My Green Corner

Developers got good news last week. Launch of a new beta tool facilitating developers with integrated software as a service platform with application development environment by Salesforce.com created rippling waves.The company named this beta tool as “Force.com Development-as-a-Service”. Several features have been included with these tools like a metadata application programming interface for accessing database schema, user interface code, and business logic on the Salesforce.com platform.

Ariel Kelman, Senior Director of Salesforce.com’s  platform product marketing says that the developers can also download from Salesforce.com “an application that enables development and deployment of software from an Eclipse-based integrated development environment”. “Eclipse”  is one of the popular open source development frameworks that the developers commonly use.

Developers can now set up ‘sandboxes’ on the Salesforce.com  platform. These sandboxes are completely on the same lines of the “SaaS Application”. The ‘sandboxes’ will now help developers in building the codes and testing the codes in these ‘sandboxes prior to moving the code for the production line.

Lastly, the Salesforce.com  has also configured an API that is readily available for integrating the development process within ‘source code control management systems’, like the ‘Perforce Software Products’ or the ‘IBM’s Rational software’.

Application of the Salesforce.com  tool will also facilitate the developers in storing definitions of applications in their systems for sharing and collaboration with other developers. In order to facilitate the online collaboration among the developers, code of Salesforce.com share also supports Google’s online repository called Google Code.

This new launch by the Salesforce.com now reflects how Salesforce.com is adding more sophisticated development tools to its platform. The company also facilitates its customers and users along with the subscribers with an extended flexibility to tailor the company’s hosted customer relationship management and sales force automation software.

Salesforce.com also launched its Apex development platform during last summer. This development platform comprised a programming language and online development tools.

As a matter of fact, the enhanced flexibility in the application development is more favorable to the large corporations with an IT staff available to build on top of Salesforce.com’s core services.

The company was enjoying a good name among the ‘small and medium sized businesses (SMBs)’ for a long time as a provider of online services for small and medium-sized businesses. It has climbed up the ladder now and serving the needs of larger businesses as well. “Dell“, the major computer manufacturing giant, joined the club as an esteemed customer last year. Another large company that is already having business with the Salesforce.com is the “Cisco Systems”.

Marc Benioff, the Chief Executive of the Salesforce.com predicted in the month of November last year that the company would expectedly achieve the $1 billion in annual revenues within a year. However, there is a stiff competition ahead.

Microsoft has also launched a new version of its CRM software, CRM 4.0, in the month of December last year. This CRM software of Microsoft provides the company and its hosting partners with the extended ability to host CRM in much higher volumes. This will in turn put a big challenge before Salesforce.com. Microsoft  has among its future plans to launch its new and much improved  ‘SaaS’ version, called “CRM Live”, sometime during the first half of the current year.

Developers and experts will definitely find this service as one of the more beneficial option with much extended features. Salesforce.com’s  new ‘Force.com Development-as-a-Service’ is in developer preview and awaits developers to have a look in to at the company’s developer site.  The company intends to make the tools available in the markets for general applications for the customers sometime this year only.

As the web based business is growing exponentially some key issues need to be looked in to having a holistic view. Some of the business makers having a business specific domain prefer to park the domain and on the other side businesses prefer to develop a domain for making a fortune. Experts have different opinions about both of these concepts.Kevin Leto discussed this issue at length in his writings, “When looking at the debate of Parking vs. Development, much depends on the objectives a domain owner has for his portfolio and the types and quality of his domains”.

In common parlance, a high quality type-in domain will normally have a higher ‘Click through Rate’ (CTR) on a ‘Pay Per Click’ (PPC) page, usually 30% to 40% or even more. On the other hand, a web site will generally have a ‘CTR’ of just 5% to 10%. Because of this situation there is a drop in revenues initially.

Ironically, a ‘Pay Per Click’ campaign never creates traffic growth. It is also not a helpful tool to create a user base. PPC does not offer any other revenue or site feature options. Meaning thereby, it leaves you with limited opportunities. But on the other side of it, PPC has an extremely upside advantage with its simplicity. It is the single source monetization solution for hundreds of thousands of website domains.

