January 2009 Archives

Enabling offline capabilities for web applications is the nemesis of desktop software since the browser could become more powerful in terms of functionality and operation. Web technology like Google Gears enables desktop-like behavior. Gears creates client-side data storage by exposing an API that allows the web application to store a database cache on your mobile or desktop machine. This allows you to access data when you are not connected to the Internet. Although gears works with other browsers; Google Chrome has it built-in and it works the same way in Android too. You'll be able to read, reply and open attachments in your Gmail account offline.  I just attended a technical overview of Windows Azure, Microsoft's new cloud computing "operating system." For the programmer, there is an offline development environment and SDK that allows client-side debugging in the Visual Studio IDE without ever "publishing" your application to Azure. The Microsoft team demonstrated a fully disconnected Silverlight application that once developed in the cloud, operates on your desktop independently of the browser. This has rich-internet-application (RIA) behavior but when asked, the team did not divulge any "gears" like capability in Silverlight. I believe Silverlight has "gears" features since it is a browser technology. The question will be if it is software plus service or just service.

Despite the lowest holiday sales in 40 years, Apple powered ahead in the fourth quarter with both a rise in profit and revenues and sending its quarterly sales past $10 billion for the first time. Tim Cook even took a shot at would-be copycats saying if anyone "rips off" Apple's IP, they will "go after anybody that does."  Former Apple executive, Jon Rubinstein was in opposition with Steve Jobs to the keyboard design of the iPhone. He left the company last year and with $325 million funding from Elevation Partners, he became Executive Chairman of Palm. My short evaluation of the Palm Pre was positive on the technology but negative on the business prospects. Maybe Jon should use some of that funding to pay royalties to Apple.

A growing community of developers continues to enhance and support a very useful JavaScript toolkit, called Dojo. This toolkit handles cumbersome tasks for eye-popping web applications using DOM manipulation, Ajax, animations and pesky event normalizations needed to get applications to behave correctly in multiple browsers. While the Document Object Model (DOM) dates back to Netscape, web browsers didn't need DOM to render HTML. This all changed with Web 2.0 UIs where JavaScript needs to dynamically modify or inspect what's coming across on the web page. There are even extensions for supporting design patterns, wrappings and persistent storage for Adobe Air, a Rich Internet Application framework.  The Dojo Zoom application here only has 50 lines of source code. It is all self-contained and of course, no Postbacks! With the help of a couple of community members, what started as a simple drag and drop example grew into a fully featured application showing off Dojo's power. As you move the overlay box, you can resize and create a zoom in the right panel. Very cool.

Business Intelligence has found its way to consumer movie prediction software. I was interested to see this article on the CIO website even though they are trying to make a connection between IT and Hollywood. Epagogix is a privately held UK firm specializing in artificial intelligence and brings together risk management, finance and operations. Will Smith's simple pattern matching worked ok when consumer sentiment was much higher. Trying to predict a successful movie now will need to take into account different attitudes consumers have about entertainment (read: no negative or sad story lines).

read more | digg story

About this time last year I was convinced we were heading into a bear market. My prediction back then was the S&P 500 would make its way down to 1000. I didn't think it would reach down to 741 as it did in November. I also thought the dollar would rally. It did during the latter half of the year as the energy and commodity trade unwound and massive de-leveraging occurred. The British economist, John Keynes believed government investment in infrastructure and low interest rates are needed to stimulate the economy and avert depressions. I'm not an economist but a student of mathematics and experimentation. We are about to witness the largest experiment of the Keynesian theory the world has ever seen (see how the IMF and World Bank are doing, they are Keynesian products). From a market perspective, I see a trading range all year interspersed with powerful bear market rallies. I believe we will see the S&P test 750 again and 1200 on the high side. I had government cheese in elementary school. Back then I didn't know the difference. I wonder if we should care if the new infrastructure spending on technology has a cheesy taste. Maybe the polyester suits from the 70's will come back too.

A quick look at the stocks of the Washington Post, Gannett or NY Times over the last five years have showed us that the printed page in news media is well on its way out. With the increased number of online news and real time feeds, the way people get their information has certainly changed. What's not been noticed is that even on news websites, the average user spends only 5 minutes a month (or about 10 page impressions). What The Standard failed to do, the news "prediction" site, HubDub did. By turning content into a game, people are spending much more time on their site. HubDub claims their active users spend 3 hours per month (about 500 page impressions). They recently scored a $1.2 million round of Series A funding, somebody's listening. They are essentially a partner platform that can turn any news site or blog into a prediction market. Group intelligence or The Wisdom of Crowds has been a frequent subject of experiments since the 1920's. When finance professor Jack Treynor held up a jar containing 850 beans, the group estimate was 871 jelly beans in the jar. Only one of the 56 people in class made a better guess. Ask the audience is always better than "phone a friend."

