Previously, he was the CTO & VP Engineering for Solavei LLC and the Associate Vice President--Technical Advisory for Global Logic Inc.
PG
has 20+ years of software products, platforms and
framework experience in leadership roles at major corporations such as
Microsoft, Lucent, AT&T and Rockwell and startups, Zaplah Corp (Founder and
CEO) and Solavei. Application areas include mobile,
Cloud, eCommerce, banking, retail, enterprise, consumer devices, M2M, digital
ad media, medical devices and social networking in both B2B and B2C market
segments. He is an innovation leader
driving invention disclosures and patents (12 issued US patents) with a Ph.D. in Electrical &
Computer Engineering.
One of PG’s relevant blogs, “Jell-O Mountain Approach to
Product Innovation” can be found here: http://pgmadblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/jello-mountain-approach-to-product.html
“Social-Mobile-Cloud
for Connected User Services” – an emergent framework to create and deliver
services to network-connected users. Can this framework be applied to humans
and devices? Yes! Can it be used in the enterprise and for personal use? Yes!
Is this something new? Not really . . .
So-Mo-Clo is the result of progressive maturation of
mobile devices, cloud computing and social networks. “Social” networks can
encompass a “tree graph” in an enterprise (hierarchical org chart), a “mesh
network” of information exchange among friends and a collection of machines
operating as a “society” (Internet with its distributed routers).
Some 15 years ago, while I was developing solutions to
monitor large machinery such as a paper mill or a steel plant, we connected up
the machine monitoring devices into a local gateway, sometimes wirelessly. This
gateway led to the Internet and a server far away. The analysis of data done at
the server provided machine condition information to the plant floor operators,
to their foreman and plant manager. Some of them had laptops with connection to
the corporate Wi-Fi. As you see, a full-fledged So-Mo-Clo system! The society
of plant staff consumed the data provided by the server on mobile laptops. No
smartphones then for SMS notifications . . .
Today, I am involved in developing a social commerce
system using mobile phones that leverage the connections among friends where
integration, messaging and commerce are executed on a platform on Azure cloud. A
true full-blooded So-Mo-Clo solution! As you see things have not changed much
but it has become a lot easier – my machinery solution took over a year to put
together but the recent social commerce solution took 3 months! All the pieces
are in place to apply the framework to a myriad of situations which has the
potential to change the way we live.
Is there any problem that does not fall within the
purview of So-Mo-Clo? I cannot think of any. In the mobile, cloud and social
loop, all our work and play scenarios under CUS can be addressed.
·
My mobile app for finding a taxi: my “mobile”
connected to the taxi dispatch “cloud” that interacts with the “society” of
taxi companies that bid for my business on my mobile.
·
My enterprise sales team info-share network: I
upload juicy tidbits (“CTO of “X” has recently moved to “Y”) into my company
Sales Social network; my enterprise Active Directory disperses the information
within the relevant portions of the org chart; my colleague in the relevant
territory picks up the news and send me an SMS asking for tips about the
prospect.
·
My enterprise Wi-Fi network: SNMP and 802.11k
information is periodically updated to the IT diagnostic backend where a “heat
map” is created; a dark spot is communicated to field engineers’ mobiles and
the nearest one goes to the location to replace the AP.
When you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail –
perhaps; but to me, So-Mo-Clo framework seems to be pretty all-inclusive!
Business Case for
So-Mo-Clo: Connected User Services
What is the monetization opportunity arising from the
realization that So-Mo-Clo is a framework that can be applied widely?
1.
Productize it and sell the So-Mo-Clo platform to
device+service companies that are in the CUS space (who isn’t?!); make it easy
for them to add their specific services.
2.
Build your own device+service business and
launch it.
3.
Major cloud and telco service providers offer So-Mo-Clo
platform to all comers; lots of startups can get off the ground very quickly (attractive
in emerging markets) and grow in response to market demand (till cloud costs
become so prohibitive that you have to bring it in-house to your own data
center; this is not all bad – it means that you have successfully created a
huge business!).
Business Model #3 can be a threat to the first two in
that So-Mo-Clo as a “feature” in a major offering such as Azure can subsume
them. On the other hand, Business Model #1 has the advantage that it can be
tailored for many applications. Let us consider an enterprise example. A full
implementation can serve the entire organization; a mini-platform can be used
by a department and a micro-version can be used for a project. Add to it
document sharing, audio and video calling/ conferencing and you have an
excellent cooperative-work solution.
So-Mo-Clo
Architecture:
So-Mo-Clo architecture can be the framework to address
any of the CUS scenarios described in the introduction section (the issue of
“hammer and nails” notwithstanding). Things we call IoT (Internet of Things),
M2M (Machine-to-Machine), Connected Devices etc. map into the architecture
framework of the last section. In fact, with a generous definition of “user” in
CUS, the framework is applicable to enterprise users, consumers and previously
stand-alone devices.
Reduced to its bare
minimum, Cloud provides the computing platform for UX, data processing and
intelligence. Social Network represents the “mesh connectivity” among the users
and the intelligence embedded in the Cloud can use this infrastructure to
understand and communicate insightful information (more about how to do this in
the section on Social Networks) and not just raw data to interested parties
within the “social” network.
Mobiles connect to the Cloud platform via wireless
communication channels provided by MNOs or wireless+wired channels provided by
ISPs. Mobiles may themselves be ends-points generating data (from the apps or
audio/ video inputs) or they could be gateways aggregating data from other
sensors (such as exercise monitors or glucose meters) connected to them via
Bluetooth or USB cables.
When So-Mo-Clo is described in this generic fashion, it
is clear that this is a classic M2M network or IoT for home automation! Add
middleware for pub/sub protocols (AMQP, DDS or recently popular MQTT) to reduce
network activity and implement Java OSGi Bundle technology to dynamically
utilize on-premises or in-cloud computing resources; you have a highly elastic
and multi-purpose So-Mo-Clo solution for a wide range of application domains!
Connected Transportation, Meters & Sensors, Machines & Screens and of
course, social commerce and other human endeavors fall within the umbrella.
Again, there may be a bit of over-reach on my part but
the unifying vision is compelling I believe.
Security is of utmost concern in large consumer facing applications which
typically call for So-Mo-Clo solutions. Web and mobile-web portals should be
SSL based (https) for the transport layer security. The security can be
augmented by the Unified Login and Form Authentication - store encrypted
username and encrypted password in the data store and authenticate by
comparison of encrypted (using the same key) inputs. Service API internal
end-points and the Business Logic service internal end points should be secured.
Because of the data sensitivity and the laws around the security of personal
information, the access to data should be constrained by making sure that there
are no endpoints for individual data access and only very specific endpoints
are available for aggregated access of the data.
Some Trade Offs -
A Personal Perspective:
There are many potential trade-offs in implementing
So-Mo-Clo. Let me make it clear that I am technology agnostic. My personal
preferences are as follows:
·
Mobile: Most applications require populating
more than one form factor (mobile, tablet, laptop display); even within one
such as mobile there are multiple sizes and resolutions.
o HTML5
with associated native access libraries (such as PhoneGap) is mature enough
today to provide best in class UI/UX. Developing for each native mobile app may
be overkill.
o Responsive
UI design so that UI is pixel-perfect for any screen metrics is a must to
assure outstanding UX.
·
Cloud: Many of the recent benchmarking studies
put Azure and AWS neck and neck. Pricing works out to be similar.
o Hence
the choice is purely driven by familiarity. .Net programmers will prefer Azure
for the continuity it provides in the development environment.
o No
cloud is a perfect utility (even our electrical utility fails once in a while);
both Azure and AWS have gone down (not frequently). So the safe approach is to
create redundant deployments on both Azure and AWS (or some other clouds) if
your financial situation permits.
·
Social: Structure and storage affect performance
as the network scale (number of users) grows large.
o While
many organizations such as business firms are structured as a “tree” in a
hierarchical fashion, communication among the nodes (users) are in a “mesh” or
many-to-many fashion.
o Traversing
a tree from a leaf-node via root to another leaf-node may become very
inefficient in terms of latency if the tree is large. While it is seen that a
relational database with Memcached is a reasonable way to manage latency, a
true graph DB is the right storage for a multi-million node social network.
Social Networks:
To the initiated, “mobile” is well-understood and “cloud”
is becoming better known. However, “social networking” and its profitable exploitation
is still a black art. So here are some highlights.
In the last few decades, interest in Social Networks has
seen explosive growth with Facebook being the poster child. Indeed work had
gone on before that time in Physics especially in the area of “random network”
(Erdos and Renyi are famous names). In such networks, each new node is randomly
connected to any previous node and its evolution was studied. The work of
Barabasi and others (Scale-Free Networks: A Decade and Beyond, Science, Vol
325, 24 July 2009; pp 412-413)showed that while the physics of Random Networks
was interesting, it had little to do with “human made” networks such as Web,
Internet, friendship networks, etc. They all fall into the category of
“Scale-Free Networks” or SFN.
“Scale-free” in SFN refers to the nature of some networks
where its diameter (average # of links to reach a node from the present node;
remember “six degrees of separation” between people) is mostly unchanged as the
network grows in size. SFN’s degree (# of links per node) is distributed as a
power law (and not a binomial distribution which is the case for a purely
random network). A well-known example of power law is Pareto distribution
(“80/20 rule”). SFNs arise in networks that grow and have preferential
attachment property while growing (exhibits “rich get richer” and “first mover
advantage” phenomena).
