Another Microsoft key hire

Posted on January 17, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: In 2007, Walt Disney shot up the ranks in two separate “Most Innovative Companies” lists. On Business Week’s annual list of “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies,” Disney zoomed from #43 in 2006, to #8.  Similarly, “The WIRED 40,” WIRED Magazine’s “tenth annual list of the most innovative companies in the world,” saw Disney come from nowhere – not even on the list in 2006 – to rank at #29.  

Analysis: Microsoft again made both lists, including a stellar #5 in Business Week, but rivals Apple and Google held down the top two spots on each list (trading positions).  Not to rest on its laurels, and to gain leverage against such innovative engines, Microsoft today announced it has lured away Disney’s CIO Tony Scott to come to Redmond and bring some of the Mouse’s magic way of supporting innovative spark with a robust and cutting-edge internal IT environment.

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Using Web 2.0 in a top-secret environment

Posted on January 14, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Network World magazine has just posted a podcast interview which I recorded with editor Paul Desmond about a month ago, just after speaking at their “IT Roadmap” conference in December. The interview topic is “Using Web 2.0 tech in a top secret world,” and we discuss the DIA and Intelligence Community experience with social networks, wikis, and blogs.  We also discuss cloud computing, enterprise IT, SOA, IARPA, and the challenges of deploying secure software. Representative quote: “Intelligence analysts are much like ‘knowledge workers’ on Wall Street or in the media, they know what’s going on on the Internet, they know what they want, they know what they need, and it’s in the IT side’s interest to try and service them.”

At the end Paul was gracious enough to ask about my new role with Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments. If your daily life has a 17-minute hole which you need to fill, then dim the lights, crank up the speakers, and mellow out to the Quiet Storm (I was using my NPR voice)….

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Space Race 2025: Does Manned Exploration Return its Costs?

Posted on January 13, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: According to a Houston Chronicle editorial urging increased funding for NASA, “The NASA budget approved by Congress is just over $17.3 billion. [A]dded funding is needed to shorten a dangerous 5-year gap between the decommissioning of the three aging space shuttles in 2010 and the first scheduled flight of Orion [the next generation U.S. manned spacecraft] in 2015.”

Analysis: NASA and its long-running race with the Russians is on my mind a bit, for two nifty reasons: first, NASA’s Dr. Lisa Porter is joining the intelligence community to lead advanced R&D (see my post last week), and I serendipitously found a stunning collection of vintage Soviet and European science-fiction images, oh-so-retro, and intend to redecorate my walls with them (or would if my wife would let me).

soviet-sci-fi-art-1953.jpgDoes NASA need more money? The answer may depend on whether there actually is the potential of a new space race… and if so, toward what goal, and does the U.S. need to win that race.  This week’s shot across our bow seems to indicate some Russians are eager for a race to Mars. Lev Zelyony, director of Russia’s prestigious Space Research Institute, was quoted as saying “We lost the race to the moon,” but that reaching the red planet by 2025 would bring “scientific and political prestige” and is “technically and economically achievable.”  He added that they have “a head start” in the race, such as it is.

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G-Cubed: Gadget Guru Gourley

Posted on January 11, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: According to a press release announcing his joining the corporate Advisory Board for startup Triumfant, longtime intelligence-community technologist Bob Gourley “is a strong advocate for user-focused software and his contributions to the Google Gadget community have placed him on Google’s list of the top 200 gadget programmers in the world.”

 Analysis: Bob Gourley and I served roughly coterminous periods at the Defense Intelligence Agency (I got there a year before him and left only a month after), and it’s fair to say we became partners in crime (bucking rules and The Man), partners in innovation (helping DIA’s CIO to overturn and modernize some seriously deficient infrastructure and apps), and partners in some boozy misadventures entirely unrelated to our work.

Bob is a brilliant technologist – I recommend his blog over on the blogroll – and as the Triumfant press release correctly states, he was a winner of InfoWorld’s Top 25 CTO award this past year – a mark of great pride for DIA, which had never won that award, so much so that DIA Director Gen. Maples re-recognized him for the honor in a special ceremony at the Agency.

 But I have to address this “Google fetish” he has (and he’s not the only one). Let’s tell some truth here….

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IARPA’s First Director: Dr. Lisa Porter

Posted on January 9, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: IARPA has a new Director.

Analysis: The well-known DARPA (part of DoD) will now at last have a full-fledged intelligence-community counterpart. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity – prosaically called “IARPA” – was created last year, but has been stepping out slowly because [/opinion on] of lack of leadership [/opinion off], with only “interim” place-holder leaders.  Many of my friends who were recruited or absorbed into IARPA at the beginning, as it swallowed the old Disruptive Technologies Office for example, felt that the new org was spinning its wheels without traction, for lack of a strong and stable hand at the helm.  [Note also this recent post on IARPA.]

