First Look at Blue Spruce, IBM's Next Generation, Browser-Based, Rich Media, Collaboration Platform

Exclusive: First Look at Blue Spruce, IBM's Next Generation Browser Platform

IBM is about to commit itself heavily to browser-based applications. The giant IT company is quietly working on a project called Blue Spruce, which aims to create a fully browser-based application development platform. ReadWriteWeb was given an exclusive first look at Blue Spruce. Last week at Web 2.0 Summit we sat down with IBM's CTO of Emerging Internet Technologies, David Boloker, for a "show and tell" of what IBM claims will be the next evolution of the browser. What's more, it's fully open standards based - so it is squarely aimed at challenging the proprietary rich internet platforms of Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Flash.

Blue Spruce is a project within IBM that is only about 5 months old. Up till now it hasn't been shown publicly. Blue Spruce isn't yet complete, but conceptually it is two different things:

• Project Blue Spruce Client Toolkit
• Project Blue Spruce Co-Web Server

Here's a summary of what we know so far about the Blue Spruce platform:

- Uses the WebKit Open Source Browser Engine (in the demo we saw, Safari was the browser being used)
- Uses the following Open standards: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, (All Ajax), XMPP, H.264
- Server runs on Linux, MacOS X
- Utilized OpenAjax Metadata Specification, so it can utilize any widgets
- It's being ported to IE 6+ and Firefox

NOT a Web Browser, But is a Platform

To be clear, IBM is not developing another browser. The client part of this project is based on a set of browser-based open standards technologies. They will in time (2010 timeframe) be integrated into existing browsers such as Safari, Firefox and IE.

The grand plan for IBM, we think, is that it wants the browser to become the platform for applications - thus putting pressure on companies like Microsoft and Adobe, which still rely heavily on desktop applications (albeit these days connected to the Web).

It's also worth noting that this isn't (yet) an open source project. David Boloker described it to us as a "community-sourced" project, meaning that it's built on open standards and so others in the developer community can contribute. Boloker said it "may" become an open source project in future, but it's too early to say.

Why is IBM Heading to the Browser?

We asked IBM CTO of Emerging Internet Technologies David Boloker why IBM is moving to browser-based applications. He replied that customers have been consistently telling them for 1-1.5 years now that they don't want to do installs anymore. Their customers want the rich experience that desktop apps have traditionally provided, but they want to have it in the browser. Collaboration and sharing data is also a trend that IBM is tapping into with Blue Spruce.

Proof of Concept Applications

At this time, Blue Spruce is in a closed beta period. IBM is creating applications for a number of customers, including Reuters and hospitals in Boston and New Zealand. They're focusing on 3 main areas right now: finance, health and "heavy industry" (defined as utilities, rail, steel, etc). As the project matures, we can expect to see IBM stepping up its application development efforts - services is after all a key part of IBM's business.

ReadWriteWeb was shown a number of 'proof of concept' demos. The functionality included Ajax-based mashups being used simultaneously by users in different locations (one in San Francisco, the other in Boston), audio and live streaming video (VGA currently, but HD is on the way) integrated with mashups, IM and feeds on the one browser page, and more rich functionality...

Your Gmail Account is Now An OpenID, Huh?

Your Gmail Account is Now An OpenID

by Erick Schonfeld on October 29, 2008

You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID.

By joining the OpenID movement, Google completes the trifecta and adds all of its Gmail users to the hundreds of millions of Yahoo and Windows Live accounts that can also be used as a single login for any Website that accepts OpenID. While Google is more than happy to become an issuer of OpenIDs, what is not so clear is whether it will accept other OpenIDs for people who want to sign up for Google services.

Google appears to be an OpenID “provider,” not a “relying party.” In other words, you cannot sign into Google with your Yahoo account. But this still helps the OpenID movement as a whole because it gives smaller sites more incentive to join as “relying parties.” Among the first sites to accept Gmail accounts for sign in are Zoho and Plaxo...

Ed: I don’t get OpenID. The RP still needs an account per user; and adds the burden to manage an alias list with multiple alias per user. The friction is higher for the user and developer. Why?

Most sites cache login information as cookies. As long as you visit once every 3 months. The login is there. Further, browsers track userid and password by site.

Is OpenID a solution in search of a problem?

Or is it a trojan horse to share information among websites. If it’s the latter, it invades personal privacy.

Can someone explain this to me?

Cloud, SaaS, ASP, Web Services - Microsoft Live Services, Windows Azure, Live Mesh Adds to Confusion

Ed: Do we need more confusion? Here it comes - more jargon from Microsoft. 

