The Litl Webbook, a new home media computer unveiled by Boston-based Litl last week, officially ships to buyers starting today. The $699 device, which is available from Amazon and directly from Litl’s website, has already attracted a wide range of reactions, from Netbook Choice’s “intriguing” to Engadget’s “unbelievably overpriced.” Xconomy was the first to cover Litl’s destealthing last week.

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Craig Mundie is a geek, and I mean that in the best possible way. Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, the 17-year veteran of Redmond, WA, still talks like an engineer, throwing out terms like “heterogeneous machine architectures,” “GUIs” (graphical user interfaces), and “clouds and clients” like there’s no tomorrow. It’s kind of refreshing, given that he is in charge of setting the long-term agenda for one of the most powerful companies on the planet.

Mundie is in the midst of a weeklong tour of some top universities around the country. He called me yesterday from Cambridge, MA, where he had just finished a presentation to Harvard University students, faculty, and guests. He visits the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (my alma mater) today, and comes to Kane Hall at the University of Washington tomorrow afternoon. It’s similar to the college tours Bill Gates used to do.

From what I can tell, the goal is to stir up interest in computer science, give audiences a glimpse of future computing systems as Microsoft sees them, and stimulate discussions about how these technologies can help solve some pressing global problems. (You can read more about Mundie’s tour and demos in this Seattle Times story.)

Besides hearing Mundie’s thoughts on computer science education and the future of computing, I wanted to drill down and ask him about the challenge of taking on Microsoft’s strategy development (after Gates stepped down last year) in the most difficult economic times in recent memory. I also wanted to ask him about the deeper culture of Microsoft, the renewed role of research in the company’s future, and the importance of nurturing relationships around the world—and his secret ally in that quest.

Here are some edited highlights from our conversation:

Xconomy: What are you trying to get across to university audiences on this tour?

Craig Mundie: In these presentations, I’m trying to get them to think not only about how computing evolves, but with that evolution, what kinds of problems will become approachable, and what are the new methods? Several things are evolving in parallel [and leading to more heterogeneous and complex machines]. That begets the requirement of how to do programming around parallel computing. With very high-scale computing facilities, the cloud and the client come together to form one system that people will program. They will use those things together with new display and sensing technologies.

Just as the GUI revolutionized computing, we could see a similar revolution with more natural interactions with machines, rather than just “type and point and click.” That will expand the number of people who can interact with computers. With the diversity, rooms can become computers [for instance]. You won’t think of them so much as a computer.

X: What are some of the global problems you think advanced computing will help solve?

CM: Beyond the computer science realm, I’ve talked about energy and the environment. I show one piece of research work we’re doing to compose computational models, a simplified climate model, at Princeton and Microsoft Research. It shows linkages between deforestation in the Amazon and atmospheric temperatures around the rest of the world. If you were a policy person, these kinds of things would give you tools to support your decision making.

In energy, we’re doing computer modeling and direct visualizations. I showed a model, loaned to us from TerraPower [the nuclear power firm spun off from Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures …Next Page »

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Somebody forgot to tell John Chuang that it’s impossible to create a new kind of home computer these days.

Either that, or he didn’t listen. Because Chuang, a serial entrepreneur who made his first fortune in the staffing industry with Boston-based Aquent, has built a gadget that looks deceptively like a laptop but works nothing like any computer you’ve ever used. From the hardware to the user interface to the activities it supports, the new machine created by Chuang’s Boston-based startup, Litl, rejects three decades of convention and makes the Web, not the computer and all its software and operating-system encrustations, into the real show.

Litl took the lid off its so-called “Webbook” computer today after more than two years of top-secret development work. The device’s purpose, Chuang says, is to take advantage of the Web’s newfound maturity as a medium for digital entertainment and productivity and make it far simpler for people at home to access all those goodies—including photos, videos, news and weather, and Web apps—without having to manage files or desktop applications.

“We didn’t want to build anything that already existed, or something with just marginal improvements,” Chuang says. “PCs have served a great purpose, but we wanted to take a crack at a different type of computer that would be for and of the Net.”

I visited Litl’s offices yesterday and had a chance to try out the Webbook, which goes on sale today at Amazon and at Litl’s website. (The price is $699, and Litl expects to ship the first units to consumers next week.) Beyond its laptop-like appearance, there isn’t much that veteran computer users like me will find familiar about the device. There’s no desktop, no windows or menus or files or folders, no multitasking, no long lists of third-party software applications to buy. There isn’t even a hard drive or a CD/DVD drive.

While the Webbook is definitely a computer—with a 1.6-gigahertz Intel Atom processor, a gigabyte of RAM, a Wi-Fi card, a Webcam, and a nice graphics chip inside—it’s also got a good dose of TV mixed into its genome. It has a separate remote control, its display can be folded almost all the way back so that it stands up on a table or countertop like an easel, and it has a cord that connects it with no fuss to your flat-screen TV, so you can see what you’re doing on a really big screen.

In other words, the Webbook breaks all the rules of personal computing. And while it may be the perfect machine for consumers who just want to get on the Internet and have no use for all of a traditional PC’s bells and whistles, Chuang is likely to face an initial wave of skepticism from heavy computer users and technology industry insiders. They probably won’t grok how a machine that doesn’t even have software, the way we’re used to thinking of software, could still be useful.

