TweetDeck swallowed up by Twitter?

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

I am guessing the majority of you reading this blog have probably been sucked into the microblogging world/social network that is Twitter? (I’m @NifS by the way. Oh, and don’t forget @ITPRO…)

Well, those who use the addictive web tool are also more than likely to have heard of TweetDeck. It is a superb little invention by Iain Dodsworth, arguably the easiest to use and best functioning desktop application to keep on top of multiple Twitter accounts, along with rival social networking sites.

What makes me particularly proud of TweetDeck is it isn’t some large corporate operation, nor another innovation from Silicon Valley we wish to covet. It is from one man based in the new-fangled tech hub of the world in London’s East-End.

So, why bring it up now? Well, it appears Twitter has picked up on its popularity and the rumour mill suggests it has bought the one man band for a tidy sum of $40 million.

This is not the first, and undoubtedly won’t be the last, client Twitter has snapped up, but it has left me in two minds.

As I said, part of me is proud. TweetDeck is exactly the sort of thing we should be showcasing in the UK. A single developer building up a superb application that went viral and became the most popular client, only second to Twitter itself, being recognised and bought in triumph.

At the same time, I am always sad to see the little guys swallowed up into large companies, never sure whether they want to kill the platform to progress their own or just take credit for all the hard work done before them.

Now, I know Twitter is still a relatively small business, despite its global numbers, and it obviously realises something good when it sees it.

But, if this acquisition has gone through, I really hope Dodsworth and his beautiful creation doesn’t disappear into the ether. He is one of the tech champions we need in the UK to encourage others to get on board and TweetDeck is one of the examples we should use to show what can be done with little start-up capital.

Best of luck to all involved and Dodsworth? I hope you get a nice Lamborghini out of it…

Cisco and Dell: A stormy nuptial on the horizon?

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

A matter of weeks ago the death of Flip was announced by Cisco. Not a sell-off or a cut down of resources, a total burial of the device which came from a company acquisition just two years ago.

Now the web is awash with rumours John Chambers’ shake-up of the Cisco catalogue is about to see two more divisions for the chop.

First up is Linksys, a consumer router division bought by Cisco back in 2003. If Cisco is turning away from these types of small fry buyers – let’s face it, the Cius tablet has yet to even emerge – then we could see why it could go.

Second is WebEx, acquired by Cisco in 2007. The online collaboration tool for web and video conferencing seemed to be a natural place for Cisco to put resources, but again, there is not often smoke without fire – ask Ryan Giggs.

What would be the biggest news to come out of all of this though is the possible merger of Cisco with Dell.

After Chambers revealed the shores in the bay were stormy of recent with “disappointed investors” and “confused employees,” the questions have been fired at the company about what they would do going forward.

Also, remember, Chambers has been leading the ship for 16 years and is due for retirement in just three, so how long will he be around to protect his baby?

Dell and Cisco could make quite a team. Despite it spreading itself rather thinly in the past few years, Cisco still has a great dominance in networking and has made a respectable play into the data centre hardware market.

Dell is a more than a worthy adversary in this area, but its failed attempts to buy up smaller firms like 3PAR has left it trailing even further behind its arch nemesis HP.

A pairing of the two would undoubtedly send shivers down the spines of Leo Apotheker, along with the upper esculents of IBM and even Oracle, but can we really see the two giants playing nicely together when they have been on their own for such a long time?

Obviously we asked Cisco about the acquisitions but were given the usual line of “we don’t comment on rumour and speculation.”

We will be watching closely, however, to see how – or indeed if – Chambers can pull this one back or have to row his lifeboat over to Dell’s studier ship.

Developing for mobiles

Monday, March 21st, 2011

Since HP acquired Palm webOS has had a lot more going for it. HP seems to want it on all platforms, not just phones
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110209xc.html

The idea of an OS that runs on your PC, slate, phone, MP3 player, …. seems nice for users and a joy for developers – though it could put a few of us out of a job, the hours I’ve spent porting apps from one OS to another have kept me in work and mortgage payments many a time!

The idea of an OS written with the web in mind also seems a good one.

Anyway, if you are interested try a google, but I’d suggest
http://www.palm.com/us/products/software/webos2/ & http://developer.palm.com/
as good starters.

And if you want to get more involved on a less virtual level try
webOS CONNECT London Kick-off
http://www.amiando.com/webosconnectlondon.html

I’m off to polish my java / java script!

Has Anonymous really targeted Westboro Baptist Church?

Monday, February 21st, 2011

Anonymous has drawn a new organisation into its crosshairs – the highly controversial Westboro Baptist Church.

Actually, nope, scrap that… it seems it’s all just a hoax. But not one organised by Anonymous, but by the anti-gay church itself.

