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As Intel and PC makers prepare to launch an app store for Netbooks in 2010, the emphasis is on speed.

"We have a lot of developers right now jumping all over this and writing apps and getting them ready," Scott Apeland, director of Intel's Developer Network, told CNET Wednesday. "Today, you can actually submit applications and get them in validation and be one of the first in the store when we have that available next year. We don't have specific dates. It's how fast we can get it up and ready."

Intel Atom Developer Program

Intel Atom Developer Program
(Credit: Intel )

How fast? "The whole program is moving extremely fast. Now we're working frantically on getting the store ready," he said.

The store itself will come preinstalled on future Netbooks, according to Apeland. "We're working with OEM partners (PC makers) now to get this ready and preinstalled on systems. So, when a user purchases it, he just runs the app store...and pulls from a catalog of applications that are available and they can make the purchases right there," he said.

The largest suppliers of Netbooks using Intel's Atom processor are Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer, and Asus--all of which are readying the next wave of Netbooks based Intel's new "Pine Trail" Atom technology, expected to launch sometime this month. It's a hot market: Intel said Wednesday that more than 50 million Netbooks are expected to be sold by the end of 2009.

Though most applications are expected to be written for the Linux operating system--Intel's version is called Moblin--Apeland claims that the program has a wide target.

"The Atom Developer Program doesn't favor one OS over another, and at its core, the program is meant to facilitate development across multiple OSes," he said. "Right now it's Windows and Moblin...we plan to expand support to different run-time environments, including Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight."

Apeland said that Intel's software developer network overall has between 700,000 and 1 million monthly users, and 20,000 independent software vendors (ISVs) who are members of the Intel software partner program. Though Apeland couldn't say how many of these developers are doing development specific to Atom-based Netbooks, he did allow that Intel has had "tens of thousands coming and checking out our site (and) thousands actually joining before we had any (software development kit) or tools available."

The developer will get 70 percent of the revenue from the sale, Apeland said--similar to the Apple app store. "The rest (30 percent) will cover operational costs and partner costs that are involved." Intel announced a beta of a software development kit on Wednesday for Atom processor-based Netbooks.

Apeland also discussed the type of applications that are popular. "For example, social networking, on-line chats, sharing of photos, video. I think there's going to be a lot of innovation around that," he said, adding that development will also target "a way so users don't have to worry about--keep track of--different sites for log-in."

On the education front, Apeland said, "the Netbook has a lot of natural opportunity because of the keyboard and screen size versus a small handheld device."

Staples is selling a big-screen laptop with robust features that belie its low price.
Acer laptop packs a 17.3-inch 1600 x 900 screen, dual-core Intel processor, and 4GB of memory.

Acer laptop packs a 17.3-inch 1600 x 900 screen, dual-core Intel processor, and 4GB of memory.

As 17-inch laptops go, it's a lot of laptop for the money, compared with higher-priced systems from vendors such as Hewlett-Packard. Big-screen, 17-inch-class laptops priced a couple of hundred dollars above the Acer typically offer slightly faster processors and higher-performance graphics. But for the average user, there's not much difference.

And what do you get for $479? The Acer Aspire AS7736Z-4809 comes with Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, a dual-core Intel Pentium Processor T4300 (2.1GHz), 4GB of memory, a 320GB hard disk drive, 8X DVD double-layer optical drive, a Webcam, and a 17.3-inch LED display with 1600 x 900 resolution.

A 17-inch laptop with high-definition screen resolution and plenty of memory to run 64-bit Windows 7--that's nothing to sniff at.

A secure backup means saving data two or three times at different locations, which should be common practice. Anyone who wants to save data online can check with a provider about their practices. But if a third party is subcontracted to do server maintenance, the possibility of mistakes increases. Know how your provider stores data.

It's become ever easier to save a document with Google or a picture with Flickr thanks to the quick spread of online storage Relevant Products/Services services, known as the cloud Relevant Products/Services.

Quite simply, the cloud allows users to dispense with purchasing their own software or extra memory. Instead, they can access programs and storage space offered by third parties online, even if those functions are stored on computers that are on a different continent.

