Apps and Technologies that will rock my world in 2011 (Part 1)

Never before has the technology expanded its outreach as it did in past couple of years. The SMS, Wii, smart connected devices and social networks have fueled technology adaption among the teens putting the American youth "almost" at par with Japan's and Europe's; and ahead in terms of mobile social networking. The government has rightly identified broadband as the key enabler for the applications and services. Broadband is the glue binding the tools which integrate all parts of a users life at one place; where banking, shopping, utilities /home appliance control, entertainment can travel with the person and controlled from a single device, I am not calling a smartphone, because mobility, data and web access are shared domains between smartphones, tablets, netbooks, notebooks, handheld gaming devices, eReaders, UMPCs, EMPCs, MIDs, PDAs etc etc. The phone just happens to be the most endearing of the personal gadgets because of its legacy voice application, but that may change with the almost arrived wireless bandwidths holding the promise to enable IP video and voice telephony on any computing device anywhere. Everything is going mobile, the cloud was yesterdays enabler, today is about the user experience and how to ride the cloud in style.

Here are the technologies that I know will rock my world in 2011.

Mobile Wallet:

The phone first took care of the Rolodex and rid the wallet of the contact book, but this one will take us a step further; no more carrying a fat wallet with an unbalanced gait. America is a laggard in mobile banking to the point where it is behind Eastern Europe in terms of mobile banking subscribers. Part of it is due to easier access to other tech avenues such as PC for banking than say LATM or Eastern blocks (which basically just jumped that phase of tech adaption straight to mobility), but it seems that the connecting technologies such as the NFC, mobile client security, and consumer acceptance along with the understanding between credit issuing, underwriting and clearing agencies have reached a critical mass where the carriers are about to get their wish and their thumbs in the credit value chain pie.

Unified Communication & IP Video Telephony:

Back in the days, about 7 years ago when I was working on the first phone that seamlessly moved a user cell call between WiFi and cellular networks, unified communication was a little known buzz word, but the time for UC has finally arrived and the users will soon have a one place and one ID for their IM, email, short message, voice and video; "unifying" their communication experience; not to overlook the separate components of IP video that is about to make video calling a norm.

Personal shopping Systems:

These have not yet taken off, part because of integration issues with different components and technologies promoted by different stakeholders, and part because of consumer reluctance to its value proposition in saving them time and money. But I believe that the bigger pipes of 3G and now 4G (LTE and WiMax), augmented reality apps along with mobile devices that can scan / download coupons and pay are allowing consumers to run instant checks and checkouts while in the aisle like never before; the increasing user comfort with their personal devices as shopping assistants will also advance the in house loyalty driven department/grocery store PSSs.

Virtual Reality:

Augmented reality, motion sensing, and voice recognition have come to age in Kinect and Wii. Virtual confererences are getting popular, but the day is not far where one instead of dry browsing an item as in touching it with a mouse cursor or a finger tip to expand, shrink, rotate the image; can actually go through an entire mall walk in a store pick an item look at it, move on to another store and so forth all from comfort of their lazy boy. To be honest I don't expect this to rock my world just yet, I mean not in the fullest sphere of my expectations, where I can go to a store and not find a human being but tiny projectors creating holographic humanoids ready to answer all queries and "process" my requests; but then again I don't want to miss cajoling for discounts just yet!

North Korea, an intriguing case study?

I was reading an article with information in it. Useful information because it somewhat satisfied a curiosity. But at the end of a coherent argument the author eventually succumbed to the fear of unknown and brought theology into it, by outlining the arrival of savior to end the east and west feud, resulting in...well head scratching for me.

The question that baffles me is why a starved nation surrounded by influential neighbors tries to rock the boat,..with umm! a missile and basically obliterates.... well, the boat. Strange as North Korean actions are, I don't see satisfaction in resembling them to the commotions of an irrate individual or maybe they are, but not Kim Jong il's!

I am from a country where every few years military coup is fed to the nation in the name of defibrillation of a dying systm, when in reality, it is a life line to the ending or to be ended power of a military leader. There is a similarity in pattern of agitating the world every now and then like a brat, among nations run by dictators, warlords and military leaders. These nations are usually poor, dependent on foreign aid even for necessities like food, high in military might, admant about their nuclear right and the people are usually either too wary, too afraid or fed a steady diet of the "revolutionary" leader, to make a regime change.

After the devastation laid by American bombings in previous war and Russia watching from sidelines, we can hardly assume that the North Korean actions stem from the combined will of it's people, democracy its not.

