Entries from August 2008 ↓

Just a few days after the Dev Team released its jailbreak tool for the 2.0.2 firmware to Mac users, WinPwn 2.5 and the QuickPwn Tool for Mac have both appeared at about the same time, offering the ability to QuickPwn the latest iPhone and iPod Touch firmwares. In other words, not only can you jailbreak your iPhone or iPod and enjoy sweet, sweet Cydia and Installer action, but you also don’t have to go through the irritating process of building a custom firmware and carrying out a lengthy restore in iTunes.

You can download the new WinPwn at this direct link, and pick up a torrent for QuicPwn Tool for Mac here.
[WinPwn and Dev Team - Thanks, Estevan and Jason]

Razor Profiler is a web-based Ajax profiling tool to help web developers understand and analyze the runtime behavior of their JavaScript code in a cross-browser environment. Razor Profiler can be access either online as a service; or be downloaded to run locally, and was created by Coach Wei who has done a lot of work for Nexaweb and Apache.

Razor Profiler Features

Razor Profiler automates JavaScript profiling:

• Automation: no application code change required. Razor Profiler automatically collects all the necessary data and presents them to web developers for analysis.
• Runs on any browser: web developers can profile any JavaScript application on any browser. There is nothing to install on the client side.
• Rich lexical analysis: Razor Profiler presents rich lexcial information about the application, such as file information (number, response status, size, mimetype, percentage, etc), tokens (size, file, percent, count), and functions (size, file, name…), etc;
• Profile scenario recording: Razor Profile enables web developers to selectively record the scenarios that they are interested in. Only recorded scenarios will be used in analysis.
• Call stack analysis: for each recorded scenario, Razor Profiler presents all the call stacks in the order of their occurence. For each call stacks, web developers can drill into it to find out the duration of the stack, all the function calls of this stack and the duration of each call.
• Function analysis: For each JavaScript function in the application, Razor Profile presents the number of times it has been invoked, the duration of each invocation, and the call stacks that invoked this function.
• Data visualization with graphing and charting: Razor Profiler presents top call stacks, top function calls of each stack, top recorded scenarios, etc. using visual charts and graphs to help web developers better understand the runtime behavior of their application. For example, each call stack is visualized as an intuitive Gantt chart.

How Does Razor Profiler Work?

Razor Profiler composes of a server component that runs inside a standard Java EE Servlet engine, and a JavaScript-based client component that runs inside any browser. Once you have Razor server started, you can profile your JavaScript application by entering the start URL of your application into Razor Profiler and run through your test scenarios. Razor Profiler will automatically record data and visualize them for your analysis. There is no client side installation, browser configuration change or application code change required. In order to achieve this, Razor Profiler goes through five different phases:

• Application retrieval: Once a web developer enters the application start URL into Razor Profiler, Razor Profiler client component (”the client”) will send this URL to Razor Profiler server component (”the server”). The server performs the actually retrieval of this URL. After additional server processing (such as lexical analysis and code injection, see below), the retrieved content is sent to the client side to be displayed in a new browser window. For the developer point of view, the application is launched and running in this new browser window.
  In this process, Razor Profiler Server is acting like a “proxy server”. But it is not really a “proxy server” and there is no need for developers to re-configure their browser proxy settings.
• Lexical analysis: Once the server retrieves the application URL, it performs lexical analysis of the returned content by identifying and analyzing JavaScript files, functions, and tokens,etc. The result is sent to the client for display.
• Code injection: Upon lexical analysis of JavaScript code, the server injects “probe” code into the application’s JavaScript sources before returning them to the client. These injected “probes” enable automatic collection of application runtime data, and saves developers from doing so manually.
• Runtime data capture: Once the application’s JavaScript code is running on the client side and as developers run through desired profile scenarios, the injected “probes” automcally collect all the necessary data to Razor Profiler Client.
• Data analysis: When the developer finishes recording scenarios and starts data analysis, Razor Profiler client performs analysis of all the collected data and presents the results.

iHologram – iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.

