Collaboration among competitors in the tech world is inevitable

Tech wars have become somehow the norm in recent times from lands far away and even back here in the motherland. Recall how Apple sued Samsung for something I am not interested in talking about now and then Samsung sued back, or is it countersuing? eventually they both ended up paying each other which makes me wonder why didn’t they have to agree, and pay the difference in damages.  Maybe it was a grand scheme of money transfer that no one got wind of and somebody was laughing at our stupidity for following the multimillion lawsuit.

Anyway today we look at the inevitable collaboration that might need to exist among the tech giants in order for all of us to enjoy the technology products that we so love to talk about. Consider what will happen if Google decided to sue Microsoft for some reason and then they part ways in terms of doing business. Then that would mean Google chrome is provided with limited resources on windows(Just a thought). This could impact performance of chrome negatively giving it a bad image to end users. While we at it, if anyone has noticed chrome has update its right click box to reflect a more flat look(read windows 8). It’s been a fortnight since I noticed that and I wonder what’s next.

Nokia is one of the phone making giants and oracle owns Java. Nokia phones are known to support the applications build in that platform. So however much both could say that they are not working together, they actually are business partners in this sense.

My friends in the business world might beg to differ because essentially these companies provide different products . However the catch is that even if the products and services provided are different, the end point is more or less the same. The clients that they target are greatly overlapped. The significance of this is that even though the customer will use the products differently, at the end of the day they budget against a fixed amount so the question is always about what will be forgone in order to acquire the other.

Having agreed about that lets take a close look at the motherland. Different tech companies are coming in providing for products and services which have a promise to fuel the transformation of the economy into a middle income one by 2030 in line with the vision.  Safaricom for instance running its hugely successful mobile money transfer or M-KOPA providing low energy solutions to rural Kenyans.  The government is talking about e-governance; this is something it cannot achieve on its own and not by a long shot. Collaboration means ensuring that it builds its data centers in way third party providers can hook onto the data and provide it to whoever needs in a way that they need it.   

Back to the Safaricom M-kopa partnership. First a customer in rural Kenya needs to decide, “am I going to spent the night in the dark because I talked too much on the phone?” Its questions of this kind that will lead to more collaborations between tech companies in order to position themselves  strategically in the face of a changing Kenya.

Therefore in the coming days, I believe we will see more partnerships among especially the tech giants or like in the case of Google and YouTube, massive takeover’s if that means these kind of partnerships are of mutual benefit to the involved parties. Additionally I hope that the government formats its data in a way that will make it more accessible not just for scrutiny by observers but also for interested parties to disseminate it in more channels which are easy to use such as the mobile platform.

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What next for government offices using windows XP?

In a recent post here, I explored the fate of two systems whose future is certainly doomed. In a continuation of the same today I explore the extend of the effect of Microsoft’s stop of support for windows XP on government offices. Recall that the support for the operating system will stop in April 2014; this is Just a year from now.

During my campus days, I attended an attachment at a government office which is supposed to be using the latest technologies and especially when it comes to the operating system used. However at the time most of the offices’ desktop machines were still using windows XP. Also note that the machines were a mere Pentium IV. Well Maybe the Pentium thing can be understood but the use of windows XP when Vista came and went with windows 7 as the main thing is quite unacceptable.

The ramifications of using windows XP after its support has been stopped are diverse and not just to the government offices but to any other person. I have talked about this in this post but one important thing to note is that there will be new malware which will be targeting the operating system and with no patches then one would never know what they expose themselves to.

Owing to the government’s bureaucratic processes and the “it’s not my responsibility” attitude it will take such a long time to have all the systems updated. In addition if the recent events at IEBC are anything to go by then a lot is left to be desired. This will probably be another opportunity for somebody’s turn to eat and we all can simply wait and see what will happen when the Inevitable happens come April 2014. 

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Beware of who you give access to your data

In my previous post here, I talked about how data about people stored in form of user profiles can be used against them. Using data against somebody doesn’t necessarily mean using the data to prosecute them or blackmail, or at least not in the strictest sense. The phrase is used in this context to mean whatever way that data can be used that the owner doesn’t approve of.

