Blockbuster Video is launching an API called “Blockbuster Everywhere.” The new cross-channel API is designed to deliver films, reviews and real-time inventory to devices that include phones, set top boxes, gaming consoles and other point of sale locations such as gas stations.

The Blockbuster story is another example of how companies are re-architecting through open API’s to reconfigure their businesses. A point of sale can be in any number of places. It may be a store, the Web or through a platform like Tivo.

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Open API’s are lightweight, flexible and relatively affordable. And that’s just what Blockbuster needs. Blockbuster has been close to bankruptcy. The company plans to close 20% of its stores by 2011.

An API strategy gives Blockbuster the leverage to give the customer a unified experience across multiple channels. It also opens new ways to sell products as the API can present the right information at the right time on the platform of the customer’s choice. For instance, that may mean doing a check on the availability of a film at local stores. It may also mean accessing Blockbuster through a smartphone or other devices. Blockbuser is limiting the API to its partners but may open it up in the future. Partners include Tivo, Samsung and HTC.

The new API strategy comes after two years of work to consolidate Blockbuster’s multiple channels to represent its new philosophy: “One Customer, One Blockbuster.”

The time was right to make the transition. API’s were on the rise. But for a while it looked like it would be a massively expensive, heavyweight integration.

In 2008, open API’s began to appear in enterprise environments. But for the most part, customers received pitches like Blockbuster did from the big technology companies to “blow up the databases,” said Mike Debnar, Blockbuster Vice President of Retail Systems.

And the cost? Some bids came in at $1 million.

In 2009, a convergence came. CEO James Keyes became a strong partner in a customer focused strategy. The company started aggregating its legacy data to integrate into an API that it built with Sonoa Systems.

Sonoa worked with Blockbuster to develop API that is built on RESTful web services. It can be easily managed by a small team. The API is integrated with back office systems.

Blockbuster is also updating its iPhone app to reflect the new cross-channel efforts.

Sam Ramji of Sonoa puts it this way. The API gives Blockbuster greater possibilities to reach across a number of varied channels.

It mat seem far away but retailers are preparing for the holiday season. And where may customers be doing shopping?

Perhaps in the store or from their desktop. But it’s also likely they will be on the couch using their iPad to buy their holiday gifts.

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Frustrated with high maintenance costs, three of the world’s largest banks are forming a technology buying alliance to forge ahead into cloud computing.

According to Jeanne Capachin of IDC Insights , Bank of America, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and Deutsche Bank are forming a technology buying alliance which they see as a way to reduce their infrastructure costs and forge ahead into cloud computing.

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Driving the issue are the high maintenance costs that they are charged by technology companies.

The banks believe that by joining together they can “force a change in procurement practices and move to more shared or even open source solutions when they make sense.”

The banks believe that traditional technology suppliers are not embracing cloud computing. Instead, they continue to show dependence on decades old revenue structures.

Another driving force in the alliance is the financial crisis and the resulting reduction revenues.

According to Capachin: “Embracing an increased off-the-shelf approach is a necessary prerequisite for these banks and it sounds like, at least in theory, they are ready,”

She says banks have in the past ignored off the shelf services and instead have built their own custom software solutions.

But things are bad enough now that it looks like they are ready to move forward.

The winners? SaaS providers. The losers? The technology giants.

This is one of those events that could have major ramifications. If the banks really are wising up then it should mean considerable disruption in the technology world and the real emergence of cloud computing as the force that will drive innovation and change for many years ahead in the financial services world.

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The Nikkei Daily in Japan is reporting that Fujitsu will invest $537 million in cloud computing for 2011.

That seems like a staggering investment to us but perhaps it’s not at all surprising considering the metamorphosis in the IT sector.

According to The Nikkei and Reuters, the investments will be for more servers and external memory storage at data centers in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Australia and Singapore.

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Fujitsu is not a name that is often thought of in terms of cloud computing. But it is one of the largest IT management services companies in the world, competing with the likes of companies such as CA and Microsoft, two providers with deep investments of their own in cloud computing.

A little more insight into the investment came at the Symantec conference last week during an interview with Fujitsu CTO Dr. Joseph Reger.

According to TechPulse 360, Reger said that relationships are developing, so to speak.

“The IT industry and the cloud thing are in the dating stage… Dating is when you see only the bright side, the opportunities and you don’t sit down and worry about what could be the issues.”

