By Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb

The presentation by Steve Jobs opening Apple’s developer conference today was packed full of details large and small about the company’s hardware and software, but the one detail that could have the biggest long-term impact well beyond Apple itself was the introduction of Apple’s new video calling system, FaceTime. On stage that the system was based on extensive use of open technical standards, Jobs explained, and that the company intends to work hard to make FaceTime an open industry standard itself.

Interoperable across various smart phones and carriers, live mobile video could be a force for major changes in the way we experience the Web and the world. It could be one of Apple’s most important contributions to the future.

Mobile Video Calling is Coming and It is Going to Be Big

Alfred Poor, analyst who estimates in research released today from GigaOm Pro that approximately 3.2 million consumers will use mobile video chat in 2010. Poor believes that the number of using mobile video chat will be grew almost 50-fold in the next five years, to an estimated 142 million consumers.

‘The first few years of the market will see fairly small numbers with the main adoptees being early adopters,’ he writes, ‘but by 2012 the market will reach beyond the enthusiast audience to a more mainstream audience, and we’ll see adoption rates similar to that of SMS and other messaging formats as illustrated in the middle of the last decade.’

‘The power of video communications,’ Poor points out, ‘lies in the ability of the participants to detect subtle emotional nuances during conversations.’

Video communication is not only an experience of face-to-face interaction remotely, but also a new form of cultural experience all together.

Barriers to the Future

Mobile computer processing power has been a big limitation and the iPhone 4’s ability to pull it off pushes the envelope. This is presumably a substantial part of why the iPhone 4’s FaceTime implementation is only able to call other iPhone 4s at launch.

Another major limitation is Bandwidth, and one that Apple is avoiding for now by limiting FaceTime calls to Wi-Fi connections. Jobs said today that the feature is limited to Wi-Fi in 2010, but the company is ‘working with the cellular providers to get things ready.’ Note the use of the word providers, plural.

We need more and cheaper bandwidth, and more efficient ways to use what is available, will be a defining issue for the near-term future of software development, tech political policy and user experience.

And the next challenge is interoperability. Mobile phone users can make voice calls across networks, email users can email across networks, however, we still need a technical standard that is agreed upon and implemented widely for mobile video calling to across networks.

That’s what Apple aims to do with the introduction of FaceTime. The awkwardly named protocol could be implemented by all major handset manufacturers so that consumers could perform video calls as easily as we perform voice calls today.

Will other companies adopt Apple’s proposed standard? If Apple maintains its dominance in desirable markets, they may.

Cross-network calling would make the market explode, as long as carriers can build out capacity fast enough. Unfortunately, there is some doubt that all parties will see big increases in consumer use of their products as a good thing. Some carriers are liable to prefer less use for more pay, and if they can spit in your eye as part of the deal – all the better.

Nothing can be taken for granted, but if Apple can help advance a cross-network standard for real-time mobile video communication – that could become one of the company’s most important contributions to the world.

By John Gallant, Eric Knorr

Few companies get a chance at a second life. ‘A very, very dead company,’ said John Chen, when he signed on as CEO of Sybase in 1998. Once a strong competitor to Oracle, Sybase had lost its way because it missed the opportunity to enter the enterprise application market Oracle now leads.

Through the efforts of Chen and his team over the next decade, Sybase turned around and reinvented itself as an enabler of the ‘unwired enterprise.’ Enterprise software giant SAP signed a merger agreement with Sybase in mid-May, citing Sybase’s leadership in both mobile and in real-time analytics.

Sybase has not granted interviews to the press since the merger announcement. However, in March, John Gallant, chief content officer for IDG, and Eric Knorr, editor in chief of InfoWorld, sat down with Chen for an hour-long chat as part of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series before rumors about the merger began circulating. The interview explored how Chen was able to rescue Sybase from the brink and establish the company as a key mobile enterprise player. This abbreviated version of the interview focused on the company’s mobile business and insights and the complete interview goes much more in-depth on Sybase’s history and analytics business.

Listen to the interview in its entirety:

Gallant: You’ve got a pretty interesting and diverse product set. You have the database, analytics, mobile management tools and mobile tools that are pretty widely deployed among the service providers. Help us understand how all of those different technologies fit into one cohesive strategy that makes Sybase unique.

Chen: Sybase traditionally has been an infrastructure software provider to the enterprise. We started as a client-server database company and then moved into development toolsets when we acquired PowerSoft.

And after I came on board, we continued to develop our database. Gradually, we positioned ourselves in high-growth areas, like analytics, mobile middleware and mobile services. And how we envision that it all comes together is that we believe mobile enterprise computing is going to be the next really big thing. If you think that e-commerce was a big sea change in the early 2000s, m-commerce will make e-commerce a very small thing. M-commerce reaches almost the majority of 6 billion people around the world.

Knorr: What characterizes an enterprise mobile service as opposed to a consumer service?

Chen: Applications must talk to applications; machines must talk to machines. There has to be intelligence gathering, mobile analytics, real-time reporting, all these things. We could be a leader in providing those kinds of infrastructures. It starts with back-end infrastructure in a data center to people sitting here with a device.