The bonus is that the data Relevant Products/Services is then accessible from anywhere in the world. Plus, users can skip buying expensive software. But there are risks of storing your files on someone else's computer, especially when it is far away.

"In general, cloud computing Relevant Products/Services is not unsafe," says Stefan Katzenbeisser of the computer science department at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany. The more important question is how the service provider goes about storing data.

Customers with T-Mobile USA recently suffered data losses when files stored with the smartphone service Sidekick got lost during maintenance on a server Relevant Products/Services. "But that's not a problem of cloud computing," says Katzenbeisser. It's a problem with the way the data is stored.

A secure Relevant Products/Services backup means saving data two or three times at different locations, which should be common practice. Anyone who wants to save data online can check with a provider about their practices, notes Katzenbeisser. But if a third party is subcontracted to do server maintenance, the possibility of mistakes increases.

Katzenbeisser sees clear benefits to cloud computing for businesses. "It means I probably don't need to set up a new infrastructure Relevant Products/Services and can save on resources."

But he's skeptical of the benefits for private users. "I still don't understand why I should save private photos on the Internet." Nonetheless, using the cloud means computers can access the data from any Internet-connected device, assuming the data hasn't been lost.

In early October, Long Beach [Calif.] communications Relevant Products/Services manager Kimiko Martinez discovered that her T-Mobile Sidekick phone had lost her 1,200 address-book contacts, photos dating back five years, and three years' worth of financial information.

The data Relevant Products/Services was stored on Microsoft Relevant Products/Services's Sidekick service. In early October, T-Mobile said it lost the data of thousands of users of its Sidekick smartphone after a computer problem at Microsoft. Microsoft says it's working to restore the data.

The glitch gave Martinez more than a few headaches. Since losing her calendar entries, she's missed three meetings. Many phone numbers are still AWOL. "I just have to start all over again," she says. There's another upshot: Martinez, 31, says she's shopping for a new smartphone -- and another service provider.

Outages at Hotmail, Gmail

As the computer industry creates hardware devices, Web sites, and mobile-phone software that increasingly rely on data stored on remote servers, the potential for waylaid data is becoming a more common problem as well.

Both Microsoft's Hotmail and Google's Gmail have experienced outages this year. Last year, some users had trouble gaining access to Apple's MobileMe service, which syncs up Apple owners' e-mail, contacts, and calendars across Macs and iPhones. BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has experienced service outages as well. "I wouldn't be surprised to hear of another, similar snafu with another vendor," says Shaw Wu, a senior analyst with Kaufman Bros. who covers Apple, RIM, and other hardware vendors.

Cloud computing Relevant Products/Services services for backing up smartphone data may be especially vulnerable. For one, the market is populated with green startups that could go out of business and take users' data with them, says Charles Fitzgerald, a vice-president at Decho, an EMC unit that provides PC and mobile storage Relevant Products/Services services to Vodafone Group and China Telecom. "There are a lot of fly-by-night players in this space," says Fitzgerald, who spent 19 years at Microsoft and left last year.

"Not All Clouds Are Equal"

Consumers may also have trouble retrieving data over slower wireless networks or backing up data over the air in areas with spotty connectivity. That means saving SMS messages, photos, and address book entries can be prone to delays and outages. Vendors' backup policies for wireless devices can also vary widely. "Not all clouds are created equal," says Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, which makes software that helps Vodafone and other carriers back up users' data.

A basic principle of warfare is never to fight on terrain chosen — or dominated — by your enemy. This principle seemed to explain why, as Google rose to challenge Microsoft as the world's most powerful technology company, the one market it eschewed was that for operating systems. That territory was dominated by Bill Gates & Co and so Google concentrated on building dominance in areas where Microsoft was feeble or non-existent: search, cloud computing, web applications, advertising. It all seemed so sensible.

But then last July, Google gave notice that it had changed tack by revealing it was working on a radical new operating system called Chrome OS. Just over a week ago, the product was officially launched at the company's Californian HQ, which left the technology community intrigued and puzzled, and the mainstream media salivating over the prospect of a head-to-head battle between Google and Microsoft.

