Internet Changes Everything

Next Simplicity

Next Simplicity - Royal Philips Electronics

Not since Vision of the Future has an exploratory design project received so much attention. How did Next Simplicity come about?

"The starting point was to develop a common understanding of what simplicity is," says Marion Verbücken, responsible for project coordination and content direction. "You may still strive for very advanced solutions, as long as you reduce the effort required to operate them. Or if you have very basic, single-function products, the challenge is to enhance the experience associated with these products.After all, the existing light bulb could hardly be simpler; you flick a switch and get light. We examined how to retain simplicity while broadening the scope, which is, for example, how we arrived at 'ledbulbs' that change color."

"There is enormous diversity in the Philips portfolio," continues Bertrand Rigot, also involved in project coordination and content direction, "from mono functional items, such as toasters to multi-functional systems such as media centers. We aimed at embedding simplicity at all levels. That is why we treated Next Simplicity as a collection, ensuring a balance between basic but also more advanced product concepts."

New codes of simplicity
Central to the project was defining the new codes of simplicity; not just the look and feel of an object, but also its behavior. "Take, for example, a mobile phone," says Verbücken. "You could design it so, held vertically, it is a phone, held horizontally it automatically becomes a camera, and flipped over it turns into an MP3 player.And each time users will only be confronted with the features relevant to that particular function."

Gesture-based operation
Gestural interaction is a recurring theme in Next Simplicity. For instance, instead of a remote control for a television there is a 'magic wand'.You scroll through on-screen content by waving the wand up and down, left and right, clock wise and counter clock wise. These kinds of gestures are extremely logical, easy to remember, and - unlike pressing buttons on a 57 key remote - distinct for a particular function. "You hardly need a user guide at all for any of the concepts," says Verbücken.

Another important aspect in the project was to address not only the rational but also the emotional. "Rational benefits are easier to quantify, such as faster response time or increased memory," says Verbücken. "But emotions are also crucial. You put a lot more of yourself in a written letter than you do in an e-mail. We wanted to address rational values, making things more understandable, as well as emotional values in the form of rich and enhanced product responses such as magical surprise effects, color changes, glowing lights, subtle movements, etc. Emotional values make objects behave more humanly."

Work on Next Simplicity started in January 2005, with an analysis of all the available research material.A great deal of dedicated web-based research was carried out, including competitor analysis and checking out relevant blogs. Roadmaps from the various Philips businesses have been gathered and visualized. Personas were used, though in a different way than usual. "Because the scope of the project was so broad, addressing all product divisions, we have concentrated on examining mass shared values and needs, rather than specific individual values and needs, as well as keeping diversity within" says Rigot. "By 'diversity' we mean gender, age, marital status, attitude towards technology, areas of interests etc.We always started by examining what makes sense in people's lives before puzzling over how we bring the solution to life."

A multidisciplinary team
The number of people involved in the project grew as it progressed. For approximately the first month it was just Verbücken and Rigot, collecting background data, creating tools, developing a framework, and defining the themes for the concept creation. Then followed another month of more or less non-stop brainstorming with a multi-disciplinary team of 8 people from Philips Design to define initial ideas. Somewhere in the region of 600 ideas were hatched for possible Next Simplicity concepts.

The key ingredients from the original framework were used as selection criteria to determine whether proposals were 'Philips fit', exhibited mass-market behavior or had the potential for growth, were meaningful and relevant for people, were focused on ease of use and pleasure and above all gave a positive feeling of addressing new codes of simplicity.

Once it became clear which ideas would be followed up, and then matured by a team of 25 designers, more than 50 people from Philips Applied Technologies helped develop the working models.All in all, approximately 120 people participated."We put product designers and interface designers together, so they could discuss, challenge each other's input, and come up with genuinely clever proposals that balanced physicality and interaction," says Rigot. "In fact, this was a feature of the project."

Inspirational provocation
"It was not the intention of Next Simplicity to come up with exact product proposals but to create inspirational propositions.This is why we needed a healthy distance from the business during the creation process. Otherwise we could not create a communication tool provocative enough to inspire the organization.

However, the data we gathered at the start ensured we stayed on track, and that the provocation was to be appropriate to the business," says Rigot. "Next Simplicity is a starting point, not an end in itself," adds Verbücken.

Because the project scope was looking three to five years ahead, the solutions proposed are similar to the products of today. There are many known typologies such as a television, remote control and electric kettle. "It was more a matter of how than what," says Verbücken. "We didn't create completely new paradigms; we chose to make known paradigms much simpler and/or more pleasurable."

Another feature of the Next Simplicity concepts, shown for the first time during September's Simplicity Event in Paris, is that they are all experiential models.Visitors can experience and interact with them. "The focus is on the usability, functionality and interaction, so we knew which aspects to demonstrate and which to leave out," says Rigot. "For instance, we mocked up the interface on the Air Tree air purifier, but didn't engineer it to actually purify air, because that isn't relevant in the context of the demonstration (since people would not really notice at the exhibition if the air would become cleaner)."

A successful launch
The launch was a runaway success, with more than 90% of the analysts, press, customers, Philips people and other visitors in Paris ranking Next Simplicity as 'very positive'. People from different Philips product divisions became enthusiastic and even started coming up with their own ideas after seeing it," says Verbücken. "The project also proves that design is a potent tool in marketing & strategy, and can also stimulate new business creations."

