Desicritics Category: BizTech: Web 2.0

Software Review: Seesmic Look - Twitter For The Masses

Aaman Lamba — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:27:04 EST

Innovation comes in little steps, it has been said, until one finds a new paradigm has been reached, and then its like things were always that way. Back in the old days, as it were, a telephone connection was a wondrous thing, connoting affluence of sorts, or at the very least, connections to the powerful.

Connections have become the currency of the social age, and a telephone is no more a means to share news and views with people one knows. It is fair to say that more information is broadcast to strangers today than to one's own family. This might explain the explosion in popularity of services like Twitter, which allow you to listen to the chatter of the masses as much as to the thoughts of the powerful.

There still seems to be a magical barrier though that Internet communication services have not yet crossed - that between the extraordinary and the mundane, where a mode of communication becomes commonplace enough to be accessible without needing to learn how to use it.

Seesmic claimed to have cracked the puzzle with their launch of Seesmic Look, a new Twitter client built on Microsoft's Silverlight platform, styled with Windows 7 thematic elements, and Tablet-friendly.

It is structured into channels that move in and out of the central space. Lists finally become easy to view and navigate, appearing as sub-folders in the Social space. Tweets vary in size as you scroll up and down, a somewhat disconcerting effect at first. The fonts are also not one's first preference, and there doesn't seem to be any way to tweak the interface other than to switch between light and dark.

Hot topics and trends have their own zone, and are visible even to not-logged in users. This is the first innovative step as Seesmic Look provides a preloaded set of channels and topics, giving the general Internet user a look-see without having to sign up. This does not translate to ubiquity but does increase the curiousness factor, making Seesmic Look more immersive than the lame Twitter home page. The application carries a 'Powered by Twitter' seal, quite unusual among third-party apps.

The most interesting innovation is the Playback mode, where recent tweets appear and disappear as floating bubbles. The effect palls after a while, though.

The channels are actually sponsored timelines by brands such as Red Bull, the Huffington Post, and Time. A channel has its own color theme and logo. Photographs and videos auto-expand, though not all sites. It isn't a feature regular users will stay with much, though.

Seesmic Look has really nailed Twitter Lists, with the easy navigation between a list and the main timeline. I'm running Windows 7 and the UI renders beautifully. There is an occasional graphic glitch though where a blue bar that appears when you switch windows from Look to another application. The application does freeze occasionally when scrolling through the timeline. The 'in reply to' link between a response and the original tweet also seems to have been lost in the interface design. A final quibble is the poor placement of the refresh button - bottom right of the window, leading one to click the settings button which is right next to the update bar on top.

Overall, it is a good departure from the norm and fits more smoothly into the new Windows UI metaphors than Adobe AIR apps, for example. The television-style interface and glossy feel will draw it many followers, although it will be hard to measure Twitter usage uptick purely as a result of Seesmic Look.

Google Launches Sidewiki - Changing The Perspective

Aaman Lamba — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:41:00 EDT

Google announced the launch of Sidewiki, a commenting system that adds a frame to any webpage and allows users of the Google Toolbar to add comments to any page, and then share or publish those on their own blogs or other sites. These comments are visible to other users, and introduce a meta-layer to the sites being reviewed.

At first blush, this seems like a very good idea, and on one hand, it is no different from commentary about the website on Digg, Twitter, or a personal blog. On the other hand, the commentary is distinct from the website's content although it appears contiguous with it. The commentary may be at odds with the website policy, and worse, could be construed as objectionable by site readers. This can lead to liability issues, and moderation might be tricky, especially for very public sites, it is hard to believe that crowdsourced moderation will not descend into a maelstrom of chaos - the wikipedia editors have enough trouble with this approach, and they make a herculean effort, with much interdiction and vandal protection. One saving grace might be the requirement to be logged in with a Google account, but this doesn't amount to much. There is an option to report abuse, but no promise that this will be addressed. The Sidewiki program policies are quite reassuring, not sure how effectively they could be enforced in the Wild Web.

Our program policies listed below play an important role in maintaining a positive experience for everyone using Sidewiki. We'd like to maintain an environment in which everyone can express their views and connect with others. To maintain this type of environment, we need to curb abuses that threaten our ability to provide this service.

