So what will it be; my ecosystem or yours?

It seems to me that anywhere you go these days, there’s bound to be someone dropping that term like it’s going out of fashion. You’ll hear them talk about this ecosystem, or that ecosystem, usually in reference to any number of things from consumer products, business models, IT systems or even personal social networks (I kid you not). So just what is an ecosystem, really?

For one thing, it is an over-used / overloaded term which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to a biological system comprising all organisms that live in, and interact with, a particular physical environment. This definition is consistent with others from a variety of both lexical and semantic sources, and as a result, one can only conclude that ecosystem is used, by most non-scientific types, as a metaphor to describe similar complex systems.

As buzzwords go, the term “ecosystem” has been around for a while, yet for some reason its use (or abuse) appears to have gained traction with a much wider variety of people, professions and circumstances. For example, it is no longer unusual to hear it from the lips of: economists, technologists, consultants, media folk and even start-ups and their VCs. In a recent panel session, at a music/tech seminar, it seemed that each panelist used “ecosystem”, in different contexts & meanings, to answer to a single question! Surely it must be time to stop and call amnesty on such indiscriminate use of this term.

To be fair, there is a certain attraction to using such a rich metaphor to describe certain things, and this perhaps reflects a rather complex, information-rich and often confusing electronic age. The ecosystem concept communicates this complexity rather eloquently, comprising as it does, such intricate components as: environments, niches, food chains, roles, relationships (e.g. specialists, generalists, predators, prey, symbiosis or parasitism), and an idea of balance and equilibrium. As a result, one can easily see a similarity and applicability to modern businesses, (e.g. high-tech or financial systems), which themselves also have a complex set of interacting entities and components including: value chains, webs & networks; IT systems; information flows & controls; as well as various business and revenue models (complete with predators, prey, and mutants with emergent skills e.g. in Internet, social network, or Cloud technologies).

However, there are limitations to the ecosystem metaphor, and perhaps not everything can or should be described in terms of an ecosystem. For example, it is extremely difficult to find anything like true balance or equilibrium in areas such as high-technology, business, politics or global economics and finance (don’t even get me started). Furthermore, new and emerging patterns of complex digital interaction, usage and convergence are not yet fully understood, and this is particularly true for: content, context, rights and entitlements (e.g. individual privacy). To my mind, this is a clear indication that even complex metaphors like ecosystems may not be rich enough to properly describe the evolutionary fusion of human beings, digital technology and our physical environment, e.g. the emergence of Augumented Reality applications are a case in point.

In conclusion, ecosystem is an over-loaded term that is increasingly used by people in business, technology and other fields, to describe complexity. It works well to a large extent, but indiscriminate and uninformed use can only add further confusion and FUD to an already complex situation. It may well be that as people, technology and environment continue to evolve / converge we’re going to need even richer metaphors to describe it all. So next time someone says ecosystem, you might do well to ask: “…my ecosystem or yours?”

Posted by Jude Umeh on February 12, 2011

Augmented Reality: You Must Be Seeing Things!

Augmented Reality (aka AR), looks increasingly set to play a major role in shaping the future of mobile computing, commerce, education and advertising. It isn’t far wrong to think of this as “electronic data mist” laid over mundane physical reality, but my main concern, as ever, is what happens when Intellectual Property Rights get thrown into the mix?

Specifically, who has the right to display what content over which physical area? Will it get to a point of digital saturation, i.e. the prospect of infinite virtual content over finite physical space? Also, how do you filter out the digital noise? I’m sure each of these questions presents immense opportunities for some digital entrepreneurs to make a killing over the next few years, i.e. if they’re not already doing so.

More to the point, I saw some fledgling offerings, precursors to a future AR industry that promises a wealth of content and applications, at last month’s BCS event on AR which featured two excellent speakers (a UCL professor, and the prominent blogger/founder of augmentedplanet.com) on the topic. Suffice it to say that they presented a feast of possibilities and opportunities for any far-sighted entrepreneur or venture capitalist to grab a stake in this potentially explosive space.

However, as with most things concerned with digital content versus physical reality, there is still a lack of clarity on governance, or rules-of-engagement, for when “digital meets physical” (sic). In light of the numerous battles fought by the music, film and publishing industries over digital content misuse or piracy, it is clear that the opportunities presented by emergent capabilities like AR will also bring its own unique challenges e.g.: privacy, limitations-in-technology, and the prospect of falling down an open manhole, or bumping into a lamp-post as your reality becomes increasingly over-augmented (for more info, you can read this excellent post about “the case against Augmented Reality”)

In spite of the above, the prospect of augmented reality applications becoming more common-place and making a real impact in the fields of medicine, education and commerce is indeed very exciting. I sincerely hope that AR will grow and flourish, overcoming the challenges that face it, in order to become an indispensible tool for this and future generations.

Posted by Jude Umeh on November 6, 2010

The end of Business as Usual is only the beginning (part 3)

In Part 1 of this series we introduced Vorpal Inc, a traditional company in the popcorn machines business, entering new markets by bringing some ‘Shadow IT’ into the light.
In Part 2 we derived a generic approach from Vorpal’s service-oriented transition, ending with a hint at the need for fast-delivering development methods...

Part 3: Fast-delivered Business Value

The “Mashup Corporations” book rightfully approaches service-enabling as a mean to create Business Value. Which is a perspective that is, unfortunately, much less emphasized when talking about ‘pure’ SOA, as this is likely to be considered as a mere technological vision. And ‘Business Value’ should be defined from an outside-in perspective. Not seldomnly do enterprises make the mistake of presenting their organization and designing their services from the inside out, meaning that they are presented according to organizational divisions and borders within the enterprise. Of which an external user/viewer has no knowledge.

But this business focus doesn’t prevent a lot of thinking and learning to be spent on technical architecture and infrastructure.

Being a Scrum Evangelist myself and having applied it for over 7 years, I like to highlight some parallels and complementarity of Service-oriented Business Transformation with Agile transitions, and the power of Scrum in particular:

1. Agile development methods by nature will support and reinforce a services inspired business transformation. Because Agile has the dynamics to keep up with rapid business evolutions, accepts and encourages change as a driving force to improve. Agile has built-in principles for collaboration, business involvement, emerging architecture and design, and focuses on lively communication and trust over dead paper contracts. Deliver quickly, with high quality but on a less formal base. Go to market, learn and adapt.

   Care should be given to the fact that Agile transitions advisably also require new professions, titles and functions in their domains. This is the time to go beyond the adoption of ‘Agile’ as common ground and principles, and select a tangible framework like Scrum. It offers organizations the new professions of ScrumMaster, Product Owner, Coach, Scrum Developer and Agile Tester.


2. Agile/Scrum transition is, like the introduction of enterprise services, not a goal in itself. It should not be limited to a technical implementation, superficial ceremonies and new titles. Like an external user/viewer has no knowledge or interest on the sort of development technologies or frameworks, hence the need for more business lead/involvement in the development process as promoted by Agile/Scrum.
   
The enterprise culture should be aligned with it. Exactly the alignment that is required for service-enabled environments. Scrum is a (powerful) framework to do so. It will increase a company's Business Value in the actual ‘era of perpetual beta', where markets change, businesses change and technologies change, where nothing much seems to be stable.


3. Moving to service-enablement requires a level of Lean thinking at the corporate level. Scrum is an excellent and tangible process that implements the Lean principles for software development.


4. Scrum has the advantage of not being limited to a technology or engineering practices. It is a pattern language that can be used to enrich enterprise practices and culture.

Overall it should be the art of modern businesses, meaning enterprises as a whole, to turn uncertainty into an advantage. Instead of blocking it, it should be used to discover new business opportunities and subsequently to explore them. Moving upstream on the curve of the Adoption Life Cycle to enter new markets, from a niche entrance even challenge the gorilla. These new markets require new business models, and proven methods like Scrum are available to actually implement the new role for IT to in-force these business models. It is clear that in the chaordic circumstances of the Bowling Alley and Tornado, Agile development methods are the only ones suitable to keep up development at the pace of business change.

In my presentations on Scrum I tend to refer to what I call the ‘tROI’ prerequisite. ‘tROI’ reflects the idea of the Troyan horse to modern markets, a combination of ‘time to market’ and ‘return on investment’. It reflects that today, it no longer suffices to have a good ROI on the one hand or a reasonable time to market on the other hand. Both must be realized together, i.e. a company/product needs to go to market without delay while instantly realizing a financial return. Because change and competing products will come so fast that there will be no time to settle and stabilize before a return can be expected.

Anyone who can figure out why Capgemini has a strategic approach that is called Business As Unusual?

Read chapter 9. Or even better, contact us...

And a personal statement for my local market:

Posted by Gunther Verheyen on October 19, 2010

The end of Business as Usual is only the beginning (part 2)

In Part 1 of this series we introduced Vorpal Inc, a traditional company in the popcorn machines business, entering new markets by bringing some ‘Shadow IT’ into the light...

Part 2: The larger picture
The larger picture of what Vorpal is going through is a shift from 'hub IT' to 'Edge IT'. The wagon wheel representation shows this as a next step in historical enterprise applications evolution:

1. The ‘hub’ holds the core enterprise data and monstrous, large scale applications to maintain it, with clear, predictable processes;


2. As the limits of the hub are reached, customization and refining to new business needs happen through custom Enterprise applications;


3. The ultimate level of flexibility and dynamism is achieved by opening up to the new world via controlled services. Inevitable to remain competitive in tomorrow’s markets.

Unfortunately it is an evolution that few companies will initiate spontaneously. One single idea -ideally-, holding a promise of revenues, might trigger the transformation process. But preferably a company has a culture that stimulates its workers in creativity, provides room and space for people to think, experiment and learn. A starting point can be pretty standard collaboration tools and platforms, although that already means for traditional management to let go of micro-control. And then quickly social media come peeking around the corner...


It helps revealing new ideas at the companies that dare to go for corporate utilization of Shadow IT. It will bring what is hiding in the dark into the light. Note that this is like unlocking the unstructured hidden information in enterprises (approximately 80%!), i.e. the Dark Matter of the Digital Universe. But, like in open-source projects, it requires gatekeepers (‘repository keepers’ in the book) for the collection and realization of ideas. Gatekeepers serve to protect the overall integrity and compliance of built services.

It may require no more than utilizing the power of the already present 'computer natives' generation workers, natural born innovators, and their use of shadow IT. They naturally form communities with like-minded outsiders, your source of innovation at hand. This is “Generation 3.0”, the X & Y generation (<30y). They are a demographically increasing portion of today’s companies. By themselves highly critical on novelties and the use of new technologies, they are very peer and community minded. So let them build new relationships, discover new business enablers. Support them. Even if it requires IT departments to start thinking beyond the firewall of the company, beyond the traditional one-way communication portals, beyond classical content management. IT can rest assured that the firewall will only let pass flows and data through controlled and secure services.

The potential of the changing web should be used in corporate advantage by using it as a platform to run transaction services, by building and supporting (composite) mashup applications. The services will safeguard secure control of the data and the conversation. And the automation aspect of it will take away wasteful and robotic operations from people, reducing errors at the same time. It will open products to new markets as external parties can connect to controlled services and do business... for you. And ‘controlled’ does still mean legal agreements, contracts, concise frameworks, documented rules, service repositories and... technical support on the offered services. Not in the least as sometimes official regulations may be applicable. Companies can at last provide real-time answers to a growing on-demand market, users and customers.

The rules of service-based operations however do not only apply to the customer side. Suppliers should be offering services to which a company can connect, establishing a complete SOA-enabled supply chain, turning it into a real value chain. It holds a way of integrating with suppliers that very much resembles the Lean vision. It’s about building relationships on profit (and risk!) sharing. Mutual growth rather than a traditional supplier-customer relationship that is based upon large volume purchases, big negotiation rounds and pressuring one another, likely to end up with at least one strangled party.

The target of the SOA transformation is that there is no target, no definite end goal. The target is an ever-involving ecosystem, a living organism of actors that interact and work together upon a clear set of technical and social rules, forming a whole to flexibly respond to external circumstances and changes. Communities.

The transition to a service-enabled enterprise is not one to be made overnight. It can only be done gradually, including learning from each step.

1. It starts with the design and implementation of one or some services;


2. To move on by grouping services in systems of services that cover complete business processes and include well-thought orchestration.


3. The highest maturity consists of service-enabling all enterprise applications. This will require new professions, titles and functions. Although that’s part of what is traditionally called ‘change management’, this still is psychologically very sensitive. And the introduction of incentives in itself is not enough. People should be in many options beneficial on the ‘success’. Many fears need to be addressed.

Creating and evolving (web)services puts a lot of pressure on IT and development. It requires a ‘build-and-run-fast’ culture throughout the organization, but certainly from those building the software and applications. The book presents a little summary of eXtreme Programming, Scrum and RUP, acknowledging the added value of these fast-delivering development methods.

Good subject to elaborate on in a next part...

Posted by Gunther Verheyen on October 18, 2010

The end of Business as Usual is only the beginning (part 1)

A curious book

When joining Capgemini Belgium, the Vice President of Technology Services offered me a book that was co-authored by Andy Mulholland, the CTO of the global Capgemini organization. The title of the book is "Mashup Corporations - The End of Business as Usual". It was first published in 2006, while an updated, second version was published in 2007.
And it turned out to be a curious book. It has a story line, but it’s not a novel. Not a highly literate, fictional or romantic piece of work, but a very direct and effective tale about... technology.

Here's the first part of my three part note about it...

Part 1: Introducing Vorpal Inc.

At the surface, the story is about the company of Vorpal inc. discovering and entering new markets. But the true subject is the power of Service Oriented thinking at Enterprise level. All techies know about ‘Service Oriented Architecture’ (SOA) of course, but this book is about deeper business transformation.

Nevertheless, the story represents a real life company with real life workers and is very readable. And beyond the story the authors list practical rules, tips and examples on how to put it all to work. Luckily there’s also room for a lighter touch and humor as is shown by the main characters’ names in the org chart.

Vorpal inc. is a traditional company in the popcorn machines business. Its market orientation and the role of IT are quite defensive. The focus is on maintaining a sort of status quo, that is only surpassed by large system upgrades. For which keeping control is the main objective.

The highest ambition for 'improvement' at Vorpal is... cost cutting.

Geoffrey Moore’s (Technology) Adoption Life Cycle is only briefly mentioned in the book.
But I find it an effective mean to indicate the maturity and adoption degree of businesses and products. Vorpal is clearly in ‘Main Street’. It operates on an established market with established players, ‘gorilla’ included. And Vorpal is, as we learn, #5. Far from being the gorilla.

But... is that a new paradigm we see over there?

Vorpal, by accident, discovers new markets and business channels. The demand for customized and personalized machines. The source is a young marketeer and his blog. Because the fictive idea for such personalized machines on his blog gets picked up by external users to... make money. It illustrates how an inside innovator uses his ‘shadow IT’, i.e. IT and applications residing with company employees but outside of the company’s official IT stack, to connect with outside innovators to open up new business channels.

Luckily the company’s CEO, Mrs. Moneymaker, is open for these new directions and drives the transformation in a top-down way. The authors understood however that this top-down support is not always present and have added a chapter to describe a bottom-up process in the second edition of the book (the one I was given).

From the perspective of market adoption, exploration of these new options pushes Vorpal back up the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. Into the Bowling Alley & Tornado phases, where a different ball game is played. The era of perpetual beta. More dynamics, constant changes and all parties have to continuously adapt while keeping up a ROI.

In the next part of this series however, we will not go into the story details too much, but discuss the evolutions that Vorpal goes through in becoming a service-based enterprise.

Do note that the Vorpal transition described in the book passes quite smoothly. But, as the authors willingly confess, a real-life transition is not likely to be that easy. So, from that perspective it is a romantic novel after all.

Posted by Gunther Verheyen on October 17, 2010

IT Security is Hot & Cloudy!

Last Wednesday's BCS event on IT security certainly made that point on many different levels. If I was a betting man, I'd wager that the IT security industry is on the brink of a major revolution, on the back of that vague and fluffy thing called the Cloud.

Case in point, my question of how many people in the audience actively use the Cloud saw only a pitiful couple of hands raised. However when put in another way, by one of the presenters, i.e. how many people used Android phones for example; a few other hands went up along with looks of dawning comprehension. The Cloud rightfully exists behind the scenes, powering various services that are often taken for granted by the consumer, and the Android example simply confirms that in spite of all the buzz, your common, garden variety, consumer has little understanding or interest in this techie catnip known as cloud computing. And who can blame her, after all was it not the same geeky fads that brought us other similar buzzwords as: Application Service Provider (or ASP), Grid computing, and heck even Web 2.0?

But I digress, what's this got to do with IT Security you ask? The answer is very simple, if the Cloud is really a behind-the-scenes enabler, then Cloud security should also be behind the scenes; but I get this uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach (no, not from eating too many nibbles after the event), that it won’t be long before someone gets sued over some security breach emanating from the Cloud. How long before we get Cloud Compliance and Cloud Security Risk Assessment models, regulations and perhaps even some exotic insurance policy for Cloud based services? Furthermore, the Internet (and consequently the Cloud) is essentially borderless technology, which means that various national and international data governance regimes may have a thing or two to say about where data is stored - assuming it can be found in one place!

Finally, we also learnt that some clever Silicon Valley types are actively seeking ways to commoditize The Cloud, and Cloud based services, such that it can be traded as a financial instrument. Now where have we seen that one before – does Collateralized Debt Obligation ring a bell? Suffice it to say there’s a lot of food for thought when it comes to Cloud Security, and far better qualified people than I have pondered, spoken and written about it (e.g. see my review of an excellent book about Cloud Security), so I shall just leave well enough alone.

Aside from the cloudy issue of cloud security (sic), the event provided many opportunities for attendees to hear and debate other key topics of interest in IT Security, and our four speakers did a great job of keeping people engaged throughout. More information, including presentation slides, can be found on the BCS NLB website.

Posted by Jude Umeh on September 17, 2010

The Buzzword Facebook Effect

It’s amazing how the right buzzword can galvanise interest even in the dullest of topics. Think seamy tabloid headline meets uber-cool geek speak, and you’ll get the picture. This post is about a particular buzzword, and the effect its having on your life right now (even as you read this post), and that word is Facebook!

Given there’s already a couple of books and a recent movie, plus a brand new Location Based Service for Facebook, (ps. “location-based-anything” is itself a major buzz-phrase), it can be taken as read that the Facebook buzzword is having an effect like there is no tomorrow.

I recently reviewed an eponymously titled “The Facebook Effect”, a book that chronicles the creation of this huge social networking phenomenon which probably plays too much of a role in your life, and that of half a billion other users worldwide. One thing that stuck in my mind was the vivid description of Facebook’s early growth across US university campuses. The strategy involved waiting until there was near hysterical demand for Facebook in each university, which invariably led to a geometric uptake once it was launched in that institution, and in turn, this created even more demand from other schools that were not yet on Facebook. This pattern of pent-up demand leading to rapid and explosive take-up of a new service or product, (also seen in the aftermath of Apple’s product launches), is something I like to think of as the “popcorn effect” for obvious reasons.

Other buzzwords that have an associated effect include the well known Network effect (as exemplified by Metcalfe’s law, i.e. the value of a network increases exponentially with each new user); also the equally potent Oprah effect, with her multi-billion dollar impact on businesses (mainly based on her core audience of women with a spending power of several trillion dollars per annum), it’s no wonder why companies and individuals will do almost anything to be a guest on Oprah’s show.

In light of these, it seems you can forget about the usual trappings of wealth like: mansions, private planes or even your own Island, because you’ve only truly arrived when you have an “effect” appended to your name, your product or to your company!

========
Jude Umeh is a senior consultant and enterprise architect in Capgemini, and you can follow him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or his Wordpress blog where this post was previously published.

Posted by Jude Umeh on August 19, 2010

Weekly digest of week 29 2010

Hereby ten links for the weekly digest of week 29 of 2010

• How Are Email, Facebook and Twitter Audiences Different? With marketers engaging with consumers across multiple channels, messages must be tailored to resonate with audiences on email and social sites. But research suggests a look at simple demographics does not give a clear indication of how audiences differ; engagement in these channels is personal and depends more on psychographic characteristics.
• The Cost of Social Media Phobia Far from being a distraction, social networking can drive productivity, customer service, and profits, users say.
• Where to Reach Women Online Women are a prime target of marketers, and with good reason: Estimates put their share of household spending at 80%, giving them control over about $1.7 trillion annually in the US.
• Mopay lets online shoppers pay with land line Mobile payments outfit mopay has rolled out a service that lets online merchants bill purchases directly to consumers' land line phone accounts.
• Locations That Are Aware: Making The Check-In Obsolete Mark Cuban recently blogged about his investment in a company that takes video of an area and can tell you exactly how many people are in the capture area at any given time.

Light reading:

• The One Mistake That Will Kill Your Facebook Page Strategy
• Indian government working on $35 tablet, hopes to get it as low as $10
• Like Dimples On a Golf Ball – These Are The Silos of Social CRM
• So the Reality Check on Apple's iPhone Complaints Numbers and Dropped Calls
• Definition of Cloud Computing, incorporating NIST and G-Cloud views

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or his personal blog

Posted by Rick Mans on July 26, 2010

Weekly digest of week 28 2010

Hereby ten links for the weekly digest of week 28 of 2010

• Internet investment's new champions: The emerging online giants DST, Naspers and Tencent have made promising internet investments in many emerging markets. Now even Western internet financiers are emulating them
• Digital sales gains over physical in 2011 According to data released July 7 by Nielsen SoundScan, the sales tracking system for music, published by Billboard magazine, digital albums now account for 27.4% of music purchases, up from 21.5% at the same point last year.
• Ben & Jerry's Drops Email Marketing In Favor of Social Media Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream of Vermont announced in an email to their subscribers last week that they will be discontinuing their regular email marketing campaigns, in favor of social media.
• New World of Warcraft Pet, Celestial Steed Banks $2 million in 4 hours If you haven’t been surfing through Bilzzard’s pet store in the past two days, you might have missed one of the new pets for WoW: Celestial Steed.
• Microsoft Pays Mobile App Developers to Help It Catch Apple Microsoft Corp. is paying developers to build mobile applications for its Windows Phone 7 system to help it narrow a lead by rival products from Apple Inc. and Google Inc.

Light Reading:

• The Old Spice Social Media Campaign by the Numbers
• Web 2.0: Is the public sector really behind the private sector?
• The intranet is dead. Long live the intranet.
• How To Drive Adoption For Your Enterprise 2.0 Deployment with Videos
• Gen Y Isn’t Leaving Social Media – Are You Ready For Them?

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or his personal blog

Posted by Rick Mans on July 19, 2010

Copyright and Technology 2010

Last week's event on copyright and technology has led me to the conclusion that a long-overdue dialogue is slowly taking place between two vital groups in the digital content economy, i.e. the legal and technology stakeholders. However, it also raised some questions about likely winners and losers in the evolution of a digital content ecosystem.

This inaugural conference took place in in New York City, and I was lucky enough to be invited to moderate a panel session on the role and future of DRM, and other content protection technologies, that inhabit the interface between copyright and technology. Below are some key messages from this event:

• DRM is not quite dead. If anything it is alive and well, outside of “permanent Internet music downloads”, according to event chairman Bill Rosenblatt in his opening address, which was also a master class on the trajectory of challenges and developments in the battle between copyright and digital technology.
• “Sopranos level” commercial piracy, as operated by sophisticated / profit-oriented criminal organizations, (i.e. not your ordinary file-sharing individual) have become the key focus of attention and anti-piracy efforts by major content owners. According to Viacom’s Stanley Pierre-Louis, organizations like Viacom are making every effort to find the “right balance to take advantage of new platforms whilst protecting IP”.
• Innovative approaches are critical for video content monetization – For example, Ads are video too, and Google’s Shalini Govil-Pai described how more brands are now using YouTube to ‘prove’ their ads before putting them out via more expensive broadcast TV channels
• Interoperability is vital. And initiatives like the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) will help “provide users with a choice of platforms”, according to Mitch Singer (CTO for Sony Pictures Entertainment). However, one notable absentee from this 50+ strong consortium is Apple which operates its own closed content ecosystem.
• “You can’t monetize what you can’t identify”, therefore correct content identification is a critical element in any monetization effort. Technologies like Fingerprinting and Watermarking both play a large part in making this happen, but there’s still more work to be done, and implementation can be tough.
• Progressive Response (aka 3 Strikes) and ISP level monitoring may be flawed – A telling question from speaker Gary Greenstein, (IP lawyer from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati) was: “What if you connect to your own music collection over an ISP, would that not be a false positive for copyright infringement”?
• Rights Management is still a major headache – An observation from my panel session was that although DRM still has a role and future (even if by another name) in digital content monetization, by far the bigger issue for content owners remains the challenge of inadequate rights management for content. This is an area that is actively being addressed by companies like Teradata, SAP and Capgemini which together can deliver even more innovative solutions for IP rights management

However, there is still a lot of work to be done before copyright and technology can claim to work well together (see my session intro slides). One attendee’s poignant observation highlighted the relatively limited availability of legal content (perhaps as a result of cumbersome content rights models, infrastructure issues or outdated release window models), versus widely available but illegal / pirate copies that can be found online, sometimes even before commercial release of the product!

In conclusion, this was a very useful and timely conference given the high level of engagement and interaction (including the customaryTwitter commentary) between audience and speakers, right from the start. However it could have done with mixing up the legal / technology streams a bit more, but the overall feedback was positive, and I suspect many attendees, and the entire content industry, would benefit from more of this type of event and dialogue in the future. Hopefully the next one might even be held right here in London - aka the birthplace of modern copyright!

Jude Umeh is a senior consultant and enterprise architect, and you can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn

Posted by Jude Umeh on June 23, 2010

What is the cost of disruptive innovation?

Lately it seems I’ve become immersed in all things start-up, and can even spout buzzwords like funding rounds, exit strategies and venture capitalisation, at the least provocation. However, I’m puzzled as to why most early stage start-ups, and their investors, appear rather too obsessed with money (i.e. raising / spending / making it) instead of focusing on creating and establishing a great service or product first.

In these extraordinary times, an online product or service must be clearly innovative (and preferably disruptive) at some level, before it can be considered great; which brings me back to the key question above: what does it really cost to innovate and disrupt? At the risk of sounding simplistic, I seriously think that it should cost no more than time multiplied by the cost of connectivity. The reasoning behind this is as follows:

1. Innovation is mostly incremental and evolutionary, and only rarely radical and revolutionary, (even though the impact may be both radical and revolutionary -e.g. Apple’s iSuite-of-products). This means that the key ingredients for many innovative and disruptive offerings are usually already available, (and sometimes freely so), thus the innovator is mainly tasked with combining them into a compelling new product or service (occasionally with some inventive glue to hold it all together). In the online world this would be something like a “mash-up” of pre-existing services.
2. In an evolutionary system, there are usually many imitators for each successful individual, product or service. Some of these imitators might even employ various differentiating strategies in order to conquer a niche, or perhaps overthrow the incumbent where possible, but the fact remains that they are building on the success of others. Therefore the efforts (and cost) should be less than that incurred by the originators. Re-inventing the wheel is expensive, but this is exactly what I’ve seen many start-ups attempting to do today!
3. Finally, flexibility and sustainability are key success factors, in my opinion, because you’ll need to adapt rapidly to the relentless change of an ever-shifting online environment (and what better way than by not having to write custom code each time). Also, if you haven’t failed fast enough to become self sustaining in a relatively short space of time, then there is something seriously wrong with your business model which your investors’ money cannot easily fix. Two examples that embody these qualities respectively are: SliceThePie (a fan-funded music service that has evolved into a music industry “Swiss Army Knife” of flexibility and value); and Betfair (a major industry-disrupting online betting exchange and service provider which just turned 10 years old today!)

