Bosworth's Web of Data

ONLamp.com has an article by Daniel Steinberg about Adam Bosworth's keynote at the MySQL Users Conference 2005:

Google's Adam Bosworth suggested that we "do for information what HTTP did for user interface."

As a result of a simple, sloppy, standards-based, scalable platform, we have information at our fingertips from Google, Amazon, eBay, and Salesforce. Bosworth's own company, Google, gets hundreds of millions of hard queries a day. He said they see it as putting Ph.Ds in tanks to drive through walls rather than around them.

In addition to the advantages in software, there have been great gains in hardware. Bosworth said that one million dollars buys you five hundred machines with 2TB of in-memory data, a PetaByte of on-disk data, and a reasonable throughput of fifty thousand requests per second. This amounts to one billion requests per day.

Having this sort of power changes the way you think. For example, organizing things into folders declines in importance. You can't remember which folder you put something in, and searches are more efficient ways of finding things. The challenge is to take a database and do for the web what was done for content. Bosworth explained that you "need a model that allows for massively linear scalability and federation of information that can spread effortlessly across a federated web."

Bosworth predicts that RSS 2.0 and Atom will be the lingua franca that will be used to consume all data from everywhere. These are simple formats that are sloppily extensible. Anyone who wants to can use these formats to consume content or to author content. Contrast this with the Semantic Web, which requires that you get a large group of people to agree on the schema of everything.

Dare Obasanjo has a comment: "What I find very interesting is using RSS is the data access format for the Web. RSS gained popularity as a way to syndicate blog posts and news sites but its turned out to be a lot more versatile than that. Sites like Feedster and Amazon's OpenSearch technology show you can use RSS as a mechanism for providing search results and integrating search engines respectively. Podcasting shows you can use RSS to syndicate digital media content instead of just plain old text or HTML. With Amazon's syndicated feeds one can keep abreast of when new CDs, books and more are released...In situations where one simply wants to expose read-only data via a service on the Web, it's looking like RSS is the technology to beat. As more and more information is exposed as RSS feeds, there will be even more interesting things people will be able to do with this technology."

TenFold for Enterprise Apps

ZDNet has an article by Dan Farber:

Jeffrey Walker makes some seemingly outrageous claims. The iconoclastic founder and CTO of TenFold asserts that business users can build high-end enterprise applications ten times faster with his application development platform than using other development platforms. A salesforce.com-like CRM application can be created in "less than the time it takes to watch a movie," according the company's marketing literature.

For the last 12 years, Walker has been a bit of a Don Quixote, trying to reinvent the process of software development and the notion of programming. "The industry is in trouble," Walker told me. "We haven't had the tools to build complex applications." With a replacement of legacy systems underway, Walker believes the time is right for a new, more efficient software development models, and his company's Enterprise TenFold platform is the answer.

EnterpriseTenFold is to enterprise applications what Excel is to spreadsheets, Walker said. "Imagine any Excel spreadsheet in the world. Everything you type is nothing more than a parameter. TenFold is already programmed for every application in the world," Walker boasted.

WiMax and BitTorrent

Bob Cringely writes in the aftermath of Intel's announcement that it has begun shipping its first WiMax wireless networking chips to OEM manufacturers.

WiMax, if you don't already know, is the IEEE 802.16 wireless networking standard that has people excited because it will support high data rates over long distances, sometimes up to 30 miles. Think of WiMax as long-range WiFi. From a logistical standpoint, WiMax beats the heck out of WiFi because you can plop an access point into the middle of town, feed it with a DS3, and have the whole town broadband-ready in a few days. That's the dream, and I am sure it will be eventually realized...WiMax will provide broadband competition in a way that WiFi never could. While WiFi was always at best a broadband extension, WiMax can be a broadband alternative to DSL and cable modems. This third player will lead to more competition and lower prices. That's why it is good.

BitTorrent...is sucking up 30 to 40 percent of all Internet bandwidth though most Internet users (not you -- those other people) have never heard of it. BitTorrent is an Open Source peer-to-peer file-sharing application that is popular for distributing huge video files because it cleverly uses the assistance of your client computer to help redistribute to other downloaders those parts of the file that you have already received.

The powers that be -- ISP's, movie studios, etc. -- hate BitTorrent. The ISPs hate it because of all that bandwidth sucking and the movie studios hate it because they think Bit Torrent is being used to steal their property.

