Wille Faler's Buzzword Bingo

Moving on - lets try again

2007-02-14T00:14:00.000Z

Well, haven't written a whole lot recently, and I've also grown very tired of Blogger, so I am hereby moving to Wordpress, I can be found at http://faler.wordpress.com
I'll try to write somewhat more frequently from now on..

The perfect Trojan horse into the living room

2006-11-07T19:30:00.000Z

There has been much talk of convergence in the living room, but so far it has mostly been vaporware.
I think the "Media PC" is doomed, I certainly don't want another expensive computer just for it to have an inferior DVD-player to my real DVD, and an interface that isn't particularly well adapted to the living room.

However, it has been announced that the Xbox will get movie and TV downloads through the Xbox Live service shortly.
I think this is the perfect Trojan horse into the living room: it doesn't require additional pieces of kit in your living room, and it piggybacks in on something that is already natural to have in the room for the owners.
Trying to push Media PC's into the living room will be a lost cause for everyone except a few hobbyists, piggybacking on existing gear is a whole different deal though: if vendors can get their interactive download services available in peoples TV's, DVD-players or videogame stations, it will be a very tempting proposition.

Considering Microsofts market lead with the new generation of video-game stations through its Xbox 360 (the Playstation 3 won't be out in Europe until spring!), we might be stuck with another Microsoft hegemony, for better or worse, this time in the living room.

Quote of the Day

2006-11-07T00:06:00.000Z

"Venture investment is like marriage, on two power point presentations and a dinner"
- Reid Hoffman in an interview on Venture Voice

Why most IT-projects fail: Fear of Failure

2006-11-01T22:37:00.000Z

Most corporate IT-projects (software developments) fail. That is a well known fact: they either fail to deliver, go over cost, go over time, get canceled or all of the above.
Why is this?
Personally, I am a big believer in the state of mind, a person being able to some degree dictate (within realistic boundaries) his outcomes based on directing his attitudes and energy. Now, I'm not going to go all "New Agy" on you, but the gist of it is: if you believe in yourself, you are more likely to succeed than if you suffer from low self-esteem. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

Funnily enough, this seems to apply equally, if not more so to IT-projects: people are generally scared shitless of failure. The general symptoms of fear of failure in an organization or project are one or several of the following:

Over-planning: People grasp for the safety-blanket of a plan. By trying to predict and plan for every eventuality, they think they can minimize their risk of failure. It's merely a safety-blanket for grown-ups, it is impossible to plan for every eventuality, especially when you are dealing with something as unpredictable as new-product development.
Procrastination: The one-egg twin of Over-planning. People who have a fear of failure do whatever they think it takes to not fail, including doing absolutely nothing as long as they can. By keeping busy with irrelevant distractions, they can delay the obvious failure, and only go over budget and time.
Passing the buck: Closely related to procrastination, but somewhat more productive. Important decisions are deferred or delegated to others, in order to be able to have a clean set of hands if things fail, and clean fingers to point at whoever eventually actually took a decision.

There are probably many more things people do when they fear failure, but they all have a common denominator: they do not achieve much in terms of tangible results.

The IT industry could really be transformed, if people only dropped their chronic fear of failure and started believing in that they could actually achieve something. This coupled with a can-do approach, a determined team committed to getting things done, and a tolerance for mistakes (mistakes can always be corrected) could do wonders.
A little faith can be a powerful thing..

People vs. Process

2006-10-02T07:20:00.000+01:00

Continuing where I left of on my last post..
One of the fallacies/risks of debating any methodology or process is the risk of misunderstanding what a process can and cannot do.
In the Agile world, it is often stressed that Agile methodologies can lessen the impact of not always having top-notch people doing the work, through it's practices and values of effective knowledge-transfer, peer-review and accountability.
However, some people, both critics and proponents tend to take this point to the extreme, where they start arguing that Agile methodologies remove, or purport to remove the need for fully qualified and competent developers.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. Agile methodologies may help raise the game of the lower performers somewhat, but it will not magically make them into highly skilled top performers.

I believe it is an important point to make when discussing methodologies and processes, that no process can ever remove the fact that the results of the team will be directly linked to the motivation and skills of the team.
If you have "monkey input" in terms of people, the result will always be "monkey output" no matter what the process is.

People will always be the single most important factor in any results, it is their ingenuity or stupidity that will be reflected in the results of a project.
People will always make up the strongest and the weakest link in the chain - No process or methodology in the world can change that. At best or worst a process can amplify the effect in one direction or the other, and even if it does, only ever so slightly.

Agile: The fanatics, the snake-oil salesmen and the critics

2006-09-29T01:02:00.000+01:00

Lately there has been somewhat of an anti-agile methodology bandwagon around the blogosphere, well demonstrated by the likes of Hani of BileBlog-fame and Steve Yegge.

To me it seems both the anti-agilists as well as the fundamentalist Agilists are kind of missing the point in their war of words.
Let me digress:

Agile becoming a religion
"Agile" and the specific methodologies like XP and Scrum have become somewhat of a religion to some of it's practitioners. Blindly following the practices has in some circles become the Silver Bullet(tm) for reaching project Nirvana.
Leaving or adapting one practice out of the equation is seen as something on the level of herecy to the true believers, and they are prepared to wage a Holy Jihad on any unbeliever who does not follow the Holy Scriptures to the word of what the Prophet's have set out.
What these religious fanatics seem to be forgetting is the core values of Agile development, especially one comes to mind: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools .
Also, setting practices and processes in stone seems at least a little bit.. Non-agile.
Leave the religion at home, and do what works.

Agile becoming a business
Another major factor in perverting the term Agile is that it has become a business of it's own.
Large, dumb organizations will keep on believing that the perfect process or methodology will magically solve all of their problems and make any human brain-activity superfluous. Because of this, they will keep on attracting and paying process- and methodology snake-oil salesmen. The latest generation, after ISO-certification, Six Sigma, Balanced Score Card, CMMI consultants et al, is, surprise! The Agile Consultant.
Obviously, in some cases there might actually be some use for an Agile consultant who actually has a clue about what he is doing to mentor a team in the practices and values, but as an integral part of the team rather than anything else. But more likely than not, most such consultants will fall into one of two categories: the clueless bullshiter and buzzword-spewer, or the religious fanatic.
Personally, I also have some doubts about the long-term viability of a business based on consulting in a specific process or other fad du jour. More likely than not, they will go the way of all the earlier process- and practice consultants: either the dole, or reschool themselves for the next perceived silver bullet technology or process.