In conclusion, if a start-up is not innovative enough to effectively build on the success of others, (and in so doing, reduce its cost significantly), then it has a serious problem which might indicate an inability (i.e. it is not flexible or sustainable enough) to survive and succeed in the current and emerging economic landscape.

(Disclaimer: The above post represents this author’s personal opinion, and does not constitute professional assessment or investment advise in any way, shape or form; also it is not an endorsement of any of the companies or services mentioned above as examples, which are solely based on publicly available information)

Jude Umeh is a senior consultant and enterprise architect, and you can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn

Posted by Jude Umeh on June 9, 2010

Weekly digest of week 21 2010

This week al lot of news about Facebook and privacy and privacy in general. Also research about the half-life of a YouTube video and why Google doesn’t have to win a battle with Apple.

• For Female Social Followers, Brands Rule About one-half of online women in the US were fans or followers of a company’s social marketing presence in April 2010, according to a survey from SheSpeaks and iVillage.
• You are what you say: privacy risks of public mentions In today's data-rich networked world, people express many aspects of their lives online. It is common to segregate different aspects in different places: you might write opinionated rants about movies in your blog under a pseudonym while participating in a forum or web site for scholarly discussion of medical ethics under your real name.
• UK Evolution of Digital Media Survey Points to Consumer Rejection of Subscription Services? The survey undertaken by HP illustrates that when it comes to the progression from physical to digital ownership of media, the UK population are far from being ‘Space Age’.
• Millennials: Generation next Management reports suggest 20-somethings are an employment headache but it's time employers woke up to our aspirations
• The Half-Life Of A YouTube Video Is 6 Days A video on YouTube gets 50% of its views in the first 6 days it is on the site, according to data from analytics firm TubeMogul. After 20 days, a YouTube video has had 75% of its total views.

Light reading:

• Why Controlling Bosses Have Unproductive Employees
• Facebook CEO: private or public, It makes NO difference to us and advertising. Erm, what?
• Patients Like Me: Share Disease Treatment and Symptom Information
• Google vs Apple: Google Doesn't Need To Win
• How To Use Google Wave for Live Blogging

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on May 31, 2010

Weekly digest of week 20 2010

This week information about measuring ROI and on reporting marketing ROI to the C-Suite, why Facebook isn’t your friend, and why HTML5 vs Flash isn’t a war and why Flash won’t die.

• Facebook is not your friend If you care about your privacy and that of your real friends, unfriend Facebook now. We are its product, not its customers
• Saying information wants to be free does more harm than good It's better to stop surveillance control because it is the people who really want to be free
• How to earn money: 17 typical eBusiness Models ScanYours approaches eBusiness consultancy in a structured way, using a eBusiness model. A business model tries to translate the more or less informal relations within organisations into building blocks and the relations between building blocks.
• Stepping Up to ROI Measurement Marketers around the world agree that it is important to get the full picture when evaluating online marketing success, but research from Chief Marketer, Collective and Datran Media indicates that marketers still consider the click-through their main form of measurement despite its flaws.
• Marketing ROI Reporting To The C-Suite What is the most effective way to measure and report on marketing ROI?

Light reading

• Brands and the Dark Side of Social Media
• SAP's emerging SaaS strategy: 'On premise on demand'
• HTML5 And Flash: Why It’s Not A War, And Why Flash Won’t Die
• Women Take Lead on Mobile Coupons
• Introducing the Google Font API & Google Font Directory

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on May 24, 2010

Weekly digest of week 17 2010

This week different views on the web and how we use it: is the mouse dead, is H.264 the video codec of the future and do browsers need to innovate?

• We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
• Finextra: Banco Sabadell gears up for iPad launch Spain's Banco Sabadell has unveiled iPad and iPhone specific versions of its mobile banking service.
• The touch computing digital divide: Is the mouse dead? Microsoft kills its Courier dual screen tablet. HP’s Slate may be on the rocks. Apple’s Steve Jobs pans Adobe for catering to the mouse crowd (among about  other reasons). And HP buys Palm in a move to grab the WebOS, which will presumably power smartphones as well as tablets from the company.
• The web sucks. Browsers need to innovate The web as an application platform stinks, and I think this is even more apparent now as we see incredible iPad apps being released. Why are iPad apps, in their initial versions, so much better than websites that have existed for years?
• H.264 Already Won—Makes Up 66 Percent Of Web Videos As the chart shows, in the past four quarters, the H.264 format went from 31 percent of all videos to 66 percent, and is now the largest format by far.

Light reading

• Facebook and the New SEO
• UK parties iPhone apps. Who got it wrong, who got it right.
• The military goes social
• Education 2.0: The Importance of Ownership
• Enterprise 2.0 & The Future of Work

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on May 3, 2010

Weekly digest of week 13 2010

This week the news that everybody in the UK might get his own personalized homepage, a comparison of social media monitoring tools, Facebook changing again its privacy settings and Social as a Service.

• Every citizen to have personal webpage Everyone in the country is to be given a personalised webpage for accessing Government services within a year as part of a plan to save billions of pounds by putting all public services online, Gordon Brown is to announce.
• EasyJet taking social media seriously as Facebook booking engine comes a step closer Will EasyJet be the first low cost carrier to offer full booking facilities on a major social network?
• Word of Mouth and Social Media: A Tale of Two Burger Joints AJ Bombers and Sobelman's.  Both have used Word of Mouth (WOM) to become successful small businesses, but while one built its buzz over 10 years, the other used social media to become a success in just one year.
• Keeping a Closer Eye on Employees’ Social Networking A service released earlier this week by Teneros, an online communication services company, makes it much easier for companies to keep tabs on their employees’ social networking activities.
• Social as a Service, Rather Than an Application The daily work of people across most of human history has been a social activity. However, information technology in the workplace has not reflected this.

Light reading:

• Why 3D TV is just a pointless gimmick
• Social media monitoring tools
• Facebook's privacy changes: When will it go too far (and will you even notice)?
• Innovation Perspectives - Kill Your Innovation Champion
• Serendipity is unexpected relevance

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on April 5, 2010

Weekly digest of week 12 2010

This week a showcase on how not to use social media by Nestle on Facebook. Pay your friends via your social network and the death of the web browser.

• Nestle's Facebook Page: How a Company Can Really Screw Up Social Media Like the Force, Facebook can be a powerful ally — but beware the Dark Side. This is a tale of how a big company can land itself in a PR nightmare in a matter of minutes, all thanks to the power of social media.
• CIOs Care About the Semantic Web Web 2.0 initiatives, social networking, software as a service and the general explosion of data within an enterprise’s four walls is why this matters now to the CIO community. “CIOs have to provide more effective data integration of meteorically increasing information–organizations must link, consume, and make valuable use of that internal and external data,” says Dr. Graham Rong, chair of the symposium.
• World’s First: Dutch Social Network Hyves Integrates ‘No Fee’ Social Payments Hyves with its 9 million Dutch profiles and around 250 million pageviews per day is by far the biggest social network in the Netherlands. Almost 60% of all Dutch inhabitants have a Hyves account.
• The Opposite of Fitts' Law If you've ever wrangled a user interface, you've probably heard of Fitts' Law. It's pretty simple — the larger an item is, and the closer it is to your cursor, the easier it is to click on. Kevin Hale put together a great visual summary of Fitts' Law, so rather than over-explain it, I'll refer you there.
• Facebook Could Be The Next Advertising Giant Facebook has recently overthrown Google as the number 1 most visited site in the U.S.

Light reading:

• The Death of The Web Browser
• Check.in Is A Potentially Brilliant Remedy For Check-In Fatigue
• 6 Do's and Don'ts for Your Company's Twitter Account
• Why Social Media And Politics Are A Dangerous Mix
• Social media monitoring and analytics

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on March 29, 2010

Weekly digest of week 11 2010

This week some insight how to apply an old book to community design, , how getting your kids to eat peas is quite identical to changing corporate culture and 10 key awareness metrics to track.

• Applying “A Pattern Language” To Online Community Design A Pattern Language is a book about architecture that was written in the 1970s, before the Web as we know it was even conceived.
• Changing corporate culture is like getting kids to eat peas Corporate culture is defined as the sum of values, customs, traditions and meanings of an organization. The stories we tell and the way we speak and behave in a company amplify its existence.
• Facebook chatter betrays alleged Mafia hitman Italy's godfathers might well be holding emergency meetings this weekend, after one of their remarkably obedient godsons was snared due to an especially pernicious habit. Yes, chatting on Facebook.
• Chatroulette Takes the College Crowd by Storm If you’ve been paying attention to the blogs over the past month, you’ve probably started noticing an increasing focus on (and maybe even an obsession with?) Chatroulette.
• All Your Apps Are Belong to Apple: The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement | Electronic Frontier Foundation The entire family of devices built on the iPhone OS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) have been designed to run only software that is approved by Apple—a major shift from the norms of the personal computer market.

Light reading:

• Proof that social media DOES work
• Social Media Trustbusters: Look At Me Marketing Gone Wild
• Microsoft Builds A Twitter Clone For Your Business
• 10 Key Awareness Metrics to Track
• From Haiti to the Oscars: Wikimedia's Community at its Best

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on March 22, 2010

Weekly digest of week 10 2010

This week it’s about the changing face of social networks, how SeaWorld used social media to react quickly to a major crisis and do you wonder what happens to you website when you die?

• Is Social CRM The Key To Innovation? We all want our businesses to grow and most of us can agree that growth comes through innovation. To innovate, a company must understand the needs of their customers
• SeaWorld uses social media to react quickly to a major crisis The recent killer whale attack at SeaWorld could have been the end of the theme park. It was that bad.
• Changing Face of Social Networks Five years is a lifetime for the average teenager’s habits. In 2005, MSN was top dog in the social-networking scene; two years later it was MySpace (owned by News Corp., publisher of this service), which was then quickly superseded by Facebook.
• Flash Player: CPU Hog or Hot Tamale? It Depends. In part, Steve Jobs stated that the iPad didn't support Flash because it was a "CPU Hog," so Apple used a technology called HTML5 instead
• What Happens to Your Website If You Die? You may not think that your website, your blog, your freelance business, is something you need to think about in your last will and testament, but it is. It’s an asset you own, and it needs to be sold, dissolved, or left to someone you trust to continue running it.

Light reading:

• 11 Free Tools for Social Media Optimization
• Ultimate guide to table UI patterns
• RSA 1024-bits Key Encryption Cracked
• Foursquare + Google Maps = FourWhere
• Bing Took Another Slice Of Yahoo’s Market Share in February

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on March 15, 2010

Weekly digest of week 9 2010

This week an explaination about what the difference is between ubiquitous computing and augmented reality, boomers slowly moving to the mobile web, should IT run like a business or a nonprofit and the next generation user interface: skinput.

• Socializing with the Fortune 500 A longitudinal study from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research shows steady uptake of social media marketing activities by Fortune 500 companies, with Twitter a clear winner.
• 5 Reasons Why Chatroulette Is Addictive, and Worth a Try Everyone from the mainstream media to celebrities is obsessing over Chatroulette, the website that randomly connects users through one-on-one videochat with strangers around the world. Why is it so addictive?
• Feature checklist dysfunction The tech press loves checklist comparisons. Let’s evaluate the iPhone to see whether it’s a good product:
• Defining ubiquitous computing vs. augmented reality What’s the difference between Ubiquitous Computing (“ubicomp”) and Augmented Reality (“AR”)?
• Boomers Slowly Warm to Mobile Web Baby boomers are on the verge of adopting smartphones and the mobile Internet, and in the vanguard of this movement are younger boomers.

Light reading:

• 8 Things Your Phone Will (Probably) Replace
• The Strategy Trap: Why focusing too much on strategy could be killing your ability to execute
• Forget Touchscreens, The Future’s Going To Be Skinput
• Should IT run “like a business” or “like a non-profit?
• 7 Social Media Behaviors That Won't Win You Customers

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on March 8, 2010

What thing is this twitter !

During a recent backpacking trip in Indian hinterland, one of the evenings as I watched TV placed in corner of tea shop in a small town, news of an acrimonious war of words between a famous Indian movie star and a political party was playing on. News channel was reporting what the star had to say on controversy, not through interview given to news agency or channel but through tweets on his twitter account. As the saga was unfolding on twitter the new channel was merely picking it up and broadcasting. Someone seated nearby exclaimed "Ye twitter kya cheej hai (what thing is this twitter)" . And this could have summarized what many people in India have wondered for past few months. Twitter has been in constant news. If it is not a political leader who is fast building a reputation of getting into trouble in parliament because of his tweets ,then it is news about what some Hindi movie star has posted on his/her twitter account. In a way it is ironical that mainstream media that had labeled twitter as flippant when it was gaining traction with geeky crowd and early adopters, is now doing more for twitter's promotion.

Like elsewhere in world, twitter is rapidly growing in India in terms of number of users. Inflection point occurred after tragic Mumbai terror attack when traditional news media discovered how powerful and fast Twitter was in spreading information. For much of last year twitter's growth has been on upswing thanks to quick adoption by news channels and traditional media. There is hardly any news channel now which has not integrated twitter as a feedback and live user commenting tool. But with recent events involving popular movie stars which have brought twitter itself to news headlines and front pages of newspapers, Twitter's growth in India will perhaps go on a different trajectory. Hindi Cinema also sometime referred to as Bollywood is one of two major obsessions in India, other being wildly popular game of Cricket. And with movie stars, coming to Twitter in drove, a different segment of users is taking up to twitter. It is not then perhaps surprising that a news channel recently gave away Indian twitterer of year award to a movie producer and director who it claimed has got large chunk of movie folks and film fraternity onto twitter. Last year, Twitter itself hosted Mallika Sherawat, a Hindi film actress in its office and stated that she was instrumental in membership in India to skyrocket. It is easy to understand why stars and celebrities are adopting twitter as it helps them promote their movies, directly connect to fans and do PR without risk of being misquoted. And of course this is threatening existence of celebrity gossip magazines and paparazzi and is bringing hordes of fans to twitter if just out of curiosity.

It is worth to note that last year in October, Twitter had struck a deal with one of major Indian telecom companies , allowing its users to tweet through SMS on normal rates. It is significant because India has huge penetration of mobile phone users with almost 600 million mobile users as compared to just 50 million internet users. With mobile users projected to grow to 1200 million by 2015, India stands as a lucrative and expanding market for mobile twitter. Twitter CEO ,Evan Williams himself says that even though lots of twitter growth has come through web, their visions has been "to spread Twitter to the weakest connection in the world", which in this part of world happens to be a no frill mobile phone. In a recent TV interview, transcripts of which can be found here, Evans also hints at possible ways of making money through twitter ads as lots of information shared is commercial in nature. He also notes how companies are using twitter to connect to their customers and possibility of making money out of analytics data which companies will be interested in buying. So, as twitter chalks out plans of making money out of its platform, many new users will keep flocking to twitter if only to check ….what thing is this twitter. And as we know, that warrants a long answer.

Posted by Gaurav Sharma on March 6, 2010

Weekly digest of week 8 2010

This week: what happens to your digital life when you are dead, is Second Life about to enter its second life, You vs My and what social media guidelines say about your company.

• Facebook comes under German law – The Local Since Facebook had opened an office in Hamburg on February 11, Schaar said that the company was now subject to Germany's strict data protection laws, the federal government official told broadcaster Deutschlandradio.
• 12 Undocumented Tricks for Google Buzz So. Google just recently announced Google Buzz. I’m not sure about you, but I didn’t see this coming. Sure, Google was bound to start a social network of some sort at some time; but, I didn’t think it’d be this soon!
• Your vs. My Pattern There are two schools of thought on this. The names of some popular sites hint at this dilemma: MyYahoo, MySpace, YouTube.
• New Study Shows 'Intent' Behind Mobile Internet Use According to a new survey announced today by Ruder Finn, one of the world's largest, independent public relations agencies, Americans are spending an average of 2.7 hours on the mobile Internet – connecting socially, managing their personal finances, and even as a means for advocacy.
• Scott Brown on Managing Your Digital Remains Hamlet, that lucky stiff, only had to worry about being or not being — what a nice, binary Denmark he lived in. We modern mopes, on the other hand, must consider not only our too, too solid flesh but also our online infinitude.

Light reading:

• Microsoft on Google Apps
• Is Second Life about to enter its “second life?”
• Social Technology Buyers Matrix: Broad vs Specialized vs Do It Yourself
• What social media guidelines say about your company
• The Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on March 1, 2010

Weekly digest of week 7 2010

This week: smart people click less, introduction of the social connector in Microsoft Outlook, which is useful since social networkers love email and the BBC news boss is clear: use social media or find a new job.

• Film director says Southwest blogged away his privacy Smith, the director of such movies as "Clerks" and a man who made an appearance at last week's Macworld, was reportedly removed from a Southwest flight Saturday for being a hazard to its stability.
• Social Networkers Still Love E-Mail With reports of young people abandoning e-mail to communicate via social networks, Facebook developing its own full-featured Webmail system and predictions that in a few years even business users will have exchanged traditional e-mail for social sites, it would appear that the success of social networks was hurting e-mail usage.
• Welcome to the Site-less Web Posterous is a new service that radiates a person’s social media activity out to a network of community sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Delicious.
• In the Netherlands, 1 Gbps Broadband Will Soon Be Everywhere Google last week announced Google Fiber, an experimental fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network that the company plans to build and use to connect between 20,000 and 200,000 homes.
• Study: Ages of social network users How old is the average Twitter or Facebook user? What about all the other social network sites, like MySpace, LinkedIn, and so on?

Light reading:

• The iPad Is Step 1 In The Future Of Computing. This Is Step 2 (Or 3).
• BBC News boss gives staff some career advice: Use social media or find another job
• The Smarter You Are, The Less You Click
• Google Buzz Explodes the Myth of First Mover Advantage. Again
• Microsoft Outlook Is Starting To Look Like A Poor Man’s Xobni

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on February 22, 2010

To search or to find? That is the question

There's more information on the Internet than one could apprehend in a hundred lifetimes, and it's growing too - and (most of the times) kept up-to-date. Different organisations, places and networks holding that information make it hard to get it all together, so how to make that information homogenous, and uniformly accessible?

Can it be done? Should it be done?

Over the last decade we went from data to knowledge.The World Wide Web has linked companies and consumers in the last decade. This inspired the more shy organisations to build intranets, where only company people would find each other
That was about linking data: the same things could be done in a new way
Then web shops came. Forums. Peer to peer networks for sharing ever legal and not so legal delight. All that came and became mainstream so fast that the inter-intra move didn't even have time to "happen".
That was about connecting, and information: more or less new things were done in new ways
In the last few years, social networks conquered the digital earth: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Such a different kind of behaviour, it was absolutely new. It was using the infrastructure already laid out (computers, networks and people using those) to build upon.
That was about sharing information, acquiring knowledge: entirely new means to an entirely new end.

Meanwhile, WikiPedia was born. An unprecedented source of information with more than 14,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages.
Stats in monthly unique visitors for all that: LinkedIn 15 million, Facebook 130 million, Twitter 55 million, WikiPedia 60 million.
That's a lot of data, information and knowledge. And it's all out there. Wait, where?

Yes, it's all out there, pretty much. Google helps us in finding it, almost real-time. We've seen some struggles with Facebook that treated their data as a walled garden, but they're slowly opening up too. With Google starting to index books, video and other content, all knowledge in the world starts to become available online and realtime.
But it is scattered all over the place, in different forms, behind different doors: not uniform or homogenous. It's very diverse

The Integration theme: overcoming diversity

Integrating applications, departments and companies has shown this same theme over the last decades: diversity in form, location and accessibility has to be overcome.
The European Parliament shows how that can be done: introduce an intermediate language (or two, in that case), support different communication channels, and facilitate-by-translation.
That works very well for all: the focus and attention remains on the "stars" themselves, the highly specialised participants. Like business shouldn't be bothered with IT, they aren't bothered by the linguistical barriers and can just move in and out.

There's a big precondition to all that though, which is that the semantics are agreed upon beforehand. In the European Parliament somehow magically, changing semantics are picked up by all parties involved. Now how does all this work in the World Wide Web?

The first WWW problem: different format
Structured versus unstructured versus semi-structured. HTML, text, .doc, .PDF, Facebook updates, Tweets, it's all different. However, search engines make all of that transparent. After all, there are only so many syntaxes around. Of course, visuals like video and images are an entirely different topic, but even those are magically informated by Google
The second WWW problem: different location
Is it on the web, or behind a company firewall? Does it need authorisation? Only what is openly available can be searched. And it doesn't matter whether it is located north, east, south, west, or orbiting around earth. Search engines make all of that transparent too
The third WWW problem: different languages, dialects and typos
It still takes too many rules to perfectly translate a language to another one. English is widely present though, and there are as many typos and spelling errors made by native speakers as by foreigners. All that has to be taken into account as well. Luckily most search engines do. They suggest correct spelling if you search something and misspell it. They'll even include misspelt search results

The real WWW problem: different semantics

The biggest problem is (changing) semantics. Wikipedia spends pages and pages on disambiguation explaining the differences between one word or acronym, and the other. The word web, for instance, can have entirely different meanings in different contexts. Even if, across all different forms, locations and languages, you are looking for the word web, what is the context you want to place it in? Heck, you might not even know that yourself...
The best example of how vivid a semantic discussion can be is the initial discussion around  E2.0 and Social Business Design

The possible solution: autonomous tagging

Tagging is a way of labelling a piece of information with a single word or phrase. Tags are decided upon individually by humans, in relative isolation. There is no central, global tagging system where one can pick their tags from. Although tags now also are a form of language or at least communication. If information were to be tagged, these tags could be translated or related, and form connections across all diversities.

What if there were a tag knowledgebase much like today's Wikipedia? Where tags are maintained, explained, etcetera? This would be the ultimate source of metadata, making it possible for the Single Source of Search to be conducted. Its interface could be defined and plugged into, and it would be the single source of truth for the Semantic Web
Bots could crawl the entire Web tagging information whether it's HTML, PDF, Video or images or whatsoever

In my last post I explained about the position and quality of humans versus machines. This very complex and dynamic terrain is definitely something that needs to be explored and maintained by humans first. When that's succesful, we might be able to automate that, and skip to the next level: wisdom

Thanks to Paolo Saitti for asking a few nasty questions and giving a few nasty answers at the same time; here they are:

Tagging however will require certain semantical and cultural alignment. The level of knowledge also dictates the detailedness of search. SQL Server is too generic if you want to find something about SQL Server 2008 Service Broker - but you need that level of knowledge to be able to know the difference!
At the basis, agreed semantics are needed. Human beings simply call it a dictionary. The traditional dictionary experience is quite enlightening: new words spring up from informal usage, often from jargon language. This is the dynamic and "democratic" evolution of natural languages. As they become (very) common, the compilers of the dictionaries decide to include the new terms in the "official" language. Here an upper authority is required to provide a formal unambiguous definition for the new word.
Distributed, informal, continously evolving tagging (a bottom-up process) is enough for human interactions. On the other hand we'll need a formal, robust and agreed tagging dictionary with a consistent effort to develop and maintain it (a top-down process) in order to build semantic applications exploiting contents over the web.

Martijn Linssen is Enterprise Integration Architect within Capgemini. You can find him on Twitter. Paolo Saitti is Enterprise Software Engineer within Capgemini. You can find him on Twitter

Posted by Martijn Linssen on February 16, 2010

Weekly digest of week 6 2010

In this week’s digest: There is a new younger generation: the iGeneration, schools shouldn’t block social network sites, we all know benefits of SaaS, but are there more benefits than just more low costs. And if you have been buzzing about Google Buzz, take a look at the special edition of the weekly digest about Google Buzz.

• Schools shouldn't block social network sites Why schools should stop blocking social network sites.
• The Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 Experience Continuum Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 efforts need to work in conjunction with one another and that’s what this whole post is about.
• Lurking: a Challenge or a Fruitful Strategy? This study investigates interpersonal, procedural, and technological knowledge sharing barriers.
• Tech-savvy 'iGeneration' kids multi-task, connect Move over, Millennials. You're not the younger generation anymore.
• Cloud Security Using… Social Networks? I've always been drawn to the more forgivably human downsides to the whole SaaS/Cloud concept like this one: How on earth do you prevent password sharing?

Light reading:

• Augmented Reality Coming to Video Conferencing
• Top 3 Business Benefits of (internal) Enterprise 2.0
• Information Management loves Enterprise 2.0
• Cascaad Taps Social Graph for Tailored News
• The benefits of SaaS (beyond low cost)

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on February 15, 2010

Weekly digest of week 5 2010

This week the big news that you can play Tetris on your TV, a demonstration of 3D with CSS, subscriptions are becoming more and more important and social search is about mobile and not about Google.

• Subscriptions are the New BLACK. (+ why Facebook, Google, & Apple will own your wallet by 2015) - The key to success in payment systems is to begin with the foundation of frequent-use products, so that users won't forget their passwords. Whether intentional or not, Facebook has played this game to perfection.
• Pure CSS Coke Can (3D) By a combination of the CSS1 properties background-attachment and background-position, 2D displacement maps could be created and, by scrolling, the displacement map would be applied to different parts of the texture (a background image).
• Now you can play Tetris on your TV Game company Oberon Media has somehow found something in common with both the Tetris Company and the Dish Network.
• Gartner Reveals Five Social Software Predictions for 2010 and Beyond “Success in social software and collaboration will be characterized by a concerted and collaborative effort between IT and the business”
• Enterprise 2.0 Adoption – Strategic and Tactical Considerations No conversation about Enterprise 2.0 proceeds very far without coming to the idea of Return on Investment (ROI).

Light reading:

• iPad vs Flash: Developers Choose Wisely
• Why You Should Be Afraid Of Internet Censorship in Australia, Even If You Don’t Live There
• Now more than ever, employers and HR pros are digging into your web presence.
• Innovation Teams Lack Data, Structure
• Forget Google, social search is all about mobile

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on February 8, 2010

Weekly digest of week 52 2009

In the last digest of 2009: A look ahead in 2010 on browser trends, flexible packages, technology trends and the Groundswell. The Economist is getting social, Napster was a good thing for the music industry and Enterprise Microblogging has more practical use than Twitter.

• Making The Economist social
  The Economist newspaper plans to acquire 500,000 fans on Facebook and 750,000 followers on Twitter within six months, says the FT, calling it another sign that traditional publishers are looking to social media as a substantial source of web traffic and new readers
• 10 Cloud and SaaS Apps Strategies For 2010
  Keep In Mind Basic Rules Still Apply Regardless Of Deployment Option
• Napster: The File-Sharing Service That Started It All?
  Unfortunately, Garland doesn't think iTunes or streaming services like Pandora will save the music industry. He says that a decade from now, industry executives may be longing for the days of Napster — when they could blame piracy for all of their problems.
• Why Enterprise Microblogging Has More Practical Use for Everyday People Than Twitter
  Microblogging, integrated with other social software, will be more useful for the general populace as a technology at work than it ever will in their consumer life.
• The Decade in Design
  Ten years of Apple, starchitects, and design for change.

Light reading:

• Exciting web browser trends in 2010
• 2010 the year of flexible packages
• Predictions for the Groundswell in 2010 — Twitter gets serious or gets bought
• Forbes: A Year In Review: 2009 Social Marketing Trends
• Five technology trends to watch in 2010

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on December 28, 2009

2010: Bazaar or still the Cathedral?

