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WebtodateEnterprise License Agreement Expands Freescale Access to Virtutech SimicsThe agreement extends the Simics license usage across Freescale. The Simics licenses include the core Hindsight platform, TLM based Model Builder, Networking Interface, unique multithreading capabilities, Accelerator and the Simics Model Libraries, which contain thousands of TLM devices, hundreds of SOCs and cores, especially processors based on Power Architecture® technology. Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:06:00 Zrodlo: Enterprise License Agreement Expands Freescale Access to Virtutech Simics
Endless Conversation: The Unfolding Saga of Blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Social Sites
But just like blogs made two-way conversations on the Web relatively cheap, easy, and quick for the masses compared to previous methods (such as personal Web sites), conversational models on the Web have continued to evolve. Recently, microblogging and social aggregation platforms like Twitter and Friendfeed have emerged to offer alternative models that are compelling for a number of significant reasons. For one, contributing to them doesn't take much time. To achieve this, they either have radical limits on the amount of content that can be posted at a time (140 characters for Twitter), or they do the posting work for you and automatically centralize your social activity on other sites into a single feed, as in the case of Friendfeed. They also tend to work very well on mobile devices -- an incredibly fast growing channel for experiencing anything on the Web these days -- as well scale conversation well, are extremely easy to use (even easier in general than blogs), and allow you to keep track of a large numbers of contacts socially. And vitally, both Twitter and Friendfeed are open platforms, not just mere tools. A key factor in their success is that they offer open APIs to allow others to add the features and capabilities that are missing for various specialty needs that would otherwise clutter the product for many users. This creates a far richer overall feature set than any single product could offer on its own, while at the same time leveraging the innovation of the user community. Blogs have been able to do something similar with badges, widgets, and plug-ins for some time but haven't seen the same directed results as we'll see below. The sheer volume of 3rd party add-on activity for these platforms is impressive. Best-of-breed applications like Twhirl for Twitter (and now Friendfeed) and AlertThingy for Friendfeed extend these new social media experiences onto the desktop and provide real-time monitoring of your "Twitterverse" or friend's feeds. To get a full sense of the depth and scope of the innovation of the Twitter community, which is certainly still a niche compared to the blogosphere, though an increasingly impressive one, you have only to look at some of its more compelling 3rd party applications: Common Twitter Applications
This only a small list of the most popular Twitter applications and they don't even include the product offerings that are stand-alone in their own right, but work much better in conjunction with Twitter and Friendfeed, such as Brightkite and Natuba. Understanding How Conversations Are Changing The challenge today is that while the size of individual contributions to online conversations is getting smaller, the frequency of conversations are increasing on these new social media platforms. Making this point, Sarah Perez over at Read/Write Web wrote this morning that there are too many choices, and too much content. Users of the latest social media tools are far more likely to post several times a day, more likely dozens of times, each one forming a new conversational beachhead. This can be overwhelming, but it can also be enormously stimulating and rewarding, as a form of collaboration, cross-pollination, brainstorming, serendipity, news gathering, and countless other activities provide one with a continuous connection to the broader world. To get a handle on how people are using these next generation social media platforms, I ran an online survey this week which I pushed out across my Twitter followers, Friendfeed contacts, and a random sampling of my personal contacts via e-mail (the latter without much regard if they used these tools.) The results largely reflect many of the points above, but there were some interesting write-in results as well. Here's how the Twitter survey results broke down: Results Of This Week's Twitter/Friend Usage Survey
One of the biggest surprises of this survey (there were 103 respondents total) was the amount of those who are thinking about using Twitter for business purposes. Whether that's just expanding their personal brand or actually leveraging it for business collaboration, marketing, and other uses is hard to tell and will be the subject of a further survey. Interestingly, in terms of being used as Enterprise 2.0 platforms by businesses, both Twitter and Friendfeed fly in the face of the underlying pull-based models that make social media more effective that traditional collaboration tools and it'll be interesting to see how well they will function in the workplace, something that seems a way off for most organizations right now. And it may be that in the end that social networking for business platforms like Google's new Friend Connect may be the best answer. One thing is for sure, we'll find out soon as the living laboratory of the Web validates the best approaches. Most other responses were within expected norms though it was interesting to see that, at least explicitly, users don't value 3rd party apps that much. They are also using these social media tools as a replacement for traditional e-mail. But it was ease-of-use and the gathering of news and information which were listed as the aspects that