Richard's Weblog

Big Data Starts with ABCs

2011-10-29T06:14:00.000-07:00

If you haven't noticed Big Data has created a lot of buzz lately. Much of the buzz is from the absolute wow factor of how big is big. With the number of smart phones nearing 6 billion all creating content, Facebook generating over 30 billion pieces of content a month and data expected to grow at 40% year on year it's easy to imagine big really is BIG.

In fact the digital universe has recently broken the zettabyte barrier which is approximately equal to a thousand exabytes or a billion terabytes. How big is that? To give you an idea of scale it would take everyone on the planet posting to Twitter 7*24 for 100 years to generate a zettabybe.

So you get the idea - it’s really big.

As an IT organization you may be thinking that your own data growth will soon be stretching the limits of your infrastructure. A way to define big data is to look at your existing infrastructure, the amount of data you have now, and the amount of growth you're experiencing. Is it starting to break your existing processes? If so, where?

“Big” refers to a size that's beyond the ability of your current tools to affordably capture, store, manage,and analyze your data. This is a practical definition since “big” might be a different number for each person trying but unable to extract business advantage from their data.

When we talk to our customers, we find that their existing infrastructure is breaking on three major axes:

Complexity. Data is no longer about text and numbers; It includes real-time events and shared infrastructure. Data is now linked at high fidelity and includes multiple types. The sheer complexity of data is skyrocketing. Having to apply normal algorithms for search, storage and categorization is a lot more complex.
Speed. How fast is the data coming at you? High definition video, streaming over the Internet to storage devices, to player devices, full motion video for surveillance – all of these have very high ingestion rates. You have to be able to keep up with the data flow. You need the compute, network and storage to deliver high definition to thousands of people at once, with good viewing quality. For high performance computing you need systems that can perform trillions of operations and store pedabytes of data per second.
Volume. For all of the data you are collecting and generating you have store it securely and make it available for ever. IT teams today are having making decisions about what is “too much data”. They might flush all data each week and start again. But there are certain applications like healthcare where you can never delete the data. It has to live forever.

These trends in data growth are something we at NetApp have been following for quite a while now. We’ve been enhancing ONTAP to deal with the scale needed to handle large repositories of data and we have also made strategic acquisitions anticipating the need for high density high performance (Engenio) and infinite content repositories (Bycast).

In conversations with our customers dealing with the onslaught of data we have noticed 3 important use cases that are stretching the limits of their existing infrastructure.

We’ve named these axis’ the ABCs of Big Data.

Analytics. - Analytics for extremely large data sets to gain insight and take advantage of that digital universe, and turning it into information. Giving you insight about your business to make better decisions.
Bandwidth - Performance for data-intensive workloads at really high speeds.
Content - Boundless secure scalable data storage that allows you to keep in forever.

Moving from Clouds to Big Data

2011-06-23T19:42:00.000-07:00

As many of you know I joined NetApp about a year ago. I've spent most of my time here developing the go to marketing strategy for NetApp's OnCommand Management Software. Last week the new portfolio was announced as part of the our Cloud launch and I posted how OnCommand supports the Cloud with four fundamental elements in my NetApp blog called Clouds OnCommand.

It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about the IT management market segment and how Virtualization is causing us all to look at new creative and innovative ways to manage the ensuing complexity. Check out the OnCommand story on YouTube.

It's been a refreshing change working at NetApp, a really great company with innovative products that is growing and doing well. I am thoroughly enjoying it.

Now I have taken on a new assignment to define our Big Data marketing strategy. Big Data is getting a lot of visibility as the proliferation of data dominates the landscape. The best defination of Big Data I've heard is that “Big Data” refers to datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, mange and analyze"

I'm looking forward to digging into this space and understanding how I can help NetApp define a winning strategy. More to come soon.

New Year's Eve Dinner At Arcadia

2011-01-02T12:08:00.000-08:00

We enjoyed an excellent New Year's Eve dinner at Arcadia in San Jose (Marriott). The four course fixed price menu with wine parings. The food was exceptional and the wine pairings very appropriate.

I especially liked the the Maine Lobster Pot Pie matched with a Moshin Pinot Noir 2008 from Sonoma. Also the Short Rib Rossini with Foie Gras was exceptional.

The only downside to a great meal was the absolutely egregious disco crap music that started at 9:30 and became progressively louder as the evening progressed. By midnight it was so loud no conversation was possible. The head waiter explained this was a New Years experiment - my comment - I don't think it worked. It would have been much better to have a live band playing well known covers to welcome in the New Year.

Duet - Photographs & Paintings

2010-12-28T16:16:00.000-08:00

I composed the following video from photographs and paintings taken and made in the Provence, Tuscany, Phoenix and California. Cheers.

Season's Greetings

2010-12-22T17:41:00.000-08:00

Enjoy this animated card from Jacquie Lawson.

Jet Lag Explained

2010-12-13T20:59:00.000-08:00

See this Interesting study on Jet Lag. Now I know why I always feel like so bad after changing time zones. However I have my own measurement - average MPH. You don't feel normal until your average MPH is below 4 (normal human speed) When you step of the plane after a 12 hour flight across 6 time zones your MPH is 600. It takes 2 days to get below 4 which is when you'll start to feel better.

Google Maps For Cycling

2010-03-11T10:03:00.000-08:00

Google today introduced maps for cycling. In my trial use some of the routes are lacking but it will only get better with time with crowd sourcing feedback. I have been using a Google Maps mashup to store and share bicycle routes for years. I've tagged my routes on delicious here.

Here's the video that shows how it works.

Broad-winged Hawks Nesting in San Jose

2010-03-10T11:37:00.000-08:00

Today I discovered that we have a hawk family nesting in the tall palm tree on our street. It was quite a sight. I took these pictures this morning. I tried to identify them and as best as I can tell they are Broad-winged Hawks.

Can anyone verify?

The Serendipitous Beauty of iPhone Use Cases

2010-02-23T11:37:00.000-08:00

It seems not a day goes by that I don't discover a new use case for my iPhone. My latest happened driving home from San Mateo. It was 1:30PM, Terry Gross was wrapping up her interview with James Cameron and I caught the last 5 minutes. Having just watched the Avatar I really wanted to hear the whole interview. Then it hit me. I could use the new NPR iPhone App to listen to it. So I went to Programs - Fresh Air - James Cameron - Listen Now, connected my iPhone to the car stereo and VIOLA listened to the entire interview.

How cool is that?

When iPhone users meet, the conversation inevitable turns to "What cool applications have you discovered?". That exploration is even more compelling as the apps can be downloaded and tried right there and then. It's hard to imagine how the iPhone challengers will ever catch up. Efforts by Sony Ericsson, LG Electronics, Samsung and 21 others to create an App Store for all their divergent phones will be lost in complexity and fraught with political land mines.

As I noted in "Goodbye Laptop - Hello iPhone" the iPhone experience has changed the way I use computers in many profound ways. Now I can't wait for my next serendipitous iPhone-user meeting to learn another life changing use case.

Use Tactical Urgency to Introduce New Technologies

2009-11-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

Recently Kelly Emo, SOA Product Marketing Manager at HP Software wrote in her post "Is your SOA in Action? Four ways to keep it that way.." One element she offers in her Obvious Insite # 3 is to use your SOA governance to drive adoption of new technologies such as RIA and Cloud Computing.

Much of my work over the last decade in getting new technologies adopted by enterprise IT has been under the proverbial banner of "Herding Cats". I have learned is that it is very hard to introduce new technology as part of the strategic plan and that SOA governance is often more of a roadblock than a driver.

Technologies that help integrate data between silos require the endorsement of too many chiefs and even with executive stakeholder support strategic efforts can fail under the urgency of immediate problems. In my experience with technology adoption of RIAs and EBSs from both the vendor and purchaser point of view I have found that even with a strong business imperative the inevitable urgency of tactical requirements derails the best strategic plans.

A better approach is to use a tactical urgency to demonstrate a real benefit. In this way it is possible to establish a beach head through a small project that demonstrates a believable ROI. From there you can position the technology successfully in the broader strategy.

Visualize Facebook Relationships

2009-10-27T14:40:00.000-07:00

Facebook has seen tremendous growth over the year. The Mary Meeker: Facebook Is Eating Your Lunch And Dinner post at All Facebook singles out the statistic from her presentation at Web2.0 that Facebook is the largest share gainer of online usage over the past 3 years. Indeed at over 300M users, if Facebook were a country it would be the forth largest behind only China, India and the US.

With all the hype on social networking I thought it would be interesting to highlight again a dynamic application called the CurlGraph. The CurlGraph shows how your Facebook friends are related to each other and is especially fun when you see how your circles of friends are interrelated.

If you are on Facebook I urge you to give it a try and to suggest it to your friends.

I made a brief demo video you can post to Facebook and you'll find the Curl website has instructions on installation.

From the Desk

Richard Treadway

Risks In The Cloud

2009-10-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

The Internet is buzzing today with the news that Microsoft subsidiary Danger has lost the server stored data on T-Mobile's Sidekick phones. See Did Microsoft Just Kill the Cloud? and Sidekick outage says more about the future of 'Pink' than Microsoft's cloud and The cloud: no place for amateurs

While there are not a lot of Sidekick users out there this incident has once a gain forced the question: How safe is your data in the cloud?

Have we developed a false sense of security as we depend more and more on data out of our immediate control on servers managed by Google, Salesforce, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter? I dare say not many of us has thought through a disaster recovery plan if all our emails, contacts, photos and documents were to disappear overnight.

The Power Law of Social Networks

2009-10-07T18:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Dion Hinchcliffe lists 22 Power Laws of the Emerging Economy. It's an interesting post worth a read but I think he omitted one of the most important "The Power Law of Social Networks" Social Networks themselves are defined by a power curve. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi illustrates this in his book "Linked, The New Science of Networks." This interconnectivity drives the information age where popular nodes can rise up quickly. Like all social networks the Internet has a few nodes with millions of connections and millions of nodes with very few connections. Increasingly 6 degrees of separation is becoming 3 degrees of separation.

iPhone 3G Network Slow?

2009-09-03T13:31:00.000-07:00

Has your iPhone 3G been going slower and slower? Mine has. Now this from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDnet - iPhone users strangling the AT&T network.

What is dawning on AT&T is that the iPhone changes the way people use phones.

"Up until the iPhone, smartphones were cellphones with a browser clumsily attached. The iPhone is basically a pipe to the internet with a phone attached."

This is exactly what I experienced when I wrote "Goodbye Laptop - Hello iPhone"

It is precisely whythe 9 million iPhone users are using more of the network than AT&T's 20 million other cell phone users.

