Internet Changes Everything

May 27, 2006

Smart sites to power semantic web

BBC NEWS | Technology | Smart sites to power semantic web

By Jonathan Fildes
BBC News science and technology reporter in Edinburgh

Holiday makers in sea, AP
The semantic web may make it easier to find the perfect holiday
Much of the talk at the 2006 World Wide Web conference has been about the technologies behind the so-called "semantic web".

Phrases like "increased intelligence", "next generation" and "bringing meaning to the web" are being bandied around by researchers, exhibitors and delegates alike.

But like many big ideas behind the hype and evangelising finding a concise definition of what the semantic web is and what it will do is more difficult.

According to Professor Wendy Hall, head of a research team at the University of Southampton looking into the semantic web, part of the problem is that the term means so many things to different people.

However, she believes it can be summed up as "creating a web that can be interpreted by machines".

Clever codes

The idea was articulated in an article in Scientific American five years ago by web creator Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Jim Hendler of the University of Maryland, and Professor Ora Lassila of phone giant Nokia.

It was their idea to try to start to make sense of the tangle of data on the World Wide Web.

Until now, almost all of the information on webpages is produced by humans for humans.

Although a computer is good for viewing the information on webpages and crunching some of the numbers contained in databases, it is no good for extracting the meaning of words and numbers on websites.

Man sneezing, PA
Flu outbreaks could be tracked if web data were smarter
So, at the moment, if you want to book a hotel in Majorca on the web you have to use a search engine to search for "hotels" and "Majorca".

You then have to trawl through various websites to look at prices, facilities, distance from the beach and the best time to visit.

It is up to you to find the hotel that best fits with your budget and holiday plans.

The semantic web hopes to do away with all of this fuss and wasted time.

On the semantic web all of the data about the hotels, for example, will be made available, but in addition it will be classified and then "tagged" with common descriptions to tell computers what they are looking at.

"That allows you to ask much more complex questions," says to Professor Hall.

For example, you could ask your search engine to find a hotel that costs less than £50 a night, that has a large swimming pool, and is less than five minutes walk from the beach.

The semantic search engine would then cross-reference all of the information about hotels in Majorca, including checking whether the rooms are available, and then bring back the results which match your query.

Although this improves on what we have now, the next step is even more intelligent.

"Once you have all of that data on the web in a form that a machine can understand, then you can start having services like a personal agent that picks a holiday for you or even negotiates the price on your behalf," explains Professor Hall.

Cold comfort

But the semantic web goes way beyond booking your next holiday.

Screengrab of Swoogle homepage, University of Maryland
The first tools to use the semantic web are emerging
Big business, whose motto has always been "time is money", is looking forward to the day when multiples sources of financial information can be cross-referenced to show market patterns almost instantly.

Financial markets, pharmaceutical companies and other data-heavy industries are all looking to the future and starting to get their data in order.

The academic world is also interested. The semantic web could allow epidemiologists to pick up on disease patterns by comparing geographical data with prescription records.

So retail data that shows a run on flu remedies can be married with geographical location to show that a particular town, neighbourhood or even street has an outbreak of flu.

Efforts to build this next wave have been going on since the Scientific American article was published.

But before the general public will start to notice the benefits, researchers must make sure that software is developed and, importantly, that the data is available and classified correctly.

According to semantic visionary Jim Hendler some of those pieces are starting to fall into place quite quickly.

There is now even a test version of a semantic search engine called "Swoogle" at the University of Maryland.

But just as getting a coherent definition of the semantic web is tricky, finding out when it will arrive is harder still.

However, one thing that all the researchers at the conference agree upon is that when it does appear, anything that has gone before on the web will seem mundane in comparison.

"You ain't see nothing yet," promised Professor Hendler.

May 27, 2006 at 04:08 AM in Internet evolution | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

May 25, 2006

E-Commerce in Crisis: When SSL Isn't Safe

E-Commerce in Crisis: When SSL Isn't Safe - -

May 25, 2006 11:31AM

"It's not a problem of authentication but one of transactional authorization," says Bruce Schneier, leading security expert and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security. "No matter how hard you make the initial authentication for the end-user or hacker, the malware can just wait until the authentication is done and then manipulate the transaction."

The Great Train Robbery of 1963 netted $69 million in today's dollars. The largest bank heists have scored more than $80 million. But "stick-'em-up" bank robberies offer high risks and low rewards: According to the FBI, the average U.S. bank heist yields just $4,200 -- and between 50 and 75 percent of perpetrators get caught.

Robbing a brick-and-mortar bank seems like petty theft compared with a new breed of cybercrime that, according to a growing number of security experts, is siphoning untold millions of dollars from banks and their customers using SSL-evading Trojans and ever more refined phishing techniques.

Every antivirus and antimalware vendor can report thousands of bank and e-commerce-specific Trojans designed to steal money and identities, often collectively referred to as Bancos/Banker variants. Yet given the vast investment in quelling consumers' fears about conducting business online, it's no surprise that few sources are anxious to provide information that highlights the severity of the problem.

Although the banking officials and security officers contacted for this article refused to be quoted on the record, all of them agreed that online bank fraud is an increasing problem. One banking regulatory security auditor told InfoWorld that in some instances, online bank fraud drains as much as 2 to 5 percent from a bank's overall revenue.

Mark Sunner, CTO of e-mail security provider MessageLabs, thinks it will take "a single, high-value tipping-point event" to wake up the general public, which would then pressure public officials. "I think the world's largest bank heist will soon be committed using malware," he says.

Phishing with a Hook

Phishing remains the weapon of choice for online bank theft -- and the sleight of hand that tricks users into visiting a phishing Web site continues to get more sophisticated. Phishing e-mails now show up with the user's address, ZIP code, or account information already filled in, indicating that professional criminals are using other, previously compromised resources to gain the trust of consumers.

Yet as phishing gets slicker, users are getting smarter. As the average Joe becomes less likely to type in authentication information in response to an e-mail, more and more cybercriminals are turning to SSL-evading Trojans.

These Trojans install themselves on unsuspecting users' PCs and either capture user log-on credentials or manipulate transactions after a successful log-on. In both cases, the SSL connection between PC and bank remains intact. The user may think the confidential online transaction is protected against mischief -- but it is not.

That shift has enormous implications. Ever since Netscape released SSL in 1996, consumers have been told that a confirmed SSL-connection icon indicates that it's safe to conduct online business.

"The problem is," according to one bank regulatory security auditor, "SSL isn't broken. SSL states that the connection between your PC's network card and the bank's network card isn't compromised. This is still true. Nobody is sniffing the transaction off the wire. Instead, this is a 'man-in-the-end-point' attack." In other words, the Trojan is sniffing or manipulating the transaction before it is ever sent across the Internet to the bank.

According to Mitchell Ashley, CTO of network security provider StillSecure, "Traditional phishing attacks have duped end-users into clicking on a link, but in the newest evolution, even the most security-savvy can fall victim to attack. Once you're infected, the game is up."

Although the theft of credentials remains the biggest threat to online e-commerce, SSL-evading Trojans are quickly becoming the criminal hacker's favorite tool, mainly because SSL-evading Trojans can bypass any authentication scheme.