IBM offers hosted or outsourced services. Google Apps offers free, hosted, outsourced services. Microsoft leverages it's many products and intellectual property into a new service - sold for an undisclosed rental fee over the web. Let the new war begin.

I prefer simplicity for consumers, customers, and partners.

Ray Ozzie Has His Head In the Clouds

Microsoft wants in on cloud computing. At the company's Professional Developer's Conference today, Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure, its "internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers." Windows Azure will only be open as a technology preview to a very limited number of developers for now, and no pricing details have been revealed that I can find. But this is basically Microsoft's answer to Amazon's Web Services and cloud computing initiatives from other enterprise IT players, including everyone from IBM to RackSpace. Azure will run Windows servers and the .Net framework in the cloud as a hosted, pay-as-you go service. It will be part of what Microsoft is calling Live Services, and it will run Live apps, .Net apps, SQL server, Sharepoint servers, and Microsoft's Dynamics CRM...

Microsoft PDC2008: Ozzie Introduces Azure

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie started off the company's 2008 Professional Developer Conference With a discussion of the back-end , server parts of the company's "software plus services strategy." This doesn't get the attention that goes to client solutions - like Windows, which I expect we'll hear more about tomorrow - but it is crucial for developers and corporate users.

Ozzie said that Microsoft's big advantage in writing platforms comes from three items: It builds its own apps on the platform, which makes sure the platform works. Because of the size of Microsoft, its platforms are likely to reach critical mass. Microsoft has always understood that ISVs need to be successful for the company to be successful.

There's a lot of truth in that - there are many companies and developers who have grown using Microsoft's tools. But Microsoft has been a very aggressive competitor to some of its ISVs, a point Ozzie didn't make. Perhaps as a result, is seeing more competition than it has in years - particularly from open source software on the server and tools side...

Ray Ozzie Announces Windows Azure - "Windows in the Cloud"

Ray Ozzie opened the Microsoft PDC '08 this morning with a keynote speech. In it he announced Windows Azure, Microsoft's "Windows in the cloud". It is a new service based operating environment. He described it as a massive highly scalable service platform. What is being released today is just a fraction of what it will become. It will be Microsoft's highest scalable system enabling people and companies to create services on the Web.

On the new webpage for Windows Azure, it is described as follows:

Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft® data centers.

To build these applications and services, developers can use their existing Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 expertise. In addition, Windows Azure supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, and XML. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments.

Use Windows Azure to:

* Add Web service capabilities to existing packaged applications.
* Build, modify, and distribute applications to the Web with minimal on-premises resources.
* Perform services (large-volume storage, batch processing, intense or large-volume computations, etc.) off premises.
* Create, test, debug, and distribute Web services quickly and inexpensively.
* Reduce costs of building and extending on-premises resources.
* Reduce the effort and costs of IT management.

Why Platforms Are Letting Us Down - And What They Should Do About It

Why Platforms Are Letting Us Down - And What They Should Do About It

In good times everyone wants to be a platform. But when times are bad and platforms are just an expense, the resources suddenly shift away. The recent re-design of Facebook, the slow down of Google's Open Social, and Flock closing its extension site - these are all part of the same pattern. Platforms that don't have monetization wired in are only good for marketing. This is why the platforms of the future need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, but long-term sustainability and monetization.

Last week Flock's community manager Evan Hamilton emailed all developers who had submitted extensions to Flock to announce that Flock will no longer support most of the extensions hosted on extensions.flock.com.

The justification was that Mozilla was doing a better job hosting and promoting the add-ons, and the majority were the same for Flock and Firefox. Since Flock does not have enough resources to support the extension site, Evan announced the decision to "cut the fat that is our unwieldy extensions system". (Note the keyword 'fat', it will be important in the rest of the post).

In itself this move was not surprising. Flock's team has just released version 2.0 of its social browser and has other battles to fight. IE8 is coming out soon with innovative features. Mozilla is racing forward with Ubiquity and the upcoming Geo-aware Firefox 3.1. And Google threw its hat into the browser ring with Chrome, so competition is getting tight. For Flock to be a player in the browser market, it needs a razor focus on building a base of diehard fans. Extensions are not helping much in that respect, they're an expense, so it was logical to cut them.

Facebook Platform - The Big Up and The Big Let Down

When the Facebook platform was unveiled in 2007, it was called genius. Never before had a company in a single stroke enabled others to tap into millions of its users completely free. The platform was hailed as a game changer under the famous mantra "we built it and they will come". And they did come, hundreds of companies rushing to write Facebook applications. Companies and VC funds focused specifically on Facebook apps.

