Paul Miller
Open is good – but encouragement better than mandate
Image via Wikipedia Openness is undeniably cool right now, at least if you move in the slightly odd circles that I do. Openly available scientific papers are disrupting the world of scholarly publishing (which may not be all good, but that’s a post for another day). Openly available university courses are finally beginning to work [...]
A conversation with Richard Wallis, an experiment, and a survey
Richard Wallis left Talis (my former employer) last month, and has set up as a consultant at DataLiberate. In this short podcast, Richard shares some of his thoughts on data, semantics, and ‘the power of the link.’ Our conversation is also an excuse for an experiment. I have been producing audio-only podcasts here and elsewhere [...]
CloudCamp London: the Big Data Special
Image by Kevin Krejci via Flickr The CloudCamp unconference returned to London for the 14th time this evening, regaling a capacity crowd in the Crypt below Clerkenwell’s St James Church with several hours of discussion and debate on the somewhat elusive topic of ‘Big Data’. Rather rough notes of the proceedings follow, after the break. [...]
TOSCA may prove a prescient name for new cloud standards effort
Image via Wikipedia Last week, open standards body OASIS unveiled yet another shiny new standards effort. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee hopes to make it “easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in,” and to support moving from one cloud to another. The usual suspects — the likes of IBM, [...]
Data Market Chat: Tyler Bell discusses Factual
Having received some $27 million in investment from big names like Andreessen Horowitz, LA-based Factual is one of the better funded examples of a ‘data marketplace.’ But Tyler Bell, the company’s Director of Product, is not sure that Factual necessarily fits most people’s perception of what a data marketplace should be. Focussed — for now — upon [...]
Data Market Chat: the podcasts are a-coming…
Image via Wikipedia To follow up on my Data Markets post earlier this week, I’m now scheduling a series of podcasts in which the conversation can — and will — delve an awful lot deeper. I’ve contacted representatives from most of the obvious data markets, some startups working in closely related areas, and several of the key [...]
Top Level Domain for data answers the wrong question
Image of Stephen Wolfram via Wikipedia British-born computer scientist Stephen Wolfram sees ongoing efforts to extend the Internet’s top-level domains (TLDs) beyond the familiar .com, .org, .uk etc as an opportunity to raise the profile of machine-readable data. In a blog post published yesterday, he argues that a new .data domain would increase “exposure of data on [...]
Nurturing the market for Data Markets
From Microsoft’s Azure Data Marketplace to the eponymous DataMarket, or InfoChimps, Factual, and Kasabi, there’s resurgent interest in the venerable business of collecting, curating, and commercialising data created by others. But despite investment and innovation, there isn’t yet the matching evidence for much use or — even — interest amongst prospective customers. In principle, at least, these data markets [...]
The myth of a data free trade policy
The border between the USA and Canada, in Washington State In my last post I looked at the USA PATRIOT Act, and at some of the ways in which it exemplifies differences in attitude and approach on either side of the Atlantic. In our increasingly connected world, these differences begin to pose quite serious challenges [...]
Microsoft, the USA PATRIOT Act, and European cloud computing
Microsoft announced last month that its Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, Office 365, will better comply with European guidelines to ensure that customer data is adequately protected. This move is certainly welcome, but the long-armed spectre of the USA PATRIOT Act continues to hang over Microsoft and other US companies, regardless of customers’ nationality [...]
Of Kindles and Business Models and Stuff
Over at TechCrunch, MG Siegler’s 2 September post on Amazon’s new Kindle has generated quite a storm. All across the web, media, bloggers, pundits, analysts and the rest are pointing to MG’s post, getting terribly excited about a new tablet that might actually challenge the iPad; something that so many others have patently failed to [...]
June is San Francisco month
For real-world applications of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, the long-running Semantic Technology Conference is hard to beat. For getting a real handle on the Cloud Computing landscape, GigaOM‘s Structure Conference is also a leading light. Working across both areas as I do, these events tend to figure prominently in my calendar for the [...]
Lessening the Pain of Data Roaming With Onavo
I am in the Belgian city of Brussels at the moment, which means that my mobile phone is ‘roaming;’ off my UK network and being charged a scary amount of money to access data. Travelling to Europe is less scary than going elsewhere in the world, as I’m ‘only’ charged about £3 per Mb here. [...]
The Appliance of Backup Science
With apologies to Zanussi for the corny title, I had an interesting conversation with Axcient CEO Justin Moore and HP’s VP for Channel Strategy & SMB Meaghan Kelly about the issues of helping small and medium businesses cope with backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. Yesterday’s conversation was taking place in the context of today’s [...]
February’s Semantic Link Podcast Discusses Marketing the Semantic Web
February’s episode of the Semantic Link podcast is now online at SemanticWeb.com. During the show, regulars Christine Connors, Eric Franzon, Ivan Herman, Eric Hoffer, Bernadette Hyland and Andraz Tori are joined by two special guests with some experience in both marketing and semantic technologies. Krista Thomas was responsible for marketing at Thomson Reuters‘ semantic technology [...]
