EDI to Web Services

VANs shift EDI layer, writes InfoWorld:

In the long term, according to Stefan Overtfeldt, program director of WebSphere technical marketing at IBM, companies will switch to Web services because they are based on the simple concept of requests that incorporate XML and wait for results, and because EDI has an extensive vocabulary.

If companies can convert smaller suppliers to Web services as opposed to more manual, paper-based methods, the savings could be substantial, said Kimberly Knickle, an analyst at AMR Research in Boston. Typically, a company that has EDI in place is using it with 20 percent of its supplier base, she said. However, the company often purchases the lion's share of its goods from those remaining 80 percent of its supply base, she added.

Ingram Micro, a global IT distribution company based in Santa Ana, Calif., is finding that more smaller solutions partners want to use Web services for connectivity, said Guy Abramo, chief strategy and information officer.

Today, Ingram connects mostly via FTP, Excel spreadsheets, and Word documents.

"We're start to look at things like wrapping XML-translated messages that might communicate with standard accounting packages ... that a small company may use," Abramo said. "These are small businesses that typically have a back office function of three people. They will want acknowledgement of the order and acknowledge[ment] of shipment. That is a large part of what we may be doing in the next couple of years."

Smart Mobs - Howard Rheingold

Hward Rhiengold is a person who can spot revolutions before they happen, says the New York Times. Author of the "Virtual Community" book in 1993, his next book is on "Smart Mobs" and will be released later in the year. Writes NYT:

[Smart Mobs] has been coined by the author Howard Rheingold to describe groups of people equipped with high-tech communications devices that allow them to act in concert — whether they know each other or not.

This phenomenon is showing up among teens in tech meccas like Tokyo, where wireless text messages have caught on in a big way. American hip-hop fans, using two-way pagers, spontaneously appear for parties. And in Finland, members of a local cooperative mix the virtual and the physical by communicating via pagers and cellphones to meet at their club.

It's not all fun and games. Smart mobs in Manila contributed to the overthrow of President Joseph Estrada in 2001 by organizing demonstrations via forwarded cellphone text messages. Protesters at the World Trade Organization gathering in Seattle in 1999 were able to check into a sprawling electronic network to see which way the tear gas was blowing. Or they could use the network to determine their preferred level of involvement: nonviolent demonstrations, civil disobedience or mass arrests.

Mr. Rheingold argues that the convergence of wireless communications technologies and widely distributed networks allow swarming on a scale that has never existed before. He envisions shifts along the lines of those that began to occur when people first settled into villages and formed nation-states. "We are on the verge of a major series of social changes that are closely tied into emerging technologies," he said.

This blossoming of smart mobs will probably happen despite the interests of business, Mr. Rheingold said, not because of any plan. He points to other technologies, like Napster, that have emerged into broad acceptance to the horror of larger business interests, and said that smart mobs could be setting the stage for the next big fight of the new economy — over control of personal information and of the technologies that connect people.

Blogging hits mainstream - SF Gate

Writes Joyce Slaton: "Blogging, aficionados say, is revolutionary because it puts the tools for disseminating news into the hands of what traditional media somewhat patronizingly refers to as "consumers" (or, more kindly, "readers"). Just as desktop publishing popularized DIY publications design and digital video tools are making it possible for almost anyone to make a movie, blogging tools are turning Joe Schmoe into Joe Schmoe, reporter."

While public blogs are great and blossomming, the real value of blogs is going to come within organisations for knowledge sharing. It is just like the Internet - we were all taken up by the consumer portals, but as time has gone on, the real business value lies in how the Internet has helped companies re-engineer their business processes and communications across the value chain. It does not make great copy, but it makes for great competitive advantage. That is going to be true for "knowledge" blogs (k-logs) also.

Nvidia's Challenges - Business Week

Dodging a Hail of Bullets:

Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang is trying to beat back the challenges. As sales slow in the company's core desktop-PC market, he's pushing into new markets, including graphics chips for high-end notebooks and such low-end products as set-top boxes. On July 16, Nvidia released a new set of chips aimed at low-end PCs and set-top boxes. And Huang is striving to make sure Nvidia's next-generation chip, code-named NV30, hits the market later this year, right on time.

