Posts tagged Platform
Ginzametrics Upgrades Enterprise SEO Platform for International SEO Management – Virtual-Strategy Magazine
Apr 24th
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Ginzametrics Upgrades Enterprise SEO Platform for International SEO Management
Virtual-Strategy Magazine Ginzametrics SEO platform now supports improved analytics in 35+ global markets, US-EU Safe Harbor Certification and Improvements to its proprietary distributed processing platform. Ginzametrics, the disruptive management and analytics platform for … |
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Ginzametrics Upgrades Enterprise SEO Platform for International SEO Management – PR Web (press release)
Apr 24th
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Ginzametrics Upgrades Enterprise SEO Platform for International SEO Management
PR Web (press release) Ginzametrics SEO platform now supports improved analytics in 35+ global markets, US-EU Safe Harbor Certification and Improvements to its proprietary distributed processing platform. We believe it's possible to challenge the economics of enterprise SEO … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Kaazing Launches WebSocket Platform in Amazon’s EC2 Cloud
Apr 20th
It’s the stateful communications protocol that HTTP lacked from the very beginning, and now it’s a key component of the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Chrome and Firefox. The HTML5 debate has cast WebSocket as a future component of every Web browser and every real-time Web app. Now its principal architects at Kaazing are changing the ballgame for developers, launching this morning its Kaazing Gateway HTML5 Edition on Amazon EC2. Suddenly the makers of MMORPG games, stock trading apps and workforce management tools won’t need to run their sessions with on-premise servers and middleware.
You’ve already seen Kaazing push live data to running apps over the Web. That doesn’t seem like a new technology on the surface, and in fact, it’s not. It’s actually a much older technology – session-based, sending characters from hosts to terminals. It’s what real-world applications need to communicate with their servers. But to do it on the Web, you have to retrofit it – and that’s what Kaazing is known for doing.
“HTTP protocol was originally designed in the 1990s as a way to exchange documents. Because of its design, it’s a stateless, sessionless, bidirectional, full-duplex [protocol]. Meaning, it’s a walkie-talkie model,” explains Yuan Weigel, Kaazing’s vice president of marketing, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. “I talk, you wait; you talk, I wait. And it’s a request/response, meaning unless the client makes a request for you to talk, you cannot come talk to me, the server. That’s just the way the Web was designed.”
The seed for Kaazing as a company grew from its founders original response to HTML5 caretaker Ian Hickson’s call for a two-way, bidirectional protocol that eliminated the need to open up separate HTTP connections for each and every exchanged element of data. First, this deflates the bandwidth consumed by Web apps by more than 90% – a deflation which is absolutely necessary if an “Internet of Things” is ever to take shape.
Second, it eliminates the need for applications servers and much of the back-end middleware (or is it “middle-end backware?”) that’s needed to facilitate messaging between conventional applications. That’s not the best news for IBM, which foresees the entire IoT as a middleware application.
“Today, as you know, app servers sit between the back end and the browser,” Weigel explains, “and the browser only speaks HTTP. The back end speaks whatever TCP protocol – JMS, AMQP, whatever. So by having Kaazing sitting in the middle, it actually allows you to extend data that’s flowing, let’s say, within a JMS system all the way to the browser. There’s no translator that needs to sit in the middle. Imagine you’re at a United Nations meeting, and you can both speak the same language!”
If you’re a Web app developer, you may already know all this. Today’s news of the deployment of Kaazing’s HTML5 WebSocket Platform on Amazon EC2 ups the ante for any serious player looking to capture the future market of inter-device communication. By putting Kaazing on DevPay, a broader base of small developers can experiment with real-time communication for the first time, on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Weigel tells us Kaazing has added some enterprise features to the platform as well, such as single sign-on, load balancing, failover and disaster recovery. It also adds something called WebSocket emulation support, which enables the cloud to work some serious magic. Quite literally, this feature presents WebSocket-like functionality to ancient browsers that are not, and will never become, HTML5-ready – browsers like IE6. “It’s so close that our customers cannot detect a difference between what’s emulated and what’s native,” says Weigel. “So when our enterprise customers choose to deploy a WebSocket-based application, they don’t have to worry about whether this is going to work. They can just code to the standard WebSocket API and not have to worry about the browser at the other end.”
