This site contains my general blogging, published articles, and information on speaking dates where I discuss how business, technology, and finance can be used to create an open, healthy, and environmentally and economically vibrant society. Please feel free to contact me at troy at troyangrignon dot com to rant, discuss, or have me speak at your organization.

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

Cops and Robbers Las Vegas Style, with Jeff Jonas, chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytic Solutions group

• has some very interesting ideas on "the database of intentions concept"
• founded SRD in 1983
• worked with the gaming business and the MIT Team
• sold to IBM Jan 2005
• Now chief scientist at IBM analytics

Rather than using the notes I had typed, I'm going to repost Jeff's excellent summary from his blog:

I was invited to speak at the Web 2.0 Summit last week in San Francisco. Believe it or not I actually presented 41 charts in less than 10 minutes. This kind of general session presentation was called a Show Me/High Order Bits. That’s right, the essence of my life’s work in just 10 minutes ... the thrill! [Note: The formal title was: "Cops and Robbers Las Vegas Style."]

If you did not make this most amazing summit with a most amazing cast of attendees or were there and missed my auctioneer-inspired delivery, here are the key points I covered:

0. I first showed a picture of a fire breather from my last New Year’s eve party – but that is not important right now.

1. I showed a surveillance video of a casino scam involving a corrupt dealer – resulting in a $250,000 loss in 15 minutes. If the dealer had the same address in the payroll system as the "high roller" had in the loyalty club and comp systems (free rooms, meals, etc.) … who would know?

2. I introduced the concept of "Corporate Amnesia." This occurs when one part of the organization makes a decision which very clearly did not account for other key data sitting elsewhere in the enterprise e.g., your marketing department is mailing offers to a person currently in jail for stealing from you!

3. "Perception Isolation" is the leading cause of Corporate Amnesia. Think of each operational system as a distinct enterprise perception. Notably, each perception is isolated from the others.

4. Enterprise intelligence requires persistent context. There is no way to get smart if perceptions are not integrated. When perceptions are integrated and stored in a database … this is persistent context. Think of this like a brain. You need a brain to be smart … duh!

5. I gave a simple demonstration of how context can be constructed and persisted and how this enables the enterprise discovery that otherwise would be missed (more corporate amnesia).

6. Then treat data as a query. And thus I introduced a 1st principle for enterprise intelligence: If you do not process every new piece of key data (perception) first like a query … then you will not know if it matters … until someone asks.

7. Treating data like a query beats periodically boiling the ocean when attempting to achieve real time intelligence.

8. Then, also treat queries as data. This means if one wishes to have a query persist, it must be persisted in the same data space as the data itself. Which leads to the 2nd principle for enterprise intelligence: Treat queries like data to avoid having to ask every question every day.

9. While constructing context (real time receipt of perceptions from across the different operational systems) this happens to be the most
ideal time for this librarian function to exhibit enterprise awareness. Which leads to the 3rd principle for enterprise intelligence: Enterprise intelligence is computationally most efficient when performed at the moment the observation is perceived.

10. This is the world I sometimes refer to as "Perpetual Analytics." A world where the "data finds the data … and the relevance finds the user."

11. And this stuff really works … and at scale. In fact, in a benchmark center this was found to scale to over 3 billion historical observations while handling the real-time ingestion of more than 2,000 perceptions a second.

12. This has privacy consequences. For example: (a) What perceptions can or should be placed into context (in one brain)?; (b) What if
perceptions are contextualized for one mission, then re-purposed later for another?; (c) What if someone steals the brain?; and (d) What if the librarian is corrupt?

13. I worry about these things. And I spend about 40% of my time thinking about the privacy and civil liberties consequences of such systems. Which prompted one of my more recent inventions: a new class of technology I call "Analytics in the Anonymized Data Space." Basically, instead of transferring perceptions from the various senses (an organization’s operational systems) that are human readable … the perceptions are anonymized first before being handed to the librarian for contextualization in the brain. The Reader’s Digest explanation of anonymization is basically this: if you take a pig and a grinder and make a sausage, even if I give you the sausage and the grinder you are not going to be able to make a pig. The cool thing about this new technology is that the librarian can still construct and persist context and discover relevance without actually handling human meaningful data.

