As a technologist, I am a firm believer that IT can change our lives in many ways for the better. And although I continue to believe that the people networks (via referral) is still the best way to meet people of our liking, it wasn’t until recently through several friends’ recommendations, that I finally created a facebook account. And in fact, I was quite impressed with its capabilities and offerings. In today’s society, I believe that people are living in a fast-faced environment and timing can sometimes be difficult to arrange, for instance, for two friends to meet up together and catch up. WWW can close this gap by having people stay connected in a non-disruptive manner, e.g. “I’m busy right now, can I call you back later” is a typical response. However, greater offerings are still needed to make these tools even more effective such as VoIP or video conferencing. It seems that the Human Network in the 21st century is about to take on another major transformation in the way people interact and form new relationships.
Many of us has probably heard from news media and other forms of communication about conserving resources on Earth and making environmentally responsible decisions. However, I found this topic to be even more interesting upon watching this video from the website TED when John Doerr talks about profits in Greentech. John Doerr is a very respectful and renown venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.
Here is the link to the video: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/128
A variety of factors can impact Greentech including efforts from companies, policy makers, and people. However, the message seems to be a long tedious process to catch on, especially in a country like the United States where we have abundant amount of resources than other places around the world. Over time, I do think that Greentech will be important in our lives and that we do need to fix it, especially in the United States. Some futurists even predict that greentech may be the next big thing such as the Internet during theY2K era. I hope that the beginning efforts to think in Greentech terms will continue to evolve. The benefits of Greentech will be seen not only from an environmental perspective, but from an economical point-of-view as well.
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In the past few years, the computing industry has seen significant paradigm shift of capacity from high-end enterprise to low-end consumers. In software, the example would be the open source projects. Many software projects now rely on open source code as an initial step to get things started and then companies build on top of such platform. In hardware, we see that commodity electronics is overtaking enterprise solutions. Although it is true that in many instance that high-end solutions provide better support, customization, and capabilities. However, when all things are considered and added, commodity hardware clearly outperform enterprise solutions via brute force simply by allocating more resources and getting more out of something per dollar spent. This is already true in microprocessors, hard disks, and network interfaces, and probably true for many other computing devices and peripherals. As the trend continues in driving commodity, end users will have access to more computing capabilities than ever before.
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As I get older, I realized that as responsible adults, the amount of work we need to do keeps on increasing. This seems like an upward trend that will keep on growing. Our responsibilities increase, ranging from school, work, family, and other engagements. Losing sleep is one way to dealt with the problem, but it doesn’t seem to be a good, long-time solution. Perhaps, as someone once told me, it is about “opportunity cost,” like the concept in economics. You pick and choose what’s important and prioritize the list. Go do those things first. If you do have remaining time aside, you try and do the remaining tasks. Otherwise, you just move on with it. It’s easier said than done. For my own life, I hope I can practice and follow the rule of opportunity cost in the right path.
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Back in the 1990s, people surf the Internet using their phone lines with dial-up modem. Things have changed quite a bit now. These days, we make phone calls over the Internet either through DSL, cable, WLAN, or other medium of connections. This trend seems to take another step further with not only having voice communicate over the Internet, but for video as well. The Internet will be a disruptive technology on the future of video delivery and rich media contents. Traditional television broadcast, in particular, may see a huge shift of users using their Internet connection to watch tv shows, movies, and daily news. In Computer Science, topic areas in distributed systems and peer-to-peer networks will be important on the future of IPTV.
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In recent years, we are starting to see more and more displays around us, starting with our computer monitors to flat panel TVs in the living room, and more recently, digital photo frames. Outside the home, similar trends is happening as the digital signage industry continues to gain ground. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. People are fascinated with pictures and this will have an important impact on the future of the display industry.
