With the recent Tsunami that hit Asia,considering the magnitude of the damage,there is lots of talk about tsunami warning systems and global cooperation.We don't need governments and huge sensor arrays to warn people on the beach about the next huge wave approaching at 400 miles-per-hour. Thanks to the Internet, we can probably do it by ourselves.
What we need is a tsunami warning system not just for parts of Asia, but for anywhere in the world that might be subject to such conditions. And that decision about what beaches to protect ought to come not from Washington, D.C., or Jakarta, or any other capital city, but from the beach people, themselves. If you are concerned about a giant tidal wave taking out your village, it might be a good idea to build your own warning system.It can be done.The Tsunami Warning System (TWS) in the Pacific Ocean shows us how such a warning system can be run with the cooperation of 26 countries. TWS is based on crunching two kinds of data -- seismic activity and changes in sea level measured by tide gauges. Most tsunamis begin with an earthquake, the severity and epicenter of which can tell a lot about whether a tsunami is likely, how strong it will be, and in what direction it is likely to go. From the TWS, the first warning is based purely on such seismic data. But once the big wave starts rolling it will have an effect on the level of the sea, itself, which is routinely monitored by weather stations of many types. This additional data gives a better idea of how bad the wave is really going to be, so in the TWS system, it is used to justify expanding the warning to other communities beyond those warned purely on the basis of seismic data.
Depending on where the originating earthquake is, the tsunami can be minutes or hours from crashing into a beach. This week's wave took about 90 minutes to reach Sri Lanka, just over 600 miles from the epicenter. That not only means the wave was traveling at over 400 miles-per-hour, it also means that had a warning system been in place, there would easily have been time to get the people who were affected in Sri Lanka to higher ground. So to start, we need raw seismic data. Thanks to the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network, here is one place where you can find real time data from 199 seismographs around the world. There are also links to a dozen regional operations that consolidate such data. The data is available. Tide gauge data is available, too, though there is less of it, and aggregation will require more effort, so let's just stick to seismic data for our warning system.
Here's where we need the help of a tsunami expert, someone who can help us calculate the size and direction of a likely tsunami based on the available seismic data. Fortunately, there has been quite a bit of work done in this area of study and appropriate computer codes that can be run on a personal computer either exist or can be derived, perhaps by reflexively evaluating seismic data from known tsunami events. But remember that what we care about here is not global tsunami warning but LOCAL tsunami warning , so the required seismic data sources can pretty easily be limited to those with an uninterrupted aspect of the target beach, which means half a dozen seismographs, not 199.
The seismographs are online, we gather the data using XML, continuously crunch it using the codes that already exist, then we need the warning, which could be flashed on the screen of the PC. Looking just like a TV weather map, the PC widget like Konfabulator would flash a warning and even include a countdown timer just like in the movies.
No international consortium, No broadband is needed to build such a local tsunami warning system. The data is available, processing power is abundant and cheap. With local effort, there is no reason why every populated beach on earth can't have a practical tsunami warning system up and running a month from now. That's Internet time for you, but in this case, its application can protect friends everywhere from senseless and easily avoidable death.
Amazing man - should be tried out immediately- Essentially decentrailised processing using powerful personal computers and ability to process significant amount of data locally coupled with availability of huge mass of data being collected currently,is the basis on which this framework would work.Let some of the fund getting raised for Tsunami relief be routed for piloting this Tsunami warning system framework. Scobeleizer wrote earlier today,Bill and Melinda Gates start writing checks for three million dollars for Tsunami relief - may be they can take the lead in driving this pilot or the indian service providers like TCS,INFY,Wipro etc.. or the Japanese,Korean majorsetc.. ( may be there is a commercialisation opportunity down the line- specialised turnkey offering for most of the beaches in the world!!)who have by the way benefitted significantly by the advancements in the technology world.This idea really requires serious consideration.
The Korean Information Security agency says in the first 10 months of 2004, it received 244,151 complaints about unsolicited text messages and calls to mobile phones, compared to just 78,063 complaints about spam e-mail, seven times more than in 2003. A KISA official went on to tell The Korea Times that junk mail to phones now outnumbers e-mail spam, a trend that's expected to continue. Mobile spam in South Korea takes on two forms - the familiar unwanted text messages, and automated voice calls. Blocking the unwanted voice calls can be problematic, as firms using them aren't required to comply with users' demands to be removed from their lists. There is pending legislation, however, that would outlaw all automated calls "that fail to obtain prior agreement" — a move that hasn't stopped too many e-mail spammers.It's hard to tell if mobile spam really outnumbers e-mail spam in South Korea from the number of complaints in generates. A likely scenario is that not only are users more resigned to e-mail spam and have better technology to deal with it, but also that mobile spam is far more intrusive and offensive — and not to mention costly — than on the desktop.
Takeaway : Operators and service providers must protect their users from spam, otherwise mobile messaging will be rendered useless. Likewise, marketers legitimately using text messaging and other mobile services must carefully orchestrate their campaigns, making sure they're sending them only to users who have asked for them, and also making it easy to stop receiving the messages. I agree with the data and the recommendation -During my recent visit to Korea, I received 90% junk messages in my mobile, and service providers and legislation can prevent spam( as countries like Singapore have shown)!!
Caterina Fake & Stewart Butterfield, Founders of Flickr.com tell Fastompany,Flickr has grown from 0 to 150,000 users while still in beta and with zero dollars ($0.00) in marketing investment. This growth has been entirely organic, based on word of mouth, blog postings and positive press. We have quickly created the largest and best-organized online photo library in existence with 1.8 million images, of which 81% are public, and 85% have some human added metadata. What this means is you can find photographs of anything that strikes your fancy. Vintage cars, butterflies, Parisian graffiti, Halloween costumes – you can get lost for hours exploring Flickr. Flickr has also provided a place for people to both express themselves and be a part of a larger community by creating self-organizing photo albums that they can share privately with friends or family, or with the world; they can curate collections of other member photos, and create dynamically assembled galleries. People all over the world upload photos from the war in Iraq, from the middle of the Florida hurricanes, from the polling booth, from the midst of the revolution in the Ukraine. Flickr is infinitely shareable and easily searchable. As Paul Allen points out, Fastest Growth Sites Are Built on User Generated Content. Paul writes,one of the most powerful ways to develop web site traffic is to enable users to share their content through your web site with others-to create community around user generated content.Many of the fastest growing web sites of all time did this (or do it now): MyFamily.com, eBay, GeoCities, Xoom, Homestead, MySpace, Epinions, Hotshots, LinkedIn.com, Meetup.com, Friendster, and more.If sites are uses to get customers to blog, use message boards, upload photos or reviews, the effect shall be dazzling.With open source software (for message boards, blogs, uploading photos, and more) and with the cost of hard drive storage a tiny fraction of what it was five years ago, the time has never been better to try a user generated content strategy.
We recently covered fibre survives and outsourcing data traffic not affected . Infoworld reports,, despite tsunami's outsourcers stay in chennai.Chennai is the closest competitor to bangalore as mainstay outsourcing center in India. All outsourcing biggies Infosys,TCS,Wipro,Satyam have major presence in chennai and have reported complete normalcy in operations without any disruptions.Infoworld adds, Wipro Ltd. in Bangalore, for example, uses its facility in Chennai as one of two backup sites in the country for its own corporate data as well as customer data from its facilities across India. Its other backup site is in Bangalore. "We have no plans to move the backup facility from Chennai, because the facility is sufficiently inland and not at risk," said a spokesman for the company. For customers who want the service, Wipro also offers backup of their data at centers abroad, the spokesman added. The Marina beach at Chennai was hit by the tsunamis and a large number of people were killed there. But the largest impact of the tsunamis was on other coastal areas of eastern India, where the primary economic activities are fishing and tourism. A number of Indian outsourcing companies including Wipro, Infosys Technologies Ltd, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. have major software development operations in Chennai.
Infosys does not have plans to move its software development facility out of Chennai in the wake of the devastation by the tsunamis, according to a spokeswoman of the company. The facility is about five miles from the coast, and there was no damage or water seepage in the center, according to a statement from Infosys. The company's disaster recovery facility is inland in Mauritius, the spokeswoman said. Most other companies with facilities in Chennai have indicated they will continue to operate in the city.
The coming 12 months will bring a continued focus on security, app dev tools, on-demand, storage, and desktop search. 2004 closed with a veritable blizzard of mergers and a downpour of desktop search offerings - events and products that may well dominate IT managers’ thoughts well into the new year. With analyst companies such as IDC and Forrester Research predicting an increase in IT spending, 2005 will also witness additional developments in operating systems, SOAs (service-oriented architectures), on-demand computing, storage, open source, and - of ever increasing importance - security.
Setting up the defense - Security: Microsoft is expected to announce a series of new products and an increased emphasis on protection in its current product line. Meanwhile, traditional security vendors will have plenty to offer in 2005, and networking and storage companies will continue to integrate security features into their lineups. Cisco’s year-end purchase of Protego, a network edge security appliance company, presages the direction the industry will take, with consolidation likely to continue, as point products get swooped up by larger security vendors.
App dev matters - Microsoft is also expected to ship next-generation upgrades to its Visual Studio developer toolbox and to its SQL Server 2005 database. Code-named Yukon and talked about as far back as 2001, SQL Server 2005 will feature enhancements in BI, database administration, development, and security. Visual Studio 2005, code-named Whidbey, will come in a new flavor, Team System, which features application lifecycle management and collaborative development. Competing with Microsoft, Sun Microsystems plans to upgrade its Java Studio Creator tool, with additional application server support planned for spring.
Waiting for Longhorn - Beta of longhorn by the end of 2005 with improved security capabilities; a built-in Web services architecture, Indigo; and a brand-new graphics subsystem, code-named Avalon. The overall market revenue for desktops, servers, and packaged software running on Linux will top $35 billion by 2008, according to IDC. Linux-compatible packaged software is expected to reach $14 billion in that same time frame.
In the emerging open source database market - MySQL in 2005 plans to ship Version 5.0 of its MySQL database with stored procedures and triggers capabilities. Enterprise-level, commercial database companies have declared their open source rivals not ready for the enterprise, but MySQL is looking to change that.
On-demand and SOAs - A technology trend that will take an even deeper hold in the enterprise during the course of this year will be the “dynamic IT” environments.“There will be a new focus on a new foundation in IT ,the vendors call ‘on-demand’ or ‘adaptive.’ It’s about the ability to apply flexible approaches based on things like SOAs, Web services, virtualization, and standard components. It is this technical foundation underneath the enterprise that will be the driver for change,” said Frank Gens, senior vice president of research at IDC.
SOA - BEA Systems IBM, Microsoft, Oracle,and Sun,are vying in the SOA space, promoting the use of component-based interchangeable application architectures as the new wave of IT infrastructure.
Computing without wires - In wireless, 2005 will be a year of pilot projects and evaluations. To comply with the first Wal-Mart and Department of Defense mandates for RFID tags, in January thousands of suppliers will deploy RFID tags but only in what is being called a “slap-and-ship” model.After the tags are applied to satisfy customers’ requirements, however, suppliers will start their own pilot projects to see how RFID might reduce costs in their supply chain. RFID will not be generally deployed until late 2006 or 2007.
Storage spreads out - In 2005, more acquisitions among storage software vendors shall happen, as storage management increases in importance and tiered storage continues to come of age. Storage resource management software will continue to grow, as will storage archive software. Dell’s success with its AX100 storage device will no doubt translate to more storage systems with ease-of-use features.Microsoft will increase its stake in storage by adding products that feature tighter integration with Windows to its storage lineup. Other products to look for in 2005 include EMC’s storage switch, which the company plans to release early in the year. Tape vendors will continue to integrate disk into their products and will offer better integration into storage networks. In the same vein, expect to hear a lot about ILM (information lifecycle management) from the major storage vendors and to see plenty of products with iSCSI (Internet SCSI), as the technology begins to take off this year.
Networks will grow faster, more complex, and larger in 2005:As more 10 Gigabit Ethernet products come to market, the network core will see a marked increase in performance. At the same time, the network edge will see a performance boost as Gigabit Ethernet extends to the outer edge.
Search gains significance : Enterprise search platforms will grow in prominence in 2005, fueled by skyrocketing volumes of unstructured content and the closing in of government regulations that mandate quick discovery of a wide range of corporate content -- from e-mails, to documents, to chat conversations.Led by IBM and its Masala project, large software vendors will accelerate the commoditization of full-text search in the enterprise. In addition, enterprise search will continue to blur more and more with content management and business analytics.In addition to continued platform expansions by Autonomy, Fast Search & Transfer, and Verity, new search-related product entrants are expected to be launched by Oracle and Sun in 2005. Meanwhile, the emerging desktop search market is expected to heat up both in enterprise and in consumer markets throughout the year.
Hosted search, another nascent space, will gain more prominence in the enterprise this year, as vendors such as Atomz and CrownPeak push the on-demand model benefits of quicker startup time and lower cost of ownership. Several exceptions : consolidation into platforms, flux in eai space, portals becoming platforms, master data management have not been covered. But overall,a balanced set of expectations - very likely to happen.
Techweb reports that online auction site eBay announced that it will soon drop support for Microsoft's Passport for log-in to the site and discontinuing alerts sent via Microsoft's .Net alerts. Microsoft says,it will stop marketing Passport to sites outside its own stable. As of late January, eBay will no longer display the Passport button on sign-in pages nor allow users to log in using their Passport accounts. Instead, members must log-in directly through eBay. Likewise, eBay's dumping .Net alerts, which means that eBay customers who want to receive alerts - for such things as auction closings, outbids, and auction wins - will have to make other arrangements. The free-of-charge eBay Toolbar, for instance, can be used to set up alerts going to the desktop, while alerts to phones, PDAs, or pagers can be created from the user's My eBay page.
eBay was one of the first to jump on the Passport bandwagon in 2001, but is only the latest site to leap off. Job search site Monster.com, dropped Passport in October. Microsoft has decided to stop marketing its sign-on service to other Web sites.The pull-back, which had been long predicted by various analysts, follows a stormy life for Passport, which among other things, suffered a pair of security breakdowns in the summer of 2003 that could have led to hackers stealing users' IDs. Microsoft also pulled its online directory of sites using Passport - perhaps because the list would have been depressingly short - stating in the online notice that "We have discontinued our Site Directory, but you'll know when you can use your Passport to make sign-in easier. Just look for the .NET Passport Sign In button!" Passport will continue to be the sign-on service for various Microsoft properties, including the Hotmail e-mail service and MSN.com. Two things to note: A.Creating a passport account was never a friendly exercise. B. All talks of community building and fortification by Microsoft are all gone.Would this impact microsoft stock valaution?? when prices rose, nominal value was attached to building and binding a community!! May be Microsoft is too big and well spread, this may be seen as just a blip!! How many blips the company need to exhibit for people to sit up and take note??
(Via Jeff Barr) IBM just published an informative article titled Great moments in microprocessor history. The Microprocessor heralded the origins of the digital revolution,perhaps the greatest of all the positive revolutions that the world has seen. Excerpts with edits and my comments added:
- Before the flood: The 1960s Just a scant few years after the first laboratory integrated circuits, Fairchild Semiconductor introduced the first commercially available integrated circuit (although at almost the same time as one from Texas Instruments).
-Development explosion: The 1970s The idea of a computer on a single chip had been described in the literature as far back as 1952 (see Resources), and more articles like this began to appear as the 1970s dawned. Finally, process had caught up to thinking, and the computer on a chip was made possible. The air was electric with the possibility.
-The first three At the time of this writing, three groups lay claim for having been the first to put a computer in a chip: The Central Air Data Computer (CADC), the Intel® 4004, and the Texas Instruments TMS 1000.
-Early Intel: 4004, 8008, and 8080 Intel released its single 4-bit all-purpose chip, the Intel 4004, in November 1971. It had a clock speed of 108KHz and 2,300 transistors with ports for ROM, RAM, and I/O. Originally designed for use in a calculator, Intel had to renegotiate its contract to be able to market it as a stand-alone processor. Its ISA had been inspired by the DEC PDP-8.The Intel 8008 was introduced in April 1972, and didn't make much of a splash, being more or less an 8-bit 4004. Its primary claim to fame is that its ISA -- provided by Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC), who had commissioned the chip -- was to form the basis for the 8080, as well as for the later 8086 (and hence the x86) architecture. Lesser-known Intels from this time include the nearly forgotten 4040, which added logical and compare instructions to the 4004, and the ill-fated 32-bit Intel 432.
- AMD clones the 8080 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) was founded in 1969 by Jerry Sanders. Like so many of the people who were influential in the early days of the microprocessor (including the founders of Intel), Sanders came from Fairchild Semiconductor. AMD's business was not the creation of new products; it concentrated on making higher quality versions of existing products under license. For example, all of its products met MILSPEC requirements no matter what the end market was. In 1975, it began selling reverse-engineered clones of the Intel 8080 processor.
- Moto 68000 In 1979, Motorola introduced the 68000. With internal 32-bit registers and a 32-bit address space, its bus was still 16 bits due to hardware prices. Originally designed for embedded applications, its DEC PDP-11 and VAX-inspired design meant that it eventually found its way into the Apple Macintosh, Amiga, Atari, and even the original Sun Microsystems® and Silicon Graphics computers.
- A new hope: The 1990s The 1990s dawned just a few months after most of the Communist governments of Eastern and Central Europe had rolled over and played dead; by 1991, the Cold War was officially at an end. Those high-end UNIX workstation vendors who were left standing after the "microprocessor wars" scrambled to find new, non-military markets for their wares. Luckily, the commercialization and broad adoption of the Internet in the 1990s neatly stepped in to fill the gap. For at the beginning of that decade, you couldn't run an Internet server or even properly connect to the Internet on anything but UNIX. A side effect of this was that a large number of new people were introduced to the open-standards Free Software that ran the Internet.The popularization of the Internet led to higher desktop sales as well, fueling growth in that sector. Throughout the 1990s, desktop chipmakers participated in a mad speed race to keep up with "Moore's Law" -- often neglecting other areas of their chips' architecture to pursue elusive clock rate milestones.
- The 2000s The 2000s have come along and it's too early yet to say what will have happened by decade's end. As Federico Faggin said, the exponential progression of Moore's law cannot continue forever. As the day nears when process will be measured in Angstroms instead of nanometers, researchers are furiously experimenting with layout, materials, concepts, and process. After all, today's microprocessors are based on the same architecture and processes that were first invented 30 years ago -- something has definitely got to give. Exciting days are ahead, with more and more speed,power and newer and newer potential usages.
Casino owners may become the newest members of the RFID bandwagon. They show a keen interest in the technology as a way to trackcustomers from the moment they hit the gaming tables. And the purchase of two patents by a large manufacturer shows they will not miss out on the 21st century technology. Shuffle Master, a gaming supply company headquartered, in Las Vegas, Nevada, recently purchased two RFID-related patents for $12.5 million.The company specializes in providing utility products to casinos, such as automatic card shufflers. But it also carries its own proprietary table games for casinos. The patents’ seller was Enpat, a licensing agent for the inventors, explained Paul Meyer, Shuffle Master's president and chief operating officer. "We did a lot of due diligence. We looked at over 400 patents to make sure we identified the correct ones," he added.
-The first patent is for RFID-enabled gaming chips. A casino could track the chip from the time it was first played to the time it is cashed in.
- The second patent is for the gaming table tracking system that monitors and records all gaming chip transactions in a casino. Both patents were originally filed in 1995.
"At last year's Global Gaming Expo, we were showing an intelligent table system," said Mr. Meyer. "At that time our product was based on optical technology, but we later decided that one size fits all made no sense because many casinos had different needs. We went on a modular development role and earlier this year concluded that the technology of the future was RFID. It offers 100% accuracy and is superior to optical. The purchase of these patents demonstrates our commitment to bring reliable and integrated RFID technology to market for the benefit of our casino customers." Gaming Partners International Corporation (which makes RFID readers and chips) will retain its exclusive license for the use of these patents in the manufacture and sale of RFID gaming chips and readers, according to Shuffle Master. "Mikohn (a Shuffle Master competitor) has a few placements of RFID. They've been trumpeting RFID for quite some time. With our acquisition; Mikohn would be a licensee of Shuffle Master," said Mr. Meyer.
Even with the minimal placements of RFID chips and tables in casinos thus far, Mr. Meyer thinks the field is still very wide open. "There are some 42,000 gaming tables in the world. That means lots of room to grow." He's looking at the end of the fiscal year, which, for Shuffle Master, is October, "that we'll certainly have something to demonstrate at the Global Trade Show." The downside to a Casino for RFID implementation, he said, is that it "would require an investment because they would have to re-rack their casinos." Case in point: a conventional chip without RFID costs about 90 cents, he said. With RFID, that cost would jump a dollar, to $1.90 a chip. "I've been told the average cost to a casino (to upgrade) is $250,000." So how do RFID-enabled chips and tables work :"Say I sit down at a black jack table and I have a player's card. I place it and a $100 bill on the table. My card is swiped which places me at that table," explained Mr. Meyer. (A player's card is another way for casinos to track frequent gamblers. They earn points on the card for free meals, or other rewards.) Without RFID, "as I play over time, the only way the casino can estimate the kind of player I am, is by using pit boss estimates. That's a pretty rough estimate. That's where table tracking comes in. Every chip is associated with me and is tracked using a reader. Exactly what I'm betting and losing or winning is tracked automatically. Without tracking, they (casino) don't know what I'm betting." In other words, the reasoning behind RFID utilization is that the casino will know what every player is doing at every table.
"Say you move away from one table with $500 in chips. You now go to cash in those chips. Those RFID chips can be read at the cage and associated with you. In your moment of generosity, you give a cocktail waitress a $25 chip. When she cashes it in, we know how generous a tipper you are." But not only does RFID allow casinos to track players, it also can track employees.
Another example: "If a dealer during a shift change tries to leave the table with a $100 chip, he'd be caught," said Mr. Meyer. "Every chip has a unique serial number, which is tied to the player card. If I don't have a player card, it's difficult to associate an RFID chip with me, but a very high percentage have player cards," he added. If the player doesn't have such a card, he would simply give the dealer his first name and last initial before buying the chips and they'd be tied to him in that fashion. In conjunction with RFID table tracking, "that literally means tracking player performance at the table and all around the casino," said Mr. Meyer. "There has been an enormous amount of attention given to this," he added. "New technology takes time to be adopted and I think it's very clear that Shuffle Master's reputation as the leader at deploying technology in the table area" could drive the move towards this new technology. "There has been a lot of buzz. People look at the adoption by Shuffle Master favorably because they know it will be deployed quickly."
Walter Mossberg writes in WSJ,Microsoft hasn't made any important functional improvements in Internet Explorer for years. The software giant has folded IE into the Windows operating system, and the browser only receives updates as part of the "Windows update" process. In recent years, most upgrades to IE have been under-the-hood patches to plug the many security holes that have made IE a major conduit for hackers, virus writers and spyware purveyors. The only visible feature added to IE recently: a pop-up ad blocker, which arrived long after other browsers had one.
Meanwhile, better browser like were getting built and the most significant of these challengers is Firefox, a free product of an open-source organization called Mozilla, available for download at www.mozilla.org. Firefoxis both more secure and more modern than IE, and it comes packed with user-friendly features the Microsoft browser can't touch. Firefox still has a tiny market share. But millions of people have downloaded it recently. There are some other browsers that put IE to shame. Apple's elegant Safari browser, included free on every Mac, is one. But it isn't available for Windows. The Opera Browser is loaded with bells and whistles, but is pretty complicated. And NetCaptor, is very nice. But since it's based on the IE Web-browsing engine, it's vulnerable to most of IE's security problems. Firefox, which uses a different underlying browsing engine called "Gecko," also has a couple of close cousins based on the same engine. One is Netscape, now owned by America Online. The other is a browser called Mozilla, from the same group that created Firefox. But Firefox is smaller, sleeker and newer than either of its relatives, although a new Netscape version is in the works. Firefox isn't totally secure - no browser can be, especially if it runs on Windows, which has major security problems and is the world's top digital target. But Firefox has better security and privacy than IE. One big reason is that it won't run programs called "ActiveX controls," a Microsoft technology used in IE. These programs are used for many good things, but they have become such powerful tools for criminals and hackers that their potential for harm outweighs their benefits.
Firefox also has easier, quicker and clearer methods than IE does for covering your online tracks, if you so choose. And it has a better built-in pop-up ad blocker than IE. The best aspect of Firefox is tabbed browsing, a Web-surfing revolution that is shared by all the major new browsers but is absent from IE. With tabbed browsing, you can open many Web pages at once in the same browser window. Each is accessed by a tab. The benefits of tabbed browsing hit home when you create folders of related bookmarks. And Firefox can recognize and use Web sites that employ a new technology called "RSS" to create and update summaries of their contents. When Firefox encounters an RSS site, it displays a special icon that allows you to create a "live" bookmark to the site. These bookmarks then display updated headlines of stories on the sites.Firefox also includes a permanent, handy search box that can be used to type in searches on Google, Yahoo, Amazon or other search sites without installing a special toolbar.