14. So I summarized with the main think towards enterprise intelligence -- (a) Without persistent context … you have no brain; (b) Treat data and queries with equal rights to improve awareness; (c) More intelligence is possible when thinking based on streaming perceptions;
and (d) And from a privacy perspective: More or less perceptions, that is the question (there is an important policy discussion that needs to take place about just how many – more versus less – perceptions should be permitted to be put in the brain).

15. While this approach to enterprise intelligence was born in Las Vegas ... today it plays a role in national security, financial services, health care, etc. And much of the focus of my current activity is towards using this technology to deliver new threat and fraud intelligence solutions in these and other areas.

To my shock at this point I had completed 36 charts and still had 1.5 minutes left. As I thought this was in fact a possibility, I quickly moved into what I called the bonus section!

Bonus Picture 1. I showed a picture of a chimpanzee with the words "99.4 percent human." The point being: If a .6% difference matters this much … no wonder traditional information systems lack so much intelligence! Net net, in intelligence systems very tiny little increments of accuracy make the entire difference between being dumb and smart.

Bonus Picture 2. And it may go without saying, that in such systems as this … the more observations one has the better the context. In fact, many times new observations will contain the evidence to improve or fix earlier contextualizations.

Bonus Picture 3. And this brings us to the crucial concept of "Sequence Neutrality." Meaning despite the order of the observations (records A, B, C received in that order versus arriving in the order C, B, A) the end state is the same. If you cannot process information with sequence neutrality then you get "data drift" – meaning you hold contradictory content which must be reconciled eventually or accuracy erodes. This is a common reason data warehouses must be reloaded. Almost no systems possess this sequence neutrality property. Notably, it is virtually essential at scale because it eventually becomes impossible to tear very large databases down to reload them every week, month, or quarter.

Closing thought. After working on designing sequence neutrality into my technologies, I have discovered there are some cases where a new
record (perception) will necessitate so much recontextualization, it cannot be done in real time. Drats! That means the system must either be periodically reloaded or alternatively go offline into a maintenance mode (i.e., deep sleep) to remedy the situation. But alas, that is why
humans sleep too – deep recontexualization that could not be handled on the fly. Our dreams are the byproduct of this necessary re-shuffling. Or so I have concluded!

This post is now the shortest read about my enterprise intelligence information theory.

I plan on blogging about "why perception isolation is the leading cause of corporate amnesia" very soon

[What were my key take-aways from this talk? That Jonas is addressing the issue we see in our company and in every company I have ever looked at where there are many disconnected and different systems that "perceive" the environment, partners, customers, and developers and no central "brain" making sense of all of the perceptions and reconciling them. This is more than a data warehouse. This is a sophisticated system in the middle that pulls in all inputs, puts them together in context, and then matches new inbound data against that entire context before deciding what to do about it and how important it is. This is not single-sign on. Or globally unique identities. Or data warehousing. Or record merging. It is a more holistic and comprehensive view of the enterprise where the premise is: The enterprise should treat me (the customer/partner/developer/supplier) in one consistent way all the time." I'm looking forward to spending some more time with Jonas to understand how these principles might be brought to bear in a real enterprise today.]

[And by the way Jeff, your compression of ten years into ten minutes (no...8 1/2 minutes!) proved my Theory of Constraint which states that "constraints are a key driver of both creativity and clarity and so should be welcomed to any project." This has seemed to be true no matter where I have been or what project I have worked on. It applies equally well to startups too - it seems that the less cash and resources they have, the more focused, creative, and disciplined they are.]

I attended the Ready to Rocket 2006 session this morning, which was sponsored by Rocketbuilders , a Vancouver based market strategy and consulting firm that helps technology companies capitalize on market opportunities.