"Such projects are so enriching for those involved, that more people in the organization should be given the chance to participate," she concludes.

It looks like her wish will come true. A new collection of Next Simplicity concepts is under discussion for 2006, meanwhile the current collection is soon to hit the road with a traveling exhibition to spread the message worldwide.

What is Next Simplicity?
Next Simplicity was intended to be a tangible and inspirational way of communicating the brand promise for the coming three to five years. There were five themes: care, glow, play, share and trust. Together they covered all the Philips divisions; a true One Philips initiative. For each theme, approximately four concepts were created and shown as working models. Each was characterized by exceptionally straightforward operation, with an almost total absence of buttons and switches. According to Andrea Ragnetti, Philips Chief Marketing Officer, Next Simplicity is "an exploration of a vision for simplicity, all the time keeping end-user insights, technological innovations and sociological trends at the center of our thinking."

Gerard Kleisterlee, President and Chief Executive Officer of Philips commented: "Our Simplicity Event marks a real milestone in the transformation of Philips into a truly market-driven company. Many companies recognize the role of design-led innovation. But we at Philips have gone one step further with a special differentiator in this area: we believe in simplicity-led design. We have focused and refined our thinking on design-led innovation and the result is simplicity-led design, which is our springboard to even greater innovation."

January 25, 2006 at 08:09 PM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

Web services thrive, but outages outrage users

Web services thrive, but outages outrage users - Yahoo! News

By Adam Pasick Fri Dec 30, 1:20 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - Web sites that share blogs, bookmarks and photos exploded in popularity in 2005, but in recent weeks a number of major outages left users stranded and frustrated.

The new breed of Web site includes blogging services such as TypePad, the photo site Flickr, the shared bookmark site del.icio.us and many others. They are sometimes known collectively as "Web 2.0": hosted online, relying heavily on users' submissions, and frequently updated and tweaked by their owners.

Their growth in the last year has been huge. Flickr and del.icio.us were high-profile acquisitions for Internet giant Yahoo, and there are now at least 20 million blogs in existence, according to some estimates, with tens of thousands being added every day.

But the surge in Web-based applications hasn't come without some serious hiccups as several notable services have crashed.

Six Apart, whose TypePad service is used by many high-profile bloggers, experienced nearly an entire day of downtime on December 16, when it suffered a hardware failure. Del.icio.us had a major power failure on December 14. Services including Bloglines, Feedster and WordPress have also experienced problems.

Nothing underlines the importance of these "social media" services as much as the outcry of users when the sites crash. While the services were usually back up and running within a few days at most, the outages prompted much consternation from users who were temporarily unable to share their blogs and bookmarks with the world.

Russell Buckley and Carlo Longino wrote on their blog MobHappy (http://mobhappy.typepad.com/) that waiting for TypePad to be fixed was like "waiting for a train to arrive, when you're sitting on a cold, damp platform. It's mildly irritating for the first 5 minutes, but then annoyance levels start to rise exponentially."

"TypePad has been growing so rapidly that it is finding the hard way that scale and scalability matter," Business 2.0 technology writer Om Malik wrote on his blog (http://gigaom.com/). "Are they the only ones? Not really -- over (the) past few days Bloglines, Feedster and Wordpress.com have been behaving like a temperamental 3-year-old."

The usefulness of Web 2.0 services -- which also include the collaborative Web pages known as Wikis and RSS feeds that deliver customized information to users -- is highlighted when they are abruptly taken away.

"You need those services to be 'on.' I have come to expect 99.9 percent uptime, and when a service crashes there is significant frustration," said David Boxer, director of instructional technology and research at the Windward School in Los Angeles, where he runs workshops on subjects like podcasting and photoblogging.

"When those services go down, then we are stuck in a ditch," he said.

Boxer's students have worked on projects aimed at making them "citizen journalists" via publishing their own blogs, podcasts, documentaries and photo essays. But when those services suffer outages, everything grinds to a halt.

When the Blogger Web site went down, Boxer's students lost some of their work. And when del.icio.us crashed recently, "it left me personally in a lurch," he said.

"I knew that eventually a machine or software application will crash, but I always expect a third-party provider like del.icio.us will build enough redundancy into the infrastructure that it will never go down," Boxer said.

It is still early days for Web 2.0, and some of the recent difficulties are likely just teething problems as companies adapt to their new popularity. However, the outages may make it harder to convince businesses and investors that blogging is ready for primetime.

Boxer, for one, is willing to ride out a few outages to take advantage of the new services.

"They allow for elements of personalization, content delivery and information pushing unlike any previous incarnation of the Net," he said.

WEB 2.0 LINKS

TypePad (http://www.typepad.com/): A paid-for service for publishing blogs and photo albums. Competitors include Wordpress (http://wordpress.org/) and Google's Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com).

Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/): An online service for sharing and managing photos.

Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us): A site for storing and sharing bookmarked Web pages.

