Web 2.0 Watch

Silverlight and the Olympic sized streaming effort

When my wife complained about missing out on some of the Olympic action on TV due to her work schedule, I was quick to remind her about the availability of the games online. Part of the reason for my enthusiasm for it was that as a Product Manager for the Streaming Perspective at Keynote, I got a peek into the efforts that go into making that happen. Streaming Perspective is being used extensively by media companies in various countries to ensure that the Olympic streams on their Web site meet the customer expectation.

Closer to home in US, Keynote integrated Microsoft Silverlight into its streaming measurement infrastructure to help measure the performance aspects of the Silverlight streams as seen on NBCOlympics.com on MSN. More details in the press release.

How measurement helps:

As any performance enthusiast would know, to ensure the highest quality experience of a video for a live event, it is not only important that you make sure that the infrastructure is up to the task, using the load testing, but also one should continuously monitor the performance of the video streams. This becomes more important as the monetization aspects of video streams on Web become clearer. The demand for the videos on line were impressive NBC alone averaged more than 1.5 million viewers daily, source: http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/fans-around-the-world-following-the-olympics-online-5703/ and (http://www.beet.tv/2008/08/nbc-olympics-on.html).

Some technical details on the metrics:

Some of the key points that Streaming Perspective collects are:

 Availability from different geographical location
 DNS Resolution Delta
 TCP/IP Connect Deltas
 Number of TCP Connections
 Total Sent & Received Bytes
 Total Number of Sent & Received Socket Buffers
 Connect Time
 Initial Buffering Delta
 Total Rebuffering Delta
 Total Rebuffering Count
 Average Rendered Frames Per Second

When you take a holistic view of the data collected the performance bottlenecks become very obvious, allowing your team to take the necessary action to fix the issue.

How can you measure from your desktop?

In addition to streaming video measurements my colleague Bard Boston, also managed to get Silverlight network/file metrics using KITE and from his desktop (to get a free copy of KITE, go to http://kite.keynote.com). The unique aspect of this is: using Streaming Perspective to monitor stream quality in a Silverlight player, and coupling that with the network metrics of Silverlight http delivery methodology, administrators have an unparalleled view into streams delivered over the internet. Here is some overview of the metrics collected.

For those of you who want to see it for yourself, Bard has listed the steps to get this metrics right from your desktop, detailed instructions will soon be posted on the KITE community (http://kite.keynote.com/community).

Step 1. Download Silverlight Beta 2 (for video streaming) to your desktop. This can be found at either nbcolympics.com or Microsoft.com

Step 2: Download and install KITE.

Step 3 Build a KITE script using the stream URL found in the NBC player.

Software As A Service - Riding on AIR?

Online software (a.k.a. Software as a Service or SaaS) sales has increased 21% from 2006 to 2007. Yet it is still a good distance away from being a dominant segment of the market. According to the Gartner Group analyst Ben Pring, SaaS still accounts for only 6% of business software sales, roughly $5.1 billion.

However, the Wall St. Journal recently pointed to trends that show SaaS will be growing significantly over the next year. The successful IPO of NetSuite has escaped the notice of absolutely no one (it helps when Larry Ellison is involved). Toss in companies such as Siebel and SAP who are taking aspects of their traditional software offerings online, and the snowball that is SaaS is picking up some downhill velocity.

According to Pring, It is expected that SaaS will grow rapidly by 2011. The perceived advantages of lower cost and lower equipment costs have him projecting online software sales increasing to 15-18% of all business software sales by 2013.

You might have noticed I said "perceived" advantages, due to the fact that while online software might cost less in the short term (due to lower hardware costs), it may cost more than desktop software over a period of time. Another point of concern is according to a December survey by Forrester Research, only 6% of IT leaders prefer to buy online software. As a side effect, SaaS companies try to sell more to the business-side leaders rather than to IT departments.

At this time, online software is better suited for tasks that are not too complex or require high levels of configurablity, hence businesses looking for supply chain software or complex financials (NetSuite notwithstanding, Wall St. demands might be a bit much for online software) are probably not looking for online software solutions - right now. But desktop alternatives are rapidly becoming, if not a viable option, at least worthy of being in the discussion.

Small and medium businesses, such as city governments wincing at the costs of upgrading or replacing MS-Office, are starting to look for alternatives. At present, these apps are not pushing Microsoft - yet. As Burton Group analyst Guy Creese stated, "At this point, I still think it's a bit early to move to SaaS-based content creation and management. However, I don't think the wait will be long -- by the middle of next year, I think, there will be some viable solutions." Some of those viable solutions could be applications produced by Google (Google Apps), Citrix, and ThinkFree.

