When Google Replies– Voice Activated Search

Google has had voice enabled search services on multiple devices (mobile, desktop, laptop, tablet) for a while (see >> “search by text, voice, image”).

However, at the recent Google I/O (2013) they announced a “conversational” search experience which has been extended to the browser and desktop experience.

This means Google search responds to an audio search request with an audible answer.

Voice search starts with a click on the microphone icon in the search bar.

giving the “Speak now” prompt

and then the “Listening…” prompt

it captures into text the voice request spoken…

The search result returned show all the usual feature giving and provides an audible voiceover of the summary text from Wikipedia (where possible).

It also often says “Here is some information about [request]”.

Often the request is not picked up or understood correctly and the following appears:

Interestingly, the voice accent and gender are different for different Google domains.

e.g. (google.com – female voice with an American accent, google.co.uk – male voice with an English accent)

At the moment I find it a little flaky and error prone but I presume it will continue to improve as more people engage verbally with Google.

Have you started making use of this service?

Sweet Suites of Integrated Mobile Forms

I had intended to post this a long time ago, closer to this generation of devices launches, but the opportunity passed.

However, I still thinking it is fascinating to watch the portfolio of devices these internet and manufacturing giants are assembling.  Much of the commentary and opinion has been developed much further elsewhere, however, even collecting images these device suites together on the same page and admiring the aesthetics is reason enough to post.

By announcing the arrival of the Nexus 4, and Nexus 10 to complement the existing Nexus 7.  Google have intimated that the application and content state within a mobile user experience across a related set of devices, is as a complete and integrated experience possible to date.  Of course this is not the 1st time it is has been brought together, but Google’s  Nexus | Android is certainly aesthetically and technologically appealing.

 

Apple with iOS offer that experience with their iphone, ipad mini and ipad too.  All synchronising via icloud.

Apart from the mass of OEM hardware manufacturing specialists bringing products to the market place, Amazon and Microsoft are the notable service companies making a inroads into the mobile device market.

Almost standing apart Samsung has that oft commented upon position of being a hardware partner with any of these key internet giants, as well as offering a portfolio of devices of its own.   Very much making the market work for it in more than one way.

Certainly I see the consumer having benefitted from the general evolution of touch based mobile devices, initially championed and established by Apple , and brought to extensive commoditisation and choice through the market entry of Google, Amazon and Microsoft.  Of course there are other players now making moves Ubuntu and Mozilla, as well as Blackberry still trying to retain a market position and relevance. 

If nothing else this post will represent a moment in technology evolution, capturing the phase of the commoditisation and proliferation of these touch based mobile devices.

Do you have a favourite device or vendor?

Now actively using Amazon Glacier

I’ve written a couple of times about the recently released AWS service AWS Glacier:

• AWS – Storage Lifecycle Management

• Amazon–intent on Freezing out the competition for low cost storage with Glacier

While I reflected on some Enterprise based use and benefits. However, my personal interest lies in using AWS Glacier for providing long archival storage for personal data (photos, videos, and music).

Now that AWS S3 integration with AWS Glacier is available (see announcement),  and that Synology NAS natively support back up to AWS S3 (see feature description).

So I’ve been testing the AWS Glacier vault integration with the storage buckets I have in AWS S3.

The AWS S3 Test folder linked to AWS Glacier  has the following common software binaries:

Notes from AWS S3 documentation:

• Amazon S3 will archive objects for you and associate those objects with the Glacier storage class according to rules that you define.
• When you transition objects to the Glacier storage class, AWS S3 internally uses AWS Glacier for durable storage at lower cost.

Therefore you don’t need to connect|link AWS S3 to AWS Glacier vaults yourself.

I’ve used the following transition rule:

 

I’ve been able to confirm the following events work seamlessly:

• Items with ‘Storage Class – Glacier’ are not overwritten | re-copied by the scheduled back up process to the S3 bucket.
• Deleting items – delete in the S3 bucket and the Glacier vault.
• Overwriting a file (same filename), re-creates it in the S3 bucket, and then it is transitioned to Glacier as per the rule sets.
• The Prefix setting needs to use the full directory | folder structure in the target S3 bucket to the location of the target files.

