Posts Tagged 'technology'

Having been given a couple of IDs for the Google Wave sandbox, we decided to have a play.

Many of you will have seen the (rather long it must be said) official video from Google I/O 2009 (see it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ) and, if you managed to stay the course you will have seen a great technology demonstration.

So what’s it like for real?

To begin with, in common with all products at this stage of their development it is buggy. Not majorly so, but subject to various browser crashes and unexplained behaviour, ho-hum. Since we first had access the stability has improved greatly, so there is a lot going on behind the scenes. Other than that, it is fairly polished and works as expected.

The best way that I can describe Wave is that it is a realtime email with bells on. The basic atom is a “wave”, which has participants, i.e. you and the recipient(s). You can both type and interact in the wave, seeing in real time what each other is typing, sharing (drag and drop photos and embed videos) and are able to invite more participants as you go along. New participants can add to and modify the existing wave, it’s completely open. Private messages can also be sent between any number of the participants of the wave allowing for more private discussion.

Along with human participants, you can also add software participants called robots. There are some neat robots already there for example:

Tweety the twitbot that brings a Twitter feed into the wave
Rosy Etta – the translation bot that does realtime translation across about 40 languages (and is pretty smart at it too)

Then there are gadgets that you can interact with, for example there is a Chess playing gadget, and one that brings Google Maps into the wave.

The wave continues forever so you can leave and come back where you left off whenever you wish. And because everything is stored, you can replay waves to see how the conversation progressed, so much better than trying to follow email trails.

At the moment it is only possible to run waves in Google’s sandbox, so there isn’t a lot of stuff we can show, but we have started doing some Google Wave consultancy, speccing out business applications looking at the implications and feasibility of new applications. In the future you will be able to run your own wave servers, and there will be, I am sure, a market for wave hosting.

It is fair to say that we are coming up with new ideas for this all the time, everywhere you look on the web you start seeing things that could be done better with waves.

The big question is whether it is sufficiently disruptive technology to change they way things are done now? From what I’ve seen I’d have to say yes.

While all the world is all a’twitter about Google Chrome OS, it is time to take a couple of minutes to reflect on Google’s other OS Android.

After a slowish start with only one handset available for a long time my impression is that there is a growing momentum behind Android. There are now 5 handsets available from HTC and Samsung, showing the flexibility of the platform.

And if the rumour mills are to believed (and they aren’t often wrong) Sony Ericcson and Nokia are also preparing Android phones, amongst others. Motorola are also poised to jettison Windows Mobile in favour of Android.

More importantly, with 02 getting the rights (not yet confirmed) to the Palm Pre and already having the exclusive on the iPhone – there is little choice of carrier if you want a state of the art smartphone.

Google aren’t talking much, but at a presentation I went to recently they were stressing mobile, particularly allied to maps, very strongly. And looking at the statistics they shared and some of the uses to which smartphones are being put to, it is hard not to see 2010 as the (takes a deep breath) year of the mobile.

So why not the iPhone? After all it is the leading player (in mindsets if not volume), has an large developer community around it, the oft quoted billion app downloads, and it looks great, (although the icons are starting to look a little bit Fisher-Price imho)

Well the answer is simple, pace of innovation. The open (linux based) platform of the Android means that developers can access the platform and add things to it. Unlike the iPhone with it’s annual June lovefest where Apple release their goodies, Android innovation happens daily, and it is mostly ported back to earlier handsets.And in less than a year (the G1 was introduced to the UK in September 2008) the OS has matured, is feature rich and has reached version 1.5 (approaching the magic 2.1 when things really work). Oh and it is natively multitasking, and has naturally great integration with Google products Gmail, Maps, Apps, Docs etc.

And whilst on the application side, whilst there is not the sheer number of fart machines and other useful apps (only joking) the ones that are appearing are very good. For example Wired says that Spotify for the Android should frighten Apple (http://bit.ly/e3gHO), and Nick Brown, Spotify’s MD says that they are able to do more with Android as they can integrate further into the OS. So it’s volume versus openness and only time will tell.

The other development byproduct that might help is that by having put your app on Android, it is not such a leap to put it on desktop linux (and Android is poised to make a move to nettops). This is where Chrome OS starts fitting in nicely.

This is probably the most interesting time for mobile for a few years, and I for one look forward to the innovations coming down the line.

This started as a project like many others. There was a great concept, an idea, a strategy, a plan, and a creative, for engaging with the client’s audience.

The concept is great, the client loves it, it ticks all the right boxes it shows the human side of the brand, it (dreaded words) “could go viral” – all we have to do now is implement it. What could be simpler? Frankly, almost everything.

So the Q&A starts:

• How many visitors – loads
• How many uploads – as many as we can get
• How big will the files be – hmmm, anything from a few hundred K up to 10′s  of megabytes
• How long is it going to run – don’t know

so, no change there then.

Now in the old days,we’d have a bit of a think, scribble some numbers into a spreadsheet, multiply everything up, say “how much?”, revisit the assumptions (how many people are really going to scan and upload all of their business cards?) vacillate between the two extremes of its trivial and it’ll melt down the web until eventually we stick a finger in the air take a deep breath and say don’t worry it’ll be fine on our existing infrastructure. Cue sleepless nights and lots of contingency plans, worst comes to the worst we can xxxxx, you can fill in the blanks.

But not any more.

Now we go, no sweat, when do you want it live? No panic, no worry, bandwidth – all you can eat , server getting overloaded, run up another one, overcapacity, shut one down. How cool is that?

And all because of Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing is the concept of using large virtual servers on the internet.  Amazon and their ilk have to have massively more capacity than they use at any one time for resilience to cope with peak loads, all sorts of reasons. Rather than keeping this spare capacity sitting there doing nothing, there is a business to be made offering them it to other companies. And so were born Amazon’s Elastic Computing (EC2) and Simple Storage Services (S3) offerings.

For a low rental price you can sign up for either or both of these services and away you go.

These services are most commonly used by Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. No up front investment in hardware and infrastructure, low ongoing costs and the ability to be “web scale” if you’re massively successful.

You can sign up online, choose your server capacity, choose a disk image, boot it up, install your software (an Apache web server and an Adobe ColdFusion server for example), point your DNS and away you go.

We have now set up our first client site on the Cloud. It is a promotional site, with relatively unknowable parameters that could use a lot of resources. By using the cloud we can be very confident that we can cope with any peaks that the internet can throw at us and we can scale accordingly. And when the promotion is over, we just scale back down onto some real servers somewhere. Better for us, better for the client, better for the visitor, better for Amazon, it really is a win, win, win, win situation.

The lesson here for brands is that Cloud Computing is an effective, and low cost way of getting large scale promotions onto the web at low risk. The downside, and the reason I wouldn’t suggest the cloud for mainstream systems, the “keep everything in the Cloud” approach, is the limitations of a relatively weak SLA and the immaturity of the solution. Recent episodes where both Amazon and Gmail disappeared for extended periods show the risks, acceptable for a promotion, a killer for your core applications.

The Project? Ah, all in good time, just watch this space.