Conundrum

Node.js and the JavaScript Age

2011-06-28T06:59:00.003+05:30

"The JavaScript age is about event streams. Modern web pages are not pages, they are event-driven applications through which information moves. The core content vessel of the web — the document object model — still exists, but not as HTML markup. The DOM is an in-memory, efficiently-encoded data structure generated by JavaScript.

LAMP architectures are dead because few web applications want to ship full payloads of markup to the client in response to a small event; they want to update just a fragment of the DOM, using JavaScript. AJAX achieved this, but when your server-side LAMP templates are 10% HTML and 90% JavaScript, it’s clear that you’re doing it wrong."

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[developerWorks] HTML5 fundamentals, Part 1

2011-05-25T10:02:00.004+05:30

"HTML5 reflects the monumental changes in the way you now do business on the web and in the cloud. This article is the first in a four-part series designed to spotlight changes in HTML5, beginning with the new tags and page organization and providing high-level information on web page design, the creation of forms, the use and value of the APIs, and the creative possibilities that Canvas provides." more>>

The first in a multipart series, so you might want to bookmark this link. This particular instalment talks about some of the new tags that replace the heavily overused div tag. Looking forward to part 2.

Run multiple Node.js instances in one machine

2011-05-24T09:59:00.002+05:30

If you want to run multiple versions of node.js in the same machine, for testing and/or dev work, try nvm. The steps to get up and running are simple.

git clone git://github.com/creationix/nvm.git ~/.nvm [Clones nvm from the git repo]
. ~/.nvm/nvm.sh [Activates nvm]
nvm install [ie: "nvm install v0.4.1"]

Once you have several node versions running, there are a few handy commands to keep track of them.

nvm ls [Lists node.js versions installed in your machine]
nvm use [ie: "nvm use v0.4.1"]
nvm deactivate [Deactivates nvm if you don't need it]

Thank you Cliff for the find :)

It's been a while ...

2011-05-12T09:44:00.001+05:30

... since I wrote something here. Quite a few things happened since my last post, that kept me away from writing. First, I sat for my final MBA semester exam last October (phew.. and got through with a ... wait for it ... 'Merit'). Immediately after that, I decided to migrate down under (that's Australia, in case you wonder).

So I resigned from my duties as Technical Lead & Product Manager @WSO2 and, by the end of last November, arrived in Melbourne. A new country, meeting new people, making new friends and ... after a few months' vacation enjoying the Melbourne summer, accepted an offer from Shine Technologies in March.

That's a quick 411 of things that kept me away from writing from the last post till now. What's keeping me busy these days are (a lot of) Node.js and Express along with good old CouchDB. All very RESTy and awesome.

Now... if only I can get back into the habit of writing actual posts instead of tweeting links from my phone......

UPDATE: Blogger decided to die the very day I posted this and forgot to restore a few comments added to the post. Just saying... that it wasn't me. If you wanna do a driveby target blogger.. aight?

Security Lessons Learned From The Diaspora Launch

2010-09-24T07:49:00.001+05:30

Security Lessons Learned From The Diaspora Launch: MicroISV on a Shoestring

The team is manifestly out of their depth with regards to web application security, and it is almost certainly impossible for them to gather the required expertise and still hit their timetable for public release in a month. You might believe in the powers of OSS to gather experts (or at least folks who have shipped a Rails app, like myself) to Diaspora’s banner and ferret out all the issues. You might also believe in magic code-fixing fairies. Personally, I’d be praying for the fairies because if Diaspora is dependent on the OSS community their users are screwed. There are, almost certainly, exploits as severe as the above ones left in the app, and there almost certainly will be zero-day attacks by hackers who would like to make the headline news. “Facebook Competitor Diaspora Launches; All Users Data Compromised Immediately” makes for a smashing headline in the New York Times, wouldn’t you say?

Nice post. Although the programming language used in Diaspora is Ruby, the vulnerabilities can pop up in any web application targeted at a large end-user community.

