IBPvo

What’s in a name? I do not know what this stands for, but it is an interesting research project. The service it delivers is also simple: ordering an viewing television programs. The service does the recording and distribution for the user. In order to keep the amount of data limited, it is only stored for a limited time in their network.

I guess such a service will be the future. The to the amount of data involved a specific infrastructure is needed, such as this one.

[via Adam Curry]

My Last Email

A funny service by Mylastemail.com. The idea is that a set of e-mails are sent after the writer has died. A good thing as we no longer have to depend on the solicitor to open the will, but is more about saying some last farewell.

A mail in the future service is nothing new, most email programs have such a feature. But with these features the sender can set the trigger. As death is often unexpected, it is not possible to set such a trigger. Mylastemail.com solved this by either requiring the user to log-in regularly (each few months) or by asking the trustees to send them the death certificate. Interesting service.

VoIP

On Werblog I saw this interesting piece on Verizon and VoIP. It turns out that Verizon intends to offer VoIP for its DSL customers. They intend to offer a whole range of services and plans. And Verizon sees VoIP as the application (service) for DSL, which is quite interesting. Could this be the killer application for DSL? The VoIP-service will be a non-QoS consumer PSTN service. But then again it will be free (most of the time anyway). Interestingly Verizon has also Wireless. The package DSL plus wireless might be very convincing for customers.

Sad

I just read Ray Ozzie’s entry on WinFS. He argues that WinFS is the only chance to get interoperability between programs, services etc. to a higher level. It is sad that for the real innovation we came dependent on Microsoft. Many attempts have gone on before, but without Microsoft it will not succeed. Who is stifling innovation here?

[tanks to Marc Canter]

Amazon’s WebServices

Tim O’Reilly has an interesting story how he tried (and succeeded?) to sell WebServices to Amazon. I like the arguments he gives for businesses to open up. Especially the platform argument: change your application into a platform and more parties will become dependent on you. The Amazon webservices page has many examples.

I do not like how he uses the words application and platform though.

Google’s Business

Andrew Orlowski discusses in the Register the business of Google. He questions whether there is a search engine business at all. He argues that Google is in the advertising business: it buys advertising space with third parties and has some advertising space themselves (mainly Blogger). All this space is then sold to Media agencies. But in the end it is unclear how Google makes money. Telepocalypse agrees with this view that Google has two businesses: a media buying business and a billboard business.

I am a bit confused about the definition of business. Telepocalypse defines two businesses: one from the selling point of view and the other from the buying point of view. And the search engine does not seem to be a business at all. Business seems to equate money. I need some better definitions here.

I think it should start with the service you are offering to your customers. A business is then defined in terms of this service. The number of users can then define the size of the business. Of course it is even better if you can earn money by offering the service.

Thus Google is in the search: it offers users a search service and thus it is in the search business. Unfortunately for Google this is a free service, thus the size of business in terms of money earned is very small. The other businesses are clearer. They sell advertising space on the pages with search results and the sell advertising space on pages they bought from third parties with AdSense. This is the reselling of advertising space. I would not call the buying of advertising space a business though.

But I do agree with Telecopalypse: do not buy the shares as their business model is unclear: but there is a search engine business as there are users.

Collaborative Spam Filtering

Thanks to the previous post I came across Cloudmark. This company operates a collaborative spam filtering service. A user downloads a button bar, which will be added to Outlook. This button-bar allows a user to block or unblock an email-message. If a users blocks a message, it is removed from his email-box and a message is sent to the central Cloudmark server. When a user downloads his email messages, his messages are checked against the central server and if needed they are tagged as spam. The service also ranks the spam-reporters (users) trustworthiness. Thus only emails spammed by trusted spam-reporters will be removed.

The service also has a service for businesses. Any email-address from a registered business will get on a whitelist. The business will however get a feedback on the reaction of the users and might end up as spam(?).

From a service point of view I see this service as a directory of email (or maybe just the hashes), which has been labelled as spam. I guess they remove non-spam email (hashes). Users can read the labels and submit labels. Businesses can un-label messages and I guess they use the labeling services of blacklists as well.

It does remind me of what Richard Soderberg has been saying.

Content WiFi Packages

in Cnet an article appeared in which examples are give of bundling content with WiFi. Telepocalyse thinks that this is a very stupid idea. I totally agree.

For starting users such a content=access package might be useful, but advanced users just want raw IP-access. These users have their own content they want to view. Especially hotspot users seem advanced to me. One might argue however that travelling users might want to access local information in order to get around. I would, when I am at a new place! And some help might be appreciated then. But that is indeed location. I guess that in the long run these packages will die, as they will more expensive than access-only providers.

eMail market future

An extremely interesting article by Kevin Laws on Ventureblog about the future of email. In order to attack spam Microsoft has the chance to win this market, as they are the major player in the email server market with MS Exchange. They are able to create a whitelist of the MS Exchange servers they sold and which prove themselves spam-free. Everything else gets in the worst case blacklisted or heavily subjected to filtering.

