Mike Wagner - Perpetual beta

USAToday Ten years from now, when someone wants to identify a moment that epitomizes the nuttiness about this Web 2.0 stuff, I vote we designate an entry in popular tech blog GigaOm this week: "A couple days ago, we pointed to Mooglets widgets, the creation of Rome-based Mad4milk.net. Today, we are shocked to learn that Mad4milk has been acquired by Freewebs. The Web host says it will repackage Mad4milk's JavaScript effects library, offering developer community site Freewebs Farms, and soon a widget library." What in the name of Moses is going on? Not even educated tech veterans can keep track anymore. Mooglets? Widget libraries? Mad4milk? Is this a scene from Harry Potter and the Stoned Venture Capitalists ? The tech industry is frothing. It is spewing companies and Web doohickeys and blog amalgamizers and Internet contraptions like video social-networking wiki cooking sites. KEEP TRACK OF IT ALL: Comment on this story on Kevin Maney's blog They have names such...

ZDNET Web 2.0 is not a heady financial bubble ready to burst, it is a hot air hype balloon ready to deflate. The cost-free ease by which 20-something weekend software developers hatch colorful, lightweight, cool apps ready-made for the colorful, lightweight, cool TechCrunch spotlight yields a dizzying parade of often indistinguishable Web 2.0 “feature sets.” In “ Web 2.0 financial success: Easy as 'two weeks and $700 bucks' ?” I present Kevin Rose’s description of his $700 bargain basement start-up of Digg: I was sitting around thinking about how this would play out. My background in school is in computer science. I wrote a scoping document to a friend, who is a developer. The friend said it would take two or three weeks to create and cost 700 bucks, so I said, 'Let's go for it.’ In “ Rocketboom: Web 2.0 'success' on $20 a day ?” I present The New York Times’ look at the early days of Rocketboom, “TV Stardom on $20 a Day”: It’s not just cool, though, i...

Posted by susanitsa on 25th August 2006 On my pestering list on the hunt for “proof cases” has also been JackBe . By now, I’m sure Mike Wagner wishes he never commented on my blog. This little firm here on the East Coast, however, has some rock’in blue chip, international customers. I’ve been doggin’ Wagner for case studies, and he’s been patiently telling me they were about to launch a new web site with “new Enterprise 2.0 positioning.” If you want a good explanation for why IT and non-IT folks should be interested in Enterprise tools, read this white paper on Ajax from JackBe. The new site launched yesterday. What I really liked was the initiative the company took to coin a new acronym, “REA.” It stands for Rich Enterprise Applications. Read for yourself what it’s all about. I’m trying to wrap my head around this, but it appears JackBe has the secret sauce to unite SOA with Ajax. Read this excellent article written by Deepak Alur JackBe’s VP of Engi...

Advanced Cell to Host Investor Conference Call to Discuss Breakthrough Technique to Generate Embryonic Stem Cells without Harming Embryo Wednesday August 23, 4:43 pm ET Proprietary Method May Remove Ethical and Political Obstacles to Stem Cell Research and Federal Funding ALAMEDA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 23, 2006--Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. (OTCBB: ACTC - News ), developers of groundbreaking human embryonic stem cell technologies to create next-generation medical therapies, will hold an investor conference call on Friday, August 25, 2006, at 12 noon Eastern, to discuss its novel technique to generate human embryonic stem cell lines from embryos while fully preserving the embryo's potential for life and development.

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Cows have regional accents, a group of British farmers claims, and phonetics experts say.

http://susanitsa.wordpress.com/ Posted by susanitsa on August 24th, 2006 I’ve decided to start tracking what I consider to be “Enterprise 2.0″ companies. In pursuit of that, I was perusing JackBe ’s blogs and this post by Mike Wagner got my attention about Enterprise Mashups and TCO. The Enterprise 2.0 movement with its disintermediating affect is poised to seriously impact all discussions surrounding TCO, yes? I’m getting together with Dan Gisolfi from IBM’s Emerging Internet Technology group in the next 10 days. Gisolfi ’s group, led by Rod Smith , is fully engaged in the business of mashup-making. They’re pulling together data from intranets and local data for clients using their IBM mashup maker technology. He gave me an example using Home Depot’s finance department and provisioning the finance department with widgets, dashboards and mashboards… By his own admission, he sees a lot of what’s going on as new and that his group is a little ahead of the curve– they’re stil...

