Sarp Erdag’s Blog

Today, at the event hosted by the MIP School of Management of Politecnico di Milano, I attended a conference given by the famous management guru C.K. Prahalad. Although I am saying he is famous, I did not know him before

In the workshop, C.K. gave examples to a bunch of new business models and he has pointed out the importance of value creation through unique customer experiences, co-creation and continous innovation. He also emphasized the pay-per-use model and how it can be implemented on any kind of business to create a higher and more customized value for its customers.

Unfortunately, the crowd listening to the guru at the Politecnico di Milano Bovisa campus hall, was not very open to interaction. There were not only students but also business people from lots of different companies at the conference, and most of the questions C.K. asked to the audiance were left answerless. I guess this happened because the audiance was not very used to the U.S. companies C.K. was giving examples of. Or maybe it was because Italians are very shy about speaking English… Or trying to speak English

Below are a few photos I took here and there, before the conference started…

On saturday, 25th I attended a private boat trip discovering Como lake and Bellaggio. The nature, in colors of autumn provided us a relaxing atmosphere. We have seen expensive villa hotels built near the lake, seen the house of George Clooney, some other villas and castels where parts of movies like Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, Ocean’s Twelve and James Bond: Casino Royale was shot. Then we have visited Villa Mezzi and its botanical garden in addition to a few small churches in the small city of Bellagio.

I have started working on a little mashup which will be a web tool that helps people keep track of events around. Currently, I am working on Google Maps, Calendar and Authentication APIs integration.

My initial tryout will be on using the tool as an event and news portal for Web 2.0 enthusiasts. That is; a website where web 2.0 and IT related conferences, events and meet-ups are indexed, powered by location based services and APIs. The site will be featuring a socially networked community around itself and will be pretty much like Facebook’s events application.

I have not decided on a name yet, so I will be referring it as “NUMP” (New Unnamed Mashup Poject)

All comments and ideas are welcome

I have been using Ubuntu 8.04 for about a month now, together with my old and faithful Windows XP. After some crazy virus/malware infection on XP, I was even more hooked to Ubuntu. Although my lack of experience on Linux systems slows me down, I have been able to do pretty much evertyhing I needed on Ubuntu.

Except…

Continuing my old projects that are over Microsoft.NET platform. It is impossible to install a .NET framework on Linux and naturally Microsoft has no support in this way. There is one way to use Wine and install the framework but this I did not appreciate much, since Wine does not support running the latest version of Visual Studio .NET 2008.

Instead, today I have tried diving into the infamous Mono Project on Ubuntu.

and here are my impressions about the issue:

• Sponsored by Novell, Mono seems to be having quite a lot attention and support from its community and it is being grown rapidly.
• With the Mono 2.0 release, you can develop LINQ powered apps. (That is the LINQ from .NET Framework 3.0, not 3.5!)
• The quick and easy to use webserver called XSP 2.0 runs aspx pages perfectly.
• They also have their Visual Studio like substitution for an IDE. Called Mono-Develop which has a few annoying bugs and incapabilities but it is fine.
• You can use Mono 2.0 and MonoDevelop to fully develop ASP.NET and C# applications but you have to follow the technology from 1 year behind. Whatever new addition Microsoft has on the .NET framework are not supported by Mono yet.
• I was not able to run my web projects on Mono that were coded using .NET 3.5 over Windows. Checked out the roadmap and seen that full .NET 3.5 support will be given on around december. Waiting for Mono guys to follow and copy MS’s work and embed it into their system can be annoying in this case.

I will be continuing on discovering Mono and following its future releases to be able completely switch to Ubuntu. Having two OSs is like having two computers and your work scattered all over the place…

In honor of their 10th birthday, Google has brought back its oldest available index. Take a look back at Google Search in January 2001. Very nostalgic.

Try searches like “facebook” or “youtube” for example

Each day we are getting more aware of the slow death of hardcore PC gaming. Fully polished, graphically appealing and action packed games are always going out first for the consoles. It is much more cheaper and easier for gaming addicts to just buy an XBOX 360, connect it to any kind of monitor and start playing games without worrying of hardware issues, software incompatibilities etc…

On the other hand, web based browser games for the PC are evolving fast. These mini games which we can even play on Facebook against friends have now got a new way of monetization.

Watch the video below and get ready for Google in-game advertising!

It is time for doing the thesis and most of the computer engineering department here at Polimi is focused on Semantic Web applications. To better decide which area I am going to choose to do my thesis, I have been reading tutorials about this new extension of the Web for about a week.

What is the Semantic Web?

W3C defines The Semantic Web as: “The Web with a meaning”.

“If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like one huge database“. The word semantic stands for the meaning of. The semantic of something is the meaning of something.

The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand. The Semantic Web is not a very fast growing technology. One of the reasons for that is the learning curve. RDF was developed by people with academic background in logic and artificial intelligence. For traditional developers it is not very easy to understand.

