Web Economy
Europe Increases IT Outsourcing Spend
Europe will increase its IT outsourcing spending over the remainder of 2010, leading to a possible surge in recruitment for IT professionals, a new survey has revealed.
IT research firm Gartner surveyed 206 organisations across Europe and discovered that 53 per cent of firms plan to increase their outsourcing in 2010, while 40 per cent plan to up their external IT services spending.
Of the firms that have an IT budget of less than €1 million (£82 million), 14.7 per cent said that they would increase their outsourcing, up from 6.1 per cent in 2009.
Claudio Da Rold, vice president and analyst at Gartner, commented: “Organisations in Europe are expecting – or are in need of – growth, but they are also still highly cautious.”
“Regardless of the future direction of the economy, European businesses and their service providers need to optimize their multisourced environments, while increasingly adopting industrialized IT services,” he added.
Gerry McLaughlin from ITContractor.com recently claimed that IT services are too crucial to cut, despite firms experiencing further cost reductions.
most world cup crazy countries
Last weekend, Spain won the 2010 World Cup. For the month leading up to the final, Googlers joined the world in cheering for their favorite teams. Around our campus, games were watched on computer screens and on cafe video screens. Code went unwritten. Emails went unanswered.
Throughout the world, real life also slowed during World Cup matches. Which teams had the most loyal fans? Which game captured the attention of world the most? To answer these questions, we looked at counts of queries using Google. People search using Google day and night—except for football fans when a game is on.
These graphs show the volume of Google queries for some of the World Cup matches:
On June 15, as Brazil played its first game against North Korea, the volume of queries from Brazil, shown using a red line, plummeted when the match began, spiked during halftime, fell again and then quickly rose after the match finished.
Queries from Spain during its June 25 game against Chile also decreased during the game, except during halftime. After some post-game querying, Spaniards went to sleep and queries dropped again.
To measure which country has the most loyal fans, we computed the proportional drop in queries during each of its team’s matches compared with normal query volume. Brazil topped the charts with queries from that country dropping by half during its football games. Football powerhouse and third-place winner Germany came in second, followed by the Netherlands and South Korea.
In fourth place, South Koreans were remarkably loyal even though some games began at 3:30am Seoul time. Japan, Australia and New Zealand, also affected by time-zone differences, expressed much less interest. A few countries searched more, not less. But only Honduras and North Korea increased significantly.
During the knockout rounds, each match’s losing team is eliminated from the tournament. As fewer and fewer teams remain, we expected increased worldwide interest in each remaining game. Unsurprisingly, worldwide queries slowed the most during the final game between the Netherlands and Spain, but the round-of-16 Germany v. England game had the second largest query decrease. Semi-finals and quarter-finals were all popular except for semi-final Uruguay v. Netherlands, during which queries actually increased.
In Latin American countries, search volume dropped more steeply leading into and out of matches while, in Europe, searches ramped down and up more gradually. Of course, for games that went into extra time and penalty shootouts the drops deepened the longer the match went on, including Paraguay v. Japan, Netherlands v. Spain, and Uruguay v. Ghana as seen here:
Finally, no blog post about the World Cup would be complete without a look at what did drive people to search—after the final match, of course. Although he won neither the Golden Boot (for the most World Cup goals) nor the Golden Ball (for best player) last weekend, Spain’s David Villa is winning in search compared to the recipients of those two honors—Germany’s Thomas Müller and Uruguay’s Diego Forlán—and Dutch midfielder Wesley Sneijder. All of these men competed for the Golden Boot with five goals apiece.
Similar to when Carlos Puyol headed in the single goal that put Spain in the final, people flocked to the web to search for information on Andres Iniesta, the “quiet man” who scored the one goal that led his country to its first World Cup championships. They were also interested in Dani Jarque, a Spanish footballer who died last fall and whose name was emblazoned on Iniesta’s undershirt, which he displayed after his goal. And after the match, searches for keeper Iker Casillas skyrocketed to a higher peak than any other popular footballer—including household names like Ronaldo, Villa and Messi—reached during the Cup. Sometimes, it seems, goalies get the last word.
