Teqlo

Jeff Nolan left SAP recently and joined Teqlo.

The fundamental problem that has bedeviled application developers is that they are fundamentally disconnected from the people who use their applications. They have design partners and focus groups, beta periods where feedback is channeled back to the developers and tweaks made, and there are post-release initiatives aimed at improving the quality and satisfaction rate of the product… but even in the best run process the users are not intimately involved in the development process. With Teqlo the users are intimately involved because they are the developer.

To expect that users, even power users, will be able to build applications that stitch together web services from multiple vendors is a stretch. Teqlo isn’t attempting to build a new development language like Ruby on Rails that dramatically lowers the barrier, what we are doing is essentially reverse programming. We’re treating development as a data flow problem, not a programming flow problem. If there is a core piece of technology that we have invented, it is the routing methodology and not the semantic definition of components; Teqlo takes web services that are wrapped up as components, we call them Teqlets, and determines the optimal sequencing based on the data inputs/outputs of each component. Yeah, it’s hard and there is a lot more to it than I am revealing here, but the point of this post is not to talk about our technology but rather what it means for users.

Dan Farber has more.

Integrated Media Platform

Doc Searls points to an an article from NewMediaTrends about Denmark:

Nordjyske today totally dominates the northern Jutland region with newspapers, TV stations, radio stations and websites. Nevertheless Nordjyske has felt inclined simultaneously to launch a new free evening-newspaper, a new newsportal for user generated content. And at the same time they remake their present free morning/traffic newspaper.

The result is a fully integrated media platform, spanning print, web and mobile: Centrum Morgen (the free morning newspaper), Centrum Aften (the free evening newspaper) and ditcentrum.dk (yourcentrum.dk)

According to Henrik Rewes, who is in charge of the web- and mobile initiative, this is by far the most wholeheartedly and aggressive online-move by Nordjyske ever. Nordjyske hopes that pendlers will read Centrum Morgen in the bus or train going to work, vote by sms while on the run, contribute with their own views on the hot issues on the web when they¹re at their office - and then, in the afternoon when they get home, read a brand new evening newspaper, all complete with news updates - including their own stories, results from sms-voting etc.

IPTV Issues

Alan Moore blogs about a discussion in Electronic News:

Electronic News: What’s the difference between Internet TV and IP TV?

Lin: Internet TV is viewed as an open distribution platform, where content can be delivered via this open platform directly to subscribers. Unfortunately, that limits the telcos’ role as dumb pipe providers, which doesn’t allow them a lot of room for getting revenue. From a telco point of view, that’s their defense.

Aalaei: They should look at Google. What does Google actually own? All they own is a Web site. What they have that no one has is the business intelligence to take advantage of it and make it more intelligent.

Alan adds: "I believe iPTV can work as a hybrid model of content, community, connectivity and commerce."

Infosphere Future

Lifeblog points to an article by Luciano Floridi:

"Infosphere" is a word I coined years ago on the basis of "biosphere," a term referring to that limited region on our planet that supports life. By "infosphere," then, I mean the whole informational environment made up of all informational entities (including informational agents), their properties, interactions, processes, and relations. It is an environment comparable to, but different from, "cyberspace" (which is only one of the sub-regions of the infosphere, as it were), since the infosphere also includes offline and analog spaces of information. We shall see that it is also an environment (and hence a concept) that is rapidly evolving.
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Nowadays, we are used to considering the space of information as something we log in to and log out from. Our view of the world is still modern or Newtonian: it is made of "dead" cars, buildings, furniture, clothes, which are non-interactive, irresponsive, and incapable of communicating, learning, or memorizing. But what we still experience as the world offline is bound to become a fully interactive and responsive environment of wireless, pervasive, distributed, a2a (anything to anything) information processes, that works a4a (anywhere for anytime), in real time. This interactive digital environment will first gently invite us to understand the world as something "a-live" (artificially live), i.e. as comprising agents capable of interacting with us in various ways (shoes, for example, used to be "dead" artifacts, but you can now interact with the pair of Nike shoes you are wearing through your iPod). Such animation of the world will, paradoxically, make our outlook closer to that of pre-technological cultures which interpreted all aspects of nature as inhabited by animating spirits.

