Article first published as Ten Tech Trends for Your 2012 New Year’s Resolutions List on Technorati

One of the most exciting things about working in tech is using it to create new ways to work, play—and even live. We have seen many great technology innovations develop over the past few years. Over 2012, ten of them will complete the jump from “new concept” to “mainstream trend.” How many of them are your ready for?

1. Everything Will Be Portable. The move to portable computing (smartphones, tablets and ultrabooks) will accelerate. Thick laptops and—even worse—desktops will be a relic of the past (except for those with high-power computing needs). If you are not yet mobile- and portable-ready, you better get there very soon.

2. Augmented Reality Will Go Mainstream. Augmented Reality (AR) is no longer a science fiction concept. Smartphones and (especially) tablets are mass-market platforms for everyday augmented reality. We are already seeing the first applications at Tech Meetups, CES and more. At least three innovators will exploit this, gaining mainstream adoption, by the end of 2012.

3. Touch Will Be Ubiquitous. Over the past five years, capacitive touch interfaces have re-programmed how millions of us interact with technology. As more devices are now sold today with touch than without, it is time to begin optimizing your user interface and user experience for touch (instead of a two-button mouse and keyboard).

4. Voice Will Be Next. While the intuitiveness of touch is a leapfrog improvement over mouse-and-keyboard, it still ties up our hands. Voice-based interaction is where we need to go. Apple’s Siri began the move of voice-driven interaction into the mainstream. This year, we’ll see SDKs for iOS and Android that harness the creativity of thousands to explode use of voice.

5. Fat Will Be the New Thin. Over a decade ago, broadband Internet enabled browsers to replace thick client applications. Now, portable computing usage across low power, lossy networks (e.g., mobile, WiFi, Bluetooth) coupled with AppStore Model has brought locally installed apps back in vogue. Building web apps is not enough; you need AppStore apps too.

6. Location-based Privacy Will Be Solved. Over the last two years location-based services became really hot. Unfortunately location-related privacy issues became hot too. The move of these services into mainstream populations of tens of millions will expand anecdotal security scares into weekly news stories, forcing adoption of safer location-based privacy policies.

7. Cloud Will Be the New Norm. Cloud computing is no longer an “edge market.” It is now adopted by big enterprises, public sector agencies—and even consumer tech providers. The cost, convenience and flexibility advantages of cloud computing will make it too hard for everyone not to use—everyday—by the end of this year.

8. …So Will Twitter. While people still love to debate the reasons to use Twitter, everything from the Arab Spring to the Charlie Sheen Meltdown showed that Twitter is now a well-recognized media channel. #Election2012 will accelerate mainstream use of Twitter—with the same overwhelming intensity we have seen for years in “traditional” campaign advertising.

9. ‘Consumerization of IT’ Planned and Budgeted. Consumer tech has become so sophisticated (without sacrificing ease-of-use and intuitiveness) that we began last year to demand its use in the enterprise. 2012—the first year in which most enterprise budgets include planned projects to support the consumerization of IT—will both accelerate and “lock in” this new tech trend.

10. 2012 Will Be Declared the Begin of “The ‘Big Data’ Era.” This year we will see another 40% increase in data we need to manage. This growth, coupled with recent releases of enterprise-ready high-scale NoSQL products will begin adoption of this tech by the entire industry. Looking back, 2012 will represent the start of the global, cross-industry Big Data era.

If you haven’t started embracing these already, now is a great time to add them to your “2012 Technology New Year’s Resolution List.”  Sponsor a few pilot projects in your enterprise. Buy one or two Post-CES products to help you work more efficiently at the office. Or—if you want to include the whole family—buy one to use while you shop online, watch TV or manage your household.

Yes, it has been a really bad year for BlackBerry. Their security architecture was almost blocked by several national governments. They have lost significant market share. Their PlayBook has not sold well. Their earnings have dropped precipitously. And now, their new line of BlackBerry 10 (f/k/a “BBX”) smartphones have been delayed until the end of 2012 and their stock hit an eight-year low today.

Right now it would be really easy to pile Pelion on Ossa and bash BlackBerry. However, that would not be terribly productive. Instead, I’d rather offer some unsolicited—but potentially very useful—advice as to how to turn around their brand and market position: get rid of the BlackBerry OS move to Android—at least on a few new smartphones

This may sound like surrender. It is not. It would be one of those rare situations when a company applies creative destruction to itself to regain leadership. Here is how it could work:

