Think about it this way. NIST is responsible for making sure the physical and technical interfaces in the nation's infrastructure fit together well. In the past, it concentrated on things like fire hydrant connections, so any fire hose could connect to any hydrant. Now it's handling digital systems of all types. Its role is becoming ever more vital as the world is increasingly networked.

The smart electrical grid is an example of the kind of role NIST is playing these days. Gallagher and his colleagues have come up with a three-phase approach that they hope will hasten the adoption of smart grid technologies and the energy savings they promise.

Phase I: NIST has been convening all of the parties with economic or business interests in transitioning to smart grids. In the past, most of the players in any standards discussions were in a single industry, but because of the importance of info tech in these initiatives, new players are coming to the table. So NIST's role as a convener is important. It's bringing people together and helping them identify the standards that already exist that can be used or adapted. Then it's working to identify the gaps and help to define the system architecture that needs to be put into place. This phase has been underway for 6 months.

Phase II: It's putting together a permanent governance model for ongoing standards and measurement deliberations. Last week it announced the formation of a panel to oversee the development of standards--with 20 members elected by companies, trade groups, and government agencies. Members include Google's Vint Cerf, Intel's Matthew Theall, and the Consumer Electronics Association's Brian Markwalter.

Phase III: Getting the participants in smart grid initiatives to agree on measurement techniques and testing procedures. You want to make sure that devices and digital systems really do interoperate--that the interfaces really work. This is key, says Gallagher: "The real challenge isn't mal intent; it's the complexity of the system. When you put three and four devices on a network that have to talk to each other, with different ways of talking to each other, the complexity increases so fast that you can have 'emergent behaviors'--new behaviors you didn't anticipate when you look at the components in the system piece by piece." This phase also starts now.

Gallaher's approach points to one of the big challenges emerging in the 21st Century. Because of the application of digital networks to most every physical and electronic system, everything is increasingly connecting with everything else. And all those systems have to interoperate. So you don't just have to understand the inner workings of an individual system; you have to understand the inter workings of intersecting systems. So I'm talking about systems of systems.

This stuff is crazy complex.

But I'll predict this: The nations and companies and individuals that come to understand the interrelatedness of systems and take problems on holistically will be thriving a couple of decades from now. The ones who try to handle things the old fashioned way will lose out.

The trend has been a long time coming, but corporations are finally caving in and okaying the use of free or mostly-free social networking Web sites as in-the-office software applications. Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter, Google Apps, etc. are becoming the everyday tools of the knowledge worker--elbowing aside stodgy programs like Microsoft Outlook and the like. Corporate IT managers have been forced to accept the inevitable and lower their guards. Unfortunately, though, allowing workers unfettered use of social networking and Web 2.0 sites is like leaving the back door open on a restaurant. A lot of bugs are coming in.

Here's the problem: Traditional firewalls are fairly good at filtering out ordinary Web threats, but they're not good at managing Web 2.0 stuff. Enter Palo Alto Networks. The three-year-old Silicon Valley startup has leapfrogged legacy firewall makers such as CheckPoint and Cisco with its next-generation firewall technology. It inspects digital traffic coming from the Web into a corporate network and not only understands what's in the data flow but also recognizes the applications associated with it. This level of penetration allows corporate tech managers to set policies that block certain risky Web 2.0 activities, such as Facebook Chat, and limit other activities to people in the organization who need to do them. For instance, programmers who use the BitTorrent program to download software code can be permitted to do so while other employees can be blocked from using the program. "This is about dealing with the negatives of companies opening up to social media," says Rene Bonvanie, who heads worldwide marketing at Palo Alto Networks.

Bonvanie knows all about the risks and rewards of social media. Until a couple of months ago, he headed marketing at Serena Software, where he helped lead a major shift in software strategy. Over the past couple of years, the company has dropped most of its traditional software and is using Facebook, Google Apps, and other Web services instead. When Serena began the switchover, there wasn't much in the way of malicious code in the social media world. That's not true anymore. A prime example is Koobface, which targets the users of Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and Twitter. Another is the spam program being run by My Mafia Family, an online game, which gets its tentacles into people's Twitter accounts and the won't let got. At one point, the company had to close off all external file sharing via Google.

