Here is a short introduction of this new and exciting solution for medium size businesses.
SAP ByDesign, the code name is “A1S”
You can check the original article from RWW
Written by Richard MacManus / September 5, 2007 / 21 comments
We’re well into the current era of the Web, commonly referred to as Web 2.0. Features of this phase of the Web include search, social networks, online media (music, video, etc), content aggregation and syndication (RSS), mashups (APIs), and much more. Currently the Web is still mostly accessed via a PC, but we’re starting to see more Web excitement from mobile devices (e.g. iPhone) and television sets (e.g. XBox Live 360).
What then can we expect from the next 10 or so years on the Web? As NatC commented in this week’s poll, the biggest impact of the Web in 10 years time won’t necessarily be via a computer screen - “your online activity will be mixed with your presence, travels, objects you buy or act with.” Also a lot of crossover will occur among the 10 trends below (and more) and there will be Web technologies that become enormously popular that we can’t predict now.
Bearing all that in mind, here are 10 Web trends to look out for over the next 10 years…
Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for a Semantic Web has been The Next Big Thing for a long time now. Indeed it’s become almost mythical, like Moby Dick. In a nutshell, the Semantic Web is about machines talking to machines. It’s about making the Web more ‘intelligent’, or as Berners-Lee himself described it
: computers “analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers.” At other times, Berners-Lee has described it as “the application of weblike design to data” - for example designing for re-use of information.
As Alex Iskold wrote in The Road to the Semantic Web, the core idea of the Semantic Web is to create the meta data describing data, which will enable computers to process the meaning of things. Once computers are equipped with semantics, they will be capable of solving complex semantical optimization problems.
So when will the Semantic Web arrive? The building blocks are here already: RDF, OWL, microformats are a few of them. But as Alex noted in his post, it will take some time to annotate the world’s information and then to capture personal information in the right way. Some companies, such as Hakia and Powerset and Alex’s own AdaptiveBlue, are actively trying to implement the Semantic Web. So we are getting close, but we are probably a few years off still before the big promise of the Semantic Web is fulfilled.
Semantic Web pic by dullhunk
Possibly the ultimate Next Big Thing in the history of computing, AI has been the dream of computer scientists since 1950 - when Alan Turing introduced the Turing test to test a machine’s capability to participate in human-like conversation. In the context of the Web, AI means making intelligent machines. In that sense, it has some things in common with the Semantic Web vision.
We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of AI on the Web. Amazon.com has attempted to introduce aspects of AI with Mechanical Turk, their task management service. It enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. Since its launch on 2 November 2005, Mechanical Turk has gradually built up a following - there is a forum for “Turkers” called Turker Nation, which appears to have light-to-medium level patronage. However we reported in January that Mturk isn’t being used as much as the initial hype period in Nov-Dec 05.
Nevertheless, AI has a lot of promise on the Web. AI techniques are being used in “search 2.0” companies like Hakia and Powerset. Numenta is an exciting new company by tech legend Jeff Hawkins, which is attempting to build a new, brain-like computing paradigm - with neural networks and cellular automata. In english this means that Numenta is trying to enable computers to tackle problems that come easy to us humans, like recognizing faces or seeing patterns in music. But since computers are much faster than humans when it comes to computation, we hope that new frontiers will be broken - enabling us to solve the problems that were unreachable before.
Second Life gets a lot of mainstream media attention as a future Web system. But at a recent Supernova panel that Sean Ammirati attended, the discussion touched on many other virtual world opportunities. The following graphic summarizes it well:
Looking at Korea as an example, as the ‘young generation’ grows up and infrastructure is built out, virtual worlds will become a vibrant market all over the world over the next 10 years.
It’s not just about digital life, but also making our real life more digital. As Alex Iskold explained, on one hand we have the rapid rise of Second Life and other virtual worlds. On the other we are beginning to annotate our planet with digital information, via technologies like Google Earth.
Mobile Web is another Next Big Thing on slow boil. It’s already big in parts of Asia and Europe, and it received a kick in the US market this year with the release of Apple’s iPhone. This is just the beginning. In 10 years time there will be many more location-aware services available via mobile devices; such as getting personalized shopping offers as you walk through your local mall, or getting map directions while driving your car, or hooking up with your friends on a Friday night. Look for the big Internet companies like Yahoo and Google to become key mobile portals, alongside the mobile operators.