But Chuang doesn’t seem to care much about what the digerati think; his device isn’t designed for them. Or to put it more accurately, it’s designed for their coffee tables and kitchen counters, rather than their offices or their backpacks. “We’re about shared processing, not local processing,” he explains. For tasks that require lots of local processing power, like video editing, power users are still going to want and need a traditional multipurpose computer. But if they just want to …Next Page »

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This morning I checked my e-mail, powered by Google, and then used Google Maps to find my way to the Google Kirkland open house. It reminded me a little bit of the scene in “Being John Malkovich” when Malkovich, the actor, finds a portal into his own brain and sees that everyone looks like him and says nothing but, “Malkovich, Malkovich.” OK, I guess the analogy would fit better if I also worked for Google and uttered “Google, Google” all day—but that might even happen sometime, if Google’s pace of hiring keeps up. (Just kidding.)

Engineering and site director Scott Silver, who’s been on the job since June (succeeding Peter Wilson, who left the company), introduced the new Kirkland facility, which has been officially open since August 31 and employs more than 350 people in a unified campus setting. He gave a little history of Google’s Kirkland operation—the first office was at Carillon Point in 2004, Google’s first major presence in the Northwest—and how it has grown and contributed to the company’s products. Google Talk, which does Internet telephony and instant messaging, was born and raised in Kirkland, for instance.

Other areas of focus for the Kirkland office include:

—Search: Webmaster tools, and instant indexing for real-time news.

—Advertising: AdPlanner (see below), AdWords Opportunities (helping advertisers optimize search ads), Google Analytics, and Campaign Insights (a new service released last week that’s around making brand ads more effective).

—Applications: Google Talk, Google Talk Video (within Gmail), Google Maps (including a new application for directions on mobile phones), the Chrome Web browser, YouTube video clips, and Google Sync (for synchronizing your mobile phone).

—Infrastructure: system and corporate billing software for supporting applications at huge scales.

Silver, a former Amazon and Netscape veteran, said he’s “quite proud of what we’ve done here, and immensely happy to come to this day,” and to be able to say Google is here to “create great products and find great engineers.”

I followed up with Silver afterwards, and he confirmed Google Kirkland is actively hiring software engineers, but he didn’t say how many positions are open at the moment. He said his team is doing hundreds of interviews per month, “and we’d love to do more.” I asked him about the 800-pound gorilla down the road, Microsoft, and whether Google is recruiting much talent from …Next Page »

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He is one of those people who defies description in a few pages, let alone paragraphs. Sure, Nathan Myhrvold is the founder of Microsoft Research and CEO of the Bellevue, WA-based “invention firm” Intellectual Ventures. But besides information technology and business innovation, he’s a renowned expert in such ridiculously diverse fields as astrophysics, mathematics, paleontology, and photography. He’s also one of at least three tech billionaires to speak at the University of Washington this month.

A few weeks ago, Myhrvold spoke to a crowd of students, faculty, and guests about another one of his great loves: the science of cooking. (His resume as a chef includes winning the world championship of barbecue and working at Rover’s in Seattle’s Madison Valley neighborhood.) As part of the computer science and engineering department’s Distinguished Lecturer Series, Myhrvold’s talk covered everything from food safety myths and a tour of Intellectual Ventures’ kitchen lab facilities, to computer simulations of heat intensity above a barbecue grill. He was joined on stage by chef and biochemist Chris Young of Intellectual Ventures, a veteran of the renowned Fat Duck restaurant in England.

Myhrvold and Young have been working on a 1,500-page book on the state of the art in cooking science for about three years, together with a staff of 15. “It’s like a restaurant without diners,” Myhrvold joked. “Unfortunately, it’s also like a restaurant without revenue.”

The focus of the book is to illuminate the cutting-edge science behind cooking techniques, and to stimulate people’s curiosity about food while also being practical for chefs. “There’s a revolution in cooking going on today. If you keep doing the old thing over and over again, you don’t actually need to know why it works,” Myhrvold said. “If you want to do things that are new and different and unusual, it really helps to know why.”

Highlights of the talk included high-speed (6,200 frames per second) video of a popcorn kernel popping and a water balloon bursting; discussion of what happens to food when you subject it to 40,000 times Earth’s gravity (“kind of a cool thing to do to food every now and again”); and the creation of a batch of almond-based ice cream using liquid nitrogen.

Here are just a few things Myhrvold left us with:

1. Cookbooks are like software. Someone in the audience asked Myhrvold when the cooking science book would be available. “A damn fine question,” he replied. “I come from a history …Next Page »

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Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick traveled to Holyoke, MA, yesterday to talk about the next steps for the planned Holyoke High Performance Computing Center, a massive project designed to advance the state of the art in “green computing” for life sciences, cleantech, and other applications, while also bolstering business development in economically depressed western Massachusetts. Construction is slated to begin in the fall of 2010 and be completed in late 2011, the governor said.

The partners in the project—which is a collaboration between the Massachusetts state government, Accenture, Boston University, Cisco, EMC, MIT, and the University of Massachusetts—have raised over half of the money needed for construction, according to a press release yesterday from the governor’s office. (The actual dollar amounts weren’t named in the release.)

Since the state’s initial announcement about the project in June, the partners have made “considerable progress” on a working plan for the facility, according to the release. That includes setting up an organizational and business structure for the center, estimating capital costs and operating budgets, outlining a research agenda, and creating preliminary building designs and construction schedules. It’s expected that the facility will be located somewhere near the Connecticut River, which produces abundant hydroelectric power, or along Holyoke’s network of industrial canals, which could provide cooling water for its computing and climate-control equipment.

The three academic institutions contributing to the Holyoke center—BU, MIT, and UMass—issued a statement yesterday saying they are committed to “work diligently over the next 120 days with the Governor, Housing and Economic Development Secretary Bialecki, Energy and Environment Secretary Bowles, and other cabinet officials, Congressman Olver, Holyoke officials and our colleagues in industry to move to the next stage of planning the HPCC.” The statement said the next steps include acquiring a site, setting up agreements on how the various institutions involved will share responsibility for the center, and raising the rest of the money required.

