Software Reviews

Verizon Wireless has expanded its network with a new cell site to provide new coverage and capacity along Routes 10, and 141 in Easthampton, Massachusetts, in the US.

Verizon Wireless has invested $145 million during the first six months of the year to enhance wireless capacity and coverage throughout the six states of New England, elevating the cumulative network investment in the region to more than $2 billion since 2000. The company’s ongoing network investment now totals more than $40 billion nationally over the past seven years.

The new expansion will provide BroadbandAccess Revision A, which offers computer users wireless mobile broadband network, operating at average upload speeds between 500 and 800 kbps, and download speeds between 600 kbps and 1.4 mbps. V CAST brings video clips of TV shows, music on demand and other multimedia services to wireless phones over Verizon Wireless’ high-speed EV-DO network.

Madhouse, a provider of mobile advertising network, has launched mobile contextual ad network for Chinese small and medium enterprises via its wholly owned subsidiary company - Madsmart.

Madsmart will serve China’s mobile contextual ads, MadWords and MadSense, enabling advertisers to reach their desired consumers browsing content relevant to their products or services. Currently China’s 160 million mobile web users can choose to view the advertiser’s mobile web site by clicking on the ad link, or click the phone number link to contact the advertiser directly. With cost-per-click/call pricing model, Chinese small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can now take advantage of Madhouse’s mobile ad serving, visual optimization, and click fraud preventing system, and more importantly, to advertise on MadNetwork major mobile web portals.

Joshua Maa, CEO of Madhouse, said: “We are glad to see that our vision has been welcomed by all the mobile internet portals and vertical publishers, Madsmart’s Contextual MadNetwork includes all major mobile web publishers such as 3G.CN, QQ, Sohu, Sina, Tom, Yicha, Downjoy, Yesky, tx.com.cn, 3G.PP.CN, and massive vertical sites in the long tail, and together we will promote Madsmart’s MadSense and MadWords.”

Montana State Fund (MSF, $238 million in net earned premium) has taken what its CIO terms a huge step out of its legacy environment with the successful deployment of Guidewire Software’s (San Mateo, Calif.) Web-based ClaimCenter end-to-end claims processing platform. The Helena-based public workers’ compensation carrier engaged HCL Technologies to lead the implementation effort in two distinct engagements. Guidewire ClaimCenter replaces an 18-year-old, mainframe-based legacy claims system that MSF CIO Al Parisian says was used “for the entirety of its life on an ad hoc, convenience and opportunistic basis.” Over the years, the system had seen multiple code accretions and extensions to a data schema as old as the application itself, according to Parisian.

While MSF currently provides coverage to over 70% of Montana’s employers, Parisian says, the limits of the legacy system threatened its competitive position owing to its limited functionality and the difficulty of integrating it to more modern systems. High maintenance costs were also a driver for replacement.

MSF faced a serious challenge in moving to the Guidewire system both because of the stark transition to ClaimCenter’s modern data schema but also because of limited internal capacity for large IT initiatives. “Like many insurers, MSF is coming off a family of legacy applications and our appetite for change is greater than our capacity to introduce it right now,” Parisian says. However, the insurer calculated that it the cost of engaging an outsourcing partner was more than justified if it meant a faster transition to a more modern state. “We determined that what we would lose by being in the past for 10 years longer was too high a price to pay,” Parisian adds.

MSF embarked on its relationships with both Guidewire and HCL in 2004. By March 2006 the carrier went live with Guidewire ClaimCenter 2.0. Of the implementation challenges, Parisian comments that HCL had developed tools that enabled the outsourcer to analyze MSF’s legacy data schema. “They were able to show us for every field how much of the data we had was consistent with the new set of parameters demanded by the Guidewire application, and how much wasn’t,” he says. “Knowing that up front in such an organized fashion helped us direct the work of our own business teams and developers, as well as HCL’s work, to ensure that we had a successful migration.”

The success of the initial implementation motivated MSF to immediately invest in an upgrade of ClaimCenter. “That decision was made, and our relationship with HCL was strong enough that we called them and reengaged them to work with us on the upgrade,” Parisian recounts. “The upgraded system went into production May 20, 2007, it’s stable and we’re already talking about the next project.”

From an operational standpoint, the ClaimCenter deployment has supported a reduction in MSF’s average temporary total disability (TTD) duration-the time an employee is on total disability status-from 43.5 weeks to 29.6 weeks, owing to the granularity with which the system enables management of cases. Parisian says the system has also introduced a radically improved degree of business agility. “We get requests dozens of times a week to make changes to the application that are completely addressable within the rules engine of the Guidewire application-we’re able to make changes on the fly as to how the application looks and behaves for the business operation, and we’re able to do it without even taking down servers,” he reports. “The business operation has been introduced to a level of responsiveness and flexibility that was technically impossible before.”

Parisian adds that another important gain yielded from the Guidewire implementation effort was that, “it taught us that we could effectively partner with a modern outsourcing company without losing any control or confidence in our own business operations and IT support.”

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SOURCING SERENDIPITY

When Montana State Fund (MSF) engaged HCL Technologies to help the public workers’ comp insurer replace its homegrown legacy claim system, CIO Al Parisian expected “a market basket of services.” What MSF actually found was a deeper and more productive partnership, which resulted in the extension of the relationship to other projects, a standing invitation for HCL to bid on future work, and greater confidence on the part of MSF to leverage outsourcing relationships in the future.

