Roman Stanek

Archive for December, 2008

Only Google…

In SaaS on December 25, 2008 at 12:39 pm

No other major SaaS company in the world could get away with this approach to paying customers. Not only Google offers no user-friendly tools to add shared contact to the paid version of Google Apps. They offer no tools. Period.

Here is the only information available to email administrators:

Administrative management of non-employee contacts now available

Premier Edition administrators can now add contacts that aren’t employees of their own company to the contact list that each user can access in the new standalone contact manager.

First, create an XML representation of the shared contact to publish. This XML needs to be in the form of an Atom element of the Contact kind, which might look like this:

<atom:entry xmlns:atom='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'
    xmlns:gd='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005'>

  <atom:category scheme='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind'
    term='http://schemas.google.com/contact/2008#contact' />
  <atom:title type='text'>Elizabeth Bennet</atom:title>
  <atom:content type='text'>Notes</atom:content>
  <gd:email rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#work'
    address='liz@gmail.com' />
  <gd:email rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#home'
    address='liz@example.org' />

  <gd:phoneNumber rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#work'
    primary='true'>
    (206)555-1212
  </gd:phoneNumber>
  <gd:phoneNumber rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#home'>
    (206)555-1213
  </gd:phoneNumber>
  <gd:im address='liz@gmail.com'
    protocol='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#GOOGLE_TALK'
    rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#home' />

  <gd:postalAddress rel='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#work'
    primary='true'>
    1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy Mountain View
  </gd:postalAddress>
</atom:entry>

To publish this entry, send it to the contact-list feed URL as follows. First, place your Atom element in the body of a new POST request, using the application/atom+xml content type. Then send it to the feed URL. For example, to add a domain shared contact to the list belonging to example.com, post the new entry to the following URL:

http://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/example.com/full

The Google server creates a contact using the entry you sent, then returns an HTTP 201 CREATED status code, along with a copy of the new contact in the form of an element. The entry returned is the same one you sent, but it also contains various elements added by the server, such as an element.

If your request fails for some reason, Google may return a different status code. For information about the status codes, see the Google Data API protocol reference document.

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End of the Retooling Decade?

In Uncategorized on December 23, 2008 at 3:24 pm

Tim O’Reilly wrote a great post about the collapse of demand for consumer electronics and there he quotes the term “peak waste” – in an analogy to peak oil maybe we’ve reached the pinnacle of waste in our consumer culture. I absolutely agree that the “creative destruction” – the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation grew to unsustainable levels recently but here is my explanation of the radical innovation that our society went through over the last 10-15 years.

One of the biggest shifts of the last decade was the move from analog to digital media. The only digital media widely used only ten years ago was the CD. And the typical CD player fits more into the analog rather then digital era (most CDs still don’t support CD-Text). The rest of media was analog – TV, VHS, radio, phone, photographs…

Ever since the mid-nineties we saw the rapid development and adoption of new music formats (MP3, WMA, OGG, AAC, Apple Lossless), new video media and formats (DVD, BlueRay, HD-DVD, DivX, MP4), new interfaces (DVI, HDMI), move from analog to digital TV (HDTV, DVB-T, DVB-S) and digital radio (DAB, DVB-H). Along with these changes came the new business models of digital media distribution (iTunes Store, AmazonMP3, Netflix online), new music providers (Sirius, XM-Radio, Pandora, last.fm). We also saw the advance of digital communication (Bluetooth, GSM, UMTS, SMS, VoIP) and it led to the rise of new providers of communication services (Skype, Vonage). Photography underwent the same transition – from analog cameras to digital cameras and now to camera-phones and from photo albums to Flickr.

The move to digital era had a dramatic impact on the design of devices we use and so we saw some very rapid changes in the consumer electronic industry: move from VHS to Tivo, POTS to iPhone, analog TV to LCD screens and many, many others. The usecases for digital world were not clear when we started this retooling and it took ten years to discover how will users get access and consume digital media and the requirements for new set of standards and interoperability.

