Month: March 2005

Wikicities

WSJ writes:

Four years ago, Jimmy Wales launched a free online encyclopedia that anyone could edit. Now, Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Web, and Mr. Wales is building on its success with a new venture. This time, he intends to make a buck.

Mr. Wales’s closely held company Wikia Inc. has begun promoting its first for-profit endeavor, an ad-supported site called Wikicities.com that is based on the concept behind Wikipedia. Through Wikicities, groups of Web users can create their own free Web sites and fill them with, well, nearly anything. Among the topics being discussed on the nascent site: Macintosh computers, college hockey and real-world cities like Los Angeles, Beijing and Calgary.

TECH TALK: The Future of Search: Yahoo 360

Yahoo 360 is a way to keep connected to friends with blogs, photos and more. It combines a personal portal with social networking. Charlene Li of Forrester Research had this to say after a preview of the service:

Central to the whole service is the concept that you want to communicate and connect with the people that you already know, rather than try to meet new people. To this end, your home page on the service shows the most recent content published by people within your network. This might be a blog post, a photo album, review, or an updated profile item. This page is constantly refreshed as the people in your network update the information on their spaces. This fundamental concept of linking people through their updated stuff is what makes Yahoo! 360 unique and inherently will drive usage of the service higher than traditional social networks. In essence, the content is being pushed to you by the service.

The profile page contains the usual features from social networking sites friends, profile, lists of things you like to do, where you work/went to school, and groups that you belong to on Yahoo! Groups. But it also excerpts content youve created that you want to share with your network. This includes not only a blog, but also photos from Yahoo! photos, reviews created on Yahoo! Local, and LAUNCHcast Stations.

The ability to leverage your network to get something done is what gives Y! 360 the real potential to become something even bigger. At the beta launch, users will have the ability to look narrow local business reviews by their network a recd from someone I know counts for a lot more. Of course, this assumes that people will start creating reviews (a clever way for Y! Local to jumpstart reviews on the service). In the future, I can imagine new modules for job searching, dating, travel planning (What hotel in Paris would you recommend?), car buyingthe list is extensive. Yahoo!s (as well as MSNs and AOLs) advantage is being a one stop shop in terms of leveraging your networks knowledge across multiple categories.

The last few years have seen the growth of do-it-yourself publishing on a large scale. Whether it is writing text or sharing photos, podcasts, screencasts and even videos, individuals and groups can now publish and share content easily on the Web. What hasnt changed significantly, though, is how reading (or viewing) takes place on the Web. While RSS aggregators have made headway, they still remain a niche. MyYahoo has been around for a long time, and now supports RSS. But fundamentally, what is needed is a new way to view the content. This is the direction I was heading in with the Information Dashboard.

Tomorrow: Information Dashboards Rationale

Continue reading TECH TALK: The Future of Search: Yahoo 360

Mr. Moore in the Datacenter

Ryan McIntyre writes:

The cost to deliver an application to an end-user has dropped dramatically for these companies and the cost to operate their data centers therefore has much less of an impact on their costs of operations and capex budget than it used to, which means their gross margins for delivering their product have improved significantly since 1995. For companies like Yahoo, Google and more recently, Technorati, this means the cost to deliver a page view or search results page has gone down dramatically, while the average size of a search-results page is perhaps only marginally larger since 1995. Even considering the size of a search index (Google’s 8B pages today vs. Excite’s 10M in 1995) has grown nearly one thousand-fold, the costs of computing power and storage have accommodated this expansion while bandwidth costs and rack space have fallen nearly tenfold.

For enterprise-focused companies like Salesforce.com, Postini, Quova and Rally, the story is similar. Add in a subscription-based recurring revenue stream and you have a business model that has all the benefits of a dependable revenue stream and profit margins that can approach those of a traditional software company. Thanks to the low cost and high performance of today’s hardware coupled with an elegant service architecture, Postini is able to process several hundred million email messages per day for its customers with an extraordinarily light hardware footprint and does so quite profitably as a result.

Yahoo’s Comeback

Om Malik writes: “A handful of blog-evangelists, a couple of key buys and some libertarian friendly moves have turned Yahoo from a dot.has.been to the new darling of the chattering classes. It is only a matter of time when mainstream media rediscovers Yahoo, and a stock market resurgence follows.”

Ten Trends for 2005

SandHill.com has a list of trends with implications for software companies. One of them:

10. Enterprises Increasingly Demand Flexible Solutions
“We are about to enter the age of the ASP where software – nearly any kind of software – is available as a service. Not a service you buy and pay for by the enterprise, by the year, but rather a pay for usage model, where a user can buy as little as a single picture or the one-time use of a special font – or budget software for his 20-person company for the next three months, extendable at will.” Amy Wohl, President, Wohl Associates

“Companies that invest in technology solutions will increasingly order ala carte and/or on an as-needed basis. The technology vendors that create pricing models that meet these requirements will win business from the competitors who do not.” Glenn Gow, President & CEO, Crimson Consulting Group, Inc.

“More companies will implement Open Source solutions.” Vamsee Tirukkala, Co-Founder & EVP, Zinnov

Implications for Software Vendors:
1. Deliver a la carte, pay-as-you-go solutions
2. Utilize best-of-breed solutions incorporating Open Source
3. All things are becoming digital think about how your product can incorporate them (e.g. telecommunications, scheduling [PDA], entertainment [Ipod], etc.)

I think ASPs are set to make a comeback. Will write more about this in a tech Talk series soon.

Virtual Collaboration

Dave Pollard answers the question: “What do you do if you need or want to collaborate, but you can’t do so in person? What purposes are best served by weblogs, wikis, and other types of online collaboration tools, spaces and media?”

