This is just a summary of the 2009 Contest – for more information please go to the WebChallenge 2009 Web site at: http://www.webchallenge2009.org/

There are so many free web-based tools available, used by students every day.  But some of these tools like email, texting, and more, can be put to greater use.

The 2009 Webchallenge, “FREE YOUR COMMUNITY!” is about using free and/or open source technologies to benefit your local community.  Some examples are:

·        build a website for a student group or local non-profit

·        create an online newspaper for a support group

·        use text-messaging to broadcast to adults about job opportunities

There are 3 categories of competition, for all levels of technology developers:

Free Tech:  Gmail, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Google Maps, Blogger and more.  You can find plenty of examples where people have used one of these tools to create something that their community benefitted from.

Open Source:  Websitebaker, Moodle, Joomla, WordPress, etc.  These are softwares that are free to download and install.  Technically more challenging, but they can be put to use without knowing how to program anything.  An example of this could be a school newspaper, such as the local www.northgwinnett.com/blackandred.

Custom Code:  Using the listed technologies or creating programs from scratch, participants in this category would create customized applications to serve their community.  While all 3 categories will have a priority on the effectiveness for the community, this category will also recognize the technical sophistication of the product.

ATDC is once again pleased to serve as host sponsor of Atlanta Startup Weekend!  Friday Nov 7-th to Sunday Nov 9-th 2008 at the ATDC in Atlanta, GA

There is huge interest for Startup Weekend in Atlanta.  The city garnered over 1,700 votes on the Startup Weekend City Vote page.  I expect this event to sell out in short order.  It costs $39.99 to register which basically helps offset the costs of putting on the event.  If you want to attend but the forty bills is beyond your means let me know and we will figure something out.

This year the number of participants will be increased to over 100.  We are able to do this as the format is changing from last year.  We will not be focusing on a single concept as we did with last year with Skribit.  This year we will move as many concepts forward as the community is willing to support, hence we can have more people involved without getting too many cooks in one kitchen.

If you want to play I suggest you register soon.  This is going to sell out quick.

Post from Lance Weatherby – http://atlanta2.startupweekend.com/

TAG Enterprise 2.0 Society – November 5, 2008 Meeting    http://www.tagonline.org/events.php

Cloud Computing – Amazon Web Services

In this session, Seattle-based Jinesh Varia, Evangelist for Amazon Web Services, will discuss the latest innovations and new technology trends like Utility computing (Paying by the hour, paying by the Gigabyte usage), Virtualization and Web Services in the Cloud and most importantly, discuss some of the innovative business models for Start-Ups and Enterprise companies.

In this session, we will learn how aspiring entrepreneurs and enterprises can take advantage of these technologies to quickly scale up their infrastructure programmatically without any upfront heavy infrastructure investment. Often termed as Cloud Computing, we will see how these technologies are changing the way we do business today.
 
Amazon Web Services provides Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) that allows requisition of machines on-demand using simple web service call and paying for computation by the hour. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) which is infinite storage in the cloud and Amazon SimpleDB which is the Database in the cloud and how these services can help local companies to scale-out and go live quickly. Also, we will see some exciting apps and some unique business models that are built on AWS that have become profitable businesses and others that are just simply cool to see.

PRESENTER
JINESH VARIA, TECHNOLOGY EVANGELIST, AMAZON WEB SERVICES, AMAZON.COM
As a Technology Evangelist at Amazon, Jinesh Varia helps developers take advantage of disruptive technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications, and the way businesses compete in the new web world. Jinesh has spoken at more than 50 conferences/User Groups. He is focused on furthering awareness of web services and often helps developers on 1:1 basis in implementing their own ideas using Amazon’s innovative services.
Jinesh has over 9 years experience in XML and Web services and has worked with standards-based working groups in XBRL. Prior to joining Amazon as an evangelist, he held several positions in UBmatrix including Solutions Architect, Enterprise Team Lead and Software engineer, working on various financial services projects including Call Modernization Project at FDIC. He was also lead developer at Penn State Data Center, Institute of Regional Affairs. Jinesh’s publications have been published in ACM and IEEE. Jinesh is originally from India and holds a Master’s degree in Information Systems from Penn State University

Initiatives, programs, and day-to-day business operations are critical to the success of the enterprise.  Large companies have invested a significant amount of resources in IT tools, business processes, and technologies to gather critical information from a variety of sources about their business operations and business processes. 