Of course, the biggest concern with any SaaS application is that it is only good as long as you are online. Offline...well there's always Solitaire or Minesweeper to kill the frustration.

Enter Adobe and their latest offering, Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a new development environment that allows for data stored on the net to be interchangeable with data on a person's hard drive. An AIR application can mimic the functionality of a web browser without needing a browser. One early adopter is the eBay Desktop, which allows users to use eBay functionality without the browser or checking email constantly. Users will be able to get alerts and run searches. AIR is also expected to add functionality to web applications that we normally expect on the desktop such as drag and drop, system notifications, and file system access.   

On Monday, Adobe will formally introduce some of new hybrid desktop-online applications that are already using AIR, among them the Nasdaq and AOL. The implications are immense. If AIR is fused into a Google Apps for example, then one would think that Microsoft and their online offering Silverline will have to up the ante.

All of this means potentially good things for small and medium sized businesses. Consider the IT manager of the city of Stratford, CT David Wright. Like many a city, Stratford needs a software upgrade, but the town isn't exactly flush with cash. But the advances in SaaS, may provide an alternative. "The longer I can put off upgrading to Office 2007, the more options I'll have... [if Google Apps or its competitors become a decent option soon], that could work out well for us."

Next week, I'll be back with more on SaaS.

Are you optimized for different browsers?

Recently when Gigaom published its visitor stats - and Om made the following observation:

You like Firefox to a degree that far exceeds the general Internet population. According to Google Analytics, 47 percent of our visits this year were made through Firefox, while 40.1 percent were made through Internet Explorer. As for the rest, 8.32 percent of our visits came through Safari, 1.69 percent through Opera, and 1.59 percent through Mozilla. Only 3.31 percent of visits were made via dial-up connections. …...

While GigaOm’s pattern as OM points out is not representative of the general internet users, the latter still prefer to use IE over 76% of the time, the rest shared by Firefox, Safari and other browsers-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers, It was interesting to note that Om analyzed which browsers were being used to access the site.

If you wonder why it matters? The short answer lies in the fact that if you are monetizing your site and your site’s performance is tuned only for a specific browser, but the majority of your user base uses a different browser to access your site, you risk losing your customers if the performance is poor. In GigaOm’s case it looks like it should be concerned about users of Firefox, Internet Explore and to some extent even Safari.

To study how major portals treat users of different browsers, I conducted a study with Per-Anders Rangsjö, a colleague of mine based in Keynote’s Stockholm office. Our aim was to find out the end user experience of using different browsers for e-commerce. We selected several popular e-commerce sites and portals and noted the performance of the sites when accessed by Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Safari and Opera. We used Keynote’s Application Perspective® for its ability to emulate different browser behavior and studied these sites for 2 weeks (November 26 – December 10). We used user-agent strings the popular means to identify browsers visiting a site, more on this article in Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent.

Some of the highlights of this study are captured in the graphs below, one shows the performance of a major online retailer to different browsers and another figure shows the first byte download time (the response time for the first byte of the data to arrive – generally considered a good benchmark for the performance) for same portal. We have also included a site that was optimized for all the browsers (requires further analysis of the individual elements) in the study.

This graph above shows the performance (against time) of a leading online retailer’s website to different browsers over a period of time. As seen from this image it becomes very clear that Web sites have to take into consideration their performances with major browsers. In this particular case the users of Opera & Safari browsers get a much better performance than IE 7 or Firefox. This in spite of the fact that majority of the online consumers use these two browsers predominantly.

The figure below shows the performance as it relates to the first byte download time for each of the browsers.

The figure below shows how a well balanced site (i.e a site that is optimized for all major browsers) behaves. The performance remains constant across different browsers. It could also be argued that this particular site did not do any browser based optimization (i.e it served same content for any browser type) but the strong perfomance (mostly below 0.4 seconds) suggests that site performance was a big consideration in its design.

Our initial observations show that majority of the Web sites in this study are not currently optimized for all browsers and even if they are it seems more based on the functionality rather than on the performance (or a combination of both), but it is important to note that Web sites need to tune their performance only after a careful study of their users. There is no incentive in spending cycles to improve the site for browsers that don’t constitute a substantial user base.

We have masked the names of the portal under study for this blog, we might release more details as we collect more results. We plan to refine our methodology to analyze the individual CSS elements downloaded for each browser and JavaScript elements delivered from the server to each browser version and finally compare the performance to a real browser using our flagship product – Transaction perspective. So keep a track of this blog for some interesting information on this topic.

