ITasITis

Following on from yesterday: Tech Review has also posted an article covering ten new ideas for the Social Web. These are startups which could catch on, for a variety of reasons.

Have a look. There are some you might recognise, like Pownce. There’s a peer-to-peer traffic reporter based on contributed GPS data from gridlocked cars. There’s a new take on making mashup APIs manageable. And more.

But the one that caught my eye is Ushahidi: not just for its idea, but for where it comes from. Ushahidi is a not-for-profit that can aggregate reports by mobile phone and display them via Google Maps. The original was developed in Kenya, as a way of gathering reliable information in the troubles following the disputed election, from local people in areas where the news media couldn’t reach. And it wasn’t developed by someone in the west with a social conscience. It was developed in Africa, by African people, for an African situation; and it could be deployed in any trouble spot or disaster area where conventional communications are disrupted. In the west, even!

Links:
• Ten Web Startups to Watch MIT Technology Review, July/August 2008
• Ushahidi

I was catching up on a backlog of alerts from MIT Technology Review. Lots of stuff about social networking, and I’m not going to discuss that here. Some of the services reviewed are the standard ones (MySpace vs Facebook, Twitter and so on) and some are smaller scale upstarts which might be the next great thing.

But this one article is worth reading, and I thought I’d flag it here rather than just tag it in del.icio.us. MIT’s Technology Review discusses whether the level of traffic now being generated will kill the internet as we know it.

The surge in video traffic started with YouTube, but there is a lot of higher-quality user-generated video out there now and some of it gets insane numbers of hits just because it’s quirky and catches someone’s attention. And the broadcasters are in on it. In the UK, the BBC’s iPlayer is coming up for its first refresh; it’s been a wildly successful service, allowing programmes to be retrieved and re-watched over a seven day period, or retrieved and downloaded until the DRM software causes them to self destruct. ITV and Channel 4 have a slightly different model, but the key thing - in common with the US broadcast-linked services mentioned by TR - is that these are peer-to-peer applications. So, not all the bandwidth used is server-to-user; a lot of it is user-to-user, and the iPlayer T&Cs make explicit the permission for your iPlayer to be used in this way.

What’s the growth factor? TR quotes analyst Nemertes as saying 100% per year. An alternative academic estimate of 50% growth can probably be coped with by current technology trends. Watch this space … while you still can!

Links:
• Internet Gridlock (MIT Technology Review, July/August 2008 )
• The Internet Singularity, Delayed: Why Limits in Internet Capacity Will Stifle Innovation on the Web (Nemertes, Nov 2007)

Symbian, the mobile phone OS, is currently celebrating its tenth anniversary. Nokia, the major shareholder, is to buy out the other partners and this news is featured in the mainstream press, not just the specialists.

Symbian is used on over 200 models. But even Nokia uses it for only a proportion of its devices. Nokia will move it into an Open Source project, to which it will contribute the Symbian and S60 software. Sony Ericsson and Motorola will contribute technology from UIQ, and DOCOMO its MOAP(S) assets. The press release says that the Symbian Foundation “will provide a unified platform with [a] common UI framework. A full platform will be available for all Foundation members under a royalty-free license, from the Foundation’s first day of operations.”

There’s more information about the new Foundation and its governance from analyst CCS Insight, together with some thoughts for the future which I think boil down to: good move, should have been done long ago, might be too late, watch this space!

Symbian’s OS competition includes Linux (LiMo) and, of course, Windows Mobile. But The Guardian’s view is that this isn’t really about handset technology. It’s about the development of a service-based model for the mobile Internet, where Nokia’s competition includes Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft’s smartphone and, perhaps, Google’s attempt to change the commercial model with Android. ChannelWeb quotes Jack Gold who sees the Symbian foundation as an attempt to challenge Android. Other commentators look elsewhere for the significance.

Nokia’s own press release talks about “setting the future of mobile free”. Significantly, it also quotes Kris Rinne, SVP of Architecture and Planning at AT&T, to reinforce this message: “Mobile phones have turned into sophisticated multimedia computers and smart phones continue to grow in popularity. The Symbian Foundation will reduce fragmentation in the industry and holds the promise of incorporating leading technology and the most mature software into a unified platform for the entire industry. This will … support AT&T in offering its differentiated services to consumers.”

For the enterprise, and the user-in-the-street, that is probably the biggest take.

Links:

• Nokia buys Symbian in web push The Guardian, 25 Jun 2008
• Nokia Squares Up to Software Rivals by Buying Symbian and Moving to Open Source CCS Insight, 24 June 2008, and comment
• Can Nokia’s Symbian Foundation Nuke Google Android, Others? ChannelWeb, 24 Jun 2008
• Mobile leaders to unify the Symbian software platform and set the future of mobile free Nokia press release, 24 Jun 2008
• Symbian
• LiMo Foundation (Linux Mobile)
• Windows Mobile
• Android - An Open Handset Alliance Project (Google)

If you click on the Gartner website at the moment, you’ll see the centre panel higlights their report on “The Modernization of IT”. When you click, though, it’s a disappointment. To judge from the headline (I don’t have client access) it is just encouraging enterprise IT to set up a programme office to manage a transformation programme.

