What's Rockin' in Singapore

Here are couple of articles that outlines a Silverlight based call center application. The code sample simulates an incoming call and demonstrates feasibility of push notifications from IVR systems. The demo doesn’t really deal with any exceptions and other errors and meant just meant to show push notifications, popup dialogs, web service implementations, etc.

Silverlight: Build Line-Of-Business Enterprise Apps With Silverlight, Part 1
Take a walk through the creation of a call center client application to learn how to build real-world enterprise solutions using Silverlight.

Silverlight: Build Line-Of-Business Enterprise Apps With Silverlight, Part 2

Here we wrap up the call center client application we began last month. The techniques we illustrate will help you build real-world enterprise solutions using Silverlight.

Web 2.0 tools present a vast array of opportunities—for companies that know how to use them.

FEBRUARY 2009 • Michael Chui, Andy Miller, and Roger P. Roberts

Technologies known collectively as Web 2.0 have spread widely among consumers over the past five years. Social-networking Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, now attract more than 100 million visitors a month. As the popularity of Web 2.0 has grown, companies have noted the intense consumer engagement and creativity surrounding these technologies. Many organizations, keen to harness Web 2.0 internally, are experimenting with the tools or deploying them on a trial basis.

Over the past two years, McKinsey has studied more than 50 early adopters to garner insights into successful efforts to use Web 2.0 as a way of unlocking participation. We have surveyed, independently, a range of executives on Web 2.0 adoption. Our work suggests the challenges that lie ahead. To date, as many survey respondents are dissatisfied with their use of Web 2.0 technologies as are satisfied. Many of the dissenters cite impediments such as organizational structure, the inability of managers to understand the new levers of change, and a lack of understanding about how value is created using Web 2.0 tools. We have found that, unless a number of success factors are present, Web 2.0 efforts often fail to launch or to reach expected heights of usage. Executives who are suspicious or uncomfortable with perceived changes or risks often call off these efforts. Others fail because managers simply don’t know how to encourage the type of participation that will produce meaningful results.

Some historical perspective is useful. Web 2.0, the latest wave in corporate technology adoptions, could have a more far-reaching organizational impact than technologies adopted in the 1990s—such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (Exhibit 1). The latest Web tools have a strong bottom-up element and engage a broad base of workers. They also demand a mind-set different from that of earlier IT programs, which were instituted primarily by edicts from senior managers.

Web 2.0 covers a range of technologies. The most widely used are blogs, wikis, podcasts, information tagging, prediction markets, and social networks (Exhibit 2). New technologies constantly appear as the Internet continues to evolve. Of the companies we interviewed for our research, all were using at least one of these tools. What distinguishes them from previous technologies is the high degree of participation they require to be effective. Unlike ERP and CRM, where most users either simply process information in the form of reports or use the technology to execute transactions (such as issuing payments or entering customer orders), Web 2.0 technologies are interactive and require users to generate new information and content or to edit the work of other participants.

Earlier technologies often required expensive and lengthy technical implementations, as well as the realignment of formal business processes. With such memories still fresh, some executives naturally remain wary of Web 2.0. But the new tools are different. While they are inherently disruptive and often challenge an organization and its culture, they are not technically complex to implement. Rather, they are a relatively lightweight overlay to the existing infrastructure and do not necessarily require complex technology integration.

Gains from participation

Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University, calls the underused human potential at companies an immense “cognitive surplus” and one that could be tapped by participatory tools. Corporate leaders are, of course, eager to find new ways to add value. Over the past 15 years, using a combination of technology investments and process reengineering, they have substantially raised the productivity of transactional processes. Web 2.0 promises further gains, although the capabilities differ from those of the past technologies (Exhibit 3).

Research by our colleagues shows how differences in collaboration are correlated with large differences in corporate performance. Our most recent Web 2.0 survey demonstrates that despite early frustrations, a growing number of companies remain committed to capturing the collaborative benefits of Web 2.0. Since we first polled global executives two years ago, the adoption of these tools has continued. Spending on them is now a relatively modest $1 billion, but the level of investment is expected to grow by more than 15 percent annually over the next five years, despite the current recession.

Management imperatives for unlocking participation

To help companies navigate the Web 2.0 landscape, we have identified six critical factors that determine the outcome of efforts to implement these technologies.

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top. Web 2.0 projects often are seen as grassroots experiments, and leaders sometimes believe the technologies will be adopted without management intervention—a “build it and they will come” philosophy. These business leaders are correct in thinking that participatory technologies are founded upon bottom-up involvement from frontline staffers and that this pattern is fundamentally different from the rollout of ERP systems, for example, where compliance with rules is mandatory. Successful participation, however, requires not only grassroots activity but also a different leadership approach: senior executives often become role models and lead through informal channels.
At Lockheed Martin, for instance, a direct report to the CIO championed the use of blogs and wikis when they were introduced. The executive evangelized the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies to other senior leaders and acted as a role model by establishing his own blog. He set goals for adoption across the organization, as well as for the volume of contributions. The result was widespread acceptance and collaboration across the company’s divisions.