I’ve showed this video to a couple of friends in Berlin (where I’m staying for a few days), and they all freaked out. Maybe because I left the “illusion” part out of it, I don’t know. But one thing is for sure, it’s a really cool effect. David OReilly is responsible for this hologram. He used “the Cat” from his award-winning but unfinished cartoon PSS and gave it a 3D effect with Anamorphosis, the same technique used in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (the one with the skull).

I wonder when the holograms become reality, Starwars style. On the iPhone it would probably look a bit like this:

[Via iSmashPhone]

Yesterday we wrote about Enterprise 2.0 from the point of view of the Enterprise, the buyer. The conclusion was that the impact of social media on the Enterprise was very big, addressing the very “nature of the firm”. This post looks at Enterprise 2.0 from the point of view of the vendor, specifically startups. This is a 30,000 foot view, but we aim to get past the hype to insights you can use in your startup. Further posts in our recently launched Enterprise Chanel will drill into specific market segments, companies and technologies.

1. Subscriptions are the best revenue you can get. Subscription revenue is more recession proof than advertising and more predictable than traditional enterprise software licensing. As long as you don’t mess up, you will have a low churn rate. Then your new subscriptions drive your revenue growth
2. It is much easier to get subscriptions from a business than from consumers. Sure we all love the idea of consumer subscriptions, the potential is enormous. But do this reality check. How many subscriptions do you pay for? How many current subscription costs would you love to eliminate or drastically reduce? What would your really (no, really) agree to pay for every month? We are in a serious consumer recession in the developed markets that may last a while. What was always hard, just got an awful lot harder. Selling to business is much easier, if you focus hard on the next rule.
3. The other 80/20 rule. 80% of enterprise IT budgets just “keep the lights on”. Only 20% goes to new stuff. I learned this in the technology nuclear winter in 2002, when a 20% cut in IT budgets meant that no (zero, nada) new projects were approved. If you can show how to reduce that 80%, you get a better shot at the 20%. That 80% market is a replacement market. You need to know what cost you are replacing. The incumbents are looking at the 20% budget as well and they have the inside track. You have to attack the 80% to make it big.
4. “Parallel replacement” is new. The old enterprise replacement market was based on capital expenditure write offs. If the client bought a $1m license fee over 5 years ago, you had a shot at selling another license fee for something “better, faster, cheaper”. In the new enterprise world of SAAS and open source, upfront license fees are the exception rather than the rule. Buyers prefer to hold onto the old stuff a bit longer until they can see either an open source or SAAS alternative. Replacement is always very risky, leaving incumbents in control and startups banging outside the door in frustration. So you need to show that you can run in parallel with the existing solution for a period until you are established enough to be a viable, safe replacement. Step 1 is run in parallel, step 2 is replace. This is what Google Apps and Zoho are doing to Microsoft office (I use both Google Apps and MS Office. Even though I use Office less frequently I own a license, so why delete it? When I get a new laptop I will decide whether I need to buy Office). To play this new parallel replacement game you need to a) offer a free entry point (the Freemium strategy) so you get traction with a low cost of sale and b) you need to show one very clear new value proposition that will tap into that 20% budget for new stuff.
5. Have one simple new “blue ocean” value proposition that any business user can understand. You need this to access the 20% of budget going to new stuff. Being “cloudy” is not a value proposition, it is simple]y a way to deliver your value proposition. The incumbent can always launch their SAAS equivalent. Your free entry level just gets you through the door so that you get a chance to upsell to your subscription; free is not a value proposition. You have to show how you will do something really basic such as either a) increase revenue with a low cost of sale or, b) reduce cost on an existing process or c) create strategic sustainable advantage in measurable ways. Most likely you will do this by enabling better collaboration/communication, both within the enterprise but also, more critically, outside the firewall to the “extended enterprise”. For a startup, this has to be “blue ocean”, a market that has not yet been defined by the incumbents. By its very nature, this means the market size will be very hard to define and there will almost certainly not be recognized external authority that has defined the market size. Smart VC understand that Blue Ocean strategy and precise market size estimates seldom go together.
