Crowdsourcing – Page 4 – Silverton Consulting

Software defined radio hits the market

Posted on July 11, 2012July 11, 2012 by Ray in Crowdsourcing, Distributed computing, Information economy, Mobile computing, Software Defined Network, Strategic Inflection Points, Visionary leadershp

[Sorry, published this post early, final version below]

A couple of years ago I was at an IEEE technology conference and heard a presentation on software defined radios (SDR). At the time, it was focused on military applications where a number of different radio frequencies were used by different organizations. The military and other services wanted a single piece of hardware with DR, to talk over any frequency band that was currently being used.

Over time I heard nothing more about this technology until today when I read a ARS Technica article on an SDR startup company Per Vices and their Phi SDR. We have recently posted on OpenFlow and its software defined networking this takes that flexibility and applies it to radio.

Looking at the hardware it still primarily for hobbyists and engineers, with a RF daughter card, computer card and the main box. It’s available as a PCIe card or comes in a kit. But it’s a start.

Not to much today but if it can be shrunk and become more widely available, any smartphone could be a multi-network phone right out of the box. Signing up for ATT, Verizon, Sprint and others would be as easy as toggling a setting and letting the SDR do the rest.

More to come

Not only that, but with SDR, that same smartphone could act as an AM/FM/shortwave radio, multi-band walki-talki, even it’s own radio station for any and all frequency bands. Not to mention including a WiFi hot spot, BlueTooth, RFid, and NearField transceiver just as easily the other bands, all in the same mobile phone without any specialized hardware other than the shrunken RF gear.

Currently the iPhone and other smart phones require separate hardware technology and at best only do some of this. But with SDR and appropriate RF gear, all this could be done over the same hardware, all within the smart phone itself and it could be just as easy as changing a setting. I could see a radio station app in my future when SDR is here.

Another possibility

I have often wondered why smart phones don’t form a mesh network with the phones closest to a cell tower offering telcom access and the phones farther away using closer ones as a sort of on/off-ramp. One reason for no mesh support is that it would take more phone processing and energy to do it. Without any compensation who would volunteer their phone to do it. But with SDR, standardized protocols could be developed together with mobile micro payment options which would allow phone users to be compensated for providing mesh services and everyone gains.

Open source radio

Of course the other thing is that with SDR, the radio logic is now open source and could be tweaked to do just about anything an engineer wanted to do. This would really open up the radio spectrum to all sorts of new possibilities.

The FCC and other regulatory agencies might have some concerns about this. But if some spectrum could be set aside for these sorts of experimentation, I am sure the world would be better off for it.

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Per Vices compares themselves to Apple and it’s Apple 1 which was just a computer card with no software for hobbyists to play with. Given where they are today it certainly is an apt description.

They just need to take it to the next step and make the Apple II version of SDR. A complete package, with software and hardware where any person could construct their own radio. Then the next step is to create the Macintosh of radios where everyone could use it for radio services and they could conquer radio.

Comments?

New cloud storage and Hadoop managed service offering from Spring SNW

Posted on April 13, 2012April 16, 2012 by Ray in Cloud services, Cloud storage, Crowdsourcing, Distributed computing, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness

Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)

Last week I posted my thoughts on Spring SNW in Dallas, but there were two more items that keep coming back to me (aside from the tornados). The first was a new startup called Symform in cloud storage and the other was an announcement from SunGard about their new Hadoop managed services offering.

Symform

Symform offers an interesting alternative on cloud storage that avoids the build up of large multi-site data centers and uses your desktop storage as a sort of crowd-sourced storage cloud, sort of bit-torrent cloud storage.

You may recall I discussed such a Peer-to-Peer cloud storage and computing services in a posting a couple of years ago. It seems Symform has taken this task on, at least for storage.

A customer downloads (Windows or Mac) software which is installed and executes on your desktop. The first thing you have to do after providing security credentials is to identify which directories will be moved to the cloud and the second is to tell whether you wish to contribute to Symform’s cloud storage and where this storage is located. Symform maintains a cloud management data center which records all the metadata about your cloud resident data and everyone’s contributed storage space.

Symform cloud data is split up into 64MB blocks and encrypted (AES-256) using a randomly generated key (known only to Symform). Then this block is broken up into 64 fragments with 32 parity fragments (using erasure coding) added to the stream which is then written to 96 different locations. With this arrangement, the system could potentially lose 31 fragments out of the 96 and still reconstitute your 64MB of data. The metadata supporting all this activity sits in Symform’s data center.