Businesses rely on people to receive and analyze information, make decisions, and initiate and coordinate the appropriate tasks and activities.  Managers are responsible for assimilating information, managing/supporting their key personnel, marshaling resources, making decisions, following up to verify that the appropriate tasks and activities were undertaken, and insuring that objectives and milestones are being meet.

Individuals, managers and workers are facing a cognitive overload.  It is estimated that a Sunday newspaper contains more information than the average 17th century citizen encountered in a lifetime. Today, the amount of worldwide information doubles approximately every 1.5 years, and corporate files double every 3 to 4 years.

The one biggest challenges to the enterprise is making better (smarter, faster) use of information about its business processes.  The problem lies in the large volume of information that is presented to managers, the wide range of disparate sources from which it comes, and the fact that it is too often dispersed in ‘information silos’ across the enterprise.  All of this makes it difficult for managers to assimilate information and data, and rapidly make (informed/accurate) decisions.  Also, managers are getting so much ‘information’ that they are having difficulty keeping informed (up to date) about key topics and issues.

Information gathering, communication, collaboration and decision making in most companies relies on a ‘conventional’ set of tools and processes: conversations, meeting, emails, voice mails, basic messaging, conferencing, and office documents mailed as attachments. 

In the increasingly rapid pace and the complexity of today’s enterprise, the use of conventional tools and processes leads to inevitable latencies in business processes, activities and decisions.  Delays in communication and decision making and slow response to critical problems and issues can have a significant impact on business performance.

Dependency on Email has put up fences to efficient communication and decision making.  Consider the manager that has hundreds of unread Emails in their InBox; how quickly can they be expected to respond to a request for information, provide guidance and feedback, or make a decision? 

Meeting and conference calls can have less than optimal efficiency – they can create bottlenecks as managers may wait until the meeting to discuss and resolve issues.

Person to person communication can induce latencies.  If the contacted party is busy then the request is put in a queue.  If may people are trying to contact the same person then that person becomes a bottleneck.  How much time, energy and effort are expended (often wasted) playing ‘phone tag’ to get in contact with a key resource to have an important discussion or make a critical decision.

A large percentage of business data and business information is stored in ‘information silos’.  In general, these systems cannot exchange information with other related systems within its own organization, or with the management systems of its customers, vendors or business partners. The same can be said of the knowledge and experience of individuals within an organization or an enterprise.  Their knowledge and expertise cannot be easily shared (exchanged) with other individuals within the enterprise or with their partners or vendors. The skills, knowledge and experience cannot be easily shared for a number of reasons.  People have few ways of making their knowledge and experience known outside their peer group, unit or department. And, individuals that have need of specific knowledge and expertise have few channels to find or discover those individuals.  There is no framework for connecting individuals, sharing information and knowledge, managing the utilization of resources, affecting the successful resolution of a problem or issues, and ultimately, successfully completing tasks and projects

As the pace of business accelerates, the use of conventional tools and processes are becoming less and less efficient and effective helping business communicate, collaborate and make decisions.

We need to enhance the competiveness and responsiveness of the enterprise by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the enterprise all levels:

A number of years ago Dion Hinchcliffe wrote on his blog “Is Web 2.0 actually the most massive instance possible of service-oriented architecture, realized on a worldwide scale and sprawling across the Web”.

That statement would indicate that Dion believes that Web 2.0 is a massive instance of SOA. However, before we engage in this discussion we need to agree on what we are talking about.  I agree with Bhupinder’s observation that ‘we need to have a clear definition of SOA and Web 2.0′.  The problem here is that there are any number of definitions of SOA, and an abundance of definitions/descriptions of what Web 2.0 is and/or means.   