2. The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale. In earlier IT campaigns, identifying and prioritizing the applications that would generate the greatest business value was relatively easy. These applications focused primarily on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of known business processes within functional silos (for example, supply-chain-management software to improve coordination across the network). By contrast, our research shows the applications that drive the most value through participatory technologies often aren’t those that management expects.
Efforts go awry when organizations try to dictate their preferred uses of the technologies—a strategy that fits applications designed specifically to improve the performance of known processes—rather than observing what works and then scaling it up. When management chooses the wrong uses, organizations often don’t regroup by switching to applications that might be successful. One global technology player, for example, introduced a collection of participatory tools that management judged would help the company’s new hires quickly get up to speed in their jobs. The intended use never caught on, but people in the company’s recruiting staff began using the tools to share recruiting tips and pass along information about specific candidates and their qualifications. The company, however, has yet to scale up this successful, albeit unintended, use.
At AT&T, it was frontline staffers who found the best use for a participatory technology—in this case, using Web 2.0 for collaborative project management. Rather than dictating the use, management broadened participation by supporting an awareness campaign to seed further experimentation. Over a 12-month period, the use of the technology rose to 95 percent of employees, from 65 percent.

3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used. Perhaps because of the novelty of Web 2.0 initiatives, they’re often considered separate from mainstream work. Earlier generations of technologies, by contrast, often explicitly replaced the tools employees used to accomplish tasks. Thus, using Web 2.0 and participating in online work communities often becomes just another “to do” on an already crowded list of tasks.
Participatory technologies have the highest chance of success when incorporated into a user’s daily workflow. The importance of this principle is sometimes masked by short-term success when technologies are unveiled with great fanfare; with the excitement of the launch, contributions seem to flourish. As normal daily workloads pile up, however, the energy and attention surrounding the rollout decline, as does participation. One professional-services firm introduced a wiki-based knowledge-management system, to which employees were expected to contribute, in addition to their daily tasks. Immediately following the launch, a group of enthusiasts used the wikis vigorously, but as time passed they gave the effort less personal time—outside their daily workflow—and participation levels fell.
Google is an instructive case to the contrary. It has modified the way work is typically done and has made Web tools relevant to how employees actually do their jobs. The company’s engineers use blogs and wikis as core tools for reporting on the progress of their work. Managers stay abreast of their progress and provide direction by using tools that make it easy to mine data on workflows. Engineers are better able to coordinate work with one another and can request or provide backup help when needed. The easily accessible project data allows senior managers to allocate resources to the most important and time-sensitive projects.
Pixar moved in a similar direction when it upgraded a Web 2.0 tool that didn’t quite mesh with the way animators did their jobs. The company started with basic text-based wikis to share information about films in production and to document meeting notes. That was unsatisfactory, since collaborative problem solving at the studio works best when animators, software engineers, managers, and directors analyze and discuss real clips and frames from a movie. Once Pixar built video into the wikis, their quality improved as critiques became more relevant. The efficiency of the project groups increased as well.

4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets. Traditional management incentives aren’t particularly useful for encouraging participation. Earlier technology adoptions could be guided readily with techniques such as management by objectives, as well as standardized bonus pay or individual feedback. The failure of employees to use a mandated application would affect their performance metrics and reviews. These methods tend to fall short when applied to unlocking participation. In one failed attempt, a leading Web company set performance evaluation criteria that included the frequency of postings on the company’s newly launched wiki. While individuals were posting enough entries to meet the benchmarks, the contributions were generally of low quality. Similarly, a professional-services firm tried to use steady management pressure to get individuals to post on wikis. Participation increased when managers doled out frequent feedback but never reached self-sustaining levels.
A more effective approach plays to the Web’s ethos and the participants’ desire for recognition: bolstering the reputation of participants in relevant communities, rewarding enthusiasm, or acknowledging the quality and usefulness of contributions. ArcelorMittal, for instance, found that when prizes for contributions were handed out at prominent company meetings, employees submitted many more ideas for business improvements than they did when the awards were given in less-public forums.

5. The right solution comes from the right participants. Targeting users who can create a critical mass for participation as well as add value is another key to success. With an ERP rollout, the process is straightforward: a company simply identifies the number of installations (or “seats”) it needs to buy for functions such as purchasing or finance and accounting. With participatory technologies, it’s far from obvious which individuals will be the best participants. Without the right base, efforts are often ineffective. A pharmaceutical company tried to generate new product ideas by tapping suggestions from visitors to its corporate Web site. It soon discovered that most of them had neither the skills nor the knowledge to make meaningful contributions, so the quality of the ideas was very low.
To select users who will help drive a self-sustaining effort (often enthusiastic early technology adopters who have rich personal networks and will thus share knowledge and exchange ideas), a thoughtful approach is required. When P&G introduced wikis and blogs to foster collaboration among its workgroups, the company targeted technology-savvy and respected opinion leaders within the organization. Some of these people ranked high in the corporate hierarchy, while others were influential scientists or employees to whom other colleagues would turn for advice or other assistance.
When Best Buy experimented with internal information markets, the goal was to ensure that participation helped to create value. In these markets, employees place bets on business outcomes, such as sales forecasts.⁶ To improve the chances of success, Best Buy cast its net widely, going beyond in-house forecasting experts; it also sought out participants with a more diverse base of operational knowledge who could apply independent judgment to the prediction markets. The resulting forecasts were more accurate than those produced by the company’s experts.

