Robertatflocke's Blog

Do more with less

robertatflocke — Sun, 09 May 2010 11:33:15 +0000

Doing more with less is the new approach in Web 2.0.

An application build up is characterised by five features of the web, which are:

Commonditation
Reuse
Strategy
Network effect
Rapid cycled development

The hardware and software used for an application are commodity goods that are low on prices and therefore cheap to operate.

Especially the software sector benefits from reuse of open-source platforms like the Linux Platform. To acquire an advantage on the marked, these software products should be used and implemented with the own specialized software. One Example for that is the Android Platform of Google. It is based on a modified Linux Kernel combined with specialized libraries from the Java platform, developed by Google.

Before the bust of the dot-com bubble, companies invested huge amounts of money to get big, fast and survive on the market. So the history taught the lesson, that this way is too risky and leads to a new approach of starting small, e.g. with a pilot project.

To increase the value in such a small startup, it has to grow by using the network effect to get more user-generated content. That means acquire more and more users whose enriching the website or platform and generate the data for the application.

And even the development part of the application became changed to an agile, highly iterative process in a small developer team. In a Web 2.0 company, one staff member addresses indirectly thousands of users, that is possible because of all the “self-service” features of a website.

These five features have an essential impact on a web-application. For example the network effect.

In the beginning of an application there are some costs to advertise or attract people, using the application. If the number of application users are rising, it reaches a critical point, where the word of mouth leads to an exponential increase of user-generated content. The point for the application provider is not to get “caught of guard” and the application fails at this point.

This can be achieved by making the application scalable form the very first start. But also the concept of the business model has to provide a certain level of flexibility to react on effects like this. A common practice for that is by working with “plugins”. The hardware e.g. severs, storage , could be outsourced to a third-party provider with a pay-as-you-go model, to provide the necessary flexibility for growing.

The last point the application depends on is the finance income. For short: “How the application is acquiring the necessary revenue”. The common method for that is placing advertisement on the website.

In the normal software sector the product licencing outweighed. An example for that would be the operating system from Microsoft. A user earns the right to use the software. Similar to that is providing a basic for free and charge a monthly fee for premium services. This approach comes closer to the thought as software as a service. An other one was mentioned already the pay-as-you-go model which is directly tied to a users action. The user just pays for that, he is directly using. A fourth approach is subscribing to an application or service. As a kind of flat-rate the user is paying a fixed fee for the usage.

Now coming back to placing advertisement on a website. Google introduced a syndicated way with Google AdSense, to provide ads on a webpage. But this is not always in the right context. So the last option of a revenue model is having a sponsorship. The sponsor places his ads on the website, which is more in context with the website.

A good example for a scalable revenue model is the web 2.0 application onlinetvrecorder.com. It’s as the name tells a recording service for the tv program. It can be programmed to record a film through the browser and afterwards the film can be downloaded on the local hard drive. This service provides a basic free account with a coin system. There have to be paid these virtual coins to download a recorded film. The user can pay money to charge an amount of coins to his account and upgrade it to a premium one. That leads to more available options of how to download or record a movie.

Leveraging the long tail

robertatflocke — Mon, 03 May 2010 08:51:17 +0000

Chris Anderson, executive editor of the american “Wired” magazine came up with a theory in 2004 about making money with products with lesser popularity by addressing micro markets with the internet technology.

The classic point of view (Pareto distribution), where the main-stream products (20 percent of a company’s product range) are generating 80 percent of that company’s revenue, becomes turned upside down, with Anderson’s approach of the “Long-Tail-Model”.

In the traditional business, the product range is strictly built by the demand of the masses of customers. The other way, offering products with a lesser popularity isn’t profitable enough.

The name of the Long-Tail-Model, comes from the frequency scale. On the left are the minor products in numbers (mainstream), where the demand in numbers is high. Ont the right are the products shown with a minor demand.
The Long-Tail-Model focus on the 80 percent of products which are lesser sold, but building the majority of the product range.

