33 posts tagged “instantwebmeetings.com”

Microsoft will ship Windows 7 sometime in or near Jan. 2010, according to a letter company senior vice president Bill Veghte sent to Microsoft customers Tuesday.

The letter, sent to enterprise and business customers, will eventually be publicly posted on Microsoft's Web site.
In the letter sent to "Windows Customers" and titled "An Update on the Windows Roadmap," Veghte said "our plan is to deliver Windows 7 approximately three years after the January 2007 general availability launch date of Windows Vista."
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Veghte wrote, "You have told us you want a more regular, predictable Windows release schedule" and he said that was the impetus for setting the 2010 the ship date.

Vista has been slowly gaining steam, but is still drawing fire from critics who say it has not lived up to promises.
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Veghte went further in addressing customer concerns over application compatibility, which had been a problem shortly after Vista's release.

"You've also let us know you don't want to face the kinds of incompatibility challenges with the next version of Windows you might have experienced early with Windows Vista. As a result, our approach with Windows 7 is to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista so the investments you and our partners have made in Windows Vista will continue to pay off with Windows 7. Our goal is to ensure the migration process from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is straightforward."

Veghte's discussion of Windows 7 was part of an effort to clarify the June 30 XP deadline that will see the operating system removed from retail shelves and OEM hardware, and to tout the virtues of Windows Vista. Veghte also thanked customers for their loyalty and support.

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MySpace has just announced that they will be launching their developer platform on February 5th. You can pre-register now by going to http://developer.myspace.com (requires login).

Earlier this evening, I spoke with Amit Kapur, who the company is also announcing has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer and will oversee the platform. While MySpace may be a little late to the platform party, it’s clear that they have been closely watching developments in the space and will be addressing many of the growing pains that chief rival Facebook has dealt with from the get-go; most notably privacy, monetization, and data ownership.

On the privacy front, Kapur tells me that the user experience will be a “top priority” and that the company will avoid the feed spam issues that have plagued “other players in the space” (he wouldn’t mention Facebook by name, but he didn’t have to). Additionally, don’t expect anything like Facebook Beacon to be a part of the MySpace Developer Platform.

Instead, MySpace plans to help developers monetize their applications, potentially through a revenue share program. Kapur believes that his company is “differentiated by our robust and mature monetization platform,” and he wants developers to be able to take advantage of it. This means that unlike Facebook, where we have dozens of ad networks competing for inventory on applications, MySpace may play an active role, presumably utilizing its large ad sales force to help developers get premium revenue.

From a technology perspective, Kapur says most of the specific details will be released on the 5th, but he did emphasize that the company has maintained an open relationship with widget developers, and wants them to be able to use data from MySpace in their applications, potentially including your friend’s list. With Facebook moving to allow developers to host applications on third-party sites and DataPortability continuing to gain traction, this seems like the only way to go.

Finally, Kapur told me that the MySpace Developer Program will support Google OpenSocial from day one. This may provide a much needed boost for OpenSocial, which has received criticism for offering very little in the way of tangible products since being announced.

Overall, it sounds like MySpace has been paying attention to what’s working on other social networking developer platforms and what user’s ultimately want. We’ll see if they can deliver the goods when they show the rest of their hand next week.

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A first look into the books of Al Gore’s cable network: Current Media (parent of Al Gore-backed Current TV) has filed for a $100 million NASDAQ IPO, trading under the ticker “CRTM”. The network, which launched in 2005, had 2007 annual revenue of $63.7 million, up 68 percent from $37.8 million in 2006. Net losses grew to $17 million, from $14.3 million. Meanwhile, the company has $2.2 million in cash on hand and $36.1 million in debt, which will be paid down upon completion of the IPO. The rest of the cash will go towards general operations. Reading through the management’s discussion and the risks section highlights Current’s challenge, as it attempts to pitch a cable channel to a crowd increasingly watching video online. While it talks about innovating in TV news and offering an integrated TV/digital platform, it also identifies as one of its key risk: “New distribution technologies may fundamentally change the way programming is distributed and our inability to adapt to them may adversely affect our business. Some highlights:…

-- Institutions owning at least 5 percent of the company include Blum Capital Partners, Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa (former president Bill Clinton is unwinding his stake in that), DirectTV, and Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) CTV Holdings. As with other cable networks, some of the company’s cable partners receive equity.

-- In 2007, Gore, its executive chairman, and CEO Joel Hyatt each made $1.05 million in salary and bonus. (That would be the difference between a net start-up and a new TV net.)

-- Current acquired predecessor NWI for $70.9 million, entirely for its relationships with television carriers.