• BlackBerry’s OS and Enterprise Server Architecture—the very thing that let them create the smartphone market—is now exactly what is holding it back. It is more vulnerable to outage than newer mobile architectures. It has a smaller developer community and much fewer apps. It does not have the features Android and iOS have. It is no longer a competitive advantage for BlackBerry. It is time to move away from it. Luckily for BlackBerry, Android is open available for their use—without license fees
• However something far less technical—the BlackBerry keyboard—remains a key unique selling proposition for them. Many people stay on their BlackBerry’s (or at least keep one for work) for one simple reason: BlackBerry’s (patented) keyboard remains the easiest, fastest keyboard to use for “power” email and text users. Imagine how compelling a smartphone would be with Android OS, Android Market and BlackBerry’s Keyboard.
• Finally, BlackBerry has something else of enormous market value: established enterprise relationships with near every Fortune 500 company (and many, many SMEs). BlackBerry sales reps and re-seller partners could bring a new Android-powered BlackBerry to the enterprise, introducing this new product to a “captive” audience of enterprise-issued smartphone users faster than anyone else. Pleasing these users would later lead to a return to growth of BlackBerry’s consumer market share.

The interesting thing is that BlackBerry does not have to do this for 100% of their product line. They can try it on a few smartphones, in partnership with Google (I am sure Google would be happy to oblige). I am also betting this innovation would create a lot of buzz around their product lime and give $RIMM a much-needed price bump.

Facebook has the potential to become the “marketing platform of the decade” used by all types of organizations (e.g., small business, enterprise, non-profits) to engage their customers:

1. At over 800 million members, it has the widest reach of any network in history (i.e., nearly all of your customers are on Facebook). Facebook Connect lets you tap this network in one click.
2. Just as important, Facebook has become ubiquitous in people’s lives. Uses spend more time on Facebook than the next four most popular domains combined (i.e., Facebook is the fastest way to share a message with your customers).
3. Best of all, the network effect of Facebook incentivizes people to use true information for identification (i.e., Facebook combines the accuracy of “traditional” paid subscription direct marketing data with the timeliness of online interaction.)
4. Finally, Facebook provides organizations easy-to-use tools to set up pages, access customer data, and analyze trends (tools good enough to potentially displace many enterprise solutions for campaign management and CRM analytics).

The One Feature Holding Back Marketing Platform Dominance

This four-way combination should make Facebook the dominant marketing platform – for small businesses, large enterprises, and non-profits alike. However, Facebook lacks one critical feature to achieve this: providing business customers the ability to geographically target (“geo-target”) ‘Wall’ content (news, videos, status updates, etc.). As a result, businesses using Facebook Pages to reach customers are forced to select from three Hobson’s Choices: 1) spam customers with irrelevant content, 2) reduce content to the least common denominator or 3) fragment their membership across multiple pages. Let’s look at three examples:

1) Large Business Example: International High-end Grocery Chain

A particular high-end grocery chain (I frequent almost daily) makes extensive use of Facebook for customer outreach. However, their stores have different inter-regional needs (based on climate and culture) and intra-regional needs (based on inventory). To manage this, this company uses dozens of different Facebook Pages: one at each country level and one for each individual store. This significantly fragments their reach as their customers are forced to locate and ‘Like’ many different pages (something annoying at best and unlikely to occur at worst).

2) Small Business Example: Specialty Recruiting Firm

A colleague of mine runs a small specialty recruiting firm for the software industry that connects companies and candidates at two levels: he shares job postings to attract candidates and he shares candidate credentials to attract companies. He does this nationally, across many metropolitan markets. To manage this in Facebook, he has to share all information with all fans, forcing him to span customers with data that more often-than-not does not interest them. As a result, many of his fans have ‘hidden’ his feeds, making Facebook less useful to his business and his customers.

3) Non-Profit Example: Nationwide Animal Rescue Organization

I used to be a ‘Fan’ of a nation-wide animal rescue group that uses social media to call animal-lovers to help animals in desperate need. However, nearly all of this assistance is local (e.g., can someone foster this cute dog in ‘City X’ before in the next 48 hours before it is put to sleep?) As a non-profit, the organization does not have the resources to manage separate Facebook Pages for each metro area. As a result, they send appeals to help for every animal in every location to every Fan. This presents Fans the choice of being bombarded with animals they cannot help (incredibly disheartening) or hiding the feed (inhibiting the organization’s mission).

Geo-targeting is the Answer

Allowing Business Pages to geo-target Wall posts would solve the problems all three of these organizations are facing:

• Customers of the high-end grocery chain would be able access to global, regional, and local information (for every nearby store) by just following one page.
• The owner of the recruiting firm could target candidates and job offers by geography, something of growing importance in today’s harder relocation market.
• The non-profit would be able to offer those who animals the ability to provide urgent help without feeling “guilty” about circumstances they are powerless to change.

The changes enabled by geo-targeting are not trivial; they are transformational. They turn a flood of mostly-irrelevant noise into tailored stream of highly pertinent information. Customers are more likely to read updates (instead of ‘Hiding’ them), leading to higher engagement (and sales). Even better, the benefits of geo-targeting grow as more organizations use them: customers are bombarded with less noise from each page, making them both happier and more likely to read the Wall Posts of many Business Pages. (It is not surprising that the use of Geo-targeting on social networks creates positive externalities, thanks to network effects.)

