|
|
-
12:06 PM Thursday, April 03, 2008
Apr
03
Thu
There was a thought-provoking and balanced post on this subject on ChannelWeb Tuesday. It makes the point that Sharepoint's growth and adoption mirrors that of Lotus Notes in the nineties. Like Notes, Sharepoint provides an easily-accessible application platform, and that accessibility can lead to problems of scaling, maintenance and management. They quote a CMSWatch Report on Sharepoint, that says: We have a lot of things to say about SharePoint, but for starters, we observe that it has become "the new Lotus Notes," repeating history as it mimics Notes' allure and pitfalls The ChannelWeb article goes on to say: CMS Watch's view is that with both Lotus Notes and SharePoint, flexibility is a double edged sword, and the ease with which custom applications can be built on the platform poses challenges for IT staff. SharePoint also suffers from shortcomings with regard to its collaboration capabilities and lacks the scalability and administrative controls necessary to make it viable for enterprise deployments, according to CMS Watch. The article quotes a couple of Sharepoint-savvy partners who agree that uncontrolled development can lead companies into trouble. I think the article makes reasonable observations, but the most insightful point is made (or hinted at) towards the end: But Ric Opal, vice president of Peters & Associates, an Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based solution provider, discounts comparisons between SharePoint and Lotus Notes. "We're in a different era, and the entire industry is different now than it was then," he said. "With the applications being deployed on Sharepoint, the back end is SQL Server, which is robust and used by tons of applications. It's an industry standard database that just about anyone can write to," said Opal. As for SharePoint's scalability limitations, Opal said "that's going to hold true with any technology if you don't properly architect a solution sitting on top of a database." The real difference between Lotus Notes and Sharepoint is the underlying platform each was built on. Sharepoint is built on .NET and SQL and it's a first class element of the Microsoft application platform. That was never the case for Lotus Notes. Notes was built on a set of unique technologies, none of which ever made it into the mainstream of IBM's application platform: - The Notes database
- The Notes Directory and certificate structure
- The Notes application platform: programming model, document model, and language
IBM is clearly committed to DB2 as it's database, Tivoli for security and Websphere as its application platform. The fact that Lotus supported none of these drove IBM's disastrous migration of Notes to a new "Workplace" platform, which they announced at Lotusphere in 2002. That approach, recently and quietly abandoned, demonstrated clear IBM's ambivalence toward the product and created a five-year period of unrest for customers and partners. As the Channelweb article concludes: Recent indications that Microsoft is working to add new functionality to SharePoint suggest that the vendor isn't planning to rest on its laurels with SharePoint, says Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at twentysix New York, a New York-based IT consultancy. Correct. The biggest differences between Notes and Sharepoint are in their underlying technology bases and the confidence and investment that their respective builders place in them.
-
01:50 PM Sunday, March 30, 2008
Mar
30
Sun
CNet reported just a few hours ago (09:30 PDT Sunday) on the International Standards Organization vote on approving the Office Open XML specification as ISO standard DIS 29500:
Early reports Sunday indicate that Office Open XML (OOXML) appears to have enough votes to be certified an ISO standard. An official tally is not expected until Monday.
The article quotes the OpenMalaysia blog: "... group of individual bloggers working to build openness in Malaysia's ICT culture. Most of us have day jobs and a couple of us are students. Those with a job work for companies ranging from large international enterprises to self-run Malaysian start-ups."
The voting ended at midnight Saturday, CET. The OpenMalaysia post, two and a half hours later, predicts that OO XML will pass the ballot. There are two criteria for approval, and OpenMalayis summarised the criteria and predicted the result as follows:
Voting Criteria (JTC1 Directives, page 49):
- At least two-thirds of the P-members voting shall have approved;
- Not more than one-quarter of the total number of votes cast are negative.
