GAPE in the Enterprise....Does it have a future?

"Google Apps in the Enterprise" is a compelling article that dissects both the pros and cons of Google's attempts to to promote their Google Apps Premier Edition to large enterprises. It talks about the various components, including Gmail, Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, Page Creator, Google Talk, and the control panel to administer these in an enterprise environment, and compares the functionality and feasibility of these against against offering found in Microsoft Office or Sharepoint 2007. The author explores the maturity of "Software as a Service" (SaaS) and the pitfalls and potentials of Google entering the Enterprise Content Management industry. The compare the infancy of SaaS to the infancy of the LAN to network PC's together and the early days of electricity (giving credit for AC to George Westinghouse instead of Nikola Tesla...I was offended), and thus recognizing the immense potential for SaaS in the future. They brought up some good points in that Google likes to release software that is "not quite ready" and that a company that adopted GAPE is loses a substantial amount of control of the versions of their applications and may sacrifice some privacy. But a couple other thoughts came to mind in reading this article. Companies that utilize a NAS and use their domain authentication to access files on that NAS would not be able to pass-through domain credentials to access files stored on Google servers. For the common user, this may create some complaints. Also, no matter how simple GAPE would be to use, there would still be a learning curve as people adapted to the interface when we as a society have become so accustomed to Microsoft Office. But, even through these pitfalls and the descriptions of different markets addressed by Google or Oracle or Salesforce.com, this brought memories of the idea of Application Service Providers. providing Applications from a central location that same way ISP's offer Internet connectivity. Although the term "ASP" was not mentioned in the article, this idea has been around for a few years and seems to be the way of the future. The same way IBM was okay to let Microsoft license the OS because "everyone knows the money in is the hardware", maybe now the money is in offering only the software a company needs, when they need it, and only in the amount they need.

Energize Your Teaching..........with MySpace!!!

In reading the blog on "Erergize Your Teaching", a very
clear example was posted, that seems to be the future of social
networking: Facebook and MySpace. I would like to discuss MySpace, as
I have more familiarity to it and it is the largest social network in
the world. Although MySpace started out as a fun way to connect with
friends and even make new ones, it has grown so much larger than that.
It has created a whole new world of web developers, even out of people
who had never seen one line of HTML code and thought Javascript was
the coffee stain on thier shirts. It has created a relationship not
only amongst people, but with their computers. They control how teh
computer protrays them by creating fancy profiles complete with
images, music, and videos. They have begun to understand how a video
from YouTube can be embedded into my page on MySpace. It becomes a
computer version of a person's persona. You can create groups and post
messge and blogs with such ease, there is no reason any of your
"friends" cannot know exactly how you are feeling or what you are
thinking at any giving moment. I can even tell you personnally that if
I am wondering what kind of mood my girlfriend is in, I check her
MySpace page and it tells more accurately than if I asked her!

I believe AOL started this craze, with their revolutionary
"buddy list" and opening up chat with your friends that you could see
were online. To their detriment, they never realized the immeasurable
potential of this technology they implemented, and let it lie dormant.
They fell into Trap Two of the Pitfalls of Emerging Technology that
are discussed by Day and Shoemaker. MySapce is so expandeded now that
it can go to your mobile phone and alert you with updates of
information. If you search for a person on MySpace and they are not
there, it feels like they are not even living in the Information Age.
Socail networking is only going to grow and make a further impediment
on our personal lives. There lies an immense danger in this, as we
have seen with the child predators on MySpace and defamation that can
be posted about an indivisual, such as that teacher in Florida I
believe that was attacked and libeled by some upset students. There is
a lot of liability in social networking, but the potential in how
these threats are handled and the more poeple seems to not enjoy
meeting face-to-face anymore will create a market and a future that is
almost unfathomable.


Personally, I do not like social networking sites such as
MySpace, but to use that idea and contain the technology to more
individualized benefit would make me a believer. I would love to make
"friends" and communicate with people I have a common interest with,
and that thought in-link with the "Energize Your Teaching" topic makes
me think it would be cool if MBA students had a POPULAR site they
could freqeunt and make friends with and discuss topics important to
them....without the risk of getting "friend requests" every day from
solicitors who aren't even real people (you MySpace people know
exactly what I am talking about).

