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.
"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."
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.
Sparked by Google's acquisition of GrandCentral, Adam Ostrow at Mashable offers his vote for the "7 Most Disruptive VoiP Services"
While the world is buzzing about Google’s acquisition of GrandCentral, there are a variety of other startups creating web-based services for managing different aspects of your telephone experience, and in some cases dramatically lowering the cost of staying in touch. Several are also taking advantage of social networks, creating widgets that connect MySpace profiles, Facebook accounts, and blogs to your various communication devices.
I've been tracking the evolution of Voice 2.0 plays for the past 18-24 months and agree with Adam's conclusion that opportunity is ripe for advanced communication applications that leverage the web to solve basic user problems. Presence, Availability, Contextual Awareness, Social Awareness and Multi-Channel Aggregation are all core user problems looking for comm applications and/or services that are intuitive, user-centric and community empowered. Additional plays worth checking out as Voice 2.0 evolves include www.iotum.com , www.gizmo.com , www.rebtel.com , www.phonegnome.com , www.sightspeed.com
From Trent Adams at matchmine
"While playing around with similarity metrics, I’ve been struck by how many different approaches there are for comparing one thing to another. For example, I’ve got a movie and want to find out how similar it is to another movie. There are probably a zillion different ways to code up a solution culled from between the covers of a standard computer science textbook. A matrix can then be cooked up for a bake-off between them.
What I find particularly interesting, though, is when you deviate from the CompSci path and try walking toward the solution in the shoes of a different discipline. Looking through the lens of my astronomer’s telescope, for example, I see a similarity dominated by Euclidean geometry and something similar to inverse-squared law of Newton’s gravitational effects. Digging into the more advanced tools of the astrophysicist, we can glean similarities based on more esoteric concepts like string theory to get from one side of n-space to another (not to mention quantum entanglement).
Jumping a bit further afield, we’ve been dabbling with some dynamic programming techniques (don’t get me started on that term that’s rife with misinterpretation). With a nod to our genetic engineering pals who like to “Think Globally, and Align Locally,” it appears to be a promising approach to identifying an optimal comparative alignment.
The question, with all of these interesting inputs, is which world view dominates the discussion? When driving toward a common, workable solution, it’s unlikely we’ll magically stumble upon the grand unified theory of the mediaverse. Only time will tell who wins the debate (if a winner is ever crowned), so for now we’re playing the field(s)."