The presentation started with an overview of the successes from 2005. Next, Geoff Hansen presented an IT Outlook for 2006. This was followed by the Ready to Rocket 25 for 2006 and the "Ones to watch" - 40 emerging companies that might graduate to the full "Ready to Rocket" Top 25 in 2007. Along with those lists, Price-Waterhouse Coopers presented an overview of the M&A and IPO activity across North America for 2005, and Bill Koty, a professor from UBC presented a brief overview of a newly released Premier's Technology Council report titled "Ahead of the Future" which gives a series of scenarios and predictions for B.C.'s technology economy development from 2005-2020. The summary notes are below along with some of my opinion at the bottom.

 

NASA should be in BC - we launched a lot of rockets last year.

 

Some interesting notes came from this session:

 

• 2005 was a breakthrough year on the Rocketbuilders list.
• These companies were successful because they had a laser focus on a niche market.
• Key highlights of the 2005 list include:
• PureEdge Solutions Inc. (Victoria, BC) was acquired by IBM
• Over 45% of the 2005 Ready to Rocket companies received new investments
• 100% of the 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 30% revenue growth
• Over 60% of 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 100% revenue growth
• Over 35% of 2005 Ready to Rocket companies exceeded 200% revenue growth

 

2006 - the rise of the phoenix

 

Here were some of the highlights of the predictions for the year ahead;

 

• general projections seem to predicting that companies will increase their IT spending 5-6% across the board this year
• SMB spending is double that and includes factoring in old hardware replacement cycles for hardware purchased before the collapse.
• there is a trend away from cost-cutting measures and back to the value creation side in terms of prioritizing projects.
• Key Themes that have been identified for 2006:
• Choice: give the user what they want, where they want, in the form they want (Tivo, xFM)
• Make it easy: make it simple to learn and use
• Safe & Secure: ensure that they can store their data safely and people will trust you with that data
• Search is king: there is a lot of work to do here
• Microsoft Office enablement: now that Microsoft has opened up the APIs, companies are succeeding by building things that integrate into Microsoft Office, even more than they were before.
• Storage is still hot: Networked attached storage companies (for example) are growing at up to 300%/yr
• Make it portable: give people the ability to stay mobile: Blackberries, iPods, xFM
• Ensure compliance: people are going to spend 30% of their IT budgets on compliance

 

For more information on the 2006 IT Outlook, contact Geoff Hansen at Rocketbuilders at 866-824-8785 or at gchansen@rocketbuilders.com.

 

Ready to Rocket 25 2006 list

 

Some interesting notes came from this session:

 

• For the 2006 list, the selection team had great difficulty keeping it DOWN to 25, which meant that the Ones to Watch list expanded to 40 companies.
• There were so many interesting technologies coming up that Rocketbuilders considered launching an "Interesting Concepts" category...but didn't
• Success factors. The Top 25 shared some key success factors:
• they were heavily verticalized (we had 5 Financial service companies and 4 Healthcare companies on the list.)
• they were well-funded to grow
• Some of these companies are approaching $5 - 10M in revenues - a point at which they become a LOT more interesting as acquisition targets.

Here is the direct link to the Ready to Rocket 25 List. But they are here for review as well:

 

Abebooks AirG Inc. Axonwave Software Inc. Bycast Inc. Caelo Software Inc. Colligo Networks Inc. Convedia Corporation Eyeball Networks Inc. FinancialCAD Corporation Flowfinity Wireless Inc

GaleForce Solutions Inc. GenoLogics Life Science Software Inc. IronPoint Technology Inc. In Motion Technology Inc. Layer 7 Technology inc. MAKE Technologies Inc. NewHeights Software Corp. ResponseTek Networks Corp. RewardStream Inc. Sxip Identity Corporation

Tantalus Systems Corp. TAP Solutions Inc. TenDigits Software Inc. Vision Critical Inc. Vivonet Inc.