Elsewhere, though, there’s a different story. Gartner Voice is Gartner’s regular podcast series, and you can hear these without an account. OK, so it’s explicitly “not published Gartner research”, but it’s worth taking a feed from it all the same. And there’s a different take in there, which I just caught up with, in the shape of an interview with British academic Prof. Peter Keen. Keen is going to be the keynote speaker at Gartner’s upcoming infrastructure forum, and he gets it.

The interview rehearses some familiar stuff. There’s a lot of new technology out there. “IT is in danger of becoming the corporate laggard” because it’s got stuck in corporate technology. do we have an architecture for mobile, for example? “We cater pretty well for the customer of today - people like ourselves.” Our customers of tomorrow (that’s real customers, not enterprise IT’s internal pseudo-customers) are different; unlike us, they’re using this stuff. Our wouldn’t-we-like-them-to-be next generation employees are using it, and some of our existing employees are too. Let’s have corporate IT get real about this stuff and, in Bob Dylan’s words, “don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall”.

But Keen has gone further than many thinkers in showing how this really applies to enterprise IT. Yes, understand your business’s customers and how to interact with them. But ask him how to get the thinking shifted about this, in the boardroom, and he says two things. Stop the “business” thinking that somehow IT isn’t their responsibility. And: stop letting IT be talked about as a cost; the best thing to do with a cost is to cut it. Get the conversation switched to investment, to be creative with or customers. R&D made that switch a long time ago. Get IT onto the same page.

We’ve often said these things separately. Saying them together is newer than it ought to be!

Links:
• Peter Keen
• The Business Blueprint for the IT Platform Gartner Voice, 5 May 2008
• Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit, 2008 (Orlando, 23-25 Jun)

When I visited MIT’s Media Lab last year, among the many exciting, mystical or practical things we saw was the work of the Tangible Media group which mix physical and computer-generated interactions to enable people to model and understand the physical world. Sandscape, for example.

Shortly after that, I became aware of Microsoft’s Surface, an interactive touch-driven table-top display. In the video, touch allows users (for example) to drag images around, group displayed objects together, and so on. It’s different from the MIT table in that it is a display screen, not a collection of physical objects. I suppose it’s not that different in principle from what you could do on a large screen with a mouse, but the table top is an easy collaborative working paradigm and fingertips are an instinctive pointing device. And it’s expensive!

And, of course, there’s the iPhone.

MIT’s Technology Review today reports on a group who are designing multi-touch systems in an Open Source project. The scaled-down version is called Cubit and led by Addie Wagenknecht of Eyebeam. Eyebeam is an interesting organisation that aims to incubate ideas by bringing artists and technologists together. It’s based in New York, not Silicon Valley.

Surface “has an image projector, infrared-light emitters, and five cameras nestled in its base”, as TR explains it. Cubit uses less technology, and off-the-shelf components such as an ordinary webcam. And the report, ahead of a forthcoming California exhibition, lists three or four other such multi-touch projects.

Click the links below for the more, and the why.

Links:
• Open-Source, Multitouch Display Technology Review, 1 May 2008
• Microsoft Surface
• Cubit from Eyebeam (click through links for other material including a video)
• Sandscape (MIT Media Lab, Tangible Media group)
• Maker Faire 3&4 May,San Mateo

Brighton BarCamp (see my post here) raised a question that’s been insistent in my mind for some time. Social computing sites (including virtual worlds) multiply like rabbits. How do you manage that? As I put it at the time:

The second day of BarCamp was illuminated by several conversations about the future of Social Networks (is there one? will multiplicity kill them off? is Facebook past it or you ain’t seen nothin’ yet? what about identity sharing with XFN and similar frameworks?)

Being a bit long in the tooth, I’ve been here before. A dozen or so years ago, I wrote the initial business case that took the company I worked for onto the Web. It was possible, then, to have a pretty good go at listing all the sites that were relevant to a pharmaceutical company and my IT colleagues. But of course that didn’t last long.

Another lesson from the past is that human beings are a gregarious species: we communicate. Almost any network technology goes person-to-person. The telephone, it was thought, would be used to broadcast church services and concerts. We know what happened. On France’s Minitel, perhaps the only really successful teletext service, the greatest successes were the interpersonal applications – not the databases. The Web’s going the same way: still lots of good information out there to browse, but Web 2.0 is all about the person-to-person Web: blogs, wikis, virtual worlds, social platforms and no doubt other things still to come.