When you talk about the database, there are many aspects of it. An OLTP database sitting underneath applications and collecting records. That’s a database. Data warehousing, analytics. That’s a database. A database could be an embedded persistent store in the field, like if you’re driving a truck, with a FedEx machine, or in U.S. Navy or Army deployment units — they have on-board computers. That’s an embedded database. So to us a database doesn’t really conjure up the image of a dark room and lights blinking. It’s that plus many, many things.

And we really do believe in [a mobile] persistent store. Five years ago, that was a laughable subject, because there wasn’t enough capacity, there wasn’t enough battery to sustain it. Well, five years have gone by and things have changed quite a bit. Things like the iPad are coming out. Who knows what the next two generations of the iPad are going to be like? I mean this is not only an Apple story. How does an enterprise take advantage of all these technologies? How do we manage these things? What about security concerns, about who’s going to use what to see what? And how do we build intelligence in?

I’m holding a device. I’m as good as what you tell me, right? Well, how do I know what you want, at what time? You can go on Amazon and they remember the history of your preferences and tell you what you ought to be buying next. That’s just the beginning. You have to be able to deliver that information in a remote way. And all these applications, they have to be able to talk to each other agnostically.

You may have an iPhone and somebody else has a BlackBerry and somebody else has an iPad. Somebody else is staring at a TV; somebody else is looking at the voice-over-IP devices on my desk from Cisco. How does that all come together? Unified communication is the software architecture that’s going to bring it through. We’d like to be a participant in that. And that’s why we invest in messaging; that’s why we invest in how to channel content. That’s why we invest in how you manage devices; that’s why we invest in all the encrypting of that information that goes over the airwaves. And that’s why we invest in analytics, and that’s how it ties back to what our core strength has been.

Gallant: That’s quite a mouthful. How do you roll all that together?

Chen: To us, this is the unwired enterprise concept: Having a layer of architecture that translates to products and services that people can actually deploy and employ. Not the entire stack, a layer of the stack. You could use my analytics engine over an Oracle database. You could put my services engine over any other company’s engine, maintaining an open heterogeneous computing environment, which was the principle of Sybase to start with. So that’s how it all ties in.

Knorr: You led the company into the mobile space very early. What did you see that other people weren’t seeing?

Chen: I knew we were going to get to that. That has a little bit to do with history. Most other CEOs will claim that they’re visionary. The fact of the matter is that we backed into it somewhat, and to be really honest, we didn’t have another choice. Because in the e-world, we lost it.

When I took over this company, we were behind in various technologies, not only in the e-world. We made our college effort trying to get there; we had our app server. But by that time, we were the seventh app server in the universe, where WebSphere and WebLogic already had 75% of the market. So you can’t rebuild a company based on that.

You have to have something that you are uniquely qualified to do. I always ask the question — what is our right to be a company?

We didn’t have applications, like ERP and MRP. That was before my time. We decided not to go there. It turned out to be a near-fatal mistake. And when I came in, the e-world was big. Everybody’s IPO’ing their business plan and everybody’s making millions and Sybase had deteriorating revenue and was losing money and all that.

Fortunately, we had a good installed base and a good loyal set of customers. And they were questioning our survivability; so were a lot of people. So I knew [I had to] be making money and stabilizing the troops and stabilizing the customers [who said]: “OK, you guys are going to be in business, I’ll take my time moving away from you.”

So we decided to look at what we can do and what the world looks like. And fortunately, at that time, we partnered with a couple of companies, at least the people who were willing to chat with us. The big one was really Intel. They were pushing Centrino chips in the early 2000s. So they came up with this “unwired enterprise”; they spent $300 million to do this campaign. I had no money. So I immediately called myself “unwired enterprise.” I see somebody’s branding this and I don’t have money to brand it. By the way, we didn’t have credibility either. If I came up with “unwired enterprise,” nobody would listen to me at that time, right?

But the hardest thing is to keep the sales force focused. The sales force still needs to put food on the table while I go develop this grand scheme. My sales force calls and says: “Hey, I like this stuff you’re calling ‘unwired enterprise,’ it’s sexy, it’s whatever. But what the hell is it? Because my customer doesn’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Those are the kinds of issues we had to deal with.

So, in some ways we backed into it, but we didn’t really have a choice. We needed to leapfrog it, and we knew if we leapfrogged it correctly, it would be big time. If we leapfrogged it wrong, well, it’s no worse than when we were given no respect anyway at the time.

Gallant: So how were you able to make the transition?

Chen: The key was that we had a team of people who were willing to do this, who would hang in there. Because there were going to be a lot of ups and downs. And there were, but we have a great team. If you look at our executive team, we’ve been together for a very long time. I’ve been here 12 years; some of them have been here longer than I have.

If you remember, we acquired a company called PowerSoft. PowerSoft acquired a company in Waterloo, Ontario, that does compilers. In the year 2000, nobody was buying compilers.