6. SaaS ++ means that Open Source is no longer a problem. Open Source has been great for buyers but it has also taken the entry level market away in most segments and that trend shows no sign of letting up. That is bad news for a startup looking to sell traditional software with a “better, faster, cheaper plus we try harder” replacement pitch. You cannot undersell Open Source. That has forced many ventures with great software and strong teams into the dead-pool. With a “SAAS ++” offering, you can use Open Source as the base, add a bit of new code and bundle it all up with hardware and service in a monthly fee. Unless buyers really want to do all that in-house, using their dwindling internal IT staff, you have a shot at it. SAAS alone however is not a barrier to entry. Anybody can replicate it. Which means (smart) VC will/should pass. You need the “++” bit as well. That is likely to be something to do with viral, communications and network effects that create a growing user base and proprietary data coming from that base. That is the “magic sauce”.
7. You need to become a very good financial and data modeler. You will need some old-fashioned face to face relationship selling to get large enterprises to understand your solution, so that the "powers that be" encourage adoption and do not seek to block it. But the business will grow one subscriber at a time and users convert to subscribers one click at a time. Modeling becomes a core competency. Modeling the costs of all the SaaS components (R&D, hardware, infrastructure software, software maintenance, system and data maintenance). Modeling the cost of subscriber acquisition using SEO, SEM, social networking, conversion from free to paid and inside telephone sales in a highly efficient funnel process that delivers the right $ per subscriber. Modeling the revenue growth with multiple what if variable assumptions. Modeling the ROI for your clients at various levels of adoption.
8. Most external market size projections do not help your business plan. Forrester Research reports that Enterprise 2.0 will be a $4.6 billion market by 2013. That is not nearly granular enough for a real business plan. You are not really in the Enterprise 2.0 market. Saying “we will get 1% of the $4.6 billion Enterprise 2.0″ market is totally meaningless and will simply get you shown the door in the VC office. You are in the market of solving a specific business problem, for a specific type of customer, competing against specific incumbents and startups. That is how you need to build a market size, from the bottom up. This is particularly true for “blue ocean” strategies where the market has not been defined by an incumbent. Building the real world, bottom up market size takes real hard work and detailed market knowledge. Look for a small enough market where you can get 20% and take that to 50% share and then leverage that market to get 10% in another market. Rinse and repeat. It is an old formula, but it works.
9. You need VC, they need you but there is a disconnect. Since 2000, most VC have sent any business plan with the word “enterprise” straight to the trash. With good reason. During the nuclear winter, the enterprise IT market was dead as a dodo. Then the big incumbents got into the consolidation game and it looked like you would count enterprise IT vendors on the fingers of one hand. The cost of entry was high, needing expensive sales teams upfront and the revenue was lumpy and unpredictable. Yech. Better to back a few inexpensive developers building a free service that some big vendor would buy and figure out how to monetize. That was a great game for a while. Most VC now view it as in its final innings at best. There is a shortage of buyers, no IPO market, we are in a cyclical downturn for advertising and in a major funk figuring out how social media can be funded by advertising. So VC need Enterprise 2.0. But they have missed the early winners. Very few of the current Enterprise 2.0 startups are venture backed. This is a disconnect. The early players always find it easier to bootstrap than later vendors. Today you need capital to fund the ramp-up and to build distance from competitors as the Enterprise 2.0 market moves from “below the radar” to “early hype” phase, thus dragging more entrants into every category.
10. Vertical is not the same as Horizontal. Classic Web 2.0 services such as Delicious, YouTube and Skype are geared at mass markets. Anything that is more niche has tended to be called “vertical”. That is confusing. Vertical means a specific industry such as banking, healthcare or manufacturing and sub-sets of those industries. Horizontal (applying to any industry) should mean a set of common and linked features used by a specific type of person in the company (e.g. accounts payable by Finance, CRM by Sales and so on). The general rule of thumb has been for vertical ventures to be bootstrapped and eventually rolled up into larger entities. VC tend to view vertical as too limited. Horizontal on the other hand is big enough.
11. Know how to deal with secrecy, structure and control needs. Social Media is about being open, loose, unstructured, informal and fun; no ties allowed. Enterprises are about secrecy, structure and control. Ties show that you are serious and fun is for after work. The ties and fun bit is just style. But secrecy, structure and control is real. If you threaten those, many forces within the enterprise will shut you out. It will be like the red blood cells attacking the foreign virus. On the other hand, if you go along with all the secrecy, structure and control rules of the enterprise you will lose the social media benefits of extended enterprise collaboration and innovation. Many people within enterprises understand this and some of them are in a policy-making position of authority. In general, the trend is towards loose, unstructured, “emergent business networks”. So “make the trend your friend”, but beware of the very strong forces of opposition and deal positively with their legitimate needs.