This may sound like hyperbole, but there is a precedent for it: Internet advertising. Before the rise of context-targeted advertising, Internet companies bombarded users with display, popup and pop-under adverts to drive as much display inventory revenue as possible. It took companies like Google to show that reducing how much you showed customers (based on location and behavior) would actually increase engagement (and revenue). Facebook has the opportunity to take this to an entirely new level, leveraging their power of their Wall and their real-time access to highly accurate demographic and location data.

One process often over-looked is answering those “account security questions” required to gain access to (or assistance with) your account. Too many businesses manage this is a way that completely falls apart when you are likely to need this most (in an airport, department store of other busy place far from your home or office).

The routine model of most companies is to ask you to provide personal identifying information (PII), such as your mother’s maiden name, social security number. Verbally sharing the answers to these is fine when you are in the privacy of your home or office. Sharing them in public, where you can be easily overheard, is an invitation to identity theft. Typing them over a smartphone is also less than ideal, especially when you are holding bags or waiting at a checkout counter.

Some companies try to get around this by using strong passwords. However this too is an item that you would never want to speak out loud in public. It is also likely be something hard to type on smartphone keyboard or flip-phone keypad.

The answer is to consider the mobile use-case from the start and to design a process that works equally well anywhere: at home, in public, on your PC or on any telephone. HSBC (United Kingdom) does a really good job with this. This is not a surprise as HSBC is a very global company and use of mobile for business transactions is much more widespread in Europe in Asia than it is in the US. HSBC uses a two-part system for authentication, where both parts are completely numeric (enabling easy entry anywhere by keypad or voice recognition) AND both are items that are completely useless to anyone who overhears them in public (a magic combination):

• The first item you use is your account number. This is fully numeric and it is the same number you give others who need to give money to you (i.e., it is something you are not afraid someone else will hear).
• The second item is a numeric PIN (Personal Identification Number). However, it is a PIN that is never used in its entirety. The IVRS, computer or call centre agent speaking to you over the phone will never ask you your PIN: they will only ask you a series of questions like “What is the third digit of your PIN? What is the sixth?” As a result, anyone overhearing you (unless you are silly enough to have your phone on speaker) will not gain any information they can use to crack your account (before triggering a fraud alert and security lock).

This simple design works really well everywhere (it even translates well across multiple languages). It is not only easy to use. It is something that you feel comfortable using in public.

We need more solutions like this to make our mobile lives easier.

Article first published as Want To Know What The Next Generation of Apps Will Be Like? Talk to Siri on Technorati.

A lot of people asked me why I upgraded to the iPhone 4S. The reason I gave—before I upgraded—was to get its new 8-megapixel camera. However, the reason I would now give—after I upgraded—is to get Siri.

It is really easy to think of Siri as a “toy”, something that lets you perform a few simple “parlor tricks” with your voice (instead of you fingers). It’s not. In reality, Siri a huge step forward into the world of the next generation of Post-PC Era interface. I know, this statement sounds a little over-blown and buzz-wordy. However, it’s rather clear if you step back and look at the trends in computing that have developed since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007:

The iPhone: Life Is Integrated

While the iPhone was not the first integrated smartphone (or even the first capacitive touch phone), it was the first smartphone that made integration “of everything” easy and intuitive. You could manage your phone calls, contact lists, texting, email, web browsing, navigation, picture and photo albums in one simple, intuitive device—using the best tool known to man: your fingers. Better yet, the iPhone recognized that life always offers new opportunities. It enabled you to add new capabilities (i.e., Apps) created by others just as easily as you would add songs to your music library.

The changes since the iPhone’s introduction have been enormous. Smartphone growth since 2007 has outpaced growth of the Internet, TV or radio. Capacitive touch interfaces are now mainstream (well beyond iOS). App Stores are not just exploding, they are becoming the mainstream way to get software.

The iPad: Life Is Beyond the PC

This success of the iPhone paved the way to the iPad, the first mainstream market capacitive touch tablet. While many tablets were launched before the iPad, none of them became “must have” ubiquitous devices. The impact of the iPad has been even larger than that of the iPhone. It has heralded talk of a new Post-PC Era. It had grown even faster than iPad. Competitors have released over 100 products—in less than two years—to compete with it.  A whole new generation of touch-based apps have been created to tap this grow, from industries as diverse as startups to old media to medicine.

