Category Archives: WebTrends

The hype of Augmented Reality

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Good overview of latest Augmented Reality examples on ReadWriteWeb.

The example i “like” most is the Augmented Identity one.

I am re-iterating the thinking we did before on this blog on how any on-line person is starting to have its own “information shadow” that is unique. No more need for identity “cards” or alike.

In that context, I recently met Dave Birch, Director at Consult Hyperion, who is 1) a very cool presenter on identity and digital money and 2) has two pretty interesting blogs on these subjects:

– His identity blog is here

– His money blog is here

Not much to add to the ReadWriteWeb article.

Have a deep dive in Gartner’s 2009 Hype Circle for Emerging Technologies.

gartner-emerging-technologies-hype-cycle-2009

See also that Human Augmentation now appears at the very start of the Technology Triggers.

Google: Microsoft all over ?

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There are 2 recent interesting posts on Google becoming too big.

Anil Dash had this post about “Google’s Microsoft Moment” on July 9, 2009.

google-microsoft-chrome-480

It’s all about the idea that Google’s self-proclaimed identity of “Don’ be evil” does not match some realities of monopoly.

Also, some of its behaviors start smelling Microsoft’s way of doing things in the old days.

Google’s recent development work on applications for mobile devices has often been delivered exclusively as applications for their own Android platform instead of as iPhone applications, despite the fact that iPhones are roughly forty times more popular in the marketplace. iPhones are also much more popular outside of the United States than Android, further limiting the actual audience served by these applications. Now, it’s obviously good company policy to make sure to support Google’s own platforms, and Google does an admirable job of using generic open web technologies where possible to avoid having to choose between platforms at all. But choosing to leave the majority of users in a given market unaddressed because they are on a platform that is not part of your corporate goals is short-sighted and leaves a lingering sense of mistrust

Another great and quite in-depth article is in Wired about Obama’s Top Antitrust Cop Christine A. Varney.

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The intro of that posting says its all: "I think you are going to see a repeat of Microsoft." Red highlighting by myself.

Christine Varney’s blunt assessment sent a buzz through the audience at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Varney, a partner at Hogan & Hartson and one of the country’s foremost experts in online law, was speaking at the ninth annual conference of the American Antitrust Institute, a gathering of top monopoly attorneys and economists. Most of the day was filled with dry presentations like "Verticality Regains Relevance" and "The Future of Private Enforcement." But Varney, tall and professorial, did not hide her message behind legalese or euphemism. The technology industry, she said, was coming under the sway of a dominant behemoth, one that had the potential to stifle innovation and squash its competitors. The last time the government saw a threat like this—Microsoft in the 1990s—it launched an aggressive antitrust case. But by the time of this conference, mid-June 2008, a new offender had emerged. "For me, Microsoft is so last century," Varney said. "They are not the problem. I think we are going to continually see a problem, potentially, with Google."

And also interesting parallel at the end of the article:

Google is playing nice so far. Its public policy blog soothingly acknowledges regulators’ concerns. "As Google has grown," it reads, "the company has naturally faced more scrutiny about our business principles and practices. We believe that Google promotes competition and openness online, but we haven’t always done a good job telling our story." Schmidt is a regular presence in Washington; he served as a member of Obama’s transition team and now sits on his technology advisory council. And publicly, Schmidt welcomes the oversight. "We understand the role here," he says. "We are not judge and jury."

mf_googlopoly4_f

But that doesn’t mean Google will neuter itself to please the government. Just like Gates before him, Schmidt says he has no plans to change his company’s trajectory in the face of regulatory challenges. Microsoft’s belligerence was a function of its will to power, a refusal to believe that the government had the authority or intelligence to take it down. Google still thinks it can get regulators to see it as it sees itself: not as a mere company but as a force for good.

And what about Mozilla’s Firefox ? Now that Google has launched it Chrome Browser and had announced it’s own Chrome OS, doesn’t all this look so similar to Microsoft killing Netscape ?

One of the big differences is that Microsoft was not funding Netscape, whereas a big part of Mozilla’s revenues seem to come from Google. The contract seems to run till 2011, but in essence they exist by the grace of Google.

Mozilla and Google have long had an agreement that makes Google the standard home page when people start Firefox, and sends them to Google when they type something into the search box at the top of the browser.

Google pays Mozilla hefty fees in return.

