Software as a Service (SaaS) is a form of Cloud Computing that delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture. SaaS has gained in popularity in the past few years, and with it came some dramatic shifts in architecture and design. For instance, restrictions on processor usage and database queries have become common place due to the nature of the distributed environment. However, as developers we need to be careful to avoid using this paradigm shift as an excuse to deviate from the development practices we know to be successful. Like Test Driven Development…
Regardless of the development environment, if you can unit test, you can practice Test Driven Development. As an example, let’s look at the best known and most successful of SaaS enterprise applications, Salesforce.com (Author note: I chose to highlight Salesforce for two reasons: 1) It offers a unique testing engine that many people think is detrimental to TDD, and 2) I have been developing custom Salesforce applications for less than a year, and I think it is really, really cool.;) ).
Custom applications are written using Saleforce’s proprietary language, Apex, which resembles Java. It also carries a testing engine, which allows you to specify test classes and method via naming convention. The hitch with Apex is that developers are not able to run test locally. All Apex code, including unit tests, must be executed in a Salesforce server. That means that a developer must save code to the server before testing it.
All true TDD aficionados should be cringing at that thought. Remember, the first step in TDD is creating a test and watching it fail. Are we really committing failing tests to the server?
Don’t worry. It isn’t as bad as it seems. The first thing we need to do is realize that we are not (or at least better not be) developing Apex applications directly in the production environment. Salesforce allows developers to create new developer accounts for each project they are working on. Through the magic of XML and Eclipse, transferring environment details between accounts is fairly easy (and the subject of my next blog...). So new code, and the related unit tests, are developed in the developer sandbox. Instead of looking at this sandbox as a server, think of it as your own personal dev machine (that you can conveniently access from any computer with a browser). When we create a unit test and verify that it fails in this development environment, it is really no different than doing the same thing on your local machine. Failing tests are OK. The idea is to ensure that all of your unit tests are passing before passing along those changes to central repository…
And this is the trick. I am leading a little into next week’s blog, which will focus on collaborative development in Salesforce, but the trick to treat the dev account that you work in as your local dev machine, and have a separate account for the central repository. (I can see the light bulbs going on now, but come back for my next blog anyway - you won’t be sorry). So we can still use TDD to our hearts content on own personal dev account. Test, Fail, Code, Pass, and Commit. It is a little different than the methodology we are used to, but the foundations of TDD are still intact. It still works, and in fact works well. Happy Testing!
Laura Ramos, a B2B marketing analyst at Forrester, has had a three-part blog series over the last several weeks that provides sound recommendations for improving B2B marketing:
After reading the posts above, I came away with five key takeaways from her series:
1) Anybody in B2B marketing today who isn’t empowering their efforts with the technologies mostly associated with new media is on a sinking ship. As Ramos said,"technology will be a key element (but not if applied indiscriminately) to help marketing and sales shift from obnoxious bullhorn to respectful partner.”
2) Marketers have to switch from a telling mode (cranking ads out the door left and right) to a listening mode (marketing enabled by feedback from the social groundswell). Only by listening to that social groundswell and analyzing customer or prospect interaction data will marketers be able to construct marketing methods that work.
3) Websites have become more important than ever. If a website is developed properly, it will deliver a helpful and interesting brand experience in a reputable and non-pushy way. People want information presented as credibly as possible to begin their decision-making process. They want that information without a pushy salesperson providing it. A company’s website provides a wonderful method for customers to find exactly what they are looking for and compare products, features, benefits, specifications and brands.
4) Integration between offline and online media is critical to success. The difference between the present situation and just a few years ago is that new web-centric marketing media is now most often the majority strategy (or should be). Offline efforts no longer lead the way for many B2B marketers, and instead new online strategies and tactics become the focal point for all marketing integration.
5) B2B marketers need to work with partners that can provide fast analysis of marketing efforts. Marketing cycles have contracted from quarters and years to days and weeks. If you can’t get a quick handle on the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, it will be difficult to compete in a marketing world that seems to move at light speed.
Ramos asked the question, “Is B2B Marketing Obsolete?” From her writings, what clearly emerges is that the only thing that is now obsolete is old marketing thinking.
