Sweeping away a sector’s chaos
By Ross Tieman
Published: May 28 2008 01:25 | Last updated: May 28 2008 01:25
It sounds like an apocryphal story, but Nigel Woodward, London-based director of financial services at Intel, insists it is true.
“At one of the big UK clearing banks, the core accounting system still does calculations in pounds, shillings and pence,” he says. Decimalisation was introduced in the UK in 1971, 37 years ago.
The scale of the IT transformation needed in many areas of the financial industry is mind-boggling. Cobbled-together systems are still the bedrock of a hugely expanded sector accounting for an estimated 7 per cent of global gross domestic product.
While bad systems did not cause the present credit crisis, they probably contributed. “Some big banks failed to keep track of the risks as the volumes built up,” says Intel’s Mr Woodward.
He uses the example of sub-prime mortgages. When a bank bought a collateralised debt obligation (CDO), “was the transaction recorded and tracked back to a residential property in Texas,” he asks. “The bank might already have had a full exposure to property in Texas but didn’t know.”
Technology-enabled scale allowed traders to run ahead of banks’ ability to measure risk, he says. And when regulators and auditors started demanding answers about the scale of banks’ exposure, extracting the information from fragmented systems and databases was difficult and time-consuming. Hence revisions to banks’ profit warnings, as the scale of risk was progressively uncovered.
Jeremy Badman, partner in the strategic IT and operations practice focusing on investment banks at Oliver Wyman, highlights the problem that arose with credit default swaps, a mechanism used by banks to lay off risk that has turned into a market measured in trillions of dollars.
It started as a market where people fixed deals by phone, recorded them on a spreadsheet and faxed contracts. Back-office processing was manual. But as volumes increased, settlement remained manual, and three-month piles of unmatched contracts built up – alarming regulators over uncertain risk positions.
The lesson, says Mr Badman, is that technology has to support innovation, and processes must be “industrialised” quickly when a new product is successful. The trouble is that many financial institutions find this hard, because they rely on gummed-up legacy systems.
Rudy Puryear, global head of the IT practice at consultant Bain, explains: “Many of the IT solutions have been layered on over 15 or 20 years or more. In the 1990s everyone went out and wanted to buy a best-of-breed solution and then had to bolt that on to the legacy system. Then everybody wanted web access, plus companies have made acquisitions of companies using different systems.
“Almost every organisation I have walked into has a huge amount of unnecessary complexity in IT. It drives up cost and it slows down response in terms of time-to-market. We want IT to be an enabler of change. Right now it is very often like a block of concrete, adding rigidity to organisations.”
His recommendations? “You have to recognise that you have a complexity problem and that it is bad. It is driving up cost and constraining the ability to respond to the market-place and it is using up more and more IT dollars.
“You have to start saying you are not going to introduce more complexity. You have to create a future-state view of where you want to migrate this to in, say, five years time. You need to push a lot of shared, common, off-the-shelf solutions. So, as you make incremental decisions, you can measure it against how it helps you towards your desired five-year target.”
One example of this kind of thinking in action is Oyster, a ticketing system for Transport for London, by which users pay fares with a smart card, which stores cash, and can be used to pay for travel and other services.
Jonathan Charley, head of banking, Europe, at EDS, which advised on Oyster’s creation, says it was built as a stand-alone solution because “to integrate it into an existing system would have been a huge challenge”. The system was built on an off-the-shelf package of services-oriented architecture, put together “like Lego bricks”.
Clipping on ready-made flexible units that can take over tasks fragmented across existing systems seems a promising way forward. Charles Marston, who previously worked in the interest rate derivatives operation of a bank, founded systems and software company Calypso in San Francisco in 1997 to develop a universal front and back office platform.
Today, Calypso offers an off-the-shelf system that can be used to trade a host of financial instruments, from spot foreign exchange via derivatives to equities and commodities, yet which also supports straight-through back office tasks such as settlement, and allows banks to capture the data they need for risk and capital management. About 80 institutions have bought the system, including HSBC, Dresdner and Calyon.
As Peter Van der Vorst, chief financial officer of Sybase, an integration, data management and platform company, points out, one of the biggest challenges for many financial firms is keeping pace with the need to process vast and booming volumes of information at appropriate speeds.
So Sybase has just launched a product called RAP, designed to handle algorithmic computer-based trading, service the data needs of the quantitative analysts who write the algo programmes, and deliver the data needed to monitor trades for risk management and compliance.
Retail institutions, too, are finding legacy systems an encumbrance to business development. Nationwide, a UK building society, has decided to embark on a wholesale system renewal using an off-the-shelf solution from software house SAP.
Darin Brumby, divisional director for business systems transformation at Nationwide, says shifting to a new platform will enable it to introduce new products – different kinds of account, for example, and a suite of mortgages – that the current system cannot support.
It will also allow improvements to front and back office organisation. It is tantamount to creating a new building society around the changed market and customer needs. Although it is costly, “we think there is a good first-mover advantage”, he says.
SAP and US rival Oracle believe a pre-integrated offering is the best solution. Over the past few years they have been positioning themselves for the colossal orders that are beginning to flow as financial institutions start replacing legacy systems.
Rajesh Hukku, senior vice-president of financial services at Oracle, reckons the company has spent $30bn buying best-of-breed suppliers and developing a pre-built application integration architecture.
This one-stop-shop purchase of a core banking architecture with the features of your choice that are all promised to work seamlessly has won some other big converts. Citibank, the world’s biggest with 350,000 staff, is among them, replacing 59 versions of its old corporate banking system with a single Oracle solution, in which, for example, a base in Singapore services 14 banking operations in Asia. It is, says Mr Hukku, the biggest legacy system replacement ever.
The idea is that each bit can access all the data, and off-the shelf packages of analytics, for example, will keep a bank compliant with Basel II regulations, credit risk, and liability management, while assuring the flexibility to add in regulatory changes without complicating or compromising performance. “Two plus two equals five, if not 11,” Mr Hukku says.
