Ubiquity

"Ubiquity" has been blowing round twitter today so I thought I had better check it out.

I think this is great. It is basically a Mozilla mashup solution. While the service requires Mozilla as a client this is a fairly light weight client so I can see that there will be huge uptake.

If I can use Ubiquity from within a browser based email system )Lotus Notes / Exchange then it has the potential to become a standard.

I wonder about the use of Ubiquity Vs Portal/Mashup sites. Once I have used a Ubiquity service perhaps I want to share this new mashup-ed up content with my colleagues by posting it to a portal site rather than an email so it would be good if there was a web page construct available as well.

I have not read the doco yet but I thought I would get the message out. Not often you see a v0.1 offering.


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

WOW - Instant Messaging

I want to tell you about a situation that happened yesterday with one of my customers that just wow-ed them.

The client is currently performing and upgrade to some software. As part of the upgrade the client needed officially supported templates. While I was on the phone to the customer I searched for right support resource added them to my buddy list and initiated a instant messaging chat (using Sametime). I asked the support guy to send the the templates to the customer and thus satisfied the customer straight away.

The customer was amazed that I could find the right resource (an off-shore resource) and satisfy his request in about 3 minutes when his expectation was that it would take a couple of days - raising a problem record etc. I was really pleased to be able to help so effectively.

Instant messaging is a cool tool for shortening processes involving human interactions and teaming. Go Lotus Sametime!

I guess this is pure product marketing but hey if it helps you do a good job who cares!?

Anglican Church goes Open

A bit of a buzz among the IBM community about the recent article about the Anglican Church in Sydney to use Lotus Symphony over and above MS Office. Have a look at the video below and listen to George Lymbers chat about how he wants to move away from licensed software.

Reading between the lines this chap wants to use Open Source software that doesn't have any license costs but does have a support structure - just in case a problem needs to be fixed. As software and the qualities of service of running software e.g. scalability, resilience, performance etc becomes a commodity then this model looks likely to become more and more popular.

It increases the pressure on software houses to develop more innovative and value added software capabilities while moving chunks of older function into the open source communities but does this only apply to on-premise software?

I would argue no to that point, if soho, google, cloudo can start to deliver higher quality offerings from the cloud then the business model becomes a flat charge for storage, power, bandwidth and maintenance and everything else including the software is free......

Following on from this train of thought why will people develop high quality software - for fun, kudos, because they can? or would it be to drive volume business on cloud computing sites?

The question arises, what will be the next generation of value added services that software vendors can actually charge customers for? Todays innovative products become tomorrows commodity - what's next?

Web 2.0 for Business = profiling

I was chatting to Donald brown of Brown House fame yesterday about some of the presentations I had recently created e.g. University 2.0, Universities and Social Networking, Twitter and the Telcos and a couple of IBM internal presentation such as Innovation for Web 2.0 Technical Sales and Future of the Media industry and it struck me that all I am really doing is looking at an industry and applying some thought to come up with how I think Web 2.0 effects those industries.

I discovered that as I apply a scenario to one industry I can also apply it to another industry - its like applying an architectural pattern............ So where is all this leading?

I think that for the Corporations Web 2.0 is about the profile.

The profile has two aspects, the person or individual and the activity they are doing.


Person:
1. Measure participation
emails, IM, blog entries, comments made, wiki updates, your content, rating of content

2. Measure interactions
while doing 1 above who are you interacting with, how much and what about?

Activity:
1. What are you doing
Twitter-esk type updates, I am walking down Queen street just passing the Newsagents.

2. What is the environment, where, temperature, weather, location
Its raining, the wind is up its 11am (the person could do with a coffee!)

If we combined all this information we have a possibility to understand the needs, wants and desires of a person at any given moment.

In IBM speak we have a research product called Atlas which is part of the Lotus Connections suite which starts to do this for enterprises - its like LinkedIn on steroids. As we move forward more tools will be needed to sift through all of a persons "participation and events" to create a more meaningful profile.

Once we have this profile we are then in a very powerful position to sell services and products.

So, Web 2.0 for the enterprise is real about user profiling.

(presentation to follow although it may be a week or so as I am in China next week with my head firmly wedged on the grind stone)