woensdag 29 oktober 2003

How Wireless Carriers Will Make Mobile Data Pay

"In the integrated service model, mobile operators don’t simply provide a connection. They’re positioned to directly influence and profit from the customer’s total wireless experience."

How Microsoft's Misunderstanding of Open Source Hurts Us All

"This week, speaking at a Gartner conference in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said some fascinating things about Linux and about Open Source software in general. And thanks to those remarks and the blinding realization they caused for me, I finally understand exactly why Microsoft doesn't understand Open Source."

dinsdag 28 oktober 2003

The Great Library of Amazonia

"The fondest dream of the information age is to create an archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC. Through centuries of aggressive acquisition, the librarians of Alexandria, Egypt, collected hundreds of thousands of texts. None survives. During a final wave of destruction, in AD 641, invaders fed the bound volumes and papyrus scrolls into the furnaces of the public baths, where they are said to have burned for six months. 'The lesson,' says Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, 'is to keep more than one copy."

Ubiquity Breeds Utility

"The wireless revolution is possibly over-hyped, but don't tell that to the good folks at Dartmouth. They have gained wireless ubiquity, and are completely re-thinking how they use cellphones, PDAs, computers, newspapers, instant messenger, printers, power outlets, and most importantly, their time."

vrijdag 24 oktober 2003

Sim Soars as Learning Tool

"So, you want to learn how to fly a plane? No problem -- just find yourself a flight instructor and get ready to spend about $7,000 to get your private pilot certificate. Or you can go out and buy a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator and a specialized controller for about $150, and learn on your PC. Even though it's marketed as an entertainment title, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight is a highly effective tool to help student pilots learn how to fly."

Free hot spots pay dividends

"At first glance, it might not make sense for profit-making businesses to give away, rather than charge for, wireless Internet access. But a growing number of hotels and restaurants have found that it pays to offer free Wi-Fi Internet access. This perk attracts customers and provides a real bottom-line payback for a relatively small capital investment, according to free-Wi-Fi pioneers."

donderdag 23 oktober 2003

Amazon moves to front line of shaping 'Web services'

"What Amazon is doing could redirect how Web services moves into the mainstream and reorder which tech companies get rich in the process, analysts say. Suddenly, Amazon has emerged as 'a model for leveraging the benefits that Web services promise,' says Yankee Group analyst Paul Ritter. Over the past 16 months, Amazon has inspired about 30,000 developers to invent myriad ways to extend Amazon's visibility on the Web. 'Amazon basically hired the entire world to create Web services for them,' says Calin Uioreanu, a Romanian tech engineer who in his spare time runs several online stores he created to funnel sales to Amazon."

dinsdag 21 oktober 2003

Are Web Services Really the Answer?

"Most large enterprises have paid billions of dollars to get to where they are today and they still can’t get answers to simple questions. This is pathetic. Enterprises try to do most anything. They try to reorganize; they try to change business policies or practices; they try to acquire a new company or move into a new market sector. And with all this, the number one challenge they have is IT. They’re told by the IT department, "Well, we just can’t do that now. You have to wait a couple of years." So it is not a pleasing experience when everything in the organization reacts except for IT. If you’re a CEO, you have every department business function with different technology that has different standards, different data definitions, different ERP methods, different semantics, different automation competencies. So when you try to do something that is cross-departmental or cross-functional, it is extremely hard to do. So the CEO has a right to say "If I paid billions, why can’t I get something that’s more reactive on a timely basis? Because I’m heavily dependent and I don’t have the option of going back to the 1970’s or going back to doing it manually."

A Connection in Every Spot

"If you spend enough time observing people near schools like MIT and Georgia Tech, you'll probably note a few solitary nerds roaming around campus, sniffing out wireless hotspots with their handheld PCs. Chances are that many of those loners are not Wi-Fi junkies on warchalking sorties, but students of 'ubiquitous computing,' a field that aims to free us from our gloomy, workaday PCs by weaving millions of tiny wireless nodes into private and public spaces. Engineers meeting this week at UbiComp 2003, a ubiquitous-computing conference in Seattle, believe that technology -- rather than isolating people within virtual spaces -- should be forming real-world connections amongst flesh-and-blood human beings."

maandag 20 oktober 2003

Text generation growing up online

"The prophets of the online world did not dream it up, the Jesuits did, but as mottos go it is hard to top: 'Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man.' And how true it is. With almost every girl and boy in Australia using the internet - 93 per cent, according to the latest reckoning - a new 'kid society' is blooming. Internet messenger services, email, text and mobile phones are broadening children's social networks and making them virtually inseparable from one another."

