TechNayak(mirror)

Most programmers know databases and its importance. Thanks to the new generation of software as a service and web services, traditional RDBMS’s are sparingly used and the number is bound to deteriorate further as enterprises adopt the Saas platform.

Data has far outgrown the domains of just text. Today we talk of mutlimedia data, urls, semantic data and many more application specific formats. Information on the Web is in JSON, REST , XML , Microformats etc. With this vareity in data formats and representations comes the inherent need for flexibility in storage and querying of such information. Almost all database users know of the conceptual modelling required for the design of any database, the key principle being that more tighter the model, more efficient the database. The integrity of the database is only as good as the integrity of the data. But you cannot talk of data integrity with the kind of formats available today.

Clearly markup data dominates the web . Though databases have developed features to better support , store and validate markup data , the initial design of databases was never to store the wide variety of loosely organized data. Querying of such markup data is fruitless and so is the attempt to index, sort , aggregate this data. To develop a custom database capable of all the above mentioned operations could be a solution, but the given the non standardized nature of this data and its probability of change, you would have a tough time scouring the web to search for changes. Plus these databases will not be semantically inter operable.

Developers are taking notice of a new scheme of storing data, I call it the bucket store. The design is roughly the same as that of a hash table, where data blocks are stored in buckets and hashes are used to index or refer to these buckets. A little improvisation in terms of adding upper layers like domains, groups and so on to complement the schema, table in a database is done to make the data easily classifiable. The advantage with this scheme is heterogeneity in data formats and the absence of constraints.

Several products are offering such services at dirt cheap prices. Take Amazon’s S3 or the recently launched Simpledb or CouchDb which offers a host it yourself version of this storage. Amazon S3 has businesses running on top of it; of the many I can recall Slideshare running on S3. With the advent of more mashups and heterogeneous data being churned out by the web more of such non DBMS related storage options will be employed. Given that this paradigm does implement all the enterprise important features like security, access control , backups, transactions etc and mature modeling methodologies that can rival the ER are proposed , I don’t see any problem in this becoming the most viable and cost effective option for data storage.

Gone are the days of the digital divide, there is a new kind of divide amongst many computer professionals now. Its the generation gap. Its hard to comprehend this statement, but anybody, whose is exposed to at least 5 years of industry dynamics, will know exactly what I am talking about. Call it Moore’s law affecting software or just plain old generation gap, there is a clear demarcation between people who appreciate new concepts and those who prefer things the 90s way.

There are a set of people that like the innovation happening on the web front and are adopting 2.0 technologies like there is no tomorrow. Everything from office automation to project management is now managed online on productivity service providers. Concepts like wiki, blogs, forums etc are fast appearing as mainstream applications in organizations. Surely as technology evolves and takes new shape, we will see a dramatic shift in adoption of these new tools .

In contrast , there are the other people who have been around for a long time and have seen a lot of productivity applications. To these people, technology is nothing more than a fast changing fad and prefer to stick to their old time favorites. Take people who have seen the main frame era, such folk just don’t appreciate concepts like distributed computing, virtual servers etc. Quotes like ” our mainframes never needed mirroring”, are common. People who still live reminiscing innovation of their times like spreadsheets and ERP’s.

It may be hard to believe but these form the majority of the so called power users of organizations and these legacy softwares( pun intended) , are maintained and supported just for their usage. Its distrubing to know that enterprise software lags open source software by at least 3 years , in terms of innovation. This lag can clearly be accounted to the legacy lovers who insist on using their accustomed softwares. Where does product development go in such a case. Office 2007 is seeing very slow adoption due to a change in the usability. Will this set of users be responsible for the sluggishness of product development? who will convince these users to adopt newer software? more importantly how? What will these users demand 20 years from now?

Its a strange question, but yes its an emerging market.

I wrote about personalization some time back and about how we should actually be approaching this problem. Google has got their act into place and are making your own light weight personalization meter, but its for ads

Google is going to put a cookie in your browser that will record information everytime you read an ad served by Google. Continue reading Personalization is one cookie away…

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.

Everybody’s writing about the new social organizer phenomenon, So I thought I could add my two cents to it.

What if you want to hire someone to build an online community? Somebody to create and maintain a virtual world in which all the players in an industry feel like they need to be part of it? It would help if that person understood technology, at least well enough to know what it could do. They would need to be able to write. But they also have to be able to seduce stragglers into joining the group in the first place, so they have to be able to understand a marketplace, do outbound selling and non-electronic communications.

Seth Godin writes about the Online Community Organizer as the job of the future.

Continue reading Online Community Organizer - a job for the future…

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.
Collaborative apps have been around for quite sometime now, but they have been lurking very close the corporate apps which can be used primarily in a business scenario. A simple example of the same could be the productivity 2.0 apps like Zoho or Google Docs. The only other breed of collaborative app has been games, which is a again a huge draw. Its true that this genre of applications is still finding its foothold on the web and as time progresses you will find killer new applications that will explore new possibilities with colloborative apps.

I had written about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and how it used the power of collaboration combined with automated project management to get arduous work done from people. Taking and extending on the same paradigm are newer applications that try and achieve some good from these collaborative applications. Its like the Seti project which uses your computational resource when idle, these applications use the power of human intelligence to contribute to a greater cause.

Continue reading Collaborative apps and Collective human intelligence…

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.

Google Gears was released recently as an effort to promote offline web. I have written time and again about this genre of web applications and have spoken about the advancements like the Dojo Offline Toolkit, AIR and the new Silverlight that try to blemish the line between web and desktop applications.

Google Gears is designed ingeniously. Gears is an activex plugin on IE and an XPI on firefox(installables) . Gears then works in your browser for any applications designed to use the gears technology. The foremost application that uses gears is Google Reader, which can store and retrieve almost 2000 articles. The transition between online and offline web is supposed to be seamless, as in one taking over when the connectivity is out and the other when its back. In reader, you have to explicitly make the shift from online to offline, something like the work offline option in IE. Continue reading Getting Familiar with Google Gears…

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.

The Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston has inspired me to write about it. So whats this enterprise 2.0 all about ? Its about mainstream enterprise applications going the 2.0 way. Everyday applications like ERP’s, CRM’s etc going soft and going web. Office automation taking a whole new meaning and likes of Chat, Social Networking , Wikis etc playing mainstream roles in Enterprises. Its an eventual evolution of all things enterprise into a more social, productive and user friendly environment.

Ten years back you couldn’t imagine IM in enterprise software;today most of the enterprise vendors supply their own chat service for support and maintenance. The recent acquisition of Tribe.net by Cisco and the more recent IBM including a social network in the recently revamped Lotus suite are just indicators of how big this phenomenon is. The general know how is somehow concocted to a statement “regular productivity apps like email will be ditched“, is not all there is to enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 will see penetration of tools like blogs, RSS, wikis , Instant messaging and collaboration, which can be defined as the aorta of web2.0 enter enterprise space. The benefits are tremendous in terms of productivity. A social network as a base for all applications makes the software more friendly , collaborative and builds better communication capabilities. Instant messaging can replace those single sentence emails, wikis can replace knowledge bases. Community portals can represent newletters and bulletin boards. Discussion forums can help solve and analyse problems better. Mindmaps makes brainstorming more productive. RSS and its enterprise filtering can make information management and overload a little less cumbersome to deal with ( see newsgator and Knownow ).

Take Basecamp for example, it encompasses a true project management tool with 2.0 capabilities. Updates through RSS. Blog like memos, easy to use resource and task management interface all this with a very social feel to it. If you look at Zoho and their productivity 2.0 suite, its got everything that any business needs. Online Office automation, wiki tools, mail and chat , their newly released meetings and project all are excellent examples of how 2.0 can be introduced into everyday enterprise applications and not compromise on quality.

The race is on and more and more enterprises will compete to cover as many 2.0 technologies as possible. Not all of them will prove useful but they will be an asset anyway , if not that at least for the sake of competition, the 2.0 radar will be covered. If you are an enterprise customer and is jittery about trying 2.0 , don’t fret, it may be too late when you do. You wouldn’t something as unimportant as new technology let your competitor get the better of you .

Dont know if I have posted this before, but I found this web trends graph which I feel is worth sharing with you all. Thanks to Mr Sadagopan and also Architectureandgovernance.com .

Click on the image to enlarge.

Its a classic case of enterprise level aesthetics penetrating into the consumer space - remember business dashboards ? Those simple looking overviews of businesses that important folk look at during their busy working days. The same concept of a dashboard is what we know today as a startpage. Given the multitude of services that we use on the web like your mail, bookmarks, blogs, chat , news feeds , stock price watchers etc it was essential to have a single point of view for the wealth of these services. When widgets started becoming popular, people foresaw a site full of widgets doing your favorite things and so the start page was born. One of the earliest efforts ,and really amazing one that, was netvibes, that started the ball rolling. Their list of services that they offer on their start page is phenomenal with a wide array of options.

The biggies themselves are toying with these start pages as they see it as a personalized version of their already popular portals like my.yahoo or the Infamous Google search page. The idea is that there are already millions flocking to these pages, why not make it more viral and add to it personalization and provide a dashboard so that people just don’t have to go to another website. Though it has worked well for homegrown services, I don’t really know how other services that bank for users , whose revenues depend on users visiting their sites and generating pageviews, will reach to such an offering.

Its just evolution I suppose that the concept is dying a premature death, primarily due to the growing popularity of desktop widgets, thanks to the efforts of mac, google desktop and of course , Windows Vista. But still discovery of these widgets will remain online and technologies like Apollo and Silverlight, are making this process of discovery and done more easier. Using Apollo technology, YourMinis , another flash based startpage service will allow for drag and drop of their web widgets onto the desktop. Now how about that, you like a widget on your start page and so you decide to give it some attention by dragging it to your desktop. The concept is more fact than fiction with a lot more services working to achieve the similar desktop-web experience.

I guess my job of ranting on start pages is done, here are some popular start pages to start of with. You can even read about some start page reviews here.

Some start pages to get you started

I found this article with snapshots from the Forrester survey of user behavior on the internet. This survey is keeping in mind the 2.0 craze aka user generated content. There are some interesting observations that can be inferred looking at this graphic alone. Here are some clear trends though:

The amount of contributors is very less. Thanks to the 2.0 era that made that figure possible otherwise that figure could look a bleak 1 or 2 pc. Also there are lot of non users who could become users in the next 5 years or so , adding that many more users to your service, thats potential. The amount of collectors also have to improve, its not enough if you have producers unless you have consumers. I had expected to see a value much more than the producers but it isn’t so.

As you can see, there has been a clear shift in way people are perceived in this age. Earlier it was the producer consumer model but now you have a lot more roles . The concept of an online identity has changed dramatically over the past few years and on this note, I have to quote Nicholas Carr’s article :

In a column in today’s Guardian, I examine how the invention of virtual drugs last week may open up lucrative new opportunities for pharmaceutical firms able to create therapies for the psychological ailments that beset avatars.

Here’s a snippet: “Up to now, avatars have led fairly narrow lives. Their main pursuits have been limited to fighting ogres and dragons and having simulated sex using artificial genitalia. Virtual reality has been like a pornographic version of Middle Earth. Now, avatars have a third and more modern alternative: abusing substances. Fighting, screwing, and getting wasted: Virtual life is becoming more like real life every day.”

Its funny where we have landed up in this confusing era of information, but the idea seems to be, now that we are here, lets make the most of it.

Ooops!! I also forgot to mention that the entire scheme is depicted as a ladder, meaning people eventually will climb up with age.