DeveloperZen.com - Technology

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Dare has written a post that claims there's an exodus from Google to Microsoft. The post is driven by his own observations and a post entitled Back to Microsoft from Sergey Solanik detailing his departure to Microsoft.
Sergey's post contains some very interesting observations:

So why did I leave?

There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement. There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid. I will not write about these things here because they are immaterial. I did not leave because of them. No company has achieved the status of the perfect workplace, and no one ever will.

I left because Microsoft turned out to be the right place for me.

First, I love multiple aspects of the software development process. I like engineering, but I love the business aspects no less. I can't write code for the sake of the technology alone - I need to know that the code is useful for others, and the only way to measure the usefulness is by the amount of money that the people are willing to part with to have access to my work.

Sorry open source fanatics, your world is not for me!

Google software business is divided between producing the "eye candy" - web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to support them.

And some observations of Google's culture (bolding was done by me):

...

On the other hand, I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and slick as it is, there's just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it's a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more.

This is probably fine for free software, but I always laugh when people tell me that Google Docs is viable competition to Microsoft Office. If it is, that is only true for the occasional users who would not buy Office anyway. Google as an organization is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.

The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture. And the culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked.

Since I've been an infrastructure person for most of my life, I value reliability far, far more than "coolness", so I could never really learn to love the technical work I was doing at Google.

Dare also quotes Svetlin Nakov that also have some interesting things to say about the Google culture:

"Google interview were not professional. It was like Olympiad in Informatics. Google asked me only about algorithms and data structures, nothing about software technologies and software engineering. It was obvious that they do not care that I had 12 years software engineering experience. They just ignored this. The only think Google wants to know about their candidates are their algorithms and analytical thinking skills. Nothing about technology, nothing about engineering."

"Google employ everybody as junior developer, ignoring the existing experience. It is nice to work in Google if it is your first job, really nice, but if you have 12 years of experience with lots of languages, technologies and platforms, at lots of senior positions, you should expect higher position in Google, right?"

This just demonstrates another cultural problem - Google doesn't hire the right people for the job.
Granted, young, enthusiastic developers, with string academic background (and probably several degrees) can do some cool innovative stuff. These are exactly the type of guys you would want in your R&D department.
But it also the type that tends to loose interest when the research phase ends and the projects has goes to scaling and maintenance phases where you have to deal with stuff like support, maintenance (Google doesn't even provide a roadmap for its products), localization, scalability, ...

The bottom line is, as Dare concluded, is that Google isn't a small startup anymore but it still thinks and acts like it is - in its hiring policies, internal processes and culture.
When measuring it up against other software giants it simply seems to lack...

As Fortune sums it up:

Think about that. Google recently made headlines by bidding almost $5 billion in a government auction of wireless spectrum, even though the company had no plan for using it. Some of its more peculiar products include Google Sky, Google Mars, and Google Ride Finder. It has become a significant investor in alternative-energy projects. Yes, alternative energy. And its founders fret that its risk-taking days are over? Then again, Google's biggest risk may be recreating the magic it enjoyed as a startup- that intangible quality that makes Silicon Valley tick. Paul Buchheit, the former Google engineer who is on to his second startup now, recalls what he loved about Google's early days. "I was always so excited at Google, because I didn't know what would happen next," he says. "Then I knew what would happen next." Predictability is a virtue in the world of big business. It's just not particularly Googley.

Maybe some of us in the industry were writing off Microsoft and crowning Google a little bit too soon...

Here are my notes from the Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference:

• Apple is cutting the price of the iPhone to $199 for the 8GB version and $299 for the 16GB version.
  This price tags now puts the iPhone in direct competition with Nokia on the consumers market and with Blackberry on the enterprise market.
  The iPhone is now targeting mainstream consumers and not only the high-end market...
  
• 35% of Fortune 500 companies participated in  Apple's enterprise iPhone experiment - including the US Army, Disney, etc. That's quite an impressive market engagement.
  The new iPhone enterprise features, coupled with the new competitive price tag can make Apple a significant player in the enterprise market. Look out RIM...
  
• Seems like $9.99 is going to be the pricing standard for iPhone apps. Cheap...
  
