Bruce MacVarish Notes

Ranking Attention in Realtime

Bitly, the company that basically ushered the world into short links on sites like Twitter, is playing around with a new service, launching it under its “Bitly Labs” umbrella.

It’s called Realtime, and is available at http://www.rt.ly

Here’s what we know:

Realtime (http://rt.ly) is an internet attention ranking engine, giving you powerful tools for analyzing what the world is paying attention to right now. You can filter and explore activity on the social web by topics, phrases, domains, social networks and more.

(via TheNextWeb.com by Drew Olanoff)

Frames and the Personal Cloud

Forrester's Frank Gillett recently published a new report on the growth of tablets titled "Tablets will rule the future Personal Computing Landscape"

Of specific interest to me was Frank's view on how tablets and a new form of personal computer they call "frames" will interact with the personal cloud.

"We predict a new form of PC, called frames, that will rise as a result of tablets and other technology innovations and why tablets will cannibalize laptops but not the new forms of desktop PCs."

This graphic illustrates the interaction between personal mobile devices like phones and tablets with (i) a desktop "frame" for productivity and creation and (ii) the personal cloud.  

I like the vision ... and believe in the opportunity of synchronized, brokered and context-aware personal cloud services that power today's and tomorrow's mobile devices.

Personal Media Memory Map

Kristina Loring at Frog Design does a nice job summarizing day 1 of PopTech 2011.

What caught my eye was the Personal Media Memory Map developed by the New York Time’s R&D Lab.

The app takes your basic personal info and creates a personalized map of media relevant to your lifetime by aggregating and curating articles, pictures, posts and other content. 

Check out this video of Alexis Lloyd talking about the challenge of creating these personalized media maps.

 

 

 

"Strong Ties" and the Design of Social Communication Apps

In my earlier posts, I've outlined an on-going project focused on improving our conversations and relationships with the people most important to us - the people we consider our "strong ties".    

I believe there are plenty of applications nurturing our connections with our "weak ties".  Increasingly, we will see new user value found in applications and devices that improve our connections with our "strong ties".   

As a result of the project, I'm continually looking for market validation of the strong ties concept.  Thanks to this FastCompany article by Addy Dugdale - I came across the ON Service developed by Orange Vallee (a subsidiary of the Orange Group).  

I found the TED Global 2010 presentation by Giles Corbett extremely helpful and reinforced my product hypothesis that "strong ties" will continue to emerge as a design focus for new social communication applications and devices.

We're seeing similar conceptual maps of "strong ties" emerge from the social research completed by Orange Vallee and Google's Paul Adams'  work on real life networks.

Here's how Orange maps out the strong ties concept:

and here's how Paul Adams at Google maps out his view of the relationship of our "strong ties" to our friends and "weak ties":

(btw - watch for Paul's new book "Social Circles" )

So, the good news - for users and for the "strong ties" project - is that we're seeing players like Google and Orange market test the "strong ties" concept as a design principle for new social communication applications and devices.

Floating Identification

 

"Getting rid of phone numbers means that we can just connect with someone by a unique ID. And that ID should be able to float on top of various networks, applications & services and protocols."

Bijan Sabet, General Partner, Spark Capital

(image: Floating Numbers)

Rhomobile - Open Source Mobile App Framework

I've been thinking about the opportunity and challenge of developing for the Mobile Enterprise.   If the future state of enterprise apps includes being device agnostic, then the current model of developing mobile enterprise apps for Windows, or iPhone, or Blackberry, or Symbian, or Android needs to change.  Rhomobile seems to be a step in the right direction.

InfoQ offers a video of Adam Blum, CEO of Rhomobile, the open mobile framework company. Blum has been founder/CTO/VP of Engineering of several successful startups in the web services and mobile spaces including Commerce One, Systinet, Good and Mobio. He is also an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University and advisor to several other software companies.

From the Rhomobile site, they highlight their core value prop of productivity, performance and portability to mobilize the enterprise:

  

The core of Rhomobile's offering is the open source mobile app framework Rhodes. Rhodes lets you quickly build native mobile applications for all smartphones: iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android. These are true native device applications which work with synchronized local data and take advantage of device capabilities such as GPS, PIM contacts and camera. 

A separate open source server-based component,  RhoSync, can be used to facilitate automatic synchronization of backend enterprise app data to the mobile device.

RhoHub, is a "Development As A Service" for mobile that enables developers to build and host their mobile apps online

It seems to me that Rhomobile is a step in the right direction to delivering device agnostic enterprise applications.  It will be interesting to watch how Rhomobile evolves and gains traction.

Apperian brings iPhone to the Enterprise

“Number one is helping companies leverage their existing technology investments in smartphones more effectively, by mobilizing workforces and bringing applications to handheld devices; and number two, and more compelling and exciting, is helping large companies really extend their brands and provide transformative, next-generation, point-of-service applications to customers."

Chuck Goldman, CEO, Apperian

(source: Xconomy)

Nuance acquires Zi for $35M

From Xconomy 

Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ:NUAN), after a series of unsuccessful offers begun last summer, has finally convinced the board of the Canadian firm Zi (NASDAQ:ZICA) to accept Nuance’s $35 million buyout offer. Under the terms of the deal, shareholders of Zi, which competes with Nuance in the market for text messaging software, will get 34 cents in cash and 0.4 shares of Nuance stock for every share of Zi stock. Zi shareholders must still approve the deal, which is actually worth less than one Zi’s board rejected in August.

Frogmetrics

Check out Frogmetrics and their real-time customer feedback and analytics solution:

LoJack moves into Location-Aware Services for People at Risk

LoJack, the Massachusetts based car security system for stolen car recovery, received FCC approval to expand their offers from tracking cars to tracking people.  In April 2008, LoJack acquired the assets of Location Systems to support the tracking and recovery of at risk people.   This FCC approval clears the way for a number of new location aware services and revenue streams for LoJack.

From the Boston Business Journal:

"LoJack Corp., which uses wireless technology to track down stolen cars, said Wednesday it received approval from the Federal Communications Commission to use a nationwide frequency for tracking missing people, people of interest to law enforcement and lost or stolen cargo.

The Westwood, Mass.-based company (Nasdaq: LOJN) said the approval was in response to a 2005 petition by LoJack to the FCC to use the nationwide frequency for purposes other than tracking stolen vehicles.

The approval gives the company the ability to diversify its technology into other segments of business. The FCC approval also grants LoJack to transition its network from wideband to narrowband, which it plans to do by 2019."

From the LoJack site and press release:

"LoJack continues to broaden its definition of valuable mobile assets beyond its traditional cars, trucks, construction equipment and motorcycles. LoJack recently acquired the assets of Locator Systems Corporation, which gives LoJack the ability to expand its recovery capabilities to help locate and recover people, beginning with missing persons who wander due to Alzheimer's, Autism, Dementia or Down Syndrome."