Computer book publisher Tim O'Reilly's essay on Web 2.0 (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/wha t-is-web-20.html)

December 31, 2005 at 10:31 AM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (36) | Top of page | Blog Home

Writely QuickNote Bookmarklet

Quick Note Bookmarklet

The WQNB allows you to create a bookmarkable link which can be used to quickly add notes to any of your current Writely documents. This bookmarklet can be placed in your browsers quick launch bar for ease of use. With one mouse click you can add whatever text you want to any document. Its that easy

December 24, 2005 at 02:51 AM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 - Hinchliffe

The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 (web2.wsj2.com)

It's getting towards the end of the year and I'm feeling the need to take stock of where we've actually come with Web 2.0 in the last 12 months. So much has happened in this space recently and a tidal wave of innovative, high-quality software has been released this year. So much in fact, that it's hard to keep track of it all. While many of us talk about Web 2.0 ideas, there's no substitute for pointing to concrete examples. And this also gives credit where credit is due to all the hard-working folks building the next generation of the Web.

So in spirit of the holidays, here is a list of some of the best Web 2.0 software that I've come across so far. You may have heard of some of these, but hopefully you'll find a few nice new Christmas presents under your Web 2.0 tree.

Finally, the usual disclaimer: This list is entirely subjective and any errors or omissions are my fault, you may not (and probably won't!) agree with some of the software I've listed. But this isn't a one-way web, I definitely encourage you to list anything you feel we missed or got wrong below in the comments. Please use the wiki link syntax ([url text_desc]) help to make sure you embed plenty of good links. Finally, a big thanks to Kate Allen for help compiling this list. Enjoy!

December 12, 2005 at 02:17 PM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (38) | Top of page | Blog Home

Sam Walton Taught Google More About How to Dominate the Internet Than Microsoft Ever Did

PBS | I, Cringely . November 17, 2005 - Google-Mart

By Robert X. Cringely

Play to your strengths. That's the key to success in any industry. This is the week I promised to explain where I think Google is headed, and playing to the company's strengths is key if they are going to do what I think, which is effectively take over the Internet. Oh they won't steal it or strong-arm us. They'll seduce us into giving it to them. And I am not at all sure that's a bad thing.

Google's strengths are searching, development of Open Source Internet services, and running clusters of tens of thousands of servers. Notice on this list there is nothing about operating systems. There are many rumors about Google doing an operating system to compete with Microsoft. I'm not saying they aren't doing that (I simply don't know), but I AM saying it would not be a good idea, because it doesn't play to any of the company's traditional strengths.

Google's strengths are searching, development of Open Source Internet services, and running clusters of tens of thousands of servers. Notice on this list there is nothing about operating systems. There are many rumors about Google doing an operating system to compete with Microsoft. I'm not saying they aren't doing that (I simply don't know), but I AM saying it would not be a good idea, because it doesn't play to any of the company's traditional strengths.

The same follows for the rumor that Google, as a dark fiber buyer, will turn itself into some kind of super ISP. Won't happen. And WHY it won't happen is because ISPs are lousy businesses and building one as anything more than an experiment (as they are doing in San Francisco with wireless) would only hurt Google's earnings.

So why buy-up all that fiber, then?

The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.

Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.

Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example. Replicating that Victoria's Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It doesn't matter. To Google's local data center, bits are bits and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.

As for the coming AJAX Office and other productivity apps, they'll sit locally, too. Two or three hops away from every user, they'll also be completely backed-up by two to three data centers down the line. Your data never goes away unless you erase it. Your latency and system response are as low as they can possibly be made for a network app.

And remember the Google Web Accelerator that came and disappeared? It's back! Only this time the Web Accelerator will have the proper hardware and network infrastructure to make it worth using.

This is more than another Akamai or even an Akamai on steroids. This is a dynamically-driven, intelligent, thermonuclear Akamai with a dedicated back-channel and application-specific hardware.

There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper. With the advent of widespread GoogleBase (again a bit-schlepping app that can be used in a thousand ways -- most of them not even envisioned by Google) there's suddenly a new kind of marketplace for data with everything a transaction in the most literal sense as Google takes over the role of trusted third-party info-escrow agent for all world business. That's the goal.

All this is based, of course, on Google's proven network and hardware expertise. Have you seen Google's Search Appliance? They ship you a 1U prebuilt server. You connect it to your network, fill out a simple configuration screen, and it scans and indexes your web site (or sites) for you. Google monitors and manages it remotely, and sucks up the data and adds it to theirs. You just plug the thing in and turn it on. It just works. You need do nothing else to keep it running. Google understands how to do this stuff. Microsoft definitely does not.

And there lies the differences between the two companies. Last week, I wrote about Windows Live and Office Live as Microsoft's best attempts at pretending to be Google. And Google will do those kinds of applications, too. But they'll build them atop a network infrastructure that Microsoft can't match.

But that doesn't mean Microsoft customers will be denied access to the Google Internet. Quite the contrary. Google would be insane to exclude Microsoft customers, which will be as welcome as any other. Only Google will be benefiting far more than Microsoft from that usage.