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“By January 2014 I will wager that in the US almost all forms of tangible media will either be in sharp decline or completely extinct. I am not just talking about print, but all tangible forms of media - newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, boxed software and video games.”
That’s five year’s away. If he was right – and I am not sure I can buy his prediction – would this be the time to buy a Barnes & Noble franchise? A newspaper? A paper mill? Would it be time to start a new print-based magazine? Would you want to be developing software that you distribute in physical form (CD or DVD) with fancy packaging. If he is only partially right the aforementioned would be risky plays.
According to the interactive poll in the article, over 70 percent of the respondents think he is 1) crazy in his prediction or 2) too aggressive on his timetable for the demise of tangible media. The reason that media’s future is difficult to tell is that the future rarely extrapolates well from the present. New things and trends yet to surface will affect the transition. However, even if you believe Rubel’s prediction harbors a kernel of truth, the next five years should be quite a ride in the media business.
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CampusMint Redefines Mobile Marketing to College Students
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Students at major colleges and universities across the country can now add one more application to their mobile phones, and it’s called CampusMint. The application claims to be the first mobile promotions application geared directly at linking merchants to college students. With access to electronic discounts, promotions, movie times and entertainment news, CampusMint provides an eco-friendly way for students to receive and redeem promotions for a variety of products and services from local restaurants, theaters, clothing stores, and more.
With a motto of “Think Green, Save Green,” CampusMint co-founder, David Chang says the free mobile application can help save money for cash-strapped students, while encouraging merchants to stop using paper offers and promotions.
CampusMint is currently offered in the most populated college markets including Boston, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. New colleges and universities are being added weekly.
Once downloaded and activated on a mobile device, the application will provide targeted promotions based on the user’s zip code. To redeem promotions, students simply show the CampusMint offer screen to the participating merchant. The promotions even work when traveling. The user simply changes the zip code, and promotions specific to that new area will be delivered.
The foundation has been set by CampusMint for an ideal relationship between providers (merchants) and consumers (college students). As businesses continue to look for ways to reach, track and more effectively target messages to a captive audience- college students stand out for their strong buying presence and love the idea of getting a good deal. With CampusMint, that is all provided and delivered right to their mobile devices without the hassle of paper. CampusMint has been able to provide a green win-win.
• Almost as many companies are increasing marketing budgets as those decreasing, but the biggest change is a reallocation current marketing resources to different media and tactics. Most companies are decreasing traditional marketing expenditures in favor of new media and social networking strategies.
• When asked “Which discipline will offer your brand the largest opportunity for growth?”, the top four responses were:
1) Social media integration (28%)
2) Grassroots, viral public relations (19%)
3) Traditional 30-second TV spots (17%)
4) Web advertising (16%)
• The metric most companies use to measure brand growth is sales and net income.
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For the last several years, Mary Meeker, an analyst for Morgan Stanley, has put together a compelling presentation on the state of the Internet and technology, and presented her thoughts at the annual Web 2.0 Summit. That summit just concluded, and you can view her presentation here on YouTube. The slide deck is embedded above.
Her presentation isn’t “light reading,” but it contains important information that can be valuable to almost anyone in business. Because Meeker is an analyst in an industry that must carefully watch what it recommends, you sometimes have to read between the lines to get the full impact of what she is saying. However, there are some things that clearly stood out:
• Meeker started the presentation with a quick, but in-depth analysis of what led us to our present economic situation. While not discounting the severity of the downturn, the takeaway from her presentation was that we have seen great contractions like this before, but eventually innovation will again have us on the road to growth.
• Meeker said, “If I was an advertiser, I would be focused on innovating in the low CPM categories [social networking, online video, VOIT] to take advantage of what is a huge arbitrage opportunity.”
• She stated mobile will be the biggest area of opportunity for technology and marketers, and that one of the biggest changes in mobile will be its transformation to a Web-centric platform.
• Meeker emphasized there are a lot of services/products that have and will help the mobile revolution along, including 3G, Apple’s iPhone, and other emerging smartphones from competing companies. However, she felt the biggest single factor to growing mobile was the introduction of Google’s Android platform.
• Another big trend Meeker predicted is a large increase in laptop computers that use wireless 3G networks to access the cloud.
