PaaS: Poverty as a Service

Life is about money and for the better part, the lack of it.

I thought I knew much about it.

My UP upbringing led me to a work with the marginalized and poor communities within Metro Manila and the neighboring provinces north of it. Had no desire to be anything else.

I fit right in with my usual torn jeans and shirt get-up, walking through potholes and narrow pathwalks. Sometimes, I just rode my bike for about a 5 kilometer trip to the community. It was perfect as far as I'm concerned.

I get to see kids and talk with parents. I don't need to wear office attire. I get to learn about the really valuable things in life.

Like, being with volunteer parents for a shared group meal worth $2 five days a week. It's not just food but communion. I get to see their living conditions but rarely do I see or hear about their worries.

I meet kids playing barefoot and unkept most of the time. Yet, their smiles are sufficiently brilliant to ward off the health concerns I usually spew out in horror. Saw a lot of them everyday that after a few years, I am not just a community worker but just your regular community wanderer.

I can be comfortable with meeting parents discussing about health and life issues just as I am comfortable playing with kids and teens at the usual makeshift concrete politician-sponsored community playground. But if there is anything I am uncomfortable with, it is having nothing else to offer to ease their burden since I've gotten so much from them about what's important in life and the perspective from the world of nothing.

Not everybody has been granted that privilege. Did the rounds of that for about 15 years until family demanded most of it. Thought I was the one giving the service.

Grossly mistaken.


Until then, I will be forever grateful and will always remember. Maybe someday, I can continue and return the favor.

Cloud: Bread Talk

Others can eat tasteless cloud bread, but more just can't.

Even with the continued hype at this point, cloud computing is still far from achieving that level of efficiency people and enterprises wish for it to be. But it goes without saying that, it doesn't stop enterprises to start early.

Yet, why wait for that ideal cloud that may not take shape within the next 24 months or so? (As they found out) There's PaaS or platform as a service and think of it as 'jam' to make the 'cloud' bread palatable and digestible. That's real food for thought. Shameless plug.

Thoughts on the ideal PaaS.
IBM's got clouds, too.

And SaaS

SaaS for ISV's: The final thoughts. Best if you read them all.

While others move to SaaS, there's a few moving away from it and for good cause. E-write Lite.

Grails and Flex: Contribute your thoughts and it might make it's way to a new book. Here.

I know you've got your fave software so check if it matches these Lifehacker's editors list.

See Google run... transport, that is.

My cup of tee. Motion comics, wee!

No Sense of Sin, Yet.

It is like going to the 'event' of the century and all the people are friendly but then I just stand on one spot freezing and doesn't know where to start. That's Friendfeed for me and I bet for some other misfits, too. Help is here, sorta.

Open Cloud Standards. Now, we're talking sense. I don't see it happening soon and maybe the one to set it up isn't a company yet like a Black Swan or something but it is all good. Or maybe, just maybe, an open sourced PaaS player can fill this up for now - whatever the cloud ....

Oh, NYT on EC2

Cloud and Social Media aside, the Personal Knowledge Base is somehow lagging in terms of emphasis but I think this one's pretty important, too. Personal indexing like your own personal library connected with every facet of your own interests. And automating it. That kind of s*cks but it does make sense. I feel robotified already.

Metrics: As if our very lives depended on this so might as well learn about it. Like Kraftwerk music on a garage. And it is still good music. But mechanized.

Radian6. I just had a demo of this a couple of hours ago and it rocks big time. This has got to be the coolest tool for eavesdropping legally and anonymously. Like big brother for benevolents. Like traffic monitoring for an entire city, giving you the locations where you need to step up and drop in. Social Media teams (and PR, too) has just been handed an equalizer. No more unfair advantages, big spenders. Great design graphics, too!

Now, is there a way to list a conversation or comments standard where you can pick which best phrases to use for a type of discussion? I bet there will be. As long as they have the personality of Wall-E married with that of Anton Yelchin. Look it up and he's that good.
Post Rank. Looks simple and promising.

          (Learn more about social media platforms.)

Speaking of graphics, what you dread has never looked so cute. Yiying Lu and FailWhale. Maybe Plurk should also ask her to design something for them like uhm a Segway surrounded by bicycles. I feel for them really.

And for something really meaningful. You should take Phil's challenge. I just can't but maybe you could.

Happy Weekend!

Alliance: PaaS -sing it on to Java, Grails and maybe some more

www.gamespot.com

It is easy to lose perspective when the hugeness of buzz and hype envelopes most that surrounds you. And the preference of coding tools is not an exception. Look at the time Google launched its AppEngine and debate around the support for Python was hand-in-hand over the threat of lock-in. Fast-forward today and the lock-in issue has been more or less addressed (by the community, of course) but regarding coding language, much ado about nothing.