Hopefully AT&T can continue to build out the plumping or Apple can sign another provider that can keep up.

Can Social Media Sell Wine?

2009-09-01T08:01:00.001-07:00

Steve Heimhoff asks the question "Has social media ever sold anything, besides itself?" It's a great question and has prompted a good discussion on his blog.

There is a lot of evidence that making social media a strategic part of a winery's overall marketing mix makes good business sense. I've been working to create a concrete ROI for social media's use in wineries and in my research thus far I've have found a lot of evidence that a dollar spent on social media can be much more effective than a dollar spent on traditional media.

According to Nielson online we trust the recommendations of friends (90%) and online reviews (70%) a lot more than traditional media (62% and lower). A good wine review from a friend is going to influence me more than a good review by a known wine critic. Forrester's recent Social Technology report found that the prime wine buying demographic of 35+ year olds grew their online participation by 60% last year prompting them to conclude:

"... marketers can now safely create social media marketing for people ages 35 and older."

In a recent survey by Viralvines.com on Twitter use in wineries, in answer to the question "How has your presence on Twitter helped your business? 96.4% responded that "It has helped us engage more with our customers"

Furthermore the conversation about a winery's brand is happening even if a winery chooses to ignore it and that carries a real risk of negative effects. According to Nielsen BuzzMetrics 25% of search results for the worlds largest brands are links to user generated content. This extends to niche brands as well and a bad review without the appropriate response can have long lasting effects.

Forrester's Social Media Profile Tool

2009-08-28T00:45:00.000-07:00

Last week Forrester released this fun social media Consumer Profile Tool.

The tools lets you query their 2009 data by age, county and gender and shows the percentages of participants in each of their defined participation categories: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives.

This reinforces the point that any social media strategy should start with a good understanding of your customers and how they communicate.

See Social Technologies Ladder for an explanation of the categories.

Thanks to Forrester for providing this fun way to access their data.

50% of US Online Adults Use Social Media Networks

2009-08-27T12:04:00.000-07:00

According to a new research report on "The Broad Reach Of Social Technologies" by Sean Corcoran at Forrester 1 in 2 US online adults are in a social network and 4 in 5 use social media at least once a month.

Interestingly the 35 and older group saw the most growth at 60% over last year with 38% visit social media sites regularly. In the 35+ somethings group with 1 in 5 are creators and 70% spectators. The conclusion:

"... marketers can now safely create social media marketing for people ages 35 and older."

This should be another signal to brands whose primary segment is the 35+ that the time is now to invest in social media marketing.

Are You Ready For Socialnomics?

2009-08-27T09:06:00.001-07:00

Some very enlightening statistics on social media in this video from Socialnomics-Social Media Blog posted by c.net. While social media is possibly at the top of the hype curve there is no denying that it is driving a fundamental change in how corporations sell and how people make buying decisions.

New San Jose Airport

2009-07-28T07:37:00.001-07:00

After bad mouthing San Jose airport for years, the new terminal is pretty nice.

Richard

Posted via email from Richard Treadway's Live Stream

The Importance of the Long Tail

2009-07-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

Nielson recently posted data on how engaging brand in the "long tail" are fairing. The data shows that we spend less time at long tail sites and more time at the top sites.

The conclusion is that long tail isn't where the future business is at least not just yet.

"What does this amount to? As much as anyone thinks the future is in the long tail, it’s just not the case-at least not yet. In fact, consumers feel more comfortable on large, mass media sites. We know the Internet is changing. We know there are more blogs, boards, tweets and social networks than ever before. But what’s also clear is that while the Internet itself is fragmenting (like all other media), people continue to spend their time on the sites that offer them the most options and functionality."

But the numbers don't support that conclusion. The numbers are simply a reflection of the fact the long tail is a power curve.

Chris Anderson’s theory of the long tail states that as the cost of distribution approaches zero the demand is infinitely eclectic. The long tail is a special power curve that stretches out forever. With a power curve you would expect people to spend the most time at the top sites and the least time in the less popular sites. Most people have more than one specialized interest and will spend a little time at each long tail site. The entry point to the long tail is usually the top sites explaining why there is more time spent there.

A more interesting measure would be total time in the long tail not the average time.

When Will Internet Access Be Like Electricity

2009-07-15T15:35:00.000-07:00

My recent stay at the Westin Kierland reminded me we are still a long way from Internet access being treated like a service utility. The Internet service at the Westin was particularly expensive and very SLOOW. Additionally the business center charged for use of their computers by the minute requiring you to submit a credit card to a reader that held it for the duration of your session. It cost me $5 to login and print my boarding pass.

Additionally there was no free WIFI access in the lobby. When I complained to the concierge I was told the reason... to discourage Internet use. Well it worked, I barely used it. But that attitude is bucking what is surely the trend to a more readily accessible Internet. Think of it; Charging for Internet access in a hotel is like charging for use of the electricity. Think how many complaints there would if a hotel required you to swipe your credit card to turn on the lights? Why should Internet access be any different?

Coming Soon: Access Your Data and Applications Anywhere

2009-07-13T20:03:00.000-07:00

I’ve often thought the time will come when you will carry all your data and applications in your pocket to be accessed whenever you need on what every computer and connection is available. This makes sense when you think about it. You don’t carry a TV around with you; you expect one to be in your hotel room. So why should you carry a heavy laptop around when you only need the power and the screen real estate on occasion. On my recent trip to Italy I lugged my lap top along and ended up never using it. My iPhone was all I needed. But I didn’t need to create any graphic designs or write any code.

I look to Steve Rubel as being on the forefront of the traveling user’s work paradigm. He correctly points out we’ll be using more devices not fewer. There won’t be a single device to meet all your needs. Certain applications require large screens and faster, larger computers others don’t. But what ever your computing needs you shouldn’t have to have your data distributed all over the multitude of devices that run the applications.

As Steve points out:

” With PCs and desktops everywhere we'll be soon booting more off USB drives. Linux, Google Chrome OS, Mac OS X and Windows, etc. will all run off portable USB drives that we'll tote from PC to PC (or in Apple's case, Macs to Macs). The OS and its entire suite of applications will run off the devices which ensures your data stays yours.”

Steve uses a PC desktop at work, at home a Mac, on the road a netbook, and everywhere else an iPhone. With all his data is in the cloud the majority of the time all he needs is a browser.

The day is coming where all you’ll need is a smart phone and a secure USB drive that will have every OS and application you use available for use on the device they run on.

I’m looking forward to it.

Curl eyeDecide Application

2009-07-08T08:51:00.001-07:00

Today Curl made available their newest example of an RIA "fit client" application, called Curl eyeDecide. It was designed by Involution Studios and implemented by on Version 7. The application features complex visual analysis of global data from Gapminder.org and demonstrates the value of visualization in the analysis of complex data.

We think you'll have a lot of fun playing with the application performing data analysis to see global trends. As always the application is available in source form here.

Watch a video demonstration of the application here.

Social Media Content Creation and Dissemination Work Flow

2009-06-28T12:03:00.001-07:00

As social media tools evolve and I become more experienced in what works and doesn’t, the proliferation of social networks has created a need to seriously think through my use of the tools and how they fit into my content creation and dissemination process.

Steve Rubel has recently shared his content creation and dissemination process in this post.

I started using Posterous after Steve explained how it created a hybrid between real-time Tweets and slower cycle analytical blog posts. Adding Posterous to my toolset immediately got me into trouble with multiple posts from duplicate services feeding FB, Twitter, etc. so I had to layout the information flow and decide which service should feed which network just as Steve shows in the graphic above.

All this suggests we are reaching the point in the evolution of the tools and the experience of the users that would enable the creation of a platform to manage content creation and dissemination and make the process much simpler.

Posted via email from Richard Treadway's Live Stream

On-line Media Report From Nielson - Video Exceeds eMail

2009-06-24T09:32:00.001-07:00

From Nielson’s Global On-line Media Report. The Audience for video has increased 339% since 2003 and exceeds the email audience beginning in November 2007.

Social Networking is increasing steadily and now exceeds web-based e-mail usage. Social media is changing the way brands are marketed.

“the world’s leading marketers are realizing that at the heart of the social media movement lies a method to transform the manner in which brands communicate with their consumers.”

Highlights of the report regarding the two fastest growing subcategories -- online video and social networks – include:

The number of American users frequenting online video destinations has climbed 339 percent since 2003.
Time spent on video sites has shot up almost 2,000 percent over the same period.
In the last year alone, unique viewers of online video grew 10 percent, the number of streams grew 41 percent, the streams per user grew 27 percent and the total minutes engaged with online video grew 71 percent.
There are 87 percent more online social media users now than in 2003, with 883 percent more time devoted to those sites.
In the last year alone, time spent on social networking sites has surged 73 percent.
In February, social network usage exceeded Web-based e-mail usage for the first time.

Posted via email from Richard Treadway's Live Stream

Posterous - The Hybrid Platform?

2009-06-23T09:27:00.001-07:00

I recently found Posterous while reading Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion. In that post he explains how Posterous is changing how he thinks about blogging. Posterous provides a hybrid between the immediacy of Twitter and the longer cycle required to create a well thought out post.

You can easily link it to your other social media networks like Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and Facebook and also have it post to your blog. All this is accomplished through email. You can control which posts are published to which networks by where you send the email.

I’m always looking for ways to be more efficient and if I can send a single email that updates my blog, puts my pictures in Flickr, posts to Twitter and Facebook and is this easy to use then that’s a good thing.

Posterous may well become my hybrid platform.

Richard Treadway

Posted via email from Richard Treadway's Live Stream

Goodbye Laptop, Hello iPhone.

2009-06-05T14:26:00.000-07:00

Dinning alfresco in Tuscany
Taken with my iPhone

We just got back from 2 weeks vacation in Italy. Being a high tech marketing consultant I've always had my laptop on trips, so this trip to Italy was no exception. I lugged the thing through airports and train stations and I didn't use it once. So finally it's abundantly clear to me that all I need is my iPhone. It fits in my pocket and it does everything.

I used it to read about historical monuments, convert currency, check the weather, locate services, get directions, take and show pictures, play music, tweet, text, read and send e-mail, check news and markets, follow the Giro, translate English to Italian, oh and also make phone calls. It's really is true that whatever life throws at you "there's an app for that."

The one thing that's a painfully missing function is "cut & paste" and now finally the new release of the iPhone will have it.

Goodbye Laptop, Hello iPhone.

Visualize Your Facebook Friends With CurlGraph

2009-05-08T11:27:00.001-07:00

With the release of Curl Version 7 Curl has created a fun RIA Desktop application called the CurlGraph.