Steve Ballmer Interview

Excerpt from an interview with The New York Times:

Q. What do you see as the most significant changes in how people use software?

A. I think one pervasive change is the increasing importance of community. That will come in different forms, with different age groups of people and it will change as the technology evolves. But the notion of multiple people interacting on things — that will forever continue. That’s different today, and we’re going to see those differences build. You see it in a variety of ways now, in social networking sites, in the way people collaborate at work, and in ad hoc collaboration over the Internet. You see it in things like Xbox Live, the way we let people come together and have community entertainment experiences. And you’ll see that in TV and video. It’s not like the future of entertainment has been determined. But it’s a big deal.

TECH TALK: The Rise of YouTube: Comments

Google announced its decision to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock last Monday. Since then, there has been a lot of discussion around the deal and what it means for social networking and video sites, and the broader Internet. In this week's series, we will pool together the various commentaries to get a view into tomorrow's world.

Jim Moore wrote:

Google launched Google Video--land and soil. Google video is a barren stretch of land. Google Video is a good service, but few planted seeds in it.

So now Google has, wisely I believe, purchased YouTube. What did Google purchase? Momentum. Community. Quality community content. A successful creative community ecosystem.

It is the ecology, smarty!

The intangible asset that makes a difference is an ecosystem with community creativity at the core, with widespread public recognition and public creativity about the daily creations of the community, and with easy ways to check out the current content and send it to one's friends.

These characteristics are then crossed with market size and service growth rate, and from the result you can estimate value to the new world, and thus to potential investors.

YouTube, Myspace and FaceBook have community creativity, widespread recognition, and easy ways to visit and forward content.

News.com published an analysis from Forrester Research:

The search giant already has the No. 3 video site, but now it will own a networking platform that makes video stickier--and better for advertisers.

To make this huge purchase worthwhile, Google must move rapidly to do three things: first, address the problem of users uploading copyrighted content; second, encourage marketers to think beyond traditional video advertisements; and third, maintain YouTube's excellent video selection and viewing experience.
Google's video site hosts more than 1.5 million videos, but the people who submit them are nearly invisible. By contrast, YouTube's site lets visitors rate videos, save them as favorites, comment on them, share them, see related videos and view other users' playlists, creating the largest and most active video community on the Web.
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The first 10 years of the Web were focused on text, graphics and pages. With broadband users popping past half of all online users, text is passe. The next generation of sites will be video-heavy, and users will be as much a part of the experience as the content. Get your ad agency's video production folks together with your word-of-mouth marketers--they're going to need to collaborate to invent tomorrow's Web experience.

Danny Sullivan wrote: “Various people see sense in YouTube diving for the copyright cover that Google's somehow supposedly going to extend. I don't know what super copyright protection technology they're expecting Google to cook up. To date, Google has had plenty of copyright violations it struggles with. Overall, the biggest takeaway for me is how the YouTube purchase is the end of an era of Google buying small. To date, most purchases have been tiny. But with loads of cash in its pockets, Google's jumped into the second round of billion dollar purchases of web sites that's been going on.”

Tomorrow: Comments (continued)

Related Entries:  [All]
TECH TALK: The Rise of YouTube: Impact for China and India [October 20, 2006]
TECH TALK: The Rise of YouTube: The Future [October 13, 2006]
TECH TALK: The Rise of YouTube: Success Secret [October 12, 2006]
TECH TALK: The Rise of YouTube: Google’s Interest (Part 2) [October 11, 2006]
TECH TALK: The Rise of YouTube: Google’s Interest [October 10, 2006]