Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus
MySpace has some hard decisions to make, as last year they entered into an advertising relationship with Google and now they find themselves unable to make similar deals with other companies. An alliance between MySpace and Google last year, where Google became the sole provider of text ads on MySpace, guaranteed News Corp"s media darling $900 million in shared ad revenue over the course of three years. The deal, made six months ago, has not been finalized but it has already taken effect. A Google search bar and ads are already present on the site and MySpace is receiving payments from those.
But now MySpace is looking to partner with eBay, to allow MySpace users to sell items using eBay"s PayPal. And like a jealous lover, Google is protesting. The Wall St Journal is reporting (full article behind paywall) that MySpace"s dalliance with eBay is holding up finalization of the ad revenue deal between MySpace and Google. You can imagine the Google ultimatum: it"s either him or me! :-)
The issues each company faces:
- MySpace wants to empower their user base and become more of a centralized hub, by allowing "peer commerce" with eBay"s PayPal mechanisms.
- eBay is facing negative backlash from investors, who are looking not only for growth, but to stay ahead of competition from Google"s new payment system Checkout.
- Google has a hard time sharing ad space. They certainly don"t want to share MySpace with eBay, when they"re trying to steal market share with Google Checkout.
So what we have here is three companies trying to grow revenue through partnering with other industry powerhouses. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that while Google and eBay say they have entered into their own advertising partnership, the general concern is that each company is competing for the attention of MySpace users and so neither maximizes their revenue on MySpace.
Then there is Google Checkout, a direct competitor to eBay"s Paypal. That can only make the relationship between eBay and Google (and now MySpace) that much more strained. It"s a classic case of what happens when companies take the easier road to growth, which is partnerships, but then one of the partners gets big enough to want to do everything on their own.
The Solution
Well, for MySpace, the solution is easy. Use Google Checkout instead of PayPal. It will become widespread enough to not have to worry about brand recognition (or lack thereof).
But this love triangle speaks to a larger issue at hand - can Google continue on their path to media monopoly? They"ve effectively used their search method of gathering data to impede on nearly every kind of business imaginable. Some stick, like Gmail and Checkout. Others the average person has never heard of, like Orkut and Froogle. But Google"s power tactic is reminiscent of Wal-Mart"s industry dominance, because they increasingly leave little room for partnerships between other companies. In this case, eBay may end up being the jilted party.
The New York Times has an
interesting report about companies that offer customized video advertising, such as
Spot Runner and Visible World. Marketers are excited
about this technology, because it means they can utilize demographics to deliver targeted
advertising across several platforms - including television and the Internet. It"s also
less expense than traditional TV advertising and in some cases means they can route
around traditional ad agencies, by creating the ads themselves using the tools offered by
services like Spot Runner and Visible World.
By now there are very few
skeptics left who do not believe that Apple can reinvent the wheel. They have done it
with iPod and it seems like they are doing it again with iPhone. Most of us have not yet
had the chance to try their patent-pending multi-touch technology on iPhone, but if the
click-wheel on iPod any indication, Apple has invented a truly new way of interacting
with digital information.
An interesting tidbit came
out of the recent Foo Camp New Zealand (which unfortunately I wasn"t able to attend).
Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla, who is based in NZ but drives the rendering engine
of Mozilla/FireFox, spoke about
how Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because
you"ll be able to use your web apps - like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google
Calendar, etc - in the browser even when offline. I deliberately mentioned all Google
web apps there, because of course this plays right into Google"s hands.
One of the central concepts
in Complex Systems is
Emergence. It is this automagical process through which elements of a
system give rise to a higher order system. Emergence is how physics becomes chemistry and
chemistry becomes biology. It is how web 1.0 evolved into web 2.0, and how that, in turn,
will become the next web.
Bill Gates of Microsoft just
announced a deal with Jan Rain, VeriSign and Sxip to develop integration between Microsoft CardSpace
and the open source project, OpenID. This is an
interesting deal between the software giant in Redmond and a popular open source project,
which deservers a closer look. For those already familiar with OpenID and Microsoft, jump
directly to the takeaway section. For others, the next two sections will provide you with
a quick introduction to two new technologies that will likely have a significant impact
on the future of Internet.
