I have this thesis that goes a bit like this: phase 1 of the modern world wide web was about linking documents (hyperlinks), phase 2 was about enabling users to create content for the web (user generated content/social media), phase 3 was about linking the creators of that content (people – social nets), and phase 4 is about data (making sense of sum of phases 1-3).

So now that we have these tools to create and consume and link together tons and tons of content, how do we filter it all? That is where I think we need to focus on a higher level, and see what the problems are, and how to make simplified services to solve them.

We have petabytes of data floating around the web, many companies have petabytes internally of data that’s been collected throughout I-III but have no efficient means of digesting this and consuming it. We also have more and more efficient computing power idling away in servers all across the globe. So now what we need is an INTUITIVE way for people to consume large batches of this data and have it spit into usable results.

What I’m suggesting is that whomever builds a yahoo pipes (but easier to use) interface for hadoop level data processing could make a killing. Imagine customers load up via their terminals (web browsers) terabytes of data, design the process and algorithms, and the system distributes the computations wherever capacity is available. This is how you solve complex problems. This is how genomes get cracked in hours, and for much lower cost.

Why did I suggest hadoop as the possible basis for this? Its open source, its free, and its able to run across a myriad of machines already out there. No need to reinvent the wheel.

So build an interface, charge by the computing cycle, and profit.

I saw a tidbit the other day about a cloud computing concept called Following the Moon. Apparently this concept had been brought up sometime last year after a study was published espousing its merits as a cost saving method for the enterprise. In a nutshell Following the Moon (FTM) involves offloading processing power to data centers where the electricity may be theoretically cheaper at night.

At the moment there are no variable priced cloud computing services out there that shift pricing based on time. Amazon has demand based pricing in some of their data centers for their cloud offerings, but as of yet, no time based. The theory is that at night, your lack of sunlight reduces your demand for electricity, as you don’t need to cool your data center as much. Also the demand for server capacity is generally higher when more users are connected (daytime). So the logic goes, pricing should drop when the temperature does as well.

Many argue that this offloading of processing would increase latency, and offset the savings in cost by an increase in time. This is a shortsighted approach in my opinion, as these people are thinking purely of on-demand dynamic data needs, I am thinking of big dataset crunching needs. These needs are less dynamic, but still require massive computing power. So lets say you need to compile massive datasets, why not shift the computing of them to lower-power-cost areas or lower-demand areas as the day goes by. Especially for parallel/super-computing tasks, you are talking about instant savings if someone like Amazon were to step up and offer such a service. Say daytime processing costs $0.15/hr, and night time drops to $0.10/hr. Over a thousand instances you’re talking about saving well over a thousand dollars a month (assuming you can shift to night pricing continuously, i.e. 3 jumps throughout the day).

High capacity users doing data modeling or genome processing could be using 10-20k instances (an instance is a virtual machine in the cloud), and saving 10s of thousands a month this way. Amazon would also effectively impede anyone else from competing in this, as the cost of implementing it would be astronomical (they already have the geo-distribution of data centers + the cost/price points). This could also be a huge boon for startups looking to shave a few expenses and making their data acquisition costs lower.

So Henry Blodget posts yesterday on Silicon Alley Insider a piece “Palm CEO explains to employees why the company is toast,” outlining a few key points from Jon Rubenstein to his troops. The gist of Jon’s points boil down to:

1. No one wants our products
2. Carriers won’t buy as many as we had hoped
3. Product quality stinks
4. Palm is increasing marketing

Soo in a nutshell, Palm is fucked, and now is scrambling to keep up. Remember Palm is competing DIRECTLY with Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, RIMM’s Blackberry, Nokia SymbianOS, and now Microsoft Windows 7 Mobile. Every one of those competitors has a larger market share than Palm’s WebOS right now, with the sole exception being Windows7Mobile, and solely because it was just announced last week and isn’t in consumer hands yet. So Palm has the largest uphill battle imaginable, and really doesn’t seem to “get it” as far as why they are stinking up the place over there.

If you are going to be building a smartphone platform and hardware for that platform as well, you have to think about how the smartphone market has shifted. It is no longer about how many features your phone can do out of the box with your pre-installed version of tetris, its about how flexible can your phone be based on after-purchase software. So that means you need tons of readily available software out there for people to install. That’s why Apple having 140,000 apps vs your 1,400 or so is a big freaking deal. Apple only had to make a miniscule percentage of those apps on their own too, because they made the tools to build on their platform readily available.

