Tonight I sat down with Microsoft executives Steve
Berkowitz (Senior Vice President, Online Services Group) and Christopher Payne (Corporate
Vice President, Live Search) to talk about their new 3D
version of Virtual Earth. Microsoft is
positioning Virtual Earth as "the beginning of the 3D Web", a quote I heard from Steve Lawler (General Manager, Virtual Earth Business Unit) during the
launch event this evening. In my discussion with Steve and Christopher - which was more
an informal sit-down than a formal interview - we discussed the ramifications of this 3D
push, as well as how visual search is the next big thing in search.
First things first. Here is a quick overview of the product details from Techcrunch:
"US users with Vista-ready Windows computers and IE 6 or 7 will be able to navigate through an aerial view of 15 select cities with enough detail to discern the texture of buildings and read clickable billboards from the likes of Fox, Nissan and John L. Scott Real Estate. Virtual Earth 3D is expected to expand to cover up to 100 cities around the world by the end of next summer. "
Virtual Earth can be used only in IE browsers (no immediate plans for Firefox, in the beta at least), and as part of search results. On that latter point, Microsoft is very keen to "change the game of search" and take it to the next level - in order to trump a certain Mountain View company. But during my conversation with Steve and Christopher, it was clear that they regard this as an evolutionary process and not a revolutionary one. They told me that visual search is the next step in search and Virtual Earth is a good demonstration of where search is headed.
This WidgetsLive panel featured Adam Sah from Google Personalized Homepage, Sanaz Ahari from Microsoft's Live.com, and Tariq Krim from Netvibes. After the usual product intros, the panel got more interesting with conversations steered by Niall Kennedy (the moderator).
Niall started by asking about monetization. Sanaz said that being a homepage for Microsoft properties is key for them, rather than making money as a standalone product by advertising. Adam said it's similar at Google and they want to drive traffic to their properties via the start page.
In terms of how they're driving users to their start pages, Tariq said that their growth is viral. Sanaz said that for Microsoft, giving users the choice of lots of content and pointing them to directories is important - which gives live.com utility for users. Adam said that Google tries "not to play favorites" [with the widgets they display] and they want to enable discovery - like in search.
I'm here
at Widgets Live in San Francisco, where Dan Strauss and Don Synstelien
from Fox Interactive Media are onstage talking about their new widget platform called SpringWidgets. The defining feature of this
product is that it works on both the desktop (like Konfabulator) and in the
browser (like Google widgets). However the desktop part is Windows only for now - Mac
support is coming.
Their showcase widget currently is the RSS Reader widget - it displays rss feeds, video and podcasts. If you have a Feedburner feed, you can customize your widget, which came about as a result of a partnership between FIM and Feedburner. SpringWidgets has a developer platform too, so the platform is flexible for publishers and developers alike.
The other defining feature is that SpringWidgets can be easily shared - users can click a small green icon (the widgets equivalent to the orange 'subscribe' button) and put the widget either on their website/blog, social network (e.g. MySpace), their desktop, or all of the above.
Tomorrow morning I'm traveling to San Francisco for next week's Web 2.0 Conference. I attended it last year and thoroughly enjoyed it. Read/WriteWeb's coverage of the 2005 conference is here - and needless to say I'll be pumping out the posts again this year.
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
WebOS services are going to be utilized by thousands of companies - and will power the next generation of web applications. Amazon is at this point leading the charge of the big Internet companies to capture this potentially huge market.
There is a very long, but interesting, cover story in today's BusinessWeek entitled Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet. The article focuses on the transformation of the e-commerce giant into a software company. The growing stack of Amazon Web Services clearly points to a sea change in the Seattle e-commerce giant. Indeed Amazon is beginning to look more like an alternative Microsoft for the web computing era!
In short, Jeff Bezos' big bet is a bet on the software infrastructure of the Web. We here at Read/WriteWeb think this is a visionary strategy by Amazon - and it is likely to pay off...
In August, I wrote a series of articles about Amazon's Web Services strategy for a Web 2.0 magazine. The article that summed up what Amazon is up to was called: Amazon - the Real Web Sevices Company. Based on the piece in Business Week, it is clear that during the Web 2.0 conference next week, Amazon's Web Services strategy will become official. As a software engineer, I can't hide my joy. This is indeed a triumph of software engineering - a large company has managed to productize the pieces of its own infrastructure.
