On the 25th, I completed one year of blogging on enterFrame. And now 410 posts later, I think I'm going to take a small break (at least till the middle of February.) The company I work with is participating at Nasscom 2004 and there is just loads of related work that will keep me busy for a while. I'll catch up on happenings later...
CNET News.com - Enterprise Hardware: Adaptec to expand India engineering efforts
The storage gear maker plans to pump $25 million into its centers in Hyderabad and Bangalore over the next four years.
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Category: Enterprise Hardware
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PubDate: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 10:21:00 PST
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E M E R G I C . o r g: Computing's Future
The Economist writes that the grand and fuzzy vision of utility computing is what all the vendors see, built around web services and grid computing.
The potential for a computing infrastructure such as this to boost efficiency and even to save lives is impressive. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an in-house guru at IBM, pictures an ambulance delivering an unconscious patient to a random hospital. The doctors go online and get the patient's data (medical history, drug allergies, etc), which happens to be stored on the computer of a clinic on the other side of the world. They upload their scans of the patient on to the network and crunch the data with the processing power of thousands of remote computers not just the little machine which is all that the hospital itself can nowadays afford.At the core of the vision is flexibility a firm must be able to make its operating costs, and therefore its computing and information costs, totally variable so that they go up and down with business volumes. Firms can improve cost flexibility today, says Mr Sood, but only if they stick with one vendor, such as IBM, or if they make only one of their many computing functions (data storage, say) flexible. But for computing to be bought and sold as a utility, firms must be able to switch vendors, to do it for all their computing functions, and with meter-based pricing. All of this will take a few more years to get right.
Most people who come to my site looking for a Flash Crack (there is none on this site) leave behind comments that they are unable to afford the software. Now, sinc1968 has posted an RIA that looks at the cost of the software when compared to the GDPs of various countries, and apparently for somebody in Vietnam to purchase Studio MX2004, they would have to work for more than two years (and spend no money on food and other necessities) It's always a challenge with the pricing game for developing countries, and can't one work out a pricing/licensing model that is country specific, and use the IP address to detect the country they are using the software from, and disable access outside the country? I know, it sounds ridiculous, but if the price is right, I don't think people would mind it...
The two main predictions according to this report are that 1. Standards and service-oriented applications will permeate IT and 2. Web services will allow enterprises to improve the way they interact, and develop, sell and support products. Also in the report:
“By 2006, Web services will take hold as a competitive differentiator in business relationships and product innovation. Enterprises that want to remain competitive will need to use Web services to provide commonly requested data to their partners. It is imperative that enterprises develop a strategy for how to use Web services to develop products, including hard goods, digital goods and services.”
Christian Ricci in this Boxes and Arrows article looks at web personalization and how it can be user to improve user experience.
“Personalization, properly implemented, brings focus to your message and delivers an experience that is visitor-oriented, quick to inform, and relevant. Personalization, poorly implemented, complicates the user experience and orphans content.”
While it does a good job of explaining how personalization can be useful, the article does not go deep into how it complicates matters. Apart from sensitivity to revealing personal information, are there any other impediments? The article does mention an increase in the complexity of the interface, but isn't this just the complexity of setting up the personalization? Does the end-user even have to know about this?
Tomalak's Realm
Adaptive Path: Seven Resolutions for 2004. The Adaptive Path partners share their resolutions for a better user experience in 2004.
Mazda USA has a cool Flash Site for the 2004 Autoshow. Check out this transformer animation that is part of the site...
Mathematik and dynamical-systems are two great places to get some javascript based visual effects for games. Should be useful for flashers too...
[via Metafilter]
New York times on the personal blogging phenomenon:
“The teenagers who post journals have (depending on your perspective) a degraded or a relaxed sense of privacy; their experiences may be personal, but there's no shame in sharing.”
Hmnn...
In this Infoworld article Ephraim Schwartz looks into the challenges of managing outsourced development and how companies will have to develop new roles and new processes that help manage these outsourced initiatives. Quoting the article:
“Long term, IT will need to change its research and development and PLM (product lifecycle management) processes to adapt to this outsource model, say both Kelly and Murphy. IT will need to refocus its skills on business analytics and strategy.
The ability to negotiate a change request will be of equal importance to technical skills, if not more so. And, though ultimately you may want to treat the outsource firm as your engineering team and you may want that process to be transparent, there will be new tasks to delegate, with time zone and language barriers thrown in for good measure. If you can’t walk down the hall, you need new processes to make sure things get done. From what I can tell, this is not something the computer science schools currently focus on. ”
This is exactly what we are tackling at Digité. Our platform allows enterprises to gain complete visibility into all their outsourcing initiatives while allowing them to adapt different processes with changing business needs...
Souldn't this be Instant Kama as Kama Shastra (Kamasutra) is the ancient India doctrines on love making. Any way, this is an interesting execution in Flash none the less...
[Via Metafilter]
E M E R G I C . o r g: Drucker on India and China
Joshua Marshall has excerpts from a Peter Drucker interview in Fortune:
India is becoming a powerhouse very fast. The medical school in New Delhi is now perhaps the best in the world. And the technical graduates of the Institute of Technology in Bangalore are as good as any in the world. Also, India has 150 million people for whom English is their main language. So India is indeed becoming a knowledge center.In contrast, the greatest weakness of China is its incredibly small proportion of educated people. China has only 1.5 million college students, out of a total population of over 1.3 billion. If they had the American proportion, they'd have 12 million or more in college. Those who are educated are well trained, but there are so few of them. And then there is the enormous undeveloped hinterland with excess rural population. Yes, that means there is enormous manufacturing potential. In China, however, the likelihood of the absorption of rural workers into the cities without upheaval seems very dubious. You don't have that problem in India because they have already done an amazing job of absorbing excess rural population into the cities--its rural population has gone from 90% to 54% without any upheaval.