Palm thought they were being totally effing clever when they spouted off about how their WebOS was going to be better because its basically a browser and anyone can program for the web right? Big freaking fail here guys. Sure I can build a thousand apps for the web if I wanted to, but those apps won’t instantly run on my Palm Pre or Pixi, they all have to be converted to run within the constraints of the WebOS. If you’re coming from behind, as Palm clearly is, they need to really incentivize the hell out of building an app for WebOS. Either give a better revenue share, give me a free phone w/free data plan, or pay me to port my apps to WebOS. Palm didn’t even bother supporting the developer community which had jumped at the opportunity to build for the WebOS (palmdevcamp anyone?).

So the only way for Palm to solve the utter lack of apps on their platform is to do the following:

• Build an iphone->webOS conversion tool to get people 90% of the way there
• Give out 10,000 Palm Pres to developers and load them up w/$100 worth of data or make them unlocked
• Pay the top web and iphone and android app developers to come over $10k or more to port an app. – Actually seems like they are trying this w/a $1M bonus payout contest to hot app devs.
• Get your phones on more than just Sprint. (Seriously who thought that was a good idea? “let’s hedge our livelyhood on the last place carrier selling a ton of our phones”)

I feel like I may have said these things before. oh wait i did. 8 months ago. nothing has improved. http://brianbreslin.com/why-im-not-building-for-the-palm-pre/

If the iPod was to music, and the kindle is to text, then what will the iPad mean to [insert media here]. Fake steve jobs had an interesting point when he states the kindle is a piece of shit, if the first ipod was to music what we correlate the kindle being to books, then what is the ipod touch to music, and what is the future equivalent kindle to books?

We as a collective whole have been so focused on ways to cram existing/established media formats we are familiar with into new devices that we are missing the point of technological improvements/innovations. Say we decided that the iPad, which is the device I’m thinking about in this example, should just be a glorified feed reader with formatting similar to magazines or newspapers. Wouldn’t we be missing out on all the innovation possible? I for one can’t wait to see LAYERS of data sprinkled throughout the canvas of my future media content. The fact that we can add in extra information about anything, instantly, means we can AUGMENT the media and content creation we’ve become so accustomed to consuming in static format.

So if you aren’t excited about the iPad, then please step aside as there are other people out there more than willing to take your place in the creation of the future. The iPad strikes me as the most important step we’ve seen in quite some time in personal computing. It opens up the possibilities for the message to be enhanced by the medium.

When the press first caught wind of chrome they said that Microsoft was the likely target, and that Internet Explorer stood the most to lose from Google’s entry into the browser market. I however beg to differ. Internet Explorer has one advantage no other browser has: locked in marketshare in enterprise and all new copies of Windows. No one will ever fully displace Internet Explorer. No matter how shitty IE becomes, it has the advantage of already being there 90% of the time. So who should really be afraid of Chrome? Mozilla and Apple and to a much lesser extent Opera.

Firefox is the easiest target for Google to steal market share from of the bunch, and so they stand to lose the most in this browser war. I’m going to discount Opera’s share for the rest of this, as they really are only going to get their butts kicked in the mobile space as they lost the desktop wars long ago. Firefox is a self-installed piece of software, which means IT departments around the world need to willingly choose to put it into their installs, not like IE which is already there. With that in mind, it is up to firefox and firefox alone to keep their product as high quality as possible, or risk losing their existing momentum. For those of you that know me, you know I’ve been a mozilla fanboy for years, heck a part of my business is derived from Mozilla related stuff (Twitbin). But for my personal use, I’ve switched to Chrome, because its faster, more efficient, and less bloated, the exact things I started using firefox for originally.

Apple needs to fear chrome for other strategic reasons, but I suspect once apple switches everyone of the 250 Million iTunes users to iTunes Web (aka Safari), their user numbers will shift dramatically. As is there is no real compelling reason to use Safari on Windows when you have Chrome which is slightly faster, and has more flexibility.

So the one who stands to lose the biggest in this game is Firefox, as that is their core business. Even though they are open source, don’t forget that Google pays Mozilla 100+Million a year for search revenue share.

I had the pleasure of meeting German Martinez and Juan Pablo Scaletti on my recent trip to Lima at the local BeerTwit twitter and blogger meetup. These two guys are the brains behind Prezentit, a very cool new service that lets you build robust slideshows/presentations directly in your browser (without Flash!).

German was gracious enough to answer a few of my questions. (A spanish version is available here)
How did you start to work with web related business?
It all started with PreZentit, the idea of creating a web company from scratch seemed a fantastic idea, it was a big challenge and we learnt a lot in the process.

What do you think about the Peruvian web community ?
In Peru there is a large community of web users, but they use the web at a very basic level. They use the web more for fun than for work, the use of web applications has not yet become as widespread as in other parts of the world.

