Emphasizing flexibity and agility, GBC-Group provides architectural consulting services to developers of software-intensive products and services, including those making use of social networking, service-oriented architecture and cloud computing. GBC-Group can provide architectural services to your project or can work with you to build your own team's skills. We use techniques such as real options, voice-of-the-customer, and agile development to establish a flexible technical architecture that aligns with business strategy and the evolving requirements of customers and users.

We are highly experienced IT professionals with strong backgrounds in enterprise applications; business transformation; distributed systems and multi-tiered web development; program management; software engineering; and software quality assurance.

A properly designed architecture is an important lever in meeting customer and market place commitments.

The process of architecting a system allows a team to address its greatest technical risks early in the development process and provides the flexibility needed to manage release content, technical risks and time-to-market commitments. In addition, a flexible architecture can be used as a platform for a large family of products or services meeting a wide range of evolving customer requirements. Investments in a software architecture are important when requirements are for

• Flexible designs and migration plans providing options for staged investments in which work could be expanded, contracted, accelerated or deferred;
• Performance-sensitive designs in which response time, turn around time, capacity, and throughput were evaluated using measurement, models and simulations;
• Designs in which strong requirements for reliability, availability and serviceability were evaluated through measurement, modeling and testing based on operational profiles; and
• Designs addressing security requirements for electronic commerce.

The key to a platform architecture is analysis,  partitioning a family of systems into components  including functions, services, connectors, and communication and coordination mechanisms. An architect guides the choice of components, ensuring those selected are appropriate for the types of services being implemented and the business results to be achieved. In particular, the architect recommends patterns or combinations of components supporting important types of architectural qualities such as flexibility, usability, performance, capacity, reliability, security, maintainability, availability, and serviceability. Often, the architect’s recommendations must include middleware solutions capable of integrating architecturally incompatible components. .

GBC-Group's consulting work centers on aligning the architecture of and information or software system with clients’ business needs and capabilities. When appropriate, he will help clients define their overall product-line architecture or customer-value proposition.

Cell phone and wireless laptop internet use have each grown more prevalent over the last year. Nearly half of all adults (47%) go online with a laptop using a Wi-Fi connection or mobile broadband card (up from the 39% who did so as of April 2009) while 40% of adults use the internet, email or instant messaging on a mobile phone (up from the 32% of Americans who did this in 2009). This means that 59% of adults now access the internet wirelessly using a laptop or cell phone, an increase from the 51% who used a laptop or cell phone wirelessly in April 2009.

 A new list of the twenty-five most valuable blogs has been published by Dougl McIntyre of  24/7 Wall St.  Value as measured in this survey is not by the information content or the editorial value add but by the most bottom-line of measures: what someone might be willing to pay for the property. This analysis of the data shows that the primary factor affecting valuation for these blogs, all operated by private companies, is audience size, measured as the number of unique visitors per month. 

In reviewing the survey, we find the range of business models quite remarkable.  Some depend on user contributed content, some depend on content provided by their own staffs, and others republish syndicated content from various sources. All are doing well at generating traffic but have a wide range of experience and success in selling advertising.  To understand the 24/7 Wall St. valuations better, we constructed a graph, shown on the left. The graph relates the 24/7 Wall St valuations to the unique visitors per month. The relationship between these two variables is a non-linear one.

With a high correlation, the relationship is described by a quadratic equation (of the form, y=ax^2 - bx + c).  At this point in the evolution of citizen journalism, whether it was a 24/7 Wall St assumption or conclusion, value is all about building your brand and generating traffic.

The 24/7 Wall St survey was limited in scope, excluding blogs with limited revenue, owned by large firms, or used primarily as fronts for other businesses. Valuations assigned to blogs on the list were callibrated by comparisons to blogs which have recently been sold, including Ars Technica and PaidContent.

To determine value, 24/7 Wall St. looked at unique visitor and page view information from several sources, estimating current and future audience size. The survey also considered the quality, quantity and duration of ads run on the blog. The survey also considered a number of factors to estimate the blog's operating margin such as the size of the operating staff. Other factors considered by 24/7 Wall St, but which appear to have had relatively little influence on their conclusions, included the blog's age, barriers to competition, the number of regular contributors, support by investors, and the likelihood that it will remain in operation.   Here is a brief summary of 24/7's analyis of the most valuable blogs, showing the data on which our graph is based.

1. Gawker Properties, $300 million. This group of blogs  has about 23 million monthly unique visitors, 250 million page views.

2. The Huffington Post, $112 million. The Huffington Post has about 20 million unique visitors. The site is set up to encourage navigation from page to page and uses editor slide shows to build page views which are probably about seven per visitor.

3. Perez Hilton, $44 million. The entertainment and gossip site have over 7 million unique visitors per month with twelve page views per visitor. The site carries text link ads. 

4. Drudge Report. $42 million. The site has about 9 million unique visitors, and carries a modest amount of premium advertising.

5. TechCrunch. $32 million. The sites that make up TechCrunch have almost 4 million unique visitors and the network has about eighteen million page views.

6. PopSugar Properties. $26 million. The Sugar Network has 11 million unique visitors who are mostly young and female.

7. Politico. $23 million. The site is the largest single media property in the US devoted exclusively to national politics. It has more than 5 million unique visitors generating 40 million page views a month.

8. MacRumors. $20 million. MacRumors has 6.5 million unique visitors per month and 45 million page views. 

9. Boing Boing. $18 million. This leading tech and gadget site has 3 million unique visitors a month and over twenty-four million page views.

10. Mashable. $17.5 million.This  blog, focused on social media,  has 4.2 million unique visitors a month generating 30 million page views a month.

