Fogbeam LabsThe FogBloghttps://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/feed/entries/atom2016-04-06T02:06:56+00:00Apache Rollerhttps://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/from-the-intranet-to-theFrom the Intranet to the Enterprise Knowledge NetworkPhillip Rhodes2015-08-31T22:20:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:02+00:00<p>Beginning from the mid 1990's, companies have been using Web technologies (HTTP, HTML, CSS, etc.) to build internal webs for knowledge sharing and collaboration. The term "Intranet" has been adopted to describe these internal knowledge sharing systems, and Intranets have become ubiquitous in the years since. </p><p>But if the "Intranet" was the application of <b>World Wide Web</b> technologies inside organizations, we think it's time to start talking about the use of <b>Semantic Web</b> technologies inside of companies. At <a href="http://www.fogbeam.com/">Fogbeam Labs</a> we are referring to this approach as the Enterprise Knowledge Network (EKN). </p><p>Of course, Semantic Web technologies have been around for some time now, so why is it now time to start applying them inside the enterprise? We believe the time is now due to the confluence of a number of related factors: <ol> <li>Simply put, the technology has gotten better, and we understand it better. We, as a technology community, now understand how to develop and apply "SemWeb" tech more effectively than we did 10 years ago. And, the tools have gotten better, the standards have gotten better, we have more experience.</li><li>Open Source Software has made the technology radically more accessible. In years past, assembling a high-value SemWeb solution meant using expensive, proprietary software. But in 2015, everything you need to deploy SemWeb tech, and build an Enterprise Knowledge Network, is available as OSS or Free Software. Of course commercial vendors like Fogbeam Labs offer support and services for a fee, but the overall cost for this level of technology solution has plummeted. And, using Open Source Software is a better value proposition in many other regards anyway. Open Source is even <a href="https://redmondmag.com/articles/2015/09/01/changing--dna.aspx">shaping the future at Microsoft</a> now.</li><li>More data. The burgeoning interest in "Open Data" over the past few years has resulted in an explosion of available data, especially from government sources. At the same time, projects like DBPedia and WikiData are hard at working making the content from Wikipedia available as part of the Semantic Web. And the <a href="http://lod-cloud.net/">Linking Open Data</a> initiative catalogs a ridiculously large number of datasets which are now available as semantic data. This data, combined with your internal data, allows for unprecedented opportunities to mine for new insights and opportunities. <li>Cheaper, faster computers, and cloud computing. - The simple truth is, using SemWeb tech takes a lot of computing "horsepower". And 10 years ago, that much horsepower was either not available, or was prohibitively expensive. Now, thanks to Moore's Law and the advent of IaaS providers like AWS, it is possible to deploy massive computing resources at reasonable prices. </ol></p><p>In short, there's really no reason to delay moving from an Intranet, to an Enterprise Knowledge Network. Now is the time to take advantage of Semantic Web technology to integrate all of the knowledge spread across your enterprise, making the right information and knowledge available to the people who need it, when they need it - sometimes even <b><i>before they know they need it</i></b>. An Enterprise Knowledge Network unifies all of the disparate repositories you have in your organization - Document Management servers, wikis, blogs, shared folders, databases, and applications, and lets you navigate through the knowledge-space of your firm, quickly and easily. </p><p>For more information on how you can move from an old-fashioned Intranet, to an Enterprise Knowledge Network, consult these two Fogbeam papers. If you have questions about how to move forward, contact Fogbeam Labs and let us help. <ul><li><a href="http://www.fogbeam.com/Modern_Intranet_v1.pdf">The Modern Intranet</a></li><li><a href="http://www.fogbeam.com/An_Enterprise_Knowledge_Network.pdf">An Enterprise Knowledge Network</a></li></ul> </p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/oracle-explain-exactly-why-youOracle explain exactly why you should only use Open Source softwarePhillip Rhodes2015-08-12T19:46:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:03+00:00Unless you have been living under a rock for the past few days, you are probably aware of the (in)famous "No, You Really Can't" blog post from Oracle. The post sparked a firestorm of controversy with its ranting about the reasons Oracle customers can't probe Oracle products for security vulnerabilities. The <a href="https://blogs.oracle.com/maryanndavidson/entry/no_you_really_can_t" target="_blank">original post</a> has been deleted, but <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150811090106/https://blogs.oracle.com/maryanndavidson/entry/no_you_really_can_t" target="_blank">a copy</a> of the post can still be found at the Internet Archive.<br /><br />In the post, the author makes the following interesting comment:<br /><p /><blockquote><i><p>Even if you want to have reasonable certainty that suppliers take reasonable care in how they build their products – and there is so much more to assurance than running a scanning tool - there are a lot of things a customer can do like, gosh, actually talking to suppliers about their assurance programs or checking certifications for products for which there are Good Housekeeping seals for (or “good code” seals) like Common Criteria certifications or FIPS-140 certifications. Most vendors – at least, most of the large-ish ones I know – have fairly robust assurance programs now (we know this because we all compare notes at conferences). That’s all well and good, is appropriate customer due diligence and stops well short of “hey, I think I will do the vendor’s job for him/her/it and look for problems in source code myself,” even though: </p><ul><li>A customer can’t analyze the code to see whether there is a control that prevents the attack the scanning tool is screaming about (which is most likely a false positive)</li><li>A customer can’t produce a patch for the problem – only the vendor can do that</li><li>A customer is almost certainly violating the license agreement by using a tool that does static analysis (which operates against source code)</li></ul></i></blockquote><p>Now what's interesting here is this: the three bulleted items above are <b>three very precise and accurate reasons why you should stop using closed source software!</b>. I suppose the author of this piece thought they were being cute or glib by insulting their customers. Instead they laid out - in precise detail - exactly why their customers should drop Oracle products and switch to Open Source solutions. Because, with OSS: </p><ul><li>The customer CAN analyze the source code as part of their security audit process, and compare the actual code with the results from scanning tools</li><li>The customer CAN create their own patch, and test it, and - since they probably don't want to maintain a forked version indefinitely - contribute it back upstream, where it benefits the entire community.</li><li>The customer is NOT violating the license agreement by running static analysis tools (or, indeed, an other tool) against the code.</li></ul><p>Of course the exact details of what you can and can't do with OSS code varies according to the specific license in use. In our case here at Fogbeam, we're proud to say that almost everything we do is licensed under the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0">Apache License v2</a> - a very "business friendly", permissive license that gives you, the customer, tremendous freedom and security. </p><p>Let me end this by saying "Thank You, Oracle. Thank you for helping explain to the world, why they should quit using your proprietary, closed-source, business-hostile products, and switch to Open Source instead." </p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/is-facebook-at-work-anIs Facebook at Work an Enterprise Social Network?Phillip Rhodes2015-01-15T01:12:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:07+00:00<p>According to <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/14/facebook-at-work-ios-android/" target="_blank" >numerous</a> <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/article/would-you-trust-facebook-for-your-work/" target="_blank">media</a> <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/14/facebook-at-work-hits-app-stores/" target="_blank">reports</a>, Facebook have just (soft) launched their new business oriented "Facebook at Work" application. Given Facebook's ubiquity in the consumer social network space, the Facebook@Work announcement was met with great fanfare, with most observers suggesting that the new offering is aimed at competing with products like Yammer, Hipchat, Slack, Salesforce Chatter and others of that ilk. This raises a number of interesting questions, at least some of which we can't fully answer yet, as Facebook@Work is still in a "closed" beta at the moment. But we can take a look at some of the issues around this new product, and its implications for the business oriented social network space. </p><p>A few important questions stand out to us, including the topics already raised by some media pundits, like "can you trust Facebook with your data?" and "how will Facebook monetize this?" These are valid concerns, and I'm sure they will be addressed in time. But right now, I'd like to start by asking perhaps the most pertinent question of all: </p><p><em>"Is Facebook at Work really an Enterprise Social Network?"</em></p><p>At first blush this may seem like a ridiculous question - you may think "Well, Facebook is a social network, and if it's aimed at business then of course it's an Enterprise Social Network." But this is a superficial and possibly inaccurate analysis. I think we can safely say that Facebook@Work is definitively a <b>business</b> social network, but whether or not it's an <b>enterprise</b> social network is a different question altogether. </p><p>To explore this in more detail, let's talk about what constitutes an "enterprise" or what qualifies as <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_software">enterprise software</a>. You could argue that any business is an "enterprise" by some definitions, but in terms of the technology industry, "enterprise" has more specific connotations. In the tech software industry vernacular, "enterprise" generally refers to companies that are large or complex enough to have very specific demands on their software systems, and "enterprise software" is software which is designed and built specifically to serve the needs of those firms. </p><p>Enterprise software typically has to meet specific requirements in terms of reliability, interoperability, extensibility, and the other "ilities" as people often call them. When a complex firm embeds business logic, which constitutes some part of their competitive advantage, into a software system, the system has to be tailored to the exact specifications of that customer, or it provides no real advantage at all. Likewise, software that does not meet minimum thresholds for uptime, response time, ability to integrate with other enterprise systems, etc., is often not suited for enterprise use. Examples of required integration points may include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, Sales Force Automation (SFA) systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms, Business Process Management (BPM) products, etc. </p><p>Given that, what can we say about Facebook@Work? Well, details are somewhat lacking at the moment, but what has been reported to date suggests that Facebook@Work lacks any integration capabilities, including even the standard Facebook developer API. And there is certainly nothing to suggest any purpose built integration points for connecting to CRM, SFA, ERP, or BPM systems. It also appears unlikely that Facebook@Work will support any kind of customization to speak of. It seems that this will be strictly a hosted offering, run by Facebook themselves, and not a product where customers will have access to the source code, with the ability to run a modified version. In terms of reliability, however, Facebook@Work should do well, assuming it inherits the same support staff and procedures that the consumer Facebook is backed by. When you look at it, Facebook is very reliable in general, given the massive amount of traffic the site serves. </p><p>Based on what we know so far, I'd hesitate to call Facebook@Work an "enterprise" product. I think it will serve well as a replacement for Hipchat, Slack, Yammer and similar tools in the SMB space.. Companies up to 250 employees or thereabouts, with limited needs to customize or integrate their software, will possibly find Facebook@Work very useful. </p><p>On the other hand, we believe that firms much larger than about 250 employees - and certainly those with more than 500 employees - will have needs that will not be served by Facebook@Work. This is, of course, based only on the information available today. </p><p>For firms that need a social platform which was purpose built for enterprise scenarios, and features API support for ActivityStrea.ms, FOAF, BPM integration, business events (SOA/ESB integration), and which is completely customizable, we suggest taking a look at our <a href="http://fogbeam.com/quoddy_enterprise.html" target="_blank">Open Source Enterprise Social Network</a> offering, Quoddy. In addition to strong API support and a business friendly Apache License, Quoddy includes support for serving as a cornerstone of a Enterprise Knowledge Network by including support for Semantic Web technologies and pre-built integration with <a href="http://stanbol.apache.org/" target="_blank" >Apache Stanbol</a> for semantic concept extraction and content enhancement. </p><p>At the end of the day, Facebook@Work is an exciting development, and we believe it will serve the needs of many - but not all - business customers. Luckily there are a large number of choices in the enterprise software space, with solutions available to fit all types of firms. Whether a firm adopts Facebook@Work, Yammer, Quoddy, Slack, or "other" we firmly believe that <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_social_software">Enterprise Social Software</a> is going to serve as an important channel for business collaboration and knowledge transfer for the foreseeable future. </p><hr />If you read this far, you should <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/FogbeamLabs">Follow us on Twitter</a>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/come-meet-fogbeam-labsCome Meet Fogbeam Labs!Phillip Rhodes2014-09-13T21:19:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:08+00:00<p>So, you've been following our blog, reading our tweets, friend'ing us on Facebook, reading our posts on Hacker News, and you've circled us on Google+, LinkedIn with us, and probably even driven by our homes a few times. Wouldn't you like to stop stalking from afar and actually, you know, come <strong>meet us</strong>?? </p><p>Guess what? Now's your time! We will be demo'ing in the "demo room" at this year's <a href="http://www.cednc.org/event/id/434643/CED-Tech-Venture-Conference-2014.htm" target="_blank">CED Tech Venture Conference</a> in Raleigh, North Carolina, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week (that's Sept 16 and 17, 2014). And even better, you'll have not one, but two great chances to meet us in October! Phil will be presenting at the 2014 <a href="http://allthingsopen.org/" target="_blank" >All Things Open</a> conference in Raleigh, which happens October 22-23, 2014. Phil will also be speaking at the <a href="http://www.trijug.org" target="_blank" >Triangle Java User's Group</a> meeting in October, on the evening of October 20th. </p><p>Of course all three of these events would be amazing even if we weren't there, and we encourage you to attend all three, even if you have never heard of Fogbeam Labs. But if you do visit, be sure to find us and say hi! </p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/starting-points-for-learning-aboutStarting Points For Learning About Open SourcePhillip Rhodes2014-08-27T18:44:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:09+00:00<p>I (Phil) have recently been asked to speak on a panel discussing Open Source Software and issues regarding intellectual property, OSS licensing, patents, and how recent changes have affected the Open Source world, etc. This makes sense, given that everything we do at Fogbeam Labs is Open Source, and we make participating in the OSS community part of our <a target="_blank" href="http://fogbeam.com/company.html#mission">mission and core values</a>. But I'm no legal expert, and there's plenty I don't know about the legal issues in this sphere, and there are licenses that I don't know much about (esp. the lesser used ones). So I decided to do some "boning up" on the topic in advance, and remembered that there are quite a few resources dedicated to this topic, which are themselves "open source" (or at least freely available). </p><p>So, I thought I'd throw together a list quickly, which may be useful to anyone who wants to get an overview of what this "Open Source" thing is all about, or who wants to deepen their understanding of OSS licenses and related topics. </p><p>First, we have the absolutely classic <a target="_blank" href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/"><i>The Cathedral and the Bazaar</i></a> by Eric S. Raymond. This book deals with the fundamental dichotomy between how software is produced in the decentralized, distributed "Open Source" model, and how it is produced in a rigid, top-down, bureaucratic organization (like most software companies). Note that the linked page includes both the text of the book (including foreign language translations) and comments by the author and links to other discussions and comments by other observers. </p><p>Fundamentally, if you want to understand the Open Source world and the mindset of the people who populate it, this is required reading. No, not everybody agrees with everything esr has to say, and yes, this book is somewhat dated now. But it has been so amazingly influential that it's become part of the very fabric of this movement. </p><p>Next up we have <a target="_blank" href="http://oreilly.com/openbook/osfreesoft/book/index.html"><i>Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing</i></a> by Andrew M. St. Laurent. This book focuses specifically on OSS and Free Software licenses, and includes a comprehensive analysis / explanation of all of the important and widely used licenses that you will encounter. If you have ever wondered "what do the mean when they say that the GPL is 'viral'" or "what's the problem with mixing code that's released under different licenses" or something similar, this is your book. It's not a law textbook, but it covers the legalities and legal implications of OSS licensing for laymen quite well. </p><p>Another excellent title covering the legal nuts and bolts of Open Source licensing is <a target="_blank" href="http://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm"><i>Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law</i></a> by Lawrence Rosen. Rosen has been a high profile participant in legal aspects of Open Source for years, and has written a great book to help people understand the interaction of law and software. This book and the aforementioned <i>Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing</i> collectively cover pretty much everything you could want to know about licensing and legal issues (to the extent that such a thing is possible. There is still a lack of case-law and legal clarity in certain areas). </p><p>Another excellent book, especially for those leading - or who would lead - Open Source projects is Karl Fogel's <a target="_blank" href="http://producingoss.com/"><i>Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project</i></a> or "Producing OSS" as it's known. "Producing OSS" covers the nuts and bolts of running an Open Source project and actually shipping software. Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) there is a lot more to running a successful project than dealing with code and tech issues. Karl's book deals with the various "soft" issues that projects face - dealing with volunteers, creating a meritocracy, understanding how money affects the project, etc. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is, or wants to be, an active participant in any Open Source community. </p><p>And last, but certainly not least, we have the <a target="_blank" href="http://aosabook.org/en/index.html">Architecture of Open Source Applications</a> series. In these two books, the creators of dozens of popular Open Source projects explain the inner workings of their projects, and reveal the architectural details that made them successful. If you value learning via emulation, this is an amazing series of case studies to learn from. </p><p>And there you have it folks - a virtual cornucopia of Open Source wisdom collected over the years. If you have ever wanted to develop a solid understanding of how Open Source works and what it's all about, this is a great place to kick off your journey. And, of course, feel free to post any questions or comments here. </p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/why-we-don-t-wantWhy We Don't Want To Be "The Next Red Hat"Phillip Rhodes2014-02-14T03:54:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:10+00:00<p>Earlier today I read an interesting <a target="_blank" href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/13/please-dont-tell-me-you-want-to-be-the-next-red-hat/">article at Tech Crunch</a> by <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/Peter_Levine">Peter Levine</a>, in which he asserts that "there will never be another Red Hat" and more or less lambasts the notion of a company based on Open Source. </p><p>We are a company based on Open Source. </p><p>So, I guess my first thought should have been "Oh, shit. We're doing this all wrong. Let's yank all of our <a target="_blank" href="https://github.com/fogbeam">repositories off of GitHub</a> and close everything immediately." </p><p>Yeah.... no. </p><p>The truth is, Peter makes an interesting point or two in his article, and some of what he says at the end is moderately insightful. In fact, it reflects some decisions we made a few months ago about how we're going to position some new product offerings in 2014. But nothing in his article really provides any support for the idea that there is one, and only one, successful "Open Source Company". </p><p>OK, to be fair, I'll take his word that Red Hat is the only <strong>public</strong> company who's primary foundation is Open Source. But I'll counter that by pointing out that "going public" is not the sole measure of success for a firm. I'll also grant you that even Red Hat, seemingly the most successful "Open Source company" to date, is much smaller than Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon.com </p><p>Guess what? Almost every company is much smaller than Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon.com. Comparing a company to those outliers is hardly damning them. Truth is, RH is an $11 billion company - nothing to sneeze at. And yes, we have been known, on occasion, to use the phrase "the next Red Hat" when trying to describe to people what we're out to do here at Fogbeam. </p><p>Let's look at something else while we're at it... Red Hat are hardly the only successful Open Source company in the world anyway. They are probably the biggest and the most well known, but stop and consider a few other names you may have heard: Alfreco, Jaspersoft, Bonitasoft, SugarCRM, Cloudera, Hortonworks, Pivotal, Pentaho... Yeah, you get the drift. </p><p>And then there's this jewel of a quote from the article: <q>If you’re lucky and have a super-successful open source project, maybe a large company will pay you a few bucks for one-time support, or ask you to build a “shim” or a “foo” or a “bar.”</q> Unless I'm misinterpreting Peter here, he seems to be suggesting that companies do not want to, or are not willing to, pay for support for the Open Source solutions they use. All I can say is that this does not match my experience at all. Oh, don't get me wrong... there will always be some percentage of "freeloaders" who use the OSS code and never buy a support subscription. Red Hat know that, and we know that. But what we also know is that most businesses that are using a product for a mission critical purpose <em>want</em> a vendor behind the product, and they are willing to pay for that (as long as the value is there). The fact is, companies want to know that if a system breaks, there is somebody to call who will provide support with an SLA. They want to know that if they need training, there is somebody to call to provide that training. They want to know that if professional services are need for integrations or customizations, that there is somebody that they can call, who <em>knows their shit</em>. And, more prosaically, they want to know that there is a company there to sue if the shit really hits the fan. </p><p>So when I read Peter's article, I really don't hear a strong argument that there can't be other successful Open Source companies. In fact, I can't help but think that all he's <em>really</em> saying is "It's hard to build an Open Source company that will generate returns at a scale, and in a timeframe, that's compatible with the goals of Andreesen-Horowitz." And that's a perfectly fine thing to say. Maybe an Open Source company would be a bad investment for A16Z. But that isn't even close to the same thing as suggesting that you can't be successful using Open Source - if your goals and success criteria are different. </p><p>Anyway, as far as the whole "next Red Hat" thing goes - the thing is, we don't <em>actually</em> aspire to be "the next Red Hat". We've just used that term because it's a simplification and it's illustrative. But as far as aspirations for where we are going? Nah... In fact, here's the thing. We aren't out to be "the next Microsoft" either. Or "the next IBM". or "the next Oracle" or "the next Amazon.com" and so on and so on, ad infinitum. </p><p>No, fuck all that. Our aspirations are far bigger than that. Wait, did I say "bigger"? Maybe I really just meant "different". Bigger isn't always better, and there are other ways to distinguish yourself besides size. Will be be an $11 billion dollar company one day? I don't know. Maybe we'll actually be a $221 billion dollar company. Maybe we'll be a $2 million dollar company. Maybe we'll never make a dime at all. </p><p>What I do know is that our plan is this: We are working to build a company that is so fucking awesome that in a few years, people doing startups will go to people and say "We plan to be the next Fogbeam Labs"... </p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/on-solving-the-social-aspectOn Solving The Social Aspect Of BPMPhillip Rhodes2014-02-06T18:51:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:11+00:00<p>Over at <a href="http://www.bpm.com">BPM.com</a> forums <a href="https://twitter.com/PSchooff">Peter Schooff</a> has posed a very interesting question: <a href="http://bpm.com/my-bpm/forums/what-is-the-key-to-solving-the-social-aspect-of-bpm">"What Is the Key to Solving the Social Aspect of BPM?"</a> This is a topic we've thought a lot about, and "social BPM" is very core to use here at Fogbeam Labs, so I wanted to take a moment and share some thoughts on this very important topic. </p><p>The discussion here is focused around this factoid from a recent Aberdeen survey: </p><blockquote>Thirty-four percent (34%) of respondents in Aberdeen’s Solving Collaboration Challenges with Social ERP indicated that they have difficulty converting collaborative data into business execution. This is unnerving because, for many processes, the ability for people working together collaboratively is essential for process effectiveness. </blockquote><p>To really understand this, you have to consider what exactly the collaborative aspects of a BPM process are. And, in truth, many processes (perhaps most) are inherently collaborative, even if the collaborative aspect is not explicitly encoded into a BPMN2 diagram. Think of any time you've been involved in a process of some sort (whether BPM software or workflow engines were involved or not) and you have to make a decision or take some action... and you <em>needed information or input from someone else first</em>. If you picked up a telephone and made a call, or sent an email or an IM, then you are doing "social BPM" whether you use the term or not. </p><p>The first factors then, in really taking advantage of collaboration in BPM, are the <em>exact same things</em> involved in fostering collaboration in any fashion. It's not really a technology issue, it's an issue of culture, organization design, and incentives. Do people in your organization fundamentally trust each other? Is information shared widely or hoarded? Does the DNA of your firm encourage intra-firm competition between staff members, or widespread collaboration which puts the good of the firm first? Sadly, in too many firms the culture is simply inherently not collaborative, and nothing you do in terms of BPM process design, or deploying of "enterprise social software" or BPM technology is going to fix your broken culture. </p><p>Next, we have to look at these question: Does your firm <em>actually</em> empower individual employees to make decisions and use their judgment? Can an employee deviate from the process? No? Well what if the process is broken? Can your staff "route around" badly designed process steps, involve other people as necessary, inject new information, reroute tasks and otherwise take initiative? If the answers to most or all of these questions are "no" then you aren't going to have collaborative processes. If your organization is a rigid, top-down hierarchy that embraces a strict "command and control" philosophy, you're never going to get optimal effect from encouraging people to collaborate on BPM processes - or anything else. </p><p>It's only once you have the cultural and structural issues taken care of that technology even comes into play. Can some BPM software do more than others to encourage and facilitate social collaboration? Absolutely. That's why we are developing our Social BPM offering with specific capabilities that help cultivate knowledge sharing and collaboration. Using semantic web technology to tie context to tasks and content (where "context" includes things like "Bob in France is the expert on this topic and here's his contact info"), and exploiting "weak ties" and Social Network Analysis to provide suggested sources for consultation, are crucial technical capabilities for making BPM more "social". Additionally, if you have the cultural and structural alignment in place to really foster collaboration and knowledge sharing, then enterprise social software are amazingly powerful tools for cultivating knowledge transfer, fostering engagement, and driving alignment throughout your organization. </p><p>Done well, combining social software and BPM can provide tremendous benefits. But no technology is going to help if your culture is wrong. If you're having trouble with collaboration, I strongly encourage you to examine the "soft" issues before you spend a dime on additional technological tooling. </p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/dominiek-ter-heide-is-deadDominiek ter Heide is Dead Wrong. The Semantic Web Has Not "Failed"Phillip Rhodes2013-11-13T22:50:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:12+00:00<p /><p>There is an interesting <a href="http://gigaom.com/2013/11/03/three-reasons-why-the-semantic-web-has-failed/" target="_blank">article at Gigaom</a> right now, by <a target="_blank" href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/dominiek">Dominiek ter Heide</a> of <a target="_blank" href="http://bottlenose.com/">Bottlenose</a> in which the author asserts that the <a href="http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Main_Page">Semantic Web</a> has failed, and purports to give the three reasons why it has failed. </p><p>This is, of course, utter bullocks. I want to take this opportunity to explain why and provide the counterpoint to Dominiek's piece. </p><p>For starters, there is simply no legitimate basis for saying that "the Semantic Web has failed" to begin with. Given that his initial assertion is flat out wrong, there's almost no reason for a point-by-point rebuttal to the rest of his piece, but we'll work our way through it anyway, as the process may be educational. </p><p>So, if I'm going to say that the Semantic Web has <strong>not</strong> failed, then how might I substantiate or justify that claim? OK, easy enough... you probably use the Semantic Web every. single. day. And so do most of your friends. You just don't know it. And <strong>that</strong> is kind of the point. The Semantic Web isn't something that's really meant for end users to interact with directly. The essence of the Semantic Web is to enable machine readable data with explicitly defined semantics. Doing that allows the machines to do a better job of helping the humans do whatever it is they are trying to do. A typical user could easily use an application backed by the Semantic Web without ever knowing about it. </p><p>And here's the thing - they do. I said before that you probably use the Semantic Web every day. You might have thought "Yeah, right Phil, no way do I use anything like that". Well, if you use Google <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en&ref_topic=1088472" target="_blank">[1]</a><a href="http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2011/06/02/microdata-rdfa-google-bing-yahoo-semantic-web/" target="_blank">[3]</a>, Yahoo<a href="http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/searchmonkey-support-rdfa-enabled-7458.html" target="_blank">[2]</a><a href="http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2011/06/02/microdata-rdfa-google-bing-yahoo-semantic-web/" target="_blank">[3]</a>, or Bing<a href="http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2011/06/02/microdata-rdfa-google-bing-yahoo-semantic-web/" target="_blank">[3]</a>, then guess what - you're using the Semantic Web. Have you seen those Google Rich Snippets around things like results for restaurants, etc.? That is powered by the Semantic Web. <i>Aside: For the sake of this article, I treat RDFa, Microdata, Microformats, RDF/XML, JSON-LD, etc., as being functionally equivalent, as the distinction is not relevant to the overall point I'm making.</i></p><p>I could stop here and say that we've already proven that Dominiek ter Heide is wrong, but let's dig a little deeper. </p><p>The first reason that Dominiek gives reduces to an argument that everything on the Semantic Web is "obsolete knowledge" or Obsoledge. <blockquote>This has the effect of making the shelf-life of knowledge shorter and shorter. Alvin Toffler has – in his seminal book Revolutionary Wealth – coined the term Obsoledge to refer to this increase of obsolete knowledge. <br />If we want to create a web of data we need to expand our definition of knowledge to go beyond obsolete knowledge and geeky factoids. I really don’t care what Leonardo DaVinci’s height was or which Nobel prize winners were born before 1945. I care about how other people feel about last night’s Breaking Bad series finale. </blockquote> This is simply a factually incorrect view of the Semantic Web. Again, the goal of the Semantic Web is to provide machine readable, defined semantics along with data on the web. It does not matter one bit if that data is as old as a reference to Leonardo Da Vinci or as recent as a reference to last night's episode of <a href="http://www.nbc.com/grimm/" target="_blank">Grimm</a>. The Semantic Web is just as relevant to the kind of up-to-date, trending data that Dominiek seems so obsessed with, as it is with "historical" data. And let also point out that history remains amazingly important - as the old saw goes <em>"Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it"</em>. To suggest that knowledge lose all value simply because it is old is simply absurd. </p><p>His second argument simply states that "Documents are dead". I could just point out that both this blog post, which you are currently reading, Faithful Reader, as well as his own article at Gigaom, are both "documents". You do the math. </p><p>It goes deeper than that, however. His argument, again, fails for extremely obvious reasons which betray a total misunderstanding of the Semantic Web and the state of the Web in general. His argument is that "now" data is encapsulated in tweets and other "streaming", social-media, real-time data sources. While it is a fair point that more and more data <em>is</em> being passed around in tweets and their ilk, the factually incorrect part is to claim that those sources are not valid components of the Semantic Web just like <strong>everything else on the web</strong>. Case in point: One of our products here at Fogbeam Labs (Neddick), consumes data from all of: RSS feeds, IMAP email accounts, AND Twitter, and performs semantic concept extraction on all of those various data sources (and more are coming, including G+, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and we can find the connections <em>between</em>, say, a Tweet and a related blog post! That's the power of the Semantic Web, and the point that Mr. ter Heide seems to be missing. </p><p>His final argument is that "Information should be pushed, not pulled". Again, this betrays a complete misunderstanding of the Semantic Web. The knowledge extracted from Semantic Web sources can be used in either "push" or "pull" modalities. Again, one of our products can leverage Semantic Web data to generate real-time alerts using Email, XMPP, or HTTP POST, based on identifying a relevant bit of knowledge in a piece of content - whether that piece of content is a Tweet, a real-time Business Event extracted from a SOA/ESB backbone, or a Blog post. </p><p>Nearing the end of this piece, let me just say that the Semantic Web is becoming more and more important with every passing day. As tools like <a href="http://stanbol.apache.org/" target="_blank">Apache Stanbol</a> for automating the process of extracting rich semantics from unstructured data mature and become better and more widely available, the number of applications for explicit semantics is just going to mushroom. </p><p>To finish up, let's look at a quick example of what I'm talking about... let's say you have deployed our Enterprise Social Network - <a href="http://www.fogbeam.com/quoddy_enterprise.html" target="_blank">Quoddy</a> and your company does something with musicians. Your Quoddy status update messages occasionally mention, say, Jon Bon Jovi, Bob Marley, Richard Marx, and Madonna. How would you do a search without SW tech that says "show me all posts that mention musicians"? Not gonna happen. But by using Stanbol for semantic extraction and storing that knowledge in a triplestore, we can make that kind of query trivial. </p><p>It gets better though... Stanbol comes "out of the box" with the ability to dereference entities that are in <a href="http://dbpedia.org" target="_blank">DBPedia</a> and other knowledge bases, which is cool enough in it's own right... but you can also easily add local knowledge and your own custom enhancement engines. So now entities that are meaningful only in your local domain (part numbers, SKUs, customer numbers, employee ID numbers, whatever) can be semantically interlinked and queried as part of the overall knowledge graph. </p><p>Hell, I'd go so far as to say that Apache Stanbol (along with <a href="http://opennlp.apache.org/" target="_blank">Apache OpenNLP</a> and a few related projects... <a href="http://uima.apache.org/" target="_blank">Apache UIMA</a>, <a href="http://clerezza.apache.org/" target="_blank">Apache Clerezza</a>, and <a href="http://marmotta.incubator.apache.org/" target="_blank">Apache Marmotta</a>, etc.) might just be the most important open source project around right now. And nobody has heard of it. Again, the Semantic Web is largely not something that the average end user needs to know or think about. But they'll benefit from the capabilities that semantic tech brings to the table. </p><p>At the end of the day, the Semantic Web is just a step on the road to having something like the <a href="http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/05/why-star-trek-computer-will-be-open.html" target="_blank">Star Trek Computer</a> or a widely available and ubiquitous <a href="http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/" target="_blank">IBM Watson</a>. Saying that the Semantic Web has failed is to ignore all of the facts and deny reality. </p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/fogbeam-status-update-september-2013Fogbeam Status Update - September 2013Phillip Rhodes2013-09-26T00:04:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:13+00:00<p>Dear Friends of Fogbeam: </p><p>Just to be clear, no, we are not about to be acquired by LinkedIn. But I'll come back to why I say that, in a few moments. </p><p>On to the news and important stuff. It's been a lot longer than normal since our last status update email. If you follow the writings of Paul Graham, you may recall his famous "How Not To Die" essay<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html">[1]</a>, where he talks about how startups usually succeed if they can just avoid dying long enough. In this essay, he makes another interesting point, in these lines: </p><blockquote>For us the main indication of impending doom is when we don't hear from you. When we haven't heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that's a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what's up, and they don't reply, that's a really bad sign. So far that is a 100% accurate predictor of death. Whereas if a startup regularly does new deals and releases and either sends us mail or shows up at YC events, they're probably going to live. </blockquote><p>Given that, you might wonder if you should take it as a bad sign that we haven't emailed you in some time. As it happens, nothing could be further from the truth. While we haven't been sending a lot of emails, we have been blogging<a href="http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/">[2]</a>, tweeting<a href="https://twitter.com/FogbeamLabs">[3]</a>, sharing content on Facebook and Google+, etc. But, far, far more importantly than all of that, is that we've been heads down, grinding away, working on moving things forward. </p><p>As a result of that hard work, we were