This period of year is the time to look back and especially look ahead. Therefore I challenge you to think about 2010: Will it be the year of the cathedral or the bazaar?
The title is borrowed from Eric Raymond’s famous essay [1] about the contrasting concepts of a cathedral – long in detailed planning, fully conceived of to a detailed extent, and fully constructed prior to opening; with the bazaar – a constant babble of contending interests and agendas, open to all and sundry.
The concept of the bazaar is the fundament for the Open Source community. Trends like ‘mass collaboration’ and ‘commons-based peer production’ even changed the World Wide Web from being primarily about the storage and retrieval of information into a fully-fledged basis for communication, social interaction and participation (web 2.0).
The new features of the digital age or network society really do amount to a basis for a fundamental rethinking about social interaction, communities, and collaboration. considering these features from a business point of view results in some interesting ideas. Let’s consider some.
After the great economic crisis of last year, many people lost their faith in the financial institutions. After the formal nationalization of all those banks which have been rescued as part of the general bail-out, there is a public demand to organize this in a completely different way. Tony Briant [2] referred to the mutuals, which are ‘friendly’, ‘co-operative’, ‘benevolent’ or ‘mutual’ societies, particularly the investment and finance organizations. The idea of mutuals, in the form of building societies, dates from the late 18th century when groups of people got together to pool assets so that between them they could eventually buy the land, materials and other resources needed to build a house for each of them. One of their key roles was to act as mortgage providers, balancing the funds they held as savings against the funds they provided to lenders financing their house purchases.
Combination of the technology and ideas of mutuals has been taken up by the financiers which results in the new form of internet-based mutuality. For the financiers it has proved to be the platform upon which a truly global, supra-national financial system can be established – able to evade any local or national control or other forms of regulation, simultaneously offering high volumes of near-instantaneous transactions at negligible cost. Imagine how this will change the financial system!

The basis of this new form of collaboration is its anarchic character, allowing a babble of different
agendas, free from central control – particularly government and other quasi-governmental bodies. It represents the alternative basis for cooperation and solidarity. Think about the health care system and even the government itself!

People might think that this has nothing to do with them for the coming years, except in case of some nice initiatives e.g.: c,mm,n.org, Nabuur.org). But think about your own organization. I guess this is like a cathedral, an hierarchical institution managed from the top. But is it possible to achieve the same results in a bazaar-like context?
I wish you all a great 2010 with a lot of wisdom. And if you have some moments of reflection during the holidays, think about what your role will be in the bazaar next year.

[1] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
[2] http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/mutuality-2-0-open-source-the-financial-crisis

Posted by Robert de Boer on December 27, 2009

In 2010, Twitter will be the pulse of the planet

It's the end of year, a time of looking back, and ahead. A fun time to make predictions, and look back at predictions made earlier - although that usually is much less fun

I predict that:

• everyone will have a Twitter account in 2010


• Every company will also have one, and use it too


• There will be Twitter boards in public places, public ones as well as private ones, some of which will be censored to a degree, much like the delay already present on US radio- and TV shows


• The private Tweet boards will also monitor Foursquare and BrightKite in order to see what the world is thinking about that particular place

Companies will have a Twitter identity just as they are supposed to have websites

• Companies will actually buy back Twitter identities already claimed just like they bought back URL's 10 years ago

Doing so, companies can prevent public outrage like this weekend's Channel tunnel drama
The real disaster there was not knowing anything. It took Eurostar on Twitter 20 hours to respond, and that amount of Tweets is still almost nothing compared to the buzz going on

• A business case for Social Business Design? Not needed

Given the fact that the initial investment is almost zero, and the fact that an online presence is a requirement already. You do need a plan though, as for everything. And don't try to push old marketing failures down this new channel

Of course the effect of all that will be measured. No better way to visualise, than a great visualisation I say

• I predict Mentionmap and Where Do You Go to become great tools for 2010 and onwards

With all that, and even without some:

• Twitter will become the source of news
• Either making it, or spreading it like crazy
• Old-fashioned news networks will take a beating from this
• And if they move in the opposite direction, they might not even survive

I wish you all a great new year!

Martijn Linssen is Enterprise Integration Architect within Capgemini. You can follow him via Twitter or join him on LinkedIn

Posted by Martijn Linssen on December 21, 2009

Weekly digest of week 51 2009

This week about the impact of social computing on public services, and the EU information society and economy, amazing mashups thanks to the BBC, cheap webcams being turned in an instant 3D scanner and iPhone users are delusional.

• iPhone users are delusional, consultants say
  Many people I know are frightfully attached to their iPhones. They treat them as if they were a peculiar and exotic lover, one they can hardly believe they have managed to seduce.
• The three clicks myth
  When designing intranets or websites, it is helpful to have some rules of thumb to follow when making decisions…
• Public Services 2.0: The Impact of Social Computing on Public Services
  The report gives an overview of the main trends of Social Computing, in the wider context of an evolving public sector, and in relation to relevant government trends and normative policy visions within and across EU Member States on future public services.
• The Impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy
  This report provides a systematic empirical assessment of the creation, use and adoption of specific social computing applications and its impact on industry, personal identity, learning, social inclusion, healthcare and public health, and government services and public governance.
• Social Media in India Wiki
  The Social Media in India wiki is a resource created by 2020 Social to help Indian business executives and practitioners adopt social technologies to achieve business objectives.

Light reading:

• The Right and Left Brains of Enterprise 2.0
  
• Amazing stop motion video mashup - thanks to the BBC
  
• Stop Giving Your Customers Too Many Choices — They Don’t Want Them!
  
• Report: The Most Active Online Are The Most Educated
  
• Amazing Software Turns Cheap Webcam Into Instant 3D Scanner
  

Posted by Rick Mans on December 21, 2009

Weekly digest of week 49 2009

This week insight on how HTML5 will change the way you use the web, Google offering DNS services, Open APIs and Reputation-based security.

• What Does it Mean to “Buy” an E-book?
  About what one actually purchases when one buys and e-book. The same, of course, applies to mp3s and any other property which can be reproduced by a third party at very low (often no) marginal costs.
• 35 social media KPIs to help measure engagement
  Social media measurement is something that I think should be undertaken with a sense of perspective, by standing back and looking at the big picture.
• Guaranteed Audience Buys: What's Promised Isn't Always What's Delivered
  One of the promises of the Internet is the ability to target an exact individual. After all, unlike radio or TV, where messages are simultaneously broadcast to a broad audience, online advertising is served one impression at a time.
• Reputation-based security – the next step
  The Information Communication Technology (ICT) security threat landscape has gone through significant changes in the last few years, which in turn have altered the distribution profile for new malware. In stark contrast to the past, where typically one strain would infect millions of machines, today the opposite is taking place; millions of malware strains are each targeting only a handful of machines which in turn makes fighting them more complex.
• Open APIs Mature Into a Next-Generation Business Model
  Internet technology has made this possible for for a decade or more, but it's taken a while for awareness to grow on both the provider and consumption side about how fundamentally valuable APIs are to the modern businesses today.

Light Reading:

• When Real Time Is *Not* Fast Enough: The Intention Web
  
• Smart cities, sensors and their potential side effects
  
• Second Life Gets A Life 2.0 At Sundance
  
• How HTML5 Will Change the Way You Use the Web [Web Browsing]
  
• Introducing Google Public DNS
  

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on December 7, 2009

Weekly digest of week 48 2009

This week a look at due diligence for SaaS and cloud computing, Salesforce.com releasing Chatter, did Wikipedia already hit its max and Pearltrees: bookmarks with a social twist (see also Capgemini’s review of Pearltrees which was published in April).

• Law may limit boss' access to social media
  Employers' use of Facebook, MySpace and other online social networks could be limited under a new antidiscrimination law.  The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act bans employers from asking employees or job candidates to take genetic tests or disclose the results of genetic tests already completed. It also considers a family's medical history to be protected genetic information. For instance, if a manager who overhears an employee say that her mother is being treated for breast cancer could not use the information against the worker in hiring decisions because they believe the person could require time away from work or have expensive medical costs if she develops the disease.
• MindTouch Cloud: The Open Source Alternative to Sharepoint and Salesforce.com?
  Sharepoint is the big giant in the enterprise collaboration space. Salesforce.com is now in the market with Salesforce Chatter, a service that embraces Facebook, Twitter and the applications within Force.com.  MindTouch has the potential to compete with the large market players. Today they are announcing MindTouch Cloud, an open-source, SaaS service that integrates business data from any number of sources, including Oracle, Sugar CRM and Salesforce.com.
• What are Google’s real motivations behind Chrome OS?
  Chrome OS is Google’s latest entry into the consumer space. It is designed to be an operating system that runs on customized hardware and provides the user with only a state-of-the art browser running HTML-5 and some plugins. The tech (and mainstream) media has seen no shortage of opinions about its meaning and future impact on the industry. Unfortunately, I think most people have missed some of the key implications of Chrome OS.
• The dark side of the internet | Technology
  Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created "a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System", or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke's software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity.
• The Future Has No Log In Button
  It all centers around identity. The idea comes with a technology called Information Cards, and a term called the “Selector”. With these technologies, websites will rely on the client to automatically provide the experience you want without need for you to log in ever again. It relies on OpenID, doesn’t really need oAuth (since all the authorization ought to happen on the client), but the best part is you, the user, don’t ever have to know what those technologies are. It “just works”.
• SAP Joins PowerPoint and Twitter – Does This Work?
  As we approach 2010, a number of new efforts are underway to make documents more social. One consultant told us how recently a client tried to turn Sharepoint into a Twitter client. That's a monster! But we have to give SAP credit for developing a more innovative way to add social elements to PowerPoint presentations.
• SaaS and cloud computing: A look at the due diligence
  Cloud computing, software as a service, outsourcing… to me, these are all synonymous terms. While “cloud computing” as a concept has gained tremendous traction and mindshare, the fact remains that this sector of computing is nothing more than today’s de jour term for outsourcing and the decisions around and challenges regarding outsourcing should remain front and center all the way through the process.
• The 'social enterprise' comes of age
  Salesforce.com’s flamboyant announcement of Chatter has catapulted social computing to the forefront of discussion among enterprise thought leaders.
• Meet Pearltrees: Bookmarks with a social twist
  A French Web site, called Pearltrees, is developing a Web service that is trying to bring a social networking element to bookmarking – but with the connections based on content instead of people. Think Facebook and Twitter mixed with one Amazon’s recommendation system.
• Is Wikipedia maxed out?
  Wikipedia may have reached the upper limits of what can be done with crowdsourcing, according to a researcher in Spain.  Felipe Ortega, a researcher at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, notes that Wikipedia is at risk because its core editors can’t continue to keep up their current pace. And if Wikipedia doesn’t recruit more volunteers its content could suffer.

Light reading:

• Bing Tries To Buy The News
  
• Why Big Media&#39;s Anti-Google Counter-Revolution Will Fail
  
• Google Turning Times Square Into A Giant Voice Search Experiment On Black Friday
  
• The Definition of Evil: Microsoft's Search Wars Hurt Us All [Search]
  
• Why Music Is Broken – The Artist To Consumer Connection
  

Posted by Rick Mans on November 30, 2009

Weekly digest of week 47 2009

This week the release of Google’s Chrome OS, Chatter from Salesforce.com, Mozilla about speeding up the web and contact lenses with built-in virtual graphics.

• Social Media ROI Examples & Video
  A big question out there these days is: What is the ROI of Social Media? Or the ever popular how do I measure the ROI of social media? Often when I get this question it’s appropriate for me to retort: “What’s the ROI of your phone?” Other times it’s not appropriate to respond with this answer, which, if done in the wrong tone, or place, can win you a free punch in the face. Then there are the naysayers that adamantly proclaim, “We aren’t doing social media because there isn’t any ROI.”
• Understanding Enterprise 2.0 Tolerances & Scale
  Small and medium business needs are typically very different to ‘enterprise’, which in general business usage tends to refer to companies with over one hundred million in revenue. This can also be misleading however since many ‘enterprises’ are in fact federations of autonomous smaller business units.
• The Rise Of Networks, The End Of Process
  The industrial influence in business management and theory is profound. In essence, for the past hundred years business has been objectified as a machine, divided into various components, like a clock or an electric generator. Components are composed of subcomponents, and so on, until you get down to nuts, bolts, and flywheels. People are — in the industrial scheme of things — gears in the machine, and their purpose is to perform a defined role in the assemblage.
• Salesforce.com Unveils Salesforce Chatter – Enterprise Collaboration
  Salesforce Chatter application allows any company to collaborate in real time with a secure, private social network for their enterprise
• Twitter Doesn’t Create Influence, it Reveals it
  You can’t read more than a handful of tweets before someone mentions influence. You also won’t find a Twitter measurement tool out there that doesn’t mention influence. Some may ask how Twitter made so many people influential. It didn’t. I’d agree that it has made some people *more* influential if only because it gave people greater reach, but they had to posses some level of influence potential. (hmm, Influence Potential, a new buzz phrase?)
• Is Facebook Getting Uncool for 18-24s?
  Others aren't so sure. "That [usage decline] could be for a small percentage of the age group, but I would want to see more evidence to show that that audience is running away from Facebook," said James Kiernan, svp and group client director at MediaVest USA.  Kiernan believes much of the decline in the comScore numbers is due to younger people accessing the site via iPhones, BlackBerrys and other portable devices and applications. That skews the numbers, as there isn't a single source that tabulates usage from all available platforms.
• Contact lenses to get built-in virtual graphics
  A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that could display information beamed from a mobile device.  Realising that display size is increasingly a constraint in mobile devices, Babak Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle, hit on the idea of projecting images into the eye from a contact lens. One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. "Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away," says Parviz.
• A faster web with Resource Packages – Mozilla suggestion to have just one HTTP request
  One of the most common problem on the web is slow web sites, wasting the time of end users. Now, perhaps, Mozilla has come up with a solution for this, which will be applicable for all web browser vendors.
• Google Wave for Project Management
  If you are wondering what Google Wave brings to the Project Management world you may want to first start by reading a Wave that has been ongoing now for quite a while (I have been following & contributing to it for at least the last 6 weeks) titled Google Wave for Project Management.
• About Half in U.S. Would Pay for Online News, Study Finds
  Americans, it turns out, are less willing than people in many other Western countries to pay for their online news, according to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group. Among regular Internet users in the United States, 48 percent said in the survey, conducted in October, that they would pay to read news online, including on mobile devices. That result tied with Britain for the lowest figure among nine countries where Boston Consulting commissioned surveys. In several Western European countries, more than 60 percent said they would pay.

Light reading:

• Chrome OS Virtual Machine Build Ready for Your Testing [Downloads]
  
• Google's Chrome OS revealed — with video!
  
• Google Is Keeping Chrome OS Simple. Maybe Too Simple.
  
• Chrome OS Still A Year Away – Screenshots and First Overview
  
• What ChromeOS Means For Netbooks And Why Microsoft Needs To Be Scared
  

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on November 23, 2009

Weekly digest of week 46 2009

This week items about The feature of the Web by Kevin Kelly, Google and others, color as a limited resource and return on investment in social media.

• Microsoft releases SDK for Facebook
  Microsoft on Monday released a software development kit for Facebook that allows developers to create Facebook applications for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. This should expand the reach of Facebook in third-party applications as well as make Silverlight and WPF more viable platforms for developers looking to build social applications.
• Social Media Influencers are not Traditional Influencers
  As more and more brands are moving all of their ad spend online, defining how influence affects their return on investment is necessary and must be done as soon as possible. While some are making inroads to define these calculations many are overlooking the fact that influence affects everything. Without factoring in the real issue of different types of influence you run into a number of problems, for instance focusing on one group of influencers over another or getting broad sweeping numbers instead of knowing exactly how effective your time and money has been spent on the proper target. One thing that usually doesn’t sync up here is that these online influencers with large followings are not the offline influencers.
• Social Media ROI Examples & Video
  A big question out there these days is: What is the ROI of Social Media? Or the ever popular how do I measure the ROI of social media? Often when I get this question it’s appropriate for me to retort: “What’s the ROI of your phone?” Other times it’s not appropriate to respond with this answer, which, if done in the wrong tone, or place, can win you a free punch in the face. Then there are the naysayers that adamantly proclaim, “We aren’t doing social media because there isn’t any ROI.”
• Understanding Enterprise 2.0 Tolerances & Scale
  Small and medium business needs are typically very different to ‘enterprise’, which in general business usage tends to refer to companies with over one hundred million in revenue. This can also be misleading however since many ‘enterprises’ are in fact federations of autonomous smaller business units.
• Your Personal Brand Is Not Scalable
  How are you going to outsource or pass-on some of the conversations and opportunities that will come your way as more and more people follow, friend and connect to you?
• The Über-Connected Organization: A Mandate for 2010
  However, there are a growing number of firms such as IBM, Toshiba, and Cerner Corporation that are becoming über-connected workplaces. Using social media tools such as wikis, blogs, microblogs and corporate social networks, they are connecting employees globally and are fostering mass collaboration. As a result, these companies are seeing improvements in communication, cross-functional collaboration and creative approaches to problem solving. More companies are discovering that an über-connected workplace is not just about implementing a new set of tools — it is also about embracing a cultural shift to create an open environment where employees are encouraged to share, innovate and collaborate virtually.
• Video Hosting vs. Video Posting with YouTube
  When implementing video online, at any point in time, marketers face a decision: to host or post video? Short for: should we host video on our own servers (or use a propietary video platform) or post the content to video sharing sites? Although such a decision primarily depends on the chosen content strategy (generating views versus traffic), there are several factors to take into consideration.
• Google: Is there anyone who doesn't have an opinion?
  Google is evil. It’s not evil. Perhaps it’s the George Washington of the Internet. Or maybe it’s just one huge dominant company trying to stay out of antitrust trouble.
• Color: The Next Limited Resource?
  As a designer, it is important to be aware of the trending colors, and how they are being applied in products and work produced today. What really isn’t being discussed by the design world at large though are the limitations being set on color. Color is as free for us to use as the air we breathe… or is it?

Light reading:

• Kevin Kelly On The Next 5,000 Days Of The Web: Bridging The Gap Between Virtual and Real.
  
• Augmented Reality Is Both a Fad and the Future — Here's Why
  
• How the web will look in five years according to Google
  
• SPDY: The Web, Only Faster
  
• The Death of Taxonomies, revisited
  

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on November 16, 2009

Weekly digest of week 44 2009

This week items about peace on Facebook, social media is not only helping social activists but also authoritarian regimes and a growing digital divide between those who are not connected to the Internet and for those who are and between those who share their information online and those who are not sharing it online.

• How Addicting is Social Media?
  Do you tweet while driving? How about on vacation, or at work? Ever wonder how much time others are spending tapping away on their mobile phone, texting a friend, checking in on Facebook, posting a tweet on Twitter, or using any of the many social media services? A recent Gadgetology study by consumer electronics shopping site, Retrevo.com went looking for answers on how much control social media has on peoples’ lives. We weren’t entirely surprised to learn how addictive social media has become especially among the 35 and younger crowd. We're no social psychologists but it looks like a whole generation (or two) is at risk of spending so much time texting, checking Facebook, using Twitter and other mobile social media services as to risk becoming addicted.
• Who's not using the internet?
  A decade ago most of us had never used the internet – now we can't imagine life without it. Actually, some of us can: there are 10 million people in the UK still without a connection. Are they, Tim Adams asks, losing out economically and culturally? Below, we ask four web refuseniks to go online to see how their lives would change
• 5 New Technologies That Will Change Everything
  3D TV, HTML5, video over Wi-Fi, superfast USB, and mobile "augmented reality" will emerge as breakthrough technologies in the next few years. Here's a preview of what they do and how they work.
• 100 Ways You Should Be Using Facebook in Your Classroom
  Facebook isn’t just a great way for you to find old friends or learn about what’s happening this weekend, it is also an incredible learning tool. Teachers can utilize Facebook for class projects, for enhancing communication, and for engaging students in a manner that might not be entirely possible in traditional classroom settings. Read on to learn how you can be using Facebook in your classroom, no matter if you are a professor, student, working online, or showing up in person for class.
• Tweeting Tyrants: Authoritarian Regimes and New Media
  In Authoritarian Regimes, Social Media Doesn't Only Help Social Activists
• Privacy is dead, and social media hold smoking gun
  Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Fitbit and the SenseCam give us a simple choice: participate or fade into a lonely obscurity.
• Peace on Facebook
  Facebook is proud to play a part in promoting peace by building technology that helps people better understand each other. By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas, we can decrease world conflict in the short and long term.
• Social networking and reputational risk in the workplace (PDF)
  Deloitte LLP 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey results
• Google’s Wave Might Find Its Real Home Inside Company Servers
  The roll-out will mean one significant thing: You can construct and run your own Wave servers on your own hardware, and have them link up to the greater Web should your Wave conversations need to include people from the outside world. And that means companies can use private Waves as a tool for intra-office conversation and, more in keeping with how Wave is being promoted by Google, as a collaboration tool. In particularly high-tech outfits, you could even imagine that company developers could put together specialist Wave Apps to help with specific tasks or to tailor Wave to the local modus operandi.
• Reocities , rising from the ashes – RIP Geocities…
  Here lies what we could salvage from the ashes of GeoCities.  Yahoo! has done an amazing thing by keeping GeoCities alive for as long as they did, but we feel that it is a waste to leave the Internet with a hole of this magnitude. At a minimum, Yahoo! could have simply left GeoCities as a monument to the early days. Maybe close it off from editing and simply make it static after getting rid of the spam pages once and for all. Behind this minimalistic page stretches a wealth of Internet history. If any of it was yours and we have successfully recovered it, then we hope it makes you happy to see it restored. We've rebuilt the walls to the Cities and the streets where a large part of the early settlers of the World Wide Web used to live in. You can still find them where they were before, but not all of the houses have been rebuilt yet.

 Light reading:

• Reading the Telegraph costs the British economy £1.38bn
• Salesforce And Adobe Partner To Offer Flash-Based Applications In The Cloud
• Enterprise Mash-Ups Defined
• Is Google Navigation the death of Garmin, Magellan and TomTom?
• How Will ‘Augmented Reality’ Affect Your Business?

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on November 2, 2009

Weekly digest of week 43 2009

This week a virtual workforce found in Kenyan refugee camp, email will not be replaced by social media , youth cannot live without the Internet and how to protect your intellectual property.

• Youth 'cannot live' without web
  A survey of 16 to 24 year olds has found that 75% of them feel they "couldn't live" without the internet.
• Software ahead of the curve: Google Wave
  Google Wave, is the hottest thing on the web at this current moment. And to be frank marks the start of Google's rise in my estimations and their commitment to the web as the platform. When I first saw the Google IO video was impressed and seeked out my wave invite I would have got if I had gone to the London event. So I've been using/on Google wave for a while now, but since the public beta I've started to really use it for conversations.
• The pocket spy: Will your smartphone rat you out?
  There are certain things you do not want to share with strangers. In my case it was a stream of highly personal text messages from my husband, sent during the early days of our relationship. Etched on my phone's SIM card – but invisible on my current handset and thus forgotten – here they now are, displayed in all their brazen glory on a stranger's computer screen.
• Creating A Google Wave Extension In 5 Steps
  This is a simple to follow tutorial on how to create an extension that other Google Wave users can install and use in their waves. We will create a simple gadget extension that will list some blog names and when the user clicks on a name, the latest posts from the blog selected will be displayed in the wave. Yes, we will create a feed reader to use in Google’s waves
• How to . . . protect your intellectual property
  Intellectual assets are central to many businesses and relevant to all, even if it is only a matter of the corporate logo.
• The Myth of Usability Testing
  In 1998, usability expert Rolf Molich (co-inventor with Jakob Nielsen of the heuristic evaluation method) gave nine teams three weeks to evaluate the webmail application www.hotmail.com. The experiment was part of his series of Comparative Usability Evaluations (CUEs), through which he began to identify a set of standards and best practices for usability tests. In each segment of the series, Molich asked several usability teams to evaluate a single design using the method of their choice.
• Is TV a Stronger Force for Social Change than Facebook and Twitter?
  The power and influence of television and radio is undoubtedly extraordinary, which often makes the possibilities of new media seem limitless. Especially regarding developing countries without much television penetration, several questions come to mind: Will new media “leapfrog” a generation? Will countries without significant TV penetration adopt new media faster than television can spread? Will television sets become eclipsed by TV streamed through mobile phones? Will the availability of more content and more choices for TV viewers make television more or less influential? Comment and tell us what you think.
• Social Media Float in Thin Air
  Two stories gripped the social media last week unlike any other in the past few months. An article questioning the theory of global warming dominated the conversation on blogs while the saga of the six-year-old who came to be known as "balloon boy" did the same for Twitter users.
• Virtual workforce found in Kenyan refugee camp
  The very poorest people on the planet have benefited little from the digital economy, but a pilot project in African refugee camps has hinted at how that might change. Refugees at the Dadaab camps in Kenya have been able to dramatically increase their income by tapping into a global demand for unskilled digital labour.
• 20 Reasons Why Social Media Won’t Replace Email
  The rise in popularity of social media only enhances email. The two can work powerfully together. Two excellent articles, Chris Crums, writer for WebPro News, “10 Reasons Social Media isn’t Replacing Email“ and VerticalResponse CEO Janine Popick, “10 More Reasons Why Social Media Won’t Replace Email. Chris always has great marketing insights. Janine also provides some insightful resources and practices what she preaches for both email marketing and social media. I recommend them both.

Light reading:

• Augmented Reality to become more about cash than hype
  
• Why Online Ratings Don’t Work
  
• Augmented Reality in Flash 10
  
• Pick a Winner: How to Choose the Right Wiki for Your Business
  
• Colonizing the Outer Rings
  

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on October 26, 2009

Weekly digest of week 42 2009

This week again claims on why email is dead (or not dead yet), Sir Berners-Lee says the // in the URLs was a mistake and the complete history of Lemmings.

• Email is Dead? Oh Really?
  The WSJ is making the call—email on its way out. Dying. Dead. It's an interesting conclusion, derived from the fact that both growth and absolute numbers are on the side of social networking this year. But we disagree.
• Twitter has lift-off: now you can tweet from 20,000 feet
  Even if you're 20,000 feet above sea level there's still no escaping the presence of social media, with the launch of a Lufthansa tool that automatically updates Twitter or Facebook with flight position updates.
  GE, enterprise 2.0 since….1989
  One of the most frequently mentioned enterprise 2.0 successful project is General Electric’s Support Central. It’s true that their numbers are really impressive even for those who usually criticize anything that’s about 2.0. So, inevitably, people wonder how they did it.
• Facebook fatigue sets in as growth slows
  Facebook's growth slowed this summer, according to one report, suggesting that despite reaching the 300 million members milestone in September, the site's growth may have hit a saturation point in some markets for the time being.
• The Complete History of Lemmings
  Lemmings started life as a simple animation back in August 1989 when DMA Design had just moved into their first office (which only consited of 2 small rooms), and were begining a new game called Walker (based on the walker that was used in Blood Money).
• Study: Firms still invest in social media
  Despite the recession, most companies are continuing to invest in social media tools and online communities, according to a new survey by Deloitte, Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research.
• Twitter and Facebook aid small firms
  Companies that have jumped on the Twitter and Facebook bandwagon are reporting a surge in customers while others struggle. With minimal marketing budgets available to many small businesses, social networking sites offer a quick and, more importantly, free means of promoting their wares to a global audience. In the face of stiff competition and a global economic downturn, it is a route more and more companies are going down.
• Web 3.0: The Building Block Web
  Some talk about the “real-time web” being Web 3.0, or the 2010 Web, but when you look at it “real-time” is just using the web as a platform, making it real-time.  The web still hasn’t really changed in essence to something else beyond the web becoming “the platform”.  The web needs to shift to something else for that to happen. I think that shift is happening in a form I call “the building block web”.
• The “//” in URLs was a Mistake, Says Sir Berners-Lee
  Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, modest creator of the internet, has a confession to make. When confronted with the question, “if you could go back in time and change anything along the way to inventing the internet, what would you change,” Sir Timothy hedged.
• Finland becomes the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right.
  According to YLE.fi, starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection, says the Ministry of Transport and Communications.

