Tag Archive for China

| January 27, 2015
Comments Off on What Holds the Internet Together

What Holds the Internet Together

What Holds the Internet TogetherThose that have followed the Bach Seat for a while, know that I am fascinated by maps. A well-done map can say so much more than a written description. One of my favorite things to do at work is to work on maps; network maps, rack elevations, logical diagrams, they just make it so much easier to discuss how to get from A to B if you can see it.

TeleGeography logoThe BusinessInsider published some cool maps from telecom data company TeleGeography of the submarine cables that hold the Internet together around the world. The maps are interesting to me for a couple of reasons, first, is the engineering wonder of how all those cables get installed, and the mind-boggling amount of information they enable, and the small number of places where they all come out of the water. My first thought looking at some of these maps was I wonder what the no such agency is doing at those sites.

The main map charts out all the undersea fiber optic cables that send Internet communication from country to country. There are more fiber optic cables that are land-based, but they’re not charted here. Here is a map of the current undersea fiber connections on the US eastern seaboard.

Atlantic fiber optic cables

Paul Brodsky, an analyst at Telegeography explained to BI how data gets around the world.

The vast majority of Internet traffic travels on fiber optic cables … Many people think Internet connections go through satellites … but that’s not the case. They run through these undersea cables.

This map shows the undersea cables that link China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia to the Internet. It also shows that North Korea does have a dedicated direct connection to the rest of the world, the Hermit Kingdom, indeed. The picture is kind of awkward because China is in blue, which you would expect to be water.

Pacific fiber opric cables

TeleGeography’s Brodsky explained to BI how the cables get installed. The companies that lay these cables have giant spools of fiber optic cable on their ships. The ship goes from country A to country B and literally lays it on the bottom of the ocean. Close to the shore, they trench it out, but at a certain distance from the coast, it just lies on the bottom of the ocean.

Coiling trans-Atlantic cable in 1857The biggest risk to the cables are trawlers, and ships dragging anchors. Sometimes there are natural disasters like earthquakes. But if one cable breaks, Internet traffic can be redirected to another cable.

Mr. Brodsky says the companies that lay the cables can track problems. If they spot something, they can go out to the middle of the ocean, pull up the cable and cut out the damaged section, and splice in a new segment of cable.

In the future, expect more cables, Mr. Brodsky told BI. Now that the world is connected, the next step is to add more connections. Any country with just one cable will want two or three.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| January 20, 2015
Comments Off on Palm Now A Chinese Mobile Company

Palm Now A Chinese Mobile Company

Palm Now A Chinese Mobile CompanyLet’s take a trip on the way-back machine and visit the first cool – gotta-have-it tech toy, the Palm Pilot. I had several versions of the Palm Pilot, The Palm V was the best version, but the  PalmOne-m515 had a color screen. The oft traded PDA builder moved from Palm to modem-maker US Robotics. Which was later purchased by 3Com, and then Handspring. Next, it was PalmOne/Source and finally purchased in 2010 for $1.2 billion by HP, where many tech firms go to die.

Palm logoNow ChinaTechNews.com reports that the Chinese consumer electronics group TCL recently announced that they will acquire the Palm brand. HP is selling Palm as part of Meg Whitman’s struggles to right the floundering HP (HPQ).

Li Dongsheng, chairman of TCL Group, claims the Palm acquisition is different from their purchase of Alcatel’s mobile division. According to the Chinese firm, Palm has its fans in America and its operating ideas are similar to Apple (AAPL). They believe this type of fandom can give Palm strength. Li said the Palm brand still has value in some of the global markets and people expect its re-emergence to continue to offer innovative products.

ChinaAccording to the article, TCL will launch new Palm products at the end of 2015. TLC plans to position Palm as a high-end smartphone brand. Maybe in China, the Palm name is an innovative mobile terminal brand, which will be closely related to users and fans.

Variety reports from CES that TCL said that it will re-create Palm in Silicon Valley. In the statement TCL claims:

Palm has always carried a lot of affect and emotions … That’s why TCL has set the direction to rebuild the brand involving Palm’s very own community, making it the largest scale crowdsourced project ever seen in the industry.

The firm will back the crowdsourced development of new Palm products with 5,000 engineers and seven research and development centers around the world.

Guo Aiping, CEO of TCL Communication, told ChinaTechNews.com that this acquisition is limited to the Palm brand and it does not include other assets such as employees.

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First, another US company sold to the competition. Just saying.

I agree with ArsTechnica they hypothesize this move could be seen as TCL’s attempt to break into the U.S. smartphone market under a well-known brand. Other Chinese companies such as Lenovo, which now owns Motorola, have a similar strategy of operating in America under a well-known brand.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| October 1, 2013
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R Social Networks Bad 4 U?

R Social Networks Bad 4 U?The average U.S. Facebook user spends 6.5 hours a month on the site. There is growing global evidence that using social networks have a negative impact on their users. Not only do social networks open their users to malware (PDF) and identity theft, but the latest research from around the world suggests that social media can impact user’s emotional well-being.