Where the anti-agilists are off the mark
Now, having gone through where I think the agilists are going off base, time to address the anti-agilists:
What these people seem to do is critize the Agile movement and it's practices based on the actions and words of the religious fanatics and the snake-oil salesmen.
The war of words seems to go something like this:

Fanatic: Agile is the Silver Bullet of software development!
Critic: No it isn't, just look at these failures [lists failed
practices in projects]. Clearly it isn't a Silver Bullet, and thus Agile must be all bunk.
Fanatic: You did it wrong! You did not adhere to the true word of the Holy Scriptures!
...and so on and so forth..

Sure, critisizing something because it isn't the Silver Bullet some claim is an easy target, but it's a bit of the mark in my opinion (it's also sadly an easy target to choose, since the people having Silver Bulletitis seem to be the most vocal advocates).
Rubbishing Agile for the actions and words of the religious fanatics is more akin to critisizing the moderate form of european welfare states* for the atrocities committed by Communism than anything else:
it's not really a fair criticism by any stretch of the imagination.

However, that being said, there is no doubting that the snake-oil salesmen, religious fanatics and other people who think Agile is a Silver Bullet are doing a big disservice to the Agile cause everywhere by perverting and distorting how it is perceived by people who are not yet buying into it.
Agile methodologies are not perfect, and definitely no silver bullet, but it is in my experience the least bad way of doing software development.

Maybe Agile should be re-termed "Doing What Works" to distinguish it from the brand that the religious fanatics and snake-oil salesmen are trying to flog..

* That being said, I am personally no big fan of the big european
welfare states, but that is another issue altogether.

Paying for adware? No thanks

2006-09-14T23:04:00.000+01:00

I've been thinking about buying some proper accounting software for my business.
At the moment I am using what my accountant provides me with over the net, but I would like to get something a bit richer that can provide me with different stats and reports.

As I am currently running Windows and not Linux, GnuCash is unfortunately not an option (which is sad, because I like GnuCash from past experience).
I have been considering Intuit, the market leader in small business accounting software.

Unfortunately, Intuit and Google have announced a joint venture today, which will allow Google to provide ads for future versions of Intuit's software.
So, I'll pay £200-300, and then get a software package litered full with ads? Don't think so, I'll spend my money elsewhere..

Haven't people learnt anything from the Kazaa adware controversy a few years back? I can live with ads on web based apps, but on my desktop I'll stay way clear of any adware. In that perspective, charging for what is essentially adware must be madness.

iTunes and Amazon movie downloads - ain't gonna fly

2006-09-12T23:52:00.000+01:00

Amazon recently released their online video download service. With horrible shackles on the ability to use files, rendering the service quite worthless.

Not to be outdone, Apple today announced iTV, releasing movies, TV-episodes etc in the wonderful high-definition resolution of.. 640x480.
Say what?! Do they even realize how grainy that will be on every screen around with a resolution of 1024x768 or above (which is just about every PC screen these days)?

To add insult to injury, the prices of these services seem to be on par with what you pay for a DVD, but with a lot more shackles on use, and of lower quality!
I sure as hell will not pay for that, I'd rather keep on buying DVD's.

Both Apple and Amazon should get back to the drawing table, because what they've come up with here is just a waste of time and space. Only an idiot would pay for their services out of their own pocket.

The best thing Apple and Amazon can do is get back to the drawing board, these initiatives in their current form will probably be more of a liability to their brands than an asset.

Expression of the day

2006-09-09T22:59:00.000+01:00

"Whitepaperware"

From a comment at TheServerSide

The humane act of firing people early

2006-09-07T00:51:00.000+01:00

During my years in the industry, I have been fortunate enough to never have to fire anyone, or be fired myself. Perhaps mostly so because I have seldom been in a position where it would have been within my authority or responsibility.
That being said, I have been on projects a couple of times were there have been people who where so obviously unfit for the task they where put in front of that they should have been let go (or relocated).

A lot of people feel uncomfortable with the situation of firing someone, being around someone who gets fired, or getting fired.
But personally, I subscribe to the theory that it is better and more humane to fire people as early as possible when it has been established that they are not the right person for the role: rather than letting a person drag down a company or a project for a long time, or in the best scenario just be a passenger, it is quite obviously in the interest of the organization to identify and get rid of the incompetents and misfits quickly.

Another aspect of the equation that people seldom think about is that it is probably also better for the person getting fired: rather than them having to explain to future potential employers why they spent years somewhere, but couldn't get a single person to say something positive about them (which will no doubt harm their future prospects), they can simply leave the role out of their CV's if they want to: if they didn't spend more than a few weeks or a month in a place, it is in practice as if they where never there.

Finally, another thing has to be recognized: having to fire someone does not nessecarily reflect the (in)competence of an individual, it can simply be a case of a mismatch between the persons skillset and their intended role. In other cases, things may just not work out the way people planned, personalities clash, or people have different ideas around how to proceed on strategic things that are insurmountable.
Having to fire someone is probably as much a failure on the part of the organization and its resourcing and recruitment practices as it is for the fired individual.
But when mistakes are made, it is definitely in the best interest of both parties to cut their losses quickly, and get on with their lives on separate paths.

The Design Flaw (almost) All HTTP Servers have

2006-08-31T22:40:00.000+01:00

More than in the past, it has recently occured to me just how flawed most modern http servers like Apache are, and also how fundamentally flawed the Java Servlet Container model is.

Let me elaborate somewhat, what they all have in common are three fundamental traits:

They have a one-to-one mapping between each incoming request and an executing thread in the server.
There is essentially no way on the server or application level to partition how said threads are used and allocated.
They use blocking, synchronous I/O, meaning that a thread will be held up and blocked until a response is returned, or the request times out.

What are the implications of this? Well, there are a couple, let me demonstrate perhaps the most fatal one:
You have Web Service A and B, both being under heavy load. Service B connects to an external system to execute its work. All of a sudden the system B connects to becomes unavailable, resulting in threads calling be starting to blocking and timing out.
The effect of this is that all the threads and the request backlog will quickly be filled up by the failing B Service, but what is worse is that Service A will also deteriorate and eventually become unavailable due to the failure of B!
This is a situation that can quickly become very critical in most systems that interface to other systems, and why there is no simple way to partition and allocate resources through server-configuration beats me. The only real solution is either resort to advanced bending over backwards in your application code, or deploying several servers serving different services.

Another result of blocking I/O and one request-one thread is that under heavy load an applications performance will deteriorate badly, until it likely reaches a point where it becomes at least partially unavailable.
Non-blocking I/O and a SEDA-based architecture would easily address this, allowing a more smooth scaling of performance with higher load, not to mention the ability to handle a dramatically higher concurrency.