One of Curl’s unique features is that it supports web applications that run outside the browser, installed on the desktop as is the case with this application.

Here's a video I made of the CurlGraph to give you an idea of how it works. Download it now and have some fun seeing how your friends are related to each other in Facebook.

Jeremiah Owyang on Social Media Strategies

2009-04-29T12:58:00.000-07:00

Jeremiah Owyang

Yesterday I attended Jeremiah Owyang's web seminar "Social Media Playtime Is Over: How Brands Must Focus In A Recession." Jeremiah has been covering social media and on-line communities for Forrester for the last year and he offers a unique perspective on the state of the art best practices. In his position as a researcher he gets a first hand view of both corporate practices and vendor product strategies.

Here are some important insights from the seminar.

The opportunity to use social media despite the recession is NOW. While the media maybe over hyping services like Twitter (Oprah and CNN vs Ashton Kutcher) with 3/4 of the US based on-line adults using social technologies this is a trend not a fad. We can expect adoption to increase during the recession as more people are between jobs and tapping into free social networking services to create and enhance personal brand.
The companies surveyed are increasing their spending on social media programs but as a percentage of their overall marketing spend it remains small as most programs are not strategic.
Most corporate use of social media is experimental with no clearly defined best practices and with many efforts underfunded and sporadic. Over 60% of the companies surveyed have budgets under $50,000 that are not dedicated but come from previously allocated marketing and advertising budgets.
Jeremiah then offered 7 tactics that can fuel experimentation. These included:
1. Socialize content - Make your existing connect available to be republished
2. Word of mouth with Twitter - Establish Twitter accounts as communication channels
3. Aggregate existing content - Provide a unified view on syndicated content relevant to your audience
4. Crowdsource your support - Empower your users to provide answers and content for your community
5. Sponsor bloggers - Give your customers a forum to talk about your brand and products
6. Sponsor events - Not only provide venue and cover expense but actively participate
7. Let go with APIs - Provide APIs into your service to allow others to build Internet properties using it in unique ways.

Bottom line is that we must treat social media as a long term strategy with the appropriate metrics and measurable returns and staff it with resources dedicated to its success that include a constant improvement feedback loop as best practices evolve.

Problems with Twitter Search

2009-04-20T08:40:00.000-07:00

Last night as I was watching the Sharks game and conversing with the Sharks faithful on Twitter when I noticed Twitter search didn't provide any updates on the #Sharks hashtag for over two hours between 19:48 and 22:51. When it did start updating all the tweets that I made in the two hour window that included #Sharks didn't show-up in the results.

Anyone had similar problems? Know what's going on?

Here are screen shots that show the sequence.

Ulitzer's Questionable Practices and Curl's Endorsement

2009-04-07T11:46:00.000-07:00

Late last year in my role as VP of marketing at Curl we were approached by SYS-CON to provide authors for their new service called Ulitzer. Having worked with Jeremy Gleelan to get Curl's message to the market at AjaxWorld events and in their numerous on-line magazines this appeared to be a good opportunity to continue the dialogue on Enterprise RIA. Jnan Dash, Bert Halstead and I all become contributors. During the period we published numerous articles on Enterprise RIA and saw their distribution in related SYS-CON on-line magazines.

As the beta of Ulitzer ended Jeremy asked if Curl could provide an endorsement. Feeling there was value in the service we did provide our endorsement.

However, given the questionable practices that have come to light over the last week I and Curl no longer feel comfortable with this endorsement and have formally requested Jeremy and SYS-CON to remove it wherever it appears. As of this writing I have been assured by Fuat Kircaali that my endorsement will be removed promptly.

RIA Fit Client and Cloud Computing

2009-04-04T09:46:00.000-07:00

Image by David Simonds

As noted in the Economist a battle is brewing over standards for Cloud Computing as the big players begin to take measure of winning and loosing strategies.

While confusion reigns relative to Cloud Computing's definition there is no denying that a new class of application is emerging. The "Web-enabled, rich client, data-driven from Internet based services" application.

RIA technologies like Adobe AIR, Curl and Microsoft Silverlight are enabling this new class of application known as the "Fit Client" - Not Fat or Thin but Fit, web-enabled desktop applications.

The lower cost of the Fit Client application will help make Cloud computing real. Read more about the Fit Client in my post here.

The Power of Twitter

2009-03-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

In today's Mercury News Larry Magid talked about his use of Twitter and how based on his experience he "didn't get it" but feared he might be missing something. And yes indeed he is.

Twitter is huge and here's why. It's Real-time search.

So many times a simple idea turns into something huge. Just as Tim Berners-Lee's simple idea of the URL morphed into the Internet so it will be with Twitter.

So what is Twitter's simple idea and why is it significant?

From a simple technology perspective Twitter is Publish-Subscribe SMS. It combines the publish-subscribe communication paradigm with real-time of instant messaging.

Publish-subscribe is a many to many broadcast protocol. I publish, many people listen. In fact as a publisher I don't need to know who is subscribing. If I have something interesting to say I can publish. If you find what I say interesting you can subscribe. This communication has its roots in the written word from cave dwellers hieroglyphs, to books, to newspapers, to websites to blogs and now to Twitter. Each technology transition from hieroglyphs to twitter has made publishing more immediate. Now by combining Publish-subscribe with SMS it's virtually real-time.

Additionally Twitter has opened up the network of subscriptions so that anyone can see who is subscribing (following) to who. Given the nature of social networks this means that interesting news has the ability to reach virtually everyone in six retweets.

This is significant because I can use Twitter to find what's happening in real-time and be alerted if something I care about happens when it happens. For example, just this morning using Twitscoop I was alerted to Lance Armstong's crash and injury in Spain.

Twitter is born of the same Cluetrain manifesto empowerment that drove blogging to prominent mainstream status. You can think of Twitter as real-time blogging. Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder described his creation as

”… an idea to make a more ‘live’ LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it.

Already Tweets have evolved from “I’m having breakfast” and “I’m watching it snow” to a powerful tool for building brand and a great way to keep up with what you’re passionate about. And because Twitter is open there is a whole industry for tools to help make Twitter even more effective. Now media giants like CNN are using such tools as a sort of police scanner to be alerted to the next news story. CNN broke the story of The Turkish airline crash which it was alerted to it by Twitter.

While Google, Yahoo and others tried to perform real-time search through their "Alert" function it does not work adequately. The main reason is their alerting mechanisms are based on repeated search of the database they build through "crawling" the Internet. The delay in that approach means that alerts to matches can be considerably later than real-time as I pointed out in this blog post, Cutting Through The Incessant Barking. Real-time works with Twitter because it limits Tweets to 140 characters which is exactly an SMS message.

As with any simple idea that drives a paradigm shift the number of use cases continues to grow only limited by the imagination of its users. While it took 20 years for Tim Berners-Lee's simple idea of the URL to morph into the Internet I think Twitter will be mainstream in a matter of years.

You can follow me at http://twitter.com/RichardTreadway.

Twitter Search About To Eclipse Google Blog Search

2009-03-15T13:14:00.000-07:00

Since my realization that that Twitter could rival Google for real-time search I've been tracking various topics using Twitter search and I must say the results have been impressive. Steve Rubel noted in this post the Twitter is about to pass Google blog search. Using Compete.com's service I ran my own comparison shown below. Google's blog search is actually trending down at -3.2% compared to Twitter search's growth at 32.8%

When I was helping PubSub in 2005 everyone in the blog search space was waiting for Google's blog search to join us and Technorati. Many predicted Google's entry would mean the end for other competing blog search engines. My own experience with Google's blog search is largely disappointing. Many of the responses to my alerts are days if not weeks and in some cases years old.

RIA Round Up - March 14th, 2009

2009-03-14T14:49:00.000-07:00

Here is this weeks round up. A collection of RIA articles and blog posts relevant to the market and technology trends.

Business Case for RIA

Virtual Panel on "The Current and Future State of RIA"
Impact
By Staff Writer, March 04, 2009

Info Q has just conducted a Virtual Panel on “The Current and Future State of RIA” featuring the thoughts of many individuals from well‑known and well‑respected companies in the space such as: Mozilla, Curl, Java, Microsoft and Adobe. Each spokesperson was provided with a series of questions relating to whether RIA technologies have “made it”, what the optimal user experience of the RIA should be, what other applications will be driving RIA technology adoption, as well as an overview of the various RIA frameworks and languages.

It's Time To Update The Enterprise Software Licensee Bill of Rights!
Forrester
By Ray Wang, March 05, 2009

With the market now in favor of the enterprise software licensee, its now time to update the Enterprise Software Licensee's Bill of Rights to include newer topics such as virtualization, SaaS and subscription pricing, newer usage based pricing models, open source, and vendor lock-in avoidance. As mentioned in a call to action in a December 2008 Monday's Musings, this groundbreaking report, originally published in December 2006, will be updated to reflect current market conditions. The goal - improve this reusable contract negotiation model that cuts across the 5 key phases of the software ownership life cycle:

RIA technologies and the downturn
ZDNet
By Ryan Stewart, March 05, 2009

The news is a pretty depressing place right now but there was a small article in the Economist about how the Fashion industry is responding to the downturn that caught my eye. Towards the end of the article the Economist mentioned how designers are looking for ways to leverage digital distribution:

Technology Comparisons

Flash is Dominating the Landscape, but Silverlight is Growing
InfoQ
By Abel Avram, March 10, 2009

A RIA statistics page is publishing the numbers of browsers having RIA plug‑ins installed on a daily basis. The RIA space today is occupied by Flash but Silverlight is catching up.

RIA User Interfaces

The Weekly RIA RoundUp for March 9
Inside RIA.com
By David Tucker, March 09, 2009

This week the Flex SDK gets some bug fixes, iLog releases a new set of visualization components, the new version of jQuery UI was released, Microsoft provides some guidance on Silverlight development, and a talk on the future of Rich Internet Applications. All this and more on the Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

Microsoft heralds Silverlight‑Eclipse link
Info World
By Paul Krill, March 09, 2009

Microsoft is touting support for its Silverlight multimedia application technology in the Eclipse open source tools platform.

Schwartz Explains Sun For You Part 2
SD Times
By Alex Handy, March 06, 2009

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, has been laying out the case for his company's future in his blog recently. Earlier this week, he gave a broad overview of his three‑ or four‑part talk. This is part two of that series. Go watch if you're interested in the company.

Framework for Flex Developers Goes Open Source
Dr. Dobb's Journal
By Staff Writer, March 05, 2009

Farata Systems has open sourced its Clear Toolkit 3.1 framework for developing enterprise Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java. Sun loses Apache and Spring vote on latest Enterprise Java

The Register
By Gavin Clarke, March 05, 2009

Updated: Sun Microsystems' rocky relationship with open source over Java is again in the spotlight, after it lost support of two influential groups for the latest update to enterprise Java.