It sounds like nirvana. And today, maybe it is. But will it still be the best answer in 10, or even five years? “We know that things will change,” says Mr Hukku, “but the basic requirement will always be to look at core data in certain aggregations.”
David Hunt, head of technology consulting at Capgemini Financial Services, agrees on the importance of data, but cautions that the IT industry still does not necessarily deliver all the right answers. “What we are not good at, as technologists, is doing that low-cost, throw-away innovation,” he says.
Yet financial services firms need to experiment with products as consumer technology changes.
Today’s private bank customers “may be happy to come to the office and have a fat cigar, but their inheritors might want to bank on their X-box 360 or mobile phone,” says Mr Hunt.
Tomorrow’s systems won’t just need to be agile, he says. In consumer, as well as investment banking, they will need to support rapid innovation of products, and rapid industrialisation of those that succeed.
It is a far cry from the days when they wrote that program in pounds, shillings and pence. Financial businesses are learning that they cannot see far into the future. System designers must learn not even to try.
Jerry Norton, head of financial services at consulting and software group Logica, deserves the last word. A layered approach that separates fundamental systems from distribution channels can help. But fundamentally, it’s about philosophy, he says. “Most other things – consumer products, even buildings – have a design life-time.”
Sure, a general ledger doesn’t change much. But isn’t it time systems were sold with an end-of-use date warning?
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
e-Spirit AG präsentiert Informationsmanagement für international agierende Unternehmen
Content-Management-System FirstSpirit 4 integriert die Mehrzahl aller externen Datenquellen nahtlos in Portale
Auf den Intranet.days 2008 im Sheraton Hotel in Frankfurt/Offenbach zeigt der Gold Sponsor e-Spirit AG die aktuelle Version seines Content-Management-Systems FirstSpirit. Vom 4. bis zum 5. Juni 2008 bietet das international tätige Produkthaus ausführliche Informationen zu konzeptionellen, technischen und organisatorischen Aspekten in Intranets. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei neben effektivem Datenmanagement auch die Portalintegration.
Basierend auf Erfahrungen aus Intranet-Projekten für renommierte Kunden wie Endress+Hauser, Schaeffler Gruppe, OTTO, Robert Bosch, Würth oder EADS informieren die Experten von e-Spirit darüber, wie selbst höchste Ansprüche an Leistungsfähigkeit, Modul-Erweiterungen und Anbindungen von Datenquellen durch kundenspezifische Anpassungen von FirstSpirit erfüllt werden können. Durch die Möglichkeit der Anbindung fast aller externen Datenquellen mit Konnektoren bietet FirstSpirit größte Flexibilität und Komfort, wie z. B. eine Vorschau unabhängig vom Dateityp. Dank der in FirstSpirit vorhandenen APIs (Application Protocol Interfaces) können kundenspezifische Datenbanken und Systeme zusätzlich mit geringem Aufwand angebunden werden.
27.05.2008, Christiane Capps
Auf den Intranet.days 2008 im Sheraton Hotel in Frankfurt/Offenbach zeigt der Gold Sponsor e-Spirit AG die aktuelle Version seines Content-Management-Systems FirstSpirit. Vom 4. bis zum 5. Juni 2008 bietet das international tätige Produkthaus ausführliche Informationen zu konzeptionellen, technischen und organisatorischen Aspekten in Intranets. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei neben effektivem Datenmanagement auch die Portalintegration.
Basierend auf Erfahrungen aus Intranet-Projekten für renommierte Kunden wie Endress+Hauser, Schaeffler Gruppe, OTTO, Robert Bosch, Würth oder EADS informieren die Experten von e-Spirit darüber, wie selbst höchste Ansprüche an Leistungsfähigkeit, Modul-Erweiterungen und Anbindungen von Datenquellen durch kundenspezifische Anpassungen von FirstSpirit erfüllt werden können. Durch die Möglichkeit der Anbindung fast aller externen Datenquellen mit Konnektoren bietet FirstSpirit größte Flexibilität und Komfort, wie z. B. eine Vorschau unabhängig vom Dateityp. Dank der in FirstSpirit vorhandenen APIs (Application Protocol Interfaces) können kundenspezifische Datenbanken und Systeme zusätzlich mit geringem Aufwand angebunden werden.
27.05.2008, Christiane Capps
Monday, May 26, 2008
Web 2.0 euphoria tempered by social problems
Web 2.0 euphoria tempered by social problems
By Chris Nuttall and Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: May 26 2008 18:46 | Last updated: May 26 2008 18:46
Facebook’s announcement a year ago that it would open up its social network to let applications from other companies on to its “platform” marked a peak for Silicon Valley’s Web 2.0 euphoria.
The move touched off a wave of enthusiasm for making “widgets” – mini-applications that internet users can plant on their Facebook page or on other websites. By grabbing the attention of the millions of users on social networks, the companies making these new portable applications dreamed of tapping into a vast new market.
A year on, the much-talked of “widget economy” has failed to take off. In their entirety, widget makers are making only about $40m in annual revenue, according to Will Price, chief executive of Widgetbox, a website that acts as a catalogue for the applications.
Max Levchin, chief executive of Slide, the most successful of the widget-makers, declines to discuss finances, though he says that only “two or three” companies have achieved the scale where they can make revenues “in the high single to low double-digit millions [of dollars]”.
For the rest, widgets have become a cottage industry. Some developers have made enough of a living from creating widgets to be able to quit their regular jobs, says Howard Hartenbaum, a partner at venture capital firm August Capital. But these are likely to remain very small businesses, he adds.
“I can’t say with any confidence that any of the widget companies have figured out a sustainable revenue model,” says Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Hummer Winblad, a venture capital firm.