The Biz School Chronicles :: On Enonomies of Scale and Invention vs Innovation

2010-09-23T22:01:00.003+05:30

Today, a friend shared an interesting article. Titled "The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart", its essence was the story how Jim Wier, CEO of the lawn-equipment company Simplicity stopped selling Snapper branded lawn mowers via Wal-Mart.

"In 2002, Jim Wier's company, Simplicity, was buying Snapper, a complementary company with a 50-year heritage of making high-quality residential and commercial lawn equipment. Wier had studied his new acquisition enough to conclude that continuing to sell Snapper mowers through Wal-Mart stores was, as he put it, "incompatible with our strategy. And I felt I owed them a visit to tell them why we weren't going to continue to sell to them."
Selling Snapper lawn mowers at Wal-Mart wasn't just incompatible with Snapper's future--Wier thought it was hazardous to Snapper's health. Snapper is known in the outdoor-equipment business not for huge volume but for quality, reliability, durability. A well-maintained Snapper lawn mower will last decades; many customers buy the mowers as adults because their fathers used them when they were kids. But Snapper lawn mowers are not cheap, any more than a Viking range is cheap. The value isn't in the price, it's in the performance and the longevity."

This looks like a case study for puritans, correct? Quality over quantity; "value isn't in the price, it's in the performance and longevity". Honestly, I think this is a bit naive in a business perspective. You see, the same article explains the prices of other lawn mowers as well. The ones who think value, in-fact, is in the price. When I read that part, I couldn't help but wonder whether Jim Wier (the apparent hero according to this article) was making a mistake.

"You can buy a lawn mower at Wal-Mart for $99.96, and depending on the size and location of the store, there are slightly better models for every additional $20 bill you're willing to put down--priced at $122, $138, $154, $163, and $188. That's six models of lawn mowers below $200. Mind you, in some Wal-Marts you literally cannot see what you are buying; there are no display models, just lawn mowers in huge cardboard boxes.
The least expensive Snapper lawn mower--a 19-inch push mower with a 5.5-horsepower engine--sells for $349.99 at full list price. Even finding it discounted to $299, you can buy two or three lawn mowers at Wal-Mart for the cost of a single Snapper.
If you know nothing about maintaining a mower, Wal-Mart has helped make that ignorance irrelevant: At even $138, the lawn mowers at Wal-Mart are cheap enough to be disposable. Use one for a season, and if you can't start it the next spring (Wal-Mart won't help you out with that), put it at the curb and buy another one. That kind of pricing changes not just the economics at the low end of the lawn-mower market, it changes expectations of customers throughout the market."

This is where economies of scale come into play. By manufacturing lawn mowers in large numbers, Jim Wier's competitors were able to bring prices significantly down. So cheap that a lawn mover is now a disposable item, with little perceived value in the eyes of customers. Where's "longevity" in this picture? The market will eventually move towards "Use one for a season, and if you can't start it the next spring, put it at the curb and buy another one". In this new market, how can Snapper lawn mowers survive? With diminishing revenues and shareholder value, they will eventually be vulnerable enough for a takeover. That was my initial thought while reading the article. Apparently that's exactly what has happened. When reading the comments section, I came across the following ...

"Not long after this article was written, Snapper was bought by Briggs and
Stratton Power Group. Briggs and Stratton also make Murray and Brute
lawn mowers, the two brands sold nationally in all wal-marts. hopes
this adds some perspective people. economoy's of scale, whether
walmarts or another companys like briggs and strattons will always win
out. thats capitalism for you...
Francis Manning01/31/2010 09:02 PM"

