Cazoodle Dives into the Deep Web

Cazoodle, a spin-off from University of Illinois (famous for technology innovation such as Mosaic, Netscape, PayPal and YouTube), is dedicated to exploring both the surface Web and the depths of the Deep Web. Using technology developed in the research group of Prof. Kevin Chang at UIUC, Cazoodle provides vertical search services, i.e. domain-specific search engines (Apartment Search, Event Search, Shopping Search).

Similar to companies such as hakia, PowerSet or ontoprise (a spin-off from Karlsruhe University), Cazoodle leverages the large and growing amount of structured data within specific knowledge domains. With Semantic search accross multiple Web sources, Cazoodle’s search engines enable vast coverage of available information. In combination with deep information integration these large data volumes can be explored through a clear user interface. In fact, Cazoodle provides search results that are valuable because they can be compared in a consistent manner. Thumbs up.

Control the Cloud: Licensing LongJump

License to Kill Build Enterprise Apps

Last week I had a talk with LongJump’s CEO Pankaj Malviya about the company’s most recent innovation: Enabling third-parties to license LongJump Business Application Platform.

Target Groups: Enterprise and ISV

The offering targets two different types of customers: the LongJump platform can be licensed for use within an enterprise’s data center or licensed by independent software vendors to build and host their own high performance, scalable, multi-tenant Software as a Service (SaaS) applications.

Now, enterprises can install the LongJump platform in own datacenters to build applications in the cloud, while avoiding risks to expose critical data to outsiders. In highly regulated industries such as healthcare or finance, information security and compliance are paramount and keeping local control of their information is an absolute necessity.

ISVs and service providers, on the other hand, can create end-user applications running on the LongJump platform without the risk of being hooked on a third-party platform (with respect to pricing, service levels, and so on).

Cloud Computing for Control Freaks

Enterprise and ISVs now have control and have a choice to take a proven application platform and install it internally, within their corporate firewall or private cloud, without worrying about compliance, security, or confidentially issues.

• Control of Delivery Options

Companies have broad flexibility to decide how to deploy their licensed LongJump platform; they could opt to deploy a private, behind-the-firewall instance, or use a virtualized hosting provider like Amazon EC2. Companies can choose to outsource infrastructure or use existing internal infrastructure.

• Control of Multi-Tenancy

LongJump provides several multi-tenancy configuration options: Multi-Tenant/Single Database, Multi-Tenant/Multiple Database, and Mixed-Tenancy, supporting both models simultaneously.

• Control of Application Portability

Move business applications from one cloud to another cloud or infrastructure.

• Control of Release Management

Develop, test and release in the Cloud: the LongJump platform enables companies to create development, staging and production instances, and assign different development roles to each instance.

During my talk with Pankaj I had a few difficulties understanding what’s so novel about LongJump platform and how the new offering is different from known platforms, such as Force.com, Zoho and Bunge Connect. Well, now I can see it: Cloud + Control.

Keyboardr

Today I came across a cool Web application that fellow students of University Karlsruhe developed: keyboardr. The major feature is to quickly navigate Google search results with your keyboard. My first impression was very positive; obviously the core developer Julius Eckert knows how to code proper Ajax. Besides the neat technical implementation, I can clearly see the value of a faster, better search interface.

Also: Check out the great developer blog of Julius Eckert.

Linked Data

On the occasion of 20 years www, Tim Berners-Lee gave an interesting presentation in a TED talk. Tim retells the story of how he invented the World Wide Web, an idea — “vague but exciting” his boss remarked with a pencil on the side of Tim’s memo — that entirely changed the way in which people around the world exchange and access information. The big challenge of our days is, to extend the Web to a source of knowledge, where not only documents are linked, but all kinds of data, a concept Tim refers to as “Linked Data”.

Although the Semantic Web has not become a reality, yet, the idea of Linked Data is gaining momentum. People begin to realize that in many cases it makes no sense to “lock up data” and with Web Services and REST it has become easier to make internal data accessible to external users. The main problem today is, that, while on the one hand data providers make data accessible via APIs, on the other hand they build walled gardens since they monetize on user-generated content. I am not sure how this problem can be overcome, but licensing seems to be a possible way. Data providers could charge money on a per-use basis for data to be used in a different commercial context or give it away for free if it is used for non-profit. Apache 3.0 for Linked Data?

Cloud Mashups

Information-integration, Presentation-layer Mashups

Is the next wave of mashups rising? Since Paul Rademacher’s early experiments with housingmaps.com back in 2005, Google Maps mashups have become ubiquitous. The Google Maps API is popular because it enables developers to build Web applications that output information in a more user-friendly representation, such as real estate locations or crime scenes [1] [2]. Yahoo has developed some really cool tools that further reduce the learning curve of processing, mixing and restructuring information and media from different sources into a single representation [3] [4]. However, it seems like these are mashups of the old days. A new dawn is breaking…

Platform Mashups

The new type of mashup that we can see today combines Cloud Computing services and integrates them into a single service or application. Amazon’s GrepTheWeb is a good example for Cloud Computing service compositions within the domain of a single provider [5]. However, the recent announcement of Appirio’s ReferMyFriends App shows that also cross-Cloud mashups are viable [6]. Other examples for cross-Cloud mashups are Facebook + EC2 back-end [7] and Force.com + AppEngine back-end [8] (although it is probably only a matter of time until [8] will become one of the single-domain examples).

What are the main motives to combine Cloud Computing services? One motive is similar to the old Google Maps-style mashups: integrate information from different domains. The other motive: make your service scalable by extending it with a Cloud back-end. Still, there are more interesting mashup opportunities at the horizon…

Mobile Device Platform vs. Cloud Platform

Today in Davos Mark Zuckerberg said [9]

The platforms aren’t there yet. With all the mobile platforms—iPhone, Blackbery, Android, the mobile web—it is difficult to develop for all of them. When the number of platforms consolidate it will become a powerful thing.

Far from it. I doubt that the number of mobile device platforms is going to decrease in the near future. On the contrary, I believe that we will see more platforms popping up. Besides Symbian, iPhone, Blackberry and Android, there is a bunch of Linux-derivatives on the way for Netbooks and other mobile internet devices (MID).

This is the hour of the Clouds. Instead of engineering an application again and again for each and every mobile device platform, just build it once for a Cloud that taps into each of these devices. Although politics might hamper the process of creating such unified Cloud environments, I am convinced that this is a better approach for many developers. Just take Facebook as an example. Instead of building a social media application for iPhone, Blackberry and Android, build a Facebook Application [10] [11] [12].

[1] http://www.housingmaps.com
[2] http://chicago.everyblock.com
[3] http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/
[4] http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/
[5] http://developer.amaz[...]
[6] http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/01/30/[...]
[7] http://developer.amaz[...]
[8] http://developer.force.com/appengine
[9] http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/30[...]
[10] http://www.facebook.com/apps/[...]
[11] http://na.blackberry.com[...]
[12] http://androinica.com/2008/11/14[...]

Tim O’Reilly vs. Nick Carr

Celebrity Death Match in the Clouds

There has been an interesting discussion between Tim O’Reilly and Nick Carr about the significance of lessons learned from Web 2.0 on the world of Cloud Computing providers and consumers. Tim O’Reilly:

But the cloud platform, like the software platform before it, has new rules for competitive advantage. And chief among those advantages are those that we’ve identified as “Web 2.0″, the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (Source)

Nick Carr has doubts that network effects are the main competitive advantage:

The Google example, far from providing support to O’Reilly’s argument that the network effect is the main way to achieve dominance on the modern web – that it is the secret to the success of “all Web 2.0 superstar applications” – actually undercuts that argument. And there are other examples we might point to as well. Apple’s iTunes online store and software system has achieved dominance in digital music distribution not through the network effect [...] but rather through superior product and software design, superb marketing and branding, smart partnerships, and proprietary file standards that tend to lock in users. (Source)

In a comment Tim O’Reilly clarifies his understanding of “network effect”:

I suppose that I am using the term a bit differently than most people do when I suggest that Google, and Amazon, and Wikipedia gain advantage from network effects in user contribution. These systems all do get better the more people use them.

and in a blog post he writes:

Nick only sees first order network effects, what you might call endogamous networks, those that require the user to be part of the tribe. Thus, phone networks, and networks like Facebook. But the internet is an exogamous network; its benefits increase by the extent to which it reaches out to new groups, increases cross-breeding, and thus the total robustness and variety of the gene pool. This is why links matter, why web services matter, because they extend the reach of the network. (Source)

Nick Carr mentions another interesting idea:

There’s one layer in the cloud that O’Reilly failed to mention, and that layer is actually on top of the application layer. It’s what I’ll call the device layer – encompassing all the various appliances people will use to tap the cloud – and it may ultimately come to be the most interesting layer. (Source)

What both are missing

I believe that Tim O’Reilly is right with his assumption that network effects have a huge impact on the Cloud Computing marketplace. The only thing is: who is the user of Cloud Computing services? Both, Tim O’Reilly and Nick Carr, are missing the main point here in assuming that end-users are Cloud-users. But Cloud Computing is a developer-facing business. The network effect does not directly depend on the number of end-users that use the Cloud of a certain provider but on the number (and quality) of developers using the Cloud to develop, test and deploy their applications and services.

Network effect is probably the main differentiator between the Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services. In an earlier blogpost I wrote:

[...] Amazon’s Web Services are more loose coupled and Google’s services are glued together. Seems like Amazon has taken the Linux approach to Cloud computing, whereas Google follows the Microsoft business model. Where Amazon Web Services offer greater flexibility because they can be combined with third-party services, integrated into (open source or commercial) frameworks and software products, Google provides a more easy-to-use model (auto-scaling, sweet APIs) at the cost of vendor lock-in.

This might explain (besides that fact that they were among the first in the business) why Amazon is much more successful in the Cloud Computing business than Google is.