Several entities assisting with the project—the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, the City of Holyoke, and the John Adams Innovation Institute—have also collaborated to launch a website called Innovate Holyoke as a resource for news on the facility. The site was developed by Ten Minute Media, a Web design company run by young Holyoke-based entrepreneur Brendan Ciecko, who wrote about the computing center project for Xconomy in June.

In remarks yesterday, Governor Patrick said the computing center would serve as “an anchor of a highly competitive and vibrant innovation district in the Pioneer Valley,” which includes the three western Massachusetts counties traversed by the Connecticut River. “The potential for job growth and advances in technology and research is unprecedented, and both the center and this collaboration will serve to create long term prosperity for Holyoke and regional economies throughout Western Massachusetts.”

[Update, 10/23/09: The John Adams Innovation Institute of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative has published a useful summary of yesterday's event in Holyoke.]

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Barely two years after he joined Microsoft here in Cambridge, MA, to launch its new Startup Labs, Reed Sturtevant is leaving the company to “pursue other interests,” Microsoft announced today.

Sturtevant’s departure was part of a broader announcement that Ray Ozzie, to whom Sturtevant reported, had reorganized his group to create the new Future Social Experience (FUSE) Labs, which will be focused on social computing. The lab will be headed by Lili Cheng, and will take the Microsoft Startup Labs in Cambridge under its auspices, along with another group previously part of Ozzie’s organization, the Rich Media Labs.

“FUSE Labs’ team will explore new social, real-time and media-rich applications and services that add value to existing products, or could be released on their own,” Microsoft said in a statement. “By combining these teams under a single leader and mission, Ray believes FUSE Labs can achieve greater impact through tighter focus and a more holistic approach. “

Sturtevant is a well-known and highly respected figure in New England computing, and beyond. He was most recently CTO at Eons before joining Microsoft to start the Startup Labs, an advanced development lab meant to help explore new ideas and speed them to market.

Sturtevant declined to comment on his departure, but you can read a lot about his background here.

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How do you go about summarizing a company’s culture in one word? I haven’t a clue, but whenever I ask CEOs, they always come up with something interesting—and often surprising. In the past couple of months, I’ve been asking top executives at Northwest tech startups to talk about their company culture and why it’s unique. So far, none has refused to play the “one word” game.

I’ve received a fascinating array of responses that speak to the companies’ management styles, the kinds of talent they’re looking for, and their overall strategy—what they think sets them apart from their competition. From Bellevue, WA-based Apptio’s “paranoid” to Seattle-based Picnik’s “easy,” you can see a lot of a company’s mindset through the keyhole of just one word. And last month, Bob did a comparison of Boston vs. Seattle one-word cultures—and found that the New England startups were a little more New-Agey in their responses than companies here in the Northwest. (No idea what this means, but it’s always fun to go up against the East Coast.) And Bruce followed that up by checking in with five San Diego firms.

Now I’m extending the exercise to Seattle’s public tech companies. I wondered whether their responses would show any glaring differences from the startups—more conventional, say, or boring. After checking with a few of them (each has been around for six years or longer), my scientific answer is “not really.”

Our initial short list of public companies spans the fields of supercomputing, data storage, and online advertising. Be warned, Mr. Ballmer, Mr. Bezos, and Mr. Glaser—I’m coming for you too.

Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY)
CEO: Peter Ungaro
Culture: “Next”
Comments: Ungaro says, “Never satisfied with the status quo, our employees are committed to providing our customers with the next-generation of Cray supercomputers. Collectively as a company, our passion is setting new boundaries of what supercomputers are capable of and providing those resources to the world’s researchers and engineers.” He adds, “We celebrate achievements and acknowledge milestones, but we are focused on what’s next and what we all have to do to get there.”

Isilon Systems (NASDAQ: ISLN)
CEO: Sujal Patel
Culture: “Driven”
Comments: Patel says, “We have been through a million different things that show how driven we are. We survived…we grew, we built, we went public, we ran into some nasty roadblocks, we recovered from that.” He adds, “We only get through that stuff because we are driven as an organization—and that’s not about me, it’s about the people in this building.”

Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX)
COO: Peter Christothoulou
Culture: “Innovative”
Comments: Christothoulou says, “Being innovative is at the core of everything we do; from delivering the most innovative products and technology, to hiring and employing innovative, collaborative people to provide our customers with the best experience possible.”

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Yesterday’s annual open house at Intel Labs Seattle, near the UW campus, did not disappoint. I got a whirlwind tour from incoming lab director Dieter Fox (who also talked with me about Intel and the future of robotics). In attendance were some prominent members of the Intel brass like chief technology officer Justin Rattner, and vice president of Intel Labs Andrew Chien. Vice presidents mixed with professors, researchers, students, and members of the tech startup community. (Among the luminaries I spotted were Matt O’Donnell, dean of UW’s college of engineering, Janis Machala from UW TechTransfer and Paladin Partners, and Matt McIlwain from Madrona Venture Group.)

There has been a lot of progress at Intel Labs since last year’s open house. Here’s a quick tour of the most interesting projects I saw, arranged by the type of technology:

—One of the main themes of the lab is everyday sensing and perception. That encompasses everything from smart sensors in the home that figure out what you’re doing in the kitchen to wearable cameras that help inform you about the world around you. Jeff Hightower, a researcher at the lab who did his Ph.D. at UW, showed me a demo of a project called “Personal 3D audio cursor” which involves a wearable camera, compass, gyroscope, and computer that senses where you are, who you’re with, and what you’re doing. The device then speaks to you over earbud headphones to identify the people around you using face recognition—and the sound appears to come from the direction of the person it is identifying.