The deal accounted for 88 percent of Mozilla’s $75 million in revenue in 2007, according to its most recent tax filings, and it was recently renewed through 2011. (The gusher of income from Google prompted the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation to set up a taxpaying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, in 2005.)

Have this great article in the New York Times following a press update as Mozilla moved offices away from the shadow of the Google campus.

Kevin Kelleher already wrote in 2004 in Wired’s Googlemania:

mf_googlopoly3_f

"Microsoft looks at Google and sees its own past, full of promise. Google looks at Microsoft and sees the future—a swaggering company that dominates the tech landscape" (bingo!).”

“Bingo” ? Could he foresee Microsoft’s rebranding of their search engine into Bing ?

Think Tank – Inspiration

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Some interesting sources of inspiration, with thanks to xstof.

1) Fantastic on-line magazine H+ (Human +), and transhumanistic inpired: http://hplusmagazine.com/magazine

ad-omg-read-hplus

In the intro by the editor of the Summer 2009 issue of the H+ Magazine, there is a wonderful setting-the-scene statement that we can also apply to our Think Tank on Long Term Future:

Watching the news as we do, we witness incredible breakthroughs nearly every week. These are stories that would have been the “story of the year” if they had happened just a decade ago. But these days, they are quickly swept aside by the next breaking science story. They seem to come at ever increasing speeds. In this sense, we are becoming ever more aware of the implications of moore’s Law being played out in the “NBIC” (Nano, Bio, Info & Cogno) “Information science” fields.

We hope that (among other things) we can inspire young people to study and get involved in the emerging “NBIC” sciences and technologies so as to help us transcend our genetic/biological limitations. We’re hoping that future generations will be able to live incredibly long and healthy life spans without disease, enjoy higher intelligences (perhaps augmented by computers through braincomputer interfaces), and generally be more productive and happy.

In the Spring 2009 Issue, there was also a really cool article about the state of Nanotechnology.

Excerpt from that article:

If nanotechnology follows Moore’s law (transistors on a chip double every 18 months), this level of nanotechnology could occur in the next 15 years or less. The vision includes:

• Precisely targeted agents for cancer therapy
• Efficient solar photovoltaic cells
• Efficient, high-power-density fuel cells
• Single molecule and single electron sensors
• Biomedical sensors (in vitro and in vivo)
• High-density computer memory
• Molecular-scale computer circuits
• Selectively permeable membranes
• Highly selective catalysts
• Display and lighting systems
• Responsive (“smart”) materials
• Ultra-high-performance materials
• Nanosystems for APM.

It also includes numerous links to the coolest sites on that subject, including a link to Eric Drexler’s Nanotechnology Roadmap, dated 2007, and translated in Russian June 2009 (Elie, how is your scientific Russian ? 🙂

2) A Web² PDF Whitepaper that is published at the occasion of the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit scheduled for 20-22 October 2009 in San-Francisco.

The whitepaper can be found here.

Some salient extracts, that really inspire me and the folks at our Think Tank:

Collective intelligence applications depend on managing, understanding, and responding to massive amounts of user-generated data in real time. The "subsystems" of the emerging internet operating system are increasingly data subsystems: location, identity (of people, products, and places), and the skeins of meaning that tie them together. This leads to new levers of competitive advantage: Data is the "Intel Inside" of the next generation of computer applications.

Today, we realize that these insights were not only directionally right, but are being applied in areas we only imagined in 2004. The smartphone revolution has moved the Web from our desks to our pockets. Collective intelligence applications are no longer being driven solely by humans typing on keyboards but, increasingly, by sensors. Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications; motion and location sensors tell where we are, what we’re looking at, and how fast we’re moving. Data is being collected, presented, and acted upon in real time. The scale of participation has increased by orders of magnitude.

With more users and sensors feeding more applications and platforms, developers are able to tackle serious real-world problems. As a result, the Web opportunity is no longer growing arithmetically; it’s growing exponentially. Hence our theme for this year: Web Squared. 1990-2004 was the match being struck; 2005-2009 was the fuse; and 2010 will be the explosion.

Ever since we first introduced the term "Web 2.0," people have been asking, "What’s next?" Assuming that Web 2.0 was meant to be a kind of software version number (rather than a statement about the second coming of the Web after the dotcom bust), we’re constantly asked about "Web 3.0." Is it the semantic web? The sentient web? Is it the social web? The mobile web? Is it some form of virtual reality?

