What if the world had never known the pleasure and convenience of RCA cables to connect disparate component audio and video together to seamlessly and transparently put together systems? It’s easy to conceptualize and implement. Application components on the other hand are still too difficult to string together for desired output in my opinion, if possible at all.

I always used the stereo system description when attempting to describe Microsoft’s Component Object Model (COM) when asked about it years ago. Similar statements can still be used in analogical ways to describe web services and Web 2.0 stuff, which seems to be back to a point where it’s again being defined and re-defined. Some people are questioning the very basis for the incremental version string applied to the “Web” monicker. I’m least concerned because ordinary people (mere mortals) can discern from the 2.0 part that “Web 2.0″ is the next iteration of what I already know but with more features. Simple. Easy. RSS — they don’t and won’t ever get that. If RSS was called Headlines — they would get that. Headline readers make sense. RSS readers sounds like a test you take at a cash for service clinic on the other side of town after meeting up with some local floozies while you’re on travel far, far away from home.

Back to components and RCA cables. Without RCA cables, we would be relegated to boom boxes that have rather monolithic designs and typically don’t support component input. When the tape drive goes bad, you’re screwed. Only a CD player and radio left, but forget ever making any mixtapes from that CD content. What’s the value in monolithic designs when distinct individual services are required to satisfy some demand? The value has and will continue to diminish as long as some smart people find ways to create user defined systems. Much is the same in the application world. Monolithic application design represents a tremendous disservice to the end user and likely the person responsible for making financial decisions regarding purchases because one will likely end up having to purchase again.

Microsoft’s COM, or any other component service oriented architecture, allows for components of an application to be stitched together dynamically to make a complete application, much like stereo components can be put together using commodity cables with very little knowledge of the inner working of the component itself. It’s a beautiful thing. And any user who is competent at putting together a component stereo system should be able to understand input/output and tweaking knobs for desired flow from one component to another. Although we’re still not quite there yet, ordinary people should be able to link disparately applications created in isolated and unique settings with applications of their own to create new functionality without the current headaches. I don’t know what it should be yet, but I am thinking about it on occassion.

Seems like a natural extension of blog search, but I wonder if blogger sentiment will become more significant as we get closer to the next Presidential election. On one hand, the demographics of bloggers clearly don’t include all voters, but there are enough people blogging that it doesn’t really matter. Geocoding surely becomes a lot more significant. But how many people are blogging in Iowa and New Hampshire?

It’s too bad that Yahoo and Google don’t have more robust APIs. I sincerely think that they bet on the fact that most people will fail to utilize the total allocated storage per user. Think of all the useful and novel services that could be offered if only they would allow application developers to programmatically access their most valuable resources.

Henry Blodgett and Joe Kraus mentioned in the same (poorly written, but who am I) paragraph? Being banned from Wall Street and being a victim of the nuclear winter constitutes two entirely different dubious distinctions awards — and two different paragraphs with better explanations as to not falsely attribute Joe to being a criminal.

Les Ink de Monde: Tech people appear hyped about their industry again

Google is trying to get into the enterprise application market. They get it. Kinda. Well, not really. Indexing everything on the public internet is a great thing. Scaling it down for enterprises is just not the same thing. Enterprises have vastly different security practices that are employed when compared to the public internet. They also employ very different applications and have different objectives with their data. Over simplifying the scenario with something to the effect of “everyone needs search” and “unstructured data makes up for 80% of total data managed” is irresponsible and naive. In fact, implementing some combined technology from these companies could create a large liability for the customer because it may allow exposure of sensitive data once secured in a protected repository.

Google and StoredIQ are getting together. Makes total sense from a biz dev perspective. Looks good on quarterly MBOs. StoredIQ guy will be telling his grandchildren how he “did the Google deal.” I would hate the be the enterprise sales guy who has to go sell that when a technology guy like me is responsible for due dilligence. My next post in a week or two will be a list questions for a customer to ask of an ICM vendor when considering one of their solutions.

