RealTime® Web. The Live Web.
Transcripción
RealTime® Web. The Live Web.
Issue 1 RealTime® Web. The Live Web. 2 Introduction 3 Testimonials Introduction | André T Parreira | CEO | IBT For years the word interactive was employed as a fundamental benefit of the Internet. However, we knew that such interactivity was limited and unidirectional. Also, the concept of real time had been bandied about for some considerable time, but in the vast majority of cases, what really existed were “almost real time” propositions trying to reproduce the real thing and, in the few cases where there was real time information the technology that enabled it was very expensive, limited in applications and the privilege of just a few. 5 Realtime® Web Can Help Marketers Make The Most Of Mega Consumer Trends 6 The (Not So) Future Web 14 Realtime® Web - What Makes It So Unique And What Does It Do For Business 17 Contacts Our thinking behind Realtime® Web was that users are always demanding a better service, faster and as close to reality as possible and websites are always seeking ways to provide it. So whoever would able to deliver on that score would be more likely to capture their users’ loyalty and win over their competition. Realtime® Web addresses those demands in full and allows companies to stay ahead of the game and make huge savings in costs and time, namely: 1. First of all, and to address the most basic concern of CEOs and managers, Realtime® Web is a technological breakthrough that does not cost more than existing technologies; 2. Secondly, Realtime® Web was not conceived to be a technological quantum leap that would make its impact and dominate the market for some time and then be copied and even overtaken by others. Rather, Realtime® Web is customer-centric in concept and design, enabled by technological pipeline that adapts and evolves on a permanent basis, according to the inputs, needs and opportunities put to us by Clients, Developers and Programmers; 3. Because of all the above: Featuring research from a.Realtime® Web is an out-of-the-box solution with both real time server technology and an easy-to-learn, easy-to-use markup language, very similar to HTML, so programmers using the Realtime® Web Framework can develop and deploy high-performance, highly-scalable real time web applications with very low take-it-to-market ratios. Our 1st full-scale project, the Diário Económico Social site, was up and running in less than 2 months. Now we are confident we could do it in just 1 month, and with only 1 developer at that; b.Realtime® Web allows to do more for more users, since makes bandwith and information processing savings of up to 90% in most cases, thus freeing webservers to deal with new requests instead of just refreshing current information; c.Realtime® Web is safe, reliable and scalable, since its technology was developed taking into account high information flow scenarios and, thus, the absolute need to avoid “information hijacking” or “information injection”. In practical terms, Realtime® Web is a technology that comes to life via 4 products that allow website visitors to interact in real time with the website server. So whether they are shopping online, visiting a newspaper site or just browsing, they can receive dedicated information, be offered products based on a truly individual profile that can be updated second by second, or receive special ad contents pushed to the browser, namely: 1. Open Realtime Connectivity - ORTC® Conveys the information from the website to the user’s browser at the very moment the information is altered or requested. 2. Extensible Realtime Markup Language - xRTML® website administrators to follow the consumer online browsing process in real time throughout the whole visit, push promotional offers when they are more relevant to the needs of each individual consumer and even offer the consumer face-to-face advice, thus turning the current consumer online browsing process into a fully informed decision process. 4. Ad Server® Unleashes all the hitherto untapped potential of online advertising by turning banners into true ads and also optimizes the online media auditing, tracking, planning and buying cycle by putting online advertisers in contact with the demonstrably best available spaces for their needs at the very moment they become available. This introduction could go on for several pages and there would still be time and space for me to tell you what Realtime® Web is and can do for business. But instead of that, I will let the facts and figures speak for themselves, in the certainty that you will find Real Time as exciting and as useful a breakthrough as many world-class analysts such as Gene Phifer and, David Mitchell Smith predicted in their “The (Not So) Future Web” analysis of June of this year. Source: lBT It is a simple yet revolutionary development of the html language that allows for quick and seamless integration of Realtime® technology into websites, with plug-ins for external platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger. And that, despite being a breakthrough, was designed to allow total compatibility with all existing browsers, thus allowing for its benefits to be felt and enjoyed by all end-users; 3. Power Marketing® Turns CRM from a projective/reactive marketing tool into a present/proactive one, thus exponentially increasing sales potential and data gathering levels whilst at the same time reducing decision-taking time. This is attained by enabling e-commerce RealTime® Web. The Live Web. Is published by IBT. Editorial supplied by IBT is independent of Gartner analysis. All Gartner research is © 2012 by Gartner, Inc. All rights reserved. All Gartner materials are used with Gartner’s permission. The use or publication of Gartner research does not indicate Gartner’s endorsement of IBT’s products and/or strategies. Reproduction or distribution of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. 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For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see “Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity” on its website, http://www.gartner.com/technology/about/ombudsman/omb_guide2.jsp. 2 Curabitur at nibh Consectetuer adipiscing elit tortor lacus Testimonials nonummy purus “ Not since I was involved in building the business model for YAHOO back in 1995 have I seen such an innovative and disruptive opportunity. ” Andy Batkin | CEO of Innovative Media Solutions, LLC. I had the pleasure of visiting a technology company in Lisbon, Portugal last week and was amazed at the demonstration of the capabilities of their new technology that enables, what we have all talked about that “was coming”... The Real-Time Web. Not since I was involved in building the business model for YAHOO back in 1995 have I seen such an innovative and disruptive opportunity. If the birth of Netscape and Yahoo was Web 1.0 and Social Media is Web 2.0 then the Real-Time Web will be Web 3.0 and will see the largest growth of the three. The company I visited is called IBT. This team of young and energetic engineers has developed software that creates for the first time, the Real-time web. It is a bidirectional patented technology that shifts the control of the web from the users and empowers website owners to control the delivery of content, ads and ecommerce….all delivered Real-Time by just adding “a little line of code”. They have identified four products and each has the capability of becoming a multi-billion dollar business on its own. 1. A new Real-Time Mark-Up language called xRTML. This language enables developers to turn HTML into LIVE HTML. The Open Real Time Connectivity (ORTC) that provides a hassle free Real-Time framework. 2. Power Marketing – a unique and powerful Real-Time platform that allows you to “see” and interact with a user that is online, in RealTime (think eCommerce). 