Beyond Widgets: MuseStorm’s Advanced Data Services Vision July 5, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Ajax, Application Development, Companies, Enterprise Application Integration, Lite Computing, Small Apps, Web 2.0.3 comments
MuseStorm has created a lot of buzz in the past couple of weeks with its much linked tutorial on How to Create an Ajax Homepage and its web site that allows users to customize pre-made widgets, then add them to their site using a few lines of code. I spoke to MuseStorm co-founder Ori Soen by telephone this morning and he gave me an overview of company vision which goes far beyond widgets.
Right now, MuseStorm aggregates content from various Web sources (APIs) and serves data to applications. On the client-side, it provides modules that free the developer from dealing with APIs, Web services, data manipulation and most client-side programming.
MuseStorm widgets allow blogs and web site owners to easily integrate data from search engines, photo sharing services, EBay, Amazon, YouTube and others into their Web pages with no programming required. Web developers can use MuseStorm’s components and service to add dynamic data to their applications with minimal programming, in a variety of development environments.
As more, and more valuable, web-delivered services are developed and deployed in the future, Ori foresees the demand for a middle layer of advanced data management services to function as a “gateway” for customers on both sides of the server-client divide. For proprietary reasons, he is reluctant to name the specific services right now but he did share some of them with me and I think they are solid and have a lot potential. Says he:
It is no secret that the web is emerging as a service delivery platform, not simply a collection of static web pages. Right now, API providers are doing everything themselves. We think that a year from now, maybe a little bit more, these application providers are going to want to add various kinds of business management functionality and metrics to their offerings. That would require a lot of programming and platform- building that is extraneous to their core business. Long term, we see ourselves becoming that middle layer. If you’re an application or data provider, you can plug-in to MuseStorm and we can provide all kinds of valuable services to help you manage and run your business. At the same time, we are making it easy for users and developers to add dynamic functionality to their projects.
My impression is that MuseStorm’s plans to add advanced data services on top of its aggregation and distribution technology looks like an attractive business model.
Cross-posted from my other site Practical Widgets.
Dabble DB and ConnectBeam–Two For the Enterprise June 30, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Ajax, Application Development, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Companies, Enterprise Application Integration, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, Tagging / Folksonomy, Web 2.0.4 comments
If you’re one of the thousands of people who use Excel as a database, as well as a spreadsheet, you probably realize you are trading functionality for ease of use and economy. Only one person at a time can enter data into an Excel database and there are limits to how much data you can store. Sharing the database with others is not easy or efficient. For individuals this is not usually a problem but these limitations can become critical in companies. A Vancouver-based startup called Dabble DB, which opened to the public yesterday, has come up with an extremely appealing online alternative that allows you to instantly copy data from MS Excel into its web application and massage the data in ways that are dificult to do with Excel. Dabble DB will even turn your data into an interactive relational database and let you share it with co-workers through RSS and iCal.
Dabble DB co-founders, Andrew Catton and Avi Bryant, have squarely targeted the enterprise market with a Web 2.0 solution. The company is well-financed having gotten a rumored US$2-million infusion this week from Ventures West.
Dabble DB is now offering a free one-month trial. You can watch a video of its features here.
ConnectlBeam is a startup that aims to take tagging and bookmarking into the enterprise marketplace which is—in principle, at least–a great idea but also one that faces some formidable cultural barriers. One big fear companies have is that workers will spend more time randomly surfing for items to bookmark and reading material marked by others than they will doing whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing at their desks. Another fear is that they will assign tags that are so uncommon that the system gets bogged down with archives that are not really useful. There is also the security issues involved in inviting others into the tree house—particularly from the other side of the firewall. Corporations do not like the kind of casual, ultimately self-correcting, anarchy that prevails on the consumer side of the web where users essentially police themselves. Companies are going to want to “control” the process to a large degree.
ConnectBeam’s solution suggests tags which is a step toward addressing the consistency issue and co-founders Puneet Gupta and Prem Malhotra have clearly paid a lot of attention to security. The company’s ultimate success will depend upon whether it can convince CIOs and CEOs that its solution delivers a clear and measurable payoff in increased productivity that is greater than the sum of their fears.
The Shark That Didn’t Eat PayPal June 29, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Companies, Google, Online Banking/Payment Processor, PayPal, Retail, Web 2.0.2 comments
Google officially rolled out Google Checkout, its online transaction service this morning and contrary to much speculation, (including my own, here yesterday) it does not appear to be the shark that ate PayPal afterall. At least, not for now.
Google Checkout will fuction as a centralized authorization service for customer purchases but it will not be a bank-like payment service that will compete directly with PayPal, which is owned by eBay. While it promises a level of transaction security that many online retailers can’t match on their own, details on how Google plans to protect what will surely become a Fort Knox of credit card information are still sketchy.
When customers click through to a merchant from Google AdWords, a little blue shopping cart icon that represents the Google Checkout option will go with them. Clicking on the icon will take the customer to the Google Checkout site, where the customer’s billing information and credit card information will already be on file. All four major credit and payment card services are participating.