Move over RIA, there's a new acronym that be is stressing on their new revised JackBe site and its foundation is built upon the Web, SOA and AJAX. Like Web 2.0 is an evolution of the Web1.0, REA is the evolution of rich Internet applications which are fine for consumer facing sites, but not really ready for real enterprise, mission critical applications. From Wikipedia: "Rich Enterprise Applications (REA) creates a new class of enterprise Web 2.0 applications . REA solutions leverage the usability and increased functionality of RIA applications and extends their reach beyond the browser and into the organization ’s Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) assets. REAs leverage an organization’s investment in SOA with enterprise Web 2.0 technologies that enable new business and application models such as Software as a Service (SaaS), enterprise mashups , next-generation portals , and browser -based deployment of enterprise applications – all with robust scalability , se...

By: AJAXWorld News Desk Aug. 20, 2006 10:30 AM SYS-CON Events ( www.events.sys-con.com ) announced today that AJAX company JackBe has joined the charter sponsors of the First International AJAXWorld Conference & Expo ( www.ajaxworldexpo.com ) as "Platinum Sponsor." The conference will take place October 2-4, 2006, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. (Are those his real teeth?) With JackBe joining the event as a Platinum Sponsor, the lineup of charter sponsors and exhibitors of the conference now comprises some of the leading AJAX technology providers in the world, including Adobe, IBM, TIBCO, Backbase, JackBe, ComponentArt, Helmi Technologies, Laszlo Systems, Nexaweb, telerik, Google, Parasoft, ILOG, Apress, and Zapatek. OASIS is sponsoring AJAXWorld 2006 as Association Sponsor, while the Media Sponsors include some of the most well-known and respected magazines and websites; SYS-CON.TV and AJAXWorld Magazine are the two Platinum ...

Monday August 21, 9:00 am ET Ajax Solution Drives Efficiencies in Production and Delivery of Intelligence Briefings JackBe and DIA to Demonstrate New Intelligence Accelerator at Intelink Conference CHEVY CHASE, Md. & DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 21, 2006--JackBe, the leading provider of enterprise solutions that integrate SOA and Ajax to deliver the next generation of rich Internet applications, today announced Phase I delivery of a Web-based intelligence briefing solution for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Powered by JackBe's NQ Suite Ajax software platform, the application will be showcased at the DNI's "Information Sharing Conference & Technology Exposition, Intelink and Beyond: Dare to Share" at Table #906. The initial implementation, called "Overwatch," consists of a personalizable, desktop-like intelligence asset dashboard or 'webtop' developed using JackBe's NQ Suite Ajax development platform, and a middle tier th...

This is one of the best pieces about the unique charecteristics of Enterprise 2.0 I've read yet. Posted by Dan Farber @ 1:09 pm After Wikipedia deleted the "Enterprise 2.0" entry, the Enterprise Irregulars swarmed, responding to the critique of the term by a Wikipedian editor as a "neologism of dubious utility" and taking a crack at defining it. Jason Wood questions the logic of excising the term for the peoples' encyclopedia: Truthfully, if Wikipedia is REALLY about being the ultimate reference source for every human being on the Earth, it shouldn't matter if ONE or ONE BILLION people care about the term "Enterprise 2.0." But when you realize that it's a term at the epicenter of a lot of creative thought and debate, I'm incensed that someone so UNFOCUSED on the business world would simply delete the entry. How is Wikipedia better for the deletion? On his ZDNet blog, Dion Hinchcliffe provides his definition of Enterprise 2.0...

By Chris Hoffmann, TripleTree, LLC It’s no longer controversial to assert that software-as-a-service (SaaS) is real, relevant, robust and transformational. The market forces driving SaaS adoption, innovation and consolidation will continue for several quarters. Missing from much of the recent analysis of the sector, however, are two important realities: Unique domains and verticals are deploying SaaS in very deliberate ways Historical valuation metrics for traditional ISVs have changed and don’t apply to SaaS firms A year ago, SaaS vendors began to experience a quiet, unexpected shift in their strategic importance to global technology and business services firms. Consider the September 2005 acquisition of Siebel by Oracle followed days later by the announcement of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. Within weeks, both SAP and Microsoft hastily launched marketing campaigns trumpeting newfound legitimacy as SaaS visionaries and just as quickly spurred their engineering teams ...

