A lot of my work involves consulting with organizations on the consolidation of their digital infrastructures. Recently for example, I worked with a client in a pan European telecommunications cost reduction effort. They were spending several million Euros a year across 27 countries. A substantial fraction of that cost was in mobile voice. With other […]
Wikipedia is just one of the new infrastructures for collective knowledge that are appearing. Others are flickr and del.icio.us, to name a few. I am using the word infrastructure here precisely because these are platforms on which multiple users converge, creating a collective value. These infrastructures are typically heralded as ‘a good thing’, for a […]
In most countries, if you buy a new mobile subscription the mobile phone company has an attractive offer for you. If you would just subscribe for a 2 year contract and commit to a monthly minimum spend, they will have a nice phone for you. Just how nice is this offer? Should you go for […]
Your online identity might reveal more about you than you can imagine. Howdoes it feel to be confronted with that? Today I visited a theatre festival (Festival aan de Werf,http://www.festivalaandewerf.nl/) where the Dat-a project(http://dat-a.z25.org/ partly in Dutch) examines this in a theatrical way.It can give you quite an uncanny feeling, even though their RFID liketechnology […]
This weekend, I was cleaning out old files, and came across some industry outlooks made by market research and consulting firms a few years ago. In it were predictions of the distant future (say 2005 …), you remember the inflated expectations people had back in de dot com boom days. It turns out that most […]
As you may have noticed from my writings, the main topic of this blog is Digital Infrastructures for (networked) computer applications. These infrastructures are the platforms on which computer applications are delivered to users, so that they can interact with each other. What are the major research questions around these digital infrastructures? How is the […]
(This post was updated in http://www.petersgriddle.net/2010/05/digital-divide-on-ip-addresses.html) Every computer connecting to the Internet has to have an Internet address. No problem, you would say, unless you realize that there are more people living on the earth than there are Internet addresses. Internet addresses are defined by the Internet Protocol (IP for short), which is currently in its […]
At the end of 2001 I wrote a presentation about the future of networking, in which I made predictions for the digital infrastructure situation in 2005. Last week I revisited these, and checked them against the reality of 2005. For the home I predicted megabit, always-on Internet, VPN to the office, video, dozens of Internet […]
Yesterday, the annual Dutch Deloitte Technology Fast 50 awards were presented. As part of the program there are also Rising Star awards for companies less than 5 years old. Among the finalists were Watchmouse and Moniforce, two companies that I have helped with their product and marketing development. Watchmouse made 2nd place! As you can […]
This week, Yahoo announced that it will be beefing up its mail service to “[mimic] the look and feel of a computer desktop application like Microsoft’s Outlook”. This means that Yahoo is taking Microsoft head-on for dominance of the desktop. We are talking about the desktop in a generic sense, as the place that is […]