Semantic Search

We have seen a number of real Semantic Web applications so far. Semantic search engines like Hakia, Powerset and hodo have been good examples to these. These engines index RDF data stored on the Web and provide an interface to search through the crawled data. Rather than using ranking algorithms such as Google’s PageRank to predict relevancy, Semantic Search uses semantics, or the science of meaning in language to produce highly relevant search results. In most cases, the goal is to deliver the information queried by a user rather than have a user sort through a list of loosely related keyword results.

Markup

Currently, the World Wide Web is based mainly on documents written in HTML, a markup convention that is used for coding a body of text interspersed with multimedia objects such as images and interactive forms. Metadata tags, for example provide a method by which computers can categorise the content of web pages.

The Semantic Web takes the concept further; it involves publishing the data in a language, Resource Description Framework (RDF), specifically for data, so that it can be categorized as human perception and be “understood” by computers. So all data is not only stored, but filed and well handled.

Resource Description Framework

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a W3C standard for describing Web resources, such as the title, author, modification date, content, and copyright information of a Web page. More information about building semantic web apps can be found on W3Schools.

There are also a bunch of APIs that allow you to create semantic apps such as the Jena RDF API for Java. Until now everything seems to be fine.

Does the Semantic Web search yet really help?

Things like creating a meaning, making the web understanding that “cat” is not just a word that consists of c, a and t but that it is “an animal with 4 legs” are nice things. However, effective semantic search will need websites that have utilised semantic technology. That means all the content on your site has to be tagged hyerarchically and they have to implement an RDF schema.

I will be continuing to write more on the Semantic side of the web as I dive further. Meanwhile, here are a nuch of nice hello Semantic Web kinda articles you may check out:

• W3Schools - Semantic Web
• Semantic Web - An introduction
• ReadWriteWeb - 11 Things to know about the semantic web
• ReadWriteWeb - Is Google a Semantic Search Engine?
• The Death of RDBMS

I have just learned about a new competition, that is organized by Google. Project 10¹⁰⁰ (pronounced “Project 10 to the 100th”) is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. Joining is extremely easy. You just have to fill a simple form that describes your idea in around 300 words and add your personal info.

After the deadline, which is the 20th of October, the submission will close. On January 27, a public voting will open and in the end, the idea with the highest number of votes will have a $10 million funding! Below are the very basic rules / criteria for building up the idea.

• Reach: How many people would this idea affect?
• Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need?
• Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
• Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea?
• Longevity: How long will the idea’s impact last?

Joining the competition is extremely easy and you can join with more than one ideas. Check out the official site here, read the FAQ or simply watch the Youtube video below.

Here is a nice article at Publishing 2.0 tells about the mis-predictions about Facebook’s revenues. Comparing Facebook Ads with Google Adwords/Adsense model, the article reminds us again why we need to create value for both the publishers and the advertisers in online advertising.

With 100 MILLION users, Facebook’s 2008 revenue was only projected to be $300 million. (The number may higher, haven’t seen, but it would be big news if it was much higher.)

We also had tried using Facebook Ads for Kuizz.com, but we had not received real benefit. With Facebook Ads, it is not really possible to reach the people who are looking for you, but with Google Adwords, your ads are shown right where your market is looking for you with search queries.

If you have used both of these services, which one was more beneficial for you?

I have been following the guys at Carsonified for some time and here is their latest attraction.

They are giving a free ticket to ALL Carsonified 2009 events that include Future of Web Design, Future of Web Apps, Future of Mobile, Fuel and all Carson Workshops. They are also covering the hotel expenses, giving a backstage pass and inviting you to a VIP speaker dinner with them. However, the only winner will be someone who writes a blog post about the enthusiasm for getting Golden Ticket. In addition, the blogpost has to get a minimum of 25 comments.

I believe this one is a very nice viral marketing technique. The more bloggers who want to get a free pass to Carsonified’s events, the more blog posts will come and a bigger audiance Carsonified will reach.

About wanting to get the ticket:

Well, with some guys here at Polimi we were alredy planning on going to London for the events, but this opportunity would be really nice if we also can have the Golden Ticket. Our passion for attending a Carsonified event has been burning like hell, travelling every inch of every vein in our bodies. Meeting with people who are the designers and producers of the coolest, slickest web apps of the world, oh god, talking with them. Seeing them, re-living the excitement, also seeing the passion in their eyes while sharing their experiences and reaching to even higher levels of coolness. Creating web apps. Usability. Human user interaction, interfaces, glossy web 2.0 logos, simpleness… Words are not enough to fully describe the excitement we would achive if we have the Golden Ticket. This, even the possiblity of a journey to a world of touched dreams creates a big-bang in ourselves that plants the seeds of the very foundations of our mental renovation.

I need 25 comments until September 30th. It will be a miracle if this post gets 25 comments and also wins the draw

http://www.carsonified.com/events/carsonified-golden-ticket