Twitter The Next Google?

2009-03-04T15:57:00.000-08:00

I recently read with interest Chris O'Brien's column, How Twitter could be a threat to Google. At first the headline gave me pause, "yeah right and how's that?" As a novice Twitter user I hadn't seen the connection. Then I got it. Real-time search.

Back in 2005 I spent a year helping a small start-up called PubSub with ambitions to be the next Google. PubSub was the creation of Bob Wyman who had studied the problem of real-time search and realized that in a publish-subscribe model the solution is to store the queries and match them against the published data. He called this "prospective search" because you're essentially saying "Tell me when this happens." Google search is "Retrospective search" as it searches what has already happened. Surely the argument went, the prospective search world must be as big if not bigger than the retrospective world.

But unfortunately in 2005 the Internet had few real-time publish-subscribe data feeds. One such data feed that was experiencing exponential growth was blogs. So PubSub's first popular use was as a real-time search service for blogs. PubSub's many followers used the service to track mentions of anything of interest as it occurred in the blogoshpere - providing immediate notification and the opportunity for immediate response.

While Google, Yahoo and others tried to perform real-time search through their "Alert" function it never worked adequately. The main reason is their alerting mechanisms are based on repeated "retrospective search." The delay in that approach means that alerts to matches can be considerably later than real-time as I pointed out in this blog post, Cutting Through The Incessant Barking

Unfortunately for all of us at PubSub and everyone that had grown to depend on the service our efforts suffered and untimely death.

But now the real-time search concept lives again with the latest publish-subscribe phenomenon Twitter. Twitter is born of the same Cluetrain manifesto empowerment that drove blogging to prominent mainstream status. Twitter is real-time blogging. Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder described his creation as

”… an idea to make a more ‘live’ LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it.

Tweets have evolved from “I’m having breakfast” and “I’m watching it snow” to a powerful tool for building brand and a great way to keep up with what you’re passionate about. And because systems like Twitter and Facebook are open there is a whole industry for tools to help make them more effective. Now media giants like CNN are using such tools as a sort of police scanner to be alerted to the next news story. CNN broke the story of The Turkish airline crash which it was alerted to it by Twitter.

Hopefully with the $35M in venture capital Twitter can accomplish what PubSub couldn't. I look forward to the day in the meantime I'm becoming a Twitter power user. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/RichardTreadway.

RIA Wars - Game On

2009-02-22T09:53:00.000-08:00

"Tech Titans' Web Battle" - The headline of an article by Brandon Bailey in today's Mercury proclaims as news the story I've been telling for 2 years now - The war for dominance of the next desktop is on. The big boys have realized it for a while now and the battle lines have been drawn within the new RIA platform category. The fact that this story has caught the attention of the Merc is further proof the fight is going mainstream.

Gartner's recent Market focus report on RIA and Forrester's planned wave are further evidence the market is heating up and that RIA is a legitimate category.

We are now seeing a class of applications that are going beyond the simple dynamic interactivity possible through Ajax and into complex standalone desktop applications. With the more sophisticated RIA platforms it is now possible to replace client-server applications with much lower cost web applications.

Of course the Mercury article only mentions the titan products: Adobe's Flash/AIR, Microsoft's Silverlight and Sun's JavaFX but notes:

"analysts say it's unlikely that one company will dominate this field — at least not in the near future. But the market is huge"

This leaves plenty of room for lesser known platforms like Curl's Enterprise RIA to position itself as successfully meeting the needs of enterprise class applications.

Indeed many of Curl's over 400 customers found Curl only after trying and failing with Ajax or Flash. While sites such as Google or Yahoo handle very large numbers of users, the interactivity with business-critical databases and existing legacy applications is not a requirement. Enterprise RIA focuses on Fortune 1000 companies who spent a lot of resources during the 1980’s and 1990’s building client-server applications using the rich user interface of desktop clients such as Windows.

2009 should be a defining year for RIA platforms as more and more enterprises look to replace and modernize their old client server applications with web applications.

Tour of California - Tracker

2009-02-17T15:07:00.000-08:00

I've been watching the Amgen Tour of California on TourTracker. While there have been some bugs with this complex Flash application overall the experience has been great. Yesterday my friends were in Santa Cruz waiting to see the race pass by and I was alerting them with status via SMS. I felt like I was Chloe running "command central" at 24. I even saw my friends in the live video as the race whizzed by them.

Below is a screen shot of the application which features live video and live telemetry including time, distance, speed and grade and well as GPS tracking in map and profile views. Very cool.

RIA Wars: Microsoft vs Adobe

2009-02-13T17:16:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Montalbano at InfoWorld reports on the RIA war going on between Microsoft and Adobe.

Microsoft's Tim Sneath lashed out at Adobe over Silverlight comments made by Mark Garrett at Thomas Weisel Partners Technology & Telecom Conference 2009 in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Garrett claimed that adoption of Microsoft's Silverlight RIA technology has fizzled. But Sneath countered in a recent post.

"Similarly, the idea that Silverlight is in anything other than rude health is more to do with what Adobe would like to be the case, rather than what actually is the case. The suggestion that “Silverlight adoption has fizzled out in the last 6-9 months” is pretty risible, in fact. For starters, Silverlight 2 shipped four months ago, and in just the first month of its availability, we saw over 100 million successful installations just on consumer machines. That doesn’t sound like “fizzling out” to me – in fact, it makes Garrett’s comments seem as if he’s living in a fantasy world."

Yes indeed - Fantasy-World - game on! With this economy we've all been living in a fantasy world.

2008 RIA Review in eWeek

2009-02-08T12:17:00.000-08:00

Jim Rapoza of eWeek summarizes the year for RIA Platforms. The hardcopy eWeek edition of the story featured the results of the RIA Survey conducted at Inside RIA by ORielly. We were interested to note Curl came in second with 16.1% responding that Curl was next on their list to use.

Looking Forward to 2009 with Curl

2009-01-08T10:05:00.000-08:00

While 2008 was a break out year for RIA technologies we expect 2009 to be even more exciting. It was good to see the recognition that Ryan Stewart gave Curl in his recent ZDnet post Looking Ahead to 2009. Thanks Ryan.

Over the last year we have considerably raised the visibility of Curl as the Enterprise RIA platform. We have grown our customer base to over 400. In 2009 we plan to continue to document the customer use cases to help highlight the bottom line business benefits of RIA adoption.

Over 2008 we made numerous releases and continued to deliver on our strategy build out our open source offering with
the WSDK (March 2008) and the CDK (July 2009). We also introduced our Version 7 beta release code named Nitro that significantly improves the ease of installation for off-line desktop applications. Finally we added Eclipse support with the release of the CDE. All in all it was a very busy and productive year.

Already 2009 has started with a bang as we released the CDK-DS which have gotten considerable visibility. With the CDK-DS Curl now has and end to end story for data intensive applications. Next up will be the release of version 7.

Wolf Camera

2008-11-30T09:42:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday I bought a camera at Wolf Camera. I would normally have gone to Best Buy or Frys but this being the Thanksgiving weekend I wanted to be as far away from those zoos as possible.

I was pleasantly surprised at the buying experience. I had thought that with the advent of discount electronic box stores, ebay, Shutterfly, Snapfish, etc that honest to goodness camera stores were dead.

The sales agent was informed and took time to show me different options and didn't rush me. And to top it off I was overwhelmed with free offers. The camera I bought (Cannon Powershot SD1100 came with a free printer/scanner/copier and free camera lessons. But wait there's more. It also came with a free rain jacket valued at $100.

So let's sum up I bought a $179 camera and got a printer, photo lessons and a jacket. The total value of the free items exceeded the purchase price of the camera.

I guess that's how you beat the box stores.

Auto Industry Bailout - Give me an iCar

2008-11-14T10:27:00.000-08:00

Thomas Freidman's How to Fix a Flat has really spawned a lot of commentary on the failings of the auto industry and much creative speculation on how Steve Job's creative genius could change the car much as the iPhone changed the phone.

I'm sure there is a complex intertwined web of factors that have contributed to the auto industry digging itself into such a hole. Is pouring more money into that hole to save the economy the right path? As the markets free fall and my savings evaporate part of me says, "please stop the bleeding." But putting more money into a failed business can't be the answer. There was no dotcom implosion bailout and yet we now have Amazon, eBay and Google.

When gas was approaching $5 a gallon, secretly I was hoping it would go up to $10 and higher. While that would hurt our wallets it would truly force a new way of life. Now as gas prices fall back down again it's back to the same old ways. The auto industry is living in a false reality that just isn't sustainable and doesn't follow free market rules. How can it be that we are giving the auto industry money to fund innovation. That can't be right. Shouldn't competition spawn innovation.

If we bailout the auto industry to save the economy it can only be a temporary fix. We need a game changer. That change can come out of the ashes of the the failed big 3. At some point we have to let that failure play out. That collapse can enable a new business model that values innovation, imposes its own mandates on MPG and sets a time line for no emission vehicles. We don't need bigger car companies we need are smaller more innovative ones.

Silicone valley has the chance to be the next center of the auto industry. Pioneers like Tulsa motors are leading the way. Up next the Apple iCar. Watch out Detroit

Web2.0 Expo New York

2008-09-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

Last week I was with Curl at Web2.0 Expo in New York. The show was at the Jacob Javits center and shared the exhibition hall with Interop. The Javits show floor is huge with Web2.0 and Interop each sharing half. The difference between the 2 exhibitions was dramatic. The Web2.0 had the typical start-up small booths where as the Interop side had sophisticated presentations and lots of consumer style gimmicks like a race car replica / video game and a beautiful custom made motorcycle shown below.

See additional pictures here.

It's clear that Web2.0 has gone main stream as large companies like HP and Microsoft had their mega 3 story booths staking a claim to the new wave.

It was busy and I barely had time to see any sessions or walk the floor as I gave more than 25 demos over the 2 days. It was interesting to note that visitors to the Curl booth were much more informed on RIA than our first experience at Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco, April 2007. Many said they had heard of Curl as the new cool RIA. It seems all our efforts to be seen in the RIA landscape are gaining momentum.

Bert Halstead, our chief architect did a great job of positioning Curl in the podcast with David Berlind of Tech Radar. You can hear listen here.

All in all it was a fun show and great to visit NY. You can see my post with hotel and restaurant reviews here.

WOA vs SOA Driven by RIA

2008-08-25T10:53:00.000-07:00

Now that's a mouth full of acronyms that 2 years ago no one would have had a clue about. But as movements go Web2.0 technologies continue to penetrate the enterprise and the old stodgy SOA is increasingly taking a back seat to WOA. As Joe McKendrick of ZDnet points out WOA wins the popularity contest hands down.

