Idea Center

In a world dominated by I.T. and ubiquitous identity accessible to the global Internet. Securing your digital identity is now important to retain credibility. The need is even higher for Highly Networked Individuals (HNI) as a single theft of identity can prove to be disastrous and require investment of time & resources to undo such theft. The damage to others can only be on a smaller scale, but damage nevertheless.

Finding your Digital Identity

Considering the above, one thing I find missing is, how do you find out if a prospective client or a prospective acquaitance or business associate has valid credentials when they contact you online? I was trying to find ways to help me out with the same problem.

 Click on the picture for usernamecheck.com which finds out whether your common username has been taken over by another person on any of the listed social networking websites.

The concern of one's own identity being used by another person has been steadily increasing. Here is a report from Pewter (2007) that indicates searches on one's own identity to confirm whether it is secure.

That brought me to the next question. Are there dedicated search tools that can inform the usage of an individual's user identity? That search led me here (2008). The Search Engine Journal lists too few tools revealing that there is definitely a gap in this market.

People describe the activity of tracking and managing one's own identity online as Online Identity Management or Reputation Management. The former appeals more to an individual identity and the latter to a corporate or a brand identity.

One of the functions that I believed would be useful was an online alarm system that could inform us whenever our digital identity or brandname or alias is in use. Check out this post from ClaimId who labels them as best practices.

What's Missing?

• A Dedicated Tool for Digital Identity Creation, Management and Tracking
• A Tool to verify whether an identity is valid (without the person using it having to use digital signatures for validation.)
• Legal assistance to prosecute "Identity" squatters (not just domain squatters.)
• Digital privacy management tools to ensure that some information related to our identity is kept private or to a select network only.

Why?

• Identity pervades computing space from the Internet to the Desktop to our Mobile phones. It is as important as our Social identity in itself.
• Digital Anonymity is not an option anymore as communication media have converged.
• Digital Identity can provide credibility for actual acquaintance, meetings and business activity when used appropriately.
• Many people have tried to avoid creating and maintaing a Digital Identity because of the ease at which it can be hijacked if managed improperly.

What's in it for a Startup?

• The dedicated tool for Online and Digital Identity Management with various levels of security could be an instant Web 2.0 business idea.
• Mobile applications that extend the functionality onto mobile devices will help in better identity management and tracking.
• Mobile applications that can protect identity theft in the event of theft of a mobile appliance.

Despite its importance, Digital Identity has too few tools for managing it today. This has to change soon. What better time to get things rolling that "now"?

Posted by morpheus at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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I have been shopping for Hard Drives ever since they came in a 40 MByte pack (which seems like a long time ago.) I recently pepped up my Home compile server with 1 TByte of storage, with 2 500GB HDDs at a non-standard 9600rpm.

Where is storage technology heading?

The first is a rapid increase in choice of "External" storage devices that can be plugged into your PC.

This one is from SanDisk, you could find hundred others.

This too is another SanDisk product for HandyCams. It isn't bigger than 5 sq.cm and it's the size and the density of the storage that makes it attractive.

If you have been missing the technology race in storage, you ought to take a look at this video which is almost a year old. It has a comparison of the Solid State Drive (SSD) versus the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) which we conventionally use for storage.

Magnetic storage has always been able to keep up with the race for increased storage. We have seen them scale from a 20 MByte Hard Drive in the pack (1992 c.e.) to 1,500,000 MByte Hard Drive in a pack (2008 c.e.) - the new 1.5 TByte Hard Drive which (some) consumers can buy.

Multi-layer magnetic storage and retrieval, multi-head, single platter storage to reduce mechanical risk, On-Drive Flash to upgrade Hard Drive firmware are some of the refinements you can find in the market today. Almost all these Hard Drives come with Logical Access modes that are configurable on the on-drive firmware to abstract low-level configuration from the BIOS and the Operating System.

The next big thing was to reduce power consumption and provide lighter systems (yes magnetic storage still stays heavier than the power source on your PC.) So we have completely Solid State Hard Drives offering almost all the storage home users need.

The next leap of course is to put Solid State Storage (SSD) and Magnetic Storage (Mechanical Storage) together in a Hybrid form for improved data read/write access speeds. The Hybrid Storage alliance shows how the user can benefit from the marriage of both forms of technology. If you're wondering when this technology is making it to your laptop, the answer is "now." Operating Systems have started sporting support for it and manufacturers are packaging storage with PCs and Laptops on the shelves.

Here is what the above average consumer would be looking for:

A device that can be connected to a Network or Wireless  network and seamlessly provide a shared storage accessible as a shared drive. DSL Modem -> Wireless Access Point -> Wireless Hard Drive giving us a simple infrastructure to store data at home, while also moving around.

