IDT Partners is pleased to publish
Big Data for Investment Research Management, a white paper focused on a big-data-based Research Management System built by IDT Partners for a financial client. The IDT Partner’s solution helped the client  achieve the following:

• 8,000% Larger Dataset
• 500% Faster Data Processing
• 100% ROI within 12 months
• 20% Increase in Operational Efficiency
• Improved User Interface (UI) & Reporting
• Automated Trend Spotting & Monitoring

Download the white paper to learn more about this solution:

For additional information or to learn more about IDT Partner’s capabilities contact info@idtpartners.com

IDT Partners is looking for talented people to join the team.

Our employees have done work for world’s leading companies and have developed products, platforms, and solutions used by millions of people globally.

IDT Partners values entrepreneurship and collaboration in a fast-paced environment. We are a small result-driven organization with focus on empowering employees to do what they do best. We offer flexible work hours, a choice of either working remotely or from our New York City office. IDT provides an environment that fosters individual development, facilitates collaboration and teamwork.

Current Job Openings:

• Sales Executive (Multiple openings in NYC, Boston, and San Fracisco)
• Senior PHP5 / LAMP Developer (NYC or Remote)
• Senior .NET Developer & Solutions Architect (NYC or Remote)
• Project Manager / Producer (NYC)
• Internship – Creative, Technology, or Client Services (NYC)

Thanks to Mongo’s improved profiler, you now can also make more sense of the logs. I highly recommend using a profile viewer called Professor (written in Python and Flask by one of the 10gen developers).

Upgrade to MongoDB 2.0 in 9 steps

# 1. start mongo if it's not already running
/etc/init.d/mongod start

# 2. make a backup of the existing collections
mongodump

# 3. stop mongo
/etc/init.d/mongod stop

# 4. remove the previous version
rpm -e mongodb mongodb-server

# 5. add one of the following yum repos
vi /etc/yum.repos.d/10gen.repo

	# 64-bit
	[10gen]
	name=10gen Repository
	baseurl=http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/redhat/os/x86_64
	gpgcheck=0
# OR
	# 32-bit
	[10gen]
	name=10gen Repository
	baseurl=http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/redhat/os/i686
	gpgcheck=0

# 6. update all packages and install the new version of MongoDB
yum update
yum install mongo-10gen
yum install mongo-10gen-server

# 7. start the mongo service
/etc/init.d/mongod start

# 8. restore from the dump
mongorestore

# 9. confirm version 2.0 & restored backups via the mongo cli
mongo
show dbs

# set the tcp segmentation offload to off
sudo ethtool -K eth0 tso off
# verify that it’s off
sudo ethtool -k eth0

Google+ should Help Google Address its Facebook & Twitter Problem

Prior to Google+, Google had faced serious competition for ad dollars and search with two rivals that had created a walled garden with massive amounts of social / user-generated content. Both Facebook and Twitter were growing like a weed and Google was unable to index the user-generated content within these walled gardens in order to improve its search & ad businesses. Now, thanks to Google’s social efforts with Google+, the company will be able to both significantly improve its search advertising platform by leveraging the Google+ user-generated content for improved targeting and to provide more relevant and real-time search results by integrating a social layer into search and its search ranking algorithms.

At its core, Google+ is comparable to Facebook with a few important improvements. One such improvement in particular — the ability to add people to circles without their permission — will help Google address the Twitter problem. The ability to add anyone to your circles allows users to “follow” anyone just like on Twitter. This makes Twitter less useful given that you can now have nearly identical functionality within a Facebook-like social network.

Google+ renders Facebook and Twitter less useful by allowing people to do similar functions plus a few more fun things such as Hangouts and Huddle — all in a single place. Provided that Google succeeds with making Google+ a hit (having a 200M+ Gmail user base should help with that), starts innovating at a rapid pace, and counteract innovation from the competition in  a timely fashion, both Facebook and Twitter should become less of a problem for the company long term.

