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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
The List Web Part for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 provides a subset of the Microsoft CRM record list functionality. It allows users to view Microsoft CRM records as a list from a SharePoint dashboard, open records in Microsoft CRM 3.0 from the list, and connect Microsoft CRM Web Parts to filter different lists.
Download
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
There's been a lot of emphasis on side projects this week. Instead of using VC money and renting offices, buying furniture, hiring lots of staff and supplying free drinks, just start with a small web app and release it slowly, and see what happens.
I've had a website idea brewing for a while, and done some experiments, so I'm more positive about pressing on with it. I got a chance to speak to Robert Scoble today, and he would find the thing useful (if I wrote it), which is further encouragement to spend my spare time hunched over a keyboard.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Following my previous post I have been asked on the performance of the function I wrote. This is an area I am keen to press on people.
Any one questioning SQLCLR performance should have come to my launch event.
CLR function is slower than built in system functions on a pure date conversion, however doing a complex date format as I showed in the post the you would probably want to use a udf to simplify the code.
UDFs are slower than the CLR equivalent.
I have yet to find a well written one that isn’t. In the date example, the difference is 50%.
Now you also have to look at the fact that with my tests on a laptop the SQLCLR function ran 80,000 times in 800ms compared to 100ms for the core system functions. That’s very quick. If you are having worry between using a function that takes 0.00001s or one that takes 0.00008s, you either have too much time on your hands or you are looking in the wrong place for your performance problems.
So it then comes down to ease of use. Which is easier, to code, understand and support.
- Datename(yyyy,getdate()) + ' ' + DATENAME(mm,getdate())+ ' ' + datename(d,getdate())
- dbo.formatdatetime(getdate(),'yyyy MMM d')
Personally I vote for no.2 and will take the hit.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Following my previous post I have been asked on the performance of the function I wrote. This is an area I am keen to press on people.
Any one questioning SQLCLR performance should have come to my launch event.
CLR function is slower than built in system functions on a pure date conversion, however doing a complex date format as I showed in the post the you would probably want to use a udf to simplify the code.
UDFs are slower than the CLR equivalent.
I have yet to find a well written one that isn’t. In the date example, the difference is 50%.
Now you also have to look at the fact that with my tests on a laptop the SQLCLR function ran 80,000 times in 800ms compared to 100ms for the core system functions. That’s very quick. If you are having worry between using a function that takes 0.00001s or one that takes 0.00008s, you either have too much time on your hands or you are looking in the wrong place for your performance problems.
So it then comes down to ease of use. Which is easier, to code, understand and support.
- Datename(yyyy,getdate()) + ' ' + DATENAME(mm,getdate())+ ' ' + datename(d,getdate())
- dbo.formatdatetime(getdate(),'yyyy MMM d')
Personally I vote for no.2 and will take the hit.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
This is really interesting. I saw it on the newswires this morning that we've signed an agreement with Radvision to provide SIP toolkits (read our press release here). They can take advantage of the SIP extensions for LCS that will be integrated into the Radvision toolkit and offered to 3rd party developers. So what does this mean? Well, you can:
Integrate Live Communications Server capabilities into solutions based on IP-PBX, IP/video phones for wire line and wireless, SIP proxies, WIFI-phones, handsets and other embedded devices for Live Communications Server environments.
Enable IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) compatibility, which will allow developers to implement products for the mobile environment that are simultaneously IMS and Live Communications Server compatible.
So when you consider this in the wider context of our newly created Unified Communications Group it must mean some amazing tools and features are planned for RTC and mobile environments..
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
The 2007 release of the Microsoft Office system is the most significant Office release for a decade - come and see why.
25 April 2006 18:30 - 21:00 GMT
Microsoft Campus, Thames Valley Park, Reading, Berkshire. RG6 1WG.
Registration
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
So I've been a little light on blogging over the past couple of weeks while I've been over in Redmond for a house-hunting trip before moving over in a couple of weeks, so there was a fair bit of post waiting for me back in the office. The March TechNet Plus subscription was among the pile, complete with the Exchange 12 CTP build (based on the beta 1 codebase). Not that with everything else going on I'll have a great deal of time to install it and have a real look at how far it's progressed :(
I also noticed in the March MSDN shipment, disk 3028.1 is Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise Edition, both x86 and x64. Now I'll have to wait until I get home, but I was sure that I only got Standard edition through MSDN before.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Win £100 worth of entertainment vouchers - Sign up to the Student News today
You could win the chance to see the concert, comedy or festival you want. Subscribe to the Microsoft student newsletter before 8 April 2006 and you will be entered into our latest free prize draw. It’s that easy.