recently able to proudly announce three new project releases<a href="http://fogbeam.com/news.html">[4]</a>, including our first every "simultaneous release" of three components of the Fogcutter project. We also launched our brand new website at <a href="http://www.fogbeam.com/">http://www.fogbeam.com</a> at the same time. We now consider our Enterprise Social Network, Quoddy, and our Information Discovery Platform, Neddick, as being in Limited Availability status. This means we have two products available for sale, with the caveat that we are only looking to make sales to customers that fit certain criteria, and who will engage with us in a "co creation" scenario as we move towards a "GA" release. </p><p>We have also been hard at work in terms of market research, and have chosen a target market to pursue as a "beach-head market" and have identified approximately 160 companies in North Carolina that we will be attempting to gain access to, and hopefully land those first few alpha customers. Also on the sales and marketing front, we are starting to see results from our content marketing strategy and are receiving inbound leads via email and Twitter. </p><p>Things have not been "sunshine and roses" since last time however. Sadly, one member of our founding team, Robert Fischer, chose to step down, due to issues in his personal life. We won't get into details out of respect for his privacy, but he had external situations that were imposing a great deal of stress on him, and left him feeling that he was not able to contribute to the level he would want. We certainly will (and do) miss Robert, but we continue to soldier on, despite this setback. </p><p>On the other hand, we are fortunate to be able to announce a new member of our team, Eric Stone. While not a "replacement" for Robert per-se, Eric brings our team back to three, and adds another wicked smart member who is going to be a tremendous asset for us. Eric received his Computer Science degree from UNC Chapel Hill, and is currently pursuing graduate studies in Statistics & Operations Research, also at UNC-CH. Eric interned with us this summer, and did such a bang-up job that we asked him to stay on as a permanent member of the team. </p><p>The other adversity we had to fight in 2012 was a serious health issue that I (Phil) encountered, when I was initially diagnosed as diabetic. Prior to being diagnosed, my blood sugar reached a level that caused a potentially fatal condition known as DKA, and left me in the hospital for three days, almost exactly one year ago. Thankfully the condition is very survivable with modern medical technology, and I'm still here and kicking. My diabetes is now well controlled and life is back to normal (or what passes for normal for a startup founder). </p><p>All of that said, let's get back to why we mentioned LinkedIn earlier on. This is a reference to a recent article<a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/09/04/companies-linkedin-should-buy.html?page=1">[5]</a> that appeared in San Jose Business Journal, titled <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/09/04/companies-linkedin-should-buy.html?page=1">The Companies LinkedIn Should Buy With Its $1B Cash Infusion</a>. In this piece, SJBJ listed Fogbeam Labs as one of their suggested purchases for LI. Now, as we said, we don't actually expect LinkedIn to come calling wanting to acquire us anytime soon. And, truth be told, we probably don't *want* to be acquired this early, as the valuation we would receive right now would not come close to meeting our expectations and goals (just to be clear, we plan on building a company here that can go public with a multi billion dollar valuation). This mention is notable however, as it demonstrates that people as far away as Silicon Valley are aware of what we're doing, and are paying some attention to us. And this despite the fact that we really haven't done any publicity or PR work that was targeted specifically at the West Coast. </p><p>So, to wrap this up: We are making great progress on the product front, we are receiving some recognition from media as far away as Silicon Valley, we have overcome some serious adversity, and we refuse to die - in more ways than one! As 2013 draws to a close, our focus starts to shift to engaging with our chosen "beach-head market" and trying to generate some initial revenue and clarify our short-term product roadmap. </p><ul><li>[1]: <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html">http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html</a></li><li>[2]: <a href="http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/">http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/</a></li><li>[3]: <a href="https://twitter.com/FogbeamLabs">https://twitter.com/FogbeamLabs</a></li><li>[4]: <a href="http://fogbeam.com/news.html">http://fogbeam.com/news.html</a></li><li>[5]: <a href="http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/09/04/companies-linkedin-should-buy.html?page=1">http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/09/04/companies-linkedin-should-buy.html?page=1</a></li></ul><p>Thanks for listening, and please feel free to ping us with any questions or comments. </p><p>Phil, Sarah and Eric <br />Fogbeam Labs </p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/social-events-bpm-oh-mySocial, Events, BPM... oh my! But what about Knowledge and Context?Phillip Rhodes2013-05-28T19:55:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:14+00:00<p>There is a very good <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/where-social-bpm-and-event-technologies-must-go-7000013623/" target="_blank">article at ZDNet</a> which speaks to the importance of the "trinity" of event driven architectures, social software and BPM. And while the basic point is sound (all of those technologies certainly <strong>are</strong> more valuable when integrated and used together) this article leaves out an important element: Knowledge. </p><p>Integrating Social software with BPM and an Event based architecture is, of course, part of what we are giving you the power to do with <a href="http://fogbeam.com/quoddy_enterprise.html" target="_blank">Quoddy</a>, our open source Enterprise Social Network product. But we believe you need to go beyond providing a social front-end for subscribing to, sharing, discussing and acting on business events and tasks... you need to provide the <em>context</em> and <em>knowledge</em> that exists within the firm, and outside the walls of the firm, that support decision making. And that's what we are developing with Quoddy and the rest of our <a href="http://fogbeam.com/fogcutter_enterprise.html" target="_blank" >Fogcutter Suite</a> of products. All of the pieces aren't quite finished yet, but we are evolving a system which will allow you to subscribe to, for example, business events from your ESB/SOA infrastructure, render relevant events into your event stream, and then find the users, documents, applications, databases and other knowledge sources, within your firm, or on the 'net, which are relevant to learning about and acting on that event. </p><p>We posit that it is this combination of events, tasks, users <strong>and</strong> knowledge / context, which will fully unleash the vision of the <a href="http://fogbeam.com/digital_nervous_system.html">Digital Nervous System</a>. When all of the people in your organization have finger-tip access to the events which are occurring - in real time, or near real time - within your organization, and convenient access to the related contextual knowledge surrounding those events, then you have the foundation for serious enterprise agility and responsiveness. </p><p>To this end, we are working on new features across our product line, which allow semantic concept extraction and automatic linking and referencing of entities with defined semantics from within your enterprise content, and then supports semantic queries against, and reasoning and inference over, that knowledge. Follow this blog, or follow our <a target="_blank" href="https://www.twitter.com/fogbeamlabs">twitter feed</a> for all the latest news and announcements as we continue down this amazingly exciting path. We can't quite give you <a href="http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/05/why-star-trek-computer-will-be-open.html" target="_blank">the Star Trek Computer</a> yet, but with Semantic Web tech applied in the enterprise, and combined with BPM, Business Events and Social Software, we will be giving you the most powerful tools yet for managing knowledge and information within your enterprise. </p><hr /><p>For more information on how you can begin to integrate Social, Events, BPM and the Semantic Web in your organization, <a href="http://fogbeam.com/contact.html">contact us today</a>. </p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/why-the-star-trek-computerWhy The "Star Trek Computer" will be Open Source and Released Under Apache License v2Phillip Rhodes2013-05-22T18:03:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:15+00:00<p>If you remember the television series <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation" target="_blank">Star Trek: The Next Generation</a>, then you know exactly what someone means when they use the expression “the Star Trek Computer”. On TNG, “the computer” had abilities which were so far ahead of real-world tech of the time, that it took on an almost mythological status. And even to this day, people reference “The Star Trek Computer” as a sort of short-hand for the goal of advances in computing technology. We are mesmerized by the idea of a computer which can communicate with us in natural, spoken language, answering questions, locating data and calculating probabilities in a conversational manner, and - seemingly - with access to all of the data in the known Universe. </p><p>And while we still don’t have a complete “Star Trek Computer” to date, there is no question that amazing progress is being made. The performance of IBM’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)" target="_blank">Watson supercomputer</a> on the game show Jeopardy is one of the most astonishing of the recent demonstrations of how far computing has come. </p><p>So given that, what can we say about the eventual development of something we can call “The Star Trek Computer”? Right now, I’d say that we can say at least two things: It will be <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source" target="_blank">Open Source</a>, and licensed under the <a href="http://www.apache.org/licenses/" target="_blank">Apache Software License v2</a>. There’s a good chance it will also be a project hosted by the <a href="http://www.apache.org/" target="_blank">Apache Software Foundation.</a></p><p>This might seem like a surprising declaration to some, but if you’ve been watching what’s going on around the ASF the past couple of years, it actually makes a lot of sense. A number of projects related to advanced computing technologies, of the sort which would be needed to build a proper “Star Trek Computer” have migrated to, or launched within, the <a href="http://incubator.apache.org/" target="_blank">Apache Incubator</a>, or are long-standing ASF projects. We’re talking about projects which develop <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web" target="_blank">Semantic Web</a> technologies, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Data" target="_blank">Big Data</a> / <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_computing" target="_blank">cluster computing</a> projects, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing" target="_blank">Natural Language Processing</a> projects, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_retrieval" target="_blank">Information Retrieval</a> projects. All of these represent elements which would go into a computing system like the Star Trek one, and work in this area has been slowly coalescing around the Apache Software Foundation for some time now. </p><p><a href="http://jena.apache.org" target="_blank">Apache Jena</a>, for example, is foundational technology for the “Semantic Web” which creates a massively interlinked, “database of databases” world of <a href="http://linkeddata.org/" target="_blank">Linked Data</a>. When we talk about how the Star Trek computer had “access to all the data in the known Universe”, what we really mean is that it had access to something like the Semantic Web and the Linked Data cloud. Jena provides a programmatic environment for RDF, RDFS and OWL, SPARQL and includes a rule-based inference engine. Jena moved into the Apache Incubator back on 2010-11-23, and graduated as a TLP on 2012-04-18. Since then, the Jena team have continued to push out new release and advance the state of Jena on a continual basis. </p><p>Another Apache project, <a href="http://opennlp.apache.org/" target="_blank">OpenNLP</a>, could provide the essential “bridge” that allows the computer to understand questions, commands and requests which are phrased in normal English (or some other human language). In addition to supporting the natural language interface with the system, OpenNLP is a powerful library for extracting meaning (semantics) from unstructured data - specifically textual data in an unstructured (or semi structured) format. An example of unstructured data would be the blog post, an article in the New York Times, or a Wikipedia article. OpenNLP combined with Jena and other technologies, allows “The computer” to “read” the Web, extracting meaningful data and saving valid assertions for later use. OpenNLP entered the Apache Incubator on 2010-11-23 and graduated as a Top Level Project on 2011-02-15. </p><p><a href="http://stanbol.apache.org" target="_blank">Apache Stanbol</a> is another new'ish project within the ASF, which describes itself as “a set of reusable components for semantic content management.” Specifically, Stanbol provides components to support reasoning, content enhancement, knowledge models and persistence, for semantic knowledge found in “content”. With Stanbol, you can pipe a piece of text (this blog post, for example) through Stanbol and have Stanbol extract Named Entities, create links to dbPedia, and otherwise attach semantic meaning to “non semantic” content. To accomplish this, Stanbol builds on top of other projects, including OpenNLP and Jena. Stanbol joined the Apache Incubator on 2010-11-15 and graduated as a TLP on 2012-09-19. </p><p>If we stopped here, we could already support the claim that the ASF is a key hub for development of the kinds of technologies which will be needed to construct the “Star Trek Computer”, but there’s no need to stop. It gets better... </p><p><a href="http://uima.apache.org/" target="_blank">Apache UIMA</a> is similar to Stanbol in some regards, as it represents a framework for building applications which can extract semantic meaning from unstructured data. Part of what makes UIMA of special note, however, is that the technology was originally a donation from IBM to the ASF, and also that UIMA was actually a part of the Jeopardy winning Watson supercomputer<a href="http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2011/04/open-architecture-helps-watson.html" target="_blank">[1]</a>. So if you were wondering, yes, Open Source code is advanced enough to constitute one portion of the most powerful demonstration seen to date, of the potential of a Star Trek Computer. </p><p><a href="http://lucene.apache.org/" target="_blank">Lucene</a> is probably the most well known and widely deployed Open Source information retrieval library in the world, and for good reason. Lucene is lightweight, powerful, and performant, and makes it fairly straightforward to index massive quantities of textual data, and search across that data. <a href="http://lucene.apache.org/solr/" target="_blank">Apache Solr</a> layers on top of Lucene to provide a more complete “search engine” application. Together, Lucene/Solr constitute a very powerful suite of tools for doing information retrieval. </p><p><a href="http://mahout.apache.org/" target="_blank">Mahout</a> is a Machine Learning library, which builds on top of Apache Hadoop to enable massively scalable machine learning. Mahout includes pre-built implementations of many important machine learning algorithms, but is particularly notable for its capabilities for processing textual data and performing clustering and classification operations. Mahout provided algorithms will probably be part of an overall processing pipeline, along with UIMA, Stanbol, and OpenNLP, which supports giving “the computer” the ability to “read” large amounts of text data and extract meaning from it. </p><p>And while we won’t try to list every ASF project here, which could be a component of such a system, we would be remiss if we failed to mention, at least briefly, a number of other projects which relate to this overall theme of information retrieval, text analysis, semantic web, etc. In terms of “Big Data” or “cluster computing” technology, you have to look at the <a href="http://hadoop.apache.org/" target="_blank">Hadoop</a>, <a href="http://incubator.apache.org/mesos/" target="_blank">Mesos</a> and <a href="http://incubator.apache.org/s4/" target="_blank">S4</a> projects. Other Semantic Web related projects at the ASF include <a href="http://incubator.apache.org/clerezza/" target="_blank">Clerezza</a> and <a href="http://marmotta.incubator.apache.org/" target="_blank">Marmotta</a>. And from a search, indexing and information retrieval perspective, one must consider <a href="http://nutch.apache.org/" target="_blank">Nutch</a>, <a href="http://manifoldcf.apache.org/en_US/index.html" target="_blank">ManifoldCF</a> and <a href="http://incubator.apache.org/droids/" target="_blank">Droids</a>. </p><p>As you can see, the Apache Software Foundation is home to a tremendous amount of activity which is creating the technology which will eventually be required to make a true “Star Trek Computer”. For this reason, we posit that when we finally have a “Star Trek Computer” it will be Open Source and ALv2 licensed. And there’s a good chance it will find a home at the ASF, along with these other amazing projects. </p><p>Of course, you don't necessarily need a full-fledged "Star Trek Computer" to derive value from these technologies. You can begin utilizing Semantic Web tech, Natural Language Processing, scalable machine Learning, and other advanced computing techniques to derive business value today. For more information on how you can build advanced technological capabilities to support strategic business initiatives, <a href="http://fogbeam.com/contact.html" target="_blank">contact us at Fogbeam Labs</a> today. For all the latest updates from Fogbeam Labs, <a href="https://twitter.com/fogbeamlabs" target="_blank">follow us on Twitter</a></p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/essential-reading-for-it-leadersEssential Reading for IT Leaders: Part TwoPhillip Rhodes2013-05-16T17:19:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:16+00:00<p>Following up on <a target="_blank" href="http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/05/10-essential-reads-for-cios-ctos-and-it.html">part one</a> in our series on essential reading for IT leaders (that is, CIOs, CTOs, IT Directors, etc.), today we offer you 10 more titles to complement your existing technical chops. The theme of this group of titles is largely the same as before: IT leaders need to move beyond being strictly technologists, and develop a much deeper, more intuitive and more strategic focus on the strategy of the business. And while other people are asking <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Do-you-foresee-CIOs-becoming-48613.S.88642165" target="_blank">Do you see CIOs becoming extinct?</a> we argue that a CIO or CTO or IT Director who understands technology <em>and</em> strategy, and who can "bridge the gap" between the world of "the business" and the technology world, will always be an incredibly valuable asset and will have a role in any modern organization. </p><p>Here then, are 10 more titles to add to your reading list: <ol><li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Future-Competition-Co-Creating-Unique-Customers/dp/1578519535/" target="_blank">The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value With Customers</a> by C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy - If anyone can challenge Michael Porter's status as "the King of modern business strategy" then it's probably C.K. Prahalad. Prahalad is one of the greatest business thinkers to have ever lived, and this book was a masterpiece by a master. In <cite>The Future of Competition</cite> the authors develop the idea of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-creation" target="_blank">co-creation</a> which is a model of interaction with customers in which the customer is cast as an equal partner, rather than merely a passive recipient. The key idea is that maximum value is created by a <em>mutual</em> development process in which the firm and the customer work together to create personalized, unique solutions. In a world where even the most technologically sophisticated products are at risk of being commoditized, co-creation stands out as a way to step around that risk, deliver maximum value, and maintain deep customer engagement.