I haven’t posted for a while about the last interesting stuff I have listened to in the last time. Some great CD’s and DVD’s, all in one post.

Gotan Project – Lunatico

Something completely new for me, the second album of the Gotan Project, Lunatico. Refreshing and excellent!

Skillfully mixing the heated passion of tango with the cool insistent beats of dance music, the group kept the best of both genres as it offered up an unheralded fusion. This time around, the production team delves further into the tradition, cutting down on the dub production filigree and overarching electronic programming–now sexy grooves often come on the back of organic beats and an unprocessed sound captured during live studio sessions in Buenos Aires. This new focus is furthered with conventional bandoneon soloing as well as acoustic piano and string section backing.

Placebo – Meds

I have already posted in 2004 about Placebo concerning their CD Sleeping with Ghosts and the corresponding DVD live Soulmates never die, both totally great.

Placebo released thir new CD – Meds – for a while (it was funny because the CD was released 4 days earlier in Switzerland than in France…). There is a Limited Edition CD/DVD, with some interesting bonus on the DVD:

• a good documentary about the band
• 3 demos
• some video live (with The Cure, at Live8, at Wembley, etc)

Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris – All the roadrunning

In a complete other style, Mark Knopfler and Emmylous Harris have published together a marvelous album called All the roadrunning.

For several years, the iconic Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris have been quietly recording a remarkable collection of duets whenever the Grammy winning artists could steal away from their own illustrious careers. The extraordinary result is All the Roadrunning. The songs from their Nashville sessions, all originals, while undeniably modern, have the appeal of classics, whether country, Celtic flavored or gently soulful. All the Roadrunning is Knopfler & Harris making music and, as the lyric for “This is Us” puts it, making history.

Herbie Hancock – Possibilities

That is another great experience from Herbie Hancock, at the same time incredibly complicated, groovy and wonderful. Surely not “pure jazz”, but who cares? *Very* exciting!

“Possibilities” is the musical event of the year. The album is a series of inspired encounters between Herbie Hancock and world-renowned musicians – including John Mayer, Sting, Trey Anastasio, Annie Lennox, Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan, Santana and Angelique Kidjo, Paul Simon, Christina Aguilera, Jonny Lang, Joss Stone, and Raul Midon. Herbie Hancock describes “Possibilities” this way: “This is a real collaboration that we’re doing here. It’s all been decided at the session, a record without borders, woven like a tapestry with many colors. The possibilities are endless”

We have had a great interview with Ed Cone for a while for the CIO Insight magazine, who published a very positive article about the ecenter case (“Insuring the future”, great title :-).

Has has started a very interesting blog called Know it all (rss), have a look!

After the 2004 and 2005 editions, I have reserved our tickets for the coming Montreux Jazz Festival on July 11. We will have the chance to be at two concerts:

• Fourplay

• Bassist: Nathan East
• Pianist: Bob James
• Drummer: Harvey Mason
• Guitarist: Larry Carlton

You can find the whole program here and buy the tickets online here.

[via Google Blog]

Great localized stuff!

We’re excited to announce that we have just launched beta versions of Google Maps for France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. These sites include the full suite of interactive street maps, driving directions, and integrated local business search. This has been a global effort with Google teams in Paris, Hamburg, Milan, Madrid, New York, Mountain View, Kirkland, Sydney, London, Dublin, and Zurich working together for much of the past year to build a truly “local” product.

[via Marc]

Food for thoughts in this post from Tom Foremski. It is about software licencing, the new positioning of Oracle, the great and healthly pressure coming from Open Source Software models.

Mr Nolan’s view is that Oracle is probably assembling a middleware stack and wants to use open-source components so that it can offer a subscription based pricing structure. This is exactly the direction that Sun Microsystems, Computer Associates and other IT vendors are moving towards.