• MobileMe was dubbed "Exchange for the rest of us" - a new service from Apple to synchronize personal data across devices and platforms.
  Basically it does what Plaxo does but its not free :S
  • Microsoft's Live Mesh\SkyDrive\Foldershare services now have a new serious competition...
  • In "Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You" Joel Spolsky claims that data portability is just a theoretical problem invented by architecture astronauts (Ray Ozzie in this case).
    Joel picked a bad example to prove his point as I guess having all the major players trying to data portability is a sign that its a real need.
    Personally, I don't know what I would have done without Plaxo and Foldershare but that's a topic for another post I guess...
    
• The seventh release of the iPhone SDK is out.
  
• The next version of Max OS X is called Snow Leopard and is set to be released within a year.
  • Apple plans to support new hardware architectures (like multiple CPUs) and fix Leopard issues as well as add native support for Microsoft Exchange.
  • Sounds more like a Leopard Service Pack than a new major version...
    
• The “Apple Push Notification Service” - finally a decent solution for notifications for background applications on a mobile platform.
  Instead of draining battery life and degrading performance by running a background process, applications can use the service to update remotely.
  Here's how Dan Moran from MacWorld describes it:
  

  as you run an app like an IM client, it's connected to the server. When the user quits the app, the iPhone will maintain a connection to the server, which will let them push notifications. It can push three types of notification: badges, custom alert sounds, and you can push custom textual alerts, appearing kind of like SMS messages and you can provide buttons that will automatically launch application. Great thing about this design: it scales, but only requires one persistent connection. This is sweet, sweet news for all developers and those who wants to use IM clients especially.

Any other thoughts regarding Apple's announcements and plans?

 

Twitter is down again. Just ask http://www.istwitterdown.com/ ...

 

It's funny that we're starting to take this for granted...

The New York Times features an article entitled "The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits" two days ago, discussing the tech industry's Single-Era Conjecture:

"the invisible law that makes it impossible for a company in the computer business to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two technological eras."

The article explains about disruption with a focus on Microsoft, Google and the "Internet Tidal Wave".

The disruptive effect described in the article has been studied by Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, who published “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” (1997) in which he presented a what would become a widely noted framework to explain how seemingly well-managed, successful companies fail to prepare for the arrival of a disruptive technology and eventually lost market leadership.

"The Innovator's Dilemma" remains one of the best books I've ever read and if you haven't read it yet I suggest you do so...

 

It seems like Microsoft and Yahoo! are talking again to such an extent that is was either required, or in Microsoft's interest to release the following statement:

Microsoft Issues Statement Regarding Yahoo!

Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business.

REDMOND, Wash. — May 18, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today issued the following statement:

“In light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business.  Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo!  Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo! at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with other third parties. 

“There of course can be no assurance that any transaction will result from these discussions.”

This comes just a day after Carl Icahn proposed to replace the Yahoo! board in an attempt to revive the Microsoft acquisition deal...

The current guess is that Microsoft will try to buy just Yahoo's search business in an effort to prevent a Yahoo-Google deal that'll make Google take over Yahoo's paid search business.

I guess there will be more to come on that...

From Plaxo's Personal Card:

Today is a big day for us at Plaxo, as our partnership with Comcast was just announced. Plaxo will be part of Comcast’s Smartzone™, which aims to provide Comcast Triple Play customers with one central location to send and receive email and instant messages, check voicemail online, etc.

(The beta/soft launch for our work together started a few weeks back. If you’re currently a Comcast Broadband Customer and a Plaxo Member, you can sign up now by clicking here. )

We’re obviously thrilled to be working with Comcast, which is the nation’s leading MSO, with over 24.2 million cable customers, 12.1 million high-speed Internet customers, and 3.0 million voice customers. This should have significant implication's for Plaxo's growth curve.

 

Why I think this makes sense?

A smart unified address book fits in to the strategy of a broadband service provider aiming for unified communication services...

Update: more on that on Dennis Howlett's Comcast scoops up Plaxo: good move.

 

Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope, otherwise known as "the thing that made Robert Scoble cry" has been publicly launched today.