</li><li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Business/dp/0062060244/" target="_blank">The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business</a> by Clayton M. Christensen - A landmark book, <cite>The Innovator's Dilemma</cite> explores the reasons why firms innovate, but fail to gain a return on those innovations. The key idea here is that fear of cannibalizing an existing, legacy, business prevents firms for investing in, and promoting, innovative products, even while their competitors are moving past them. Understanding the ideas here is essential for executive leadership in any company which depends on continuous innovation for growth.</li><li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Solution-Creating-Sustaining-Successful/dp/1578518520/" target="_blank">The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth</a> by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor - The followup to <cite>The Innovators Dilemma</cite> this title explores how firms can become producers of disruptive innovations, and adopt strategies to achieve disruptive growth through successful innovation. </li><li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Outside-Innovation-Customers-Co-Design-Companys/dp/B000ULVK7Q/" target="_blank">Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company's Future</a> by Patricial Seybold - <cite>Outside Innovation</cite> is an excellent and in-depth analysis of how to work together with customers to develop innovative offerings. The ideas presented in this book overlap to some extent with those of <cite>The Future of Competition</cite> and the two titles complement each other well. Seybold's book is more "hands on", so to speak, with plenty of real world examples of what she calls "outside innovation", where the work by Prahalad and Ramaswamy is a little more academic.</li><li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-Marketing-Disruptive-Mainstream/dp/0060517123" target="_blank">Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers</a> by Geoffrey Moore - This may be the most famous marketing book ever, at least in high-tech circles, and rightly so. Moore illustrates how the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle" target="_blank">Technology Adoption Lifecycle</a> is not a continuous curve, as it had generally been presented in the past. His analysis of the gap or "chasm" between segments of the curve represents an insight that changed high-tech marketing forever. If your firm has to deal with the challenge of introducing new, technologically innovative products to the market, you owe it to yourself to read <cite>Crossing The Chasm</cite> and put Moore's ideas into practice.</li><li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Whats-Next-Theories-Innovation/dp/1591391857/ref=pd_sim_b_2" target="_blank">Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change</a> by Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth and Scott D. Anthony - a followup to <cite>The Innovator's Dilemma</cite> and <cite>The Innovator's Solution</cite>, this title deals with predicting change within industries. Here Christensen and his colleagues provide a model for how to spot the signals of impending industry change, anticipate the outcomes of competitive engagements, and asses how a firm's strategy will affect it's future success (or lack thereof).</li><li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Balanced-Scorecard-Translating-Strategy-Action/dp/0875846513/" target="_blank">The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action</a> by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton - Here, Norton and Kaplan lay out the fundamental ideas of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_scorecard" target="_blank">Balanced Scorecard</a> which has become one of the most widely adopted <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_management" target="_blank">performance management</a> frameworks in business, and has evolved into a strategy execution process. The value of the Balanced Scorecard approach is its ability to help firms articulate their strategy in <em>actionable</em> terms, and to generate a concrete roadmap to implementing that strategy. </li><li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Focused-Organization-Scorecard-Companies-Environment/dp/1578512506/" target="_blank">The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment</a> by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton - The successor to <cite>The Balanced Scorecard</cite> this is a further exploration of the ideas of Kaplan and Norton. Here they lay out five specific steps which are required to truly align strategy with operational implementation: 1) translate the strategy into operational terms, 2) align the organization to the strategy, 3) make strategy everyone's everyday job, 4) make strategy a continual process, and 5) mobilize change through strong, effective leadership. </li><li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Maps-Converting-Intangible-Tangible/dp/1591391342/" target="_blank">Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes</a> by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton - <cite>Strategy Maps</cite> continues to dive deeper into the mechanisms of creating real alignment between a firms strategy and it's people, processes, systems and and information technology. Here the authors present powerful new tool - the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_map" target="_blank">Strategy Map</a> - for documenting and managing the strategic intent of the firm, and mapping that strategy to tactical objectives. </li><li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Execution-Premium-Operations-Competitive-Advantage/dp/142212116X/" target="_blank">The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage</a> by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton - Our final Kaplan & Norton recommendation of the day, <cite>The Execution Premium</cite> provides firms with the know-how needed to generate an effective strategy, plan the tactical implementation and execution of the strategy, and - perhaps most importantly - test and refine the strategy. </li></ol></p><p>And there you have it... 10 title that IT leaders should familiarize themselves with, in order to be better equipped to analyze technological decisions, and evaluate technological capabilities, in terms of the strategies they support or enable. Armed with this kind of knowledge, IT leaders can prepare to move away from being thought of as specialists in <em>only</em> technology, and begin to become recognized and valued business strategists in their own right. </p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/10-essential-reads-for-cios10 Essential Reads For CIOs, CTOs and IT ManagersPhillip Rhodes2013-05-13T16:04:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:17+00:00<p>Over the past 10 years or so, IT has found itself under fire from many quarters. "Thought Leaders" like Nicholas Carr write about how <a href="http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/articles/matter.html" target="_blank">IT Doesn't Matter</a> (we'll revisit that in a future blog post) and other pundits openly ask <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/the-cio-is-dead/229213237" target="_blank">Is The CIO Dead?</a></p><p>The truth, of course, is that this is mostly hyperbole, but with an element of truth hidden underneath. And that element of truth is that IT <em>does</em> matter and CIOs <em>are</em> important... to the extent that the add value to the business. This means that IT leaders: CIOs, CTOs, and Directors of IT must move beyond a single-minded focus on technology, and begin to take a broader view of the organization, and they must understand how information technology provides <strong>capabilities</strong> that support and enable <strong>business strategy</strong>. And in order to truly have a "seat at the table" alongside the CEO, CFO and other traditionally respected positions within the organization, IT leaders must become trusted partners who routinely demonstrate the ability to add essential strategic insights to the conversation. To this end, I posit that CIOs and their ilk should set down the latest <a href="http://hadoop.apache.org/" target="_blank">Hadoop</a> book, close the <a href="http://cassandra.apache.org/" target="_blank">Cassandra</a> and <a href="http://incubator.apache.org/mesos/" target="_blank">Mesos</a> tabs in their browsers, cancel the meeting with the sales guy from Microsoft, lock the door, and sit down and focus on business strategy and how technological <em>capabilities</em> can create new <em>strategic opportunities</em> for the organization, and support existing strategic initiatives. </p><p>As part of the "Re-education of the IT Leader", there are a handful of foundational works on business strategy, and a few titles on the intersection of strategy and technology, that I recommend to all technology leaders who want to gain more influence and relevance within their organization, and who want to contribute to the strategic direction of the firms where they work. At least a passing familiarity with the following works will greatly expand your ability to see things from the perspective of the CEO and to begin to think strategically. </p><p>So, with no further ado, here are 10 essential reads for CIOs, CTOs, Directors of IT and other IT leaders: </p><p><ol> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Strategy-Techniques-Industries-Competitors/dp/0684841487" target="_blank">Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors</a> - Michael Porter's seminal title, this book basically created the modern field of strategic analysis. Porter's Five Forces model, laid out in this book, is one of the most well known and frequently encountered techniques for analyzing a firm's position within its industry and for thinking about strategic initiatives. If you can only read one book on business strategy, go to the source and read this one. Yes, it's somewhat academic and can be a bit dry and terse at times, but it's worth the effort. Your CEO, or the consultants your CEO hires, will be talking in terms of the vocabulary defined in this book. </li> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Capability-Cases-Solution-Envisioning-Approach/dp/0321205766/" target="_blank">Capability Cases: A Solution Envisioning Approach</a> - this is an excellent follow-up to the first Michael Porter book, as it builds on Porterian strategic analysis and presents a methodology for using that analysis to generate new strategic initiatives, which will be supported by technological capabilities, and then building a case for those capabilities, in terms of the impact on the business. Adopting an approach like this is how a CIO can move from being seen as filling a strictly tactical or operational role, into being seen as an influential strategist in his/her own right. Note that we have written extensively on the Capability Cases approach here, and you may find that useful reading as well. See: <a href="http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-capability-cases-are-must-when.html" target="_blank">Part One</a>, <a href="http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/02/so-what-is-capability-case-anyway.html" target="_blank">Part Two</a>, and <a href="http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/05/capability-cases-part-three-sample.html" target="_blank">Part Three</a> in our series on Capability Cases. </li> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Adaptive-Enterprise-Sense---Respond-Organizations/dp/0875848745" target="_blank">Adaptive Enterprise: Creating and Leading Sense-And-Respond Organizations</a> - If you want to understand and talk about possible sweeping changes to the very DNA of your organization... new business structures that are better equipped for competing in the 21st century - like "Sense and Respond" management - then this book is for you. The authors present a theory of a fundamentally different way of structuring organizations, which result in a much more responsive and agile organization which is much better suited to compete and survive in an era of hyper-competition. </li> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Business-Speed-Thought-Succeeding-Digital/dp/0446525685" target="_blank">Business @ The Speed of Thought</a> - Bill Gates wrote this back in the late 1990's and it's as relevant today as it was then. In this book, Gates presents a vision for what he called the "Digital Nervous System". As an analogy to the human autonomic nervous system, the "Digital Nervous System" represents the way in which a firm's IT system enable the flow of signals and information within the "body" of the firm, allowing coordinated decision making and agile manoeuvring. And despite the decade plus which has passed since this title appeared, most firms still do not truly use their IT systems in this way, to the present day. For more information on achieving this goal, see our article: <a href="http://www.fogbeam.com/digital_nervous_system.html" target="_blank">Digital Nervous System</a>. </li> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Peripheral-Vision-Detecting-Signals-Company/dp/1422101541/" target="_blank">Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company</a> - the title really says it all. In a hypercompetitive era like the one we operate in now, it is more important than ever to be able to detect changes in your environment and react to them appropriately. Consuming massive amounts of data, applying automated analytics and extracting meaningful insights, are tasks where IT is absolutely essential. In this regard, IT can serve to provide a sort of "radar sensing" capability to the organization, which allows it to "see through the fog" and avoid danger. This title is a deep dive into the importance of, and techniques for, discovering these "weak signals" and surfacing them for your enterprise. </li> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Michael-Porter-Essential-Competition/dp/1422160599/" target="_blank">Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy </a> - if you don't have time to read all of Michael Porter's works first-hand, this is a great "Cliffs Notes" review of his thinking and techniques. Written by one of Michael's students and collaborators, this book provides a solid overview of Porterian strategic analysis, without being quite as dry and terse as the original source material. Reading this is still not truly a substitute for reading Porter himself, but it's a good start, and is definitely better than not studying the subject at all.</li> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Advantage-Creating-Sustaining-Performance/dp/0684841460/" target="_blank">Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance </a> - another seminal work by Michael Porter, this builds on and expands the ideas present in his first title. As before, this is essential reading for anyone who seeks to be a knowledgeable business strategist.</li> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/On-Competition-Updated-Expanded-Edition/dp/142212696X" target="_blank">On Competition</a> - The third and final Michael Porter book in this list, it finishes fleshing out the overall field of Porterian strategic analysis. As with his other works, it is somewhat academic and isn't exactly leisure reading, but the payoff is more than worth the effort.</li> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference-Matters/dp/0307886239/" target="_blank">Good Strategy, Bad Strategy</a> - a lot of people bandy the word "strategy" around, and a lot has been written on the topic. This work by Richard Rumelt dives into what "strategy" actually is, and helps explain what is and isn't actually strategy, and helps you to distinguish between good strategy and bad strategy. This is a great complement to all the Michael Porter stuff previously listed. </li> <li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-Generation-Visionaries-Challengers/dp/0470876417/" target="_blank">Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers</a> - written by Alexander Osterwalder, this book is often recommended to founders of startups, but it has application inside any business... especially one which feels besieged and under fire from all directions, and which is desperately trying to find new ways to compete in an increasingly competitive environment. Competition isn't solely based on your products! You can also compete by altering your business model, and that is the essential discussion in this book: What is a "business model" and how to you create a new one? And how do you know if the new one is good? Read this book and you'll have some very powerful arrows in your quiver, in terms of presenting new strategic models for your enterprise.</li></ol></p><p>There are, of course, more than ten titles that I might recommend to a CIO, CTO or Director of IT (or to anyone in business for that matter). And while this list gets at some real essentials, it is by no means comprehensive. Please share your own suggestions, comments and observations in the comments on this post. For even more great suggestions from the Fogbeam Team, see <a href="http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/05/essential-reading-for-it-leaders-part.html">Part Two</a> of our list. </p><hr /><p>If you've read this far, please visit us at <a href="http://www.fogbeam.com">Fogbeam Labs</a> and/or <a href="https://twitter.com/fogbeamlabs">follow us on Twitter</a>. </p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/why-the-kiera-wilmot-situationWhy The Kiera Wilmot Situation Is Bad For AmericaPhillip Rhodes2013-05-03T18:12:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:19+00:00<p /><p>In case you missed the <a href="http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2013/04/florida_teen_girl_charged_with.php" target="_blank" >recent news</a>, a 16 year old Florida high-school student named Kiera Wilmot was expelled from school and charged with felony counts of "possession/discharge of a weapon on school grounds" and "discharging a destructive device" for conducting a harmless science experiment which resulted in a small explosion... which injured no one and caused no harm. </p><p>Predictably, the story has sparked a firestorm of controversy. Add in that fact that the student in question is female and black, and the <a href="http://hiphopandpolitics.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/the-case-around-fla-teen-kiera-wilmot-is-part-of-a-bigger-more-disturbing-pattern/" target="_blank">story</a> has quickly morphed into one focusing on the possible racist and/or sexist influences involved. And yes, there likely <em>are</em> overtones of both sexism and racism influencing the public officials involved in this story. But I think focusing on that is missing a much larger issue, and one that represents bad news for <strong>all</strong> hackers, makers, DIY'ers, amateur scientists... and for America as a whole. There are serious economic consequences to the kind of narrow-minded, overly risk-averse, brain-dead thinking which leads to a story like this. </p><p>Simply put, our society seems to be moving towards an overly protective, overly risk-averse, parochial mindset, where we are all encouraged to accept blind conformity to "authority" in the name of "safety". Students are arrested for harmless experiments, at a time when business leaders around the country are screaming for improvements in STEM education, at a time when our country is facing a continuing severe economic crisis, and a time when we may or may not be balanced on the precipice of a "manufacturing renaissance" which could bring jobs to the unemployed, and bolster the economy across the board. But what message are we sending to innovators, especially young ones, when incidents like this happen? And what about the damage done by people granted "authority" over others, as so well demonstrated in the (in)famous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment" target="_blank" >Stanford Prison Experiments</a>? </p><p>I contend that this Kiera Wilmot story, and similar stories, will have (or have had) a "chilling effect" on all the hackers, makers, DIY'ers, amateur scientists and hobbyists around the country, who are working to educate themselves, create new things, and provide the basis for a future generation of technologically savvy, well-educated, innovative citizenry which our nation needs. And this is at the worst possible time... the DIY movement, or "maker movement", whatever you want to call it, has been flourishing for a few years now. <a href="http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/" target="_blank">Hackerspaces</a> are popping up all over, individuals are buying (or better yet, building) their own 3D printers, CNC milling machines, robots of various sorts, and are learning and creating and making at blinding pace. Heck, even <a href="https://www.radioshackdiy.com/">Radio Shack</a> have re-embraced the DIY crowd - which they had abandoned decades ago - and now sell <a href="http://www.arduino.cc/" target="_blank" >Arduino microcontrollers</a> and an expanded selection of discrete components and electronic kits. </p><p>So, just at the time when young people may be starting, ever so slowly, to embrace technological exploration, science, electronics, robotics, etc., we throw a cold glass of water in their faces, by demonstrating that "doing science on your own will mean going to jail for the smallest mistake". And what does it say to the people holed up at their local hackerspace, working on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor" target="_blank" >DIY fusion research</a>, or high-voltage electronics experimenting, or anything else with even a slight "danger factor"? Are people going to be less likely to experiment and participate in shaping the future, when the threat of going to jail for a harmless mistake is lingering in the air? </p><p>Sadly, this is not a new story. People have been lamenting, for example, the restrictions on components found in chemistry sets for years... But it's a big jump from restricting access to components needed to run an experiment, to <em>putting someone in jail</em> for simply running an experiment in which no one was harmed and nothing was damaged. Let me re-iterate that last bit... despite the "explosion" no one was harmed and no property was damaged. And yet, this young lady is still being charged with felonies and will be tried as an adult. A spokesperson for the school district <a href="http://blogs.miaminewtimes.com/riptide/2013/05/florida_school_responds_to_cri.php" target="_blank" >said</a>: <p><q>We urge our parents to convey to their kids that there are consequences to their actions, </q></p><p>This is wrong... there are (or should be) consequences for the <strong>outcomes</strong> of actions. An action which causes no harm or injury, should *not* have any punishment associated with it. Otherwise we will have to ask "what are the consequences of brain-dead educational policies that dampen curiosity, discourage learning and experimentation and turn kids away from science"? Personally, I don't think we want to experience those consequences. </p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/prolog-i-m-going-toProlog? I'm Going To Learn Prolog??Phillip Rhodes2013-05-03T04:34:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:20+00:00<p /><em>Note: If you think you've seen this post before, you're probably right. This was originally written and posted on the OLD "OpenQabal" weblog. For those who don't remember, OpenQabal was Phil's personal project centered on Open Source Social Networking back in the mid 2000's. Not much ever came of it, but some of the ideas live on in <a href="http://code.google.com/p/quoddy" target="_blank">Quoddy</a> and other parts of the <a href="http://code.google.com/p/fogcutter" target="_blank" >Fogcutter</a> suite. It's time to delete that old weblog, but this one post seemed worth preserving and moving here. Most of these links are probably still good, but some might be dead. </em><p /><hr /><p />Sometime ago I blogged about the availability of some great resources for learning <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolog" target="_blank" >Prolog</a>. At the time, the available materials I'd found were: <p /><ul><li><a href="http://faculty.nps.edu/ncrowe/book/book.html" target="_blank"> Artificial Intelligence through Prolog</a></li><li><a href="http://www.j-paine.org/prolog/mathnotes/files/pms/node1.html" target="_blank">Introduction to Prolog for Mathematicians.