With a thousand mile border, it is scarcely in interest of China, that North and South go at it again. The refugee problem alone will make China cringe on the thought, but more than that a stronger unified Korea as an aftermath, will probably pose a bigger economic threat. However the pacific is currently controlled by American vessels, and Japan and America just had their biggest ever combined military exercises. This show of power can't just be meant for North Korea. The trade routes now policed by American warships are rather important to China. Neither China nor North Korea are too fond of Japan, and with India also rising to prominence in Asia, China might consider keeping a powerful military ally close by. That doesn't mean that the North's provocations are blessed by China, as an eventual all out Korean war will not be in China's obvious best interests.

The middle east interest in North Korea as an eligible force against Israel, true as it maybe, cannot be larger than the oil producing countries concerns in their biggest oil consuming market, namely USA. And even if the middle eastern nation or nations are arming themselves through North Korea for a possible war against Israel, it is less likely the leverage for North Korea's current military actions, for little assistance can be expected from these countries in case of an all out war.

With powerful military comes, well, powerful generals, which possibly can have designs of starting their own dynasties. After all the only eligibility Kim Il Sung's son Kim Jong Il possessed was a hereditary right, and cunning. As time comes nearer to replace Kim Jong Il, the internal political power struggles are bound to heighten. One might start a war in order to redirect the population's attention from the crowning of the heir, or to create a scenario where a young heir has no play in the action and only a true war hero or military strategist can emerge as the rightful heir; son, son in law or ......

Python in elevator

or vice versa..I'd say they both present a sizable slippery problem. You press a button, the button lights up, whatever happens behind the scenes the curtain rises to an inviting open door to take you places, vertically that is. Never before I had thought about this but an elevator controller presents quiet a twisted problem. Just imagine people who are standing by the elevators, who, like me, believe that if you press a lit elevator button again, and again, and harder, would somehow translate to porting their urgent travel needs to the elevator controller. And off course sometimes just at the instance of your pressing the already lit button, the door opens to a ding, like ta da!... it's the magic touch of that divine individual that summoned the powers of calculations to just lay humble in his honor and drive the shaft to quickly meet his need...

Data structures and algorithms are complicated and life needs to be simple and simple is beautiful. Efficiency in life is aesthetically pleasing and closer to purity, but difficult and inefficiency is ugly and results ultimately, in a complete breakdown of system and ...sadly is easier to attain. The simplicity in complexity is the art of making life aesthetically pleasing and beautiful, that's why the most complicated of algorithms are just beautifully implemented and the most evolved minds are capable of expressing the intricate ideas in simplest of ways - the art of knowledge to make rest of us mere mortals observe in awe and bask in; hey at least I am one of the species, where that intelligent specimen came from.

Human life, a Wiener Process?

This is a blog by a dot whose favorite read is Candide. If any of topics have been taken out of context or dealt lighter than their exalted position in shaping the future of human race or "markets" it is being done purely subliminally but intentionally. Now is the time to notice that the author puts his disclaimer right on the top of his ideas, to spare his limited readership the extra stress on their eyes and a nuisance on their minds of a footprint, because they are allowed to form opinions, disregard, discard, take out of context to north, south, east, west or simply read on because sometime spending a precious commodity such as time frivolously feels powerful, may the empowerment be yours. For more seriously inclined I have a blog "Also sprach Ashar", or the pathetic "Leiden des alter Ashar".

As the topic suggests we want to ponder on predictability of another stochastic variable in the illusory realm of universal time be it discrete or continuous; umm! a human. Considering the human has a normal disposition, I mean normal distribution which in our case is one and the same. Unfortunately for a human to be a "Wiener" he/she/it will have no dependence on the historical path, which we all know is only true in case of lottery winners(well even lottery winners have to buy a *#$!@#) or Markovians, the rest of us may depend on the Brownian motion for our existence but the outcome of our lives is pretty correlated to our historical paths, "outliers" or not. Let's for fun's sake assume that happenings in a long time interval can be divided into infinite small happenings which are independent of each other and are meaningless as in having a mean of zero and they deviate from each other by a fixed amount always. The drift rate i.e mean change per unit of time for a stochastic variable( not to be confused with a drunkard, even if he is following a Brownian path on a straight line) multiplied by the change in time will give us one part of his future while we can add an unpredictable string of events in terms of some multiple of deviation from expected outcomes. But since both the predictable and unpredictable parts of the generalized "Wiener" are multiples of constants (part average drift per unit of time and part a fixed variation from the mean), I declare that humans are not mere Wieners, they may be whiners or diners but they are not Wieners, in mathematical sense that is, because some us can be all of the above specially...okay never mind that thought process. Simply said a human cannot be modeled as a stock even if he/she/it follow a random walk.
Ahh! but Ito's process may give us a better approximation, not to mention a headache of calculus to go through as it makes the constant terms in a Wiener process a function of the variable and the time itself, which is more human, since the change in our future is neither free from where we are at present nor from the time it takes to make that change.

