Software to Rule the New Mobile Market

October 8th, 2008 by jeremychone | 3 Comments »

The value chain used to be one of the main differences between the mobile and PC markets. The PC industry was driven by software vendors (i.e., Microsoft, Apple, Oracle), while the mobile industry was controlled by the Telcos and device manufacturers. For a long time, the Telcos  even had the power to remove features from devices that they felt caused too much competition with their own service offerings. For example, tethering and other features frequently were disabled on early versions of Windows Mobile devices. Interestingly, iPhones 3G, despite its flying pixels, still does not have tethering nor allows it. I am not sure if it is an iPhone limitation or another example of Telcos control.

Read the rest of this entry »

Search Oriented Tagging

September 30th, 2008 by jeremychone | 5 Comments »

Tagging has been a relatively popular, human-driven method for organically categorizing information on the Web. Users are now accustomed to tagging the content that they are publishing or bookmarking.

However, by design, tagging requires users to have some sort of writing privilege, which greatly limits its reach potential. Practically speaking, it means that if a user wants to tag an item on a system (e.g, Youtube, Flickr, or delicious) he or she must have an account on that system and be logged in at the time of the operation.

While this is probably not an issue for major Internet services, it can be a chicken-and-egg issue for new, upcoming services that do not yet have a large enough community to build a meaningful tag cloud. How can a new service maximize its community tag cloud if it doesn’t yet have a community?

Read the rest of this entry »

Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome Harmony

September 23rd, 2008 by jeremychone | 7 Comments »

Google Chrome is only about three weeks old and is already an Internet phenomenon. To sum it up, Google Chrome is all about making web browsing safer, faster, and easier. While some might see a fierce competition between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, I see harmony.

Here is some background to better understand this point of view. There has been a somewhat valid belief stating that the un-typed and interpreted nature of the JavaScript language was a major limitation for building demanding client applications. Consequently, to overcome this challenge, the browser technology providers had the following two options:

  1. Re-invent the language by “upgrading” the JavaScript language to a more a traditional typed and object-oriented language, such as Java or C#, allowing the runtime to just focus on running the code.
  2. Re-invent the runtime by creating novels ways for the JavaScript virtual machine to parse and interpret the JavaScript code, making the language as robust and reliable as more traditional languages.

Read the rest of this entry »

Seven Design Principles for Enterprise Collaboration 2.0

September 16th, 2008 by jeremychone | 6 Comments »

The two premises of this article are as follows:

  1. Social Networking is the method of connecting and communicating with the purpose of increasing knowledge (of people and of domain).
  2. Collaboration is the method of organizing knowledge and expertise to efficiently accomplish a particular task.

So, Social Networking is about sharing and discovering, and collaboration is about organizing and creating. Although informal, the point of these definitions is to demonstrate the similar but inherently distinctive meanings of collaboration and social networking.

The latest challenge for an enterprise is that social networking has undergone significant innovation cycles, mostly on the consumer side, and collaboration has not kept pace. As a consequence, an enterprise is often tempted to substitute collaboration by social networking, which could lead to an oversized enterprise social network with very little productivity gain, or even a loss, due to the over-communication side effect.

Read the rest of this entry »

Which Open Source License?

September 9th, 2008 by jeremychone | 17 Comments »

Which Open Source LicenseFor a commercial entity, building an effective open source strategy can be a relatively daunting task. Open Source strategy discussions tend to revolve around licensing. Typical questions are, ”Should we use dual licensing?,” “Should we use GPL or BSD?,” “What are the risks of GPL?,” “Can the licensing help us drive users to our commercial assets?,” or “What are the competitive risk associated with each type of license?“

Well, while the licensing questions are pertinent and will need to be answered at some point, the real questions are “What? Why? And How much [open]?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Flying Pixels

August 13th, 2008 by jeremychone | 9 Comments »

With the emergence of new technologies such as AJAX, Flash, and Silverlight, and popular applications such as Google Map and iPhone, the temptation for developers to fully and deeply animate their upcoming applications has become almost irresistible.

While slick animations and transitions are certainly useful for emotionally driven applications, such as car configurators, and some applications or components such as Google Map and charting, they should not be used as a substitute for a good interactive design. Application developers need to realize that these animations and transitions come at an extra design and development cost (no matter what tool they are using). 