 Light reading:

• Why Desktop Touch Screens Don’t Really Work Well For Humans
• User interfaces for AR
• Comment Form Styling: Examples and Best Practices
• An introduction to HTML5
• From Social Tools to Social Business Design

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on October 19, 2009

4 Myths about blocking Internet access in the enterprise

Some enterprises think that blocking Internet access for their employees is the solution to many of their issues. They think that productivity will be increased, costs can be saved, less security and legal issues will occur and, since the rise of Web2.0 and social media in particular: less damage to their reputation can be done. So if you are ever confronted with one of these four reasons for blocking the Internet access for your employees (or if somebody is using this argument to explain to you why your access to the Internet is blocked), you will know the answer.

Read more

Posted by Rick Mans on October 16, 2009

Weekly digest of week 41 2009

This weekly digest is created to keep you informed about the latest developments concerning the topics of our community of practice. This week nice tools for PowerPoint to integrate Twitter in your presentations, top 10 web collaboration tools and a five minute presentation on how you can effectively visualize information.

• Intranets – stop benchmarking, start leading
  For a while now, of all the big analyst firms, Forrester has continued to output some well thought out research and analysis on the information management space. Along with this piece on workforce technology adoption (summarised on ReadWrite Enterprise) and also another on barriers to intranet use (discussed by Bill Ives on the Fast Forward blog).
• Social media gains importance to packagers and suppliers
  Emerging forms of communication prove valuable for packaging professionals worldwide
• Apple Tablet To Redefine Newspapers, Textbooks and Magazines
  Several years ago, a modified version of OS X was presented to Steve Jobs, running on a multitouch tablet. When the question "what would people do with this?" couldn't be answered, they shelved it. Long having established music, movie and TV content, Apple is working hard to load up iTunes with print content from several major publishing houses across several media.
• Facebook Cracks Down on Devs, Suspends Apps Over Bad Ads
  In its first big move to implement the stricter ad guidelines it introduced this summer, Facebook recently suspended applications that served advertisements with deceptive content within them. The apps were suspended without warning, leaving developers confused as to why Facebook took this action and didn’t give them a chance to handle the offending ads first, according to Nick O’Neill over at AllFacebook, who first reported the story over the weekend. This confusion is likely a result of a problem we discussed earlier: Facebook’s vagueness about how its ad approval process actually works.
• Podcasting Just Might Be the Tool to Revolutionize Education
  Schools all over the country have flocked to podcasting as a new medium to assist the teaching profession. Professors are using podcasts to instruct students and get their messages out. Podcasting is not restricted to one educational sector, professors at prestigious colleges from Bentley to Purdue have flocked to this medium.
• Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience
  From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues.
• Top 10 Web Collaboration Tools (That Aren't Google Wave) – Collaboration – Lifehacker
  You've probably heard about a hard-to-get, hugely new service called Google Wave. Lest ye forget, there are plenty of web-based collaboration tools that don't require learning a new way of speaking. Here are a few of our (mostly free) favorites.
• FREE PowerPoint Twitter Tools | Based on SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius technology
  A beta version of PowerPoint Twitter Tools is now available for testing. Based on SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius technology, the twitter tools allow PowerPoint presenters to see and react to tweets in real-time, embedded directly within their presentations, either as a ticker or refreshable comment page.
• Ident Engine – A JavaScript library that retrieves and aggregates profiles from across the web
  Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. We've filled in profiles, uploaded photos, videos, reviews and bookmarks. The Ident Engine uses semantic web API’s to bring together these web footprints.
• » Would You Please Block? Bud the Teacher
  Ever since we opened up lots more of the Internet in our school district earlier this year, the district has received several requests from teachers and other staff to block resources that are distractions in the classroom. I’ve written a stock response to those requests that I thought might be worth sharing. It’s my hope that their requests and the conversations that come from this response lead to changes in classroom practice.

Light reading:

• UX: An art in search of a methodology
• Social Business Design
• Preparing for Multi-touch in Flash – A Primer
• Effective Information Visualization: How to Visualize Meaning
• 23 Brilliant Web Apps To Simplify Designer’s Work Life

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on October 12, 2009

Three thoughts to guide your first social business steps

Again a piece on Social Media in the business since there are increasing signs that mainstream business is steadily starting to pick up on this. More and more I get the question, what should we do and where should we begin? Well, I believe three is still the magic number, even in the realms of new technology. So ponder this…

1. Select a small area in your business where you can start with social media; how does it fit in your strategy and what new insights can the advances in (business) technology bring you in this phase of strategic decision making. 
2. Make sure you architect and integrate your endeavor according to SOA principles with existing landscapes to ensure you get the maximum effect out of your old and new investments. Use your current systems, but be sure they are in order and able to do so. I.e. make sure you have a stable zen-garden to plant your new seeds in.
3. Take your experimentation to the cloud, it’s safe, it’s scalable and it’s cheap… and it allows you to start experimenting  with cloud in your organization.

In my work at Capgemini as a Business Technologist, I apply new business concepts enabled through new technologies for (new) clients through an approach which has recently been labeled innoversion by Frank Wammes (contact him for more info). The pivotal idea here is that technology should be involved in Business strategy from the onset due to the inherent beneficial nature of new technologies to the business in creating new markets, new channels or new services or products. After all, where would a concept such as co-creation be without the recent advances in online technologies. There is nothing really new in this approach except the notion that technology should be involved in the earliest beginnings of strategic decision making. The advances of technology are too fast, too widespread and have too much revenue generating potential to be ignored or, as is still far too often the case, ignored until a later stage in the process. Technology, expecially under the notion of Business Technology has strategic value-adding potential and should be considered as such.

 The second vital notion we are operating under is that new technologies should and in reality will be combined with existing ERP landscapes. Currently we’re investigating the value of SAP Business Suite 7 to this respect. Social media, especially in its combination with Multi-channel retail, co-creation concepts and progression of CRM should allow for companies to renew their focus on generating more transactions on their current platform by enabling new forms of interaction. This should be the focus of platform vendors which in essence have been focusing on the efficient "management” of these transactions.  Here lies, in my opinion, the key to the success of any Social Media endeavor: integration! Integrating your CRM systems to allow for maximum utilization of customer intelligence. Integration of purchase to pay systems to allow for the efficient management of the (micro) payments you are aiming to incur. Integration of Social Enterprise software such as Salesforce is currently pushing to the market under its Service Cloud 2.

Experimentation with Social Business can be facilitated by cloud computing. Cloud would be the perfect opportunity for experimentation in this area due to its inherent nature, lack of vendor locking, and minimal impact in capital expenditure and thus budgets. A no-brainer really…

So there you have it; three easy notions to help you incorporate Social Media in your organization.

Niels van der Zeyst is a Business Technologist at Capgemini. You can follow Niels on Twitter http://twitter.com/zeyst or contact him directly via Niels.vander.zeyst@capgemini.com.

Posted by Niels van der Zeyst on October 7, 2009

Weekly digest of week 40 2009

This week IBM is going after Google Apps Premier, employers should be social media savvy, mixed feeling about Google Wave and women, teens and seniors fuel the mobile web spike.

• Online Recruitment – Employers must be social media savvy to attract graduate talent
  Employers risk going under the radar of the best graduates if they don’t adopt robust and consistent social networking strategies according to research by TMP Worldwide and TARGETjobs.
• Fads vs Business Value: Knowledge Management & Enterprise 2.0
  Anyone with a computer and access to stock photos can put together a slide presentation and upload it to sites such as slideshare, and sometimes it seems like everyone and his brother is doing just that on social media, enterprise 2.0 and other 2.0-ish subjects.
• Do you trust your social networking site?
  What these sites are supposed to bring you is a sense of being closer connected to your friends, family and peers. Noone can argue that this goal has not been reached, but i keep asking myself, at what cost?
• Geeks Try Google Wave, Have Mixed Feelings
  Google Wave is one of the most-hyped new product launches in recent memory, but now that thousands of lucky people are getting to try it out – early reactions are mixed. If the hard-core geeks aren't sure if they like it, that could spell serious trouble for mainstream adoption.
• Women, Teens, and Seniors Help Fuel 34% Mobile Web Spike | Nielsen Wire
  Web visitors using a mobile device increased 34 percent year-over-year, from 42.5 million mobile Web visitors in July 2008 to 56.9 million in July 2009 according to The Nielsen Company. Overall, year-over-year growth among the 13-17 and 65+ age groups outpaced the growth of the total mobile Web audience, with a youth increase of 45 percent and seniors surging upwards 67 percent in July. While men continue to make up a larger portion of mobile Web users versus women, comprising 53 percent of the audience in July, the growth of female visitors outpaced the growth of male visitors during the month, with women increasing 43 percent YOY as compared to a 26 percent growth among men.
• Social Network Statistics
  Social Networks are among the most powerful examples of socialized media. They create a dynamic ecosystem that incubates and nurtures relationships between people and the content they create and share.
  As these communities permeate and reshape our lifestyle and how we communicate with one another, we’re involuntarily forcing advertisers and marketers to rapidly evolve how they vie for our attention.
• Showcase of Designs Optimized for iPhone « Smashing Magazine
  Over the last couple of years, mobile devices have managed to gain mainstream popularity. With iPhone, making mobile Web applications finally usable by broad masses, web design can now be applied to mobile applications as well. In this post we are focusing on designs that are specifically optimized for mobile devices, in particular iPhone.
• P2P legislation is smart next step in piracy education
  One of the things that has always bothered me about the Recording Industry Association of America and its file-sharing lawsuits is that, for many of those people, their biggest crime is being uninformed.
• Crowdsourcing coming to iPhone apps, big time
  If you've ever been driving down the highway and looked at the Google Maps application on an iPhone to see what traffic is like ahead, you may have wondered where the data behind the green, yellow, and red lines indicating real-time vehicle flow come from.  In fact, the data are coming from people just like you: users of smartphones with GPS who, by the very act of driving down the highway, are feeding back information about how fast they're going to Google, which in turn is sending it back to users of its mobile map apps
• IBM targets Google Apps for business, undercuts pricing and touts reliability
  IBM is going after Google Apps Premier hard and has the pricing to show it’s serious. Big Blue is announcing the general availability of LotusLive iNotes, a cloud email, calendar and contact management service, for $36 a year per user. Google Apps Premier runs $50 per user a year.

Light reading

• 16 Augmented Reality Business Models
• 40+ Desert Island Web Development Tools
• Managing Identities, and Data – whose responsibility?
• Online Database of Social Media Policies
• More on how web performance impacts revenue…

Rick Mans is a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on October 5, 2009

The Death of Windows – Coming soon to a screen near you!

No. Not that “Windows”, (just couldn’t resist the sensationalist headline). Instead this refers to ongoing debate about the questionable relevance of release windows in the context of digital entertainment. Basically, does it still make sense to employ multiple release windows when nowadays almost anyone can get illegal copies of films and music, sometimes even before the official release date?

This is not in support of piracy, in any way shape or form, but it does beg the question that illegal file-sharing may be addressing a demand that is left unfulfilled by the entertainment industry, i.e. “unfettered, and inexpensive access to any content, on any device, at any time and in any location that the legally purchasing customer wishes to enjoy it”.

And just what is so difficult about that you might ask, but industry people will undoubtedly try to reassure you, that is exactly what they would like to see too, if not for those pesky pirates ( …and their Pirate Bays, P2P filesharing, and expectations of free online content by those leeching Freetards and other “Long tailed” miscreants, grumble, grumble & grumble ). I suspect the underlying problem to be related to release window mechanism and the creation of artificial scarcity in order to generate / stimulate demand and fat-head (as opposed to long tail) revenues for each release window cycle.

In a creative industry that is accustomed to selling the same content over and over to its customers, the release window mechanism has been a great way to maximize return-on-investment for each successful title. However, with digital media (i.e. perfect copies), and broadband Internet (i.e. near immediate global distribution), this release windows model has struggled with the insatiable demand and expectations of instant gratification from a consuming public that has tasted the cornucopia of ‘free’ content online. This surely indicates that time has come to reconsider these release mechanisms particularly for digital content (e.g. music, films, books etc).

A recent Forrester report and blog post about music release strategies, has proposed a new windowing model which takes into account the growing importance of “free” and feels-like-free versions of works; but even this model does not go far enough in my opinion, because ultimately, any lag creates an opportunity for further content leakage. Perhaps the best solution would be to do away with any form of release windows and other artificial delays, which only create more demand / opportunities for leaked content, thus allowing the full focus of anti-piracy measures to remain solely on mechanisms of illegal content distribution, after the fact.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jude Umeh is a senior consultant and enterprise architect within Capgemini, as well as an author, blogger and Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS). He can also be something of a rights management evangelist (but only when provoked), and you can follow his sporadic chatter on Twitter

Posted by Jude Umeh on September 29, 2009

Weekly digest of week 39 2009

This week (again) a lot of Google news (Sidewiki, Chrome Frame and the styleguide), Vodafone going social, Augmented Reality Markup Language and Generation V.

• Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  Users hate change, so it's usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture.
• Corporations in swimsuits: Are you faking social media?
  Digital strategist Jordan Julien got us thinking about "synthetic authenticity," the risk large corporations face as they try to engage customers in social media. The problem, Jordan says, is social media tools were built for individual people to interact with each other, but suddenly faceless entities — big brands with big names — are entering the space.
• Multiple Online Personas: The Choice of a New Generation – Intelligence
  Is your business ready for Generation V? Baseline looks at how learning the personal, behavioral traits of multiple, online personas will be important to the future of business-to-consumer strategies and practices.
• Sidewiki: Google colonial sideswipe
  Not only do our friends at Google want to own all of our brains, but now they also want to own all of the comments on our websites. With a new downloadable feature called Sidewiki announced yesterday, Google is adding a feature that allows anyone to comment on a webpage and for that information to be openly available on the Internet.
• Introducing Google Chrome Frame
  Today, we're releasing an early version of Google Chrome Frame, an open source plug-in that brings HTML5 and other open web technologies to Internet Explorer.
• Why Windows Mobile as a Business Platform?
  So why is Windows Mobile right for your business compared to all these other guys?
• Measurement tool tackles social media challenge
  The thorny issue of how to measure web traffic and social media activity effectively is being tackled head on by a new tool which claims to analyse both simultaneously.
• Google styleguide
  “Style” covers a lot of ground, from “use camelCase for variable names” to “never use global variables” to “never use exceptions.” This project holds the style guidelines we use for Google code. If you are modifying a project that originated at Google, you may be pointed to this page to see the style guides that apply to that project.
• Vodafone links phone contacts to social media
  Vodafone has unveiled a range of internet services which centre around connecting a phone’s address book with social media.
• Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML)
  With this surge in AR development the potential arises for the multiplication of proprietary methods for aggregating and displaying geographic annotation and location-specific data. Mobilizy proposes creating an augmented reality mark-up language specification based on the OpenGIS® KML Encoding Standard (OGC KML) with extensions. The impetus for proposing the creation of an open Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML) specification to The AR Consortium is to help establish and shape a long-term, sustainable framework for displaying geographic annotation and location-specific data within Augmented Reality browsers.

Light reading

• Enhancing User Interaction With First Person User Interface
  
• Foursquare Beats Twitter to Local Advertising Goldmine
  
• Video: Symantec Shows The Danger Of Shortened Twitter Links
  
• The More Affluent and More Urban are More Likely to use Social Networks
  
• How to Make Data Visualization Useful for Color Blind Users
  

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on September 28, 2009

Social Business Evangelism

We have seen a lot of activity in the 2.0 space in the recent past, specifically in the social media arena. In addition to this, we have also seen a bunch of views, expressions and thoughts put down by leading industry experts and a majority of them have been around the social consulting landscape, acquisitions in this space, and experts moving into more focused social strategy & social consulting roles. Once again, we see that the importance is given to a lot of factors, in addition to just the social software per se. Most of the above actions are pointing to one phenomenon which being termed as Social Business Design.

Here are some of the lines I have picked from various sources:
Social business design is the intentional creation of a dynamic business culture that empowers all of its constituents to better exchange value. The rise of the social web has taught us a lot about how we can significantly reduce the costs of collaboration and co-ordination inside businesses, and demonstrated the power of iterative, evolutionary processes driven by real-time data and user feedback. Social Business Design is probably the first effort to completely unite both the strategic and implementation components of a new kind of business. It is a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive way of considering how a corporation, business unit, or project can create and capture value from today's emerging technologies and evolving operating environment.

Social Business Design is a concept that companies like Dachis Group and Altimeter Group are built on, and we definitely should give them credit for explaining the concept and making it as popular as we see it getting now. We are also now witnessing others follow suite, such as the India based 2020 Social calling it as Social Business Strategy; in fact Gaurav Mishra from 2020 Social has done a great summary of all the recent happenings in one of his recent blogs at Gauravonomics.

The entire point being made is that it is not just about the emerging technologies, but the significance of other aspects like guidance, approach, strategy, and design, etc and the value they bring, which is why one must give some attention and importance in understanding it. And if there is one term which encapsulates this, then it is Social Business Evangelism. Yes, I prefer calling it ‘Social Business Evangelism’ and define it as a philosophy consisting of a set of practices (including strategy & consulting services) provided by an individual or an enterprise to its employees or customers, guiding them in leveraging the emerging social technologies for transforming their businesses and achieving their goals in a way that is optimal and effective in nature.

Rather than concluding this, as an attempt to create yet another buzzword, I would like to explain why I prefer to use these specific words (social, business & evangelism) to describe the concept. These three words when put together brings out an expression which will allow businesses to transform for better in its entirety. The word ‘Social’ covers the human factor, the word ‘business’ is precisely the reason why customers are doing what they are doing and the word ‘evangelism’ is the philosophy that will facilitate customers in changing their business into success stories; and I think this philosophy-aspect is more important than anything else in any business. In addition, it will give intent to the entire approach of becoming 2.0 and will facilitate enterprises in becoming enterprise2.0. I would go with the Sameer Patel’s explanation of Enterprise2.0 - a state that the enterprise achieves by leveraging social computing concepts and technologies, to accelerate business performance - and Social Business Evangelism will steer these enterprises on their journey towards 2.0.

One might feel that I have completely left out ‘technology’ from this definition of mine, but to be honest technology is so much a part of our lives, that the need to give it a mention in here, just to indicate the important role it plays, is I guess a little redundant and that it being one of the key enablers, comes by default. We are already aware of how significant, technology is and how it enhances in the approach to 2.0. With the speed at which technology is evolving, what today constitutes as social technology might soon be the thing of the past and we will have a completely new set of tools; however the objectives of a business run by people towards success will always remain the same!

Some time back in May this year, I had posted about Social Media League, which was more about my view of a function in an enterprise that will act as a social media facilitation center providing all the guidance one needs inside the organization in benefiting from social tools. And this social media league acts more like a sub-set of Social Business Evangelism, where in, it complements the philosophy and has its focus on the internal environment and its needs.

Just as I was closing this article last evening, I observed a set of discussions taking place on Twitter around Enterprise2.0 & Social Business, with views coming from two distinct schools of thought and if definitions or terminologies really matter, or do the results speak for the terms we define. However I would say, to win that first customer of yours which may later show the results, you need to be very clear in what and how you define, with what you are trying to tell your audience in make them successful. So, even though I don’t encourage buzzwords, I do feel a good definition/explanation of what you suggest is fairly important.

I will close my post here, but would love to hear from you all on what you think about my views expressed above.

Nikhil Nulkar is a knowledge management consultant within Capgemini and is passionate about web2.0, specifically in enterprise2.0 & social media. Want to know what he is up to? Follow him on Twitter

Posted by Nikhil Nulkar on September 22, 2009

Weekly digest of week 38 2009

The subjects for this week’s digest are: Google’s Internet stats and Google liberating data, Microsoft’s vision on the next-gen newspaper and digital contact lenses that monitor your health.

• Linked Government Data « Decentralyze
  identify ways for governments and computer science researchers to continue working together to advance the state-of-the-art in data integration and build useful, deployable proof-of-concept demos that use actual government information and demonstrate real benefit from linked data integration.
• Digital Contacts Will Keep an Eye on Your Vital Signs | Gadget Lab | Wired.com
  Forget about 20/20. “Perfect” vision could be redefined by gadgets that give you the eyes of a cyborg.  The tech industry calls the digital enrichment of the physical world “augmented reality.” Such technology is already appearing in smart phones and toys, and enthusiasts dream of a pair of glasses we could don to enhance our everyday perception. But why stop there? Scientists, eye surgeons, professors and students at the University of Washington have been developing a contact lens containing one built-in LED, powered wirelessly with radio frequency waves.
• PrimeLife – Privacy and Identity Management in Europe for Life
  Individuals in the Information Society want to protect their autonomy and retain control over personal information, irrespective of their activities. Information technologies hardly consider those requirements, thereby putting the privacy of the citizen at risk. Today, the increasingly collaborative character of the Internet enables anyone to compose service and contribute and distribute information. Individuals will contribute throughout their life leaving a life long trail of personal data.
• Google – Internet Stats
  This Google resource brings together the latest industry facts and insights. These have been collected from a number of third party sources covering a range of topics from macroscopic economic and media trends to how consumer behaviour and technology are changing over time.
• Facebook: "We're cash-flow positive"
  "We’re also succeeding at building Facebook in a sustainable way. Earlier this year, we said we expected to be cash flow positive sometime in 2010, and I’m pleased to share that we achieved this milestone last quarter. This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term."
• Semantic Video at Google
  Google may never call itself a semantic web company, but yesterday it plunged a bit deeper into the space. The search engine leader announced in a blog posting that it is announcing support for Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa.
• Microsoft’s vision for a “next-gen newspaper” looks like TweetDeck
  The Newspaper Association of America cast a wide net this summer in seeking proposals for generating online revenue. Their request went out to many of the firms we’ve been covering closely but also several tech companies that aren’t exactly in the thick of the news industry, including Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle.
• Social Media, Web 2.0 And Internet Stats
  As our digital and physical lives blur further, the internet has become the information hub where people spend a majority of their time learning, playing and communicating with others globally.  Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of just how staggering the numbers are of people collaborating, researching, and interacting on the web.
• Government 2.0: A case study from Australia
  I found this presentation by Matthew Hodgson a great overview of the ways "government 2.0" tactics are succeeding at home and abroad. Check out some of his screenshot examples online: FutureMelbourne (a wiki for citizens to design a better Melbourne), Powerhouse Museum (a Sydney museum that allows users improve its online collections through tagging, ranking and sharing information), and Bang the Table (a service facilitating public policy discussion).
• Tweeting is more than just self-expression
  From CNN to Ashton Kutcher, everyone is tweeting. In ads, many companies now display the logo of an animated blue bird holding a sign that says "follow me."  Twitter, a micro-communication service that gives users an opportunity to express their thoughts in 140-character "tweets," is a hit in the social media world. Companies are also benefiting from Twitter, where 20 percent of the tweets contain requests for product information or responses to the requests, according to Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at Penn State.

Quick links

• Innovation should not be the race for the new-new thing
  
• 22 Awesome Adobe AIR Applications for Designers
  
• Seven jQuery Plugins That Let You Do Cool Stuff With Images
  
• Google apes revolutionaries with launch of Data Liberation Front
  
• Top 10 Underhyped Webapps, 2009 Edition [Lifehacker Top 10]
  

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on September 21, 2009

Weekly digest of week 37 2009

This week a more concise version of the weekly digest: 10 links with a description, and 5 quick links that are also nice to reads. Please let me know what you think of this format.

The subjects for this week’s digest are: Lifelogging is “the next step”, Pigeons beat broadband, Facebook releases Tornado, the real-time web framework, as open source and even better: Facebook enhances your intelligence.

• Gravity – Collaborative Business Process Modelling within Google Wave (SAP)
  Gravity is a prototype developed by SAP Research in Brisbane, Australia and SAP NetWeaver Development providing real-time, cloud-based collaborative business process modeling within Google Wave. Google Wave is Google's new real-time collaboration platform that combines features of e-mail, social networking, wikis and instant messaging in one integrated browser-based client. Google Wave offers rich developer APIs to extend the core functionality with custom components. We have embedded Gravity as a Google Wave "gadget" that can be added within the Google Wave client. Leveraging the collaborative features of Google Wave, all business process modeling activities get propagated in near real-time to all other participants of the Wave. In addition, participants of the Wave can use all other features provided by Google and its developer community to enrich the collaborative modeling experience.
• This Is Your  Lifelog
  Gordon Bell sees beyond the Twitterverse, when we'll be documented in digital detail
• The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed's web server – Bret Taylor's blog
  Today, we are open sourcing the non-blocking web server and the tools that power FriendFeed under the name Tornado Web Server. We are really excited to open source this project as a part of Facebook's open source initiative, and we hope it will be useful to others building real-time web services. Check out the announcement on the Facebook Developer Blog. You can download Tornado at tornadoweb.org.
• Marketing Trends Report 2009: Where does Social Media Stand?
  What are the marketing trends for 2010 and where does Social Media Figure in the mix? A report by Equation Research indicates some interesting trends that highlight that “Social Media” is certainly past being a fad and becoming mainstream.
• Flex meets Google App Engine
  I remember the first day I met flex, it was version 2 beta, the first version built on eclipse after Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia. Since then Adobe did a very good job with Flex and they are far ahead of their rivals in RIA area. Meanwhile Google hired most of the Java experts we learn Java from and doing great with several Java projects (such as Guice, GWT). Actually I was quite disappointed when they released Google App Engine with only Python support. I am not against python but of course i feel more comfortable on Java. At last, several months ago, Google finally announced the Java support to Google App Engine.
• Ubidesk – online collaboration workspace, Document collaboration, online project management, Task management, Enterprise wiki, SSL
  Ubidesk is an online collaboration space where you can run team projects with document collaboration and task management. Ubidesk is offered as a SaaS(Software as a Service), and you can use it through your web browser anywhere anytime. Try Ubidesk and have your team enjoy real time collaboration!
• Social Media Outsourcing Can Be Risky
  Hosting a company's content and services on 3rd-party social networking sites involves both tactical risks (lower usability) and strategic risks (less user loyalty).
• Tesco’s looking outside the building to predict customer needs
  Tesco, the UK's largest retailer, has started using weather forecasts to help determine what to stock in its stores across the UK.
• Facebook 'enhances intelligence' but Twitter 'diminishes it', claims psychologist
  Spending time on the Facebook networking site could enhance a key element of intelligence that is vital to success in life, a psychologist has claimed, but using Twitter may have the opposite effect.
• jQTouch — jQuery plugin for mobile web development
  A jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, and other forward-thinking devices.

Quick links

• RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win
  
• Salesforce Pushes Social CRM Technology –But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone
  
• In South Africa, carrier pigeon faster than broadband
  
• Making Augmented Reality Browsers Even Better With Panoramic And Bird’s-Eye Zooming
  
• The Inevitable Move Of iTunes To The Cloud
  

If you think that 15 links are not enough, please let me know. In the mean time you can browser my Delicious bookmarks for more interesting links.

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on September 14, 2009

Weekly digest of week 36 2009

This week the Telelgraph published a list of 50 things that are being killed by the Internet, Gartner published the top 10 strategic technologies, McKinsey published research on how enterprises could benefit from web2.0 and research that showed that Perl developers are almost twice as happy as Visual Basic developers.

