Mike Wagner - Perpetual beta

Webcast: Ajax for the Enterprise - Nov. 29, 12pm EST. zune JackBe, the leader in Rich Enterprise Application software and services, will host 'Ajax for the Enterprise' on November 29 at 12pm EST. JackBe will share it's experiences in proving enterprise-grade Ajax solutions for over 4 million users in organizations like CitiGroup, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Sears, and Tupperware. To register for this webcast go to http://www.jackbe.com/email/webinar_ajaxforenterprise.php Send inquiries to chris.warner@jackbe.com.

by Rachael King Richard Hababou scouts out technology deals for the corporate venture arm of French banking giant Société Générale. Yet the nine-hour time gap between Hababou's San Francisco office and Société Générale's Paris headquarters can make communicating about multimillion-dollar transactions a big challenge. For years, Hababou and some 1,000 colleagues have used an online portal where they can collaborate, share documents, and track progress on deals. As useful as it was, the portal needed a facelift. Hababou wanted to add several features to the deal-tracking application and ditch others. So, in mid-October, he brought in software company ActiveGrid, which added a host of tools, from Yahoo! (YHOO) news feeds to Google (GOOG) Maps to AltaVista's Babel Fish for on-the-fly English-French translation. Best of all, the upgrade took all of three days, compared with the three months it took to build the application at the outset. "It's all the applications I nee...

Seminar: ‘Ajax for Breakfast: How to Deliver on the Promise of Rich Internet Applications’ 12.13.06 Will you be in the Mid-Atlantic area on December 13? If so, JackBe would like to invite you to attend ‘Ajax for Breakfast’, an interactive discussion about Ajax in the enterprise including live demonstrations of production Ajax applications in the corporate world. To attend, contact Jessica Agunsday at Jessica.agunsday@jackbe.com or (240) 744-1274. Unrelated. For those who wondered, Heidi and I loved Borat.

November 1, 2006 — Have you looked at the code behind AJAX implementations? Forget about spaghetti code. We're talking about shredded wheat. We're talking about heaps of jumbled rubble. I'm a wholehearted believer in AJAX . Many of the user interface examples that I've seen are incredible. While there's no mistaking AJAX apps for true native applications, well-designed UIs are an order of magnitude more responsive and intuitive than classic Web applications. I've seen some, though, that are pretty terrible. Alas, most Web developers simply aren't good UI designers. They're far too used to dealing with the constraints of standard HTML and CSS, and in thinking about postbacks, to know how to use the freedom that AJAX offers. That's one problem with AJAX , but I dare say it's not the biggest. The challenge is that AJAX is being retrofitted to existing Web applications using immature tools, immature libraries and immature runtimes...

At the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Intel plans to announce SuiteTwo , a business-oriented collection of blogging, wiki, and RSS applications from the likes of NewsGator, SimpleFeed, Six Apart, and Socialtext, coordinated by open-source software integrator SpikeSource. Intel Capital, the chipmaker's venture capital organization, helped realize the arrangement. Intel's venture group has investments in each of these companies and aims to be a matchmaker that can add value to the Intel platform, not to mention its portfolio. "Small- and medium-sized businesses purchase software best when it's an integrated suite that's going to be available very easily through an ASP model, through a SaaS [software as a service] model, and that will be supported by a third party," says Lisa Lambert, managing director of the software solutions group at Intel Capital. SaaS accounted for about 5% of business software revenue in 2005, Gartner sa...

Hundreds of technology executives and investors will congregate this week to take the quickening pulse of Internet entrepreneurship. At the third annual Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco , dozens of industry players will gather to break down topics like Internet infrastructure, Net neutrality, mashups, data protection and the future of video. Among those on hand at the city's Palace Hotel will be Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos; Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie; and Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google. High Impact What's new: At the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco , industry players will take the pulse of the Internet industry as talk of an investment bubble builds. Bottom line: Many start-up companies that fall under the Web 2.0 rubric will die off or prove only modestly successful to their investors. But the current period of active experimentation is solidifying an industrywide shift t...