The inventor of the World Wide Web has arrived, somewhat belatedly, in the Twitterverse. Tim Berners-Lee, head of the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium, set up a Twitter account shortly before making an appearance at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco yesterday.

Normally it wouldn’t be news when Twitter gains a new user—somewhere between 10 million and 20 million people already use the microblogging service, which makes it easy for users to share short, 140-character messages with anyone who signs up to follow their tweets. But Berners-Lee is a special case.

People follow the man who came up with the idea for a network of hyperlinked, consistently formatted electronic documents—and who still oversees its evolution—as if his every move were prophetic. As TechCrunch put it, Berners-Lee joining Twitter is the kind of event (at least in the blogosphere) that “could potentially rip a hole in the time/space continuum.”

So, how is Sir Berners-Lee making use of the new medium? As of this writing, he’s tweeted only twice—once to complain that Twitter’s user interface is confusing, the second time to say that he was “following the teens.” We gather that this wasn’t a reference to Twitter’s popularity among teens, but to the Web 2.0 summit talk that preceded his appearance, a session called “What Do Teens Want?” led by former Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy.

Berners-Lee is gaining Twitter followers fast—when we checked at 5:00 a.m. Eastern time this morning, he had 218. As of this writing, that number had zoomed up to 1,849. But the father of the Web still has a ways to go to catch up with Ashton Kutcher, who has more than 3.8 million followers.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

In the mid 1990s, three on-ramps led us on to the information superhighway: AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe. For a monthly fee, users were served up a customized version of the Web offered by one of these network providers. They took a walled garden approach, offering applications only through their services and limiting e-mails within their networks. For a while, it worked. But soon, consumers and application developers alike were clamoring for more—and, fortunately, the walls around the World Wide Web came tumbling down. Untethered from these artificial constraints, developers created innovative Web-based applications, sites and services available to all—regardless of their provider—and consumers began logging onto the Web in droves.

The subsequent Internet boom that took place is well known. It’s hard to imagine where we would be now if those walls had remained. The Web 1.0 movement showed us that technological innovation flourishes when markets are open. Yet despite the lessons learned, we find ourselves repeating history in the U.S. mobile marketplace. With so much hype about the “mobile Internet,” did you ever wonder why we have yet to see a mobile start-up grow to the scale of an Amazon, Google, Yahoo or Facebook?

Clearly, the innovation and growth of Wireless 1.0 was led by Europe and Asia. The question is whether the U.S. will lead the Wireless 2.0 era. While our European and Asian counterparts understood and embraced open mobile networks early on, closed markets here in the U.S. constrain progress. Consumers here can’t buy just any mobile device with any software and use it on any network. The carriers argue that this level of control is necessary to ensure network “quality.” AT&T made the same argument about the quality of the landline network before the 1982 divestiture. But as of this writing I’m still unaware of anyone who bought a landline phone at Target, plugged it in at home and thereby brought down the AT&T landline network.

From 1999-2007, we saw an explosion of wireless innovation in Europe and Asia, where mobile devices weren’t limited to one network and developers could build and distribute wireless applications to virtually any mobile consumer. Japan had wireless Internet through NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode as early as 1999. Meanwhile, in Europe, the introduction of the open GSM standard created an environment where early interoperability and network openness were standard.

During this same time period, U.S. mobile innovation was largely sluggish, stuck in the walled garden model. While you could argue this was acceptable during that time period because our technology had not caught up yet, we only need to look at the iPhone and BlackBerry app stores to know that we are now capable of more. Apple—and the ecosystem that has surrounded it—has shown the world that an innovative company can create a great product with a direct-to-consumer path to market.

Smart phones (such as BlackBerry phones and the iPhone) are built on open technology by default, and carriers cannot block access to these devices. Apple has proven that a friction-free ecosystem can be built to allow independent software vendors (ISVs) to address this market. But alas, smart phones account for less than 25 percent of the market, and won’t exceed 50 percent for several years—an eternity in high tech. So for the foreseeable future, the vast majority of the U.S. mobile market will be comprised of feature phones, which only run software approved by the wireless carrier.

Herein lies the problem and the solution. What kind of innovations would emerge in the U.S. market if we could replicate for the 200 million feature phone users what Apple has created for the iPhone? I’m not talking about the iPhone’s elegant form factor or usability. Rather, I mean …Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

The beginning of the Internet gold rush is often dated with some precision—the date of Netscape Communications’ IPO, on Aug. 9, 1995—even though a broad array of Internet-related technologies had been under development for years before that. A case in point is Network Solutions Inc., a small Herndon, VA, computer networking company that was acquired by San Diego-based SAIC six months before the Netscape IPO.

