As consumers increasingly purchase sophisticated smartphones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Droid, they are developing expectations for how these phones allow contacts, calendars, e-mail, and social networks to remain in sync across all their devices.
One of the big challenges is that users don't always maintain the same source of inputting data--they switch from browser to desktop application to smartphone as their data access and entry point, introducing many variables into the data chain. And data integrity will only get more complicated as more applications become browser-based and keep no local data storage.
Most enterprise users have a local store in addition to the cloud storage, something that I still find puzzling from the T-mobile Sidekick outage, where consumer data that should have been in multiple locations (or at least present on the device) was thought to be lost.
The most common sync services are not provided directly by the mobile operator. Generally this is a good thing, as the more you can dis-intermediate the carrier, the more control you have over your data. But because the sync services are provided by others--notably Microsoft, Google, and Apple--you end up locked-in to their data structures as well as whatever privacy and data management issues that might arise in relation to advertising or other usage of your information.
Today, you can fairly easily sync your mobile device with most common online e-mail and PIM services although the BlackBerry, Droid, and the iPhone differ in their approaches--or at least in the visibility of how they work. For example, you can sync with Gmail and other services on the iPhone, but it rather perversely requires the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol.
By controlling the address book, Google and Apple effectively lock-in users to their sync service, leaving the carriers and devices to be easily replaced (minus the cancellation charges.) The user would barely notice the difference, aside from the sticker on his phone that says AT&T or Verizon.
Mobile operators do not want to cede control of the address book to Google or Apple, but they are late to the game and do not yet have sync solutions of their own. As a result, they are scrambling to add this functionality, but building a sync solution that works with all different devices and email services is no easy task, thanks to the widespread problem of device fragmentation in the industry.
One option is to deploy a white label solution, like the open mobile cloud sync offered by Funambol. Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco told me the company has been approached by many of the top mobile operators, with several of them looking to setup sync services for their customers. They all recognize the issue, and according to Capobianco can turn to Funambol as a way to quickly bring a high-quality solution to market.
With all the different players in mobile sync, users will begin to question who owns their data. Enterprise users, in particular, should have privacy concerns about trusting their data to someone else. In the case of Android users, there is a growing anti-Google sentiment, and if Google already owns your email, calendar, and search queries, do you really want them to own your phone contacts as well?
If recent research is any indication, Amazon.com and Google are winning the cloud game.
Evans Data on Tuesday released a report (registration required) on how developers perceive cloud service providers related to cloud services offerings, including their completeness and the companies' ability to execute on the vision.
Janel Garvin, the founder of Evans Data and the author of the report, provides excellent insight into the current state of the market and how quickly things could change, if certain large vendors (notably AT&T and Microsoft) got their acts together more quickly.
Given their robust services, it isn't surprising that Amazon and Google top the list. And although IBM, VMware, and Microsoft trail, each offers important components of cloud infrastructure.
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MySpace today announced a new open-source project called Qizmt, a distributed computation framework developed by its data mining team.
Qizmt is based on the MapReduce distributed processing framework, well-known as a core part of Google's search indexing infrastructure. Qizmt, however, runs on large clusters of Microsoft Windows servers, an interesting sidebar to a computing style we most commonly associate with commodity Linux machines.
MapReduce is a programming model and an associated implementation for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key.
I spoke with Java architect and distributed systems expert Eugene Ciurana about MapReduce and he contends that "indexing large amounts of unstructured data is a difficult task regardless of the technologies involved. MapReduce provides a simple, elegant solution for data processing in parallelized systems."
As more sites move to manage large data sets, the uptake of frameworks like MapReduce and projects like Hadoop is sure to grow. And along with the growth of the data is the growth of the market opportunity. Open source is a great way to expand and enlarge the adoption curve as users figure out the best way to use these new tools.
Qizmt is currently being used in the MySpace "People You May Know" feature, and will soon expand to user recommendations and other new areas.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
According to the Guardian, Wolfram will be opening its curated data to be queried via an application programming interface, or API. Currently, you can view results in a browser, export them as a PDF, or "play" them using a Mathematica plug-in. The ability to use the data on other sites and for other means, such as computations in spreadsheets, is appealing, if not earth-shattering.
