The video Machine is Us captures the essense of what Web 2.0 is or is becomeing. Given the lack of standards as to what “Web 2.0” actually means, implies, or requires, the term can mean very different things to different people.
According wikipedia:
Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004,refers to a perceived or proposed second generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.
The following summary is derived from O’Reilly’s article: What is Web 2.0. Some may ask what summary? This is just a list of points and of links. To capture the true essence of what Web 2.0 is one need go to the web and explore.
- Web as a platform
- Netscape vs. Google
- Doubleclick vs. AdSense
- Akamai vs. BitTorrent (business with the tail not the head)
- Harnessing Collective Intelligence – Global Brain – Social Networking
- Data is the Next Intel Inside
- End of Software Release Cycle
- Lightweight Programming Models
- Software above the level of a single device
- Rich User Experiences
Core Competencies of Web 2.0 Organizations:
- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
- Software above the level of a single device Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models
The five best business products at the Web 2.0 Expo
1. Vidoop – The Vidoop authentication engine replaces passwords with a visual image recognition system. It is the biggest innovation in authentication technology in a long time.
2. Egnyte – Sharing Microsoft Office documents usually happens in e-mail and results in tons of inefficiency and wasted disk space. Egnyte provides an effective portal for sharing doc files and spreadsheets. You can view them in a version tree, which allows you to access any of the iterations of the doc or spreadsheet. It’s a great innovation for file sharing and archiving, and there’s a free version for up to 1 GB of data.
3. Nokia Widgets — Nokia launched a standards-based widget system for its S60 smartphone platform (based on Symbian). This includes the usual widgets you’d expect (news and weather), but the main business benefit is that it could provide an excellent platform for business applications. What really makes it work is the S60 Web browser, which is the most sophisticated and useful browser that I’ve seen in any phone.
4. G.ho.st — As a Flash-based OS-in-a-browser, G.ho.st can provide businesses with a way to allow users to access their personal mail and data in a sandbox that is separated from their work computer.
5. AppLogic – If you are running an Internet company or a business that demands a farm of public Web servers, then you probably have a colo or a managed services environment. 3Tera’s AppLogic provides a virtual data center that is easier to manage than a colo and less expensive than managed services. My favorite aspects of AppLogic are 1.) it lets you build out your data center with a Web-based Visio-like tool, and 2.) you can build redundancy and fault tolerance without wasting hardware.
mLearning
According to Wikipedia — M-learning, or “mobile learning”, now commonly abreviated to “mLearning”, has different meanings for different communities. The term covers:
- learning with portable technologies, where the focus is on the technology (which could be in a fixed location, such as a classroom);
- learning across contexts, where the focus is on the mobility of the learner, interacting with portable or fixed technology;
- learning in a mobile society, with a focus on how society and its institutions can accommodate and support the learning of an increasingly mobile population.
Technical challenges include:
- Connectivity
- Battery life
- Interacting with small devices
- Displaying useful content in small-screen devices
Social and educational challenges include:
- The intrusion of formal education into daily life:
- Protecting the privacy of young learners, from being continually monitored and assessed through their mobile devices.
- How to assess learning outside the classroom
- How to support learning across many contexts
- Developing an appropriate theory of learning for the mobile age
- Design of technology to support a lifetime of learning