YouTube’s Growth a Headache for IT Admins?
As numerous World Cup games have shown in recent weeks, watching Web video in the workplace can be a recipe for disaster.
And with YouTube being one of the Web’s most popular destinations for watching video online, the Google-owned site is, not surprisingly, also a potential source of pain for network administrators looking to rein in their employees’ runaway bandwidth consumption.
That problem may be poised to get even more acute for enterprise IT, considering that YouTube is looking for ways to increase its viewership to more closely rival TV usage patterns. Datamation has a look at the implications.
SAN BRUNO, Calif. — Google’s YouTube is nowhere near as popular as television, but the popular video sharing site is working hard to change that with a new method for video viewing and discovery.
While YouTube is focused on consumers, there’s no question the site is a popular destination for office workers looking for a distraction or simply clicking through a “You’ve got to see this” e-mail message from a friend with a link to some oddball YouTube video. But if a new YouTube service proves popular, enterprises could see a significant uptick in the time employees spend on the service, potentially impacting productivity.
Predictions: The Future of the Internet
At the same time, there was strong dispute about those futuristic scenarios among notable numbers of 742 respondents to survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University. Those who raised challenges believe that governments and corporations will not necessarily embrace policies that will allow the network to spread to under-served populations; and that serious social inequalities will persist.
The experts and analysts also split evenly on a central question of whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater transparency of people and institutions afforded by the internet: 46% agreed that the benefits of greater transparency of organizations and individuals would outweigh the privacy costs and 49% disagreed.
Internet’s future in 2020
The Pew report on the future internet surveyed 742 experts in the fields of computing, politics and business.
More than half of respondents had a positive vision of the net’s future but 46% had serious reservations.
Almost 60% said that a counter culture of Luddites would emerge, some resorting to violence.
The Pew Internet and American Life report canvassed opinions from the experts on seven broad scenarios about the future internet, based on developments in the technology in recent years.
Written responses
The correspondents were also able to qualify their answers with written responses giving more detail.
“Key builders of the next generation of internet often agree on the direction technology will change, but there is much less agreement about the social and political impact those changes will have,” said Janna Quitney Anderson, lead author of the report The Future of the Internet II.
She added: “One of their big concerns is: Who controls the internet architecture they have created?”
Bob Metcalfe, founder of 3Com and the inventor of ethernet, predicted the net would be a global connection of different devices.
“The internet will have gone beyond personal communications,” by 2020 he wrote.
Mobiles
“Many more of today’s 10 billion new embedded micros per year will be on the internet.”
Louis Nauges, president of Microcost, a French information technology firm, saw mobile devices at the forefront of the net.
“Mobile internet will be dominant,” he explained. “By 2020, most mobile networks will provide one-gigabit-per-second-minimum speed, anywhere, anytime.
“Dominant access tools will be mobile, with powerful infrastructure characteristics. All applications will come from the net.”
But not everyone felt a “networked nirvana” would be possible by 2020.
Concerns over interoperability (different formats working together), government regulation and commercial interests were seen as key barriers to a universal internet.
Ian Peter, Australian leader of the Internet Mark II Project, wrote: “The problem of the digital divide is too complex and the power of legacy telco regulatory regimes too powerful to achieve this utopian dream globally within 15 years.”
‘Real interoperability’
Author and social commentator Douglas Rushkoff agreed with Mr Peter.
He wrote: “Real interoperability will be contingent on replacing our bias for competition with one for collaboration.
“Until then, economics do not permit universal networking capability.”
Many of the surveyed experts predicted isolated and small-scale violent attacks to try and thwart technology’s march.
“Today’s eco-terrorists are the harbingers of this likely trend,” wrote Ed Lyell, an expert on the internet and education.
“Every age has a small percentage that cling to an overrated past of low technology, low energy, lifestyle.”