The number of web developers is growing little by little. Even though it is small there are people in Peru who are very well trained

What are the advantages/disadvantages of being a programmer/web developer in Peru?
The main advantage of being a web developer in Peru is that the cost of living and the price of web services like Internet are relatively cheap compared to the USA or Europe. This allows us to offer slightly lower prices than what is charged in those countries.

The great disadvantage is the lack of visibility. It is very hard to have your work become known in other countries. This is especially true about web applications such as Pre-Zentit.

Another disadvantage is the fact that most of the available information about web matters is in English. So it becomes essential for anyone who wants to grow as a web professional to have a good command of English.

How would you describe your Project, Prezentit , in l0 words or less?
The most user friendly online presentations editor.

Why did you create Prezentit
We realized that Power Point had many shortcoming when we wanted to create group presentations, so we decided to create an on line application that would solve these problems but keeping in mind our own needs.

What were your most important resources that you used to create Prezentit? What programming languages and libraries did you use to develop it?
We are big fans of Ubuntu and we created PreZentit using all kinds of free software. My partner, Juan Pablo Scaletti, was the main programmer. I think he is one of the best Python and JavaScript programmers in Peru. We used the framework TurboGears for Python and the library Mootools for JS.

In what direction do you think the Peruvian programming community is going to develop as regards the Internet?
I think web users are going to stop using desk applications and begin using more web applications.

The Internet will also become an essential work tool here.

What problems have you faced in working with foreign companies from Peru and in working with local Peruvian companies in Peru?
The greatest roadblock in working with foreign companies is the tools for payment. A large problem is not being able to link Pay Pal with a Peruvian bank account in order to receive payments easily. As regards local companies, they still do not realize the advantages that having a presence on the web gives them and most of them are not willing to invest in this presence.

Which are your favorite web 2.0 sites? Which ones do you see growing more in Peru than others?
Right now I am a big fan of Twitter. It seems like a fantastic idea to me. I also admire You Tube and Flickr.

Recien tuve la oportunidad de visitar a Lima, Peru y tuve la fortunidad de poder encontrarme con el grupo de twitters y bloggers aya. Durante esta reunion conoci por primera vez a German y Juan Pablo de Prezentit, un nuevo sitio para armar presentaciones sin tener que instalar cualquier software en tu systema.

German me hizo el favor de responder a unas preguntas que tuve, y aca las tienes. (la version en ingles se puede encontrar aqui)

¿Cómo llegaste a trabajar en la web?
Todo comenzó con PreZentit, la idea de crear una aplicación web desde cero me pareció genial, fue un gran reto y aprendimos muchísimo en el camino.

¿Cómo ves la comunidad en Perú con respecto a la web?
En Perú hay una gran comunidad de usuarios de internet pero a un nivel básico, se usa mucho más para ocio que para trabajo, además aún no ha entrado con fuerza el uso de aplicaciones web.

La comunidad de desarrolladores está creciendo poco a poco. Aunque aún es pequeña hay gente muy capaz.

¿Cuales son las ventajas/desventajas de ser programador/desarrollador en Perú?
La principal ventaja de ser un desarrollador en Perú es que aquí el costo de vida y el acceso a servicios como internet es relativamente barato en comparación con USA o Europa. Esto nos permite tener una tarifa un poco más baja que la que usualmente se cobra en esos países.

La gran desventaja es la falta de exposición, es muy difícil hacer notar tu trabajo en el extranjero. Sobre todo cuando hablamos de aplicaciones web como PreZentit.

Otra desventaja es el hecho de que la mayoría de información disponible al respecto se encuentre en inglés, así que es un idioma obligatorio para cualquiera que esté interesado en desenvolverse como desarrollador web.

¿Tu proyecto Prezentit, como lo describirías en menos de 10 palabras?
El editor de presentaciones online más fácil de usar.

¿Como vinieron a armar Prezentit?
Nos dimos cuenta de que PowerPoint tenía muchas limitaciones y desventajas a la hora de hacer presentaciones en grupo, así que decidimos crear una aplicación online que los resolviera teniendo en cuenta nuestras propias necesidades.

¿Cuales fueron los recursos más importantes en armar Prezentit? ¿Que lenguajes de programación y librerías usaste para desarrollarlo?
Mi socio, Juan Pablo Scaletti fue el que se desenvolvió principalmente como programador, yo lo considero como uno de los mejores programadores de Python y JavaScript en Perú.Usamos el framework TurboGears para Python y la librería Mootools para JS.

¿En que dirección crees que la comunidad peruana va avanzar con respeto al internet?
Creo que los usuarios van a dejar de depender tanto en aplicaciones de escritorio y empezar a usar aplicaciones web.

El Internet se convertirá en una herramienta de trabajo indispensable.