And like a lot of enterprise technology companies, Fujitsu is pushing for is own cloud stack for he enterprise:

“It is a step away from current IT but it needs to be connected to the current IT: so private-public cloud. We’re thinking about trusted boundaries, the security perimeters and so on. And we are seriously hoping that the cloud will be just another incarnation of IT, not a total different thing. Meaning that there will be a cloud stack where everybody can contribute… Because if the cloud is like an end to end proprietary big heater proposition, that’s not good for us, for you [Symantec] and for our customers either.”

Open standards, anyone?

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Social commerce applications provider Bazaarvoice has partnered with Google to share product reviews in Google searches and advertisements.

Retailers and manufacturers using Bazaarvoice can use their product review content to drive more traffic from Google as well as provide brand exposure to shoppers.

Consumers will be able to access opinions from other customers as they research and complete purchases, adding more relevance to the process. Google says the program will feature full-length product reviews and user ratings from retailers and manufacturers to help with the shopping experience.

"In the past four years, there has been a tremendous change in consumer shopping behavior as people increasingly rely on information from their friends and peers to make purchase decisions," said Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice.

"Our clients’ innovative use of the voice of the customer has helped Bazaarvoice become one of the fastest growing technology companies today. Now, Google is affirming the power of social commerce with this partnership to integrate Bazaarvoice reviews content into Google.com – the heart of its business – as well as throughout product search and advertising vehicles. It is a big honor to be Google’s partner in this industry first, and this will be transformational for our retail clients and their suppliers."

On Google Product Search, Google will feature a brands logo beside reviews from the brands website with the goal of increasing both exposure and conversions.

Some of Bazaarvoice’s clients include Best Buy, Costco, Dell, Macy’s, Proctor & Gamble and QVC.
 

The New York Times’ new Doc Viewer 2.0 is, depending on what you value, either a pasted-on ornament of no real use to a typical news consumer, or it’s an open-source, crowd-sourcing game changer.

With information-taming technologies like search engines already at a reader’s fingertips, there is debatable value in the Doc Viewer’s ability to annotate a story with “raw” information. However, the fact that the Doc Viewer’s code is due to be released on an open-source basis introduces an additional value to it. It is not just the back-end that a media source, of whatever size, will have access to, but the whole megillah.

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Want annotated source materials embedded in your kitty blog without having to churn code until the tears flow? You can do it.

This latest viewer by the New York Times is the latest iteration of a two year development process. The viewer allows reporters to augment stories by including evidentiary documentation and providing context to news stories. The viewer keys documents to words or phrases in the source story, allowing viewers to pursue the process to the depth they prefer. These “annotations” are similar to an old-fashioned “hot link” but with a new-fangled dynamic delivery.

Future versions will open up the annotation process to readers, instead of just the writers and editors. Additional features may include an embeddable version for blogs, a search-friendly version without JavaScript, variable image file type control and the ability to create custom annotation shapes. The open-source software behind Version 2.0 will be released “in the very, very near future,” according to the newspaper, and will be available on the Times’ Github page.

The key criticism to this undertaking, of course, is: so what?

BayNewswer quoted Aron Pilhofer, the paper’s editor for interactive newsroom technologies, as “recognizing that news organizations are slowly but gradually becoming more and more like technology companies.” They are, that is, more likely to triumph if they leverage a wider distribution of invested community members.

Alan McLean, interface engineer at the Times, says his focus is on the Doc Viewer as a reporting tool.

“Fundamentally what we are trying to do here is get as many tools in the belts of reporters as we can to assist them in telling stories online,” he told RWW. “Seeing it as a publishing platform is somewhat limited. It really depends on the kind of content that is being published.”

However, Chris Heisel, in a post on an earlier version of this viewer, said, “In a world where I can easily find more infor­ma­tion than I can ever pos­si­bly use does the public really need more access to raw infor­ma­tion.”

We read news in a politically and socially polarized environment. The most common charge against the NY Times – this most mainstream of MSM – is bias, that there is nothing more than a writer’s unexamined feelings or political secret sauce to support the angle of a given story. With foundational documents appended to the story itself, the reasonableness of the reporter’s approach should prove easier to determine.

But that is posited on the not-altogether-likely notion that reason and reality will overpower the desire to froth.

