Here at ETech, Chad Dickerson, Sr. Director of the Yahoo! Developer Network, gave a session about Yahoo's experience in engaging its own engineers to utilize Yahoo! APIs in creative ways.

Yahoo's method to the madness

The self-organization is exciting and powerful, but to get results there needs to be control. Yahoo's answer is "Hack days", where developers can showcase their creations to their colleagues. Here are the rules:

• Build something in 24 hours;
• No Power Points;
• Present in 90 seconds;
• No prior review, anything goes.

These rules encourage small teams to do what they love, letting people create what they want and, occasionally, letting the bizarre out.

In addition to internal hacking, Yahoo! opened up the program to a group of external hackers and invited them in September to the Yahoo! campus for a full day of hacking. According to Yahoo! the day turned out to be a "mega success".

Examples of Hacks

What goes on during the internal hack days is kind of a secret. Chad shared an example of a rather controversial hack. It was a web site built in 'Hot or Not' style, showing pictures of Yahoo! employees and letting people choose who they think is the boss of who. The application kept track of all "mistakes" and then displayed a chart for who should be promoted or demoted. Apparently calls from the Human Resources department followed.

Another hack was a purse that would take a photo after you walk every 100 steps and then use the Flickr API to upload it online. Yet another interesting hack was created by a group of developers, who turned an old TV into a widget display. One of the widgets connected to the internet and showed (you guessed it) the current weather.

Conclusion

At first, this 'hack' culture might seem to be somewhat chaotic and wasteful. It is in a way, but there is also a big potential gain. By using self-organization, Yahoo! bets that while a lot of these hacks will be mildly interesting - there may be a handful that are profound and game changing for the company. Since there are so many APIs, possibilities are almost endless. 

Yahoo! hacks is a great program that could lead to breakthrough ideas and products. The key question is how to add a process on top of this dynamic and fluid process, that drives productization and monetization of the best prototypes. Presumably, the really interesting solutions get noticed and get on the management radar screen. It is not clear if Yahoo! is doing this already, but it would seem that an nternal, Digg-like system where all Yahoo! employees would be able to rate creations, could be also helpful. We will see over the next year or so how Yahoo! executes this project, but the potential is definitely there.

So why does Mozilla need a manifesto? As Mozilla increases its share of the browser market and gains more visibility in the public eye, it wants to to show its principles and build public trust.

Mozilla's Principles

Here are the principles in Mozilla's manifesto:

Major Themes in Mozilla Principles

Looking at these 10 principles, we notice 5 major themes: Openness, Security, Personalization, Interoperability and Commerce.

• Openness: Mozilla calls the Internet an open, public resource that belongs to humanity. Mozilla believes that their way to openness is a code of honor, open source community and a focus on international aspect of the web.
• Security: Even though the internet is open, it does not mean that it should be insecure. Security always has been - and will remain - a major concern for individuals and companies. Mozilla's commitment to security is commendable.
• Personalization: Mozilla acknowledges diversity and emphasizes the power of this. Tailoring online experiences to each individual's goals is an important and ongoing part of Mozilla's mission.
• Interoperability: The Mozilla Manifesto also acknowledges the power and importance of interoperability and standards. Through the evolution of computer industry, we know that standards are critical - as they have direct consumer benefits. Without standards, the user experience of the Web quickly degrades.
• Commerce: Mozilla explains that commercial involvement is critical in order for the web to grow. The Internet is an open public information exchange, but it is supported via commerce. By declaring this, Mozilla invites businesses who play by the rules to monetize via web sites, web services and browser extensions.

What is the impact on major Web Players?

The natural question is: is this manifesto aimed at Internet Explorer? Yes and no. Yes, because Internet Explorer is not open and is not quite as compliant as Firefox. No, because the overarching theme of the manifesto is to present what Mozilla stands for, to the public. In a way, this is a brand message that Mozilla is trying to send to the public.

The impact on Google and Yahoo! is minimal. We could view this as a call to those companies to support Mozilla's principles, but a manifesto can only be supported in the context of an organization's own goals. While it is likely that Mozilla would benefit from having an open round table on these issues with both Google and Yahoo!, it is unlikely that this is intended by the current manifesto, or that it might result as a consequence.

Conclusion

Mozilla's Manifesto is a genuine attempt to reach out and communicate their ideas to the world. It is also another call to raise awareness of how the Internet and its tools should be developed. And of course, it is also another way to raise awareness of a certain alternative web browser called Firefox.

Deepfish - Enhanced Browsing on Mobile Devices

Deepfish is Microsoft's intelligent web browsing technology for mobile devices. It renders mobile web pages "in a view that is closer to the desktop experience". This kind of mobile Web navigation is very similar to the one shown by Steve Jobs in January at his demo of the iPhone. The Deepfish technology works on both cell phones and the pocket PC. But unlike the iPhone, the navigation is done via Zoom box - sort of like Google Maps, in that it allows the user to focus on a specific part of the page. [Ed: is this the same technology as ZenZui?]