Prediction:
- Criteria 1: 22/32 = 68.75% (PASS)
- Criteria 2: 14/69 = 20.29% (PASS)
- Overall Result: PASS
-
12:19 PM Saturday, March 29, 2008
Mar
29
Sat
The ISO vote on OOXML closes at midnight CET tonight. It's been a divisive topic, and while browsing for the last-minute volleys on the subject, I happened on this debate. It is mostly a one-sided set of rants about how much IBM will or won't support OOXML and what"support" really means. But, buried down towards the end is a long-ish and mostly well-written comment from Doug Heintzman, "Director of Strategy for IBM Collaboration Technologies," which includes this paragraph: Let's be clear. IBM believes that the monopolistic domination of the office productivity market has inhibited investment and innovation. We believe that XML based file formats have tremendous potential to improve workflow, activities, and team collaboration. We believe that a modern XML based file format will allow customers to perform business analytics, generate automated semantic information, improved searchability, and make the information contained in documents much more socially and process aware and increase its overall value to the customer. We think that documents will become much more seamlessly integrated into business applications and processes. I was struck by how little the topic sentence: "IBM believes that monopolistic domination of the office productivity market has inhibited investment and innovation" had to do with what followed: "We believe that XML based file formats have tremendous potential to improve workflow, activities, and team collaboration ...." From his job title, I suspect Doug knows something about collaboration, and is credible in the main part of the paragraph. I believe he is right in that part and I think most people in the industry (including those at Microsoft) would agree. See this from http://www.microsoft.com/interop/letters/choice.mspx Microsoft has long believed in the power of XML-based file formats to unlock data in documents and to help integrate front and back office processes – while providing significant opportunities for independent software vendors to create high-value applications But why the disconnected opening sentence about monopolistic domination? Well, IBM cast the only "no" vote for ECMA approval of OOXML, and has done the same in the ISO Technical group. From ZDNet yesterday A technical group formed to make a recommendation to the BSI's policy panel has voted five-to-one in favour of OOXML being accepted as an international standard, a source close to the process has told ZDNet.co.uk. There was intense lobbying by interested parties before a meeting on Tuesday, in which IBM was apparently the one remaining dissident. IBM uses the competing OpenDocument Format (ODF), which is already an international standard. Given the trend in IBM's share of the collaboration market, I can understand a certain peevishness in Doug's opinion. But, for the same reason, he might do better to focus less on the economics of business, and a whole lot more on IBM's strategy for Collaboration Technologies.
-
02:50 PM Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Mar
12
Wed
Interesting article on the OOXML saga on Internet.com yesterday, but the piece that caught my eye was this one from Patrick Durusau, who is chairperson of the technical committee advising the U.S. governing board. Interestingly, Durusau may be an ODF backer, but he's pragmatic too, and had some direct words for opponents of OOXML on his blog: "What is puzzling in this day and age of quarterly reports and returns that any corporate governance structure would long tolerate spite as a business strategy. Or that investors would stay with companies that follow such strategies. "OpenDocument supporters should be wishing that [OOXML] will be approved along with a new work item to amend it to fix the problems found at the BRM ... Any other wish is a walk in a cold rain with a Russian peasant wishing his neighbor's cow would die,"
-
11:20 AM Friday, January 18, 2008
Jan
18
Fri
IBM Announced 10% revenue growth in the 4th quarter of 20007. 6% of the growth came from currency fluctuations (as the value of overseas income rose in dollar terms due to the dollar's decline). In other words, 4% is a better measure of business growth. Software revenues grew 12% in dollar terms in the 4th quarter; 6% in constant currency terms. The interesting news is in the software segments: - Websphere (application platform and portal) grew 23% in dollar terms - Information Management (Database, the biggest segment by far) -- 11% - Tivoli (Systems Management) -- 19% - Lotus (Collaboration) -- 7% 
Lotus significantly lagged the other IBM software businesses, and after accounting for currency fluctuations, showed no growth in the fourth quarter of 2007. 
It's only one quarter. It's possible these results reflect customers postponing purchases until the new Eclipse-based Notes/Domino 8 (which launched in August last year) is proven out. <updated with supplemental segment information from IBM>
-
06:33 PM Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Jan
16
Wed
An update on earlier posts comparing jobs for the two leading enterprise collaboration platforms: IBM's Notes, Domino and Workplace products vs Microsoft's Sharepoint and Exchange. Comments and caveats: - It's only one country, so doesn't necessarily reflect the situation outside the UK.
