by Douglas A. McIntyre, 24/7 WallSt.

Micro-blogging platform Twitter has 32 million users, which is an increase from about 2 million a year ago, according to research mentioned in The Wall Street Journal. Some Internet measurement services show that figure increasing 50% to 100% month-over-month. While it is not clear that Twitter will become as large as social networks, MySpace and Facebook or video-sharing site YouTube, the company could certainly have 50 million visitors by the end of the year. …. Because Twitter can be used with ease on both PCs and mobile devices and because it limits users to very short messages of 140 characters or less, it has become one of the largest platforms in the world for sharing real-time data. A number of large businesses and celebrities have hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter….

1.) Hyper-local marketing. Twitter is currently being used as a marketing tool for small businesses…..

2) Outdoor ads are used almost everywhere in the world because of their simplicity and the relatively low cost of creating them….

3) Twitter will become a huge platform for discussing stocks and other financial instruments and will probably replace message boards like the ones at Yahoo! ……

…….

7)  The use of Twitter for “micropayments”,….Twitter may not replace the landline, the cell phone or voice and texting communications but it will certainly supplement them as a way to get around telecom data plans. Tweeting inside a browser does not have the same data cost for the telecom user that texting does which adds another huge non-metered communications opportunity for businesses and consumers. It opens the question of what large cellular services providers will do when conversations move away from their ability to track them. ….

9) The commercial sector will not be the only part of the enterprise landscape that will be affected by Twitter. Large government agencies will quickly realize that Twitter may be one of the single best ways to communicate with the public and may even mandate that Twitter participate in some programs that allow emergency notices to make their way to citizens quickly…….. This would add certain “911” aspects to Twitter which could be used for health alerts like following the spread of a major disease like swine flu, @swineflu.  This could be done on a local or national basis, @nyscswineflu.  The service could be used regionally for programs to find children who have disappeared, a sort of Amber alert over Twitter.

…………………….

10) Philanthropy “as business” use of Twitter will involve social activism and fund-raising. ……………

The Internet and the major products set up to use it are changing at a remarkable speed, permanently altering the way we live. Twitter could have as large a role in this transformation as Google or Facebook have had in the last decade.

DCL: If any 5 of these 10 ways come to pass, there will certainly be a need for CEP technology.  Google.org, the “philanthropic” arm of Google, is working very hard on tweet-based methods of epidemiology monitoring - with much reluctance to talk about it, I might add!

the full article is worth reading!  See also IBM investing in Mobile

Does parallel processing require new languages?
Government Computer News

Now that almost all new servers and computers are running processors with multiple cores, the software-design community is trying to figure out the best way of making use of this new architecture. Unfortunately, the community is divided about what the best way would to split their programs across these multiple cores.

Getting the full workload of multicore processors can be tricky because, in order for a program to make use of more than one core, it must divvy its workload in such a way that it doesn’t take more effort than the gains achieved by adding more cores. Most programming languages were written assuming just one processor would be working through the code sequentially, line by line. ….

“The challenge is that we have not, in general, designed our applications to express parallelism. We haven’t designed programming languages to make that easy,” said James Reinders, who works in Intel’s software-products division and is the author of a book on parallel programming titled “Intel Threading Building Blocks.”  ….

DARPA’s new languages use an architecture called the Partitioned Global Address Space. PGAS does two things: It allows multiple processors to share a global pool of memory, but at the same time it allows the programmer to keep individual threads in specified logical partitions so they will be close to the data as possible, thereby taking advantage of the speed boost brought about by “locality,” as this is called. ….

Whatever the approach, the goal of writing programs that can run concurrently on several processors, or processor cores remains elusive. “Concurrency is complicated, as an industry we are still coming to grips with the programming model,” said Sun Microsystems engineer Brian Goetz at a talk about processors at the JavaOne conference being held this week in San Francisco. Are small changes or big changes needed?