Now, at the same time, coincidentally, it was the early days of Palm [which had been bought by 3Com]. 3Com wanted to have a lot more intelligence on a device. Apple had failed at that with the Newton, if you remember. I said, well, these kinds of devices don’t have a lot of memory or processing, but it’s got to be able to do more than just keeping contacts, address books. I mean, it’s got to be able to do more than that, right? So we started taking an interest in that.

I came from a chip design background. I used to design VLSI chips for Motorola. So I said — well, we could apply the same concept, take the compilers and compile application-specific code. So take the hardware concept of ASICs, application-specific ICs, into application-specific code.

So I challenged the team in Waterloo. I said: What is the smallest database you could build? And this is very interesting historically. We went to 3Com and 3Com came up with some ideas about the smallest usable applets. Apple obviously is a much better marketing company, but we had that concept way back when.

So we were generating applets with our compilers. We had the first ultra-light Java compilers that could compile things down to 60,000 bytes. [Those apps] actually did something. They didn’t do a lot. But 60 kilobytes is all they gave us in terms of real estate. Today that’s nothing. But in those days, 10 years ago, it was a different world.

So we got really interested in that, and then we won a lot of embedded business because of that. So at the time when IDC and Dataquest were tracking that market, called the embedded database market, the whole market was only $300 million. We owned almost 70% of that market. We were in all kinds of software, even Siebel — you know, all the CRMs — and Remedy. We were in handheld devices like FedEx and in all kinds of hardware, software. In fact, the government used it in the system for international travelers, with the palm reader. That palm reader is on our mobile database. High-end chain stores were using it to scan prices, like Andronico’s. So we ended up doing very well.

[Editor: That's the history, what about now?]

Right now I go to my existing customer base, the database customers, and say: “You need to use devices, right? Yeah, OK. So do you use one type of device, like a BlackBerry, or do you use more than one type of device?” Well, you know, three years ago, they said a BlackBerry is good enough. Today, they say no, no, no, we want the iPhone.

So we said, “OK, now how do you manage that?” And they said, “Well, that’s just the problem.” So I said, “OK, let me tell you what I’ll do. I will manage it for you because I’m going to provide you a server that will allow you not only to manage these devices from a security point of view, but also develop apps.”

You develop the app one time and deploy, because we will write the device-specific code. You could deploy it on a BlackBerry as easy as you could on an iPhone.

That’s where our technology called the Sybase Unwired Platform comes in, which is both development and deployment. We take the traditional database customer and go in and say: “I’ll sell you analytics, because you’ve got all this data and you need to analyze it.” OK, good, that’s obvious. “By the way, if you ever use devices, I will sell you the server to manage all these devices.”

Gallant: John, since you see the direction for this mobile market, talk about what you think enterprises aren’t thinking about today that they ought to be thinking about.

Chen: Today their [concept of] mobility is still by and large an information delivery mechanism. E-mail is a perfect thing. But you know, it’s not really an action-based platform.

So what does that mean? Well, taking a cell phone and paying for something is action-based. I don’t think there’s a serious push yet into payment, remittance — that whole area of the mobile commerce world.

We will have to clear a couple of hurdles to get there. Government regulations are a huge hurdle, but it will be fixed, because otherwise Western Union couldn’t have been in business for 150 years. It will be fixed. And there’s a big fight between the telephone company and the banks — who owns the wallet. Now that fight is somewhat political; different countries have different regulatory environments. It will be interesting.

We provide mobile unwired technology to Celcom in Malaysia, for example. In Malaysia you can trade minutes with 13 different telecoms in Southeast Asian countries using our technology. You can buy things. You can give people money or something of monetary worth, like minutes.

So that whole area — the machine-to-machine, point-to point-of-action space — is still in a very, very early stage of life. Partly because the high-end PDAs – about 13% of all the devices out there — are still relatively expensive. I could use my Web-based phone (which you could probably buy for 15 bucks) for SMSs and all that. I could use it to tell a bank to deposit something. I could do that, but I can’t really do a hell of a lot more than that. And so these high-end devices need to become cheaper. It’s a matter of time. Very shortly in the near future you’ll be able to buy PDAs very cheap.

On the Top 500 list of world’s fastest supercomputers, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and its Jaguar system kept the No. 1 spot for years, but China’s new Nebulae is closely followed at No. 2.

On June 31, the Top500 list will be published at the 10th ISC Conference held in Hamburg, Germany. The ranking list is compiled by Hans Meuer who comes from the Mannheim University of Germany; also co-complied with Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

As China’s big entry into supercomputing, Nebulae, which turned up at late last year is currently one of the fastest supercomputer all over the world. Its theoretical peak performance is 2.98 petaflops per sec. One PFlop/s equals one quadrillon calculations per sec.

Nebulae, located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China, who runs on a Dawning TC3600 Blade system with Intel X5650 processors and Nvidia Tesla C2050 GPUs. Nebulae’s Linpack performance benchmark was 1.271 PFlop/s so it ranked No. 2. Dawning is an Asia-based high performance computing provider. Supercomputing systems with GPU accelerators have a higher theoretical limit.

Jaguar held on to No. 1 with 1.75 PFlop/s. Jaguar’s theoretical peak is 2.3 Pflop/s and nearly a quarter of a million cores.