For example, our online site that delivers search results, there is no one who carries a beeper, because the software understands that if any of the hardware component fails, it knows how to redistribute that load. So it's completely fail-safe. There's multiple locations. That kind of capability can be provided to even fairly small-scale datacenters.
There are software products, enterprise products, client products that really enable people, other software developers, to build software plus service. So we have stuff like Windows Live, and Office Live, Popfly, MSN, Live Search, Virtual Earth for individuals. I'm particularly charged up about what we're doing in business services. We have an offer now for managed communications and collaboration where we'll run the e-mail, the collab infrastructure for an enterprise account out of our own data centers.
We're investing today in two new capabilities. We are going to be an advertising company, and we are going to be a devices company. Being an advertising company means learning about online and operational efficiency. Advertising is a new business model. Now we don't just talk about ISVs, we talk about publishers.
The machine will become contextually aware. It essentially has infinite memory or recall capability, and the whole model of search at the global scale is just sort of an indication that there's not really that much limitation to what we can remember and our ability to go find it. The question is we don't find it in a way that makes it generally useful to people to build new applications. So the second thing that will happen - and here by "context" I mean not only what you do but the environment in which the machine sits - you know, sensors, video sensors, audio sensors - these all will essentially accumulate context and define the environment.
On the consumer side our ability to monetize after market a PC with application -- I mean, we do better than anybody else selling software. We sell a reasonable amount of Office. You can buy Office for home, student-type use for just over a hundred bucks. And yet most of the Office you would find on home computers has been pirated. And so the notion of being able to monetize -- and monetize -- I'm not talking about Office now, but in general, advertising is a potential better monetization source in a market where piracy is high; I think we have net opportunity, particularly consumer and tiny businesses, home businesses, et cetera, to actually increase revenue on everything we do that's application-related, because of the move to software plus services.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