Google has the reach and the resources to make this work. There are only so many fiber networks and they'll be BUYING service from those outfits -- many of which are in or near bankruptcy. Say the containers cost $500,000 each in volume and $500,000 per year to run. That's $300 million to essentially co-opt the Internet. And you know whose strategy this is? Wal-Mart's. And unless Google comes up with an ecosystem to allow their survival, that means all the other web services companies will be marginalized. There will be startups and little guys, but no medium-sized companies. ISPs, which we've thought of as a threatened species, won't be touched, but then their profit margins are so low they aren't worth touching. After all, Wal-Mart doesn't try to own the roads its goods are carried over. And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google.

Microsoft can't compete. Yahoo probably can't compete. Sun and IBM are like remora, along for the ride. And what does it all cost, maybe $1 billion? That's less than Microsoft spends on legal settlements each year.

Game over.

And yet next week I'll take it one more step.

December 5, 2005 at 11:48 AM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home

Q&A: Microsoft Touts New Ajax Tools

InformationWeek > Microsoft > Q&A: Microsoft Touts New Ajax Tools > November 19, 2005

nformationWeek talks to Microsoft Product Manager Brian Goldfarb about the trendy new Web technology called Ajax, and Microsoft's plans for tools to make Ajax development easier.
By Tony Kontzer
InformationWeek

Think of how responsive Google Maps or GMail are, and imagine that kind of performance on your corporate intranet or your B2B extranet. That's what Microsoft hopes to deliver with development tools built on Ajax.

Ajax, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is the technology underlying Google Maps, GMail, Microsoft's own MSN.com and Hotmail, and other highly responsive applications on the Web. It's a conglomeration of technologies that cover everything from presentation and object modeling to data interchange and retrieval. Microsoft thinks Ajax apps are too hard to build, and the company's Web platform team is trying to demystify Ajax with the development of an easier-to-use Ajax-style programming technology code-named "Atlas" that it's planning to bring to market during the first half of 2006. A prototype of the technology is available here.)

InformationWeek's Tony Kontzer recently caught up with Brian Goldfarb, Microsoft's product manager overseeing the development of Atlas. An edited version of the E-mail interview follows.

InformationWeek: Tell me about Microsoft's strategic approach to using and promoting Ajax-- why is getting developers to start writing Web apps using Ajax important, and what is Atlas all about?

Goldfarb: First of all, we need to understand the need driving the interest in Ajax, which as a style of Web development bears its roots in what Microsoft invented almost 8 years ago with IE4 (DHTML) and IE5 (XMLHttp). Most of what is fueling the interest, in this somewhat old technology, has been frustration around how to create richer applications on the Web. Recently I think two important things happened to revitalize interest in Ajax. First, a wider number of browsers have provided support for the technologies developers need for Ajax- style development, and second, there has been a new focus and interest in delivering better user experiences for customers.

Microsoft is distinctly focused on driving richer user experiences on the Web through to the client and devices for our customers. For the Web there are two challenges to this. The first is the limitation of application development within the browser, and the second is development complexity. When looking at the Ajax approach to Web development, we realized this was way more difficult than it needed to be. As a result, we created Atlas to help make Ajax- style development easier, and more approachable for a broader range of developers. We believe that Atlas will be as good as is gets on the browser and will enable the broad masses of developers to easily take their Web applications to the next level. To me, the most important part of our strategy with Atlas is to the take the rocket science out of Ajax and make it easier for our customers to create more compelling experiences on the Web.

InformationWeek: What do you see as the key business benefits to Ajax-powered Web sites?

Goldfarb: In simple terms, Ajax enables better user experiences on the Web, which can help businesses gain a competitive advantage. User experience is beyond a pretty interface. It's about the emotional connection that users have when they use an application, leading to brand loyalty and more. Richer experiences are able to provide big business benefits and I think you’ll see that more and more in the years to come. Technologies like Atlas are all about helping businesses build more compelling experiences to help them differentiate their businesses.

From a technical perspective, compared to traditional web apps, the primary advantages of Ajax-style Web applications include more interactive user interfaces by executing code on the client, automatic updates without requiring the user to refresh the page, and better performance from fewer round trips to the server, among many others. Ajax-style development enables developers to optimize the user experience by gaining more control over what happens on the client versus the server.

InformationWeek: What are the barriers to Ajax adoption? How difficult are the technologies to work with?

Goldfarb: Today, the Ajax approach to Web development is incredibly difficult. This is in large part because there is a lack of tooling and infrastructure. In addition there are a number of general compatibility issues across different browsers and operating systems that developers are forced to address. Essentially, creating an Ajax Web application today is rocket science and our goal is to help provide a great platform and improved tooling. There’s an ‘as good as it gets” notion of Web user experience due to browser restrictions and development complexity, which is why our goal with Atlas is to offer the best implementation of AJAX- style programming available.

InformationWeek: What's the profile of a business or Web site that's ripe to benefit from Ajax?

Goldfarb: I’m not sure there is a specific “profile” that is ripe to benefit from Ajax. It comes down to experience -- if a business wants to provide customers with a superior level of interaction on the Web, Ajax style programming with Atlas is one way to accomplish that. If it is on Windows, Windows Presentation Foundation and our new set of experience focused technologies for Windows Vista will enable that. Is it customer facing? Then you want it to be the best it can possibly be. Is it internal? Well, if it is hard to use it will take employees more time to accomplish tasks, and that costs money. The opportunities for better experiences to help businesses both internally and externally are abundant and I fully expect over the long term we are going to see experience become more of a focal point in the development lifecycle. Our goal is to make user experience a foremost tenet in application development.