It’s just an example of what can be done to enhance your information about the world around you. The real innovation, Hightower says, lies in the “online learning aspect” of the face recognition algorithm. You feed the computer three example photos of a person under different lighting conditions, and the software learns to recognize their face. Hightower says they are starting with photo albums to train the computer, and want to try things like people’s LinkedIn contacts as training examples. (Which makes me think of Learn That Name, the iPhone app for helping people recognize their LinkedIn contacts in the real world.) Hightower says this type of face recognition software will “absolutely be ready for prime time” in five years.

—Just across the room, UW Ph.D. Student Shaun Kane was giving a popular demo on “Bonfire,” a new kind of computing interface for extending your workspace from your laptop to your tabletop (see photo left). Using a camera pointed at the area around his laptop and virtual buttons projected onto the tabletop, Kane showed he could press the virtual buttons to do things like scroll through applications on his laptop. The camera tracked his hand movements and also captured an image of a business card placed on the table, which could be stored for reference. The software can potentially do things like make your laptop aware of all papers and objects on your desk; then the computer might do helpful things like turn off music when you take your headphones off and put them on the desk. This was the first time the project has been shown to the public; Kane will be presenting it at a research conference next week (UIST 2009 in Victoria, BC). The big-picture goal, he said, is to “make interacting with laptops richer, more involved, and smarter.”

—One of the big crowd pleasers was a mobile robot that could plug itself into a wall socket to charge up (see photo below). Software engineer Louis LeGrand, a UW alum, showed me how it works. The robot starts with an internal map of the lab space, so it knows where the electrical outlets are. It uses a range finder to get close to the wall, in the vicinity of the outlet. Then it uses an electric field sensor (not vision) to find the right electrical signature for the outlet—so essentially it senses the electricity in the wall. After about a minute of slow-moving adjustments, it plugs itself in. “We expect in the not-too-distant future, there will be a huge new market for robots—and Intel processors,” LeGrand says.

Next door, Dieter Fox showed me some interesting work on robotic manipulation of an object (like an apple or a bottle of water) using a robot hand and computer vision. Using a camera system, the computer figures out a physical model of what the robot is picking up. This way, Fox says, a robot can learn about the world around it the way a person would, by handling objects and looking at them. It’s a longstanding challenge in robotics, and quite a burgeoning area of research.

—Another theme of the lab is wireless power—everything from being able to charge your mobile device without plugging it in, to antennas and radio frequency identification (RFID) chips powered by the sun. Researcher Emily Cooper, who did her Ph.D. at MIT, gave me an update on the magnetic resonance project for charging devices like a laptop or a phone through the air (we saw it last year). The device now sends both radio signals and power in the same transmission, which could help you find power for your particular mobile device over a range of about one meter.

Lastly, outgoing lab director David Wetherall showed me “WISP” (Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform, see photo left), a type of enhanced RFID tag that contains sensors and a microcontroller and gets its power from an ultrahigh-frequency RFID reader. The device can also use solar cells to harvest more power. The lab is working with academic collaborators who use the WISP for everything from gaming applications to undersea neutrino detection.

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Yesterday afternoon I stopped by Intel Labs Seattle, the research lab run by the chip-making giant near the University of Washington campus, for the lab’s annual open house. It’s an extravaganza that always draws a big crowd from the local tech community. Besides the huge variety of lab demos, one of the most interesting things going on was a changing of the guard.

Dieter Fox, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the UW, succeeded David Wetherall as director of the lab two weeks ago, when Wetherall’s three-year term officially finished (see photo below). Fox is the fourth director of the Seattle lab, formerly called Intel Research Seattle; all have been UW computer science professors. While Wetherall’s expertise is in wireless networks, mobile devices, and Internet protocols, Fox’s strengths are in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. (He is the co-author of the 2005 advanced textbook, Probabilistic Robotics, with Sebastian Thrun of Stanford University and Wolfram Burgard from the University of Freiburg.)

So, will Intel Labs Seattle now be doing all robotics, all the time? Will the first general-purpose household helper robot come out of Intel (NASDAQ: INTC)? One can always hope—but Fox seems to have a broader and more practical outlook on the lab’s role in shaping the future of computing.

“Our role with respect to Intel is performing what they call disrupting research that is off-roadmap, but essentially our task is also to surprise Intel,” Fox says. “If we show what can be done with future computing systems, then we are serving our purpose. And beyond surprising Intel, we also want to surprise consumers by what can be done. It’s becoming more and more important that these computational systems are going to be observing the environment, using sensors. Today’s smartphones all have GPS, accelerometers, and all that. The key question is, how can we extract relevant information to make it more interesting for users?”

Seeing as robots are computing systems that sense and manipulate their environment, they will certainly figure prominently in the lab’s work—perhaps more than ever before. “For Intel, it’s clear the future of robotics is going to become extremely relevant. We need to see what are the key questions from a computational perspective, what kind of processing is needed for these systems,” Fox says. “Our key agenda is to inform Intel on what the future of computing looks like, especially computing connected to everyday scenarios.”

The idea is that if and when the market for intelligent household robots takes off, it’ll be Intel that provides their brains (in the form of microprocessor chips). But even beyond that, Fox says, “Intel could provide the processing that’s adapted to the specific needs of those systems, and along the way maybe also provide the computational toolset I need. So it’s not only the hardware, but it’s also a better understanding of how you extract information from these sensors. That’s also a theme for Intel—they want to go beyond just building the hardware, and show the whole user experience you can get if you have good computational power.”