WorldWide telescope is a desktop application that essentially turns your computer into a virtual telescope, allowing you to browse the universe. You can roam the universe freely or choose from a growing number of guided tours by astronomers and educators. You can also join communities of stargazers, connect your own telescope to your computer and control using the application.

Another cool option allows you to gain a different perspective on what you're seeing by switching between imagery sources.

The interface is pretty complex right now but everything works quite smoothly once you get the hang of it. I guess Microsoft will have to simplify it to allow wide adoption

I don't know about you but I'm going to take some time and travel the universe...

dasBlog 2.1 just got released on its new home at CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/dasblog

You can read about the new release and the move to CodePlex on on dasblog.info:

About version 2.1

This version is predominately a bug fix release with a number of other small features and incremental improvements. Our 2.0 release was based on source revision 730 and 2.1 is based on source revision 813. So you see there has been tons of activity in the background.

Some of the bugs squashed are:

• Search result was displayed multiply times instead of once.
• Theme picklist displayed multiply times instead of once.
• Zip file creation of log files failed in certain cases
• Cross posting between multiply blogs failed in certain cases
• Better support for white space with the CSS PRE command for text formatting of sample source code etc.

Some of the new features are:

• GeoRSS support
• Several new user created macros for paging and theme layout improvements (currently only documented in the source);  CommentsCount, IfCommentsRawText, IfItemRawText, IfViewPermalinkUrlRaw, IfParamRawText
• Macros; OnPagePreviousLink/OnPagePreviousLink (Renders links to the previous and next posts on the same page, only in list view)
• Macros;  IfModified (prints localized text if entry was modified) - Modified, FormattedModified, FormattedModifiedBare (prints modified date/time if the entry was modified)

 

I was at the Ra'anana park this morning for the Robots Exhibition from the students of Aviv Highschool.
I was hoping to for some Robot Wars style action but the competition turned out to be in basketball - two competing robots are supposed to be able to lift a big heavy ball and put it in a "basket" (which is still pretty cool).

One of the students explained that these were the regional finals in a world-wide competition whose finals will be held at Atlanta later on this year. Can anyone post a link to this competition's homepage?
( I wonder how the same kind of event looks like at Singapore or Japan )

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the guys from Aviv school as the competing robot pretty much died at some point. Wish them good luck in getting to Atlanta...

 

P.S.

There should be an Israeli Robot Wars... That'll be cool...

 

About half a year ago, just before my lengthy travels to Bangalore and Seattle I came to the conclusion that its about time to take my emails online so that they'll be accessible from anywhere, not just the Outlook client on my personal machine.

Google Applications for your Domains seemed like exactly what I needed:

• I could keep my ekampf.com email address
• 5GB of online storage - no need to take care of backups etc.
• GMail's spam filter
• GMail's web interface which is a lot better than the interface my domain host had to offer
• Online Calendar and Address Book

Included Services:

• Email (obviously)
• Calendar
• Start Page

"The personalized start page is a syndicated version of iGoogle, allowing you to set up dynamic homepages for your users that bring together your content, Google services, and the best of the web."

• Chat - GTalk integrated with the Email service
• Web Pages - Allows you to create web pages for your domain using the Google Page Creator.
• Sites

"Google Sites is an online application that makes creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. With Google Sites, people can quickly gather a variety of information in one place - including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and text - and easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, an entire organization, or the world."

So, how do Google Apps stand up to the expectations?

The Good

Setup

Setting up my Google Apps for Domains account and configuring my domain was quick, smooth and simple.

Migration from Another Online Service via POP

GMail supports getting mail from other accounts via POP3. Simply go to your Google Apps mailbox, click Settings|Accounts and you can add a POP3 account for Google to fetch information from. I fetched all the information from my old email account without any problems.

When I wanted to import the mail items from my gmail.com account I got a message saying that GMail for Apps can't import from a Gmail mailbox via POP.
You have to use Outlook\Thu8nderbird as an alternative...

Migration from Outlook

Since I was using Outlook as my main email client before switching I had lots of emails on a local PST file (and several backup PST).
In order to move all these emails to Google I used Google's IMAP support in Outlook and drag-and-dropped all my items from the PST into Google's IMAP folder.