There are lots of Web 2.0 services that are vulnerable to being abused by Black Hat hackers and other unscrupulous operators. Palo Alto Networks does occasional studies of the aggregate traffic of its 600 corporate customers, and the survey done in September found 202 Web 2.0 services inside corporations, 70% of them capable of transferring files and 28% of them known to propagate malware.

As employees use more and more Web 2.0 stuff, the threats will get worse and worse. It just goes to show once again: Free software doesn't necessarily come without costs.

Now, along comes an upstart with truly global ambitions. It's XIHA Life Launched last year, the site was designed from the ground up by a young Finn living in China, Jani Penttinnen, to be multilingual and to bridge between languages and cultures. Users submit content or chat in their own languages and other people can translate the discrete chunks using Google's translation technology, which is deeply embedded in the site. Today, the site has 600,000 registered users from 208 countries (No country accounts for more than 5% of the total traffic) and about 1 million unique visitors per month. Small, yes, but it's only a year old. Penttinnen, a soft spoken guy with an elfin persona, has ambitious growth targets: 5 million in the next year and 30 million in the next five years.

This site has great potential in its globalocity. But it's not for everyone. It's a magnet for people who see themselves as global citizens or who want to reach across the national chasms. (A group that's about 70% female.) For some, the site offers the possibility of developing online pen pals. For others, it's mostly about reaching out to people in places where they're planning to travel or where they're temporarily working to get the skinny on what they should see and do. A smaller group is hooking up with people willing to help them learn a foreign language. "We try to get and keep the 'right' people--the people who are focused on our themes," says Penttinen. To help steer things in the right direction, he's rounding up a network of expats who will produce high-quality blogs about their experiences--in exchange for small fees. (If you think you have the right stuff, contact Jani@xihalife.com)

Penttinnen, 33, has a personal history befitting his occupation. He came to the US in the early 2000s as a game software programmer when he was hired by EA's Westwood Studios in Las Vegas. After EA closed the studio in 2003, he launched his own tiny mobile gaming company, XIHA Games, with a dab of angel funding. He tried to keep costs ultra-low by outsourcing much of the programming to China, but discovered that remote management of software projects didn't work very well. So he moved to China and managed a small team of programmers. A new problem emerged: To make it in the mobile gaming business, he needed to create versions of his games for each handset operating system--a huge amount of work that was unattractive to him. Fortunately, he had a hobby that he could turn into a business. Back in 2006, he had launched a crude social networking Web site aimed at an international and multilingual audience. In late 2007, he and his Chinese wife, Wen, moved to Finland and launched an early version of XIHA Life.

This could be one of those really good ideas that never grows up, though. XIHA Life doesn't have much of a business model. Today, Penttinnen, collects affiliate fees for selling mobile games and connecting people with travel sites. That won't support a big operation. Fortunately, he has low costs. The whole thing runs on a single server (Highly optimized software) So it seems likely that XIHA Life will have a chance to succeed. In the meantime, it will be well worth watching to see how a truly global community develops. It could teach valuable lessons even if it doesn't become the next big thing. And, for travel-related businesses, it could turn into a valuable advertising and sales venue.

By the way, xiha means "fun" or "happy" in Mandarin and "Hip-Hop" in Cantonese.

He's got a terribly tough job. Only two tech icons have brushed with death and come back to become powerful factors in the industry again: Apple and IBM. One of Barrenechea's hurdles is the name itself. It cuts both ways. While there's brand equity in SGI, the name also has the odor of failure lingering around it. Do tech managers really want to buy from a faded icon? While SGI's 6000 existing customers may want to stick with the name they know and the technology they have adopted, it seems unlikely that new customers will rush to sign up.

So the value of the name is a question mark.

Barrenechea is depending on other factors, namely new product development and the trend winds, to power the new SGI forward. The trend winds are blowing in his direction. Rackable specialized in producing thousands of small computer servers that are mounted on racks in data centers--so it's benefiting from the growing popularity of cloud computing. On the product side, the new SGI is starting to deliver new computers that were already underway before the merger was completed, and which strengthen its hand in a couple of important markets.

First, a month ago, it introduced a new line of deskside supercomputers for use by university researchers, national laboratories, and product designers. These babies take up very little space (one foot by two feet) but pack up to 80 microprocessor cores.

