tecosystems

links for 2009-11-19

2009-11-19T17:03:41-08:00

Wolfram|Alpha Blog : Future Directions of Wolfram|Alpha

"But do you know how often we release a new version of Wolfram|Alpha?
It’s once a week. 23 times so far."

(tags: wolframalpha saas updates maintenance upgrades)

What’s After Excel? Big Data and the Future of Spreadsheets

2009-11-19T14:24:52-08:00

For the better part of twenty years, Microsoft Excel has been the most popular spreadsheet application on the planet. In a very real sense, it is the driver of Office revenues, because while office workers will use alternatives to Powerpoint and Word, you can pry Excel from their cold, dead fingers.

So how do you replace it?

You don’t. Many have tried. All have failed. Excel has, at least as measured by marketshare, been chewing up and spitting out competing products for well over a decade.

The best strategy in competing with Office generally, as evidenced by the success of Google Docs, is to reframe the debate. To compete where Office does not. As Sun Tzu tells us, “You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended.”

But what territory, precisely, has Excel left undefended? It’s the gold standard for analysts the world over, and it’s actually somewhat frightening how many businesses are run purely on top of it. Excel isn’t online yet, but it will be and even if it doesn’t get there, Google Docs did. So that’s out. Leaving what?

How about big data?

Excel has been used on big data for years, it’s true. But not directly on big data. With a row limit of around 65,000 [Update: Mike Cullina writes in to say the 65K limit was eliminated in the last release, 2007 - the new limit is 1M plus], it certainly can’t be used as a direct window into data warehouses or marts. So instead analysts use it to front end views or other subsets of the original dataset. Which, by the way, has probably been heavily cleansed and normalized.

Want to ask questions of the entire dataset? Or of datasets, pluarl? Terrific. Learn SQL, find and be very nice to a DBA, and beg for the access you need. Also, be prepared to wait days or even weeks for your answer. Working on big data is hard, remember.

Unless you have a new back end, one designed to reduce complicated questions into a set of tasks that can be individually executed on multiple machines. A back end like Hadoop.

The good news about Hadoop, you’ve already heard: it’s very, very good at carving up large workloads when you can supply it with adequate hardware. The bad news, however, is that the front ends for the tool are, to put it charitably, a bit behind. See this slide from Kevin Weil’s presentation at NoSQL East

And that’s the simple interface. Anybody who knows SQL is in good shape, but I think it’s safe to say Hadoop is just a tad less accessible to analyst-types than Excel.

Which is where IBM’s Big Sheets comes in. Called M2 at the time of Rod Smith’s presentation from HadoopWorld, you can think of it as a spreadsheet-like front end (with elements of DabbleDB, ManyEyes, and others) for Hadoop datasets.

Hw09 Enabling Ad Hoc Analytics At Web Scale

View more documents from Cloudera, Inc..

If you can’t see the promise in the slides, just wait for the video from HadoopWorld. Or just trust me: Big Sheets is the real deal, and the shape of things to come. Maybe it’ll be Big Sheets, maybe something totally different: the concept is real.

Should Microsoft be worried? Not in the short term. Excel is near perfectly adapted to its environment, and is in no danger of being replaced by an alternative, whether that’s Big Sheets, Google Docs or OpenOffice.org Spreadsheets. But environments are not static; they have a way of changing, and it certainly appears that we’re in the midst of a change now.

Data hypergrowth has pretty much become a cliche at this point: how many times can you hear “we’re going to produce more data in the next [small time period] that we have in human history” before you stop hearing it? Less apparent, however, has been the impact on individual analysis. Take the Twitter datasets recently released by the Infochimps guys: the monthly base tab separated values spreadsheet is 1.7 GB. The hourly version, it can be assumed, is a bit larger.

Point being: a lot of us are going to be working with large datasets soon, if we’re not already. And while the current toolset of choice – Excel – has its strengths, that doesn’t happy to be one of them. So either it gets there, or someone goes island hopping beyond the most popular spreadsheet product in history and defines the user interface and experience for Big Data.

Adapt or die, as they say.

Disclosure: Both IBM and Microsoft are RedMonk clients; Google is not.

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links for 2009-11-18

2009-11-18T08:32:13-08:00

Microsoft's Ray Ozzie: "Apps Don’t Make Your Phone Special" – Ray Ozzie – Gizmodo

disagree. i'm not going to get anything other than an iPhone until the MLB At Bat app is available on a competing platform. more, the volume of applications for the iPhone is an enormous selling point.

i think this is more how Ozzie would like to see the market than how it actually is.

(tags: rayozzie apps mobile microsoft itunes mlb atbat)

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Can One Bad Apple Ruin it for the Middle Men?

2009-11-16T13:27:04-08:00

sad iPod, originally uploaded by benjibot.