Note #1: that the Outlook 2007 support for IMAP sucks. It simply hangs when trying to move a large amount of items, so you have to perform this operation on small item batches....

Note #2: You can use this method to migrate mail items from any online service that Outlook can connect to. I used it to migrate my gmail.com account too...

Mobile Support

Google's mobile HTML interface for GMail works great. They've also got a GMail Mobile application that I've installed on my E65.
Now I can really access my mailbox from anywhere...

The Bad

Migration from GMail accounts

As noted in the previous section, Google Apps do not support fetching items via POP from Gmail mailboxes. I'd expect Google to make migration from GMail to Google Apps smoother, allowing me to merge my accounts.
This leads us to the second point which I find most annoying...

Severity: Bad.

Google Accounts CHAOS - Google Apps Accounts ARE NOT Google Accounts

So far, that's the most annoying issue with Google Apps.
I expected Google to support identity federation but they don't. My Google Apps account can only be used for logging into my Google Apps (mail, calendar, docs, etc.). In order to access any other services Google has to offer (Google Reader, Google Code, Analytics, Adsense...) I have to keep a gmail.com account (which means another mailbox etc.).

I can't tell you how annoying it is that in order to use the new friends feature of Google Reader I have to add all my contacts to the gmail.com address book and GTalk. I have to maintain two identities to be able to work with Google...

Severity: Awful.

Different Codebase Than Regular Google Services

It seems that the Google Apps codebase branched out of the main Google development code.
This is most noticeable when looking at iGoogle vs. Google Apps Homepage.
Google Apps users do not get the latest features and Google is in communication blackout as to its plans for Google Apps.
There's no Google Apps Blog, no roadmap describing Google's plan for this service and I haven't noticed any enhancement in the service so far.

Seems like Google just came up with an initial beta for a bunch of services, branched out from its main codebase and just left the project hanging in mid-air.

Severity: Awful.

Google APIs are not Compatible with Google Apps

I'm using Plaxo to sync my Address Book and Calendar between all my devices, computers and online accounts.
From all the services out there, only Google's calendar sync was buggy until not long ago (seems to work fine now) and Address Book sync doesn't work at all (it supposed to work one way only according to Plaxo but I was never actually able to get that work at all).

There seems to be all sorts of compatibility issues between Google services APIs and Google Apps.

Seems like I'm not the only one suffering here as Zoli posted about his Google Apps troubles too...

Severity: Bad.

Google Start Page

Simply doesn't measure up to its iGoogle brother and the other competitors. It looks bad and there enough good content available to make it usable...

Severity: Bad.

The Summary - Google Apps Chaos

For the simple use of online email, Google Apps deliver what is expected of it.
However, it seems like Google is in chaos with its services strategy:

• You have to maintain several identities to use different Google services.
• No clear roadmap for Google Apps. As a customer, I hate the uncertainty...
• Google Apps are branched out from Google. Again no word from Google on feature parity or integration efforts...

Google Apps could have been a great service for individuals and small businesses, but (as usual) Google seems to be missing it and yet again
providing us with a functionality impaired "beta" and no vision...

Maybe its time to look for alternatives. Microsoft Live seem to handle most of the mentioned issues so its worth to take a look...

 

TechCrunch and Macworld were live blogging from the Apple iPhone Software Roadmap event at the Apple campus at Cupertino.

Below are the main takes from today's announcements (plus some commentary of course):

• Long list of features aimed at the Enterprise market:
  • Push email\calendar\contacts
  • Global address list
  • Cisco IPsec VPN
  • Two-factor authentication, certificates and identities.
  • Enterprise-class Wi-Fi with WPA2/802.1x.
  • Security tools to enforce security policies.
  • Deployment tools to allow an organization to configure and set thousands of devices easily.
  • Data Security - Ability to protect iPhone data and remotely wipe it.
    
• Apple licensed the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol and will feature full Exchange sync support on the next iPhone update.

"With ActiveSync, the iPhone talks directly to Exchange. So the iPhone will get push e-mail, push calendaring, push contacts, global access lists, and remote wipe, all while talking to Exchange. And it's built into the existing applications -- mail goes into the same Mail program, calendar into the same Calendar, and so on."