Hmmmm. One trip to the city and you could tell that no NYC cabbie would have said this:

“…look gentlemen, you may disregard it all you want, but I know the facts since I just gave a ride to some eBay execs who discussed exactly what would be happening”.

Link-e: How The Skype Rumour Spread

I downloaded NextPage after hearing about them from a couple of podcasts recently on Podtech.net of which they seem to have some level of sponsorship role in. My experience in this particular area leads me to believe that they have something novel and worthwhile, but like any other early release NextPage needs more specific functionality to be truly effective. People collaborate using more than just Office documents. Projects take shape and develop using all sorts of editable and static content. Enhanced file support is surely in their roadmap.

I also think that the cost is out of line for something like user based document collaboration and tracking. As a matter of fact, I think it should be free for limited functionality. If they want any level of adoption by the masses, it will need to be free. So, how are they supposed to make money? Offer some level of accelerated service or similar and charge willing particpants for compelling functionality.

How can I argue that functionality is insufficient but the price is out of whack? Simple. The value of the user network is apparently worth more than cash flow anyway. Skype proves that. $7M in revenue for a $2.6B+ transaction but with 52M users.

This is a great read on how the VCs found Skype and some of the complexities involved due to the Kazaa relationship.

“This was the best return I’ve ever had,” says Bill Draper, one of the earliest venture capitalists in the United States and a partner in venture firm Draper Richards in San Francisco.

What is Storage 2.0?

I promise that I’ll get off of the del.icio.us kick that I’ve been on lately. But the functionality employed by del.icio.us partially lends itself in analogical ways into what’s being called Storage 2.0. What is Storage 2.0? It’s the less geeky way to refer to Storage Existentialism. I also recently described it in my post regarding “The Star Alliance” of Storage.

With del.icio.us, users tag web pages and other objects for themselves and others. They’re creating user managed pointers to data that can be shared and reused.

The concept of user generated tagging already exists in the business world and it’s been around for a long time. Storage 2.0 is the new layer of data storage management that can leverage user and application tags. It refers to the way that business data will be tagged and managed by real-time value rather than by physical storage aspects. It’s not limited to unstructured content like Word, Excel, and PDF files. It spans all business assets such as radiology images in a hospital, video feeds in a Digital Asset Management application, and structured objects found in a relational database.

So the new layer that represents Storage 2.0 consists of reusable, programmatically generated tags that describes data for the purpose of more efficient storage management.

“How will WinFS work in the Storage 2.0 world, Raj?”

So you’ve been reading up on the next generation Windows relational object file system and you want to know how it will play out in the new layer of storage management. The real impact of WinFS will depend on adoption by application developers. Without being “aware” of WinFS, it will have no benefit to users other than the fact that Windows Explorer will have extensions that allow you to view a “document that represents other documents.”

But in the world of storage management for businesses, user workstation file systems have no implication on the data center. So how will WinFS work in the data center where Storage 2.0 really fits? To take advantage of this new functionality, server applications and processes will still need to be aware of the ability to create and read data in this new relational object file system. There are many server type applications that can benefit from such a file system, but developers have been overcoming this for years with other methods that are actually quite elegant and graceful.

When (and if) server application developers take advantage of the functionality in the new file system, it will essentially become a transparent part of the Storage 2.0 layer. This is assuming that enterprises choose to store data on a Windows managed file system. Enterprises aren’t ditching their high-powered, industrial strength Unix and Linux based storage servers just yet.

Microsoft will need to prove the scalability of the file system with some huge benchmarks before enterprises trust it for mission critical storage. Though the theoretical limit is very high, NTFS has been known to have real-world upper limits in terms of file count per partition due to performance issues.