Fighting the Last War

Most banks and e-commerce sites fall one step behind, responding to Trojans that steal log-on credentials by creating more complex authentication schemes and implementing two-factor authentication solutions. Today, banks frequently require that users click on-screen, randomized keyboards; type in the random letters of a "magic word"; or enter information from a hardware-based cryptographic key fob. None of these solutions works against the new breed of SSL-evading Trojans.

"It's not a problem of authentication but one of transactional authorization," says Bruce Schneier, leading security expert and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security. "No matter how hard you make the initial authentication for the end-user or hacker, the malware can just wait until the authentication is done and then manipulate the transaction."

For example, you think you're checking your bank balance or writing an online check to pay a bill, but the Trojan is transferring your bank balance to a bank account in the Cayman Islands.

"The real problem is that we are allowing computers to make transactional decisions for us on our behalf, and the computer really doesn't know what is right or wrong," Schneier explains. "The consumer may not be able to see the real transaction to put a stop to the automated authorization approval, and the bank really has no way of knowing that a Trojan is making the decision, and not the customer."

Even more disturbing is that most banks and regulatory officials don't understand the new threat, and when presented with it, hesitate to offer anything but the same old advice.

Every bank and regulatory official contacted for this article said they have already recommended banks implement a two-factor or multifactor log-on authentication screen. In general, they expressed frustration at the amount of effort it has taken to get banks to follow that advice. And all complained about the trouble these schemes are causing legitimate customers.

When told how SSL-evading Trojans can bypass any authentication mechanism, most offered up additional ineffective authentication as a solution. When convinced by additional discussion that the problem could be solved only by fixing transactional authorization, most shrugged their shoulders and said they would remain under pressure to continue implementing authentication-only solutions.

They were also hesitant to broach the subject with senior management. It had taken so long to get banks to agree to two-factor authentication, they said, it would be almost impossible to change recommendations midstream. That puts the banking industry on a collision course with escalating attacks.

Verifying Real Transactions

Workable answers to the SSL-evading Trojan problem aren't necessarily more inconvenient than two-factor authentication solutions. They just have a different focus: transactional authorization. Solution providers need to realize that any authentication mechanism can be bypassed, and instead focus more on the right long-term answer.

Some banks now send consumers an "out-of-band" authorization code -- that is, not through the PC, but via voice message or text message through another device -- to type in and confirm a particular transaction. Unfortunately, the bank is confirming the transaction as the bank sees it, whereas an SSL-evading Trojan could be manipulating what the customer thinks the bank is getting ready to do.

The customer may think he or she is making a small transaction, whereas the bank, because of the Trojan, is closing an account out and a transfer of funds to another bank.

In this case, sending an authorization code to the customer by itself doesn't work because the consumer is confirming a transaction he or she can't really see.

A better solution would be to send the consumer the relevant details -- such as the date, from, to, amount, and so on -- along with the authorization code, thus allowing the consumer to confirm the transaction. Some banks and e-commerce sites do this already using in-band e-mail confirmations.

Schneier has his doubts about the out-of-band approach. "These types of authorization schemes would work, but it sounds a little extreme as a solution. Unfortunately, we live in an economic reality where users will not accept extremes. They want convenience."

Bank officials concur. One regulator said, "Most banks, because of their customers, would probably not accept such an extreme form of authentication. How often would the out-of-band device fail or not be available? Requiring users to confirm every banking transaction out-of-band would not be accepted by today's consumers."

The regulator speculated that a better solution might be for the bank to offer out-of-band confirmations as an option and allow the consumer to pick the dollar amount at which the transaction would require additional confirmation measures.

Other bank security officers thought implementing added intelligence on the back end would provide more value. "How about not allowing online transfers to banks and countries with strong ties to crime?" offered one officer. "We could deny any transaction that the bank deemed highly suspicious, like your credit card company does now, and require a second confirmation."

Close observation of consumer behavior can also help. In one case, nearly 100 customers of one large bank were infected with an SSL-evading Trojan. As usual, the phishing e-mail used mostly legitimate links to the real bank's Web site. After noticing outside requests to links, most of which were normally referenced from other internal links, the bank's I.T. staff realized a Trojan was to blame.

The solution was to rename one of the requested links. If any user went to the real bank's Web site, the renamed link was now referenced by the legitimate Web site. Only the phishing customers would request the link's old name, enabling the bank to tell how many of its customers were compromised.

Yunus Emre Alpözen, a consultant for one of the world's largest banks, says, "Every customer requesting the old Web page link was redirected to a new page that notified them that they were the victims of a phish attack, and how to proceed. We used the phisher's e-mail against them."

Self-Defense for Consumers

Sadly, infection can't be stopped merely by convincing users not to execute untrusted software. No consumer knowingly installs malicious software, and SSL-evading Trojans can easily go unnoticed by the most careful user.

One of the best defenses is simply to convince consumers to check their online balances frequently. Beyond this, consumers need to lobby financial institutions and move their accounts from institutions that keep their head in the sand.

Banks that require stronger authentication and transactional authorization should be rewarded. Those institutions should also encourage customers to report phishing attacks to the site's security reporting e-mail address so they can take down fake Web sites or otherwise minimize risk.

Currently, log-on-stealing Trojans are still the No. 1 threat to the banking industry, but SSL-evading Trojans that can bypass any authentication scheme are emerging as a particularly frightening challenge. They need to be dealt with now before consumer confidence in e-commerce goes into serious decline.

May 25, 2006 at 10:31 PM in Financial Services | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

May 14, 2006

How To Build A Better Product—Study People

How To Build A Better Product—Study People - Yahoo! News

Bary Alyssa Johnson - PC Magazine Tue May 9, 9:25 AM ET

Did you ever imagine the world's largest chipmaker may ride the train into work with you to find out how mobility could be improved?

Product development has historically been predicated on a "build it and they will come" basis. But times are changing, consumer choice is increasing and the game plan has evolved.

Ethnography, a branch of anthropology, uses a variety of research methods to study people in a bid to understand human culture. Since top companies across several industries are treating ethnography as a means of designing for and connecting with potential customers, technology companies have recently begun investing significantly more research time and money into the field. At chip giant Intel, for example, the company spent approximately $5 billion on ethnographic research and development during 2004.

As the respective leaders in the hardware and operating systems markets, both Intel and fellow tech giant Microsoft have begun using teams of researchers to identify new market opportunities and improve existing products.

"As the global market becomes more competitive in technology it's not enough just to say that you have the coolest new product," said Tracey Lovejoy, who works as an anthropologist at Microsoft. "Consumers have so many choices today, so you have to work hard to understand what people want and need."

At Intel, for example, the company's anthropologists have been focusing their efforts on user-centered innovation over the past two decades. Intel has also begun a wide range of pilot programs in place to meet the needs of potential consumers in remote areas. For example, the company is looking at making e-banking and e-government applications available through a community PC platform in Mexico. Intel also has unveiled community-based PC platforms in rural India and Mexico, a direct result of its ethnographic research.