Wharton Ch. 3 - Enlightenment

This chapter really threw me for a loop, and brought me to an enlightenment about emerging technologies. What we sometimes view as a revolutionary technology is not revolutionary at all, but rather evolutionary. Focusing heavily on the examples of xerography, wireless radio transmission, and the Internet, this chapter sought out to explain that a manager of an existing firm need not create the wheel, but rather recognize other application domains that wheel could serve. So often a technology is developed for a sole focused purpose, and it is not until that technology is taken out of it's zone of development is it's true potential realized. For example, the Internet was developed decades before it changed the world. ARPA was developed and used by the miliatry and was only heard of in military and academic circles. But once Netscape developed the first browser, this information transmission mechanism called the "Internet" became a technology of value to the masses. The first two chapters had sucha focus on what not to do in dealing with emerging technologies, this chapter was the first to start explaining what a firm should do. In reading about the Internet and it's roots, I thought of what I believe will be the next big high-speed revolution: Internet2 and the Dynamic Circuit Network. the IP protocol has allowed for vast data transfer all accross the world at relatively high speeds, but the way the packets tranverse the Internet so randomly, it has created a bottleneck to acheiving super high speed and ultra-reliability. Internet2 does not revolutionize the trasnfer of IP traffic at all. Rather it has evolved that technology to provide for a constant, contigeous high speed "Circuit" for the data packets to travel through. Much like the phone lines create a a circuit to circuit connection, IP will operate in the same way. As America and the world become more bandwidth-hungry and such an immense load is put on our routers to direct every packet of IP information, Internet2 will feed this transmission thirst to, in my opinion, move High Definition movies accross the Internet in real time, and a doctor coudl view real-time motion MRI scans from accross the world. The world runs on the Internet, and Internet2 is going to be the new freeway. To quote 3M's slogan, it didn't invent the INternet, it just makes it better.

Wharton - Chapter 2: 1 Chapter and 4 Pitfalls

This chapter discusses four "traps" that an established company can fall into when investing in emerging technology. Simply put, they can "wait and see" and let another establishment do the due-diligence of innovation, and then only enter the market if it seems to have a future. This could be tragis because they will lose the early-adopters of that product, and may never be able to catch the innovative firm in market share or technology to gain a strong foothold. This would be a bad mistake. Another trap a company can fall in to would be to stick to their familiar business model and product. This should not happen to a successful company, because they would know that if they do not innovate, they will become obsolete. I liked the books example with Encyclopedia Brittanica, which was a great example. But also if companys only stick to what they know, the natural evolution of an industry could take them down. I think of Union Pacific for this example. A once great railroad and transportation company that did not recognize the innovation that was coming along with the creation of the automobile. With UP's resouces and knowledge of transportation, they could be bigger than Mercedez-Benz if they had got into the market when Benz did. Third, if a company does not fully commit to an emerging echnology, it may be the first thing scratched when their balance sheet starts to look a bit unfavorable. I think this could be attributed a lot to the way American investors value a company. Investment and stock is valuated based on quarterly results, so if a company were to invest in a technology that would pay off immensely in four years at an increased expense now, then investors would bolt. American investors seek immediate gratification and results, so this would leave the comapny no choice than to only make decisions that keep them in the black on their balance sheets. Having survived the first three traps, a company must not fall into the fourth one: not be persistent. they have to realize that sometimes products or technologies hit the market before the market knows it needs them. The comapny must be ready to not pull a profit for many years in order to realize the full potential and success of their product. The book mentions Knight-Ridder as an example of what not to do, and USA Today as a success story. I think of Amazon.com when I read this. They had substancial losses at first, but with persistence they are the online bookstore leader, even over such powerhouses as Barnes and Noble and Borders.
The ways an established comapny can avoid these pitfalls lies in the culture it creates within it's organization. Emphasis and support into "collective learning" and critical thinking in collaboration will allow the company to "think outside the box" and always challenge the things they think they know. From this chapter, I also have a better understanding why large, successful businesses that own other businesses operate them as a completely seperate unit. Although PepsiCo owns Pizza Hut, for example, operating Pizza Hut as its own autonomous unit creates the flexibility and culture that Pizza Hut needs to survive in its market. PepsiCo wsa not made great selling Pizzas, so PepsiCo lets that business unit that knows what they do best operate to their niche. I think PepsiCo and it's subsidiaries are a great example of the right things for an established company do when appraoching emerging technologies.