Ideally, using a combination of

1. Skype (free global VoIP telephony),
2. White-boarding (everyone online can see what anyone posts to the white-board),
3. Document-sharing and
4. Mindmapping or some similar session annotation tool (everyone can see what the group’s ‘scribe’ has documented as the findings, decisions and next actions from the collaboration)

would be a close approximation to an in-person collaborative session.

Building A Better Brain

Forbes.com: writes:

Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky, creators of the Palm and Handspring personal digital assistants and the Treo smartphone, have formed a software company built around a powerful and unorthodox vision of how the human brain works. In its early stages, they hope to create predictive machines useful for things like weather forecasting and oil exploration. Further out–much further, says Hawkins–they plan to lay the basis for cosmologically attuned robots that conceive and reflect on the universe itself.

Okay, it is a big idea. And so far the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company, called Numenta, has built what the creators say is a set of tools for creating pattern-recognition software capable of “learning” shapes and events, with a goal of foreseeing what the pattern will next create. Yet these tools draw on decades of work that Hawkins has done on how the brain works. If it pans out–and there is an attractive logic to much of his thinking–Numenta may certainly oversee the creation of embedded software that adapts and improves its own performance.

TECH TALK: The Future of Search: The Messy Web

Let us start by considering what Adam Bosworth wrote recently, describing a web John Battelle termed as the Messy Web. Here is what Adam Bosworth had to say:

I’ve been complaining about two things on the web for years. Think of the web as the worlds best communication machine. Then the promise should be that anyone can connect to any information or application or anyone else and that any application can connect to anyone or any application or any information. We got anyone to anyone early in the form of email and more recently in the form of IM and of Blogs. IM adds real time communication and presence and Blogs add broadcasting to the world along with a dialog with the world. We got anyone to any application from the esteemed Tim Berners Lee in the form of HTML, HTTP, and URL’s which changed our world. I say applications because there wasn’t any standard way to ask for information. We got, unfortunately, any application talking to anyone (we call this spam). Web services in one form or another are letting applications access other application although, as I’ve said elsewhere, I think that the standards are too prolix and that a lot of the action will come out of REST and RSS.

But we didn’t get two things. We didn’t get a standard way to get information (e.g. a standard query model for sites). And we didn’t get people working together in communities to create and construct things with one interesting exception, message boards/groups. Mail was the interface, not the web and not IM.

With [Amazons] Open Search the lack of standard ways to get information is, for the first time, beginning to change. There is now a simple but de-facto standard way to start querying sites for information. That’s hugely exciting. The current standard is limited, but a great start. And the web is now rapidly becoming the place for people to collaborate. Wiki’s are growing like wildfire. Folksonomies(tagging) are causing people to quickly and in an emergent bottoms up way, come together to build taxonomies that work for them and surprisingly rapidly become stable.

To get a glimpse of the future, one need look no further than Yahoos soon-to-be-launched Yahoo 360.

Tomorrow: Yahoo 360

Continue reading TECH TALK: The Future of Search: The Messy Web

Innovation in India

[via WorldChanging] Science Magazine has an essay by Raghunath A. Mashelkar, director general of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), a chain of 38 publicly funded industrial R&D institutions in India:

India can similarly become an innovation hub for global health. Its reputation as a low-cost manufacturer of high-quality generic drugs already is high. Now discovery, development, and delivery of new drugs to the poor is another area in which India is becoming stronger. By following alternative paths rather than beaten ones, India is aiming to develop drugs at prices that are more affordable to more of the world’s people. For instance, India is trying to build a golden triangle between traditional medicine, modern medicine, and modern science. By culling clues from traditional medical practices, researchers here are doing a sort of “reverse pharmacology,” which is showing great promise. Our recent program on developing a treatment for psoriasis through a reverse pharmacology path (presently in phase II human clinical trials) is expected to take 5 years and cost $5 million. If successful, the resulting treatment will be priced at $50, quite a step down from a new $20,000 antibody injection treatment developed by a western biopharmaceutical company! The opportunities that are unfolding are breathtaking.

As I see it from my perch in India’s science and technology leadership, if India plays its cards right, it can become by 2020 the world’s number-one knowledge production center, creating not only valuable private goods but also much needed public goods that will help the growing global population suffer less and live better.

Simplicity is More Critical than Complexity on Mobile Phone

[via Dana Blankenhorn] Slashphone has an item about a speech given by Nicholas Negroponte:

“The killer application in mobile service is decided by response time, Professor Nicholas Negroponte at MIT said during an interview in the middle of the LG Technology Forum.

In his keynote speech, “The Future of Wireless,” Prof. Negroponte emphasized the right direction of change for mobile handsets. He insisted that any new function of handsets should be downloadable, but phone makers are just adding new functions in the device like inserting new tools into Swiss Army knife.

About the power efficiency, he said, future mobile handsets should be designed to be inserted in shoes so that people can use their phone while they are running or the battery system should be simple so that users have only to shake their phones to recharge them.

He emphasized simplicity, saying the industry always talks about easy-to-use interface, but nothing has been done; the smaller the handset gets, the thicker the manual becomes. He cited Swatch as an instance of the way the future wireless devices should take. According to him, although Swatch is widely known as a famous watch brand, it is the concept of “second watch” that the company has pursued. Likewise, he recommended, the handset industry should try for the “second handset.” Selling more handsets at lower price will lead to large profit, the renowned professor added.

Dana adds:

Future hardware designs must make it easy to connect, hands-free. Software must have intuitive user interfaces, as simple as speech. Services need to be spur-of-the-moment.

A lot of the mobile services I see today violate these principles big-time. They’re based on Web interfaces, and thus have a limited time horizon. The key is to get inside the phone, so you’re bought as soon as the customer thinks of buying.

Rather than thinking of a browser as something you look at and type at, as is done with even the best mobile browsers, how about a browser you talk to?