Mobiles Design

BBC News writes:

The mobile phone industry is in danger of confusing people in its quest to pack everything into handsets, thinks Scott Jenson, a leading mobile industry design consultant.

Converging all these functions that are now possible into one device opens up major design problems.

What the industry should be coming up with are more innovative ways to get at these functions, thinks Mr Jenson, in ways that understand the kinds of experiences people want. It is about simplicity through design.

The mobile industry has watched iPod's success carefully in its quest to find the "next big thing", says Mr Jenson.

It knows it has to make use of ever-increasing processing power and other innovations, such as high-speed net access, to make money.

No longer are simple voice calls - the mobile's original function - the main cash generator.

But cramming multiple functions into a mobile is still problematic. Mr Jenson is currently working on a product with a company that is a "mobile phone-iTunes type thing", he says.

PayPal's Plans

Business Week writes about eBay's PayPal, the web payment service: "The goal, says PayPal President Jeff Jordan: 'We want to be the standard for online payments.'...Could PayPal become a full-fledged credit brand on par with Visa -- perhaps even beyond the Web?

Challenges for China's Internet Companies

The Street writes:

As the leading Chinese Internet companies report earnings for the first three months of 2005, a frustratingly familiar pattern is emerging: Ad-supported content and wireless services, areas where many believe the greatest long-term potential lies, continue to suffer from regulatory setbacks and relatively slow growth. Other areas, like games and online travel, are performing much better, but the stocks are trading at dizzying valuations.

And hints from companies indicate the second quarter will bring more of the same. As a result, many of these names are down for the year. Among Chinese portals, Sina (SINA:Nasdaq) is down 12% and Sohu.com (SOHU:Nasdaq) is off 5%. Shanda Interactive Entertainment (SNDA:Nasdaq) and NetEase.com (NTES:Nasdaq) , two leaders in Chinese Internet games, are down 22% and 5%, respectively. Travel site Ctrip (CTRP:Nasdaq) has fallen 8%. Wireless company Tom Online (TOMO:Nasdaq) has lost 23%, while jobs site 51Job (JOBS:Nasdaq) is the worst performer of them all, dropping 74%.

A series of obstacles kept revenue and profit from rising at most of these companies, ranging from government hobbling of emerging wireless services, slower-than-expected growth in new Internet users, and a bottleneck of Internet access points in cafes and elsewhere (commonplace as many Internet users can't afford PCs).

The Future of Databases

ACM Queue has an article co-authored by Jim Gray of Microsoft:

We live in a time of extreme change, much of it precipitated by an avalanche of information that otherwise threatens to swallow us whole. Under the mounting onslaught, our traditional relational database constructs—always cumbersome at best—are now clearly at risk of collapsing altogether.

In fact, rarely do you find a DBMS anymore that doesn’t make provisions for online analytic processing. Decision trees, Bayes nets, clustering, and time-series analysis have also become part of the standard package, with allowances for additional algorithms yet to come. Also, text, temporal, and spatial data access methods have been added—along with associated probabilistic logic, since a growing number of applications call for approximated results. Column stores, which store data column-wise rather than record-wise, have enjoyed a rebirth, mostly to accommodate sparse tables, as well as to optimize bandwidth.

Is it any wonder classic relational database architectures are slowly sagging to their knees?

But wait… there’s more! A growing number of application developers believe XML and XQuery should be treated as our primary data structure and access pattern, respectively. At minimum, database systems will need to accommodate that perspective. Also, as external data increasingly arrives as streams to be compared with historical data, stream-processing operators are of necessity being added. Publish/subscribe systems contribute further to the challenge by inverting the traditional data/query ratios, requiring that incoming data be compared against millions of queries instead of queries being used to search through millions of records. Meanwhile, disk and memory capacities are growing significantly faster than corresponding capabilities for reducing latency and ensuring ample bandwidth. Accordingly, the modern database system increasingly depends on massive main memory and sequential disk access.