This will not take time and I would bet on a company that tries to completely de-couple storage from the PC without the need for extremely high speed access like Data Center : Network Access Storage [NAS] devices.

Posted by morpheus at 06:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (202) | TrackBacks (0)

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I recently got myself into the mode of wanting to buy an e-book reader. I found that there was a lot of choice, but not anything compelling. So I asked a friend of mine who doesn't own one but has done enough research to tell me what I could shop for.

Here's what he shared with me.

A comprehensive Comparison Chart that named some models I hadn't even heard of.

• The BeBook Reader
• The Sony Reader
• The Amazon Kindle
• The Hanlin Reader
• The Netronix CyBook

This link leads you to a Feature and Price comparison chart that I found informative. The real price finally lands between $200 and $300. The $100 - $400 margin includes a larger classification of devices. 

I had heard a lot of buzz about the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader, but not the rest of them.

If you are interested in where the technology is heading, there's a company named Plastic Logic which seems to have a High-tech solution. They aren't retailing right now, and by my guess this isn't going to be anytime soon. You can take a look at their reader here. (Warning Hi-Resolution Picture.)

Panasonic started out with an e-Book reading gadget in 2004 (The SigmaBook), moved on to a color version and recently got a spot on enGadget for a mini e-Book reading gadget.

With e-Ink technology getting more aggressive, here are a few things that catch the eye with promotions from e-Ink. If you're a Gadget developer and you're interested in building your own e-Book, here's where you can find kits from them.

From 2004 till date, the industry has been churning out e-Book readers. So, has the charm dimmed out? It seems nothing would stop more people from trying. Check out Astak's Mentor e-Book.

This one made its debut in the recent Las Vegas CES 2009 show.

So if you're really interested in buying one, I suggest you read this MobileRead Wiki for a matrix of  a comprehensive comparison and costs.

The prohibitive thing in keeping e-Book readers away has been the business model which would take longer to come through. And yes, you can search for the iBook, I can promise you, there's one on its way.

Posted by morpheus at 06:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (30) | TrackBacks (0)

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Being an ardent bookworm myself, I have always been interested in the evolution of reading and publishing as a whole. There is a generation who believe that the printed book and the printed paper cannot be substituted with anything else.

I love collecting and reading books, but here is the present problem I face:

• Books are getting costlier on the shelves owing to rising costs of Paper and Printing
• Paper is getting costly and is not really environment friendly
• Storage of books require space, which is something that not everyone can afford
• Conventional books are difficult to search; locating a book with a particular reference can be difficult, if you haven't been reading it recently
• Carrying books on a long trip is diffficult, as even paperback and pocket versions weigh considerably
• Books have fixed formatting rendering some of them difficult for those with vision difficulty to read. They have to buy exclusive hardback editions with larger fonts just to read the same content.
• A printed book does not necessarily guarantee its authenticity that it has been written by a specific author and provided by a Publisher because of the ease with which they get pirated or copied.
• It is usually difficult to create references from books while doing research as books remain a conventional physical medium.
• Damaged books have to be replaced in whole; they have to be bought all over again. Damage usually happens because storage requires special care to avoid infestation and some protection from fire.
• Libraries, private or public have to be manually indexed allowing room for manual error.
• Books which carry a lot of photographs and illustrations use higher grade paper which costs a lot more and increases the cost of the book heavily.
• The availability of books to the average reader is restricted by Book retailers and Libraries who stock them. This becomes a blocker for new titles to be quickly available to the end-user or reader.
• Magazines are more readily available, but the time they reach their readership is restricted by logistics. As readership increases many magazines struggle to reach their readers on time.
• The prohibitively high cost of newsprint renders magazines and books with lower profit margins.

The issues listed above have been identified and many solutions to them have been sought after.  Here is what has been done so far:

• Digital Books have been created as an easier mode of distribution. Owing to the ease of copying different techniques including DRM are being tried to restrict the distribution and usage to the customers (some of which seem overboard.)

The content of the books becomes easier to search and shopping for the books becomes still easier with the ability to check out the content without having to browse the book as a whole.

