The way online services are setup today implies that the only technical means to provide a more personalized experience to customers is to collect as much as possible personal data into a server and then to put it into some machine that offers recommendations. Personalization is convenient, and we all want convenience, even at the price of compromise of our personal lives. This line of thought started with Amazon, Google, and Facebook, and today it…
There is no large corporation on the planet which does not have digital transformation as one of the top three strategic priorities, and many have already deep-dived into it without necessarily understanding the meaning of success. Digital transformation is highly strategic, and many times existential due to the simple fact that technology changed everyone’s life forever and kept on doing that. A change that gave birth to a new breed of companies with technological DNA…
Mark Zuckerberg was right when he wrote in his op-ed to the Washington Post that the internet needs new rules, though naturally, his view is limited as a CEO of a private company. For three decades, governments across the globe have created an enormous regulatory vacuum due to a profound misunderstanding of the magnitude of technology on society. As a result, they neglected their duty to protect society in the mixed reality of technology and…
Random thoughts regarding Mary Meeker’s?Internet Trends 2017 report: Slide #5 The main question that popped into my mind was, where are the rest of the people? Today there are 3.4B internet users where the world has a population of 7.5B. It could be interesting to see who are the other non-digital 4 billion humans. Interesting for reasons such as understanding the growth potential of the internet user base (by the level of difficulty of penetrating…
Siri apparently has started a revolution, at least public relations wise since voice activation has been around for quite a while but never seemed to be perfect. It seems people like to talk to her and she responds back. Few in the industry have written on the impact the new voice interaction paradigm might create -?Gigaom discusses the potential loss of mobile ad revenues?and Bloomberg reports on?Siri doubling data volumes. Voice indeed seems as a…
I have been enjoying my first iPad for the last year and a few weeks ago I got a new one, iPad 2. I knew I should not expect too many new features on it except for better speed and camera support. Indeed it felt very fast. Very fast in comparison to my first old iPad. And then I got a weird feeling about the improvement as if someone cheated me. Actually, it was not…
Software applications have two main perspectives the external perspective where interfaces to the external world are defined and consumed and the internal perspective where an internal structure enables and supports the external interface. Let me elaborate on this: The internal perspective shows the building blocks and layers within the application allowing specific data flow and processing. To further simplify things let’s take an example from the real world and that is a real building block.…
I have been reading about the whereabouts of News Corp., Google, and Microsoft in recent two weeks and I noticed something weird happening here about but could not put my finger on it. To those who do not know the storyline here is a short description posted on Hitwise today: Two weeks ago we posted on Rupert Murdoch’s threat to block Google from Indexing News Corp. content. While at first it seemed as though Murdoch…
I get to see here and there the term ‘3.0’ used in reference to the next internet/technology revolution and somehow it does not feel right to me. I am not sure about this but for me, the coined term ‘2.0’ was a metaphor belonging to the concept of software versioning. If the first internet era where infrastructure was established is called ‘1.0’ implying the first version of a product then what we had recently was…
Google having their own browser is a move I did not anticipate and is actually a brilliant idea in terms of os replacement for other proprietary operating systems, hence Microsoft. I think it will actually be very successful for two reasons: – being open source – is powered by a web state of mind (and no one is such as google is) The fact it is open source I think means a killer for IE…
All the big guys are rushing these days to launch as many web applications as possible to “captivate” web surfers in their “club”. Google in a dramatic and maybe a little bit panicked response to Microsoft‘s threats and Yahoo‘s renovated website started launching an application a day. It doesn’t matter anymore what it is, as long it is new and it does something at all then it should be launched – that seems to be…
After writing yesterday about the launch of Google Pages Beta at Should Google Lead the Web Development Tools Market? I realized that Google has changed profoundly from what they were at first. At the beginning, Google was an enabling technology by really making the world wide web “matter” accessible to everyone. They have contributed immensely in making the web a useful and enjoyable place to be. Ever since Google raised their head towards direct competition…
Microsoft completed the acquisition of Sybari Software, their new anti-virus and anti-spyware line of business – The Windows Observer–Antivirus, Anti-Spyware Strategy Moves Forward for Microsoft. One line from the news caught my eye as something that makes immediate common sense but may not be right strategically after all “Not surprisingly, Microsoft will discontinue new sales of Sybari’s products for the Unix (Solaris and AIX) and Linux operating systems. It will, however, continue to sell and…
Many news sites require a username and a password, which is understandable in terms of specific business model requirements. Still, the burden for newsreaders, who are required to register and maintain account information for each individual site becomes a real problem. Especially considering the huge cross-linking the blogosphere offers for online news sites. I think that a central identity management service, which will provide a single sign-on service for these sites will be very popular.…
It seems that web-based applications can accomplish today the most extensive and complex tasks that were possible before only by locally installed software. One aspect that has not been addressed by either Microsoft IE or Firefox, the leading web browsing software, is working offline. Although Microsoft has mentioned it in the past under the hat of Smart Client architecture still current products do not show any sign of support. Offline capability is something not trivial…
Yesterday I wrote about the news that Microsoft opened their tech support knowledgebase via RSS feeds Structured Corporate Feeds? with a new concept of structured RSS and I thought to elaborate on it further to make the idea more useful. RSS feeds in the perspective of infrastructure tools enable today an efficient mechanism for detecting changes in distributed content and it mainly serves for personal publishing via blogging tools serving publishers and news reading tools…
My perspectives on the important subject of software as a service presented on Venture Chronicles by Jeff Nolan: Software as a Service – Part 1. Evolving Relationships – Technology is nowadays an integral part of businesses in all sectors and the general trend of evolving and de-coupling the dependencies enterprise customers has on technology vendors shows its signs also on the evolution of the way technology is delivered. In the customer’s perspective, the financial alignment…