Understanding your audience
is the key to success in any business - including blogging. Lately the Read/WriteWeb
authors have been discussing what it is that keeps readers coming back here. Our recent poll
indicated that most of you come back to this blog for Analysis and
Reviews. We are thrilled to hear this, because we focus a lot on those
two things.
The Future Of Web Apps 2007 kicked off in London
today with a host of speakers from various startups, bigcos, media outlets and associated
businesses. Hosted by Ryan Carson of Carson
Systems, the event is covering what various successful web companies are currently
doing, why they are successful, and where they are headed. 
Next up was Edwin Aoki, a
chief architect with AOL, who went through the importance of building user trust in your
products, and protecting their privacy and personal identities. This seemed like more of
a confidence-building exercise for AOL, given their data leak last year. He also pointed
out that email is still the biggest destination on the web, and not community
sites such as MySpace. 
Matthew Ogle and
Anil-Bawa-Cavia from Last.fm gave an overview of their
company history, from its humble origins on a rooftop patio somewhere in London to their
more comfortable offices of today. They claim that 15 million tracks are listed every day
on the site, with a total of 6 billion items listed from day one. This is a huge amount
of data and they talked about how they scaled their systems to cope with this.
The last speaker of the
day was Kevin Rose from Digg. He gave an interesting
insight into the history of the company and what goes on behind the scenes. He talked
about enabling Digg users who regularly digg the same stories and are nearby
geographically, to hook up and become friends. He also wants Digg to start showing you
stories based on what you have digged in the past.
Molded case (1) 
Today started with Mark Anders, Adobe"s senior principal scientist. Mark previously
had worked on the Microsoft .NET project from it inception until 2003. He gave a good
technical demonstration of Flex and
then created an application on the fly, to search for photos on Flickr. He also showed
off an online photo editing site called picnik,
which was built with Flex. 
At last some talk of the
mobile world came in the form of Daniel Appelquist from Vodafone. The first thing he did was to find out,
by way of the raising of audience hands, who used their mobile to access the web
regularly. This showed that most people in the room here use a mobile device to access
the web on a regular basis, and that most had even done so in the past 24 hours. A very
interesting fact that is obvious when you read it, but very interesting at the same time,
is that there are up to 4 times more mobile devices in use around the world that have web
access, than there are computer and laptops with web access. These numbers are
confirmation of just how big this space really is. In the UK vodafone data shows that the
biggest destinations for web users are Hotmail, BBC News and then Google. He talked
at length about the need for more adoption of standards by mobile
developers. Vodafone has a best practices list that they
advise everyone to follow:
Tariq Krim from Netvibes made a quick announcement about their
new universal widget API. You will now be able to develop a widget for
Netvibes and it will work across a whole host of other platforms, such as
google desktop etc. You can see a preview of it here next week: http://eco.netvibes.com/uwa. He also mentioned
that they are going to support OpenID in the near future.
Music makes us happy. So happy in fact that we
shake, smile and fork off billions of dollars every year on it. So it is not an accident that
music is one of the most popular forms of media online.
It is becoming more clear that the web is turning into a gigantic
database. We explained this trend in our recent post about Yahoo!
pipes. SongBird is another good example of this growing trend, because it treats the
web as a music database. As shown in the picture on the left, SongBird replaces the
standard search engines with the set of ones specific for music, making the music
searches quicker and more relevant.
I went down to the Mashup event in London tonight, which was
organized by Vecosys and eTribes. The topic of conversation for the night was:
"What"s next, Web3.0? - The coming semantic web". The panel consisted of Paul Walsh from
Segala, Mark Birbeck from X-Port Ltd, Tony Fish, and Sam Sethi - who took the role of chair
for the night. Sam started by talking about where the semantic web movement was at the
moment and the emergence of Microformats. He showed us some
examples of sites that are using formats like HCard and HCalendar. For those of you who
are not familiar with Microfomats, a good example is a site called worldcupkickoff.com. They used the HCalender
format to help users bookmark the dates of games in the World Cup, in their own
calendar applications. Microformats are only supported in the browser at the moment
through the use of third party browser plugins, but it seems almost certain at this stage
that Firefox 3 is going to support them natively.
One
of the things I realized during the
MobileMonday Global Peer Awards is the increasing globalization of innovation. Innovation
is happening everywhere and a lot of start-up companies are working in the mobile web
area; while still in its very early stage, the mobilisation of the web is happening.