Still, Nvidia's problems look like they're going to get worse before they get better. The company is having a tough time penetrating the new markets it has targeted. In low-end graphics chips, for example, Intel is pricing so aggressively that it is expected to grab 40% of the market by mid-2003, up from 17% now. Worse, ATI introduced its new Radeon graphics chip on July 17, and industry analysts say it's a step ahead of Nvidia's current top-line GeForce4 chip in speed and graphics quality.

Is the PC Party over?

Yes, according to McKinsey Quarterly (via News.com). It writes:

A total of $1.25 trillion was spent on new information technology systems from 1995 to 1999. Approximately $350 billion of this sum involved responses to extraordinary events, including Y2K investments, the growing penetration of personal computers in consumer and business markets (a phenomenon driven by a desire to access the Internet), and the creation of corporate networking infrastructures.

Moreover, the growing memory and speed requirements of new application software and of Microsoft's Windows operating systems raised the frequency of computer upgrades.
But the tide has since turned. Over the next three to five years, fewer software upgrades and the near saturation of the consumer and, especially, the business markets could push growth below what it was before 1995. The inevitable result is declining productivity growth rates in computer manufacturing. Productivity growth will also slow in the semiconductor industry--though not as much, because of sustained international demand for microprocessors and other chips and of continued performance improvements.

I dont disagree with the facts above, but the conclusion is not correct. What is over is the party for companies selling new and expensive hardware and software. The world still has a huge population just getting exposed to computing, but they can only pay a tenth of what users in the developed markets have paid for. They need innovative computing solutions, but at their price points and for their needs.

Helix for Universal Media Content

Real Networks announces Helix as an open-source project:

RealNetworks has announced its intentions to join the open source community by launching the Helix Platform, an open-source set of solutions that promises to deliver a variety of media formats.

The Helix Platform contains the source code for three major components: the Helix DNA client, server, and encoder. The source for all related APIs will also be made available.

As a product, Helix's main push appears to be the ability to host a variety of media formats in a single solution, thereby eliminating the need for a media provider to purchase and maintain several different media servers.

After Mozilla and OpenOffice, Helix holds the promise of being a very important open source initiative. A NewYork Times article provides additional background:

Under the licensing strategy, companies will be able to freely gain access to the underlying code that the Helix program is based on, but they will still pay a licensing fee when they sell commercial products based on the technology.

The community-source approach to software, which was pioneered by Sun to distribute its Java programming language, is a variation upon the original free software or open-source approach which has confounded the software industry in recent years.

While open-source software can be freely shared, with some restrictions, the community-source approach is more restrictive and yet still tries to persuade others to collaborate and add innovative ideas.

RealNetworks is trying to strike a balance between opening up its technology to persuade others to participate and innovate and not losing control of the technology entirely, Mr. Glaser said. "We think we've struck the balance well," he said.

Analysts said the strategy shift by RealNetworks was likely to shake up the industry. "The moment you've open-sourced something you've cornered your competitor," said Matthew Berk, an analyst a Jupiter Research. "To date this stuff has been very proprietary. Opening it up makes it accessible to creative and gifted programmers who will come up with wild stuff that the companies have never considered."

Bruce Perens has more details on the Open Source aspects of the announcements [on Slashdot]. A related report from The Register.

Enterprise Systems' Top100

A look at the top influencers, forces, technologies and products in large enterprise computing.

Top 4 Technologies: Web Services, Data Warehousing, Linux, CRM

Top 5 Technologies which have lived up to expectations: Java, Linux, XML, Linux on Mainframe, Web Services

Top 5 Technologies which have failed to match to their hype: Windows 2000 Datacenter, ASPs, ERP II, Bluetooth, CRM

Blogging for Businesses

An Information Week article on corporate use of blogs:

What are the selling points for using weblogs inside a company? Ease of use, for starters. "It really doesn't take much in terms of learning to get people up to speed," John Robb says. With their focus on a single person's point of view, weblogs are distinctly different from bulletin boards and discussion threads, which are group-oriented. And practitioners say weblogs are less disruptive than E-mail, which can demand hours of attention during the course of a day.

weblogs can trigger a rich chain reaction of ideas and possibilities, which is why they hold such great potential for the workplace. Give individual employees within a company their own weblogs, encourage them to document their best ideas and personal experiences, link them, add search capabilities, and it's easy to imagine that at least some innovation will arise from the ordinary.

For companies that go down this path, the trick is to capitalize on the mental energy that's unleashed by blogging. In the business world, after all, the destination counts more than the personal journey.