According to an Anonymous release the whole thing was designed to give the church, which was the subject of an excellent Louis Theroux documentary not so long ago, some limelight, as well as trick the hacker group.

“You thought you could play with Anonymous. You observed our rising notoriety and thought you would exploit our paradigm for your own gain. And then you thought you could lure some idiots into a honeypot for more IPs to sue,” the message to Westboro Baptist Church read.

Anonymous warned its members not to launch a DDoS attack, claiming that the church had its “ports wide open to harvest IPs to sue.”

But this is where the whole concept of Anonymous becomes a troubling one – if it has no accountability then the group opens itself up to such dirty tricks (if it was a trick…) and even somewhat destabilises its credibility, even if its causes are thought to be morally right.

How do we know the aforementioned post was really from Anonymous? And how do we know the original message calling for attacks on the church was a hoax? Who writes the releases? Who is running the show, if anyone?

For its backers, the great thing about WikiLeaks is that it is accountable – it has a face in the form of Julian Assange. This means people have something to hold onto and can really get behind. Indeed, Anonymous itself became famous through its support of Assange and his cause.

Of course, Anonymity can have its benefits – most notably that things can be said that need to be said, without any comments having to be attached to a certain individual or organisation.

But what I would say is that accountability can create martyrs, and martyrs can aid a cause, just as targets give you something to shoot at.

Whether you agree with the way Anonymous goes about its business or not, the fact is it will always have to cope with fakers. It’s an easy model to hijack.

And what if another organisation tries to pull what Westboro Baptist Church supposedly did with IP harvesting, but succeeds? Anonymous members could find themselves in handcuffs. Just earlier this year, arrests were made as part of investigations into the group, so law enforcement are clearly after them.

Oh and then there’s the issue with being a protest organisation, and yet staunchly in favour of free speech. Anonymous will also have to cope with the paradox that when fighting against certain causes, you risk going against advocacy of freedom of speech. Admittedly, the group has tread this line carefully and avoided any hypocrisy from this respect thus far.

Expect to see more twists in 2011 – another big year for Anonymous and hacktivism in general.

Massive Amounts of Big Language Abuse

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

IT and the US are both major sources of corruption – of the English Language at least. HP has just acquired Vertica
http://www.vertica.com/

and I was going to blog of the IT business implications but can only get as afar as
“Customers Can Analyze Massive Amounts of Big Data at Speed and Scale”

Where else could you read “Massive Amounts of Big Data”? You only have to look further down the page before you hit a “monetizing”. Eugh!

Anyway, hopefully this is part of HP’s commitment to high value, high return software rather than low margin hardware.

Here there be Dragons

Friday, October 15th, 2010

Back in the good old days when when there be Dragons and Margaret Thatcher told the world ‘everyone needs a Willy’ in those days a Jet Set version, we had a whole Spectrum of home computers. Who needed such boring things as word processors?

Blimey! What were computers for other than making sure your little green ‘bullet’ slowly made its way to the evil Death Star target. Besides, how could we have printed the resulting document? Printers were extremely expensive, huge and noisy gadgets.

Then those boffins at DEC ruined it all by inventing word processors. Their original, WPS-8, was page-oriented rather than document-orientated. Which meant that you worked on each page by itself. If the text over-ran it had to be cut out and placed at the top of the next page. If that pushed text off that page, the extra text had to be cut and placed in the next page, and the next page…

Golf Balls
This page orientation was just the job for making designs, especially as the output was often done on golf ball printers which had a selection of typefaces, each on a removable golf ball which pushed the letters through one-time foil printer ribbons. These gave excellent results. So good that the output was used for making newsletters and magazines.

Columns of text were pasted onto artwork boards and photographed to make printing plates. With our then ’studio’, about three homes ago, we used to use a double bed as our work bench, it being the only area large enough to take the huge art boards.

By then it was also possible to send computer files for output on high quality photo-setting machines which printed them on bromide paper in long ‘galleys’. The coding looked a lot like HTML and like web design, forget to turn off italics in the coding and the galley arrived with three metres of italicised text.

Word processors then moved to the new WYSIWYG computer systems coming from the likes of Apple, Commodore and Atari. It soon became obvious that word processors, even document-orientated ones, were not the answer for making real books and magazines and desktop publishing was born. Obviously with a bit of help from Adobe, Apple, Xerox and others.

Write’s alright
Meanwhile, Microsoft made a pretty neat word processor called Write, devised largely to compete with Apple’s MacWrite and supplied with Windows 1 and 2, Atari TOS and Mac OS. Although it was fairly simple compared with today’s word processors, it was capable of doing just about everything the average user needs today. Which appears to be organising text with space space space space, return return return return. Adjustment of line or paragraph spacing is a complete mystery, as is the point of turning on invisibles to see why they cannot get the words to line up. “I didn’t type that” (symbol for paragraph ending or tab).

