increasingly, governments -- whether it's federal, state, or city -- are doing the same thing, to increase innovation and provide more services to citizens. It's enough to make me want to start programming again.
@mitch - I remember those days too, like back in 1997, when I offered to do my website for my insurance agent freelance. If I recall correctly, she said that her son, who was in 10th grade, had already done it for them.
Since that time, I think it's fair to say that there is a little more room for differentiation between GeoCities and a RealWebSite (TM). :-)
I remember a few conversations with the CIO who brought Wells Fargo online. He described building the company's first website in an afternoon. He installed the Web server (this was before Apache, I think), then got in the elevator to the lobby of the building, where there was a bank branch. He grabbed a couple of brochures, scanned in the images, retyped the text, and bam! Website done!
We used to call primitive websites "brochureware." This site was literally that.
Since then, Wells has gotten a bit more sophisticated....
@Matt I enjoyed visiting the web of the 90s. I didn't join the fold until the mid 2000s. I scan job descriptions with some regularity to see the current wishlist of skills employers are publishing. It is really amazing how far the industry has come just in the last few years. I think back to the days where raging debates over the use of tables for layout was the biggest thing going on.
"I think the real opportunities are in taking the new complex world and making it easier for customers/emploees to use.'
It sure is interesting how these new solutions abstract and hide the complexity, but you're right, we've always been doing that, since my IBM PC Jr told me my floppy drive was called the A:\ drive -- I never had to worry about writing data to sectors and tracks and moving magnetic heads on media now, did I? :-)
@Thinkernetter - Sure. The simplest examples are sites that take their capabilites and offer them to the public at large - think Facebook Login, Your Twitter Stream, or a list of Amazon Search Results. Instead of returning a web page, the sever returns data in a structured format (usually XML or JSON). These results can be processed so the consuming application can create a reasonable GUI - either a web-page or a native device GUI. One great example of this is tweetdeck.
Large travel agencies are using the public API from Royal Carribean to create their own cruise scheduling applications - that might consume services from several cruise lines, airlines, a taxi service -- you name it. A dozen or so companies are extending the capabilities intuit has with quickbooks - to build add-on applications - and they are doing it with the QuickBooks API. The 'solution provider' sees a niche need and can sell the application over iTunes, solving a problem for some customers (before they switch to something else) and tying customers more closely to Intuit along the way.
And, of course, we see amazon stores, Etsy stores, and Ebay stores. The company creating the API benefits from these by driving sales, while the trade partner is usually either selling their own product, or making a small profit through an associate program.
You could think of this, a little bit, like Yahoo's store from the 1900's, but instead the company is offering a public web page, the company is offering public URL's which can be manipulated to do things - from get recent tweets, to post a tweet, to search, get mentions, send a direct message, etc.
Nice stroll down "memory lane" Matt. I think the bigger question is "why simple things become complex"? Is it because technology changes at the "speed of thought" (Thanks Bill Gates)? I think the real opportunities are in taking the new complex world and making it easier for customers/emploees to use.
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In the fall of 2011, around 160,000 students in 190 countries enrolled in a Stanford-sponsored online course about artificial intelligence. About 23,000 completed the course and got certificates, including 248 who got a perfect score. The university offered the same course the old-fashioned way to students sitting in Stanford classrooms. None of the those students got a perfect score.
As Mitch Wagner discussed today, Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr. The big Internet debate at the moment is whether Tumblr will be good or bad for Yahoo. Regardless of their stances on the future of Yahoo itself, many claim that Yahoo will somehow ruin Tumblr.
Has China stolen a march on the West, developing an Internet architecture that is not only based on IPv6, but is also inherently secure from both internal and external attack?
Recently, the Obama administration has been of two minds where privacy rights are concerned. On one hand, you have an administration that vowed to veto CISPA and mandated open data for government websites. On the other hand, you have an increasingly out-of-control Department of Justice on a fishing expedition at AP and demanding legislation to let the FBI wiretap private, encrypted communications and levy fines if a company fails to comply.
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The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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