This all will require a new, much more dynamic query optimization strategy as we move forward. It will have to be a strategy that’s readily adaptable to changing conditions and preferences. The option of cleaving to some static plan has simply become untenable. Also note that we’ll need to account for intelligence increasingly migrating to the network periphery. Each disk and sensor will effectively be able to function as a competent database machine. As with all other database systems, each of these devices will also need to be self-managing, self-healing, and always-up.

Enterprise Social Software

News.com writes:

Today, most corporations still do little, if anything, with blogs, wikis and social networks, but that will change quickly over the next few years as more companies integrate these technologies into their daily routines. And if early signs are any indication, the evolution will lead to blogs replacing blast e-mails, wikis strengthening collaboration software and social networks taking conversations around the water cooler to a meta-level never envisioned by the most enthusiastic evangelist of the Internet boom.

Those buyers and sellers of technology that embrace the power of social media services early in the life cycle of this new tech sector will no doubt gain a key competitive edge over rivals, provided they figure out how best to use the newfangled Web tools. Those decisions could well be the most important ones that the storied C-suite makes in the coming years.

So far, there are few obvious signs of the best corporate strategic use of social media services. The two high-tech powerhouses most out in front of the public curve with blogs are Sun and Microsoft, both of which have established blogging Web sites for customers, partners and employees to see and use. Sun President Jonathan Schwartz and Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble are two of the best in the corporate blogging business today.

TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Buyer’s View

So far, we have seen that buying software as a service makes great sense from a customer perspective – in our case, the SMEEMs (small- and medium-sized enterprises in emerging markets). The key benefits are: there is no need to invest in any IT infrastructure, payments are made monthly and can be tied to business outcomes, and it is possible to get an integrated solution which automates key business processes. David Coursey has more:

1. The app provides functionality many businesses need, but isn’t terribly different from one company to the next.
2. The service allows customization, but the Software as a Service (SaaS) model prevents clients from doing too much reinvention. This saves money and grief. It also encourages best practices.
3. The service brings together information from several sources and presents it to the user in a friendly, web-based interface.
4. Hosted services are easier to get running, partially because of the limited customization potential but also because there’s no hardware to buy and no software to install.
5. There’s also no software to manage, fix, upgrade, etc. All that is the responsibility of the vendor. Customers get a semi-custom application without having to hire developers and people to keep it running.
6. SaaS costs are predictable and typically usage-based.
7. If the vendor doesn’t meet your needs, there usually is no long-term commitment and it’s easy to switch. This keeps SaaS vendors responsive.

Ed Sim adds: “While every piece of software should not and will not be delivered as a service, it is also quite clear that customers are tired of buying expensive software products with large upfront licenses, expensive hardware to purchase, manage, and maintain, followed by expensive professional services to get the product up and running. From this backdrop, it is easy to see why reducing complexity and simplifying technology for customers is a big driver to more rapid adoption of products. It is also easy to see why reducing complexity for the customer also helps reduce complexity for the vendor, lowering the friction to sell and deliver its product. This means a more capital efficient business model, one which would hopefully scale much quicker and cost less to build product, sell, and support customers.”

From an emerging market perspective, buyers have few choices once they decide they want to automate their business and invest in IT. Most current packaged software solutions continue to be priced in the dollar-equivalent in local currency making it far too expensive for most enterprises. The home-grown solutions packaged software solutions may not be good enough. This leaves them with three unpalatable options: non-consumption (which does not help them do what they started out to do), piracy (which tends to happen quite a lot in the emerging markets but is limited to some of the more basic applications), or customised development (which can leave them dependent on a mon-and-pop software company, take time and over the long run, prove quite expensive). Thus, buyers in emerging markets will look favourably at ASPs. Given their lack of legacy in terms of business applications, it may actually help them leapfrog with state-of-the-art software applications – delivered over the Internet, and integrated with their mobile phones.

Tomorrow: The Seller’s View

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: Technology Building Blocks (Part 4) [May 30, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: Technology Building Blocks (Part 3) [May 27, 2005]