The difficulties of the widget companies point to a broader problem that has beset the crowded Web 2.0 landscape. The wave of “social media” companies that has arisen since the middle of this decade, many of them characterised by user-generated content and new forms of communications, has changed the way millions of people interact and entertain themselves online.
Yet, by their nature, these new forms of behaviour are proving extremely difficult to turn into hard cash.
At the start of the decade, Google struggled to find a suitable way to make money from search before alighting on the keyword advertising that has underpinned its fortune. A similar hunt for forms of advertising that suit the social media – where users want to engage with each other, not corporate brands – has proved difficult. By common consent, the key to commercial success lies in co-opting the crowd, though few have so far succeeded.
“The core strength is the communication between people and the network,” says Martin Green, head of business development at Meebo.
“They send each other tons of links, refer things to each other and if you can put ads into that stream in a way that users pull it through, not hijack those relationships, then we think you’re halfway there.”
Even those companies that hit on a way to meld adverts with their media are likely to discover few advertisers ready to try it out.
“Social media is ahead of the capacity of the advertisers to take advantage of it,” says Mr Price at Widgetbox. The standardised units of advertising and methods of measurement needed for this medium have yet to be developed, he adds. “Real spend has been held hostage by that lack of analytics and what we’ve been relegated to is fighting for experimental budgets that don’t require clear proof of value.”
Meanwhile, many Web 2.0 companies face another challenge. Four or more years since the movement began, the winners, at least in terms of users, are starting to emerge. Many others can still dream of winning “viral” adoption, as millions are drawn to their services by word of mouth, but setting themselves apart from the crowd is getting harder.
“Some of those companies have risen to the top and people are beginning to believe they will have an overwhelming advantage in the market,” says Mike Maples, who runs a micro-cap fund whose investments include Twitter, a micro-blogging site, and Digg, a news aggregator.
It is only natural, he adds, that the winners in this race for audience attention will end up with “mass adoption and user attention before you necessarily recognise where the revenue comes from”.
That was the thinking behind a few winners – and many losers – from the first generation of consumer dotcoms at the end of the 1990s. Something similar looks in store for Web 2.0.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
By Chris Nuttall and Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: May 26 2008 18:46 | Last updated: May 26 2008 18:46
Facebook’s announcement a year ago that it would open up its social network to let applications from other companies on to its “platform” marked a peak for Silicon Valley’s Web 2.0 euphoria.
The move touched off a wave of enthusiasm for making “widgets” – mini-applications that internet users can plant on their Facebook page or on other websites. By grabbing the attention of the millions of users on social networks, the companies making these new portable applications dreamed of tapping into a vast new market.
A year on, the much-talked of “widget economy” has failed to take off. In their entirety, widget makers are making only about $40m in annual revenue, according to Will Price, chief executive of Widgetbox, a website that acts as a catalogue for the applications.
Max Levchin, chief executive of Slide, the most successful of the widget-makers, declines to discuss finances, though he says that only “two or three” companies have achieved the scale where they can make revenues “in the high single to low double-digit millions [of dollars]”.
For the rest, widgets have become a cottage industry. Some developers have made enough of a living from creating widgets to be able to quit their regular jobs, says Howard Hartenbaum, a partner at venture capital firm August Capital. But these are likely to remain very small businesses, he adds.
“I can’t say with any confidence that any of the widget companies have figured out a sustainable revenue model,” says Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Hummer Winblad, a venture capital firm.
The difficulties of the widget companies point to a broader problem that has beset the crowded Web 2.0 landscape. The wave of “social media” companies that has arisen since the middle of this decade, many of them characterised by user-generated content and new forms of communications, has changed the way millions of people interact and entertain themselves online.
Yet, by their nature, these new forms of behaviour are proving extremely difficult to turn into hard cash.
At the start of the decade, Google struggled to find a suitable way to make money from search before alighting on the keyword advertising that has underpinned its fortune. A similar hunt for forms of advertising that suit the social media – where users want to engage with each other, not corporate brands – has proved difficult. By common consent, the key to commercial success lies in co-opting the crowd, though few have so far succeeded.
“The core strength is the communication between people and the network,” says Martin Green, head of business development at Meebo.
“They send each other tons of links, refer things to each other and if you can put ads into that stream in a way that users pull it through, not hijack those relationships, then we think you’re halfway there.”
Even those companies that hit on a way to meld adverts with their media are likely to discover few advertisers ready to try it out.
“Social media is ahead of the capacity of the advertisers to take advantage of it,” says Mr Price at Widgetbox. The standardised units of advertising and methods of measurement needed for this medium have yet to be developed, he adds. “Real spend has been held hostage by that lack of analytics and what we’ve been relegated to is fighting for experimental budgets that don’t require clear proof of value.”
Meanwhile, many Web 2.0 companies face another challenge. Four or more years since the movement began, the winners, at least in terms of users, are starting to emerge. Many others can still dream of winning “viral” adoption, as millions are drawn to their services by word of mouth, but setting themselves apart from the crowd is getting harder.
“Some of those companies have risen to the top and people are beginning to believe they will have an overwhelming advantage in the market,” says Mike Maples, who runs a micro-cap fund whose investments include Twitter, a micro-blogging site, and Digg, a news aggregator.
It is only natural, he adds, that the winners in this race for audience attention will end up with “mass adoption and user attention before you necessarily recognise where the revenue comes from”.
That was the thinking behind a few winners – and many losers – from the first generation of consumer dotcoms at the end of the 1990s. Something similar looks in store for Web 2.0.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Web 2.0 fails to produce cash
Web 2.0 fails to produce cash
By Richard Waters and Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: May 26 2008 19:18 | Last updated: May 26 2008 19:18
Many members of the Web 2.0 generation of internet companies have so far produced little in the way of revenue, despite bringing about some significant changes in online behaviour, according to some of the entrepreneurs and financiers behind the movement.
The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.
“There is going to be a shake-out here in the next year or two” as many Web 2.0 companies disappear, said Roger Lee, a partner at Battery Ventures.
