Laurin Herlt Blog

Representing #austrianapps on Google I/O #io2011

2011-05-09T10:23:23Z

Awaiting good presentations, and interesting insights on the latest Android and mobile HTML5 trends in San Francisco.

Follow me on twitter to stay tuned.

No, Honeycomb is NOT just for tablets

2011-02-04T15:07:59Z

C'mon everybody (slashdot, bgr, ...) , stop bloggin rumors! Honeycomb work's fine on small screens, as demonstrated by Dianne Hackborn (Google Software Engineer).

p.s. kahless, keep fighting this rumor! ;)

Now, that's semantic!

2011-01-19T17:51:27Z

In 1997 IBM's Deep Blue defeated the world's best chess player. Last year, IBM's Watson defeated the world's best Jeopardy! player. Now that's a semantic usecase! ;)

App Industry Forecast 2011

2011-01-06T09:06:00Z

My predictions for the 2011 app industry.

The term "app" has even been voted Word of the Year 2010.
The market evolves at a speed, which is hard to follow.
It's even harder to make an educated guess of what will happen in 2011.

I'd like to act as an "independent" analyst in this post, and present my forecast and predictions for the mobile applications smartphone market 2011, with a focus on the Android platform.

#1 Mobile Payment

There have been some efforts for mobile payment within the last years. Most of them were based on old school technologies like sms phone billing or stk . With the support of NFC on the Android 2.3 platform and Samsung's Nexus S device , we have everything we need to pay our sandwiches, toothpaste and gasoline, without cash and card.

We will not yet have a wide adoption of mobile payment, but there will be some early adopters of app- and NFC-based payment in 2011 in European supermarkets or stores.

Who is going to do the clearance and the app? Either the regional finance institutions and store chains will stand up to this opportunity. Or, more likely, a big players will emerge, and provide a global solution. Perhaps even Google? If that's the case, Europe is most likely to stay behind, and will probably not make this year.

#2 Mobile Banking and Trading

More bank- and trading companies will provide app- instead of web-based user interfaces. Because it's apps they need: They need real-time, effectiveness and notifications. In 2010 not a single Austrian banking institute provided mobile banking, although a German iPhone banking app, has been awarded app of the year. In 2011 some, but not all Austrian banks and online traders will have mobile app banking, most of them iPhone, some of them Android as well (none of them Android as 1st choice).

#3 Bump!

Get used to this icon now!

Although the current Android platform does not yet support data exchange through bumping (the current Android 2.3 NFC implementation only supports RFID tag reading, but not exchange), I see Google providing an update which supports data exchange by bumping two devices together.

NFC will begin to be available and enable us to do some great things, like:

Exchange messages
Exchange contact info (sorry poken, you will be outdated soon!)
Do game interaction with co players
Do money transfer (You owe me! - *Bump* - We're settled)

But since this requires new devices, only some early adopters will use this in 2011.

#4 Recognition as Customer Contact Point

Most companies with constant customer contact have already recognized the value of a satisfying user experience on the web.
Many have implemented this on iPhone.
Little have done this for Android phones in 2010

In 2011 some of the large companies (public transportation, airlines, retail stores), will recognize the value of a better user experience for Android phone owners, and extend their contact points to Android apps.

Still many of them will be confused and don't understand the differentiation of small screen apps, large screen apps, mobile websites packaged as apps, mobile websites and websites compatible with mobile devices.

#5 Android platform fragmentation continues

The current Android platform distribution is:

Froyo
Eclair
Donut
Cupcake

At the end of 2011 the Android platform distribution will be:

Froyo
Gingerbread
Honeycomb
Eclair
Donut and Cupcake will be less than 2% each

#6 Unapplied security fixes will cause damage

There has been a proof of concept, how to use security holes of Android to do damage to the user in August 2010. Today in January 2011, still more than 50% of the Android phones are vulnerable for this attack, because the phones have not been updated.

In 2011, a noticeable amount of Android phone users will become victims of attacks (money, privacy or vandalism), which could have been avoided if their phones had no outdated Android version.

