Steve Jobs was a visionary man. He revolutioned our lifes in more than one way along the last three decades. From Lisa to the iPad, he brought his creativity to our day-to-day life.

He’s made a small company one of the most respected not only in the tech industry but in all of them. And further to his death, his legacy will remain.

Steve has been fighting with health issues for some time now. Despite a forced leave, he returned to Apple in order to perpetuate the constant innovation for which the company has grown to be known for. But then later, in August 2011, he had to permanently resign as a CEO but still holding a chairman position.

Today many mourn him. And I would like to pay him my respects as well.

Steve Jobs insights, creativity and innovation will be missed. He was a talented speaker and reputed to pay attention to the smallest details influencing Apple’s strategy and products. He will join the hall of fame of people remembered several centuries later.

Many fans mourn him across the world, including President Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and Google (who changed its home page). here are a few testimonies from fans in  Apple stores around the Bay area.

And as a reminder: If you’re feeling moved by his death, do not forget to donate to cancer research.

Je vous en souhaite une bonne lecture.

Efim Bushmanov, a researcher, has announced on June 2nd, that he has reverse-engineered the Skype protocol, and has published it on his blog.

This news comes only a few weeks after Microsoft’s announcement of its acquisition of Skype for $8.5Bn.

Skype is the most popular VoIP platform. By the end of 2010, it was estimated to have 663 Million users.

According to him, he’s reversed the protocols from version 1.x to 4.x, including the compression algorithms.

I haven’t got time to go through the code, which I have just downloaded, but it will most likely be a good shot to look at.

If you’re interested, it is all available here:

• Binaries
• IDA
• Source

I guess it will only take a few days before Skype and its lawyers force Efim to take these files off. So if you’re interested, have a look now.

They reference themselves as a company that wants to bring trust to online advertizing.

Ghostery loads as a plug-in for your browser, which you may configure with various options going from:

- Notifications

- Auto-blocking the trackers (currently an experimental feature)

- Send statistical updates on the identified beacons

Ghostery will also allow you to see the associated script with the alert that has been displayed.

The detailed view allows you first to check the code but will also allow you to visit the profile of the behavioral company. Currently, Ghostery has referenced more than 200 of these companies.

The detailed profile will display information about the company, other sites that use the same tracker but more importantly the appropriate contacts for privacy inquiries.

For each of the displayed alerts, you will then have the ability to selectively allow or block the tracker to be loaded, and track your activities

In contrast with the major ad-blocking software that mainly focus on visible ads (popups and banners), Ghostery will target any type of tracker that would help online marketing companies build a profile based on your behavioral and browsing profile.

GhostRank

Ghostery will also provide an opt-in option called GhostRank that allows you to send anonymous data to Evidon (the company behind Ghostery) in order to help build the beacons database. The data sent is mainly statistical information such as:

• Bugs identified by Ghostery
• Bugs blocked by Ghostery
• Number of times the bug has been identified
• Domains identified as serving bugs
• Advertisements served at particular domains, including companies associated with each ad

Ghostery is, overall, a really nice product. The impact on page loading is minimal and most analysis happens in the background. It currently supports Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari.

Reto Meier is the author of the book Professional Android 2 Application Development, and works for Google as an Android developer advocate.

I thought I would share the good stuff with you.

This may be typical in the context of a large company with heavy processes that orchestrate any activity happening in its ecosystem.

Innovation is usually known as being an iterative process. Innovation is not about invention, it is about evolution.

We’ve seen it: many innovations have come from a slightly different usage of existing technologies, processes into a different and relevant context. Although innovation is about agility, it may also be a lengthy process.

Thus, how do you organize innovation within your company? What are the keys to make it an innovative company?  How do you implement innovation through your whole organization when part of your business is already a creative and innovative one?

I will lazily reference as a “product” the output of your innovative journey. But it may as well reference a marketed product, a technology, a process or an organizational change, and very often all of them.

Innovation is about try and fail

Innovation does not happen overnight. The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

You will have to work-out several leads in order to achieve your objective. Most of the leads will fail, few of them will succeed, but you’ve learned in the process several lessons on what are the requirements to build a successful target.

You have to give yourself the right to fail, provided that each failure (and success) leads to return on experience, an assessment on what went well and what went wrong. You will have to inject each and every bit of new knowledge into your approach.

Innovation is a process

Yes. Despite what people might say or think, innovation is a true end-to-end process. The “idea” might be a genuine enlightenment, but driving the idea from a fuzzy set of great thoughts to a concrete product/process/organization is a complex and organized process that might succeed or fail.

Albert Einstein once said: “Innovation is not the product of logical thought, although the result is tied to logical structure.”

Without a proper organization, support, governance, assessment, your idea is unlikely to go mainstream and find proper application into the world, other than theoretical.

Some will reply that many innovations went out right of a garage in the Bay area. And I will reply that a process does not mean it is a complex corporate property. A process is a series of steps, with a start and end and decision gates. At each stage, you know who should do what, and what should be the expected outputs.

And yes, garage days producing innovative products also went through a process, whether it was formal or informal. From design to production to market launch, you will have to make sure that all required fulfillments have been achieved, and that your public is ready to adopt your new baby.

Innovation is about collaboration

Anyone within your neighborhood has ideas. Some are good, others are not worth spending a penny on. You need to be aware of your environment and listen to its needs. Pull-off good ideas and try to incubate them.

Within a company, you might build an idea box/place in which employees can make suggestions on how to improve their life (aka being more agile, more efficient, gaining customer competitive advantage).

An incubated idea should be submitted for testing to a community, get a feedback. This is essential to measure the adoption of your product and enhance it. Leverage your ecosystem in order to get most of it, as pointed earlier, everyone has an idea, and very often, people have good ideas. People have different skills and will contribute in enriching your idea, with views and evaluations from different angles.