“I’m skeptical of people who say we have to throw everything out about computing and start from scratch. We clearly don’t have to do that – it’s very expensive to do.” Goetz said. “I think there is an incremental path to get there, but I do think we need to change the way we think.”  Report

The Internet is incomplete, says its co-designer, Vinton Cerf
Cerf cites security and mobile as pressing needs
by Patrick Thibodeau, CompterWorld

The co-designer of the Internet’s basic architecture, Vinton Cerf, said the Internet “still lacks many of the features that it needs,” particularly in security, during a blunt talk to a tech industry crowd here. ….

One of the most critical needs is authentication, Cerf said, and he told the crowd at a TechAmerica gathering Wednesday that anyone who performs transactions over the Internet — which is everyone — should “should be deeply concerned about that technology.” ….

Mobile is another problem. “We do a terrible job serving up mobile,” Cerf said, referring to the ever broadening use of the Internet via mobile devices. He said protocol work is needed to address it.

Asked later what the White House should be doing in regard to this issue, Cerf cited the work that has been assigned to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in coordinating standards on the smart grid and health IT. However, he said he would anticipate that Obama’s new CTO and CIO will “have some things to say about what the U.S. government hopes will emerge in the infrastructure of our digital communications system.” … Report

by Ian Monroe, Charles Berretand Michael Scott Leonard, Medill Reports

Intrepid is an IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer: a huge, ultra-powerful machine used by scientists and researchers to model complex systems with a degree of precision never before achieved. Built over five years, at a cost of $77 million, Intrepid exemplifies the state of the art in supercomputing. In this realm, speed isn’t measured in gigahertz but rather in floating-point operations, or flops. Intrepid provides half a petaflop of computation capacity, or 500 trillion flops. A poster on the wall says it would take two stacks of MacBook laptops, each as tall as the Sears Tower, to match Intrepid’s power.

“This is a 50,000 cubic-foot-per-minute air handler,” says Allcock, the operations director for the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. “You see these typically on skyscrapers — they are the things that move the ventilation inside skyscrapers. We have six of them, so we move 300,000 cubic-feet-per-minute of air through this room.” Moving all that air is key to keeping Intrepid’s 160,000 cores, or central processing units, from overheating under the load of the advanced scientific calculations being carried out 24 hours a day. ….

Beyond Intrepid, the computing facilities at Argonne contribute a multitude of other important resources to the scientific community. Advanced visualization systems developed at Argonne help researchers explore the structure of proteins and understand the mechanics of supernovae — exploding stars. Software, such as the Access Grid, allows collaborators all over the world to interact in real time using sophisticated video conferencing. The open-source Nimbus software lets scientists and businesses summon supercomputers on demand and on the cheap. And the collective experience of years in the high-performance computing field feeds back into the development of next-generation systems that will dwarf today’s supercomputers in speed and efficiency. …

…. “In the future of supercomputing, [electrical] power is everything,” he said. “What we are planning toward is a machine that’s 40 times as powerful as [Intrepid] in about twice the space, and [with] about three times the power consumption,” Allcock said.

But Allcock and Papka stressed that significant problems remaining before computing tasks can be spread with optimal efficiency across large numbers of processors.

“We have ideas,” Papka said. “We don’t have the answers. That’s why it’s a research problem.” See if you have any answers.

by David Luckham

Suppose a quantum leap in commercially available CEP technology were to happen. What would it consist of?  I would guess that one of the new components would be something that we haven’t seen offered up till now,  tools to help users make greater use of abstraction than they do at present.

Interestingly, if you look at commercial CEP applications today, you will see abstract events being created all over the place. But nobody pays any attention to the concept of abstraction.  The immediate problems can be solved without thinking explicitly about how one abstract event relates to another. At present the power of event abstraction is used in unconscious, ad hoc and informal ways.  If we are to stop muddling along and apply abstraction more precisely,  we will need new tools that  are not on the market at the moment.  And there is always the question of whether added formality will lead to added pay-off!  pdf article

A Past Flight May Offer Clues to Air France 447
by Mark Thompson / Washington

We’ll never know what it was like to be aboard Air France Flight 447 as it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on May 31, apparently killing all 228 aboard. For now, the closest we may get is listening to the passengers on a similar Airbus 330 jet whose flight computer put it into an uncommanded dive over northwestern Australia last October.

