Six Sigma Software

May 27th, 2005

 

In this post, Nicholas Carr asserts that software will have to eventually reach Bell telco levels of reliability.  I agree with this argument and believes it applies to almost all businesses.  Disciplined focus on process management is the only sure-fire way to attaining this standard of reliability (also known as five nines (99.999+%).

 

With software forming an increasingly vital part of the infrastructure of the world’s economy, reliability, stability and security are paramount concerns. In the past, software companies routinely shipped bug-ridden programs, figuring they could patch and update them later. And their customers took what they were given. That’s history – or will be soon. In the future, the best business software companies will distinguish themselves by producing industrial-strength, bulletproof code – code that approaches Six Sigma standards.

 

Government as Communications Infrastructure Provider

March 30th, 2005

In spite of being an ardent free market propronent and a believer that less government is better than more, I am beyond beginning to believe, although not yet completely sure, that government would be the best WiFi provider. And I should add that maybe, maybe that could also be true for the physical wired network infrastructure (fiber-to-the-home/business) as well.

Should WiFi Be Public Infrastructure? (continued)
I hate logging in to all of these various hot spots. Each one has a different login, a different account, and the process is one big hassle.
I’ve begged for better wifi roaming and I’ve wondered if Wifi should be public infrastructure.
Yesterday, a reader sent me a link to this story about a silicon valley firm called AnchorFree that is putting up free hotspots that are sponsor supported.
That’s a lot better than the paid hotspots we have now, but what I really want is free Wifi everywhere. Or at least let me pay a monthly bill to someone and then get free wifi everywhere I go without having to deal with different vendors with different payment schemes and different login systems.
This is only going to become more important as we get wifi voip phones, wifi iPods with podcasting built in, wifi cameras, and wifi video.
I honestly believe that the cost of supporting public wifi is not that expensive and the benefits to the citizens of every city that does it is enormous.
UPDATE: A great post on the comparisons between public water projects in the 19th century and wifi today. It’s a very interesting read.

Easy Money?

March 30th, 2005

Fred Wilson comments on a journalist’s observation that we are about to enter "the most furious investing cycle in history" due to the vast amounts of cash raised by VC funds in 1999-2000 that their partnership agreements require them to soon use (invest) or lose (return to limited partners along with management fees that pay their salaries and expenses).

It is true that there is a huge "overhang" of venture money left over from the 1999/2000 fundraising binge. But that money can’t go into early stage deals because those deals take 5-6 years to turn into realizations. So this "overhang" is going into later stage deals. Look at $75 million going into Fastclick or $108 million going into Webroot. That’s where the overhang money is going to go. The early stage market may also be entering a "furious investing cycle" but that’s not being driven by the overhang from 1999/2000, its being driven by Web 2.0 and the realization that we have entered another wave of innovation around the Internet that will result in a lot of interesting companies being created, built, and sold over the next several years.

Burnham's Beat: The Death of Compiled Applications

February 22nd, 2005

Burnhams’ Beat describes The Death of Compiled Applications:

Data was the first and most logical component piece to be pulled out of applications and from that a giant industry was created, databases.  Later, client-server architectures broke applications into muliple pieces and separated applications functions, but they didn’t actually pull a lot of functionality out of compiled code.  With the birth of the web though, applications started to change dramatically.

The web browser changed applications forever by substituting a generic GUI front-end and structured text (in the form of HTML) for a compiled GUI.  In this way the browser became merely a generic execution engine.  It requested non-compiled text and then translated that text into a unique GUI according to a pre-existing industry standard.  By pulling out the presentation logic from compiled apps and making it open and accessible to not only other programmers but basically anyone who could view text, browsers launched the massive wave of innovation and creativity that in turn made the Internet a true “web”.  HTML “programmers” swapped HTML tricks and tips liberally.  They cut and pasted code from each other’s sites and as time progressed they began to use the power of HTML and HTTP to create composite sites that actually borrowed both content and styles from other sites.

Thus, in just 10 years, the presentation layer of the web has become an incredible laboratory for innovation and creativity with people using the power of HTML’s accessibility and portability to create radical new services, many of which people simply had not thought possible beforehand.

Financial Supply Chain

February 11th, 2005

While wandering the Web, I stumbled across a company, Prime Revenue, that offers to optimize the "financial supply chain" of its customers. 

PrimeRevenue is the key to a financially optimized supply chain.  For Buyers and Suppliers.

Our program is an innovative and unparalleled solution that brings the benefits of information technology to the financial supply chain.  Our services deliver greater working capital efficiency, cost savings, and revenue growth opportunities for both Buyers and Suppliers.

With our program, Buyers provide Suppliers with transaction visibility and payment certainty around trade payables to their Suppliers, reducing the amount of cash tied up in the order-to-cash cycle.  Our services streamline AR/AP processes, link the flow of funds to the flow of transaction data and, by creating visibility into future cash flows, give corporations access to a variety of transaction level financing options at very attractive rates.

Simply stated, PrimeRevenue helps companies do more business with less working capital.

