Sunday, March 04, 2012

The man who knows everything: using data to make the world a better place...

Here comes TopCom, the Facebook for  world leaders...

A single cloud hangs in the sky over San Francisco Bay, like a rip in a blue curtain. Vivek Ranadivé, the CEO of a $4 billion software company, Tibco Software Inc. — and also the co-owner of the Golden State Warriors in the NBA — drives his black Mercedes S600 over the low bridge from Palo Alto to Oakland. And because the sky is unmarked except for that one spectacular little cloud and the morning fog is gone until tomorrow, it is as if he's gliding across a huge blue screen. The scene looks choreographed: the Silicon Valley visionary driving to an important meeting on a perfect day, talking about ideas as big as the heavens.

"Everything's real-time," he says in a raspy voice with a thick, singsong accent, emphasizing certain vowels unexpectedly, so he sounds a little like an Indian Christopher Walken. "Everything's event-driven. It's all about the data." He looks out over the bay, waves his hand over the wheel, and says that if you take all the data that was generated from the dawn of man to, say, the day Barack Obama became president, that's x. And then if you add up all the data that's been generated since then, in just three years, that's 10x. We are drowning in data.

(...)

It is a private communications platform for the two hundred most powerful people in the world.

TopCom is being officially launched in late January at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It is basically a customized, ridiculously secure version of tibbr, a platform developed by Tibco as a kind of combination Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, texting, and Skype. It is a private social network, essentially — in this case, for world leaders. Full story...

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