::.. Timing ..::

:: 2003/05/15 ::

Factiva Briefing: Up in a Down Economy

Had a great conversation with Clare Hart, President and CEO of Factiva, and Stacey Gelman, Chief Product Officer for Factiva, this afternoon. Along with some relatively sunny financial news (growing a few per cent in a down economy when all their competitors are going negative), we had a chance to talk about some of their technologies. They recently announced that their technology was to be integrated with Microsoft's Office 2003, which looks pretty neat. Nothing said about InfoPath, but I sense something between the lines.

I was very interested to learn that Factiva Alerts -- a real-time business intelligence alerts system -- was built using Jabber open source technology, long before co-parent Reuters (joint venture with Dow Jones) licensed technology from Microsoft for Reuters Messaging. The Factive technology platform is an open XML/SOAP architecture, so the Jabber technology was a good fit, and they have no plans to transition to the Reuters technology at this time. I expect that Stacey has more sophisticated collaboration on her viewscreen, leveraging real-time collaboration aggressively.

:: Stowe Boyd 5/15/2003 05:32:23 PM [link] ::
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Dave Pollard's BLOGS IN BUSINESS: THE WEBLOG AS FILING CABINET

Dave Pollard has a good piece about blogs as a repository of business knowledge and a medium for collaboration.

"That's not to say blogs are a panacea. They don't really capture tacit knowledge. They don't solve the 'team knowledge' capture problem. And it would take considerable training to get the average employee to learn to use a blog effectively and comfortably as a complete replacement for the filing cabinet, so that maintaining the blog would take no more time than maintaining the filing cabinet takes now.

But they do represent a potential breakthrough in both personalization and democratization of the process of grass-roots, peer-to-peer knowledge sharing of unfiltered knowledge."

[Pointer from McGee's Musings an entry that includes a number of other interesting pieces on the intersection of knowledge management and blogs.]

:: Stowe Boyd 5/15/2003 05:11:39 PM [link] ::
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New Version of AlwaysOn: Starting to Get It

I received the following email today, from tp (Tony Perkins, the founder of AlwaysOn, and formerly of Red Herring):

"Hi Stowe Boyd,

We just launched the new version of AlwaysOn! We call it version .75. In response to member input, we have two really cool new features I would like to highlight:

1. Members can now instantly blog their own opinions. The most recent three member blogs will appear at the bottom of the home page, and then bump over to the Member Blog page.

Check it out and start blogging: http://www.alwayson-network.com/publog.php

2. Members can now complete detail member searches by name, company and location in the updated Member Directory.

See if a friend is an AO member and re-mail them through our system:

http://www.alwayson-network.com/members/profile_view_all.php

In addition, at the suggestion of our members, we have upgraded the navigational ease of the site, and expanded our industry themes and links and research page. We have also added a regular “VC Pitch” and “AO 100 Contender” section to the home page, and added an AO News section that will bring members tech-related news from around the globe.

As always I would appreciate any feedback on v.75, and encourage our members who want to state their opinions to use the new Member Blog function to get the word out!

Thanks for being an AO member.

Best, tp

P.S. To those members who had previously sent along opinion pieces that we had not responded to (sorry), please feel free to post them in the new Member Blog section. The blog entries that get the most viewer traction will be upgraded to the regular blog section, and have more air time on the AO home page."

So it looks like all the fooforah regarding AlwaysOn not being a real blog-oriented site has percolated through to the AlwaysOn folks, and they are taking steps to rectify the ill-humor they have engendered in blogland.

Note in particular the "viewer traction" comment, that the most successful/popular/contentious blog contributors will get more "air time" on the front page... enlisting the volunteers to sell his mag! I love it! See the social software flavor of searching to see if friends are in the "network"? Are they trying to build a LinkedIn capability into the system?

They are leveraging the power of the online community and making a break (of sorts) with the journalistic tack it seemed they were going down. I will add to my list of things to keep my eye on.


:: Stowe Boyd 5/15/2003 12:08:04 PM [link] ::
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New Issue of Message -- The Future of Presence: Don't Strangle the Killer App

The newest issue of Message is available in PDF. I explore some of the obvious and not so obvious ways that presence is being used, and is likely to be used, all of which will lead to tremendous performance demands for presence management systems.

I not too long ago postulated that routers would in the future be optimized to support presence pinging efficiently, and likewise, every layer of the emerging real time enterprise architecture 'stack' will focus on supporting the pinging of trillions of devices, equipment, sensors, cameras, phones, computers, and vehicles. A few call outs:

"Presence is the killer app of the next generation of software technology, and presence will explode in the next few years: not just the doubling or trebling of people using IM systems, but the trillions of devices, hardware, and software that will be publishing presence. But if this growth is not to be choked off, new technologies are needed. I profile TimesTen’s real-time event processing system, an example of the software infrastructure needed."

"What information would be served up about groups through presence? The first would be the number and presence of its members, but other attributes might be just as interesting, like the status of the group’s activities, associated documents, timeline of events, next steps, and the like."

"If a group exists for a long time, the history of the group’s chat is potentially an enormously valuable asset: a knowledge base to be drawn upon."

