Sparkboxx - Wilco van Duinkerken

Interview with Google CEO on Cloud Computing

Nice interview: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/share.html?s=news01s2c18qa51

My online toolset: working in the cloud

In a conversation I had yesterday about "working in the cloud" somebody asked me which tools I use online. I sent him an e-mail this morning with the list but I'd also like it to share it online with you.

Project/Customer Management
Project Management: www.basecamphq.com
CRM: www.highrisehq.com
Functional Specifications, Wireframes and Designs: www.protoshare.com

Technical / website related:
Issue Management: www.lighthouseapp.com
Technical issue traching: www.hoptoadapp.com
Server Monitoring: www.newrelic.com
Source code control: www.github.com

Other
Brainstorm: www.mindmeister.com
Sporadic photo editing: www.pixlr.com
Google-apps for: e-mail, docs, calendar
File and document sharing: www.drop.io
RSS: Google Reader
Blogging: www.typepad.com

Hosting
www.heroku.com
www.railsmachine.com
www.byte.nl
Amazon S3

Other Services
Twitter: @sparkboxx
Facebook: wilcovd
LinkedIn

The ultimate glue, so that I don't forget all the urls: www.dnsmadeeasy.com to connect most services under records like http://[application].sparkboxx.com

On the topic of "hosting" in the cloud I recommend 2 video's:

Presentatie on Amazon web services: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/amazon-web-services

Amazon Cloud Hosting for rails Applications. It's a pretty techy video, but it does illustrate how you can "think differently" using cloud services for hosting on any platform.  http://pivotallabs.com/talks/40-engine-yard-solo

How do you manage your relations with software component providers?

Did you ever ask yourself one of the following questions?

• Should I write a software component myself or buy/use it from somebody else?
• How can I limit the costs and risks of using external components?
• I’m using an open source component, when do I start contributing?
• What are the “hidden” costs of using external components?
• How to govern the relationships with my component providers?

As some of the followers of this blog already know: I'm writing my final thesis. My research is about the governance of the relationship between product software vendors and their component suppliers e.g. your database provider, the plugins and external libraries you use, specific OCX or ActiveX components and so on.

Right now, I'm looking for managers/architects of product software vendors that want to participate in my research by having an interview of about 1 hour (skype/phone is no problem when you're not located in the Netherlands)

I made this presentation to convince you to participate :-)

And I made another presentation with the stunning tool Prezi, with a little more in depth information about my thesis.

Looking forward to your participation :-)

You can contact me at:

e-mail: wilco at sparkboxx dot com 

twitter: @sparkboxx 

Making the move

I'm making the move into the cloud.

I decided to try working with internet tools as much as possible for a while. Over the next couple of months I'll test drive cloud life. For those apps that are only online, or possibly work better than the desktop ones I will make the switch completely. e.g. switching to gmail instead of mac mail. I'll try to move into the cloud "unobtrusively" so that I can switch back to "offline" life without losing data. e.g. being able to export MindMeister mindmaps to offline tools like MindManager. 

For apps not working in the cloud I'll try to move as much to the cloud as possible. E.g. saving bookmarks from safari/firefox straight into Delicious.

First victim: Mac Mail in favor of Gmail

Nominations for the next couple of weeks:

- Calendar

- Pages (Google Docs)

- Keynote (Prezi, Google Docs)

- Numbers

- Timelog / GrandTotal

- Skype

- Backup system

- Bookmarks

I'm already using:

- Basecamp

- Lighthouse

- Github (Git repository)

- Hosted-Projects (SVN repository)

- MindMeister

- ExactOnline

and I do have a MobileMe Account

Paying for online software is no problem.

There's a larger plan behind all this. I hope I can revealing it in the upcoming months.

New New Economy: Business Ecosystems

And this is why I started studying Transaction Costs in Software Ecosystems about 1 year ago:

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_essay

How web is transforming software architecture

Nice Video Presentation from Qcon:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/dion-hinchcliffe-architecture-web-platform

Google Data API's

I had to build a small "wedding" website for a family member and decided to fool around a bit with the google data APIs, more specifically the Spreadsheet API. In order to manage the visitors list. After a couple of hours of fooling around I can say that it works :-)

The ability to connect all Google tools on the back-end makes me think of nice mash-ups. I wonder when the first "Export to Google" features will start appearing at most CMSs.

Some guidance to help fellow rubyists in getting started:

• Google offers a data wrapper gem for Ruby/Rails: http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/articles/gdata_on_rails.html
• You need to fix the package: gdata-1.1.0/lib/gdata/client/base.rb  rule #89, change it into rase BadRequestError.new(response). Else you won't be able to POST any new data.
• SpreadSheet data api docs can be found here: http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/docs/2.0/developers_guide_protocol.html 
• When creating a row in Spreadsheets add namespaces. The examples provided  are not working as is.

<entry xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:gsx="http://schemas.google.com/spreadsheets/2006/extended">
<gsx:name>#{self.name}</gsx:name>
<gsx:email>#{self.email}</gsx:email>
</entry>

• Help yourself by using irb or script/console. You might make a new class GoogleTest where you setup some debugging code (e.g. in the initialize function) this way you easily can test the GData gem in your app using script/console without a lot of repetitive typing. Don't forget to use the 'reload!' command when you change anything in the class.

MindMeister Mindmap

I made a MindMeister mindmap today as preparations for a Prezi.com presentation. It's great product! Fast and real easy to start.

Thought I'd share my first MindMeister Mindmap :-)

Thesis: Transaction Cost Theory in Software Ecosystems

I might put the Prezi presentation online later.

A new monolith! Oracle acquires Sun

Software Monoliths are sooo 1980's!! But still Oracle is aiming to provide customers with a monolithic stack.  Even though my study of Transaction Cost Economics might give some explanation I still think the move of software monoliths in the 80's to software ecosystems right now is way stronger than any reason to become the new IBM Monolith.

- Message from The Next Web

- Oracle Statement

- Download Introduction_software_ecosystems

Twitter business model

Twitter seems to have started with some ads on the website. While I do get the idea it brings back a discussion I had the other day about possible business models for Twitter. Besides possible "business accounts" I expect Twitter to enter the micropayment circuit. 

A couple of years ago when I was busy implementing a (world wide) SMS payment system for songs one of the big problems of the US market was the lack of interoperability between SMS service providers. 

SMS was unreliable in the US, it wasn't always possible to send SMS from one provider to another and so on. Twitter solved this problem for the US. Messaging became free, easy and pretty reliable.

So, looking at the european market...what's next? For years now, we (europeans) have had the possibility to buy stuff using SMS messages: Ringtones, Information, Wallpapers, using recurrent billing or one time billing up to about 7.5 euro's. 

Since Twitter provided the "missing" link in the SMS chain in the US, I suspect it will start acting as a micropayment provider soon, filling the gap, and hopefully outperforming, SMS payments.