Making better products

 Update : Participant registrations  for Barcamp Bangalore 5 arenow open. Please go ahead and register at http://barcampbangalore.org/wiki/BCB5_Registrations.

It’s time to Bar camp again, this time around, the winter edition is happening on the 17 & 18th November, 2007 at IIM Bangalore.

Registerations are not yet open, but watch out this space for more. As with every bar camp, it’s by the people and for the people, so YOU can play a very important role in shaping how BarCamp turns out. You can contribute in many ways - ideas being one which everyone really appreciates. For instance you could participate in the logo contest which is currently going on.

If you company would like to sponsor BarCamp Bangalore 5, leave me a comment or check this page for some of this event’s sponsors. If you are going to be at BCB5, drop me a message and we can catch up at the event.

This is a very interesting snippet of information. The table on the right says it all, of course it is heavily based on the valuation from the Microsoft deal, which happened a few days back.

The $15 bn evaluation makes Facebook No. 5 on the most valued pure Internet based companies in the US. Only Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon have larger market capitalizations than Facebook. This is quite incredible, considering the other honchos on this list.

The list of other top valued firms are below and Microsoft of course tops the list. Quite amazing that Facebook is valued more than AOL, MySpace and a bunch of other long timers.

Image courtesy : Techcrunch

After much speculation and rumours, looks like Microsoft has won the Facebook deal with a $240 million investment for 1.6% of the company. If Microsoft’s investment is indicative of what Facebook is worth, its valuation is somewhere in the ballpark of $15 billion. After having lost out on some other high profile deals such as MySpace, this will be great joy for Microsoft.

The deal makes Microsoft  the sole advertising provider for Facebook in the United States and internationally. With facebook’s mamoth user base, this definitely means serious business for Microsoft.

The crucial aspect is how Microsoft takes this forward and improves it’s partnership with Facebook. There is a lot of scope for Microsoft to leverage this deal and work on it and bring on enhancements which will enable some Microsoft Products such as Live Messenger and the Live platform as such to be integrated with Facebook.

My bet is that this is going to be a very interesting time for the Web 2.0 space as we see major players getting into this space.

Image Courtesy : Webcommunityforum

More coverage below

The social news

ZDNET blogs

Boston Herald

For Microsoft, Sharepoint and MOSS 2007 have always been dear products, with a lot of sales and marketing activity happening on this front. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a key product for Microsoft - it has collaboration, business intelligence, content management, search and “social computing” capabilities (Microsoft’s idea for ‘web 2.0′, according to this page on Microsoft’s website).

Microsoft is going Web 2.0, and what better way than to go with Sharepoint. Some of my previous posts talk about MOSS 2007 and building Web 2.0 sites using MOSS.

Microsoft recently announced two strategic partnerships, with enterprise software  company Atlassian and RSS solutions vendor NewsGator. The   partnerships link togther Microsoft’s SharePoint product with Atlassian’s wiki collaboration product Confluence and a new offering from Newsgator called ‘NewsGator Social Sites’, a collection of site templates, profiles, Web parts and middleware for SharePoint.

The big picture which Microsoft is of course looking at is to sell SharePoint as a social collaboration platform rather than just an enterprise productivity platform by adding more Web 2.0 features such as collaboration, user generated content etc. The other IMHO is of course the limited out of the box functionality which Wikis, blogs and other web parts provide in MOSS 2007 and customizing these can take quite a hit on the timelines and cost of a project.

According to this source,  Microsoft has around 80 million users on SharePoint and is reported to be worth $800 M per year in revenue for the Redmond company. Atlassian has 4,100 Confluence enterprise customers. So this definitely seems to be a win win relationship and a great advantage for SharePoint users.

There is in fact a new connect launched by Atlassian which is available for download.

Social networks are quite the buzz in 2007, with more and more people waking up to Facebook and MySpace, as they feel these networks are changing the way they manage and maintain their relationships.

Facebook and MySpace continue are leaders in this segment, and it looks like for the first time Facebook might actually be gaining more popularity.

To me, it seems quite obvious why more and more are favoring Facebook. Going beyond the consumer space, it offers much more features to the business community to network and showacse their products.

One of the key aspects of Facebook’s success has been due to their open architecture and the ability for the dev community to create apps on top of Facebook. Facebook currently has an entire category of business applications with over 227 different applications  offered today, none of them built by Facebook itself. This is a new value proposition to corporates, moving from the old paradigm of creating groups or microcosms within a social network for their particular organzation.

