Now appearing–this week only the Syncverse

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I’ve bounced around the topic of SSE (Socialist Synchronization Engine) and the broader concept of the Syncverse this week. The Syncverse remains intriguing as I would love to see what an information broker looks like.

If you think back to the middle ages, we had information merchants who held information and provided access to that information. What would it look like in a much more equal state like the internet, where if you overcharge or over secure in the end the only source that loses is yours.

An information broker would become a source for information and could simply advertise on the internet – I know about X. It would create a series of cottage industries around building and managing specific information. The economics for a broker would be keep the information high value and low cost. The concept of “make it up in volume.”

The information merchant would be the person selling specific rules that help manage the aggregated information from the brokers, as well as specific corporate data.

This of course would present an issue for the various security teams who would in effect have to evaluate the ability of a specific information merchant to provide

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The information merchant

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There is an interesting concept here, one of the information merchant actually selling you rules for your information as well as information not currently in your store. What would that look like from the perspective both of the data you have and the data you need?

The scenario of course is interesting. We connect to the “Syncverse” to gather the rules that we will apply to the information we have and are seeking. If our organization has rules those get applied first, with our own rules from the Syncverse applied second. The next component would be the selection of the overall data source. The data source would have relevance pending of course the speed requirements and specific data requirements that the solution required.

Imagine a series of rules that would allow you to gather the information you need from the Syncverse while applying the rules you purchased from the “information merchant.”

These rules might include:

· Personalization rules

o What data

o What source

o Why/purpose of the data

· Contact rules

o Who can contact you

o How can they contact you

o When can they contact you

· Source rules

o Speed

o Reliability

o Security

 

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Back from the brink

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The brink, or the edge is normally defined as a place you do not want to be. Normally as you stand on the edge of infinity you run the risk of course of falling off.

I found that out with yesterday’s blog although some would argue that I was at the edge of the Syncverse (the universe that is syncing tools, solutions, user information and intellectual capital). It is the ever expanding reality of information.

The Syncverse falls from the concept of SSE (or the socialist synchronization engine). The who, what, when, where and why of synchronization fits neatly in to the overall concept of the Syncverse. We have to be able to build a place where the information about, for and required by people is at home.

Without a doubt this is a very high level, (200,000 foot plus) view that presents a very simplistic reality. But sometimes you have to ask the stupid questions and of course look under the easy solutions to find the right answer.

So, if there was a solution (azure…) that allowed you to create a simple view of the data, an expandable storage capacity and a structure for the applications to be built against would this make the sync engine simple?

The reality here is that no matter what we will have complexity in the sync engine – that reality is that there will be so many rules for both personal and business information that in fact it would be very complex.

But is there a way we can simply the presentation of rules building engine so as not to make it too hard and too complex for everyone to easily use?

Or will this cause the creation (as used to be a long time ago) of information brokers who sell simple managed rules for people who can’t build their own?

The information merchant as an extension of your information but as a broker of that information?

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If today were a pattern what pattern would it be?

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So, I have been thinking about the concept of syncing for so long its started to invade my social space as well. Now I am trying to consider all of the different online accounts I have and how would I keep all that together.

Perhaps Netflix will introduce a Facebook inspired emotional movie queue. How are you feeling today? Sad? We will add a comedy to your instant queue we think you will like.

Not sure how you feel? we will add a romantic comedy.

Facebook status change to single again? We will add a romantic comedy with a dark revenge plot. Not that you should ever take revenge, its just something you can watch to help cheer you up.

Or a merging of my Amazon account (kindle) and  my Netflix queue. Movies that are based on books I’ve read. Movies that are ones I have already purchased via Amazon etc.

A brave new world to have such a tool in it…

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Make my sync useful

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22 hours of video

60,000 +/- pictures

Most of that is of my kids. Over 100 gig of data. Its a wonderful thing as a parent to have the pictures that capture the moments of your child’s life.

But how do i share all of that in a useful way with my parents?

In the old days you had 36 pictures per roll and it cost a lot of money to develop and store them safely. You didn’t take that many pictures and sharing them was as easy as a family photo album.

Now?

100 gigs of data.

There is no automated way for me to share them. There is no structured way for my mom to request pictures of my grandchildren at the beach or in the park or at the zoo.