It is all of those, and more.

The Web is no longer a collection of static pages of HTML that describe something in the world. Increasingly, the Web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an "information shadow," an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mind bending implications. Web Squared is our way of exploring this phenomenon and giving it a name.

The whitepaper tackles Web² from following angles:

– Redefining Collective Intelligence: New Sensory Input

– Cooperating Data Subsystems

– How the Web Learns: Explicit vs. Implicit Meaning

– Web Meets World: The "Information Shadow" and the Internet of Things

– Photosynth, Gigapixel Photography, and Infinite Images (example)

– The Rise of Real Time: A Collective Mind

Thrilling is the thinking on identity and information shadows of objects:

For instance, a book has information shadows on Amazon, on Google Book Search, on Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing, on eBay and on BookMooch, on Twitter, and in a thousand blogs.

A song has information shadows on iTunes, on Amazon, on Rhapsody, on MySpace, or Facebook.

A person has information shadows in a host of emails, instant messages, phone calls, tweets, blog postings, photographs, videos, and government documents.

A product on the supermarket shelf, a car on a dealer’s lot, a pallet of newly mined boron sitting on a loading dock, a storefront on a small town’s main street — all have information shadows now.

In many cases, these information shadows are linked with their real world analogues by unique identifiers: an ISBN or ASIN, a part number, or getting more individual, a social security number, a vehicle identification number, or a serial number. Other identifiers are looser, but identity can be triangulated: a name plus an address or phone number, a name plus a photograph, a phone call from a particular location undermining what once would have been a rock-solid alibi.

This puts a completely different perspective on the thinking about for example the Belgian Electronic Identity Card (eID) which is based on information in the government central database and referred to by the Belgian Social Security Number.

Why do we still need numbers ? See also my earlier post on “Do we still need identity numbers?”.

There is also a fantastic reference to Jeff Jonas work on Identity.

Jonas’ work included building a database of known US persons from various sources. His database grew to about 630 million "identities" before the system had enough information to identify all the variations. But at a certain point, his database began to learn, and then to shrink. Each new load of data made the database smaller, not bigger. 630 million plus 30 million became 600 million, as the subtle calculus of recognition by "context accumulation" worked its magic.

The last paragraphs are even more stimulating:

But 2009 marks a pivot point in the history of the Web. It’s time to leverage the true power of the platform we’ve built. The Web is no longer an industry unto itself – the Web is now the world.

And the world needs our help.

If we are going to solve the world’s most pressing problems, we must put the power of the Web to work – its technologies, its business models, and perhaps most importantly, its philosophies of openness, collective intelligence, and transparency. And to do that, we must take the Web to another level. We can’t afford incremental evolution anymore.

It’s time for the Web to engage the real world. Web meets World – that’s Web Squared.

3) A recent interview with Ray Kurzweil at the occasion of the real start of his Singularity University.

It little less exciting – at least of you have read his book “The Singularity is Near” – but always inspiring.

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-06-26-Inventing-the-Future.cfm

Let the future emerge !

The (ir)relevance of the desktop

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How relevant will the desktop be in the next 5 years ? I don’t know about you, but I do more an more in online tools such as hotmail, gmail, googledocs, etc

I want to offer you 3 perspectives to this trend:

– A business to business point of view (Salesforce)

– A 2007 (!) vision by Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs

– The announcement of Google Wave and OS

I have included 3 video is this post. The first one is short (1:54), the others are longer (1 hour 20 min) and (1 hour 20 min) respectively. But i can assure you they are worth every minute.

Let’s start with Salesforce. On 9 June 2009, I attended the free Salesforce-event “CloudTour 2009” in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

 

This was a very, very professionally run event with very professional speakers (drilled like an army). They flew over a number of hotshots from San Francisco for this event.

Some key facts about Salesforce:

  • 1,2 Billion $ revenue in FY 2009
  • 59,000+ customers
  • 1,5 Million users
  • 100 Million API transactions per day
  • Average response time: 300 Milliseconds
  • 3 releases per year, without any disruption for customers
  • Customers: big to small. Some examples: Solvay, VUM, Polycom, DELL, Corporate Express

All this to say this is not Mickey Mouse business: these folks exist for 10 years. This is mature business.

Their tag-line is: NO SOFTWARE.