However, the iPad has not quite “closed the door” on PCs yet. The “$64‑Billion Question” I always hear is, “iPads are great, but people are going to still need to enter text. How will they do that without a real keyboard?” Yes, tablets are “re-wiring” how we interact with “information devices” (f.k.a. PCs). Yes, many creative apps have shown that tablets can be used to create content in ways that keyboards cannot. Nevertheless, these techniques have still not yet answered the $64‑Billion Question. Now, Siri provides the answer.

Siri: Life Doesn’t Need a Keyboard

What iPhone did for smartphones, Siri will do for voice-based recognition and interaction. It is the first application that makes integrated voice interaction with multiple applications (phone, texting, pictures, email, web, picture and music album management) easy and finger-free (touch screen- and keyboard- free). The idea of being able to replace what you did with your hands with your voice is no longer a concept—it is real. Ellis Hamburger of Business Insider recently wrote how surprisingly much this changes your entire way of interacting with information devices, after just two weeks of use.

However, this is just the beginning of much more to come. The introduction of Siri to the (“not a major upgrade,” “limited market”) iPhone 4S triggers two important steps. First, it begins “training early adopters” in voice-driven interaction (while simultaneously creating “buzz” for everyone else). Second, it gives Apple valuable data needed to fully achieve a best-in-class voice-driven usability experience on a much broader scale in “major” product releases.

From, here we will see five things to come—by the end of 2012:

1. Massively Expanded Siri on iPad 3. Apple will launch a massively expanded version of Siri on the iPad 3, drawing upon its much bigger screen and integration with your home or office. Imagine people able to dictate documents, letters, etc. with nice formatting, watching the screen type faster than you can. Imagine extending this music, video, family photo albums, controls for your home, etc.

2. New Siri SDK for iOS. In combination with release of the iPad 3 (or iPhone 5), Apple will release a SDK to enable all developers (not just a select few partners) to build voice interactive applications on the iPhone, iPad, and (maybe) Apple TV. This will create an…

3. Explosion of New Voice-driven Apps. Just as the iPhone and iPad app stores created an explosion of mobile- and touch-based Apps, the Siri SDK will do the same for voice-driven applications. This creativity will yield more ideas that any one company or person could conceive of on their own.

4. Renewed Innovation from the Competition. The millions of people downloading voice-driven apps for their iPhones and iPads will be too attractive a market for competitors to ignore. They will develop voice-driven applications, SDKs and markets of their own. Google will be a major player (given their work in voice-driven search) ensuring the “iOS vs. Android” fight continues its intensity.

5. Smartphones Will Improve Microphone Quality. Human beings are (for now) much better at understanding speech than computers are. We are all now trained to “fill in the gaps” of things we cannot hear on poor-quality mobile phone calls. Voice-driven computer apps are going to take a long time to catch up. As a result, Apple, Google and Microsoft will drive handset providers to improve microphone clarity—making smartphones better for all.

By 2013, new applications will look (and sound) very little like they do today (let alone how they did in 2007). Of course the challenge at this point will be figuring out how can we all hear ourselves over everyone talking to his or her devices. I’m sure someone will figure out an app for that.

Article first published as Aurasma: Augmented Reality on Your iPad, iPhone or Android on Technorati.

At this week’s New York Tech Meetup event, (after surprise opening comments by Mayor Bloomberg), I got to see demos from several interesting new companies that exemplify the use of technology to change how we work, live and play—always something very exciting to see. One of demonstrations that jumped out was one of Aurasma, by Autonomy. Autonomy calls Aurasma “the world’s first visual browser.” As most browsers are already visual, I am not sure what this means. However, what jumped out at me was that Aurasma is a great expression of the idea that tablets (and now even some smartphones) not just keyboard-less computers, but instead a mass-market platform for augmented reality. It combines the portable application processing power, camera, touch screen and Internet connection of an Apple or Android smart device with backend image recognition and multimedia content management software to let you literally bring images you see “to life.” Here’s how it works:

1. Point the camera at an image (billboard, magazine advert, box cover, etc.)
2. Aurasma detects the image and replaces it with interactive web pages and multimedia adding information and enabling online transactions regarding what you are viewing
3. This interaction is “stateful” – once you start the process you can walk away from the picture, product or billboard and continue to explore the interactive information

The video below shows how Aurasma works in action:

This type of technology opens the door to many interesting applications:

• Turning a static billboard or print advertisement into a commercial or move trailer
• Viewing real-time product information and reviews on a product displayed in a store
• Immediately purchasing (online) something you see anywhere: in an advert, store window—or even a friend’s house
• Reviewing a bio and statistics for an athlete or actor you are watching on TV
• Overlaying a landmark or museum display with maps and historical information

What is nice about this approach is that you don’t need to put QR Codes, Snap Tags, or MS Tags everywhere (you only need to “point and shoot” at an image you see). What adds complexity is the replacing the ease-of-search that these 2D barcodes bring with less structured image recognition software (and many uploaded images). Whether this approach is “The One” remains to be seen. Regardless, it is something to take a look at (and try-out) if you are interesting taking advantage of the growth of tablets and smartphones to create rich, interactive experiences for your customers and partners—wherever they are.

