Innovation in Software

Tonight, the BBC finally got around to airing the RTS Huw Weldon Memorial Lecture recorded in September. The speaker this year was Anthony Lilley talking on issues relating to social media and ironically given the subject of his talk, no online archive of the talk appears to be available. For all the embracing of “The Me in Media” – as the talk was titled – and the power of the network, we on the network are not allowed to see it.

No matter. The point, the thesis, the element, is quite communicable: we the audience are now in charge. What’s more, Lilley makes a compelling argument that this isn’t a sudden and new development, but something that happened the moment the audience started to appear on screen from quiz shows to our scribbles being sent to Tony Hart.

The power of networked media is considerable, and it’s pretty odd to see a bunch of network TV executives try and grasp the content that they, their ideas, their employers and their money don’t matter much any more. Within 10 years, Lilley hinted that networks like UKTV which mostly show repeats will essentially be pointless with the advent of VoD and PVR systems being widespread. Within 20 years the people being asked to pay the license fee will have no real memory of broadcast media. Within 30 years… who knows?

I was minded of a certain cartoon and then thought about how the BBC Innovation Labs is on again this year. I wonder how daring the BBC and others want us to be. Personally, I think they’re just outright scared.

I’m almost human again after last week’s ‘grand tour’. I am however a little behind on blog articles. As promised though, some notes from Thursday’s mashup* event:

Sun Microsystems were providing space for this event at their office in Sale. It’s a great venue, but the trip out of central Manchester during rush hour left your correspondent a little frazzled. All trips out of Manchester leave this correspondent frazzled though, and it may have just been the task of crossing 8 lanes of heavy traffic that did it.

We opened with David Terrar from Blognation giving us a run down on where he’s seeing ‘Web 2.0’ technology in the enterprise. He touched on the BBC using blogs and wikis extensively, and discussed Pfizer’s use of the same. A lot of people seem to be trying to lock into consumer-orientated applications because the current success stories – Facebook, Flickr, MySpace – are in that arena. I think David is onto something in that the real money is bringing this style of social technology into the enterprise.

Simon Grice then did a more bi-directional talk on the premise that Web 2.0 doesn’t exist. I piped up and got agreement with Simon on the point that indeed the very first web browsers had “edit” capabilities and at some point, somebody decided it was too anarchic and turned the web into a broadcast medium. We’re now just getting back to where the web should have been more than a decade ago.

I also had to admit to the room that I have hired deviants in the past. Long story, I’ll fill you in some other time…

Simon discussed the disruptive nature of new media, and cited his own recently-launched testcard.tv – a site lawyers working on behalf of media companies will no doubt be particularly interested in.

UPDATE: Checking URLs, I notice that testcard.tv has been put into an “Under maintenance” mode, citing the takedown of a similar service and asking people to head over to their blog – it’s one way to get traffic I suppose. :-)

Next up, was Lee Strafford of Project Sahara. He’s trying to gauge interest on this side of the Pennines in what could be an interesting project. Talking to people after the meeting, the consensus was “wait and see where it goes”, which is unfortunate as it needs people to get involved now for it go anywhere. I’m going to do some talking around over the next few weeks and see what interest there is in getting stuck in at an early stage.

We then skipped the break – Ouch! Don’t do that again! My brain was hurting! – before moving onto case studies of NetVibes, edocr and Meecard. All interesting stuff, but I was already quite familiar with NetVibes and edocr – Meecard was a little food for thought though.

There then followed some discussions, some light networking, some pizza and a few beers before wandering off home.

All in all, this is a more polished and business-focused version of GeekUp. As a format it has a lot of potential, and providing the case studies and speakers can be lined up it could be a regularly anticipated event. Some people complained about the £25 entry fee (a sentiment I broadly agree with), but I know several people want to try and help out on that front.

I also find myself a little disappointed that I’m going to have to wait until February until the next one, so that has to be a reassuring thumbs-up for Manoj and Simon.

Service Level Agreements are a must-have for Enterprise clients and it has surprised me that so few web companies have used them as a route to making money: if you don’t need an SLA, take the app for free. If you do want an SLA (because say your entire email operation is running on our web service, say), then you need to pony up some cash. It’s worked in open source, so I think it’s a no-brainer for an industry that is service-orientated at its core.

Good news then that Amazon S3 has today announced an SLA which means if they drop below 99.9% uptime per month you can have some cash back. You get even more money back if they drop below 99% uptime. They also agree to give you 60 days notice if they want to get rid of you for any reason – but don’t have to give that reason.

It’s a step in the right direction, but they could make even more money by offering even better SLAs if customers are prepared to spend more money to get them. That money would be capital Amazon would be free to invest in infrastructure which not only enhances S3, but Amazon’s core systems and business.