At Curl we see this phenomenon first hand. Many of our customers are enterprises that have SOA initiatives and see Curl as the RIA for SOA. We continue to enjoy our position as "The Enterprise RIA" which links us directly to SOA.

But 2008 is proving to be the inflection year for Web2.0 enterprise adoption and increasingly RIA is leading the way. Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester has commented numerous time on how the Gen Yers are driving adoption of more dynamic web applications. Coming from academia to the enterprise you can't be satisfied with boring, clunky old corporate applications when all the tools you used at school offered a compelling dynamic user experience.

At Curl we observe WOA popularity is largely driven by RIA. Increasingly we are finding enterprises are being forced to address application usability and seriously considering RIA implementations.

From the Desk

Summer's Over - Back to School

2008-08-25T09:56:00.000-07:00

Well it's been a hectic several months and as a result I haven't had time to keep up my Weblog. But summer's over and its time to get back to watching and commenting my postcard observations.

With Web2.0 Expo in New York coming up there will be a lot of interesting RIA things to see and comment on.

Heading to Web2.0 Expo

2008-04-22T14:58:00.000-07:00

I'm headed up to Web2.0 Expo with Curl. It was one year ago at this same event that we launched Curl into the US market. It certainly has been a fun year.

Ryan Stewart has a good post highlighting the RIA related things that are happening at the show.

Over the last year the RIA space has really heated up and Curl is now regularly mentioned with the big boys Adobe and Microsoft. We've received some great coverage with our recent announcements of Eclipse and Ubuntu support and our next version of the Curl platform code named Nitro.

Some mentions include:

Curl IDE To Be Integrated in Eclipse
Application Development Trends By Will Kraft
April 21, 2008
http://www.adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=22493

RIA Is Dead! Long Live Web Applications
Mark Finkle’s Weblog By Mark Finkle
April 21, 2008
http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2008/04/ria‑is‑dead‑long‑live‑web‑applications/

Product review: Adobe breathes fresh AIR into RIA
InfoWorld By James R. Borck
April 21, 2008
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/21/17TC‑adobe‑air_1.html

Revenge of the desktop app
CNet By Dan Farber
April 21, 2008
http://www.news.com/8301‑13953_3‑9923421‑80.html?tag=newsmap

Curl Enters Desktop Wars
eWeek By Darryl Taft
April 18, 2008
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application‑Development/Curl‑Enters‑Desktop‑Wars/

Ajax Disappoints Power Users

2008-03-21T14:58:00.000-07:00

A recent Forrester research paper by Stefan Ried examines how new RIA Ajax based applications are being accepted in the business community.

Stefan notes that "a great user experience is one of the most compelling and important characteristics of a modern business application." As Ajax based business applications are becoming more common his research shows that their interfaces tend to frustrate powers users. Power users are used to high performance extremely interactive client-server applications and are easily frustrated by Ajax based applications.

Stefan details a list of Ajax's shortcomings as a platform for enterprise business applications. These include slow performance, inability to deal with large complex displays and inconsistency between browser platforms.

To all you Ajax folks who have experienced these shortcomings first hand, you should check out Curl! Curl offers the high performance of client-server applications, easily handles complex displays with large datasets and runs on Windows, Linux , Mac. It's easy to Get Started Now.

From the Desk

Richard Treadway

Curl Releases Web Services Developer Kit

2008-03-02T09:07:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday we will announce the release of the Curl Web Services Development Kit - WSDK. Yesterday I briefed Paul Krill of InfoWorld on the announcement and he wrote this article.

This announcement is significant to Curl for a couple of reasons.

This is our first Open Source product. - Back in October of last year we contributed 3 components to Open Source. This was the first step in our open source strategy. We will continue to contribute key components of the product that help support rapid development of enterprise-class RIAs to Open Source . Now we have completed the integration and testing of the Curl WSDK and will offer it as a fully supported component of our RIA Platform.
The WSDK links Curl RIA applications directly to SOA - As enterprises continue to execute on their SOA strategy they are increasingly seeing the need to present and visualize large complex data sets on the client. Untill recently complex business processing and data manipulation has been a server side task. Now with RIAs more processing can happen on the client enabling much more responsive and dynamic applications. The WSDK provides the functions to enable direct connection to SOA back-end data.

The WSDK provides a simple way to use web services directly in Curl applications. You are can obtain information resources from a Service Oriented Architecture though SOAP and WSDL, or from a Resource Oriented Architecture though REST and XML.

SOAP Web Services described using WSDL are processed by the WSDK and converted directly into Curl packages and class definitions, which can be used just like any other Curl application component. The service definitions can be processed programmatically, or using a tool in the Curl IDE.

Additionally the WSDK XML Document Model (XDM) provides functionality for processing XML data in Curl: reading, creating, modifying and writing XML documents. XML document contents are represented as a hierarchy of Curl objects. The objects can be accessed using methods and by XPath expressions. They can be displayed, transformed into other Curl representations, and used as a basis for data binding.

In traditional Web environments, Web services and resources are usually consumed by other Web servers. The full potential of web data can be realized using Curl’s rich client environment. Curl clients can directly consume Web services since the Web service technology stack is embedded in the runtime platform. This allows for dynamic presentation and direct interaction with the information resources.

From the Desk

Richard Treadway

RIA Spectrum

2007-09-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

With the release of the Technology Study we commissioned from Sonata it is now clear that there is a spectrum of RIA technologies that serve the diverse needs of Internet applications. These needs define a spectrum from simple B2C interfaces to the more complex highly visual interfaces of real-time dashboards.

We have created the following graphic to position the RIA technologies along a spectrum from B2C to B2E and B2B.

From the moment I first heard of Curl it was clear to me that it was uniquely suited for the demanding enterprise applications. But all our evidence was anecdotal. Now with the release of the Sonata report we have actual numbers to support that positioning.

We have been working with Jeffrey Hammond at Forrester to validate this positioning. It was good to see Jeffrey's comments in the Redmond Developer News article by John Waters.

"“Curl has positioned itself exclusively for enterprise organizations, and mainly for business-to-business apps… the Curl platform stacks up well against the competition”

Additionally we have been working with Ryan Stewart, RIA blogger at ZDnet to help educate the market on the Benefits of RIAs. We gave Ryan a preview of the Sonata report which he highlighted in this post.

One of the more interesting findings of the report the trade-off between the size of the run time environment and the size of the application download. The flowing graphs show the RTE sizes and application sizes.

While Ajax has no RTE it ncurs a heavy penalty with the largest application size. At the other end of the spectrum Curl's runtime is the largest at almost 8MB but using pCurl compression it has the smallest application size by a wide margin.

From the Desk

Richard Treadway

RIA Panel at Office 2.0

2007-09-07T15:00:00.000-07:00

It has been a busy first day at Office 2.0. Marc, Jnan and I are here to represent Curl's Platform as an alternative to other more well know RIA alternatives such as Adobe's Flex.

Marc moderated a panel that explored the state of RIA adoption by enterprises in the
market.

Representing the different RIA technologies were Peter Armstrong for Ruby, Kevin Hakman for Tibco, Ryan Stewart for Abobe, David Tempkin for Laszlo and of course our own Jnan Dash representing Curl.

Marc did a great job moderating and got a lively discussion going.

Marc started the discussion by putting out a definition of RIA from Martin Heller at InfoWorld.

RIAs attempt to combine the strengths of desktop and Web applications without falling prey to their weaknesses. RIAs try to present most of their user interfaces at the client so that they can be responsive and the interface can be as complex as it needs to be. RIAs often do need an installation, but usually only for the runtime engine, which tends to be small and most often updates itself automatically. The RIA application itself typically launches from the remote server.

The first question was when will the fortune 1000 jump onto the RIA bandwagon?
Ryan made the point that it will be end users that will drive adoption, but many on the panel including Kevin and Jnan see that adoption is already underway and it is driven by real business needs.

Jnan pointed as we know that in Japan Curl is deployed in business critical applications at companies like Panasonic, Sony and Toyota. That matched Kevin's experience at Tibco were their fortune 1000 companies are seeing the benefit of RIA in particular at HR block.

All agreed with the point that it's hard to get enterprises to talk about applications behind the firewall. No one wants to give away their competitive differentiation.

Jnan pointed out an insight we got from our recent meeting with Accenture. As I have noted the adoption of RIA in Japan seems to be a couple of years ahead of the US. What the folks at Accenture pointed out is that Japan is much more prone to do in house IT development. This has lead them to implement solutions using RIA directly to satisfy business imperatives. In the US market IT is much more likely to choose packaged software over in house IT development. This means that RIA adoption will be driven by ISVs and to this point ISVs have not felt the competitive pressure to cause them to create better products through the deployment of RIA.

See also the post on the panel at Blognation by Tris Hussey

See also my photos of the panel discussion here.

Richard

Gnomedex Report

2007-08-18T20:00:00.000-07:00

It was fun attending Gnomedex last week. I was there with Marc Orchant representing Curl and reaching out to the blogger community to raise the awareness of Rich Internet Application technologies. This was Marc's first Gnomedex but as a professional blogger it seemed he knew everyone there. Gnomedex was planned as the event we would out the news that Marc joined Curl to help build the Curl developer community and raise awareness of RIA technologies in the enterprise.

The last time I attended Gnomedex in 2004 the feature was the announcement of Microsoft getting on the RSS band wagon. Blogging was taking off big time. With Rubel and Siffry featured prominently in the BusinessWeek cover article, "Blogs Will Change Your Business." There were 9 million blogs. This was "the wild frontier." Technorati and PubSub were the leading contenders for blog search.

Just 2 years later Gnomedex 7 had a decidedly different tone. Today PubSub imploded in a melt down that I witnessed first hand and Technorati is tracking over 70 million blogs. Now that you can make a living as a professional blogger, the conversation is turned from the "wild frontier" to "getting down to business." Marc's kids friends are always surprised to hear what he does for a living " you mean they pay you to blog." Now we have public voices we also have public exposure like never before with all the good and bad that comes with that. What happened to Kathy Sierra (one of my favorite bloggers) has become a real worry. Vanessa Fox's session generated a good discussion about privacy and safety on-line.

I also especially enjoyed Gregg Spiridellis talk about the history of JibJab and how their business model has been changing on a regular basis. Now they're into the personal cards market making entertaining user generated content. We got a great laugh as he featured Scoble and Pirillo in a Hawaiian number. Good fun. Here's my version.

