From Evernote:

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — StratVantage News Summary 03/19/01 Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/031901.htm

The News – 03/19/01

NYSE Fines Online Brokerage for Bad Service

In early March, the New York Stock Exchange levied a $225,000 fine and censured TD Waterhouse Investor Services for failures in filling online stock orders and inadequate customer service related to the outages.

Waterhouse, the second largest online broker, was unable to process online customer orders on 33 different trade days from November 1997 to last April. The Web site failures ranged from 2 minutes to 1 hour and 51 minutes. The NYSE also said that Waterhouse failed to handle the outages properly, resulting in more than 20,000 customer complaints.

In February, online broker Charles Schwab was forced to switch customers to a backup server due to database problems. The Exchange has taken no action against Schwab as yet.

The NYSE’s decision to get tough on Waterhouse indicates the importance of Web site performance for businesses. If you are doing business on the Web, even if it’s only a small percentage of your total revenue, you need to treat it with the same care you’d treat your other channels. The Exchange decided to fine Waterhouse more for the way they handled the outages than for the outages themselves.

At this stage of the Internet’s development, it is nowhere near the level of reliability of, say, the power grid or the telephone system. These systems operate at “5 9s” (99.999 percent uptime). That means they are down no more than 5 minutes a year. TD Waterhouse’s experience is probably typical of large-scale business implementations on the Internet, and it’s nowhere near 5 9s.

Thus it’s important if you’re offering services over the Internet to negotiate a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with your clients that specifies uptime, and, more importantly, what happens when outages happen. There’s a good white paper on SLAs on the Geneer Web site if you’re interested.

ComputerWorld

Watch Out for Petabytes

This story has nothing to do with rabid dogs or cranky felines. Rather, it’s about the next frontier of disk storage – petabyte capacity. A recent Yankee Group study predicts that, although it may take the average business a year to use one terabyte of storage today, it will take only 30 days to use the same capacity in 2002. A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes and a gigabyte is a billion bytes, or characters. A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes. It is common to be able to buy 30 to 80 gigabyte PC hard drives these days. However, by 2003, it will take only a day to use a terabyte of storage, and in 2004, just one tenth of a day, the study said.

If your business is using 10 terabytes of storage a day, you’d churn through 125 of those 80 gigabyte drives each workday. So obviously, hard disk technology is going to need to drastically improve – to the petabyte range. Higher drive capacities are on the way, with 200 gigabyte drives slated to hit the market by the end of the year. And British disk vendor Keele High Density claims to be able to fit 11 terabytes in a credit card sized device within the next two years.

All this is great, but what will you be doing in a few years to require all this storage? Today a single 40 gigabyte disk drive can hold either:

• the text from a stack of paper 2,000 feet high
• 27 days of CD-quality MP3 songs
• 3 hours of digital video
• 10 DVD movies, in MPEG-2 format

There are a few applications that could drive petabytes of volume.

First, network teleconferencing will improve. Rather than running in postage-stamp-sized windows on your screen, virtual meetings will fill your screen, requiring lots of bandwidth. Chances are good you’ll want to save records of important virtual conferences, and that will take a lot of storage.

Another disk hogging application will be the intelligent supply chain. Today companies are beginning to put into place the means to take information from the factory floor and make it available throughout the enterprise and to supply chain partners. In turn, your supply chain partners (retailers, logistics firms, warehouses) will share their data to you. (For an indication on how this may go, see my white paper , Taking Control of the B2B Exchange: What’s Next in the Supply Chain Evolution.) While it’s certainly true that nobody will ever have the time to examine in detail all this information, there is no question it will all be rolled up into sophisticated decision support applications. Thus, all this tremendously valuable data will be stored in giant data warehouses, and they’re going to need a lot of disk space.

Finally, the traditional network killer app, email, will continue to grow. (I doubt any of you would predict a decrease in the amount of email over the next four years.) This growth will present a variety of challenges (like how will you survive being inundated with hundreds of emails a day). But there’s a good chance that one of the challenges will be where to put it all. If your company doesn’t have an email retirement plan in which you destroy all email records over a certain age, this very newsletter could be enshrined somewhere on your network in 2004, taking up space.

