Web 2.0

Proud to share that one of our team member, Krishna Chaitanya, was recently selected as a Most Valuable Professional (Internet Explorer) for the year 2011 by Microsoft. He was selected for his "technical expertise and contributions to the developer community".  This status was awarded to him for his contributions such as presentations and blog articles, and participation in the product group discussions related to web browsers, (JavaScript/jQuery/DOM, AJAX, web standards etc.)

The pride is, essentially, in the fact that he is the only Indian in a list of 14 MVPs from across the world for the year 2011. Krishna recently received a plaque and some memorabilia from Microsoft to announce his inclusion.

Continue reading "A Moment of Pride for a Team Member and the Team (of course)" »

Posted by Dr Ajay Kolhatkar at 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's a new era. Brought on by a technology that blurs the line between what's real and what's virtual. Introducing, SONAR (Social Networking and Augmented Reality based Retail) - a platform that combines three worlds: the physical, virtual and social. For success in the age of digital marketing, SONAR should be on your radar.

SONAR is a patent pending software platform, which is a combination of three worlds: physical world, virtual world and the social world. We built SONAR as an innovation demonstrator for retail enterprises who want to provide immersive customer experiences. As part of this, we conducted detailed exercises based on design thinking principles including storyboarding, user studies, design, prototype, beta testing and iteratively building the system. Augmented Reality (AR) intersperses vision with computer generated information, superimposed on the user's view. AR combines the physical world and an interactive, three-dimensional virtual world. Augmented reality adds graphics and sounds to the natural world as it exists. It is a technology which blurs the line between what's real and what's computer-generated by enhancing what we see, hear, and feel. Augmented Reality has the potential to enable natural interactions and immersive user experiences by blending physical and virtual worlds. This provides users with experiences not possible in just the real or virtual worlds.

SONAR is an effort to build future ICT systems which offer immersive user experiences for retail customers. Retailers are seeking answers to issues such as differentiating user experience on their points of interaction, increasing reach to the consumer, improving conversion rates on the website, sustaining consumer loyalty, etc. In several such areas, emerging interaction technologies such as AR can make a significant difference. New interaction technologies such as AR can help retailers find answers to some of these pressing needs. Given below is a screenshot of the system. Feel free to share your feedback and write to us if you need more information on SONAR.

Posted by Dr. Jai Ganesh at 2:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Facebook F8 conference is an yearly event hosted by Facebook, to bring developers & entreprenuers together to build the social web. With the previous events announcing the Social graph & Facebook Connect, the 2010 F8 (21st April, 2010) had big news for the evolution of social web, briefly:

• The Graph API
• oAuth 2.0 based authorization
• Social plugins
• The Open Graph protocol.

Continue reading "Programming the Social Web with Facebook's Open Graph API" »

Posted by Guest at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As mentioned in the previous post, I attended the W3C India Office opening event and a conference on Internationalization and Standardization associated with this event, which was organized by the Technology Development in Indian Language (TDIL) of the Department of Information Technology, GOI on 6th and 7th of May , 2010. While the opening of the India office was an occasion for which several folks from W3C, including the newly appointed CEO Dr. Jeffery Jaffe came to India, the focus of the event was primarily on the standardization and internationalization of the standards pertaining to web, mobile telephony as well as Indian language computing. Details of this conference and event are available at the W3C India site.  What follows is a quick review of the two day proceedings of the conference.

Continue reading "Update on W3C India Office Opening Event" »

Posted by Dr Ajay Kolhatkar at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As mentioned in an earlier blog on CISTM2009 I would like to talk about some interesting discussions on the topic of Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing. The track was chaired by Dr. Jai Ganesh and I was one of the panelist on this discussion. The third panelist was Prof. Rahul Singh, of the North Carolina University at Greensboro.

The discussion started off by Jai describing our take on the intersection of Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing. He elaborated on one of the basic tenets of Web 2.0 viz Web as a Platform and discussed how this connects with the concept of cloud computing. He highlighted the merging of software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) leading to computing resources available as and when someone needed them.