And it has a cool feature called "Extensions." These are small add-on modules, easy to download and install, that give the browser new features. Among the extensions include the one that automatically fills out forms and another that tests the speed of my Web connection. You can also download "themes," which change the browser's looks.There is only one significant downside to Firefox. Some Web sites, especially financial ones, have chosen to tailor themselves specifically for Internet Explorer. They rely on features only present in IE, and either won't work or work poorly in Firefox and other browsers. Luckily, even if you switch to Firefox, you can still keep IE around to view just these incompatible sites. (In fact, Microsoft makes it impossible to fully uninstall IE.) There's even an extension for Firefox that adds an option called "View This Page in IE." So Firefox is the current choice of a Windows Web browser. It is to IE in 2004 what IE was to Netscape in 1996 -- the upstart that does a better job.
Light Reading writes, Telecom services across South Asia are gradually being restored after the devastating tsunami that hit the region last weekend. With tens of thousands dead and more than a million homeless, subsea communications links will be vital as aid agencies the world over continue the work of assessing the damage and providing assistance. The major undersea cables, operated by consortiums of telecom providers, survived largely unscathed -- Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd, says the Tata Indicom-Chennai-Singapore cable, SEA-ME-WE-2 and SEA-ME-WE-3, and the Western Africa Submarine Cable (WASC) were not affected; neither was Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd.'s 3,200 kilometer cable connecting Chennai, India, with Singapore. Om Malik points out that these are the cables over which much of the outsourcing traffic to-and-from India travels. Many US retailers, banks and credit card companies operate call centers that use these cables. In a sense, this tragedy also proved that even in worst case scenario, the work of money continues. Sad, but true! The Malaysian leg of the South-Asia-Far-East (SAFE) submarine cable had been disrupted and traffic was being rerouted via VSNL’s redundancy cables. There was no word on when the cable could be restored, as repairs have to be made by the Malaysian landing operator. The SAT-3/WASC cable links Europe with West Africa and SAFE continues the connection on to India and Malaysia. The Indian link remains operational. A map showing the major undersea cables in Asia,is available here.
(Via Mohan Srinivasan) Michael Porter says,it is way too early for India to think it had been successful — or even partially successful!!. We had recently covered in this blog India's lack of competitiveness and the gap that India needs to bridge to be competitive. Manjari Raman interviews Michael Porter for Business Standard and writes,Porter signalled that it was way too early for India to think it had been successful — or even partially successful. Concerned that India’s globalisation story might be aborted by short-sightedness in policy or blind-sided by misguided ambition, Porter prescribes a healthy dose of self-criticism. As a frequent visitor to India and as head of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard, Porter has a clear understanding of India’s potential as well as Indian companies’ latent aspirations for global growth. At the same time, as the architect of The Business Competitiveness Index in the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Competitiveness Report, he knows how far Indian companies have to go before they can rightfully claim their place in the League of Multinationals. He also knows, first hand, how hard it is to make Indian CEOs realise that a critique is not the same as criticism. “India has a tremendous tendency for overstatement,” says Porter, and “ Indians don’t take criticism well. They get very offended.” To compete in an aggressive global environment, Indian companies must not only learn to invite criticism, but also find ways to use it to strengthen strategy and twist into competitive advantage. Excerpts with edits and comments added:
On Indian Companies Not Being in Top 100 International Business : The ability of Indian companies to prosper and be competitive internationally has a lot to do with the home base, and whether India offers an attractive business environment. If companies don't have to compete at home and don't have a vibrant, dynamic environment at home, it's very, very hard for them to compete internationally.
What must be done to be in Top 100 global lists : A good place to start is to think about the nature of the business environment in India and where India stands internationally. Certainly, India is on the right track and is improving its economic performance. The growth in GDP per capita has been quite good. The growth in productivity is still low, but there is some evidence that it has picked up a bit. India's exports are growing, but that growth is dominated by growth in service exports and in particular IT-related services. India is doing quite well in IT-enabled services, but to a considerable extent, that's it! It's a one-trick pony. India is getting tremendous international profile from IT service exports, but they aren't indicative of the broader economy. The export clusters that are growing rapidly are jewelry and precious metals, textiles/apparel, fishing, construction, metal manufacturing and agriculture. Pharmaceuticals are very small, and as per dataa, the sector is growing at a slower rate than India's average growth rate of exports of goods. In automotive components, India shows up on the list; in automotive products, India has a 0.15 per cent share of world exports, and it has not grown its share. Components are one area that has been doing a little bit better. India has a 0.3 per cent world export share in automotive parts and it has grown slightly. But automotive components exports from India in 2002 amounted to just $460 million.In terms of the business environment, IT service exports are growing, but India's service exports, in general, are not growing that fast. Exports of goods are growing, but, again, not that fast, and the big areas in goods exports are still traditional clusters like textiles. There is certainly movement in the right direction, but the magnitude of that improvement is still tiny. In terms of assessing where India really is, we have to understand that there's a long way to go.
On How to globalize faster & better and Government’s role :To build a competitive economy, first, you need to have sound overall contextual conditions, such as macroeconomic policy, a sound legal system, etc. Those are cross-context factors, and include macro, legal, social, and political factors. They need to be sound, stable, and trusted for an economy to be competitive. But in of themselves, those are not enough.In order to have a competitive economy, you also have to have competitive firms. To have competitive firm, you need to have an efficient and appropriate business environment, which creates the right inputs, the right incentives, and the right competitive pressure to allow firms to improve their productivity. Governments shouldn't work with individual firms--that's almost always a mistake. Government should work, first, to enhance and improve the overall business environment--the cross-cutting business environment that affects many clusters. Then, government ought to work with established or emerging clusters to remove the obstacles and constraints that prevent those clusters from becoming more dynamic. If government does those two things, we find that exports and outward foreign direct investment follow. But it's inappropriate and inefficient for government to engage with individual companies. When it is engaging in cluster development, the government's role is really to support the efforts of all existing and emerging clusters to upgrade productivity rather than to make choices about which clusters need specific support. There has long been a tendency in India of distorted support through subsidies. The mentality needs to shift from "we need to support some clusters" to "we need to create a policy framework that allows all clusters to flourish."
On links between country, clusters, and companies and global competitiveness & country: competitiveness is defined as, companies that can be productive and meet the test of international competition. A company has to be globally competitive, or it's simply going to die. From a company's point of view, competitiveness is a matter of survival. Having competitive companies is the way a country supports a high and rising standard of living because those companies can afford to pay high and rising wages. They create new jobs. And by the way, India has a crisis of jobs in the formal economy. When we think about cluster development, we can't think national; we have to think regional. The locus of economic development, particularly in a country of the scale and size of India, needs to be driven down to the state level, and within the state, down to the metropolitan and urban areas. The fact that some states are fairly advanced and organised in terms of that kind of thinking is one reason that India as a nation is successful.
On Trends in competitiveness of Brazil, Russia, India ,China economies and on Indian competitiveness: Emerging economies are becoming more significant players in the global economy. We are seeing increasing outbound foreign investment from the emerging economies, and India is an example of that. Foreign investment out of India is up to roughly $1 billion a year, and that's a meaningful amount of external investment by Indians. That would be one trend. Secondly, the global economy has been shifting a little from the traditional West to the emerging economies in terms of sheer weight.Although the Indian business environment is improving in multiple respects, it has some fundamental weaknesses. A. the capital markets remain relatively weak and undeveloped. B. the physical infrastructure is abysmally ranked.
Indian firms face a really compelling logistical disadvantage over companies in China in terms of getting goods and services to market. But the most pernicious problems in India--which are still not being confronted head-on - are the pervasive barriers to competition. A lot of Indian companies are investing abroad partly to, if you will, escape weaknesses in the domestic business environment, and to build assets and skills that are slow to develop at home. It's interesting that the most successful Indian clusters are ones where the government didn't really have any (contribution). A fundamental shift is still required in the nature of the business-government relationship.
On why globalize , when there is a large domestic market : If India opens up its domestic market and has a lot of competition in the domestic market--as in the United States--then it will begin a more positive cycle. Companies will get to ramp up and build some capability in the domestic market, and competition will drive them to start looking abroad. That dynamic could happen in India if the fundamental characteristics of the business environment are systematically addressed. The other consequence of a large domestic market--which affects both India and China—is, what little foreign investment comes into India is not because India is a great business platform; it's there because of the consumers. China has taken better advantage of that than India has because China is in many ways more open, more dynamic. We've seen many more companies come into China because that's such a dynamic place. The business environment is a bit more efficient, which is why multinationals use China as an export platform. But we don't see that much in India. The multinationals are there primarily just to do business in India and sell to the Indian market. Another really big challenge for India, if she is going to develop the more advanced clusters, is the issue of intellectual property (IP) protection. Until India can be really credible on that, I think the growth of biotech will be limited. Can't say anything more and better than this!!
Wired has an interesting article on Bram Cohen and BitTorrent, the filesharing software that has tens of millions of users and generates about a third of all internet traffic. Excerpts with edits and my comments added:
Bram Cohen is the creator of BitTorrent, one of the most successful peer-to-peer programs ever. BitTorrent lets users quickly upload and download enormous amounts of data, files that are hundreds or thousands of times bigger than a single MP3. Analysts at CacheLogic, an Internet-traffic analysis firm report that BitTorrent traffic accounts for more than one-third of all data sent across the Internet. Cohen showed his code to the world at a hacker conference in 2002, as a free, open source project aimed at geeks who need a cheap way to swap Linux software online. But the real audience turns out to be TV and movie fanatics. It takes hours to download a ripped episode of Alias or Monk off Kazaa, but BitTorrent can do it in minutes. As a result, more than 20 million people have downloaded the BitTorrent application. If any one of them misses their favorite TV show, no worries. Surely someone has posted it as a "torrent." As for movies, if you can find it at Blockbuster, you can probably find it online somewhere - and use BitTorrent to suck it down.
Cohen’s idea : Breaking a big file into tiny pieces might be a terrific way to swap it online. The problem with P2P file-sharing networks like Kazaa, he reasoned, is that uploading and downloading do not happen at equal speeds. Broadband providers allow their users to download at superfast rates, but let them upload only very slowly, creating a bottleneck: If two peers try to swap a compressed copy of Meet the Fokkers - say, 700 megs - the recipient will receive at a speedy 1.5 megs a second, but the sender will be uploading at maybe one-tenth of that rate. Thus, one-to-one swapping online is inherently inefficient. It's fine for MP3s but doesn't work for huge files.Cohen realized that chopping up a file and handing out the pieces to several uploaders would really speed things up. He sketched out a protocol: To download that copy of Meet the Fokkers, a user's computer sniffs around for others online who have pieces of the movie. Then it downloads a chunk from several of them simultaneously. Many hands make light work, so the file arrives dozens of times faster than normal. Paradoxically, BitTorrent's architecture means that the more popular the file is the faster it downloads - because more people are pitching in. Better yet, it's a virtuous cycle. Users download and share at the same time; as soon as someone receives even a single piece of Fokkers, his computer immediately begins offering it to others. The more files you're willing to share, the faster any individual torrent downloads to your computer. This prevents people from leeching, a classic P2P problem in which too many people download files and refuse to upload, creating a drain on the system. "Give and ye shall receive" became Cohen's motto, which he printed on T-shirts and sold to supporters.
Bram Cohen's approach is faster and more efficient than traditional P2P networking:
1. A single source file within a group of BitTorrent users, called a swarm, spreads around pieces of a film or videogame or TV show so that everyone has a chunk to share.
2. After the initial downloading, those pieces are then uploaded to other needy users in the swarm. The rules require every downloader to also do some uploading. Thus the more people trying to download, the faster everything is uploaded.
3. Before long, the swarm has shared all the pieces, and everyone has their own complete source.
Traditional Peer-to-Peer sites are slow because they suffer from supply bottlenecks. Even if many users on the network have the same file, swapping is restricted to one uploader and downloader at a time. And since uploading goes much slower than downloading, even highly compressed media can take many hours to transfer. BitTorrent is something deeper and more subtle. It's a technology that is changing the landscape of broadcast media. "All hell's about to break loose," says Brad Burnham, a venture capitalist with Union Square Ventures ... BitTorrent does not require the wires or airwaves that the cable and network giants have spent billions constructing and buying ... BitTorrent transforms the Internet into the world's largest TiVo. If enough people start getting their TV online, it will drastically change the nature of the medium ... The whole concept of must-see TV changes from being something you stop and watch every Thursday to something you gotta check out right now, dude. Just click here.What exactly would a next-generation broadcaster look like? The VCs at Union Square Ventures ... suspect the network of the future will resemble Yahoo! or Amazon.com - an aggregator that finds shows, distributes them in P2P video torrents, and sells ads or subscriptions to its portal. The real value of the so-called BitTorrent broadcaster would be in highlighting the good stuff, much as the collaborative filtering of Amazon and TiVo helps people pick good material. Man... this is amazing.. True convergence at work.
The 2005 A.T.Kearney study of outsourcing's most remarkable change is likely to be a quantum leap in the number of countries vying for this back-office work, which increasingly is being outsourced by U.S.,Western European and Japanese companies. Excerpts with edits and my comments added:
As many as 40 countries are being considered for next year's list, says Janet Pau, policy analyst for A.T. Kearney's Global Business Policy Council, a roundtable for corporate chief executives.The trend is toward "more offshore activity in countries besides India, such as some of the smaller players like the Czech Republic and Malaysia," Pau notes. Moreover, she adds, there is likely to be a farther eastward push within Eastern Europe, to countries such as Romania and Bulgaria, as work spills over from places such as the Czech Republic and Hungary.A similar expansion is expected in other regions of the world. Several of the nations the A.T. Kearney experts are currently considering for inclusion in their spring 2005 survey are unlikely to leap to mind when Western executives contemplate potential off-shoring locations. Among these are Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana and Uruguay.
A longer list of contenders will only reflect the rapidly spreading interest around the world in getting a piece of the BPO action. While the amount of back-office work that is currently sent outside their national borders by Western, European and Japanese companies is still a tiny fraction of the total amount of such work that these companies outsource, it can constitute a substantial source of revenue and employment for recipient countries, as India has demonstrated.locations as disparate as Dubai, Mauritius and Sri Lanka are making plans to capture some of this economic upside. Dubai, a component of the United Arab Emirates, is setting up a Dubai Outsourcing Zone where wholly foreign-owned companies can operate tax-free. Dubai is also promoting its efficient transportation infrastructure and westernized lifestyle to potential outsourcers.Mauritius, already a destination for tourists drawn to its sparkling Indian Ocean beaches, is working on creating a high-tech enclave and touting the multilingual skills of its population. Because of periods of both French and English rule, many of its 1.2 million people are comfortable in both French and English. "I think the next big emerging phenomenon is a hub-and-spoke model in globalization of services," Aron says. Singapore already has become a BPO off-shoring hub whose spokes extend to India, China and the Philippines, and some day could reach out to Sri Lanka and Vietnam, he says. Dubai has the potential to be a Singapore-like hub in the Middle East. It is "stable, forward looking and technological advanced," he says.
Singapore and India bear a symbiotic relationship, Aron adds. So far as business process off-shoring is concerned, one couldn't exist without the other. India has depth and breadth of technologically skilled labor, available at a low cost; English language skills that facilitate communications with the developed English-speaking countries; an improving telecommunications infrastructure and extensive IT experience.Singapore has a far smaller population but it has deeper ties to the West, including a free trade agreement with the U.S., and a highly advanced transportation and internet infrastructure. It also has "squeaky clean markets and judicial systems," Aron says, adding that frequently, when Indian companies export software, the contracts include clauses that provide for arbitration of disputes in Singapore courts. Singapore also has sophisticated managerial talent attuned to Western standards and provides a standard of living that is more attractive to expatriate Western managers than locations in India.Add its geographical location, virtually "next door" by air, and Singapore increasingly is serving as the "natural hub for doing long-term strategic control," Aron says, providing services in such areas as regulatory compliance, auditing, data security, and risk mitigation that overlay nitty-gritty call center and back office work.More than 300 Indian IT-services companies - including giants Satyam Computer Services and Tata Consultancy Services - have located in Singapore, in part to insure themselves against adverse U.S. legislation on trade issues."Singapore is a natural shelter because of its free trade agreement with the U.S.," Aron says. If needed, Indian BPO companies' computers can route their TCP/IP packets of data to the United States via Singapore. Besides, Singapore's extraordinary telecom and physical infrastructure also makes it a prime location for business data continuity and disaster recovery operations of Indian and other companies offering BPO services. Latin America and Eatern Europe shall also be powerful contenders. My Take: I still beleive that India shall retain a marketshare of 65% to 70% for atleast the next 5-6 years. Maturity, process advantage, manpower availability, mindshare - all shall help India maintain the momentum - but the race is getting tougher with every passing day - India has to create world class infrastructure and become more and more and more business friendly -otherwise this could become the case of another missed opportunity.
The blog—short for weblog can indeed be, as Scoble and Gates say, fabulous for relationships. But it can also be much more: a company's worst PR nightmare, its best chance to talk with new and old customers, an ideal way to send out information, and the hardest way to control it. Blogs are challenging the media and changing how people in advertising, marketing, and public relations do their jobs. A few companies like Microsoft are finding ways to work with the blogging world—even as they're getting hammered by it. So far, most others are simply ignoring it. That will get harder: According to blog search-engine and measurement firm Technorati, 23,000 new weblogs are created every day—or about one every three seconds. Each blog adds to an inescapable trend fueled by the Internet: the democratization of power and opinion. Blogs are just the latest tool that makes it harder for corporations and other institutions to control and dictate their message. An amateur media is springing up, and the smart are adapting. Says Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman Public Relations: "Now you've got to pitch the bloggers too. You can't just pitch to conventional media."
In a blog, whatever the topic, the discussion of business isn't usually too far behind: from bad experiences with a product to good customer service somewhere else. Suddenly everyone's a publisher and everyone's a critic. Says Jeff Jarvis, author of the blog BuzzMachine, "There should be someone at every company whose job is to put into Google and blog search engines the name of the company or the brand, followed by the word 'sucks,' just to see what customers are saying." It all used to be so easy; the adage went "never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel." But now everyone can get ink for free, launch a diatribe, and—if what they have to say is interesting to enough people—expect web-enabled word of mouth to carry it around the world. Unlike earlier promises of self-publishing revolutions, the blog movement seems to be the real thing. A big reason for that is a tiny innovation called the permalink: a unique web address for each posting on every blog. Instead of linking to web pages, which can change, bloggers link to one another's posts, which typically remain accessible indefinitely. This style of linking also gives blogs a viral quality, so a pertinent post can gain broad attention amazingly fast—and reputations can get taken down just as quickly. As the impact of blogs spreads through global business, that pain—and promise—will be something companies will have to deal with. And if they don't? You're bound to read about it in a blog. This piece does provide a good overview of the ways blogs are impinging on the business world and watch the bloggers action about the Tsunami - they are now one of the most significant community in the world towards fund raising, communication and in aid measures..
Open Source components inside software products can be potential, "Deadly Room of Death that one may not like to have inside the product."Many software companies and other businesses as engineers frantically search their files for something they hope not to find: open-source components. The improper use of open-source components, in the worst-case scenario, could subject companies to costly litigation from parties like SCO Group of Lindon, Utah. SCO says it owns intellectual property in the Linux open-source operating system and has set off alarm bells in executive suites by suing International Business Machines and three other Linux-using companies over the past year. "It's almost like you've got be a lawyer now to develop software," grumbled Jothy Rosenberg, chief executive and chief technical officer, Service Integrity ,who this month ordered a 24-hour scanning of his company's Sift 3.5 software during a "code freeze" before its introduction. "In this day and age, anybody building a commercial piece of software has got to do this. It's like buying insurance on your building."
There are no hard numbers on how much U.S. businesses are spending to prevent themselves from possibly infringing on open-source licenses. While few say that the problem rises to the level of the "Y2K" problem - adapting numerous programs to display four-digit numbers for years after 1999 - many say it has become pressing and costly. Some liken it to the Sarbanes-Oxley financial reporting requirements that have rattled executives at publicly traded companies. And the problems are related, in that Sarbanes-Oxley requires public companies to value their software and assess their litigation risks. Open-source software is freely available to use, distribute and modify, but it is subject to large and small restrictions set forth in dozens of open-source licenses. Some companies, like Avid Technology, which makes digital film editing machines, have sought to avoid license conflicts by banning open-source software. Others have persisted in using open-source code but have purchased scanning software or set up search engines to hunt for license conflicts they can resolve through proper identification or attribution. The most serious conflicts, involve code covered by the so-called General Public License. Under that license, anyone who acquires and modifies open-source code must make their modified versions freely available to the public. Depending on how many files of code are covered and what is in them, such a requirement can sometimes be a major impediment for a proprietary software company. Among the scariest aspects of the problem is that many business executives do not know whether open-source code is in their software, or they mistakenly presume that they have none. Either way, they could be setting themselves up for a lawsuit.
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Software developers working on "value-added" applications routinely borrow pieces of open-source code as building blocks for such functions as encryption, security or platform interfacing. Offshore programmers for American companies have become especially adept at grabbing lines of open-source code and mixing them with proprietary code in progress. "There are corporations that literally don't know what lurks in their code," said Douglas Levin of Black Duck , a start-up company. Black Duck developed its scanning software partly by assembling a giant repository of open-source code, employing a young team of "spiders" to sift through Web sites looking for open-source lines and patterns. A related article here highlights the potential for litigation in using opensource. Law firms, consultants, software developers and technology service companies - also are moving to capitalize on the jitters that have been spreading in the business world. Optaros , a consulting start-up, is offering to provide its clients with open-source audits, examining how they use the software and advising on licenses. Levin, president and chief executive of Black Duck Software estimated that the market for all companies addressing open-source litigation risks could total $500 million by 2005. "There are a lot of challenges for companies working with open-source software, but they're manageable," is what some in the industry feel. "Open-source is here, and companies have to deal with it, just like you have to deal with snow in New England." Open-source has been around for two decades as a favorite tool of computer scientists and technology-minded college students, but it only recently has moved into the business world.
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IBM's decision to support Linux in 1999, partly as a counterweight to the dominant Windows operating system sold by its rival, Microsoft, brought open-source software into corporate data centers where it has gained momentum among users of large servers, the machines that form the backbone of business computer networks. But the corporate love affair with open-source cooled in March 2003 when SCO sued IBM for more than $1 billion, alleging that it had introduced into Linux proprietary code misappropriated from SCO. And SCO has since sued DaimlerChrysler, AutoZone and Novell, the company that sold SCO the source code and patents from the Unix operating system that was a model for Linux. About 1,500 other Linux-using companies received warning letters from SCO. Businesses fear that SCO's flurry of lawsuits may be a sign of trouble to come. "What SCO has done is to throw down the gauntlet," Scott Nathan, a lawyer, said. "If SCO is successful, there are going to be copycats." Nuisance suits related to open-source could prove a worrisome distraction for companies that have belatedly embraced the technology as a cost-saving measure. "If you're Wal-Mart and you have embedded Linux in every cash register, you might be seen as a deep pocket" by litigious SCO copycats, said Thomas Carey, an attorney with the Boston law firm Bromberg & Sunstein. Interesting developments. Watch this space for related developments.
Wal-Mart's experience so far has served as a reminder that creating the future is not all that easy. With Jan. 1 just days away, the technology is not yet ready to meet the needs of either Wal-Mart or its suppliers. The tags, which are typically about the size of a credit card and contain an antenna and microchip encased in plastic, receive query signals from scanning devices called readers. Using the energy captured from those signals, they broadcast a snippet of code identifying the goods to which they are attached.
To date, most of Wal-Mart's suppliers have not figured out inexpensive ways to automate the printing and application of the tags. Although read rates are improving, no one who uses the technology has systems that can reliably read the information 100 percent of the time in factories, warehouses and stores; Wal-Mart said the rate was around 60 percent in its stores. Nor is the data currently integrated well enough with other technology to initiate changes in manufacturing or shipping schedules that could actually save the large sums of money that would make the investment worthwhile. Wal-Mart's official position is that it is working closely with suppliers, meeting its goals and learning valuable lessons that will pay off as the technology continues to roll out. But analysts who regularly survey major consumer goods companies said that most participants were cooperating with Wal-Mart out of fear of offending the retailer and were, as much as possible, putting off investments in the technology.
"The big manufacturing companies have advocates for the technology who are very positive, but the people on the floor who are implementing it are much more negative," Kara Romanow, an analyst at AMR Research,said. Wal-Mart's goal was to wring billions of dollars from the supply chain by using the tags to keep shelves filled with whatever consumers were buying, cut back on shipments of other goods and combat theft.The mandate was soon defined in narrower, more practical terms as supplying tagged cartons and pallets, not individual items, to a limited number of stores through just three Texas distribution centers by the Jan. 1 deadline. Wal-Mart said recently that more than 100 suppliers would be tagging bulk shipments to the three Texas centers next month. But only 40 will be tagging everything they send. Of the remainder, two have been so tied up in a complete overhaul of their entire information technology infrastructure that they have put off attempting to introduce radio tagging. Some suppliers will be tagging as little as 2 percent of the goods going to the centers.
