3rd PLATFORM 101

IDC and Gartner both define the 3rd platform as a loose collection of technologies consisting of mobile, social, cloud and big data.

Mobile Apps

Mobile
Smart phones and tablets are ubiquitous. I would use my smart phone for everything if I could. (insert joke about tiny unreadable screen here)
I want the power to Google whenever & wherever I am!

The trick to understanding Mobile is... it's more about "how we are doing things" these days rather than "what we are doing them on".

2nd Platform required thick SW clients installed on laptops. These SW applications were large, complex applications installed using a CDROMs and required complex updates. They were designed to solve many generic challenges for many generic users.

3rd platform mobile apps are small, click to download, mostly free apps that solve a users single challenge. Mobile "App Stores" are full of millions of small simple apps rather than boxed rather than a few large complex SW applications that solve many generic challenges.

"How" mobile is doing things - The app logic and the data both run and are stored on the web.
This is the salient point. Web apps don't require thick laptop clients with powerful processors and big "local" storage.

Social Networking

Social
Now that these simple mobile apps are keeping you connected to the web not just when your sitting in front of your laptop at work, you can share what you do, when your doing it. @AirportGate @KidsSoccerGame let us know.

Personal websites that required HTML coding knowledge have given way to Facebook pages, blogs, Linkedin and wikis. Users can link themselves to their friends and favorite companies, TV shows, products, etc. These linkages work both ways. Companies can now learn who is following and commenting on their products.

The enormous amount of data being produced from billions of users can show us connections we did not know exist and shape how we feel about the world around us.

Cloud Computing

Cloud
I worked for a Web Hosting provider circa 99's early 2000's and with so much competition for pricing,  we knew that win market share you had to keep capital and operational expenses down by:
1. USE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
2. AUTOMATING

Private IT firms still used commercial off-the-shelf SW or developed their own coded enterprise applications. Cloud providers had self-service e-commerce websites that automated the deployment of Open Source SW for paying customers. System administrators were only there to step in when the automation broke. Customers were signing up for services online with credit cards in the middle of the night and when we arrived at work we would see that the service had been automatically provisioned before we had arrived.

Big Data

Companies have been building relational databases to store their enterprise application data for years. Companies would aggregate their daily generated OLTP transactional data from enterprise applications into data warehouses at corporate HQ. They would then restructure that warehoused data into OLAP databases for analysis.

Enterprise applications are not the only things generating data that companies want to analyze these days. Mobile apps, social websites and the IoT (Internet of Things) are generating huge amounts of data nowadays, Relational DBs just can't handle the this type of data. Big data is not just BIG but FAST and UNSTRUCTURED.

How do you eat an elephant? Answer: One bite at a time.
To analyze big data you must divide and conquer. Dividing the data, analyzing the many pieces independently and putting it back together requires distributed computing and storage. Analyzing unstructured data often requires key-value pairs and columnar not relational databases. Enter Hadoop, Redis and other NoSQL DBs

I will break down each of these 4 technologies Mobile, Social, Cloud and Big Data in future blog posts - stay tuned!