The content
hall (Hall 7) of the exhibition was filled with a lot of mobile adult (Sign ‘O’ the
Times?) and web companies resolutely going mobile including Yahoo. Shozu won for the 2nd time in a row the prize for Most Innovative Mobile Application
or Content Award with its Mobile MultiMedia Delivery Platform. To me Shozu is one of
the truly real great mobile integrated applications, but isn’t this a sign that no
other great innovative applications are around, or haven’t been noticed by the
organizers, or maybe have not been found worthy or mature to market yet?
To close, a
note that Second Life will soon be accessible from your mobile phone.
According to MarketingVox and Reuters’ Second Life bureau software from Comverse Technology will enable Second Life residents to visit the
virtual world from their Java-enabled mobile devices.The software was developed over the
last six months, well before the open-sourcing of the Second Life client, and relies on
using a separate PC or server as an intermediary. Comverse has also created an
application that allows Second Life to run on IPTV platforms. (picture from
Reuters)
May I have the envelope
please...and the winner is...GoshMe! In my opinion,
GoshMe is nothing short of amazing. When you go to Google and type in, for example,
"coffee," you get 197,000,000 results. When you go to one of the Metasearch engines on
the List (Dogpile, mamma, gnosh, PlanetSearch, et al) you still get millions of web
Pages, but they are collated from a number of different search engines. GoshMe searches
across a variety of specialized search engines and databases, and for the above "coffee"
example it returned about 1,200 search engine options - each one of which might have 197,000,000 results! GoshMe results are categorized and have the option to be
filtered further. 
The first tool for a virtual company has to be one that
replaces face-to-face communication. This is not an easy task, but Skype gets close. This popular software bundles the
phone, traditional chat, conferencing and video conferenecing and works on Windows, Mac
and Linux. It is powerful to be able to chat and, when necessary, call a team mate. All
Skype PC-to-PC calls are free and there are options such as SkypeOut (calling normal
telephone numbers) and SkypeIn (gives you a phone number for anywhere in the world).
Skype facilitates communication, but it does not allow sharing
of screens. It is helpful to complement meetings with real-time screens, particularly if
you are brainstorming, talking about design (for example) or simply want to get on the
same page faster. 
Project management is essential to the success of any project,
let alone a virtual one. Execution requires planning, scheduling, division of tasks and
tracking. Basecamp from 37signals is an excellent tool that encapsulates the
essential elements of project management.
Noticibly missing from
Basecamp is the calendaring feature. Personally, I would like to see that as part of the
project management solution - particularly a view of events and milestones. Fortunately,
there are quite a few calendaring solutions that do a good job. The one that stands out
from the crowd is Google Calendar.
If you are running a software development business, you need
to have a source code version control system. While you could run such repository on your
corporate computers or have your web hosting do it for you, it is even better to use one
of the specialist online services - to make sure that things are done right.
Whether it"s our personal data or corporate
information, it is always better to be safe than sorry. In our day and age no one can
afford to waste even a single day due to data loss. Luckily there are now online backup
solutions that can be deployed quickly and on a budget. ElephantDrive is one of the newcomers that offers
a backup solution based on Amazon S3 storage. It comes with an intuitive user interface,
that allows you to specify files and directories that you want to backup. After that it
just works, quietly backing up your files to S3.
Last, but certainly not least, is the category of accounting
and payroll software. The problem is that financial matters are rather complicated. In
addition to complex federal laws and regulations, there are state (and country!) specific
nuances that can drive you crazy for hours. This is one area where getting a specialist -
a bookkeeper - is definitely a good idea. The good news is that online services like QuickBooks are working hard to make things
easier.
The idea for Many Eyes came from some
surprising behaviors that we each serendipitously observed.
OpenID has gained two more high profile Internet company
supporters. Wordpress announced their support today
and also Chris Messina did a bit of snooping and discovered that
37Signals support is nigh. These two organizations join Digg, Microsoft,
AOL, Yahoo,
LiveJournal, MediaWiki, and others in their support of OpenID. There are still gaps -
e.g. even in today"s Wordpress announcement, it"s worth noting that you can"t actually
sign into your Wordpress blog with an OpenID a/c. But you can (as Chris
Messina explained) use your WordPress.com URL as an OpenID elsewhere, making
WordPress.com an “identity provider”.