“In the past, developers spend 75% of their time on glue code. How do you communicate from the browser to the application server? What do you send back and forth? And all these things are not the things that make the application or the user experience compelling,” she continues. “It’s simply things that you have to do to make it work in a Web environment. Whereas with WebSocket, because you don’t have to worry about the communication layer, you can now focus on developing really compelling user experiences – the stuff that makes the customer loyal. It really shifts how your company invests in development time.”
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Pardot enhances platform with new SEO tools – BtoB Magazine
Apr 12th
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Pardot enhances platform with new SEO tools
BtoB Magazine In addition, a new competitor monitoring tool compares user SEO rankings with those of competitors as well as components such as inbound links and indexed pages that influence SEO ranking. It also delivers trend reports. Pardot Prioritizes SEO With Keyword and Competitor Monitoring Pardot enhances software for keyword monitoring |
View full post on SEO – Google News
GoGrid Introduces Predictive Analytics Platform
Apr 10th
GoGrid today introduces its Big Data Solution predictive analytics platform. It adds features that combine the best from cloud computing with hybrid cloud flexibility and front-end apps. Everything is managed from the GoGrid web-based management portal.
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The idea is to support very high performance analytics. It has preconfigured hardware that includes a collection of four different servers as part of GoGrid’s Professional Cloud plan. You can use this to quickly scale up demand to meet traffic spikes in your Hadoop NoSQL databases, for example. This allows for a complete hybrid cloud solution with the added security of a single-tenant infrastructure.
Martini Media, the leading digital advertising platform for reaching affluent U.S. consumers, has already deployed GoGrid’s Big Data Solution. Martini’s platform requires substantial processing power to handle more than 250 million online events each day. “We considered four providers, and only GoGrid offered everything we wanted,” said Manicka Babu, VP of engineering at Martini Media. “Most important was the hybrid architecture. The improvements in Cassandra replication and latency are impressive.”
The Big Data Solution is now available for $3,800 per month, and all customers that sign up for a year’s subscription will get 20% off.
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Nokia After the Burning Platform
Apr 4th
Paralyzing cold stuns the man’s senses as soon as his body hits the icy water of the North Atlantic. Gasping for air and struggling to breathe, the man who jumped from the burning oil platform looks up to see a tower of flame silhouetted against the black sky. Panic washes over the man. He begins to swim. Not far away he knows there is a buoy that he can cling to until help arrives.
In February 2011, new Nokia CEO Stephen Elop dropped a bomb on Espoo, Finland. In 1,221 words to Nokia employees, he told them their platform was burning. Behavior needed to change. Apple and Android were eating Nokia’s lunch and the company’s trajectory and decision-making were unsustainable. Fourteen months later, Nokia has made a dramatic re-entrance into the North American market with the Lumia 900 and Windows Phone. Clinging to a buoy, looking for help, how has Nokia fared?
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Elop’s Defining Decisions
Two days after the burning platform memo, Elop announced that Nokia would form a partnership with Microsoft to create Windows Phone devices. While this came as a surprise to many, including many Nokia MeeGo developers, it was not completely unreasonable. Elop is a former Microsoft man. Nokia needed to differentiate itself and MeeGo was not going to be the answer. It was either align with Android, start from scratch or partner with Microsoft. Starting from scratch was not an option, and Nokia aligning itself with Android was unreasonable considering how many other manufacturers build devices on the platform.
So, Microsoft it was.
“The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem,” Elop wrote.
Nokia is now in deep with Windows Phone. Once it took the plunge and tied itself to Redmond, Nokia did not have a choice but to go full-steam ahead. The best place to look for what is trending with Nokia is at its official blog, Nokia Conversations. Since Nokia World 2011 in London last October, the blog has almost entirely been about the Windows Phone ecosystem. Recent posts include; “The Nokia Lumia and its Gaming Prowess” and “Best of the big Screen Apps for the Nokia Lumia 900.” Nokia has realized that its success is not entirely about how well the Lumia series does but how Windows Phone performs in the market.
