TreeWorks Blog

I took a look at the previous post and I realized that it can also be read in the hype/firemen-ish code. Behold Grid Computing!

Look at this paragraph from (the famous, but too little read) What is Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly:

Operations must become a core competency. Google’s or Yahoo!’s expertise in product development must be matched by an expertise in daily operations. So fundamental is the shift from software as artifact to software as service that the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis. Google must continuously crawl the web and update its indices, continuously filter out link spam and other attempts to influence its results, continuously and dynamically respond to hundreds of millions of asynchronous user queries, simultaneously matching them with context-appropriate advertisements. It’s no accident that Google’s system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques are perhaps even more closely guarded secrets than their search algorithms. Google’s success at automating these processes is a key part of their cost advantage over competitors.

It’s also no accident that scripting languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, and now Ruby, play such a large role at web 2.0 companies. Perl was famously described by Hassan Schroeder, Sun’s first webmaster, as “the duct tape of the internet.” Dynamic languages (often called scripting languages and looked down on by the software engineers of the era of software artifacts) are the tool of choice for system and network administrators, as well as application developers building dynamic systems that require constant change.

If we admit that the phase of software as an artifact has passed away and its place has been taken by the software as a service, is obviously that on the hardware side more-more flexibility is needed. Practically, this grid computing thing does exactly this: includes the hardware into the application.

We are now working at a project for upgrading some systems in the grid computing paradigm. This paradigm goes really well with the web 2.0 philosophy. For instance, Google got to top at the same time as the wave of computing as commodity. That was the moment when the cost of the usual hardware got to be so low that, by placing them together,it got to replace the supercomputers. And maybe the most important technological advantage of Google is the big capacity of storing/processing plus high availability: that being the Google OS. The ensemble of computers from data centers plus the software that coordinates the leviathan.

On the other side this advantage is kind of passing. We now have grid computing. For which the type of hard you are placing is no longer important. The most known grid service is from Amazon (Elastic), but there are others too. The idea is that every smart little firm or a group of smart kids can now do cool stuff and scale the resources in the mean time with the success. As you probably know the big problem is that of scaling at big numbers of requests/users/processed data. Of course, the problems of grinding big numbers do not completely disappear.

But I should not drag it out: the idea is that in times in which the power of computing will be delivered just like electric power, the innovative idea and its execution are going to count more. You do not have to think at the costs of a hydro power station until you get with the workshop at the dimensions of a big factory and you want to reduce the operation costs.

I’ve been at Netoo #3 yesterday. It was cool. We’ve talked about corporate blogs.

My point as the representative of a very custom services firm was that blogs have a signaling role and an important part in the human relations.They prepare the ground for discussion and establish the value compatibility with prospects.

What are the tools we use here at TW?

1. Knowledge base - Very important. Daily use. Based on wiki. We place there all the cool stuff we discover. But also cabs phone numbers. And work procedures. And documents. And standard emails. And working rules. It is cool that one can separate everything on name spaces, categories, subcategories. And that you can give full access to everybody without fearing that a document might be deleted. Because you can see the history of the document. And if you want you might use it for discussion on a certain subject.

2. Time/project tracking - A customed services firm counts the taxed hours. And calculates the progress of a project. And when the clients are stable ones and the evaluations of costs are made at the end of the month it is important to offer them a nice tracking and not, like they do in some restaurants, a piece of paper saying “15 persons table - 7 millions”. And it is good for the company too. Because one can calculate efficiencies, peoples’ occupying scale, client’s profitability, history of the activity of a team member or a department. We did this thing ourselves. And maybe we will also launch it next year as a product. It really makes sense.

3. CRM - We also did our mini-CRM. Unfortunately, we do not use too often. Probably because the CRM works in companies with many clients and with a relatively reduced value. In retail, for instance. Anyway, maybe we go public with this one too.

I now it has a cool function for monitoring the interaction of the user with the website. Meaning, if you send an email to someone, you can find out if it has been opened, how many times, if it has been forwarded, place some cookies and it will tell you if it has been re-opened, if the person entered the website, how many times and when. This works out fine for filtering the prospects. For example, you are a company that sells automobiles, you have a clients database, you send everyone an email to announce a new model. Then you can see who grabs the bite: who enters the website, who returns on the website, who checks out the prices. Who forwards the email and whether the persons who got the forwarded message enter the site. After that you can choose the most promising prospects. Offer them a test ride or some discounts.

4. Blog - Because we want to tell what we are doing here, how we see the things in this industry and the ideas that come our mind. Keep in contact with our clients. And bring new ones. Go out for a beer with them and discuss things. Because in big long term project, the relationship really counts. Maybe most of all things.

Ovidiu Petrescu, Ellen, Eric Case, Pedram Keyani all have something in common. That is the fact that they are Googlers. They are people who wake up in the morning and go to work at Google Inc. They all post on their personal blogs. The links can be found on the official Google blog.

