Sunday, December 24, 2006

Best tech videos

Best tech videos is a collection of videos of conference presentations and screencast demos and tutorials. You can watch or download them.

Friday, December 22, 2006

Business use of consumer services

The Economist has an article on business use of consumer services. One could argue that consumer products and applications, not military or business, are now driving technological innovation.

One example cited in the article is Arizona State University which is now using Gmail and plans to use other Google services. ASU IT director Adrian Sannier explains why he made that choice in this blog entry.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Paying to seed a user community

J. C. R. Licklider described the importance of communities of common interest rather than common location in his widely influential 1968 paper on The Computer as a Communication Device. Today we have many examples of the importance and value of user-contributed content and community. But, people's time and attention are limited, and starting a successful community is difficult. Yelp.com has experimented with paying early users for reviews of restaurants and other local businesses.

Would you be willing to contribute content in an area you know about for a small fee?

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Global wealth disparity underlies Internet disparity

We have discussed global disparity in Internet backbone deployment, cost and usage rates. North America, Western Europe and the rich Asian nations are the "haves," and the rest of the world ranges from "have not" to "have almost nothing." A recent UN study investigates the distribution of world wealth (as opposed to income), and, not surprisingly, finds high correlation with the Internet disparity we observed in class.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Amazon Web services

We have talked about data centers and mashups or composite applications. Amazon has exposed application programming interfaces for its applications and will also store your data at their data centers. All you supply is the business idea. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos describes their services in in a short video or you can read more in this Business Week article. Amazon Web services could be used for Internet, intranet or extranet applications.

Friday, December 01, 2006

Parking garage mashup

We've been talking about mashups and hosted applications. The city of Santa Monica has a parking availability site that mashes Google Maps with online counters at the gates of city parking structures. This would be particularly useful if accessed from a mobile device while driving to the parking structure.