Sherweb

Some said it wouldn’t last, that it would never be able to sustain the amount of users; that eventually, it would crash. But despite doubt and scepticism, the Internet has changed the world as we know it; the way we communicate, find and share information, do business and proven- it is very much here to stay. From being a network of networks to becoming a medium; an information superhighway without geographic frontiers, the Internet has made distances shorter and the world much smaller.

McLuhan’s “Global Village” Becomes Reality

Referred to as the “Oracle of the Electronic Age” in the early 1960’s, Marshall McLuhan predicted that humankind would one day be connected through “electronic interdependence”. Shifting from individualism to a collective identity, what McLuhan coined the “Global Village” couldn’t be more accurate today, thanks to the World Wide Web.

Though McLuhan was far ahead of his time, it would take decades before his theories came close to fathomable. In a Newsweek article published in 1995: The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana, Clifford Stroll argues that “the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data”, “without any pretense of completeness”, “lacking editors, reviewers or critics”. Bold statements that were a little too quick to judge, (meanwhile, his article had at least two typos in it), Stroll’s main concern was that computers would actually work to isolate us from one another, not bring us together.

Companies were also worried about investing time and resources into the Web due to its perceived unreliability. In many respects, their concerns were valid. Had more companies gone to the web, the Internet almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to handle the influx of new users.

But the Internet has come along way since then. In December of 1995, a total 16 million people around the world were using the Internet. As of December 2009, that number rose to 1.6 billion.

The Impact of Social Media on Today’s Business

In earlier days, websites functioned as simple on-line brochures for organizations, with very little interaction or real value for customers. But as technology improved, so did websites. Over the years, websites have become more interactive and it’s common to see discussion forums, e-commerce for on-line retailing and a wide range of other features, which ties back to the idea of a Global Village. Social media networking is the name of the game now, with websites having to hook into social media websites and create communities. Though we are beginning to see more and more attempts by both businesses and governments to control the Internet, the trend will most likely lead to increasing transparency if they wish to thrive in our fast-paced Age of Information. “The greatest changes will occur in the arena of trust and human relations.”

Internet Predictions Through Time

Here are just a few videos that offer a glimpse into how the Internet has been perceived over the last 40 years.

Internet predictions in 1969

Shopping online, online banking, webcams, (but perhaps not exchange hosting services)- take a look at how remarkably accurate predictions of the future were in this 1969 video.

Internet 1981 from print to online

One of the first attempts at a newspaper going from print to online:

Peter Mansbridge on the Growing Phenomenon Called “Internet”

For $200 a year you could be logged on to a computer network called: INTERNET

Interview with an Internet Café owner in 1995

“Ranking up their in popularity with VCR’s, people are now paying their bills, balancing their chequebook, and playing games online with people on the other side of the globe.” Wonder what they would have thought about today’s web based crm software?

Customer Relationship Management, it’s that time again. No, seriously, we’re talking CRM. Fortunately, we’re not going to bore you with any old regular CRM product, but a full-blown Enterprise Edition called Hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

From the ground up, Dynamics CRM 4.0 is designed to be a fully customizable and extendable solution to your business and SaaS needs. How’s that? Think about this. Ever had the situation where one of your sales staff gets a couple key calls about a potential new product offering but is missing sales literature and loses the lead while someone in marketing is hoarding sales pamphlets because they are wondering who their target market may be?

Missed sales opportunities like this occur all the time, and it’s the reason why Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 exists – no more lost emails or phone calls to important contacts or associates, no more wondering what happened to that hot lead from last week, and no more second guessing what your company needs to know about the customer.

But Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 isn’t just about your sales department: it’s more, much more. For example, without a CRM system like Dynamics in place, you can think of your business like an unassembled puzzle on a table. Each piece on its own only yields a hint of the picture, but when assembled a clear image is to be found. That is to say, Dynamics CRM 4.0 functions to take all those important little pieces from all over your business and put them together in one place to acquire a complete 360⁰ view of your customer relationship management.

Need a comprehensive scheduling application for client service calls? A customer service support desk with knowledge base and case tracking? How about a powerful marketing engine with automated workflows? Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 does it all with native integration into your current Outlook so you can focus less resources on training and user adoption – and that folks, is why we’re seriously talking CRM.