From my point of view, Web 2.0 is used to describe the changing trends (evolution) in the development and use of Web technologies.  If you agree with that, then definition of Web 2.0 that Tim O’Reilly attempted to ‘clarify’ back in 2005 will be different than ‘the current definitions/descriptions’, and those definitions will be different than the ones that will be in vogue three to five years from now.   

Today, when I think about Web 2.0 the following concepts and ideas come to mind (in no particular order of importance):

-        Collaboration and utilizing collective intelligence

-        Communication and connections

-        Virtual communities and worlds

-        Tagging of content (folksonomy) and search

-        Social software and social media

-        Universal (wide spread) access to and ownership of data and information

-        RIAs and rich user experiences

-        Innovation in assemble – Mashups

-        Lightweight programming models and services

-        Convergence – device independent access to content

-        Decentralization – distribution of content and control throughout the network

I am sure that if you ask ten different people for their definition of Web 2.0 you will get ten [significantly] different lists/descriptions.

With all due respect to Dion (and many other Web 2.0 experts – who have more knowledge and experience that I have) I truly believe that SOA is a different animal.   It may be my many years of software development, but I think that SOA is much less of a ‘moving target’ than Web 2.0.  And, I think that you can come up with definitions that most people would ‘mostly’ agree with.  One definition that I like is: the elements of SOA are generally regarded to be a methodology (set of processes) for system and software architecture & integration where the functionality is organized around a set of business processes or tasks and delivered as a set of services that can be discovered and executed.

One could argue that the (above) definition of SOA is not much different than that of Web 2.0, but I would disagree.  The following are characteristics of SOA services that are not always found in Web 2.0 components:  service discoverability – services are exposed so that they can be discovered and utilized by other services/components, service autonomy – the service has control over all of the functionality that it provides, and service abstraction/encapsulation – like classes, services do not expose internal logic and functionality.

At a high very level you could think of Web 2.0 as an instance of SOA.  However, when you get down into the details of SOA, then it seems to me that one should view SOA as one of a number of methodologies that provides services to support Web 2.0 applications.  

Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Boston, June 9-12 2008

One of the biggest hits of the conference was a presentation of Unity; a social computing platform developed by Lockheed-Martin (LM).

“Enterprise 2.0 at Lockheed Martin is sparking a knowledge management revolution enabling the business to more effectively compete, win, and perform. At its core, a social computing platform empowers knowledge workers by lowering the barriers to create, share, and find information. The platform evolved from collaborative tools and now includes Web 2.0 tools such as social bookmarking, blogs, wikis, discussion groups, weekly activity reporting, and personal/team spaces. This session will communicate what the platform is, demonstrate the components, and share some case studies and lessons learned from the E2.0 implementation at Lockheed Martin.”

Before Unity was developed, the state of collaboration within Lockheed-Martin consisted of the usual set of office productivity tools: email, meetings, basic messaging and office documents mailed as attachments.

The goal of Unity was to bring social collaboration to the enterprise to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of their business processes. The key points of the product strategy were:

1) Provide a user experience employees would love, address “what was in it for me”, and balance security concerns (need to know vs. the need to share information).

2) Develop a social computing framework around a standardized platform: integrating wikis, RSS, blogs, social bookmarking, and document sharing.

3) Provide support for discussion forums, status and activity reporting, and suggestion tools.

4) Capture patterns of usage and gain insight into the adoption of the framework within the enterprise.

5) Maintain a consistent user experience.

6) Ensure that all information could be feed-enabled, and integrated into the framework.

Unity was built using Google [enterprise] Search Appliance (GSA), Microsoft’s Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) and Newsgator’s Enterprise Server.

Unity has a backend database that collects all relationships, feeds into “spaces.” There are two types of spaces: personal spaces and team spaces. Each space can have wikis, blogs, discussion forums, shared documents, and social bookmarks. Both types of spaces can be networked, and can relate to each other.

Activity streams let people record and tag their activities. An employee can easily view relevant activity streams and be plugged into what other employees are doing. An employee can subscribe to activities streams so that they can follow tasks, activities and people of interest to them. Each activity generates an RSS feed that can be consumed by Newsgator or a portal.

