•
We're seeing a few glimpses from Mix10 of what Windows Phone 7 Series will look like for the enterprise. Perhaps most compelling is the continued emphasis on creating an experience more so than an enterprise "phone." It appears that Microsoft has learned a lesson that is more apparent every day. People want smartphones as much for personal use as for business use. Sponsor But Microsoft is saying little about what it does plan for the enterprise with its Windows Phone 7 Series. They say more is to come in the next few weeks but clearly the emphasis is on the consumer market, not the enterprise. Network World did a little sniffing around Mix10 and did get a few tidbits of what we should expect: Windows Phone 7 is no longer enterprise-centric but the user experience is still catching the fancy of independent software vendors that want to sell it into the business market. The iPhone and Google Android are proof enough that people will find relevance for smartphones in the enterprise even if the devices are meant primarily for consumers. A developer community is ready and waiting to make applications for Windows Phone 7. Developers can create applications within a development environment they understand. Network World notes: "Visual Studio programmers can drag and drop controls onto a Windows Phone surface, bring in existing Silverlight libraries or Azure cloud projects, and wire them up to data sources, behaviors and services, just like they do when writing software for a Windows PC." Microsoft is expected to offer a secure area within its Marketplace to accomodate enterprise applications. The intention wold be to provide a place where enterprise customers could download company specific software or the framework for their own marketplace. This would provide IT administrators with ways to administer applications within the enterprise. It's uncertain what security features will become part of Windows Phone 7. Microsoft has historically provided Microsoft Exchange Active Sync which enables Windows Mobile devices the ability to sync with Microsoft Exchange. Actice Sync has offered a number of security features such as remote data wipe and encrypted connections. Will this rich security framework be kept intact? With such a consumer focus, it's uncertain what will come of it. Windows Phone 7 includes an Office Hub, allowing people to create and edit Microsoft Office documents. Microsoft has put a lot of effort into making Sharepoint a mobile site. Windows Phone 7 will integrate with Microsoft Exchange. It appears users may set up tiles within Windows Phone 7 to edit and share Sharepoint documents. It appears that Microsoft may not necessarily have to focus on the enterprise. Its rich user experience may be enough to get people interested. Core enterprise features will only help give Windows Phone 7 a chance to compete more effectively. Discuss
Excerpt from:
Will Windows Phone 7 Series Be A Smartphone for the Enterprise?
Tags:
Business,
consumer,
Microsoft,
network-world,
news,
Office,
phone,
silverlight,
user,
windows phone,
windows-mobile
•
At the RSA Keynote a few weeks back, Amazon's Security Lead, Steve Riley participated on a panel with other security leaders of the industry. We were impressed with the openness of all of the participants, and particularly excited with the new concepts coming from at Amazon. Riley used a term that is being used within his part of Amazon, the "Think Cloud". As we understand it from the discussion on stage, a Think Cloud is a "body of knowledge" that is a real-time information base of Amazon cloud that can be pivoted all the way down to the threads and individual data concurrency. It would be an index that acts like a control point that helps define movement of data through a servers and compute tasks. Looking at the journey from the data point of view, including data about the environment itself and how to repair itself when damaged and keep data concurrency in tact. Sponsor Here's the RSA cloud security keynote to get a bit of inspiration to benefits of portable (cloud) computing. In this 30 minute discussion, there are several notable considerations from the contributors on how cloud security challenge can be thought of as a big opportunity and that perhaps now is time to debunk the myth that security is not a part of the cloud. We picked out a few of Riley's comments that we believe are leading towards the idea of the Think Cloud and why Amazon may be there first. I/O Amazon knows it is critical to be able to have good inputs and outputs. And emphasizes ease of use even more than data portability standards themselves. Riley described a great use case where an un-named customer used Amazon for compute, another cloud provider for data processing, SalesForce for crunching, and then pushed the results to Facebook. Interconnection is happening and applications are already "using all the clouds out there". In this case, all the way down to the consumer. When we look at this pattern, it we see parts that mimic the history of web in the enterprise. Back-end systems moving data around, optimizing, and passing it to the a web portal. And, the portal demanding "real time" updates for key pieces of data, while relying on batch for others. We can see that idea of a Think Cloud may come into this pattern to help set boundaries and checks so that when a piece of data passes through an Amazon, it is returned reliably, ever time. Perhaps a Think Cloud is a registry that does part of what a smart Enterprise Services Bus does when registered new applications for master data, that is keeps track of activity. In a way, we need to solve the cloud-equivalent "floating point" problem in the CPU of generations past in the computer itself. On the CPU math co-processor, the question was, "Does it know how to do math correctly every-time under all conditions?". Perhaps the question in the cloud may be "Are all my customers still in the database even though that thread died?", or "Do we have encryption set on every cpu that this user's information is stored in memory or on disk". Solving that