Conclusion

What is your position in the Enterprise 2.0 market. Do you work in IT in a large Enterprise? Do you work for a large incumbent Enterprise IT vendor? Do you work for a startup that is going to change the Enterprise world? Are you writing about this rapidly emerging market? Do you have unique insights or research to share? We would love to hear from you in the comments and maybe as a Guest Author. Email us if you’re interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb’s Enterprise Channel.

You can subscribe now to our special RSS feed for the Enterprise channel.

Tonight, Microsoft has publicly launched Photosynth, its long awaited Live Labs product that allows you to stitch your photos together to create a detailed 3D environment.  While most of the computation is done on your desktop, the images are uploaded to Microsoft's servers and Microsoft is giving all Photosynth users a total of 20GB of storage for their collections. The rendering and browsing is done with the help of Seadragon, another Live Labs product.

Windows Only

When Microsoft first publicly showed a demo of Photosynth in 2006, it almost looked too good to be true. Now, getting started with it couldn’t be easier – as long as you have a Windows machine – there is no Mac version available yet. You first have to install both a browser plug-in and a desktop application (all done through just one installer). The installation was as standard as Windows installations get and finished in less than a minute. We tested the plugin in both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 without any problems.

One interesting aspect of the uploader is that you can choose a license for your creation. You can either choose a Creative Commons license, put the pictures in public domain, or mark it as ‘All Rights Reserved.’

Desktop App

The desktop application does most of the heavy lifting for creating the ’synths’ and seemed to make good use of all available cores. You only have to pick your photos, give your collection and name and click ‘Synth.’ After it has finished, it will create a score telling you how ’synthy’ your photo collection was. Obviously, your photos need to have common areas for Photosynth to be able to stitch them together. While Photosynth does a great job making these connections, it can’t work magic and our first attempts with relatively unconnected images were futile.

The more pictures you have, the longer the process of creating your synths takes, of course, and depending on your connection, the upload to Microsoft’s servers can also take quite a while. In the end, though, your patience will be greatly rewarded.

Online Viewer

The online viewer is quite intuitive and allows you to zoom in and out, move around the picture and also go through the pictures in a 3D slide show mode. One nice feature is that you can also go full screen, which is really the best way to showcase your photos.

You can also embed a copy of your synth on any website and email a link to your friends.

The animation in Photosynth is astonishingly smooth and our screenshots really can’t do it justice. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should watch Microsoft’s demo of Photosynth at TED2007, which will give you a good impression of what the final product looks like.

Different Way of Shooting

It really takes a different approach to shooting pictures to make the most out of Photosynth. If you often stitch together photos, you are probably already used to this, but Photosynth also gives you more freedom, as you can zoom in and out, or walk around an object and still have Photosynth recognize the common areas.

In our tests, Photosynth performed flawlessly, but we would recommend that you have a set of at least 10 to 20 photos to create an interesting ’synth’ and the more photos you have, the more interesting it will be.