6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk. A common reason for failed participation is discomfort with it, or even fear. In some cases, the lack of management control over the self-organizing nature and power of dissent is the issue. In others, it’s the potential repercussions of content—through blogs, social networks, and other venues—that is detrimental to the company. Numerous executives we interviewed said that participatory initiatives had been stalled by legal and HR concerns. These risks differ markedly from those of previous technology adoptions, where the chief downside was high costs and poor execution.
Companies often have difficulty maintaining the right balance of freedom and control. Some organizations, trying to accommodate new Web standards, have adopted total laissez-faire policies, eschewing even basic controls that screen out inappropriate postings. In some cases, these organizations have been burned.
Prudent managers should work with the legal, HR, and IT security functions to establish reasonable policies, such as prohibiting anonymous posting. Fears are often overblown, however, and the social norms enforced by users in the participating communities can be very effective at policing user exchanges and thus mitigating risks. The sites of some companies incorporate “flag as inappropriate” buttons, which temporarily remove suspect postings until they can be reviewed, though officials report that these functions are rarely used. Participatory technologies should include auditing functions, similar to those for e-mail, that track all contributions and their authors. Ultimately, however, companies must recognize that successful participation means engaging in authentic conversations with participants.

Next steps

Acceptance of Web 2.0 technologies in business is growing. Encouraging participation calls for new approaches that break with the methods used to deploy IT in the past. Company leaders first need to survey their current practices. Once they feel comfortable with some level of controlled disruption, they can begin testing the new participatory tools. The management imperatives we have outlined should improve the likelihood of success.

External source: http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Business_Technology/Application_Management/Six_ways_to_make_Web_20_work_2294

President Obama used it to get elected. Dell will recruit new hires with it. Microsoft's new operating system borrows from it. No question, Facebook has friends in high places. Can CEO Mark Zuckerberg make those connections pay off?

Facebook held no appeal for Peter Lichtenstein. The New Paltz, N.Y., resident had checked out so-called social networking sites before, and he wasn't impressed. ("MySpace," he recalls, "was ridiculous.")

A chiropractor and acupuncturist, Lichtenstein was already a member of a few professional web-based user groups. The last thing he needed was another message box to check. Then a buddy posted a link to photos from a trip to Thailand and India on his Facebook page and flatly refused to distribute them any other way. The friend's assumption: Duh - everyone's on Facebook.

And so Lichtenstein, 57, recently became an official member of the Facebook army, 175 million strong and, Facebook says, growing at the astounding rate of about five million new users a week, making it a rare bright spot in a dismal economy. If Facebook were a country, it would have a population nearly as large as Brazil's. It even edges out the U.S. television audience for Super Bowl XLIII, which drew a record-setting 152 million eyeballs.

But these days the folks fervently updating their Facebook pages aren't just tech-savvy kids: The college and post-college crowd the site originally aimed to serve (18- to 24-year-olds) now makes up less than a quarter of users. The newest members - the ones behind Facebook's accelerating growth rate - are more, ahem, mature types like Lichtenstein, who never thought they'd have the time or inclination to overshare on the web. It's just that Facebook has finally started to make their busy lives a little more productive - and a lot more fun.

Try logging in to quickly check a message, and you may find yourself scrolling through new baby photos from that guy who used to sit next to you in Mr. Peterson's English class. How did such a goofball end up with such a cute baby? And how'd he find you here anyhow? Soon you're checking the friends you have in common. This addictive quality keeps Facebook's typical user on the site for an average of 169 minutes a month, according to ComScore. Compare that with Google News, where the average reader spends 13 minutes a month checking up on the world, or the New York Times website, which holds on to readers for a mere ten minutes a month.

The "stickiness" of the site is a key part of 24-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg's original plan to build an online version of the relationships we have in real life. Offline we bump into friends and end up talking for hours. We flip through old photos with our family. We join clubs. Facebook lets us do all that in digital form. Yet we also present different faces to the different people in our lives: An "anything goes" page we share with pals might not be appropriate for office mates - or for the moms and grandmas who increasingly are joining the site. Basic privacy controls today allow users to share varying degrees of information with friends, but when I recently met with Zuckerberg in Palo Alto, he waxed philosophical about eventually giving a user the ability to have a different Facebook personality for each Facebook friendship, a sort of online version of the line from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself": "I contain multitudes."

His ultimate goal is less poetic - and perhaps more ambitious: to turn Facebook into the planet's standardized communication (and marketing) platform, as ubiquitous and intuitive as the telephone but far more interactive, multidimensional - and indispensable. Your Facebook ID quite simply will be your gateway to the digital world, Zuckerberg predicts. "We think that if you can build one worldwide platform where you can just type in anyone's name, find the person you're looking for, and communicate with them," he told a German audience in January, "that's a really valuable system to be building."

Just how valuable is subject to great debate. Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) in 2007 invested $240 million for a 1.6% stake in the company, giving Facebook a valuation of about $15 billion. But according to a June 23, 2008, court proceeding, the company values itself at $3.7 billion. (With a 20% to 30% stake, Zuckerberg quite possibly is the world's youngest self-made billionaire, on paper at least.) A big part of the challenge in assigning a valuation to Facebook is that its financial results don't come anywhere near to matching its runaway success signing up members: The site pulled in estimated revenues of just $280 million last year, and sources close to the company say it didn't break even.