He is right, we are coming to the end of the licensing model for enterprise IT software, and in Sun’s case, John Loiacono, Sun’s Software chief, told me late last year there would be a time when Sun would even throw in the server hardware for “free” as part of the monthly subscription price per user.

And SAP is riding that trend but so are others. IBM is very strong in middleware but Mr Nolan points out “this whole middleware stack is becoming commoditized very quickly.” SAP’s strategic strength is in its dominant position in enterprise applications and business process; and with a very broad customer base of more than 32,000 companies.

Oracle’s strategy is based on the belief that owning the database is the key to owning the glass house of the IT organization. And its database is used by most of the Global 2000 enterprises, which is a trusted role.

It can try to commoditize the middleware through the use of open source components, and use the open-source platform to integrate its PeopleSoft and Siebel enterprise applications which would create a powerful alternative to SAP.

Oracle could hurt IBM because IBM does not have any enterprise applications. (BTW, Ray Lane, former president of Oracle and now a leading VC, at Kleiner-Perkins has advised IBM that it should acquire SAP. Otherwise its lack of apps will hurt its software business.)

IBM also has a large database business and a strong middleware business but the commoditization of middleware by Oracle and Sun mean that Steve Mills, IBM’s Software chief, has to scramble higher up the stack. And for IBM that means automating business processes, and a creating a closer partnership with its top business consultants from its acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

SAP could become squeezed at the top by IBM’s business process push–and Oracle pushing from its database customer base–into enterprise applications. Then there is the roll-your-own software brigade, or what I call skinny apps, custom crafted IT applications created by departments using powerful application development platforms. Jotspot and SocialText are examples of this type of technology, which will only improve over time.

Then there are the numerous web services applications companies using AJAX-type technologies that will allow organizations to create mashup suites of IT applications.

[via NASA]

Beautiful picture of the surface of the sun.

It was a quiet day on the Sun. The above image shows, however, that even during off days the Sun’s surface is a busy place. Shown in ultraviolet light, the relatively cool dark regions have temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius. Large sunspot group AR 9169 is visible as the bright area near the horizon. The bright glowing gas flowing around the sunspots has a temperature of over one million degrees Celsius. The reason for the high temperatures is unknown but thought to be related to the rapidly changing magnetic field loops that channel solar plasma. Sunspot group AR 9169 moved across the Sun during 2000 September and decayed in a few weeks.

A new publication based on an interview we had last week with Heather Havenstein. You can find the article online or here as pdf.

Some extracts:

The Final Payoff

Despite the technical and cultural challenges of SOA, the returns can be substantial, successful users say.

SOA veteran Helvetia Patria Group, an insurance company in St. Gallen, Switzerland, has seen a 201% return on investment since launching its SOA six years ago. Helvetia officials said the SOA project cut IT costs for the company’s Internet-based businesses by 59%.

Helvetia overcame the “tough exercise” of bringing developers on board by using a change management program from Hewlett-Packard Co., said Didier Beck, director of Helvetia’s eBusiness Center.

Beck said the HP tools and services helped developers integrate 15 systems into a centralized SOA platform. “The way we are working today is really very different because before, there wasn’t any contact between the different subsidiaries — they had all their own development processes and tools,” Beck said. “The consequences and impact were really quite high.”

The new development processes included centralizing change management and software-release schedules, Beck said. In addition, the company now provides all new developers with six to 12 months of training at its eBusiness Center, where it centrally manages the SOA.

“An SOA implementation is really a journey,” Beck said, “and you have to invest a lot before you can reach a new agility level.”