InformationWeek: A lot of high-profile sites have no immediate plans to test out Ajax, and some haven't even heard of it. Are they missing the boat?

Goldfarb: Ajax has received a lot of attention in the press recently, and while it does provide some options for creating Web applications that deliver a better user experience, it is not the only option for delivering such applications. In the developer division at Microsoft our goal has always been to provide developers with easy-to-use and productive tools, such as Visual Studio, that enable them to create applications that target the Web, Windows or mobile. This way they can create applications that best suit the needs of their users.

InformationWeek: What are some of the key adoptions of Ajax that you're aware of in the marketplace today, and what's interesting about each of them?

Goldfarb: There are a few sites cropping up that are leveraging some aspects of Ajax development to improve their experiences-- these include msn.com and Hotmail, Gmail and the Google start page, MSN Virtual Earth, and Sidestep. What is interesting is the experience they deliver for each individual unique scenario. Ajax has offered a level of differentiation, and I think we will continue to see creative uses of the technology on the Web as it becomes easier to adopt.

InformationWeek: What's your crystal-ball outlook for Ajax and other programming tools that are or will be modeled after it?

Goldfarb: Ajax itself is a development style, and today there aren't many tools available, which is why Ajax development is so difficult. When I look into my crystal-ball, which I admit is not always very clear, I see a larger focus on generally better experiences. Ajax is just a component of the story. Businesses are already starting to see tangible value out of better experiences. The ROI studies will come, but the anecdotal evidence is there. If it is easier to use, employees can be more productive–and productivity is a good thing. If customers love it, they’ll come back, and if it's easy to use, they’ll come back. My crystal-ball says it is about differentiating offerings, standing out from the crowd, and providing awesome experiences–and that need will drive the technology.

November 20, 2005 at 11:58 PM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

Vendors look to Ajax to make SOA shine

Vendors look to Ajax to make SOA shine

By Michael Meehan, News Writer
10 Nov 2005 | SearchWebServices.com
SOUND OFF! Post your comments

For anyone who thinks they've seen dynamic, Ajax-rendered Web pages, you ain't seen nothing yet.

In 2006 a wave of Ajax (short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) products are planned to hit the market, giving IT shops their choice of tools to build front ends to their Web services that mimic desktop functionality. As it turns out, the companies building these tools are also the companies building out service-oriented architecture tool sets, marrying application layer Web technology to presentation layer Web technology.

"Ajax is the way Web applications are going to be built," said Steve Benfield, vice president of strategy at ClearNova Inc. "In a very short time, that's pretty much become a given."

ClearNova plans to release the second beta of its ThinkCap JX rapid application development platform this month. The product puts a client-centered application program interface on the server, allowing programmers to make user interface changes in Java rather than in JavaScript, broadening the number of developers who can take advantage of Ajax functionality.

Microsoft has put out the beta of Atlas, which implements Ajax in ASP.NET. BEA Systems Inc. is building Ajax functionality into its portal product and adding Ajax APIs to its runtime tools. Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to wed Ajax to Java Server Faces. Enterprise service bus vendor CapeClear Software Inc. plans to add Ajax tools to its SOA-centric product as well.

"Putting the two together makes sense at a programmatic level," said David Clark, CapeClear's executive vice president. "A lot of the principles around Ajax, namely its asynchronous model, are similar to the ESB model. It's an extension of what we would consider good ESB patterns."

Tibco Software Inc. first married a Rich Internet Application front end to middleware when it bought General Interface last year. According to Kevin Hakman, General Interface founder and director of product marketing, the beta of the 3.1 version has seen 100% quarter-to-quarter growth in downloads.

Hakman's team has been trying to measure the burst in interest around Ajax. They've been tracking Google searches around Ajax since the summer. As of July 18, Ajax had 3.2 million Google hits, but by October 28 that number had risen to 23.8 million.

"People envisioned doing this for a long time only to be disappointed by the limits of HTML and the browser," Hakman said. "I think the spike in interest stems from them seeing that now this can be done."

Yet, like any rapidly expanding technology, Ajax implementations will run into some bumps along the way.

"Maintaining Javascript code is difficult," said Jeet Kaul, executive director of Java EE (Enterprise Edition) and the Sun Java Application Server at Sun Microsystems. "You have lots of dependencies to deal with and every browser handles it differently."

Sun's plan is to "hide the complexity of Ajax" with the 2006 release of Java Studio Creator Web development integrated development environment. It will make Java Server Faces components Ajax-aware inside a drag-and-drop tool. Sun also plans to build Ajax support into the 2006 release of its Java Standard Edition product, code-named Mustang.

BEA demonstrated an alpha version of Ajax functionality for its WebLogic Portal 9.0 product during its user's conference in September. Yet Pieter Humphrey, BEA's senior product marketing manager, looked beyond portal APIs to Ajax support inside frameworks like Beehive as the real sweet spot for application vendors.

"If you can start to connect your user interface to your services on the back end, then you've really got something," he said. "It would [bring] the possibility of service reuse into a vendor-neutral client tier."