It really did look like a revolution, but it didn't last. The first reason was that Facebook apps quickly arranged themselves on a power law curve. A handful of apps (think Vampires, Byte Me and Sell My Friends) landed millions of users, but those in the pack had hardly any. The second problem was, ironically, the bloat. Users polluted their profiles with Facebook apps and no one could find anything in their profiles. Facebook used to be simple - pictures, wall, friends. Now each profile features a zoo of heterogenous apps, each one trying to grab the user's attention to take advantage of the network effect. Users are confused.

Worst of all, the platform had no infrastructure to monetize the applications. When Sheryl Sandberg arrived on the scene and looked at the balance sheet, she spotted the hefty expense that was the Facebook platform. Trying to live up to a huge valuation isn't easy, and in the absense of big revenues people rush to cut costs. Since it was both an expense and users were confused less than a year after its glorious launch, Facebook decided to revamp its platform.

The latest release of Facebook, which was released in July, makes it nearly impossible for new applications to take advantage of the network effect. Now users must first install the application, then find it under the application menu or one of the tabs, then check a bunch of boxes to add it to their profile (old applications are grand-daddied in). Facebook has sent a clear message to developers - the platform is no longer a priority.

Google's OpenSocial and The Me Too Syndrome

Apparently Google was threatened by the Facebook platform. Its quick response was OpenSocial, the open platform for social applications. Unlike Facebook, which was proprietary and closed, Google's was open to everyone. When OpenSocial was announced, techies raised their eyebrows - it looked raw and unpolished. Some of the existing iGoogle container APIs were mixed in with a new contact sharing library. But, being Google, a lot of people signed up to support it.

Fast forward one year later and how much has been done? Well some companies did implement some elements, but the overall buzz died. Why wouldn't Google put more resources and marketing behind it? Because now it doesn't matter. The Facebook platform play is over and so the marketing strategy called Opensocial is not a top priority for the search giant anymore.

Why Apple's App Store Will Be Different

Next we turn to the latest platform getting buzz, Apple's iPhone App Store. At first glance it's much like Facebook, but in reality it isn't. Firstly, the user profiles aren't visible - you can't see applications installed on your iPhone. Each user can decide which apps to get, based on a simple review-based dashboard. There's no promise of a massive network effect, although there's a simpler user experience.

Importantly, Apple wired the monetization into the App Store right from the start. Sure there are free applications, but for companies that want to invest resources and play on the iPhone for a long time, there is an instant, simple opportunity to monetize. Note that paid applications get priority listing in the App Store, which is no accident.

Apple took care of the most important part of the equation - the transaction. It was also able to insert itself in the middle and recoup some costs associated with building the App Store. In the future, if it takes off and sustains the growth, App Store will ring in significant revenue for Apple. Jobs and his team were smart to wire monetization into the platform at the outsert.

The Future of Platforms

Where does all this leave us? Certainly it's absurd to say that having Web platforms is a bad idea. Yet we're left with a bitter taste in our mouths after the latest moves from some big platform players. The platforms of the future need to think about not just short-term marketing and buzz, butlong-term sustainability and monetization. Here are some questions that companies need to ask themselves before delivering a platform:

• Why are we building a platform?
• How will we monetize this platform?
• Will the platform make us money, and how much will it cost?
• How will applications be able to monetize the platform?
• Can we support the platform for years to come?

Our culture of sensation and free makes it much harder for platforms to think deeply and be disciplined. Google felt they had to come out with something to stop Facebook's momentum. Facebook rushed to create a completely open infrastructure; and it backfired both for users and developers. Having been burnt by Facebook, small and large companies alike will now think twice before investing in a presence on platforms. This is a shame, for we need platforms and we need them to work well.

Let us know what you think about the opportunities to plug into major platforms? What are your thoughts on the recent platform dynamics that we have witnessed?

Ed: Agreed. Platforms need to become one-step monetization. Multiple steps interest few developers in bad economic times.

Linux not ready to replace Windows

Linux ready to replace Windows? Not yet…

Posted by Ed Bott @ 11:28 am

157 TalkBacks

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Over at JKOnTheRun, James Kendrick uncovers a fascinating statisticoriginally published in Laptop Magazine:

Andy Tung, Director of US Sales for MSI … told Laptop that their experience shows that netbooks with Linux are returned four times more often than those with Windows XP.  This would indicate what others have already noted, many consumers pick up the cheaper systems and then realize that the Linux system is not what they are used to so they return it.

