Unless otherwise noted, all content on this company blog site is authored by Steve Holcombe as President & CEO of Pardalis, Inc. More profile information: 
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Sunday, April 12, 2009 at 10:22PM Traditional business applications and platforms are too complicated and expensive. They need a data center, a complex software stack and a team of experts to run them.
This short video explains what Cloud Computing is and why it's faster, lower cost and doesn't eat up your valuable IT resources.
Friday, February 6, 2009 at 11:43AM From RegisterDanGoodIn on YouTube:
"Ethical hacker Chris Paget demonstrates a low-cost mobile device that surreptitiously reads and clones RFID tags embedded in United States passport cards and enhanced drivers' licenses."
For the full story see The Register article.
Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 1:11PM 
My brother, Scot, and I traveled to North Dakota last week for meetings in Dickinson, N.D. (in southwest North Dakota) and Fargo, N.D. (southeastern North Dakota on the border with sister city, Moorhead, MN). Leaving Oklahoma we traveled north through Kansas, spent the night in North Platte, Nebraska. The next day took us by the Black Hills of South Dakota and Mt. Rushmore. If you have never been there, it's definitely worth the stop. I hadn't realized that the four President's gazed out of the Black Hills toward the east and a vast sea of prairie. We also drove on some beautiful, shoulderless 'blue' highways like that of Highway 85 between Belle Fourche, S.D. and Belfield, N.D. If you love the movie Dances with Wolves, you'll love this stretch of scenery. Lots and lots of pronghorn antelope, too. And Redig, S.D. really is one of those 'towns' with one house sitting on a rail straight road stretching endlessly into the distance. No kidding.
But, I digress.
For those of you who think you are unfamiliar with complex supply chains, allow me to jog your memory because you actually know more than you think you do. Spinach. Lead painted toys. Mad cows. Tomatoes. Jalapeno peppers. Hamburger. What do they all have in common? They are products that originate at the frayed ends of lengthy (even international) supply chains beset by many, many fears related to information sharing. And they are products that have been deemed poisonous (lead paint) or unhealthy (contaminated with e. coli, the prions that apparently cause BSE, or salmonella). Actually, the tomato industry got hammered this summer and they weren't even at fault. But take a look at some of the wonderful, free advertising the tomato industry received before the FDA called off the dogs.
What is the value of immediately accessible, credible, supply chain information? If it incontrovertibly points to you and your business as the culprit in a food disease crisis, for instance, then, yes, you are limiting your options. But if your company uses best practices in its crop management and limits its risks in advance, the value of credible information at your fingertips in a disease crisis is to immediately distinguish your company from (a) the actual culprits, and (b) all other companies who perform best crop management practices just like you but can't provide credible information for months. In fact the damage is not measured in months but in hours. Unfortunately, within hours the damage to reputation has been seeded into the minds of wholesale buyers and retail consumers. And without your ability to immediately provide exonerating information, the government regulators are going to 'play it safe' and cast a broad net that unfortunately ropes in a lot of innocent parties.
Information is like a sword. Unfortunately, if you don't firmly grab the sword and make it cut for you, in a crisis the sword will be out of your hands and you will potentially be sliced to death in the name of 'public health'.
The Dickinson Research Extension Center of North Dakota State University (NDSU DREC) is the first land grant extension center, and perhaps still the only one, to operate a beef livestock age and source verification program sanctioned by the USDA. It's called the CalfAID USDA PVP (i.e., process verified program employing RFID ear tags) and it's managed by NDSU DREC for the real cattlemen of the North Dakota Beef Cattle Improvement Association. The Agro-Security Resource Center at Dickinson State University also makes a significant contribution. It's partly research driven (with Congressional funding) and partly market-driven. It's market-driven in that those real livestock producers pay a fee per animal out of their pockets with the expectation that they will receive greater dollars (i.e., premiums) later on that the market pays for credible information about those calves. The CalfAID PVP exists to keep the calves connected with their age (i.e., birthdate) and source (i.e., origin) as each calf winds its way along an otherwise 'information dysfunctional' supply chain.
How dysfunctional is the information sharing? The U.S. has a national herd of about 100 million cattle. There's about a million cattle operations of one sort or the other. The vast majority of calf producers don't know where their calves eventually end up being slaughtered. Most packers don't know from what ranch or farm the animals they slaughter originated from. It's pretty much the same as it was in the 19th century. Most products (i.e., the livestock) are pushed one-step at a time as 'as is' commodities along a supply chain in which each segment only sees one step back, and one step forward. It's kind of like standing in a bucket line helping to pass along that bucket of water to put out a fire. You know who is passing you the bucket, and you know to whom you are passing it on. But in the beef industry, chances are you don't know where the fire is or even where the water is coming from.