Beside the Hull is laying Saigyo so quoating one after the other is befitting,

"Shino tamete suzume umi haru o no warawa
hitai eboshi no hoshige naru kana",

Drawing his
sparrow hunting bow
of bent bamboo
the litle boy seems to be wishing
for a guardsman's black hat

Building and Including Boost libraries (VS 2010)

Before I venture into the pair trading further, I had to do a modification. Which is to read all the files in a directory and calculate stats on each pair one by one. I needed a directory iterator, which took me to boost filesystem, which happens to be one of the boost libs that need to be built in order to be used. Building and using boost with VS 2010 was easier than I thought. Here are the simple steps to build boost library and linking to it.
Assuming we have the boost downloaded for windows (boost_1_45_0_beta1.zip includes bjam, so no need for separate download)

1. start a command window.
2. change to directory Program Files (x86)\VS2010\VC\bin and run "vcvars32.bat". This will setup nmake and other environment variables for visual C++ to run from command line.
3. Change to directory where boost is installed. Run "bootstrap.bat". This will get the bjam specific setup done.
4. Run the command "bjam --build-type=complete". The only reason I will build the complete libraries is if, somehow you decided to static linking instead of dynamic linking you will need to rebuild those specific libraries. The default "bjam" command will only build dynamic linking libraries.
5. After a patience, patience and more patience messages the libs will be ready and at the end you can see the directories for include and link libraries.

If you do a simple program like directory iteration (just pluck a sample from the boost_1_45_0_beta1\libs\filesystem\v3\test\msvc10 directory).

Two more steps are needed to compile and link the program.
First in the C/C++ properties add the boost directory in the "Additional Include Directories" (For me it was D:\boost_1_45_0_beta1\)

Secondly in the Linker options add the library path (in my case it was D:\boost_1_45_0_beta1\stage\lib ).

The program should compile and link. I used static linking (in the C/C++ code generation-->Runtime library options, choose the options with(/MTd) or (/MT) depending upong debug or release build) to avoid the hassle of packing my libs along with my exe, so I needed the libboost_filesystem-vc100-mt-sgd-1_45.lib. One can choose which libs to build, but in the age of terabyte hard drives, building a Gig worth of libs in one shot was the option for me.

Pair trading application

When I downloaded the open source FIX engine I thought going through open source FIX ,Quantlib, and boost will get me up to speed on writing any numerical application. But compiling libraries and going through code was not really making me feel "accomplished". I wanted to brush up my C++ in a financial setting with my teeth clutched into the monster and its fangs ripping my sanity apart. I needed a project! So I posted a comment on GQR group in linked in and got response from a nice quant who wanted a pair trading algorithm developed. Well little I knew about the complexity of the project, till he sent me a 200 plus page book, a research paper and some instructions. I was excited to get a project. I was to make time series statistical calculations for statistical arbitrage. Although I believe that economic environment is/was? ripe for risk arbitrage as the chances of companies going bankrupt and emerging out of "crisis" as brand new organizations offer ample opportunities for remodeling capital structures.

I started with the book, the chapter one is .......by the end of 7 chapter, I was underwater.I started the project and I was hoping for a river of code to just flow through, but instead of monsoons and torrentials it was a trickle here and a drop there. Meanwhile I was also collecting all sort of available "free" C++ books, numerical methods in C++, design patterns, thinking in C++, Stroussup, Eckel, Scott Meyer, Erich Gamma to feel securely fastened as the programming part took off. I even downloaded the open source UML tool by Ameos to help design the class structure. The result of all this was a month and a half spent on reading material, writing snippets and "strategizing". I am not sure if any or all of that browsing, nibbling, sniffing, gnawing at pages helped but one night, I sat down and wrote the class structure and was on my way to at least getting the different time series calculations....

....The end result is a beta version completed few days ago... and from here on I will chronicle how the project will develop further....Next blog I will outline some of the C++ and the calculations for a stochastic time series parameters including C++ routines for covariance, variance, co-integration etc....and what a wonderful tool STL containers are...