I will now start transitioning my other S3 bucket stores from AWS S3 – RRS to AWS Glacier.  I will track the charges and costs of storage and data transfer as this process goes forward, I do anticipate a spike in data transfer costs for the bulk migration of content from AWS S3 – RRS to AWS Glacier. 

Are you thinking of using the AWS Glacier service?

Key Links for SharePoint 2013

These are some key links for SharePoint 2013:

• Capabilities and features in SharePoint 2013

• Topologies for SharePoint 2013

• SharePoint 2013: presentation: IT pro training

Overview Video of Microsoft SharePoint 2013

AWS – Storage Lifecycle Management

Again, while I don’t claim expertise on the “cloud computing” phenomena let alone storage, it is an area that fascinates me for delivering technology and service based innovation.   Especially considering all the data proliferation era that is often spoken about in statistical superlatives (e.g. article from Forbes).

In particular I have considerable admiration for Amazon and their AWS business aspect, and I’m not alone in this respect – as this article points out.

I recently wrote a post about the Amazon Glacier storage service.  This is a follow up post.

AWS has recently brought out announcements on AWS S3 integration with AWS Glacier  and about enhancements to their AWS Storage Gateway with Gateway Cached Volumes.

Now the concepts around Information Lifecycle Management, and Digital Asset Management and the use of Hierarchical storage management or the related Automated Tiered Storage are not new, and there is a lot of traditional technology around to deliver or cover some of those aspects.

Tiered storage is a data storage environment consisting of two or more kinds of storage delineated by differences in at least one of these four attributes: price, performance, capacity and function.

Any significant difference in one or more of the four defining attributes can be sufficient to justify a separate storage tier.

Automated Tiered Storage is the automated progression or demotion of data across different tiers (types) of storage devices and media. This movement of data is automatic to the different types of disk according to performance and capacity requirements.

So where does AWS come into this?  Here’s how I see it:

same with recently updated iconography from: AWS Simple Icons

I think with the combination of AWS Storage Gateway, AWS S3 and AWS Glacier  Amazon has pretty much got a wrap on this.  This storage service combo gives cloud based hierarchical storage management, that has a gateway entry point into the traditional enterprise data center, rule based storage policies, an api as well as market leading price point.   I think the CIO will soon find this an appealing combination, easing his/her cost concerns around storage of data and record archives necessary for compliance to various financial and legal stipulations.

Is that not an awesome combination!

Do you think they’re on to something?

Working with and looking after Lotus Notes–it’s a complex beast, but there are some benefits

This blog post is a reflection and summary about a product I’ve known and used for a long time, it may be slightly out of place with the current mobile and socially enabled products. However, for all pros and cons, evangelists and detractors, it has note worthy place in history and evolution of productivity software.

So far,  I’ve been a Lotus Notes user for my entire career, and also a spent a several of those years as a Lotus Notes | Domino administrator. 

With the Hannover (Notes | Domino version – 8) release IBM adopted the integration of the Eclipse framework for the multiple client support and plug-in widget capabilities.

While this has improved the capability and feature set of the Lotus Notes client, and made it capable integrating many modern collaboration services into the client.

e.g. Lotus Notes Sidebar plug-ins | integrations:

multiple Lotus collaboration plug-ins:  

Connections

Quickr

Sametime

multiple 3rd party plug-ins:

File Navigator

Linkedin

Tripit

Tungle (see settings page | connectors once logged in)

Wildfire

Check out these Widget recommendation posts:

My Top 10 Widgets for Lotus Notes (currently) via @IdoNotes

Notes 8 Sidebar Widgets (Slideshare) via rkrueger202

Notes 8 Sidebar Widgets from IBM

The Complexity Factor:

Unfortunately,  for all this connectivity and integration goodness, the incorporation of the Eclipse framework it  has definitely brought a factor fold increasing the complexity of supporting the client.   I recently experienced a laptop crash which rendered my Notes client unusable – it shut itself down as soon as I logged in.  Only through an operational understanding of the product (from prior year’s experience), and through reading up across many pages of support information, and then not inconsiderably time to recreate lost settings, was I able to restore the client to settings I use everyday.  Without those personalisation settings, I would class the product as a hindrance and not a help.