Now, "what's the drawback?" you must think, because if there where none, surely Apache HTTP Server would have been implemented this way long ago.
Actually, there are none that I can think of. The simple answer is: The Apache developers didn't think of it, they got lazy and used the model that just came to mind and seems to be the convention in other servers.
Nothing in particular, they just didn't think of it.

So what I'd like to see now is an actual SEDA-based http-server with non-blocking I/O hitting the mainstream. Preferably with the added boon of administrators and developers being able run services and applications in isolation with individually assigned resources and thresholds.

That would really be something. And I could bet that it would make development easier, not to mention how it would decrease the hardware costs in high-volume environments.

When will we get REAL push-technologies for the web?

2006-08-18T23:52:00.000+01:00

So called "Push-technologies" have gone through a couple of phases during the life of mainstream internet. A few can probably remember the likes of Pointcast back in the mid 90'ies, and the support for "Push" in Internet Explorer back in those days.
These days people talk about RSS as the new push-technology.

..But what people miss most of the time is that RSS isn't really a push-technology, its simply a XML-format (or rather, several). Its still the same old story behind the covers: to get new content, your RSS-reader is still polling for new information, rather than getting it pushed to itself.
There are still no viable real push-technologies for the net available, in the same way as messaging middleware has been used in enterprises for a very long time by now.

Technologies like JMS and IBM's MQ Series have been around for ages, but surprisingly, there is nothing similar available for consumers on the net.
The closest thing you will probably get to real push, where people can subscribe to updates is either e-mail (where you poll for new messages..), or HTTP-callbacks.

Now, in my opinion the thought of doing HTTP-callbacks to a client is an interesting one. However, it is dependent on a few things, that you simply cannot depend on on the net, considering how heterogenous the internets infrastructure is:

The client has its own unique IP, and is accessible through firewalls.
The client is always accessible.
The network is never down.

Not exactly a given in any of the three cases..
My question remains, when will we see real push-based messaging available for consumers using a simple, yet reliable technology?
I'm still waiting..

Business 2.0 get's it all horribly wrong about startups

2006-06-19T22:18:00.000+01:00

Business 2.0 is probably my favourite magazine.
But in the June issue they get it all horribly wrong in an article about "how to build a bulletproof startup".
Unless you are starting up a really capital intensive startup, they are widely of the mark, and given Business 2.0's general slant, it is likely their article is a take on Silicon Valley style software/web startups.
How is this for measure:

$15-25K just to write a business plan and incorporate.
$100-500K to create a prototype.
$500K-1M for developing a Beta product.
$1M-3M for launching the product.

If the money spent wasn't bad enough, they also have a focus on things that are completely irrelevant early on in a start-up, like creating big-name advisory boards and management teams. Good advise is always good to have, but you really shouldn't try to get a lot of big names just to impress the VC's.

As for the money spent, it's completely asenine for a software or web-startup, regardless if they are targeting consumers or enterprises.
If you can't get something tangible out the door and gain some initial traction with some customers on less than $50K and 6 months worth of sweat-equity from the founders, you are probably to incompetent to run a business, or the idea and plan just isn't good enough.
Burning through almost $6 million in cash and building up lots of fixed costs before you even have any paying customers whatsoever is complete insanity!

The only thing that the article puts across effectively is that the author is either living in a warped dreamland, or has never-ever been involved in any kind of startup situation.

Looking for the next big thing..

2006-06-16T23:07:00.000+01:00

Ten days left of my current contract. After that it's of for a months vacation in warmer climes and time for some reflection. Being able to take as much time of as I like between contracts and not having the stress of work piling up while I am gone is one is one of the things that I like about being a contractor. It also gives some time for reflection and enables me to think about what I want to do next.
At the current time, I would love to start something up, or be involved in a genuine start-up situation again. It's been four years since the last time, I've always seen contracting as somewhat of a temporary thing until I find "the next big thing". However, with a few false starts (ideas that where scrapped early) I have just gone on contracting for four years..

Well, we'll see if my vacation period can help me come up with some stuff, I have some rough ideas, but I seem to be struggling at the moment with nailing it down to focused specifics.
If anyone has any ideas to kickstart my thought process over the summer, feel free to pitch in!

Considering my current lack of specific ideas, the likely scenario is that I will pick up yet another contract until the end of the year. Where, I don't know. I kind of like it here in London, but then again I am always curious about new and other places: Switzerland, South Africa, the US, Australia, Hong Kong are all venues I'd like to try at some point, although I doubt I will manage more than a few of them, at least professionally.
I guess curiousity and mobility are the advantages of being (relatively) young and single..

On Deadlines and "Deadlines" in software projects

2006-06-13T22:38:00.000+01:00

Today I overheard a conversation about some government software project being "two years late".
This kind of made me smile, not only because I tend to think that anything government usually does it does badly, but also because a two year deadline in a software project is an oxymoron:
If you are counting your deadlines and time estimates in years rather than hours or days, then you are no longer doing making estimates tied to reality.
You are in the realm of prophecies and foretelling the future with the help of tea-leaves. If you believe in that kind of thing, then that's your choice. I personally don't.

There is just no way anyone can make any kind of realistic prediction about a software project that is supposed to take years to finish. It is just not feasible in such an unpredictable environment, when you are essentially doing new product development.

Now, the obvious solution to anyone with a little common sense is that if you are intent anyway on taking on such a big project, break it into several smaller projects (but not necessarily in parallel!) that will deliver considerable value on their own. That way the project won't be dependent on a big bang.
And there is also another side-effect which may be welcome:
you might actually realize down the line that what you have achieved after X months is quite sufficient for your needs. If that happens you won't have wasted another year or year and a half.

Well slap me on my arse and call me Lucy..

2006-05-05T00:23:00.000+01:00

No, I haven't become a transvestite and I haven't picked up any kinky habits, but I just found something I wasn't expecting to see yet for a good few years:
Channel 4 has released the first season of Lost on the net, for your viewing pleasure, free of charge (at least in the UK, I don't think it works outside the UK).

Now, some TV channels have been putting up locally produced material for sometime, but I think this is a first for a international blockbuster hit TV-series..

Wikis, blogs and other tools in the enterprise: not a guaranteed home-run

2006-04-29T13:44:00.000+01:00

Nicholas Carr makes some great points about the use of Wikis and blogs in the enterprise, and their potential utility.
For thos who don't want to read the entire post, the short story is that for Wikipedia as an example, the amount of active and very active contributors is quite small compared to the number of users. And for something like Wikipedia to be useful, there has to be a fair number of active contributors.
This extrapolated to the enterprise might imply that simply using wikis as a knowledge base isn't for everyone, if you would take the contribution ratios of Wikipedia and scale them down to the average enterprise, the number of active contributors would be way to small to allow the wiki to be of any greater use to the enterprise.