"There are billions of people around the world with little or no access to the Internet," said Kevin Teixeira, a spokesman for Intel. "Our ethnographers meet with these people, live in their towns and get to appreciate their socioeconomic conditions."

Intel executives recently announced plans to spend $1 billion on bringing Internet access to emerging nations.

"Intel has sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and ethnographers on-staff…learning how people want to use technology, then going back to the engineers with that information, who use it to figure out how to sell more chips for Intel," said Gerry Kaufhold, an analyst with In-Stat.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is using "personas" to identify the archetypical consumers that will be using its products, including its new Vista platform. The company's researchers put together detailed profiles to help identify the different features each category of customer would need.

"Anthropology and ethnography help you understand the people," Kaufhold said. "The great thing about people is that they don't move nearly as quickly as technology does, so you can do a fifty-year plan on the evolution of consumers, which would probably be more accurate than a fifty-year plan on the evolution of technology."

Intel's process

Intel Labs employs a number of ethnographers that work within its business divisions. Included on the roster of social science-based research teams are Intel's Digital Home Group, Digital Health Group and Emerging Markets division of its Channel Platforms Group.

Intel's anthropological researchers immerse themselves in the "natural environments of real people" – including hospitals, elder hostels, schools for hearing impaired children, remote villages in emerging nations, and more – and utilize different tools and techniques to collect data which, in turn, is used to help make future business decisions.

To create these user-centered technologies, Intel uses methods like videotaping and interviewing potential consumers, shadowing people during their daily activities (what the company calls "deep hanging out") as well as "focus troupes," which help to demonstrate the technology.

"Actors are hired to act out scenarios of hypothetical concepts to help people grasp ideas they've never experienced before," said Christine Riley, manager of Intel's People and Practices Research Group, in a statement."Theater works really well to get people to suspend belief, and you need very few props to excite imagination. The whole idea is to be very open-ended and to get new ideas." Continued...

Technology as culture

Intel researchers studied the aging process in different cultures for several years and came up with several technologies that allow caregivers to keep a remote eye on their loved ones by tracking their daily activity from afar.

In the U.S., much of the elderly population appreciates the ability to maintain their independence by living in their own homes, rather than taking to the institutional lifestyle, Intel researchers said. At the same time, these older individuals are concerned about "burdening" their loved ones, who take on the unofficial role of caregiver. This is largely an American phenomenon; in Japan, families are much more willing to care for their elderly relatives.

"We don't want [the elderly] to feel like they're under surveillance so we try and stay away from cameras and work more with sensors," said John Sherry, an Intel ethnographer who works in its Digital Health organization. "By putting simple sensors in doors, chairs and under mattresses you can get a sense of how much a person moves around the house and you can track their activities."

"We're also doing a pilot project in India where eye doctors can perform eye exams using a digital camera connected to a PC," Teixeira said. "That could bring a lot more medical access to all parts of the world."

As part of its research on globalization and technology, Intel studied "trans-nationals," people who are not born in a place, but live there. In London and India, for example, up to 30 percent of the population may have moved from another country. In such a case, money, technology, and culture flow back and forth as the transnational populations keep contact with family and friends back home.

"Besides the sheer value of money we're also interested in the understanding of technology," said Ken Anderson, an anthropologist for Intel's People and Practices Research Group. "For example, a man from Ghana who was living in London went back to Ghana with his iPod and transferred music onto his cousin's hard disk. His cousin didn't have an iPod so he ended up cracking the hard disk out of his machine and taking it to parties."

In other international research, the company has been testing a "China Home Learning PC," which is geared toward educational use and is being branded, produced and marketed by Shanghai-based PC marker Founder.

Intel called in its ethnographers to help create the product, which would have to address a number of issues.

"The standard PC isn't quite a fit for families in China because one of the hardest things in Chinese education is learning how to write," Teixeira said. "That information was brought back, mentally digested and a prototype was developed. One element was to design a computer with a touch screen and stylus so students could practice Chinese characters."

The company didn't participate in any actual field work while researching for the learning PC, due to "logistical constraints," so the ethnographers created a so-called "China Room" as a substitute.

The "China Room" work space was designed to incorporate photographs and other relevant artifacts to "allow for some level of immersion by the US-based product definition team." It may not have worked; some researchers from Intel who recently visited China said that the Learning PC is not doing as well as expected in the target market.

"Intel is a leader [in this area], no question," Intel's Sherry said. "Microsoft [also] has some capabilities that are differently and maybe more appropriately structured for their own corporation, but we have some collaboration going on cross-organization as well."

"Since Xerox PARC [Palo Alto Research Center] started hiring anthropologists in the 1970s, it has become a pretty standard practice," Lovejoy said. "In terms of companies using anthropologists today, HP has a pretty long history – also IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola,
Nokia, Yahoo, Adobe…and outside of the tech realm there's Wal-Mart, Washington Mutual, Wells Fargo, GM, JC Penney..." Continued...

Applying anthropology to Vista

Microsoft is relatively new to corporate anthropology; the company hired its first full-time anthropologist in 2000. Since then, it has carried out extensive research on consumers and culture across the globe and in the U.S.

"We started developing Vista five years ago," Lovejoy said. "I did a lot of work looking at how people work with files. Vista has an entirely new storage model that helps people conceptualize file structure."

In developing Vista, Microsoft researchers learned that people often forget file names. They discovered that there are clear ways people associate their files, such as by topic or date, and realized that the company hadn't traditionally leveraged such information.

"Microsoft for a long time put technology at the center of development," Lovejoy said. "My job is to put people at the center of everything we do in terms of development."

Early on in its Vista research, Microsoft defined three key demographics that the new operating system would target: enterprise, small business and consumer. During product development, the company's anthropologists ran several in-depth studies to examine potential customers.

"I did a lot of research looking at storage models, communication and mobility," Lovejoy said. "I did a two-year study with enterprise workers and followed them everywhere they went…thinking about the role of OS in communication and how mobility affects work."

Aside from shadowing future Vista users, Microsoft researchers also compiled statistical and field data to create a set of "personas" for the new operating system, representing the ideal customer for a particular product.

"Personas are fake people based on real data that are used as a tool to help the product development team focus their vision," Lovejoy said. "For Vista there were seven personas to spread across small business, enterprise and consumer."

One of Vista's consumer personas was a woman named Abby, who the researchers envisioned was mother to a teenage son. Abby became an intrinsic part of Microsoft's research process, Lovejoy said. Each time the team convened to discuss potential Vista features, they would relate their ideas to each persona to examine relevance and usefulness, among other things.

Vista researchers were given documented profiles on each persona. Microsoft officials also displayed detailed posters about each profile in the workplace and project managers were encouraged to think about Abby and the others when writing up specification sheets about products.

"So if you're building a media player, you know that your key personas are Abby and her son," Lovejoy said. "You're not looking to build a good player for someone in the enterprise because they don't use a lot of media in the workplace."

While carrying out ethnographic research, Microsoft began examining cultural issues in other countries around the world. Microsoft established a research center in India that was designed for studying changes in the country's middle-class social patterns, along with associated technology intersections as they relate to income level. The center was important for determining the needs of the developing markets.

