BusinessGyan, Twitter brings out surreal in the mundane

Charu Bahri’s roundup of Web2.0 for SME poped up in BusinessGyan recently. Some of the things I filled her about Twitter and WordPress found its way into the article. Obvious Inc indeed is Twitter Inc, and there is a umbrella metaphor in the blog that explains it. That is besides the point for SME though:

Ever observed youngsters hanging out, seemingly doing nothing, yet busy all the same text twiddling their mobiles? The camaraderie and the gossip bonds them. Now you can not just beat them in their game, you can jump in and join them! That seems to be the message that Labsji sends out in recommending Twitter, a ‘free’ Web based group texting service from Obvious Inc. In many ways, Twitter scores ahead of plain cell texting. But Twitter comes with a twist, for although it is Web based wherein it is feasible to offer a virtually limitless message size by design, Twitter ‘SMS’ messages are restricted to a maximum size of 140 letters. This design choice makes Twitter available via the most basic phones.

It is said that art, yoga, freedom and restrictions are related in a very very subtle way. Human creativity( freedom) flourishes where restrictions are opted in:

Labsji is all praise for this restriction, as he says “the restriction of 140 letters though technically motivated tends to bring out the surreal in the mundane – that changes the entire dynamics for the group.” Why? Forced brevity ensures smart conversations. In the personal sphere, less works as more, brevity of the mundane knits relationships that get more interesting with time! Over time, the network of twittering people that you know expands, which is invariably handy in advancing business or career goals. After all, as Web 2.0 and the open source software movement indicate, business development is now all about conversing and sharing, not so much targeted advertising.

If you think about it, the web is in a de javu – the good old ways of delivering Usenet via tape transfer is getting played out with little mobility thrown in. Common denominators and minimalism rulez:

In this regard, Labsji talks of the Internet and the Web predecessor – Usenet, both of which were strong proponents of the common denominator approach. This approach has come a full circle in Twitter, as the service is all about establishing a common denominator and giving an impetus to community dynamics. If you think of it, isn’t that what Web 2.0 and open source software are also all about?

Bonus Links:

Twitter and Enterprise by J P Rangaswami CIO British Telecom and Confused Of Calcutta: Twitter brings in the sideways encounter bar stool metaphor into the enterprise. More likeSaHaNa VaVaTu

RedMonk says Twitter Is Money – strange when Twitter’s monetization model is, well, not Obvious

And Dennis Howlett on Twitter and News – rather democratization of News and response to it and shortening of the time cycle. BTW, what is the co-relation between Moore’s law, attention span and (biz)’cycle times’?

Smoking Pipes

The Unix Pipe made it versatile and made the ‘everything is character file’ metaphor of Unix work. Now in the web2 world, we need something as versatile to marshal data spread all over the web. Is Yahoo Pipes it answer? Find out more at PipesCamp:

The unconference trend is taking a new twist with this super focused event, and more interestingly, a startup hover.in

is organizing and sponsoring it.
The Agenda looks very enticing:
Agenda

* Introduction to Yahoo! pipes
* History and evolution of Pipes
* Yahoo! pipes from a blogger’s perspective
* Yahoo! pipes from a developer’s perspective
* Experiments with pipes
* Workshops / Tutorials
* Building a community for collaborating with pipes
* Feature requests for Yahoo! Pipes? – api, import/export, more operators, support for 3rd party widgets?
* There will also be a contest running through out the day for the “Best Pipes” created / showcased at pipesCamp ,with prizes announced at the end of the day.

See you there.

Take Over The Sky – Slowly

Amazon and Jeff Bezos are all set to take over the world – in their typical way – Slowly. With the announcement of AWS DevPay today closely following SimpleDB announcement last week, the game is getting interesting by the hour.
With the rapid commoditization of hardware and to a large extent software, the power is shifting away to the periphery. DevPay will accelerate the shift and making it sustainable too. SimpleDB announcement just commoditized the structured data storage landscape dominated by RDBMS majors Oracle, Microsoft and the like.

