Finding Info about Tsunami Named Google Wave
May 30, 2009
If you are want to ride the Google Wave, you need to get up to speed. I found a couple of resources that may be useful to you. I don’t recommend the Google Web site or the Web log posts. These are breezy and are not as comprehensive as some of the third party write ups. I looked at a number of descriptions today. I would recommend that you read Ben Parr’s Google “Wave: A Complete Guide” here. Then you can sit back and check out the official video. You can find an easy link on Google Blogoscoped here or look at the Google Channel on YouTube. Once you have this information under your belt, head on over to my Overflight service here and read the posts about Wave on the Google Web logs. If you are into code instead of marketing frazzle, click here. I want to reiterate what I wrote earlier. The Wave swamped the new Microsoft Web surfer, Bing Kumo.
Stephen Arnold, May 30, 2009
More about Exalead and Its Miiget Technology
May 30, 2009
I mentioned Exalead’s Miiget not long ago. I received a couple of questions about the technology. To provide more color to that reference you may want to look at Same Story here. That company has licensed the Exalead technology. The announcement of the deal is here. The system provides content from the Same Story repository and from other sources. The system incorporates profiles so that information is tailored to the user. You can get more information about the Miiget technologies here.
Stephen Arnold, May 30, 2009
Cyberwarfare Attack Devices
May 26, 2009
If you worry about enterprise search, you won’t find much of interest in this Aviation Week. The addled goose, on the other hand, sees the story “Network Attack Weapons Emerge” here by David Fulghum as a precursor of similar information initiatives in the business arena. Information is a strategic asset and methods to locate, disrupt, intercept, and analyze those assets are going to remain and become increasingly significant. The core of the Aviatiion Week story was this comment:
Devices to launch and control cyber, electronic and information attacks are being tested and refined by the U.S. military and industry in preparation for moving out of the laboratory and into the warfighter’s backpack.
Mr. Fulghum added:
The Russians conducted a cyberattack that was well coordinated with what Russian troops were doing on the ground,” says a longtime specialist in military information operations. “It was obvious that someone conducting the cyber[war] was talking to those controlling the ground forces. They knew where the [cyber]talent was [in Russia], how to use it, and how to coordinate it. “That sophisticated planning at different levels of cyberwarfare surprised a lot of people in the Defense Dept.,” he says. “It looked like a seamless, combined operation that coordinated the use of a range of cyberweapons from the sophisticated to the high school kids that thought it was cool to deface official web sites. The techniques they used everybody knows about. The issue was how effective they were as part of a combined operation.”
I found interesting his description of the components of a cyberattack toolkit:
The three major elements of a cyberattack system are its toolbox, planning and execution capabilities. The toolbox is put together by the hardware and software experts in any organization to address specific missions. They maintain the database of available capabilities.
Worth reading.
Stephen Arnold, May 26, 2009
Amazon to DC
May 25, 2009
With the Army embracing Windows Vista and the Google moving appliances, Amazon has, if this news report is accurate, decided to chow down at the Federal feed bag. TechFlash here reported that Amazon wants to hire a government savvy manager. If you are tracking Amazon’s non book activities, you will want to read Eric Engleman’s “Amazon Targets New Web Services Customer: Uncle Sam”. Mr. Engleman wrote:
There are certainly lots of technology possibilities emerging with the incoming Obama administration, including the president-elect’s proposal to digitize the nation’s health care records (Microsoft and Google have projects to put personal health records online). Is Amazon lining up to tap federal dollars?
The answer may be yes.
Stephen Arnold, May 25, 2007
Copyright and the Real Time Microblog Phenom
May 24, 2009
Liz Gannes’ “Copyright Meets a New Worth Foe: The Real Time Web” is an interesting article. You can find it on NewTeeVee.com here. Her point is that copyright, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and other bits and pieces of legal whoopdedoo struggle with real time content from Twitter-like services. She wrote:
If you’re a copyright holder and you want to keep up with your pirated content flitting about the web — well, good luck. The way the DMCA is set up means you’re always chasing, and the real-time web is racing faster than ever before. Analytics services are only just emerging that will tell you where your views are coming from on a semi-real-time basis. That’s especially true for live video streaming sites such as Ustream and Justin.tv. Justin.tv, in particular, has come under fire by sports leagues for hosting camcorded streams of live game broadcasts. The company says it takes down streams whenever it is asked to. But the reality is, often the moment has passed.
In short, information flows move more quickly than existing business methods. An interesting illustration of this flow for video is Twiddeo here. Government officials have their work cut out for them with regard to ownership, copyright, and related issues.
But…
As I read this article, I thought about the problem Google has at this time with real time content. Google’s indexing methods are simply not set up to handle near instantaneous indexing of content regardless of type. In fact, fresh search results on Google News are stale when one has been tracking “events” via a Twitter like service.
As important is the “stepping back” function. On Google’s search results displays, how do I know what is moving in near real time; that is, what’s a breaking idea, trend, or Tweet? The answer is, “I don’t.” I can hack a solution with Google tools, but even then the speed of the flow is gated by Google’s existing indexing throughput. To illustrate the gap, run a query for American Idol on Google News and then run the query on Tweetmeme.com.
Two different slants biased by time. In short, copyright problem and Google problem.