Indeed, sometimes it seems as if everyone but Facebook is capitalizing on the platform. The Democratic Party in Maine is using it to organize regular meetings. Accounting firm Ernst & Young relies on the site to recruit new hires, and Dell (DELL, Fortune 500) will soon do the same. Microsoft's new operating system has a slew of features lifted straight from Facebook's playbook.

Zuckerberg knows this is a make-or-break moment for the company he founded five years ago in his linoleum-floored Harvard dorm room. He must figure out how to continue to add new members and make Facebook vital to its mass audience without alienating the kids and early adopters who helped popularize the site. (Growth has leveled off at MySpace, the original mega--social networking site with 130 million members, and it may wind up as a playground for music lovers.)

He'll have to fend off search giant Google, which has its own grand plan to profit from social networks. And he has to live up to his change-the-world bravado: The Net is riddled with examples of companies and services that promised to be the next great communications platform - AOL (owned by Fortune's parent) and Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500), to name two - but failed to do so.

To help Facebook figure out how to profit from its scale and popularity, Zuckerberg has brought in a chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, who built Google's money-minting AdWords program. YouTube's former chief financial officer, Gideon Yu, runs the finance operation. And the board is packed with old-school cred (Washington Post publisher Don Graham and venture capitalist Jim Breyer) and tech smarts (PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen). Zuckerberg, who favors jeans and T-shirts, has taken to wearing ties beneath his black North Face jacket because, as he tells his colleagues, "2009 is a serious year."

And not just for Facebook. Few ultra-young tech company founders manage to hold on to the CEO reins as long as Zuckerberg has. They either go on to become the stuff of legend (Bill Gates) or flame out fabulously. There are certainly those who wonder whether the wunderkind is in over his head, punting on profitability when every other company in Silicon Valley is under enormous pressure to make money. And what's a stiff, reticent guy who'd rather be writing code doing in the CEO's job in the first place? Sure, Zuckerberg's done pretty well so far, creating a site that has won a rabid following among mainstream web users. But a lot of those people were once passionate about their AOL accounts too. Zuckerberg has our attention. What's he going to do with it?

A digital world

Mark Zuckerberg has always liked to build things. I first spoke with him in the summer of 2005 when he was still crashing on a friend's couch in Menlo Park, Calif.? He was on his cellphone, pacing back and forth in the backyard as he explained his parents' reaction to his project: "The thing I made before Facebook almost got me kicked out of school," he said, referring to Facemash, a site that let people rate photos. He went before the school's administrative board to answer questions about how he gathered data. "When I started making Facebook, [my parents] were, like, don't make another site." Then all his Harvard classmates - as well as students from the rest of the Ivy League - joined, and he spent the remainder of his college money on servers. So much for school.

Even in our initial interview, Zuckerberg was clear that he wasn't simply creating another online tool for college kids to check each other out. He called Facebook a "social utility" and explained that one day everyone would be able to use it to locate people on the web - a truly global digital phone book. And he also knew that if the site were easy to use, a combination of peer pressure and the so-called network effect would, like, totally kick in. Since that summer afternoon Zuckerberg has passed legal drinking age, found an apartment, accepted more than $400 million in venture capital, and attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, several times.

But Zuckerberg makes it clear to me that he's still intensely focused on connecting the entire world on Facebook - only now his vision goes well beyond the site as a digital phone book. It becomes the equivalent of the phone itself: It is the main tool people use to communicate for work and pleasure. It also becomes the central place where members organize parties, store pictures, find jobs, watch videos, and play games. Eventually they'll use their Facebook ID as an online passkey to gain access to websites and online forums that require personal identification. In other words, Facebook will be where people live their digital lives, without the creepy avatars.

To achieve that goal Zuckerberg has brought in plenty of seasoned veterans, like Google's Sandberg, but he's also surrounded himself with young enthusiasts who share his view that Facebook can change the way people live and work. Like the early employees at Google, most won't see 30 for a long time. Pass by a receptionist, a straw-haired woman with funky glasses, and you'll notice she's updating her Facebook profile. Stroll through the stretch of University Avenue in Palo Alto that houses the company's different offices (it is getting ready to consolidate operations in new digs in April) and you'll be able to differentiate the Facebook employees from the venture capitalists who toil in offices nearby: The Facebookers are the super-young brainiacs in ratty T-shirts and jeans.

At times it may seem hard to reconcile Zuckerberg's lofty aspirations for Facebook with the utterly commonplace content that users create on the site. Consider 25 Random Things, a new take on the chain letter that has grown so popular it was written up in the New York Times Style section. You list 25 supposedly random things about yourself and send the note on to 25 of your friends (who are supposed to do the same), but your randomness also ends up on display to any gawker who may be surfing your profile. The items range from the banal (No. 17: I never, ever, ever throw up. Like five times in my adult life) to the intimate (No. 2: I knew I was gay in the sixth grade but didn't tell anyone until I was 19). The feature is high profile - some 37,500 lists sprang up in just two weeks - but taken as a whole it just seems like a lot of user-generated babble.

