Sadagopan writes abour our MyToday:

I particularly liked the horizontal and vertical partitions that are made available in the system – Months back, I have seen this system for sometime – backtracking from my visitor log – did not then know that it is product under beta(it looked good even then) and more than that did not know it is a Netcore product. Rajesh – over time you may consider to publish some analytical information about the frequency of blog updates as they get published – also the number of blogs that on average user subscribe to and read. Perhaps a view of common subscribers/taggers (like shown by bloglines/del.icio.us) and details like top50 subscribed feeds would make usage more attractive. I have also pointed out in the past about the near total domination by the US based enterprises on web 2.0 applications(I have no complaints about that - The US is the epicenter of the IT World). New Web2.0 applications like MyToday, R.L.Narain's TracBac,a visual project handling, digital white board, version tracking tool for the designers worldwide and others coming out of India make it interesting that much more interesting to watch.I am sure that in the near many more such applications would folow - looking forward to the day when the next riya.com, flickr.com or the next writely comimg out of india based enterprises. Congrats folks - you are setting an example to the several hundred thousand IT wannabe entrepreneurs out in India to take the plunge.

John Hagel writes:

The Intention Economy is still much too narrow a view of the opportunity. By focusing on intention to buy, we ignore the whole question of how intentions emerge in the first place. In a world of exploding options and scarce attention, how do we find resources (products, ideas, people, etc.) we weren’t even looking for? One option is that we wait for vendors to find us and “capture” us. The other option is to rely on friends or agents who know us and can be trusted to be helpful in introducing us to new resources we weren’t even aware of.

Given this, The Attention Economy is a richer way of describing both the challenges and the opportunities from a customer’s perspective. Yes, it is true, many vendors and start-ups have grabbed on to The Attention Economy to figure out clever ways to find those increasingly elusive eyeballs.
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Intention is where the near-term money comes from. But Attention is where the long-term value to the customer resides.

WSJ writes:

So far, click-to-call customer service has yet to gain much traction, in part because consumers think it would be easier to pick up and dial a toll-free number. But those offering click-to-call say that using the feature often means customers are less likely to be bounced from agent to agent. While customers using a click-to-call feature are often connected to the same call center as those who dial the company's toll-free number, the online retailer can typically tell what section of their site a customer is calling from, either through information from the third-party provider or because they only offer the service on limited portions of their site. Toll-free numbers can also be hard to find. Amazon's 800 number isn't publicized on the site.

Retailers hope the new option boosts customer satisfaction. With customer retention increasingly important to the maturing industry, companies have been improving old customer-service models that forced customers to poke through "frequently asked questions" sections online. Newer options include allowing shoppers to send customer-service inquiries via email or offering instant-messaging features that enable agents to answer customers' queries in real time.

Paul Kedrosky writes about the launch of a new search engine:

In essence Vast is a classifieds vertical search service -- but one with an important twist. Before getting to the twist, however, you need to know the context and scope. Vast is big, really really big. The folks there argue that it is the biggest search service for cars, and one of the biggest for the other categories it currently searches (jobs and people).
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Whatever your views on search size, Naval & Co. have an interesting and big "What to do with it" idea. They are encouraging you (yes you) to steal it. Take it. Use their data. Freely. Want API-level access to the biggest classifieds search set on the Internet? It's all yours. Just sign up for a Vast API key and bang away (via a REST-ful interface) up to 50,000 times a day. If you want any more than that then Vast's developer text politely asks that you contact them so they can "provision the site accordingly".

That's a fascinating idea, especially given that Vast makes its data available for both commercial and non-commercial uses. About the only thing you can't do with it is create your own crawler or spider. So what does that leave? Anything, from advanced analytics, to data repackaging, to grand-scale mashups -- it's all yours.

Ars Technica writes:

Amazon opened up S3, its new online storage solution for web applications, and now you can store unlimited amounts of data on Amazon servers for US$.15 per gigabyte, paid monthly. S3 was purportedly built to support both Amazon's own internal applications and the external users of the Amazon Web Services platform. That should be proper motivation to build a service that's fast and robust enough for mission critical use, yet flexible enough to support any storage task thrown at it.