problem of interchange the role the concept of Think Cloud might lead. Many legacy applications won't make it to the cloud. At least, not as-is. Riley comments that "servers are disposable horsepower, they come, they go". In other words, Since applications sit on top of servers, and servers are sinking into the cloud, applications will sink or swim based on how they migrate to this model. So, the first movers are "the rats" that have jump ship as it started to sink. Follow the rats, or drown. The tear-down of the server into the n-resource cloud breaks-or-suboptimizes server based applications in a fundamental way. Thinking back, this is very similar to web services revolution in the enterprise, where just because an application can export its data model, doesn't mean it is optimized for web services, or API level interaction. We find this almost a reverse-trend to server virtualization, which has expanded the physical compute space. Perhaps we are finding that there is some new turf to be claimed on where the cloud reaches and virtualization ends. We like to think of it as "smart service bus" meets "smart application" on infinite resources. Infinite, or course, equaling the credit in your PayPal (or other) form of payment collection required by either, or both parties. As reported by The Register's Cade Metz, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer recently pointed out that this is a potential opportunity with Microsoft and Azure. Where, instead of "only" focusing on infrastructure clouds, the company is working towards a new programming model, Steve said on March 4, 2010. "I think Azure is very different than anything else on the market. I don't think that anyone else is trying to redefine the programming model" When we look at the services recently in our post, Is Amazon's Computing Fabric a New Economy , we noted a series of services outside of core computing that start evolving Amazon quickly down the path of a new development paradigm. Abstracting storage, network, monitoring, and perhaps in future security, in raw terms gives rise to new opportunities to bind them back together. Security is the topic for RSA. Compliance is the reason to get it right. If the computing model wants to be secure, it needs to know the assets and their relationships. As reported by Search Cloud Computing , Amazon's Riley also tipped the audience at RSA that Amazon is weighing in on encryption as a service offerings. This is another example, where that now Amazon is supporting a new services such as Virtual Private Cloud, it moves one step closer the knowledge point for all the key assets, including their peers within the corporate network. We find this area, as well as certificate management, to be an area ripe for the type of thinking we see at Amazon. The problem to be solved isn't a better routine, but is how to apply it tandem with the moving assets and data that is ever changing in demand. Perhaps We Needed to Get to Random, to Get to Secure We wonder if Amazon's Think Cloud is something new, and if so, is a path towards solving the collision of the major parties in the network. If it joins network, storage, person, and server resources together, perhaps it is the brains of the next generation Internet. The winner will be the one that makes it simple, because as Devo on Chatroulette is proving, demand is asymmetric, and access control is from the eighties. Photo credit: RSA , Devo , Inc. Discuss
Excerpt from:
Future: Amazon's 'Think Clouds' are Data Aware
Tags:
architecture,
clouds,
consumer,
data,
database,
enterprise,
history,
knowledge,
Microsoft,
paypal,
random,
relationships,
security challenge,
security leaders,
Steve Riley,
virtual,
words
•
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission built upon its growing new media prowess with the launch of its own iPhone and Android applications. The FCC's new apps allow users to test the speed of mobile broadband services and report deadzones where mobile broadband is not available. The FCC iPhone app is a free download from iTunes or the Android marketplace . Sponsor Alexander B. Howard is the associate editor of SearchCompliance.com at TechTarget. His work there focuses on how regulations affect IT operations, including issues of data protection, privacy, security and enterprise IT strategy. You can find him on Twitter at @digiphile . Before he joined TechTarget, he was the associate editor of WhatIs.com , and worked at Bain & Company and Sapient, along with stints as a teacher and carpenter in Massachusetts. "Transparency empowers consumers, promotes innovation and investment, and encourages competition," said chairman Julius Genachowski in a press release. "The FCC's new digital tools will arm users with real-time information about their broadband connection and the agency with useful data about service across the country. By informing consumers about their broadband service quality, these tools help eliminate confusion and make the market work more effectively." The Consumer Broadband Test and the Broadband Dead Zone Report are also available as fixed applications at Broadband.gov . According to the FCC, the Ookla, Inc. Speed Test and the Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) running on the Measurement Lab (M-Lab) platform are used to power the app. On the night of March 13th, the FCC tweeted that over 80,000 tests had been registered using the Broadband Speed Test. It was unclear how many tests were through Broadband.gov or the apps. In the future, the FCC says it will making additional broadband testing applications available for consumer use. Consumers can also submit availability information by e-mail to fccinfo@fcc.gov . And, perhaps taking a page from Google's playbook, this application is in beta. According to the Consumer Broadband Test information page, "this beta version is the FCC's first attempt at providing Americans with real-time information about their broadband connection quality." I ran a quick test on my home cable Internet connection. My downlink isn't quite fiber optic speed, but I found it close to