Ambient Awareness. The cloud killer app?

SOA is Dead; Long Live Services

By G C Network | January 7, 2009

Blogger: Anne Thomas ManesObituary: SOA“SOA met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. SOA is survived by its…

2009 – The Year of Cloud Computing!

By G C Network | January 6, 2009

Yes, everyone is making this bold statement. In his article, David Fredh laid out the reasons quite well: The technological hype has started already but the commercial breakthrough will come…

Salesforce.com and Google expand their alliance

By G C Network | January 5, 2009

In a Jan. 3rd announcement, Salesforce.com announced an expansion of its global strategic alliance with Google. In announcing the availability of Force.com for Google App Engine™, the team has connected…

December NCOIC Plenary Presentations

By G C Network | December 31, 2008

Presentations from the NCOIC Cloud Computing sessions held earlier this month have been posted on-line in the Federal Cloud Computing wiki. The event featured speakers from IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, HP,…

Booz|Allen|Hamilton Launches “Government Cloud Computing Community”

By G C Network | December 30, 2008

As a follow-up to a Washington, DC Executive Summit event, BoozAllenHamilton recently launched an on-line government cloud computing collaboration environment. In an effort to expand the current dialog around government…

Is Google Losing Document?

By G C Network | December 29, 2008

John Dvorak posted this question on his blog Saturday and as of Sunday evening had 52 responses! This is not a good thing for building confidence in cloud computing. Or…

Cryptographic Data Splitting? What’s that?

By G C Network | December 26, 2008

Cryptographic data splitting is a new approach to securing information. This process encrypts data and then uses random or deterministic distribution to multiple shares. this distribution can also include fault…

Now really. Should the Obama administration use cloud computing?

By G C Network | December 23, 2008

It’s amazing what a little radio time will do! Since Sunday’s broadcast, I’ve been asked numerous times about my real answer to the question “Will ‘Cloud Computing’ Work In White…

NPR “All Things Considered” considers Government Cloud Computing

By G C Network | December 21, 2008

My personal thanks to Andrea Seabrook, Petra Mayer and National Public Radio for their report “Will ‘Cloud Computing’ Work In White House?” on today’s “All Things Considered”. When I started this blog…

HP Brings EDS Division into it’s cloud plans

By G C Network | December 18, 2008

The Street reported earlier this week that Hewlett Packard’s EDS division has won a $111 million contract with the Department of Defense (DoD) that could eventually support the U.S. military’s…

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