- Here's an alternative view of the job market
- The ITJobsWatch site appears to provide high quality, normalised and de-duped data, so it shouldn't be compared with keyword job search sites in which:
- a query for, Notes, may return jobs ".. taking notes ..." or Exchange may return jobs in a " ... stock exchange ..."
- a single position will appear many times from different sources.
Application Platforms: UK Permanent and Contract IT Positions for 3 months ended Jan 16th 2008 Source ITJobsWatch 16th January, 2008 
Note: this site breaks out the MSFT products by release (Exchange2003, Exchange 2007, etc), so I added together the individual results. The Lotus releases are combined (i.e. one entry for Notes, one for Domino). 12-month Trend: Lotus Notes Permanent positions trend is shown in the chart below 
Additional 12-month trend lines for each company's leading entries are below: Domino Permanent Positions Notes Contract Positions Domino Contract Positions MS Exchange Permanent Positions MS Exchange Contract Positions Sharepoint Permanent Positions Sharepoint Contract Positions
-
01:08 PM Sunday, December 30, 2007
Dec
30
Sun
Two friends of mine (Michelle and John) recently launched a new service called Outshouts. While it’s early days yet (the site’s only been up a couple of weeks), it shows a lot of interesting potential. Outshouts lets you record a voice message, combine it with a song or some other pre-recorderd content, and send the whole thing out to your friends (or enemies, I imagine, depending on your mood and your choice of message and song). The service is easy and fun to use, and I’m a fan. However, beyond that, Outshouts seems to me a poster child for some of the more interesting aspects of software on the web. A new example of emerging “big ideas” I recently used Outshouts to create a series of “Originals: better or worse than the covers?” as a sort of discussion and showcase of original versions of songs that may have been eclipsed by better-known covers, like Tom Waits’ “Jersey Girl” for example, or Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes.” My topic and choices may not be original but a few folks commented, and I’ve also enjoyed some of the other member selections and discussions. This seems to me another sign that media will be increasingly personal. I don’t mean in the sense of user-created content. Rather that recommendations from friends and “people who like what I like” will eventually combine into one or more “radio stations” I tune into regularly. As John wrote in a recent email exchange on this topic: The micro-blogging aspect of sending a single musical mash-up provides a new context for music discovery and recommendation -- when someone you know sends you a song that means something to them, you suddenly hear that song, and maybe even the artist, the band, and/or the genre, in a whole new way. First-generation Web radio was simply traditional radio broadcast over IP – I could listen to KFOG streamed on-line. The next generation of Web radio, pioneered by services like Pandora.com, replaced those general broadcast streams with individual streams of music customized to the taste and interests of an individual listener - KFOG Radio becomes CliffReeves Radio. The next generation? Maybe we disaggregate the streams into individual ‘atoms’ of content, pointcast from one individual to another or to a small group. It's a sort of "rifle shot radio.” I’m not arguing that one generation will replace another – television didn’t replace radio, and I don't expect Pandora to replace KFOG, or Outshouts to replace Pandora. But innovations like Outshouts do have the potential to experience profoundly different business economics. Web broadcasters are extremely concerned about the magnitude of the fees to be levied by SoundExchange for the streaming of copyright material; broadcasters believe that the proposed rates make Internet radio uneconomic (see, for example, http://www.kurthanson.com/dos/) Outshouts is subject to those same fees, but rather than sending out a continuous stream of songs for background listening, it’s sending out single songs with a personalized cover message that demands attention. Assuming traditional revenue models of advertising and music sales, then that model may give them much more bang for their copyright-fee buck. We shall see. Multi-modal My phone is the only device I have with me almost all the time, so it’s vital I can receive and send Outshouts from it. Outshouts have done a neat job on this. I can send an outshout to a mobile phone; it’s delivered as an SMS and played over the phone. No PC – or even SmartPhone – required. I can even send an Outshout from my mobile phone – a simple voice menu lets me select the song, record my message, and send it along. This lets Outshouts leverage the same back-end systems, marketing, and alliances for both the Web and the phone – with all of the device ubiquity that delivers. A realistic Perspective on Community Outshouts is based on the premise of sharing with friends and developing communities of shared interest, but it work well with other communities than its own. I belong to a number of communities and I have several web personas (all, by the way under may own name and my real age and gender J). Outshouts has their own simple community functionality which works fine, but more importantly, in my view, they make it easy to embed my Outshout into my blog or community site. You can add a standalone widget to your Facebook profile, or a number of other popular sites, or just copy and paste the script in a blog or other personal site. They're using Gigya for that – a nice, simple, and outsourced approach to the problem: 
Rapid, Outsourced, Component-based development Just as interesting as the service itself is how it was developed. The concept was Michelle’s and she did much of the basic functional and user design. Most of the development, though was done by a team of professionals from all over the U.S., communicating by the Web, phone, etc. A truly virtual team. There's a lot of specialization required for high-end graphics design, Flash, PHP and Java; rather than building a small local team of generalists, Michelle has built a virtual team of specialists. Michelle has worked in traditional development teams before, but this is her first experience with this kind of structure. Her view: it’s made a dramatic difference to the speed and the quality of the product. A structure like this depends on powerful, well-understood development frameworks and interfaces; as you'd expect, Outshouts makes extensive use of open source components and existing web services, including Asterisk for IVR, VoicePulse SIP gateway, ClickaTel’s SMS gateway.. Quite apart from Outshouts itself, the big message for me is how much the software development landscape has changed: there’s the web of course, but the attendant services, components and communities have subordinated traditional development challenges to the “big idea.” This brings to mind another example I read in the Seattle PI in October This is a signal all of us in the existing software industry need to heed.
-
11:09 AM Sunday, October 28, 2007
Oct
28
Sun
Redbend http://www.redbend.com/ … Redbend provides tools for remote management of mobile software on mass market handsets, specializing in firmware: FOTA (firmware over the air). This is a highly specialized and demanding area due to stringent requirements for the user experience and restrictions on the use of bandwidth. They have agreements with Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and estimate that they are now managing approximately 200M phones. WeFi http://www.wefi.com/ …. Software to help users connect quickly and easily to WiFi anywhere and upload the information to a central server which creates an aggregate map. They also reward members who make the most contributions. They do more analysis than most connection managers by analyzing the connectivity and helping the user connect more effectively. 150,000 access points. Aprrox 6,000 current users, currently in beta with no marketing. Users can enter the routers they themselves own, and allow access to a limited group of friends. Axis Mobile http://www.axismobile.com/ …. Delivering email and attachments via push to almost any phone. The MNO runs an Axis Mobile server which collects the users’ mail from any service: Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo etc. For each user, the Axis Mobile server detects what device the user is holding at the time, and performs real-time transcoding of the email and the attachments, They can support a number of formats: MMS, XHTML, WAP, etc. Axis Mobile has contracts covering 200M subscribers via 15 operators in Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Poland). Axis Mobile is currently listed on London’s AIM which is technically a $30M IPO (investors hold common stock) , but operates like a VC (the investment are corporations). Axis has recently introduced MMBox, which allow non-MMS users to enjoy MMS services (with transcoding at the server) and allows the operator to bill where they often cannot with MMS that is sent to unknown recipients. PhotoSync enables management and sharing of mobile photos on the service provider’s servers. This runs in the background, synching at off-peak times allowing the phone to be used for other functions.