Lastly, I got some closing thoughts on the lab’s evolution from its outgoing director. “The trajectory of the lab is, we’ve always done perception and sensing, starting with location, and we’re moving now to richer systems” like computer vision and robotic manipulation of objects, says Wetherall, who is going back to full-time teaching and research at UW this month (though he’ll stay involved with Intel Labs). “It’s quite a natural progression for the lab,” he notes. “That’s what leads to intelligent systems.”

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Now that the media craze around cloud computing seems to have died down just a bit, I thought it would be a good time to take a considered look at what one of the Northwest’s most prominent venture capital firms is working on in this space, which is having increasing influence in every area of software and information technology (IT).

Over the past couple of months, I’ve had a chance to talk with a number of VCs at Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners, and they’ve shared a great deal of knowledge and insight into how they think about cloud computing and virtualization. What follows is not a comprehensive look at the firm’s strategy, but rather a few thematic highlights that struck me as important to those interested in cloud-based technologies and business models. To an outside observer at least, what Ignition does in this area will go a long way towards determining its long-term success—and to some extent, it already has.

First, a couple of definitions. Cloud computing, as most see it, is about using remote servers run by vendors like Amazon or Google to store and process data over the Internet, instead of buying and maintaining your own local machines. In fact, Amazon’s chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, has a more industry-focused definition, one that Ignition Partners agrees with: cloud computing is “IT as a service,” delivered in a scalable way to multiple customers via the Web.

Virtualization is a related but different animal; it can be thought of as enabling cloud computing, among other things. Ignition defines virtualization as separating software from hardware—and applications from operating systems—so it lets you run multiple operating systems on a single server, for example, or multiple applications on your desktop, all with minimal setup and security hassles. Big companies like Microsoft, VMware, IBM, and Citrix compete heavily in this space.

But back to Ignition. The firm was founded in early 2000 by ex-Microsoft and McCaw Cellular executives, and now has more than $2 billion under management. It invests in both early-stage and growth-stage companies in the U.S. and China, focusing on consumer tech, communications and wireless, and business software and infrastructure. Ignition has received its fair share of criticism in the press, stemming from incidents like the closure of Sotto Wireless earlier this year, and last fall’s accounting scandal at Entellium—both companies it backed.

Yet Ignition is strong enough in cloud computing and virtualization that, given how central these issues have become to most aspects of IT, it seems like a key differentiator for the company. Especially at a time when most if not all venture firms are going back to basics and thinking about where their most valuable expertise lies. Indeed, Ignition’s biggest win to date was in virtualization: XenSource’s $500 million …Next Page »

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Tadayoshi Kohno spends his career looking at life through the eyes of a criminal, and he’s teaching University of Washington students to do the same. The UW computer science and engineering assistant professor studies computer security and privacy, which to Kohno means anticipating the bad guy’s moves before he does. I chatted with him recently to find out more about the “security mindset,” how you teach it, and what this mysterious bad guy could do using ingenious technology hacks.

“We’re seeing computers in all aspects of our lives, in medical devices, exercise equipment, cars, airplanes, utility systems, power lines, everywhere,” Kohno said. “One of my main concerns is that while we’ve thought a lot about security for our desktop computers, computing is much broader than that, and we need to address security for all of it.”

Kohno’s interest in security goes back to his teenage years, when as a 10th grader he won the Colorado History Day competition with an essay about the history of cryptography. During his doctoral work, Kohno revealed security flaws in the software of electronic voting machines. The machines, which were rising in popularity following the 2000 presidential election, could easily be hacked to manipulate votes or reveal people’s voting choices, Kohno said.

Since then, he and his graduate students at the UW have pointed out security holes in technologies such as implantable cardiac defibrillators, pacemakers, radio frequency identification tags (which are used, among other places, on many credit cards and Washington state’s new enhanced driver licenses), and the Nike + iPod sport kit (the workout tracker that fits inside running shoes). His group has also recently developed software that causes messages or data to self-destruct after a set period of time. The program, Vanish, is one step towards a security answer to the problem of putting all your information into the “cloud” of sites such as Facebook or Google, Kohno said, where it might be backed up and never fully deleted.

I found his group’s revelations about implantable medical devices especially chilling. Right now, devices such as cardiac defibrillators signal wirelessly only over short distances, to allow doctors to adjust them without surgery. But in the future, Kohno said, he can see technology advancing to the point where those wireless signals have a longer range, and that’s where the real danger to the patient comes in. Beyond just gleaning a patient’s medical and other personal information, a defibrillator hacker could send signals to shut off the device or send electric shocks to the patient’s heart. In 2008, Kohno’s group managed to perform these potentially fatal hacks on a real defibrillator (not in a person).

“This is a wake-up call for the industry and the FDA that these are serious issues, or could become serious in the future,” Kohno said. “I believe that providing the first concrete evidence is the first step toward having a broader impact.”

To figure out which piece of technology he’s going to hack into next, Kohno asks what the next big thing in technology is going to be over the next five to 10 years, that people might not have examined for security gaps. Then he tries to think of every damaging thing a devious person could do with that technology, if they hacked into it. “I think I have always liked to play the game of looking for holes in the system,” Kohno said, when I asked him how he first got interested in security.