• iPhone SDK

"Starting today we're opening up the same APIs and tools that we use to develop our own applications today. Now, there are a lot of pieces that make up an SDK. But the most important are the APIs and the platform. And we have a great one, Mac OS X." Layers: Core OS, Core Services, Media, and Cocoa. "To build the iPhone OS, we took the bottom three layers and moved them across. Now Cocoa is interesting... it's the best application framework out there, but it's based on a keyboard and mouse." Instead, they build Cocoa Touch, based on touch interaction with the iPhone OS."

According to Apple, its opening up all the APIs used by its own developers to develop the iPhone applications. They're also building tools to support developers (on a Mac):

"Now a brand new development tool, the iPhone Simulator. Runs on a Mac, and simulates the entire API stack of the iPhone OS. So right here, on your Mac, you can run your application in the simulator, which gives you an incredible turnaround time on development."

• iTunes as an Application Market

Apple is using iTunes to allow distributing and selling applications. Developers have a standard platform to be used for distributing their application.
The application store is going to be the exclusive way to distribute applications to the iPhone. It is going to be free of charge for free applications and will involve a 30% fee of revenues of commercial applications.

Reminds me of Nintendo tactics - in its early days, Nintendo kept all manufacturing rights for Nintendo hardware. Being the manufacturer of Nintendo cassettes media it made all its developer buy its media to be able to distributing games...

• Gaming platform

One of the aspects of the SDK is that it supports OpenGL for graphics and OpenAL for sound.
Apple had representative from EA testifying about the iPhone as a gaming platform and talking about games they're working on.
Apple is selling the iPhone as a device with serious gaming capabilities. I bet we'll also see more desktop oldies converted to iPhone now....
Combines with iTunes as a game distribution platform Apple can be on to something interesting here...  Kind of like what Microsoft is doing with Xbox Live! Arcade

• Business Applications Platform

The iPhone graphics capabilities can also be used for analytics in business applications, as demonstrated by a SalesForce.com application:

"Salesforce automation application comes on screen. There's a needle showing how a sales guy is doing, on a spectrum from red to green. A full iPhone toolbar on the bottom, and a native iPhone list at the top."

Other demos shown:

• Apple also had AOL talking about bringing AIM to the iPhone. I guess the other instant messaging platforms will follow...
• Epocrates - Software used by doctors. I guess Apple is joining Microsoft, Google, SAP and Oracle in attacking the health market

• iFund

Kleiner Perkins announced a $100 million iFund for investment in startups who create applications for the iPhone.
http://www.kpcb.com/initiatives/ifund/index.html

I wonder how corporate IT is going to treat these new features. Richard Koman at ZDnet seems skeptic...

In any case, an iPhone SDK plus tight integration with Exchange can bring up some interesting ideas for Enterprise Applications like the ones we're doing at SAP...
An iPhone Duet (iDuet) anyone?

 

This is absolutely awesome:

I should get a wiimote....

 

From the guys at Common Craft:

Via Craig's...

Nokia just announced its intentions on bringing Microsoft's Silverlight to its mobile phones:

Nokia to bring Microsoft Silverlight powered experiences to millions of mobile users
March 04, 2008

Extends choice for developers on the world's leading mobile platforms

Espoo, Finland - Nokia today announced plans to make Microsoft Silverlight available for S60 on Symbian OS, the world's leading smartphone software(1), as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.  Adding support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way.

"Today's consumers are very clear in what they want: easy access to tightly integrated services and data on any device," said Lee Williams, Senior Vice President in Nokia's Devices software organization. "Nokia's software strategy is based on cross-platform development environments, enabling the creation of rich applications across the Nokia device range.  Nokia aims to support market leading and content rich internet application environments and to embrace and encourage open innovation. By working with Microsoft, we are creating terrific opportunities and additional choices for the development community, S60 licensees and the industry as a whole."

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications.  Silverlight is already powering thousands of applications around the world and organizations including Entertainment Tonight, the NBA and NBC Universal to deliver superior Web-based experiences to their customers.  The arrangement with Nokia will substantially extend the reach of Silverlight by making the platform available for hundreds of millions of devices, including S60 on Symbian smartphones from a range of manufacturers, as well as Nokia Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.