Yet it is that very babble that makes Facebook so valuable to marketers. Imagine if an advertiser had the ability to eavesdrop on every phone conversation you've ever had. In a way, that's what all the wall posts, status updates, 25 Random Things, and picture tagging on Facebook amount to: a semipublic airing of stuff people are interested in doing, buying, and trying. Sure, you can send private messages using Facebook, and Zuckerberg eventually hopes to give you even more tools to tailor your profile so that the face you present to, say, your employer is very different from the way you look online to your college roommate. Just like in real life. But the running lists of online interactions on Facebook, known as "feeds," are what make Facebook different from other social networking sites - and they are precisely what make corporations salivate.

The stream

Every user on Facebook has two feeds. There's a personal feed, which you'll find on your profile page along with your photo and list of interests. Every time you log a status update, comment, or video post, that interaction is captured and stored for your review; those changes also become fodder for a second news feed that runs on your home page, the first page you see when you log on to the site.

That feed keeps tabs on all the interactions your friends are having (and alerts friends to updates you've made on your personal feed). If your brother RSVP'd to a dinner party, for example, you might be notified about it, even if you weren't invited to attend. And if you change your profile photo, it may let your brother know. Like Facebook itself, the feeds are subject to the network effect: The more data you share and interact with, the more robust your news feed becomes.

Zuckerberg calls the sum of those interactions the "stream," and it's his newest obsession. Unlike Google, which uses complex algorithms to serve up advertisements based on what you search for, Facebook lets you help "curate" your feeds. The information that pops up is partly a result of controls you establish in your privacy settings and feedback you provide to Facebook. But Facebook also can track your behavior, and if the site notices you're spending a lot of time on the fan page of a certain movie star, for example, it will send you more information about that celebrity.

Needless to say, marketers would love to tap into that information. "If there are 150 million people in a room, you should probably go to that room," says Narinder Singh, chief product officer for Appirio, which helps big companies like Dell and Starbucks (SBUX, Fortune 500) find ways to connect with users over the site. "It's too attractive a set of people and too large a community for businesses to ignore."

Yet because businesses haven't yet effectively infiltrated Facebook, its users may be under the mistaken impression that they aren't under surveillance. "What I like is that it doesn't bombard you with advertisements, so it feels really personal," says Heather Rowley, a 35-year-old photographer in Berkeley. It seems inevitable that some members will feel betrayed or uneasy when ads based on casual chats with friends start to appear on their feeds.

Facebook already has had one brush with member backlash in 2007 when it introduced a feature called Beacon, which allowed members to see what websites their friends visited, and even showed purchases on e-commerce sites. Users protested vehemently - one even filed a lawsuit on privacy grounds - and Facebook apologized.

Now the company is trying a slightly different approach. A feature called Facebook Connect lets users log on to company websites using their Facebook logins. The system, which dovetails with Zuckerberg's vision of a Facebook account as a form of personal ID on the web (privacy settings and all), appeals to advertisers for a couple of reasons. When a user logs on to a third-party site using Facebook Connect, that activity may be reported on her friends' news feeds, which serves as a de facto endorsement. The tool also makes it easy for members to invite their friends to check out the advertiser's site. Starbucks, for example, uses Facebook Connect on its Pledge5 site, which asks people to donate five hours of time to volunteer work. If you sign in using a Facebook account, a new screen, a hybrid of Facebook and the Pledge5 home page, pops up with information on how to find local volunteer opportunities. A tab on the page asks you to "help spread the word." Click on it and your entire address book of Facebook friends pops up, enabling you to evangelize Pledge5 with just a few keystrokes.

So far most of the organizations using Facebook Connect are social enterprises, like Pledge5, or news outlets, like CNN, soliciting members for discussion groups. Who knows how Facebook users will react when a brokerage asks a member to spread the word about its services. Of course, members can ignore the exhortations to invite friends, the same way they might decline to forward their 25 Random Things.

He also insists that marketing on Facebook isn't obtrusive, and that users can control what kind of advertising they see: Each ad contains a small thumbs-up or thumbs-down button. If a user finds an ad irrelevant, repetitive, or offensive, she clicks thumbs-down, and Facebook records her dissatisfaction. Eventually the inappropriate ads will go away. And when ads are useful, many online users do click on them. Rowley, the California photographer who values Facebook's intimacy, says she recently clicked on a Virgin America ad for tickets to the East Coast when it popped up on her news feed. "I was going there, so it made sense," she says.

Still, the company couldn't have picked a worse time to start wooing marketers in earnest. Online advertising growth is expected to decelerate in 2009 from 17.5% last year to just 8.9%. And historically most of those ad dollars have flowed to portals and other online destinations, not experimental sites and social networks like Facebook. When Sheryl Sandberg arrived at Facebook, a substantial chunk of the company's revenues were still coming from a 2006 deal with Microsoft in which the software behemoth sold traditional banner ads on Facebook pages and the parties split the revenue. But attempts to sell traditional online ads on Facebook and other social-networking sites have failed miserably: Banner ads can sell for as little as 15 cents per 1,000 clicks (compared with, say, $8 per 1,000 clicks for an ad on a targeted news portal such as Yahoo Auto) because marketers know that members ignore them.