Unclear to me what you have to provide as far as ongoing access to your contributed storage. I would guess you would need to provide 7X24 access to this storage but the 32 parity fragments are there for possible network/power failures outside your control.

Cloud storage performance is an outcome of the many fragments that are disbursed throughout their storage cloud world. It’s similar to a bit torrent stream with all 96 locations participating in reconstituting your 64MB of data. Of course, not all 96 locations have to be active just some > 64 fragment subset but it’s still cloud storage so data access latency is on the order of internet time (many seconds). Nonetheless, once data transfer begins, throughput performance can be pretty high, which means your data should arrive shortly thereafter.

Pricing seemed comparable to other cloud storage services with a monthly base access fee and a storage amount fee over that. But, you can receive significant discounts if you contribute storage and your first 200GB is free as long as you contribute 200GB of storage space to the Symform cloud.

Sungard’s new Apache Hadoop managed service

Hadoop Logo (from http://hadoop.apache.org website)

We are well aware of Sungard’s business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) services, an IT mainstay for decades now. But sometime within the last decade or so Sungard has been expanding outside this space by moving into managed availability services.

Apparently this began when Sungard noticed the number of new web apps being deployed each year exceeded the number of client server apps. Then along came virtualization, which reduced the need for lots of server and storage hardware for BC/DR.

As evident of this trend, last year Sungard announced a new enterprise class computing cloud service. But in last week’s announcement, Sungard has teamed up with EMC Greenplum to supply an enterprise ready Apache Hadoop managed service offering.

Recall, that EMC Greenplum is offering their own Apache Hadoop supported distribution, Greenplum HD. Sungard is basing there service on this distribution. But there’s more.

In conjunction with Hadoop, Sungard adds Greenplum appliances. With this configuration Sungard can load Hadoop processed and structured data into a Greenplum relational database for high performance data analytics. Once there, any standard SQL analytics and queries can be used against to analyze the data.

With these services Sungard is attempting to provide a unified analytics service that spans all structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

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Probably more to Spring SNW but given my limited time on the exhibition floor and time in vendor discussions these and my previously published post are what I seem of most interest to me.

1 on 1 auctions vs. person years of A/R time

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Ray in Crowdsourcing, Decision making, Executive leadership, Information economy, Market dynamics, Strategy, System effectiveness, Systems

1918 Farm Auction by dok1 (cc) (from Flickr)

I have had this conversation before (and have blogged about it with Crowdsourcing business analyst …) where there is lots of time and effort (person years?) devoted to scheduling one-on-one meetings between analyst firms and corporate executives. I may be repeating my earlier post but the problem persists and I see an obvious easier way to solve this.

Auction off 1 on 1 time slots

By doing this the company puts the burden on the analyst community by giving every firm some amount of “analyst buck”s (A$) and then auction off executive meeting slots. In this way the crowd of analysts would determine who best to meet with whom (putting crowdsourcing to work).

Consider today’s solution:

Send out a list of topics to be discussed at the meeting,
Have the analyst firm select their top 3 or 5 topics, and
Have analyst relation’s sift the requests and executive availability to schedule the meetings.

For analyst events with 100s of analyst firms, 20 or more executives, and 10 or more time slots, the scheduling activity can become quite complex and time consuming.

I understand a corporation’s need to make the most effective use of analysts and executive management time, but what better way to make this determination than to let the (analyst) market decide.

How an executive 1 on 1 auction could work

The way I see it is to hold some sort of dutch or japanese auction (see wikipedia auction) where all the analyst firm representatives attended a webex session and bid for 1-1 time slots with various executives. In this fashion the company could have the whole schedule laid out in a single day with the only effort involved in identifying executives, time slots and supplying A$s to analyst firms.

It doesn’t even need to be that sophisticated and potentially could be done on eBay with real money supplied by the company (useable only for bidding in executive time slot auctions) and donated to charity when the process is finished. There are any number of ways to do this on the quick and cheap. However, using eBay may be a bit too public but doing this over a conference call with webex would probably suffice just as well and could be totally private.

Of course with this approach, the company may find that their are some executives that are in higher demand than others. If such is the case, perhaps a secondary auction could be supplied with more time slots. Ditto for executives that have time slots that are not in demand – they could be released from providing time for 1 on 1 meetings.

In my prior post I mentioned the option that maybe the corporation might want more control over who meets who. In that case allocating some A$s to the corporate executives (or A/R as their proxy) to use to augment analyst firm bids might do the trick. Of course providing those firms more A$s would also give them preferential access. Obviously, this wouldn’t provide as much absolute control as spending person years of effort doing 1 on 1 scheduling but it would provide a quick and relatively easy solution to the problem from both the analyst firm as well as analyst relations.

