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The cloud computing story for the iPad will fill out as more applications become available. The first few applications we've seen give a glimpse into how the cloud plays a role in the iPad's future, especially with collaborative services such as online meetings. Cisco is launching a WebEx client for the iPad . Cisco is one of the more experienced companies for developing cloud-based products through its hosted service. It's beefing up that strategy, too, as mobile plays a more significant role in the workplace, especially as video is concerned. Sponsor Cisco is building a number of data centers throughout world, with the latest rolling out today, said Grace Kim of Cisco. The network gives Cisco flexibility in developing its client software for multiple platforms. WebEx is available on most smart phones through the browser. The app is available on the iPhone and the iPad. It is available on the Blackberry. WebEx does not as of yet have an app for the Android, With the data centers in place, Cisco gets some flexibility in how it structures pricing for clients, which it can extend to new platforms. A catalyst for that strategy may be the iPad itself. The iPad's form factor allows customers to view meetings on a screen that is simply much bigger. That's where the iPad has value. That, too, comments on how cloud computing becomes more important. The iPad makes video more logical to use. It's not available yet on the WebEx app. Cisco developed the app in the 50 days since Apple announced the iPad. Like a lot of other apps. we notice that WebEx is lacking some features. Cisco, though, is fully focused on video as a focal part of its collaboration strategy. You can expect that we will see video as part of the iPad app in future versions. The iPad is the right device for meeting collaboration. Far more so, we would say, than the iPhone. Customers will take advantage of this, fueling the need for more data centers that are designed for tasks that require elasticity, a key tenant of the cloud computing movement. Will Cisco offer more elasticity in its pricing models? Online conferencing has its roots in the ancient history of cloud computing. That's a time that dates back more than 10 years ago, (chuckle), when we first saw the glimpses of a per use model. Kim said they are always exploring new pricing structures which you can see in new products such as its hybrid offering that allows a large enterprise to use an on-premise client for data critical sessions and the hosted service for meetings that require lesser levels of security.
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The Cloud's Important Role for WebEx on the iPad
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You may or may not be excited by the acronyms OAuth and IMAP/SMTP, but the combination of them all together is very exciting news. Google Code Labs announced this afternoon that it has just enabled 3rd party developers to securely access the contents of your email without ever asking you for your password. If you're logged in to Gmail, you can give those apps permission with as little as one click. What does that mean? It means mashups based on the actual emails in your inbox. If you've given a 3rd party app secure access to your Twitter account, then you'll be familiar with the user experience. The first example out of the gate is a company called Syphir , which lets you apply all kinds of complex rules to your incoming mail and then lets you get iPhone push notification for your smartly filtered mail. Backup service Backupify will announce tomorrow morning that it is leveraging the new technology to back up your Gmail account, as well. Sponsor People are often wary about the idea of giving outside services access to their email, and well they should. OAuth is designed to make that safe to do. Combined with the IMAP/SMTP email retrieval protocols, it gives an app a way to ask Gmail for access to your information. Gmail pops up a little window and says "this other app wants us to give it your info - if you can prove to us that you are who they say you are (just give Gmail your password) - then we'll go vouch for you and give them the info." The 3rd party app never sees your password and can have its access revoked at any time. You can read more about OAuth, how it was developed and how it works, on the OAuth website . Why is this so exciting? Because it means that the application we all spend so much time in, where so much of our communication goes on and where you can find some of our closest work and personal contacts - can now have value-added services built on top of it by a whole world of independent developers, without your having to give them your email password. That's the kind of thing that the data portability paradigm is all about. It's the opposite of lock-in and seeks to allow users to take their data securely from site to site, using it as the foundation for fabulous new services. Google says it is working with Yahoo!, Mozilla and others to develop an industry-wide standard way to combine OAuth and IMAP/SMTP. See also: Rapportive - an incredible GMail contacts plug-in . Discuss
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Gmail Becomes an App Platform: Google Adds OAuth to IMAP
