TechFest and its Value

Posted on March 5, 2008 by lewisshepherd

I am spending much of the week at Microsoft Research’s annual TechFest, which is proving to be an absolutely mind-blowing experience.  So much, so cool, so out there….

There’s been some good press about the show already (ComputerWorld, and ITWorld for example), and the official Microsoft TechFest site has a wealth of material.  The media were allowed in on the “Public Day” to report on a carefully selected subset of the projects being displayed. But I think the coverage has missed an important difference between this show and something like COMDEX or CeBIT.

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Social (Network) Science

Posted on February 19, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: The social-networking site LinkedIn claims as users “17,000,000+ Professionals, 500,000+ Senior Executives, Executives from 498 Fortune 500 companies, [and] 65,000 new Professionals every week.”

Analysis: Since I hold the title of “chief technology officer” for my group at Microsoft, I regularly check the widely-read blog CTOvision, written by Bob Gourley, CTO of Crucial Point.

CollaborationlogosYesterday he posted a very solid summary of several social networking tools, including my preferred LinkedIn.  If you’re not up to speed on the genre it is a helpful cheatsheet and “buyer’s guide.”

The technology area deserves the attention. There are a dozen or more such sites for each that Gourley covers, and he chooses the ones that have shown growth and potential longevity; why invest any time adding personal data to a site just to watch it disappear? We’ve all had that happen. And yet hockey-stick growth has to be managed – LinkedIn for example has come in for some critical attention for some snafus along the way.

Let’s look at some efforts to understand more about the science behind the software….

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Filed under: Government, Microsoft, R&D, Society, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

New Report on Homeland Security’s S&T Directorate

Posted on February 13, 2008 by lewisshepherd

Fact: “The Directorate of Science and Technology is the primary organization for research and development (R&D) in the Department of Homeland Security. With a budget of $830.3 million in FY2008, it conducts R&D in several laboratories of its own [and] funds R&D conducted by industry, the Department of Energy national laboratories, other government agencies, and universities.”

Analysis: The quote above comes from my hot-off-the-press copy of the new Congressional Research Service report (a pdf version here) on the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate. Bottom line: CRS notes that “Congress and others have been highly critical of the directorate’s performance. Although recent management changes have somewhat muted this criticism, fundamental issues remain.” 

By the way, you’ll get a special bonus for reading to the end of this post, derived from an obscure footnote in the report.

The report is being reported in short-hand in the Beltway technology media, as criticizing DHS S&T for not being receptive to industry.  “DHS Directorate Elusive, CRS Report States,” is the headline in Federal Computer Week. The sister pub WashingtonTechnology has the same story with a different head: “CRS: DHS Directorate Lacks Collaborative Spirit.”  And yes, the report does detail the poor job DHS does at providing an open door to new ideas and technologies from the private sector.

But there’s a lot more in the report and it deserves more thoughtful reading & reporting, as it goes into some detail into the difficulties in bringing powerful and effective new technical and scientific approaches to bear for homeland defense and the war on terror.

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Seeking Business Intelligence

Posted on February 6, 2008 by lewisshepherd

I had breakfast this morning with Gartner’s Lisa Gross and we were able to talk about her continuing work in support of my old haunts – the agencies of the Intelligence Community. She’s first-rate at understanding the IT needs of large-scale government enterprises, and has always been known as a trusted adviser for CIOs, CTOs, and senior IT executives across many federal agencies.

I was recounting to her that when I first started at Microsoft (oh these many weeks), I was ecstatic at finding on our corporate intranet seemingly total unfettered access to Gartner research reports and white papers (along with similar access to Forrester research and reports).  The mother lode! 

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Filed under: Government, Intelligence, Microsoft, R&D, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

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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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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