1. Tibco trades at 4.4x sales and 16.2x EV/EBITDA. 2. Citigroup says there is a "middleware" gap; that's what Tibco is. I believe it will get bought out by one of these players: Oracle, HPQ, SAP

August 17, 2006 10:56 AM PDT It's an ignominious step for any company: Listing your business for sale on eBay. Yet that is exactly what Web calendering site Kiko has done , in what appears to be an abrupt end to its high-flying ambitions of only a few months ago. Kiko had been one of the small companies cited often in fueling the Web 2.0 boom among small businesses with promising technologies. Its precipitous fall has many wondering what happened and whether Kiko is a harbinger for other start-ups. It's too soon, of course, to say whether the second dot-com bust is already beginning. Nevertheless, as Dharmesh Shah writes on OnStartups.com , it's well worth reviewing Kiko's experience to help others from suffering a similar fate. Kiko obviously isn't the first Web 2.0 company to stumble and most certainly won't be the last. But as Shah notes, its credentials were particularly noteworthy as a case study: "It was one of the prototypical Web 2.0 co...

Gross Month-to-Date Revenue Shows Double-Digit Percentage Growth for Sixth Consecutive Month BETHESDA, Md., Aug. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- MobilePro Corp. (OTC Bulletin Board: MOBL - News ), a leading broadband wireless services company, announced today that paid usage of its WazTempe network continues to increase with another double-digit percentage increase for August month-to-date gross revenue versus July.

EarlyStageVC Aug. 14th Gartner has now officially anointed Web 2.0 a bona fide IT trend. BFD. Of course, they straddled the meme, by putting it at the peak of their 'hype cycle' graph. That is the consultant's version of plausible deniability. If it turns out to be real, they called it. If it is not, they still called it. This idea has picked up a lot of steam since I first noticed it ten months ago . Dion Hinchcliffe and Andrew McAfee are the real thought leaders, emphasizing the technologies and social/managerial impacts respectively. Dion Hinchcliffe does his usual masterful job of deconstructing some of the elements of this Gartner-validated wave. Before we all jump on this bandwagon, let's exercise some intellectual restraint and rigor, and in the process perhaps abandon the use of 2.0 as a synonym for "new". The original moniker of Web 2.0 has been used to imply/describe/justify/motivate a collection of concepts that range from standards ...

My sister called me to tell me about a terrible accident. A friend of the family was changing a tire on the side of a highway. His 16 yr old sat on the grass waiting and watching his dad while his mother waited in the car. I don't know what all were thinking about. Maybe they had a small fight like many families do over something little and really not that important. I hope though that they were all thinking good thoughts thou. Why? Because a 16-wheeler clipped the car killing the dad and putting the mother in critical. The 16 yr old watched it all while on the grass. He is OK and staying with family. My, and friends and families hearts go out to them all. Life is short. Try not to let the little things get in the way of what is ultimately a short time here. Unfortunately it sometimes takes these tragedies to remember this.

TheOnion BOSTON—You may not know him by name, but Eric Greeley is one of a new breed of Americans making a difference. While most employees at John Hancock Security and Financial Services just use the photocopier and walk away, Greeley considers it his duty to do the right thing: to make sure the machine is stocked and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Enlarge Image Greeley doesn’t ask for recognition, and he doesn’t get it. Though he’d never say it himself, that’s just what a hero does. "I like to think that anyone in my position would do the same thing," said Greeley. "In the end, it’s such a small sacrifice for a far greater good. All you have to do is go get the paper, pop out the input tray, fill it to exactly the right level, and slide the tray carefully back in. I’m doing my part to make the world a little better, one ream at a time." Greeley’s philosophy is that a good deed is its own reward, and it seems to be paying off for the whole office: ...

WebProNews IT industry analysts Gartner published their 2006 hype cycle for emerging technologies this week - their predictions on what they think will be hot technologies in the near future, and what won't be. These predictions form part of the hype cycles Gartner uses to characterize the over-enthusiasm or "hype" and subsequent disappointment that typically happens with the introduction of new technologies. Hype cycles also show how and when technologies move beyond the hype, offer practical benefits and so become widely accepted. Looking at the chart, of particular note is what's at the peak of inflated expectations and about to hit the download ski slope into the trough of disillusionment - mashup , Web 2.0 and folksonomies . These three are perfect examples of unrealistic expectations produced by a lack of clear understanding (or, perhaps, lack of effective communication) about what such technologies can actually help you achieve from a business perspective...

