A Whole New Internet

Janice Fraser writes:

Something is happening right now, and the developer community has an electric gleam in its eye. Curious, inventive people are making cool stuff again. There’s been a notable shift, and it’s incredibly exciting.

I was sitting in a conference room with a pair of brilliant developers last week, watching them show-and-tell the latest geeky gadgets. Greg Veen loaded an Ajax-based file upload routine that was recently added to Ruby on Rails. Michael Buffington, a developer who’s been around the block too often to be easily impressed, said earnestly, “I think I’m gonna cry.” A few days later he wrote this on his weblog:

“The Web as we know it is changing probably more than it has since the first graphic showed up… The idea of the webpage itself is nearing its useful end. With the way Ajax allows you to build nearly stateless applications that happen to be web accessible, everything changes.”

What will happen when amateurization and folksonomies make their way into enterprise web applications? What happens when IT managers can tag Oracle’s product documentation with their own words? Where will our bookmarks go when the idea of the “webpage” becomes obsolete?

Invention inspires invention. Ideas are collapsing into each other, recombining, and having powerful effects. The Internet has always been a medium for democratization, and by reconnecting with our idealism we’re once again uncovering its poetry, nobility, and transformative power.

Jason Kottke adds: "Now that the money is back, the focus will necessarily shift even though, as Janice notes, we'll be a little wiser about it this time around. There will be less innovation and activity from individuals because they'll be snapped up by companies to work on their projects for their customers. The information flowing out of companies, even those that are pretty open, will be limited because of competitive and legal concerns. A person who -- when she was unemployed 3 years ago -- could spend a couple weeks in releasing a neat web app for anyone to use because she wanted to or could say what she wanted on her blog will now be putting all her coding energies into an application that serves a few customers & needs to be cash-flow positive and won't have the time to post anything to her blog (and can't say much about what she's working on anyway unless all her readers want to sign NDAs)."

The Daily Me

MiniMediaGuy discusses an idea by Robin Good: "What about if I could have a nicely printed and bound daily personal magazine of everything critical that went though my computer each day?"

Though it would be helpful to have a utility such as Robin Good describes, it seems like a great deal of technology aimed at saving a few moments for a relatively few busy folks. What if instead we turned this personal magazine tool into a publishing engine, that allowed a small producer to create a low-cost, high-quality print vehicle for the convenience of the site’s viewers – dare I call them subscribers?

Here’s what I mean. The Web publisher could offer a utility that let viewers check articles or submissions that they would want to have sent to them, in print form, on say a monthly basis. It would come printed and bound as envisioned by Robin Good. (There are even hard-cover binding options that look like a million bucks but can be done in small runs and on the cheap.)

What would be the point? For the Web publisher to make money by selling print advertising that would be interspersed with the material selected by the user. In this way the publisher would offer advertising clients a coordinated campaign – inexpensive page-view advertising on the website, coordinated with more costly, but more information-laden print displays that would go into a printed volume which the customer has specifically requested. I am not a great salesman, but I think I could sell that combo.

Novatium Write-Up

Siliconindia has a write-up about Novatium:

Indian computer industry never had it so good. With the active backing of the Government, computer manufacturers in India are leaving no stones unturned to develop and sell low cost computers both in India and abroad.

After all the talks of empowering Indians with low cost computers, a Chennai based PC startup Novatium will soon launch low cost thin client machine, one of which can be upgraded to a PC.

Aimed at India residents with no PC experience, Novatium is developing the Nova NetPC, a thin client expected to cost just $100. The PC is now in beta-stage development and will reportedly be maintenance-free and appliance-like.

Novatium' three founders include Analog Devices' chairman Ray Stata, Ashok Jhunjhunwala of the Indian Institute of Technology, and Indian entrepreneur Rajesh Jain

India’s first attempt at developing common man’s computer resulted in the invention of Simputer four years ago. Early this week the company that developed Simputer launched Mobilis, a kind of desktop computer for about $200 under a government-backed initiative.