If the Netscape browser made it possible for people to tour the World Wide Web, Network Solutions was responsible for keeping track of all the places they could go. The small, minority-owned government contractor founded in 1979 was granted a government-sanctioned monopoly in 1992 to serve as the sole registrar of Internet domain names that end in “.com,” “.edu,” “.net,” and “.org.” At the time, Network Solutions was a money-losing enterprise that had been generating about $18 million a year in revenue, mostly by installing computer networks for banks and government agencies.

SAIC, the defense contractor also known as Science Applications International Corp., purchased Network Solutions before it was obvious just how important—and lucrative—that service would be. As I explained yesterday, SAIC operated Network Solutions from 1995 until 2000—an extraordinary inflection point in terms of Internet growth—and made billions of dollars on its initial investment. But it’s not a story that’s widely known. So it’s something of a coup to provide an exclusive interview with two key insiders, SAIC founder (and Xconomist) J. Robert Beyster, who was SAIC’s chairman and CEO during the Network Solutions years, and Mike Daniels, the SAIC executive who led the acquisition and served as chairman of Network Solution’s board during the years SAIC controlled the company.

Here is an edited account of our conversation:

Xconomy: SAIC’s former chief financial officer told me SAIC began an expanded acquisition strategy in 1990. Why?

J. Robert Beyster

J. Robert Beyster: At the time, I was interested in expanding our network installation business. This task fell under Mike Daniels in Washington, who managed the contracts where SAIC installed networks for other companies and for the government. I felt that business was such that we needed to acquire more people, and the best way to do it was through acquisitions.

X: Why did SAIC acquire Network Solutions?

JRB: We were originally interested in acquiring …Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Even when the Internet boom was happening—even during the incandescent gold rush years of the late 1990s—Network Solutions was not exactly a household corporate name. Not compared to the first wave of companies like America Online or Netscape Communications, whose Aug. 9, 1995, IPO seems to be the demarcation line between everything that existed before the Internet and everything that came after.

Even to those who had heard of Network Solutions, the little company in Herndon, VA, that held exclusive rights to register Internet domain names was something of a mystery. Just how did that government-issued monopoly come about, anyway? And then there was SAIC, the San Diego-based government contractor that had acquired Network Solutions in March 1995. SAIC was an even bigger enigma, because so much of its work involved specialized and classified research and engineering services for the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies. Even on projects that don’t involve secret DoD programs, SAIC doesn’t go out of its way to attract attention.

So it’s not widely known, for example, that SAIC acquired Network Solutions for only $4.7 million, and operated the company during a five-year period of near-exponential growth. Network Solutions was managing only about 60,000 Internet domain names when SAIC took over, but during those crucial early years the company built out the infrastructure needed to manage millions of domain names. At the same time, SAIC sold off pieces of its stake in the Virginia company—eventually realizing billions of dollars in increased valuation.

I got a rare opportunity to gain new insight on this story from two key insiders: SAIC founder (and Xconomist) J. Robert Beyster, who was SAIC’s chairman and CEO during the Network Solutions years, and Mike Daniels, the SAIC executive who led the acquisition and served as chairman of Network Solution’s board during the years SAIC controlled the company. We’re publishing my exclusive Q&A with them tomorrow [now online here--Eds.].

They tell me they became friends in 1986, after SAIC acquired Daniels’ company, Computer Systems Management. It was a small government contractor in Northern Virginia that had worked on sensitive IT projects for the Reagan Administration, such as an upgrade in the National Security Council’s crisis management decision-making system.

Daniels says he had a front-row seat on the Internet from …Next Page »

Comments (11) | Reprints | Share:        

Three quiet and unknown Finnish engineers in their late thirties, Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, and Teemu Rantanen, have spent their working careers at the engineering software company Tekla in Finland. Their clients have used the software they created to model several well-known buildings, including Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, New York’s Hearst Tower, the famous ‘Bird’s Nest’ that is Beijing’s Olympic Stadium, and the world’s tallest building, Burj Dubai.

But if matters had turned out a little differently, these men—and a former colleague named Kati Suominen (now Kati Borgers) who could not be present at the interview—might have become known as the Fathers and Mother of the World Wide Web browser.

[Editor's note: This article is our first from Juha-Pekka Tikka, Xconomy's new Fellow from Stanford University's Innovation Journalism program. "JP," a reporter at Ilta-Sanomat, a major national newspaper in Finland, will be based in our Xconomy San Diego offices.]

According to the trio, whom I met earlier this year in Finland, the Internet’s rise and emergence as a daily working tool might have happened a year earlier than it did had their group been able to complete their project.