….The plane abruptly entered a smooth 650-ft. dive (which the crew sensed was not being caused by turbulence) that sent dozens of people smashing into the airplane’s luggage bins and ceiling. …
Following an investigation of the A330’s uncommanded dive, Australian aviation officials, assisted by U.S. and French authorities, blamed a pair of simultaneous failures for the near disaster. …
…”For some reason, the damn computer disregarded the healthy channels,” says Hans Weber, an aviation expert who heads Tecop International, an aviation-consulting firm in San Diego. “Instead, it acted upon the information from the rogue channel.” The computer, responding to the faulty data, put the plane into a dive.  Read the analyses.

“Events and other things”,   Philip Howard , Bloor Research

The advent of IBM’s System S (which I shall discuss in more detail in a subsequent article) raises interesting questions about the nature of event and stream-based processing. The reason for this is that the early adopters of System S are doing some interesting things with the product. For example, IBM has initial users processing sonar data, doing real-time facial recognition against video and CCTV footage, processing the high frequency radio spectrum and so on.  ….

Now, traditionally in the CEP (complex event processing) market we have thought about both discrete events and streams of data. But these can effectively be treated in the same way since you can regard a stream of data as a series of events with only a very short time lag between each event. … Article

“RTI Data Distribution Service Adopted for Sports Betting Platform”

SUNNYVALE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Xuenn Limited, a premier online gaming software solutions provider, today announced that the company has deployed Real-Time Innovations’ (RTI) high-performance messaging and data-caching middleware in its sports betting platform, AgileBet. Serving some of the largest betting companies in the industry, Xuenn has standardized on RTI Data Distribution Service to process betting transactions in conjunction with Complex Event Processing (CEP).

“We selected RTI Data Distribution Service because it offered proven low-latency, high-speed messaging with multicast capabilities; ease of deployment; excellent technical services; and a flexible licensing model. Scalability and availability were also key, since each AgileBet operating customer has at least 50,000 concurrent users at any given time.” Press Release

“Aleri and JWG-IT Examine What it Takes to do Liquidity Risk Management Right”

CHICAGO - (Business Wire) Aleri Inc., a leading provider of enterprise-class complex event processing (CEP) technology and CEP-based solutions, today announced the publication of an analysis report entitled “What If You Could Have Heard the Bubble Bursting,” authored by the neutral think-tank JWG-IT Group.  The report identifies the essential tools banks must acquire in order to comply with new liquidity risk regulations. The paper also explains the business benefits of implementing enterprise-wide risk intelligence tools.  Press Release

“Cloud Computing And More With IBM’s Dr. Angel Luis Diaz”
by Cristian Sturek, InformationWeek

What exactly is IBM (NYSE: IBM)’s BPM BlueWorks? At IBM’s IMPACT 2009, Dr. Angel Luis Diaz and I talked about BPM working in the cloud and how he sees Business Event Processing (BEP) differ from traditional Complex Event Processing (CEP).

Dr. Diaz is the Product Management for BPM and Connectivity Director in IBM’s Software Group.

CS: What can you tell our readers about BPM BlueWorks? Why would anyone be interested in doing BPM “in the cloud”?

ALD: Folks approach business process management within the context of SOA from different lenses: understanding how they run their business, trying to optimize cost by eliminating waste from their systems, and making their people more effective and more efficient. To help people be more efficient, we created BPM BlueWorks. It is a community of business leaders that will be launched in June where you can go, learn, experience, feel and touch. It will be a unique place that marries the social things in our world today – blogging, twittering, with stuff that’s real. It’s good to collaborate, exchange messages online or through mobile phones, but there needs to be a reason. We added value content to this community, process models, diagrams, business cases, industry reports, etc. In addition to the content, we have a hosted BPM platform in the cloud that people will be able to use, author, be able to persist what they’ve done, and collaborate. All the stuff build can be brought into execution and further optimization. What makes it stand out is that they can take what they have done and use that to build the business case.  ….