This is the departure that Nokia has made from its former approach. No longer does Nokia look at an individual device and try to one-up it, Nokia is looking at the entire environment and trying to carve itself a niche. When it comes to the high-end smartphone ecosystem, niche is the best that Nokia is going to do in the short term.
That is because Windows Phone is a niche. And a small one at that. As we mentioned in the review of the Nokia Lumia 900 yesterday, users do not understand Windows Phone. They have been conditioned to expect a smartphone that has several home screens, customizable apps, menus and themes. Windows Phone does not fit in with the average user’s idea of a smartphone, and they do not know how to treat it.
By tying itself to Microsoft, Nokia’s oil rig worker clinging to the buoy in the cold, dark ocean automatically limited the amount of people that could come to the rescue.
Would Nokia Have Been Better off Building for Multiple Platforms?
In the smartphone market, Nokia has Symbian and its current Asha series, as well as the Lumia running Windows Phone. These are both good if unspectacular entries in the ecosystem and have some of the best external hardware designs on the market. Nokia phones are fun and solid and work. They just are not that exciting.
Like many reviewers who were issued early releases of the Lumia 900, we wanted to really like the device. More for Nokia’s sake than for Microsoft or AT&T. People want Nokia to re-emerge as a major player in the United States because the company is still known for making great cellphones. Nokia is like the anti-Research In Motion. Where many see the mess that RIM has become and want to pig pile on the “BlackBerry is dead” meme, that sentiment does not exist for Nokia. The fact of the matter is that we would have loved the Lumia 900… if it were not running Windows Phone.
Any conversation of where Nokia stands in the market has to be juxtaposed with its biggest global rival: Samsung. The Korean electronics maker also makes Window Phone devices, such as the Samsung Focus S. Samsung has long been known to diversify. It has kicked the tires on webOS and was rumored to be looking at making BlackBerry devices or outright buying RIM. It continues to attempt to expand its Bada operating system and has even given resources to Nokia’s bastard offspring MeeGo (now called Tizen). If Samsung could make iOS devices for Apple, it would jump at the chance (it does the next best thing and supplies parts to Apple). Samsung has penetrated every channel in the mobile ecosystem at every price point with (almost) every operating system. If one market starts to collapse or rapidly expand, Samsung is ready to act accordingly.
Lumia 900 is getting poor reviews. but hey, it is only $99 .. like the kindle of smartphones
— chetansharma (@chetansharma) April 4, 2012
Nokia is not. Its eggs are firmly placed in the Windows Phone basket and its fate is tied to how well that ecosystem grows. To a certain extent, Windows Phone will grow because of its association with Nokia but the measurable impact of that will be limited, especially in the U.S. where Android and iOS dominate.
Winning the Rest of the World
Nokia and Windows Phone are kind of like the team that lost the Super Bowl. Before the game, T-shirts are printed proclaiming each team the winner. The franchise that actually does win the game gets to sell those T-shirts to proud fans eager to gobble up the merchandise of a winner. The loser’s T-shirts are shipped to emerging markets and worn by people that may or may not know what the Super Bowl is.
In the smartphone wars, the U.S. is the Super Bowl. The teams are Apple and Google, and the players are iOS and Android. This is not a battle royal where multiple teams get a chance – not anymore and not for the foreseeable future. Nokia and Windows Phone will continue to be an also-ran, a team that sometimes does well, sometimes does not but always enters the season with high hopes that, yes, this will be the year.
That does not mean that Nokia cannot perform well in the rest of the world. Its primary challengers to bringing Windows Phone to the rest of the world are Asian manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei and ZTE, among others. Nokia has brand loyalty in much of the world, and consumers that would love to upgrade from a feature phone or a Symbian to the slick operating system that is Windows Phone.