“Of course there will be more Unabombers,” wrote Cory Doctorow of blog BoingBoing.
Some commentators felt that the violence would either be tied to the effects of technology, rather than the technology itself, or possibly civil action around issues such as privacy.
“The interesting question is whether these acts will be considered terrorism or civil disobedience,” wrote Marc Rotenberg or the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
More than half of respondents disagreed that English would become the lingua franca of the internet by 2020 and that there would be dangers associated with letting machines take over some net tasks such as surveillance and security.
Internet Society Board chairman Fred Baker wrote: “We will certainly have some interesting technologies.
He added: “Until someone finds a way for a computer to prevent anyone from pulling its power plug, however, it will never be completely out of control.”
The repondents were split over the whether the impact of people’s lives becoming increasingly online, resulting in both less privacy but more transparency, would be a positive outcome.
‘Access information’
Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby awards, said such transparancy would be a benefit to society.
“Giving all people access to our information and a context to understand it will lead to an advancement in our civilisation.” But NetLab founder Barry Wellman disagreed: “The less one is powerful, the more transparent his or her life. The powerful will remain much less transparent.”
Mr Doctorow wrote: “Transparency and privacy aren’t antithetical.
“We’re perfectly capable of formulating widely honored social contracts that prohibit pointing telescopes through your neighbours’ windows.
“We can likewise have social contracts about sniffing your neighbours’ network traffic.”
By 2020 an increasing number of people will be living and working within “virtual worlds” being more productive online than offline, the majority of the respondents said.
Ben Detenber, an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University, responded: “Virtual reality (VR) will only increase productivity for some people. For most, it will make no difference in productivity (i.e., how much output); VR will only change what type of work people do and how it is done.”
Glenn Ricart, a board member at the Internet Society, warned also of potential dangers.
He envisaged “an entire generation opting-out of the real world and a paradoxical decrease in productivity as the people who provide the motive economic power no longer are in touch with the realities of the real world”.
The Shift to Service-Web Economy
Cloud computing and virtualization reflect a general movement driven by the Web: a shift towards a more service-driven economy.
There are two major trends that are now coming together to reshape our economies and societies. One is the continuing replacement of humans by computers in the workplace. Computers are essential in manufacturing and in the office. They continuously replace human effort and boost productivity.
Consider this: most of the products we design today could not be designed without computers. A new computer from Dell, for example, can only be designed by using computers from a previous generation. In other words, an older model of a computer is helping in the creation of a newer one.
So in which areas are computers not likely to replace humans (at least in the short term)? Service. The caring industries. People like being cared for by other people. A genuine smile and a friendly voice have a powerful affect on us. The computers will look after the hard space, humans will look after the soft space.
The Web thrives on interconnections; cloud computing and virtualization live on the Web. If you are not connected-if you live on a remote island with no outside connections-then to live you must physically have everything you need beside you. But if you live on the Web, it doesn’t matter where what you need resides, once you can make use of it. It’s not the owning or the physical proximity that matters-it’s the use. And what are the implications of all this? Service.
Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, said in March 2010 that Microsoft was “betting our company” on the cloud. I hear the same sort of statements in other big companies I deal with. There’s a shift to the cloud; a shift to service.
Part of this shift is of course technical. But there’s an equally large cultural part . A service-driven economy will be different from a product-driven economy. Why? Because the most important thing will be the service. You pay 10 dollars a month, not 400 dollars as a once-off payment. That changes how you think about what you’re getting.
Most organizations are structured around a launch and leave project-based culture of products, marketing and communication campaigns. The reward is for producing things (products, websites, brochures, videos, advertising campaigns). In a service-driven economy, the reward-structure will be based on how happy the customer is with your service.
How does a service-based brand thrive? By showing customers that you care about meeting their needs, month-in, month-out. These customers have not bought your product; they’ve bought your service. And that means they judge you on your service and can leave you more easily if your service declines. In service-driven economies people are locked in by trust and satisfaction, not by the fact that they have made a major investment in a product and must stick with it.
