Kaizen Bits

Well, I know that besides not writing very often lately, due to lectures and specially project proposal writing, I might be deemed as lazy (which in my very deep I am, or aspire to be), I am recently devoting my posts to Google, talking about them becoming a phone company or about Chrome for Mac.

But when last week, for some reasons I don´t finally understand, Firefox, my favourite and best of breed web browser, started underperforming (I can´t store bookmarks anymore and can not use the back button when browsing, don´t ask why), I thought of giving a hard try with Chrome for Mac and here is what I have to say: go Chrome go!!

Simply, because the Google folks are probably the best software engineers in the world, changed and revolutionized the Web and seem limitless in terms of innovation (or even disruption). Chrome for Mac is extremely fast, reliable and it has a great look & feel. So what is the moral of the story? In many software related areas and apps, Chrome is the way to go. Yeah.

Three new jobs from the Seth Godin blog to consider. From the beginning, I was interested in the second one:

• Community Manager: Since my friend Ina was appointed Community Manager in Rummble, I could see the potential of her great experience in blogs, social networks, etc.
• Stats Fiend: This is the one I have been thinking of ad maximum for a potential research project. Tracking the “appearances” in search engines, blogs, media, social apps and the own impact factor in the web.
• Manager of freelancers: In a networked economy, freelancers are the building blocks of IT teams.

I was interviewed after my talk at the University of Murcia. We talked about Web 3.0, Cloud Computing and and this is the article finally published in Europa Press with excerpts of our conversation.

Enjoy!!

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…

Salesforce is an amazing case study of what has to be done in technology. Right today, Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com founder and CEO was talking about the three waves of the Web being: “First it was webs such as Yahoo, eBay or Amazon. The second weave of the Internet was user generated content drivenwith Webs such as YouTube, Flickr o Digg, and the third generation was determined by the different plataforms. It´s happening today: people is creating their own applications”.

Following Benoiff vision, it is not anymore about Visual Basic, .Net, SQL, Java o WebSphere. Open Source change the application development paradigm and in stead of talking about Microsoft, Sun Microsystems or Bea, developpers use Google for social networks apps, Facebook and Amazon for end user programs.

Why shall we believe this? Let me give you three strong reasons:

1) Salesforce made room for their Force.com platforms face to giants such as Oracle, SAP or Microsoft.

2) They made in one decade 41.000 customers all over the world (7.000 in Europe) 850 M$ profit.

3) At the beginning it was SME-oriented, but now they have Dell, Adecco, Citibank or Allianz in their portfolio.
But far more important than that, they have created the SaaS industry, found a profitable business model and have the power to turn innovation into real business sustainable value. The best proof is that all their competitors are moving into the arena.

That is for me the real proof-of-concept.

“With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine”. That is how the super-fast Internet of the next generation is entitled to behave.

When I was in Lao last summer, I was fully able to confirm a suspiction I had all over those years: there is no single place without the Internet.  Even in the most coined and isolate placed in the world, such as Luang Prabang, in the rivershore of the Mekong river, the Yellow River, there were plenty of Internet cafes and a whole bunch of youngsters travelling Asia using the very Net.

The iPhone SDK  is now available. Apart from Android, this is a promising app suite for mobile services. My plans are now working on the latter because we are working togteher with people with expertise in the area.

On the other hand, the Netbeans Mobile Device Environment looks also interesting. I only need to convince now some students to work on this

I have been reading and working on the Software as a Service (SaaS) phenomenon for about two months now and I think it is the next big thing. At least in what regards to Business Process Modelling or Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).

Why? The answer would be better why not. Lately the SOC space is kind of bland. There are some initiatives going on regarding service computing but the gist of the approach is not really paying attention to the real advantages of having a huge amount of services hosted in different slices of the same application and that, my friends, is what SaaS is all about.

Something like ten years ago, Application Server Providers (ASP) with the only difference that code did not have to be replicated all over the infraestructure, now each tenant has its own slice.

Still, I have some questions to myself: How does SaaS relates to SSME? Why there are no open source SaaS implementations? How difficult it would be to create one?

Ever wanted to know how Chinese (China Mobile only: 350 Million customers)  people use cell phones?

“Some 34.8 percent reported they listened to mobile music every month compared with 20 percent in Spain, 18.9 percent in Britain and 5.7 percent in the United States”

The report also noted some other interesting differences in other use rates between Chinese and Western mobile users:

“Compared with users in the United States and Europe, Chinese consumers use their phones much less to check on their email or to send photos and videos…Over 30 percent in Italy, Spain and Britain use their phones to send or receive photos and videos, and only half as many do so in China.

Users in the United States lead the poll in email usage with 11.6 percent compared with nine percent in Spain and Britain, but only 2.5 percent in China.”

It would be easy to say why mobile email is failing in Spain, it is all about taxes and non-competitive fares. However, in China, this might be because mobile phones are associated with the fun side of the device. For me, as a Chinese student, I find it very interesting.

In Slashdot, they pondered the issue of XMPP being the next big thing.  Well, no clue but it looks a really good idea. The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), an open XML technology for presence and real-time communication developed by the Jabber open-source community in 1999, formalized by the IETF in 2002-2004, and continuously extended through the standards process of the XMPP Standards Foundation.

I have always wondered why IM apps are not following the same protocol, since it would help a lot for interoperability and I can think of a single reason against, except that, very well know and very old, of building barriers, make things difficult for the enemy and, bluntly, being squeamish.