¿Que obstáculos has visto trabajando con empresas extranjeras desde Perú? ¿Y con empresas locales?
El mayor obstáculo al trabajar con empresas extranjeras es el medio de pago, un gran problema es no poder usar PayPal con una cuenta bancaria de Perú para recibir dinero.

Lo que pasa con las empresas locales es que aún no entienden las ventajas que les da la presencia en Internet, además en su mayoría no están dispuestas a invertir en ello.

¿Cuales son los sitios web2.0 que te gustan más? ¿Cuales ves creciendo más que otros en Perú?
Ahora mismo soy un gran fan de Twitter, me parece una idea genial, tampoco puedo dejar de mencionar a YouTube y a Flickr.

After my blitz trip through lima this past weekend it came to my attention that there is huge amount of underlying potential for the web in this part of the world, but its missing key components needed to grow. I spoke with a number of very intelligent and very in touch people who understand many of the changes going on in the social media and web2.0 sphere, and frankly came away with mixed emotions.

At my first South American Twitter meetup ever, over 40 people were there! Lots of people in this crowd were what we would call the early adopters here. Whereas in the US an early adopter of something like twitter is typically 6 months to a year ahead, there they are 2-3 years ahead of mainstream adoption. The main reason being that the infrastructure (SMS, Telecom, Internet) isn’t there for the majority of the population, and is still prohibitively expensive for many.

But here is what I see that made me really glad to have gone down to peru (from a developer/strategist perspective). There is a large group of people who are genuinely interested in these new emerging technologies, who have great skills in programming and development, and are really just waiting for a great project to come along. There isn’t the same entrepreneurial mindset there is here in the US, but there is a spirit of creativity. I spent hours talking to the talented team behind Prezentit about how to make the greatest twitter experience possible. How we could extend something as simple as the 140 characters of twitter and build a robust community around that social object.

Some of the things that Peru lacks from a web perspective: capital (not that much is needed, things are relatively cheap), someone with the balls to experiment on a number of things and put their $ where their mouth is, and people talking about the community as much as possible. The local paper El Comercio is doing a great job on this last part already (my visit is even mentioned here ) There are also a number of cultural issues that can be corrected, especially at the youth level (the same point where much of this development can occur).

I’ll write more in the future about south america and its role in this emerging global network of web development, software, and online culture. But for now I’d like to thank all my new twitter + facebook friends down there. Saludos a todos.

So you might be thinking, why on earth would this be a good deal for either party? How can two also-rans of the internet fit well together? How can they compete against the all mighty goog? Well this harks back to my theory on the evolution of advertising and the shift to behavioral advertising.

At the moment, Yahoo is probably the number one player in this field. AOL is distant second, but the two are definitely the leaders in this market. With a combined effort on their part, they can merge the patents and IP advantages they each posses and come out with some amazing ad solutions. AOL’s Platform A initiative is already strong, but what it really needs is the massive pageviews Yahoo! has. Yahoo’s behavioral targeting is good, but could benefit from some of the stuff AOL has + AOL’s extra pageviews, the social network they just bought (Bebo), and more.

What would Yahoo get out of buying/merging with AOL?

• Bebo – 3rd largest social network in the US and Europe
• Platform A/Advertising.com – One of the largest behavioral and display ad businesses on the net. Reach to millions of sites, which Yahoo! publisher network never was able to do (probably because they never accepted anyone!)
• Netscape – Still millions of browsers out there, tons of traffic.
• AOL Mail – LOTS of additional users to be migrated into the Y! Mail platform
• AOL dialup business – something they could quickly sell off to recoup some cash
• AOL Blog Network – these are a great fit for Y! content offerings. Esp. Y! Finance

What does AOL get from this deal?

• No more Time Warner! This has been a deal that dragged them down so far, its embarassing
• Stability – Y! has lots of cash on hand and TONS of traffic, and is less fickle than TW
• More reach – again Y! traffic
• LOTS of cost savings – data centers alone would be consolidated
• Cross promotion
• More data for their ad programs.

So to me this seems like a great fit, even if Microsoft does buy Yahoo, it would cost them another $20 Billion to get it done after an AOL merger. To me this seems like a great move, even if Y! does outsource the monetization of some of its search traffic to Google. I see them as a better fit together than Y! + MS.

Here’s a thought: Apple does an unlimited rentals for $15-17/month but you can only have 2 movies “rented” at a time. Think this would work? Think apple would do it? It would be their answer to Netflix‘s download service, which to be honest isn’t that great (and doesn’t work on my mac!)

I think I know a few people who would pay $15/month for unlimited movies. Are we really moving to a society whereby we own nothing and rent everything?