CS: What is Business Event Processing (BEP) and why isn’t IBM calling it Complex Event Processing (CEP)?  … Interview

TIBCO Announces NOW Virtual Online Summit
PALO ALTO, CA — 05/28/09 — TIBCO Software Inc.  today announced the launch of NOW Online, a series of global virtual events that will offer customers insight on best practices, new technologies and direct access to its most senior subject matter experts all through the convenience of a virtual venue.

TIBCO will kick off its first global NOW Online summit on June 3, 2009, which is designed to be the industry’s largest virtual gathering of TIBCO users with more than 1,500 registered attendees. This year’s theme will focus on the company’s new cloud computing offering.
Attendees for all online events will have the opportunity to listen to customer and partner keynotes and simultaneously interact with TIBCO practitioners as they visit booths, demos, and participate in live chat rooms, all from the convenience of their desktops. Press Release

IBM’s new event stream

by Madan Sheina, Tony Baer, Telecoms and Software News
IBM has announced the release of its own stream processing technology, InfoSphere Streams. Stream processing, a form of complex events processing (CEP), isn’t new. IBM’s entry is aimed at the high end of the market, encompassing a new stream processing language and engine, coupled with Red Hat Linux-based Intel clusters. InfoSphere Streams is intended to transform business intelligence (BI) from historical analysis to near-realtime predictive mode. Although currently too costly and complex for most enterprises, in the long run enterprises of all sizes will have need for predictive BI. The trick is for IBM and its rivals to package the technology into simpler, more digestible bundles that will ultimately expand the market in much the same way that online analytic processing (OLAP) was commoditized.  Report

by Wyatt Kash,  Government Computer News

Internet pioneer still envisions an Internet that manages information, instead of just moving data.

It’s been just over 40 years since Robert E. Kahn took a leave of absence from the MIT faculty and helped create a computer networking project whose effects are still being felt today. His design ideas enabled the creation of ARPAnet, the world’s first packet-switched network, and ultimately to the Internet. His subsequent work at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where he headed the Information Processing Techniques Office, would later lead to the largest computer research and development program ever undertaken by the federal government.

As chairman and chief executive of the non-profit Corporation for National Research Initiatives, Dr. Kahn continues to be a global advocate for long-range infrastructure research and open-architecture networking. He still harbors a vision for how the Internet could be used to manage, not just move information, using Digital Object Architecture and Knowbots. He shares that vision in a recent interview with GCN chief editor Wyatt Kash, and explains how it could help make electronic health records and other data more secure and permanently accessible. Interview

by Herb Torrens, ADT

The middleware software market has entered the slow lane in 2009, according to a Gartner report announced on Wednesday. The report, “Market Share: Application Infrastructure and Middleware Software, Worldwide, 2008,” examines the AIM market, which includes technologies such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, business process management suites (BPMSs) and other integration software.

Gartner is projecting a 0.8 percent decline in the AIM market for this year. The market has been affected by the generally declining economy, plus some uncertainty after Oracle’s acquisition of BEA last year, according to the report. ….

Emerging technology areas within AIM include extreme transaction processing (XTP) platforms and complex event processing, according to the report. In addition, the BPMS segment is continuing to grow because it can support cost-cutting measures. Report.

by Antone Gonsalves, intelligententerprise.com

The company launches a free online service called Abandonment Tracker that helps companies reach out to Web site visitors who abandon shopping carts or start, but never complete, registration forms and other processes.

Web site abandonment is a problem for companies. That’s because up to 70% of Web site visitors abandon shopping carts and Web forms, yet only 17% of companies try to bring the potential customer back, according to SeeWhy. The company claims that with its service, companies can get 30% of those people to come back and complete what they started.

“We see this as a huge opportunity that’s largely untapped,” Charles Nicholls, founder and chief strategy officer of SeeWhy, said. Users of the free service will get a list of the e-mail addresses of people who fail to complete an online application, such as for a new product or service, or who fill the shopping carts, but never make it to checkout. Report.