“These are challenging macro-economic conditions,” said Shawn Hardin, chief executive of Flock, a browser maker that raised $15m in venture capital last week.
Yet that has not stopped a continuing round of venture capital fundraising and acquisition activity at high valuations as investors and corporate acquirers hunt for businesses capable of rising above a crowded field.
“If you look at some of the valuations, you wonder what fantasy of revenues they’re based on,” said Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Hummer Winblad.
In one sign of the continued hopes for start-ups that have yet to alight on a solid business model, several financiers expressed support for the private fundraising being undertaken by Twitter, one of Silicon Valley’s most talked-about companies. The “micro-blogging” service, whose users post messages no more than 40 characters long, has yet to find a way to make money, but its early adoption by a group of enthusiastic users is seen as a sign that it will eventually be successful.
Other recent venture capital deals have included fundraisings that have put valuations of about $500m each on Slide, a maker of “widgets”, small applications that are carried on social networks, and Ning, a social networking platform founded by Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of browser maker Netscape.
Despite the slow start to money-making by Web 2.0 companies, the trend towards more social online behaviour that it embodies is widely claimed by insiders to be of lasting significance.
“The capabilities that are coming with Web 2.0 are very profound,” said Devin Wenig, head of the markets division of Thomson Reuters. “The Valley is usually right, and it’s usually early.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
By Richard Waters and Chris Nuttall in San Francisco
Published: May 26 2008 19:18 | Last updated: May 26 2008 19:18
Many members of the Web 2.0 generation of internet companies have so far produced little in the way of revenue, despite bringing about some significant changes in online behaviour, according to some of the entrepreneurs and financiers behind the movement.
The shortage of revenue among social networks, blogs and other “social media” sites that put user-generated content and communications at their core has persisted despite more than four years of experimentation aimed at turning such sites into money-makers. Together with the US economic downturn and a shortage of initial public offerings, the failure has damped the mood in internet start-up circles.
“There is going to be a shake-out here in the next year or two” as many Web 2.0 companies disappear, said Roger Lee, a partner at Battery Ventures.
“These are challenging macro-economic conditions,” said Shawn Hardin, chief executive of Flock, a browser maker that raised $15m in venture capital last week.
Yet that has not stopped a continuing round of venture capital fundraising and acquisition activity at high valuations as investors and corporate acquirers hunt for businesses capable of rising above a crowded field.
“If you look at some of the valuations, you wonder what fantasy of revenues they’re based on,” said Mitchell Kertzman, a partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Hummer Winblad.
In one sign of the continued hopes for start-ups that have yet to alight on a solid business model, several financiers expressed support for the private fundraising being undertaken by Twitter, one of Silicon Valley’s most talked-about companies. The “micro-blogging” service, whose users post messages no more than 40 characters long, has yet to find a way to make money, but its early adoption by a group of enthusiastic users is seen as a sign that it will eventually be successful.
Other recent venture capital deals have included fundraisings that have put valuations of about $500m each on Slide, a maker of “widgets”, small applications that are carried on social networks, and Ning, a social networking platform founded by Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of browser maker Netscape.
Despite the slow start to money-making by Web 2.0 companies, the trend towards more social online behaviour that it embodies is widely claimed by insiders to be of lasting significance.
“The capabilities that are coming with Web 2.0 are very profound,” said Devin Wenig, head of the markets division of Thomson Reuters. “The Valley is usually right, and it’s usually early.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Way to go? Mapping looks to be the web’s next big thing
Way to go? Mapping looks to be the web’s next big thing
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: May 21 2008 19:04 | Last updated: May 21 2008 19:04
When European regulators last week cleared the €2.9bn ($4.5bn, £2.3bn) purchase of TeleAtlas, a digital mapping company, by TomTom, the maker of navigation devices, they were giving a nudge along to one of the hottest business fads on the internet.
Approval for that deal makes it almost certain that a bigger transaction will also get the nod: Nokia’s proposed $8.1bn purchase of Navteq, the largest acquisition undertaken by the mobile handset maker.
Navteq’s database of maps covers more than 70 countries. Yet as a source for the next world-changing online idea, digital maps might appear a distinctly unpromising place to start. These basic graphical representations of the world seem a rather humdrum commodity, hardly a key to unlocking the riches of the internet.
That is not how it appears to Nokia. Anssi Vanjoki, a senior executive of the Finnish company, recently summed up the reason for its acquisition: “We can locate our experiences, our history, on the map. It’s a very concrete expression of a context.” Displayed on the bigger, higher-resolution screens that are becoming more common on mobile handsets, maps can become “a user interface to many things”.
This is turning into a prevailing view in the internet industry – partly because mapping does not stop at simple two-dimensional representations. Mike Liebhold, a veteran technologist who is now a fellow at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future, calls it a “3D data arms race”, with some of the biggest technology companies rushing to amass vast libraries of information describing the world in painstaking detail.
Erik Jorgensen, a senior executive in Microsoft’s online operations, says the software company is building a “digital representation of the globe to a high degree of accuracy” that will bring about “a change in how you think about the internet”. He adds: “We’re very much betting on a paradigm shift. We believe it will be a way that people can socialise, shop and share information.”
The bet, in short, is that the map is about to become the interface to many of the things people do on the internet – and that the company that controls this interface could one day own something as prevalent and powerful as Google’s simple search box. This proposition takes on added power when applied to the mobile world. Displayed on location-aware handsets, digital maps can be used to order information around the user. The information that matters most is information about things that are closest.
That explains why a car navigation company and a maker of mobile phones are leading the charge. A collision with established internet powers such as Google, which has itself identified the mobile internet as its next big money-making opportunity, is inevitable.
Reordering the internet around this new geographic interface is a project that has been under way for some time. It starts with what engineers at Google call the “base canvas” – a detailed digital representation of the physical world on to which other information can be “hung”. Thanks to the plunging costs of technologies such as digital imaging and geolocation equipment, the world is being mapped, measured, plotted and photographed in almost unimaginable detail.