Opensource is a key driver in the rapid( or runaway) commoditization of software. More and more software vendors are looking at Software as a Service(SaaS) model as a way to guard against the opensource onslaught. Amazon’s DevPay is a swim with the (opensource)current strategy. Now you don’t have to be the unique – Ridiculously Possible – Obvious Inc to be profitable AND OpenSource. Most people will be happy to pay up for the hosted service and rather not dabble with the code, building it and deploying it. The reduced financial friction offered by Amazon DevPay will see interesting services offered by garage startups challenging the incumbent players in every domain possible.

This is a good opportunity for Indian (2 peeps garage kind)startups, especially when the (Indian startup) ecosystem is not mature enough to nurture them cross the ‘infant mortality’ barrier. The opensource code and the operational service can be easy way to gravitate co-founders and talent their way – while they work up some cash flow.

The DevPay, it is said, will be extended beyond S3 and EC2. That is very interesting. While the outlook is very rosy, all is not rosy with AWS for non-US developers. While it makes a lot of sense for Amazon.com(ecom) be region specific, why should zeros and ones manipulation be restricted across borders/currency? I know there are valid legal issues that warrant these restrictions. But at the end of the day, it is not enticing enough for non-US developers. Larger (opensource)codebase and larger developer skill base is a strategic advantage for AWS to keep the competition at bay. Till it becomes enticing for developers at every nook, the take over of sky will be sure yet Slow!

Twitter Story:The Darkness Inside

Via Angela Thomas
Have a writter’s block? Ask your twitter network for help. Or better still, get the entire writeup get done by the network. Twittories are new genre of collaborative creative writing.
Here is how the story ends:

Savanna sighed and put down the book. Spy novels always captured her imagination, but the mundane realities of life were calling. She whistled to herself as she headed down the stairs, eager to see what the day had in store for her. While she might not be a famous spy, she

Technology makes it possible to fine grain non-trivial activities in an hitherto un-thought off ways. This is going to be very very interesting as it evolves.

Amazon Web Services Chennai Meetup: I love this community!

The much awaited Chennai AWS Enthusiasts, Startup founders and wannabe meetup was a total success. The response was overwhelming. There were more than fifty( 56 on last count) registrants at the event’s wiki. Nearly sixty people attended the event.
Jinesh Varia did an excellent presentation on Amazon Web Services in the startup context. He talked about AWS in general, and moved on to S3, EC2 and SQS. The style of presentation was informal and the flow very fluid. As someone mentioned, content worth a full day workshop, was capsuled into an hour and an half.

Siddharta has video footage of Jinesh’s presentation Part1, Part2.

The meetup took place at Rails Factory, Senthil Nagayam, Dinesh and rest of the Rails Factory team worked really hard to attend to every little detail of the arrangement. I just had to wish it and it was there. Hat tip to the Rails Factory team!

Narain of 360 Degree Interactive – 360in.com kicked off the event with his genial introduction and made sure that the meetup started in time, flowed smoothly and ended in time.

Prior to the meetup, there were several productive 1:1 discussions.
My key take aways were:
1) There is an active community of AWS users in Chennai, and a wider section of AWS wannabe users.
2) Amazon is serious about removing hurdles on the way of widespread AWS usage.
3) Community rulez! Organizing this meetup was an effortless and pleasant experience – the community just responds and gathers around and makes it a success!

RippleRap: The New Twitter Killer for events

I was waiting for the LeWeb, not for the conference as such but for the Ripplerap TiddlyWiki mod. The tiddly hack works as a simple wiki based notes taker offline. When there is connection to the Internet/Intranet, it collects notes from other users and makes it available.
Let me be a bit unfair to the devl team now. I see there is a lot of ConfusedOfCalcutta in this piece of software – the good old Bloomberg chat wine in new tiddly micro bottle. His open-the-inbox-for-everyone-to-see has resulted in this new monster. And because it is from the stable of BT, you can also make a call! A through confusion on ‘Because of Effect’. I casually tested it, I did get the call to my mobile but got hung up before I was able to further test it. The fact that the call got initiated itself is interesting.

