Original post here: http://www.contentsutra.com/entry/419-orkut-to-disclose-user-ip-details-to-mumbai-police-in-case-of-objection

EARTHQUAKES, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions are the price that more than 300m Indonesians and Filipinos must pay for living in the Pacific ocean’s “ring of fire”, the world’s most seismically active zone.But there are benefits, too. One is that the grinding of tectonic plates over the æons has left valuable metal ores near the surface. Another is that, where the earth’s crust is thin or cracked in such regions, huge amounts of electricity can be generated from super-hot rocks lying not far underground.

The principle behind this geothermal energy is simple. Usually, groundwater has trickled down into the rocks over the ages, and has been trapped at high temperature and high pressure.

Drilling a hole into this underground well releases a bountiful source of steam which can drive a turbine. The waste water is pumped back down into the earth, where it can heat up again and produce more steam.

Geothermal electricity is clean, with no emissions of carbon dioxide or other pollutants; and sustainable, since the supply of underground heat would appear to be almost limitless.

The Philippines and Indonesia each have enough hot-rock sites to provide most of the extra electricity that they desperately need to boost their economic growth. Already, the two countries rank second and fourth respectively in the world league of geothermal generators (America and Mexico are first and third).

Mainit, in the Philippines

Even so, they have barely begun tapping their potential. Indonesia generates a mere 850 megawatts of geothermal electricity, or about 4% of its total electricity supply. Properly exploited, geothermal sources could generate perhaps fifty times that amount.

On February 23rd Indonesia’s energy ministry said it would invite bids to exploit seven geothermal areas this year, yielding a modest 575MW of electricity. The Philippines hopes to boost investment in new plants through a privatisation.

Geothermal energy could supply more power in more parts of the world, especially as scientists improve on exising technologies. A recent study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) concluded that America could generate as much as 100,000MW of clean, reliable and cheap electricity from geothermal sources by 2050―equivalent to about 10% of all America’s generating capacity now. In South-East Asia the potential is greater still.

However, there are still catches. One of them, says MIT, is the worry that drilling for geothermal projects could trigger earthquakes, landslides or subsidence. Those living nearby may take a lot of convincing that such risks are worth running―the more so in Indonesia, where one whole village on Java has been submerged recently by eruptions of foul mud, which locals blame on nearby oil drilling.

Drilling for geothermal projects could trigger earthquakes, landslides or subsidence; those living nearby may take a lot of convincing that such risks are worth running

Even if public fears can be overcome, there are political and economic obstacles to big new energy projects in Indonesia and the Philippines, whether geothermal or not. Investors need to be persuaded that there will be steady demand for the electricity produced, and that they will not be subjected to new price controls, predatory taxes, or any other nasty surprises.

Indonesia and the Philippines find it hard to offer such guarantees, though each has been working to improve its business climate. Lack of investor confidence is one reason why the Philippines has failed repeatedly to auction off its electricity grid. In Indonesia, investors still remember how a modest boom in geothermal projects some 15 years ago was punctured by the Asian economic crisis of 1997, and how the legal rows over broken contracts dragged on for years.

The huge unrealised potential for geothermal power in South-East Asia stands as a permanent reminder that, in much of the world, the development of alternative energy sources is more than a scientific challenge. It means developing the administrative competence, the political restraint and the reliable rule of law neeed to make large-scale infrastructural projects of any kind predictable and, where appropriate, profitable. Compared to that, the scientific challenges may come to seem almost trivial.

It’s amazing how few non-profits there are taking advantage of the hundreds of usually-free, community-building Web2.0 tools that are around these days (with the exception of idealist of course).

Meet the new kid in town, a non-profit org called “All Day Buffet.” Started by a LVHRD honoree, All Day Buffet hopes to tap into a similar creative community, but with a greater mission towards social change. In their words:

“Think Fader Magazine meets Human Rights Watch; My Space meets New York Cares; a mix tape meets a political flyer; Live 8 meets the collaborative evolution of a Wikipedia entry. And it’s coming soon.”

Note to all non-profits hoping to succeed at marketing for good: Raise social awareness by making your communications more social.

National accounts data suggest that GDP growth in India today is around 8%. What would it take to increase it to 10%? According to Virmani, part of the answer lies in an upswing in manufacturing. “For the first time in decades, we are seeing sustained growth [across the entire manufacturing sector] of 9%,” he says.