We ask that everyone abide by these program policies so that we can all enjoy using Sidewiki. Violation of these standards may result in denial of Sidewiki access or deletion of your Google Account. Be sure to check back from time to time, as these policies may change. Please also refer to Google’s Terms of Service for more information.

Visually, the implementation seems crisp and unobtrusive with a hideaway frame. There is a challenge though in the provision of paged comments, and it is likely only the most recent comments will be read, although Google Sidewiki provides an option for page owners to leave a special entry that appears above all others, and is styled differently. Multiple languages are supported. Sidewiki comments can also be ranked, ordering comments through some private logic.

Sidewiki uses a quality algorithm and user ratings to determine the order of the entries that appear in the sidebar for a given page. The entries that are scored as being the most helpful and pertinent are more likely to display.

Google Wave, not yet in public beta, may provide enhanced control over Sidewiki content. It would be quite straightforward to expose a Sidewiki comment as a blip, and the entire thread as a wave on Google Wave. An API to export content from Sidewiki is inevitable, and one should be able to integrate commentary back into the website.

There are no features for website publishers in Google Sidewiki yet, and no option for websites to opt-out of Sidewiki comments. This is by design naturally, but one believes this feature will be added by Google soon, There is no restriction on posting commercial content to Sidewiki, and this could lead to egregious abuse of the service by SERP professionals and marketing advertisers, so brand managers could have their hands full moderating external content, including competitor links, negative feedback, and more. This can be the ultimate CRM tool, though, aggregating feedback conveniently juxtaposed with the brand/site.

This new service unfortunately seems to be another tangential effort from Google, and one hopes they would focus on stabilizing & improving their existing business critical services before remaking the web yet again.

Social Consolidation - Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

Aaman Lamba — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:32:20 EDT

With communities replacing eyeballs, social media sites have been reaping much hay. From early niche sites, walled gardens like AOL, and geek zones like Usenet, people realized the value of spending some of their time online telling others what they were doing, thinking, and listening to. Even before the surprise success of Twitter, communities like MySpace, Facebook, and Orkut had amassed their millions of followers.

There were still other, higher quality zones, some might say, where the cognoscenti migrated as the masses logged in. FriendFeed was one such space, with its real-time, conversation-style timeline featuring mixed media inputs, the ability to aggregate activity from a variety of sources, and a self-policied, active community. Very recently, Robert Scoble set off a veritable firestorm by unfollowing his thousands of Twitter followers and asking those who wanted to engage with him to come to FriendFeed, where he could categorize them into lists, hide unwanted ones, and even easily report spammers to be blocked by the ever-responsive FriendFeed staff.

With the rise of gargantuan walled gardens, as it were, there was little left to do in the social media space but shift to acquisition and consolidation as a means of meeting the breakneck rate of subscription growth they have experienced over the last couple of years. Much as Tom Siebel predicted the enterprise consolidation wave (and saw it consume his own company), Facebook kicked off the new trend by announcing the acquisition of FriendFeed for an estimated $50 million. This brings to the Facebook stable not just the innovative technology and subscriber base, but also the great team of FriendFeed founders, many of whom are ex-Google employees. Facebook also announced it was opening up its internally developed real-time search capabilities to its user base.

This acquisition can thus be seen as a strategy aiming primarily at the Googleplex, with its imminent release of Google Wave, the collaboration platform, and not just Twitter. Search is Google's primary value proposition, and while the Google Index itself is still probably the best around, there is a perception it lacks true real-time search capabilities people have come to expect.

Personally, I might move away from FriendFeed if it begins to look too much like Facebook, which I found to be shallow and boring. The people I've come to know on FriendFeed are what I'd miss though, so I'd like to take my social graph with me wherever I might end up next. There's a business opportunity right there.

Book Review: Using Google App Engine

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:54:36 EDT

Using Google App Engine starts with introducing cloud computing and the App Engine as a concept within the Google Implementation of cloud architectures. There is some discussion about the basic ways of developing web applications in HTML and CSS, Python and enough concepts to begin interacting with App Engine server using HTTP protocol commands. Python is to be used as a sort of controller to the HTML and CSS in front-end.