So what can you do now? Whenever you buy a computer, or especially a server, get the largest hard drive available. Look into using a Storage Service Provider (SSP), a company that provides storage you can use over the Internet. Or you can outsource your applications to an Application Service Provider (ASP) and let them worry about it.

TechWeb

Briefly Noted

• Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.: StratVantage has launched a new service, CTOMentor™, designed to allow Chief Technology Officers and other technical leaders to get rid of the Guilt Stack, that pile of magazines you’ll get around to reading someday.

  CTOMentor is a subscription advisory service tailored to customers’ industry and personal information needs. Four times a year CTOMentor provides a four-hour briefing for subscribers and their staffs on the most important emerging technology trends that could affect their businesses. As part of the service, subscribers also get a weekly email newsletter, Just the Right Stuff™, containing links to the Top 10 Must Read articles needed to stay current. These and other CTOMentor services will let you Burn Your Inbox™.

  As part of its launch, CTOMentor is offering a two-part white paper on peer-to-peer technology: Peer-to-Peer Computing and Business Networks: More Than Meets the Ear. Part 1, What is P2P?, is available for free on the CTOMentor Web site . Part 2, How Are Businesses Using P2P?, is available for $50.
  CTOMentor

Return to Mike’s Take

From Evernote:

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 03/08/01 Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/030801.htm

The News – 03/08/01

Upstart Domain Registry Offers New gTLDs

Just as domain name authority ICANN begins its meetings in Australia, rogue domain registry new.net has unveiled 20 new domain name suffixes for immediate availability. ICANN is supposed to be the Internet authority on domain names, but it is a voluntary organization without any real teeth. There have been other challenges to established domain authority before, but new.net is very high profile. Users of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Earthlink and Excite@Home will be taken to URLs using the new generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) names automatically. Other users will need to either wait to see if the names are supported broadly, or go to www.new.net and download software that ensures their browsers can find the new sites.

Several of new.net’s gTLDs are names that ICANN rejected during their consideration of new names. ICANN approved seven new gTLDs in November, but recently announced all would not be operational by the original July deadline. New.net says their registry is online now. Here are the new gTLDs offered by both new.net and ICANN:

gTLD	Purpose
New.net Names
.chat	Chat sites
.club	Clubs
.family	Family sites; probably similar to ICANN’s .name
.free	Sites offering free goods or services
.game	Game sites
.GmbH	German corporations
.hola	Spanish chat sites?
Corporate sites
.kids	Sites that can prove they contain children-friendly content and comply with the Children Online Privacy Protection Act.
Law-related sites; probably similar to ICANN’s .pro
Limited corporations
Medicine-related sites; probably similar to ICANN’s .pro
MP3 sites
.tech	Technology-related sites
.travel	Travel sites
.shop	Shopping sites
Social sites
.sport	Sports sites
.video	Video sites
.xxx.	Adult content sites
ICANN Approved Names
.aero	Air-transport industry
Businesses
.coop	Cooperatives
.info	Unrestricted use
.museum	Museums
.name	For registration by individuals
Accountants, lawyers, and physicians

New.net started in May 2000 and is an idealab! company. idealab is a leading Internet incubator, having helped start eMachines, CitySearch.com, Intranets.com and the now bankrupt eToys (which yours truly lost money on). New.net claims to have patent-pending technology that allows their domain-naming system to exist alongside the traditional domain name system. The company charges $25 a year for a domain name, higher than the going rate for .com domains.

When I tried to register StratVantage.tech, however, I ran into a snag that will probably catch a lot of people.

I don’t actually have a dedicated IP address for my Web site; I have a virtual address. When users go to www.stratvantage.com , the domain name servers (DNS) at my hosting provider, FeaturePrice.com, direct them to 64.245.225.29/stratvantage.com/, where my Web site is. The numbers in this URL represent the IP address of the machine that hosts my site. When you sign up with new.net, they want you to either specify the IP address of your site, or the DNS servers of your hosting provider. Since I can’ use the virtual IP address, my only recourse is to indicate the DNS servers. But that means I need to contact my provider and get them to assign StratVantage.tech on their servers. And there’s no telling whether that would be possible. Many Web sites are in this same boat, so it may not be easy sledding for new.net.