Everything runs in the cloud.

There was a great demo on deep integration in Services Cloud of Twitter, Facebook discussions in Salesforce app, direct visibility in Google search. All in real-time.

Another demo was about “Building an app in 30 minutes”. They built in essence an expense report app like most companies have. Built and on-line in 30 minutes: With currency conversions, linked to accounts for which the expenses are incurred, with approval workflow, access management etc. All this was point and click. Not one single line of coding.

Peter Coffee, Director Platform Research had some strong messages about the economics of cloud. He stated that all of the following is commodity and does not add business value, and is ready to go to the cloud: Email, twitter, backup, security, virtualization, OS patches, running an Operating Centre, messaging. He also stated that SaaS, IaaS, PaaS are not relevant in itself. It’s about the apps and the business value add you create with that. And that cloud is NOT about IT budget cost reduction !

It is about moving from “less low level people on less value tasks” to “high value level people on high value tasks”

Your IT budget may go UP over the years, as you spent more on high value tasks

Beware of the expectation it is easy or cheap

When strolling through the exhibitor space, picked up a comment from a customer:

Now that I have this, I never want to go back to on-premise. This works. Never any probs of crashes and alike or things that do not work. Unbelievable I ever accepted doing business the old way.

Let’s have a  look at what Aza Raskin had to say about the desktop.

“Had” because this is dated May 2007, more than 2 years ago.

I am a big fan of Aza. See also my post on Mash-ups and Cloud and Semantic Web.

His bio is fantastic:

Aza is currently the Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs, where he works on crafting the future of the web. He’s led projects ranging from semantic language-based interfaces (Ubiquity), to redesigning the Firefox extension platform (Jetpack). Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; at 19, he coauthored a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; at 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Two years later, Aza founded Songza.com, a minimalist music search engine that had over a million song plays during it’s first week of operation. In another life, Aza has done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated with degrees in math and physics.

His GoogleTalk in 2007 was titled “Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop”. On the opening picture, he looks even a bit like the very young Bill Gates ;-). Aza was born in 1984. So 25 years old now !

And it is NOT about bashing on Microsoft. He is explaining why it does not make sense anymore to follow what has been.

He is using some pretty powerful metaphors: the shovel analogy, “it’s not Microsoft’s fault”, Analog vs. Digital watch, “Start with the manual”.

If you don’t have the time to view the full video, go straight to minute 21 or so. In essence most user interfaces force the user to adhere to the program hierarchy of the developer.

He goes on with seeing natural language as a universal access to application: like you search the web, you could also search services. Basically, there are 4 “do this” commands: create, select, navigate, and transform.

Aza will this week also speak at TEDGlobal 2009 in the Connected Consequences track. I have also invited Aza to speak at SWIFT’s Sibos 2009, in the Innotribe track for which i am the overall content owner.

Enjoy Aza !

The other announcement that created a twitter & blog storm on the internet was Google Wave. Just google “Google Wave” and you will see what i mean 😉

I don’t get all the criticasters. This is really very cool stuff and it is going to change fundamentally how we think of online communication. I strongly recommend to watch every minute of this launch event video.

On May 29, a couple of days after the announcement, i spotted a Facebook comment from a person with a quite high-level position in the Belux Microsoft organization: "Not impressed by Google Wave. More of the same in a different jacket. Ever watched conversations in Outlook 2010 ?"

As i am an ex-Microsoft employee, and still have some friendly contacts there, i wrote him an e-mail and explained that i was soon going to write something on my blog on this and the relevance of the desktop.

I asked to share some links to Outlook 2010 to be able to link my readers to what Microsoft has to offer in this area so that my readers can make up their own mind ? This is the answer i got: “Outlook 2010 is in Technical Preview – we cannot show outside. But if you look on the web you will find a couple of things about it.”

So it’s “help yourself” at http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/. Oh yeah, you probably will have to pay for Office 2010. Last week, Microsoft also announced they will offer a FREE on-line version of Office as part of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2010 release.

To close this post, a really good opinion on this in Hutch Carpenter’s blog “I’m actually not a geek”. One of his latest posts relate to SaaS and also relates to Google’s more recent announcement of the Chrome OS.

