Recently in travel Category
While at net@edu and CAMP this week, I got reacquainted with a couple of relatively new efforts for IPTV and learned of a new one.
During a session about rich-media in the classroom, Tim Lorang from the University of Washington stood-in for Amy Phillipson and gave a thorough overview of what ResearchChannel.org is all about. I hadn't been there in awhile and I was surprised by the richness of their "catalogue" now. Penn State is a contributing member if you were wondering. And I think their web site is slick - but then again these are the same folks who help make KEXP (my favorite radio station) happen.
Jeff had made me aware of Joost, and I heard people talking it up again at net@edu. Joost is an IP based alternative to television that is getting lots of buzz, in great part because Joost is founded by the same guys who started Skype. Nice track record, huh?
The effort I hadn't heard of before is called Inuk. They are providing VoIP, internet connectivity and multicast television (with an eye on hi-def) to students at universities in the UK over their research and education network, JANET. This would be equivalent to running that service over what Internet2 now calls NewNet (used to be called Abilene).
At the 2007 net@edu meeting in Tempe, AZ I attended a presentation by Kurt Sauer on "Skype in education - implication for product security." Kurt did a high level overview of Skype's architecture and opined on Skype's future as well as other happenings in VoIP. Here are some observations, large and small from his presentation.
-some slides in both English and Japanese
-could we federate into skype? would we want them to use "our" certificates or are we ok with them being the CA and signing relayed transactions if we did federate?
-how are you going to compete with browser snap-ins? answer: mobile is a bigger battleground and we are well positioned for that
Kurt can be reached at kurt@skype.net and his skype name is kurt.
Next, I attended Dewayne Hendrick's presentation called "The Future of Wireless Internets."
-"Reality is under reported."
-"Our congress isn't dealing with reality."
-Looking to Wi-Fi VoIP to undercut cellular based mobile -we, the U.S., are even farther behind in networking than I thought we were and I thought we were pretty far off
Today confirmed what I've been encouraged to wonder about for some time - we (IT at Penn State) must work harder at expanding our field of view in technology to include the whole globe. Our vendors must do it, our university does it - but there are times when I wonder if our (IT) thinking is effected by global thinking as much as it should be. By taking a broader economic, technology and innovation view we will increase the accuracy of our forecasting for new directions.
From January 3-5, 2007 I attended the winter Common Solutions Groups (CSG) meeting at the University of Southern California. Attending with me was Steve Kellogg and Vijay Agarwala. The agenda and materials from the various presentations can be found at the CSG website.
The first workshop was on "Models and Methods of Hosting Research Computing." We talked about governance, funding models, and developing cyberinfrastructure support on our campuses. The presentations are on the web site, but the big takeaway for me is that everyone is either starting an investment in developing cyberinfrastructure support of figuring out how to invest more in what they already do. With the reports coming out of various consortia and the recent meetings I've attended, it is abundantly clear that this is the hottest topic right now.
The second workshop was about managed storage solutions. The presentations on these ran the gamut and are very content rich. I found myself coming away from this workshop with the feeling that we don't leverage what we do and know about storage within ITS as much as we could. Perhaps we should do our own workshop on managed storage solutions in ITS.
The Collaborative Tools workshop was highly charged and provocative. Not only was the format engaging, but the dialogue that was stimulated really helped peel apart the onion as they say. An overwhelming majority of us are in the same boat - working hard to understand the landscape in its own right, what we need to do to serve our campuses, and what we need to do within our own organizations. I highly recommend reviewing these presentations.
The meeting topics (the meeting is separate from the workshops) were, as usual, compelling. The last session on DRM, lead by Paul Hill, validated my concerns about how terrible the landscape is in all phases - technology, standards, existing laws, possible future legislation, etc. So much is happening so fast that our country is having a hard time wrapping its head around the social and economic outcomes of the changes. As a result, there are knee jerk reactions to what's currently happening and of course, in such an atmosphere every vendor is scrambling to create the one tool or technique that will master lock-in. And even with all that, it's a challenge we really need think about a lot. This one isn't going away, it's getting more complex, and we'll need to be able to help out when it collides with how we're helping people manage their content and how they gain access to others content. Our own Mairéad Martin was mentioned twice in the conversation - she may be hearing from some of her old friends in I2 about DRM in the future.
As usual, a stimulating meeting. We meet next at Columbia in late May.