"We think the average supplier will be tagging about 65 percent of the volume they ship to the three centers," Linda Dillman, the chief information officer of Wal-Mart, said. AMR, the research firm, said it had found that companies were investing $1 million to $3 million to comply with Wal-Mart's program, far less than the $13 million to $23 million that AMR had estimated in August would be needed for fully integrated systems that generated useful data.Some companies delayed getting started for so long that they are now having trouble getting tags, according to the analysts and Wal-Mart. That problem is expected to recede next year as tag manufacturers expand their production lines. An important stimulant to that came last week, when a next-generation standard for tags and readers was ratified by EPCglobal, a nonprofit industry group. Heavyweights like Texas Instruments and Philips that had not made the first-generation tags plan to enter the market with the newer technology.
Although the progress has been slow, it has an air of inevitability. Radio tagging, known as RFID (for radio frequency identification), has been spreading through the economy for decades in applications like automated toll collection, tracking tags for animals and wireless cards controlling access to buildings.But the technology was not widely publicized until Wal-Mart announced its deadline. Subsequent decisions by other merchants like Target,and Best Buy to push for radio tagging made it unmistakable which way the wind was blowing, at least among retailers. The movement toward radio tags on consumer products gathered momentum when the Defense Department also set a Jan. 1, 2005, deadline for its major suppliers of a broad range of general merchandise and endorsed the tag and scanner standards being developed by a consortium of retailers and major suppliers like Procter & Gamble and Hewlett-Packard.In addition, drug companies are expanding pilot projects of applying radio tags to pharmaceutical shipments. The Food and Drug Administration has set 2007 as its goal for general use of the technology. Separately, Boeing and Airbus are working together on standards for tagging the 5,000 or so aircraft parts that are most frequently handled by airline maintenance crews.
Wal-Mart and other retailers, and many manufacturers, are excited about the technology because the tags can store more information than bar codes, and large numbers of them can be scanned at one time. In addition to its top 100 suppliers, Wal-Mart is working with 38 others that have volunteered to be in the first wave of vendors complying with its mandate. But the pilot testing this year has offered evidence that, before most businesses can justify big investments in the technology, its costs must fall sharply and the scanners must be able to read tags faster and in more varied conditions. To drive down costs, manufacturers want the recently adopted American standards to be made compatible with those being developed elsewhere. Still, if the size of the challenge became apparent in 2004, so were the ways in which it could be tackled. Wal-Mart and others say that, in 2005, not only will tagging be expanded, but there will also be a sharp increase in the testing of software and business strategies that use the data captured from the tags.
Recently we covered the future growth prospects and the direction that cisco would be taking moving forward.Oligopolywatch writes Cisco Systems appetite for acquisitions remain unabated.Cisco Systems, the dominant player in the market for network routers and switches, is a major success story. While it was the darling of the 1990s bubble, it is still a very successful firm with $22 billion in income and $4.5 billion in net income, and is #100 in the Fortune 500. Much of Cisco's growth has come though acquisitions, numbering almost 100 in its decade of existence. The company acquired when its stock price was stratospheric, and it continues to acquire now that its stock price is more reasonable. In spite of its hunger to acquire, Cisco has stayed very close to its core strengths, communication and security hardware and software. But that core area has extended in recent years to such areas as teleconferencing, Internet telephones (VOIP), and home networking. Writing about Cisco, CNET.com wrote, "Acquisitions have been the lifeblood of Cisco's growth. From its early days, when it branched out from its router focus to build a multibillion-dollar switching business through acquisitions to its current strategy of buying its way into the optical networking market, the company has used its high-flying stock to access new market niches". The stock isn't flying so high anymore, but with 14 acquisitions in 2004, the company philosophy hasn't changed much.It's possible to see Cisco as an engine for acquisitions, swallowing up nearly all the new relevant ideas that pop up in small start-ups, then integrating those ideas into its product line. Many of the acquisitions have been relatively inexpensive, though over the years that have been several multibillion dollar deals, including those for companies like Cerent and ArrowPoint Communications. The 2004 acquisitions include:
- Protego, which makes data security monitoring equipment aimed at small to
mid-size businesses
- BCN Software, which offers network routing software
- Jaki Networks, which sells networked device management tools
- NetSolve, with its remote network management software
- P-Cube, that offers software for management for IP service providers
- Dymanicsoft, software for providing VOIP services
- Perigo, a company that makes something called admission control software,
used to defend networks form attacks.
- NetSolve, a provider of software for remote network management and secure
operation
- The UK's Parc Technologies, Ltd., which makes software for data traffic
routing optimization
- Actona Technologies, which makes wide-area file management software
- Twingo Systems, a maker of software for protecting secure network transactions
- Riverhead Networks, a maker of software to protect servers from
"denial of service" attacks
- Procket Networks, which develops router software
- Latitude Communications, a provider of online conferencing software
As the venerable Om Malik points out,Only Procket was a hardware vendor. Perhaps like all hardware vendors, Cisco is realizing that the future is software, not hardware which is becoming increasingly commoditized.
Entire enterprises and global supply chains will NOT be rebuilt by RFID in 2005.RFID technology continues to make steady, progressive headway into consumer goods and retail deployments. 2004 was a banner year for new product releases, service offerings, and overall market education. The RFID market is steadily growing and offers loads of promise as the first iteration of intelligent sensor networks. However, the technology has a long way to go to make a measurable difference within its adopters' supply chains and all will not be answered in 2005. If 2004 was the year of technology advancement, discussion, and frustration, 2005 will be the year business process adaptation dominates RFID planning and discussions. Where technology was dependent on EPC standards, process change involves much more than the EPC global network. Process adaptation implicates enterprise software and application vendors as well as systems integrators, who will have more than enough client conundrums to address.
Too much attention has been focused on January 1, 2005 and two little attention has been directed to the remaining 364 days in the year. As of December 1st, 2004, EPC Global has yet to finalize a standard and has yet to work out the China standards issue that will be critical to source tagging interoperable EPC-based cases and pallets overseas (Note : New Gen 2 standards have beem since announced - we recently covered this here). Moreover, Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense have underestimated the standards gridlock caused by Intermec's intellectual property claims -- claims that are, contrary to its public relations spin touting a 60-day royalty-free window -- prohibiting long-term RFID investment planning at the retail and DOD supplier levels. As a result, supply chain RFID projects and planning have been delayed due to suppliers' understandable concerns regarding the Intermec IP filibuster and its impact on hardware prices and availability.
2005 will provide more of the same for RFID – ups and downs, wins and losses, momentum and bottlenecks. Issues will be resolved, but, from a consumer and defense goods supplier perspective, full scale RFID enterprise integration efforts will remain on the "work in process" list and not the "finished goods" list. Good overview, this blog shall be adding some more related views on this space in a few days.
Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. on Monday said it set a one-day selling record this year and logged its busiest holiday shopping season in its 10 years. The Seattle retailer said it logged orders of 2.8 million units on its busiest day, or about 32 items per second worldwide, boosted by shoppers flocking to the site to snap up Apple Computer Inc. iPods and books during the busiest time of the year, between Nov. 25 and Dec. 23. Amazon did not specify which day was its busiest.Sales of consumer electronics such as digital music and DVD players and digital cameras topped the list of most sought-after items, ahead of other sales chart toppers including comedian Jon Stewart's book, "America: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction."Amazon said more than half a million gift certificates were ordered in the busy period and some 100,000 shipments were delivered to U.S. military personnel overseas. We recently covered Amazon : Giving Away The Store Through Amazon Web Services. It would be interesting to know what's the proportion of sale/influenced sale through the amazon webservice channel.
Waypath,the Blog Discovery Engine watches over 4 million blogs.Waypath breaks blogs into individual posts and analyzes each for subject matter.Along with a new front page (the vanguard of an entire site redesign), Waypath launched a new service recently, Blogs On News. As the name suggests, Blogs On News lets you follow discussion of the latest news, as it takes place in weblogs.Using semantic matching technology, we're able to find relevant blog posts for news articles, even if those posts don't link back to the news. The technology doesn't rely on keyword matching, so you won't get a bunch of garbage, either.This first release of Blogs On News uses the latest news articles from Yahoo! News. You can track blog posts for a specific article, or use Blogs On News to follow an entire news category. My early one or two trials were not too encouraging though - for one thing the interface was not appealing and looked bewildering to me to understand the features. Watch this space for more updates.
Gartner will acquire META Group in an all-cash transaction valued at $10.00 per share, or approximately $162 million. Both companies are based in Stamford, Conn., and provide information technology research and consulting. Meta Group , which revamped its executive ranks last month, had revenue of $104 million and a $48,000 loss in the first nine months of 2004. Gartner had revenue of $638 million and net income of $12 million in the same period. In 2003, Gartner generated $858 million in revenue from 76 locations around the world, while META Group generated $122 million in revenue from 52 locations.
Gene Hall, Gartner's chief executive officer, said the combination "will give gartner the increased depth in key sectors, geographies and markets, and an increased ability to seize revenue opportunities with the addition of Meta Group's well-trained, successful sales force." Meta, which has a different analysis style compared to Gartner always used to say that corporate customers believe Meta offers better customer service than Gartner, was generally perceived to offer more objective analysis than gartner by 2:1 had to finally offer itself up for sale. I certainly think that the consumer are genuinely losing out here by means of reduced choices -particularly in this case, as I have always felt that both these firms have disctinct styles, focus and approach towards applied research..
Sad to see Meta getting swallowed , but this portends some trends:
- Research & Consulting is becoming more competitive..(It was always the case..)
- But now with the tech industry in a different phase of growth ( we recently covered Carly Fiorina’s view on slowing tech industry growth - "On the fact that technology become a utility-like industry, with permanently slower growth" - Carly said that the tech industry is going to grow at two times growth [in U.S. gross domestic product]. It was a five-times-GDP-growth industry in the late 1990s, and that was unsustainable. Now we've entered a period where tech is fundamental. When something becomes fundamental it involves a more important and complex set of decisions, so growth slows. By the way, two times GDP is an OK growth industry. But it's not what it used to be.I think there are changes that are yet to occur". The software industry still has some consolidation to go. [So does] the communication-technology side" and we also recently covered the turmoil in the tech industry - Almost an year and half back, Forrester bought over Giga and we are left with a few other small consulting research outfits apart from financial service research. Recently we saw many product companies making acquisitions, oracle, Symantec, Sterling commerce(Yantra acquisition), Lenova(IBM), EMC(Smarts) not to forget the Cingular (AT&t wirleless deal)May be its rule of three in action.
- Next expecting – we can be certain to expect acquisition announcement by software service companies..(watch for announcements by IBM, Infosys and Wipro etc..)
- Expect more consolidation amongst the consulting research organisations themselves - afterall, Moreover the nearest research competitor viz.Forrester is reporting a revenue of around 126 million USD last year -roughly less than one sixth the size of the new Gartner
(Via Bill Ives ) Weblogging has emerged in the past few years as a new grassroots publishing medium. Like electronic mail and the web itself, weblogging has taken off and by some estimates the number of weblogs is doubling every year. Recent estimates place the number of active weblogs at about 1.4 million.
The weblogging microcosm has evolved into a distinct form, into a community of publishers. The strong sense of community amongst bloggers distinguishes weblogs from the various forms of online publications such as online journals, 'zines and newsletters that flourished in the early days of the web and from traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television. The use of weblogs primarily for publishing, as opposed to discussion, differentiates blogs from other online community forums, such as Usenet newsgroups and message boards. Often referred to as the blogsphere, the network of bloggers is a thriving ecosystem, with its own internally driven dynamics.
The cross-linking that takes place between blogs, through blogrolls, explicit linking, trackbacks, and referrals has helped create a strong sense of community in the weblogging world. There is work underway to understand the dynamics of the weblogging network, much of which springs from bloggers themselves. The self-publishing aspect of weblogs, the time-stamped entries, the highly interlinked nature of the blogging community and the significant impact of weblog content on politics, ideas, and culture make them a fascinating subject of study.
There is a call for papers for the 2nd Annual Workshop on Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics. The objective of this workshop is to provide a forum for sharing research on the blogging ecosystem. The workshop will consist of technical papers, panel discussions, and demonstrations of research prototypes. Deadline of electronic submission: March 4, 2005 Author notification: March 28, 2005. Workshop: May 10, 2005.
Last Year Papers are available are here.
Juan Carlos Perez writes in Infoworld that Customers use searches more, show confidence in on-time shipments.
Vendors and researchers have detected various new trends at play in online retail shopping this holiday season, such as shoppers' increased use of search engines and comparison shopping services to make better informed buying decisions. Not all trends are encouraging, however, such as a disconcertingly high percentage of shoppers willing to buy from spammers. Excerpts with edits and my comments added:
What is indisputable is that online retail shopping has grown significantly this holiday season over last year's period, a fact verified by various market researchers. For example, comScore Networks expects non-travel retail spending to grow by between 23 percent and 26 percent to between $15.1 billion and $15.5 billion in November and December of this year, compared with last year. Two factors contribute to better saled: shorter shipping times and improved options to buy online and pick up the merchandise at a bricks-and-mortar store. The shorter shipping times prompted buyers to shop more last week with the confidence that the products would arrive in time for the holidays, Hess said. "There has been extensive work done behind the scenes by retailers and shippers to shave days off of shipping timelines and effectively communicate them to consumers," he said. "The days of online retailers not meeting their product-delivery commitments are becoming a distant memory." Meanwhile, many major online retailers have improved their options to buy online and have the buyer pick up the products at a local store, which eliminates shipping costs and shipping wait time, Hess said. "This is not a new option this year, but it has been perfected by more retailers than ever before, including some which were experimenting with it in years past, and consumers have really taken to the option."
Online shoppers for the first time planned to spend more of their holiday shopping budget online (53 percent) than offline, according to an America Online survey conducted in August and September. The study also found that shoppers planned to spend on average 6.5 percent more online this holiday season than last year, although they cut their overall budget for both offline and online holiday purchases by 3.6 percent, compared with last year. While spending is undeniably up, so is shoppers' willingness to take advantage of search engines and comparison shopping sites, a trend identified by several organizations. online measurement company Hitwise found that during the week ending Dec. 11, search engines contributed a significant number of referrals to shopping and classified sites, led by Google with 4.26 percent of referrals and followed by Yahoo (2.24 percent) and Microsoft's 0.54 percent. Moreover, the AOL survey found that 27 percent of online shoppers described themselves as comparison shoppers or researchers, up from 23 percent last year, and that 48 percent are using search tools, up from 42 percent.
And the more time shoppers spend researching buying decisions online, the less fixated they are on price and the more value they place on other factors, such as companies' reputations and brands, according to a year-long study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management and announced this month. "A common assumption has been that the more time people spend searching, the more price sensitive they are," said Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for eBusiness at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in a statement. "But there's more to a product than its price. We found that consumers weren't searching just for lower prices, but for other characteristics." In other trends:
- Web surfers have been less inclined to visit Web sites devoted to humanitarian causes and charities this holiday season, according to Hitwise.
- Men are expected to outspend women by as much as 15 percent this holiday season, according to AOL.
- Rural shoppers are more likely than their urban counterparts to visit online shopping sites, according to HitwiseDefinitely newer trends are emerging maturing the online retail industry.
Thousands of people in India and Sri Lanka were among the more than 11,000 people killed after being hit by walls of water triggered by a tremendous earthquake early Sunday off Sumatra. The warning system is designed to alert nations that potentially destructive waves may hit their coastlines within three to 14 hours. Scientists said seismic networks recorded Sunday's massive earthquake, but without wave sensors in the region, there was no way to determine the direction a tsunami would travel. A single wave station south of the earthquake's epicenter registered tsunami activity less than 2 feet high heading south toward Australia, researchers said. The waves also struck resort beaches on the west coast of the Thailand's south peninsula, killing hundreds. Although Thailand belongs to the international tsunami warning network, its west coast does not have the system's wave sensors mounted on ocean buoys. The northern tip of the earthquake fault is located near the Andaman Islands, and tsunamis appear to have rushed eastward toward the Thai resort of Phuket on Sunday morning when the community was just stirring. "They had no tidal gauges and they had no warning," said Waverly Person, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., which monitors seismic activity worldwide. "There are no buoys in the Indian Ocean and that's where this tsunami occurred."
The tsunami was triggered by the most powerful earthquake recorded in the past 40 years. The earthquake, whose magnitude was a staggering 9.0, unleashed walls of water more than two stories high to the west across the Bay of Bengal, slamming into coastal communities 1,000 miles away. Hours after the quake, Sumatra was struck by a series of powerful aftershocks. Researchers say the earthquake broke on a fault line deep off the Sumatra coast, running north and south for about 600 miles or as far north as the Andaman and Nicobar islands between India and Mynamar. "It's a huge rupture," said Charles McCreary, director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center near Honolulu. "It's conceivable that the sea floor deformed all the way along that rupture, and that's what initiates tsunamis." Tsunamis as large and destructive as Sunday's typically happen only a few times in a century. A tsunami is not a single wave, but a series of traveling ocean waves generated by geological disturbances near or below the ocean floor. With nothing to stop them, these waves can race across the ocean like the crack of a bullwhip, gaining momentum over thousands of miles. Most are triggered by large earthquakes but they can be caused by landslides, volcanoes and even meteor impacts. The waves are generated when geologic forces displace sea water in the ocean basin. The bigger the earthquake, the more the Earth's crust shifts and the more seawater begins to move. Most tsunamis occur in the Pacific because the ocean basin is rimmed by the Ring of Fire, a long chain of the Earth's most seismically active spots. Marine geologists recently have determined that under certain conditions, the U.S. East Coast and other heavily populated coastlines also could be vulnerable.
In a tsunami, waves typically radiate out in directions opposite from the seismic disturbance. In the case of the Sumatra quake, the seismic fault ran north to south beneath the ocean floor, while the tsunami waves shot out west and east. Tsunamis are distinguished from normal coastal surf by their great length and speed. A single wave in a tsunami series might be 100 miles long and race across the ocean at 600 mph. When it approaches a coastline, the wave slows dramatically, but it also rises to great heights because the enormous volume of water piles up in shallow coastal bays. And unlike surf, which is generated by wind and the gravitational tug of the moon and other celestial bodies, tsunamis do not break on the coastline every few seconds. Because of their size, it might take an hour for another one to arrive. Some tsunamis appear as a tide that doesn't stop rising, while others are turbulent and savagely chew up the coast. Without instrumentation, so little is known about this tsunami that researchers must wait for eyewitness accounts to determine its characteristics. "It was a big tsunami, but it is hard to say exactly how many waves there were or what happened," McCreary said.
In the hours following an earthquake, tsunamis eventually lose their power to friction over the rough ocean bottom or simply as the waves spread out over the ocean's enormous surface. The international warning system was started in 1965, the year after tsunamis associated with a magnitude 9.2 temblor struck Alaska in 1964. It is administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Member states include all the major Pacific rim nations in North America, Asia and South America, was well as the Pacific islands, Australia and New Zealand. It also includes France, which has sovereignty over some Pacific islands, and Russia. However, India and Sri Lanka are not members. "That's because tsunamis are much less frequent in the Indian Ocean," McCreary said. The warning system analyzes earthquake information from several seismic networks, including the U.S. Geological Service. The seismic information is fed into computer models that "picture" how and where a tsunami might form. It dispatches warnings about imminent tsunami hazards, including predictions how fast the waves are traveling and their expected arrival times in specific geographic areas. As the waves rush past tidal stations in the ocean, bulletins updating the tsunami warning are issued. Other models generate "inundation maps" of what areas could be damaged, and what communities might be spared. Not all earthquakes generate tsunamis. The warning center typically does not issue warnings for earthquakes below magnitude 7.0, which are still unusually powerful events. Oh God , If Only......
(Via Om Malik).Dean Takahashi of SiliconValley writes,Chips may be down next year if semiconductor industry forecasts are on target, but, Craig Barratt, chief executive of wireless chip maker Atheros Communications, is looking at a growth year in 2005. Atheros is profitable and shipping millions of chips a year that enable the high-speed wireless networking known as WiFi. IDCestimates that the WiFi chip set market will grow 42 percent a year from 2003 to 2008, with revenues rising from $805 million in 2003 to $2.4 billion in 2008. That's a much faster growth rate than the 11 percent a year predicted for chips overall. "If the chip industry has a downturn in 2005, this market niche will be a refuge from that," IDC analyst Ken Furer said. Atheros and other start-ups such as Airgo Networks have gained traction in a market that everyone expected to be dominated by larger companies by now. They are proving that constant innovation still pays off in market share. “WiFi is a lot bigger than just laptops. It's bigger than Intel,'' says Barratt, whose name is spelled almost exactly like Intel CEO Craig Barrett's but pronounced Barr-ATT. While some companies are profitable, that doesn't mean that making WiFi chips is a cakewalk. Since 2001, more than 50 start-ups and established chip makers have entered the market.
Pioneers such as Intersil and Agere have lost share to Broadcom and Atheros. Intel drove demand for WiFi with its Centrino marketing campaign, but it also has helped push prices lower. And players such as Texas Instruments, Conexant, and Broadcom hope to make life hard for start-ups by integrating WiFi into communications chips for cell phones. The chip makers that stick with WiFi will reap the rewards of a fast-growing market. But they will have to survive on thin margins and keep innovating as older chips become commodities and new technologies come along, says Joe Byrne, an analyst at market researcher Gartner. In that sense, WiFi resembles the graphics chip market of the 1990s, in which dozens of chip makers joined the gold rush to make 3-D animation chips. Nvidia, Intel and ATI Technologies came out on top after years of brutal competition. Technological changes matter in WiFi. Whoever comes up with the first chips in the alphabet soup of new standards takes market share. Intersil and Agere were technically competent at making radio chips and led the market for 802.11b chips, which transferred data at 11 megabits per second.
Atheros topped that with its 802.11a chips, which were up to five times faster. But last year Broadcom shot to the top when it came out with 802.11g chips that were just as fast and had lower power consumption. Jeff Thermond, head of Broadcom's wireless networking business, said the company raced ahead of rivals when it decided to launch its chips before the final standard was approved. It assured customers such as Dell that its chips would be compatible with the standard. That helped Broadcom prosper from the Centrino craze. Intel fueled market demand for wireless networking with the May 2003 launch of its Centrino campaign. Intel sold what it calls a platform, or a bundle of chips that included microprocessors, PC chipsets and wireless networking chips and it guaranteed that they would all work well together. Intel launched a marketing blitz to trumpet the benefits of using wireless networks.In 2003,31 percent of laptops had WiFi built-in. In 2004,about 61 percent are expected to have it, according to IDC. Intel came to dominate the market for wireless chip sets sold to laptop makers.
Intel was slow to incorporate new standards into the Centrino platform. And Intel's own chips weren't ready so it chose to include chips from Texas Instruments, Philips Electronics and other manufacturers in its first WiFi Centrino products. Intel is now pushing a technology called WiMax, which could widen the range of a wireless network to as much as 10 miles in some areas. Wireless networking chip maker Airgo, hopes to repeat Broadcom's success in releasing chips before final standards are set. This start-up has shipped more than a million units of its high-speed wireless networking chips since October and is trying to blaze a new standard, known as 802.11n. The company's so-called ``pre-N'' chips can deliver a sixfold increase in speed and eightfold increase in range.The 802.11n standard isn't expected to be set until 2006, and so far there are warring camps led separately by Airgo and Intel. As WiFi expands to consumer electronics devices and cell phones, there are still a healthy number of competitors pursuing the market. Texas Instruments has pulled back on stand-alone WiFi chips but is focusing on making chips that function well even in close proximity with other radio chips in a cell phone.When WiFi is integrated with other things, companies with broader businesses have an advantage. Barratt at Atheros says it will be hard to integrate WiFi radio chips into other chips. He predicts a healthy stand-alone WiFi chip market for the foreseeable future. Trends to note :
A. The big is not necessarily the better, the faster one shall win , size does not matter beyond a certain level. More true in the Hightech industry.
B. Very interesting developments, pushing innovation and advancements to the edge and of course this makes the high tech, communication industry more vibrant,competitive and makes the industry more efficient with good correlation to economy and the consumers making the right choice in purchasing emerges the clear winner..
Jeff Bezos has made Amazon.com,the biggest,best,most credible and inimitable internet retailer in the universe. Not for Nothing ,In the early days of the web – web1.0 era, he was anointed - Time magazine’s Man of the Year, but had to see several financial analysts declare near death for his company.Jeff Bezos has always been interested in anything that can be revolutionized by computers. Intrigued by the amazing growth in use of the Internet, Bezos created a business model that leveraged the Internet's unique ability to deliver huge amounts of information rapidly and efficiently.In 1994 he founded Amazon.com,Inc., now the leading online retailer, offering services that traditional retailers cannot: lower prices, authoritative selection and a wealth of product information.He also led the development of computer systems that helped manage more than $250 billion in assets for Bankers Trust Company.
Today,Bezos has emerged out stronger and mor formidable, making the skeptics run for cover ,his pathbreaking amazon web services platform making waves and his plan to turn Amazon.com into a web platform for both consumers and partners has paid off handsomely. Recently we cvered Amazon : Giving Away The Store Through Amazon Web Services,outling the direction of the amazon web services platform. What lay ahead for Bezos and Amazon.. Jeff is an interesting conversationalist with powerful ideas and a master of analogies. listen here..