Carol Bartz led Autodesk for 14 years and has close ties with Jerry Yang and Susan Decker (the current Yahoo President). The Wall Street Journal has confirmed she's accepted an offer to become the new CEO of Yahoo! Autodesk is considered a legacy software company and one that really had nothing to do with the Internet era or Web 2.0. Some industry observers and bloggers are already pointing out she knows nothing about the web, she won't last long and her photo is a glamour shot to hide her 60 year age. Oh well, so what, no one complained about Greta Van Susteren. I think they are all missing the point.  As I've stated here before, Yahoo needs to package itself up for sale and Autodesk is no stranger to M&A. Under Carol's watch, they completed 19 acquisitions between 1997 and 2005.  I see this management change opening up discussions with Microsoft. I think she brings the toughness Yahoo needs right now. At minimum the company will most likely be broken apart as they try to seek value and extract the growth engines that are left.

By building upon their heritage in personal information management devices, Palm has extended good functionality to popular websites that appeal to business users with the new Palm Pre. I believe this is the last Hoo-Haa for Palm as they have struggled for several years (stock was $1.50 in December). They redesigned the operating system, WebOS, from the ground up and many industry observers like the new user interface. It makes use of MEMS to support tilt like the iPhone. It received a lot of attention at the Consumer Electronics Show this week. The browser is based on WebKit and developers who know XHTML, Javascript, XML and Cascading Style Sheets should be able to develop for the device without learning any new languages. Palm has many loyal users. Their carrier partner, Sprint has experienced a severe drop in subscriber growth recently. So you have two weak players making another go at it. If Verizon gets a hold of it, that would help it flank AT&T's iPhone. We're not out jumping in the stock yet, it went from $3 to $6 in a couple of days, mostly a short-covering rally.

Microsoft displaces Google on Verizon wireless handsets as it attempts to pass-rush Google in the consumer market. Steve Ballmer's first CES keynote last night did not include the typical futuristic products people can't buy yet. Instead, they focused on practical applications like Windows 7, the successor to Windows Vista. He even took a swipe at Apple saying the "the most power and most value for the money is a PC." If Microsoft operating systems were home videos, Windows Vista would be Blu-Ray and Windows 7 would be Blu-ray with 3D glasses. Just like Windows XP put a new face on Windows 2000, Windows 7 is more of a marketing makeover with new features that appeal to MAC users (maybe). Most analysts do not recommend enterprises skip Vista because for one reason they just advised them to move forward with deployment (oops). Besides, there aren't enough improvements to wait a 20010 release cycle of Windows 7 SP1. Most beta testers however are saying this release is further along than Vista was at this stage. Microsoft is trying to get it right. The Quick Launch bar even went the way of Rowdy with the Dallas Cowboys, that's a good start.

Twitter, the $20m funded startup from San Francisco was hacked over the weekend. Over 30 high profile accounts including Barrack Obama's were compromised.  Developers have found numerous holes in Twitter's code. Rather than notifying Twitter, one person decided to exploit the insecure code. Problems with authentication, session state and scalability have been addressed for the most part but more problems keep coming up, that's the way some of these Web 2.0 sites are. There was even a post on Network World recommending IT Pros sign up for a Twitter account to stay informed with news feeds. Surely the IT Pros can take care of themselves on Twitter, what about everyone else? Another potential service for the enterprise is Yammer. They have a viable business model in that if a company wants to provide a higher level of security for their employees, they pay $1/month per user.  Let's see, save a dollar, get hacked; pay a dollar get peace of mind. I wonder if Yammer comes with a service level agreement.

There are more rumors circulating that Apple will introduce a $300 iPhone Nano. When I checked for a web link on MSNBC, the page was taken down. The excitement started when a post of "photo" of the new case showed up on the appleinsider site. Most people thought it was a fake. What makes sense however is having a touch-screen Nano. Perhaps that is the new product. However since it only costs $25 to add the chip and antenna for 3G, you could have a mini iPhone too. You'd have to draw the line with WiFi and GPS. If this is a real product, it could be offered to people with smaller hands.