-
11:06 AM Sunday, October 28, 2007
Oct
28
Sun
Starhome http://www.starhome.com/ … Starhome is a mature (established late 1999) and very-well funded firm with over 120 MNO customers worldwide., and a very close relationship with Vodaphone. They are attempting to bridge the divides between mobile networks and between mobile and fixed-line environments. Starhome allows carriers to “wrap their users in a bubble of value-added services” that remain available to them when they roam. It also allows visitors access to the carrier’s services. In addition to roaming services they provide services across network types. For example, they can provide PBX-like services like videoconferencing (usually available via an enterprise service) that allow the user to continue on a cell network, a videoconference begun on a corporate network. Olista http://www.olista.com/ … Olista, a three-year old company, targets mobile carriers with a service adoption management (SAM) platform. There is a modest professional services effort to customize the SAM platform to the carrier’s environment, but once in place, the SAM platform monitors the experience (eg data from WAP gateways) of each user. Olista analyses performance issues (multiple duplicate downloads, slow downloads, etc) and alerts the carrier. Over time, the SAM platform can implement rules which will automatically handle (similar to MOMs agents) recognizable situation. In addition, Olista can analyze the usage of the carrier’s portal, identifying areas of low use, and where trials are not pursued. Individual user performance can be analyzed. For example a heavy user whose usage has recently declined can trigger an alert. If a customer downloads content more than once, the carrier can notify the user and void charges, perhaps directing the customer to better training on downloads. Olista can also identify group of users who ccommunicate with each other and use, say, MMS, and can then ensure that they receive promotional material and pricing that encourages and supports their use. Olista can be licensed on a traditional basis or via a shared risk (increase in ARPU) model. Olista has a particularly strong customer base.
-
10:59 AM Sunday, October 28, 2007
Oct
28
Sun
Asocs http://www.asocstech.com/ … fab-less semiconductor … software-reconfigurable chip targeting multi-protocol, multi-technology convergence handsets. The chip is re-purposed dynamically to work in the most effective way with different kinds of communication: Cellular and wireless, for example. This dynamic configuration allows the chip to exploit different syles of parallelism for the different kinds of communication, resulting in improved battery life and better performance of tasks such as viewing video. Nexperience http://www.nexperience.com/ … remote access and automatic testing of user experience on handsets. This is targeted at mobile operators, handset vendors, and ISVs who need to test a number of phone types in a number of different networks and countries. Nexperience provodes a cradle and rack system in which multiple phones can be loaded and tested in on one mobile environment, while being monitored centrally. The video and voice interaction with the test script is controlled centrally and all interaction (the image is captured by a camera) is transmitted back to a monitoring server. The test script can evaluate take action based on responses and QoS. Nexperience’s currently targets mobile carriers and the people who build apps for them. Flash Networks http://www.flashnetworks.com/asp/main.asp .... mobile data quality of experience. Another company (like Amobee) addressing the issue of providing users access to more content across more mobile networks. On handsets, Flash optimizes the viewing experience (ensuring, for example that a YouTube FLV can be viewed on a particular handset, and converting it to another form, if necessary) as well as providing content control. Content can also be customized by the carrier to adapt to the user’s profile. A businessman, for example, may have a BMW ad placed in the stream. Detailed knowledge of the handset (they support about 3,00 user agents today) and the user (inferred from behavioral analysis) is a central element of Flash’s value.
-
10:55 AM Sunday, October 28, 2007
Oct
28
Sun
Jajah. http://www.jajah.com/ …. Server-centered VoIP plus PSTN for consumers. You make a phone request from your PC or mobile phone, providing the two endpoint numbers. Jajah makes the call over VoIP and PSTN and handles all billing and payment. Jajah integrates with a number of address books and also Outlook. Jajah has also added convenient buttons that can be added, for example. The recipient clicks the button to call the sender. Jajah is also one of the EBT Accelerator companies. Amobee http://www.amobee.com/main/hp.htm … Amobee is both a software company and a business development and sales service. They provide a comprehensive set of offerings for mobile operators, application developers and agencies. For mobile operators, Amobee provides a telco-grade ad serving platform. For developers they provide an SDK which allows the application to be subsidized by contextual ads and access to agencies and advertisers who will place them. For agencies, the platform provides campaign management services and a catalog of mobile inventory Silent Communications. http://www.silentcom.com/ … Silent communications provides features likely to be attractive to carriers who want to increase call completion by providing multiple ways to respond to unanswerable voice calls. For example, if you receive a call while in a meeting you can silently send a voice reply that suggests you begin a SMS session. You can also carry on a silent voice conversation using a set of predefined responses or statements. The opportunities here are endless :-)
-
10:36 AM Sunday, October 28, 2007
Oct
28
