DownloadTube

It’s no longer news that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a booming industry. We learned last year that 61% of North American companies with sales over $1 billion planned to adopt one or more SaaS applications this year. And Gartner projects that 25% of all new business software (CRM, ERP, SCM, etc.) will be delivered by means of SaaS by 2011.

What’s becoming news is what’s happening online. We’ve talked here before about the influence of Web 2.0 on CRM development. And the social networking achievements on the Web are compelling, especially as they suggest methods for delivering better customer service.

Datamonitor recently suggested in a report on the pharmaceutical industry that it should develop online communities as a tool for learning about its customers. Datamonitor predicts that in the future, the focus of CRM will move beyond managing customer relationships towards community-building and support.

More than a decade ago Sun Microsystems proclaimed that “the network is the operating system.” Software developers are of course attuned to the development path and behavior of operating systems, since this is where their users and their applications will work together. It should be no surprise that the Internet, as the largest network ever created, demonstrates almost daily new and original uses of applications. Here at Dovetail we take note of these innovations.

The forces at work on the evolution of software are fairly massive, in today’s connected global operating system. Microsoft may yield its original configuration to better online operators, with services reduced precisely to majority needs, or perhaps, to a degree, configurable on-demand. At the same time its original software may unlock so much new value that it occupies or dominates an entirely new market, especially as Microsoft becomes increasingly visible in the CRM field.

The message is: Build in .NET and be able to embrace more services, applications, resources and data.

Dovetail Software’s platform is .NET, as many of you know. We wrote our applications from scratch to run on .NET, precisely because of the ease of integration and rapid development this platform affords. Like Microsoft, we’ve been quietly developing our software (in policy if not in code) according to SOA principles for a long time now. Our architecture allows users of Clarify™ data to create hybrid applications, for example, using Web services for customized data access.

One of our customers who deployed our SDK development platform reports satisfaction in using the Dovetail Web Services because of its ability to “Respond to Market Changes Quickly”. They also praised WebLogic/SOAP/.NET because of its ability to connect with multiple databases and systems to obtain customer information such as loyalty points, service order history, etc. Essentially they can provide each of their agents a portal view across multiple customer data sources.

We developed our applications because we believe that Amdocs is ill equipped to service the evolving needs of the Clarify install base for thin clients, Web portals, and remote data access. But there are two sides to the SOA coin.

Let’s be honest, the current generation of consoles is barely out of nappies, but already people are beginning to ask the question: what next for consoles?

There have been some naïve suggestions that the current crop (probably excluding Nintendo’s Wii) have provided too much capacity for the poor old game developers to fill, but as anyone with half an interest in these things will tell you, gimmicks are all very well but people want power!

Making assumptions about technology is always a dangerous game, but there are some predictions that you can make about the direction gaming is taking. All three of the big boys – Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and the Wii – are machines built to provide online play, and in the case of the former two – consoles are also doubling as multimedia hubs.

But if you were building a next generation super-gamer, what would you be including? We’ve stuck on our thinking caps and come up with our list, and as ever we’d love to see your suggestions for the kind of machine that would grace your living room.

The iPhone is just a cool toy. There’s no 3G in this version. It costs £269 (and that’s just for starters) and the 2MP camera is hardly high-tech.

The phone is a second generation mobile phone in a third generation market… Many of the iPhone features are wants not needs. It whets consumers’ appetites, rather than satisfies their hunger.”

All good points. But let’s not overstate the 3G issue. Nokia packs 3G plus Wi-Fi into its N95 and, should you use either on a regular basis, you’ll typically not get much more than a day’s usage out of the phone. Many users have found that they need to charge their N95s up every night. This is hardly ideal for a so-called smartphone.

She’s dead right about the camera though.

The very fact that the iPhone is a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ phone means (if we adhere to the old saying) that’s going to be ‘master of none’. As we’ve written before, you can think of the iPhone as a phone with a built-in iPod. Or you can view it as a sexy, connected PDA (or Internet Tablet), that you can also make calls with.

The iPhone could be part of an Apple strategy that embraces the ‘connected home’ or ‘digital home’.

And while Carphone Warehouse expects to sell 10,000 iPhones on Friday, there might not be the mad rush to buy one that we witnessed in the US.

Apple will be reaching out to mainstream, picky mobile users who want full content portability rather than a partial service.

There has been more mainstream press on Virtualization technologies and the adoption of roles outside the traditional data center use case. It is apparent that this technology is working its way into the SME (Small to Medium Enterprise).

Internally we are using Virtualization technology (variety of programs) for server consolidation, testing, evaluations and troubleshooting. The ability to load multiple desktops is important in providing demos of upcoming products and evaluating application and program compatibility without disrupting my primary desktop.

It is my understand that the upcoming Windows Server 2008 will have more technology built on virtualization and the ability to manage multiple instances. The core features will occur post Server 2008 launch (http://news.com.com/Will+virtualization+be+Windows+Servers+silver+bullet/2100-1016_3-6190465.html).

The challenge for vendors (Pervasive included) it to identify the best licensing model that meets the needs of all parties.

So I have a few questions for our partners and uses around virtualization:

Do you have any plans to incorporate Virtualization technology into your testing or production environments?
What is your expected timeframe for adoption (6 months, 12 months, longer)?
What is the expected benefit that you are looking at gaining (application compatibility, testing, etc)?
When purchasing products will you start to consider the licensing model around virtualization as a decision in the buy process?

Hey, maybe actually, it is below our standard!