Social collaboration tools

• Don’t Let Social Media Comments Ruin Discussions On Your Blog
  
• Social Networks Leaking Users Data To Tracking Sites
  Many popular social networking sites typically make personal information available to companies that track users' browsing habits and allow them to link anonymous browsing habits to specific people, according to a new study by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).
• 10 Sobering Twitter Statistics
  Twitter-bird I don't have to tell you that everyone is talking Twitter. If you haven't heard about it from your friends, co-workers, or favorite social media "guru," then you've certainly heard about it via CNN, Oprah, The Today Show, USA Today, and countless other media outlets that are constantly talking about it lately. There are a lot of great things things about it. I've met some wonderful people and value it for online reputation monitoring and live search purposes, but there are downfalls that many overlook. Allow me to be the "fun sponge" and share 10 sobering Twitter statistics found after scouring nearly a dozen comScore, eMarketer, Nielsen, HubSpot, Pear Analytics, and Alexa reports :
• Is social media worth your marketing dollars?
  As social media has reached mainstream consciousness this year, businesses have been inundated with the message that they must immediately get on board or risk doom and calamity. The hyperbole (and the frenzied buzz it creates) is confusing and many businesses could use a practical guide on how to evaluate social media and how to engage – if it’s appropriate.
• Cisco Readying Collaboration Software Platform
  Cisco Systems is developing a collaboration software platform that will allow enterprises to combine social networking, presence, content and transactional applications in a single interface.

Enterprise2.0

• Enterprise 2.0 is Neither a Crock Nor the Entire Solution
  
• Enterprise 2.0: Finding success on the frontiers of social business
  It’s entirely possible something may cause social tools to abruptly stop their broad movement into the workplace, but history tells us that it’s just not likely.
• Enterprise 2.0 is a Crock: Discuss
  

Web development

• Opera 10 unleashed, brings Web Fonts and transparency to the table
  
• ¿Habla HTML?
• MiniAjax.com / Highlighting Rich Experiences on the Web
  
• 50 Most Usable RIAs
  

Tools

• 35 Excellent Wireframing Resources
  
• 150 Worth Knowing Web Developer Tools and Techniques
• Low-budget Prototyping Techniques
  
• 100 Firefox Add-Ons to Create a Truly Brilliant Browser
  

HTML5

• Testing HTML5
• Loving HTML5
• Get Ready for HTML 5

Anonymity

• Gotcha! Why Online Anonymity May Be Fading
  This idea that you could live your life moving from place to place and not have your personal history follow with you is a very strange thing. Now we're moving towards a time where more of that information does stick with you, but it's on the Internet.
• De-anonymizing the Internet Using Unreliable IDs (PDF)
  

Augmented reality

• Augmented reality contact lenses give you Terminator-vision
  
• BMW augmented reality
  
• ARToolKit (Augmented Reality in Augmented Reality)
  
• TAT augmented ID
  
• Augmented Reality Magic 1.0
  

General

• Best Customers: Those Who Steal Their Content
  Historically, an easy way to stoke the ire of a major media executive was to start talking about the surge in peer-to-peer file distribution.
  
  Now, we do lots of research at Frank N. Magid Associates to take the pulse of various media channels for customers, and recently a P2P company, Vuze, hired us to find out how its users' media habits compare with those of the average internet user. When we did, we found that those media execs may not have cause for all the quaking. (While we conducted the study on behalf of a client, I assure you we used the same sound, time-tested methods we use for any of our in-house, proprietary research.)
• Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009
  Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.
  
  These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.
• How SPEAR Identifies Domain Experts within Delicious
  
• Dolores Labs Blog » The Programming Language with the Happiest Users
  Which languages make programmers the happiest? It’s clear that some languages are more popular than others, and many of us debate long and hard over the relative merits of Python vs Ruby, C vs Java or Lisp vs everything else. But what’s the general consensus?
• How companies are benefiting from Web 2.0: McKinsey Global Survey Results
  
• Douglas Adams on the internet in 2009
  Twitter has become a polarising service. I’m one of the millions of people who find value in Twitter, mostly because I’ve built a network of new media and digital journalism professionals, many of whom I am lucky enough to call friends. As I’ve said before, my network is my filter, and my Twitter network provides me with an incredibly valuable filtered feed of content that I have to know as a social media journalist. It’s better than any single site. I generate an RSS feed just of the links that friends post in Twitter to keep on top it.
• 50 things that are being killed by the internet – Telegraph
  The internet has wrought huge changes on our lives – both positive and negative – in the fifteen years since its use became widespread.
• Gov 2.0: It’s All About The Platform
  
• Got no friends? Now you can buy them on Facebook
  
• OpenCalais Brings Semantic Metatagging to Oracle Databases
  OpenCalais, a semantic web service from Thomson-Reuters, has announced a deal to integrate OpenCalais into the Oracle Database 11g Release 2, giving Oracle customers programmatic access to the OpenCalais metatagging service.
• 50 things that are being killed by the internet – Telegraph The internet has wrought huge changes on our lives – both positive and negative – in the fifteen years since its use became widespread.

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on September 7, 2009

Does eDisclosure / eDiscovery really equate to eDisaster?

According to the British Computer Society’s Information Security Magazine, eDisclosure is a time bomb waiting to happen, and the key question for many organisations should be: "how ready are we for any potential fall-out?"

This excellent article claims that the astounding growth of Electronically Stored information (ESI) means that Security and Search / Accessibility, not Storage, have become the biggest challenge for most organisations. However, due to an increasingly stringent regulatory and legislative environment, we are witnessing a definite increase in the number of requests for ESI, or eDisclosure, by regulators and the legal process. It also predicts that “eDisclosure related investigations, prosecutions and fines are likely to become more common”. So just what is eDisclosure, and what does it mean for most organisations?

First of all, Disclosure is, according to the UK Crown Prosecution Service, “one of the most important issues in the criminal justice system” which requires that “…full disclosure should be made of all material held by the prosecution that weakens its case or strengthens that of the defence”. In other words, all relevant material information must be disclosed by both sides in order to ensure fair-play, and in the case of electronic information this is referred to as Electronic Disclosure or eDisclosure (Note: This is also known as eDiscovery in the USA).

Secondly, The repercussions for any organisation caught out by eDisclosure could be rather severe, as it is often commensurate with those accruing from major information management / compliance risks, which may result in significant costs and fines; charges of non-compliance; and damage to reputation and stakeholder / customer confidence. So what can organisations do to address this very real challenge, and to mitigate the associated risks?

1. Build and Increase Awareness– there is a surfeit of information about eDisclosure online, and a simple Google or Bing query will throw up loads of links. (Note the most relevant links are not necessarily those of solution vendors). Also there are several high-profile conferences and events that take place each year on this topic, (e.g. see the upcoming Information Retention and E-Disclosure Management Europe)
2. Improved Data Governance – this should go without saying, but the number of enterprises that are lacking in this particular area is quite alarming in light of reported incidents of data breach / loss. Most organisations and their CxOs need to raise the profile and priority for a holistic information security / management strategy that encompasses ALL aspects of information risk (e.g. compliance and risk management, information audit, security and access control / monitoring), and that’s just for starters.
3. Investigation of Solution Options for eDisclosure (i.e. Build, Buy, or Services) - Several vendors may claim to do this, but the key is to find one/s that address not just eDisclosure, (which really boils down to good data management, search and retrieval capabilities), but also all the relevant / impacted areas as listed above under Data Governance. In addition they must include policies and provisions for new technologies / usage scenarios (e.g. Cloud, Blogs, Wikis, plus Social Networking Media e.g. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube etc.)

In conclusion, and in line with a previous post about Data Loss, eDisclosure is a BIG topic that affects all legal, legislative, regulatory, enterprise and technology stakeholders alike; therefore the right solution/s (including IRM like capabilities for access tracking and control) must be equally wide-ranging and fundamental in order to be effective.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jude Umeh is a Snr. consultant / Enterprise Architect within Capgemini, as well as Author, Blogger and Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS). Jude is something of a rights management evangelist (when provoked), and you can follow / connect with him on Twitter

Posted by Jude Umeh on September 1, 2009

Weekly digest of week 35 2009

This week a lot of people were discussing what the definition of Enterprise2.0 (or Enterprise Karmic Koala as Ron Tolido puts it) should be, criticism grows on Apple and the iPhone and a whitepaper (PDF) by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle on Web squared.

Social collaboration tools

• Visible Banking: the Social Media Directory
  
• How to Extend Your Customer Experience Through Social Media
  
• Pfizer will recruit patients through online community
  
• Why social networking tools will go enterprise: All your employees are using them
  
• Why isn’t my SharePoint Environment Social??? – SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land
  As we prepare our environments for SharePoint 2010 to take advantage of new features and solutions, there is still much more we can do to so we can take advantage of the social features today. You may have read the heated debate around whether SharePoint 2007 is social software or if it’s true enterprise 2.0 or read the various whitepapers that drill into the feature sets. Have you stepped back and looked at your environment and asked… Did we turn on those knobs and switches?

Enterprise2.0

• Annoyed at ‘Enterprise 2.0′
  
• A Defining Moment
• Enterprise 2.0 is Not an Application
  Enterprise 2.0 should be a structure that allows great flexibility in the choice and use of applications throughout an organization, supporting the applications with APIs to allow data to be taken from and deposited into central data stores. Enterprise 2.0 currently “fails” because we are attempting 1.0 deployments of 2.0 applications.
• Enterprise 2.0: Skip the Pilot
  Get out your pitchforks, I'm about to commit Enterprise 2.0 heresy.  There's an orthodoxy in Enterprise 2.0 circles about how you're supposed to run an implementation. The orthodoxy goes something like this: Start with small-scale pilots, define your business objectives, watch the pilots closely, evaluate their success, make a go/no-go decision. (A good recent articulation of this view is in Chris McGrath's post on 8 Tips for a Successful Social Intranet Pilot.) As far as I can tell it's what everyone thinks. In fact, it's what I used to think. Unfortunately, it's dead wrong. The orthodoxy is wrong for a very simple reason: Size matters. By constraining the size of your pilot, you significantly alter the way your company can and will use the tools.
• Enterprise Karmic Koala
  When on holidays, I try to be unaware of technology as much as possible (people that happen to know my e-mail out-of-office messages will recognise this). Only natural. But not as easy as it seems. Two years ago, when we drove back through the French Lorraine region, we ended up in an ultra-modern fuel station that had literally crashed due to a software error. A guy in a yellow emergency vest was nervously searching for a Windows start-up disk while all of his screens just showed that all too familiar sandglass. And last year, when we cruised through lovely California we could not even imagine how to do it without TripAdvisor, Google Maps and a bunch of other on-line travelling tools. This year, after returning from Spain and the Alsace, I decided to buy a new bicycle. I found a not too expensive Gitane mountain bike – completely made in France, quite an unexpected pleasure – only to find out later that the model is called ‘Fitz Roy 2.0’.

Numbers

• BlackBerry Users Work An Extra 15 Hours Per Week
  
• Who's Winning the Smartphone Wars?
  
• Numbers we track in our online/offline life
  
• Social Network Penetration by Age and Gender
  

Web development

• 25+ Great HTML 5 Resources to Get You Started
• 50 Useful New jQuery Techniques and Tutorials
• Flex + Force.com: A Powerful Combination for Building Great, Data-Driven Web Applications
• Why is HTML Suddenly Interesting?
• Has IE6 Finally Reached the End of the Line?

Is Apple losing it?

• Facebook developer slams Apple censors
  The man behind Facebook's iPhone app has called for Apple to scrap its policy of reviewing and rejecting apps submitted to the App Store.
• The Google Voice app scandal: is Apple losing control over the iPhone?
  
• Facebook App Developer To Apple: Tear Down This App Store Wall
  

General

• You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again | Epicenter | Wired.com
  More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday.
• Does the GPL Matter? In a Word, Yes
  Given that I’ve used the “Does x matter?” conceit myself, I understand completely that John Edwards’ “Does the GPL matter?” headline is merely a rhetorical device. Nor does it escape me that its sensationalism is designed, either by Edwards or his editor, to attract the very attention it’s receiving.
• Microsoft Brings Twitter And Facebook To The Emerging World With OneApp
  
• Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On (PDF)
  
• A Glimpse at Web 3.0: 13 Semantic Web Applications Reviewed
  Web 2.0 was all about getting people to connect with one another and establishing a presence for them on the web. Now that you have gotten the chance to get to know each other through the web, it’s time for our computers to socialize. The aim of the next iteration of the web, Web 3.0, is that computers will be able to understand the content and the information they contain. Rather than the data just being a document, it will be put within context helping the computer to relate pieces of information and present them to you accordingly. Therefore, you will no longer have to sift through a pile of search results, some of which are irrelevant, to get the information your want.
• Multitouch interface for Firefox is stunning (Video)
  
• Newspaper replaces writers with search algorithm
  
• Goodbye Virtual Reality, Hello Augmented Reality
  If you haven’t yet heard about Augmented Reality or Web Squared, allow me to make a quick introduction. This is the next iteration of the Web and also desktop and mobile applications and is indicative of the future hybrid Web and device experience. And no, it’s not called Web 3.0. Augmented Reality joins the likes of the Semantic Web, Geo-Location, Artificial Intelligence, among many other emerging technologies in what the father of Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly, refers to as Web Squared.
• BBC uses Google Gears to test location-based mobile
  
• Mashups in Action: Stories from the Global Mashup Developer Community
  

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on August 31, 2009

Weekly digest of week 34 2009

You probably know your hourly rate at work, but what about the rest of your time, the time spent not doing work: shopping, queueing, waiting on the phone, eating lunch, watching TV, drinking in the pub? Paul McCrudden decided his every minute was worth money, and set out to reclaim it from every company he spent time with over a six-week period this summer. Google is accelerating the web (again) with pubsubhubbub and Samsung Opens Up Their Cross-Platform Widget Interface To Developers.

Social collaboration tools

• 20+ more mind-blowing social media statistics
  The social media statistics I posted a few weeks ago seemed to strike a chord amongst the digital community, especially in highlighting just how big an issue this particular area of online currently is. So I’m happy to say that I’ve trawled around the internet to bring you some more snippets of useful data and awesome figures.
• The Social Networking revolution is just getting started. There’s so much more to come.
  Social networks; by now even our parents are aware of them. In fact many of them even have their own profiles (my mom signed up to Facebook 2 days ago). The billions of daily page views on these networks mostly go to viewing pictures, writing on walls and, as research has shown, dating. But what I’d like to focus on is what doesn’t happen on social networks. There has to be so much more then merely browsing photos and sending messages.

• The cultural implications of E2.0 integrations: ignore at your own peril
  It seems to me that nearly every blog post about E2.0 discusses the great business outcomes the technology itself can drive – innovation, inter-organizational collaboration, quicker insight into buyer behavior, stronger customer relationships, and lots more. And they’re absolutely right.
• How the Old, the Young and Everyone in Between Uses Social Networks
  Social networkers utilize popular Websites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in different ways depending on their age.  According to Anderson Analytics, Generation Z (13-to-14-year-old) social network users were more likely to use MySpace than Facebook. Only 9% of them used Twitter and none used LinkedIn.
• Social Media Case Studies SUPERLIST- 23 Extensive Lists of Organizations Using Social Media (UPDATED)
  

Web development

• Web fonts and standards
  
• Taming Advanced CSS Selectors
  
• When to read out the end time in browser speed tests
  
• Google Voice + RIA has Potential
  
• JavaScript MVC
  

PubSubHubbub

• Google Alerts Gets PubSubHubbub, Real-Time Programmable Hooks
  
• Google Continues To Feed The PubSubHubbub. Google Alerts Now In Real-Time.
  
• Towards a programmable web: PubSubHubbub for Google Alerts
  

General

• Pirate Bay leads Swedish Viking charge on paid content
  Swedish piracy – digital piracy, that is – is challenging the very essence of traditional copyright law. And even legal Swedish enterprises – such as the popular new music sharing website Spotify – are threatening to rewrite all the laws of conventional media economics.
• The iPhone is Not Easy to Use: A New Direction for User Experience Design
  
• The State of Apps – Q2 2009
  As you’ve seen us do last time, every quarter we bundle what we know about software and web applications in a trend report called “The State of Apps”. We’ve just released the report for the second quarter of 2009, and you can get it completely free here.
• Samsung Opens Up Their Cross-Platform Widget Interface To Developers
  
• Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality
  Many people enter the inside-out world of augmented reality (AR) by doing something as ordinary as visiting a major city like New York and trying to get to a local friend’s favorite pizza shop, somewhere deep in Brooklyn, via public transportation. Standing in Times Square on a summer evening, they might hold up a new smart phone and pan it slowly around the Square to see a pointer to the nearest subway entrance overlaid on their phone’s video display of the buildings around them.
• How much is your time worth?
  You probably know your hourly rate at work, but what about the rest of your time, the time spent not doing work: shopping, queueing, waiting on the phone, eating lunch, watching TV, drinking in the pub? Paul McCrudden decided his every minute was worth money, and set out to reclaim it from every company he spent time with over a six-week period this summer.
• Google knows your past, present AND future
  The search engine has unveiled an upgrade of Google Insights for Search which advises brands how much money to set aside by predicting what people will search for and how often.

  
  

  Gazing into its crystal ball, Google found trends in over half of the most popular search terms are predictable year-on-year, and the resulting information will be valuable to brands looking to increase ROI in paid search. Google Trends and Google Insights for Search have been giving daily insight into what the world is searching for the last year but now Google's graphs of search trends include future results.

• 14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail
  Creating and nurturing a community is not something at which traditional stakeholders in software projects are often skilled.
• Why you shouldn’t be getting your ‘BI 2.0’ from your BI vendor
  
• Google beefs up search appliance features, hooks into Salesforce
  

 

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on August 24, 2009

Weekly digest of week 33 2009

Facebook was very prominent in the news this week: first with the acquisition of Friendfeed and then with the possible introduction of a special Facebook browser (which already was predicted on Capgemini’s Technology blog). Google introduced this week a lot of social features and even Apple seems to take social networking seriously.

Social collaboration tools

• Should you be paid to participate in social media?
  Employees are a key element in social business. Designing roles for employees in social business requires particular thought around ecosystem (i.e. how they connect with others), hivemind (i.e. their level of social calibration), and dynamic signaling (i.e. content creation and distribution).
• Behavioural transition strategies for E2.0
  
• The Top Myths to Avoid Change in Social Media & the Role of “Antibodies” in Today’s Corporation
  
• Social Media Inside the Firewall Roll-out Best Practice
  
• Is Apple finally taking social networking seriously?
  

Facefeed

• FriendFeed should have been part of Facebook from Day One
  True confessions time: I created a FriendFeed account some time back but never really used it. I was already deeply entrenched in Facebook by then and was starting to see some value in Twitter – so I jumped into FriendFeed and created an acccount.
• Revealed: why Facebook acquired FriendFeed
  Facebook has splashed out almost $50m (£30.3m) on FriendFeed, the start up that allows people to see what their friends are doing in real-time on social media sites including Digg and Twitter. Will McInnes, managing director of NixonMcInnes, examines the strategy behind the deal.
• Oh, FriendFeed is now Facebook’s “official” R&D department!
  
• Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?- The SiliconANGLE
  I say ‘quite possibly so’ – though it’ll be a long road to get there. I say we’re headed towards a Federated real-time web, and Wordpress looks like it could be best positioned to take the helm of that ship.Friendfeed (and their acquisition by Facebook) has been the topic of conversation here at SiliconANGLE as well as much of the blogosphere yesterday and today. I don’t doubt that this will continue for a while. Louis Gray probably best captured the emotional aspect for most of us early adopters who were on the system chatting away with the immediate family of the founders when it was just us:

Rockmelt (The Facebook browser)

• The RockMelt Mystery. Is it Just a Facebook Browser, Or Will It Break The Mold?
  
• facebook://
  Facebook has the size to introduce its own browser-like platform, its own operating systems and perhaps even its own hardware line. Facebook could disrupt the Web and create a new (proprietary?) standard on how the new Web could be. They can, because one out of every six people that is online, has a Facebook account. They can because they have got such immense amount of data and people who are spending so much time on it, people will miss it when it is gone.
• Netscape Founder Backs New Browser
  Mr. Andreessen is backing a start-up called RockMelt, staffed with some of his close associates, that is building a new Internet browser, according to people with knowledge of his investment.
• Why I'm suspicious of the Facebook 'RockMelt' browser
  

Social Google

• Google Reader Unleashes A Gaggle Of Nice Social And Feed Management Updates
  
• Google goes social but not in a Facebook kind of way
  It’s no Facebook. And it’s certainly not Twitter. But Google today introduced a social element of its own – called Social for iGoogle.The company introduced 19 new social gadgets as part of the launch. In a sense, the only difference between the previous gadgets for an iGoogle page and these gadgets is that friends with the same gadgets can see your updates and even engage in a game with you.
• iGoogle Releases Social Gadgets
  
• A flurry of features for feed readers
  
• Google updates Reader, Youtube, iGoogle
  

Web development

• JavaScript 2.0: A Sneak Preview
  As a developer and writer, part of my job is to stay informed of current trends in the web world, whether it be company mergers, online-shopping trends, or programming technologies. I'll admit that it's hard to keep up with everything that's going on in the industry these days, but one tidbit of news is making the rounds that is raising a lot of eyebrows: the drafting of the JavaScript 2.0 proposal. The new JavaScript 2.0 / EMCAScript 4.0, isn't due to be finalized until the end of the fall of 2009, but it's already garnering lots of strong reactions – both good and bad. Today, we'll be taking a look at some of the proposed specifications and you can decide for yourself whether they constitute improvements in the language or merely unnecessary standardization.
• How to Use Operating System Styles in CSS
  
• Will Microsoft Implement HTML5 in Internet Explorer?
  
• PHP is the Future
  

Augmented reality

• Discovering Papervision3D: Best Design Practices and Tutorials
• Beam your ads onto Buckingham Palace with this new AR app
  Metaio, an augmented reality specialist, is developing an app that allows brands to place 'virtual ads' in real places like landmarks or tourist attractions for consumers to view via their mobile phone.

Mobile

• Nokia Considering Ditching Symbian For Open Source
• How to Create Your First iPhone Application
• Majority of CIOs still reject the iPhone, but resistance is weakening

Tools

• 16 Apps That Make Sharing Large Files A Snap
• Free Tools to Back Up Your Online Accounts [Cloud Computing]
  

General

• Forget the iPhone app, Google Voice coming as a Web app
• 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Blogging
  
• 15-24 Year Olds in the U.K. Encroach on their Elder’s Social Networking Space
  The number of 15-24 year olds visiting social networking sites reached 6.8 million in June, up 14 percent versus the previous year. Though the overall audience of social networkers in this age segment is up substantially during the past year, the time they spent on social networking sites is down 9 percent. The overall decline in time spent on the sites appears to be attributable to younger users spending less time on secondary social networking sites.
• The Evolution of Blogging
  Dave Winer’s ability to peer into the future is uncanny. He was talking about a river of news long before the current activity streams became popular. He was evangelizing RSS long before there were blogs. I could go on and on about his prescient observations, but it’s his warnings that are especially prophetic.
• Social Media Revolution
  
• 'Spotify are the new pirates': Swedish artist
  Swedish musician Magnus Uggla has withdrawn his music from streaming music service Spotify claiming his "songs are being given away".
• SQL pie chart
  My other half says I’m losing it. But I think that as an enthusiast kernel developer she doesn’t have the right to criticize people. (”I like user space better!” – she exclaims upon reading this). Shown below is a (single query) SQL-generated pie chart. I will walk through the steps towards making this happen, and conclude with what, I hope you’ll agree, are real-world, useful usage samples.
• Google Website Optimizer Case Study: Daily Burn, 20%+ Improvement
  This post will show exactly how one start-up improved their homepage conversion rate (visitor to sign-up flow) more than 20%, then 16% again, with a few simple changes and Google Website Optimizer.
• As Media Brands Build Their Own Communities, They Must Evolve Their Business Model
  

 

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on August 17, 2009

Weekly digest of week 32 2009

This week: holograms you can touch and feel, a Social Media Apocalypse, what is customer experience, a fight on who unfollowed who the first on Twitter and information about the most engaged brands on social media.

Social collaboration tools

• The 3 Fundaments of Online Strategy
• Stryder: 'I axed Harris from Twitter first' Tinchy Stryder has claimed that he removed Calvin Harris from Twitter before the Scottish dance star deleted him.
• The Only Way To Keep Everyone Active
• Social Desktop Core idea of the Social Desktop is to connect to your peers in the community, making sharing and exchanging knowledge easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself.
• Balancing Technology and Culture During a Social Business Implementation

Customer Experience

• Customer Experience Is Not About Coffee
• Ryanair's Terrible Customer Experience May Be Just Right " In what seems to be a low point for airline customer experience, Ryanair might start charging passengers to go to the bathroom. This discount airline doesn’t cut any slack for its customers. It charges for even slightly overweight luggage and extra carry-ons like duty-free shopping bags, and offers no refunds or apologies.
• Capgemini’s Customer Experience Blog

Social Media Apocalypse

• Professor Main Target of Assault on Twitter The cyber attacks Thursday and Friday on Twitter and other popular Web services disrupted the lives of hundreds of millions of Internet users, but the principal target appeared to be one man: a 34-year-old economics professor from the republic of Georgia.
• Twitter attack: Bots may have been hardest hit
• Was yesterday’s Social Media Apocalypse an attack on one man?
• Twitter's "Harsh and Cold" Honesty Tells Devs No ETA for Fixes
• The Adventure Continues

Research

• ENGAGEMENTdb: Most Engaged Brands On Social Media
• Social Networking on Intranets Community features are spreading from "Web 2.0" to "Enterprise 2.0." Research across 14 companies found that many are making productive use of social intranet features.
• Trends: Visualizing the Social Software and Collaboration Marketplace Here's our simple division of the enterprise social software and collaboration marketplace, into six categories. I don't claim that this is a complete list of vendors — just a categorization of the most important ones on enterprise buyers' short lists today. It also does not confer any "leadership" status; a magic sextant this is not. But it does tell you where a vendor resides on the landscape.
• Gartner Social Software Hype Cycle 2009 Gartner maintains a series of well-followed reports, called Hype Cycles. The Social Software Hype Cycle highlights the most important technologies that support rich social interactions
• Burson-Marsteller Social Media Fortune 100 (research)

Web development

• Just When You Thought IE6 Would Die…
• Mastering CSS, Part 1: Styling Design Elements
• Build Your Own URL Shortener

Tools

• Make Microsoft Outlook More Social
• Ginipic: Neat Image Search App For Web And Desktop
• Sigil Sigil is a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor. It is designed to edit books in ePub format.