Today the Director of National Intelligence named Dr. Lisa Porter as IARPA’s first Director. She’s been at NASA, and before that DARPA itself.  She and I were at Stanford at around the same time, although hanging in different crowds – she working on her doctorate in Applied Physics while I was over doing the real heavy lifting in the hardest of all sciences, Political Science 🙂  

I’ve never met her, unless I don’t recall from old DARPA visits, so I did a tiny bit of surfing to clip a few salient tidbits from her DARPA work.

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Inflection Point for Google, or Karma’s Wit?

Posted on November 26, 2007 by lewisshepherd

Fact: Google Inc.’s corporate philosophy famously includes the injunction, on its list of “Ten things Google has found to be true: #6. You can make money without doing evil.”

Analysis: Today’s closing price for GOOG stock has a certain ring to it. (Apologies for this entry: the Hollywood Writers’ Strike is still on, so in deference I am allowing the news to write the stories all by itself.) 🙂

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Tagging in Esperanto

Posted on November 24, 2007 by lewisshepherd

Fact: “Russian search leader Yandex has released their Autumn report on the current state of the blogosphere in Russia [source: Nick Wilsdon, CEO of the e3internet group]… Some of the highlights:

  • There are now 3.1m blogs in Runet [the Russian-language areas of the Internet], 2.6 times larger than this time last year…
  • The blogosphere in Russia represents 3% of the global total…
  • Now there are more Russian language blogs than French, German or Portuguese ones, but less than blogs in Spanish, Italian, Chinese, English or Japanese…
  • About 7000 new blogs appear daily in Runet.”

Analysis: I found the numbers on Russian-language blogging interesting, and not only because I still remember some of my schoolboy Russki. (I’ve forgotten nearly all my Arabic and Maltese.)

Comparing the velocity of blog-growth in Runet (the term used quasi-officially to refer to all of the Russian-language and Russian-geographic areas of the entire Internet) with the growth of all global blogs shows Russian is a mover, but not the biggest one.

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Blogs & the Death of Stealth Mode

Posted on November 23, 2007 by lewisshepherd

Fact: “Folks at Path101 are doing a very interesting experiment. They are liveblogging their start up. Everything about the startup is out there, including their to-do list from Monday meetings – with items such as preparing presentations for investors, etc.” (from Toni DasGupta’s BizOrigin, 10/29/2007)

Analysis: Silicon Valley chronicler Michael Malone used to say that the greatest new company in the Valley is the one being formed late tonight by two engineers sitting in a back booth at a Mountain View Denny’s, bouncing ideas off one another with napkin sketches. Today, the napkins would be personal blogs, and the engineers may never have met and may be sitting halfway around the world from each other, working for different companies, but engaged in the same technically promising pursuit.

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A-Space: Top-secret social networking

Posted on November 16, 2007 by lewisshepherd

Fact: As reported in InformationWeek recently, “In December, the DNI will launch A-Space, a portal that will eventually include everything from wikis, blogs, and social networking; built using SOA.”

Analysis: Our team at DIA got assigned by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to design and build A-Space, a brand new social-networking environment for the full intelligence community – “the MySpace for spies.” We’re talking a very high-walled Walled Garden.

I had to devote (not to say divert) some of our most talented people leading the all-important Alien program to this new effort, which really only began in September. Phase I of A-Space must go live by the end of the year; Phase II (with more advanced Web 2.0 capabilities) just a few months later.

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VC-like Beauty Contests for Government

Posted on November 13, 2007 by lewisshepherd

Fact: In Mumbai, according to a Wall Street Journal/Hindustan Times Livemint report, “Thirty start-ups have made it to the business plan showcase at TiE-ISB Connect 2007, which closed submissions on 30 September. The annual networking event for entrepreneurs organized by The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) along with the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, will be held from 14-16 November. TiE received close to 400 entries this year….”

Analysis: The Bubble Redux has brought with it a resurgence in business-plan competitions, typically with a panel of venture capitalists as judges. Now along comes YouBeTheVC.com, launched by Mark Modzelewski of Bang Ventures in Cambridge, Mass, who says the competition combines “venture capital and ‘American Idol’ with a little bit of wisdom of the crowd thrown in.” And, believe it or not, he’s got Curt Schilling (yes, of the Red Sox) as a judge – along with web-based voters.

That idea may only surface new contenders for Henry Blodget’s “Bonehead VC Pitch of the Month,” but I’m considering starting a new competition, a beauty-contest to find the best business-plan beauty-contests.

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