The simplicity of Tiddlywiki, with the versatility of BT API access is indication of the mashing era just round the corner. I was surprised to find that the Mojo API plugin was only 2KB and it was just a few lines(~60) of code. I was disappointed to find that it was proxy and server based. It is not making REST calls directly as I was eagerly anticipating.

All is not well with the user interaction design. The jumpy scroll up and down to find all notes of a particular session becomes annoying. But sure worth a spin!

Sap Killer Thingamy on Barely Repeted Process(BRP) for SAP Expansion?

From twitter I got an update from sig tipping about his new blog post on how SAP is missing its biggest opportunity. Reading and commenting on it I was not able to resist. But sadly, the typepad did not publish my comment the first time and couple of other attempts. So here is the full post for the context.

SAP Influencer Summit #3 – SAP missing the biggest opportunity ever

I believe that SAP is missing an opportunity to more than double their market, in the same space with the same customers, still for business processes, in a new market segment that is amazingly virgin with virtually no competition, and where the customers are only waiting for the first products.

How’s that possible? Well, allow me:

A Business Process is any process, sequential work or activity, that happens in an organisation. Some are repeatable and linear, others happens in unstructured ways and are hard to model.

Let me keep it simple and divide process types into two groups:

1. The Easily Repeatable Process (ERP for me)

Processes that handles resources, from human (hiring, firing, payroll and more) to parts and products through supply chains, distribution and production. The IT systems go under catchy names like ERP, SCM, PLM, SRM, CRM and the biggest players are as we know SAP and Oracle plus a long roster of smaller firms.

Known to be rigid, but handles events and transactions with precision and in volume. Systems delivers value through extensive reports and full control over resources.

Resource oriented, transactional, event driven systems. Delivered by system vendors with roots in accounting using up to 25 year old technological solutions.

A mature market segment where an upgrade from version 7.0 to 7.1 would not deliver much in productivity growth for the customer so much of the vendor growth stems from finding new customers for the same solutions.

2. The Barely Repeatable Process (BRP)

Typically exceptions to the ERPs, anything that involves people in non-rigid flows through education, health, support, government, consulting or the daily unplanned issues that happens in every organisation. The activities that employees spend most of their time on every day. Processes that often starts with an e-mail or a call. A process volume, measured by time and resource spent at organisations, probably larger than for the Easily Repeatable Processes.

These are mostly handled and organised – frameworked – by systems like paper based rules and policies, e-mail, meetings, calls and now in more modern organisations by wikis and other collaboration systems and methods.

Known by extensive loss of information (e-mails residing on HDDs), little knowledge acquired and reused (typical research says 70% of problems solved before without being known) and most of all, untrustworthy processes (oops, forgot to send that mail). In other words not an iota (well almost) of business process thinking or methodology applied to this huge untapped area of business processes.

Requires a different conceptual representation of the processes and data than the transactional linear processes so this would require a technological shift from the current.

A truly virgin market segment where even installing a humble wiki would increase productivity measurably. And most important, a market where the customers are yearning for solutions.

The big question: Why does not SAP spend almost all of it’s R&D funding in the BRP space? It would make utterly, completely, undisputed sense.

Now folks, this situation puzzles me so much that I need some help; is there a glitch in my logic? Good folks at SAP, prove me wrong or right!

[Sidenote: Obviously BRPs is what thingamy can handle nicely, but I'm not afraid of some competition at all so come on ye big enterprise software vendors, I'm waiting! ]

Here is the comment that needs to go with the post:

Is not the big ERP vendors the wrong tree to bark? At least when the market is virgin as you say. Each of the BRP will get addressed by a niche vendor perhaps in SaaS model. For instance, to organize an event( say an unconference) there are several options right from a wiki to some really cool services that handle the messy payments refunds, tour booking along with the event etc.
In time these vendors will offer the bridge to import/export information from/to these niche solutions.
When these services become one too many and fragmented, big vendors will integrate them in their good old ERP and everyone is happy.

The course you are suggesting will commodify ERP more rapidly. Which might shrink growth and profits.

An Aside,when Chris Gay of Milemeter asked about helping develop an accounting package for auto insurance by the mile, I was wondering if thingamy is the way to go. I got muddled while at it. Not able to go beyond the high level match of thingamy and milemeter. Any clues pointers out of the muddle welcome.