Still coders are a hardy lot when it comes to turfs. Despite the prevailing sense of reason that languages are but tools towards a projected application result, many continue to espouse the "ours are better than yours" mentality. And you thought that religion was divided enough.

But the programming world is such a big pie that a premise contrary to this isn't guaranteed to make a worthy app. What developers need is an environment that provides the support and the tools to make them better at their craft and increase the chances of hitting it big. It could be something regarding workspace or culture and for the better part, we know all types/kinds of workers need that.

But there's also the coding environment.

Clouds like Amazon's are a big help now. It is language agnostic that with proper configuration, programmers will have a good enough place for their apps for a fee. But it takes effort to work on this and more so, on managing it. This is where PaaS providers come in and lighten the load literally. Ruby on Rails got better momentum leveraging the PaaS platforms and replicating this for other languages isn't a bad idea. Many providers are coming up with their different solutions right now and despite the apprehensions, I honestly believe that cloud space adoption will increase.

But for that to happen, platforms will need to continue to innovate. Using open source technologies is a great way to start and pushing them to include support for all languages will be mutually beneficial. Ruby on Rails may have gotten a head start but the Java community with Grails is just too big in numbers that we can expect it too to have adopters equal to or maybe more than the number of PaaS Rails users there is in the world now.

The possibilities with clouds and platforms are endless at this point given that mobile is also focusing its signals on it. I guess there is a lot more we haven't thought of yet. That it shouldn't stop with Ruby on Rails or with Java is something certain. And what about the other emergent web frameworks? Maybe some PaaS providers need to just take a chance with it and help it grow.

Anybody who says PaaS exists only for the big programming languages is short-sighted. But that is another story which is not for the faint-hearted.

Post-POSS

Highlights from the 2nd Day from sessions I attended at the POSS.

SugarCRM. I was able to catch a brief talk about this open source CRM and seeing how lightweight it is as an application is quite SaaS-sy. Will be testing it more on the next couple of days as I was able to get a demo cd.

Open Source in the Academe, Gov't and NGOs.
Take-aways.

1. IBM Phils. bullish on RP IT sector. Partnering on their SSME programs with a lot of colleges and universities.

2. DCI - Official IT company that handles and manages all Philippine government agencies IT needs still into proprietary software under the pretense of being unbiased and "pro-choice". Uh-oh. How about pro-cost-effective? I hope I misread that.

Had the temerity to stand up and speak about the SaaS option in general but I don't think I got my message right in this room of execs and officials. They thought I was doing a marketing pitch. Nooooo.

3. Mark Buenconsejo on Ruby on Rails for Pinoy IT. Hope he does encourage some more RoR guys. Pity that I did not win the Rails book he was giving away.

Then, a smooth segue to SaaS and PaaS as discussed by our main man, David Abramowski. What can I say? Just proud to be there listening to a great explanation as usual. Will post some pics later so you'll see what I mean.

Overcast of Industry Players

Peter Laird had the presence of mind to note that people need more than words to show what the atmosphere is like with all the cloud players hovering above us.

Great: He got down to the details and specifics
Not-so-great: He needs to revise based on growing trend of startups entering the market and mor.ph hasn't been included yet. Can console myself for being acknowledged in the comments page for now. Yeah, scroll down.

SaaS to PaaS and ultimately, the CLaaS (Clouds as a Service)

Just read that wonderful post from Kent at Production Scale about the '-aaS' clarifications. Let me offer my two-cents worth on the subject. You can skip the CLaaS, just thought it sounded uhm classy. Not.

We won't be going to historical details here with regards to dates. What I'm after is a confirmation regarding the natural progression of Software as a Service.

Simply put, Software as a service refers to a method of deployment wherein applications can be accessed via the web as opposed to the traditional model of software installation on your computer. Samples of which are the mail apps like Yahoo Mail and Gmail and best made into a web byword by the highly successful CRM apps company called Salesforce.

SaaS exposed, not only the need for a successful conglomeration of web apps to be made easily available via a single site and easily accessible by demand, but more importantly, that apps need to be more or less housed in a common platform.

Consider the benefits:

1. It gives users - both business and individual consumers, a common point of experience which equates to shorter learning curve resulting in faster adoption.

2. Developers tend to congregate using common expertise on programming languages. Nothing better than a platform to unite 'em all. And what good is SaaS if you don't have the apps to showcase?

3. A common platform allows companies who offer SaaS easier maintenance requirements. This translates to savings that can be passed on to both third party developers and ultimately to users.

It doesn't stop there. On demand apps and on demand platform can only reside in the web. And so comes the Cloud.

Surely there is still a lot of debate on the eventuality of the (few) Clouds ruling over the whole computing space. But business is business. And as long as SaaS, PaaS and Cloud players continue to offer very good deals (esp under threat of recession) leading to better revenue, the march towards increased business adoption will continue faster than pundits expected.