"India, Brazil, Russia and China are our biggest new markets outside of the United States," Lovejoy said. "There are [already] products existing for those countries right now."

Microsoft
Windows XP Starter Edition, an inexpensive version of the Windows OS, was one of those products. The low-cost alternative was designed to simplify the user experience for first-time PC users by including additional components for help, among other features.

"Vista won't have a Starter Edition skew because it's high-end," Lovejoy said. "But around the same time that Vista is released, we'll also have a new version of Starter Edition."

Microsoft's online unit, MSN, has also been working with online content as it relates to cultural scenarios in different countries. One of the topics that MSN addressed in its research was the fact that its Messenger product has not been widely adopted in Japan, as opposed to in the U.S. where instant messaging has become something of a pop-culture phenomenon.

MSN researchers reasoned that issues often crop up when it comes to the way people approach each other in terms of communication. In Japan it's considered rude to interrupt somebody, so instant messaging is seen as the ultimate interruption. It's different in American culture because instant messaging is not considered disruptive or rude, as the user has a choice in whether or not to respond, according to Lovejoy.

"In Japan there are unequal power dynamics, which makes some forms of communication inappropriate," Lovejoy said. "For example in the work place in Japan I would never use IM to connect to my boss." Continued...

Demand for researchers growing

Having proven the value of ethnography in their own research departments, Intel, Microsoft and other employers are now struggling to attract new talent.

Top researchers at Intel and Microsoft created EPIC (the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference), an annual joint venture hosted by Intel and Microsoft. The conference was created to enable ethnographic collaboration opportunities across all industries as well as an opportunity to network.

The 2006 EPIC conference is slated to be held September 24-26 at Intel's conference center in Portland, Ore. The brains behind the EPIC conference are Intel's Ken Anderson and Microsoft's Tracey Lovejoy, both ethnographers for their respective companies.

"The audiences for traditional Intel conferences have always been 'us' – Intel trying to teach Intel," Anderson said. "The EPIC Conference is different in that it's open to anybody. It's designed for people outside of technology."

Once a purely academic discipline, ethnography is moving out of the classroom and into corporate laboratories – and not just within IT firms. The field is touching almost every industry including finance, advertising, banking, marketing, food manufacturing and more. Representative companies at EPIC include Instrata, Pitney-Bowes, Yahoo Europe, Veri-Phi Consulting, PARC USA and Red Associates Denmark, all of whom serve on various organizational committees.

"Ten out of Microsoft's seventy thousand employees are people who practice anthropology," Lovejoy said. "The situation is similar in other companies as well, so…that means there aren't a lot of people with similar jobs to network with. We created EPIC as a networking opportunity."

According to Anderson, when he graduated from college the emphasis was on getting a job within the academic sector because such a position would allow for teaching, researching and creating new content in the ever-expanding field of anthropology.

"When I was in school, corporate anthropology was a very dirty word in a 'sell-out' way, as if it wasn't 'real' anthropology," Lovejoy noted. "There's since been a massive disconnect because most new jobs today are available in the corporate sector and students are having trouble getting jobs in academic placement."

Although this trend is still mid-transition, signs point toward increased ethnographic employment outside of the scholastic realm. Anderson says he has spoken with the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which says a high-priority issue is employing more people outside of academia. The AAA is beginning to encourage professors to encourage their students to pursue corporate-type careers, according to Anderson.

"But they haven't fully thought through the ramifications for that yet," Anderson noted.

The AAA was founded in 1902 as the world's largest organization of individuals interested in anthropology, according to its Web site.

"Now we're not only ethnographers, we're becoming theoreticians and we'll end up changing the discipline, I think," Anderson said. "In two years we'll have the brightest students [working with us] rather than keeping them in academia."

May 14, 2006 at 09:57 AM in Consumer trends | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

SOA hurdles forcing changes in IT units

Computerworld > SOA hurdles forcing changes in IT units

Staff resistance and new ways of doing development work are some of the barriers that need to be overcome when implementing SOA. Heather Havenstein reports
By Heather Havenstein, Framingham | Monday, 15 May, 2006

Many companies and government agencies that are shifting from client/server technologies to service-oriented architectures are facing technical and cultural challenges that are forcing an overhaul of their IT development groups.

Officials at Wachovia, Railinc and other large US corporate and government organistaions have taken measures to tackle the myriad challenges that come with using SOA technology, including changing roles for developers and architects and a blurring of the lines between IT development and operations groups.

Wachovia’s retail banking division has started work on a new multi-year SOA project to create business processes from web services that can be used in a new call centre application and eventually be reused across the bank’s various customer channels.

The project is the division’s first foray into designing, assembling and managing common business processes that span multiple channels, and the IT department is feeling the pinch of the transition.
This and an earlier, less-complex SOA project are already presenting challenges to Wachovia developers, who must adjust their mindsets from the traditional waterfall development approach to a more iterative one, says Harry Karr, strategic architect for Wachovia’s retail banking division. Using the waterfall approach, developers build monolithic applications in one fell swoop. The iterative approach calls on one group to develop a service, for example, while another builds a client to consume a service, Karr says.

To ease the taxing transition for its application development group, the division brought in new tools for designing a development process and created new IT roles.

“SOA is a set of best practices, a discipline you have to follow,” says Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at consultancy ZapThink. “For the developer, this means there are new rules they have to follow. They don’t want to follow any rules.”

Wachovia used IBM’s Information FrameWork — a set of business models and an information architecture blueprint — in its project to build common processes from services that can be used by all customer channels.

“We haven’t really mastered the business process part of it,” Karr says. “We’re trying to figure out how to do a more iterative approach but also outsource. If we had the business processes modelled ahead of time, that might help us.” In addition to starting the SOA projects, Wachovia plans to begin outsourcing a significant portion of its development and operations staff over the next year.
The bank has also tapped software asset management provider Flashline for its services registry, repository and lifecycle management tools. Those should help its developers model the processes, show dependencies and build reports to help manage and understand the effect of the changes, Karr says.

The project continues to evolve as managers hunt for methods to ease the work. For example, Wachovia’s IT division has added a connectivity layer to its architecture. Karr says the new layer, an enterprise service bus (ESB) from IBM, can handle message orchestration, transformation and routing.

“We’re trying to figure out what types of things we have to have in place so the outsourcers can build in this distributed environment,” he says. “[With the ESB], we can put out some dummy services for the outsourcers to use to test their services with.”

The chief architect of enterprise architecture at a large US-based financial institution, who asked not to be named, said recently that hired developers there are embracing the organisation’s shift to SOA, but veteran mainframe and legacy experts are bucking the change. The plan to use SOA technology “has not been easy for our developers”, the architect says.

To ease the transition, the financial institution created a grass-roots community for its 1,200 developers to share best practices and connect with the owners of web services. In addition, the organisation is helping the mainframe and legacy developers fine-tune their skills while it hires new developers for the SOA project, the architect says.

The institution plans over the next 18 months to create an SOA with sufficient security and performance to extend web services beyond the firewall, the official says.