The multiplicity of websites gave rise to the search engine. But when it’s multiple platforms that all carry part of your life, that’s not going to help.

Solutions are beginning to emerge: integration technologies to pull your life streams into one place. It’s not just what you put out there: it’s keeping in touch with your friends on different platforms. Here’s some of what’s going on; maybe the techies can comment with others.

Jabber links multiple instant messaging platforms. Corporate closed IM services are beginning also to open up to the outside world. It’s a great help to doing business.

Any RSS reader, pulling together feeds from any number of places but, in this context, perhaps particularly from blogs you want to keep up with. I like Google Reader.

OpenSocial is intended to link social networking platforms: led by Google (which includes YouTube, remember) with, among others, Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart and the database giant Oracle.

XFN (XHTML Friends Network) is Semantic Web technology to assert links between different web sites or services which are “you”, like this blog, my Pocket Website, and my base InformationSpan website. See the blogroll for links!

Now there’s Thwirl, downloadable software that plugs directly into Twitter. Twhirl, lets you post to three services at once: Twitter, plus the similar services Pownce and Jaiku, according to the report in MIT’s Technology Review.

And Technology Review also reports on the MOGBox, which will let you design a high-resolution 3-D character and transport it as an avatar to multiple virtual worlds. It wouldn’t link the worlds themselves, but at least you can look the same everywhere without having to recreate.

Come to that, SMTP was the unifying technology for email. In the early days there were two addressing conventions on the Internet and proprietary closed systems like AOL as well …

So you have to bet on the unifying power of the human spirit to pull together these threads.

Links:
• Consolidating Your Web Banter Technology Review, 9 Apr 2008
• One Avatar, Many Worlds Technology Review, 8 Apr 2008
• OpenSocial (Google)
• XFN
• Jabber.org the Jabber project
• Thwirl “a desktop Twitter client”
• MOGBox announced (Mogware blog, 19 Feb 200
• Minitel (Wikipedia)

MIT’s Technology Review recently carried a review of some of the new features trailed for Microsoft’s IE8 ,and for others in beta in Firefox. It looks like Microsoft are picking up on the trend for people to write their own add-on apps (in this case called Activities) which are well used in applications such as LinkedIn, Facebook and salesforce.com. The review focusses on Activities, and doesn’t discuss other potential enhancements in 8. For example, says the review, Microsoft links a slew of Activities to its own email, blogging and news services. Of course, these pre-written Activities link to Microsoft’s own services (e.g. Hotmail) but the API is open, and anyone can write one and publish it.

Firefox 3 has been out in beta for a while now (anyone using it? Give us a comment on your experience). Its enhancements are in a different direction, enhancing bookmark management and providing a level of offline support. This might resonate in the enterprise, where the move from replicated collaborative services (such as Lotus Notes) to browser-based applications killed off the ability to easily take your application with you on your laptop.

Take a look!

Links:

• Review: New Microsoft browser eases Web sharing, use of multiple services Technology Review, 19 Mar 2008
• IE8 Beta on microsoft.com
• Firefox 3 Beta 4 Release Notes from Mozilla, 10 Mar 2008, with links to download (in 40 languages)
• Mozilla Developer News (look for links to the Firefox 3 programme)

I’ve been involved for several years with CSC’s Leading Edge Forum (LEF) on a theme which we initially called “Consumerisation of IT” and, more recently, “Living on the Web”. LEF’s been in the vanguard of this movement. Researcher Doug Neal identified the trend before most other commentators, and LEF has been actively supporting it through research, study tours, an ongoing working group, and a great deal of active sharing of knowledge and experience. Where most insight services are still identifying the trend, LEF has already multiple reports out and a workbook in active development.

What’s new is that the major analysts are now working on the trend, and mainstream press people have picked it up too. Gartner, after much scepticism about its value, now claim to have invented the term. Forrester’s Matt Brown and colleagues have just published a new report: Forrester’s term is “Technology Populism”. In the UK, The Guardian recently published a piece quoting a user in BP’s flagship programme: “Feels like I just got out of IT prison!”. In the US, members of the group have had various interactions with the media. The idea is out there!

BP’s experiment, embedded now and widely talked about, was to educate users in the bits that home IT doesn’t teach (like intellectual property protection, and other enterprise risks). All connectivity – even in the office – is via raw internet and VPN. Really sensitive information is totally fenced off from the Internet. Then BP provides participants with a budget to self-provision.

What may not be so well known is the number of other large enterprises which are adopting their own consumerisation formulas to increase the acceptability and adaptability of enterprise IT. And, perhaps counter-intuitively, these approaches have one thing in common. The auditors agree that it reduces enterprise risk. Abolishing largely discredited perimeter security saves costs, but it also focusses attention on protecting data effectively at source. And provisioning of access can be more granular too.