ClearNova has been one of the first companies to attempt to bridge that gap. Benfield said Ajax won't proliferate as anticipated if it remains a pure client-side play.

"You need to be able to build business applications with Ajax, not just pretty Web pages," he said. "Now you're dealing with much more complex sets of data and you're not going to rewrite a lot of code to do this."

Hakman noted that Ajax developers are also in short demand.

"It reminds me a lot of 1998 with Web site development," he said. "Everybody's looking to do this and there aren't enough skilled developers to go around. Benfield noted that ClearNova is getting 80-100 registrants for its weekly Ajax webinars.

Kaul noted that Ajax has become one of the highest hit pages on Java.Net.

"For what it does, it's just awesome," he said.

Clark made no bones about the importance of the Ajax movement.

"Ajax is going to be a big part of the future SOA, no doubt about it," he said. "We expect that if you're doing the one, you'll be doing the other."

November 12, 2005 at 05:24 PM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

Mashing the web

MONITOR | Mashing the web | Economist.com

Sep 15th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Software: Programmers are combining data from different websites to create “mash-up” sites with entirely new capabilities

ARMED with a stack of house-listing printouts from Craigslist.com, a popular website, Paul Rademacher was driving around Silicon Valley late last year looking for a place to live. It was not until he was about to park that he looked up and realised he had already visited the same house earlier. Surely, he thought, there had to be a better way to evaluate and visualise a list of housing options.

And so there was. In February, Mr Rademacher—who by day was a software engineer at DreamWorks Animation—began building a website that combines the mapping capabilities of Google's search engine with housing listings from Craigslist. The result, HousingMaps.com, creates maps showing houses or apartments in a particular city within a designated price range. The site went live in April, and is a leading example of one of the latest internet trends: the web mash-up. HousingMaps instantly attracted a crowd and has since been visited by more than 850,000 people.

The term mash-up is borrowed from the world of music, where it refers to the unauthorised combination of the vocal from one song with the musical backing of another, usually from a completely different genre. Web mash-ups do the same sort of thing, combining websites to produce useful hybrid sites and illustrating the internet's underlying philosophy: that open standards allow and promote unexpected forms of innovation.

“Mash-ups are emblematic of the direction of the web,” says Paul Levine, the general manager of Yahoo! Local, a subsidiary of one of the web's most popular sites. “This is about participants in the web community opening up their systems.” It may also be about good business. By building their sites using open standards, and so making it easier for customers and developers to build other sites that plug into them, companies can both encourage innovation and boost their own popularity. “When you lower the barriers to entry, interesting things happen,” says Tim O'Reilly, president of O'Reilly & Associates, a firm based in Sebastopol, California that publishes programming handbooks. “The players who figure this out will wield a great deal of economic power.”

As often happens online, this trend is being driven from the bottom up, by users. Most mash-ups happen without the sites that supply the data even knowing about it. For example, Greg Sadesky, a programmer based in Quebec City, grabbed textual data from Yahoo! Traffic and map data from Google without consulting either firm, to create a mash-up (see traffic.poly9.com) that produces traffic maps. Similarly, Chris Smoak, who lives in Seattle, has mashed together several traffic, web-cam, transport-information and map sites to create Seattle Bus Monster, a public-transit site for the Seattle area (see www.busmonster.com). The rise of online journals, or blogs, has spurred the mash-up trend by bringing programmers together to discuss new ideas and tricks. Mr Sadesky credits the inspiration for his traffic-map mash-up to the blog run by John Resig (ejohn.org), which explains how to extract traffic data from Yahoo!'s website.

Mashing is getting easier for these after-hours programmers as big websites start to cater to their needs. ChicagoCrime.org, a mash-up that lets visitors view crime data by street, date, type and zip code on a map of Chicago, for example, said at the end of June that Google's decision to release an official method for linking to its maps had made the site far more reliable. Yahoo! opened up its map data in a similar way in June, and in July Microsoft unveiled a pre-release version of its mapping site, MSN Virtual Earth. It includes a “Community” button to help programmers create websites that incorporate data from Virtual Earth.

Such firms are happy to see their sites get mashed. At the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco this summer, Brett Taylor, the product manager of Google Maps, noted that “everyone is doing it already”—so why fight it? “A mash-up lets a company like Google tap into the creativity of the world's programmers,” says Nathan Torkington of O'Reilly Media, who was the conference chairman.

So will mash-ups march on? Only if they lead to revenue, some predict. “Something has to evolve,” says Craig Donato, the founder of Oodle, a site with local buying, selling and donation listings. If the information being mashed is useful, he says, it is probably expensive for the originated sites to put on the web in the first place. At the Where 2.0 conference, Mr Taylor of Google said that programmers were free to use Google maps for mash-ups that were “free to consumers”—but added that his firm reserved the right to deliver maps with advertisements on them in future. Dave McClure of Simply Hired, a recruitment site based in Silicon Valley, says he expects the mash-up scene to change, just as the blogging scene did when Google's advertisement-placing service, AdSense, first appeared and “turned free content into a monetisable data source”.