Kohno, who is kicking off the Technology’s Alliance’s Science and Technology Discovery Series with a lecture this morning, also teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on computer security at UW, and is planning a security lecture or event for middle school and high school students sometime in the next year. Even though most of his students won’t go on to become security professionals, Kohno sees his courses on the “security mindset,” or how to think one step ahead of the hackers, as valuable for the computer industry, so that those working on new technologies will know when to call in the experts. “I want students have the habit of saying ‘what if’ when they see a new system,” he said. “The gritty details are much less important than having the mentality of asking, ‘What if something bad happens?’”

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Seattle-based Cray, the supercomputing company, announced today it has signed a multi-year contract with the Korea Meteorological Administration worth more than $40 million. Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) will deliver a next-generation supercomputer (capable of more than 600 trillion calculations per second), as well as service and support, to the Seoul-based weather forecasting and climate research organization. Delivery and acceptance of the supercomputer are expected in 2010.

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Last night, Google hosted a series of technology talks at its Fremont office in Seattle. The goal was to give the tech community a look at the core technologies and problems Google is working on in the Northwest—the first time Google Seattle has spoken publicly in detail about a number of projects it’s pursuing. Between its Seattle and Kirkland, WA, offices, Google has more than 500 employees here, making it one of the three largest outposts for the Internet giant outside of its Mountain View, CA, headquarters (the other two are in New York and Zurich, Switzerland).

Brian Bershad, Google’s Seattle site director, said the company has gone through a period of six or seven months of slowed growth (along with everyone else). But it has emerged from that and is hiring again. “We’re back in the mode where we’re looking for extremely strong talent,” Bershad said.

Three tech talks followed. I heard nothing earth-shattering, but Google provided an in-depth and unusually transparent look at how its local engineers are pushing the state of the art in the company’s key products. Some of this was clearly aimed at building relationships with the local technology talent pool. Here’s a brief recap:

—Stephen Adams, a staff software engineer, discussed his project on Web browser security. Like any browser, Google Chrome, which has 30 million users, needs periodic updates (software patches) to stay secure from viruses and other bugs. The problem is these patches are huge and take a lot of time and bandwidth to download. Adams figured out a clever way to reduce the size of a patch from 1 megabyte down to about 79 kilobytes (better than a factor of 10). Adams said he’s been going to Mountain View headquarters to work with the Chrome team on building the product, code-named “Courgette.”

—Peeyush Ranjan, engineering director for search, gave an overview of how his team is improving Google’s core search engine technology. One area they’ve been pushing is the freshness of search results—how to find and rapidly rank the importance of new Web pages as they come online. Another area is improving Google’s Hot Trends feature, which tells you the top rising queries in the search stream (terms like Hurricane Katrina or Apple iPhone). He also mentioned some future work in real-time search and push-based Web, but didn’t elaborate. Ranjan did say Google has a special team in Kirkland dedicated to pushing the state of the art in Web search.

—Chee Chew, engineering director for client and applications tools, talked about advances in desktop software and Web apps. He touched on Gmail tools—viewing attachments without having to download PowerPoint or PDF reader, and uploading groups of photos with one drag and click. Chew also showed a demo for a project on how to make it so adding video to the Web is as simple as adding an image.

Afterward, there were questions from the audience on how Google can make money on some of these products, and why it chose to go open-source for Chrome. “Let’s agree that Google is an Internet focused company” Chew said. “Our Internet apps are richer, faster, more robust. That helps our business model.” Bershad added that there are millions of paying Google Apps customers. Kirkland site director Scott Silver added that not every Google product has to make money.

As for the open source question, Bershad said, “Much of what we do, we want to see other companies pick up.” The best way to drive engineers to build valuable applications on top of existing platforms like Google’s, he said, is to “show them what you’re doing.”

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Amazon Web Services announced it has launched Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, a Web service that helps big companies extend their IT infrastructure into the Internet cloud while addressing isolation and security concerns. Companies can use existing firewalls and security to create an isolated network, and then access the Amazon cloud within that network.

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If you want to glimpse the future of gaming and entertainment software, check out the presentations at the world’s largest and most prestigious graphics conference.

This week, at the annual SIGGRAPH meeting (in New Orleans this year), researchers from Microsoft and elsewhere are presenting cutting-edge techniques in computer animation, image and video processing, interactive interfaces, and digital special effects. Microsoft Research has had a strong presence at this conference for the past decade.

What’s particularly cool about SIGGRAPH is its combination of academic rigor and almost immediate commercial applications for games and movies. It’s the nature of the ultra-competitive entertainment industry: everyone wants to use this stuff as soon as it’s ready for prime time (and sometimes even when it isn’t).

Here are a few of the Microsoft projects that stood out to me:

—Sometimes it’s all about the hair. But in the digital world of games and special effects, hair on characters can be a big pain. Artists and programmers have to manually create hairstyles for each character or base them on photos of real hair, and these are costly and time-consuming processes. Now Baining Guo of Microsoft Research Asia has teamed up with researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as well as Tsinghua University and Zhejiang University in China, to create a new method for synthesizing digital hair (see image above). The software designs each hairdo at two levels—keeping track of 2-D and 3-D geometry—and uses a “hair clustering algorithm” to take an input hairdo and create a new, original ‘do’ that can be put on a new character or avatar. This has clear applications for crowd simulations, game development, and online virtual worlds.

—Now you can search for clouds in the cloud. If you do an image search on Google or Bing, the results are tied to text surrounding the images, not the content of the pictures itself. You could potentially get much better results if the software could find specific features in the image you’re looking for. Now Jian Sun of Microsoft Research Asia and his collaborators at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Beihang University have solved this problem for a certain class of images (see left): a collection of more than half a million photos of the sky. Their software, called SkyFinder, can take a search query like “landscape at sunset with the sun on the bottom left,” and returns all pictures fitting that description. The tool could be useful in photo editing and film production, to swap in different sky backgrounds for a particular shot or scene.