Wolfram's launch fanfare was followed by much confusion about what Wolfram actually is. One thing that's clear is that the service has an impressive amount of data. What's not clear is if and when it will ever make money.
APIs are at least a good start in relation to monetization--holding the Alpha data captive within its site meant that it would never go beyond its own traffic, a recipe for disappointment and counter to the link economy that has been built around sites like Twitter.
In today's socialized Internet, APIs to your data are the barrier (or door) to getting users hooked on your data. Regardless of whether through an API that controls a cloud service like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), or the ability to get communications in and out of Facebook, users want to consume data in the way they feel most comfortable. Any company that creates or aggregates data needs to make it available, if it expects to ever hit critical mass.
CNET News' Tom Krazit recently wrote about a licensing deal between Microsoft's Bing "decision engine" and Wolfram Alpha (two non-search engines join up to create a super search engine?) that "allows Bing to present some of the specialized scientific and computational content that Wolfram Alpha generates."
If Microsoft is serious about taking on Google's geek factor, and asserting its dominant position in spreadsheets and higher education as Bing grows, then the data from Wolfram adds a new dimension. From the consumer perspective, the more informed the data is, the better, but both Bing and Alpha have a long way to go to catch up to Google.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
According to a new report by researchers in Australia, stress tests have revealed that the "infrastructure-on-demand services offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft suffer from regular performance and availability issues."
The seven-month study of Amazon's EC2, Google's App Engine, and Microsoft's Azure cloud computing services simulated 2,000 concurrent users connecting to services from each of the three providers, with researchers measuring response times and other performance indicators.
The results were at best mixed, and at worst, severely dysfunctional. For example, I'd never heard that when using Google App Engine, none of your data-processing tasks can last longer than 30 seconds, lest the service throw an exception back at you.
Researchers found that the three platforms "delivered wildly variable performance results as Amazon, Google and Microsoft trialled, added and dropped new features."
... Read more
In trying to figure out what exactly is at the heart of the problem (don't say Apple's "control issues"), I heard an interesting perspective on this brouhaha from Todd Barr, vice president of marketing at Bandwidth.com, a nationwide CLEC voice carrier that sells voice and data services to businesses. (Note: Fellow CNET blogger Matt Asay provides a good overview of the company's FreePBX product here.)
Barr believes that what this controversy boils down to is number portability. Increasingly, our phone numbers (especially mobile numbers) have become our identity, and the FCC enacted the number portability act some time ago to make sure that businesses and consumers can take their number with them when they switch carriers. The FCC believes this is important because number portability ensures competition among providers and allows businesses and consumers to keep their number to ensure continuity of their identity.
At the time, the FCC contemplated carrier competition - but now, Barr described, there are these "meta" carriers, like Apple, that have a key control point in the telecom ecosystem: the phone user experience. "Just like users want to control their number and identity, they also will increasingly want to control their own telephony experience - like having one number, that can ring to any phone you specify, and even display the correct called-ID number when you call from any phone. Ultimately, I think the crux of the issues is how far the idea of number portability extends to the entire user telephony experience, not just the phone number."
This will be an increasingly important issue to carriers as they experiment with fixed-mobile convergence features that let business users control their call flows in more intuitive ways, such as sharing one number and common features across wireless and fixed networks.
It will also become very important for services like Google voice that abstract the number from the carrier and make the networks dumb pipes.
For users to ultimately be in control of their telephony experience and to encourage the next wave of telephony innovation, the concept of portability will need to extend beyond just numbers to the telephony user experience.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
Google's Chrome operating system isn't the only thing threatening Windows these days. In a recent New York Times story, VMware CEO Paul Maritz highlighted how dynamic Web frameworks and languages are fundamentally shifting our understanding of the operating system. He said, "If you are in Ruby on Rails, you have to work really hard to tell what the operating system is, it is so far removed."
I spoke with Engine Yard's Yehuda Katz, a member of the Ruby on Rails core team, who said that open-source platforms like Ruby on Rails are changing the game by giving power to the developer to make decisions. "The freedom that comes with open standards and open-source software like Rails will ultimately make software applications better. We believe the replacement of the traditional desktop with application-centric development will benefit everyone."
