Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for May 29th from 05:17 to 12:45:

• Some stats from Twitter conference compared to… – Robert Scoble – FriendFeed – Anecdotal data from 140tc this week. 200 tweets/second at peak. Didn't see an estimate of current user account population though, I keep seeing site unique visitor estimates, which aren't useful.
• Microsoft Silverlight vs Google Wave: Why Karma Matters | Zoho Blogs – "The real interesting contrast to us, as independent software developers, is the way developers responded to Silverlight as opposed to the reaction yesterday to Google Wave. Both Silverlight and Wave are aimed at taking the internet experience to the next level. To be perfectly honest, Silverlight is a great piece of technology. Google Wave, as yet, is not much more than a concept and an announcement. It is easy to dismiss all this with "Oh, the press just loves to hype everything Google, and loves to hate Microsoft," but that cannot explain why even competitors like us are willing to embrace Google's innovations, but stay away from perfectly good innovations from Microsoft, such as Silverlight? It comes down to one word: karma."
• makerfaire.com: Maker Faire – This weekend at San Mateo Expo Center
• Google Wave Federation Protocol‎ –
• Google Wave API Overview – Google Wave API – Google Code – APIs for Google Wave email / bbs / wiki / chat / collaboration / communications mashup platform introduced yesterday.
• What Emacs Commands Do You Use Most and Find Most Useful? : programming – Reddit thread discussing favorite emacs commands

These are my links for May 6th through May 7th:

• Content Syndication with Case-Hardened JavaScript – kentbrewster.com – Handy code for building Javascript widgets with content from various sources such as Twitter, Digg, Yahoo Pipes, etc.
• Mathematical Atlas: A gateway to Mathematics – "The Mathematical Atlas is a collection of articles about aspects of mathematics at and above the university level, but (usually) not at the level of current research. The goal of this collection is to introduce the subject areas of modern mathematics, to describe a few of the milestone results and topics, and to give pointers to some of the key resources where further information is to be found. Like any good atlas, we try to present several ways to look at each area and to show its relationship with neighboring areas and sub-areas. "
• Three Reasons Why Twitter Will NOT Index the Links You Share – ReadWriteWeb – Argues that Twitter will rely on bit.ly through partnership or acquisition to handle sentiment and semantic analysis of twitter search and link contents.
• Tough Love For Microsoft Search – December 2008 post from Danny Sullivan on Microsoft and the search landscape.
• Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker – Malcolm Gladwell, with a reporter at large on Vivek Ranadivé and his NJB girls basketball team, employing asymmetric strategies to overcome conventionally stronger teams, and a broader look at the history of insurgent strategies from David and Goliath, T.E. Lawrence, George Washington, etc.

These are my links for April 24th through April 27th:

• Gallery: Flickr users make accidental maps – tech – 27 April 2009 – New Scientist – Building map visualizations using geotagged photos from Flickr.
• Does Hewlett-Packard Need a Dose of Anarchy? – NYTimes.com – When your organization is built on lean, predictable operating excellence (cost cutting, procurement, scale), where do speculative, high risk, growth opportunities come from?
• JavaScript for hackers – Opera Developer Community – On Javascript parser and some eval examples that lead to XSS vulnerabilities
• Processing.js – Javascript port of Processing graphics library, requires Canvas.
• Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition – Face recognition technology startup from CMU, with a demo of tagging faces in video of all episodes of Star Trek (the original series).

These are my links for February 26th through February 27th:

• What to do if your startup is about fail (or “Don’t Stop Believing”) « The Jason Calacanis Weblog – Practical advice for startups facing a slowing market and limited cash.
• 25 Forex-Related Twitter Accounts Worth Following –
• How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data – Bret Taylor’s blog – Implementation notes on how FriendFeed manages very large data sets in which the schema changes relatively frequently.
• The "A Hard Day’s Night" Chord – Rock’s Holy Grail@Everything2.com – Exactly which notes on the guitar. Plus the piano.
• Beatles Unknown "A Hard Day’s Night" Chord Mystery Solved Using Fourier Transform – Four years ago, inspired by reading news coverage about the song’s 40th anniversary, Jason Brown of Dalhousie’s Department of Mathematics decided to try and see if he could apply a mathematical calculation known as Fourier transform to solve the Beatles’ riddle. The process allowed him to decompose the sound into its original frequencies using computer software and parse out which notes were on the record.

