Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning
Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris
Harvard Business School Press (March, 2007)

This book makes a compelling case for enhancing a firm’s competitiveness through the systematic use of fact-based analytical decision making techniques.

It has been 15 years since the code that enables the World Wide Web was put into the public domain. Apparently there are now well over 165 million different websites around the world.

However, the man who started it all — Sir Tim Berners-Lee — feels that we are just the beginning.
Click here to read more about where Sir Tim, and other key Internet luminaries, feel that the World Wide Web is headed.

Fireman poles, slides, games rooms, aquariums and plenty of free food – all in a day’s work at Google apparently.

Have a look at this BBC clip to get a peek into Google’s wacky offices – certainly a far cry from the soul-sapping cubicle dreariness of most corporate offices.

Bronze medal social network (behind ever newsworthy Facebook, and MySpace) has announced that they have been taken over by AOL for a cash deal worth US$850 Million. The deal far surpasses the US$500 News Corp paid for MySpace in July 2005 – but the average price for each of their claimed 40 million users is slightly lower – US$21.25 vs. the US$25 Rupert Murdoch paid for each of MySpace’s 20 million users.

However it must be noted that their figure of 40 Million users is slightly contentious with Wikipedia listing some 20.3 million, and some of Bebo’s other claims have been questioned.

Yesterday, Apple head-honcho Steve Jobs finally unveiled the long awaited iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit – a collection of software tools and documentation designed to help programmer write new software for the platform). Until now the software on the iPhone was closed to developers, and programmers who wanted to create software for the device had to resort fairly complex ‘hacks’ to get their software working on the device.

Apparently half a billion people across the world log on to the internet from a cybercafe everyday. Jooce – a Luxembourgh-based start up – aims to tap into this huge reservoir of “cybernomads” with its new virtual desktop.

This free, web-based desktop aims to give users all the functions of their very own PCs from any computer with an internet connection – “their very own private space online,” according to Jooce founder Stefan Surzyck. Jooce gives users easy access to emails, online storage, instant messaging and such.

However, much of the core functionalities that it currently aggregates appears quite old-hat – you can pretty much do the same thing with free services from Google, Yahoo! and the like. Jooce does stand out with a slick and quite intuitive user interface, though, and it is being aimed squarely at the developing digital world – Jooce is involved with a number of digital-divide bridging projects in places like the Philippines, India & China.

Jooce is just one among many companies pursuing the holy-grail of a web-based operating system. Its long-term business model seems a little hazy at the moment, but Jooce does have the backing of Mangrove – the VC firm that initially funded Skype.

Social web king, facebook.com, has seen it’s first ever drop in monthly users according to analytics firm Nielsen Online.

Almost half a million users who visited the site in January 2008 didn’t bother to return in February. Competing sites like Bebo.com and Newscorp’s MySpace have reported similar drops in traffic.

So far Facebook has been able to find investors, and justify their massive spending (In the coming year Facebook plans to spend US$ 200 million on servers alone) with their rapid growth. The end of the growth cycle will increase the pressure on facebook to find a way to turn their popularity into a viable revenue stream.  Facebook’s advertising platform, which allows advertisers to target extremely specific customers, has so far met with a tepid response.

At the peak of the excitement, Facebook was collecting almost 200 thousand new users a day, and Microsoft spent US$ 250 million buying 1.6% of the company – a deal that valued Facebook at $15 billion.

Todays news suggests that those frothy days may be over.

The archives of Salon.com turns up this wonderfully prescient article about why underdog startup Google was going to win big.

http://archive.salon.com/21st/rose/1998/12/21straight.html

“There’s something ultimately dumb about these all-things-to-all-people sites in a medium whose greatest strength is the ability to be specific things to specific people. If the portals can’t even build a better search engine, I am not betting on their ability to control an industry as fast-moving, innovative and metamorphic as the Internet — next year or any year.”

One notable feature of Apple’s recently launched ultra-thin MacBook Air laptop is the optional SSD (solid-sate drive). Long heralded as the slayer of traditional magnetic platter hard-disk drives (HDDs), SSDs are starting to show up in a number of high-end laptops, albeit at smaller capacities and a hefty price premium to HDDs.SSDs do bring a number of advantages to the table – most notably a lack of moving parts, lower power consumption, greater reliability and quieter operation. These advantages are particularly useful for smaller mobile devices.The WSJ’s Walt Mossberg recently reviewed the performance of SSD equipped laptops – his conclusion: despite the obvious benefits, it is probably too early for mainstream users to plumb the extra cash for SSDs.

In a move bound to excite the open source community, today, AOL (operator of both the popular AIM, and ICQ Instant Messenger networks), seems to have begun the process of moving their systems from their proprietary protocols, to open source solutions.

ICQ, developed in 1996 by Mirabilis and sold two years later to AOL for US$407M was one of the early stars of the Social Web. Developed at a time when instant messaging was a new concept, it’s creators were forced to develop their own language to allow their new application to communicate with their server. In the years since, dozens of other protocols and clients have been developed by competing companies. Internet giants Yahoo, Microsoft, and even AOL before their purchase of ICQ, developed their own IM networks.

Because each of these networks relied on their own protocol, clients were incompatible with each other and there was no interoperability. To communicate with each other many users were forced to join, and use multiple networks simultaneously.

In 2005, when Google launched it’s own IM network, gTalk, it took a different approach. Rather than developing their own proprietary protocol, google chose to use an open protocol called XMPP (developed by the Jabber Open Source Community). This allowed google to focus on providing network support, integration with their own software (in-browser messaging in gmail for example), and the general user experience. Users can choose can choose from the many XMPP compatible IM clients, and share contacts between gTalk, and other XMPP compatible networks.

In 2006, Yahoo and MSN seemd to be experementing with the idea of combining their networks. The latest versions of each of their client programs allow users to add friends from the other network. The move by AIM to XMPP will put pressure on Yahoo and MSN to go all the way, and adopt an open protocol too.

For information on connecting to AOL’s XMPP test server, read on here.