At one end of the spectrum are people like Steve Coast, a British amateur who is hoping to create a communal map of the world as comprehensive as Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. Volunteers who contribute to Mr Coast’s OpenStreetMap.org literally redraw the map. “You buy a GPS [global positioning system] unit and cycle around the roads,” he says. “It drops a data point every second, like Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs.” Collecting those data points and joining the dots is the first step in sketching a map of the road network.
At the other extreme are the likes of Google, which is approaching the task with its usual unbounded ambition. “Our goal is to make a kind of mirror world, a replica world,” declares John Hanke, head of its Google Earth unit.
Many of these data are being gathered through painstaking methods and put into private databases. For instance, Navteq and TeleAtlas each use their own fleets of vehicles to collect a mass of street-level information useful to motorists but not shown on official maps – covering everything from speed limits and one-way streets to big construction projects.
These are not the only trucks and vans crawling the kerbsides of cities to suck up information. Google is there too. “Every five feet or so, we’re capturing a 360-degree image that is many megapixels,” says Mr Hanke. Those pictures add a detailed street-level view. Microsoft, not to be outdone, has taken to the air. It has gone as far as designing and building specialised cameras, flying them around to collect three-dimensional images using a technology called Lidar, a variant of radar.
This is about more than mapping and photographing the planet. It also involves modelling it, collecting enough geographic and spatial data points to be able to render a detailed digital version. With a service called Sketch-up, for instance, Google lets users draw their own digital models of real-world buildings and add them to its 3D “warehouse”.
These are expensive undertakings and are based on an untested proposition: that the resulting digital representations will form the new backdrop for a whole range of money-making online activities. Also, with several companies all racing to create what are essentially the same basic geo-spatial frameworks, the costs have been multiplied across a number of rivals.
Yet it is not hard to see how these companies justify the costs to themselves: gross profit margins on internet search are above 80 per cent and, for any company that can generate scale, these development costs are likely to pale by comparison. In addition, as the acquisitions of TeleAtlas and Navteq show, companies that have created parts of what could become the web’s next compelling interface already command high values.
Digital representations like these can be used to meet a basic human need, according to the companies that are racing to outdo each other in their exhaustive rendering of the real world. “You can see it on the cave walls: this is where the animals are, this is where we are,” says Mr Hanke at Google. “This is dinner, how do we get there and get home again?”
The cave walls have been replaced by the worldwide web and the tools have grown more sophisticated but the idea is the same. For an internet service that can place itself at the centre of this – guiding the modern hunter to dinner or performing other geographically relevant tasks – there may be serious money to be made.
Imagine, says Mr Jorgensen at Microsoft, that you are going to the theatre: you will probably want to find other things nearby, like a place to park and a restaurant, so it makes sense to search by location. “Sometimes, to go to a place and find all the information associated with it is easier than regular search,” he says. Advertisers might well pay a premium to reach internet users who are looking for things with that level of geographic specificity.
Mr Hanke adds that this type of search interface obviates the need to type in keywords – just go to a digital map and browse around. “Geography is another way, a different way, to organise information,” he says. “As human beings, we inherently understand geography.”
All of this works, however, only if information on the web is indexed geographically. That means adding machine-readable “tags” to documents to indicate the location to which they refer: think of it like sticking Post-it notes on to web documents, says Mr Liebhold – labelling information so it can be sorted and found in a different way.
Mr Jorgensen at Microsoft estimates that 60-80 per cent of web pages have geographically relevant information on them and could be indexed like this. Viewed on a mobile phone that knows its location (handsets incorporating GPS are set to become more common in the next two years), these ubiquitous digital maps and the new “geoweb” could become a powerful force. Ask for a restaurant and the handset would be able to show where the nearest one is, along with how to get there and an option to book a table by text message.
But why stop there? Once the basic building blocks are in place, the interplay between the virtual world and the real world could become much more inventive. Using a geographically “aware” handset, says Mr Jorgensen, the user could simply issue an instruction to “show everything around me” on a particular subject: the device could trawl the web and filter and present information based on proximity.
Even seemingly fanciful ideas would become possible using these basic technologies, according to Ian Holt, who leads an advanced technology group at Ordnance Survey, the UK mapping agency. Why not location-aware spectacles? “As you look around, they will overlay data about what you’re looking at,” he says, like the “heads-up” displays used by fighter pilots.
According to the technocrats, ideas such as this are a stepping stone towards a future digital playground called “augmented reality”. It is a place where the real world becomes a frame on which to present information. Virtual reality would be turned inside out: rather than retreating into a make-believe virtual world, inhabitants of augmented reality will be living in real space but with layers of data overlaid to deliver a supercharged version of reality.
Using these technologies, real or fictitious information could be “mapped” on to the real world to create new experiences, says Mr Liebhold at the Institute for the Future. “At the click of a mouse, this street could be converted into a space colony or a mediaeval village. This hints at an enormous new entertainment industry.”
For now, ideas of this ilk still sound fanciful. Attempts to project how particular technologies will be used have a habit of missing the mark and can often seem quaint in retrospect. However, that does not weaken the force of those technologies or their long-term impact. The project to render the physical world in digital form, down to small levels of detail, marks one of those turning points in the information age that could change everything.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
By Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: May 21 2008 19:04 | Last updated: May 21 2008 19:04
When European regulators last week cleared the €2.9bn ($4.5bn, £2.3bn) purchase of TeleAtlas, a digital mapping company, by TomTom, the maker of navigation devices, they were giving a nudge along to one of the hottest business fads on the internet.
Approval for that deal makes it almost certain that a bigger transaction will also get the nod: Nokia’s proposed $8.1bn purchase of Navteq, the largest acquisition undertaken by the mobile handset maker.