As always Gnomedex-networking is the highlight. You can find new interesting ideas and get a pulse on the state of the blogosphere from those that shape it on the front lines. I had a great conversation with Ryan Stewart who has been blogging on RIA for almost 2 years know. He recently joined Abobe and it was fun hearing of his adventures on the Adobe onAIR bus tour. He has seen a real increase in the RIA interest level over the last 4-6 months. We also talked about how the event driven publish-subscribe technologies like KnowNow have seen slow adoption. RIA's should be the interface of choice for real-time data driven applications. This is something Adobe is working to evangelize with their Flex Data Services.

Ryan thinks that bloggers are 6-9 months away from really understanding RIA. I think it may even be longer. What we notice with Curl's experience is that the US is at least 2 years behind Japan in the adoption of RIA. In fact in Japan they don't even think of it as RIA but rather as a means to end. The question is not "How can I use RIA to reduce TCO and get to new markets", but "How can I reduce my procurement time" or "How can I get my product to more distributors." Use of RIA technologies are only a means to reach their business goals. Hopefully the US enterprise RIA market will start to see growth in the next 6 months.

Richard

Introducing Enterprise RIA

2007-08-08T20:00:00.000-07:00

I have started blogging on the Curl Blog about enterprise RIA. You can see my fist post here.

Over the next several months I Will be writing about my experiences in helping Curl with their go-to-market efforts in the US.

Some of the topics I intend to cover include:

Enterprise use cases

Enterprise application characteristics

RIA technologies for enterprise apps

How enterprises are measuring RIA benefits

How enterprise RIA in effecting the workspace

Curl's deployments in Japan offer a unique opportunity to study RIA in the enterprise and I look forward to sharing the results of my exploration with you all.

Richard

Curl Re-Launch - Web2.0 Expo

2007-04-16T07:53:00.000-07:00

I'm here at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco supporting the re-launch of Curl. For the Past 4 months I have been working with Curl to define their go-to-market strategy and execute their launch back into the US market.

We have completed some dozen briefing of press and analysts and the our positioning is being clearly understood. Our theme for the booth played on the Curl name. "Curly brackets aren't just for little girls." Curl's name is from the fact that the key delimiter in the language are curly brackets { and }.

Here are some of the photos from the booth.

All in all the launch has been a great success. I'll be posting more on our progress over the next several months.

From the Desk

Richard

Web 2.0 Report

2006-11-10T15:03:00.000-08:00

If I had to sum up a simple message from this years Web2.0 I would say that it's the realization that the Internet IS the platform and let's stop talking about it and start getting on with it. AOL announced that they will open AIM. Their new slogan "open in every way." With Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Salesforce.com you can implement a very sophisticated application and host it virtually for free. Marc Benioff has put aside the whole 5th floor of the old Seibel building (which he got cheap) for entrepreneurs to create saleforce.com mashups that salesforce will help them monetize.

The implication of this is certainly felt by the VC community which judging from the attendee list was very well represented. Today a start-up can create a product with free Internet software services from Google, Amazon, AOL, Yahoo and Salesforce.com. Gather a critical mass of users and create immediate value. This new formula for success has very low risk and potentially very high return. The key is identifying a problem and optimizing everything for the user. The prime example of the power of user generated content and listening to what users want is Craig's list.

Craig's list CEO, Jim Buckmaster put it succinctly saying "defer to users early and often." Craig's list is the 7th most visited Internet property but only has 18 employees which is several orders of magnitude less than anyone in the top ten.

In fact many of the start-ups indicated that their VC money was still in the bank. In the session with Ram Shriram and Roger McNamee both agreed there is a lot of money out there for Web2.0 companies. After a question from a young entrepreneur on how much of her company to give up to VCs the question of smart money vs. dumb money came up. Roger pointed to Ram saying "he's the smart money." Roger went onto say the the best way to know the smart money is - If you can call (your investor) with good news or bad news at 2AM then that's the smart money. Ram shared his criteria for investment. He looks for the passion of the founders. If they have found a problem to solve and are passionate about solving it, then he's in. It's not a question of understanding the business plan. That can come later.

In the session with Jeff Bezos, Jeff explained that Amazon's biggest cost is idle time. This is why they are making Amazon's infrastructure available at a very low cost as services over the web. Some of the prices he mentioned.

S3 - 15 cents GB/month
EC2 - about $70/month
Alexa Web Search - 30 cents/1000 requests

The computing is completely elastic. In the future you will be able to send inventory to Amazon's warehouses with a webservices call. Later you can send specific items anywhere with another webservices call. This is further proof that you can easily leverage all of Amazon's infrastructure at very low cost to build your own company.

The other main theme was how convergence of media and the Internet is creating disruption. The buzz was all about Google's acquisition of YouTube and the problem of digital rights that exists every where user generated content is published. It seems a problem that can be solved with a lot less posturing then we're seeing. The rumor is that Google set aside $500M to pay for content rights in the YouTube acquisition. This video of Colbert makes the point.

To set the stage for irreverence, the conference featured 40 shorts. This one opened the conference.

From the Desk

Richard Treadway

Off to Web2.0

2006-11-06T14:53:00.000-08:00

Well I'm off to the Web2.0 conference in San Francisco. I'm really looking forward to it. Last year I signed up late and couldn't get in. This year I made sure to sign up early and fotunately made it in. I heard that 5000 people applied but didn't get in. Lucky me.

More from the conference.

From the Desk

Richard Treadway

Say One Simple Thing - Repeat

2006-08-01T10:18:00.000-07:00

Car with 4 Steering Wheels

I've just concluded a prolonged engagement at Kabira as their Interim VP of Marketing. The project involved a deep dive into the world of high performance transaction processing. Miles away from my previous engagement with the ill fated PubSub and the blogosphere.

There is non-the-less a learning I take from both projects. That is that your marketing message must SAY ONE SIMPLE THING. While we marketers of high tech software know this to be true in practice it's not that easy. Especially if the software you develop has thousands of applications.

I have focused my marketing consultancy of helping companies find that simple positioning.

Many times this involves convincing the engineers to simplify their product from the car with the 4 steering wheels into something easier to drive. This is often hard as it means giving up some of the capabilities.

From the Desk

Richard Treadway

Tag, Watch, Notify - Moving to a New Web Model

2006-04-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Mercury News had an interesting article about a number of new search / tagging services that are combining simple search with the ability to save the results including notes and share them with others. See the article by Matt Marshall here.

Ben Elgin from BusinessWeek also writes about a Search Engine for Every Subject.

I took a look at two of the services, Jeteye and Kaboodle. As a long time user of del.icio.us I immediately understood the value.

There are number of new services like this stemming from the problem we all have in storing interesting information and then being able to retrieve it later. Kaboodle was created by Manish Chandra because he had trouble surfing the web for items he needed in refurbishing his home. Del.icio.us was created by Joshua Schachter because he was frustrated with the inadequacy of browser bookmarketing. Flickr's Caterina Fake brought the power of tagging to photos. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Side note, both del.icio.us and Flickr have been acquired by Yahoo.

Of course we all understand this problem of find things and then wanting to make use of them later. It isn't just on-line information. Remember the last time you read an article put it down and now can't find it. Or hanging your pictures, you put down your hammer and now - where the heck is it? Or you put that important document in your filling cabinet and now you can't remember which folder.

Tagging helps with this because you can put any number of tags on the same item. This means however you are thinking of a particular item the moment you are looking for it you are much more likely to find it.

But there needs to be more than just tagging, and saving. As we move to Singularity we need to transition from searching to watching, finding to notification and have it all integrated into our immediate context and location.

How about combining Jeteye, Del.icio.us, PubSub, Rrove and Watson into a single service that works from wherever you are.

Stay tuned for more.

From the Desk

Richard Treadway

Software 2006

2006-04-04T15:37:00.000-07:00

Pundit Panel at Software 2006

I'm attending the Software 2006 conference in Santa Clara for the next 2 days. MR Rangaswami puts together this conference annually to discuss the state of the enterprise software business.

This morning Ray Lane gave his annual view of the software industry. Nothing new here but Ray always has some good insights. Some key points from Ray. Successful software companies have three attributes.

Low resistance to value (Clear value, immediately recognized with decision to start as a no brainer)
Viral TCO (customers pay after value is created to further viral adoption)
Viral Installability (one button install to be up and running)

Viral is what it's all about.

Unfortunately the conference has turned into a forum for Indian outsourcing. There maybe some Indian outsourcing companies that aren't here but I wouldn't know them.

This afternoon we suffered through 2 shameless corporate pitches by Dave DeWalt, President of EMC Software and Thomas Kurian, SVP of Middleware at Oracle. I've never heard someone use more words to say nothing.

More tomorrow.

From the Desk

Richard Treadway

Dad, He's Here

2006-03-24T15:47:00.000-08:00

Gabriel Treadway

The phone rang. It was the call I was expecting from Chris, my oldest son. "Dad, he's here, " he said.

And just like that I'm a grandfather. Chris and his wife Maureen had their first born son, Gabriel, born March 24th, 2006 at 3:57 PM in Phoenix, Arizona. Gabriel is a big boy and measured in at 8 pounds 15 ounces and 20 1/2 inches.

It is amazing to me how technology has changed how we experience a life being born. Not long ago no one would know the sex of the expected child. The father in the waiting room ready with cigars to pass around.

Today with ultra sound and other technological advances we knew a lot about Gabriel even before he was born.

And so it was. Chris' call with the simple words, "Dad, he's here" brought it home to me. The miracle of life.

From the heart

Richard Treadway

A New Meaning of "Googled"

2006-03-18T08:20:00.000-08:00

Google search results for Kinderstart

Today I read in the San Jose Mercury that KinderStart.com is suing Google after it suffered a "cataclysmic fall'' in search ranking. See the article by Mark Schwanhausser here.

Indeed I tried a few searches using terms like "Kinderstart" and the first page of results did not contain a pointer to them.

Ummm... That does indeed seem strange.

The economic system would provide motivation for google to serve up results that would maximize its revenue. See this post by Steven Baker of Blogspotting.

Googled.

Definition: When Google decides it does not like you and removes you from any page results.

From the Desk

Richard Treadway

Almaden Valley Snow Line

2006-03-12T14:21:00.000-08:00

Snow covers 6 story tracking
tower atop Mt Umhunum

Well spring might be just around the corner but it's snowing in Almaden Valley. With the jet stream coming in from Alaska the snow line came down below 1000 feet. Yesterday I toured the valley and got these photos.

Today Jon and I rode up Hicks road to Mt Umhunum. A tough climb - 2500 verticle in 4 miles. They should put this climb in the Amgen Tour of California next year and have a hill top finish.