See here for full details:
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/academia/students/student-newsletter/default.mspx
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
So it looks like during the past week or so whilst I’ve been away has been a relatively unstable one for the site. It boiled down to MySQL disappearing, resulting in Typo (Rails) dying.
I checked out /var/mysqld.log and there were a few entries with the following snippets:
051224 7:06:35 InnoDB: Fatal error: cannot allocate 8404992 bytes of
InnoDB: memory with malloc! Total allocated memory
InnoDB: by InnoDB 6319072 bytes. Operating system errno: 12
InnoDB: Cannot continue operation!
InnoDB: Check if you should increase the swap file or
InnoDB: ulimits of your operating system.
InnoDB: On FreeBSD check you have compiled the OS with
InnoDB: a big enough maximum process size.
InnoDB: Fatal error: cannot allocate the memory for the buffer pool
051224 7:06:57 [ERROR] Can't init databases
051224 7:07:00 [ERROR] Aborting
051224 7:07:55 [Note] /usr/libexec/mysqld: Shutdown complete
051224 07:08:02 mysqld ended
It looks like something is gobbling up memory to the point where MySQL can’t allocate enough. What’s weird is I can’t see what could possibly be trying to get MySQL to allocate 8.4MB? Any MySQL gurus know anything? Does MySQL just expand the data files by a certain margin every now and then, or is this allocation as a direct result of data manipulation/querying?
I was quite happily taking around 200+ hits per day a few weeks ago (although this seems to have dropped significantly as a result of my Google ranking for a few things dropping, related to outages perhaps?) so I’m guessing this is related to my (mis)configuration of Lighty and PHP, although I can’t quite see where.
I’ve changed my PHP FCGI socket configuration inside Lighty to recycle PHP processes sooner to see whether that helps:
"bin-environment" => (
"PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "4",
"PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "100"
)
Failing that, any suggestions from any Linux gurus? I’ve noticed that when it does die, it either completely locks-up the VPS, or, it seems to look absolutely fine without any process hogs. I’ve noticed that there’s been a couple of defunct PHP processes listed, is that indicative of a problem?
Anyway, hopefully this’ll sort itself following my tweaks, if not, any MySQL configuration changes people can suggest?
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Amazing stuff. Look here.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Remember a few years ago there was the video of the infamous fat kid (no offence) doing light-saber moves posted on the internet? Well heres another - albeit somewhat slimmer guys - doing some very *funky* moves with light saber's titled Ryan vs Dorkman... Very good quality fighting sequences...
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Remember a few years ago there was the video of the infamous fat kid (no offence) doing light-saber moves posted on the internet? Well heres another - albeit somewhat slimmer guys - doing some very *funky* moves with light saber's titled Ryan vs Dorkman... Very good quality fighting sequences...
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
I'm just going to get this all down before I go and see Craig and his list...
Yesterday in the free beer queue, I met Wright Sullivan, who runs a factory automation company in South Carolina. He was as surprised as I was to meet someone at SxSW who knew what a PLC was. He uses all the major SCADA packages, and uses FactoryLink for doing fuel systems for the navy. (Wright, if you read this, Mike's OPC site that I was telling you about is at opcconnect.com). We hung out for the evening, and went to the web awards (which weren't really my thing), and a couple of parties. Loads of free food and drinks. I asked for a glass of red wine at a bar, and was given a small bottle. No glass. So, I drank red wine from the bottle. I got another free book at the blogads party.
I wore my gaping void t-shirt yesterday, and Kathy Sierra stopped me as she recognised it - it had the same quote on it that she used in her session yesterday. (I mention this to make Hugh proud.)
Dave Seah sat next to me in one of the seminars this morning. I'd heard of him before, as I read one of his blog post about how he's often mistaken for Dave Shea. He said he'd prefer to be known for something he is, rather than someone he's not, which is fair enough.
Anyway, I'm having an amazing time, so thanks very much to Lee, Ian, Amy and Geek Dinner London for getting me here.