</a></li><li><a href="http://www.amzi.com/ExpertSystemsInProlog/" target="_blank">Building Expert Systems in Prolog</a></li></ul><p />Now, thanks to <a href="http://programming.reddit.com" target="_blank">programming.reddit.com</a>, I've found a couple of additional references on Prolog, which are also freely available online. <p /><a target="_blank" href="http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~flach/SimplyLogical.html">Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example</a><br />and <br /><a href="http://www.ida.liu.se/~ulfni/lpp/" target="_blank" >Logic, Programming and Prolog</a><br />and <br /><a href="http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/pbrna/prologbook/" target="_blank">Prolog Programming: A First Course</a><p />Edit (05-08-2013): A helpful Hacker News commentator has pointed out another good title for inclusion in this post: <p /><ul><li><a href="http://www.mtome.com/Publications/PNLA/pnla-digital.html" target="_blank">Prolog and Natural-Language Analysis - Digital Edition</a></li></ul> <p />Luckily there are also a number of high quality implementations of Prolog available, including <a href="http://www.gprolog.org/" target="_blank">GNU Prolog</a>, <a href="http://www.swi-prolog.org/" target="_blank" >SWI Prolog</a> and <a href="http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/Software/Ciao/" target="_blank">Ciao Prolog</a>. <p />Now to find some time to dig in... <p />Edit (03-30-2009): Apropos, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.google.com/notebook/public/08330933169560253578/BDQT7SgoQ3_aR_-si#NDRouSgoQ_9yG-fki">this link</a> just appeared at the top of programming.reddit.com. Good stuff. <p />Edit (05-04-2013): For anybody who doesn't get the reference in the title of this post: <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/n_uzEj71AU4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/capability-cases-part-three-sampleCapability Cases Part Three - Sample Capability Case: Technology RadarPhillip Rhodes2013-05-03T03:22:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:21+00:00<p>In <a href="http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-capability-cases-are-must-when.html" target="_blank">Part One</a> and <a href="http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/02/so-what-is-capability-case-anyway.html" target="_blank">Part Two</a> of this series, we explored the idea of a "Capability Case" and argued that this approach will be essential for firms who want to align IT with business strategy in the future. In this installment, we’ll look at the *process* of creating a capability case in more detail, and we’ll look at a sample of what the result of that process might look like. </p><p>Specifically, this Capability Case, which we call "Technology Radar" is an example of a Capability Case which a software vendor (like Fogbeam Labs!) might develop to use as an exploratory tool to for helping customers understand their solutions. In this example, the case uses a fictional (we hope!) firm as the subject, and is, by it’s nature, a little more generic than a Capability Case which is "cut from whole cloth" by a firm running through the process from scratch. </p><p>In either case, developing a Capability Case begins with an analysis of the <strong>business</strong> and its current status, the forces and trends affecting the business, and the desired results. Porter’s Five Forces analysis is the gold standard of strategic analysis tools, and a firm will usually choose to engage this model to start the process. </p><p>Given the output of the "Five Forces" analysis, and a survey of significant trends affecting the firm and its industry, the firm leadership should begin to design a strategic direction to address these forces and trends. It is only then that the firm should begin to look at technological capabilities and start building the bridge from strategy to concrete capabilities. This however, is exactly where the CIO, CTO, Director of R&D, and other technology experts must be directly engaged with the highest levels of firm leadership, so they can articulate what capabilities exist (or could be developed or acquired) which could support the strategic direction and desired outcomes. </p><p>Candidate capabilities may be drawn from a catalog of pre-existing capabilities which exist within the firm, or they may be created from scratch and proposed for development. Vendors may also provide lists of potential capabilities which they can provide through their products. In the end, a proposed Capability Case may feature a mix of existing capabilities, ones which will be developed from scratch, and ones which will be purchased from 3rd party suppliers. Once a list of capabilities for the proposed Capability Case have been developed, a "solution story" is generated, which puts the use of the capabilities, and their mapping to the strategic objectives, into a narrative form. </p> <hr /> <h4>Name</h4> <p><strong>Technology Radar</strong></p><p /><h4>Intent</h4><p>Identify technological developments - which may present either a threat to the enterprise, or a groundbreaking new opportunity - as early as possible. </p> <h4>Description</h4><p>New technologies are being developed at a dizzying pace. Worldwide, private enterprises, academic researchers, and open-source hackers are all constantly pushing the envelope, developing new approaches and tools. Some of these advancements may represent a huge threat to your organization, perhaps by enabling a competitor to cannibalize your existing business model with a much less expensive alternative. Others may represent an opportunity to break new ground with products, product features, or services that can represent sizable new revenue streams. It is advantageous to identify these advances as soon as possible, in order to outmaneuver the competition and take maximum advantage of new developments. </p><p>As <a href="http://larrydownes.com/" target="_blank">Downes</a> and <a href="http://www.chunkamui.com/" target="_blank">Mui</a> point out in their book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1578512611/killerplatforms" target="_blank">Unleashing the Killer App</a>, this kind of awareness requires a technology radar consisting of a fat pipeline, a sensitive radar screen and sophisticated intelligence. </p><h4>Forces & Trends: (American Textile Manufacturing)</h4><p><strong>Porter’s Five Forces</strong></p><p> <em>Threat of New Entrants</em> - there are low barriers to entry for manufacturing many textile products. Capital to build or purchase a mill, knitting machines, looms and other equipment is the largest barrier. For technical textiles, intellectual capital is also a potential barrier. More specialized products are harder for new entrants to duplicate. </p><p><em>Threat of Substitutes</em> - many textile product are substitutable for others. Polyester, for example, is gaining ground in my applications formerly served by natural fibers. This is less of a problem for specialized materials and advanced technical textiles. </p><p><em>Bargaining Power of Customers</em> - Moderate to high, especially for commodity products such as denim. Smaller mills are especially prone to being “bargained down” by customers working in concert with each other. </p><p><em>Bargaining Power of Suppliers</em> - Moderate, especially for raw materials like cotton whiche are widely available from multiple suppliers. </p><p><em>Competitive Rivalry</em> - Intense. This industry has relatively high fixed costs, especially for labor. This subjects American manufacturers to intense competition from imports from low-wage countries like China, Malaysia, or Korea. </p><p><strong>Industry Trends</strong></p><p><em>Customer co-creation</em> - Textile firms are working more closely with their customers, doing joint R&D, to develop new products. Using computer based collaboration, companies are becoming more value-added partners with customers, and co-creating value through developing innovative products together. </p><p><em>New Fiber Development</em> - There is a trend towards the development of bio-based products, including fibers made from raw materials like corn, wheat and beets. These new fibers are being used to create a variety of high-performance textile products with unique properties. </p><p><em>Military Fabrics</em> - The Pentagon is a significant purchaser of textile products and military applications are a steadily growing niche. The military is constantly seeking textiles which perform better in extreme climates, are less bulky, and are lighter in weight. There is a significant opportunity to introduce new, specialized products catering to military applications. </p><p><em>Medical Textiles</em> - Demand for specialized technical textiles is growing, especially for products which can help prevent infections during surgical procedures. </p><p><em>Nanotechnology</em> - Research in the area of nanotechnology is advancing at a rapid pace, and innovations in this area enable a wide range of new, specialized, high-performance textile products. Universities are creating significant breakthroughs, but commercialization of this research is lagging. </p><p><strong>Summary</strong></p><p>Given these forces and trends, MegaCorp come to the conclusion that a primary strategic objective is to start introducing more innovative and specialized textile products, which are more difficult to copy, have no other suppliers, and are not subject to the same pricing pressure from imports as more commoditized textiles. </p> <h4>Desired Business Results: (MegaCorp, Inc.)</h4><ul><li>Better awareness of technological advances which are significant to the organization.</li> <li>Ability to gain early mover advantage over competitors, and market differentiation, by incorporating advances in materials science sooner.</li><li>Ability to preempt low-priced imports by introducing more specialized and innovative products.</li><li>Lower risk of being one-upped by the competition with a significant technical advancement.</li><li>More rapid, and greater overall, return on R&D investments.</li></ul> <h4>Typical Use Scenarios and Guidance</h4><p>A technology radar is established to pull in information from many disparate sources: RSS feeds, Twitter streams, email lists, and user submitted links to websites, documents and articles. Collaborative filtering through collective intelligence is used to filter the lower value submissions, while ensuring the relevant information gains visibility. </p><p>Employees throughout the organization view the radar, through the “emerging technologies” channel and take advantage of the information. </p><p>In some cases this may represent a “bottom up” scenario, such as an engineer finding an interesting new library which enables a feature the engineer likes... he quickly knocks out a prototype, shows it to senior management, and it is eventually adopted into a product release. In another case, this may be a “top down” scenario, where a senior leader discovers a new technology, and issues a mandate that R&D investigate its applicability to their product. </p> <h4>Capabilities</h4><p>The process of identifying a solution for this situation discovered the necessity of the following technological capabilities: </p><ul> <li>C1. Collaborative Filtering</li> <li>C2. Content Aggregation</li> <li>C3. External Application Integration</li> <li>C4. Personalized Information Stream</li> <li>C5. Real-time Alerting</li> <li>C6. Social Information Sharing</li> <li>C7. Trending Topics / Hot Items</li> <li>C8. OpenSearch Integration?</li></ul> <h4>Solution Story</h4><p>At MegaCorp, a North Carolina based manufacturer of advanced technical textiles, leaders are constantly jousting with rival HyperCorp, each striving to steal market share from the other. Recently, HyperCorp has released several innovative new products, with properties that MegaCorp had not considered possible, and were not able to deliver in their own products. After the most recent release, MegaCorp leaders dug in and discovered that HyperCorp had integrated advanced technology developed by researchers at Miskatonic University. <q>"Why," </q> asked MegaCorp CEO Howard Phillips, <q>"did we not know about this sooner? This is actually a better fit for our product.. if we had done this first, we could have taken a huge chunk of HyperCorp’s market share, instead of letting them jump out in front of us!"</q> </p><p> In order to address this lack of awareness of emerging technologies, MegaCorp decide to implement a Technology Radar. An "emerging technologies" channel is created (Capability C2), where every member of the organization can submit links to documents, articles and documents (Capability C6) that touch on technologies related to MegaCorp’s industry, along with relevant news-feeds and data streams from external content repositories (Capability C3). Users throughout the organization vote, tag and comment on each submission, allowing the collective intelligence of the organization (Capability C1)to filter the less important items, while pushing the key ones to the top. Product Managers and executives begin to make browsing the latest ‘top items’ (Capability C7) on the channel a routine habit... and some users configure the system to send them a dynamic alert via instant messaging when an entry reaches a certain score (Capability C5) while other users choose to filter entries by keyword or topic (Capability C4). </p><p> A few months later, the Flozzit Product Manager receives such an instant message - the link is to a paper published by researchers at Arkham University, detailing the development of a breakthrough in nanotechnology which solves a problem that MegaCorp engineers have been struggling with. MegaCorp quickly contact the AU technology transfer office, negotiate to license the new technology and begin integrating the new approach. They also manage to recruit two of the students from AU who worked on the project to join their own internal R&D department. </p><p>Using the new technology, MegaCorp are able to release their "Flozzit" material with properties which clearly outclass the closest equivalent material from HyperCorp,which had been steadily eroding market-share away from MegaCorp until now. </p><p>CEO Phillips talks to his managers and explains why he’s happy with developments - "If we hadn’t rolled that new stuff out when we did, HyperCorp would have been able to put a dagger into our heart. Now we’ve shown them, and the market, that they aren’t always the ones on the forefront of technical advancements. And the two new guys we hired from Arkham are already hard at work on some stuff that’s going to blow everybody away." </p> <h4>Vintage</h4><p>Mature Commercialization </p> <h4>Challenges</h4><p /><ul><li>Corporate culture which fosters a “Not Invented Here” syndrome.</li> <li>Lack of incentives for participation in the system.</li><li>Lack of belief in the utility of the system.</li><li>Lack of participation in the system by executives and other decision makers.</li></ul><p /><h4>Applicable Technologies</h4><p /><ul><li><a href="http://www.fogbeam.com/neddick_enterprise.html" target="_blank" >Neddick Enterprise</a> from Fogbeam Labs</li><li>Other corporate knowledge repositories (blog servers, forums software, document management systems, HR management systems, etc.)</li><li>Existing Data Warehouses / Databases / Knowledgebases</li><li>External information sources (web pages, databases, etc.</li></ul><p /><h4>Integration Mechanism</h4><p>RSS feeds, HTTP, OpenSearch </p><hr /><p />If you found this interesting, please <a target="_blank" href="https://www.twitter.com/fogbeamlabs">follow us on Twitter</a> or visit our homepage at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.fogbeam.com">Fogbeam.com</a><p />https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/the-truth-about-fogbeam-labsThe Truth About Fogbeam LabsPhillip Rhodes2013-04-12T21:00:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:22+00:00<p /><p>Inspired by a <a target="_blank" href="http://blog.pmrobot.com/2013/04/truth-about-pmrobot-project-management-app.html">recent blog post</a> from the folks at PMRobot - titled "The Truth about PMRobot" - I was motivated to write something in a similar vein. I was particularly struck by what PMRobot said here: <blockquote><p>I recently watched an excellent talk by Jason Cohen from the Business of Software conference in 2011. He talks about the importance and value of being honest about your product's strengths and weaknesses. I’m putting this into practice by being brutally honest about our product in conversation with people I meet. </p></blockquote><p />and <p /><blockquote><p>My experience is that people find honesty refreshing, even disarming. By being upfront about your shortcomings, you give them a reason to trust your claims about your strengths. Honesty, also makes you more human and relatable. It makes you the kind of people others want to see succeed. It opens you up for receiving honest feedback, which is essentially to any lean startup.” </p></blockquote><p>When I read this, my immediate reaction was to think (and <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5540545" target="_blank">post to Hacker News</a>) something like: </p><blockquote><p>Love it, love it to death! There is so much truth in this article, on both a meta level and the obvious level. In fact, you have inspired me to write a similar post for Fogbeam Labs. </p><p>I sometimes feel torn when writing about us, on our blog, our website, etc... trying to choose between "generic corporate voice" where we try to sound like a typical "big company" and something more "down to earth, folksy and honest". And, truth be told, I think I sometimes default to "generic big company" because it's actually easier in some perverse sense. Figuring out how to write simply, directly, and honestly, while preserving the underlying message and not sending a different message, is - IMO - a non-trivial thing. </p><p>We want potential customers to know that we're a small company (2 people at the moment), that our products are unfinished, immature and buggy, and that we can't provide some of the things that IBM or Oracle can. But we also don't want them to think that we're a bunch of rubes who don't know what we're doing, or to think that we'll do anything less than bend over backwards to provide the best possible support to those who take a chance on us at this early stage. We also want people to know that we genuinely believe that we have what will be the best product offerings in our space, as things mature and we finish fleshing things out. </p></blockquote><p>So what is the truth about Fogbeam Labs? Well, quite simply that we