The four Finns developed a graphical, point-and-click Internet browser a year before the pioneering Mosaic browser on which Netscape Communications was based: the historical Netscape IPO in August 1995 is widely credited with starting the Internet boom.

“Our 1991 X Window system browser, ‘Erwise,’ showed that a net browser was possible. We were ahead of the times. The next step, to commercialize it, did not happen,” Kim Nyberg says.

Aside from some local media, the Finns have never before been interviewed about this remarkable story. But Erwise has an important place in the Internet’s birth history. And its fate offers a case study of what happens when invention and innovation are not accompanied by funding, talent infusion, and a strong venture capital market or angel investor presence—all ingredients that Silicon Valley (where Mosaic was funded and developed) takes for granted.

In the U.S., commercialization of the browser, now so much a part of our everyday lives, began in 1994, after Marc Andreessen left the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where he and Eric Bina had developed the Mosaic browser the previous year. Andreessen had moved to California following his December 1993 graduation and teamed up with Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark, backed by venture capital powerhouse Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, to form Mosaic Communications, later renamed Netscape Communications. Europe was quickly left out in the cold.

But for a few key factors, it didn’t have to be that way. In 1991, Nyberg, Sydänmaanlakka, Rantanen, and Suominen were young IT undergraduate students at HUT, Helsinki University of Technology. The campus is actually located in Espoo, just a few miles from Helsinki and only half a mile away from the headquarters of Nokia Corporation. At that time, Nokia was not internationally known.

The four were about half-way through their studies when they met that September at a HUT course on designing and coding software.

In Switzerland, meanwhile, Tim Berners-Lee had just laid the groundwork for the World Wide Web at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). He thought the Web would be a useful tool for researchers and others but was frustrated at its pace of growth, which he partly attributed to the lack of a point-and-click browser. As he notes in his 1999 book Weaving the Web, “We were so busy trying to keep the Web going that there was no way we could develop browsers ourselves, so we energetically suggested to everyone everywhere that the creation of browsers would make useful projects for software students at universities.”

How did this project end up in Finland? It was largely because …Next Page »

Comments (25) | Reprints | Share:        

Berners-Lee Creates Web Foundation

The man who invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has launched a new foundation to promote open and expanded access to the Web. Ars Technica reports that the World Wide Web Foundation has $1 million in seed funding from the Knight Foundation. Specific goals of the project have not yet been announced.

DNA Machine Advances Personal Genomics

One of the hopes for the revolution brought about by the sequencing of the human genome is that doctors will one day be able to customize medical care to individual patients’ based on their genetic makeup. Technology Review reports that a Menlo Park, CA, company, Pacific Biosciences, has developed a machine for quickly and cheaply sequencing DNA. The company hopes to make the process fast and inexpensive enough that sequencing can become a routine procedure in doctors’ offices.

Chamber of Commerce Decries Carbon Regulations

Regulation of carbon dioxide would affect more than 1 million businesses and could stifle economic innovation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says. Reuters tells us that the Chamber is releasing a report claiming that any business that spends more than $70,000 a year on oil or natural gas would be affected by proposed regulations. But a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council calls the report an attempt to stir up anti-regulatory hysteria.

Engineer Demonstrates Robot Prius

Tired of the stress of stop-and-go driving? An engineer in San Francisco has a proposed solution, a robot-driven car that makes the decisions for you—speeding up, braking, staying in the lane all on its own. CNET News reports that the engineer, Anthony Levandowski, demonstrated the system he built into a Toyota Prius by having the car navigate its own way through San Francisco last week.

Comparing the Candidates on Science Issues

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has answered a series of questions posed to him by a group called Science Debate 2008. The New York Times summarizes his positions, along with those of Democratic candidate Barack Obama, who answered them in late August. Not surprisingly, Obama’s answers stress the role of government while McCain focuses on business in addressing some of the nation’s main science-related challenges.

Link Found Between Plastics, Heart Disease

A chemical used in some food and drink containers may increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study found that people with the highest levels of bisphenol A in their urine were three times more likely to have cardiovascular disease and 2.4 times more likely to have diabetes than those with the lowest levels, Nature reports. The story cautions that the study does not prove that the chemical causes these diseases, but quotes an epidemiologist as saying that it “puts a scientific question mark” over the substance.

U.S. Losing its Lead in IT

The United States still has the world’s most competitive information technology industry, but that lead is slipping, according to a new study. BusinessWeek says the Business Software Alliance ranks 66 countries in six areas, including the availability of skilled labor and friendliness to innovation. The U.S. ranked number 1 in only three categories, and had an overall ranking lower than last year’s.