[tags: sxsw gapingshirt]
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Just read an article about the Shortness of Dark which details how life for us now differs a great deal than life before the light bulb was invented in terms of staying awake longer, and what it does to our health and those of our plants. Interesting read, as a guy who usually sleeps 6-8Hrs during weekdays and maybe a bit more (10max) on weekends I guess I'm on the verge of getting screwed over soon. I do feel sorry for those that can live on a 4hr sleep 'shift' diet.
Once humans began to use artificial light to vary the length of the day, the average night's sleep decreased from about nine hours to about seven, and the amount of sleep began to vary considerably from one night to the next. This irregularity prevents one's circadian rhythm from settling into a pattern, and creates a state of perpetual semi-jet-lag. Our bodies' rhythms attempt to appropriately adjust our alertness, blood pressure, and such for particular times of day; but we often do things contrary to this cycle, and therein lies the problem.
And then theres this...
A growing number of doctors believe that betraying our internal clocks is the source of a host of health problems. Once night falls, the body stays awake by activating the stress response, which in turn weakens the immune system. This is evidenced by the fact that individuals working graveyard shifts are more susceptible to stress, constipation, stomach ulcers, depression, and heart disease.
Well, lets not forget the youth of today going out, drinking, partying, clubbing and generally causing a muck of their internal clocks...
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Just read an article about the Shortness of Dark which details how life for us now differs a great deal than life before the light bulb was invented in terms of staying awake longer, and what it does to our health and those of our plants. Interesting read, as a guy who usually sleeps 6-8Hrs during weekdays and maybe a bit more (10max) on weekends I guess I'm on the verge of getting screwed over soon. I do feel sorry for those that can live on a 4hr sleep 'shift' diet.
Once humans began to use artificial light to vary the length of the day, the average night's sleep decreased from about nine hours to about seven, and the amount of sleep began to vary considerably from one night to the next. This irregularity prevents one's circadian rhythm from settling into a pattern, and creates a state of perpetual semi-jet-lag. Our bodies' rhythms attempt to appropriately adjust our alertness, blood pressure, and such for particular times of day; but we often do things contrary to this cycle, and therein lies the problem.
And then theres this...
A growing number of doctors believe that betraying our internal clocks is the source of a host of health problems. Once night falls, the body stays awake by activating the stress response, which in turn weakens the immune system. This is evidenced by the fact that individuals working graveyard shifts are more susceptible to stress, constipation, stomach ulcers, depression, and heart disease.
Well, lets not forget the youth of today going out, drinking, partying, clubbing and generally causing a muck of their internal clocks...
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
I have a couple of invites available. The first 3 comments to this post with valid
e-mail addresses can have them.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Here it is! I certainly hope it’ll fix a number of the problems I was seeing, but I haven’t had time so far to try it out.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Imagine Cup UK Finals 06, first hand review and results!
Arriving at St. Anne’s Manor, after what can only be described as the most tedious taxi journey of my life, I was looking forward to meet the teams who would be fighting it out to be this years UK Imagine Cup Finalists. Fame, fortune, X-Box 360s and a trip to Delhi awaited the winners. Walking into the reception sublime wafts of curry flavoured air tickled my already hungry body. For the next 3 hours I got to walk, talk and eat my way through the different ideas that had excited us enough to get them this far. Dietary trackers, pill monitors and a number of medical problems were addressed. Every team had a great proposition, and these enterprising, excited students were here to do battle!
Act 2, Scene 1. Microsoft Campus, Thames Valley Park, Reading
After a good night’s sleep, hearty breakfast and the early morning jitters the 10 finalists descended on TVP and made their way to their posters which had been erected the night before. For many this was the first chance to see the Microsoft campus and in a short while they would need to pull together their practice, ideas and team spirit to ‘sell’ their idea to the Judges.
In the vein of a venture capital pitch or as some put it, our very own mini Pop-Idol Competition the contestants had 5 minutes or so to pitch their ideas, and answer a Q+A session. After this nerve racking round, all under the steady gaze of a film crew and camera, 3 final teams were selected to present to the large crowd (no easy feat in itself) and from these final three a winner would be selected!