Navteq’s database of maps covers more than 70 countries. Yet as a source for the next world-changing online idea, digital maps might appear a distinctly unpromising place to start. These basic graphical representations of the world seem a rather humdrum commodity, hardly a key to unlocking the riches of the internet.
That is not how it appears to Nokia. Anssi Vanjoki, a senior executive of the Finnish company, recently summed up the reason for its acquisition: “We can locate our experiences, our history, on the map. It’s a very concrete expression of a context.” Displayed on the bigger, higher-resolution screens that are becoming more common on mobile handsets, maps can become “a user interface to many things”.
This is turning into a prevailing view in the internet industry – partly because mapping does not stop at simple two-dimensional representations. Mike Liebhold, a veteran technologist who is now a fellow at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future, calls it a “3D data arms race”, with some of the biggest technology companies rushing to amass vast libraries of information describing the world in painstaking detail.
Erik Jorgensen, a senior executive in Microsoft’s online operations, says the software company is building a “digital representation of the globe to a high degree of accuracy” that will bring about “a change in how you think about the internet”. He adds: “We’re very much betting on a paradigm shift. We believe it will be a way that people can socialise, shop and share information.”
The bet, in short, is that the map is about to become the interface to many of the things people do on the internet – and that the company that controls this interface could one day own something as prevalent and powerful as Google’s simple search box. This proposition takes on added power when applied to the mobile world. Displayed on location-aware handsets, digital maps can be used to order information around the user. The information that matters most is information about things that are closest.
That explains why a car navigation company and a maker of mobile phones are leading the charge. A collision with established internet powers such as Google, which has itself identified the mobile internet as its next big money-making opportunity, is inevitable.
Reordering the internet around this new geographic interface is a project that has been under way for some time. It starts with what engineers at Google call the “base canvas” – a detailed digital representation of the physical world on to which other information can be “hung”. Thanks to the plunging costs of technologies such as digital imaging and geolocation equipment, the world is being mapped, measured, plotted and photographed in almost unimaginable detail.
At one end of the spectrum are people like Steve Coast, a British amateur who is hoping to create a communal map of the world as comprehensive as Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. Volunteers who contribute to Mr Coast’s OpenStreetMap.org literally redraw the map. “You buy a GPS [global positioning system] unit and cycle around the roads,” he says. “It drops a data point every second, like Hansel and Gretel dropping breadcrumbs.” Collecting those data points and joining the dots is the first step in sketching a map of the road network.
At the other extreme are the likes of Google, which is approaching the task with its usual unbounded ambition. “Our goal is to make a kind of mirror world, a replica world,” declares John Hanke, head of its Google Earth unit.
Many of these data are being gathered through painstaking methods and put into private databases. For instance, Navteq and TeleAtlas each use their own fleets of vehicles to collect a mass of street-level information useful to motorists but not shown on official maps – covering everything from speed limits and one-way streets to big construction projects.
These are not the only trucks and vans crawling the kerbsides of cities to suck up information. Google is there too. “Every five feet or so, we’re capturing a 360-degree image that is many megapixels,” says Mr Hanke. Those pictures add a detailed street-level view. Microsoft, not to be outdone, has taken to the air. It has gone as far as designing and building specialised cameras, flying them around to collect three-dimensional images using a technology called Lidar, a variant of radar.
This is about more than mapping and photographing the planet. It also involves modelling it, collecting enough geographic and spatial data points to be able to render a detailed digital version. With a service called Sketch-up, for instance, Google lets users draw their own digital models of real-world buildings and add them to its 3D “warehouse”.
These are expensive undertakings and are based on an untested proposition: that the resulting digital representations will form the new backdrop for a whole range of money-making online activities. Also, with several companies all racing to create what are essentially the same basic geo-spatial frameworks, the costs have been multiplied across a number of rivals.
Yet it is not hard to see how these companies justify the costs to themselves: gross profit margins on internet search are above 80 per cent and, for any company that can generate scale, these development costs are likely to pale by comparison. In addition, as the acquisitions of TeleAtlas and Navteq show, companies that have created parts of what could become the web’s next compelling interface already command high values.
Digital representations like these can be used to meet a basic human need, according to the companies that are racing to outdo each other in their exhaustive rendering of the real world. “You can see it on the cave walls: this is where the animals are, this is where we are,” says Mr Hanke at Google. “This is dinner, how do we get there and get home again?”
The cave walls have been replaced by the worldwide web and the tools have grown more sophisticated but the idea is the same. For an internet service that can place itself at the centre of this – guiding the modern hunter to dinner or performing other geographically relevant tasks – there may be serious money to be made.
Imagine, says Mr Jorgensen at Microsoft, that you are going to the theatre: you will probably want to find other things nearby, like a place to park and a restaurant, so it makes sense to search by location. “Sometimes, to go to a place and find all the information associated with it is easier than regular search,” he says. Advertisers might well pay a premium to reach internet users who are looking for things with that level of geographic specificity.
Mr Hanke adds that this type of search interface obviates the need to type in keywords – just go to a digital map and browse around. “Geography is another way, a different way, to organise information,” he says. “As human beings, we inherently understand geography.”
All of this works, however, only if information on the web is indexed geographically. That means adding machine-readable “tags” to documents to indicate the location to which they refer: think of it like sticking Post-it notes on to web documents, says Mr Liebhold – labelling information so it can be sorted and found in a different way.
Mr Jorgensen at Microsoft estimates that 60-80 per cent of web pages have geographically relevant information on them and could be indexed like this. Viewed on a mobile phone that knows its location (handsets incorporating GPS are set to become more common in the next two years), these ubiquitous digital maps and the new “geoweb” could become a powerful force. Ask for a restaurant and the handset would be able to show where the nearest one is, along with how to get there and an option to book a table by text message.