"The highest barrier to supporting large-scale presence management is the actual updating of presence changes. The use of a conventional RDBMS is simply not a good match as volumes increase."

Download it. Read it. Share it with your friends.

:: Stowe Boyd 5/14/2003 03:01:06 PM [link] ::
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"Are You Ready for Social Software?" posted at Darwin

My newest piece for Darwin was posted today, Are You Ready for Social Software?

Go read it: no excuses.

:: Stowe Boyd 5/14/2003 12:56:59 PM [link] ::
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Ross Mayfield on "Boyd's Law"

Ross riffs on my newly proclaimed "Boyd's Law" -- which is an insight into why real-time communication improves productivity:

"Boyd's Law is one method of achieving economies of span. When a company effectively integrates vertical production functions, sequencing results in lower transaciton costs. This can happen both at the system economics and firm-level."

:: Stowe Boyd 5/14/2003 09:36:04 AM [link] ::
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More on Jabber used in Sputnik

I found a stroy by Glenn Fleishman at InfoWorld re: the use of Jabber within Sputnik:

"Central Control and the Sputnik APs interact using the open-source Jabber IM protocol. Using XML streams, the controller and APs exchange authenticated, encrypted messages that allow the controller to sense the presence of newly installed access points, pass them configuration info, and detect problems on the WLAN. Proxim and Cisco are also looking at including XML communication protocols in future versions of their controllers.

According to Sputnik, SOAP and other XML-based protocols could be embedded into these streams, allowing any kind of XML document to be sent. For example, a network management app could leverage XML to allow administrators to update user authentication information to a set of access points. The application could add a user's information, including his or her group memberships, to an internal database or management system, and then use SOAP to communicate relevant details to the central controller, which would in turn push out revised authentication lists and other details.

Individual access points supporting XML communication would also allow custom controller software to be written from scratch based on an organization's specific needs, as well as allow the deployment of heterogeneous access points. Today, SNMP's limitations make it less than ideal for this kind of control and communication.

With APs receiving communication via SOAP or through proprietary channels, there's good reason to fear that crackers inside or outside a network might be able to reconfigure APs to their own nefarious purposes. Sputnik has dealt with this by using SSL for all communications, along with a certificate signed by Sputnik's own certificate authority. Customers can change the certificate if they wish."

I know that Jabber's architecture is basically an XML message passing solution -- instant messaging and presence being just two of the interesting sorts of packets that can be routed -- but this is pretty cool stuff.

Also found this at DailyWireless courtesy of Sam Churchill:

"Glenn Fleishman explains that Central Control and the Sputnik APs interact using the open-source Jabber IM protocol. Using XML streams, the controller and APs exchange authenticated, encrypted messages that allow the controller to sense the presence of newly installed access points, pass them configuration info, and detect problems on the WLAN. Proxim and Cisco are also looking at including XML communication protocols in future versions of their controllers."

Also, Peter Saint-Andre, of the Jabber Open Source Foundation, mentions the blogthread at his blog.

:: Stowe Boyd 5/14/2003 08:33:00 AM [link] ::
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Sputnik -- wireless router based on Jabber

I see from Joi Ito that Sputnik has been launched, which would not have caught my attention, since I am not a Wi-Fi freak and Sputnik looks to be a hardware/software solution to Wi-Fi access points. However, the software relies on Jabber open source, at least in part. I plan to track down Dave Sifry, the CTO, (who is at the same time launching Technorati!) and get the skinny.

:: Stowe Boyd 5/13/2003 04:05:08 PM [link] ::
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Ev Clears up Google Rumor

My buddy, Michael O'Connor Clark, in an effort to stop me from making a fool of myself, points out that Ev Williams has countered the rumors about Google forking off the search for blogs. And he neatly skewers the source of the rumor saying "as far as I know, Orlowski [Google to Fix Blog Noise Problem] is full of crap. Again. If Google didn't find that blogs improved the results (and I don't know, I would assume they test these things, like, constantly), do you suppose they'd increase the frequency at which they crawl them, or decrease it? Yes, that's what I think."


:: Stowe Boyd 5/13/2003 08:13:59 AM [link] ::
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Google: Separate but Equal for Blogs

Rumors abound that Google will create a separate search mechanism for blogs. Makes sense.

:: Stowe Boyd 5/12/2003 06:23:35 PM [link] ::
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Time to Get Real: Challenges for the Real Time Enterprise

My most recent big, fat report, "Time to Get Real: Challenges for the Real Time Enterprise," is now available to Cutter Business-IT Strategies subscribers. Here's an abstract:

"The idea of the real-time enterprise has reached the top of the hype curve, and, as a result, the term is being stretched in so many directions by so many pundits that it’s becoming shapeless, like a much-rented tuxedo. A casual Google search on “Real-Time Enterprise” yields approximately 1,890,000 hits, and an examination of the first 10 shows how incredibly overloaded the expression has become. A bunch of software vendors (PeopleSoft, Ultimus, Waveset, TimesTen, and others), a number of analyst firms and a few articles on the subject provide probably 10 different definitions of what the real-time enterprise is supposed to be.

