I don’t want to discuss the impact of globalization or the offshore business, no I actually want to highlight a recent initiative that Thomas Friedman (and/or his publisher) launched: give away a free audio copy of his book! You might wonder… why? Since sales of his books are rocket high (still to date with all the reprints), why does he need to give away audio copies for free? Apparently he is about to launch a new book in September, called “Hot, flat and crowded” that will focus on “how America can lead the green revolution in the 21st century”. This is a pretty smart move, since (as far as I can see it) it creates two effects:

1. By doing this, he gets a lot of publicity (well we are talking in this blog about it, aren’t we?). It’s probably inspired by Radiohead’s decision to let users decide how much they want to pay for their new album (between 0 and unlimited). Radiohead got a lot of publicity, got a lot of street cred for this initiative and they get a huge revenue from their live performances anyway. So it’s free publicity for his new book (since you get also an excerpt from his new book for free).
2. He potentially reaches an audience that was not planning to buy his book “the world is flat”, but now that it’s free, they “just try it”, with the hope that they’ll like it and are willing to buy his new book

When you think about it, with almost no budget they have created a whole media buzz for Thomas Friedman and his new book, by giving away his old book for free. A similar initiative was launched recently by a computer book writer (sorry, I really can’t recall his name anymore) that gives away his books in PDF. His reasoning is that with almost zero costs, you can potentially reach millions. This has two effects:

1. People that were never ever planning to buy his book, download it and read it. They like it and decide to buy the hard copy.
2. People that were planning to buy the book, download it as well, but then decide not to buy the hard copy since they already have the digital one for free.

As long as the first group outweighs the second one, you make profit. Let’s just hope that his theory works out.

The funny thing is that this model of giving away something with the hope to get extra revenue back, is seen as “disruptive” outside the IT world, but it’s a very common business model in our industry for years: giving away hardware to drive software license and support revenues, giving community editions to drive sales of the commercial editions, opening up Google APIs in order to gather even more data that can be analyzed… Whatever initiative, you always need to be aware that there is not such a thing as a free lunch. How tasty it might be!

Can we apply this strategy also for knowledge? True, by opening up code, you are giving away intellectual property, experience and knowledge but I am more talking about knowledge management systems. What if you would open up your whole company internal knowledge system? Can you monetize that in such a way that the benefit you gain, is bigger than the “threat” that your competitors gain by having an insight in your knowledge?

An interesting blog I read is High Availability that discusses the architecture from the largest internet applications in the world, think about Facebook and MySpace, think about Digg and 37Signals. I frequently read that several of those big websites share a big part of the way how they have tackled scalability issues with the rest of the world. Why? Because most of the time they are all reinventing the wheel again and again. They all face issues that the database becomes a bottle neck, caching issues, fault-tolerance, etc. Facebook and 37Signals are not competing with each other on having the fastest database, no they are both focused on delivering a web application: Facebook a social network platform, 37Signals a hosted project management software. If they can learn from each other’s experiences, they can serve their respective markets better.

Does this also hold for a knowledge sharing system? Let’s say that Capgemini would open its knowledge system and thus exposing information of how we have tackled a complex IT infrastructure problem. We could keep it internal and reuse that knowledge at other clients. We could also share it with the world, thus risking that another competitor of us applies our solution to another client. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily I’d say. If you are producing really innovative solutions, it really boasts your brand. You get a lot of recognition for the information you have shared and can establish yourself as an industry leader, with the added side-effect that it gets appealing for IT professionals to join your company. One concrete example that I can give is the Integrated Architecture Framework (IAF), an internally developed enterprise architecture framework that we have opened and donated to the Open Group’s TOGAF standard. Now we get a lot of street cred in the enterprise architects scene for this.

So open up the corporate knowledge system or keep it internal?