Way back when I was in high school I found myself in a high school science
class. It was your typical experience, replete with bunsen burners, saftey
goggles and a science teacher named Norbert. But one day Norbert had an
inspriation - he let the class watch a video of James Burke and his Connections
series, which described all of the happy accidents in technology through the
years, that have brought us where we are today. My favorite accidental
connection was the development of fine mist sprays for perfume bottles. While it
may have helped people smell better, the real combustion happened in your
automobile, where the fine mist sprays became fuel injection nozzles for the
modern gasoline engine.
Today I was invited to
TVNZ"s headquarters in Auckland, along with several other local bloggers, to check out
their new web-based television on demand service - called TVNZ ondemand and due to be launched
later this month. It will have a mix of free (ad supported) and premium content; the latter may only be viewed for 7 days, after which the user"s rights to it
expires.
Earlier this week Emre wrote about declining
traffic on Technorati and considered the exit options for this blog vertical search
and portal site. The challenge from Google Blogsearch is certainly serious. It is
difficult to compete with Google on speed and breadth of the results. But Technorati is
more than a search engine for blogs - it is also a directory and a popularity site. In
this post, we tap into Technorati to review the current 100 popular blogs. We attempt to
understand what is popular in the blogosphere today; and why.
The mashups of our Top
100 Alternative Search Engines list continue! The Name Inspector, a fun and interesting
blog run by a PhD in Linguistics, has done a linguistic analysis of
the 100 search engine names on the list. His conclusion is that "the search for search
engine names has drawn on some creative linguistic strategies." The top 100 alt search
engines (from February) fall into the following categories:
MyBlogLog started off with the aim of providing blog
analytics. MyBlogLog Communities was launched mid last year, to enable readers of blogs
to join communities and share their experiences with other like-minded groups of readers.
The idea was that if readers like the same content, they probably have plenty else in
common. MyBlogLog built a platform where readers could trade messages with others and see
what other sites they visit.
Explode provides the same
analytics capability as MyBlogLog, but in addition to Analytics it also allows users to
build a network for friends - who can be readers or writers of blogs. Bloggers can then
display a "friends" widget on their blogs. This widget provides valuable context on the
readers of the blog and the blogger"s circle of friends. Another capability that Explode
provides is a comment wall
for each user, where friends and other users can post comments. This also provides
valuable context on each of the users.
OthersOnline has an
interesting twist on the idea of providing context. They allow people to register their
profile along with their website. As part of the registration process, OthersOnline asks
users to categorize their website and themselves, via keywords. Using these keywords,
OthersOnline shows profile information of users, along with presence and email, via a
browser plug-in (a widget is in the works as well). The idea is to make it easy for
people to locate other like minded individuals or websites, in the course of
browsing.
The Open Data Workshop 2007
took place yesterday in New York City. The gathering was organized by AttentionTrust and sponsored by Reuters. The workshop brought together over sixty influencers from
startups, web giants, financial firms, venture capitalists and journalists interested in
the attention space. It was a very refreshing, open and candid dialog about the different
issues and faces of open data.
Probably the hottest topic revolved around
tracking users behavior. Websites (and even ISPs!) these days
routinely track peoples behavior without, letting them know in an obvious way. Often
there are disclaimers and fine print, but people are not warned upfront in plain English
about the fact that their data is being captured. Is this reasonable?
Last Friday we posted about
weird search
engines. We got some good comments and found some new weird search engines to add to
our list. Note that we mean weird in a good way - as in something a bit different.
Winzy
- win prizes while searching
My experience has also been that Techmeme is usually the fastest, although
I"ve taken to referring to the top stories on there as "Techmeme
scrums" - because when a top story breaks, there is a massive "me too" pile
on from tech blogs. It"s the same on TailRank and Megite - and this trend is
getting a little tiresome. Why? Because the business type stories (like the
current Cisco-Webex one dominating the news) tend to obscure the real
web tech stories too much... but that"s just me.
Today"s Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden
from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in
esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is
likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What
we mean by "Web 3.0" is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web
services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.
We have written here before
about Amazon"s visionary WebOS strategy. The Seattle web giant is reinventing itself by
exposing its own infrastructure via a set of elegant APIs. One of the first web services
opened up by Amazon was the
E-Commerce service. This service opens access to the majority of items in Amazon"s
product catalog. The API is quite rich, allowing manipulation of users, wish lists and
shopping carts. However its essence is the ability to lookup Amazon"s products.