Activity reports show the tasks, activities, and people that have been met with over the last six months. You can look at the activity report of an individual to see what they are doing. This can make it easier to find and engage the right people. The activity report is a good vehicle for transferring knowledge and information. The activity reports can be integrated into a branded “UReport” tool (UReport is a custom .net application).

How did the Unity team quantify the return on investment (ROI) for the dedication of resources and purchase of software? Some of the points of the ROI justification were:

- Productivity savings of users rapidly finding/locating appropriate information and resources.

- Customer’s interest in using Unity to collaborate with ML.

- Project bidding process, especially those proposals that involved knowledge management.

The Unity development team put together a “collaboration playbook” that demonstrates how use of wikis, blogs, and other collaboration components. They also developed a set of best practices. For example, as a team member, you should ask questions on a group page not just call and ask someone or send an email; this helps to capture information for everyone to see and use. The playbook described which communication type made sense for different collaboration activities: blog posts, wikis, email, virtual conferences or in-person meetings.

Lockheed-Martin built the basic Unity platform in 2007, and then ran a beta pilot of it over the course of the year. After the initial release, it took just six months for a second version to address the information security and legal issues. Unity was rolled out in to a number of divisions in early 2008. Currently, there are 4,000 personal spaces; the number is growing 10% every three weeks.

The most successful approach to ‘selling’ unity within the company was to emphasize the value of the team spaces. Project/program Managers that blogged in the team space really helped the engineers see the value of Unity and get them engaged. People who already have to collaborate between groups were good champions. The Unity team used a project management blog to keep colleagues up to date about what the development team was doing.

Lockheed-Martin wants to roll out Unity across the entire company in the third and fourth quarters [of 2008].

Value to the enterprise:

- At any time an employee can see what others are working on. They can access shared documents and ask questions on shared workspaces or directly to the relevant decision maker or stakeholders.

- There is significant value to the enterprise in tracking and reporting on activity streams.

- Team spaces for process compliance very effective. They got a significant amount of participation and input from a geographically diverse set of users.

- Ease of generating and sharing activity and status reports.

- Being able to search for information and ask relevant questions raises productivity. This leads to improved collaboration and knowledge exchange.

Apple’s WWDC 2008 Keynote Address – I’m trying not to drink the ‘cool aid’.

The conference keynote was ‘quite the show’!  Yes, Steve/Apple still know how to push a new product.  The keynote was all about the iPhone, and Mobile Me.  Steve mentioned that they will be talking about the Mac and Leopard after lunch.  I am wondering if the iPhone will become (has already become) Apple’s ‘flagship product’.

Yes, the iPhone 2.0 is quite impressive. I have been trying really hard not to ‘drink the cool aid’.  However, it is not that easy.  Apple has packed a considerable amount of features and functionality (major understatement) into a small device.   

3G support – AT&T plans to have 3G support in 275 markets by the end of June, and support in the rest of its 350 markets by the end of the year.

Security – The security enhancements look good – IPSec VPN, WAP2 (featuring 802.1X based authentication), data encryption, manageable security policies and remote kill/wiping.  These features should address many/most of the enterprise security concerns. 

Built in GPS (assisted).

Full MS Exchange support; it must have given Steve great pains to do that.  Support for Push Email, Calendar, and Contacts (via Active Sync).  There was no mention of support for Domino (has Microsoft won that battle?)

The Apple iPhone SDK is most impressive. 

• Full iWork document support – view iWork documents, pages, etc.
• Complete MS Office Document Support – Word, Excel and PP. Documents can be downloaded as attachments.
• Bulks delete and move of messages, and saving of images to the photo library.
• Full set of parental controls.
• 70 Countries will be supported by the end of the year – Europe, most of Central and South America, parts of Africa, India, Japan, Australia and New Zeland (support in China can’t be far behind).
• Push notification services for applications via persistent IP connection to the phone (beta in July, GA in Sept 08) – Badges (# of waiting messages), custom alert sounds, and custom text alerts (with activation buttons to launch related applications). The unified push notification services will work over the both the cellular and the Wi-Fi networks; it can scale to many 3-rd party services.
• Price – $199/$299 – Great pricing!The largest round of applause during the keynote was when Steve announced the iPhone pricing.