Route up Mt Umhunum

Climb Profile

There is a property owner that will not allow anyone to travel the section of Mt Umhunum road that goes through his property so it is impossible to ride all the way to the top of the military base and the 6 story tracking station at the top. This is most unfortunate as it would be a world class Hors Category climb at just under 3500 vertical feet in 8 miles with much of the climb at over 13%.

From the bike

Richard Treadway

Internet Word-of-Mouth Marketing

2006-02-27T08:45:00.000-08:00

Olivia LCD TV

Today's San Jose Mercury News had an article by May Wong (AP) about how the market for flat screen TVs has opened to new brands that have used a Word-of-Mouth Internet marketing strategy. This shows the power that consumer recommendations can have in a commodity market.

"At Amazon.com, a 32 inch Olivia flat-panel LCD TV was recently the No.1 selling TV. The relatively unknown brand ranks in Amazon's top TV vendor list, helped by positive customer reviews, according to Amazon officials."

This is further evidence that the new long-tail WOM-Internet marketing is working and having a real impact. See also Hugh MacLeod's post on success of Stormhoek.

From the desk

Richard Treadway

Amgen Tour of California - Sierra Road

2006-02-21T21:10:00.000-08:00

Discovery Leads the chase up Sierra Road - Stage 2

Today the Amgen Tour of California rode through our back yard. It really was a thrill to see the world's best cyclists hammering up the very hill I climbed just the day before. Sierra is a tough climb rising 2000 feet in under 4 miles. It took me 39 minutes to climb it. The pros would climb it in 20 minutes.

I had no idea just how big this event would be and I certainly was surprised. As we waited on Sierra for the race to arrive the road gradually began to fill with hundreds of spectators. Jon and I had positioned ourselves about 1/3 of the way up and found a good spot to catch the action. A steep right hand turn. From our vantage point we could see down to the intersection of Sierra and Piedmont roads where the racers would turn left and start the climb.

People with cell phones getting updates on the peleton's progress... They're 30 minutes away! Then suddenly the skies filled with helicopters, motor cycles, police cars honking their horns and camera crews all whizzing by. It was like an invasion. Then the leaders on the climb. Yes with the same cross eyed brain dead look that marks the absolute concentration required to climb a 13% grade at 13+ mph at your HRMAX. Savoldelli, Hindcapie, Simoni all fly by. WOW.

Here are my photos from the stage

From the bike

Richard Treadway

Publish Subscribe Press Releases

2006-02-10T10:04:00.000-08:00

Here's more evidence that the web is moving from request-response to publish-subscribe.

As noted by Tom Biro, PR Newswire now has a button that enables readers to tag press releases with del.icio.us.

Steve Rubel takes this one step further in his post Social Press Releases with idea that if a press release were like a blog post it would enable a conversation through posted comments.

This points once again to the need for a new application that lets you be notified of puslished events that are material to you. As I discussed here that application is not an RSS reader.

From the desk

Richard Treadway

Meditation Point

2006-02-10T09:30:00.000-08:00

Santa Teresa Park...

Sitting on a rock at meditation point.
What do you hear? What do you see?

Wind in your face to the south. Sun in your face to the north.
The first day of spring. In with some rain. Out with some sun.
Only the faint signs of life. Bird's song issuing the new bright green grass of spring.

Deep tracks in the hard baked mud of winter. Signs that there are other inhabitants you can't see, but certain they can see you.

Can you be still enough?
Can you be observant enough?
Can you be patient enough?
Can you be quite enough?
To hear and see and feel what you know is there.

From The Trail

Richard Treadway

Morning Coffee

2006-02-06T22:42:00.000-08:00

After a difficult 2 weeks at work it's a great pleasure to enjoy an early leisurely morning outdoors having breakfast in the cool sun. Birds chirping. Sounds of the day awakening.

Each time I spend a morning like this it takes me back to my time in in Cassis, Provence. The early morning when the air is still cool, the wind is calm and the smell of pines is abundant.

It belongs to the early birds. Those that service the tourist industry, working diligently and efficiently to prepare for the new day. Cleaning the sidewalks, cafe tables and beaches in anticipation of the tourist onslaught.

Those moments of industry, so purposeful, so practiced, so efficient, followed by sleepy eyed tourists wondering about with no particular purpose but for that all important cup of coffee. It's a time when everyone can tell the tourist from the local.

Gradually the sun becomes stronger and the "cigals" start their chorus. You have to look hard to find the locals, their time of preparation spent, the tourist onslaught overwhelms them. The lazy moment of the wondering tourists ends as the early birds fly away into the mayhem of the crowed streets.

From the heart

Richard Treadway

Lost in Time On A Horse With Two Wheels

2006-02-02T10:21:00.000-08:00

Cowboy Country From the Bike
Originally uploaded by Richard Treadway.

I took a great ride in the back roads of Hollister today with my son Jon. Just like San Juan Batista this area is lost in time. Cattle farms that have changed very little since the late 1800s dot the landscape as cows graze peacefully. This must be where they film the "Happy Cows" cheese commercials. I think if I were a cow this would be the place to be.

When I look out at the undeveloped land I'm taken back to a time when we'd be riding horses not bicycles.

Into The Hills

Old Barn

Here are the other pictures I took on the ride.

The day was perfect and the temperature was cooling in the mid 50s. The hills are all golden this time of year and made for a real contrast to my rides last week in New Hampshire.

Here is a part of the route.

Jon and I made a plan to do this ride again in the Spring when all these hills will be emerald green. Earlier this week a major bicycle race, the Tour of California will go through this area in February. That should be a perfect time to highlight the beauty of the region.

I'm looking forward to it.

From the Bike
Originally uploaded by Richard Treadway.

Richard Treadway

Enter at Your Own Risk

2006-02-02T10:16:00.000-08:00

San Cristobal Mine, Quicksilver Park

My Brother was visiting for Christmas and to give him reprieve from the flatlands of Florida I took him on a 4 mile hike in Quicksilver Park to the San Cristobal Mine.

Quicksilver is a magical place that has loads of wildlife and plenty of ruins from the mines that closed down in 1972. A great place to take out of towners that is authentic and not touristy. I know that trials well as I ride my mountain bike on the English Camp - Bull Run loop often. In the years I have been visiting I have seen wild boar, bobcats, wild turkeys, coyotes, rabbits, deer and even a mountain lion.

It must have been a hard life as a miner but when you finally did get out of the mines you could rejoice in the surrounding beauty. The kids of Quicksilver must have been a tough bunch as well if this class picture in any indication.

English Camp School Kids

The hike to the mine is a little over 2 miles mostly uphill with a mild 6% grade. The day was cloudly but warm as we've had a series of storms driven by a jet stream straight from Hawaii known as the pineapple express.

On entering the mine the air is strangely warmer and our glasses steamed up as did the camera lenses. The mine has been closed off about 100 feet in. Looking beyond the barrier gives you an idea of what cramped quarters the miners must have had to work in. It certainly gives you an erie feeling even though you are only 100 feet in. The rails remain in the entrance which makes for nice picture looking out.

Into The Light

You can see all the photos from the outing here on flickr

From The Trail

Richard Treadway

Blogs Are Conversations - Not Really

2005-10-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

When I first heard of the Cluetrain Manifesto and read Mary Meeker's paper on blogs and Paul Kedrosky's article on syndication I understood the idea that blogs maybe a way to turn the one way web into a two way conversation. Publish-subscribe and syndication offer a loosely coupled dynamic way for corporations to create a conversation with their constituents.

A new communication paradigm. Cool. I'm on it.

I created this blog. I started monitoring blog conversations about our product. I discovered other bloggers with great insights into product requirements. I started subscribing to blogs in bloglines. I created Technorati watchlists. I started tagging with del.icio.us. I moved my photos to flickr and started tagging and blogging them.

It's been almost a year since I started and it was a lot of work. Stepping back to access the net value of all that work I'm coming to the conclusion that we don't have the right tools to make the blogosphere an effective conversation. The amount of work required far exceeds the benefit. Most people I have talked to about the power of blogging simply say they don't have the time to engage. It is clear that there is a lot of value but at this stage of the blogosphere's evolution it's too hard to realize it.

With any new communication paradigm an appropriate etiquette backed by good set of tools needs to emerge before we can really effectively communicate.

Take email for example. Remember those early email messages all in CAPS - why are you shouting? The flame test - would you have said that face to face?

While an etiquette is emerging for the blogosphere, the tools needed to realize an effective conversation have a long way to go.

The reason the tools are lacking, I believe is that we have made the assumption that blog posts are messages and therefore we should operate on them like email. Today's aggregators all look like email readers. The problem in making this assumption is that we have mixed 2 fundamentally different communication types - conversations which are request-response and blogs which are publish-subscribe.

Effective conversations need to adhere to a request-response protocol. I say something you listen, you say something I listen. There are varying cadences dictated but the medium but essentially they remain a serial request followed by a response. Verbal conversations are immediate and prolonged silence will end them.

IM and SMS have a slower cadence and can sustain some latency. In fact IMs asynchrony sometimes breaks the request response protocol. This causes conversations get out of synch and it can be unclear which of the 2 statements you made is the one I'm responding to. Email has an even slower cadence measured in hours and days and snail mail sustains conversations over weeks and months.

Publish-subscribe is a many to many broadcast protocol. I publish, many people listen. In fact as a publisher I don't need to know who is subscribing. If I have something interesting to say I can publish. If you find what I say interesting you can subscribe. This communication has its roots in the written word from cave dwellers hieroglyphs, to books, to newspapers, to websites and now to blogs. Each technology transition from hieroglyphs to blogs has made publishing more immediate, but publishing is inherently not conversational.

In order to converse you have to write back to the publisher and he/she must respond back to you. This is the conversation of the "letters to the editor." What's different from a Newspaper's "letters to the editor" and comments in blogs is that the latency is so low it approaches the cadence of a conversation.

So what kinds of tools do we need to be able to intermix publishing with conversations? It's clear that the tools and interfaces available today are far from adequate to actually enable the promise of a conversational web.

Jeremy Zawodny kicked off a good discussion on the lack of adequate tools with this post.

It's easy to get stuck in old think. Blog posts are messages therefore blog readers should look like email readers.

But blogs are not email and if we are to really deliver on the conversational web we need to start thinking about tools and interfaces that are up to the task.

What we need are tools that integrate tags, comments, posts and subscriptions into a usable interface that enables a conversation to exist within publish-subscribe. A web2.0 style interface with the kind of cross task integration shown in the new email from Zimbra is what I'm looking for.

Hopefully innovation will continue and not be stifled by Microsoft as they did with Outlook.

One thing for certain we have a lot of work to do before a really useful model emerges.