For me it is clear that all plug-in based techniques will be replaced by more native techniques like JavaScript. JavaScript was forgotten due to some browser wars which ended up in the result with two rather incompatible implementations of JavaScript. However with the several incompatible implementations becoming less dominant (there now is only one implementation that is questionable at some points) and the rise of the libraries like JQuery, Prototype, SproutCore, YUI, MooTools, ExtJS it is clear that JavaScript is back on its feet again and it is running to overtake all these plug-in based techniques. JavaScript is platform independent, as most plug-in based techniques are not.

The limitation in JavaScript used to be the 'flashy' things: drop and drag, animations, interoperability and other nice and fancy stuff that was either limited by the technique or by the processing power of the client. Nowadays this isn't a limitation anymore, do you want nice animations, you could use script.aculo.us, JQuery UI, or Processing.js. Interoperability is arranged in almost all libraries. Do you want applications that feel like desktop application, think of your design and build it, just like 280 Slides, Google Docs, Zoho and SproutCore gallery. You are no longer limited, you can make these things happen with techniques that are native for all browsers: HTML, CSS and JavaScript!

It will be hot JavaScript winter, especially since everything is possible again. Flash, AIR and Silverlight aren't the only techniques that can make flasy desktop like nice solutions. JavaScript can do that too and JavaScript does not create a vendor lock-in requiring a specific closed source plug-in.

This really sounds horrible to me. Whenever I write code I would like to see it executed the way I wrote it, not the way I could have probably thought about it that it should work. If I write lousy code, let the browser crash, let my operating system crash and probably I will learn something of it. In the worst case even valid code could be corrected by the browser since it could match a pattern that is used to filter invalided code blocks. That would be a real developers nightmare: hyper correcting browsers that are adjusting valid code blocks combined with all current known specific browser quirks.

However this hyper correcting behavior could make the web even more insecure. Microsoft will probably implement some protection in Internet Explorer 8, at first sight this is pretty nice, however there are quite some (amateur) developers that 'test' their websites in only one browser. After testing it in e.g. Internet Explorer 8 it assumed save and published on the Internet. However when using a different browser XSS is still possible and the visitor can still be harmed by these kind of attacks.

With all these hyper corrections you will be in the end only safe on the Internet depending on what browser you use. This is incorrect you should always be safe on the Internet no matter what browser you use. The developer is responsible for the security /usability of his web page/ application, not the browser! The browser should only be supportive to visit and use this page / application.

I didn’t take much with me, with the idea that I’ll buy most of it over there, so armed with a couple of t-shirts, a pair of jeans, slippers and of course my 3G cell phone I took off. The latter was part of an experiment to redefine the way we travel. Forget maps, forget sending postcards, forget exchanging phone numbers. These are so nineties! The tools of the modern traveler are Google Maps to navigate, Dopplr or TripAdvisor to get advice from fellow travelers, Twitter to keep the home front updated and Facebook to keep in touch with the other backpackers you’ll meet.

It’s remarkable how well penetrated Facebook is in the young travel community. When I was passing by internet hotspots, 75 % of the people were checking their Facebook account and a very standard way to say goodbye is “oh, add me on Facebook”.

I use Twitter already a lot to engage in interesting discussions with colleagues and friends and a couple of my best ideas came from Twitter discussions. The most interesting part of something like Twitter is that you can think out loudly and once in a while it gets picked up by one of your contacts who gives you a whole different view on the problem you are trying to tackle. For this trip, I wanted to use it more to use as some kind of diary to keep everyone updated what I was doing and I even got engaged in some funny Twitter discussions while crawling through one of Bangkok’s many markets.

I sure admit that it takes perhaps some of the “romantic backpackers way of life” away, but it also puts an extra dimension to your trips. Think about a great night you had in a bar with some travelers you met. You take some pictures, upload it on your Facebook account, the people you’ve met can comment on the pictures, share their pictures with you and you build up a whole world of memories. It would be actually cool to have your geography location associated with your Twitter updates so that you can afterwards see on the map where you have exactly seen that funny cow sleeping in the middle of the street.