VoIP Innovation Award for 2007

Imagine your customer contact center receives a call from a customer who has a few questions about your product before completing the online transaction, or your sales person in the field needs to confirm the features in your product roadmap before an important client meeting. Your company has just adopted VoIP to use all the new features that were not available with your traditional phone service. Unfortunately when both of the calls happened the users were outside of your corporate firewall, spread around the country and navigating various hybrid networks to reach you.

Wouldn’t it have been useful to know how those calls performed? What bottlenecks they encountered? And specifically which geographic areas had most of the issues? And most importantly how you could enforce SLA’s with your providers to make sure your users get the best service? We at Keynote bet it would, and certainly got a shot in the arm when our solution was recognized as one of the top innovations of 2007 in VoIP by VoIP News.

Keynote’s vision for VoIP has been to help in measuring the end user experience of VoIP enabled services to enable business to proactively manage the user experience and take preventive actions to mitigate the impact. The need for outside the firewall measurements from an end user perspective becomes all the more important as vital VoIP applications rely on public internet infrastructure to transport VoIP packets.

While the Year 2007 saw the introduction of many VoIP telephony services, Year 2008 promises to be more exciting with the possibility of an increased usage of Flash-Voice in Web applications.

VoIP coming to a business near you!

With over 3 years of monitoring voice quality of service providers in the US and noticing how the quality of both VoIP & PacketCable service providers have seen a continuous improvement, It was not surprising to see a recent Forrester poll indicating that around 90% of the business polled planned to migrate to VoIP. The latest Wave 4 study results from Keynote comparing and contrasting different VoIP & PacketCable service providers on various quality metrics re-emphasized this assumption.

Growth in adoption of VoIP by small & medium business:

There is more to VoIP than affordable calls, in fact to most of the business that move to VoIP do it for the plethora of new features it provides than solely for cost savings. For small & medium business the promise of having multiple contact points with the customer (integrating with CRM), the ease of ramping up & down on the number of agents depending on the call volume, flexibility of choosing service providers and using hosted solutions are all compelling reasons to adopt VoIP.

These features once the sole preserve of high end contact centers and large enterprises are now being increasingly offered to small and medium business by many VoIP start-ups.

Why does VoIP quality matter?

As companies seek to monetize their VoIP deployment to up sell their services to consumers, it is important to realize that with VoIP, the voice packets now travel via the public internet and is subject to all the unpredictability of the Web Traffic.

Let’s examine this differently, When Keynote Systems first (almost 10 years ago) started measuring Web performance and its impact on end consumers (people like you & I who shop & live on Web) the frustration time was considered to be 8 seconds. That is if the Web page does not load within 8 seconds you would end up spending your money on a different Web site. Now the frustration time is closer to 4 seconds and increasingly becoming shorter.

So for the business adopting VoIP, it is important to take into consideration the affect of voice quality and its impact on customer churn, similar to what enterprises using Web application monitoring services do to keep their online customers happy.

Measures to improve voice quality & Customer satisfaction:

Business should proactively measure VoIP quality on a continuous basis, taking a holistic view of the customer experience. The figure below attempts to capture some of the key elements involved in maintaining a good VoIP call quality, while still reaping the benefits of the technology.

 
It is important to emphasis that monitoring voice quality  continuously, enforcing SLA with service provider and defining key performance indicators to measure and track service quality should all be a part of the steps taken to provide a great customer experience with VoIP.

Deconstructing the new Web

It's great to join my stellar colleagues on the Web 2.0 Watch blog! So why would you read what I have to say, anyway? An introduction is in order. Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, many of us have the daily insights and connections to the world's best known Internet businesses. At Keynote, my team members and I spend much of our day deconstructing what's happening with Web business models of our customers - companies like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL and about 2597 other companies that want to continuously improve the Internet experience for their visitors. Here's more about me, but enough said. Let's talk about what's really behind the scenes for Web 2.0 applications.

The people I talk to every day work at the world's top Internet companies and are responsible for their Web sites, applications, and infrastructure actually working 24x7x365. They are rapidly moving from a world that has been deeply network-focused to an application-focused world, but wait, wait, there's more. For them, the Web is moving from a server-centric Web focus to a client-centric Web world. A technology that has sparked this move is the increasing adoption of AJAX.

So what is going on with Web applications and AJAX, and how does it really work? For a really great, but pretty technical treatise on the subject, read Kurt Cagle's AJAX on the Enterprise. From the audience of this blog, I hear cries of "executive summary". Ok, so here it is.

Web 1.0, or I got a page for you, buddy. Here's how the current Web 1.0 technologies work. A single page is created from fairly complex components on the server. The server needs to maintain a lot more information about the user, the session, the state of the application. Most of the times that you click on a link, or move from one state in the application to another, you are served a new page, i.e. a new URL.

