Blog Tool Feature Comparison Table -- very comprehensive.

Sunday was a good day – got time to do a lot of reading, and there was a breakthrough in conceptualising Emergic. I used to think of what we want to do more on the lines of Microsoft and its MS-Windows and MS-Office. But in doing so, I was missing out on the bigger picture. What we are really want to do to Enterprise Software and the IT architecture is bring out the kind of revolution Intel’s microprocessor did. Thinking about the enterprise the way the personal computer is makes the model much clearer. I’ll be writing more about this over the next few days as part of my ongoing series of Tech Talks.

Meanwhile, the updates on the current Emergic activities:

BlogStreet: We’ve been writing various proglets for blogroll extracting. Need to integrate them together this week. We didn’t do any blog addition, because of my realisation that the approach of manually adding and classifying blogs is fundamentally flawed. We need to automate that process, and have bloggers themselves add their blogs. Developments like RSS auto-discovery in the past week have also made me think that the process of identifying clusters can be simplified. We’ll be re-working our BlogSTreet strategy this week.

Digital Dashboard: We wrote out the Outline Web Service but were facing some problems when it came to larger outlines. Working to fix this. Also wrote out an Outline-to-Presentation utility. In parallel, as a precursor to working with blogs, have been putting together an RSS Aggregator.

Thin Client-Thick Server: We now have 13 people using the Thin Client architecture on their desktops. Next step is to migrate the others who are using Windows. My notebook (2-year-old Fujitsu) was also converted into a Thin Client so I no longer need a separate desktop. This is important because it validates what we have done – the ability to take almost any computer and make it into a Thin Client. This week, as we migrate my Mails over, I should have little reason to use a Windows machine! Bookmarks and Cookies migration was smooth. The one problem with OpenOffice which I came across was that the apostrophes and quotes get replaced with question marks. Need to get a solution for that.

Enterprise Software: This continues to be the most nebulous area and the one I have been spending the most time thinking through. As a start, we are going to work on integrating information within our organisation from Tally (accounting) and the customer information in MS-Excel. We want to do this using Sash, an open-source database and J2EE.

Messaging: Work continues to build out the channel, and enhance the core product with support for real-time messaging through SMS alerts.

Previous Update

Microsoft stories are always interesting to read. It is after all the world's largest company (by market cap). The latest is a cover story in Business Week -- Ballmer's Microsoft. An excerpt:

[Microsoft's] new mission sounds simple enough, but it's audacious in scope: "To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential." That's far broader than the company's basic goal of building software for any device, anywhere. For the first time, Microsoft's mission is not just about technology. It's also about improving the way the company handles relationships with customers and others in the technology industry.

Acer is the subject of a Fortune story. It is also part of the theme for the book I am reading which makes the story all the more interesting. Stan Shih is betting the company on China and IT Services. Concludes Fortune:

Shih's dream is to make Acer into an acknowledged member of the tech elite--a sizable fish in the very big pond that is the global market for computers and IT services. That is the kind of ambitious thinking that helped him propel Acer out of the crowd of look-alike Taiwan tech companies. But Acer's probable future is a more modest one--as a big fish in the small pond that is Taiwan, where its brand actually has the kind of clout that Shih dreams of. Home may not be where Shih's heart is, but it's likely to be where the profits are.

Fortune writes on three technologies that are that are changing production (Superglass for Tomorrow's Chipmaking), inventory keeping (The New Wireless Movement in Factories), and the design of new products (Virtual People That Help Design Products).

13 US and 5 international cos. make the list. The 4 that I had heard of earlier from Fortune's list: Pyra Labs, Good Technology, US Genomics, J-Phone.

One problem is we look at technology developments is our immediate past as we have seen some of the darlings of yesterday go bust. This leads to skepticism about the future. But even as enterprises rethink on technology investments, the pace of technology improvement and innovation has not slowed. Look beyond the bigger IT companies and one finds a whole new universe of companies experimenting with ideas that they whole will become the next, new things. Only time will tell whether concepts like the Semantic Web, Weblogs, tablet computers, web services, community wireless networks built around WiFi and peer-to-peer become tomorrow’s hits.

Some of the important drivers for the new technology infrastructure are:

Linux: Linux is a proxy for the open-source software revolution. A story in Business Week (May 15) on Linux wrote: “What's emerging now is an operating system -- the software that runs a computer's basic functions -- that's more reliable, consistent, and businesslike, approaching older and more robust forms of Unix in scalability and stability. Steady improvements to the code have come as big tech players such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard have thrown significant research dollars at improving open-source software. In short, the Linux movement is not only growing up but it's also going mainstream.” It is, in fact possible, to build clients (desktops) and servers in the enterprise entirely out of open-source software. We should keep this point in mind as we target new users in new markets.

P2P: Napster may be dead, but the technology segment it pioneered is very much alive and throbbing. Writes Dan Gillmor in the San Jose Mercury News (May 14):

Peer-to-peer continues to infiltrate the tech landscape. It simply makes sense to make more efficient use of capabilities -- of devices and people -- at the edge of networks. Consider the “content-addressable Web” being introduced at the conference today by a Minnesota-based company, Onion Networks. It makes clever use of the P2P concept, enabling people at the edge to distribute large files much more easily and cheaply.

Here's a rough description of how it works: Say you have a video you want lots of people to see. You configure your server computer with some of Onion's capabilities. When someone downloads your file, that person's own computer becomes a site where other people can go to download the same file. The more people who get the video, the more widely it's distributed -- with the Onion software keeping track -- and the less load you'll see on your own computer.

Storage: One of the more dramatic trends has been the dramatic fall in storage costs and corresponding storage space available. Desktops come with 40 GB or more of disk space. We will shortly reach a point where it will be possible to capture everything that we know and experience in our life on a single hard disk. More interestingly, the disk can travel with us. Already, a significant percentage of IT spend in enterprises goes towards storage and its management.

Security: As more of the information in an enterprise is online and available, it is extremely important to protect it from unauthorised access. Security at various levels – in hardware, software and communications – is one of the key challenges facing companies as they build out the new technology infrastructure.

Google: It may seem surprising that a search engine finds its way on a list of enterprise software trends. But, after Outlook, Google may rank as the next most used tool. By making it easy to search for information on the Internet, Google has reduced the need to keep local copies of lots of interesting information around the Internet. More interestingly, as Google exposes its document database via programming interfaces (for example, the recently announced Google API), it will be a platform for innovations which will find their way into many an enterprise product.

The challenge before us now is to see how we can put these four key trends (targeting small and medium enterprises in emerging markets, using software and business process standards, enabling the real-time and extended enterprise, and using new technologies) to put together cost-effective and disruptive solutions in the enterprise software space.

Tomorrow: Solution Ideas