Those who think that PPC is better must take a second look in to the concept deeply. Ultimately, PPC is not a huge monetization resource. Kevin Leto says, “If PPC was indeed better than we wouldn’t have any problems selling our fabulous sounding one word domain names to major corporations all day long. They’d be falling all over themselves to pay any price we ask”.  As a matter of, it’s not happening and it’s not going to happen, with rare exceptions of course.

Undeveloped and underdeveloped domains would never serve the purpose for any business. Any major business organization would be least interested in acquiring such a domain that has only type-in traffic for a longer time period. Such organization would rather prefer to have a brand domain with loads of users so that the users can be given a positive experience with product information, and services. Such developed domains would be a nice platform for establishing an interaction with the users and also entertain them.

“One of the most popular website, Business.com went from a $150,000 domain acquisition to a $7.5 million acquisition for development as a search engine with companies paying annual fees of $199 to be included and paying for ad clicks to their directory listing, and just recently to a $345 Million acquisition by the R.H. Donnelly company”, refers Kevin.

It seems to be a good option for the domain owners to have such a PPC landing page and minting money. But this strategy alone would never help them making a money factory with their domain. It is never the traffic alone that hits the treasure always. A careful analysis of such a website would reveal that it is the well managed and meticulously created database that creates an established advertisement empire. The advertisers generated with the help of a well conceptualized database can always be converted in to further advertisers for the entire network of domains.

Internet users and specifically the web surfers have no particular landing base. They just click, spend few seconds or a few minutes sometimes, and then hop up to the next site instantly. They do land up on a PPC page often but this is not what a domain owner could desire. A cherished prospective customer walked in to the store and within seconds it moves out to find another opened up door of someone else’s store. That is not a good business in any aspect.

The number game looks mind boggling indeed. A big domain could have more than 25,000 visitors a day and this may continue for even 10 years making it a site with more than 10 million visitors a year. Meaning thereby, this much people or prospective customers did walk in to the online store but none of them was an actual customer. No one of this huge number left their email addresses for future communications. None even bothered to leave an imprint of its choices, preferences, and liking for products. This is a bit more hypothetical but it could happen also. If not in true sense but it may be possible that just five or ten percent of these visitors did so. Therefore, this can never be a foundation for a big business ahead.

Having a different look at this concept gives an interesting picture also. A typical PPC model, for instance, may pay 15 cents a click and gives 60% CTR for a domain on an average. This way in a period of almost ten years at least $10 million can easily be earned. This is huge money, no doubt. This is a successful business, no doubt again.

Business with a developed domain would be ideally and practically different. In the same period of ten years, keeping the number of visitors as same, a considerable number of these visitors would turn in to customers. Many of them would be repeat customers as well. Several others would have subscriptions and even opt for being registered members. These customers would be assets to the domain in true sense. They will provide free word of mouth publicity. It will bring more traffic and more users and more customers.

The generation of revenue may reach to any level, even unimaginable heights. Doing a business with a website and adopting correct practices would generate cash flow automatically. The amount earned could be simply equal to the PPC or could be in any multiple of that.

Key issue is having a website and an incredibly reliable and valuable domain. A customer at this website would be even more valuable asset. This asset could make a fortune for the domain owner.

Both the techniques therefore, are money making techniques but a developed domain model is definitely an ultimate long term business model for creating wealth and not just making money. Of course, not every developed website does wonders. The only good point about this internet business economy is this that it is really less expensive and anyone can always try several alternative concepts without much investments. “You always have your base type-in traffic. That is not going anywhere. If one building doesn’t work, knock it down and put up another until you get it right. It’s that simple”, says Kevin.

  Google is now planning to commence an innovative effort to capture human knowledge on the internet. This new initiative, “Google Knol”, is presently undergoing its testing phase. This would be an innovative ‘Web-publishing approach’ that is drawing comparisons to Wikipedia, according to Google.A “knol,” according to Google, is an individual segment of information or knowledge. This innovative concept of a new publishing platform is running in trials and tests in the hands of selected individuals who have been invited to take part in a beta version, the search giant said in a statement recently.