3. Ad Server – a new and highly effective way to deliver ads to users without the user refreshing the page. This has huge implications for both publishers and advertisers. If you Google “Real Time Web”, you will get the feeling that there is a lot of talk about the fact that “this is coming”, but you will not yet see any links to real solutions or software providing the “Real-Time” framework to compete with IBT. No doubt the competition will be there, but with the first mover advantage and solid patents (and a parent company with the resources to defend the patents), I think IBT is going to be one of the biggest success stories of the internet... with a multibillion dollar valuation in the not too distant future N.b.: When Andy Batkin wrote this testimonial, he was the CEO of Innovative Media Solutions. Subsequently, because he was so convinced this technology will succeed, he joined IBT as the head of Operations for the U.S. “ This mechanism would seem obvious, but until very recently it was not available. ” - Felipe Patury | Journalist | Época Magazine | Brazil, The Real Real-time A new internet information management platform can give a website automatic, real time updates based on the traffic and interaction levels between the website and its users. What does that mean? In practice, this mechanism allows for the information on a given page to be given a hierarchy according to the number of accesses each of its links receives. The page is updated at every moment without the user having to click on anything. This mechanism would seem obvious, but until very recently it was not available. And a version of it was launched in October at the Web 2.0 Expo, in New York, by IBT, a Portuguese company. “This is a unique product, since we have managed to make possible for the user to be connected in real time to the primary source of information”, says André Parreira, CEO of IBT, the company responsible for the development of Real Time. A pioneer experience with if is being conducted in the Diário Económico website on Portugal, whereby the publication managed to increase user traffic by 35% in just 1 month. IBT foresees sales of Realtime® Web reaching the half billion Euro mark within the next 2 years. “ Económico Social is the 1st publication in the world to turn its readers into co-editors... Thanks to model to be exported and show that it is possible, in Portugal, to challenge the best – António Costa – Editor- Diário Económico ” 3 Económico Social is much more than an online platform that aggregates the contents of Diário Económico and Económico TV . It is actually unique in the sense that it is the 1st publication in the world to turn its readers into co-editors, with the news and videos individually organized in real time according to the number of visualizations. We know that it represents a radical and most beneficial change in the way that journalism is practiced, since whereas there already used to be what is called “participative” or “citizen’s journalism” the fact is that up to now readers could not decide, in real time, what are the most important news for them. Now they can, and thanks to a model to be exported and show that it is possible, in Portugal, to challenge the best. We also know that all this is just the beginning of a truly new and extremely exciting journeyl that no-one can guess where it will lead. But we all can assert that it will lead to great things, for sure and for all that embrace it. Editor’s note: The above testimonial was given in the wake of 2 major changes that Realtime® Web brought about in the Portuguese editorial panorama: 2. The fact that, because of its full interactivity and the way readers – regular and sporadic – received it, it managed, in just 1 month after the introduction of Realtime® Web, to grow its regular readership by 30%. “ Their tech involves minimal code that needs to be added to the web page, some software in the server side in the cloud, more CPU capacity since real time utilizes less caching, and so on – Roger Keating - SVP Digital Media. ” There are advertising benefits of real-time as well… their tech permits one to know precisely what ad units are being shown above the fold, and for precisely how long, which opens up the ability to sell display ads on a time basis (i.e., cost per minute seen, versus cost per impressions), to roadblock certain times, etc. 1. The fact that “Económico Social” became the 1st online publication in the world to have real time interaction with its readers; Source: lBT 4 Realtime® Web Can Help Marketers Make The Most Of Mega Consumer Trends Luis Rasquilha – IBT CMO, using data sourced at Science of the Time Science of the Time identified “Augmented Social Reality” and Augmented Product Knowledge” as 2 major consumer trends for the foreseeable future in its “2011/2012 WW Trend Report”, both intertwined and that can be summarized thus: A good example of the above is Domino’s Pizza electronic ticker on Times Square that was able to drive both sales and brand reputation, by a. Displaying real-time consumer comments about the brand – good, bad or neutral – on a 4,630 square-foot billboard. The comments were not filtered, except for bad language and appropriateness, and taken out of Domino’s Tracker, which lets consumers track their orders, and tied to a TV Campaign showing New York Domino’s store managers reacting to seeing the comments in Times Square. b. Helping present a major brand that’s not afraid of exposing its weak spots to the general public – and thus also highlighting its present and future strong ones in a much more powerful way – and using the fruits of direct, unvarnished consumer feedback to both improve their offer and conquer consumer trust and sales. And Realtime® Web can help our Clients make the most of those 2 mega trends in a number of ways, by: 1. Leveraging and enhancing product knowledge, thus transforming the browsing and selection process into an informed decision process that can only benefit buyers, sellers and whole economies alike, by creating: a. More and better access to product & price comparisons, by more; b. Better information on credit and payment conditions for more; 2. Giving Consumer Relationship Marketing a much more intensive knowledge and service component, by integrating the Client fully and instantaneously into the process; 3. Helping make the Consumer Experience happen even before the consumer has entered a shop, thus exerting a huge - and hitherto available only by the combination of online and offline strategies – influence on the moment of truth when one decides on whether to buy something or not and that nowadays can literally mean the difference between survival (or prosperity) or death for countless retail businesses by a. Delivering and tailoring offers to each customer’s needs and wants, as they need and want it; b. Updating and following-up on consumer profiles in a much faster way than present methods allow for; c. Giving it a degree of personalization – be it in how each customer’s needs and wants are anticipated or acted upon as well as in the way they are catered for that can and will made a huge difference for both companies and their customers alike. In short, Realtime® Web can make the future happen now. In fact, Realtime® Web is already here and delivering for our Clients on every front. It’s real, and it is high time more and more Clients and their Clients can make the most of it. Source: IBT 5 From the Gartner Files: The (Not So) Future Web The Web has evolved significantly in its short life span, but the evolution is far from over. Innovations of the future Web will be key to enterprise Web strategies. Many of the features in this research are already present in leading websites, so perhaps we should call this the “not so future Web.” • Although many leading Web innovations aren’t right for your enterprise today, be aware that your competitors may be moving forward. Don’t fall behind. Overview The Internet is a societal, epochal technology that does not progress uniformly, but in a sequence of dependent waves. The capabilities of earlier waves create new information and knowledge tools that permit the creation of the next wave. The 1980s Internet enabled computer and information