11. Seeking Alpha. $16 million.Seeking Alpha is a financial content aggregation site, with 2.5 million unique visitors and 18 million page views.

12. GigaOm. $15 million. This network of websites has 1.7 million unique visitors and 12 million page views.

13. Breitbart Sites. $11 million. Total unique visitors across all sites are 3.2 million and 18 million page views.

14. SB Nation Network. $8 million. The company has a network of about 200 relatively small sites across all major sports. The network has 4 million unique visitors.

15. ReadWriteWeb. $7 million. The site covers online trends. It bills itself as a site for tech innovators. The site has 1.2 million unique visitors and 10 million page views.

16. The Business Insider. $7 million. The Business Insider is a family of websites covering media, the internet, business, and finance. The sites together have 1.8 million unique visitors and 14 million page views.

17. Destructoid. $5 million. Mega-gamer site with 1.1 million unique visitors and ten million page views. The website is game reviews meets social networking with a very loyal audience.

18. Apple Insider. $4.5 million. The site has 1.2 million unique visitors and eight million page views.

19. //film. (SlashFilm). $4 million. This film blogging unique visitors are still 1.3 million and eleven million page views.

20. SearchEnginLand. $4 million. This site, which covers the search engine industry, has about 400,000 unique visitors and 3.5 million page views.

21. Smashing Magazine. $3.5 million. The site is the online destination for graphics design and has 900,000 unique visitors a month and 6 million page views. The site has a huge Twitter following of over 80,000.

22. Talking Points Memo Sites. $3.5 million. This collection of sites, which includes political coverage site Talking Points Memo, has 1 million monthly unique and 8 million page views.

23. VentureBeat. $3 million. Provides online venture capital news and analysis serving 800,000 unique visitors and seven million page views.

24. The Superficial. $3 million. The Superficial  is a modest version of Perez Hilton, with one million monthly unique visitors.

25. 24/7 Wall St. Network. (value not reported) A family of sites which includes 24/7 Wall St., Volume Spike Investor, BioHealth Investor, and Apple Financial News.

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Here is the link back to the orriginal article at 24x7 Wall St: http://247wallst.com/2009/11/10/the-twenty-five-most-valuable-blogs-in-america/  

Ubiquitous Computing can be thought of as the idea of invisible computers everywhere. Specifically,it is the idea that computers are embedded in the environment, with literally dozens or hundreds of computers available to each person, and each computer performing its tasks without requiring human awareness or a large amout of human intervention. If the mainframe represents the era of "many people, one computer", and the PC is the era of "one person, one computer", then ubiquitous computing can be thought of as the era of "one person, many computers". 

Free news services, such as History Commons and Source Watch, are demonstrating the value of  publishing blog posts under licenses that allow sharing of content within the blogosphere. Unfortunately for the blogosphere, full copyright protection is  the default status of any published work.  Full copyright protection can seriously limit the sharing and redistribution of published work, making it difficult for bloggers,  to publish an interesting, comprehensive, and current treatment of a topic or issue.   Furthoremore, the for-profit revenue models of many online news services drives them to emphasis the use and distribution of current content and neglecting the collection of archived material to provide comprehensive treatments of a subject.  

To demonstrate the value of less restrictive licensing, History Commons and Source Watch emphasize the cataloging of contemporary accounts to provide comprehensive treatments of a subject. 

Other syndication services such as AllVoices and AssociatedContent, combine liberal licensing with a revene-generating model to create a news service that covers  topics and areas from the 60% of the world not well covered by major news gatherers. AllVoices generates most of its revenue through advertising and plans to pay contributors when their work is used  while allowing contributors to retain copyright to their material.  AssociatedContent has a similar model, though  it pays authors for submitting work rather than when their work is used. 

This story is based on reports from on Journalism.co.uk, AssociatedContent.com, and Wikipedia.

The semantic web potentially offers a solution to the emerging problem of interoperabilty among applications hosted in the Cloud. Work being done at the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) aims to create a common cloud taxonomy and ontology, which is a way to express cloud computing and its subsequent parts in terms of a consensus data model.

A group at CCIF is applying the Semantic Web to APIs as part of a broader effort to create a unified cloud interface -- a Semantic Abstraction Layer, single programmable interface for all other APIs, with OWL (Web Ontology Language) serving as the basis of that model.

July 15 was T-Mobile's release of its Galaxy Vibrant, which is a variant of Samsung's Galaxy S Phone. Galaxy provides HD video capture support on an outdoor-friendly Super AMOLED screen that measures over four inches.  The Galaxy is driven by a1GHz processor  runing Android 2.1. Of the many exciting features, we're most interested in the operating system, Android.

Android is  a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. The Android SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the Java programming language.

Applications can utilize Android Cloud to Device Messaging to enable mobile alert, send to phone, and two-way push sync functionality.

An Android-powered phone can be used as a 3G connection for a Windows or Linux laptop by connecting the computer to the phone with a USB cable. The connection is then shared between the two devices.

An Android device can access content providers to expose data to other applications. A content provider is an optional component that provides read/write access to application data, subject to whatever restrictions the data provider has defined.

Android 2.2 implements a new media framework (Stagefright) that supports local file playback and HTTP progressive streaming. For cameras, Andriod supports portrait orientation, zoom controls, access to exposure data, and a thumbnail utility. A new camcorder profile enables apps to determine device hardware capablities. Android 2.2 also provides new APIs for audio focus, routing audio to SCO, and auto-scan of files to media database. Android also provides APIs to let applications detect completion of sound loading and auto-pause and auto-resume audio playback. A new preview API doubles the frame rate from ~10FPS to ~20FPS.  

Developers should have fun with this!