But why stop there? Once the basic building blocks are in place, the interplay between the virtual world and the real world could become much more inventive. Using a geographically “aware” handset, says Mr Jorgensen, the user could simply issue an instruction to “show everything around me” on a particular subject: the device could trawl the web and filter and present information based on proximity.
Even seemingly fanciful ideas would become possible using these basic technologies, according to Ian Holt, who leads an advanced technology group at Ordnance Survey, the UK mapping agency. Why not location-aware spectacles? “As you look around, they will overlay data about what you’re looking at,” he says, like the “heads-up” displays used by fighter pilots.
According to the technocrats, ideas such as this are a stepping stone towards a future digital playground called “augmented reality”. It is a place where the real world becomes a frame on which to present information. Virtual reality would be turned inside out: rather than retreating into a make-believe virtual world, inhabitants of augmented reality will be living in real space but with layers of data overlaid to deliver a supercharged version of reality.
Using these technologies, real or fictitious information could be “mapped” on to the real world to create new experiences, says Mr Liebhold at the Institute for the Future. “At the click of a mouse, this street could be converted into a space colony or a mediaeval village. This hints at an enormous new entertainment industry.”
For now, ideas of this ilk still sound fanciful. Attempts to project how particular technologies will be used have a habit of missing the mark and can often seem quaint in retrospect. However, that does not weaken the force of those technologies or their long-term impact. The project to render the physical world in digital form, down to small levels of detail, marks one of those turning points in the information age that could change everything.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Forum "Portalintegration" der e-Spirit AG in Frankfurt am Main
Publizieren in komplexen Portalumgebungen mit FirstSpirit - Exklusives Praxisbeispiel des Pharmakonzerns Merz
Die e-Spirit AG, Hersteller des Content-Management-Systems (CMS) FirstSpirit, veranstaltet am 25. Mai 2008 im Japan Center in Frankfurt am Main das Forum "Publizieren leicht gemacht - FirstSpirit im Portal". Fokus der halbtägigen Veranstaltung ist die Pflege redaktioneller Inhalte in der Umgebung der drei großen Portale von IBM, SAP und Microsoft.
Ein exklusives Beispiel aus der Praxis bietet dabei der internationale Healthcare-Konzern Merz GmbH & Co. KGaA: Im Rahmen des Forums gewährt das Unternehmen erstmals Einblicke in sein Intranet und schildert die Praxiserfahrungen mit FirstSpirit.
In weiteren Fachvorträgen informieren Gastredner der Firmen IBM Global Business Services, adesso AG und HLP Informationsmanagement GmbH über FirstSpirit und seine Einsatzmöglichkeiten in den unterschiedlichen Portalen.
Namhafte Unternehmen wie EADS, Commerzbank, Robert Bosch GmbH und OTTO setzen seit Jahren FirstSpirit zur Integration in die großen Portale ein. Im Rahmen des Portalforums wird in verschiedenen Fachvorträgen dargestellt, wie das CMS von e-Spirit den spezifischen Anforderungen komplexer Umgebungen im SAP NetWeaver Portal, IBM WebSphere Portal und mit dem Microsoft Office SharePoint Server begegnet.
Weiterhin konnte Dr. Andrea Kreißelmeier, Head of Corporate Communications der Firma Merz, als Rednerin gewonnen werden. In einem exklusiven Vortrag berichtet sie erstmals öffentlich über den Einsatz von FirstSpirit im unternehmenseigenen Intranet "Merz & More".
Im Anschluss an die Veranstaltung haben Teilnehmer und Referenten beim Business Lunch die Gelegenheit, Informationen und Erfahrungen auszutauschen.
Weitere Termine für das Forum sind der 24. Juni (Düsseldorf), der 30. September (Hamburg) und der 7. Oktober (München). Die Teilnahme ist kostenfrei. Das Anmeldeformular sowie weitere Informationen finden sich unter www.FirstSpirit.de/Forum
19.05.2008, Christiane Capps
Die e-Spirit AG, Hersteller des Content-Management-Systems (CMS) FirstSpirit, veranstaltet am 25. Mai 2008 im Japan Center in Frankfurt am Main das Forum "Publizieren leicht gemacht - FirstSpirit im Portal". Fokus der halbtägigen Veranstaltung ist die Pflege redaktioneller Inhalte in der Umgebung der drei großen Portale von IBM, SAP und Microsoft.
Ein exklusives Beispiel aus der Praxis bietet dabei der internationale Healthcare-Konzern Merz GmbH & Co. KGaA: Im Rahmen des Forums gewährt das Unternehmen erstmals Einblicke in sein Intranet und schildert die Praxiserfahrungen mit FirstSpirit.
In weiteren Fachvorträgen informieren Gastredner der Firmen IBM Global Business Services, adesso AG und HLP Informationsmanagement GmbH über FirstSpirit und seine Einsatzmöglichkeiten in den unterschiedlichen Portalen.
Namhafte Unternehmen wie EADS, Commerzbank, Robert Bosch GmbH und OTTO setzen seit Jahren FirstSpirit zur Integration in die großen Portale ein. Im Rahmen des Portalforums wird in verschiedenen Fachvorträgen dargestellt, wie das CMS von e-Spirit den spezifischen Anforderungen komplexer Umgebungen im SAP NetWeaver Portal, IBM WebSphere Portal und mit dem Microsoft Office SharePoint Server begegnet.
Weiterhin konnte Dr. Andrea Kreißelmeier, Head of Corporate Communications der Firma Merz, als Rednerin gewonnen werden. In einem exklusiven Vortrag berichtet sie erstmals öffentlich über den Einsatz von FirstSpirit im unternehmenseigenen Intranet "Merz & More".
Im Anschluss an die Veranstaltung haben Teilnehmer und Referenten beim Business Lunch die Gelegenheit, Informationen und Erfahrungen auszutauschen.