He suggests a multilayered filtering approach in order to minimise the false-positives. Sounds like a good idea. Check out the article!

ITXC

I am not a specialist of deep networking services, but there was is so much hype on VoIP that I wanted to have a look. ITXC is a wholesale network service provider. They have a proprietary network based on IP and the offer connection services to other VoIP-providers and to PSTN-providers. Thanks to their numerous interconnection deals, they can terminate any (?) international call. ITXC will merge with TeleGlobe, another global provider, so I guess the technology is getting accepted.

From a service point of view I do not understand why they are called VoIP-providers. They offer wholesale PSTN-interconnection services (if this a good term). From the PSTN-customer point-of-view, it is the same as other interconnection services. They do not (should not) care about the technology used. Only for other VoIP-providers it does matter (I think), as they need another interface in order to exchange the call control.

[inspiration Fred (a VC)]

invisiblog.com

This blogging service let you create blogs that are completely anonymous. They use GPG and Mixmaster to anonymize the entries.

I hope some useful blogs will be produced by this. At the moment I did not see any.

[inspiration: Dan Gilmor]

Reger.com

This service allows the user to publish his structured content in the form of a blog. The most interesting thing is that this service allows the user to define any structured MicroContent type and start publishing it. The service has predefined a large set of MicroContent types to get the user started.

• Structured MicroContent - YES, any MicroContent type is possible;
• Data Outside - YES, there should be some import options for data. It already has a the possibility to import the definition of MicroContent types through a XSD-file (it gets a YES thanks to this feature);
• Licenses - NO, did not see it;
• Feeds Galore - YES, any blog can be read as feed as well. It allows to publish any feed as RSS in Structured Blogging format;
• Web API’s - NO, not that I am aware of;
• Desktop Integration - NO, only the standard RSS blogs can be read by a standard News-reader;
• Single Identity - NO;
• MicroWeb - NO;
• Wild Structure - YES, the user can define a structure he wants;
• Cross Platform - NO;

tags: microcontent; wild; service; reger.com;

Soople

Google has many hidden features, which take some time to find out. Some Dutch people have created an interface to these hidden features. The service is in Dutch.

[via ZDnet]

Personal Service-Oriented Architecture

Also John Udell discusses SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). The word SOA seems to have originated at InfoWorld. I am not sure I understand what they say. They talk about events (result of?) written in XML and of flows, which can be inspected and act upon. Below that is a messaging infrastructure of XML-messages (as envisioned in Longhorn). The quotes that Marc Canter added to this gives me a very deja vue feeling: see objects as services, in fact web services.

It is an extremely good idea, but what is new here? That is has been adopted by Microsoft (at last)? These models have been around for many years. The first time I really used it was within NeXT with their distributed objects model. They also moved this idea to their desktop with the Services-menu. But think also of the pipes in the Unix-world. What do I miss here? I miss the deployment. This is where Microsoft certainly can help.

SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services (Platform)

Marc Canter discusses this new platform from Microsoft. It seems to be a server based platform, that can be used for creating reports from SQL-databases (or only SQL-server?). He suggests that Microsoft will offer this platform in the form of an online service, which he calls an online service oriented application.

I see no evidence that Microsoft will do so. I get the impression that Microsoft will allow other parties to act as service provider for this platform. These parties then act then as Application Service Provider (no need for a new name). I categorise these kind of services as Application IT Services. IT Services are very general services. I still do not like the word application together with the word service. Applications refer to software that run locally on your PC (the client). These Client Applications offer a service once you run the software. In contrast Server Applications run somewhere on the company network (the Intranet). If the application runs somewhere outside the network at an external party, then we talk about an Application Service. And the party that offers this Application Service, is the Application Service Provider.

I am still not sure what makes an Application Service different from other Online Services, such as an Teleshopping service. There is the difference between users and customer. For a Tele-shopping service there is a one-one relation. For an Applications Service there might be one customer (the company) and many users (the employees). Another difference might be that the application that is used to deploy the service, is the same whether it is a used as a Client Application, a Server Application or an Application Service. Thus many ingredients (the Enabling Processes) that are needed in order to offer the Application as a Service are missing in the Application. What also can be different is the responsibility for the functionality. An Application Service provider can not be held responsible for the functionality that the Application offers. If Microsoft would offer the Reporting Service themselves this would be different. I would call them then a Reporting Database IT Provider and not an Application Provider.

What is the definition of a Platform by the way?