The concept of mostly HTML template to be rendered from Python code uses the Django project for the default syntax used in Google App Engine. The database that is at the back end of the Google App Engine uses a hierarchical object-oriented storage approach called as Bigtable technology. The interaction with this type of database being different from the widely used relational database models, there is an entire chapter dedicated to interfacing with this database.

The memory cache comes between the web application and the datastore and is one of the mechanisms used to improve speed of web applications. There is an interesting discussion about using the memory cache of Google App Engine as a sort of large Python dictionary.

In addition to the all these topics, the book gives a good amount of information to properly using the App Engine webapp Framework, setting up and using Google Application Engine accounts, using JavaScript, jquery and Ajax and finally, downloading and installing Google App Engine Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows XP,Windows Vista,Macintosh and Linux Systems.

Google App Engine is part of the Platform-as-a-service approach that the Google cloud uses. Adding to the rapidly growing technical literature dealing with implementation of applications to clouds, this O'Reilly-Google Press book is dealing with making the usage of Google App Engine as detailed as possible starting from budding application developers to advanced professionals. This is a recommended read for the professionals looking to begin and ramp up their web application deployments quickly and as cleanly as possible to the Google App Engine.

Book Review: Simply SQL

Ganadeva Bandyopadhyay — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:08:02 EDT

The book discusses, in eleven chapters and four appendices, the essential commands and features of SQL needed as a useful tool set for the web designer and web developer.

The book starts with chapters explaining the use of SELECT statement, the clauses such as FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING among others. Then it discusses the use and types of SQL data types generally used in major database types. The concluding parts are devoted to brief discussions on relational integrity ,emphasizing on the uniquely identifiable attribute for each instance of an entity, and some of the Special structures encountered in real databases.

One of the highlights of this book is the simple way in which joins are described, with examples, in the chapter for the FROM clause. These include the inner join, the three types of outer join and cross join.

A useful title for all the web designers and developers looking for a practical way to learn SQL language without getting into the details of specific database implementations. For advanced database users and practitioners, such as DBAs and application developers, this can be a refresher course before going for the implementation-specific manuals of different mainstream databases.

Innovation - That Strange Mythical Animal

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sat, 7 Feb 2009 05:16:13 EST

It was an interesting email that I got from Google Alerts. I have an alert setup for “innovation” as a keyword. The interesting thing is that I get the most interesting and curious hits on that keyword. As it so happens, on the same email, I got referred to a Businessweek article on innovation and another article on how Nortel could not save itself from bankruptcy despite investing heavily in innovation.

Innovation is a tough thing. What exactly is it? Something to do with new things? OK, lets run with it for now. But everybody and his dog wants to be known as innovative. Nothing wrong with it at all. But just like every buzz word, it needs to be treated carefully. People can get into all this innovation business too much and then forget about the basics of business. The two articles given above are interesting examples of this phenomena.

My son has been on World of Warcraft for the past 4 years now and has a good little business running there. So I have a fair idea of what is happening there. He has also managed to rope in my little princess as a magic maid, so that promises to be a good story one day. Anyway, I do appreciate the points made in the article about how WoW has managed to incorporate basic principles of innovation into its game so that it is doing brilliantly. I quote some of the main principles that the authors quote as lessons from the game:

Reduce barriers to entry and to early advancement
Provide clear and rich metrics to assess performance
Keep raising the bar
Don't neglect intrinsic motivations
Provide opportunities to develop tacit knowledge, but do not neglect broader knowledge exchange
Create opportunities for teams to self-organize around challenging performance targets
Encourage frequent and rigorous performance feedback
Create an environment that rewards new dispositions

But I have a bit of an issue here, and that is that the principles seems to be driven from the story and then generalised. To put it in another way, if I had to pick up these principles and plonk it into any other business, i can, very easily, but does that mean that my old business has suddenly become innovative? Or that innovation starts gushing from each pore? No, obviously not. None of these principles are wrong at all. But at end of the day, people have to keep a a laser eye out on the main business of selling profitably.

Which brings us to the second example, that of Nortel. Nortel did everything that these principles said should be done. It turned its attention to new products, it brought in imaginative thinkers, changed its investment policy, new products were gushing out, strategy was changed, people were let go and new people hired, and so on and so forth. But does this mean that they did wrong? No, just that their basic idea of migrating the firm into a new world of web 2.0 was simply not good enough. It just bombed. As a matter of fact, you could point towards its debt load but then again, they already had $2.6 billion in cash. That again was not enough to save it from going under provided its products were good enough to provide a good cashflow. Which it didn't.

