Micorsoft in Mashup : Popfly

On Friday 18th May 2007 Microsoft announced their new Online Mashup Tool Popfly and as expected Community has started blogging about it without any delay. People are saying that it is a copy of Yahoo pipe and Google. Few people feel that even logo is similar with Linux logo.

While writing my last blog "Mashup: An Overview" I got chance to do some hands-on on yahoo pipe and few other Mashup creator application. So I thought to try with this also.

Ooppsss.....I have to wait…….Microsoft announced this alpha version, which is not for everyone. I registered it and I got a unusual email from them saying

"We have received your request for an invitation to Popfly. We will e-mail your invitation when we send out our next batch of invites. L

Mail from suf@microsoft.com

I am not able to understand technical difficulties in granting access and why Microsoft wants to do this in batches. So I could not do any hands-on, but they have published nice screen-cast. So I want to put my thoughts on PopFly based on that screen-cast.

I am happy about :-)

• PopFly has very rich user experience, look and fell seems awesome. (I am using words seems because I have not used it, it is just based on screen-cast) . Microsoft is leader in creating UI and new Office 2007 is proof of that.
• It does not require any programming language (Nothing new these days) but if required Microsoft visual studio editor can be used to do add code for creating advance features. (This is more exciting for me). So naive user can use on-line tool while advance user can enrich features with IDE. (Yahoo and Google are behind with this approach in their application).
• It also provides online space community, with all the “Web2.0 features” so Mashup can be shared, can be commented and rated etc.
• It has online web-page creator application like Google pages, but it seems richer then Google, User has more options to create interactive web-sites.
• It is free, Microsoft and free, these two words do not fit together :-)
  

I am sad about :-(

• User has to wait till access is granted, No way to do any hands-on.
• Storage space is limit to 25MB.

I can’t say anything ? ? ?

It support exes files also into Mashup with java script, html, mp3 and others. Will I be able to use exe within online Mashup application, strange but I am not sure how????...

Lets wait till Microsoft grant the access to me to use PopFly !!

Mashup An Overview

From the word it can be inferred that, It is about of mixing, either mixing of music to create new one or mixing of tomato with ginger to make Indian curry, both create something new which is more important then individuals. But I am not here to write about music or curry, because neither I am musician nor very good cook (I don't know about music but I am sure I will be good cook in few months :-)). I am here to write about Software Mashup.

It is also about mixing, mixing different type of information from different sources such a way that they become more appropriate in user context. There is no formal definition available of Mashup but from my point of view the key for Mashup is a)information must be coming from outside of host application b) application should more useful then individual data sources.

Internet is growing with rocket speed, it has huge huge amount of data in the form of news, blogs, wiki, public web-pages, and more then that are locked into private databases behind web applications. Consummation of this kind of data effectively is also a big concern and solution of this can be Mashup.

Take an example weather.com has information about weather forecast of almost all city around the world, great very useful information, and Google is master in creating maps...so when we merge these two information to create Mashup we have one trip planner kind of application, which can give me the information about distance between arrival and departure place, and weather conditions in between the route. So this Mashup application (weatherbonk) is more useful for me when I am planning my trip from Zurich to Paris then google maps or weather.com .


Now, Lets go behind the scene. There are basically three entity involved in mahup application

• Service provider - google, yahoo, ebay, amazon, flickr, youtube , trulia, ........


• Mashup provider - virtual place,wii seeker, diggDot, weatherbonk......


• User - you and me :-)

Service provider publish their service in form of API, Feeds (RSS/ATOM), Web Services or by any other open standard like REST. Mashup publisher can be anyone who combines these services to achieve some goal, and publish them over Internet, and finally end-user enjoys these Mashups.

Business model is fairly simple, service provider become more famous, their reach to end user increases and henceforth their business. Mashup provider mostly earn by putting advertisement on their site and most profitable is end-user, as he gets effective applications free of cost which saves lots of time (My father always says that "Time is money" :-) )

Putting all these in diagram,


Mashup is already in mainstream, Programmableweb has listed 426 API , 1869 mashups which is increasing by 3 per day. You can find lots of interesting mashup here, although most of them are evolved around yahoo map, google map, flickr or youtube, because these services are leader and has published API in very early stage but new API are also coming from other community like real state (Trulia), shipping (UPS, FedEx).

There are lots of user-friendly Mashup builder tools are also available like Yahoo-Pipes, webjam which create Mashup just out-of-box. No need of any programming knowledge, with just little creativity anyone can develop new Mashup. Yahoo Pipes are one of these kinds of application where user can easily integrate feeds, can search from yahoo, google base, flickr and can performe other related operations. Most exciting things is that there is no need to start from scratch, you can clone pipe shared by other people and enhance the features.

Please have a look to my yahoo pipes (Latest movies video), which just shows all the videos from youtube related to latest bollywood movies in, It combines feeds from "sulekha" and then search videos from "YouTube" and sort it by publication days.

In future, availability of new API and easy to use Mashup builder will create environment where user will hardly access contents directly, rather he will create or customize Mashup once and use it forever.

Note: Mashup comes with security and copyright problems, so before creating any Mashup be aware that you are using information from trusted source and not using other's licenses or key.

!! Create and share new mashups with me also!!

-AmitKumar P Agrawal

Enterprise 2.0 - New Buzzword

Web 2.0 has changed the way we use Internet and I am not away from its influence, Lets take some example,

Nowadays I scrap my friends on orkut (People Networking) to keep them in touch rather then giving offline message on Yahoo . believe me, two years back i used to have 5 offline messages everyday even though i have very short friend list, it reduced to one or almost none now because almost all my friends are on orkut and offline messages has changed in scraps.

Nowadays I don't add the links to in my explorer favorites, rather i use del.icio.us (Bookmarking and tagging site) and add them there, so i can get access it from anywhere (specially from office, its my good luck it is not yet blocked in my office :-) ) and I also use other's bookmark.

Nowadays I don't send my new photos to my friends indivdually, I upload it on flickr (Photo sharing site) and send a link to my friend group. It's really great pleasure to have comments on those photos from friends and same thing applies for videos on YouTube(Video Sharing)

To keep updated my knowledge on the my favorite subjects I dont go to different internet sites, rather I use Google Reader(RSS Feed) for that.

No more days, when to get some information I have to turn different pages of google, I use wiki (encyclopedia) as my first preference (even google gives same for most of things :-) ).

In nutshell, inadvertently I entered in web2.0 and it changed the way i use Internet in my personal life, great.... but my professional life has not changed yet, still i create word document and share it to my colleagues by emails. I have to manually search repository for different documents, I have to navigate different internal sites to know about policies, best practices and other organization stuff.

Technology leaders has noticed this gap, and created a concept "Enterprise 2.0". Though lots of different definition available, In my words Enterprise2.0 is a collaborative platform to use web2.0 (searching, people networking, blogging, wiki, bookmarking and tag sharing, RSS feed etc.) within intranet.

In other words, Enterprise 2.0 is infrasturcure for environment where employees can search the document using globle search, they can express their views on their internal blogs, they can share their bookmarks on particular topics with others,RSS feed for topics which is useful for their daily work and can make them inovative. day to day knowledge are well kept in wikis and taged which is searchable. This kind of envrionment enable Bottom-Up work approach rather then traditional Top-down and can make employees more expressive and adoptive for new ideas which is key for success.

Best of my knowledge, Andrew McAfee "Associate professor of Hardward Business School" has coined this term in first quater of 2006. Though McAfee itself reported that there was some article written by Stuart Eccles "UK based Internet consultant" before he start writing Enterprise 2.0, McAfee is famous in medai as a leader and founder of this term.

Lots of leading organizations have started adopting this funda, as an example, Wells Fargo has deployed a hosted version of the KnowNow Market Intelligence solution which monitors broad range of public RSS feed and notify employees based on their selected criteria. They have started blogs to put information about student loan.

Lots of vendors are very optimistic about new business in this area and few are ready with their product and marketing them under the tag of Enterprise 2.0

• IBM become first vendor to adopted google gadget in their commerical portal applications websphere. This can create syndication of small application on user's portal based on their interest.
• BEA has launched new website name as "En.terpri.se" to showcase his ability in this new area and ready with there new product named as Pages (wiki kind of application to create and manage web pages with RSS capabilities) , Ensememble (mashup application), and Pathways (application for tagging, searching and bookmarking service).
• Oracle has product known as "Oracle webCenter" which can be used by knowledge workers as a single Web interface to access a wide range of enterprise services, including business applications, enterprise content, business intelligence, enterprise search, communication and collaboration services, and Web 2.0-centric applications.

Leaders in this area has started communication with world using international conference.I could find following events.

• Enterprise 2 Conference -(http://www.enterprise2conf.com/IT) vendors like Cisco, IBM, BEA, Webex are sponsoring this event. It is sheduled on 18th – 21th june 07 in boston. Purpose of this conference to leverage Enterprise 2.0 to business community. Enterprise 2.0 leaders (Andrew McAfee and David Weinberger) , Business leader (Mike Rhodin-general manager IBM lotus and Marthin De Beer Senior VP, CISCO ) will going to present keynotes.
• Enteprise 2 Rave - (http://www.enterprise2rave.com/) This 2 days event is scheduled on 21st May at NYC, and leaders like Andrew , Ivis are speaker.

From my point of view, this new concept will take some time to come into action, but it has very good momentum. I believe that this is going to bring a drastic change how we works currently but it will come its own challenges like security and Interactual Property constraint(IP) for the companies which works for mutlipul client simultenously. Though we already have all the technology to acheive this concept, it will not be so easy to bring into the implementation for lots of company very soon as it demands change in culture of company and attitude of workforce.

Lets keep watch and enjoy the transition from E1.0 to E2.0 !!

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Please fell free to share the events with my Enterprise 2.o and to join please enter email id here and press .

To just visit the group use this Enteprise 2.0 link.

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Paragliding An ultimate experience

I visited utliberg "Known as top of zurich" few months back... and saw few people doing paragliding....I had dream of doing same from last five years but never took it seriously... but that day i was just amazed and my dream got strength...
and finally i got chance to do it....We had Easter holiday a four days long weekend...and we simply cant waste it...although planing was not so good, and collected all the information in last few hours, we were able to create two days vacation plan of "Burn - Interlaken - Jungfrau".
Although Jungfrau "Top of Europe" is most exiting place for others, i was more concerened about Interlaken as i heard that it is possible to do paragliding there but still i was afraid about my will power...I was not sure that i would be able to do it................
Early morning we reached to Bern , I just booked my flight at 2.oo PM...my pilot told me that he will pick me from Interlaken station.....and arrange everything so everything was well set......great at least crossed one big milestone.
Me and my friend reached interlaken around 1.oo after having a trip to a beautiful city
Bern but my mind was thinking about something more exciting...........and suddenly my cell rang....and my pilot "Richi" was ahead of time...and i am also eager to do it as soon as possible.......
He reached to pick up me, It was great to see a big van, with full of paragliding stuff...lots of jacket, shoes...etc... and we started our journey............I was really exciting and somehow nervous also... I had no idea, from where will we take off, where will we land...whats height...so i was asking lots of question to Richi...

after 15 -20 min of journey we reached at take off point , height is around 1200 ft... and my beat rate has started increasing... Richi unpacked glide bag....wow....glider was so colourful...

he helped me to tight all the jackets and belt and tie glide with me........so we (me and richi ) was read

y for fly.... and he started giving me last minute instruction... I was told to run with glide on 1200 ft height, that also around 40 degree slope...was i mad???

but that moment i was not thinking about all this.... weather was in favour of us...by just running few step..I was in air...........wow.....i dont know how it happened...first one minute i was scared lit bit....but Richi helped me and instructed to just fell comfortable...I saw down, we must be on the height of 1300 ft...and downside there was jungle...and i was sitting on air....I never thought it can so balanced....
around 5 min we were flying on that jungle, sometime up , sometime down...it really amazing... then i told Richi to just move form that place, i wanted to go above just away from that jungle , it was quite scary to fly above that...
Richi waited for a moment for good wind to change direction,, and sudden we were in different direction...above the river...I was able to jungfrau mountain clearly...

Now most exiting moment, Richi gave control to me,,,I was sure that it wont be easy for me, and i was quite correct... I pulled one strip, and it started going down...and moment i passed control to Richi, because Richi has children and he he loves them.... :-)

Richi asked my permission for some tricks, and who will dare to deny anything to his pilot on the height of 1200 ft, :-).......He just did something with one or two stripe and we just roleded around 90 degree....dangerous but really fun.

and slowly we were in the direction of landing point, a big green field. he just gave me few landing instruction, and in few minute we were at land, the way we were in air, i guess everything happens very quickly in paragliding....

Finally I did it, It will hard to forget these most exciting 20 minutes of my life.

P.S. For more photos http://www.flickr.com/photos/amit_agrawal1/tags/paragliding/

Gmail Paper

Today 1st April 2007, lots of friends tried hard to make me fool, but they all failed badly. Last night, one of my friend "Rakesh Suthar" called me and told that they have very good plan to visit "Rapperswill" (one of the city in Switzerland) and called me at our meeting point 7 30 morning, but the same moment I understood that they are trying to make me April Fool. I was confident that no one can make me April fool...
I was happy till night, that everyone's prank failed, and around 11 at night I just logged to gmail to check my mails before going to bed, and I saw a big advertisement on gmail homepage about "Gmail Paper" and they were telling that by clicking a one button, they will send hard copy of your emai ls to you, Not that only, they will print all the pictures on good quality paper and best part of the service is "Its Totally FREE"
I was amazed by service, I thought I will send request to send my some pics which I wanted as hard copy from long time. I logged in, and tried to find the button "Paper archive". But I was not able to find it, I thought I have to change some settings, so I went to google search and fired a query "gmail paper". And I was surprised that there is no relevant result. It cant happen, service started by google and there is no news about that, it simply cant happen.. I had no clue, I never thought that somone is making me fool and laughing loudly from a corner...
I again went to gmail homepage, and read all details, They have nice pics inside, page was saying that they can send you one , one thousand, or one hundred thousand email by post... They will earn by advertisement, and they will use environment friendly papers, everything well published to make people fool.......and I will admit that I was one of them, I was April fool in last minutes of day :-( ...
I must say nice prank by Google............