As I watched election coverage last night, I was keenly aware that I was witnessing an astonishing piece of history in the making, not only from a political perspective, but also from a communications viewpoint. The announcers on both CNN and FNC, kept referring to Obama’s rise from relative obscurity to winning the Democratic nomination, and eventually becoming president-elect, as fueled by an Internet strategy and groundswell. It seems the torch has been passed from TV to the Web.
After the networks confirmed his victory, I watched Obama address a throng of people gathered at Grant Park in Chicago. It reminded me of another young president — John F. Kennedy — and another communications era. I was only in seventh grade when Kennedy was elected, but I can remember sensing his charismatic powers even at that young age. At that time, everyone thought it would be impossible for a Catholic to be elected president of the United States, but he proved the pundits wrong. Many people pointed to the power of television as shaping the outcome of that election, and the famous televised Nixon/Kennedy debates as the turning point in that political contest. Now it appears the pivotal power of the Web will be the key to future election success – even the Republican right acknowledges that.
No doubt, television and other traditional media will continue to play an immensely important role in many elections to come, but the most important and most powerful network is the people’s network powered by pervasive Web technologies and strategies. That seemed a forgone conclusion at precisely 10 PM CST last night, and delivered, ironically enough, on television.
I was recently browsing through a web development forum when a particular posting caught my eye. A member was asking what is the best way to mark-up and design a calendar in HTML without using a table. He got plenty of answers, with a lot of advice on complex code structure and CSS floating techniques, some with a few existing examples. He also got few responses telling him to just do it in a table; but he remained convinced it should be table-less.
Where does this anti-tableism come from? In the early days of web design, it became a very popular technique to build web pages using tables to lay out the elements. The ability to slice up Photoshop mockups and arrange them in a grid was the most basic skill a web designer could have. Everybody did it. Since web browsers were in their infancy, it was almost the only way to have a consistent design across browsers. As time went on, pages became more complex. Their designs required more and more tables nested within tables, and page size grew and grew. I remember building pages where just the markup was over 100KB.
But soon, the web grew up, and browsers did too. With using stylesheets, we now have a much better way of designing a page. We keep the HTML dedicated to defining the content, and the CSS to styling it. When this method was new, we called it ‘table-less design’. Tables became associated with the ugly past. So they needed to be replaced…everywhere.
But tables should not be replaced. Tables are meant for tabular data (hence the name). Just think of them as a spreadsheet in HTML. All the HTML elements and parameters associated with tables are there to support a tabular structure. And they are perfect for the job.
Of course, this means tables should NOT be used for laying out a page, since sliced images and transparent spacer .gifs are not tabular data.
As for the calendar? It’s meant to be a grid. Calendars are tabular data. Each row represents a week, and each column represents a day of the week. Once the HTML defines the structure, CSS takes over styling it.
Tables aren’t dead in web design. They’re just finally doing what they’ve been supposed to be doing all along.
To some, return on investment (ROI) may appear to have reached marketing buzzword status. However, despite the term’s widespread use in the current business lexicon, its importance cannot be understated — especially to marketing executives. While understanding and being able to measure ROI is of vital importance to external marketing efforts, it is just as important for internal communication and credibility. With all the financial turmoil that many companies are presently facing, it will be vitally important for marketers to exquisitely detail that marketing is a lifeblood investment for the enterprise rather than a costly excursion.
Without hard numbers to support requested marketing budgets, top management and boards of directors will be in no position to approve marketing outlays in today’s economic quagmire. Faced with declining sales, some companies cut marketing by a certain percentage across the board. That may be an easy way to cut budgets, but it is seldom the smart way. If, and that is a big if (see Turtles vs. Giraffes), you absolutely need to cut your marketing, concentrate on cutting out what isn’t working for you and preserve what is working well for the organization. The only way to know that is to have an ROI analysis in hand.
Getting a handle on ROI isn’t tough if you wire a system into your efforts through the entire sales and marketing funnel. However, that commitment must start at the top of the marketing chain of command. INC magazine recently had an article, Ten Myths About ROI, that should be helpful to those who have questions about the emphasis on ROI.
It’s Halloween, and the only thing that seems scary to me is the thought of CMOs or marketing executives trying to navigate their way to success – externally or internally – without having numbers that support their efforts.
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As individuals, we all have our own idea about what features make a product “the perfect fit.” To support this, companies have increased product diversity and customization, while new industries are born for the sole purpose of providing additional accessories to cater to our desire for personalization. Not only do we want things now; we want them customized to match our specific need on a whim. The bar is constantly being raised as companies scramble to learn more about how customers use their products and what changes or improvements will keep them happy and coming back.
While customer surveys and focus groups are still a viable option for many companies, others are leveraging the power of the internet to gather this feedback. We continue to see an increase in companies developing strategies to “harvest” this information from the internet. Companies have added whole departments whose purpose is to surf blog postings or social networks looking for discussions about their products and services. After gathering data, development teams research the information to create their next generation products.
Earlier this week, Intel Corporation and ASUS took customer driven design to a new level when they launched their “Community-Designed PCs” project. “ASUS and Intel have created WePC.com in an effort to bridge innovation and technology with consumers’ wishes,” said Lillian Lin, director of ASUS’ Marketing Planning Division. The community is divided into three groups which address some of the most popular PC categories: netbooks, notebooks and gaming notebooks. The web site even gives the users a means to sketch out their plan if they are more visually oriented. “Intel believes the spark for innovation can come from anywhere,” said Mike Hoefflinger, general manager of Intel’s Partner Marketing Group. “That’s why Intel is working with ASUS to tap into the creative energy of consumers as they share ideas on designing their ideal PC. Intel is committed to encouraging conversations with consumers and giving people a voice in the design of technology they use every day.” The results of this project could lead to the world’s first community-designed PCs.
Consumers want to be involved and they want their voices to be heard. Companies are learning that listening to their customers will lead to an improved customer experience and ultimately increased customer loyalty and overall sales.
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Freecycle: a social network changing the face of recycling
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Can social networks be utilized to help tackle environmental problems across the world? Freecycle appears to be doing just that. In the midst of a global economic crisis, when people are looking for ways to be more frugal, Freecycle is using the web to help millions of people go green and save money too.
Freecycle is a nonprofit movement composed of 4,618 groups and nearly 6 million members globally. What makes this nonprofit unique is that members are giving and getting stuff for free in their own towns thanks to the web. Their grassroots theme is that “it’s all about reusing and keeping good stuff out of landfills.”
Founded in 2003 by Deron Beal, Freecycle’s launch was all about finding a way to get rid of furniture and household junk collected during a local recycling effort. Beal’s initial e-mail went out to only about 30 friends, but from there a site was created and the popularity of the Freecycle idea exploded exponentially.
Today, as a member of your local area’s group, you can start posting and responding to messages listed. The three common phrases are: “wanted,” “offer” and “taken.” These simple messages, accompanied by a short description, allow members to easily navigate through the postings on the message board.
Currently a part of Yahoo Groups, Freecycle does not yet collect any advertising revenue. However, that may change in the near future. They intend to create their own site where members can post by category, enable posts by radius and distance within groups, and provide other tools specific to both members and local volunteer moderators. As Freecycle progresses to have their own web presence outside of Yahoo, they may opt to sell Google ads to generate income.
Regardless, with a simple mission to “get online and give away something you are likely to otherwise throw away,” Freecycle is showing the world that social networks can help tackle environmental problems locally and globally.
Recently, there was an interesting story about the Finnish government establishing a goal to bring a 100Mbps or faster internet connection within 1.5 miles of all its citizens. Their plan also paves the way for gigabit speeds to be made available by 2015.
“Data connections are no longer entertainment but a necessity,” said Harri Pursiainen, the permanent secretary for the transport and communications minister (in Finland? Or of what area?). ”Regional, equal communications infrastructure will not come about without state action.”
What are the good citizens of Finland paying for all this speed? One cable service provider, Welho, charges customers around 80 dollars for a 110Mbps connection. Last time I checked, I was paying around half that price for only 3 Mbps. So why such a huge price difference? Let’s see ... how about a general lack of real competition, lack of government incentives, no regulatory benchmarks like we have for the upcoming transition to digital TV in February, and perhaps a little corporate greed (come on ... just a little)? In some respects, the United States is a victim of its own success. This country led the way in developing infrastructure for telecommunications and the internet. But now, in order to achieve nation-wide broadband speeds of 100Mbps and greater, a lot of expensive equipment needs to be upgraded.