One point that Carr misses completely however, is the fact that the scope of a company is much more focused and small than the scope of an ambitious undertaking such as Wikipedia. This in itself means that you actually do not need to have such a high ratio of contributors to create the value, as a small number of active contributors will be more than able to provide the initial needed value to justify the investment in time, effort and money.

Nonetheless, Carr does make some good points, and although he misses part of the picture, they are worth taking note of, since enterprise collaboration is not just as easy as installing a wiki and expecting knowledge sharing paradise thereafter.

Reputation and the prisoners dilemma in a connected world

2006-04-29T01:44:00.000+01:00

Dealing with people and organizations on the Internet is a prime example of a prisoners dilemma. A couple of years back I had recurring discussions with some friends about the concept of trust and reputation on the net, but we could never really work out a way in which we would feel that a trust and reputation system would be robust and attractive enough for people to actually use and trust.

Now, some would argue that eBay has solved this, and that is very true, but they have solved it in a natural way: in the context of the eBay marketplace. They have control over the whole process, and can thus trust that an actual transaction that is being rated has taken place in one form or the other.
I have noticed that there are some start-ups turning up trying to approach the whole issue of trust and reputation in a more wide context, some examples of these companies are iKarma and Opinity.
However, I foresee some considerable problems for these start-ups, for a number of reasons:

In the case of eBay, the intrinsic value is in the auction-marketplace, not in the reputation system. The reputation only serves as a means to make the marketplace even more valuable and trustworthy.
These new companies rely on people actually rating eachother. In the case of eBay, the rating is pretty well integrated into an exchange of goods for money. In the case of these new companies, the rating is a whole separate step, which poses a problem, what is the value of actually going and voting for a supplier/customer? The value is quite minimal unless there is a very high turnover of evaluations.
Related to the above: it requires a critical mass to be of any value to users. This is a double-edged sword. If you gain a critical mass, the rewards can be massive. Gaining critical mass can however be very hard. In the case of eBay, there is a natural critical mass already built by virtue of the marketplace. iKarma and Opinity do not have the same benefit, and since they are of minimal value until they have a critical mass, they face an uphill struggle to ever reach it.
Fraud and identity theft: If you do not have control over the actual occurence of transactions as in the case of eBay, how can you be sure a competitor does not register a "fake" identity just to smear a competitor without their knowledge?

This being said, I do believe that reputation and trust has a very important role to play in the future of the Internet.
But I do not believe in any of the approaches I have seen so far. I rather believe that there will not be any single "repository of trust", instead a successful system must build on the open exchange of trust-data between those who hold such information.
How an open exchange and open standards with regards to trust and reputation are feasible when you look at incentives and the cultures of companies that hold such information, I do not know, but I believe it is the only approach that will have any success if trust and reputation are to be measured on a more "global" level, rather than a market-by-market basis.

What we need is a Peer-2-Peer system for the exchange of trust and reputation data.
Someone who wants to build that probably needs deep pockets, lots of contacts and the patience of an angel.

Name your start-up after a Finn

2006-04-29T01:17:00.000+01:00

Apparently, Finnish names are very geek-chique and suitable for Web 2.0 start-ups..
I'm sorry to say, someone beat me to registering Tytti.com.

Yep, there's a bubble

2006-04-27T10:28:00.000+01:00

When Dilbert starts making jokes about desperate VC's throwing money at people, there is definitely a bubble going on (I am referring to the "Web 2.0" craze)..
The last time it started happening was sometime in late 1999 when VC's where throwing money after Wally in a number of Dilbert-strips.
Heed my warning, you have around 6-9 months.

Google releases Google Calendar

2006-04-13T21:49:00.000+01:00

Google has now released Google Calendar.
Personally, I have not used a calendar other than at work for a long time. Not for a lack of a need, rather for a lack of decent ways to sync between computers and having it available most of the time.
Google can probably go a long way to adress that, and the start looks promising.
But I do have some major concerns:

So far, it seems buggier than a cockroach infested crackhouse. Saves and edits fail seemingly at random. The UI does not respond, or it responds a couple of minutes(!) late.
The API provided is useful in the "download" direction, both iCal and RSS are available, which is useful. Creating new events programmatically however is more of a problem: there is no way to create an event without actually opening up a Google Calendar dialog. I would like to have the option of being able to use some sort of API to create events programmatically without having to exit my current application or webapp.

On the whole though, it looks promising. If Google can adress these small niggles, they may become a real threat to Notes and Outlook, at least in the consumer- and small business markets.
I for one prefer web-based applications over desktop applications, if the user experience is comparable.

..and now, a shameless plug

2006-04-11T00:02:00.000+01:00

Thought I would use this space to make a shameless plug (don't worry, it wont become a habit):

I have created a simple web-based project & task management application using AJAX (with the help of DWR).
So far the functionality consists of To-do lists, "notepads" editable in a WYSIWYG editor, and a project specific file-archive/feedback function.
It is quite nifty and useful, I have personally started using it to stay organized (if you're going to do something, you migh as well do it for yourself).

The application is available here: www.agendapoint.com
Demos of the application in action are available here.

Registration and use is free, although I might start charging for more "premium" services in the future to pay for the hardware and bandwidth costs. The basic version will however always remain free.

The purpose of the application IS NOT to try to be a very complex tool in the mould of MS Project, rather, the purpose has been to try to keep things simple with flexibility and adaptability through the users imagination, rather than complex features. That underlying goal will continue to drive the development: simplicity and user experience will be the priority now and in the future.
I plan to add a few more features, but beyond that, I think it will mostly be a refinement of what is already there in order to remove an user bottle-necks. In this case (as in many others), I believe that less is actually more.

Internet traffic - a fickle little thing

2006-04-07T00:04:00.000+01:00

It has occured to me how fickle internet traffic can be: some sites, that are quite good can languish in obscurity forever, to one day have an explosion of traffic.
But for some sites it may never happen at all.
So the notion some people have about "lets just start an internet company and put up a website" is really a proposition that isn't going to hold up, for the simple reason that attention is even harder to come by on the Internet than in real life:
Opening a shop will at least get the attention of passers by, on the net unless you get publicity, you are simply an isolated island, of which noone is even remotely aware.