These comments bring to light the changing nature of application development. A decade ago, if you were writing an application, chances were you were writing it for Windows. Today, there's a good chance you're writing it for the Web as a platform. A new generation of applications are both Web-centric and OS neutral thanks to open-source development platforms.
Importantly, the language and underpinning architecture for Web applications doesn't matter to the end-user (though it has serious impact on the development and operations teams). What matters is the ability to add new features quickly and affordably.
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Gmail may not yet have the same footprint as Microsoft Exchange, but megadeals such as a recently announced 30,000-seat installation at Valeo prove that large enterprises are comfortable running applications in the cloud.
Valeo, an "independent industrial group fully focused on the design, production, and sale of components, integrated systems, and modules for cars and trucks," is deploying Google Apps, supported by Capgemini, in a phased approach throughout 2009 ultimately serving the 193 Valeo entities in 27 countries. The adoption of Google Apps among those units is part of a program to reduce administrative expenses.
As a first step, users are being given access to Google sites, online documents, video management, and instant messaging, including voice and video chat, in order to improve teamwork. The new system will then offer applications to further enhance the company's efficiency, such as an enterprise directory and work flow tools to automate administrative processes.
In the final stage, users will benefit from Google mail, calendar, search, and online-translation solutions to reinforce personal efficiency. They will be able to access the applications from a desktop, laptop, or other mobile device.
It's not totally clear what role a systems integrator plays in this scenario--my guess is that Cap Gemini will do the initial work to build out processes and work flow, and then manage the e-mail migration as the company starts the deployment of Gmail to its staff worldwide. After that, the ongoing support would seem to be rather minimal.
Somewhere down the line, the necessity of SIs in relation to cloud solutions will become more obvious. There are a few companies, such as Appirio that specialize in the development and customization of on-demand applications, but so far, no single SI has figured out how to create a sustained revenue flow.
Of course, they probably shouldn't--a big part of why companies are choosing on-demand or cloud-based infrastructures is to remove the expense of the SI middleman, in addition to removing the overhead of maintaining the systems and software on their own.
(Note: I wrote extensively about moving entirely to the cloud in a December 2008 piece titled "Cloud computing to the max.")
Via Seeking Alpha
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
Interesting new data from Nielsen Online says "member communities" (e.g., social networks and blogs have become more popular than e-mail.
While the data does not show a dramatic difference between member communities and e-mail use, in terms of percentage points, it does reflect an impact that social communication is having on the way we work and communicate.
Of course, the other side of the equation is finding out how the sample data was taken and if it's based only on consumer data. Nonetheless, it shows that information is moving online, not getting stuck in e-mail boxes.
Another interesting statistic is the fact that 85 percent of those surveyed use search tools, showing once again that the data structure of the Web still has a long way to go. That stat should also bring comfort to Google shareholders.
If there is one battle that continues to rage, it's the war for browser supremacy.
While exact market share figures change on a daily basis (and vary widely from site to site), Microsoft's Internet Explorer commands about 65 percent of the market, Mozilla's Firefox about 20 percent, Apple's Safari about 8 percent, and Google's Chrome about 2 percent.
There are three main rendering engines:
- Trident, from Internet Explorer, is used by many applications on the Microsoft Windows platform to render HTML, including the minibrowsers in Winamp and RealPlayer.
- Gecko, Mozilla's open-source rendering engine, is used by a variety of products derived from the Mozilla code base, including the Firefox Web browser.
- WebKit, originally from Konquerer, and currently best-known as powering Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome Web browsers.
Different engines mean that developers (and users) are still forced to contend with Web sites that are designed with one specific browser in mind. This often means a lack of functionality or a flat-out inability to use a site with the wrong browser.
Lunascape, (currently Windows-only) is a triple-engine browser that has a new take on the "browser wars." Launched in November 2008, Lunascape continues to push the envelope with its latest beta. In addition to improving the core triple-engine technology, new features include toolbar shrinking, appropriate for Netbook users who require low CPU usage. With this update, Lunascape claims to have the fastest JavaScript execution, according to the SunSpider JavaScript test.
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