Sun
While visiting Israel the week of the 15th October, I met with a number of startup companies in meetings set up by their investors. I was struck by the apparent completeness and no-nonsense business approaches of the companies. They appeared to me as strong as the best I saw at Demo Fall 2007 last month. Mobile platforms and mobility-centric consumer companies dominated. The mobile platforms are targeting download speeds, matching content to devices, and attempting to link the walled gardens between content providers and mobile carriers. The consumer mobile apps exemplify the trend toward “lifestream” applications like Twitter and Jaiku (acquired by Google), in which the mobile phone delivers real-time information as well as a journal between a user and the user’s community. I'll provide a brief overview of each company, collected in posts organized by the investors who introduced them: - Yossi Vardi
- Sequioa Capital Israel
- Vertex
- Gemini Israel Funds
- Pitango
First, Yoss Vardi's companies (all of them on Windows Server, btw) ATLAS CT http://relive.atlasct.com/ … ATLAS CT provides a vector-based (for speed and readability on different devices) mapping and community platform targeted at mobile users. ReLive is an application built to show off the platform, but it’s extremely slick in its own right. ReLive tracks a user’s travel and associates photos and notes with key locations. Users can share and relive (via browser) the experience with others. The client currently requires a GPS phone, but Atlas CT is working to support other location services (carrier triangulation, WiFi). FRING http://www.fring.com/ … Voice-enabled Mobile IM (i.e. voice over IM). Fring just got an $11M 2nd round from Northbridge Ventures. Here are Dave Drach’s notes on Fring from the recent Demo in Germany (thanks, Dave): Mobile VOIP – peer to peer. Works with all IM clients. Works with over 400 mobile devices. Works with Windows Mobile. Works without the SIM card. Mobile carriers gotta love that. Ultraroaming – and whisper. Can move between types of wireless networks, i.e. from WIFI to 3G, etc. Presence is constantly updated. Phone used without SIM card – it found the wireless network and dynamically connected and continued the call. Fring won the demo gods award. Speedbit: http://www.speedbit.com/ … download/upload accelerator. Speedbit analyzes network speed and file availability to improve file up- and download by downloading conent from multiple sources simultaneously rather than one. There are three products, all built around the network optimization core. Top Story ion Businessweek.com: Speedbit claims to be able to download a movie in approximately 20 minutes - Download Accelerator. The main product provides client-side network optimization
- Speed Optimizer. Client-side performance monitoring, cleanup and diagnosis
- Video Accelerator. Analyzes performance for key services (iTunes, YouTube, CNN, Facebook,, etc), optimizes and bookmarks
Dyuna http://www.dyuna.com/ … a mobile entertainment platform which allows a federation of mobile carriers and content providers. Dyuna has built relationships with content providers and indexed content and facilitates cross-selling and usage analysis. Essentially, Dyuna is addressing the built-in conflict between the carriers (who want exclusive access to content shipped on their networks) and the content owners (who want the broadest possible reach). Dyuna provides a content catalog, carrier provisioning, billing and settlement, and content-relevant advertising. They have agreements with a number of content providers in Israel, including Orange Israel.
-
09:55 AM Sunday, October 28, 2007
Oct
28
Sun
I made my first trip to Israel the week of Oct 15th, and spoke at the VC Summit on the morning of the17th. The event was coordinated and planned by my colleague, Barak Shein. The morning session was limited to VCs and then opened up to a town hall meeting in the afternoon -- co-sponsored by leading Israeli VC, Pitango -- with the theme "The Future of Communication Services." Moshe Lichtman heads up Microsoft's Israel R&D Center and he kicked of the morning with a casual and engaging presentation on How Microsoft Israel is working with the local community. I followed Moshe with a discussion of how the Microsoft Emerging Business Team operates worldwide and answered a lot of great questions from a very boisterous and friendly crowd. Questions included: Why doesn't Microsoft have a startup fund like, say, Intel's? My answers: - there's no shortage of liquidity, so the market doesn't need our investment - we are software developers; not investors - an investment in one company would likely distort our perspective on partnering with, or acquiring, others Does Microsoft just look for potential threats like Google and try to head them off? The questioner said this was asked kindly and in jest, so I took him at his word and answered with another question: - if it's that easy to spot future winners why bother to be in the software business? InfoGin's CEO Eran Wyler then gave a startup company's view of working with Microsoft. David Vaskevitch, Microsoft CTO, wrapped up the morning with an insightful view of Microsoft as an innovator and also delved in to some of the technology issues the company is tackling. The town hall style meeting in the afternoon focused on communications and two panels compared the perspectives of the tech community (the mobile operators and carriers are doomed) with those of the carriers themselves (we are differentiating around our franchise). Brian Arbogast (Microsoft Corporate VP, Mobile Services) and Gary Shainberg (VP Innovation, British Telecom -- or self-described "bandwidth curator") gave keynotes. It was an excellent day. The audience was boisterous and very friendly and I felt at home. Thanks for the invitation and the opportunity, Barak.