Companies like Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Palm, Blackberry and Microsoft have been active in the Mobile Web for years now, but one of the main issues with Mobile Web has always been usability. The iPhone has a revolutionary UI that makes it easier for users to browse the Web, using zooming, pinching and other methods. Also, as Alex Iskold noted, the iPhone is a strategy that may expand Apple’s sphere of influence, from web browsing to social networking and even possibly search.
So even despite the iPhone hype, in the US at least (and probably other countries when it arrives) the iPhone will probably be seen in 10 years time as the breakthrough Mobile Web device.
The Attention Economy is a marketplace where consumers agree to receive services in exchange for their attention. Examples include personalized news, personalized search, alerts and recommendations to buy. The Attention Economy is about the consumer having choice - they get to choose where their attention is ‘spent’. Another key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy. As long as the consumer sees relevant content, he/she is going to stick around - and that creates more opportunities to sell.
Expect to see this concept become more important to the Web’s economy over the next decade. We’re already seeing it with the likes of Amazon and Netflix, but there is a lot more opportunity yet to explore from startups.
Image from The Attention Economy: An Overview, by Alex Iskold
Alex Iskold wrote in March that as more and more of the Web is becoming remixable, the entire system is turning into both a platform and the database. Major web sites are going to be transformed into web services - and will effectively expose their information to the world. Such transformations are never smooth - e.g. scalability is a big issue and legal aspects are never simple. But, said Alex, it is not a question of if web sites become web services, but when and how.
The transformation will happen in one of two ways. Some web sites will follow the example of Amazon, del.icio.us and Flickr and will offer their information via a REST API. Others will try to keep their information proprietary, but it will be opened via mashups created using services like Dapper, Teqlo and Yahoo! Pipes. The net effect will be that unstructured information will give way to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing.
Note that we can also see this trend play out currently with widgets and especially Facebook in 2007. Perhaps in 10 years time the web services landscape will be much more open, because the ‘walled garden’ problem is still with us in 2007.
Image from Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services, by Alex Iskold
This is a trend that has already exploded on the Web - but you still get the sense there’s a lot more to come yet. In October 2006 Google acquired the hottest online video property on the planet, YouTube. Later on that same month, news came out that the founders of Kazaa and Skype were building an Internet TV service, nicknamed The Venice Project (later named Joost). In 2007, YouTube continues to dominate. Meanwhile Internet TV services are slowly getting off the ground.
Our network blog last100 has an excellent overview of the current Internet TV landscape, with reviews of 8 Internet TV apps. Read/WriteWeb’s Josh Catone also reviewed 3 of them - Joost, Babelgum, Zattoo.
It’s fair to say that in 10 years time, Internet TV will be totally different to what it is today. Higher quality pictures, more powerful streaming, personalization, sharing, and much more - it’s all coming over the next decade. Perhaps the big question is: how will the current mainstream TV networks (NBC, CNN, etc) adapt?
Zattoo, from Internet Killed The Television Star: Reviews of Joost, Babelgum, Zattoo, and More, by Josh Catone
As the current trend of hybrid web/desktop apps continues, expect to see RIA (rich internet apps) continue to increase in use and functionality. Adobe’s AIR platform (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is one of the leaders, along with Microsoft with its Windows Presentation Foundation. Also in the mix is Laszlo with its open source OpenLaszlo platform and there are several other startups offering RIA platforms. Let’s not forget also that Ajax is generally considered to be an RIA - it remains to be seen though how long Ajax lasts, or whether there will be a ‘2.0’.
As Ryan Stewart wrote for Read/WriteWeb back in April 2006 (well before he joined Adobe), “Rich Internet Apps allow sophisticated effects and transitions that are important in keeping the user engaged. This means developers will be able to take the amazing changes in the Web for granted and start focusing on a flawless experience for the users. It is going to be an exciting time for anyone involved in building the new Web, because the interfaces are finally catching up with the content.”