 

The Ones to Watch

 

This list was presented but the final list will not be out until January 13th, 2006.

 

Lane construction finally complete - traffic now moving slowly towards IPO exit lane

 

In this 2005 review of M&A and IPO activity across North America presented by Randy Garg of Price-Waterhouse Coopers , there were quite a few interesting tidbits:

 

• The IPO market has finally been resurrected.
• $100B of private equity was present in 2005.
• Private equity funds are becoming more active in M&A (25% of $100B or 25B) which is a new development.
• Local companies are going public...but not necessarily on the TSX. Some have gone to London or to the USA. This is a new development.
• Debt and subordinated debt as financial instruments have started to appear and this is a new development which is being enabled by the fact that newer companies have (gasp) revenues that can support the debt and are more financially solid and lendable from a cash-flow perspective.
• Public companies are going private again in order to lower their costs, and simplify their operations because the costs of compliance are huge (up to 30% of IT spending per above notes, not to mention other back-office charges.)
• Rule of Thumb: if you're looking to get acquired, make sure that you have audited financials
• BC and Canadian companies are now on the U.S. radar but our prices have gone up and our currency has gone up, leaving us as less of a bargain than before.
• The major M&A deals are still predominantly cross-border - U.S. companies buying Canadian ones or vice versa. There was very little activity in Canada between Canadian entities.
• M&A is still a revenue purchase decision for companies. They are buying revenues, not necessarily technologies. Once a company crosses the revenue barrier, there are a LOT more suitors.
• $5M seems to be a baseline deal size.
• 2006 is poised to be the best year yet for M&A activity!
• There is a ton of money out there - $100B raised in the U.S. in the Private equity markets in 2005
• therefore money is not the problem
• finding good deals and good teams are the problem
• M&A is still the preferred route of exit when compared to IPO, but IPOs are now back as options.

 

I'd like a micro fuel-cell powered proteomics machine for gene therapy web research

 

William Koty of UBC presented some of the findings from the Premier's Technology Council report on Emerging Technologies titled "Ahead of the Future". It evaluated 39 emerging technologies, boiled those down to a short-short-list of 12 Emerging technologies and then presented two almost contradictory charts - one from the academics and one from the industry advisory board.  It was long on research methodology and somewhat short on conclusions.

I am hoping that they will do a follow-on or that it will feed into a larger discussion where they do indeed flesh out the scenarios that they discuss very tentatively in the report.

 

At the end of the day, what did they really say?

If I had to summarize the session, I would say it like this:

 

• The tech industry is ramping up again. A lot of people had that gut sense but the numbers now prove it.
• We are building some really kick-ass companies here in B.C.
• Those companies are growing again.
• M&A activity will be at an all time high in 2006 and the IPO markets are opening up again as exit routes.

 

"Your playing small doesn't serve the world"

 

We build good companies here that are very capital efficient and that are still attractively priced for acquisition. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It brings money into the economy, it gives local entrepreneurs access to global acquisitors' systems and training and talent, and spawns more entrepreneurial ventures. A year or two ago, one of the local entrepreneurs hosted a VEF event titled something like: "Why acquisitions are gutting B.C.'s economy." The resulting talk though had every one of the entrepreneurs on the panel saying that their acquisition was a good thing and that in fact it had had a net positive benefit across the board on a bunch of different things. I remember the host lamenting at the end that he should have talked to the panel BEFORE naming the talk.

Another key point was that we are finally starting to grow our companies again to a decent size We need to keep thinking bigger. Even the statement that they are growing to a decent size is deceiving since we are referring to companies approaching $10M/yr in revenues, which is laughable in the U.S. But it's a starting point. If you are an entrepreneur, don't say, "We're going to dominate the lower mainland", say "We're going to dominate the western world" or the whole world for that matter.

I am always reminded of the quote that was incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela but which was actually written by Marianne Williamson in her 1992 book, "Return to Love":

 

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of god - your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of god that is within us. It is not in just some of us. It is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

B.C. entrepreneurs would do well to think about that and learn from it. Our playing small doesn't serve the world. So get out there, think big, and serve the world.