ZapThink’s Bloomberg says developers often find the cultural changes associated with a move to an SOA more taxing than the technology associated with the shift.

“To move to SOA requires organisational changes across IT and even into lines of business,” he says. “Often, the developers have to work with people they may not have worked with much before.”
As Railinc, which provides supply chain information to 460 US railroads, has taken on more SOA projects, the Association of American Railroads subsidiary has created training programmes for both developers and recipients of the services to show the benefits of the technology.

Over the past two years, Railinc has developed several external web services for its clients — including one that went into production in March to allow railroads to report rail-car repairs.
The latest initiative includes various project teams within IT and the lines of business that are creating reusable services for application development, says Garry Grandlienard, Railinc’s IT director of enterprise architecture. The project is slated for completion by year’s end.

The training sessions aim to show developers and managers the benefits of building an SOA and why they should buy into the concept, Grandlienard says. “They may have to help build something today, but maybe later this year they may be the recipient of the service,” he says. “We have to help them see the bigger picture of why this is a good thing to invest in.”

The state of Kentucky used senior developers in its early SOA projects and is forming an integration governance group and a competency centre to extend training to more of its staff.
The state has built various applications using a service-oriented approach. Among them is an enterprise system that will allow the state’s revenue department to streamline the collection of delinquent taxes and a service to allow the US Department of Justice to query Kentucky’s sex-offender registry.

Kentucky’s IT shop is now moving to tackle its newest SOA challenge — identifying opportunities to re-engineer business processes and creating the associated supporting infrastructure, says Ashiq Zaman, branch manager in the Office of Application Development in the state’s IT department.

The District of Columbia earlier this year went live with an SOA-based system called CapStat, which uses web services to help emergency command centres in Washington and surrounding areas coordinate responses in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist attack.

The district also has a programme called DCStat that uses web services to monitor the delivery of municipal services. It has been expanding that programme since the beginning of the year.

Despite those efforts, Dan Thomas, director of the DCStat programme in the district’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, says the city’s developers are still “not the biggest believers” in SOA. “Some of my junior developers think all I am doing is adding overhead and they don’t see the value of the reusability yet,” Thomas says.

To address such scepticism, his group developed a metadata engine to help track down services as they are mixed and matched to build new applications.

The engine associates metadata with data to be used in a service as it is pulled from a source system.

Despite the technical and cultural challenges of SOA, the returns can be substantial, successful users say.

SOA veteran Helvetia Patria Group, an insurance company in Switzerland, has seen a 201% return on investment since launching its SOA six years ago.

Helvetia officials say the SOA project cut IT costs for the company’s internet-based businesses by 59%.

Helvetia overcame the “tough exercise” of bringing developers on board by using a change management programme from Hewlett-Packard, says Didier Beck, director of Helvetia’s eBusiness Centre.

Beck says the HP tools and services helped developers integrate 15 systems into a centralised SOA platform. “The way we are working today is really very different because before, there wasn’t any contact between the different subsidiaries — they had all their own development processes and tools,” he says. “The consequences and impact were really quite high.”

May 14, 2006 at 09:42 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

May 12, 2006

Rapid results without a rugby scrum

Untitled Document

By Andrew Baxter
FT.com site; Jul 27, 2005

Scrums are big news at WildCard Systems – it has more than 35 of them in progress – but the Florida-based specialist in stored value cards has not gone rugby mad. Nor has Yahoo, the internet services company, which is running 15. Nor even conchango, an IT consultancy based in the UK, the home of the sport.

None of these three companies is looking for staff with legs like tree trunks, willing to crunch shoulder against shoulder in a melee of collapsing limbs and mud. Instead, they have all adopted Scrum, a process for developing software that breaks a project down into small chunks, each of which produces a tangible result, to be carried out by self-managing teams (see panel).

Traditional approaches to software development take too long to produce results, and by the time they are delivered, the customer's priorities and business conditions may have changed, says Ken Schwaber, a US software developer and industry consultant who co-developed Scrum in the early 1990s with fellow software expert Jeff Sutherland.

Worse still, people involved in the process hate coming to work every day and sitting in cubicles to be given w

Worse still, people involved in the process hate coming to work every day and sitting in cubicles to be given work and more work, he says.

Scrum is different, he says, as it "takes people out of cubicles and puts them in a room with whiteboards. They have to talk about a problem and address it as a team. If you come into a room where people are using Scrum, the key indicator is the noise level, because people are talking. If it's dead quiet, they're not using Scrum.

"The customers like it because they say 'Holy bananas, this kind of software development finally delivers results, and in one month'."

It is only recently that the debate over methodologies has had much relevance beyond the arcane, and often introverted world of software development. Rather like Linux and the open source software movement, Scrum became popular largely by word of mouth among software developers, gradually developing a following of admirers.

Now it is being targeted more systematically at chief executives of large companies that might benefit from using it. "We aim at CEOs because CIOs [chief information officers] are part of the problem, not the solution," says Mr Schwaber. "We are trying to directly connect the software developers with the customer, and CIOs are not too thrilled about being cut out of the action."

This initiative coincides with a growing feeling among some companies that traditional methods of software development are holding them back. "We felt the old methodologies had run their course and were not able to scale for us," says Tim Dorsey, senior vice-president of performance improvement at WildCard.

The company used the classic "waterfall" method of software development, where groups of people work on separate stages of several projects simultaneously, handing off to the next group in sequence over a period that could typically last 12 months. The methodology assumes that nothing has changed over that time, says Mr Dorsey. And with a lot of people working on different projects, "if someone drops a ball, it can affect five or six other projects." With Scrum's dedicated teams, that issue does not arise.

At Yahoo, Pete Deemer, vice-president of product development, is less critical of the traditional waterfall approaches – it can be cumbersome but also pretty quick, he says, crediting it with helping the company launch a range of innovative products. The company started using Scrum in February, but only as an alternative. "We're always looking for new ways of doing things," says Mr Deemer "and we're trying to figure out where it works best."

Mr Schwaber says 2,000 people are trained to run the Scrum process – so-called scrum-masters – but he has no idea how widespread its use is, and he is determined not to turn it into a product. "It's free," he says. "Once you commercialise it, all you think about is making money from it."

Instead, he spends much of his time helping companies implement Scrum – an important task because the process is hard to use, as Mr Schwaber is the first to admit. "We expect only about one-third of companies that try to use it will succeed," he says. "Those companies that do succeed with it are often those for whom technology is their lifeblood, and if they don't succeed with it, they risk going out of business."

One of the main challenges for companies adopting Scrum is how to deal with the huge cultural change involved in moving to an approach based on small teams, and the costs associated with that. "It's not cheap, you've got to change and retool the culture," says Mr Dorsey at WildCard. "The training costs are significant."

On top of this, companies need "a lot of really good leadership skills," according to Bob Schatz, chief development officer at Solstice Software, which makes software for enterprises to test their integration infrastructure. "Many people have a lot invested in the old way of doing things, and it becomes more about ego, but you have to drop that."

