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Published
December 20, 2007
Yesterday, I attended Day 2 of the Web Innovation 2007 conference.
The irony to note is that the conference website is so NOT Web 2.0.
For example, where are the slides that people can download? These guys
can learn a thing or two from the foss.in website and conference.
Again, for a web innovation conference, why is there no wifi? How are
you supposed to access the websites?
On the other hand, this conference has been surprising to me in the
sense that it actually turned out to be interesting. I think the
quality of people who have come to speak here is high and that’s
probably because these people are high up in the decision-making chain
and they have come to talk about what they do best – websites and
business.
Of course, the other half of the speakers are doing just boring sales
pitches but that didn’t deter the audience from asking tough questions
and seeking their value from it. They even directly questioned how
their company lives up to what was described in the presentation.
Continuing Day 1’s trend, here are the transcribed notes:
- Jayabalan (CTO, Netmagic) on “Building scalable and resilient
- Users, Connectivity, IT infrastructure, Applicationinfrastructure
- Challenges – Growth (number of concurrent users), Hardwarefailure, Software bugs, Security threats
- Management and maintenance, Connectivity/routing issues, Secureconnectivity, Cost
- Failures can’t be avoided
- Features and functionality alone not sufficient, Performancealso required
- Difficult to get people with end-to-end knowledge
- Recommended setup – Storage, SANSw, Web + App + DB, Switching,Accelerator, Firewall
- Develop for future – scalability in all layers
- Performance optimizing techniques – Compression, TCPmultiplexing, TCP optimization, TCP buffering, Caching, CDN,Load balancing, URL/content/cookie switching, Contentmodification, SSL offloading, Surge protection
- Please outsource parts of these infrastructure to experts whohave good infrastructure and service
- Netmagic caters to all of the above (can it get more blatantthan this?)
- jb at netmagicsolutions.com
- Replies to audience that Yes, Providers in India do have suchinfrastructure now. Power and Connectivity are major issues thatyou can’t scale in-house, so outsource it.
- Rohit Varma (Founder and CEO, Techtribe) on “Delivering Value
- (Unfortunately, missed this session in the business trackbecause the session in the other tech track was long)
- Get into the press, only way, do not depend on viral marketing
- Pradeep Gupta (Chairman, CyberMedia Group) on “Media Incumbents
- Internet reaches only 4% of India
- 90% of internet users on 9-10 websites
- Touch and feel has to supplement online activities
- Cross-media strategy a must (such as Miss India contest usingonline polling to sms to TV)
- ciol.com – 1 million unique users per month
- All major Indian sites including rediff and indiatimes have bigtraffic but have flat growth now
- pradeepg at cybermedia.co.in
- Kiruba Shankar (CEO, Business Blogging) on “Business Blogging”
- Examples of Club Mahindra on how a bad user’s blog post can havedetrimental effects on your popularity even though the actualproduct maybe good. Once they asked that person to visit a ClubMahindra resort, he went back and changed the post to a lessnegative-minded one and actually listed pros as well.
- Audience says lots of company internal blogs, but very fewexternal blogs
- Corporate blogging hasn’t taken off because people are afraidand no one wants to take responsibility
- But Kiruba reminds people of Robert Scoble and Microsoft
- Very interactive session, lot of views from some people sayingit’s about credibility to others saying that only people with nowork actually blog.
- Kiruba said it’s a double-edged sword, if you don’t think it’sright for your company, don’t do it. But if you do, if you haveto dive in and there’s no turning back.
- Varun Singh (CTO, Web18) on “Scaling Web 2.0 Infrastructure using
- (Too much info on slides, font size too small to read)
- Services – Apache web service + HAProxy load balancing
- Code and volatile cache – PHP/Perl applications, memcached
- Nonvolatile and Managed data – MySQL DB and GlusterFS storage,Cache Logs
- Manas Ranade (TIBCO) on “Four Quantum States of Ajax”
- (three-fourth people already said they use Ajax frameworks, sowhy explain the history again?)
- 4 quantum states
- A, J, X – all communication
- DHTML widgets – enabled with asynchronous communication(maybe)
- Multi-widget libraries – shared underlying services
- RIA frameworks
- Common GUI, data, communication frameworks
- Ability to visually author GUIs and more
- Framework
- OO JS foundation
- Data Cache
- Communication
- Data Bindings
- Pub/Sub event
- Logging and Debugging
- Out-of-the-box GUI components
- There are > 45 Ajax frameworks out there, including ones byAdobe (I assume he means Spry)
- TIBCO General Interface available both under BSD and proprietarylicenses
- Says it doesn’t require client-side plugins ( ;-) )
- (I think we take all of these features for granted in AdobeFlex, so I personally didn’t see the novelty)
- mranade at tibco.com
infrastructure for web applications”
through Social Networks”
embrace Web 2.0 to survive and thrive”
Open Source software”
- Darpan Munjal (CTO, eCommerce, Indiatimes) on “Future of eCommerce”
- Not tech, not features, but business i.e. transactions andfeatures for this activity
- Evolution: Transact -> Involve (implicit community) -> Engage(explicit community) -> Empower
- Evolution: Sell products and services -> Build relationshipswith customers
- Crowdsourcing
- Future – Moderators, Community Managers, PM, Sales
- New game : Community -> <- Corporation
- Right incentives are important for the community
- Many examples of this new game on how the community has takenover aspects of traditional companies
- Category Management : Zlio
- Content Editing : Kaboodle
- Marketing : ThisNext.com, SellABand
- Technology : Amazon web services allow you to build storessourced from Amazon
- Product Design : Threadless.com (where you can uploadT-shirt designs)
- Support : woot.com
- All good but what about India?
- About building trust
- About transparency
- About empowerment
- About understanding barriers in ecommerce and leveragingcommunities to overcome
- Opportunities for India
- Assisted eCommerce (affiliate based communities)
- Human filters for finding better products and better prices
- “Geek Squad” for service market
- A/B testing -> A/B/C testing where C is for Communities
- For example, DellIdeaStorm.com
- New ecosystem
- Mashups such as social shopping or niche vertical sites(using web services) and they focus on communities (saycooking community, etc.)
- Base is Indiatimes Shopping, etc. who are horizontalshopping portals
- Key Considerations
- Popularity is becoming popular i.e. Minority view is gettinglost, so provide alternate methods of navigation to make“long tail” accessible
- Tagging may reveal good, bad and ugly
- Offer incentives for community to contribute, exampleepinions.com
- I asked what kind of community participate in such websites,I would think wannabe artists will put their T-shirt designs onThreadless, but not professional artists. He said that’s whereincentives are important.
- darpan.munjal at indiatimes.co.in
- Presentation available on his blog commercewiki.com
Lots of food for thought here.
Point to note for wannabe-entrepreneurs : Really think about what is
the value that you are giving to people. Relatedly, I liked the
‘stadium’ analogy by Sandeep
P.S. Cold weather + Cold AC + irritated throat + cough + slight fever
+ just out of horrible traffic + rain = bad.