“The aim of ‘Knol’ is to help bring some order to the vast amount of human knowledge being shared online”, said Udi Manber, Vice President of Engineering at Google.

The internet is like an ocean of information, and Google is attempting to fathom this information by providing pretty good search facilities. There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it”.

“The challenge posed to us by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt was to find a way to help people share their knowledge,” Udi Manber noted. “This is our main goal.”

Focusing On Authors

‘Knol’ will differ from Wikipedia , the open encyclopedia that invites users to submit content and then opens them up to continued editing and updating by others. The difference between the two would a focus on one key aspect, the author.” The authors of ‘knolls’ will be heavily featured”, said Google.

The basic idea behind the ‘Knol’ project would be to highlight ‘Knols-Authors’. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, and scientific articles always have authors. Somehow the web-world evolved without standard notions to keep authors names highlighted. Udi Manber says. “We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content”.

Another difference the ‘Google Knol’ would be demonstrating would also be related with the authors and this time it is related with their income opportunities. The author will have the opportunity to make money from writing ‘knols’.  Displaying the Google Ads on their ‘knols’ would not be mandatory for the authors but doing so will offer them a unique opportunity to generate and share the  ad-revenue.

Google will be providing a working platform, hosting and tools for designing and writing the ‘knol-pages’ to the authors and will not edit or censor the pages. The main objective is to make each knol “the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read,” added Udi Manber. Google will not endorse the content on ‘Knol’ pages but will help move pages that it deems worthy up the rankings in search results.”We do not want to build a walled garden of content. We want to disseminate it as widely as possible,” says Udi Manber. Google will not ask for any exclusiveness on any of the knol’s content and will make that content available to any other search engine.

A New Landing for Advertisements

Experts are of the view that this new initiative of Google may prompt people to question whether Google has strayed too far from its search roots. “The Knol project fits with other efforts to organize what is otherwise scattered information”, Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst Charlene Li said.

Knol would be a base project of Google and it would require making the splash in the classifieds and miscellaneous information space. If this becomes a successful venture, it will revolutionalize the web content scenario.

“More content means more places to deliver ads to and the more specialized it is, the more advertisers will be interested in it”, Charlene Li said.

Experiences Lead to Further Challenges

Google has its previous experiences of leveraging human knowledge in the search context. In the beginning of the year 2007 Google discontinued its attempts with “Google Answers”. The company accepted that it has learned plenty from the two-plus years it ran the service which required that users pay for answers and would incorporate that knowledge into future products.

This time Google has high expectations from high value creators and high value advertisers both. Users will submit pages to the new service and this would extend a potential and abundant new landscape to populate with advertising.  The ‘knol’ pages will be focused on specific topics, and this in turn would certainly be a nice opportunity to attract relatively high-value advertising. Sterling Market Intelligence analyst Greg Sterling says,” “If it takes off, you can certainly see applications for local content and advertising,”

Becoming successful would be a big challenge for Google’s Knol project. Existing platforms like blogs and other websites still could be a continued choice and preference for majority of the users. People may choose to keep their knowledge and content limited to these resources only.

Wikipedia still remains one of the heavily visited web community. It is constantly trying to raise editorial standards to ensure content is accurate but it continues to roll under fire for spreading misinformation often.

Many experts and bloggers feel that Google may have to face an uphill task attempting distinguishing its new offering from its own blogging tools or the existing and already widely popular Wikipedia.

IBM recently  introduced “OmniFind Personal Email Search (IOPES)”, a  semantic search engine exclusively for companies that are interested to extend their employees more advanced tools for searching their e-mails stored in ‘IBM’s Lotus Notes’.

This new innovative concept of email search takes search beyond keywords by being able to make associations between the underlying concepts of words often used in ‘corporate e-mails’. IBM also intends to offer customers technology that can help them retrieve useful information hidden in e-mail databases.

“IBM’s OmniFind Personal Email Search (IOPES)” is a result of the collaborative research conducted by the ‘IBM Research Labs’ in Almaden, California, in Haifa, Israel, and in Delhi, India.

