Referring to my post about the Norwegian pair in Congo, they got their death penalty today. They had to be convicted before international press noticed the news and now it seems to be everywhere. CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera. Pretty well visited as well accordning to Norwegian papers. Good!
By the way I still miss aftenposten.no/english and think I may start a facebook-group to get it reopened some day. Or maybe start a new english service from Norway?
Equals zero if nobody reads what you write. How to get readers? (1) Post frequently, (2) post relatively short, crisp and to the point and (3) include a picture (preferably of your boots, boobs (see my last post) or other body parts if you are female) is the top three advices.
Since my sencond last post was May 22nd (i refound some inspiration this week), I tend to write long and I often drop pictures (even though I try) there are no wonder I don’t have thousands of readers. Maybe I can do something about it this autumn?
Let me try to stick to my promise – being a Tiger on the changing world – the fact is I almost feel like the world has stopped changing this summer, but obviously that is not true, I just need to figure out what the hell happened.
Something did not change though – Kongolesian military courts view on Norwegian “soldiers” killing in their country. Wonder if they get some money from our government, I hope they do not.
Something else that obviously does not change either is CNNs lack of coverage of Norwegian news, I searched CNN for Congo Norway and nothing. Norwegian Aftenposten (Finance crisis took away their English desk, leaving Norway without any English news service to my knowledge 😦 ) had a massive number of news items about the case. UK Guardian have picked it up also, see this article.
Facsimile from The Guardian
I just read this, a tad old pre-finance-crisis, but still relevant and good article on “Gartner prediction misses today’s enterprise cloud action” when I realized it was automatically linked to my post “Enterprise cloud computing and security, the missing debate or solved” – it actually still gives me hits, nice!
The post refers to security certifications for cloud applications and it also provides a nice grouping of applications with a timeline of when the author expects the cloud to be ready to handle this type of apps.
I certainly believe that certifications that document security and processes, and new good architectural solutions will bring us to a point where cloud-sourcing bullet three is considered ok sometime in the future, but it still comes down to the level of trust one is able to build.
If you are the owner of business critical data that is “super secret and sensitive” a certificate doesn’t help much when your competitor got hold of your customer base and attacked all your customers with their marketing machinery, but of course a certificate helps documenting and is good in the sales process.
Who knows, your data might be more secure in the cloud than in your basement server room, which is normally most certainly not certified and it will provide documentation to hide behind. To conclude, yes, I think it will help adoption.
Security officer, courtesy to erotikknett.no
Meanwhile, be aware of social hacking amongst your trusted security officers 😉
Recently there was a case in Norway (the first in our country that I know) where profiled Norwegian blogger Vampus tweeted “cleaned out my desk and ready for new challenges”. She was just internally reorganized in her company, and most certainly did not quit – at least not by communicating to her boss via Twitter.
The handling of the case by her management was an interesting one, where we should learn. I just posted at the Norwegian collaboration blog about what to learn if you are a manager or CEO, and here is the executive summary so to speak:
I just watched the TED talk, Shai Agassi: A bold plan for mass adoption of electric cars, and I became very excited with his proposal.
He says car 2.0 needs to be about infrastructure coherence and separating the battery from the car. So what does he need:
– Charging stations where you normally park your cars. He states that Scandinavia already have this many places, and we do.
– Battery swapping stations. This we do not have, so let’s start building.
Earlier i wrote about BYD and Tesla, now he tells that the Renault-Nissan alliance is committed to make his dream a reality. That is great news and it seems like most auto manufacturers are really starting to get around!
He also introduve the term eMile (should have been eKM I think), currently priced at 8 cents. Remarkable! Does anyone care to do the math and make comparable tables with gasoline?
Finally! The moment I have been waiting for is here! The tiger in front of Oslo Central Station is back! Oslo is once again claiming it’s rights as Tigerstaden (tiger city).
I have tried to find out where it has been and whether it was plans for it to come back, but did not succeed. Well, here is proof, taken yesterday with my HTC diamond Touch (the kid happened to not want to move out of my picture).
I am referring to Swedish SaaS Company Projectplace International AB, which proves the Enterprise SaaS model absolutely viable. I was flying home from Tromsø the other day and read an 8 page insert to SAS inflight magazine Scanorana (a nice advertising media by the way).
More than 300 000 projects are currently run on projectplace. I have used it in a project – it works great, but I think it provides less flexibility than for instance a well set up Sharepoint site. However a couple of nice features extend those of Sharepoint, being the time and issue registration features.
I have had several skeptical comments to SaaS, but obviously it works very well for Projectplace. I do not think they have higher security than username and password. That seems to be enough for the projects mentioned above, so perhaps it is enough for Innovation also, ref Induct Softwares SaaS model?
Steria Norway is testing collaboration with Yammer – so far we are satisfied and a need is uncovered. It is a great example of enterprise software as a service solution featuring what seems to be good enough enterprise security by reducing visibility by others to only those with same mail domain.
Other than that it is a better version of twitter with file attachments, no post length restrictions and better group functionality.
Our community likes it. However, one needs to assess how it adds value to a projectized organization like Steria. Can it be too much collaboration?
