I would encourage everyone to view this inspirational speech she gave a while ago at TED:

In the meantime,  I am very happy the wiki is evolving.  If you want to understand what it is that is getting all of is Semantic Web groupies excited - watch Tim Berners-Lee explain it.

I was on a cruise and for most of the time had no data service on my Treo 700W, the only device I brought with me.  I used the ship's computer center once which I assume is connected via satellite but paying per hour and sitting in a computer lab setting is not that conducive to getting things done.  So all I really did was shoot off short replies to a few emails and just browsed the rest.

As I walked away from the ship computer after about 40 minutes, I was thinking that those 40 minutes would have been enough to sync up all my email on even the slowest of connections and at that moment I wished I had brought a laptop.  Well since I hate carrying a laptop - I actually wished for a fictional device like the new Palm Folio but one that ran Outlook.   I could have sat anywhere and really worked on some stuff without worrying about 'being connected'.  A lesson I learned a long time ago is that almost live is just as good and 95% cheaper.  I could have gotten a lot of communication done by just syncing up every day or two when I was docked on an island or by stopping by the wifi center for a few minutes.

So as I sat back with yet another of the one too many Arnold Palmers I had onboard I began to think how offline apps are the only answer and what a powerful position Adobe is in right now with one of the first technologies that allow an online apps to go offline and sync - Apollo (or whatever they call it now).  I guess Google through its heavy influence on Mozilla is also working to solve this problem but my sense is that Flash/Apollo has a huge head start and the Mozilla guys are just not good at this creative stuff.

While looking for specialized hosted solutions for our clients, I came upon FreshBooks. This is a small focused application designed for time tracking and invocing. They do one thing and do it well. Their pricing model is superb and simple (while still allowing customization for the control-freak set). They even have a usable free version very suitable for the boutique consultant that has two or three clients they regulary invoice on a time basis.

All said, great company, and a great product. If you need something like it, use it.

Of course, since this is not a paid ad, I will go into what this really is about:

The "Web 2.0" (gosh, I really dislike that term... Then again I still call AJAX... DHTML! ;) was a great movement towards solution development. It broke the focus on total solutions that tried to be everything to everybody and ended up being barely useful for barely anyone.

But an inherent problem of all of these solutions is the lack of interoperability. They solved the problem of generalist focus on specialized needs, but completely forgot that no matter how specialized, people never use a single tool for their productivity: no solution is an island.

For example, we use a tool called Wufoo for some of our customer input needs.

It is very easy to setup, integrates well into the Squarespace CRM we use for this website, and delivers real value to our company. However, it only sends emails and doesn't even have an ecosystem around it to turn the inputed data into usable form.  This isolation is frustating: a great solution becomes less attractive just because it doesn't interoperate easily.

Some companies are approaching this problem creatively:

For example Salesforce.com and Google both strive to develop ecosystems around their platforms, seeing themselves as data repository and interface providers to a whole range of development efforts. These are great ways to approach this inherent problem, and are a step in the right direction.

 However, they also have their own set of inherent issues, which I will dicuss at a later date...

 Carlos R. - Lead Developer

First they buy JotSpot, which has been our corporate knowledgebase since the tool was launched. Fine, Jot was a natural for Google, and I had even predicted this might happen.


Now they are in the process of picking up Postini, which has long been the anti-spam and email security tool we use for ourselves and all of our customers. It also makes perfect sense.

(Eat my dust, Barracuda!) 

Google is changing the way IT is done, switching the application layer to the cloud and off the hands of consultants. Sinu is among the few, if not the only, IT companies that realizes this, and our customers get increased value as the tools our platform runs on get validated by the most dynamic application company out there.

Now, if Google only got around creating an Outlook killer...

-Carlos R. - Lead Developer  

I ended up writing a long comment that I thought I would share here in the sandbox. 

-- 

I think many of these solutions are slightly off target with the way they are approaching the problem. DabbleDB might be the closest.