However: for those who have valuable and/or interesting content, there seems to be a consolation out there, there seems to be some sort of "critical mass", at which a site will spread explosively by word of mouth. What that is? I do not know.
But I saw a very good example of this phenomena today: a site that went from 1000 hits in two weeks, to almost three million(!) hits in a week, out of which over two million of the hits where in the last 24 hours!
The content of the site? Judge for yourselves, but in my opinion the contents just go to show how completely unpredictable the Internet can be when it comes to what catches on and what doesn't..

Bubble Ideas: Reloaded

2006-03-08T23:51:00.000Z

Many of us europeans may not be aware of it, but there is a new Boom in town in Silicon Valley.
"Web 2.0" is the latest fad, and a lot of the ideas flying around seem to be rehashes of old bubble-era ideas. A lot of companies also seem to be "built to flip", in other words, their exit-strategy is basically being bought by either Yahoo! or Google, failing that, they will be in deep trouble. This means these companies are probably more like "features" without a real business model, rather than real tangible businesses that have an actual way of making a profit.

..but, I do think that there probably are some companies that will survive, thrive and become new giants. It might even be a company that has rehashed an old bubble-era idea that was ridiculed a couple of years ago. Now, you may think I am insane for suggesting this, but I think there actually are a few factors that would point to this theory being credible:

Broadband penetration: six years ago, almost no one had broadband, yet some ideas pre-supposed broadband to be there. Today we are connected and wired almost anywhere, anytime, which is much more than you could say we where six years ago (28.8K modem anyone?).
New technology makes webapps more usable: New technologies, such as AJAX makes webapps much more usable and less clunky than those of the year 2000. Webapps closing in on the usability of a desktop application paired with a permanent broadband connection, you do the math about the potential implications..
Greater Internet-literacy: People are more used to the Internet today than six years ago. Whereas it was a novelty back in the wild days, it is now an embedded part of our daily lives and routines. Old ideas that hinged on changing peoples behavious slightly no longer have to hinge on that: People have changed their behaviours.
Payment willingness is higher today: Six years ago, people where hesitant about getting their credit card out and paying for anything. In part because everything was free, in part because above factors made the utility of most services questionable. That is no longer the case, people do pay for subscriptions and services that are totally digital today, without complaints.
Lower infrastructure costs: 6-7 years ago, just getting a scalable webapplication up could cost a ton of money: broadband, software and hardware was expensive, if it was even available (writing your own infrastructure software was not uncommon). The heavy investments sunk into these areas back then is however starting to pay of: Hardware and broadband is dirt cheap, Open Source software is readily available and free, businesses can now focus on creating a business and a product instead of the infrastructure.

Entrepreneurial proverbs

2006-03-08T23:50:00.000Z

Best advice for budding entrepreneurs I have seen in a while..

Does AJAX require a rethink of old MVC frameworks?

2006-02-19T22:39:00.000Z

I am currently in the midst of creating an application that makes quite a lot of use of AJAX, and one thing that has come to my attention is the fact that "old style" MVC frameworks like Struts, WebWork and JSF weren't really built with AJAX in mind (and yes, it is an oversimplification, since JSF differs heavily from say Struts).

Now, I am the first to confess I am no expert in front-end development, but it would seem to me that sending a request in say Struts, and thus kicking of the whole cycle of invoking the Action and rendering a new View doesn't sit too well with AJAX, considering this chain of events would force the re-rendering of a full page (to my knowledge). This wouldn't exactly be what you want, since what you may want to use AJAX for is just changing a smaller snippet of a page rather than the whole thing.
There may be some way I am unaware of in some of these MVC frameworks that allow for using it only on a smaller portion of the page, such as say a span-tag somewhere in the page, but I have not found any (haven't looked to hard either to be honest).

To me, even though front-end development is not my forte, nor my primary interest, having started using AJAX to make the little front-end stuff I do to make them more rich, there really is no going back. It simply makes the user experience so much better when correctly used.

However, these observations put together begs the question:
Is anyone out there working on an AJAX MVC-framework, one that is not just something old retro-fitted to AJAX (akin to putting lipstick on a pig)?
If so, I would be very happy to be made aware of it.
Also, if there are none, but someone reading this is considering building one: I wouldn't be entirely unhappy if it leveraged DWR, since DWR's approach to AJAX seems close to perfect to me, it's just missing the MVC part.

Playing with AJAX, criticizing JSF

2006-02-12T18:35:00.000Z

This weekend, I thought I would have a look at how AJAX and Java front-end development fit together. Being more of a back-end/integration guy, I was surprised at the fact that it wasn't close to as complex as I would have thought.

I found DWR, which is a nice little framework for integrating AJAX front-ends with serverside Java-code, and I have to say I was pretty impressed.
Having delved a little deeper, and gotten "conversational" with the basic stuff, I really got the feeling that they have done it pretty much in the same type of manner as I would have. Only small caveats with DWR is that the documentation leaves a little to be desired (be prepared to look at the sources rather than the documentation), and the API seems to have changed a bit between 1.0 and the 1.1 betas.
However, from what I have seen so far, and looked around at other AJAX-Java frameworks, it looks to me as DWR probably has one of the better solutions: a solution that if you do things properly wont end-up with a cludge of tightly coupled front-end and back-end code, something which is a very real risk if you go wild with AJAX without thinking first.

However, having started looking at AJAX, it struck me that JSF really wasn't built with AJAX in mind. Sure, you could (and can) probably integrate JSF with AJAX, but I get the feeling that that would be a little akin to performing eye-surgery with a rusty crowbar: not exactly a match made in heaven.

I think this however is more a reflection of JSF more than AJAX: I was initially quite impressed by JSF, and it has gotten quite a few things right, however, it seems to have gotten more wrong.
To begin with, it basically has it's own tags for just about anything in the presentation tier. What's wrong with regular html, or something close to it?
Building or editing a JSF-presentation isn't exactly something you can leave to a web-designer, the JSF-tags are a completely new language of their own. And this in my view, kind of invalidates the whole point of "lets use tags, so a web-designer can easily edit it and it looks html:y" (hell, it even has it's own tags for creating tables!).
JSF is really only a framework to consider if you want to learn a new framework AND a new tag-language or if you have fantastic WYSIWYG tools available to work with and don't mind being locked into a tools-vendor.
The JSF tags and the way they generate html in unpredicable ways, at least with my cursory familiarity with the framework, basically makes it much harder for you to add AJAX-like capabilities without getting into the whole deal of creating your own JSF-classes, tags etc, making the whole process very heavy-weight compared to combining something like DWR and WebWork, which seem to go quite well together (haven't tried it a whole lot though).

Now, AJAX capabilities isn't my only rub with JSF, the whole "new tag-language" part had made me slightly disheartened with JSF long before I tried any fancy stuff.

On software performance and design

2006-01-14T23:59:00.000Z

I have recently come in contact with quite a few people who are completely crazed about software performance and benchmarks.
It has to be said that this is understandable, as many organizations may actually have performance requirements written into their service level agreements: things such as "must get a response within 50ms".

What is a common misconception around software performance however, is that people believe that they will have to make a lot of compromises on design to achieve performance. People seem to think that if they use something like some specific classes, or use good design practices and patterns that performance will somehow vastly suffer.

In my experience, this couldn't be farther from the truth: performance requirements are no excuse for cranking out badly designed, tightly coupled crap code. Sure, there will always be some "gotchas", like having to avoid excessive network traffic, or looking at how you process vast amounts of data, such as XML. But if you look at both these cases, these are pretty high level considerations at the boundaries of your program, you will still have to make them work somehow, so making them work in a flexible way with code of high quality is really not an issue.

But somehow people live with the conception that the actual internal workings of a program may slow it down considerably: like using interfaces and polymorphism, or having several classes that has a very specific role instead of large "Manager"-classes, or having a few layers of abstraction and indirection.
How they ever got these silly ideas into their heads really beats me, because in reality they are so trivial and non-issues for performance that it shouldnt even be worth debating.
In my experience for instance, the performance "hit" of an extra level of indirection to keep things decoupled is not even measurable most of the time (and we are talking about milliseconds here), so thats how much that argument is worth.

The real performance hogs will almost always be how you handle the things on the boundaries of your application: how you do network calls, how you process data and similar things (choosing the right way to process large XML documents back and forth is a prime example of where the means of doing so might have high impact on performance, and different methods can give you extreme variations in performance).
So the whole notion that you need to sacrifice design and flexibility to get high performance is nothing but folly. People who imply that you should sacrifice design "to get higher performance" should be called out for their ignorance.

Storing passwords - how many times does it have to be said?

2005-12-01T12:28:00.000Z

Apparently, Skype is the latest in a string of companies that have had customer passwords compromised.
It just makes me wonder, it has been common knowledge for years, if not decades, that storing passwords in clear-text in some database is not only bad practice, it is a security risk waiting to blow up in your face.
Then why do people persist in being lazy, ignorant and out-right stupid when it comes to this, and keep storing their passwords in clear-text? Beats me..

Now, hashing algorithms have been around forever, are available by default in most popular programming languages, and provide a perfectly good way of hiding a password from prying eyes in a way so that not even people who have access to the data can easily work out what a password is.
Given, there have been some concerns around hashing algorithms such as MD5 that they are not fool-proof, but at least they provide a little more security than storing things in clear-text for all the world to see.

Gah! Stop the three-word acronym buzzword!

2005-11-15T01:33:00.000Z

Just stumbled over this company, Activiti, who apparently do something called "Distribution Communications Management" (or DCM). It is something they describe as:
Distribution Communications Management is the automation and acceleration of the distribution process in investment management firms who need to attract new clients, proactively inform sales and distribution channels and service existing clients with product information. The distribution process, with the investment business being so highly fragmented, feeds product information in the form of investment consultant updates, requests for information and proposals, marketing materials and quarterly reports.

Did you get that? I certainly didn't the first few times I read it.
After reading it a few times, I think(?) I could sum it up in "We help investment managers give their clients better product information".
So why In the hell can't they just say that?!

The point of this post is not to bash Activiti in particular, but to point out an illness that is terminal to the tech sectors credibility:
the tendency to make up three letter acronyms based on something like "Man-boob Reduction Management, or MRM" (it's almost always "Management" at the end), and then trying to explain it in a tediously technocratic and unpedagogic fashion with sentences longer than the genitalia of John Holmes.
Look, if you can't explain what business your company is in to a moron (like me) with one short sentence that takes less than 15 seconds to say, don't bother, go back to the drawing board.
Answer the two questions "What do you do?" and "How do you do it?" separately rather than making it into an incoherent mess.

Keep it simple, keep it short.
"We do mainframe-integration software", "We help airlines optimize their ticket-pricing", "We sell cars" are all perfectly good explanations of what a company does.

The pain of dealing with agencies

2005-11-11T16:57:00.000Z

Back after some time of, and back looking for my next project. During such times, you get exposed to all the scams and games that agencies play on contractors.
First of, it's worth noting that there are a lot of good, dependable agencies that are definitely good to work with, but there are at least as many (probably many more) agencies that are great scam artists.
So, I thought I would list some of the most common things that agencies pull on the unsuspecting contractor (it definitely helps to not be naive):

"What is the lowest rate you would accept?": Answering this question directly and honestly is a great way of screwing yourself. Once you have given them a figure you can bet that that will be used as a base for the highest rate you will ever get out of that agency, unless you have other competing offers. A better approach is to ask them about the ballpark figure their client has given them, and always go for the higher end of what they say (if it is acceptable). If a contract offer is presented, ask them what margin they are getting, typical agency margins should be in the range of 17.5-25%, if they are taking an excessive margin and you have already been offered the contract, you may be able to pressure them to give you a better rate (and more fair margin): if an offer has been made, you are sure money as opposed to unsure money (having to look for someone else, risking another agency gets the deal), even if they will get a lower rate.
"What other companies have you been put forward to? We don't want to hurt your chances by putting you forward somewhere you have already been put forward": This is a fishing expidition for new business leads, by getting to know other companies that are looking for people like you. Do not for a second believe that the agency would hesitate in calling the client and offering more candidates that are not you, more competition. Avoid answering this question at any cost, even if it means bluntly saying that you wont answer it.
"Can you give me any references from your past work? Don't you have any more senior references?": The first question is a very valid question when looking for a new contract. But beware, if the role discussed is very vague and the agent is not being specific about the role, and your regular references are not "good enough", it might be a fishing expedition. Basically, if your direct managers do not suffice for some reason, or it seems the agent is looking for people who have power to recruit, paired with the "vague role" and disinterest in what your relationship to the reference actually was, it is very likely he is just farming references to get the names of people who might be recruiting contractors. A very tricky one indeed, hard to distinguish the honest reference request from the dishonest one.
Advertisement with a vague/broad role and location: Some agents get commissions for the number of CV's they retain. This means that from time to time they will put out ads for roles that simply do not exist. These roles are usually extremely vague or broad (looking for several types of roles even), and very vague on the location of the project. Typical CV farming.
The last-minute change in terms as you are about to sign: It is not uncommon at all that terms discussed while negotiating a contract all of a sudden are not what they where agreed once the contract is presented for your signature. Agencies trying to pull a "switcharoo" in hope of you not reading the fine-print is extremely common. Most common are shorter changes in the duration of a contract, the notice period, or more insidiously: adding vague terms to the contract basically enabling the agency to get rid of you instantly at their leisure stating some vague reasons, basically taking away the effect of the notice period alltogether. Before you sign, do read the fine-print, and if something is vague or unclear, get advice.
Bad liquidity of an agency: Not a scam as such, but it is worth making a credit check on any agency you will work with or through, as at least in the UK, if the ultimate client pays the agency, but the agency doesn't pay the contractor and later goes bankrupt, the contractor is out of luck most of the time. The prospects of getting paid are extremely slim in such a case.