The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

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Google, together with Microsoft, AT&T, AOL, Intel, the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a number of other organizations launched a new effort to modernize the Electronic Communications Act (ECPA) today. ECPA, which was enacted in 1986, sets standards for low enforcement access to electronic communications and other data. According to this coalition of technology companies, which calls itself Digital Due Process, ECPA has been outpaced by technological advances like cloud computing and is now a “patchwork of confusing standards that have been interpreted inconsistently by the courts, creating uncertainty for both service providers and law enforcement agencies.”

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ECPA: Outdated and Convoluted

In an announcement earlier today, Google specifically noted that while the ECPA was originally designed to protect citizens from unwarranted government intrusion (while still giving law enforcement the necessary tools to ensure public safety), ECPA is now completely outdated. Indeed, as Google notes, ECPA became law before most people even knew what email was and long before the “cloud” became a buzzword.

Today the law gives more protection to data you store locally than to data stored in the cloud – an issue the Digital Due Process coalition is trying to rectify. The coalition also wants to ensure that government agencies get a search warrant before they can track the location of your cell phone. Digital Due Process also wants to protect citizens (and its member organizations) against unnecessary bulk data requests from government agencies.

As CNET’s Declan McCullagh noted yesterday, ECPA is notorious for being extremely convoluted. Digital Due Process also noted that the ECPA standard are not clear (especially with regards to access to location information), that it’s not clear how the Fourth Amendment applies to new services and information and that some fo the standards are simply illogical.

Digital Due Process wants the U.S. Congress to completely rewrite the law, but to focus on a handful of issues: access to email and other private communications stored in the cloud, access to location information, and the use of subpoenas to obtain transactional data.

Here are the four ways Digital Due Process wants to modernize the ECPA:

• Better protect your data stored online: The government must first get a search warrant before obtaining any private communications or documents stored online;
• Better protect your location privacy: The government must first get a search warrant before it can track the location of your cell phone or other mobile communications device;
• Better protect against monitoring of when and with whom you communicate: The government must demonstrate to a court that the data it seeks is relevant and material to a criminal investigation before monitoring when and with whom you communicate using email, instant messaging, text messaging, the telephone, etc.; and
• Better protect against bulk data requests: The government must demonstrate to a court that the information it seeks is needed for a criminal investigation before it can obtain data about an entire class of users.

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I’m a big fan of maxims and technology. It should be no surprise, then, that Melvin Kranzbergs six laws of technology really speak to me. Perhaps my favorite is, “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” There have always been – and will always be – winners and losers. Lately I have been wondering if there have been too many of the latter and not enough of the former.

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Guest author Phil Simon is an independent technology consultant and a dynamic public speaker for hire. He focuses on the intersection of business and technology. Phil is the author of two books: Why New Systems Fail and The Next Wave of Technologies. He maintains a blog, writes for a number of technology media outlets, and hosts the podcast Technology Today.

What specifically am I talking about? I’m talking about how there are only a few companies and industries actually creating jobs these days – and how they’re certainly in the driver’s seat. In this post, I’ll take a realistic (as opposed to moralistic) look at the power that technology companies are wielding these days vis-à-vis job creation.

Supply and Demand at Work

Consider the recent announcement by Facebook to create 200 jobs in Austin, Texas. However, there’s a hitch. The company’s U.S. expansion is contingent upon Austin officials approving considerable tax breaks.

Some might question why local governments would essentially bid for jobs. It’s really quite simple: supply and demand. In this case, the demand for jobs is quite high while the supply is not. What’s more, from Austin’s perspective, the costs of lost tax revenues need to be viewed against the self-explanatory benefits of newly created jobs.

Google in North Carolina

With that in mind, it’s hard to blame Facebook or Austin city officials for trying to make a deal. In fact, they are hardly the first parties to work out a sweetheart deal. I can cite a number of recent examples of organizations that have played would-be suitors against each other for the purposes of procuring the lowest corporate taxes.

Perhaps the most publicized recent case involved Google and Research Park, North Carolina. In that very piece, Rick Smith writes about the complicated negotiations that Google executives held with public officials about job creation – and the subsequent public backlash. Smith rightly asks two questions: Should North Carolina government officials accede to Google’s demands? And what’s the alternative?

Technology’s Role in Unemployment

So there’s a fundamental imbalance between the supply and demand of jobs. Let’s not pretend that this has never happened before. However, let’s compare The Great Recession with previous economic crises. What’s different this time? Two things.