Also, the Indian government has spoken of a low-cost computer, which aided by tax breaks and incentives, could cause computer hardware manufacturing to take off in India.

There is also a reference to Novatium here:

Novatium Solutions Pvt Ltd., a startup in Chennai in south India, is working on a Linux thin client that will sell for about $100 and lack moving parts. The company believes that as broadband proliferates, the most viable option for low-cost computing for mass markets like education, home, small and medium enterprises and e-governance will be to hook a simple appliance on to a Linux server on a network, according to a company spokesman. In addition to low prices, in emerging markets, manageability is also critical, said the spokesman.

Besides supporting traditional data processing, the thin clients will support multimedia applications such as streaming video. Novatium aims to deliver computing as an utility that is piped through networks into thin clients.

Wired 40

Wired has a list: "They're masters of technology and innovation. They're global thinkers driven by strategic vision. They're nimbler than Martha Stewart's PR team. They're The Wired 40." The top 10:

1. Apple Computer
2. Google
3. Samsung Electronics
4. Amazon.com
5. Yahoo!
6. Electronic Arts
7. Genentech
8. Toyota
9. Infosys Technologies
10. eBay

This is what Wired has to say about Infosys...

Outsourcerer
Last year: 11

The caricature of the Indian outsourcing industry as a voracious monster bent on devouring US jobs isn't just oversimplified, it's obsolete. Case in point: Infosys. The Indian coding shop, which garnered $1.1 billion in sales last year, is hiring 500 employees for Infosys Consulting, a $20 million foray into high-end IT advice based in - guess again - Fremont, California. Dirt-cheap outsourcing plus strategic guidance makes for a powerful combination - and one that moves jobs back to the US.

Challenge: Beware the rest of Asia. In the low-cost sweepstakes, China is to India as India is to Western economies.

Opportunity: Do to bloated US consultancies what Dell did to the PC industry.

...and Salesforce.com (No. 20):

Software as Service
New

There was a moment circa 1999 when everyone loved the idea of delivering productivity software as a Web-based service. Then they moved on to the next fad. But Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff stuck to his guns, and today his company helps 13,900 corporate clients manage their customer relations; last year, it brought in $176 million. By eliminating the time and expense of installation, Salesforce.com gains a huge advantage: The company released 17 revisions of its software in the same time Microsoft turned around only two versions of its SQL server.

Challenge: India! If Salesforce.com slows down, it could be steamrolled by an outsourcer.

Opportunity: OK, Benioff - you were right. Now sell the company to IBM.

Tagging Eveywhere

Jeff Jarvis writes:

We are tagging not just content but also people... and behaviors... and processes...

If I can be assured that I won't be the victim of spam, impersonation, or privacy violations (big if's), I want to be tagged so that as I go from site to site, I get what I want: Give me my local content, give me the ads I'm interested in, don't tell me what I already know, find me the job I want.... It's not a cookie but a tag I control.

When I was at the Associated Press for a lunch recently -- among a group of smart execs who will have a big impact on the future of news not just from the wire service but also across the industry and the internet -- we speculated on the need for a content cookie: a tag that travels with content as it is syndicated.

So, for example, a wire story about, say, Apple could travel with meta data that allows the site that uses it to run contextual ads reliably targeted. And as people read and link to that story in a distributed world, it would be good to gather aggregated meta data, to find out how popular it is, who is reading it, and -- most important -- what other topics (and audience) are associated with it. This allows people to find the story more effectively in search engines and such and also educates the content provider to improve future stories.

Transparency and control are essential to this. I should control my tags and use them at my will; that's part of the point of tagging, after all. So I can tell an online service where I am so I can get local news or weather or business listings; that would be convienient. I can tell Google I want results in English and German because I read both (sort of). I can tell employers about me and have them rush to my door because they need a me. That only works if I control the tagging and the use of it is transparent. The same is true of tagging content: It only works if you can see the tags and add them yourself and swarm around the best ones. Sorry. I should have added that.

