Paul Miller

Siri provoked a flurry of interest last summer, and not just because CTO Tom Gruber took part in one of my podcasts. With their genesis inside a big DARPA-funded Artificial Intelligence project, their talk of emergent Virtual Personal Assistants and their slick iPhone-powered demonstrations, the company ticked more than enough of the right boxes to get the semantic technology community positively drooling for more. And then things went quiet. Fast forward to 2010, and Siri is back. The back-end technology is faster, more robust, and fuelled by loads more data. Robert Scoble has been amongst those dropping not-so-subtle hints on Twitter for days, and other big names in and around the Valley have also been targeted in a carefully orchestrated programme of pre-briefings an... (more)

Security and the Cloud

I was talking with Avanade’s Senior Director for Enterprise Security, Ace Swerling, earlier today. The conversation touched on a wide range of security and identity management issues that I’ll probably return to, but one of Ace’s comments brought my attention back to an issue that has been nagging at me for a while. As I’m sure we all know, security concerns often figure highly in discu... (more)

Keep Your Executive Assistant Happy if Moving to the Cloud

Cloud Computing Journal Google held a small event in London late last month, at which senior executives from a wide range of organisations gathered to discuss the impact of the Cloud. Presenters included luminaries such as Marc Benioff, Werner Vogels, Geoffrey Moore and Nick Carr, as well as CIOs at the coalface in adopting various Cloud (mainly SaaS) solutions. Carr blogged on Friday, n... (more)

International Cloud Computing Piece for GigaOM Pro

Cloud Computing Journal on Ultizer I have been a fan of (and subscriber to) GigaOM’s analyst site, GigaOM Pro, for some time. As the site’s blurb describes, “All too often, insider analyst research and commentary is costly, inaccessible or ineffective to the entrepreneurs, investors and innovators who need timely insights most. We’re changing this by making high-quality expert reports, d... (more)

If Government is a Platform, What Are People Building?

I’ve written and spoken before about a recent upsurge in enthusiasm for exposing data from Government in ways that facilitate use and re-use, and will doubtless be returning to this topic in the ‘Government Data’ panel session at the Linked Data Meetup in London on Wednesday. Tim Berners-Lee has been amongst those rallying to the cause, and working with Governments here and overseas to re... (more)