In essence, Google is foregoing revenues in transaction fees in order to boost its targeted advertising sales volume by giving online retailers a major incentive to participate. Among those who have already signed up are Buy.com, Ace Hardware and the Starbucks Store.
Is Google’s decision to make GCheckout a marketing incentive rather than a transaction business a good one? In the short term, at least, it looks like a winner. Google builds ad volume without offending eBay, one of its best customers, and gets a feel for the banking business. Like all good sharks know, lunch will still be there if you get hungry later.
Testdriving Musestorm’s Awesome Widget Machine June 28, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Ajax, Application Development, Companies, Enterprise Mashups, Lite Computing, Web 2.0, Widgets, WordPress.2 comments
If you’re among the millions of people who belong to the curious-but-not-all-that-geeky crowd, the folks at MuseStorm have put together a fabulous AJAX Desktop Tutorial that will give you a hands-on, step-by-step demonstration of how to build an AJAX desktop or homepage in ten minutes or so. I went there last night intending to spend about five minutes kicking the tires and wound up killing a couple of hours moving boxes around and happily turning feeds into merry little widgets.
In addition to the terrific tutorials, MuseStorm also has a collection of customizable forms that allow you to easily create widgets for RSS feeds, Google Search, News and Definition, Technorati, YouTube, Amazon Books, eBay Auctions, Flickr photos and del.icio.us tags. Create a feed, push a button, and MuseStorm generates code that you can drop into your blog or web page. I would have liked to drop some in here to show you but, alas, the WordPress folks are a little paranoid about javascript they haven’t pre-approved.
Once you play with widgets for a few minutes, you begin to realize that this really could be the future of the desktop. What is likely to make the little devils ultimately appealing to enterprises is their simplicity of use and their ability to eliminate a lot of wasted and unnecessary tech fat from the way office work is currently performed.
Imagine going into the office in the morning and instead of firing up the old PC with its cranky, mostly Microsoft office applications (so overloaded that you actually use perhaps 2% of their features), you flip on a networked thin client, which opens your personalized homepage with the lightweight applications you use most often, i.e., a calendar, e-mail, and maybe a collaborative teamspace. If you need something special–a spreadsheet, for example–you go to the widget closet and pull one out and drop it on your desktop. As you work, your output is automatically saved and stored–not on your PC–but on a giant server farm in Montana or somewhere.
This won’t happen overnight, of course. Too many Western companies have too much money invested in huge operating systems designed to run needlessly complex applications. As was the case with telecommunications industry’s shift from landlines to wireless, the countries and companies that will benefit first and most from thin computing will be those who have the least investment in existing infrastructure. China, for example, managed to leapfrog directly from a 19th century economy into the digital age by leveraging Western advances in telecommunications and computing. You can bet they (and many others) will do the same with the new lite computing paradigm.
If you want to experience Web 2.0 firsthand, give MuseStorm’s AJAX Desktop tutorial a test drive. You’ll understand what all the excitement is about.
Web Payments Smackdown: Google vs. eBay June 28, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Companies, Google, Web 2.0.3 comments
Google is expected to launch an online electronic payment service called GBuy today that will directly challenge eBay’s PayPal for internet shoppers’ transaction fees and could touch off an internet turf war that will make Tony Soprano’s latest brush with the New York gang look like a kids birthday party.
Unlike so much of the stuff that Google releases in a kind of semi-permanent state of “beta,” there is no doubt how the company plans to turn this one into cash. GBuy will work in conjunction with AdWords, so that consumers who visit a merchant’s site through a sponsored link will have the option of going to a separate, GBuy checkout site. The goal, company executives say, is to “automate the advertiser click cycle,” which means that instead of simply handing you off to a merchant when you click through to an AdWord link, a virtual rep from Google will tag along and offer to charge your purchase if you decide to buy. That will speed up transactions which translates into more money for merchants and, of course, for Google.
According to widely leaked (some might even say, widely hyped) details, Google plans to charge merchants a 2.2 percent commission, as well as a fee of 30 cents per transaction. AdSense advertisers will get a discount.
What turns this into a potential killer app for Google is its apparent link to its newly announced Content Referral Network, an eBay style sales lead generation and transactional commission-based affiliate network that is bound to poach eBay (and Amazon and other online merchants’) customers. Of course, the nice people at eBay must have seen this coming because they just announced the test launch of AdContext, an automated, keyword-based contextual ad system for use by its affiliate network which looks suspiciously like it was designed to claim a chunk of Google’s territory.
Meanwhile, the two companies have to be pretend to be nice to each other. eBay is one of Google’s largest AdWords customers and, as such, Google delivers a lot of traffic to eBay, and gets a lot of money from eBay in return. This is going to fun to watch.