"This is an important relationship on so many levels. Working with Nokia means we are easily able to reach a huge number of mobile users, including customers of all S60 licensees.  This is a significant step in gaining broad acceptance for Silverlight and ensuring it is platform agnostic. This is critical since we want to make sure developers and designers don't have to constantly recreate the wheel and build different versions of applications and services for multiple operating systems, browsers and platforms," said S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Developer Division.

"There is clear market demand for rich, Web-based services across a variety of device types, but developing these can often be commercially difficult. For Microsoft this extends Silverlight to a broader range of vendors, platforms and devices.  For Nokia it expands the web runtime options on its devices, enabling a wider community of developers and more applications. This should help the  uptake of higher speed mobile services and advance a new era of anytime, anywhere device-based computing", said Bola Rotibi , Principal Analyst at Ovum.

Microsoft will demonstrate Silverlight on S60 during the opening keynote at Microsoft's MIX08 conference on March 5 in Las Vegas. Silverlight is intended to be available to S60 developers later this year with initial service delivery anticipated shortly thereafter for all S60 licensees.   This will allow S60 application developers to use an even wider range of development environments for S60 on Symbian OS than today. Today S60 developers can use: C++ (using native Symbian OS APIs and Open C providing subset of standard POSIX libraries), S60 Web Run-time (supporting standards-based web technologies such as Ajax, JavaScript, CSS and HTML), the Java(TM) language, Flash Lite from Adobe, and Python.

I wonder if this is Silverlight 2.0 they're talking about. Will we have a CoreCLR running on Symbian OS?

My friend Eran from Kampyle invited me to be the first to try out and review their new service, now in private beta stages.
The company, based in Ramat Gan, offers a new service for website owners that will help them collect and manage user's feedback.

Reinventing the Feedback Form

According to Eran, most companies today use simple email forms to track feedback from end-users. This mailbox tends to become flooded as companies fail handling the overwhelming amount of feedback and lack the human resources required to read and analyze all the responses, to act upon these feedbacks and to respond to these feedbacks.

Kampyle aims to offer a service that can give insights that are usually only available to companies that are able to employ a large customer support organization - the ability to track, analyze, manage, act and respond to a large amount of feedbacks without requiring a significant human effort.

Making Sense of it All

Managing Feedbacks

One of the most important aspects of making sense of a large amount of comments is figuring out the similarities and grouping feedbacks according to topics.
Besides the obvious grouping by feedback type and sub-type, the Kampyle team is working on an algorithm that can also figure out similarities and group according to the actual content of the feedbacks. It can also provide an automatically generated summary for a group of feedbacks.

Besides the actual feedback, Kampyle also collects contextual information (like resolution, OS, browser version...) which may prove useful in understanding the feedback.

Analyzing Feedbacks

One of the important aspects of managing feedbacks is the ability prioritize the most important issues and analyze the possible causes.
Kampyle's Feedback Analytics dashboard provides an overview on the site's feedbacks. Besides the regular analytics features that illustrate the amount of feedbacks and the rate they're being received, overview of feedbacks by grade or by type, the Feedback Analytics screen displays information to help with decision making - which topics are the most important (most reported) and require attention and an analysis on the possible causes...

Acting and Responding to Feedbacks

The whole purpose of the management and analytics screen is to allow you to figure out what is the input you're end users are trying to provide you with, and act upon this information. End users like being listened to, and what better way to let them know you care about their feedback (which is not just thrown into a flooded unmonitored mailbox anymore) than to respond to their feedback?

Using Kampyle you can quickly respond to a group of users who gave feedback on an issue.

Final Thoughts

Every site and every new startup wants to gather feedbacks from its users. Developing such a system and dealing with the processing complexities is, by definition, not part of the company's core. So I think a lot of site owners will appreciate Kampyle for taking that task off their shoulders and providing them with an out-of-the-box service that provides them both actual feedback and insights, allowing them to concentrate on their core product - their site.