#7 Android fridges, coffee machines and cars ;)

Last, and least indeed, a kind of fun forecast: In the 90ies Java was said to be running on TV sets, coffee machines and fridges soon. What turned out to be different for Java, might become reality for Android in 2011.

Android is already driving TV sets, home entertainment systems and navigation systems. We will see more of this in 2011. Maybe even coffee machines or fridges. And you will definitely have more Android user dialogues in cars in 2011.

IKS amsterdam, stanbol and RDFa

2010-12-10T16:29:28Z

The semantic stack evolves, but help is needed!

It's halftime in the IKS Project, and the software stack is evolving.

Beginning with FISE in March 2010, two new components where added:

KReS
and RICK.

With Bertrand Delacrétaz support these components, make the new Apache Stanbol Incubation Project, which might leave incubation stage mid next year.

The semantic content of our world is evolving a little bit faster. Checkout this cloud diagram showing datasets published in the Linked Data format:

Even Google is gearing up, with it's support of RDFa, microdata and microformats for reviews, people, products, businesses and organisations, recipes and events in Google rich snippets.

Last but not least, the latest rumor: The JavaScript framework rdfquery might go into Apache Incubator. Let's see if rdfquery/Apache or the W3C Semantic Web working group/RDFa API make the race.

Andy Rubin's Honeycomb demo

2010-12-07T15:02:45Z

Watch the demonstration of Google's new Android platform and Motorola's tablet, coming next year.

When releasing a major new platform, Google's strategy is not to deliver the software alone, but get a partner and release the software together with a partner's hardware. We have seen this with Nexus One (HTC and Froyo), Nexus S (Gingerbread and Samsung), and we might see it with a tablet (Motorola and Gingerbread) next year.

Gentics won Web Idol 2010

2010-11-05T11:26:27Z

Gentics won the Janus Boye Web Idol 2010 contest yesterday. Congratulations to everyone, who participated in this achievement ! Good job!

Flash vs HTML5 Pong

2010-11-03T20:37:54Z

Pong with 2 players: Flash on the left and HTML5 canvas on the right, nice! :)

Kiwis, the universe and semantics

2010-10-15T11:48:00Z

Though the Kiwi Release Party took place at Vienna Planetarium yesterday, semantics is still stuck in labs.

Kiwi 1.0 is is still far from delivering user value with their semantic capabilities (besides providing a horrible UX - sorry folks). Personalized search results were one ray of hope. Anyways gratulations to the release!

I enjoyed listening to Ross Gardler (vice president of community development at Apache Software Foundation) and chatting with David Ayers (fsfe.org) and of course John Pereira (Salzburg Research).

IE6 resurrection on Windows Phone 7!

2010-10-11T18:00:27Z

According to heise, the Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 is based on Internet Explorer 6. And I thought it's market shares will vanish rapidly, after YouTube dropped IE6 support. Thou shall not be mistaken.

goo.gl

2010-10-01T10:12:53Z

Google recently released their URL shortener service to the public. Nice features and 2 characters shorter than bit.ly :)

Google url shortener features, a personal history, click tracking (including some details about traffic sources, like country and referers), and QR codes by appending .qr to the url. Keep in mind, the click analytics (and URL mappings of course), are public!

Example:
Long URL: blog.herlt.at
Short URL: goo.gl/CE7v
QR code:

Awaiting support in twitterfeed.

RT 10 Problems your CMS will not solve

2010-09-24T13:07:07Z

RT scroisier: 10 Problems Your Content Management System Will Not Solve And How To Overcome Them

RT 8 HTML5 Features You've Never Seen Before

2010-09-23T12:10:25Z

For those of you, who didn't have a chance to get to know the details of HTML5 yet, Michael Mahemoff gave a short presentation of some features, which will affect future application architecture.

RT Interview with Elie Auvray about Adobe, Day

2010-08-03T22:29:06Z

Adobe - Day: Acquisition or Big push for the Content Management Market? Read the Interview.

RT IKS Semantic Editor Workgroup

2010-06-30T16:29:14Z

Get informed! read about the new IKS semantic editor development group or watch an interview with Henri Bergius and me about it.