The recent flow of products and services differs from those of previous hotly competitive eras in two ways. The most attractive offerings are free, and they are concentrated in the newly sexy field of "search." Google, current heavyweight among systems for searching the Internet, has not let up from its pattern of introducing features and products every few weeks. Apart from its celebrated plan to index the contents of several university libraries, Google has recently released "beta" (trial) versions of Google Scholar, which returns abstracts of academic papers and shows how often they are cited by other scholars, and Google Suggest, a weirdly intriguing feature that tries to guess the object of your search after you have typed only a letter or two. Give it "po" and it will show shortcuts to poetry, Pokémon, post office, and other popular searches. (If you stop after "p" it will suggest "Paris Hilton.") In practice, this is more useful than it sounds. Microsoft, heavyweight of the rest of computerdom, has scrambled to catch up with search innovations from Google and others.For years Microsoft had emphasized the importance of "WinFS," a fundamentally new file system that would make it much easier for users to search and manage information on their own computers. Last summer, the company said that WinFS would not be ready in time for inclusion with its next version of Windows, called Longhorn. The latest news was that WinFS would not be ready even for the release after that, which pushed its likely delivery at least five years into the future. This seemed to put Microsoft entirely out of the running in desktop search. But within three days, it had released a beta version of its new desktop search utility, which it had previously said would not be available for months.
Meanwhile, a flurry of mergers, announcements and deals from smaller players produced a dazzling variety of new search possibilities. Early this month Yahoo said it would use the excellent indexing program X1 as the basis for its own desktop search system, which it would distribute free to its users. The search company Autonomy, which has specialized in indexing corporate data, also got into the new competition, as did Ask Jeeves, EarthLink, and smaller companies like dTSearch, Copernic, Accoona and many others.
Two weeks before our meeting, I.B.M. released OmniFind, the first program to take advantage of its new strategy for solving search problems. This approach, which it calls unstructured information management architecture, or UIMA, will, according to I.B.M., lead to a third generation in the ability to retrieve computerized data.
- The first generation, according to this scheme, is simple keyword match - finding all documents that contain a certain name or address. This is all most desktop search systems can do - or need to do, because you're mainly looking for an e-mail message or memorandum you already know is there.
-The next generation is the Web-based search now best performed by Google, which uses keywords and many other indicators to match a query to a list of sites.
- I.B.M. says that its tools will make possible a further search approach, that of "discovery systems" that will extract the underlying meaning from stored material no matter how it is structured (databases, e-mail files, audio recordings, pictures or video files) or even what language it is in. The specific means for doing so involve steps that will raise suspicions among many computer veterans. These include "natural language processing," computerized translation of foreign languages and other efforts that have broken the hearts of artificial-intelligence researchers through the years.
But the combination of ever-faster computers and ever-evolving programming allowed the systems demonstrated succeeds at tasks that have beaten their predecessors.
One example is question answering. Google-type search engines are fabulous at retrieving random data, but mediocre at handling subtler queries. Using Google or Ask Jeeves, you can eventually find out how many of the world's Web pages are in each of the major languages, but it's slow and frustrating compared with finding out, say, Mozart's birthplace. A system called Piquant, analyzes the semantic structure of a passage and therefore exposed "knowledge" that wasn't explicitly there. After scanning a news article about Canadian politics, the system responded correctly to the question, "Who is Canada's prime minister?" even though those exact words didn't appear in the article.
The Semantic Analysis Workbench, demonstrated, showed another way of exposing latent meaning. The I.B.M. officials said the best use for this technology would be customer-support call centers: As representatives took notes on the problems people were having with their cars or computers or prescription drugs, automatic interpretation of the results would reveal useful patterns. An I.B.M. strategist for its unstructured-information project, said that call centers would be the first place for new search systems to be applied. Genomic-research projects, where unexpected correlations can be crucial, might be the second. But the demonstration suggested another likely market, since every bit of sample text was a transcript of intercepted phone calls, apparently among people suspected of terrorism. IBM demonstrated a new system : an assortment of news headlines, roughly comparable to Google News, but from non-English language sources. The system automatically - and comprehensibly - translated the headlines and leads of each article. If you wanted to read more, you pressed a button and in 15 or 20 seconds had a good-enough translation.
Mr.Ciccolo, the search strategist, said that in a way his team was trying to match - and reverse - what Google has achieved. "As Google use became widespread, people began asking why it was so much easier to find material on the external Web than it was on their own computers or in their company's Web sites," he said. "Google sets a very high standard for that Web. We would like to set the next standard, so that people will find it so easy to do things at work that they'll wonder why they can't do them on the Internet." How soon might this happen? He said, with a chuckle, "Well, if I could freeze what everyone else is doing, it could be in two years." The great part is, the competition won't be frozen. At least this part of the future looks bright. It is also noticed IBM racking up a large numbers of search related patents in the past couple of years and IBM is pursuing a very ambitious program called Webfountain, a pathnbreaking approach to search and videosearch. IBM is trying to demonstrate here the power of multipronged approach to solve complex issues like search in tune with latest technological advances - other existing techniques are currently deployed for searching static files with approach primarily developed during dial-up times, whereas the current age of dynamic web pages, multimedia files and the broadband and wirelss age requires a different approach.
1. John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson, Powerline Also the Time Magazine’s recipients of Blog of the Year. Having played an important part in propagating Rathergate, they still managed to stay humble: “We’ve been having such a good time writing together on the site… to not only to see it come to fruition but to be recognized for it by an institution like Time is just beyond belief.”
2. Dave Winer, Scripting News Dave is often referred to as the god of blogging, and although often mistakenly credited with creating the format, his role in the 1990s with Userland software and the creation of RSS helped pave the way for the Blogosphere we know today. Winer is also widely known for his role as the creator and convenor of BloggerCon conferences. Although writing an eclectic blog of thoughts, travels and other titbits, his site is still one of the most widely viewed blogs on the net.
3. Jason McCabe Calacanis, weblogsinc .
After some initial scepticism from some, Calacanis has gone on to make a quality network of blogs and bloggers creating cumulatively some of the best content in the Blogosphere. Although not quiet making the 100 blog target he set himself for 2004, the 75 odd blogs is a great achievement from a driven, committed blogger, who isn’t afraid of speaking up on matters of morals and ethics in business and on the internet.
4. Nick Denton, Gawker Media Both Calacanis and Denton have done amazing things in developing a corporate business model placed around quality, sponsor supported blogging, albeit in slightly different directions. Denton’s stable of blogs have come to dominate their targeted niches and provide a nation’s capital with more gossip than it can digest in one sitting.
5. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, The Daily Kos Much of what he said may not be agreable to all,his commentary on the deaths of a number of contractors in Iraq still remains a candidate for a “worst commentary on a blog” award, but Zuniga has raised the profile of the Blogosphere to new levels and is by all reports one of the highest earners from blogging on the planet. His leading role in the advocacy of the Kerry campaign catapulted him from relative obscurity to international stardom.
6. Jeff Jarvis: Buzzmachine A long term player in the Blogosphere, Jarvis will be forever remembered as the Blogger who went the extra mile to break news. Whilst blogs have often been the recipients of inside gossip or the breakers of major news (Drudge and the Lewinsky Scandal) Jarvis showed the Blogosphere that major stories can be created with initiative and an application under Freedom of Information Laws when he broke the story in relation to the limited number of complainants to the US FCC.
7. Anil Dash: sixapart The human face of the SixApart Empire that is always affable and pleasant to deal with. Anil shot to fame earlier as a blogger and writer, but has now gone onto bigger and better things as VP at the Californian based blogging firm.
8. Ana Marie Cox, wonkette.com If the award was for the most interest female blogger on the net, Cox would top the list. From “suburban housewife in Arlington, Virginia” to Washington DC’s leading gossip columnist, Cox did more than any person this year in bringing blogging from tech to water coolers.
9. Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit The one, the only, the original pundit, Glenn continues to provide a daily dose of commentary that keeps the site at No. 2 on the Technorati’s greatest hits list.
10. Marc Canter: Marc’s Voice The founder of Macromedia made headlines this year for possibly all the wrong reasons as the creator of the Marqui Cash for Comment program, which pays $800 USD per month and $50 per lead to talk about the Marqui CMS. You may not agree with the program, but he’s certainly made enough headlines to take in tenth position. Interesting Selections Indeed. I would have liked to have the indefatigable Scobeleizer included in this list for his sheer passion, range of issues, his latent tranparency and regularity of postings.
In the past few years, mobile middleware emerged that provided a conduit between the multitude of devices and the back-office applications. These vendors had a moment in the sun before getting squeezed by the enterprise application vendors and the large infrastructure vendors. Ominous parallel exist between the mobile middleware market and the market for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) middleware.
The vendors of RFID middleware will evolve in one of three directions in the next 18 months:
- get bigger,
- get specialized,
- get bought out or go bust.
Several factors created the mobile middleware market, and they all apply to RFID:
Device heterogeneity—Mobile middleware had to deal with thousands of different devices with their own peculiarities. Current practitioners confirm that RFID hardware also is unique across platform and brand.
Emerging standards—Mobile middleware had the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and evolving generations of spectrum. RFID has EPCglobal, the Gen 2 specification, and ISO.
Product/expertise gaps—Deploying mobile applications on handheld devices was a new frontier, and the established vendors lacked the technology and skills to deliver success. Today’s RFID middleware vendors are right in the middle of most pilots, delivering key technology and knowledge to make these implementations work.
These factors will lead to growth in RFID middleware in the next 18 months, but they are not enough to sustain it as an independent market. Ratification of Gen 2 and its broad adoption will accelerate the commoditization of hardware, making device support less of a distinguishing factor. And by that time, the big vendors will have closed the gaps and delivered relative parity of base middleware functions.
The current crop of vendors will evolve into one of three camps:
- Get bigger/acquired—For mobile middleware, the big guys largely built their own because the lack of market demand gave them the time to do so without missing the window of opportunity. This forced more mergers over acquisitions in the mobile middleware space. The demand is there for RFID, so the big guys are more likely to buy their way in this time.
- Get specialized—This is already starting to happen in RFID. The RFID middleware vendors are adding workflow and business process logic on their platforms to give customers more event handling at the edge. Expect these vendors to continue moving up the stack to deliver more out-of-the-box application functionality, either for horizontal business processes (within a distribution center, for example) or vertical-specific applications (like electronic pedigree tracking in Pharma).
- Go Bust —Several of the existing vendors of RFID middleware will not be here two years from now. Even ones with customers today are at risk, since most organizations that bought RFID middleware for compliance are planning to reevaluate their whole implementation in the next 12 months.
The notion of RFID middleware will remain important for many years to customers deploying RFID; however, the landscape of vendors providing the software will change radically in the next 18 months. All high potential his growth segments in the tech world have undergone a similar trend - RFID middleware vendors are likely to undergo such a journey.
The vast majority of CEOs have long accepted monopoly control over the software their companies use, something they would never tolerate elsewhere in their businesses. But 2005 is going to be the year when that finally changes. Why? Because viable open-source software based on Linux is now becoming widely available to corporate users, both at the server and the desktop level. Choice is returning to information technology. CEOs need to understand this so they can free their chief information officers from Microsoft’s grip. Linux is the best-known success of the open-source community, a loose association of roughly 1 million programmers all over the world who believe in choice. Anyone with an Internet connection can download Linux. But users have to be sophisticated enough to install and administer this software, which is not an easy task. Leading industry vendors such as Novell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and others have devoted significant resources to creating certainty and predictability around the constant motion that characterized the open source movement. Companies like Novell does take several thousand open-source packages and assemble them into a usable whole, make sure the programs are compatible and that there are no issues with intellectual property protection and also ensure the distribution works on all the leading enterprise hardware platforms from IBM, Dell, HP and Sun, and on leading chips from Intel and AMD. Maintenance of the resulting code for a five-year period, delivering patches and updates becomes Novell’s responsibility. Enterprises need this stability to plan along with support and training.. The net result is software for the corporation that, because there’s no license fee, is much cheaper than what the dominant market player offers. One can run applications—Oracle, SAP and more—on it.
Because it’s open, with the code visible to all, Linux also gives customers more flexibility to solve one of the corporate sector’s biggest nightmares: integrating different pieces of an enterprise that don’t function well together. Any enterprise of significant size has built up a hodgepodge of systems and applications over the years that weren’t designed to work together and that certainly didn’t anticipate the Internet phenomenon. The polite phrase for this is a “heterogeneous environment.” The reality is, integration challenges can be a financial and technical black hole. Linux and open source are going to significantly improve the way that information technology gets done.
Here are three examples of interesting open-source initiatives under way:
1. How companies write software. We’re seeing fundamental changes in this. A very large U.S. electronics company that put an internal software project into the open-source community and was able to tap the skills of several thousand programmers. This CEO lowered the company’s risk and costs at the same time. It’s true that the company ultimately had to give up ownership of that technology because the open-source community demands it. So it’s not something a company would do with highly proprietary functions. But there are many kinds of software that don’t need to be proprietary. There is no reason to waste money by building them by yourself.
2. The financial sector as an early adopter. The financial industry is perhaps the most aggressive user of Linux and open source. Apparently, those companies really know how to do cost-benefit analysis. But the bottom line is that technology is critical for finance—both in terms of maintaining always-on connectivity, as well as driving down costs. And Linux has proven its performance capabilities time and again in independent tests.
3. Inroads into retail. Given that the system requirements of retail store locations are fairly limited and well-defined, retail is one area with great potential for early Linux adoption. IBM and Novell have a combined retail solution offering that Circuit City and Pep Boys, among others, are deploying.
Does the success of Linux to date mean CEOs should tell their CIOs to run out and dump everything for Linux tomorrow? Not at all. But it does mean CEOs should be asking CIOs a series of questions about the next information technology infrastructure buys:
• Are there viable alternatives to the dominant vendor?
• Are there cheaper options?
• Will this increase or decrease our future flexibility?
• Does this improve our security?
• Will it support applications from leading partners?
• What about technical support?
• Am I protected against intellectual property challenges?
With Linux delivering favorable answers to these questions, companies gain new IT options. Linux can be additive. For additional infrastructure, add Linux. It can replace costly existing deployments. If you’re shifting off of proprietary UNIX or replacing desktops, consider a Linux option. Try introducing open source in stages, or to different parts of the business. Workers in a call center and mobile workers like airline employees or salespeople simply don’t need all the bells and whistles (and the expense) of a Windows desktop. A dependable, Linux-based machine with a browser, word processing, messaging and scheduling is enough. Open source is not the answer to all problems. The future of IT will be a “mixed-source” world. Novell will continue to offer our proprietary networking technologies that run on top of Linux, but we’ll certainly encourage our customers to evaluate and deploy open-source products for platform and core infrastructure.
As open source keeps working its way up the ladder, we will have to continue to move our own software rapidly upward to stay ahead of the curve. That’s the challenge all software vendors face, and most—Novell, Sun, Oracle, Computer Associates, SAP—are trying to adapt. Software vendors sticking to an old, solely proprietary model will be hard-pressed to compete.In the long run, the most important impact of open source is that it shifts power from vendors to customers. The technology “lock in” will disappear. Not surprisingly, the company with the most to lose is trying to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt—a.k.a., the “FUD” factor—about Linux. But, to date, it has no real strategy to respond. The situation is reminiscent of AT&T and IBM decades ago. AT&T couldn’t escape its lock-in strategy. IBM showed that it is possible to escape. Today’s mighty gorilla, Microsoft, is facing an army of open-source guerrillas. And those guerrillas are getting stronger. Extremely well reasoned and very timely.
A just released Mckisney report says, Fragmentation is keeping china’s IT services industry from grabbing a larger share of the global software-outsourcing market. China's spectacular economic success has prompted speculation that the country's software-outsourcing industry could soon compete with India's. A recent McKinsey study of China's software sector, however, shows that it will be many years before the country poses a threat to its continental rival in this arena. Excerpts with edits and my comments added:
The Chinese must consolidate their highly fragmented industry to gain the size and expertise needed to capture large international projects. Currently, there is little movement in this direction. While signs of healthy expansion abound in China's IT industry. The number of engineering graduates and software-applications professionals has grown considerably in recent years. Since 1997, annual revenues in software and IT services have risen by 42 percent a year, on average, reaching $6.8 billion in 2003.2 Moreover, the number of English-speaking graduates in the workforce—particularly crucial in software outsourcing—has doubled since 2000, to more than 24 million in 2004.
But shortcomings in the structure of China's IT industry prevent it from taking full advantage of these changes.
- Although revenues from IT services are rising, they are barely half of India's $12.7 billion a year.
- Growth is driven by domestic demand—most customers are small and midsize Chinese enterprises that want their software customized to their own needs.
- Moreover, the country's nascent foreign-software-outsourcing business accounts for just 10 percent of the industry's total revenue, compared with around 70 percent for India.
- Japanese customers, which seek mostly low-value application-development contracts rather than more lucrative ones for design, supply about 65 percent of this sector's income.
- Despite lower costs, operating margins in Chinese software-services companies average only 7 percent, compared with 11 percent at similar companies around the world, because many projects are below optimal scale, suppliers often compete on price, and collecting payments can be problematic.
- The top ten IT-services companies have only about a 20 percent share of the market, compared with the 45 percent commanded by India's top ten.
- China has about 8,000 software-services providers, and almost three-quarters of them have fewer than 50 employees. No company has emerged from this crowded pack; indeed, only 5 have more than 2,000 employees.
- India, on the other hand, has fewer than 3,000 software-services companies. Of these, at least 15 have more than 2,000 workers, and some—including Infosys Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro Technologies—have garnered international recognition and a global clientele.
- Only 6 of China's 30 largest software companies are certified at levels five or four of the capability-maturity model (CMM);3 by contrast, all of the top 30 Indian software companies have achieved these rankings
- About a quarter of the Chinese companies we surveyed are trying to implement the CMM quality standards, but more than half of the companies in the survey said that such efforts weren't necessary, feasible, or worthwhile
- Most do little to develop their employees, and very few use stock options, training programs, or other incentives to build talent
- Annual employee turnover was about 20 percent, compared with an average of 14 percent in the United States, which itself has a very fluid IT labor market
- They are more vulnerable to the loss of key personnel, may not have the financial muscle to survive for the duration of a project, and often don't have the capacity or breadth to absorb large projects easily
- Most companies will have to abandon their project-based mentality and adopt a new focus on giving clients long-term value.
Indin headquartered companies beleive China will be a useful source of skills for Indian companies Tata now has more than 200 people working at three China offices and plans, like Infosys, to market services to multinational companies operating in China as well as domestic ones.Now powerful Indian outfits such as Infosys, Tata, Satyam are putting down roots in China, too. There are risks: The Indian companies must spend extra money to train Chinese engineers, many of whom lack strong project-management and consulting skills, including good English. But the Indian companies feel they need to be physically closer to their existing Western and Japanese clients who are now selling more products inside China. The idea is that Chinese programmers are best-suited to deal with material written in Chinese and can better customize programs for the heavily regulated Chinese market, including the accounting and billing software used by Western companies.The Indian companies also are worried about their bottom lines: With competition for skilled programmers getting fiercer in India, and salaries soaring, the companies need new, affordable sources of labor to maintain a competitive edge over Western rivals such as IBM.
Infosys estimates that wage costs for software engineers are rising about 15% a year in India, but increasing just 4% in China. That makes China an alluring alternative to India for all types of programming, not just software built specifically for a customer's China business.In terms of producing software, China is "the only country that comes close to India in cost, quality and scale," says Vineet Toshniwal, Infosys' head of sales and marketing for greater China. The English-language skills of Chinese engineers also are improving rapidly, and Chinese infrastructure -- including roads and power supply -- is often superior to that in India, he says. Mr. Toshniwal, is moving to Shanghai from Hong Kong to help open the new China office, which now employs more than 100 people. Company officials expect that figure to double by March. One thing is clear : Its going to be the Indian Headquartered companies all the way in future ruling the IT services market.
"In the client market, U.S. companies will no longer be the dominant buyers as Western European firms create strong demand for offshore services," the report says. "We see acceptance for offshoring as a foregone conclusion for multinational corporations." Manufacturing, Health care and Retail sectors that particularly will embrace outsourcing more aggressively in 2005.India experienced sharp growth in the outsourcing of software and services during the fiscal year ended March 31. Software exports grew about 25% from a year earlier to $12.5 billion (9.33 billion euros), and back-office work generated nearly an additional $4 billion in revenue.
NeoIT, however, expects this growth to only accelerate next year, with software exports from India posting growth of around 25% to 30% and revenue from back-office work growing an additional 60%. "Deals involving business process outsourcing [BPO] work tend to be larger" than deals involving pure software. Even as India continues to grow, however, neoIT sees China, Russia, and a number of Eastern European and Southeast Asian countries also becoming large players in the outsourcing industry. Chinese firms will "make headlines" in 2005 by acquiring outsourcing companies as a means to generate growth, according to the report. Central and Eastern European countries, meanwhile, "will become increasingly credible markets for European clients." The growth of the outsourcing industry will force global software and back-office companies to increasingly seek scale as a means to effectively compete. As a result, the consultancy expects a string of mergers and acquisitions in the coming year, as well as a number of stock-market listings by BPO firms. This will involve both multinationals buying out Indian firms, as well as the reverse. 2005 may see the first merger of a leading Indian supplier with a leading U.S. supplier.Despite the boom in outsourcing, firms still will face considerable challenges in successfully executing an offshore model. More than 40% of the new offshore initiatives will fail to achieve the anticipated "savings, scale and risk diversification," neoIT says. "The key reason for these disappointments will not be due to supplier capability but buyer preparation and management," the report concludes. The trends noted here look quite consistent with what is felt in the marketplace.Key trends to note - Japan and Western Europe joining the bandwagon, BPO deals becoming larget than services deals and potential acquisition of Indian firms in 2005.
A strong illustration of their basic differences is seen in the way these two industries have handled disruption: Music has generally been quick to sue (and sue and sue), while Telecom has tended to turn towards regulatory relief. As it turns out, though, these seemingly divergent industries have found a way to make great music - and great telecom - together. who would have thought that ringtones would grow into over a (US$) 3 billion worldwide dollar business? And today the term "ringtone" yields over 61 million website hits on Google! Yes, Music has become the new content king for Telecom. One new twist on ringtones that is now being offered by service providers , quite interesting is custom ringback tones. With this new service you can specify the sound that a specific caller will hear when they call your phone. For instance, phone service can be configured so that each time a particular friend calls he is presented with a ringback tone of Elton John's "Daniel" (assuming ringtone is owned by the caller, of course) instead of the ubiquitous phone-ringing sound. Looking ahead, we shall seee an ever-increasing growing synergy between the Music industry and the Communications industry, and not just due to the continued evolution of ringtones technology. Many of today's cell phones and phone-service-enabled PDAs are coming equipped with much greater file storage capacity, memory and media-playing software, which is likely to result in a significant penetration into the on-demand portable music space by Telecom operators. The future is happening! Sometimes you just need to take a moment and listen. :-)
Apple, shall have minimal impact from the IBM deal. If PowerPC does better, Apple will make a bit more in royalties from those chips, but that is hardly going to change the direction of the company. And if enough companies get behind PowerPC, Apple might find it easier to get more of the higher performance chips it needs. Still, Apple is a minor player in this event.
Sun will be immediately hurt more than any other company because Sun gets more of its revenue -- close to 90 percent -- from the server market IBM is about to target. Sun is in an extremely difficult position. Its strengths have traditionally been in enterprise software and high-end hardware, both of which mean that it can't flirt too much with Linux and AMD or risk its traditional customer base. At the same time, IBM is targeting the same customers as Sun, will be offering more powerful, cheaper hardware and a great depth of software options, including a Linux that doesn't in any way threaten other parts of IBM. Sun can't compete on chips, can't compete on price, can't compete on depth. What Sun needs to do is to establish itself as the de facto UNIX (not Linux) software vendor. Drop the hardware, make Solaris run beautifully on every high-end system from every manufacturer and compete with Linux by offering world-class consulting, service and support. Fortune 500 companies would sigh with relief, but Sun would also have to accept that the company will shrink in sales and headcount, though not in profit. This is the only viable strategy left for Sun, which is going to shrink dramatically anyway, possibly to nothing.
Where does Microsoft come into this? That works in two ways that again can be separated into hardware and software. Selling its PC division gives IBM some distance from Microsoft and takes away from Redmond a few of its favorite weapons. First, there is the denial of a Windows OEM license, which Microsoft loves to threaten. By selling to Lenovo, IBM no longer needs a Windows OEM license, so that power over IBM is gone. Lenovo needs a license, but China is a market that Microsoft covets, so they can't afford to push Lenovo around as much as they could a traditional U.S. supplier. And even if Microsoft did deny Lenovo the license, IBM could always just buy its boxes from some other company that does have a license.