In order to set the stage for scaling out from tracking thousands of cattle to tracking potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of cattle, NDSU DREC has adopted a web service for their supply chain that empowers livestock producers to do with their cattle data what the following jazzy video envisions for social networks.
DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo
The web service, patented and engineered by Pardalis, is called a 'data bank' and it's coded in .NET with SQL server architecture on the back-end (though I would be very interested to see an open source, adjacent Linux system similarly funded and architected from Pardalis' IP as a data bank for the social networking space).
Common Point Authoring ModelSo how exactly does the 'data bank' work. To the right is the information model for the Common Point Authoring system (CPA) - that's the name that Pardalis has used in its most recent patents. You can also compare this image with other views, images and information about the CPA system to be found elsewhere in this blog site. Within the CPA system data cannot be changed once set (i.e., registered) so that the data can be used for verification and certification. Or, put another way, Pardalis has transformed the traditional application of immutable objects beyond run-time efficiencies, and empowered end-users with tools for granularly authoring, registering, controlling, and sharing these immutable objects.
The end-users 'own' and directly control sharing rights over what they author and register (or automatically collect and register), they just can't change it once it's authored. It becomes a part of a permanent, trustworthy record of the bank albeit controlled by the author. Other data bank account holders who receive any information from another data bank account holder know that. And they can remix it with their own data, and further share it, permission being granted to do so by the original author. This all helps build confidence, data credibility and, especially, trusted communication where it did not exist before. It provides a means for supply chain participants to reap benefits not just from their traditional products, but now also from their informational products. And, yes, there's no free lunch. The government might very well be able to subpoena those electronic records in their quest to protect the public's health. But they do the same with traditional monetary banks, too, don't they?
Now there are a number of technological ways to accomplish the same thing, it's just that Pardalis' object oriented approach provides certain long term advantages in terms of scalability, efficiency and granularity in 'the Cloud' that match up extremely well to an emerging Semantic Web. And you don't have to take my word for it. See, for example, the blogged entries, Efficient monitoring of objects in object-oriented database system which interacts cooperatively with client programs and Advantages of object oriented databases over relational databases. And Pardalis’ granular information banking system provides a substantial head-start in the race toward the standardization of a metadata platform for what I call an Ownership Web.
Online encyclopedias like Metaweb's Freebase Parallax are beginning to roll out tools for semantic search and semantic visualizations of publicly accessible information. See the nifty video clip in Freebase Parallax and the Ownership Web. Others like Google, Yahoo! , and Wikipedia will follow. The intrinsic value for connecting these search engines and encyclopedias with the Ownership Web will be the opportunity to likewise empower their authenticated end-users with the same semantic tools for accessing information that people consider to be their identity, that participants to complex supply chains consider to be confidential, and that governments classify as secret.
But, again, I digress.
Here's a film clip demonstrating the the authoring and portability of immutable data objects along the beef livestock supply chain. The interface is neither sexy nor jazzy. But it is effective. This type of look and feel makes sense for the beef livestock supply chain as Microsoft Excel is familiar to a large percentage of cattle producers (at least the ones who have moved on from pencil and paper). Currently, there's no audio because, frankly, I've provided the audio 'live' when called upon to do so. If you, too, would like a verbal walk through, drop me an e-mail. Or, in the alternative, I've scripted a written walk-through that you can download, print and follow as the clip runs its course. If you want to see a full screen version, click on the hyperlinked text below the graphic to take you to the Vimeo website.
NDSU CalfAID Data Bank Demo from Steve Holcombe on Vimeo.
In the coming months the data bank will be used not just to track the data uploaded and ported by CalfAID members, but also for helping to keep data connected with the animals from other age and source programs, and probably even for COOL compliance, too.
Once again, there's way more to the data bank than its application to the beef industry. As Dr. Kris Ringwall, Director of NDSU DREC, said in Fargo to a large vegetable growing company during a live demonstration of the data bank, "whether it's an animal or a vegetable, it's a product with a pedigree".
Well, that may be more of a paraphrase than a quote, but I know that Kris in this Presidential campaign season would nonetheless 'approve this message'.