Facebook can make you feel badBuzzFeed reports that social scientists at the University of Michigan looked at the impact of social networking. The UofM researchers released new research that using Facebook can make you feel bad. The U of M research published in the online journal Plos One found that Facebook use predicted declines in the well-being of surveyed participants.

Facebook

The Michigan research indicates that using Facebook negatively impacts how people feel from one moment to the next. It also impacts their overall life satisfaction. As UM social psychologist Ethan Kross explained to BuzzFeed:

“On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it.”

University of MichiganBuzzFeed points out that the results are just another piece in a larger stack of evidence. The evidence says that increased hours per month spent on Facebook could have a harmful effect on our lives. Professor Kross told the LA Times, “We measured lots and lots of other personality and behavioral dimensions … none of the factors that we assessed influenced the results. The more you used Facebook, the more your mood dropped.”

The Michigan study tested for and discounted alternative reasons that might account for Facebook’s negative impact on happiness. However, the article claims the deceased life satisfaction of Facebook users has more to do with behavioral patterns than the service itself.

The article equates Facebook use with gambling. The author cites Alexis Madrigal‘s article in the Atlantic, “The Machine Zone.” The Atlantic article says that Facebook users, similar to those who play slot machines, are unwittingly lulled into a time-distorting rhythm. They are lulled by repetitive and sometimes rewarding tasks — like looking at an endless stream of your friends’ photos. This behavior can mimic the deleterious effects of gambling and even addiction. The article claims this kind of problem stems from Facebook’s savvy design and engineering. Facebook takes advantage of how humans are wired to keep users on the site.

Social networks in China

China's Beihang UniversityTechEye also points out a study from researchers at China’s Beihang University. The Chinese study claims social networking sites are generating a lot of anger. The study, by Rui Fan, Jichang Zhao, Yan Chen, and Ke Xu, examined human emotions on China’s Twitter-like microblogging site Sina Weibo.

After reading 70 million messages from 200,000 users of Weibo, the researchers found that anger spreads faster and wider than other emotions like joy. The TechEye article suggests that posts you write out of anger will have more impact than those expressing happiness. The researchers also found that users with a larger number of friends have a more significant sentiment influence on their neighborhoods. According to the article, the Chinese researchers found that anger among users correlated much higher than that of joy. They concluded that angry emotions could spread more quickly and broadly in the network.

Angry tweetsIf a user sent an angry message, researchers looked at how likely the recipients were to also send out an angry message or retweet the same emotion. The BuzzFeed article also references a German study. The German study found that Facebook’s social pressures created noticeable stress and feelings of envy. These are emotions that could, ultimately, lead to people abandoning the social network.

Social networks FOMO

A Pew Research Center report released in May 2013 reinforces the risks Facebook faces. According to BuzzFeed, younger users told Pew the stress of needing to manage their reputation on Facebook contributes to their lack of enthusiasm for the social network. Nevertheless, the site is still where a large amount of socializing takes place. The teens reported feeling they need to stay on Facebook to not miss out.

social media as an industry ranked third to last in consumer satisfactionThe BuzzFeed article concludes that future social media networks will have to figure out have to survive if they make us sad. The question isn’t exclusive to Facebook. In a recent survey, social media as an industry ranked third to last in consumer satisfaction. Social networks ranked below the airline industry. They state that it’s not hard to imagine a future where users will demand social platforms that are not only intensely engaging but also keenly aware and respectful of how our psychological state works.

As Madrigal notes in his post, “fighting the great nullness at the heart of these coercive loops should be one of the goals of technology design, use, and criticism.” Facebook has succeeded in its mission to connect the world. But we’re only beginning to understand what that means for humanity.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| June 11, 2013
Comments Off on China Shuts Down Internet for Maintenance

China Shuts Down Internet for Maintenance

TechEye reports that the Chinese government switched off the Internet last week. According to the article, the Chinese government flipped its kill switch on the great firewall of China when it became concerned that some citizens might remember the 24th anniversary of the massacre of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Great Firewall of ChinaApparently, China has decided that the best way to commemorate the massacre is by declaring 4 June “internet maintenance day” when all loyal communists spend the day updating their servers while remaining unconnected to the net. According to the author, the government switched off the Internet so that the loyal network managers would not be bothered by too much net traffic.

Tiananmen Square Lego Duck Man

Those sites under maintenance include blogs and websites that might want to remember 4 June for reasons other than being a patch Tuesday. The Washington Post speculates the Chinese government’s “fool’s errand” of censoring the memory of Tiananmen Square, is due in part to last year’s Arab Spring. The article maintains that shutting down websites and censoring rubber duckies and Legos is part of Beijing’s reaction to the Arab Spring.

Despite the Internet shut-down TechEye reports that some sites were allowed to stay up. The Twitter-like Sina Weibo was working, as were the Chinese operations for MSN and Yahoo. For some reason, the dictionary website WordKu.com offered just one page: a definition for the word “encore”.