Real social network has 3 major features:
1. Clusters (of friends who “hang out”).
2. Weak links (to your long forgotten high school
classmates).
3. Hubs denoted by “H” (politicians and others with
massive number of contacts).
Failure Modes: (1) SFN is robust to Failure and (2) SFN
is vulnerable to attacks.
Failure means random loss of network elements such as
some computers or local routers going down in the Internet. Attack refers to
concerted take-down of major “hub” routers. It has been shown that removal of a
small percent (15 to 20%) of “hub” routers will pull apart the network and
“cascading failure” will spread (due to routers NOT under attack being unable
to carry the extra load from “hub” routers) leading to total network failure.
The knowledge of failure modes has applications in the
real world. Since Hubs (or “Influencers”) have the potential to be very helpful
in spreading messages such as in a viral marketing campaign, it may pay to
reward them with extra incentives. By the same token, we saw that a few Hubs
leaving the network can cause “cascading failure” – if your business has a
customer support feature (who doesn’t!), pay special attention when Hubs call
in with a complaint – coddle them!
SFN Terms
|
In Real Life
|
What can they do?
|
How to Find?
|
Action
|
1. Cluster
|
Close friends
|
Influence
economic activity
|
Found as most
used in the Contact List
|
Make
messaging easy
|
2. Weak Links
|
Distant
acquaintances
|
Increase the
network size
|
Found as
seldom used in the Contact List
|
Message
infrequently and mention context
|
3. Hubs
|
Powerhouse
“connectors”
|
Keeps network
robust
|
Algorithms
|
Value
exchange messages
|
These insights beg the question – how do you find Hubs
and other key influencers? Rooting through the graph and counting the number of
attached nodes may be one way. While useful, this approach could be misleading
in that some nodes created a lot of connections to them early on but there has
been not much exchange of information lately. Here is a more elegant way to
analyze the social graph and derive meaningful analytics from it.
Much of the work in social networks can be modeled and
understood as the spread of infections in a population. In an IT context, we
will talk in analogous terms of “mention of information or word” in a posting
as indication of an “infection” (as in “that posting is infected by that
particular word”).
Each Node has a different “influence function” – a Node
talks about the “word” (Infection) to varying number of other Nodes (out of
total of ‘N’ Nodes). Volume of Contagion for each infection (or word of
interest/ significance) is the total number of mentions of the word in the
network (for each of total ‘K’ words of interest). In linear algebraic terms, Linear Influence
(or Infection) Model is -
v = Mi
M - Influence Matrix (KxN);
v – Volume of Infection vector (Kx1);
i – Node Infection vector (Nx1)
To the initiated, this equation is a joy to behold in its
simplicity and familiarity! Linear algebra has so many powerful tools, fast
algorithms and practical insights that a lot of useful information can be
extracted by the expert. In general, singular values and vectors (and related
eigenvalues and vectors) of matrix, M, can tell you which nodes are the major
“influencers” or Hubs, how big is their influence and even what forms the bases
of their influence!
To apply this technique in practice, you will start with
simulations of your social commerce network and predict Hubs, influence and
other behavior. For those interested, I
can provide MATLAB code that generate Scale Free Network of ‘N’ nodes and ‘d’
degrees (2 is typical for social networks) and some plotting routines. This
is also the time to optimize your algorithms for large networks (large ‘N’
nodes) for matrix computations above as well as develop iterative or adaptive
solutions so that you can study and predict network behavior over time with
minimal computations.
Once your business is up and running, you can start
replacing simulated data with historic data collected from your real network
and apply the results and insights to your business to improve or control the
viral spread of your marketing message or identify the Hubs to provide them
with targeted incentives and so on.
Call to Action:
·
No more stand-alone devices - wrap a connected
service at least for remote configuration and maintenance à “Connected User
Services”.
·
Deliver service from the cloud; consider
redundant cloud deployments of core functionality for 100% availability.
·
Mobile phones provide ideal interfaces for
service and status information anywhere, anytime.
·
Adopt responsive design to be pixel-perfect for
varying display form-factors.
·
Tier data connectivity according to their
significance; time-shift and consolidate low-importance data upload to minimize
mobile network activity.
·
Shared information creates a social network; add
social analytics to provide useful metrics and insights to improve service
delivery.
From the foregoing, it must be clear that So-Mo-Clo
framework is a powerful one that brings together the power of wireless mobiles
for “anytime anywhere” interactivity, cloud as a computing utility and social
networking as an analytics tool to deliver end-to-end Connected User Services; applications
are many and will impact all business segments. Whether you are a So-Mo-Clo
platform vendor or a user, the solution framework is already past the
feasibility threshold today and your insightful use will have a positive impact
on your quarterly revenues!
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