Monday, April 17, 2006
Software-as-a-Service Myths
For years, organizations of all sizes have suffered the hassles and unexpected costs that accompany deploying and maintaining a variety of traditional software applications that, ironically, were intended to make them more productive. Now a new breed of Web-based services are pushing legacy applications aside and finally giving users the business benefits they've been seeking.
This new form of software-as-a-service, or SaaS, has been spearheaded by Salesforce.com's (CRM) customer relationship management and salesforce automation applications, and NetSuite's "net-native" enterprise resource planning applications.
These companies have recognized the inherent inefficiencies of the traditional software market, including the tremendous time, effort, and cost that organizations -- especially large-scale midsize businesses -- have to expend to install applications and keep them up and running.
Despite the success of these companies, many people are still skeptical about the long-term success of SaaS. Others are concerned that recent Salesforce.com outages represent a fundamental fault line in the SaaS landscape.
As someone who has consulted with a variety of SaaS users and vendors and manages a rapidly growing directory of SaaS players, which can be seen at saas-showplace.com, here's my response to some of the most common myths associated with SaaS.
Myth #1: SaaS is still relatively new and untested.
Salesforce.com has been in business over five years, has more than 399,000 subscribers at 20,500 companies worldwide, and is growing at about 80% a year. NetSuite has been in business eight years, and company officials say it has thousands of customers globally using its online applications.
The oldest and biggest SaaS purveyor? ADP (ADP) -- the world's largest payroll application outfit -- has been in business for nearly 60 years, generated $8.5 billion in revenues last year, and served about 590,000 clients worldwide.
Myth #2: SaaS is just another version of the failed application service provider, or ASP, and hosting models of the past, and will suffer the same fate as its predecessors.
While SaaS isn't a new idea, the economic climate and rapid advancements in application development tools have combined to make today's SaaS providers more successful than their predecessors.
The ASPs and hosting companies of the dot-com era failed for two reasons. First, they did not fundamentally change the architecture of their software applications, but simply resold legacy applications to organizations that didn't want to house them on their own systems. The up-front and ongoing costs of hosting legacy applications proved to be too much for the ASPs to withstand.
The second reason the ASPs and hosting companies failed: Only a small segment of the market was willing to outsource their application needs to relatively untested outfits because most companies during the dot-com era felt that their IT operations and business applications were a strategic asset.
Times have changed. Today's economic and competitive pressures make nearly any form of outsourcing fair game. Many companies now consider various IT functions and business applications commodities and not core competencies. This has made SaaS, essentially an outsourced application management business, more attractive today than ASPs and hosting services of the past.
Myth #3: SaaS only relieves companies of the up-front costs of traditional software licenses.
SaaS not only alleviates the costs of traditional perpetual licensing fees but also eliminates the need for additional IT infrastructure investments to support new applications.
A variety of enabling technologies, such as service-oriented architecture and Web services, permit SaaS to be more easily provisioned and metered based on actual usage levels. This means companies no longer have to pay for excess capacity. The bottom line? Lower total cost of ownership and quicker time-to-value.
Myth #4: SaaS is only for small- and midsize businesses and will not be accepted by large-scale organizations.
Companies of all sizes are taking advantage of SaaS. The scalability of the new generation of SaaS solutions enables users to test the reliability and performance of on-demand applications in limited deployments, and expand their adoption incrementally.
Many SaaS vendors have emulated Salesforce.com's market penetration strategy of appealing to individual users with free trials or low-cost single-user subscription fees with the intent of permeating the market, and then winning business unit and enterprise-level adoption in major corporations.
Today, Salesforce.com counts a growing number of Global 2000 and other brand-name companies as its customers, including AOL (TWX), Avery Dennison (AVY), Nokia (NOK), Perkin-Elmer (PKI) and SunTrust (STI).
Myth #5: SaaS only applies to applications such as customer relationship management and salesforce automation.
While SaaS certainly makes sense for many front-office functions and team-oriented collaboration purposes, SaaS solutions are emerging to address nearly every business application need. These range from accounting and financial applications to supply chain and channel management solutions.
For example, Aramark (RMK), Dow Chemical (DOW) , HP (HPQ), Honeywell (HON), Hyatt Hotels, Roche, and Wachovia (WB) rely on Taleo's (TLEO) SaaS talent management solution. On-demand supply chain management vendor Click Commerce boasts Arrow Electronics (ARW), Delta, Tyco (TYC) and Volvo (VOLVY) as customers.
Myth #6: SaaS will only have a minor impact on the software industry and will fade over time.
A third of the respondents to THINKstrategies' recent survey said they are already using SaaS, and another third said they are planning to adopt SaaS in 2006. Other research firms have generated even higher ratios.
As SaaS gains mainstream acceptance, it is becoming an important disruptive force in the software industry. And as long as the quality and reliability of SaaS solutions continues to improve, the appeal of SaaS isn't going to go away.