A few days ago, I had the opportunity to try a little experiment with my roommate. Using a large online picture album in Flickr, we stream targeted pictures to a computer monitor as screensaver. We used a simple freeware package called Slickr and it worked beautifully on the first try. Here is the link to download Slickr: http://cellardoorsw.com/?page_id=4
Soon thereafter, contents in the display will be dynamic, customized, and streamed on-the-fly. The display experience in the future will be exciting to watch.
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A few months ago, I took a graduate course from the UCI Paul Merage Business School. First, I should say that it was a great honor to have taken Professor Kenneth Kraemer’s class, especially since it was his last time teaching a class at UC Irvine after 40 years. Professor Kraemer is a great educator, and a very friendly and approachable person.
From this class, I had the opportunity to write a case study on a high-tech company where Information Technology played a critical role on the company’s success. And it so happens that I was interested in digging deeper into Google, one of the most admirable companies in the world. Few months later now, the paper has matured through several makings and I am honored to have the chance in publishing this paper in UC Irvine’s own Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations (CRITO), one of the world’s leading think tanks on the impact of information technology on organizations and society.
Here is the link to the Google paper published on February 2007.
I hope the materials written in the paper are accurate to the best of my knowledge. I welcome anyone who may have comments on this work. My email address is: rex@uci.edu
Posted in technology | Tagged research | 1 Comment »
During this past week, I gave a presentation in my Ubiquitous Computing course on the topic of Indoor Communications. The intent was to introduce and describe a number of communication technologies for applications for indoor communications. In my presentation, I touched on a number of communication technologies including Bluetooth, Powerline, and Infrared.
Here is the slides to my powerpoint presentation on February 6th, 2007.
However, it seems to me that none other than 802.11 Local Area Network is the clear winner for indoor communications. In many residential and even some metropolitan areas today, we already detect multiple wireless access points nearby. Furthermore, besides having 802.11 wireless access points in the typical household with multiplePCs and laptops for sharing Internet connection, there are now a number of consumer products that are already or soon-to-be wi-fi enabled (e.g. cell phones, Skype phones, cameras, and digital photo frames) AlthoughWi-Fi is known to have interference issues in the open spectrum, over time I think there will be technological solutions to this problem such as cognitive radios.
The FONera Movement is an interesting business case of using wireless access points as a mechanism to share network connection with every consumer being also a service provider. Currently, the target rate for FON routers is to reach a critical mass of having 1 in 10,000 FON routers to human population per country around the world.
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In the past, I used to think that Time Management is simply a waste of time. After all, it takes time to manage how one would like to allocate his schedule. However, as I get older, I realized that more responsibilities are piled up, more role playing are required, while using the same amount of time that everyone has, twenty-four hours a day.
I am now starting to learn about time management and how it needs to be done. Time management is about productivity, efficiency, patience, and priority setting. One needs to think ahead, be able to say “no,” and yet stay truthful with oneself. Furthermore, time management is about when to stay focus, when to juggle multiple tasks, and when to relax with busy schedules. Working day and night without any breaks can quickly lead to burn-out, which can transform into unproductive down-turn. As I am writing this entry, I am feeling the importance of time management . However busy one can be, I realized that having a tight schedule can also be quite exciting to see how far one can stretch and reach his limits.
Posted in living | Tagged development | 1 Comment »
VoIP technology has been around for quite some time. However, it is now emerging as a mainstream form of communication. First, many traditional telephony companies are having difficult times competing withVoIP firms such as Vonage, SunRocket, ViaTalk due to competitive pricing while offering comparable voice quality. In addition, applications such as Skype is becoming pervasive and allowing people around the world to connect.
However, there are now many other web applications offering similar services such as Skype, the difference being that they do not have millions of online subscribers. And they too are getting very competitive. For example, I recently found theseVoIP applications to allow “free” international calls either directly from your PC or mobile device. The technology is not completely mature as there are limitations such as the countries it can reach and some countries are limited to dial land-line calls only. However, the services will get better in time, and the days of expensive international calling rates will disappear. This is a very exciting time for communication and the movement is going towards simplicity, free services and common technology.
Check out these VoIP sites:
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