Do we still care whether aliens exist or not?  According to 5.2 million earthlings in over 200 countries around the planet, we do.  This number represents the number of people who have participated in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, more famously known as the SETI@home project.  Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, hosted over 5 million computers worldwide, all working independently to pick up any potential alien signals which may have been sent our way.  SETI@home remains to this day the largest distributed computing project in history according to Guiness World Records, a grid whose forces combined can compute over 528 TeraFLOPS.  Now, I ain’t no geologist, but that’s a lot of FLOPS.

For those who don’t remember, SETI@home sought out participants with home computers and internet connections to help them “listen” for aliens.  When the government cancelled all its funding towards extra-terrestrial listening programs in 1993, the SETI team could not afford to build the supercomputer necessary to process and distinguish an extra-terrestrial signal amidst the infinite amount of data floating around out there, so they decided to get us, the people, involved.  By simply downloading their software, which came in the form a screensaver, thousands of home computers could begin to analyze the data recorded by the Arecibo telescope, which kept a vigilant watch on the skies from Puerto Rico.  The SETI@home technology would not interfere with people’s day to day computing, as it would only function while they were away from their computers. Kind of like what an email filtering system does on exchange hosting server. And while a combined two million years worth of recorded data all returned to Berkeley without so much as an alien hiccup, the system created to support the project known as BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), which harnesses the power of many volunteer’s computers to achieve a common result, proved to be a massive success.

The search for Spock continues…

In the continued search for extra-terrestrial life forms, scientists are engaging in what’s known as “Active SETI,” or “METI,” which stand for “Messaging to ETI.”  What do you do when you’re sick and tired of waiting around for the phone to ring?  You pick it up and you call them.  The only problem with this scenario is when many people around the world have all been waiting for the same call, and suddenly one person decides “to hell with this!”  That person happens to be Alexander Zaitsev, Chief Scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics.  After many years of waiting by the phone for E.T. to call, Zaitsev decided to put one of the most powerful radio transmitters on earth to good use and has sent several messages into space, hoping for someone to “pick up.”  These “Cosmic Calls” were send to constellations Orion, Cancer, Cygnus, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Sagitta, and Ursa Major.  The first messages were sent in 1999, and they still have at least another 50 years of travelling before they arrive at their destinations.

While everyone appreciates a man of action, “scientists feel that [Zaitsev] is not only acting out of turn, but also independently speaking for everyone on the entire planet. Moreover, they believe there are possible dangers we may unleash by announcing ourselves to the unknown darkness, and if anyone plans to transmit messages from Earth, they want the rest of the world to be involved.” (source)  Zaitsev’s transmissions have pushed several SETI members into resignation, as his actions directly violate an internationally-agreed upon Protocol which basically states that before any messages are sent into outer space, the public should be notified, and the nations of the world should all have their say in what the message will contain.  In 1974, for example, a binary signal was sent from the Arecibo telescope which contained information about human DNA, complete with pictures of us, our solar system, and the telescope itself.  Unfortunately the “star cluster to which the signal was sent… will have moved out of range of the beam during the 25,000 years it will take the message to get there.”  (source)

In our perpetual quest to answer the question “Is there anybody out there?” we continue to increase technology’s ability to watch, to listen, and for the more bold, to speak.  The real question should be whether or not we’re prepared for an answer.  Hollywood has presented both sides of the alien coin, offering extra-terrestrials who have either come to warm our hearts and help us out, or to painfully probe and destroy us.  So as far as intergalactic communication is concerned, should we take a more democratic, passive, sit back and quietly listen approach, as the SETI@home project has always promoted?  Or should we take the more aggressive Russian approach, of just knocking on other galaxies’ doors, hoping the hyper-intelligent, willing-to-teach-us-the-secrets-of-the-universe-type of aliens will open?  Despite a complete and total lack of results, and assuming that aliens might in fact be evil creatures bent on sticking pointy metal objects inside our bodies, the former would seem to be the safest thing to do.  In fact, SETI and the University of California have teamed up again to develop more, stronger ears.  The “Allen Telescope Array” will consist of 350 20-foot diameter dishes, allowing researchers to gather more space data than ever before.

