Archive for August, 2007



Shopping in the “2.0 Era”

Found this interesting video while browsing through YouTube. Imagine if shopping malls operate in the Web 2.0 way. Each items can be tagged, last vowel letters are dropped from brand names (Quacker becomes Quakr? Tongue out), social networks and commenting systems are applied to customers and products, and AJAX turns out to be a detergent.

Though the video is not entirely brilliant - scene-transition wise - and lots of “awkward” scenes too, but it gets the point across. So check it out Laughing

Made by the Wishood team - a Web 2.0 startup with an app that allows you to share your wishes with the world and make them come true.

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Are we ready for Web 3.0?

Web 3.0I noticed that there has been quite a number of discussions over the Internet on the topic of what the future Web 3.0 is all about. Like the current Web 2.0 itself, it is predictable that the term “Web 3.0″ will never get properly defined as well, but the term will eventually be used and mentioned in numerous papers, documents and materials, in blogs and the mainstream media to describe web apps that exhibit some sets of characteristics, features and capabilities more advanced than that of the current Web 2.0. The question is, what kind of characteristics are we talking about here?

The truth is no one knows, and only time will tell. But some of the most notable implementations mentioned around the term “Web 3.0″ includes the following:

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial IntelligenceArtificial Intelligence itself represents the future, so it is no surprise that AI is going to be one of the core implementation of the future web applications. AI is, in itself, a very broad field of study which consists of many distributed branches like Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Data Mining, Voice/Pattern Recognition, Probability Algorithms and Expert Systems. Although they sound complex, what these things do is basically trying to incorporate human intelligence into machines - or in our case - the Web. Some of the web apps around lately has already started using AI techniques in their applications. SpinVox for instance has such an impressive “Voice Recognition” engine that I’ve seen so far, and also Odiogo.com which does the exact opposite so elegantly! There are also plans to somehow “restructure” (see below) the Web as a database which can be “mined” to extract a collective human knowledge around the world. Since I majored in Artificial Intelligence back in college, the idea of implementing AI to the mainstream web gets me pretty excited. Laughing

Semantic Web

It doesn’t matter how many times I read about Semantic Web on Wikipedia, I will still have trouble understanding its concept as clearly. My understanding is that it tries to put the web information into an extensible sort-of way so that it can be “understandable” by machines (when I say machines, I mean computer programs) but at the same time can also be presented to human in a form that is described as “natural”. An easy example of this is RSS feeds, which have been widely used in content publishing. Today, the data that’s being published through RSS can be submitted to many different feed readers and websites. Web 3.0 may have higher ambition towards this by which the Web could even use, digest, understand, compare, and make decision based on all of the data being presented to them in certain formats. Semantic Web will turn the web into a so-called World Wide Database, realizing the concept of “intelligent web”. I could see that this is going to be closely related to the AI field above. Didn’t I mention that this is going to be hard to understand? Tongue out

3D Technology?

This can be quite ambitious, but with the recent invention of multi-touch technology, realizing 3D experience on the web might be just around the corner. A lot of this takes the Web beyond web browsers and using the SecondLife project as an example. However, something inside me tells that 3D stuffs just doesn’t cut it for the masses. We’ll just have to wait and see whether 3D is going to be the next big thing in the future web.

Open Technologies

OpenIDWeb apps providing open APIs and using open identities (such as OpenID) for authentication mechanisms. This will allow multiple apps to be pieced together and distributed into many different platforms and gadgets. That’s probably what Eric Schmidt tried to convey to the audience when asked about what he thinks of Web 3.0 is gonna be about. And this may also be the reason why Facebook is kicking off this year with their extensible app API feature that they provide.

The video below shows Eric Schmidt’s attempt in defining Web 3.0 even though it was not entirely what I had expected. I was hoping that he would’ve at least mentioned “AI” Innocent:

Sealed

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Talk about being a busy entrepreneur…

This was me at 8PM yesterday, happily playing squash at the Cyberjaya’s Community Club with an unknown guy from MMU who dared to challenge me for a match when suddenly I received an SMS message from one of my users who’s complaining about my site being inaccessible. I wasn’t playing happily anymore the rest of the game because I knew I have hundreds of users unable to access the site at that moment and I’m in the middle of a match! (no, I’m not talking about this website. This is just a blog.. come on.. Tongue out)

Playing squash

So because my mood have been sapped, 20 minutes later I had to cut the match short, went looking around for a wi-fi enabled hotspot area around Cyberjaya and ended up squatting on the stairs of TMNet’s front door (a Malaysian broadband provider) to get access to their office’s wireless Internet to solve the problem. I just had to get online quickly!

Squatting at TMNet

Apparently my whole dedicated server was down. And it took more than 4 hours for my provider to actually get the server back up and running. That was the third time in a row my server went unaccessible and when you had to pay RM840 (USD250) every month for the server, you’ll expect a much better service than that. It was found out later that they had problem with the network cables and switches which were unfortunately connected to my server. So they sent some men all the way down to the datacenter (which was funnily at the same place I was squatting at) to fix the problem.

This is just one of the challenges you had to face of being an entrepreneur. Your sweet time can suddenly be interrupted by unexpected (and unwelcomed) circumstances. It can happen anytime and anywhere; while you’re having your dinner, while you’re in the cinema enjoying your long-awaited movie, even while doing your “business” in the toilet. Suddenly a problem creeps in and you had to immediately change your mindset from whatever-ur-doing-at-the-moment to having the problem fixed, unless if its not an urgent one.

And I haven’t yet talked about how I had to deal with users’ complaints afterwards. Cry

Sometimes it can be tiring… but that’s what keeps entrepreneurship interesting… Wink

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