Onfolio is no bag of chips. People rave about the ability to manage resources using tools like Onfolio, but I can’t imagine full-featured client side applications taking off in viral proportions. (I should qualify that — I didn’t want to create a massive run-on sentence as I am so skilled at doing.) Applications that require large client-side footprints for specific purposes are acceptable in my opinion. OCR and scanning applications are one such example — we’ll never have the same performance from web applications that employ high-level code as we can with applications that are use lower-level languages such as C/C++. Which circles me back around to Onfolio. Why would anyone use such a product when del.icio.us exists and is free? Security and privacy may be concerns. Which leads me to my other tangential thought of late…

In some ways, del.icio.us is not-so-social. It’s only social to the degree that other named users in the existing del.icio.us network can be referenced. Yes, anonymous public users can browse etc, but to subscribe to or have data tagged for you using the “for:” semantic, you have to be a named user. Get it? It’s only really social within the bounds of the existing named user network. Services like del.icio.us will only truly be social when they can reference named users from other social bookmarking systems such as Raw Sugar.

SMTP is the original social networking application in that it connects disparate message management systems. Currently, del.icio.us is the equivalent of setting up an email server like Exchange or SendMail and only be able to send to users within that named user data store. The only difference is that the entire data store is completely public with del.icio.us. That’s what social bookmarking really is: message management at the public level, but when does it start resembling email? As soon as rajbala@del.icio.us can start saving or subscribing to feeds at user@rawsugar with the “for:” semantic, the process begins to resemble email without attachments. You can already include a “message” in the body of the resource that you want to bookmark with del.icio.us.

I’m not beating up on del.icio.us by any means. I think it’s a fantastic service and a very raw example of the power of XML and related services in the Web 2.0 world. That’s really what it all comes down to: XML and it’s transparent adoption. Bill Burham wrote recently about the fact that most users who read blogs don’t know what RSS is. That’s scary! We have to ask ourselves why? It’s just like Bill says: it’s too geeky. I think the case would be different if the feature was known as something else much more user friendly. That’s specifically why email has been widely adopted. Send, to, from, forward, attach: they’re all common sense terms that reveal nothing technical about the complexity that mail transfer agents really involve.

Gosh, just when I thought things were bad in India, one begins to realize how bad it is in China. You can’t speak your mind there — nor can you blog about it. Business Week interviewed the founder of one of China’s leading blog providers, Blogcn.

This is required reading for anyone remotely interested in First Amendment rights. Venture Voice recently interviewed Scott Rafer, CEO of Feedster, who talks about some of the issues they face being a provider of RSS search and doing business in China. Fascinating to listen.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about viral applications like del.icio.us vs. the enterprise application market. Which direction does one take when confronted with some basic dilemmas of a startup? I would argue that the cost of creating and releasing an application focused on the enterprise market carries more risk though it may also have a commensurate reward. Even though the unprecedented access to skilled world labor markets presents a compelling opportunity to absorb less risk, the time required to come to market with an enterprise application is far greater than that of its big city cousin. Couple today’s requirements for seamless interoperability with broad platform support and you’ve got a QA nightmare on your hands when trying to develop applications that run in the data center. The Web 2.0 world of social networking and search can’t be bothered with such development and release roadblocks.

Enterprise apps can’t be in “beta forever” like the Web 2.0 applications of today. Technorati seems like they should be in beta though they are not. How long was Gmail in beta? Google is known for keeping something pre-GA for a long as they need. But, the engineering effort alone to get to beta phase for enterprise applications can be very expensive, especially for a cash strapped start-up. Then that leads me to think about the blokes from Skylook. These guys from Australia develop a plug-in to Outlook that integrates with the Skype API. These full-featured client plug-in applications relate far more to their Web 2.0 cousins than do those applications meant for utility and enterprise computing. Plug-ins require less engineering effort since they’re typically focused on being able to plug-into a limited set of applications and technologies. With Skylook, they only have one application to be worried about — Outlook. Their business is based upon Skype so they only have one API on that end to keep up with. But I don’t see plug-in developers making a huge impact on the world at large.