What do we do?

Windows Home Server is a start, but there are disk space and backups. not the least of which is disk space and backups. Photobucket and Flickr are two resources I use at times, but like anything else – there are limits and I have to spend time for others to see what I am sharing.

The automation would actually have to go back to the device itself. GPS settings for an automated this is where we were when the pictures were taken. Effective Time and Data stamps from the GPS so no one has to set them. That way you have time, location set automatically for every picture.

Simple, automated uploads of the pictures in a structured manner so that they are handled by automation no human intervention. That would allow me to place the camera in its charging bay and have it automatically present my photos to the internet and to the home network for backup. Two sources right away rather than one.

All of this, in a camera that costs 199.

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The formality of a greeting or why do people smile?

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Art Linkletter (who sadly passed earlier this year and will be missed) had a segment on his show “Kid’s Say the Darndest things” that always amazed me.

One of my boys uttered my blog tag line/title yesterday. They were talking about how people greet each other and in particular that people always seemed happy when they greeted other people, even when they weren’t happy moments before (or after).

They talked about the concept of, why people smile when they greet other people for 10 minutes, ending the conversation with the question above.

Why do we smile?

Animals show their teeth as a warning (I WILL BITE YOU.) Humans show their teeth as a greeting (NICE TO MEET YOU).

That conversation is still rattling around inside my head and probably won’t go away for awhile.

Hopefully it isn’t stuck in yours now.

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sink, sync, statics and not a drop to drink

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Excellent comment yesterday got me thinking again about the “cloud scenario” in all of this. A single source engine that is assigned to an organization or person and allows them to setup the rules that are relevant to their sync needs.

• First off the engine would need to be a cloud based application.
• It would need to have the ability for a business to set specific rules about what data would in fact be available from a “business perspective”
• The person would need to be able to setup specific rules around the data they wanted to keep/have specific to what they are doing or are interested in
• To reduce the cost advertisers would have to pay to put adds into the system and the adds would be limited as to when they could be displayed

All of this results in an application that requires a distributed backbone (Azure) that could scale on demand (Azure) and would have a model that support advertisers paying for the overall solution.

Now the question has to be how would the advertisers be allowed to interact with the end users themselves…

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The ever expanding kitchen sink

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As I consider my ever expanding quest to synchronize data via the Cloud I have come to realize that i am now seeking the kitchen sink of synchronization.

Perhaps I should call my new quest the Socialist Sync Engine or SSE for short. “From anything to everything depending upon what you need” would be my tagline.

The thing about building a consistent managed sync process is that your process has to have business rules that allow it to pick and choose the source and process to be used in an intelligent manner. This of course involves a lot of change from what we do today (source is selected by the application and the data is provided) but really not as much change as you would think.

Source selection:

• closest source
• most recent source (update intelligence)
• source with the best bandwidth to device

Business rule processing:

• Data is allowed to have some exposure
• Data is not allowed to have any exposure
• Data can be exposed
• Data is time critical
• Data is not time critical

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Wandering a little today

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Nearing blog number 500 here on WordPress! Two books and a lot of nonsense in those 500 posts!

Interestingly with over 1000 posts overall on my now three blogs (I also post a blog on http://www.iasahome.org for the IASA Board of Education roughly twice a month) I am not running out of topics.

Lots of things come to mind now when I am walking or biking. I suspect there is a risk factor in thinking while biking, but it is where many of my good ideas come from.

But the thing that amazes me right now remains the concept of keeping things synchronized on the world wide web of information. I find myself spending hours thinking, diagramming and contemplating the concepts of data, synchronization and process.

Anyway – back to the salt mine.

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Three things I would do differently for my home network

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1. wire the house before we move in
2. CAT 6 wire everywhere
3. fixed IP address

 

The first one is a lesson learned. I wired my house in Cincinnati with CAT 5 everywhere but that was 12 years ago. The builder looked at me funny when I asked for network jacks in all the rooms. Now I wish I still lived in that house

I love my current house but not having built in wiring everywhere means more reliance on wi-fi and frankly wi-fi has its limits (in particular load bearing walls cause problems).

The CAT 6 is simply smart planning.

The fixed IP address would be with my provider and is something I have been thinking about for while. If we do move eventually, I think I will ask for that.

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