The two Press Releases from HP (my post from April 11, 2006) were published at 4 other places:

HP unveils SOA architecture for financial services (pdf)

Helvetia Patria Doubles Return on Investment with HP Service-oriented Architecture (pdf)

HP introduces multi-market SOA frameworks (pdf)

Helvetia Patria Doubles Return on Investment with HP Service-oriented Architecture (pdf)

First beautiful springtime week-end and a lot of stuff to do in the garden because of the bad and cold weather in the last time:

• first mowing (about 4 hours yesterday)
• tree-trunks to be cut after the last spring pruning (about 30 trees)
• preparation of the ground with compost for the future patches (tomatoes, zucchini, lettuces, raspberries, etc)
• re-initiating the water pump
• fertilizer for the plants

Gosh, my “back to the roots”, I like that so much :-)

[via TechCrunch]

TechCrunch posted about a really very informative, extensive and dense Fortune’s article – Microsoft’s new brain – about the role of Ray Ozzie by Microsoft, their new strategy, etc.

A must-read, if you would like to apprehend (partly) what is going on in Seattle.

Ray Ozzie by Microsoft

But the chairman and the CEO already had so much confidence in Ozzie – a renowned programmer who had created Lotus Notes, one of software’s biggest triumphs – that he had become Gates’ proxy. Since the retreat, Ozzie’s responsibilities have expanded even further. The white-haired, soft-voiced 50-year-old is spearheading the companywide transformation agreed upon at Robinswood.

“I cannot overstate the importance of what Ray Ozzie has done here,” Gates says. [...]

Put simply, Ozzie’s assignment is to Webify everything: To intertwine Microsoft’s entire product line – software for consumers, software for businesses, Xboxes, all of it – with the vast and ever-growing power of the Net.

“Everything we do should have a presence on the Web,” Ozzie says. [...]

Ozzie can do what Gates no longer can – not only formulate strategy but also help implement it by working with the troops. People tell stories of the approachable Ozzie having long conversations with low-level programmers by the coffee machine about security strategies or other arcana.

“Ray brings people together in a way others don’t,” says Blake Irving, head of Internet communications products at MSN. “He’s sort of a grand unifier across the company.” [...]

But many of the company’s leaders, including Gates, were impressed with the way Ozzie looked at technological challenges.

“Ray really starts with the customer,” says Windows and MSN boss Kevin Johnson. “He looks at things ‘outside in,’ as he says, not technology-out.”

Many executives now concede that Microsoft tended to take the opposite approach – focusing first on the technical possibilities and only later on what customers really wanted.

As a senior executive puts it, “Our customers buy our products in an integrated fashion, but we build them in a siloed fashion.” [...]

Ozzie remembers “vigorous disagreement” over business models based on advertising revenue, vs. those based on transaction fees or traditional licensing.

“It’s clear that in the consumer realm, online advertising is this new economic engine,” says Ozzie. “It’s not as obvious how that engine is applied in the enterprise market.”

But the companywide excitement about the potential of online advertising is palpable. MSN’s Blake Irving calculates that annual worldwide advertising spending amounts to about half-a-trillion dollars, vs. total software industry revenue of about $120 billion.

Live Drive vs. GDrive

Though he won’t get very specific, Ozzie says that he is amazed at the amounts Microsoft is spending, and that the cost of building the physical infrastructure for Web services will be a major barrier limiting the number of players in this business.

“The people who could build a viable services infrastructure of scale,” he says, “are companies that have both the will and the capacity to invest staggering amounts of money – staggering amounts.” Think billions, many billions. [...]

Microsoft has to move before Google or even Yahoo! offers its own large-scale services for businesses over the Web. Up to now those companies have focused on consumers, but it’s widely believed in Silicon Valley that Google, at least, will soon launch corporate e-mail services to exploit the infrastructure it’s already built for Gmail.

(Google is rumored to have a million servers around the world and, according to a knowledgeable source, is already the top electricity user in at least one large U.S. state. Google would not comment.)

Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data. It even has a name for that future service: Live Drive. With Live Drive, all your information – movies, music, tax information, a high-definition videoconference you had with your grandmother, whatever – could be accessible from anywhere, on any device.

Google apparently has similar plans. An internal memo accidentally posted online in March spoke of company efforts to “store 100 percent of user data” and mentions an unannounced Net-storage system called GDrive.