Anderson discovered the Long-Tail phenomena at the online video store “Netflix”, which sends the DVDs via post to it’s customers.
A normal video store has around 3000 movies, which is a mixture of classical and latest movies, depending of the demand of the store’s customers.
In comparison, Netflix offered 62000 more movies. The generated revenue of these was 21 percent.1

One of the driving forces of the “Long-Tail” is the traceability of products.
An other is, using customer reviews or ratings to attract other users for the reviewed product. This is a way to increase the product’s popularity with more or less no costs to spend on advertisement.
In 2006, Netflix offered a prize for developing a recommendation algorithm, that can top the existing one.²

A slight different way is the online gaming platform “Steam” of the Valve Corporation going. It’s a multi player, distribution and communication platform for computer games. The build-in shop uses external reviews by gaming magazines and websites to rate a computer game and in this way to attract users to buy a game via online distribution.
It is an all-in-one solution for the global gaming market, which offers over 1100 games with a backend community of approximately 25 million users.

Software development by using user feedbacks

robertatflocke — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 10:19:24 +0000

In the classical software-development process, a project is structured after a top-down concept. Eric S. Raymond compared that structure with a “cathedral” and the opposite, the open-source development concept or model as a “bazaar” in his essay „The Cathedral and the Bazaar“ from 1997.
One major difference is the availability of code of the developed application for the public. The “cathedral”-model publishes the code, with every release of the software, the “bazaar”-model gives developers from the outside the possibility, to maintain the code and offer their own ideas to the project.
That means more flexibility for the open source model, because the workload of the project is divided and shared with many of small development groups, which are loosely connected. Through the many small different development units, each one can specialise itself on one of the parts of the project. Since there are so many groups involved to a project, the release rate is higher than in the classical “cathedral”-model.

To improve the flexibility of the classic software development cycle, there are concepts like “Scrum” or “eXtreme Programming” which focus an rapid release cycle and small development teams. Both concepts have their roots in the concept of “continuous integration”.
These concepts where also introduced to the development on web applications and resulted into the concept of the “perpetual beta”. The application development isn’t only driven by it’s developers. The application becomes build by the developers and the users as “co-developers” who provide feedback and new ideas, which could be implemented into the software.
By the time the software is online, the stage of testing, results in a continuous development cycle, where users are giving feedback to improve the application. The application is no longer just a software, it became a service, which has to be maintained and monitored.

Here come the so called “Shadow applications” in play, which are analyzing the usage of the service and monitoring the whole process. On the basis of the data which the monitoring software is providing, the service becomes improved and reviewed.
Therefore the monitoring software should be as well planned as the main application.

When considering these facts, the operational review and maintain process has become a key business for a company.
Monitoring the user usage provide the company with real time data of it’s application and shows how the software is used.
An example for a monitoring Software is “Google Analytics”. A few Features this software provide are calculation of the “Advertising ROI” or “Cross Channel and Multimedia Tracking”.

On the other hand, the user feedback can’t replace quality assurance, it’s just an other instrument among others. And even in the perpetual beta process it is necessary to use version management systems to handle the development process.

Software above the level of a single device

robertatflocke — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 10:47:10 +0000

The web as a platform provides the infrastructure to connect a wide range of various devices with each other. The most commonly used devices, accessing the Internet is the mobile phone, alongside with the PC.

In March 2010, the volume of mobile data traffic outreached the ‘normal’ mobile phone traffic for the first time. A large of that data traffic is caused by social networks like ‘facebook’.¹ The mobile browsing became a common part in everyday life.

This point shows the growing importance of providing a software which is no longer restricted to a single platform.
Implementing a software which can interact or be accessed from multiple devices, hast to come up with an universal structure, offering multiple interfaces and standards for access and data communication.

A positive aspect for developing this kind of software is, the standards it should be using are open-source and therefore reduce the costs of development.²
An other issue is the capacity of a single devices. Heavy workloads for example should be delegated or processed by the network, because a Web server is always faster than the single device.

