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What's New, Winter 1999 – 2000

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind (beef!)
Our pal RadioSara knows for sure her favorite hacker has a crush on her. She gave her cell phone to her best friend, who put it in CAST mode while talking to the hacker. RadioSara heard every word of the good news by simply picking up the handset of her home phone and listening to their chat.

It got better. The cell phone was also in COPY mode. So the entire conversation was stored to a RAM/Stick plugged into the cell phone's SWAPslot. After the hacker finished jabbering, the two girls got together and popped the RAM/Stick into their laptop's SWAPslot. (Their laptop does CAST and COPY, too, but the cell phone could be out of sight in a purse. For Christmas, they want their own CAST-COPY PDAs with global positioning.)

They fired up StudioMaster4GRRLZ, a tasty software multitracking nonlinear media editor, and ripped the conversation off the Stick, mixing their voices in along with the hacker's to make it sound as if he were raving on with them. After saving the new file as an MP3, they emailed it to their pals. Their Net newsletter is called From The Mouths of Babes. When the heat flows, says RadioSara, they'll capture everything using the cell phone's built-in video camera and stream it live over the Web. We can't wait.

Moral: When you store and communicate sensitive information, keep in mind what little pocket devices do for your groupies and their attorneys.

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Come Together (m.s.b)
If you want to make honest money working the Web, build its transaction engines. Build them better and make them platform independent. Deliver them with the software that facilitates the transaction, bringing people together along lines of mutual interest. Make sure a person – or a machine – can work them easily. Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web and you must be as Thomas Edison: focus on making things work rather than contributing to the marketing hype of what these working things are all about (yes, this is an historical simplification; we know Edison mastered hype).

Your systems must allow one-to-many, many-to-one, one-to-one, and many-to-many conversations regardless of the device used. They must be, in proper order

• Device independent
• Dead-on accurate
• Easy to learn
• Enjoyable to use
• Easy to rollback
• Very fast
• Very secure
• Linked to a human that the user can contact immediately
• Provided with a test mode users can play with to learn how they work
• Able to be operated by another network device

None of the current engines do these things now. The lesson to take home is that people work the Net with much of its scaffolding exposed. Would you watch television as much if you had to reboot the tuner regularly after crashes, tweak the settings to get the best picture for each show you watched, and upgrade the system everytime the new season offerings came out?

Running transactions on the Net is a trip through a technological Potemkin village. People wait for things and do repetitive things – things that machines do best. The power of the Web lies in its potential as a friction-free marketplace for anything. The power of the machinery behind the Web lets you place the priorities of people up front. The power of good design lets you realize this. When you nail it down the money will follow. Nothing changes this, period, but some things will make it happen faster.

To begin, you must sharpen and focus the transaction experience. Every major Internet success from email to Usenet to the first Web browser to Yahoo to Amazon to Ebay to Schwab to the next-big-thing has revolved – and will revolve – around new, easy, fun vehicles for conducting transactions. If you go outside the Web, PeopleSoft, SAP, and the other enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages are nothing more than glorified, overpriced, old-technology transaction engines. And what are UPS, Federal Express, and the United States Postal Service if not transaction engines? The transaction is ecommerce.

Next, you must work hard to keep XML, the extensible markup language, from fragmenting into babel as vendors greedily squabble over its definitions. A thoughtfully designed XML is the gateway to the exponential growth of high quality, ubiquitous, customer-oriented Web transactions. XML lets you label the information within any file of any type in a standard way for standard storage, recovery, conversion, and transmission to online devices of any type. Think of it as the grail. You can tag any piece of information as what it is according to a standard. Machines can talk to each other and request and share this information. More people benefit.

Finally, you must build the Net to behave as a one system whose interconnected components and programs reside anywhere yet seem to operate locally as a unit. Reduce the physical network abstraction to wiring and make it transparently link programs everywhere into a single piece of software. The first Web browser was a transaction engine uniting all computers and all information, everywhere. It was a Swiss Army knife for the Net, usefully blending the Web, ftp file transfers, telnet terminal emulation, and other Net protocols. With XML, the next major transaction engines will unite all online devices and potentially all online users through all protocols, everywhere.

In the 19th Century, James Clerk Maxwell constructed the theoretical foundation of electromagnetism. Thomas Edison ran parallel to Maxwell, developing the practical tools that capitalized on electricity. Like Maxwell, Tim Berners-Lee created the architecture of the World Wide Web. The best site developers working now are Edisons, making practical realization of this vision. Together, they flesh out the superstructure and turn what remains a primitive Potemkin environment into the next major vehicle for bringing people and their devices together.

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Incarna Redux (beef!)
View the architectural framework design drafts for the interface and the data model of Incarna, the traffic-parsing firewall. The Incarna interface derives from SourceVision, originally a graphical compiler; the data model derives from Incarna, originally a temporal database of time-evolving Web data (and the origin of the Incarna firewall brandname).