Depending upon which product category you refer to, innovative products have a very high failure rate, ranging from 40% to 90% (as reported in the HBR – June 2006 edition). When you are talking about such a high failure rate, to maintain innovative capability is paramount. You have to dust yourself off and keep on working. In a recent research paper where innovation was studied with respect to Sun, what is normally held to be an innovative company. After one of their products bombed, the researchers coin what is called as Innovation Trauma. This manifests itself by disillusionment, cynicism and contagious demotivation.

So what do you do to improve matters? The researchers suggest that individuals who were championing and pushing innovative products should be given time to disengage from their previous work. Second, they need to conduct post-mortems on the failure to find out why that happened and if they can learn from the results. Third, this postmortem is best if its done collaboratively by the original team or a team of some sort, an innovation anonymous, if you will. Fourth, seed the failure aspects into a new project so that the old failure is uplifted by the excitement of the new project while the new project is calibrated downwards by the caution of the old failed project. Expectations management.

So what do you do? Here’s something that we are trying to do. The British Political system is pushing heavily on the idea that Britain has to become an innovative idea. Pretty good stuff, but how do you deal with innovation? I have recently been invited to join a group on Innovation which will assist in coming up with strategies to improve the UK innovation footprint. It is not easy. Actually, anybody can come up with a good idea. Ideas are dime a dozen, but to get from the idea stage to a company which is stand alone, has some cash in the bank, has a good order book with some good client companies, ah!, now that’s the holy grail.

So what we are hoping to do is to provide that bit of a helping hand from the corporate and government sides. If a small firm does have a good idea, we will get together and try to do two things, (1) try to assist in framing the new idea as something that is innovative in terms of resolving a business problem and (2) try to assist by championing it inside our firms. Obviously no money and all that stuff, but in my experience, innovators fall in love with the idea rather than how it will resolve the problem.

They forget that we are in business to sell (anything, potatoes, widgets, credit cards, etc.) to somebody who can pay for it. Do not want to go into detail, but the idea has to be something that somebody is willing to push his hands into his back pocket and put out money. So despite having great ideas, if you forget the basic elements of selling and making products that will sell, all those innovative ideas will be useless.

Technorati Tags: innovation

Kindling The E-Book Revolution

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 06:53:07 EDT

In the dim and distant past, I have used the Palm Pilot as well as the Sony Clie before as my e-book reader but after having moved to a Blackberry which did my PDA bits, I never could get back to getting an e-book reader. In an ideal situation, if the Blackberry can give me Windows functionality, a very good camera (5-6 MP) and some kind of e-book reader capability, I would be happy. Just one device to carry around, but in the meantime, I either had to read on my laptop or on my home pc.

But recently, on holiday in the USA, I was gifted an Amazon Kindle by my brother-in-law and his sister. This is one of the best gifts one could have hoped for and I immediately started drooling over it.

The Kindle comes in an attractive box, it looks like a book itself. Nice packaging. Something that you can easily plonk into your bookshelf without any issues, looks pretty neat, those letters and symbols floating around?

The package is clipped closed with a rubber band and opening it shows you the kindle on the right and a storage compartment on the left which contains the leather case, the charger, USB cord and the manual.

Took it out, charged it up (see the white charger? shades of Apple?). This was in the USA and I have an amazon.com account. So when I powered it up, it asked me for my amazon.com account, put that in and viola, I was up and running.

Can you see the little round button on the right hand side? looks like a wheel? It is a wheel and click mouse. The lone channel on top of the wheel with a small silver pointer running up and down is the main guidance mechanism. Pressing it brings up a context sensitive menu, you can go to the Kindle Store (I am in the UK, so the wireless network doesnt work, but in the UK, you can subscribe to newspapers, blogs, magazines and the lot, brilliant stuff).

It seamlessly connected to the Amazon.com website via the wireless cellular link, showed me my purchases and recommendations, and so on and so forth.

I did a download for my son and it was again seamless, a chapter came down, he read it and it was quite easy.