But how much to grant to each analyst firm?

The critical question is the amount of A$’s to provide each firm. This might take some thought but there is an easy solution. Just use last years analyst spend as the amount of A$s to provide the firm. Another option is to provide some base level of analyst bucks to any firm invited to attend and then add more for the prior year spend.

Possibly, a less appealing approach (to me at least) is to give each analyst firm an amount proportional to their annual revenue regardless of company spending with the firm. But perhaps some combination of the above, say

1/3 base amount for any invitee + 1/3 proportional to annual spend +1/3 proportional to annual firm revenue = A$s

would work.

In my previous post I suggested so many A$s per analyst. As such, bigger firms with more analysts would get more than firms with less analysts. But I feel the formula described above makes more sense to me.

Information provided to facilitate the 1 on 1’s auction

In order for the auction to work well, analyst firms would need to know more information about the executive whose time is being auctioned off. But aside from that just a schedule of the time slots available would allow the auction to work. On the other hand, some idea of the company’s org chart and where the executive fit in would be very useful to facilitate the auction.

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That’s it, pretty simple, set up a conference call, send out executive information and org chart, allocate analyst bucks and let the bidding begin.

Auctioning off Lot-132: 30 minutes of Ray Lucchesi’s time …, let the bidding begin.

Comments?

Crowdsourcing business analyst 1 on 1 scheduling with executives

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Ray in Crowdsourcing, Market dynamics, Strategy

Paris vs Pranksky - Lot 101 by Pranksky (cc) (from Flickr)

Just got back from a conference with business analyst meetings and while there I talked with a number of analyst relations people in the audience about what it takes to pull these meeting together. I was astounded by the effort that goes into setting up 1 on 1s for all the analysts. In some cases, person weeks of effort goes into this scheduling nightmare.

I have a better answer, just crowdsource the process and let the analysts do all the work by auctioning off your executive meeting slots. For example, give every analyst showing up a certain amount of analyst bucks (A$) and let them bid their A$’s for whichever executive(s) they want. The winning bidders get to meet with the executives and the losers can take their money to the next auction.

I see this working as follows:

A company creates an auction website accessible to analysts registered for the meeting, with the executive names, bios, and pertinent areas of expertise/influence listed for everyone able to talk with analysts. One may want to add the number of meeting slots and a minimum acceptable bid (if warranted).
The auction should have a duration or time window with which all bids would need to be in and at the end of which a “striking price” could be determined for each executive time slot.
While the auction is open, analysts would apportion their A$s to whichever executive(s) they wished to talk to, letting the analysts decide (do the work to determine) which they want to meet with.

Whether this could be done on eBay, some conference call/webex or other facility would need to be investigated. If eBay were used, the proceeds from the auction could go to charity.

One problem with this approach is sometimes executives have to change their schedules at the last minute. Thus, there would need to be some list of alternates for executives so that if the primary executive bowed out, an alternate could take their place.

Another potential issue is in how to apportion A$s to analyst firms or analysts. Personally, I like a per attending analyst apportionment (one man/women, one vote sort of thing). This way, larger firms with multiple analysts attending would have more A$s to use. Although as a single person analyst firm I may be disadvantaged with this allotment, there is a possibility that I could syndicate with other firms to build up our collective A$s, if necessary.

A follow-on question is whether to use the English, Dutch, or sealed-bid auction method (see wikipedia on auctions). Personally, I think either the English or Dutch auction form would work fine and would provide adequate visibility. However, the sealed-bid approach could make the process simpler for the company hosting the auction as it wouldn’t require much support other than some address to email the bids for the various executives.

Of course, this all assumes that the purpose of the analyst 1 on 1 meetings is to have executives meet with analysts. But alternatively, another purpose may be to have executives influence particular analysts. In this case, the auction could be reversed and have the executive team bid on meetings with the analysts.

On the other hand, a combination of the two approaches could be done by supplying both the analysts and executives some A$s and have each submit bids for the other. The total combined A$ value from the executives and the analyst (firms) would decide how their time slots are allocated. This may not be optimal from either the analyst or the executive perspective, but it would cross-optimize both sides for meeting slots.

Well there you have it, crowdsourcing/auctioning meeting slots, my solution to the problem of scheduling 1 on 1’s for company analyst meetings.

Auctioning off Lot-102, 30 minute meeting with Silverton Consulting/Ray Lucchesi, do I hear any bids?