The first computers equipped to run Chrome won't hit stores until late next year, but we now know what they will look like. Essentially they will be "netbooks", but with a difference: all the software on them will come from Google, via the internet. And Google will make the key decisions about the hardware on which its new system will run.

As the Guardian's Jack Schofield put it: "If Chrome OS takes off, it will give Google an unprecedented degree of power over PC vendors, who will only be able to use products that Google specifies and supports. Google will control and maintain the operating system remotely, so if it doesn't want you to have something, you can't have it."

The degree of power Google seeks over hardware is akin to that demanded by Apple, hitherto the leading exponent of control freakery in the technology business. For example, Chrome netbooks won't be allowed to use hard disks – because flash (ie solid-state) drives boot faster and Google is obsessed with reducing boot-up times. And if you want to install your own wi-fi card in your netbook, forget it: Google will specify which wi-fi cards its software will support.

Implicit in Google's operating system strategy are two radical ideas. The first is that we have definitively moved into the era where the network – not the PC – is the computer. The idea is that most people can now get all the computing services they need – web browsing, email, instant messaging, word processing, spreadsheets, blogging, telephony, etc – via the net, so they no longer need to have a machine capable of running a bloated, clunky operating system. All they need instead is an internet-ready device that can get its operating system from the network "cloud" and then get on with the real work of the day.

The second radical idea embedded in the Google scheme is the notion that what people really need is an information appliance that "just works". Sundar Pichai, the Google vice-president who launched the system, claimed that the aim was to make the Chrome OS work like a TV: you turn it on and in a few seconds you can get the programme you want. No more interminable delays while the computer boots up, checks its memory and loads the operating system before it deigns to give you so much as a log-on prompt.

The flip side of all this, of course, is that Chrome netbooks will be the ultimate in tethered devices. You may own the machine, just as you may think you own your Apple iPhone, but in fact Google controls it, just as Apple controls the phone. If, for example, you've tinkered with the device overnight, and the Google server detects the change as you hook up to the net, then the operating system may be remotely deleted and a fresh version installed without your knowledge or consent. Google will argue that this is for your own good – that it's an effective defence against the viruses, trojans and malware that plague current users of Microsoft operating systems.

And so it is. But it's also a limitation on your freedom. In his 2008 book, The Future of the Internet – and how to stop it, Harvard academic Jonathan Zittrain painted a vivid picture of the dangers of a world in which most people's access to the internet is via tethered devices controlled by powerful companies. If Chrome OS takes off we will have taken a giant leap into that nightmare. For 1984 read 2010.

IBM's (NYSE: IBM) revelation at SC09 created quite a stir and immediately brought forth visions of Cylons and Hal 9000.

The cognitive computing team at IBM Research has moved significantly forward in creating a large-scale cortical simulation and a new algorithm that synthesizes neurological data -- two major milestones on the path to a cognitive computing chip. IBM says computers that mimic the human brain are just 10 years away.

This is not a mere advancement on the artificial intelligence (AI) scale. This is a different approach to computing.

"Non-cognitive computing approaches to artificial intelligence have generally led to underwhelming results: We have nothing near HAL-9000 level capabilities even after many years of trying, so there has been increasing attention on cognitive computing approaches," Steven Flinn, chief executive officer of ManyWorlds and author of the upcoming book The Learning Layer: Building the Next Level of Intellect in Your Organization, told TechNewsWorld.
AI vs. Cognitive Computing

Cognitive computing isn't your father's artificial intelligence which is to say it isn't just a new model of an old idea.

"Cognitive computing goes well beyond artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction as we know it -- it explores the concepts of perception, memory, attention, language, intelligence and consciousness," Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing at IBM Research - Almaden, told TechNewsWorld.

"Typically, in AI, one creates an algorithm to solve a particular problem," Modha said. "Cognitive computing seeks a universal algorithm for the brain. This algorithm would be able to solve a vast array of problems."

Still confused? Then try looking at it as the difference between learning and thinking.