Microsoft is also on a tear lately to sign patent cross-licensing deals with all its major OEMs. This is part of a new concentration on intellectual property in which Microsoft is patenting everything it can think of, and a lot of things already thought of long before by other people at other companies. By cross-licensing, Microsoft gains access for free to all the neat stuff at its OEMs while simultaneously positioning itself to concentrate its own IP enforcement actions on smaller competitors, in the belief that if anyone is going to eventually take down Microsoft, it will be a startup. By selling its PC division, IBM opts out of the class of companies over which Microsoft has power to coerce such an agreement. Given that IBM holds more patents than any other company, this has to hurt Microsoft. The hardware implications of this deal for Microsoft are also interesting. The next version of Microsoft's xBox game system will use a PowerPC processor, and that the development system for game companies targeting xBox 2 is actually an Apple G5 Mac. Microsoft made this design decision not to throw the fear of Bill (FoB) into Intel, which produces the current xBox processor, but for simple performance: xBox couldn't stick to an Intel processor and be competitive with future Sony and Nintendo game consoles. So at a time when IBM is pulling away from Microsoft influence, Microsoft is, itself, coming more under the influence of IBM.
xBox 3 will be Microsoft's effort to extend its dominance of the PC software industry into dominance of the PC hardware, game, and electronic entertainment industries. At that point, even mighty Dell goes down.With its continual need for more revenue, Microsoft will by then have already finished its destruction of the world software market, will have sucked all the profit out of the world hardware market, and will discard its hardware OEMs like HP and Dell and compete with them head-to-head. And they'll be doing the same for DVDs, TVs -- even mobile phones. Of course, part of the plan is for all the content coming to those devices to throw off little revenue streams to Microsoft, too. And the software that holds it all together will be rented, rather than owned or even traditionally licensed. This would give Microsoft both the deterministic revenue stream it covets and the leverage of being able to threaten to turn off the tap and thereby maintain control over, well, all of us. It will be an effective five to 10 percent tax on global income that suddenly appears one day, and academics will call it a natural monopoly. But IBM may save the day. By maintaining independence from Microsoft and actually making Microsoft dependent on it, IBM can have some influence on this diabolical scheme. They could foster alternate standards and, by doing so, make a good living. Let's just hope the two companies don't decide to simply share the booty and jointly enslave us, couches, potatoes, and all. Vey uniquely said, the Cringley way, but quite insightful indeed.
In the 20th century, Americans, Europeans, and East Asians enjoyed material and technological advances that were unimaginable in previous eras. In the United States, for instance, gross domestic product per capita tripled from 1950 to 2000. Life expectancy soared. The benefits of capitalism spread more widely among the population. The boom in productivity after World War II made goods better and cheaper at the same time. Things that were once luxu¬ries, such as jet travel and long-distance phone calls, became necessities. And even though Americans seemed to work extraordinarily hard (at least compared to Europeans), their avid pursuit of entertainment turned media and leisure into multibillion-dollar industries. By most standards, then, you’d have to say that Americans are better off now than they were in the middle of the last century.Oddly, though, if you ask Americans how happy they are, you find that they’re no happier than they were in 1946 (which is when formal surveys of happiness started). In fact, the percentage of people who say they’re “very happy” has fallen slightly since the early 1970s—even though the income of people born in 1940 has increased, on average, 116 percent over the course of their working lives. Nor is this a uniquely American phenomenon: you can find similar data for most developed countries. Perhaps the most striking example of progress having little impact on what economists call people’s sense of “subjective well-¬being” is Japan. Between 1960 and the late 1980s, Japan’s economy was utterly transformed, as the nation went from a low-cost supplier of cheap manufactured goods to what is perhaps the world’s most technologically sophisticated society. Over that stretch, the country’s GDP quintupled. And yet by the late 1980s, the Japanese said they were no happier than they had been in 1960.
Since the 1950s, reports of major depression have increased tenfold, and while much of that increase undoubtedly represents a new willingness to diagnose mental illness, there’s a general consensus among mental-health experts that it also reflects a real development. People are more anxious, trust government and business less, and get divorced more often. Is it possible that technology, instead of liberating us, is holding us back? Is technological progress merely a treadmill, and if so, would we be happier if we stepped off of it? The relationship between happiness and technology has been a perennial subject for social critics and philosophers since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer published an academic survey of the subject in Happiness and Economics in 2001. But the truly groundbreaking work on the relationship between prosperity and well-being was done by the economist Richard Easterlin, who in 1974 wrote a famous paper entitled “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?” Easterlin showed that when it came to developed countries, there was no real correlation between a nation’s income level and its citizens’ happiness. Money, Easterlin argued, could not buy happiness—at least not after a certain point. Easterlin showed that though poverty was strongly correlated with misery, once a country was solidly middle-class, getting wealthier doesn’t seem to make its citizens any happier.
Easterlin’s work did not get much attention when it was first published, but its implications were profound. By suggesting that there was no direct link between wealth and well-being, Easterlin was challenging some basic assumptions of mainstream economics. Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, demonstrated that students, when asked to eat a bowl of their favorite ice cream eight days in a row, had a poor sense of whether they would or would not enjoy the experience. “The question of technology”: net loss or net gain?- in trying to decipher how technology affects well-being, then, it’s worth paying attention to a few things. First, there have been few rigorous studies of the specific relationship between technological change and how people feel about their own lives. So the question “Does more (or better) technology make people happy?” is irreducibly speculative. Second, there is something inherently unstable about people’s accounts of their own states of mind. Forget people’s uncertainty about what will make them happy in the future; can we even trust that people know what makes them happy now? Most seriously, thinking about technology is hard because people adapt so quickly to the technologies that are available to them. If you had asked someone in 1870 whether she would be happier if she had a personal vehicle that would give her the freedom to travel hundreds of miles a day, in whatever direction she chose, at relatively little cost; the opportunity to fly across the ocean in a few hours; and the ability to speak to people who were thousands of miles away in real time for a few cents a minute, chances are very good that she would have said, yes, it would make her a lot happier. But today, it’s the rare person who gets excited about cars, planes, and telephones. We recognize their utility, but they’re also sources of frustration and stress. On balance, most people would say they’d rather have cars and telephones than not, but—and this is what makes thinking about happiness so hard—it’s not clear they really make us happier.
This seems to be close to a universal phenomenon. In fact, one of happiness scholars’ most important insights is that people adapt very quickly to good news. Take lottery winners. One famous study showed that although winners were very, very happy when they won, their euphoria quickly evaporated, and after a while their moods and sense of well-being were indistinguishable from what they had been before the victory. Psychologists even have a word for the phenomenon: “hedonic adaptation.” So, too, with technology: no matter how dramatic a new innovation is, no matter how much easier it makes our lives, it is very easy to take it for granted. You can see this principle at work in the world of technology every day, as things that once seemed miraculous soon become mundane and, worse, frustrating when they don’t work perfectly. It’s hard, it turns out, to keep in mind what things were like before the new technology came along. That’s why broadband users should occasionally use dial-up: it makes them appreciate just what a difference a high-speed connection really does make.
Obviously, a technology as wide-ranging and ubiquitous as the Net will have myriad, immeasurable effects. But the Internet is essentially a communications technology, one that, like the telephone, allows people to expand their affective and informational networks. The Net is hardly the ideal public sphere, where all discussions are rational and everyone agrees on a definition of the common good. But it is a public sphere, and one that crucially functions without gatekeepers. . But one way in which technology, as a rule, does make people less happy is in its relentless generation of newness. One of the key insights of happiness studies is that people have a very hard time being content with what they have, at least when they know that others have more. Today, technological change is so rapid that when you buy something, you do so knowing that in a few months there’s going to be a better, faster version of the product, and that you’re going to be stuck with the old one. Someone else, in other words, has it better. It’s as if disappointment were built into acquisition from the very beginning (unless you’re buying a 70-inch plasma screen, in which case you should be fine for at least a couple of years). There’s no way to circumvent.
In the marketplace, for instance, the Internet has made consumers happier not so much by cutting prices as by expanding the enormous array of choices available to them in a manageable way. In the happiness stakes, expanding consumers’ options is really a double-edged sword: consumers do have a preference for variety and novelty, and the more choices you have, the better the chance that you’ll find the thing you really want. But too much choice can actually paralyze people, leaving them, paradoxically, worse off. A well-known experiment conducted by Professors Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar (at Stanford and Columbia, respectively) illustrates the point: they set up two tables in a supermarket, one with 24 jars of jam and the other with six, and offered discount coupons to anyone who stopped to sample the jams. Of the people who stopped at the 24-jam table, only 3 percent went on to buy jam, while 30 percent of the people who stopped at the six-jam table did. More choices often make people frustrated because they have no reasonable way to navigate through them. What the Internet offers, at least in a nascent form, is a host of mechanisms—collaborative filtering, shopbots, consumer-rating sites—that give people the tools to make informed choices relatively quickly and easily, reducing paralysis and making them happier. The important point here is that among the infinite choices that the Internet offers, one is the option of less choice.
Technology has also radically changed the nature of work, or at least some people’s work. This matters because the workplace is central to people’s sense of well-being and is more important to them than anything, including family. Studies show that nothing—not even divorce—makes people more unhappy than unemployment. The most important impact of technology on people’s sense of well-being, though, is in the field of health care. Before the Industrial Revolution, two out of every three Europeans died before the age of 30. Today, life expectancy for women in Western Europe is almost 80 years, and it continues to increase. The point is obvious, but important to note: the vast majority of people are happy to be alive, and the more time they get on earth, the better off they feel they’ll be. (Remember, the point about prosperity and happiness is not that prosperity makes people unhappy; it’s that it doesn’t necessarily make them happier.) On a deeper level, what the technological improvement of our health and our longevity underscores is a paradox of any discussion of happiness on a national or a global level: even though people may not be happier, even though they are wealthier and possess more technology, they’re still as hungry as ever for more time. It’s like that old Woody Allen joke: the food may not be so great, but we want the portions to be as big as possible. Technology may only improve the taste of the meals slightly, but it makes them a lot bigger, and for most of us, that has the promise of something like happiness. End of the day, people should come home from work as happy individuals and an ethos of happiness should prevail in the society - The point is whether technlogy is able to directly contribute to building sustainable overall happiness. My Take: I would think yes in three ways, A. By creating a huge industry, technology is defintely creating new buisness value and by extension helping the stakeholders. B. By making life better fot the society as a whole C. Tech industry is one of the fastest innovators and so is able to roll out newer solutions/products faster - in the process helping society at large happy by providing new variety!!.
"Leapfrogging" is the notion that areas which have poorly-developed technology or economic bases can move themselves forward rapidly through the adoption of modern systems without going through intermediary steps. We see this happening all around us: you don't need a 20th century industrial base to build a 21st century bio/nano/information economy. Rather than following the already-developed nations in the same course of "progress," leapfrogging means that developing regions can experiment with emerging tools, models and ideas for building their societies. Leapfrogging can happen accidentally (such as when the only systems around for adoption are better than legacy systems elsewhere), situationally (such as the adoption of decentralized communication for a sprawling, rural countryside), or intentionally (such as policies promoting the installation of WiFi and free computers in poor urban areas).
The best-known example of leapfrogging is the adoption of mobile phones in the developing world. It's easier and faster to put in cellular towers in rural and remote areas than to put in land lines, and as a result, cellular use is exploding. As we've noted, mobile phone use already exceeds land line use in India, and by 2007, 150 million out of the 200 million phone lines there will be cellular. There are similar examples from all over the world. Examples of leapfrogging other than with mobile phones abound. A few examples, include:
Two important things to notice about many of the leapfrog examples: most haven't yet led to society-wide transformation (although it is happening with mobile phones, and, in the case of Linux use, may be happening soon in Brazil and China); and the "leapfrog" technologies are largely those which don't require a pre-existing grid -- solar power, mobile phones, wifi, etc.. The important thing to note is that the "leapfrog" isn't in the specific technologies themselves (which are no better than those in the West), but in the infrastructure, the rapid growth of decentralized, ad-hoc, flexible networks.
Mobile phone towers go up faster than stringing phone lines, as noted, and there's no worry about upgrading legacy analog switches. It's easier for Pakistan or India or African nations to push for wide adoption of community solar power than for most places in the West, since they don't have to worry about integration with sprawling existing power systems. Down the road a bit, it may be easier for China to shift to fuel cell vehicles than in the West, as they'll have a much smaller existing network of gas stations that would need to be converted from gasoline/diesel to hydrogen.
Leapfrogging doesn't always work. There may be government policies or lender mandates requiring the adoption of certain infrastructure technologies which made sense a decade or two ago, but are less useful now. There may be resistance for reasons of tradition or marketing. And chosen leapfrog technologies may simply not work well. But leapfrogging is an important concept to keep in mind when thinking about global development and the future of emerging countries such as India, Brazil and China. Developmental histories do not all follow the same path. Technologies and ideas which seem somewhat powerful when implemented in the West may be utterly transformative in locations not laden down with legacies of past development. The future belongs to those best able to change along with it; sometimes, starting from nothing can be an engine for just that sort of change.
PLM vendors and projects seized the initiative bubbling up out of product innovation as an aid to business growth. This has been good news for most vendors, which have seen strong growth in revenue and valuation. Looking ahead to 2005, however, the game is changing fast as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and supply chain vendors find their place in the product innovation world. New product innovation is widely seen as a business imperative. The best case study is Apple Computer versus Dell. Apple is a famously messed-up supply chain with a history of disastrous forecasting and a manufacturing model that is regarded as archaic, but its iPod and sleek Mac product lines make it a perennial darling among product innovators. Dell spends far less on Research and Development (R&D) than its peers in electronics and is the symbol of 21st century supply chain operational excellence. Nevertheless, in the past year, Apple’s stock has outperformed Dell’s by more than 200%. Even over a five-year horizon, Apple beats Dell. Investors obviously see the value of excellent product innovation. The best growth companies of the 21st century will be operationally excellent and quick innovators. Such companies will justify higher valuations for the same dollar of current earnings. The higher p/e multiples await companies that can demonstrate operational effectiveness and quick time to value. Time to value is defined as the total elapsed time between a new product concept receiving its first formal development budget and the time it achieves breakeven with all development and launch spending.
For several years, as PLM has emerged, the product innovation domain has been left alone by big vendors selling other classes of enterprise applications. Not anymore. SAP in particular has defined the path forward by moving beyond a me-too PLM strategy in favor of a general management pitch to fix New Product Development and Introduction (NPDI). The difference is more than semantics. In a survey of new product development practices and tools, several major findings leave the door open for non-PLM vendors to win big business.
- Average overall product development volume managed in a formal process—only 74%. This is an opportunity for collaboration, business intelligence, and resource management applications from Microsoft to PeopleSoft.
- No. 1 reason new product launches fail: product does not meet customer needs—52%. This is an opportunity for CRM, marketing analytics, and business intelligence applications from Siebel to Cognos.
- Most important single tool in NPDI today: project management—19%. This is an opportunity for program management, cost estimation, and portfolio management applications from Primavera to Oracle.
Business leaders aiming to improve product innovation need to rationalize requests for new tools investment, ranging from better CAD systems to supply network planning tools. Companies committed to accelerating time to value in product innovation certainly cannot succeed without a sound PLM foundation. This, however, will not be enough because leaders will separate from the pack by connecting multiple tools that capture the voice of the customer, the limits of the supply chain, and the patience of finance.
There are reasons why Microsoft bundles technology and views their ability to create synergy among products as an important way to both grow new product lines and protect existing franchises. To that end, it's important to understand that there are three main technology and/or product integration strategies that Microsoft has historically used.
- The first is intended to create a market for a new product that has little or no penetration but is strategically important to Microsoft as a platform to drive Windows forward. (e.g. Internet Explorer, Messenger, Windows Media). Microsoft bundles the new technology into the OS and gains immediate distribution breadth as a result. Market share is built in to the OS not the product. The challenge that Microsoft faces in this case is that it still must evangelize the market to make sure that the technology gets used. Although Redmond loses the opportunity to to charge for these products, the new technologies raises Windows profile and helps protect the core platform from competitive advances. This is one reason why Microsoft is fighting so hard to preserve the right to integrate Media Player into Windows.
- The second strategy is specifically designed to foster product upgrades by users. While some users are early adopters and will upgrade over time, Microsoft needs to create compelling scenarios to drive consumer upgrade incentives, promote product value and drive earlier upgrade cycles. In this case a new product may have no market share but can be connected to other product bundles and brands that are strong and therefore provide value to end users. As a result, this ultimately drives upgrades and future sales. (e.g. Office 2003/OneNote).
- Finally, Microsoft integrates new features to gain advantage over time in what we call competitive reaction cycles (e.g. PocketPC/Smartphone, X-Box). In this case Microsoft enters a new category where it has little or no share. To drive the product forward, Microsoft will continue to add new features and refine the product over time (without raising price) until the product is competitive or superior to alternatives.
The notion of success breeds success is a common theme for Microsoft. The ability to leverage technology platforms to drive new initiatives are important to the company and it is likely that they will continue to fight any efforts to curb their actions in integration or bundling.
a.Apple shipping a new family of computer
b.Tablet PC becoming more popular
c.Harddrives, Mobile Phones and Skype convergence
d.RSS becoming mainstream and available as a browser feature
e.Executives would be fired for not Blogging!!
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The register reports that european plans for biometric passports and visas have been derailed by, er, European plans for biometric passports and visas. A technical committee set up to report to the Council of Ministers on the implementation of a uniform visa format has concluded that collisions between contactless chips in a passport would make the current plans unworkable, reports Statewatch. The basic problem was eminently predictable, and stems from plans for a standard form of biometric identification across a number of different documents, not all of which are entirely controlled by Europe. Notably, the common European passport format is not, if you think about it, entirely controlled by Europe. so how does that work (or not), then?
The technical committee's report commences by saying it is feasible to integrate an RFID chip and two biometric identifiers in a passport "while assuring a high level of security". But what happens when you try to put an RFID biometric visa in the passport as well? This "leads to difficulties for the reader to read out the valid visa in case there are several contactless chips on different visa in the same passport." At the moment Europe's plans for ID consists of two biometric identifiers, facial and fingerprint, for passport and for visas and residence permits for third country nationals. The passport plans theoretically stem from ICAO's standard for biometric passports (which only requires facial) and from US requirements for biometric passports for visitors (again, facial acceptable) from late next year. Next on the agenda are plans for a common format for ID cards.
Conceivably you could produce a compatible system for RFID-readable biometric passports, residence permits and ID, because European control of the standards here makes it at least theoretically possible to avoid collisions between chips. The ID cards/permits would only have one chip on them (provided the permit was a separate card and not in the passport), and the passport system's operation would only become doubtful if other countries started putting RFID biometric visas in them. It considers a number of proposed permutations and finds they're all unworkable, but tentatively puts forward two others that aren't in the current proposals. A "visa sticker and separate biometric visa smart card" could work, but there's obvious potential for losing the card, while a sticker with no chip, but with biometrics in a barcode wouldn't cause collision problems, but would need a different reader, and would only have space for two fingerprint templates, not ten. Basically, the plans are a mess.The report however says that some delegations now wish to wait for the introduction of Europe's Visa Information Service (VIS), which has a target of 2007-8, to produce a fix. The VIS is intended to collect biometrics from visa applicants and store them first on national databases, then on a central EU database, which in theory would mean biometrics could be compared from records rather than locally between bearer and document.
The file formats most people use in their daily computing lives are now standard and universal, and Apple and Windows machines co-exist happily in countless corporate and home networks. Steve Jobs's 1997 return to Apple restored the company's business focus and revived its reputation for making easy-to-use products with great style. That's the one-two punch that powers Apple's legendary brand, and without it none of what's followed would have happened. The first big wave hinting at what's coming wasn't the iMac or the G4 Cube - nice machines that signaled the company was here to stay, but weren't the stuff of revolutions. It was - and is - the iPod.For all intents and purposes, the iPod is digital music. Apple has more than 90% of the market share for hard-drive-based digital-music players, and both the iPod and iPod Mini are in short supply this holiday season. The iPod embodies everything Apple's always claimed to be: Its cool design makes it a must-have accessory for hipsters, and its ease of use makes it the default choice for newcomers intimidated by digital music. With the success of the iPod mini spinoff, other ideas are generating excitement: While Apple has rejected the idea of a video-player iPod, other rumors being batted around – with varying levels of credibility -- include an iPod that uses flash memory, a satellite-radio iPod and even an iPod/iTunes phone.
The iPod has drawn well-deserved raves, as has the multimedia suite of iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto and iDVD. Still, the company's share of the desktop PC market has remained stalled, leading some to wonder if Apple isn't morphing into a digital-entertainment company, with the computers that made it famous becoming an afterthought. After all, home computing itself is morphing into digital entertainment, with all the usual suspects trying to provide software and hardware for managing music, photos and movies and marrying the PC with various pieces of consumer electronics. While nobody's found the perfect formula just yet, so far Apple's done a better job than anyone else has. One of the more-interesting bits of recent speculation has been about the "halo effect," which holds that the runaway success of iPods could drive sales of Apple computers: In a Piper Jaffray survey conducted last month, 6% of iPod users said they'd moved from PCs to Macs after buying the digital-music players, and another 7% said they planned to do so in the next 12 months. The halo effect seems to be working: While there are always some people making the PC-to-Mac switch,the iPod is making many more people consider a move to the Mac world. Its success has meant Apple products in what were once Windows-only homes, paving the way for other products -- where iPods lead, wireless-networking products tend to follow.
Still, iPods and wireless networking are on the periphery of digital entertainment, whose center remains the Windows-dominated PC. Apple's operating system and machines are generally hailed as superior to their Windows counterparts, but much as it'll pain the Appletistas to hear it (again), that superiority isn't enough to cause enough people to switch camps. The biggest issue in tech today: the drumbeat of viruses, spyware and other maladies that plague Windows and are practically nonexistent in the Apple world. It's true that this perceived immunity is partially a reflection of Apple's small market share, but that won't matter to consumers tired of computing anxiety and pain. Sure, it's a lot to ask folks who've lived in the Windows world for years to switch -- Apple tried that campaign a couple of years ago, with little success. The difference between then and now is that the combination of Windows' security woes and greater familiarity with Apple products, a combination will be what Apple needs to unlock that market. It's happening slowly right now, but it's happening, and it'll gain momentum in the months to come. And while it won't alter the commercial-PC landscape at first, it'll put Apple in a position to consider whether it wants to try to make inroads into that market as well.We also need to see the effect Linux and Firefox has on windows, that could also influence Apple's position in the PC world.
For enterprises seeking increased utilization and management of bar-code-challenged assets--tools, machinery, equipment, people, radio-frequency identification provides a new measure of control. RFID tags can help in situations ranging from bulky rolls of paper that can lose their bar-code labels when stored in a high-humidity environment to heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning dampers that are installed with bar codes facing a concrete structure, rendering them unreadable or unreachable for maintenance tracking. In future, enterprises will deploy RFID-tagged assets, creating operational cost reductions (e.g., reduction in missing assets) and operational improvements (e.g., reduced location times) and further, enterprises will tag more than 70% of their assets and generate operating-cost reductions of 1% to 3%. These reductions will be realized through reduction of lost assets, improved tracking of asset maintenance, and protection of assets from theft, fraud, or injury. Asset-management pilots will draw experience from successful RFID asset-tracking implementations such as the tracking of livestock, boxcars, and trucks.Three tag-frequency ranges are of interest for asset-management applications: low frequency 135-KHz tags, high-frequency 13.56-MHz tags, and UHF 433-MHz tags.
- Low-frequency 135-KHz tags are used in one of the largest RFID applications: livestock tracking. RFID lets cattle ranchers track livestock movements without having line-of-sight or perfect weather conditions, both of which are requirements for bar-code-based readings. Cattle are recorded as they move through gates, similar to the way cars are tracked as they move through electronic toll stations. These same low-frequency tags are used to protect other classes of assets.
- 135-KHz tags are in use for many card-key, access-control systems that let employees enter and exit facilities and protect automobiles from theft, as they are part of many automotive anti-theft and key-entry systems. They've also been used to track runners from start to finish in marathons and other races.
- High-frequency 13.56-MHz tags are being tested in applications such as baggage tracking (e.g., Delta Airlines) and site maintenance (e.g., Frankfurt Airport). In the case of baggage handling, the line-of-sight capabilities of bar codes do work. However, it can require more than one handler to locate the tags to scan and load baggage, which increases the overall time it takes to process baggage and increases use of human resources. Site maintenance (e.g. power, telecommunications switching, and mining facilities) has a combination of lost tags and line-of-sight limitations. In this case, bar-code labels attached to installed components such as pumps, valves, or engines can lose their stickiness over time and fall off the item being tracked, or the components and the tag can become covered with dirt and dust, hindering location of the tags. In the world of health care, 13.56-MHz tags will track key assets (e.g., wheelchairs, infusion pumps, and operating-room equipment); in addition, doctor- and patient-tracking applications are in development to enable improved service and safety levels within hospitals. For example, as a means of improving patient safety, tags could be placed on patients, letting health-care providers collect patient-identification data without having to disturb sleeping patients, or the entrances to operating rooms could be RFID-enabled to ensure that the right patient and doctor can gain access to an operating room.