General

• Can the Rock Band Network Transform the Music Industry? When the Rock Band Network — essentially an App Store for musicians who want to upload and sell Rock Band-playable versions of their songs — opens for business later this year, it has the potential to transform the music industry by giving musicians large and small a distribution platform on one of the few online services that’s managed to successfully monetize music downloads. If, that is, the Network can make their songs easy to find and enjoyable to play.
• APIs Critical to Facebook’s Plans to Dominate Real Time Search As Facebook continues its major push toward greater user openness (a la Twitter) this year, two product priorities are leading the way. First, Facebook’s new privacy controls will make it easier for Facebook users to share content publicly with everyone. Second, Facebook’s new real time search engine is designed to make it easier to find content your friends – or any Facebook users – have shared.
• Will Videoconferencing Kill Business Class Travel?
• Learning from Games: A Language for Designing Emotion
• Augmented Reality: Mobile Marketing infusion I do believe these are the opportunities and purposes where Mobile Marketing and the role of mobiles devices have been waiting for, enabled by: Augmented Reality.
• The bandwidth-sync correlation that’s worth thinking about
• Spotify, Napster and The Quest For Premium Music Dollars
• What Works: The Web Way vs. The Wave Way – Anil Dash Google Wave is an impressive set of technologies, the kind of stunningly slick application that literally makes developers stand up and cheer. I've played with the Google Wave test sandbox a bit, and while it's definitely too complex to live up to the "this will replace email!" hype that greeted its launch, it certainly has some cool features. So the big question is whether Wave will succeed as overall in becoming a popular standard for communications on the web, because Google has made an admirable investment in documenting the underlying platform and making it open enough for others to build on and extend. I think the answer is no, and the reason is because the Wave way is not compatible with the Web way.
• A Comparison of Open Source Search Engines
• Holograms That You Can Touch and Feel Holograms are cool. But holograms you can actually touch? A team of researchers from The University of Tokyo has created just such a technology. The tactile hologram, which is being shown-off this week at the SIGGRAPH conference in New Orleans, actually involves two basic pieces: A hologram, which is generated simply by shining an LCD projector onto a concave mirror, and a novel technique which creates ultrasonic waves.

 

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on August 10, 2009

Weekly digest of week 31 2009

This week almost 15 million people watched a wedding video, Apple removed Google Voice from the appstore which created an intense debate about the fairness of it, a publication about Gartner’s Hype Cycle and also there was something about collaboration between Yahoo and Microsoft, however that seems to have disappeared in all the noise about Apple.

Social collaboration tools

• Usage and Experience Doesn’t Equate to Social Expertise
• Ten top issues in adopting enterprise social computing
• SAP’s Mark Yolton: Creating vibrant, engaging online communities
• Number of Social Networking Users Has Doubled Since 2007
• Developing an Enterprise Social Computing Strategy Intel IT has deployed an enterprise-wide social computing platform that combines professional networking tools with social media such as wikis and blogs, and integrates with existing enterprise software. Read how Intel IT transformed collaboration across Intel while addressing top business challenges such as helping employees to find relevant information and expertise more quickly, breaking down silos; attracting and retaining new employees; and capturing the tacit knowledge of mature employees.

A wedding (a great example of the viral effect of social media)

• YouTube: Viral Wedding Videos Are Great For Advertising
• I now pronounce you monetized: a YouTube video case study
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0 (the video all the buzz is about)
• Viral Wedding Video’s 10M Views Drive Chris Brown Buzz and Sales

Research

• Gartner Hype Cycle 2009: What’s Peaking, What’s Troughing?`
• June 2009 Mobile Metrics Report
• Teens Don’t Tweet; Twitter’s Growth Not Fueled By Youth
• Social Media Best Practices Marketers have become more than willing to start a conversation about their brands through social media. But that’s only the beginning of the marketing effort.In late 2008, MarketingSherpa surveyed social media marketers about the effectiveness of their practices. Large majorities rated social media marketing effective at influencing brand reputation, increasing awareness and improving search rankings and site traffic.
• Who will own the screen? an analysis of the Active Idle Screen market 2009-2011

Web development

• Text Rotation with CSS
• Misunderstanding Markup: XHTML 2/HTML 5 Comic Strip
• What You Need To Know About JavaScript Scope
• 33+ Online Resources to Learn CSS/li>

Apple AT&T and Google voice

• Apple Is Growing Rotten To The Core: Official Google Voice App Blocked From App Store
• How long can Apple's reputation stay untarnished?
• Google Pulls Apple from Search Results Mountain View, CA – In response to Apple pulling the Google Voice application from the iPhone App Store, Google has removed all search results leading to Apple.com from its index. Google is also redirecting searches for "iPhone" and "app store" to the IMDb.com page for Payback.
• iPhone-Google Voice Issues Underscore iPhone for Business Issues
• FCC eyes AT&T, Apple rejection of Google Voice apps (full text of letters)

Augmented reality

• “Preparing Us For AR”: the value of illustrating of future technologies When I wrote about Text In The World over on my personal blog a few weeks ago, our colleague Matt Jones left a comment:“preparing us for AR” (augmented reality) And this got me thinking about the ways that design and media can educate us about what future technologies might be like, or prepare us for large paradigm shifts. What sort of products really are “preparing” us for Augmented Reality?
• Augmented reality & face recognition & mobile

General

• Microsoft Backtracks on Browser-less Windows 7 E
• Choosing a non-relational database; why we migrated from MySQL to MongoDB Until recently, our server monitoring application, Server Density, was running using MySQL for the backend. Although we primarily provide it as a hosted service, it has been written to work as a standalone application for customers that wish to install on their own servers. This means each customer had their own MySQL database.
• The Semantic Web Considered Harmful? Today, there is tremendous activity and promises under the auspices of the Semantic Web covering the academic, research and industrial sectors. This includes numerous accounts of the benefits that this set of new technologies brings to these communities, and ultimately, the end user – underpinned by the RDF and OWL languages. These benefits include the rhetorical “semantics” and much vamped “reasoning” features.
• Collaborating With The Competition: How It Can Help You Succeed
• Designing “Read More” And “Continue Reading” Links
• Pulling the Plug: A Technical Review of the Internet Shutdown in Burma | OpenNet Initiative Examines the role of information technology, citizen journalists, and bloggers in Burma and presents a technical analysis of the abrupt shutdown of Internet connectivity by the Burmese government on September 29, 2007, following its violent crackdown on protesters there. Completely cutting international Internet links is rare. Nepal, which severed all international Internet connections when the King declared martial law in February 2005, is the only other state to take such drastic action. Although extreme, the measures taken by the Burmese government to limit citizens’ use of the Internet during this crisis are consistent with previous OpenNet Initiative (ONI) findings in Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, and Tajikistan, where authorities controlled access to communication technologies as a way to limit social mobilization around key political events. What makes the Burmese junta stand out, however, is its apparent goal of also preventing information from reaching a wider international audience
• Business Integration of Social Media Marketing
• Social media marketing, while its concept and fundamentals have been around for a while, has changed remarkably in the past six months. There was a time when a social media link building campaign was very easy. The big search engines valued domains like Squidoo and MySpace to the extent that your profiles could easily rank for targeted keywords. It should come as no surprise that this is no longer the case.
• Microsoft and Yahoo: Too Little, Too Late, Too Hyped
• Web2.0 is Dead – As a common phrase anyway
• Google Apps + OpenID = identity hub for SaaS

 

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on August 3, 2009

ICANN (But U Can’t, Yet)

Starting spring of 2010, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will begin taking applications for additional generic Top Level Domains (gTLD) that could see an expansion of up to 500 new domain suffixes (such as: .food, .drink, .books, etc.). So what are the implications for established online brands, Internet Governance, and Cyber-crime?

For one thing, an expanded set of gTLDs has long been positioned by ICANN as something that “will allow for more innovation, choice and change to the Internet’s addressing system”. This is well in line with ICANN’s founding principle to promote competition whilst ensuring security and stability. Also the expansion programme is being undertaken only after lengthy and on-going consultations with the numerous communities of stakeholders across the global Internet Community, (apparently the new gTLDs can be up to 63 characters in length, and will provide support for Chinese, Arabic and other characters), thus opening up the field more fully to a global audience. Furthermore, several organisations have apparently announced plans to apply for the new gTLDs. So what’s the controversy you might ask?

Well, according to this article, there still several issues / criticisms to be addressed by ICANN e.g.:

• What protection exists for trademarks and intellectual property (i.e. protecting brands from phishing and cyber squatting)?


• Whether registrars can operate new gTLD registries (thereby overturning the previous ICANN requirement to separate the two entities / activities)


• How will community and geography-based gTLDs be evaluated (i.e. who will oversee the criteria and validity of applications for geographically-based gTLDs)


• The fast tracking of foreign language domains (e.g. for new language character support);


• How will this impact the domain naming market overall (who will win / lose in the new gTLD landscape)?


• At some $185,000 per new gTLD, this won't be cheap and ICANN faces criticism over the fees it plans to charge new gTLD applicants (i.e. if only rich organisations can afford a new gTLD, then how does this cater for poorer but equally legitimate applicants)?


• Finally, according to an analysis piece in the Financial Times, there is ongoing tug-of-war over if and when ICANN should transfer full accountability for its operations to an international body

In summary, although there are still lots of issues / questions / criticisms to be addressed, the overarching goal of providing more choice, innovation and wider reach for the gTLD namespace is both laudable and to be encouraged. However, it must be done in a controlled manner in order to avoid any unintended consequences that could lead to irreparable fragmentation in the global Internet naming and addressing system.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jude Umeh is a senior consultant and enterprise architect within Capgemini, and he can be something of a rights management evangelist (only when provoked). You can follow him on Twitter , and his BCS blog

Posted by Jude Umeh on July 29, 2009

Weekly digest of week 30 2009

This week Nielsen presented results that teens are actually quite normal regarding media usage. YouTube drops support for IE6, Adobe released Wave and Google’s Wave is available from September and had an early release to build your own Wave.

Social collaboration tools

• Does mobile and social technology breed narcissism?
  But enough about cultural trends; Let's talk about ME! A look at how Twitter, Facebook, cell phones, and online social networks are changing the human race
• How to Use Interns In Your Social Programs
• Social Media Done Right Means No More Social Media “Experts”
• IT blocks users from social networking in 71% of organizations
• Enterprise: List of 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines
  Managing staff who participate in social networks.
  This list also includes policies called; Staff blogging policies, enterprise social network guidelines, Employee Blogging Policies, Staff engagement in online communities, and so on

Social Media Cases

• Social Media Case Study: Dairy Queen
  It’s no surprise that in this digital age corporations are actively engaging their customer base through social media. I can list hundreds of companies who successfully quote on quote “get it“. I thought I would focus on one, Dairy Queen.
• Social Media Brand Engagement Report
• Wells Fargo’s Joel Nathanson: Social media engagement during a crisis
• Does social media really correlate with the bottom line? Color me skeptical
  A study has found that revenue, gross margins and profits correlate nicely with companies that are the most engaged with social media. Should you build a portfolio around these highly engaged social media friendly brands? Probably not.
• Teens More “Normal” Than You Think Regarding Media Usage | Nielsen Wire
  It’s 2009: Do you know where your kids are?
  
  They might be on the Internet, or gaming or texting… but they could also be be watching live TV, listening to the radio or reading a newspaper. At the annual What Teens Want conference in New York, The Nielsen Company presented How Teens Use Media, which argues once you look past the hype – American teens are not as alien in their media usage as you might expect. Sure, it might sound hip and trendy to suggest they’re too busy texting, Twittering or LOL-ing to be engaged with traditional media, but ultimately, the research proves otherwise.

Rich Internet Applications

• YouTube to Drop Support for IE6
• 50 New CSS Techniques For Your Next Web Design
• Computing with JavaScript Web Workers
• BBC Glow – a New JavaScript Library
• HEY-IT – We want to get rid of IE6!
  Wake up IT, guerrilla-style! And finally get your browser upgraded!

HTML5

• Web fonts, HTML 5 roundup
• Gmail for Mobile HTML5 Series: Autogrowing Textareas

Adobe

• Adobe launches Wave
• Adobe Releases Beta Text Layout Framework
• Adobe Unveils New Open Source Initiatives Targeted Towards Media Companies

Tools

• Quality Assurance tools for HTML5
• Testing Multiple IE Versions, VPC’s and Super Preview
• 13 Firefox Add-ons For Web Development

Web3.0

• Web 3.0 Is Coming — Are CIOs Ready?
• Linked Data and the Public Domain
• The upcoming Internet pandemic: data addiction
• When Information is NOT the Answer

Google Wave

• Surf on Google Wave from September
• Google Wave – First Impressions
• Google releases 20k+ lines of Wave Protocol code and Instructions. First step towards your own version of Wave.

General

• Estimation
• How The Average U.S. Consumer Spends Their Paycheck – Visual Economics
• A Crowd-Sourced National Communications Census
• Forrester: 2.2 billion people online globally by 2013 (43% in Asia)
• If today is an average workday, you could lose about an hour of time trying to get something done
  But you won't be able to accomplish the task because you can't find the right information, access the right tool or reach the right person due to inefficient processes. Employees spend 25% of their time just looking for information. Every week, 42% of people use the wrong information to make decisions, requiring rework. And with the economic downturn, there is an even greater urgency to improve business productivity.
• ARtisan
  ARtisan is the fastest and easiest way from point A to point B in browser based augmented reality. With ARtisan, the developer needs no knowledge of the inner workings of augmented reality to create in-depth, interactive AR experiences.
• The Future of Search: Social Relevancy Rank
  What we are about to get is a Social Relevancy Rank. Whenever you search streams of activity, the results will be ordered not chronologically but by how relevant each is to you based on your social graph. That is, people who matter more to you will bubble up. How does this work? Well, there will be a formula, just as there is a formula for Page Rank.
• End the SOAP: this is how simple it should be
• Why Standards Fail

 

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on July 27, 2009

Weekly digest of week 29 2009

Chrome OS was still widely discussed on the Web this week, Safari is supporting 3D CSS, a 15 year old tells Morgan Stanley that Twitter is not for teens and a clear overview why you should not annoy Internet Explorer 6 users any further with upgrade notices.

Social collaboration tools

• Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect
  
• Release the Enterprise 2!
  
• Does Social Networking Breed Social Division?
  Is the social media revolution bringing us together? Or is it perpetuating divisions by race and class?
• Telligent Releases an Integrated Suite of Collaboration Tools with High Powered Metrics
  
• What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later
  

Social Media Research

• Social Media Ignorance – Case Study PayPal
  Paypal was one of the first online payment services and had a great start but over time lost the edge. The company seems to struggle with their internal administration and adjusting their business processes to meet customer needs.
• Twitter is not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15-year-old expert
  Report on young people's media habits written for investment bank by teenage intern causes huge interest in the City
• Managing beyond Web 2.0 – McKinsey Quarterly – Business Technology – Strategy
  It’s hardly news that the Internet has evolved into the primary vehicle for communication, information, and commerce. But in a surprising twist, today’s online customers—as both producers and consumers of their own content and services—ferociously guard their online experiences. This trend, which goes far beyond Web buzz, is catching some executives by surprise and making others more than a bit worried.

Rich Internet Applications

• CSS 3 Cheat Sheet (PDF)
  
• How To Store Adobe AIR Application Preferences Using JavaScript
  
• Silverlight 3 Launch
  
• One year and ten months is how long it's taken Microsoft to release their third version of Silverlight. From the beginning, Silverlight has been media and consumer focused. Projects such as the NBC Olympics, Wimbledon, the NCAA March Madness basketball video player have defined what Silverlight is. What isn't as well known is that Silverlight is quickly becoming a viable option for RIA development.
• Web Fonts Now, for real
  

HTML5

• HTML 5 is a mess. Now what?
  
• HTML5 and The Future of the Web
  

3D CSS

• 3D Transforms
  
• Watch this: Hardware-accelerated 3D CSS is coming to a browser near you!
  

User Experience

• I don’t care about UX
  
• Social Network Design: Examples and Best Practices
  
• Five UX antipatterns to avoid when designing Log-in & Registration …
  

Augmented Reality

• Want to augment the reality? Layar adds API to their service!
  
• TwittaRound: An Augmented Reality Twitter App
  

Chrome OS

• Google Chrome Operating System: the Facts and Fallacy
  
• Google's Microsoft Moment
  I'm not sure Google's new Chrome OS announcement is that big a deal, or that the eventual product that gets released will actually have that much impact, but it's a useful milestone in marking Google's evolution towards becoming an older company with a distinctly different culture than they used to have.
• Google Chrome OS: 3 reasons it matters, and 4 reasons it's irrelevant
  
• How We Know Chrome OS Will Be A Hit: Steve Ballmer Doesn’t Think So
  
• Thoughts on Google Chrome OS
  

General 

• We Have Invites! Five Stages of Beta and Battling to Get Access
  
• Google Eases The Switch From Lotus Notes To Google Apps
  
• Interest in Lucene continues to accelerate
  
• Internet Explorer’s ActiveX Security Mitigations in Use
  
• 10 Ways IT Managers Can Deal with Social Media
  With persistent reports about hacker attacks, compromised privacy and phishing scams, social networks can be scary places. But that doesn't mean the corporate world should run. IT managers can establish policies that protect corporate network and data security without shutting out social networks altogether. Here are some of the issues IT managers should keep in mind when dealing with social networks.
• ColdFusion 9: Why You Should Pay Attention (Yes, You!)
  
• Much Ado About IE6
  This goes directly to why most folks use IE6: they don’t have a choice. Three out of four IE6 users on Digg said they can’t upgrade due to some technical or workplace reason.
• Dismantle Mistrust Between IT and the Business
  
• The Web of Identities: Making Machine-Accessible People Data
  
• Location Based Social Networks Links (appr 50-100 networks listed)
  

 

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on July 20, 2009

Weekly digest of week 28 2009

This week a lot of buzz around Google’s Chrome OS, the death of XHTML2 and perhaps also of IE and news and information about HTML5:

Social collaboration tools

• Web 2.0 Collaboration Tools for Next Generation of Public Service
  Web 2.0 technologies and services have spread around the world at an amazing pace and are used by millions of people every day. Many public service organizations are also adopting Web 2.0 applications to improve their ability to collaborate and serve citizens more effectively.
  
• Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Internet
  Larry Page should have been in a good mood. It was the fall of 2007, and Google's cofounder was in the middle of a five-day tour of his company's European operations in Zurich, London, Oxford, and Dublin. The trip had been fun, a chance to get a ground-floor look at Google's ever-expanding empire. But this week had been particularly exciting, for reasons that had nothing to do with Europe; Google was planning a major investment in Facebook, the hottest new company in Silicon Valley.
• Amazon, CloudMQ Create “Social Data Cloud”
  I was shocked to hear a Social Data Cloud (SDC) is in full operation, created by Freedom OSS using Amazon Web Services (AWS) technology. CloudMQ is making social data available “in the cloud”, and all the major social networks are participating in the exchange.
• Enterprise 2.0 ROI Metrics: One Size Doesn't Fit All
• Email: The First –and Largest– Social Network

Social Media guidelines

• SAP Social Media Guidelines 2009
  SAP recently announced a new set of Social Media Participation Guidelines to help employees make the most of new social media channels such as Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the spirit of Web 2.0, we would like to share our guidelines with the community.
• Guidelines are important, but interpretation is key
• Intel publishes social media guidelines for its employees

Rich Internet Applications

• RIP XHTML 2
• Misunderstanding markup
• Web Form Validation: Best Practices and Tutorials
• HTML in a Flash World
• Morgan Stanley raises the bar for rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash Platform technologies
  Morgan Stanley have launched a comprehensive online trading tool called “Matrix” which allows their customers to get closer to the trading floor than ever before; the application enables them to view live pricing, get informed opinions for market professionals, review historical market data and make derivatives and foreign exchange trades in real-time, directly from their browser.

Tools

• 12 Tools To Check Your Site’s Accessibility
• 10 Web Apps To Build The Next Big Thing Without Writing Any Code
• Developer Heaven: Mozilla Launches an Open Web Tools Directory.
• Find Creative Commons images with Image Search
• Six Tools For Testing Designs On Mobile Devices

Browsers

• Since March, Internet Explorer Lost 11.4 Percent Share To Firefox, Safari, And Chrome
• Browser wars: Losing ground
  Although Microsoft still dominates the internet browser market, its strength is waning

HTML5

• HTML 5: Ogg Theora Vs H.264 In The Battle For A Web Video Standard
• Adobe and HTML5's Canvas
• A Marriage Made in Heaven? HTML 5 & CSS 3
• HTML 5 Cheat Sheet (PDF)
• HTML 5 Parsing

 

Chrome OS

• Why We Need To Chill About ChromeOS
• Google OS announces Partners: Acer, HP and more…
• Putting What Little We Actually Know About Chrome OS Into Context

General

• Android’s are getting more real than ever. Are you ready?
• Microsoft explores extreme augmented reality
• The value of information
• No Second Life, Twinity Wins $6m For Real Worlds
• Are Semantics Helping Bing Make Better Decisions?
• Will We Soon See a Rally on Web 3.0 Start-Ups?
• Volvo incorporates Twitter into their banner ads
• FREE for free: first ebook and audiobook versions released
• Why You Need to Fail
• Toward a PeopleWeb (PDF)
  Important properties of users and objects will move from being tied to individual Web sites to being globally available.The conjunction of a global object model with portable user context will lead to richer content structure and introduce significant shifts in online communities and information discovery.

 

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on July 13, 2009

Weekly digest of week 27 2009

Every Sunday I scan, collect and organize all my links I ran into the previous week and I send them out to our community of practice in Capgemini that is about SaaS, social collaboration tools, mash up applications and Rich Internet Applications. Since these links are public links there is no reason to not publish them here on our technology blog, especially since publishing them here will give more people the opportunity to read all the information. This week there was the introduction of the term Web Squared and the release of the long awaited new version of Firefox. Besides those two big events quite some buzz about HTML5, Government2.0, Michael Jackson in relation to the Internet and Augmented Reality.

Social collaboration tools

• Real-time systems hurting long-term knowledge?
• Guest Post – Notes from Enterprise 2.0: Still looking for End User Adoption
• The Seven Deadly Sins of Online Community Management
  Community managers are human and imperfect. Here are the Seven Deadly Sins that community managers are sometimes guilty of:
• Debunking Social Media Myths
• Deloitte CrowdIN: Social Media Strategy & Delivery

Rich Internet Applications

• Tibco PageBus: an event framework for JavaScript
• The evolution of client-side scripting
• In the past years browser makers have been working very hard to improve their scripting engines and add new DOM APIs. There are currently so many projects going on that it sometimes starts dazzling me and I have a hard time to keep track of which feature belongs to what project or has been included in which browser. This article attempts to give an overview of all the major innovations that have recently arrived or will hopefully come our way soon.
• Web Video Codecs
• Gmail for Mobile HTML5 Series: Using Timers Effectively

Mash up

• ReST + Context For Killer Apple iPhone Apps in the Enterprise: WE 2.0
• Unified Cloud Interface Project (UCI)
  The unified cloud interface (UCI) or cloud broker will be composed of a semantic specification and an ontology also referred to as "Semantic Cloud Abstraction". The ontology provides the actual model descriptions, while the specification defines the details for integration with other management models.

Tools

• PictureSlides 2.0 – highly customizable option to create JavaScript slideshows
• How to Pick the Perfect Programming Editor

Augmented Reality

• Pachube :: blog: Pachube augmented reality demo, with Dennou Coil-style chalk-drawn space-hack
  We're developing Pachube as a platform that helps people to build applications that bridge physical and networked worlds. To that end, we are going to be releasing demo apps more frequently, and where possible all necessary code for building your own, to show off the kind of things that you can do once your data is Pachube-connected.
• 35 Awesome Augmented Reality Examples
  Augmented Reality!? That's so 2008
  Has AR jumped the shark? Well if Virtual Magicians are using it I think that's your answer. For me the best application of this is in store and also with kids toys. Both applications have far more useful applications than a fun web toy.
• See This New Augmented Reality App for the Apple iPhone

Web Squared

• The Evolving Web In 2009: Web Squared Emerges To Refine Web 2.0
  It's been five years now that we've begun to understand what Web 2.0 is, starting way back in 2003. It's been a fairly impressive if winding road as a new online generation was born. But far from getting long in the tooth, along the way Web 2.0 became vitally important — even central in some cases — to the very future of global culture and business. Oh certainly, sometimes we get tired of the term itself, and admittedly it doesn't describe something necessarily new anymore, but what we just do these days. But the concepts identified as Web 2.0 have proved to be highly insightful, even prescient, and are used around the world daily to guide everything from product development to the future of government.
• Web Squared: Web 2.0's Successor?

Browsers

• How Can Google Chrome Become More Popular?
• IE Compatibility List Pruning
• Firefox 3.5 for developers – MDC
• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3DOT5
  Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is the culmination of nearly a year-long quest to build a browser for the next version of the web. And while it’s not perfect, it comes very, very close.

Government2.0

• Can Open Government Be Gamed?
• Radical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard
• Everyblock’s Code is Open-Sourced
• Lessons from U.S. federal IT dashboard: Transparency and accountability

General

• 5 Lessons in Youth Marketing: Gen Z, Brands and Advertising
  It’s time to move on from Gen Y. Gen Z are the new breed of consumers. They are in their teens, digital natives, lovers of advertising and most importantly, they know you are trying to sell them something.
• InfoQ: Twitter, an Evolving Architecture
  Evan Weaver, Lead Engineer in the Services Team at Twitter, who’s primarily job is optimization and scalability, talked about Twitter’s architecture and especially the optimizations performed over the last year to improve the web site during QCon London 2009.
• Michael Jackson and the Zombieconomy
• Introducing The Open Web Education Alliance
• How to Value the Advertising-Supported Internet
• Blogging Is Still the Foundation In A World of Streams
• Kid Swaps iPod For Sony Walkman, Gets A Culture Shock
• Google's approach to software won't work for enterprise or mobile
• Cisco CEO: 'Video is the killer app'
• Vendor Managed Infrastructure – Are clouds just a VMI solution?

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on July 6, 2009

Weekly digest

Every Sunday I scan, collect and organize all my links I ran into the previous week and I send them out to our community of practice in Capgemini that is about SaaS, social collaboration tools, mash up applications and Rich Internet Applications. Since these links are public links there is no reason to not publish them here on our technology blog, especially since publishing them here will give more people the opportunity to read all the information. This week I used a shorter format to not overwhelm you with 100+ links. The category Augmented Reality I added last week, also returns this week, besides that there are three other new categories: Web3.0, browsers and Trends:

• Social collaboration tools
  
• Rich Internet Applications
  
• Mash up
  
• Tools
  
• Augmented Reality
  
• Browsers
  
• Trends
  
• Web3.0
  
• General
  

Social collaboration tools

• Is Privacy An Illusion? Facebook ‘Fans’ Claim Hack Exposes Private Profile Information (Update)
• Experts: Don't clamp down on social media
  The use of Twitter to spread information about the unrest in Iran can teach businesses valuable lessons about the flow of information in their organizations, according to leading lights of the IT security world.
• How to Build Collaborative Software That People Will Actually Use
  
• Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment
  Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets.
• Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies
  When Facebook re-launched its fan pages earlier this year, companies were thrilled. At last, there was a solid way to have a presence on Facebook (Facebook), and users were actually responding positively. Within a couple of weeks it seemed as though every major brand had put up a page. However, very few are using them well.

Rich Internet Applications

• Bing and Google Agree: Slow Pages Lose Users
  
• Bespin » Code in the Cloud
  Bespin is a Mozilla Labs experiment on how to build an extensible Web code editor using HTML 5 technology.
• The Billion Dollar HTML Tag
  Can a single HTML tag really make a difference on a corporation’s financial results? It can at Google, according to Marissa Mayer, who says web page loading speed translates directly to the bottom line.
• Gmail for Mobile HTML5 Series : Cache Pattern For Offline HTML5 Web Applications
  
• 35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design
  

Mash up

• Introducing the Virtual Keyboard API
• Smash the Silos, Mash the SOA, Share the Mashups…
  

Tools

• Adobe BrowserLab: Cross Browser Testing Still Teething…
  
• 18 Free Text Editors To Clean Up Your Code
• Dojo ShrinkSafe — the safe way to make your JS sprightly
  ShrinkSafe is a JavaScript "compression" system. It can typically reduce the size of your scripts by a third or more, depending on your programming style.

  
  

  Many other tools also shrink JavaScript files, but ShrinkSafe is different. Instead of relying on brittle regular expressions, ShrinkSafe is based on Rhino, a JavaScript interpreter. This allows ShrinkSafe to transform the source of a file with much more confidence that the resulting script will function identically to the file you uploaded.