First, technology has made jobs more portable, less tied to an individual community. It’s not as if Procter & Gamble in 1932 could make contemporary arguments in an attempt to bargain for tax concessions from local government. Employees had to work near other employees; they weren’t virtual.

Now, my plumber still needs to be local but he is increasingly the exception to the rule. High-tech companies such as Facebook and Google can take their operations virtually anywhere around the globe. What’s more, without getting all political, U.S. tax laws are hardly as employer-friendly as that of other countries that are equally if not more desperate for job creation. Don’t think that tech companies are not acutely aware of these facts when they make local U.S. communities in essence bid for job, a trend that will continue.

Second, technology seems to be destroying jobs much faster than it is creating others. German economist Joseph Schumpeter coined a term for this phenomenon in 1942: creative destruction. No doubt that has endured for both its relevance and its wonderful dichotomy.

Technology has always been a disruptive force, but has it become a net negative with respect to job creation? Journalists certainly come to mind. Also, what about the downward pressure that technology exerts on wages? What about the emergence of “The Disposable Worker“. As Peter Coy, Michelle Conlin and Moira Herbst argue in a recent BusinessWeek article, more and more people are forced to work as independent contractors, absent the benefits of W-2 – e.g., health benefits, sick time, etc.

Business Realities and the Swinging Pendulum

Let’s not kid ourselves here. No economic system is perfect. With capitalism, you have to take the fleas with the dog. Publicly traded corporations such as Google have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to maximize profits. As for privately held companies such as Facebook, VCs investing millions of dollars surely want to see a ROI sooner rather than later.

Bottom line: We can’t blame any organization for minimizing expenses and seeking the lowest taxes, the biggest loopholes. Current economic conditions allow companies to be extremely picky with regard to hiring and establishing new offices. The pendulum has swung squarely to their side.

The Downside of the Internet and Globalization

The question becomes: Is the pendulum permanently stuck on the side of employers? In other words, have globalization, the widespread adoption of broadband, and collaborative tools collectively put too much power in the hands of employers? If so, then are employers unjustly wielding their power to extort onerous terms from communities desperate for job creation?

I know enough about economics and history to rarely use the term “permanently.” To me, it’s the acme of foolishness. I’d also argue, however, that it’s equally foolish to take a Pollyannaish view of technology. Returning to Kranzberg for a moment, technology always creates winners and losers. For the foreseeable future at least, it appears as if employers will fall into the former group.</P

Photo by dreamguy.
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If there is any doubt about the social Web moving into the enterprise, then the news today from Jive Software has to make even the hardest skeptics start to wonder.

The Portland, Oregon company that has built its success on providing a social layer to the enterprise is pursuing a path that may lead it to a public offering.

Fueled by venture capital, the company said today that it is looking for a new CEO.

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Current CEO Dave Hersh is stepping aside from his role to become chairman of the Jive board. The interim CEO will be Tony Zingale, a Jive board member.

Hersh has lead the company since 2001. He will lead the search effort for a new CEO. Zingale is an experienced CEO. He most recently lead Mercury Interactive, a company acquired for $5 billion. He was also CEO of Clarify, a CRM company.

In a phone interview today, company executives said an IPO is a possibility. It’s a move that makes sense. Jive is now competing with the largest technology companies in the market. For instance, Jive has a Sharepoint integration with Microsoft. But the reality is the two companies are vying for the same accounts.

The issue is size. Companies like Microsoft have huge sales channels. Jive does not have that kind of reach. An IPO would give Jive the resources to compete more effectively with the giants of the tech world.

It’s also a clear sign that the market is there for social software in the enterprise. Hersh said to us in an interview recently that there is a mad chase for all applications to be social.

That’s quite true. And Jive’s dreams of an IPO are representative of that reality.

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The Obama Administration came out on Wednesday to let us know about all the jobs saved since the U.S. Congress passed the stimulus package one year ago.

Which gets us to start thinking about how the technology world is faring in these hard times. Stories more relevant to us than what we hear in the current political discussions.

Unfortunately, some of the largest technology companies in the world don’t want their story to be told. It’s the story about the racial and gender makeup of technology giants in the Silicon Valley and how diversity has changed over the past several years.

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Recently, federal regulators ruled in favor of five technology companies that waged an 18-month battle to block a San Jose Mercury News Freedom of Information request for employment information. The federal regulator ruled that collecting the data would cause “commercial harm” by potentially revealing the companies’ business strategy to competitors.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Google, Yahoo!, Apple, Oracle and Applied Materials argued that the race and gender of its work force is a trade secret that cannot be released.

