by Steve MezakOutsourcing your software development can save you time and money if you know what you need. Too often US companies attempt to outsource without a good understanding of what their software should do, and this is the biggest cause of outsourcing failure. It is unreasonable to expect your outsourcing team to have a menu of software, pre-prepared, so you can just select the items you want.Ever go to a restaurant with a picky eater? They tell the waiter in excruciating detail how they want their food prepared. And heaven forbid that the food arrives different from what was requested! Back to the kitchen it goes to be “fixed” to make the picky eater happy.

Sometimes US companies hire an outsourced partner as if they were going to a restaurant. They select the cuisine based on the flavor of the technology they require. Chinese .NET or Indian Java? How about some Russian C++? Unfortunately there is rarely a menu for the exact items you might like to order from an outsourced team.

Are you approaching outsourcing your software like you are walking into a restaurant? Are you expecting the outsourcing team to advise you, like an attentive waiter, on the way your software should look, be prepared and presented to your customers?

Instead, bring your own recipe when you start work with an outsourcing team. Unlike your dining experiences, you cannot ask for the daily special. You have to provide a specific description of what you would like to have, and how it should be prepared. Without such a recipe, your outsourced software development efforts can be starved for success.

Poorly specified software is often the result when “subject matter experts” are involved. Subject matter experts, or SMEs, know a lot about a particular subject, like IC design, business process workflow, inventory management, etc., but very little about designing software. SMEs can struggle to get their ideas encoded in the software. They need to work with someone that knows the best way to design and develop software.

Sometimes, there is a fear of getting bogged down in the details. Since some software executives are great with people, they feel much more comfortable hiring a person to handle the details. They know how to manage a person here, better than they can manage an offshore team of programmers in a remote offshore location.

One Accelerance client is in this situation. The CEO wants to outsource the development of a new software product. But there is no specification. In this case Accelerance is acting as a virtual CTO, responsible for the design, and development of the client’s software.

The client is essentially saying, “Design the software for me, and I’ll tell you if it matches what I am thinking.” This can work because the cost of outsourcing is so low that rework and multiple design iterations are affordable.

This type of arrangement only works when paying on a Time and Materials basis. There is no way to offer fixed pricing because the end product is not defined.

Of course, not having a specification may not stop you from asking for a fixed price bid! In this case, you can outsource the creation of a specification that defines your software for a fixed price. Then the resulting complete design specification is used to create a second fixed price bid for writing your software.

Another factor comes into play when you pay a fixed price amount for a software design specification. You usually have to pay at least half up front. This is to protect the outsourcing company from delivering a specification for creating the software and then not getting paid.

Because software design often occurs at the beginning of a relationship, both parties seek to minimize their risk. You minimize your risk by selecting an outsourcing team with a proven track record and great references. The outsourcing team reduces their risk by getting partial (sometimes full) payment before starting.

There are multiple deliverables that should be produced during the design phase of creating your software, whether you do it yourself, or outsource the design:

* Marketing Requirements
* Storyboard Demo
* Functional Specification
* Multiple Release Milestone Schedule
* Detailed Task Schedule for First Release
* Detailed Design Specification (optional)

Unfortunately, software development has not progressed to the point where ready-made modules are available to order and combined to create your software. There is not yet a menu of choices available to anyone that is hungry for new software. Instead, you must provide your own recipe for what you need. The good news is low cost outsourced software design and development resources are now available to create your custom software to meet your exact specifications. 

Source: http://www.articles-hub.com/index.php?article=36823&highlite=offshore,software  For more information please visit offshore software development , web development and designing  

SAN FRANCISCO — Online social networking websites saw their ranks swell and values soar this year as everyone from moody teenagers and mellow music lovers to mate-seeking seniors joined online communities.

Google’s freshly released “Zeitgeist 2007″ reveals that seven out of the 10 hottest topics which triggered Internet queries during the year involved social networking.

A Top Ten list compiled by the world’s most-used search engine includes British website Badoo, Spanish-language Hi5, and US-based Facebook.

Video-sharing websites YouTube and Dailymotion are on the list, along with the Club Penguin online role playing game where children pretending to be the flightless birds “waddle about and play” together.

Virtual world Second Life, where people represented by animated proxies interact in digitized fantasy settings, is the final social networking property in the Zeitgeist Top Ten.