“Middle men exist to reduce the cost of getting a product from A to B, and as long as that cost is significant, they will be useful. However, the moment the middle man monopolizes the means of distribution, he becomes a gatekeeper, and creators can be made to fail not by the merits and popularity of their products, but by the whims and short-term interests of the gatekeeper.” – “On Middle Men,” Joe Hewitt

There are 474 words in Joe Hewitt’s call to action. Apple is not one of them. If anything, the omission speaks more loudly than a mention ever could have.

The backdrop of the piece is this: last week, Hewitt made the decision to hand off the development of the Facebook iPhone application to another developer. His reasoning was equal parts disappointed and realistic:

My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.

For those that might argue that this is a bluff – a futile attempt to influence Apple’s behavior by boycott – two things argue against it. One, Hewitt acknowledges that his decision will make effectively no difference on the popularity of the platform for developers. Two, he’s right.

If Android can avoid death by fragmentation, a Unix wars of its own making, it will be, in time, a credible alternative to the iPhone platform. Palm may be as well, if it can address its anemic hardware and its developer relations issues; certainly they have two of the best in the business in Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer for the latter. RIM will remain strong within the enterprise, but I’ve seen little to convince me that they get the consumer. As for Nokia, my view is that their present, at least in terms of marketshare, looks much brighter than their future.

Until one or more of the above can deliver a platform with the same polish and application volume that Apple has, however, they’re really just squabbling over second place. Not a close second.

Which makes the questions that Hewitt raised important. Not new, of course. This is how I described the App Store last February:

Apple seems to have figured this out in its iTunes store, which is succeeding wildly in spite of the fact that it’s governed by policies that are fundamentally broken at every level.

Nor was that exactly a revelation at the time. That iTunes has succeeded is a testament to just how impressive the device was designed initially and the power of the Apple brand.

Apple, for its part, doesn’t comment much on the application approval process. Perhaps believing, correctly, that in the face of the application store’s continued success, there’s no upside to a more candid stance.

This is all too bad. Not because it impacts my choice as an Apple customer and iPhone user. Not because it’s resulted in hundreds if not thousands of wasted hours from developers who find themselves indicted, like Josef K, for crimes that are never revealed to them.

It’s a shame because it could, by proxy, leave marketplaces as collateral damage.

Hewitt, to his credit, acknowledges that middle men can add value. And indeed they do, as I use them daily. As does anyone who uses apt, or Portage, or Yum. What is package management but a middle man, sitting in between me and the developer as it does.

One of Apple’s stated objections to a more open marketplace is the stability of the device. Which, in Apple’s defense, is a more credible point than is commonly acknowledged. Many of us will experiment with laptops and servers in ways that we would not with a phone, given the differences in the relative importance and substitutability between them.

But the perceived tension between a stable platform and less stringently vetted software need not exist. For all that it is a real problem, it is also a solved problem. Consider the Linux distributions’ approaches. Debian uses distributions, Ubuntu PPAs, Gentoo overlays overlays, and so on. Or, closer to home, there is the seriously relevant example of jailbroken iPhones. Which Apple, predictably, claimed were illegal.

Is it so difficult to imagine a world in which Apple could officially enable jailbroken applications with the caveat that support ends the minute that takes place? It shouldn’t be, but probably is.

The point here is as simple as it is obvious: Apple’s justifications are belied by the evidence, which indicates that the problem they are solving is in fact no problem at all. Which leaves their secretive and opaque application approval process as an artifact of their own culture of intense control, their codependent relationship with AT&T or a combination of the two. None of which consumers or developers should have to care about. Who’s actually in favor of the Permission Based Web?

Ultimately, Hewitt and I might differ on the potential value add of middlemen, because I am a firm believer in the value of marketplaces and centralized distribution. Never more so than after using the package management-less OS X, in fact.

But what we agree on, at least as far as I can tell, is that it would be a real shame if a bad Apple ruined the whole bunch because they were intent on preserving their monopoly on distribution.

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What’s in Store for 2010? A Few Predictions

2009-11-12T14:35:06-08:00

“The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.” – Peter Drucker

So let’s do some predictions, shall we? True, I dislike the entire business of prediction, close cousin that it is to guessing. Which I hate. But James’ excellent thoughts on what we might see in the year ahead got me thinking about what I’m anticipating.

Maybe we see over the hill imperfectly, but the following assertions are not without their substance either. Feel free to take them with a grain of salt, several grains, or not at all. We’ll see how we did a year from now.

One thing to keep in mind about our predictions: we’re looking a bit further out than, say, Gartner. Where they are predicting that cloud computing will a strategic technology for 2010, then, we instead consider that a given. So if you’re looking for predictions like, “open source will be a mainstream option,” you’ve come to the wrong place: we figure you know that already. It doesn’t mean that Gartner’s wrong, of course; merely that we’re having an entirely different conversation.