The facility works with simplicity in search. For instance, if a person is looking for a colleague’s phone number, then he would type “Paul phone” in the query box. The search in turn would give results for Paul’s phone number. It becomes possible because the system is smart enough to make the association that the person is looking for Paul’s number, and not just any phone number in an e-mail with the word “Paul” in it.

IBM designers created an index of keywords found in corporate e-mail, and then linked it with another index of associated concepts and relationships. Shiv Vaithyanathan, manager of unstructured information mining at” IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, USA” ,says, “ when a query is submitted, the system first matches the words with those in the keyword index, and then delivers results based on the associations”. Specialists at IBM have also added rules to help the system determine what information is most likely being sought.

IBM made this software available for “Lotus Notes”. This smart ‘email search tool’ eliminates the frustration many of us feel when irrelevant search results are returned for a simple text or keyword search. It has inbuilt common search concepts, such as dates, times and phone numbers. It also has some additional search parameters, such as meeting requests or specific locations. These parameters may be defined and used on the fly without any programming expertise. Such user-defined concepts can be shared between individuals and used to build a more personalized search system.

“With gigabytes of e-mail storage readily available to nearly everyone, e-mail has evolved from a simple communication tool into a personal database where we retain vast amounts of valuable information,” said Douglas Wilson, Chief Technology Officer of Lotus. He adds further, “We continue to deliver better tools to speed and improve personal mailbox search, and ‘OmniFind Personal Email Search’ illustrates how IBM’s advanced technology delivers the ability to quickly and easily access the precise information we need, exactly when we need it”.

This software is based on the “Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA)”, an open source software framework that helps organizations build new analysis technologies to realize more value from their unstructured information by discovering relationships, identifying patterns, and predicting outcomes. Originally developed by IBM, UIMA is now an open source project at the “Apache Software Foundation (ASF)”. UIMA is used extensively in enabling text analysis, extraction and concept search capabilities in other parts of the ‘IBM OmniFind enterprise search portfolio’, including ‘OmniFind Enterprise Edition’, ‘OmniFind Analytics Edition’, and ‘OmniFind Yahoo! Edition’.

This new and creative search based system has  enabled the IBM specialists to have developed technology that runs on top of the framework for quickly extracting words and concepts from electronic documents, comparing them to the indexes and delivering results based on algorithms developed by the scientists.

IBM Researchers have empowered this software with advanced algorithms that can interpret incomplete queries and find information such as phone numbers, people, meetings, presentations, documents, images and more.Several major corporate companies including ‘Google’, ‘Microsoft’, and ‘Yahoo’, are also developing more advanced search algorithms in order to deliver better answers to queries.

Shiv Vaithyanathan accepts that semantic search becomes less effective as the universe of possible concepts and relationships associated with words grows, which is why it would be difficult to implement, for example, in a huge, general purpose Web mail system.

Targeting a corporate e-mail system gives researchers a narrower set of possibilities in determining the kind of associations the system should make of words. In addition, IBM has made it possible for developers to expand the “OmniFind Indexes”.

The “IBM OmniFind Personal Email Search (IOPES) “plug-in is available at “alphaWorks”. It is an online community that gives the outside world a unique peek into the work underway in IBM labs by highlighting the company’s most cutting-edge work and providing it at no cost.  As on today, more than 90 of the ‘Fortune 100 Companies’ are making use of “alphaWorks” technologies. The company at the same time hopes that the feedback it gets from developers will help to improve the technology by finding its shortcomings. “Finding out the things we should do is precisely why we’re putting it out there,” said Shiv Vaithyanathan.

Goggle is all set to invade the realm of storage now. It may be a “Virtual Hard Drive” from Google. An article recently published in the November 27 issue of the ‘Wall Street Journal’ discussed about strong possibilities of such an innovation by Google.

The ‘Wall Street Journal’ cited few people who are closely connected with the source of this information and are well familiar with the matter. On that basis,WSJ put forward a claim that Google is close to announce an innovative service that would help users store all their word-processing documents, digitized music, video clips, and photographs on its servers.