Everybody says China has 8% growth and India only 3%, but that is a total misconception. We don't really know. I think India's progress is far more impressive than China's.
Joshua leaves us (and the policymakers in the US) with an interesting point to ponder: "Think how much of our broad, long-range foreign policy thinking rests on the premise that China is the rising economic and military power? What if the premise is wrong? Or what if India, nearly as large a country in population terms, is another rising behemoth?"
Scoble points out to a Longhorn Demo that takes you through a sample Real Estate Application using Avalon (the vector based renderer) Indigo (reliable Messaging) and a host of other web services which form the basis of the Service Oriented Architecture behind longhorn. All this is quite exciting in terms of technology, but it is introducing the same kind of challenges that Flash had during its early days with respect to consistent user interfaces. The zoomable map using a magnifying glass that enlarges the area underneath it, reminded me of so much of the early Flash days, when such effects were considred cool. Avalon might go though a similar phase where developers will be so much in awe of what is possible that they might go ahead a design interfaces without actually thinking whether the interfaces are actually usable. By the way, couldn't the Linux/J2EE group use a combination of Flash and Webservices (read Central) to achieve what Longhorn is aiming to do without having to re-write anything?
Rajesh points to Jim Moore's post on why bloggers will prove to be an influential lot in the time to come. Moore talks about the paradoxical strength of weak social ties. These weak social links are primarily responsible to bringing about social networking connections, and form the prime force behind Kevin Bacon's concept of Six Degrees of Separation.
Social Networking sites like Rhyze and Friendster may be exploiting this phenomenon quite literally, but one of the most interesting applications of using the strength of weak social connections in marketing has been exploited in Seth Godin's new book Purple Cow.
Godin who is a pioneer of direct marketing and an avid blogger himself, puts forward the concept of ‘sneezers’. Sneezers are early adopters who love your product and are willing to voice out their opinion about it. Good products will automatically appeal more to the sneezers and they in turn will let others know about it. One important thing to notice is that most bloggers are in natural sneezers. They are vocal about things they like and things they don't and though few in number they are able to spread their ideas and thoughts amongst like minded people.
To a company looking at effectively spending their marketing budget, this is exactly the kind of people to target. Macromedia has done this quite effectively till now, and the Macromedia Bloggers List is a very efficient way of getting the word out to the right people. Microsoft has also done the same with .NET.
But the marketing vehicle is not one of the most important lessons that Purple Cow is trying to put out. In fact the whole emphasis of the book is on having a remarkable product, which is what the Purple Cow is: A remarkable product that stands out from amongst all the black and brown ones.
After all a remarkable product hardly needs any marketing. The product itself will do the talking, and good old word of mouth will take care of the rest. After all, we are today living in an age of information overload, where the barrage of advertising and spam has left us numb. What still works are the weak social ties.
However, this power of bloggers is not for everybody to exploit their own causes. If you have an unremarkable product, then no amount of sneezers will help. In fact it would be the other way around. Mitch Kapor once was approached by an (un)named company, and the whole incident backfired on the company. One of the main reasons, well the product was not a Purple Cow...
The Purple Cow, by the way is not just a book about marketing products, you can use the concepts in the book to your career too. So even if you're not involved with marketing directly, it makes an excellent read...
MetaFilter: I (can see into the future), Cringely
Robert X. Cringely's Predictions for 2004 : first he updates readers on his 2003 predictions (80% accuracy) and then dishings 15 new techie prophecies.
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Scoble believes that Longhorn is going to be such a radical paradigm shift, that Microsoft cannot call it Windows. After all it has a brand new UI, it is completely SOA, and most importantly, apps designed for Longhorn will not be backward compatible (though if the app is built using .NET, should it not run on XP with some small tweaks or run-time engine? Not sure...)
In any case, Scoble is also looking for a new name for this OS. Care to contribute?
Tomalak's Realm
WIRED: 101 Ways to Save the Internet. Paul Boutin. Desperate solutions range from abandoning email to requiring a license to log on. Halt, fools! The Internet's problems stem from the same virtues that make it great: open architecture, the free flow of information, peer-to-peer cooperation, and a bias for linking strangers, not disconnecting them.
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E M E R G I C . o r g: Tackling Information Overload
Daily Herald writes about information overload: "The always-connected nature of our world can be overwhelming. Instead of driving technology to better our lives, we're often letting technology manhandle us. And the longer we stay connected, the more data we tend to produce for others to process, quickly cycling into information overload."
Jakob Nielsen adds that "a steady dose of realtime interruptions is toxic to anyone's health." A suggesed solution is the Internet control panel (or what I prefer to call the Digital Dashboard):
This would be a single central base for monitoring and prioritizing all the information a user is interested in. Do you want to keep track of your eBay auctions? Instead of five e-mails per auction, all scattered throughout your inbox, you would have a single flag in the control panel. Discussion groups? The control panel would show when hot topics of interest to you are being discussed and would call attention to discussions with contributions by writers you particularly respect. E-mail? Restricted to truly personal communication. Newsletters, intranet status reports, and other nonletter communications would be summarized and available for perusal on request. IM would have a small role, but your personal agent would be very strict at screening incoming requests.Whether or not you believe in my control panel, the most important point is to change our ideology for computer-mediated communication. The old thinking was that more information was better. If a unit of information were sent, it would have to be transmitted and received at all costs. The new thinking must be that human time is our most precious resource. Stop strip-mining
it.Traditional operating systems managed and scheduled computer resources. The next generation of computers must protect users' time just as strictly as the most vigilant executive secretary protects a CEO's calendar.
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