Websites that died in 2009
11:41, December 30, 2009
While some websites have flourished in 2009, most notably Facebook and Twitter, others have fallen by the wayside. Many sites that died were relatively small enterprises. But even the big Internet giants, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo ditched once popular services and websites.
January saw Google''s changes to Jaiku and Dodgeball. Jaiku, a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter, was not shut but will be left to flounder. On January 14, 2009 it was announced that Google would be open-sourcing the product but would "no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase" leaving development to a "passionate volunteer team of Googlers". Dodgeball was a location-based social networking software provider for mobile devices. Users would text their location to the service, which then notified them of crushes, friends, friends'' friends and interesting venues nearby. Dodgeball was shut down by Google in March 2009 and replaced with Google Latitude. Google Notebook was also shutdown for new users as cloud services like Google Docs increased in popularity. Another cloud service owned by Yahoo also announced its closure in January. Yahoo''s Briefcase had been deemed somewhat useless by many observers. The site offered 30MB of online storage, a number that was quite useful when it was launched in 1999. However this was quickly eclipsed by other Web storage providers and Web mail services. Users were given two months to download any files before it was shutdown.
February saw the demise of Jubii, an online communication utility. It included e-mail, text chat, VoIP, and file hosting--all in one tool. However it was seen as being incomplete with tools that did not tie into other existing services. The Jubii brand was actually an attempt to repackage the Lycos brand to U.S. users, however it, along with the European versions of Lycos Mail and Tripod Internet hosting, were shelved in mid-February. HP''s Upline was an online backup solution built off of Titanize, a product it had absorbed as a result of acquiring makers Opelin in 2007. Upline let users back up their home and work computers to the cloud for a yearly fee. Unlike some of the other storage providers, Upline''s paid plans offered unlimited storage. But in late February Upline announced it was to shutdown the service at the end of March, giving users a little more than a month to grab their files from HP''s servers.
Microsoft''s Encarta began as a software encyclopedia and later moved to the Web. Microsoft ran it as a subscription service, but in order to compete with free services like Wikipedia, the company provided portions of it that were supplemented with advertisements to non-subscribers. But in late March, the software giant announced that it would be discontinuing both the online and software-based versions of the site. The service was finally shelved in October though the company continues to use Encarta''s namesake for its free, online dictionary service. Japan''s Encarta site remains online but is due to close on December 31, 2009.
Wikia Search launched in January of 2008 with the idea that it let users control the rankings of search results. The hope was to let people constantly vote up more relevant pages, while letting the less-relevant pages move down. Wikia and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales hoped the system would spread across the Web, as it was made open-source, but it failed to do so. At its peak the site drew around 10,000 users a month. But with competition from Google''s own similar solution, called Search Wiki, Wales called it quits on Wikia Search in March.
SpiralFrog, a music download service based in New York, collapsed in late March under a mountain of debt. The site, launched in the United States and Canada in September 2007, offered free and legal music downloads, all supported by advertising. But on March 19, 2009, SpiralFrog terminated operations due to loan recalls. Unnamed sources say that the music provider supposedly tried to borrow at least 9 million U.S. dollars last year to stay in business. Its shut down came on the heels of another ad-supported music provider, Ruckus, which was geared toward college students. Users who had downloaded music from the site were also left with unplayable tracks due to strict DRM conditions (Digital Rights Management) that required logging into the site every 60 days.
Yahoo closed another of its services in June. Jumpcut.com was a website that provided free video editing and hosting services. Launched in January 2006, it was was purchased by Yahoo in October of the same year. But due to corporate prioritizing and the on-going financial problems at Yahoo, the upload service was terminated in December 2008 and the site was closed on June 15, 2009. Then came another Yahoo coffin. Geocites, one of the oldest web hosting services, shut down confining to history some of the earliest existing online content. Yahoo picked up personal Web site maker Geocities in January 1999 for a staggering 3.65 billion dollars in stock. Many of its most fervent users moved to other hosting providers partly due to poor, post-purchase choices from Yahoo that changed the site''s terms of service as well as core functionality. The rise of easy blogging tools and social networks, which for many was a simpler way to publish personal information, also helped bring the death-knell for Geocities. Yahoo announced its decision in April and finally shut the site down in late October.
