April 27th, 2007

Podcast: From Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0

Posted by Dan Farber @ 1:11 pm

Categories: General, Office 2.0, Open Source, Podcasts, SaaS, Search, Social networking, Software Infrastructure, Web 2.0 Expo, Web Technology

Tags: Web, Podcast, Web 2.0, Dan Farber

I posted a video clip of the panel on Web 2.0 in the enterprise  (also known as Enterprise 2.0) I moderated the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week. Panelists included Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText; Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google Enterprise; and Satish Dharmaraj, CEO of Zimbra. 

We discussed the impact of blogs, wikis, search and social networking; mashups; and the barriers to Enterprise 2.0 and Office 2.0 adoption and the shift from centralized command and control hierarchies to more bottom up collaborative environments, enabled by lightweight, less cost Web tools. Click on the player above to listen or to download a podcast of entire 25-minute discussion.

April 20th, 2007

Web 2.0 for the enterprise: Wisdom of the employees

Posted by Dan Farber @ 9:28 am

Categories: Enterprise 2.0, General, IT Management, SaaS, Social networking, Web 2.0 Expo, Web Technology

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At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, I moderated a panel on Web 2.0 in the enterprise (also known as Enterprise 2.0) with Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText; Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google Enterprise; and Satish Dharmaraj, CEO of Zimbra. We discussed the impact of wikis, Web apps, blogs, search and other facets of what is considered Web 2.0 on enterprises.

It's a major cultural shift for organizations governed by centralized command and control to allow usage of bottom up, lightweight, less costly, distributed, collaborative Web tools that offer more flexibility and less rigid work flows. Over time, the new generation coming into the workforce, who have grown up digitally, will force that cultural shift. Organizations that fail to embrace Enterprise 2.0 and facilitate it will get left behind by competitors who do.

What strikes me as the most important facet of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 is applying collective intelligence–the wisdom of employees, partners and customers–to enterprises. This is the social networking piece, using corporate data, such as employee and customer profiles and directories, and user generated data–tags, voting, ranking, comments, feeds–to make connections, such as identifying people within a company with a particular expertise or rapidly forming ad hoc groups with the right set of people to solve a problem or even connecting people within a company or as part of a federated network who have shared interests.

 
Watch the video clip

April 19th, 2007

Web 2.0 Expo: Top 5 picks

Posted by Dan Farber @ 11:10 am

Categories: General, Mobile, Personal Technology, Search, Social networking, Web 2.0 Expo, Web Technology

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Webware's Rafe Needleman, Josh Lowensohn and Erica Ogg scoured the isles at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week and selected their Top 5 products and services: Tellme, Octopz, Dapper, Coghead and Spock. Watch to video to find out why.  

April 17th, 2007

Google presentation app on the way

Posted by Dan Farber @ 11:35 am

Categories: General, Google, Microsoft, Web 2.0 Expo, Web Technology, YouTube

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In an interview with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo today, the Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced that a presentation application that is part of the Google Docs and Spreadsheets is forthcoming, completing the basic "Office" suite.

"We don't think it's a competitor to Microsoft Office," Schmidt said. "It's casual and sharing, and a better fit to how people use the Web. My guess is many companies in the audience are building products like this or other variants of this using the emerging architecture."

Battelle challenged Schmidt on the notion that a free Google alternative to Microsoft Office, even not as full featured, isn't a threat to the Microsoft company. Schmidt continued to maintain that Microsoft is building applications for the Web and that the shift to online applications is a testament to the Web 2.0. See Google's announcement and Techmeme discussion. 

Regarding the planned DoubleClick acquisition, Schmidt first explained that Google has four major thrusts as a company:

• Building supercomputers to run operations
• End user solutions–how end users will use information
• Advertising
• The way Google is run and makes decisions–the Google culture

The planned DoubleClick acquisition is just part of Google's strategy to provide a complete advertising platform, Schmidt said. "Advertising is an art and a science. We can provide the science to the artists," he stated artfully.