Cloud API Proliferation Will Become a Serious Problem

When I meet with cloud providers these days, the default answer to questions about the openness or lackthereof with respect to their software is “we have an open API.” But this is, unquestionably, the wrong answer for customers. It’s not that open APIs are bad, individually: far from it. You’d rather have one than not. But how are customers to manage them as they multiply? Cloud providers should be considering Kant’s Categorical Imperative:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Unsurprisingly, however, they are not. Which means that cloud API proliferation will reach new, frightening heights in the year ahead. Or maybe you want to individually review and compare the APIs as they iterate. Watch the Deltacloud project for traction as a result; platforms with an API compatibility story like Eucalyptus should benefit as well.

On a semi-related note, I expect IaaS to remain more popular than PaaS for 2010.

Collaboration Will Never Be the Same

Google Wave was quite a splash when it landed; Mozilla Raindrop far less so. Or so says Google Trends. But both will play an important role in the fundamental reshaping of the interfaces – and in the case of Wave, infrastructure – that we all use to collaborate in the year ahead. Nor will the impacts be limited to the early adopter market those products are aimed at. As James noted, Lotus sold 1M licenses of its Connections product in two weeks to six customers. The appetite for next generation collaboration toolsets is strong, whether we’re talking about Rogers’ innovators or laggards.

But all of that may end up being the least interesting trend we see from collaboration in 2010. Of potentially greater impact are those that go beyond the interface. Github, for example, strongly incents social coding and cross pollination in ways that change the way development is done. Offerings like Gist and Threadsy, meanwhile, take a business intelligence-like approach to email, attempting to both consolidate multiple streams and process the content algorithmically according to its inter-relation. Message from your boss? Important. Someone you hear from once every two months? Less so. Neither are ready for primetime, by my testing, but they point the way forward.

And collaboration will never be the same.

Data as Revenue

I’ve written about this fairly extensively already, so I won’t belabor the point. But we’re going to see datasets increasingly recognized as a serious, balance sheet-worthy asset. Twitter pointed the way with its Bing and Google deals, and then Infochimps reinforced that value by making available, commercially, data they harvested from everyone’s favorite micro-blogging service.

This will continue. I’m fully in agreement with IBM’s Steve Mills when he says that we’re “moving into an era of information led transformation.” As margins slim and economies continue to stagnate, enterprises of all sizes will increasingly turn their eyes to data based assets, both for their latent commercial value as well as for improved decision making.

As a result, fear and concern over the privacy implications will spike.

Democratization of Big Data

Yes, Facebook and its 24 terabytes of new content per day is an outlier. But what about the individual developer that wants to make sense of the 1.7 GB Twitter dataset that Infochimps is making available? OpenOffice.org, as I can personally report, doesn’t want anything to do with it.

Fortunately, the democratization of big data is well underway. Hadoop puts MapReduce within reach, Pig puts Hadoop within reach, and with the Cloudera desktop you even have a nice, shiny browser based GUI. Throw in Amazon, and you have as many machines as you could possibly want. We’re still a little light in the front end space, with the ability to visualize the data lagging far behind the ability to process it, but that will come. Maybe in the next year, maybe not.

But either way, the ability to work on big data will increasingly be available to any business, large or small. Democractization of Big Data, commence.

Developer Target Fragmentation Will Accelerate

Between cloud fabrics, programming language proliferation, mobile application development and the spike in development framework popularity, development targets have been fragmenting for several years now. We are more or less in full retreat from the one time promise of write once, run anywhere as an industry. I see nothing on the horizon that will throttle or even slow this trend; if anything, the increasing volume of cloud platforms and the surge in interest in mobile development will accelerate this trend.

This has significant implications for purveyors of middleware, application development tools and cloud platforms, but also for those charged with setting enterprise technology standards. The CIO’s job is going to get harder in 2010, because picking a winner from the myriad language, framework and platform options will be much more difficult than picking a safe option.

It’s All About the Analytics

Flowing Data, a blog run by PhD candidate Nathan Yau, is one of my favorites. The visualization of data is as much an art as a science, and there are few practitioners more talented. The challenge of taking data and hammering it into a form that conveys meaning and supports conclusions is, of course, an age old challenge. But the tools at our disposal are getting better, fast.

Consider the simple analytics that are available, for free, to virtually anyone today: Google Analytics for the web, Feedburner for feeds, Bit.ly for links, About:Me for the browser, Flickr Stats for pictures and so on. Emerging services like PostRank will even extend that value by consolidating various streams into a meaningful, single glance assessment of performance.

I’ve never subscribed to the idea that only what can be measured can be managed – open source, in particular, belies that claim – but there’s no debate that metrics can be immensely important in maximizing returns, and to an extent, profits.

We’re going to see analytics become, as James said, ubiquitous to the extent that they’re not already. Two projects to keep your eyes on in this space, both from IBM: the chronically underleveraged ManyEyes, and the Hadoop-backed M2. Both could – should, in my view – be important at advancing the state of analytics forward in the next year.

Marketplaces Will Be Table Stakes

Why has it taken so long for the idea of marketplaces to catch on? Don’t look at me; I’ve been banging on about them since 2006 or so. The equation has long seemed like a no brainer to me: developers and ISVs get a centralized channel and wider audience, platforms get a wider ecosystem, and customers get a more efficient discovery and acquisition process – at a minimum.

Whatever the initial reluctance, that’s over. Two plus billion Apple iTunes store downloads later, mobile players are falling all over themselves to roll out marketplaces to compete. Canonical, sponsors of the Ubuntu project, are moving towards their own software store (though, regrettably, it still doesn’t include developers as I’ve hoped for). Amazon, meanwhile, has most of the pieces it would need to sell apps, and a sustained rate of innovation that is more or less unmatched in the industry at present.

What does 2010 hold, then? Marketplaces, and a lot of them. Mobile is quickly becoming staturated, web apps and the desktop are probably next, and data marketplaces may ultimately eclipse them all. If you want to play next year, bring your marketplace. Or go home.

New Languages to Watch

Seems like we have a new hot programming language every year. Some are in it for the long haul, some fade away, and some linger in between like the undead. I’m not prepared at this point to call the winners for the next year, but two that a.) might lend themselves well to cloud and cloud-like environments and b.) are receiving disproportionately more attention relative to their erstwhile competition are Clojure and Go. The former is essentially Lisp reborn on top of the JVM, while Go borrows from C syntaticly but adds in modern language conveniences such as garbage collection without taking too much of a hit performance-wise (Go is 20-30% slower than C/C++, reportedly).

It seems unlikely that either will make significant inroads at the expense of the currently popular compiled languages such as C#/Java or the dynamic alternatives (PHP/Python/etc), but the level of attention – and the people paying attention – distinguish them from other languages aimed at concurrency like Erlang and Haskell.

NoSQL Will Bid for Mainstream Acceptance

Maybe the NoSQL label is a misnomer, and maybe Michael Stonebraker is right that NoSQL has nothing to do with SQL. Either way, I am not ready to predict that the NoSQL moniker will retired in favor of, say, AltDB.

What I will claim, however, is that projects in this space will individually and collectively make serious bids for mainstream acceptance. Cassandra, CouchDB, InfiniDB, MongoDB, Riak, Tokyo Cabinet and the like – different as they all are from one another – will position themselves not as relational replacements but complementary technologies that solve a different set of problems.

While I don’t believe the bid for mainstream acceptance will be successful generally – enterprises are too wedded to the RDBMS model, the tooling for the NoSQL projects is generally weak, etc – they will find a fertile ground in areas illsuited to the traditional relational, row-based model.

So that’s my nine. As a bonus, five predictions for free and open source software:

FOSS Predictions

Usage of dual licensing will continue to decline, in part because of the Oracle and EU dispute over MySQL
FOSS advocates will increasingly turn their attention from licensing to the related mechanisms of copyright and trademark
Permissive licensing will continue to gain at the expense of reciprocal licensing, albeit slowly
The value of project code will be eclipsed, in a few cases, by the data the project generates
Open source, building from its mainstream acceptance, will emerge as the most credible alternative to proprietary cloud and mobile platforms

But that’s just what I’m seeing. What are your predictions for 2010?

Update: Nat Torkington’s done an excellent follow up that looks at the opportunity side of the above: highly recommend you go read it.

Disclosure: Basho (Riak), Canonical, Cloudera, IBM, Oracle, Sun (MySQL) are RedMonk customers. Apple, Google and Mozilla are not.

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links for 2009-11-11

2009-11-11T17:03:31-08:00

Recommendation against Python? – Unladen Swallow | Google Groups

interesting, if unsurprising, commentary on the role of Python w/in Google

(tags: google java programming python performance scalability architecture c++ via:rafe)
EC2StartersGuide – Community Ubuntu Documentation

just what it says: very nice piece of documentation

(tags: amazon api s3 ec2 aws documentation cloud install howto ami)
Keith Bergelt: The Case for Market Based Patent Reform – CNBC Guest Blog – CNBC.com

"The foregoing dynamics underscore the need for legislative, regulatory and judicial patent reform coupled with market-led patent reform. Absent a joint market, industry and government effort that is comprehensive and seeks to resolve all of the challenges posed by today’s patent system, the result of legislative reform will be suboptimal."

(tags: patents system legislativereview regulation oin software)
Introducing InfiniDB from Calpont | infinidb.org

"What happens when you marry a column-oriented database that’s modular in design, can scale both up and out, with open source? You get Calpont’s InfiniDB."