Gartner and IBM says Cloud computing will skyrocket in 2009. Microsoft is more reluctant but coming along as well. Several news sites report that 2009 will be the year of enterprise cloud computing, but others are unable to spot the next salesforce.com, requesting it to come out of the cave. Why? I believe that security concerns are the biggest hurdle; IT department does not trust that services in the cloud are secure enough. I am not talking about uptime and availability, which is also a needed discussion, but I am talking about viruses, hacking, and information leak and so on. Ok, Gartner sees this as well, but they still predicts “sky rocket growth” three quarters of a year later – I am not convinced, and I consider myself innovative – I dare not think about conservative 50 year old CIOs.
Viruses in the cloud, you got to be kidding? Well, last week Norwegian Police went out of business because of virus brought to them by MSN. Phishing attempts is a well known problem, and the “fatter” the account you can phish or hack, the more vulnerable it is. When Barrack Obama runs a teleconference in the cloud, god knows who listen to that.
Hacking in the cloud? Well, the first is social hacking; it has always been and probably always will be a problem, but when running on level one security (username and password) it is no doubt that it is not good enough, to get someone’s password is just too easy. I heard from youths at the age of 13 hacking MSN accounts. And one expects enterprises to jump onto this with storing mission critical strategy documents? No fucking way! Maybe you could get around this with solutions like decided IP-range, VPN-solutions, RSA code calculators and so on, but then the usability (and thus the usage!) starts to drop, people start complaining, the money starts running out anyway, and the IT department has it going. Norwegians has used internet bank since around 1998, when I visited Poland in 2003, long queues of bill paying polish men and woman were standing outside the banks. They had no trust in online banks, and thus were not using it. The same goes for US Consumers, using checks to pay bills. I am 25 years old, and can barely remember checks in Norway. Yes Norwegians have a large trust in banks, but then, BankID has never been exploited in successful large scale hacking attempts, and banks have spent millions on campaigns building user trust.
Information leak? Not long ago I heard about EmailXtender, a plugin to Outlook, helping you search for lost e-mail. The company at question had set it up wrong so all incoming e-mail was searchable from every employees computer. How about if the same thing happened to salesforce, suddenly some competitor could see all the leads to someone else? Often you want to share with people outside the company, but not always. The “not always” unfortunately is a must have, whilst as long as email, google documents and public CMS-systems works, the other is a nice to have. You get to share your documents and texts somehow anyway.
All right, I admit it, I am very critical towards enterprise cloud computing, but realise that I might “look like a server hugger who want to sleep with a copy of my data under my pillow“. Why am I critical? I have spent two years working for Steria and visited several customers, and security concerns are always an issue. Now, it may be that Steria has a traditional look upon this, we even promote and sell security consulting, but no one has yet proven to me that security is taken good enough care of when it comes to cloud computing. That said, I love the many fantastic new services developed out there like doodle, vyew, etherpad, comapping and so on, just do not even consider using them when you are hosting a discussion that needs a higher security level – yet!
Ok, I admit, I have forgotten all about SecondLife, Linden Dollars and avatars in my recent research on social media.
In a class called collaboration at Uni three years ago I visited another 3D-world, and today (after being ticked off by a colleague) i joined SecondLife and now officially have an avatar called TigerOfNorway Riddler (why do you have to choose last name on your avatar, and why on earth do I need to type the choosen last name when logging in??) and I did some quick discoveries listed below.
People. What stroke me first was that there was actually quite a few people (yeah yeah, avatars, or what ever) in there. And I have heard that some Norwegian companies are establishing themselves there, but could not find them – how are you navigating this anyway? Eventually I found a way to search, but at first it gave me only web page hits. I learned to teleport after about four minutes.
Content and learning. My colleague said that content is moving away from gaming (if it ever was there) and more towards big and small companies establishing themself there, running electronic meetings in there, and sharing content in there. I have not had the time to discover this properly yet, but will eventually. My biggest question though, is how this will ever compete with Google + Wikipedia – there is no way I can see more content quicker in SL, then I can by searching and reading Wikipedia. Maybe the learning and illustration example will do the trick here but is that really enough?
Avatars. Not long ago, I saw something about us designing computers to more or less replace humans, rather than augment them. I think the entire SecondLife smells of this life replacement a little bit and is still skeptical. Compared to video conference where people is unable to do anything but look either at you when they talk and they expierience you looking down on them or the other way around (see “the problem with video conferencing“) however, I believe avatars actually improve collaboration, avareness and the conference expierience.
The world loads slowly. Last time I visited a 3D world was at University as stated above. My expirience then was reduced by the fact that it loaded slowly. And so did SL today. I was sitting at work at relatively proper lines, but still things moved slowly and lagged a lot. I also had trouble zooming on details. This bugged me quickly.
Now that was four cents from me. Hopefully I will overcome some of these on my next visit. Until then, I stick to Vyew, Skype and MOSS 2007. Any comments to my SL opinions? How is secondlife going to be really useful and take on?
Best regards,
TigerOfNorway Riddler
Newbie in SL
Tiger Of Norway on a changing world 