We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg of what is possible. One of the most promising areas for the future is the domain of location-based services where services and information adapt to your location, but that’s an experiment I will talk about in August. I’ve been asked by Nokia to test their E71 business phone (with GPS, HSPDA and Wifi) and will take this new way of traveling to a next level during my trips to Berlin and Helsinki.

Stay tuned!

In that final episode they were discussing whether - in their own words - "Pundits should fuck off". Their definition of a pundit is someone who writes or talks authoritatively about subjects without actually being an authority on that subject. In short: someone who pontificates. Listen to the episode yourself if you want to know what they concluded. One interesting question that came out of this discussion was whether good bloggers are just good at articulating things and not necessarily knowledgable about the subjects they write about.

Now I might be venturing on very thin ice here, but I actually like to write about subjects that fascinate me. And I am always fascinated by the things I don't fully understand yet, but am trying to understand. So my blogs are often thoughts that I am saying out loud, hoping I can spark some thoughts in other people's heads too. Does that make me a pundit? I'll leave that up to you (be gentle...).

Last week, Eiso Kant posted an entry on his blog with the inviting title: "Is blogging dead?". His point is that "blogs are often no longer about the integrity of the content but the number of backlinks it receives, the number of page views and how high it ranks in Google". I admit, these things matter much to me too, but you actually need to write about someting that is valued by others to achieve all that. That's the beauty of Web 2.0!

The thing that triggered me most was a response by Eiso on a comment to this blog entry, where he wrote:

"I have been at the head of a project where we hired article writers to populate blogs. When we paid them we didn’t ask for great articles, neither were we looking for the best writers, we were looking for cheap keyword rich content."

So if I am understanding correctly, you can rent a ranter for populating blogs. These people actually get paid to provide mediocre content. I have tried www.rent-a-ranter.com but it doesn't exist yet. So here's your chance!

How should real world laws apply to virtual worlds?

One thing which comes to mind straight away is that there can be more than one kind of virtual world. The rules around a quest for dragons' gold will probably be different from an office meeting and the context should be obvious.

So if I am meeting a group on line for a work meeting, then the rules of a work meeting would apply. In a work meeting you could commit offences like breach of contract, hate speech etc. This could create interesting evidential weight issues if someone wants to prosecute on the basis of behaviour at an online meeting. If someone suddenly decides to murder a colleague at an online meeting (assuming that our online office environment has such a facility), then we may not condone such behaviour but it clearly isn't real murder.

At a fantasy world on the other hand, the rules could be very different. Because everyone knows it's a game, I would expect more latitude about what speech and behaciour is acceptable. But would using an automated attack bot be illegal? What if I use it to rob someone of virtual gold pieces that are convertible to real money - is this robbery? I believe this situation has already arisen.

In all cases, I strongly believe that virtual smoking should not be an offence!

Should we have the same rights (e.g. to free speech) online as in real life? You can always argue that if you don't like the rights you get from one virtual world you can always go to a different world. Does that mean that governments shouldn't define online rights? I'm tempted to say yes.

One of the frequent readers of this Technology Blog pointed me recently to some proof of concept (PoC) of the bank for the digital natives, where every feature has been thoroughly investigated how it can come forward to my needs: the Frank Bank (http://www.thefrankbank.com). It incorporates all the Web 2.0 concepts like tagging, gadgets (small applications you can add) and personalization of data. On top of that it lets you administer your budget with fancy bar- and piecharts and gives you different views on your data.

When you look at the video on the URL mentioned earlier you can see that one of the interesting features is that everything is based on tagging. You can add tags like “shopping” or “work” to every expense and thus create views on your expenses based on the tags. This is a similar approach that Google’s Gmail use to categorize your emails (instead of using the old-skool folder based approach). That gives you a grip on your shopping expenditure because you can perfectly get statistics of your shopaholic alter ego and decide whether you still need those Manolo Blahniks or not.

I’d say that the first bank that offers this to its clients will change the way how we look at financial portals. Trust me, this is quite revolutionary. It’s banking, but redefined.