Recap #IKS early adopter workshop

2010-06-23T11:09:36Z

The goal was to bring small to medium cms vendors together, to explore the first results of the IKS cms components.

The IKS project intents to build a semantic CMS stack, in an approach, similiar to the LAMP architecture. After more than one year, the first results have been developed, and are available for development and testing:

FISE

FISE is a RESTful, OSGi-based, pluggable text content enrichment engine. It's still under heavy development, but the API was planned foresighted. See the introduction slides. I'm impressed about the community drive and energy behind it!

Semantic Editor

Aloha Editor was presented to the community by me (Laurin Herlt) and Haymo Meran, and proposed to be used as the semantic editor in the IKS stack. Aloha is still under development at Gentics, and still missing a communitysite and some examples to be released. The expectations and demands from the IKS audience are high, let's see how the community likes to work with the Aloha Editor.

Some feedback we got from the community:

yenzenz: iks aloha editor is really cool. goodbye tinymce, semantics is coming! ;)
bergie: wow, the #Aloha table insertion dialog is very nice. Well done @didldum and @draftkraft! #iks
scroisier: Presentation of a new OSS Semantic JS WYSIWYG Editor for CMS by @didldum & @bergie http://bit.ly/a5DdVd >competition for CK and TinyMCE #iks
michaelmarth: Interesting preso of OSS inline HTML editor #Aloha http://is.gd/cZd2m by @draftkraft @didldum & @bergie < plugin architecture looks good

Genius of Design BBC documentary online

2010-06-16T13:31:49Z

The BBC documentary "Genius of Design" charts the story invention and innovation from the Industrial Rvolution up to modern day. The first two episodes are now online on vimeo.

"This five-part series, made by the team behind the award-winning series The Genius of Photography, tells the story of design from the Industrial Revolution through 20s modernism, the swinging 60s, the designer 80s and up to the present day. Features interviews with star designers like Philippe Starck and creatives from Apple and Ford; as well as design fans like Stephen Fry."

You can also buy the DVD on amazon or BBC Shop

The Genius of Design episode 1

The Genius of Design episode 2

Source, RT

CSS3 calc() in FF4

2010-06-10T15:48:47Z

Firefox 4 will support the CSS3 calc() value! This will replace lot's of hacks. RT.

recap #uxce10

2010-06-03T16:20:00Z

A short recap of the UXcamp Europe 2010. Impressions, session, contacts, things learned.

Sessions

There have been 59 session each 45 minutes within 2 days. So you had to select wisely which sessions to attend, and switch sessions once you noticed you were in the wrong session

mobile ux design

talked about mobile ux design, mentioning a couple of good books:

Learned about the 1cm² rule (touch buttons should never be smaller than 1cm² - the size of a keyboard key).

Content strategy, Ove Dalen, Eirik Hafver

Talked about the long neck, long tail paradigm and how the increased the conversion for their customers by deleting content. The little top (20%) of your content is the long neck, but the long tail (80%) may in the end bring more conversion. But if you struggle with the content volume, cut the tail.

typo3 5 preview

Jens Hoffmann gave a preview on the next generation typo3 ui, which will come within the next year. Development has just started.

grumpy old man Eric Reiss service experience

What an entertainer :) ... Here is his reading list to the topic.

Psychology of Creativity

Check out the slides.

Twitter

The twitter #uxce10 tag was heavily used. Browse through the history to get an impression what people were saying about this barcamp.

Aloha

We had a lot of good talks on the first day, and told about our Aloha vision. Due to the massive interest, we decided to make and hold an Aloha presentation on the second day. Pointing out the problem Aloha adresses, the solution we have in mind, and the current development status of the new Aloha editor.
The live demo ist still under development (you need to know what to click to make ist work), so please be patient. We hope to have a demo and community site up somewhen in july. By following haymo and my tweets, you'll be the first to know.

Some Aloha feedback:
WrYBiT: @didldum @draftkraft .. Yes, we liked "Aloha"! I hope we could work together on that cool Inline-Editor! #typo3 http://yfrog.com/5ppvjj
WrYBiT: "@draftkraft #ALOHA RTE makes contenteditable useable! Beta out in june #uxce10 slides http://sn.im/wy6xv" Our hope for #TYPO3 5.0, PLZ RT!
mahemoff: Aloha from @draftkraft+1 looks awesome! Not-yet-released open src lib turbo-charges ContentEditable with a plugin framework #uxce10
mahemoff: http://twitpic.com/1sgbl7 browser differences in contenteditable. Aloha project making text editing easy #uxce10
ines.lindner@biolab.ch: ich habe gestern mit Begeisterung eure Aloha Präsentation verfolgt. Ich würde euer Produkt morgen sehr gerne in einem Projektmeeting vorstellen.
ines.lindner@biolab.ch: Meine Kollegen wollen es schon live sehen :)

Photos

Look at the (really good!) photos some people have taken, to get a visual impression of the camp.

Feedback

Thanks for all the feedback, which was very valueable for us, the questions, nice talks and last but not least, the really interesting sessions:
Matthias Bauer, Jens Hoffman, Ines Lindner, Michael Grundkötter, Michael Dreusicke, Michael Mahemoff, Eric Reiss, Ove Dalen, Eirik Hafver, and many others ...

RT Future of Open Source CMS

2010-05-21T11:02:19Z

Stephane Croisier blogged about future of open source cms.

Facebook, HTML Standard and RDFa [Update]

2010-05-12T10:00:00Z

Facebook recently introduced Open Graph Protocol to "meta-tag" webcontent, creating some confusion about existing web standards.

Here is an examples taken from opengraphprotocol.org:

<html xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/"> <head> <title>The Rock (1996)</title> <meta property="og:title" content="The Rock" /> <meta property="og:type" content="movie" /> <meta property="og:url" content="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/" /> <meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/rock.jpg" /> ... </head> ... </html>
The HTML meta element does not allow a property attribute. When you integrate Facebooks OpenGraph data into your website, following the guide, be advised your website will no longer be HTML conform:

<meta property="og:title" content="The Rock" />
You can easily verify this by running the opengraphprotocol.org html code itself through W3C's validation service.

[Update]

Facebook's approach is inspired by RDFa, but they seem to ignore the fact, that without the corresponding RDFa doctype, opengraph enabled sites will be invalid (X)HTML (thanks to kahless for mentioning).

So add your RDFa doctype, and your page is HTML compliant. I'm still working on an example to combine this with HTML5 and the og: namespace. If someone get's this done, contact me.

Attending IKS workshop salzburg june 22-23

2010-05-11T09:23:28Z

Places for the Early-adopters workshop are filling fast!

Facebook, HTML Standard and RDFa

2010-05-10T16:56:02Z

This post has been updated.

Beams are in! #LHC

2010-03-30T11:18:33Z

Good luck to everyone at CERN and LHC. Follow their tweet.

package com.gentics; Your name could be here

2010-03-22T18:40:01Z

package com.gentics; /** @author your name could be here */
read more

RT Must read Presentations in UX Design

2010-03-18T10:41:36Z

RT @webtechman: 10 Worthwhile and a must read Presentations in User experience (UX) Design.

Android architecture for breakfast

2010-03-16T08:01:06Z

Watch this youtube architecture presentation. I like the idea of intents triggering code to reuse or replace components.

W3C Standard for microformats is born

2010-03-05T14:49:17Z

The W3C consortium decided to break up the microformat and HTML5 standard. The microdata draft standard was released yesterday, as an extension to the HTML 5 standard.

Good decision! This will hopefully improve the standards popularity.

Social feeds hub

2010-02-11T14:57:00Z

I'm starting to like Google Buzz because it was super easy to syndicate all my feeds on one profile site.

Define innovation

2010-01-15T14:05:35Z

Same game, completely new user experience. 26 years after the game's initial release. That's innovation! First Person Tetris

RT The bottom 10 things of 2009

2009-12-23T10:20:05Z

Justin Cormack looks back at 2009 in a technologyofcontent.com post.