—There’s a new model for computer architecture. Microsoft graphics guru Kurt Akeley, together with Stanford University researchers including Pat Hanrahan (known for his work with Pixar, and co-founder of Seattle’s Tableau Software), have developed a new programming model and toolkit for future graphics processing units (GPUs). GPUs are specialized chips, found in most personal computers, mobile phones, and game consoles, that are designed to manipulate and render 3D graphics efficiently. In the past few years, though, GPUs have become powerful enough to do more general kinds of computations, and influence the way computing is done in general. (One example is Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies, which takes advantage of GPUs to do advanced video encoding and processing for businesses.) Akeley and his collaborators are aiming for the day when GPUs redefine computer architecture; their toolkit could have applications not only in entertainment (for rendering sophisticated new graphics) but for the broader future of software development.

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Seattle-based supercomputing company Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) surprised analysts this morning by turning a modest profit in the second quarter, and was rewarded with a 12 percent bump in its stock price today.

Cray said today its revenues for the quarter ($62.7 million) increased by 34 percent compared with the same period last year ($46.7 million). That sales performance was enough to lift Cray to a profit of $3.4 million, compared with a $6.4 million loss it reported in the same period a year ago. This translated to a 10 cent per share profit in the quarter, which handily beat the consensus expectation of analysts, who forecasted a break-even quarter, according to First Call.

It has been a long road back for Cray, as I reported last week in an in-depth profile of the company. CEO Peter Ungaro told me Cray has become debt-free as of this spring (it had been saddled with $80 million of liabilities), and has been boosting its revenues through an aggressive three-pronged business strategy: selling high-end supercomputers to national laboratories, performing custom engineering and services, and selling lower-end machines to corporate customers through partnerships with companies like Microsoft and Intel. This strategy has been paying off handsomely, as the company announced several new contracts as part of its quarterly report—and this puts the company on sound enough footing to be profitable for the full year in 2009 and beyond.

Last month, Cray was awarded a multi-year contract with the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The contract, worth more than $50 million, includes the delivery of a Cray XT5 supercomputer, which will be upgraded to a future-generation Cray machine. And just this week, Cray received a contract to upgrade its “Jaguar” machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Jaguar, which runs scientific applications at a rate of more than one petaflop (quadrillion mathematical calculations per second), will be upgraded to exceed two petaflops, which would make it the world’s most powerful supercomputer. The upgrade is expected to be installed by the end of this year.

“We’ve made tremendous progress on some of our new initiatives, expanding our product and service offerings to further solidify our leadership position in the industry,” Ungaro said in a statement. He added that Cray is delivering its supercomputing technology to a “broader set of customers,” and cited “over $70 million in new wins in just the last week.”

Cray has about 850 employees, 160 in the Seattle office. The company also has large facilities in Minnesota and Wisconsin, its original birthplace. (Cray Research was founded in 1972 by the renowned engineer Seymour Cray.) Its main competitors in supercomputing include IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics, Hitachi, and NEC.

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The reality in the IT world, as one executive at Marlborough, MA-based Netezza (NYSE: NZ) puts it, is that “the cost of adding more data to disks is getting closer to zero every day.” That’s not great news if your traditional business is selling high-performing servers at $60,000 per terabyte. So to keep growing, Netezza is getting more competitive on price.

Netezza’s newest data warehousing appliance, set to launch Monday, isn’t a custom-built box with all the elements specified and integrated by Netezza, like the company’s previous generations of machines, but rather an off-the-shelf blade server from IBM that’s got Netezza hardware and software inside. The new product’s price? $20,000 per terabyte, or one-third of what Netezza was charging before. [Update: Thanks to Curt Monash, publisher of the database industry blog DBMS2, for helping with clarifications to this paragraph.]

Called the Netezza TwinFin, this new product can actually hold a lot more data than its predecessors. The company hopes the radical price reduction, and better performance, will open up the market for data warehousing hardware to companies and industries that wouldn’t previously have considered using such specialized and expensive hardware.

In general terms, data warehousing means storing historical data (as opposed to real-time, transactional data) that can be mined for trends or insights to guide business decisions. For example, wireless operators use data warehouses to store cell-phone calling records and identify users who could be invited to switch to more profitable calling plans. The pitch at Netezza—whose 2007 IPO was one of the most successful in New England, raising more than $100 million—has always been that the company’s patented hardware architecture speeds up the database queries that companies must run against such data to draw out trends. The architecture relies on massive parallelism (doing many calculations at once) and some clever filtering of data through chips called field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) as it streams off of hard drives.

The performance of commodity blade servers from IBM and other companies has advanced to the point that they can handle the type of query volumes typically placed on Netezza appliances, says Phil Francisco, Netezza’s vice president of product management and product marketing. Netezza has relied on IBM’s latest blade servers, which include a slot for an expansion card, also known as a “sidecar,” in order to make the product faster and cheaper.

“We’ve used that sidecar technology from IBM to incorporate some of the secret sauce of Netezza, the field programmable gate arrays, which acts essentially as a turbocharger to speed up query processing and the decompression of data as it comes off the disk,” Francisco says. “It allows us to get the best of both worlds—the commodity platform along with the Netezza secret sauce.”