Things of note:

The Client directory structure is now definitely more complex, in fact this is now  a combination client – Traditional | basic client executables and configuration data + Eclipse framework  executables and configuration data.

<PROGDIR> / (location of core Notes Client and Java executables and base configuration data)

<DATADIR> /  (location of core Notes Client and Eclipse personalisation and user specific content and configuration data)

<DATADIR>\Workspace/.metadata (location of Eclipse | RCP Instance Data Area)

Important Documents to read:

• Understanding the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5x client directory structure
• Notes 8 Preferences settings storage

Benefitting from Widget Goodness:

However, there are several good articles on how to create useful widgets or to exploit the Live Text recognition available in Lotus Notes.

Documents worth reading:

• Building composite applications with Notes widgets in IBM Lotus Notes 8.0.1
• Creating Google Gadgets with IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.1
• IBM Composite Applications in Lotus Notes technical education roadmap
• Increase productivity with widgets add-ons
• Using Live Text and Widgets to improve productivity of daily work

So I’ve have been able to add the Evernote web interface into my Lotus Notes client experience:

I’ve also got Live Text working for UK Postcodes and Telephone numbers, as well as having configured service look ups on names, email and postal addresses.

These list the widgets I’ve added:

For local UK based postcode and telephone look up I’ve needed to use Regex expressions. e.g. Regex UK Postcodes

Balancing the Benefits:

While the widget plugin interface and customisations delivers the potential to empower and enable a user to  increase their productivity via adding varying degrees of personalisation to the client.  In reality the use of these widgets aren’t really that accessible and meaningful to a regular information or knowledge worker.  These customisations really required too much configuration activity and a reasonable degree of competency and familiarity with client’s inner working and technological terminology. 

This is in stark contrast to the modern mobile and browser “apps|extensions” available for almost instant delivery of application or service functions.  This renders some of these plugin functions rather aged, as well as appearing very convoluted, but it is in some way exactly that.  It shows, that even back then the acknowledgement that these plugin | widget applications did have beneficial function to play, however, achieving the ease and simplicity of app deliver was clearly some way off.

We should perhaps acknowledge the pioneering features or functions that Lotus Notes  attempted to bring into the end user experience.  Though I think the opinion of whether these were well received, is already known.

Amazon–intent on Freezing out the competition for low cost storage with Glacier

Amazon Web Services (AWS) – recently released their Glacier their extreme lost-cost storage, archive, and backup service.

Amazon Glacier is described as:

• Low cost- Amazon Glacieris an extremely low-cost, pay-as-you-go storage service that can cost as little as $0.01 per gigabyte per month, irrespective of how much data you store.
• Secure – Amazon Glaciersupports secure transfer of your data over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and automatically stores data encrypted at rest using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256, a secure symmetric-key encryption standard using 256-bit encryption keys.
• Durable- Amazon Glacieris designed to provide average annual durability of 99.999999999% for each item stored.
• Flexible –Amazon Glacierscales to meet your growing and often unpredictable storage requirements. There is no limit to the amount of data you can store in the service.
• Simple– Amazon Glacier allows you to offload the administrative burdens of operating and scaling archival storage to AWS, and makes long term data archiving especially simple. You no longer need to worry about capacity planning, hardware provisioning, data replication, hardware failure detection and repair, or time-consuming hardware migrations.
• Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – You can use AWS Import/Export to accelerate moving large amounts of data into Amazon Glacier using portable storage devices for transport. In the coming months, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) plans to introduce an option that will allow you to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier using data lifecycle policies.

Getting Started with Amazon Glacier

I’m particularly interested in the domestic consumer potential, though obvious Enterprise application potential is huge too.

