Kaizen Bits

I learned about SuccessFactors in a couple of late meetings I had last week. Together with those who think that SaaS 3.0 and ITSM are matches made in Heaven, I found out that most of the stuff we are doing towards SaaS could really have an impact soon.

In principle, SuccessFactors takes the SaaS model to the HR domain. For me, the app as such is not as interesting as seeing yet again an application of model we have talked a lot abou lately to a different and challengin business domain.

Specially now that we seeded a lot of project proposals in the winder, and lookg forward to the harvest in summer

I was testing Opera Unite an interesting idea from the Norwegian company (whose browser has been awarded very often as the most reliable and trustworthy to surf the net). The basic idea of Opera Unite is including a server inside the browser. This implies turning your machine into a P2P, filesharing or FTP-like node, but through the browser, what is quite important.

However, I am not sure what is really the point. First of all, a browser is a broswer (like in Gertrude Stein, a rose is a rose is a rose) and in a well-defined client-server structure, it fulfills a particular role. Also, the big success of the so-called Web 2.0 sites (such as Flickr, Youtube and so on) has been precisely centralize content, instead of distributing it through computational devices, like Opera Unite will do. I would have expected something like Google Gears, which puts on the client side a number of functionalities traditionally hosted in the server.

Finally, Opera promise of “reinventing the Web” seems to me a bit…ambitious I´d better say they have re-invent the browser, which is really good and shows the Norwegian browswer is once more on the innovation pathline. Great for them!!

OK, I must admit it. I never liked Guns’n'roses. In the mid-90s, my friend Jorge gave me as a present two cassettes (yes, we had cassettes, no iPod at that time, yes) for the summer. One was the unbelievable Los Rodriguez album, “Sin Documentos” and the second was Axel and his guys shouting and screaming. I even don´t remember the name of the album. Whereas the first still makes me enjoy life and I simply can´t stop singing each and every brilliant Calamaro lyrics, the second, and most of their songs, give me the creeps.

Well, with this Chinese Democracy, I can´t say that much. It is nice, “listenable”, so to speak. However, it does not transmit me anything, so I listened it once (and not the whole, as happens both with books and songs I am not interested in) and jumped to a much better one: Journal for Plague Lovers, Manic Street Preachers.

Apparently, Ning is a network of Social Networks, organized all of them around a set of “topics of interest”, like Indian cricket or the Twilight saga. I found this concept interesting, since most SN (that remained, there were many who simply didn´t make it, since its busines model is not clear enough) and made a quick summary of the interview with the Ning CEO:
– Ning had 4.7 million unique visitors from Jan, 1st and surpassed 1 million netowkrs (1/5 being active) on April, 2009.
– Mission: Giving people the opportunity to create their own social experiences for their own unquie passsions / topics / interest.
– Business Model: If somebody wants to add a feature like creating an own domain, he can pay a la carte for options. The free service has contextual ads.

It is a great idea, but again, where is the business model? I know Facebook and Twitter do not have it either, and millions of people are using them, though. And also they are worth a lot. Fair enough, but this is the time of the concentration in the SN domain, and only a few (like those two) will prevail.