I expect that the once we finish this transition we will be able to design more interoperable and software upgradeable devices. These devices will hopefully last longer but I still can’t imagine handing down “my grandfather’s iPod”. The rate of innovation will not decrease, it will simply move to the social aspect enabled by this retooling. Once we assume that every person in the world has an access to a device that is always connected, has a microphone, camera and GPS chip we can change the ways our societies communicate. Fortunately it will require less physical waste…

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“Business-IT Chasm”: The Business Perspective

In Work on December 18, 2008 at 11:03 am

My plan for today was to write more about the “Business-IT chasm” but I came across a great blog post written by Jorge Camoes that reveals the business perspective of this divide. There is nothing better than the first hand experience:

IT will try to change your project, naturally. Try to avoid the “security bomb” (their favorite). You know how poor their expensive BI toys are, and you should know what they can and can’t do with them. Minor concessions can earn you some points. When they tell you they can’t implement your core ideas be prepared to fake genuine surprise, compare costs (again) and emphatically say that their options clearly don’t meet the organization’s needs.

My suspicion that business has limited ability to influence the electrical engineers is demonstrated by this quote:

Pissing off the IT department is one of the most enjoyable games in corporate life, but be a gentleman and don’t make them look stupid. They don’t usually have a good sense of humour and take their quest to conquer the world very seriously. If you really want to implement the dashboard, don’t make it an island if you can avoid it (connect it to the tables in the IT infrastructure, instead of copy/pasting data).

Here is the link to the full post.

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The New Chasm

In SaaS, Work, web on December 15, 2008 at 11:12 pm

I believe that readers of my blog are familiar with the chart below. It is the classical “Crossing the chasm” diagram from Geoffrey A. Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers. This book was published back in 1991 and it is still number two on “Twelve Business Books in One Hour for the Busy CEO” list. The main argument that Geoffrey Moore makes here is that the “early adopters” have no ability to influence “early majority” and it leads to a chasm that is very difficult for startups (or any company with disruptive technology) to cross:

Adoption Cycle

This book was written in the days when startups typically sold to electrical engineers (a.k.a. IT) and Brad Burnham described it well in his recent post:

In the old days, electrical engineers focused on getting computers to work not on getting people to engage with the systems built on top of those computers. The folks that built enterprise software were vaguely aware that their systems had to be accessible to the humans that used them but they had a huge advantage. The people who used them did so as part of their job, they were trained to use them and fired if they could not figure them out.

This is why even Wikipedia uses the following example to describe the end-user:

The end-user or consumer may differ from the person who purchases the product. For instance, a zookeeper, the customer, might purchase elephant food for an end-user: the elephant.

But virtually no startup gets funded today if it sells directly to electrical engineers. Innovation happens in the consumer space anyway and so the assumption is that any disruptive technology (social networks, SaaS, web2.0…) gets adopted first by the end-users and then it is picked up by the IT. But here comes the new chasm: low ability of end-users to influence IT:

Reversed Adoption Cycle

This chasm is the new manifestation of the classical “Business-IT” gap but this time is the innovation flow reversed: business leads and IT follows. And this new flow doesn’t make it any easier to cross the new chasm…

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Can Cloud IP Address Be Damaged Goods?

In cloud on December 6, 2008 at 4:01 am

Elasticity of the cloud computing is a wonderful idea. You can get an instance of networked computer exactly when you need it and you only pay for the time when you actually use it. But while the virtual memory and hard disk is a “clean slate” created specifically for you, the IP address assigned to your instance may have been previously used by a spammer and it could be already on a “spam blacklist”. In an extreme case the whole IP address range can be marked as a source of spam. And this is exactly what happened to Amazon’s EC2: “Go Daddy blocks links to EC2 “.

The problem is the scarcity of IP addresses — Amazon.com doesn’t have enough addresses to give every user a fresh new IP address with the new instance. And the solution to this problem is called Internet Protocol version 6/IPv6:

The very large IPv6 address space supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses, or approximately 5×1028 (roughly 295) addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion (6.5×109) people alive today. In a different perspective, this is 252 addresses for every observable star in the known universe – more than seventy nine billion billion billion times as many addresses as IPv4 (232) supports.