It was not a good year for Yahoo users who then saw Yahoo! 360° consigned to the dustbin. Yahoo! 360° was a personal communication portal similar to other social networking sites. The site included social networking, blogging, and photo sharing services. Users could create personal web sites, share photos from Yahoo! Photos, maintain blogs, lists of local reviews, supply profile information, and see which friends are currently online. In May 2009 Yahoo! announced that the Yahoo! 360° service would close on July 13, 2009 as Yahoo! developers aimed to "focus their efforts on the new profile on Yahoo". The site wasn't killed off entirely though. Despite its lack of popularity at large, it was remains popular in Vietnam where it is still available.
As well as its Encarta service, Microsoft also shutdown Windows Live Events which had been an effort to replace services like Evite, Facebook events, MyPunchbowl, etc. It was launched as part of the Windows Live rebranding back in late 2007, and let users create events that could be shared publicly. More importantly, it was a smooth move to get users friendly with other Microsoft services like Live Spaces and Live Messenger. But in August, Microsoft announced that it would be closing up Windows Live Events in favor of building some of its functionality into Windows Live Calendar. In September, the company disabled the capability to create new events. Come April 2010 the site will be taken offline entirely.
Facial recognition was big in 2009, but not for face-finding tech Riya. It shuttered its doors in late August. It had come close to being snatched up by Google just four years prior, but the search giant instead went with competitor Neven Vision. Riya was simply overshadowed by tech giants who had time to catch up with their own facial recognition products. This included Google with its Picasa Web albums and photo library software, both of which were offered free of charge. Even Apple, has introduced its own facial recognition features as a part of its latest iLife release.
Google's telecommunications service GrandCentral will shut shop at the end of the year. The voice service was acquired in 2007 but has been left dormant for more than a year. However, it has effectively been reborn in the form of Google Voice and old GrandCentral users will be switched to the new service.
Source:Xinhua/Agencies
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Wednesday, 30 December 2009
Tuesday, 29 December 2009
Using The Cloud Computing For Business
Using The Cloud For Business
Dan Woods, 12.29.09, 06:00 PM EST
Why the cloud is much more than a technology phenomenon.
Jan Baan, founder of Baan Corp., was present at the creation of enterprise resource planning. While leading the ERP software company from 1978–98, Baan observed what worked well and what failed as companies automated their business processes using a datacentric approach. For the past 10 years, Baan has spent his time and more than
250 million euros ($360 million) of his money on Cordys, a software company that creates what Baan calls a business operations platform. In this Q&A, Baan examines what the cloud means for business, what went wrong with ERP, and how a business operations platform delivers flexible automation of business processes that can be optimized through cloud computing.
Forbes: Why are companies getting the cloud wrong?
Baan: If you want to get the cloud right, put away the slide decks on virtualization and infrastructure and start thinking about who you should be working with and how to work with them, and then think about how you can support that better than ever before. Too many people look at the cloud as a technology phenomenon when they should look at it as a business opportunity and an accelerator for collaboration. The cloud is an environment for creating ways of doing business that are radically different from monolithic ERP-based processes. The age of command-and-control in business technology is over. You empower the knowledge worker through collaboration.
What does the cloud really mean for business?
Business processes should be the core element in the cloud, not Word documents or e-mail. Everything in the cloud should grow out of an inherently collaborative business process. You have to think beyond the business processes in your company to linking your customers' customers to your suppliers' suppliers, and draw them all together in a common end-to-end business process. You can create those relationships much faster now, but people aren't taking advantage of it. They are still very much in the ERP paradigm, which can be limiting. The cloud allows everyone to focus on their own processes, share them with others, and add some individual elements to their own processes and optimize them.
