What's new in week 12, 2008

Monday, 17-03-2008, Copenhagen

Never heard of 'Kyte.tv?' It is a video streaming service that let users upload video from their mobile phones or web cams to be distributed on the web through Kyte channels. I wonder the difference between Kyte.tv and YouTube. Perhaps Kyte is more focused on the "channels." Which means the company Kyte tries to put their channels connected to more customers and then they are in a position of having a lot of people's focus so that they are able to attracts a lot of business to distribute their content through these channels. YouTube can be used for B2B, B2C, C2C (and C2C is probably the most widely used one). Kyte is more likely to be focused on B2C.

What happens when AOL gets Bebo? Bebo is a social networking site with 40 million users. It has a heavy presence in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. Bebo can be seen as in the top three most popular social networking sites in the United States behind MySpace and Facebook. They are so many social networking sites. Which ones will always stay successful? From a user's point of view, do I need to have an account in every of these sites to keep up with all my friends (as they may have different belief or taste on social networks and may choose to use different sites)? There are two ways to understand this. First, it may come in the near future that, these networks decide to open to each other in certain ways so that users do not have to remember so many accounts and passwords. It is like you have both ICQ and MSN account and you can talk to your friends in MSN from your ICQ software. Second, there may be a kind of "mediator" sites that help people to connect to all these social networks in a easy way. It is like that there is a software that, once you logon (yes, you may need yet-another-account), it automatically login you into both ICQ and MSN so that you do not feel any difference talking to friends on either world.

Hulu.com, a legal and commercial media service on the web? As claimed, Hulu.com is a legal site where people can watch and share TV shows and full length movies. It is backed by NBC and News Corp and is open only to US users now. The player is developed based on Flash technology so that it can run only multiple platforms. Although there is no charge to use Hulu but users have to watch commercials in a certain frequency. And there are small banners running across the bottom of the screen. It is a successful (well, may be not yet) story for many P2P and online media in the 'dark world' to read.

Google and Postini. It was last summer that Google bought Postini to bring much-needed security to Google Apps. Postini provides message security, archiving, encryption and policy enforcement services for hosted software. Well, we used to received security attacks (I mean virus, spams, etc.) at our PCs. And later there were many attacks towards web servers. When SAAS are becoming more and more popular, I guess the next generation of security attack will be around the hosted applications. And yes, the attack will be more and more clever.

Tuesday, 18-03-2008, Copenhagen

Do we need to migrate to Vista just because it is a newer version of OS? If you are at an enterprise and you think of all you PCs. No! Not now. For many enterprises, such OS upgrade will only happen when the hardware needs to be upgraded. The direct upgrade of OS on an established hardware occurs only if the new OS brings a lot more performance, usability, and reliability benefits, such as from Win95 to Win98. Micrsoft has said it will end mainstream support in April 2009 and extended support in 2014.

MS vs. Google in the online market? I guess the winner will be the customers only. MS recently bought Rapt, a company that makes advertising yield management software for online publishers. If we think of the recent moves from MS to acquire Yahoo, it seems that MS is seriously looking for the next big piece of cake. And Google is definitely uncomfortable with such a giant player on one of its dominant business areas.

What do we expect from 802.11n? Well, four times faster speed then 802.11 a/b/g and longer connection distance? It seems that WiFi is getting closer and closer to our lives. Is there anybody doing medical research can tell me if WiFi is always safe for pregnant women and babies?

Talking about information security of an enterprise, do you think authentication, authorization, and coding is enough? Nowadays there has been an ongoing paradigm shift of the security industry. People are thinking of an information-centric security model. One example can be the prevention of information loss in an enterprise. The master data management (MDM) application can partially solve this issue. But a whole security framework (plus the privacy concerns) is more like an ultimate solution in a while.

MS released a new component library for financial service developers. Good news for developers of the banking and insurance industry! The component library seems to have a tight connection with both the Office tools and the back-end systems such as SQL Server. It seems that this component is trying to replace the IT developers’ efforts into a product so that the business developers can make user of. On the other hand, are there any jobs left for IT developers, or do they have to migrate into the business planet?

Sunday, 23-03-2008, Copenhagen

After a long Easter holiday, here is the latest info that I’ve got from my side.

There are stories that people built a “hot-pluggable architecture” for their BI infrastructure which enables the success of BI across quite a few legacy systems. It seems that this term in the BI and DW area is brought forward mainly by Oracle. The idea of this architecture is to allow an enterprise to mix and match existing and emerging technologies from a range of software vendors. Having a hot-pluggable architecture will allow the enterprise to easily connect and extend the existing heterogeneous systems and maximize the return on current and future IT investments. I think the basis of having such architecture is to enable and enrich the semantic layer of the enterprise information.

A lot of us are talking about cloud computing. Are we ready for an era that we do not have to care about upgrade of our software? It seems that SAAS is a trend with proven cases in industry. But the total era of cloud computing has to wait for a few important factors to grow mature. For example, one important factor is the internet connection availability. And a lot of people are worrying about internet security since it first appears. When the security threats turn their heads on servers and the network, we have to witness enough effort to protect the cloud computing technology against the threats. BTW, IBM has an initiative called “Blue Cloud” following this trend and Google has already established the Google App.

It seems that “Collaboration Tool” is one of the most important technologies of 2008. For a big enterprise, such tool allows employees to brainstorm, analyze, and share work and make their decisions together. Apparently, if the collaboration tool is equipped with unified communication capabilities and supported by various types of hardware such as mobile phones and PDAs, it is going to be the ultimate system that everybody will use.