Caveats

A couple of caveats:

• All synths are public – there are no privacy controls!
• Photosynth only runs on Vista and XP so far.

Verdict

Even though we only had a short time to test Photosynth, it has already changed the way we think about taking pictures. Suddenly, you can do so much more with your photos. But besides the cool factor, we can also see a lot of other interesting applications for Photosynth. A realtor, for example, could use it to create a more immersive virtual tour of a house.

If you already have Photosynth installed already, you can see a 3D view of Venice below – otherwise, clicking on the image will take you directly to the installer.

Jeremy Keith has been doing a great job blogging An Event Apart, and his writeup of The Lessons of CSS Frameworks by Eric Meyer caught my eye.

Eric took a look at the most popular CSS frameworks (960, Blueprint, Content With Style, That Standards Guy, YAML, YUI, Elements, Tripoli, WYMStyle) and talks about choosing one…

Let’s get one question out of the way, the question “which one is right for you?” Answer… none of the above. It’s like templates. There’s nothing wrong with templates but you don’t put together your client’s site based on a template, right? They can be a good starting point for ideas but you do your own designs. If you’re going to use a framework, it should be yours; one that you’ve created. You can look at existing frameworks for ideas and hack at it. But the professionals in this room are not well served by picking up a framework and using it as-is.

Eric put together a grid of features and which frameworks support those features. Every framework does reset, colours, and fonts. The fact that every framework has a reset is evidence of the frustration we all feel with the inconsistencies between browsers. The rules for colour tend to be much more minimal. Font styling, on the other hand, is more fully-featured generally. Whereas the colour might just be set for the body element, font sizes and faces are specified throughout. Usually that font face is Helvetica. Most frameworks steer away from trying to style form elements. Almost all of them do layout, usually combinations of columns. Four of the nine frameworks included print styles. Three of the nine included hacks.

After using a framework on Google Code, I can definitely say that they add a lot, and can take some of the pain of out CSS.

reachums submits this glance at "the newest level of computer animation," intended to get past the paradoxical "uncanny valley" — that is, the way animated humans actually can appear jarring as the animation gets hyper-realistic. "This short video gives us a glimpse of what we can hope to see in the future of computer games and movies. Emily is not a real actress, but she looks like a real person, something we haven't truly seen before in computer animation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Before Gizmodo, I worked in the bowels of the broadcast industry for a number of years. I was either shooting video or cutting video every day, all day. And while Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects were both tools I used with some proficiency on a daily basis, I’ve never seen a post production demo as incredible as this clip from the University of Washington.

Essentially, you shoot some crappy, low-rez video of a still scene. You then reshoot the same scene with a digital camera (with higher resolution). Software can automagically combine these images to upconvert the video AND fix problems in the image— all while compensating for 3D space. Make sense? The remarkable demo will clarify things a bit:

What’s especially notable is that the software can fill in the nasty bits of the scene despite the videographer/photographer rotating their view (you see this as they shoot around the tree) and despite any lens differences (the software can compensate for different lens sizes/distortions).

Also, note that many details from the source video are retained (the glass reflections in the statue shot may be the best example), which means that the photograph’s information isn’t the only information we see in the composite image.

I’m not quite convinced that the entire process is quite as automatic as the students would make it, but the technology is extremely promising all the same. And at this point, it should only be a matter of time before we see the idea work its way into our favorite post production products. [Project Page via bbGadgets]

I just stumbled across CrowdSound, a slick widget that enables anyone to gather ’social feedback’ from users and customers. There’s inherent value to creating and maintaining a direct dialogue between you and your customers, so I decided to take a look and see if it’s really a good tool to implement in order to improve customer relationships and product development.

CrowdSound is a social widget that allows anyone to become part of a discussion on your site, without the need to leave it, thus allowing a direct conversation between other users and yourself. In fact, the widget allows you to interact without even signing up for an account, so the threshold is pretty low. You can run CrowdSound widgets on your own website or on a CS-hosted one (example).

This is a test widget I set up in a few seconds:

Furthermore, the widget can be customized to fit your site’s look and feel, all to provide a seamless, integrated experience for sharing suggestions and voting on other users’ submissions. CrowdSound allows for suggestions to be marked as ‘private’, allowing a customer to submit a suggestion that can only be seen by your company, and also allowing you to take offline sensitive suggestions that may otherwise be visible to your competitors.

You can also pre-define categories, such as bugs, feature requests, account-specific issues, etc. The company even offers a full-featured iPhone interface for managing CrowdSound conversations on the go.

Some of the features mentioned above are not available in the free version (a pro version sets you back $10 a month), but the basic functionality offered in the free version seems to be sufficient for a test-drive. A non-embeddable (grrr) screencast can be watched here.

CrowdSound is the work of Washington-based Intridea, who makes other cool stuff like SocialSpring, MediaPlug and Scalr.

On a sidenote: the backend of the platform seems to extremely ‘inspired’ by the lay-out of WordPress, as you can tell from the screenshot below.

The popularity of photography has exploded because of digital cameras. It’s easier and cheaper to take and share thousands of pictures, and if you choose a known brand, it’s almost impossible to buy a bad camera. But one thing that has suffered is the actual knowledge of the amateur photographer (and from the forums I read, a lot of pros have an embarrassing lack, too).

When you bought an old time manual SLR, there were no automatic modes (those that existed were often worse than useless, easily fooled by simple lighting conditions). You had no choice but to learn about light. You needed to know that 1/500 sec at ƒ8 lets in the same amount of light as 1/250 sec at ƒ16. You had to manually focus before a shot. And if you wanted to remove red-eye, you bought a black sharpie.

Now, I’m all for auto-everything. My cameras scarcely come out of auto mode, although I tweak the recommended settings. But, fancy as they are, a camera is still a box with a hole in the front, and understanding the fundamentals will make you a better photographer. Which is where Photocalc comes in. The $3 iPhone app will help you with all the calculations that the old-hands do in their heads. What’s in there?

First, there is a tool to teach you about exposure reciprocation, the rule that if you open the aperture one stop, you need to quicken the shutter speed one stop to achieve the same exposure. This is baked into my head, but I remember it was tricky to learn.

Second, and way more useful, is the depth-of-field calculator. Depth of field is the amount of your picture that will be in acceptable focus. If you focus on a subject, the depth-of-field means that there will be a little area behind and in front of that subject that is also sharp. And the size of that zone depends on the aperture that you are using. A wide open hole in the lens means that the background will be blurred, while a small hole means almost front to back sharpness (this is why pinhole cameras work).

But how do you know how big this area is? Well, older lenses had a scale on the lens barrel to show you. Now you need a calculator, and Photocalc does that. Tell it what camera you have, how long your lens, how far away your subject is and what aperture you are using and it will tell you the depth of field limits, and will give you the hyperfocal distance. Clunkier than lens barrel markings, but still dead handy.

Next, there is a flash calculator. In the olden days, this was all done with math tables printed on the back of the strobe. Now the flash does it all for you. But if you want to kick it old-school, Photocalc will do all the heavy lifting for you. You lock any one of the five values as the one you wish to know and supply the other variables. It’s quick and simple, especially if your brain is frazzled and you just need to know the aperture now, dammit.

Next up, and an amazing resource for the n00b, is the reference section. There’s a full glossary of technical terms, a page that tells you the sunrise and sunset times today (using the iPhone’s location features), a table for using Ansel Adams’ Zone System (don’t ask), a full rundown of the properties of different films (if anyone still uses them), a list of filters and a guide to the “Sunny 16 Rule”.

In all, this little app is a great pocket guide. The interface could use some help — entering values into the calculators is a little clunky — but as a learning tool for newcomers and as a reference for old pros, it’s certainly worth the three bucks.

Product page [iTunes]

Product page [Adair]