Wednesday August 08, 2007

Convergence has become one of the most central and significant issues faced in the Technology, Media & Telecommunications sector today – shaping everything from product and service launches to catalyzing multi-million dollar mergers and acquisitions.

Convergence Conversations, a book published by Deloitte comprises interviews with 36 senior executives from the converging world. In this PDF you'll find interresting insights from executives from companies like NTT, Gartner, BenQ, SK Telecom, General Electric, Telenet, Orange, Vodacom, Telegraf, Telefonica, oogle, RIM and Time Warner and many other more.

There is a wide range of views on how the subject should be approached – with original perspectives on the rationale and scope of convergence that others will find of interest and learn from. Have a look on this.

In my understanding, Identity is key for this convergence play. If services, networks and devices will come together nothing else matters than the underlying identity management.

It might be that tk20208, Lady16 or MillionDollarInvestor_2007 are relevant customers for you. It might be not. Perhaps all three identities are belonging to only one person. Perhaps on different services, handsets or networks.
Will you be able to manage this?

Tuesday August 07, 2007

Some people think of Web 2.0 only in terms of an advanced collection of web interface technologies and consider web applications with a pop-up calendar, a rich text editor, or drag-and-drop functionality as being all there is to Web 2.0. But when these capabilities are joined with the idea of the read/write web, then the true power of Web 2.0 emerges.

For example, the pop-up calendar is the user interface for an online calendar that is shared with other members of a group, and clicking on the date checks the availability of the other people in the group to make meeting scheduling easier. The rich text editor is the user interface for a wiki that enables users to quickly and easily publish documents that can be shared with other members of a group.

Today I read an interresting blog entry from Matt Rogers about how Web 2.0 affects users. As this is a great summary please find the main points in following. Matt sees three topics which are important:

"Personal expression – It gives users a greater ability to express their personalities to others
Efficient connections – It makes meeting new like-minded people more efficient
Information discovery – It changes how people discover information"

Sure, so far nothing new and not really rocket science, as Matt admits. But:

...”none of these dynamics are new or unique to Web 2.0 – they represent some of the core motivators of most humans – all Web 2.0 has done is make achieving these human objectives online easier.

From its aggregation capabilities to community support, self-publishing features, and collaboration services, a portal implemented using Sun Java System Portal Server gives you access to better web technologies to build the read/write web.

Tom Mueller, a colleague at Sun, has written an excellent article at developers.sun.com about Web 2.0 and Sun's Portal server, where he points to many other sources. Have a look on it!

Wednesday August 01, 2007

comScore released the results of a global study into online gaming, showing the number of unique visitors to these sites to have reached almost 217 million worldwide – a year-on-year growth of 17 percent.

The comScore World Metrix study took into account all sites that provide online or downloadable games, excluding gambling sites. The sector attracted 28 percent of the total worldwide online population in May and recorded an average of 9 visits per visitor.

“With one in four Internet users visiting a gaming site, playing games online is extremely popular. The fact that these websites are pulling in over a quarter of the total worldwide Internet population shows what a global phenomenon gaming has become”, said Bob Ivins, EVP and managing director of comScore Europe. “The potential of the online gaming arena should be especially appealing for advertisers, as the average online gamer visits a gaming site 9 times a month.”

According to the report, Yahoo! Games was the largest property, attracting 53 million unique visitors. MSN Games followed in second place, having grown by 16 percent since May 2006 to reach 40 million unique visitors in May 2007. Both properties provide a mixture of strategy, trivia, arcade, and board games, with puzzle and card games proving to be the most popular choices for gamers in both cases.

The fastest-growing Top 10 gaming property was WildTangent Network, a US company that makes online and downloadable games, which grew by 398 percent year-on-year to attract 11.5 million unique visitors in May 2007. The site also attracted an average 12.2 visits per visitor, notably higher than any of the other top 10 gaming properties.

But as your business grows - can you really grow fast enough your service quality to meet the expectation from your customers? You need an infrastructure who can grow with it. Project Darkstar is designed to provide an environment for game developers that allows scaling.

Have a look into the paper from Jim Waldo, Distinguished Engineer and
Karl Haberl, Research Director both from Sun Microsystems. They just gave an great overview about the open sourced game server technology from Sun Microsystems. In this paper both explain how scaling can be achieved through the use of the inherent parallelism found in virtual environments without requiring that the programmers coding such environments learn either distributed computing or multi-threaded programming.

Project Darkstar presents an illusion to the programmer that the code for the server side of the application is running on a single machine in a single thread. In fact, the work being done by the server can be spread across any number of machines and threads in a way that allows both increased scaling and fault tolerance. Learn more at Project Darkstar Overview.