Another example that came to mind was Sun Microsystems vs Oracle. In addition to economies of scale, Sun's demise is a good example how innovation trumps invention always in the business world. So here's the story (I fondly recall this as I come closer to the final semester exams of b-school). One day a lecturer asked "What's the difference between Invention and Innovation?". Since no one else seemed to be volunteering, I gave an answer (I can't remember it today, which I consider as a good thing). The lecturer took a long hard look at me and replied "Now think like an MBA and try again". I couldn't at the time, and according to him, "Invention is the formulation of new ideas for products or processes, while Innovation is all about the practical application of new inventions into marketable products or services". That's exactly where Sun failed and Oracle keeps winning. Sun has(/had?) James Gosling the "inventor" of Java and a platoon of "Computer Scientists". But did they innovate? It seems not. Oracle doesn't seem to have superstar computer scientists (well.. other than Bob Miner of course). You know what they DO have? a leadership team with great business acumen and a sales force on steroids (If I remember correctly Larry Elison has a sales background). Apparently Oracle had generated more revenue by practically applying Java than Sun could ever dream of.

"The objective of a firm is to maximize its value to its shareholders. Value is represented by the market price of the company’s common stock, which, in turn, is a reflection of the firm’s investment, financing, and dividend decisions."

If you want to play the game, you better learn the rules. Otherwise you can always run a non-profit. But you won't be able to employ James Goslings of the world then. Because the pay cut, apparently, was one of the reasons he quit after the Oracle acquisition (read that story here). Oh the irony...

Creating Shazam in Java

2010-09-18T07:29:00.001+05:30

"Shazam is an application which you can use to analyse/match music. When you install it on your phone, and hold the microphone to some music for about 20 to 30 seconds, it will tell you which song it is.

When I first used it it gave me a magical feeling. “How did it do that!?”. And even today, after using it a lot, it still has a bit of magical feel to it.
Wouldn’t it be great if we can program something of our own that gives that same feeling? That was my goal for the past weekend." Read the complete post here

A nice experiment. The author got into trouble for patent infringement. But that's expected I guess :)

Re-targeting Technology - "The Pants That Stalked Me on the Web"

2010-09-08T22:41:00.001+05:30

The Pants That Stalked Me on the Web - Advertising Age - DigitalNext

"I surfed over to my favorite apparel website, Zappos, now a part of Amazon.

After a few clicks, Zappos' recommendation engine went to work and started offering me the selections that people who looked at the same shorts I did ultimately bought -- a cool idea and a feature that has been useful to me in the past.

Then, I abandoned the search and did something else. That's when the weirdness started.

In the five days since, those recommendations have been appearing just about everywhere I've been on the web, including MSNBC, Salon, CNN.com and The Guardian. The ad scrolls through my Zappos recommendations: Hurley, Converse by John Varvatos, Quicksilver, Rip Curl, Volcom. Whatever. At this point I've started to actually think I never really have to go back to Zappos to buy the shorts -- no need, they're following me."

That story might sound creepy at first. But I find the technology both fascinating and a great tool for marketers. Have a look at Criteo, who are behind the technology. Here's how it works.

This is like AdWords on steroids... and marketers should definitely see better ROI. Because you already know the prospect has shown interest, as opposed to just randomly displaying ads based on the content he's currently browsing. And user stories such as the one above prove that the technology works in the real world ;)

What Big Brands Are Spending on Google

2010-09-06T23:34:00.001+05:30

What Big Brands Are Spending on Google - Advertising Age - Digital

"The data obtained by Ad Age includes huge brands such as GM, Walt Disney, Eastman Kodak and BMW, which appear to have spent less than $500,000 in June. Tech rival Apple spent just under $1 million on search during the month, as did chip maker Intel.

Among Google's biggest spenders are businesses that depend on search traffic, including those that resell AdWords or simply buy Google traffic to resell to their own advertisers, including Hungry Machine, which does business under the name Living Social, which spent $2.4 million in June, and Yellowpages.com, which spent $1.2 million.

As a snapshot, it's also remarkable that Google's biggest advertisers, big monthly spenders like AT&T, Apollo Group and Amazon, individually accounted for less than 1% of Google's U.S. revenue in June. The top 10 advertisers in the document collectively accounted for just 5% of Google's U.S. revenue during the month."

According to AdAge, the data is from a leaked google document. The values in the graph are just for the month of June!

An Oscar Winning Software?

2010-09-05T10:47:00.001+05:30

Pixar's RenderMan® | Showcase

"The challenge of shading food for Ratatouille was to work with a stylized look that fits into our world, yet is still readable and recognizable as something appealing to eat. We, as humans, have a built-in sensory system to know what looks edible to our eyes and stomach. Finding that acceptable (and tasty) appearence was the main focus. To achieve this, we used subtle illumination techniques that became a general approach for a variety of objects. Here we will study a brief technical overview, followed by descriptions of different concepts, techniques and systems to achieve the look."

I've been reading iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business for a while now. Well, with work, studies and other stuff, it's hard to finish reading a book in a single sitting these days, hence the "for-a-while". I'm almost at the end of Part Two of the book and kept coming across a software called RenderMan. RenderMan this, RenderMan that, then how Steve and his early team at Pixar negotiated with Disney to do the very first movie. It was getting too much and I googled it.

I'm glad I did. Read the case study above and you'll see how the software was used in the movie Ratatouille. Forgive me if you already knew about RenderMan. But this software has a historical value too. IMHO, there wouldn't have been a Second Act for Steve Jobs if it wasn't for RenderMan. Kudos to the creators who made it. Wow! an Oscar winning software.. who would've thought?

Empowered Employees, Self-service IT and the Future Enterprise

2010-09-05T09:10:00.001+05:30

IT in the Age of the Empowered Employee - Ted Schadler - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

"Incremental innovation and process improvements have always come from those closest to the problem. It's the basis of kaizen, a system where employees continually improve manufacturing processes. It's also a founding principle of Six Sigma tap employees' relentless, incremental quality improvements.

The same is true in the way employees are harnessing consumer technologies social, mobile, video, and cloud. They're improving how they do their jobs and solving your customer and business problems. And it's not just a few employees; it's a critical mass of employees. In a survey of more than 4,000 U.S. information workers, we found that 37% are using do-it-yourself technologies without IT's permission. LinkedIn, Google Docs, Smartsheet.com, Facebook, iPads, YouTube, Dropbox, Flipboard the list is long and growing. Many of these scenarios are do-it-yourself projects. For example, want to ask me business questions on Facebook? Piece of cake, I'll just friend you. Personal iPhones for email, apps, and Internet access outside my clients' door? Check. Google Sites and Docs to exchange documents with partners? Sure, I can spin up a free site or IT can spend the $50/user/year and make it secure. YouTube to post fix-it-yourself videos for tough service problems? My kid's good with a Flip camera. She can film me doing the fix myself."

The popularity of Social Media, Mashups and App Stores is a clear indication that business users of today are do-it-yourself types. Social communities such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in addition to devices like the iPhone and iPad appeal to this new enterprise user. The way I see it, in the near future, enterprise IT will have to implement technologies that empower business users the same way these technologies do. Enterprise applications need to have social functionality build in, while allowing users to pick and choose exactly the apps they need, as and when needed.

Use SOA, think about exposing data as APIs. Secure them where needed. Most importantly, keep service re-use and composition in mind. Because that's where your ROI would be. Re-using existing stuff to create new apps with the minimum time and effort. Use a social App Store within the enterprise to govern these new apps. Ensure that business users get a say via rating and commenting. Have activity streams so that users are aware what's going on in their enterprise social circle.

The list goes on... but do take a user-centric approach and build from there. That's why Google can't succeed in the social media space, they are technically brilliant but clueless about how the social web works. Look at Wave, an engineering masterpiece, but a miserable failure as far as user adoption is concerned. Now look at Twitter. Always in trouble with technology, fails consistently when too many users start tweeting. But the users love it. If you ask me, the problems faced by twitter are good problems to have. "So many users like us, we can't handle the love!". I remember YouTube going through a similar phase a few years back. Not any more. Because technical problems can be solved. But if users don't like what you have, how on earth are you going to justify the pay checks of all those engineers?