existing tools. The test depends upon Java, though many users are likely to have that installed at this point. I tried out the mobile app as well, which used the GPS in my iPhone to discover my location. According to the FCC mobile broadband testing app, I'm getting 1.42 Mbps download speed from AT&T 3G here on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., and .11 Mbps upload. My connection certainly beats GPRS, if not a Clearwire 4G connection — or my Wi-Fi. Privacy Concerns? The FCC states that it's "committed to protecting the personal privacy of consumers utilizing these tools, and will not publicly release any individual personal information gathered." It's posted a privacy statement to that effect. Crowdsourcing Citizen Reporting The larger context of the release of the FCC mobile broadband testing app is worth noting. The FCC will release its National Broadband Plan this week. Part of that plan will certainly incorporate assessing where broadband service exists, how robust it is and how closely service matches advertised rates. An executive summary of the National Broadband plan is embedded below: FCC National Broadband Plan Executive Summary This kind of data collected by the FCC's broadband tests could serve in much the same vein as the FTC's consumer complaint assistant works at FTComplaintassistant.gov . By releasing the apps and test at Broadband.gov, the FCC has given citizens a tool to report service quality and availability around the country. Equipped with that data, commissioners may be able to make policy decisions informed by data as they roll out the national broadband plan. Discuss
See the article here:
FCC's New Mobile Apps Could Shape Federal Policy
Tags:
Alexander B. Howard,
associate,
broadband,
broadband speed test,
Capitol Hill,
citizen,
consumer,
country,
D.C.,
Executive Summary,
FCC,
federal communications commission,
government,
internet,
iphone,
Julius Genachowski,
location,
Massachusetts,
measurement lab,
mobile,
national,
network,
night,
personal,
test,
Washington
•
Last week we talked about managing split teams with Danny Wong of Blank Label , a site for creating custom men's dress shirts and a startup in the growing field of co-creation. These types of startups, which have gained more traction overseas than in the U.S., run on a model of on-demand production, which allows them to become cash-flow positive in a relatively short period of time. Wednesday I had the chance to talk about co-creation with Carmen Magar, a German woman living in New York who works for chocri , a German startup that sells customizable chocolates. Sponsor According to Magar, Germany is quickly becoming a hub for co-creation startups while the U.S. and the U.K. have been much slower to adopt them. Before setting up shop in the U.S., custom t-shirt company Spreadshirt actually began as a startup in Germany. Magar, who has spent significant amounts of time in both countries, says that while the difference in cultures has been an influence, the main reason that co-creation has taken off in Germany is the country's smaller market which allows startups to make a larger impact. "What happened in Germany is that there were a lot of startups doing co-creation; a lot of companies that didn't have a production process in place that were really flexible and could talk to their customers directly," Magar told ReadWriteWeb on Wednesday. "In the U.S., the way it was proselytized was that soon in the future every big company would change their production process to enable mass customization, but that's actually a really risky thing to do. What I think will happen is that the startups, the small companies that are nimble, will lead the way to bring that control to the consumer." Another reason why co-creation and mass customization may have taken root in Germany is that the country, like many in Europe, suffers from a severe lack of seed level funding, while the U.S. has incubators and VC firms across the country targeting early stage companies. As we mentioned last week with Blank Label, most co-creation startups use a business model that lets them produce products only as they are ordered, keeping costs down and allowing the company to have an early cash flow. In a region like Europe, the need to bootstrap businesses from the ground up like chocri (which started with €25,000) is much higher, and co-creation is a great way to accomplish this. American startups may be less likely to go down the route of co-creation because the investors are more willing to take risks on less proven businesses. Magar, who lived in Germany most of her life and came to America to get her MBA, believes that Germany's propensity towards mass customization is also part of what led chocri to hire her as their representative in America. The company just happened to be looking to expand their presence to the U.S. when Magar called to express her interest in the company. "I think why they chose to have a German on the team is because I saw a lot more of this happen, and I understand more about mass customization," says Magar. "Because I live here I've experienced the American market, but it was more important to them to bring in an understanding of the concept." This is an important concept for startups to grasp, both in the U.S. and abroad. When looking to expand overseas, it is important to find someone with familiarity in both regions who can survey the new market and who can grasp the core values of your business. As a German, Magar completely understood chocri's co-creation strategy, and studying in America made her a great choice to help the company find a presence there. Is co-creation finally beginning to catch on in the U.S. with companies like Spreadshirt and Blank Label? Or perhaps co-creation is more alive in America than we realize? Or is mass customization a startup model that will continue its struggle to gain traction in America? Let us know what you think about co-creation and spreading startups overseas in the comments below! Discuss
Go here to read the rest:
Is America On the Verge of A Co-Creation Invasion?