“We knew we were hiring qualified coders, but HCL’s ability to help us with change management aspects of the implementation were more strategic than we anticipated,” Parisian says. “What we’ve come to understand about HCL’s capabilities is that there may be higher-order intellectual development that we don’t have to grow internally because we can safely park it with a company like HCL,” Parisian says.

After 2006 — a year when virtually no one managed to launch a digital music service in competition with Apple’s dominant iTunes — 2007 was a refreshing change of pace.Several fresh faces emerged onto the digital music scene this year, buoyed in part by record companies’ newfound willingness to experiment with different business models, but also by the departure of several high-profile competitors.

By far the most visible service to throw in the towel this year was MTV’s Urge; now, a new entity called Rhapsody America joins Rhapsody’s technology with MTV’s editorial and music curation staff.

Sony began the slow dimming of the switch on the struggling Connect music service. The company in August announced a gradual shutdown that will begin in March, laying off about 20 employees and reallocating the remainder to another division.

Zune, though, is hanging in there. This year, the Microsoft service was upgraded with a decidedly social networking-oriented strategy. The Zune Social initiative incorporates user profiles (called Zune Cards) that members can use to list their favorite artists, post widgets onto other social networking services and let others sample music in full-song fashion.

Meanwhile, a host of such companies as Snocap and Lala tried a more “distributed commerce” approach — where digital vending machines called “widgets” let artists offer downloads from their own social network profiles, as well as from their fans’ profiles, rather than forcing consumers to visit digital megastores like iTunes.

And the year ended with Radiohead’s monumental decision to sell its new album directly from its Web site and let fans set the price.

But neither the stumbles of MTV and Sony nor the experimental methods of Radiohead and others have kept the following services from entering the market with their own business models.

AMAZON

After years of “will-they-or-won’t-they” teasing, Amazon finally unveiled its much-anticipated digital music service — which, as promised, features iPod-friendly, digital rights management-free MP3s from EMI Music, Universal Music Group and a handful of independent labels. In addition to unprotected music, it promotes a variable pricing model that sells albums for between $5 and $9. In the short time it’s been active, the service is already considered the third-largest digital retail outlet on the Web, after iTunes and eMusic — and that’s without content from Sony BMG and Warner Music Group (WMG).

SPIRALFROG

The poster child for the much-discussed “ad-supported” business model, Spiralfrog finally went live after a lengthy delay that saw its original CEO leave the company and millions in music licensing fees wasted while the service hovered in limbo. But launch it did, to a great degree of press and mixed critical reaction. It works much like any other music subscription service, complete with iPod-excluding DRM technology, only it requires that users view ads at least once per month rather than ask them to pay a monthly fee. All major labels and many independents are onboard.

SLACKER

Belying its name, Slacker actually worked overtime this year with two service launches. The first, in the spring, marked the start of its free, ad-supported customizable online radio service. It then followed up in November with phase two: transferring that service to a portable device that uses Wi-Fi to update channels, and a subscription service tier that offers users more functionality for a monthly fee. Now that all the pieces are in place, look for Slacker to pick up the slack during the holidays and into next year.

IMEEM

The digital music business model these days is much like a game of chicken. Start with a service that lets users stream free music, then hope to gain as many users as possible so that when the labels threaten to sue, you can turn it around into a licensing deal instead. That’s what Imeem did. After WMG initiated legal action against the playlist streaming service, Imeem implemented filtering technology and an advertising system from Snocap to cut WMG in every time a user played one of its songs. It now counts all four major labels as partners.

A Canadian company specializing in Internet porn is being sued by Facebook amid allegations it hacked the popular social networking website’s computers and tried to access the personal information of users, court documents show. A numbered Ontario company, which does business online under the name SlickCash, along with several people in the Toronto area, are named in an amended complaint filed by Facebook in San Jose, Calif.

The hugely popular information sharing website alleges that, for two weeks last June, the defendants attempted to access Facebook’s servers at least 200,000 times.

“Each of these requests sought to direct Facebook’s computers to send information on other Facebook users back to (the company’s Internet Protocol) address,” the court documents say.

“These requests for information from Facebook generated error messages and were detected as unauthorized attempts to access and harvest proprietary information.”

It wasn’t clear from the documents what information was accessed, but the complaint alleges “the defendants knowingly and without permission took, copied, or made use of, data from Facebook’s proprietary computers and computer network.”

Facebook, with an estimated 34 million users worldwide, allows members to post photos alongside personal information like a birth date, hometown, e-mail address, phone number, and workplace.

The lawsuit names Istra Holdings Inc., the numbered company affiliated with SlickCash, and defendants Brian Fabian and Josh Raskin as either “residing or working” at the same Toronto address.

The complaint contains allegations that have not been proven in court.

Calls to Istra Holdings were not immediately returned, and it was not immediately clear whether any of the defendants had filed a statement of defence.

The SlickCash website boasts that its partners have been “involved in every facet of the online adult industry” since 1999.

The suit also names Ming Wu and six other defendants whose identities remain unknown.

The amended complaint was filed last Wednesday after Facebook was granted court orders in Canada forcing Internet service providers Rogers Communications and Look Communications to divulge subscriber information.

Both companies were asked to hand over the information voluntarily, but refused, the suit said.

“We have a policy that we do not turn over customer information without a valid court order,” said Rogers spokeswoman Taanta Gupta.

“Those are the steps to balance privacy with the requirements of the law.”

After the first IP address that tried to hack its severs was blocked, other addresses began trying to gain access, the complaint alleges.

The suit alleges Facebook has suffered damages in “excess of $5,000” and has been “irreparably harmed.”

The “extent and amount of such injury and damage will be demonstrated at trial,” the complaint says.