Using the new open architecture, companies can actually showcase their products to a wide audience of engaged, tech savy users willing to use some of these biz apps in their everyday life. Life Zoho’s Office suite Facebook app which allows you to access your documents through Facebook. Their is a lot of opportunity for a company like Zoho to leverage this - for instance linking Zoho Calendar into Facebook so that you can link up your events from Facebook into your main Zoho Calendar which you use at your company.

Or probably have contacts imported from Zoho CRM, and network with these contacts on Facebook ?

Business applications for Facebook include offerings from well known companies such as eBay, Zoho, Jobster, and Blue Nile that offer integration with their home sites and data. There are other small business apps which provide To Do lists, appointment management, managing business cards etc. Other popular business apps include virtual stock exchanges, job finding widgets, and small content management packages.

But an interesting trend is that, none of these business apps have a user base which is close enough to other popular Facebook apps. Is this because social networking as a concept has not been understood by corporates or probably they haven’t realized the need for having a Facebook presence. Whatever the case is, Facebook with it’s open architecture is definitely moving us towards the “Web as a platform” era and this holds out a lot of promise for large corporations in advertising, media, CRM, and other departments in traditional businesses.

How do you think Facebook can be better leveraged by the business community ?

I’m pleased that Microsoft responded quickly to the demands of the online community. They have made available patches to the calculation problem which involves calculations around the number 65,535 and 65,536 in Excel 2007 and Excel services.

Here’s the take of the problem from the Excel and Excel services team blog.

The Problem
” This issue was introduced when we were making changes to the Excel calculation logic in the Office 2007 time frame.  Specifically, Excel incorrectly displays the result of a calculation in 12 very specific cases (outlined below).  The key here is that the issue is actually not in the calculation itself (the result of the calculation stored in Excel’s memory is correct), but only in the result that is shown in the sheet.  Said another way, =850*77.1 will display an incorrect value, but if you then multiply the result by 2, you will get the correct answer (i.e. if A1 contains “=850*77.1”, and A2 contains “=A1*2”, A2 will return the correct answer of 131,070).”

The good part is that they will be pushing this out with Windows update, which mean you can have the potential fix without any explicit download. The fix will also be available along with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Office 2007 (official date of release for which has not yet been announced).

The Expression around the clock event happened yesterday in Bangalore at Fuga, a cool venue for an even cooler event. This was a global designer conference(taking place simultaneously in 10 venues around the globe) aptly themed “Design is back!” 

The event started with out with registration, Microsoft had a very strict registration and confirmation process for this event and inspite of that the place was packed with people. There were about 200 people and seating was available only for about 70 people.

The event kicked off with a keynote from Shelly Armstrong of the Microsoft Design team. Shelly has been involved in various projects in Microsoft, including the interaction design for the XBox and the Zune. Her talk was totally targeted towards designers and tips on improving UX, design, importance of keeping up with latest trends, networking etc.

After this there was a break, with the bar being opened up [:)]. There was more action ahead though. The next session was by Supreet Singh, an UX designer and Pandurang, a dev. They started out with a desinger dev duel and demostrated how Expression Studio supported the designer-dev collaboration with ease. This was pretty interesting, with Surpreet putting in a video on to his canvas and then Pandurang writing a bit of code for the play and pause functionality.

The dev, (as they put it, didn’t have much idea about UX) and hence he puts up text messages for play and pause. Surpreet then takes this XAML and immediately ports this message into a cool button.

The next part was demos - impressive stuff overall, though I had seen most of them before. The demo which impressed me the most, was the one of a Silverlight video player being able to play 10 high definition videos simultaneously with ease, and the ability for the user to seamless switch between them with no system overload.

Post this was the usual networking session (with more beers though!). Met a couple of interesting people and managed to market ADITI’s UX blog. People seemed to be very interested by this, especially because we are not a design only firm.(Thanks Ram ! for mentioning our blog in your post.)

At the end, Microsoft gave away a goodie bag to each participant. It had a 60-day trial of the Expression Studio, a design magazine and a Reebok t-shirt!.

I am all excited about attending the Expression around the clock - Global designer event at Bangalore.

The event will cover a range of User Experience (UX) technologies that will enable designers and developers to build next generation desktop and web applications. I am particular excited in seeing new demos on Silverlight and WPF and new features which are to be added to Expression studio.

This space of Rich Internet applications with Microsoft introducing Silverligt and Adobes traction on Flex is very exciting and the next few months will tell us who the real pioneer will be.

If you are going to be at the event, leave me a comment and we can network there.