Good News For Big CDN Users, Bad News For CDNs: Prices Dropping

Good News For Big CDN Users, Bad News For CDNs: Prices Dropping

Digital video companies and media conglomerates: Good news if you're shopping for a little (or a lot) of content delivery services.

Pricing dropped significantly during Q3 for some of the middle-of-the-road (250 terabytes transferred/month) and larger (1000 TB/mo.) video delivery customers during the quarter, according to survey results published by industry analyst Dan Rayburn. Some highlights:

• The biggest drop in pricing came for relatively smaller volume customers -- 250 TB/mo. -- where CDNs apparently courted them with cheap rates. Average pricing ranged from 20 cents to 35 cents per gigabyte delivered in Q3, down from the range of 40 cents to 55 cents per gigabyte delivered in Q2.
  
• The next-biggest drop came for very high-volume customers -- 1000 TB/mo. -- where rates ranged between 2.5 cents to 10 cents per gigabyte delivered in Q3, mostly down from the range of 4 cents to 9 cents per gigabyte delivered in Q2.
• Service pricing for mid-to-high-level customers, in the 500-750 TB/mo. range, stayed about the same.
  

Also noted: Limelight Networks (LLNW) was the "most aggressive with regards to price" while industry leader (by market share) Akamai Technologies (AKAM) was "coming in at almost double" to rival quotes. But what we don't know: Who won which deals at which prices -- and what this all means for Akamai or Limelight's Q3 results.

Amazon to Launch Content Delivery Network against Akamai and Limelight

Amazon to Launch Content Delivery Network

This morning, Amazon announced that it would soon launch a content delivery network (CDN). This new service, which does not have a name yet, will be complimentary to Amazon's existing web services and will work seamlessly with S3, Amazon's online storage solution. Like most of Amazon's web services, this new product will not require a contract and does not have any minimum-usage requirements. Amazon did not announce a specific launch date, but it expects the new service to be available by the end of this year.

With this new service, Amazon is going up against a number of established companies, including Akamai and Limelight, which are almost synonymous with content delivery. While these larger CDN providers tend to target enterprise customers, though, Amazon's pay-as-you-go plan seems to be geared towards smaller businesses and developers who might not have a sustained need for a complex CDN solution.

Just like Amazon's S3 and E2 shook up the market for online storage and cloud computing, this new CDN solution will surely drive down the prices for content delivery. At first, however, Amazon's new service will not support streaming video or live broadcasts. Because of this, Akamai and Limelight don't have to fear the competition with Amazon just yet, but we would be surprised if Amazon did not add more video specific features to its CDN in the future.

Preemptive Move

Interestingly, as Om Malik points out, New-York based Voxel just announced a CDN solution based on S3. Amazon rarely pre-announces new services, so we definitely agree that this announcement today should be seen as a preemptive move by Amazon.

Comparing Web Platforms - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook

Comparing Web Platforms

from ReadWriteWeb by Richard MacManus

It's great to hear that Marc Canter is writing a book, called 'How to build the Open Mesh'. He's been working for years on this vision with his product PeopleAggregator. He's just posted the four Appendices that conclude the book in his blog. It's a great overview of the major web platforms: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Mesh, and Facebook/MySpace.

Here are Marc's comments, via his post, and you can click the images to see the diagrams.Disclosure: I used to do some consulting work for Marc's company, during 2005-06.

Google

“What does Google’s Open Mesh look like?”

Most of the infrastructure, services and applications that Google offers work all by themselves and are not dependent upon anything else. Google has launched OpenSocial and built Google Friend Connect.

Yahoo!

“How is Yahoo building the open mesh?

Yahoo probably has the most comprehensive, well architected approach towards building their own open mesh. They've left lots of room for us without getting in our way. Now they just have to execute those plans!

 

Microsoft

“Will Microsoft connect their Live Mesh to our Open Mesh? …[and what about the rest of Microsoft?]

Live Mesh totally rocks and it'll probably become a key element of our open mesh. It'll gateway us to mobile, car, living room, game machines.

Facebook & MySpace

“Aren’t Facebook and MySpace really Closed Meshes?” … [ and how can we connect to them?]

Sending out tentacles or satellites isn't the same as being open.

 

 

IBM aims $400 million at cloud computing

Posted by Jim Kerstetter

IBM announced Friday that it's spending nearly $400 million on new cloud computing data centers in North Carolina and Tokyo. Big Blue will spend nearly $360 million to renovate an existing building at its Research Triangle Park campus in North Carolina. The goal is to reuse 95 percent of the existing building's "shell," recycle 90 percent of the old building's material, and make sure 20 percent of the new material is recycled. The new center is expected to be completed by late 2009.