Weitere Termine für das Forum sind der 24. Juni (Düsseldorf), der 30. September (Hamburg) und der 7. Oktober (München). Die Teilnahme ist kostenfrei. Das Anmeldeformular sowie weitere Informationen finden sich unter www.FirstSpirit.de/Forum
19.05.2008, Christiane Capps
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Praxis-Workshop: "Unternehmensprozesse mit SharePoint optimieren"
Die Locatech GmbH setzt am 30.05.2008 mit dem Praxis-Workshop "Optimieren unternehmensweiter Prozesse mit SharePoint" ihre Veranstaltungsreihe fort. Dieser Workshop richtet sich an alle, die für die Organisation von Arbeitsprozessen verantwortlich sind und einer Datenflut aus strukturierten und unstrukturierten Informationen gegenüber stehen. Beispielsweise Geschäftsführer, IT-, Projektleiter oder Leiter aus dem Bereich Organisation werden hier in die Methoden für das Dokumenten- und Informationsmanagement eingeführt.
Ziel ist es, den Teilnehmern zu vermitteln, wie sie auf Basis der Microsoft-SharePoint-Plattform ihren Verwaltungsaufwand auf ein Minimum reduzieren und sich so Zeitfenster für andere Projekte schaffen. Ihnen wird aufgezeigt, für welche typischen Szenarien eine SharePoint-Umgebung sinnvoll eingesetzt werden kann und wie sie Unternehmen wirkungsvoll beim Vereinfachen und Optimieren von Arbeitsabläufen unterstützt. Außerdem wird erläutert, wie mit einfachen Schritten ein eigenes Portal realisiert werden kann, in das Unternehmensdaten, zugehörige Informationen, Dokumente und eine Teamkommunikation integriert werden.
Veranstaltungsort für den aktuellen Workshop ist das Seminargebäude der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Dortmund, Märkische Straße 120, 44141 Dortmund. Die Workshopgebühr beträgt 95 Euro zzgl. MwSt., Nachlässe werden für Teilnehmer aus dem gleichen Unternehmen gewährt. Anmeldungen sind online möglich unter http://www.locatech.com/index.php?id=106 .
Referent:
Referent dieses Workshops ist Dirk Löhn, der Gründer der Locatech GmbH. Er unterstützt seit über 20 Jahren Unternehmen mit ganzheitlichen Lösungen für das Dokumenten- und Informationsmanagement und verfügt dadurch über tief greifende Erfahrungen mit SharePoint.
Stimme eines Seminarteilnehmers:
"Das Know-how, das ich mir in dem Workshop 'Pflichtenhefterstellung' angeeignet habe, werde ich für unsere internen Projekte gleich anwenden. Der Workshop war sehr gut organisiert. Der Referent hat sein Wissen direkt aus der Praxis vermittelt, wodurch seine Erläuterungen sehr anschaulich und leicht nachvollziehbar waren", meint Mike Therolf, Geschäftsführer der unternehmen online GmbH & Co. KG, der im April einen Locatech-Workshop besucht hat.
13.05.2008, Leif Sonstenes, Locatech GmbH
Ziel ist es, den Teilnehmern zu vermitteln, wie sie auf Basis der Microsoft-SharePoint-Plattform ihren Verwaltungsaufwand auf ein Minimum reduzieren und sich so Zeitfenster für andere Projekte schaffen. Ihnen wird aufgezeigt, für welche typischen Szenarien eine SharePoint-Umgebung sinnvoll eingesetzt werden kann und wie sie Unternehmen wirkungsvoll beim Vereinfachen und Optimieren von Arbeitsabläufen unterstützt. Außerdem wird erläutert, wie mit einfachen Schritten ein eigenes Portal realisiert werden kann, in das Unternehmensdaten, zugehörige Informationen, Dokumente und eine Teamkommunikation integriert werden.
Veranstaltungsort für den aktuellen Workshop ist das Seminargebäude der Industrie- und Handelskammer zu Dortmund, Märkische Straße 120, 44141 Dortmund. Die Workshopgebühr beträgt 95 Euro zzgl. MwSt., Nachlässe werden für Teilnehmer aus dem gleichen Unternehmen gewährt. Anmeldungen sind online möglich unter http://www.locatech.com/index.php?id=106 .
Referent:
Referent dieses Workshops ist Dirk Löhn, der Gründer der Locatech GmbH. Er unterstützt seit über 20 Jahren Unternehmen mit ganzheitlichen Lösungen für das Dokumenten- und Informationsmanagement und verfügt dadurch über tief greifende Erfahrungen mit SharePoint.
Stimme eines Seminarteilnehmers:
"Das Know-how, das ich mir in dem Workshop 'Pflichtenhefterstellung' angeeignet habe, werde ich für unsere internen Projekte gleich anwenden. Der Workshop war sehr gut organisiert. Der Referent hat sein Wissen direkt aus der Praxis vermittelt, wodurch seine Erläuterungen sehr anschaulich und leicht nachvollziehbar waren", meint Mike Therolf, Geschäftsführer der unternehmen online GmbH & Co. KG, der im April einen Locatech-Workshop besucht hat.
13.05.2008, Leif Sonstenes, Locatech GmbH
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
AIIM startet Umfrage zur Auffindbarkeit/Findability
Vor wenigen Tagen hat Microsoft den Kauf des Such-Experten FAST Search & Transfer für 840 Millionen Euro abgeschlossen und zuvor auch noch ein milliardenschweres Übernahmeangebot an Yahoo! abgegeben. Auch wenn dieses kürzlich zurückgezogen wurde, die Fakten bleiben bestehen: Der Markt für Online-Suche ist aus gutem Grund interessanter denn je: Jeglicher Content ist nutzlos, wenn keiner ihn finden und darauf zugreifen kann. Aus diesem Grund führt die AIIM Market Intelligence, eine Geschäftseinheit des internationalen Anwender-Fachverbands AIIM Europe - the ECM Association, eine Marktumfrage zum Status Quo im Bereich Suchen und Finden von Informationen durch.
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