University of Washington Emerging Technology

Steven is our speaker for our last Spark Session of the academic year. Feedsync is an Open Spec for Synchronization through Atom and RSS.

His team is connected to Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft.

Feedsync was called simple file sharing for RSS. Oh, also Microsoft announced a new service recently, called Live Mesh and it has FeedSync baked in deep. (ugh, I hate that term, but it works.)

With feedsync the data is multi-master meaning it can come from and go to anywhere. All endpoints get the same result, eventually. As he points out, if I shut my laptop lid for two weeks it will be out of sync, but when I open up, the machine will sync to RSS feed.

It is protocol independent, lightweight, extensible and preserves conflicting data. which means that it doesn’t just keep the last one, or a merged version, but saves all version. They are hoping there will be creative Commons and Microsoft Open Specification Promise.

What are other ways to sync? iTunes to Ipod, Phone/PDA to PC, rsync and some of the new ways (sugarsync, dropbox, etc) are some examples of point to point syncing.

In the xml, some of the new tags, focus on giving it a unique id. URNs or other methods are ok. There is also sync metadata there too. there is also some history tags to differentiate who did what when and on what device, so that you can tell the update you did on your phone with the one you did on your laptop.

feedSync is not domain specific, meaning it works with email, music, web pages, voice data, etc. For example you can update your calendar from an evite or update the evite from your calendar. FeedSync takes care of the communication between the two services.
Here’s the audio recording for this first part of the talk. (length = 21:26)

He gives a demonstration where he adds a note with some to-do items on one laptop back at his desk via VPN and then goes the to laptop here at the podium, signs in to the service, and the notes app has his notes from the remote machine. When there is a conflict in editing, the notes gives you an alert.

they have examples that work in python, and .net.

For a real life example, he is talking about a project with a NGO in Afghanistan. The group needed to get information from office to office but the infrastructure in the country is minimal and slow. So the keep their data in MS Access files, and sync the data via a server connected by satellites. they figured out a way to send access databases via SMS. Who’d a thunk?
Here’s the audio recording for this second part of the talk. (length = 37:57)

Now he’s talking about Live Mesh, a technology preview announced by Microsoft, with a capacity 10,000 users who signed up for the service in the initial 2 hours that it was available.

Live Mesh is like a central station or desktop in the cloud. you connect all your devices to this desktop in the cloud. One Application is Live Folders, a shared folder across all your machines.
Here’s the audio recording for the last part of the talk. (length = 20:08)
Here are his slides:

Feedsync Presentation (ppt)

FeedSync Presentation (pptx)

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of participating in a panel on Educational Technology in Higher Education at this conference. Gnomedex is hard to describe. You might say it is for bloggers, but that would be too limiting. This was my first one, and I must admit I only participated as a presenter, so I didn’t get the full feel for the event. I think it is a place for innovators to share emerging ideas amongst peers. First of all I was really impressed with the registration tool! This is the kind of application that makes sense for connecting folks of like minds. I was asked to add information about buzzwords, skills, interests and experience. Then the application from introNetworks produced a circle with me in the middle (represented by a blue push pin) and everyone else represented by red push pins around the circle in the four quadrants spaced in relation to my by how close our interests are. Interestingly, one of the closest to me was Kathy Gill, a Senior Lecture in the Communications Department here at University of Washington.

Kathy invited me to speak on iTunes U at UW, along with a graduate student and undergraduate. I really enjoyed hearing their experiences with blogging for credit and creating online open journals for research. I ended up talking about emerging technology strategies at UW, because I want to get the word out about all we are doing.

Right before our talk, Derek Miller shared with us his experiences recovering from cancer via web conferencing. Quite a compelling conversation and engagement! He really is courageous.

Also, in the front row was Jay Cross, who writes Informal Learning Blog, one of my daily reads, so that told me right that this group knew its salt!

So, check out jibjab.com and their new app, “Staring You”. Very cool.

There is some interest in exploring how this new product may be useful to the rest of us here at UW. Oren Sreebny will participate in an Apple University Executive Forum iPhone Task Force. His notes on the new handheld device are at his blog.

If anyone else is writing about their use, let me know and I will link them here.

Some challenges we face in adopting a product aimed at the consumer market for use in our enterprise setting include getting the devices and services incorporated in to our purchasing and billing processes. It is very expensive to buy them retail and with credit cards, and they are not very transportable, as the registration process links the devices to a person.

I also worry about device obsolescence. When the first iPods came on the market in November of 2001, Apple as already prepping for the next version that launched in February of 2002. The second generation had twice the capacity and cost less to purchase and had significant improvements. I hope they have improved their product development cycle over the years.

The good folks over at the Simpson Center for the Humanities have creative ideas for reaching students in the near future using social networking tools or sites like Facebook or MySpace. They would love to see a UW-centric mechanism for like-minded students of different disciplines to discover each other and collaborate on research projects. Tony and I had a great conversation with them the other day seeking ways we could learn from them and help them grow their ideas.

One very interesting idea Peter Leonard broached was adding profile information channels to MyUW, where one could post interests, activities and descriptive data and perhaps the portal could assist the users in finding each other. That led Tony to ask what might be key for social networking at Universities? Discovering others? Linking with others? Searching for particulars? Collaboration on projects?

We would be interested to hear your ideas for social networking here. Please comment or drop us a line.

William H. Janeway, Vice Chairman, Warburg Pincus
Peter Bloom, Managing Director, General Atlantic LLC
Tim O’Reilly, moderator

Trades on Wall Street average one every 30 miliseconds. So speed matters, mentions Tim. Peter notes that location matters as well, as the brokerages are battling to locate their servers as close to the trading center as possible to reduce latency.

Dark Pools of liquid: Bill describes this as the process of breaking down large transactions, say selling 10,000 shares of Google on one exchange to 2,000 shares over different exchanges in odd size lots, which preserve the anonymity of the seller.

So is the information that we all thought would be freely available, now too valuable, and therefore is the internet environment retrenching from this goal?

But Peter mentions Trade Station, where people are sharing information and trading models and using processes that allow for that 10,000 trades per second he mentioned earlier. So this is a community approach, yet it is not free ($100/month.)

“Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes” by Gary Belsky, Thomas Gilovich

Web 2.0: Now there is less time to live with or correct mistakes. Picture a car going 120 MPH.