After the YouTube/CNN US Presidential candidates debates received huge attention and the Yahoo! Candidate Mashup saw near record numbers of visitors to its site, you might wonder - what more could be done with online video around the upcoming election?
10 Questions is an honestly innovative project that combines user voting with the open-ended time format that online video can offer far better than TV. It's backed by a list of 40 media heavyweights, from the New York Times and MSNBC to Talking Points Memo to Michelle Malkin and TechRepublican. The project was put together by the folks at TechPresident and David Colarusso of Community Counts. Community Counts was a site put up in response to the YouTube/CNN debate, focused on viewer voting. If the media sponsors push this subsequent project through their channels - 10 Questions is probably going to be very big.
Details and video after the fold.
This week has been an exciting one in mobile and voice news, here's three important stories you don't want to miss.
Steve Jobs posted to the Apple Hot News page today that a software development kit for the iPhone and iPod touch will be released in February. I'll be curious to see what kind of reactions emerge around this news in a few hours, after everyone sobers up from the announcement. I bought a futon couch on iPhone weekend (a purchase the whole family could enjoy, brick and price drop free) but our crew over at Last100 has an in-depth analysis of the SDK news.
A new mobile version of Google Docs has been released and it's a whole lot better than nothing. That's about all it's better than, though - it's view only.
Maybe I'd change my tune if I was viewing Google Docs Mobile on an iPhone, as Chris Messina is in the image here.
On my BlackJack (great phone by the way) and IE mobile you can't edit any docs, you can't invite new collaborators or viewers, you can't do much at all in fact. Doc view is great and I'm thankful for that but spreadsheet view in HTML is barely usable and Presentations can't be viewed at all. It's a good start and I can imagine using it, but I sure hope it's only the beginning.
Starting next month, MySpace users will have Skype voice calling integrated into their IM clients. Both Skype In and Out will be available. That's a big score for Skype but why not team with Gizmo or another open standards based VOIP client so that developers can leverage that too in the forthcoming "MySpace platform." That's a rhetorical question. I'd love to see the business details on this deal.
Some days the mobile and voice worlds are really interesting to pay attention to. I'd say today is one of those days. It's hard to think of a set of technologies likely to be more important in the future.
Jerry Yang, founder and CEO of Yahoo!, the world's third most trafficked collection of web sites, yesterday laid out his plan to investors (and in a blog post) to revitalize the company. Yang wants Yahoo! to become the "starting point" for consumers on the Internet -- or in other words, return to the portal strategy that made it the most popular starting place for web surfers in the 90s.
Yahoo! talked about creating the "sites that help you better manage your life and connect you to what matters most to you." According to the New York Times Yahoo! is rapidly losing ground to Google as the sort of web starting point that they want to become.
Today Microsoft is announcing two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The partnerships link togther Microsoft's SharePoint product with Atlassian's wiki collaboration product Confluence and a new offering from Newsgator called 'NewsGator Social Sites', a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft - it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and "social computing" capabilities (Microsoft's term for 'web 2.0', according to this page on Microsoft's website).
The aim of the partnerships is to add more "social computing platform" capabilities to SharePoint, which up till now has mainly been promoted as an "enterprise productivity platform". In other words, Microsoft is adding more web 2.0 functionality (e.g. collaboration, personal publishing) to SharePoint, using best of breed web products from Atlassian and Newsgator.
I sat down with Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes yesterday in San Francisco, to discuss their partnership with Microsoft. Essentially it involves Atlassian integrating Confluence, their enterprise wiki, into Microsoft SharePoint (and vice versa). According to Cannon-Brookes, their customers frequently ask them how Confluence can be used alongside SharePoint - e.g. how content can be shared or searched between the two products. It's important to point out that SharePoint already has wiki and blog functionality, but they are generally considered to be rather basic compared to more sophisticated enterprise wiki solutions such as Atlassian's Confluence or SocialText.
SharePoint has a huge user base, so it's easy to see the attraction of this partnership for Atlassian. Microsoft has around 80 million users on SharePoint and is reported to be worth $800 M per year in revenue for the Redmond company. Atlassian has 4,100 Confluence enterprise customers.
Krugle, the eponymous code search engine launched by Ken Krugler in June 2006, is announcing today a partnership with Amazon to provide enterprise code search for Amazon's Web Services developer network. Krugle has recently announced similar alliances with IBM developerWorks, Collab.net, SourceForge.net, and Yahoo! Developer Network.
Krugle's search engine now searches 2.5 billion lines of code -- up from 1 billion at launch just over a year ago -- and reaches one third of all developers world wide, according to the company. The Krugle DevNetwork Edition being deployed for Amazon will allow developers to search for AWS code examples and other resources across Amazon's sites and outside resource sites defined by the company from a single location.
In 1975, Frederick Brooks wrote a classic book on software project management called
The Mythical Man-Month.
In the book, he famously argued that adding more people to a development project will hinder rather than help to get things done faster.
The reason is that having more people working on the project introduces a non-linear overhead in communication.
