The Googlebrain

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Mike Burrows, Google’s Principal Engineer, came to the Cambridge Computer Lab on Wednesday to give a talk on “The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems”, a large-scale distributed lock service used in several Google products. This is a gig he’s done before, but it was interesting to see him in action. As he was talking, the thought that came to mind was that Google has two main advantages over the competition: one is the PageRank algorithm; the other is its ability to manage the Googleplex — the enormous, distributed computing resource that the company owns and operates. Mike’s work is a key element in the latter.

The Lifestraw

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Picture credit: Vestergaard Frandsen

From Photos: Low-cost tech that meets basic needs | CNET News.com…

People can safely drink from polluted bodies of water through the go-anywhere LifeStraw, which filters more than 99 percent of life-threatening bacteria and viruses. It costs up to $5 and lasts about a year, filtering 2 liters per day. A quarter of a million LifeStraws are in use throughout Asia and Africa, where nonprofit groups distribute them following emergencies, such as this month’s monsoon floods in India.

LifeStraw maker Vestergaard Frandsen is working to develop water filters to shut out toxic chemicals, such as arsenic found commonly in Bangladesh. Its new household filter can handle 15 times the amount of water as the straw. The Swiss company spent millions of dollars over a decade to develop the LifeStraw, which grew out of the nonprofit Carter Center’s goal to eradicate the Guinea worm disease. The prevalence of this ailment, caused by a water-borne parasite prevalent in western Africa, has shrunk to less than 100,000 cases from 50 million in the 1950s.

Neat, eh?

The future of computing (contd.)

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As Quentin says, who would have thought ten years ago that Unix machines would look like this? The most interesting thing about the iPod Touch is not that it’s a music player, but that it’s the best portable browsing machine we have yet seen. Its capacity to render web pages and make them readable is simply astounding. The touch interface plus the software’s rendering ability also suggests that the newspaper industry has been looking in the wrong place all the time. It always supposed that its electronic salvation lay in display hardware — in the form of ‘e-paper’, i.e. lightweight foldable, flexible, high-resolution displays. The effectiveness of the iPod Touch suggests that the combination of clever software and even a small high-res display can do the trick.

Social graph-iti

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The Economist isn’t impressed by the huge valuations currently being placed on Facebook. Neither am I.

Update: In the end, Microsoft valued Facebook at $15 billion.

Microsoft has paid $240m for a 1.6% stake in Facebook that values the hugely popular social networking site at $15bn.

Facebook spurned an offer from Microsoft’s rival Google, which was also keen to invest the site.

Microsoft will also sell internet ads for Facebook outside the United States as part of the deal that took several weeks of negotiating.

What’s surprising is how small the Microsoft stake is. This has to be about advertising rather than investment.

Apple now bigger than IBM

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Hmmm… From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Ask people these days who Big Brother symbolized in Apple’s classic “1984″ commercial, and a goodly number of folks are liable to say Microsoft. But 23 years ago, the target of Apple’s hammer-wielding freedom fighter was IBM, the PC market leader at the time. So it must have been with an exhilarating sense of satisfaction that Steve Jobs and the Apple brass watched another dazzling set of quarterly financials push the company’s stock price up to around $187 a share today, vaulting Apple’s market cap past IBM’s by about $6 billion.

And while Google-watchers go gaga over its soaring share price (see “A six-letter word for bubble? Try gasbag“), note that an investor who bought Apple on the same day Google stock debuted in 2004 would have, as of the close of market yesterday, made 40 percent more than if the same money had been put into the search sovereign’s shares.