The web 2.0 poster child, del.icio.us, is also famous as one
of the first companies to open a subset of its web site functionality via an API. Many services followed, giving rise to a
true API culture. John Musser over at programmableweb has been tirelessly cataloging
APIs and Mashups that use them. This page shows almost 400 APIs
organized by category, which is an impressive number. However, only a fraction of those
APIs are opening up information - most focus on manipulating the service itself.
This is an important distinction to understand in the context of this article.
We recently covered Yahoo!
Pipes, a new app from Yahoo! focused on remixing RSS feeds. Another similar
technology, Teqlo, has recently launched. It focuses
on letting people create mashups and widgets from web services and rss. Before both of
these, Dapper launched a generic scraping service
for any web site. Dapper is an interesting technology that facilitates the scraping of
the web pages, using a visual interface.
Lately
I have been discussing the vertical segments that old media companies are losing to new media,
with a focus on Personal Finance as an important category.
Previously on Read/WriteWeb I covered Yahoo
Personal Finance and in this post I will take a look at Microsoft’s
offering, using my framework.
At Cambrian House, people submit ideas for software
products and then vote on which ideas are the best, commenting on changes or improvements they would like to see made. Development of the most popular ideas is then sourced to members of the community, who earn "royalty points" that determines how much each contributor makes. Cambrian House can be looked at as a commercial spin on the classic
site, halfbakery.
CrowdSpirit is a very ambitious project that aims to utilize crowdsourcing to develop and bring to market tangible, sub-$200 electronic devices (think MP3 players, digital cameras, or game controllers). Community members will decide what
the product is, from concept to design to technical specification, by submitting and voting on product and design ideas. Winning ideas will then be funded by members of the
community - and after prototyping and beta testing, the completed products will be delivered to market.
PicksPal is a sporting event prediction site that allows users to vote on amateur and professional sporting events. The site is set up like a game, allowing you to spend points to try and beat the odds makers
- you win or lose points depending on the accuracy of your picks and how ambitious you are. PicksPal awards weekly prizes, like sports tickets and flat screen televisions, to the top performing players. PicksPal says they have over 100,000 users.
Marketocracy was launched in 2000 with the goal of finding the best investors and tapping their collective knowledge to create a superior mutual fund. Anyone can sign up for free and run a virtual fund, starting with $1 million. The site has attracted over 60,000 users to date. In November 2001 the company launched the Masters 100 Index, a
real mutual fund based on the virtual investments of its 100 most successful members (as determined by a computer ranking).
digg is not only a poster-child for Web 2.0 success, it is also an excellent example of using the wisdom of crowds to organize and highlight information. digg"s concept is simple: users submit links to websites, articles, news stories, photos, or videos, and other users vote on whether they are worth checking out. Depending on how many people, who, and how quickly links are "dugg" they may be promoted to the main page as a worthy link of the day.
StumbleUpon is a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that allows users to rate and share web pages. The plugin is very straightforward: users vote thumbs up or thumbs down on pages and are served random pages based on their previous picks, specified topic areas of interest, and the picks of other like-minded users. The idea is that the sites with the most thumbs up votes,
will be the most relevant. Further, users are fed sites that were voted up by others who share a similar vote
history - i.e. the more you use StumbleUpon, the more it learns about what you
like and the better recommendations it gives to everyone.
The Mashup dashboard
on ProgrammableWeb contains a lot of
interesting statistics about Mashups. On the right, we see the numbers for the past six months.
We conclude that mashups have been growing steadily, but not spectacularly. This is not
surprising, because creating mashups requires time and more importantly technical know-how.
Back now on ProgrammableWeb and the chart on the right demonstrates
the growth of APIs. As with mashups, the actual growth is not that impressive - but it is steady.