We have a unique opportunity in the USA right now. Shortly, there will be new leaders in the Congress, Senate and the White House. So again I ask you; start writing those emails and making phone calls to ask your newly elected officials to put the USA on the same playing field as the rest of the world. We cannot afford to lose this race.
An Inside Perspective on Big Brands and Social Media
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Although many big brands are active in social media, few are willing to share how their efforts are developed, implemented and measured. So when social media leaders from Wells Fargo, UPS, The Home Depot and Graco gather for a group discussion at the Online Marketing Blog, it’s worth paying attention. Here are some take-aways.
Lead with strategy: The big brands see social media as one component of their broader marketing efforts. The Home Depot’s efforts are more successful when they begin with customer expectations, not the latest shiny-new technology tool.
It isn’t a campaign: Social media requires constant attention, and organizations should avoid campaign-style thinking. From The Home Depot’s interactive marketing manager:
It’s not something you “do” the way you might traditional execute a print or television campaign. Instead, it’s about finding ways to connect and engage with customers in an authentic, timely and relevant manner.
Listening is key: Before you begin any social media efforts, listen to the conversation that’s already taking place. Graco uses listening as a foundation for building the social media business case and developing individual tactics. Others monitor the chatter on Twitter, blogs and online communities.
Metrics are important: Each organization bases their success on bottom-line results. In addition to the usual online measurements, consider how social media affects consumer engagement, customer feedback and brand preferences.
Entry barriers are few: One benefit of social media is its rapid implementation and relatively low IT investment. Begin with a small pilot effort and expand as your success grows.
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Email Marketing has become a large part of my workload lately. I felt a refresher course in HTML email was needed in order to sort out all the confounding aspects of producing an effective HTML email message. Before setting out on the design phase of a couple recent HTML email campaigns I needed up-to-date answers to these two questions: What email clients are people using? and What is the current state of email clients regarding standard support for HTML email?
What Email clients are people using?
Fingerprint by Litmus collected the following data from nearly a million consumer email recipients noting Web-based email clients were more popular with consumer recipients than desktop clients.
What is the current state of email clients regarding standard support for HTML email?
The Email Standards Project is a great source for the latest news on this subject. They provide a list of email clients and results based on their acid test. Most email clients performed excellently except for Gmail, Lotus Notes 8 and Outlook 2007 which all received poor scores. Windows Live Hotmail has average standard support for HTML email messages.
Sometimes technology is its own worst enemy. That is made evident every year when Gartner releases its “hype cycles” like the Gartner 2008 Emerging Technology Hype Cycle shown above (click to enlarge). Many of the technologies listed here will no doubt be immensely important to businesses in the future. Unfortunately, hype cycles often illustrate that there is almost always a substantial time lag between something that seems so immediately important to a small group of early adopters until it actually does enter the economic or business toolkit mainstream.
Because Sundog is a marketing and technology company, we are significantly exposed to most of these “edge” technologies on a regular basis. This technology can be an elixir that generates enthusiasm, but like all businesspeople we sometimes have to be diligent and patient until a critical mass is reached and the hype meets reality. In some cases, that patience is challenging. For example, pundits have talked about the adoption of mobile technologies for marketing purposes for years. It seemed like “next year” was always going to be the year. This has been going on for about five years now! Well it looks like the time for mobile as a marketing platform is finally here or near, but there are probably three factors coming together that have made mobile marketing feasible: 1) the increasing number of smart phones and very smart phones (iPhone, G1, etc.), 2) social networking made even more ubiquitous through cell phone usage, and 3) increasingly sophisticated wireless coverage, i.e., 3G.
Another trend that surprised even our company in its swift marketplace acceptance and adoption is cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms. The timing on these technologies seemed to go from mild interest a couple of years ago to top priorities for many companies today.
Speaking of priorities, Gartner provides a tool that explains the phases of the hype cycle and assembles a priority matrix for technology planners (see their priority matrix chart for emerging technologies at the bottom of this post). The phases of the hype cycle include:
1. Technology Trigger
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations
3. Trough of Disillusionment
4. Slope of Enlightenment
5. Plateau of Productivity
In addition, Gartner also has a book and a blog on the subject. The Emerging Technologies hype cycle is just one of dozens of hype cycles that Gartner tracks.
Remember, some technologies that are looming on the horizon might not need to be fully embraced today, but anybody who is going to invest in technology solutions in the near future would be best to explore how future solutions will affect current priorities and expenditures.
One of the benefits of working in a company that embraces the cutting edge of technology is the opportunity to work with the very latest in programming languages. While this drastically improves the cool factor of my job, it also means that I get to deal with some of the normal community problems that one encounters when developing in a new or immature language. Most recently, I have been working in Apex, the proprietary on-demand development language for building software as a service (SaaS) applications for the relatively new (and very cool) SalesForce.com. I commented to one of my fellow developers that I was surprised by the amount of code I was seeing that didn’t follow naming conventions. Her response was even more surprising… “What’s the big deal with naming conventions?”
Maybe it is my Java background, but that question shocked me. In Java, very strong conventions were established from the beginning requiring classes and variables to be capitalized differently. Thus, to a Java programmer, widget.expand() and Widget.expand() imply significantly different behavior, even without prior knowledge of the Widget class and despite the fact that the compiler enforces no such rules. Apex, to be fair to the development platform, directs developers to use the same conventions as Java. So the lack of use is a community issue, not a language one. But it is still an issue none the less.
There are other reason of course (like keeping overly long or “cute” names out of applications. But the maintenance aspect of it is especially close to my heart. When I am looking at someone else’s code (or even my own code that I haven’t touched in a while), it helps to have certain expectations about what an identifier is and does from first glance. Considering that a software application spends the majority of its life in the maintenance phase, every little thing to make said maintenance easier helps. Especially when it is something as easy as following a few naming conventions.
I recently completed Allen Adamson’s new book, Brand Digital. Like his earlier book, Brand Simple, it helps articulate the importance of brands in the digital age. One of the key takeaways from the book is that the brand/media relationship has done a 180 degree flip. A little more than a decade ago marketers were concerned with how mainstream media was going to steer their brands. Big media was just about the only game in town and communication between a company and the public depended on that connection. However, today, astute marketers are more concerned with how the brand concept should determine what media is to be used, and how best to use that media.
Adamson points out, both brands and media are now beholden to a hyper-networked consumer, and that consumer has become a major and immediate factor in building brand equity. As a result, Brand Digital reveals that for more and more marketers, the major focus of their branding platform is dependent on digital communication channels, and increasingly, how to develop and maintain a positive dialog with customers and prospects.
After reading the book, you are left with the obvious conclusion that in this digital age it is imperative your brand promise aligns precisely with your brand experience. As a result, a substantial part of the marketing effort for today’s CMOs is not aimed at directly “selling” the consumer, but instead enhancing the brand experience by using digital technologies and Web-based marketing platforms that ensure their company’s brand experience will be second to none.
In a meeting earlier this month with magazine executives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt helped illustrate the importance of brands in the Internet age. Schmidt said the Web is fast becoming a “cesspool” with a lot of false and misleading information. One way the consumer can count on the information they find online is to associate it with a brand they trust. “Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Schmidt offered. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”
Like most businesses, the magazine executives wanted to know how to improve their page rank. However, Schmidt cautioned that there is no consistent shortcut and said the best way to increase page rank and show up well in Google searches is to have relevant content.
Schmidt added another comment to underscore the importance of brands:
“Branding...may be an essential element that helps people navigate the world. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”
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Economic Downturn Helps Drive Evolution of Cloud Computing
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The article below from the Java Developer’s Journal correctly identifies Cloud Computing as ‘Hosting Evolved’. The article lists the following key benefits from the client side:
1) Can expand amount of resources applied against a given workload without having to front the capital and without having to build in advance of demand
2) Do not have to build the expertise in areas like HVAC, Electrical and Mission-Critical Facility Design/Operation in-house - let someone else deal with it
3) Can be part of a business continuance and disaster recovery strategy
4) Can enable a stateless computing architecture when coupled with other technologies like VDI
When properly designed, Cloud Computing environments allow you and your company to focus on your business goals and not technology.