I’m referring to the article titled “New Ethics Code Governs Businesses that Serve Fund Raisers” published today on the News Updates website of The Chronicle of Philianthropy.  Authored by Holly Hall, this article cites the action of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) to create these “new” ethical standards and invite businesses to pay to attest they meet those standards. They do this by now offering to allow these businesses (including us for GiftWorks fundraising software) to become AFP members so we can display their “Executive Circle” logo.

I’m still trying to understand the logic of being charged to be labeled ethical but I certainly appreciate the need in the marketplace. Fundraisers, often so pressed for time and dollars, can give due diligence short-shrift. Lamentable but true. Then, of course, no field is free of shysters either.

In any case, I’ll hold our Mission Research standards of ethics and demonstrated behavior, up to anyone. Everyone here “gets it”. And we didn’t need AFP to get there. Now about that AFP membership fee….

A multi-year agreement has been made between Yahoo and eBay to bundle many of the two company’s services together.

Mick Weinstein of Seeking Alpha precedes his summary of blogosphere reactions with this noe. “Note that JP Morgan Securities had a report (.pdf) out just two days ago predicting such a eBay-Yahoo alliance as the most likely deal of its kind among the big internet players.”

Thoughts: I think this is liable to be seen as a less obtrusive partnership than some other search engine/other vendor deals. As far as I know, nobody’s computer or even browser comes with Yahoo or eBay baked-in top-level (Firefox Yahoo inclusion is substantially more low key than that of Google) so I think this is going to be received as an extension of voluntary use.

Second, I’m not sure how limited the possibilities are here. Will people start using Flickr to upload their photos for eBay? Will future auctions be promoted on Upcoming.org? Maybe I’m being silly here, but the point is that Yahoo’s recent torrent of feature-add-by-acquisition offers a lot of creative potential for a partnership with a huge player like eBay/PayPal/Skype.

Some people have said this is just a trial balloon, that these two companies are really competitors, etc. But in the face of Google’s success and Microsoft’s largess I can’t imagine that Yahoo and eBay wouldn’t be able to work out some really powerful collaboration. The fact that Yahoo gets more page views than any other site online, has acquired so much hippness and yet is the dark horse in this space is amazing.

Working on a presentation for a conference where I’m going to talk about RSS and am wondering - what are the coolest examples of nonhuman generation of RSS feeds? I know that technically every search feed, stock report feeds and things like that are generated without the immediate involvement of humans. But some time ago Lisa Williams told me about a buoy at sea that publishes a feed of hourly updates to all kinds of weather conditions. That’s from the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS). She told me she would like to be able to subscribe to a feed that would tell her when her home’s heating oil was running low.

There’s got to be more examples out there - anyone care to point to ones you know of? I know there are systems to track package delivery (like FedEx). There have to be some RFID systems that utilize RSS. I know there are quite a number of innovative examples of RSS feeds generated in libraries. Limited traffic reports for particular cities from Yahoo and Traffic.com. Incidentlog.com is a cool use of police reports, mashing up feeds and Google Maps.

Really far out examples of RSS feeds being generated for a useful purpose without substantial human input is what I’m looking for. I really believe there will be a lot of this in the future, but the sooner we can find examples the sooner we can prepare ourselves and others for the idea. Please do post examples in comments if you can think of or find any that I haven’t.

To be honest I’d be curious to see peoples’ favorite applications of RSS in any context. Anything already listed by Tim Yang or Basement.org excluded.

Unfortunately, what’s necessary for startup is different for different PC’s. Here’s what I do for my PC and for friends… Get a list of the startup programs on your PC from msconfig (the Startup tab). Jot down all the names (make sure you spell them properly). Then go to:

www.castlecops.com/StartupList.html. If you scroll down the page a little, you’ll see a Search field. Key in the name of one of the programs on your startup list, and click on the Search button. Scroll down the resulting page, then click on the program link that it found. This will bring up a page that will tell you what the program does, and whether it is necessary. You’ll still have to make some decisions (like is that Adobe speed loader really necessary), but it will at least give you some information to make an informed decision.

Probably the best suggestion was already made. Msconfig, to view and change apps that open at starrtup.  This can really bog your system down at startup.  Also it never hurts to upgrade the RAM, I have Vista and it only takes me about 45 seconds to boot up.  Thanks mostly to the amount of RAM I have.

Mine loads up real slow , it has 512 mb of ram , I don’t want to tinker with it because I can end up with less than desirable results considering that it is the main computer in the house and supports another  with a shared internet connection, and is burdened by all the firewall /antivirus soft ware needed in today’s environment, I am considering getting a wireless router and out fitting all ours with wireless cards but have had a lot of trouble trying to use conventional cable routers, the drawback is the security issues created by the wireless system.

How long does your PC take to start up?” Our desktop, an HP Pavilion m7463w Media Center PC, 3GigRAM, has been on 24/7 since we bought it last year in May 2006. AVG-free, SpywareBlaster, Spybot-Search&Destroy, ZoneAlarm, AdAware SE and Windows Defender are all loaded and run in the background. No problems, so far. We do disable the wireless connection when the PC is not being used for ‘net access.

We agree that Norton & McAfee are total system hogs and should be avoided. Windows Defender is all you need for spyware (it does work very well actually) and it doesn’t seem to slow down my machine at all. For virus and worm protection, there is a program called Avast that is totally free for home use. I discovered it when I once had a virus that no other app would detect. Avast monitors email, web browsing, P2P file sharing, IM and general network access and yet starts quickly and has a minimal impact on system performance. You just have to re-register it every 6 months or so (for free) by confirming your name and e-mail address with them.

Ditch McAfee & Norton and you will free up several minutes each morning, and will also free up minutes during your day because the apps mentioned above won’t bog down your system.