As of now, there are close to 400 registered APIs. The way that Programmable Web
measures API popularity seems to be more objective and reliable than is the case
with mashups. The popularity equals the number
of mashups that use the API and the chart below shows the distribution of the most popular
APIs:
Jeff
Hawkins made a name for himself in the tech industry as the founder of Palm Computing and inventor of the Palm Pilot. He later founded Handspring, where he invented the Treo. If you were a fan of his work then, you are going to love what Jeff is
up to now. He is currently pursuing his life-long passions, neuroscience and
intelligence. His latest work made quite a splash a few years ago when he published On
Intelligence. In this thin volume Jeff Hawkins elegantly summarised his
theory of how the brain gave rise to intelligence. Disputing conventional
wisdom
that the brain is complex, or that intelligence is inseparable from other human
qualities such as emotions, Jeff put forward a proof that human intelligence
is a function of the neocortex and that it is temporal in nature.
The
Apollo team from Adobe is here at ETech, presenting the Alpha version of their new
runtime environment - which is aimed at empowering web developers to create desktop applications.
Apollo is a lightweight virtual machine that runs on the desktop and acts as an interpreter
of HTML, JavaScript and Flash - much like the browser does today. The difference is that applications
that run on Apollo can work in an offline mode, while you are not connected to the internet.
The browser can"t yet do this, however Firefox
3 is slated to have offline functionality and IE surely won"t be far behind.
As the connection speed of the internet has increased, the demand for web related services has also increased. After the Web revolution, peer-to-peer networks evolved and currently have a number of different usages - instant messaging, file sharing, etc. Some other revolutionary ideas are still in research. People want to use peer-to-peer in many different applications including e-commerce, education, collaborative work, search, file storage, high performance computing. In this series of posts, we will look at different peer-to-peer ideas and applications.
Gnutella has been used in many applications to allow connecting to the same network and searching files in a centralized manner. It"s an open, decentralized search protocol for finding files through the peers. Gnutella is a pure P2P network, without any centralized servers.
Like many other web 2.0 geeks, today I woke up to Mike Arrington"s elaborate April Fools joke that Techcrunch has acquired infamous dot com site F**kedCompany.com. It actually is 1 April where I live, but it wasn"t until I had finished reading the article that I realised it was probably an April Fools joke (thanks to a timely IM from Steve O"Hear!). There were some clues in the Techcrunch article, but subtle ones. Particularly the statement: "its clear that we are at the tail end of the current boom". As in all good April Fools jokes, there is a strong element of truth in that statement - but when you think about it, it makes no sense for Techcrunch to be the one stating it. The following bit is probably the biggest clue though:
Quintura is a clustering search engine, one of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines chosen by Charles Knight. Quintura, like many other alt search engines, is focusing on user interface (UI) innovations - see our previous categorization of search engines here. The company recently closed an undisclosed amount of funding from Skype"s investors, Europe"s leading early-stage VC company Mangrove Capital Partners. 
Written by Can Erten and edited by Richard MacManus. This is the second in a 2-part series exploring the world of P2P on the Web. Part 1 was a general introduction to P2P, along with some real-world applications of P2P. Part 2 (this post) discusses future applications.
There is little doubt that RSS is a disruptive, game-changing technology. The so called Really Simple Syndication (previously also called Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary), has powered a fundamentally new way to deliver and consume web content. Before RSS, users had to visit individual web sites to find out what was new. Today, news is delivered via RSS directly to web browsers, desktops and aggregators. With RSS, the dynamics of the web changed into an on-demand medium.
In May of 2003 Nicholas Carr put forth the argument that IT Doesn"t Matter. In case there was any lingering doubt about Mr. Carr"s views of Information Technology departments in the workplace, The End of Corporate Computing appeared in the Spring of 2005. While the essays have come and gone, one thing that actually has remained is corporate IT departments. Indeed, walk into any company today and IT"s relevance is abundantly clear in myriad forms and options: desktops, laptops, cellphones, mobile devices, WiFi, terrabytes of storage, etc. The question isn"t whether IT will go away, but rather, given all these choices and complexity, what will IT become? Doug Neal of Computer Science Corporation, in collaboration with a Consumerization Working Group comprised of Fortune 500 industry veterans, has been studying this issue for several years and was kind enough to share his research with Read/WriteWeb. Their report, entitled Harnessing Web 2.0: Enterprise Strategies for Living on the Web, proposes that IT embrace the development of the internet, trust your employees, educate them on tools and live on the web.
This week Optaros released a free survey report entitled "How Will Enterprises Deliver Next Generation Internet Applications?". Over 400 senior decision makers responded to the survey, which looked at how enterprises will deliver the next-generation of Internet applications. A little background on Optaros: it describes itself as "an assembler of Next Generation Internet applications (NGI) leveraging open source components". So bear that in mind when reading the report (particularly with the custom development findings, mentioned below).