Second, on Monday, the company announced a new generation of server products, called Altix UV, aimed at supercomputing applications, large-scale databases, and data analytics. The clustered machines take advantage of x86 processors, the Linux operating system, and shared memory--so they're economical. SGI hopes to differentiate itself with a proprietary and ultra-fast interconnect system linking the servers. This marks Barrenechea's attempt to keep SGI relevant in the high-performance computing market--where he hopes to collect 30% to 40% of the company's revenues.

SGI has a solid position in supercomputing. One of its systems, nicknamed Pleiades, located at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, ranked sixth on the Top500 semi-annual ranking of supercomputers that was released on November 15. Bill Thigpen, engineering branch chief in NASA's advanced supercomputing center at Ames, says he and his colleagues chose SGI's technology when they installed the machine last year because "we got the most computing for our dollar." Also, the supercomputing center provides shared services for all of NASA, so it needs general-purpose machines that can handle a wide variety of software. That's what SGI sells. Thigpen calls the merger of SGI and Rackspace a good marriage. "It's good for the industry. By having multiple vendors in the space, everybody benefits. And having multiple healthy vendors is even better," he says.

But the crowded competitive landscape is going to be a major challenge for SGI. It faces supercomputing giants HP and IBM, an on-rushing Dell, and a strong niche player in Cray, which captured two of the top three positions in the Top500 ranking. Sun Microsystems is fading, true enough. But in a business where size matters a lot, SGI will have a difficult time keeping up with the giants.

I don't know enough about SGI and its markets to expertly handicap its chances, but, based on what I know of the industry I'm going to have to wish Barrenechea luck. He'll need it.

A lot of the people who post comments on Globespotting are angry about one thing or another, which, of course, disappoints me. I hope my blog can build bridges across cultures and continents.

A group of four friends in Boulder, Colorado, has come up with an inventive way to address the loneliness of the social entrepreneur. These folks, founders of The Unreasonable Institute, have created a 10-week mini-MBA for promoters of social change. No, check that. The metaphor isn't quite right. That's because the 25 or so young entrepreneurs who participate in the program next summer won't just be learning the skills of social business; they'll be putting them to work, too. The idea is to come up with ideas, develop them into business plans, vet them, divide up a small pool of venture capital, and connect with a support network--all in the span of an intense 10 weeks. It's like packaging Silicon Valley in a box. "We want to give young social entrepreneurs the skills, training, and networks to help their ideas grow wings and create a lot of impact," says Tyler Hartung, the Institute's community tactician.

The four founders, all University of Colorado at Boulder grads, scan like a mini-United Nations. They refined their ideas for the Institute last summer when they were widely scattered: Teju Ravilochan in Boulder; Vladimir Dubovskiy in India; Daniel Epstein on a bike ride down the West Coast; and Hartung volunteering for a microfinance outfit in Uganda. "It was a most unreasonable time for our founding team," quips Hartung.

For sure, these guys are having almost too much of a good time, but their idea seems to be both ingenius and practical. All experienced social entrepreneurs themselves, they'll do a lot of the training in the program, but they're also planning on bringing in 50 mentors from around the world who are experts in everything from business formation and venture capital to international development and poverty alleviation.

The whole process gets started on Nov. 15, when they begin taking applications from people who want to be Unreasonable Fellows. (www.unreasonableinstitute.org) Applications close on Dec. 15 and a list of finalists will be posted on Dec. 20. Then it's time for philanthropists and social investors to get into the act. They'll vote with their dollars for the entrepreneurs who seem to be most promising, and every applicant who raises the $6,500 tuition by Jan. 31 that way will be invited to the summer program. "We want market forces to determine who will come," explains Hartung.

Now for my part: I'm supposed to help the group round up applicants and funders for the program. So, how about it?

Ross's job at State is to figure out how to use the global communications network to address poverty, health pandemics, human rights violations and the like. "With the ubiquity of our global networks, there are opportunities to engage with people that weren't possible in the past. We're practicing what I call 21st Century statecraft," he says. While he's supposed to use technology to accomplish Clinton's goals, "In some cases it's cutting edge. In other cases it's basic."