How (and what) reddit gained from digg revolt #5

2010-09-01T08:00:00.004+05:30

Here's that analysis we promised of what happened yesterday traffic-wise (tldr: everything went better than expected). via reddit.com

We had some interesting traffic yesterday. Usually that would mean it's time for a technobabbly post-mortem about which part of our infrastructure failed and caused the site to go down for three hours. However, something strange happened this time: the site didn't go down (knock on wood). So I guess we're going to have to set aside tradition and instead make a, um.. "postpartem" blog post about how things bent but did not break.

TL;DR: Money from reddit gold users went to defence against a massive attack of Digg users. And not only reddit managed to overcome the attack, it also converted them to the better religion! Plus, they have reandomly put games in their advertisement boxes, which makes users turn AdBlock off for reddit.

As those who follow me on Twitter know, I created an account at reddit too, joining the flood of digg refugees going there since digg revolt #5 started. As things stand at the moment, I might not return... ever.

Creating a loved brand by telling a story: Tether

2010-08-30T08:10:00.002+05:30

From the YouTube description of this clip ...

Stanley Hainsworth has been creative director at Nike, Lego, and Starbucks—all brands that have become iconic through good design. He just finished designing the new Gatorade bottle, too. Hainsworth clearly has a remarkable eye for style, but he insists that the key to creating a brand that attracts fans, that people love, is telling the company's story.

Hainsworth says that companies like Apple have a persona. "You could describe what Apple is as a person, because of the personality they've created," he explains. "So when we work with tech startups, the first thing we have to figure out is their story—what sets them apart in the marketplace."

Now at the helm of Tether, his own design studio and retail space in Seattle, Hainsworth keeps looking for new challenges. "When I left Starbucks, people thought I'd want to work someplace really hip, like Diesel or Apple. I told them I wanted to work with Microsoft and Wal-Mart—two great American brands that have never told their story well. They both have incredible stories, if you think about the startups that they were at the time—it's unbelievable. Bill Gates, what he went through, and his story: it's never been told well. They've never used it to their advantage. They've become a product company with no soul."

"Great companies read your soul," says Hainsworth. "They give you something you didn't even know that you needed."

The Smoking Gun of Sales and Marketing Alignment

2010-08-16T23:11:00.001+05:30

The Smoking Gun of Alignment » Crandell’s Corner

Boards and CEO, regardless of their domain expertise, are puzzled as to how to measure marketing. When asked what metrics they use the most frequent response is leads. Yet when probed, it’s not really leads, it’s inquiries. Both groups then lament on how marketing cannot produce quality “leads” and when asked how they fix the situation, the most frequent response is to replace the CMO. The response was the same for those CEOs that rose through sales as well as marketing ranks.

... a great post by @ChrisCrandell

The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing

2010-08-01T20:30:00.001+05:30

Executive Summary

Brands are jumping on the Facebook bandwagon to reach customers. The Society of Digital Agencies reports that more than 45% of senior marketers worldwide named social networks and applications their top priority for 2010. Yet despite the urgency, most brands lack a strategy. Altimeter Group conducted research, and gleaned input from 34 vendors, agencies, and experts, to determine success criteria and develop a roadmap for Facebook page best practices. We found Eight Success Criteria for Facebook page marketing, and then tested the maturity of 30 top brands across six industries.

Our heuristic evaluation revealed that brands fell short half of the brands we reviewed (14 out of 30) did not fully leverage social features to activate word of mouth, the hallmark behavior of social networks. Within this immature landscape, a few brands were on the right track to successfully harnessing Facebook page marketing. Brands like Pampers, Macy's, Kohl's, and AXE increased engagement and activated word of mouth through advocacy and peer-to-peer interactions, or solicited business call to actions that result in transactions. Brands need to stop experimenting in Facebook on their own customers. The criteria and findings in this report provide brands with a roadmap towards Facebook page marketing success.