Now let's look forward two to three years. Broadband will be pervasive by then and in nearly every city, users will have the choice of DSL, cable, WiMax, and possibly Power Line Internet service. Average speeds may be slightly higher, average bills will be slightly lower, and the market will be perfectly poised for video-on-demand (more properly download-on-demand) to replace much of broadcast and cable television as we presently know it. And when that happens, when the movie studios have finally realized that they can cut out the networks and the cable companies and sell or rent directly to you and me for less money but more profit, the way they'll do that is by embracing BitTorrent.

My prediction, then, is that competition from WiMax and other new broadband providers will force ISPs to be more open, that movie studios and others will realize BitTorrent can be an ideal distribution medium, and that ISPs -- by localizing most Bit Torrent traffic -- can make customers happy and save money, too.

5 Cs of Hiring

Paul Allen writes about a speech given by Alan Hall, founder of MarketStar:

For Alan, there are 5Cs in hiring/recruiting. Each have equal weight in the equation.

Competence. Most companies hire with about 100% weight on competence. But for Alan, it's important, but only part of the equation. If someone is just right for a company, but doesn't have the competence for the particular job, they can be trained. But some of the other Cs can't be as easily taught.

Capability. This represents how much potential an employee has to grow in their job and be promoted in the future.

Compatibility. For Alan, this has become one of the most important criteria lately. A person has to fit with the team.

Character. Values, ethics, etc.

Commitment. This means that a person will be loyal and dedicated.

Alan says they do a 360 degree interview process, which means that you get references and talk to the candidate's former boss, peers, and subordinates. You need to know how the candidate works with others. Always have both men and women interview the candidate, since you get different insights from each.

Flat World

Doc Searls writes about Tom Friedman's new bestseller, from a Linux/open source angle.

In Part 1, I said Tom's flat-world insights are right-on, though a bit compromised by emphasis on competition--much of which isn't there--between Open Source communities and Microsoft. I also said he gave insufficient credit to open source for flattening the world in the first place--making Google and cheap wireless possible, for example.

In Part 2, I want to examine the human origins of the open-source materials we're using to build this new world. And I want to start by distinguishing them from corporate origins. Again, this is not to diminish the importance of big-company contributions to the flat-world revolution but to subordinate them to the profound work being done by individuals and small groups.

TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: SMEEMs

SMEs in Emerging Markets (SMEEMs) have a twin focus for their business: how do they grow, and how do they ensure that they manage this growth efficiently. Business growth comes from getting new customers and retaining existing customers (and upselling to them). One of the key ways to bring in efficiency in operations comes from automation. Smaller companies are more focused on generating newer business opportunities since they have a greater control on costs. Mid-sized companies need to more focused on ensuring business efficiency – they already have business coming in, and that needs to be managed better. So, the basic mantra for SMEEMs can probably be summed up as: automation for growth.

Technology can play a role in helping SMEEMs achieve both the objectives. Business growth can be enhanced via the use of the Web through a website, email newsletters, use of CRM (customer-relationship management) software, and search-engine marketing. Automation can be achieved by streamlining the flow of information across the value chain – to complement the flow of products and services, and money. What the right use of information technology can do is to ensure that the right information is available to the right set of people at the right time – so that decisions can be made appropriately. In essence, what IT can do is to enable SMEEMs to become event-drive, real-time enterprises.

The problem has been this goal of super-smooth, frictionless information flow rarely happens. Information is locked up either within people or inside closed business applications. As a result, managers do not necessarily have the right information they need to make decisions. At a time of increasing competition and the demand for faster response times, this can be the death-knell for businesses. The right use of IT can make a significant positive impact on SMEEMs. But so far, investing in IT has been largely limited because of lack of appropriate IT personnel within the organization, coupled with the cost of applications and their limited availability. Even the applications available only succeed in creating silos – because the cost of integrating different applications can be quite substantial.

It is this world that the next-generation of Application Service Providers need to target. There are many areas of improvement within SMEEMs and across their value chains. By providing the right set of integrated, hosted solutions with a utility-like pricing model, the ASPs can provide three clear benefits to SMEEMs. First, since software is delivered over the Web, there is no need for anything more than a computer connected to the Internet within the enterprise – complemented by the mobile phone. Second, a wide variety of integrated applications can ensure that multiple functions can be automated rapidly. This addresses the desirability issue. Third, monthly payment options allows the SMEEMs to link payments to business outcomes, thus addressing not just the affordability issue but also the ability to measure return on investment (RoI). As Ray Lane puts it: “I define software as a service as tying supplier revenue to a business outcome: the supplier sees the client’s end result, measures its success, and receives revenue based on the results achieved.”

Next Week: The Coming Age of ASPs (continued)

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]