As I would be in the UK, I would not be able to connect wirelessly, so have to do the USB business. So I connected to Many Books, a site with free books in kindle and mobipocket format books and downloaded the top 10.

Here's the Count of Monte Cristo e-book. Pretty crisp to read. There are 2 buttons on the right, for next page and back. On the left, there are 2 buttons, back page and next page.

You can change the text size, this is the default big ass size, which I reduced as soon as I could. The battery life is amazing. I have been carrying it around for the past week in India without charging and have read it for about 15 hours now, and the charge meter has rarely shifted. Oh! yes, I did have a problem with it, it froze at one point. But being a good old windows user for a long period of time, simply opened the kindle's back flap, got out my trusted paper clip and gave the reset button a damn good shove. Obviously nothing happened. Still frozen. So swore at it, banged it on the desk, prayed to Ganesh, poked the reset button for 5 seconds and it worked.

I have downloaded the mobipocket creater to convert my e-library to the mobipocket format. The Kindle comes with 200MB of built in memory which is good enough for about 100-150 books, I guess. I have a few CDs full of scanned and downloaded and free and gifted and every weekend, there is a pleasurable time reading and converting those books. There is also a slot for an SD card, where you can store music and additional books if you need, although I dont see the need for it. I use my mobile phone to listen to music.

All in all, a very neat device, very hardworking and rugged (have dropped it, travelled with it jammed in my backpack for 1 week, swore at it, read it in the bog and in the dusty environs of Gurgaon, no problems) and is quite well readable in all angles and lighting.

And yes, you can read this in the bath, you have to be careful, of course, dont drop the thing into the bath, but then, you would not do that to a paper book either, would you? Some drops of water did splash on it, but a simple wipe took care of that. Only quibble? It just doesn't smell the same, but you can annotate and clip away to glory..

Oh!, the screen saver is just brilliant, the images that it throws up are very amazing, old authors, old wood cut impressions of printing presses, exotic and strange word definitions, very good. Good first impression. Anybody who is a logophile and/or a bibliophile would love this.

Technorati Tags: Bibliophilia, Logophilia, Kindle, Reviews

Product Review: Google Chrome - The New New Thing

Aaman Lamba — Tue, 2 Sep 2008 15:47:07 EDT

Google seems to bringing order to its cornucopia of services, slowly yet strategically. Like all grand designs, the emergence of something big wasn't evident in the beginning, perhaps even to the creators. The basic structure remains the same - to provide convenient access to information through an unobtrusive intelligence layer. The services have been layered in, providing essential plumbing to what is evidently an operating system for the always-connected noosphere.

Another critical component was introduced today - the much-awaited Google Chrome web browser. While one might wonder what incremental value yet another browser might provide as an interface, it is the primary means of human-Internet interaction, and played right, could mean a consistent memory layer that brings the Google Mind ever closer to sentience. From a user perspective, there's little to write home about just yet, if one overlooks the relatively new process-independent tab architecture (IE 8 does the same thing, and IE 7+ separates the browser UI and tabs in terms of permissions) and the minimalistic interface. The pain of giving up essential add-ons and workflow steps might mean more than using the next new new thing, but Google is looking beyond the desktop client, even if the first release of Google Chrome is Windows-only.

In a few months or perhaps sooner, it is highly likely Google Chrome will be the front end of Android-based phones. The non-standard Windows UI used in Google Chrome makes sense when one visualizes a small scale equivalent on a mobile phone. The near-instantaneous startup is going to be handy for an always-on interface. Google might go further in terms of bundling services if it didn't have the ghost of Microsoft Anti-Trust in its rear view mirror. As it is, it allows you the option of changing default search engines from Google and Google applications don't seem to be running any differently within Chrome or other browsers, expect perhaps Google Reader. The most-visited sites are a nice touch when opening a new tab, and the ability to slide a tab over others is a neat touch. There does not seem to be torrent download capabilities and I strangely didn't see any auto-discovery of RSS feeds on a website. The setup told me it was importing my Firefox bookmarks, but I don't see them anywhere, and why leave out IE?