Facebook: A Platform Marketers Cannot Ignore
Consumers are adopting Facebook at staggering levels. Facebook touts a staggering 500 million users worldwide. Engagement is ripe, with 50% of active users logging on in any given day, connecting to an average of 130 friends.3 Average internet users are spending more time on Facebook per day than on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia and Amazon combined. The attention of consumers has shifted marketers must take action. Consumers lean on each other to make decisions bypassing brands. Consumers trust their friends and family more than other sources of information about products and services, according to a Nielsen study. Another study reports that 60% of Facebook users are more likely to recommend a brand after becoming a fan (Chadwick Martin Bailey). As consumers make decisions directly with each other on Facebook, brands are left out of the mix. Confused, brands need a roadmap or risk experimenting on their own customers. Seventy percent of brands indicate that they planned to increase spending on offsite social media investment, including Facebook in 2010, according to an eConsultancy study.

Yet despite the urgency, brands lack a pragmatic approach. Rather than spin their wheels and waste resources experimenting on customers, brands need guidelines for Facebook page marketing success.

The full report is embedded below and contains references to Nielsen and other relevant survey statistics.

The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

The New World of B2B Marketing

2010-07-30T23:47:00.001+05:30

The original author of this is Holger Schulze. I find his B2B marketing framework interesting as well.

The Biz School Chronicles :: Fire Your Marketing Manager and Hire A Community Manager

2010-07-29T08:39:00.011+05:30

Fire Your Marketing Manager and Hire A Community Manager - David Armano - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

A community manager actively monitors, participates in and engages others within online communities. These communities can be on Twitter, Facebook, message boards, intranets, wherever groups of people come together to converse and interact with each other. A traditional marketing manager is likely to have little experience with this function. Historically, community management developed outside marketing, in areas such as community organizing (politics) or in niche verticals such as the video game or software industry, which are no strangers to digital outposts such as message boards.

Spending four semesters in b-school, makes one knowledgeable enough to sort out genuine marketing efforts from nonsense. The world has enough marketers who talk about social media and blogs without maintaining neither of their own, and throw around phrases like "unique proposition" and "brand image" because they sound and look good. It's about time organisations prioritise their marketing evaluation metrics correctly. From the data I gathered for my thesis, it's clear that generated revenue is THE metric to use. Click-through-rates and visitor counts are fine, but you really can't put them in a balance sheet, can you?

I came across the post from HBR above, on the same day I read the results from the "Old Spice Man" campaign. Why is this relevant? Well, the old spice campaign is a case study of how to mobilize social media to revive a brand. At the time I'm writing this, that particular video on youtube (one of many used in the campaign) had 16,243,818 views. Other videos included odes to Alyssa Milano and Demi Moore, as well as a marriage proposal. In one clip, Mustafa provides the audio a Reddit user requested to construct a do-it-yourself voicemail recording application.

Now that's as viral as it can get. BUT, did it work?

According to Nielsen data provided by Old Spice, overall sales for Old Spice body-wash products are up 11 percent in the last 12 months; up 27 percent in the last six months; up 55 percent in the last three months; and in the last month, with two new TV spots and the online response videos, up a whopping 107 percent. "Our business is on fire," Moorhead says. "We've seen strong results over all of our portfolio. That is the reward for the great work." (Source)

Yes! a 107% increase in sales. Now that's what most can rightly call measurable ROI. But the most important points to take away from this campaign are how they engaged the community and how they identified key influencers within social media circles.

The social media experts initially identified a crop of popular bloggers in key areas like entertainment (Perez Hilton), technology (4chan) and advertising (Adweek's own AdFreak), as well as regular YouTube and Facebook commenters. Some videos were pre-shot, but Tait said Wieden has done the vast majority over the past 48 hours from a studio in Portland, writing and producing them on the fly. (Source)

So that's how it was done. Oh, and quoting that last paragraph made me realise that none of the buzz-word-crazy, wannabe social media marketers I mentioned at the very beginning will know who the hell Perez Hilton is :) <-- That's your litmus test right there. Until next time ....

Silver fish hand catch!!!!