"AI attempts to have computers learn how to learn -- for computers to make their own connections without only being constrained by their hardware and software," said Daniel Kantor, M.D., BSE, medical director of Neurologique and president-elect of the Florida Society of Neurology.

"A cognitive computer could quickly and accurately put together the disparate pieces of any complex data puzzle and help people make good decisions rapidly," he told TechNewsWorld.

"The problem with this is that even the human brain is unable to do that," Kantor laughed. "These two technologies could be used in tandem to complement each other if the algorithms are sophisticated enough."
Aiming for Human, Landing on Cat Feet

Cognitive computing is a different beast entirely -- and right now it's looking very cat-like.

Scientists at IBM Research, in collaboration with colleagues from Berkeley Lab, have actually performed the first near real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex and contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses.

Cat? How did the scientists end up exceeding the scale of cat but falling short of human rungs?

"This was the best that we could achieve given the available supercomputing resources," explained Modha. "Specifically, using DAWN Blue Gene / P supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab with 147,456 processors and 144 TB of main memory, the simulation used 1.6 billion neurons and 9 trillion synapses."

For some scale reference points, consider this:

* A cat cortex has roughly 760 million neurons and 6 trillion synapses. So, IBM's simulation exceeds cat-scale.

* A monkey cortex has roughly 2 billion neurons and 20 trillion synapses. IBM's simulation is roughly equal to 50 percent of monkey-scale.

* A human cortex has 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses. IBM's simulation, then, is 4.5 percent of human-scale.

"If we have access to a supercomputer with 1 exaflops of computation and 4 petabytes of main memory, a near real-time human cortex-scale simulation would be possible," said Modha.
Elements of Cognitive Computing

Essentially, the scientists created a new algorithm called "BlueMatter" that exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture in order to measure and map the human brain. It is noninvasive, meaning subjects' skulls are not drilled into, and there are no talking human heads in bell jars a la mad scientist horror movies.

Instead, the scientists use magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging to measure and map the connections between all cortical and subcortical locations within the living brain.

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brain map
IBM's BlueMatter algorithm maps the brain's communication network.
(click image to enlarge)

The resulting wire diagram untangles the brain's communication network and helps scientists understand how the human brain represents and processes information in a tiny space and with little energy burn.

The implications are huge -- so much so that all possible uses have yet to be imagined.

"In the future, businesses and individuals will simultaneously need to monitor, prioritize, adapt and make rapid decisions based on ever-growing streams of critical data and information," explained IBM's Modha.

"A cognitive computer could quickly and accurately put together the disparate pieces of this complex puzzle and come to a logical response, while taking into account context and previous experience," he said.

"It could have implications for mining live, streaming data from sensor networks, macro- and micro-economic data analysis and trading in a financial setting, understanding live audio and video feeds, and even the gaming industry," suggested Modha.

"It would have the ability to point out anomalies, deal Increase Customer Sales with Email Marketing -- Free Trial from VerticalResponse with constantly changing parameters, and possibly prioritize what to look at first in the data," he concluded.
Human Brain Add-On

The simulator is also an important tool for scientists to test their hypotheses for how the brain works.

"One of our highest goals in neuroengineering is to develop circuitry that can mimic the human brain, not only for a certain discrete action, but to mimic the thought process in general," explained Neurologique's Kantor.

"Such technology would allow us to use microchips [or] nanochips to augment brain function in someone who has suffered a brain injury," he said.

"It is entirely feasible that we will see such technology in the next decade, but it may not be applicable to many types of brain injuries, cautioned Kantor.

"Often damage to the brain -- from disease, traumatic brain injury or a direct blow to the head -- destroys part of a neural circuit, but leaves other parts in place," he pointed out. "This means that it would be more useful to have artificial neurons that can grow and make synaptic connections with other healthy neurons to reform a circuit."

Cognitive computing mimics the human brain by using hardware, software and by mapping or augmenting wetware.

To sum it up: Cylons and Hal are out, and Johnny Mnemonic

IBM on Monday is expected to unveil Blue Insight, a massive business analytics cloud that will hold more than a petabyte of data. This internal cloud computing environment will be the basis for future external services.

