System iNetwork

December 2007

December 10, 2007 2:20 PM

Our System i Wish List for 2007

Being in the thick of the holiday season (and at least for some of us, budgeting season) and with most of us probably having some children somewhere in our lives (even if it's merely our very own selves), the end of the year seems like an ideal time for wish lists. After all, we're looking forward to a new year, and how better to make us anticipate even more that new date on our bank statements than a list of new toys to play with. (Even if, for boys and girls of a certain age, that toy list is pretty much confined to some new technology we wish we had or wish our companies would buy for us to use at work.) As we say goodbye to 2007, perhaps this is a good time for us to build such a list for the System i.

Let's impose one rule. I think we should wish for things we can't get just yet. Maybe you would desperately like to have something like a programmer productivity tool package or a document-management solution or maybe even an ERP application. All these kinds of products are already available in the System i market, so you could have had them already, except that money's lacking in the IT budget. Unless you have a friendly grandma with a bottomless wallet, (in which case what are you hanging out with the likes of the rest of us for?) let's not simply wish for more money. Let's wish for what we'd like to be able to buy someday without having to change platforms. What should we put on our list? I have a few ideas to get the ball rolling.

First let me say that you're probably not aware of a fact that I, as a journalist, must deal with every day. That's the sad situation that many public relations firms seem to be populated by dolts. "Your publication exclusively covers the System i?" they say in effect to me, "Well, then, you must be interested in our client company's software, which runs only on . . . " and here you can take your choice of Windows PCs, z/OS, Digital Equipment Corporation platforms, Hewlett-Packard machines, Xbox 350, Sunbeam waffle irons, or what have you: Basically anything but i5/OS. (This is, of course, after I've explained carefully what i5/OS is.) This would be tiresome except for one redeeming truth, which is that occasionally, some of those products that run on platforms other than the System i are actually rather intriguing. In fact, some of them seem quite useful.

So I'll start our wish list with a few of those. And let's all think of our wish list being directed not at fluffy-bearded Santa but instead at the vendors, and would-be vendors, of solutions in the System i community. We'll call this list, "Hey Mom and Dad, kids on the other platforms get to play with this stuff, why can't we?" (And, I have to admit, I didn't learn about all of them from clueless PR people.)

Language barriers are the pits. It's bad enough that humanity is fragmented into speakers of so many national, regional, and ethnic languages, but sometimes we can't even understand people speaking our native tongue (the apocryphal example being the developer and even one end user who can agree on the meaning of the word "intuitive"). There are at least two off-platform companies trying to tackle this conundrum. Language Weaver addresses the first case. It's software that automates translations of human languages based on statistical probabilities. Borrowing cryptographic techniques, it uses learning algorithms to pair up any two languages, even unlikely seeming ones such as Czech and Hindi, analyzes millions of words in specially prepared texts, and figures out from that how to translate from one language to the other. The second case is handled by a company called Linguistic Agents with its Streaming Logic service, which enables computers to act on natural language queries and commands. It can take an English sentence and convert it into computer language while retaining the sentence's original meaning, and as a service, be incorporated into a wide range of other applications and application-development projects.

Some of us have been itching for stuff like this since the original "Star Trek," but Streaming Logic isn't the only recent innovation in handling the human/machine interface. Conceptual Speech Technologies' Speech Vibe can perform every operation in the MS Windows 2000 or XP operating systems via exclusive use of voice. Designed primarily to help users who, due to carpel tunnel or other difficulties, have trouble using a mouse, Speech Vibe can also be incorporated into other applications and can operate Internet Explorer.

Another product reaching beyond the mouse is Gentle Computing's Gentle Mouse, which replaces standard physical clicking, pressing, and scrolling actions via mouse buttons with a transparent "trigger window" that performs these functions by letting the user move the mouse's pointer to a menu of these actions. The window appears whenever the mouse pointer pauses and offers subwindows that represent every possible mouse action. Although designed to help users suffering from repetitive-motion injuries and arthritis, it's conceivable that this could make some able-bodied users even faster at what they do and makes me confident that by the time age would perhaps otherwise curtail my computer activity, there will be some readily available remedies.

"Ambiguous keyboards" is another area of interesting input-related development. This technology is based on the telephone keypad, combining three letters each on nine large keys, then providing "disambiguation algorithms" that automatically determine which letter was actually meant when a user strikes a key. These algorithms take advantage of the fact that 92 percent of words in a 24,500-word dictionary in the technology's initial testing each had a unique combination of keystrokes. Although this is dependent on the layout of letters on the keys and there's still disagreement about the optimal arrangement, Research in Motion, maker of the ubiquitous Blackberry and other wireless devices, signed an agreement in October with Eatoni Ergonomics to work together on the next generation of predictive-text technologies to support ambiguous keyboards. That could mean the miniaturization limit imposed on wireless devices by the need to have input keys that our fat little fingers can press individually might be going away in the not-too-distant future.

These products are all examples of innovative ideas on which no platform will have a monopoly in the long run. But good ideas come from wish lists like this, even if they're only informal lists people carry around in their minds with them.

How about you? What kind of software (or hardware) products for the System i would make your life better? What would you put on your wish list if budgets and availability weren't obstacles? Please offer a post and let us all know.