Although apparently not a new concept (there’s a link on their website
to a fairly sophisticated vision of it in an article written in 2000),
the integrated communications and software infrastructure for implementing it are
only now reaching the maturation to support it.

On another Web sojourn, I encountered Wells Fargo’s Commercial Electronic Office (CEO), a proprietary financial portal that claims to provide "cash management, credit, international, and trust and investment services all in once place with a single sign on".  Maybe so, but my experience with banks suggest that would be something of a stretch.  (Wells had even applied bankers’ bureaucratese to the term e-commerce, turning a concise word into a mouthful of multi-syllabic mush.)  My instincts and experience with online media content tell me that a proprietary business model will not stand.  For the same underlying economic reasons that it would make no sense for Yahoo, MSN or AOL to limit their available market to that of one communications company (as in cable or telco), it would make no sense for a true financial portal to limit its market to the available market of a given depository institution (even if owned by that institution). 

This is worthy of futher "focused" Web wanderings, thought and conversation.

 

Blogging 2.0

February 10th, 2005

I believe Fred Wilson nails it in this post..

That was Blogging 1.0.  We knew back then that the web was a great platform for personal expression.  All three businesses still exist.  Two of them exist inside of web portals and About.com apparently is going to get sold soon, apparently to the New York Times Company.

Blogging 1.0 paved the way for Blogging 2.0.  I see four fundamental improvements that differentiate Blogging 1.0 from Blogging 2.0.

The first is the notion of the post as the central piece of content.  About.com had some of this in its DNA, but Geocities and Tripod did not. Posts drive freshness, frequency, and syndication and make Blogging 2.0 much more exciting than Bloggin 1.0 was.

The second is related to the first.  Permalinks have changed the game fundamentally.  Linking to content was not really possible until permalinks came along.  Now each piece of content is a persistent object that has a unique identifier.  This is a huge deal and this concept did not exist in Blogging 1.0.

The third is RSS. Blogging 1.0 was a web experience.  Blogging 2.0 is a everywhere experience. Content was a solid in Blogging 1.0 and its a fluid in Blogging 2.0.

The fourth is CPC and contextual ad networks.  In Blogging 1.0, the only way to monetize the business was with banners.  And brand advertisers were not thrilled with paying high CPMs to advertise on "amateur content".  With the arrival of CPC and contextual ad networks, this is no longer the case.  Wherever advertisers can get clicks, they’ll place their ads. The result is a huge increase in the potential revenues.

Neural Plasticity, Free Will and the Blind Painters

January 29th, 2005

From the Belmont Club comments section comes this fascinating story about a congenitally blind Turkish artist, Esref Armagan, who paints visual imagery!  Armagan’s works are described as “disarmingly realistic” and his skills characterized as “formidable”.  My interest heightened as I read that Armagan visited the US at the invitation of Harvard & Boston University neurologists, who wanted to scan the operation of his brain for further insight into the phenomenon of neural plasticity.  In an also fascinating and intellectually challenging book I recently finished, The Mind and the Brain, Jeffrey Schwartz (UCLA professor of psychiatry) articulates a deeply grounded (in science and spiritual philosophy) finding that neuroplasticity serves as the mechanism for the operation of conscious mental force, or free will. (Neural plasticity can be defined as the ability of the neurons in the brain to reorganize their interconnections and roles in response to long-term loss of neural functioning elsewhere in the brain or long-term disruptions in the nervous sytem.  In a  book, The Mind and the Brain, in which the author, Jeffrey Schwartz, describes his two decades of research into neural plasticity and his collaboration with quantum physicists to understand how a human can consciously exert mental force to direct neuroplasticity for desired purposes (overcoming obsessive-compulsive disorder, compensating for learning disabilities, regenerating neural function in response to brain or nervous system injury, etc.).  Obviously a deep and penetrating thinker, Schwartz opens his book

The painter is Esref Armagan. And he is here in Boston to see if a peek inside his brain can explain how a man who has never seen can paint pictures that the sighted easily recognise – and even admire. He paints houses and mountains and lakes and faces and butterflies, but he’s never seen any of these things. He depicts colour, shadow and perspective, but it is not clear how he could have witnessed these things either. How does he do it?

Because if Armagan can represent images in the same way a sighted person can, it raises big questions not only about how our brains construct mental images, but also about the role those images play in seeing. Do we build up mental images using just our eyes or do other senses contribute too? How much can congenitally blind people really understand about space and the layout of objects within it? How much “seeing” does a blind person actually do?

Belmont Club

November 24th, 2004

Belmont Club.

Can there be any doubt abut the geopolitical impact of communications technologies?

Russian special forces dressed in Ukrainian Special forces uniforms are in Kyiv. Ukrainian militia have been instructed by the mayor to protect the people from the Russian troops. Ukrainian militia have established a hotline for Ukrainians to report any incidents with the Russians and pledged to protect Ukrainians. These Russians flew into Ukraine this morning. They’re now surrounding the administration buildings they say “to protect Kuchma (the outgoing president and his PM Yanukovich). Following is a chain of email messages I’ve been sending by blackberry. Please pass along to others. Bob Schaffer.