Google Goes to Sea

As if Google’s dominance in cyberspace weren’t enough, the company is now thinking of taking its mainframes to the bounding main. The Times Online reports that the company is considering placing the supercomputers that power its search engine on barges anchored up to seven miles offshore, where it could use wave energy to run and cool the machines. Let’s just hope the data doesn’t end up in Davy Jones’s locker.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Citizens depend on their governments for documents and information ranging from driver’s licenses to tax forms to maps. And the more of this information is stored on the Web using open formatting standards such XML, the more people will be able to access it and re-use it for the public good. At least, that’s the argument being made by the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which launched an “eGovernment Forum” today with the aim of creating new guidelines for using the Web to enable better access to government.

The forum is open to the public and is expected to meet via teleconference roughly twice a month and face-to-face once or twice a year, with the first in-person meeting slated for October. In an announcement about the new body, MIT professor and World Wide Web originator Tim Berners-Lee, who directs the W3C, urged government agencies to send representatives to these meetings.

“Open standards, and in particular semantic Web standards, can help lower the cost of government, make it easier for independent agencies to work together, and increase flexibility in the face of change,” Berners-Lee said. “Publishing linked data on the Web enables creative re-use of it—citizen mashups, and commercial mashups, which combine the data from many sources to stunning new uses.”

In some ways, government agencies are being forced into modernizing their approaches to information management. In an age when people can go online to find a job, buy a car, or even get a college degree, citizens are demanding the same kind of online, 24/7 responsiveness from government agencies that they get from most consumer-facing online businesses. “Exposure to the rapid evolution of services and functionality on the public Web has led citizens to expect and ask for improvements ranging from basic provisioning services to more advanced solutions, and cooperation between the commercial and public sectors,” the W3C announcement observed.

The W3C is an international consortium—headquartered in Cambridge, but with offices in 17 countries—where dues-paying members, full-time staff, and public representatives work together to set unofficial (yet widely accepted) formatting and technology standards for the Web. In essence, it wants more government agencies to adopt standards it’s already developed in areas such as XML, the Semantic Web, languages and internationalization, and accessibility for people with disabilities and people using mobile devices. By doing so, the consortium argues, government agencies will not only save money and collaborate more easily with other agencies, but will be able to deliver existing information to citizens in innovative new ways.

For example, using Semantic Web standards, the United Kingdom’s Office of Public Sector Information, the University of Southampton’s Electronics and Computer Science school, and the city council of Camden, a London suburb, were able to combine data from Ordnance Survey maps and local government records of restaurant hygiene inspections. The resulting mashup showed eateries on a map of Camden, color-coded according to their hygiene score. “The ability to reuse and remix enables a third party to take various set of data from the public sector, combine it with data from the private sector, and generate new value,” the W3C observed in the summary report for a 2007 workshop on transparent government.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The Extensible Markup Language, or XML—a way of structuring data inside semantic tags that allow it to be interpreted consistently across disparate information systems—is the key to many types of business software today, not to mention the entire Web 2.0 revolution. And on Sunday, the critical Web standard turned 10 years old.

The Cambridge-based World Wide Web Consortium, which approved XML 1.0 as a recommended standard on February 10, 1998, is collecting “XML stories” or personal reminiscences from Web luminaries and plans a series of birthday-celebration events throughout 2008, according to a press release issued by the non-profit organization today. Befitting the geekiness of the anniversary, the W3C has also published an online guest book where netizens can leave their thoughts about XML.

“There is essentially no computer in the world, desk-top, hand-held, or back-room, that doesn’t process XML sometimes,” Tim Bray, director of web technologies at Sun Microsystems and a major contributor to (and co-editor of) the XML 1.0 standard, said in the W3C’s release. “This is a good thing, because it shows that information can be packaged and transmitted and used in a way that’s independent of the kinds of computer and software that are involved. XML won’t be the last neutral information-wrapping system; but as the first, it’s done very well.”

Bray has already published his own XML recollections, and Uche Ogbuji, principal consultant for Fourthought Inc., has published a paper on IBM’s DeveloperWorks website calling the last 10 years “the XML Decade.” Ogbuji tells an interesting story about the COBOL programming language, a business-oriented language that had nearly gone extinct until the late 1990s. That was when hundreds of companies still using decades-old legacy COBOL software realized that the Y2K problem could sink their systems—resulting in a huge new demand for COBOL programmers who could write around the problem.

Ogbuji calls the crisis “an extraordinary waste in resources spent agonizing over past assets rather than productively developing new ones”—the main lesson being that “it is extremely valuable to develop data so that it outlives the applications that presently operate on it. XML, used properly can help prevent such crises in productivity as the artificial COBOL boom of the 1990s, and even better, it can be a building block rather than a stumbling block for productivity by pointing the way to new applications in the constant quest for competitiveness.”

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share: