I recently saw these presentations on Social Media and wanted to share it… Enjoy.
It is interesting to compare this to the second presentation along the same lines done 1 year later…
See this interesting blog posting about the value of a Consulting CTO. Consulting CTO’s can help you out on a short term basis; generally for small amounts of equity.
Depending on the type and amount of work; you will end up giving 25,000-100,000 stock options (where you have 10 million outstanding @ .01 – .10 cents). These will generally vest based on the terms of engagement and deliverables you require from the freelance / consulting CTO.
My recommendation; as someone who actively plays this role for multiple startups is to be very clear up front on the scope of involvement, deliverables and compensation. Startups are by nature fluid. The core team and all need others involved to be flexible; but putting some structure around this at the beginning can lead to a successful relationship long term.
I recently ran across a new innovative Web 2.0 marketing campaign. ArtFlute is a premier Art portal based out of India. They have artists wanting to post art from all over the world – however for now they are focusing on the Indian market.
In partnership with a boutique consulting firm in Hyderabad (Bodhtree Consulting), they are changing the way art enthusiasts can find and buy art. They are combining the concept of a simple online portal, an offline gallery and Web 2.0.
In just 1 month,
258 Facebook members
937 on Twitter
Somewhat equal numbers on LinkedIn, MySpace, HiFi, Friendster etc.
Just by using a daily twitter post, they were able to network with someone to partner in opening an offline art gallery as an extension to their online business.
A few days back they have launched a collection of applications for the leading social networks like Facebook, MySpace, etc. This will have a dramatic impact as now art fans can view this art within the context of their favorite online presence.
In talking with the founders, Neeraj and Chandni Harlalka, they are looking at expanding their presence using Google Gadgets, Vista Gadgets, iPhone applications and truly leverage the Semantic Web for Art.
In my last posting, I put out a thought that SOA is the foundation to the success of Web 2.0 and SaaS. Let’s talk more about that.
SOA provides for the loose coupling of business functionality and access to this functionality over the wire. Actually the real value behind SOA is how Web 2.0 / SaaS services are simple, easy to “mash” ,ease to use and consume. The concept is that of Service Composition where composite applications are built using tens and hundreds of smallers services to deliver business value. This is well served by the technologies and products in the Web 2.0 and SaaS spaces.
Thus the fundamental principles behind SOA, combined with the innovations around Web 2.0 and SaaS offerings, lead to a SOA approach that targets the millions of internet consumers. Web 2.0 allows the thousands of internet services to be orchestrated together to form new services for the internet consumer.
In Enterprise SOA initiatives, or rather in an Enterprise, you end up needing a tighter wiring of the Services and typically have fewer of these Services, which then begs you to question the value of SOA in that environment. Additionaly E-SOA is typically behind the company’s firewall – and each Service has 1-5 consumers. This agains begs you to ask the question, do you really need a “Service” or some other form of integration between that data or business functions.
As someone said, SOA is dead in 2009. If you start agreeing with this line of reasoning, you will probably say something like “SOA will be re-born in 2009, 2010″.
SaaS and Web 2.0 are the new mantras, and once we recover from the financial crisis, these technology concepts will see a new birth. The hundreds of startups, service providers and hosting providers that are aggresively innovating new products and services will finally see the customer base they would have hoped for, if the economic issues had not put pretty much a stop on spending.
Web 2.0 is all about the free exchange of content. The content can be simple one line message (Twitter) to videos of all sizes (home videos on YouTube, targeted content at Break.com and Crackle, legal video on demand at Netflix and even the illegal video and music sharing sites like ….. ). However, is Web 2.0 just that?
It is also about the ability to take this content and create new content from it in new and innovative ways. Guess what, there is another word for that – “Mashups”. Thank GOD – not another TLA. Google Maps is probably the most used Web 2.0 concept that is exploited in mashups.
This multi-user, multi-device, ubiquitious way of information sharing is quickly becoming the next generation of the Internet.
SaaS is way of offering software over the web. Instead of making huge purchases of software and dealing with infrastructure and support issues, SaaS is a way to offer that over the Web. This is obviously putting it very simply! Guess what – that leads to yet another concept called Cloud Computing! We’ll talk about that in a later blog posting.
SaaS can be seen in various forms. The example most often cited is probably SalesForce.com. However, you can see SaaS offerings in almost every technology area – CRM, ERP, Identity Management/Security, Audit/Complaince, Content Management and even SaaS for custom business application – aka Compute and Storage Clouds like Amazon and Google. SaaS is also combined with Web 2.0 for content sharing like Google Docs and Microsoft Live.
Ok… so what happened to SOA. The real question to ask is would Web 2.0 and SaaS have existed without SOA?
I have to agree with the SOA skeptics in most cases. SOA as an enterprise architectural pattern has had mixed success. Any technologist will probably argue that the failure of SOA was not due to the fact that the technology architecture, tools/products to support SOA etc where wrong or not up to par. They went through their maturity cycles, and are now prime time ready.
However, the failure of SOA can be probably be attributed to the lack of a solid process understanding of how to implement SOA in an Enterprise. I have written enough about this…. (see my publications)
I would argue that the software architectural principles that existed since the inception of Computer Science, but highlighted using SOA as the buzz word, form the foundation that enabled the innovation around Web 2.0 and SaaS. Let’s chew on that……. thoughts… arguments……? I will do another post soon with some more thoughts beyond this bold (or not so bold) statement.