Thanks to the good people at Rocketbuilders for the invitation and for all the hard work in putting this together!

 

 

 

My nephew Matt sent me a link to this Wired article on rat neurons being used to control a flight simulator. In essence, they have plugged the feedback and the control systems into the neurons and have found that eventually the neurons learn how to "fly" the virtual plane.

Now, I have heard of using neural networks connected to wings or to legs and then letting them learn how to walk or fly. But I have never heard of using live brain material to achieve the same thing.

It brings to mind (no pun intended) articles I have read on teaching the body to "feel" fake limbs as well as on retraining sexual stimulation (teaching quadriplegics to attain orgasm through touch stimulation of their head for example rather than their genitalia), many of which point to the somewhat universal nature of neurons and their ability to remap to different inputs and outputs by simply retraining them purposefully.

The fascinating thing for me about this work is:

• the brain works without a heart (or so it appears unless I read the article incorrectly) which makes me ask, what is feeding it? Also, it's interesting to me that all you need is the core material and then it just works - it does what it is supposed to do, which is receive inputs, establish communication channels, and drive outputs.

• it is a true bionic hybrid, similar to the guy who sent email via his thoughts recently.

Matt asked me what I thought of the ethics of this work. I don't think there are any ethical problems with designing and building hybrid bionic creatures to understand the cognitive systems and signalling networks.

Although I do admit that the idea of fleshy brain material being inside this device did give me pause for a moment for some reason that I still can't articulate.

UPDATE: This Wired article discusses research at Andrew Schwartz's neurobiology lab at the University of Pittsburgh that allowed them to train a monkey to learn how to use a robotic arm simply by sending it brain signals, in essence, re-mapping some small subset of neurons to the inputs and outputs of this robotic arm. The monkey could then use the arm to feed itself. Once again, this seems to point to the brain as being quickly able to adapt to new limbs, new motor skills, and new sensations or at least the sensation of sensation.

Here is some very interesting research from the National Institute for Health on the two different decision making processes being observed in the brain using functional MRI.

It appears that when faced with a decision between a short-term emotional reward and longer-term logical reward, two different parts of the brain are involved.

This brings to mind (no pun intended), Marvin Minsky's work on the "Society of Mind" where he posits that the entire brain is simply a bunch of independent processes which vote collectively on outcomes.

I wonder if this is how the Sim game programmers are doing it?

The Universe is 14 billion years old and will either either re-collapse into itself, expand into a completely diluted state, or rip apart in its 36th billion year in a runaway expansion so violent that galaxies and planets will be torn asunder in a fraction of a second. How do we manage the polarity inherent in knowing that our influence on the universe at that scale is essentially zero balanced against the fact that here in our own very small sphere of influence, we can have an effect on things around us that only exist in this little slice of time?

The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. 2 billion years ago, our first ancestors were microbes. It took 1.5 billion years before those microbes turned into something resembing fish, another 400m years for those fish to turn into mice-like creatures, another 90m years for those mice to evolve to apes, 9 m years for the apes to turn into proto humans and then we evolved from there. No matter what religion you are, you have to look at that in awe and wonder.

Now for the bad news. The sun in our solar system is expanding and it is expected that it will eventually absorb Mercury, Venus, and Earth, causing life here to only last for another half billion years. I am pretty sure that the last life forms left will be single-celled bacterium, cockroaches, and spammers. So the window of opportunity for life to develop here and then migrate throughout the rest of the solar system and Universe is about a billion years. Given that we didn't invent space travel until the first half billion were over, that window is now a half billion to get off the planet and out into the Universe. Given that we only have another half a billion years, shouldn't we all just get along, enjoy the sunset while it's that far away, and figure out how to get the hell off this planet? Of course, while we're here, we should do as much mountain biking, trail-running, paddling, travelling and exploring as we can.

By the time the Earth has hit 8 billion years, long after we are gone, the oceans will have vaporised and at the 12 billion year mark, Earth will have folded entirely into the sun. If the planet is going to be gone, does that mean I think that we should use up the precious natural resources pollute our biosphere while we are here? Of course not, that would be asinine and short-sighted. But then again, humans are not the best at extending their time-scales, nor at empathizing enough with future generations. Although that does seem to be changing in some small but important ways with the spread of the sustainable development movement. I may be a bit of an odd realist/pragmatist in the sustainability movement in that I'm not sure I believe in the implicit value of resources, plants, and animals on earth for their own sake. If they're all going to be gone anyway, that seems moot. But since these things took tens and hundreds of millions of years to develop, I do believe that we should learn from them (biology), design things based on them (biomimicry and nanotechnology), be efficient in our use of them so that we do not mortgage our children's future (sustainability), and learn how to build efficient systems so that we can spread out into the universe and live in harsher, resource constrained regions as we do so.

Of course, we're not good at passing along our knowledge on long time lines, and we're quite adaptable in the moment so maybe it is just the way of our species that we will consume all available resources where ever we go but that we will conserve it when we are pressed to do so. Sort of future-blind, but highly adaptable, with very little long-term memory. Which leads me to think that maybe Mr. Kurzweil's great leap forward really will be the best way for our species to spread itself.

Ray Kurzweil has calculated that by 2040, we will hit the inflection point of the technology development curve of mankind, known as the Singularity , an event horizon beyond which we can not possibly see with our tiny little massively parallel chemical-processing brains. By around 2040, $1000USD of computing power will be the equivalent of all human brain processing capacity on the earth combined (about 12 billion brains worth). He posits that in order for the technology development curve to be maintained, our inefficient genetic mutations will not be able to keep up, meaning that humans will essentially pass the "smart creature" torch to the robots and computers which will have the same brain processing capacity as us, but with MUCH faster substrate (silicon or otherwise, raher than our slow massively parallel chemical brains). 

What is really great about this is that in a few more decades we may get to really explore questions around whether consciousness is something spiritual/other-worldly, or simply an emergent property of going beyond a particular threshold of neuronal capacity or simply a self-referential program that is convincing enough to appear conscious. I can't wait. Really.

Given Kurzweil's supposition about the double exponential rate of expansion of technology, that means there is a heck of a lot of stuff that will need to be brought to market in the next 35 years. Hence my interest in venture capital, angel investing, technology cycles and trends, and the tricky process of nurturing technology from idea to plan to funding to company to production, and eventually to some sort of exit. Hence I will be writing a lot on business and technology development.

Some of the most fascinating events are transpiring in the border wars between business, technology, society, and our natural environment. Bio-ethics - how will we use cloning? Nanotechnology - will it create autonomous gray-goo that will devour us and the earth? Bio-IT convergence - will we really build the Ceylons? What about the ability to project power and wage war - on a budget? According to Lord William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson in "The Sovereign Individual", that is one of the key factors that contributes to massive historical inflection points. As technology changes the power equation, power-structures and economies follow suit. Consider: Osama Bin Laden, a multi-millionaire (who was supported by the U.S.), is now the enemy of the American goverment. They have for the first time in history chosen to target an individual rather than a nation-state. Primarily because of the alleged threat of relatively massive power (bio-weaponry) for minimal cost. I will rant, question, and point to interesting discussions in this area as they develop.

Finally, I have some more mundane, smaller-view areas that I am very interested in as well. They include but are not limited to: Complex Systems, Emergence theory, Health & Wellness, Environmental issues, Renewable Energy, Ethics, Fitness and sport, Humour, Interesting People, Nanotechnology, Philanthropy,  Privacy/Security, Sustainable Development, and World Affairs.

I wish I could remember the author who said, "I do not write what I know, I write so that I may know myself." That was very wise. That is also a goal of this blog. Thanks for reading.