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Thanks to the growing popularity of mobile augmented reality (AR) applications such as Layar and Wikitude , as well as countless advertising campaigns from corporate giants, AR is beginning to make its way out of the shadows of obscurity and into popular culture. Once an experimental technology left for expert engineers, AR is becoming more and more accessible to both developers and consumers of the experiences. Now, the greater AR community has another feather for its cap as Time Magazine has recognized it as one of its 10 Tech Trends for 2010. Sponsor "One challenge for 2010 will be harnessing the growing ubiquity of webcams and smart-phones to make augmented reality useful as a tool in day-to-day life," writes Time's Dan Fletcher, pointing out the U.S. Postal Service's virtual box simulator that helps customers determine what size box to use by holding the item they are shipping up their webcam. Unfortunately, Fletcher merely skims the surface of AR in his 10 part article published Monday, and in doing so he unintentionally labels players in the mobile AR space as "gimmicky." I can see how it would be easy for someone investigating AR iPhone apps to be overwhelmed at the plethora of apps that let you shoot things in an augmented first-person perspective, but it is still disappointing that he failed to notice the quality apps in the space. But hey, it's still great for us augmented reality fans to see our beloved emerging technology receive national notoriety in a publication such as Time, so we'll take what we can get. AR snagged the #4 position on Time's list, but when you look at some of the other trends listed, you notice that AR is already taking advantage of most, if not all of them. Time's #1 tech trend for 2010 is location, and it points out the growing popularity of services like Foursquare and Gowalla . Mobile AR applications have been taking advantage of location data since day one and it continues to play a crucial role. After location comes "building platforms, not websites," which Layar has been developing with their third-party POI data-sets and their upcoming layer marketplace . Good thing "frictionless payments" is another trend to watch for in 2010, otherwise Layar's marketplace would be ahead of its time. Also on Time's list is social gaming, and social objects, immediately reminding me of Tonchidot's Sekai Camera app which lets users leave AR objects in physical space for people to interact with through the application. One could argue that AR uses all of the other nine technologies featured on Time's list with the exception of the iPad, which unfortunately has no camera with which to augment our realities. On a related note, Layar co-founder Claire Boonstra was named to Laptop Magazine's list of the most influential women in technology . Alongside Boonstra was Google 's Marissa Mayer, Caterina Fake of Flickr and Hunch fame, and Melinda Gates. This, as well as Time's inclusion of AR on their tech trends list, is great exposure for augmented reality. If you'd like to learn more about how companies are using augmented reality for marketing in both desktop and mobile-based experiences, be sure to check out our latest premium report on the subject which was released earlier this week. Discuss
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Augmented Reality Among Time's 10 Tech Trends for 2010
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The Web has hit a point where tracking pageviews is useless for startups. There was a time when all you needed to succeed on the Internet were lots and lots of eyeballs, and the best way of measuring those eyeballs was by tracking pageviews (measuring exactly which pages on a website are viewed by individual visitors). The dot-com crash showed us that the eyeball-based business model was a failure. Sponsor Since then, startups have moved toward direct monetization strategies such as subscriptions and virtual goods - and these businesses using these strategies require very different metrics than an advertising-based business would. Make no mistake, pageviews were valuable metric once, but their time has passed. Guest author Tim Trefren is one of the founders of Mixpanel, a real-time Web analytics service that helps companies understand how users interact with Web applications. He writes about analytics at the company blog . For startups that sell something, metrics like average revenue per user (ARPU) and customer lifetime value (CLV) are vastly more valuable than detailed pageview tracking. It doesn't make any sense to focus on pageviews (an approximation for value) when you can measure the real thing directly. There's also a clear pattern in the direction the Web is heading - toward interaction and responsiveness, and away from separate pages. If you're going for incredible user experience, on-page interactions are your bread and butter. Can you imagine what a drag it would be if the page reloaded every time you commented or 'Liked' something on Facebook? It would be awful. This trend further devalues the pageview as a valid metric. If you have a highly interactive Web application that spans only a few pages, there's not a whole lot of value in seeing how many times those pages were loaded. Much more valuable information can be found by tracking the parts of your application that your users are interacting with the most. The benefits here are twofold: You can directly measure the things that are important to you, and you gain unparalleled insight into how people actually use your application. If Not Pageviews, Then What? When you're deciding how to incorporate analytics into your strategy, the most important thing is that you are gathering actionable data. By this I mean that you have to be able to use the information you gather to make a decision and take action . If you're not going to use it to make a decision, it's a waste of time to even look at it. With this in mind, there are a few areas we should focus on: split testing, interaction tracking, conversion funnel analysis, and click tracking. These methods will give you the information you need to both improve your conversion rates and your understanding of user behavior. Just a few years back, your only options were to roll your own analytics or to pay tons of money to a giant company like Omniture. This left startups in a tough spot, one many startup founders still encounter today: it's difficult to justify putting a lot of development time into analytics when it's not your main product, and it's hard for a small company to work with a large sales organization. Luckily, the analytics landscape is changing. Many new companies are sprouting up to handle every aspect of your analytics, freeing you from the need to develop your own internal tools. Split testing Split testing involves creating different versions of your site and measuring how the changes affect user behavior. Your