Category Archives: enterprise web 2.0

Rich Internet Applications

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Microsoft’s “Silverlight” announcement a few days ago has gotten a lot of positive early attention (see here and here and especially here for examples) and focused attention on the category of Rich Internet Applications. The Mono folks have announced that they’re going to do a Linux version, tentatively codenamed “Moonlight.” OpenLazlo, a pioneer RIA, has been discussed as a Google acquisition target, if AJAX and the persistence engine planned for Firefox 3.0 aren’t enough. And Silverlight, uh, overshadowed Adobe’s recent Flex announcement.

All the initial reports suggest that Microsoft, presumably under the watchful eye of Ray Ozzie, got this one right; it’s fast, small, beautiful, and reclaims space for Microsoft on the desktop. Can Office on Silverlight be far behind?

I’ve used the New York Times Reader (free trial, $15/mo., included with paper subscription) which is based on Silverlight and it is a great experience. You don’t need to be online to use it; in fact, it sort of blurs the distinction between being on and off line to the extent that you don’t really care so much. And it has rich controls for viewing, much better, because it’s customized for reading a newspaper, than a plain old browser, even with all the cool Javascript and prefetching tricks.

Lazlo claims some corporate customers, but from what I’ve seen Rich Internet Applications are in their infancy in the enterprise. Silverlight’s got an advantage there, of course, because of all the armies of VB and .Net developers who now have another tool at their disposal; it will be interesting to see what they build.

Online (offsite) storage news

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Via TechCrunch, news that Mozy, an online-storage service, has scored a huge contract with GE to provide backup services for all of GE’s 300,000-some employees. Pretty good for a little Utah startup in a very crowded space.As I’ve written before, I’ve been following the online storage for a while and I’m surprised that it isn’t more mature. The market, which seems like a no-brainer, really has not yet taken off. Who doesn’t need it? Mozy’s version of online storage is focused very narrowly on backup; competitors also offer shared workspaces, synchronization between machines, and so on.

Players in this market include Xdrive, ElephantDrive, DriveHQ, Box.net, Streamload, and many many others. Omnidrive is especially interesting. Joyent offers Strongspace and BingoDisk.  The latter, based on WebDAV is cheap ($20/year for a basic account) but the WinXP implementation of the WebDAV protocol essentially renders it unusable.

Mozy is venture-backed, including investment from Drew Major formerly of Novell, and offers several tiers of service. The cheapest is free for two gigs of backup, in return for the occasional spam email. That seems like a fair trade-off, but a little cheesy. I avoided Mozy because of that, but they also have non-spam paid options. They have a client (Windows and Mac) that backs up selected folders in the background. Apparently the service works well, although there have been some complaints about the restore process being too cumbersome.

Getting GE’s imprimatur is a huge coup, though, and it’s made me look at them again. My own solution consists of a mirrored RAID array with nightly backups via SyncBack (which I love) to a NAS device. For offsite storage I’ve been doing weekly backups of TrueCrypt (which I’m afraid of) encrypted volumes via FTP to a hosted site that I have space on. But that’s a pain to set up and it feels fragile; and I can’t believe that the broader public is ever going to put up with things like configuring TrueCrypt. So I’m going to check out Mozy.

The most promising offering is Amazon’s S3 service, which simply offers raw storage. I haven’t seen any good, stable, usable front ends for this yet, although JungleDisk, S3 Backup, and S3Fox (a Firefox extension) look like they have potential. I’ve played with S3 a bit and it’s cheap and reliable but I’d really like some solution that makes S3 appear as a part of my native file system. Perhaps open source? That would be sweet.

See also Fred Wilson, Jeremy Zawodny (also here), TechCrunch, here, and here.

Dell Ideastorm

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Interesting new ‘community’ site from Dell, “Ideastorm.”

[Later: Jon Bultmeyer points to a similar site at Salesforce.com.]

Kevin Rollins was famously ambivalent about the consumer market. His ouster, Michael Dell’s return, and other recent changes, including Ideastorm, seem to suggest that they’re looking again at the consumer business. Ideastorm has a very Web 2.0 look and the early discussions are what you would expect from the same group of 25,000 people who try everything first: pre-load Linux(es), Open Office, get rid of the pestware that comes with new Dell PCs, etc.

I’ve written before that a bad support call made me swear off of Dell consumer products. I still like and recommend their enterpise-grade stuff, but when I needed to get a new desktop machine for myself, I ended up getting a sweet deal from EndPCNoise and never thought of going to Dell.

Visualization

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Hans Rosling displays some amazing visualization software tools in a talk he gave in February at the TED conference, on the topic of rich vs. poor countries. It’s really worth watching, for at least three reasons: first, the topic is important and we are operating with faulty assumptions about poor countries; second, it’s a virtuoso performance that is exhilarating in its own right; and third, it’s one of (if not *the*) best examples of visualizing data to prove a point that I’ve ever seen. Seriously. Hans is rockin’ it in a plaid shirt and Countryman mike. Some of the software, by the way, is available at Gapminder.

Thanks to Jon Bultmeyer for turning me onto CX Now, a simple but powerful data visualization tool from Business Objects. It’s free. You import your Excel (sorry, Open Office Calque*) model and then manipulate it with all sorts of handsome graphical elements, dials and graphs and slider bars. Then you can export it in a variety of formats, including Flash. So, for example, here’s fifteen minutes’ worth of goofing around with the tool.

Lazyweb, wouldn’t it be great if we could integrate this sort of thing (an open source alternative?) into an “analyst’s workbench” SLED, targeted at the sophisticated but under-served enterprise business analyst, who is still sorely lacking tools? Maybe it could be a virtual machine that runs inside of a Windows desktop, taking advantage of our new Relationship. That would then make it “virtualized visualization,” which might qualify it for tax exempt status as a religious movement. But, seriously, Rick Sherlund has argued that the path to desktop Linux adoption is via individual adoption, and that is going to come from people having needs that are better met with open source tools. One community of users is these empowered but under-served Excel jocks that manage the spreadsheets that run companies. Can we make them mid-level heroes? And one way to get at them might be via virtualization, so that they can keep their Windows desktop and have the swiss army knife to solve problems. (Maybe a Knoppix-like Live CD? USB key pre-loaded?)

* This is a really terrific pun.