Are you ready for service? Because that’s where the Web is at. Great websites are run by service professionals. People who want to help their customers succeed. People who care more about whether the customers are happy than whether the organization is. If you focus too much on the organization — the internal politics — you invariably lose focus on the customer.
Collectively The Power Of Google And Digg
The link journalism meme seems to have legs, based on the number of smart people who picked it up. Now it’s time to kick it up a notch, with the concept of NETWORKED link journalism, which can give journalists, collectively, the power of Digg and Google to direct huge amounts of traffic on the web.
But first lets look at how the concept of link journalism has been refined and supported:
From Josh Cantone at ReadWriteWeb:
The Drudge Report and other so-called link blogs, are really a subset of edited news aggregation, which has a great signal to noise ratio. Because the content is being vetted by an editor, readers can assume that they’re being directed only to relevant, non-redundant reporting (assuming they trust the editor). Link journalism is also something citizen journalists do a lot of, as when we share links via Google Reader like Robert Scoble, or via del.icio.us like Jemima Kiss. Bloggers and citizen journalists have long recognized the value of the link as a way to add context for readers and reinforce the points we make in our posts.
Mindy McAdams points to the example of Joshua Micah Marshall’s link journalism on Talking Points Memo, which recently receive a George Polk Award in journalism:
In providing links to diverse reports appearing in many different locations, TPM’s Marshall and his colleagues demonstrated the authority of their analysis that particular U.S. attorneys had been dismissed for political reasons.
Rather than relying on what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have famously criticized as the “journalism of assertion,” the new link journalism supplies evidence by backing up statements. Rather than making a phone call to a favorite and easy-to-reach expert or pundit, the journalist conducts research (imagine that!) and sources the facts by linking directly to them.
Jack Lail shares his own experience with link journalism:
I’ve been posting content that consisted of links to blogs for about a year and have for a long time included outbound links in stories. But those efforts are accelerating. I recently began experimenting with Karp on creating sets of links as content, some created by one person bookmaking relevant content and some as collaborative efforts of multiple bookmarkers.
The results are impressive. These outbound linking articles are strong traffic drivers because, I believe, they are providing a valuable, time-saving service to readers. On more than one day in the past week, a link “article” was the No. 1 “story” on the combined knoxnews/govolsxtra sites. And in the context of stories, they provide an additional rich layering of information.
All of these observations support the substantive journalistic value — and content value — of links in the context of a specific reporting effort, i.e. the link journalism equivalent of a news article.
But what’s the link journalism equivalent of the entire newspaper?
That’s were networked link journalism comes into play.
Networked link journalism is combining all the links created by journalists practicing link journalism to determine that most important, interesting, and newsworthy content that journalists are linking to.
In the simplest form of networked link journalism, one link = one vote. The stories with the most votes rise to the top.
This is the newspaper of the future — or rather the newspaper of today. This is how Google works, and how Digg works, by combining the power of many links.
What’s on a Google search results page? Or Digg’s homepage? A bunch of links.
But not just any links — the “best” links.
Why do some many people go to Google and Digg to click on those links? Why do they drive so much traffic on the web?
Because those links are determined by networks, not individuals — and networks are the most powerful force on the web.
An individual practicing link journalism can drive tens or, in the case of top link blogger/journalists, hundreds of visits for each link. The uber link journalists like Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan can drive a few thousand. Matt Drudge, the exception that proves the rule, can drive many thousands.
It’s all a matter of scale.
Journalists practicing link journalism in isolation can influence content distribution on the web (which most journalists are not doing at all), but only to a limited degree.
Journalists practicing networked link journalism, on the other hand, could have a huge influence over content distribution on the web — if enough journalists participated, they could drive enough traffic to crash servers.
We created Publish2 as a platform for networked link journalism, to give journalists and news organizations the power online that they once had offline — the power of distribution, the power of Google and Digg on the web — a power that, completely counter to the monopoly distribution model, journalism can only have collectively.