Tag costs won't be the issue for asset-management pilot projects. Unlike tag costs for retailers, consumer-product-tag costs must fall below 5% of the item's costs. In this case, the asset will have a cost that is much higher, making the tag-cost"to-percentage-of-asset-cost ratio much lower and palatable to the enterprise. For example, a piece of medical equipment such as a wheelchair can cost $1,000; therefore, placing a $10 tag on the wheelchair to prevent its theft is an easy ROI calculation, since the tag cost is only 1% of the asset. In some cases, the asset may be of low value but its contents may not be; for example, money pouches used in the movement of currency in a bank or casino. Other asset-management functions that RFID can enable include the accountability of hard-to-track items such as surgical equipment in an operating environment. Successful enterprises will use RFID asset management to create bottom-line shareholder value.
The business initiatives for performance and process improvement, along with regulatory concerns for compliance management, are creating a new focus on and investment in information management. The purpose of information management and its supporting architecture is to ensure high quality and efficient processing of data in the enterprise. While seemingly simple in concept, this is yet another challenging and transformational step at top of the CIO list today. To address this issue, companies must move beyond conventional wisdom and historical database or integration approaches. Adopting an information management initiative that focuses on managing master data including definitions, references, and business to technical metadata can become a focal point for improvement. The demand for information is increasing at such a fast pace that IT organizations are struggling to deliver timely responses to the information requests of businesses. Because of the unfortunate state of most companies' information architecture, these requests take months, not days, to satisfy. This has driven business and operational management to become more involved with understanding and driving new investments to overcome these shortfalls. Many organizations are re-examining their existing approaches to managing data and ensuring the foundation of information management is well-managed. Many organizations just consider standardization and consolidation of data integration and BI systems without considering the required investment for managing the foundation and interoperability of data in the enterprise. Leading organizations are focusing and investing into data management that can be leveraged with existing investments to ensure high quality data for their business. Master data management (MDM) is the practice and technology of providing business and IT with the capability to define and link master data that includes definition, reference, and metadata in a secure and high quality manner. As enterprises take on this approach, business users must work to ensure the business and technical aspects of the data will deliver the value needed.
Organizations are ensuring that their data warehouse and information management investments include management of the data outside of the data integration, database, and BI tools. Many organizations have, or are simply picking, a best-of-breed tool for data integration, data warehousing, and business intelligence, which will not necessarily bring the full business value sought by the CIO and business management. IT organizations should consider best practices that balance investments and include master data management as part of their existing and future information architectures. The first step is to evaluate individual technologies in the context of the entire information architecture, and not as separate technologies. To bring high quality and more relevant information to business, IT and business management must create a parallel strategy to improve the data management and information architecture of the organization. New advancements in information management, like master data management, can provide a focal point for data quality. It allows you to link information from source operational systems to business intelligence and performance management systems. It is important to ensure that your investment in master data management will operate in a heterogeneous environment, allowing you to leverage your existing ERP, DW, and BI investments.
More "bottom-up" transference of power—much more. Technology is suddenly giving people who've had no voice at all a surprisingly powerful one. Ukrainians, protesting their presidential election results, show us just how effective technology can be in organizing political movements. This power shift is also revolutionizing the software industry. Open-source software is a "bottom-up" technology that is gaining acceptance among business clients and even consumers. We now know that big companies aren't the only ones that can create top-quality software.Firefox is a case in point. Explorer's share of the global browser market is already down substantially, by some counts to below 90%. And that's in a business where it had a near-monopoly only a year or so ago.
But worse, from Microsoft's perspective, is that consumers who discover that Firefox is a great product are now more comfortable with the concept of open-source software in general. Firefox will continue to outpace expectations in 2005, gaining at least another 5 to 10 percentage points of the browser market share.
Other predictions for technology trends we'll hear about in 2005:
• Sun emerges as a major x86 player. Its alliance with AMD is powerful and that will likely lead to market-share inroads for inexpensive servers.
• AMD rocks. It will stay ahead of Intel on critical technologies, further reviving its reputation. This is a powerful competitive advantage for a smallish company.
• Intel steadies. Just because AMD does well next year, doesn't mean Intel won't, too. Paul Otellini will take charge soon. And though Intel may not be able to make super-cool (in temperature), super-fast, multi-processor chips as elegantly as AMD can, its production capacity is much larger than AMD's—or anyone else's, for that matter.
• Apple introduces iPhone. It would probably be the best one you've ever seen, with impressive integration with your Mac or PC.
• Cisco thrives. It's just about the only big tech company out there that doesn't seem to face any major near-term challenges. Networks will continue to gain importance, even if corporations don't invest in other aspects of their IT infrastructure.
• Carly leaves HP. The alternate prediction: HP shows steadily improving financial results.
• Tech seeks sales beyond India and China. Sure those are great markets, but so are populous countries like Egypt, Mexico, Malaysia, etc. That's the next big source of tech spending.
• Outsourcing won't be a dirty word. Companies will routinely think globally about every aspect of their needs, including people.
• Mergers become even more common. Some candidates for takeover: Gateway and BEA Systems. Mercury Interactive is another possibility. So could any of the business intelligence software companies, such as Cognos and Business Objects. SAS, the daddy of the business intelligence software industry, remains private and might even be an acquirer.
The tech's potential to improve our lives, shall remain very strongPredictions look good and reasonable, but am surprised that David has not covered potential advances in telecom, VoIP, Digital Entertainment, Search, Web Services, Online Business, biometrics, RFID, Hosted Services & Utility Computing , Reverse Migration, Impact of falling dollar on the industry as a whole etc...
1. We will have a goat rodeo of sorts in the blogging/micropublishing/RSS world as commercial interests push into what many consider a "pure medium." I've seen this movie before, and it ends OK. But it's important that the debate be full throated, and so far it looks to be shaping up that way. 2005 may be a more fractious year in the blogosphere as we evolve through this process.
2. we'll in fact be making huge strides in understanding the path forward, it just won't seem like it. By the end of the year, the world will begin to realize that "blogs" are in fact an extraordinarily heterogeneous ecosystem comprised of scores, if not hundreds, of different "types" of sites.
3. There will be two to five major new sites that emerge from "nowhere" to become major cultural influencers along the lines of the political bloggers of 2004. One of them will be sold to a major publisher/aggregator for what seems like a large sum of money, driving the abovementioned #2 and #1.
4. Meanwhile, the long tail will become the talk of the "old line" media world. To capture some of that value, we'll see a slew of deals and new publishing projects from the established brands that seek to capture the idea of community journalism, affiliate commerce sales, and collaborative content creation. 5. Google will do something major with Blogger. I really have no idea what, but it's overdue. Six Apartwill grow quickly but face a crisis in its implementation as its core users demand more features that are "unbloglike" like customer databases and robust publishing support tools. Six Apart may get sold. 6. Ask will continue to consolidate traffic by buying smaller search sites.
7. Yahoo and Google will both test systems that combine local merchant inventory information with search, so that merchants can use search as a direct sales channel. By the end of the year, there will be no question that the search companies are in direct competition with the ecommerce companies.8. Microsoftwill lose search share before they gain it back later in the year when the integration of MSN search starts to scale with new versions of Office and IE .
9. Firefox will near 15% of total browser share. Firefox faithful will wonder why it's not much much higher. But MSFT will release a very good upgrade of IE, see #8
10.A third party platform player with major economies of scale (ie eBay or Amazon) will release a search related innovation that blows everyone's mind
11.The China question will become a critical issue to the search community.
12.By the end of the year,there will be no question that search is a media business and that the major players in search are major players in the content business.
13.Something major will finally happen at Tivo. We all hope that it's a sale to Apple, but if it is a sale, it will more likely be to Comcast or DirecTv
14.Apple will be rumored to launch a video iPod, but it won't - it's still too early.. Google will introduce Video search at some point in 05, but it will stay in Labs
15.Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation - the kind that makes us all say - Jeez that was obvious - will occur. At the core of this innovation will be the concept of search.
While companies such as Google and Microsoft are also experimenting with the idea of letting outsiders tap into their databases and use their content in unpredictable ways,none is proceeding more aggressively than Amazon. The company has, in essence, outsourced much of its R&D, and a growing portion of its actual sales, to an army of thousands of software developers, who apparently enjoy nothing more than finding creative new ways to give Web surfers access to Amazon merchandise—and earning a few bucks in the process. The result: a syndicate of mini-Amazons operating at very little cost to Amazon itself and capturing customers who might otherwise have gone elsewhere. It’s as if Starbucks were to recruit 50,000 of its most loyal caffeine addicts to strap urns of coffee to their backs each morning and, for a small commission, spend the day dispensing the elixir to their officemate.
The strategy behind Amazon Web Services is to give programmers virtually unlimited access to the very foundation of Amazon’s business—its product database—whether they are inside or outside the company’s walls. Developers can grab product data, reformat it, add related services, and use it to attract eyeballs to their own sites. If they feel like it, they’re even free,to create parallel-universe Amazons that have the added features they crave. Amazon demands only one thing in return: that visitors to these satellite sites complete any purchases through Amazon.com itself. The site owners, meanwhile, earn a decent commission on each sale. Exposing the world’s largest product database—along with the editorial content and personalization functions that make Amazon.com so uncannily useful—is such a counterintuitive business strategy that analogies are hard to come by. In a way, the risk the company is taking is like the one Apple Computer has always avoided by refusing to license its Macintosh operating system to other manufacturers. Some observers still think Apple missed its golden opportunity to mount a comeback against Microsoft, while others maintain that the Mac OS is Apple, and that putting it on other machines would have diluted the brand. In Amazon’s case, outside programmers could find cleverer ways of using Amazon’s data than Amazon itself and end up sucking away so much traffic that Amazon’s own site cedes e-retailing’s center stage.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos put it in a speech at October’s Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, “Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people; Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for computers.” Web services, whose name became a marketing meme years before the technology to make them work had actually matured, boil down to the simple but powerful idea that the Web should be more than just a way for human users to call up preformatted documents. It can also be a medium for software programs to communicate and share data with one another. Through a nonproprietary formatting scheme called the Extensible Markup Language, or XML, a string of data can be labeled according to type—as, say, a phone number, a price, or a book title. Web software can then harvest the data from a remote site and re-present it to the end user in any way a programmer wishes. That means a company with a trove of data it wants to share need only put it on the public Web and give programmers a few simple tools for accessing it.
By November 2004, the number of developers participating in Amazon Web Services had grown to 65,000. To keep up with their demands, the company has kept updating its APIs to open up more types of product information and more functions, such as wish lists and advanced searches. How many purchases originate each day with Amazon’s growing web of syndicated storefronts? The company won’t say, but experts have estimated that sites using the company’s Web services send 10 million requests a day to Amazon’s servers.Amazon is far from the only company exploring Web services. IBM, for example, has opened its Websphere server software to outside developers and expects to invest $1 billion this year in new business-to-business Web services, according to Michael Liebow, director of Web services for IBM Global Services, the company’s consulting wing. One IBM creation: a system that uses XML and other standards to tie together the disparate databases used by merchants, banks, and credit-card firms, helping to resolve disputed credit-card charges faster. In fact, Web services’ biggest impact may not be the syndication of individual businesses’ information, as in Amazon’s case, but the standardization of business processes across whole industries, such as finance, electronics, or automobiles, according to Liebow. “Amazon is unique,” he says. “It’s kind of a closed system, and there’s a level of control.” That’s true—and Amazon reserves the right to shut down its Web services at any time. But doing so would destroy the rare symbiosis that has emerged from years of careful community building. “Developers are another kind of customer for us,” says Jeff Barr. “The work they do is going to bring even more diverse types of customers.” In other words, by sharing not just its data but also its retailing tools and a modest slice of the profits, Amazon has turned a programming subculture typically ruled by anticorporate suspicion and paranoia into a wellspring of evangelism, not to mention a funnel for revenue. Surely, that’s one for the books. Absolutely amazing - The Amazon Way!! Some say the business model pursued by an enterprise is the crucial determinant of success for the enterprise - That seems to be very true in the case of Amazon as well.
Millions of users now find it hard to imagine life without the internet - without email, instant messaging, web search engines and online trading or gaming. Over the past decade since Online was launched, it's the web that has made the difference. It has made it easier to access all the net's facilities, and encouraged a huge explosion in the number and diversity of websites. With the web still expanding, Guardian has taken the opportunity to ask Online's readers, contributors, and some of the Guardian's journalists to suggest the 100 most useful sites. It is a sign of the vast reach of the web that it was constricting to have to limit coverage to 20 categories with only five sites in each - a lot of great sites have not made the cut.With more and more information coming online, the benefits of being connected can only increase, and in the next decade, few lives will remain untouched by the web.
Category :Blogs
Typepad has unseated blogger.com as our favourite personal publishing tool. Like Blogger, it will also host your site - although you have to pay - but it will let you transfer your own domain name over too. A high level of control over content and layout, plus decent default templates top it off. Statcounter shows who's visiting your site, and helps you understand why they're there. Technorati lets you see who's linking to you. Blogdex shows what the blog community is obsessing about. Once you've mastered writing a blog, start the radio version with iPodder.org
Typepad Statcounter Technorati Blogdex Ipodder.org
Category :Buying and Selling
The theory used to be that the net let you spend less time shopping, freeing you up for more interesting stuff. Now it's become clear that the net has drawn many into the shopping experience more deeply. EBay remains the most amusing place to browse. The small sellers in Amazon's Marketplace are great for tracking down deleted/out of print items. The shopping search site Kelkoo allows you to research products, compare prices and find out if the stores are signed up with the Isis (Internet Shopping is Safe) trust mark scheme. The Apple iTunes Music Store could do with some tweaking pricewise, but it still looks like the future of music retail. For offbeat gifts and early adopter gizmos try Josh Rubin's Cool Hunting blog.
ebay Amazon Kelkoo Apple Joshrubin
Category :Community
You should be able to find a community for any interest, however niche, on the web - but for geek news, the best port of call is Slashdot. Orkut, a site that lets you communicate with friends of friends has replaced Friendster as the peer network du jour, but those wanting to focus on their local area might visit Craigslist, an eBay-meets-Loot which now has sites for London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin. Del.icio.us is a bookmark manager that lets you store and organise your web favourites and then share the sites you browse with others, while Flickr is an online photo gallery that lets other people look at (and comment on) your pictures
Slashdot Orkut Craiglist Del.ico.us Flickr
Category :Email
Hotmail is the free email service everyone knows. It's also dangerous, because Microsoft will delete all your messages if you don't log on every 30 days. However, it's an obvious choice for people who use Microsoft Messenger, MSN Spaces (Microsoft's new blogging service), and Internet Explorer, because they all work together. But if you just want web-based email, go for Yahoo. It is cleaner and faster, and you can forward email to a phone or pager. Yahoo only provides 100 megabytes of free space, whereas Hotmail provides 250MB, and Google's Gmail a gigabyte (1GB). One drawback with Gmail is that you cannot sign up: you have to be invited. My first choice is Bluebottle. It's free, it offers 250MB of storage, and as well as web access, it supports POP3 and Imap, so you can use a proper email program from copy.
(via apnews) Broadband use at home has surpassed that of dial-up in the United States, reaching 53 percent of residential Web users in October, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. For now, what people do online hasn't changed as much as its frequency and duration, although some people are beginning to make telephone calls on the Internet or use cheap webcams for video chatting. Surveys from the Pew Internet and American Life Project find that 69 percent of broadband users go online on a typical day, compared with 51 percent for dial-up. Broadband users who went online averaged 107 minutes surfing the Web, checking e-mail and otherwise engaged, 21 minutes longer than dial-up users. Taking advantage of their always-on connection, they practice "infosnacking."
- Telephone books? Gathering dust on the shelf.
- Atlases? What are they?
- Communal behavior also is tempered by the broadband effect.
Family members arguing a point over dinner are more apt, if they have broadband, to "look it up online rather than continue to yell at each other," said Lee Rainie, Pew's director. TiVo Inc. had such networks in mind in designing features for its popular digital video recorder. Already, users can schedule recordings online - from the office, say. But unless they have broadband, the updates can take up to a day to make. TiVo is soon expected to launch a service that lets users move recorded programs to laptops. In the future, TiVo spokeswoman Kathryn Kelly said, users will be able to send programs to other recorders they own, in a vacation home, for instance. Microsoft Corp. recommends broadband for its PCs running Windows XP Media Center Edition, which lets users view photos and movies on regular TVs or listen on a stereo system to music stored on a hard drive.
Content creators, meanwhile, find the broadband audience now big enough to make it worthwhile to produce resource-hungry features. Amazon.com commissioned five short films to view for free at its site this holiday season. Americans are hardly pioneers, however, in embracing broadband. The United States trailed 12 of the 15 top economies, including Canada, in broadband penetration, according to a September report from U.N. International Telecommunication Union analyzing 2003 data. dvSouth Korea topped the list at more than double the U.S. rate. Broadband helped spur a social and political renaissance in South Korea, where thousands of citizens contribute to an alternative news site called OhmyNews,shaking the traditional media and political establishments. In sixth-ranked Denmark, Internet-based telephones have become popular as they allow customers to avoid per-minute local phone charges, said John Strand, a telecommunications consultant in Copenhagen.
Broadband does have its share of headaches. Computers now stay connected 24 hours a day, extending the window of exploitability by hackers. And with only one or two companies in many markets controlling the main pipelines into the home, consumer advocates fear they might give preferential treatment to content from business partners, or make competitors' content difficult to find or slow to load.
Paul Saffo at the Institute for the Future has pointed out that in a two-year period, less happens than we would have thought, and in a ten-year period, more happens than we could have ever imagined. That fits here. If you have 10 years, wow, what change ahead. The mismatch is that 99.842% of investors ain't got 10 years to wait around, and the revolution ain't happening inside two years. Then why are we so negative about the short-term 'revolution' of something like the entertainment PC, and so positive about the long-term fate for the exact same thing? Because of changing demographics. This is an incredibly important issue that offers long-term hope for a significant IT spending resumption a little ways down the road. The demographics will change, and the world will change.
Marc Prensky in Games2Train classified two types of people'digital natives' and 'digital immigrants'. It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today's students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors." Here we're adding a third, larger group: 'analogists.'
For simplicity, we classify anyone in a developed nation who's under 25 as a digital native. Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Labs said "You don't need to teach kids to be digital. They are digital". The next category is digital immigrants. For some reason—perhaps either economic or social—these over-25-year-olds choose to become digital people.
Analogists have three characteristics:
• They are over (somewhat arbitrary) 25-year-old barrier
• They are terrified of any whiff of technology, and
• They are abundant
Today, the vast bulk of the purchasing power and of the corporate power reside in the hands of analogists who are terrified of technology. But again, 'So what?' Well, the demographics will change, and the world will change. If you want to sell a lot of something today, you'd better consider how to sell it to the analogists, and not the far smaller crowd of digitalists. Mobile phones have a 640 million run rate—640 million! Whereas iPod has approximately an eight million run rate. There's nothing wrong with 8 million users, but is it a revolution today? Not yet, though it's a great start. Analogists—contrary to even the analogist-sensitive Walt Mossberg articles in the Wall Street Journal every Thursday—do not view the iPod as simple. They view it as complex and scary. They're thinking, "How do you do this loading of my CDs on to the PC, and then downloading to the thingy, and how are the song titles classified and do I have to spend time labeling and how will I find The Beatles in the music store thingamajiggy...? Help, where's my kid?"The mobile phone has a much lower level of perceived pain of adoption. It was a simpler extension of what folks already did. The mobile phone doesn't represent the digital revolution, but the iPod does. The iPod is irresistible to the media—as are many other items in the digital revolution toolkit. The masses shall use them in large numbers..
Ten years from now, the digital natives will be everyone under 35, so the group's purchasing power will go up. And, less obviously—but perhaps even more importantly—the analogists will be immigrating to the digital world at record rates. Just as it is hard today to find a CRT display in Tokyo's Akihabara electronics district, ten years from now it will be hard to find someone fessing up to being scared of technology. Why? Imagine the perceived social and economic crisis of an assertion like "Poor Joe, he's still afraid of technology." Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to "serious" work.In the all-important enterprise, the 35-year-old types will be running lots of meetings and setting the culture. That will be a big change. Here's a little mental exercise if you wish: Imagine the degree of digital acumen in a typical meeting of eight to nine business folks today. Got it? Okay, good. Now think of the digital acumen in a similar meeting, but 10 years ago. Lot less digital acumen goin' round, huh? A whole lot less. Finally, imagine the digital acumen in a similar—perhaps virtual—meeting 10 years from now. If that difference between now and 10 years ago was 2x (whatever that means), the difference with 10 years from now will be 10x. Will a 47-year-old looking at a typical life span of 85 years start thinking about becoming a digital immigrant, and the consequences of not doing so? Definitely, to avoid that "Poor Joe got fired, he's still afraid of technology" risk. Back at the shopping counter, ten years from now, will the populace-at-large easily be able to absorb TiVos, iPods, Entertainment PCs, Webcams, home servers, and downloadable first-run movies that are sensitive to digital rights management issues? Oh yeah, and a whole lot more besides. Will there be a 10-year digital revolution? Absolutely, that's the great news.The bad news for investor types is that there probably isn't anything to be done to have this demographic reshaping occur within the next two years.
-The app provides functionality many businesses need, but isn’t terribly different from one company to the next.
-The service allows customization, but the SaaS model prevents clients from doing too much reinvention. This saves money and grief. It also encourages best practices.
-The service brings together information from several sources and presents it to the user in a friendly, web-based interface.
Hosted services are easier to get running, partially because of the limited customization potential but also because there’s no hardware to buy and no software to install.
-There’s also no software to manage, fix, upgrade, etc. All that is the responsibility of the vendor. Customers get a semi-custom application without having to hire developers and people to keep it running.
SaaS costs are predictable and typically usage-based.
-If the vendor doesn’t meet your needs, there usually is no long-term commitment and it’s easy to switch. This keeps SaaS vendors responsive.
-It's true that most hosted services use a single copy of their software to serve all their customers, providing only configuration options to do "customization."However, some hosted services, create a distinct copy of the system for each customer. This allows the system to be 100% customizable for each customer.Support for a hosted application or ASP is moe convenient, than in-house developed software. For many organizations it is more efficient to spend the time customizing the program than building from scratch. Leaves you with one place to blame. As we get more and more standard platforms, integrating a hosted software service with another should be come easier. For example mating payroll systems, HR systems and expense reports and time slips for service organizations. Of course the joining of CRM, help desk and technical support applications are also a logical progression.
-we shall see some joining of CRM application with web meeting platforms, to make it easy to send out login info, set up demos and webinars from one program. From here you can manage which prospects came from your webinar, virtual tradeshow and so on. Combining these platforms with the marketing program management would be a logical next step.
-The problem with any locally hosted data or software on the current OS platforms is that it greatly increases the complexity and cost to maintain the solution. Conflicts arise for each platform and between vendors software packages and security and privacy issues abound, all increasing costs ( which is why we have remotely hosted ASPs in the first place ). One solution is to use standardised virtualized plaform, which is where "Twelve Step TrustABLE IT" comes in...
-For the price of a modest server, hosting Virtualized Standard Based Linux, the enterprise could host many virtualised linux systems, each instance dedicated to and remotely maintained by the application service provider. Because each vendor's virtual server will be appear to be identical, the ASP vendor can effectively maintain thousands of remote servers.
In Google-land, search is no longer just about locating Internet Web pages. The 2005 mantra for the world's most popular search engine is "bringing more information you want." "One of the important issues with search is, if we don't have it in our index, we can't return an answer," says Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The company is now worth nearly $50 billion. Putting more information into its mammoth index was the impetus for Google's recent groundbreaking deal to digitize five huge library collections, including the New York Public Library, Stanford and Oxford. Many of the books should be scanned and available for reading online by early next year. But Google's expansion plans go way beyond dusting off old books and making them available to the masses. In the past few months, Google has added several offerings that seemingly have nothing to do with search, including, desktop search engine,
free photo editing and sharing tools, free blogging tools, free news and news alerts, free SMS query engine.
With all these digital tools — plus a popular e-mail program and links to news sites — don't tell executives here at the "Googleplex" in Silicon Valley that Google is becoming a Web portal, like Yahoo and MSN. For years, Google has said its focus was simply on search. Executives, often in language that can only be described as Google-speak, insist it still is. Google's expansion plans are a natural part of the growing-up process. Danny Sullivan cites the success of Google's wildly popular text-based advertising program as fuel for the expansion. Even if Google adds products that have little to do with search, they potentially "bring more people to Google, the site gets bigger, and they have more people to show their ads to."
Perhaps Google's most acclaimed innovation of the year was the October launch of software that hunts for files on a computer's hard drive. Competitors had to scramble to catch up. Microsoft and Ask Jeeves introduced desk-top search programs last week, and Yahoo says it will have one in January.Desk-top search is another way for Google to keep users loyal for more hours a day. The same theory applies to Google's entry into free digital-photo software. How Google will make money giving away software that used to cost $30 "is the number one question I get," says Picasa general manager Lars Perkins. Digital photography is so popular, "Google wants to be in the middle of how we manage this kind of content," Perkins says. "We'll figure out how to monetize it later." This is really a unique case of business philosophy.