Note: I have no relationship with Autonomy. I just have a strong belief that mobile, portable and capacitve touch technology will fundamentally change how we use computers in the next decade.

Three of the most thought-provoking articles I have read this year on enterprise technology have shined a light on a new, emerging phenomenon: how the rapid advancement of Web 2.0, cloud computing, tablet and smart phone technologies has opened the door to allow consumer-oriented products to displace traditional enterprise technology:

• R “Ray” Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, explored this from the perspectives of speed, innovation and freedom of choice, writing about the emergence of consumer technologies that meet robust enterprise needs – fast, cheaper and more flexibility.
• Matt Rossof, in an interview with Andreessen-Horowitz partner Peter Levin, discussed this from the end user experience, asking why people should not get the same ease of use from enterprise tech that they do from the products they use outside of work.
• Thomas Wailgum, writer on enterprise for CIO.com, highlighted the poor customer experiences that can arise after “vendor lock-in”, questioning the business rationale to accept this in light of influx consumer-style, on-demand options now available.

It does not take much research to see the increased use of consumer tech for business. Many of us now can use personal smartphones and tablets to read our corporate email or Skype to conduct free, easy videoconferences. App Stores have thousands of business productivity apps we can install instantly. Media giants like CNN use WordPress. Even the US government now uses Drupal, a GSA-managed App Store and Google Office via the cloud.

Why This Is Happening Now

Technology innovation is not new; it happens all the time. What has changed is the emergence of a whole new set of innovations that focus on making it much, much easier to deploy and integrate robust, advanced technology. Three particular developments stand out:

1. Cloud Computing. The Cloud has turned computing into a utility. Fortune 500 firms, SMEs, startups and even individuals can setup business-class environments with equal ease – without the need for large investment in capital or specialized teams.

2. Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 (and Mobile 2.0) movement has made integration open and market-driven. You can go to an App Store and find thousands of applications that work together rather than managing—and maintaining—integration projects yourself.

3. The Post-PC Era. Consumer “off the shelf” smartphones have changed how many people view computing—at work or at home. As a result, they are now creating demand for a new class of business application, one that deliverable over the cloud and Web 2.0.

The Result: Consumer and Enterprise Worlds in Collision

In the past, the enterprise and consumer technology worlds rarely touched. Consumer tech was in the household (or consumer-facing websites). Enterprise tech was on-premise. The resource-intensive requirements to deploy and integrate business technology served as a barrier between the consumer and enterprise technology words.

Now that barrier is gone. Clouds, Web 2.0, smartphones, tablets and other dual-use innovations have created a “land bridge” between these two worlds. Non-technologists can now implement many projects without specialized technology teams and large budgets. They are regularly doing this based on their personal (i.e., consumer-based) experiences with technology. In more and more businesses, enterprise and consumer technologies are competing head-to-head.

Why Consumer-oriented Tech Will Win Out

Companies who build consumer-style products evolved in a fundamentally different environment than those companies that have evolved in the world of the “locked-in” enterprise agreement. As a result, they have three critical “genetic” differences:

1. Another Choice Is Always Available. Consumer-facing product companies cannot rely on multi-year enterprise agreements to retain their customers. If customers are not happy, they will leave now – not in four years. Companies fighting in this intense environment are used to working daily to keep customers happy enough not to not only keep using their products, but also to recommend them to their friends.

2. Support Is a Cost Center Not a Revenue Center. In the consumer world, it is very hard to charge for support. It is equally hard to sell products that require lots of setup and training time to use. As a result, consumer-oriented companies design products to minimize the need for customer service. This is vastly different than many enterprise companies, who view extended service and support agreements as a key revenue stream.

3. Integration Is Free, Open and Instant. Products that easily share contacts, photos, updates and other useful information are used more and more often; products that don’t fall by the wayside. Integration is inherently open, instant, free and simple. It does not require complex partner agreements, extensive training and long integration timelines typical of legacy enterprise systems.

These differences are not superficial; they are embedded in the very “DNA” of the missions, products and teams of successful consumer-oriented companies. They provide enormous competitive advantages in comparison to those with “enterprise lock-in ‘dinosaur’ mindsets.” Freedom of choice will beat lack of choice. Pleasing user experiences will trump frustrating ones. Companies like Salesforce, 37 Signals, DropBox, Box.Net, Atlassian, Google and Apple are displacing “traditional” enterprise vendors in many corporations – even at Fortune 50 ones like Proctor & Gamble. However, this is just the beginning: in ten years the lines between consumer and enterprise tech will be blurred beyond recognition.