Sandberg acknowledges that Facebook has much more work to do to secure advertisers. "What we have to figure out is, How do we build a monetization machine which is in keeping with what users are doing on the site?" she says. "It's about execution, doing things faster and better, getting more users and more advertisers."

Facebook's march to 200 million users began in earnest in January 2008. That's when the site made translation tools available to international users. Today more than 70% of Facebook users are outside the U.S., and most of them read it in their native language. But anecdotal evidence suggests that American baby-boomers have discovered Facebook in a big way: Some, like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, use the site to keep an eye on their kids' online activities. Others are using it as a networking tool in a bad economy.

The fastest-growing demographic on the site? Women 55 and older, up 175% since September 2008. Cynics might say that if Granny is on Facebook, the site absolutely has jumped the shark. Quite the contrary: Having a broad swath of users is exactly what Zuckerberg wants. The arrival of an older, less web-centric crowd suggests that he has succeeded in making the site easy to use. And Facebook can't become a standardized platform if only cool kids use it. Besides, there doesn't currently seem to be another hot social-networking site that is drawing young users away from Facebook in large numbers.

But the Facebook juggernaut still could very easily go awry: Remember AOL's Instant Messenger? Teenagers lived on it and companies started using it in lieu of e-mail. But AOL never figured out a way to make money on it.

Facebook could meet a similar fate; indeed, it is a little worrisome that neither Zuckerberg nor Sandberg seems to feel any particular urgency about putting Facebook in the black. Zuckerberg prefers to leave the question of revenues to Sandberg, who punts: "I think what's really important is that we are able to fund our expansion, and we're very focused on that," she told me in mid-February. Investors seem pretty passive about it as well. Early board member Jim Breyer, who put in $1 million of his own money and $12.7 million from an Accel Partners fund, says that profits are "a secondary consideration in this stage of the growth." He wants to get a return on his investment, but he's not pushing anything now.

And then there's Microsoft, which is in the unusual position of being a Facebook owner, a partner, and, through its Windows Live social network, a competitor. Since taking a stake in Facebook, Microsoft has been working closely with the site to create links between Facebook and the Windows Live social network so that when members update their status message or upload photos on Facebook, that information appears on the Microsoft site too.

Facebook has influenced Microsoft in other ways. Its new operating system, OS 7, features a list of interactions, news, and information that happens to look a lot like Facebook's news feed. Could Microsoft end up buying Facebook outright? Both sides would have much to gain from the arrangement. Facebook investors could get their money out, and Microsoft, which has been searching for a way to deliver more of its software applications over the Internet, would own a viable online platform for selling a new generation of services. But Zuckerberg, like that other famous technology-loving Harvard dropout, seems determined to create a business empire that touches virtually every computer user in the world. Zuckerberg's not interested in selling to Microsoft; he wants to build the next Microsoft. And with 175 million "friends," he's off to a helluva start

External source: http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/16/technology/hempel_facebook.fortune/

Microsoft patterns & practices is excited to announce the release of:

Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight v2.0 (PRISM)

| What’s PRISM | Goals| Getting Started | Videos & Presentations | About patterns & practices |

What’s PRISM?

The Composite Client Application Guidance is designed to help you more easily build modular Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight client line of business applications.

These types of applications typically feature multiple screens, rich, flexible user interaction and data visualization, and role-determined behavior. They are built to last and built for change. This means that the application's expected lifetime is measured in years and that it will change in response to new, unforeseen requirements. This application may start small and over time evolve into a composite client—composite applications use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together in the overall application.

Included in this release:

· Composite Application Library

· Reference Implementation (Stock Traders application in WPF and Silverlight)

· Quick starts (9)

· How-Tos (26) and

· Lots of documentation for everything you want to know about UI patterns  and client architectures

Click here to download this release.

Quick Links

http://www.microsoft.com/compositewpf

http://www.codeplex.com/prism

Download here

Goals of This Release

Prism 1.0 shipped in July 2008 with support for WPF. This release takes the composite line of business scenarios and provides guidance on how to extend the scenario to Silverlight by:

· Providing guidance on building modular and composite Silverlight applications.

· Simplifying the composition of the user interface.

· Providing guidance and light tooling on reusing code between Silverlight and WPF.

Getting Started

The Composite Application Guidance is for building modular applications using WPF or Silverlight. You should consider using the Composite Application Guidance in any of the following scenarios:

· You are building a application that presents information from multiple sources through an integrated user interface.

· You are developing, testing, and deploying modules independently of the other modules.

· Your application will add more views and more functionality over the coming years.

· You must be able to change the application quickly and safely to meet emergent business requirements.

· Your application is being developed by multiple collaborating teams.

· Your application targets both WPF and Silverlight, and you want to share as much code as possible between the two platforms.

The following topics may help in understanding the guidance and how it applies to your scenarios:

· When to use this guidance

· Intended audience

· Evaluating the Composite Application Guidance

· Modularity design concept

· UI composition design concept

Videos and Presentations

Channel 9 videos

(http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Continuum/Prismv2/)

( http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/akMSFT/What-is-Prism-v2/)

About patterns & practices

The Microsoft patterns & practices (p&p) team is responsible for delivering applied engineering guidance that helps software architects, developers, and their teams take full advantage of Microsoft’s platform technologies in their custom application development efforts.