Well that sounds great, but what is in it for the users of the browsers and what is in it for the developers testing their web pages for standard compliance? In my opinion: nothing. Do you as a user really care that you use a browser that passed the Acid3 test? Probably not, otherwise the browser statistics would be quite different. Currently only the webkit (Safari) and the presto (Opera) engine pass the Acid3 test with a 100/100 score. These two browsers have only a market share of almost 5%. The trident engine (Internet Explorer) scores only a questionable 18 points and the new Gecko engine (Firefox) scores 80 out of 100. However these two browsers are used by approximately 90% of the internet population.

Users do not care about something nerdy like an Acid3 or 4 test. Simply because it has not any added value for them to have an Acid3 compatible browser. Most of the sites will be perfectly rendered in their browser; only a few specific advanced things that are tested in Acid3 will not be shown correctly. These specific techniques aren't used that common that it should have impact on ones browsing experience.

When buying a car, the results of the NCAP test can influence the decision to buy a car, simply because these results do add value (when you crash, will you and you passengers still live, or not). On internet there is another mindset. Bert Bos once said the following:

I'd like browsers to fix bugs as soon as possible, but it is true that they (and not me) will get the complaints from users when pages that used to work suddenly look differently in a new browser version. Too many people see the Web a bit like television: who ever heard of incompatible content? If there is an error, it's because the TV set is broken, or maybe the antenna. On the Web, it is much more likely that the content is invalid, but try to explain that to users who just want to buy their holiday or see their bank account…

This still is the mindset of most browser users. If you cannot visit your favorite website with your browser and you can with another browser, than the browser is broken and not the website. This mindset is also adopted by lot developers. Which is quite reasonable because would you make a website that can only be viewed successfully by 5% of your visitors?

Users and developers should become more standards aware, without proper use of standards the web is doomed to become something useless. The user's mindset should be changed that the Acid test is his NCAP test for the browser, however currently this is not the mindset. Therefore Acid3 is and Acid4 probably will be great for browser vendors and geeks like me to compare how well their render engines function, however the normal user and less geeky developer will not care. I hope they will care in a few years...

To all who nominated us: Thank you!

And because there really is no sense in being modest about this, I can only encourage everyone to vote for us:

in Company Blogs

The nomination alone makes me become redoubled in posting to this blog and winning the award will probably redouble that redoubling (=requadruplicating?). So, think carefully before you vote. It might mean I will get a lot less sleep ;-)

While the service is still in its infancy, not that many big data producers signed up and couple of services like message transformation not present yet, it reminds me to some kind of domain-specific Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). One of the problems we face now with all these Web 2.0 websites that offer APIs and all these data aggregators/clients is the tight coupling between producer and consumer. Service-Oriented Architecture promotes loosely-coupled services and that is exactly what Gnip tries to provide: some kind of message middleware that decouples the tight coupling between Web APIs while providing message transformation (coming soon).

If Gnip (or some other service for that matter) succeeds in this by having all the major Web 2.0 companies signed up, they could become the Internet’s Service Bus. Which could be bought by Google so that they can throw in their infrastructure to make it scale and in the meanwhile add some advertisements… ;-) Or of course Amazon by using their Simple Queue Service… Oh, this promises to be an interesting battle, since the company that will own the Internet Service Bus will control pretty much of the Web 2.0 space.

Internet Service Bus: the next revolution.

I would really value your opinion of our blog now, dear reader. Did I just see you suppress a yawn?

I use different web resource types (blogs, search engines, feeds, ...) for finding out about different subjects. Moreover, the resource type that I use for finding out more about a subject depends on my connection with the subject. This is visualized in the picture below. I call it my web usage spectrum.

The horizontal axis marks the favourableness of subjects. On the left are the subjects that I don't care much about and on the far right are my favorite subjects. The vertical axis marks the frequency at which I use certain web resources for finding information about subjects. At the bottom are my least used resources and on top are the ones that I use all the time. The length of the boxes inside the graph says something about the universal usefulness of a resource. It is by no means exact nor did I collect any statistics.