Steve Holcombe
The activities in North Dakota with CalfAID have been suspended. The livestock industry is struggling to find its way when it comes to animal identification. See the New York Times article dated 5 February 2009 USDA Will Drop Program to Trace Livestock in which USDA Secretary Vilsack announces the termination of the National Animal Identification System.
But the activities in North Dakota have by no means gone to waste.
In November, 2009 Pardalis joined with North Dakota State University, Oklahoma State University, Michigan State University, and Top 10 Produce LLC in a grant application filed in January for a Specialty Crops Research Initiative Coordinated Agricultural Project under USDA-NIFA-SCRI-002672. The essential premise of the $5M/5YR SCRI application was that providing supply chain participants (including consumers) with more control (i.e., traceability) over their data will increase the availability and quality of product data, and open up new, sustainable business models for both large and small companies. Though we received notice on 1 June 2010 that we would not be funded, here's what one reviewer had to say:
"Although [the application] addresses a topic area clearly of importance to Homeland Security, the FDA, and of course to USDA, the proposed traceability-system project, as written, could be used just as well for widgets as for fresh produce .... [But what] funding program within USDA or between the interested federal agencies mentioned above could be a better home for this proposal?
The "widgets remark" was right on target. We were indeed attempting to get across in our application that there is now an increasing critical need for bringing infrastructure standardization and uniformity to agricultural traceability in general, and not just for specialty crops supply chains.
Undeterred, the 'SCRI team' is committed to a process of filing applications, and two letters of intent have been filed under the Agricultural and Food Research Initiative, CFDA No. 10.310. They are entitled Stakeholder driven food supply safety system for a real-time detection, risk assessment, and mitigation of food borne contamination (Program Area Code: A4121 of the AFRI Food Safety RFA) and Stakeholder driven food supply safety system for a real-time detection, risk assessment, and mitigation of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli in beef products (Program Area: A4101 of the AFRI Food Safety RFA). Funding for each is potentially up to $25M/5YRS.
And academics from additional universities are coming on board. So are new stakeholders in ag supply chains. The snowball is rolling faster down the hill. Getting bigger. Gaining momentum.
Steve Holcombe
The "snowball" has become The Whole Chain Traceability Consortium™, a trademark of Pardalis, Inc. See http://pardalis.squarespace.com/blog/2011/10/29/the-whole-chain-traceability-consortium.html
Tuesday, June 10, 2008 at 3:13AM Let's begin with the definition of Cloud Computing as currently found in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia -
"The term ... derives from the common depiction in most technology architecture diagrams, of the Internet ... using an illustration of a cloud. The computing resources being accessed are typically owned and operated by a third-party provider on a consolidated basis in data center locations. Target consumers are not concerned with the underlying technologies used to achieve the increase in server capability, [the availability of which] is sold simply as a service available on demand."
As reported in Data Center Knowledge, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently spoke about the boom in data center growth -
"The shift of services to the Cloud is getting us to think about data centers on a scale we never have before .... When you think about design, you can be very radical and come up with some huge improvements as you design for this kind of scale ...."
As reported in The Economist there is indeed a boom in the data center industry -
"Data centers are essential to nearly every industry and have become as vital to the functioning of society as power stations are .... American alone has more than 7,000 data centers .... And each is housing ever more servers, the powerful computers that crunch and dish up data .... Google is said to operate a global network of about three dozen data centers with ... more than 1 million servers. To catch up, Microsoft is investing billions of dollars and adding up to 20,000 servers a month .... In America the number of servers is expected to grow to 15.8 million by 2010 - three times as many as a decade earlier."
This boom is building the Cloud where software as a service (SaaS) will find the 'oxygen' it needs to survive and thrive. The expansion of the Cloud augurs well that distributed data within the Cloud will come to substitute to some extent - perhaps substantially so - for data distributed outside of the Cloud.
One resulting consequence will likely be that mobile technology becomes promoted not as a storage device but as a utilitarian tool for taking a sip of data as needed, when needed, from the moisture of the Cloud. Imagine the Cloud holding the data for each user's personal mobile technology. Imagine users traveling as 'digital nomads' without laptop computers, because they will stay connected to the Cloud through their internet-accessible mobile phones.
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, spent a week recording his life as one such digital nomad for The Economist.
Here's the takeaway quote (paraphrased) from this podcast - "In my travels I keep a pen and a BlackBerry. My assumption is that the network has become ubiquitous across the world. The network is more a utility for me than a destination."
