Year: 2003

Global Attention Profiles

Writes Heath Row: “Ethan Zuckerman is working on a project that tracks global media attention. He maps what countries newspapers and media outlets such as the Washington Post are paying attention to, color coding them to indicate how ‘hot’ they are. He’s been tracking global media attention since late June.”

More on the project: “GAP – the Global Attention Profiles project – tracks the attention that selected news media outlets pay to different nations of the world. A set of automated programs performs 1700 web searches every day to determine what nations news media outlets are paying the most attention to and presents this information in table and map form. GAP also correlates media attention to different development statistics, including national GDP and population. GAP maps of media attention include maps of the relationship between attention and GDP or population.”

Pico-cells

Peter Cochrane writes about pice-cells being the future of mobile communications:

With conventional mobile telephone networks the cells generally span 3 to 25km, which turns out to be adequate for the density of handsets in most city, town and rural locations. But as the number of mobile devices proliferates we will need individual radio cells for the human body, inside the car, room, home, office, building, hotel, campus, street, village, town and so on.

A multitude of small digital radio units costing $50 screwed to the side of every house and office building connected to a PC, hundreds of cars and trucks carrying a similar capability, and every laptop, PC and PDA, all wireless-enabled, will see the emergence of a new form of mobile network. And in a curious, and counterintuitive, twist such networks will also demand more fixed optical fibre to cope with the clustering of people and devices.

What is required to achieve all of this? Only the allocation of spare frequency space, power limiting specifications to keep radio operation safe and interference free, and some really smart self-organising software.

Most of this technology is either available to buy today or currently under trial. Data rates in excess of 11Mbps look increasingly likely and the overall throughput surprisingly increases with the addition of more and more moving elements. As one community after another powers up, such networks will grow across complete geographic regions and an internet without the need for any formal network authority will be with us. Every few hours each element can check to see if it is still optimised relative to the overall net growth and in the event of an individual unit failing, traffic will automatically re-route and the net reconfigure to take account of the missing node.

Email Client Idea

Steven Johnson has an idea: “It would be a huge help to me if my email software would automatically organize incoming messages based on 1) whether I’ve responded to the sender before, and 2) on average how quickly I’ve responded to the sender in the past. So what I imagine is a kind of fuzzy inbox: a message from a complete stranger would stay in my inbox for a week, before getting bounced to the archives. A message from someone I once responded to would stay for two weeks, while a message from a regular correspondent wouldn’t leave the inbox until I removed it myself. Effectively, what I want are filters based on the history of my email interaction with specific people: prioritize mail from people I always respond to immediately; demote mail from people I ignore. Has anybody seen software that will do this?”

Business Week on Wipro’s Premji

Wipro and its CEO Azim Premji feature on the cover of the Asian edition of Business Week.

Premji seems focused on just one goal: even more success. Wipro has grown from a small producer of cooking oil founded by his father in 1945 to a colossus by Indian standards: 23,000 employees, $902 million in revenues, and $170 million in profits for the fiscal year ended in March. Sales have increased by an average of 25% a year and earnings by 52% annually over the past four years.

Premji isn’t slowing down, either. Just a few years ago, Wipro did software coding and systems maintenance. Now it’s expanding into more ambitious areas such as high-end research, and helping customers design their IT systems. Consulting today represents 7% of Wipro’s revenues, up from zero two years ago. The firm has added 8,000 new employees in the past year, expanding its call-center services and beefing up software expertise in health care, retail, and energy. Premji has bought three companies, and he’s extending his global reach, especially to countries in the Middle East, where U.S. outfits are less welcome these days.

His goal is to turn Wipro into one of the Top 10 IT-service companies in the world.

TECH TALK: SMEs and Technology: Recent Developments

Take a look at some of the recent developments in the context of solutions for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Cisco Systems introduced less-expensive versions of its Internet phone software and services, as the company broadens its push into the small-business market. One of the new products, CallManager Express, costs between $750 and $2,800 and is meant for businesses that have fewer than 100 employees. Cisco also debuted software called Unity Express, which creates voice mail and an automated attendant. The product costs $3,000. Ten system “blueprints” help companies assemble the pieces, the company said. The new Cisco equipment and blueprints are an attempt to interest small businesses in voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), a cheaper form of dialing that uses the Internet. [News.com, October 2]

Siebel Systems and IBM are unveiling a hosted software product in an effort to grab some of the IT dollars small and midsize businesses are spending. The product, called Siebel CRM OnDemand, is an attempt to sell customer relationship management systems via the Web rather than through traditional software licensing. The companies are hoping that corporate clients in need of CRM applications would rather access applications online than by going through the lengthy process of licensing and deployment. The software will cost $70 a month per customer. Start-ups such as Salesforce.com have reported success in selling similar services and claim to have signed up some of Siebel’s customers. Oracle has also touted its outsourcing software as one of its fastest-growing businesses [News.com, October 2]

Microsoft will start selling a simplified bundle of its Windows Server operating system and Microsoft Exchange e-mail software. Ayala said both Microsoft’s internal sales force and resellers will have their compensation tied to their ability to sell the bundle, which is called Microsoft Small Business Server 2003. [News.com, October 1]