He positions all this in the context of Clayton Christensen’s “disruptive innovation” model, and goes on:

Which brings us to the PCs of today. They are marvels, providing a slick experience for users and able to accommodate a host of new applications. But if I were a betting man, I’d say the most common activities people do with their computers are:

  • Surf the web, engage in social media
  • Email
  • Write documents
  • Build spreadsheets
  • Create presentations
  • Consume and work with media (video, music, graphics)
  • Use web-based business apps

Among those activities, what’s the magic of client-based computing? The media-related activities perhaps require the horsepower of a client app. But even those are getting better with web apps.

I recently decided to switch from hotmail to gmail.

Competition is good.

Mash-up, Cloud, Semantic Web

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Have been on the road quite a lot with a bag full of new ideas.

In all the discussions, it became clear for me that the end-game is about superior and dramatically better user experience.

The end-game is not cloud, the end game is not Web 3.0 or 4.0 for the matter. These are just enablers. The end-game is user experience.

And much of that experience will come from Mash-ups, real-time and giving the power for creating in the hands of the end-user.

We all have seen the Google map mash-ups with addresses of best bars in town. For sure a life-critical application, but what i have seen the last couple of week is a bit more impressive.

I will NOT cover Google Wave announcement, as already all over the place, and this blog is not intended as just an echochamber of other sites.

It all started at the iMinds conference some weeks ago, where i saw a presentation by Ben Cerveny from Stamen Design. Ben used to be one of the founders of Flickr.

Ben was really mis-casted in a political-themes-debate, but did well anyway. He gave a pitch about the importance of web-literacy of our population, and about identity in a special way. For ex everybody recognizes the New-York skyline. But would you also identify yourself with the traffic visualization map of your own city ? Ben showed some great visualization examples. Have a look at http://delicious.com/benstamen. I most like the swarm example and the cab-spotting. The swarm shows you real-time visualizations of chat/twitters/social media conversations. The cab-spotters is also real-time, and the resulting visualization shows most used street patterns.

Thanks to my sponsors, I also was lucky to be able to attend Semantic Web3.0 in NY some weeks ago. Many good stuff, but i would like to share at least 3 examples: Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs, Dan Willis from Sapient and Alex Karp from Palantir Technologies.

Aza Rasking (have a look at his bio on wikipedia, the guy was already a star at the age of 17 😉 is Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs, and gave a preview of some cool things that will come out of the box in Firefox. And yes, I know IE8 Accelerators can do similar things but not quite yet.

Aza gave demo of Ubiquity and TaskFox.

Here is Ubiquity:

And here is TaskFox, a bit slimmed down version of Ubiquity in Firefox:

Dan Willis from Sapient gave a presentation on what happens when machines talk to machines. He did a great pitch illustrating with some sort of Kindle device with transparent screen capturing signals from semantically enabled objects. I love the very last example about taxis that radiate their traffic violation history. His presentation is on slideshare below, but you should really have heard Dan’s voice-over during the conference which makes it much more lively.

The User Experience When Machines Talk to Machines

Last one for today comes from Palantir Technologies. At Web3.0, Alex Karp gave an amazing demo about a mortgage fraud investigation system, build as a mash-up of many different data-sources that were exposed with semantic techniques.

Here is the video of the Mortgage Fraud Investigation app. http://www.palantirtech.com/government/analysis-blog/mortgage-fraud. Many other staggering mash-up videos from Palantir are at http://www.palantirtech.com/government/videos

The point i am trying to make is not that these are cool videos. The point i am making is that all these use the principles of the semantic web (which is essence is about giving meaning to data, meaning that can be exploited via APIs by a computer), ideally run in a cloud (where integration is done these days at data-level), enabling great user experience.

Interactive Radio

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Very quick link to Tagger.FM

Tonight 13 May 2009 they do something special. There will be a concert by a band, and the audience will be able to live-tag the band during the concert.

You can also do this tag-test at home. Send after 8pm a SMS with text “TAG BBR” to 4123 (this is a Belgian SMS number)

Saw those guys at iMinds yesterday, and his really rocks.

More on the iMinds event in the next days

Think Big – Think Open

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My friend xstof pointed me at ThinkBigManifesto. I started this blog with “Inspire others to Dream”. It could have been “Inspire others to Think Big”. And the advertising text of ThinkBigManifesto suggests: “Big thinking is open and generous, discerning and judicious, yet not judgmental. Big thinking is not excessive, nor is it about the pursuit of excess. Rather, it is moderate.”

