Ambient Awareness. The cloud killer app?

NJVC Platform as a Service to Include Google Geospatial Services for NCOIC Geospatial Community Cloud Project in Support of Disaster Relief Efforts

By G C Network | July 9, 2013

CHANTILLY, Va., July 9, 2013 — NJVC® was selected by Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) to provide the platform as a service (PaaS) element of a cloud-computing-based humanitarian assistance…

Fathers of Clouds – A Tribute

By G C Network | June 14, 2013

(A guest post from Mr. Ray Holloman, NJVC Digital Communications Manager ) For more than half a century, cloud computing has changed names more often than a Hollywood starlet. Utility…

CNBC Closing Bell: Bob Gourley on NSA Leaker

By G C Network | June 13, 2013

This is clearly off topic, but I couldn’t help myself!  Please take a moment to view this CNBC video where my good friend Bob Gourley addresses this important event. Good…

Guest Blog: Sequestration and the Cloud

By G C Network | May 30, 2013

(This post was provided by Praveen Asthana, Chief Marketing Office of Gravitant, a cloud service brokerage and management company) Sequestration burst out of obscurity and entered our household vocabulary in…

Join Me at the Gartner IT Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit

By G C Network | May 22, 2013

Please  join me at the Gartner IT Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit in Orlando, Florida, June 18-20, 2013, where my session topic will be “Cloud Service Integration: Increasing Business Value…

Five Years of Cloud Musings!!

By G C Network | May 14, 2013

https://kevinljackson.blogspot.com/2008/05/hello-world-april-18-2008.html  “Sunday, April 18, 2008 Hello World ! – April 18, 2008 I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a blog for about six months now. Initially I didn’t…

Global Interoperability Consortium’s Cloud Computing Project Detailed at NATO Conference

By G C Network | April 30, 2013

PRESS RELEASEApril 30, 2013, 2:30 p.m. ET Eric Vollmecke of the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium reports  the proliferation of geospatial information will pose problems for disaster  responders and describes…

IBM Debate Series – What’s Next in IT?

By G C Network | April 25, 2013

Next week I will be participating in the inaugural session of What’s Next in IT Debate Series, a  new program of authentic debates and conversations on key technology topics. Sponsored…

Lisbon Bound: NATO Network Enabled Capability Conference 2013

By G C Network | April 21, 2013

This week I will have the honor of attending the 2013 NNEC Conference  at the Corinthia Hotel in Lisbon, Portugal. The NNEC conference is an annual event which has been sponsored by HQ…

Demystifying PaaS for Federal Government

By G C Network | April 2, 2013

Join us on April 16, 2013 at 1 PM EDT to remove the mystery surrounding Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for Federal Government https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8966264786104832512 The PaaS market is plagued with confusion, and agencies…

Ambient Awareness: the ability to acquire, process, and act upon application specific contextual information, taking the current user preferences and state of mind into account.

In the September 5th New York Times article, “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy“, Clive Thompson really got me thinking about how cloud computing, social networking sites like Facebook and adhoc information networking tools like Twitter are combining to mold our future social interactions. This social transformation may also provide new tools to address situational awareness requirements within the national security community.
While a Twitter stream of consciousness may, on the surface, seem useless, the paradox of ambient awareness may make such technologies incredibly useful. As Clive Thompson says in his article:
“Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as [Ben] Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.”
To me, this is the essences of situational awareness. An ability to sense and understand your environment and the actions of others in that environment. Clive goes on to explain that sociologists have found that “weak ties”, such as those created by twittering, greatly expands an individual’s ability to solve problems.

Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant, with over 5,300 followers on Twitter, brags that she can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes!
Yes. This certainly is a brave new world.
Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson

G C Network