The idea of the real-time enterprise is going to remain hot for some time. Analysts are eagerly fanning the flames, stating that the typical multinational enterprise will spend 30 percent to 60 percent of its IT budget to develop real-time capabilities. This equates to 1.6 percent to 3.2 percent of total enterprise revenue. For a US $5 billion enterprise, this translates into US $80 to $160 million a year, for at least the next five years: an investment of US $400 million to $800 million.

What could these firms expect to get as a return on this investment, and what is motivating them to this enormous commitment? And where is this money being spent? These questions are the motivation for this report."

I get the opportunity to dig into the value of real-time communities, explore the rapidly emerging real time enterprise architecture from folks like Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, and examine the explosion of instant messaging and its impact on business. I explore Reed's law and extend it into the real time context:

"The third law [explored later on as Boyd's Law] is what I call synchronization amplification: As companies seek to increase their individual responsiveness and decrease the impacts of volatility in their markets, they will increase their synchronous communications with partners, but the net effect will be an increase in asynchronous operations of the meta-enterprise. This seeming paradox is simply explained. A real-time enterprise will have more frequent communication with its partners – passing information from application to application, or conducting real-time communication between people. As a result, the latency in information transfer decreases. This means that companies in the meta-enterprise are free to take action on this lower latency information, increasing overall performance across the meta-enterprise."

And here's one footnote from the full report:

"I have invented other Boyd's Laws before -- including "It can be demonstrated that the average person has below average intelligence," and "The farther away it is, the smaller it looks," but I hereby recant them all, leaving only this one behind for posterity."

A fun report to write, and I hope someone buys it and reads it. If you do, let me know.

:: Stowe Boyd 5/12/2003 04:25:56 PM [link] ::
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An Answer to the Messiness of Blogging: Blooks

The messiness of becoming a member of the blog digerati is a strong negative to involvement. There is no really effective way to hold on, manage, or even relocate all the 'nasty bits' of the interactions you have with folks all over the place.

A comment here, an email there, a trackback here. Can you even find all of them? Google doesn't seem to be reliable on things like comments, and people take files down all the time. The transitory nature of everything bloggish is a problem waiting to be solved. Blogthreads and so on are cool, but they don't pin anything down.

I had an interesting discussion about this with Stephen Fraser at Lulu recently -- they are in the business of trying to make money out of on demand content packaging and printing. I suggested that there would be an interesting product lurking in this mess somewhere.

Imagine wanting to take a snapshot of all the blogthreads, comments, news snippets, whatever, that went into some exchange, and being able to a/ collate it into some usable form, and then b/ freeze it, and c/ "publish" it -- meaning put it somewhere so it would be available in a permanent way for others.

Might be a new metaphor for "blooks" (blending of "books" and "blogs" -- turns out that Dave Winer coined this term, but used it to refer to books about blogs, which is all wrong). I have a long and interesting chat with Joi Iti and others over at Joi's blog (like what is going on right now re: LinkedIn), and let's say it is buzzworthy in some way or another. I could annotate with supplemental commentary, and publish it -- keep it around.

Could be a great way to generate a different sort of bloggish content, or a new starting point for traditional books.

:: Stowe Boyd 5/12/2003 10:52:36 AM [link] ::
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Metro AG Future Store

I read at the Mercury News about Metro AG, a German retail chain, that is building the store of the future: Future Store.

Among a slew of otherworldly gizmos and heavy application of wireless, they intend to use RFID (radio frequency IDs) to tag the groceries in the store:

``We are just at the beginning of the technological modernization of retailing,'' says Metro CEO Hans-Joachim Koerber.

Perhaps the key feature at Metro AG is smart tags, or RFID chips -- short for radio frequency identification -- that broadcast data for several feet, enabling receiver-equipped smart shelves or handheld scanners to track what's in the store.

Thus, the store alerts staff to outdated products or when the milk is running low. More enticingly, RFID offers retailers the chance to make the time-consuming job of taking inventory by hand simply go away." "only a few products have RFID tags, not enough to make their use at checkout worthwhile. Later it's hoped that the tags will enable customers to simply breeze out and have the bill appear later on their credit card.

Right now, RFID only tracks goods at the box and pallet level -- useful, but not something customers will see.

Metro, which has more than 2,300 stores in 26 countries, says it is paying supplier Philips Electronics 50 cents to $1 for the chips -- too much to tack on to low-priced items such as a 25-cent cup of yogurt.

Only when the price comes down -- to, say, 3 cents a chip in the coming years, with order volumes in the hundreds of millions or billions -- could RFID show up in the dairy section."

I love it. Stores will track what you buy through presence id of each individual item (not the veggies, I guess, but all packaged goods), and based on you walking out the door with it, you get billed.

When you get home, your smart kitchen will track the presence and "availability" -- in this case, eatability -- of the food in the rerigerator and on the cupboard shelves. So, at the end of a busy day, before you leave the office, you can check whether you need to buy more Half&Half or bread through the instant messaging app on your phone.

"O brave new world, that has such things in it!"

:: Stowe Boyd 5/12/2003 10:07:37 AM [link] ::
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