There are already signs that mash-ups have commercial potential. Simply Hired and the social-networking site LinkedIn, for example, have already mashed themselves together. If you are a member of LinkedIn and go searching for a job on Simply Hired, you can link from a job listing to a list of LinkedIn contacts who could get you an introduction at the company in question. As well as helping users to land a job, this mash-up should help the two websites to boost their traffic. And in August, Salesforce.com, a pioneering provider of business software that runs inside web browsers, announced Smashforce, an initiative to make it easier to incorporate its software into mash-ups. A firm could, for example, combine a list of sales prospects with a map, to help a salesman plan his route.

All told, the urge to mix things up should keep companies and programmers busy for the foreseeable future—too busy, sometimes, even to use their own mash-ups. Mr Smoak, who created his mash-up during evenings and weekends, says he never gets up early enough to take the bus to his day job, at Amazon. “I'm not an early riser,” he says. “But if I stay up late I can do projects like this.” And what of Mr Rademacher's housing search? The popularity of his website helped land him a job at Google, but has also kept him so busy that he has not had time for any more house-hunting.

October 16, 2005 at 02:52 AM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Internet enters a bold second act

The Internet enters a bold second act | csmonitor.com

By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Across the high-tech landscape, tectonic plates are shifting.

Google, the company that's king of the online search, recently offered to provide wireless Internet access to the entire city of San Francisco - for free.

Apple Computer now offers an iPod music player so tiny it could get lost in your wallet.

And the British Broadcasting Corp. is starting to offer many of its TV programs in digitized formats online.

In their own ways, these developments point to a common theme: Led by the Internet, the high-tech industry appears to be entering a vibrant new phase of both growth and upheaval.

This is a far different boom from the dotcom craze of the late 1990s. It is the Web's sober second act, characterized not by soaring stock prices but by forces that are challenging traditional industries - from publishing to telecommunications - to adopt new business plans. Consumers seem to be the only sure winners.

"We've taken a huge step forward and moved from a stage of concept to a stage of product and service delivery," says Brooks Gray, vice president of Technology Business Research in Hampton, N.H. His warning is clear: "There are some sizable risks to companies that don't evolve."

The maturing of the Internet as an engine of the global economy is being driven by a handful of important forces:

Prices and sizes shrink. Miniature "flash memory" technology, for example, is enabling the rise of little gadgets that link people to the Web. Transferring songs from the Internet to a shirt-pocket music player is just one example. Next, in an announcement Wednesday, could come iPods that show music videos. And cellphones will soon display TV episodes.

Information goes digital. Lines are blurring between computers and traditional consumer devices such as phones, television sets, or even printed books and newspapers. Finally, "digital convergence" - the fusion of computing with other traditional industries foreseen in the 1990s - is happening in earnest, challenging traditional communications industries.

Mobility expands. Wireless services, such as the network Google envisions in San Francisco, are making the Web portable, not just a desk-bound tool. Shopping for shoes? A smartphone will help navigate as you hoof it from store to store.

As all these trends shower consumers with new products and services, corporations face both risks and opportunities.

The good news, experts say, is that the online realm has reached critical mass.

As of this fall, an estimated 1 billion people worldwide have Web access. In the US, the share of Internet users with high-speed connections is passing 50 percent. Online advertising revenue is soaring, and consumers are getting used to the notion of paying for services online.

But as information is digitized, profit margins can get squeezed. The Internet may be maturing, but it's not yet yielding the rich rewards that top companies typically reap when an industry reaches full bloom.

Instead, it's shaking up a host of traditional industries.

Consider telecommunications. Businesses and consumers are increasingly flocking to upstart providers like Vonage, which send calls over the Web for a fraction of the traditional land-line cost.

The rise of wireless online networks adds to the potential for price wars. These networks compete with phone and cable wires to take people online. They also could give consumers an alternative to traditional cellphone voice traffic.

"It's good for everybody except possibly the providers" of all these networks, says Allyn Hall, an expert in wireless technologies for the market-research firm In-Stat, in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Advertising revenue may help Google or some other bidder to finance a free wireless network that San Francisco hopes to create.

Such efforts, under consideration in other US cities, represent a direct challenge to traditional phone companies. So it's likely they will fight back not only with rival service plans but also by lobbying lawmakers and regulators.

"Never bet against the regulated providers," Mr. Hall says.

But in this battle to provide access to an array of online services, the winner will be "perhaps less dependent on technology than on other factors like marketing," he says.

The providers of content, such as media conglomerate Time Warner, face a different set of challenges. As content goes digital, these firms are learning to get consumers to pay for the information and news they get online. And they're finding more advertisers who will help foot the bill. By 2010, online ad revenues are expected to more than double from last year's $9.3 billion.

The problem of illegal copying, which has plagued the music industry, must be solved anew for video products as TV goes online.

Whatever the hurdles, Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons recently said the Web - specifically his company's troubled merger with Internet service provider AOL - is where the "growth opportunity" lies.

Mainstream high-tech companies are also scrambling for their place in the wild wild Web. The most closely watched battle pits Microsoft, the dominant software provider for personal computers, against Web-search giant Google.

"Google is certainly the best candidate that's come along in a long time to displace Microsoft," says Joe Wilcox, a senior analyst at Jupiter Research.

That doesn't mean it will. Microsoft is famous for tenaciously fending off threats, and has recently reorganized, in part to strengthen its MSN Web services. The company has also discussed a possible alliance with AOL.

