Blogs and "blogs"?

Don't you just love a blog that is only written as a political stunt? To be thought cool when you're really out of it?

I was referred to one today; a government minister writing an entry recording a success. Not much more than ten words and three of those were a link to the official Press Release!

Blogs are great at recording/sharing thoughts on any number of subjects; allowing an audience to build on / shout down the idea. They are not so good when used for crude PR.

Or are they?

Frank ( Frank@vecta5.com )

Web-based Services; which will succeed?

Taking the old 2*2 approach favoured by Strategy Consultants, we should have web-based services that save us time, allow us to do something, or both.

All have value, so we should be prepared to pay.

One service I came across recently translates a piece of foreign language text into my preferred language. Nothing new there? Yes, when the foreign text is captured using the camera in my mobile phone and the translation comes back within a few seconds. A step closer to holding up our phone as someone speaks in the foreign language and we hear it through our Bluetooth earpiece almost in real time. IBM have done that? Sure but let's see it in the street.

More useful; essential to some; is when the phone is in the hand of dyslexic who annot read a vital sign or instruction. What a boon to have a "translation" into speech delivered over the earpiece!

Another twist in this series is to take a photo on the cellphone and have the phone reshape it and sent it off to our favourite social networking site - that's cool, too.

Many more to come, I'm sure.

Frank (Frank@vecta5.com)

Web-based services are coming

I recently had the pleasure of attending an event that explored some of the opportunities and challenges involved in a world in which web-based services become intrinsic to almost everything we will do.

That event, hosted by SAP and attended by a number of leading experts from a number of well-known traditional and new wave businesses, progressively looked at:

• Moving beyond software as a service, so infrastructure, even aspects of identity, might be offered as services over the, increasingly mobile, web;
• Where the "killer apps" might emerge in this new world;
• The role, if any, to be played by the semantic web in allowing automated service discovery to facilitate new mash-ups etc.

There are numerous challenges, of course, but if the complaints logs in any number of contact centres are taken as a sign of the opportunities, then disruptive innovation will continue to cause headaches for technology businesses from IBM, Microsoft, and even Google to all sorts of services businesses, including even eBay and Amazon.

There's more; take a look at Frank's take on IRF2008

Frank ( Frank@vecta5.com )

SaaS and stuff

Some years ago, before the bubble burst, I was quoted in the UK's Financial Times. That article was about the likelihood of success for Application Service Providers.

As I recall, I argued that the ASP model was flawed for two reasons.

First, software was rarely, if ever, produced to a consistent standard. The version you opened on Tuesday might be significantly different from the one you used on Monday. Enough of an issue if it was the formatting of a flyer about a social event; more if it was a critical business calculation; and so on. Trust matters.

Second, few users had the bandwidth to support the more complex applications that were being touted as the most likely offerings. Performance matters.I thought only very complex, very expensive packages could effectively be delivered using the ASP model.

Now we have software being delivered over the web as a service; is it the same? was I wrong?

My impression is that the successful SaaS deliveries are new products that use web services, rather than old products re-engineered; much as Excel designed for Windows vanquished the previously dominant 1-2-3 designed for DOS and adapted for Windows.

Successful new products add things that are only possible in the new environment and don't have lots of baggage from features that no longer work as well.Where's this going?

We are being offered software as a service; but now we are also being offered infrastructure - storage, processing, etc - as a service frmo the cloud. It's new, it's shiny, it's cheap - just get out your credit card and you're off. A start-up service provider has never been able to enter the market so easily. Even Microsoft is begining to adapt once more.

And we are not just talking software or communications services. Pretty soon, on a (smart) cellphone, car PC, home TV, or game console near you, you could offer and receive a host of services built and delivered in this way.Which will survive? What are the issues?

More next time.

Frank ( Frank@vecta5.com )

Clouds and Hubs and Services and Things

Hello World,


Long time since I've said that.

I want to outline my reactions to events in communications, technology, automation, media, and security that move us to a really interconnected world that respects privacy when we need it yet communicates freely.

A world of sensors and actuators (is a display an actuator?); wrist, pocket, car, home, office, train, plane hubs; wire and wireless connections; and that cloud; and those services.

How will it all play? Who will win or lose? Which devices will we use and how will we connect them? Most of all which information, education and entertainment services will we use most?

Watch this space.


Frank (Frank@vecta5.com)