The past year has proven Ryan right, with Adobe and Microsoft duking it out with RIA technologies. And there’s a lot more innovation to happen yet, so in 10 years time I can’t wait to see what the lay of the RIA land is!
As of 2007, the US is still the major market in the Web. But in 10 years time, things might be very different. China is often touted as a growth market, but other countries with big populations will also grow - India and African nations for example.
For most web 2.0 apps and websites (R/WW included), the US market makes up over 50% of their users. Indeed, comScore reported in November 2006 that 3/4 of traffic to top websites is international. comScore said that 14 of the top 25 US Web properties now attract more visitors from outside the US than from within. That includes the top 5 US properties - Yahoo! Sites, Time Warner Network, Microsoft, Google Sites, and eBay.
However, it is still early days and the revenues are not big in international markets at this point. In 10 years time, revenue will probably be flowing from the International Web.
Personalization has been a strong theme in 2007, particularly with Google. Indeed Read/WriteWeb did a feature week on Personalizing Google. But you can see this trend play out among a lot of web 2.0 startups and companies - from last.fm to MyStrands to Yahoo homepage and more.
What can we expect over the next decade? Recently we asked Sep Kamvar, Lead Software Engineer for Personalization at Google, whether there will be a ‘Personal PageRank’ system in the future. He replied:
“We have various levels of personalization. For those who are signed up for Web History, we have the deepest personalization, but even for those who are not signed up for Web History, we personalize your results based on what country you are searching from. As we move forward, personalization will continue to be a gradient; the more you share with Google, the more tailored your results will be.”
If nothing else, it’ll be fascinating to track how Google uses personalization over the coming years - and how it deals with the privacy issues.
We’ve covered a lot of ground in this post, so tell us know what you think of our predictions. What other Web trends do you forsee over the next decade?
I didn’t care about dotnet for a long time (java is my preferred programming language in the working place). When i came back, wow, so many new features, tools, and technologies have been spread in .Net world: .Net framework 3.5 was released, VS.Net 2008 has released the beta2, and the final version is on the way…The Enterprise Library now is in the version 3.1…
I am trying the new features in netfx 3.5, actually, netfx3 is not the update of netfx2.0, because it just merges some additional modules: Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows CardSpace. I am expressed by the WPF, it’s so cool.
The open source O-R mapping tool “Nettiers” is in the version 2.0, unfortunately, the supported code generation engine “CodeSimith” is now commercial. I remembered it’s open sourced. I can use the free trial for 30 days, hah..
Anyway, there are so many amazing changes in dotnet, so i need to take some time on these technologies. I was a dotnet fan, now i am returning.:)
一年以来，主要的注意力基本上都是在关注着互联网的发展，却忽视了自己的发展，想的很多，做的很少，这当中产生了好几个非常不错的创意，到如今还一个也没有实现，实在是惭愧，细细想来，还是技术准备上面很不足，选择的技术框架不断的变化，结果都是半途而废，现在对一些非常看重的想法，实在不能如此蹉跎了，在技术特别是Web发展飞快的今日，每一天都是弥足珍贵的，浪费了一个时机，当初的蓝海可能就成了红色。
“I will live this day as if it is my last!”
“I will act now”
—“The Scroll Marked”, By Og Mandino
Carl Howe (Blackfriars Communications)
At MIX07, Adobe (ADBE) introduced its complement to Flash (despite the fact it owns Flash) called Apollo. Not to be outdone, Microsoft (MSFT) did the same thing a few hours later with Silverlight. As is often the case, Mark Pilgrim at Dive Into Mark uses his snarky wit to eviscerate both vendor attempts to create new proprietary standards to replace open ones.
