Kaizen Bits

After reading all this about the Apple software race,  even to sell it like “a two-part package comprised of a tool kit to help developers write programs for the iPhone and a venue in which to sell them — a variation on Apple’s iTunes music store model called the App Store”.

For sure, there will be hundreds of apps developed. Something I was always surprised about is the amount of apps created already for the Mac, despite its market share is not rocket numbers. Now the question for me is: how those apps will be capitalized? Which software business model is following the iPhone? Pay-per-use, telco revenue, licensing? Any help?

Now that Google announced it will support OAuth, in stead of developping its “own litte thing”, a number of movements in social networking might be identified with the word “open”. Via this interesting article in Digg,it all looks like this:

- Niche clubs: talking about small things that interest everybody
- iPhone and geographic tracking

- Streaming Live Video

- Social Lending: Peer to Peer Lenders like Lending Club can get you a 25K personal loan funded by individuals

- Online Elections

- Mobile Profiles

- Universal Connectivity

My two cents? Well, this is all about trends, but I still do not see a business model (except advertising, as always) underlying these trends. So I will remain skeptic about the non-buzz till I can see (and touch) a fully-fledged business succes stories.

It is really impressive the amount of SMS and emails, and what not people are sending since yesterday night when Spain won the EuroCup 2008. People from Brazil, Bangladesh, Bulgaria and Germany, some of them people I had not heard for quite a while, were cheering our team and the great victory.

That is something I will never forget. I don´t like soccer, but sometimes I had the feeling I am missing a big share of the knowledge of the Universe just because of it. Soccer has become far more than a simple sport, reaching a global (almost) religious fact.

Thanks to them all!!

I just got this email I wanted to share:
“Microsoft, the software giant flush with billions of dollars in its warchest, has agreed to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset, we’ve learned.  The purchase price is rumored to be slightly more than $100 million. An announcement is expected next month.  Powerset, of San Francisco, has developed a technology that attempts to understand the full meanings of phrases you type in while searching, and it returns results based on that understanding.

By buying Powerset, Microsoft is hoping to close the perceived quality gap with Google’s search engine. The move comes as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer continues to argue that improving search is Microsoft’s most important task. Microsoft’s market share in search has steadily declined, dropping further and further behind first-place Google and second place Yahoo”.

Powerset has been classified as a “semantic” company for many (particularly I read it in the Spanish technical press) and avoided under that term by many other, so I am not sure if it is very correct to describe it as a semantic company. It is though, the underlying search engine of Wikipedia!!

Nokia will acquire part of Symbian and it will release its code as part of the open source move-it wave.  It is an interesting move in a company which couldn´t be more European and, now that the new iPhone is coming, closed source, could rely on an active developer base and third-party value added services.

We got one paper accepted from our cooperation with the folks at UniK, Capturing Semantics for Information Security and Privacy Assurance, published in Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. I hereby enclose the abstract:

Security and privacy assurance is indispensable for ubiquitous access to information and resources. This paper focuses on the security and privacy provisions in a restricted organizational environment through access control mechanism. It includes the representation of the semantics of an organization and its access control mechanism exploiting the Web Ontology Language. The system controls access to the resources of an organization through differential access privileges. These are formulated based on the roles of the individuals, and the projects and departments they belong to. Instead of explicit definitions, some additional facts of the mechanism are inferred by executing semantic rules using the Jess rule engine over the designed ontology. These information are then passed back to the ontology to enrich it. The ontology is designed to cope with the organization restructuring with minimal efforts. 

Today at the Bioinformatics course I am attending at the Universidad de Salamanca, they talked about Deja Vu and sanctioned duplicates in articles. Something that looms over academic production, something to be taken into account.

Duplicates are very dangerous since many articles pondering the same issues must prove and show contribution to the area.

Same as last year, I was lecturing at the Master de Ingeniería de la Web at the Universidad de Oviedo. I appreciated very much that Labra invited me again.

I had a terrific time and introduced a number of changes from last year, particularly I talked about new stuff such as Cloud Computing and the ever-growing possibilities of service computing, things I have already blogged about.

Yes, the picture is not from Oviedo, despite I love Asturias, I had no time to take a picture…

Last week, I was in Athens at the ICIW08 where I was presenting ESACake. Actually, the city was impressively cool at night, I could hang out and have a great time. I was staying in Plaka, the bohemian area and had a terrific time at the Fresh Hotel, a Soho big glasses designer masterpiece design hotel. Dare to dream, as they said.
The only downhill is how dirty the city was. There were tons of rubbish, shabby street sleepers and bad looking people in the very  center. I can hardly imagine how was the city before Athens 2004, when they apparently clean it.

I love Greece. It was my third time there, after Crete 2004 and 2005, but first time in the mainland and it is oustanding. Particularly, the Parthenon and the Acropolis are simply breathtaking. History looks directly into your eyes.

Adobe has announced a Flash version for the nice market of the iPhone. However, Apple has given a number of (open source) first steps in a different direction. With SproutScore, Apple would avoid Flash lock-in and dependance on a unique provider.

However, to me, this is an important issue. If the iPhone really wants to become the new mobile Web multimedia device we have always dreamt (and if you see its sales, figures and expectations, it might happen), Flash and RIA are probably one of the most delicate issues.

In that sense, I always loved a W3C-like solution, where consensus and working groups create fully-fledged recommendations that everybody could use. In this market, it is different because there might be a lot of money involved, but didn´t big software providers commit with BPEL in 2002 as a de facto standard for composing Web Services and creating workflows?