Nokia is no longer clinging to a buoy in a cold, dark sea. The fire and smoke caught the attention of a large ship passing by, the U.S.S. Microsoft. The worker is now stuck on that ship, traversing dangerous waters populated by many other large ships. The worker may never again prosper, but for the time being we know that he will not drown, burn or freeze to death.
Images: Burning platform and light tower courtesy of Shutterstock.
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SlideShark Becomes a Turnkey Mobile Preso Viewer for New Box Platform
Mar 28th
Earlier this year, my colleague David Strom shared with you the sudden rise of a mobile presentation tool called SlideShark. It was a fairly simple concept to begin with: Upload a PowerPoint presentation to Brainshark’s servers, and then deploy that presentation to multiple recipients who can watch them from their mobile devices. Think YouTube without the possums chasing squirrels, and with a tailored suit.
Today, that concept got simpler in a way that’s both compelling and scary: One of the charter iOS apps for Box.net’s new OneCloud platform lets you effectively open up PowerPoint preso files in Box, in a way that uploads them to SlideShark and displays them in front of you.
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It’s the latest demonstration of Brainshark’s free functionality, which up until now was only available through the Apple App Store. Through SlideShark for Box, you create a kind of conduit for opening presentations that are already uploaded to Box, in SlideShark without you having to download the presentation locally first.
This is important for folks who have been considering subscribing to Brainshark’s Team Edition. As we’ve covered here, Team Edition provides an environment for multiple users on a team to collect their presos together in a centralized “office.” Once a presentation is published, Team Edition gathers analytics about who’s viewing it, including members of the general public. So the presentation becomes a kind of website in itself, and the publishers become collaborators.
Up to now, the Team Edition has been the only way to achieve collaboration with these presos. But Box’s OneCloud also promises collaboration capabilities around all the files uploaded to Box, which may include items you display with SlideShark. Now, with SlideShark for Box, your preso is being published through SlideShark, not Box – so Box cannot gather analytics on nonpublic files. So if analytics is not important or necessary to you, but collaboration might be, Brainshark has opened up some new possibilities for free users and impromptu teams.
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Brightcove Wants to Be Your End-to-End HTML5 Mobile Development Platform
Feb 29th
Brightcove does not want you to think of it as a video hosting company. From the beginning, that was never the plan. Yet, Brightcove rode its cloud video-hosting platform to an initial public offering last week,with the company valued at about $392 million. Brightcove considers itself a “cloud content services” company and wants to be the go-to resource for publishers storing and delivering media from the cloud.
Brightcove’s next big project, dubbed App Cloud, is creating content containers for mobile HTML5 apps. The popular term for this is “wrappers” – taking apps written in Web languages and wrapping them with native functionality. Facebook and PhoneGap were the first to implement this practice but Brightcove thinks it can take it a step further, creating an entire platform for hybrid app development, as opposed to just a series of tools.
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In an hour long meeting with Brightcove in their Cambridge, Mass. offices last week, it became clear that App Cloud is more than just a tool for HTML5 hybrid app development. The PowerPoint slide deck for App Cloud looks like a “Best of ReadWriteMobile” summary (without specifically mentioning ReadWriteMobile). Brightcove has done its research, taken the long-view approach and created a platform that has aspects of mobile development tools created by vendors across the United States.
“It is not just a generic app platform, it is specific to content apps,” said Jeff Whatcott, SVP for marketing at Brightcove. “We built our platform to target content apps specifically. The reason for that is that as a company we think of ourselves as a cloud content services company. We are passionate about content experiences and about using the model of the cloud to help people build businesses around content. This is not a general purpose platform, this is specific.”
Let’s look specifically at what the Brightcove App Cloud does before comparing it with other services.
Brightcove provides a dashboard for creating mobile apps out of HMTL5, JavaScript and CSS and then wrapping them for Android and iOS deployment. Content can be pulled from a variety of sources including video feeds (of course, being Brightcove), social channels, RSS feeds among others. Wherever content can be found, it likely can be pulled into the App Cloud. The platform provides a wide array of custom templates that publishers can use to differentiate apps across several different content sources. Brightcove then compiles all of that content in its cloud, creates a visual rendition of it and serves the binary that the publisher can then take to Apple and Google to be submitted to the App Store and Android Market.