FilmCamp.in, MindTree Osmosis: Unconference adaptations to watch

The unconference trend set by BarCamp and other unconference is undergoing rapid adoption and transformation. MindTree’s Osmosis the annual tech fest is going the BarCamp way on the final day. Other noteworthy adaptation is the FilmCamp.in which started off as roof top film festival(RTTF). In tune with the trend of not just passive consumption but active creation, it morphed into bunch of enthusiasts wanting to make movies. Though with all the digital goodness, making movie is still non-trivial. It is not yet a casual solo-play for most aspirants.

Taking this into consideration, FilimCamp organizes one-on-one hands on workshop on film making. Right from ideation to editing and screening is taken care! The most interesting aspect of FilimCamp is it is paid, and the level of participation expected is very intense. There is going to be rapid fire workshops in Chennai as well as Bangalore now and more to come.

MindTree Osmosis is adoption of the unconference trend in corporate/enterprise environ. It serves the purpose of inducing the free and open/sharing culture of unconfrenece within the corp, and also creates better mindshare, and more importantly act as a recruitment ground. But an unconference is only as good as its sessions, interactions and relationships built. Diversity and the mix of participants plays a huge role in success of an unconference. With just a week to go, the MindTree Osmosis participant list looks more like an MindTree internal exercise with hardly any participation leave alone diversity. Lack of visibility, benefits of attendance not obvious, and locational disadvantage can be attributed to the slow uptake thus far. As mentioned earlier, let us see how this works out.
UPDATE: Abhishek Kant has an interesting take on BarCamp Delhi 3, an instance of a BarCamp done outside the city. Abhishek Kant’s registration to actual participation figures.

Milemeter got my vote in AWS Challenge

Today I voted for Amazon Web Services StartUp challenge. I voted for MileMeter – an auto insurance company that offers insurance by the mile. It seems they have sixty ‘patent pendings’ on the concept and processes.

They are going to use Amazon Flexible Payment System to do the payment processing. It is a best fit for the biz model of MileMeter and AWS offered.

MileMeter has the right ingredients to succeed, first the concept, then the green aspect that will give them the viral publicity, and choosing the IT infrastructure that fits their biz model.

If only Chris Gay and his team opensource some of the AWS building block code, it will further increase their operating efficiency and earn them lot more good will.

Unconference Becoming Mainstream?

Just got a tweet from Ujj that the Mindtree annual festival is going to be BarCamp style unconference. Coincidentally when Tara ‘MissRogue’ Hunt heartbrokenly lamenting that BarCamp is about LOCAL and GRASSROOT and empowering. Hmmmm!

Yeah, it is inevitable that LOCAL sometimes gets lost in translation as LOLCAT. Let us see how it pans out at Mindtree. I’m more keen to watch how it percolates down the IT also ran ladder.

While that happens in the physical unconferences, the virtual unconference is slowly maturing. Judging by Jeff Barr’s recent SecondLife presentation on Amazon Web Services, the quality of discussion pre-and post event, Virtual Unconference will become mainstream faster.
When Jeff Barr was evangalizing AWS on expected lines with deftness…

there were several ‘Visual’ conversations happening like the Reindeer/Santa Avatar on the front row:

I see that with time lot more features( how about using some Havoc4 Physics for a show and tell?) of Virtual Worlds will be put to use to express and have a conversation making it a richer unconference.

Amen!

PS: Speaking of unconference and Amazon Web Services, do you know that Amazon Web Services, Chennai Meetus is on 13 Dec? If you happen to be there in Chennai be there to hear about AWS from Jinesh Varia and other Startups on how AWS is cool, useful and reduces the entry barrier.

UPDATE: Sid Govindaraj has some interesting observations on MindTree Osmosis Barcamp. Given that this is second (public) unconference they are hosting(KM KAMP-blr was the first), I’m sure balance will prevail. Let us see. Perhaps they can make it easy to ‘See’ by making the BarCamp available also via SecondLife, ustream.tv etc.