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O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies

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iGEM Congratulations to NewcastleToday

Belated congratulations to the Newcastle team who won the 2008 iGEM contest with a cheap biosensor for pathogens that used a biological implementation of an artificial neural network (life imitating art imitating life?), modelling the regulatory networks with CellML and simulation software to help them evolve a predictable circuit. Two of the team members, Mike Cooling and James Lawson are at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, for which I'm an advisor. ABI was one of the major developers of the CellML standard. Great job, all!

Velocity 2009: Themes, ideas, and call for participation...Yesterday

Last year's Velocity conference was an incredible success. We expected around 400 people and we ended up maxing out the facility with over 600. This year we're moving the conference to a bigger space and extending it to 3 days to accommodate workshops and longer sessions. Velocity 2009 will be on June 22-24th, 2009 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.

This year's conference will be especially important. I've said many times that Web Performance and Operations is critical to the success of every company that depends on the web. In the current economic situation, it's becoming a matter of survival. The competitive advantage comes from the ability to do two things:

1. Generate more revenue with fewer resources
2. Respond quickly to change

Our Velocity 2009 mantra is "Fast, Scalable, Efficient, Available", a slight change from last year. (We've replaced "Resilient" with "Efficient" to make focus clear.)

I'm excited to announce that joining Steve Souders & I on this year's program committee are John Allspaw, Artur Bergman, Scott Ruthfield, Eric Schurman, and Mandi Walls.  We've already started w

Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the CloudYesterday

Yesterday I gave a talk to the Privacy Forum in Auckland, New Zealand, titled Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud. The talk was intended as a scene setter for a discussion with the audience, about 70 lawyers, technologists, consultants, and public policy wonks. They responded well to the challenge, and we talked about the nature of privacy, how expectations change over time, trust.salesforce.com, and more. The presentation is embedded below, and can be downloaded (CC-Attribution-ShareAlike) from Slideshare (I recommend expanding the preso to full-screen so you can read the notes, which contain the text of the talk).

Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: ubicomp cloud)

The Commoditization of Massive Data AnalysisNovember 19

Big Data is a major theme on the O'Reilly Radar, so we're delighted to welcome guest blogger Joe Hellerstein, a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley whose research focuses on databases and distributed systems. Joe has written a whitepaper with more detail on this topic.

There is a debate brewing among data systems cognoscenti as to the best way to do data analysis at this scale. The old guard in the Enterprise IT camp tends to favor relational databases and the SQL language, while the web upstarts have rallied around the MapReduce programming model popularized at Google, and cloned in open source as Apache Hadoop. Hadoop is in wide use at companies like Yahoo! and Facebook, and gets a lot of attention in tech blogs as the next big open source project. But if you mention Hadoop in a corporate IT shop you are often met with blank stares -- SQL is ubiquitous in those environments. There is still a surprising disconnect between these developer communities, but I expect that to change over the next year or two.

We are at the beginning of what I call The Industrial Revolution of Data. We're not quite there yet, since most of the digital information available today is still individually "handmade": prose on web pages, data entered into forms, vid

DIY Appliances on the Web?November 18

Or, My Enterprise is Appliancized, Why Isn't Your Web?

I wrote a couple of posts a while back that covered task-optimized hardware. This one was about a system that combined Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's) with a commodity CPU platform to provide the sheer number crunching performance needed to break GSM encryption. This one looked at using task-appropriate efficient processors to reduce power consumption in a weather predicting super computer. In these two posts I sort of accidentally highlighted two of the three key selling points of task-specific appliances, sheer performance and energy efficiency (the third is security). The posts also heightened my awareness of the possibilities for specialized hardware and some of my more recent explorations that focused on the appliance market in particular got me wondering if there might be a growing trend toward specialized appliances.

Of course, specialized devices have been working their way into the enterprise ever since the first router left its commodity Unix host for the task-specific richness of specialized hardware. Load balancers followed soon after and then devices from companies like Layer 7 and Dat