Continue reading "Learning from CISTM 2009 - Cloud Computing" »

Posted by Dr Ajay Kolhatkar at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), 2009 was recently held in San Francisco. The conference was themed as 'The Golden Gate to the Future of IS (Information Systems)'. As part of the research group at Infosys, from the Web 2.0 Research Lab Dr. Jai Ganesh and I chaired three mini-tracks in this conference. These were:

The overall conference was replete with variety of parallel tracks including those on Design Theory,  Analytical Modeling and Simulation, Decision Support Systems, diffusion of IT, eBusiness and eCommerce, Enterprise Systems all the way to Social issues of IT.

Continue reading "AMCIS 2009" »

Posted by Dr Ajay Kolhatkar at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was recently involved in couple of panel discussions on Web Accessibility as well as Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing at the CISTM 2009 held at MDI Gurgaon. Sharing some quick learning from those discussions.

The first discussion focused on whether Web 2.0 poses challenges for web accessibility. The panelist were Rahul Gonsalves, a trained designer and a usability and accessibility enthusiast; Dinesh Kaushal, a lead developer at an accessibility solutions organisation and himself a developer of screen reader enabled for Indian languages; and yours truly. I believe that the topic was interesting for most people attending the conference. I say this because although the discussion started at a late hour and went on till almost 7:30 PM, we had a good audience which was very inquisitive and interacted actively. We primarily discussed what and why of web accessibility, some business considerations for making the web accessible and legal regulations around the world that necessitated equal accessibility for everyone. The participants were so involved in the discussion that we barely touched upon the aspects of Web 2.0 posing a challenge to accessibility.

Continue reading "Learning from CISTM 2009" »

Posted by Dr Ajay Kolhatkar at 2:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The seventh annual Conference on Information Science Technology and Management (CISTM 2009) is being held from 13th until 15th July 2009 at the Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, India. The schedule of the event is available here. We will be chairing two panel discussions at this conference.

Dr. Jai Ganesh will be chairing a discussion on 'Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing'. In this discussion we will explore the complementarities as well as points of intersection between the principles of Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing.  

I will be leading another discussion on "Does Web 2.0 Challenge Accessibility?" This discussion will bring to fore some of the challenges posed by Web 2.0 technologies for people with different abilities and debate the adequacy of regulations as well as technological solutions to address these challenges. Other panelists for this discussion include an independent accessibility consultant as well as a leading technology developer in the field of screen readers.

Posted by Dr Ajay Kolhatkar at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Most modern enterprises are in the rush towards understanding & rolling out social media to help with their marketing efforts or to reduce support costs (among others). Most of this effort is in figuring out where to set up a blog, or communities. Companies pay little or no attention to who does the blogging and commenting - in fact they're grateful that someone volunteers!

 

Continue reading "'DMV' for enterprise social media?" »

Posted by Akash Bhatia at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the last couple of weeks I had two people urge me to go and read Groundswell. So I did. If you haven't already, I would recommend it.

In summary, it's probably the closest thing to a road map for implementing Enterprise 2.0 in companies (although to their credit, they don't call it that).

It's chock full of data (some of which will surprise you) and case studies. It also makes concrete recommendations how to evaluate what's the best strategy for a company (should we do a blog, an open forum or a video on You Tube). And best of all, the language the use (for the most part) is clear (focussed on business value not technology) and practical (always refreshing).

Continue reading "Groundswell: A game plan for Enterprise 2.0?" »

Posted by Akash Bhatia at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

By Ajay Kolhatkar

Here is an interesting experience shared by one of the attendees at the same conference. The person represented a respected foods and beverages company and also talked about the restriction on social media usage in their corporate office. He talked about how a senior product manager, who was required to comment on a blog about their product, had to rush to the nearest Starbucks outlet to access the social media website since it was inaccessible from within their corporate network.

Continue reading "More Experiences from The Conference Board Meeting" »

Posted by Guest Author at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Ajay Kolhatkar 

The earlier post is a good example of what is not a blog.. It obviously didn't come out as one had expected it to be. It reads more like a news article, or for that matter even an "advertorial". While the intention was to share one's experience in sharing the Infosys research with senior folks from Fortune 1000 organizations, it does seem to have converted into a news article and lost that personal sharing tone. I was actually talking about this kind of a faux pas in the same workshop. Some attendees of the workshop talked about how some of their employees can not make out the difference between a news insert and a blog and I had said that if we approach blogosphere with the same mindset as that of a PR and Corporate Communications these kind of blunders are bound to happen. And just to prove me right, they happened with me.

Anyways lessons learnt and we are ready to move ahead. This time I would like to share some questions raised and discussions around the same.

Continue reading "Practice Before You Preach" »

Posted by Guest Author at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Infosys recently co-hosted a meeting of The Conference Board in New York on March 13,, 2008. The meeting, co-chaired by Peter McLaughlin from Corporate Marketing, was a day-long congregation of senior communications executives from Fortune 500 companies across Cosmetics and Personal Care, Financial Services, Telecom, IT, Transportation and Logistics, Consumer Goods, Energy and Utilities, and Educational Services industries.

Dr. Ajay Kolhatkar from Web 2.0 Research Lab, SETLabs presented our research in the area of Web 2.0 Metrix. He briefly covered the impact of emerging web technologies on enterprises and then went on to explain the Web 2.0 Metrix.  

The presentation focused on Web 2.0 Metrix, a patent pending  approach of benchmarking the Web 2.0 initiatives across enterprises. The Web 2.0 Metrices are based on three high level parameters of Content, Collaboration and Commerce. These parameters are further broken into sub parameters that capture Web 2.0 features. A scoring model is used to arrive at a composite score for each of the primary parameters.

Continue reading "Infosys Web 2.0 Metrix shared at The Conference Board NY meet" »

Posted by Guest Author at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With the penetration of internet getting deeper, changing demographics (exposure to the internet at a very early age), the advent of mobile computing and the changing social hang-outs - the models for learning and education are changing. The Web 2.0 based technologies are going to have a significant impact in influencing this. While traditional classrooms may continue, the percentage of learning done from the classroom is shrinking. The social hang-out and the collaborative learning models will shape the learning tools and techniques of the future. Ask a new employee on any topic the first thing that comes to mind is “wikipedia”. The next thing is “communities of practice”. This calls for a paradigm shift in the way HR managers approach employee learning, its impact on productivity and how to leverage IT to provide for this learning experience, and also importantly measure its effectiveness.

Continue reading "Learning 2.0" »

Posted by Tushar Sachdev at 8:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

For many Gurus who keep evaluating the scope and practicality of agile Web 2.0 in the structured Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) space – here is a scoop!

Some of the biggest drivers of Enterprise Architecture are standardization and communication of services and infrastructure on an ongoing basis. So while there could be excellent and detailed plans from Business Architecture to Application, Information, System and infrastructure architecture – EA is desperately in need for tools to drive communication and adoption.

A few early corporate pilots have seen tremendous benefit from using Web 2.0 capabilities of tagging, knowledge and expert identification (Diggs), RSS for communication but most of all Wikis for online templates and procedures that drive utilization through availability. One company found new subject matter experts they did not know they had!

So while Web 2.0 might not be the end all for Enterprise Architecture – it sure is helping a lot.

Keep looking for more practical and fun experiences.

Posted by Sohrab Kakalia at 6:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think with Web 2.0 technologies, the Enterprise can open up a whole new set of implementations, which in the past were expensive, time-consuming and difficult to justify from an ROI stand-point. Web 2.0 technology today, with its simplicity in implementation can enable organizations to do things quickly and cost effectively. For example a Collaborative Innovation network.

Continue reading "Web 2.0 and the Enterprise - Part 2" »

Posted by Tushar Sachdev at 3:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There is so much talk on Web 2.0 and bringing it to the enterprise. These talks vary from the different technologies that are helping the enterprise achieve this to what different organizations are doing around it. The information is large, varied and instead of making life simpler for a CIO/CTO, I think it ends up leaving them with too much to absorb and decide.

Continue reading "Web 2.0 and the Enterprise" »

Posted by Tushar Sachdev at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)