This means that there will be enough IP addresses not only for the elastic clouds but also PDAs, cell phones and other IP based clients. On the other hand it will make the “spam blacklists’ irrelevant since every piece of spam can come from a different IP address: “If the earth were made entirely out of 1 cubic millimeter grains of sand, then you could give a unique IPv6 address to each grain in 300 million planets the size of the earth” .

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Derivatives and Transparency

In web on December 3, 2008 at 2:42 pm

Every time I think about the current financial crisis I come to the conclusion that the lack of transparency is the biggest reason why things got so bad. There is an obvious implication for business intelligence but even when I simply look up “derivatives and transparency” on Google Trends I am surprised by the level of correlation between those two search terms over last five years!

transparency
derivatives

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Leading Healthcare Information Provider Licenses Good Data for On Demand Business Intelligence

In SaaS, Work on December 2, 2008 at 2:54 pm

We made the following announcement earlier today and it is obviously a very important milestones for us. And I absolutely believe in what I said in the press release: “Intelimedix’s expertise, combined with Good Data’s on demand collaborative analytics, form an unbeatable combination for healthcare organizations,” said Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of Good Data Corp. “This is a great opportunity to show how solution providers benefit from incorporating Good Data into their offerings.”

Leading Healthcare Information Provider Licenses Good Data for On Demand Business Intelligence

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – December 2, 2008 – Good Data Corporation, an emerging provider of on-demand (SaaS) collaborative business intelligence solutions, today announced its first customer agreement – with Intelimedix LLC, a leading supplier of business intelligence solutions for health insurers.

Good Data, which recently completed a $2 million initial round of funding from private investors, delivers a cloud-based platform for business intelligence projects. The company is launching a public beta of its hosted service in December 2008 that will offer data analysts in any company immediate and inexpensive access to the power of collaborative business intelligence.

Good Data helps Intelimedix enhance its core analytic service offerings. Intelimedix plans to integrate Good Data capabilities into core applications that run reporting and analysis tools for functions including payment integrity, fraud detection, benchmarking, and measuring operational efficiency.

“In the healthcare environment, users need to be able to access information quickly, efficiently and reliably to make strategic decisions that impact their business,” said David Robinson, Chief Technology Officer of Intelimedix. “Good Data’s technology will help us improve our analytical tools immeasurably. We see Good Data as an important strategic partner that will help us deliver more flexible, effective solutions to our customers.”

“Intelimedix’s expertise, combined with Good Data’s on demand collaborative analytics, form an unbeatable combination for healthcare organizations,” said Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of Good Data Corp. “This is a great opportunity to show how solution providers benefit from incorporating Good Data into their offerings.”

About Good Data
Good Data Corporation was founded with the mission to provide a platform for collaborative analytics. The company believes sharing and teamwork allows users to move past isolated reports and arrive at the true meaning of “business intelligence.” Development of the underlying technology began in 2002 and is currently in use in large insurance and retail corporations. Good Data is a privately held company with headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., and engineering operations in the Czech Republic.

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Taking Advantage of the Failure Framework

In Work on December 1, 2008 at 1:54 pm

For a long time I planned to write a case study on NetBeans and the innovations we brought to the tools market back in 1997 and I finally manage to finish it yesterday. Here it is and it is probably very timely as Steve Gillmore speculates on TechCrunch that:

“Sun Microsystems has been under particular pressure to realign; analysts and even Sun employees such as Tim Bray have been outspoken in their pleas for Sun’s executive team to jettison unprofitable ventures in favor of some kind of cloud strategy. JavaFX could be one of the casualties if Sun decides to pare technologies along with the 18% of its employees it’s trimming. Other cuts might include the NetBeans development environment, which has kept pace with or even bettered Eclipse in quality but not in uptake”