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The Polar Express … for data!

english, General, Ideas View all 6 comments

I was at a nerd party last Friday and as it goes, ideas became wilder as the beer supply diminished. One of the wilder ones stuck with me: Jarl brought up the possibility of a submarine cable across the Arctic region, properly connecting East-Asia and Europe.

This is certainly a wild idea, but as a matter of fact it may have a great potential. The current routes between Europe and – say – China or Japan are flat out lousy. Ping times to Japan range between 300 and 400ms and to China close to half a second (brief and unscientific tests gave me average ping times of 320 and 420ms respectively). And for a good reason – the traffic has two equally lousy routes to choose from:

  1. Across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and via the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean where it zig-zags its way to the region, probably through a major peering point, located in Singapore.
  2. Across the Atlantic to the Atlantic Coast of the US, across entire North-America and then across the Pacific! Incredibly this is the route I usually saw when tracerouting Japanese and Chinese servers.

Either of these two routes is at least 16 thousand kilometers and probably closer to 20 thousand, with a lot of peering points along the way. (See Wikipedia map of submarine cables for reference)

Iceland is finally becoming pretty well connected as we will soon have at least 3 major submarine cables, each with bandwidth in the 1 Tbit/s range, and directly linked with the main peering points in Europe, namely London and Amsterdam (the latter one is unconfirmed).

From here, the distance through the Arctic region to Japan is less than 10 thousand kilometers as drawn below: From Iceland, north of Greenland and then straight across the North Pole to enter the Pacific Ocean via the Bering Strait and on to Japan. It is probably possible to lay a cable this route using submarines. It has been done, but I bet maintenance is a bit tricky. Somehow I just don’t see a submarine taking in a cable to splice damaged fiber.

A more likely route would therefore be the fabled North-West passage that presumably is now open for cable ships just as well as other vessels, allowing for relatively normal maintenance on a cable lying there. This variation is a little further in total (counting from mainland Europe). Both routes should nevertheless be able to bring ping times from Europe to East-Asia down to the 100ms range (laws of physics, like the speed of light start to kick in at these distances).

This is not perfect, but importantly this is below the threshold acceptable for VoIP traffic, meaning that bandwidth on this route should be hot property. So maybe, Iceland will one day become a major peering point for IP traffic to Asia…

Certainly a big, crazy, wild idea – but worth further investigation.

thumb-polarexpress

Google, gPhone and the disruptive business model

english, gPhone, mobile View all 2 comments

gPhone Rumors about Google’s upcoming mobile phone – dubbed gPhone – are becoming ever louder.

If you thought Apple’s iPhone business model was disruptive for the wireless industry (demanding 10% of the operator’s revenues from iPhone users – voice and data) – just you wait for Google entering the scene.

There’s not much confirmed information on the device, let alone the business case, but judging from how Google usually goes about, here’s my prediction:

gPhone will not be SIM locked like the iPhone, but rather accept SIM cards from any mobile provider. It will have a WiFi connection and an integrated gTalk client. Whenever the phone is in WiFi coverage, it will use VoIP, thereby only using the mobile operator’s network if no other connection is available. Even for those, I predict that Google will quickly open local VoIP gateway numbers in all major markets, thereby ensuring that the cost of any call made on the gPhone will be limited to a call to a local landline at the most.

All value added services will be ad supported, and as such free to the user. No doubt Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and other prime Google services will be nicely integrated, giving Google lots of valuable eyeballs and thereby ad revenues.

This will drive gPhone owners to mobile networks offering the lowest fixed monthly prices and data plans, making the operator as dumb a pipe as possible for now.

In a longer run, Google’s interest in the 700MHz auction in the US furthermore opens the possibility that traditional wireless operators could over time be cut out of the value chain altogether.

Oh man, this is going to be one fierce battle!

iPhone: APIs, 3G and “nothing new”

english, iphone, mobile View all 3 comments

iPhoneNews flash: iPhone is coming out on Friday!

(oh – you knew?)

I’ve been moaning about it (in Icelandic) since it was only a patent and do not doubt that it will be a major success.

In my evangelism since I’ve heard three main things criticized:

  1. It’s not a 3G phone
  2. It doesn’t allow 3rd party applications
  3. Other phones have all the same features

…and then of course the price. But who wouldn’t price their products high with this kind of anticipation? AT&T has even added an activation fee and the subscription plan announced today is not exactly cheap either. They will still be stressed to keep up with demand. The first couple of million buyers don’t even think about the price.

As for 3G, it’s a perfectly rational decision not to support 3G for the initial US version. AT&T’s 3G coverage (and in the States in general) is spotty and the fact that the iPhone (opposed to most other phones with WiFi support) automatically logs on to open and known WiFi networks for internet connectivity should actually make the experience quite impressive most of the time. Many of us spend most of our time either in the office or at home, and apart from that, EDGE is actually not too bad. It would actually not surprise me if Apple still had an extra card up it’s sleeve, using HTTP compression technology to speed up the downloads. The rumors that the European version will support 3G (and not be released until late Q1 or even Q2 next year) are getting louder and make perfect sense.

The lack of API suggests to me that Apple is trying to drive 3rd party development to use the integrated Safari browser instead. Keep in mind that this is a fully compatible XHTML/Javascript browser. Just look at some of the things that people have been doing with AJAX in the past 24 months or so. It’s possible to write pretty much any end-user application you can think of that way – and it keeps the applications securely isolated from the phone’s OS – which in my mind is a half-decent excuse by Jobs for not having an API. By supporting URI schemes like tel or wtai, they could allow calls to be set up directly from such applications, and by adding a couple of custom tags, schemas and/or javascript calls that would give access to things such as the address book and the maps. My money is on that being what Jobs was referring to here (see Q&A session). I believe my theory is further supported by Apple’s release of Safari for Windows, guessing that Jobs is buying into predictions that browsers are replacing operating systems as the most important software on any device.