The code is not commented, but it might be helpful for building something on top of it or taking snippets from it. If you can't down load, send an email to asharmairaj@yahoo.com. (I cannot post the PDF for Quantitative Methods and Analysis by GANAPATHY VIDYAMURTHY, but shoot me an email and I will send)

Example ticker files with trade data
============================
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B_40SUf1ic7PNmRhZjhkNWQtMmZhZC00MDg4LThiOWEtMWEzNzYzMzUxMzgz&hl=en&authkey=CPPv7aoH
Executable
================
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B_40SUf1ic7PNDQ3YmFiYjQtZjIzNy00NWM4LTlmYTUtZGE0N2MwYzJiODU0&hl=en&authkey=CJ-ktugB

Visual studio 2010 Project and files
==========================
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B_40SUf1ic7PYzY3ZjQwMGItMDBmNi00Y2FhLThiNmItMDAwMWU0ZWE3MTMz&hl=en&authkey=CL_X_JwL

The ROI?

Blogs are like diaries, some pages are wonderful and full of insights delivered in poetic frenzy of a wine drenched sage, and others...are well babbling...and this my dear reader, is; my page. Today I want to explore my understanding of an organization. We have finance, operations, and marketing, which sometimes are the same person who answers the phone, no matter how many different numbers are listed on the website.

Everything you make is operations, everything you sell is marketing, and everything you spend or earn is finance. Yes, I understand it is a bit more complicated than that! but complication is the devil in the heaven of free floating thoughts and we don't want to have none of it here in this blog. The question now is where does strategy sit in this whole affair of bartering products (services are products of labor) for that abstraction of human capability or "luck", which used to be identified by paper, plastic and soon to be your phone?

The question is why can't all the intelligent people involved in these functions/"departments" come together to decide what is the best course of action(ugh! for lack of better prose) to take. After all if you are making a goblet or you are in serving business you should know pouring better than the "Saqis" of Rumi or at least know the make of Jamshed's "Jaam". If you are in business of selling bibles you better be able to sell it to the pope. Lastly if you don't know profit and loss you would have some one who does, and you must be the expert crafts man or his voice to the world.

As much as I would like the world to exist in dimensions of you make, I like and we exchange, it has moved on to be a world of manufacturers, services providers, consumers and regulators. And hence evolved the need of a fourth player. Somebody who can Abra cadabra in to the minds of people, generalize their desires to satisfy their needs in a sustained manner to market segment, and then, best of all, magically guess their future needs and wants into sustained growth or "forecasting".

On top of it someone may desire a service and may have ample means to satisfy his need, but the problem here is that his excess in exercising his will and means to quench his needs may evoke a chain reaction of desire in others, with or without the means, to satisfy their needs, causing a disruption in ways of living of us "normals", and when things are good, change is bad, hence we must have, you guessed it, regulators.

Then there are those, who, while the enterprising creator of comforts grinds his capabilities to deliver, simply mimick to evolve and hence create competition. Competition is bad for an enterprise, the consumers, us humans may benefit through the evolutionary benefits of competition, but enterprises fear becoming the apes of world, so competition is bad. In the days of yore, we would use a club to extinguish such a blatant attempt to steal now we must use stealth sting of competitive intelligence, and avoid in process, SEC, FCC, FDA and whole bunch of other acronyms.

The ever increasing engagement of species into genetics chaos through random multiplication leaves nothing to certainty except fickleness, hence we need consumer trends. But we do expect a pattern in randomness and we intend to find a person who can identify that pattern of needs, and behaviors. But we want that person to understand that we are limited in our powers to create an exact match to the perceived need because of limitations of our craft and our access to "resources",( ummm! budgetary constraints). And we also want this voodoo child to realize that seemingly entwined human interests are not that "interdependant" to all eyes seeking sustenance through same enterprise. So he must act as a vehicle to bridge that gap of understanding between the maker, seller and counter. Also he must do all this in a way that makes the regulators feel that the greater good caused by the tax dollars is far more beneficial than the implications of dodging "regulations" and quashing pesky competitors

No wonder the ROI of strategy is hard to calculate......

Myspace was, facebook is, like Yahoo and Google?