As a domestic consumer, I already use Synology NAS products, which integrate with Amazon S3 for schedule backup to a secure, cost efficient, off-site storage location.  But as the Amazon Glacier FAQ points out :

Q: How should I choose between Amazon Glacier and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)? A:Amazon S3 is a durable, secure, simple, and fast storage service designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

• Use Amazon S3 if you need low latency or frequent access to your data.
• Use Amazon Glacier if low storage cost is paramount, your data is rarely retrieved, and data retrieval times of several hours are acceptable.

(high lighting by myself)

In the coming months, Amazon S3 will introduce an option that will allow customers to seamlessly move data between Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier based on data lifecycle policies.

So as a domestic consumer – my local NAS device provides all the rapid access to content I require. What I need from offsite storage, is to be stable secure and cost effective, so I am hoping Amazon Glacier can provide exactly that.  Particularly, it will be the right place to store, photos, videos, and music content that once created and transfer to the appropriate folder can be kept on low cost storage like Amazon Glacier.

I am really looking forward to the further integration of Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier, but also direct support of Amazon Glacier by Synology.

I certainly think Amazon Glacier is a step ahead of the rest of market, and set a very high barrier to market entry, with the delivery of such a low price point.

What do you think of Amazon Glacier – do you think you’ll end up as a user of the service?

The Cloud goes to the Enterprise (role reversal)

I don’t choose to write often about “Cloud Computing”, as there’s already plenty of more knowledgeable folks writing articles, giving opinions on this maturing technology delivery models particularly (IaaS), (PaaS)  and (Saas).

If at all I would offer comment or a view point, as a consumer or end user,  mainly in the areas of personal knowledge management or collaboration software services which I have a keen interest.

But I’ve noticed a marked change in the approach key Cloud providers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) are taking to help major businesses (enterprises) embrace or on-board to their cloud services.  This is the rise of the Enterprise | Premium level service support area.  OK, this may not be new, but to me this now definitely more prominent and comprehensive part of the service portfolio on offer.

Whilst the traditional stance has been to expect the customer to self-service | self-support themselves to a greater or majority case. I think this trend towards to more comprehensive Enterprise (IT) Service Management is a recognition of the need by service providers to be much more responsive, not solely rely on technological automation and scale to deliver the level of quality and relationship expected.  Instead of the customer gearing up and extending their skill and ability to be able consume “cloud services” effectively and with less risk. The service providers are now reaching out with more services to reduce this risk and skills gaps from their customers to feel more confident about consuming these services.

Of course, there is also the business partner | service integrator middleman approach, which is very common and frequently the method used by a cloud pure play to add the “service management wrap around” for their “raw” service capability.  So the build of service management capability into the service provider is going to be an interesting playing field for incumbents and new arrivals to that market space. 

This is most noticeable cloud provider to go with Enterprise-scale service support is Amazon – Premium Support :

The fact that Architecture Support for Enterprise level is defined as:

Demonstrates the acknowledgement of the level of enterprise architecture and system integration required by Enterprise scale customers.

Of course the usage scale needs to be there:

• Greater of $15,000

- or -

• 10% of monthly AWS usage for the first $0-$150K
• 7% of monthly AWS usage from $150K-$500K
• 5% of monthly AWS usage from $500K-$1M
• 3% of monthly AWS usage from $1M+

On 14th of June 2012 AWS announced:

We are excited to announce a number of improvements to AWS Support that we believe will deliver more value than ever to our customers. The changes include:

• An expanded free Support tier
• Lower prices on Premium tiers
• Launch of the AWS Trusted Advisor Dashboard which provides customers self-service access to proactive alerts that identify opportunities to save money, improve system performance, or close security gaps
• Launch of Chat for Business and Enterprise Customers
• Expansion of Customer Service phone and email availability to anytime hours
• Technical Support for Health Checks starting with Amazon EC2
• Expansion of 3rd Party Software Support to include Support for Databases (MySQL, SQL Server), Disk Management tools (LVM, RAID), and VPN solutions (OpenVPN, RRAS) running on AWS
• Increased Named Contacts from 3 to 5 for Business Customers

With Google, and  Microsoft these services are less obvious, but I’m sure they are there to a certain degree, perhaps not across all their cloud services.