Some of these same promises about end-to-end business processes were made about ERP when it was new. What went wrong?
In the ERP world, everything is data-centric. Data is king, and business processes became embedded in data silos. Many big companies have created stovepipes that are isolated from each other, with business processes stored in the data. The vendor's best practices are then overlaid on the processes. Those stovepipes are still isolated, trapped on premise. That inhibits innovation.
What is your vision of making the cloud work for business?
I don't want to imply that everything has to be on the cloud. The optimal situation is a combination--a kind of composition between legacy systems and the optimized business process from the business and its partners, and it lives in the cloud.
I call it a business operations platform, a bridge between traditional service-oriented architecture and some of the heavy-duty infrastructure and standard components from ERP. Business components are decoupled from underlying technology. The concept of "programming," in which a businessperson conceives of an idea and technologists program something that achieves it, gives way to describing a business process, and the IT landscape responds in kind. There is much more of a "what you model is what you get" feeling to this new paradigm.
What is the role of ERP in this scenario?
Your ERP system, along with a product life-cycle management system, logistics systems and others, can be integrated and used as vanilla components, while being further enhanced by best practices or best processes, achieving a state of operational effectiveness. Take what you have learned through years of experience with ERP and apply it to the cloud.
What are the benefits of getting this right?
Dramatic improvements in business processes, reduction in IT costs, and a radical expansion of partners to help you run your business. Applications in the cloud cost less than 10% of an on-premises application. That means double-digit-percentage cost savings, and, more importantly, a boost to the value stream. Lead time for product creation can be reduced from 60 days to one or two hours. It's already happening. Instead of building a car in six weeks, we can do it in a day.
What stands in the way of this transformation?
First of all, the role of CIO sometimes seems afraid of its own shadow. The CIO should become more of a business leader. Maybe we should change the title Chief Information Officer to Chief Process Officer (CPO).
CIOs with guts are crucial to change. The CEO is too isolated and unaware of the development of these trends, but now the CIO, in the new role of a CPO, could be a tremendous asset to the CEO, providing leadership for changing the company and improving business processes. The value is in aligning IT and business, and the CPO is much more on the business side, not just on the IT side.
Too much attention is focused on technology innovation and not enough on business innovation. When that happens, we add functionality, but also complexity. The technology innovations with real impact are those that reduce complexity.
IT should be democratized in the same way Henry Ford democratized the car. Currently, fully functional IT is only for Fortune 1000 companies with a big budget. In the future, the benefits of IT will be available for everyone. Small and medium-size enterprises are, with the new technology wave of a business operations platform, able to connect their supply chain much faster than Fortune 1000 companies can. Agility is the mantra for today's smart companies.
Social media and cloud computing are exciting because they foreshadow this future.
Dan Woods is chief technology officer and editor of Evolved Technologist, a research firm focused on the needs of CTOs and CIOs. He consults for many of the other companies he writes about. For more information, go to evolvedtechnologist.com.
Dan Woods, 12.29.09, 06:00 PM EST
Why the cloud is much more than a technology phenomenon.
Jan Baan, founder of Baan Corp., was present at the creation of enterprise resource planning. While leading the ERP software company from 1978–98, Baan observed what worked well and what failed as companies automated their business processes using a datacentric approach. For the past 10 years, Baan has spent his time and more than
250 million euros ($360 million) of his money on Cordys, a software company that creates what Baan calls a business operations platform. In this Q&A, Baan examines what the cloud means for business, what went wrong with ERP, and how a business operations platform delivers flexible automation of business processes that can be optimized through cloud computing.
Forbes: Why are companies getting the cloud wrong?