The Hype Cycle....By Cody

The first thing I noticed was that Tera-Architecture is slated to be 10 years or more to mainstream adoption. I disagree with this statement, in that they say that the first step will be virtualization. Virtualization is not new technology, by anmy means, but it is just starting to gain footing in the mainstream, with EMC's VMWare leading the pack. But, Microsoft is pushing virtualization heavily with their Server 2008 platform, and I believe once this sets, the Tera-Architecture could hit it's 1% market infiltration maybe five years after that. So instead of more than ten years, I would say that seven or eight years would be a better estimation, without conducting further research.
Behavioral economics will flourish as we become less and less prone to privacy, so I do agree with the authors' conclusion. I also agree with them on thier status on Idea Management being five to ten years out. I only think that because I see how the ITSM model has infiltrated the mainstream corporate process and the vast success it hs found. Idea Management will be just a natural progression of progress integration.
The authors give a five to ten year time frame on RFID, and that is something I also disagree with. I believe it will be further out, regardless of Wal-Mart's influence in pushing the technology. The tags are cost-prohibitive, and the radio frequency still has issues with bouncing off of metal and being absorbed by liquid. I recently visited NCR headquarters in Duluth, Georgia and witnessed their development of RFID tags. They were very novel, and with certain items, I really could just push a cart full of groceries though their receiving gate and have the total pop out on a receipt. But there were a lot of errors regarding the aforementioned packaging, and I do not believe the technology will increase enough, and bring the cost down enough, to gain widespread adoption in the next fove to ten years. RSS bar codes are chearp, can hold a trillion bits of information, and are accomodated by most of the scanners on the market today. RSS will win over RFID for the next 20 years.
There were many other interesting notes on the Hype CYcle chart, and you could almost already see the difference since it was posted in July, 2007 and now. Web 2.0 is here and we are already approaching Web 3.0, and location awareness I would say they hit right on the button, so to speak. Very interesting chart in itself, but more than that was the way it advises one to THINK about how they see emerging technologies and lay a framework as to how to approach their market strategy.

Yahoo Pipes - Check it out

Here is my Yahoo Pipes page, with links to everyone's blogs. Pipes is really sweet. You can basically customize your page to only contain information you want to see from other sites. It is obviously still in Beta, as mine crashed three times. I discoverd it crashed since I have Google pages open under a Google account, and then the pipes page open under my newly created Yahoo account. Crash and burn! But, it could be attributed to IE 7, as it still has inherent issues with a lot of functions since they are still trying to learn how to code their tabbed browsing.
But here is the link to my pipes. CHeck it out if you wish. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=lus6TWjX3BGEHDeDjtzu1g

Have good day!

Energizing Your Teaching....My picks

From "Multiple Ways to Communicate online": I choose Social NetworkingFrom "Use available tech tools to promote collaboration ": I choose "Online Groups"
From "Provide timely feedback to students": I choose Blackboard gradebookFrom : "Reduce student time on task by showing students how to be more efficient": I choose "access files from any computer"
From: "Make students’ work relevant and authentic through opportunities to publicize student work online": I choose Wikis

But, the schedule says for everyone to pick a different one, but there are not seven options per topic. SO are we to only choose 1 subect overall? If that is the case, my favorite pick is "Social Networking".....

Economic Forum - thoughts

In my opinion, the most innovative products awarded at the World Economic Forum were from InSightec and Skysails. InSightec's ExAblate 2000 takes already incredible technology within the MRI to a new level. At the exact point when issues are visible within the human body, they can be dealt with under closer supervision that a surgeons' eye. It was just fascinating that they are able to combine the diagnosics and treament into one single visit. The addressing of uterine fibroids, for example, is not a sequential treament process, where there are pictures taken, and then action taken after-the-fact. With ExAblate 2000, these two seperate processes are combined into one concurrent treatment. The other product that most impressed me was Skysails' wind propulsion system. What a simple concept, yet so advanced and engenius. A simple sail could potentially set the standard for cross-ocean travel, as oil becomes more expensive and carbon emissions become more regulated. Over two centuries ago, the Mayflower came to America using wind energy, and this new-age approach proces that some form of power truly are ageless. The one company that impressed me the least from the Forum was Kayak. As a faithful Priceline user, I checked out Kayak.com to see if it had any benefits that would make me leave Priceline. The look and feel of it was no different than Expedia, Travelocity, or Priceline, so I decided to test it. On Priceline I could not book a tripto Hawaii as far out as December, 2008. It was simply not available. So i went to Kayak.com, and it allowed me attempt to book the same trip to Hawaii in that December 2008 time frame that Priceline would not. When Kayak.com was attempting to find my trip for me, it got locked in a processing loop that it did not error out on, return a message for me, or simply exit. It just sat there processing. Even though it was a simple test, it left me with no faith in kayak.com, and thus I will continue to use Priceline. Not very innovative, in my opinion.
A sweet emerging technology not discussed in the forum was Hybrid cars. I think they are making more of a statement and impact to the overall global economy than many of the ideas that were awarded. Regardless as to whether they are feasible replacements to our dependance on oil in the future, they are substancial to advertising the impact that our relaince on oil has become. They have become an avenue of new thinking and developing renewable energy sources in an arena that touches every aspect of human nature: transportation. Personally, I will not drive a hybrid right now because I think they are ugly, but I think the technology is pointing society in the right direction, and I think this emerging technology will change the transportation world significantly going into the future.

