Brij Singh's Random Musings

Customer-focused

Just heard one CEO tell the world that his is a very customer focused company.

Having experienced the  painful sign-up and eventually the canceling process for their  service, I am just wondering whether these web2.0 companies understand customer support in the same way as other companies do. It's one thing to provide uber-cool solution but providing boring and essential customer handholding is a different ballgame.

At the end of the day we have to get our job done.  That hasn't changed in web2.0.

Apple leading the way

As Longhorn gets more and more delayed, Apple is really taking advantage of that by introducing some cool apps for all the new hot trends. After nailing down the music market they are aiming to extend iTunes to the video market.  Starting from podcasting support they will no doubt go all the way to make vlog look good on iTunes.

So what's next ? Going to Apple store to rent out Sundance movies ! Or may be on-demand download of hard to find movies !

I think this lead by Apple has very important implication for the developers  market.  Developers market will eventually become a three way contest.  Split along  -

Superior aesthetics       (Mac platform)
Superior convenience  (Windows)
Superior economics      (Open source)

It will be hard to avoid any of the three platforms but aesthetics will come around to differentiate every developer's innovation. Importance of aesthetics will grow suddenly, more so in the highly commoditized IT landscape.

So my advice to developers- dont just pass on ipod and iTunes by saying its all about music and video ! Time to include audio and video in your good old  enterprise app is now ! Atleast start thinking about it.

If I have to borrow developer's jargon then I would say Apple is successfully transforming the basic data type of the development from text to rich media (sound and video). Implications will be significant.

Ruby Vs J2EE

Aaron Rustad wrote a pretty good white paper comparing Ruby on Rails with J2EE framework. Those who care to follow programmer productivity metrics and enterprise frameworks will do themselves a favor by reading this.

Ruby's claim of being 10 times more productive than other framework may be better left for performance  debates but there is no doubt about it's capability to provide  faster development cycle and simplicity. Some popular apps written with Rails include Basecamp, 43Things,  and I am sure there are many more in the works right now.

Who is going to make money ?

Rebecca Henderson answers this question in this MIT video clip :

If you are in the business of making "boxes" -- say, to play downloaded music, or to compute data-you are facing a dilemma Customers are no longer seeking the best designed product, but "a total system experience." Whether the business involves bicycles or cell phones, medical or financial services, the future in an interconnected world is about selling parts of interconnected systems. So firms must "think about controlling architecture or influencing the architecture of the system and building the best products within it."

The challenge will be to seize on the right strategy for competing in a world where a common telecommunications backbone connects devices and people everywhere. If your systems don't dovetail with the architecture of this telecom backbone, you might face "sudden death" when the market for your product tips toward a different standard. Henderson suggests that organizations are more likely to survive if they embrace public open standards such as Linux, and abandon proprietary software. She advocates "soft standards," where companies design systems compatible with current and future public standards but at the same time offer customers performance and functionality tailored to their needs

Many people claim that they know how to make money in this web2.0 world but it's hard to say at this point.  It's in a very early phase right now,  it will be a different picture once the standards dust settles.

Follow the MacHeads

Looks like Mac users are really driving the RSS adoption, as per Brian Livingstone's research:

Bloglines* -- 19.49%; NetNewsWire -- 10.07%; iTunes -- 9.53%; Firefox Live Bookmarks -- 7.25%; iPodder -- 7.17%;

Also brief mention that overall blog count has reached a 10million mark !

Culture of generosity

NYT (reg'd reqd) summarizing the user generated content based business models. Master of good sound bites has this to say -

"The really interesting thing about the network today is that individuals are starting to participate. The endpoints are starting to inform the center"

We will have something interesting down the road in this context.

Google Earth

I must admit I am blown away by this  Google Earth

Being a geography and atlas freak I enjoy physical topologies and all things related to maps. There is something magical to this software.  I will not be shy in saying that  this software ranks along with other category killers such as Netscape, Blogger, Flickr etc.

This will change the way people will think about the physical world. I can already imagine creative applications such as versioning piece of land to track environmental changes, real estate expansion, urbanization, urban design etc.  Hackers will keep Sunnyvale 1.0, 2.0,3.0 in some kind of source code control and will run diff on them to visualize urbanization !

This is way too  cool and I salute Google for giving this free  !

This shouldn't have happened

Just when this country needed more innovation we have this decision.  This will affect the way technology companies market their wares:

"clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement"

So next time you use photo-copier, publisher can potentially take Xerox to the court. Well if Xerox marketing pitches like - "go ahead, remix your own book !".

Pitch doctors will have to go through legal blessings each time they put a new slogan or message. More cost and more conservative approach = bad business.

This shouldn't have happened. Grokster's loss is a big big loss to US innovation machine in the time when flat world is putting fire from the bottom.

Add some more legal cost to your business instead of putting money in the R&D. Thats a new ruling.

Adxplosion

Looks like every web service worth it's money has some Google Adsense equivalent. Typepad rolled out a new text ad serving functionality using  Kanoodle's network.

Not able to test it completely since I use   
custom templates (it sucks to see that  advanced  users can't use this feature who
incidentally pay more for Typepad service !).   It's only available for standard templates.

There are so many areas they can improve Typepad service,  after a long wait all we see is this text ad which doesn't work on custom templates. Overall I like their service but their slow adoption of all the plugins and nice hacks will eventually push me towards wordpress.

But then I am too lazy to manage my own blog infrastructure !

Not Funny

This is new for me and I am wondering how to handle this.

We all quote others work according to the fair-user principle but to see the complete blog getting hijacked and served elsewhere is new to me.

This website Etamp.net (apparently hosted  from South Korea) takes the complete blog and serves it under their domain - My blog served from their site !

Quick whois check gives this:

Registrant : Ha Jea Eung
	815-8 Hwagok-dong Gangseo-gu SEOUL
	(157010)

	Domain Name:  ETAMP.NET
	Registrar:  Gabia,Inc. (GABIA.COM)

	Administrative, Technical, Billing Contact:  
		Ha Jea Eung	hhje22@hotmail.com
		815-8 Hwagok-dong Gangseo-gu SEOUL
		(Tel) 02-2653-7327	(fax) 

	Record created on 	MAY       07, 2004
	Record expires on 	MAY       07, 2006
	Record last updated on 	MAY       09, 2005

	Domain servers in listed order: 

	ns.softcan.net	
	ns.newseoul.com	

Now I have three options -

tell this guy not to do this (what if he points to Google caching as a legal precedent ?)

if he refuses then I can just sit back and wait for my lawyer to give me better hourly rate to go after this fellow.

OR I can request Typepad to help me here. After all if 10 more Etamp.net type site-jackers show up then not only content producers who suffer but also the infrastructure provider's integrity takes a hit as well.

Funny thing is this post will also show up there in this fellow's site.