The recent news about Myspace's falling web traffic and it looking for new search advertising partner came as no surprise. But that made me think that why some websites and portals do better than others. Why did Google made it so big than Yahoo! actually let me rephrase that, because that may sound like Yahooo didn't do well, while it was "the" search engine of its time. Before going to a macro level of combining searching preferences of 100s of millions of users into one over encompassing, over arching, sweeping and I mean a really grand stroke of generalization, I thought I should just think about me, and why I like Facebook better and why I like Google for searching and yahoo for emailing. And I realized I don't like noise. A portal makes for a noisy search engine. If Yahoo! main page would give me an option to just have a search UI, without the surrounding barrage of information that I may as well put in the recycling bin, I would use Yahoo more often for searching purposes. Same with Myspace, the home page, yes it is configurable, but the default is an organizational nightmare. I am not so fond of Myspace's new title page either, as it appears to be more portal like with tons of "suggestions" for music, video, and yes! Karoke instead of a social networking as the hub from which everything else evolves. This makes the site the center and not the consumer. But I guess they are targeting the musicians, trying artists and a demographic which likes to use Myspace as the portal of choice for showcasing their talents, building a fan base and what's new in popular culture. Although I think that can be done equally well with facebook.
Overtime, I tend to favor a website with a specialized purpose, LinkedIn for professional contacts, Facebook for all contacts and social "tweets", and twitter for following a buzz without any additional responsibility of actually knowing the "bird".
The main question remains, is their a turnaround for Yahoo and Myspace? For Myspace to find the same growth in its user base will be very difficult. It may find new niches or develop the old ones like the artists in residence, but as far as being world's contact book, it has lost to Facebook. The newer generations will find and figure out their own social networking sites just like the music, clothes and fashion, but for this gen X, Y and I think Z it will be Facebook, lets just assume that advertising dollars are heading that way for the foreseeable future.
Yahoo, is more complicated because Google has to maintain a reputation of not forcing consumers will, or strong arming advertiser, something of a sort that Microsoft faced when it killed Netscape. This can always turn searchers back to other search engines. To make an analogy, in the search space we have Walmarts like Google, but that in no way means that Target can't make a decent buck.....
.....

Why is my desk phone still at my desk?

Well the new self imposed infliction is to build QuickFIX java using the netbeans. What better way of getting on rally with Java and C# then to build a small exchange and a webservice in .net. Shelving that topic and delving into how the day was spent on going over VoWLAN market shares and who shipped the most units and whose market share bumped up and which theater is showing more progress. Frankly speaking, when is the promise shown by IP phones is really going to be realized. I see smartphones projections going through the roof, and apps galore to dazzle the consumers till they will think they need a head scratching app, but where are my IP everywhere phones, and I mean wireless. Interestingly enough, most enterprises have converted to IP PBXs and the desktop phones are mostly IP based, then why O! Why that IP phone is not my Droid, iPhone, Blackberry or your pick of robots or fruits. Even with the promise of unified communication, the conversion to Mobile VoWLAN has not been "exponential". Surprisingly, even the companies that make WiFi enabled, or single mode Wifi phones don't have their products rolled through out their network. The Mobile plans are still not cheap enough to replace each office worker with a smartphone hence the need for a VoIP phone is there. The seamless transfer of call between a cellular and Wifi network is a thing of past, and it did not generated any thrill in the market place, but I think it is not the feature that is lack luster, it is the devices and their eco systems. It took iPod to popularize digital music, iPhone to apps, iPad to tabletts, and I guess when there is a superb VoIP client on a dazzling device with all the right integration to PC, PBX, networks, social media, cable, reality TV...I am getting carried away here...
Back to fun...with some build configurations..

Uncle Sam wants you, to broadband

....and for good reasons. The way FCC has taken up the task of making broadband every citizens right foretells its importance. The broadband is probably the next "industrial revolution" and FCC wants to make sure that it has the right tools and data to bring this revolution to masses. The mechanism it wants to evoke is competition to lower the prices and incentives to bring private sector investments. The tools it wants to use is the power to allocate spectrum and yes the eternal source of never ending cash flow, tax payers money, will be used as development funds. Hey 10 Billion in 10 years to bring high speed data to my premises, is better than using 100, no ...200 Billion dollars to basically insure an agency, that insures me, well that's a "technical" discussion of other sort.
The task to reduce prices of wireline by bringing about competition from wireless, through increased spectrum allocations and developments seems plausible. But the task is much harder then it seems. First the top speeds of LTE and WiMAX download/upload don't and can't match the peak speeds of wireline as Cable, PON or DSL. But for most practical purposes, I would say they can and will compete. But the real problem is the cost of laying infrastructure and then the two to maximum three players in big metros, to one and none players in rural areas.
The recent price hikes and data plan manipulations by AT&T highlight this problem, and we can also see similar moves by Verizon and Sprint to limit data usage or pay to "stream" as much as you want.
The FCC wants to get a better handle on pricing and competition and it will start collecting pricing data to decide the best remedies. Data collection is first, then it is 500 MHz spectrum, 30o MHz of which will go to mobile but all in due time of 10 years, which is not bad, since it accompanies a plan to spread digital literacy. We should see some of the broadband "stimulus" fund money, aka Connect America Fund going to the Digital literacy Corps.
...This post is to barely scratching the surface of one chapter of the plan...but hey we have 10 years to catch up ...