cloud computing's where the money's at

At a beer festival, a friendly stranger asked me what things he should invest in, assuming that since I do trendspotting I must also know how to work the stock market. Right.

Well, what I told him to watch for the expansion of cloud computing and for opportunities to invest in that arena. He had no clue what I was talking about. I said that given that people are creating endlessly larger amounts of digital data, much like we need trash dumps to store our garbage, we need spaces to store our digital junk. At this point we buy gigs or terabytes of external storage space to keep all of our stuff. Eventually though, the average Joe will be annoyed that he doesn't have his external with him when out and about or that he has multiple externals that he has to search through for one darn file. Joe will begin to wonder why all of his files aren't accessible in the way that his emails on Gmail (who uses cloud-computing) are. He will head to services like iDrive who do remote data backup or cloud computing.

I was proud of my prediction today when I read in a Wired Magazine article, "The Good Enough Revolution," that Microsoft is moving into cloud computing. Apparently Office 2010 will be largely cloud-based. To add to it's cloud-computing operations, Google is developing a cloud-based operating system that will work in tandem with the company's Chrome browser.

Who knows? Maybe I could do alright in the stock market game.

wired magazine: vanish contest

How difficult is it to disappear in a digital age? In Wired Magazine’s recent contest, Vanished, writer Evan Ratcliff took on the challenge of living under the radar for a month. The chase became a game of Where’s Waldo? meets The Bourne Ultimatum as people hunted Evan down, sharing clues and working together through social media to discover his whereabouts.

Ratcliff provided hunters with some basics about himself such as a few photos, his hometown and the fact that he has a gluten allergy. Ratcliff even provided his IP addresses (which show the general location from which a computer has accessed the Web), bank account transactions and emails to be published by his editor. According the rules, the first person to take a picture of Ratcliff and say the code word “Fluke” won the $5,000 prize.

Evan created a new Twitter account under alias name, James Gatsby (one of his favorite fictional characters) and made allegedly made anonymous comments to confuse hunters. He complicated his digital trail through his knowledge of how to manipulate and hide digital data in order to stay hidden.

In the last week of the contest, Wired enticed Evan into public spaces by offering prize money for the completion of challenges discoverable only by completing that morning’s New York Times crossword puzzle. After 25 days on the run, his IP address informed the only gluten-free pizza place in New Orleans, Naked Pizza, that Evan had been accessing their Web site. Knowing that Evan’s challenge that day was to attend a book reading, the team caught Evan walking in to a local bookstore and won the prize.

When asked by ABC News what he learned from doing this experiment, Ratcliff replied that in our digital age “fantasies about disappearing are just that, they are fantasies.”

Read all about it in Wired's December issue.