Regarding Microsoft and AT&T complaining about Google/DoubleClick and bringing up anti-trust issues, Schmidt said, "They are wrong. Give me a break. It is false." He reiterated previous statements, that advertising is a trillion dollar business and DoubleClick is less than a percent of that total, and that users have many choices. The people complaining were involved in the DoubleClick acquisition reviews, but lost out to Google, he stated. 

Battelle as a customer of Google and DoubleClick said he was worried about Google now having too much information about his business, Federated Media. Schmidt responded, "You aren't forced to use either product, and if you became unhappy you are not locked in. It makes no sense for us to get you to that point. These are issues we are going to work out….We need your business and you as a partner," he explained. Google could keep the targeting information DoubleClick has separate from what Google's systems has, or create it as an opt out feature, he added. "If we lose our end user or advertiser support, the company is kaput," he stated in CEO speak.

Regarding Viacom's copyright against Google/YouTube, Schmidt said that Viacom is using the suit as a negotiating tactic. "The important point is that we fully complied with the law [taking down 100,000 Viacom videos] and YouTube traffic went straight up ," he said. Google is bringing out a copyright protection tool, Claim Your Content, that will rule out the issues Viacom brought up, Schmidt said.

Schmidt also said that Google would not do something like Amazon's S3 storage service. He talked about the current Web as an emergent platform, with players such as Google, Ebay, Amazon and Yahoo building powerful applications on the platform, and said statesman-like that no single company will dominate.

Schmidt shared two areas of great interest to Google's business–mobile applications and ad services that use the targeting available in mobile platforms, and the local space, taking more advantage of the local content inherent in the Web and mining it for targeted advertising.

"We are just as the beginning of getting at the information kept in small groups on these platforms," he said.

Another core theme for Google is scaling–the technology platform, staffing, global, training, cash flow and other dimensions.

On the issue of who owns the data, Schmidt one again pledged that Google would never trap users' data and would allow people to take their information out of Google and use it elsewhere. "Technically these systems exist because end users choose to adopt them," he said. The company is working on data portability technology, he said.

All in all a perfectly diplomatic and politically astute performance by the Google CEO, who is learning how to wield the company's increasing power with a velvet hammer.

Update: Garett Rogers posts on Google's presentation app, the technology acquired from Tonic and compatible with the PowerPoint file format.
 

April 17th, 2007

Swivel launches a YouTube for data and charts

Posted by Dan Farber @ 11:09 am

Categories: General, Web 2.0 Expo, Web Technology

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Swivel doesn't mention the term "data visualization" in explaining what it does. Instead the company speaks about "exploring all the world's data and making it fun and insightful for everyone."  As an example, Swivel announced that The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is making its 2007 OECD Factbook available on Swivel.

 
Swivel is creating a community around data and visualizations, allowing users to rate, discuss, tag, see related graphics as well as upload data and graphs. Currently, Swivel works only with public data, but according to company CEO Brian Mulloy, a subscription-based professional edition will be enabled by the end of the year on the hosted service for companies that want to keep their data private and secure. 

Swivel was founded at the end of 2005 by CNET founder Halsey Minor. Initially, Swivel was going to be an on demand site in the online advertising and e-commerce space. A YouTube for data and charts appears to be a much better investment.

April 16th, 2007

Tim O'Reilly: We are becoming part of the machine

Posted by Dan Farber @ 5:36 pm

Categories: General, Web 2.0 Expo, Web Technology

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Tim O'Reilly opened the keynote phase of the Web 2.0 Expo describing the Web 2.0 philosophy: "It's about building the global computing network and harnessing all the collective intelligence of all the people who are connected….We are talking about persistent computing in which we are becoming part of a great machine," O'Reilly said. 

I don't believe that O'Reilly is talking about chips implanted in brains or "The Matrix" scenarios. At least not yet. More World of Warcraft, Digg, Facebook and what follows on. It's about the man-machine interface, with machines running increasingly sophisticated algorithms and people adding tags, rankings and other data to the pool to deliver better information, more efficient business models, flatter hierarchies, less friction and more compelling user experiences. It's the data Web, informed by new layers of inputs, leading toward a semantic Web, but also laden with difficult problems, such as who owns the data. As in most human endeavors ownership becomes an issue of contention…

April 16th, 2007

Web 2.0 Expo: Amazon's S3 passes 5 billion objects stored

Posted by Dan Farber @ 3:12 pm

Categories: Amazon, General, SaaS, Web 2.0 Expo

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Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezo shared the growth numbers for S3, the company's on demand storage service (check out the video clip of his remarks). In July of 2006, S3 held 800,000 million objects. Today the number surpasses 5 billion. The best day so far is 920,847,345 objects added and the peak second record is 16,607 objects, Bezos said.

