1. Enterprise software backlash. After being a temporarily fashionable haven from the dotcom collapse, enterprise software takes a beating
2. Hybrid social networking and blogging services emerge
3. VOIP makes the music industry
Have been trying out the Vonage softphone with some success.
My Laptop (IBM T40), like most, has built in speakers and microphone, and I don’t want to have to bother with a headset.
The problem is that there doesn’t appear to be any way of controlling the echo that the person I am calling hears when the mic. picks up the sound of their own voice from the laptop speakers feeding back into it.
I can’t find any third party, echo cancelling, software to turn the laptop into a decent hands free phone.
Another question that springs to mind is why the softphone software is better than the reliability and ease of use of voice conversations via an IM client - why are these so unreliable?
In general it seems that IM clients switch to peer-to-peer when dealing with file transfers or voice and this is often screwy, but there seems to be no reason why it should be.
Business Plan Archive is a repository of business plans and information about failed .com companies - a sort of intellectual anti-matter I guess, but fascinating reading nonetheless.
My personal favorite that I’d forgotten about:
Zap.com
Portal that makes fish oil
After ditching its Salesforce.com rival, Sales.com, Siebel is now doing a complete U-turn with its own Salesforce-like ASP tool.
Call me old-fashioned but most Enterprise software seems to suck. When will it go the way of mainframe computers?
The whole notion of spending millions for software that is ‘bespoke’ tailored to your needs, but requires you to do that tailoring yourself for more millions, based on a Return On Investment that has a minus sign in front of it, seems like, well, old-fashioned.
The tool I am using to write this is a more elegant solution to web publishing than the raft of Jurassic CMS systems that are waiting for an enormous meteorite to hit them.
ASP software is a car and enterprise software is a steam train. When the .com bubble burst people tried to make steam driven cars out of the remnants and that was daft.
Too many metaphors, but you get the drift.
Go Salesforce!
Anniversary of first flight - Dec. 17, 2003
Exactly 100 years ago today: flying made possible.
This year, top speed for a commercial airliner: 1350mph
Next year, top speed for a commercial airliner: 650mph
Computers, the Net, telephones and air travel all make the world a smaller place, but exactly 100 years after the invention of flight that is no longer the case.
Moore’s law applied to computing and the spread of the net, arguably shows the world shrinking by half its size every year and a half.
For travel, the plane shrank the apparent size of the earth to one tenth over 50 years, it then shrank by half again over the next 20 years; 20 years later it shrank by another half with supersonic passenger travel. This year it didn’t merely stop shrinking, but it doubled in size.
RSS, or more generally, web based syndication, appears to be hitting critical mass, but where is the money?
Despite the promise of metadata enriched syndicated content, RSS is usually no more than a way to syndicate a link and a headline.
No large publisher will syndicate their full content in RSS because they would lose traffic and therefore, money.
Without full content no aggregator can add much value by categorizing and filtering infomation, so no purely RSS based aggregator can make much money.
Despite all of the interest around web based syndication, people like Lexis Nexis will still make all the money unless this problem is solved.
The solution that gives publishers traffic and allows aggregators to add value is to syndicate full content in such a way that it can be searched or categorized, but people still have to go to read the article on the publisher’s site. All that is needed to do this is to remove ’stop words’ such as ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘of’ and place the tokenized remainder of the full text in the description tag.
Persuading publishers to do this would surely be the best way of focusing community efforts to guarantee the success of web based syndication, rather than concentrating on standards minutiae.
Microsoft’s partnership with Loudeye will allow third parties to develop Apple Music Store style services:
“But the Digital Music Store lets any company interested in starting an iTunes-style service do so for a fraction of the cost, said Loudeye President Jeff Cavins”
Meta-files proposed for legal music sharing
“The Content Reference Forum (CRF), founded by Universal Music Group and backed by technology companies including Microsoft, released the first specifications for the standard this week.
Using the new standard, computer users could share small files containing information about music, video or other data, but not the content itself”
Shouldn’t this be RSS? Does anyone know the people involved in CRF?
Search for ‘Linux Windows’ on MSN and Google respectively:
MSN Search: Results 1-15 of about 18 containing “linux windows”
Google Search: linux windows, results 1 - 10 of about 8,990,000
A slight discrepancy in the numbers.
Update: see comments, MSN does in fact return lots of resuls if you view the second page.
This weekend I had the pleasure of seeing Steve Malkmus at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland.
This dance hall has one of the last remaining sprung floors in the US and was built at a time when the Tango was illegal in Portland. A city ordinance proclaimed a standard dance position be adopted so that ‘no undue familiarity between partners shall be permitted’.
RSS