Picture your MS Hotmail or GMAIL account being erased because of any technical reason. You may say that is impossible, considering that Microsoft and Google are trusted companies. Well, that is not what always happen.

Some users over the web have claimed that their Google account have been erased meaning that years of e-mail messages, contacts, agenda and even document files were simple gone.

The question is: to whom you should complain about? To the service provider that is actually fostering a free of charge solution? If you don’t pay for the service that means you cannot complain, can you?

In fact if you read the terms of agreement of these free content providers, that actually nobody do it, they do not disclaim responsibility for any problem that may occur.

It is very important to consider that Google does not disclose where are their data centers. Some IT analysts report that they are over more than 38 places around the globe (http://royal.pingdom.com). That is the essential strength and at the same time weakness of the Cloud Computing business model. Everything in the web? How much is going to cost you if you loose data?

There is a business gap today that no company is taking: provide a service to backup up all the customer data over the different service providers. Figure out these business offers:

1) $10,00 per month, daily backup and storage.
2) $30,00 per year, monthly backup and storage.
3) $20,00 for a bundle backup and storage.
4) $100,00 per year including daily backup, storage and all the backup data delivered in your home for Christmas.
5) Video call us to consult the recovery pricing table. (GMail only $5,00 etc.)

How much are you willing to pay for such a service? Remember: it will backup your e-mails, contacts, agenda, documents, photos, social network profiles etc.

I tryed to think “out of the box”, about mashup of things and …

What is Mashup TODAY ? All steps and components in virtual world.

1. Data capture (API’s, screen scraping, …)
2. Data processing (Datawarehouse with Business Intelligence, mashup editors, SOA Roadmap, programming …)
3. Data presentation (Computer Monitor, PDA, Mobile …)

What will be Mashup in the FUTURE ?

1. Data capture (QR Code, RFID, …) – People and things recognition, Atoms & Bits and/or Micro Machine goal.
2. Data processing (Datawarehouse with Business Intelligence, mashup editors, SOA Roadmap, programming …) – Nothing really new, just more organized. Exception: Web Semantics
3. Data presentation (Holography, 3D, flexible screens (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081002084217.htm), new projection technologies …) – New display types

Conclusion:

Mashup team must focus in “data presentation” and Web Semantics. Customers want to minimize devices and maximize screens to see all informations consolidated through mashups.

Do you agree? Please, help-me with comments.

While browsing the web, I find this interesting web site.

http://www.google.org/flutrends/ Did you know it? 

Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems: the power of the technology!!

They simply consider that every week, millions of users search for “online” health information. 

“As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. “

If you consider they are putting this result on the web this is a sort of mash up still based on maps.

It could be unbelievable that search queries (trends) provide a reliable model of real-world phenomena: if we consider that they found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms, not every people who search for “flu” is actually sick.

But a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are “added” together: this is the trick, the statistical approach.

Google compared their query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening.

“By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.” Google said. And their  results have been published in Nature.

Now: they work on searches, but what a Telco Operator could do considering, for instance, counting possible phone call to “well known” numbers (maybe coming from particular region)?  May we do some sort of “trends” or identify possible patterns? Furthermore: may we do some sort of business on this?

Explore flu trends across the U.S.

 Data current through: April 27, 2009

OLED has made the progress it promised in terms of production yield: it is now economically feasible to produce large OLED screen, up to 42” at a reasonable cost. OLED delivers much better colour quality, has lower energy consumption than a normal LDC (and Plasma) and it is much brighter. So why is it that we find OLED screens on some cell phones but very little in television screens?

The reason is similar to the failure of NED to reach the market. The explosion of flat screens has driven production cost down much more than expected (only 4 years ago the forecast was for a 40” LCD to have a market price around 3000$, now it is down to 1000 $); besides, several innovations have led to bettering of colour (by extensive use of software), better contrast and brightness and at the same time solutions to decrease power consumption are appearing. The new line of backlight illumination based on LEDs is driving energy consumption down since illumination is provide just where it is required (like in Plasma screens) and at the same time this delivers higher contrast.

The other advantage of OLED, a thinner screen, has also been met by conventional LCD screen. The new Sony is just 9.9 mm thick (if calling it thick still makes any sense…)-

There is simply very little incentive for a manufacturer to invest huge amount of money to deploy the infrastructure that would surely deliver a better product but may not lead to significantly greater revenues.  Infrastructures… sound familiar, doesn’t it?

There are also other technologies ready on the labs’ benches that can deliver better image quality and much better resolution. One is the quantum dot display. Here the colour of the pixel is given by the different size of the nano-particle (9nm for a red colour, compare this size with the 300,000 nm of an LCD pixel!  Notice however that we need several of this quantum dots to achieve a comparable brightness, still the gain in resolution is obvious…).

Electronic paper, on the contrary, is very far to compete with the other technologies for high resolution display. It is an interesting technology for reading eBooks on the beach, since it reflects the sun light and the more ambient light available the better the contrast and reading ease. It is not suited for providing a large colour gamut nor high resolution.