Key Benefits of a robust Cloud Computing platform:
1) Focus on achieving business goals versus fixing software headaches
2) Pilot new efforts with a small initial investment
3) User Scalability built in - 1 to 1,000,000+ users
4) Geographic Scalability built in - no need to co-locate servers, this is already done for you
5) Security built in - look for a SAS 70 certification (Statement on Auditing Standards (SaS) No. 70 Type II certifications, developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).)
6) Multi-currency built in
7) Multi-language built in
8) Disaster recover built in
9) Backups built in
10) Business continuity built in
Economic Downturn Helps Drive Evolution of Cloud Computing
— As providers evolve from traditional hosting they may be facing a window of opportunity in the current, rather dismal, economic outlook: Cloud Computing. In periods of economic uncertainty, especially when the capital for large-scale build-outs may be hard to raise in the debt markets or at least much more expensive to raise people turn to look at other options that enable them to continue to meet end-user and business demands for IT services.
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Attention webmasters: Google wants you to know your site has security vulnerabilities. As part of their online webmaster tools, Google is now providing free notifications of common web server security problems.
Here’s how it works: As Google’s search crawler indexes your site content, it also compares the signature of your server software against a database of known vulnerabilities. When you log in to your webmaster account, you will see any new warnings in your message center. Why is this important? Google search expert Matt Cutts describes the situation:
There’s been a recent trend of spammers hacking websites, and most of the time that happens because the webmaster or site owner didn’t update a piece of software that runs their website. If you think you can install a piece of software on the web in 2008 and run it forever without upgrading, I’m sorry to say that your website will be at much higher risk of getting hacked.
Initially, the free analysis only looks for an older version of the popular blog software WordPress, which is known to contain security holes. (The newest version of Wordpress plugs these holes, but many site administrators have not upgraded.)
Presumably Google will add more vulnerabilities to their database over time, but for now this service is limited to Wordpress sites. The full disclosure missing in last week’s announcement of this service is that Google owns Blogger, their own competing blog software. Could this be some underhanded PR tactic against the competition? Of course everyone knows Google can do no evil. It must be a coincidence.
Most people don’t think of Facebook as a photo site, but it has far more photos on it than either Photobucket or Flickr: Over 10 billion to be exact. Flickr hosts about 2 billion photos and Photobucket hosts around 6 billion photos.
It also underscores the pervasiveness of social media when you consider at peak traffic Facebook serves 300,000 images per second to its 100 million members.
Paola Antonelli On The Interplay Between Design and Technology
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Paola Antonelli, design curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), delivers an interesting talk about the connection between design and technology. Her influence is certainly part of the reason MoMA is such a fascinating place to visit, and their catalog is a joy to receive.
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Doing my daily walk through the blogosphere, every once in a while I come across a gem that I can’t help but share. David Van Couvering‘s blog entry entitled The Curse of the Swallowed Exception is one of these gems The second paragraph alone was enough to earn him a spot in my reader:
I think one of the most common and most expensive (in terms of maintenance) programming errors I see is the handling of exceptions.
I couldn’t agree more.
Many times, a significant portion of maintenance cost goes into the developer digging through the logs, trying to figure out what happened. If exceptions are swallowed (resulting in no error logging), then the developer has no idea where to begin and must start walking the code to see if they can identify the problem. Even worse is when the errors are obfuscated, resulting in the stack trace pointing to the wrong location. This sends the developer on a wild goose chase, and in the end they are no better off than they would have been had no error log been produced at all. This is not only very time consuming, but also very frustrating for the engineer. Anyone who has ever attempted to set up an instance of the Oracle Application Server from scratch has likely beat their heads against their desk many a night while trying to figure out the culprit behind one of their ultra-generic error messages.
Long story short, poor exception handling can drive the price of maintenance up and the quality of life for the maintaining engineer down. Take a look at David’s blog, in which he details 7 Principles of Exception Handling and Reporting. Implementing them can definately make life easier on both the customer and maintaining engineer further down the road.