Whatever happens, it will be interesting to watch this latest domain name confusion play out. Business owners need to keep tabs on it to determine whether there is a whole new range of gTLDs they need to worry about.

new.net

Watch Them Pushing Tin

If you’re like me, you don’t necessarily believe the airport personnel when they tell you your inbound aircraft is in the air. I’ve been burned many times by automated flight information phone numbers that insist the flight is on time. Well now you can see what the aircraft controllers see: every plane in the sky. But after looking at the example below, perhaps you won’t want to. Flight Dimensions International’s Flight Explorer allows any PC with an Internet connection to track airplanes anywhere in the US and in some other countries. Not only can you see a specific flight, you can see all of them, along with NexRad weather.

As cool as this app is, it appears to be quite expensive and not at all for the hobbyist. But there’s a free service on the Web that lets you track any flight with just your browser: WebTrax. This service deals with one flight at a time, and is considerably less detailed, but what do you expect for free?

Anyway, businesses that depend heavily on air transportation may want to spring for the full-featured Flight Explorer. Those of us who just want a quick check on airline veracity will be satisfied with WebTrax. You can even put their service on your Web site. Check the StratVantage site soon to see whether they’ve accepted my application. When they do, you’ll be able to track your flights right from the StratVantage main page.

Flight Explorer

WebTrax

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From Evernote:

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — StratVantage News Summary 03/06/01

The News – 03/06/01

A Web Server the Size of a Match Head

Researchers have been outdoing one another in creating the smallest possible Web servers. A graduate student at the University of Massachusetts has created one the size of a match head. The most extraordinary thing about this achievement: He did it in 1999. Ages ago.

Today, a company called Thalia is already allied with appliance manufacturer Sunbeam to automate your morning routine via networking. Sunbeam plans an alarm clock that can start the Mr Coffee machine 10 minutes before you get up and turn off your electric blanket before you get out of bed. If you reset your alarm time, the clock communicates with the other appliances to coordinate your morning. Since Sunbeam also owns Coleman, I shudder to think of the possibilities of campsite automation.

The news here is that however silly we may think appliances on the Net may be, they’re coming, along with clothes that compute. Many manufacturers are part of the Universal Plug and Play effort led by Microsoft. Many others are signing up with Sun’s Jini effort. Cisco is pioneering the networked home of the future.

Bottom line? Computing will disappear into the environment, just like the electric motor did. Kevin Kelly describes the turn of the century Sears Home Electric Motor, with attachments that mashed the potatoes and did the wash. The motor was an expensive, precious commodity, and so it needed to do multiple chores to make itself worthwhile, much like the PC of today. But nowadays, I’ll be you can’t count all the electric motors in your house (don’t forget the clocks). So it will be with computing. Your fridge will reorder milk. Your medicine cabinet will refill your prescription. Your house will know when nobody’s home and reset the temperature accordingly. And all this will be commonplace to our kids or our grandkids.

Businesses need to realize that pervasive computing will change a lot of the rules, just like the miniaturization of the electric motor revolutionized the washboard-making and clockmaking industries. Is your industry in the way of this wave?

Ipic Computer

New Domain Suffixes Delayed

ICANN, the organization responsible for Internet domain names, has announced that the seven new gTLDs (generic Top Level Domains) will not be ready to go by July as previously hoped. There’s plenty of finger pointing, with ICANN blaming the dot bomb phenomenon for weakening the finances of potential registrars, and registrars blaming ICANN’s legal inexperience. ICANN says, however, the gTLDs will be online by the end of the year at the latest.

RegistryPro, which has rights to the .pro gTLD, is now likely to launch sometime between July and September in phases. The .pro domain is limited to professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and accountants (but not Internet strategy consulting professionals!). However, RegistryPro’s planned phased release is a bit worrisome: They will allow individuals and companies that own a particular trademark to have first crack at signing up the corresponding domain name.

There’s always been contention regarding trademarks and domain names. In the last SNS, we talked about the flap about eReferree, which is just one example of the muddy trademark picture. By giving trademark owners first crack, RegistryPro is equating trademarks with domain names, something the US legal system has yet to do unequivocably.

So owners of professional businesses need to be on the ball and watch for the opening of this important domain registry.

Afilias LLC, which has the .info gTLD, may open for business by May. The .info gTLD is not restricted like the .pro domain, and so we can expect a land rush mentality as speculators try to stake claims on names to later sell for a profit.