Today Brightcove announced the first series of value-added services around this system, bringing “intelligent” push notifications and dashboard analytics to the platform. The push notifications can be targeted at users in a specific geographic area, by time spent (or not spent) in the app, or a general combination of these attributes. The analytics can tell in real-time the effectiveness of the push notifications and track the effectiveness of a single piece of content (such as a blog post or a video).
“Anything that can expose data via REST-based APIs we can access it. You then load up our SDK and what is called App Cloud Workshop to build your apps,” Whatcott said. “You then put the custom template in HTML5, uploaded that to App Cloud and then in App Cloud you can visually assemble apps without having to code.”
The Holistic Approach
The goal for Brightcove is to bring mobile apps to the “adulthood” stage of development. See the chart at the top of this post.
“As you can see, as they grow from infancy to childhood to adolescence to adulthood, there are kind of a lot of issues,” Whatcott said. “We are looking at this and seeing that a lot of organizations are trapped in infancy and childhood and maybe some have moved into adolescence. We want to figure out how to provide a platform that brings apps to adulthood. That is where the gravitational pull is. Every organization in the future is going to have many apps for all kinds of customer segments and products that they offer. They are going to need to be able to manage those and operate those in a sustainable fashion. Right now everybody is just kind of obsessed on how I build them. We are trying to shoot in front of the duck.”
Taken on separate basis, Brightcove’s tools are similar to many others on the market. Whatcott said that the company has thought about breaking the platform into separate a la carte pieces but that is not currently the plan. The idea is to get enterprises to build their apps with one top-to-bottom system. The pricing for App Cloud comes in two flavors. It is free to use the product and build and test as many apps as you would like but to actually get the binary for the App Store or Android Market, companies need to sign up for the premium enterprise edition that costs $15,000.
In terms of similarities, Brightcove’s custom templates and workshops look a lot like the app building tools that Conduit offers. Conduit offers more wrappers for native environments while Brightcove offers only Android and iOS at this point. The development dashboards for Conduit and Brightcove look a lot alike. From a push messaging perspective, several companies provide this functionality with the most prominent startup in the realm as Portland-based Urban Airship. From an engagement analytics perspective, Apsalar and PlayHaven both offer dashboards for tracking users and sending push notifications and engagement messages. HTML5 development studio appMobi provides many similar functions to Brightcove but has released its APIs as free, open source tools to developers.
“Where this is going is that people are going to manage whole portfolio of apps and we want to reduce the number of tools that they have to use,” Whatcott said. “As opposed to having 19 different vendors and having to integrate all those different pieces together. We have seen this in the video cloud business.”
The difference between Brightcove and the individual tools available through other vendors and startups is that small developers are cost-prohibited from using the App Cloud. Brightcove is focusing on the enterprise-level content app for marketers and large media companies, like Fox. While the end-to-end solution may be one of the most robust on the market, the small to medium app publishers are cut out with the pricing model.
Developers: Are you more likely to pick and choose from the a la carte vendor ecosystem or pony up for a platform like Brightcove’s App Cloud? Let us know how you think the platform works in the comments and what services you might use instead.
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Prudential Rubloff Launches Proactive SEO Platform – PR Web (press release)
Feb 28th
 PR Web (press release) |
Prudential Rubloff Launches Proactive SEO Platform
PR Web (press release) Through this comprehensive SEO platform, each Prudential Rubloff listing receives special SEO treatment allowing it to appear higher in search results than was previously possible. The platform drives online traffic, giving agents and their listings a … |
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Can OpenGeocoder Fill the Platform Gap Left by Google Maps?
Feb 26th
How do machines understand what place you’re talking about when you say the name of a city, a street or a neighborhood? With geocoding technology, that’s how. Every location-based service available uses a geocoder to translate the name of a place into a location on a map. But there isn’t a really good, big, stable, public domain geocoder available on the market.
