Near Field Communications – Primer

This article from Ars-Technica is a great high-level primer on Near Field Communications (NFC). NFC is a very exciting technology that has actually been around in one form or another for years. Many folks consider it an evolution of the contactless payment systems already out there from MasterCard and Visa. In Asia it’s been around for a while with FeliCA. There are well known standards, like ISO/IEC 14443, supporting the wireless communication, especially around payments. The standards leverages two types of data communication, type a – Miller encoding and type b Manchester encoding.

Keep in mind, likening it to the contactless payment can suggest that’s the only usage. However, there’s lots more potential applications. Think of it this way, hold your phone around 4CM(up to 20cm, but most will be 4cm) from whatever it is you are interested and get more information. Looking at a car, hold it near the side view mirror and get cool videos, looking at a tent (yeah I like camping), hold it near a tent pole and get stats on the tent, etc. I think you get the point. However, these are only one way communication examples.

While NFC stands on the shoulders of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), it is different in a couple of ways. One difference is two-way peer to peer communication. So, the NFC device(i.e. phone, camera, laptop, etc.) can communicate back and forth with the tag. Traditional RFID is one way. Lots of new applications are enabled through two way communication. Envision applications like an NFC-equipped digital camera that could transfer an image to an NFC-equipped TV set for viewing. Or an NFC-equipped computer could transfer mobile apps to an NFC-equipped mobile handset. Or shoping at a Pharmacy, hold up the phone to a tag and get a coupon, and on and on. It’s always nice to see technologies like RFID start to catch up with the long-term vision.

Given the communication requires close proximity, that inherently helps security. In addition to the proximity requirement, encryption is available as well. That isn’t built into any of the standards, but is feasible and likely important in personal and financial applications.

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Razorfish Agile Offering

The offering is targeted at helping our clients adopt more Agile best practice to achieve better results faster and more efficiently. Our Agile team brings tremendous passion to this offering and is looking forward to taking it to the next level. The offering itself consists of a training program and methodology that we can deploy internally and with clients. In addition to core training on cross-discipline agile, beyond just software development, we also offer organization support on how to align with a lean organization that can support Agile Product Development. Here’s a link to the press release for more on our offering.

Here is a recent blog post from Forrester which was an early affirmation of our thinking

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Fully automating releases to production and The Toss Test

I just read this article on web ops 2.0, basically the movement to automate pushing builds to production. There’s been a lot on the web recently on the topic, this slideshare presentation from flickr is great. A proof point that we can release a lot more often to production, especially with agile/iterative teams that include QA practices as part of development as opposed to a separate effort. The analogy between spock as development and scotty as operations is pretty spot on. It highlights another important point, which is while the technology is there, we also need to bridge the different personalities.

The ‘toss’ test in the article was funny. So, to determine the success of your environment. Basically grab any machine, rip it out of the rack and throw it out of window, preferrably a high window. Can you automatically re-provision your systems and return to a previous state? Or question two, your sr. engineer runs away to Alaska(I didn’t want to toss anyone out a window:)), can your operations proceed as normal?
So, not only does fully automated provisioning enable faster releases to production, but it also hardens your infrastructure and protects against failure.
Leveraging cloud APIs and technologies like Puppet, Chef, Kickstart, Rightscale, etc. is what makes this all possible. Of course, these capabilities come compliments of cloud computing and the ability to automate through cloud api’s and inexpensive, on-demand compute capabilities.

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Chrome web store

Last week, Google released the Chrome Web Store. Not all reactions were overwhelmingly positive, but having played with it for the last week, I like it. Even though in some cases the ‘apps’ are not much more than mere links to various web applications, in others, the applications are quite unique and different from the standard web sites. Having one single place to browse for new apps is a fun activity. The fact that the applications show up in my browser when I launch a new instance is very convenient.

It is going to be interesting to see how this further evolves, but as this engadget article describes, it is sure to result in further UI innovations.

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Java is still doing fine, it’s the framework not the language

It’s really amazing to see all the innovation that keeps coming out of languages and frameworks. Obviously languages like Ruby and even more so, frameworks like Ruby on Rails are needed to challenge the status quo. Ruby and Rails helped pulled Java and .Net into the stateless realm of the web and out of heavy session memory, cumbersome non-service oriented architectures. We were having a conversation with the DAY CTO, David Nuescheler, who pointed out the architectures of old based on stateful sessions like Struts don’t really have the flexibility needed for the web of today. The lesson is that language frameworks and languages need to change to be more RESTful and based on service oriented approaches. Frameworks like Spring and Groovy Grails help provide those best practices for Java for example.