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Many people I know in the business community keep talking about the rough, present-day economic climate that we face in the immediate future. There seems little doubt that companies everywhere are going to have to ask some difficult questions. Unless you are in a business that is relatively immune from our challenging business climate — say perhaps a publisher specializing in economic doom and gloom books – it seems a certainty that growth, or even stability, is not going to come from grabbing an upward trend in consumer or B2B spending.
So how does a company maintain or grow when the economy is in disrepair? Economic downturns seem to create either a turtle or giraffe mentality among businesses, and the turtles, by far, make up the majority.
Turtles try to weather the threat of a downturn by pulling in their necks and hunkering down hoping the protective shell they built in better times will help them through the turmoil. They cut budgets. Cut staff. Cut marketing. Cut R & D.
Giraffes stick their neck out. While their competitors are running scared or laying low, giraffes are out scouting the landscape for opportunities, and they are doing so in an environment that is suddenly devoid of competition. Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett) is a giraffe with his purchase of Goldman stock. While many investors are herding toward the exits, Warren Buffett walks in to take advantage of the emotional detritus on Wall Street. Citigroup also appears to have a giraffe mindset in their offer for Wachovia.
The turtle mindset is predominant in times of uncertainty because there is panic and it is the safe thing to do. Also, if a company’s balance sheet isn’t strong enough, it may be the only thing that can be done. However, for companies that have the mindset, the courage, and a healthy enough balance sheet to take some calculated risks, this can be a time to leapfrog the competition that is much more difficult to do when things are rosy.
Lastly, whether your company adopts a turtle or a giraffe mindset, this is the time to make absolutely certain that your investments in marketing and technology (whatever they might be) are producing the maximum return on your investment. More on that here.
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Above is another interesting interactive infographic that illustrates 24 hours of worldwide air traffic. Check out the higher resolution graphic here for much better detail.
This chart not only conveys air traffic, but it is easy to see when it is prime time for travel on each continent. Not only that, it clearly shows where economic development is going on (and where it isn’t). Good data visualization such as this will become requisite in a world that creates 281 exabytes of information annually.
Thanks to kottke.org for the point on the air traffic info.
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A common tenet of modern Web development is to avoid long, obscure strings of characters in your URLs. So, for example, if your page’s URL looks like this…
The conversion of the former URL into the latter is known as “URL rewriting,” because it converts a long, ugly query string into a short, clean Web address. URL rewriting typically requires a special Web development framework or server module, but it has many advantages:
URLs are shorter and easier to remember
URLs are human-readable
URLs do not expose the back-end web address to potential hackers
Until recently, rewritten URLs were also considered more search engine friendly. Google’s guidelines used to give this warning:
Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index
One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static. It’s always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.
As other bloggers have pointed out, the irony here is Google’s own post on BlogSpot uses URL rewriting.
But the question remains: does URL rewriting help or hinder search engine optimization? I believe the benefits outweigh any potential drawbacks. Both static and dynamic URLs may be indexed just fine by Google’s bots, but ultimately it is humans who will decide whether or not to click on a link. Clear, friendly URLs are simply more likely to be clicked. If your Web development platform or content management system does not support friendly URLs, it still makes sense to find one that does.
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Toyota Puts Pedal to the Marketing Metal with 0% Financing
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Amidst the credit-crunch rollercoaster, Toyota is going all out nationally with a 0% financing incentive on 11 models. A spokesperson said they have the inventory and capacity through Toyota’s own financial services division for this huge financing and leasing push.
The announcement comes on the heels of the auto manufacturer’s huge sales decline last month of 30% compared to a year ago, the largest drop for Toyota since 1987.
The aggressive move also is rolling out at a time when consumers are hearing about and experiencing first-hand how much credit standards have tightened.
Toyota intends to use this big-news offer to drive showroom traffic, increase sales, and make customers aware that credit is still available – a message running contrary to what people are hearing in the news these days, and one analysts expect will actually help bolster Toyota sales.
Amidst the financial institutions’ PR messaging of safety and soundness sweeping the web and mailboxes right now, Toyota is now entering the mix with it’s own tune of “We’ve got money to lend.”
And for many consumers, that message will be music to their ears.
From Harvard Business School, here are the lessons learned from Obama’s win for 1) 
I recently completed Allen Adamson’s new book, 
In a 