Big Blue also boasts that the new data center's mechanical equipment will be "50 percent more efficient than the industry average, equaling a reduction of approximately 31,799 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year." If IBM can follow through on that promise, that would be the equivalent of taking 5,800 cars off the road, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Tokyo facility will be linked to the new North Carolina facility and seven other IBM cloud computing centers in cities including Dublin, Ireland, and Beijing.

Clean air benefits aside, few should be surprised that IBM, which runs the largest computer consulting business in the world and derives the bulk of its revenue through services such as software hosting, should jump head-first into cloud computing services.

While Google caters to consumers with its Web-based applications, Amazon provides hosting services to start-ups, and companies like Salesforce.com provide an array of on-demand software, it can be easy to forget that IBM is the real heavyweight in business computing.

In November 2007, IBM unveiled its "Blue Cloud" bundle of services. And at a conference in Los Angeles in April, IBM executives made it clear that providing hosting services is nothing new to them. The rest of computer industry? According to IBM, they're new to this game.

Amazon Announces New Payment Services

Amazon Announces New Payment Services and Updates to Mechanical Turk

In a quick succession of announcements, Amazon released a set of hosted e-commerce payment services, as well as anupdate to its Mechanical Turk service. The payment service, Checkout by Amazon, will allow online retailers to use Amazon's one-click checkout system, calculate shipping costs and tax, as well as allow their customers to track shipments...

Checkout by Amazon

Out of the two announcements, the payment services service are the most interesting. Amazon gives its customerstwo options: Checkout by Amazon or Amazon Simple Pay. Simply Pay is basically a stripped-down version of the full Checkout package and doesn't include the one-click checkout and most of the order management features such as calculating sales tax and shipping rates, creating packing slips, or collecting buyer feedback. Simple Pay, on the other hand, allows sellers to use more payment options, including credit cards and bank accounts. Checkout by Amazon can only accept credit cards.

These services are basically an extension of Amazon's "Flexible Payment Service." This service (which has been in beta for quite a while now) gives developers a set of API that hook into Amazon's payment services. One area that Amazon is especially targeting with this is micro-payments.

With these new services, Amazon is going up against Google Checkout, as well as most credit card merchant accounts. However, with Amazon's already established reach among consumers, as well as the level of trust that most consumers have when it comes to working with Amazon, both Checkout and Simple Pay have a distinct advantage over their competition. For merchants, Amazon's Checkout service also offers a wider range of services than most credit card processors or Google Checkout currently offer. Google Checkout, however, is generally cheaper than Amazon's offerings - though it also offers fewer services...

HP, Intel and Yahoo create cloud computing research centers

HP, Yahoo, Intel Launch Cloud Computing Test Bed

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

The mystery announcemnet we mentioned yesterday was just released - Yahoo, Hewlett Packard and Intel are jointly announcing a new cloud computing research initiative called the Cloud Computing Test Bed. Users will be able to build and launch new applications on the platform.

It’s being described as “a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before.” Other partners include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) (which is distinct from the MDA, I believe, which isunfortunate), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany...

Intel, Yahoo, HP Partner On Cloud Computing

from Silicon Alley Insider by Vasanth Sridharan

HP (HPQ), Intel (INTC) and Yahoo (YHOO) announced a partnership to create data centers at each of the three companies and ones in Illinois, Germany and Singapore in order to research and innovate in cloud computing. The servers will be provided by HP, the processors are from Intel, and Yahoo's bringing the software expertise. The centers will be operational later this year.

See Also:
Google, Amazon Lead Disruptive Cloud Computing Wave, Microsoft Again Behind Curve

Cloud Computing Test Bed: Live Notes From The Conference Call

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Hewlett Packard, Intel and Yahoo announced the Cloud Computing Test Bed this morning. Executives from the three companies are holding a 9 am PST conference call to discuss the new venture. Participating are Prith Banerjee, Senior Vice President, Research, HP and Director, HP Labs; Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research; and Andrew Chien, Vice President, Corporate Technology Group, Intel and Director, Intel Research...

HP, Intel and Yahoo create cloud computing research centers

from VentureBeat by Dean Takahashi

Hewlett Packard, Inteland Yahoo today announced a cloud computing research project to promote the growth of use of computing using centralized servers in the Internet “cloud.”

HP, Intel, Yahoo join forces on cloud computing research

New "test bed" project will give companies, as well as partnering researchers, access to top-notch hardware for exploring the future of the hot server-outsourcing technology.

Yahoo, Intel and HP Form Cloud Computing Labs

from PC World: Latest Technology News

Yahoo, HP and Intel are partnering for cloud computing research...