Booz Allen asked distinguished scholars from respected universities across the United States to identify Enduring Institutions from an unrestricted field of worldwide public and private organizations.Their mandate was to create a definitive list of two in each of five categories based on seven specific criteria. While vastly diverse in origin, mission and size, the finalists share a common trait of having stood the test of time over decades, even centuries. Explained Dr. Ralph W. Shrader, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Booz Allen Hamilton, "An Enduring Institution is one that has changed and grown in unswerving pursuit of success and relevance — yet remained true through time to its founding principles."The ten institutions chosen within each category are:
Academic Institutions — Dartmouth College; Oxford University Arts and Entertainment — The Modern Olympic Games; the Rolling Stones Business and Commerce — General Electric; Sony Government Institutions — American Constitution; International Telecommunication Union Nonprofit Organizations — The Salvation Army; the Rockefeller Foundation.
Each institution is recognized for its unique abilities to meet or exceed seven specific criteria for an Enduring Institution:
Innovative capabilities — The capacity to create and modify strategies based on market opportunities and threats.
Governance and leadership — A leadership structure and senior management team that promote an organization-wide commitment to enterprise resilience.
Information flow — A continual flow of information regarding an organization's operations and markets that is evaluated by senior management in making strategic decisions.
Culture and values — A working environment in which the adaptive qualities required for enterprise resilience are cultivated.
Adaptive response — The ability to withstand operational disruptions, market risks and other threats without significantly compromising an organization's effectiveness.
Risk structure — A system for managing risk that doesn't encumber or limit an organization's operations.
Legitimacy — The undisputed, withstanding credibility of an organization within its market.The quality of innovative capabilities is exemplified by all ten organizations but perhaps most notably by General Electric, which has clearly mastered innovation by instilling in its employees a keen ability to sense demographic trends and integrate them with population information to create a diversified product line. Indeed, GE has made research and development a foundation for a company-wide culture of innovation. At GE, there is an expectation innovation will permeate all businesses of the organization, from production and manufacturing to even billing.
Sony is equally an innovator, with a long, distinguished record of stretching product development beyond what is immediately required and extending its innovative capabilities beyond development into unique product promotions. With its flat organizational structure, Sony aggressively encourages innovative ideas no matter where they come from in the company.
Enduring Institutions are similarly noteworthy for their adaptive response, and the American Constitution is an ingeniously adaptable institution, crafted to at once reflect — and if necessary subsequently reject — the temperament of the citizenry at any given point in history. It is not only the oldest written constitution in the world today, it is arguably the best example of adaptive response in any governmental structure.
Equally nimble at adaptivity, panelists agreed, is a group of working-class kids from provincial areas of Great Britain who formed a band in the early 1960s — The Rolling Stones. Although they offered the world their first Farewell Tour in 1972, their seemingly infinite capacity to reinvent themselves and their music while remaining true to their bad-boy image brilliantly illustrates adaptive response.
Dartmouth College demonstrates by its often-challenged yet ultimately triumphant existence a set of internal systems for managing risk. Dartmouth has literally had to fight for survival from its earliest days, time and again emerging a stronger, more viable institution whether facing a legal threat to the college charter, or an internal threat from misguided leadership. Its risk structure has enabled and empowered this institution to survive these crises and emerge the stronger and the better for it.
Effective information flow is a defining characteristic of the Rockefeller Foundation. This Enduring Institution has taken deliberate steps to ensure its trustees get fresh and insightful advice about how best to plan the future direction of the organization. The Foundation has consistently sought out accomplished generalists to lead the organization, critical as a means of insuring uncorrupted information flow from the outside world into the organization.
Another organization notable for its effective information flow is the International Telecommunication Union, founded nearly a century and a half ago in Paris. Bringing together representatives from national governments and the private sector, the ITU exemplifies internally what it represents externally — as a facilitator of information and communication technologies infrastructure. Absent this strong system of information flow, it would have long ago lost the adaptability that has enabled it to respond effectively to changing political and economic conditions that characterize its environment and the ever-changing technologies it seeks to regulate.
The leadership structure of an Enduring Institution must promote an organization-wide commitment to enterprise resilience. The Olympics, revived in 1894 by Pierre de Coubertin, is governed by just such a structure in the form of the Olympic Organizing Committee. Its broad mission is to ensure continuity of the universal event, and in spite of threats from over-commercialization and corruption, the IOC has been able to rely on its unique governance structure to pull through these storms. Because members of the IOC serve as representatives of the Olympics within their respective countries, they are granted the independence necessary to ensure decisions are made in the best interest of the Games, not any individual country.
While culture and values necessary for endurance are readily apparent in all ten organizations, one, The Salvation Army, is iconic in its ability to motivate and inspire its workforce. The Salvation Army's skill is in creating the culture and expressing the values that make its own endurance possible. As an "army" it broadcasts this culture through simple but effective practices, such as the readily recognizable uniform it asks volunteers and workers to wear.
The final quality supporting and defining endurance is legitimacy, and each Enduring Institution clearly meets this test, none more than Great Britain's centuries-old Oxford University. With its highly decentralized administrative and academic structure, its legacy of conservatism and its centuries-old traditions, Oxford exudes legitimacy.
(Via Dan Gilmor) WalMart is pursuing its own Linux strategy, retail-style, with desktop computers and now this laptop model. For under $500 you can get a well-equipped machine with both the OS and OpenOffice. Walmart's aggressive push of linux based desktops and laptops could mount a new challenge to windows monopoly.
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( Via Roland Piquepaille ), Helene Zampetakis, writing in MISweb asserts than in 10 to 15 years, we'll be unable to use today's technologies to build electronic devices always smaller and more powerful. Instead, three disruptive technologies will converge and deeply change our lives: nanotechnology, sensors and wireless technology. The article explains how this will influence molecular computing or quantum information processing and also describes future advances in robotics, including nanobots. And the transportation industry will welcome the arrival of skycars, which are under development today. But will we travel anymore when holographic videoconferencing tools will be available? Excerpts with edits and my comments added:
A trio of disruptive technologies will converge over the next five to 15 years to overtake our incumbent systems and create new competencies that will profoundly change the way we organise our lives and the way we do business.The driving principles behind modern technology are running out of steam: it is becoming prohibitively costly to continue to shrink technology, while Moore's Law, which postulates the doubling of computer power every 18 months, is reaching its physical limits under current processes. By 2015 we will be hard pressed to use today's techniques to make devices increasingly smaller and more powerful.
-'Embedded Connectivity' a new area will draw strength from nanotechnology, sensors and wireless technology. The embedded world of the future will harness the power of billions of microprocessors on a single device, wirelessly connected to others, that can read the environment and react accordingly. Scientists portray a future in which we attach these devices to our bodies to communicate, set them loose on our streets to do menial tasks, and embed them in the commonplace objects of our lives to address our daily requirements.
The underlying foundation for this new era of embedded connectivity is nanotechnology, which is based on the manipulation of molecules less than 100 nanometres in size. At one millionth the size of a millimetre or 1/100,000th the diameter of a human hair, and roughly five times the size of an atom, a nanometre (nm) is the measuring unit for the basic building block of the future.
- Nanorobots will eventually construct materials atom by atom to create products that do anything from surveillance to in vitro navigation.
- You can see flying cars priced at less than US$100,000 using automated functionality based on NASA's EquiPT (Easy-to-use, quiet Personal Transportation) technology set.The obstacle in using has been the intensity of training required to fly them, so automation is critical. The goal is to have the vehicle controlled by a computerised brain that senses and responds to weather conditions or other crafts in the vicinity, and compensates for technical failures.
- Videoconferencing : The synergy of vastly increased bandwidth, three-dimensional video projection and interactive holography systems is expected to change the way we collectively communicate.
Business technology on the move :The top five expected changes in business technology in next five to 10 years.
- Service oriented architecture: Software will become a service. Web services applications will automatically be directed to other application services through standard interfaces, creating system-to-system communication.
- Utility computing: Enterprises will increasingly opt for a pay-as-you-go model of technology. They will pay fees on a transaction basis for functions such as storage, processing and managed security.
- Virtualisation:Advances in virtualisation and policy based management tools will help organisations manage multiple devices from a single product. These tools will be policy based so that management can be automated.
- Wireless mobility:Between 10 per cent and 15 per cent of enterprises use wireless technology today but that figure will be closer to 75 per cent in three years' time, says Gartner's Bob Hayward. Wireless devices will become cheaper, handle greater bandwidth and consume less battery power, especially because of advances in screen technology.
- Metadata tools: The average enterprise captures 30 per cent more data every year from wired and wireless activities, says Hayward. Enterprises will be leveraging this surge with business intelligence tools that probe and analyse these vast repositories to extract more information about the data.
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Cheap disk drives make it possible to store every piece of data your company creates. Billions, trillions, even quadrillions of bytes are piling up in computer centers. What to do with it all? Forty-five thousand slot machines generate $4 billion in annual revenue for Harrah's Entertainment, the world's largest casino operator. But that's only part of their job. With each push of the button, each swipe of the casino's loyalty card, these noisy bandits also gather information, zipping records of their 100 million daily spins across the Internet from 28 casinos to a computer in. By morning Harrah's knows which customers should be rewarded with free show tickets, dinner vouchers or room upgrades, enticing them to spend more of their gambling dollars in Harrah's rather than in rival casinos. The company is working to shrink this information loop to a matter of minutes. "We can see how much money is going through a machine, and how frequently it pays out, and how much it pays out, and what type of player is on it, male or female, and what age they are," says Tim S. Stanley, chief information officer at Harrah's in Las Vegas. "It's no different from what a good retailer or grocery store does. We're trying to figure out which products sell, and we're trying to increase our customer loyalty." Companies are always hoping to figure out what makes their customers tick, but never before have they been able to do it on the scale possible today. Casinos, retailers, airlines and banks are piling up volumes so vast it would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Harrah's data storehouse holds 30 terabytes, or 30 trillion bytes, of data, roughly three times the number of printed characters in the Library of Congress.
"A decade ago the biggest data centers in the U.S. had 10 terabytes of storage, and there were only five or ten of them, today there are enterprises with 2 or 3 petabytes," says Gil Press, senior director , EMC. Visa, the credit card company, manages more than a petabyte, or 1,000 terabytes. EMC says one of its biggest customers, a global retailer, expects to buy 3 petabytes of capacity this year (not all from EMC). Two years ago the same company bought 300 terabytes. It's the curse of cheap storage. All that customer data is out there, and it seems a shame to throw it away. But doing something with it is almost beyond the reach of the available microprocessors and database software. How do you scroll through a spreadsheet 1 billion rows deep? "The situation we're in is like having a dam that's filling up with water, getting bigger and bigger, and we're trying to get water out of it with a straw," says James Gray, manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center, where scientists are studying ways to speed things up. Storage shipments this year will top 22 exabytes-or 22 million trillion bytes-of hard disk space, says market researcher IDC. That is four times the space needed to store every word ever spoken by every human being who has ever lived, and it's more than double the amount sold in 2002. By 2006 storage shipments will nearly double again, IDC estimates. Demand for storage is so strong that even with prices plunging 35% a year, storage hardware makers EMC and Network Appliance will grow 30% this year, six times the rate of the overall data processing market. "Companies want to look at all the data. They want atomic-level data," says Sanju K. Bansal, chief operating officer at MicroStrategy , whose software analyzes vast databases, looking for customer trends. "Instead of analyzing data at a weekly level and a category level and a regional level-say, sales of men's socks in one week in all the stores in Virginia-now retailers are looking at gold-toe socks by Calvin Klein, in black, size 8, in every store, and by the hour. A decade ago our biggest customers were analyzing 10 gigabytes at a time. Today more than a third of our customers are using data sets that are larger than a terabyte," Bansal says. As data repositories grow larger, even simple chores like backup and recovery become a giant pain in the neck. "Managing all this stuff in an effective way is just enormously difficult to do," says Scott Thompson, chief information officer at Visa, the credit card company. "We're processing a billion transactions a day. And every one of those gets stored. That's why our storage keeps on growing. You're talking about very large data sets. Just backing them up becomes very difficult." This year Visa's network will process transactions worth $1.7 trillion, up 55% from $1.1 trillion in 2002. Much of the new volume comes from commercial purchases that are more data rich, carrying more than just dollars spent. Last year Visa built a data warehouse that produces 15,000 reports a day based on billions of rows of data, examining statistics on things such as fraud and chargebacks. At Premier, an alliance of 200 hospitals headquartered in San Diego, some queries were so complex that the company's IBM system couldn't return an answer in any amount of time. "Users would be frustrated. We had all this data, but it was useless," says Gary Feierstein, vice president of information technology at Premier. In 2003 Premier took a flyer on a Boston-area startup called Netezza whose specialized box zips through data 15 times as fast as Premier's IBM system, Feierstein says, enabling managers to query away to their heart's content. No wonder Netezza is on a growth spurt . Teradata, a division of NCR in Dayton, Ohio, made the multimillion-dollar machines running the world's biggest data warehouses, for customers like Wal-Mart, Bank of America and Verizon Wireless. Teradata boasts that it is stealing customers from IBM and Oracle, whose products, Teradata says, were designed to handle online transaction processing. "Customers try to use them for data warehousing, and they hit a brick wall," says Stephen Brobst, chief technology officer at Teradata. Its sales grew 11% in the first nine months of this year to $949 million, double the rate of the overall infotech industry.
The Teradata setup for Harrah’s, chugs through hundreds of jobs each day, analyzing 18 terabytes of data streamed in from 28 casinos around the country. The Teradata system helps Harrah's decide where on the floor to place its slot machines, which machines it should buy more of and even how much it should pay for them. A piece of visualization software generates a dynamic "heat map" of a casino floor. Machines glow red as they get busy, then turn blue, or white, as the action moves elsewhere. Because 75% of its 250,000 daily customers use a rewards program card, the casino can track them as they gamble, learning how long they spend at a certain machine, how often they visit a casino and for how many days. Harrah's keeps records on 30 million people and can combine those records with slot records to find out which games are most popular with women, or with tourists or with locals, or how much a certain person won or lost on recent visits and on which machines, and how long he usually plays before calling it quits. Harrah's claims that its loyalty program has boosted its share of customers' gambling budgets from 36% a few years ago to nearly 50%. Harrah's next ambition is to make these calculations in real time, from the moment a customer slips his rewards card into a slot machine or shows it to the front desk clerk at the hotel check-in. "The hotel clerk can see your history and determine whether you should get a room upgrade, based on booking levels in the hotel at that time and on your past level of play," Stanley says. "A person might walk up to you while you're playing and offer you $5 to play more slots, or a free meal, or maybe just wish you a happy birthday." If Harrah's planned $9 billion acquisition of Caesars Entertainment goes through, Stanley says he might need to double his Teradata system to handle Caesar's volume. He may double his Teradata system next year anyway, deal or no deal. "You just have this endless desire to put more information into the warehouse and to do more with what's already in there." |
Ventoro has released a detailed 2005 offshoring strategy framework report. The report based on extensive research including interviews with more than 6000 executives makes good reading. The report amongst other things focusses on issues like:
- What does it take to be an offshore outsourcing or offshoring success story?
- What are the critical success factors you need to know?
- Are there any tips or tricks that will help you plan, implement, manage and tune a successful offshore outsourcing or offshoring strategy?
A good read for those considering offshoring or involved in offshore service provider selection process.
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John Udell in his weekly infoworld column writes, The blog network is malleable and is shaped by our use of it.He argues that the blog network filters and retransmits knowledge is a way that approximates a human nervous system or insects acting as a cooperative group. As a proof point he notes that he subscribers to more people than publications, knowing that people will alert him if a publication contain important information. Thus, a subconscious facility of the blog network is that it can help filter the crush of information. Excerpts with edits and my views added:
It’s more like a nervous system than a computer network, and for good reason. The crush of information we process every day creates a terrible dilemma. On the one hand, we must conserve the scarce resource of attention. On the other hand, we need to become aware of everything that matters. It’s a tricky balancing act, but one that nature’s humblest creatures have adroitly mastered.We can’t say exactly how the trick is done, but we understand the basics: a network, a message-passing protocol, nodes that aggregate inputs and produce outputs. The blog network shares these architectural properties. Its foundation network is the Web; its protocol is RSS; its nodes are bloggers. These ingredients combine in ways that are not yet widely appreciated.
Consider how one's own inputs have evolved over the past five years. At one time, the RSS intake were mostly feeds from conventional published sources, along with a few from individuals. Now it’s the reverse. One subscribes to people more than to publications, and not because the information has more value in those publications -- but rather because, outside of the realms in which one is closely involved, the job can be delegated to tracking primary sources to people whose interests and inclinations qualify them to do so.
The blog network is made of people. We are the nodes, actively filtering and retransmitting knowledge. Clearly this architecture can help manage the glut of information. More subtly, it can also help ensure that no vital inputs are suppressed because nobody has to rely on a single source. If one of the feeds monitored doesn’t react to some event in a given domain, another probably will. When they all react,one knows it was an especially important event.Ideas ping around the blog network like firing neurons. One node takes an input, gets excited, processes the idea in the context of its experiences and comes to a conclusion. Other nodes do the same. And ideas are discussed and developed like a conscious thought.The resemblance of this model to the summing of activation potentials in a neural system is more than superficial. Nature knows best. Well said John.. |
( Via ZDnet). The horizontal economy is based on recent advances in technology - in telecom, computing and processes. In Part 1 of this series, we saw the potential for horizontal economy and horizontal integration across enteprises. In the early days of computing, there were a few vertically integrated companies that provided everything from the raised floor and air conditioning to the behemoth computers and punch cards. Then, horizontal integration came along -- in which enterprises built solutions out collections of hopefully best-of-breed products from different vendors. Now we are entering a phase in which a few companies will rule enterprise computing, each with a suite of pre-integrated functionality that promises to dramatically reduce integration and administration costs. Cisco, IBM, HP, Oracle, SAP, Sun, and others, are leading the move toward more integration. Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC (which acquired several companies), tells Dan Farber of ZDnet,the current shifting landscape as a movement toward matrixed integration. "We've figured out some of the complexity," Tucci said. "It's not vertical or horizontal stripes--it's both. There is also the rule of "three"--the number one company gets the majority of the revenue. There will be big time winners and big losers." In other words, if you don't get big fast, you will be left behind. If you are swift, small and innovative, you'll likely get scooped up by a big fish. Companies in the middle will have the hardest time surviving in the current consolidation phase.
Oracle wants to provide the application and data infrastructure stack. IBM, although it doesn't have applications, offers everything else, but also profits from the complexity of IT with its consulting services. Computer Associates is everything management--systems, storage, security, business intelligence, lifecycle management and data management. Symantec and Veritas will (eventually, they hope) develop a comprehensive, integrated suite that knits together security, systems and storage management. And, the merged company is likely seeking other acquisitions to bring into the fold to fill out its stack. For IT buyers, the rampant consolidation has a good and bad side. Fewer vendors mean fewer choices and possibly more lock-in and less price elasticity. On the other hand, a matrix of easily integrated IT infrastructure that you buy or apply pay-as-you-go pricing is a reflection of the commoditization of the data center. You have fewer vendors to deal with (how many phone companies do you work with?) and, theoretically, fewer integration headaches.
IT over the next decade is not about creating the most ideal, customized solution it s about delivering application services and meeting service levels. Any customization happens within the applications themselves or at the fringes, rather than in the infrastructure data center core. You shouldn't have to care what servers or software stack are running. Not all of the standards-based hardware and software stacks that vendors are building will be the same, but the basic ingredients won't differ much. They will address different IT problems depending on what they have in their stack. And, like any stack--a structure like a skyscraper that has different, integrated layers--the solution will only be as effective as its weakest parts. And, over the long term, it will only be effective if it is built to survive the next major tectonic plate shift in IT. IT is really witnessing major transformation and shall look very different moving forward - significant shift is underway now. |
( Via ZDnet). The horizontal economy is based on recent advances in technology - in telecom, computing and processes. In the late 1930s, economist Ronald Coase (later to win the Nobel prize) wrote an influential paper examining why firms tend to keep some activities in-house, yet rely on an open market of suppliers and partners for other things. Coase learned that "transaction costs" – the costs associated with coordinating and collaborating with outside firms – often were just too high. Under the circumstances, vertical integration made perfect sense. Unfortunately, it often tended to undermine entrepreneurialism, replacing it with excessive rules and schlerotic corporate bureaucracy. Much has changed since then. New technologies of communication, information and transportation have radically reduced transaction costs. Now, it’s possible for companies such as Dell Computer and Procter & Gamble to tout "virtual integration" – a business strategy focused on building dynamic relationships with partners and suppliers. As David Moschella notes in his impressive book Customer-Driven IT, Web services have the potential to go way beyond today’s focus on internal IT integration and leverage to drive far-reaching new waves of collaborative commerce. Imagine purchasing business processes and services on the Web – often, in real-time – much as we now purchase books from Amazon and tickets from Travelocity. "The real change, if it is to come, will have to be in the fundamental structure of companies and even the economy itself," he writes. "Many Web services advocates have argued that by increasing the flow of information and lowering transaction costs, the Web will eventually create a much more specialized horizontal economy in the United States and other technologically advanced nations. According to this scenario, longer, more integrated value chains will become the dominant economic pattern as specific business processes evolve into specialized third-party offerings."
HP's Carly Fiorina expands this thought, "Value in this era of technology is delivered horizontally. Not in vertical silos", the ’80s and the ’90s was the era in which value was created with vertical organizations and technology was implemented vertically. Vertically by division, by department, by application, by process. Content was connected to very specific devices or infrastructures were connected to very specific applications. But stand-alone islands of technology no longer drive sufficient value. And you can look in any industry, any part of government or society and what everyone is talking about is the requirement for silos to begin to interact and interoperate. Silos can’t interact and interoperate unless the technology does. And so today, it’s about making a heterogenous world work together and speak a common language. It’s about connecting up what was not connected before. And this is not just about networking devices. It’s about networking businesses and companies and employees and suppliers to customers. And getting those silos to talk to each other. It is now about horizontal value creation, not vertical."
Fiorina then goes on to apply this concept, quite specifically, to service-oriented IT: "You have to increase the business value of IT by delivering it as a service to the enterprise. That means you have to have a complete view of your whole IT environment – from business processes to applications to infrastructure and the tools to manage and control the whole environment in real-time…The answer to these challenges is a service-oriented environment that is tightly and dynamically tied to business requirements. That is managed as a single, globally distributed resource. That is powered by modular, standards-based components. And that draws on virtualized systems that can scale up or down to meet shifting business demands." Part II shall follow.
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EPCglobal announces the much anticipated completion of the UHF Generation 2 air interface protocol as an EPCglobal standard. With the Generation 2 standard now in place, technology providers will create products that will meet the requirements of suppliers, manufacturers, and end users; and industries as a whole can drive EPC implementation with standards-based equipment. The protocol is the technical framework on which all future products can be built, including tags, readers and other technology. The announcement follows successful testing of prototypes from several technology providers, which illustrated that the ratified standard can meet the EPCglobal community end user requirements, as well as final determination that all intellectual property presented on a licensed basis during the standards development process was not necessary to the standard. Commercially available products are expected the first half of 2005. This is the new standard for RFID tags favoured by both the US Department of Defense and the supermarket giant Wal-Mart for passive RFID tags working at Ultra High Frequencies of between 860Mhz and 960MHz. This promises faster reading of tags at greater ranges than the current generation of RFID tags which have been tested in various warehouse and, more controversially, supermarket shelf trials.
Here is a new perspectiveThis is a global standard that uses frequency and power in a way that complies with the major regional regulatory environments. In addition to improvements in security of the data on the tag, the standard includes the ability to lock the identification fields in the tag, so that they can't be spoofed or changed without a password. It also includes a strong kill mechanism, so retailers and others have the option of automatically erasing all data from the tag as it passes through a reader. However, the standard does not allow for encryption, because one of the user requirements for the standard was that the tags be inexpensive. But security issues will continue to be addressed in the hardware and policy working groups. RFID tags can be thought of as bar codes on steroids. They contain a tiny transponder that, when it comes within distance of a reader, transmits its unique identifier, which can be matched to a database. EPCglobal envisions a unique EPC stored in an RFID tag attached to every item in a supply chain. As the transmission is automatic and doesn't require a line of sight, RFID technology could automate many processes in a supply chain and capture information at new points. Technology research firm IDC considers RFID a disruptive technology, and forecasts the market for related consulting, implementation and managed services to grow by 47 percent in 2004 and reach $2 billion worldwide by 2008. Stratton Sclavos, CEO of VeriSign, the company that won the contract to build the EPCglobal network infrastructure, says that RFID and the electronic product codes they'll contain could transform business as much as the Internet did. "In 1994, it wasn't clear why businesses would use the Internet vs. EDI or private lease lines," he said. "And many of the people who would be the biggest beneficiaries were the biggest naysayers. Right now, people question the value of EPC vs. building all the infrastructure themselves. Once we begin to develop the capabilities, people will wake up and say, 'Wow, that looks like the Internet.'"RFID has certainly crossed the tipping point - we can expect hugr advances in technolog and applications centered around RFID developments for the next five years - RFID product companies( across the spectrum) and professional service companies,well geared with supply chain consultants, RFID application consultants should see huge volume of Business - Without doubt industries employing RFID shall benefit a lot - in terms of increased efficiency and better returns on capital- an index of benefits in many streams like inventory, service levels etc.