The badger is well-protected from predators. Its muscular neck and thick, loose fur protect it when it is captured by a predator. This gives the badger time to turn on the predator and bite and claw it. When a badger is attacked, it also uses vocalizations. It hisses, growls, squeals and snarls. It also releases an unpleasant musk that may drive a predator away. The badger does not usually seek to attack, but, when driven to bay, its great muscular power and tough hide render it a formidable antagonist. Consequently the animals were used in the psuedo-sport of badger-baiting. Weighing up to thirty-five pounds when fully grown, badgers have an extraordinarily dangerous bite, which they are willing to use recklessly when threatened.

You would think after all the recorded horrible customer service interactions between customers and large companies they would be taking action to correct or weed out the loosey reps. Comcast must not have been listening. It took a week and a half for them to simply get a technition out to my house with the correct HDTV box. This is the short story of course but includes at least 8 calls to the worste, most incompetent and rude reps from Comcast like a women named Deseray who not only yelled at me but when I asked to speak with a supervisor said there wasn't one initially and then transferred me to an entriely differant dept. I would advice anyone with the option of another provider to seriously consider it.

Document ID: ZAPFLASH-200689 | Document Type: ZapFlash By Ronald Schmelzer We often refer to information technology (IT) as if it were one cohesive department within the enterprise. However, for most businesses, IT really consists of at least three separate organizations each with their own technologies, best practices, approaches, and terminology: the systems and network people, the application development and integration team, and the data storage and information management group. It should come as no surprise that this siloed approach to organizing IT leads to inflexibility, and limits IT’s ability to meet the changing needs of business. For people who construe Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) narrowly as applied directly to the application development and integration arena, SOA would be of little help in addressing these broader issues of siloed IT organizations. However, to be most compelling to the organization, SOA should apply to all groups within the IT departm...

Enterprise Web 2.0 The recent round of discussion of enterprise mashups has been a good one, lead primarily by a stellar write-up recently by Galen Gruman, and highlights a phenomenon that is nigh upon us. As part of tracking this, I've been spending the better part of the last couple of months searching high and low for good quality tools that let anyone build enterprise-quality mashups, and I can safely report here that there are only a few. But why are enterprise mashups important? I've had discussions a number of enterprise architects currently working in the industry about this and I do see a common theme in many of the IT requests they get these days. There seems to be considerable pent-up demand for smaller, custom applications in large numbers. The solution space around large enterprise apps is increasingly well-bounded; almost all enterprises today already have their mainline IT systems well developed and evolved. The remaining IT projects are oft...

Posted by Scott Delap on Aug 02, 2006 06:56 PM InfoWorld columnist Peter Wayner recently reviewed six of the most popular open source Ajax toolkits. The article sets out to see if they are enterprise ready in comparison to commercial products such Backbase, JackBe, and Tibco's General Interface. The six open source projects covered were selected because each has a high-profile in the developer community and support of one or more stable organizations. Microsoft Atlas is included as a part of the six due to its "few pratical restrictions" and freedom to license code created with it as you like. Peter's summary of the each toolkit's main feature points: Dojo Broad collection of widgets Package system speeds loading Spotty documentation Google Web Toolkit Fascinating/Simple Javascript to Java translation Broad collection of widgets Complicated to integrate with other Javascript apps Microsoft Atlas Deep Integration with .NET Excellent documentatio...

There is much we can learn from failure, both in our own lives and business. Personally, I learned more from being part of a failing company years ago than I did when the day-to-day operations were showing promise. Through analyzing the interworkings of these types of experiences one can identify the true factors of the demise and draw correlations between them. And by identifying these factors one is able to deduct what appropriate actions could and should have been applied. This is a short collection of a few “lessons learned.” Vision To be successful a company needs to align its people with a common end goal or vision for the organization to achieve. This ensures that everyone is aligning their individual duties to reach for this goal; creating a commonality in the interworkings of the organization. The importance of a vision statement is not simply the one-time event of stating a vision and then implementing it. Vision is an on-going creative process, requiring a leader...