YouTube is Supercool. But Can It Make Money? June 27, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Companies, Social Networking, Web 2.0.1 comment so far
Like so many next-generation web startups, YouTube is a great idea in search of a business plan. What started as simply two friends–Chad Hurley and Steve Chen–trying to figure out how to share home videos online–has now blossomed into a Web 2.0 megahit with viewers eyeballing more than 70 million short videos a day–and uploading 60,000 or so new ones for others to view.
How YouTube plans to convert that traffic into a sustainable business is the subject of a page one article in today’s Wall Street Journal (alas, subscription required). In a nutshell, Hurley and Chen are quietly building a Google-like online ad system which they hope will lure Hollywood and other big media producers to post teaser videos on YouTube–not only to create buzz but also to make money. The company plans to run context-sensitive ads alongside the special videos and share the revenues with the producers. Says the Journal: “Messers. Hurley and Chen hope that Hollywood will come to see YouTube much as it now views network TV: a legitimate means of distributing content with revenue and promotional payoff.” The system is expected to be running later this year.
Web 2.0 For Dummies June 23, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Companies, Google, Microsoft, Web 2.0.4 comments
Okay, so you think Ajax is a sink cleaner and a mashup is the freeway fender bender that made you late for work this morning. Your eyes glaze over when you scan the latest heavy-breathing geek porn at web sites like Scripting News or Slashdot. Everything you know about social networking you learned from typing “babe” in the MySpace search box.
But, let’s get real. How much of this Web 2.0 stuff do operational managers and workers—people in finance and accounting, HR, marketing and so on—need to know or even understand? The answer, at this early stage, is probably not a lot. Big companies today are cloistered in gated communities and they like it that way. They view the web as a great place to visit and sell products and services but you wouldn’t want to have your enterprise applications live there. At least, not yet, until you’re absolutely certain that it’s as safe and reliable as your IT infrastructure behind the firewall. For now, the still-unsolved problems of security, reliability, transaction integrity, scalability and performance preclude any large-scale movement of strategic enterprise applications to the web.
All that will change over time. The Internet simply offers too many competitive advantages–global reach, round-the-clock access, richer applications with deeper, real-time features and lower application development and IT infrastructure costs–to be ignored. Serious, grown-up open source web development companies like Nexaweb and OpenLaszlo and many others are hard at work, sprucing up the neighborhood, setting standards, and fixing the potholes.
Ironically, the Internet grassroots movement to preserve so-called “net neutrality” may hinder the development of the enterprise web because if it is successful infrastructure providers will have no financial incentive to develop and offer the enhanced levels of security and reliability that large companies require, which means they will invest less in infrastructure. Ultimately, that is a bad thing for everybody.
The first companies to benefit from Web 2.0 are the web natives, companies built from the ground up to perform functions that leverage the huge web marketplace and its real-time immediacy and e-commerce capabilities. Traditional enterprises will get there but not that much and not that soon. The old saying about a leader being the guy out front on the horse with the arrow in his chest still holds true
So, cheer up, Mr. or Ms. Tech-Challenged. Play with your Excel spreadsheet and waste an hour trying to find a missing e-mail by searching with the Outlook “find” function. But, if you really want know what the revolution is about, sneak a copy of Google’s free Desktop Search on to your machine when your resident geek isn’t looking, type in a couple of words that you remember from the missing e-mail, and see how startling fast it appears on your screen. That’s what all the cool kids at Microsoft do these days.
What Business is Google In Anyway? June 22, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Companies, Enterprise Mashups, Google, Web 2.0.1 comment so far
If you think the Evil Empire of Redmond works in paranoid ways, consider the case of Google, the undisputed heavyweight champ of next generation web technologies. Seldom has a company become so big and so powerful without explaining to investors exactly why it does what it does and how it plans to make money in the future.
The $64-billion question is: Will Google continue to focus on its core search and keyword-based advertising business or is it gearing up to try to replace Microsoft as the main provider of productivity applications to enterprises and average computer users?
Company executives deny or deflect such speculation but you have to think that it didn't introduce an online word processor, calendar, e-mail manager, instant-messaging program, photo manager, web page creator and, most recently, a spreadsheet just for the heck of it.
The reality is that Google is the only company big enough and Web-dominent enough to challenge Microsoft, not only in the office tool space, but also in the larger goal of transforming the web into a universal OS. Nobody ever bought a Windows machine because they loved the Windows operating system. Most users go with Windows because that is what you need to run Outlook and MS Office and most of the other most-widely used desktop software. Its dominance in office productivity applications made the Windows OS standard and gave Microsoft its so-called network effect.
Perhaps, as a result of being the unchallenged market leader for a very long time Microsoft has become bloated and risk-adverse and its products seem more dated and clunky by the day. We have now reached the point where the quality of office tools available as online applications is approaching parity with Microsoft's Office line. The long-predicted concept that the network is the computer is finally coming true. Google is the company best-positioned to benefit from this profound shift.
And let's face it; an all-out innovation slugfest between Microsoft and its homies and the Google gang would be good for the industry, good for web users, and great fun to watch. It might also save Microsoft from a long and nasty slide into irrelevance.
But, before all this can happen, Google has to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.