• Web-Based Productivity Suite Zoho Now Integrated With Microsoft SharePoint
  
• IBM adds Lotus social networking to SaaS – Mass High Tech Business News
  At the Enterprise 2.0 conference today in Boston, IBM Corp. announced LotusLive Connections, adding the Lotus Connections layer of social networking tools to its LotusLive software-as-a-service offering.

Augmented reality 

• Zugara’s Augmented Reality Dressing Room Is Great If You Don’t Care How Your Clothes Fit
• Mobile Data: IBM Tags Wimbledon With Seer Android
  
• Mobile Devices are Finally Making Augmented Reality…a Reality. But there’s so much more to come…
  
• TEDTalks : Chris Hughes: Augmented reality made easy – Chris Hughes (2009)
• Layar: First Augmented Reality Browser
  

Browsers

• Opera Unite – some questions and answers
  
• Internet Explorer Extinct by 2013? 2009 Update
  

Trends

• Post-Crisis Trends You Have to Watch
  
• Thought Leadership: Anticipating Internet Growth in Africa: Identifying Market Opportunities
• Ubertrends Map (PDF)
  

Web3.0

• Robot RoboCrunch Official Six-Fold Definition of Web 3.0
• What is the Semantic Web really all about?
  The Semantic Web is based on the relatively straightforward idea that to be able to integrate (link) data on the Web we must have some mechanism for knowing what relationships hold among the data, and how that relates to some “real world” context. The following is a lot of detail that comes from this simple idea.

General

• How Companies Increase Innovation
  When companies try to come up with new ideas, they too often look only where they always look. That won’t get them anywhere.
• Email patterns can predict impending doom – tech – 22 June 2009 – New Scientist
  EMAIL logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point. That's the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees.
• Triumph of the Default
  
• David Chappell – The Microsoft Application Platform: A perspective
  What is an application platform? Why is it important? And how should we think about application platforms in a world of cloud computing? In this session, David Chappell looks at all of these topics, providing a general model for both on-premises and cloud platforms. He then uses this model to examine several important issues in this area, including the competition between .NET and Java, why SOA is failing, and how the Microsoft platform compares with its on-premises and cloud competitors.

• The Web Collapses Under The Weight Of Michael Jackson’s Death
• A Good Way to Change a Corporate Culture
• Sour Outlook
• Should some requirements be called out as “architectural” requirements?
• Software Architecture Visualizations – a set on Flickr
• How Michael Jackson Became a Brand Icon

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on June 29, 2009

Weekly digest

Every Sunday I scan, collect and organize all my links I ran into the previous week and I send them out to our community of practice in Capgemini that is about SaaS, social collaboration tools, mash up applications and Rich Internet Applications. Since these links are public links there is no reason to not publish them here on our technology blog, especially since publishing them here will give more people the opportunity to read all the information. This week I added two new headers: ‘augmented reality’ and ‘business models’, mainly because the content below the header ‘general’ was too much that it deserved to be split up in several subjects. If you have any other suggestions for input, please let me know.

 

Social collaboration tools

• The revolution will be twittered
  Mock not. As the regime shut down other forms of communication, Twitter survived. With some remarkable results. Those rooftop chants that were becoming deafening in Tehran? A few hours ago, this concept of resistance was spread by a twitter message.
• On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog
• Why 1.5 Is Greater Than 2.0
• What Social Media Isn’t
  Social media is everywhere and for a lot of businesses they approach it likes it’s the magic wand that’s going to be the savior to their business. When you begin to talk to them, usually the conversation starts like this. “Can you help us with that Twitter thing and that Facebook thing, not to mention it’s vital if you can produce for us one of those viral videos. Second, this has to help our business look hip and cool and last but not least, we don’t have the time to really be involved in any conversations.”
• Twitter as a News Gathering Tool
• The future of enterprise collaboration
• Citizentube: Watching video change our world
• Humans prefer cockiness to expertise – life – 10 June 2009 – New Scientist
  EVER wondered why the pundits who failed to predict the current economic crisis are still being paid for their opinions? It's a consequence of the way human psychology works in a free market, according to a study of how people's self-confidence affects the way others respond to their advice.
• TEDTalks : Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history – Clay Shirky (2009)
• Tim O’Reilly: What Twitter has taught me
• Iran protests meet the social Web: What we've learned
• Chapter 1 of Enterprise 2
• Semantic Enterprise 2.0 – Enabling Semantic Web technologies in Enterprise 2.0 environment
• A twitterable Twitter policy
• 10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2009
  "Social media" was the term du jour in 2008. Consumers, companies, and marketers were all talking about it. We have social media gurus, social media startups, social media books, and social media firms. It is now common practice among corporations to hire social media strategists, assign community managers, and launch social media campaigns, all designed to tap into the power of social media.
  
  But social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie.
• Can Enterprise 2.0 Afford to be Boring?
• Web 2.0 Architectures–New from O&#39;Reilly: What Entrepreneurs and Information Architects Need to Know
• SocialSafe offers Facebook ‘backup’ solution
• To Join or Not to Join: The Illusion of Privacy in Social Networks with Mixed Public and Private User Profiles – WWW2009 EPrints
  In order to address privacy concerns, many social media websites allow users to hide their personal profiles from the public. In this work, we show how an adversary can exploit an online social network with a mixture of public and private user profiles to predict the private attributes of users. We map this problem to a relational classification problem and we propose practical models that use friendship and group membership information (which is often not hidden) to infer sensitive attributes. The key novel idea is that in addition to friendship links, groups can be carriers of significant information. We show that on several well-known social media sites, we can easily and accurately recover the information of private-profile users. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that uses link-based and group-based classification to study privacy implications in social networks with mixed public and private user profiles.
• Cisco Releasing Sophisticated Collaboration Framework to Accelerate Your Business Value
• Semantic & Social Web – What’s In It For You?
• Personal Democracy Forum: Politics in the Web 2.0 Era
• Web 3.0: 'Vague, but Exciting'
  When computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee first submitted his 1989 paper, "Information Management: A Proposal," his boss, Mike Sendall, wrote "vague, but exciting" on it by way of endorsing what was the blueprint for the World Wide Web.
  
  Two decades later, Berners-Lee and others are formulating what can be called the third generation of the Web, the "semantic Web," or "Web 3.0." I know, I know, most of us are still trying to deal with Web 2.0 as part of a very confusing marketing landscape.

Rich Internet Applications

• 15 Resources To Get You Started With jQuery From Scratch – Nettuts+
  Maybe you're a seasoned jQuery pro. Heck, maybe you're John Resig. On the other hand, maybe you read words like "Prototype", "jQuery", and "Mootools" and think to yourself, "What the heck are these?" Now is the time to learn.
• Opinion: Arrogance is Limiting Framework Adoption
• Thoughts on Microsoft’s move to ship Windows 7 without Internet Explorer in Europe
• Take Your Design To The Next Level With CSS3
• First Look: Object Oriented CSS
• SkyFire Mobile Browser 1.0 and the Flash User Experience
• XHR progress and rich file upload feedback at hacks.mozilla.org
  A common limitation on the web today has been a rich file upload widget for web applications. Many sites use Flash or a desktop helper applications to improve the experience of uploading files.  
  
  Firefox 3.5 bridges one of these gaps allowing a better progress indicator to be built. Many developers don’t realize that they can use Firefox’s File object (nsIDOMFile) and XMLHttpRequest together to accomplish file uploads. This demo will feature an upload widget that gives the kind of rich progress feedback that users have come to expect, as well as fast and easy multiple simultaneous file uploads.
• YouTube – What is a Browser?
• State of the Browsers -  IE edition
• 10 Ways To Make Your Site Accessible Using Web Standards
• Geolocating Your iPhone Users via the Browser
• New JavaScript features with native JSON support and JavaScript 1.8.1 additions
• YUI 3: Lighter, Faster, Easier to Use
• Compatibility View and "Smart Defaults"
• Five Reasons Architecture Matters

Mash up

• Google Wave Questions and Answers – Google Wave Preview
• Mash-ups are so last year…
  Mash-ups are cool – ever since Ordnance Survey, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft launched there various mapping APIs we’ve seen quite a few of them.
• Hemlock: An Open-Source Real-Time Web Platform
  Hemlock, a new open-source framework for building real time web apps in Flash with an XMPP back-end has been released by MintDigital, a development shop in London and New York. Real time apps that use efficient methods of communicating information between the browser and the server are all the rage these days. Now Flash developers will have an easy way to get in the game.
• SeeClickFix: Time for an Open 311 API
  311 is a non-emergency number (like 911 is the emergency number)
• uberVU brands its API as ContextVoice – launches a free and a paid service

Tools

• 40+ Helpful Resources On User Interface Design Patterns
• 40 Essential iPhone Applications For Web Designers
• Quick video example of Firebug
• Aviary Launches Falcon, A Browser Based Image Editor
• Open Source Testing Tool Smackdown for REST Web Services
• Pictaculous: Color-Pickingly Delicious!

Business models

• Focus shift in Innovation: from Technology to Business Model towards Value Networks
• Does Microsoft need to go cross-platform to save Office?
• Chris Anderson’s Counterintuitive Rules For Charging For Media Online
• Enough with the Appstore model

Augmented Reality

• Augmented reality: top ten campaigns (so far)
  No longer the stuff of science fiction, augmented reality is fast catching on with forward-thinking brands. Zed Media's Alex Smith lists the best examples to date of AR as part of wider brand-building activity.
• David Polinchock Explains Augmented Reality
• ARhrrrr! : Augmented Reality Zombie and Helicopter Game

General

• Backbars: Turn Headlines of Social Link Sites into Ambient Bar Charts
• 25 Best Programmer WebComic Strips
• The Privacy Jungle: On the Market for Data Protection in Social Networks
  The Privacy Jungle: On the Market for Data Protection in Social Networks
• 'It's Everybody's Business': Microsoft launches reality show
  What makes good television? How about a bunch of people sitting around a conference table talking business strategy? Sounds like your exciting 10:30 meeting, huh. Well, Microsoft thinks it's a good idea, and with creative editing "It's Everybody's Business with Jack & Suzy Welch" – a new online reality show on MSN.com – could build a following.
• More Talk, Less Chalk: Lexically Sparse Slides Improve Recall of Taught Material
  Classroom use of presentation software, whereby information is simultaneously delivered verbally and visually, risks overloading students' working memory and impairing learning. We compared traditional and lexically-sparse slide presentations, using multiple-choice and short essay answers to assess learning; participants exposed to traditional slides performed significantly worse on their essay answers.
• The latest version of Opera turns your browser into a web server.
• What Geeks Love – Part 1
• IE6 denial message for Momentile.com
• The Four Pillars of an Open Civic System
• Measuring The Big Shift
• Why Wolfram Alpha is Important
  In the new Bing-enabled world, search is hotter than ever. Your entire Search Insider lineup has been trading quips and forecasts about the future of search. Aaron Goldman thinks Hunch may be the answer to my call for an iPhone of search. Today, I want to talk about why Wolfram|Alpha is very, very important to watch. It's not an iPhone, but it is changing the rules of search in a very significant way.

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on June 21, 2009

Weekly digest

Every Sunday I scan, collect and organize all my links I ran into the previous week and I send them out to our community of practice in Capgemini that is about SaaS, social collaboration tools, mash up applications and Rich Internet Applications. Since these links are public links there is no reason to not publish them here on our technology blog, especially since publishing them here will give more people the opportunity to read all the information.

Social collaboration tools

• Online Communities are not created equal: A rant from the trenches
• On Twitter, Most People Are Sheep: 80 Percent Of Accounts Have Fewer Than 10 Followers

• World Map of Social Networks | Vincos Blog
  A map of the world, showing the most popular social networks by country, according to Alexa & Google Trends for Websites traffic data (June 2009).
• Using Twitter to Connect with Audiences
• Twitter is Not a Conversational Platform
• 33 Website Success Metrics Instead of Rankings, Google PageRank and Traffic
  How to measure website success when rankings, Google PageRank and sheer traffic have gone the way of “hits”: All these older metrics become more and more meaningless in the current web environment.
• 7 Kinds Of Conversations That Always Stimulate Activity
• Everybody’s talking: the Social track at Google I/O
• The 10 Commandments of Social Media
  "What do I need to do engage my company, my products, and myself in social media?" The answer is easy: participate. Get out there and get involved. If you aren't in the game, you can't win. Here's your Ten Commandments or things you need to be doing to get in and win with social media.
• Microsoft CRM seamless integration with Twitter
• Reconciling social computing with the enterprise
• HP test mobile social network
  An intelligent, mobile-phone-based social network is being tested by researchers at Hewlett Packard.
• Toward a Pattern Language for Enterprise 2.0

Rich Internet Applications

• How to Easily Create a JavaScript Framework, Part 1
• Google Web Toolkit at Google I/O
• Adobe Flash Builder 4: Data-centric Features for PHP
• Functional Testing for RIAs on the iPhone
• “Not Safe For Work” tag in HTML 5
• Nicholas C. Zakas: Speed Up Your JavaScript
• Google Open Source Blog: Introducing Android Scripting Environment
  The Android Scripting Environment (ASE) brings scripting languages to Android by allowing you to edit and execute scripts and interactive interpreters directly on the Android device.
• Adaptive CSS-Layouts: New Era In Fluid Layouts?
• Multifriend Selection Component
• Fastest Firefox, Part 2: More Speediness
• Why Blocking Ad Blockers Will Fail
• Gmail for Mobile HTML5 Series: Suggestions for Better Performance
• Store information on the client side with DOM Storage/Web Storage – plenty of improvements available
• Web development timeline
• HTML5 Storage tests
• IE8 Smart Address bar: What’s new
• What&#39;s New and Cool in Flex 4?

Mash up

• Channel 4 to Make its Entire Catalogue of TV Programs Available Online for Free
• Microsoft gives us the no-usage-limits Bing API
• Google I/O: Session videos on building apps using the AJAX and Data APIs
• Watercoolr – Gossip for web applications
  pubsub via webhooks, or "twitter" for your applications
• Translating the world&#39;s information with Google Translator Toolkit
• Testing Google Wave: This Thing is Tidal
  Everyone’s been talking about it: Google Wave. Google’s super communication tool has been a top trend on Twitter, a focus of media speculation, and was even able to knock Microsoft’s Bing from the top of the news cycle. But almost all the hype has been based on the demos – almost nobody’s actually got to try out Google Wave.
• Microsoft Microphone: Market Research Via Facebook Apps
• How SaaS Changes the Vendor-Customer Relationship
  One of the lingering myths regarding Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions is that they simply change the way software is packaged and delivered to make it easier for customers to purchase and deploy them. While these attributes are absolutely true, they are only the most obvious advantages of acquiring SaaS solutions rather than legacy, on-premise software.
• Google Wave Is Wikis 25 Years Later, Not Email
  Wave picks up the original idea from old-time Smalltalker Ward Cunningham and moves it 25 years into the present. Wave is what Ozzie's Groove always wanted to be, but Ozzie missed the Internet, so it found a good home with Microsoft. Wave is the Facebook for more closed groups, but also the MySpace for all the social stuff you want to share with your friends, but may be not with the world.
• UK Government Moves to Put Data on the Web

Tools

• Summary of all new GMail features in Google Labs
• FineTuna: A Handy Collaboration Tool For Designers
• 21 iPhone Apps For Business

General

• What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket?
• Is innovation fair?
• Case Study: Publishing STW Thesaurus for Economics as Linked Open Data
  The ZBW German National Library of Economics—Leibniz Information Centre for Economics is the world’s largest economics library. It holds more than four million media items such as books, articles, journals, grey literature and databases. ZBW supports its users with fine-grained thematic access to these information resources. For this purpose the STW Thesaurus for Economics has been developed and applied since the 1990s. It provides a high-level taxonomy of subject categories, thousands of keywords (“descriptors”) and tens of thousands of both synonyms and links between the thesaurus concepts. The media items are indexed with descriptors from this thesaurus. They can be retrieved by these descriptors through the library catalog ECONIS.
• Book – Collaboration in the Cloud (PDF)
• The Worst Business Model in the World (And What You Can Learn From It)
• Security Research & Defense : Understanding DEP as a mitigation technology part 1
• Google Apps is now an Exchange-replacement; Users can even keep Outlook
• Squarespace: Could It Make Web Designers Redundant?
• Project Natal: Time to throw out your game-controllers
  During the E3 2009 expo, which was held from the 2nd to the 5th of June, Microsoft presented Project Natal. The project brings human-computer interaction without an electronic input device to the masses. By capturing your full body movement and your voice (and being able of doing this for several people at the same time) it brings gameplay to an entirely new level.
• Why the Smart Grid Won’t Have the Innovations of the Internet Any Time Soon
• Indexing the Web—It’s Not Just Google’s Business
• 16 PHP Frameworks To Consider For Your Next Project
• Usefull MySQL articles and tutorials to improve your skills!
• How The Different Mobile Data Syncing Services Stack Up
• Play Your Cards Right: Run Your First Card Sort
• Impossible to uninstall Safari 4 in Mac OS X – Apple pretty much follows suit with Microsoft
• The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection
• On ambient visualization
  I want visualization to be less a part of a specific application that I go to and to be more of a natural extension to the computer itself, available from everywhere. I want visualization to an ambient experience.

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on June 15, 2009

Copyright, Digital Content, and the Internet

The second World Copyright Summit, which took place last week, at the Ronald Reagan Conference Centre in Washington DC, was a well attended and successful event that drew great interest from all key stakeholders in the 21st Century’s fast-evolving, global creative economy.

Note: This post is taken from the executive summary of a report I have written about this event, which can also be found here: World Copyright Summit 2009 - Report.pdf

The main objective of the Copyright Summit was, as stated on the conference tag-line, to explore “New Frontiers for Creators in the Marketplace”, and this was achieved by providing a platform for the stakeholders (represented in both speakers and audience) to engage with each other in a series of dialogues, interviews, discussions, keynotes and general networking. One immediate outcome from this has been the wider recognition of a few key messages, which are outlined below as follows:

1. Time to Change Copyright
Right from the very first keynote, on day one, to several sessions on the second day, it became increasingly clear that most stakeholders are in agreement over the need for some far reaching changes to be made on the current copyright system before it can become more effective in protecting and incentivising creative works in a dynamic digital environment.

2. Need a Central, Unified and Authoritative Global Rights Registry
The above was identified in several of the sessions as a key enabler towards a more appropriate and effective rights management mechanism in a global digital context. The key issues are global / technology related, therefore the solution would appear to lie in taking a unified approach to implementing what some refer to as a global database for content rights

3. Accelerate the Shift towards New Business Models / Mindsets
The Google Books Settlement was repeatedly held up as a prime example of the art-of-the-possible in reaching a constructive and satisfactory outcome for all stakeholders. This model may be more difficult to accomplish in other media formats, but the fundamental requirements of an open, collaborative approach / mind-set by all stakeholders is mandatory for success. It is also becoming clear that content in digital / non-physical forms may be more appropriately positioned as a collaborative service, instead of the product-unit-centric worldview of the pre-digital content world.

In conclusion, and on the above terms, this summit can be deemed a success, and CISAC -the event organisers, deserve a hearty congratulation for their commitment in putting it all together. However, it might even be more of a success if and when the mid - longer term outcome of this Summit leads to some concrete changes in the world copyright system; and perhaps in the evolution of an authoritative / unified global rights registry; as well as the adoption of a more collaborative approach, in both business models and mindsets, by the content industries and all other stakeholders.

It is this author’s sincere hope, and recommendation, that the next version of this Summit will see the inclusion of more representatives from the developing world, as well as the much over-looked consumer / end-user stakeholder group, (which includes: ordinary citizens, students and the younger, next generation of users), that will ultimately deliver the verdict on any / all future initiatives on copyright..

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jude Umeh is a senior consultant and enterprise architect within Capgemini, and is something of a rights management evangelist. You can follow his Tweet-stream here

Posted by Jude Umeh on June 14, 2009

It is an attention economy, not a follower economy

If you are on some social networks you might notice that are different economics: the one who posts first, the one with the most posts, the one with the most karma (or kudos on other networks) and on Twitter there is the one with the most followers. However all of these economics are not about the first poster, or the one with the most followers or the superdude (or whatever obscure label one might get when one has the most karma / kudos), it is all about attention. Attention economy does exist and is creating bigger revenues than ever.

The fact that I have 600+ followers on Twitter does not mean a thing. It matters how much attention I can get them for my tweets. Mr Kutcher might be a bit more successful since he has 1.6 million followers, which is just a numbers game. If I only can get attention of 1% of my followers, it means that 6 people will read my Tweet and make an action. If Mr Kutcher can get attention of only 0.1% of his followers, it means that he got 1600 people who do something. This is just a game of numbers, however it might be clear that the number of people who are following you does not make the difference, nor the number of posts / tweets you produce on a certain platform,  it is about how many people you can really reach,  of how many can you get the attention and how many people can you inspire to take action.

Same goes for music, anybody can download a copy for free (which does not necessarily mean that it is legal!), however not everyone can make something that freely available into something that catches the attention of the public and is worth paying for. A great example is the iPhone application from the Presidents of the United States, you can download their music for free (again, this does not mean that you are performing a legal action), however they also offer a paid application in the Appstore for 5 euros. You can pay 5 euros for a box, a piece of user experience and listen to the music. The box is about creating attention and seems to be worth paying for, the copy of the music which is leveraged by the box is not unique and already available for no costs.

You can make money if you can create awareness and capture one's attention, you probably make no (or less) money on copies and on vague big numbers such as the number of followers. It just matters of how many time people give to you when you capture their attention.

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on May 7, 2009

How about a World Copyright Summit?

Judging from the recent brouhaha around piracy, (no - not the real kind), e.g. the Pirate Bay Trial / Verdict, anyone would be forgiven for thinking that copyright lawyers are probably the only ones making a killing out of this particular global crisis. It seems that the world’s copyright system, which served (some of) us so well in the past, may have become fatally compromised by the digital revolution, and emerging consumer predilection for free digital content (i.e. free as in beer).

It seems the time has come for some serious dialogue, and actions, to address the issues that threaten both existing content industries and emerging players. This is not about what some might call “stick n plaster” initiatives like DMCA, EU Copyrignt Directive or DRM; which essentially either only treats the symptoms, or kills the patient outright. Instead it just confirms the need for a forum that brings together all key stakeholders, in order to create a meaningful, practical and effective approach that will help address the failures of the copyright system, in an increasingly global / digital context.

The forthcoming World Copyright Summit will attempt to accomplish this very objective, in a two day event that draws from all players and stakeholders in the creative industries and the global copyright / digital content ecosystem. Although similar initiatives have been launched by various countries to address these same issues, from their own perspectives, (e.g. the UK Copyright Consultation), but this Summit, which is organised by CISAC, will be global in scope and coverage.

As you might imagine, this will not be an easy task, for too many obvious reasons to mention, but then neither is the current recourse to expensive litigation, almost at every turn, to settle disputes between stakeholders (usually between commercial and / or other stakeholder groups). This latter practice, if unchecked, could very well result in the imprisonment of pretty much every individual on the planet, as hilariously predicted in this Pirates Prisons video below.

Disclosure - Yours truly has requested an invite to attend and contribute to this debate at the Summit, and will aim to cover it right here, and on: twitter, Yammer and my other blog, so watch this space.

Posted by Jude Umeh on April 26, 2009

Going to The Next Web Conference

This week is The Next Web Conference this week and am I looking forward to it. Not often do I have the opportunity to see speakers like: Jeff Jarvis, Matt Mullenweg, Andrew Keen, Bradley Horowitz and Chris Sacca. Besides that, it is a good event to meet some people I have talked with online for months, but have never seen them in person.  As any proper conference about these subjects, there is W-Fi available, and therefore I will tweet from the conference (using the hashtag #tnw).

If you are at The Next Web Conference and you want to meet up, just drop a comment or a tweet, I will contact you! See you in Amsterdam.

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on April 13, 2009

'IE8 is already obsolete'

As many of you might have noticed today Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8. Tristan Nitot (founder and chairman of Mozilla Europe) made the statement 'IE8 is already obsolete' in the podcast ICT Roddels (the podcast is Dutch in general, however the 1 hour session in episode 257 with Tristan Nitot is in English).

Why would IE8 be obsolete? Because IE8 has not implement at least three important things:

• SVG which enables drawing lines and shapes in your browser (it is used in Google Earth).
• HTML5 Video tag which enables native open video, without e.g. flash. (see also this previous blog about the video tag)
  
• HTML 5 Canvas which also enables drawing on a screen and rastering images. It is pixel based instead of lines and shapes as in SVG.

The implementation of canvas and the video tag in most browsers (except IE) makes it for example possible to do special effects in video via javascript and canvas. Which is really a great improvement and gets on step closer to a browser based netbook OS.

Microsoft has a hard time to keep up with the other players (Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari) in the market, especially since Microsoft stopped (or did very little) working on the browser for some time after IE5.5 / IE6.0. Can Microsoft still compete with the other players? Is IE8 already obsolete, although it has new features as accelerators, web slices and visual search? Is Tristan Nitot right when he says "old slow Microsoft"?

Rick Mans is Information Architect and a social media evangelist within Capgemini. You can follow and connect with him via Twitter or Delicious

Posted by Rick Mans on March 19, 2009

The no-brainer business case for RIA

Although the RIA seems to defy definition, its business case has become crystal clear. If you are still not convinced about adopting RIAs, then have a look at these great slides from this webinar by Forrester on Enterprise RIA adoption.

Wait, what do I mean "RIA seems to defy definition"? Well, the definition of the term RIA seems to be shifting continuously. It certainly no longer just literally means rich internet application. I have said before that RIA was becoming a synonym for website, because nowadays, people expect you to build an RIA when they ask you to build a website for them. Just yesterday, I attended a seminar about RIAs, and the keynote speaker was of the opinion that an important aspect of RIA is "cross-platformness". And I can only agree, because the capability to build an application only once and being able to deploy it on many operating systems and devices is definetely a big development and maintenance cost reducer: win-win.

Interestingly, the definition of the term Web Service is undergoing a similar process as its meaning is also becoming broader. Well, that is not entirely true, because the definition of Web Service is depending on the perspective of its beholder. Seen from a business perspective, a web service is a course granular thing that reflects a certain business process or transaction, for instance "payment". Seen from the perspective of a software architect, a webservice is a programming interface that provides a set of operations that can be invoked from anywhere on the web. Seen from a consumer's perspective, a web service has a much broader meaning: a service of a company that is rendered to them through the web, for instance "online banking". Each of these notions is essentially true.

Did you notice how close the perceived meaning of "web service" comes to the meaning of RIA when seen from a consumer's perspective? In any case, an RIA can significantly improve the quality of the service that is rendered to the customer, because the rich capabilities of RIA technology allows you to develop appealing and responsive web applications. Add the above mentioned "cross-platformness" to the equation and you get a no-brainer business case: RIA technology improves customer satisfaction and reduces cost. And if you pair RIA development with an Agile methodology (also a no-brainer) and rapid design & visualization, you can have your customers experience the first version of your cost reducer and customer satisfier within the month. No kidding.

Posted by Mark Nankman on March 11, 2009

The sex appeal of Web 2.0

Let's face it: the term Web 2.0 is as sexy as a brick (I originally wanted to put in "picnic table", but after reading this article that I came across on Fark.com, I changed my mind). The part "Web" is sort of mildly cool still, but the trouble is in the appendix "2.0". That bit just puts off non-geeks, and causes revulsion and almost allergic reactions at business men and women (their faces contort and they can hardly suppress a snort, well, okay, I might be slightly exaggerating).