The world has only seen “the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to online social networking, says MySpace vice president of business development Amit Kapur.

“It is a natural step in the evolution of the Web,” Kapur said.

“The Web is getting more personal. I think you are going to see much more of that happen on every website across the Web.”

MySpace aspires to become people’s homes on the Internet, with profile pages serving as online addresses as well as springboards to online music, video, news and other content conducive to their tastes and interests.

“It is a next-generation portal,” Kapur said.

Industry statistics show Facebook membership more than doubled in the past year to about 55 million, while reigning champion MySpace grew 30 percent to top 110 million.

One in every four US residents uses MySpace, while in Britain it is as common to have a profile page on the website as it is to own a dog.

“We are very social animals and this allows us to ramp it up to a whole other order of magnitude,” says professor Jeremy Bailenson, who heads a Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University in Northern California.

A strong appeal of online role-playing games and virtual worlds is that they free people to “interact as their ideal self and not their real self,” according to Bailenson.

“You can be whatever age you want — 20 forever — dress any way you want, be any gender you want, and be socializing with zillions of people at once all the time,” Bailenson said.

His lab has created 3-dimensional digitized models customized with people’s facial expressions and mannerisms.

“You can make a digital version of you that is animated so your grandkids’ grandkids could put on a helmet and you can read them a story from the grave,” Bailenson said, adding virtual communities offer a sense of immortality.

“People love virtual community.”

Interest in online communities surged in 2007 as the gregarious nature of humans merged with increasingly available high-speed Internet and affordable computing hardware, according to Bailenson.

“It has reached a critical mass,” Bailenson said. “It is not just the geeks doing it. It is my mom.”

California-based social networking website BOOMj just launched as an online community for Baby Boomers, the first of which turned 65 years old this year.

“Boomers grew up meeting people through mutual friends, which a lot of times meant it was the bartender,” said BOOMj spokesman Jim Welch, himself a “boomer.”

“Now you have Boomers re-entering the single world, widowed or divorce, and on new-relationship terrain they haven’t set foot on in many years. As they re-enter the single world they reach out to the Internet.”

Younger generations are much more comfortable with the Internet, which has woven ever more tightly into their lifestyles.

“It won’t replace face to face interaction,” Bailenson said.

“It is another way of thinking about maintaining social relationships. It is here and it is not going anywhere.”

Forrester Research senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang said the social networking rage is happening “where ever there is high-speed Internet.”

Owyang said membership at the website Cyworld includes 85 percent of South Korea’s Internet users. A major company in that country gave employees annual bonuses in the form Cyworld currency.

Online communities and virtual worlds are forums for commerce, advertising and business meetings, said Owyang.

MySpace’s Kapur says social networking will become increasingly global and mobile as the use of Internet-linked handheld devices becomes ubiquitous.

The meteoric rise in popularity of social networking websites is driving up their values in the minds of investors as the firms grapple with how to cash in on membership bases.

Microsoft recently paid 240 million dollars for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing paid 60 million dollars for a piece of the San Francisco company.

The investments give three-year-old Facebook a theoretical value of 15 billion dollars. News Corp-owned MySpace wouldn’t disclose its value, saying only it has about triple the membership and activity of Facebook.

Source: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2007-12/27/content_6352208.htm

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KOAM TV — Dec 28 — Personalized lending has taken off as the phenomenon of microfinance has grown in scope and stature. With microfinance, a funding organization teams up with local partners to capitalize tiny businesses, often with just a few or no employees. For Ms. Reese, an IBM engineer, the revenue stream from loans she’s made at 0% interest through Kiva isn’t as important as what the payments represent.

They mean her hand-picked business partners — a barber in Uganda, a fish saleswoman in Vietnam, a school principal in Kenya. In February, Prosper debuted with a claim to be America’s “first people-to-people lending marketplace.” In May, LendingClub launched a direct lending site that uses a social-networking database to link lenders with suitable borrowers on the basis of a lender’s preferences and risk tolerance.

Zopa is a for-profit firm that’s been pairing lenders with borrowers in Britain since 2005 and launched its service in the United States earlier this month. Virgin Money in October acquired CircleLending, a six-year-old manager of loans among friends and families. It plans to add more types of loans next year.