2nd day of IKS rome is about to end

2009-11-13T13:14:04Z

The IKS workshop is about to end. Finally some enduser showcases! Sprint over to my Gentics blog post for videos and live demos.

My resume of Day 1 of the IKS rome workshop

2009-11-12T18:23:47Z

Header over to my Gentics Blog post.

Gentics 2nd place Austria's Leading Companies

2009-10-30T09:58:02Z

Gentics was voted 2nd place of Austria's Leading Companies by PricewaterhouseCoopers and WirtschaftsBlatt yesterday at the Hofburg! Good job!

Ballmer unveils Sharepoint 2010 in Las Vegas

2009-10-20T11:21:32Z

"When paired with Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 will transform efficiency by connecting workers across a single collaboration platform for business" Ballmer said at the SharePoint Conference 2009.

Attending IKS workshop rome nov 12th-13th

2009-10-15T15:18:06Z

The workshop title "Semantic Search - Fact and Fiction" and agenda seem to be interesting (again).

RT The 10 Best, Must Watch, Enteprise 2.0 Videos

2009-09-28T14:06:17Z

Thanks to scroisier for this: The 10 Best, Must Watch Enterprise 2.0 Videos/Presentations of the Month

Git and Gerrit?

2009-09-24T16:56:00Z

I'm thinking about using Git and Gerrit. Any experiences out there? Is it easy to operate and administrate?

The end of business cards? Let's give it a try.

2009-09-11T10:20:48Z

Let the hands of your pokens touch, they will glow green, and your contact data including social networks are exchanged.

53 subjective Enterprise 2.0 Facts

2009-09-07T12:28:54Z

ZDNet blogs about top ways, reasons and issues around Enterprise 2.0.

Five Common Enterprise 2.0 Misconceptions

Five ways to avoid Enterprise 2.0 failure

14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail

Nine worst social media fails of 2009... thus far

Ten top issues with social computing in business

Ten top issues in adopting enterprise social computing

Wanted! Java Developer

2009-09-02T14:24:48Z

Looking for a Java Webdeveloper, who wants play a part in our ECMS software. Fulltime employment in Vienna, Austria.

Eagerly awaiting columns

2009-09-01T11:58:37Z

I'm eagerly awaiting CSS3 column support in browsers. Working draft finished, Candidate Recommandation upcoming.

RT interesting social media map

2009-08-27T10:23:36Z

Thanks to scroisier for sharing the link to this nice map

Collaborative strategic planning

2009-08-26T13:54:21Z

Wikipedia's foundation has set up a wiki to collaboratively develop their strategy.

With this open community process, Wikimedia hopes to develop good answers to the questions where they are, where they should go, and how to get there. I'm sure they will do their best to abide their community principles in this wiki as well.

Interestingly the initiator for this innovative approach is rather conventional: Omydar Network of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar promises 2 mio USD fundings, if the Wikimedia foundation further developes their strategy.

So if strategic planning is one of your passions, goto strategy.wikimedia.org and contribute!

Absurd but handy new swiss post service

2009-06-15T16:08:53Z

The swiss post offers a new service to scan your paper mail and store them in an online digital post box. An absurde but handy next step towards a world without paper mail.

Google wave - an application enriched chatroom

2009-05-29T09:25:48Z

Google is working on a communication platform allowing users to communicate and work with applications at the same time and same place (yes, my allusion to IBM's products is intended).

#Gentics at #IKS day 1

2009-05-29T02:45:39Z

Day 1 of the IKS requirements workshop has passed

It has been very interesting to see many of the european cms vendors and implementors on one table, interested to coorperate to make progresses in semantic knowledge management.

Stephane Croisir, co-founder of jahia made his position clear to market driven killer apps based on research results, instead of the other way around.

Johan Janssens, joomlatools, empathized the importance of small but continuous steps in the progress of the open source iks stack.

Shubham Nagar, InfoAxon CEO, mentioned the importance of a common understanding of business problems and use cases.