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(Via Christian Science Monitor)In a country where nearly every facet of society is controlled, North Korean authorities are encountering a new foe: the cellphone - Mobile phones, which are ubiquitous in China and South Korea, are now infiltrating North Korea and are allowing information into - and out of - the "hermit kingdom." Douglas Shin, a Korean-American minister who has been campaigning for human rights in North Korea, sees the emerging cellphone "revolution" as paralleling, if not abetting, budding dissent against the government. "At first cellphones worked on a narrow band of land along the Chinese border," says Mr. Shin. "Now they can penetrate a great distance." Often, he says, cellphone users must climb a hill or mountain to use them, but still he says it's possible to convey messages that previously would never have penetrated the barriers of a state that bars normal international mail and ordinary telephone calls for all but a privileged few.Many observers say the fact that anyone can hold such long-distance conversations in North Korea could spell trouble for the country's leader, Kim Jong Il.Shin predicts the US government may even use the spread of cellphones to help bring about regime transformation, if not change in North Korea. He predicts that the US in the next two or three years will begin sending cellphones into North Korea, just as it now plans to penetrate the North by smuggling in small radios capable of receiving Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, both official US stations.
It was shortly after the rail disaster last April, that the government imposed a ban on all cellphones. North Korean officials have suggested that the ban was intended to stop saboteurs from plotting against the North Korean regime. Kim - whose train had sped through Ryongchon shortly before two trains collided and blew up, killing several hundred people - is widely believed to have been the target. "If possible, Kim wants mobile phones to disappear in North Korea," says Nishioka Tsutomu, a professor of modern Korean studies at Tokyo Christian University. "But North Korean people do not have enough food. To trade on the black market in China, it is essential to have a mobile phone."Despite the ban, North Koreans have been using cellphones more than ever, according to visitors to the region. Whether crossing the border legally on official business or illegally to procure food and other vital supplies, they routinely rent or purchase phones on the Chinese side, then turn them off and hide them from border guards as they return. Cellphones by now are in common use in Sinuiju, the North Korean city across the Yalu River from Dandong, the major Chinese center through which China does much of its trade with the North. They're also widely used along the Tumen River border in the east, and advances in technology now mean callers can occasionally reach contacts as far south as the capital, Pyongyang.
It was only last year that North Korea legalized cellphones, at least among the elite in the capital, after they had been in use illegally for several years. Now that they are illegal again, the only people who can use them legally are high-level officials and the political police.Clearly, "something strange is going on in North Korea," says the legislator. "A lot of North Koreans are not happy under dictatorship and are not well off, so loyalty for Kim Jong Il's regime has lessened, and they are beginning to yearn for the outside world. The leadership is having a hard time controlling people through food distributions, prison camps, and executions." Under the circumstances, he says, "cellphones are a threat for the leadership."
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We earlier covered in this blog India Inc. Is Growing Twice as Fast as Japan Inc , wherein we covered the viewpoint of G.B.Prabhat of Satyam saying - "Across every industry spectrum, there is potential for knowledge work to relocate to India." Prabhat now writes,A new diplomacy for Destination India is needed to effectivlely attract global talent, and tap the latent potential. Prabhat,starts by saying ,It is now clear that knowledge work will inexorably continue to relocate to India across various industries, not just Information Technology and that as this trend intensifies, the world can head towards one of two scenarios.
Scenario A: Economic compulsions continue to propel business corporations to send work where it is most efficiently done. Political and social compulsions don't necessarily align with this movement. Large job losses continue in the developed economies, and the social outcry against India becomes vociferous. While economically the Indian is hailed as a smart professional, he is ostracised. Hate groups form against ethnic Indians. "Bangalored" joins the vocabulary of expletives. Western governments take veiled protectionist measures that cause their economic engine, and others, to sputter. Tension prevails in this tug-of-war for jobs.
However, a new diplomacy can remedy Scenario A. It will take hard work but will lead to the more desirable Scenario B.
India needs to markets itself as an attractive work destination for foreign nationals. The emerging economic order need to seen as a relocation of jobs across the globe and not as the loss of jobs in one economy to the gain of jobs in another. India should embrace all developed nationalities to evolve a new professional melting pot which attracts the best professionals from all over the world and emphasise the better quality of life in India. A good number of foreign nationals move to India to work, and outsourcing is no longer seen as inimical to any country. Relieved of tension, corporations assign more than the planned quantum of work to India. More Indians, than foreseen before, find employment. The new diplomacy begins with the idea that jobs relocate and are not always lost.This new diplomacy has to gently remind the governments of developed countries that there can never be a globalisation with the movement of just capital and work. Movement of labour is just as necessary to sustain the new world order. Indians need not be worried about job loss due to this migration as the number of foreigners shall be small, economic power vastly exceeds political power that the forces to fear would be large companies, not large countries and no country will win by insularity. The economic dominance of America is largely due to the fact that it was most liberal in admitting foreign professionals.
How to put this new diplomacy to action? Much the same way a large corporation markets itself, India needs to :
- First, by implementing some changes that make the new proposition attractive.
- Next, by communicating its virtues and aggressively campaigning to its intended audience so they turn votaries.
India can be made attractive by addressing the twin aspects - physical and emotional health. A number of attractions of physical convenience already exist, albeit undersold. supply of domestic help, clement weather,(save for such exceptions as California) suffer from extreme weather. More and more Indian residential colonies resemble the best in the world. Telecommunications now work as well as anywhere else in the world. Designer labels are everywhere. For sure, a number of infrastructure elements need dramatic improvement. Airports, Cities,Road infrastructure etc.. Twin metros need to be built alongside existing cities. The emotional security of employees will be higher than the previous world average. No one employed in India needs to worry about job availability. The cost and efficiency arbitrage of the current India will ensure that it will be a long time before knowledge-based white-collar jobs that migrated from elsewhere will leave this country. A far less stressful life, with less attendance in psychiatric clinics and emotional well-being programmes, would be an important part of the desiderata of the average westerner.Prabhat concludes by saying that given its overarching nature, this diplomacy has to inform every policy: economic, political, educational or foreign. The challenge of building this new India would energise the country as a whole.. .
Can't agree more - Key issues to note, as much as the demand gets forecast in terms of nature and volume of offshoring, the fulfillment mechanism must be well geared and shall not happen just by chance hoping the vast pool of talent available would help meet the demand. Meeting this scale of demand needs far more planning and nay,as highlighted far more concerted planning,timely and efficient implementation. This is far more challenging than it looks as the ability of India Inc to thing big and effectively execute in time mega projects like twin cities is a cause for concern, but history and living examples amply demonstrate that this is possible - after all chinese infrastructure began to get developed in the last 20 + years - Today china boasts of more kilometers of expressway than the US!! China has shown how trade can be advanced much in its favour when strong political and social undercurrents were running against it - India is better placed from that perspective, to raise to the occassion and make this happen. |
Companies use as much as 80% of their IT budgets to maintain the status quo. They are often forced to delay investments in innovations that aid growth because they are spending too much of their limited IT budgets on non-strategic activities, such as data center operations, application development and maintenance, and staffing an IT help desk. It doesn’t have to be that way.By 2010, cost savings from offshore outsourcing will create an additional $30B per year in new investments for U.S. companies.
In the next six years, 15% of IT jobs required by U.S.-based companies will be performed in India, AMR Research predicts. By then, the Indian IT labor force will be larger than three million, and half of the workers will be performing jobs for U.S. companies.Companies effectively outsourcing to India can slash by 40% to 50% the cost of application management and development, data center operations, help desk support, and other non-strategic activities. With average U.S. IT fully loaded labor costs approaching $80K per worker per year, a worker in India represents a $36K savings per year, and 1.5 million workers represent $54B in savings each year. Our research shows that companies reinvest 60% of savings from outsourcing in IT or business unit projects,that’s $30B per year.
Companies, on average, invest $2.5M per year for a strategic project. Depending on the specific project category, average investments per year break down as follows:
-Supplier-facing projects—$1.8M
- Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) projects—$2.3M
- Customer-facing projects (the most expensive)—$3.4M
With the savings from outsourcing to India, U.S. companies can fund and launch 12,000 new strategic projects.Outsourcing to India will aid the U.S. economy if the savings from outsourcing continue to be reinvested in new strategic projects. The impact of these new projects can be huge. According to our research into Demand-Driven Supply Networks (DDSNs), investments that allow companies to improve by just 10% their ability to fulfill orders that are complete, accurate, on time, and in perfect condition can result in additional earnings of 50 cents per share—a result that stockholders will applaud.
Part II, shall cover what India Inc needs to do to scale up to meet this demand.
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The paradigm of yesterday is that you have multiple devices, and each one has its own set of information you work with. Your PDA holds your contacts and calendar, which occasionally syncs with Outlook where you also have your email. Your laptop contains your files and presentations that you work with, and your work server contains corporate files. Your home computer contains your digital photos and your private work.What a mess. We keep things consistent through a complicated set of procedures we learn over time: sync your PDA daily, enter numbers into your phone, copy files from your work servers or home computer to take with you on your laptop, and hope that you don't accidentally forget or change the same file in both places.
The latest fad in the consumer world is finally giving us a glimpse into the future. Google released the Google Desktop Search utility, which indexes your personal files and emails. It then allows you to search them using the familiar Google interface. It's cute, but the really powerful tool is called X1 (from the prolific folks at Idealab). It indexes all emails, even the old archived ones from three years ago, and has a variety of features that put Google to shame. This is finally a window into your desktop that could fit on a 2" by 2" screen. I wouldn't need to carry my desktop files around with me. I should be able to do a very simple text search on my Treo that will tell me precisely what file I'm looking for on my desktop. I could then download the file, work with it, and put it back.
The additional technology necessary to support this feature is trivial. All X1 or Google would need to do is open up a secure interface as a web server. Any device with a web browser - your laptop, your Treo, your cell phone - could log in and find the necessary file, email, or information. Your entire virtual world could be available to you in seconds through device that fits in your pocket. Will the desktop search companies realize this potential?
Cell phones are mobile, so the environment and the database are constantly changing.The killer app for Mobile Advertising will be a portal/platform that “turns on” those physical world hyperlinks. Search engines will lose initially when this transformation takes place. But eventually they will realize that brands will be directing traffic through this portal and will want a piece of this.
Nokia’s CEO Jorma Ollila states his goal is “to put the internet into every pocket”. Think bigger, how about making every physical object Internet accessible. Give every physical object in the world a physical world hyperlink. So who will offer this app/platform that advertisers/surfers choose to use for the mobile phone.
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This is the 15 December 2004 Recommendation of “Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One.” This document has been reviewed by W3C Members, by software developers, and by other W3C groups and interested parties, and is endorsed by the Director as a W3C Recommendation. It is a stable document and may be used as reference material or cited from another document. W3C's role in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. This enhances the functionality and interoperability of the Web.The World Wide Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across languages, cultures, and media. In an effort to preserve these properties of the information space as the technologies evolve, this architecture document discusses the core design components of the Web. They are identification of resources, representation of resource state, and the protocols that support the interaction between agents and resources in the space. We relate core design components, constraints, and good practices to the principles and properties they support. I liked the document -particularly Sec 3 on Data Formats and Sec 5 on Architectural Principles.
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About time for some good news. Here are ten stand-out companies which, in the midst of a miserly, risk-averse horde of unimaginative, uninnovative companies in almost every sector of the economy, we should be celebrating. While corporatist giants believe the best way to deal with innovation is to shut it down by patenting everything and suing every upstart into oblivion, these ten companies are setting the example to show how business should be capitalizing on the market, not cornering it:
Most Innovative Manufacturer: WL Gore. The makers of Gore-Tex and a lot of stunningly inventive medical products you've probably never heard of. Fast Company's complete story on the company is available in pdf form here. Best takeaway: The six secrets of Gore's innovation success:
- The Power of Small Teams: Gore tries to keep its teams small (and caps even its manufacturing plants at 200 people). That way, everyone can get to know one another and work together with minimal rules, as though they were a task force tackling a crisis.
- No Ranks, No Titles, No Bosses: Associates (employees) select mentors, they don't have bosses. Associates decide for themselves what new commitments to take on. Committees evaluate an associate's contribution and decide on compensation. There are no standardized job descriptions or categories.
- Take the Long View: Gore is impatient with the status quo but patient about the time - often years, sometimes decades -- it takes to develop revolutionary products and bring them to market.
- Make Time for Face Time: There's no hierarchical chain of command; anyone in the company can talk to anyone else. Gore discourages memos and prefers in-person communication to email.
- Lead by Leading: Associates spend 10% of their time pursuing speculative new ideas. Anyone is free to launch a project and be a leader, so long as they have the passion and ideas to attract followers. Many of Gore's breakthroughs started with one person acting on his or her own initiative, and developed as colleagues helped in their spare time.
- Celebrate Failure: Don't stigmatize it. When a project doesn't work out and the team kills it, they celebrate with beer or champagne.
Most Innovative Hardware Company: Apple. With the iPod, Apple has reaffirmed its ability to create and reinvent whole hardware product categories.
Most Innovative Financial Organization: ING. The Dutch company that realized you don't need offices to run a bank has got the big banks, and now the big insurance companies, running scared. They offer better rates, minimal bureaucracy, by simply thinking smarter and constantly challenging all the established rules in the financial services industry.
Most Innovative Retailer: eBay. You know what these guys have done. Long after Wal-Mart is disgraced for having destroyed so many jobs and ruined so many companies in the race for the bottom, eBay will be remembered as the real innovators in retailing.
Best Blockbuster Idea Incubator: The New Yorker. This is the company that nurtures people like Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point) and James Surowiecki (The Wisdom of Crowds). Who would have thought you could make money by paying people to just think about great, world-changing ideas?
Most Innovative Business Advisor:Charles Handy would be the choice, though Clay Christensen, Peter Drucker, Gary Hamel and Michael Schrage are pretty good too.
Best Website for Creativity-Boosting:IdeaChampions. If giving things away free is its own reward, Mitch Ditkoff and the crew at IdeaChampions should be very wealthy. This little company's website is a goldmine of good ideas and tools that spark creativity and innovation.
Most Socially & Environmentally Responsible Innovator:Patagonia This is a company that developed a process that recycles the plastic in discarded soda bottles to make state-of-the-art clothing. And they donate 10% of profits to environmental causes that they're deeply involved in. In more ways than one, they make you feel warm all over. Dave also points out a few other companies, like Amazon, Sony, and 3M would have made the list, but unfortunately they're on the Boycott List. Ingenuity must be tempered by responsibility, says Dave. A good selection of innovators list.
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In Part 1 of this article we covered Bill Coleman's views on the potential of utility computing, wherein Bill projected the potential of this technology amongst other thinsgs as buying the equivalent of a mainframe for $50 a month.Excerpts with edits and my views added:
How does that work : - We virtualize the entire physical world so the management of all the systems looks like one big SMP machine. We virtualize the application space. We virtualize the data space. We can scale and parallelize the data. Then we just set policy against how the systems will run, how the applications will run and how the business will run and use the dynamic provisioning independently of hardware and software. What we do is optimize the policy of what's running where and how data on the network is configured to the policy. And it requires no changes to the physical environment, the operating system or the application. We plug in as a layer in between them all, and it works today. You install our system, it goes out and discovers everything on your network, profiles it, and sets your policies on how you want your system and applications to run. It automatically will detect if something fails and needs more capability and [will] harvest or repopulate it. The basic mechanism, which we call dynamic provisioning, relies on some concepts we have patent-pending that can bring up a system or a network somewhere between five and 16 times faster than the other three guys. Plus, with one mechanism, we get provisioning, scalability, reliability, failover, patch management and version management.
On launching a busines channel program : We're going to start a channel program early next year, probably first in the federal [government] market. We're also going to certify a lot of configurations over time. We're going to actually specify in our documentation, literally down to the part numbers, what to order and how to assemble it. I actually think there's a huge opportunity because it's something partners can get started on pretty quickly without gobs of training, technology and everything else.
On How this offering come together:We realized that virtualization should work the way that Cray had done on their MPP systems back in the early 1990s. So we bought a company called Ultimate Scale that had been the architects of that at Cray. They were building a Lintel version of the virtualization, and we took that and spent a little over a year generalizing that part for Windows. Then we built the rest to solve this problem.
On the impact that it has on the performance of the overall system : We've scaled to more than 3,000 CPUs over about 800 servers. It doesn't matter. We add about 3 percent overhead on a server, and it never goes up. We have something that's called 'No Specialization' that allows us to offload all the management to specialized nodes.
How does your approach differ from all the things that IBM is trying to do in this space : In the first place, they're adding huge amounts of complexity to the system. They require you to change how your system is working. They're not saving you any costs. IBM has had a single strategy for decades, which is to continue to add complexity to the system so that you have to buy their systems and services. And it's been a very successful strategy. But it works against what customers want out of commodity computing, which is to eliminate the services.
Very powerful ideas extremely well articulated.. Must read for all interested in utility computing.
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Bill Coleman, co-founder and former CEO of BEA Systems, is back in the game. Coleman was the original chairman and CEO of BEA, the company he co-founded in 1995 with Ed Scott and Alfred Chuang. Under his leadership, BEA became the fastest-growing software firm ever to exceed $1 billion in annual revenue. He has recently launched a new company called Cassatt, which promises to deliver next-generation systems management tools, and shall begin shipping tools for utility computing architectures built atop Windows and Linux servers. In an interview with CRN Editor In Chief Michael Vizard, Coleman says a new era of commodity-based computing means greater opportunity for business-savvy solution providers and doom for incumbent vendors such as IBM. Excerpts (with edits and my views added)
Background Note: High performance computing (HPC) has benefited greatly from Moore's Law and the commodity economics driving microprocessor development. Where HPC workloads once required expensive high-end proprietary systems, today organizations are building systems with hundreds or thousands of commodity processors that meet HPC demands and fit well within typical budgets.The commodity hardware trend has created a need for scalable system software to manage resources for HPC installations. The challenge: effectively configuring and managing hardware platforms, while scaling to hundreds or thousands of processors.Thats where Cassat fits in.
What is driving all the interest in utility computing: In the overall market, the big drivers are to rationalize operational expense and capital expense and generally figure out how to do better with what you have. This is driving the automation of IT operations, which is something that has never really been done.
The impact on the overall trend: This is about the commoditization of computing, period. We're starting with the commoditization of the hardware. But ultimately, probably in the next decade, we'll see the commoditization of software around Web services and not applications. On the software side, it will mean the disintegration of monolithic applications.
Impact on vendors:On the hardware side, only the commodity players win. When an infrastructure can be simple enough to use and powerful enough to scale, it eliminates all of the problems of high-scale management while providing guaranteed quality of services and business agility. That will eventually be provided by the most-commoditized players, which are the ISPs and the telco service providers. In doing it, they will drive out both the hardware costs and the operations costs. We'll be talking about buying the equivalent of a mainframe for $50 a month. And that basically will drive the large server guys out of the server business, and it will drive the large companies out of the IT operations outsourcing business. So it totally compromises IBM's business model. It destroys the server model. What it does is makes the business a price-driven battle among the service providers selling capacity on demand. There will be a huge consolidation and transition in the service provider side that will compromise most of the generic outsourcing business today. Most of what IBM does for its outsourcing business is that. It will also drive outsourcing to a much higher level because as CIOs feel more comfortable with it, they'll realize that in doing it in one fell swoop, they're not just outsourcing the running of IT at a lower cost, because they're outsourcing their operational expenses, which the provider is eliminating. What's left is the next higher-level services, which is how do you configure workflows in a vertical market? That's where the winning next-generation application guys go, and that's where the winning systems integrators go. Everybody has to move to a higher level on the value chain or get crushed.
On opportunity for solution providers creating managed services : In the next few years, the capital expenditure to actually provide these kinds of services is going to be really low. The real place to do it is in vertical markets, where you become the backbone ASP for a hospital and provide the whole thing. You provide the ability to help them to configure and customize the actual applications. There's a huge opportunity here because the capital expenditure is low and the value is going to be bringing the expertise.
On the role that Cassatt can play in all this : What we need for this is an operations system, something that automates IT operations, eliminates the cost of IT and enables the scaling of commodity computing, while providing guaranteed quality of service on an application and allowing business policies to dictate where the resource is employed. It has to attack all three at once:
- the scaling in operations costs,
- the quality of service and,
- the business agility.
Cassatt shall providing a software infrastructure that virtualizes the hardware world and allows a company to set policy against their applications. Then we'll use what we call 'dynamic provisioning' independently of hardware and software to change workflows based on the policy and what's happening in the real business world.
Efficiency and sociability aren't polar opposites. Efficiency can be enable sociability, by making a device easier to use or an interface simpler. We've all had the experience of having technologies sometimes get in the way of communication-- think of bad phone connections, or devices that distract you from the person you're talking to. But in these cases, efficiency is a means to a new end, not an end in itself. This pattern of more efficient designs helping trigger a technology's move from efficiency to sociability is something we've seen repeatedly in the last twenty years. It happened with the cell phone, which shifted from an emblem of high-powered businessmen, to a pocket-sized accessory for teenagers. The personal computer's primary raison d'etre used to be its utility for managing household finances or writing papers; it hasn't shed those functions, but for many users, e-mail and instant messaging are the first uses of computers that come to find.
Are there technologies currently used in efficiency contexts that are likely to be reinvented as sociability tools in the future? Definitely. MEMS sensors, which currently are used mainly in high-stress applications like airbag accelerometers, are starting to be used to enable tangible interfaces, in which users gesture or move to control a device or initiate an action. RFID, which thanks to Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense is today's Hot Disruptive Technology, is already starting to appear in toys and games. One thing that's new about these and other cases, though, is that they really enable two kinds of sociability: sociability between people (which is what the telephone and writing were about); and sociability between devices. Books don't talk to each other, except metaphorically; but devices with embedded intelligence and sensory capability can, and will.
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IT GOES AGAINST human nature to always expect the worst. But with IT projects, pessimism—otherwise known as contingency planning—is the only way to keep small technology problems from becoming full-blown business disasters.Hanger, HP's senior vice president of Americas operations and IT, had an unbroken record of success migrating five product groups within the two former companies onto one of two SAP systems. Hanger had every reason to believe that the sixth would go well too. Even so, she knew to be prepared for problems. At approximately $7.5 billion in annual revenue, the division involved with this latest project, Industry Standard Servers (ISS), is much larger than any of the others that Hanger had migrated to SAP to that point. So Hanger took the contingency plan that her team had developed for the other five migrations and adjusted it to accommodate the ISS division's larger sales volume. She planned for three weeks of IT snafus, mostly focused on what might happen as a result of tweaking a legacy order-entry system to work with the new SAP system. But the plan wasn't pessimistic enough.
Starting when the system went live at the beginning of June and continuing throughout the rest of the month, as many as 20 percent of customer orders for servers stopped dead in their tracks between the legacy order-entry system and the SAP system. As IT problems go, this wasn't too big: Some data modeling issues between the legacy system and the SAP system prevented the SAP system from processing some orders for customized products. These programming errors were fixed within four or five weeks. But Hanger and her business colleagues from the ISS division who were on the project steering committee never envisioned the degree to which these programming glitches would affect the business. Orders began to backlog quickly and HP did not have enough manual workarounds to keep servers flowing fast enough to meet customer demand. Angry customers picked up the phone and called HP—or worse, arch-competitors Dell and IBM. In a commodity market such as servers, customer loyalty is built upon a company's ability to configure products to order and get them delivered on time. HP could do neither for much of the summer. In a third-quarter conference call on Aug. 12, HP Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina pegged the financial impact at $160 million: a $120 million order backlog that resulted in $40 million in lost revenue. That's more than the cost of the project itself, which AMR Research estimates to be $30 million.
The headlines all claimed an IT disaster, but in fact, HP's disaster resulted from a few relatively small problems in IT that snowballed into a much bigger problem for the business: the inability to cope with the order backlog.This was a disaster that could have been prevented—not by trying to eliminate every possibility for error in a major IT system migration, which is virtually impossible, but by taking a much broader view of the impact that these projects can have on a company's supply chain. CIOs don't run the supply chain in most companies, so they have trouble envisioning what will happen to sales if a critical system doesn't function as expected for a few days or weeks. Businesspeople, meanwhile, have trouble imagining an IT programming glitch getting past the walls of the data center and causing hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of lost sales. The chasm between cause and effect is almost too vast to contemplate. But if CIOs want to stop being held liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for relatively small IT problems, they have to convince business leaders of the vastly increased risks that major enterprise software projects pose to businesses with high-volume supply chains. They must use that awareness to build—with full support and cooperation from the business—a business contingency plan for IT projects that is as robust as the project plans they create for the new software.
In both Nike's and HP's cases, the IT problems were due to a combination of factors that would have been difficult to eliminate in the project-planning process. At HP, Hanger says her team tested the connections between the legacy front-end ordering system and the SAP system. And the connections worked fine for orders that did not involve any custom configuration, as well as for some custom orders. One message that needs to be communicated more strongly within HP—and within every company these days, Bouchard believes—is the message that is implicit in his dual role: "There is big leverage between IT and the business processes when you deal with a large supply chain," he says. "Just looking at contingency planning from an IT point of view would be a big mistake. It has to be looked at from an integrated view of IT processes and the business.