The general impression is that any employee may write on the Google external blog: production managers, Dennis – the one who draws the Google Doodles or software engineers. That is also the impression the Tree blog leaves, isn’t it? =))

But a blog, especially an external one is rather like a communication window for the public; it needs care and competence to develop into an efficient tool.

This does not mean that the internal ones – that help the employees collaborate and develop their ideas – are meaningless. Here at Tree we do not have an internal blog (for we have already developed the telepathic communication inside the company). But if we had, Emil would be given the chance to post the Steaua football team anthem’s words and Ioana to post photos with the one and only Super Cat.

If we get back to the real purpose of the blog, there are a few things you can use to implement a blog that will help both you and your employees and, especially, your readers. First of all, you must not forget a blog is a communication tool, so the dialog has to be encourages (the comments and the contact page work in this direction). Secondly, you could use the new white paper about alternative communication tools – the blogs.

Certainly, blogs do not match every company’s profile, but they get better results in the search engines, grow the online visibility of your firm, are an alternative media form that offers a personalized voice to your company and create WoM marketing opportunities.

What do blogs really do? Allow the passing to Web 2.0. This meaning: they help you advance.

PS: Although the title may sound a senseless babbling, a flexible mind like my own can actually arrive at a coherent result.

Ionut spun his charmed twig and with two whiffles transformed the TreeWorks headquarters into a Fairyland. Bridi blew magical dust over us and transported everyone in the land where only friendly dragons exist. There where little frogs allow only attentive children to listen to their songs, where the dragon lights the stars and the bandmaster organizes concerts in the glade.

Almost synchronizing with Santa, the riped minds from Tree returned back to the childhood years, trying to remember the first school years and the confused letters, the meaningless numbers and the long studious afternoons. And because majority’s vote was against the wooden / plastic counting frame, we replaced it with garden full of magical beans. We have also decided that the ABC is a too cold, impersonal character, so we introduced the Inventor obsessed with noting everything he sees.

For Anna we have prepared a princess who is waiting to try on her complete and coquette wardrobe and an entire collection of colorful butterflies. For Daniel we have a quiver full of arrows waiting to be pointed to playful balloons.

But what we wanted to announce is the discovery of the fact that our minds stayed close to the first school years. For me, for instance, school was associated with the bang of chestnuts on the asphalt and technology with the great HC 91. But no matter the common generation gaps, we realized that the most important attributes of childhood are those that also existed 10 or 20 years ago. Curiosity and innocence.

We may grow wise. But we stay young at the same time. And that is what we wish for you too.

PS: We mention that we are responsible for having drew some other young minds into this: Ana, Olga, Simona, Alin and Alin. To whom we thank for having played a role in the Fairyland.

When the design was made, the guys were thinking at Nicoleta Luciu (their hearts are broken since you’ve got married, Nicoleta, and Ionut will even tell his grandchildren about that time when he told you something funny and made you laught). The girls dreamt about Dan Bordeianu and Lucian Viziru while working for the programming. The result: the new AcasaTV website. I just hope we haven’t all been day dreaming.

Yesterday I was talking with Emil about changing our 4 gb ipods with the new 8 gb ones. (The ones with a hard disk have a too big size.) Ioana and Ionut were mocking us (they are the light shuffle users and that explains it all): Why would we need an 8 gb one for current stuff? My explanation: because I always want to listen to the album I have just deleted yesterday. Emil’s explanation: an audio-book has 600 megas; putting 3-4 audio books on an i pod barely leaves you any place for the music. I hove everyone agrees with me when I say that 4 gb is not enough.

My futuristic solution is this: heaping up on a central server with high speed access through wifi,wimax, widracs Everyone should have its own secured backed-up virtual space with different access levels. Even more, the state should offer every person at birth an incipient space, with the possibility of buying extra space if needed. This could gather public things (ID card, birth certificate, CV, diplomas, tax and interest returns), personal stuff that can be accessed by everyone (for instance photos, blogs etc.), personal stuff with access for different security levels (pictures from private events, contract drafts, personal conversations etc.) and very personal stuff with access only for the owner. With this – association of the file with the owner and not with the device – all DRM (Digital Rights Management) problems could be solved. The access system, however, would put most problems – in order to be both usable and safe. Some embedded stuff could exist, so that the social structure be respected: parents can verify the space of children until a certain age, married couples could share a certain space of intellectual property – in co-ownership and so on.

Of course, there would be some things to discuss about the legality of order organisms‘ access. Plus those of scripted protocols – RSA? Biometric security (retinal, vocal, digital marks) for a certain privacy level. There a lot of things to consider.

My point is: the future is for small hardware clients who can access heaped information centralized by wireless, plus a comunitary definition for the concept of information. In this kind of future there are two big winners: technological aggregates (like Google), quality content producers (from persons to production companies). Who is going to have problems? The distributors who base on their dominant position: I mean, what point is there in having a public television in a world where everybody composes its own informational menu. If one wants to support culture, education and so on, better give subventions for the content producers. But this is another talk and I must start my work day.

While reading these sentences I can choose to perform from one of these actions: read the e-mail, delete it or mark it as a spam.

I usually do not open the emails that come from unknown addresses or ones that have vague headlines. I do open emails from sites I have logged on, but not always follow their links and most of the times I take a glance at the content and that’s all. From time to time I get an email telling me I haven’t visited a specific website for some time and probably someone who manages the answers evaluation is wondering if I want to keep my account. Other times I order products online and after that I keep receiving offers or just events invitations.

Thus, day after day, I open and delete newsletters, latest products offers, news of order forms. It does not really mean so much for me, but it sure does for people who generate them.

B2C Internet Direct Mail Communication - direct, personalized, targeted - is more and more used. Because an email is less expensive than a letter, a print or a tv ad, the results of a campaign can be measured, the resources are limited and the messages can be customized for a specific target.

The questions you need to answer before implementing an internet direct mail campaign are:

• Who do you send the emails to?
• Where do you get the addresses from?
• What will be the format of the message?
• What about the content?
• How will you measure the results?

For instance, HTML email strengthens the message, but are preffered by the unexperienced users. That is why it is advisable to let the users choose their desired format. ROI (Return Of Investment) is an efficient method of measuring the results of a campaign. The rate may vary depending on the product, industry and target.

You can find the answers to all these questions, as well as how you can avoid being labeled as a spam generative here.

I found out from Iulian Comanescu that the newspaper Romania Libera relaunched their site.

A few small remarks plus, in my opinion, a very important one.

The small ones:

1. Some RSS would have been extremely useful. Think Web 2.0!

2. Why does the general belief that the “Advertising” section must have a place in the menu still exist? I mean, how many times does it happen for a big corporation or advertising agency to pop up and say “I saw on your webpage that you also sell advertising space. We would have never guessed that.”

3. What is the use of a clock in the header of the page? To show exactly the time the computer also shows? At least if it would have shown the time of Bucharest for the ones abroad, for instance.

Besides these remarks, everything is ok. Except my big dissatisfaction.

This site is a very clear example how to not use the AJAX for the sake of AJAX. If you look at the URLs you will see they don’t change at all. Index.php remains like that all the time. Which is extremely bad for the search engines which will see exactly one page. Apparently, until now, 15-20 percents of the visitors came from the search engines. From now on only the ones looking for “Romania Libera” will find a link to the page.

More, it is a completely not usable thing, affecting all users. What should I do if I want to save some articles to read later? How do I save the URLs? Of course, there might be some appended parameters when sending the articles by email, but this facility was not working at the time I checked it. So it was impossible for me to figure it out.

And what do I do if I want to link an article from RL to another site, for instance?

I think they did it to avoid certain websites that merge content, but I think it was a completely counter-productive choice. To try to turn into a totally isolated island in this fluid online world proves a profound misundersanding of the way value and web content are created and propagated.

PS. And since it is all about faulty misunderstandings of the way things on the Internet work, here’s a very cool post written by Vladimir about a workshop at Biz Days. Completely hilarious, you almost wonder if that workshop does not deserve all the money in times when Hollywood does not produce good comedies anymore.

The T-shirts that carry a message say something about the persons wearing them. Quotations, funny ideas or ironical phrases (I see dumb people / I smile because I have no idea what’s going on / Your lips keep moving and all I hear is Blah Blah Blah). This can label a person as being either ironic, funny, the fan of a band, with a fantastic imagination or not, but, above all, they can label him/her a person who wants to stand apart.

How should the text on a t-shirt look, in order to be read? Short, concise and big. Because the street is a dynamic place. People move, run, are in a hurry. The texts should adapt the environment.

The online is similar to this to a certain amount. Scanning, rapidity and concision. If we analyze a concrete example, we will notice why not only the design and the usability count, but also what and how you write online.

Above we have a compact block of text. Maybe I’m just being subjective, but the design of the first text is not similar to this one:

How are they different? Lists, bullet points, one idea per paragraph, white spaces, clear structure, URLs. Just a few elements that convince the user to read the webpage or to return on it. Because he liked it and it was not difficult to get the information he needed.

But how do you write something for the online? You put yourself in the user’s position, you choose the key words (that will be underlined, made URLs etc.), you try to structure text so that it appears airy and not just a block of text. Think if some of the information can be better explained with the use of a photo, a graphic or a table. Do not insert a big quantity of information on one page. Instead, insert a URL to a downloadable file or to another webpage for the users that are really interested on the subject. More about writing online you can find here.