(tags: opensource mysql bigdata columnstore column infinidb calpont persistence database nosql)
MOA – Massive Online Analysis

interesting big data related project

(tags: java programming bigdata datamining streaming analytics distributed framework moa weka via:josh)
The Go Programming Language

what everyone is talking about, seemingly. close to C/C++ speed, but with fewer barriers to entry, simplified concurrency and garbage collection.

(tags: go opensource google programming C++ c language concurrent)
Comparing Mongo DB and Couch DB – MongoDB

Mongo compares itself to Couch: two next generation database options

(tags: couchdb mongodb database cloud performance development scalability sysadmin nosql comparisons)
Dynamo: A flawed architecture – Part I « Joydeep Sen Sarma’s blog

pushback to Dynamo

(tags: dynamo amazon scalability architecture distributed computing scaling nosql key-value eventual consistency)
Cassandra: Open Source Bigtable + Dynamo

good presentation on the Cassandra roots and approach

(tags: cassandra bigtable dynamo nosql database)
Blogging Roller: Trip report: NoSQL meetup at ApacheCon

Dave's report from the NoSQL meetup @ Apacheon

(tags: apachecon nosql davejohnson databases meetup)

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The Startup’s Guide to Working With RedMonk

2009-11-11T12:52:22-08:00

At RedMonk, we’ve been fortunate to work with a wide variety of companies over the past seven years, ranging from two person startups to some of the largest businesses in the world. Given this diversity in our clientbase – which, it’s worth noting, we strive for both in our model and otherwise – it’s to be expected that some of our potential clients are less than clear on what it’s like to work with analyst firms in general, and RedMonk specifically. The big firms, after all, have entire teams dedicated to working with analysts. Smaller firms and startups, on the other hand, tend to be understandably fuzzy on what analysts do, let alone how to work with them effectively.

The past few weeks, all of us at RedMonk have been answering most or all of these questions as a bunch of new folks come in the door, so I thought it would be worth taking a minute to put it down in writing. We’re happy to answer any other questions you might have, of course, but these should give you a fair idea of what it’s like to work with us. Herewith, then, the Startup’s Guide to Working with RedMonk, or Everything You Wanted to Know About Working With RedMonk, But Were Afraid to Ask.

Q: What is an analyst?
A: There are lots of different definitions, and lots of different models. At the most basic level at RedMonk, we take in a wealth of data from blogs to research papers to conferences to conversations to Twitter to quantitative research to application testing, process it all extracting conclusions that we call analysis. Some of that makes its way on to the blogs where anyone can read it, some of it is used tactically and strategically on behalf of clients and some of it just rattles around in our brains waiting for the right outlet.

Q: Couldn’t I do that work myself?
A: Possibly, depending on your training and contacts. But it’s a full time job. Would you rather spend your time on your products or doing hours and hours of research? You could probably also learn to do your own accounting, but do you want to?

Q: Who do analysts work with, typically?
A: There are many different markets, but three of the biggest are a.) end users (enterprises, governments, etc), b.) vendors, and c.) financial analysts.

Q: Why should we work with an analyst?
A: Ask ten startups and you’ll get ten different answers. Ultimately, whether you decide to work with an analyst or not will depend on whether you think you’ll benefit from an informed set of eyes that’s external to your organization. What we find is that most organizations large and small have trouble, at times, seeing the forest for the trees. It’s difficult to retain an industry-wide perspective when you’re working all day, every day on your product. A big part of our job is providing that perspective: telling you where you’re good, where you’re bad, the same for your competitors, and where there are unleveraged opportunities. We’re your radar, your devil’s advocate, your conscience and your network in one convenient package.

Q: How is RedMonk different from other analyst firms?
A: Well, from what we hear some of the other firms have differing opinions on this subject But here are just a few of the ways that I think are important:

Bottom Up:
At RedMonk, each of us has – in some way – lived Billy Marshall’s dictum,”The CIO is the Last to Know.” That’s not to say the role’s not important: as the one writing the checks, CIOs remain a key stakeholder. But they are no longer, in our view, the primary decision makers when it comes to technology adoption. Technologies like Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Eclipse, and Firefox didn’t reach mainstream acceptance because of CIOs; they are where they are because they’re good technology and lots of people used them. When adoption hits a certain critical mass, CIO approval becomes a fait accompli.