Microsoft Write developed into Word and became the world’s most-used word processor. Those that chose a different one could always open and save documents in the almost universal doc format. Most now use ODF, a free-to-use, universal standard devised to guarantee long-term access to data without legal or technical barriers. The data storage is far more sophisticated than earlier formats and the resulting files automatically ZIP compressed. Of course, Microsoft bludgeoned a new ‘standard’ into existence, their semi-proprietary Open XML or docx format.

My colleagues can be reasonably sure they can open any document made in just about any version of Word currently running, including ODF files. Except that is their new ’standard’ the dreaded docx. Installing their free converters (how many times have I had to do that?) doesn’t necessarily mean the converted docx will look remotely like the original Unlike documents saved as RTF or ODF.

The Bad, the Worst and the Ugly
But the biggest, worst, ugliest and most stupid mistake must surely be the abomination Microsoft have made of the new version of Word. Did they think of the end-user? Did they redesign the interface for any valid reason? Our office spends, no completely wastes, hours every week trying to get the new copies of Word to do what the old versions can with ease.

It took a whole day, an IT department and four of us to work out why the text steadfastly refused to turn from red to black, which it had automatically done mid-sentence. In the end I exported it as a doc file to an older version of Word and changed it there. This is just one small example out of a huge pile we get every day. I hate Wednesdays when all the staff are in for a team meeting. I spend most of it running from one machine to the next, sorting out their tussles with Word.

Meanwhile, in organisations not beholden to the great god of Seattle, they have gone for free software or bought in one of the many cheap, reliable and better options. Such as SunOffice, NeoOffice and OpenOffice. Their users happily swap ODF files between each other and can all access them. The software is clean and easy to use and did I mention free?

Where to put docx files
There is one new piece of software which is stylish, easy to use and on the pocke and is a combination of word processor and page-layout application. But it doesn’t support ODF. It is Apple’s Pages app, arguably the easiest and best of the lot apart from that one big missing capability.

As for Microsoft, I like to get a dragon to blow fire straight up their corporate…

Windows Phone 7 + Flash = iPhone killer. Wait, what?

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

The internet is a bit like a slightly eccentric relative. It makes a lot of noise and always seems to be around, whether you want it to or not. The latest mad tattle spewed out on the web is an alleged meeting between the CEOs of Adobe and Microsoft and the speculation that this forms part of merger negotiations between the two software giants in an effort to combat Apple in the smartphone market.

But first, something completely different

Unlike a mad relative and their crazy ideas about tin foil hats and aliens, this rumour deserves to be taken a little more seriously. Microsoft’s software products cover almost every category imaginable – operating systems, servers, office suites, web browsers, databases and games. One of the most noticeable omissions is creative design software – Adobe’s territory.

For a company that depends almost exclusively on Office and Windows for profits, buying Adobe and its extensive range of lucrative creative software to add some diversity and conquer yet another market must be very attractive. Given Microsoft’s size and greater finances it would almost certainly be a purchase of Adobe by Microsoft and not a merger of equals.

However, if Microsoft does buy Adobe, Ballmer and his crew will need to do a better job of integrating and exploiting it than they have compared to other, recent acquisitions. Bungie, despite bringing the lucrative Halo video game franchise to the Xbox 360, has been spun off which potentially allows Bungie’s talent to be exploited by rival console makers once their post-spin off exclusivity agreement ends. The acquisition of smartphone maker Danger has so far brought little benefit to Microsoft, despite the burgeoning smartphone market, apart from an embarrassing loss of customer data and the Kin smartphone which was canned after mere weeks on the American market.

For Adobe, the benefits of being bought by Microsoft for its desktop software business are less clear. The company doesn’t need Microsoft’s help to sell shiploads of its software. A large portion of those sales are to Mac users. They now have Apple-developed alternatives to some Adobe products, such as Final Cut instead of Premiere and Aperture instead of Lightroom. However, unless Apple also develops credible alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, Adobe’s future in the Mac market will be safe and it still has significant Windows sales to rely upon.

I love it when you call

Despite the potential benefits that Photoshop and the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite could bring to Microsoft, it’s smartphones and tablets that may be the real driving rationale behind any potential acquisition. Both Adobe and Microsoft may miss out in these lucrative markets and they may be better able to compete by combining their efforts, if the pundits are to be believed.

Apple has famously barred Flash Player from the iOS for a variety of reasons. Although Apple now accepts apps developed in Flash, Adobe is still at the mercy of Steve Jobs. Although Flash Player is now available on some Android phones and Flash-developed apps will also run on RIM’s upcoming PlayBook, Adobe’s position in the smartphone and tablet markets is nowhere near as dominant as it is on the desktop.