Mr Schatz says companies often make the mistake of treating a Scrum manual like a cookbook that will produce the right results if followed to the letter. "It doesn't work like that," he says. "You have to understand the principles and apply them as situations come up."

Some software developers, too, may prefer to work in cubicles, receiving orders from above. For these more introverted types, says Mr Schwaber, it helps to have an approach such as Scrum, with its clear rules for how people should work together, much as in football or rugby.

"There are people who say they want to be left alone," says Mr Dorsey. "But once they interact with the team, and are not pulled in five or six directions at the same time, they say 'This isn't that bad after all.'"

Copyright © Financial Times group

May 12, 2006 at 11:49 PM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

DoCoMo to Unveil New Eight FOMA "9 Series" Phones

NTT DoCoMo: Press Releases - DoCoMo to Unveil New Eight FOMA "9 Series" Phones

TOKYO, JAPAN, May 11, 2006 --- NTT DoCoMo, Inc. and its eight regional subsidiaries today unveiled the new lineup of eight FOMA "9 Series" handsets. All 9 Series phones are preinstalled with i-appli™ software required to use DoCoMo's DCMX™ credit card.

The series includes Japan's first HSDPA-compatible handset, the N902iX HIGH-SPEED. HSDPA is a new high-speed packet-transmission technology for downlinks at up to 3.6Mbps, or 10 times faster than current FOMA handsets.

All models in the 9 Series have music players. Some are also compatible with DoCoMo's Chaku-Uta Full® service for downloading full music tracks from i-mode™ sites, as well as Music Channel™ for programmed, automatic downloading of music from i-mode sites during the night (N902iX HIGH-SPEED), and Windows Media® Audio files (F902iS).

Other features common to many of the new 9 Series handsets include:

* Extensive security

Data Security Service™ enables phonebooks to be stored on the DoCoMo network.

Omakase Lock enables users who lost their phone to telephone a 24-hour call center to have the phone's smart card and personal data locked immediately.

Biometric Authentication requires confirmation of the owner's fingerprint, facial or voice features prior to accessing most features of the phone.

Business mopera "ANSHIN" manager enables corporate administrators to lock phones and delete/backup phonebooks remotely via computer.
* Chaku-moji

The caller's phone can transmit a 10-character message that displays on the receiver's screen as the phone rings (5 yen per message excluding tax).
* Transferring contents to external memory

Chaku-Uta, i-motion™, i-appli application data can be stored on a removable miniSD™ disk, as well as internal memory.
* 3G roaming

Compatibility with DoCoMo's WORLD WING™ service for international roaming via W-CDMA networks in 33 countries/regions.
* Deco-mail™ Signature

Decorative Deco-mail graphics can be automatically inserted in e-mail signatures and subject lines.
* Receive videophone calls during packet communications
* Compatibility with 1.7GHz bandwidth
* Compatibility with communication congestion control

DoCoMo will control voice and packet communications separately to ensure that congestion on the packet network will not affect the voice network, and vice-versa (available this summer).
* Remote control of A/V equipment

The "9 Series" handsets can be used outside the home to program audio/video equipment, such as DVD recorders, for recording TV programs.

*Certain charges will be applied for some services.

Many of the new handsets are also compatible with existing 902i features, such as:

* PushTalk™ for simple, walkie-talkie-style communication.
* Osaifu-Keitai™ e-wallet services, including mobile-phone credit cards, e-money, e-ticketing, membership programs and more.
* ToruCa™ for mobile access to information about stores, products, etc. by simply waving the phone in front of a reader/writer at a merchant or other location.
* i-channel™ for news, weather, sports scores, horoscopes, etc., delivered automatically to the phone's standby screen as telop text.

Please see the attachments for further details about the D902iS, F902iS, N902iS, P902iS, SH902iS, SO902iWP+, DOLCE SL (SH902iSL), and N902iX HIGH-SPEED.

About NTT DoCoMo
NTT DoCoMo is the world's leading mobile communications company. DoCoMo serves more than 51 million subscribers, including an unmatched 24 million people subscribing to FOMA™, launched as the world's first 3G mobile service based on W-CDMA in 2001. DoCoMo also offers a wide variety of leading-edge mobile multimedia services, including i-mode™, the world's most popular mobile e-mail/Internet service, used by more than 46 million people. With the addition of credit-card and other e-wallet functions, DoCoMo mobile phones have become highly versatile tools for daily life. NTT DoCoMo is listed on the Tokyo (9437), London (NDCM) and New York (DCM) stock exchanges. For more information, visit www.nttdocomo.com.

i-mode and FOMA are trademarks or registered trademarks of NTT DoCoMo, Inc. in Japan and other countries.
NTT DoCoMo's FOMA service is only available to subscribers in Japan.
i-appli, DCMX, iD, Music Channel, Data Security Service, i-motion, WORLD WING, Deco-mail, PushTalk, Osaifu-Keitai, ToruCa and i-channel are registered trademarks or trademarks of NTT DoCoMo, Inc. in Japan.
Chaku-Uta Full is a registered trademark of Sony Music Entertainment Corporation.
Windows Media is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.
miniSD is a trademark of SD Associations.
i-channel uses a technology of Flash Cast™ of Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Flash and Flash Cast are registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the U.S. and other countries

May 12, 2006 at 10:36 AM in Telecommunications | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Everything's coming up Drupal

IT Business

What started as a community bulletin board system has become the content management platform of choice for a variety of users. We profile a Canadian enterprise that's used it to launch dozens of sites in less than a year
5/11/2006 5:00:00 PM
by Neil Sutton

A company that owns a slew of radio stations across Canada is now dialed in to an open source content management solution for its 40-plus Web sites.

Standard Interactive, a division of the privately-owned Standard Broadcasting Inc., is using Drupal as a means to manage Web sites for stations like EZRock 1340 AM in Southern B.C. and 97.7 HTZ FM in St. Catherines, Ont.

Standard has rolled out 45 Web sites using Drupal as a backbone over the last six months. The project started in 2004, when the company sought a replacement for the homegrown content management system it had been using. After evaluating various commercially-available tools, “Drupal kind of emerged as the one that had the best architecture and allowed us to do what we needed to do in the limited time frame that we had,” said Rowan Kerr, senior Web programmer for Standard Interactive.

“We started using Drupal because of the module system and APIs it has, letting you add features with very minimal effort. It also has a very flexible themeing system, allowing you to make it look like pretty much anything we want,” he added.

Kerr said he opted for Drupal partly for budgetary reasons – there are no licensing issues to worry about – but also because of the community spirit behind open source. Kerr is active in the Drupal User Group Toronto chapter, an organization that meets once a month to discuss new uses for the software.

The group is planning a “Drupal camp” this Friday – a series of sessions designed to educate new users. “The main focus of it is to get more developers comfortable with using Drupal effectively,” said Jason Diceman, one of the camp's organizers. Diceman runs his own Web consulting business called Co-op Tools. “There's a high demand for Drupal developers. Right now everyone in our community is maxed out in terms of our availability,” he said.

There's little to indicate that an open source tool like Drupal is a threat to established proprietary content management software like EMC's Documentum, said Waterloo, Ont-based Info-Tech Research Group analyst, Carmi Levy, but it is finding its niche.