In response to these numbers and other industry trends, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates stated in an internal memo that became public last fall: "This coming 'services wave' will be very disruptive....Services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions will dramatically change the nature and cost of solutions deliverable to enterprises or small businesses."
Myth #7: It will be easy for the established software vendors to offer SaaS and dominate this market.
Nearly every established software vendor is being forced to determine how to revamp their legacy application business models to join the SaaS movement. This isn't a small challenge.
Legacy software companies have to re-architect their applications to make them work on the Web. They also have to redesign their sales and financial models to accommodate the pay-as-you-go SaaS fee structures. And they have to rebuild their corporate cultures to make them more service-oriented rather than product-centric.
It could be argued that Siebel was acquired by Oracle (ORCL) last year because it wasn't up to the task of fighting off Salesforce.com. Now Oracle, Microsoft (MSFT), and SAP (SAP) must respond to the SaaS movement while trying to avoid cannibalizing their existing software business in the process.
Myth #8: SaaS is only for corporate users.
Anyone who uses McAfee (MFE) or Symantec (SYMC) antivirus software to protect their home PCs likely uses their subscription and 'live update' features, which represent another example of SaaS. Microsoft's new "Live" version of its popular Office productivity applications is aimed at small and midsize businesses and the home user. And don't look now, but online gaming and video-on-demand also can be considered forms of SaaS.
source:http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2006/tc20060417_996365.htm?campaign_id=bier_tca
Cops Walking the MySpace Beat
source:http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/16/2227209
Lessons from the Browser Wars
In a famous example of how first movers can lose their advantage, second-mover Microsoft won the Web browser wars from Netscape and continues to dominate the market today. But that competition was the subject of another "war," this one among researchers who study how technology is diffused into the market.
The debate was this: Did Microsoft win because its Internet Explorer was the technologically superior product to Netscape Navigator, or was Microsoft just more successful at the distribution end by convincing most PC companies, some argue by anticompetitive tactics, to include IE on every PC shipped in the late 1990s? Researchers line up on both sides of the argument.
A recent working paper by Harvard Business School professor Pai-Ling Yin and Stanford professor Timothy F. Bresnahan offers an answer. Looking at both the pace of adoption of new versions of the browsers and the brand choice made by users, "distribution played a larger role than did technical progress in determining the market outcomes," the scholars conclude in the paper "Economic and Technical Drivers of Technology Choice: Browsers."
The implications are significant. Browsers simplified access to the online world, transforming the Internet from a communications vehicle for academics into a mass consumer phenomenon. At the same time, the growing usefulness of the Internet drove sales of personal computers off the chart—the installed base of PCs doubled to 213 million computers between 1995 and 1999. Understanding the complex interaction between the two technologies and how a second mover was able to unseat the incumbent market champion will help innovators of all stripes learn how new technology gets diffused into mass markets.
In this interview, Yin discusses the results and implications for new browser upstarts such as Firefox and Camino. Do they stand a chance against Internet Explorer? Yin says Microsoft's entrenchment in corporate IT, the maturation of the PC market, and the technical difficulty many consumers have in switching to a new browser make it hard soil for new challengers to take root.
Sara Grant: Why did you choose to study Web browsers to look at the idea of diffusion of innovation in a market?
| ||||
Pai-Ling Yin: Web browsers were the turning point in mass commercializing the Internet. They were the easy-to-use user interface that permitted the average person to access information on servers around the world.
As a tool for exploring how standards are set when new technologies hit the market, the browser wars exhibit many features we like to study: competition between two viable alternatives, rapidly improving technologies, the ability of firms to use strategic levers such as market power and channels of distribution, growth in demand leading to diffusion of the new technology through the population, and uncertainty. Thus, this is one example from which we can generalize lessons regarding the outcome of diffusion of innovation into a market.
Q: In your paper, you explain that your analysis of the "classical concern" in the diffusion of new technologies is based on technological progress versus economic resources. Can you explain this?
A: The classical debate in economics has been whether the market always produces the "best" outcome. Best can be defined in different ways. In one stream of the debate, "best" has been defined as "technologically superior" (again, a term that can be defined differently). So, does the market always lead the "technologically superior" outcome, or can economic actors take actions to influence the market outcome so that a "technologically inferior" outcome arises?
We conclude that while both technological progress (measured by releases of newer and better versions of browsers: version 1, version 1.1, version 2, etc.) and strategic actions (distribution browsers with PC purchases) increase the rate of diffusion of browsers into the population, the strategic actions (distribution or restrictions on distribution in the case of Netscape) are twice as important as technical progress.
Q: Your findings show that at the height of the competition between Netscape and Microsoft during the 1990s, Microsoft's Internet Explorer became the de facto browser standard. What does this say in regards to first-mover versus second-mover advantage, and about future browser battles?
A: What is interesting are the lessons we can learn about how a fast second mover can upset the normally strong barriers to entry that a first-mover advantage in a network setting can create. In short, the big lesson learned is that a window of opportunity exists for a second mover to challenge a first mover in this setting early on when the new technology has not yet diffused through the entire population—the second mover can try to influence new users rather than get the small installed base to switch over.
The second mover has to have some sort of asymmetric advantage, such as control over the distribution of a complement (in this case, the PC), in order to slow the build-up of network effects around the first mover and ensure that the second mover's product begins to build up a critical mass. A number of smaller strategic elements converge to generate this window of opportunity, but I encourage people to read the paper as well as a chapter on this phenomenon which is forthcoming in Shane M. Greenstein & Victor Stango (Eds.), Standards and Public Policy, Cambridge University Press.
As for the future of Web browsers, the standard has been set, and it will be very hard to displace IE. Although Firefox is touted as the new challenger, its share of end-users is only estimated at 10 percent, and end-users are less of a barrier to further market share than are Webmasters.
Q: What are the chances for browsers like Firefox and Camino for the Mac to become mainstream products?
| The big lesson learned is that a window of opportunity exists for a second-mover to challenge a first-mover. |
A: Firefox and Camino claim only a small market share, and those users are on the tech-savvy end of the user spectrum. In particular for Mac-centric browsers, we still live in a PC-dominated world. Until IT managers in large enterprises are willing to support these browsers, they will not hit the mainstream in any major fashion.
Why won't an IT manager support these versions? The biggest headache with these browsers is that the majority of Web sites are optimized on IE. Try going to some of the major commercial airline sites, or to the Web sites of older and smaller companies. If you use Firefox, sometimes you will find missing menus, missing pictures, links that don't work, etc. Even Netscape doesn't work with all of our Harvard Business School applications.
But its Webmasters who are the real barrier to a late-to-the-game second mover in the browser market. Because different browsers require slightly different code to be viewable, it is costly for Webmasters to write for different types of browsers. They will tend to pick the browser that is most used by the majority of end-users. Thus, the source of network effects in this market is indirect. While end-users don't know which browser other users are using, the developers of the content that make the browser so useful do care that everyone is using a similar browser.
Q: So Firefox and other new browsers, no matter that they have new features and refinements that IE lacks, remain at a competitive disadvantage?
A: Game over. Firefox and the others have to get the installed base of IE users to switch to their browser, a much harder proposition than IE faced in the '90s when all it had to do was get new users to pick IE rather than Netscape as their first browser.
| Until IT managers in large enterprises are willing to support these browsers, they will not hit the mainstream in any major fashion. |
Either the innovations would have to be huge improvements over what IE can currently do, or a huge problem would have to arise with current IE use to create an opening for such a late second mover to make headway and lead people to go through the hassle of switching their browser.
Even with the security issues that plague IE, Microsoft has a huge amount of cash. If any browser really became a threat, Microsoft could easily imitate their innovation, or fix the IE problem with a patch. Indeed, IE successfully caught up to Netscape's quality by throwing a lot of money and manpower into IE browser development.
Q: What are you working on next?
A: Most closely related to the browser wars is research with professor Estelle Cantillon on how a second mover tipped the derivatives exchange market in the German Bund.
These works contribute to a more general theme in my research on how firms can change industry structure. The market tipping work addresses one part of that question: How can second movers break incumbent control? Casework and early-stage research attack a second aspect of that general theme: Can technology drive changes in demand? In a world of growing information resources, what are the drivers of search? How do people search, really? What would the answers to these questions imply for industry structure and business models in the next twenty years?
source:http://workingknowledge.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5288&t=technology
African Catfish Hunts On Land
source:http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/16/0436215
A high-tech way to defrost
Humans have been getting rid of ice the wrong way for centuries, it turns out.
Dartmouth College engineering professor Victor Petrenko, not to be confused with one of the Champions on Ice, has devised a way to use a burst of electricity to remove ice caked on walls or windows. For surfaces coated with a special film, the jolt gets rid of ice in less than a second, far less time than it takes to hack at it with an ice scraper.
While drivers might find easy-cleaning windshields convenient, the technology--called thin-film pulse electrothermal de-icing, or PETD--could have significant economic impact if widely deployed. It could, for example, cut the costs of repairing power lines downed by ice storms and keep plane windshields frost-free, decreasing fuel consumption.
In Sweden, civil engineers have tested PETD and decided to cover the Uddevalla Bridge in a 12-millimeter-thick PETD foil to keep it from icing over.
"Frost-free refrigerators can approximately reduce energy consumption by a factor of two. Billions of dollars are spent each year on running refrigerators and air conditioners. If you can cut that, it's great," Petrenko said. "In ice makers, we can cut the ice-harvesting cycle and increase the productivity of ice makers by 30 (percent) to 40 percent."
A refrigerator for the residential market sporting PETD will likely come out soon. The technology will also be incorporated into the windshield of an upcoming commercial jet, according to Petrenko. Aerospace parts supplier Goodrich, an investor in and one of the seven licensees of Petrenko's Ice Engineering company, is also promoting the concept among utilities as a way to keep wind turbines de-iced.
PETD can go in reverse, too. By varying the electric pulse, the technology can cause ice to stick better to surfaces. That could help snowboarders and skiers better manage the friction with the slope, for greater or lesser traction, as needed.
The technology essentially takes advantages of the inherent properties of ice. Ice, it turns out, is a semiconductor, meaning that it conducts an electrical charge under certain circumstances. Unlike silicon, which conducts negatively charged electrons, ice conducts protons, the core of hydrogen atoms that are part of the water molecules.
"(An) ice surface has an enormously high electric charge," Petrenko said.
As a result, ice doesn't simply cake onto surfaces--it bonds to them in three ways: via the hydrogen atoms themselves, via an electrostatic bond caused by the current, and via comparatively weak van der Waals forces.
PETD works by breaking the first two bonds. An electric charge lasting a few milliseconds heats the surface buried in ice just long enough to melt about a micron or two of the surface of the ice. Once the ice is melted, the hydrogen and electrical bonds break. The resulting water then acts as a lubricant, allowing the mass of ice to slide away.
"With short pulses, the heat doesn't have time to diffuse. It is all released on the interface," Petrenko said.
To get ice to stick to a surface, the pulse is shortened--first the ice melts, then refreezes. The resulting bond between the material and the ice is even stronger than before.
Why hasn't anyone already come up with this?
"I don't know," he said. "It is a very common story: People for centuries miss a very simple principle. When it's found, people say, 'How could we miss it?'"
Traditional ice removal methods don't address how to reverse the electrical bonds, which explains why they don't work that well. Ice scrapers essentially tear away ice from the outside. Material to repel ice also fails because ice will invariably bond. Companies have thrown money at trying to develop ice-resistant surfaces, but the results have been mediocre.
Petrenko himself worked on a project funded by a generous federal grant. "We concluded that it is against the laws of nature to have an ice-phobic material," he said. "Ice is very strong glue. It is a universal adhesive."
The difficulty with PETD lies in power delivery. The surface only has to be heated to about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, but a broad surface has to be heated simultaneously.
Still, an ordinary car, while running, could provide enough energy to remove the ice. It also takes less energy than heating the windshield.
The intellectual property at Ice Engineering mostly concerns developing power distribution systems and thin films, which coat the surface and conduct heat to the ice material interface. The composition of the films varies. In the case of windshields, Ice Engineering employs a layer of clear indium oxide. "It is the same thing on laptop displays," Petrenko said.
Ice machines and refrigerators, meanwhile, can rely on titanium or carbon fiber composites, which are more durable, because transparency isn't an issue.
The research, so far, has yielded 14 U.S. patents, and several more are pending. Dartmouth owns the patents but markets them through Ice Engineering.
Petrenko came to studying ice by accident. For years, he worked as a semiconductor researcher at Moscow's Institute of Physics and Technology. While on an exchange at Britain's University of Birmingham, he happened upon that school's ice research department. His life changed after that.
"We built a solar cell made of ice," he recalled. "While it is not as efficient as a silicon solar cell, it costs a penny a square mile."
source:http://news.com.com/A+high-tech+way+to+defrost/2100-11395_3-6061333.html
Natural light 'to reinvent bulbs'
 The clock is ticking for light bulbs |
The organic light-emitting diode (OLED) emits a brilliant white light when attached to an electricity supply.
The material, described in the journal Nature, can be printed in wafer thin sheets that could transform walls, ceilings or even furniture into lights.
The OLEDs do not heat up like today's light bulbs and so are far more energy efficient and should last longer.
They also produce a light that is more akin to natural daylight than traditional bulbs.
"We're hoping that this will lead to significantly longer device lifetimes in addition to higher efficiency," said Professor Mark Thompson of the University of Southern California, one of the authors of the paper.
Old fashioned
Traditional light bulbs were invented more than 130 years ago. Since then the basic principle of creating light remains the same, although the design has been tweaked.
An electric current passing through a tungsten wire causes it to heat up and glow white hot.
Today, more than 20% of electricity used in US buildings is eaten up by lights and nearly half that amount is used by traditional, incandescent light bulbs.
It has been a long-term goal of scientists to come up with something that would reduce this mammoth energy demand.
The new work exploits the properties of carbon-based polymers to produce the white light. These are already found in some mobile phone displays and MP3 players.
Until now, they have been unable to generate sufficient light to illuminate a room. 
To create the new material, the scientists build up ultra-thin layers of plastics coated with green, red and blue dyes.
When an electric current passes through them, they combine to produce white light.
Previous attempts to make OLEDs like this have largely failed to make an impact because traditional phosphorescent blue dyes are very short lived.
The new polymer uses a fluorescent blue material instead which lasts much longer and uses less energy.
The researchers believe that eventually this material could be 100% efficient, meaning it could be capable of converting all of the electricity to light, without the heat loss associated with traditional bulbs.
The new material can also be printed onto glass or plastic and so in theory could create large areas of lighting, relatively cheaply.
Before this becomes a reality, the scientists need to work out a way to seal the OLEDs from moisture which can contaminate the sensitive material, causing it to no longer work.
If that barrier can be overcome, the new polymer could eventually become the material of choice for stylish, environmentally friendly lighting.
The research team incorporated members from Princeton University, the University of Southern California and the University of Michigan.
source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4906188.stm
Summer of Code 2006 is On
source:http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/14/1854255
The world's most modern management - in India
NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - I have seen the future of management, and it is Indian. Vineet Nayar, president of India's 30,000-employee HCL Technologies (Research), is creating an IT outsourcing firm where, he says, employees come first and customers second.
Every employee rates their boss, their boss' boss, and any three other company managers they choose, on 18 questions using a 1-5 scale. Such 360-degree evaluations are not uncommon, but at HCL all results are posted online for every employee to see. That's un-heard-of!
And that's not all. Every HCL employee can at any time create an electronic "ticket" to flag anything they think requires action in the company.
Explains Nayar, "It can be 'I have a problem with my bonus,' or 'My seat is not working,' or 'My boss sucks.'" The ticket is routed to a manager for resolution.
Amazingly, such tickets can only be "closed" by the employees themselves. And Nayar is vigilant that managers not intimidate employees about creating or closing tickets. Managers are evaluated partly based on how many tickets their departments are creating - the more the better. Nonetheless, I'm sure it continues to be recommended not to be the employee who regularly posts a "my boss sucks" ticket.
In addition, every employee can post a question or comment on any subject in a public process called "U and I." About 400 come in each month, and questions and answers are all posted on the intranet.
"The food served in Sector 24 is stale," read one recent comment. Vendors were replaced.
You can't become a manager at HCL until you've passed a group of courses that include negotiation skills, presentation skills, account management, and what they call "expectation management" - dealing with the expectations of both customers and employees.
There is a method to what some might consider madness. Nayar has concluded that what he calls the "effort-based" model of Indian IT up to now will not win long term. That's because IBM and other global IT companies now have their own local employees and can match many longtime Indian cost advantages.
The winners, Nayar believes, will be those that deliver the best results to customers. Employees who are secure and happy can better focus on customer success, he thinks. So he aims to build an organization full of highly-skilled employees dedicated to creating customer value. He wants to make HCL, which employs 20 percent of its workforce overseas, the place people most want to work.
Nayar is also looking to solve a problem that looms large for Indian IT companies these days: Attrition. The best employees are increasingly the hardest to retain. Nayar wants anyone who leaves for a job elsewhere to end up frustrated.
"I want to be the company that gives superior service to my employees compared to everybody else," he explains. He also firmly believes the ideas that will guide HCL into the future will come not from him, but from below.
Early signs suggest his bold strategy is working. Nayar has only been president for a year, a tumultuous one in which most of these innovations have been implemented. But in that time the attrition rate has dropped in half, he says; the stock more than doubled - HCL Technologies' market cap is $4.2 billion. (The company is mostly owned by a holding company which also owns HCL Infosystems, India's largest PC-maker.) Revenues last year grew 34 percent to $764 million.
In January HCL won one of the biggest Indian outsourcing contracts ever, a three-year deal, reportedly worth $300 million, with European electronics retailer DSG ((
HCL's innovations are not only managerial. The company aims to become a strategic partner with customers by also working with them on business process management and by managing infrastructure remotely, a business it pioneered in India, says Nayar. It has succeeded with AMD (Research), a marquee customer for which it does all those things.
Another key customer is Cisco (Research), a 10-year customer with whom HCL is now embracing another form of innovation - shared risk. Since February, HCL has been completely responsible for engineering one Cisco product. It gets paid based on how well the product sells.
In engineering all this innovation, Nayar's humility appears to be a potent managerial asset. Last week he wrote a letter to the company's employees marking the anniversary of his taking the job (He worked his way up over 21 years.).
"Please excuse me if I stepped on any toes or hurt any feelings in trying to hurry the transformation agenda," he wrote. "I am here as long as I have your support and confidence."
Don't you wish more managers had the strength to speak like that?
source:http://money.cnn.com/2006/04/13/magazines/fortune/fastforward_fortune/index.htm
Improve Your iPod with Rockbox
source:http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/14/1356246
Stark warning over climate change
 The UK's own carbon emissions have gone up recently |
Professor Sir David King warned this would happen because world governments were failing to agree on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases.
He told the BBC that nations had to act now to tackle the warming expected to happen over the next 100 years.
And he said even if a global agreement could be reached on limiting emissions, climate change was inevitable.
The UK government and the EU want to try to stabilise the climate at an increase of no more than 2C, but the US refuses to cut emissions and those of India and China are rising quickly.
A recent report called Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, produced by the Hadley Centre, one of the top world centres for projecting future climate, modelled the likely effects of a 3C rise.
It warned the situation could wreck half the world's wildlife reserves, destroy major forest systems, and put 400 million more people at risk of hunger.
Professor King told BBC Radio 4's Today Programme: "We don't have to succumb to a state of despondency where we say that there is nothing we can do so let's just carry on living as per usual. 
I do not think enough countries really see it as a serious issue... yet!! 
"It is very important to understand that we can manage the risks to our population.
"What we are talking about here is something that will play through over decades - we are talking 100 years or so.
"We need to begin that process of investment."
He said it would be a major challenge for developing countries, in particular.
The Hadley forecasts hinge on stabilising the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) at a level of 550 parts per million in the atmosphere. Professor King said this was the figure Prime Minister Tony Blair wanted world leaders to agree on.
He admitted politicians were taking a big risk to push CO2 levels as high as 550ppm. This figure is almost double the pre-industrial level of two centuries ago.
But he said the UK government believed 550ppm was the lowest figure achievable worldwide as developing countries continued to increase their emissions, and the US refused to cut its CO2.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has criticised Professor King for accepting global temperatures could rise above 2C.
And Friends of the Earth director, Tony Juniper, said: "It is technologically possible to significantly reduce our emissions and deliver 2C - Professor King should be pressing for government polices to deliver on this rather than accepting the current lack of political will and talking of three degrees as an inevitability."
So far, the US, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has been unwilling to debate a CO2 threshold.
President Bush's chief climate adviser, James Connaughton, said he did not believe anyone could forecast a safe level and cutting greenhouse gas emissions could harm the world economy.
source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4888946.stm
Microsoft to Sponsor WCG
source:http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/14/0153258
Top Web sites for March 2006: Yahoo!, Microsoft, MSN. MySpace is in top 10.
Nielsen//NetRatings published its findings on top Web sites in March 2006. While the rank of leaders - Yahoo!, Microsoft.com, MSN, Google, AOL and eBay - remained unchanged from February 2006, MySpace is a newcomer to the Internet's top 10 list with the monthly traffic of 36,373,000 unique visitors and average time spent at 2:09:04 per user.
| Top sites in March 2006 | ||
| Site | Audience, 000 | Time spent |
| Yahoo! | 105,027 | 3:28:39 |
| Microsoft | 99,368 | 0:50:16 |
| MSN | 95,124 | 1:52:10 |
| 93,244 | 1:00:56 | |
| AOL | 75,348 | 6:13:54 |
| eBay | 55,573 | 1:59:18 |
| MapQuest | 40,809 | 0:12:05 |
| Amazon | 40,721 | 0:23:21 |
| Real | 36,961 | 0:43:00 |
| MySpace | 36,373 | 2:09:04 |
| Source: Nielsen//NetRatings | ||
ITFacts also published Web traffic findings for top sites in February 2006, top sites in January 2006, top sites in December 2005, top sites in November 2005, top sites in October 2005, top European sites in September 2005, top sites in September 2005, top sites in August 2005, top sites in June 2005, top sites in May 2005, top sites in february 2005, and top sites in January 2005.
source:http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=10630
Search users 'stop at page three'
 Companies are advised to be found on the first page of search results |
At most, people will go through three pages of results before giving up, found the survey by Jupiter Research and marketing firm iProspect.
It also found that a third of users linked companies in the first page of results with top brands.
The study surveyed 2,369 people from a US online consumer panel.
It also found 62% of those surveyed clicked on a result on the first page, up from 48% in 2002.
Some 90% of consumers clicked on a link in these pages, up from 81% in 2002.
And 41% of consumers changed engines or their search term if they did not find what they were searching for on the first page.
Effective marketing
Robert Murray, president of iProspect, said the study shows the "increased importance of being found in the first top search results".
He added as search engine efficacy has improved, along with the searching skills of users, so have expectations. It's another call for search engines to look at their performance
"They [users] know what they want, and they want to find it immediately, and the majority want to find it on page one," he said.
He said businesses needed to take the results of the study on board.
"It should be clear that to be effective, marketers need to take action to ensure that their company is found in the top search results on a broad range of search terms and not just single word generic terms."
"It's time that companies that are refreshing, re-designing, or launching a new website start with the end in mind. If no one can find it, no one will use it."
Increasing traffic
Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of Search Engine Watch, said the study reinforced current thinking.
"It's always been the case that businesses want to be on the first page because then you get the traffic," he told the BBC News website.
"This study tells me it was already important to be on the first page, now it is even more so.
"It's another call for search engines to look at their performance."
He said businesses wanting to improve their chances of returning good results should have "good pages, text rich content, and good links pointing to you".
source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4900742.stm
Number of Web Application Hacks Up
source:http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/13/2012253
Best Buy's 'Geek Squad' Accused of Pirating Software
AUSTIN, Texas — A Texas software company sued Best Buy Co. Inc. (BBY) in federal court on Tuesday, alleging that the nation's largest consumer electronics retailer was using unlicensed versions of its diagnostic equipment.
In response, a U.S. District Court granted Winternals Software LP's request for a temporary restraining order.
The lawsuit by Austin-based Winternals alleges employees of Best Buy's computer-repair subsidiary, Geek Squad Inc., have been using pirated versions of the software since talks on a commercial licensing agreement broke off.
The suit accuses Best Buy and its subsidiaries of copyright infringement, circumvention of copyright infringement systems and misappropriation of trade secrets.
"We are aware of the lawsuit filed today by Winternals. We are currently investigating the claims, but cannot comment further on pending litigation," Best Buy spokesman Jay Musolf said in an e-mail late Tuesday to The Associated Press.
According to the lawsuit, Winternals and Minnesota-based Best Buy began negotiating an agreement to use a Microsoft (MSFT) Windows-based systems recovery and data protection software last fall.
The lawsuit says Best Buy broke off negotiations in February, saying it was no longer interested in the commercial license.
source:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,191593,00.html
Tech's New Headache: Feature Creep
When Sony's (SNE) video games chief, Ken Kutaragi, announced in mid-March that the company's new PlayStation 3 console would be delayed, he offered what seemed a good excuse. Sony had risked far too much time and money to settle for anything but the top-of-the-line technology, he said. The main holdups were a copyright protection mechanism for the PS3's high-definition DVD player, and extra features that had been stuffed into the box. Who could blame him for making sure the console wouldn't be outdated the moment it arrived on store shelves?
But ask management gurus what they think and they'll wag a disapproving finger. To them, the PS3 delay is a classic case of a mismanaged project and feature overload. "You can't wait for certainty. In the technology business, that's always true," says Joel Koppelman, CEO of Primavera, a Bala Cynwyd (Pa.)-based company specializing in product planning. "There's always something better coming along."
Sony is just one example of how Asian tech firms have been a victim of their own promises to roll out the latest electronics goods. In recent weeks, a handful of companies have delayed the kick-off of critical products because they couldn't secure vital parts, or costs skyrocketed beyond initial projections.
STILL WAITING. On Mar. 8, Toshiba (TOSBF) and partner Canon said they would postpone the spring, 2006 rollout of new flat-screen TVs -- featuring surface-conduction electron-emitter display, or SEDs -- until late 2007. Three weeks later, Toshiba announced its high-definition DVD player, known as HD DVD, would hit stores in Japan months after its scheduled launch, and wouldn't sell in the U.S. until mid April. On Apr. 3, Korea's Samsung Electronics blamed the rescheduling of its Blu-ray player -- the same technology in Sony's PS 3 and the rival format to HD DVD -- from May to June on copyright protection delays and an add-on for showing high-definition pictures.
Sony gets a failing grade for succumbing to feature creep. That's industry-speak for the temptation to keep modifying a product at the last minute, adding all kinds of futuristic technologies, even as a deadline looms. The concept, first used in the computer software industry decades ago, applies to the corporate dilemma of whether to rush a product to market even it if doesn't have every whiz-bang feature available, or wait and update.
Luckily for Sony, analysts think PS3 might make up for lost time (see BW Online, 3/16/06, "Sony's Delay of Game"). But in the tech world, where consumer trends can rise and fall and product cycles are short, that's more often the exception than the rule. The penalty for a delay can be severe -- even catastrophic. One of the biggest risks in postponing a product launch is being out-hustled to market by rivals.
PLAN AHEAD. SED TVs, for instance, might lose some of their allure if Mitsubishi's new high-definition TVs relying on colored lasers arrive in stores later this year, as expected. "When you delay a product six months to a year, by the time you bring it out, you run the risk of its being obsolete on or near launch," says Rob Enderle, a tech consultant and principal at the Enderle Group based in San Jose, Calif.
There's no golden rule for avoiding delays, experts say. It takes realistic planning, a well-organized supply chain, and tons of vigilant monitoring to pull off any project. That's doubly difficult for tech makers, whose products amount to a gamble on what consumers will want years from now. Most should have a Plan B.
But once a project hits a snag, it can be next to impossible to get it back on track. "One of the things that has been proven time and again is... about 15% of the time into project, if a project is already falling behind schedule, the likelihood of its every catching up is zero," says Koppelman.
CREATING A MARKET. Anecdotal evidence suggests being the first to offer a new technology matters -- even if the technology is imperfect. Consider Apple Computer's (AAPL) iPod flash-memory music players. In January, 2005, the company began selling the 512-megabyte and 1-gigabyte Shuffle, a gum-pack-sized gizmo that held about 100 songs and played them in order or randomly. It was hardly the ideal music player.
But within eight months, Apple had another flash-based player, the nano, which had more memory, a tiny screen, and far more features. Had Apple waited for the nano, the company might not have gotten as many consumers hooked on its iTunes software, a big reason there have been so many repeat iPod buyers.
Consultants Bain & Co. have studied just how much speed matters. A few years ago, the company looked at PC maker Dell's (DELL) switch from 1-gigabit disk drives to 2-gigabit drives several weeks ahead of a big rival that wasn't as alert to the shift in demand. The result: Dell won out. A similar finding emerged when Bain & Co. examined a Mexico-based maker of 3.5-in. drives for removable "floppy" disks in the late 1990s.
LAG TIME. "In the disk-drive industry, if you're late to market with a next-generation product, as little as three months could cost you all hope of ever being profitable," says Mark Gottfredson, who heads the firm's global performance improvement unit based in Dallas. A head-start will give a company a shot at cutting production costs sooner than slow movers.
Even so, setbacks are likely when developing a technology that's years in the making. The first HD DVD players are only now reaching stores, about three and a half years after winning endorsement from a group of tech firms. Sony had to plan five years in advance for its PlayStation 3 console, while Canon first started research on SED TVs in 1984.
PLAY NICE. There are other complicating factors. The digital era has forced companies to make devices that can be compatible with rivals' machines. Both Sony and Samsung had to collaborate with other tech companies and Hollywood studios on the Blu-ray disc player's copyright protection system.
Kutaragi also wanted to ensure his machine played super-clear videos on any high-definition, flat-screen TV. To do that, he had to wait to see which HDMI, or high-definition multimedia interface, would become the standard. "The consortium approach has some fairly severe risks because the folks that are doing it don't naturally cooperate," says Enderle. "We had it with the wireless technologies' Wi-Fi, with Bluetooth. It's a recurring nightmare for these consortium-based technologies." For tech makers, it's a problem that won't go away anytime soon.
source:http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/apr2006/gb20060412_598932.htmFossils unearth proof of human evolution: experts
"For the first time, we found fossils that allow us to connect the first phase of human evolution and the second phase," Dr Berhane Asfaw, anthropologist and co-research director of the project that found the remains, told a news conference Wednesday in Addis Ababa.
"The fossils represent unambiguous evidence for human evolution," he said.
The remains of eight individuals found in the northeastern Afar region of Ethiopia belonged to the species Australopithecus anamensis -- part of the Australopithecus genus thought to be a direct ancestor to humans, according to a report due to be published Thursday in Nature magazine.
"The fossils are anatomically intermediate between the earlier species Ardipithecus ramidus and the later species Australopithecus afarensis," he said.
The fossils were found by a team directed by the paleoanthropologist Tim White from the University of California, Berkeley, working in the Asa Issie site in the Middle Awash area, 230 kilometres (143 miles) north of Addis Ababa.
The ecology of the surrounding area indicated that the specimens were forest-dwellers, the Nature report said.
In 1992 White found remains of a more primitive hominid, Ardipithecus ramidus, which inhabited the region around the same time as the anamensis species. But no evolutionary link between them has been established until now.
The origin of Australopithecus is a key problem in the study of human evolution and a contentious subject among anthropologists. Some see them as early ancestors to humans, while others believe they represent a dead branch of the hominid genealogical tree.
A notable specimen of the newly found fossil's descendant species Australopithecus afarensis, a three-million-year old fossil nicknamed Lucy, was discovered in 1974.
"We have proved that one (species) is transforming into the other, so this evidence is important to show that there is human evolution... that human evolution is a fact and not a hypothesis," Asfaw said.
The anamensis species had previously been found in the Lake Turkana region of Kenya, but a link between the earlier and later stages of evolution could not be proven until anamensis was found in the same area as the other species.
"The ecological setting where we found the fossils shows that the first phase of the human evolution took place in the forest," he said. "They started moving out of the forest only after anamensis."
Ethiopia is "the cradle of humanity", according to Nature. All three of the species linked together by the new finds were found in Ethiopia.
"It is the only place in the world where the three phases of evolution could be documented and proved," Asfaw said.
"All (three species) were able to be found in one place, proving that evolution is a fact," Asfaw said. "Successive records that we see here prove that the Afar region is the origin of human kind."
source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/sciencepaleontology;_ylt=Apq73Z7wNWOFRgnKBqGgy9wDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTBhcmljNmVhBHNlYwNtcm5ld3M-