-
12:22 PM Sunday, October 07, 2007
Oct
07
Sun
A recent request from a startup company looking for Sharepoint partners reminded me of a site that I had meant to blog about some time ago, and just forgot. Sharepoint, like any platform, is intimately associated with partners of all kinds, who both contribute to and benefit from its growth. I work closely with the Sharepoint team and recently they reminded me of this site, where you can locate Sharepoint partners by a wide range of criteria. For example, I checked just the"Systems Integrator" category and got 817 hits. Adding "Filenet Integration" yielded 38. "Notes Migration" got 117, and so on.
-
02:30 PM Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Aug
28
Tue
 I'm always fascinated by businesses that break old paradigms, and I was introduced to BrightSpot by someone I met by chance at a party on Lake Washington last month.
BrightSpot media attempts to increase the value of internet advertising by rearranging the relationships between advertiser, content, and consumer.
In the traditional model, advertising subsidizes consumer access to content: I get free searching because advertisers pay Google to place ads on my search results, and pays them even more if I click on one of the ads. For Google, substitute Fox Sports, Forbes, and any number of content providers.
No surprise, the advertiser may be reaching people completely uninterested in the advertiser, which makes the placement costs wasteful. The ads rarely add value to the user’s experience (think of those annoying ads that precede MSN news videos) and users may avoid the content as a result.
The proposition for users
BrightSpot treats the time users spend viewing ads as a user-owned asset that can be used to pay for other content they want. In other words, the BrightSpot users earn dollars for watching targeted commercials on Brightspot.tv that can be applied to select content partners. A BrightSpot user can contribute to a charity, get Gamefly subscription, or Napster To Go subscription by agreeing to watch ads on Brightspot.tv.
The proposition for advertisers
Advertisers reach a targeted audience that has selected their ads to watch and are assured the user watches the entire commercial. While anyone can become a Brightspot user, Brightspot targets users who have already enrolled for online subscriptions (Napster users for example), who are more likely to view ads to support their online habit.
BrightSpot builds user profiles which help advertisers to have a deeper understanding of the audience and reduce wasted placement. Advertisers can also use keywords to describe their target consumers’ interests, buying habits, and general marketing demographics.
The proposition for content providers
Content providers like Napster get a set of potential subscribers whose tastes are well known and segmented, and whose time watching ads can be directly converted into subscription payments.
Is this different?
Basically, Brightspot arranges for users to be paid to watch ads. This isn't new. Brandport Sweepstakes, Clixsense, Adbux and several others already do this in one way or another.
Brightspot differentiates itself, though, by:
- Targeting an audience already predisposed to internet subscriptions
- “BrightMatch” technology that searches through the audience and matches the advertiser to the right viewer
- Using questions to ensure customer understanding of the ads and qualifying the ad watching
- Providing a marketplace: a set of content on which a user can, and likely will, spend her earnings. Brightspot connects users to a network of content providers, so that earnings can be transferred directly to online subscriptions
Overall, Brightspot has hit a higher value proposition and a higher tone in branding their service and presenting their company.
I don't know if they are the last word in improving the relationship between advertising and content, but they are a step in the right direction.
[thanks to Beti Cung and Nicolas Kardas for comments)
|
|
|