Murder: Fast datacenter code deployment using BitTorrent

2010-07-22T13:38:00.002+05:30

Twitter - Murder Bittorrent Deploy System from Larry Gadea on Vimeo.

The Twitter Engineering Blog: Murder: Fast datacenter code deploys using BitTorrent

It was time for something completely different, something decentralized, something more like.. BitTorrent..
running inside of our datacenter to quickly copy files around. Using
the file-sharing protocol, we launched a side-project called Murder and
after a few days (and especially nights) of nervous full-site
tinkering, it turned a 40 minute deploy process into one that lasted
just 12 seconds!

Murder (which by the way is the name for a flock of crows) is a combination of scripts written in Python and Ruby to easily deploy large binaries throughout your company’s datacenter(s). It takes advantage of the fact that the environment in a datacenter is somewhat different from regular internet connections: low-latency access to servers, high bandwidth, no NAT/Firewall issues, no ISP traffic shaping, only trusted peers, etc. This let us come up with a list of optimizations on top of BitTornado to make BitTorrent not only reasonable, but also effective on our internal network. Since at the time we used Capistrano for signaling our servers to perform tasks, Murder also includes a Capistrano deploy strategy to make it easy for existing users of Capistrano to convert their file distribution to be decentralized. The final component is the work Matt Freels (@mf) did in bundling everything into an easy to install ruby gem. This further helped get Murder to be usable for more deploy tasks at Twitter.

Now that's a cool idea. The code is open source and can be found at http://github.com/lg/murder.

Confessions of-a-gadget-holic (Slides from the webinar)

2010-07-22T02:07:00.003+05:30

You can listen to the recorded webinar and download these slides from the WSO2 Oxygen Tank as well.

Confessions of-a-gadget-holic

View more presentations from tyrell.

Confident, But Not Really Sure

2010-07-21T15:40:00.001+05:30

A Great Boss is Confident, But Not Really Sure - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

My favorite track on Tom Petty's 2006 album Highway Companion is a song called "Saving Grace." About halfway through, he closes off a verse by singing: "You're confident but not really sure." That's a state of mind that sounds paradoxical, but at times it really is true. In fact, it's the essence of what developmental psychologist John Meacham called the "attitude of wisdom." And it's a good description of some bosses I know, who strike a healthy balance between knowing and doubting.

A good companion read for this is "Confident But Not Really Sure: A JetBlue Boss and Other Examples of Wisdom". It's a follow up post with examples.

Apple Study: 8 easy steps to beat Microsoft (and Google)

2010-07-21T12:09:00.001+05:30

An interesting presentation. Nice flow and some good data in there.

Apple Study: 8 easy steps to beat Microsoft (and Google)

View more presentations from Ouriel Ohayon.

Upcoming Webinar :: Confessions of a “Gadget-holic”

2010-07-12T15:00:00.003+05:30

On Wednsday, 14th July 2010 I will be conducting a one hour webinar explaining Enterprise App Stores as described in a previous post here. We will run this during two time slots. 9 AM - 10 AM (GMT) and 10 AM - 11 AM (PDT). Here's a sneak peak at the topics I plan to cover;

App stores - Components of an App Store echo system and how they interact together
App Stores in the Enterprise - Self Service IT
Mashups - How they can provide APIs to App developers and facilitate code re-use
Google gadgets - The Apps that will power your Enterprise App Store
The Enterprise Gadget Repository - The App Directory that powers your Enterprise App Store
Tips and tricks that may come in handy ....

So if you haven't already, register and drop in at a convenient time slot depending on your time zone :)

UPDATE: The recorded webinar and slides are here.

HBR :: China's Exchange Rate Policy: What's Really Going On

2010-07-05T15:42:00.001+05:30

China's Exchange Rate Policy: What's Really Going On - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

"You don't need complex models to predict that the renminbi will remain undervalued for a long time. Whereas an equilibrium exchange rate must eventually lead to a balance in international payments, the data show that between 2000 and 2007, China's share of global manufacturing output soared from 5.7% to 11.4%, and it accumulated foreign exchange reserve of nearly 2.4 trillion dollars. Those are the world's largest reserves in absolute terms; in relative terms, they're astonishing. They account for 50% of China's GDP, 12% of US GDP, and 30% of the world's reserves today. China knows it must do something radical to rectify the imbalance and a tightly managed float against a basket of foreign currencies isn't the solution."