-- The network pases a total of 51 million homes, 41 million of which are in the US.

-- At the moment, Current.com is not a source of meaningful ad revenue for the company, though it expects it will be in the future.

-- JPMorgan, Pacific Crest and Lehman Brothers are listed as underwriters

-- There’s no information yet on the number of shares, the time-frame for the filing or its expected net proceeds after underwriting fees.
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In the consumer economy, the Main Street shopper leads the way. In the corporate economy, big technology buyers like Monte Ford will determine the arc of business spending in the coming months.

Skip to next paragraph

American Airlines

Monte Ford, the chief information officer at American Airlines, plans a modest increase in technology spending this year.

The decisions of Mr. Ford, the chief information officer of American Airlines, and his peers across corporate America matter a lot, because information technology looms so large in the modern economy. Today, purchases of computer hardware and software account for half of all capital spending by businesses.

Will falling corporate investment be the next shoe to drop on the way to a recession, or will it hold up enough to help steady the economy?

The outlook is encouraging, according to corporate technology buyers and industry analysts. There will surely be belt-tightening, and cuts may be sharp in some industries, especially the financial sector. Overall growth in technology spending may fall from 7 percent last year to 4 percent or less this year, according to estimates by IDC, a research firm.

That would be in sharp contrast to the experience of the 2001 recession, when technology spending fell 11 percent over two years in the aftermath of the dot-com collapse. During the boom years, the mentality was to spend on technology and hope for a payoff. But in recent years, corporate technology managers have been far more disciplined spenders, measuring results to prove that investments in technology really can cut costs, increase productivity and lift sales.

So the cutbacks in this downturn, analysts say, should be modest — reassuring news for the economy. “This is a reason for optimism that if there is a recession, it will be a mild one,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

At American Airlines, a unit of AMR, Mr. Ford doubts that the current downturn could be worse for the airlines than the falloff after the 9/11 terrorist attacks — “a gigantic economic crack for our industry,” he said. The company decided then that despite cutbacks elsewhere, it would not sharply pare its technology budget. This year, he plans to spend modestly more — a few percent — than last year.

To explain, Mr. Ford points to three major costs for an airline: people, planes and fuel. “Technology remains the best lever for getting more value from all those, making your employees more productive, making better use of your fleet and increasing your fuel efficiency,” he said.

That view, Mr. Ford said, is supported by results. A fuel efficiency drive begun in 2005, including software to tailor routes, flight paths, even baggage loading, has reduced fuel consumption by an estimated 96 million gallons a year.

At Pitney Bowes, a maker of mail handling equipment and marketing services, Gregory E. Buoncontri, the chief information officer, expects his budget this year to be roughly $180 million, about the same as last year. Despite the economic slowdown, Pitney Bowes will make some targeted new investments that the senior management team has agreed are priorities to help the company become more competitive. The priority projects, Mr. Buoncontri said, include analytics programs that sort through customer data to predict promising sales opportunities and to improve customer service.

“You only want to start projects you are dead-serious about,” he said. “A downturn really heightens that discipline.”

To make room for spending on new things, managers must make cuts in the spending for basic operations. The preferred way to do that is to trim the budget for routine things like replacing personal computers, issuing employees mobile devices like BlackBerrys and putting off upgrades to new desktop software like Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system or Office 2007 programs.

“You adopt the mentality of a small-business owner for those kinds of things — you just want to avoid writing a check,” said Jack Santos, an analyst at the Burton Group, a technology research firm.

In a survey of 300 chief information officers last month, IDC found that personal computers and mobile devices were the hardware products that would face spending cuts first, said Stephen Minton, an IDC analyst. The software products at the top of the budget-cutting list were office programs and desktop operating systems.

Microsoft this week reported strong quarterly results, led by its big desktop software businesses. But the C.I.O. survey suggests a slowdown in sales, especially in the United States, if the economy falters.

Technology spending, if managed prudently, can also deliver new abilities and productivity without more dollars, executives say. With processing speeds and storage capacity doubling every 18 months or so, each generation of technology is faster, cheaper and smaller than its predecessor.

So, according to Frank Modruson, chief information officer for Accenture, a real danger during an economic downturn is adopting a rigid austerity that saddles a company with technology that is behind the curve. Steady investment, he said, can save money fairly quickly because of the rapid pace of improvement in computing technology.

Accenture, a technology services company, spends less on technology today than it did in 2001, even though its payroll has more than doubled to 175,000 employees worldwide. “The reason we could do that is that we invested during the last downturn,” Mr. Modruson said.

Companies are likely to find that it is smart to make new investments as long as their overall technology spending is under control. In a recent survey of large companies, Gartner found that technology budgets have increased an average of 2.8 percent annually in the last three years. By contrast, spending at those companies in the three years leading up to the 2001 recession had grown 12.9 percent a year.

“Information technology spending,” said Mark McDonald, an analyst at Gartner, “is not the rich target for cuts that it was in 2001.”

SOURCE

In the consumer economy, the Main Street shopper leads the way. In the corporate economy, big technology buyers like Monte Ford will determine the arc of business spending in the coming months.

Skip to next paragraph

American Airlines

Monte Ford, the chief information officer at American Airlines, plans a modest increase in technology spending this year.

The decisions of Mr. Ford, the chief information officer of American Airlines, and his peers across corporate America matter a lot, because information technology looms so large in the modern economy. Today, purchases of computer hardware and software account for half of all capital spending by businesses.

Will falling corporate investment be the next shoe to drop on the way to a recession, or will it hold up enough to help steady the economy?

The outlook is encouraging, according to corporate technology buyers and industry analysts. There will surely be belt-tightening, and cuts may be sharp in some industries, especially the financial sector. Overall growth in technology spending may fall from 7 percent last year to 4 percent or less this year, according to estimates by IDC, a research firm.

That would be in sharp contrast to the experience of the 2001 recession, when technology spending fell 11 percent over two years in the aftermath of the dot-com collapse. During the boom years, the mentality was to spend on technology and hope for a payoff. But in recent years, corporate technology managers have been far more disciplined spenders, measuring results to prove that investments in technology really can cut costs, increase productivity and lift sales.

So the cutbacks in this downturn, analysts say, should be modest — reassuring news for the economy. “This is a reason for optimism that if there is a recession, it will be a mild one,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

At American Airlines, a unit of AMR, Mr. Ford doubts that the current downturn could be worse for the airlines than the falloff after the 9/11 terrorist attacks — “a gigantic economic crack for our industry,” he said. The company decided then that despite cutbacks elsewhere, it would not sharply pare its technology budget. This year, he plans to spend modestly more — a few percent — than last year.

To explain, Mr. Ford points to three major costs for an airline: people, planes and fuel. “Technology remains the best lever for getting more value from all those, making your employees more productive, making better use of your fleet and increasing your fuel efficiency,” he said.

That view, Mr. Ford said, is supported by results. A fuel efficiency drive begun in 2005, including software to tailor routes, flight paths, even baggage loading, has reduced fuel consumption by an estimated 96 million gallons a year.

At Pitney Bowes, a maker of mail handling equipment and marketing services, Gregory E. Buoncontri, the chief information officer, expects his budget this year to be roughly $180 million, about the same as last year. Despite the economic slowdown, Pitney Bowes will make some targeted new investments that the senior management team has agreed are priorities to help the company become more competitive. The priority projects, Mr. Buoncontri said, include analytics programs that sort through customer data to predict promising sales opportunities and to improve customer service.

“You only want to start projects you are dead-serious about,” he said. “A downturn really heightens that discipline.”

To make room for spending on new things, managers must make cuts in the spending for basic operations. The preferred way to do that is to trim the budget for routine things like replacing personal computers, issuing employees mobile devices like BlackBerrys and putting off upgrades to new desktop software like Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system or Office 2007 programs.

“You adopt the mentality of a small-business owner for those kinds of things — you just want to avoid writing a check,” said Jack Santos, an analyst at the Burton Group, a technology research firm.

In a survey of 300 chief information officers last month, IDC found that personal computers and mobile devices were the hardware products that would face spending cuts first, said Stephen Minton, an IDC analyst. The software products at the top of the budget-cutting list were office programs and desktop operating systems.

Microsoft this week reported strong quarterly results, led by its big desktop software businesses. But the C.I.O. survey suggests a slowdown in sales, especially in the United States, if the economy falters.

Technology spending, if managed prudently, can also deliver new abilities and productivity without more dollars, executives say. With processing speeds and storage capacity doubling every 18 months or so, each generation of technology is faster, cheaper and smaller than its predecessor.

So, according to Frank Modruson, chief information officer for Accenture, a real danger during an economic downturn is adopting a rigid austerity that saddles a company with technology that is behind the curve. Steady investment, he said, can save money fairly quickly because of the rapid pace of improvement in computing technology.

Accenture, a technology services company, spends less on technology today than it did in 2001, even though its payroll has more than doubled to 175,000 employees worldwide. “The reason we could do that is that we invested during the last downturn,” Mr. Modruson said.

Companies are likely to find that it is smart to make new investments as long as their overall technology spending is under control. In a recent survey of large companies, Gartner found that technology budgets have increased an average of 2.8 percent annually in the last three years. By contrast, spending at those companies in the three years leading up to the 2001 recession had grown 12.9 percent a year.

“Information technology spending,” said Mark McDonald, an analyst at Gartner, “is not the rich target for cuts that it was in 2001.”

SOURCE

The changes that XMPP could enable for web innovation in general are quite interesting. "It turns out," writes Jive co-founder and CTO Matt Tucker, "that all of the problems that had to be solved for instant messaging make the protocol perfect for cloud computing."

Jive is based in Portland, Oregon, took funding from Sequoia Capital (Early Google and YouTube funders) and has an impressive customer list available on its site.

The technical details of the argument are interesting and the product due from Jive at the end of this quarter is one to watch for, but I'm interested here primarily in what this professed trend could mean for startups, mashups and users of any number of services that together could make this a trend.

Early Examples

Jive points to a number of examples. Tivo, they say, no longer requires your box to check in with the Tivo servers periodically - the server sends a signal via XMPP to available boxes when new information is published. Tivo is essentially using machine-to-machine Instant Messaging for real time communication within its service.

Dave Winer says XMPP could be the foundation of a decentralized version of Twitter. Valley golden-boy startup Seesmic is using XMPP for messaging and AOL has reportedly begun experimenting with it as well. The Google-acquired Jaiku microblogging platform used XMPP heavily. One of Jive's own open source XMPP libraries was incorporated into the source code of Google's Android Mobile OS, as well.

Let's talk a bit about what exactly this means, followed by some creative thinking about where it could lead and some arguments against this forecast.

Jabber Explained In Simpler Terms

In simple terms and to the best of my understanding, the http protocol used by web pages is said to be inefficient because it requires a user's machine to poll a server periodically to see if any new information is available.

Quite often there is nothing new and energy has been wasted. Think of how often Gmail checks to see if you've got any new emails (every two minutes) or how many times your RSS reader pings all of your feeds to see if they contain any new items. Meanwhile, the time between polling leads to a delay in updates.

That might seem like a small burden to you, but multiply that times everyone using these services and there's a lot of inefficiency. Sometimes that inefficiency can define the technical limits of what a service is able to do. On an individual level, I know I'm unable to use Google Reader because I have enough subscriptions that it times out checking every single one of them for new information. I wish it would just chill out and wait!

This is not a problem experienced in the world of Instant Messaging. While there are too many IM protocols in the world, a growing number of IM clients, including Google Talk, use the open standard Jabber, or XMPP.

XMPP lets one party signal to any XMPP server that it is available to receive any new information that's being delivered. When another party sends new content through the XMPP server, the message is passed on immediately and automatically to all recipients who are marked as available, basically.

What Could a Future Built on Jabber Look Like?

Ask yourself what a decentralized, open source infrastructure for real time communication could offer. A lot. As an RSS-head, I'd love to see XMPP let my various RSS clients do more faster and get bogged down in fewer unnecessary activities. RSS is all about speed for me but clients can only do so much so often when they have to pester someone else's server every time they want to check for new information. Those delays can be of real consequence.

The Tivo example is just one of many possibilities in the realm of machine-to-machine XMPP communication. Automated alerts are useful in all kinds of more serious use-cases and why use polling to monitor changed conditions when you can use an open source protocol that can make presence and real time communication scalable?

Counter Arguments

The primary arguments against a future powered by XMPP are two. First, so much of what's already been developed is web-centric, based on http, that the options for mashup-fodder are relatively limited for XMPP. For a service to integrate a number of new and existing communication features, making the leap to a less ubiquitous protocol might not make sense. Time will tell if things like IM, Android and software like Jive's can change the near total imbalance in marketshare between communication protocols online.

The second argument against this rosy picture of the future could be that open standards-based technology falls outside the profit model of many larger companies. If one vendor can corner their respective model with proprietary technology and charge a monopolist's premium for superior service, then a standards based competitor will have their work cut out for them. Google Talk's use of XMPP may have been the straw that broke the camel's back in IM because the chat client rode the coat-tails of so many other Google services.

It's hard to know what role these obstacles will play in the future, but it is exciting to think about the possibilities that a standards based approach like XMPP offers for real time communication. No one will want to wait for a web page to load if a significant portion of the internet starts working as free of friction as IM does today. Enable that communication to go on over a decentralized system based on open standards and you're talking about a whole new world.

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