A few posts back, Alistair wrote about Human 2.0, focusing on sensory immersion, augmented reality. and bridging the gap between the human and the screen. These techniques are only half of the Human 2.0 equation -  they modify the environment - the inputs - not the human body itself.

Human 2.0 is about breaking human performance barriers, both mental and physical, by modifying the human body and environment. Think transhumanism. Biogerontology. Life extension. Brain hacking. Body hacking. Even baby hacking.

I’ve been interested in these fields for more than a decade, to the point that I have my own EEG at home so I can read my brain waves and learn to modify them at will. Some people have closets full of golf clubs they never use. Mine is full of soliton lasers, cerebro-electric stimulators, light/sound goggles, micro pulse generators, and FIR-LED neuron growth stimulators. I can’t wait to get my own Emotiv headset.

Smart drugs? Tried them all (and I won’t say if I take them now). I’m a board member of a non-profit called the Smart Life Forum that meets once a month in Palo Alto. (Third Thursday of the month - check it out; I’ll be there…) SmartLife’s advisors include leading anti-aging physicians and Steve Fowkes, author of “Smart Drugs II,” and head of the Cognitive Enhancement Research Institute. Hormone testing? Been there. SPECT scan? Done that. Ayahuasca? Check. You get the point. Ray Kurzweil definitely gets the point.

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Jennifer Bell and the folks at Visible Government took the covers off their much-needed I Believe In Open project. If you’re a Canadian, you should go sign up. Simply put: any elected official who isn’t willing to be transparent and accountable to their electorate has something to hide, and we now have the technology to track their record.

Which makes me wonder what Bitcurrent’s record is. Once upon a time, many of the folks behind Bitcurrent were part of Networkshop, a consulting firm that became Coradiant, a web performance company that helped create the end user experience management space.

Back then, Networkshop talked a lot of trash. We blew the whistle on SSL performance issues, and wrote a huge (250+ page) study on load balancing. We also prognosticated a lot.

Using the Internet Way-Back Machine, I decided to go scoop up some issues of Networkshop News and see how they stood up to scrutiny nine years later. Here’s one on how networks change if the PC is no longer the dominant client, from March, 2000.

How do you think it stacks up?

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Cloudcamp San Francisco, the first in a series of events centered on cloud computing, took place on June 24. If the roughly 300 attendees at this informal industry meet-up are any indication, cloud computing is a popular and rapidly growing subject.

“Based on attendance at recent Amazon cloud conferences I was expecting maybe 100 people”, said CloudCamp instigator and Enomalism co-founder Reuven Cohen, “this is an amazing turnout after only 3 weeks of planning.”

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I’m in San Francisco this week for Velocity, CloudCamp and Structure’08 and the valley buzz du’jour is definitely Cloud Computing. Tomorrow evening is the inaugural CloudCamp and I’m bracing myself for more argument over the rules of membership in the Clouderati.

It strikes me that for the business minded, the question is not who’s in and who’s out, rather, who’s going to be able to stay in. Cloud is simply an IT delivery model. It comes with high customer expectations that few companies are tooled up to meet. 24×7 availability, self-service provisioning, pay-per-use billing and internet scale, all for $1.78 a month.

I’m hoping for good debate about Cloud adopters, their expectations, and how we can implement Clouds to meet them… without going broke. See you there.

…cross posted to duncanhill.com

Cloudcamp SFO is the inaugural event in a series on cloud computing. Launched by the irrepressible Reuven Cohen, it’s a free mashup of smart people from all over the cloud computing landscape.
It’s free to attend, and if you’re in town for Structure 08, it’s a great way to get in the cloud mood.

There has been a remarkable amount of blog banter about what constitutes a cloud. Most of the arguments have some merit, others are self serving attempts to shape our collective understanding to commercial ends.

For the average reader however, I think much of this banter has done more to confuse than clarify the notion of cloud computing. In many cases the confusion stems from arguments that don’t differentiate between cloud offerings and the technologies that enable them.

What constitutes a cloud service depends largely on the perspective of the user. For users of cloud services, each of these offerings provides a different demarcation point between the value you want to create and the necessary evils you require to support your creation.

• If your value-add is a unique idea you want to share, Wordpress and Google Docs take care of the input, formating and large scale distribution of text so you can focus on the craft of writing.
• If your value-add is the creation of a community to support an event, Ning and EventBrite take care of membership, collaboration and coordination so you can focus your energies on creating a great event.
• If your value-add is providing an web page that helps people track wildfires in California, Coghead and BungeeLabs provide you with a way to easily integrate data sources and generate visualizations so you can focus on getting the data to those affected quickly and intuitively.
• And if your value-add is delivering a new life-streaming application to millions of adoring users, Amazon Web Services and Joyent take care of providing you with scalable virtual machines, storage and internet connectivity so you can focus on coding the features you will need to compete with Twitter and FriendFeed (best of luck on that…).

From the user’s point of view, these are all cloud computing offerings. In every case, they outsource the ‘necessary evils’ required to deliver the user’s creation. The common threads that both bind these outsourced offerings together under the cloud umbrella and differentiate them from outsourcing offerings of the past are that they are all:

• Self-service
• Pay-per-use
• Internet scale

As a user, I don’t care if the service provider is using Enomalism, 3Tera, Elastra, or armies of sys-admins on Redbull and steroids to deliver me the service. As long as I can get it when I want it, pay only for what I use, and have it scale with my needs, then I’m a happy guy (is that really so much to ask???). To the Service Provider it may make the difference between making money and going broke, but that’s an implementation discussion to be argued by the attendees of CloudCamp. It doesn’t really have any bearing on the definition of Cloud.

So lets try to separate the services from the implementation and recognize that Cloud is not a revolution, its just an evolution of an age old business model - outsourcing stuff for people that they don’t want to do.

…crossposted to blog.duncanhill.com

Cloud concepts can be pretty confusing. But when you tell a small business owner or early-stage startup it means not having to spend a lot of money, it gets simple fast.

Denise Deveau wrote about this recently in the Globe and Mail (and I got quoted a bunch, which was nice.) But defining what “cloud” really means is a contentious subject. At the upcoming Cloudcamp in San Francisco (running before Structure, and organized by the energetic Reuven Cohen) this is sure to be a subject of debate.

My overly simple soundbite for the Globe article was that cloud computing was “having computing resources available to you when you don’t own the machines.” But that might get me into trouble: There’s a taxonomy of on-demand services, from platform-as-a-service to hardware-as-a-service. And then there’s grid computing. And of course SaaS gets lumped in with this.

So I’m going to try a more detailed description:

Cloud computing means having a set of abstracted resources available to you, and not worrying about what’s below that abstraction.

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