respondents appreciated the most in these emerging platforms. Which highlights that crowdsourcing of news via Twitter in particular continues to be a fascinating topic as a Paul Bradshaw wrote recently as he explored the news tweets coming out of China about the recent earthquake disaster. All of this highlight that the unintended uses and emergent outcomes that we continue to see with with these platforms is demonstrating that they have the power to achieve compelling results of a wide variety, from news and learning to staying in touch and achieving business goals. But the biggest challenge will continue to be the challenge of scaling our attention and time, something that's always in finite quantity. The product creator that can successfully aggregate conversation without losing the social value will be the winner as these endless conversations spin around us, informing, educating and enriching us. You can track me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe and on Friendfeed at http://friendfeed.com/dhinchcliffe. Where do you see conversation online headed? Will it be microplatforms like Twitter or SNS like Google Friend Connect? Or something else entirely? Note: Use wiki markup below to embed links. Photo Album: Presidents RockPresidents Rock
  Blood-Thinning Drug Under SuspicionEvery day thousands of Americans rely on the blood thinner Heparin to survive. Now Dr. Emily Senay reports, that drug is under suspicion for 21 deaths and hundreds of allergic reactions. Case Divides La. Town Along Racial LinesIn a story with echoes of the pre-civil rights era, a Louisiana appeals court makes a major ruling in a case that has divided a small town along racial lines. CBS News correspondent Harold Dow reports. Product Development 2.0While the window on using the "2.0" suffix is probably closing, I thought it would be worthwhile to explore an especially significant trend in 2006 that will likely see much more widespread uptake in 2007. Specifically, I'm talking about building highly competitive online products by turning over non-essential control to users directly via the Web. For now, I'm calling this online business trend "Product Development 2.0", a concept that embodies the use of Web 2.0 concepts such as harnessing collective intelligence, users as co-creators, and turning applications into platforms, three of the most powerful techniques in the Web 2.0 arsenal. What is Product Development 2.0 exactly? It's an informal term I'm applying to something that online startups and traditional businesses both are increasingly doing: leveraging of mass user contributions, providing open architectures for others to build on as they like, and even handing control over key product decisions directly to users. The reasoning behind doing this is simple: Satisfied customers have always been essential to having the most successful business, both online and offline. But how best can you ensure that they get exactly what they want from you, as customized and quickly as possible? This is where the scale, new tools, and business models of Web 2.0 have stepped in, giving us the potential to provide our customers with better, rich products, much more quickly, and with more of what they want. Taken as a whole, it's increasingly clear that there are new business models afoot that are just now being well understood.
Given that any business typically is vastly outnumbered by its customers and potential customers, and that putting a bureaucratic, centralized product development team into the critical path of product creation and ongoing maintenance highlights how little we can actually serve them, especially in an individualized way. And with everyone online, it's increasingly obvious where the biggest source of talent, engagement, innovation, agility, and worker bandwidth really lies: with your customers. Using the techniques and technologies that have emerged in just the last few years, you can now finally give them the tools and motivation to tweak, tune, refine, and contribute to your products and services. And increasingly, they'll probably do it. YouTube is still currently one of the best examples of user co-development of a world-class product in its pure form (65,000+ videos uploaded by users per day), but sites like eBay, Slashdot, and many others have been leveraging their users in product development for a long time now. And as it turns out, Product Development 2.0 is not a small topic and starts off at collecting explicit user contributions, leveraging the Database of Intentions, and putting in automated real-time feedback loops to identify the best or most popular new content or capabilities for other users that come along later. It's important to note that it's a fundamental shift for a business to turn over a large part of its product development to its users, becoming more of a mediator and facilitator than a product creator or owner. This is the shift of control from institutions to individuals that the apparently relentlessly democratizing force of the Web has begun exerting on the business models of organizations of every description around the world. As more organizations figure out how to apply Product Development 2.0 to their individual offerings, they will reap significant competitive advantage over those not harnessing the Web to directly connect to customers and begin a rapid and never-ending innovation cycle. This is another aspect of the perpetual beta concept that reflects the fact that increasingly, products and services online are never finished, and indeed, can't ever be finished as changes and additions seamlessly pour in over thousands of millions of Internet connections. But enough about the possibilities. Let's talk some examples, both in terms of what older style product development did vs. what this new style is doing. Finally, let's talk about some companies actually doing this successfully. Note: Incidentally, though I normally write about services in terms of Software as a Service (SaaS) or Web Services, for the purposes of this discussion I'm talking about non-physical business processes for sale, such as car or medical insurance, tax preparation, etc. and not software. Like the recently discussed Programming 2.0 concept -- a set of software development tools, techniques, and attitudes that is, not incidentally, enabling much of this -- and the original Web 2.0 definition, it is examples in lieu of principles that's one of the best ways to paint a picture of what appears to be happening in the evolution of product development: The Move to Product Development 2.0