scientists to exchange ideas and experiment with models, which gave rise to the World Wide Web. This, in turn, enabled global technological, business and social interactions, which gave rise to Web 2.0. As Web 2.0 progresses, the tools it provides will enable at least one more major evolutionary stage to occur, and this will coincide with important hardware price/performance tipping points. The Web has become the standard model for user interaction, whether the users are your employees, customers/constituents, business partners or suppliers. Most enterprises have a traditional Web strategy, one mired in outdated tools and techniques. At the same time, consumerization has shown “the realm of possibilities” to users, and they are demanding similar capabilities for their websites and portals. Key Findings • Many enterprises are operating in a traditional Web strategy. Avoiding key Web innovations like context, social and mobile can place an enterprise at a significant competitive disadvantage. • New technologies will lead to a lot of Web innovation, but methodologies and practices must evolve too. • As cloud computing grows, the Web will be the primary access model. Enterprises must prepare for increases in demand for Web resources. • Web application development will evolve at a faster pace with the advent of innovations like HTML5 and ensemble programming. Recommendations • Make the business aware of the realm of possibilities when it comes to the Web. This will clarify its thinking for future Web requirements. • Many Web technologies will be in a significant state of churn over the next few years. Experiment now, and track the maturation of these technologies. 6 Analysis Introduction It is hard to find an enterprise today that doesn’t have some kind of Web strategy. Even the smallest businesses usually have some kind of website. Despite the pervasiveness of the Web, enterprise strategies regarding the Web vary significantly. Web technologies are integral to the majority of projects and applications implemented in the past decade – at the very least, the primary design point has been access through a Web browser. Advanced enterprises aggressively leverage the Web for internally and externally facing channels of interaction. They leverage the Web as the central strategy for dealing with customers. They also leverage advanced Web tools and principles such as: • Dynamic languages: Many enterprises leverage dynamic languages and dynamic Java languages as application development (AD) tools. Although these won’t replace all languages, they provide rapid development of robust, Web-centric applications. • WOA: Web-oriented architectures (WOAs), or approaches that use RESTful Web interoperability, are being used to build a new generation of mashup-style composite applications. • A2A integration: The Web is not just a front-end tool. It also provides applicationto-application (A2A) integration capabilities. The year 2009 saw two important birthdays: The Internet turned 40 and the Web turned 20. It’s amazing that these two innovations are so young, because they have changed the world for both consumers and enterprises. It also points out that these two are a long way from retirement, with plenty of spunk and energy, and will see lots of innovations and evolution in the future. Many people still confuse the terms, however. The Internet is a network or networks, originally established by the U.S. Department of Defense as a reaction to the Cold War with the then Soviet Union. The Web is an innovation that runs on Internet protocols (and the Internet itself), a hypertext media tool that allows easy publication and consumption of a wide variety of content types. The cloud is an abbreviation for cloud computing, a style of computing where IT capabilities are provided as a service to internal and external customers, using Internet technologies. You can think of the Internet as phase 1, the Web as phase 2 and the cloud as phase 3 of a long-term project. The focus of this research is on the future Web. The reality, however, is that many aspects of the future Web are already in play in some Type A (risk takers) enterprises. So don’t assume that you have years for the future Web to become a reality. For many, it is a reality today. Evolution of the Web Although many use terms such as “Web 1.0” and “Web 2.0,” it is best to limit the use of these to refer to eras of the Web. There are generally no real definitions of the terms or the eras, but the best way to apply them is as follows: 7 • Web 1.0 is a term applied to the original Web of the 1990-to-2000 era. The technologies typically associated with the era are HTTP, HTML and URI. It is mostly about a one-to-many model, where there were relatively few producers of content. • Web 2.0 refers to the period roughly starting from 2004, and continuing today. Web 2.0 builds on Web 1.0 technologies and concepts. Gartner identifies three anchor points around Web 2.0: • Technology and architecture —WOA, Web platforms and rich Internet application (RIA) technology, most notably Ajax. • Community – The dynamics of social networks and other personal content, public/shared models, wikis and other collaborative content models. Gartner prefers to think of the future as “the modern Web”, and that it is all part of “just the Web.” There will surely be new, breakthrough technologies, methodologies, approaches and models. Like Web 2.0, these will fall into technology/architecture, community/social and business/process aspects. The future Web will become pervasive. Not only available via Web browsers, the future Web will be accessible by a broad spectrum of devices, including automobiles, consumer electronics and more mobile devices. Consumerization will become an even greater influencer in the future, as the worlds of personal technology and content, and enterprise technology and content blend even further, to the point where the boundaries will disappear in many cases. The future Web is many things, including: • Contextual • Business model – Web-service-enabled business models and mashup-/remix-style composite applications. The Web 2.0 era has been described as the two-way Web, and it leverages the “architecture of participation.” As such, the community angle is the most dominant of the three anchor points. However, the most powerful application of Web 2.0 can be achieved by exploiting new business models that leverage the technology and community aspects of Web 2.0, but this isn’t the only way to drive value. Each anchor point can be examined individually, and in combinations, to drive value. For example, Web community models can be exploited for internal collaboration without changing the organization’s basic business model. Web technologies can be applied to develop a flexible service-oriented architecture (SOA) without changing the business model or exploiting Web communities. The Future Web The Web will continue to evolve. Some pundits are already defining “Web 3.0.” Rather than get caught up in silly numbering schemes, • Mobile • Rich experiences, driven by HTML5 and the modern Web • Running on the user experience platform (UXP) • Social • Cloud-centric • Real-time • An architecture • Running in parallel with native and OSspecific approaches • In the midst of a new era of browser wars • Running on a webOS/cloud OS for certain classes of users • Enabling and being influenced by a growing wave of consumerization • Rife with commerce • Driving global government change Contextual Context makes the access to Web resources relevant to the individual user, based on a set of static, user-centric attributes and dynamic, session-centric attributes. The first context tools were portal products, which delivered context features in the form of advanced personalization as early as 1997. Context has evolved, with much current focus on the location-based services available in mobile devices. The future of context will see underlying context architectures and standards that will allow a variety of context-aware technologies to plug into context databases or context brokers and share context freely. Another aspect of context is attention management. Today, we are overwhelmed with the volume and diverse, disconnected sources of information that we deal with daily. This problem will only get worse in the future. Attention management will allow users to prioritize and categorize information as it is delivered, allowing the high priority, most important and most relevant information to bubble to the top. Attention management capabilities will be embedded in many existing technologies, such as email (where it already exists in a basic fashion), and will also run as stand-alone products and cloud-based services. Enterprises can leverage context-aware computing to better target and deliver on the promise of increased customer intimacy for millions of consumers. Consider: • By 2015, the average Global 2000 enterprise will manage between two and 10 business relationships with context providers (this will be driven by the fact that no single context provider will have the span to allow enterprises to reach all the end users they wish – this includes B2E, B2B and B2C opportunities). 