JavaScript and CSS rendering appear to be smooth, and performance is good. I noticed five chrome.exe processes in my task manager when I had only three tabs opened, ranging between 20 MB and 42 MB each in terms of memory usage, but a large number of page faults, and minimal bloat over an hour of running. The memory utilization was almost three times that in Mozilla Firefox for a similar load. One simple script in MovableType gave unexpected results, triggering a search when I hit the save button. Pages can fail to be rendered, with an 'Aw Snap!' error that blanks out the tab. Not a nice experience, to be frank.

Incognito Mode, or as it came to be known when Microsoft announced the feature in Internet Explorer 8 - porn mode - is invoked by Ctrl+Shift+N and removes pages browsed from the browser cache and history, and avoids cookies.

For the moment, I'm not going to be giving up any of my current browsers, and it remains to be seen if this new kid on the block lives up to its promises.

The CFO-CIO Crossover, Part III

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 12:30:59 EDT

We spoke about the interesting roles of CFO and CIO and about the development of both roles in the past and the present. In this essay we will look at the future and make some predictions about the cooperation between them.

1. What developments will occur in IT in the next three to five years? If one looks at a standard finance function, then these are the broadly the main chunks: Product Control, Financial Control, Finance Administration, Operations, Mandatory Reporting, Management Reporting, Taxation, ALM, Risk etc. All these areas are going to get impacted by improvements to workflow systems, communication applications, business intelligence systems, reconciliation systems, fraud detection and exception management systems, product control systems, spreadsheet management applications, better reporting cube / data warehouses / data marts, ERM systems, better cost analysis applications, and so on and so forth. One can write a full book on just this question, but those are the application facing bits. There will be huge numbers of finance related changes coming from the internet, the client aspects, the hardware bits, the database bits, the networking parts, the communication channels, the IT people, the service delivery model, and so on and so forth, which is too much to go into now.

2. What issues will arise for finance and accounting in the next three to five years? The main issues which will arise can be divided into the following categories:

(a) future regulatory driven change such as liquidity risk management proposals, contingency funding modelling etc. – this will cause a significant impact, best case scenario – a new regulatory report, worst case scenario – a full-blown Basel II type implementation;

(b) feeding old regulatory changes into BAU such as Basel II – Basel II has been rolled out but it will need more time to bed down and impact BAU aspects such as risk weighted capital allocation and performance evaluation;

(c) hitting barriers to service delivery such as human capacity or process architecture / issues;

(d) sharply increased demands for aggressive capital control and management;

(e) increasing demand for better quality financial intelligence and MIS by the business;

(f) little appetite for errors or operational risk or high emphasis on reputational risk management emanating from financial misstatements or mispricing,

(g) continuing and increasing M&A activity etc.

3. How will these issues and developments impact the CFO/CIO relationship? From a generic basis, as can be seen from the above, the level of technical and technology impact on the CFO is just going to grow and grow and grow. So CFO’s will become much more demanding. Not only that, they will expect CIO’s to take responsibility of BAU activities, something that is not commonly understood and accepted. SOXA approvals by CIO’s have caused a severe issue in terms of how CIO’s see their roles, but if this is going to be extended to other parts of the Finance business, then the CIO will become much more embedded in the BAU Finance Change function. So the impact will be from both sides, pushing each other into each other’s arms. Whether it is a hug or a squish depends upon how open-minded the two executives are.

4. How will the issues change the way IT aligns with business strategy? IT will move up the decision making value chain. Before any changes come down the pipeline, IT will start getting involved, because financial institutions have started to understand the benefit of including IT earlier in the decision making process. The business has started to realise that while they define the strategy, delivery is most often dependent upon IT. So the more they involve IT, the more delivery is improved in lock step. IT has to become proactive as well, in terms of analysing its service delivery model to become far more agile and mobile; in terms of analysing its technology M&A methodology; in terms of its reporting data warehouses; etc.

5. Will IT drive changes in business strategy? Will business strategy changes and external factors (e.g. globalisation) drive changes within IT? Will both occur simultaneously? Will IT drive changes in business strategy? On a corporate level we will see very little of that, but on a line of business level yes we will. I can see and have seen business strategy change because new technology has come forth, such as in trading. For example, expansion of product coverage within the FIX protocol can trigger changes in business strategy by suddenly opening new markets or changing existing markets. Changes in technical market infrastructure, such as addition of a new stock trading platform can trigger and driver changes in strategy. Better risk management and fraud detection technologies can give confidence to managers that they can extend personal loans or credit cards to new customer bases. Will business strategy and external factors drive changes in IT? Of course, completely. And yes, both can and do occur simultaneously.

6. How will these changes play out? Let me bring my tarot card deck, crystal ball and tea leaves cup out. That is to say that anything might be possible.

7. Will these changes have an impact on IT’s influence on the integrity of the financials? Anything that changes IT has a 30-50% chance to impact the integrity of the financials (based very roughly on the proportion of systems impacted by SOXA compared to the non-impacted systems). So that will indicate where we have an issue if any external factor impacts technology.

8. What does the future look like for finance and accounting technology? Very bright. And that is primarily because the finance and accounting arena is and will be hit by a tidal wave of changes from its business clients, regulators, professional bodies (IASB..), and so on and so forth. And massive, rapid and huge change like this is perfect breeding grounds for that perfect storm for technology, it will provide mandatory driven investments, fear, ambition, vagueness, and dreams for results/order where technology loves to breed and innovate

We have spoken about the interesting roles of CFO and about the development of both roles in the past and the present. We have also made some predictions about the developments in the future. One aspect is certain, technology is here to stay. While before a CFO would worry about the professional standards, rules and processes versus the humans who would operationalise them, the CFO has to worry about the technology as well. In many structural ways, technology itself is changing the finance profession and vice versa. The future not only promises to be bright, it promises to be entwined like the proverbial double helix.

Technorati Tags: technology, management, financial institutions

Photo Essay: Worldwide Photo Walk, Bangalore

Tanay Behera — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:47:06 EDT

Last Saturday morning offered perfect weather for going out and capturing a few moments of Bangalore city through camera clicks. I, along with other shutterbugs, made full use of this opportunity as we participated in the Bangalore leg of the Worldwide Photo Walk. The Photo Walk was held to mark the release of Adobe Lightroom, a photography software application developed by Adobe. Bangalore was the only city in India where this was talking place, apart from the other 192 cities across the world.

There was no planned agenda for the walk and it was quite informal. We all started the event at around 7:30 A.M. from Mayo Hall, one of the prominent landmarks in Bangalore. Then we clip-clopped on the Residency Road. On our journey we were free to capture anything and everything in our camera lenses.

I was in a mood to make some bio-scopic compositions, even though I was walking down a road heavily masked with glitz shopping malls. Bangalore's old memories are fading very fast, both in the physical environment and in the social atmosphere. That's a logical outcome of economic growth, so better capture those in pictures before they are reduced to dust.

Just a decade ago, anyone could walk down the narrow alleyways and sip a cup of coffee or tea for one rupee or so. But today rusted locks adorn the entrance doors of these neighborhood tea/coffee houses. The once sleepy get together places have given way to a cosmopolitan shopping juggernaut.

Something is definitely lost, for a few its for the better, while for the rest, its for the worse. The city's populace is no longer nostalgic about the remnants and with an urge to modernize fast, the Government and the builders have gutted the city's very soul.

Bangalore and traffic jams are synonymous. The intensity of the blockage varies with the time period of the day. Even though the day had just started, there were long queues of two-wheelers parked near the road.

Construction sites are a common sight but what really adheres to one's vision is the vibrant life visible on the streets. Like this one, a cobbler mending and polishing shoes, sitting on a tiled pathway by the side of the road, enjoying the cacophony of the traffic in front of him.

Today, the city that is bursting at the seams is home to people from so many different strata of life, each seemingly a different world of its own. Some enjoy food in the elegant and refined restaurants that have mushroomed in the cities and some are happy with the food that a make-shift stall owner provides.

Who cares as long as its food?

This way the walk continued and many eyes in the traffic were settled on me and few of my fellow shutterbugs. Since there were few foreigners in our group, the autowallas thought that we were tourists, exploring the city over the weekend and approached us with invites to take us on a paid tour of the city. It was around 11 A.M. that we finally decided to put an end to the walk. All of us gathered in the Mocha restaurant where many had late breakfast amidst passionate discussions about the snaps that each had taken.

All in all a refreshing way to spend four hours of a weekend, walking down the narrow streets and capturing life in pictures. By the way, were these snaps, Ok?

You can check the photos taken by all the participants in the event here.