Google encourages contact of their sales team for enterprise support:

and wish to collect some pertinent enterprise infrastructure details:

Details  on Microsoft  are harder to find, but stem from their WindowsAzure Support Page.  Also what is not surprising is the expectation for existing support contracts and agreements to play their part.

So, have you noticed this change too?  Or am I just playing catch up, on a set of services I’m not watching closely?

Do you think this is a significant shift in the market?

Google Nexus – Delivering Beautiful Hardware and Software – Consumer beware!

Looking at the Google.com/Nexus site, there no doubt Google want to | and do – deliver a “Wow!” factor around their consumer device portfolio : Nexus : – (phone|tablet|player)

This is going to go a long way to help Google establish a firmer foothold in the digital consumer market, beyond their stronghold of web services and grow the Android mobile platform into a core delivery platform | access gateway into many other Google products and services.

My impression is that this has the potential to bring them on par with the established market-share that Apple holds with it’s iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod, AppleTV) product set.

This will also be a warning shot to other digital consumer stalwarts such as Microsoft, Amazon and Sony.  Particularly as these are working to combine product with services.  There are a whole bunch of hardware and product manufacturers which will be also watching, but much of their activity is in becoming “manufacturer of choice” to these conglomerate mega-brands.

However, this is not an overnight takeover, for a start nowhere on Google.com is there any link to the Nexus mini-site.  However, it is highlighted on the Google Play mini-site:- in fact the Nexus 7 is available for pre-order now! (in the UK)

Google Play is the consumer storefront for its digital products and services (music, movies, books, magazines, apps (games)) – though not all services are globally available yet.

While Apple has iCloud , Amazon the Kindle store and Amazon Cloud Drive and Music player (again not generally available outside the US), Microsoft Xbox Live and Sony the Playstation network.

I think there will be a pang of regret and surprise (amongst these competitors : Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Sony) at how comprehensive a service | product suite that Google is establishing and how rapidly these parts have been assembled. Certainly looking at how these companies are evolving their web presences for the digital consumer, I think it is fairly clear that Google has a well thought strategy and presentation to the consumer market.   Amongst the others, it seem more “mixed message” at what it is they wish to be their primary delivery to the consumer (e.g. just products, already established services) – but not necessarily such a “front & centre” digital consumer experience.

What do you think? 

Is Google on to a winner with Google Play to become a digital consumer products and services hub?

Or do you think another provider has a better set of products and services?

A Curiosity about Windows Explorer Jump Lists

I really enjoy the Jump List feature in Windows 7 and I’ve described how useful Windows Jump Lists are before.

Here >> Helpful tool for Apps that don’t use Windows 7 jump lists

The Curious Frustration:

However, I found a frustration about the manner in which the “Frequent” folders list get populated.

It considers folders that are “Frequent” to be those that you open files from them (they contain files).

Therefore if you have folder of folders e.g. “My Documents\JumpList Folder\” – it won’t be counted or included.

Even though you open it and access it plenty of times, it won’t appear on the “Frequent” list on the Windows Explorer Jump list.

The Demonstration:

To demonstrate this – I created three “sub folders” (see image below).

I created a notepad document in both “Sub Folder1” and “Sub Folder2”.

I tested this by theory by opening the Notepad document in the folders “Sub Folder1” and “Sub Folder2”, those folders appeared on the Windows Explorer Jump list immediately. (see image below)

But, however much I accessed the empty folder “Sub Folder3” or the folder of folders “JumpList Folder” – neither appeared in the Windows Explorer Jump list.

Now I understand that empty folders don’t need to classed as a “used” | “pin able” item.  However, I think it strange that a folder containing folders doesn’t captured by the Windows Explorer Jump list.

I also haven’t found any documentation to state this?  Anyone seen anything useful here?

Jump List Hint & Tip:

So my Windows Explorer Jump list hint & tip, is if you use a “folder of folders” which you wish to pin to the Windows Explorer Jump list – create a txt file in it, and open it, pin the folder to the Windows Explorer Jump list and remove the file!

For another Windows Explorer Jump list tip for removing stuck pins check out : Fix for When Pinned Jump List Items Get Stuck in Windows 7 by HowtoGeek