Everyone is talking about the rapid growth of the tablet market. Analysts are continually revising (upwards) the number of tablets that will be sold over the next few years. Hundreds of new tablets are competing for market leadership. Even our friends at the TSA now regularly ask us to “remove computers and tablets” for our carry-on luggage when going through airport security.

However, in the midst of this explosion, something big is changing right underneath our noses: millions of us are “re-wiring” how we interact with computers. We are discarding clumsy interface tools (physical keyboards, mice, thumb wheels and styluses) that get between us a computers in favor of the most advanced, flexible tool we possess: our fingers. We are not simply using our fingers to press “virtual” buttons. We now combine gesture with the context of what we are doing to interact in ways that are more natural than we have ever done before.  This fundamental change in human-computer interaction allows software developers to design applications the way that architects design buildings, allowing form to follow function:

Tailored Utility: We can now tailor the user interface to provide exactly what controls are needed – and no more. We can provide a big, landscape keyboard for text-intensive applications; and eliminate it entirely, replacing it with buttons and sliders, for media-intensive applications. We can finally get rid of all those pesky “modifier keys” (e.g., Control, F1) and replace them with meaningful keys or buttons (like Play, Save, New, or Edit) Our customers can use their fingers – not multi-step menus – to work as they would in “real life” to turn pages, highlight text, select items, and more.

Environmental Adaptation: We can now – using built-in APIs – exploit accelerometers and embedded cameras to automatically adapt application the surrounding environment. We can let people use natural gestures to optimize the display to suit their needs, allowing them to switch from portrait to landscape, zoom in out, or scroll faster or slower. We can automatically incorporate the tablet’s location and orientation into work or play, saving customers the need of to enter this information themselves. We can use cameras to do everything from automatically adjusting contrast and color based on ambient lighting to automatically recognizing faces and bar codes.

Universal Localization. Providing customers hardware is a loss leader in many industries (e.g., smart phones), often subsidized through software and subscriptions. Doing this across multiple markets, with different languages and character sets, is even more expensive. Touch screen tablets allow localization of application to any language, without switching hardware. In addition, their environmental adaption (above) more naturally supports non-Western languages that use right-to-left and/or top-down orientation.

Yes, capacitive touch-based interaction is not yet perfect. Virtual keyboards are still not as fast as physical ones. Touch entry can be difficult when you have large fingers (or long fingernails). However, the capacitive touch-based tablet market is no longer a fringe market; it is now a growing, mainstream one. Competition will drive innovation, resulting in tablets with better surfaces, broader APIs and increased functionality. In time, tablets will make the keyboards and mice of today as obsolete as the physical buttons and gauges of the past.

Article first published as Insurance is NOT the Answer for the Cloud on Technorati.

Two weeks ago Dr. Alexander Pasik, CIO of IEEE, posited that businesses would be more inclined to use cloud services if service providers carried insurance against data breaches. I could not disagree more. I do not disagree that providers (cloud-based and internal) need to pro-actively manage the operational (security, availability, and scalability) risks to their computing platforms. What I disagree with is the use of insurance to do this.

The very definition of risk management is selection of the right strategy based on the nature of the risk you are facing. In general, there are four different strategies to manage risk:

1. Avoidance: Reducing or eliminating the chance that a risk will occur. An everyday life example of this is driving carefully to avoid an accident.
2. Mitigation: Reducing the damage that a risk will cause if it occurs. When you wear a seat belt in your car you are mitigating accident risk.
3. Transfer: Moving fungible damage from a risk to a third-party. Buying automobile insurance to pay accident-related bills is a use of risk transfer.
4. Acceptance: Actively deciding to accept the consequences of a risk, if it occurs. Those who drive over the speed limit are accepting the risk of getting a ticket.

Use of insurance – a risk transfer strategy – is the wrong approach to manage the operational risks of computing (cloud or on-premise). Why? Because techniques like these only transfer the fungible portion of the risk to a third party. Unfortunately, much of the damage a risk can cause is not fungible. As a result, risk transfer strategies often fail to sufficiently manage risk, creating a false sense of risk security for those who rely on them.

Data breaches, massive system downtime and long periods of slow performance are brand-damaging risks. Regardless of whether they are caused by your own systems or a cloud provider, you cannot transfer the effects of these to a third party. Just imagine briefing your Board on a big loss of customers and a “black eye” to your company’s reputation and saying, “It’s o.k. We got a big check to compensate us.”

Instead, computing providers (on-premise and cloud) should use a combination of risk avoidance and risk mitigation techniques (e.g., use of highly distributed systems with redundancy, reserve capacity, real-time fail-over and multi-layer security) to reduce the risk of data breaches, outages, slowdowns and capacity over-runs. Cloud providers – due to their specialization and economies of scale – are well positioned to do this more efficiently than most customers can do themselves.