7 • By 2015, 90% of enterprises delivering consumer-facing applications will use context-enriched services. Action Items: Enterprises must consider how they will publish and subscribe to federated information models. Enterprises will need to more closely consider the information elements present in past consumer interactions and in interactions in the moment of choice, and they will need to have blueprints for future interactions. Mobile For many years, there has been hope for mobile Web applications going mainstream. Although acceptance in some geographies has been higher than in others, the experience had been less than ideal, until the introduction of the iPhone by Apple. Its Safari browser, along with good JavaScript support and overall ease of use, has made the difference. When the iPhone was introduced, the only way to develop for it was via Web programming. Although, subsequently, Apple has moved emphasis toward native applications (via the Apple App Store), its contribution greatly raised the bar for mobile Web applications. In addition, Apple and other vendors (for example, PhoneGap, WebApp.Net, CiUI and MotherApp) have libraries that allow for a richer-than-expected user experience, using primarily HTML and Web technologies. Often, these are used in conjunction with extensions or native code wrappers for JavaScript that enable mobile Safari applications to access the accelerometer, geolocation, multitouch and, in the future, camera, sound and vibration functions. Google’s Gmail is a Web application that doesn’t have a wrapper, and that uses Safari’s HTML5 functions and SQLite offline storage to provide a user experience comparable to the native iPhone mail application, without any installations or upgrades. Improvements in other platforms and browsers (e.g., Google’s Android and Palm’s webOS) continue this push. The real movement will happen as critical mass for various pieces of HTML5 materializes; however, testing and interoperability issues will remain due to implementation 8 differences. For example, the HTML5 spec leaves some caching implementation details to the browser supplier; thus, there will be differences in how offline modes operate. The proliferation of WebKit-based browsers in mobile devices will help with this. HTML5 is early on the Hype Cycle, but is seeing adoption of components of the specification now. We see three major eras of mobility. The device era was characterized by iconic devices, such as the Motorola RAZR, and was dominated by device manufacturers. The application era arrived with the iPhone, which popularized application and media stores. Although stores had existed in the previous era, they had never been an integral part of the end-to-end experience of the type created by Apple. This era is characterized by stand-alone applications and media. The service and social era will build on the application era, but will be characterized by cloud services and streaming media. Applications will survive, but often as a component of a more complex, end-toend experience involving the cloud. A key factor in this era is the importance of social computing – for example, social networks as essential components of the device and cloud experience. The Web will become a better experience in the browser, but the best, mostsingular experiences will only be possible using more-advanced technology that targets specific platforms. As has always been true, most enterprise applications do not require “the very best” experiences, and HTML5 will serve those applications well. However, the death of Flash and other proprietary RIA technologies has been wildly overstated, and they will continue to fill niche roles. Although there will still be app stores by 2015, over 50% of the apps sold and/or pointed to (rather than installed) will be Web apps, not platform-specific native apps. There will still be paid apps, but more will be Web apps for which users pay. More specifically, by 2015, 60% of enterprise mobile applications and 40% of consumer mobile applications will be Web applications. App stores themselves will evolve (and new entrants with Google’s Chrome Web store as a harbinger) to support the delivery of Web apps. This will not be unique to mobile, but will certainly be a major factor in the mobile space. The real value of these Web app stores will be in providing monetization opportunities and discovery, as opposed to the actual delivery of apps. Native apps are important on mobile devices, but not as important on the desktop. Native apps will be less significant in 2015. This has led to Google’s two Linux (OS) strategies: Android, a native platform primarily for mobile, and Chrome OS, an OS (not platform) primarily for Web apps. The mobile Web experience, as delivered first by the iPhone, points the way to a new generation of user interfaces and services on mobile clients. A new level of expectations has been set among consumers. Online strategies must increasingly take into account not just a mobile Web experience, but also a mobile app experience, as more applications are offered via Apple’s App Store and other distribution mechanisms. The major reason to go with mobile Web apps is to hedge bets regarding platforms. Another consideration is security, because direct access to device software introduces additional security concerns. Flash and Silverlight are choices only for a subset of devices (i.e., not the iPhone). Mobile Web apps can, in certain scenarios and with careful attention to application programming interfaces and extensions, provide a rich user experience that does not equal native apps, but approximates them at a fraction of the development effort and with greater portability and flexibility. Rich Experiences, Driven by HTML5 and the Modern Web HTML5 is a draft specification for browser behaviors and capabilities that likely won’t be final until mid-2013. A de facto standard set of features has already appeared in a range of popular browsers, including from Google and Apple. Microsoft is now behind HTML5 support with Internet Explorer 9. HTML5 makes the browser much more powerful. Included are new markup tags that make it easier for programmers to design for search engine optimization, support for local storage, rich media types (such as video, audio and scalable vector graphics) 9 and a low-level “canvas” reminiscent of early software-based graphics renderers. HTML5 makes it possible for the browser to become a full-fledged application container, even when disconnected from the Internet. Support for location-based services enables the browser to become an interesting platform for mobile applications, and features like background threads (via Web Workers) and lower-level networking support (via WebSocket) create the potential for faster, more-responsive Web applications. The implications for developers are clear: The browser becomes more important than ever, and proficiency with HTML