So, it’s great having all these new languages out there, and given we are doing more web development outside of the browser, there’s room for more diversity, which is great, but Java is still doing fine according to this ReadWrite Enterprise article. The interesting thing for Razorfish is that our clients are enterprise 500-1000 organizations and we don’t see a lot of the newer languages there, but we do see a lot of Java and .Net. Until there are drastic and readily apparent increases in language productivity, it seems it’ll continue to be more about the framework than the language. Frameworks like Java EE are extremely broad, where lightweight frameworks like Rails and Groovy Grails are very web centric, but not as complete.

That being said, I would keep my eye on node.js. Since node.js can run on just about any device, that may turn out to be the next ‘hot’ language. I thought it was neat to see the webos platform choose node.js as it’s application language. The folks at Joyent have some very interesting thoughts on node.js.

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Social networks overtake Google in the UK

This post makes it clear that we need to think beyond just SEO when building web properties. If you think about it, SEO and now also integrating with Social Networks is probably the most important thing you can do for your digital property. If you are building a site that no one can find, what’s the point. I do think social will help grow you link popularity, at least tangentially. At the end of the day, link popularity is a factor in organic SEO anyway.

from http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/06/08/report-social-networks-overtake-search-engines-in-uk-should-google-be-worried/

Tags: bing, google, seo, social

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Apigee and Mashery

There is some pretty cool stuff going on around APIs (application programming interfaces). It’s getting more and more important that you are using APIs to access social graphs and social functionality through API calls to Facebook Connect (now called Facebook for websites) and Twitter API for example. But on the other side of the equation it’s getting more and more imporant for your company to open up your own APIs. Best Buy’s Remix is one of my favorite examples of a company opening up their product catalog so people can build apps on top of the catalog. Think of things like shopping engines or widgets and gadgets for the latest on sale products, etc.

Companies like Apigee and Mashery help insure that you are getting the best performance. Think about it like a caching delivery network for API calls. Some of the caching can be done with Akamai i.e. jSON, but it’s not built for that. Apigee has an offering on top of twtiter for example. Mashery and Apigee are great for exposing your own API’s as well. They can throttle calls to ensure that your application doesn’t fall down if you get a spike in traffic and they can help accelerate delivery to your users through caching. These companies also provide services to manage the community of developers doing things like providing keys for access to the engine, etc. Analytics also start to get interesting. Some have called Apigee’s analytics the Google Aanalytics for apis.

Tags: API, apigee, mashery

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Announcing our Amazon Web Services Partnership

Today we announced our Amazon Web Services Partnership. Building on our Razorfish 5 report and the recent Razorfish Techology Summit, this is the latest affirmation of our commitment to supporting the marketing and business needs of our clients with the cloud. We are really excited about the opportunities to work together, especially with the rapidly evolving cloud infrastructure technologies in the marketplace. We’ve been growing our cloud computing practice quite aggresively over the last couple of years and see huge potential for our clients. Some of the immediate benefits we’ve seen for clients are the following:

• Speed to market, getting up and running with servers and infrastructure is at a pace like never before. Minutes as compared to weeks.
• Elasticity to scale up and down easily saving money and keeping up with unexpected demand. We rarely see good traffic forecasts, so this makes us more nimble to be ready for unexpected traffic spikes with campaigns and product launches.
• Business solutions we have never dreamed of before. Using technologies like Amazon’s Elastic Map Reduce allows us to work with trillions of rows of data at very low costs. With traditional RDBMS’s this would have been both cost-prohibitive and practically impossible. Imagine using EMR to build a mini-google.

I am looking forward to the new and exciting things we can do with cloud computing.

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Social Brands and Cloud Services Technology

Here’s a presentation I gave at a conference recently sharing our point of view on the linkage between social brands and cloud services technology. At the end of the day the power of cloud services helps to drive traffic in several powerful ways.

• Social cloud services like Facebook Connect have already gotten privacy permission to share consistent with each user’s guidelines. This will help you better deal with the upcoming privacy rules in the European Union. The EU is requiring all anonymous cookie to ask a user for permission before placing them on their computer, so likely ad servers, analytics, etc. will be impacted.
• Social cloud services help increase your ranking with Google, Bing, and Yahoo. For example, twitter is indexed by all those services. Facebook has started to let some content get indexed, but has to respect privacy guidelines in many cases.
• Open API’s are empowering brands in new and innovative ways, with API’s both in and out. So, for example, tasty-d-lite uses foursquare and twitter to power their loyalty program. Or the Guardian Open Content API is being used to power new and innovative experiences like a new Guardian Content Roulette application.

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Why Should You Consider SharePoint for External-Facing Sites

Tags: Razorfish, Sharepoint

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