Act 2, Scene Pi. Chicago 1 and 2, Building 3
The first team to present was team Three Pair. The idea being pitched was a system for patients in Intensive Care Units to have contact with the outside world and their family. Often patients recovering form surgery spend a long time lying in their bed waiting for healing to finish. Unfortunately while their physical attributes may heal, often the patients are left with mental scars. The solution to this was a simple application and user interface that allowed the patients to read blogs, connect to family members and at least try keep some idea of what was happening in the world around them. The idea was well explained with lots of good technical and medical information to backup their claims
The second team to present was Team Ariel. The idea being pitched was for a hospital wide solution to the problem of infections being spread inadvertently by hospital employees or visitors. The figures floated by the team showed that this was a huge problem, and cost the NHS dearly, both in financial loss but also, in the loss of human life. The solution was a system that tracked where everyone had been in the hospital and warned if a mistake had been made that could lead to an infection. The idea was well thought out with market research and statistical information.
The final team to present was team Med-Aware. The idea being pitched was for a system that tracked the intake of prescription medicine. A large proportion of people fail to complete their courses of antibiotics and this can lead to mutations of viruses or bacteria. The waste of this medicine also costs the NHS dearly every year and is a problem that needs to be addressed. The solution was a connected application that allowed members of the NHS to track, monitor and contact individuals who were currently taking prescription medicine. The team pitched their idea well and made a great case for not only its financial implications but also the impact it would have on the spread of disease.
And the winners?
Team three Pair! The judges decided that the team had the best idea which could impact the world in a profound way. It is now up to Team Three Pair to prepare for Delhi, and hopefully bring the cup back to England!
The competition was followed by The Register (which is going to have the winners blogging regularly on their progress)
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/03/13/imagine_cup_final/
Winners!
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Supermarket Tesco asks eBay to stop people selling its Computers for Schools vouchers.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
By my reckoning, the most recent Feb 2006 CTP of WinFX represents the eleventh public release for Windows Presentation Foundation. (And I'm going to step out onto a limb and conjecture that we've probably got just three or four CTP-style releases to go before we release WinFX.) Most of these releases have of course come with a variety of associated paraphenalia, including SDKs, developer tool extensions and even dependent applications such as Microsoft Max or Expression Interactive Designer.
Moving from release to release is an inexact science. It doesn't take a mathematical genius to figure out that there are hundreds of combinations of different build histories on machines out there, and inevitably (since the setup process is also beta) there can be bits of cruft left over on machines after one element or another is installed. The comments on the entry I wrote to announce EID are a good reminder for us here that we've not cracked this yet. I can't offer a panacea, unfortunately - it's the price we all pay for being early adopters of a new system-level component that integrates tightly with the rest of the operating system - but I did want to offer some tips to try and mitigate the worst of the pain and help people get their machines clean. (Not that this will be of any comfort, but it's not any easier internally, where there are daily builds from multiple build labs to deal with!)
- By far the most important step is to make sure that you've uninstalled all the components of older versions before updating to the latest release. Go into Add / Remove Programs and check for any of the following:
- Microsoft Windows SDK (or WinFX SDK)
- Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" CTP for WinFX (known in earlier versions as the Visual Studio Extensions for WinFX)
- Debugging Tools for Windows (installed by the Windows SDK)
- Microsoft Command Shell (installed by the Windows SDK)
- Microsoft FxCop (installed by the Windows SDK)
- WinFX Runtime Components
- Microsoft Codename "Avalon" (this stems back from the days before we distributed as part of WinFX)
- Microsoft Max
- Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer
- Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer
It's probably safest to uninstall all of the above just to be sure, making sure you leave the WinFX Runtime Components until last.
- Once you've uninstalled everything you can, we have an uninstall tool that helps clear up any other unwanted files. This helps with a few known situations where the uninstaller fails to remove a few shared assemblies successfully.
- The first two steps should get you into a position where you can install a fresh new release. If you're still having trouble, we need to get down to the next level of investigation. Perform steps 1 and 2 again to get back to semi-clean. Then it's worth checking the contents of the following directories:
- %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Windows
- %WINDIR%\WinFX\v3.0\WPF
- %PROGRAMFILES%\ReferenceAssemblies\Microsoft\WinFX\v3.0
I've seen occasions before where one or two older files can get left over in these directories that can fool installers such as Expression Interactive Designer, or worse, can prevent newer versions from being installed. In particular, if you see files such as PresentationCore.dll, PresentationFramework.dll or WindowsBase.dll, that should act as a warning sign to you that you've got some left-over cruft. Make sure you don't just randomly delete the content of these directories unless you're sure that the uninstallers have done all they can do - you start to edge into completely unsupported territory at this point, since it's hard to troubleshoot a system in this state.
