Bits And Buzz, by Jeremy Chone

Now that Google is in, the game is on. As I mentioned in my previous post, software is now ruling the mobile industry. As in the PC world, the big contenders are Apple with iPhone, Google with Android, and Microsoft with Windows Mobile.

But the big questions are: which one is better and which one is going to ultimately win?

While it is hard to objectively answer this question, here is my first attempt to create a simple score card. I have created a “4 Ss Scorecard” that I think is quite representative of the mobile market need.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

For 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 »

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 »

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 »

In 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 »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »