Industrialized IT

IT is industrializing: What does that mean to me? | The View from Forrester Research | ZDNet.com

Manufacturing process improvements like the assembly line and just-in-time manufacturing combined with automation and statistical quality control to ensure that we can make products faster and more consistently, at a lower cost. Most of the products we use could not exist without an industrialized model.

Wal-Mart has industrialized retail, by perfecting industrialized supply chain management. Supply chain management at Wal-Mart (and many other game-changing companies) is incredible. Products are always moving and the supply-demand cycles ebb and flow almost instantaneously to market demand, with inventories kept at a bare minimum everywhere and always. Service companies like FedEx, Amazon, and Apple’s iTunes also demonstrate the power to destroy the old models of business because their business models are based on the same principles of industrialization.

A good, thought provoking article. But I must admit that words like "assembly line", JIT and manufacturing don't usually make a good impression with puritan geeks. Task 0, therefore, would be to find geek friendly terms to all this buiz jargon :)

The Biz School Chronicles :: What the bleep is a buyer persona?

"A buyer persona is a detailed profile of an example buyer that represents the real audience – an archetype of the target buyer. Marketers can use buyer personas to clarify the goals, concerns, preferences and decision process that are most relevant to their customers. Imagine how effective marketers could be if we would all stop making stuff up and start aligning our messages and programs with the way real people think."

I just came across a nice blog dedicated to the study of "Buyer Personas". The above explanation is from there. The author also posts some practical examples ...

"Design engineers frequently build user personas as a part of their product development process. The application of personas for marketing is less common, but hardly without precedent. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush successfully campaigned to the soccer mom persona during the 1992, 1996 and 2000 elections. By 2004, the soccer mom had morphed into a security mom persona as school violence and terrorism became big issues. The Presidents' campaign staffs used dozens of personas like these to focus their messages and win more votes."

So where do we need buyer personas? I feel that it is ideal to develop your buyer personas immediately after Segmentation of your potential market. Now that you have an idea about your market segments, and the next logical steps in the process are targeting and positioning, developing buyer personas for the target segments would help a lot moving forward.

Case studies, brochures or any marketing collateral for that matter will benefit immensely if you have a buyer persona in mind when you develop it. This makes targeting more accurate and the whole positioning exercise a productive one. Otherwise a marketer falls into the abyss of messaging to no one in particular, which is a costly mistake. The blog I mentioned above takes Sugar CRM website as an example of doing things the right way ...

"I recently visited the Sugar CRM website and saw a series of demos for their Customer Relationship Management product, one for each of the five personas who influences the decision to buy. Navigation to these role-based demos is labeled for each buyer's functional role -- sales, marketing, support, executive and admin -- a great example of the application of persona-based messaging. This website offers visitors a chance to hear how this single solution addresses the needs of whichever buyer persona lands there, and as a bonus, SugarCRM can readily measure which of their target influencers is spending the time to listen to their message."

So that's what the bleep a buyer persona is :)

Google Web Toolkit + HTML5 = Javascript Qake2 ?

Confused? Some of the engineers at Google have used their 20% time to port Jake2, a Java port of the Qake 2 engine to Javascript.

"We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit" (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into Javascript. You can see the results in the video above -- we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops (your mileage may vary)!"

Here's a demo. I, for one, can't wait to try it out (and have a look at the GWT code of course).

Google Announces OAuth access to IMAP/SMTP in Gmail

Google Code Blog: OAuth access to IMAP/SMTP in Gmail

Google has long believed that users should be able to export their data and use it with whichever service they choose. For years, the Gmail service has supported standard API protocols like POP and IMAP at no extra cost to our users. These efforts are consistent with our broader data liberation efforts.

In addition to making it easier for users to export their data, we also enable them to authorize third party (non-Google developed) applications and websites to access their data at Google. One of the more common examples is allowing a social network to access your address book in order to send invitations to your friends.

This is great news for Gadget and Mashup developers. We will definetely have some sample Gadgets and Mashups in a near future release using the newly 'liberated' GMail :)

The Enterprise OSGi spec is here ...

Enterprise OSGi spec rolls out at EclipseCon

At EclipseCon in Santa Clara, Calif., the OSGi Alliance announced approval of its long-brewing OSGi Enterprise Specification (Release 4, Version 4.2). This release of the OSGi bundled component standard is targeted at a broad group of Java application server developers. Greater modularity and increased component re-use are main OSGi goals.

WSO2 Gadget Server and WSO2 Mashup Server .next

The WSO2 Mashup Server, still the only true Free and Open Source Mashup platform in the industry will see its 2.1.0 release alongside Carbon 3.0.0 - Irridium. Highlights for this release include ...

• Carbon 3.0.0 - Irridium as base platform
• Hierarchical mashup deployment (mashups deployed under user work spaces)
• New HTTP client Host Object to retrieve any resource over the internet, supplementing the Screen Scraper and WSRequest Host Objects and
  
• numerous fixes and improvements as suggested by users in our forums 
  

We are almost there with version 1.1.0 release of the WSO2 Gadget Server and Nuwan, a key member of my team has done a nice round up of the latest features and improvements we've done for this release. To highlight ...

• We are powered by Carbon 3.0.0 - Irridium
• Latest stable revision of Apache Shindig
• Pub/Sub and i18n for Gadgets and
• HTTP mode portal (in case you haven't noticed we ran the portal on HTTPS in previous releases, which was not a must, since Gadgets themselves come from HTTP sources.)

I'm also working on an article explaining inter Gadget communication with pub/sub that I hope to publish in the WSO2 Oxygen Tank right in time for the release.

We are at the beta testing stages of the release cycle and are hoping to announce the final release within the next couple of weeks.

The funnel is dead. It's time for Conversational Marketing

Conversational Marketing

View more presentations from Arto Joensuu.

This came via Annie Infinite. One of the marketers in my social network.

Add Gadgets to your blog

Step 1: Go to layout settings in your blogger.com blog and click "Add a Gadget".




Step 2: Click "Add your own" and type the gadget URL as http://gsdemo.wso2.org/registry/resource/system/gadgets/soa.xml

(This gadget is hosted in the WSO2 Gadget Server demo instance at http://gsdemo.wso2.org)




Step 3: Change gadget settings if required and click "Save".



Step 4: Save your layout. Now the latest posts from the SOA Platform Blog will be visible in your blog. And the beauty of this particular gadget is that your viewers can read the SOA Platform Blog's posts without leaving your blog :)

The Biz School Chronicles :: Hierarchy of Social Community Needs

Read the original article here.

Forrester analyst Nigel Fenwick makes a nice connection between Abraham Maslow's classical theory on the Human Hierarchy of Needs and the needs and aspirations of those who participate in today's on-line communities. At a glance the mapping looks like ....



The author recommends that those who develop/host such communities keep these motivational factors in mind and facilitate achieving them via;

• Offering a mechanism for easy communication (e.g. micro-blogging).
• Helping members to connect through rich profiles and profile search with friending.
• Encouraging support by providing not only Q&A but also the ability to vote and reward contributions
• Providing the ability to share ideas and to comment and add insight such as through virtual whiteboards, photos, video or a wiki-type content platform.

Good read!

Bill Gates No Longer World's Richest Man

India, China make mark on Forbes rich list / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com

Eight Indians made Forbes magazine’s latest list of the top 100 billionaires, and two – energy tycoon Mukesh Ambani and steel mogul Lakshmi Mittal – sit in the top 5. Mr. Ambani is now the fourth richest person in the world, and the richest person in the Asia-Pacific region.