and JavaScript, the “lingua franca” of the browser, will follow. What of “heavy RIA” technologies like Flash? Gartner expects these technologies to be under pressure to find new ways to innovate to justify their existence. However, there are imperfections in the HTML5 specification that can be exploited. For example, HTML5 does not support digital rights management (DRM), a key feature for content creators and publishers. HTML5 does not support accelerometers and webcams in mobile devices in completely standard ways, so applications like Apple’s FaceTime can’t be easily delivered in a browser. Running on the UXP Recent trends in user demand and independent software vendor (ISV) behavior indicate a shift in the technologies used to deliver the user experience (UX). Enterprises have complained for years about the multitude of technologies and tools they must use to deliver the variety of user experiences necessary. Enterprises have also come to the realization that no matter how technically complete a website or portal is, a poor user experience will, more often than not, cause it to fail. In addition, convergence of several UX-related technologies is definitely visible: content, collaboration, context, portal, mashup, RIA and analytics. A UXP is an integrated collection of technologies and methodologies that provides the ability to design and deliver user interface/presentation capabilities for a variety of interaction channels. The UXP will subsume traditional portal and mashup technologies, and will overlap significantly with others (see Figure 1). Vendors are delivering integrated sets of these technologies, some as suites and, in one case (Microsoft SharePoint), as a single product. The extension of the UXP to formerly separate considerations, such as Web analytics, will likely open up the UXP opportunity to a larger set of providers (such as Adobe and Cisco Systems). Also, the expansion means more opportunities for niche vendors that effectively fill in the inevitable gaps, provide industry-specific capabilities and provide open capabilities that span across the megavendors’ oftenproprietary UXP offerings. FIGURE 1 The UXP Gartner expects leading RIA vendors to maintain a pace of innovation that keeps them relevant, but for a gradually shrinking percentage of Web applications. Most enterprises will be satisfied with HTML5 alone. The power of the browser extends to mobile devices as well. Apple, Google and Research In Motion (RIM) have settled on the WebKit browser engine as the basis for their mobile browser offerings. If these vendors can maintain and grow market share, developers can look forward to less-fragmented support when designing mobile applications. Note that Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, a Silverlight-based device, utilizes the technology as a native programming model, not as a Web plug-in. Microsoft, as well as other mobile ecosystem owners like Apple, will always have a vested interest in pushing developers to native applications that provide a proprietary user experience. Source: Gartner (June 2011) 9 Social Social computing has three major aspects: • Public social media, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube • Use of social software by the enterprise, targeting employees • Use of social software by the enterprise, targeting external audiences, like customers and business partners Social software includes blogs, wikis, tagging tools and social networking tools. These Web 2.0-style collaboration tools have seen good adoption in many enterprises, while some enterprises are still taking a wait-and-see attitude. Social software can be used inside the enterprise to facilitate collaboration among employees. It can be used outside the enterprise to facilitate collaboration between the enterprise and its customers, partners and suppliers. Externally facing social software has been implemented on many websites, especially customer websites. Essentially, every site can become a social site. Mass adoption of social software for internal and external use has only just started. In the future, we expect to see massive adoption of social capabilities. Social media includes many forms of content, all of which are authored by “the collective.” Whether updating blogs on Blogger, entries in Wikipedia, photos in Flickr, videos in YouTube or “tweets” in Twitter, digital natives and naturalized digital citizens are using social media on an almost daily basis. Social media provides enterprises with a wealth of undiscovered information from their customers and prospects. By mining this information, enterprises can leverage the collective as a source of innovation, customer self-support and problem identification, and for handling specific customer support issues. Tools like social media monitoring and sentiment analysis provide additional added value. 10 How should enterprises leverage social media? • Monitor the blogosphere, microblogging sites like Twitter, social network sites like Facebook and mass-publishing sites like YouTube. Mine these sites for references to your products or company. Significant intelligence can be gathered there. Reputation management is key, but be careful not to overreact to negative press. • Contribute content to social media sites. Consider creating a Facebook page and application, and having some of your people tweet regularly. Put how-to videos for your products on YouTube. • Use select social media technologies internally; they can facilitate highly productive collaboration and innovation. • Recognize the power of social media in major events worldwide, and harness that power for your enterprise. Cloud-Centric The hype around cloud computing continues to grow. Vendors are increasingly using cloud computing as a marketing label for old technologies and offerings, devaluing the term and trend. This is understandable, because cloud computing is a natural evolution of enterprise and Web-based technologies and trends. However, it is a mistake to relabel these older technologies as “cloud computing.” Cloud computing emerges from the synergistic intersection of elements of these trends and technologies. This new computing model drives revolutionary changes in how solutions are designed, built, delivered, sourced and managed. Cloud computing is not defined by one product or technology. It is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. While there is a lot of hype around cloud computing, there is also value. Gartner describes the aspects of the value as falling into two main categories: cost and capabilities. There are many ways to “slice” into cloud computing. A horizontal slicing along the lines of public versus private and hybrid deployment models is one way. We describe a spectrum of cloud computing deployments that takes into account the nuances introduced by the “private cloud” concept and how it fits in with public cloud computing. Another way to slice it is vertically, along the lines of somewhat-traditional layering approaches, but adjusted to meet the realities of the cloud. We are often asked why enterprises are or should be considering cloud computing. The answers lie in two different buckets. One (cost) is more evolutionary, while the other (capability) is more revolutionary. The first bucket, cost, is usually driven by a discussion of potential cost savings. Not surprisingly in today’s economic climate, the desire to save money is part of many discussions. However, cloud computing does not always save money – in fact, it can drive costs up if it is used simply to replace onpremises work with an exact duplicate of that work in the cloud. Knowing when to redesign or when to avoid using cost savings as a justification for cloud computing is critical. Cost considerations are relevant at all levels of cloud computing, but are only a piece of the real issue. The second bucket, capability, is about the ability to do things that otherwise couldn’t be done. Discussions focus on the desire to create new solutions that were not technically or economically feasible without