My 2010 R&D plan beyond Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing

Here is my My 2010 R&D resolution (to be exact, that is my consolidated R&D plan.)

Nowadays, I am often invited to several conferences so as to present my thoughts about “cloud and mobile devices.” I have been saying that killer application enablers will emerge from these ideas:

1. Cellular Fat Pipe (will be available soon)
2. Cellular Phone as Sensor Hub, where cellular phones are now equipped with GPS(commodity) +Compass +Gravity +Motion + Intelligent Processing of Image and Audio data
3. Cellular Phone as Information Hub over Cloud that integrates the data: mail, address, schedule, .whatever!
4. Application Market as Incubation Platform toward Cambrian Explosion of Killer Application Candidates.

See one of my presentations for further details (MS IE is recommended to see).

As for the new term, “cloud”, personally speaking, I don’t have a strong opinion. “Cloud” is a buzz word recent two years. As for the definition of “Cloud Computing”, you can refer to the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
A more important point is that the recent technology and market trend are still in good accordance with Tim O’Reilly’s web 2.0 concept.
On 09/30/2005, Tim O’Reilly described “What is Web 2.0” at his home page
The key concept consists of

1. The web as platform,
2. Harnessing collective intelligence,
3. Data is the next Intel Inside,
4. End of the software release cycle,
5. Light weight programming models,
6. Software above the level of a single device, and
7. Rich user experience.

I admire his and his colleagues’ insights in what was going on mid 200X.
“The web as platform” implies “cloud computing.” Of course, the web as platform doesn’t explain web-scale (i.e., gigantic scale) computing technologies such as Google File System and Amazon EC2 virtualization for Platform-as-a-Service. Nevertheless, the concept expressed by the buzzword “cloud” has been mostly covered by the heart of web 2.0.

What is changing from the original web 2.0, in other words, the noteworthy point of change is that data aggregation and integration in cloud servers is in full progress and those have reached to a critical state for a communication paradigm shift. According to O’Reilly remark about “Data is the next Intel Inside, he said “the race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.”

Yes, that’s why I started a data-mining project in 2006 inside NTT docomo, given tons of data (tera-byte order) every single day. Data has been and will be vitally important.
The discussion point is what type of paradigm shift we are facing.
When looking at people’s data from the viewpoint of communication, what we are experiencing can be depicted by the following figure.


Before the cloud computing emerges, cell-phones have been at cross-roads of personal data. There have been several research topics to utilize the data for service coordination, where a scheduler launches a mailer, vice versa, and there is also some limit of coordination benefit due to poor computation power, battery and amount of data.

Now, the personal data is surely being stored into clouds. I’m a user of Apple’s Mobile ME, Evernote, Google’s services, SugarSync, a teleco’s address book backup service, and its GPS tracking service, etc. All the data is not necessary to carry. Those are stored in the clouds, and invoked over wireless broad band networks when necessary.

Thus, in Earth, we individuals are living with personal handheld devices, i.e., cell-phones. In Heaven, the cloud servers are taking data integration over people. How far we can integrate the data over the people? That depends on the consensus of our society. If the society and individuals allow the data under our trusteeship, we may have the paradigm shift in communication. It’s going to be beyond “Harnessing collective intelligence” and to be a communication facilitator. I hope the society doesn’t see any similarity to Big Brother of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
My 2010 plan is to facilitate a virtuous circle of People’s trust as depicted here. We have done it to some extent, by initiating the inner circle of individual personal data integration. More important and essential one is to rotate the outer circle. We need a couple of killer applications with people’s data integration. That is one of my year 2010 wishes.