Kaiyzen Group

I really do not like to make my own predictions but with a bunch of activity of late I figured I would throw out a couple thoughts/ideas I have been having:

1) FIM will purchase Pandora sometime within the next 12 months.  Pandora has continued pressure for lack of revenue and high streaming costs and with MySpace Music’s launch their IP is a perfect fit especially once their figure out the syndication issues

2) Amazon will continue to dominate the “cloud space” and pull in some big name enterprise customers with some nice PR around them and pull in Microsoft as a partner to offer their solutions on AWS.

3) Palm will turn heads in the first half of next year with their new devices and platform that will be coming down the pipeline

4) Android will get ~5% smartphone market share by the end of ‘09 and wireless devlepment will continue to be a huge pain in the ass till sometime in 2010

5) On their way to the $1 billion revenue mark Facebook will face some serious pushback with their Facebook ID program and continued efforts to push/pull activity stream info everywhere…, possibly also look for them to become a wrapper for LiveID to help move things along on the unified login front.

During Yahoo!’s Hack Day event one of the sessions covered their mobile tools for developers and specifically Blueprint.

Blueprint was born out of Yahoo!’s OneConnect efforts.  For those unfamiliar with OneConnect it is a fantastic mobile app that runs on many evices and has an open framework that third parties can piggy back on and install themselves as widgets on a users OneConnect setup.  Some apps of note are last.fm, ebay, wikipedia, etc.

OneConnect is pretty good, but falls short for those developers that really want to own the user experience and not just sit in as a widget…., this is where Blueprint comes into play.

BluePrint is a huge mobile play for Yahoo!  This is really where they set themselves apart in the mobile space from the rest of the big players.  Where Microsoft and Google are playing mostly on OS side of things to get developers involved, Yahoo! wants to own the dev relationship across all handsets and OS’s.

BluePrint has two main components to it.., one that is pretty ready for primetime.., another that needs some more time to bake going into the end of the year.

The first part that is ready for primetime is the mobile website BluePrint server.  Yahoo! has created a proxy server for rendering content and apps into mobile friendly sites.  When a user requests a mobile page from you, your site passes all of the content and, buttons, menus, etc in the BluePrint XML markup to the Yahoo! proxy.  The proxy then determines which handset is requesting and renders the page accordingly.

This is a pretty handy service for those devers out there whom do not want to get too into mobile development while still providing their users with a nicely designed and functioning mobile view into their property.

The second part of BluePrint.., that I am really excited about, but still needs some baking.., is their BluePrint platform for this client applications.  Yahoo! is throwing their hat in the ring with the rest of the mobile platform translation libraries to provide a one stop shop for developers to write an app once, and run anywhere.  They plan to support Java, .net, android, Symbian, and iPhone, as well as provide location based interfaces.

This is going to be fantastic for developers if Yahoo! delivers this close to how they presented it.  I have my doubts on the iPhone side of things as I have talked to several diferent vendors that provide platforms for universl app development and they have all had no luck when talking to Apple about opening up the iPhone to them.  We need  someone of Yahoo!’s size to help tip the balance in our favor and make Apple see the light.

Downside to BluePrint.., no planned media support yet, but that might come down the road as many devers would love to gain acess to the camera and any stored media on the device.

More on this in the coming months as Yahoo! opens things up more

I had the pleasure of attending and participating in Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day event held at their corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale here in the Bay Area.

This is the second time that Yahoo! has held an Open Hack…, the first time was almost two years ago in September of ‘06.  Unlike last time I had the pleasure of partaking in the hack…, our project took home a User Interface prize.., more on that in the future.

Hack Day began on Friday morning and ran through till early Sat night the following day.  The first day is setup so you attend sessions on various API and libary overview sessions.  Yahoo! uses this time to introduce some new things, giving a sneak peak for the 48 hrs, then taking it away to let things back some more.

Once again they did a fantastic job hosting the event.  This is probably the 5th tech event I have attended over the last 2 years hosted by Yahoo! and they are among the best.

Upwards of 50 groups hacked away overnight and presented their projects over 90 seconds. Here is the post on the winners:

Hackday Winners

Some more posts on a couple of the cool items that Yahoo! unveiled at the event to come.., stay tuned.

Been MIA for a while now, been on the road again.., slew of updates coming in the next few weeks though I promise.., a quick note regarding Yahoo! Hack Day.

That is right.., Yahoo! is holding another public hackday at HQ in Sunnyvale.  I was lucky enough to attend the first event that was a fantastic experience between the sessions during the day, the exposure to all tihngs Yahoo!, and of course the Beck concert didnt hurt either.

Really excited for this one, I have been working with a couple of friends on some fun browser based tools.  We are getting  close to a beta of the service and will be doing some flickr integration for our hack.

As usual, I will probably do some posting from the event when I need a break from the coding,

If you are a interested hacker or follower of tech space, sign up and attend here:

http://hackday.org

I love trade shows and conferences.  Besides the great people watching and personal encounters you have with the booth dwellers it is always the fastest way to absorb info about a market segment.

The Expo in Tokyo did not let me down.  This was my first international trade show experience.  The show was a bit smaller that I was expecting, there were about 2K exhibitors and around 100K attendees.  Compared to the MAGIC or PPAI/ASI shows in Vegas, this was relatively tame.., still great though.

It was very interesting to experience the Japanese IT and enterprise software market first hand.  It seems to me that most applications and especially user interfaces.

It was exciting to see the presence that we had at the show.  A strong showing from our partners CareBrains (now OSS CRM) and Softbank representing on our behalf.  We were there to hop nob and experience the show while helping out with some larger Japanese clients and new partners.  Here is some pics of the booth:

It was also great to have a large booth right across the aisle from our good friends Salesforce…, tried to snap some pics before they drove me away.., “no pictures here” they told me.., able to get one of them off:

I was able to swing by the Embedded Systems show in the hall across the way.., pretty interesting.  I love all sorts of gadgets and microcontrollers, flat screens, etc.  It was interesting to see first hand the massive push that Microsoft has for their embedded system of Windows.  They had an ok sized Dynamics booth on the software side.., but a HUGE booth on the embeded side of the show.

My good pals at Google K.K. had a booth there.  Lots of people flocking their booth while they pushed adsense, maps, and their applications.  I obtained their handout.., 100 ways to use Google.., will try to get some pics up from the booklet once I can get some pics snapped.

All in all good times.  The take away from the show.., the Japanese market is quite picky.., they want a corporate presense.., they want case studies.., and above all.., they love give aways just as much as companies in the states do when it comes to trade shows.

Top 2 booth give aways.., a invisible writing pen that has a black light on the end shat shows what you have written, and a mechanical calendar from Softbank that is good forever.

Also.., the Japanese seem to be taking to Open Source quite well.  They are a bit behind the Euros and Aussies, but the understanding and acceptance in on the uptick.  As we continue to close more markee customers over here and get more case studies.., this place is primed for Open Source explosion in the enterprise.

A funny thing from the show that I was not able to capture before getting chased away was the pics that Salesforce had in their booth for testimonials.., I swear that at least 3 of them were our taxi drivers.., if you dont understand this read the first Tokyo report here.

After the Expo one day we headed across the river/bay divide to one of our partners new offices for a meeting before a dinner with a new SI partner out there.., pretty amazing view of that side of the city:

The Standish Group has released a report stating that Free Open Source Software is responsible for taking away $60 Billion worth of revenue from proprietary vendors.

The study taking place over the last 5 years claims that approximately 6% of the IT sotware market (estimated to be in the trillions) is eatin up by FOSS.

I am a big fan and user of Open Source software and also work in the industry.  That being said.., I am also a fan and user of proprietary software/vendors.  I look forward to the future when FOSS reaches its saturation point and we can start moving away from the “Us vs. Them” mentality.

The study costs $1,000 so I won’t be reading its details so there are a couple things I am wondering.

One, I wonder if they talk about Commercial Open Source and how much of that estimated $60 Billion was not completely removed but spent with Commercial Open Source vendors.

Secondly.., I wonder what math/logic was put into place to figure out the $60 Billion total.  Did they simply look at the installs of MySQL at an Enterprise and estimate some value between Oracle and SQL server?  If that would be the case these numbers do not carry as much weight.

Anyone who got their hands on the actual study feel free fill me in on the details.

Open Source trading platform provider Marketcetera has closed a $4 Million Series A round accroding to Mr. Ha over at Venture Beat.

It is nice to see the continued influx of cash into the Open Source world.  Everyone really believes nowadays that there is really a play.., no matter what market.., in the Open Source place.

There is lots of disagreement amongst Open Source enthusiasts, and business realists on whether most Open Source is just a sales/marketing play.., or truly new and unique.

Here is a write up on Benchmarks John Bearden giving his thoughts on Open Source at the recently held OSBC event in San Francisco.