Not only that, but Amazon is very serious about making money on this endeavor. The web giant is carefully and methodically rolling out the building blocks of its next generation Web Platform. It started with the Amazon eCommerce API and Alexa services. But not until the Simple Storage Service rolled out, did it became clear that Amazon is building a full web services stack. Here is our diagram showing what it looks like:
This morning I participated in a conference call by MIT and the University of Southampton in Britain, announcing an initiative called Web Science. Tim Berners-Lee is leading the program, which is essentially about formalizing a new kind of scientific discipline called Web Science. The goal is to understand the deeper structure of the social Web and how people are using it. But as well as studying the Web, they also hope to shape the future of the Web.
Web science will have both social and engineering dimensions. As the NY Times reported, it will include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. For example trust and privacy are two specific areas that can be studied more. Also Web Science will look at more technical areas, such as how huge decentralized Web systems work. In the conference call, it was made clear that researching the economic consequences of the Web (and "web 2" was mentioned) is part of the agenda too.
Those of you who read John Milan's insightful article on R/WW about the coming convergence of Web apps and desktop apps, will be interested in a new development by Blake Ross - famous in the Web world for co-founding Firefox. Blake has an intriguing new startup called Parakey, which is going to be a WebOS for the masses. In a long IEEE Spectrum article, Blake describes the product:
"As he describes it, from a user’s point of view, Parakey is “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox’s."
Readers of my ZDNet blog will be familiar with my obsession earlier this year with the WebOS. There are a lot of small, mostly European, startups building a WebOS system - a virtual desktop, if you will. Check out my WebOS market review from April, to see some of the startups in this space. None of them have made any headway into the mainstream market yet - in fact most are still building out beta versions of their products. Let's not forget also that Google (in particular) and Microsoft are very well positioned to come stampeding into this market, like a herd of.... er, elephants.
Reality Digital is an online video and social
networking platform for business websites, for example those with a media and
entertainment focus. Crudely put, Reality Digital enables businesses to set up their own
branded YouTube. They view their competition as being the likes of VideoEgg, VidaVee,
BlipTV - which are all video publishing platforms with social networking aspects. Plus of
course they're kind of competing with YouTube itself, as increasingly businesses are
distributing marketing campaigns and messages via YouTube.
I spoke to Reality Digital CEO Cynthia Francis to find out more about their product. But first a look at the features...
Reality Digital is a video production and sharing platform, designed for businesses - an example is the website for the popular CBS tv show Survivor, which uses the Reality Digital platform. Also part of the product is blogging, forums, an admin dashboard and an advertising portion called Opus AdCel (which they are patenting). Blogs and forums have only just been added to the product. Their business model is being an ASP (application service provider), so Reality Digital hosts everything for their customers.
Written by John Milan and edited by Richard MacManus. John is Senior Software Architect and founder of TeamDirection.
The days of purely desktop-based applications are clearly numbered, but so are the days of exclusively web-based apps...
The two
elephants of personal computing these days are Microsoft and Google.
Microsoft rose to dominance by capturing the desktop. Google is rising to dominance by
capturing the web. Both strategies revolve around who can capture your data.
Elephants require massive amounts of food to survive, so it's no surprise that Microsoft
and Google are eyeing each other's data. Microsoft has started a 'Live' initiative to engage Google on the web.
Google has tinkered with productivity apps that
might just work offline, to
join Microsoft on the desktop. If either Microsoft or Google is successful at grabbing
the other's data, the most useful byproduct of their efforts will be new ways to easily
move data between the desktop and web. The result of this battle will further blur
the lines between purely desktop and exclusively web applications.
But as often happens when elephants trample the landscape, they create new opportunities for smaller, more nimble animals to grow and prosper. As Microsoft and Google narrow their focuses on each other, they will either fail to notice the landscape is changing underfoot, or will be unable to adapt quickly enough. It's not just naive optimism; there's plenty of historical precedent. Just as Ford couldn't build all the world's cars, AT&T all the world's telephones and IBM all the world's computers - neither Microsoft nor Google will be able to write all the world's software. In fact, the very rise of Google demonstrated this to Microsoft. As a result, the consumer and business software markets are poised to open up as never before.