So we at RedMonk tend to spend more time focusing on the adopters than the CIO, because we think that in this day and age, they’re the make or break audience.
Coverage:
At RedMonk, we are generalists rather than specialists. If you’re looking for someone to build you a product scorecard comparing every last feature between products A and B, then, we’ll happily direct you elsewhere. If you’re looking for analysts that have an understanding of all of the pieces that might go into, say, cloud platforms, from the virtualization technologies to the operating system to the database to the programming language to the development framework to the tooling, you’ve come to the right place. As the hard boundaries between technologies – be they individual software products, or how same interact with storage, hardware, and networking – it’s our view that analysts need to have a broad skillset to provide good coverage. Sure, we have areas of specialty: Cote spends the most time on IT Management for example, and I tend to be the point person for free and open source software questions, but we all have the wide beats necessary to answer complicated questions.
Independence:
Simply put, as James said this morning, you can buy our thinking but not our opinion. What does this mean? In simple terms, it means that you can’t pay us to say nice things about you. There are analyst firms that do that, and we’re happy to point you in their direction. We’re a small firm, and our integrity is a big part of who we are. So that means no RedMonk-branded, commissioned whitepapers, period. If folks want to buy them after we’ve written them, great. But we won’t write complimentary whitepapers for cash. Not just because it’s – in our view – a dishonest practice; we also don’t think they’re high value for readers.
Open Source:
As the home page advertises, we are built on and for open source. We believe in open source. We’ve covered it all along. We practice it ourselves, by publishing our content free of paywalls under Creative Commons licenses. We give back, by doing what we can in going to bat for various open source communities both publicly and behind the scenes, writing up open source HowTo’s, commissioning plugins like Progressive License and building out sites like FOSS FAQ.
No Barriers to Entry:
Because we at RedMonk preach heavily about lowering barriers to entry, we’ve tried to make them as low as possible for startups. Want to work with us? We have a standard $5K proposal available in PDF form that everyone signs: saves time on negotiations. Want to schedule a consulting session, purchase a screencast, or setup a speaking engagement? We’ll give you an hourly figure you can choose to debit from your bank of hours, a link to book our time and we’re done: no hassling over “seats”, or “web rights” or “lifespan.” Want to know what we’ve been researching lately but don’t have the time to follow our blogs? We have a bi-weekly newsletter that will keep you up to speed.

We try to be easy to work with, and we think we are. If you think we’re not, just let us know how to fix it and we’ll do our best.

Q: Aren’t analysts the ones predicting things that have been obvious for years?
A: Well, we’ve tended to be a bit ahead of the curve. And some folks that we respect have seemed to agree. We were out front with our coverage (not to mention adoption) of open source, but let’s take something less inevitable. Five years ago, we were arguing for REST, four years ago we were talking about dynamic languages, non-relational datastores (think NoSQL), MySQL’s ubiquity, and the promise of SaaS, and three years ago we called Amazon’s EC2 a Big Deal. Seems like those have all been pretty decent guesses, and not obvious at the time. Our timing can be off, which is why we say “we can tell you what will happen, we just can’t tell you when,” but overall I think our radar is pretty reliable.

As it should be, because it’s all about listening to the makers.

Q: Who works with RedMonk? What’s your client list look like?
A: Check that out at any time here.

Q: How does RedMonk make money? Don’t you give everything away?
A: We give away content on our blogs, yes, because we believe giving back is the right thing to do and because the resulting commentary improves our analysis. But this in no way precludes our commercial opportunities; if anything, it dramatically expands them. Think of it this way: when we put out a piece on a new product or technology, we’ve only got a thousand words – three or four thousand, max – to explore the implications. Many of our clients engage us on subjects we’ve already written up to understand how what we’ve written about affects their respective businesses.

Q: Does RedMonk keep secrets?
A: Yes. As we’ve said before, many times, if you can’t keep secrets, you can’t do this job. We’re trusted with secrets every week; from the trivial to the financially material. As far as I’m aware, we’ve had zero complaints on our ability to protect the information we’re entrusted with.

That said, customers need to understand that secrecy is a tradeoff. If you give us a presentation of twenty NDA slides and four that are public, we’re likely to consider the whole thing confidential just to be safe. As long as you’re comfortable knowing that excessive confidentiality will negatively impact our ability to tell your story, we’re happy to keep your secrets.

Q: Even if you keep our information confidential, should I be concerned that you work with our competitor?
A: We get this question a lot from folks new to working with analysts, and the best answer I can provide is this: just about every one of our customers competes, in some form or fashion, with another customer of ours. If we didn’t protect their private information and strategies, we wouldn’t be in business today. It’s that simple.

Q: How do we manage the analyst relationships: can we pick who we work with?
A: Absolutely. Again, we want to be easy to work with. The only caveat here is scheduling; because we’re all busy, if you have an urgent need and the analyst you want is travelling, you’ll probably have to either wait or work with whoever’s available.