changes can be as small as a different call to action or as large as a complete redesign. With this data in hand, you can make changes to your website to massively improve your conversion rates. What companies do it? Google Website Optimizer is a free multivariate testing solution. It makes it possible to change a number of different things and determine the optimal combination of changes. Conversion funnel analysis Funnel analysis is a way of measuring conversion rates across multiple steps of user acquisition. For example, you can measure the rate at which visitors from the front page go to the pricing page, and then how many continue on to actually create an account. This is an incredibly important concept to understand, and can be applied to many aspects of your application. What companies do it? Mixpanel (my company) is a freemium service that provides funnel analysis and segmentation. Google Analytics has a feature called Funnel Visualization that provides basic pageview-based funnel tracking. KISSmetrics is a new company with a funnel analysis product in closed beta. Click tracking Click tracking is a great way to measure how effective your website is. Every click a visitor makes is recorded, so you know which links and buttons are receiving attention. There are a number of ways to report this data, but the most popular is to overlay an image of your website with a heatmap of all of the clicks. If your users aren't performing as you expect, you can try changing the page and continuing the test. What products do it? ClickTale is a freemium service that can generate click heatmaps and movies of single visitor sessions. CrazyEgg is a paid service that can generate a few different reports for your visitor click activity, including heatmaps. Event tracking Event tracking is a way of measuring exactly what users are doing on your site. Things like invites sent, videos played, and user signups all count as events. This functionality will grow more and more important as the Web grows more interactive. What companies do it? Kontagent is a freemium service that is focused on Facebook applications. It can track Facebook-specific events like invites and notifications, among other things. Google Analytics recently added basic event tracking to complement its pageview based service. Measure Relevancy, Not Your Ego Ultimately, analytics are crucial to online success. If you want to improve your startup, you've got to be measuring it. It's critical to measure the right things, though - the things that are actually important to your business, not things merely appeal to your ego. It can be mesmerizing to watch the unique visitor count go up day-over-day, but this is a dangerous diversion. The era of eyeballs equaling success is long past, so you should instead be measuring the things that are truly relevant to your business. If you're not measuring your visitors yet, I urge you to get your toes wet - track something small. The conversion rates for the buttons on your front page would be a great place to start. Is the pageview really dead? What other companies and services are available to help companies move beyond a pageview-centric mindset? Let us know in the comments Photo by Iva Villi . Discuss
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The Death of the Pageview
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Google launched an application marketplace today comprised of services from third-party providers that integrate with the Google Apps ecosystem. The news has been anticipated for some time. In particular, it shows how much Google is embracing open-standards and leveraging its search and Google Apps platform to attract third-party developers. Sponsor Google made the announcement at its Google Campfire One event tonight. The emphasis Google is putting on the enterprise is apparent in how much attention the company put into the event. Over and over we heard that Google passed the 25 million customer mark over the weekend. It is that mark that Google is using as its hook for attracting developers to its platform. Developers will be charged $100 to join the program. With that entrance fee, they may add as many apps as they wish to the Google Apps Marketplace. The marketplace supports OpenID to provide a single sign-on for developers. Authorization is integrated into the platform. The customers get access through OAuth, the open standard for authorizing users. A "manifest page" is the foundation for the service. The developers provides information when adding the application to the marketplace that identifies it. Developers then provide additional information about the product. The system is a controlled. Application developers submit the app for approval, which might take a few days. Intuit provided an example of how the system works by showing how payroll could be managed. The customer accesses the account. With Google Apps integration, the customer accesses an account where they have the employee information. It's that collected contact network that is then integrated with the payroll application. Atlassian showed how Studio, its project management application, would integrate with GMail and Google Apps. Again, if the company is standardized on Google Apps, the information is available through the network. Manymoon is another project mangement application that was demonstrated. It uses Google Apps to develop features such as a calendar, showing how a startup can leverage Google Apps to add features to its service. Other companies that were a part of the initial launch include Socialwok and Appirio . At its core, the marketplace is built upon Google's search capabilities. Google Apps can be extended with applications. In turn, developers have access to the built-in capabilities of Google Apps. Perhaps the greatest value to customers will be if they are centralized on Google Apps. If so, they can get some pretty powerful capabilities of the marketplace. Discuss
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Google Launches Apps Marketplace for the Enterprise
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