Quantum Art Releases QP7.Payment

This is a reprint of a post from the other blog:

Who said content management is not about revenue generation? QP7.Payment is a transaction capture solution designed to help governments and corporation centralize disparate electronic revenue management functions. For example, say you are a government with 60 different departments. Each of the departments has a specific business process and product categories for generating revenue (Treasurer collects property taxes; Clerk's office sells records, both certified and not; Planning and Zoning issues permits; Parks allows you to reserve facilities; etc.).

Now, integrating all of these items into a single catalog is a major undertaking. Plus, the checkout process will be different for every department. In this situation, does it make any sense to do the integration on the product or the content level? We didn't think so either and architected QP7.Payment to be a web-services solution that integrates these disparate revenue generation sources on the transaction level, thus becoming a transaction capture solution.

The government process I described is just an example. It's actually based on Bernalillo County (NM) that already implemented QP7.Payment. But same applies to sales of, say, digital assets, or an actual product inventory.

QP7.Payment is, of course, based on QP7. All the nice things about the platform still apply.

END REPRINT

Goodbye Blogger, Hello WordPress

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Click... and mortal

I was introduced to a new term today: "click & mortal". As opposed to a better known "click & mortar" term, which is the last boom's description of traditional business engaged in e-commerce, "click & mortal" must be describing e-commerce companies that were buried by the bust.

By the same token, the term "brick & mortal" must also exist, but has nothing to do with commerce.

From an anonymous online source:

Throughout the years, we have assisted our clients to transform their “brick and mortal” business to “click and mortal” business. They are happy on the results as thousands of dollars have been saved, the major benefits are reduction in office rental, staff cost as well as advertisement cost.

The "brick and mortal" approach must really be a hit with staff cost reduction initiatives.

Content Management Is Not Rocket Science

Web content management is not rocket science. But web content management and rocket science are a powerful combination. One of Quantum Art’s earliest international customers was the Khrunichev Space Center, the Russian rocket science institution. They are the people behind the Soviet Mir space station and the international version currently under development. So when the scientists needed a way to communicate with their peers or publish information for the rest of us, they realized that they need a solution for managing online content.

The mind of an engineer works in mysterious ways. I realize now that Khrunichev’s problems were not unique, but when they approached us wanting to manage information by types, not by pages, we were simply too excited about our customers sharing the same philosophy as we were on managing online content. It’s not about pages, but about handling your content inventory, reusing information, and managing relations between different pieces of content to achieve a fluid publishing environment.

When we started working with Khrunichev, it didn’t occur to me that the problems we solved would ultimately lead to the idea of a content application server, a solution that for many reasons is replacing traditional web CMS tools. A parallel that I draw now is that to the CERN content management project that started in the early 1990s by Tim Berners-Lee and grew into the world wide web. At CERN it was nuclear physicists that pioneered HTML to create the fabric of the web as we know it today. By a similar token, Khrunichev’s rocket scientists pushed Quantum Art to rethink its product development strategy and deliver an enterprise solution for publishing to the new fabric of the web, the one where information is structured, tagged, and easily indexed.

In short, kudos to Quantum Art’s engineers, who may not be rocket scientists, but who could certainly speak their language and years ago foresee problems that are now becoming commonplace.

P.S. This glance into the past was in part caused by the product development plans Quantum Art’s technology team presented to the management earlier this week. The plans will soon be publicly announced on Quantum Art’s site with a flurry of activity around them. Check back shortly!

The Death of the Letter

Blogs are killers. Not bloggers, by any means – the writers themselves are generally harmless (even if the pen is mightier than the sword), but in transforming communications, blogs are the killers of personal correspondence. Blogs are the death of the letter.

What’s even more curious is that the rise of blogging both signals and facilitates a significant social change. For centuries people confided their personal thoughts, desires, intentions and general feelings to their correspondents. Remember, Choderlos de Laclos' “Dangerous Liaisons”, constructed completely from letters? And how about volumes of Lord Byron’s or Mark Twain’s correspondence?

What about the idea of a pen pal? Do you have one right now? Did you correspond with someone regularly just a few years ago? I certainly did. In fact, this post is a result of me rereading some of the letters I wrote in 2003/04 to Alexei Parshchikov, a Russian poet living in Germany.

Letters to the editor, which are more like “emails to the editor” now, as the electronic form replaced the physical, are still in existence, but have also evolved. They’ve become more of a “forum-around-the-editor”, not direct correspondence. Hell, the whole idea of an editor was really deflated with the rise of blogosphere.

Some industry insiders have described blogs and wikis as solutions to the email problem. Of course, there is spam, but as emails are just letters in cyberspace, blogs are out to rid the world of personal correspondence. Blogs become the death of the letter.

In conclusion, letters are private by nature and privacy of thought does not exist in blogosphere by definition (it is paradoxical, as all thoughts in the blogosphere are private). Then again, if letters were representative of a society of individuals and empires, does the appearance of the blogosphere mirror the society characterized by lack of privacy, exploding social pressures, and growing terrorism? Am I making the world a better place by blogging or adding to the downfall of the Western world?