Tim Barnes is a widely experienced consultant and author. He has provided strategy, market research and branding services to industries as varied as semiconductors, software, banking, furniture, industrial design and life insurance.
His unique philosophy and working style have enabled him to achieve an industry-leading 95% rate of repeat business.
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Computing's new frontier
The world of computing is undergoing a massive change, and it’s going to affect every one of us. It’s called cloud computing, and it’s a really different way of thinking about the use of computers and networks.
In the past, we’ve seen the rise of personal computers on the one hand, and its offshoots like mobile computing. We’ve also seen the rise of the Internet, with servers offering us content from every imaginable source. The new thing is how some of the masssive applications we enjoy – like Google or Amazon – are implemented.
Google’s back end is built out of something like a million computers. Each one is not very powerful. But together, they can satisfy a planet’s worth of curiosity. Google now takes on more than 50% of the world’s searches, and each search is computationally intensive, and memory intensive.
It’s just not possible to do this with a few big machines. You can’t make them big enough. So Google has learned to manage with a lot of smaller machines. They are able to take this cloud of computational capability, and share the work across all these resources. Amazon and Yahoo do the same. So do a number of smaller sites. These systems are good because they are massively redundant, and they rely on mass-produced (therefore low-cost) hardware that can be easily replaced.
The importance of cloud computing is that sites like Amazon and…
How this site is made
There’s a new generation of web frameworks emerging that have built upon the experience gained from past systems. I’ve written about content management and LAMP before – Django is a LAMP-based framework that started its life as a publishing platform for a newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas. It’s built in Python, which provides a huge variety of built-in classes to support almost anything you might want to do, and it interfaces to a range of relational databases.
As a tool to learn about Django and Python I spend the last few days building this site on a sort of extended blogging model. It is completely styled in CSS, with its own RSS feed (which you can access directly here).
For the database, I’m using SQLite, which is an amazingly small and capable database that requires no configuration at all.
The total size of the code for this site is (OK – it’s growing now!) less than 300 lines combining templates, database models, and the logic that drives the site. Everything else comes courtesy of the Django developers and the power of Python.
Sales and Marketing MindXchange
I just returned from three interesting days in Tempe, Arizona, at the Frost and Sullivan Sales and Marketing MindXchange. This is a highly interactive event – workshops, facilitated discussions, and a lot of networking.
I was somewhat skeptical at first, but it turned out to be a good thing for several reasons:
- The quality of the participants was high. From many different branches of marketing, and many different kinds of businesses, so diverse experiences and challenges.
- The interactivity – which meant we could benefit from all the experiences of the different people.
- Some great speakers – the two best in my view were Martha Rogers (of 1:1 Marketing fame) and Vincent Cho from Intuit, who gave an excellent presentation on the implications of the new Internet technologies on sales and marketing.
The result of these was good networking. Frost and Sullivan also did a great job of keeping the whole thing informal – no ties (well, hardly any), and a very casual atmosphere throughout.
So if you’re in marketing and are interested in getting a broader picture of what’s going on in a range of different markets – this is not a bad way to do it.
Technology will let us live forever
Ray Kurtzweil is not only a respected technologist and innovator, he is also known as something of a futurist. His latest book, The Singularity is Near, argues that technology will radically change our experience of living, and will fix a lot of the things that eventually kill us. There’s a summary of some of the main points here.
It occurs to me that there’s a connection to something the Jesuit theologian Teilhard de Chardin said many years ago – that there’s educational evolution as well as physical evolution. When we learn new things, we are irrevocably changed. The connection is that Kurtzweil is reminding us that technology, which is the result of knowledge, and therefore inextricably linked to education, evolves faster than we do biologically. Our bodies will be overtaken developmentally by machines. This is unavoidable.
The challenge for all of us is to make the absolute best of this that we can. To be responsible, forward-looking, and to express our care for the future of our world in the way we harness the potential of our technology-rich future.
Web 2.0 - Inside the Bubble
I had the chance to attend a panel discussion in London this week – at the Serpentine Gallery, in the inflatable bubble building.
The topic was Web 2.0 – the set of techniques upon which this site is based. The meeting was sponsored by Banner – a UK agency that’s part of the WPP group.
It was interesting because it shows how much the web has changed. We are no longer satisfied by pushing HTML out at our audience – we crave interactivity, and the ability to connect with real people through their web presence.
Banner published a set of pictures on flickr here, and a video on YouTube with a snippet of an observation I made in the discussion here.
Web 2.0 may be important enough to start another Internet bubble – this time funded by advertising and fuelled by consumer and business participation.