are an early stage, bootstrapped startup, self-funded so far, and comprised of two people. We were three people, but one co-founder had some really difficult issues going on in his personal life and chose to step down. And the truth is that our products are buggy, immature and unfinished. And the truth is that we don’t have the resources of an IBM or an Oracle or a Microsoft, to promote, support, build and enhance our products. And the truth is truth is that not everyone is a potential customer for us right now. Running as a lean startup, we are focused on conserving cash and minimizing overhead as much as possible, so we are focusing on serving customers in North Carolina first and foremost, then other Southeast states (VA, GA, TN and SC in particular) to minimize travel cost, and to allow us to be as responsive as possible to our customers. Simply put, we are small, so we can provide better service to a company in NC than we can to a company in Seattle, WA or in London, England. </p><p>We are also mainly interested in a certain type of customer. Because our products are buggy, immature and incomplete, but will - as we flesh out our vision for them - eventually be leading edge and offer some real competitive advantage to our users, we are looking for customers who fit the mold of what Steve Blank calls <a href="http://readwrite.com/2012/06/20/excerpt-earlyvangelists-the-most-important-customers-of-all" target="_blank">Earlyvangelists</a>. An Earlyvangelist is aggressivly seeking to be on the cutting edge, and is looking for technology as a means to a competitive advantage. Earlyvangelists will work with unproven startups, pay money for unfinished products, and provide feedback and input that helps the startup flesh the product out into it’s finished form. They will also evangelize for the startup (assuming they deliver on their promises) and promote them to their peers. </p><p>So why should a company take a chance on Fogbeam Labs and our products? Simply, because we believe we have a broader, more comprehensive vision of how certain types of software products, coupled with new approaches to management and organizational structure, can allow a firm to develop a real, meaningful competitive advantage. And we believe that, in the hypercompetitive times we live in, many firms need what we are offering. </p><p>We also believe, very strongly, that proprietary software is a dead-end, and that enterprises have begun a slow, but steady transition to favoring <a href="http://www.fogbeam.com/oss.html" target="_blank">Open Source Software</a>, developed in an open and collaborative fashion, and released under a liberal license. </p><p>Finally, because we are not just “in it for the money”. At Fogbeam, our <a href="http://www.fogbeam.com/mission_values.html" target="_blank" >Mission and Core Values</a> statement is not just a bit of glossy rhetoric or a marketing gimmick. It defines why we are here and how we do business. And we believe we are advocating a better way of doing business than many (if not all) of the traditional, big proprietary software vendors. </p><p>So, if you are looking for an Enterprise Social Network, an Enterprise Search engine and a novel Information Discovery platform which can provide the plumbing for improved knowledge management, knowledge transfer, innovation and productivity in your enterprise, <a href="http://www.fogbeam.com/contact.html" target="_blank" >give us a call</a>. </p><p>Whether we wind up doing a deal or not, you know you’ll get one thing from us at a minimum: the truth. </p>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/i-m-tired-of-theseI'm Tired Of These Armchair Entrepreneurs. Your Opinion Means Bugger-all To Me.Phillip Rhodes2013-04-08T21:36:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:23+00:00<p>Every where you turn lately, there seems to be someone who’s more than happy to dispense advice on how to be an entrepreneur, or - more to the point - dispense their opinion on who, exactly is or is not a “real” entrepreneur. Somehow, without ever having met you, and without knowing anything about you, your partners, your company, your customers, your market, your products, your competition, your funding, your complements, or any-fucking-thing else relevant, these people “know” how committed you are, how likely you are to succeed, when you should quit your dayjob, and everything else. </p><p>On the one hand you have people telling you that if you haven’t quit your dayjob yet, then you aren’t a “real entrepreneur”. Then you have people telling you that “older founders” aren’t as “committed” as younger ones. Next have people with fancy schmancy titles, like “VP of Entrepreneurship” at places like the Kauffman Foundation issuing decrees from on high, like: </p><p>“Unless there are real consequences for failure—until you’ve personally guaranteed a line of credit and tried to sell your product to an actual human being,” says Ruhe, “you won’t have the motivation needed to build a business that matters” -- Thom Ruhe, VP of Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation </p><p>Now, I don't know who Thom Ruhe is, and I don't really care. But what I know is that this armchair quarterback with his fancy title, working for some foundation somewhere, knows bloody fucking bugger-all about my motivation, or lack thereof. You want to talk to me about motivation, dude? Quit your job at the Kauffman Foundation and come work with us. We offer no pay, no benefits (not even free coffee), long hours, sleepless nights, stress beyond belief, non-stop fear of failure, and an equity stake that could make you really wealthy if we succeed. Would you be motivated to take that swap, in order to gain the satisfaction of doing your own thing, the freedom of not having a "boss" and the sense of accomplishment that goes into building something? No? Well, guess what... we are. So unless you want to take me up on my offer, don't fucking talk to me about motivation. </p><p>Even from local organizations like CED, nominally dedicated to advancing entrepreneurship in NC, you get them telling you that “you can’t take advantage of our mentoring service yet, because you’re too early stage.” Wait, what? If we weren’t early stage, we probably wouldn’t be looking for bleeding mentors! Isn’t the idea for mentors to help, well, mentor, people with less experience, to help them avoid the obvious mistakes, and to shorten their learning curve? It just never stops... </p><p>And of course there are always plenty of people at any startup oriented networking event you attend, who are happy to criticize you, tell you that you need to “pivot”, or point out that you will be competing against $BIGCO and should therefore not bother. Again, without any specific knowledge of your startup, they somehow know all this stuff. </p><p>You know what I think? I think if all of these people are so bleeding brilliant, or prescient, they need to start a startup of their own, or head down to the local convenient store and pick up a handful of lottery tickets... or maybe head to the horse track. Because, honestly, I’m tired of hearing your opinions. Advice and constructive criticism are cool, especially when they are rooted in some actual meaningful context or experience, and when you actually know us, our team, our products, etc. Ultimately, the only opinions I care about are mine, my co-founder’s, and the people we’re selling to - along with a very select subset of people who have *demonstrated* to us that they have something constructive to add. </p><p>We are here on a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.fogbeam.com/mission_values.html">mission</a> and we have a company to build. So unless your advice is somehow directly contributing to advancing our cause, I really don't care what you think. Whether it’s the handful of local mentors / advisors we consult, or a few “net celebrities” like Paul Graham or Steve Blank, we listen to these people, because they offer actionable, useful, constructive advice and information. The rest of you can bugger off, and settle back into your armchairs to do some more Monday Morning quarterbacking. </p><hr />If you found this interesting, please <a target="_blank" href="https://www.twitter.com/fogbeamlabs">follow us on Twitter</a> or visit our homepage at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.fogbeam.com">Fogbeam.com</a>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/the-point-of-a-startupThe Point Of A Startup Is To Make Money, Not To Raise MoneyPhillip Rhodes2013-03-25T14:29:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:24+00:00There is an intriguing <a href="http://wraltechwire.com/rating-the-seris-a-elite-8-of-triangle-tech-startups/12251196/" target="_blank">new post by Joe Procopio</a> over at WRAL TechWire, provocatively titled “Rating the 'Series A' elite eight of Triangle tech startups”. The piece starts off with some interesting perspectives on the state of technology startups in the Triangle area, reviews some interesting new developments in terms of support for startups, and talks a bit about the availability of funding for startups. Now, if you’ve been around the Triangle for any length of time, you’ve probably heard the old saw that one of the major obstacles to building a startup here is the lack of access to funding. Investors in this area are reputed to be very risk averse and reluctant to invest, especially in early stage startups. So this is a topic that is always of interest to entrepreneurs in the area. <p />The article also dives into what it will take to attract more attention to the Triangle startup scene and questions whether or not we need more startups here. Joe then proceeds to list off his 8 “elite series A” startups, based on their presumed chances of raising an A round in 2013. All in all, it’s an interesting article that appears at an interesting time for startups in the Triangle. There is some evidence that more funding is becoming available (there are rumors of a new seed stage VC fund being formed), and <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdfunding">crowdfunding</a> is becoming an option as the SEC gets around to implementing the requirements of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumpstart_Our_Business_Startups_Act" target="_blank">JOBS ACT</a>. <p />But... I find myself wondering if we, as a community, are spending too much time obsessing about fund-raising. Whether it’s the Triangle or Silicon Valley, Hacker News or Triangle Tech Talk or WRAL Tech Wire, TechCrunch or Quora, one topic that always seems to be on the lips of startup founders is “venture capital”. We obsess over what’s happening on CrunchBase or AngelList, gossip about who is or isn’t raising right now, who’s investing in who, etc. But is this really healthy? <p />I consider this kind of thinking, in which people begin to mistake the means (funding) with the end (a profitable company) to be a disease. Call it “FundRaisingItus” if you will. It appears to be an epidemic among entrepreneurs, wantrepreneurs, tech journalists, and others attached to the startup scene. <p />This danger of this disease, is that it leads entrepreneurs to spend time chasing investors when they could be talking to customers, doing market research, writing code, innovating, and otherwise working on building a company that creates value. Worse, it leads to entrepreneurs doing this when they don’t need to. Not every startup needs to raise outside capital at all, and even those who do don’t necessarily need to do so *right now*. Unfortunately, when we elevate fund-raising to being it’s own end it leads entrepreneurs to, at best, wasting time trying - and failing - to raise money. In an even worse case, they succeed, but raise too early, before they have enough leverage, and so they take really bad deals from investors - the kinds of deals you hear about where the entrepreneur gets “screwed out of his/her company”. <p />Interestingly enough, Joe himself has written some words on this topic, hitting on a similar theme. In his blog post at <p /><a href="http://exitevent.com/durham-startup-boostsuite-hits-5000-customers-13220.asp" target="_blank">http://exitevent.com/durham-startup-boostsuite-hits-5000-customers-13220.asp</a><p />Joe says <cite>“In an era where most startup talk is concerned with who is raising how much and from whom, it's so much more rewarding to talk about who is landing customers, proving out their product, and raising recurring revenues.”</cite><p />And in his N&O article at <p /><a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/01/07/2589196/triangle-startups-follow-national.html" target="_blank">http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/01/07/2589196/triangle-startups-follow-national.html</a><p />Joe says: <cite>“But beyond the basic supply-and-demand issue, there is another trend of entrepreneurs focusing their efforts on revenue rather than investment. It might turn out that some of these startups won’t need additional funds beyond the seed stage”.</cite><p />I think that’s a pretty good assessment of the situation! <p />Anyway, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that every company should bootstrap / self-fund and avoid outside capital forever. I am saying that we, as a community, should close the Crunchbase tab, and the TechCrunch tab, for a while and quit fixating on fundraising - and focus on creating value and then exchanging that value for dollars. Wait to pursue capital until you A. absolutely must have it to continue or grow, and B. have the maximum amount of leverage possible, in order to get the best possible terms. <p />Who knows, we may even find that we are able to fund our companies strictly from generated revenue anyway. After all, the point of a startup is not to raise money, but to make money. <p />https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/post-good-google-who-willPost "Good Google", Who Will Defend The Open Web?Phillip Rhodes2013-03-21T12:15:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:25+00:00In a <a target="_blank" href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5412231">recent discussion on Hacker News</a>, user <a target="_blank" href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andyl">andyl</a> made the following comment: <p /><cite>“Before Google+ came along, Google had many great products and embraced the <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Web">OpenWeb</a>. Now Google has abandoned Open Standards like RSS and CalDAV, and I think Google is more interested in building their own walled garden.”</cite><p />My first thought was: “Bingo, you nailed it.” <p />My second, third and subsequent thoughts were something like this: <p />This is a *very* unfortunate development, as Google were uniquely positioned to be great defenders of the Open Web, and - for quite some time - seemed to *be* defenders of the Open Web. Now, one has to ask: Who will defend the Open Web, post “Good Google?” <p />Sadly, there are not a lot of obvious candidates. One wonders, who else has the clout to do it now, as well as the motivation? Does anybody see Marissa moving Yahoo that way? I'm guessing "no" but would love to be proven wrong. Yahoo *have* done some pro Open Web things in the past, but even if they had the inclination, I’m not sure they have the clout to do a lot, especially since they don’t even run their own search engine anymore. <p />It won't be Microsoft, you can bet on that. They have been notoriously inimical towards Open Standards, Open Source, and pretty much “Open Anything” for most of their history. And I haven’t seen any recent evidence to suggest any fundamental change of heart on their end. <p />Red Hat are a moderately powerful company, but they aren't *that* big and could wind up acquired by Oracle tomorrow for all we know. And they aren't that into services and web applications. <p />I think they have the right spirit and attitude, and probably will prove to be a valuable ally in the fight to preserve an Open Web, but I don’t think they can have the influence of a Google. <p />Mozilla have a lot of clout on the browser side, but arguably much less so than in years past, as their market share has slipped. Also, they are pretty much locked solely into the client side, as they don’t really offer services or make any server side software. <p />Amazon? Nope, don't see them stepping up to defend the Open Web. Although... let’s not write them off completely. It *might* be in the best interests of their AWS side, to promote Open Web standards. But the E-commerce side, I imagine want to create their own ”walled garden” especially on mobile devices. <p />Facebook? Hell no. <p />LinkedIn? No, not seeing this. They are very much a walled garden now, and obviously aren’t interested in Open Standards. For example, notice that you can’t even do something as simple as search Companies by <a target="_blank" href="http://www.census.gov/eos/www/naics/">NAICS codes</a> on LinkedIn. <p />Sun? Maybe if they hadn't been acquired by Oracle. <p />IBM? Maybe not totally ridiculous, but history doesn't paint the best picture of IBM in this regard. And they also don't really offer services over the web, like a search engine. Maybe they could scale Watson up to webscale and make that the new Google? <p />Wolfram? No. Everything they make and do is proprietary, including Alpha. <p />The Wikimedia Foundation? Yes! They certainly have the right spirit and attitude, and they DO have a decent degree of influence, thanks to the popularity of Wikipedia and related projects. Like Red Hat, they can't do it alone however. <p />There has been a lot of discussion over the past few years about the Open Web, and I think most Hackers agree that it’s an important principle. But recent developments have perhaps put a pall over the idea. Let us hope this proves to not be true! <p />Right now, other than the Wikimedia Foundation, Red Hat and Mozilla, the most obvious candidate for “defender of the Open Web” is simply the broader “hacker community” and the “free culture” community (especially where they overlap). In other words, it’s US. Me, you, the guy in the back of the room with the bad hair, the sterno bum at the corner of 5th and Main, whoever. But competing against large, influential commercial interests as a grassroots movement is never easy. Hopefully one or more additional companies or organizations will also emerge as new champions of the Open Web and help usher us into a new era. <p />Join the <a target="_blank" href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5414498">Hacker News Discussion</a><p />See Also: <ul><li><a href="http://www.openwebfoundation.org/ " target="_blank">http://www.openwebfoundation.org/ </a></li><li><a href="http://tantek.com/2010/281/b1/what-is-the-open-web" target="_blank">http://tantek.com/2010/281/b1/what-is-the-open-web</a></li><li><a href="http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2008/04/whats-open-web-and-why-is-it-important.html" target="_blank">http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2008/04/whats-open-web-and-why-is-it-important.html</a></li><li><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23FOB-medium-t.html?_r=0" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23FOB-medium-t.html?