Internally, IBM's effort is dubbed Blue Insight, a business analytics cloud that will give 200,000 employees access to key corporate data around the world. Blue Insight will suck in data from 100 different data stores and warehouses. The data will then be dished out to salespeople and developers.

According to IBM, Blue Insight is a showcase of the "eat your own dog food" mantra. The system is built using Cognos, IBM's business intelligence software, and hardware systems such as System Z, the company's mainframe (right).

Going forward, IBM said it will add structured and unstructured data to Blue Insight. Some of this data will include revenue forecasts and sales quotas, product breakdowns, queries from real-time data and inventory levels and defects.

As much as Twitter is a powerful communication and social application, it's a relatively simple Web app. As part of a new contest sponsored by Engine Yard, Ruby on Rails developers are going to turn Twitter into their own application server.

The contest asks developers to program the "Worst App Server Technology Ever" (Waste) using Twitter as the message bus. While much of the contest is being done tongue-in-cheek, it's actually an interesting use case to see if a service like Twitter can take the place of a more traditional message bus like IBM MQ series or AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol).

Contest participants register up to five Twitter handles and code the function that each would perform in a program. When the contest challenge is issued on November 12, participants will have to use at least 10 of the pre-designated Twitter handles (other than their own) as endpoints to perform functions on data sets located at unique URLs. All messages will work through a series of automated public Twitter replies.

This is somewhere between an application server, a social game, the "telephone game" and service-oriented architecture (SOA) where Twitter plays the role of the enterprise service bus and the Twitter API is the broker between data sources. SOA relies on services exposing their functionality other applications and services can read to understand how to utilize those services. In this case, Twitter can be used as an application server in the cloud. (Take that buzzword bingo players.)

The funny thing is that as absurd and comical as this sounded when the Engine Yard guys told me about it, I've started to think about this as a way to possibly achieve a real technological breakthrough. And while I don't think that Twitter will be the "cloud bus," I do think that there is a lot to be learned from applying this type of constraint to a data flow process.

Engine Yard VP of marketing Michael Mullany told me that the contest shows how developers can leverage a relatively straightforward platform in innovative ways. But it's also another example of an interesting marketing effort to use Twitter as the vehicle for one's own benefit. Also, in true open source fashion, developers wind up building new applications based on code written by their peers.

Let's hope Twitter can handle the attention and developers are not greeted by the ever-lurking fail whale. You can check out the contest and learn more details at Engineyard.com

IBM on Wednesday announced a program designed to help educators and students pursue cloud-computing initiatives and better take advantage of collaboration technology in their studies.

The IBM Cloud Academy, announced at the Educause annual conference, includes a global roster of educational institutions as initial participants. Educause is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.

IBM will provide the cloud-based infrastructure for the program, with some basic collaboration tools available at the outset. IBM's LotusLive service provides the basis for the new offering. Participants will immediately be able to do some very basic tactical functions on the new system:

* Create working groups on areas of interest to the education industry
* "Jam" on new innovations for clouds in education-related areas with IBM developers
* Work jointly on technical projects across institutions
* Share research findings and exchange new research ideas

Shared research across universities and other higher-learning institutions remains a vital part of technological innovation, but many programs don't have formal tool sets in place. Cloud services are a logical place to run these types of programs, especially as international groups need immediate access to data from their partners.

Cloud computing has many benefits for academia, as IBM highlights through its Cloud Academy program:

* With cloud computing, universities can open their technology infrastructures to businesses and industries for research advancements.
* The efficiencies of cloud computing can help universities keep pace with ever-growing resource requirements and energy costs.
* The extended reach of cloud computing enables institutions to teach students in new, different ways, and help them manage projects and massive workloads.
* When students enter the global workforce, they will better understand the value of new technologies.

Universities--and perhaps more to the point, students--are not just the target market for current and future cloud services, they have come to expect software to work in a different way than we did even 10 years ago. Efforts like this will help push the boundaries of application consumption and increase innovation.