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Seems like the technical side of vertically integrated saas opportunities, which is mostly where things are going. Weve more or less built the parts bins. Now t

Seems like the technical side of vertically integrated saas opportunities, which is mostly where things are going. Weve more or less built the parts bins. Now the remaining growth areas are in highly specialized, specific verticals. The issue I see is actually more to do with moving the data vs moving the computing. We currently perform all these integrations by moving the data around then taking 1% of it to do something useful. I wonder if offering serverless in-situ compute and assembling the results would be easier.

xbar 6y ago
Thanks for something truly thought provoking this evening.
lambda_obrien 6y ago
It would be neat to use a sort of reverse-holomorpic encryption, where the client could send the server a computation to perform on some data the client had access to then return the results, but the server cannot see exactly what the computation is, stepwise, so at to protect the client's internal business logic.
- webmaven 6y ago
  There were a bunch of CS theses starting in the late 90s along those lines, some of the general labels used were 'trustless computing' and 'fog computing' or something similar. Other keywords are 'enclave' and 'opaque'. David Brin also promoted 'translucent databases' as a way to allow computations on aggregate data without the possibility of revealing individual rows. Intel has a related technology platform called SGX (Software Guard Extensions) in this space that is aimed at being able to run your own trusted code on infra owned and operated by potentially malicious providers. On the activist front, Doc Searls has been pushing a marketing/commerce twist on the idea of user-owned and controlled data under the labels 'Project VRM' (Vendor Relationship Management) and 'The Intention Economy' but without much traction.
  - thinkingkong 6y ago
    Fascinating; Do you have any links you could suggest?

xbar 6y ago

Thanks for something truly thought provoking this evening.

lambda_obrien 6y ago

It would be neat to use a sort of reverse-holomorpic encryption, where the client could send the server a computation to perform on some data the client had access to then return the results, but the server cannot see exactly what the computation is, stepwise, so at to protect the client's internal business logic.

webmaven 6y ago
There were a bunch of CS theses starting in the late 90s along those lines, some of the general labels used were 'trustless computing' and 'fog computing' or something similar. Other keywords are 'enclave' and 'opaque'. David Brin also promoted 'translucent databases' as a way to allow computations on aggregate data without the possibility of revealing individual rows. Intel has a related technology platform called SGX (Software Guard Extensions) in this space that is aimed at being able to run your own trusted code on infra owned and operated by potentially malicious providers. On the activist front, Doc Searls has been pushing a marketing/commerce twist on the idea of user-owned and controlled data under the labels 'Project VRM' (Vendor Relationship Management) and 'The Intention Economy' but without much traction.
- thinkingkong 6y ago
  Fascinating; Do you have any links you could suggest?