Read the rest of this entry »

iPhone 3g, 1 out of 3

June 12th, 2008 by jeremychone | 12 Comments »

BitsAndBuzz.com would not be much of a technology blog if it didn’t blog about the new iPhone.

As have many others, I’ve been relatively impressed by the innovation and popularity of the iPhone. I think Apple CEO Steve Jobs has a unique ability to gauge when and how a specific industry is ready to change (the Apple way). Though he somewhat missed the first PC market, he definitely didn’t miss the Internet music one, and now he is right on track to owning a big part of the next generation mobile market. The latest iPhone 3G phenomenon (product and buzz) is definitely a great example of Steve Job’s pioneering vision, and while most of the features of the iPhone were more or less expected, the total package, including the pricing and the developer platform strategy, is pretty darn impressive.

However, as a business user, I am mostly interested in three main following features, and so far, I can safely see only one out of these three.

Read the rest of this entry »

Web Developer Spectrum

March 15th, 2008 by jeremychone | 2 Comments »

Web Developer Spectrum SmallIn the last few years, the technology industry has been particularly focused on Web developers, and the last couple of weeks have been a relatively good example of such attention. First, Adobe released its Adobe AIR and their Flex 3 products; Microsoft did a massive SilverLight push at its now famous MIX event (see Read/Write post); Google announced Google Gears for mobile devices and, finally, Steve Jobs splashed the market with his “Flash not good enough for iPhone” comment (which, in my opinion, is more of a strategic move than a technical reality). Meanwhile, “non-corporate-backed” Web frameworks, such as Spring, Ruby/Rail, and many AJAX frameworks, also continue to attract more and more Web developers. Consequently, Web developers have now, more than ever, a wide variety of technologies at their disposal.

Read the rest of this entry »

Service Oriented Platform: 4 Modes

February 22nd, 2008 by jeremychone | 4 Comments »

Over the last few years, we have witnessed the emergence of a new type of software platform – the Service Oriented Platform (SOP). The SOP concept is to offer an application platform as a network service (inside or outside an enterprise firewall), providing a centralized runtime to execute and manage distributed or centralized applications.

SOP services can range from application aggregation, presentation, linking (e.g, Mashup), provisioning, componentization, and context augmentation (e.g., Social Graph and common application data). As SOPs mature, it would not be surprising to see these platforms offer most, if not all, of the traditional application platform services in a service-oriented manner, such as application testing, versioning, data migration, and much more.

In the consumer space, the best SOP examples would be Facebook, OpenSocial, and Ning. In the enterprise, a good example would be SalesForce.com (including their latest Force.com addition) and some of the newer smaller players such as Coghead, DabbleDB, and BungeeConnect. Note that SOP solutions can be offered as a hosted service (Platform as a Service, aka PaaS), or can be packaged as a product (not as common yet). In many ways, enterprise portal architecture can be considered the SOP ancestor.

We can identify four distinct but complementary main SOP access modes. Most SOP providers (such as Facebook and SalesForce.com) offer more than one access mode. Others, like OpenSocial, have thus far focused only on one.

Below is a simplified visualization of these modes and their corresponding descriptions.

SOP 4 Modes

Read the rest of this entry »

Seven 2008 predictions

February 2nd, 2008 by jeremychone | 7 Comments »

Despite some worldwide economic difficulties, 2008 might be a very dynamic year for the technology industry. I see two main reasons. First, the economic conditions might favor some interesting acquisitions, in the consumer as well as in the enterprise spaces. Second, I think the enterprise technology industry is going to work actively to leverage the best of Web 2.0 for their business. In other “buzzy” words, 2008 is the start of Enterprise Web 2.0.

1) Facebook to make big push to Mobile

facebook to mobileThis is more of an opinion than a prediction, but I think that Facebook should make a big push in the mobile space. Apple reinvigorated this space from a consumer point of view; however, mobile applications are still hard to develop, integrate, or promote. Facebook has the reach, the technology, and the platform experience to create an online mobile platform allowing application providers to build, integrate (i.e., mashup), and deploy (i.e. provisioning) mobile applications.

The challenge to build a true online mobile platform would be to take some distance from the “PC world” and focus the mobile specific issues, constraints, and value chains.

Google might be another challenger in this space; however, their strategy seems to be very device-centric (with Android), which will take longer to unfold.