the use of cloud services. These may include developing new applications. One of the main characteristics of cloud computing that enables these capabilities is elasticity. New approaches are happening as a result of cloud computing and are pushing cloud computing to advance. The merging of development and operations (e.g., DevOps), big data, hybrid cloud deployments and information as a service are some prime examples. Vendors, IT departments and other key players will need to deal with these potential dramatic changes to exploit opportunities and to avoid becoming irrelevant. Real-Time The concept of the real-time Web refers to the fact that information is made available much more quickly, and that the results of searches 11 and other activities are much more up to date. Enterprises will plug-in to this real-time source of information, seeking to be the first to react to new trends and events. PatternBased Strategies will also be employed here, looking for early, weak signals that may indicate the start of an important trend. Microblogging is largely equated with the consumer site Twitter. Twitter is the most widely known microblogging site in the consumer market. Use of Twitter is often considered a derivative form of blogging. Information shared by members is broadcast in short message fragments (140 characters) called “tweets” (sometimes referred to as a “post”). Tweets are displayed in reverse chronological order and are public by default. The resulting stream of tweets creates a realtime collective user experience. This real-time behavior can cause some people to consider Twitter a social messaging platform that is more similar to IM than to blogging. An Architecture WOA is an architectural substyle of SOA that integrates systems and users via a web of globally linked hypermedia based on the architecture of the Web. This architecture emphasizes the generality of interfaces (user interfaces and application programming interfaces) to achieve global network effects through five fundamental generic interface constraints: • Identification of resources • Manipulation of resources through representations to-business (B2B), and has experienced some intraenterprise A2A implementation successes. Many enterprises are now engaged in implementing or seriously considering WOA in addition to, or as an alternative to, WS-*. The WOA style has been used by many of the services delivered by major Web service providers (Amazon, Google, etc.), and the popularity of these services, the growing interest in cloud computing and the hype around mashups are propelling enterprise interest in WOA as a viable architectural approach to SOA. Therefore, WOA is moving up the Hype Cycle as architects and developers explore and employ WOA for enterprise applications. This move is driven, in part, by increasing tool support by major vendors. Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), IBM WebSphere and Apache Axis now support WOA. However, there is still significant room for WOA advancement beyond integration to a general approach with the construction of enterprise applications. Also, enterprises suffer from a lack of WOA design skills, and advanced WOA concepts, such as WOA quality of service (QoS) support and hypermedia-based application state management, are still immature. The programmable Web will continue to grow in popularity. The initial thrust of mashup-style composite applications, which has slowed of late, will gain interest as it becomes a primary model for enterprise developers. Eventually, end users will engage as well. Ensemble programming will become a reality, allowing a single code base to be deployed across a range of devices. • Self-descriptive messages Running in Parallel With Native and OSSpecific Approaches • Hypermedia as the engine of application state First, the trend toward mobile and the emphasis on native apps is the most prevalent area where native approaches continue to drive usage and innovation. • Application neutrality WOA represents an alternative style to the middleware-oriented and object-oriented styles most commonly associated with WS-* Web services. Although WOA has dominated Web user-toapplication (U2A) implementations for years, it is frequently used for Internet business- The majority of applications in organizations today continue to require Windows in one way or another. While OS-neutral applications continue to grow – and OS-neutral applications will typically comprise the majority of applications for many organizations through 2012 – most organizations will need Windows for many of their applications well into the decade. Many people are under the impression that most applications are browser-based or are written on some other technology that does not require Windows for the application to run. While this is true for most new applications being developed (internally by organizations’ developers and by many ISVs), it is not true when the entire installed base of applications is considered. The majority of applications in a typical organization require Windows (this includes IE6-only apps that are tied to Windows XP). Although we expect OS-neutral applications to comprise the majority by YE12, the client OS, namely Windows, will continue to be essential as long as a sizable number of critical applications require it. Many organizations have a significant number of applications that are critical to running their businesses, many of which were built internally and require Windows. Even as late as 2020, we expect nearly one-quarter of applications in the installed base to be client OS- or browser-specific. If many of these applications are business-critical or are used by a number of users, Windows will still be a critical technology and decision point. In the Midst of a New Era of Browser Wars Gartner does not collect statistics on browsers, because there are many public sources. Figure 2 shows recent data from Net Applications. The key to using this data is looking at it in conjunction with what you know about your users. Almost all IE6 usage is by large enterprises, so if yours is one of these, or if you are looking at B2B use where many of the other companies are large enterprises and likely users of IE6, then you need to factor this in. In the broader consumer usage scenario, IE6 use is disappearing quickly. As for future browser share, our feeling is that Firefox has likely peaked. IE will maintain a majority share, with Chrome being the one to watch. Chrome has been getting “anti-IE” users at the expense of Firefox, and we see this trend continuing. 11 FIGURE 2 Web Browser Share by Browser Type, and Web Browser Share by Browser Version 2% 1% 1% 7% Microsoft Internet Explorer Firefox 13% Chrome Safari 54% Opera Opera Mini 22% Other 21% 33% Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 Firefox 4.0 7% Chrome 11.0 Firefox 3.6 Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 9% 10% 10% Other 10% Source: Net Applications For much of the past 10 years, the Microsoft browser has been lagging far behind competitors. However, Microsoft IE9 is now a first-class browser, comparable to Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Any organization that has been thinking about switching from Microsoft to another browser no longer needs to apologize for staying with IE. With IE9, Microsoft shows that it is serious about winning (or at least, not losing) the browser competition. In that sense, “browser wars” have returned. As long as the vendors don’t diverge from industry standards, the impact of the renewed browser wars on enterprises will be positive. However, if vendors support proprietary 12 extensions or features, and enterprises write applications to specific browsers (or specific versions of specific browsers), there is great risk of lock-in and inability to evolve to new versions or better browsers. Running on a webOS/Cloud OS for Certain Classes of Users The concept of a webOS (not to be confused with the HP Palm webOS) has been around since the early days of network computing, specifically, the network