There are probably lots of other small scams and games that agents play on contractors that I haven't thought of in this post (please comment and fill in if I have!), but to sum it up: any naivety a contractor may have will be very quickly lost after a few years of contracting.
It's a dog eat dog world out there..

To any agencies or agents out there who might read this: honesty actually does pay in the long-term (even if you don't always get the quick and easy buck).
An honest agent is more likely to get my business.
And on the other side of the spectra: there are quite a few agencies on my personal "blacklist", whom I will never do business with, and will warn anyone I hear might be doing business with. It's the beauty of capitalism baby, your sins will come back and haunt you through a bad reputation and lower repeat sales and customer loyalty.
And if you are looking for leads on which companies may be recruiting contractors, don't try to scam them out of a contractor, try asking politely, and you might actually be surprised at the results!

Google Web Accelerator - useful for getting your online account robbed?

2005-10-24T21:54:00.000+01:00

If you are thinking about using the Google Web Accelerator, perhaps you should think twice after you have read the privacy policy:
Google temporarily caches cookies from third party sites that are used in your web requests.

I am not entirely sure what they mean by "third party", but I would asume that it is someone who isn't Google or you, in other words cookies from any site you may visit.
Would you feel comfortable having your cookies from your online banking log-on cached at a remote server? I certainly wouldn't!

Google's motto might be "Don't be Evil", but I am not too sure I would trust a corporate motto, or the possibly numerous people who may have the opportunity to "be evil" within the company, or the net-bandits rubbing their hands together when reading this privacy policy.

This could be an accident waiting to happen..

What is the best way to organize unstructured information?

2005-10-20T18:57:00.000+01:00

Today at work, I was trying to find a document I knew was linked to on the project Wiki, where it was placed was a complete mystery though. Using the search functionality did not help a lot, as the document in question was in word format and the search doesn't look into word documents.

This whole ordeal made me doubt whether or not the hierarchical organization of documents and data really has much of a lifespan left as a way of organizing data as data-volumes continue to grow.

So what would be a better way to organize information and documents? Beats me, but I am starting to wonder whether or not Google are onto something with Gmail: search and labels may be the way to go.
However, what I am missing in Gmail is the ability to cross-reference labels: for instance being able to combine labels to show documents that are labeled with all of the chosen labels.
There are probably other ways to organize information that lets go of the hierarchical directory-tree metaphor, but I am really starting to believe that labels/tags have a lot going for them.

Any tips on interesting links, background information and technologies for organizing unstructured information that move away from the hierarchical metaphor?

Listen up wifi-providers, this is what I want!

2005-10-19T12:55:00.000+01:00

Now, I understand that there are lots of different wifi-providers out there, all with their own networks and hotspots. Choosing which provider to sign-up with is probably as easy as "Sophie's choice", I probably would want to use them all, but I don't want to use one of them exclusively under any circumstances. It's nice that wifi is growing, but so is my headache when it comes to using it outside my own home.
So here is what I want:
I want to sign-up with one account and one provider for my Pocket PC and laptop. I want this one account to work with all the different providers, and I want to be able to move from one hotspot to the other without being any wiser about the fact that I am using another operators network. In other words: I want it to be completely transparent to me.
Finally, I don't want to pay anymore than a flatrate of £40-50 a month for it, at the most (40-50 is a bit rich, 30 about right, 20 a bargain, provided the coverage in central and west London is excellent and I can expect a signal walking down most larger streets).

So what would a business need to be able to provide me with this?
Well, they would need to strike deals with most of the people that own the current hotspots. They would also need to find a good formula for income distribution while retaining a healthy profit themselves. Furthermore, they would need to create software that could technically achieve this with a minimum of fuss.
One potential way of approaching it is to create an income distribution model that makes it attractive for others than just hotspot operators to participate: say that people and businesses that already have wifi-networks but don't use them fully could open up their networks for some outside use (at a price), voila! You would have quite a bit bigger coverage than just by using hotspot operators. And people could make money of underutilized networks to get back some of what they pay for maintaining them.

Finally, a seamless wireless experience with coverage throughout most of London would almost enable me to get rid of my cell-phone whilst I am only moving within London: a Pocket PC, bluetooth headset and Skype for PPC with SkypeOut and SkypeIn credit would go pretty far.

Does anyone know if something like this is already in the works in London? If so, please let me know, I´d love to sign up for it!

AJAX applications: the challenges

2005-10-18T16:44:00.000+01:00

On the back of the last post, it might be interesting to look at some of the challenges that AJAX poses.
AJAX is based on having asynchronous "callbacks", or rather lots of small "micro request-response" cycles, in practice this will affect some areas of application development in interesting ways by adding to the challenges:

Higher server-load and bandwidth usage: If you are having a "mini-request" for each field in a form due to auto-filling and help, and the form has 10 fields, you will end up with 11 requests in order to submit the form (at the least, not counting possibly several requests for a single field). Compare this to the one request in a traditional web-application. Guess what this will mean for you server-load, response-times and bandwidth bill?
Coding challenges: Lots of mini-requests to do trigger very specific UI-events will mean that it will take some effort to keep the modularity between parts of an application that many organizations are just starting to get to terms width. It is quite likely we will see a rise in the number of badly designed spaghetti-code applications as a result of AJAX popularity. This will not do any wonders for productivity or software-reuse to say the least.
Usability challenges: People going wild with a new technical toy? You can bet that you will see more than your fair share of applications that will make you think "what the hell where they thinking?!".

AJAX - the next big thing or the fad du jour?

