"Clone cloud"

Via a dude at my work, a pretty neat article about how Intel is taking cloud computing to another level--by running a clone of your mobile device in the cloud:

When you ask your handheld to perform a computational task that would benefit from more horsepower, the device and the cloud could negotiate at run-time to determine how best to satisfy your request. If the cloud can help, it will - delivering the results back to your handheld.

Of course, offloading computationally expensive operations from clients to hosts is not new. The Clone Cloud is different, however, in that the client/host relationship dissolves into the cloud. The smartphone isn't getting data from an application running in the cloud. The smartphone itself is running in the cloud in clone form.

The cloud, by the way, doesn't have to live on big iron in a data center. The Clone Cloud concept is designed to scale down to a point where the host could be your laptop or desktop machine.

To demonstrate the power of the Clone Cloud, Chun ran an image-processing task that took a minute and a half on a smartphone. On the smartphone's clone, the same task took a second and a half - including the transmission time - and the process was seamless. To the user, it simply looked like one hella-fast smartphone.

A couple of things. First, I think the idea of the "cloud" consisting of just your own hardware--your desktop, for instance--is pretty dang neat. I like the idea that consumers will just buy computing power in the abstract--in the form of a desktop, say--and that everything else we have will draw from this pool of computing power.

Second, I was surprised to see "hella" in the article (the author hails from SF), especially since this is an article written for the UK Register. Are people over there savvy enough to recognize the term? It seems like even a lot of people in Southern California don't know it.

(Photo by MikeLove)

Tales of Energy Efficiency

Pretty neat:

Nokia, however, has taken another baby step in that direction with the invention of a cell phone that recharges itself using a unique system: It harvests ambient radio waves from the air, and turns that energy into usable power. Enough, at least, to keep a cell phone from running out of juice.

...

Mind you, harvesting ambient electromagnetic energy is never going to offer enough electricity to power your whole house or office, but it just might be enough to keep a cell phone alive and kicking. Currently Nokia is able to harvest all of 5 milliwatts from the air; the goal is to increase that to 20 milliwatts in the short term and 50 milliwatts down the line. That wouldn't be enough to keep the phone alive during an active call, but would be enough to slowly recharge the cell phone battery while it's in standby mode, theoretically offering infinite power -- provided you're not stuck deep underground where radio waves can't penetrate.

Nokia says it hopes to commercialize the technology in three to five years.

(Photo by MRBECK)

Fine print

It looks like a new way to read the internets had been developed:



This, it seems to me, ought to revolutionize internet access, particularly for mobile devices. Think of it: now on the NYT, the entire paper can be right there on the front page, just at varying scales. So you'd have a headline and subhed, say, and then the entire article right underneath it. With something like the iPhone's two-fingered zoom, you could easily zoom to whatever scales you want. Neat!

UPDATE: As someone pointed out to me over lunch, this would actually be a pretty horrible UI. But: whatever!

A Brave New World of Retail

There is an interesting article in the Times about the resurgence of haggling in big retail stores like Best Buy and Home Depot:

Savvy consumers, empowered by the Internet and encouraged by a slowing economy, are finding that they can dicker on prices, not just on clearance items or big-ticket products like televisions but also on lower-cost goods like cameras, audio speakers, couches, rugs and even clothing.

The change is not particularly overt, and most store policies on bargaining are informal. Some major retailers, however, are quietly telling their salespeople that negotiating is acceptable.

This is pretty interesting to me, because for a while now it has seemed to me that the retail economy hasn't quite caught up with mobile technology and the internet. I mean, here we are, all equipped with little computers on our person, and yet when I go to buy a TV at Best Buy there is no way for, say, Circuit City across the street to say: Wait a second, we'll beat that price!

When you go to buy something at a retail store, other stores should be able to make competing offers for the same (or a similar) product. This reverse-bidding system could be easily implemented as a mobile application, especially if we move in the direction of the Japanese, where the cell phone itself is used as a method of payment (i.e., you can swipe it like a credit card). Everything could be integrated right there in the device--so if Circuit City were to offer a better price on the TV, you could purchase it from within the application and then walk across the street to pick it up. Or, alternatively, the store you are currently at may lower its price as a counter-offer to the competitor, netting you a discount without having to do any extra legwork at all.

If this idea worked, it would improve the efficiency of the retail economy, because stores would be dynamically setting the optimal price for each purchase. Of course, old-fashioned haggling serves the same function--but I bet having the whole process automated and integrated with the consumer's cell phone would work a whole lot better. (Side-note: unlike with a lot of Web 2.0-ish business models you come across, this one would not have any kind of "critical mass" requirement in order for the service to be valuable. In fact, it is just the opposite--the less companies that participate in the service, the better it is for participating companies. E.g., if only one company participated, it would have the luxury of being able undercut the competition without itself ever being undercut. And so I think it would be easy for the whole thing to get started, with major retailers participating in the service.)

I am aware that this sort of reverse-bidding model already exists on the internet--for example, I believe this is essentially how priceline.com works for plane tickets and hotels and such. However, I think it's clear at this point that internet purchasing will never completely supplant the bricks-and-mortar retail stores, and so I think it would be worthwhile to introduce the price-efficiency tricks we see on the internet into the world of bricks-and-mortar retail by developing mobile applications like the one I outline above.