Infrastructure as a service has arrived.

With SQS, S3, and EC2, and even Mechanical Turk, Amazon is making good on its claim to handle the muck, the undifferentiated heavy lifting at Web scale–infrastructure as a pay-by-the-drink service–10 cents per CPU hour. Customers for Amazon's various infrastructure services include many startups, and even Microsoft. 

"Seventy percent [of creating an application] is things on the back end, and it is similar in almost every Web scale application. None of this stuff helps your idea get any better or gets your product to market faster, but it has to be done at a very high quality level. If not, it can torpedo your successful product…it's the price of admission." You also have to loop through cycles, he added, revising products and the infrastructure. 

Bezos said that Amazon is not making money yet on its infrastructure services. "We are already rapidly deploying new infrastructure, disks and servers, to support [growth]. EC2, for example, is completely capacity constrained and invite only. For S3 Amazon is taking all comers," he said.

"We would like our current customers to get good service before taking on new customers. We are trying to get ourselves into position where we are demand constrained rather than capacity constrained," Bezos said.

Regarding where the infrastructure business fits in, Bezos said, "This is a new incremental business. Our retail and seller facing businesses are doing very well and have very large market sizes."

April 16th, 2007

Web 2.0 Expo: WebEx Connect seeks developers

Posted by Dan Farber @ 10:27 am

Categories: Enterprise 2.0, General, IT Management, SaaS, Salesforce.com, Web 2.0 Expo, Web Technology

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Last year WebEx launched WebEx Connect, an on demand development platform for collaborative, composite (mashup) applications. At the Web 2.0 Expo, the company announced Connect Developer Network that includes tools, community resources and marketing programs for participants.   

WebEx claims that its distribution, integration and monetization platform will help to transform software "just as RSS, newsreaders and Google transformed the content world." I asked Shankar Iyer, vice president, strategic initiatives at WebEx, about the claim. "Much like there were platforms for consumer content publishers, we are a publishing platform for the next generation of applications."

I asked Iyar about customers and competitors. "We are just announcing the Developer Network, and it's not out to customers yet.  It's a new kind of platform, and it remains to be seen who are our competitors." As Phil Wainewright has pointed out WebEx has a large installed base via its collaboration software and robust infrastructure as a starting point for attracting outside developers large and small into its emerging ecosystem.

Iyar wasn't forthcoming about competitors for the WebEx Connect mashup platform, but salesforce.com has similar ambitions with its Apex platform and many tiny players, such as Coghead and Teqlo, are in the business mashup game.

What's clear is that business mashup, integration, distribution platforms, as well as more pure infrastructure platforms like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, that can handle billions of transactions and provide a highly reliable and scalable environment and services for billing and monetization, is a next big thing.

April 15th, 2007

Web 2.0 Expo: Changing the face of the desktop

Posted by Dan Farber @ 9:59 pm

Categories: General, Office 2.0, Web 2.0 Expo, Web Technology

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One of the byproducts of the latest incarnation of Web 2.0 is the marginalization of operating systems. Personalized home pages, such as Google, Live.com, MyYahoo, Pageflakes and Netvibes; browser-based, rich Internet applications such as Zoho and ThinkFree; thousands of widgets, such as the Flash-based yourminis; even faux desktops  such as G.ho.st (Global Hosted Operating SysTem–really stretching for an acronym and Web 2.0 coolness).

The desktop OS doesn't become irrelevant, but it fades into the background as Webtops and widgets lay their bits on top of it. G.ho.st, which is being previewed at the Web 2.0 Expo this week, combines OpenLaszlo, Java, and Amazon Web Services for the back end to create what the company describes as a virtual Web desktop, complete with a file system.