Stephen Arnold, May 24, 2009
Google, YouTube, and Digital Volume
May 22, 2009
Short honk: A year or so ago, I learned that Google received about one million new video objects per month. TechCrunch reported here that Google’s YouTube.com ingests about 20 hours of video every minute. I don’t know if this estimate is spot on, but it is clear that YouTube is amassing one of the world’s largest collections of rich text content in digital form. For me, the most interesting information in the write up was:
Back in 2007, shortly after Google bought the service, it was 6 hours of footage being uploaded every minute. As recently as January of this year, that number had grown to 15 hours, according to the YouTube blog. Now it’s 20 — soon it will be 24.
Lots of data means opportunity for the GOOG. I am looking forward to having the audio information searchable.
Stephen Arnold, May 22, 2009
Cloud Comparison – Amazon, Google, Microsoft
May 18, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me this weekend a link to an article that appeared about a month ago here. The write up was “Amazon, Google, Microsoft – Big Three Cloud Providers Examined” by Brandon Watson. His approach was to describe the cloud services of these three Web powerhouses.
My reading of his article left me with the impression that Amazon is the big dog in this kennel of pit bulls. He wrote:
AMZN is, essentially, in the load management business. They are a low margin retail operator that is running a hugely expensive infrastructure for which they are seeking maximum utilization. They would like nothing more than to be noise in their own system. AMZN is relentlessly metrics driven. As such, they have a pretty good idea of how much money to expect off of traffic that walks through their front door. They know how much to expect from traffic ending up at one of their marketplace partners. With the addition of AWS, they have a new way to monetize their capacity, and with their predictable pricing model, they know exactly how much money they are going to make off of customers who deploy applications to their service.Traffic on their network makes them money. It may not make your app money, but it makes them money, so they are happy. It more than likely saves you money, so you are probably happy too.
The Google warrants some tough love. Mr. Watson expressed his love for Google “guys” and then offered:
Applications on GAE are mostly CRUD apps, storing structured data into big table. As a developer, building an application on GAE, you are essentially feeding the GOOG beast. While they have not yet released final pricing, allow me to put on my pointy tin foil hat and talk about what might come to pass. GOOG knows exactly how much it costs to run their infrastructure, and as such could hand developers a bill for the resources which they consume. However, GOOG doesn’t have AMZN’s problem. Their traffic is mostly linear, and going up and to the right. It’s probably logarithmic at this point, but who’s counting? In any event, since they have little variability in their traffic patterns, they don’t have to get into the load management business. By allowing developers to build applications on their infrastructure, they are incurring unnecessary costs. Their motivations, however, are driven by their business model. Each new app that is plugged into the infrastructure ads new data to their data set, and creates new opportunities for page monetization.
For the Redmond giant, Mr. Watson opined:
As for MSFT, there are plenty of things I could say, but let me simply state what I believe to be our motivations. We are a platform company. We very much believe that we are in the business of delivering the best platform and tools to developers to build great applications. Our on-premise stack has proven to be extremely successful over the last several decades. With the release of the Azure Services Platform, one of the core design tenets was that we would like to achieve parity between our on and off-premise stacks. The entirety of the Azure Services Platform is designed to enable experienced MSFT developers to be combat effective on day one.
I enjoyed the article. With Amazon the king of the cloud kennel, can it hang in there with Xen and the economical approach to next-generation computing.
Stephen Arnold, May 18, 2009
SAP and Business by Design
May 16, 2009
SAP, Europe’s largest software company, continues to intrigue me. The company’s roots are deep in the on premises hydroponic tanks of its customers. The writing is on the wall, however. SAP customers are pushing back on costs, long deployment times, and complexity with each passing month. I read Michael Krigsman’s “Understanding SAP’s Business by Design SaaS Strategy” with interest. You can find that article here.
When I copied the url for this link I notice that the subdirectory was “project failures”, which is by itself an interesting bit of information. The article is based on conversations Mr. Krigsman had with a panoply of SAP luminaries. For me the most important passage in the article was:
The Business byDesign initiative presents two broad strategic challenges to SAP. First, from a Board-level perspective, the company must decide, on an ongoing basis, how much to invest in this product, which has long-term potential but is expensive in the present. The relatively slow rollout reflects the Board’s measured and carefully paced level of investment. Second, Business byDesign reflects a new way of managing and delivering software for SAP, a company with deep on-premise roots. As SAP has learned, on-premise vendors face formidable challenges and a steep learning curve during the transition to SaaS deployment. SAP obviously underestimated these obstacles.
In my opinion, on premises business models will be cannibalized a nibble at a time by software as a service and other ways of delivering enterprise software. In short, SAP may be a lab experiment that provides useful data on the fate of other on premises giants. You can’t make up the consulting revenue, long deployment times, and high license fees on volume in my opinion. Again, nary a word about search. SAP seems to be drifting.
Stephen Arnold, May 16, 2009
Web Wide API: The Battleground
May 14, 2009
If you wondered what was the driver for the API snowstorm, read “Can Amazon Be the Default Payment API for the Web?” here. The author aaronchua did a good job of explaining the logic behind a single Web API for online payments. The issue is not multiple payment systems. The call is for a single payment system. Assume this happens. Monopoly, right? The APIs are important to Amazon, Google, and others. Winner takes all is logical, right?
Stephen Arnold’ May 14, 2009
Google Apps Click Forward
May 13, 2009
Valeo, according to Computer Weekly here, has signed a three year deal for Google Apps. The account will be serviced by Capgemini. The article said:
About 30,000 workers will use Google’s software, which is delivered over the internet as a cloud computing service. The automotive components maker wants to reduce its administration costs so is using a communication and collaboration platform based on Google Apps Premier Edition. Valeo has 192 locations in 27 countries.
Important global deal for the GOOG in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, May 13, 2009
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