- If your machine has had a chequered history with many older versions of WinFX on your machine, you might want to try running Dan Mohr's Avalon cleanup script, which looks for various system DLLs such as milcore.dll (the Media Integration Layer, a low-level component that renders WPF content to screen) and cleans them and their associated registry entries out.
- For Expression Interactive Designer, if all else fails, you can use the undocumented SKIPAVALONVERSIONCHECK=1 parameter at the command line to force EID to install without heed to the version of WPF it detects on the machine. Make sure you've successfully executed an application with the appropriate version of WinFX on your machine prior to using this brute-force approach. For example, Valentin Iliescu has a great 3D Chess game implemented as a XAML Browser Application that can test whether you have a fully working WinFX Runtime Components installation.
- When recompiling an application from a previous build, I've found that it's safest to entirely clear out the bin/ and obj/ directories from your project before attempting a rebuild. Sometimes left-over object files from a previous release can cause rogue build breaks.
- Make sure you have Windows Media Player 10 installed on your machine if you want to show media elements.
- It's important to run the latest available updated display card drivers for your machine. Because of the way WPF uses DirectX (multiple non-fullscreen windows), we've uncovered a number of display driver bugs that can cause crashes or other unintended effects. We try and mitigate this by switching to software rendering for older drivers, but that inherently reduces the performance of all WPF applications. If you can, get current!
That's all the tips I can think of for now. I'll update this entry as appropriate over the next day or two with any corrections or additional suggestions. I'll sound like a faceless corporate automaton if I apologize for any inconvenience caused, but I do mean it! In an ideal world we'd do a better job in the installer of cleaning up old installs, but that would really detract from the purpose of CTP releases, which is to get regular updates out to the developer community without imposing a heavy burden on the developer team. I hope this post at least helps to explain the trade-off, even if it's still not all that pleasant for us in the trenches.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
I recently tried my WCF service on Vista\IIS7. I noted that .net sdk is installed by default but IIS is not, when you install IIS you need to sort out IIS with aspnet_regiis. What struck me about this is that you will always need to do this, seems a little crazy but maybe thats just me.
Next I tried the svc file and it complained about MIME type, I note Sam's post on svc issues with iis7 so I mapped it as a application folder and it still complained. I then set the MIME type as application\soap-xml. This time around it then tries to serve me the file rather than execute it, now I am really stuck hunting around the IIS7 interface trying to figure this out. Any advice or tips welcome, one step away from an fdisk.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Last week I attended Etch in San Diego. The theme was “the attention economy” and whilst there wasn’t a huge amount about the attention economy there wasn’t much about Web 2.0 which was good. In fact it was pretty much dismissed by all as hype and most of the conference was about the nuts and blots of the future architecture of the client.
There were a number of high level talks and they were kicked off By Tim O’reilly talking about the symbiosis of users and technology both explicitly (Mturk) and implicit (Google links). A number of follow on speakers came back to this theme which I thought interesting and powerful. The most attention grabbing of these was the Web 3.0 talk on Second Life. The way that people and the second life virtual world interacted was very powerful allowing things like real estate, teaching, game development and even coding to be undertaken in a virtual world.
Then there were a number of talks which I would group into the four areas of the edge architecture:
Identity
An interesting Identity 2.0 talk by Dick Herdt both in terms of style and content. The conclusion was that identity should be held by the owner, something I totally agree with.
Discovery
This was a major theme at the conference being covered in the talks on The Musical myware which was a really great description of Lastfm, Root Markets: Applications for the New Attention Economy covering the storage of personalization information and Ambient Findability about taxonomies vs tagging. The Attention Focusing Strategies talk had 4 excellent discovery patterns and I particularly liked the quick look at storytelling as a discovery strategy. I think we will hear a lot more about this in the future.
Content
There was a lot of discussion around Micro formats in talks such as Microformats and The Data Dump: Fun with Graphs and Charts . A breathtaking demo of the use of Micro formats in a really simple context was given by Ray Ozzie in Simple Bridge-building where he showed how a small script on a web page enables copy and paste which with the appropriate micro formats provided the ability to do some really amazing applications on the web. This type of demo was repeated a number of times by other talks but none had the elegant simplicity of Ray’s. There was also a good overview of content patterns in Native to a Web of Data: Designing a Part of the Aggregate Web where we had an amusing buzzword bingo at http://bingo.scrumjax.com/
Collaboration
The collaboration area was discussed in a number of the social based talks such as the really excellent Shut Up! No, *You* Shut Up: A Pattern Language for Moderation Strategies and When Do We Get the Events We Want where I liked the idea of event demand generation.
