Copyright and the Real Time Microblog Phenom
May 24, 2009
Liz Gannes’ “Copyright Meets a New Worth Foe: The Real Time Web” is an interesting article. You can find it on NewTeeVee.com here. Her point is that copyright, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and other bits and pieces of legal whoopdedoo struggle with real time content from Twitter-like services. She wrote:
If you’re a copyright holder and you want to keep up with your pirated content flitting about the web — well, good luck. The way the DMCA is set up means you’re always chasing, and the real-time web is racing faster than ever before. Analytics services are only just emerging that will tell you where your views are coming from on a semi-real-time basis. That’s especially true for live video streaming sites such as Ustream and Justin.tv. Justin.tv, in particular, has come under fire by sports leagues for hosting camcorded streams of live game broadcasts. The company says it takes down streams whenever it is asked to. But the reality is, often the moment has passed.
In short, information flows move more quickly than existing business methods. An interesting illustration of this flow for video is Twiddeo here. Government officials have their work cut out for them with regard to ownership, copyright, and related issues.
But…
As I read this article, I thought about the problem Google has at this time with real time content. Google’s indexing methods are simply not set up to handle near instantaneous indexing of content regardless of type. In fact, fresh search results on Google News are stale when one has been tracking “events” via a Twitter like service.
As important is the “stepping back” function. On Google’s search results displays, how do I know what is moving in near real time; that is, what’s a breaking idea, trend, or Tweet? The answer is, “I don’t.” I can hack a solution with Google tools, but even then the speed of the flow is gated by Google’s existing indexing throughput. To illustrate the gap, run a query for American Idol on Google News and then run the query on Tweetmeme.com.
Two different slants biased by time. In short, copyright problem and Google problem.
Stephen Arnold, May 24, 2009
Google, YouTube, and Digital Volume
May 22, 2009
Short honk: A year or so ago, I learned that Google received about one million new video objects per month. TechCrunch reported here that Google’s YouTube.com ingests about 20 hours of video every minute. I don’t know if this estimate is spot on, but it is clear that YouTube is amassing one of the world’s largest collections of rich text content in digital form. For me, the most interesting information in the write up was:
Back in 2007, shortly after Google bought the service, it was 6 hours of footage being uploaded every minute. As recently as January of this year, that number had grown to 15 hours, according to the YouTube blog. Now it’s 20 — soon it will be 24.
Lots of data means opportunity for the GOOG. I am looking forward to having the audio information searchable.
Stephen Arnold, May 22, 2009
Cloud Comparison – Amazon, Google, Microsoft
May 18, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me this weekend a link to an article that appeared about a month ago here. The write up was “Amazon, Google, Microsoft – Big Three Cloud Providers Examined” by Brandon Watson. His approach was to describe the cloud services of these three Web powerhouses.
My reading of his article left me with the impression that Amazon is the big dog in this kennel of pit bulls. He wrote:
AMZN is, essentially, in the load management business. They are a low margin retail operator that is running a hugely expensive infrastructure for which they are seeking maximum utilization. They would like nothing more than to be noise in their own system. AMZN is relentlessly metrics driven. As such, they have a pretty good idea of how much money to expect off of traffic that walks through their front door. They know how much to expect from traffic ending up at one of their marketplace partners. With the addition of AWS, they have a new way to monetize their capacity, and with their predictable pricing model, they know exactly how much money they are going to make off of customers who deploy applications to their service.Traffic on their network makes them money. It may not make your app money, but it makes them money, so they are happy. It more than likely saves you money, so you are probably happy too.
The Google warrants some tough love. Mr. Watson expressed his love for Google “guys” and then offered:
Applications on GAE are mostly CRUD apps, storing structured data into big table. As a developer, building an application on GAE, you are essentially feeding the GOOG beast. While they have not yet released final pricing, allow me to put on my pointy tin foil hat and talk about what might come to pass. GOOG knows exactly how much it costs to run their infrastructure, and as such could hand developers a bill for the resources which they consume. However, GOOG doesn’t have AMZN’s problem. Their traffic is mostly linear, and going up and to the right. It’s probably logarithmic at this point, but who’s counting? In any event, since they have little variability in their traffic patterns, they don’t have to get into the load management business. By allowing developers to build applications on their infrastructure, they are incurring unnecessary costs. Their motivations, however, are driven by their business model. Each new app that is plugged into the infrastructure ads new data to their data set, and creates new opportunities for page monetization.
For the Redmond giant, Mr. Watson opined:
As for MSFT, there are plenty of things I could say, but let me simply state what I believe to be our motivations. We are a platform company. We very much believe that we are in the business of delivering the best platform and tools to developers to build great applications. Our on-premise stack has proven to be extremely successful over the last several decades. With the release of the Azure Services Platform, one of the core design tenets was that we would like to achieve parity between our on and off-premise stacks. The entirety of the Azure Services Platform is designed to enable experienced MSFT developers to be combat effective on day one.
I enjoyed the article. With Amazon the king of the cloud kennel, can it hang in there with Xen and the economical approach to next-generation computing.
Stephen Arnold, May 18, 2009
SAP and Business by Design
May 16, 2009
SAP, Europe’s largest software company, continues to intrigue me. The company’s roots are deep in the on premises hydroponic tanks of its customers. The writing is on the wall, however. SAP customers are pushing back on costs, long deployment times, and complexity with each passing month. I read Michael Krigsman’s “Understanding SAP’s Business by Design SaaS Strategy” with interest. You can find that article here.