Finally: Yes you can find all the features of iPhone in other phones. You might even find a single phone that sports almost all of them. But if you think the game is about that – you’re totally lost. Apple has three things that combined make them unique:

  • Brand and marketing muscle (including the loyal user community)
  • Hip designers
  • A dedication to and nose for superior usability – that means that people will actually use all those fancy features

This is what separates the iPhone from the rest.

In short: Apple is not making any rash mistakes. Any product design decision regarding the iPhone is taken either to make it a better product or for Apple’s benefit in their quest for the throne of IT.

How far is it?

english, Ideas Leave a comment

I’ve always been fascinated with those center-of-the-world type sign posts that tell you how far it is from where you are to various distant places.

I just made a fun little tool so that anybody can do the calculations needed to create one.

It’s fairly straight forward to use. The input fields accept most formats used for geo-coordinates (including those given by your GPS). Alternatively you can pick from a list of major cities around the world.

If your city is not listed and you don’t know your location, you might be able to find your coordinates by looking up your town in Wikipedia.

Any feedback is welcomed.

Enjoy!

How far is it?

Books are too long

english, General View all 7 comments

I love books, but I never have enough time to read. Most of my book reading is non-fictional except during the Christmas and New Year when I try to swallow the cream of the crop of the years’ fiction.

A lot of the best non-fiction books are really communicating only one or two core ideas. Something that could be hard-boiled down to 20 minutes worth of reading with optional supplementary material.

I’d love if authors would structure their books in this way or if someone would offer the service of extracting the core and publishing it in compact format (just make sure that the author gets her share). I’d pay the same for the books, and probably buy a lot more of them. In fact I’d pay the same to be able to access such “book cores” online as I do a lot of 20 minute reading sessions there anyway.

Shortened versions have been published for a lot of fiction. Often to the author’s (and literature lecturers’) inconvenience. But it makes a lot more sense with business, popular science and other non-fictional books. And there are probably more people out there willing to pay for it.

White male seeks single search engine

english, search One comment

As I store more and more data in different online applications, the need for a search engine that can search across them all becomes apparent.

I have photos on Flickr, blog posts here on my blog, bookmarks in Spurl.net, contribute to several project Wikis, have written articles for a number of diferent online publications, edit documents in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, enter data to DabbleDB and try to store most other documents in an online folder using WebDAV.

I’m convinced that online apps will replace most if not all desktop applications, but with all my data scattered all over the place, an obvious drawback is the lack of searchability.

Most of the applications mentioned above have RSS feeds, APIs or other relatively open and simple ways to get the data out. So how about one app to “search them all and forever bind them”?

Here’s how it would work: Type in a search phrase and get in return a list of results linking to the individual entries or items in their respective applications – displays thumbnails for extra credit.

Start with supporting the most common Web 2.0 services and make a way to easily add support for additional ones; ensure that I can keep my private data private and – voila – you have at least one paying customer.

Where do I sign up?

The next Amazon web services

english, General, web20expo One comment

Jeff Bezos took the stage here at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, followed by a conversation with Tim O’Reilly.

Bezos was talking about the current state and future vision for Amazon Web Services. He said that basically Amazon wants to give web applications developers of the world the tools they need to be able to leave the server operations part of their business to Amazon, and focus on the development and building of their business – adding that over the course of 13 years Amazon had gotten “quite good at it”. Knowing by heart how all involving this part of operations can get as soon as an application sees significant traffic I buy into this easily.

Bezos refrained from answering many of O’Reilly’s questions. One of them about what new web services Amazon had coming. It’s an interesting question – and I immediately started guessing.

Let’s first see what they have in the field:

  • Simple Queue Service (SQS): A highly scalable message queue.
  • Mechanical Turk: A way to integrate humans into your applications. (I bet Bezos read this blog post when coming up with it :))
  • Simple Storage Service (S3): A massive file storage service.
  • Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2): Servers on demand, rented by the computing hour.

Additionally they have several E-commerce services related to their retail business and Amazon’s Alexa also has some web services available, but these services are really a part of another business strategy.

So, looking at the above, I can immediately guess a few likely upcoming services:

  • Database Service: A web service wrapping the operations of large scale databases into a simple API, hiding all the complexities of clustering, redundancy, replication and backup from the blissfully ignorant developers. Could be interesting to see this as a RDF datastore, but that’s probably premature or at least something to include in a separate service for the time being.
  • Authentication and payment services: It’s something that Amazon is really good at, it makes perfect sense to give the rest of us access for a fee. This could potentially take a serious stab at PayPal. Note to Bezos: Use OpenID.
  • Web application framework: Wrapping EC2 in at a higher level would make sense. With the current solution, deciding when to spawn new servers and so on is still left to the developer. An application framework could relief this burden and once again let the developer focus solely on the application itself.

Anyone out there have further ideas?

The world needs more people like him

data, english, General View all 5 comments

This is a video of a presentation by Hans Rosling of Gapminder, the Swedish data visualisation organization that Google recently bought.

Rosling has a great vision: To make the world a better place by improving access to and presentation of data about the world, such as statistics about poor countries.

He makes the point very well in the presentation – which in turn is actually funny as hell and at times as exciting as a good sports broadcast – just a lot more important.

When you next think about sitting down to watch a brain-numbing sitcom, watch this instead. It’ll make you feel better.