The customer testimonials were, not surprisingly, very positive and upbeat.  However, they did not, on the whole, seem to be over stating the capabilities of the iPhone.  The statements made by principles from Disney, the Department of Defense, and Genentech gave credibility to the ‘enterprise ready’ claims that Apple was making.  

The user/customer demonstrations were most impressive.  And, given the relatively short amount of time that most customers said that they had been working with the iPhone SDK (weeks to a few months), the demonstrations showed a surprising amount of features and functionality. 

 The demonstration of a LBS/Social application by Loopt was slick.  With Loopt, iPhone users will be able to see if their friends are nearby.  It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which you can use your iPhone to ‘check out’ entertainment venues (bars, restaurants) to see how many of your Facebook friends are there.  If it can do that, the iPhone might even be able to do the impossible-make Twitter useful J

 The gaming (Sega, Pangia Software, Digital Legends Entertainment) demos were really fun. The graphics/display looked better than many of the games on the DS.  I liked the idea of using the motion of the device as part of the controller (ala Wii).  I don’t think that Sega or Nintdeno need to worry too much (total cost of ownership if a fraction of a portable game device).  However, if you already have an iPhone then you will, most likely, not really need/want your GameBoy/DS.

 Six Apart, Typepad – The TypePad blogging client simple, uncluttered, and easy to use.

 Associated Press, Mobile News Network –  Allow real time reporting/posting of news stores from local sources. http://www.apnews.com/

 MLB.com, At Bat – You have to give high marks to to MLB for so quickly integrating nearly real-time video into their box scores. This is going to be a killer app for ‘sports junkies’.

 There were two demos in the medical/educational space.  Modality showed their medical educational software – currently used in curriculums at the medical colleges.  MIMvista demonstrated high-resolution medical imaging software.  The images were just amazing. One can see why there is strong interest in the medical community for the iPhone. The iPhone is going to be a great platform for building rich educational apps for all curriculums.

 Apple has made the development and delivery of custom mobile applications a very high (if not the number one) priority. 

 Application Distribution will come via three modes:

• iPhone App Store – Users can access App Store from iPhone in 62 Countries
• Enterprise Application Distribution – Companies will authorize iPhones (to run their application) in their enterprise, and they can create applications that will only run on those phones, and they can distribute those applications via their intranet. Their user then download the applications to their computers, and snyc them to the phones via iTunes ???
• AdHoc Distribution of iPhone Apps – via expanded developer certification program. Up to 100 phones can be registered to run a set of applications. This will provide an easy method for development testing and small alpha trials. Would be nice to be able to expand the number of users to a few hundred users/phones for beta testing (I suspect that the limit is not hard and fast)

 In summary, it was one of the most impressive and compelling presentations of information technology that is have seen in a long time.  That said, Apple still has more work to do on the iPhone.

 What is missing, but appears to be coming:

• Safari needs Flash Support. From a number of recent posts on iPhone Blogs, it would appear that Flash suport ‘is coming soon’.
• Needs Java / JVM support – Sun says that there will be a JVM for the iPhone some time this ‘summer’ (July I suspect).
• Native data encryption was announced, but no details were given. Note: It does not appear that encryption was available in the beta release

What is missing, but could be added (3-rd party application):

• Dedicated/native iChat/IM applications.
• Better YouTube search.

 What is missing and should be added:

• Application delivery channel for the enterprise – TheiTunes sync requirement is justnot going to cut it with enterprise customers (I trust Steve knows that)
• Multimedia Messaging.
• Cut and paste of text – That is a really strange omission.
• IM and SMS Forwarding.
• Better Bluetooth (including OBEX transfers).
• Support for Voice Dialing – Speech Recognition will have to be ‘native’ to work well.
• Text-to-Speech – Should be native.
• Needs a 32G version.
• A real (non-toy) camera would be nice.

 All in all, the iPhone is an amazing consumer product.  That said, one of the most interesting things about the iPhone is the business model for application development and distribution.  The App Store provides the store front, the hosting, and the channel for the wireless distribution of 3-rd party applications.  Over time, it will be the 3-rd party applications that add the most value to the iPhone.

Given the price, features, functionality and the availability of 3-rd party applications, I believe that the iPhone will soon become the device of choice for consumers that are in the market for a smart phone.

 As for the question, “is the iPhone really enterprise ready?”  I think that the jury is still out on that question.  There have been a number of articles (from ComputerWorld, ZDNet, Gartner)  stating that that the iPhone remains largely untested from a corporate security standpoint, and that is still doesn’t offer quite the same level of security as either BlackBerry or Windows Mobile devices do.  There have been some unconfirmed reports, from beta testers, that there are still a number of outstanding ‘security concerns’.  It remains to be seen if they will be addressed by the July 11-th release date (only a month away).

Another major issue is the lack of third-party security software, such as antivirus and encryption tools.  Such tools are readily available for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices

The iPhone has a relatively small presence and a fairly short history in the enterprise.  It has yet to be widely checked for vulnerabilities by third-party penetration testers.  There needs to be validation of the security of the iPhone by third parties who have tested and validated the security of the iPhone within the enterprise.

April 25, 2008

Atlanta, GA. Last month, I attended the 2008 Annual MITEF/TAG Forum on Leading Technologies http://www.tagonline.org/2008miteftagevent.php. The topic was a timely one – Convergence. They had a good panel of industry experts: Jim Straight, SVP Consumer Product, Verizon; Mark Taylor, SVP, Product Delivery, Business Markets for Level 3; Bob Schukai, VP Wireless and Broadband Technologies & Platform R&D, Turner; Allen Weiner from Gartner; and Dr. Neale Martin  http://www.tagonline.org/2008miteftagevent.php#bios.
It was a little, actually a lot, like the blind man/men describing the part of the elephant that they were touching.  Or, more to the point, the part of the elephant that they wanted you to see and they way in which they wanted you to see it.  That said, the presentations and discussions were useful and informative.
 The title of the forum was ‘Convergence’, but the theme that I kept hearing was the need for all of the various players to find/make new ways of doing business.

Allen Weiner’s keynote touched on a wide range of topics:  from TV on your cell phone and social casting, to what he described as ‘Super Enablers’ (Amazon and Google Business Apps), to opportunities presented by the elections and the Olympics.  However, in all of the topics was a clear message that Convergence was going to drive the creation of new business strategies and relationships.

Jim Straight talked at length about the need for Verizon and their partners to develop and implement new business models:  core business capabilities, partner relationships and value propositions.

Mark Taylor described how Level 3 had to completely re-architect their network to be able to double  the amount of bandwidth that they can deliver (every year), and, at the same time, lower the cost of their services.

Bob Schukai’s (Turner) presentation focused, not surprisingly, on media and content delivery. He is one of the few presenters that I have heard recently who asked the audience to ‘turn on your phones and let them ring’.   The tagline for Bob’s talk was ‘brands without borders’ – the delivery of media and content, and, of course, advertising, without regard for networks, technologies or devices.  The second theme was ‘no experience in isolation’ – being able to link media and content from one source to another (i.e. use TV to promote mobile content and vice versa).  In the end, it is all about finding/making new ways of linking content, channels and  networks, experiences, and devices (to drive subscription and advertising revenue). 
One of the key issues presented was ‘openness/access to cellular networks and
creation of services/applications that can run on those networks’. Jim Straight talked at some length about the need to embrace new business models and their [Verizon's] plans to open up their wireless network. However, he gave few specifics or details about their plans.
During the Q/A session, I asked Jim Straight a direct question about their support for Google’s open mobile software project (Open Handset Alliance), but all I got were general statements about their commitment to ‘openness’ (he even started talking about Linux, not sure where that was coming from).  I did not come away from all that with a ‘warm/fuzzy’ about their open network plans. I talked to a couple of the other presenters about their take on Verizon’s plans to open their network.  One presenter was somewhat (guardedly) positive – “yea, open, but open in Verizon’s terms”. However, another presenter was quite negative – “a cold day in hell”.  That person reminded me that the FCC mandated an open cable standard five years ago, and then asked if I could see any evidence of an open cable network [open to 3-rd parties] – I could not think of any such evidence.
 