When I copied the url for this link I notice that the subdirectory was “project failures”, which is by itself an interesting bit of information. The article is based on conversations Mr. Krigsman had with a panoply of SAP luminaries. For me the most important passage in the article was:
The Business byDesign initiative presents two broad strategic challenges to SAP. First, from a Board-level perspective, the company must decide, on an ongoing basis, how much to invest in this product, which has long-term potential but is expensive in the present. The relatively slow rollout reflects the Board’s measured and carefully paced level of investment. Second, Business byDesign reflects a new way of managing and delivering software for SAP, a company with deep on-premise roots. As SAP has learned, on-premise vendors face formidable challenges and a steep learning curve during the transition to SaaS deployment. SAP obviously underestimated these obstacles.
In my opinion, on premises business models will be cannibalized a nibble at a time by software as a service and other ways of delivering enterprise software. In short, SAP may be a lab experiment that provides useful data on the fate of other on premises giants. You can’t make up the consulting revenue, long deployment times, and high license fees on volume in my opinion. Again, nary a word about search. SAP seems to be drifting.
Stephen Arnold, May 16, 2009
Web Wide API: The Battleground
May 14, 2009
If you wondered what was the driver for the API snowstorm, read “Can Amazon Be the Default Payment API for the Web?” here. The author aaronchua did a good job of explaining the logic behind a single Web API for online payments. The issue is not multiple payment systems. The call is for a single payment system. Assume this happens. Monopoly, right? The APIs are important to Amazon, Google, and others. Winner takes all is logical, right?
Stephen Arnold’ May 14, 2009
Google Apps Click Forward
May 13, 2009
Valeo, according to Computer Weekly here, has signed a three year deal for Google Apps. The account will be serviced by Capgemini. The article said:
About 30,000 workers will use Google’s software, which is delivered over the internet as a cloud computing service. The automotive components maker wants to reduce its administration costs so is using a communication and collaboration platform based on Google Apps Premier Edition. Valeo has 192 locations in 27 countries.
Important global deal for the GOOG in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, May 13, 2009
Microsoft Dismissing Rumors
May 13, 2009
Investment mavens love buy out rumors. Chatter causes churn. As long as one gets a commission on buying and selling, the commission cash register rings. A number of top drawer news outfits reported that Microsoft was once again thinking about gobbling the software giant SAP. Bloomberg here reported that Microsoft is done with SAP and tossed in the observation that Microsoft was done with job cuts.
I heard a rumor about an enterprise acquisition road map. On that cartographic view of the future, Microsoft thinkers had identified a number of potential acquisitions. Some of these were in the enterprise space. I don’t have any details about the hypothetical targets, but I got the impression that Microsoft like Autonomy and Oracle is thinking about buying customers and market share in certain enterprise market sectors.
SAP is an interesting company. But there are other potential targets as well; for example, what about certain telecommunication players?
Microsoft may have to start buying and buying big. The reason? Structural changes are now taking place in enterprise applications. Even if the economy turns around, the punishing costs of on premises software may suck revenue from Microsoft’s core revenue streams. A loss of a few percentage points could ripple through the company. Rumors usually arise from a tiny crumb of fact. Acquisition thinking is in the spring breeze, but we don’t know the targets… yet.
Stephen Arnold, May 12, 2009
Brin and the Cloud
May 8, 2009
Google’s executives have become chatty Cathies. Click here to read a summary of Sergey Brin’s comments about cloud computing. Cloud computing is important to the Google. For me, the most important comment in the write up was:
“There are a number of things we could improve about these Web services,” Brin wrote. “There is less uniformity across them than there should be. For example, they can have different sharing models and chat capabilities. We are working to shift all of our applications to a common infrastructure. I believe we will achieve this soon.”
I take this to mean that Google will crank up the tweaks to Google Apps and related code components. Microsoft has a rested and ready Google to face in the autumn methinks.
Stephen Arnold, May 8, 2009
SharePoint Overview
May 6, 2009
Barb Mosher wrote “SharePoint Online (SaaS) Review – What It Is and Isn’t.” You can find the full write up published by CMS Wire here. Ms. Mosher has done a very good job of explaining the Software as a Service implementation of SharePoint. She walks through the basics and provides some screenshots. She has done what she could to make these screenshots easy to follow, but I find the steps for some basic tasks convoluted. Addled geese are not good candidates for SharePoint wisdom, I suspect. The most useful part of the article is her description and lists of what is included and what is not included. With regards to search, it seemed that only the bare bones of queries within a site are supported. I have questions about the stability of SharePoint from the cloud, which she did not address. Latency also triggers questions in my mind. Useful information to download and keep close at hand.
Stephen Arnold, May 6, 2009
Microsoft and Two Rip Tides
May 4, 2009
Jason Hiner’s “The Two Trends That Are Conspiring against Microsoft” here is a so-so title for a pretty good analysis of the rip tides sucking at Microsoft’s revenue. The two points are browser-based applications which blur the distinction between the desktop and the cloud, and mobile devices, which make the traditional desktop computer a boat anchor. The essay is hard hitting, and I think it makes some excellent points.
Stephen Arnold, May 4, 2009
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