Archive for December, 2007
by Rob Paterson
December 24, 2007 at 11:37 am · Filed under
Social Media, The Queen, YouTube
[photopress:queenpage.png,full,centered]
Wow! 50 years on from the first TV broadcast, the Queen speaks directly to the world.
Her 1957 message – about change, constancy and heart – remains timeless.
“If you look through the years, the queen’s always kept up to date with changes in technology,” a spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace said. In fact, the monarchy has had its own Web site for the past decade, and the queen made her Christmas message available as a podcast for the first time two years ago.
The new site , www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel, went live just after midnight on Sunday. It includes footage of royal-related events, including garden parties, funerals and a documentary called “Long to Reign Over Us,” about the monarchy. There is also the queen’s first-ever televised Christmas message, which took place 50 years ago, in 1957.
A spokesman for YouTube said that the Royal Channel had been a huge success so far, drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers by Monday. The most popular clip so far is the 1957 broadcast, with more than 400,000 viewers, while a clip of Prince Charles visiting a school has drawn slightly more than 3,000.
“The content has clearly struck a chord with a lot of people,” said the spokesman, who declined to be named citing company policy. (NYT)
So what is your organization’s excuse for not using this type of direct approach?
by Joe McKendrick
December 23, 2007 at 12:35 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Business Model, Cloud Computing, Data Management, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Web 2.0, Web Services
Run an entire enterprise — including sophisticated IT — from the cloud? Just a couple of weeks again, I posted Ismael Ghalimi’s list of all the Office 2.0 tools and technologies you could ever need to avoid bloatware of any kind and run your business entirely from services delivered over the network. Ismael cited Dabble DB as an example of a cloud database that can provide such functionality.
Since that posting, Amazon Web Services announced a “limited beta” of a new service called SimpleDB.
SimpleDB, Amazon says, is a Web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provide the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud.
Amazon charges for SimpleDB services on a per-use basis, which initially is priced at 14 cents per machine-hour consumed. Data transfer rates range from 10 cents per gigabyte for data transferred to the database to 13-18 cents per gigabyte for outgoing data. Structured data storage is $1.50 per gigabyte a month.
Cloud computing has interesting implications for enterprises in the long run. Already, cloud computing appears to be leveling the playing field for many start-ups, helping to basically avoid the necessity of any enterprise IT investment at all.
For example, online podcasting service GigaVox Media, an Amazon Web Services customer, reportedly spent just over $80 in its first two months of business on storage, messaging and processing. (I went into some detail about this case and cloud computing over at my ZDNet blog.)
GigaVox uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to store files from podcasts, videocasts, and advertising images. The alternative would have been to buy disks and storage arrays to provide back-up storage, which typically range in price between $2,500 to $20,000 for network-attached storage units. GigaVox would also have had to invest in switches and hubs, as well as the expertise to put it all together and manage on an ongoing basis.
The company then adopted Amazon EC2 to fulfill its transcoding and automated show-assembly needs, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to serve as the glue between these services monitoring EC2 server instances, queuing transcoding requests, and issuing instructions for program processing. As Doug Kaye, co-founder and CTO of GigaVox, put it in a Webcast:
“Even if we could have done this with a cluster of outsourced managed servers, which still wouldn’t have been as scalable, we would have spent tens of thousands of dollars more,” said Kaye. “We didn’t have to buy a single server. We didn’t have to spend any time in a ‘cage.’”
Cloud computing services such as SimpleDB are more likely to catch on among smaller companies and startups. However, Oracle and Microsoft have little to fear at this point among enterprise customers suddenly dropping their onsite databases installations in favor of cloud databases. In fact, open source databases such as MySQL may suffer the most.
Along with small businesses, the cloud databases will most likely start to catch hold among individuals or departments within organizations that need to pull something together quickly, without the necessary budget machinations. But as with all new paradigms, cloud services may start at the peripheries of enterprises and slowly be absorbed into more and more functions. That’s the route open source is taking now, and Microsoft technologies took in the 1990s.
by Joe McKendrick
December 20, 2007 at 11:16 pm · Filed under
Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 may have interesting ramifications on workplace interactions. Once again, Oliver Widder of Geek & Poke fame enlightens us.
by Paula Thornton
December 20, 2007 at 8:51 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Facebook, Social Networking
Respected colleague, Tony Byrne (editor of CMS Watch, which often does deep industry reports) took an interesting look at Facebook in his piece, Is Facebook in the Enterprise an Oxymoron?
Since Tony is one my top respected resource for all-things-content, I know he is not one to take this subject lightly. I consider his attention to this topic as a call to take serious note. He shares:
“At CMS Watch we’ve been experimenting with Facebook as a collaboration platform internally and with external partners, and we like it. There are some definite limitations to Facebook as a portal. The inconsistent behavior and security profiles of different Facebook applications will be familiar to any portal developer struggling with third-party portlets or Web Parts. Facebook applications seem to revolve principally around people rather than groups, which can be inconvenient for professional collaboration (where typically micro-applications are applied selectively to workspaces). Facebook doesn’t have real document management — although arguably you wouldn’t want it seated there anyway — and Alfresco and others have developed hooks into Facebook from their repositories.”