Five years before Brooks' book, a software development methodology called the Waterfall Model was coined. This approach applied the insights from mature engineering disciplines (mechanical, civil, etc.) to software. The idea was to construct systems by first gathering requirements, then doing the design, then implementing it, then testing, and finally getting it out the door in one linear sequence.
We have come a long way since then and learned a lot about making software. The Waterfall Model is now considered a flawed method because it is so rigid and unrealistic. In the real world, software projects have ill-defined and constantly evolving requirements, making it impossible to think everything through at once. Instead, the best software today is created and evolved using agile methods. These techniques allow engineers to continuously re-align software with business and customer needs.
With the advent of modern programming languages (Java, PHP, Python and Ruby), rich libraries, and unprecedented infrastructure services like those from Amazon, we are arriving at yet another evolutionary step. Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube and other poster children of the new web era were developed by just a handful of programmers. To build software today all you need is a few good men (or women!). In this post we trace how we got here and where we are heading next.
Another year, another iteration of Napster. The pioneering file sharing program that has existed the past couple of years as a music subscription service will relaunch with a web-based client, according to our network blog last100:
"In yet another attempt to return to glory, Napster will rely less on its desktop client in favor of a Web-based approach as it hopes to attract more paying subscribers.
Napster seeks to make its platform more flexible and compatible with any Internet-enabled device with the release of Version 4.0. The move will allow Napster’s 770,000 subscribers to play their music from any computer without having to download additional software. Before today, Napster subscribers could only listen to their music after downloading the desktop client to their personal computers, although the Napster software is still required to transfer music from the service to compatible devices."
Napster COO Chris Allen said during a press conference that he expects the music industry to be free of DRM by the end of next year. That's an odd thing for Allen to say given that Napster runs a subscription service that relies on DRM to work. If Napster is really getting ready for a DRM-free world, they will have to change their business model. For more, check out the post at last100.
One of the knocks on Yahoo! has long been that although it has a fairly large second place stake in the search market, it has never been able to monetize search effectively. A new study from SearchIgnite and RBC Capital Markets indicates that Yahoo! is making progress on rectifying that, however.
According to the study, even though Google's share of impressions rose dramatically between August and September, and Yahoo!'s fell at about the same clip, Yahoo! beat Google on eCPM for the first time since February. Google's eCPM was down due to falling click-through rates, while Yahoo!'s was up due to higher CPC figures -- Yahoo!'s CTR has stayed more or less the same since May. Is this the much vaunted Panama advertising platform finally paying off?
The BBC has announced a deal with Wi-Fi hotspot vendor The Cloud to offer free public access to the BBC website and media player at thousands of London locations. The Cloud operates at 7,500 McDonald's, coffee shops and airports around the UK. The companies said in their release today that they expect to offer mobile access soon, as well. See also our coverage yesterday of the new BBC iPlayer.
It's a fascinating deal that I feel very ambivalent about. I can't help but wonder - is this the future of the web? Sponsored access to a walled garden of content seems legitimate, perhaps even a good idea, but it also raises questions of the commercialization of public discourse and Net Neutrality. (Update: Resident smart guy Steve O'Hear points me to PaidContent coverage indicating that the BBC is in fact not paying The Cloud in the deal, The Cloud is seeing this as a promotion to drive paid customers. Fair enough.)
I suppose if you want to access the whole world of interlinked content online, with diverse points of view and interactive communication - then you can just pay for it. Nothing new there, but there's something about a sponsored and very limited web that I feel wary about. How long until US web users can go online for free, as long as it's Fox News they're watching?
Do our UK readers have any thoughts on this from the particular perspective of the BBC as a more-or-less public utility?
Last week Read/WriteWeb editor Richard MacManus interviewed Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and CEO. The result is a 30 minute podcast available on Read/WriteTalk (transcript included). The following post is highlights from the discussion, which focused on Zimbra's journey from October 2005 Web 2.0 Conference launch to September 2007 acquisition by Yahoo! for $350M.
In September 2007 Web Office startup Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo! for $350M. As I noted at the time, it seems like only yesterday that Zimbra was the buzz of the 2005 Web Conference (which incidentally was the first Silicon Valley conference I attended). Yet in just under 2 years from launching, Zimbra went from Web Office poster child (one of them at any rate) to a company worth $350 million. How did it happen? What lessons can aspiring entrepreneurs learn from Zimbra, as they attempt to create a multi-million dollar business too? For me there was only one way to find out: interview Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra co-founder and CEO.
The entire interview is up on our podcast show, Read/WriteWeb. Here are some of my favorite bits:
Question: who came up with the idea for Zimbra and when did that happen?
Satish: "While we were brainstorming on ideas - and we cycled through a lot of them - we always kept coming back to: What are the big things that people do on a computer? Well, they search and they web browse and they read email. We started believing that people spend more time on email than search or web browsing, and so we said, 'Man, that's huge.' It seems so evident but that was basically the genesis. Well Google is tackling search and, obviously, Firefox and IE are tackling the web browsing issue, and then we have Outlook or Thunderbird or Entourage for email. Well, that seems really broken. [...]
Then at the same time, we were thinking about technologies and how the web browser is becoming the predominant platform of modern day computing. Do we really need to have a desktop app and can we do everything on the server side? That's something to break into."