Web 2.0, or, In the AJAX world. the server pushes all the components on to the client. Each component on that client, then, in turn, becomes responsible for how it interacts with the server. The state of the application ends up residing in each component, in a client-side "model" server which all the components interact with.

Dumbing down the server. What's different in the AJAX world is that the server becomes somewhat "dumb" - unlike Web 1.0 applications, it does not need to maintain as much state for a particular session or applications.

• The server becomes simpler and simpler in these ways:
• The server needs to send each component only once and then let the component handle the presentation layer instead of doing this task for each component every time some aspect of state changes.
• The server layer becomes thinner - really a pipe between the client and the database.
• The server does less work, and this allows it to generate more sessions using the same resources.

The client, on the other hand, becomes a lot more complex! Until next time…

Streaming content and Advertisement potential

Recent announcement from BBC to offer TV channels via its new player –iPlayer is a sign of things to come for Streaming content on the Net and its potential to accelerate newer forms of advertisement.

There is a clear move towards media companies wanting to monetize their contents. Some of the technology trends that will help them in this effort are
•    Better Search functionality on streamed video content
Search compatibility is the Holy Grail of content monetization, with search spiders doing an increasingly better job of parsing content on video streams (yes, even on Flash content).

•    Better integration of content & relevant advertisements
With the evolution of advertisements on the Web from text to video, there is an increased need to match video content and the right advertisement, for e.g. while watching how to make 'Arroz Doce' Portuguese Rice Pudding with Grilled Mandarins on BBCTV, it is great to see the text based advertisements for other recipes, weight loss product, etc. but what is missing is a means for me to find out more about the parrot green jacket the host was wearing. These are some of the new features future players are going to add.

This versatility of combining content and advertisements in the rich media has given rise to an entirely new marketplace, some of the players in this space are adap.tv and YuMe

•    Vesatile Players 
The Streaming market is abuzz with highly customizable players like Silverlight by Microsoft and AIR –Adobe Integrated Runtime (formerly Apollo) and the trend towards customized players from CDN network (most use modified flash players).

In addition to the pre and post roll ad placements, the newer players will be able to provide more creative means to place and monitor ads. In some cases, these players would take the form of the browser themselves, with features for content aggregation from RSS feeds, ability to select / subscribe to different TV channels on the web, etc...

So, while BBC TV currently has the smallest tab size when compared to its other popular product offering (News, Weather, Sports, etc…), the exponential consumption of Videos on the net and corresponding monetization possibility, it will in near future increase its tabfootprint on the site. Meanwhile the market for videos on Web gets more interesting.

Some from down under

It's everywhere. Web 2.0 in Australia brings us a very artistic way to connect. It uses the idea of creative collaboration to get you talking.

Check out "the broth".

It'll take a few moments to figure out what's going on. Mosaics? Tiles? A map (courtesy Google) of players around the world? What kind of game is this?

Then after taking the quick video tour (courtesy YouTube) you'll say - wow, this is pretty neat. An entire site built around creating art.

After clicking on the confirmation email, you'll be sucked right in. There are multiple ways to start creating your own masterpiece. You can join an existing "active room" or create your own. If it's public, then others can join you as you work.

All the while, you'll be able to chat in the side window as you see your collaborators picking up new tiles, moving them across the screen, and assembling them on the digital canvas.

In my first experience I met a fashion designer from New Zealand, killing some time at 5PM her time, before heading out for dinner. She was kind enough to give me a lay of the land but in return, unfortunately, she got a pretty poor collaborator. You would think assembling tiles on a screen would be easy enough - and it is. But making it look good is a different matter entirely.

If you've got the talent, you can enter the competitions and win some nice prizes.

The technology behind this was seamless – AJAX and PHP. The experience is really great – and wow, fast as a cheetah running after lunch. Creating new galleries was easy and I loved the interaction with someone on the other side of the planet.

And if you go, they tell me you gotta check out the art work of GOGO or BRRRFrost - they are the best.

Keeping Watch

"Web 2.0" may just be the most prevalent phrase since dot-gone.  Is that ominous?

I don't think it is in and of itself.

I view it as a convenient way to signify a change from something to something.  It is a nice handle to use when discussing trends, technology, and even customer experience.

There are of course business implications for what Web 2.0 signals to companies and investors and what behaviors are encouraged by ROI calculations and payback assumptions.   

In this new blog, I will write about what's behind Web 2.0.  Together, we'll look at companies, technology and online behavior. 

I hope you'll join me.