Baan: If you want to get the cloud right, put away the slide decks on virtualization and infrastructure and start thinking about who you should be working with and how to work with them, and then think about how you can support that better than ever before. Too many people look at the cloud as a technology phenomenon when they should look at it as a business opportunity and an accelerator for collaboration. The cloud is an environment for creating ways of doing business that are radically different from monolithic ERP-based processes. The age of command-and-control in business technology is over. You empower the knowledge worker through collaboration.
What does the cloud really mean for business?
Business processes should be the core element in the cloud, not Word documents or e-mail. Everything in the cloud should grow out of an inherently collaborative business process. You have to think beyond the business processes in your company to linking your customers' customers to your suppliers' suppliers, and draw them all together in a common end-to-end business process. You can create those relationships much faster now, but people aren't taking advantage of it. They are still very much in the ERP paradigm, which can be limiting. The cloud allows everyone to focus on their own processes, share them with others, and add some individual elements to their own processes and optimize them.
Some of these same promises about end-to-end business processes were made about ERP when it was new. What went wrong?
In the ERP world, everything is data-centric. Data is king, and business processes became embedded in data silos. Many big companies have created stovepipes that are isolated from each other, with business processes stored in the data. The vendor's best practices are then overlaid on the processes. Those stovepipes are still isolated, trapped on premise. That inhibits innovation.
What is your vision of making the cloud work for business?
I don't want to imply that everything has to be on the cloud. The optimal situation is a combination--a kind of composition between legacy systems and the optimized business process from the business and its partners, and it lives in the cloud.
I call it a business operations platform, a bridge between traditional service-oriented architecture and some of the heavy-duty infrastructure and standard components from ERP. Business components are decoupled from underlying technology. The concept of "programming," in which a businessperson conceives of an idea and technologists program something that achieves it, gives way to describing a business process, and the IT landscape responds in kind. There is much more of a "what you model is what you get" feeling to this new paradigm.
What is the role of ERP in this scenario?
Your ERP system, along with a product life-cycle management system, logistics systems and others, can be integrated and used as vanilla components, while being further enhanced by best practices or best processes, achieving a state of operational effectiveness. Take what you have learned through years of experience with ERP and apply it to the cloud.
What are the benefits of getting this right?
Dramatic improvements in business processes, reduction in IT costs, and a radical expansion of partners to help you run your business. Applications in the cloud cost less than 10% of an on-premises application. That means double-digit-percentage cost savings, and, more importantly, a boost to the value stream. Lead time for product creation can be reduced from 60 days to one or two hours. It's already happening. Instead of building a car in six weeks, we can do it in a day.
What stands in the way of this transformation?
First of all, the role of CIO sometimes seems afraid of its own shadow. The CIO should become more of a business leader. Maybe we should change the title Chief Information Officer to Chief Process Officer (CPO).
CIOs with guts are crucial to change. The CEO is too isolated and unaware of the development of these trends, but now the CIO, in the new role of a CPO, could be a tremendous asset to the CEO, providing leadership for changing the company and improving business processes. The value is in aligning IT and business, and the CPO is much more on the business side, not just on the IT side.
Too much attention is focused on technology innovation and not enough on business innovation. When that happens, we add functionality, but also complexity. The technology innovations with real impact are those that reduce complexity.
IT should be democratized in the same way Henry Ford democratized the car. Currently, fully functional IT is only for Fortune 1000 companies with a big budget. In the future, the benefits of IT will be available for everyone. Small and medium-size enterprises are, with the new technology wave of a business operations platform, able to connect their supply chain much faster than Fortune 1000 companies can. Agility is the mantra for today's smart companies.
Social media and cloud computing are exciting because they foreshadow this future.
Dan Woods is chief technology officer and editor of Evolved Technologist, a research firm focused on the needs of CTOs and CIOs. He consults for many of the other companies he writes about. For more information, go to evolvedtechnologist.com.
Trouble ahead for US community banks
Trouble ahead for community banks
By Rob Cox, breakingviews.comDecember 29, 2009: 3:03 PM ET
(breakingviews.com) -- During the recent financial crisis it appeared that America's small banks could do no wrong. President Barack Obama said the world would have been better off if the entire financial system had been more like them.
Legislators tried to ease their burden, often at the expense of their bigger banking competitors. Last week, community bankers even won a meeting with the president to try to convince him to reduce red tape on their part of the industry.
But while it's true that the nation's 8,000 small banks mostly managed to avoid the excesses of their mega rivals and are healthier than big ones, they're not yet out of the woods.
A majority of the 140 banks that have failed were small -- and most on regulators' watch lists have less than $10 billion in assets. As Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) and other problem hulks of the financial firmament have shored up their balance sheets and exited the government's bailout scheme, the small bank fraternity could see more pain ahead.
Take net charge-offs as a percentage of average loans, a measure of the relative health of loan portfolios. For banks with less than $5 billion of assets, these amounted to just 0.25% in the third quarter, compared to 1.53% at larger banks, according to SNL Financial. But the percentage actually declined somewhat from the second quarter for the big banks and rose by a quarter for the small ones.
One of the biggest problems smaller banks face is that they generally have higher concentrations of their loan books in commercial real estate, a sector that investors expect has further to fall. That could result in greater asset writedowns for this heretofore healthier corner of the banking world. Losses on real estate could lead to more failures and easily stymie lending, particularly to smaller businesses.
Though they account for less than 12% of all American banking assets, financial institutions with less than $1 billion of assets make nearly a third of all loans of $1 million or less to companies, according to the Independent Community Bankers Association, eight of whose members met President Obama last week. Less lending from such banks could have powerful knock-on effects for an economy struggling to rebound.
For now, America's smaller banks have more capital, make more on their assets, and have fewer problem loans. But as defaults in the commercial real estate arena begin in earnest next year -- and consumers continue to feel the economy's pinch -- the relative fortunes of the small fry and leviathans of finance will almost certainly converge.
By Rob Cox, breakingviews.comDecember 29, 2009: 3:03 PM ET
(breakingviews.com) -- During the recent financial crisis it appeared that America's small banks could do no wrong. President Barack Obama said the world would have been better off if the entire financial system had been more like them.
Legislators tried to ease their burden, often at the expense of their bigger banking competitors. Last week, community bankers even won a meeting with the president to try to convince him to reduce red tape on their part of the industry.
But while it's true that the nation's 8,000 small banks mostly managed to avoid the excesses of their mega rivals and are healthier than big ones, they're not yet out of the woods.
A majority of the 140 banks that have failed were small -- and most on regulators' watch lists have less than $10 billion in assets. As Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) and other problem hulks of the financial firmament have shored up their balance sheets and exited the government's bailout scheme, the small bank fraternity could see more pain ahead.
Take net charge-offs as a percentage of average loans, a measure of the relative health of loan portfolios. For banks with less than $5 billion of assets, these amounted to just 0.25% in the third quarter, compared to 1.53% at larger banks, according to SNL Financial. But the percentage actually declined somewhat from the second quarter for the big banks and rose by a quarter for the small ones.
One of the biggest problems smaller banks face is that they generally have higher concentrations of their loan books in commercial real estate, a sector that investors expect has further to fall. That could result in greater asset writedowns for this heretofore healthier corner of the banking world. Losses on real estate could lead to more failures and easily stymie lending, particularly to smaller businesses.
Though they account for less than 12% of all American banking assets, financial institutions with less than $1 billion of assets make nearly a third of all loans of $1 million or less to companies, according to the Independent Community Bankers Association, eight of whose members met President Obama last week. Less lending from such banks could have powerful knock-on effects for an economy struggling to rebound.
For now, America's smaller banks have more capital, make more on their assets, and have fewer problem loans. But as defaults in the commercial real estate arena begin in earnest next year -- and consumers continue to feel the economy's pinch -- the relative fortunes of the small fry and leviathans of finance will almost certainly converge.
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