Marketing has proven the value of blind tests and customer tests, but do not forget that your first customers and voices are your employees.

In essence…

Of course, the above are not the absolute truth on how you may become an innovative company, but in a nutshell, these are essential steps to consider whenever you plan to become one. Then consider having a lot of ideas and pull-of a good one.

Last night, I have been looking for an information on when the next SAP World tour will take place in Switzerland. Usually, I’d go and google this, and it would take me about 1 minute to get the information.

Instead of that, and without really giving it a second thought, I asked the question in Twitter, and almost instantly got several feedbacks from my community, with the appropriate answer.

Search trends are moving. Previously people were mainly looking for information, and were using search engines for that. Ultimately, they were using forums and IRC in order to exchange with other people and look for opinions.

Today, social networks are bringing a whole new dimension: leveraging the people to find the most appropriate information.  By using your network, you’re mainly relying on getting the information from people knowing the info, rather than gathering facts in order to express the right answer.

A fact is that many people will now turn to people to find the information, rather than run a search on Google. One of the main reasons being probably the proliferation of land pages with a dead end but are SEO optimized.

The run for traffic has considerably made the searches more difficult, having to run through several sites before finding the appropriate information, if you can find it.

The recent change in the indexing algorithm by Google is a pretty good indicator. The aim is to fight the content farms, SEO optimized pages, and anything that is not useful for the users but is designed to generate traffic.

Discussing this topic with few people in my network, I’ve got an interesting feedback from Arik (Co-Founder of Topify):

@freakyfays if I want to know which monitor to buy or hear opinions on specific models, I ask on Twitter/FB.

@freakyfays if I need help with some programming issue, I google for it

So basically, networks are leveraged for opinions, while standard search is aimed to gather less opiniated facts. And I tend to think this is true in most cases, but I also tend to think that many people will start looking for these non opiniated facts using networks.

Mahalo, Qora, Facebook questions, Answer.com, are all examples where people are starting to search for information, and actually do want to discuss the options. Thus, fact gathering is slowing moving into conversations.

But these are just thoughts which I would like to confirm. For this purpose, I would like your support in filling this very short survey, which will potentially help us get some more information on the new search trends.

The values are multiple:  smooth integration of the software and the hardware in order to enhance the processing of information. The first applications were naturally in the Business Intelligence field, where executives and operatives always looked for up-to-date, nearly realtime, information on various areas.

But HANA could also have several applications in other fields. SAP is looking forward into using this technology for other fields, and I can foresee a great usage in several areas:

- EH&S: Calculations of the characteristics of products in order to determine the product safety and identify the dangerous goods. Identify the compliance to the various agency regulations. This could also be applied to other initiatives such as REACH.

- Supply Chain: Optimization of automatic packing, route optimization for transport management, planning.

- MRP: We all know how much this is a consuming and lenghty process, which obviously, should make great benefit from the HANA technology.

- Finance: Period closings should be significantly optimized and reduced.

These are a few examples of where HANA could help ERP systems make more from In-memory technology, and would definitely be life changing in several areas, allowing companies to gain a competitive advantage (gaining in service levels).

SAP, just like many other vendors, embraced these paradigms, making its software comply with the customers expectations, and providing solutions that support the concepts of agile provisionning.

Through a comprehensive toolset, including PI – CE – ACC, SAP has provided a solid base to shift from monolithic and siloed applications to open composite apps, based on service components provided using different technologies.

Once we provided enough agility to the application, we were due to align on the infrastructure. Cloud computing allowed to design the next generation architecture. Although, let’s face to face it. Neither SOA nor the principles of cloud computing are new. They have been around since two decades already. But technologies (hardware and software) have matured to the level of providing mainstream solutions that can be leveraged for these purposes.

As such, we have seen several great products shaping including ones such as Business By Design or Amazon’s EC2.

Now, we’re 2010, and we’re just at the starters of a technology downturn. From an usage standpoint, there have been  massive changes to the world of business applications. SOA and Cloud Computing have offered a first level of transition supporting these usages:

• Mobile access including the usage of embedded devices in a smartphone (camera, GPS)
• Mobility: applications available anytime and anywhere
• User Experience focus (UI, desktop personalization and virtualization)
• Increasing real time requirements

And we’re still about to see several newly emerging trends.

If you’ve attended TechEd this year, you might have heard of a few of them. Tighter integration between the hardware and the software: HANA appliances provide high performance platforms for analytics. But this is just the beginning, OLTP systems and middleware platforms are on their way. This also means, that we’re moving back from grid architectures back to heavy frames integrating all components (Servers, Storage and Network). Oracle and Terradata are developing similar appliances.

This has a significant impact where your appliance is designed for a specific usage. This, theoretically, goes against the fundamentals of reusability that are pertaining to cloud architectures. But this is not a bad thing.

The future of architecture will be driven by service levels.

Up to now, SLAs have focused on two main drivers:

• Availability
• Performance

In the (near) future, SLAs will define class of applications and its underlying infrastructure, allowing different visions for each component of the landscape, allowing a better optimization ofthe resources leveraging appliances, cloud computing and virtualization.

]]> http://www.thinkervine.com/blog/2010/11/13/the-future-of-sap-environments-architecture/feed/ 0 http://www.thinkervine.com/blog/2010/11/13/impressions-after-the-sap-teched-2010-demo-jam-in-berlin/ http://www.thinkervine.com/blog/2010/11/13/impressions-after-the-sap-teched-2010-demo-jam-in-berlin/#comments Sat, 13 Nov 2010 21:13:04 +0000 Fays http://www.thinkervine.com/blog/?p=721 This video has been shot by Martin Gillet (@mgillet) right after the demo jam during the SAP TechEd in Berlin. Enjoy the bits.