Just by looking at the examples, we can tell that the scaling is not ad hoc - rather it is 'intelligent' and sensitive to phone size, colors and images on the page. Like iPhone, Deepfish also supports vertical and horizontal viewing mode, although this is probably dependent on the kind of device you are using. Deepfish works now on Windows Mobile 5 and can be downloaded from the live labs web site (also more info here). Overall it does not look as slick as iPhone, but it is certainly on a par with iPhone's technology.

Boku is a visual programming language aimed at teaching kids how to program. Boku looks like Microsoft Bob circa 2007, but it is actually quite cute - so kids will like it. The setup is that Boku is on a desert island and he is facing challenges. To help him solve these challenges, kids have to program it. The program renders in a realistic 3D landscape and has built in 'primitives' for sensing the surroundings and executing commands. Kids can program it by chaining together boxes.

For example, a chain might be: If you [see] [something red] [move towards it]. Seeing is a sensor function (like touch, smell, etc), something red is the filter and move is the command. The wide variety of sensors, filters and commands is what makes the world of Boku rich and interesting. 

To be fair, at first look it is no different in principle from the old MIT LOGO. But it certainly is flashy and video-game like, so it might be just right for kids.

Epitome - Image Feature Extraction Technology

Epitome is an interesting image compression technique, which creates a smaller image from the essential features of the original image. The 'epitome' of an image is its miniature, condensed version - containing the essence of the textural and shape properties of the image. It is based on probabilistic methods, which works by dissecting an image into a smaller set of patches. Each patch is of a different size and represents a piece of the original image. Feature extraction is then applied to create a small image that captures the "essence" of the original.

A really interesting example, that illustrates the application of this technology, showed a picture of 300 people. After creating an epitome of the entire set, the researcher pointed out a piece of the epitome, which represented all smiles found in the original image. By clicking on the smile, he was able to retrieve all people who were smiling in the original picture. You can learn more about this technology, as well as see some examples, on the project web site.

Werner Vogels, VP and CTO of Amazon.com, took the ETech stage to discuss the challenges in building a large-scale, reliable web infrastructure. Amazon spent a decade and a whopping $2 billion dollars to build the world class technology that powers their web sites. Today Amazon makes available their own infrastructure to the anyone, via Amazon Web Services. We have extensively analyzed Amazon Web Services, as well as companies that are already leveraging it in their businesses.

AWS value proposition

Why build on Amazon Web Services? Vogels said because there are compelling business and technical advantages:

• Total Cost: Running services via Amazon is substantially lower than building infrastructure and running it on your own;
• Pay as you go: Pay only for what you consume;
• Time to market: AWS lets businesses focus on their core competency instead of infrastructure;
• Scalability: Automatic scalability is guaranteed by adding more hardware;
• Robustness: Amazon guarantees 99.9999% of up time;
• Security: Using Amazon Services collectively makes your offering more secure;
• Technical complexity: Building things from scratch requires a lot of knowledge and experience.

Amazon is rapidly moving to build a new kind of infrastructure, one that can really be considered a new WebOS. The stack of services offered by Amazon today is quite impressive. Here is how we summarized it in graph form in November:

As we discussed in November, Amazon is likely to roll out more services in the near future. Here are some further pointers that can be helpful if you are new to AWS:

• AWS home page
• AWS blog by AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr
• Business Week coverage of AWS
• Jeff Bezos Podcast at Web 2.0

Werner Vogels: focus on your idea!

Dr. Vogels made the case for why it makes sense for businesses, particularly startups, to use AWS. He started by pointing out that building Web-scale services is incredibly difficult. He showed examples of traffic graphs from major retailers like Target and Walmart that demonstrated that even these companies are not able to handle peak loads. He added that conventional wisdom is just wrong when it comes to understanding what it takes to build a scalable infrastructure.

For startups, Vogels advocated the 37Signals philosophy - build now, scale later. This is not because scaling isn't important, it is because scaling is just too hard. As a young company, focusing on infrastructure is very costly. His statistics indicated that up to 70% of resources can go into what he calls Undifferentiated heavy lifting - work that does not fit into your company's core competency. Instead, he suggests that businesses should rely on AWS to do all this work.

Conclusion

AWS is continuing to impress. Amazon is now focused on amplifying the customer success stories and turning that buzz into more customers. Given the pricing and simplicity of AWS, it appears that it is not going to be long before a large percentage of small and medium size companies will be using one or more Amazon Services. Larger companies are likely to lag behind, mostly for political and branding reasons, so it will be interesting to see if this inflexibility will hurt them in the long run.