I talked to John Pereira, to contribute to the way this EU project is set up: A wiki and a source repository is a must have from the beginning. Already on day 1 many cms vendors had a lot of ideas (use cases, existing libraries and toolkits, etc) to contribute. If i'd manage this project, i'd setup a wiki with a couple of samples of good use cases and libraries, and encourage the participants to contribute. At this early stage contributing business problems, use cases and references to existing tools would already be a big gain. A simple facebook like voting (thumbs up) would be everything you need to determine the communities opinion.

I'm looking forward to day 2 ... Let's see what the IKS guys have prepared ...

Secret questions are too easily guessed

2009-05-19T14:23:13Z

Secret questions during user registration are often used the wrong way. Often they alone allow password recovery, although they are easier to guess than a password.

I have been warning against this for a long time. Finally a study (thanks to herbert for forwarding) shows that secret questions often are used as a backup password, which is a really bad idea.

Answering these questions is indeed very simple for intrudors. Either by guessing or by research.

When secret questions are used as a backup password, they provide a perfect weak point for intrusion. They should be used as nothing more than an additional security step during password recovery, but should never replace a password recovery.

Since this has often been missunderstood in the past, i urge to completely avoid secret questions:

Enter random (slap the keyboard) answers when asked,
and don't ask them when developing an application.

A sneak preview on Wolfram Alpha

2009-05-14T14:25:00Z

A couple of weeks ago i had a chance to take a sneak preview on Wolfram Alpha, a new search / knowledgeengine based on Mathematica.

Since Wolfram Alpha is going to be release to public next monday (18. may), and there has already been a public presentation, i dare to blog about my experience as a previewer:

What is it?

A "computational knowledge engine". Lots of more or less structured information (geography, physics, people...) is pushed into the engine. The engine tries to understand the meaning of your query, and tries to give you a good presentation of the information you where looking for, and - if you are lucky - even an answer.

What it's not?

A search engine. It doesn't spider the whole web.

What i found useful during first contact?

Currency and metrics conversion.
Finally one converter for all, and one that is able to convert lb feet to newton meter (very important for us car fans *g*).

Weather and temperature forcast and history.
It rained 11.1 hours last week, and there where thunderstorms for 30 minutes here in Vienna, and it's supposed to rain for 3.6 days in the next 7 days (let's check back on next thursday).

Mathematics and Science
formulas, genomes, etc, etc, etc ... I did't have the time to validate the quality of the output.

What else?

You can see a growth chart with standard deviation for a 4 year old boy.
Compare stocks, economy regression, salaries.
... biology, chemistry, health, physics, ...

Conclusion

Usability is definitely different than a search engine. Already because doing queries, understanding the interpretation and the results is way more complicated. Users will have to LEARN to use this product. Let's see if is simple enough to help everybody in daily life.

Testing content syndication with twitter

2009-05-13T13:18:57Z

twitterfeed seems to be the only twitter feeder based on OAuth. Good thing, so my password is secure again ...

Listening to Enterprise 2.0 Webinar

2009-05-12T14:52:00Z

Listening to an online presentation about Enterprise 2.0 potentials and risks by Dr. Clemens Cap, University Rostock and Klaus-M. Schremser, Gentics.

Attending IKS workshop salzburg may 28-29

2009-05-11T17:48:38Z

I am going to attend the Interactive Knowledge Stack workshop in Salzburg 28-29 may.

IKS is a project part-funded by the European Commission, to design and implement an open source technology stack for semantic content management systems. Sounds very interesting to influence a potential industry standard, and be an early adopter. Looking forward to have a call with John Pereira for more information.

Thanks to Peter Hofer for forwarding an invitation to this workshop to us.

Opentext to buy Vignette

2009-05-07T11:03:00Z

Opentext wants to buy Vignette. This could lead to an interesting market consolidation ...

Welcome to my new blog

2009-03-12T14:51:42Z

I have been blogging for Gentics for some time now. Recently i started playin around with a new layout and brand: blog.ifelse.com...

Stay tuned ...

Until then head over to my older blog posts in the Gentics Dev Team Blog.