2) Ning to be acquired by Yahoo! (or Microsoft)

iPhoneOn the consumer portal front, I predict that Ning will get acquired by Yahoo! (or Microsoft). TechCrunch predicted that it would be Google, but I think that Google has its hands too full with Open Social to buy yet another “framework.”

Yahoo! might want to make an aggressive move in the social network space in a novel way. A Ning acquisition might allow them to differentiate themselves, at least from a developer standpoint. In a way, Yahoo! could become the social network platform for the rest of us.

Note: Google might very well buy Bebo.com to deepen its US/EU social network presence.

3) Apple to revolutionize the media distribution market (iTunes 2.0)

Apple Media Well, this one is not hard to predict, but I think that Apple’s move to online video will become big. The WGA strike definitely works to Apple’s advantage. While Apple’s video rental numbers might look relatively low by the end of 2008, when compared to Blockbuster, I think Apple is going to be in a position to dominate this market (or at least, create its own).

The big question is, how will Apple be able to get into the living room? Apple TV?

4) Apple to acquire Adobe

Apple AdobeThis is an easy and now popular prediction. Despite the fact that Apple has a lot on its 2008 plate, I think, as many others do, that it would be a good strategic move for Apple to “merge with” (i.e. buy) Adobe. Apple is now, more than ever, the king of user experience from a consumer point of view. It would make perfect sense for Apple to also become the tools leader for creating these user experiences.

The irony of such an acquisition would be that, with the newly-acquired tools and runtime (Adobe Flex/AIR), Apple developers would be able to build and deploy applications for Microsoft Windows (as Microsoft developers used to do with Microsoft tools for Apple computers).

5) Microsoft to open SilverLight and/or XAML

SilverLight XAML2007 was the SilverLight year, in which Microsoft first attempted to take over the Flash market. SilverLight is mostly based on an XML language called XAML which is also used to build desktop applications with the WPF runtime. However, while some XAML clones already exist (e.g., Wayne’s post and eFace) none of these technologies are officially open.

I predict that Microsoft will either standardize the XAML language or even open-source the SilverLight code. It won’t do any harm to Microsoft, and will definitely counter some common attacks against these technologies.

Note: In the XAML Wikipedia definition, you might read the following:

“As XAML is simply based on XML, developers and designers are able to share and edit content freely amongst themselves without requiring compilation.”

Well, given my experience on the subject, I am not sure that XML in itself improves the designer-developer workflow. Better and more integrated tools will do so. The main challenge is that the design semantics are drastically different from the programmatic ones. In other word, a “Designer Component” does not necessarily map to a “Programmer Component.”

6) Oracle to buy RedHat or SalesForce.com

Oracle Redhat SalesForce I was going to say BEA, but this would be cheating now. I think the next one could be either SalesForce.com or RedHat. Oracle has been pretty aggressive in its Linux strategy in the last couple of years. A RedHat acquisition would be definitely in-line with Oracle’s disturb-before-striking acquisition strategy. RedHat new CEO would probably facilitate such acquisition.

I also think that online platforms for enterprise software/service companies are going to become strategic in 2008. SalesForce.com, with its force.com platform, is being aggressive about this, and can become the Facebook for enterprise applications. I am not sure that Oracle is ready to bet big on SaaS or PaaS (Platform as a Service) yet. But P/SaaS is definitely going to continue to grow, and might even become more relevant in economic downturn.

Anyway, both of these acquisitions are probably just a matter of time, and 2008 will tell us more.

7) Enterprise Web 2.0

Enterprise Web 2.0As mentioned in the introduction to this post, I think that 2008 will be a real start for Enterprise Web 2.0, the buzz-word for leveraging the best of the Web 2.0 technologies and paradigms to make enterprise internet applications more usable (i.e. RIA/AJAX), simpler, and collaborative (i.e. social). In this context, SaaS and PaaS (i.e., Platform as a Service) are going to be critical. (see Dion Hinchcliffe’s 12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008)

To this end, I am now consulting with enteprise software and service companies to help them leverage Web 2.0 technologies and paradigms for their products and services. See www.jeremychone.com for more information.

 

So, here you have my seven predictions for 2008, hoping the “recession” won’t be too hard on the industry.

And a belated happy new year to you all!