Wharton book on Emerging Technologies - Beginning

The first thing I noticed about the preface and Chapter one is that it picked up an important topic I remember coving in my Economics course: Mature companies can hinder thier own development of emerging technologies. The authors really elaborated this subject in discussing the various circumstances that can lead a well-funded, well-managed develpopment group to fail if they aare too controoled or follow the tried-and-true thinking of their parent company. I liked how they emphasized that a balance needs to be found between the parnet company and the child company to successfully develop and market a disruptive technology. The parent-teenager analogy made teh concept easy to understand. The child company needs room to explore and grow on it's own basis, but it also needs the right amount of guidance and expertise of the parent.
Emerging technologies need to have goals and milestones to monitor their progress and to keep investors interested, but they must also be flexible to adapt to where their product or market may head.
I remember distinctly one passage that really bothered me, though. The authors mentioned the conflict between Edison and Westinghouse concerning AC and DC electrical current. How I have always understood this imoprtant aspect of the early days of electricity transmission, Nikola Tesla was an employee of Edison's and he was the first to push the idea of Alternating Current. Nikola sold this idea to his good friend Westinghouse, and there the confilcts with Edison continued. On that note, Nikola sold the AC idea to Westinghouse for royalties of $2.50 per horsepower, which he was subsequently cheated out of, even though this technology brought light (literally) to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Nikola was probably the greatest mind in history for the idealogical development of emerginf technologies. But more on that later. Hopefully something I can discuss on the class I get to present.
Although this book states clearly it does not hold the answers for developing successful emerging technologies, as most will fail, it does lay the historical framework for what has worked in the past and what has not. I think it will be a great read for this class.

Human Computation

Very fascinating. Beginning with the basic statistics on the volume hof hours people spend playing solitaire as it relates to the Panama Canal or the Empre State building was a great introduction for Luis to use to begin his presentation. It is interesting that we typically think of utilizing computing power in the technology sense, without realizing that the human brain has capabilities far beyond that of computers. If people can find basic enjoyment in playing a game, that processing and evaluative power can be used to coincide with the processing power of computers and servers on the Internet. The games Luis demonstrated and explained seemed to hold some of the basic fundamentals that have made solitaire so successful: simple, acheivable reward, realxing, and yet with still an element of excitement and connection with other people. Indexing the photos on the Web would seem to be an impossible, daunting task, but to put that task into a game and invite the time and cognitive thinking of thousands (or even millions) of humans makes the possibility certainly tangible. Luis addressed the sight-impaired benfefits of his games, but this technology has advances far beyond that. It is using the human element to address algorithyms that computers are not addressed yet to handle. It furthers the integration of the human brain and the computer processor into waht really could become a Matrix-like world. (as he joked about in his presentation)

The Wall Street Journal Articles - My Take

***Business Solutions; Don't Fence Me In: New security technology doesn't put a firewall around a corporate computer system; Instead, it scans traffic, piece by piece***

Simple article on IDS (Intrusion Detection Systems), and anyone who works within the IT arena of a medium to large business would be familiar with. It goes beyond the basic firewall (still a necessity), to monitor the contents of every packet that crosses into a company's yellow zone. These do require constant montiroing, and can report false-positives (legitimate traffic blocked) unless they are tuned to the specifications of the company. They have matured significantly over hte last several years, and will only get better.



***Technology (A Special Report); Thinking About Tomorrow***

The last sentence of this article pretty much sums up where all of this technology is heading. As mobile phones have evolved to become al-in-one phones, cameras, GPS units, and media centers, the individuality of people will continue to disintegrate. More and more personal information is gathered on people and sometimes they even offer up their most intimate information voluntarily on sits such as facebook.com and myspace.com. With satellite technology, it is possible to pinpoint the location of any person at any given time, and this gives me much angst over my privacy going into the future. People are more connected than ever before and those communication channels have become so cheap to facilitate the communication and store and analyse the date that individuality and privacy will become things of the past. The technology is very cool, and a lot of parts of it are focused on making our lives easier, but how mig with the trade-off be for this convenience?



***Technology (A Special Report); Predictions of the Past: How did we do the last time we looked ahead 10 years? Well, you win some, you lose some***

In 1998 the WSJ polled for the technological changes the world would see in ten years (2008). Some predictions were spot-on (desktop computing power), while some were not so close (the Dutch). I think at the root of this article, yet not stated, was push vs pull of technology. Some technology was developed and then found a market to service. Essentially letting people know they wanted something before they wanted it. But most technolgy comes from a "pull". As the general population became more comfortable and accustomed to developing technology, they started finding new ways they wanted to use technology, and the developers answered that call. There has been a big idea of "listen to what the poeple want and give it to them, and then some". It is almost amazing the accuracy that some poeple predicted ten years out, and leaves us to wonder what the world will be like come 2018.