Here’s the problem with the passive SETI listening approach as opposed to the pro-active METI:  If the rest of the universe is also only listening, then no one will ever hear anything.

Though the Internet may seem like a relatively new concept, the idea of a computer network that would allow communication between a wide scope of users from various computers was formulated in 1962 in a series of memos by J.C.R. Licklider discussing ‘Intergalactic Computer Network’. These ideas contained almost everything that the Internet is today.

Early P2P networking

In the late 1960’s, the peer-to-peer networking system was developed. The ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was created by the United States Department of Defense during the Cold War and was the world’s first operational packet switching network- now the basis for data communication. The original ARPANET connected UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbra and the University of Utah as equal computing peers source.

Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and Usenet

In 1979, Usenet was developed by two graduate students from Duke University and one from the University of North Carolina, which allowed you to exchange information in the UNIX community. UNIX was the first widely-used operating system that could switch from and outlive its original hardware.

Similar to Bulletin Board Systems, which could perform functions such as downloading or uploading software and data, reading news and exchanging messages with other users, students from both universities were able to exchange messages, post news, and read public messages with Usenet. The articles users would post were then organized into topical categories called newsgroups. Newsgroups were added to the main topic hierarchy. If a newsgroup vote passed, a new group message would be sent and propagated through the Usenet network.

Usenet grew from those original two sites to hundred of thousands of sites, while still retaining the P2P model of networking. Usenet was essentially the precursor to various web forums used today- a hybrid between email and web forums, minus the advanced security features of a hosted exchange server.

The 90’s: When http and ftp Reigned

P2P networks developed throughout the 90’s but were mostly used for in-house purposes. When the Internet became really popular in the mid 90’s, most developers and web architects were creating systems that did involve P2P exchange. The Internet made its way into the mainstream and primarily became a way for people to exchange email, access web pages, and buy stuff.

Between 1995-1997, FTP (file transfer protocol) file sharing and free homepage file sharing became the major way to share files. The most popular file sharing was the (anonymous) file transfer protocol. An anonymous FTP server allows a user to login using an anonymous name to send or receive a file over the Internet.

HTTP was also widely used, beginning as a simple protocol used to request pages from a server. The browser would connect to the server and send a command like:

GET/ welcome.html

The server would then respond with the contents of the requested file.

In 1997, ICQ messenger became the new major way to share files and enabled you to send instant messages. It was developed by an Israeli company called Mirabilis and was the first of its kind as at that point, no software existed to enable an immediate connection between users, and most people were accessing the Internet through a non-UNIX operating system.

Napster 1999

The P2P system began to gain popularity again when Northeastern University student Shawn Fanning developed Napster, along with two friends he had met online, Jordan Ritter and Sean Parker. Its technology allowed people to copy and distribute mp3 files amongst each other which ended up paving the way for decentralized peer-to-peer file distribution programs. 60 million people worldwide were using this application, which generated an immense selection of music to download.

But with Napster’s popularity also came a unanimous anger by recording artists and studios who felt that this so-called music sharing application was violating copyright laws. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster in December of 1999, and in April of 2000 Metallica filed a lawsuit as well. After long legal battles Napster stopped operation in July 2001.

Kazaa, Morpheus, Gnutella, Audiogalaxy, Limewire…

Even though Napster disappeared it opened the door to new file-swapping programs such as Kazaa, Gnutella, Audiogalaxy and these continue to be used to share music files. These programs operate without any involvement from central computers so even if these companies were sued the file-swapping networks would still exist.

Bram Cohen’s BitTorrent

American computer programmer Bram Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to download files from many different sources, in order to speed up download time especially for users with faster download than upload speeds. BitTorrent became very popular for its ability to share large music and movie files online at fast speeds- the more popular the file the faster the download.

uTorrent, azure (and other torrent software)

uTorrent is a freeware closed source BitTorrent client by BitTorrent Inc and is the second most popular P2P application.

