Google Developer Day 2008 - Video Presentations Available

Video presentations from Google Developer Day 2008 (held in Prague) are now available at the following URL:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=D6C46D8326AA72F6

Slides are here:

http://sites.google.com/site/developerday2008prague/

Future of Shopping

What is the future of shopping going to look like in the next five years? That is the question I am asking myself a lot now. Personally, I do believe that some kind of social shopping will dominate in few years across all kinds of possible communiaction platforms and channels. Two speakers, Robert Garf (Retail Strategies AMR Research) and Fred Balboni (IBM Global Business Services), share some thoughts about future shopping in IBM and the Future of Shopping podcast.

Their vision is that web shops, as we know them these days, will become more like a service centers:

... the major growth in retail we see happening is the rise of services. The services around your core retail experience. ... So as we see services increasing in retail, the store also becomes a place where you organize your services -- a service center, if you will.

And the physical shops will become more like a depot:

Getting the product in your hands to get it home, the store might shift to become possibly more of a depot where you go collect what it is that you've already browsed and selected. I think that's a real possibility in the future.

As for the technology that will make this possible Balboin says:

...the technology dimension of this really isn't the hard part.

and he follows:

The challenging thing for retailers is the business model to operationalize. How do I...if I understand that somebody in a certain market wants a certain product, how do I, in a cost-effective manner, get that product to them? The ability to manage from these large quantities of customer information I think is going to change retail over the next five years.

And I agree with this point. But even if the technology part is not that hard the question is if it would be effective for each retailer to invest into development, implementation and maintenance of this layer (I mean distributed social shop service center). And I think the answer is no. Moreover, looking from the customer point of view they might prefer to stick to independent service which gives them more freedom and product choices as opposed to specific retailer service implementation. And this leads me to conclusion that there is a possibility for a new business model, something like new Google or may be Facebook platform for retailers. A platform which would be simple enough so that individual retailers could easily feed the data in and compete for customers in more effective way and don't have to worry about the technology side of the thing... 

New Business Product Idea for Sun

As a Java developer I really like what Sun is doing for me (and the list would be very long). I periodically regret to read stories about Sun's poor stock market results. One example of such news can be found here: Sun reports 1.7$ billion loss and falling sales.

I can hardly come up with perfect business plan for them but I have one idea though. Why they don't build a public cluster with Hadoop for rent? As far as I know Sun engineers are interested in Hadoop technology and cloud computing is a new mantra of many web services. If I were to build a new scalable service then I would probably end up using Hadoop at some point as well. The problem is that there is a shortage of public Hadoop compatible clouds (Amazon is probably the only option as of now, Google App Engine does not provide integration with Hadoop now) and Sun has all what's needed.

Google Developer Day 2008 - lessons learned

Google Developer Day (GDD) 2008 in Prague was very interesting. I focused on scalability and cloud computing sessions and I also managed to visit some Google Map and geo web sessions.

I had a chance to talk to Peter Kukol after his high level presentation and I was really interested if Google uses MapReduce (MR) for all of its massive data processing calculations and it seems that the answer is yes (more specifically the answer is that it is used a lot more often then before and the number of MR jobs is still growing). The interesting point is that there isn't any specific algorithm for which they would consider utilization of different (non MR) architecture. As far as I understand it can be challenging to operate calculation on top of some specific data structures like graphs or trees in MR but it seems that Google has enough resources and can spend some extra cycles of its data centers on non optimized calculations. When it comes to contorl and optimization of MR jobs then the developers can use a lot of visual tools (it would be nice to know more about this).

Also it seems that Google App Engine does not provide support for long running background MR processes now and if it will in the future then there is a little chance that it would directly integrate with Hadoop implementation. This is a pitty because I can imagine that this would allow developers to switch between App Engine and Amazon or other cloud provider very easily.

Anyway, the service in the Clarion hotel was excellent the the meal was delitions! Thanks Google, I hope to be there the next year. All the presentations were recorded on a video and should be available on the youtube in the future.

Some photos:

Opening speach by Jan Šedivý

All the speakers

Relax room exhibition by 3rojka

After party "U Vejvodů"

Google Developer Day 2008

I am going to attend Google Developer Day 2008 in Prague tomorrow (feel free to drop me an email [lukas dot vlcek at gmail dot com] in case you would like to meet me). Agenda is full of interesting stuff: Maps and Earth API, App Engine, Open Social Web, GWT, Gadgets... etc. It is clear that I won't be able to track all sessions but I am specifically looking forwar to Peter Kukol's session about large-scale computing architecture including Hadoop and HDFS.

Rich Client Programming - NetBeans Platform

I like the NetBeans platform and I have been using it for rich client application development for more then year now. When it comes to learning NetBeans platform API I can recommend book called Rich Client Programming, plugging into the NetBeans platform. I had a chance to study this book quite shortly after it had been released and I also had a pleasure to attend an excellent NetBeans training course held in Prague on 6-7, March. Quite recently I also won this book in NetBeans Puzzler. Folks in SUN are not only giving a lot of high quality SW out for free but they are also doing an outstanding job when it comes to education. Thanks!

I hope to post more about my experience with NetBeans platform development in the future.

Other useful NetBeans platform resources:
Podcasts: http://www.netbeans.tv/podcasts/
API: http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/index.html
Geertjan's blog: http://blogs.sun.com/geertjan/

Hadoop User Group UK Meeting

Hadoop User Group (HUG for short) was held on August 19th, 2008 in the UK. You can find short video presentations and slides here: http://skillsmatter.com/event/java-jee/hadoop-user-group-meeting

Found via Last.fm blog entry.