Daniel Brookshier's Blog

Deployment Archives

Save P2P by stopping the INDUCE Act.

I just received an email from Ray Gao of P2PJournal.com. Apparently the lobbyists are at it again. This time your MP3 player is at risk. This also opens the door to a lot of other anti-P2P shenanigans from other companies. The INDUCE Act is just plain bad to the bone.

But first, let me say that I am 100% legal. I don't steal music. I buy a lot in fact (you gotta see my iTunes bill). Stealing is stealing. But the music industry wants to stamp out fair use. That's why I am hot about this issue.

Please take a look at this anti-P2P bill currently being proposed at the congress. And, sign the petition oppose it. Tell your congressman that this bill should not become a law.

I just sent a free fax from the site urging my reps in Congress to stop the INDUCE Act. Convincing even a single Senator will force a real debate on the bill.

Check out: www.savetheipod.com which will allow you to fax congress with a few clicks (I used auto form fill on my browser to do most of the work).

www.savetheipod.com has more info about the INDUCE Act and a form to fax your Senators and Representative. It only takes a few seconds to send a fax and it is really important that we respond to this legislation quickly.

Take a look at www.savethe.com for more information and details on the lobbyists and specific congressmen that are paid to be lobbyists lapdogs.

JavaOne - Day Three - More friends, JXTA, epackaging of an app server and open source

Greetings!

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them - Albert Einstein

I got to attend Brad Neuberg's tech session on P2P Sockets and Paper Airplane. Paper Airplane is a Mozilla plugin written with JXTA. It is a great example of extending a known metaphore into the P2P world. Brad talked about a shared Wiki and other services like SOAP via the JXTA network. Check out http://p2psockets.jxta.org/ and http://paperairplane.dev.java.net/ for more info. I really think this is a great way of doing things. There is a freedom from servers and a freedom to communicate. There are a few things to work out, but Brad has a lot of great ideas in this area that need to be explored.

Email==Face

Got to meet more people today. From the JXTA community, to my book readers, to business customers. Most I have never seen or talked to except via email. Some of these people have been emailing me for years and this is the first time I have seen them in person. JavaOne is getting to be a watering hole where everyone meets. Forget the sessions, it's about meeting the smart people of the world in person.

UML

I also got to teach a short class on UML today for NoMagic and ExitCertified (Sun's education partner). I had room full of people willing to learn UML and we had some fun too. Speaking of UML, I overheard someone say that the white-board is the best place to do UML. All I have to say is that is misleading. Using a white-board to think about a design is nice, but you need to capture the design for the long run. A white-board can't be emailed to your customer. A white-board can't be filed away to be referenced years later by a maintenance developer. You can't edit the same white-board to change the design over the course of ten years of maintenance. Use tools, free or otherwise and be a professional.

Creating an Artificial Einstein with JXTA

One of the more visionary people I met today (well... yesterday because it is now 2:00am) was Jeff Zhuk of ITS Inc. Jeff is using Open CYC and JXTA to create a distributed knowledge system and expert system. How cool is that? I have done similar things, but Jeff is going for a massive solution that integrates thousands of people to build an expert system via peer to peer computing. In addition, Jeff teaches Java, JXTA, and JINI. He has all the pieces and is looking for help.

Einstein and Java Enterprise Server

Spent the morning at Sun looking at Java Enterprise System (JES). JES is a new way to deploy and license the infrastructure of an internet business. Sounds innovative, but I would say it just shows that there are finally some smart people at Sun thinking about doing things right. JES is built on the idea that most portals are really built of a dozen or so applications like the portal application framework, web server, application server, calendar, email, instant messaging, LDAP, single sign on and many others. All of these pieces are usually put together one at a time and with a lot of work dedicated to getting them to actually work as a single unit. My past is littered with the with the wasted and long hours or complete failures because of applications not mixing well. What Sun has done is create a clean integration of all of these tools that runs smoothly and is tested as a unit to discover integration problems. The end result is a lot of the core business software is up and ready to use in a few hours. Think about the Integration of all the software components that make up the infrastructure. They are like building an airplane from little pieces and a blueprint. Instead, JES is a fully assembled and tested Lear Jet.

Like I said, not really innovative, but it takes a lot of work and politics to integrate all your standalone products into a single install, with a single interface for management, and one application to license, and get maintenance agreements on. My hat is off to the guy that proposed such a departure in the Sun way of doing business.

But now to the second part of the innovation of JES that might give JBoss a run for their money. The JES set of componenets in the common install management tools is available with a cool procing model. Think about having it all with a portal application framework, web server, application server, calendar, email, instant messaging, LDAP, single sign on and many others for just $100 a year per full time employee. This is just the business model for pricing and not some magic number that is part of the CPU count, the number of gigabytes of storage, email accounts, your first born child, and a chariot that turns into a pumpkin at midnight. The key is that this is just a way to price the system, it is not the price for the number of actual users. This just buys support for the tool and your software updates.

This is more cool and obvious if we look at a company that has 100 employees for a cost of 1000*$100 (it is free up to 99 employees but there is no maintenance). Now even though the company bought the 1000 employee license, they can have a million customers and their 1000 employees use the system without any additional costs(except for the pesky hardware). A good example is Google with 5,000 employees and 7 million customers would only need to pay for the 5,000 employee license. The economies of scale look like open source with maintenance.

The tools are all based on open standards, not open source. Seeing and modifying code is not an option. But when you have a good maintenance agreement, the risk and cost of maintaining open source verses a maintenance contract is about the same or better since most of the components are usually used as is and not customized. Because they are tested as a suite, there is even less need for the IT department to be fiddling with code that should be considered infrastructure rather than custom applications. Of course this is still a modular system and you can swap out almost any piece with an open source or commercial alternative (like the application server).

Is Sun really a winner with JES? Hard to say at this point. They have happy customers so far with the first release and a model that is hard to ignore. The application server and all those component parts are newly rewritten and running fast and seem scalable. They could be a market leader in their own J2EE market. Really! Stranger things have happened. Stay tuned.

One more day

One day to go here at JavaOne. Time to pull out all the stops and meet as many people as you can and collect ideas and business cards. Make friends, learn from them, and help them as much as you can. We are all in this together and we are a community. Get out there and make the Java world a better place!

Peer-to-Peer, JXTA, and Making a Lot of Money with Virul Marketing

.

Viral Marketing with JXTA

Viral marketing is a concept used in marketing and sales that describes how adoption of a product occurs and how it can be coerced to spread like a virus. Very simply, viral markets are those where one purchaser infects friends and acquaintances with their enthusiasm for a product or other wise causes them to use the product because it is required by the first person. Viral markets are coveted because they can create huge profits in a very short time.

The Viral License

With most software, you buy a single license. If it is a networked application, you can only interact with people that have bought a similar license. In open source, we just download the application, so there is no barrier caused by reluctant buyers. If you look at all the network applications that are widely distributed by commercial companies, they are all free to avoid this same problem. For example the chat applications like Yahoo, AIM, and MS Messenger. But what about commercial applications? How do you get people to buy enough copies so that there is a large group of interconnected users?

An alternative to selling a user a single license, is to sell several that they have the right to distribute to acquaintances, family, and coworkers. For example, have 3 to 5 licenses as your standard package rather than just one, In fact, never let a customer buy just one copy.

The Power of Giving

You are more likely to install a piece of software if a friend bought you a license. It is a gift. People accept gifts. Compare this to a single license. If your friend buys a chat program, you must also buy a copy to chat with them. That’s not a gift, that’s a burden that your friend is imposing on you. You will resist purchasing a copy because it is not your idea and the chat application may not interest you too much. As a gift however, you will willingly install it and try it out. If it does turn out to be useful, you may buy a copy for your other friends.

This type of license is a great way to push the other products because it only takes one person to bring in many others who in turn bring even more. This also improves the local share networking by getting the original licensee to get his friends to install the product as soon as they purchase it. That way network optimizations happen during installation. You can up-sell the secondary licensees by disabled functionality or just let them add 5 packs to share with their friends for a few bucks a pop.

Let’s look at the economics. This is buying in bulk, so the prices are smaller. Who is doing most of the work, the buyer. That means you are not working to sell 5 licenses for instance, instead one license pack to a guy that has 5 friends or coworkers. In fact those other licenses are possibly going to people that would never use the product and would probably not buy a license for themselves. But not you have 4 guys for the effort of one, You also have 4 people that have more friends. Economics? The economics are the cost of a single transaction for 5 users and free marketing. Of course, this also means there are possibly 4 people that know 4 people “each” or 16 people. Those 16 know 4 each for a total of 64 which leads to 1024 users and so on into the millions. That is a lot of sales for the infection of just one person if the application is compelling enough. That is very economical on a grand scale!

Small Worlds

This a model described by the small world theory. The world is made up of a web of interconnected people. Simply, the network of relationships links us all together. But small world theory says that the links between any two people averages out to about 6 hops on a chain of people that know the prior and the next person. The implication is that given something that can travel this network, the entire network will be saturated very quickly. If the whole world is connected by an average of 6 steps, I should be able to sell to the entire population after reaching 6 steps away from my original buyer.

A Real Virus

It is the same for very virulent contagious diseases. The more contagious, the faster it will infect the population. The fact that a large number will be infected is caused by the network which passes the disease from node to node or person to person because of the relationships whether it be friends, coworkers, or even customers and clients or merchants.

We can take advantage of the interconnections and the forward purchase of licenses to walk the network of relationships to populate the network based on the one-to-one connections between people. This also ensures a purchase for a group by selling to a singe person rather than having to sell everyone. Once the other users have it and are addicted, they buy licenses to interact with their other friends, family, and coworkers. By having a license pack rather than a single license, the network can grow at an exponential rate because it forces adoption both by original seed purchasers that were not a part of the network and by those that are given a license, but buy more to expand the reach to their own circle of acquaintances.

Did I mention that I study marketing, sales, and persuasion psychology along with P2P and JXTA? To survive in today’s economy it helps to think like Leonardo DaVinci. This is about leveraging a small set of facts to create a larger truth. And like many of DaVini’s inventions, the solution is based on a study of nature,

Viral Ideas

The world is a network. JXTA lets you write applications that live in the network. Always keep in mind that the power of P2P is not just about the improvements for users, but the improvements in how you can use that very same network to grow its self.

As part of your social network, you now know who I am and how I think. Ideas are infectious. Pass this one on and tell your friends that Daniel says, hi.

Daniel Brookshier is a freelance technology writer and JXTA Consultant. Daniel can be reached at Turbogeek@cluck.com.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.