Steve Coast, the man who lead the creation of Open Street Map, has launched a new project to create what he believes is just what the world of location-based services needs in order to grow to meet its potential. It’s called OpenGeocoder and it’s not like other systems that translate and normalize data.
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Google Maps says you can only use its geocoder to display data on maps but sometimes developers want to use geo data for other purposes, like content filtering. Yahoo has great geocoding technology but no one trusts it will be around for long. Open Street Map (OSM) is under a particular Creative Commons license and “exists for the ideological minority,” says Coast himself in a Tweet this week. And so Coast, who now works at Microsoft, has decided to solve the problem himself.
This has been tried before, see for example GeoCommons, but the OpenGeocoder approach is different. It is, as one geo hacker put it, “either madness or genius.”
The way OpenGeocoder works is that users can search for any place they like, by any name they like. If the site knows where that place is, it will be shown on a big Bing map. If it doesn’t, then the user is encouraged to draw that place on the map themselves and then save it.
Above: The river of my childhood, which I just added to the map.
Every single different way a place can be described must be drawn on the map or added as a synonym, before OpenGeocoder will understand what that string of letters and numbers means with reference to place. Anyone can redraw a place on the map, too.
Then developers of location-based services can hit a JSON API or download a dump of all the place names and locations for use in understanding place searches in their own apps. It appears that just under 1,000 places have been added so far. It will take a serious barn-raising to build out a map of the world this way. It wouldn’t be the first time something a little like this has been done before though.
“If only it was that simple 
” said map-loving investor Steven Feldman on Twitter. “Maybe it is?”
The approach is focused largely on simplicity. Coast said in his blog post announcing the project:
“OpenGeocoder starts with a blank database. Any geocodes that fail are saved so that anybody can fix them. Dumps of the data are available.
“There is much to add. Behind the scenes any data changes are wikified but not all of that functionality is exposed. It lacks the ability to point out which strings are not geocodable (things like “a”) and much more. But it’s a decent start at what a modern, crowd-sourced, geocoder might look like.”
Testing the site, I grew frustrated quickly. I searched for the neighborhood I live in: Cully in Portland, Oregon. There was no entry for it, so I added one. But there are no street names on the map so I got lost. I had to open a Google Map in the next tab and switch back and forth between them in order to find my neighborhood on the OpenGeocoder map. Then, the neighborhood isn’t a perfect rectangle, so drawing the bounding box felt frustratingly inexact. I did it anyway, saved, then tried recalling my search. I found that Cully,Portland,Oregon (without spaces) was undefined, even though I’d just defined Cully, Portland, Oregon with spaces. I pulled up the defined area, then searched for the undefined string, then hit the save button, and the bounding box snapped back to the default size, requiring me to redraw it again, on a map with no street names. Later, I learned how to find the synonym adding tool to solve that problem.
In other words, the user experience is a challenge. That’s the case with Wikipedia too, and OpenGeocoder just launched, but I expect it will need some meaningful UX tweaks before it can get a lot of traction.
I hope it does.
That’s just my experience so far, though. Not everyone feels that way. GIS geek Paul Wither calls it “addictive.”
There are certainly high hopes for the project, too.
“I’m obsessed with the need for an open-source geocoder, and this is a fascinating take on the problem,” says data hacker Pete Warden about OpenGeocoder. “By doing a simple string match, rather than trying to decompose and normalize the words, a lot of the complexity is removed. This is either madness or genius, but I’m hoping the latter. The tradeoff will be completely worthwhile if it makes it more likely that people will contribute.”
Coast will certainly be able to gather the attention of the geo community for the project. As we wrote when he joined the Bing team 18 months ago:
Coast is a giant figure in the mapping world. In 2009, readers of leading geo publication Directions Magazine voted him the 2nd most influential person in the geospatial world, ahead of the Google Maps leadership and behind only Jack Dangermond, the dynamic founder of 41-year old $2 billion GIS company ESRI. Coast will turn 30 years old next month.
The more I play with OpenGeocoder, the more it grows on me. I hope Coast and others are able to put in the time it will take to make it as great as it could be.
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