“It is a very specifically-focused product,” he said. “This really is targeted at enterprises that wouldn't otherwise be allocating the budget for something like this.”

Companies that haven't already substantially invested in a content management solution might consider Drupal as a low-cost alternative. “That's where an open source product like this comes into play,” said Levy.

Currently on version 4.7, Drupal was originally conceived in 2000 as a community-based bulletin board system by Belgian open source programmer Dries Buytaert. It subsequently evolved into a content management system and became the basis for “Deanspace,” which was used to support Howard Dean's U.S. presidential bid in 2004.

Deanspace has since became Civicspace and is probably the best-known variant of Drupal, said Diceman. Developers may patch or hack aspects of Drupal to meet their own needs, he said, but there haven't been too many instances of code fragmentation, or “forking,” within Drupal community.

“From what I can tell, because of the sensibility and good will of the core developers. I think forking often happens when some of the core developers are not open to new people's ideas.”

Using Drupal, Kerr and his team of three IT staff have built standard templates and a common code set, which makes it possible to roll out Web sites at the rate of seven a month. Separate style sheets are used to differentiate the sites. Once a new feature has been built – like charting modules, listener feedback and polls, and content from third-party news feeds – it is immediately available to each of Standard's radio stations.

While Kerr is responsible for maintaining the overall system, stations will determine the actual content that appears on their individual sites. “We wanted them to have ownership,” said Kerr. “There are only four of us, so we would like to have as little involvement as possible in the actual content and day-to-day operation of the sites.”

All new sites that are launched by Standard Interactive will be built entirely on Drupal, said Kerr. But an acquisitive company like Standard Broadcasting may buy more radio stations and find itself with Web sites that are built an on entirely different infrastructure. In that case, “I would imagine we would try to move them over, but it won't be instant. We'll have to evaluate what they have,” said Kerr. “But I think the ultimate goal will be to have everything on Drupal.”

DUG TO's Drupal Camp runs all-day Friday at the Centre for Social Innovation at 215 Spadina in downtown Toronto.

May 12, 2006 at 08:49 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

May 11, 2006

Fuzzy maths

Google | Fuzzy maths | Economist.com

May 11th 2006 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition
In a few short years, Google has turned from a simple and popular company into a complicated and controversial one

MATHEMATICALLY confident drivers stuck in the usual jam on highway 101 through Silicon Valley were recently able to pass time contemplating a billboard that read: “{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com.” The number in question, 7427466391, is a sequence that starts at the 101st digit of e, a constant that is the base of the natural logarithm. The select few who worked this out and made it to the right website then encountered a “harder” riddle. Solving it led to another web page where they were finally invited to submit their curriculum vitae.

If a billboard can capture the soul of a company, this one did, because the anonymous advertiser was Google, whose main product is the world's most popular internet search engine. With its presumptuous humour, its mathematical obsessions, its easy, arrogant belief that it is the natural home for geniuses, the billboard spoke of a company that thinks it has taken its rightful place as the leader of the technology industry, a position occupied for the past 15 years by Microsoft.

In tone, the billboard was “googley”, as the firm's employees like to say. That adjective, says one spokeswoman, evokes a “humble, cosmopolitan, different, toned-down” classiness. A good demonstration of googley-ness came in the speeches at a conference in Las Vegas this year. Whereas the bosses of other technology companies welcomed the audience into the auditorium with flashing lights and blasting rock music, Google played Bach's Brandenburg Concerto Number Three and had a thought puzzle waiting on every seat. The billboard was also googley in that, like Google's home page, it had visual simplicity that belied the sophistication of its content. To outsiders, however, googley-ness often implies audacious ambition, a missionary calling to improve the world and the equation of nerdiness with virtue.

The main symptom of this, prominently displayed on the billboard, is a deification of mathematics. Google constantly leaves numerical puns and riddles for those who care to look in the right places. When it filed the regulatory documents for its stockmarket listing in 2004, it said that it planned to raise $2,718,281,828, which is $e billion to the nearest dollar. A year later, it filed again to sell another batch of shares—precisely 14,159,265, which represents the first eight digits after the decimal in the number pi (3.14159265).

The mathematics comes from the founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The Russian-born Mr Brin is the son of a professor of statistics and probability and a mother who works at NASA; Mr Page is the son of two computer-science teachers. The breakthrough that made their search engine so popular was the realisation that the chaos of the internet had an implicit mathematical order. By counting, weighting and calculating the link structures between web pages, Messrs Page and Brin were able to return search results more relevant than those of any other search engine.

So far, they have maintained this superiority. Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Watch, an online industry newsletter, ranks Google as the best search engine, Yahoo! as second-best, Ask (the re-named Ask Jeeves) third, and Microsoft's MSN last among the big four. Google's share of searches has gone up almost every month of the past year. Including those on AOL, an internet portal that uses Google's search technology, Google had half of all searches in March. Excluding AOL, the figure was 43%. This is why people “google”—rather than, say, “yahoo”—their driving directions, dates and recipes.

Mathematical prowess is also behind the other half of Google's success: its ability to turn all those searches into money. Unlike software companies such as Microsoft which get most of their revenues from licence fees, Google is primarily an advertising agency. It does not sell the usual sort of advertising, in which an advertiser places a display on a page and pays per thousand visitor “impressions” (views): it has perfected the more efficient genre of “pay-per-click” advertising. It places little text advertisements (“sponsored links”) on a page in an order determined by auction among the advertisers. But these advertisers pay only once an internet user actually clicks on their links (thereby expressing an interest in buying). This works best on the pages of search results, which account for over half of the firm's revenues, because the users' keywords allow Google to place relevant advertisements on the page. But it also works on other web pages, such as blogs or newspaper articles, that sign up to be part of Google's “network”.
The world brain

These two interlocking “engines”—the search algorithms coupled with the advertising algorithms—are the motor that powers Google's growth in revenues ($6.1 billion last year) and profits ($1.5 billion), as well as its $117 billion market capitalisation. Its horsepower is the reason why Andy Bechtolsheim, Google's first investor (as well as a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a big computer-maker) still holds on to all his shares in the firm. It's all about advertisers “bidding up the keywords” in Google's auctions, he says. “How far this thing could go, nobody can say.”

Since its stockmarket debut, however, Google has been adding new and often quite different products to this twin engine. It now owns Picasa, which makes software to edit digital photos on computers; Orkut, a social-networking site popular mainly in Brazil; and Blogger, which lets people start an online journal. It also offers free software for instant-messaging and internet telephony, for searching on the desktop computers of users, for (virtually) flying around the Earth, for keeping computers free of viruses, for uploading and sharing videos, and for creating web pages. It has a free e-mail program and calendar. It recently bought a firm called Writely, which lets people create and save text documents (much as Microsoft's Word does) online rather than on their own computers. Google is also scanning books in several large libraries to make them searchable. It is preparing to offer free wireless internet access in San Francisco and perhaps other cities, and dabbling in radio advertising. And that is only the start of a long list.