... & Greedy when others are fearful

2010-06-21T00:59:00.001+05:30

"Be fearful when others are greedy & Greedy when others are fearful" - Warren Buffet

China Buys Greek When No One Else Will

"With the global economy muddled in a sluggish recovery, few governments have been out to shop and invest. China, however, has gone forward to wine, dine, and conquer market shares that some Western nations deem insignificant or even scoff at -- Greece is just one example.

In the past five years, China has made other market building bargains in otherwise overlooked countries, including Costa Rica, Sudan and Zimbabwe. While the United States is heavily financing the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, China is taking advantage of U.S. security there and negotiating oil field contracts and managing the Anyak copper mine, home to one of the" largest deposits of the metal in the world.

Building an Enterprise App Store with WSO2 Gadget Server

2010-06-15T09:56:00.005+05:30

In my previous post, Portals and Mashups in the Cloud, I described an ecosystem that can be deployed either in your data centre or in the cloud.

An ecosystem such as above will allow enterprises to do two important things;

Expose APIs for third party mashup/gadget developers to utilise in their apps
Maintain a repository where business users can visit, browse and select apps from. These apps run in their personal portal pages.

Within that post lies the fundamentals of an Enterprise App Store. What is an enterprise app store? Well, in the mobile device world of iPhones, Androids and Symbians, we all use an app store at one point or the other. Whether it's iTunes, The Android Market Place or Nokia's OVI Store, we all visit them and they provide one significant benefit in general. We get to personalise our device with the applications we need. We get to build, at a software level, a phone that is optimised for our day-to-day use, without being programmers. We also get to influence the programmers who write these apps, by requesting new features for existing apps or, at times, encouraging them to develop new ones. The role of the device vendor here is to provide the best API possible for the app programmers. The vendor benefits by increased user base and the programmers get intrinsic and more often financial rewards for their creations.

An Enterprise App Store brings this to your organisation's IT department.

"The premise of an app store model for enterprises is simple: By removing the middleman, the famous bottleneck between the business and IT demand can be reduced in many cases. Application backlogs can shrink, consumption of internal and external IT resources will increase, and fierce competition to provide the best solutions to niches can greatly improve overall quality (the long tail of IT argument), all while reducing costs. At least, that’s what is possible if we look at what’s happening to the non-enterprise software market today." - Source, Dion Hinchcliffe.

This is why we had an Enterprise Gadget Repository in the WSO2 Gadget Server from day one. If you already run it within your enterprise (either in your data centre or in the cloud), you already have the infrastructure for an Enterprise App Store.

Adding gadgets to the repository.
An administrator can add gadgets to the repository in a few easy steps (we have documented how).

How users interact with the App Store.
Users sign in to the portal and see a default set of gadgets configured by the administrator. Of course they can change the layout of these gadgets and save their personal preferences for each. They can add new tabs, clone existing tabs to build new tabs.. but I digress. Let's see how they interact with the App Store. When they decide to add gadgets, they are re-directed to the gadget repository.

Apart from browsing the directory and adding gadgets to their portal pages, the users get to rate and comment on them.

This builds a community where users see what others think about the app, feature requests and even bug reports. They also see how many are already running this app.

"That is, the app store supports an ecosystem of developers and creators, but acts as a governance mechanism to make sure the crappy and malicious stuff doesn't degrade and contaminate the ecosystem." - Source, Joe McKendrick.

A nice software delivery mechanism for an SOA isn't it? :)

Additional Resources:

WSO2 Gadget Server, WSO2 Mashup Server and other SOA resources in WSO2 Oxygen Tank
Gadget and Mashup Servers as cloud-native services.