The storage space is accessed by standard SOAP and REST interfaces, and networking is handled by HTTP and BitTorrent protocols. The data streams are encrypted with customer-specific keys, and access rights are supposed to be granular enough to provide private or public storage object by object, and user by user. Apart from the storage fee, you pay $0.20 per gigabyte transferred, but there are no minimum fees and no setup costs, so you pay as you go. And the Amazon APIs overall are quite generic and should be usable for writing services that have nothing to do with Amazon per se. It's a lightweight, scalable, flexible, and redundant storage solution, and Amazon says it's secure, too.

So what can S3 do for you? Well, it can be used as a 15-cents-a-gig online backup drive, for instance, or backend storage for your homebrew data warehouse with distributed, reliable access from anywhere and on demand. Any application with storage needs could use something like S3, so you can think of it as a rent-an-NAS solution on a large scale.

Peter Fingar writes in his book “Extreme Competition:”

4. Three Billion New Capitalists

The years 1979, 1989 and 1991 could be the most significant years in portending the world economy for the 21st century.

In July 1977, Deng Xiaoping was reinstated in all the Party and government posts he had been dismissed from during Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution.”
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In 1989, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down shifting the Soviet Empire into a market-driven group of independent nation states.
And in 1991, Manmohan Singh, the finance minister and now prime minister of India, moved the country to abandon Soviet-style central planning, massive bureaucratic socialist regulations, and steep tariffs blocking the import of state-of-the-art equipment, and opened up to free enterprise.
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The result of these three watershed years is described at length in Reagan administration trade official, Clyde Prestowitz‘s book, Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East (2005). This is not a book of light reading, or for the faint of heart, according its review in the American Library Association’s ‘Booklist’ by Mary Whaley, “Prestowitz, economic trend-spotter, reports, ‘Over the past two decades . . . China, India and the former Soviet Union all decided to leave their respective socialist workers paradise and drive their 3 billion citizens along the once despised capitalist road.’ These new capitalists symbolize the threats to end 600 years of Western economic domination as America’s lead role in invention and technological innovation lessens and the Internet allows jobs to be performed anywhere.

5. The New IT

It won’t be just the satellite/fiber networks that drive the continued globalization of highly skilled white-collar workers, it will be the ability to create virtual work spaces where far flung teams can work together in real time. As globalization continues, the demand for a new generation of technology support for work accomplished by geographically dispersed teams becomes clear.
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The Old IT applied automation to information; the New IT applies automation to relationships. The Old IT was about keeping records and transmitting data; the New IT is about “connecting and collaborating” to get work done—now that productivity doesn’t require proximity.

The New IT requires a new kind of leadership, the Chief Process Officer (CPO), not the traditional Chief Information Officer (CIO), whose chief concerns were mostly the management of technical assets. To this extent, the HBR article is certainly correct, traditional IT, the Old IT, doesn’t matter, for this form of IT is indeed a commodity. The new CPO’s chief concerns will be in providing a technology-enabled capability to manage a company’s business process assets and support the ability for knowledge workers to “connect and collaborate” inside and outside the walls of their companies.

Peter concludes by writing:

Grand notions of business change are particularly problematic. It all boils down to “what should you do next Monday morning?” While there are no secret formulas, business leaders are well advised to evaluate the…new realities of 21st century business, and ponder business innovations that were once thought to be impractical prior to the wiring of the planet; the resources embodied in three billion new capitalists; the New IT; and the advent of jumbo transportation.

Rather than ripping your company apart, innovative business strategies can now be embraced incrementally with technology enablement—one breakout strategy at a time. Change in strategy and operational transformations become matters of portfolio management, not big-bang, rip and replace disruptions. There is much to learn, and many cultural barriers to overcome, but Monday morning is a good day to start your company’s incremental business reformation. Better still, today is a great day to start your company’s journey to becoming an extreme competitor.