Introducing New Approach

This service will facilitate everyone to move their digital data and other forms of information on to the Google’s servers. This ‘Internet Cloud’ approach of Google will also provide a specifically dedicated ‘search tool box’ in order to facilitate users to reach at their own data. The facility will be extended from multiple computers and all handheld devices with a password. This will be a new approach as the user will be able to access its own data from anywhere. It actually breaks the traditional set up where user can only access through its own machine.

Cloud Concept, the Base

The ‘Cloud Concept’ landed almost five years back along with the concept of “Software as a Service (SAAS).’SAS’ was a brainchild of the service provider’SalesForce.com’ and it delivers multiple applications to the customers through internet and ‘Amazon.com’. The service provider ’SalesForce.com’ is offering its dedicated servers and storage services though the internet.

“Cloud computing is going mainstream. The apps people use every day, such as e-mail, photo sharing and word processing, are moving to the Web because it’s easier to share and access your data from anywhere when it’s online in one place.” Said Google’s spokesperson to eWeek though denying confirming the facts given in the ‘Wall Street Journal’.

Google has multiple applications that are internet based and of course free for all users. It is already offering free online storage facility for its “Gmail Web Mail Client” and “Picasa web Album Software”. Paid services for online storage is also underway from Google.

Visualizing Challenges Ahead

will certainly face a consternation situation among privacy advocates when it will launch a service of data storage involving the movement of customer’s files onto its servers. Microsoft will definitely pose hurdles and stiff competition as it is also concurrently working on the concept of online file storage services called “Live Folders”. Another big competitor in this field would be “EMC”. This traditional storage company, ‘EMC’, recently acquired an online storage services provider company”Mozy” and is growing fast.

The online anywhere access storage concept of Google, assuming that it is coming with all these features as the ‘Wall Street Journal’ reported, would be facing some more relevant challenges and will raise some very pertinent questions regarding its sanctity. It is not going to be a cakewalk for Google.

Security and Privacy Concerns

One of the major challenges is the accessing of user’s data and files irrespective of place, machine, and individuality. Allowing the access just with a password would certainly involve the privacy and security issues. In this time when password theft has become so common, spywares and malwares are continuously hunting for such confidential and personal information of users, the idea of an access through a password seems a bit lightly taken. Considering the intentions and ability along with the strength and user friendly attitude of Google, it seems less likely that Google will not be addressing these issues with utmost care. Despite that, users will want to be doubly sure about the security of their own data on the Google’s servers.

Data Encryption

The idea generates several other related points in one’s mind. How Google will deal with the issue of ‘Encryption of data’. Who will be managing the encryption keys in such a situation? Access to the stored data and file would definitely have certain limiting factors. The ‘cloud’ may also go down at any moment and during that period users will not be able to access their data and file. If this process would be completely online and no other alternative is available for users to access their files offline, it would be an obscure situation and Google certainly have to include all possible remedial measures.

Online Backup

This online data and file storage system of Google would also require an added backup service. It is not wise enough to have distrust on Google guys as this is an almost parallel pre-prequisite.Google has an advantage of learning from the experiences of already functioning services in the market like ‘EMC’.

Geoff Bock, an analyst of repute from the Gilbane Group expressed his views on this possibility, “if Google creates an online backup service, it will be thrust into competition with EMC and others who have been practicing storage for years. However, Google lacks the expertise EMC does in information management, such as backup, recovery and archiving”.

Desktop Environment

Supplementing the user’s ‘Desktop Environment’ is one more relevant issue that would need Google’s attention. If the provider has any plans to make such supplements more curative and safety measures in addition to the in built affordability, it will definitely require working hard on implementing a file system in the cloud.

Collaborative Web Environment for Sharing Information

Geoff Bock favors an idea of creating a collaborative web environment. He advocates creating “Microsoft’s SharePoint in the cloud”. This software supplements multiple functions for users. People will certainly find this utility as immensely helpful for working in the cloud on their desktop or handheld devices.” collaborative web environment that paves the way for ad-hoc information sharing among work groups”, says Geoff Bock of Gilbane Group.

The idea of creating an online data storage services perhaps has a right timing in today’s business and information age. The idea however could prove a sticky one also and Google would require being doubly sure of its success.