These are my links for February 26th from 10:39 to 20:05:

• Piano Etudes – Assemble, play, and print scores for do-it-yourself etudes built from short musical snippets. An example GWT application.
• CloudStatus – Dynamically displays the last week of health status for selected remote computing services. For services with recent outages, a health bar is shown. Given no recent outages in a provider's services, key indicator charts are shown.
• Yodel Anecdotal » Blog Archive » Getting our house in order – Carol Bartz says "hello world" with first set of reorg and directions as CEO at Yahoo.
• Google App Engine Offers Pricing Plan Beyond Quotas; Grab A Free I/O Ticket To Celebrate – Interesting discussion on app engine in the comments section.
• Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media – Full content of last year's ICWSM 2008 conference papers.

Spent some time at CloudConnect last week. “Cloud computing” has an increasing amount of buzz lately. I notice that India is the top region and Korean is the top language for searches on the topic. The top 3 cities are Bangalore, San Jose, and Seoul. That sounds consistent with my impression of levels of interest and activity. Infoworld says “Cloud Computing shapes up as big trend for 2009″. It’s certainly turning into a hot label, although the underlying internet service infrastructure ideas have been around for a long time.

The current business environment is characterized by high uncertainty. However, assuming the global economy doesn’t totally collapse, companies that successfully migrate IT activities to the cloud can achieve lower costs and flexible scale, at the potential cost of vendor lock-in, regulatory uncertainty, and the operational risk of the transition itself.

Some of this reminds me of the dynamics around corporate ERP projects a decade ago. If you were the incumbent leader in your market, you’ve already invested in your line-of-business IT infrastructure, and it’s working. You may have even been an early adopter of ERP technologies, gaining time and experience in pilot projects to develop a competitive advantage in your in-house IT. At some point the other competitors in a given market end up in a difficult position – either continue as they are with a strategic disadvantage (no ERP), or take on a risky overhaul of their core IT systems and business processes to become more competitive (if the project succeeds). Kind of like Iron Man rebuilding the power supply for his heart and super-suit. It’s great, as long as it actually works. But it might kill you.

So who went down this path? The leaders tend to, because part of how they became the leaders in their markets is by looking for the next competitive edge, whether it is a technology, business process, or other. The interesting part is that in many ways it is more attractive for an *uncompetitive* company to attempt a radical technology and process overhaul, simply because what they’re doing is already *not* working. So it’s literally adapt or die. The implementation risks were substantial, sometimes companies suffered major setbacks through failed ERP adoption, Hershey’s being a the poster child for a disastrous SAP project, although it didn’t *quite* kill them.

Now let’s look at cloud computing. It is clearly a win for startups and insurgents in a given market. They gain IT capabilities and scale on par with all but the very largest organizations, and don’t have a sunk cost of equipment, staff, and existing business process. They can’t differentiate themselves on better IT per se, but they can develop their processes around the flexbility and scalability of the cloud, and design for competitive advantage within its constraints. They also have nothing to lose, so why not take the risk?

The more typical case is much more difficult. An existing enterprise already has substantial IT infrastracture assets, staff, and business processes. They will be severely criticized and probably sued if someone doesn’t like what they’re doing, which is problematic because they have an actual working business and assets. Nonetheless, in the current business environment, many existing organizations will be approaching that “adapt or die” point, in which the choices are to try something risky and maybe have it fail (in this case, moving IT services and processes to the cloud), or die (weighed down by higher costs and lower flexibility). One implementation risk is that the regulatory issues around privacy, security, accountability etc haven’t been worked out yet, and what major financial institution, bank, insurer, or health care provider would want to be the guinea pig in court? Not their first choice, but the prospect of lower incremental costs and the operating flexibility grow more and more appealing every day. Someone is going to be first, probably get sued, and then everyone will know what the rules are and jump in. Either that, or startups and insurgents in their markets are going to take over first.