With offering access for a wide range of devices, there comes the difficult task of keeping the data synchronized with every connected device a user is working with.

But there are also barriers as the competition of Apple with the iPhone- and Google with the Android-Platform, show. Both platforms provide a wide range of applications, but their use is restricted to the platform. That makes it difficult to introduce a common standard and means to develop an application for each platform.

An example for a application which can be accessed by a wide range of devices is “Evernote“.³ It’s a note-taking service which works on several platforms like Android, BlackBerry OS, iPhone OS, Mac OS X, WebOS, Microsoft Windows, Windows Mobile. There is an application provided for each platform, but there is also the option to access the service via a web interface to keep the data synchronized with the Evernote server.⁴

In conclusion, it is a long way to an application providing access for any kind of device. And there remain open questions about the digital rights management when everything is shared with everyone or the wide range of open standards which can be used to build up a application.

sources:
[1] http://www.laptopkarten.de/mobilfunk/daten-traffic.html

[2] http://de.blog.bettr.info/index.php/2008/10/03/offene-schnittstellen-ermoglichen-verknupfung-von-angeboten/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evernote
[4] http://www.evernote.com/about/corp/

Rich User Experiences

robertatflocke — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 05:01:30 +0000

The buildup of web 2.0 introduced new concepts of light weight programming models to the developer community and offers possibilities to create applications with innovative user guidance through the menu options like in a desktop application.
These programming approaches like JavaScript, XML, DOM and XMLHttpRequest are pooled under the name AJAX.
This framework is already used by Google docs or Google mail. As to be seen from these examples a Internet application can be programmed to behave like a desktop environment without its common problems like the boundedness on a specific platform.
A Internet application can be accessed with each computer providing a browser and an Internet connection with enough bandwidth and provide data-rich and collaborative working environments.
On the other side the AJAX framework isn’t the only solution to build up a web 2.0 application. There are many toolkits which can be used and therefore this might be a weakness or issue for providing the platform independence.
There is also the problem of complexity of a buildup which produces an entrance barrier to get a application project started.
But the major issue nowadays is the dependency on the Internet bandwidth or connection the computer is using. So a developer has always kept in mind to reduce the traffic, the application cause, to a minimum.

To show how innovative a Internet application can be, I chose an web-based Desktop-Application called ‘eyeos‘. This app is developed with PHP and JavaScript and pursues the AJAX-trend.
A user is able to access the main server of eyeos or download his personal desktop and run it on his own server.¹
With that functionality providing the application is very flexible and it tries to give a solution of a small Internet bandwidth.
The system on the main-server has a ‘cloud’ as a back-end which offers more possibilities to enrich this application with collaboration techniques and the web 2.0 network effects like the ‘collective intelligence’.

¹ http://eyeos.org/index.php?p=whatiseyeos_technically

Innovation in assembly

robertatflocke — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 03:58:14 +0000

The ongoing innovation in web services, can traced back on the miscibility of web services.

These mixed services are also known as mash-ups, which provide programmers and non-programmers to build their own web application in a short period of time and with just knowing the fundamentals of programming.
A mash-up relies on the APIs (Application Programming Interface) from a provider like google or amazon. Through an API, a creator of a mash-up is able to access services, resources and data of the provider who offers the API.
In general, the used APIs in a mesh-up have three key characteristics:

They enable the programmer to gain access to well-engineered technologies of a kind only a company has.

They also grant access to the content of the provider.

Every API lowers the barriers and costs to develop new web applications.[1]

By using an API the customer just has to pay as much as he uses the service, so it reduces the costs for an web application.
On the other side the provider is able to charter idle hardware which he doesn’t currently need to the customer in form of the service.

In conclusion through the easy and cost-effective use of APIs, a great majority of Internet users is able to create their own application. And with that majority comes a wide range of different and special web mash-ups.