GetSparc is debuting a dashboard that integrates a bunch of webtop applications, including ThinkFree Office. Like many Web 2.0 companies, GetSparc has a YouTube demo. The Web site touts "multiple active windows, cross-correlated applications, the fastest remote storage solution on the planet, unlimited size on and offline file transfers, overlays Win, Mac or Linux as an Internet Operating System (IOS)."

Another Web 2.0 Expo exhibitor, ZCubes, is making claims about being the "world's first website that seamlessly integrates browsing, searching, editing, painting, freehand drawing, cursive hand-writing, audio-video media management,  publishing, and much more" in a browser-based platform. 

Bottom line, these hodgepodges of functionality and assertions represent a very early stage in changing the face of the desktop.  

Via Webware 

April 14th, 2007

Spock's alpha people network

Posted by Dan Farber @ 6:41 pm

Categories: General, Search, Web 2.0 Expo, Web Technology

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One of the debutantes at the Web 2.0 Expo this week is Spock. While the name was acquired from the now defunct Dr. Spock Web effort, this Spock is about finding people, not health and babies…or Star Trek. Mike Arrington (Techcrunch), Rafe Needleman (Webware) and Tim O'Reilly have covered it already in fine detail. They are all mostly enthusiastic about the effort, which is still in alpha and will go into private beta next week.

I got a preview of Spock and liked the concept. The software is still under construction, and while it can do some nice tricks, it also demonstrates the difficulty in building a specialty search engine. In addition, I see Spock as more of community site, which starts with people profiles but extends deeply into the social networking sphere, similar to LinkedIn or Facebook but with data gleaned from the entire Web and user inputs.  

Spock has crawled about 200 sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Wikipedia and IMDB–the low hanging fruit–and is also incorporating the larger Web. At this point, Spock has accumulated 2 billion data elements and records on about 100 million people, said CEO and co-founder Jaideep Singh.

Spock aggregates and tries to disambiguate the data strewn across the Web related to individuals. It's clear that disambiguation and delivering good people finding results is not an easy problem for machines to solve. The term "North Carolina lawyer " is fairly easy to parse (especially if there are clean sources to crawl and plenty of good metadata), compared to "John Smith"  or even "George W. Bush," which confused the alpha Spock–the "W" caused it to throw up a poor result. 

Spock adds associated tags, such as other attributes linked to the entity North Carolina lawyer John Edwards, and can also include metadata, such as age and gender, gathered from various sources. The human input comes in the form of adding new tags and voting (yes or no) on the validity of existing data, such as photos, Web sources and tags. Spock has filed for some patents around the combination of tag extraction and the ability to take machine and human input to create rankings, Singh said.

Social networking comes into play in the way that people can have "favorites" and claim their own profile. Favorites is a collection of people you care about in the Spock network. For example, you can find golfers among friends who are VCs (given the data is present), said Jay Bhatti, Spock co-founder and product manager. People will be able to "claim" their profile and control aspects of their Spock persona.

While Singh and Bhatti claim that they don't intend to turn Spock into a social network, it seems a logical byproduct of the feature set. People will have multiple places online where their personae exist; Spock taps into the superset of the data to render its profiles, and is its own network, surfacing relationships between people and groups. Spock will enable users to import contact lists, such as from Outlook or LinkedIn, and add them to the network. Sounds like a social network to me. 

April 13th, 2007

Coming up: Web 2.0 Expo

Posted by Dan Farber @ 9:13 am

Categories: General, Web 2.0 Expo, Web Technology

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Next week at Moscone Center West in San Francisco, a crowd of 7,000 to 10,000 people will congregate for the Web 2.0 Expo. It is both a conference and product expo, including interviews with Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Eric Schmidt (Google) and Jeff Weiner (Yahoo) as well as numerous panels covering the latest products, technologies and trends (schedule here). I will be moderating a panel, "Web 2.0 for the Enterprise: Is It Soup Yet?," with Satish Dharmaraj, CEO, Zimbra; Subrah Iyar, CEO of WebEx; and Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext.

Stay tuned for coverage next week.