Haven’t been keeping up on feedreading due to this cold for the past few days. I’m still kind of out of it, but I finally went to see the doctor and the prescription meds seem to be knocking it back a couple of notches.

I see that Riya (née Ojos) is about to start their public alpha trials. Mike Arrington got an early look today. Looking forward to trying it out.

During the past few days of semi-coherent downtime, I was having something like the following thought, which Russell Beatty articulated in a post this evening:

All these startups in my feeds lately are killing me! There are tons of them, but none seem to be doing anything particularly special. I mean, it’s nice that there’s a sort of rebirth of small startups, but there’s absolutely no sort of wow factor that I’ve seen. And no, this isn’t an anti-Web 2.0 style backlash: I really believe in the idea of the web as a platform. Amazon and eBay’s web services are perfect examples of platforms which have created huge value for both companies, as well as the developers using their APIs. That’s not the problem. It’s all these Flickr-wannabes, flip-it-quick companies that are bugging me.

He goes on with a quick taxonomy of web2.0 startups:

• Scrape Engines
• Mashed Ups
• Web Trapps
• Social Anything
• Phile Sharing
• User Generated Dis-Content
• RSS Holes
• Firefoxing

It just seems that no one is trying to change the world any more. No one is aiming to create “insanely great” products or do the impossible. Why not? Why are so many people grasping at the low-hanging fruit, when there’s so much more goodness for everyone if they just stretched a little higher?

A lot of people are wrestling with the question of where’s all this “web2.0″ stuff going to take us. Many of the past barriers to entry have dropped, with free software, nearly free hardware, inexpensive and widely connected networks, and lower cost labor than ever before. As a predictable consequence, a lot more ideas are getting tried out. Unlike before, we now have tools and infrastructure that allow what would have been just paper concepts or slideware be turned out as functioning web sites on the internet.

We presently have a wonderful but frenzied universe of new-this-mashed-with-that-meets-flickr. Trying to think about it during this cold has been making me dizzy, but I had visualized something like an old science movie illustrating the Cambrian Explosion, in which life suddenly went from fairly simple cell-based organisms to a diverse assortment of fascinating, squiggly, twitching, wiggling, multi-colored creatures, bumping into each other, gobbling each other up, and most of which subsequently disappeared.

Obviously, not everything worked out. But:

Aside from a few enigmatic forms that may or may not represent animals, all modern animal phyla except bryozoa appear to have representatives in the Cambrian, and most except sponges seem to have originated just after or just before the start of the period. Many extinct phyla and odd animals that have unclear relationships to other animals also appear in the Cambrian. The apparent “sudden” appearance of very diverse faunas over a period of no more than a few tens of millions of years is referred to as the “Cambrian Explosion”.

OK, so we’ll have a few winners left standing after the next crash.

The economics for many of the web 2.0 startups is driven by companies like Google, Yahoo, and Amazon. The existence, success, and low entry requirements for pay-per-click advertisement and affiliate sales has shaped their implicit revenue plans, while the cheap-or-free access to and straightforward implementation of the web service APIs has shaped their technology and investment (or spending) plans. They also provide the possibility that “if you build it, we will buy you”.

So, any number of things could bring an abrupt end to our web2.0 “Cambrian Age”. Here are some random possibilities:

• Paid search gets screwed up by click fraud, spamblogs, or other, thus removing money from the system
• XML patent guys make some headway, thus making lawyers central to the system
• Avian flu crosses over to humans and puts a dent in the globally mobile elements of society

For a quick view of the landscape for web2.0 startups, go check out Paul Kedrosky’s presentation slides from the Vancouver Enterprise Conference, titled “Get Your Head Out of the F*cking Tag Cloud”

• The cost of customer acquisitions is falling
• The cost of infrastructure is falling
• The cost of people is falling
• The cost of company creation is falling
• The cost of venture capital is falling
• …
  Web 2.0 is the democratization of technology entrepreneurship.

I like the taxonomy and evolution slide near the end. Wish I could remember what movie the “explosion of life” clip was from. Probably one of those old Bell System science movies. (I saw Hemo the Magnificent the other day.)

Now I’m off for another round of meds…

See also:
The Home Pages of this New Era
At least it’s not Avian Flu (yet)