Whilst I strongly believe that the personalization, identity, relationship attention and other Meta data belong to the user and should be held primarily on their machine (with delegation to other third party system as appropriate) it does make for a difficult business model. This was covered by the The Economics of Attention: A Layman's View of the Economic Model of Attention talk.
Following on from these four areas there were a huge number of talks about the client composition platform and architectures such as Do-it-yourself IT: Sponsored by IBM using a Wiki, Unconventional Thoughts About AJAX, and Expressive Applications .
Two interesting talks in this area were Enterprise Ajax for a Spectrum of Solutions about building development tools in Ajax and Building Apps for the Business Web about building an ISV platform on top of a SaaS system.
All in all an interesting conference which rather nicely confirmed the edge architecture work I have been doing. It was a bit of a curates egg with some talks being excellent and very thought provoking and some being sales or generalizations which were not very useful.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Robert Scoble and Jeff Sandquist explain why on10net is worth checking out. Jeff asked me to test out last week and I loved what I saw.
Also, congrats to Duncan - this is the first major product that's shipped with his code since leaving the MSDN team.
More Ajax than you can shake at stick at.
Enjoy.
Tags: 10, on10, ten, Microsoft
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
British Rail once filed patent for transporting passengers by space ship, recently uncovered plans show.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Investors hope that recent movements in the Vodafone boardroom will end rumours of a rift at the mobile giant.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Matt Goyer has a nice picture of the Channel browser in Vista, which you can use the up down arrows to look at what is on on the other channels with out leaving the current channel . My TV does it now so it will be nice to see Vista catch up with that but I do tend to use the guide screen to pick what I want to watch
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Coming up on the show this week is Jury Balta from 10 Foot World
10 Foot World are "10 Foot Search, Placement, Design and Hosting service that allows users of Windows XP MCE to view desired content through 10 foot interface technology"
They have some great content for Media Center on 10 Foot World.
The show will be out Thursday
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
The latest burn down graph, for sprint 5 of our Bakery Control System, is available to look at and comment on here.
Tags: Burn down graphs, bakery control system, scrum
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Two American operators stop selling the popular Razr phone as a faulty batch of handsets is discovered.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
The Tokyo Stock Exchange says it is to delist internet firm Livedoor over allegations it broke securities law.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
…it’s probably nothing compared to what these guys are having.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
The big search sites are trying to tempt users to live their online lives via their particular portal.
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
I followed a nice link this morning from my developer fusion feed to a blog about creating passionate users.
It has articles to help developers get inside the heads of the "regular people" who use our applications. There's some great advice about things like motivating users to learn your product and just trying to make your users happy.
I'm going to have to admit it made its way into my RSS program because it's just so funny though. :D
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Published on 13 Mar 2006 from
Google is to sell online access to books. Here's how it works. User searches for something on Google, finds some useful content via Book search - every Google results page has "Try your search again on Google Book Search at the foot. However, the book search only shows a few pages. The user then gets an option to purchase access to the complete online book:
Google Book Search helps users who find and preview your books buy them through online retailers, local bookstores, and soon, will let them pay for immediate access to them right from their browser.
The new program is just for books; and a book in Google's terms is something with an ISBN. But what if I wrote some content, called it an eBook, purchased an ISBN for it, and offered it for for sale through Google Book Search? On the face of it, I don't see why not. Furthermore, I don't see why Google should not extend its program to cover any online content for which the publisher wants to charge a fee.
It all sounds like Micropayments. Do Micropayments work? Not yet. Jakob Nielsen was famously wrong in stating most sites that are not financed through traditional product sales will move to micropayments in less than two years - back in 1998. Clay Shirky said in 2000 that micropayments have failed because they "waste the users' mental effort in order to conserve cheap resources, by creating many tiny, unpredictable transactions."
I'm not so sure. Let's say I decide to sell access to some content on ITWriting.com. In order to do this, I first have to get the users to subscribe to my site, or at the very least to approve a PayPal transaction or similar. Hassle and anxiety. A trusted third party such as Google can remove most of that. Single sign-in, to Google. Transaction through Google. Content access through Google. Could work? Certainly has a better chance.
Note: this is not what Google has announced. Not