Use of insurance is not the answer to reducing cloud risk. Requiring cloud providers to provide all the benefits of cloud computing – with information security, business continuity and recovery service levels that are better than enterprises can provide internally – is the answer.

Too many extolling the virtues of cloud computing are ignoring its most transformational benefits

Cloud computing has definitely moved into the mainstream. You now see commercials from Microsoft, Cisco, IBM and others every evening on prime time Cable TV. CNBC has created a Cloud Computing Special Report for investors to learn more about it. Even government agencies are now moving to cloud-based solutions.

Unfortunately, one of the most touted reasons we see for using cloud computing – that it provides universal access to data and applications from the Internet – has nothing to do with what cloud computing actually is. This is simply what web-based applications have been doing since the 1990s. True cloud computing offers a whole lot more.

In October 2009, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published an excellent definition of cloud computing that calls out five essential characteristics that separate clouds from simple remotely hosted, web-based computing models:

1. On-demand self-service
2. Broad network access
3. Resource pooling
4. Rapid elasticity
5. Measured service

I know, some of these terms are mouthful – especially to those who do “live and breathe” technology. However, they remove so much of the work and complexity that has so frequently made management of computing so painful and costly:

On-demand Self-Service (Think “Now”): With on on-demand self-service, you do not need to ask your provider to execute an “IT project” to enable you to use your application (or update it) to support a new business development. You can do whatever you need, when you need it – without the cost and delay of overhead managing your vendor.

Broad Network Access (Think “Convenience”): This lets you work wherever you need, whenever you need – from your work or home computer, netbook, tablet, or smartphone. Traditionally, this was done through browser, to bypass the need to install local software. However, the rise of (cloud-based) App Stores now allows us to install richer applications to access our data – wherever we are, on-demand.

These first two characteristics are what most people think of when talking about cloud computing. However, it is the next three characteristics that make true clouds stand out:

Resource Pooling (Think “Black Box”): Somewhere far away IT people are managing shared, redundant infrastructure across many data centers. They manage maintenance, business continuity, elimination of failures and bottlenecks, etc. You gain all of the benefit of these large-scale investments in time and resources – but without the need to do any work.

Rapid Elasticity (Think “No Limits”): You never have to worry about capacity planning. If you suddenly get a surge in traffic (due to an emergency or unexpected popularity) the computing resources you need are automatically – and immediately – available. You avoid slow-downs, timeouts and outages that waste time, cause frustration and turn away customers.

Measured Service (Think “Value”): Pay only for what you use – and no more. Rather than paying 100% for servers that you only use at 20% utilization, you pay for the exact number of resources you use, when you use them. The ideal cloud providers charge usage in terms that everyday people – not just IT systems administrators – understand and value.

When explaining these cloud computing characteristics to those whose “day jobs” are not in tech, I like to use the electricity analogy. When you buy a new television, you do not call the power company and ask them to initiate a project to set up your television. You simply plug it in and begin using it. If you don’t like where it is in your house, you unplug it, move it to a different room, and plug it in again. At the end of the month, you don’t pay for the power company’s generator and labor investments; you pay for the extra kilowatt-hours your television used.

Services that meet all five of these characteristics are so much more convenient and valuable than legacy computing models. That’s why cloud computing has the potential to be so transformational.

The iCloud is a new kind of cloud where copies of data co-exist in MANY places. This is a “game-changer.”

Just over one hour ago, Steve Jobs came on stage at Apple’s WWDC and introduced the iCloud. This is not just a case where Apple is jumping on the “cloud bandwagon.” It is the introduction of an entirely different type of cloud, the multi-presence cloud, to the mainstream market.

Apple’s iCloud is quite different from the clouds we usually see. Instead, of hosting your data “in the cloud” (usually a bunch of remote, virtualized servers and storage) and requiring you to access it there, iCloud allows you to download your data to multiple devices. You can access your data (most likely first music, but later videos and documents) remotely (from Apple’s servers) or locally (on your Mac, PC, iPad or iPhone)—whichever is more convenient.

This difference is not a fine point. It opens a whole new set of opportunities.

You are not “tethered” to the cloud

One of the weaknesses of the traditional cloud (and remotely-accessed services in general) is that you have to be connected to the Internet. As long as you have a connection to the Internet, you can access all your information. However, if you are in place without Internet access (e.g., on an airplane, travelling to a faraway place, at your Aunt Matilda’s), you are “off the grid,” with no access to your data.

The iCloud model overcomes this. Your Mac, iPad, iPod, etc. is a mobile “piece of the cloud” that you can carry wherever you go. You have both access to your data and the software to process it—letting you autonomously listen to music, watch videos, or read documents anywhere.

