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Today Atos Origin becomes AtoS

Last Friday (July 1, 2011) the shareholdersmeeting of Atos Origin confirmed the Acquisition of former Siemens Information Services (SIS) by Atos Origin. Today we present the new company: ATOS.The power of TO.

Apple buys Facebook (…or not)

Image by Farid Iqbal via Flickr

Every year Danish Saxo Bank publishes a list of 10 predictions that follow 3 simple rules and that are based on the Black Swan Theory:

1. It is unpredictable
2. It carries massive impact
3. After the fact we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was.

In this years list we see a prediction on Apple and Facebook:

“What do you do when you want domination of the electronic and mobile device consumer market and have no significant presence in social networking? Oh, and a war chest of a mere USD 51 billion? You buy Facebook, the mother lode of (yet to be monetized) social networks. Facebook is worth USD 43 billion, according to sharespost.com. In interviews, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has explained that Apple was in talks with Facebook about partnership opportunities, but that the talks ultimately produced nothing. Facebook was after “onerous terms that we could not agree to”, according to Jobs. At the Web 2.0 Summit Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called for Apple to ease its approach to connecting Ping with Facebook, and said that Apple had to “get on the bus”. Steve Jobs might get on the bus indeed and buy Facebook outright. It makes perfect sense; Facebook doesn’t compete against Apple and it ‘faces up’ to Google, which Jobs loves since Google has become his new number one enemy. It’s a deal made in heaven… The gigantic 500+ million Facebook user base could be integrated across Apple’s consumer products and services - every Facebook user automatically has an iTunes Store account and FaceTime chat is integrated into Facebook chat. That’s a lot of iOS devices.”

Wow, that would be something. BTW this is not the only source talking about this possibility, TUAW did it, Macficionado also reported on this and Gizmodo reported on the dinner date of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg at the beginning of October 2010.

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• Does Apple want to buy Facebook? (tuaw.com)
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• Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg Talked Ping Over Dinner (mashable.com)

SAP to Buy Sybase in $5 Billion Deal – impact on mobile business scenarios?

Image via Wikipedia

News:

Most people will associate SYBASE with their database product, which by the way was at the core of the creation of Microsoft SQL Server:

“The code base for MS SQL Server (prior to version 7.0) originated in Sybase SQL Server, and was Microsoft's entry to the enterprise-level database market, competing against Oracle, IBM, and, later, Sybase. Microsoft, Sybase and Ashton-Tate originally teamed up to create and market the first version named SQL Server 1.0 for OS/2 (about 1989) which was essentially the same as Sybase SQL Server 3.0 on Unix, VMS, etc.”

(source: Wikipedia)

However, Sybase has developed an impressive portfolio of mobile services/apps in the last couple of years. Beside being responsible for handling the SMS services for more than 4 billion phones, it also links different message systems of different phone companies. Sybase also is the owner of Afaria, software for remote management of mobile devices.

SAP AG will undoubtedly make their products run on the Sybase database products and as such widen their platform to run SAP ERP software on; but I think that SAP was more interested in the mobile capabilities of Sybase.

“Yvonne Genovese, an analyst at Gartner, described this mobile technology as “a big deal.” Large companies already started to push their standard business software out to mobile phones, and now they are trying to do more with the data that returns from the devices.”

(source: nytimes.com) 

Using the technology and knowhow of Sybase, we will see an extension of SAP in the mobile business arena. They will be able to connect the shop to the office, using the context aware capabilities of mobile devices and extent this into the consumer arena.

Having said all that, it is probably also very necessary to own a database technology in order to make the vision of an “in-memory-database” a reality. This technology has been pitched by Hasso Plattner (co-founder and Chairman of the Supervisory Board of SAP AG), but has been dismissed by Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation. Mr. Ellison has suggested that SAP does not have the capability to make this vision a reality (and that is just a polite translation of his actual comment - see the video, the question/answer starts at 46:46).

With the acquisition of Sybase, SAP now has an in-house database technology that may help them actually develop this in-memory capability.

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• SAP to Buy Sybase in $5 Billion Deal (nytimes.com)

Courier killed

News:

Microsoft executives have confirmed that the project around the development of a touch and/or stylus based 2-screen tablet “Courier” has been stopped.

Microsoft Corporate VP of communications, Mr. Frank Shaw:

“At any given time, we're looking at new ideas, investigating, testing, incubating them. It's in our DNA to develop new form factors and natural user interfaces to foster productivity and creativity. The Courier project is an example of this type of effort. It will be evaluated for use in future offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time.”

I feel disappointed. Courier bundled a lot of new and innovative ideas and the available information on the device showed great potential for a mobile workforce.

I blogged several times about it and promised myself to be an early adopter as soon as the device would be launched.

Maybe something secret is still lurking within Microsoft, but an iPad (without the current shortcomings) looks to be the most innovative device at the moment and worth a second look (maybe….).

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Apple Buys Siri

Image via CrunchBase

On February 10, 2010, I blogged about Siri and called it “the next chapter of the web”? Well it seems I was not alone in thinking this was a big thing. On April 28, 2010, Apple announced they bought Siri for a undisclosed amount of money (educated guess? between 100 and 200 million dollars).