Q: What do we get for our money?
A: A number of services:

Press Services: media handling and supporting quotes for releases
Investor Relations: market and product education for angel/VC/etc
Newsletter Subscription: access to client only bi-weekly research digests
Network Services: identification and introduction to prospects, community or partner contacts
Consulting Hours: may be used for strategy, messaging/marketing testing, screencasting, podcasting, speaking engagements, etc.
Preferred Pricing: for rich/multimedia content, including audio and video (demos, executive and developer, interviews, etc)
Interactive Briefings: briefings are always free of charge with RedMonk, but customers get real-time feedback and insight
Recruiting Assistance: wherever possible, we are happy to broker connections from clients to available talent in our network

Apart from the consulting hours, which are preset at 10, you get 12 months of service for the contract. So if we end up talking to the press for 20 hours over the year – don’t laugh, that’s happened – it’s all included.

Q: I just need you for one specific project – can you work on an a la carte basis?
A: We can. It usually ends up being pricier to bill by the hour, but if that’s what’s easiest for you, we can figure something out.

Q: Does it cost me anything to brief you?
A: Never has, never will. Pay for play is a model that frankly should have died years ago. We can take a higher volume of briefings from clients, but everyone has the right to talk to us – provided it’s a relevant product – irrespective of whether they are a customer or not.

Q: What’s the first thing you do with new clients?
A: A kickoff call, generally. We’ll all get on the phone, do introductions to people and technology, and talk about what we see as opportunities and what you need. This doesn’t count against your time, of course.

Q: How do we best work with you?
A: Keep in touch. The more you talk to us, the more service you get.

Q: What kinds of things can you do for us?
A: Varies widely, of course, and depends on what you need. Is your organization engineering focused? We might discuss market segmentation, community outreach, and consider doing a screen or podcast to help educate about your product. Have the business and sales sides under control? We might talk about technical trends that are or will affect your product direction and strategy. Early to market? We’ll help you match your featureset to business problems and reduce the barriers to entry for potential customers. Have a product widely adopted, but problems in customer conversion and revenue? We’ll look at your business model and compare it to what we’ve seen be successful, as well as trying to help you identify unleveraged assets.

And so on. There are a lot of ways we can help be your eyes and ears, your checkpoint, and a broker for conversations you’d like to have.

Q: Where are you all located?
A: I’m based out of Portland, Maine, James is in London, and Cote’s in Austin, Texas. We also have a GreenMonk line of business covering all things green, and that’s led by Tom Raftery who works out of Seville. Marcia, who handles all of our operations, is also based in Maine.

Q: If I want to engage, how do I go about it?
A: Drop a note to sales at redmonk.com or marcia at redmonk.com and we’ll get you set up. It’s that easy

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links for 2009-11-10

2009-11-10T17:02:54-08:00

Synchronize Tomboy Notes with Dropbox – Starry Hope Productions

i'm doing exactly this. if you try it, make sure you've synced from the master directory first: you can't sync against just a regular Tomboy directory. also, you might want to remove any "conflict" files maintained by Dropbox.

(tags: tomboy linux sync dropbox)
Open-source Hadoop powers Tennessee smart grid | Software, Interrupted – CNET News

Hadoop in the real world. good piece by Dave.

(tags: daverosenberg hadoop tva bigdata smartgrid)
82 Billion Objects in Amazon S3 – All Things Distributed

"When looking at the graph keep in mind that the first 4 markers are a year apart, but the last one only 6 months."

(tags: amazon cloud s3 webservices stats)
blog.reddit — what's new on reddit: Moving to the cloud

"Last week we also decommissioned the last of our physical servers. We are now operating our entire website "in the cloud" as the kids would say. Specifically, we are using Amazon Web Services. If all went well, you didn't notice a thing."

(tags: reedit amazon ec2 aws s3 cloudcomputing cloud)

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links for 2009-11-09

2009-11-09T17:04:54-08:00

thefemgeek: AT&T's City-By-City Plan To Up Wireless Coverage

profiling is not a bad idea, but i'm not sure it's going to help much in SF, where they pretty much need two or three times their currently available bandwidth

(tags: at&t network bandwidth capacityplanning sanfrancisco iphone)
Korean HBP Reaction: Seeing is Believing | The Dugout Doctors

i can't say that i've ever seen anything remotely like this. it defies description, and is unquestionably the strangest thing i've seen in baseball.

yes, weirder than Randy Johnson vaporizing that dove, or the Izzy Alcantara take-out-the-catcher charging strategy.

(tags: baseball korea weird via:jsimonds)
Safe as Milk » Blog Archive » The trough of disillusionment for Ubuntu?

Dave on the expectations for Ubuntu and what they mean?

(tags: ubuntu expectations troughofdisillusionment daveneary)
Brian "Krow" Aker's Idle Thoughts – Amazon RDS, MySQL, Hmm?

"Kudos to Amazon. Having them run a database service won't provide the "high end" sort of usage that keeps the folks who tune databases in business, but there certainly are a lot of users for whom this type of service will work just fine.