Many people are using the term "Social Media" today in stead of Web 2.0. Social Media provides a nice umbrella for all collaborative technology. It comprises wikis, blog, microblogs and social networks. When it is wrapped in this new term, Web 2.0 definitely seems to be more easily adopted by the business. Although I believe that Web 2.0 has a broader meaning than Social Media, I can live with the new synonym.

The same thing happened to Extreme Programming, which has been having much trouble of getting adopted by the business. That's why the umbrella term "Agile Methodology" came into existence (it was first coined somewhere in 2001 by one of the pioneers in Agile software development: Alistair Cockburn). Geeks are good at inventing stuff, but tend to have poor creativity when it comes to naming their babies. That is because their iron logic prevents them from doing that. A name should reflect the exact meaning of the named thing, right? Wrong. Raw logic usually doesn't sell. You need to wrap it in something more appealing and add a few subtle frills here and there.

The bottom line of all this is that sex does sell, so that's why technology that has been around for ages, can all of a sudden become hot because someone gave it a sexier name. Look at the term Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), for example. As logic as a hammer, but would you say a hammer is sexy? Now, I wonder if "Cloud Computing" is a sexy enough wrapper.

What do you think?

---
Mark Nankman is a UX Architect and Web 2.0 thought leader at Capgemini. His public brain waves can be followed on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mnankman

Posted by Mark Nankman on March 4, 2009

Microsoft Commerce Server in the cloud: a threat to Amazon?

After my conspiracy theory on SharePoint 14 overtaking SAP’s Netweaver in a recent blog post, another one popped up in my mind: “Microsoft Commerce Server in the cloud: a threat for Amazon?”.

Here’s the deal: Microsoft is going all SaaSy with their Microsoft Online, also known as BPOS or Business Productivity Online Suite. I had some discussions with Microsoft last week during an executive briefing in Redmond about the way I would like to see Microsoft moving: e.g. fully embracing online as their application delivery platform. Meaning that for instance I’d like to see a full version of Office coming out that runs in a browser and offers offline capabilities and full rich user experience. Consider Internet Explorer 9 or 10 as THE application development framework for Microsoft, a bit like WebKit or the Eclipse core framework.

Feeling Google breathing in their neck with the Google Apps suite, Microsoft started to offer some of their products as a hosted SaaSy product: SharePoint, Exchange, Communication Server, Dynamics, etc. It does make A LOT of sense to do this and let me tell you that this is THE confirmation to the enterprise that SaaS is THE way to go (I’m using too many capital letters, am I?). Why? Well if Microsoft is doing it, then it must be the way to go. With their sales and marketing army force, this is bound to be a sales success. So just let go of your objections against cloud and SaaS stuff (remember resistance is futile) and just accept it. Now that you’ve accepted it, what else can we SaaSify?

Exactly: Commerce Server! And hell it makes a lot of sense. Look, what is Amazon’s business? Right, e-commerce! Even more, they offer an e-commerce out of the box experience to everyone that wants to start their own online shop without the hassle. So if Microsoft would offer their Commerce Server suite as a SaaS solution with great adapters to backend systems like SAP ERP systems and figure out a way to get the way performing rock hard, then it could be an interesting option for enterprises to adopt this solution.

If only SAP would offer now their ERP system in the cloud, it would be a dream. Imagine a cloud data center where SAP has their ERP systems as a service and where Microsoft has e-commerce as a service, connect that together and offer it in some kind of pay-per-use model and you’re all set. You have the elasticity that you need to handle resource spikes during Christmas, you have a reliable hosting partner (MSFT/SAP) and a skilled systems integrator (needless to say: Capgemini).

I’d like to call this Double-E-as-a-Service: e-commerce/ERP-as-a-Service. Can I file a patent for this?

PS: Bill, Steve or Ray: if you are reading this, you can call my manager to hire me. I have some more conspiracy theories.

---
Lee Provoost is a Cloud Computing Strategist and ERP+ lead at Capgemini. You can follow his ongoing stream of thoughts on Twitter http://twitter.com/leeprovoost.

Posted by Lee Provoost on March 1, 2009

Ahoy There Pirates!

Yes, this means you, you, and yes, you too. The only people exempt are those that can honestly claim to have had no contact with computing, Internet and mobile technologies, (and live under a rock for good measure), but even so I think they’d still struggle to prove their innocence on charges of file sharing.

Luckily the burden of proof usually lies with an injured party, or litigant, as is currently the case with the prosecution team in the ongoing Pirate Bay Trial in Sweden. This trial, in case you have been residing underground, was launched against the operators of Pirate Bay, (an online BitTorrent tracker website), who stand accused of contributory copyright infringement. If found guilty, the four defendants could each face a two-year jail term, and six-figure fines, just for starters. The case has attracted great public interest and media coverage over the possible outcome and implication for the global content industry (and for the unwashed hordes of ye olde file-sharing pirates & parasites. Arrrr!)

This is an interesting one to watch, if only for the unfolding drama, (I bet someone has already cornered the film rights), on which you can find further coverage here. The highlights, apart from this trial being the hottest ticket in town, include:

• Defendants remain defiant and upbeat - you can even catch them on your favourite Web 2.0 channel e.g.: Twitter / Blogs / YouTube, etc.


• Prosecution drops some charges – i.e. for outright copy-based infringement, but have retained the charges related to making files available to the public


• The IFPI website got hacked – Although the defendants have pleaded against such activities


• Prosecution alters charges – apparently in a bid to ensure conviction


• IFPI president has his day in court – and squarely blames Pirate Bay, and similar services, for damaging the music industry

I can’t wait to see which way the dice will fall on this trial, which just replays the never-ending and titanic struggle between the old and the new in their efforts to win hearts and minds.

Finally, and on a similar theme, a major ISP in Ireland has agreed to block users from accessing music swapping websites, at the instigation of the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA). Interestingly enough, this might well prove to be a more effective method for reducing casual piracy than the Pirate Bay trial. However, it also opens up a whole new battle ground between ISPs and their customers, as the latter might very well decide to change providers, and / or raise a huge stink about some violation-of-human-rights or other. Watch this space.

Posted by Jude Umeh on February 27, 2009

The ISP Dilemma (adapted)

It seems of late that Internet Service Providers (i.e. ISPs) are facing some very difficult choices that could either completely change their business models at best, and / or undermine their ability to operate as independent, viable business entities at worst.

The biggest challenge by far is around the growing perception of ISPs as de-facto gatekeepers of the Internet, which effectively adds another layer of complexity to their traditional / core business. As a result, not only do ISPs have to deal with existing non-trivial issues (e.g. declining markets, convergent evolution via multi-play business models, and issues around increasing broadband / bandwidth consumption), they also have to contend with the fact that:

• Content owners want ISPs to play a more central role in preventing, detecting, monitoring and punishing illegal file sharing (e.g. via schemes like the infamous three strikes proposal).
• The Digital Britain interim report has called for the creation of a UK Rights Agency (to be funded by ISP Levy) that will monitor the activities of suspected copyright infringers.
• There are also signs of lack of trust by ISP customers over service quality / charges, and potential invasion of privacy

These all add up to a severe headache for ISPs, both now and in the future, therefore some of the options they might want to consider in dealing with these challenges, includes:

• Reduce costs - E.g. via opt-in targeted advertising schemes to help subsidise the cost of service (perhaps even extending to “free” access)
• Stronger industry self regulation - Not easy to do, but would benefit the entire industry, and help address the pressure from content owners
• Maximise network use / value - Invest in better ways to track, monitor and control network traffic, in order to deliver better quality of service, promote fair use, and support law enforcement
• Partner with content owners – To explore new and more flexible content business models. E.g. a recent survey found that music fans actually prefer ISPs as their music supplier over others
• Embrace innovations – E.g. IPv6 (or Internet 2.0), should help resolve the looming threat of insufficient IP addresses, and deliver improved quality of service.

Regardless of which options, (or combinations thereof), are considered, it is advisable for ISPs to bear the following three points in mind:

1. Do not alienate or irritate the customer - protecting the customer relationship and keeping their trust will be key to future success
2. Resist excessive external pressures – Content owners need ISPs as much as ISPs need them, and perhaps even more so.
3. Take the initiative – ISPs should be more proactive in creating customer-pleasing, regulator-friendly propositions and business models (perhaps by working closely with content owners)

In conclusion, although there is no easy way to prevent what is ultimately likely to be the natural evolution of the Internet, ISPs need to understand that these current challenges also provide great opportunities to evolve and embrace their critical niche in the emerging digital access / content ecosystem.

Disclosure: The above is an adaptation of a soon-to-be-published article, by this author, in Computing magazine.

Posted by Jude Umeh on February 11, 2009

Wanna get rich? Give away everything for free!

Just had a very entertaining discussion on Twitter with my colleague Rick Mans about the definition of Cloud Computing: whether the pay-per-use model is an essential part of this cloud thingy yes or no. Rick ended with a nice reply:

I know I'm taking it now a bit out of its original context (but that is also as a punishment to Rick for his hideous background :-p) but I'd like to disagree with that. "Free" sure is a business model and you can get incredibly rich by adopting it...

Whether you can or cannot enjoy Monty Python is just a matter of taste, but if you do, go check the Monty Python channel on YouTube to check some content. With 74.000 subscribers and 1.7 million channel views you'd probably think that it eats away of the Monty Python DVD sales. Why pay for it if you can see a lot of it for free on the internet?

An article on /film tells a different story: sales of Monty Python DVD's raised with 23.000 % and reached the number 2 spot on Amazon's best selling list!

I beg your pardon? How is it possible that even by giving away everything for free, you still generate loads of sales? Apparently by triggering the interest of people, by letting them savor the high quality of their productions, by treating the consumer with respect (I'm sick and tired of reading that piracy is a crime when I am in a movie theater, I paid for the ticked damned!) and by putting links to an online store where you can buy their DVD's, they did the trick.

Just wondering how this could be applied to the software business...

---
Lee Provoost is an emerging technologist with a focus on cloud computing strategy and ERP+ lead at Capgemini. You can follow his ongoing stream of thoughts on Twitter http://twitter.com/leeprovoost.

Posted by Lee Provoost on January 28, 2009

Tech predictions 2009: Dead of the money making core product

Selling your product for money is a very normal business model. If you make a product it will cost you some money and to make a profit you'll ask more money for the product than you spend on manufacturing it. The same goes for services you offer. However your product is very seldom unique and if you are selling a not unique quite homogeneous product, you should not ask money for it. You should offer it for free to your customer.

Customers will not buy your product or your service since it is 2 euro's less expensive, customers buy your products since ancillary products and services add value to your product. Therefore let customers pay for the ancillary product and not for the core product itself. Also there are more ancillary products to think of than core products, so perhaps you could even earn more money with those products than with your core products (seems to be something like The Long Tail again).

This is not a revolutionary business model: Ryanair offered som of their flights for free (or very low prices) and they are planning to earn money completely based on ancillary products (which already was not quite new, since KLM used to have some money in the Hilton Hotels). Zappos (online shoestore) has a brilliant story around it that someone phoned them asking where they could order a pizza and the employee of Zappos provided them with five numbers they could order pizza from (not an ancillary product though, however very good for Zappos reputation). And the newly launched service Rypple (which is for free) does offer an awfull lot of service and direct interaction concerning their service. When I used it the first day I already got some extra followers on Twitter and a good mail conversion with David Priemer from Rypple about the service and its possible improvements.

Your core product will be your lead to sell the ancillary services and products that make the real money and gain marketshare.

Posted by Rick Mans on December 8, 2008

The Long Tail is not a fail

Anderson downgrades Long Tail to Chocolate Teapot status:

"The end came quickly," as authors of morbid weepies like to say. On Monday WiReD magazine editor Chris Anderson effectively admitted game over for his "Long Tail", the idea he's been dragging so lucratively around the conference circuit for the past four years. In as many words, he downgraded it from "the future of business" to something that's, er, not very helpful for your business at all.

Off course there should be a bit of nuance in this quote from The Register: The Long Tail can be the future of your business as well it can be not very helpful for your business at all.

The Long Tail used to be something of mythical proportions making the mass market approach something dirty that was doomed to fail. However the mass market approach does work as well as The Long Tail does (and they even work well when you apply them both on the same market). What you should keep mind in:

1. The market in which you operate
   Some markets are not for The Long Tail, that is not something bad, that is just a fact. Some markets are better off with a mass market approach and you should not feel bad about that.
2. Your business
   Not all businesses have the ability to adopt their business models and their processes to The Long Tail. It can be very hard to implement The Long Tail concept and still be cost effective (most common result of The Long Tail concept is that costs will increase harder than the revenue). A kind reminder: The Long Tail is not only about maximizing profits and earning tons of money, it is also about getting a larger audience for your products and services.

Do keep in mind that The Long Tail can work, however it does not work due to the fact that you are applying a myth to your business. It does work when the market allows it and when your business has the ability to implement The Long Tail in a cost effective manner.

Posted by Rick Mans on December 4, 2008

Tech predictions 2009: Information filtering and behavioral targeting are the new gold

Clay Shirky mentioned it some time ago "It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure". And he is right, currently there is so much information that it is hard to filter it correctly to come to the information you need (Well it is not hard to filter it, it is hard to find a filter that fits your needs). Not only will you have this issue in your RSSreader or your inbox, you'll also experience it when visiting websites.

Not only website visitors will experience this issue, website owners will experience related issues. Due to the fact that the visitors cannot find the information they are looking for they will either stop looking and do nothing or will contact the organization of the site via another channel that is more expensive (a call to a helpdesk costs approximately 7 Euros for the helpdesk owner). The result however is a bad user experience for the visitor. Visitors will either not visit the site again and will try to find another more userfriendly site or they will only use the more expensive channel. Both results are not pleasing for neither the owner of the website (resulting in more costs and perhaps even lower revenue) nor for the visitor (bad user experience and wasting time on another channel than he initially prefered).

Therefore information filtering as well as behavioral targeting is the big thing for 2009. It will enables the visitor to get to the information he needs within the amount of time he wants to spent to look for this information. By customizing the website in run time on the personal needs of the visitor the site owner is able to create a nice you experience and the website owner will save money by having less phone calls and perhaps even earn more money due to the fact the visitor is seduced by some products he really could use that pops up thank to behavioral targeting.

Posted by Rick Mans on November 21, 2008

The 2008 "it" list

While all our colleagues (including us) are doing bold predictions on what will be hot or not in 2009, let’s take a quick recap of what was hot in 2008. In a true Web 2.0 collaboration fashion we (@mnankman, @rickmans and @leeprovoost) discussed through Twitter the candidates and collaboratively wrote this blog piece using Google Docs. True, our personal top threes might be biased since we are looking at the domains that WE are interested in, but that’s also why we call it our PERSONAL top three :-)

Rick Mans (follow me on Twitter @rickmans)

TweetDeck: If I have to twitter without TweetDeck I feel lost. TweetDeck is the best tool there is to Twitter, especially when you follow more than 30 people. These are the killer features of TweetDeck:

• Groups: you have the ability to group your tweets. I use these groups to prioritize who I have to read, who I should read and who I could read. Besides that I have a group containing all my Capgemini and Sogeti colleagues and I have a search on Capgemini since I am very interested what other tweet about Capgemini.
• Cross platform: since I am using Windows Vista on my Capgemini laptop and Ubuntu on my private laptop I am very pleased that I could use TweetDeck on both laptops.
• Support: TweetDeck's creator (Iain Dodsworth) seems to answer all the issues of TweetDeck that are mentioned on Twitter. Besides that he is quote democratic in the development of TweetDeck since he also uses Uservoice in the way it was intended to.

Minggl: Minggl is a real timesaver, it is my PA for my social networks. This way you can manage all your connections without having to take care of any tool. It is easy to tag / group people and to define who will receive which message and who can see which data. Besides this functionality Minggl also offers a tool for social annotations on sites (or parts of sites). These sites can be any site which is available at the WWW or at local servers. You can decide who can see your annotation on the site (All Minggl users, all connections, some connections). The annotations can be display only (“social graffiti”) or it can be complete separate social applications in which users / connections can interact with each other. I am still getting used to it, however I see great power in these kind of tools.

Sproutbuilder: Sproutbuilder is the future of web development, you do not have to know any coding language. The only thing you need is your mouse to click your sprout (widget) to its final stage. Creating mashups? Absolutely no problem, select the components you need and again drop and drag and click to get your widget to its final stage.

Lee Provoost (follow me on Twitter @leeprovoost)

Animoto: One of my favorite applications of 2008 and also one of the few ones where I actually paid for a pro account! You give them pictures (upload or through Facebook or Flickr), select a song, highlight the pictures you find most important and Animoto delivers you an impressive photo video with awesome effects. Not happy with it? Remix it! Recently they've added the feature to add texts to your movies, something I quite missed. For the ubernerds amongst you: Animoto becomes even cooler if you know that it has been fully built on top of the Amazon cloud! Boo Yah!

Facebook redesign:I admit, I'm highly addicted to Facebook and an early adopter of their Facebook Mobile. However, I started to dislike more and more Facebook for the very reason that made Facebook big: the applications. I am in Facebook more for the conversations and staying in touch and barely use applications. So I got pretty annoyed with the fact that the applications were really cluttering up the profile pages and made some very tough to load. The Facebook redesign put the user and the conversations (wall) central again and put the applications to the background. Add to that the Facebook chat and that's why nowadays Facebook has replaced a lot of my email conversations and did me ditch my MSN messenger and Skype. Now I'm a happy farmer with Facebook messages, Facebook chat, GTalk (over Gmail) and Gmail itself.

blip.fm:The best way to describe this gem is: Twitter with music. Same interface, same concept, same character limitation but you express yourself rather with music than with your tweets. I manage to resist for quite a long time since I know from myself that I'm very easily hooked up to things like this, but @alkronos' influence was stronger (damn you!). Now I'm blipping my way through cyberspace while getting to know tons of new songs. The concept is pretty simple: tell blip.fm what kind of bands you like and they present you with 30 likeminded souls (or DJs). Since they should have a similar taste for music, you suddenly get to know a whole bunch of artists and songs you've never heard about, but that you quite like.

Mark Nankman (follow me on Twitter @mnankman)

280Slides and other cool sassy (read: SaaSy) stuff: 280Slides uses the Cappuccino Web Framework, but that is not why I like this product so much. I like it because it looks great, it works great, does everything anyone would ever need in a slide tool. And the best thing is that you don't need to install anything besides a Web Browser. No worries about having to install updates, and no worries about backing up your slides. Of course, that can be said for all your sassy software. Here's my new credo: don't worry, be sassy!

Webkit for the incredible penetration I believe it is going to get next year: I am impressed by the number of products WebKit is currently being integrated in. This ubiquity makes WebKit a platform that cannot be ignored. I predict that this ubiquity will further increase in the next years, making WebKit one of the most important platforms for SaaS application development. Currently, developing SaaS applications involves lots of Ajax coding, and we all know about the browser compatibility struggle. Every Ajax application that does more that saying "Hello World" will have an if statement somewhere for checking the browser vendor and version. What if you could simply develop for a single platform and being able to run the application everywhere. Allright, there are several alternatives for achieving that, but who would have thought that WebKit would be one of them.

Dell Inspiron Mini (basically any Netbook, because these devices have huge SaaS potential): My ideal netbook is affordable for everyone (wow, how communistic of me), boots up in mere seconds, has long battery life (see, I am green too), is small and light enough to make it REALLY portable but also just big enough to keep it usable. Also, a netbook gets you online in a few seconds. These qualities make the netbook the ideal device for delivering SaaS. The netbooks will be the devices to deliver SaaS to the masses, mark my words. ISP's are already giving netbooks away for free with their internet connectivity plans.

We encourage you to disagree with us and drop your 2008 favs in the comments below.

Rick, Mark and Lee

Posted by Lee Provoost on November 18, 2008

Tech Predictions 2009: Music-As-A-Service (…at last)

The title says it all, and I believe that 2009 will be the year in which we start to see some real music-as-a-service propositions come to life. Although some existing online music services may claim to be already providing “music as a service”, but such services are often limited in one way or another. To my mind, a real music-as-a-service proposition would be able to supply: any music, any time and on any device, perhaps in a model akin to utilities e.g. water / gas / electricity.

The technology components to deliver this vision are already available today, and several trends in online music provision / consumption lend further support to this outcome. However, the biggest stumbling block remains the ever so excruciating process of license negotiation with rights owners, but even that is slowly becoming less of an insurmountable task given the number of online music services that can boast of content from all four major music labels and numerous Indies. So I can predict that it won’t be long before we see a proposition that offers real music-as-a-service; and one of several exciting fall-outs from this could be mega mash-ups of music content distribution and channels with a multiplier network effect (Think Rock Band meets Pop Idol meets Virtual Worlds, with an Alternate Reality Game ARG thrown in for good measure). You heard it here first.

Posted by Jude Umeh on November 16, 2008

Tech Predictions 2009: First convict for hacking into a cloud

The year 2009 will definitely see much cloud accumulation. Cloud computing is a hard to miss trend. Gartner ranked it #2 in their top-10 of tech trends. Let me list some noteworthy clouding initiatives that got to my attention:

Microsoft has already announced their own cloud (Azure). This cloud which will likely see some impressive applications in 2009.

Amazon recently announced that their Elastic Comput Cloud (EC2) now also runs Windows, allowing for cost-effective deployment of applications built with the .Net platform.

Oracle and Intel are collaborating on cloud acceleration to enterprise speed and possibly demo their first results in 2009.

Apanta - known for the popular Ajax IDE "Apanta Studio" and the incredible serverside javascript platform "Jaxar" - has now also introduced a Cloud that can run Javascript and do serverside DOM magic. This cloud has one very compelling benefit: it allows for very flexible mobile apps. If a device isn't powerfull enough to do CPU intensive stuff such as graphing, it could choose to simply do that in the cloud, using the same Ajax code!

There will be many more in the coming year. No doubt about it. The people on the ground look up in awe and wonder whether they should put their trust in these Clouds. Myself, I have no worries whatsoever. The benefits outweigh the risks. Clouds will reduce cost while increasing storage, automation, flexibility, mobility and innovation. Sure enough, these clouds will also attract hackers. To them, the clouds look like huge, very irresistible nuts, simply waiting to be cracked. Therefore, I predict the first cloud hacker to be convicted in the year 2009.

Posted by Mark Nankman on November 4, 2008

There is no such thing as a phase two

When developing enterprise 2.0 solutions there is no such thing as a phase two in which you can do product enhancements that are left out in phase one. If you did not start with a proper enhanced product or service within your E2.0 environment that has value for your colleagues or employees, you will deliver a bunch of code that can be redirected to the scrapheap.

In E2.0 you have to create services that add value, in Web2.0 you cant ake the risk of not doing that. Why is E2.0 so strict? Simply: your target audience is way smaller and mistakes aren't tolerated in E2.0. In Web2.0 you create a poorly interface or service and people still will adopt it (Twitter is one of the best examples, it had structural outages, a poor interface and still the community was growing). Besides that E2.0 does not equal Web2.0. Just building your E2.0 solution is not enough, as Thomas Vander Wal said in his Tale of the two tunnels :

Many organizations initial believe that Web 2.0 tools will take off and have great adoption inside an organization. But, this is not a "build it and they will come" scenario, even for the younger workers who are believed to love these tools and services and will not stay in a company that does not have them. The reality is the tools need selling their use, value derived from them, the conceptual models around what they do, and easing fears. Adoption rates grow far beyond the teen percentages in organizations that take time guiding people about the use of the tools and services. Those organizations that take the opportunity to continually sell the value and use for these tools they have in place get much higher adoption and continued engagement with the tools than those who do nothing and see what happens

For example: I overheard a conversation concerning a portal that should be build within a company to help employees with their work live balance. This portal would contain, in phase one, only functionality to plan a trip from location A to B and would provide a comparison on different transportmodes (phase two would have more functionality). Imagine you being at home starting your day with planning how you could get from your home (location A) to a customer (location B) and you start planning with the tool provided on the internal portal: You first have to startup your company laptop, than connect via VPN to the company network, go to the portal and than plan your trip. Or what you also could have done was going to a public site that is offering exact the same service and plan your trip (without using VPN, without your company laptop, you can even use this public application via phone).

It might be clear that there will not be a phase two for this portal project. Simply because it does not add value and the adoption rate in phase one is too low (if any at all). If you are planning to build an E2.0 solution: add value, sell value, sell value, add value, sell value, sell value, sell value, add value (this process is should be repeated over and over again).

Posted by Rick Mans on October 31, 2008

FirstTuesday: The Entrepreneur’s Ball

On Tuesday evening, I had the distinctly heady experience of speaking to an audience of some 100 Entrepreneurs, Investors and Service Providers in an event to “Celebrate the 10th Anniversary of UK’s Internet Industry”. This informal event, organised by the eponymous FirstTuesday.org, consisted of three brief panel discussions (focusing on the past, present and future of the Internet), and interspersed with severe bouts of furious networking (the primary goal of the event) between attendees. The representative panel members included: Peter Whitehead (Moderator and FT Digital Business Editor); Sean Phelan (Entrepreneur and founder of Multimap); Julie Meyer (Investor and founder of FirstTuesday & Ariadne Capital); and yours truly (Service Provider and Capgemini Consultant).

Some key take-outs from the event include:

1. Capping the Crunch on Investment – With potentially less money available, entrepreneurs and start-ups must be ready to ‘bootstrap’ their own business development in order to ride out the current dire economic situation, and to prove the viability and resilience of their business models

2. Successful entrepreneurs never say die - The next wave of successful Internet businesses start-ups will be the ones that can adapt and survive even in adversity (such as in the post ‘dotcom bubble’ era).

3. Technology won’t stop evolving – from the static / info-centric Web1.0, to the hyper-collaborative web2.0 and potentially contextual / dynamic WebN.0; it seems that technology-enabled change is definitely here to stay, therefore we (i.e. the entrepreneurs, investors and service providers) must evolve our models accordingly

4. The role of service providers – In my opinion, service providers should lead the way in enabling and supporting their client’s entrepreneurial efforts and business transformation goals based on a clear vision and broad industry experience / expertise. Our approach might include:

• The TechnoVision 2012 – This concept describes how and why service providers must have a comprehensive perspective on the evolution of technology, as well as its likely impact on their client’s business and the way they work. This is supported by initiatives like RAIN (RApid INnovation), RDV (Rapid Design & Visualisation) and the ASE (Accelerated Solutions Environment)
• Thought leadership - Capgemini’s CTOs and subject matter experts have become authors, and evangelists for change, with several books published on various forward looking and game changing topics like: Mashups, Mesh Collaboration, 21st Century Business & IT Communication, Wealth Management and The World Beyond DRM.

The question then remains as to whether service providers like Capgemini, and other similar organisations, should invest time and effort in supporting entrepreneurs and start-ups, and if so what would be the best way to go about it (in light of lessons learnt from the ‘dotcom era’)?

There is no easy answer other than to highlight the fact that; given the harsh economic realities of a changing global business environment, it might be prudent or even vital for all segments of developed economies to invest more resources towards realising a coherent framework for a truly global digital economy, based on a more evolved concept and interpretation of intellectual property rights. Basically, not everything will be free, open source, or ad-funded in tomorrow’s digital economy, much as we might wish it to be so, and I welcome any observations to the contrary.

In conclusion, I thought this event was an excellent networking forum for entrepreneurs, investors and other Internet / start-up cognoscenti in attendance; and I also met a couple of attendees with really interesting ideas which I can’t reveal here on pain of discomgooglation (yes, it is a word). I would gladly recommend it.

Posted by Jude Umeh on October 8, 2008