It’s a decision that borders on the absurd. It’s unbelievable that the racial makeup and gender of a company would reveal its strategy to competitors.

We highlight this news to point out how the lack of diversity in the tech sector prevents minorities from enjoying the high salaries and benefits that come when working for large technology companies.

Plus, as the Mercury News reports, it prevents us from understanding what the civil rights legislation should be in this day and age. Technology companies like Apple did not exist back in the 1960s when civil rights legislation first passed.

The issue about diversity in the tech economy is especially relevant when you look at what communities are suffering the most during this current recession. Joblessness among blacks is twice that of whites.

The Mercury News eventually did get access to Department of Labor data and the results show how great the gap is in the Silicon Valley:

“The Labor Department data ultimately obtained by the Mercury News shows that while the collective work force of 10 of the valley’s largest companies grew by 16 percent from 1999 to 2005, an already small population of black workers dropped by 16 percent, while the number of Hispanic workers declined by 11 percent. By 2005, only about 2,200 of the 30,000 Silicon Valley-based workers at those 10 companies were black or Hispanic.

In addition, among the roughly 5,900 managers at those companies in 2005, about 300 were either black or Hispanic — a 20 percent dip from five years earlier. Women slipped to 26 percent of managers in 2005, from 28 percent in 2000.”

We look at Google, Apple and Oracle as leaders in technology development. How they fare in terms of diversity is a matter that unfortunately will be kept in the shadows under the cloak of trade secrecy.

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When we think of Google’s competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft often come immediately to mind. We think of other search engines. There’s no question that Google is (by far) dominating this space. What do you think Google’s greatest source of competition is? Share your thoughts.

We all know that Google has its hands in many other projects beyond search, but even in search itself, it is not impossible that another could come along and win people over. Microsoft’s trying with Bing, and it could succeed. I’m not saying it will or that it is probable, but it is not impossible.

The rise of social media has put an interesting spin on the whole web dominance game, and has given Google even more to worry about. The company’s co-founder Larry Page has acknowledged publicly that Google has to get on board with real-time search, because Twitter search came along and highlighted a need that most people never saw coming, even just a couple years ago.

Facebook is much bigger than Twitter (so far), and it is getting more Twitter-like as time goes on. People can now make their Facebook status updates public (like Twitter). This means that real-time search is a need here too. Real-time search is only a piece of the puzzle though. Twitter search or Facebook search won’t replace the need for what Google search offers, but it’s part of the big picture.

Another part of the big picture is the government. The New York Times ran a piece, over the weekend looking at this, noting that some analysts say that government opposition could pose the biggest threat to Google.

"The Justice Department is examining the hiring practices at Google and other technology companies, and it is investigating a class-action settlement between Google and groups representing authors and publishers," explains the NYT’s’ Miguel Helft. "The Federal Trade Commission is looking into ties between the boards of Google and Apple."

You probably also remember the infamous Google-Yahoo deal that never was. You might say that Google’s greatest competition comes from Washington. Helft also brings up the negative impact such issues could have on the company’s reputation among users who have otherwise viewed Google in a positive light.

According to Helft, Google also says it’s competing with sites like Amazon, WebMD and Wikipedia, and in terms of ad dollars, Google is competing with "television, radio, print publications, bus stop benches and milk cartons." If you want to break down every aspect of Google’s offerings, you will be able to name a lot more competitors.

Google’s Senior Competition Counsel, Dana Wagner tells the NYT that Google could be dethroned if it stops innovating. I would agree with that to an extent, but you would have to throw some other elements into the mix, such as acquisitions and marketing.

Microsoft is throwing tons of money into the marketing of Bing, and so far it has managed to generate quite a bit of interest – perhaps more than the company has ever managed to do in the search industry. The consumer response has been mixed, but much of it has been positive. And Bing isn’t the only thing Google has to worry about.

The point to all of this is, Google has a lot of competition from all sides. So far, Google is doing a good job of staying on top of its game, but that doesn’t mean it is not vulnerable. It could take a perfect storm of occurrences, offerings, and marketing from other companies, the government, and consumer response to put a significant dent in Google’s dominance on the web, but to think of it as impossible, is naive. Google knows this, and has acknowledged it.

Do you agree that Google is vulnerable to competition? Tell WebProNews readers what you think.