Web fosters prolific product reviewers

"After four years of telling the world what he thinks about beer, Mexico vacation spots and Latin music, Mark Stevens of Houston recently experienced an epiphany. 'I'm rethinking things,' says the prolific 43-year-old Epinions.com free-lance writer. 'I've written 664 reviews. It's a book, and I didn't really get paid for producing it. I should really be getting royalties for all that work.' But Stevens and thousands of other Net denizens seem addicted to sharing their thoughts with the world."

zondag 12 oktober 2003

Hub Media Strategy

"....But the research results were specific to media multitasking. Now I was interested. What they (Yahoo) essentially did was provide a name (not a bad one at that) for what a lot of us have already been thinking: The Web can (and sometimes should) be at the center of a communications plan. The name is Hub Media. Hub Media is the notion most or all non-digital communications in a plan should drive a person to the Web for a larger payoff. It's supported in this research by data suggesting the Millennial Generation multitasks at extraordinarily high levels. The one medium almost always present in the multitasking equation is the Internet. If they want more information about the clothes they saw in the magazine ad, they go online. If they want to tell their friends the referee blew the call on the last play, they IM or e-mail. It's the pervasiveness of the Internet for the Millenial Generation that makes Hub Media viable."

The New Communities

"For e-marketers, probably the most interesting phenomenon of the current political season has been the astounding success of Howard Dean's fundraising effort. His site, DeanForAmerica, has allowed a previously unknown former governor to raise millions of dollars, much of it in small donations. While this is a pretty major accomplishment, most of the media have missed the real Dean campaign story. His success doesn't stem from raising money online. That's relatively easy to do from a technical standpoint. Rather, he's used the Internet for what it's really good for: connecting and organizing people. Lessons from Dean (and others, like John Kerry) about using the Internet to bring people together are ones all marketers should pay attention to."

Misunderstanding Micropayments

"The following is a response to Clay Shirky's new article Fame versus Fortune (a follow-up to his 2000 essay The Case Against Micropayments) which takes aim at the 9-week-old BitPass payment system. I'm a long-time advocate of micropayments, an advisor to BitPass, and my online comic The Right Number is mentioned in his first paragraph, so I'm hardly a disinterested party. Still, I hope my arguments will help illuminate why I think that Shirky's logic is flawed, and why his caricature of the idea of micropayments bears little resemblance to the reality being created right now."

The Wireless Challenge

"Since the days of Alexander Graham Bell, Finland's national phone company has provided service for customers from the shores of the Baltic Sea to the upper reaches of Lapland. But last summer the Helsinki-based telco, now part of $9 billion Swedish-Finnish TeliaSonera, did something remarkable: It ran radio and newspaper ads urging its own customers to drop fixed-line voice service and switch to wireless. Huh? A phone company asking its customers to cut the cord?"

zaterdag 11 oktober 2003

The Internet Generation

"The reason you can’t stop file-trading has nothing to do with the law or ethics. When you live on the network, you use one device to buy music, get music, store music, and hear music. You’re not driving to get a one-hour CD, packing its jewel case in a stack somewhere, then reloading every hour. The experience must be more organic than that."

woensdag 8 oktober 2003

The Blogger Revolt!

"The bottom line as I see it is the original blogging community represents
the early-adopters of a movement that will eventually radicalize the entire
media industry. Some time off in the future, if major media brands do not
open up their content to more participation, readers will just not trust
them, and they will go elsewhere."

maandag 6 oktober 2003

Jeff Bezos: Fixated on the Customer

On webservices:


Q (Business Week): Amazon.com now runs sites and online operations for retailers such as Target and Toys 'R' Us. What's the future for that services business?

A: It's a rapidly growing part of our business. And that goes from [large] companies that are customers of that all the way down to individuals using our Web services to tap into the fundamental platform that is Amazon.com. They can build their own applications very effectively. It's almost closer to an ecosystem.


Q: So Amazon is becoming a kind of software platform a bit like Microsoft?

A: People are building stuff that surprises us. That's what's so interesting about this. We've built this big base of technology to serve ourselves, and now we're opening it up and letting people access it. They're taking these fundamental pieces and building completely new things that not only would we have never gotten around to but in some cases maybe never even have thought of. There are thousands of developers who are building applications using Amazon Web services. The sky's the limit on their creativity.

The New Marketing Order: How to be Chosen

"Call it the new marketing order. It's a philosophical shift in the marketplace that has everything to do with intrusive techniques like spam and telemarketing. It's fueled by the rise of a marketing-saturated (and -savvy) generation, and is underpinned by the technology revolution that raises consumers' expectations of how companies can interact with them. While customer acquisition techniques are under the heaviest fire, the new order also demands changes in how companies conduct relationships with existing customers."

Small Spending, Big Branding

"I remember hearing information technologists would never be fired for choosing IBM. I suppose you could once could have said the same of marketers who combined the traditional media channels in their plans. But things are changing. The IT guys probably still won't be fired for recommending IBM, but marketers with plans based on traditional channels and old school thinking shouldn't get too comfortable."

vrijdag 3 oktober 2003

Joint Service From Reuters and Microsoft

"The Reuters Group, the information services company, said yesterday that it would announce today a deal with Microsoft to connect the companies' instant messaging systems as an offering for financial services companies."