computer, roughly in the mid-1990s. Even with all the promises of the webOS, and early attempts at delivering it, the traditional OS dominates desktop computing. Google is the latest in this game, with its Chrome OS. Based on Linux, Chrome OS attempts to provide access to the Web and cloud computing resources. Essentially, Google is attempting a transition from the browser as an appendage to the OS, to the OS as an appendage to the browser. Will the webOS kill off native app/OS combinations? Not likely. The prevalence of Windows and the rise of mobile platforms will make this highly unlikely for the next few years. However, new classes of client devices, namely netbooks, may benefit from the webOS. Netbooks are designed to be always connected, and the limitations of the webOS will not impact the workloads running on a netbook the way they do a regular PC. However, any 100% solution (webOS requires that 100% of apps run in the cloud) is unlikely to gain any dominant position. Emerging markets that do not have significant presence of traditional desktop OSs may also be affected by the webOS. For example, China is a prime market for netbooks running a webOS. Enabling and Being Influenced by a Growing Wave of Consumerization The consumerization of IT focuses on how enterprises will be affected, and how they can take advantage of new technologies and models that originate and develop in the consumer space, rather than in the enterprise IT sector. Consumerization is not a strategy or something to be “adopted.” It can be embraced. Consumerization cannot be stopped. It can be dealt with. It has led to “the IT Civil War”. Recent surveys on consumerization have identified four key observations: • There is quite a bit of use of external Web 2.0 applications. • What users say they are doing is quite similar to what IT professionals say they are doing. • IT professionals are significantly underestimating what users are doing. • End users, when asked to describe the behavior of their peers, also significantly underestimate what other end users are doing. 13 Consumerization is a real force in many enterprises. Enterprises that ignore this trend may be setting themselves up to be marginalized, or, worse, users may actively circumvent IT controls if IT is perceived to be out-of-touch or draconian. Rife With Commerce Emerging economies will see rapidly rising mobile and Internet adoption through 2014. At the same time, advances in mobile payment, commerce and banking are making it easier to electronically transact via mobile or PC Internet. Combining these two trends creates a situation in which a significant majority of the world’s adult population will be able to electronically transact by 2014. Electronic transactions can include transferring funds using mobile remittance schemes, paying for public transportation or groceries using a mobile phone, and buying items via PC Internet or mobile commerce sites. Technologies can vary (e.g., Near Field Communication [NFC] or over the air). The scope of this prediction refers to B2C and peer-to-peer (P2P) electronic transactions. Gartner research predicts that, by 2014, there will be a 90% mobile penetration rate, and 6.5 billion mobile connections. Penetration will not be uniform, as continents like Asia (excluding Japan) will see a 68% penetration, and Africa will see a 56% mobile penetration. The UN Population Division estimates that the world population will be more than 7 billion by 2014 (with approximately 5.5 billion over 18 years old). Multiplying populations of continents with penetration rates by continent results in an estimate that more than 3 billion adults will have a mobile phone by 2014. Although not every individual with a mobile phone or Internet access will transact electronically, each will have the ability to do so. Cash transactions will remain dominant in emerging markets by 2014, but the foundation for electronic transactions will be well under way for much of the adult population (think of the Internet before e-commerce). Driving Global Government Change The Web has leveled the communications playing field for most countries. No longer is censorship of television and print media preventing the free flow of information. This has facilitated action by many citizen groups, most notably, the uprising activities in countries like Egypt. It has also caused some governments to try to quell the impact of these actions by “turning off the Internet” or applying censorship. These negative actions by governments will only have short-term affects, and will likely not stem the tide of involvement of the masses facilitated by the Web. The debate about “net neutrality” has been subverted by a much deeper issue about the control of information, whether for commercial reasons (as in the case of media companies in the U.S. and elsewhere) or political reasons (as in the case of the Chinese government). The Internet has, so far, benefited from an ecosystem where no entity or group of entities holds excessive power in the marketplace. The fiercely competitive marketplace for bandwidth, particularly in carrier-neutral data centers, has led to a dramatic decrease in bandwidth prices, which have made applications like streaming media and online gaming practical and affordable. Online censorship techniques have an unfortunate technological alignment with some of the Internet aspirations of the media industry – specifically, its desire to implement traffic monitoring at the ISP level, as suggested, for example, in a recent brief submitted by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which calls on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to endorse ISP adoption of “network management policies” – a euphemism for monitoring traffic for copyright violations. Although the techniques suggested by U.S. media associations are not identical to those employed by China for the purposes of censorship and the identification of dissidents, they’re likely to have the common effect of bolstering the development, adoption and defense of so-called “darknet” countermeasures that are designed to shield users from either objective. Net neutrality is a key issue. There is concern that service providers that provide both Internet services and their own video content will be tempted to throttle third-party content on their networks, degrading the quality and causing consumer frustration. Legislation is being developed by some countries to prevent this under anticompetitive laws, but, ultimately, governments expect market forces to prevail, so alternative models are being explored to balance the needs of consumers, content providers and ISPs. It is possible that, by 2013, net-neutrality issues will have generally disappeared. What You Need to Know The Web is not dead. It is going through somewhat repetitive phases in a cycle. The Web began in universities and science. Tim Berners-Lee was a physicist who needed a tool that facilitated distributed, collaborative sharing of richly formatted information with other research physicists worldwide. This phase can be called Web 0.5, and lasted from the early 1990s to the mid-1990s. Web 1.0 refers to the era during which the Web went mainstream, and emphasis focused more on enterprises and monetization, and walled garden approaches such as AOL. The watershed event marking the start of Web 1.0 was the IPO for Netscape, which occurred in 1995. With Web 2.0, the cycle went around. Dissatisfaction with complex, monolithic technology stacks from large platform vendors (Java/Java EE and .NET) has fueled interest in lightweight, dynamic languages (PHP and Ruby), open-source technologies (Apache, Linux and MySQL), loosely coupled architectures (REST) and lightweight protocols (microformats). Much of this is a return to the Web’s roots, but some is new. Some differences in degree have resulted in differences in kind, regarding always-on broadband connectivity, global Web content distribution and mobile devices. We are now seeing cycles continue, with renewed interest in monetizing what had