There's a temptation to fantasize that just because the opposition in Iran used Twitter so successfully during its brief uprising, the latest in social media can be spread around globally like some sort of super digital goo. So it's good to know that Ross is thinking in a more nuanced way. He gave me a couple of examples of calibrated responses to particular situations.

The low-tech solution: In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where nobody rules and militias run wild, one key issue is figuring out how to get militia members to quit fighting and return to peaceful living. Ross visited with former militia members in demobilization camps and asked them for their advice. What he heard back was that the authorities should use radio to communicate with fighters who are hiding out in the bush, since they all listen to it. The former fighters also suggested that they should be put on air. Fighters would listen to somebody else who had walked in their shoes. So now the State Department is putting together a radio outreach program. "We use 1920s technology if 1920s technology is the right solution," Ross says.

The high-tech solution: In Mexico, the State Dept. is working with the Mexican government, NGOs, and telecom companies to set up a system for tracking crimes. Right now, a big problem there is that citizens are afraid to report crimes for fear of reprisals--sometimes via police who are working with the thugs. So Ross and his collaborators are working on a cellphone-base tip-off system for the police that will scrub identifying information about the tipsters from the system. They're also planning on mapping out the activities of common criminals and narco-trafficantes in near real-time on Web sites, so citizens can see where to avoid. "We're bringing transparency to the activities of the bad guys and empowering citizens," says Ross.

I guess this dismal track record is no surprise for a dynamic industry where stock prices are volatile and fabulous fortunes have been gained by so many. Tech is an easy mark for unscrupulous people.

But are these waves of badness the work of a few rotten apples or is there a climate of corruption surrounding the tech industry? I asked this question today of John Mutch, CEO of software maker BeyondTrust Corp., who has seen the tech industry from some very interesting vantage points. After working for nearly two decades at Microsoft, one of the straight-arrow companies, he later served as CEO of Peregrine Systems after several of its executives were fired and prosecuted on charges of falsifying sales and accounting information. He recalls that the scandal was still unfolding after he was hired as CEO to attempt a turnaround of the company. During a speech he was giving to the staff, the FBI entered the room and arrested two Peregrine managers.

Early this morning, I had read one of the government's complaints in the Galleon matter, this one against Danielle Chiesi and Mark Kurland of Newcastle Partners and Robert Moffat of IBM. Then I read that former AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, long considered one of the industry's boy scouts, is being implicated. It all made my head swim.

I asked Mutch: Is the Galleon mess an anomaly or are there many crooked information-gathering networks operating under the covers? His answer: "Unfortunately, I think the tentacles of information networks that cross the boundary of insider trading are deep and pervasive in the industry."

He recalls being called in the past by Wall Street types in search of intelligence about upcoming earnings announcement. Which he rebuffed. He said people in the investment community work hard to develop sources of information, sometimes without much regard for propriety. And their sources within the tech industry, he said, don't seem to understand when they're nearing or crossing the line. "People feel, 'If I'm not trading, I'm not doing anything wrong,'" he said. "They don't understand that tipping is an illegal activity."

Clearly, there's harm in this type of activity. It gives some people unfair advantages in the equity markets. But Mutch says it also puts a black mark on the reputation of the tech industry--hurting the entire industry's credibility. "This is a great industry. I don't want to see it dragged into the mud," he told me.

I remember that during one of the earlier scandals, I surveyed some of the most respected leaders in Silicon Valley, and Bill Campbell, the longtime chairman of Intuit scolded the industry for having lax values. But, think about it: you seldom hear giants of the industry preaching about law-breaking or ethics. Maybe it seems uncool.

I'd like to hear more of it. The tech industry has a high calling. Information technology has tremendous potential to improve the workings of companies and the services of government, to build economies, and to empower individuals. But every new scandal cuts into the industry's credibility--making people wonder whether claims about the capabilities of tech are feed too often by the desire to profit at any cost.

In fact, I think the tech industry should operate with higher standards than others. Not only should people not break or shave the law, they should aim to have a positive impact on the world. This business isn't the same as selling toothpaste, or widgets, or complex derivatives, or sugar water. At least, in my view, it shouldn't be.

That includes marketing. Unable to match the global brands in advertising clout, they came up with creative ways of getting the word out about their capabilities on a tight budget. Now one of the leading practitioners of this art, Jessie Paul, chief marketing officer for Wipro Technologies, has come out with a book, No Money Marketing, that tells how it's done. Her book is a great primer for upstart companies in emerging markets, but also provides useful ideas for people in large, established companies at a time when the Internet and globalization are putting big cracks in traditional marketing orthodoxy.

Here are some of the ways that Wipro spread the word on a tight budget:

--The company (and the other leading Indian outsourcers) took advantage of the network of more than 300,000 people of Indian origin that worked in the US tech industry. The company's executives, sales people, and marketers tapped their contacts among university alumni and former employees and colleagues to find allies in US corporations who helped them connect with decision makers.
--Because of the Internet, Wipro saw that it shouldn't attempt to segment and differentiate its marketing messages by type of customer. Instead, communicated mainly via the Web, its consistent marketing messages reinforced each other rather than clashing with one another.
--Corporate leaders were hungry for information about offshoring to India, and the operators of industry conferences needed experts to make speeches and sit on panels. Wipro came up with a pool of experts that it offered up to the conferences--and got a ton of free publicity.
--Rather than putting on huge and expensive user conferences, Wipro stages annual "Mandala" meetings of top executives at its clients. There are no sales pitches, just lots of big-think talk about management and technology issues, but the situation frequently yields new pieces of business.

Paul worked for Infosys, iGate, and Ogilvy & Mather before she went to Wipro, and her book has examples from those companies and more. One of her insights that interested me most concerns Infosys. She writes about "core branding" and "surround branding." Core branding is the work you do to communicate about the quality and benefits of your offerings. Surround branding is the work you do to create excitement about the brand and give it credibility. Early on, the leaders of Infosys decided to differentiate themselves from the competition by becoming world-class in each of the surround elements. They accomplished this by creating a strong ethics policy and financial transparency, for example. But surprising things mattered, too. Co-founder and longtime CEO Narayana Murthy noted that India had a reputation for being dirty and backward, so he insisted that the Infosys campus in Bangalore would be ultra neat and clean. In fact, he was known to personally supervise the cleaning of the cobblestone pathways with toothbrushes.

It worked. I can remember my first visit to Infosys, years ago. It was startling to leave the chaotic and gritty reality of Bangalore for Murthy's haven of calm and cleanliness.

India's big tech companies have successfully bridged the chasm between the emerging and the developed worlds. They did it in part by turning a disadvantage, their relative paucity of resources, into an asset--and some really innovative marketing techniques.

Read and learn.

The microfranchising outfit that Rosenrot told me about is Village Laundry Services, in Bangalore and Mumbai, India, which helps poor people set up street-side laundry services. VLS has developed an all-in-one laundry kiosk complete with washer, dryer, and ironing set up. The kiosks, with the brand name Chamak, are mounted on rollers so they can be moved around fairly easily. They have self-contained water supplies and plug into the grid via extension cords. Customers who drop their clothes off at the kiosks get them back, folded, within 24 hours. That's a far cry from the normal laundry service in India--where your clothes are washed manually and air dried, and can take days to come back to you. (Too often with missing buttons.)

Rosenrot says VLS has about 15 rigs in service now, hopes to have 110 on the streets by the end of next year and 8500 operating within five years. As of now, VLS owns the rigs, but the plan is to have the entrepreneurs own them--with financing from local microfinance organizations.

In addition to providing ready-made businesses for thousands of poor people, Innosight sees VLS as proving basic business training that will help prepare people to run all sorts of businesses. "We give the local entrepreneurs an opportunity learn from within how a business is run," Rozenrot told me.

It's business ownership on training wheels. This is a new form of capacity building that shows tremendous promise for promoting economic development and self-determination in poor countries.

Not-so-poor countries, too. Rozenrot tells me that Innosight Ventures now has an office in Baltimore as has begun setting up ventures here. "There are some strong parallels between Mumbai and inner-city Baltimore," he says.

Sad, but, I'm sure, true.

Fortunately for GE and its investors, CEO Jeff Immelt takes innovation in the core businesses very seriously. Since he took over as CEO from Jack Welch in 2001, he has tripled the annual output of patents and doubled the company's level of investment in overall R&D. That includes increasing the funding of basic scientific research at the labs from $315 million in 2001 to $555 million last year.

It can take years or even decades for investments in this kind of research to pay off, but Immelt and GE don't have the luxury of time. They need to see those R&D payoffs in the next couple of years. Otherwise, GE could wind up shivering in Wall Street's dog house for a very long time and Immelt could be out of a job.

I recently spent a day chock-full of meetings with scientists at GE's main laboratory in Niskayuna, New York. What I saw there gave me the belief that an innovation-led surge at GE is at least in the realm of possibility. It's no sure thing. But R&D could save GE.

The chamber confab was held at Royal Albert's Hotel, a large white stucco building architected to look like a maharaja's palace. It's on the outskirts of Edison, a town in central New Jersey that's the epicenter of Indian culture in the state. Royal Albert's Hotel is set on a bluff overlooking a handful of warehouses. There's a 20-foot-tall status of Indian freedom fighter Sardar Patel out front, and, down in the basement, where the chamber meeting was held, there are elaborately decorated rooms that are typically used for weddings and coming-of-age "thread" ceremonies for Indian and Indian-American boys.

I got a friendly welcome from 30-or-so participants. They were happy to give me their reactions to the controversy over outsourcing and guest worker visas.

Ashok Nagrath, the owner of World Wide Connections Inc., told me that the company had once had 60 employees, but business had dwindled so much that he now that he stopped operating. "There's very little work today, so we're dormant," he said. For him and his company, the Internet changed everything: "It was the death to distance." He doesn't fault India Inc. for the demise of his business, however. And he thinks the US Congress is making a mistake by trying to curtail the offshoring of labor and the use of H-1B visas. "I'm affected by offshoring, but I think it's still the best thing for America," he said. "The US should encourage it, to get the best minds and make them American customers." Concerning guest workers, he said: "They bring in the new thoughts and energy. They pay taxes and contribute to the country."

Ravi Bhangley left a job at Dun & Bradstreet late last year and planned to start his own software company. He told me he understood the backlash against offshoring and visa workers. "If you're losing your job and it's going to somebody else at a low wage, it's natural to be angry," he said. He also said it's natural for American programmers to resent Indians and blame them for their problems. "If people are racist, it's misdirected anger," he said. "I'm a US citizen. If there are job losses here, I can experience them, too."

Kumar Balani, publisher of the magazine Biz India, told me that native Americans should take the holistic view. Products they want to buy can cost less if American companies cut costs and become more competitive by using offshore labor. The challenge for Americans is to acquire more skills and be more creative. "Everybody in the world is under pressure to make themselves more valuable," he said.

Satish Bhalerao, owner of Network Solution, was unapologetic about using guest workers in the US and offshore labor in India. His customers want to reduce costs, and he offers them a lower-cost alternative. He said he pays guest workers in the United States the same as he does native American workers, but he prefers to hire Indians on visas. "They're easily trainable. They're motivated to work hard because they want to live here and to find a way to stay here," he said. But he also worried about America's future. America has already lost so much manufacturing, and now it's losing the lead in science. "Our research is gone. What are we going to offer the world?" he asked.

James Rajiv Bhasin has seen offshoring from both sides. As an employee of Chase in 2003, he lost his job when a lot of the company's work was outsourced to India. Now he's the general manager of business development at Upstream, a subsidiary of Intelenet Global Services, which performs finance and accounting work in India for US clients. "I was shocked when I lost my job at Chase, but I recovered," he said. "I had to reinvent myself. In six years I've done so much more than I ever would have done if I stayed at Chase." Bhasin started his job at Intelenet late last year. He was surprised to realize that it was the company to which he had lost his job six years ago. His new boss is the guy who managed the outsourcing project at Chase. "It amazes me. I've gone full circle," he said.

As I think back on the Indian-Americans I met that night, I can't help but contrast the kinds of things they said--and the unemotional way they said them--to many of the angry and even ugly comments we got on our High-Tech Sweatshops story after it was published online. It was disturbing to see workers from different nationalities verbally tearing at one another. The situation is reminiscent of earlier eras in American history, when employers played immigrants of different ethnicities against each other to defeat labor unions and keep wages low. Like them, today’s guest workers and American programmers are pawns in somebody else’s game.