From the desk

Richard Treadway

Cutting Through the Incessant Barking

2005-10-02T12:20:00.000-07:00

Heather Green's recent Blogspotting post featured this cartoon that is making the rounds online. With PubSub and Technorati tracking over 16 million blogs there certainly is a lot of pointless, incessant barking going on out there.

How to cut through the noise and find the good stuff?

The best way I've found is to use a prospective search service such as the one provided by PubSub. With prospective search you define a persistent query. Whenever anything is published that matches your query you are immediately notified. Through the PubSub service I have found numerous insightful and informative blogs on the topics that most interest me.

Prospective search can be thought of as an alerting service. Today there are many alerting services but they all offer different interfaces and only work within their own walled gardens. What I really want is a generalized alerting service that can notify me in a flexible and consistent way when ALL the things I'm interested in happen. The service will need to provide flexible notification delivery. I want to know about blogs that match my query in my blog reader but I want my flight delays delivered to my phone. Today's alerting services only provide alerts on their own data, are not consistent and as I have found don't really work.

Take Yahoo Alerts for example. I have a subscription to Notre Dame Football. As shown below the alert on the final score in yesterday's game came today at 1:03 in the morning. Needless to say by 1 AM I was fast asleep and I had already heard the final score.

Another altering service failure is ebay. In this example ebay sent me an alert of an auction I was watching 5 days after the auction concluded.

A generalized alerting service has yet to be developed. Can PubSub take the lead here? PubSub boasts it can deliver matches in seconds not days so it can easily beat the existing alerting services that simply don't work. The trick will be providing the right mix of really useful information with a consistent and flexible way to create, edit and deliver alerts.

From the desk

Richard Treadway

An Evening with Ray Kurzweil

2005-09-22T22:52:00.000-07:00

Ray Kurzweil
Originally uploaded by Richard Treadway.

This evening I attended the SD Forum Event "An Evening with Ray Kurzweil" at SAP in Palo Alto.

You can see my photos from the event here. You can get the slides from Kurzweil's presentation here.

Ray has a new book coming out soon called THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR - When Humans Transcend Biology.

Kurzweil's ideas are facinating and he is plugged into the center of so much innovation. Here are my main take aways.

Advancements in human intelligent thinking follow a straight line on a logarithmic plot. The first advance took hundreds of millions of years the last one took 10.

As advances are exponential, by 2013 computing power will surpass human intelligence and we will be able to model the human brain.

These advances happen incrementally and it won't become a human vs machine fight. The machines will be a part of intelligence - the assist we get from computers will become us. This is like all innovations that have changed us and become a part of everyday life. Computational power will be so small and available it will become part of our brain assisting our thinking in many ways.

If we can model human intelligence then we can separate our memory (software) from our brains (hardware). Just as you back up your data and programs and can move them to different processors you will be able to back up your memories, beliefs, and thoughts and load them into another brain. Wow imagine Douglas Adams idea of the "point of view gun" if we could load it with the real data.

The final thought... If we can live another 50 years then maybe we can live another 300.

Richard Treadway

The Power of Tagging

2005-09-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

I just read that BusinessWeek online selected Del.icio.us as best of the web.

I discovered Del.icio.us last year and have been using the service ever since. It really changes the way you view the web. As BusinessWeek points out tagging is one of the essential tools that make it possible to listen to the web as a conversation. Being able to see what people are reading and how they categorize it provides a wealth of information for brand managers.

Email and a browser are being replaced by the new tools of the trade: Del.icio.us, PubSub and Bloglines.

The blogosphere conversation is based on a Publish and Subscribe model. The loose coupling of that model means that publishers and subscribers don't need to know anything about each other. If you find a blog you like you subscribe. The publisher doesn't need to know or take action to let you subscribe. The the power of the publish subscribe model is why RSS has become so popular. Before RSS the only way to get alerted when your favorite site was updated was to either check regularly (polling) or to sign-up for an email notification (asynchronous alert). As email has become spam infested, email alerts look like just more spam. Furthermore email is designed as a communication model where publishers and subscribers do need to know each other. With email the publisher owns the subscriber list making getting on and off the list problematic.

In the publish subscribe model tags can be created by both publishers and subscribers. Of the two alternatives the more useful to brand managers is subscriber based tags. The reason is that publisher based tags are completely susceptible to spammers. The best know tagging service, library of congress doesn't rely on the author to categorize its book. The library does it after careful analysis. As such Del.icio.us tags (subscriber based) are infinitely more useful than Technorati tags (publisher based) for understanding what's being tracked in the blogosphere .

An interesting tag space where both publishers and subscribers meet is Flickr. I switched to Flick recently because I wanted to integrate my photos into my blogging. I had been using Webshots. Webshots uses a the photographic paradigm of "albums" to organize your pictures. With the album approach a given picture is in an album. With that approach you're left with the question, "should albums be organized by media, events, places or subjects"? The reason that Flickr tags are so useful is that the answer can be all four. For example this photo was tagged "SantaTeresaPark SanJose California Landscape Poppy NikonN90-Agfa 2003-03-15"

What you want from a photo organizing system is something that lets you find pictures at a later date no matter how you happen to remember them. Flickr tags do just that.

Here is the tagging system I use.

The interesting thing with Flickr is that subscribers can also tag your photos. This gives you the unique perspective of seeing how others categorize your pictures.

Richard Treadway

Viral Marketing

2005-09-16T16:08:00.000-07:00

With blogs implementing the idea that the web can become a conversation, the concept of providing personalized badges that let you express your character are having visible viral effects. Well known examples include Flickr Zeigeist, Feedster top 500 and Bloglines shared subscriptions.

One such site I recently found is the Cyborg Name Generator. You choose your name and your graphic and it gives you the HTML code to insert into your blog. According to the creator Lore Sjöberg the details matter as he describes on his blog he made one small change and it really took off especially among live journal users.

Richard Treadway

I'm a Recovering Programmer

2005-09-01T08:44:00.000-07:00

Car with 4 Steering Wheels

I'm a recovering programmer. It has been 785 days since I wrote code. I’ve learnt to deal with it. Now I'm in marketing.

I discovered a great blog the other day called Creating Passionate Users, by Kathy Sierra. Her post makes an insightful point - Programmers should get over their distain for marketers and realize they are marketers. Anyone who is passionate about their product is really a marketer.

As an engineer and programmer of 20 years I've crossed over to the dark side of marketing on numerous occasions to evangelize the products I’ve built. I never saw marketing and engineering as opposing camps but I personally know the pain of being mistrusted by the technical community. In a world where marketing is all too often driven by technology, telling a consistent simple story about complex enterprise software is a never ending challenge.

Complex enterprise software is like a car with 4 steering wheels - it can go anywhere, in circles, at a diagonal, sideways, and more... Wow, let me delight in the beauty of your design but it's still a bitch to drive and what is it really?

In the end creating passionate users is what it's all about and no product will be successful without the viral effects of that passion. Kathy has another great post explaining the dynamics of passionate users called the Koolaid point. You know you have arrived when you have as many people that passionately hate you as passionately love you.

Thanks Kathy for your insights and for such an entertaining blog.

Richard Treadway

GoogleTalk and XMPP

2005-08-25T09:24:00.000-07:00

While the announcement of Google Talk hasn't impressed many technology watchers like Mike Langberg, it is significant that Google decided to base their IM on industry standard XMPP.

AIM is the industry leader in IM with 51% market share or 54.3 million users and getting their loyal users to switch to a new IM will not happen anytime soon. Nonetheless don't underestimate the power of open standards to create a flurry of new competitive applications. The challenges to the big players in the IM space have already started. Russell Beattie extols the benefits of using XMPP and wishes his employer Yahoo! would support an XMPP gateway to Yahoo! IM. Let the innovations begin.

As the web evolves and publish-subscribe technologies become more prevalent there is a need for a common protocol. As Bob Wyman points out in this post innovative companies like PubSub are betting that standard will be XMPP. Now Google is backing up that bet with the size and clout that can make it happen.

Richard Treadway

LLRX: The Government Domain - Bloggin USA

2005-07-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

LLRX: The Government Domain - Bloggin USA

John Keegan dot org :: A FeedMesh Primer

2005-07-13T17:23:00.000-07:00

A good primer on feedmesh by John Keegan

John Keegan dot org :: A FeedMesh Primer

ben barren - rss'ing down under: Life of a Start-Up

2005-07-11T15:02:00.000-07:00

ben barren - rss'ing down under: Life of a Start-Up

The Long Tail: What the Long Tail isn't

2005-06-11T17:23:00.000-07:00

The Long Tail: What the Long Tail isn't

Test

2005-05-26T17:33:00.000-07:00

Richard Treadway test

Frankwatching - Blogosphere: 3 x 10.000.000

2005-05-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

Blog StatsFrankwatching - Blogosphere: 3 x 10.000.000

Nick Bradbury: RSS Ads: Now it Gets Tricky

2005-04-30T07:25:00.000-07:00

Nick Bradbury: RSS Ads: Now it Gets Tricky

ONLamp.com: Bosworth's Web of Data

2005-04-27T06:34:00.000-07:00

ONLamp.com: Bosworth's Web of Data

The Social Customer Manifesto: BusinessWeek Business Blogging Cover Story Nails It

2005-04-25T06:38:00.000-07:00

Corporate blogging crosses the chasm

The Social Customer Manifesto: BusinessWeek Business Blogging Cover Story Nails It

Corporate Blogging, Risk Management and "The Journalist Becoming Bigger Than The Story"

2005-04-25T06:31:00.000-07:00

Corporate Blogging, Risk Management and "The Journalist Becoming Bigger Than The Story"

Searching the future with a new interactive tool - Ecademy

2005-04-25T06:14:00.000-07:00

Searching the future with a new interactive tool - Ecademy

NewPRWiki - Main.HomePage

2005-03-15T10:51:00.000-08:00

NewPRWiki - Main.HomePage

Public Relations, PR, Publicity, Public Relations Strategies

2005-03-02T15:22:00.000-08:00

Target for brand protection use case
Public Relations, PR, Publicity, Public Relations Strategies

Best Business Blogs: Venture Capital

2005-03-02T15:15:00.000-08:00

Best Business Blogs: Venture Capital

Infectious Greed: Yo, We Won!

2005-03-02T12:35:00.000-08:00

Infectious Greed: Yo, We Won!: "I just learned through my Pubsub 'ego search' that my site was selected as one of the best business-related (specifically, venture capital) blogs on the net by the folks at Fast Company. Gee, thanks guys! I appreciate the kind words, even if I smiled somewhat at how the reviewer struggled to label my oft-times wandering musings. Guilty as charged."