been a labor of love with hazy business plans. Walled gardens like Facebook and Apple dominate headlines. Current obsession with native apps in mobile devices, while a real phenomenon, will be followed up by mobile Web app proliferation. The claims of the Web being dead reflect this turning point. The Web is a critical part of enterprise strategies. With many innovations imminent, the Web will take on an even more critical role for enterprises. Source: Gartner RAS Core Research G00213533, Gene Phifer, David Mitchell Smith, 21 June 2011 13 Realtime® Web - What Makes It So Unique And What Does It Do For Business Realtime® Web Realtime® Web is a newly developed bidirectional technology that shifts the control of the web and empowers website owners and transforms the worldwide web into the real time web! Realtime® Web kills static content, enhances the user experience and provides real time site feedback as well as providing a better browsing experience and personalized content assimilation. Realtime® Web is a powerful tool whether you’re a small business, big business, a publisher or an advertiser in that: 1. It makes HTML comes alive 2. The distribution of information takes on a more fluid approach 3. It enables constant contact with the user and client 4. Does away with F5 or constant page refresh 5. Allows content injection 6. Reduces bandwidth usage or does much more with the same amount 7. Promotes job creation With Realtime® Web, companies can send specific and uniquely targeted content to their users on site. Such as, for example, helping a customer buy new shoes online: 1. By assessing the shopping history and allowing to detect what brand or color the customer buys the most. 2. By grabbing a banner or ad for a similar product and push it as a pop-up reminder for that user to see or send them a chat request. Or, even better, send them a video chat request – on the spot and at the best moment! 3. Talk to the customers face to face and advise them on the best products, promotions and options available. Everything without a page refresh and at the exact second you decide to do it! And to achieve this level of interaction we have developed 4 essential, groundbreaking product technologies to help you take the most out of Realtime® Web. • ORTC® • xRTML® • Power Marketing® • AD Server® 14 Introducing ORTC® Open Realtime Connectivity or ORTC® is a part of a hassle free patented enterprise-grade Realtime® Web framework. Its abstract interface allows the use of Realtime® Web without the worry of keeping up with the fast paced changeability of providers. ORTC® basically does the distribution for you: on the Server side API and on the Client side API. • Secure core • Hidden process • Platform independent • Write only once • Flexible • Security focused • Aggregates several technologies • Liaison provider between the markup language and the server • Horizontal Scaling to Support Unlimited number of users in a Elastic Cloud Introducing xRTML® Extensible Realtime Markup Language or xRTML® is the markup language that makes it all possible and accessible to community share. RTML® is a patented HTML-like markup language that allows you to add Realtime® Web features to your website, and easily and seamlessly transform regular HTML into live HTML. The “X” in xRTML® means that RTML becomes extensible, thus allowing you to add new features to existing tags or even create your own! • Tags are the controllers. • Easy to learn • Predict behaviors based on user actions. • Manage a store or a campaign and get client feedback in Realtime, tweak it and target only those users that are open to a specific product placement. • And with the two available Realtime® Web Social Brand Monitor widgets in your Dashboard you’ll be able to: • Check immediate social feedback of your product, store or campaign • One code line • Take the temperature of the user’s mood • Hybrid open source • Plug-ins for WordPress and Blogger • API for server-side languages such as ASP.Net, PHP, JSP and more to come • Tweak or enhance a product or campaign with that real time feedback • Audience Management: Script > Placeholders > Revenue share • Avoid wasted advertisement space and time • Cross Browser and Cross Platform • Create e real time database • More added features to come Introducing Power Marketing® • Obtain real time statistics Power Marketing® is where the real power of Realtime® Web comes into action. It’s a unique platform that allows you to see and interact with a visitor in Realtime® Web. • Achieve real time interaction with the customer With Power Marketing® you’ll have a dashboard that will provide you with constant Realtime® Web information and allow you to: • Push user-relevant advertisements • Target specific audiences • Manage you website like an actual physical store • Follow user actions • Push actions • Provide helpful information according to the user current browsing activity • Filter visitor information displayed by custom parameters • Customize the dashboard according to the operator’s role or preferences • Do Realtime Web® Social Brand Monitoring As regards online stores, Power Marketing® allows for: • Visualization of possible sales according to items in all of the users’ shopping carts • Visualization of final sales value with Realtime® Web updates With Power Marketing® you can now have absolute control over the information activity in your website in real time and: 15 Introducing AD Server A new and highly effective too, aimed equally at Publishers and Advertisers alike that provides a new and unique way to advertise online with features and benefits such as: With AD Server®, registered Publishers can turn their websites into platforms to carry real time ads and earn revenue with it. And registered Advertisers using AD Server® can: • Real time bidding • Create, manage and launch their products or campaigns. • Real time advertisement push • Have access to all the Realtime® Web benefits on their websites and maximize revenues with less cost. • Real time reporting • Real time user activity monitoring • Automatic management of wasted AD space • Automatic management of wasted AD time • Minimize wasted adspace and time • Push whole campaigns to selected audiences Up until now Advertisers would buy adspace in a rather inflexible way – say a 1 page space, and regardless of whether the user would be paying attention to that space or not. But with the arrival of AD Server®, the “wastage” potential of this or that space is no longer a problem, since the advertiser can find a better placement – according to reliable and real time readership data – and change the placement of the ad to the preferred space also in real time. AD Server®, in short, provides a better experience for the users, and less waste for Advertisers and maximized revenue for Publishers, thanks to: • Real time fair ad sale exposure time • Filtering by personalized parameters • Real time bidding for the most relevant space in any affiliate website • Payment only when users are watching features such as browser focus and visible viewport • Usage of ad space like never before: after the ad is printed on the page and before the user clicks away. 16 This why we can state that Realtime® Web and all its products are really unique and represent a massive opportunity to leverage consumer interaction, consumer experiences, and businesses to levels that hitherto could only be dreamed about. Source: LBT Contacts www.realtime.co André T Parreira - CEO [email protected] Alexandre Botelho - Commercial Executive Board Member [email protected] United States 1000 Highview Avenue, Manhattan Beach CA 90266 Phone: +1 310-406-8855 Brasil Avenida das Nações Unidas, 11.541, 14º Andar 04578-907 São Paulo Andy Batkin - Head of Operations US [email protected] Gilberto Martins - Country Manager Brazil [email protected] Luís Rasquilha - CMO [email protected] Portugal Rua Fernando Namora, Lt 18. 2 Piso Ed. Metropolitan Business Center 2675-487 Odivelas Phone: +351 21 934 03 22 China Av. Jianguomenwai, Nº1 World Tower III, 15th Floor Beijing 17