App-less Web Apps

37signals writes:

What makes a web-app an app? I’d argue it’s not the functionality — there’s a lot of functionality on the web that we wouldn’t explicitly consider a “web-app.” I’d argue it’s the account, the infrastructure, the multi-page UI, the navigation between elements, the billing, the overview pages, etc. That’s the stuff that makes a web-app an app.

Now, what if we removed all of that? What if a web-application looked more like a web-document? What if the whole “application” was a single document, a single URL? What if the interface was one page? No account, no preferences, no settings, no “navigation” in the traditional sense. What if you could email it around just as you do a photo or a file attachment?

Information Masters

Forbes profiles seven "masters of information" and writes in its introduction:

Every era has its prized commodity, cherished for its value and utility--gold in the 1850s, oil in the 1870s, water out West in the 1940s.

Ours is data.

But a mountain of raw data is as useless as one of unmined gold. The biggest Internet fortunes are being made by those who have figured out how to sift out only the data they need. Some are retailers wanting to snag customers, some marketers looking for telling patterns, some consumers looking to buy the right gizmo or just build on what they know.

They are:

Barry Diller: The dealmaking chairman of IAC/InterActiveCorp concentrates on the Web’s sweet spots.

Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield: The shutterbugs behind Flickr are making searching for images a snap.

Jeffery Jonas: The wizard behind IBM Entity Analytics finds non-obvious connections.

John Markus Lervik: The co-founder of Fast Search & Transfer is focused on high-speed corporate searching.

Ellen Siminoff: Efficient Frontier’s queen of the keyword calculates what that online ad is really worth.

Peter Norvig: Google’s director of search quality and research adds speed and relevance to the world’s best search engine.

Jimmy Wales: The founder of the nonprofit Wikipedia is committed to answering the world’s questions for free.

Reinventing TV

Wired has a couple stories on Jon Stewart and Yahoo. Excerpt:

Wired: Yet there's a lot of venture capital going into video-delivery technologies that could allow more shows to go online. Isn't there something promising about new ways to watch television?
Stewart: Sure. But how much do you need TV to be available in convenient form? It already is convenient - we have the DVR. Do you need TV on your watch as you walk from your cell phone to your BlackBerry? At what point do we get saturated enough to say, "OK, I get it! We can get anything we want at any time! Let's go sit around a large table and eat a meal in silence"? Sometimes this shit's just overkill.
Karlin: I do think it would be cool if at one point your computer and your television are more or less the same device. That's one less big box screen that you have in your house.

Wired: Ben, I read something in which you talked about how network television and cable were going to become one and the same.
...
Stewart: It's the idea that the content is no longer valued by where it stands, in what neighborhood it lives. What matters is what you put out there, not its location. I think that's what people have come to learn from the Internet - it doesn't matter where it comes from. If it's good, it's good. Just because our channel is after HGTV and right before Spanish people playing soccer doesn't make it any less valuable than something that exists in the single digits on your television set.
Karlin: The bottom line is network television is going to have to figure out a way to produce its shows less expensively in order to survive and compete. And cable shows are going to have to figure out a way to pay people a little more, probably, as they start getting the same kind of revenue out of their shows that the networks get.

3G in Europe

WSJ writes that demand is picking up:

Subscribers to 3G services still account for a small fraction of cellular-phone users in Europe. But some analysts expect 2006 to be the break-out year for the technology. Ovum, a telecommunications consultancy in London, forecasts that European operators will have registered 63 million 3G subscribers -- one in six European cellphone users -- by the end of next year, as the sophisticated networks needed to carry the technology finish being rolled out and prices for 3G handsets come down.

After the tech-stock bubble burst in 2000, the term "3G" came to embody the once-ballyhooed and then derided notion that phones and multimedia content would "converge." This convergence is finally happening. Today, users in Europe can watch TV, surf the Web, download music and videos and send video messages on their 3G handsets. By contrast, wireless services in the U.S. remain more primitive.

Sun Grid

News.com writes:

On Friday, the server and software company plugged into its own advanced utility computing services when its IT department began running a handful of enterprise resource planning applications on the Sun Grid, William Vass, the company's chief information officer, told CNET News.com. The grid will be widely available to customers in September, he said.

Sun Grid, launched in February and being tested with about 100 companies, is a computing service modeled closely on the delivery of electricity and other utilities, such as water and gas.