Corporate cultures will need to change if blogging is to fulfill its promise as a tool for collaborative business. There's a "reluctance to open the floodgates of letting opinions fly around and not be able to control that," Chen says...Companies that blog need to be prepared for the bad ideas, disagreements, and general dissonance that might also be generated by the system...The flip side of blogging for business innovation would be this: hours wasted recording, reading, and responding to low-value meanderings. There's a risk of getting bogged down in blogs.

In the next week or so, we are going to open up blogs within our company. Lets see what happens!

Mark Pilgrim on Website Accessibility

Mark Pilgrim has taken his multi-part series of articles on making websites more accessible and made it into a book form. He says:

This book answers two questions. The first question is "Why should I make my web site more accessible?" If you do not have a web site, this book is not for you. The second question is "How can I make my web site more accessible?" If you are not convinced by the first answer, you will not be interested in the second.

MicrocontentNews' Weblog Software Report

A detailed report on the Blogging software packages and toolsthat are available, by John Hiler. 28 of them are analysed.

Weblogs for News Organisations

Steve Outing, Senior editor, Poynter.org writes an exhaustive series of articles on how Weblogs can be used by news organisations. [via John Robb]

Outing classifies blogs as follows:
- the basic blog
- the group blog
- family and friends weblogs
- collaborative weblogs
- photo weblogs, video, audio, and cartoon weblogs
- community weblogs
- business/corporate/advertising weblogs
- knowledge base weblogs or 'k-logs' (intranets)

TECH TALK: Tech's 10X Tsunamis: Google: Our Other Memory

There used to be a slogan used by NYNEX (a Baby Bell in the US, now part of Verizon) in the early 1990s: “If it’s out there, it’s in here.” The same can now be said of Google. In just the past 3-4 years, it has become the “info utility” for many of us. Any information that I am looking for on a topic, Google is the first place I will look. Even if I am searching for a person, an address, a phone number, Google finds it for me. Google has become an extension of my brain – it remembers things for me. It has, in effect, become my other memory.

So, you may ask, what’s the big deal about it? What’s the “10X-ness” about Google?

Google makes information on the Net easier to find. Search engines have been doing so since the Web took off. Yahoo, Excite, Altavista, Inktomi, AskJeeves – they have all their moments of glory. But what Google has done is superceded them all and made them redundant. A Google Search has the uncanny ability to get you to the relevant information from all that’s out there. It does not let you fend for yourself with a list of thousands of “matching documents”. It shows you what you are most likely to be looking for on its first page. This simplification is the 10X force. It means that one longer has to worry about URLs, keeping copies of web pages or documents locally, or remembering where one read it.

David Reed, writing on SATN.org, summarises it best:

It happened again. I told a friend about a new program. He wants a URL. I say "Did you try Google?" and he says "oh ... yeah." He doesn't need a URL.

Maybe it's just that we're used to having difficulty finding information about things. So few people have absorbed that Google creates a shared context that is bigger than all of our brains, so we humans don't need specific pointers most of the time anymore. We're slow learners.

But now when I sit in a meeting where I have an Internet connection, or conferencing on the phone in my office, I'm Googling all the time. The context it creates is immense and useful. Somebody might make an allusion to some literary idea - and I'm no longer in the dark. Somebody might mention a product or service - and I can order it immediately, or bookmark it.

When someone can't remember a fact or a name, I can usually get it quickly enough to be useful.

Google is my other memory. If it isn't yours, it probably will be eventually.

Mary Meeker called Google “the eBay of information” in Fortune (May 27, 2002). She said, “You go to eBay to find things that are hard to find. You go to Google to find information that is hard to find.” At the heart of Google’s success is its simple, light interface and its unique, PageRank technology, which, according to Fortune, “ranks Web pages not by how many times keywords appear, which is what most search engines do, but by how popular and relevant each page is.”

The amazing thing that Google has brought into perspective is that it is much easier to find information on the Web than it is to find information on our own desk or desktop PC! Google has a near-infinite capacity for remembering and returning documents (now extended to images). It has made the Web much more usable. Going ahead, Google’s API, which offers a programmatic interface to its database, promises to open up new vistas to the wide world of information.

Google has been a 10X force in making information on the Internet accessible and usable. More than just a search engine, used intelligently, it can become a powerful productivity tool. And, as we will see later, our own memory, Google and a personal weblog can create an unparalleled personal knowledge management system.

Tomorrow: Wireless: Magic in the Air