I believe that the meaningful innovation in this space is likely to come from some number (possibly all) of the following scenarios:

 - There will be a strong push from the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco and others with real muscle to get carriers to open up their cell networks – any applications, any devices.  The open platform provisions from the recent 700M auction are a good starting point; but, as always, ‘the devil will be in the details’.
- One of the more innovative carriers is going to embrace some new/radical business models that are inherent to this new, open network – possibly a T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile or Sprint (the Clearwire deal may have potential).
- The openness of the European carriers (Vodafone, T-Mobile, O2, Orange) and Asian countries (Japan and Korea) will put pressure on ATT and Verizon.
- Clever innovation from players in the eCommunication space (i.e. VoIP capabilities imbedded in Adobe Flex).
- Clever individuals will find workarounds to the restrictions of the cell networks (i.e. iPhone hacking).

Review of a presentation at eComm2008 by Trevor Baca

This was a compelling presentation on the use of voice enabled applications to enhance/improve business processes by reducing the latency in computer-to-human and human-to-human communications.

The talk focused on real world examples of CEBP applications:

§  Buyer Verification and Fraud Control – A customer trips a fraud threshold when using their credit card for a transaction.  Instead of the card being automatically locked (and the purchase denied), the system can call the user and prompt them to ‘press 1’ if the charge is valid.  The user can also press 9 to contact C/S and dispute the charge.

§  Critical System Support – The system can be configured to automatically contact (dial) essential support staff and alert them to critical system problems/outages.  The systems can also ‘conference in’ members of the support team to discuss/resolve the problem. 

§  Wakeup Call Notifications – The user can set their current location (city or Zip Code) and time of wakeup. The system will call user with a ‘wakeup call’ and play relevant information (i.e. local weather, traffic information, flight status) based on their notification profile.

§  Job Site Closure Notifications – The system will call team members and notify them of job site closures. The notification app can get a confirmation of receipt of the message from the users.

§  Caring Line Services (not really a CEBP app) – Automated system that allows callers to leave ‘caring’ messages for individuals who are in need of support.  The messages can be picked up and played from anywhere.  This is an example of a communication system that is used to broker human-to-human communications.

The following is a summary of Trevor’s report on Judaka’s key learning and takeaways from their experience in developing CEBP applications, and my response/take on his [their] findings.

§  Voice apps are easier to develop then Web application.  ->   I would agree for simple voice applications.  However, for complex voice applications that is clearly not the case.  The problems with poor quality voice application and poorly designed voice dialogs are well known. 

§  The best opportunities for voice services are in areas where there is a sense of urgency (i.e. disaster response).  ->   Yes, especially if you want the parties to be able to communication immediately.  You could to the same thing with SMS multi-casting, but that would not be my first choice for communications when I am in the middle of trying to recover critical systems/services.

§  Voice can be a better bearer of emotion.  ->  Yes, this a clear advantage of voice over Email or SMS.

§  Try to target times in which things are going to happen, rather places where which things happen.      ->  I am not sure that I completely agree with that.  Location based services are going to be huge.

§  Look for opportunities where people that are texting or IMing and want/need to talk to one another.  ->   Yes, clearly a good opportunity for automated voice connect

§  If scaling is not currently a problem, it will be [it you are the least bit successful].  ->   Yes!

§  Integration is hard.  Even if you have APIs, and a Web Service architecture – integration will take time and effort.  ->   Yes, and you need to carefully manage the customer’s expectations at every step of the process.