By the way, I've added Kampyle's feedback button to my blog's side panel on the right (and to the bottom) of this post.
Let's hear some feedback about this site... What do you think about the content?  Did you notice the new design? 

If you haven't heard of Modu by now you've probably been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks.
The company who's product has been a kept secret so far, has been spreading teasers around the net for the past couple of weeks until it finally announced and exposed their product yesterday.

Modu Mobile, led by Dov Moran - the mind behind the USB flash drive, aims to revolutionize the cellular world by introducing a modular phone, called Modu.
The Modu is a device, smaller than a credit card, containing flash memory and a cellular SIM and is meant to fit into different "Jackets" that can make use of its abilities. From cell-phone like devices to car radios, digital cameras and TVs - simply plug you're Modu device into the jacket and it'll have cellular abilities and access to the personal information you've got stored on it.

Basically, behind all the PR, teasers, and claims for revolution, the Modu simply adds cellular capabilities to the Disk-On-Key we all know - A DiskOnKey Evolution. Not such a  big surprise given Dov Moran as one of the inventors...

Can the Modu really deliver the revolutionary promises of its inventors?

To answer that question lets examine the DiskOnKey. Like the Modu, the DiskOnKey was also meant to be a small device that holds your personal data allowing you to carry that data with you anywhere and provide any device with a USB socket access to this data. Pretty much the same concept as Modu's Jackets "revolution" only based on a wide-spread standard - USB- rather than a proprietary one.

The main problem with the DiskOnKey is that the master copy of the information is saved in a single location which can only be plugged into one device at a time - not a limitation that is easy to live with, especially when there's an existing alternative of using wireless technologies (Wifi, Bluetooth, etc.) to sync the different devices and have all the data available anywhere and not locked in a single location on a single device.
The fact that you'll rarely find a USB socket in a newly purchased TV, car radio, etc. proves that the DiskOnKey failed in achieving its goal and penetrate the market that's beyond computers.

The Modu is exactly like the DiskOnKey only it uses a new proprietary connection standard...

Which leads us to the big question, what's so special about the new Modu Mobile that will make it succeed where the DiskOnKey failed?

 

Facebook is releasing a JavaScript library allowing Facebook applications to be embedded in any web-site - not just inside Facebook.
This small step brings Facebook closer towards becoming a true web operating system - a platform for any application that wants to use the user's context information (social information, friends etc.).

As Nick O'Neill from AllFacebook puts it:

...Facebook just released their JavaScript client library than enables developers to extend their applications to their own websites. Rather than building your applications strictly within Facebook you can now extend the full functionality of the platform to your own website and leverage Facebook as the tool for managing members and their relationships. Somehow nobody has seemed to take note of this significant step.

Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own website but leverages the power of users’ Facebook relationships? Now you can! There had previously been applications that could leverage the Facebook API prior to the launch of the platform but there are some significant differences now versus before. The first significant difference is the broader access to Facebook’s core features that the platform provides.

By extending to the web, Facebook will encourage the growth of its developers community without loosing its main asset - user's information and relationships (as opposed to OpenSocial that will allow users to take their data anywhere).

Unlike all the Web-OS companies trying to sell us "windows inside your browser" Facebook seems to get it - an operating system based on social information and relationships can be much more valuable than the one that simply operates our personal computers.
No wonder they're comparing Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Gates...

I found out about this cool new text-to-speech service from Jeff's blog. It's called Odiogo and it converts the text I write on my blog into audio.
It also makes my content downloadable so you can listen to it as a podcast on your iPods, MP3 players and cellular phones!

From the Odiogo web site:

Turn readers into listeners, and transform your blog into a high quality, ad-supporting broadcast that can vastly expand your audience reach!

• Automatic podcast generation
• “Near-human” quality text-to-speech
• Listen Button feature deployed in next to no time for WordPress, Blogger, TypePad and Terapad platforms
• Detailed download statistics
• Make money from embedded ads

I'm pretty happy with the results I'm getting on this blog. What do you think?

 

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I have a short introduction to Powershell presentation at SAP today and to make things interesting I made the presentation slides using a Powershell script rather than using Powerpoint (I actually stole and modified this).

So, here are my presentation's "slides":

$ppt = {