I have written several pieces recently about the Extended Enterprise trend, covering Segments such as Collaboration, CRM and PLM.

In the same vein, that I have proposed a framework for Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS), I would like to discuss in this piece, a framework for Enterprise 3.0.

Fot those working with web technologies, and focused on business applications, the trend to watch carefully is the Extended Enterprise one, which hasn’t quite become mainstream yet.

Saas (Software-As-A-Service) or OnDemand is already a well understood and accepted trend. Nick Carr wrote in November 2006:

“Large companies appear to be jumping en masse onto the software-as-a-service bandwagon, according to a new survey of CIOs by management consultants McKinsey & Company. The survey found that 61% of North American companies with sales over $1 billion plan to adopt one or more SaaS applications over the next year, a dramatic increase from the 38% who were planning to install SaaS apps in 2005.”

However, to come up with new ideas, or to position your existing SaaS technology on a problem that matters to customers today, I suggest you focus on the Extended Enterprise trend.

So, let’s recap the vocabulary again. What is the Extended Enterprise (EE)?

The modern enterprise is no longer one, monolithic organization. Customers, Partners, Suppliers, Outsourcers, Distributors, Resellers, … all kinds of entities extend and expand the boundaries of the enterprise, and make “collaboration” and “sharing” important.

Let’s take some examples. The salesforce needs to share leads with distributors and resellers. The Product Design team needs to share CAD files with parts suppliers. Customers and Vendors need to share workspace often. Consultants, Contractors, Outsourcers often need to seamlessly participate in the workflow of a project, share files, upload information. All of this across a secure, seamlessly authenticated system.

Few of these Extended Enterprise stakeholders are inside the firewall. They don’t necessarily have accounts in the Enterprise IT network, posing challenges and creating friction in the workflow.

If you are designing an application that does either Expertise Location, Talent Management, or Contract Management using web 2.0 technologies, remember that you need to provide access control options to include these off-enterprise team members.

The reason I like this framework, is that companies are facing the full impact of globalization today, and yet their IT systems were designed a long time back – without any provision for managing this Extended Enterprise architecture. Thus, if you do come up with an architecture that successfully manages the workflow of EE, focused on a specific application, chances are you have hit some ready CIO painpoint and, therefore, appetite.

So, let’s try to use this framework: Enterprise 3.0 = (SaaS + EE), and see if it can help us hone the architectural design, as well as the application positioning.

Sramana Mitra is an Entrepreneur, Founder CEO of 3 companies, Strategy Consultant to 50+ companies, and Author of a popular technology business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy.

Internet Service Providers dislike BitTorrent

Internet Service Providers can limit download speeds, and can block default BitTorrent ports, and force an inferior experience. There are other ways ISPs can mess with the Torrent traffic. Expect broadband providers to ask for their pound of flesh, I mean dollars from BitTorrent and their content partners.

BitTorrent’s not easy, especially for novices

BitTorrent is still pretty tough to use for mainstream, less sophisticated users, and can leave novices pretty confused. Little things can ruin the experience.

Despite the P2P architecture’s elegance, the ability to download and playback the content right away is the top priority amongst non-geeky content customers. Any delays can turn off the customers for good.

Rememer that BitTorrent is a pay-it-forward kind of system: it downloads parts of a file, and then uploads it to others. Any problems in say your router or your firewall prevents you from getting the credits for uploading the file-slices. As a result your download speed gets crammed down. The slow upload speeds of most U.S. broadband connections could prove to be the bottleneck.

They can overcome most of their problems with their own super peer infrastructure, but that takes away much of the infrastructure cost savings. They have a partnership with CacheLogic that can fix these issues, but it is unclear if that infrastructure is in place.

Content on BitTorrent Store ain’t all that

BitTorrent needs to offer content that is far superior either in quality (HD for example) or in variety for users to switch from the click-and-download ease of the iTunes store, or similar such services.

Beyond that the content is shackled by very limiting digital rights management software. DRM, as Ingram rightfully points out, works against the BTL (BitTorrent Legit). BT team knows that, and said so in The New York Times.

Furthermore, downloads require Windows Media Player and works only on Windows machines and is tied to one single PC for now.

Who uses the official BT client?

BitTorrent’s official client has lost out to alternative clients including Azureus and BitComet.

