More clouds in the heavens!

Everyone wants a place in line at Heaven's Gates! HP, Intel, Yahoo just created their own cloud in the skies. There have already been players in this space - Amazon's been doing this with their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) framework and their Simple Storage Service (S3). Unfortunately, in recent months, the Amazon offering has been beset with some stability challenges. IBM and Google had already made their foray into this space, and Microsoft is also headed that way.

IBM had pushed for the network computer in the 90s - it was the right idea, but it was a few years too early. Now is the right time. I presume that networking companies are going to try to put more into the network routers - or at least take credit. But Cisco's thrust into messaging the Human Network is admirable, although, I guess Telepresence does stand out.

I see many Google engineers with a sticker on their laptop that says "My other computer is a data center".

Blurring the Human-Machine line

The industrial revolution clearly established machines superior to humans on a physical basis. Now, the intellectual assault is on.

As new techniques are invented where machines are beginning to outperform humans, and as more realistic humanoid and other intelligent robots take stage, the blurring of the line between human and machine is happening as we speak.

As machines can search better, churn through numbers faster and play better chess, interesting applications for machines is all it takes. Check out how BigDog can not just move across rough terrain, but actually regain its balance after a pretty large and sudden replacement (don't miss the comedy version - it is a classic!)

What would you do if you could clone yourself (at least physically and behaviorally, if not mentally) with an Android? How would autonomous Androids interact with each other?

There's discussion around micro- and nano- applications to health, which is a different way of looking at the problem - the android is the human in this case -

Human systems are first being aided, then being mended by chips and nano-devices. Genetic engineering and personalized medicine is where the assimilation will be complete.

Your heart just got fixed! Is your heart in the right place?

Web-TV or TV-Web?

A simple choice of combination - do you want to browse the web on your TV, or do you want to relate from the TV to the Web. WebTV from Microsoft struggled its way forward (not really sure how it is doing - seems still alive :-) - but this brilliant move from TiVo takes it to the next level. Not sure how much time it will take for people to start doing purchases this way, but the possibilities are phenomenal.

Couch potatoes with money and impulse - shopping from the couch without even picking up the phone - just click on the remote!

The real next step on this is mobile - are you really on your couch all the time?

Maybe the Amazon is really the greenest place on earth?