Monthly Archive for September, 2008

My 10 to the 100th Entry: Education via TXT Messaging

Published on September 28, 2008 in Observations from the Web. Closed Tags: , .

So I stumbled upon the Project 10 to the 100th page on the Internet. Pretty much the call has gone out from Google for people to come up with ideas to change the world, the more people changed, the better.

This of course, is a difficult task. So what separates well off people from not so well off people. While money helps, poor people become rich and rich people become poor all the time. Then I realised it was education that made people more organised in their thought, and wealth always flows from the disorganised to the organised.

So the idea is getting education to the masses. I’ve seen some other ideas floating around like a Google College. Neat idea, but this requires people to have access to the Internet, and Broadband access for video. But what about those people who don’t have the Internet, or a computer? What way can we disseminate education to the masses?

Verbal isn’t very scalable, and there’s language issues. Paper is more scalable, but has a production cost (the paper itself), and isn’t easily changeable, scalable, searchable, or transmittable.

Turns out there are 3.3 billion mobile phones out there. And odds are they all have TXT Messaging (or SMS). Since this is digital, it’s scalable, transformable (from language to language), has really low production costs (compared to paper), and is easily changeable, searchable, and transmittable.

There are limitations to SMS. It’s only alphanumeric, limited to around 160 Latin characters per SMS, and no one’s ever done this before. So how can we do it?

  • Mini-Knols: Obviously we’re not trying to replicate a college degree. We are trying to communicate discrete bite sized peices of knowledge. For example, explaining how NPK works in fertilizers, so a farmer in China knows the best way to fertilize their crops;
  • Automated test taking: If 3.3 billion people are using the system, the less human intervention the better. When courses are created, tests that can be automatically marked by a computer are preferred. Multiple choice questions can be used to a great extent to examine fine grained concepts.
  • Anyone can create a course: The success of Wikipedia is through people creating content. This content is reviewed by others for correctness, and the same process needs to apply here.
  • Sponsored: There is still a cost to this system, and while Wikipedia can survive with donations, it doesn’t have to pay TXT messaging costs per page view. Sponsors could either have a TXT message at the start of a course, the end of a course, or be written into a course.

I’m sure there other people have more ideas, and I’d be more than willing to help.

Interesting spam Myspace hack

Published on September 19, 2008 in Observations from the Web. Closed Tags: , .

So I received an email from Myspace saying I had a friend request. I could tell it was fake since I don’t have any friends on Myspace.

Anyways, find attached the profile of the friend. Notice anything (apart from the Uber jersey I gave the girl)?

The spammer has created an image and overlayed it on top of the Myspace profile page. Hence why you don’t see any “Jennifer is in your extended network” message.

There’s a few hints that this is fake. The compression on the JPEG is horrible, and makes the artifacts around the text really quite noticable. I’d change the compression level to say 90.

Also the picture is a bit more explicit than the normal Myspace profile pictures.

Interesting Micro-blogging posts

Published on September 19, 2008 in Observations from the Web. Closed Tags: .

Some pages for me to look at later:

  • http://identi.ca/
  • http://pistachioconsulting.com/twhirl-makes-yammer-irrelevant/
  • http://laconi.ca/trac/
  • http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/09/08/list-of-enterprise-microblogging-tools-twitter-for-the-intranet/
  • http://profy.com/2008/09/08/yammer-another-take-on-enterprise-microblogging/
  • http://falkow.blogsite.com/public/item/212683
  • http://www.chrisbrogan.com/you-can-do-your-job-without-twitter/
  • http://apextoday.blogspot.com/2008/08/oratweet-tweeting-on-enterprise.html
  • http://statushq.com/account/login
  • http://www.elsua.net/2008/03/27/social-networking-the-twitterverse-debates/
  • http://presentlyapp.com/

My competitor: Yammer

Published on September 19, 2008 in Business, Career Development, Development, E-Commerce and Observations from the Web. Closed Tags: , , , .

So I’ve found my first near direct, and biggest competitor: Yammer. Yammer is the enterprise version of Twitter so to speak, it allows you to micro-blog to a group of people within the same domain name.

Similarities between Resourcer and Yammer:

  1. Micro-blogging to corporate audiences

Differences between Resourcer and Yammer:

  1. Resourcer is a workforce utilization reporting and modelling tool.
  2. Yammer is a corporate micro-blogging tool.
  3. Resourcer doesn’t limit you to people within a certain domain name, and uses powerful organisation and group functionality that lets you create virtual organisations and groups that cross domains, i.e. projects involving multiple companies.
  4. Yammer reminds me of a chat room, except there are multiple ways of sending and receiving messages.
  5. Resourcer gives managers powerful reporting tools that allow you to view the productivity of your workforce.

As always, if you’re doing something right, then there are going to be multiple companies doing it. When I first heard about Yammer (thank you Jo), I panicked. And then when I saw they won the Techcrunch 50, I panicked some more.

But there are some positives. They launched nine days ago, and have 50,000 users already. As always, first mover advantage is significant, and often turns into the sustainable competitive advantage of a user base. Once a company decides to settle on Yammer or Resourcer, that’s a decision that’ll be made once. Hence now the battle will need to be done company to company.

And so the updated road map:

  1. Finish linking core application functionality with database.
  2. Gather requirements and building secondary application functionality.
  3. Finish information type pages.
  4. Tidy pages, do quality assurance, move project into Beta stage and open logins to other people.
  5. Write business plan.
  6. Contact angel investors.
  7. Move application onto framework, either Seagull or Silverstripe.
  8. Tidy pages, do quality assurance, move project and beta data/logins onto Gold release.
  9. Publish API.
  10. Advertise.