Tiananmen Square Lego Tank Man

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I hope I’m not the only one that recognizes the ironic timing of the revelations of the Obama administration’s massive domestic spying campaign and the Tiananmen Square anniversary.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| March 26, 2013
Comments Off on Chinas Internet Giants are Massive

Chinas Internet Giants are Massive

Chinas Internet Giants are MassiveDerrick Harris, writer for GigaOM recently gave us a peek inside China’s Internet giants and their massive scale. The author describes China’s big four internet companies as huge, but not technological innovators like their American counterparts – yet.

China’s Internet market

Great China FirewallThe Chinese Internet market is very, very big despite the Great Firewall that cuts Chinese citizens off from many popular U.S. web services. The article states there are more Chinese netizens than all the citizens of the United States and European Union combined. And they use social media and e-commerce just like the rest of us. The author gives some examples of the scale of the companies providing social media, e-commerce, and information-discovery needs to China’s 1.3 billion people.

TaobaoAlibaba Group

Taobao, the eBay-like e-commerce line of business from Chinese internet giant Alibaba Group, does a lot of business. On a single day — Nov. 11, 2011 — the company did a whopping 19 billion yuan (about $3.05 billion) in sales. According to Alibaba Group CTO and Alibaba Cloud Computing President Wang Jian, the company site surpassed the 1 trillion yuan (about $160 billion) mark for 2012 revenue at the end of November. Alipay, the company’s version of PayPal, handles about 3 billion yuan (about $480 million) in transactions every day.

AlibabaBy comparison, eBay (EBAY) posted $3.4 billion in revenue for the entire third quarter this year. Amazon (AMZN), with which Taobao also competes (although Alibaba also has a business-to-consumer division called Tmall), closed its third quarter with $13.8 billion in revenue. Of course, Taobao and Alipay are just two of Alibaba’s expansive portfolio of services, which includes a troubled partnership with Yahoo (YHOO).

That type of business means Alibaba needs a lot of servers. In a single year not too long ago, Jian told the author, the company bought more servers than it had in the previous five years combined. If you charted Alibaba’s server count now versus five years ago, he added, the previous number would look like zero. How big is its database? Enough to store data for more than 800 million items for sale.

Baidu

Baidu logoThe Chinese search giant is ranked fifth in the Alexa internet rankings, which is evidence of its popularity. All those users, I’m told, result in an annual server growth about equal to the previous three years combined. It is reported that Baidu (BIDU) is planning possibly the world’s largest data center — spanning 120,000 square meters, costing $1.6 billion, housing 100,000 servers (totaling 700,000 CPUs and 3 million cores), and storing 4,000 petabytes of data.

Tencent logoTencent

Sometimes compared with Facebook (FB), Tencent (TCEHY) boasted more than 717 million users for its popular QQ messaging service as of September 2011. That number has surely grown. The company says its highest-ever number of concurrent users was more than 176 million, although there are often tens of millions (if not more than 100 million people) using it at any given time. An individual with some knowledge of the company’s infrastructure told me Tencent adds about 100,000 servers per year.

Weibo

Weibo logoThe Twitter-like platform from internet new-school internet company Sina had more than 400 million users as of April 2012. That’s about twice the number Twitter claims. And the Chinese use Weibo a lot, for everything from micro-blogging to self-publishing. It might actually be a more important tool in China than Twitter is in the United States, sources told the author, because while the government can censor official news outlets, it can’t possibly control the stream of information coming off Weibo. And that will mean even more growth.

Mr. Harris concludes that, despite their sheer scale, Chinese internet companies are, by most accounts, less technologically inclined than their American counterparts. The biggest reason, the author says is that these companies tend to view themselves as traditional businesses and not technology companies. Another factor mentioned is that employees often strive to work up the management ladder not remain career engineers. This inevitably affects R&D budgets, makes companies less willing to take risks, and reduces the pool of employees that really, deeply understand complex systems.

10,000 webscale serversThe blog cites the server situation within China’s big four internet companies. Alibaba’s Jian told the author that although his company is running all white boxes in its data centers now, it had a lot of legacy IBM (IBM) gear in its data centers five years ago. The same thing is reported about Baidu. Tencent, had 10,000 webscale servers fail in six months last year and is considering a move back to traditional boxes.

Open Compute Project

The article speculates that these companies are coming around on innovation beyond just buying more efficient gear. Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba, for example, are all members of the Facebook-led Open Compute Project for designing webscale hardware. Tencent and Baidu actually created their own rack-design specification, called Project Scorpio, which is being merged into Open Compute’s Open Rack design in 2013. They still don’t build their own servers like Google and Facebook do, preferring instead to push their custom specs on server makers, but many innovative American companies, including eBay, do the same thing.

Open ComputeFacebook VP Frank Frankovsky told PCWorld, “We compete with those guys, but on the infrastructure side, if we can make our infrastructure more efficient, it makes everyone that much better. Where we differentiate our business is in the service we provide to our end users.”

That differentiation comes in large part from an incredible investment in research and technology. If they want to be considered thought leaders in their field — and if they want to expand significantly into cloud computing (as Alibaba and Sina clearly want to do) — China’s internet companies will have to start matching their immense scale with demonstrated technology.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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