We’ve seen two key components to the consumerisation trend. First, enterprise business people are using a range of consumer-oriented and web-based services from Salesforce.com to LinkedIn to Gmail to Skype to SecondLife, to get their jobs done. If their access is blocked at work, they’ll use their home kit. And that links to the second trend: users have high capability kit at home, and bring those expectations to the workplace with questions like “Why can’t I have desktop video?”. It’s no longer a case of home IT catching up with enterprise provision. The two have diverged, but home kit has higher capability in the overlap. And, remember: personal computing started in the home, with the Sinclair and BBC machines, not in the office. Full circle. People forget that.

Forrester have contributory research going back a number of years. A key part of it is analysis of changes in attitudes as today’s “technology natives” enter the workforce. It’s not just younger people. Have a look now many of your colleagues are using web based services. Take LinkedIn, for example. You may have excellent support for interpersonal networking within your enterprise boundary, but a colleague put it succinctly when he commented that he learns more from contacts outside his own organisation than inside. Hence LinkedIn or, perhaps, Facebook though Facebook seems to be losing its cool these days.

But the point of this post isn’t to (re-)rehearse the components, benefits and balances of consumerised approaches to enterprise IT. Just to point out that the idea is going mainstream, as the world at large catches up on what LEF has been saying for the best part of four years!

Links:
• Embrace The Risks And Rewards Of Technology Populism (Forrester Research, 22 Feb 200
• A Workbook for Putting Consumerization to Work (current LEF project, and links to previous work)
• Why a worker says ‘it feels like I just got out of IT prison’ (The Guardian, 6 Mar 200
• This Google search returns press coverage of the BP initiative
• To Deal With Consumerization, CIOs Should Ask ‘Why?’ Not Just Say ‘No’ (Gartner, 10 Mar 2008

External references are provided in good faith, but InformationSpan does not take responsibility for the content of linked third party sites. Insight service content generally requires a subscription. Most news services archive material after a short while; use the site’s search engine if a link doesn’t work.

The second day of BarCamp was illuminated by several conversations about the future of Social Networks (is there one? will multiplicity kill them off? is Facebook past it or you ain’t seen nothin’yet? what about identity sharing with XFN and similar frameworks?).

I learned a bit more about Twitterbots. Twitter is one of those services which I know about but would, I think find overly intrusive into my working day. Partly that’s just me being older, I guess, but there’s a personality element to those sort of choices as well. There were a couple of people at least who are doing research into social network analysis: Aleks Krotowski of Linden and The Guardian’s tech team, and Beth Granter of Sussex Uni. I suggested a connection with Peter Gloor who’s a guru of this stuff at MIT’s Sloan School, who I met on a company IT Field Trip I organised to MIT last May.

Jeff Barr ran a session on Cloud Computing, for me an update on what Amazon Web Services has added to its portfolio since I first met Jeff on a Study Tour two and a half years ago. AWS lowers the entry barriers for startups, and enables enterprise IT to test things out or do big short-term projects without major capital investment on infrastructure.

So overall, what a great event! From the initial publicity, it could have seemed like a geekfest for students, but the great value was the whole spectrum - people with that kind of sharp insight, established hi-tech companies, start-ups and more - and the chance to absorb a much younger IT culture than the one I’ve spent the last twelve years in. And for free, thanks to the sponsors! If you get a chance, go to one!

Links:
• Amazon Web Services
• Peter Gloor at MIT’s Sloan School
• SocialSim Aleks’s blog

A new experience: informal techfest at Sussex Uni under the heading of Barcamp. Completely informal, with the expectation that everyone will present a session. About 50 people: not all IT people. And when the assembled company ranges from luminaries like Jeff Barr of Amazon Web Services, from sponsors like Yahoo and SecondLife, from UK companies like BT, from university research … no keynotes, everyone, even the luminaries, just put up the notice for their talk like everyone else. You’re in for a fascinating and interesting time meeting people and learning things.

Jeff, who I’ve met before, didn’t talk about AWS. He talked about doing business in SecondLife, and the hurdles he’d had to get over to get Amazon to let him take an official interest. Some of these were issues picked up in my own session which I billed as a survival guide for a geek in enterprise IT. A group of about half a dozen of us talked about some of the fears (if you’re discounting a career in enterprise), frustrations (if you’re in there) and the upsides and benefits - for a geek, remember, not the financials. I’ve been at sessions on accessible javascript, basic image editing (with Photoshop or something like it), RDF, Social Network Portability (half the session, because I left to go to Jeff’s) and met people from Yahoo!, The Guardian, a local start-up called Ribot doing mobile design, a local authority, and more.

Uploaded is a version of my session. It will get edited to reflect the conversation we actually had! More tomorrow, and look out for tags on Flickr and so on.

Links:
• How to survive in enterprise IT
• BarCamp Brighton 2