Whether these are arbitrary distractions or not depends on one's point of view. For Messrs Brin and Page, they make mathematical sense. Mr Brin (“the strategy guy”) has calculated that Google's engineers should spend 70% of their time on core products (ie, the search and advertising engines), 20% on relevant but tangential products, and 10% on wild fun that might or might not lead to a product. The result is that lots of tiny teams are working on all sorts of projects, the most promising ones of which end up on the prestigious “top 100” list that Mr Page (“the product guy”) spends a lot of his time on. Most of the items on that list in theory have something to do with Google's mission, which is “to organise the world's information”. Scanning and indexing books, for instance, brings offline information online.

The outside world increasingly sees it differently. Among Google fans, the company has come to epitomise the more mature (ie, post-bust) internet generation, which goes by the marketing cliché “Web 2.0” (see article). In this context, it is assumed to be working on absolutely everything simultaneously, and every new product announcement, no matter how trivial, is greeted as a tiny step toward an eventual world-changing transformation.

At a minimum, this hypothetical transformation would consist of moving computation and data off people's personal computers and on to the network—ie, Google's servers. Other names for this scenario are the “GDrive” or the “Google grid” that the company is allegedly working on, meaning free (but ultimately advertising-supported) copious online storage and possibly free internet access. Free storage threatens Microsoft, because its software dominates personal computers rather than the internet; free access threatens other internet-access providers.

At a maximum, the transformation goes quite a bit further. George Dyson, a futurist who has spent time at Google, thinks that the company ultimately intends to link all these digital synapses created by its users into what H.G. Wells, a British science-fiction writer, once called the “world brain”. Google, Mr Dyson thinks, wants to fulfil the geeks' dream of creating “artificial intelligence”. Passing the so-called “Turing test”, created by Alan Turing, a British mathematician, to determine whether a machine can be said to be able to think, would be the ultimate reward.
From primes to share prices

But many who deal with Google in their daily lives are getting fed up with such grandiose notions. Google's shares, after nearly quintupling since they began trading, have fallen in recent months. Pip Coburn, an investment strategist, says that “Google was a simple story at one point: online ads on top of the most popular search mechanism on the planet. Simple. But now it is pretty much a mess and to get the stock going again, the company may need to work on its own simplicity so as to match the simplicity of the Google home page itself.”

Mr Sullivan of Search Engine Watch says Google has become distracted. “Oh, give me a break,” he wrote in his blog after yet another product announcement. “A break from Google going in yet another direction when there is so much stuff they haven't finished, gotten right or need to fix.” He points to a rule in Google's corporate philosophy that “it's best to do one thing really, really well,” and suggests that the company is “doing 100 different things rather than one thing really, really well.”

Google is thus starting to look a bit as Microsoft did a decade ago, with one strength (Windows for Microsoft, search for Google) and a string of mediocre “me-too” products. Google Video, for instance, was supposed to become an online marketplace for video clips, both personal and business, but has been overtaken by YouTube, a start-up that is a few months old but already has four times as much video traffic. Google News, where the stories are, characteristically, chosen by mathematical algorithms rather than by editors, perennially lags behind Yahoo! News, with its old-fashioned human touch. Google's instant-messaging software is tiny compared with AOL's, Yahoo!'s and MSN's.

Google is beginning to resemble the old Microsoft in another way, too. A decade ago, Microsoft stood accused of stifling innovation, because entrepreneurs would stay away from any area of technology in which it showed any interest. Google, whose slogan is “Don't be evil”, hates this comparison and wants to think of itself as ventilating rather than stifling the ecosystem of developers and entrepreneurs. “I don't see how they can say that,” says an entrepreneur and competitor who is too afraid of unspecified consequences to speak on the record. Like most of Silicon Valley these days, he finds Google's slogan ridiculous, because “we're not evil either, we just don't go around saying it.”

Entrepreneurs like him are getting annoyed by Google's seemingly endless “betas”, also known as “technical previews”, when new products are not yet officially launched but available, ostensibly for testing and review. Traditionally, beta reviews were meant to last weeks or months and were targeted at testers who would find and report bugs. Google seems to use betas as dogs sprinkle trees—so that rivals know where it is. Google News recently graduated out of its beta after about four years.

In fairness, Google's role today is more complex than Microsoft's was in the 1990s, when start-ups often hoped to “exit” by listing their shares on the stockmarket, and were occasionally expunged by Microsoft before they got there. Today, start-ups (such as Writely, Picasa, Orkut and Urchin) often use Google (or the other internet titans) as the exit, selling themselves to the big guy. It works for individuals too. Paul Rademacher is a software engineer who last year came up with a clever way of combining Google's interactive maps with other websites. Google hired him.

To Google's initial surprise and subsequent chagrin (is it not enough to vow never to be evil?), it alienates more groups of people as it enters more areas of modern life. It appeared to be genuinely taken aback that some book publishers oppose its plan to scan their books and make them searchable. Google also seemed surprised when privacy advocates voiced concerns over its practice of placing advertisements in contextually related e-mail messages on its webmail service, and again this year when it announced a Chinese version that censors the search results.

Slowly, the company is realising that it is so important that it may not be able to control the ramifications of its own actions. “As more and more data builds up in the company's disk farms,” says Edward Felten, an expert on computer privacy at Princeton University, “the temptation to be evil only increases. Even if the company itself stays non-evil, its data trove will be a massive temptation for others to do evil.” In a world of rogue employees, intruders and accidents, he says, Google could be “one or two privacy disasters away from becoming just another internet company”.

Such concerns are forcing Messrs Brin and Page, still in their early 30s, and Eric Schmidt, whom they hired as chief executive and who is in his early 50s, to behave increasingly like a “normal” company. Google recently sent its first lobbyists to Washington, DC. Its decision to build an “evil scale” to help it devise its China strategy was more unusual, but its hiring of Al Gore, a former American vice-president, to aid the process, was just the kind of thing that old-fashioned empire-building firms do all the time.

Other companies are reacting in traditional ways to Google's dominance. Former rivals, such as eBay, Yahoo! and Microsoft, are exploring alliances to counter its influence. When Microsoft tried to buy AOL from its parent, Time Warner, Google's Mr Schmidt flew in for talks that led to Google taking a defensive stake in AOL, thus keeping it out of Microsoft's and Yahoo!'s reach. In response, Microsoft has contemplated buying all or part of Yahoo!, and has recently announced a vague but large increase in research spending which amounts to an arms race. Google is now alleging that Microsoft is unfairly steering users of its web browser to MSN for searches, and is preparing to dispatch lawyers to keep Microsoft in check.

Google thus finds itself at a defining moment. There are plenty of people within the company who want it to play the power game. “The folks who are closest to Larry and Sergey are very, very worried about Microsoft, as well they should be,” says John Battelle, the author of a blog and a book on Google. Yet the company's founders themselves may not be prepared to drop their idealism and their faith in their own mathematical genius. They have always wanted to succeed by being good and doing good. “Never once did we consider buying a big company,” says David Krane, Google's 84th employee, by way of example. It would not be googley. It would, he says, be “yuck”.

May 11, 2006 at 11:28 PM in Portals | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home