2005-10-18T16:40:00.000+01:00

AJAX, the technology making it possible to create richer and more dynamic web-applications like GMail is starting to get a lot of press coverage, both in Geek circles as well as in Entrepreneurial and Venture Capital circles.
So what's the big deal? Is AJAX really the next big thing(tm)? Can you build a viable business based on AJAX?
Well, erm, no.
AJAX is surely the next step on the web in creating more usable web applications that closer resemble desktop applications, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if web applications that are not in some respect AJAX enabled in 3-4 years time are considered crude and old fashion.
But... That doesn't mean you will be able to build a business around the technology.

The way I see it AJAX is just the next evolutionary step: it doesn't really pose a technological shift in any way (in fact, AJAX is a combination of old, pre-existing technologies). To my understanding, AJAX doesn't really do much more than update small pieces of a web-page instead of the whole page at once.
AJAX enabled web applications might give a short-term competitive advantage in terms of user attraction, but it is really nothing more than a bit of make-up on the same old same old.
We will probably see most of the incumbent companies in their respective sectors move their applications to be more "AJAX:ified".
And as for technology providers? My guess is Microsoft, IBM et al will provide the tools in their next generation of development tools.

Sure, we might see a few start-ups based on AJAX-enabled applications that might survive, but that won't be as much because of their own inventiveness as it will be for the laziness of the incumbents persisting in providing an inferior user-experience.
As for "completely new products"? Yep, we might see some of that as well, but it won't be because it's AJAX, it will be because it truly is a new product, and those would have kept coming regardless of AJAX or not.

Starting a company "based on AJAX" is about as moronic as it is starting a company who says it's value proposition is "Java" or "Visual Basic": its just a technology stupid!

No, AJAX won't make Microsoft Office obsolete, no, AJAX won't make the PC obsolete, no AJAX won't revolutionize the Internet.
It's a useful technology for improving the user experience though.

Apple does it again

2005-10-17T21:32:00.000+01:00

As a complete iTunes addict since a while back, I cant help but notice that Apple probably has another smash-hit in the works:
Their musicvideo store is showing some real promise and looks really slick, I could not have imagined a better looking product. At £1.89 a piece, the videos are quite affordable as well.

Not surprisingly, the Top-100 music videos chart is dominated by videos by hot young women, bands consisting of hot young women, older videos by women who used to be hot young women (80'ies Madonna videos seem to dominate the chart) or hip-hop videos, incidentally with some hot young women in the background.
Could it possibly be the metaphorical storylines in the videos that attract?..

I think the real attraction for the iTunes Video Store will most likely be music videos and TV episodes. Personally, I still want to own DVD's for movies, but for TV series, I want to see it as soon as possible when it is convenient for me.
Now, if I could just buy the latest episodes of "24" as they are first shown in the US, this will be perfect!

Are lower barriers of entry creating a second IT bubble?

2005-10-17T18:16:00.000+01:00

Peter Rip of Leapfrog Ventures has some interesting points on the subject that I touched yesterday:
I mentioned how the lower barriers of entry for tech start-ups makes it extremely easy to start a company and get of the ground these days, but also makes it very likely that the hotshot of yesterday will be a bankrupt has-been the next day.

Peter Rip goes on to tell how these lower barriers of entry are creating both a Venture Capital bubble and an entrepreneur-bubble, makes for very interesting reading with parallels to 80'ies Personal Computer software start-ups.

I think he might have some very good points there, at the very least there is a most definite entrepreneur-bubble: looking at enterprise software which I am familiar with, it seems that everyone and their mother have been starting companies based on open-source software, each company with a more asinine product and business model than the other.
And the fact that there seems to be more money chasing these ideas than there is need for money, it would very much support the idea of a capital bubble as well.

My guess for areas up for a very brutal shake-out in the next 12 months: open source companies and RSS/Blog companies.

Tech start-ups face strange problem: more VC money than they need

2005-10-16T20:07:00.000+01:00

Mercury News reports that tech-startups face a new, strange dilemma: more VC money is available than they need!

I believe that this is a great example how progress in a wide-area of technologies have diverged to dramatically lower the entry barriers for new businesses through lower entry costs:
The ever plummeting costs of hardware and bandwidth, paired with the availability of mature Open Source software that can act as building blocks for new products and services makes it ever easier to put up a new business in no-time.

What does this all mean?
I think we will see a couple of trends that will shape the next few years (at the very least):

Acceleration of innovation: since it is relatively cheap and low risk to try out new ideas, more ideas will be tried out. This will result in more innovation, a lot of ideas will die quickly, but a lot of ideas that no-one ever would have thought of trying earlier might stick, taking us into entirely new directions.
Acceleration of commoditization: Once an idea starts sticking, we will see a quicker cycle time from unique idea to commoditized market. With lower barriers of entry, the (often debated) advantage of being first will become even less useful, and the need for continued innovation sooner rather than later will be greater to avoid getting dragged into a price-war.
Increased competition, continued plummeting prices: Consumers will continue to benefit from ever lower prices in most areas and better service. Since the barriers of entry will be lower and the cycles of innovation to commoditization will be shorter, consumers will benefit from both increased competition and commoditization.

To sum it up: It has never been easier to start a company and quickly become succesful, but just as well, it has never been easier to fall from grace and go from yesterdays winner to tomorrows bankrupcy-case.

When will the taxman notice virtual tax havens?

2005-10-16T19:16:00.000+01:00

In relation to my previous post, online roleplaying games and their virtual worlds pose an interesting economic dilemma that may be cause for som legal wrangling in the near future:

Many of the massive online roleplaying games have very well functioning economies, a lot of them to the extent that their virtual currencies may be exchanged for real-world money according to exchange rates that are somewhat stable.
In practice, this means that some players may make money in the virtual world, re-invest this virtual money without paying taxes in order to make even more money, to eventually cash in the virtual profits for real-world money.
The profits and income to be made from investing money through deferring tax payment until the very end are potentially quite big, as you can reinvest untaxed profits indefinitely.

The question is, how long will regulators let these virtual tax havens go unregulated and untaxed?
The prudent company running a massive online roleplaying game would probably do wisely by hiring a couple of lawyers to preemptively look into the situation, so they are prepared once the taxman comes knocking on their doors..

Virtual Worlds - helping research on epidemics

2005-10-16T19:08:00.000+01:00

CNet News (not a direct link) report in their PodCast from the 13th of October about how an epidemic in the massive online roleplaying game World of Warcraft have given researchers important insights into human behavior in epidemic outbreaks.
These new insights are expected to be of great use in future epidemic outbreaks in the real world.

The concept of using virtual worlds to gain insight into real world phenomena is an interesting one, I have previously expressed how this may be used to gain insight into the real effects of economic policy on markets, but apparently the dynamics of virtual worlds mirror those of the real world closely enough to provide useful insights into other areas as well.