Marketing & Innovation: December 2005

Thursday, December 29, 2005

PERFORMANCING: A Blog Editor That Sits Within Firefox

Performancing is a brand new Blog editor that sits within your Firefox browser. It enables users who are new to blogging to create a blog very easily.
It also enables you to upload a file to your blog, but the limit set on file uploads is very low. Not quite sure what the benefit of using Performancing is compared to Blogger or another online blogging system. Explanations/comments welcome ...

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

BT's Vision on Digital Content Provision

British Telecom has published the following article on the decline of traditional media and the development of new digital content. They are expressing this vision while promoting their new line of service devoted to content provision. In 2001, BT started to work on the delivery of a Standard Delivery Platform (SDP). Their aim has been to 'enable the industry to standardise'. In June 2005, and after a long period of incubation, they decided to spin off the existing department a new entity co-owned by FT and NVP (New Venture Partners). This new entity is entitled iO and delivers special contents services to MVNO's. Their webpage is available at http://iogloballtd.com/iO-Home.html

Monday, December 19, 2005

Climate Change: Should Marketers Go On Working Unabated?

A new scientist article about global warming and its consequences in Europe is raising fears that Europe might enter a new ice age. Not much to do with Marketing and Innovation you will say. Well I think just the other way round. It has everything to do with Marketing and Innovation. We as professionals go on working unabated and our aim is to produce riches. There is nothing wrong with this obviously - as long as it is done ethically - but what can we say about the consequences of the 'new' economy we are generating and its impact on the world. Indeed, we are no more guilty about this than our forefathers, and maybe less even.

But what difference does it make to the world as we know it? Would we be able to pursue our activities if Europe became a mere slab of ice? Would we be able to sell more LCD screens if no electricity could be produced anymore? Could we go on with Web 2.0 if a major disaster was taking place and you could not live in your flat anymore? Surely, survival would be number one on your and everyone else's agenda. So like it or not we are all part of it. But what can we do about this? Is it not too late anyway? If there anything we can do to change things in the short term? Or is it just a matter of waiting for scientists to be proven wrong about climate change. After all, only a few years back, when people were asking whether that particular heatwave in Europe was linked to Global Warming, the same scientists were denying the facts. It seems that they have changed their minds this time but it may change again I am sure.

Come what may, should we not surmise that Marketing should also encompass such Society issues and become more caring about people and the environment? If so, will that apply to emerging countries too? After all, I saw that air transportation for passengers went up by 7% in 2005 (2 billion passengers carried i.e. up by 100 million on 2004). Should we deny the right to travel to the increasingly well off Chinese for instance, who find it possible at last to roam the world freely after so many years of oppression? Is it really fair? It seems like changing the world for anyone of us individually is an impossible task. We had better leave this to our governments, but still ... maybe doing something about it could be a nice thing too, even though it looks like a daunting task for a single human being.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Web 2.0 gone mad

It's not because you are a collaborative work enthusiast that you have to agree with everything that is going on in the name of so-called WEB 2.0. A USA today editorial published on Nov 29th entitled "A false Wikipedia biography" is making our hair stand on end. How come anybody can log in to a system as visible as Wikipedia and fabricate a biography for a living person. Besides, other online encyclopedias have copied this information too.

One may imagine what it would be if someone started to rewrite history in that manner. Historical characters would not be able to rise from the dead in order to correct such mistakes. In retrospect, this is more than just outrageous. What we are seeing here is the end of a myth around collaboration, it is Web 2.0 gone mad (see previous entry about Nicholas Carr's latest article against the Web 2.0 craze). And Web 2.0 gone mad is just like 1984(*) with people rewriting history as they like. There has to be - eventually - limits to our freedom of speech, and these limits are set by the general interest. Failing to understand this would definitely kill Web 2.0 and the wonderful tools brought by the Internet.

(*) George Orwell, 1984, Penguin Books Ltd ISBN: 0140126716

Monday, December 12, 2005

A whiter kind of web development with Ajax

As described in Richard McManus's post on Zdnet a flurry of new online applications are being developed - literally - as we speak. They are one of the occurrences of so-called WEB 2.0.

Of course, one could sneer at that new buzz-word which mainly seems to be filling the gap for a nameless all-encompassing concept. Last week, I heard erstwhile O'Reilly CTO Jon Orwant (now a Director of Research for the FTR&D Boston lab) rightfully point out: "What was wrong with Web 1.0 that one had to rebrand it Web 2.0; wasn't it working properly?" he said in essence. After all, WEB 2.0 is the umpteenth buzzword and fad that we have been able to witness in the IT industry in the past 20 years. Each time a new buzzword is created, there are hopes - on one side - that things are going to get better for ever, and fears - on the other side - that this is the end of the world as we know it. Taking a bit of hindsight can prove useful, particularly in this context.

Having said that, one should pay a lot of attention to the following developments, which are putting ASP (Application Software Providers I mean, not Microsoft's 'active server pages') back on the IT agenda. Not all these applications are Ajax-based. But this new development method (this is not really a language as explained by Garrett, see following link) is setting the pace for an increaslingly fast-changing world. For a thorough description of Ajax , please refer to Guru Jesse James Garrett's blog page by clicking here.

Some of the online apps mentioned by McManus (following lines taken directly from ZDNET)

" [...]

Writely - "The Web Word Processor" (note that for creating documents, it uses an HTML editor and then converts to Word format)
FCKeditor is also an MS Word-like web app. It's open source too.
gOFFICE - "a browser-based online word processor and desktop publishing program"
Num Sum - web-based spreadsheets - except only the author of a spreadsheet can edit it.
Kiko - Online calendar solution powered by Ajax.
Gmail and now the new Yahoo! Mail (Microsoft is rumored to be working on a Hotmail upgrade, codenamed Kahuna)
called S5 - web-based Powerpoint
Webnote - web-based version of Microsoft's OneNote
thinkfree - online Office suite
Openomy - online file-system

And ones Peter has added to the mix:

[...]"

I hope my readers will be able to add more tools to this list. Reviews welcome.

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

How much is your Blog Worth?

On his weblog Dane Carlson has developed a tool which can help you evaluate your Weblog. His tool is inspired by Tristan Louis's research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc. He created an applet which is using Technorati's API and displays your blog's worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Networking and Collaborative Work

Proposed outline for the March 2006 RIM conference Date: 04/12/05

By J.Delacroix and Y. Gourvennec

Networking and Collaborative Work
Status and Trends for the Networked Economy

Please note: this is a draft executive summary; parts or even the entirety of this document may be subject to change

INTRODUCTION

The advent of Collaborative work is now well and truly established within the enterprise world. In a mid 2004 survey, analyst company IDC pointed out that their “focus group participants voted Web conferencing the most appropriate collaboration and meeting tool in 60% of everyday meetings and business processes”, and this is a clear sign that collaboration – or at least some form of it – has now become mainstream. But it's certainly not just a matter of technology. In this article, Jerome Delacroix and Yann Gourvennec have analysed the root causes for such changes. Beyond behaviour, it is the very relationship between working habits and technology which is at the heart of this issue. When Vannevar Bush wrote his trail-blazing article on dynamic associations in 1945, he created the concept of hypertext and eventually paved the way for Berners Lee's invention of the Web as we know it. Bush's idea was not about creating yet another technological gizmo, it was about knowledge, about improving our access to information and our understanding. At the end of the day, hypertext made possible the growth of information networks.

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