I wish to stay abreast with subjects that I am strongly connected with. For that I am relying on resources that I value and trust. As you can see in the graph, I follow these resources using syndication and collaborative tools. For less favourable subjects I take a more traditional, pre-Web2.0-approach.

My web usage spectrum is highly subjective and reflects how I prefer to milk the web. I adapt it every now and then when I learn new tricks. Usually an adaption leads to an improvement in the quality of the information I find, the time I need to find the information or the amount of fun that I am having.

My guess is that my web usage spectrum is not unique and probably sub-optimal. I know that it is tweakable but I am relatively slow at adopting new tools (I am skeptical and allergic to change...). For example, I was only very recently convinced of the use of twitter (you can follow me here).

This all poses an interesting question: How do you know if your spectrum is optimal in the sense that you use the right resources the right way? One approach to answer this is to compare your spectrum with other spectrums. So please share with me: how do you milk your web?. What does your web usage spectrum look like?

The idea of the Capgemini University course is to let you experience the offshore business where it all happens. How much better can you experience India than in… India? It’s a tough five days course where you get cultural training to better understand how your Indian colleagues are working and why certain things are done in a certain way. It also discusses the root causes for communication failure and why we sometimes don’t seem to understand each other. The other part of the course was geared towards senior software engineers that work in a geographically distributed environment where all issues like RUP distributed delivery, use case estimations in a distributed delivery setting, etc are discussed with plenty of room for networking (50 % Indian participants, 50 % European participants).

This course tries to radically change your mind and let you realize that the sooner you involve the offshore team, the better it will be for the project. Think about it, how much effort gets wasted with doing knowledge transfer and trying to assure that the back office has understood everything what the front office has designed? A very effective approach is to involve the offshore team right from the moment of doing the bid (since eventually they have to build it) so that they are onboard even before the project has kicked off.

Does that mean that we have to be afraid for our jobs in the United States and Europe? Look around you at how many open job positions are. A very important reason to consider offshore nowadays is the fact that we can’t find enough technical IT people in the western countries. We see year after year less people entering the computer science programs at universities, while in India almost everyone that goes into university wants to do something with IT. Capgemini India hires fresh graduates at a rate that we can only dream of in the Netherlands. The lack of sufficient skilled IT professionals in the western countries is a concern to all of us in the industry. We even ask experienced software engineers in our Indian office to fly over to Europe for a couple of months to work at a client location since he or she has a certain skill that is very hard to find in the Netherlands. This means that all of us have to start accepting that this transfer of work skills on a global scale is a necessity if we want to stay competitive. Companies that keep on refusing to join this trend, will face the fact that they stay behind since they won’t find enough skilled IT professionals.

Accept it and open up your mind…

I am currently looking into the possibilities of using the Amazon Cloud Computing offer and I was looking around for some like-minded souls in the company. I just twittered (twittering a new verb like googling?) if someone at Capgemini was working on this and it got picked up by Tim Kelly, the Capgemini Second Life guru. He met on Second Life the chief evangelist of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Jeff Barr and brought me in contact with Simone Brunozzi, the European Evangelist for AWS and I got in touch with him through Facebook and LinkedIn.

Another nice example, which is not directly work-related but quite interesting because of the collaborative effort of a crowd to solve a problem. Trough Bombay Expats Yahoo! Group, I got the message from a fellow expat here in Mumbai that she found someone’s credit card in the city center and she wanted to return it. Based on the details she found on the credit card, I did a Google search and found the person’s weblog. The other expats in the community were continuing with the web search and soon we found the email address of the person and were able to contact the “victim”.

So, basically with a set of extra web 2.0 tools like Yahoo! Groups, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, I can tap into a whole crowd of people that can help me in achieving my goal. Often not even intentionally. A couple of very interesting initiatives recently started because someone saw my twitter message or read my blog and approached me. One could call it desperate or inefficient, the fact that I am shouting out something with the hope that someone else picks it up. I like to call it collaboration, but redefined.