Web 3.0 is coming!
The future points to Web 3.0, where people not only contribute to content but also subscribe to relationship sites. The next phase in this revolution has users contributing to the development of tools and products. In this interview, Fábio Boucinhas, Yahoo!’s Product Director for Brazil, talks about some of its major highlights
Ci&T Webnews - “Relationships” and “content” are some of the key-words in the Web 2.0. Are we well served in these areas?
Boucinhas - User-generated content is one of the major milestones of this era. Allowing people to communicate with each other and to exchange information in generic or vertical communities was a real revolution. Many sites were created to provide relationship environments. Flickr, which not only allows relationships among people, but more specifically, photo-sharing is a good example of this trend. The site was initially used by photographers who became famous for their quality photos and images. However, it is now largely used by the general public. This is a model of a verticalized community with user-generated content. We are now experiencing an Internet where it is possible to provide different venues and options for people who want to express themselves.
Ci&T Webnews - Is the type of information people share becoming more sophisticated too?
Boucinhas – Certainly! Yahoo! Answers is another good example of user-generated content, not necessarily geared to communities but to knowledge sharing. When you are looking for the best travel route for instance, in a traditional search site you may not get an exact answer. Since there are different routes for different profiles, in a relationship environment it is possible to get to what you want by using hints offered by an infinite number of people. Yahoo! Answers alone has over 7 million users – all thanks to the Web 2.0 trend.
Ci&T Webnews - And where is this universe going to?
Boucinhas - The next step is Web 3.0, where people not only contribute with content, but also to the evolution of tools and products. This is another revolution in the making. Mash, Yahoo!’s new social networking, in the near future will be opening its platform so can develop modules they truly enjoy. Games like kaleidoscope or sudoku, for example, will be modules users can “pickup” and use in their own pages. Of course, in an environment where users will be starting to develop their own systems, an issue that may occur refers to patents. I believe this is a question that will end up being regulated by the community itself. Sites such as blogs or Flickr are already self-regulated as to content authorship. Users are aware of these rules and are accountable to legal actions.
Currently, Ci&T is developing a series of solutions for Yahoo! “We initiated a partnership with Ci&T so we could support our talents, with the agility in terms of scale and required skills. These talents can be organized in independent teams either dedicated to managing projects or to working in direct collaboration with Yahoo!’s internal teams”, states Rodolfo Calil, Yahoo!’s Outsourcing Partnerships Manager. Our portal has used Ci&T’s services to develop hotsites and provide support to certain services and platforms, not only with products in Brazil, but overseas as well. Recent examples of developments supported by Ci&T’s services are Argentina Elections, Argentina Rugby and Argentina Auto sites. “Such services include both front- and back-end development activities. Some extensions in the integration of content providers are just an example of their involvement”, says Calil.
J&J’s first global Software Center of Excellence was installed in Brazil and is able to meet the shared IT needs from the group’s 200 companies. Ci&T is one of the software facilities supporting the development, maintenance and optimization of IT applications. Recently, Johnson & Johnson won the 2007 Award for Quality Standard in Non-durable Goods category, promoted by B2B Magazine.Lower than US costs and high quality of outsourced IT services were the two criteria guiding the multinational when they decided in 2005 to select Brazil - among 53 countries where J&J operates - to harbor its first Center of Excellence (COE), a global software center of competence. Though IT is not its core business and due to the Group’s 200 companies in over 175 countries worldwide, Johnson & Johnson felt it needed to consolidate all of the companies’ demands into a single point. It opted for creating a dedicated in-house area, thus it invested into the construction of the Center in São José dos Campos (SP). The in-house area would be responsible for all the development, maintenance and optimization of its applications. This initiative worked well and has already produced its share of success cases, such as the development of a Business Intelligence (BI) application for the Customer Service area, running on its global corporate intranet.
The expectation is to have its production doubled, while increasing its developers’ team size as well as the technologies portfolio of tools integration. To meet all the company’s specific demands, the COE operates today, in partnership with software facilities such as, Ci&T who provides support with the extra projects. “The success of our project is the result of a lot of dedication in overcoming the constant daily hurdles. The major benefit was that, worldwide, we ended up having alternatives for application development and maintenance”, Argemiro Leite, Johnson & Johnson’s IT Director said.
Source: B2B Magazine