Remember the rule of networks on the web — the bigger the network, the more powerful it is.
Google: Future of news publishing
Google knows a lot about the future of news — more than many publishers. It’s evident in Google’s new product, Fast Flip, which allows news consumers to “flip” through news stories. What’s striking about Fast Flip is that Google is innovating precisely where publishers used to lead innovation.
Fast Flip is a new package for news.
The publishing business has always been about packaging content. Newspapers. Magazines. Newsletters
In digital media, on the web, the news package is now a function of software — which is why Google is innovating precisely where publishers are not.
Fast Flip is, more accurately, an attempt to create a new UI for news — a better way to consume publishers’ content than publishers provide on their own sites.
Most publishers are focused on how to charge for news. But there’s very little talk about how to innovate the packaging of news, much less a new UI for news. There’s very little talk about how people consume news on the web, about the value of aggregating articles from multiple sources, about solving consumers’ problems rather than publishers’ problems.
That’s why Google is taking the lead on figuring out how to create the new news package, and why they will continue to control the lucrative front end of distribution, while publishers are left with far less profitable back end of content creation.
Google is sharing revenue with publishers because Fast Flip goes way beyond linking to actually partially reproducing entire web pages. And publishers will have to be content with the revenue that Google shares.
Unless they finally decide to compete on the real playing field that will determine the future of news and publishing.
The Associated Press for the 21st Century
This week, at TechCrunch Disrupt, we’re announcing the launch of Publish2 News Exchange, a platform aimed at disrupting the Associated Press monopoly over content distribution to newspapers. With Publish2 News Exchange, newspapers can replace the AP’s obsolete cooperative with direct content sharing and replace the AP’s commodity content with both free, high-quality content from the Web and content from any paid source.
With Publish2 News Exchange, we’ve created what the AP should have become, but can’t because of a classic Innovator’s Dilemma. The New AP is an open, efficient, scalable news distribution platform. We’re enabling newspapers to benefit for the first time from the disruptive power of the Web, and from the efficiency of content production on the Web.
The Package Does Matter
In response to the launch of Google’s Fast Flip, I observed that Google is correctly focused on creating a new user interface for news, when most media companies are not. A lot of people responded that Fast Flip is not an innovative or effective UI for news — which may be true, but that misses the point entirely.
It doesn’t matter so much whether Google succeeds or fails with this particular experiment. What matters is that they are trying to solve the right problem.
The challenge for media companies is not to figure out what to do with their content — content in and of itself doesn’t matter. It never has.
It’s all about the package.
Newspaper articles don’t matter without a newspaper. Magazine articles don’t matter without a magazine. TV shows don’t matter without a broadcast or cable channel.
Newspapers’ inability to generate the same revenue online as in print has nothing to do with content. It’s because on the web they are no longer in the business of packaging content, and that’s what the newspaper business, like every other media business, has always been about. Instead, media companies put their content on the web and let search and other aggregators package it.
An individual content item on the web, without a package, has marginal value approaching zero — and attempting to charge for an individual item of content is unlikely to change that. What you CAN charge for is the package.
Media companies need to be doing what Google is doing — experimenting with new ways to package content, which in a digital media world means new UIs and new ways to aggregate.
The nature of innovation is that many experiments will fail along the way. The key is to be aimed at solving the right problem.
Focus on the package. Whoever controls the package wins.
Ask newspapers. Or Google.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of Fast Flip, lots of people overlooked one of the key words in the product name — FAST. Why does fast matter? How long does it take to get a result when you search on Google? Not long at all. In fact it’s darn FAST. (You can even see how long your Google search took in the blue bar across the top of the search results page.)
That’s why it matters — to the tune of $20 billion. Here’s Marissa Mayer on the importance of being fast. Google has the most successful UI and content package in the history of the web, that created one of the most lucrative business models in the history of media, so don’t write them off too quickly.