The time may come when a computer will be able to out-compute a human, but not yet. According to a recent study, adding up all the computation power in every laptop, server, mainframe, cell phone, and digital processors of all kinds, everywhere on the planet will give you approximately the ability to handle approximately 6.4 x 10^18 operations a second. About the same as a human brain.

All the worlds storage – paper, film, hard-drives, etc. would give you same amount of storage as human DNA. In other words, somewhere around 2011 the planet has enough computing power to account for 1 extra person. The vast amount of “thinking” is still done by organic chemistry. Read the article I read on ARS Technica.

I think we have the building architecture down. But somebody has got to get to work on these wonderful flying machines.
Technically, blimps are soft-body-inflatable aircraft – these are more like zeppelins, rigid-body-lighter-than-air craft. Either way, I would except the longer commutes if I could have a conversation without losing my voice and hearing.

| View | Upload your own

The purpose of this presentation was originally to inspire a group of educators at a single school in Colorado to take their job seriously and invest in education. From that intended audience of 250 people, it has now been seen by millions. The message is clear, the world is changing. More and more of my clients are asking me to help them adapt to this change. To prepare road maps and visions and governance models that will help them adapt. What are you doing to prepare?

For now, companies are offering genotyping—”the strategic scanning
of your DNA for several hundred thousand of the telltale variations
that make one human different from the next.” It will take a few more
years before anyone can offer (or afford) to sequence all 6 billion
points of a person’s genetic code, but in the meantime, genotyping can
provide a lot of the kind of health-related information many people
would love to know.

Remote Executive Assistant

• Do you spend more time on routine administrative tasks instead of important business issues?
• Are you suffering from information overload?
• Are you finding less time to devote to your personal interests?
• Are you up against a deadline and need help with research on your project?
• Do you have an interesting idea but need help in creating a business plan?
• Do you need assistance for extensive internet research and database creation?
• Do you want to create/improve your website which gets you more customers?

Tasks they do:

• Formatting/beautifying any MS office files like word, excel, PowerPoint
• Quick mail mergers and sending mass mails in your name; Email & fax blast
• Internet search or any other sources that you provide them access to
• Designing customized greetings cards and sending them on your behalf
• Fine tuning your logo, business cards and other stationary including converting image to vector
• Data processing like data entry, OCR conversion; creating the PowerPoint presentation from the handwritten data;
• Updation, normalization & standardization of database;
• photo edits; b/w to color
• Shopping
  assistance like comparison of models & prices, listing of shops
  within a specific area with address, phone number & route map

Has anyone tried this?

• How long does it take for these networks to reach critical mass?
• What happens when the market is saturated?
• How many networks are people willing to invest time into?
• What’s next for them?

To answer the first question I went to Google trends and plotted MySpace versus Facebook.

From this it looks like myspace has peaked and facebook is nearly as popular now. Next I went to alexia.com which ranks sites.Here are the top 20 sites:

Rank	Change	Web Site
1	(none)	yahoo.com
2	1	google.com
3	1	live.com
4	1	youtube.com
5	3	msn.com
6	(none)	myspace.com
7	4	facebook.com
8	1	wikipedia.org
9	1	hi5.com
10	2	orkut.com
11	2	rapidshare.com
12	2	blogger.com
13	2	megaupload.com
14	3	friendster.com
15	1	yahoo.co.jp
16	7	baidu.com
17	2	fotolog.net
18	1	microsoft.com
19	4	google.fr
20	7	qq.com

Of the top 20 – Myspace, Freindster, facebook, orkut, and hi5 are all social networks (a collection of personal profiles linked together and competing for attention). The rest of the list is search engines, webhosts (which rank high because a lot of websites have that domain like rapidshare.com and blogger.com), and wikipedia – the king of user created content. Baidu.com is the top Chinese search engine.

Here is the one year trend for social sites on alexa:

One thing that is clear about the top 20 sites – user generated content is definitely king. Not a single site other than microsoft.com pay for content – they all harvest, search, sort, rank, and enable the general public to do it for them.

So getting back to social networks, how long can these things last, I think once they hit the level myspace and face book are currently, they have to innovate quickly or die. Like shopping malls in the real world, the crowds come for a while but are quickly lured away by brighter lights. Plus, a lot of users begin to get turned off when a system is seen as too main stream and want the cool factor of the next great thing. In any case there are plenty of options for users to try. While I do have profiles at Linkedin and facebook, I don’t update them. If I’m going to generate content, I want more control over it then those sites allow. Also, I want to benefit from the advertising.

People search for terms like “full moon” with the clockwork regularity of celestial events like, well, like full moons.

The holidays also show a steady heartbeat in search. I thought it was strange that “Earth day” would be more popular than Easter.

But then i remembered two things. First people are still working on Earth day, so they are at their computers, and second, google skews the results with those cartoon logos they put on their main search page. When you click it, it searches for that term. So bottom line, this just means more people are using google on Earth day than Easter. It makes sense but also reminds us that we have to take these graphs with a grain of salt.

Other things that follow a pattern: American Idol, which is apparently very popular in the Philippines.
IBM’s star is falling (its as popular now as summer is in the winter) and Lenovo’s is rising.

Point A in the graph is where Lenovo bought IBM’s PC business. One last graph, this one ties into both IBM and portals. Since I spent a lot of time helping clients get value from their portal investments, lets look at where the market interest lies.

This may be apples and oranges since Sharepoint is used for collaboration more than portals (and I’ve always felt it creates silos for information more than it tears them down, but thats the subject of a later blog.) Tell me about the interesting trends you discover in the comments.

Consolidate because I have 34 domains hosted with half a dozen ISPs. This is great for playing the feild and comparing level of service (except they all pretty much suck the same with 1 notable exception), but it is very poor for having any kind of focus. The fact is,  I do a little bit of work online each week outside of my client paid activities.  But since it is  spread out across so many different projects, it is lost.

Simply because my old site, while cool, was based on a cold fusion platform I build my self with several different web services integrated into it. Half of these were down half the time. Well see how well this new approach works. Fingers crossed. (by the way, if its 2010 and this is the only thing up here, you will know it failed.)