Tony Bain

Kickfire: Data Analytics for the Masses

You may not realize it, but the data analytics market is buzzing. There are new vendors emerging, new products popping up, new deals being done, and several new strategies being pursued. Vendors are predominately chasing big data, with battles lines being drawn by solution providers that cater to between roughly 100 TB and 10 PB data sets. The battle was inevitable because the world is producing data at a phenomenal rate, and we have an increasing need to analyze them within shorter time frames. In this post we analyze one of these vendors, Kickfire.

Yet while the big names in town are capturing the headlines, in reality only a small percentage of businesses today need to be able to analyze petabytes of data. Today, the rest of us are more likely to deal with analytic data sets in the 50 GB to 3 TB range.

Kickfire is interesting because it has decided to let the other vendors fight it out for the massive data volumes. Instead, it has focused on a relatively untapped segment: the MySQL database market or, more correctly, the market that MySQL serves.  [more]

Silicon Kelly

Silicon Kelly is a community of companies that are working together to raise the profile of the bustling technology sector in Melbourne, Australia.  “Silicon Kelly” is of course a play on Silicon Valley, and Victoria’s infamous folk icon Ned Kelly.

Companies listed on this site have shown both a commitment to Melbourne and are active in the area of technological innovation and thought leadership.

This site will be updated to include announcements, news, interviews deals, mergers and general events as reported by the collective organizations.

Apple, DRM & Content Protection

Image via CrunchBase

The music industries decision to do away with DRM, which has lead to Apple’s ability to offer titles DRM free in iTunes is a great decision that will encourage people to purchase more not less of their product. 

Time and time again we are seeing examples of these brute force approaches to content protection fail.  Regionally encoding DVD’s was/is a terrible idea, however largely irrelevant as most DVD players are multi region.  DRM was a long suffering headache for the digital music revolution that was doing more to hurt the sales of digital music than protect the artists.  There are still examples when people are trying to protect content using old world mentality in a new world medium, such as the BBC iPlayer which tries to restrict viewing of their published shows by geographic location (and similar services exist in the US).
To date content protection has all been at the cost of convenience, freedom and flexibly of the legitimate user.  If I am travelling to the US and see a DVD I like, why shouldn’t I be able to legally purchase it and watch it when I get home?  If I buy a song on iTunes, why shouldn’t I be able to decide to listen to it on my Blackberry or other device I happen to choose at the time?  If I watch BBC TV online, why can’t I continue to do so while in the US on business?

However content protection is a valid pursuit which isn’t just about monopolies trying to protect their turf, it is about protecting ones digital assets whether than be commercial assets or not.  The field of content protection will evolve dramatically over the next decade.  And when we get it right content protection will be something useful for all of us and something we don’t really think about on a daily basis.

Some key hurdles that we will:

• Content protection will have to stop being a standalone fence around content and become part of the content itself.  The problem with creating barriers around content is that it only takes one person to move that content outside of those barriers, then those barriers no longer apply and the content is no longer protected.  Instead having the protection as part of the content ensures the relevant protection mechanisms are always in place.  DRM was an attempt at this but it was a method that put the needs of the user last and failed because of this.  A common standard for all forms of content will have to be agreed upon.

• Authentication & Authorization will need to be fixed first.  Today there is no single standard for determining who you are across multiple platforms and devices.  Before content protection can work we need to ensure there is a common standard in place that allows you to be you regardless of where/how you are accessing content.  The content producers won’t own or control this, in fact no single authority will control this but a common standard will fix the authentication mess which exists in the digital world today.

• Content protection can and will be policy based.  You can define a specific authorization list or you can define demographic attributes (such as age restrictions) which allow you to control who can access that content.  It is not just about granting content based on named users.  You can grant content based on age, relationship to you (friend, family, associate), employer etc.

So imagine if you publish a photo of your family you might choose to limit the content to only be viewed by members of your family.  It doesn’t matter who copies or re-publishes that photo because the content protection mechanism is built in and only people who are authenticated as a member of your family can view.  Maybe you publish adult material (photos, videos etc), you can assign a content protection mechanism that ensures only people 18 years or older can view the content (regardless of where it is published or redistributed).  Finally if you are a musician you can assign a content protection policy to your music which specifies that only people who have a licenses to listen to your music can do so.  Then it doesn’t matter who sells the physical bits, what format it is in, what device the music is played on.  People don’t even need to download the music they own, they could go to any jukebox web service and only see the tittles they are authorized to play.

Clearly there are numerous challenges to face until we get to this point, but until we do any content protection mechanism is just going to be a facade causing more inconvenience to authorized users than it does to unauthorized users.

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Is love for Twitter blind?

Image via CrunchBase

Oh Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.  In almost every respect Twitter has been a perfect example of how not to launch a start up.  They have made blunder after blunder and in application of conventional logic, they shouldn’t be around today.

Issues that come to mind (that I remember) include upsetting half the world when they one day cut off the TXT msg service to everyone but the US & India (without any prior notice) and removing the instant messaging feature (without prior notice).  Then months of availability problems (the “fail whale”, how many other successful start ups have a common term for failure in their users vernacular?).  They have been extremely slow to roll out any new features, I can’t think of any significant features in the last 12 months, their web interface is outdated when compared with third parties.  Yes they have an API for integrating but they have on occasion changed this without warning breaking some third existing party applications.  Now it is security, a whole bunch of users passwords were phished over the weekend and following on from that a number of high profile “celebrity” accounts were hacked in a seemly separate incident (apparently hacking twitters support tools, whatever that means).

But does this matter?  I am still using Twitter today, and I am sure Twitters own numbers while show their user base has remained similar this week to last week.  Maybe it has even grown due to the publicity.  So this begs the question, is love really blind?  Twitter provides a micro community which you can’t really get anywhere else and the users love Twitter because of that.  And just like many relationships this love gives Twitter some freedom to screw up and have their users forgive and forget time and time again.  But also just like being in a relationship this love is not necessarily forever.  If you screw up big time there may be no forgiveness.  Twitter hasn’t done this yet, but I think they would find it hard to recover from a multi day outage or mass data loss for example.  And of course the other potential cause of love loss is something much better comes along.  A more attractive, more dependable alternative that has their head on straight and doesn’t screw up all the time.  But because people are so committed to Twitter this is unlikely to happen unless both of these scenarios happened at the same time, but for Twitters sake I hope it is able to get itself together, grows up a little and makes their users proud.

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2009: Products I Can’t Live Without

Inspired by TechCrunch I have put together my own “can’t do without” list as we head into 2009.  This of course skips over all the boring by necessary productivity software (Office, Visual Studio etc).
The following is my list of technology products that I use on a daily basis:

• Blackberry Bold 9000
• Facebook
• FeedDemon
• Flickr
• Google Search
• TweetDeck
• Twitter
• TwitterBerry
• Typepad
• Wikipedia

BlackBerry Bold – I have tried a lot of mobile devices and the BB Bold is the one I have liked best so far.  I would not use another Windows Mobile device at this point, some major improvements would have to be made before I ever touch one of these again.  In saying that, the BB Bold has crashed quite frequently but I have just updated the firmware which apparently fixes this – here’s hoping.

Facebook – I had a Facebook account for years before I started really using it.  It wasn’t until after a lot of non techie friends signed up that I really used it and now it is a good way to stay in touch with people who are all around the planet.

FeedDemon – I think I must be one of the few people still using this instead of Google Reader.  I haven’t actually taken the time to look at Google Reader yet.  Shame on me I know.  Feed Demon is what I monitor all feeds in.  Works ok but sucks memory up from time to time.

Flickr – Have a pro account and keep a copy of all my photos here.  Mix public and private for everyone, family and friends.

Google Search – What can I say, I Google things probably 50 times a day on average.

TweetDeck – This isn’t as good as what it could/should be but the interface is better than what comes natively with Twitter.  Real time tweets stop me having to hit the refresh button constantly and groups allows some sort of order to be applied.

Twitter – It took me about a year to get into Twitter.  I now see a clear distinction between blogging and micro-blogging and Twitter is now the only place to micro-blog.

TwitterBerry – A lot can happen on Twitter in a short space of time, the only possible way to stay up to date is to keep an eye on things regardless of where you are.  TwitterBerry allows me to do this from the Blackberry.

Typepad - For some reason I chose Typepad as my blogging platform in 2002 and I have used this for all my blogs since.  Typepad hosts everything and allows me complete control over layout, does everything I need and I am very happy with it.  Has an API so I even integrate some of the blogs with twitter.

Wikipedia – I have a pretty specific area of knowledge which means I need to look other things up, often.  Regularly I note that when I Google something if there is a Wikipedia link for what I am searching for I go straight to that.  Also more often I am searching directly on Wikipedia rather than Googling.  Wikipedia is great.

And that’s it.  I will do this list next year and see how much stuff changes.

Who cares about your data?

Image via Wikipedia

JournalSpace, a blogging website which had been around for 6 years but failed recently when their server died and they realized they didn’t have any backups of their users data.  This is bad for them and bad for the users of their services as presumably thousands of blog posts (their users data) have been lost.

Their defense was nonsense, they essentially blamed someone who didn’t work there any longer.  Phftt, a business whose sole purpose is to manage data which doesn’t have a sound backup strategy is the fault of the entire business not of one no longer employed IT guy.  Ultimately it doesn’t matter whatever the excuses are because regardless it seems the data is gone.  As we move more and more data to web services we are going to see more and more occurrences of this.  The problem is, the difference between a ‘web site’ going boom in the 2000 crash and a ‘web service’ going boom in the current climate is that web services are much more likely to eat data that matters to you.

This highlights a key issue as we move more data into a cloud services world.  While we are beginning to transition the management of information from our direct control to the control of a service provider, at the end of the day who has the ultimate responsibility to make sure your data is backed up?  Should you or your business trust your service provider to undertake a recovery strategy that will ensure you will always be protected from data loss?  You can’t see what is happening behind the scenes in their data centers so do you trust that they always remember to put the tapes in or do you trust that they are doing off sites in case of fire?   Do you trust that they actually have a data center and that their web service isn’t just been served up from someone’s PC under a desk somewhere?  Maybe you do, but do you also trust them to pay all their bills on time and not be shut down and disappear overnight?

I think the key learning here is that even in a web services world the only person who is going to have the same level of care and responsibility for your data as you do is you.  If your blog posts are important then you should have them backed up somewhere.  If your Amazon S3 data files are important then you should have them backup up somewhere.  If your Flickr photos are important these should be backed up somewhere.  If your tweets are important, or your Facebook friends list, and so on…

Good web services providers will provide good data recovery but will also understand that users are going to want the ability to provide additional protection to their own data.  They should in fact make it easy for users to do this by be providing the necessary API’s or interfaces to allow third party web services to hook into the users data and make copies of it elsewhere.

There are a lot of great web services out there that allow you to publish, store and share your data in ways like never before.  But remember that your data is yours and it is up to you to make sure it is protected whatever circumstance may arise.