Fake Cellphones – Good products, disgusting ethics.

Published on September 18, 2008 in Observations from the Web. Closed Tags: , .

A while back I considered starting a website for selling cell phones. While the idea hasn’t gone away, my priorities have adjusted since then, so here’s my experience.

Then problem when dealing with the magnitude of wholesalers in China is, most of them have appalling ethics (like my spelling, thanks Erin). In New Zealand we respect things like:

  • Our relationship with the customer
  • Out relationship with suppliers

And hence why I have a fake iPhone on my desk, as well as a Nokla N76. You’ll note the L in Nokla, instead of the regular I.

Another example, check out the real Samsung Armani phone:

And now for the fake version:

What’s the main differences:

  1. One has crappy crappy fake branding that is a rough approximation of the truth.
  2. One has a slightly poorer GUI.

That’s it. That fake phone could well compete with the real phone if it would get rid of this silly idea to be something it’s not, and instead invested a little money into having a decent brand that people respect, and a decent product that people enjoy using, then this phone would be a delight.

And to show that not all imitation phones are behind the curve, does your phone change songs when you shake it, or have TV built in:

Fonterra.com’s Down

Published on September 17, 2008 in Observations from the Web. Closed Tags: .

And it’s not even a nice error page.

Living in a Desert you notice a lot of sand + Resourcer technology updates

Published on September 16, 2008 in Business, Development and Observations from the Web. Closed Tags: , , , .

So Resourcer is currently in a live prototype state. This means that we’ve moved past the basic HTML+CSS design stage, and are now linking various parts of the website to a MySQL database. Of course this means that various parts of the site are up and down at any one stage, but we’re getting there slowly. A roadmap from here is:

  1. Finish linking core application functionality with database.
  2. Gather requirements and building secondary application functionality.
  3. Finish information type pages.
  4. Tidy pages, do quality assurance, move project into Beta stage and open logins to other people.
  5. Move application onto framework, either Seagull or Silverstripe.
  6. Tidy pages, do quality assurance, move project and beta data/logins onto Gold release.
  7. Publish API.
  8. Advertise.

Also, I’ve noticed an awful lot of time tracking applications on the web, like Harvest, Tick, 88 Miles, and 14 Dayz (seriously, a Z on the end?). They’re all sexy web 2.0 applications that focus on the hastle that is Time Management. Where does the time go? I’d never noticed this applications until I started working myself in this space, and then saw all the other people who were there, hence my sand in the desert headline. But there’s a bit of a difference between Resourcer and time tracking applications:

  1. Resourcer tracks the time between each status update. There’s no timers, no punch in and punch outs. Managers can see how much time was taken between status updates, but that doesn’t imply the amount of time spent on a particular task.
  2. Resourcer focuses on a higher level than tracking time taken to do a particular task. Your status update could be about one or many or no tasks. Instead Resourcer is at heart a communications application across large enterprises.
  3. Where we improve on basic collaboration tools (like email and instant messaging) is our reporting tools for Managers to see snapshots of workforce utilization and to dice that information into project, or manager, or business unit specific reports.
  4. Where we improve on complex collaboration tools (like portals) is ease of use across multiple GUIs and multiple devices using our simple API, and ease of use to end customers. We want to be as simple as Twitter, but a lot more powerful to business.

Good morning Resourcer

Published on September 13, 2008 in Business and Development. Closed Tags: , .

And on a fine day in Silicon Welly, I’ve taken the first steps towards a new service for large enterprises to manage their human resources. This is of course, Resourcer. And while the link could be interperated as Gore-Sourcer, or the source of all Al Gore related things, the link is actually Go-Resourcer, as in, go you good thing go.

While I’m being a little light weight on the details, they’ll all come out in the wash soon enough.

Action points from here:

  1. The Resourcer homepage is built around Seagull PHP Framework. Should I develop the entire solution on the framework, meaning a longer learning time initially but a more robust solution in the future or;
  2. Continue to knock up functional prototypes using just basic PHP and MySQL, which would respond better to continually changing requirements.

I think trying to nail down requirements at the same time as learning a new framework is a tall order, and something is bound to slip through the cracks. The decision I’ve made is to continue developing functional prototypes with basic PHP and MySQL (ignoring things like logins), and once the prototype has been created, replicate that functionality on the Seagull Framework.

Differences between the first dot com boom and the second dot com boom

Published on September 13, 2008 in Business and Observations from the Web. Closed Tags: , .

So here’s some differences between the first dot com boom and the second dot com boom:

  1. Successful businesses need to have a viable business plan
  2. A great idea is not enough – it needs to be executed well
  3. There needs to be a revenue stream (except for Meebo?)
  4. New businesses run on the smell of an oily rag rather than million dollar IPOs
  5. New businesses actually make money.

Free Sun Access Manager training

Published on September 12, 2008 in Career Development. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

If you’re deploying the Sun Identity Management suite in a complex deployment, then check out Sun’s Free OpenSSO training. This training gives you a workbook and a virtual machine, and walks you through the process of:

  1. Setting up Apache Tomcat 6
  2. Enabling HTTPS support on Tomcat
  3. Setting up Sun Java Web Server 7 as a load balancer
  4. Deploying OpenSSO to Tomcat
  5. Setting up Session failover
  6. Setting up Sun Java Web Server 7 and Glassfish
  7. Installing Sun Access Manager Policy Agents to protect the above web servers

It’s a complex workbook (and there are a few issues, both with the workbook and the technology), but it’s free training, and gives you a glance of what to expect from Sun Access Manager 8.0.