Our goal is to help software development teams be more successful with the Microsoft application platform. We do this by delivering guidance that:

· Helps to simplify the Microsoft application platform.

· Provides solution guidance to common problems.

· Helps development teams grow their skills and learn.

For more information: http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices

“Nucleus found that companies were able to improve developer productivity by up to

40 percent by reusing assets from patterns and practices.”

Download Nucleus Research paper on p&p

“In the past, user experience was not a high priority for most development projects, but that's changed. Today, end users have a lot of experience with the Web and with software. They want design that's easy to learn and use and that fits their workflow. This column will show you how to deliver such designs.

“User experience design is comprised of a number of subfields. Most UX designers have skills in all the core areas, but some are more specialized. The key areas are interaction design (IxD), information architecture (IA), user research, visual design, and usability testing.

“Usability testing ideally involves the actual user audience to validate early and often (iteratively) in order to ensure that the software being created has the fewest possible usability bugs. Practically speaking, there is a lot of synergy with Agile. Both are essentially iterative. Both require regular collaboration with the people (ideally, the actual users) for whom the software is being built.

“In future installments of this column, we'll be exploring more concrete examples for incorporating the knowledge, techniques, and tools of User-centered design (UCD) into your software development practice.

Read the complete article in Usability in Practice: The Human Face Of Software

How should boardrooms respond to the macro crisis? Is it just a case of recession-as-usual: budget-paring, personnel-slashing, and portfolio-trimming?

Not a chance. The tactics of recession-as-usual are neither necessary nor sufficient for firms to weather the global economic superstorm - because it's no ordinary squall, but a once-in-a-lifetime gale ripping up the very foundations of the global economic order. Rather, the macro crisis requires decision makers to confront fundamental transformation on three levels.

The first and simplest level is a change in global patterns of savings, investment, and consumption. For too long, the poor have financed the rich. China and other emerging markets have lent to the US so Americans could buy Hummers, McMansions, and Frappuccinos. But this never made sense -- it was deeply unsustainable; the macroeconomic equivalent of a giant planetary fossil fuel engine. The days of export-led growth -- and it's flipside, force-fed consumption -- are numbered.

Strategists in the boardroom face a new global macroeconomic picture. Overconsumption in developed countries must slow sharply, and capital must be redirected to long-run investment, especially in public goods. Conversely, emerging markets must shift from financing consumption in developed countries, and begin investing in the basic institutions of a vital microeconomic environment and power long-run growth.

What does that mean, concretely? Let's take a simple example. If Starbucks wants to grow in the States via new stores and new products, its corporate strategy must support the clear macroeconomic need to shift overconsumption to long-run investment. That means relying less on Vivannos, and more on, for example, Starbucks as a platform for communities to build and invest in local resources. Conversely, if Starbucks wants to grow in developing countries, it cannot just rely on a handful of new stores serving fatter-margined deluxe water to a new global bourgeoisie -- rather, to make growth sustainable, Starbucks must reinforce and support fair trade, responsible relationships, and account not just to count profits -- but to gain insight into long-run value created.

On a second, and deeper level, strategists must rediscover the lost art of authentic value creation. Authentic, long-run value isn't created through arbitrage or gamesmanship -- what we too often confuse strategy for. Games of off-balance sheet accounting, currency hedging, capital structuring, so-called labour arbitrage -- where corporations simply shift to the lowest-cost, or most poorly regulated, sources of manpower -- don't create value. They just shift it around. Corporations who play this game of economic musical chairs are in for a rude awakening - because the music just stopped. And so they must rediscover the simple fact that value creation flows from making economic activities not just profitable in the short- run -- but meaningful over the long-run.

Let's go back to our Starbucks example. Starbucks tried to grow by selling us more junk we don't need -- music, mugs, and mouse pads. That was orthodox, textbook, industrial-era strategy: grow by seizing share in adjacent markets. But it's also defunct in a world where we don't need more useless junk.

What do we need in the 21st century -- not just as brain-dead consumers, but as global citizens? We need opportunities to grow and amplify our capabilities. For Starbucks, that might mean, instead of hawking mugs and chocolates, training baristas to teach classes in coffee-making, letting communities use Starbucks as a venue for local government, or, at the limit, training local suppliers from developing countries as Baristas in developed ones. How cool would that be? Very.

On the third, and deepest, level, strategists must rediscover entirely new sources of advantage as old ones fade and decay. Once we rediscover how to create value, we must learn how to sustain and maintain it. But the sources of advantage we teach in business schools and boardrooms alike were built for an industrial-era -- not a hyperconnected, hypercomplex 21st century. For example, brands ain't what they used to be -- and, as the investment banks just showed us, neither is scale, proprietary knowledge, or top-notch relationships.

Tomorrow's sources of advantage aren't like yesterday's. They're not built on being able to exploit, dominate, or coerce more strongly than others -- they don't result from being harder, better, faster, stronger. They're about exactly the opposite: being softer, better able to fail, having the ability to be slower, gaining the capacity for tolerance and difference. Ultimately, they are about a true advantage -- one that accrues not just to the corporation, at the expense of people, society, or the environment; but one that accrues to all.