Google is big. Google is about Thinking Big. But what would it take to become a Google-Killer ? “More transparency and less opaqueness, more open”, says Jeff Jarvis in his short video posting on www.bigthink.com about the Google Killer. Jeff Jarvis is quite known from his bestseller “What would Google do”.

But how open can you go ? Whereas in the past “standards” or “protocols” were focusing only on the connectivity (how to get data from A to B) and syntactic (and sometimes semantic) standards for data standards and “messages”, today we have open standards for all layers.

I recently found this very interesting deck by Micah Laaker from Yahoo! I have to confess that these Yahoo! folks seem to be on top of everything these days. Also have a look at Yahoo Pipes if you have the time. Especially if one starts thinking about being open in a cloud and/or SaaS type of private or public community.

Micah basically proposes an updated set of standards for many more layers than we used to think of (with courtesy of http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/04/baychi_open.html):

1. Open Source (PHP, Hadoop)
2. Open Infrastructure (Amazon EC2 & S3)
3. Open Architecture (Firefox, YQL Open Tables)
4. Open Standards (XML, JSON)
5. Open Ontology (Microformats, RDFa). See also my recent blog on Smart Data and the OpenCalais project.
6. Open Access (Twitter, Yahoo! BOSS)
7. Open Canvas (Facebook, Yahoo! Application Platform)
8. Open Content (Google Reader, My Yahoo!)
9. Open Mic (WordPress, YouTube)
10. Open Forum (Digg, Yahoo! Buzz)
11. Open Door (Get Satisfaction)
12. Open Borders (OPML)
13. Open Identity (OpenID, AttributeExchange); btw have you noticed that Facebook is one of the first true big players to adopt OpenID ? Not as an Identity issuer, but accepting OpenID’s issued by other big players such as Windows Live ID, Yahoo ID, Google ID

Slide #43 gives a good overview which standards bring most value to what audience (users/developers).

Designing your Product as a Platform

View more presentations from Micah Laaker.

This presentation was delivered on 14 April at BayCHI http://www.baychi.org The meeting Report by student Gregory Cabrera ends with the appropriate questions:

• Does the system need to be open in order for users (and developers) to derive value?

• Is creativity an important feature in the design of a platform?

• What are the features of a successful, creative, open system platform?

• How creative would you like your users (or developers) to be?

• How would you inspire creativity in the development of a product or service?

Imagine a business to business cloud. What of these or other standards would make your offering truly open ? Feel free to comment or to come up with “open” suggestions.

Publishing Revisited

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I guess you are all familiar with mainstream on-line offerings such as Hotmail, Gmail, Skydrive, GoogleDocs, WordPress, YouTube, etc, etc. I guess you are also familiar with more advanced on-line end-user software such as Slideshare, iStockphoto and Vimeo.

These apps are getting better every day.

Recently, I really stumbled upon Issuu. Maybe i was living on another planet, but i never saw any real good coverage of this in most frequent magazines, news-sites or blogs.

Issuu Landing page

Issuu (pronounced ‘issue’) is a dedicated team who strive for excellence in online publishing. They launched the first public version of their service in December 2007. Since February 2007, they are  venture-backed by Sunstone Capital.

First of all, the site experience is fantastic. But then the content ! All the finest magazines, creative works, sorted and filtered by all sorts of criteria.

You can publish yourselves in basically any format, and once uploaded you have a fantastic on-line reader with Silverlight/Adobe like Rolodex experience. And of course, their site has standard Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, MySpace option. Looks and feels all very very professional, including a nice press-kit.

Small detail: these guys are still in Beta ! Sets the bar for anybody planning to offer some on-line experience, and gives you an idea how fast this sort of SaaS software will become a real competitor for on-premise software.

Some people us Issuu to publish niche creative initiatives or are trying to promote new creative talents through this channel. Good example is the AddictLab, the brainchild of yet another Flemish guy Jan Van Mol, who recently re-launched LabFiles via this on-line Issue Publishing platform.

Issuu.com is also a real recommendation if you have one of those “off” days: go a stroll around on this site, and get fueled with fresh creative ideas and energy. You’ll feel revitalized !

Clouds and Boom in the Zoo: the unbearable lightness of IT.