The approved new gTLDs are:

gTLD	Purpose	Applicant
.aero	Air-transport industry	Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques SC, (SITA)
Businesses	NeuLevel
.coop	Cooperatives	National Cooperative Business Association, (NCBA)
.info	Unrestricted use	Afilias, LLC
.museum	Museums	Museum Domain Management Association, (MDMA)
.name	For registration by individuals	Global Name Registry, LTD
Accountants, lawyers, and physicians	RegistryPro, LTD

eMarketer

Shameless Promotion Department

The StratVantage TrendSpot has hit the big time. Well, OK, not the big time. It’s just the first time another site has cited it as an authority. Nonetheless all of us here at StratVantage Central are pretty pumped. It just goes to prove my favorite maxim: “An expert is just some jerk from out of town.” Check out Softroad to see the citation.

Briefly Noted

• Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.: StratVantage has launched a new service, CTOMentor™, designed to allow Chief Technology Officers and other technical leaders to get rid of the Guilt Stack, that pile of magazines you’ll get around to reading someday.CTOMentor is a subscription advisory service tailored to customers’ industry and personal information needs. Four times a year CTOMentor provides a four-hour briefing for subscribers and their staffs on the most important emerging technology trends that could affect their businesses. As part of the service, subscribers also get a weekly email newsletter, Just the Right Stuff™, containing links to the Top 10 Must Read articles needed to stay current. These and other CTOMentor services will let you Burn Your Inbox™.As part of its launch, CTOMentor is offering a two-part white paper on peer-to-peer technology: Peer-to-Peer Computing and Business Networks: More Than Meets the Ear. Part 1, What is P2P?, is available for free on the CTOMentor Web site . Part 2, How Are Businesses Using P2P?, is available for $50.
  CTOMentor

Return to Mike’s Take

From Evernote:

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 03/05/01 Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/030501.htm

The News – 03/05/01

Watch Your Trademarks! eReferee Decision Broadens Trademark Protection for Domain Names

A recent federal court decision bars startup RightSports from using the word referee not only in its domain names (for example, AskTheReferee.com) but also in the names of its Web site directories (for example, RightSports.com/referee).

This decision reverses an ICANN decision that found in favor (for a change) of the little guy in a dispute with Referee magazine. The mag runs a pretty weak site called referee.com, which is little more than a place to sign up for subscriptions. RightSports developed a full-featured site called eReferee, the name of which the mag complained was too close to their trademark. Seems that the mag has a trademark on the use of the word referee in all publishing.

While I certainly can see the magazine’s point about the eReferee site name, I believe the court made a tremendous error in barring the use of the word referee from any part of a URL. This is tantamount to giving the trademark holder unlimited rights to a common English word.

In their arguments before ICANN, RightSports stated that there are other instances of the “e” usage. For example, eGolf is not affiliated with Golf magazine.

Regardless of whether the magazine had a legitimate complaint, this court decision sends a chill throughout the intellectual property community, and should worry any business person who uses un-trademarked words to describe their industry in a Web site. What’s next? Prohibiting RightSports from using the word referee in the text of their Web site? Keeping you from using industry terms on your Web site?

If there’s any justice, this ruling will be struck down upon appeal. Those interested in supporting RightSport’s legal struggle can donate to their legal defense fund .

By the way, I love eReferee’s tag line: “We rule!”

C|Net

WAP Browser for PCs

Alert SNS reader Larry Kuhn pointed me to a WAP browser you can install on your PC and use to view WAP-only sites. It’s at: www.winwap.org . After installing the browser, you can go to sites such as www.webnum.net , which I mentioned in the last SNS, and view the content. If you go to Webnum and type in my phone number, 19525251584, and if the site is up (it is beta), you should be taken to my wireless page.

Winwap

Return to Mike’s Take

From Evernote:

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 03/02/01 Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/030201.htm

The News – 03/02/01

Use Your Phone Number As A Web Address

Now here’s a bright idea for wireless users: Verisign (which now owns Network Solutions, the domain registrar) is beta testing a new service called Webnum. You can sign up to have your telephone number turned into a pointer to your Web site. This makes it easier for wireless Internet users. To access your site, users don’t need to laboriously peck in the whole address on their keypads. Just cruise to the www.webnum.net Web site, enter the phone number, including country code (1 for US phone numbers) without dashes, press OK, and your phone browser goes right to the site.