Again, data distribution becomes more about distribution of data stored within the Cloud and less about distribution of data stored on mobile technology. Lost your internet-accessible mobile phone in Paris, France? Purchase another one when you land in San Francisco and re-connect to the Cloud (and your address book, scheduling calendar, etc.) without missing a beat.
Another likely consequence of the Cloud is that as people and businesses consider moving their computer storage and services into the Cloud, their direct technological control of information becomes more and more of a competitive driver. The buzz created by Dataportability.org is the early evidence of this driver. See Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership (Part I).
But mere portability is not enough. It only whets the appetite of people and business owners for more technological control - not just legislated or contractual privacy protections. See, e.g., Personal Health Records, Data Portability and the Continuing Privacy Paradigm. That is, the Cloud significantly increases the opportunities for privacy friendly technologies, including data ownership technologies.
"The [online] company that ... figures out ways of ... [technologically] building into [its] compliance systems ... [privacy] compliance mechanisms ... will be putting itself at a tremendous competitive advantage for attracting the services to operate in [the cloud computing environment]." Quoting Reidenberg in Computing in the Cloud: Possession and ownership of data.
Steve Inskeep of NPR's Morning Edition recently talked with Craig Balding, an information technology security expert for a Fortune 500 company, about Cloud Computing. Here's the takeaway exchange from the 3m 30s audio clip 'Cloud Computing' Puts Computer Resources on Tap -
Inskeep (2m25s): "Is somebody who runs a business, who used to have a filing cabinet in a filing room, and then had computer files and computer databases, really going to be able or want to take the risk of shipping all their files out to some random computer they don't even know where it is and paying to rent storage that way?"
Balding: "Yes, that's really a key question, even though these are reputable companies ... there's going to be a whole ecosystem that builds up around around [Cloud Computing] ... of smaller companies that will offer additional services on top of [Cloud Computing's] basic services .... so what I've done is [I've} actually started up a blog [called] cloudsecurity.org and what I'm trying to do is to get the various cloud providers to come and have a discussion about what security they are doing ..."
If you are an IT security expert, I would encourage you to take a moment to familiarize yourself with Mr. Balding's Cloud Security blog. Security is an absolute essential for the Cloud, as it has been for databases of any size since they were first engineered.
But security ... is not enough.
As Bruce Schneier has written in Secrets And Lies - Digital Security In A Networked World -
"The average person can not tell good security from bad security... the world is filled with specialties that are critical to public safety and security, and yet are beyond the comprehension of the general population... Commerce works the same way. When was the last time you personally checked the accuracy of a gas station's pumps, or a taxicab's meter, or the weight and volume information on packaged foods?" [emphasis added]
Schneier's language parallels the central theme of Banking on Granular Information Ownership -
Banks meet the expectations of their customers by providing them with security, yes, but also credibility, compensation, control, convenience, integration and verification. It is the dynamic combination of these that instills in customers the confidence that they continue to own their money, even while it is in the hands of a third-party bank."People are comfortable and familiar with monetary banks. That’s a good thing because without people willingly depositing their money into banks, there would be no banking system as we know it .... [By comparison, we] live in a world that is at once awash in on-demand information courtesy of the Internet, and at the same time the Internet is strangely impotent when it comes to information ownership ....
In many respects the Internet is like the Wild West because there is no information web similar to our monetary banking system. No similar integrated system exists for precisely and efficiently delivering our medical records to a new physician, or for providing access to a health history of the specific animal slaughtered for that purchased steak. Nothing out there compares with how the banking system facilitates gasoline purchases."
No, security is not sufficient by itself to compel the hypothetical business owner, whom Inskeep was referencing, to take the risk of putting his or her information into the Cloud.
As blogged in Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership (Part IV), nobody has done a better job of describing why data ownership matters to the use and effectiveness of big databases than Marshall Van Alstyne. And I continue to be charmed with the 1994 publication he co-authored entitled, Why Not One Big Database? Ownership Principles for Database Design.
You might have seen this before, but here’s my favorite quote from Van Alstyne's paper -
“The fundamental point of this research is that ownership matters. Any group that provides data to other parts of an organization requires compensation for being the source of that data. When it is impossible to provide an explicit contract that rewards those who create and maintain data, "ownership" will be the best way to provide incentives. Otherwise, and despite the best available technology, an organization has not chosen its best incentives and the subtle intangible costs of low effort will appear as distorted, missing, or unusable data.” (emphasis added)
I know I am in effect bootstrapping Van Alstyne's research results.