Why pay to play?

How do you convince people to pay for something they are used to downloading for free by using BitTorrent? This is especially hard since BT also offers a torrent search engine on their site, which also comes up with the illegal stuff. Will they start stripping out the legal content from their search service?

The torrent dilemma!

One of the things I realized during the MobileMonday Global Peer Awards is the increasing globalization of innovation. Innovation is happening everywhere and a lot of start-up companies are working in the mobile web area; while still in its very early stage, the mobilisation of the web is happening.

Google vice-president and chief Internet evangelist Vinton G. Cerf – also one of the founding fathers of the Internet – predicted Tuesday that mobile phones, not personal computers, will fuel the growth of the worldwide Web, as countries like India snap up millions of handsets monthly.

The mobilisation of the web was an important part of the discussions during 3GSM. Mike Rowehl and Carlo Longino wrote on this already; also read Michael Mace’s interesting take on this subject.

The content hall (Hall 7) of the exhibition was filled with a lot of mobile adult (Sign ‘O’ the Times?) and web companies resolutely going mobile including Yahoo. Shozu won for the 2nd time in a row the prize for Most Innovative Mobile Application or Content Award with its Mobile MultiMedia Delivery Platform. To me Shozu is one of the truly real great mobile integrated applications, but isn’t this a sign that no other great innovative applications are around, or haven’t been noticed by the organizers, or maybe have not been found worthy or mature to market yet?

This 3GSM was definately too early for the many mobile 2.0 (web) companies. Many of them need to work harder on their business models; they may try to go around the operators, but I think that over the next couple of years start-ups need to combine their innovative ideas and technology to work with the network operators, to deploy compelling new services – supposing these become available for the masses with affordable fees of course. In any case, this show didn’t have any sign of partnering mobile 2.0 companies yet, but hopefully we can expect some changes next year.

Operators now seem to realise that the top down content models are not working – people need content to consume and to play with. Vodafone seems to have understood this ahead of its competitors, and they announced some remarkable breakthrough deals. With European markets fully saturated with mobile telephones, Vodafone sees India as a key area for potential growth – see Vodafone’s $11.1 billion acquisition of India’s Hutchinson Essar. On the services side, Vodafone concluded deals with YouTube and MySpace. Nokia, on the other hand will offer YouTube content through a web browser and its new Nokia Video Centre, over mobile video RSS feeds. You can check all 20 Nokia press releases released during 3GSM thanks to Stefan at RingNokia.

3UK announced that Windows Live Messenger is now provided as a rich instant messenger mobile software client, allowing 3 customers to see the “presence” of their Messenger contacts and exchange messages when on the move with 3 mobile.

In the Mobile Search field I missed a panel with Daniel Appelquist – one of the real mobile illuminates I met during 3GSM, but you can read a good review here at MoCoNews. Another session I had to miss due to the many meetings was the Technology Breakout session on Mobile Web 2.0 moderated by Ajit Jaokar with Jon von Tetzchner – CEO Opera Software, Alex Kummerman – CEO Clicmobile and David Wood – VP Research at Symbian. Alex sent me a link where you can view the session presentations. Also interesting was the transcription of Tim Berners Lee’s keynote at 3GSM by Ajit.

To close, a note that Second Life will soon be accessible from your mobile phone. According to MarketingVox and Reuters’ Second Life bureau software from Comverse Technology will enable Second Life residents to visit the virtual world from their Java-enabled mobile devices. The software was developed over the last six months, well before the open-sourcing of the Second Life client, and relies on using a separate PC or server as an intermediary. Comverse has also created an application that allows Second Life to run on IPTV platforms. (picture from Reuters)

SMS accounts for approximately 75-80% of carrier’s non-voice plan revenue, with voice plans comprising 80% of worldwide mobile revenue. Competition amongst carriers has been eroding voice margins and mobile content providers for ring tones and wallpapers are on their last legs, with users more easily accessing content over the internet. One of the largest content companies, Moderati, was recently purchased by Bellrock Media, and will be transitioning into mobile applications. Consequently, carriers should be turning their attention to data services.

SMS has been the fastest growing messaging service, but the pricer MMS, e-mail, and mobile IM are expected to grow healthily as well. The report suggests operators must carefully manage rates for these alternatives in order to avoid cannibalizing the SMS market.