You can try it now on your wireless phone by typing in my phone number, 19525251584. Note: if you use your computer to go to the Webnum site, it won’t work.

Right now, during the beta period, Verisign is not charging for this service. But you can be sure they will charge once it’s released.

This scheme reminds me of the Internet Keywords offered by RealNames . This effort, which is supported by the major search engines, allows you to designate a key word or words that send users to your site. For example, I tried to register Internet Strategy as a keyword. Unfortunately, RealNames doesn’t accept generic registrations. They would have accepted StratVantage, but I figure, if you need to use a search engine to find me, and you know my company name, the site will probably turn up anyway.

Anyway, despite being a pretty cool idea and despite support by the search engines, MSN, and AOL, RealNames haven’t really caught on. I wonder how well Webnums will be accepted.

Webnum

Verisign to (Eventually) Give Up .net and .org

In other domain name news, Verisign has agreed with ICANN, the quasi-governmental domain name authority, to give up it’s monopoly on the .net and .org suffixes (AKA gTLDs, or generic Top Level Domains). VeriSign will operate the .org registry only through December 2002, and the .net registry through Jan 1, 2006. The company’s rights to the .com registry will expire in November 2007.

This new agreement modifies a previous agreement with ICANN that had Verisign spinning off its registry business by May of this year. ICANN stated that competition in the popular .com registry business had become so intense so fast that they didn’t feel that Verisign had an unfair advantage any more.

With ICANN planning on having registrars registering several new gTLDS, such as .firm, .biz, .info, and .name, real soon now, there will be plenty of domain name competition. It could also get pretty confusing for businesses, what with new gTLDs and soon, new choices for registering .net and .org.

C|Net

Return to Mike’s Take

From Evernote:

StratVantage Consulting, LLC — Mike’s Take on the News 03/01/01 Clipped from: http://www.stratvantage.com/news/030101.htm

The News – 03/01/01

Silly Wabbit

Stupid buzzword alert: Enterprise Application Integration vendor SilverStream announced they’d purchase the wireless software division of European company Waptop Holding A/S. Waptop. Oh, let’s all hope this buzzword doesn’t catch on. I was so glad when the ugly Webtop buzz died down. I have visions of AOL Time Warner getting a hold of this one and peppering us with commercials featuring Elmer Fudd and his wascally waptop.

SilverStream

Wireless Portals Keys to Access

In a free research report, Summit Strategies outlines some of the reasons why wireless portals will be even more important than the regular Web portals:

Portals will be more important for both consumer and business wireless users because it is so difficult to navigate the Web on small wireless devices. Business portals will yield particular value if they can provide fast, easy, personalized access to content and functionality aggregated from multiple sources, through a single user interface, with single sign-on and with simple authentication and security.

Summit asserts that the real power of wireless will be unleashed by what they call wireless workplaces. They predict these virtual workplaces will provide seamless, personalized access to corporate and third-party applications and information, and transparently handle log-on, authentication and security. Summit also predicts a much faster uptake of business use of wireless Web than there was of the regular Web. It’s stunning to realize that the Web has only been seriously used for business for, at most, four or five years. I released by first Web application six years ago last month, and, boy, was it a different world then. Yet businesses are already flocking to wireless platforms to conduct serious business.

It’s important for businesses to realize that a revolution is brewing in wireless. No matter what business you’re in, wireless devices are going to permanently change the way you do business. When you can conduct all your office business anywhere, anytime, the pressures to deliver quicker will become extreme. Just look at how the cell phone and laptop have accelerated business change in the last few years. Now multiply that many times and you’ve got an idea of what’s to come.

So the big question is: Is there an end point? Is there some point at which people stop and say, “that’s enough. We can’t move any faster”? As companies go virtual, and employees become free agents, and alliances become more fleeting, will anything stop the accelerating pace of change?

Personally, I feel there’s got to be some maximum point, some point at which people are totally saturated with information, possibilities, and demands on their time. I’ve no idea what that point might be, but I feel it’s going to be different generationally. Generation E (preteens) will have a much different tolerance than Generations X and Y and us aging Boomers. Nonetheless, everyone needs to have a life, don’t they?

Me? When it gets too intense, I’m going to Texas.

Summit Strategies

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