On the desktop, there’s little choice other than Flash for multiplatform streaming video and apps. With smartphones and tablets, there are HTML5 videos and apps, as well as native platform apps. Despite the buzz surrounding HTML5, Adobe’s support for the emerging standard in its web development program Dreamweaver is incomplete at best so it’s still dependent on Flash and Flash Player.

Microsoft has of course launched Windows Phone 7 in an attempt to compete against the iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Like Adobe, Microsoft is in a position of weakness here, compared to its overwhelming dominance of desktop operating systems. Although, judging from initial impressions, Windows Phone 7 is a vast improvement over Windows Mobile, it’s a late comer to a market where Apple has set the standards, RIM has a large following among business and government users, while Android is now the operating system of choice for many OEMs that were previously Windows Mobile licensees.

One way for both Microsoft and Adobe to compete in the smartphone and tablet markets is to combine their resources and back a unified development standard to rival iOS native apps. What standard a combined Microsoft-Adobe would back, however, is up for debate.

Flash is well known and is supported in one way or another by iOS, Android and the PlayBook, but not, tellingly, Windows Phone 7. Microsoft does support Silverlight, its home grown competitor to Flash, as a development environment for Windows Phone 7. Choosing one over the other, or merging the two, would be full of technical, political and commercial hurdles, many of which would be tricky to overcome.

Perhaps the greatest of which is how Apple, Google and RIM would react to a Microsoft Flash. If they react negatively, which Apple almost certainly will, they would embrace native and HTML5 apps even more. This would undermine the supposed write-once, run everywhere advantage of Flash, and there’s no guarantee Flash or a Flash-Silverlight hybrid be compelling enough to attract developers to Windows Phone 7 to both boost Windows Phone 7 as a platform in its own right and make up for the loss of development business on those other platforms.

Even if these hurdles could be overcome, whether they’re worth overcoming is a different matter entirely. If desktop software is just a sideshow and smartphone/tablet development is the priority, a Microsoft-Adobe alliance or joint venture rather than a full-on merger/acquisition would be less risky and costly. As I see it, what Microsoft and Adobe don’t want to do is to repeat the mistakes of AOL-Time Warner – merge for woolly reasons rather than for concrete, achievable benefits.

Taking the BI-gher ground

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Who would have thought the world of CRM and business intelligence applications could be such a hotbed of gossip, intrigue and good old traditional bitching?

It is no secret that competition is rife in this area and certain men, perhaps going by the names of Ellison and Benioff, really do like to rant and rave, not just about how superior they are, but how inferior their competitors are.

Unfortunately for those who favour the soap opera approach to things, SAP would not bite today. I spent half an hour chatting with the head of large enterprise in Europe, Chris McClain, at SAP’s World Tour event in Birmingham and he was mightily well behaved, taking the higher ground.

When I asked him how his company compared to competitors he was very aloof saying the companies “didn’t come into his mind” and even when talking to customers they “didn’t come up.”

I found that hard to believe but he was pretty adamant his focus was on his own company, not the performance of rivals.

McClain did pass a slight comment on the environment of those companies, pointing out the negative comments “come from the top” down, referring to the gents I mentioned earlier, and the closest he came to a negative remark was to claim the best way was to focus on what his company wanted to do and by doing this, they would do better.

“We will see who comes out on top,” he said but clearly McClain had the faith SAP would take the number one spot.

Last year I had an entirely different experience with Mark Benioff of Salesforce. He is Larry Ellison’s protege so obviously not a bad word was said about Oracle, but he leapt into a vicious attack on SAP saying “their religious and fanatical denial of the cloud may have destroyed their company.”

However less than a year later SAP were ‘bigging up’ their cloud or “on demand” strategy, be it more aimed at the private cloud market favoured by the likes of EMC and HP than Benioff’s public cloud.

Maybe I shouldn’t revel in the bitchy nature of business but even the more passionate about software of you would probably agree a bit of spicing up doesn’t hurt BI conversations.

Oh well, at least Tim Noble, managing director of SAP in the UK and Ireland, managed to sneak in a quick dig at Oracle’s Business Intelligence 11g product, launched yesterday, saying he hadn’t seen “anything new” in the feature set, despite Oracle’s claims the software was full of industry firsts.

Is this the iPhone 4.0?

Monday, April 19th, 2010

And we don’t mean the OS.  Apparently, someone picked up an iPhone-looking device lying about, and sent it in to Engadget.

Their ever-wonderful sources say it’s real — but only time will tell… What features would you like to see on the next iPhone? Forward-facing camera? Faster processor? Let us know in comments below…