Posted by on December 10, 2007 at 2:20 PM | Comments (0)

December 4, 2007 1:52 PM

Walking in an Online Wonderland

With the holiday season upon us once again, retail-market System i users, along with many others, are casting eager glances at their websites in hopes those outlets will add a solid contribution to the bottom line this year. While it's getting to seem as traditional as candy canes for marketers to proclaim that this will be the year Internet shopping will really break through, one thing that is different this year is availability of a wider variety of sources providing more concrete information about Internet shoppers and their habits. Because this information applies to websites on any platform and good ideas can come from anywhere, let's take a quick tour of some highlights.

Whether or not 2007 proves to be a "breakthrough" year, consumer confidence in buying over the Internet is growing, despite all the horror stories of identity theft and misappropriation of credit card numbers due to inept security at some retail sites. In a survey released just yesterday, Safe Home Products, an online retailer of safety and health products, found that 95 percent of people who have previously shopped online during the holiday said they plan to again, 85 percent said they'd visit old and new sites as part of their shopping regimen, and 65 percent of them said they plan to do more than half of all their holiday shopping online. (And contrary to the mass media's hyping of Cyber Monday last week, 74 percent said they would not be shopping from work.)

Trend Micro, a network antivirus solution vendor, recently announced the results of its third annual Internet Confidence and Safety Survey, which it conducts twice a year of 1,500 international users. Among U.S. respondents, the percentage of shoppers who view the Internet as "very safe" increased from 45 percent last February to 53 percent this past August, and those who believe the Internet will become even safer in the next six months rose from 26 percent to 32 percent over the same time period. The survey also reports an increase in what it calls "riskier behavior," showing a 9 percent increase in shoppers who do banking online and an increase from 12 to 16 percent who say they use WiFi in public locations for online transactions.

The question of what makes a website attractive to shoppers has been a perennial source of speculation and research. One new source of information on that score is Internet Retailer magazine, which in its December issue begins a new tradition of selecting a list of "Hot 100 Retail Web Sites," pointing out some strengths in sites it singles out for kudos. "Market leaders . . .stand out [because] they create striking and effective site designs, do something critical such as site search better than the rest, take risks on new concepts and technologies such as social networking and Ajax, set trends such as m-commerce [buying and selling via mobile electronic devices] rather than wait and see, and know their customers extraordinarily well, exceeding their desires and needs," summarizes Bill Siwicki in the cover article. Examples cited include 20,000 pages of content from experts and an online forum at Bodybuilding.com, information and repair how-to's on major appliances at RepairClinic.com, downloadable widgets that link directly to their website for J.C. Penney's JCPToday site, product and instructional online videos at BestKiteboarding.com, and a product-sorting algorithm at AbtElectronics.com that helps buyers quickly find what they need among 10,000 different offerings.

Customer reviews can also play a big role in attracting buyers. Although Amazon.com was a pioneer in this area, PowerReviews, a site that specializes in customer reviews and social merchandizing solutions for online retailers, has examined this more closely and unveiled some specific findings. "Social Shopping Study 2007" studied 1,200 people who shop online at least four times, and spend at least $500, each year. The study identifies 65 percent of those customers as "Social Researchers," a label it assigns to shoppers who actively seek out and read reviews by other customers before making purchase decisions, either always or "most of the time." 78 percent of them spend at least 10 minutes reading reviews, 76 percent feel "top-rated product" lists to be extremely or very important to their decisionmaking, 64 percent research products this way no matter where they end up buying them, and perhaps most surprising, 82 percent felt reading reviews was a better method of researching purchases than in-store sessions with a knowledgeable sales associate. The process of making purchase decisions based on cues from other users, whether in person or electronically, is called "social navigation," and 76 percent of the Social Researchers said they were more likely to shop at the sites of retailers who offer it as opposed to those who don't.

Yet another survey points to e-mail enticements, providing immediate access to information throughout the entire purchase process, and prompt after-sale followups as critical in building online buyer loyalty. The Online Retail Report, released last May by RightNow Technologies, a company that specializes in helping companies develop frontline sales services, surveyed 2,873 adult U.S. online shoppers. Of those, 68 percent said they were prompted to browse a web site after receiving an e-mail message from a retailer, 73 percent said they would appreciate post-purchase followup communications, and 42 percent said they would prefer to be able to find information they need online by themselves during an online shopping experience.

Maybe this seems like a lot of advice to follow, but follow it you should, as Yoda might say. Or, maybe not . . .

To bring this discussion back to at least an IBM-specific context, I'll close with pointers from a book, Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules, published in October by IBM Press. Written by Mike Moran, one of the builders of the ibm.com website, this book advocates not even worrying about whether or not you're actually following the right advice on your website. Instead, you should simply keep trying new techniques and methods one after the other until you find something that works. According to Moran, it's cheaper to try something, study the effects, and be prepared to try something else immediately if that doesn't pan out, than to develop and execute a cautious online marketing plan. Studying the metrics of how users behave on your site and watching how they "vote with their mice" is the fastest and most reliable way to figure out what the people who actually make it to your site like and don't like. In this, he seems to echo Internet Retailer's counsel to "take risks on new concepts and technologies."

It's a reindeer-eat-reindeer world out there. Happy hunting . . . and happy holidays.

Posted by on December 4, 2007 at 1:52 PM | Comments (0)