Possible Improvements to the Circles & Contact Management

Google+ uses Gmail to help users populate their social graph. This is great for over 200 million Gmail users given that you don’t have to start from scratch. However, the social graph creation and maintenance process could be much easier to manage if Google+ supported nested circles and an ability to de-dupe contacts on the fly without having to manually go through all your contacts in Gmail. Otherwise, given a few thousand or even a few hundred contacts, it’s tough to first organize everyone into a single level of circles and then use these limited single-level groups to disseminate information to your social graph.

Moreover, it is quite frustrating to manage contacts with multiple records/email addresses given that there is no ability to see the actual email addresses for each record within the ”suggestions” box for the circle contacts. Meaning that when you add duplicate contacts, you may send multiple content emails or invites to the same person.

Comments on Recent Glitches & SPAM

In addition to the recent privacy issues, Google+ had an issue with SPAM yesterday. Google+ had sent multiple copies of the same invites due to a technical glitch. Google’s SVP of Social had posted a note about it this weekend:

“Please accept our apologies for the spam we caused this afternoon. For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications. Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes.  – Vic Gundotra“

The above technical glitch is to be expected since the product is still in beta and is not available to the general public. However, it’s also a bit odd given that Google obviously has quite a bit of expertise with systems monitoring and capacity planning. I’m guessing that Google+ significantly exceeded Google’s best-case scenario capacity plans due to a huge demand for the new product and /or that Google+ team wasn’t able to put proper capacity plans and systems monitoring in place due to a premature product release. The latter could possibly be attributed to the the fact that under its new CEO, Larry Page, Google is now trying to bring new products to market much faster by releasing half-finished products into closed beta much earlier than Google would under Eric Schmidt.

Existing Google Product Integration into Google+

It’s exciting to see the various existing standalone Google products getting rolled up into Google+. Picasa and Blogger are getting phased out as standalone products and are getting integrated as Photos and Blogs within Google+.  These product integrations should allow Google+ to better compete with Facebook Photos and WordPress / Tumblr.

Google is fighting a battle on quite a few fronts right now and it looks like Google+ is poised to help Google better position itself in the social networking space. Google+ rollout is clearly a significant milestone for Google and I wish Vic Gundotra and the Google Social team success!

Start Your Own Circle of Trust

Though Google is downplaying this new product roll out and their marketing refers to Google+ simply as “a few new thoughts on sharing”, this is a major milestone for Google and it is a part of their bigger strategy to combat Facebook. Specifically, Facebook had passed Goolge in “time spent on site” for the first time ever in August 2010.


In less than a year since then, Facebook had gained momentum and has left Google in the dust.

 

This is one of the reasons why Google+ needs to be a success for Google (unlike other half baked products like Google Buzz). From what I’ve seen thus far, I think Google+ has a fighting chance against Facebook. It will be interesting to see how this plays out for the “time spent on site” comScore metric for the two sites in the next 12 months.

Over the past 14 years, I’ve helped build and launch over 30 B2B and B2C products, which have generated billions of dollars across half a dozen industries. Throughout my career, I’ve nearly always been involved in the product development process. First, starting out as a developer, and eventually wearing the product development / management hat while serving as a director and then as a CTO at various companies.

Through the years, I’ve come across a number of organizations that have tried to bring new products to market without following any standard product development practices & processes. Unsurprisingly, more than 65% of all new products are commercial failures.

For example, some organizations are often driven by a belief that if a handful of customers are asking for a new product or if a competitor has a new product that’s well received by their customers then, the  new comparable product/service/ feature should just be built after doing some minimal due diligence & internal checks. This often leads to products that could be well received by the clients but have unsustainable margins, may result in cannibalization of existing services & offerings, and poor overall ROI.

Another example might be organizations that get carried away with the “big idea”, where one or more senior executives have a grand product vision and do not follow any standard product development processes. For example, an organization may fail to solicit customer feedback during the concept development and testing phase based on a very strong belief in their big idea and some positive internal feedback. This often results in customers finding severe issues with the product at launch and may cause irreparable damage to the company and/or product’s reputation.

The following is an 8-step New Product Development Process Guideline that has worked well for me in the past and has been used by numerous organizations to successfully launch new products.

New Product Development Process

1. Ideation
   Idea generation.
2. Screening
   Idea screening to eliminate unsound concepts.
3. Concept Development & Testing
   Develop marketing & engineering details, collect customer feedback.
4. Business Analysis
   Customer feedback on pricing, sales & profitability estimation.
5. Market & Beta Testing
   Prototype, beta & customer acceptance testing.
6. Technical Implementation
   Plan & build.
7. Commercialization
   Launch & market.
8. Product Pricing
   Assess portfolio impact, internal/external value & cost analysis, financial forecasting.

The above steps are a guideline. Each step should be expanded to encompass sub-steps as required for specific products by your product organization.
Additional Notes:

Product Development / Management @ Google

See Google Product Development / Management Process presentation by  Marissa Mayer. Though this presentation was given in 2003, it is still relevant today and has a number of good ideas for any product organization. Quote: “Formula:  Smart people + creative environment + outlet for ideas = innovation”.

Book Recommendation

For more information on the subject, I highly recommend a great book by Karl Ulrich titled Product Design and Development.

Charts:

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/SQL+to+Mongo+Mapping+Chart
http://cheat.errtheblog.com/s/mongo

Quick MongoDB Facts:

• Written in C++
• License: AGPL (Drivers: Apache)
• Custom, binary (BSON) protocol
• Master/slave replication support
• JavaScript query expressions
• Better update-in-place than CouchDB
• Horizontal Scalability (sharding built-in)
• Uses memory mapped files for data storage
• Best used for dynamic queries and evolving schema/columns
• Performance over features

Apple had unveiled iPad2 last week,  proclaiming 2011 the year of the iPad2. The analysts and tech bloggers alike have since declared iPad2 the tablet winner for the foreseeable future, with no real competition. The new version of the tablet will be available online and in stores in the US starting this Friday, March 11th.

The 100+ other tablets on the market don’t come close in terms of the user experience, the price point, or the ecosystem offering (iTunes / App Store). Note that Apple had thus far paid out $2,000,000,000 to App developers. All other ecosystems pale in comparison with developers typically developing apps for iOS first and foremost.

Weak PC Sales Outlook

Apple’s Halo Effect

The PC market will further take a hit due to continued Apple’s halo effect, where customers that purchase an Apple device such as an iPod also tend to purchase additional Apple devices (iPads, iPhones, Macs, etc) due to ease of use and dependency on the Apple’s ecosystem. The Mac install base has been growing year after year and this trend is likely to continue as well for the same reason.

The Browser Wars & Safari Market Share

From 1996 through 2002, Netscape had lost its market dominance to Internet Explorer, dropping from 85% to 0% in less than 7 years. More recently, the “Other” browser category, which includes Safarai and Chrome, has been growing and is likely to become more significant in the coming years.

Safari market share is currently estimated to be 6.36%.

The increased number of Apple devices and continued cannibalization of the PC market will likely translate to significant growth for Safari market share as people switch from Internet Explorer on PCs to Safari on iPads.

Furthermore, Firefox is likely to continue to lose market share to Chrome, meaning that the browser wars will likely shift in 2011-2012 from Microsoft vs. Mozilla to a four way battle of Microsoft vs. Mozilla vs. Apple vs. Google, with Microsoft and Mozilla losing ground to Apple and Google.

Thanks to the extraordinary success of Apple’s iPad, Apple’s Safari is likely to have the most significant relative percentage gain in browser market share  in 2011-2012, making it a must for cross-browser testing for web application developers that have thus far been ignoring Safari (many major banks still don’t support Safari).

The patent covering the basic concept of iris recognition expired in 2005, opening the door for new companies to develop their own technology. And now, the 1994 patent covering iris recognition automation is scheduled to expire this year, according to the website of the National Science and Technology Council. A number of small private companies are now working on commercializing the technology and the first customers / adapters of this technology are likely to be the military, the government and the private security firms.

The advertising companies are likely to follow suit as well. I’ve previously written about the potential use of this technology for interactive indoor and outdoor advertising, which now seems one step closer to being  possible thanks to continued development and innovation of iris-based biometric technology.