• Blogs, Online websites with shared content have made it easier for the Authors to reach readers. Sites like Scribd are testament to this fact.
• PDAs and PDA Phones have been equipped with software capable of reading books and form a small yet considerable group of users.
• Projects like Gutenberg have taken up a volunteer approach to the task of converting older paperback and hardback editions of books to an open digital format accessible to everyone.
• Dedicated e-book readers have been created to carry multiple (upto 150 or more) books and read them. These readers have been using the e-Ink technology that allows them to use far lesser power than conventional Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) making them a usable companion. Here is a short list (courtesy Wikipedia.)
• eSlick by Foxit (2009)
• Digital Reader 1000 by iRex Technologies (2008)
• Kindle by Amazon (2007)
• Cybook Gen3 by Bookeen (2007)
• GeR2 by Ganaxa (2007) ^[1]
• Star eBook STK-101 by Star eRead (2007)
• Hanlin eReader by Jinke (2007)
• Sony Reader by Sony (2006)
• iLiad by iRex Technologies (2006)
• Librié by Sony (2004)

The e-Slick reader with a 7.4" size that hasn't yet made it. It's lighter than the Kindle and is more of a PDF reader.

Books themselves were an attempt to reach out to a larger audience in the Sixteenth Century when written material was restricted to the elite and only those who could afford it. The natural evolution of books would therefore have to make them more (not less) accessible to a larger population at lower costs to the reader and the authors & publishers.

So here is what the existing solutions miss out and would be areas waiting for answers

• Localisation and support for regional Languages for Digital Books and Digital Book Readers needs work. Many latinised languages have good support, while East Asian and African languages would require work.
• Buying books in a language one doesn't understand and having the Digital Book Reader do the translation is an expectation that hasn't yet been fulfilled. I would love to read some text in Old Latin with an automated translation showing up half screen, but that isn't yet available.
• If you could have a dedicated Digital Book Reader than can digitize documents or articles and store them for search, that would turn out to be very useful. The device could do this with the help of an external scanner (which is not hard to imagine in these days of convergence.)
• Publishers and Authors do not have a simple mechanism for feedback from their readers. Popular books do make it to enough forums that the Author might be following. However there are many volumes that lie in the dark and a single comment on them will never make it to the author. This level of interactive feedback could be sorted out in the future with Digital Distribution Channels.
• Backing up books is something that is possible for non-DRM books but not for DRM books. For DRM itself to work, there has to be provisions for the rightful owner of the book to create a backup for fair use.
• Those who've bought books have the habit of lending the physical copy of the book to someone, usually a friend or a relative. Many books get lost this way. Presently DRM enabled books cannot be shared, while others can be abused or pirated. This needs to be addressed with a good solution coupled with a policy.
• Books should provide some items from new technology like interactive puzzles, touch selection of words to find their dictionary meaning and an easy method to choose a paragraph, chapter or section of text for reference in one's own research work. Digital media has provisions for all these, but they haven't brought them out to the end-user.
• Open and Portal Document formats should be easy to convert a book to without affecting the status of its formatting of the DRM (Digital Rights Management) component. This is to ensure that books can be transferred from one digital reading device to another with no extra costs. Lack of such conversion makes a user captive to one specific type of reading device.
• Faster distribution channels should allow for the release of books to a group of reviewers before a book is released for public reading (if this is necessary.) Presently, proof reading books and sending them back to the publisher is time consuming. The Distributed Proof-Readers initiative from Project Gutenberg is a nice example, except that it cannot be done on digital readers.
• Digital Book Readers for those having impaired vision should now be possible. Digital Braille display and text-to-speech technology exists today.
• A suggestion of books that have similar content for those pursuiing research interests and the ability to search books that haven't yet been loaded from a Digital Book reader (with some connectivity requirements to a network) would be very useful. This isn't yet possible.
• A single device that can help one read a book and author using the same device should be possible given the state of today's technology. The keyboard in itself is slowly obsoleted. Faster text entry mechanisms including speech-recognition and improvised user interfaces are available. Integrating these into one solution could be the dream device for many a bookworm.
• Reading Blogs, Blog Racks, News Articles from a digital text/book reader should be possible. Many PDAs today offer the capability to blog and to read blogs. The main scoring area of a Digital Text reader is the size that offers easier readability with lesser eye-strain.
• Many have been complaining about carrying an "extra" device for reading books, but if there were strong features dedicated to Text/Book Reading and Content creation, people would stop objecting. This has been primarily due to the convergence of the Mobile Phone with a PDA, Web Browser, Music Player and Text Reader constrained by size and battery life.
• While battery life has been extended on many Digital Book Reading devices, charging them with Solar power or similar means hasn't yet made it. Reading a book in sunlight is something that manufacturers of devices have to ensure (which conventional LCDs do not support in full.)

Startups and many Hardware Device Manufacturing ventures have been focusing on creating the better e-book reader with tactile feedback, low energy utilization, lighter weight and a host of other goodies. They should also keep the Book Reader in mind while creating a solution that really makes a strong case for user adoption by features (those listed so far) and usability & accessibility.

Posted by morpheus at 06:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3546) | TrackBacks (0)

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