Then he cautions:
“But when does Facebook-behind-the-firewall stop being Facebook? I think the minute a central authority gets behind it — and instinctively mandates some available MOBIG (Microsoft/Oracle/BEA/IBM/Google) software because it happened to be familiar or free — is the minute the system will lose its appeal to rank-and-file employees.”
In comparing the use of Facebook to the simplicity of SharePoint, Tony notes:
“…the problem with SharePoint is that there is no native way to manage multiple instances of it. “
I ‘m particularly supportive of his recommendations to IT:
“I suggest offering (or just allowing) a set of collaboration alternatives. Then step back, keep lifecycle management as unobtrusive as possible, and see what takes off. This may mean allowing multiple collaboration solutions — including hosted solutions — to compete internally. May the best one win. I’m not suggesting this will be easy; in fact, it may take hard work to retrofit suitable retention and security services onto a newfangled collaboration package that was not explicitly designed for enterprise-wide deployment — but became popular across your enterprise nonetheless. “
Here’s my only caveat to the latter…I fundamentally believe in the principle of evolution, but when not having a ’standard’ creates islands of identities then there’s a problem. If you can ‘architect’ a cross-offering so that people can search for an individual based on attributes and be able to find them, then I’m ok. Maybe someone at FAST can weigh in on meaningful architectural/governance approaches here?
In the end, the result should accomplish what I normally champion, but Tony did a great job:
Start by institutionalizing an attitude that says, “how can we help our employees be more effective?” Specifically, “how can we support them in the way they really want to work (as opposed to the way we think they want to work)?”
21 Dec 2007 UPDATE
Tony shared with me directly: “And btw, I quite agree with your caveat about silos. We are seeing the lack of standards come home to roost here (though it’s not anybody’s fault). It’s really more of an intuitive feel that product selection for collaboration/networking tools has to be bottom-up, rather than top-down, and the price we’ll pay in the short run is a proliferation of repositories until a standard is set….“
Somehow colleagues in Europe were on the same wavelength as today they forwarded this “Social networking ‘white elephant’ warning“. This piece reminded me of my insistence on a ’synthesized’ profile for individuals, which should provide for internal ‘confidential’ content/references and yet leverage the public profiles/identities individuals may already have and maintain (i.e. don’t recreate reality), including blogs. Besides, in this faster-paced, rapidly changing work environment, resources can and should have public identities separate from the company/entity they happen work for at this moment in time.
I’m reminded of the time where I was so struck by the backwardness of accepted thinking around work relationships, when I had to go to considerable lengths to explain to my daughters why I was up at 5:30 on my computer the week after I’d been laid off from a job (never mind I should have been working to land my next relationship). I said: “I do what I do regardless of who I work for. I just sometimes happen to do what I do for a specific company.”
The one observation from the warning that I totally disagree with: “There is also little evidence that social networking will be as beneficial for businesses as other web-based communications tech such as instant messaging and VoIP.” Good grief. The PRIMARY justification for social networking from an enterprise perspective is to connect resources TO each other, by way of the context their profiles provide. You can’t leverage instant messaging and VoIP, until you’re aware of the other resource’s existence. It’s a matter of ACCESS (findability). So yes, “Ultimately, Gartner suggests, the value of social networking tech comes from content rather than the product itself.“
by Bill Ives
December 20, 2007 at 11:40 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Yes, there is an enterprise Facebook market. You knew this was coming. I got an email a few days ago from Worklight, Announcing WorkBook, “a Secured Facebook for the Enterprise. WorkBook, an addition to the WorkLight 2.0 software platform currently in use by Global 500 companies, allows employees to interact with their colleagues using the hugely popular Facebook service, while eliminating the security issues that have constantly dogged organizations looking to leverage and embrace the social networking revolution.” Look what happens when you open up your APIs.
Unlike Facebook which is free, Workbook pricing starts at $10 per user per month, with volume discount pricing available. I hope that their security features warrant this. Serena, as I wrote about on the blog, created their own security features through custom Facebook apps. Not every company may have that capability but Serena assured me the apps were quick and easy. However, there are many companies that may want more security than they can build themselves.
Now I am not knocking Workbook, in fact, I have been in favor of Facebook for the enterprise 2.0. If this helps get it in the door then that is great. I wonder if Facebook shares in the $10 cover charge per person? Do other Facebook apps charge? Could they charge? Who gets all the money? I am showing my lack of depth here. Perhaps the gold rush for Facebook apps has more direct revenue that I thought.
Here is what Dan Farber & Larry Dignan said in WorkLight secures Facebook for enterprises. They have pictures. They also link to Andrew McAfee on the related security concerns around apps like Facebook in People, Computers, and People People.
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