Is It Now Web Squared?

The O’Reilly Web 2.0 Sumit is coming up later this month. Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle have been talking about their vision of Web Squared—Web Meets World—as they solicited suggestions for conference content at midsummer. The conference program seems to be set and it’s likely to have its usual major impact on thinking about the web and what it means in our life.

Their live webcast is posted on YouTube. It’s almost an hour long but both of them are always worth listening to. This slideshow hits the major points and is well worth paging through.

Web Squared

View more presentations from oreillymedia.

When you do, you’ll probably also want to download their white paper (note the number of channels they are using in a totally integrated fashion). They point out that Web 2.0 has always been about the Internet as common platform and using it to harnessing collective intelligence. We need to go beyond that to develop new applications, new systems that become better as they are used. That implies a lot of data; they use the term mobile sensors and give some interesting examples, the iPhone You R Here app is one. Their point is that there’s more to this “data cloud” than every item having its own separate identifying chip. There are all sorts of information flows (information shadows) produced by various kinds of machine-to-machine activity and, taken together, it provides a powerful data set. If that frightens you from a privacy standpoint that’s another, but important, topic.

In their overview, they talk about “stuff that matters” and this is their conclusion:

If we are going to solve the world’s most pressing problems, we must put the power of the Web to work – its technologies, its business models, and perhaps most importantly, its philosophies of openness, collective intelligence, and transparency. And to do that, we must take the Web to another level. We can’t afford incremental evolution anymore.

It’s time for the Web to engage the real world. Web meets World – that’s Web Squared.

No quick overview can do justice to the thinking of O’Reilly and Battelle and their collaborators. You should read and mull over some of this material for yourself. It may well be the roadmap to the future of the Internet!

Cloud Computing - A New Model?

Cloud computing is one of those concepts that’s either very simple or very complex. Until you know which, it’s hard to understand the concept. I’ve been wrestling with that for several months and I’ve come up with a few nuggets of understanding that I’d like to share. Last week the AlwaysOn network posted a video from one of their conferences that’s helpful. The “chief geeks” of both NASDAQ and HP give their perspectives. Russ Daniels of HP points out that cloud computing can reduce operational costs, which his IT-manager customers obviously care deeply about. As a marketer I cared more about his follow-on statement that IT could then put more effort into creating value for customers. Think about that as you watch the video!

So cloud computing is a potentially valuable concept. What IS it? Irving Wladawsky-Berger is a retired IBMer who writes a tech blog that’s comprehensible to laypeople on the Always On Network. He’s a proponent of the cloud computing concept, seeming to see it as a logical extension of his work at IBM eservices. In a July 14 post he says:

I prefer to think of what is happening as the long-needed evolution of application software to something that is far more usable by humans. When virtualizing applications to be used by people who care nothing about computers or technology - as is mostly the case with Clouds - the key thing we want to virtualize or hide from the user is complexity.

In a more recent post he links to a page with 20 different—and all useful—definitions of the concept. That’s a strong indicator that the field is still evolving.

According to Gartner, the evolution is in its early stages. Actually, the interpretation of being near the top is their “hype cycle” is that sanity will soon return and the field will mature. Cloud computing is nearing the peak; note that Green IT is even closer. Translated, does that mean it’s a maturing, but not yet mature field? A field for IT managers to watch closely, but not necessarily ready for major investment.
Wladawsky-Berger likens cloud computing to other major management initiatives like Six Sigma and Lean Production. He says:

If cloud computing implies delivering high quality consumer and business services to your customers around the world over a variety of channels, as well as operating well engineered, efficient data centers - how can you stay in business and ignore this major marketplace strategy? It would be like an industrial company saying that all the advances in manufacturing and production over the last 25 years are not for them. It would be nearly impossible for a business to stay competitive with such an attitude. In fact, a number of enterprises have already been embracing cloud-like methodologies for delivering services to their customer, even if they don’t call it that.

The take-away? Cloud computing is a new model—an IT model, not a marketing one. Is it a new business model, allowing companies to outsource technical infrastructure (where have we heard that before?) and concentrate on their core business competencies? Maybe. It bears close tracking.

Applications like Amazon Web Services and Google Maps are examples of “computing in the clouds.” The Amazon cloud and the Google cloud, to be precise. They maintain the infrastructure, users take advantage of the functionality--as explained in yesterday’s post. Another example would be Facebook APIs. There are plenty of places to experiment without much risk or investment. Shouldn’t marketers be pushing those experiments—and doing so with the understanding there’s a greater implication than just a single application, important though it may be to their current marketing tactics?

Mashups--Business and Otherwise

An interesting article that I accessed through the Knowledge @ Wharton newsletter led to another appealing DIY opportunity. The article discusses the changes in software application development that are occurring, partly to satisfy the demands of the Millennial generation for instant gratification—even in software application development. Read the article for yourself and see if you agree with the management perspective.

I was intrigued by the idea of DIY business mashups, so I investigated the Serena Software site. The site is currently in beta and offering its mashup software free. The FAQs say that you only pay when you publish (“in the cloud”) and start using the app. They don’t say how much or on what basis they charge for the working app.

The first video on their MashupTV page illustrates a situation that many of us are all too familiar with—we need programming support but IT has a seemingly endless backlog of requests. The young man must be a marketer; he wants to interface with Salesforce.com. In the video he promotes the idea of mashups in his unit and, in the process, makes his boss happy and confuses the personal relationships of colleagues who don’t understand “mashing.” Are software marketers developing a sense of humor?

Users can create their own app or customize a number of prebuilt ones that satisfy a lot of communications needs in enterprises. There’s a lot of material on the site to convince you that you can do it and show you how.

This slso ties in to an article in today's iMediaConnection. Max Zabrammy urges marketers to move beyond the desktop to give users access to the site or to specific functionality in other contexts including mobile and offline. One way of doing that is special-purpose apps, so we all better get good at creating them.

So back to where this blog started. Marketers need a lot of Internet firepower these days. It can take a long time for IT to build it for them; hence, the demand for DIY Marketing applications. This seems to be another attractive option.
Sphere: Related Content