Cyber Riot

In American sports, the conclusion of a contest typically crowns a team as being a "World Champion". Champagne flies across the locker room of the victors. Victory parades are scheduled. Unfortunately, another aspect of a team winning a championship is the inevitable "disturbances" which occur as ignorant fans in the city of the newly crowned champions choose to celebrate by looting and rioting. Last night's World Series win by the San Francisco Giants is no different here.

What was interesting, however, was the lack of coverage of these disturbances via traditional news media outlets. Even local San Francisco media had little coverage of these events as they broke. Where news of the "San Francisco Riots" was breaking, however, was the internet. This made me think of the discussions which we had in class and about what consumers want to see as news items versus what traditional news media outlets choose to present as news.

Tracking Students with RFIDs. Good? Bad? Who Knows?

After today’s discussion on the use of RFID’s and school buses I came across this article and several others just like it. It seems that school districts all over the United States and the world are starting to incorporate RFID technology beyond school buses to track students. One article I read described how a school in India plans to replace manual attendance taking in classrooms with school id bracelets equipped with RFID technology that the students wear. Other articles mentioned that this technology could be used to help diagnosis hyperactive disorders in students, by tracking their movements in classrooms. These proposed ideas for expanded use of RFID in schools, like most IT advancements, immediately caused me to consider the privacy concerns that will inevitably result.

How secure is the information transmitted on these RFID bracelets? Could this specific information be intercepted by criminals interested in tracking children outside of the school?

I personally feel that the potential benefits of integrating RFID technology more into school systems will vastly outweigh the potential problems. Still I feel that mass integration of this technology will take years because of privacy advocates comparing these initiatives to something out of George Orwell’s 1984.

Do you think RFID technology should be expanded in schools or not? If expanded where does it end, at what age do we stop monitoring children, who determines this? If we monitor students in schools, will this eventually lead to companies monitoring employees the same way? This could potentially be a slippery slope.

On the importance of ACPs

I thought this WSJ article was a good example of the importance of maintaining carefully thought-out architectural control points (ACPs).

In brief, the article describes an internal Facebook investigation to address a breach of privacy issue in which third-party application developers were sending users' Facebook ID numbers to marketing and data firms.

While Facebook had previously addressed this control point through a governance mechanism (sending out Facebook ID numbers is a violation of Facebook policy), they obviously did not enforce the policy through technology.

Multitouch lawsuits: Apple defending ownership of mobile device user physical interface layer?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/209397/apple_taps_multitouch_in_motorola_patent_lawsuits.html

Apple has launched two lawsuits against Motorola, both concerning the use of 'multitouch' technology in mobile devices. Simply put, multitouch involves "touching a screen with multiple fingers at the same time." This is the latest salvo in a series of lawsuits between the two companies. Motorola launched lawsuits against Apple a few weeks ago on a wide variety of smartphone-related technologies, none having to do with the user interface.

These two lawsuits suggest that Apple is attempting to defend a key competitive advantage of the iPhone - multitouch capability. There are precious few ways for users to interact physically with mobile devices. For receiving information, users can listen and read/see visual imagery. For providing information, users can speak, type characters, or touch a screen with a finger or object (single point touch). That's about it. There is lots of innovation and competition in other layers of the value stack, e.g. visual user interface design, communications and networking technology, and content distribution. But there aren't many ways a product can distinguish itself in the realm of physical interaction with a mobile device. Apple's multitouch technology, introduced with the iPhone, was one such way. For this reason, Apple appears to be defending the technology as an important leverage point for asserting ownership of what are presumably the most value-creating aspects of the mobile device layer. The assumption, of course, is that the value created can then be extracted by Apple. This assumption may not hold - witness Dell's success in dominating the layer of PC hardware, only to be sidelined when this hardware became marginalized in importance relative to innovations in the software layers above it.

Video Clip: School Buses & RFID

Today's topic discussion on school buses and RFID made me think of a video I saw recently (last week) on the the Today Show http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/39828599#39828599. This example really helped to drive home the idea of what "edge" means within the context of platforms and capabilities. Anyway, hopefully this provides an illustrative example of what we discussed today in class.

Energy Sector and IT

This article from MY Times today is relevant for the group focused on the energy sector for sure. It also is relevant for others who see patterns in the energy sector as a reference point to shifts that could happen to other sector as well.. At minimum, it makes you think about the relevance of these companies in the energy sector over the next five years as well as their potential role in other related sectors.

get paid to drive safely

Do you like to multitask while driving? SafeCellApp will PAY you to put down the phone. The new points-based program rewards you for every mile that you drive without distractions.

This app uses iPhone's GPS to track how many miles you've driven safely -- i.e., without talking on the phone or texting. Each mile driven safely equals one point, and 500 points can get you a $5 gift card to retailers like Amazon, Apple, and Macy's. For emergencies, you can press a big emergency button and make a call. And even though your GPS location is being tracked everywhere, you are supposedly the only one who has access to the details of your whereabouts.

At $12, SafeCellApp is considered pretty expensive for an app, but the idea is that you'll make it all back with safe driving. Although you'd have to (safely) drive a whopping 1,200 miles before you break even. Personally, I can't imagine this being an effective incentive to get people to stop calling/texting while driving. The only person I can imagine having the patience to drive without distractions for 500 miles is my mom, and she's the kind of person who would never pick up the phone while driving in the first place.