In the retail grid's initial phases, Sun is offering processing and storage in a pay-as-you-go arrangement of $1 per CPU (central processing unit) per hour, delivered via an Internet connection. The company has established four data centers to fuel the service.

TECH TALK: Internet Tea Leaves: The Metaphor

We’ll take up the discussion of the Internet in the series next week. For today’s column, we will take a slight detour and discuss about the art of reading tea leaves.

I was wondering what title to give this series. I had first thought of “Google and the Future.” While that was bound to capture attention, Google is just one of the companies shaping the Internet. In fact, from a vantage point in India, what is happening in China may be more important given the similarities of these two emerging markets. So, I thought that was too narrow a title.

The second title I thought was “August ‘Appenings.” It was a funny attempt at alliteration but the title did not even give a hint of the story. The more obvious “The Future of the Internet” was too broad a title and would also not be reflective of what I was discussing.

It was then that the phrase “reading tea leaves” occurred to me. I liked the Chinese connection also. The initial title “August Tea Leaves” quickly gave way to “Internet Tea Leaves” and I knew I had just the right title for this Tech Talk series.

But my curiosity had been piqued. How exactly did the phrase “reading tea leaves” originate? And so, I dug around a little. (Since all of this writing is online, there really are no constraints in times of “hyperlinks” that I can take!)

JoyOfBaking.com offered this explanation:

In order to read the tea leaves, you will need to use smooth shallow tea cups that have white interiors. The loose tea leaves need to be of a good quality, large leafed, and brewed directly in each tea cup.

To make the tea, place about a teaspoon of tea in each cup and then fill with boiling water. As the tea steeps the leaves will settle to the bottom of the cup. As you drink the tea, make a wish or think of a question. After drinking the tea, leave about a teaspoon of the tea on the bottom of the cup, and with your left hand, swirl the tea three times to spread the leaves around the sides of the cup. Gently turn the cup upside down onto the saucer to drain out the leftover tea. Turn the cup right side up again and look for a picture pattern. The first picture you see is the answer to your wish or question you thought of while drinking the tea.

They say the placement of the pictures in the cup is very significant. Leaves on the bottom of the cup foretell the distant future. On the sides foretell of events in the not too distant future, and leaves on the rim area tell the present. The pictures or symbols that you see very clearly have more weight than those that are unclear.

I found this on SoYouWanna.com: “It seems so random that people actually read tea leaves in order to predict future events. You might as well try to ‘read’ a toilet bowl or a piece of gum. Where in the world did the practice come from? Tasseography, as it is sometimes called, is an ancient Chinese practice that spread to Europe with nomadic gypsies in the mid-1800s. And while most people don't take the art of tea-leaf reading too seriously anymore, it is nonetheless a fascinating hobby.”

Hmm…Tasseography. I hadn’t heard of that before. EasternTea elaborated:

Tasseography, sometimes called tasseomancy, is technically a branch of divination where patterns of symbols made by tea leaves in a cup are interpreted. Not a science, and not new, it probably developed thousands of years ago in China, but it has also been associated with the Eastern European "gypsies," the Scots, and the Irish, among others. Although enjoying a resurgence in New Age philosophy, for most of us, and especially tea-drinkers, it just plain fun -- something to do as we contemplate the bottom of a great "cuppa."

Tasseography consists of three distinct phases. The first is creating the reading. [This involves knowing] how to set up the cup so that it is "readable." The second step is recognizing the individual symbols, associating them with the inquirer, and determining their significance. This takes a knowledge of the symbols and no small amount of imagination. The third step is putting it all together in a way that combines the symbols into a single coherent interpretation. This last step seems to require practice and a touch of omniscience.

Well, for a person like me who doesn’t drink tea, I guess I’ll have to stick to “reading tea leaves” on the Internet!

Next Week: Internet Tea Leaves (continued)

Related Entries:  [All]
TECH TALK: Internet Tea Leaves: Endgame [September 16, 2005]
TECH TALK: Internet Tea Leaves: Defining Themes (Part 2) [September 15, 2005]
TECH TALK: Internet Tea Leaves: Defining Themes [September 14, 2005]
TECH TALK: Internet Tea Leaves: The New Internet (Part 2) [September 13, 2005]
TECH TALK: Internet Tea Leaves: The New Internet [September 12, 2005]