Tags:
america,
blank-label,
Business,
consumer,
country,
Europe,
german,
life,
magar,
really-flexible,
representative,
Startups
•
In part 1 of our interview with Adam Greenfield , author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing , we discussed the impact of the iPhone and other smartphones on the Internet of Things . In Part 2, we explore how the Apple iPad may also become a key device. Adam Greenfield thinks it may become the missing link between Internet-connected items in your home, for example the Internet fridge, and the Web. Sponsor In yesterday's post, we talked about how Asian cities are ahead of the curve in deployment of Internet of Things technologies. One reason is that quality of life can be more easily be delivered as a service in a country like Korea, because its citizens are more open to futuristic appliances like the Internet fridge . The counter-argument is that the Western market has never taken to the Internet fridge because of the poor utility of such appliances. The answer may be a device that acts as an effective intermediary between the fridge and the Internet. The iPad could be that device. Adam Greenfield explained to me that the iPad may become the kind of device that people carry around with them everywhere inside the house, from the lounge to the bedroom to the kitchen. That got me to thinking. Imagine this use case: you're feeling peckish, so you wander into the kitchen for a snack. Your trusty iPad is tucked under your arm, as usual, and you place it on the kitchen bench while you open the fridge. You guiltily pick up a chocolate bar and you're about to close the fridge door when your iPad beeps. You glance at the iPad, where a diet management iPad app has automagically opened and is flashing the message: "Hey buddy, you've already had too many calories today - put that back!" Blushing, you return the chocolate bar into the fridge and pick up a punnet of strawberries instead. You glance back at your iPad, which now displays a large green check mark on its screen! There are many other scenarios I could describe, but the point is the iPad may well become a linking device between Internet-connected appliances and objects in your house, and the Web. Adam Greenfield explained that the mistake we've made with Internet fridges in the past was to think of them like a dumb sensor. He remarked that it's not the instrumentation that is important in an Internet fridge - it's the network. The data will probably be collected by the fridge, in time via RFID-enabled food packaging. But the fridge itself is a clumsy interface to that data. Early examples of Internet fridges have tried to be an interface for the consumer. Although some have had tablet-like devices that could be disconnected from the fridge and used on the kitchen bench, users have not found even those very compelling. There are a variety of reasons, including limited utility of fridge-tablets, poor user experience, and the sheer awkwardness of attaching a tablet to and from a fridge. The iPad, however, will be used anywhere and everywhere by its users - inside and outside the house. So it's a natural device to use to connect (virtually, not physically) to your fridge - along with other appliances and objects. This isn't restricted to inside the house either. We've written before about cars as a service . This is where you, the consumer, can effectively subscribe to a car or a car provider. This is already happening with the American service Zipcars . Greenfield noted that cars will become a "network resource" - addressable, scriptable, queryable, and so on. And once again, the iPad may be the device which connects you to cars and all of the data that is pumped out by cars and connected web services. In the not too distant future, household appliances and other real-world objects such as cars will be connected to the Internet. The iPad may well become the connector to all of those things. Discuss
Read more here:
Why The iPad May Save The Internet Fridge
Tags:
chocolate,
consumer,
data,
house,
instrumentation,
internet,
iPad,
iphone,
kitchen,
Korea,
network,
RFID