The ‘cloud’ stands for a worldwide infrastructure of computers that can deliver applications and content to any place on the Internet. Early examples of clouds are content distribution networks (CDN), which can serve web content from a worldwide distributed network of servers. Because the servers are closer to the user the user will see quicker […]
In the future, the dominant traffic on the internet will be video. However, it will not look like TV. Instead it will be more like video on demand, for everybody. The early internet was mainly used for interactive terminal traffic, but that soon gave way to file transfer. In the late nineties, web traffic took […]
Google App Engine is an infrastructure to deliver applications through Google’s cloud. You can drop applications written in Python in it, and let Google do the hosting. I am setting up a business based on this (GriddleJuiz). So the first obvious questions are: where is the cloud, and does it perform? With the help of […]
At the Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 last week in London, Jim Cicconi, chief lobbyist at AT&T warned that the Internet will be fully clogged by 2010. When I worked at AT&T Bell Labs around 20 years ago, the phrase “imminent death of the net predicted” was already a running joke, so something else must […]
Websites can go down. But there is a lot more that can go wrong with all your digital assets online. Have you ever heard about site-defamations, spoofing, identity theft, plagiarism, and software vulnerabilies? How much revenue will you lose, or damage will you suffer, if any of these happen? If so, do you know how […]
The International Herald Tribune reports on an experiment done by Random House, a distributor of audio books. They released digitally watermarked books and then monitored file sharing networks for these books. It turned out that pirated copies were often made from physical CDs. “Our feeling is that DRM (Digital Rights Management, another word for copy […]
According to Ericsson’s CEO Svanberg, the volume of data traffic (i.e. Internet usage) on mobile networks will surpass the volume of voice by 2010. For fixed networks, this point was past years ago.
The new Google maps for mobile (GMM) impresses me a lot. Have a look at www.google.com/mobile/maps/ It is an application that you can download to your mobile phone, in my case a Qtek phone with Windows Mobile 5. It is a scaled down but very usefull version of the full version of google maps (GM). […]
Apparently Youtube reached an agreement with Thai authorities concerning the blocking of pictures that are deemed insulting to the Thai royal family. In effect, the Thai authorities now have the capability to selectively censor Youtube. While I disagree with Internet censorship in general, I can sympathize with the Thai point of view. In Thailand the […]
A TechRepublic article describes 10 skills that are relevant to develop if you are into technical IT infrastructures, or digital infrastructures as I call them. These skills obviously point to areas in which we can expect serious development in the coming years. They are: Voice over IP, especially for replacing phone systems withing companies. Unified […]