Now some may be wondering why so many people, myself included, have such violent negative reactions to these attempts to improve the user experience of the World Wide Web. After all, I wrote a report at Forrester about seven years ago called the X Internet that claimed that the Web needed to be more interactive. So what’s wrong with a extensions and developer tools to make it all easier? Well, other than attempting to sidestep important collaborative efforts like World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Standards Project, these proprietary browser extensions break the utility of the World Wide Web in important ways. The problems with these proprietary tools (and by the way, I include Flash in this list as well) is that they:
Put users into plug-in hell. Here’s a fun experiment. Load your original installation disk of Windows. Install it on your computer. Launch Internet Explorer and go try to download one of these plug-ins. You’ve just embarked on a many hour to many day project. Why? Because these plug-ins only work on the latest versions of most operating systems. So you’ll be downloading security updates, verifying Windows Genuine Advantage checkers (don’t get me started), and updating your security software to OK your plug for many hours. Oh, and if you aren’t on a broadband connection, you have about as much chance of doing this successfully as swimming the Atlantic Ocean. Because of this plug-in hell for all but the most up-to-date users, plug-in requirements will…. Create Web ghettos. Browser plug-ins divide the Internet into two camps: those that have, and those that don’t. And despite these vendors’ best efforts, users of Internet Explorer 6 and earlier, Windows 98 and 2000 users, Linux afficionados, cell-phone browsers, and those unwilling to put up with absurdly restrictive end user license are just out of luck. In today’s more than a billion user Internet, that means telling millions of users, “You aren’t important enough for us to serve.” Nice. Don’t provide accessibility. If you’re sight-impaired, good luck finding anything within a Flash/Apollo/Silverlight-powered site. These systems are so focused on providing streaming video, flashing menus and shiny objects that they provide almost no information that can be used by standard text or reading browsers. Yes, you can add alternative information in the underlying HTML markup, but that means keeping parallel data consistent; any developer knows that is painful. Make search a pain. Yes, Fox Studios may put its catalog in Silverlight, but you can forget Google ever finding the films in that catalog once you do. Suddenly, you are held hostage by Fox’s searching capability (or worse, Microsoft’s) to find what you want, and if we’ve learned one thing over the last decade, it’s that good searching is hard to do right.
One final note on Silverlight. This isn’t the first time Microsoft has created a new framework for interactive Internet applications to embrace and extend the Web. Mark Pilgrim’s reference to shiny objects triggered a long-dormant synapse in my brain. Does anyone remember Microsoft’s 1998 initiative called Chromeffects? Here’s a reminder from the press release:
Chromeffects interactive media technology gives developers the power to dramatically improve the end-user computing experience by adding visual impact and unique real-time functionality without the lengthy downloads of current bulky multimedia. Chromeffects takes advantage of the latest multimedia enhancements to the Windows operating system and leverages the power of the latest PC hardware to deliver an end-user experience that is uniquely entertaining and efficient.
Fast. Chromeffects introduces a host of new interactive media data types to achieve richer interactive graphics with smaller, faster downloads, increased frame rates and real-time performance. XML tags in Chromeffects allow lightweight descriptions to be sent over the Internet for the Windows 98-based client to render and process the media, exploiting the latest PC hardware for acceleration gains in performance and real-time interactivity. Flashy. Developers can now easily create high-fidelity, television-style effects and animations never before seen on the Web. By utilizing the 16-bit color and 3-D compositional space of Chromeffects, designers can create a more entertaining, engaging and memorable viewer experience. Functional. Content optimized for Chromeffects can be used to improve overall navigation and communication of information. Mapping HTML text or images to a cube can multiply the effective real estate of a page. Rather than navigating through pages, the user can mouse-over a cube to bring a new side of information to the front. Chromeffects also enables bend-away menu bars, to increase focal area on the screen. The Chromeffects SDK provides many interactive examples of how the technology can be applied to greatly improve functionality. The documentation on the SDK itself is an actual example of how the Chromeffects technology inspires viewers to interact and explore concepts. “The Chromeffects SDK puts the ability to create compelling interactive media content in reach of a far broader community of graphic and publishing designers,” said Eric Engstrom, general manager of multimedia at Microsoft. “By making it simple for third-party developers to design and adapt add-in enhancements to Chromeffects, we intend to fill the huge void in the easy-to-author tools space.”
Of course, that was the sequel to Microsoft’s original Web-killer Blackbird from the early 1990s. It’s nice to know that despite changes in interfaces and software technology, Microsoft’s strategy for the Internet hasn’t changed.
What is Google doing now?
Flex, Flash and Apollo for Rich Internet Applications (James Ward, May 2, 2007)