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There was spring in the air yesterday afternoon. So what do you do ? You make a nice drive in your convertible car and you head for the Antwerp Zoo. (I don’t have a convertible, but I thought this would be a nice start for today’s blog)

Antwerp Zoo: not that i am such an animal-freak, but that’s where the 1st CloudCamp for Belgium was held. For this first, the organizers got about 80 people together. Not bad, and gives an idea of the buzz going on about this topic. And as you will see, these sort of CloudCamps happen everywhere in the world. Take your chance if there’s one in your country.

cloudcamp_antwerp_banner

For those not familiar with Cloud Computing, a good primer “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing” was recently released by Berkeley University. You can download it here.

You will quickly find out that this is the space of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure, and many many others. Many, many others… right. Just have a look at the list of sponsors of yesterday’s CloudCamp: some well established big boys such as Sun and Microsoft (strange that neither AWS not Google had any presence or sponsorship), and then “the rest”: all (at least for me) new names such as A-Server, Zeus, iTricity, Flexiscale, Terremark, WDC (Wallonie Data Center), Virtualization.com, Ausy, Unuits Open Source, etc…

It’s maybe good to throw in some buzzwords in here:

  1. IaaS: Infrastructure-as-a-Service
  2. PaaS: Platform-as-a-Service
  3. SaaS: Software-as-a-Service

Most of the speakers come out of what i call the datacenter/hosting space. The IaaS space. When i walked in (too late, as usual), there was a presentation going on about: cooling, racks, power being 30%+ of the cost of a datacenter,…

I was only 30 min late, but this was already the 5th presentation after the keynote.

That’s a bit the problem with these “un-conference” formats. Each speaker gets 5 min to do a non-commercial pitch, and for the rest one hopes that during the “power-break” and the “beer with cheese” after-event some good discussions or business will happen: they usually don’t (except of seeing some old pals again after years) and there is no way how you can get some depth on these subjects. And then at the end you have these terrible unprepared Q&A sessions with the “panel” that really go nowhere.

But there was a lot of positive as well:

There was this spring "Internet Boom” feeling again: a lot of idealism, lots of young people, going for it and not afraid to go to war against the incumbents.

The speaker from Microsoft at least had a story to tell. Although his presentation was in essence a very high level powerpoint of the Berkeley report (download above) plus one obligate slide on Azure, he was not too arrogant to admit to sat “there is still a lot of work to be done”.

And of course every time you have Microsoft in the room, you get these sterile and religious “let’s bash Microsoft” interventions about the desktop is dead, everybody else is more secure than Microsoft, etc, etc. It’s a real pity, because Microsoft deserves better and they have a story to tell. And the speaker handled the questions very well in an non-arrogant and respectful way.

There were some good interventions by the Sun guy. You could feel he was used to talk to CIO’s and alike. In the end he said that any big company will need it all: their own infrastructure, a private cloud next to their datacenter to be able to deal with latency issues, and one or more public clouds.

There was a good – although light – debate why big banks or airline companies (i think business criticality and high I/O were the underlying themes) have not yet embraced Cloud. The answers from the panel were staggering and almost a license to kill for any CIO you would like to convince about Cloud:

  1. We are in a learning phase
  2. There are a lot of security issues to be tackled
  3. You don’t have the right skills
  4. Cloud is for Web 2.0 architectures, for rendering and streaming. We can’t help you with your legacy.
  5. High I/O database projects don’t fly well in the Cloud.

As the afternoon progressed, i got more and more irritated with what i would call “The Unbearable Lightness” of these sort of events. These folks really have to do a major effort to speak the language of the business: they speak about security, migration, liability, scalability, resilience like you would talk to your 3 year old daughter about your latest visit to the Zoo. I know some companies where you would be shown the door after 5 minutes if you came with such a pitch.

By contrast, we closed the day with a not-so-light Belgian Beer and Cheese buffet. After that, i strolled around in the by now empty Zoo. “That’s where he belongs”, i hear some of you thinking.

The last sunrays were sprinkling a soft and cozy “light” into the warm early spring evening: in the end, i was happy i went to this CloudCamp: this is a space with a lot of action for the next 1-2 years. Then the rain will fall out of the clouds, and we will see who will be able to offer alternatives to the Cloud power houses of today.

Web Trend Map 4 – Final Beta

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You probably will be hit by this from numerous sources, but Information Architects just released 4th "Web Trends Map".

The original URL is here

But for really a cool visualisation of this I recommend the Zoomorama site.