But Google embodies a whole new model of computing.

Where Microsoft has traditionally helped people make the most of their own PC, Google wants the Internet to be a giant personal computer for the planet. It's stated mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible."

The more the Internet becomes such a tool, the less important traditional desktop software like Microsoft's becomes. The PC becomes just a way to get on to the Web.

Mr. Wilcox isn't counting Microsoft out just yet. But "Google could be in a very good position if it executes well," he says.

And as all these battles shake out, consumers stand to be in the best position of all. Their main challenge may be the old one of competing standards. Remember Betamax vs. VHS? Today, consumers could pay $299 for an iPod, only to find that next year's music player comes from a different company.

October 12, 2005 at 08:34 PM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (28) | Top of page | Blog Home

Could Ajax Wash Away 'Smart Clients'?

Could Ajax Wash Away 'Smart Clients'?

By Mary Jo Foley
There's more than one way to write a powerful client app. Just ask the Google and Flickr folks.

A key premise behind Microsoft's "smart client" pitch is that Web apps are not as good as fat/rich/locally based ones.

Microsoft defines smart clients as software that combines the best of Web apps with the best of locally hosted ones.

Microsoft's smart client elevator pitch: Web apps can't handle all the complex tasks that smart-client apps can. They can't gracefully switch between connected and disconnected states. And they can't take advantage of all the rich graphics and processing power that smart-client apps can.

Microsoft has been pushing the virtues of smart clients for at least two years. But this year, the company is intent on getting that message to stick.

But not everyone thinks you need Microsoft's .Net, Visual Studio and Windows environment to write powerful, savvy apps. There's an alternative camp that's gaining some mind share. They are backing a programming model known as "Ajax," which translates roughly to "asynchronous JavaScript and XML."

Adaptive Path, a consultancy that does Web design work for companies large and small, is the firm that coined the Ajax moniker.

As is true of Microsoft's smart client model, Ajax isn't a technology. Instead, Ajax is "really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways," Adaptive Path says. Among the technologies included are:

# standards-based presentation using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS);

# dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;

# data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;

# asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;

# and JavaScript binding everything together.

Adaptive Path points to Google Maps (the poster child for Ajax) and Google Suggest as examples of the kinds of applications that can and have been developed using Ajax principles and technologies. And Ajax isn't meant to replace Flash, as some industry watchers have speculated. Instead, Ajax can coexist with Flash, as the Flickr online-photo-sharing app from Ludicorp demonstrates.

"Ajax has platform independence," one of Adaptive's founders, Jeffrey Veen, told Microsoft Watch earlier this month. "It doesn't make sense to just develop for IE (Internet Explorer) any more. The Web is an open platform."

It seems like the Ajax camp is gaining some momentum as of late. Even some Microsoft folks are blogging about it.

But Microsoft has an awful lot of developer momentum. And it's planning to spend lots of evangelism dollars on extolling the virtues of its smart-client strategy in 2005 and beyond.

Is the Java vs. .Net battle giving way to an Ajax vs. smart client one? Will we see a dev world divided along Ajax/smart client lines? Or is there room for both programming platforms to coexist and (shudder) maybe even interoperate?

October 5, 2005 at 01:46 PM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home

OpenDocument could 'turn everything inside out'

OpenDocument could 'turn everything inside out' | CNET News.com

A Sun Microsystems executive says the OpenDocument format has the potential to change the world.

Tim Bray, the director of Web technologies at Sun, said at the OpenOffice.org conference in Slovenia late last week that the file format developed by standards body OASIS has the potential to transform the world as much as the World Wide Web did.

"Now we have the potential to explode the world again, to turn everything inside out again, if we get the widespread use across the office desktops of the world, of a common, open, unencumbered, reusable data format, namely OpenDocument," Bray said at the conference. "So we could see an explosion over the next decade that is like the Web happening again. And that would be fun--I'd love to see that happening."

Bray claimed that although Microsoft Office documents have become the de facto standard, the software giant's applications suite has not caused a revolution because it is not a format designed to be open or reusable.

The OpenDocument format has already been embraced by the commonwealth of Massachusetts and is being considered by some European governments, including Denmark and Norway; by Japan; and by other U.S. state governments. Microsoft has said it will not support the OpenDocument format.

The success of the Web, Bray said, can be attributed to the fact that everyone agreed to use HTML as the standard format data for presenting information.
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"For many years before the Web there were many different ways of publishing information. There were many different ways of doing hypertext. There were many different ways of doing online information retrieval and search, and navigation," said Bray.

"But then in the early '90s everyone agreed on one data format--HTML. HTML is not the world's greatest data format, but the power that came when everybody agreed to standardize on one data format--it changed the world. The whole world of online information exploded. It turned the world inside out," he said.

Bray's views on the impact of a standard data format on the success of the World Wide Web could be seen as a simplification. One of the main reasons why the Web succeeded where others had failed is due to the functionality it provided. In addition, other standards were also important for the success of the Web, in particular URLs and HTTP.

Ingrid Marson of ZDNet UK reported from London.

October 4, 2005 at 04:01 PM in Web 2.0 | Permalink | TrackBack (57) | Top of page | Blog Home