Let's go back to our Starbucks example. If Starbucks wants to survive the 21st century, it must get radically experimental, learn to tap the power of network effects, shift to becoming resilient, develop and live a sense of purpose, or learn to occupy the creative high ground. It is only through new economic avenues like those that Starbucks can make sure its own advantage isn't just the flipside of Detroit's, Dar es Salaam, or Dhaka's disadvantage -- that it's not just, like the investment banks, building an economic house of cards.

That's incredibly difficult -- because industrial era DNA is built to power a nakedly competitive advantage; one that's deliberately blind to being unfair, unsustainable, or flat-out imaginary.

There's a different way to say that. Discovering new sources of advantage depends on new DNA -- on building new kinds of institutions with entirely new capacities. Because, at root -- and as we'll discuss at length shortly -- the macro crisis isn't really a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a liquidity crisis, or a solvency crisis. It's an institutional crisis: the economic institutions of capitalism are in shock.

And though it's a scary, frustrating time -- the cool part is this: it's up to us to reimagine, reconceive, and reinvent them. We get to rethink the institutions of capitalism for a new century.

What could be cooler than that?

External source: http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/10/how_strategists_should_respond.html

Dr. Zhiming Xue interviews Steve Michelotti, senior solution architect at e.magination. Steve discusses what his team had to do to build a highly available 64-bit based web solution that supports a demanding service level agreement (SLA): more than 3 billion daily transactions, 99.99% of all transactions under 250 ms response time. One particular challenge they faced was dealing with the garbage collection (GC) process that is normally managed by the CLR of the .NET framework. With potentially millions of .NET objects in memory, a generation 2 GC can take 5 to 8 seconds on a 64-bit server with 16 GB memory, which quickly breaks the SLA. At their first attempt Steve and his team tried to reduce the frequency of GC occurrence. They applied several techniques such as delta refresh, minimization of boxing and un-boxing, use of object pooling, optimization of the large object heap, and an implementation of flow control between the web tier and the application tier. To ultimately address the challenge, they worked closely with the Premier Field Engineer team and the CLR team at Microsoft, which introduced a new feature called GC notification. With the new feature, which will be released in a future .NET service pack, they were able to deterministically take off a server from servicing any web request when a GC was pending on the server and put it back to service rotation when ready.

As an Architect Evangelist, one of my key initiatives would be to engage with the technical decision makers and architects in Singapore. I am forming an Architect Council where I would invite (exclusive invitation) architects in the enterprises to join me together with the rest of the architects. Key objectives of running this council....

In between the Architect Council meetings (which happen once in every 2 to 3 months), I will also send out Architecture newletters to update the architect community on the latest happenings in architecture and technologies.

There will be one session coming up on the 27 Feb 2009 (Fri). The EDM is below….  Theme is Software+Services : Cloud Computing & Virtualization. For more details, visit http://www.mstechevents.sg/.

Microsoft has released an improved structure for the patterns & practices node in the MSDN Library. You can find the new top level page here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998572.aspx.

What’s Different?

Microsoft has restructured the catalog of p&p offerings into generally well-understood categories. These categories include Solution Development Fundamentals, Client Development, Server Development, and Services Development. These categories provide a level of technical context (helping customers to find other related guidance) and also reinforce the common conceptual model that are now using across all patterns & practices communication. This model is called the “p&p Product Frame”.

Microsoft has also clarified which releases are current (for use with the current versions of Microsoft products and technologies), which are previous but still useful, and which releases are retired and should no longer be used.

While Microsoft will continue to make incremental improvements in the p&p Developer Center, Microsoft will be increasingly relying on the Library structure, and the content on our node level pages in the library, to facilitate navigation. Meanwhile, Microsoft will prune the Dev Center down, over time, into a simple portal of introductory information.

Moonlight, the open source implementation of Silverlight for Unix systems has officially reached its 1.0 level. They are feature complete, they pass all the Microsoft regression test suites and they shipped support for Microsoft's Media Pack for x86 and x86-64 architectures.

Moonlight is available as a Firefox plugin that can be installed with a single click from the moonlight download page.

What is in Moonlight 1.0

Moonlight 1.0 contains the plugin that can be used in Firefox 2 and 3 on Unix systems using the X11 windowing system.

Moonlight 1.0 (and Silverlight 1.0) both come with a graphics pipeline, video and audio frameworks and a javascript bridge and neither one of them contains an actual execution environment. The execution environment is the browser's own Javascript engine. When developers build 1.0-based plugins they script all of the functionality using the browser's own Javascript engine.

The browser Javascript engine communicates with Silverlight (or Moonlight) through the Javascript API exposed by the plugin.

With Silverlight 2.0 and Moonlight 2.0 in addition to this model where the browser's Javascript drives the interaction a new model is available: the ECMA CLI execution system powers the actual execution of the code and will deliver performance anywhere between 20 to 300 times faster execution speed than even the most modern Javascript implementation if you use a strongly typed language like C# or Boo.

…read more online…  http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Feb-11.html

If you are interested to learn more about the new aspects of TOGAF 9. Refer to an interesting blog here.

What’s New in TOGAF 9