The mobile web is growing by leaps and bounds. Jon Thompson points out one reason why this is happening in places like Africa where clouds provide the only way of providing mass computing power.

When providing aid, the need for good communication and measurement is paramount.  Clouds provide an answer although they have nothing to do with those beautiful towering shapes you may see in the sky.

If only one person takes their iPhone to the field and commits to mapping their tracks while going from health post to health post and then uploading that data via a local network (either while roaming or on a cracked handset) the world might just be a better place.  My guess is that mapping Monrovia, Goma, Juba, etc. now will pay off in the long run.  With the cloud hovering over Africa rapidly growing in size the advantage goes to those folks on the ground who have the power to generate the data and ultimately benefit from it.

Tim O’Reilly provides an explanation on why using your iPhone and working in the clouds is so powerful:

Cloud integration

It’s easy to forget that the speech recognition isn’t happening on your phone. It’s happening on Google’s servers. It’s Google’s vast database of speech data that makes the speech recognition work so well. It would be hard to pack all that into a local device. And that of course is the future of mobile as well. A mobile phone is inherently a connected device with local memory and processing. But it’s time we realized that the local compute power is a fraction of what’s available in the cloud. Web applications take this for granted — for example, when we request a map tile for our phone — but it’s surprising how many native applications settle themselves comfortably in their silos.

The announcement earlier in the year that IBM is Opening Cloud Computing Centers in Africa and  China shows the kind of support that is being put in place:

Cloud computing enables the delivery of personal and business services from remote, centralized servers (the "cloud") that share computing resources and bandwidth — to any device, anywhere. Cloud computing represents a major step up in computing — as it enables governments, businesses and individuals to access super-computing power, analysis of massive amounts of data, and applications five to 10-times more cost effectively.

For example, using IBM’s new centers, a university could access the computational power of a supercomputer to analyze data and determine how diseases might spread in a region or how climate changes will affect natural resources.

This points to new ways of getting the facts more impartially and openly such as Crowdsourcing when reporting on crises.

Crisis reporting usually had to deal with politics, bureaucracy and authenticity mostly because policy making and crisis situations are joined by the hip. It has always been a one-to-many situation with government/corporate dominated (and manipulated) crisis reporting. Basically we have always had to believe what ‘they’ tell us about how it happened, how it is being handled and how it will be prevented in future.

Crowdsourcing means that crisis situations can be explored at comparatively little cost, by making information freely available from an untold numbers of sources. We would basically be liberating information from the vaults of Non Governmental (and governmental) Organizations that have of necessity safeguarded information release for self-preservation.

The Clue-train manifesto pointed in this direction but few could have envisaged how massively the movement would expand.

Post from: BPWrap

Benefit of Clouds in Africa

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Coincidences are sometimes amazing. I was really impressed this week by reading a long article about Ray Ozzie, the new chief software architect in Microsoft. That was of course Bill Gates‘s title before he left. I found so much of value in that article, The Man Who Would Change Microsoft: Ray Ozzie’s Vision for Connected Software. I rarely like to write a post that just points somewhere else but it would have been worth it.

Then UIE BrainSparks, one of my regular reads, had an item on Conway’s Law. This discussed a longer post by Karl Long, which covers more on Conway’s Law. Conway’s Law was devised in 1968 by Melvin Conway. It reads as follows:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.

That’s exactly the theme that Ray Ozzie was emphasizing in his vision. Particularly as the Mobile Web takes off and we all try to figure out how the Mobile Web and the Desktop Web should interact, Ray Ozzie is raising the right concerns within Microsoft. Google doesn’t have a lock on this expanded cyberspace. Perhaps this is where Microsoft can do an end-run around Google.

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Conway's Law and Ray Ozzie

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You might think the world is going for smaller and smaller with the new .mobi LTD shortly available. It’s even available already if you’re the owner of a certified trademark. The mobile world is growing apace. It’s clearly bigger and growing faster than the traditional Internet world, if you can judge by Canadian experience.

Nevertheless it’s nice to see that the old-fashioned ways are not losing out. Sometimes bigger is better.

There were probably doubters that this would happen but Boris Mordkovich, Publisher of the Search Marketing Standard magazine says that the second issue is going to the printers within a week and that it will be out in August.

This time, it will be 30% larger than its predecessor and will contain more intermediate to advanced material by popular request.

Good for SMS. It’s tough reading web pages on cell phones, so it’s great to see alternative media providing a more comfortable way of staying in touch with what’s happening on the Internet.

Tags: Dot Mobi, Search Marketing Standard

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Dot Mobi – Tougher To See Than Search Marketing Standard

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Cre8asite Forums has created a new Forum called the Cross-browser Device Assessment Panel or CDAP for short.

If you are aware of what is happening on the Internet, then you probably are not surprised to see this. The Mozilla Firefox browser and others are beginning to cut away at Microsoft’s quasi-monopoly with its Internet Explorer browser. More devices are being used to stay in touch with the Internet. Some are still using desktops, but everywhere you turn people are also using mobile devices. When you inform Google of the web pages in your website using their Sitemap process, they even ask whether the web pages are for mobile devices or for regular desktops. How can the poor web designer make sure that the website created for their client will give a satisfactory viewing experience to most visitors?

The most practical test is to get feedback from visitors who are using different browsers and devices. This new CDAP will provide exactly that. The Cre8asite Forums have a rich diversity of experts from around the world. They use a variety of browsers and devices. So a website designer can get an assessment of how robust the website design is for his diverse audience. The Cross-browser Device Assessment Panel provides a wealth of information on the issues involved as well as informed assessments of the websites submitted. At the same time, it will sensitize web designers in general to the increasing complexity of the Internet world.

For more details, you can check out the Press Release on that: it’s called New Panel Curbs Web Babel at Cre8asite Forums.

Tag: cross-browser, mobile, desktop

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Cross-browser Device Assessment Panel (CDAP)

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