Francisco says the TwinFin is the first in a family of four appliances that will include an even cheaper, entry-level product, a high-capacity version for customers with huge datasets, and a memory-intensive version for “highly interactive or very operational deployments.” This, too, is a departure for Netezza, as the company’s previous appliances have varied only in their storage capacity, not their basic capabilities. The related appliances will be unveiled at the company’s user conference, Enzee Universe, in Boston in September.

By lowering the price of its systems, Netezza wants to get data warehousing appliances into small and mid-sized companies that wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to spend $60,000 per terabyte. “What we are trying to do is open up the market for anyone who has databases sized from a few hundred gigabytes up to a petabyte, which is a pretty wide swath.” The TwinFin will appeal to Netezza’s big customers in the retail, telecommunications, financial, digital media, pharmaceutical, and government sectors, Francisco says, but also will be affordable to smaller players in those niches.

So, at one-third the price, will Netezza be able to make up the revenue difference by selling at least three times as many appliances? “Certainly we anticipate that,” says Francisco. “That’s the whole point of being able to appeal to a wider set of customers.”

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Where I grew up in the Midwest in the 1970s and early 80s, Cray was synonymous with supercomputing. Back then, a supercomputer was a top-flight machine that could perform a few hundred million floating point operations per second (”flops”). That was good enough to help scientists do intensive calculations in areas like weather forecasting, climate modeling, and nuclear weapons simulations. Cray’s first supercomputer, the famed Cray-1, was bought by Los Alamos National Laboratory for $8.8 million in 1976; eventually, some 80 of the machines were sold, for $5 million to $8 million a pop.

Today, your average desktop computer is far more powerful than a Cray-1, and so the definition of “supercomputer” keeps changing to keep up with the times. But one thing has not changed. Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) is still a major player in the space, despite a long history of ups and downs. The company, which began in 1972 as Cray Research in Chippewa Falls, WI, was bought by Silicon Graphics in 1996 for $767 million, and then was reborn in Seattle in 2000 following a $50 million merger with Tera Computer (which was renamed Cray). Since then, it has been a long uphill climb to get back near the top of the supercomputing heap against heavyweight competitors like IBM and Hewlett-Packard.

Nobody better to tell that story than Peter Ungaro, the chief executive of Cray. I recently had a chance to speak with Ungaro by phone at his Spokane, WA, office about his company’s strategy and recent history, the technical challenges involved in modern supercomputing, and innovative ways of gaining new customers (how do you sell someone a $10 million machine?). What impressed me was his ability to lay out the financial concerns of his company while also diving deep into the technological aspects of supercomputers—how they will interact with cloud computing, how computational records will continue to be broken, and when computers might exceed all processing capabilities of the human brain.

First off, I wanted to know how Ungaro (left) defines a “supercomputer” these days. Some would say it should be one of the 500 fastest machines in the world. Others would say it’s a machine used for scientific and technical problems that costs more than a certain amount. Ungaro’s definition is simple and focuses on the bottom line. “We like to think of supercomputers as costing more than a million dollars,” he says.

Ungaro, a Washington State University alum, joined Cray in 2003 to run sales and marketing as senior vice president. He had been at IBM for 13 years, most recently running its high performance computing group, a $2 billion business inside Big Blue. Why did he make the jump to Cray? “I really loved the supercomputing space,” Ungaro says. “Customers are doing really interesting things. I really wanted to try and see what a smaller company was like. Even at $2 billion, you’re only 2 percent of IBM’s revenues.” In short, like many entrepreneurs, he wanted to have more impact. “There was no better place to go than Cray. It was a natural move.”

But Cray had its share of problems. The company had struggled to get its next-generation supercomputer product ready, and 2004 was “really rough,” Ungaro says. Cray was losing money and …Next Page »

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Think about the technological tools you use most often. For many of us, cell phones and computers rank high up on that list. But these devices are designed with the hearing and sighted in mind, and are constantly evolving, so there are numerous hurdles to clear to make a phone or a computer usable to the blind or deaf.

The University of Washington’s Richard Ladner, along with students in the electrical engineering and computer science departments, is using engineering and computational tools to work on several of these hurdles—and the commercial applications could have far-ranging impact.

“When you think about a person with a disability, such as a blind person, most people think that’s a medical problem,” he said in a recent interview. “Just restoring the human function may be a solvable problem, but probably not for a long time. But maybe there’s another way to get the same thing done, to allow a person to read a book or talk to their family. So thinking non-medically, as an engineer, there are other ways to solve these problems.”

Ladner, who was born to two deaf parents, also believes that technologies developed for the blind and deaf may eventually lead to broader technological advancements—not such a far-fetched idea, as it’s happened before. Mobile GPS was originally developed as an aid for the blind, Ladner said, as was optical character recognition, a technology developed in the 1960s to turn an image of text (such as a photo of a book page) into digital text, which would then be read out loud using speech synthesizers. Now, the same technology is ubiquitous in turning pictures of text into digital text;Google uses it to digitize books.

Ladner used to work on computational theory before shifting to accessible technology in 2002. He and colleague Eve Riskin, professor of electrical engineering, are now trying to take their long-running project on accessibility for the deaf, MobileASL, to the market. This project uses video compression technology to enable signing over video cell phones on low-bandwidth wireless networks (such as those in the U.S.). Currently, deaf people can’t reliably use video cell phones to communicate using sign language, because the videos are too choppy to be intelligible. Ladner and his colleagues are working with UW TechTransfer on commercializing MobileASL.

“We’re trying to get it out and get it in actual use,” he said. “It’s in high demand. I get hundreds of e-mails about it.”

Although designed with the deaf in mind, MobileASL could be used by anyone who wants better quality video phone calls, Ladner said. Bringing it to market is slightly complicated by the fact that …Next Page »

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