Some will say this is about Apple going into the ‘search business’ – but I believe it is not that what interests Apple. Their strategy is to create platforms that integrate the web and Siri does exactly that. I have seen the term API-broker or info-orchestration. This kind of strategy allows Apple to build the best platform and have the information infrastructure to make it profitable. With so much experiences in online stores with mini-transactions, we can see a new business model emerging.

In fact, is there really a lot of difference in bringing entertainment content or any other content to a web store? Buying a new song, movie, theater or restaurant reservation is basically all the same. The combination, presented in a very user-friendly way to the consumer brings added value and access to millions of users will reinforce the value.  

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BPOS roadmap 2010 - 2011

About two years ago I started working on building a relationship with Microsoft and their BPOS offering. Last week we have been informed on the roadmap for the next 2 years. Because it is now published on the Mary-Jo Foley weblog, I can share it also with you.

 

Note that BPOS is available in a ‘dedicated’ and ‘standard’ way of delivery. In ‘dedicated’ the customer gets its own set of hardware in the Microsoft datacenter. In ‘standard’, the service is run from a shared hardware platform in a Microsoft datacenter. Both versions are available through a reseller or directly from Microsoft, however Microsoft will not integrated BPOS with your existing application platform. This is the responsibility of your own IT department or system integrator. Selected SI’s will be able to provide BPOS in a reseller construction, allowing for the SI to deliver and invoice BPOS through a single vendor construction.

iPad is here – I’m not buying

(yet)

• No Camera
• No Expansion Slot
• No Multi-Tasking

 

Picture © 2010 bbspot.com
(click picture for PDF version)

The State of the Internet

The numbers are in:

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Microsoft and Amazon.com Sign Patent Agreement

News:

Quote from the press release:

“Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has signed a patent cross-license agreement with Amazon.com Inc. The agreement provides each company with access to the other’s patent portfolio and covers a broad range of products and technology, including coverage for Amazon’s popular e-reading device, Kindle™, which employs both open source and Amazon’s proprietary software components, and Amazon’s use of Linux-based servers.”

Wow. Worlds biggest online retailer + Microsoft Marketplace + Windows Phone 7 Series + Zune + Windows Slate + Kindle + Xbox. The blogs all mention patent-dealing to avoid lawsuits – I am thinking market penetration and platform-share. Put on your conspiracy hat. What do you think they are planning to do?

Oh wait, would this also cover Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure?

[More…]

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Siri – The next chapter of the Web

Image via CrunchBase

News:

Searching is one-dimensional; actions have much more value to us. It is interesting how we are now used to using the Internet in our daily live. Most of our activities focus on engaging with this vast amount of computing power by giving it single-dimensional tasks. We search for an address, maybe for a review of a new mobile phone or any other aspect of our complex live that needs information to proceed.

We as humans are very good in taking the outputs of the internet and combining it into actions and decisions. Putting context to facts and figures enables us to make decisions and actually do something.

“…No more endless clicking on links and pages to get things done on the Internet. Delegate the work to Siri and relax while Siri takes care of it for you…” (www.siri.com)

Siri is about to change this paradigm. By combining existing capabilities with our inquiries on a mobile platform (with strong speech recognition) it can make decisions, take actions on our behalf and answer complex queries in Real Time.

“Siri – I would like to have a taxi in 1 hour…”, is an inquiry that shows what I mean. Siri needs to understand where I am, otherwise it could not dispatch a taxi to the right location. It also has to find a way to actually order a taxi.

It all works based on two starting points: (a) the Programmable Web and (b) the Semantic Web.

Remember I wrote about the fact that we are able to monitor the availability of Internet API’s? There are already dozens of API’s available that allow a process such as Siri to reach out and send commands to the web services that have an API and the number is growing fast. Because most services also have a semantic context attached to it, Siri can distinguish between a taxi or a limousine service. When other data on the web also gets a semantic context, not only API’s will be available to Siri – but also storylines, opinions, emotions and priorities.

The creators of Siri have establish an engine that can already talk with dozens of API’s. These include restaurant services, music, movie, taxi, local shopping, weather and airline services. This allows you to ask very complex questions such as: “Siri, I want to see a movie with Clark Gable in about an hour, can you order me the transport and tickets for this?” or “Siri, please order a table for 2 in my favorite Chinese restaurant, next Thursday at 9:00 pm”.

This all is run through an iPhone app with apparently excellent speech recognition and the developers have stated other mobile platforms will follow shortly.Go to www.siri.com for the full story.

I do not know if Siri is going to make it, but they have some serious money behind them as stated in their interview with Robert Scoble. Even if this particular company is not going to make it – I predict this is the next killer app for any platform and a whole new way of utilizing the power of the Internet.

Siri is being described as a ‘Do-Engine’ to explain the difference to a ‘Search-Engine’. More of these applications are emerging as Personal Assistant Apps.

Star Trek comments are allowed, but this is real now and it works.