A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy

If you are interested in understanding the new economy of technology, information and Internet services you should consider buying this book: Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian.

Shapiro is Professor of Business Strategy at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and has also served as chief economist at the Antitrust Division of the US Justice Department. Varian is the Dean of the School of Information Management and Systems at University of California, Berkeley.

Parallel processing model at Google

Google Fellows Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat published a paper in the January issue of Communications of the ACM that details the programming model Google leverages to process more than 20 petabytes of data every day on commodity-based clusters.

The method, known as MapReduce, lets users break computations into a map and a reduce function, which the runtime system automatically parallelizes across large clusters while navigating machine failures and honing the efficiency of network and disk use in the process. The methodology abstracts parallelization, fault tolerance, data distribution, and load balancing into a library.

More on MapReduce is on Google Code.

eventseer.net

Eventseer.net is an interesting website that tracks computer science conferences. But it does much more, this site lets you track and search events, people and the topics these people work on. Furthermore, it shows the persons that are similar to you by research topics.

I have tried with my name and it has correctly found two conferences in which I participated, the topics I am working on and the persons that have similar interests. In fact, two of the researchers in the list are my colleagues with which I have written papers, however, others are persons that I know and that are in the same area of research.

This site is not in its final release but it looks promising. Thomas Brox Røst, a PhD student at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway has developed evenseer.net.

CREATING NEXT GENERATION APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES FOR MOBILE DEVICES

One of the papers I wrote with my colleagues at the Nokia Research Center, CREATING NEXT GENERATION APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES FOR MOBILE DEVICES: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES, is getting some attention.

At the Department of Computer Science, at Trondheim in Norway, in the TDT49 Mobile Information Systems course, our paper is one of the required reading.

This paper is a nice text to look for the interesting experiences we have had in creating mobile applications that are context aware and in a certain way, intelligent. One important observation is that many of these applications can be created right now.