CenterBeam NewsLog

Web 2.0: At the tipping point | InfoWorld | News | 2006-03-23 | By Stacy Cowley, IDG News Service

Link: Web 2.0: At the tipping point | InfoWorld | News | 2006-03-23 | By Stacy Cowley, IDG News Service.

Time for a real Internet highway | CNET News.com

Link: Time for a real Internet highway | CNET News.com.

Economist.com | Economics focus

Link: Economist.com | Economics focus.

The economics of sharing

Feb 3rd 2005

Technology increases the ability of people to share, but will they share more than just technology?

BY NOW, most people who use computers have heard of the “open source” movement, even if they are not sure what it is. It is a way of making software (and increasingly, other things as well), which relies on the individual contributions of thousands of programmers. The resulting programs are owned by no one and are free for all to use. The software is copyrighted only to ensure it remains free to use and enhance. In essence, therefore, open source involves two things: putting spare capacity (geeks' surplus time and skill) into economic production; and sharing.

Release 1.0, November 2004: The Accountable Net: Let's Take Back Paradise!

E-mail marketing is less effective because of spam and phishing schemes; businesses register their competitors' domain names to woo their unsuspecting customers; individuals are able to steal and use the good credit of people with similar names. As a result, the Net is losing its appeal to many. It's ironic, because the Net should be a safer place than the physical world. You don't need to engage with people you don't want to, and things in theory are more trackable. That has led - in our trusting world - to a very open Net in which strangers roam. But if you change the default - from everyone's a stranger to no strangers allowed - you can create a very different world. We're about to change that default. Instead of starting open, systems will start closed. Everyone will deal only with identified, trusted, accountable counterparts, in the peer-to-peer accountable Net.

Like so many other things, governance works better when it is peer-to-peer or occasionally clustered (but not centralized). Unregulated by government does not mean completely unregulated. In theory, the government should be regulating the behavior of all the entities on the Net. We don't believe government is up to that task. But we do believe that the entities on the Net can regulate one another, if systems are set up properly. And they have an interest in doing so.

This issue of Release 1.0 outlines some significant recent developments towards realizing the promise of the accountable Net. It's a vision of decentralization, and there are lots of parties and pieces that need to work together. We look at only a few of them here - primarily at the accountability of organizations from the point of view of individuals.
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eWeek, 12/2/04: Berners-Lee Maps Vision of a Web Without Walls

Lisa Vaas
BOSTON—To envision the Internet of the future, W3C director and WWW founding father Tim Berners-Lee suggested during the W3C's 10-year birthday bash here Wednesday, first envision groceries—say a box of rice.
On the box's side, in small, rice grain-sized type, you will find nutrition information. On its back, you will find directions on how to cook it. Somewhere else you may find a URL that you can use to research any number of rice-related things: recipes, country of agricultural origin, Uncle Ben company data or relevant information pertaining to the allergenic nature of rice, perhaps.
The Web of the future, for which Berners-Lee, the W3C and other research and industrial partners have been working to lay the foundation since about 2000, will give us a rice box that, when scanned, electronically unfurls that multifaceted, rice-related Web of data—without having to squint at dinky type.
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Gartner, 11/1/04: Predicts 2005: A Focus on Intent Enlivens CRM

Due to demand for precision, design and measurement of customer relationship management efforts, organizations will center strategies on business benefits and customer intent. Real-time decision support will be critical.
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Gartner, 11/1/04: Predicts 2005: Deploy New Technology, Applications for Success

Significant technology events and trends are looming that will challenge or facilitate your growth goals. Many of our predictions promise to have a big impact on your company or industry, beginning in 2005.
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Gartner, 11/1/04: Predicts 2005: Communications Services Are Changing

Communications services will undergo changes in 2005. Prices will stabilize, carriers will consolidate and re-integrate, old networks will be replaced, and voice will see renewed interest.
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Morgan Stanley, Mary Meeker, 10/25/04: An Update from the Digital World

The Internet has become a leading source for news and information over the past decade, but we believe the emerging acceptance (by users and publishers) of Web content syndication services will drive even broader / deeper usage of the Internet as an increasingly relevant news and information medium. We see three factors that are combining to drive momentum: 1) rising usage of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) by content providers as a standard distribution platform for online content; 2) ramp in the creation of blogs and other user-generated content; and 3) Yahoo!’s easy-to-use integration of RSS feeds (including blogs) that was rolled out in beta to its distribution channel of 25MM+ My Yahoo! users in late September.
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ZDNet, 8/12/04: Why host your SOA's connective tissue when you can outsource it?

By Dan Farber
Grand Central CEO Halsey Minor (also founder and former chairman of CNET Networks) likes to talk about how his company is similar to salesforce.com (he was one of the first investors in that company), which is leading the first wave of business software as a service. Grand Central's business is a bit more esoteric in that the company provides hosted integration services, leveraging service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web service protocols.

During a video interview and a follow-on conversation with me, Minor asserted that software delivered as a network service is going to replace traditional enterprise software, providing a cheaper, simpler solution.
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