There are already enough “high level” languages to address the range of programmers from hobby coders to full time coders (Ruby/PHP -> Java/.net)

If solutions are to move to the next level of abstraction then the solutions need to be built at a higher level with the components broken down into stages:

New Information Acquisition ( Data Input/Import )
- New Information Forms
- Questionnaires
- Import of Data using standardized import templates with deduping/updating capabilities

Business Rules
- Simple Logic Statements that dictate how data is processed and when (Filemaker Pro’s Model is a good starting point)

Summaries and Reports
- Drag and drop creating of Reports (Very much like Crystal Reports)
- Report Scheduling
- Report Bursting (creating multiple reports from the same master report which have unique permissions and data for each)
- Ability to maintain the presentation pages for these which can be embedded into other CMS’ like Squarespace
- Export to various formats (embedded html/RSS/XML/RDF )

Workflow/Change Approval management
- Ability to pause for approval during different parts of the workflow through the solution

Note that none of these solutions approach the problem the way a coder would approach this problem - it is more like the way Quicken/Quickbooks approaches the problem of collecting, organizing, processing and reporting lots of information.

In a perfect world, users create their “app” by being guided through the stages of the solution and hopefully having more value on the other side of the experience.

I also think a great solution would try to encourage reuse of data and logic wherever possible by encouraging Yahoo! Pipes like connection of your ’solution’ which others. If all works well, niche solutions should develop, evolve and create more value for the ecosystem than any one person could create. This would let users focus on the piece that matters most to them - their unique data and business rules.

As for the people who think these solutions are not needed, I would say that there are lots of people like myself who understand how a solution should come together - but just don’t want to spend so much time in a traditional programming language and instead want to quickly build a proof of concept that can evolve into a workable solution and if the need arises can have parts of it replaced with more enterprise class code as scalability needs increase.

This is the kind of aligned incentives we are always thinking about here at Sinu.  Recently we have had similar discussions with a few subscriber companies about their wiring infrastructure.  Like preventative measures in health care (routine check-ups, diet & exercise) many of us do not see the immediate impact of IT areas like wiring or equipment replacement.

I wonder if an HSA type arrangement for portions of the IT budget could be accomplished where the 'savings' could eventually be translated into obvious benefits to the staff like, raises, new machines or mobile devices.  Companies would not think twice about the cost of a laptop, because it is tangible, but an $80 wiring job to handle the laptop's thirst for sweet juice of 'The Internets' seems unnecessary.

On a related note, if I were a Web 2.0 startup - I would start building tools for families to compare doctors, drug costs and HSA investment options collaboratively with other families.  Revolution Health will be snapping up discrete-feature-startups left and right soon..

Tools to help you keep from dying - talk about killer app.

-John C. 

I am about 3/4 of the way through the book and much of it is the typical sharing-is-great/not-sharing-is-evil which is close to preaching to the choir here at Sinu.  

But one idea stood out.   The authors point out Ronald H Coase's paper - "The Nature of the Firm".  In this paper he explores why firms form and why, at the time, they were more efficient than a free market of freelancers or small group of companies/individuals getting together to produce the same good:

Coase noted, however, that there are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something with a firm. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally and somehow avoid these costs.

There is a natural limit to what can be produced internally, however. Coase notices a "decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function", including increasing overhead costs and increasing propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in resource allocation. This is a countervailing cost to the use of the firm. ^{source: wikipedia}

It seems that these transaction costs have decreased dramatically as communication costs have dropped, The Internet has expanded and collaborative lingua-francas have evolved (TCP/IP, Wikis, XML, LAMP)

If I sit back and think about the development meeting we had this morning I have to realize that our development efforts just this week included:

• a customization team from Colombia working on integrating a case management system by a company in India
• an Enterprise Backup expert from Italy deploying a backup solution on a server in The Bronx
• Updating a calendar on my hosted Exchange mailbox which lives in Fort Lauderdale
• Updating our project management tool from our conference room Mac which is connecting to the hosted solution in Chicago
• API integration with a monitoring solution in Sweden

The way we run Sinu every day is evidence that the transaction costs are truly lower than ever for collaborating with other companies to deliver overwhelming value to your customers.

There are some areas that the book is just drinking too much wiki kool-aid, such as the lack of imagination for how Apple could continue its Ipod dynasty (Hint: people will do anything for convenience and if your Song/Playlist can pause on your Ipod and continue seamlessly in your car or living room - people would pay cold hard cash for that convenience and no amount of reverse engineering or Open Sourcing can compete with the companies that have the resources to pull off this level of integration, ease of use and consumer-product execution power.  at least not for a while.)

Overall I think Wikinomics is right,  companies who don't learn to open up and collaborate will hurt bad and companies who learn to be agile,  who embrace that change is inevitable - will have a fighting chance against them.

 Now imagine the level of collaboration and dedication that can happen _within_ a small business - stay tuned...

 And JotSpot and OnForce:  you guys are so on target!