Towards the Bekenstien Bound

Interesting article on the ultimate limits of data storage capacities, in theory. Even electronic quantum holography seems absolutely humongous. What we can possibly pitch our hopes on in the near future is indeed the reducing  costs of DNA storage - and assuming we solve some of its problems of slow access. 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/05/22/can-data-storage-ever-reach-an-absolute-limit/

Excellent Initiatives

Plans of developing seed funds for on- campus startups is an excellent idea, which will foster and promote entrepreneurship in new ways.

https://www.fis.dowjones.com/WebBlogs.aspx?aid=DJFVW00020100723e67q000gp&ProductIDFromApplication=&r=wsjblog&s=djfvw

The only hope is that getting a slice of those funds should not be yet another bureaucratic process.
Processes should be in place to pick the right group/student/professors.

Andriod and Windows

Interesting point here from Sanjay Jha today. He likens Andriod eventually beating iPhone in the market place to the way Windows dominated Apple/Mac in the PC market in the 80s and 90s.

http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2010/7/27/motorola-ceo-tips-android-dominate-smartphone-market/

There are still a bunch of mobile OS's out there, and a few of them may die out. Perhaps Sanjay Jha is right in some ways..

One key difference to note is the licensing model. The core of andriod is still GPLv2 , though most of the user space infrastructure is Apache. This drastically changes the dynamics as barriers to emulate something like Andriod in the market place seems to be really low, unlike what was the case with Windows in the 80s and 90s.

GPU Clouds

Here is a potentially ground breaking technology that could have huge ramifications in the media and entertainment industry. I would pitch my hopes more on the massive multiplayer gaming segment.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1256065754359.html

Could GPU clouds spawn a new generation of GPU based cloud service providers targeting the gaming industry?

Some other interesting areas of application would be:

1. 3D simulations
2. 3D movies

We are already seeing some of those:
http://www.hoopoe-cloud.com/

Personal Computing Breakthrough?

We are seeing form factor improvements in computing devices day after day. The tablet ( version 2.0, if I may say so!) PC which is expected to reign in along side netbooks is indeed going to be a sweet spot for desktop players in the coming 2-3 years. I dont need to go into any detail of the mobile market at all. We have thus seen the evolution of personal computing in three distinct phases:

1. Desktops
2. Laptops
3. Netbooks/Tablet PCs and Mobile Devices

The arrival of each phase seems to have "commoditized" the previous phase in many ways. No longer are Desktops /Laptops cutting edge markets to go after. They have reached the "Late Majority" of the Technology Adoption life cycle - if I may borrow some insights from G.Moore. There are indications of the Mobile Devices market having reached some critical mass. Netbooks/Tablet PCs may soon get there.

What is the next stage for personal computing? If the folks at MIT media lab and people like Pranav Mistry can execute on the promise of delivering the "SixthSense" technology to the masses, this may be it! We would enter a generation where there is a seamless interaction between the physical world and the digital world , which renders any form of a "computing terminal", be it, desktops, Laptops, Netbooks or Mobile Devices almost unnecessary for day-to-day use. This is not just something out of the movie "Minority Report"(thinking about Colin Farrel doing all those gestures in front of a big screen), but a lot more!

Here is one of the talks by Mistry which I wanted to share.
http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

I do think that this has tremendous promise, and needs support and backing from the Venture Capital Industry for it to be brought out of the labs and into the mainstream market.

Good luck Mistry.

Cloud Computing and Russia

With everything moving to the cloud, the demands on the the cloud compute infrastructure is going to be enormous - especially the cooling requirements. The higher the compute power, more the cooling requirements. Enormous amounts of energy would have to be spent just on keeping the infrastructure temperatures below certain values. This energy spent on cooling might in fact have an adverse impact on the "green footprint" of the massive datacenter in the "cloud".

There is some very interesting talk that has begun to take place in the cloud computing community. How about moving data centers to arctic countries ( maybe northern Russia, or Greenland/Denmark, Iceland, etc)?The energy required for the cooling would be potentially completely eliminated , thanks to the very cold climate. That is great for:

1. The cloud service provider
2. The earth in general ( "Green footprint")
3. The economies of the cold countries ( Surely , they would possibly love to invite the Cloud service providers)

This raises an interesting new economic paradigm akin to "outsourcing". There is a huge market potential that can be tapped by these cold countries. If the costs of moving and running data centers here is lesser than the OPEX of running the cloud service elsewhere ( which is really the key point ) , this would be a win for the cloud service providers as well. So a potential win-win situation.

This possible paradigm would possibly work out super for Russia, who is looking to improve economically , and who have an enormous "real estate" in the arctic. There is always some technology outsourcing going on here as well, even otherwise.

40GbE

Congratulations to Mellanox for announcing one of the industry's first 40GbE solutions. Its definitely the next big step in the evolution of Ethernet - and it has indeed come a long way from the conceptualization by Metcalfe.

Getting networking software working at 40GbE will be an enormously interesting challenge(Though the 40GbE adapter has the capabilities for running storage protocols such as FCoE obviously in hardware). The existing software TCP/IP stacks will definitely run into *severe* issues trying to get the best out of the huge pipe lying in front of it. TCP/IP was never designed with such speeds in mind. This is not to say that there are no solutions to the problem. The CPU speeds are increasing fast, but CPU speed increases are more of a linear trend - unlike the "leaps" in network bandwidth evolution.

The market adoption however might be an issue - considering that even 10GbE doesn't have the necessary traction it was presumed to have.

Anyways - good luck folks.