Source: http://www.socialnetworkingwatch.com/2007/12/growth-in-socia.html

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Mark Sweney 

Guardian Unlimited, Monday December 24 2007 

Badoo: allows users to pay for popularity using its Rise Up function Badoo, a social networking website which offers users the chance to pay to be popular while banning all advertising, is set to launch into an increasingly crowded UK market. 

At the moment, Badoo is a relatively unknown web brand. However, Google recently rated it number two on its “fastest rising” list - behind the iPhone and ahead of Facebook - in its annual report based on the most popular web searches. 

The fledgling company positions itself as a “natural evolution of existing social network and blogging sites”. 

Badoo’s unusual business model works against the received wisdom of the primarily advertising-led efforts of established firms such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. 

“We wanted to be advertising free in order to have a ‘clean’ site so our users weren’t subject to adverts which we know can be a turnoff,” said Neil Bryant, the managing director of Badoo. 

Revenue is derived by technology named Rise Up. For $1 in the US, €1 in Europe’s eurozone and £1 in the UK, users can choose to have their profile moved to the top of a rolling list of profiles - in a blend of Digg and a Reuters ticker - that all users can see. 

“With Badoo users don’t have to add friends - they have immediate access to get their profile in front of the site’s entire online community,” said Bryant. 

For security, users can block any “undesirable” or annoying profiles from seeing, or appearing, on their web page as well as keep information such as birth dates secret. 

Asked whether this Rise Up function can provide enough revenue, Bryant said that 20% of Badoo’s 12.5 million users access the function once a month. 

Thus far, Badoo has developed a strong following in Latin American countries, as well as France, Spain and Italy. 

Next year, cracking the UK is a top priority. However, until Badoo has significantly more customers than the current UK user base of around 100,000, the Rise Up function will remain free. 

Badoo is also trying to carve a niche in the celebrity market, just as MySpace has in music and Bebo has with youth. 

The website aims to approach celebrities and pay them to build an official profile page - bogus profiles will be deleted. 

“Badoo users love sharing information about themselves, their friends and celebrity so Badoo has decided that the quickest way to get the message out about the site is to get celebrities to spread and demonstrate the word,” said Bryant. 

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/24/web20.digitalmedia?gusrc=rss&feed=technology 

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By Richard Edwards

Travellers’ logs and “microblogging” are tipped to be the online hits of 2008 as the internet becomes the most popular way for people to stay in touch with friends.

 Online baby boom reaches Facebook  The dotcom world was dominated this year by Facebook, the social networking website, and copycat services are building on its success.One site aimed at frequent travellers, called Dopplr.com, is tipped to become a favourite.

Users type in their travel schedules and link to their friends and colleagues. It allows them to keep track of where they are in the world and enables them to meet up in unexpected places - or watch for who is turning up in their home town in the next few days.Another site expected to boom next year is Twitter.com, which lets users text-message large groups of people simultaneously for free.

The text is limited to a few sentences, leading Twitter’s creators to call it “microblogging”. A third site tipped for success is Seesmic.com - a serious version of YouTube focused on “conversation” between individuals posting video diaries. It was founded by Loic Le Meur, the internet advisor to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/26/wface226.xml 

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Posted by Michelle Meyers

Apple is developing a volume control device for its iPods that would automatically calculate how long a person has been listening and at what volume, before gradually reducing the sound level, all in an effort to protect users’ hearing, according to the London-based Daily Mail.

Citing a new patent application, the report–to which Apple declined to comment–says the “device will also calculate the amount of ‘quiet time’ between when the iPod is turned off and when it is restarted, allowing the volume to be increased again to a safe level.”

In February 2006, a Louisiana man filed a class action suit against Apple, saying the computer maker failed to take adequate steps to prevent hearing loss among iPod users. That was followed by warnings from politicians and researchers on hearing-loss hazards related to MP3 player use.

Apple responded by releasing a free software update for some iPods that lets listeners set a maximum volume limit. But we haven’t heard much on the matter since.

Let’s turn to rocker Pete Townshend for his foreshadowing quote: “I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal components deaf,” he said on his Web site two years ago.

“Hearing loss is a terrible thing because it cannot be repaired. If you use an iPod or anything like it, or your child uses one, you MAY be OK…But my intuition tells me there is terrible trouble ahead.”

Source: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9837612-7.html

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