Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

Welcome to 2009! I've enjoyed nearly two weeks off for the holidays, with limited online work duties, however I routinely found myself returning to my laptop for a myriad of personal activities. Planning for an upcoming business trip to Europe, I ran across this wonderful visualization of London taxi traces through the course of a day, thanks to the wonders of satellite GPS technology. Thinking a bit farther ahead, I prepared for my favorite lottery, the annual February lottery for Mt. Whitney backcountry permits, by downloading the PDF form (unfortunately, you still have to print out and mail in the lottery application via US Postal Service, anyone out there at the Forest Service know how to write an online form, I'll offer to pay for a one year MySQL Enterprise Server subscription if you put the application online). Actually, there is a business idea for someone, create a web site to allow people to fill out paper only US government forms online and then do the hard work of mailing in the forms. Probably some rule against that, but maybe our new president will help. While Forest Service permit applications are probably not high on the to do list, how about a new law that says every new government form needs to have an online version? That would either help jump start the IT market or at least save tax dollars by preventing a lot of new paperwork handling.

Too early in the year to complain. Anyhow, thinking of Whitney, I'm seriously looking at the SPOT personal tracker. I really like the Goggle Maps integration of their tracking feature. SPOT claims to process 2.3 tracking message every second or over 6 million per month. How about a Google mashup to show weekly increase in SPOT messages versus London GPS enabled taxi miles driven. Sidebar on % of GPS-enabled London taxis.

Now not quite as high tech as SPOT, more and more cell phones are GPS enabled and could easily provide similar tracking in areas with cell coverage. Thanks to Werner for pointing out Opera's state of the mobile web. While not necessarily a full representative sample of the entire mobile web, Opera Mini had 5.7B (that is B for Billion) page views in November, up 12.1% over the previous month and 303% over the previous year. For those of you counting seconds, that is 2199 per second (ask me sometime why I always remember 86,400 seconds per day). Hum, roughly 1000 times more Opera Mini page views per second as SPOT tracking messages. Not sure if that seems high or low.

So while one can't predict how long it will take the economy to bounce back, I do think it is fairly safe to predict that there will be more telemetry generated, transmitted, processed, stored, and visualized in 2009 than in 2008. And that won't just require faster supercomputers and more storage, it will require new approaches to storage (like Sun's Open Storage and flash initiatives) and perhaps even more importantly new algorithmic approaches. If you are a software architect and Hadoop sounds like a typo, or if you are not already thinking about how to optimize your code for multicore processors, you had better get busy.

Anyhow, a few more hours of holiday celebrating before I head off on my first business trip of the year, so that's it for today!