Vod:Pod"s interface is set up like an RSS Reader. This ends up feeling very intuitive (assuming you"ve used a feed reader) and provides a great interface to explore other users video feeds.
Social News sites have emerged as a great way to aggregate news and blog content from across the web. One of the market leaders, Digg, now provides the same functionality for videos. If this becomes popular enough, I"m sure other social news sites will release competing offerings. However, I don"t think it will be as easy to categorize online video content as it has been to categorize areas that social news sites have done well with - e.g. tech and political news.
Today Salesforce.com announced a new product called Salesforce ContentExchange, a content management product for unstructured data such as email and html. They also publicly announced the acquisition of Koral, a web 2.0 content collaboration platform that was at DEMO07 earlier this year (see Zoli Erdos" review). Koral is a key enabling technology for Salesforce ContentExchange. The new product means that Salesforce.com now manages all types of content in a company - both structured information (e.g. CRM data like contacts and sales information) and unstructured information (office documents, HTML, video/audio files and email, etc). Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, calls this “another step towards our vision of managing all information on demand”.
Martha Stewart"s company today officially unveiled the latest version of its marthastewart.com website. They are positioning it as "the most authoritative lifestyle destination on the Internet" and it"s aiming for a market of an estimated 102 million women online. I was immediately curious to look at the new site, because back in July 2005 I did a comparative analysis of marthastewart.com for a consulting client at the time. My conclusion in July 2005 was that marthastewart.com wasn"t a lifestyle website to emulate. My exact words in the report were: "The Martha Stewart site has a very strong offline brand, but the inconsistent navigation and design of the website produces a disappointing online experience."
We learned the fundamental law of Supply and Demand in Economics 101. The textbooks explain that shifts in demand cause corresponding changes in supply. No matter what the changes are, the point where the curves intersect sets the price of the good or a service. This law provides a powerful explanation for how markets come to equilibrium.
In a timely follow-up to Alex Iskold"s thought-provoking piece on Google being The Ultimate Money Making Machine, Hitwise has released stats today that reinforce Google"s dominance in the search engine market - at least in the USA, the leading market still. Hitwise says that Google accounted for 64 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending March 31, 2007. Their main competitors were far behind: Yahoo! Search got 22%, MSN Search 9% and Ask.com 3%. The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 5 percent of U.S. searches. Note to Hitwise: check out Charles Knight"s Top 100 Alt Search Engine list for a further 48 search engines (4 + 48 + 48) to add to your list ;-)
WetPaint, a popular hosted Wiki solution, announced this week that they are to provide person-to-person and private messaging between users of their Wiki network. This means that Wetpaint Wiki users can now send single or multi-person private messages, to connect and collaborate with others about their interests. On reading this news, it got me thinking about Wikis - or more to the point, who is using them and for what purpose. Firstly, I"ll briefly describe wikis and then we"ll explore the range of wiki products in the market right now.
How important is corporate adoption of technology in selecting the rewards and spoils for the technology winners? It provides the framing and context for the mass-market to evaluate technology. How important is framing and context? Everything. The Washington Post recently performed an intriguing experiment (free registration required) on just this question. What happens when you take one of the world"s greatest classical violinists and have him play in the subway? If he opens his violin case for donations, much like Web 2.0 companies putting a shingle on the Internet, how much can he expect to bring in from the busy populace based purely on his brilliance? Read the article for the answer, but let"s just say it"s the difference between a world renowned virtuoso and a local artist; a Windows PC and a MacIntosh; an Intel and an AMD; a RIM and a Palm; a Lion and a Cheetah.
Every generation there"s a company that CIOs can purchase from which is considered "safe" - perhaps because it"s the best solution; certainly because everybody else is doing it. However, this is, in the long run, a self-defeating strategy. If there is no variation, then there is no advantage. If there is no advantage, then there is no superior profit margin. And if there is no superior profit margin, then there is no way to treat IT other than as a cost center. Suddenly the IT Cheetah is suffering from too little genetic variation and a decidedly herd mentality. If a social, more collaborative gene is suddenly needed, how much effort will be required to grow and nurture it - or is it even possible?