Top Torrent Sites In Recent History

Suprnova
Torrentspy
Demonoid
Oink
Isohunt
The Pirate Bay
MiniNova
Torrentz
Torrentreactor

At the moment, torrent downloads account for a majority of all peer-to-peer exchanges over the internet. Its prevailing use has lead to many innovations and avenues for smaller and larger companies alike to share and distribute digital content in all forms.

While the original intent behind torrents was noble, most torrents available online are of copyrighted materal. It goes without saying that downloading copyrighted materials on the internet is inherantly risky as most countries currently have laws protecting artists.

We’d all seen the bomb – a fiery mushroomed column of mortality, destructive power that could kill the dead. Awe and hysteria born from the ashes of the Second World War led to the Cold War, and in turn a need to protect messaging and communication in case such a nuke ever hit home. Indeed, there is strength in number, or rather, in networked distribution, on many levels. From these beginnings, adaptations of the first digital communication technologies emerged, connecting 4 western universities and laying the foundation for the age of telecommunication.

Email, as a means of electronically sending messages between two people, is said to have began at MIT in the 1960s. The system was crude, and basically amounted to different users leaving notes for each other stored on the same shared computer. This was a precursor to today’s method of sending an email across a network, which, incidentally, was created not too much later.

The First Network Email

The backbone of our current email system began with ARPANET, near the end of 1971, by Ray Tomlinson, an ARPANET contractor working for Bolk Beranek and Newman. ARPANET was the network created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense during the Cold War. Tomlinson’s goal was to take his existing basic messaging system, SNGMSG, and take it to the next logical evolution, indicating for a given message which user was at which of the network’s computers.

At its core, email isn’t too different from regular mail. When you send a letter to someone, you indicate two things on the outside in order to get it where you want it to go: the name of the intended recipient, and the presumed current location of said recipient. Tomlinson came up with an elegant way of designating these two parts with the adoption of the @ symbol. His system, familiar to all of us now, identifies the recipient before the symbol, the location after. While the location referred to a particular computer at the time, the location now refers to the domain at which a mail server is hosted, a bit like sending a letter to an apartment building, and you leave it to the building administration to get the note to the right person. There’s a popular myth that the first email ever written was “qwertyuiop”, but actually was some forgettable test text that Tomlinson himself can’t remember.

Email Exchange Today

The principles behind the ARPANET extended to the Internet that followed. Messages are now sent via a local electronic mail server, which then relays to the intended destination using SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, read using Post Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) which access the mail server that received the message. Many companies have local mail servers of this kind, which manage the incoming and outgoing messages workers send and receive internally or from outside their network. The next step, which many companies have started to take, uses services like Microsoft Exchange Hosting. While local mail servers get the basic job done, numerous factors make hosting a mail server off-site a safer option. A hosted exchange service, in short, acts as an intermediary between senders outside the network and those within, offering an added layer of protection to catch SPAM, viruses, and other junk or dangerous email. Also, the infrastructures of the kinds of companies that offer a hosted exchange service, for instance, Microsoft Sharepoint Hosting allow pretty much guaranteed uptime and security over a cloud-computing network, far more stable than a company’s local mailserver. No offense to affected IT workers! It’s nice to know that in the event of a robbery, fire, or anything else horrible, that stolen or destroyed equipment doesn’t mean lost data.

The Future

One possible direction for email could be towards using XMPP instead of SMTP. Anarchogeek explains the situation well, basically that instant messenger services use a means of transferring information that is highly permission-based (because of invited friends), usually resulting in less junk and more quick and pure communication. There are critical mass issues to overcome in making a transition away from something as prevalent and accepted as SMTP, but XMPP could very well be the next step in electronic mail.

SherWeb’s outstanding growth, thanks to its Hosted Exchange offering, was acknowledged on April 17 as we proudly made it twice to the podium of the 2009 Gala Reconnaissance Estrie in Sherbrooke. We won the Service Business Excellence Award and were discerned the honorable mention for most innovative SMB in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.

These recognitions acknowledge that SherWeb is the number one choice for SaaS solutions (i.e. Hosted Exchange, Hosted Blackberry, and Hosted SharePoint). Clearly our daily efforts in providing our customers with the most innovative solutions and the best support are paying off. We are grateful to all our customers for trusting us with their business and allowing us to become one of the fastest growing companies in the industry.