Bandwidth (i.e., time) is irrelevant

Another weakness of the traditional cloud is that your access to your data is only as fast as the slowest link between you and the cloud provider’s nearest server. Traditionally, most people have said this is not a problem as broadband is “everywhere.” However, this is not true in many situations. When the hosting company’s servers are busy, you slow to a crawl. When walking and driving around you routinely leave 3G coverage areas. When downloading large media files the Internet is always slow.

The iCloud model overcomes this as well. Most of the content you will access (e.g., your music library) will be instantaneously accessible (either on your PC or on your home network). Bandwidth is not a worry (nor are 3G connections, firewalls, etc.)

Access is now nearly ubiquitous

One of the primary strengths of the traditional cloud is that you have near-universal access to your data. It does not matter if you are on a different computer, in a different office, on a different network: you can access you data from any device, anywhere (as long as you have an internet connection). Unlike clouds, iTunes did not allow this (i.e., the PC was the hub). You had to transfer your files from device to device, a tedious process.

The iCloud model ends this limitation. You no longer have to transfer data from device to device. Any device that can connect (for a period of time, not permanently) to the Internet can download your authorised data (from the new hub, the cloud).

This IS the future of cloud computing

What Apple has pulled off is not a trivial accomplishment: universal access with centralized management. It requires the complex synchronization of data and authorization to access it across numerous independent, distributed devices. It requires software that can access this data both while it is connected to the cloud and when it is off-line. All of this has to work seamlessly—and without need of customer support.

Even with these challenges, this is the future of cloud computing. The world has benefited greatly from the economies of scale and network externalities provided by the Internet. However, life does not run on a tether. We need both the benefits of both cloud-based, large-scale efficiency and the freedom of offline operation. This will become even more important as the growth in the volume of data we use far outstrips the growth in bandwidth available.

It will be interesting to see how many other cloud providers follow Apple’s iCloud model over the next 18-36 months.

Later this month the European Union’s “Article 29 Working Party” is likely to issue new rules requiring mobile and smartphone providers to treat location-based data as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Last week, Apple, Google and others testified on the Hill regarding their use—or misuse—of consumer’s location data from smartphones.

What is driving the speed and intensity of this regulatory response? A simple fact: location-based data links mineable information context about what you are doing, when and where, in a manner that is explicitly tied to your identity. This is a watershed threat to privacy we have not seen since the commercialization of the Internet (when we had to pay for Internet access).

Providers of smartphones and mobile applications need to realize and proactively manage this. If not, life could quickly become much harder for them. This would not just be bad for providers; if would curtail innovation enjoyed by consumers.

Now is the time for industry to get out in front and establish a Code of Conduct guiding use of location-based data (just as the Mobile Marketing Association did years ago for text messaging). Not only could this head off costly regulation; it could also set the standard for a trusted consumer experience, significantly expanding the location-based service market.

An effective Location-based Data Code of Conduct should include the following policies:

1. Enable users to turn location services on or off easily and transparently

Location-based tracking and promotion is great when people are gift shopping. However, sometimes it is simply an invasion of privacy. This applies equally to the enterprise, as companies don’t want their mission-critical staff to turn off corporate mobile phones to protect their private lives when they are out of the office. Smartphone and mobile app providers need to enable people to turn location-based services on or off. Those who make this easy and transparent will establish market leadership.

2 Manage location-based data with the same fidelity as billing data

Yes, mobile phones have tracked where you were (and when) for years. However, smartphones now combine this with data about what exactly you are doing—in a format that can be mined for targeted marketing, legal discovery, and more. Providers need to treat these data as sensitively as they do with billing data: asking for consent before collection or sharing, encrypting it, guarding it behind firewalls, and anonymizing it for marketing analysis. Those who fail to do this will lose customers and face lawsuits or worse.

3. Require mobile app providers to adhere to the code of conduct

Right now people are “up in arms” because a few very visible, publicly traded companies are keeping their location-based data. Imagine what this will become when hundreds of “fly by night” companies exploit location data for identity theft, targeted burglaries and more? Industry needs to create an App Store-agnostic, straightforward certification program for location-based app providers. This will create the same trust needed for location services growth that similar self-policing programs did for eCommerce and mobile marketing.

4. Let customers request anonymization of their location data

Consumers are already worried about their online data be stored forever in search engines. However, search engines can only crawl data actively posted. Location-data is collected passively; removing the conscious “should I post this” moment. As a result, consumers face a Hobson’s Choice on consumers: do I forgo location services or permanently lose privacy? Providers need to enable customers to request anonymization of all stored location data. This process can be balanced (e.g., linked to continued service use). However, it must exist.

Location-based services are enormously exciting and present an unimagined range of applications for commerce, logistics, medicine and more. A smart Location Data Code of Conduct will enable all of use to exploit this innovation safely, profitably and effectively.

Article first published as It’s Time for a Location Data Code of Conduct: Four Needed Policies on Technorati.