I am taking liberties by stretching his research from big organizational databases to cover that of the Cloud. I recognize that the Cloud is already of a scale that is astronomically larger than even what Van Alstyne in his mid-1990's research could have possibly imagined it would become today.
But when I read Van Alstyne's paper there is an insistent voice inside of me that says "data ownership matters to the Cloud for the same reasons it matters to big, organizational databases."
[This concludes Part I of a three part series. On to Part II.]
Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 3:00AM The following video is provided by UChannel, a collection of public affairs lectures, panels and events from academic institutions all over the world. This video was taken at a conference held at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy on January 14, 2008. The conference was sponsored by Microsoft.
What you will see is a panel and discussion format moderated by Ed Felten, Director of the CITP. The panel members are:
Here is a paragraph descriptive of the questions addressed by the panel.
"In cloud computing, a provider's data center holds information that would more traditionally have been stored on the end user's computer. How does this impact user privacy? To what extent do users "own" this data, and what obligations do the service providers have? What obligations should they have? Does moving the data to the provider's data center improve security or endanger it?"
The video, entitled "Computing in the Cloud: Possession and ownership of data", is useful and timely. And the panel is well constructed.
Tim Lee, who readily states that he is not a lawyer, very much serves as an apologist for the online companies who believe that "total, one-hundred percent online privacy would mean ... that there wouldn't be any online [sharing] services at all" (Video Time ~ 2:07).
The online services Lee briefly touches upon by way of example are the ubiquitous use of Web cookies for collecting a wide variety of information about usage of the Internet by online users (~5:30), Google's Gmail which employs a business model of examining contents of users' e-mail and tailoring advertising presented to users (~8:05), Facebook's News Feed service which permits users to keep track of changes to their 'friends' accounts, and Facebook's Beacon service which sends data from external websites to Facebook accounts for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements (~10:54).
Joel Reidenberg, a professor of law, believes that the distinction between government and the private sector loses its meaning when we think of computing in the cloud (~ 15:10), but that the prospect of cloud computing also reinforces the need for fair information practice standards (~16:00). He is of the opinion that as computing moves into the cloud it will be easier to regulate centralized gate-keepers by law and/or by technical standards (~23:50).
Marc Rotenberg, also a law professor, emphasizes that without user anonymity, and without transparency provided by the online companies, there will be no privacy for users in the cloud (~29:47 - 37:20). And in doing so Rotenberg challenges Tim Lee for his statement that there cannot be complete user privacy for online companies to provide the services they provide (~33.30). This actually makes for the most interesting exchanges of the video from the 38:00 minute mark to the 44:00 minute mark.
There is also an interesting dialogue regarding the application of the Fourth Amendment. One of the conference attendees asked the panel why there had been no mention of the Fourth Amendment in any of their presentations. Here is the response from Reidenberg at the 53:30 mark:
"Cloud computing is threatening the vitality of the Fourth Amendment ... [because] the more we see centralization of data [by private, online companies], and the more that data is used for secondary purposes, the easier it is for the government to gain access outside the kind of restraints we put on states in the Fourth Amendment."
In other words, why should the government worry about overcoming Fourth Amendment hurdles about confiscating a person's data when it can sit back and relatively easily purchase or otherwise obtain the same personal data from the big online companies? And do so even in real-time? Why, indeed.
For me, the second 'take away' from this video is found in another cogent comment by Professor Reidenberg at the 88:53 mark:
"The [online] company that ... figures out ways of ... building into [its] compliance systems ... [privacy] compliance mechanisms ... will be putting itself at a tremendous competitive advantage for attracting the services to operate in [the cloud computing environment]."
The technological data ownership discussed and described in Portability, Traceability and Data Ownership - Part IV, supra, is a privacy compliance mechanism.
For those who are interested in the legalities and government policies revolving around burgeoning data ownership issues related to software as a service, the Semantic Web and Cloud Computing, and who are motivated to sit through a 90 minute presentation, here is the video clip ....
Steve Holcombe
In the United States, and notwithstanding the impotency of the Fourth Amendment protections against government search and seizure, it is an irony that the growing centralization of the Cloud may well render it more amenable to government regulation and lawsuit liability.
"Cloud computing opens doors for privacy enhancements [driven by regulation]. It's easier to target for regulation by law or by technical configuration [the] gatekeepers. So to the extent there is a central management, they're easier to find, they're easier to regulate, and they're easier to hold liable than distributed systems."
Quoting Reidenberg at the 23:50m mark.