§  Vertical markets did not work the way they thought that they thought that they would.  Voice did not seem to provide a significant advantage in a particular market.  ->   I am not sure what to say about that.  It is clear that their voice applications can be used in many ‘horizontals’.  However, there are many successful voice applications for the corrections, medical, finance, legal, insurance, and travel markets. 

§  Our best solutions come from thinking about people [the end user] and real-world problems and issues.  ->   Yes! 

§  The money is in the enterprise; the monetization for products and services is right there [the slide shows logos of Apple and Nike].  ->   If what he is saying is “don’t expect the end user to directly pay for the service”, then yes, I would agree.

The last point needs a good bit more discussion.  What is the value proposition for the product/service? Who is going to pay for it, and how much will they be willing to pay? 

In developing the prompt framework for a multi-lingual application, I gained some useful insight into the use of XML in the design and implementation of flexible and extensible data/information structures.

Given the number of ways that prompts can be configured and used (initial, help, no speech timeout; single, concatenated, or escalating; time, day, month and/or year; recorded or TTS, etc, etc) it would be difficult to specify a relational database model (schema) that full represent the configuration parameters and variations of the all of the voice application prompts. Also, it can take a significant amount of effort (time/resources) to modify database tables (schemas) when the prompt structures change, or when there is a need for new features and functionality.

We try to get a full set of requirements for a new products/services before we begin development. However, the more we get into the project, and the more that we work with the users/clients/customers, the more that learn (discover) what the service ‘really needs to do’ and how best to develop those capabilities. As that is ‘the world in which we live/work/develop’ then it is essential, where possible/feasible, that we insure that the underlying data structures that hold configuration information (i.e. protocols, profiles, etc) be designed and developed with a flexible and extensible data structure/representation – if we do that, then XML can be a good tool for the job.

XML Features

XML has many features that can be of significant value in supporting rapid design and implementation of flexible and extensible information/data structures:

- Extensibility – Data tags and hierarchy are designed to match the structure of the data. We are not locked to rigid DB structure when the requirements for the data change or when new features and functionality is added. New data tags/structures can be specified/designed and then rapidly integrated, tested and implemented.

- Ease of creation – Simple XML documents can be easily created by hand. For more complex structures, there is a wide range of tools to rapidly author (create/edit) XML documents – we do not need to build tools to do these tasks. The data structures that we create are not limited/constrained by the tools that we build to author them.

- Flexibility – Data/information structure can be easily developed and tested. These structures can be easily modified/extended as needed. When requirement change or additional features and functionality are added, the XML structure can be extended or modified as necessary.

- Simplicity – Information coded in XML is easy to read and understand. You don’t need to be a programmer to make good use of XML

- Openness – XML is a W3C standard, endorsed by software industry market leaders. There are XML parsers for every programming language. There is full support for XML in PL/SQL, therefore XML could be easily integrated into our middleware

- Validation – XML provides processes for validating the structure of the documents (elements, attributes, hierarchy, order, etc). The schemas can also validate the data/information contained in the tags using – data can be validated by type, range and value(s)

- Self-description – XML documents can be stored without such definitions, because they contain meta data in the form of tags and attributes. XML Provides a basis for author identification and versioning at the element level. Any XML tag can possess an unlimited number of attributes such as author or version.

- Contains machine-readable context information – Tags, attributes and element structure provide context information that can be used to interpret the meaning of content, opening up new possibilities for highly efficient search engines, intelligent data mining, agents, etc.

- Separates content from presentation – The look and feel of an XML document can be controlled by XSL style sheets, allowing the look of a document (or of a complete Web site) to be changed without touching the content of the document. Multiple views or presentations of the same content are easily rendered.

- Facilitates the comparison and aggregation of data – The tree structure of XML documents allows documents to be compared and aggregated efficiently element by element.

- Can embed multiple data types – XML documents can contain any possible data type – from multimedia data (image, sound, video) to active components (Java applets, ActiveX).

- Can embed existing data – Mapping existing data structures like file systems or relational databases to XML is simple. XML supports multiple data formats and can cover all existing data structures and.