In expounding how users’ data can and will be used against them, I will give a small anecdote of what happened a few days ago. I own a yahoo account which I created five years ago before I joined campus. Somewhere mid campus I discarded it for obvious reason that Gmail offered a more superior service. However I didn’t burn the bridge and usually I go back to clear spam or something like that. So last week after I logged, instead of being redirected either to my mailbox or the highlights page, I was presented with a page that said I needed to authorize yahoo to duplicate my data to a server in a different country. The prompt claimed that this move was to enable for more efficient services.  Whether or not I allowed yahoo to duplicate the data they have about me is not relevant for now.

Yahoo, I would say were kind enough to state their intentions. There are a number of applications whose makers don’t care whether the users allow it or not. What they do is state somewhere in fine print that the provided data will be used in various ways. But we as users are very careless and the inclusion of Privacy policy to which one has to agree to is seen as a nuisance.

These applications mostly apply in Gmail and facebook. Consider an application that allows you to chat from anywhere. A user has to provide their username and password. Or probably when one is visiting a website and they need to comment on the page in Facebook, they have to provide their login details. In the real sense what happens is that the provision of those details is like telling the application to login on the user’s behalf.

What users miss out from such a feature is that somewhere in very small fonts, there is a variant of this statement, “we will use your data as we please”.

I have nothing against Skillpages, but while we are at it , I think that’s the lack of innovation. We have LinkedIn etc, why should anyone be registered to Skillpages? Anyway, late last year I got an email from somebody I didn’t expect to send me an email. It turned out they were inviting me to join skillpages. But we weren’t in good terms so I had to ask why they cared which sites I registered. I embarrassed myself because they said they had not done such a thing.

The blame goes entirely to skills pages. When a user registers from a link inside Gmail then all their contacts are imported and an email is sent to each one inviting them to skillPages. Not everyone in the contacts list fancies social sites.

As I pen off I just wanna remind everyone out there. Under any site where users have to create an account, there is always a section called privacy settings. From there, applications access to personal data can be controlled or even denied all together.

Let’s not enjoy the fruits of the information society while putting our reputation at risk. It is precarious that I haven’t talked about data being used to steal money from your bank account because that has been talked about before. I emphasize on handling ones data in a way that it keeps one reputation at check. This is because in the coming days reputation will be have more worth than money!!!

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Your data is never really deleted, for real!

In my continuation of the personal buzz with the “cloud” I need to write about how the data we store on various portals is never actually deleted. What data am I talking about? This is the personal information such as names, home town, addresses etc that we supply when opening accounts say on facebook, twitter or creating an email address on yahoo or Gmail.

Many a times I have come across people who said they have closed their facebook accounts. Even the websites purport to help close accounts if one needs to do so even though they make finding that option very difficult since users are their customers and the first mission of any enterprise is to retain existing customers.  There is also an online tool at www.accountkiller.com which is a self proclaimed solution to all problems such as a comment someone posted on facebook, some emails someone sent or stuff like that.

Well it’s important to note that at a technical level deleting any form of data is  near impossible. Let me start with the simple introduction to computer concepts. In any computer system, data is usually stored in a hard drive. If data is deleted on a hard drive it’s not deleted in the actual sense, the space it occupies is only marked as “free”. This space remains in that state until more data is posted there and overwrites the original one.

However no entity would dare delete data they have about anything. That’s the rule of the thumb. Even the DELETE commands learned in basic programming are just for demonstration purposes; they are never used, trust me on this. Whenever a user decides to close their account the script that runs at that point will only  tell the data manager at the back end to mark the account as closed. This is as simple as changing the status field from 1 to 0 or active to inactive/closed.

Moving on to another approach. Assuming that the data is actually deleted, does it mean that now all the information about a person is lost? No? This is because as long as a company collects information, then information is its source of competitive advantage. It has to take proactive steps to ensure that even the brink of Armageddon won’t make them lose the information they have. The very first step in achieving this is through laying out a water tight Disaster recovery programme.   When dealing with data what comes to mind first is continuous back-up of the live site with the backup copies encrypted and stored offsite. So even if someone tries to disappear the old fashioned way by bombing the data center where data about them is stored then still copies of the same will be available elsewhere for restoration.

That, just like some six people somewhere, is my verdit on why anyone’s data is never really deleted and can possibly be used against them. But the use against them is a post for another day.

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