Pimpin’ ain’t easy. Especially when you’ve set your sights high and you’re making an attempt at big pimpin’. Alright, I’ve whined long enough about how much more effort and risk are required to sassify big businesses. I’m not really considering putting something out geared for the Web 2.0 world for a simple reason — I’m not in love with it. It doesn’t keep me up at night and consume my thoughts whilst sitting idle at a stop light. But data storage and information lifecycle management gets me randy. (That might be the geekiest thing I’ve thought all day.) I’m consumed by the thought of data having a beginning, middle, and an end.

But it’s not as simple as that. I’m further intrigued by the macro relationship of the lifecyle of information to the physical storage infrastructure on which it resides. It’s data storage existentialism. Humans have a variable lifecycle compared to other humans, but in the bigger picture, just accept for the moment that you can only discretely affect the course of this lifecycle. A human’s habitat and environment take into consideration the stage of the lifecycle and often times will evolve appropriately. That doesn’t really happen in today’s disconnected data center. The environment for data rarely evolves just because the information is no longer beneficial. Why? Because it’s not overly clear to anyone, especially those responsible for the environment, that the habitat can and should change accordingly.

There are quite a few companies out there trying to solve this problem, but their attempt is in such a monolithic fashion that it ends up competing with other better-suited remedies. It’s as if they’ve found what they consider to be the miracle drug that is the end-all-be-all, but you can’t compete with Tylenol on certain levels.

Or then on the other hand, you’ll find the companies that are under the mistaken notion that the entire problem of information lifecycle management falls squarely in their ballpark. (I hate sports analogies, so I’ll stop right there. You get the picture.) Mark-a-tecture in practice requires that companies focus their spin relative to what they do. I don’t blame them necessarily, but I don’t want to present myself as the end-all-be-all. I just want to be the necessary cog that’s required to make the information lifecyle wheel turn more efficiently.

It’s not just about efficiency today though. I want to build a better mouse trap that also keeps you from getting into trouble with the various government regulations that dictate how you manage your mice. More on the mice later…

Seriously. Calacanis can. And so can you. I don’t think there’s anything technically revolutionary about what he’s doing either. He’s a blogmaster and he manages about 100 professional bloggers. Much of his business is based on Google ad revenue. Is there anything uber astute about his service? Not really. He has indentified information that people want and he gives it to them — in 75 different flavors.

What is significant is that he’s beating the pants off of the big guys. He gets it and they don’t. Oh, and he’s got stones the size of Texas. CNET and the NY Times wish they could compete with him for readership. Microsoft is trying to do something similar with their MSN Filter gamble. Jason Calacanis hasn’t even been doing this for a full year. I hate to be the master of the obvious, but Jason, Ruport Murdoch, and Google all tell us that user driven content is the name of the game in 200x. Jason has proven that we can capitalize on that content equitably and other bigger media outlets are following his lead.

Fred Wilson tagged an interesting blog post for me this morning using del.icio.us. Jason Calacanis, of Weblogsinc, goes off today on the excuses that entrepreneurs in the Web 2.0 (Bubble 2.0, anyone?) world give in regards to competing with Google. I love reading stuff like this. Lately, I’ve been reading and listening to entrepreneurs and VCs who know a little more than I do about the game.

Plenty of my friends and readers of this blog are not nearly as geeky as I might be. But there are several technologies that I think you should be familiar with. del.icio.us and Skype are two services in the “Web 2.0″ world that you cannot live without. del.icio.us is an online social bookmarking service that allows you and I to bookmark stuff for each other. Skype allows us to communicate using voice over the internet for free. Seriously. Free. To tag stuff (links, mp3s, etc), just use this format in the tag field: for:username. My username is rajbala, so obviously you would use for:rajbala in addition to creating and managing your links using your own custom tags. If you notice on the right-hand side of my blog, I have a list of del.icio.us bookmarks that shows up as an RSS feed simply by inserting some code. You don’t need to do this, but you can check out my bookmarks to get a sense of what this is all about.

To tag mp3s for me to listen to, tag them using for:rajbala/rajbalasipod and the mp3 will automatically download to my iPod by way of iTunes 4.9 since it support podcasts.