Sparklines

Anil Dash writes about Sparklines - "intense, simple, wordlike graphics", pioneered by Edward Tufte.

Tufte defines Sparklines as "intense, simple, word-sized graphics", but I think the "word-sized" part of that definition is probably overly restrictive. More important is the idea that graphics have a very high representational value that's sustained even if the reader doesn't absorb 100% of the data being presented. I don't have to know the meaning of every data point if the overall graphic communicates the point the author is trying to make.

In short, they're data-dense but somewhat deliberately opaque about the data sources which informed their creation. The liberating constraint placed on the graphics is that it'd be impossible to provide a key detailing each item in the space provided, so the reader is freed from the burden of having to know what each point means: All forest, no trees.

Sparklines would be good for use on mobiles given the limited display area that is available.

TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: What’s Different (Part 2)

KB Chandrasekhar of Jamcracker writes what is different this time around:

When Software as a service (SaaS) was introduced in earnest in the late '90s the SaaS providers were working on such thin margins that there were no significant cost savings compared to traditional software implementations.

On the demand side, the companies consuming the software were flush with money.

Today, with improved on-demand delivery and management solutions, software providers have gained significant efficiencies-of-scale in delivering SaaS, which in turn helps make for some very attractive price points.

On the demand side, companies have faced severe economic challenges over the last five years, forcing CIOs to do more with less, and to focus on bringing more discernable value to their companies.

SaaS pricing coupled with the experience of CIOs burned by massive implementations that didn't deliver promised value, means the SaaS supply and demand sides have both moved 180 degrees to where they are now in sync.

Today, while CRM dominates the on-demand market, there isn't a segment of the software spectrum from ERP to supply chain that isn't represented by a SaaS provider.

Generic functionality of the offerings is sufficient to meet the needs of most organizations, and specialized vertical offerings go even further. If customization is needed, on-demand technology has progressed to the point that it can be done much easier and more cost effectively than before.

SaaS providers are also using technology such as Web services to make it easier for their offerings to integrate with their customers' infrastructure.

All of these factors combine to make the on-demand model more attractive for the larger enterprise, and as a result, we are seeing increasing adoption in this market segment.

But the real driving force for acceptance of SaaS today is the increased focus of CIOs to deliver value. This means expending resources on projects that are mission-critical to the company.

CIOs do not want to spend time and resources installing and maintaining transactional applications that fail to differentiate the business or provide a competitive edge for the company. They want to provide the functionality required to run the company with the least amount of resources expended.

Improved technology, converging economic models, greater security (real and perceived), offerings that meet the functional needs of the enterprise, and CIOs working with leaner resources and a greater need to deliver real value have all impacted the attitude of companies considering SaaS and have breathed new life into a once left-for-dead industry.

Phil Wainewright adds:

The problem I have with talking about 'software-as-a-service' and 'on-demand software' is that these phrases continue to give the impression that the model is all about delivering software, with the underlying implication that all that's changed is the delivery mechanism. In truth, the transformation is far more fundamental than that. The most important point to bear in mind about these net-native, on-demand independent software vendors (ISVs) is that they own and operate the software themselves. They take responsibility for making sure it's up and running before the customer starts using it. What the customer pays for is not the software itself, but the working functionality the software provides.

This is a distinction that the conventional software industry has a lot of difficulty understanding. They're so used to customers paying them simply for shipping out software that they think 'software-as-a-service' means signing a service contract for the same thing spread over three years. Think Microsoft Software Assurance (I know it's not a service in the same sense but it's symptomatic of the problem), in which the only thing assured is that you'll keep on paying Microsoft for the term of the contract, however much or little turns up on your doorstep, and irrespective of whether it works. The conventional ISV's view of 'software-as-a-service' cannot help but be tainted by all the defects and limitations of their current software-as-a-product model.

Tomorrow: Software’s Long Tail

Related Entries:  [All]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: Looking Ahead [June 3, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Problems [June 2, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Seller’s View [June 1, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Buyer’s View [May 31, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: Technology Building Blocks (Part 4) [May 30, 2005]