Trying to follow…

I have been looking for some wine resources on the internet for quiet some time now. And never found something good, allthough there are some nice initiatives and a lot of action is going on. Maybe I also get distorted by my profession. But now I found a vodcast, which I think is good. I cannot use it because the wines are american inspired, but the presentator does his best and doesn’t pretend to be the next Parker (Actually he does pretend that but with less ambitian). Anyway check it out at tv.winelibrary.com

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2007/jul07/07-25DiggPR.mspx

Unbelievable but true. Microsoft and digg join forces …on advertising. Aiks, this bites google

A google web seminar called ‘away with applications the Death of the desktop’ is actually a very nice piece. It goes about the desktop apps as we know them and that is has become to expensive to really recreate the ‘office’ apps as they exist today. The support and release management of those tools and the low acceptance (in UI terms of course) are also cumbersome.

In the future the presenter predicts more apps made out of services. Instead of photoshop of XXXGB we get just the services needed on the fly and always the best version. All the services plug in in a central platform that hosts the file.

It is actually the ultimate personalisation widget, even internet becomes slowly a commodity. You will forget when you are online or not (as we already do), but you will also just install a small base for access to the local file system. The rest will come from internet, a la gears even offline.

Sounds like a very realistic future to me. Even taking the business models into account, which is most of the time the benchmark for succes. But it will need some years of cultivation before it starts to work?

Presentation can be viewed at google video or here.

Google and the competition

This is a nice article about Google and the competition in the fields Google is active in. On most of those area’s Google is going or is already marketleader. but sometimes the competition is strong.For me Google is the perfect web 2.0 company. They pick services from the stack, develop them perfectly and then launch them. The crowd picks it up and Google can optimize the service. When a certain point of acceptance is reached, google can start with optimizing the business model and at the same time keep the service up to date.

For me that is web 2.0. Separating service and data and optimizing each of them. The goal is to make money from it, by making the service or the data popular. Therefor it is necessary to optimize the service for user acceptance, get some ‘fanbase’ and then start optimizing the business model. That is also the case with netvibes eg, they have their fanbase right now. And now they are starting to optimize the revenue.

Today in a Belgian newspaper: http://www.standaard.be/Artikel/Detail.aspx?artikelid=UB1EB65A

BBC is going where we are thinking of going. They are clearly on top of their game. But I’m curious how the player will look and feel like. Because after all I’m NOT watching TV on my computer….