At the very least this service will certainly up the ante for others in the MySQL hosting business.

Providing services like RDS and application is the future for cloud companies. It will be interesting to see what they will come up with next.

I'm surprised Memcached hasn't been done as a service yet, but perhaps that is why I have those SASL patches sitting in my inbox. " – likewise

(tags: mysql rds amazon hosting cloud memcached)
Marco.org – Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

"I know you’re double-charging your advertisers for the same story by artificially inflating your pageview count. It’s just like the old auto-frame-refresh trick, but this one’s better because most of the ad networks haven’t banned it yet. That’s their problem, right?…But it doesn’t really work as well as you had hoped because only a tiny percentage of viewers will actually read page two. You know that, but you don’t care, because you won’t give up a chance to make a few extra cents. Who cares if it annoys the crap out of that tiny slice of your audience? Who are they, anyway? The people who actually read your content thoroughly instead of skimming the headline and moving on? That can’t possibly be your most important audience segment — they’re just the most involved and attentive. Repeat customers. You already have their “eyeballs” that you can sell to your real customers. And these dupes get their eyeballs double-counted. What a steal!"

(tags: websites pagination advertising worstpractices)
Boston.com Mobile

""The beauty of releasing the data is it frees us from having to develop the applications ourselves,'' said Chris Dempsey, an assistant secretary in the Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation. "That's expensive and something that we're not very good at.''"

(tags: mobile bostonglobe mbta open data corecompetency)

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Worst Practices in Mobile Development: The Boston Globe and Mobile Redirection

2009-11-09T13:10:31-08:00

First, a bit of background: for almost twenty years, I’ve been a reader of the Boston Globe. In print when it was available across the street from my off campus housing in college, online these days. Mostly for the sports section, it’s true, but as a fan of the city as well as the Red Sox, I’ll consume a lot more of the paper when I have the time. Witness stories like this one which I just bookmarked this morning.

Given that history, then, you might understand why it pains me to use the Globe as my example of how to do mobile wrong. To be honest, I could have picked a dozen or more media properties I care little for to make the point. But it’s precisely because I care about the Globe and its content that their mobile redirection is so irritating, and thus making its way here.

So, the problem. For reasons that are still not clear to me, the Boston Globe and a slew of other sites practice rigid mobile redirection. For a subset of handsets – namely the the more handicapped mobile platforms out there – this is not a bad decision. The pitiful browser on my old LG CU320, for example, would probably catch fire if it had to parse the bloat that is a regular Boston.com page. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the iPhone, however, as just about anyone who’s used one can tell you, is that it is the real internet. Less Flash, ok, but apart from that it’s the real deal. And yet the Boston Globe, in its infinite wisdom, chooses to redirect me not to the stories I want to read, but their (crippled) mobile homepage. Let me show you what I mean.

This morning, like any other morning, I picked up my iPhone and began my stroll through the morning’s feeds on Google Reader. Chad Finn, perhaps my favorite of the Globe writers these days, had a new column up. The entry looked like this.

Chad Finn and Bill James? Together in the same post? Doesn’t get any better, I thought, and clicked on the “See original” link. Which should, in a perfect or even mediocre world, take me to that column, AKA the one I want to read and the one that I specifically asked to see. That’s what we in the technology world would call the “Expected result.”

What was the actual result? They redirected me to their poorly designed and rendered mobile homepage, which looked like this.

Where was the Chad Finn column I wanted? Damned if I know; didn’t see it in three clicks and then I gave up looking. Here’s the Home: Sports: Red Sox page. Do you see it in there anywhere? I sure don’t.

But let’s assume that I would be willing to navigate through the additional clicks it would take to track down the story I thought I was being pointed to: what would I get when I was there? A fragmented and disjointed “mobile” version of the content I’m looking for.

For example, take a look at the story segment below. Notice anything odd?

No? Try comparing it against the full version, pictured below.

What’s the difference? About a paragraph, it seems. The mobile version of the story is missing the introduction of the next section, as is often the case. The Globe’s mobile version isn’t just overaggressive in its mobile browser sniffing, then; once you get there, you’re getting only part of the story.

If anyone from the Globe reads this, then, I’d ask you to please, please, PLEASE stop directing capable mobile browsers like the iPhone’s to the mobile site. And if for some unknown reason you can’t do that, please a.) redirect requests to the actual article and b.) make sure that the mobile version is the actual story, rather than a version short the odd paragraph or three.

With the fate of newspapers in general seemingly writing on the wall, I’m aware that everyone has their opinions on how to “fix” things. I do, certainly: it’s all about leveraging usage data. I make no promises here, however, that fixing the mobile experience will cure all the ills that have beset the Boston Globe. All I can guarantee is that fixing the above would make any of its iPhone using customers happier, and that can’t be a bad thing.

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