EcoBox for an office (MaryMary is definitely ready).
Here's some pictures as the new OpenWork was being prepared - a fine engineering project in true Sun tradition:
I didn't get a chance to wander around Menlo Park today, but it's inside the courtyard. This is a standard shipping container and they certainly didn't drive it in. Take a look at the satellite image of the Menlo Park campus and see if you can figure it out.
Posted at 09:52PM Apr 02, 2007 by bs in General |
No April Fools here
There's a rich history of April Fools Day pranks at Sun but since it's Sunday, today was a little different. I went to see my New Jersey Devils play against the Boston Bruins for one of their last regular season home games at the Continental Airlines Arena. My girls always enjoy going to hockey games and it was a game that gave them a lot to cheer about. I spent enough time living in Boston that I always enjoy going to see the Devils play against the Bruins and the Devils are usually ready.
Today was no exception with fellow Boston University Alumnus, Jay Pandolfo scoring 2 goals in the 3-1 win over Boston, regaining the division lead. The game also put Martin Brodeur one game away from tying Bernie Parent's single season win record that was set in 1973-74. No foolin'
Posted at 06:56PM Apr 01, 2007 by bs in General |
Community drives value
We all have our communities, whether it's a home, work or play. And we're usually passionate about those communities, involving ourselves to varying degrees. There's a great community of cyclists here in my neighborhood of NJ where we can find plenty of friends to ride with. All summer long, I know that I can find them at the local bike shop just waiting to go for a ride. If all you've seen of NJ is The Sopranos , there's some beautiful areas to ride like The Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge . One of our favorite rides, now known as Brian's Ride since he mapped the route, is a 75 mile loop through Far Hills and horse farms - an absolutely beautiful area to ride.
Everyone will value and interact with their community differently. I've had some very interesting meetings with start-ups lately and the common thread is community. They're finding different ways to enhance the user experience, but the they all provide a place with content that appeals to users with common interests. It doesn't really matter whether the content is blogs, pictures, music or video. What matters is the interaction and a chance to gather, discuss and share. I've seen a lot of Web 2.0 and Web.next discussions lately and this is a common thread.
I've been meeting with a lot more of these types of companies lately. I've been with Sun for over 9 years and have been working with internet companies since the days of Pathfinder (that wasn't exactly a start-up). It's great to see that Solaris and our platforms are valuable to these companies. Solaris with Niagra and Galaxy-based systems, along with our storage and software, is a very unique story that people are finding very compelling.
If you're interested in finding out more or have suggestions for us, take a look at Steve Staso's blog . Matt Ingenthron is also part of that group and has some terrific posts about Open Solaris and Sun's Web 2.0 stack.
Posted at 09:54PM Mar 31, 2007 by bs in General |
"V" is for video
Most of the conversations that I have about VOIP are regarding "Voice" over IP. We have several partners with solutions that run very well on Solaris and I think there's been a lot of activity and growth in that space. It seems that for the most part we've figured out how to reliably deliver audio over IP.
As well as we're doing with music or voice, it occured to me the we're still just working on a comomon vocabulary when talking about video over IP whether it's IPTV or internet delivered video. I was at a customer who delivers more video than many other content providers combined when they were asked about their IPTV infrastructure. They politely responded that they don't deliver an IPTV service, rather it's a video over IP (in this case, the internet) service.
I have to say that I agree with him and it's not just because I've known the guy for nearly seven years. I try to be fairly specific when talking with customers about video delivered over the internet vs. IPTV vs. internet television because it definitely matters when you're looking for a solution. And, you may as well talk about traditional linear television channels delivered over standard broadcast channels, cable or satellite.
Shelly Palmer's book called "Television Disrupted: The transition from network to networked TV" opens with a quote from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory about "Wonkavision". That's a phenomenal way to capture the spirit of the disruption that's taking place today. While you can't quite get a chocolate bar delivered to your settop box, the programming and business of delivering video over IP has quite a bit of variety.
Even Wikipedia is sorting through the differences between the terms with a recommendation to merge the IPTV topic with the Internet Television topic. I try to differentiate between delivery and access methods as well as programming types.
From the content side - one of the big attractions for video delivered over IP is the availability of on demand, custom, personalized content. This can either be short form, "video snacking" or longer form, shows or movies. Much of the short form content is user generated content, many of those with vigorous and active user communities. Of course, traditional linear, programmed content is also available from video delivered over IP from the traditional broadcast and cable channel, as well as, internet only TV channels. While on demand and time-shifted video is a growing trend for consumers in general, there's still a place for the professional linear programming. People like to be entertained and sometimes they just don't want to work that hard to search for their content.
The delivery methods are just as diverse as the types of content that they can provide. Video delivered over the internet is typically any video from a website to an IP-connected computer regardless of the encoding format - QuickTime, Flash, Windows, MPEG or anything else. Internet television is a programmed, linear channel available over the public internet regardless of the client device or format, but would typically be an IP-connected computer. IPTV is video delivered over a dedicated IP network to a settop box - this would include offerings from many of the US telcos.
You can see where we need to get fairly specific before continuing any conversations about methods and solutions for delivering video content. And this doesn't even address the concept of mobile video whether it's over a broadband network or a DVB-H type broadcast. That's an entirely different story. I'm not sure what Willie Wonka would have had to say about that, but Veruca Salt would have said "I Want It Now!"
Posted at 11:59PM Mar 29, 2007 by bs in General |
From the Redshift, I can see spring?
Okay, I'm not really sure that makes much sense to me either. Redshift is "increase in the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation". But spring was in the air last week in Menlo Park and there was an interesting view into some of the challenges and opportunities that our customers are facing.
There was a little rain and a lot of sun in the Bay Area last week but I was inside Sun's Excecutive Briefing Center with some media customers from around the country and the UK. We had a day and a half planned to talk about their projects and Sun's technology. The goal was to start a dialog and build a community.
One of the interesting concepts is from Greg Papadopoulos's talk on Redshift . It's about the explosion of the massive scale of systems and those markets that have either been overserved or underserved by Moore's law. That's an interesting concept for media companies especially as they start to deliver more and more content over alternative networks. You may have noticed that any overcapacity in bandwidth has been consumed and the need for additional bandwidth grows every day.
We spent a lot of time talking about video, both because it's interesting and it's important to their business. It's also a huge issue when a lot of time is spent outside the prime distribution channel to create alternate formats for various multi-channel distributions. Depending on the content, there can be from ten to twenty different formats required for alternate distribution. If each piece of content were to be individually checked, it could take as much as 300 hours each day. This demand causes some interesting operational challenges in helping to satisfy this new three screen experience. One customer's three requests were: more network I/O, more disk I/O and more CPU power. That certainly sounds like someone who has been underserved by Moore's law. Maybe this is a start with 10Ge networking!
This conference was a good way to lay the foundation and the discussion will definitely continue. Their feedback is that Sun is in a unique position to help as their environment changes and as the product set of their traditional partners continues to change. A strong community can only help build new, open systems. Sun's technology, experience in open systems, communities like Open Media Commons and our partners are a very good start indeed.
Posted at 10:35PM Mar 25, 2007 by bs in General |
Today's Page Hits: 52