There is a website http://www.programmableweb.com/ which offers further information about what kinds of APIs are available and it
also show the number of released mash-ups during the last 6 month. (There have been about 4700 mash-ups released only this month).[2]
Another nice gadget of this side is the Mash-up Matrix where each mash-up is shown in connection its used APIs.

As to be seen at the numbers of releases it is right of talking about “Innovation in assembly”.

sources:
[1] Floyd, Ingbert R.; Jones, M. Cameron; Rathi, Dinesh; Twidale, Michael B.; Web Mash-ups and Patchwork Prototyping: User-driven technological innovation with Web 2.0 and Open Source Software; 2007-04-24; 10 p.; Available from: http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/679
[2] Web-page: http://www.programmableweb.com/images/charts/ProgWebMashupTimeline.png; viewed on 17th March 2010 13:49

It’s the Data inside that matters!

robertatflocke — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:48:44 +0000

Now days it’s difficult to find a sector on the Internet business which is not yet discovered or is worth to invest in.

The only competitive possibilities are on the on hand, the top layer of the Internet stack, providing a service and using the network effects of web 2.0. On the other hand, the bottom layer of the Internet stack, about controlling data and owning it.

There are several strategies to own or create a database. For example ‘NavTech’ as a provider of map material which it gives away under licence to third-party companies.
An other approach to this topic is to build up a database via a community (by using the web 2.0 network effects) and to control the access and/or special data formats.
The risk in this approach lies in the “cold-start”- problem until the database/community reaches the critical mass that the network effects start working.
An other aspect to focus on in this content is the copyright of the generated data. There is always the question of ownership and with that comes the question in how far a provider can use it to make profit with it.

At the first go-off the provider has to appeal users to use his service, e.g. by providing the infrastructure to upload content like photos.

As pointed out it’s a big challenge to build up a database, because there are already many in place.
That leads to the third approach: Mash-ups.
These concepts are using existing data and combine it in a new way.

An example for that is the web app “weatherbonk.com”. It’s like the name tells, a weather service which combines google-maps, weather data (like radar or satellite images and web cam data) to give an exact impression of the weather situation somewhere.1

These mash-ups are a great way to create or improve services with a minimum of investment.

src:

[1] http://www.weatherbonk.com/

Harnessing Collective Intelligence

robertatflocke — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:00:50 +0000

The collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2001 was the basis for many of new technologies and concepts for the Web 2.0 era. One of these concepts is the Harnessing of Collective Intelligence of a community.

Harnessing Collective Intelligence is about creating the content of a web application by its users.

The generation of content can be done in three different ways as shown in this week’s lecture.

The first way is based on volunteers work to produce the content for the web application.
Another option is paying people to post on blogs or generate the content which is necessary for the platform.
The third point is to have it build indirectly through the self-interest of others.

These three methods can be found everywhere over the internet.

As an example I chose “Whispurr”, a “blogging”-platform similar to Twitter, with the difference that the character-limit is twice as high as e.g. on “Twitter”.¹

The main thought behind Wispurr is to control the visibility of you blogs and posts.

Like in a programming language, it’s possible to declare the visibility of a blog as “public” or just make it visible for a small group of users. The creators of “Whispurr” are promoting this in an example, to distinguish between thoughts a user wants to share with old friends (first group) or with people from work (second group).² So this application is offering a more detailed “visibility”- management for blogs and posts than the common social platforms like “facebook”.

This concept proviedes a good advantage when it comes to privacy and to control your information online.

One key effect that comes with these applications is the more users the community has, the higher is the value of this community. In the case of “Whispurr” it has the same effects as on facebook, to enrich the platform through user generated content.

This effect is an important key figure for social platforms and it opens new perspectives for business models and concepts.

¹ Src: http://www.whispurr.com/home

² Src: http://www.whispurr.com/about

Hello world!

robertatflocke — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:43:46 +0000

This is my first Blog and I’m looking forward to keep blogging. Have fun.