It's worth noting a couple of key points about the table above. One is that the Web makes the shift of control possible by putting every business in direct contact with every one of its customers. No small system can remain unchanged by sustained contact with a much larger system, and this means that any business (which is the small system in this scenario) which embraces its customers over the Web in a two-way fashion will likely undergo a move fairly quickly from the first column to the second. The fact is, if you have loyal customers who like the products and services that you offer online, you're going to have a hard time avoiding the shift of control and opening up of your product designs and architecture. The second is that those that play to the strengths of the Web as platform, instead of trying to fight it, can exploit the most powerful software platform, or indeed, platform of any kind, that has been created to date. Triggering network effects, building an extensible platform out of our product offerings (whether it's an online software application or if you're an insurance company, doesn't matter), and you can see the advantage to be had in the assyemtric model of business on the Web; all of the potential is on the edge of our networks now (where the users are) instead of the middle. And waiting too long to enter the Product Development 2.0 arena potentially means waiting for your competitors to get their ahead of you. And the longer you wait to get the clock started on collected the Database of Intentions (continuously turning 100% of all customer interaction into enriching your product dynamically), the more likely you will face competitive dislocation and even lock-out. Amazon is famous for collecting user contributions to enrich their product database and they are about a decade ahead of potential competitors of in terms of the enriched, hard-to-recreate database they have built. Now on to a few examples to highlight what companies are actually doing that has many of the elements of Product Development 2.0. First, the usual preamble about checklists of features; just like Web 2.0, one doesn't have to implement every one of these in order to deliver better results, just the ones that apply in your situation. So let's look at a couple of stories of companies -- and I have many others I'll be sharing as soon as I can -- that are going part of the way down the Product Development 2.0 path and getting valuable early experience. I selected real-world companies since that's the majority of companies that have to figure out whether they're going to play in this space or let others do it for them. Product Development 2.0 Examples
The Potential for Disruption and Opportunity The Web is a fundamentally different platform from any platform we've seen before. Unlike previous general-purpose platforms, the Web is fundamentally communications-oriented instead of computing-oriented. Sure, computing still happens but what the Web does that's so important is its ability to connect information and people together. The hyperlink is the intrinsic unit of thought on the Web . So, it's information connected by links instead of programs that operate on data, that's the basic difference. But why does this hold the potential to put traditional product development on its head and usher in Product Development 2.0? 1) Because the aforementioned information can now truly be generated by anyone. And 2) because we're all nearly universally connected to this new medium by the devices on our desktops, in our briefcases, and in our pockets. All of us can now be directly and continuously connected to the products and services which we need, which increasingly, is the rest of us and not a handful of large companies. The very best companies in the future are likely ones that will create innovative new ways to facilitate innovation and collaboration by the hundreds of millions of us that can be reached and embraced by effective architectures of participation. The big winners will enable us and encourage us to take control, contribute, shape, and direct the designs of the products and services that we in turn consume. The good news: Only a few industry leaders and early adopters fully appreciate the significance of these trends as yet or even how to fully exploit and monetize them. There's still enormous opportunity, and for existing businesses with large investments in existing business models, blowing your business model up before someone else does will be the order of the day. This will prove though very hard for most to do successfully. And therein lies the potential for significant industry disruption in the next 5 years as new players with core competency in Product Development 2.0 push older, slow-to-adapt businesses off the stage. While this is far-fetched for some, effectively embracing the Web is key to business success today. Why do you think this will or won't be the ultimate future of how we do business? Informacji szukaj w: google yahoo msn |
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It wasn't long ago that to be a credible participant in social media one only had to have a decent blog and keep it updated fairly regularly. The 
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