If the 5 of you can’t decide where to eat lunch without saying the dreaded words “up to you”, how in world can 100,000 or even 1 million people combine together to solve a problem? The answer is through a mixture of the right collaborative systems enabled by the right technology and people with the right skill-sets motivated by the right things. Get all 4 components right, and you’ve got yourself the answer to any problem.

However, getting these 4 components right is very very tricky.Some might argue it’s more difficult than solving the task at hand, but a handful of successful crowdsourcing projects have broken the mold and set the tone for others to follow. Today I want to focus on what is quite possibly the biggest crowdsourcing project ever, and with the exception of wikipedia is probably the most successful as well. ReCaptcha.

My blog & name was mentioned on BFMs tech talk today. Woo hoo!! I’m so happy!!

You can download the podcast of the show at BFMs website here , and it’s fantastic (partially because it mentions my blog).

So while MOSTI still hasn’t given up on the bill, apparently no one in the Industry wants the bill except MOSTI, and they’re just a Government Ministry. Where were the Industry players MOSTI engaged before proposing the bill? The sad part is that even drafting out the proposal of the bill would have cost money and resources that could have been better spent elsewhere…sad!

So there’s a lot being said about the new Computing professional bill, even on this blog. For now though, if you’re really interested in finding out about the legal implications of the law, check out this amazing article here from the Bar Council Website written by ‘The Awesome’ LoyarBurok. Or if you’re in the mood for some petition, try signing this petition here, they’re aiming for 2000 signatures, so far they’re about half way through.

You might also want to digest a point by Tony Pua (opposition MP from PJ Utara):

The Thais have had a rough couple of months. With floods inundating entire swaths of the country, Bangkok had to revise its GDP estimates for the year and even hard-disk prices spiked due to limited supply. There is some good news though, Western Digital recently started up it’s plant in Thailand (although no news on when it’ll be resuming operations) and many other companies are following suit as flood waters appear to have subsided.

Some laws you have to fight wars to keep….others you have to fight wars to be repealed. This is one of those laws you have to fight to prevent from ever being made a law…

On April 12th , 1861 Confederate forces attacked Union Military installation named Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The attacked marked the beginning of the American Civil War, and the United States of America would never be the same. The war was about more than just a secession from a Union, it was about preserving the right that every man was created equal and that no man or woman would ever be ‘owned’ again. In just over 140 years later, the United States of America elected their first Black president.If ever there was a war worth fighting for, it was the American Civil War. The Abolition of slavery was a law worth fighting for, it was worth preserving, even till death.

Cloud computing is already lowering the barrier to entry for new startups to essentially $0 hardware cost. Of course the cost itself isn’t zero, but what cloud computing has done is turn that cost from a Capital Expenditure to a Operating Expenditure. So instead of buying expensive servers, switches, racks and house them in expensive data centers, you can instead rent these devices …with no money down, and in most cases a lot cheaper than if you rented the actual physical hardware yourself.

So what’s the catch?

Large Corporations usually have service providers that provide services to us that we otherwise ‘would prefer not to run’. These services are core components of our business and critical for business operations…but it’s just that we’d rather not invest money/resources and expertise running the servers and software. We’d prefer someone else to do it for us.

The Malaysian government is a crazy bunch, just today I saw two bits of news that left me squirming with disgust. First a short piece on Christmas Carollers requiring Police Permits to go Carolling (not just permits but full details of every activitiy) and then later today there is a new Computing Professionals Bill 2011.

Why would a government want to regulate the computing Industry? It’s not like we’re bankers or something? Why is there a need to regulate an industry that first off is too broad to define under an umbrella called computing, and secondly isn’t exactly a threat to national security.

Lowyat has done a great deal to summarize the bill and post it up for reading here..

But where we should be really intrigued is a part of the bill (according to Lowyat) that says:

Last week I migrated my blog from Nearlyfreespeech (who are awesome by the way!) to dreamhost (who are also quite awesome in their own way). What prompted the move was that I’m already subscribed to a year of hosting to dreamhost at about $6/mo, while my blog at Nearlyfreespeech is still costing me money, although admittedly not much. So I thought why waste my dreamhost hosting, and instead switch over from Nearlyfreespeech to dreamhost.

Before I start, let’s me first explain what I want to do. I want to migrate my blog from nearlyfreespech to dreamhost, in essence I want to change my hosting provider from Nearlyfreespeech to dreamhost. I do not want to change my url, I still want readers who type www.keithrozario.com to visit my blog, it’s just that the blog is now hosted on a different service provider and will ultimately have a different IP.

I also want to point out that although I already have a parallel blog setup on blog.keithrozario.com, I decided not to migrate because nearlyfreespeech kicks ass in terms of reliability, up-time and speed :).

I’ve long been a great fan of all things Google, even when they weren’t exactly producing top quality stuff (like Google Wave), I stuck by them through thick and thin. That being said, it’s been more good than bad, sure they had a rough patch with Wave and Google Buzz, and yes Google+ isn’t exactly the Facebook killer it was tauted to be. However, think of all the really cool stuff they’re doing, consider the fact that I literally LIVE on Googles Cloud, all my email is on GMail, there isn’t a single day that goes by that I don’t get my daily dose of blogs via Google Reader and I do Google Searches at least 10 times a day. So overall Google is still pretty good in my book.

Be that as it may though, one of the hallmark of successful innovators is that they know when to call it quits. Google has already shelved Google Buzz, and spun off Google Wave as Apache Wave. Which begs the question of what would replace Buzz.

Amazon Web Services has formed the IAAS backbone of many corporations IT infrastructure, through it’s various tools and offerings you can do almost everything under the sun on the cloud. You can spin EC2 instances till they merge together to become one giant super-computer, you can host webpages on their Simple Storage Solution (S3) platform which offers nearly limitless storage, you can even host that data on edge servers via CloudFront to reduce load times, and the list of offerings go on and on.