Dell said its new PowerEdge 400 SC server would come with preinstalled Windows Small Business Server 2003 software and would cost around $1,000.
[News.com, September 22]

Hewlett-Packard plans to pump $750 million into a new “Smart Office” initiative to market its computers, printers and services to small and medium-sized businesses. [InfoWorld, September 18]

Network Associates Inc.’s Sniffer Technologies division last week launched network and security-management tools for small and midsize businesses. The Netasyst Network Analyzer, a stripped-down version of Sniffer’s protocol analyzers, supports the most common network topologies those businesses use, including 10/100 Ethernet and 802.11 wireless LANs. [Information Week, September 1]

[South Koreas small businesses] can buy access to the computer network and basic business-management programs for an average of $15 to $25 per month. More robust software for bigger companies costs $75. The computerization agency has put together customized packages of software for 22 business lines, including real estate brokers, eyeglass shops, beauty parlors, sports clubs, and restaurants. Programs for an additional 36 business types are being developed. [Business Week, August 26]

Internet security firm Check Point is targeting medium-sized companies with a firewall/VPN package designed for organisations with up to 500 employees. Check Point Express includes firewall, VPN, network and application attack protection combined with multi-site, centralised management functions. The package is designed to be easy to purchase, install and manage. [The Register, August 20]

Tomorrow: Recent Developments (continued)

Continue reading TECH TALK: SMEs and Technology: Recent Developments

China’s Huawei

NYTimes writes about the Chinese company that is taking on Cisco with its “affordable” telecom products:

With dozens of sleek stone and glass buildings that would not look out of place in Silicon Valley, the expanding campus houses many of the 10,000 engineers working to establish Huawei as China’s first international player in the communications equipment business…In a tough market, its domestic sales grew by a third in the first half of the year, and analysts expect international sales to grow from $550 million last year to $1 billion this year and $1.4 billion next year.

Started on an investment of $1,000, Huawei began by selling imported telephone call switchers before turning to making them itself. Huawei grew rapidly by first focusing on the poor, rural regions ignored by larger companies and then, taking advantage of China’s rapid upgrading of its communications infrastructure, entered more lucrative cities like Shanghai and Beijing.

“Because the development here has been so rapid, there have been many opportunities for us to develop new products,” said Xu Wenwei, the executive vice president for international marketing. “That’s how we were able to move from the margins to the center.”

Its product line expanded from telephone exchange equipment to fiber optic networks, mobile telephone technology and data routing systems. Huawei’s critics claim, however, that its growth was also fueled by a fast and loose attitude toward the intellectual property of rivals.

Huawei has an R&D centre in Bangalore and has also been making some inroads in the Indian market.

Innovation Convergence

Renee Hopkins has a compilation of notes from the Innovation Convergence conference.

[One of the presentations was on] Customer-Centric Innovation: Turning Consumer Pain Into Innovative New Products by Tom Kuczmarski and Scott Lutz.

Tom quoted a 2003 best practices study his company did: 85% of CEO respondents said conducting customer problem/need identification research prior to ideation is the most important driver of new product/service success in their organizations.

A main reason why research for new product development should focus on consumer needs and an understanding of consumers lives rather than product and service attributes is that the resulting ideas are more likely to be true breakthroughs.

This makes absolute sense to me. If you focus on needs, youll come up with new products that meet those needs. These products may or may not resemble current offerings, but at the very least they shouldnt be so far out in left field (a common problem with unfocused new product development efforts) that they dont still meet those needs, since that was the objective.

On the other hand, when you focus on researching what consumers do and dont like about an existing product, the best you can expect is incremental improvement suggestions.

One more point Tom made about starting with pain your new products are more likely to be profitable if they enable the solution to a problem on which consumers place a higher need intensity.

Blogging Survey

[via Dave Winer] Perseus Development Corp has done a survey of blogs. It “randomly surveyed 3,634 blogs on eight leading blog-hosting services to develop a model of blog populations. Based on this research, Perseus estimates that 4.12 million blogs have been created on these services: Blog-City, BlogSpot, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga…The most dramatic finding was that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned.”

Enterprise Social Software

VentureBlog has a post on enterprise social software and some of the companies that are working in the space, concluding that “This stuff may take a while to make its way into enterprises. But in the mean time social software is building a cadre of believers in the consumer space and with critical mass will undoubtedly come crossover.”

It is a question that I have been pondering over: how can all these new software ideas make us more productive – personally and in the groups that we work with? We need to combine the tools (blogs, wikis and the likes) with appropriate methodologies. What is missing is the recipe for putting together the various ingredients to help us manage the growing quantum of information that we need to manage in both our personal and professional lives.

Bill Joy Interview

Excerpts from a Fortune interview with one of the co-founders of Sun who just left:

The hardest part isn’t inventing the solution but figuring out how to get people to adopt it.

On the network, where part of the software works here and part of it works there, programs also behave in emergent ways that are more biological and difficult to predict. So until you have a science of doing distributed computing, software developers will continue to just throw stuff out there. That’s why the Net is not going to be secure.

I’d really like to go and do something that’s more like Javathat starts from a clean sheet and that isn’t required by its compatibility with something else to be so complicated.

The first point he makes is so correct. So many ideas and inventions come up – the challenge is how to make them acceptable to users and profit from them.