_r=0</a></li><li><a href="http://www.w3.org/wiki/Open_Web_Platform" target="_blank">http://www.w3.org/wiki/Open_Web_Platform</a></li><li><a href="http://scripting.com/stories/2011/01/04/whatIMeanByTheOpenWeb.html" target="_blank">http://scripting.com/stories/2011/01/04/whatIMeanByTheOpenWeb.html</a></li></ul><p /><hr />If you found this interesting, please <a target="_blank" href="https://www.twitter.com/fogbeamlabs">follow us on Twitter</a> or visit our homepage at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.fogbeam.com">Fogbeam.com</a>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/the-google-question-is-theThe Google Question: Is The Hacker Ethic Compatible With A "For Profit" Company?Phillip Rhodes2013-03-17T09:02:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:26+00:00<p />Earlier, I start a <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/1/114301088526097505896/posts/7EuBexR73HA">G+ discussion about Google and their "War on RSS"</a>, and spoke a bit about which organizations "out there" have a commitment to the <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Web">Open Web</a> and to <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard">Open Standards</a>. In that brief and hastily written post, I came up with only four organizations (not "companies" mind you, but organizations in general) which seem committed to protecting access to technology in an open manner, and which could be said to promote something like the <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic">hacker ethic</a>. The four I came up with initially were: <p />1. Mozilla <br />2. Free Software Foundation <br />3. Electronic Frontier Foundation <br />4. Red Hat <p />Now I'm thinking, there <strong>must</strong> be more than four, and there must be more than one "for profit" company which leans on the hacker ethic as a pillar. But no others immediately come to mind. Well, except for us here at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.fogbeam.com/">Fogbeam Labs</a>, but we don't really count, as we're a bootstrapped, self-funded startup, with very little in the way of resources. I'm thinking more about established, profitable, for-profit companies. <p />So the question that occurs to me now is this: Is the Hacker Ethic, and related mindsets, including commitment to the Open Web, Open Standards and F/OSS, compatible with a for-profit enterprise? This hits very close to home for us here at Fogbeam, as our entire model is based on F/OSS. For those of you who don't know, all of our software is available under the Apache Software License v2, or another OSI approved license. (Aside: practically speaking, everything we do is ASLv2, but we might ship something that's BSD license, MIT license, LGPL or GPL. We don't be doing any CPAL badgeware crap even though it is OSI approved). Our goal is to follow in the footsteps of our neighbors in Raleigh, the fine folks at Red Hat, and build a profitable business around a true Open Source approach. <p />So, since we're talking about Red Hat, one might say the question is settled, that RH are an "existence proof" that a company can be profitable (and growing) as a public company and still adhere to the Hacker Ethic. But one has to wonder, why aren't there more companies <strong>like</strong> Red Hat? And why has a company like Google, once considered a haven for hackers, started to look more and more like a 2010's version of 1990's era Microsoft? <p />Of course, Google certainly aren't <b>as</b> evil as 1990's era MS, and maybe they never will be. Google have released a ton of code as Open Source over the years, and they bought the VP8/WebM technology just to make it an open standard. Android is still OSS (sort of), as is Chrome, and I'd still look at GOOG as more "hacker friendly" than Microsoft. But I think it is painfully obvious that Google have backslid in recent years, and that their reputation among hackers is somewhat tarnished. <p />So, where is all this going? And why does it matter? Well, it matters to us, for aforementioned reasons... we <b>want</b> to be a company that grows into a position where we can make money, be influential, and become a great haven for hackers who want to get paid for hacking on cool stuff. But you have to manage to be profitable to do all that. And you have to wonder, if the sacrifices you have to make - in order to become profitable - necessarily mean slipping away from that core ethic. <p />And, looking beyond our own immediate concerns, you have to question what all of this means for society at large. There are forces at work, and trends developing, which would limit access to technology and knowledge, and lock it down behind all sorts of walls and gates, both technological and legal, or otherwise turn it against the people it should serve. DRM baked into hardware, the Windows 8 <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Secure_boot">UEFI / Secure Boot</a> debacle, the <a target=_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act#Anti-circumvention_exemptions">DMCA and it's "anti circumvention" measures</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_Intelligence_Sharing_and_Protection_Act">CISPA</a>, the list goes on and on. For a fascinating and in-depth analysis of some scary changes in the tech landscape, see the famous <a href="http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html" target="_blank">The Coming War on General Purpose Computing</a> talk. <p />So, my challenge to you, and to ourselves is this: Seek out ways to create companies (for-profit AND/OR non-profits and other organizations) that <b>do</b> embody the hacker ethic, and which can help fight the good fight to, as an old Lulu t-shirt said "Take Back Technology". And help promote and encourage the existing organizations that are on the right side of this. Also, continue to publicly "call out" the Google's of the world when they start to falter. Join, contribute to, or start a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackerspace" target="_blank">hackerspace</a>, or a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_culture_movement" target="_blank">free culture</a> meetup, or a Linux User's Group. Start or join an Open Source project of some sort. Whatever works for you. <p />For my own part, I plan to chip in some more money to the EFF very soon. And Fogbeam Labs will continue to churn out awesome <a href="http://www.fogbeam.org/" target="_blank">Open Source products</a> as we play our (currently) small part in this story. <p /><hr />Join the <a target="_blank" href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5388630">Hacker News discussion</a> or <a href="https://www.twitter.com/fogbeamlabs" target="_blank" >follow us on Twitter</a>. https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/so-what-is-a-capabilitySo, What Is A "Capability Case" Anyway?Phillip Rhodes2013-02-19T01:01:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:27+00:00In our <a href="http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/01/why-capability-cases-are-must-when.html">last post</a> we talked a lot about how important Capability Cases are for Information Technology professionals on either side of specifying a software system. But what we didn't do was go very deep into explaining <b>exactly</b> what Capability Cases <b>are</b>. At least one reader was put off by our jumping straight into the rationale for Capability Cases without defining them (and perhaps some other terms) first. Posting on <a target="_blank" href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5129034">Hacker News</a>, user <a target="_blank" href="http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hiccup">hiccup</a> said: <p /><i>I'm having a hard time cutting through the business buzzwords to understand what these capability cases are. Seems like a standard Waterfall design methodology used by big consulting companies. </i><p />OK, heavy stuff, but we hope to correct that here. <p />First, to the point about "business buzzwords", I would say that there are no "buzzwords" in the previous post. That is, in the sense that a "buzzword" is a word which exists only to tap into some sort of faddish sensation and which conveys no actual meaning. What there is - perhaps in excess relative to some audiences - is a lot of technical jargon from the business world. Anyone not familiar with Porter's Five Forces model or SWOT Analysis might have found some bits to be a bit cryptic. This is one of the dangers of creating a mechanism which is designed to bridge the chasm between two "worlds" which have radically different technical jargon. Anyone not versed in both sets of lingo will find the literature on the topic to be a tough slog. <p />As it turns out, this "bridging" notion is the strength of Capability Cases, with the caveat that anyone who intends to master this technique must expend a little bit of effort to learn jargon, techniques, and skills from areas in which they may not currently be well versed. This is, perhaps, also a weakness of Capability Cases, as the technique demands its practitioners have at least a certain baseline of knowledge from both the "IT world" <b>and</b> the "Business World". <p />With that said, let's start, then, with explaining what Capability Cases are and a bit more about the methodology behind them. First, as stated in <a target="_blank" href="http://www.capabilitycases.org/">the book</a>, a Capability Case is "the case for a capability". Succinct, but not very enlightening without talking more about what a "capability" is, and without defining "case" more clearly in this context. <p />In this context, when we talk about a "case" we mean something like "justification for" or "argument for". This is the way the word is used when someone says "make your case for X" or "what's the business case for Z"? It could also be thought of as somewhat akin to the "cases" or "case studies" that are used in business school. So, a "Capability Case" then is a detailed explanation, from a business perspective, justifying the development of a technological solution using a set of capabilities. <p />This now leads us to the question of "what do you mean by capability"? The authors of the CapCases book put it this way "<i>By Capability we mean the potential to deliver business functionality</i>". <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability">Wikipedia</a> defines Capability thusly: "<i>Capability is the ability to perform actions</i>". When we talk about a "technological capability" then, we are talking about technology which enables some action or function which has business value. An example of a Capability might be "placing orders and checking out online using a web browser" or "full-text search across an array of disparate document repositories". <p />So how exactly do Capability Cases work to bridge the IT world and the Business world? First, a practitioner of this approach works to identify the <b>problems</b> or <b>challenges</b> confronting the business, using one or more well known techniques drawn from business analysis and strategic planning: <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_five_forces_analysis">Porter's Five Forces analysis</a>, <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis">SWOT Analysis</b>, <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_stream_mapping">Value Stream Mapping</a>, review of <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_indicator">Key Performance Indicators</a> or perhaps the use of a <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_scorecard">Balanced Scorecard</a> or <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_map">Strategy Map</a>. <p />Once a problem or challenge has been identified, the next step is to identify candidate capabilities which could be used to address the problem and build a solution. An example problem might be something like "Revenue is declining and our sales people are spending too much time managing routine orders from existing customers, which cuts into their ability to prospect and build new business". Once a succinct problem has been identified, the practitioners begin to review technological capabilities, which can include existing capabilities developed within the firm, capabilities which can be acquired in the form of pre-existing <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_off-the-shelf">COTS</a> or <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F/OSS">F/OSS</a> packages, or non-existing capabilities which would need to be developed from scratch. <p />And it is at this intersection point that a firm truly needs staff who can walk - at least partially - in both "worlds", business and IT. To map the capabilities to the problem, and identify the most reasonable solution is the real work of capability cases. Once candidate cases are identified, a "solution story" can be constructed, which walks through a scenario involving the various actors, and explains how the capability leads to a solution to the problem at hand. A fully fleshed out Capability Case detail how one or more capabilities will be deployed to address the identified problem. <p />Now, to hiccup's earlier point about this sounding like a "Waterfall" methodology: Nothing about using CapCases implies the use of a waterfall approach! You certainly can - and should - iterate through the development of the CapCases which lead to the commissioning of a project to implement a solution. One could think of the use of Capability Cases and the associated methodology as corresponding, roughly, to the <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Process#Inception_Phase">inception</a> phase of the <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Process">Unified Software Development Process</a>. This technique is also entirely compatible with <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development">Agile principles</a> and could either front-end the initiation of a project using, for example, <a target="_blank" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)">Scrum</a>, or the analysis and review and development of the Capability Case could become a part of the ongoing Scrum process. <p />Of course, the preceding discussion is focused on a scenario where a firm identifies a problem internally, and sets out to commission a technological solution to the problem. But I also argued last time that this technique is important to vendors, such as ISVs, as well. How can this be? <p />Simply, an ISV should develop "canned" or "cookie cutter" Capability Cases which illustrate how the capabilities provided by their products are used to address commonly encountered problems in their target market. The cases can be used to salespeople to help inform their earliest contacts with firms they are attempting to sell to (you could think of a canned Capability Case as a "job aid" in Solution Selling terminology) and can be used as part of an educational marketing initiative. If your capabilities are new and exotic enough that many people will not be familiar with them, a strong Capability Case will help demonstrate the value of your wares. And, of course, a canned Capability Case can serve as the starting point of a more detailed analysis, tailored to suit a particular customer, as the exploration process continues. <p />It should also be possible to talk about composing Capability Cases, and assembling more sophisticated cases at higher levels of abstraction, which are made up of less sophisticated cases, joined together. It should also be noted that naming your Capability Cases is important, as this gives you a vocabulary with which to converse at a higher level of abstraction. Of course, the case for a single capability may simply reflect the name of the capability, but a case which contains multiple capabilities, or a compositional case, may have a more illustrative name. <p />So, hopefully this goes helps lift some of the confusion around this powerful tool. Capability Cases are a powerful tool, and developing a deep understanding is not something one can gain overnight. We highly recommend that anyone interested in learning more go and read the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.capabilitycases.org/">seminal book</a> on the topic, and - if you have further questions - <a href="http://fogbeam.com/contact.html">contact us</a>. Please don't hesitate to leave a comment here, and consider following our <a target="_blank" href="https://www.twitter.com/fogbeamlabs">Twitter feed</a> for the latest news and updates from Fogbeam Labs. <p />Join the <a target="_blank" href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5244493">Hacker News discussion</a>. https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/why-capability-cases-are-aWhy Capability Cases Are a Must When Defining Software SystemsPhillip Rhodes2013-01-27T01:23:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:28+00:00If you have not yet heard of "Capability Cases" and you are in the software business, run, don't walk, to <a href="http://www.capabilitycases.org/">capabilitycases.org</a> or your favourite on-line / physical book retailer and pick up the book "Capability Cases: A Solution Envisioning Approach" by Irene Polikoff, Robert Coyne and Ralph Hodgson. Capability Cases are a must for any professional involved in defining, proposing, building, selling or creating software systems in 2013. <p />"Why", you might ask, "are Capability Cases so bloody important, and if they were actually all that, why haven't I heard of them before"? Glad you asked. In short, Capability Cases solve the problem of bridging between the worlds of the hardcore technologist - who appreciates technology for it's own sake, and values technical elegance first and foremost - and the business executive who is more concerned with solving business problems and defining solutions that will help the business address market challenges, operational deficiencies, and improve internal processes. <p />As to why you haven't heard of them already, well, that's harder to explain. They are a new'ish idea, and the word about Capability Cases seems to have been drowned out by all the noise being generated in the technology world. Perhaps because a proper appreciation of the value of the Capability Case requires a rare breed of individual, someone who can walk in both the world of the technologist and the world of the business executive. In any case, this approach is a significant step forward in terms of defining software systems to solve business problems, and will soon be all but required in any organization which wants to do more than pay lip service to generating competitive advantage from information technology. <p />"But wait," you might protest, "Nicholas Carr has already said that IT doesn't matter and can't represent a source of competitive advantage. You must not know what you're talking about."<a href="http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/articles/matter.html">[1]</a> Well, it <b>could</b> be that I don't know what I'm talking about, but, to put it simply, Nicholas Carr is wrong. Information Technology absolutely still represents a means to achieve competitive advantage. The important point to realize, is that "IT for IT's sake" is not a means to achieve competitive advantage... a modern, enlightened organization must instead focus on understanding the <b>capabilities</b> which Information Technology can provide, and must understand how those capabilities <b>enable</b> aspects of their business strategy. In other words, competitive advantage is not a simple as "whoever has the best algorithms wins" but instead is derived at the intersection of strategy and technology. <p />And this is where Capability Cases come into play. By beginning with the forces affecting the business, and driving through to solutions and the capabilities needed to enable those solutions, the Capability Case is exactly the means to understand how to leverage technology to achieve a strategic / competitive advantage. However, to gain the maximum benefit from Capability Cases, an organization is going to need people who can - to at least a minimal degree - speak both the language of business and the language of technology. If you are a technologist who speaks "Relational database" and "NoSQL graph database" and "CORBA" and "RMI" and "distributed / replicated cache" but does not know anything about "Porter's Five Forces" or "SWOT analysis" or the meaning of "Value Chain" or "Balanced Scorecard", you will not be properly equipped to serve in that "gap bridging" role. Likewise, if you are a business executive who believes "I don't need to know anything about technology, I'll leave that to the geeks in IT" and you don't know the difference between a database and a web browser, your days are numbered. The most valuable members of the most effective organizations going forward, will be those who can serve in this role of defining solutions using Capability Cases. <p />So, are we saying that IT people need to go get an MBA, or that business execs need to go get a Computer Science degree? Not at all, but regardless of where you currently fall in this dichotomy, you will need to make a conscious effort to gain a minimal level of skills and knowledge from the "other" domain. If you are a technologist and you don't know the name "Michael Porter" and have no idea what "SWOT analysis" is, then go buy a textbook on Strategic Planning and dig in. If you are a business executive who has no idea how a "relational database" differs from an "application server" then go to <a href="http://www.codecademy.com/">http://www.codecademy.com/</a> and start programming, or go sign up for a course at <a href="https://www.coursera.org/">Coursera</a>. Do it now, or you will probably find yourself unemployed sooner than later. <p />Likewise, if you are an ISV or other vendor of software solutions, if you are not able to articulate the capabilities of your software in terms of Capability Cases, you will struggle to communicate the value of your products to the people who control the purse-strings and make buying decisions. Influenced by Nicholas Carr and his "IT doesn't matter" mantra, executives have become more sceptical of proposed technology initiatives and want a better map to show how the initiative leads to an actual business benefit. That map consits of one or more Capability Cases, especially when the Capability Case is tailored to the specifics of the customer in question. <p />Capability Cases are also an excellent tool for Lean Startups who are taking advantage of the "Customer Development" methodology developed by Steve Blank. Use the tools from the Capability Case methodology to help zone in on the important business forces affecting your customers, and you'll do a much better job of identifying high value needs, and developing solutions to those needs. <p />To summarize: Capability Cases are a methodology for defining and specifying software solutions, which operate at the boundary between the business world and the technology world. They map from the forces affecting the business, to the solutions needed to address those forces, and to the capabilities which enable those solutions. They are the current state of the art in solving the problem of communicating between the business domain and the technology domain and are essential for turning technology into competitive advantage. <p />Join the <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5129034">Hacker News discussion</a>. <p />If you've read this far, you should probably follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/fogbeamlabs">Twitter</a>. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/project-10-ideas-a-dayProject: 10 Ideas A Day, For 6 MonthsPhillip Rhodes2012-09-01T18:54:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:29+00:00<p />An <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4459710">interesting post</a> showed up on <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com">Hacker News</a> recently, titled <a href="http://mariusandra.com/blog/2012/08/stop-producing-shit/">Stop producing shit</a>. The post struck me as a bit unfocused and rambling, but there was one bit in particular that jumped out at me. The author of the post shared a <a href="http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2012/08/ask-james-how-to-get-over-heartache-the-5pm-diet-what-should-you-do-in-life-and-more/">James Altucher quote</a> that I found quite fascinating: <p /><blockquote><i>Exercise: come up with 10 ideas today. Then throw away the list. Come up with ten ideas tomorrow. And so on. I’ve written before: but in six months your life will be completely changed as a result. </i></blockquote><p />I may be wrong, but intuitively, that feels like a very powerful exercise. I'm fascinated enough with the possibility, that I'm going to commit to doing the exercise for the next 6 months. I may tweak the parameters a bit, but it will basically reduce to "come up with 10 new ideas per day." In my case, I'll be mainly focused on business ideas, or product ideas that could be deployed here at Fogbeam Labs. <p />I won't try to blog this every single day, but if I find some interesting revelation or insight from doing this, I'll definitely blog it. And I'll probably try to post a snapshot of the ideas every so often. <p />Oh, right... you're supposed to throw the list away each day. OK, that's one parameter I'm going to tweak. I'll keep each day's list, partly because I don't want to accidentally reuse an idea, and also because I want to see how my idea generation evolves over time. Also, if there's a genuinely good idea in the lot, I don't want to lose it! <p />Otherwise, here are the parameters I'm setting for myself: <ul><li>No reusing "old" ideas (by "old" here, I mean, ideas I've had and chewed on in the past), the focus should be on new ideas. I may relax this a little the first day or two, just to help seed the list, but the purpose here is not to rehash old stuff.</li><li>No trivial derivatives. If the idea on day 1 is "a bitcoin marketplace for cat pictures" then no fair putting "a bitcoin marketplace for dog pictures" on day 2. </li><li>Each idea should be something fairly concrete. That is, it should be something that I'm reasonably sure <i>can be done</i>, not an idea for a research project. So, "start an online business selling Fizbits" is game, but "use genetic algorithms for NLP??" is not. </li></ul><p />Now, let's hope this turns out better than my joking response on the original HN thread: <blockquote><i>I might just give it a try, to see how it goes. I'll start a list of ideas, and try to add 10 new (unique) ones to it every day. I'm guessing after about day 2, it'll be hard to come up with 10 new unique ideas, that aren't just ridiculous. By day 3, it'll probably look like: <ul><li>Start a service to let people launch the remains of their deceased pets into orbit. </li><li>an Android app that makes Farting noises (probably already exists) </li><li>a YCombinator clone </li><li>Something that combines the best elements of Slashdot, XKCD, 4chan, and Ebay. </li><li>An AS/400 compatible RPG environment, to let businesses move off of (expensive) iSeries hardware and onto commodity Linux boxes without expensive porting costs. </li><li>A bitcoin marketplace for cat pics </li></ul></i></blockquote><p />So, what techniques do you use for generating new ideas, brainstorming, etc? Join the <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4464723">discussion on Hacker News</a>. <p />If you've read this far, you should probably <a href="https://twitter.com/FogbeamLabs">follow us on Twitter</a>. <p />https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/what-are-we-working-onWhat are we working on here?Phillip Rhodes2012-08-17T23:06:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:30+00:00Earlier today, someone posted a question on <a href="">Hacker News</a> asking "What are you working on? I posted the following answer, but the entire thread wound up getting deleted for some reason. I've decided to reproduce the answer here, since it would have made a good blog post anyway. <p />So, what exactly *are* Fogbeam Labs working on? <p /><a href="http://www.fogbeam.com/">We</a> are working on some F/OSS knowledge management / collaboration tools, heavily based around social-networking, machine learning, collective intelligence and semantic web technologies. <p />One of our projects, <a href="https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy">Quoddy</a>, is sort of (to oversimplify) like a "Facebook for the Enterprise," but with a focus on actually integrating into value creating workflows, and supporting collaboration in new ways, as opposed to simply being another complement to (or replacement for) email. In other words, Quoddy is an open source social network for the enterprise. <p />Another of our projects, <a href="https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick">Neddick</a> is a lot like Reddit, and I guess you could call it a "Reddit for the Enterprise," but - again - with more of a focus on features that will make it a valuable productivity tool in an organization. Neddick is another example of open source social software for the enterprise, or "open source enterprise 2.0". Neddick is all about using voting, tagging, social ranking, content analysis, metadata and social connections to support social information sharing and knowledge discovery. <p /><a href="https://github.com/fogbeam/Heceta">Heceta</a> is our open source enterprise search engine, which takes advantage of metadata from both Neddick and Quoddy to enhance search results. <p /><a href="https://github.com/fogbeam/Hatteras">Hatteras</a> is probably not going to remain a standalone project, but right now it's the "bridge" that allows Quoddy users to subscribe to business events from a SOA/ESB backend and surface those events in their news feed. <p />Of the projects, Quoddy and Neddick are the most developed, Hatteras works just well enough to let us demo the business event subscription stuff in Quoddy, and Heceta mostly exists in my head and in some drawings. But we're making great progress, and we should have an alpha version of Quoddy that's developed enough to start trying to sell to "earlyvangelist" types fairly soon. <p />There's also a good chance that we will work on "productized" versions of some other existing F/OSS projects, especially some ASF stuff. Nothing is written in stone, but you may one day see "Fogbeam Office, powered by Apache OpenOffice" or "Fogbeam BigData Server, powered by Apache Hadoop" or something along those lines. <p />Basically, the goal is to be the next Red Hat, but with a focus on a slightly different part of the stack. Not that there might not be some overlap with them at some point, but time will tell. <p />https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/planning-an-eventPlanning an eventPhillip Rhodes2012-08-17T04:01:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:32+00:00As we mentioned <a href="http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2012/08/is-anyone-blogging-their-startup.html">last time</a>, we're planning a "special initiative" to coincide with the <a href="www.cednc.org/techventure">CED Tech Venture Conference</a> which is coming up in Raleigh, on Sept 11th and 12th, 2012. A number of local startups and tech firms are going to host a special "hospitality suite" alongside the CED event, where investors, customers, journalists, etc. can get away from the noise and babble of the main conference floor, and interact with a select group of startup founders in a more intimate setting; having one one one conversations, private demos, or whatever is required. <p />Needless to say, pulling all of this together is a tremendous effort, and with Phil being isolated in Chicago doing the consulting thing all week, it's been a huge challenge. But thanks to a number of wonderful people, including Andy Hunt from Pragmatic Press, Robert Rice and Eric Martindale from LocalSense, Jason Caplain from Southern Capitol Ventures, Chuck Hester, and many others, this is shaping up nicely. <p />More details and a formal announcement will be coming soon, including the full list of sponsors, participating startups, and more. And if, by chance, YOU would like to participate, either as a startup, or a sponsor (or both) let me know. Email fogbeam (at) gmail (dot) com for the full skinny. <p />And now, off to bed, to try and get a full 8 hours of sleep for the first time this week. <p /> https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/is-anyone-blogging-their-startupIs Anyone Blogging Their Startup Experiences? Yes, We Are.Phillip Rhodes2012-08-16T05:56:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:33+00:00So, this question hit Quora recently: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Bootstrapping-companies/Is-anyone-blogging-their-early-stage-experiences-creating-a-niche-webapp-product">Is anyone blogging their early stage experiences creating a niche webapp/product?</a> Of course <a href="http://www.fogbeam.com">Fogbeam Labs</a> are blogging our experiences, but - to be honest - we've all been so busy lately that there hasn't been much time for blogging. We've been too "heads down" grinding away. <p />But, we know our adoring fans want more (you fans always do!) and we aim to please. So, here's some juicy stuff from the past week or so: <p />Phil (that's me) spent some time chatting with the VP of Sales from a former employer of his, soliciting advice on sales, marketing and general "stuff". It was an enlightening conversation, but the biggest takeaway was probably the urgency to drop the "screwpile" name for the Open Source product suite. Honestly, we all knew it was a bad name (and I take credit for it), but had put off changing it because A. this stuff had been renamed once already, and we didn't want to seem too flakey, and B. we didn't really have a good replacement in mind. So we'd just been drifting along, keeping that on the mental backburner. But the conversation with Matt really emphasized the point, and we're now working on a new name. <p />Sarah and Phil met at Beyu Cafe in Durham last week (that's one of our favorite hacking spots, drop by and say hi sometime if you see us there) and made some good progress on <a href="http://code.google.com/p/quoddy">Quoddy</a> - our Open Source Social Network for the Enterprise (aka "Facebook for the Enterprise, but better"). <p />Sarah is driving some major UI improvements through, and Phil is working on our "User Stream Filtering" feature which will give the user more fine-grained control over what appears in their feed. <p />Unfortunately, Phil is now distracted by working on an initiative related to the upcoming <a href="http://www.cednc.org/techventure">CED Tech Venture Conference</a> and hasn't had much time to code this week. And tonight he started working on the <a href="http://www.ncidea.org/content/grants/956">NC IDEA grant</a> application. <p />Robert, meanwhile, has been hacking on a bug related to sending JMS messages, and on getting the codebase moved over to Grails2. <p />So, dear Reader, as we end this post, Phil is sitting in bed in beautiful Chicago, IL (doing some consulting there by day to pay the bills), writing a blog post, and the others are back in NC, holding down the fort there. Phil will be lucky to get 6 or 7 hours of sleep tonight, but there's no rest for the wicked (or startup founders). <p />Next time, we'll talk about more fun stuff, like the secret initiative for the CED event (it won't be secret by then), marketing plan(s), more about the projects themselves, and whatever else we can think of. Stay tuned, you do *not* want to miss this stuff. As we keep doing this, and find our voice a little, it'll get even more real, personal, gritty and, well, downright addictive. <p />https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/fogbeam-labs-status-updateFogbeam Labs Status UpdatePhillip Rhodes2012-07-21T01:11:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:34+00:00Dear Friends of Fogbeam Labs: <p />It's been a while since I had a chance to reach our to all of you with the latest news, and I wanted to take a quick moment and let you all know how things are going. <p />Since last we spoke, things have been very dynamic and exciting here. We have had a new co-founder join the team, we've made tremendous strides one one of our products from a development standpoint, we've added a new project and some exciting new capabilities to our portfolio, we've had one of our projects used as part of a research project by researchers from <a href="http://www.mpi-sws.org/" target="_blank" >The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems</a> in Germany, and we are continuing to iterate through the Customer Development process. <p />First things first, I'd like to introduce our newest co-founder, Robert Fischer. (No, not the character from Inception!) Robert is a supremely skilled developer with tons of experience using Groovy and Grails (our chosen development environment) and has a strong AI / mathematics background. Robert also (literally) wrote the book<a href="#anchor1">[1]</a> on persistence in Grails. <p />Needless to say, Robert's choosing to join us boosts our capacity tremendously, and he brings another great perspective and set of ideas to the team. <p />In other news, we have been hyper-focused on building out <a href="http://code.google.com/p/quoddy" target="_blank">Quoddy</a>, the enterprise social networking component of our suite. For those of you who don't know, Quoddy could be considered something like a "Facebook for the enterprise," but it's better. Much better. And it's also better than software from competitors like Yammer (now Microsoft) and Jive Software, as our vision is to deeply integrate the social aspect into actual business value creating activities... not to provide a superficially useful addition/replacement for email. <p />That brings me to one of our more exciting announcements. To support what we are referring to as "Business Event Subscriptions", we've created project <a href="https://github.com/fogbeam/Hatteras" target="_blank">Hatteras</a>. Hatteras work with Quoddy and enables users to subscribe directly to relevant business events from their organization's ESB/SOA infrastructure. As we move forward with adding elements of machine learning and complex event processing to do event correlation and automatically link context to events, this becomes an amazingly powerful set of capabilities for organizations that are embracing the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_nervous_system" target="_blank">Digital Nervous System</a> or "Zero Latency Enterprise" mindset. <p />Regarding the research at The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, one of their researchers contacted us some months ago, and asked if they could use Quoddy as one case study for a research project on scaling geographically distributed systems. We said "yes," and were happy to learn just this week that their research was fruitful, and that a paper which mentions Quoddy will be presented at the USENIX OSDI (Operating Systems Design & Implementation) conference in October of this year. <p />And, finally, I have been in Chicago for the past few months, consulting by day in order to pay the bills... and while I've been here, I've been beating the streets, networking, making new connections, friending people, and working to expand the circle of people that are part of our Customer Development process to include some representatives from Chicago area firms. That process is going well, and will help us gain some additional validated learning, from a new set of customers. <p />Thanks for reading this far, and feel free to ping us with any questions, comments, feedback or flames. <p /><p />For myself, Sarah and Robert, until next time: <p /><p />Cheers, <p /><p />Phillip R. <p />[1]: <a name="anchor1" id="anchor1" href="http://www.amazon.com/Grails-Persistence-GORM-Robert-Fischer/dp/1430219262">http://www.amazon.com/Grails-Persistence-GORM-Robert-Fischer/dp/1430219262</a>https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/what-can-you-do-withWhat can you do with Fogbeam Labs' Quoddy?Phillip Rhodes2012-04-26T02:13:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:35+00:00<p />If you're a regular follower of this blog (and we know you are, so don't try to lie about it. We have hidden CCTV camera footage and everything), you'll have heard us talk about the projects we're working on. Yes, we said "projects" and not "products." That's because we are an Open Source Company and the F/OSS projects we sponsor will ultimately form the foundation for our product offering(s). <p />And while we're still working on exactly which features and what tech will go into which product, and thinking about naming and branding for our commercial offerings, we'd like to take a few minutes to tell you about one of our projects. <a href="http://code.google.com/p/quoddy/">Quoddy</a> is our enterprise social networking project, and we are <i><b>very</b></i> excited about it. "So," you may be asking yourself, "why do I need an enterprise social network, what is it good for?" Well, we're glad you asked, and hang around for a little while and we'll tell you all about it. <p />For starters, an enterprise social network allows members of your organization to connect with each other, and define the nature of their relationships with each other, and to search/browse their colleagues to find people with similar interests, or people with specific skills needed to solve a problem, or simply to communicate "in the open" in a way that encourages collaboration and those serendipitous conversations that often lead to amazing innovations. <p />But this is true of most of the products in this space. That's a cool feature of ESN's in general, but it's not what makes Quoddy unique. Used in this manner, an ESN is a fairly superficial additional communications channel, and it may not be obvious how it is superior to email or other communications mediums. <p />Where we are going with Quoddy is towards a much deeper level of integration between the people, documents, workflows and applications in your enterprise. Quoddy allows you to funnel communications from other <b>people</b>, output from disparate <b>applications</b>, documents and <b>content</b> which may be spread across content repositories, and <b>business events</b> (and associated workflows) and put all of your most important messages right at your fingertips. With Quoddy you can subscribe to messages from, for example, the Sales Entry System and set criteria to define which messages you see... so if you are the Sales Manager and you want to see the message anytime a sales person on your team closes a deal above (or below) a pre-defined amount, or a deal to a certain customer, etc., you can have it. This is part of the foundation of the Fogbeam Labs approach to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_business_intelligence">Real Time Business Intelligence</a> and only one of the incredibly exciting things we are hacking away on over here. <p />To whet your appetite here are some (very) preliminary screen-shots of Quoddy in action: <p /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3zK2-RdgNrY/T5d_Jnx3B1I/AAAAAAAAADU/kzVJcMaiEa4/s925/quoddy_bizevent.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="600" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3zK2-RdgNrY/T5d_Jnx3B1I/AAAAAAAAADU/kzVJcMaiEa4/s925/quoddy_bizevent.png" /></a></div><p /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-1LxQweUfVFk/T5d_KesA2CI/AAAAAAAAADs/CH6634oZ9mE/s925/quoddy_list_subs.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="600" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-1LxQweUfVFk/T5d_KesA2CI/AAAAAAAAADs/CH6634oZ9mE/s925/quoddy_list_subs.png" /></a></div><p /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-dB_Th2A4k84/T5d_JrGMG4I/AAAAAAAAADc/eSj1CJwqrrc/s925/quoddy_edit_sub.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="600" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-dB_Th2A4k84/T5d_JrGMG4I/AAAAAAAAADc/eSj1CJwqrrc/s925/quoddy_edit_sub.png" /></a></div><p /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-0n3f3Gg2gwc/T5d_J8MMoHI/AAAAAAAAADY/T0Fu3d-ZR40/s925/quoddy_edit_sub2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="600" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-0n3f3Gg2gwc/T5d_J8MMoHI/AAAAAAAAADY/T0Fu3d-ZR40/s925/quoddy_edit_sub2.png" /></a></div><p />In short, with Quoddy and sister projects from Fogbeam Labs, you will finally be able to truly realize the vision of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Nervous_System">Digital Nervous System</a> and provide the base required to achieve real <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_agility">business agility</a>.https://www.fogbeam.com/blog/fogbeam/entry/a-christmas-special-new-neddickA Christmas Special: New Neddick Release is available!Phillip Rhodes2011-12-25T12:54:00+00:002016-02-13T06:47:36+00:00<a href="http://code.google.com/p/neddick/">Neddick</a> Technology Preview Release 3 (tpr3) is available, just in time for Christmas! See <a href="https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick/tree/tpr3">https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick/tree/tpr3</a> and enjoy!<br /><br />Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all, from Fogbeam Labs.